The priestess of Apollo at Delphi. Before seeking answers from the oracle, visitors first met with the words, ‘Know Thyself.’
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Critical thinking has never been more popular. Schools, universities, and employers encourage us to evaluate evidence, identify logical fallacies, and recognise cognitive biases. Entire books are devoted to helping us think more clearly.
Yet intelligent people continue to believe ridiculous things.
They buy into political propaganda, dubious medical claims, financial scams, cults, conspiracy theories, and all manner of comforting or self-serving lies. They do so not because they lack intelligence, and often not because they lack evidence.
They do so because modern critical thinking shares our greatest blind spot. It teaches us how to analyse arguments, but not how to analyse ourselves.
Most books on critical thinking treat reasoning as though it were mathematics. Learn the rules and you will think more clearly. But reason is not merely an intellectual achievement. It is also a moral and psychological one. We do not merely need sharper minds, but greater courage and honesty.
The greatest obstacle to reason is neither dullness nor ignorance. It is our unconscious need to protect our sense of self. This is the realm of self-deception.
Unlike ordinary deception, self-deception is unconscious. We do not deliberately lie to ourselves. Instead, we unconsciously reshape reality to preserve a comforting image of who we are. We rationalise our failures, project our faults onto others, and convince ourselves that what we want to be true is true. These are not simply errors of reasoning but acts of self-protection.
This is why intelligent people can cling to implausible beliefs despite overwhelming evidence. Often, they are not defending an argument so much as defending themselves.
To think clearly, then, it is not enough to study logic, rhetoric, and cognitive bias. We must also understand the unconscious forces that distort our judgement before reason has even had a chance to speak. Self-deception is not peripheral to critical thinking. It belongs at its very heart.
More than two thousand years ago, Socrates reached much the same conclusion. Rather than speculate about the natural world, he turned philosophy towards the study of ourselves.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, as they pass the place where Boreas is said to have carried off Orithyia, Phaedrus asks Socrates whether he believes the story. Socrates politely declines the invitation. While still ignorant of himself, he says, he has no interest in such questions:
I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous.
For Socrates, self-knowledge came before all other enquiry.
Perhaps it should also come before critical thinking.
Socrates had been inspired by the oracle at Delphi, the greatest oracle of the ancient world. Long before there were textbooks on critical thinking, there was a two-word inscription above the Temple of Apollo at Delphi:
The Deepest Cure for Fear and Anxiety—No Prescription Required
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs culminates in self-actualization. But the journey does not end there.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
In his influential paper of 1943, A Theory of Human Motivation, the psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed that healthy human beings have a certain number of needs, and that these needs can be arranged in a hierarchy, with some needs (such as physiological and safety needs) being more primitive or basic than others (such as social and ego needs).
Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ is often represented as a five-level pyramid (Figure 1), with higher needs coming into focus only once lower, more basic ones have been met. Maslow called the bottom four levels ‘deficiency needs’ because we do not feel anything if they are met but become anxious or distressed if they are not. Thus, physiological needs such as eating, drinking, and sleeping are deficiency needs, as are safety needs, social needs such as friendship and intimacy, and ego needs such as self-esteem, status, and recognition.
In contrast, he called the fifth and highest level of the pyramid a ‘growth need’ insofar as the drive to self-actualize requires that we move beyond the pursuit of comfort and security to fulfil our deepest potential as human beings.
Once we have met our deficiency needs, the focus of our anxiety shifts to self-actualization, and we begin, even if only dimly, to contemplate our bigger picture. However, only a minority of people ever truly self-actualize, because self-actualization requires unusual qualities such as independence, awareness, creativity, originality, and, above all, courage. Many people who have satisfied all their deficiency needs remain unable to self-actualize, instead inventing more deficiency needs for themselves, because to contemplate the meaning of life would lead them to entertain the possibility of its meaninglessness and the prospect of their own death and annihilation.
Existential Anxiety
A person who begins to contemplate their bigger picture may come to fear that life is meaningless and death inescapable, while at the same time clinging to the comforting belief that they are somehow immortal, important, or at least significant. This inner conflict gives rise to existential anxiety. Whereas fear and anxiety and their pathological forms (such as phobias or panic disorder) are grounded in threats to life, existential anxiety is rooted in the brevity and apparent insignificance, or absurdity, of life.
Existential anxiety is so disturbing that most people avoid it at all costs, instead constructing a false reality out of goals, ambitions, routines, relationships, customs, values, culture, and religion in a bid to deceive themselves that their lives are meaningful and that death is distant or delusory.
Unfortunately, such self-deception comes at a heavy price. According to the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, those who refuse to face up to ‘non-being’ are acting in ‘bad faith’ and living out a life that is inauthentic and unfulfilling. Facing up to non-being can bring insecurity, loneliness, responsibility, and, with them, anxiety, but, beyond that, it can also bring a profound sense of calm, freedom, even nobility. Far from being pathological, existential anxiety is a necessary transitional phase—a sign of health, strength, and courage, and a harbinger of greater things to come.
The Courage to Be
The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich took this idea a step further. In The Courage to Be, he argued that refusing to confront non-being leads not only to inauthenticity, as Sartre had argued, but also to pathological—or neurotic—anxiety.
He wrote:
He who does not succeed in taking his anxiety courageously upon himself can succeed in avoiding the extreme situation of despair by escaping into neurosis. He still affirms himself but on a limited scale. Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being.
According to this striking outlook, pathological anxiety, although seemingly grounded in threats to life, in fact arises from repressed existential anxiety, which itself arises from our uniquely human capacity for self-consciousness.
Squaring up to non-being enables us to put our life into perspective, see it in its entirety, and thereby lend it a sense of direction and unity. If the ultimate source of anxiety is fear of the future, the future ends in death; and if the ultimate source of anxiety is uncertainty, death is the only certainty. It is only by facing up to death, accepting its inevitability, and integrating it into a life that we can escape from the pettiness and paralysis of anxiety, and, in so doing, free ourselves to make—and get—the most out of our lives.
This, I believe, is the philosophical cure for fear and anxiety.
Some philosophers have gone further still in asserting that the very purpose of life is none other than to prepare for death. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates, who is about to face the executioner, tells his friends that absolute justice, beauty, and goodness cannot be apprehended by the senses, but only by pure thought, that is, by the mind or soul. Thus, the philosopher seeks as far as possible to separate soul from body. As death is the complete separation of soul and body, the philosopher aims at death—and can be said to be almost dead.
Only a true philosopher who no longer fears death truly possesses courage and the other virtues. Those who remain in fear of death can only have, at best, the appearance of virtue; but behind the facade, they are forever trading one fear against another.
How the Sophists Forced Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to Rethink Truth
Protagoras’ dictum: Anthrōpos metron pantōn—’Man is the measure of all things.’
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
For centuries, Greek philosophy had looked outwards. The first philosophers sought to understand the nature of the universe, inquiring into the substance, origin, and hidden principles of all things. Thales is remembered for upholding water as the fundamental substance, Heraclitus for his principle of perpetual change, Parmenides for his diametrically opposed principle of unchanging being, and Democritus for his atoms.
But by the middle of the fifth century BCE, philosophy faced an altogether different challenge. The question was no longer what the universe is made of, but whether we can know anything with certainty. Philosophy’s first great crisis arose not in a school or temple, but in the bustling streets and public squares of democratic Athens.
The Need for Sophists
By naturalising the world, the pre-Socratics had been responding and contributing to a waning of the old myths. As the world became demythologised, attention shifted from the gods to man, from the temples to the law courts, from questions about the cosmos to questions about logic, language, politics, morality, and society.
This intellectual revolution was matched by a political one. By the middle of the fifth century BCE, Athens had emerged triumphant from the Persian Wars. Enriched by empire and transformed into a radical democracy, it became a city in which political influence depended less upon noble birth than on the ability to persuade an assembly, sway a jury, or carry a crowd. In this new world, rhetoric became power.
The Sophists travelled from city to city offering public lectures and private instruction, especially to ambitious young aristocrats hoping for careers in public life. They taught rhetoric, argument, memory, and the art of persuasion. They were also handsomely rewarded. Some charged fees so enormous that Plato and Aristophanes never tired of mocking them.
Although itinerant, the Sophists naturally converged upon Athens, where they often resided at the houses of wealthy patrons such as the magnate Callias or the politician Callicles. According to Plato, Callias owned ‘the greatest and most glorious house’ in Athens and ‘spent a world of money on the sophists’. In Plato’s Greater Hippias, the Sophist Hippias tells Socrates, ‘If you were to know how much money I have made, you would be amazed…’
What the Sophists Taught
The Sophists were not a school in the usual sense. They had no common doctrine or shared founder, and often disagreed with one another. Some, such as Protagoras and Prodicus, were serious thinkers who won the respect even of Plato. Others became famous as intellectual entertainers, dazzling audiences with verbal tricks and paradoxes. Yet all shared a new concern with language, argument, rhetoric, politics, and practical life.
This marked a profound shift from the pre-Socratics. Rather than asking, ‘What is the universe made of?’, the Sophists asked, ‘How do we persuade others?’, ‘What is justice?’, and even, ‘Can there be any objective truth at all?’
No Sophist embodied this new outlook more fully than Protagoras. His most famous dictum, Anthrōpos metron pantōn—’Man is the measure of all things’—came to epitomise the movement. In the Theaetetus, Plato argues that if each and every man truly were the measure of all things, then nothing could be inherently true or false, or right or wrong—not even the dictum itself.
Protagoras is also remembered for the remarkable opening line of his lost work, About the Gods: ‘About the gods, I cannot be sure whether they exist or not, or what they are like to see; for many things stand in the way of the knowledge of them, both the opacity of the subject and the shortness of human life.’ Such agnosticism was startling in a deeply religious society, and only reinforced the suspicion that the Sophists were undermining traditional beliefs.
Gorgias, who lived for 108 years, pushed scepticism further still. Whether or not he believed his own arguments, he delighted in demonstrating the astonishing power of rhetoric. He boasted that he could speak on any subject at a moment’s notice and likened the effects of speech upon the soul to those of drugs upon the body. Words, like drugs, could heal, intoxicate, or poison.
Other Sophists explored different aspects of the same revolution. Prodicus became famous for distinguishing between near synonyms with pedantic precision, and for suggesting, not unlike Wittgenstein twenty-four centuries later, that philosophical progress begins with linguistic clarity. Antiphon contrasted nature (physis) with convention (nomos), raising the unsettling possibility that many of the laws and moral codes by which we live are no more than a matter of convention. The dichotomy surfaces in the Antigone of Sophocles (c. 441 BCE), when Antigone seeks to justify her attempt to bury her brother Polynices by claiming the superiority of divine over man-made law. Hippias claimed to be an authority on everything and wrote many books. He held that the purpose of life is autarkeia (self-sufficiency), and boasted of presenting himself at Olympia wearing nothing that he had not himself made, down to his girdle, sandals, seal-ring, strigil, and oil-flask.
The Sophists transformed Greek education, but they also raised an unsettling question: if every position can be defended by a sufficiently skilful speaker, what becomes of truth?
Why Socrates Objected
Socrates accepted many of the Sophists’ starting points. Like them, he turned away from cosmology to focus on ethics, politics, and the human condition. Like them, he engaged his fellow citizens in conversation. Yet there was one crucial difference.
The Sophists taught their pupils how to argue. Socrates sought to discover what was true—and never charged for it.
For Socrates, words were not instruments of persuasion but tools of inquiry. His famous method of questioning—the elenchus—served not to win debates but to expose contradictions, undermine false confidence, and inch towards genuine knowledge. He believed that careful questioning could reveal objective truths about justice, courage, friendship, and the good life.
Whereas the Sophists taught the art of persuasion, Socrates insisted that persuasion and truth were not the same thing.
This was the question at the heart of philosophy’s first great crisis: is philosophy a search for truth, or merely the art of persuasion?
Why Was Socrates Mistaken for a Sophist?
Ironically, many Athenians mistook Socrates for one of the Sophists. Like them, he challenged traditional beliefs and exposed the ignorance of prominent citizens through relentless questioning. In Aristophanes’ Clouds, he is portrayed as the head of a ‘Thinking Shop’, where students learn ingenious arguments and how to make the weaker case appear the stronger.
The caricature was unfair, but revealing. Socrates charged no fees, claimed no expertise, and repeatedly insisted that he knew nothing. Yet to many Athenians these distinctions seemed trivial. They saw only another unsettling intellectual who questioned convention and undermined established authority.
If Socrates was put on trial and, ultimately, to death, this was in part because many Athenians mistook him for a Sophist.
Plato’s Response
If Socrates sought truth through dialogue, Plato sought to explain why truth is possible in the first place.
The Sophists had shown how easily opinions differ. Plato agreed. But he refused to conclude that all opinions are therefore equally valid.
Instead, he argued that behind the changing world perceived by the senses lies a higher reality of eternal Forms: perfect Justice, Beauty, Equality, and Goodness. Our arguments may be confused and our perceptions unreliable, but these realities remain unchanged. Philosophy is therefore not merely the art of persuasion, but the search for objective truth.
Many of Plato’s greatest dialogues are shaped by this confrontation. In the Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, and other dialogues, the Sophists become Plato’s principal interlocutors. Sometimes they are treated with respect, sometimes with devastating irony, but always they represent the challenge that philosophy must overcome.
Whether Plato portrayed them fairly remains an open question. Much of what we know about the Sophists comes through his writings, and he had every reason to emphasise their weaknesses while strengthening his own case. It was, perhaps, one of history’s most resounding philosophical victories—so complete that the word ‘sophist’ still carries negative connotations.
Aristotle’s Response
Aristotle inherited the same problem but answered it differently. Whereas Plato had looked beyond the visible world, Aristotle looked more closely at it.
Instead of grounding knowledge in transcendent Forms, he sought reliable methods for investigating the world itself. His answer to the Sophists lay not in another metaphysical theory, but in the careful disciplines of logic, observation, and demonstration.
Aristotle analysed arguments with a new precision, distinguishing valid reasoning from fallacy and demonstration from mere persuasion.
The Sophists had shown how arguments can mislead. Aristotle sought to show how, properly constructed, they can also lead us to truth.
Rehabilitating the Sophists
After Plato, the Sophists became the villains of Greek philosophy: eloquent teachers more interested in winning arguments and enriching themselves than discovering the truth.
Yet this judgement is probably too harsh. The Sophists helped lay the foundations of higher education. They recognised the importance of language, communication, critical thinking, and cultural difference. They questioned inherited assumptions and forced philosophy to justify itself rather than merely assert its conclusions.
Many of their questions remain alive today. Are moral values objective or culturally relative? Does language shape thought? Is law grounded in nature or merely in convention? Can rhetoric obscure truth as easily as reveal it? To these questions there are still no universally accepted answers.
The Sophists did not destroy philosophy. They transformed it—albeit, sometimes, despite themselves. By questioning truth, morality, justice, and knowledge itself, they created the first great crisis in Western philosophy. Socrates responded by seeking definitions, Plato by defending objective reality, and Aristotle by developing the tools of logic. Much of subsequent philosophy can be understood as an attempt to answer questions that the Sophists were among the first to ask.
They may have lost the argument in the eyes of Plato. But they changed philosophy forever.
If Aspasia taught Socrates, Western philosophy begins with a woman.
According to Plato, Socrates’ education may have included the occasional slap.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Few figures in ancient Greece are as intriguing—or as neglected—as Aspasia of Miletus, the companion of Pericles, the friend of Socrates, and the greatest female intellectual of classical Athens. Although she has been erased from the traditional history of philosophy, there is substantial evidence that she did far more than beguile great men. If that evidence is to be believed, Socrates is rooted not only in Anaxagoras and Pythagoras, but also in Aspasia.
The first piece of evidence comes from no less than Plato’s Menexenus, in which Socrates claims to have learnt the art of rhetoric from Aspasia of Miletus, ‘an excellent mistress… who has made so many good speakers [including] the best among the Hellenes—Pericles, the son of Xanthippus.’
To prove it, Socrates recites a funeral oration that Aspasia recently composed and taught to him. He tells Menexenus that he still ought to remember the speech because, whenever he forgot the words in rehearsal, Aspasia threatened to slap him.
The speech closely resembles—and gently satirises—the famous funeral oration delivered by Pericles and recorded by Thucydides. When Socrates is done reciting, Menexenus marvels that such an oration could have been written by a woman.
The Menexenus is not the Gorgias or the Republic. Even those who do read it tend to skim over this passage or dismiss it as mere fiction or comedy.
But should they? Fortunately, Plato is not our only witness.
The Most Remarkable Woman in Athens
Aspasia emigrated from Miletus to Athens, where she lived as a metic, or resident alien. After his amicable divorce from Deinomache, she became the companion of Pericles, the leading statesman and general of Athens. According to Plutarch, Pericles kissed her every morning before leaving and every evening upon returning.
Owing to her foreign birth, unmarried status, and influence over Pericles, Aspasia became one of the most controversial figures in Athens. Comic poets branded her a prostitute, and in the Acharnians Aristophanes goes so far as to blame her for starting the Peloponnesian War.
This raises an obvious question. Why would Plato have chosen such an infamous woman for the Menexenus? Plato is no Aristophanes, and even his comic touches are generally in the service of his philosophy. Had his intention been merely to parody funeral oratory, he could easily have done so without invoking Aspasia. The more interesting question is not why Plato jokes about Aspasia, but why he mentions her at all.
Socrates’ Teacher
The Menexenus is not the only Platonic dialogue in which Socrates claims to have been taught by a remarkable woman.
In the Symposium, he relates a conversation that he once had with a mysterious priestess, Diotima of Mantinea, who, he says, taught him the true nature of love. This is Plato’s famous ‘Ladder of Love’, by which aching lust can be sublimed into wisdom and virtue.
Armand d’Angour, among others, has argued that Diotima is in fact Aspasia under another name—with Plato, this time, having taken the precaution to disguise her identity.
If so, Plato has presented Aspasia not only as Socrates’ teacher of rhetoric, but also as the source of philosophy’s most influential account of love.
Plato Was Not Alone
Plato was not alone in portraying Aspasia as an intellectual authority.
Besides the two famous ones, Plato and Xenophon, at least another nine of Socrates’ followers wrote Socratic dialogues. Among these dialogues we know of two with the title Aspasia, one by Aeschines and another by Antisthenes.
In the Aspasia of Aeschines, Socrates urges the millionaire Callias to send his son Hipponicus to Aspasia for instruction. Socrates presses his recommendation by citing Aspasia’s credentials in rhetoric and in marriage guidance—precisely the same combination of talents that we find independently confirmed in Plato (rhetoric) and Xenophon (marriage guidance).
A pattern is beginning to emerge. Aspasia is not some isolated anecdote. She is repeatedly presented by various Socratics as someone from whom others—including Socrates himself—could learn.
Aspasia Speaks
A substantial fragment of the Aspasia of Aeschines has come down to us, preserved in Cicero. In it, we can finally hear Aspasia in her own voice.
Aspasia asks a husband named Xenophon whether he would prefer his own horse or a better horse belonging to his neighbour.
“The better horse,” he replies.
Would he prefer his own farm or a better one?
“The better one.”
Would he prefer his own wife—or a better wife?
At this Xenophon falls silent.
Aspasia then asks his wife a parallel series of questions. She too admits that she would prefer finer possessions—and then blushes into silence when asked whether she would prefer a better husband.
Aspasia concludes:
Since each of you avoids answering me that question alone which was the only one which I wished to have answered, I will tell you what each of you are thinking of; for both you, O woman, wish to have the best husband, and you, O Xenophon, most exceedingly desire to have the most excellent wife. Wherefore, unless you both so contrive matters that there shall not be on the whole earth a more excellent man or a more admirable woman, then in truth you will at all times desire above all things that which you think to be the best thing in the world, namely, that you, O Xenophon, may be the husband of the best possible wife; and you, O woman, that you may be married to the most excellent husband possible.
The conclusion is striking enough. More striking still is the method. Aspasia proceeds much as Socrates would: by asking apparently innocent questions, drawing analogies, exposing contradictions, and gently leading her listeners towards a conclusion they reach for themselves. Her conclusion, moreover, echoes that of Diotima. Love’s highest purpose is not pleasure but virtue.
Did Aspasia Teach Socrates the Socratic Method?
According to Plato, Socrates developed his method of questioning, the method of elenchus, after his friend Chaerephon asked the oracle of Delphi whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates. Astonishingly, the oracle replied that there was no one wiser—leaving Socrates, who knew only that he knew nothing, perplexed.
To discover the meaning of the oracle, Socrates questioned several supposedly wise people, and in each case concluded: “I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.” From then on, he dedicated himself to the service of the god of the oracle by seeking out anyone who might be wise and, “if he is not, showing him that he is not.”
Plato presents the oracle story as the turning point of Socrates’ career. By validating his skeptical stance, it gave him the impetus to develop his own distinctive method of doing philosophy.
The method of elenchus consists in questioning one or more people about a concept, exposing contradictions in their initial assumptions, and provoking a reappraisal of the concept. As the process is iterative, it leads to an increasingly refined definition of the concept, and, in due course, to a shared recognition that it eludes our understanding—and hence that we know far less than we thought we did.
With our initial dogmatism transmuted into a state of puzzlement and suspended judgement, we are ready to become much more open and subtle thinkers—assuming, of course, that we have not first become angry and resentful.
But although Socrates may have perfected the method of elenchus, it is unlikely that he originated a mode of conversation that seems so naturally and fundamentally human. Diogenes Laertius, the ancient biographer of philosophers, claims that it was the sophist Protagoras who ‘first introduced the method of discussion which is called Socratic’. In Plato’s Parmenides, the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who was a generation older than Protagoras, himself uses the method of elenchus on Socrates to undermine Plato’s Theory of the Forms.
It remains that while other thinkers tried to make a show of their knowledge, Socrates tried to make a show of his and everyone else’s ignorance. In contrast to the pre-Socratics and especially to the sophists, he seldom claimed to possess any positive knowledge; whenever he did, it was because he had learnt it from somebody else, or because he had been ‘divinely inspired’. In Plato’s Phaedrus, he compares himself to an empty jar, filled through the ears by the words of others.
Against this background, Aspasia begins to look less like a literary curiosity and more like a plausible influence. In Plato, she teaches Socrates rhetoric. Perhaps she teaches him love. In Aeschines, she employs the very methods later associated with Socrates himself.
Did Aspasia invent the Socratic method? Almost certainly not. Did she influence the man who perfected it? The surviving evidence suggests that the possibility deserves to be taken far more seriously than it usually is.
A Different Beginning
None of this proves that Aspasia was Diotima, or even that she taught Socrates. Ancient history rarely affords such certainty.
But the evidence does point in that direction. Plato presents Aspasia as Socrates’ teacher—and has her threatening to slap the man he most admired. Other members of the Socratic circle independently portray her as a teacher. The surviving fragments show her employing the same methods, and pursuing the same moral aims, for which Socrates became renowned.
For centuries, the story of Western philosophy has begun with Socrates. It may be that it ought to begin not with Socrates alone, but with the remarkable woman from Miletus who taught him rhetoric, perhaps taught him love, and may even have helped shape the philosophical method that transformed the Western world.
If Aspasia taught Socrates—and perhaps even slapped him—Western philosophy begins with a woman.
Aristippus of Cyrene believed that pleasure is best enjoyed by those who remain its master.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
History has largely forgotten Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 435-c. 356 BCE). It shouldn’t have. A disciple of Socrates and the founder of the Cyrenaic school, he was the original hedonist— far more radical than the better-known Epicurus (341-270 BCE). He was also one of antiquity’s sharpest wits, perhaps even its funniest philosopher. Yet to dismiss Aristippus as funny but shallow would be to miss the point entirely. His philosophy is far deeper—and far more demanding—than first appears.
Before we turn to his celebrated wit, it is worth pausing over philosophy itself.
Ancient philosophy, for all its theoretical underpinnings, was above all an art of living, which aimed, through self-transformation, at controlling the passions, relieving suffering, and attaining wisdom. Philosophy was to the soul as medicine is to the body, and the philosopher, first and foremost, a healer of the soul. In the words of the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, ‘Unless the soul is cured, which cannot be done without philosophy, there will be no end to our miseries.’ According to the Roman Stoic Musonius Rufus, ‘We must live like doctors and be continually treating ourselves with reason.’ For the Greeks and Romans, philosophy was not merely something to discuss, but something to be lived.
The conception of philosophy as therapy can be traced back to Socrates. After his death by hemlock in 399 BCE, his closest students each carried away a different aspect of his teaching. Plato inherited his theoretical side and founded the Academy. Antisthenes embraced his ethic of self-sufficiency and laid the foundations for Cynicism. Aristippus, by contrast, established the Cyrenaic school, which taught that the only intrinsic good is pleasure—especially the vivid, immediate pleasures of the present moment.
The Philosophy of Pleasure
Aristippus emphasised present and physical pleasures over distant hopes or abstract ideals. For Aristippus and his followers, pleasure meant not merely the absence of pain but positively making the most of every moment.
Aristippus first encountered Socrates while visiting Athens for the Olympic Games. Captivated by the philosopher, he remained in the city and became one of his closest followers. Yet he was never content merely to imitate his master. Once, he had the temerity to tell Socrates that he preferred living in Athens because it spared him the politics of his native Cyrene—the sort of remark that alienated fellow Socratics such as Plato and Xenophon, who regarded civic duty as an obligation rather than a burden.
Aristippus was also the first of Socrates’ followers to take money for teaching. When he demanded five hundred drachmas from a man for tutoring his son, the man protested, ‘For that much money, I could buy a slave!’ ‘Go ahead,’ replied Aristippus. ‘Then you’ll have two.’
Many stories are told of Aristippus, and even if some are later inventions, they capture something essential about the man.
One day, Diogenes the Cynic was washing the dirt from his vegetables when he saw Aristippus passing by. ‘Had you learnt to make these your diet,’ called Diogenes, ‘you would have no need to pay court to kings.’ ‘And you, Diogenes, had you learnt to associate with men, you would have no need to wash vegetables.’
When someone chided him for his extravagant tastes, he retorted, ‘Wouldn’t you have bought this if you could have got it for three obols? Very well then, it is no longer I who am a lover of pleasure, but you who are a lover of money.’
When someone remarked that philosophers were always to be found at the doors of rich men, he replied, ‘Physicians are always calling on the sick, but no one would therefore rather be sick than be a physician.’
When Dionysius I, the tyrant of Syracuse, asked why he had come to his court, Aristippus answered, ‘When I needed wisdom, I went to Socrates; but now that I am in need of money, I come to you.’
On another occasion, Dionysius spat in his face. When someone reproached him for enduring such an insult, Aristippus remarked, ‘If fishermen are prepared to be drenched in seawater in order to catch a gudgeon, should I not be prepared to be sprayed with spittle in order to take a blenny?’
When Dionysius gave him his choice of three courtesans, Aristippus carried off all three, explaining, ‘Paris paid dearly for preferring one out of three.’
For many years he was intimate with the celebrated courtesan Lais of Corinth, reputedly the most beautiful woman in Greece. Yet he maintained, ‘I possess Lais, but I am not possessed by her.’
The Hidden Depths of Aristippus
By now, Aristippus might seem little more than a witty opportunist devoted to luxury and pleasure. But appearances can be deceptive.
Aristippus was far from amoral. He simply believed that we ought to make the most of every situation. When criticised for his love of pleasure, he replied, ‘It is not abstinence from pleasures that is best, but mastery over them without ever being worsted.’ Pleasure, in other words, is not our master; we are.
One day, as he entered the house of a courtesan, one of the young men with him blushed. Seeing this, he said, ‘It is not going in that is shameful, but being unable to come out.’
Vitruvius, in his treatise on architecture, recounts the story of Aristippus’ shipwreck. Cast ashore on Rhodes, Aristippus made straight for the gymnasium, where he spoke with such eloquence that the Rhodians provided for all his needs. When his companions later prepared to return home and asked what message they should carry back, he bid them tell their children to acquire possessions that could swim with them even out of a shipwreck.
Despite having two sons, Aristippus appointed his daughter Arete to succeed him as head of the Cyrenaic school. Her own son, Aristippus the Younger, would later formalise the principles of Cyrenaicism.
Several later Cyrenaics departed from Aristippus’ original teaching. Theodorus the Atheist (c. 340–c. 250 BCE) placed greater emphasis on mental than physical pleasures, identifying the good with prudence and justice. Hegesias of Cyrene (fl. 290 BCE), perhaps influenced by Buddhist missionaries sent out by Ashoka the Great, argued that happiness is unattainable and that the true goal of life is merely the avoidance of pain and distress. According to Cicero, his book Death by Starvation persuaded so many people that death was preferable to life that Ptolemy II Philadelphus banned him from teaching in Alexandria.
A Philosopher for Our Time
Within little more than a century, the Cyrenaic school had been eclipsed by Epicureanism. Yet Aristippus deserves to be rescued.
Contrary to the caricature, Aristippus did not teach people to become slaves to pleasure. He taught them never to become slaves to anything. He could enjoy wealth without depending on it, luxury without being possessed by it, and the company of tyrants without surrendering his independence. Pleasure, for Aristippus, was never an excuse for self-indulgence. It was a test of self-mastery.
In an age that often swings between thoughtless excess and puritanical self-denial, Aristippus still has something important to teach us. Freedom lies neither in rejecting pleasure nor in chasing it blindly, but in remaining its master. His life looked like a celebration of pleasure. His philosophy was really about freedom.
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