What Ancient Cynicism Can Teach You About Love and Happiness
How Embarrassing Truths Lead to Enviable Lives
Most people would probably not look for advice on love, relationships, happiness, or anything else from a self-professed cynic. In this article, I’m going to explain to you why you would be wrong about that.
The reason is that a central practice of ancient cynicism, called parrhēsia, literally “free speech,” is not only crucial to their view of a happy life, it’s also the backbone to any good relationship.
Moreover, one of the few famous couples of classical “Western” antiquity — which ranks included Helen and Paris, Penelope and Odysseus, and Cleopatra and Anthony — was a pair of cynics: Crates and Hipparchia. And unlike their more famous partners, they were happily married in a loving relationship.
My philosophical thesis here is that freely speaking, understood in the cynic’s way, is not only underexplored, but the later Stoics were also right to think of it as a form of courage.
But if I’m going to present, even in outline, what the Cynic’s view was, we’re going to have to start by clearing away some modern misconceptions about Cynicism.
What Ancient Cynicism Was
The origins of ancient, philosophical Cynicism are fuzzy. But scholars agree that Diogenes of Sinope, the man originally called “the dog” from whom the school gets its name (“cyon” means “dog” in Greek), was foundational to the view. That puts the school’s birth around 400 BC.
Unlike the modern meaning of “cynic” in English, philosophical Cynicism had nothing to do with being mean-spirited or assuming that everyone is motivated by selfish reasons. Theirs was a philosophy that held three basic points:
- The right way to live is to follow nature.
- The conventions of society almost always distract from that course.
- The solution is to become free of society’s conventions by following reason.
The real purpose of Cynicism, then, is to achieve liberation. That was how they understood a happy life. And you cannot be free if you are always living your life according to the arbitrary customs of your society, or what other people think.
To give you a sense of what Diogenes was like, I’ll tell you perhaps his most famous anecdote. Alexander the Great had heard of Diogenes and was impressed by him. So one day he went to meet the man and found Diogenes sunning himself.
Alexander came and stood over him and said, “Ask of me any gift you like.” To which he replied, “Stand out of my sun” (DL 6.28 translation modified).
The implications were (at least) double: Alexander had nothing of real value to offer Diogenes, and what Alexander had been pursuing in his life — wealth, fame, and empire — was itself not really valuable, only apparently so.
Given that outlook, it’s not hard to grasp why the Cynics thought that “parrhēsia” was essential to liberation. It is nothing but the practice of speaking plainly, freely, and truthfully with the goal of changing people’s actions for the better.
Almost everyone has difficulties speaking the truth at some point.
Often, we recognize that the person hearing the truth will not like it, may take it as a personal attack, and so we fear the consequences of their reactions. On the flip side, when we sometimes do speak the truth, we do it out of anger, or a desire to wound the other person, or some other ego-soothing purpose. Both reasons are the wrong reasons.
Speaking freely isn’t free. It’s “caged in” by the requirements of telling the truth to your audience in such a way that they will receive it. That’s why it requires courage, but also a good dose of practical wisdom to be effective.
Diogenes, after all, didn’t tell Alexander that he was living his life poorly. He let him infer that point by turning down his gift.
How To Practice Truth-Speaking (Parrhēsia)
The basics of the practice couldn’t be more straightforward. Tell someone when they are wrong about something or when you disagree. Just speak up.
But again, there are constraints. You have to go into the conversation recognizing that you might have misunderstood the situation. And above all, you need to speak in a way that is focused on helping the other person out.
Without those conditions you won’t end up “liberated,” you’ll just end up a slave to your passions — as so many emperors and tyrants became.
There are many ways that giving feedback can go wrong, and that’s why many of us don’t do it often. And we’re not all as clever as Diogenes. Here then are some lessons from the Cynics themselves about truth-speaking.
Use Gestures
The Cynics were renowned for using gestures. And they did this, in part, to communicate a point without triggering other people’s defensiveness.
When one philosopher made a sophisticated argument that we all had horns on our heads, Diogenes is said to have replied simply by touching the top of his head as a rebuttal.
In reply to the Platonic definition that humans were “featherless bipeds,” the story goes that Diogenes found a plucked chicken and put it in the philosopher’s midst (DL 6.39).
Not all Cynical gestures were forms of speaking-freely in this sense. Diogenes, infamously, slept in a tub (for a period) to underscore how little humans actually need to live well (DL 6.23). We don’t even need a home, he was implying, but this isn’t a form of free speaking exactly because it’s not directed at specific people. It’s a general condemnation of society.
Still, many of their gestures did work in this way, and using it in your life is probably easier than you think.
A colleague of mine used this method with me to prod me along in updating a class syllabus for some new university requirements. To do it, she gave me a copy of her syllabus and asked what I thought of her updates. Her syllabus was pristine — and it took me a moment.
Then I got the message louder than any words could speak.
Avoid Anger
Remember, even for the Cynics who were outlandish in their gestures, their purpose was always focused on changing the other person’s behavior.
This precludes telling people off.
As Seneca, the later Roman Stoic philosopher who learned from the Cynics, writes on anger:
Man is born for mutual help; anger for mutual destruction. The one desires union, the other disunion; the one to help, the other to harm; one would succor even strangers, the other attack its best beloved (De Ira I.V.2)
When you call people names, or insult them, or even just address them aggressively, you will trigger their defensiveness. And once a person has become defensive, you have no chance of getting them to change their mind or their behavior.
It feels good to give in to anger, especially if you have suffered an injustice. But speaking freely isn’t the practice of self-soothing or ego-stroking.
Do It Early
A final point about speaking freely proves especially useful for maintaining friendships and romantic relationships: do it early, before the matter gets out of hand.
The most striking example one finds in Cynical philosophy is in Crates’ proposal to Hipparchia (in the generation after Diogenes).
The story goes that Hipparchia was enamored of Crates and, though she was a “very marriageable young woman” (= attractive and well off), she would be satisfied by no one else. Exasperated, her parents asked Crates to dissuade her.
Crates was originally from a well-off family but had long ago renounced that life. By this point, he was renowned as a philosopher but was also unattractive and had a physical disability. To dissuade Hipparchia, then, he came to her room naked and said:
“This is the bridegroom, here are his possessions, decide on this basis” (DL 6.96).
She said that she wanted him anyway. And when he said that she would be of no help to him if she could not participate in his activities, she stated that she would live as a Cynic too. Having accepted him for who he was, they married.
And at a time when it was unseemly for anyone to eat in public, and for a woman to leave the house for reasons unrelated to housework, Hipparchia would go about with Crates, eating in public and discoursing as a philosopher.
She wrote books of philosophy, accompanied him to symposia, and they had a child together — whom they, of course, also raised as a Cynic.
The point is that they fared well because they started off with free and frank speech. And living as Cynics, they continued in this way, always speaking up when something would go wrong or was a concern.
How Truth-Speaking Will Shift Your Life
At its base, speaking the truth is a practice about freedom. Sure, it requires courage to perform, and it requires practical wisdom to execute well, but its purpose is to ensure that the society you live in is free (eleutheros) and that you are free to direct your own life (have autarchia).
I have written in another piece about the way that Stoic logic, understood as the art of thinking slowly in a fast world, can be structured into our daily lives to help us live better. Truth-speaking, or speaking freely, has the same target but approaches the goal differently.
Because our lives are busy, it’s easy to overlook the ways that we daily give away little bits of our freedom. We say yes to another work assignment to avoid a “confrontation” or no to a social gathering because we haven’t worked out that problem with our coworker.
And if that’s true of our work lives, it’s even more true for our personal relationships. We avoid this topic because it’s “a sore spot,” or make a decision because we worry what “they” will think. We are afraid to look bad, for fear of losing our partner’s interest, and we fear the shame that might follow if our plans end poorly.
Yet, the surest way to fail in love is to lack Crates’ courage to expose yourself as you are, and to live by what “they” think.
By lacking courage, your relationship will be distorted by the lies you project. The greater the lies, and the more denial involved, the less of you there will be left to love.
By living according to what “they” think, your relationship will never be yours, or what remains will be whatever is left over after adjusting to what “they” say.
The scientific research on happiness and romance is straightforward. People are about as happy as their romantic life is good. Of all the situational factors in your life, then, this one is the most important.
I’ll leave you with a pair of quotes from Diogenes.
On someone who stated that his own friends had set against him, Diogenes exclaimed,
“What is to be done then, if you must treat friends and enemies the same?”
He meant, of course, for the young man to go talk to his friends about the matter. That’s why they were friends and not enemies.
It is exactly this line of reasoning that explains why, when asked what the most beautiful thing in the world was, Diogenes replied:
“Speaking freely / parrhēsia” (DL 6.68).
Thank you for reading and I hope you learned something.
For more philosophy as a way of life, using all of the world’s traditions, join my newsletter.
Sebastian Purcell’s research specializes in world comparative philosophy, especially as these ancient traditions teach us how to lead happier, richer lives. He lives with his wife, a fellow philosopher, and their three cats in upstate New York.
