The Cynics
The Cynics formed a minor branch of speculation in whom we find Socrate exaggerate. This school was founded by Antisthenes and Diogenes was its prominent member. They made individualism the center of their study.
They believed in the citizenship of the world and in the natural equality of mankind; they abandoned the old Greek idea of the state. Barker says: “In them we see the conscious apostles of a cosmopolitan tendency which was perhaps inherent in the philosophic school, composed as they generally were a teachers and disciplines drawn together from all the quarters of the Greek world. The Cynics based their position partly on the life, and party on the teachings of Socrates…They embraced poverty …because they hated the kingdoms of earth…they revolted against the whole of society with all its grades and institutions. They were the antinomians of the Greek world—the enemies of property, finally, city and whatever else involved degree, priority of place.
They Cynics are thus the first proletarian thinkers and their ideas of natural equality and world citizenship appear to foreshadow later speculations of the Stoics and the Romans. Their idea of simple life and stern indifference to material charms appear to be borrowed by Plato in his theory of communism. Their view of self-sufficingness is taken over by Aristotle in his theory of self-sufferingness of the state. Sabine says: “The chief practical importance of the Cynic school lay in the fact that it was matrix from which Stoicism emerged.” Likewise, Barker comments: “Thus was the city state sapped both by the equalitarian assertion that every man is as good as every other man, whatever his political status, and by the cosmopolitan conception of the wise man being sufficient for himself, and in need of no state to train him in the ways of righteousness. The national will of the individual superseded the moral association of citizen as the seat and home of the virtue. We seem close to Christianity and the Church Universal; and indeed a continuous line of thought can be traced from Cynics to Stoics, from Stoics to the early Fathers, a line of thought along which the conception of the independence of the individual soul goes together with that of a world association of souls”.
The Cyrenaics
Another minor school was of the Cyrenaics. The Cyrenaic school, equally descended from Socrates, pursued the same individualistic direction. Knowledge, in their view, was sufficient for salvation; but salvation lay, according to their tenets, in the pursuit of pleasure. Findings the goal of life in the cult of wise pleasure, the Cyrenaics no longer needed the state to supply any rule of action. Philosophy was good, Aristippus is reported to have said ‘to enable the philosophy was good, Aristippus is reported to have said ‘to enable the philosopher, supposing all laws were abolished, to go on living as before.’ Having attained a height where law was unnecessary, the Cyrenaics found it easy to regard law as conventional and to hold that right and wrong existed by custom. Yet, they did not abolish the law to make room for the indiscriminate enjoyment to private pleasures. On the contrary, they conceived that man might find pleasure in the welfare of this friends or his country. The Cyrenaics thus percussed the tendency of Hedonism. Barker observes: “The hedonism of an individual enjoyment thus rose into the Utilitarianism of a general welfare.”