Cynical Hedonism (2)

In its literary form, Bion’s diatribe is the antithesis of the Stoics’ didactic works, with their skeletal reasoning and bewildering terminology. Yet it is not a continuous discourse, composed of periods, in the manner of the rhetoricians and sophists; it has retained something of the discussion from which it originates (diatribe, in Plato, refers to the Socratic dialogue); it addresses itself directly to the listener it seeks to convince or refute, through short, urgent questions: “Man,” Poverty is supposed to say, “why attack me? Have I deprived you of a true good? Of temperance? Of justice? Of courage? Do you lack necessities? Are not the roads full of beans and the springs full of water?” A fictitious interlocutor even sometimes speaks up to raise objections; like the one who complains of his lot: “You command,” he says, “and I obey; you use many things, and I use few.” But alongside these passages, which are like a stylized discussion, there are others, more oratorical, where thought unfolds in images: some have remained famous and will be repeated ad nauseam: “Just as the good actor plays well the role the poet assigns him, the good man must play properly the one Fortune assigns him. Fortune is like a poet who sometimes gives a leading role and sometimes a secondary one, sometimes that of a beggar,” or again: “As we leave a house, whose landlord has removed the door and the roof, and blocked the well, so I leave this poor body; When nature, which lent it to me, takes away my eyes, ears, hands, and feet, I cannot bear it, but, as I leave a banquet without getting angry, so I leave life when my time comes.” Finally, Bion employs the edifying anecdote, the chreia or apophthegm, which he borrows from the heroes of Cynicism, Diogenes and Socrates in particular. All of this together forms the kind of discourse that Eratosthenes called “philosophy in an embroidered cloak,” because it is made up of all genres: discussion, anecdote, and speech.

The diatribe comprises a thousand variations on the same theme: Fortune (Tyche) has distributed men their fates in a sovereign and incomprehensible manner, without any trace of providence; Happiness consists in being content with one’s lot and submitting to all circumstances, as a sailor obeys the winds: a kind of resigned wisdom that leads to impassivity, that renounces understanding the secret of things or even admitting that they have a secret, that therefore renounces acting upon them, and that seeks to become completely independent of them through the inner disposition of the soul. This is the era of the development of the cult of the goddess Tyche, who replaced the entire pantheon with a kind of capricious and impersonal force; Bion could have learned this from his Peripatetic teacher Theophrastus, who, before Strato, said in his Callisthenes everything was governed by chance. Vitàm regit fortuna non sapientia, Cicero translates it[1]; and the Stoics devoted treatises to refuting this disenchanted thought, of which Plutarch’s On Fortune has left us an echo. He shows how prudence, the master virtue and defining characteristic of humankind, implies that not everything is governed by chance and that, if everyone admits that prudence is necessary in the lesser arts, it must be admitted a fortiori in the more important matters relating to happiness[2].

With such a doctrine, if indeed it is one, the only method is not to provide proofs but to suggest an attitude or a state of mind; to show, for example, that one should not rely on pleasure nor see it as an end in itself, Bion takes up the theme of Crates and Hegesias: depicting the ages of life, he shows that sufferings outweigh pleasures, with all the hardships in which the child lives, the worries that overwhelm middle age, the regrets that consume old age, and half of life spent in the unconsciousness of sleep[3]. Wanting to show how things cannot affect us, he will give the floor to Poverty who will develop the ideal of a frugal, healthy and happy life, a meal of figs and fresh water, a bed of leaves; Wealth will show on the other hand all that it gives to man: “The earth itself does not produce spontaneously and without my help; I give the impetus to everything,” Is it a question of consoling for the death of a friend: “Your friend is dead, that is because he was born too. “Yes, but he will no longer be. – He wasn’t there ten thousand years ago either, neither at the time of the Trojan War, nor in the time of your grandparents.”[4]

This diatribe, which concentrated within itself so many previously scattered themes, was immensely successful; it created for philosophy a new style that made it as attractive as a rhetorical flourish; through the image of Tyche, it gets rid of all doctrine and thus becomes popular. Ready also to unite with any doctrine, since it preaches in essence the same impassivity, the same detachment that Stoics and Epicureans believe they can only acquire at the price of physics or theology, it will give birth to all those airs of bravado of popular philosophy that we find in the poet Horace or Lucian, or inserted into a doctrinal fabric as in Lucretius or Philo of Alexandria, in the Stoics of the Empire, Musonius, Seneca and Epictetus and even in Plotinus; is not this last flower of Socratic thought traditionally considered the summum of ancient wisdom?