In philosophy this led to immediate and sharp results: Plato and Aristotle had not been able to think of an ethics that was truly distinct from politics. If man and citizen are no longer identified, it becomes possible to look for meaning in life that is not confined to expressing the ethos of a polis, but simply as an individual, a unique individual answering only to his or her own (possibly reasoned and reflected upon) sense of what is good and right. Corresponding to the rise of cosmopolitanism was the rise of a new sense of individuality.
The other side of this devaluation of one’s own particular polis was the development of an ideal of cosmopolitanism, that is the belief that beyond membership in one city or culture all human beings were at some level united as citizens and members of the human world. This was particularly the approach of the Epicureans. They tended to make politics something morally indifferent or neutral, not of importance in living a good life), or they made politics into something morally negative, something to be avoided because it was the source of ambitions and passions that lead the soul astray and disturb it. The new philosophies respond to this situation (or give in to it) by devaluing politics.
They were no longer the activities that counted. There was simply no space to put them into practice. They ceased to appreciate the old ideas and ideals of civic political participation along with the virtues they demanded. Instead of being citizens, men became subjects. But the affairs of the new empires went on independent of the wills of any but a truly tiny number of individuals. The classical Greeks had been unable to envision a meaningful social life outside the polis. So the set of problems connected with the existence of the polis that had generated the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle simply disappeared. The new empires (of Alexander and his successors) did not accept limitations on their power, thus virtually identifying themselves with the state. The polis was destroyed in the project of creating a universal monarchy by divine right. But before we look at Cynicism in the form of its most typical representative – Diogenes of Sinope – it would be worthwhile to make some comments about the period as a whole.įirst, Alexander’s conquest of the Orient and of Greece led to a radical shift in Greek culture. We will look at only one of these schools. All of them were united in rejecting the dualism (even in its modified Aristotelian form) between a real, transcendent world of intelligible, permanent, unchanging forms superior to the shifting, unreliable world of sense experience. The three major schools are Stoicism, Epicurianism and Cynicism. In philosophy, this era is dominated by three or four schools noteworthy for quite a few things that turned out to have been of crucial importance for the development of the culture of the West. The next 600 years are dominated by the rise of large scale empires.
This whole new era, from roughly 323 BCE and the conquest of Greece and the Near East by Alexander the Great down through roughly 300 CE when the Roman Empire becomes officially Christian, has a distinctly different character and culture and a distinctly different set of political problems than the period of the classical polis. Although the schools founded by Plato and Aristotle continue for a couple of centuries after the deaths of their founders, they either change their doctrines radically or come to be seen as largely irrelevant to people’s lives.
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Asher Horowitz | Department of Political Science | Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies | York Universityĭiogenes and the End of the Polis: Philosophy in the Shadow of EmpiresĪfter Aristotle a radically new spirit comes to dominate ancient philosophy, and with hindsight it is remarkable how swiftly the change takes place.