Jacob the Cynic

Jacob Burckhardt, the famous historian of Renaissance and Greek culture that Nietzsche highly appreciated, famously said that ‘What is of interest to [him] is not so much to see how far the Greeks took philosophy as to see how far philosophy took them.’ The phrase encapsulates the fascinating tension that pervades Burckhardt’s attitude towards Greek philosophy: whereas he was fundamentally hostile to philosophical doctrines, in particular because philosophers were themselves doctrinally hostiles to art, he also highly praised philosophy in as much as the embodiment of one of the great achievements of Greek culture, the development of the ‘free personality’. This explains why the Cynics, with little doctrine and much life, were his preferred philosophers.