So here he was, washing off some discarded lettuce in the market, when the great Plato deigned to give the lowly Diogenes some career advice. It really starts with the Cynics."īonus: "Someone took into a magnificent house and warned him not to expectorate, whereupon having cleared his throat he discharged the phlegm into the man's face, being unable, he said, to find a meaner receptacle." You don't see that in Socrates, Plato or Aristotle. "It's the first time in the history of Western philosophy that you get this really radical conception of freedom.
#DIOGENES POT FREE#
"Diogenes makes it clear that he's the master in that relationship, not the person who bought him, just like he's more free than Alexander the Great," says Piering. Even as a slave, Diogenes was freer than his supposed master. He spotted a rich man in the crowd named Xeniades and said, "Sell me to this man he needs a master."Īgain, Diogenes used a witty exchange to say something about the nature of freedom. When the auctioneer asked Diogenes "in what he was proficient," according to Diogenes Laertius, the mischievous philosopher replied, "In ruling men." Kind of an odd thing for a slave to say, but Diogenes persisted. According to Diogenes Laertius, the mighty Alexander is reported to have said, "Had I not been Alexander, I should have liked to be Diogenes."īonus: "When someone was extolling the good fortune of Callisthenes and saying what splendour he shared in the suite of Alexander, 'Not so,' said Diogenes, 'but rather ill fortune for he breakfasts and dines when Alexander thinks fit.'"
You might think that insulting an emperor would get you in trouble, but Diogenes enjoyed a strange type of immunity as a "comic" figure and even posh Athenians had a grudging respect for Diogenes' unencumbered freedom. "So not only does Diogenes not need anything from Alexander the Great, he doesn't want anything from him." "When you're indebted to a politician, a statesman, or even more so the emperor, you have lost your ability to speak freely and act freely," says Piering. And Diogenes knew that a "boon" from Alexander wasn't just a gift, but an attempt to buy his loyalty. But what we do know is that Cynics like Diogenes prized one thing above all else: autarkeia, a Greek word that roughly translates into autonomy or freedom. Here are five of the most memorable moments from the life of Diogenes of Sinope:ĭid Diogenes dislike Alexander? We don't know. For our purposes, we're going to quote directly from "Lives of Eminent Philosophers" even if the quotes or anecdotes about Diogenes are written in the third person. If you search the internet for Diogenes quotes, by the way, you'll find a lot of lines that were lifted from Diogenes Laertius and reworded as first-person quotes from Diogenes. In " Lives of Eminent Philosophers," the Greek historian Diogenes Laertius recorded the greatest comedic hits of Diogenes, including some truly sick burns directed at figures like Alexander the Great and Plato. Everything else was nonsense.ĭiogenes left no writing of his own and just about everything we know about him was written centuries later by another guy named Diogenes. Human nature and reason, to Cynics, were the only requirements for a happy life.
But the Cynics lived this way to make a point - that there is nothing shameful about being human. They dressed in rough blankets, slept under porticos, and did every "shameful" human act in public. It's Diogenes who took the radicalized version of that."ĭiogenes and his Cynic followers were beggars. "He just said not to care about money or status or power more than you care about the state of your soul. "But Socrates never said to give up all of your possessions," says Piering.
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