Diogenes the Cynic

Diogenes of Sinope was the most famous of the Cynic philosophers, and perhaps the most colourful figure in the history of Greek philosophy. Exiled from his native city on the Black Sea, he lived in Athens and Corinth in deliberate poverty, sleeping in a large earthenware storage jar (pithos), begging for his food, and performing in public — eating, sleeping and worse — the acts that convention confined to private life. His philosophy was a practice: to live according to nature, needing as little as possible, free from fear, ambition and shame, and to expose by provocation the folly of conventional values. He called himself a dog (kyōn, from which “Cynic” comes), and a “citizen of the world”. No writings of his survive; he is known through hundreds of anecdotes, collected above all by Diogenes Laërtius in the third century CE, which make him the hero of a philosophy of freedom through simplicity that passed into Stoicism and, much later, into the modern figure of the dissident who speaks truth to power.

Life

Diogenes was born around 412 BCE in Sinope, a Greek colony on the southern shore of the Black Sea, where his father Hicesias was a banker or official of the mint. Father and son were involved in a scandal of “defacing the currency” — adulterating or defacing coins — and Diogenes was exiled. Tradition says he had consulted the oracle at Delphi, which told him to “deface the currency” (paracharattein to nomisma); he took it at first literally and later as a mission to deface the nomisma — the coinage, but also the customs (nomos) — of society.

In Athens he became, according to tradition, a follower of Antisthenes, a companion of Socrates who preached virtue through hardship (the connection may be a later invention). He lived in the agora, slept in a jar near the temple of Cybele, owned a cloak, a staff and a wallet for food, and lived by begging. Later, captured by pirates while sailing to Aegina, he was sold as a slave in Corinth to a man named Xeniades, who made him tutor to his sons; there he lived until his death, around 323 BCE, at about ninety.

Living according to nature

The Cynics held that happiness (eudaimonia) consists in virtue, and virtue in living according to nature (physis) rather than according to convention (nomos). Most of what people pursue — wealth, reputation, luxury, power, refined food, fine houses — is unnecessary for happiness and a source of anxiety and slavery. The gods, he said, need nothing; and those who need least are most like the gods. He trained himself to endure hardship (askēsis): rolling in hot sand in summer, embracing snow-covered statues in winter. When he saw a boy drinking water from his cupped hands, he threw away his cup.

Shamelessness

Since what is natural cannot be shameful, Diogenes did in public what was considered decent only in private: he ate in the marketplace (eating in public was considered vulgar), and he masturbated in public, remarking that he wished he could relieve hunger by rubbing his stomach. His shamelessness (anaideia) was a deliberate assault on convention, designed to show that much of what we feel ashamed of is arbitrary. His freedom of speech (parrhēsia), frank to the point of insult, made him a symbol of truth-telling — studied in modern times by Michel Foucault.

Anecdotes

The stories about Diogenes are his philosophy. He walked through Athens by daylight with a lit lamp, saying “I am looking for a human being” — an honest man. Asked where he came from, he answered “I am a citizen of the world” — the first recorded use of kosmopolitēs, rejecting the city-state as the boundary of obligation. When Plato defined man as “a featherless biped”, Diogenes plucked a chicken, brought it to the Academy and said, “Here is Plato’s man.” When Plato talked of “tablehood” and “cuphood”, Diogenes said, “Table and cup I see; but your tablehood and cuphood, Plato, I can nowhere see.” Plato reputedly called him “a Socrates gone mad”.

The most famous meeting is with Alexander the Great, who found him sunning himself at Corinth and asked if there was anything he could do for him. “Yes,” said Diogenes, “stand out of my sun.” Alexander is said to have remarked, “If I were not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes.” Asked what he had gained from philosophy, Diogenes replied, “If nothing else, to be prepared for every fortune.” Asked why people give to beggars but not to philosophers, he said, “Because they think they may one day become lame or blind, but never that they will become philosophers.” When asked how he wished to be buried, he said, “Face down”, because soon everything would be turned upside down; or, in another version, that his body should be thrown over the city wall for the dogs.

Legacy

Diogenes’ followers included Crates of Thebes, who gave away his fortune, and Crates’ wife Hipparchia, who adopted the Cynic life against her family’s wishes — one of the few women philosophers of antiquity. Crates taught Zeno of Citium, who founded Stoicism (Stoicism), which took over the Cynic ideals of living according to nature, virtue as the only good, and cosmopolitanism, while softening their contempt for convention; Epictetus described the true Cynic as a messenger of Zeus. Cynic preachers wandered the Roman Empire for centuries. The modern sense of “cynic” — one who distrusts others’ motives — is a degraded echo; the ancient Cynics distrusted only false values.

In conversation

• “Stand out of my sun” — Diogenes and Alexander.
• The lamp in daylight — looking for an honest human being.
• “Citizen of the world” — the birth of cosmopolitanism.