Diogenes the Cynic

Whilst Antisthenes might have constructed the bones of the Cynic school of thought, it takes a student of Antisthenes to make it a fully-fleshed living and breathing (and barking) way of life: Diogenes ‘the Dog’.

Diogenes was from Sinope, a town on the northern coast of what we would now call Turkey. His father was said to have been in charge of the public bank there but had been exiled (or imprisoned and killed, depending on the story) for defacing the currency. Or perhaps it was Diogenes who defaced the currency, causing his father to be punished. However it happened, the young Diogenes was forced to flee his home town, subsequently travelling to Athens and coming to meet Antisthenes.

Whether it starts with Diogenes’ father, or Diogenes himself, or even if it’s just a myth, the practice of ‘defacing currency’ became something associated with the Cynic school of thought. It’s clearly symbolically fitting, as an act: you literally mark your disdain for wealth. It’s so fitting, in fact, that it casts doubt on the authenticity of that part of Diogenes’ origin story. Too good to be true, surely? Perhaps more legend than legal tender.

After some long hard pestering, Antisthenes reluctantly agrees to take the down-and-out Diogenes as his student, and Diogenes proceeds to exceed his teacher’s defiant self-reliance in all ways imaginable.

Self-Reliance

Diogenes took to self-imposed poverty easily, being already poor and homeless, and limited his possessions to one cloak for clothing, which he wrapped around himself double when it was cold, and one bag to hold food. And that’s it. He had no home and lived on the streets. He begged for food and coin, living off a diet of water and lentils (and whatever else anyone threw his way). He took to living in what is described as a large earthen jar – the Ancient Greek equivalent of living in a cardboard box, I suppose.

This is how he gains the title ‘the dog’: he lives like a stray dog, on the streets, living off scraps, barking angrily at passers-by and accusing them of lacking virtue.

He once owned a cup, from which he would drink, but when he saw a child drinking from its cupped hands, Diogenes threw his cup away, not wishing to be outdone in self-reliance by a child. He once owned a spoon, with which he would eat his soup, but on seeing a child eating soup with a crust of bread, Diogenes threw away the spoon.

Diogenes would train himself to endure hardship, rolling around in hot sand in the summer and hugging frozen snow-covered statues in the winter. He’d also beg from statues to practise being rejected. He’d walk around barefoot in the hot sun or freezing snow.

So far, so self-denyingly good, and much aligned with Antisthenes’ scornful and disciplined avoidance of luxury. But there is an important modification of the Cynic school of thought that seems to emerge (or gain emphasis) with Diogenes, because Diogenes did not avoid all pleasure; at times quite the opposite!

Simple Pleasures

There are stories of Diogenes masturbating in public. When he is challenged on the impropriety of this, he famously replied: ‘If only I could satisfy my hunger by rubbing my belly.’

It’s perhaps not a pleasant story and not an example we might want to emulate, but there’s a lesson in it. If the satisfaction of basic natural desires, like thirst or hunger or warmth (or sexual gratification) is readily available, why not take it? If you’re thirsty and there’s water, drink the water. If you’re hungry and there’s bread, eat the bread. Perhaps there are social conventions that say we should only eat at certain times of the day and in certain places, but what power should those conventions hold over a Cynic?

There is a similar, if less striking, story about Diogenes being admonished for eating in the marketplace (which was not the done thing). Diogenes replies that he did, ‘for it was in the marketplace that I was hungry.’

A more famous story says that Alexander the Great (the most powerful man in the world at the time) came to meet Diogenes the philosopher, who was sunbathing, and, being impressed by the stories he had heard, offered Diogenes anything that he wanted. Diogenes replied that Alexander could get out of his light.

Alexander asks Diogenes: ‘do you not fear me?’ Diogenes says no, why should he? ‘Are you good or evil?’, asks Diogenes. Alexander replies predictably, ‘I am good.’ To which Diogenes points out that no one fears the good, so what has he to fear from Alexander the good?

Alexander himself remarked that if he had not been Alexander, he should like to have been Diogenes. Alexander the Great, the most powerful man in the world, acknowledging the greatness of Diogenes the Dog, a homeless beggar without a coin to his name. Such is the power of philosophy.

Align Yourself with Nature

What emerges from Diogenes is not an outright rejection of pleasure, as we see hinted at with Antisthenes, but a very careful limitation of pleasures.

Diogenes sees a mouse, happily running about, not looking for money or prestige, and finds a lesson in the mouse’s behaviour: Diogenes says the gods have given us an easy life, but we’ve made it difficult for ourselves by overlaying it with nonsense.

It’s not pleasure that’s the problem; it’s that we pursue pleasures that we don’t need. In doing that, we pursue other things we don’t need, like wealth and status. But if we abandon our desire for all of these unnecessary things and live like a mouse, or a dog, we find there is more than enough pleasure in life. Virtue is sufficient for happiness, and the gods (or nature) provide the rest. All you need to do is stick rigidly to your virtue and align your life with nature.

Even in Diogenes’ time to talk of ‘the gods providing’ would be taken metaphorically. This is even more true in our much more secular time. So we can replace ‘the gods’ with ‘nature’ here and the effect is the same. Nature has given us a relatively easy life, but we’ve overlaid it with nonsense. We make life difficult for ourselves by wanting more than our nature needs. Diogenes implores us to realise this, offering us a walking talking living breathing lesson with his own example.

An Embodied Example

He knows he is going to extremes to make the point. With Diogenes, it’s sometimes difficult to separate the philosophy from the performance art, if there even is a separation there. But Diogenes said he imitated the teachers of choirs, who speak over-loud so that the choir can find the proper tone. When people are singing, you have to shout over them to be heard. He knows he’s being excessive in his behaviour, but he knows it is necessary to break through the noise – people need to be shocked out of their chains.

So he makes a big visible display of his poverty and indifference to anything but virtue. And when people aren’t paying attention, he draws their attention somehow. A lot of this is clearly intended to provoke. He masturbates in public. He hugs statues and begs from them. He mocks, insults, and abuses. He barks like a dog.

This doesn’t come without consequence. Reading between the lines, there are more than a few stories that feature Diogenes getting punched in the face. This is not to say that Diogenes was universally hated and despised – there is a story that someone broke his jar, and the youths of Athens beat the perpetrator up and gave Diogenes a new one – but even so, there are enough stories about Diogenes being beaten to indicate that it was a common occurrence.

One such story is innocuous enough and simply says that Diogenes, having been hit in the head, remarks that he was lucky to have discovered that he was wearing a helmet and didn’t realise. What he means by this is that the head, or at least parts of it, are pretty well-made to be punched. (Anyone who’s been punched will know this: the top of the head and forehead is very strong and can easily take a hit, but the sides and lower parts are less resilient.) So on the face of it this is a story about the self-sufficiency of nature: the head doesn’t need a helmet. But also, you wonder why he was getting punched in the first place.

Other stories are more transparent. We’re told that Diogenes is attacked by someone called Midias; the implication being that Diogenes had been over-eager in his begging. There had recently been a compensation claim settled in court, awarding the victim of an assault 3,000 Drachmae. So Midias strikes Diogenes and says ‘there’s 3,000 Drachmae for you’. (Midias is clearly a kind of witty one-liner action hero of his day.) Diogenes’ response reveals more than the simple story suggests, I think: he goes and gets a boxer’s cestus – a kind of basic but slightly more savage boxing glove, designed to protect the hand and do a bit of damage to your opponent when punching – returning the next day to give Midias a sound beating, repaying the debt and saying ‘there’s 3,000 Drachmae for you’.

This is a ‘natural’ response, you might think; the kind of response that someone looking to align their life with nature and live like a dog might see as natural, anyway. If someone barks at you, you bark back; if someone bites, you bite back. It’s perfectly natural. But it is an act of barefaced revenge, on the face of it not particularly virtuous, even by Cynic standards. It’s not exactly aligned with the Socratic claim that ‘it’s better to suffer evil than do it’, for example.

Live Naturally

What these stories mark, for me, is a gradual transition away from their Socratic origins into a new kind of virtue, one that prioritises living aligned with nature. It is this form of virtue that goes forward as the more influential idea. It might be there as an idea in Antisthenes, but it’s Diogenes that breathes life into this idea and gives it a kind of celebrity. Diogenes is the branding that takes over the company; the tail that ends up wagging the dog.

What we are left with is a coherent and powerful philosophical school of thought that is partially obscured by a veneer of bad behaviour. Upon entering a grand and finely-decorated house, Diogenes spat in the owner’s face, claiming everything else was too fine to spit on. At a feast, some drunken guests mockingly throw their leftover bones at Diogenes ‘the dog’; and so Diogenes, on his way out, cocks his leg and urinates on them.

I’m sometimes puzzled by the Cynics, because whilst they profess to eschew pleasure, they also say to do (and do) what feels natural. Lots of what they do is clearly about enjoying simple pleasures, such as sunbathing, masturbation, or insulting people that you despise.

I think the answer is that once you are indifferent to the ‘shadows’ of pleasure – the empty pleasures of glory, success, wealth, reputation, or even luxury – you come to realise that there is more than enough pleasure to be found in simple things. These simple things are amply provided for by nature: the sun is nice and warm, lentils are filling, water quenches your thirst. What more do you want? And if it’s not a sunny day, or you don’t have any lentils or water, then that’s fine too, because it trains you to be better able to endure the cold or hunger or thirst.

In keeping your desires so extraordinarily minimal, and focussing your will only on virtue (as Socrates instructed), you make yourself invulnerable to misfortune. Life literally cannot hurt you, because there’s nothing that you want or fear.

This means there is less contradiction than there might first appear in on the one hand claiming hostility towards pleasure whilst also enjoying it when it presents itself. Diogenes says that covetousness is the metropolis of all evils, but when asked which wine is best to drink he replies ‘someone else’s’. There is no contradiction here.

Walk Away from the Academy

Diogenes didn’t show much respect for philosophical debate – in response to someone who argued (like Parmenides or Zeno) that there was no such thing as motion, he simply got up and walked away – and he showed especial disrespect for Plato, whom Diogenes repeatedly accuses of being arrogant. He puns that Plato’s ‘discussions’ are ‘disguise’.

Incidentally, Cynic wordplay is obviously clearer in the original Greek, as when Diogenes says that a certain other philosophical school (schole) is bile (chole).

There is a famous story of Plato presenting a philosophical definition of a ‘man’ as being a ‘two-footed, featherless animal’; to which Diogenes responded by plucking a chicken and bringing it to Plato’s Academy proclaiming: ‘here is Plato’s man!’

The bad feeling between the two appeared to be mutual, judging by the many stories of Plato looking down on Diogenes’ low status with scorn. There is a story of Plato mocking Diogenes for washing vegetables, essentially saying that if Diogenes had been more successful he would not need to spend his time washing vegetables. Diogenes replies that if Plato had spent any time washing vegetables, he would understand that there is no need to be successful.

It’s no surprise that the two heirs to Socrates’ tradition didn’t see eye to eye. They are clearly very different characters, with very different approaches to philosophy. In contrast to Plato’s elitist intellectualism, Diogenes is aggressively anti-intellectual. He mocks someone for asking for a philosophy book, saying: ‘you don’t want to eat paintings of food, but actual food, so why do you only want to read about virtue, rather than do it?’

Don’t Just Think It: Do It

Diogenes understood that it’s not enough to read and think; you need to do. And when it comes to getting stuff done, it’s practice that makes the biggest difference.

The mind needs the body. So if you want to live well, doing only intellectual things is never going to be enough: you need to practise living well to get better at it.

Like Diogenes, Plato understands that virtue is what really matters and pleasure is not what really matters. But, unlike Diogenes, Plato thinks that if your mind understands that then your body will adapt accordingly.

Surely it’s not that simple. The desire for pleasure is a very natural desire, deeply embedded in our nature. It’s not so easy to willingly go without.

Diogenes understands that if you practise ignoring pleasure, you get better at it. And if you keep this up, you might end up getting enjoyment from eschewing pleasure. Contempt for pleasure itself becomes pleasurable.

If you train yourself to go without luxury, you get better at going without and find it harder to get distracted by empty pleasures. But if you practise getting pleasure, you find it easier to get lured by empty pleasures and find it harder to go without.

Show It by Doing It

Diogenes practised what he preached, looking to show his philosophy through his lived example; he looked to change habits, not only minds. For this purpose, all Plato’s complex metaphysics and geometry was unhelpful and unnecessary: all that high-mindedness achieves is flattering egos.

At some point in Diogenes’ life he is captured and enslaved. Even this doesn’t dampen his philosophical spirit, let alone break it. When put up for sale, he is asked to say what he can do of use: to which Diogenes replies that he knows how to instruct people about how to live well, and so someone who wants a master and teacher should buy him as a slave. A man called Xeniades buys Diogenes, and so Diogenes tell Xeniades that he should obey his slave’s instructions, even though he is his slave, just as a patient obeys the instructions of a doctor even though the doctor is employed by the patient.

Xeniades doesn’t quite go that far, but he does seem to put Diogenes to use as a tutor for his children and a manager of his house. Diogenes did these tasks well. He taught the children to be self-reliant and seems to have been generally respected and admired even as a slave.

Diogenes lived a long life, never relenting in his philosophical activity. Enslavement was no obstacle for Diogenes and neither was age. When told he should relax in his older years he asked: ‘Why? If I were running a long distance, would I stop running as I neared the end and not press on?’

Diogenes said that exile, and the poverty and social estrangement that came with it, made him a philosopher. It taught him that he could be self-reliant even with nothing. Once that alignment with nature has been achieved, there is little that the world can do to threaten you. And once there, you can do as you please. Even as a slave. As he said of his life:

‘There were times when I did what I did not wish to do, but that is no longer the case.’

Antisthenes, Cynicism, Diogenes, Ethics, Nature, Philosophy as a Way of Life, Plato, Socrates, Wisdom