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Cynicism, Joy, and Baloo the Bear
I don’t often speak about joy; I think it’s silly. (I don’t know why I think this.) But recently I’ve been troubled by troubles of my own making, and this coincided fortuitously with my daughter’s discovery of Disney’s The Jungle Book and with that Baloo the bear. What a picture of a Cynic: contentedly resting at ease with just the bare necessities. It’s a healthy correction.
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Diogenes the Cynic
Diogenes sees a mouse, happily running about, not looking for money or prestige, and finds a lesson in the mouse’s behaviour: 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. […]
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Antisthenes: Founder of the Cynic School of Thought
Antisthenes said he would rather go mad than experience pleasure. That is clearly hyperbolic, but it captures the more austere Socratic approach that can be seen in the early days of Cynic philosophy. […]
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Luxuries
Luxuries are a creeping and relative thing. The more you have the more it seems reasonable to have. And the more it seems reasonable to have, the more it seems unreasonable to go without. Soon you will call them necessities.
An experiment with philosophy as a way of life
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