11/11/2023 0 Comments Diogenes of sinope thrown in trash![]() ![]() He was banished, or fled from, Sinope over debasement of currency. In mocking all for their absurdities, Diogenes demonstrated a pure view of his world, in which ethics and logic reigned supreme.Diogenes was a controversial figure. Diogenes himself espoused Socrates’s definition of a “cosmopolitan” man who was a citizen of the world. It warns of the follies of materialism and worldly desires and instead favors living a simple and virtuous life, although the journey to that life may be cloudy. Moreover, the ideas of cynicism have merit and are worth considering without having to give up all of one’s belongings and live in a wooden tub.Ĭynicism advocates living a life of freedom and reason. Stoicism in turn inspired the tenets of early Christian thinkers and later figures of the Northern Renaissance. His philosophy inspired Zeno’s school of Stoicism, which emphasized pure virtue as a maxim of life. The man in blue sitting on one of the steps of Raphael’s School of Athens is none other than Diogenes himself, surrounded by other great men, but alone in his simplicity.īut Diogenes’s significance extends past a few funny anecdotes. Diogenes was also famous for walking through the streets of Athens with a lamp in daylight declaring he was searching for an honest man–an ideal he could never find. Then, once he guilted those men into giving him their money, he himself would walk into the brothel and spend the coins. He enjoyed standing outside of brothels and telling would-be patrons to donate their coins to poor beggars like him instead. When Alexander was convinced that he was speaking to the wisest man alive, he told Diogenes he would grant him anything that was within his power, to which Diogenes asked the most powerful man in the world to move to the side because he was blocking his sunlight.ĭiogenes also mocked the hypocritical morality of others. Alexander, who had desired to meet Diogenes after hearing that he was the most famous philosopher in Athens, stood over the Cynic as they discussed matters of life. ![]() He rejected greed and worldly extravagance and pleasures even when he was offered anything he wished from Alexander the Great. This wasn’t the only instance of Diogenes’s penchant for challenging the established beliefs of others. Diogenes countered that question by saying that, in that case, there was no point in caring what would happen to his body in the first place. According to Cicero, when the people asked him how he would defend his body, he said he would need a stick, to which he was asked how we would use it, being dead. ![]() Plato then added having nails to his definition.ĭiogenes lived on the streets and relied on begging and scraps of food to survive. Diogenes Laërtius, a later, unrelated biographer of Greek philosophers, recounted a story in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers where, upon seeing a poor boy drinking out of his cupped hands, he got rid of the only bowl he owned because it was “superfluous baggage.” Before he died, Diogenes told the people of Athens that he wished his body to be thrown over the city walls for the dogs to eat. In fact, when Plato defined man as a “featherless biped,” Diogenes left a plucked chicken on Plato’s doorstep to show him an example of his definition of a man. Although Diogenes was around when Plato and his Academy were at the apex of their popularity, he rejected what he saw as their useless theorizing and embraced as simple of a life as possible. Diogenes was one of the founders of Cynic thought, which describes a loosely-united group of philosophers living in the fourth and fifth centuries BC in and around Athens. ![]()
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