Diogenes said he would rather meet with failure among the cultivated than with success among the uncultivated.
‘That was when I was just as you are now; but what I am now, you will never be.’
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Diogenes said, ‘People pray to the gods for good health, and yet most of them consistently act in such a way as to damage their health.’
Seeing the servants of Anaximenes moving a large amount of furniture, he asked, ‘Who does that belong to?’, and when they replied, ’To Anaximenes’, he said, ‘Isn’t he ashamed to possess all that when he doesn’t even possess himself?’
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This volume collects sayings and anecdotes by and related to Diogenes and a handful of his followers, the same for Arisippos and the Cyrenaics, and also includes some Apocryphal letters. I only read the ones relating to Diogenes.
To him literature, music, mathematics, science, and philosophical investigation and discussion were a distraction and a waste of time . . . Diogenes was a great simplifier who lost sight of an entire dimension of human life by scorning it as a tissue of illusion.
Robin Hard gets at a fundamental question which you may find asking yourself when reading Diogenes; those things: literature, music, mathematics, science, philosophical investigation and discussion . . . do they have value, or are they utterly pointless? If they are utterly pointless, it could be argued that you should take away a great deal more from Diogenes than you hopefully do; but if they do have value, you will realise he has taken Cynic philosophy to an absolute extreme, as Robin Hard also remarks:
It was a commonplace of Socratic thought that one can be rich by being satisfied with little, and so achieve a measure of invulnerability to fortune. Diogenes radicalised this idea, taking it to the utmost extreme. If one takes into account only one’s most basic needs and desires, putting everything else aside as mere fancy and illusion, and is content to satisfy those needs in the simplest and most direct way possible, one needs hardly anything at all; and if one divests oneself of all that one possesses to live as a vagrant, one can anticipate the very worst and become inured to any hardship, and so achieve complete invulnerability to fortune.
in which case you may find yourself leaning towards Plato’s thinking, that Diogenes is a
Socrates gone mad
However, the second opinion may not stop you from sympathising with Alexander, when he is said to have remarked,
If I were not Alexander I should be Diogenes . . .
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[May I recount] what Diogenes did with the man who declared that Athens was an expensive city. He took him in hand and led him off to a perfume-seller, and asked how much a half-pint of myrrh cost. ‘A mina’, replied the seller, and Diogenes cried out, ’The city is indeed expensive!’ And then he led the man off to a butcher’s shop and asked the price of a choice cut of meat. ’Three drachmas’, replied the butcher, and Diogenes said, ’The city is indeed expensive!’ Next, to a seller of fine wools, where he asked the price of a full fleece; ‘a mina’ was the reply, and he cried again, ’The city is indeed expensive!’ ‘Here now’, he said, and took the man to a lupin-seller and asked, ‘How much for a quart?’ ‘A copper’, was the reply, and Diogenes cried ‘How cheap the city is!’ And then again to a seller of dried figs: ’Two coppers.’ And to a seller of myrtle berries, ’Two coppers’; ‘How cheap the city is!’ So the fact of the matter is that the city is not cheap or expensive in itself, but expensive if one lives expensively, and cheap if one lives cheaply. (24b)
One day he shouted, ‘Hey men!’, and when some people came along, he struck them with his stick, saying, ‘I called for men not scum!’ (60)
He walked around. Backwards in the public arcade, and when people laughed at him, said, ‘Aren’t you ashamed while you’re walking in the wrong direction along life’s path, you scoff at me for walking backwards?’ (73)
Diogenes said that true pleasure lies in having one’s soul in a calm and cheerful state, and that without that, the riches of a Midas or Croesus will bring no benefit; and if one suffers any distress at all over matters small or great, one is not happy but wretched. (106a)
To someone who said life is bad, he said, ’Not life, but life lived badly.’ (108)
When asked whether a certain man was wealthy, Diogenes replied, ‘I have no idea, because I don’t know how he uses his wealth.’ (143)
Seeing a youth spendthrift who had squandered his inheritance feeding on bread and olives, and drinking water, he said, ‘If you’d breakfasted in that way by force of reason, you wouldn’t be dining in that way by force of necessity.’
Love, he said, is the occupation of the unoccupied. (163)
When asked what is the right time to marry, he replied, ‘For those who are young, not yet, for those who are older, never at all.’ (172)
One day he saw a young man engaging in philosophy. ‘It is a fine thing’, he said, ’that you should cause the lovers of your body to turn to the beauty of your soul.’ (178)
When someone asked how one can become a teacher to oneself, he replied, ‘By reproaching first of all in oneself those faults that one reproaches in others.’ (274)
Diogenes said: from books one should take for use only what is of true value, and the rest one should throw away, just as we do with bones; for we make us of their marrow, while we throw the bones themselves to the dogs. (291)
A disreputable eunuch had inscribed above the entrance to his house, ‘Let nothing evil enter in.’ ‘How, then’, enquired Diogenes, ‘will the master of the house be able to get inside?’ (364)
Diogenes was suffering from pain in his shoulder, because he had been wounded, I think, or perhaps for some other reason. Since the pain seemed to be very severe, someone who was on bad terms with him scoffed at him, saying. ‘Why don’t you die, Diogenes, and free yourself from your sufferings?’, to which Diogenes retorted, ’those who know what they should do in life, and what they should say, those are people for whom it would be better to stay alive’, indicating that he placed himself in that category; ‘As for you,’ he continued, ’since you have no knowledge of what you should say or do, it would be an excellent thing if you were to die; but it would be proper for me, as one who has knowledge of these things, to stay alive.’ (386)
Demetrios says in his book On the Men of the Same Name that Alexander died in Babylon on the same day as Diogenes died in Corinth. He was an old man in the 113th Olympiad. (245)
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. . . and you are incapable of sharing my life, because you are afraid of suffering. 320 Sometimes amusing. Sometimes boorish. Of almost no philosophical interest. 320 Kinik Diogenes nerelisin? sorusuna dünya vatandaşıyım cevabını verir ve olaylar gelişir. 320 Love reading about the dog. Diogenes would probably be my first invitation to my literary/philosophical party. 320 8.5/10.
This collection brings together all of the anecdotes, exploits, and sayings of Diogenes and his fellow Cynics from the entire classical canon. It must have been quite the enterprise to bring together.
Diogenes and his Cynic followers have a life philosophy close to the Stoics. They disdain material circumstances and back up their words with actions. A cloth will do for clothing (fold it in half for the winter), begging will suffice for food, a backpack will work for one's house, streams will provide water, and the ground will be one's bedding. With nothing to lose, one will not have an unnatural attachment to material circumstances. Instead of being a slave to alcohol, extravagant food, plushy cushions, perfume, and servants, one will be self-sufficient and not dependent upon the wiles of Fortune to be happy.
But Diogenes and his followers are caustic. They will lambast you for your worship of wealth, purple robes, and expensive wine. Diogenes will walk into your mansion, look for a suitable spot to spit, and finally do so on the lowliest thing in the room — yourself. Diogenes said to Alexander the Great that he should get out of his way, as he was blocking the sun. Another example: He walked into a theatre against the flow as everyone was streaming out, and when asked why he was doing so, replied, ‘Why, this is what I seek to do my whole life through.’.
Diogenes provides an essential counterbalance to the cultural impetus of modernity. Instead of focusing on money, Diogenes focuses on virtue; instead of devoting his life to a better job and a higher position on the career ladder, Diogenes laughs at these slaves of gold; instead of becoming a shape-shifter to fit in with the crowd, Diogenes spits on them and their false values. He is a model of life for us today. His example calls us to live below our means, to reduce our slavery to material goods (women, food, drink, comfort), and to shun the false approval of the falsely-programmed masses around us.
Here are some golden quotes with my commentary:
Diogenes said that other people lived to eat, but he ate to live. (Stobaeus 3.6.41; G182)
The stomach is a powerful master. Its proclivities along with certain financial interests putting massive amounts of vegetable oil and sugar in our food have led to the creation of soft, mushy creatures. They are, as Diogenes said, rot[ting] themselves alive. Yet, all this pleasure leads to eternal suffering! Day after day the obese person is a slave to their stomach; they cannot stop eating. And they begin to hate themselves because of it. The solution is self-control, self-mastery, and restraints on pleasure. By taking control of pleasure and mastering its wiles, we will actually begin to experience more pleasure in the act of mastering it.
One day he shouted, ‘Hey, men!’, and when some people came along, he struck them with his stick, saying, ‘I called for men, not scum!’ (Diogenes Laertius 6.32; G278)
What do you see when you look around you? Do you see readers? Do you see leaders? Do you see Faustian spirits with their swords up high, swearing to duty, honor, and obligation to higher standards? I see nothing of the sort! I see hunchbacked phone-scrollers, pretentious picture-posters, illiterate plebians, and a propagandized populace. I see a great herd, not thinking for themselves. Why should we care of their approval? Why should we feel a tightness in our chests when we revolt against modernity? We should not.
Seeing an Olympic victor repeatedly turning to gaze at a woman of easy virtue, Diogenes said, ‘Look at this fire-breathing ram of ours, caught in a neck-hold by the first wench he comes across!’ (Diogenes Laertius 6.61; G452)
Women today are masters at visually manipulating men. All makeup — lipstick, blush, eyeliner, perfume — is designed to mimic a female in heat, i.e. a female ready to have children. Everything is fakery, designed to elicit male attention. Add on to that scantily clad clothing and you have a recipe for disaster. Even the best men — the true philosophers, the warriors, the studious scholars, the world-investigators — can fall prey to this great distraction. We best steel ourselves against this presence by separating our time into time meant for women and time not meant for women. To defeat our desires, we should stop masturbating regularly, and especially stop watching porn. We must accomplish our purpose, and that is not simply getting a wet hole.
When someone proved by an impeccable deduction that he had horns,* he touched his forehead and said, ‘Well, I don’t see any.’ And likewise, when somebody said there is no such thing as motion,* he got up and walked around. (Diogenes Laertius 6.38–9; G479)
The profession of twisting words, of piling them one on top of another, totally displaced from reality, is a hot commodity today. This profession is that of the academic. They conjure up explanation upon explanation — Oedipus complex, systemic racism, the glass ceiling, the proletariat vs. the bourgeoisie, the eternal sin of Whiteness — to pseudo-explain the facts. The more you get trapped in their web, the more confused you get. It is best to run away from it altogether. Run to the simple explanations — those which use simple concepts like evil and biology — to explain our world.
To one who said, ‘I’m ill-suited to philosophy’, he replied, ‘Then why live at all, if you have no interest in living well?’ (Diogenes Laertius 6.65; G362)
Why live in this world if you do not aspire higher, if you do not obligations you put on your shoulders? What purpose can there be? To maximize sensation, all while getting deadened to all sensation? To try weed, then LSD, then get blackout drunk, then dry-hump some wet hole? What is the point of being a pig? Man was made in the image of God, meaning that we have a higher telos than the animals. We have a higher goal to strive for. We have a duty to become in control of ourselves, to become strong, to take orders vertically (not horizontally with the aim of social approval), to raise a family, and to fight for what is right. We have an objective purpose; from there flows all life. This wicked, inverted world of ours saps all meaning.
When he fell prey again to some mishap, he would say, ‘Thank you, Fortune, for having confronted me in such a manly fashion!’; and on such occasions he would walk away whistling. (Stobaeus 4.44.71; G351)
All events of Fortune and of Fate that happen to us are tests to make us strong. Does the warrior fight against strawmen? Does the scholar tackle children's books? No! They want a challenge equal to themselves. So too does God want us to have challenges equal to our ability. He wants to test our strength and thus throws events at us that we can rise up to and overcome. So every time a negative event happens — you injure yourself, get rejected, fail a class, screw up a work assignment — say, Thank you Fortune, thank you God. You are putting me to the test. I will recover; I will become better from this. I look to the future and towards the skies. I go up! 320
Uzun süredir okuduğum en iyi antik / felsefe kaynağı, çeviri metni olabilir mi acaba? C. Cengiz Çevik antik yunanca ve felsefe çevirisi konusunda bence çıtayı yükseltmiş. Tüm bunlara Türkiye İş Bankası Yayınları'nın özenli basımı ve en önemlisi Antisthenes ve altını çizerek söylüyorum; Diogenes'in eşsiz kişiliği ile kitabı zirveye taşımız. Diogenes'i okurken her cümleyi işaretlemek istedim. Çok başarılı bir yayın. Tavsiye ederim :) 320 Heard about him thought he was an insane loser, read him and realized he is extremely wise, his wit was on par with any of the great philosophers and he could have been as wealthy as Plato but he chose to be homeless to prove a point which makes him even more incredible in my eyes. The point in my opinion is: as long as you have your virtue, wit and your self-confidence you can endure any difficulty, if Diogenes can live with pride in the worst situations you really have nothing to complain about and should likewise practice hardening yourself. Not necessarily like him of course, because he was fucking insane but not a loser :) 320 Just about everything I thought I knew about this guy seems unlikely to be true - which is always one of the more annoying things in life. For instance, he is unlikely to have walked around Athens carrying a lamp looking for ‘a good man’ - it turns out he was looking for ‘a man’ of any description. He is unlikely to have said to Alexander, when asked what Alexander could do for him, to get out of his sun - it seems most of his reported interactions with great men were more indicative of what he might have said to them if they’d met, rather than what he actually did say. He probably didn’t live in a large earthenware jar, but rather just about anywhere that was convenient given the time of year and weather outside. And, and this troubles me more than all the rest put together, he probably didn’t walk about the streets masturbating in public and, when asked why, say, ‘if only I could cure my desire for food by merely rubbing my stomach’.
Even so, Diogenes is a curious guy. He was the first cynic - the word comes from the Greek for dog. This was originally meant as a insult used by others against him, but he adopted it because offence can only be ‘taken’ and so by adopting the name himself - seeing himself as a guard dog for his friends’ virtues - the implied insult was deflected. He believed that people spent far too much time acquiring things that they basically didn’t need or even want, and that this was tragic, since life ought to be about much more important things. It would be wrong to think he lead a simple life - rather that, like Socrates, he saw his task as being to be a gadfly who would annoy people into reconsidering their lives. He consciously sought to shock people - to show how foolish their customs were, and how much of their lives were wasted on pointless things. He was compared to a drunken or insane Socrates, but again, not something that particularly bothered him.
He had decided to take the shortest path to virtue - but the shortest path is anything but the easiest path. The metaphor used is of two tracks up to the Parthenon - one a gentle slope winding up the hill, the other nearly straight up the side. The short path being therefore much, much harder.
This is virtually the opposite of Plato’s Socratic dialogues. This consists of a series of what could be called philosophical one-liners. Humour clearly played a large role in Diogenes armoury, as it ought to for all those who try to challenge the existing order.
I came away from this unsure of what to make of Diogenes. It is hard to see how the world could exist if everyone was to follow his advice - for such a man to exist, an entire society must also exist - all the same, we do need people to poke fun at us and make us question our assumptions and even how we live and why. Although, I have to say that spitting in the face of one’s host, so as not to spit on their floor, or masturbating in public, even if only by repute, are probably choosing to live more dangerously than you absolutely need to - even if you are going to be a philosopher. 320 The first shitposter in history deserves all the stars in the world 320 Hilarious read, and like Oxford Classics likes doing, authentic. Which means that it's not a flowery embellished narrative, but just whatever we have left about Diogenes and others (who are honestly equally hilarious).
It's always humbling to see people toiling with issues and realizing that two thousand years ago people were working on solving the same issues. It's a shame Diogenes and the cynics weren't able to leave more of an impression in modern thought, it seems like a decent counterweight to capitalism and its endless excesses. 320
Diogenes the Cynic is famed for walking the streets with a lamp in daylight, looking for an honest man. His biting wit and eccentric behavior were legendary, and it was by means of his renowned aphorisms that his moral teachings were transmitted. He scorned the conventions of civilized life, and his ascetic lifestyle and caustic opinions informed the Cynic philosophy and later influenced Stoicism. This unique edition also covers his immediate successors, such as Crates, his wife Hipparchia, and the witty moral preacher Bion. The contrasting teachings of the Cyrenaic school, founded by Aristippos, a pleasure-loving friend of Socrates, complete the volume, together with a selection of apocryphal letters.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and Anecdotes, with Other Popular Moralists