"Socrates gone mad" - my hero Diogenes the Cynic

He lived in a jar, owned a staff and a cloak and nothing else, and was a sarcastic pain in the ass.  He took the example of Socrates to its limit.  Plato is the one who called him “Socrates gone mad,” but in a sense he is just the logical result of thinking through how Socrates lived.  It is the integrity of Diogenes the Dog, the Cynic, that is hard to distinguish from madness.

I am Athens’ one free man. (#13)

He often seems like a  proto-hippie.  The quotations are all from Guy Davenport’s Seven Greeks, which I find the most fun place to read about, or read, Diogenes, his surviving works in thirteen pages with no sources or doubts.  Some are likely jokes or misattributions from later Cynics.  There were never many Cynics, but it was clear enough who they were, ethical descendants of the legendary Diogenes.

In the rich man’s house there is no place to spit but in his face. (#56)

The curious thing is that Athens, perhaps feeling guilty about Socrates, seemed to like Diogenes.  In general, Roman Cynics would insult the emperor once too often (e.g., once) and be exiled to Greece, where they were adopted by one or another city.  I suppose they were thought of as holy fools, allowed to say and do things that other people could not.

I pissed on the man who called me a dog.  Why was he so surprised? (#73)

I love the performance art of Diogenes.  He would beg money from statues, since the result was the same as if he begged from people.  He wandered the marketplace in the daytime with a lamp, “looking for an honest man,” or more literally “a human being,” a hopeless task. He refuted the Platonic Academy’s definition of man as a “featherless biped” with his famous plucked chicken, a kind of deconstructionist joke.  I mean, he wasn’t the one who introduced the idea of feathers, which is what any comedian would latch onto.  People seemed to find Diogenes funny.

I am a citizen of the world. (#7)

Or perhaps a “cosmopolitan” is a citizen of the cosmos.  In context the concept is negative, a rejection of the narrow citizenship of Athens, but over time it has become something positive, if empty.  I worked for a while at a liberal arts college that actively encouraged students to think of themselves as citizens of the world.  It amused me that this was an idea that went back to crazy Diogenes.

I greatly enjoyed William Desmond’s Cynics (2008), a guide to the movement for college students, bizarrely well written for such a book.  The nine hundred years of Cynicism affords lots of good stories.  Eventually Christian asceticism, the hermits, stylites, and monks, replaced Cynicism for good.  Asceticism is a natural, if rare, human impulse, and a healthy society finds a role for its ascetics.  Mockery, prayer, something.

Diogenes and his followers did benefit from Mediterranean privilege.  I am thinking of the scene in Walden where semi-Cynic Henry David Thoreau spends a day desperately trying to recover the axe he dropped in the pond.  If all he had in Massachusetts were a jar and a cloak, he would freeze to death.  The New England Cynic has to own a lot more stuff.

Tomorrow I’ll turn to the great satirist Lucian.