#DIOGENES CYNICISM HOW TO#

Once, when invited into a man’s home and told not to spit on the floor, he cleared his throat and spit in the man’s face. Diogenes walked up to him, lifted his robe, and peed on him. In one tale, Diogenes was invited to a rich man’s party, but his behavior attracted the anger of one of the guests who began to call him a dog and throwing bones at him.

He was known for frequently flipping people ‘the bird’, a gesture which still means today what it meant in ancient Athens.Īdding to his reputation as a dog, he is said to have defecated in the theater and urinated on people who insulted him. “What difference does one finger make?”, he asked. He said that if one walked around with one’s pinkie extended all day, no one would be offended, but if you walked around with your middle finger extended all day, everyone would be outraged. Several stories involve Diogenes being obscene, further rejecting custom and tradition to show people that they were attached to things that were meaningless. Diogenes said that while dogs bite their enemies, he bites his friends, shocking them to teach them about life.ĭiogenes said that wealth was inferior to courage, custom inferior to nature, and passion inferior to reason.

#DIOGENES CYNICISM HOW TO#

Dogs are honest and free of human anxieties, and so Diogenes believed people should study dogs to learn how to live. Diogenes noted that dogs sleep anywhere, eat anything, and do their natural bodily functions in the open without shame. The word ‘cynic’ comes from the ancient Greek kynikos, ‘dog-like’. This was also a radical rejection of tradition, as most identified with their city and saw outsiders as barbarians.Ĭalled “Diogenes the Dog”, it is unknown whether this was an insult that he came to accept as a badge of honor or he came up with the concept himself.

Diogenes is thought by some to have invented the term by use of this expression. Diogenes admired Antisthenes for being the antithesis of the average Athenian, who increasingly had come to indulge in luxury and excess as Athens had become the wealthy center of the newly independent Delian League.ĭiogenes when asked said he was a citizen of the world, literally a ‘cosmopolitan’ (like the socialite, not the beverage). Antisthenes tried to chase him away, beating him with his staff, and Diogenes replied that he was going nowhere, there being no staff hard enough to drive him away from Antisthenes’ wisdom. According to the story, Diogenes heard Antisthenes in the marketplace, and offered to become his disciple. While later cynics believed that Diogenes studied with Antisthenes, this is questionable. Diogenes became the most famous and emblematic cynic. Socrates did prefer the simple life, and despised wealth and excess. In Athens, Antisthenes (445 – 365 BCE), a student of Socrates, was the first to make Cynicism a distinct philosophy. Either way, sources tell us that Diogenes moved to Athens, where he became famous for his lifestyle and amusingly cynical interactions with others. If this is true, the story stuck to Diogenes as a metaphor after the fact. It is also true that there were, understandably, warring factions of pro-Greek separatists and pro-Persian loyalists fighting over authority of the city, and the coins may not have involved Diogenes but rather political infighting.

Diogenes believed that people were corrupted by society, and should return to a simple life. While some believe that Diogenes and his father were involved in counterfeiting, it is likely that this is a metaphor for Diogenes’ rejection of traditional life, the “way of his father”, the common currency used in the marketplace. Large numbers of coins have been found in the region that have been defaced, some with Diogenes’ father’s name on them as the minter. One source says that Diogenes went to the Oracle at Delphi, and the pythias told him to deface the currency. Legend has it that Diogenes’ father was a banker in charge of the mint, making coins for the government, but Diogenes “defaced the currency” and was banished.

Diogenes cynicism