Diogenes of Sinope, a beggar who lived on the streets of Athens within the fourth century B.C.E., has been hailed as the progenitor of efficiency artwork, an inspiration for the Occupy motion, and, by the novelist Joyce Carol Oates, “the primary, some would possibly declare the very best, stand-up comedian.”
He was additionally a famous thinker. But his legacy doesn’t lie in his written work—virtually none of which survives—however in colourful anecdotes about his life recorded by contemporaries and compiled most prominently by his namesake, Diogenes Laërtius, about 600 years later in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. Diogenes’s status rests on a present for one-liners within the spirit of Groucho Marx. Flouting social norms, Diogenes was mentioned to masturbate within the market, responding to side-eyed glances with bemusement: “If just one may do away starvation by rubbing one’s abdomen.” Admonished for consuming in a bar, Diogenes shot again, “I additionally get my hair reduce in a barbershop.” Captured and offered into slavery, Diogenes was requested to checklist his abilities. He replied, “Ruling over males,” and advised the herald, “Unfold the phrase in case anybody needs to purchase himself a grasp.”
Philosophy is notoriously troublesome to outline, however you might marvel if this actually counts. Once we take into consideration the delivery of Western philosophy, we have a tendency to think about Diogenes’s up to date, Plato, a scientific theorist who based an academy and whose written dialogues, clocking in at greater than half one million phrases, have been preserved in full. Plato was rich and properly related. He didn’t dwell in a big ceramic jar, proudly owning not more than a cloak, a stick, and a knapsack, as Diogenes is claimed to have carried out. (When he noticed a boy consuming from the hole of his personal hand, Diogenes threw away his cup: It was superfluous.)
How may Western philosophy, in its infancy, embody such divergent figures: on one aspect, a scholar of metaphysics who was a member of the Athenian 1 %, and on the opposite, a mendicant gadfly with out political capital, a avenue performer recognized for his verbal wit, an activist who dismissed Plato’s discourse as a “waste of time”? Newly printed books in regards to the lives of Plato and Diogenes ship us again to a time when philosophy didn’t know what it will develop as much as be.
A outstanding reality about Robin Waterfield’s Plato of Athens is that it’s the primary full-length biography of Plato ever printed. The explanations for this neglect are partly historiographic: Although Plato’s dialogues survive, they barely point out him. Now we have no official Athenian data of his life, and the earliest (quick) biographies had been set down centuries later. However that’s not the entire story. We additionally know little or no about Diogenes of Sinope, but he’s had three biographers thus far. The issue with Plato is that he was not a lot enjoyable. Plato’s life, just like the lifetime of most profession teachers, was comparatively uninteresting. The exception is a collection of misadventures in worldwide politics described at size in a Platonic letter most students now regard as apocryphal. Waterfield’s lifetime of Plato positive aspects vitality by arguing that this letter is the truth is genuine.
By Robin Waterfield
We’ll come again to the political intrigue, however other than that, Waterfield’s portrait of Plato is conventional. He was born round 424–3, in the course of the Peloponnesian Struggle, however was too younger to struggle in it. When the battle ended, the victorious Spartans imposed on Athens the rulership of the Thirty Tyrants, with Plato’s relative Critias—like him, an admirer of Socrates—amongst them. The regime was ruthless and unstable. It was overthrown inside eight months, and Athenian democracy was restored.
4 years later, Socrates was executed for impiety and Plato withdrew from public life. He had toyed with turning into a poet earlier than committing to philosophy, touring to Megara to go to the Socratic thinker Euclides round 396. On his return to Athens, Plato seemingly fought within the Corinthian Struggle (395–86). Within the peace that adopted, he visited Pythagoreans in what’s now Southern Italy and met political leaders in Syracuse earlier than founding the Academy in a park on the outskirts of Athens in 383. There he taught till his dying in 348–7.
What you suppose you realize about Plato’s philosophy might be proper. He’s well-known for believing in summary, immaterial “kinds”: beliefs of justice, magnificence, and the great that exist outdoors of area and time. For Plato, the fabric world was second-rate and the soul was immortal. Like each Socratic thinker, Plato held that residing properly is extra in regards to the virtues of justice, temperance, and braveness than honor or pleasure or wealth.
By the point he based the Academy, Plato was already well-known. However he was not a “public thinker.” Waterfield finds proof of two fashionable appearances, one a studying of Plato’s dialogue, Phaedo, throughout which, we’re advised, “the remainder of the viewers drifted away and solely Aristotle remained to the tip.” The opposite was a lecture on the great. It didn’t go properly:
The viewers for the lecture got here within the expectation that Plato would discuss human items akin to well being, wealth, and standing, and would give them a recipe for the great life; as an alternative they had been handled to summary and perplexing discuss “arithmetic, numbers, geometry, astronomy, and eventually the argument that the great is one.”
Waterfield leaps to Plato’s protection, discounting the dig in regards to the dialogue as “malicious gossip” and complaining that, for Plato, the great isn’t just an ethical however a metaphysical idea, “the transcendent supply of all worth on the earth … [and] the last word explanation for all issues.” One can not comprehend how one ought to dwell with out partaking in abstruse metaphysics. Nevertheless it’s straightforward to sympathize with an viewers who wished a TED Discuss and received a textbook as an alternative.
Regardless of this chilly reception, Plato “invented what we name the self-discipline of philosophy,” Waterfield writes. He didn’t do that alone. Regardless of their disagreements, the Socratics “flooded the market with their books, writing scores of philosophical works within the forty or so years after Socrates’s dying … making an attempt to comb apart anybody else’s declare to be an educator.”
Waterfield’s narrative is compelling. However is it true? Was Plato Socrates’s inheritor obvious? They had been very completely different individuals. Socrates was not rich; he wrote nothing; and he didn’t set up a college. As an alternative, he conversed within the market, typically with satirical wit—the quintessential public thinker. Once we undertake a wider lens, the historical past seems completely different too. The pre-Socratics had been metaphysicians, arguing that every one is flux, or that every one is one, or that every one is made from water. For Socrates, the pressing query was not metaphysical however moral: “How ought we to dwell?” Plato inherited this query however argued that we want metaphysics to reply it, synthesizing Socrates with the pre-Socratic custom. The end result was philosophy because it has come all the way down to us at this time: dense, discursive, theoretical.
However this wasn’t predetermined. A very powerful Socratic thinker beside Plato was Antisthenes. Waterfield presents him as a fellow traveler, however his critique of Platonic philosophy was hardly affable: The title of his misplaced dialogue, Sathōn, which means “prick,” is a grimy riff on Plato’s identify (Platōn). In line with custom, Antisthenes taught Diogenes. They had been the unique Cynics—after kynikos, or “doglike,” on account of their shameless conduct: shitting, pissing, and masturbating in public. Seen on this mild, Diogenes’s performative philosophy, his willful demolition of social norms, was a plea for the grounded pragmatism of Socrates over Plato’s ethereal theorizing. If crucial factor in life is the pursuit of advantage, Diogenes screams, why don’t we act prefer it?
Like each mythic hero, Diogenes has an origin story which will or might not be true. As advised within the French Classicist Jean-Manuel Roubineau’s biography, The Harmful Life and Concepts of Diogenes the Cynic—newly translated by Malcolm DeBevoise—the oracle of Apollo cryptically instructed Diogenes to “debase” the forex. He returned to Sinope and, together with his father, Hicesias, an official cash changer, did simply that: One or each had been concerned in monetary fraud. Fleeing prosecution, Diogenes was exiled from Sinope. With the advantage of hindsight, he noticed that solely fools take oracles actually: His philosophical job was to debase the forex of conference by residing in accord with human nature.
By Jean-Manuel Roubineau
Diogenes seemingly washed up in Athens within the mid-360s, across the similar time as a teenage Aristotle. At this level, Plato was practically 60 and Antisthenes round 80—if, certainly, he was nonetheless alive. (Diogenes was influenced by Antisthenes, however could have arrived too late to fulfill him.) What we all know of Diogenes’s philosophy has been preserved in tales about his life. His philosophical interactions had been typically comedian. When Plato outlined man because the featherless biped—so it’s mentioned—Diogenes introduced a plucked rooster to the door of the Academy. Whereas a thinker was arguing that movement is unreal, Diogenes received up and walked away.
Performances like these are primarily vital: Philosophy and comedy share a disruptive spirit. However Diogenes had convictions too. What he stood for, at coronary heart, was the aspiration to dwell because the Socratics claimed to consider one ought to. For Socrates, famously, the unexamined life was not value residing. Diogenes went one step additional: “To handle our lives correctly,” he mentioned, “we want both purpose or a rope.” His brash efficiency of poverty confirmed the right way to be self-sufficient with subsequent to nothing by limiting one’s wishes. In politics, Diogenes criticized battle between nations and the establishment of personal property, calling himself “a citizen of the world.”
If Diogenes requested how one can dwell with integrity in an unjust world, the reply we now have isn’t in what he wrote however in what he did. As an alternative of musing on the metaphysics of justice inside the partitions of an academy complicit in wealth and energy, Diogenes uncovered injustice and its obfuscation, demonstrating by instance that what appears pure or inevitable isn’t. Life will be examined not simply in concept however in apply: by way of trials of life that widen our conception of what’s doable or fascinating—as Diogenes did.
Plato scorned this type of Socratic philosophy. When somebody requested him, “What kind of a person do you take into account Diogenes to be?” he replied, “Socrates gone mad.” By and enormous, the custom has shared on this opinion. Western philosophy has been described as “a collection of footnotes to Plato”; nobody calls it a cacophony of callbacks to Diogenes. However it’s to some extent an accident of historical past that the vital examination of society in pointed jokes, efficiency artwork, or radical experiments in residing isn’t counted as “philosophy.” For Diogenes, ethical philosophy was an inescapable a part of life, implicit in every part we do, not an esoteric topic of analysis. The query “The way to dwell?” is one we can not assist however ask, and we reply it in apply each day.
This goes for Plato too. He could have been a metaphysician, however Plato had a life to dwell. His sensible ambitions had been political, and he wrote extra about politics than another subject. (Taken collectively, Republic and Legal guidelines, each targeted on political philosophy, make up practically 40 % of his collected works.) Probably the most arresting chapter of Waterfield’s e book treats the seventh Platonic letter as Plato’s “apology,” recounting his doomed try to rework Dionysius II, the tyrannical ruler of Syracuse, into one thing like a philosopher-king.
Plato had visited Syracuse as soon as earlier than, in 384, making a convert of Dion, a trusted adviser of Dionysius I. Dion persuaded Dionysius II to ask Plato again to Syracuse in 366. It was a suggestion Plato couldn’t refuse. “It will have induced me acute embarrassment to seek out myself to be completely nothing greater than a pure theorist,” reads the seventh letter, “unwilling to absorb hand any sensible job.” The journey was a catastrophe. With Dion, Plato hoped to make Syracuse a constitutional monarchy. However Dionysius didn’t belief them, banishing Dion from the town. Plato then fled. When Dionysius invited him once more in 363, professing new curiosity in philosophy, Plato stalled for 2 years earlier than agreeing to come back. The very first thing he did when he arrived was check Dionysius’s sincerity. The tyrant failed miserably: “His philosophy was not more than pores and skin deep, like a suntan,” writes Waterfield, borrowing a simile from the seventh letter. It was solely with assist from highly effective pals that Plato was capable of escape from Syracuse and return to Athens, humiliated.
The Plato of the seventh letter is politically naive and strategically inept: a warning to teachers who hope to see their concepts in motion. Diogenes was apparently scathing. When Plato noticed him washing greens, the story goes, Plato quietly remarked, “When you paid court docket to Dionysius, you wouldn’t want to try this.” To which Diogenes replied: “Sure, and in case you washed greens, you wouldn’t must pay court docket to Dionysius.”
Diogenes was not impressed by wealth or energy. Maybe probably the most well-known anecdote about him includes Alexander the Nice, who got here to fulfill him in Corinth. Whereas the thinker was sunbathing, Alexander approached him and mentioned, “Ask no matter you need,” to which Diogenes replied, “Stand out of my mild.” Diogenes died in poverty within the late 320s, of causes unknown—rumors embrace meals poisoning, self-asphyxiation, lethal fever, and previous age. He requested that his physique not be buried, however it in all probability was.
Plato, in contrast, got here from cash, and his funeral was marked by a procession. Waterfield is oddly sanguine about this. “Plato’s wealth was all to the great,” he writes: “It gave him leisure time. Philosophy can be poorer if Plato had been poor.” Which is a pleasant flip of phrase, besides it’s adopted by this:
Individuals from the working class within the fictional city-state of Republic are rigidly excluded from a share in authorities, on the grounds that their occupation makes it inconceivable for them to have the type of lofty and long-term ideas which can be acceptable to political leaders.
Plato’s repressive, hierarchical “utopia” is a dystopian regime.
How the historical past of philosophy, and of society, would possibly look if Diogenes had dethroned Plato is a troublesome query to reply. Diogenes did have college students. He was the trainer of Crates, who taught Zeno of Citium, the primary Stoic. On this lineage, the up to date revival of Stoicism as a life-style motion is the legacy of Diogenes at two removes. However like Plato, the traditional Stoics had been metaphysicians. They had been armed with a cosmology by which the divine thoughts, Zeus, ensures that every part works out for the very best. Diogenes refused such comfort. Nor would he have warmed to well-connected Stoics akin to Seneca, a political adviser to Nero, or the Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius.
The true heirs of Diogenes the Cynic are activists, thinkers, and performers outdoors of educational philosophy. They’re figures akin to Gerrard Winstanley, who tried to construct a communist utopia in Civil Struggle England, 200 years earlier than Karl Marx; Henry David Thoreau, who aspired to dwell intentionally, “entrance[ing] solely the important info of life”; and Greta Thunberg, who leads faculty strikes for local weather motion. Diogenes’s heirs are writers who use philosophy to criticize our lives however aren’t skilled philosophers—like Jenny Odell, whose best-selling e book, The way to Do Nothing, cites Diogenes as an affect. They’re artists who think about different communities, as Ragnar Kjartansson does in The Guests, a multichannel video set up by which a gaggle of pals, performing threads of a repetitive, wistful tune in separate rooms, come collectively as one. They’re comedians whose work protests the established order: Dave Chappelle releasing 8:46 after the homicide of George Floyd; Michelle Wolf on the White Home Correspondents’ Dinner; Sacha Baron Cohen exposing bigotry with comedian characters like Borat.
Diogenes was hardly unreflective. To at least one who mentioned, “I’m ill-suited to philosophy,” he replied, “Then why dwell in any respect, if in case you have little interest in residing properly?” However his reflection was pressing: The way to dwell on the earth as it’s at this time? Requested why individuals care extra about poverty than philosophy, Diogenes quipped: “As a result of they count on that they could grow to be lame and blind, however by no means that they are going to grow to be philosophers.” Our world can be a greater place if we acknowledged that we would grow to be each.
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