M D Usher has made some judicious selections in this little volume, including the story of some Greek philosophers meeting some radical Indian ascetics and comparing notes. Diogenes would fart in their general direction. We live in a society that constantly tells us that we are all equal, while simultaneously communicating that some people – the rich, the famous, the royals – have greater value than we do. So too is their disregard for human hierarchies. So the cynics’ attitude to growth and greed is as relevant as ever. More, in the form of economic growth, is the highest aspiration of our politicians and their central promise to us. “Civic conflicts, wars, conspiracies, and slaughter,” he tells his listeners, “all these things have their source in the desire for more. Greed and the constant desire for more was futile to Kynikos. You “import your pleasures from the corners of the globe and always prefer what is foreign to what is locally produced, what is costly to what is inexpensive, and what’s hard to procure to what’s easily acquired.” “You don’t think your own land and sea are enough in themselves,” says Kynikos in a street argument related in the book. They were early minimalists, fore-runners of anti-consumerism. This was his defining act of defiance – a rejection of money, of human authority, of society’s values.ĭiogenes wanted no favours from kings because he was committed to radical simplicity, and this is another reason to learn from the cynics. Diogenes was exiled from his home town for defacing the currency. Or deflating the most powerful man on the planet at the time, Alexander the Great, by telling him to stand out of his sun.
#Diogenes stories series#
There is a story in the book that I hadn’t heard before where he turns up at the Isthmian Games and upstages the whole event with a series of subversive acts, including crowning a horse.īetter known stories of Diogenes include him carrying a lantern around the marketplace in the middle of the day, or choosing to live in a barrel to demonstrate how little people really needed. Diogenes, one of the best known cynics, was by all accounts rude and provocative, witty, and above all highly skilled at embarassing the rich and powerful. For one thing, they were having a lot more fun than most philosophers – more than the modern definition of ‘cynicism’ implies. It’s worth bringing the cynics to new audiences for a number of reasons. “Their mode of life was a philosophy of doing,” says M D Usher in his introduction, and this little book gathers together a variety of original sources describing their actions and thought, in a modern translation. They were more like performance artists and troublemakers. They didn’t leave much of a written record of their thinking, because they weren’t part of a scholarly tradition. The cynics were a niche movement within Greek philosophy.
0 kommentar(er)
