He seemed to regard Socrates as disingenuous in his claim that he knew nothing and that no-one knew more than he, but nevertheless pushed the Socratic dialectic to a logical conclusion.

The term comes from the Greek word for Dog : the Cynic School was a school for dogs - wiser, more spontaneous, honest and more down-to-earth than the sophists whom Diogenes despised, and amongst whom he counted Plato. Some of his stories about Diogenes are suspiciously similar to stories about the many other figures he describes in his ten-volume Lives of the Ancient Philosophers. The 'Cynicism' of ancient Greece and Rome did not have the particular opprobrium of heartlessness that it has today: on the contrary, it was a passionate commitment. In any event, all our information comes (like our information on Jesus of Galilee) second-hand at best, many of the anecdotes coming from Roman authors many centuries later, and some, much later again, from Muslims who saw Diogenes as a proto-Sufi.Ī major source of information (and legend) about Diogenes is the third century (AD) Roman doxographer Diogenes Laertius (as disorganised as he was gullible), from whom much that follows is taken. It is likely that he disdained to write any of his ideas down. He would have agreed with Khayyám that society is merely knots of people on puppet-strings of systems of belief. He is famously said to have gone around Athens with a lantern by day, vainly looking for an honest personality. P ublic poverty and ignominy were at the centre of the Diogenean message. The Cynic (or honest and true) philosopher puts him/herself at the bottom of the local heap from where he or she can look around with a clear (not necessarily jaundiced) eye - knowing that s/he is as dying sperm in the rectum of a horribly impoverished 'reality'. Reputation, so valued by patriarchal societies (which depend on female and other servility of one kind or another), is a very fragile thing to want. Socrates-Plato, on the other hand, had quite a lot to lose - notably reputation. He honed himself into the position of having nothing to lose but life itself - which he despised. He believed that virtue (the goal of most Greek philosophers but an irrelevance to consumer-societies) could be attained only by fighting hypocrisy, greed, luxury and corruption - i.e. He expanded the teachings and world-view of his slightly older contemporary, Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates whom he probably never met and whom he likely would have outraged.ĭiogenes took Antisthenes' anti-worldliness to what is now (and was in Roman times) foolishly considered an extreme, turning the latter's disregard for wealth and worldliness into complete rejection. The most celebrated son of Sinope, a Greek colony on the Black Sea coast of Turkey (modern Sinop, whose towers still stand, unlike those of Trebizond to the east - and which has been chosen as a site for a nuclear power-station), Diogenes was the founder and most famous of the Cynics - a Zen-like non-School of anti-Philosophy expounding and embracing an ascetic and transcendental nihilism. His philosophy was based on moral outrage, and did not allow for sordid compromise between competing 'interests'. He also disdained rhetoric - the hallowed Greek system of reasoned debate and persuasion which has since 'Classical' times inspired councils and cabals, and, of course, modern parliaments. Like his near-contemporary, Pyrrho, he disdained writing. Of the pre-Christian Greek philosophers, by far the truest and most radical was Diogenes, who is thought to have died in 320 BCE. Most philosophy - and all theology - is sophistry.Īpart from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, there have been very few true philosophers since Classical philosophy and Seneca, the unfortunate Stoic from Córdoba, were finally destroyed by the emperor Nero.

Who was diogenes