![]() ![]() Contrarianism shows that there are other manners of acting and being in the world. In our age of unapologetic conformism and generalized herding, such a contrarian spirit may be the one thing that can save our lives - politically, culturally, intellectually, and spiritually. No wonder that, asked once “what was the most beautiful thing in the world,” Diogenes replied: “Freedom of speech.” Nothing brought him more pleasure than doing the opposite of what everybody else was doing. Socrates had been a vigorous naysayer in his time, yet Diogenes outdid him. It’s precisely the absent part that’s so fulfilling here.Īt a deeper level, what we come across in the theater-entering chreia is the figure of Diogenes the contrarian. A Diogenes whose complete works could fill a bookshelf would be similarly dubious. There would be something suspicious, if not overtly fake, about an impeccably preserved ancient statue. Indeed, a Diogenes sans books exudes the same aura and melancholy beauty that attracts us to ancient statues with missing heads or limbs. Nothing has survived from Diogenes’s written output (assuming there was such a thing), which seems appropriate. When a certain Hegesias asked Diogenes for one of his treatises, the Cynic responded: “What an ass you are, Hegesias! For you do not choose painted figs, but real ones yet you neglect real training, and rush to read about it instead.” When that Sufi “holy fool,” Nasreddin Hodja, was once riding his donkey backwards, and people were puzzled, his response seemed to be taken from Diogenes’s book: “It’s not that I am sitting on the donkey backwards the donkey is facing the wrong way.”īy acting out his philosophy so expressively, Diogenes gained his place in the tradition of what Pierre Hadot called “philosophy as a way of life.” Ancient philosophy, thought Hadot, was not about the production and transmission of texts but rather about the inner transformation that students of philosophy underwent as they engaged with the ideas. ![]() In this respect, Diogenes is, unwittingly, the founder of a grand school of wise foolishness, with illustrious followers among Christian hermits, Sufi sheikhs, and Zen masters. Diogenes’s motivation may seem succès de scandale at first, but it turns out to be something more consequential. That we are still discussing the meaning of his scandalous deeds some 23 centuries later shows that Diogenes had a more serious point to make than merely to shock. Later that evening, “in the manner of a dog,” the story goes, the philosopher “urinated on the guests as he was leaving.” Be careful what metaphors you use for they may come to haunt you. Not that Diogenes was particularly exhibitionistic, but he must have found it to be an effective strategy to mock his society’s customs and conventions and to prove their unnaturalness (a central tenet of the Cynic philosophy).Īt a dinner attended by Diogenes, “some guests were throwing bones to him, as one would to a dog.” The gentlemen were apparently having a good time at the Cynic’s expense. He did in public, gleefully and to great rhetorical effect, what most people go to great length to keep private: spitting, scratching, defecation, urination, masturbation. Asked why, Diogenes answered: “To get practice in being turned down.” When your fellow humans are as cold as Athenian statues in winter, you can teach them something about charity by pretending to expect it from stone.Īn important part of Diogenes’s performance was his strategic shamelessness. On another occasion, he was conspicuously begging alms from a statue. When some philosopher was trying to prove, before a gullible audience, that “motion did not exist,” another story goes, Diogenes said not a word but “stood up and walked about” - the best possible counterargument most economically delivered. To make an argument, you just have to make a move - sometimes literally. When he wanted to prove a philosophical point, Diogenes used not just his speech but his whole body, his sensuous presence in the world. On this view, philosophy is not a purely theoretical affair, something to be thought out and formulated in impenetrable jargon, but rather a way of acting and being. There is, first, the notion of philosophizing as a live performance, which Diogenes embodied like few thinkers, ancient or modern. When someone, puzzled, asked him why, Diogenes said: “This has been my practice all my life.” (This history is recounted by Laertius in Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, among many other stories starring Diogenes the Cynic.)Īs with every Cynic “anecdote” (or chreia, as they called it in ancient Greece), several layers of meaning are buried inside. DIOGENES THE CYNIC once tried to enter the theater at the end of a performance, even as everybody else was leaving.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |