Diogenes of Sinope: The Dogged Philosopher

Diogenes of Sinope: The dogged Philosopher

Within the Greek philosophers, we have many well-known ones, such as Aristotle, Plato, Socrates and so on. Most of these are common knowledge yet many are forgotten by the normal people. One such philosopher is Diogenes, commonly called the Cynic due to being one of the founders of cynicism . Many who would be reading this would stare at that name in confusion or perhaps disgust. That opinion, likely, won’t change as the man could hardly compare to our other philosophers. Most would never have learned of him due to his exile, his strange tendencies and main philosophies. The exile is one of the clearer parts of his timeline and is a good warm up before the cruder aspects of him.

To begin on Diogenes, we must start with his year of birth which is believed to be 412 B.C.E. His father worked with money but, much with a majority of ancient history, we are not sure how exactly it specifically worked. Diogenes worked with his father and thus begins how he was exiled. Many sources agree that due to his belief that he must “deface the currency” , he proceeded to literally deface the currency, either by cutting the face off the ‘heads’ side of the coin or making large slash marks across it. Both Diogenes and his father were exiled from Sinope for this and left for Athens but Diogenes, as he is the focus of this, choose to use this chance to become a philosophical thinker and adopt a life of asceticism . He found that most of the people in cities were corrupted by the customs of mankind. He was extremely well known for sleeping in public buildings, eating in public market (which was prohibited in ancient Greece) and even sleeping in a bathtub. Both in ancient times and now, many people found Diogenes to be quite hilarious, especially the philosophers. The philosophers and nobles found him so hilarious, in fact, that they threw bones at him and called him a dog. Diogenes, not being one to stand down to criticism, decided the most logical response would be to urinate on the throwers, similar to how a dog would. As stated many times previously, Diogenes is regarded as a cynic and is known for carrying around a lantern, surrounded by dogs. The lantern was used to help him find an “honest man” who actually, by his standards, is a human. He had many quirks, excluding the ones we already talked about, such as a distaste for showing manners, which he equated to lying, a belief in personal excellence and a very meager living, similar to a homeless person. Although he did all these strange and, in some cases of what we would classify as public indecency, disgusting things, he was beloved by the community. There are many stories of him meeting with Alexander the great and being, well, his usual self to the ruler. He was a great philosopher after all, just not talked about that often due to clear reasons.

Diogenes, as a person in history, is an interesting topic. He was regarded as a great philosopher and had several interesting and humorous ideas. As one hears about him, you can clearly tell why he isn’t talked about within schools but understanding his impact is slightly more difficult. What makes it even more difficult is that ancient cynicism is far removed from current cynicism. From both a civilian aspect and from a student aspect, I can’t really find a true reason as to why Diogenes should be added to our history books, outside of a small sidebar.

The podcast itself was surprisingly interesting. I did know a little about Diogenes before going in and most of those points were covered during the run time. The closest thing to an argument I could find wasn’t something along the lines of ‘Diogenes should be taught about in school’ but rather an informative podcast about a strange philosopher that is not talked about much. Although it took a bit of searching, I did find their sources and funnily enough, since I didn’t look for the sources until after the podcast, I did use one of their sources as one of mine and the ones that were functional, all seemed to support their comments or ones I found from my sources. I’m rarely a fan of podcasts, the few I listen to focus on more luck focused topics, but I would not mind listening to another episode of this one, assuming it was something I enjoyed.