Plato once walked up to Diogenes as he was rinsing his vegetables and whispered.
#DIOGENES OF SINOPE BIRD FREE#
When he passed a woman praying, in a somewhat awkward position, he, in what I can only imagine as a botched attempt, tried to free her from her superstition by saying: “Hey, woman! Don’t you realize you are acting indecent, the Gods are in everything and one might be standing behind you?”Īnother person who was blessing himself with holy water, Diogenes walked up to him and said: “You miserable man! Holy water won’t remove your moral sins any more than it will correct your spelling errors.” Nothing was really sacred to Diogenes, least of all religion and other forms of superstition. When Diogenes got wind that Plato had defined humans as a two-legged creatures without feathers, he simply plucked a bird, walked into Plato’s school, hen in hand, and proclaimed: “Behold, the platonic man!” “But the ‘tableness’ and ‘ladleness’ are nowhere to be found”. “I can see the table and the ladle”, Diogenes said. Plato was explaining his theory of ideas, using words like ‘tableness’, and ‘ladleness’. When he heard someone give a lecture on the impossibility of movement, he simply stood up and started to walk around.ĭiogenes once visited a lecture given by Plato. What did Diogenes do? Well, he went and sat down by the target. He once saw a really shitty archer constantly missing his target. And when he saw a boy pouring his soup into the bread, Diogenes threw away his bowl.ĭiogenes could also be described as a radical empiricist and realist, being convinced by arguments based on the senses, rather than proofs coming from logical deduction. When he saw a child drinking from their hand, he threw away his cup. Therefore he chose to live in a barrel without any possessions. When some people at a feast threw Diogenes a bone, he pissed on them like a dog as he left.ĭiogenes had nothing but contempt for social conventions and he regarded greed as the metropolis of all things evil.
Being a contemporary of Plato, the great philosopher took notice of the strange man, who once jerked off in the town square while proclaiming “If only I could silence my hunger by rubbing my belly!” Plato said that Diogenes was Socrates gone mad, and stated that he was acting like a dog. The word comes from the Greek word for canine and it simply meant ‘dog’. It is important to note that in ancient Greece the word ‘cynic’ had different connotations than it has today. And he certainly was a philosopher who practiced what he preached. The philosophy of Diogenes can only be known through the stories about him since none of his writings have survived to this day. Both of them are often credited as the founders of the cynical school of philosophy, but Diogenes would by far surpass his teacher in fame and notoriety. “Go ahead, beat me! You won’t find wood hard enough to keep me away, as long as you have something to say”, Diogenes responded.įrom that moment on he would be the disciple of Antisthenes.
Once in Athens, Diogenes approach the philosopher Antisthenes, who had a somewhat unorthodox approach to recruiting students.Īntisthenes raised his stick, threatening to beat the shit out of Diogenes. Diogenes followed his father to Athens and would later debase all the conventions held by society, but more on that later. Diogenes was the son of a banker, who was forced into exile for the debasement of the coinage, which means lowering the intrinsic value of coins. When asked where he was from he simply stated that he was a citizen of the world, a cosmopolite. Diogenes was born in Sinope (a town in modern-day Turkey), although he himself would have none of this.
The man featured in the scene is none other than the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes.Īround 405 B.C. Around the man there are four dogs, curiously watching, as the man lights a lantern in broad daylight. In the painting Diogenes Sitting in His Tub (1860), by Jean-Léon Gérôme, a man sitting in something, which more resembles a huge clay pot than a tub, is depicted.
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