1/7/2023 0 Comments Diogenes potI suppose we have to be grateful that on this occasion he only has a sheet of parchment in his hand: A cynical posture. Even in the context of Raphael’s School of Athens, he sprawls in the attitude of a renaissance beatnik, primed to trip Aristotle over as he attempts to descend the stairs. His posture of choice was undoubtedly supine. Hence, he famously undertook the herculean task of carrying a lamp around in broad daylight in search of an honest man.ĭiogenes was, in plain truth, the anti-Hercules, anti-action hero. It’s a semi-mythical personality that comes down to us, which is possibly appropriate to a man who saw himself as following Hercules as a man of action, though while the big man was famous for his labours, Diogenes is best known for his dirty protests against the conventions of Athenian society and for not doing what that society expected of him. As a result, we only really have the anecdotes (which may well be apocryphal) and the sayings (which may have been misattributed). None of Diogenes’ writings have survived, which is a great loss to us all. Intellectual bondage is worse than any other for a cynic or stoic, freedom from it is also the antidote to literal bondage. Thus, the theme of enslavement appears again. Now Epictetus was well aware of Diogenes’ biography. What he meant was that Diogenes was set free mentally by the philosophical teachings of Antisthenes. Indeed, according to Epictetus, “Diogenes was set free by Antisthenes, and said that from that point forward he could never be enslaved by anyone again” (Discourses, 4.1). Diogenes merely invited his blows, declaring “you will find no wood hard enough to deter me, so long as I think you have something to say.” Eventually, with some reluctance, Antisthenes accepted him as his pupil. The feeling was mutual, with Plato calling his rival ‘Socrates gone mad.’ It turned out that when Diogenes followed Antisthenes, his puppylike devotion was unwelcome and the older man attempted to beat him off with a stick. He considered Antisthenes the true disciple of Socrates and disdained Plato. The philosopher is famous for having lived in a barrel, though more properly we should picture it as a large ceramic pot, or pithos. There are aspects of the old dog’s character that suggest he went on to imitate Manes, or at least the likely career path of his escaped bondsman. His ex-master’s reaction to this misfortune was typically unruffled: “If Manes can live without Diogenes, why not Diogenes without Manes?” Apparently, Manes felt that hanging around his master was incurring too much reputational damage. Forced to leave his native Sinope under a cloud – he was accused of having debased the currency – Diogenes headed for Athens and promptly lost his companion, a slave by the name of Manes. That old dog (cynic comes from κυνικός, meaning doglike) had a constant fixation with slavery and may well have died in bondage, albeit bondage of a very paradoxical kind.įrom early on in Diogenes’ story there is a slave involved. Epictetus, one of the foremost stoic theorists, was actually an ex-slave, one of the few philosophers with first-hand experience of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. What isn’t so generally known is that some of the most influential philosophies of the classical age derived from slavery: the cynics and the stoics both drew their inspiration from it. As for the Romans, they may have been marvellous engineers, but it was their slaves who ran the plumbing. The ancient Athenians may have invented democracy, but the voters still depended on slaves to serve the wine at the symposium. It is well known that in antique times the institution of slavery was pervasive.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |