According to legend, Alexander the Great came to visit the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope. Alexander wanted to fulfill a wish for Diogenes and asked him what he desired. As told by Diogenes Laërtius, Diogenes replied, “Stand out of my light.”
One day while he was eating a frugal dish of lentils, he was challenged by the philosopher Aristippus, who, for his part, led a golden life as he was one of the king’s courtiers. Aristippus scornfully told him: “See, if you learned to crawl before the king, you wouldn’t have to settle for rubbish like this vulgar dish of lentils!” Diogenes replied: “If you’d learned to make do with lentils, you wouldn’t have to crawl before the king!”
Big dick energy. Love this guy.
He should be ashamed to think nature doesn’t make mistakes. Although, and not to “it was a different time” this, he probably didn’t know about cancer and had some other excuse for birth defects.
You can’t fully extract yourself from your cultural environment, exceptional philosophers like him already managed to do that a lot more than commoners but he missed other things, it’s to be expected. Reminds me of the people who wrote the first Men’s Rights Rights of Man and of the Citizen during the French revolution which was incredible progress and yet they voluntarily ignored women, despite women fighting to be mentioned (like her https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympe_de_Gouges).
He should be ashamed of even believing nature had any sort of will or intentionality. Nature doesn’t care about what Diogenes, or any human for that matter, has to say about nature.
I got a feeling that if he was alive today he’d be telling you to get off the computer and touch grass.
Wow, my opinion of this intentionally abrasive and combative, potentially mentally ill homeless man who was well known for public urination, defecation, and masturbation, and who lived in a society 2400 years divorced from my own, whose understanding of gender and sex that was, as is the case for literally all of us, a product of his environment and upbringing, has never been lower.
Did you actually read those articles? The latter was a biographer of the former (among others – he wrote about pretty much all of the famous Greek philosophers).
Diogenes was, by all accounts, a gross-ass motherfucker.
…but I like his revolutionary spirit.
He was a raving homeless man who frequently masturbated in public and antagonized anyone who would approach him. However, beyond all that he was one of the smartest people in the ancient world and lived life never comporimising his principles.
No I think philosophy is cool actually
Nietzsche is such a wonderful read, because he has the soul of a poet and doesn’t give a damn if he’s being consistent.
Kierkegaard is harder to parse, but very fascinating.
Marcus Aurelius legit just wants you to be a good human being.
Yamamato Tsunetomo wants you to kill people and don’t afraid of anything.
Musonius Rufus is remarkably modern in his thinking for someone of the first century AD.
Little Footnote for the unawares, Nietzsche was NOT a nazi philosopher, a close relative of his converted his writings to nazi ideology and claimed it was him.
He was actually pretty religious, though, when he wrote “God is Dead” he was actually writing a warning to athiests and unaligned that a world without a central pillar of morality was coming. Ironically, uneducated religious people have been misconstruing his message ever since thinking it was an argument against them instead of for them, lmfao.
One that I really enjoyed during my pretentious phase was the father of modern philosophy himself, Immanuel Kant. He wrote a lot about ethics and aesthetics but the crux of his work boils down to the idea that space and time are just “forms of intuition” that structure our experience and are just appearances we can comprehend. The true nature of things as they are in themselves is unknowable to us.
As someone who has always considered themselves very rational and more of an agnostic than an atheist, his ideas really clicked with me.
Yeah… something about the anecdotes told about Diogenes sounds off to me - you don’t see homeless people today live the charmed life they say Diogenes got to live.
It’s not implausible. Being a famous wit and wacky character can get someone a lot of latitude. I’m reminded of the Emporer of the United States, a locally famous weirdo who lived in San Francisco way back. Among his other notable hijinks, he was unemployed, yet never went hungry because he printed his own alternate currency (which he insisted was the only valid currency). Many of the local shops and restaurants just accepted it like official money even though it was worthless to anyone else, because everyone enjoyed his antics so much.
