Diogenes of Sinope

Diogenes (c. 412 – 323 BCE) left no writings that survive and needed none. His philosophy was a way of living, practised in public in Athens and Corinth and preserved in hundreds of anecdotes, many of them surely invented and all of them making the same point. He is the figure through whom the Cynic school became visible, and the word itself comes from the nickname he accepted: kyon, the dog.

Deface the currency

The story that explains his life begins with an oracle. Exiled from Sinope after a scandal over adulterated coinage, Diogenes was told at Delphi to "deface the currency." He took the instruction to mean the conventions of society: honour, wealth, shame, rank were tokens stamped by custom and worth nothing in themselves. His task was to strike them out.

Practice

• He lived in a large storage jar in the marketplace and owned a cloak, a staff and a wallet.
• Seeing a child drink from cupped hands, he threw away his cup.
• He walked the streets at midday with a lit lamp, saying he was looking for a human being.
• Asked by Alexander what favour he wanted, he replied: stand out of my sunlight.
• Told that Plato had defined a human being as a featherless biped, he brought a plucked chicken to the Academy.

The argument inside the jokes

The anecdotes are not merely rude. They enact a claim: that what nature requires is small, easily obtained and sufficient for happiness, and that everything beyond it is a burden taken on to please other people. Training, askesis, was the method, because a body and a will hardened to cold, hunger and contempt cannot be bribed or frightened. Self-sufficiency, freedom of speech and shamelessness were its results, and each was treated as a virtue.

Asked where he came from, he said: I am a citizen of the world.

Legacy

Crates of Thebes followed him, and through Crates the young Zeno of Citium, whose Stoa began as a reformed and gentler Cynicism. The Stoics kept the idea that virtue alone suffices for happiness and dropped the jar. Diogenes would have said they kept the doctrine and lost the proof.