Once there was a war scare so serious that it stirred even the lazy, profit-happy Corinthians. To a gentleman whose servant was putting on his shoes for him, Diogenes said, “You won’t be really happy until he wipes your nose for you: that will come after you lose the use of your hands.” At bright noonday he walked through the market place carrying a lighted lamp and inspecting the face of everyone he met.
He thought most people were only half-alive, most men only half-men. And, by design, he publicly behaved in such ways as to show people what real life was. Therefore he chose to live in Athens or Corinth, where travelers from all over the Mediterranean world constantly came and went. But for Diogenes, laboratory and specimens and lecture halls and pupils were all to be found in a crowd of ordinary people. such as Plato and Aristotle taught mainly their own private pupils. The other great philosophers of the fourth century B.C. ”: to take the clean metal of human life, to erase the old false conventional markings, and to imprint it with its true values. His life’s aim was clear to him: it was “to restamp the currency. There have been many men who grew tired of human society and went away to live simply ─ on a small farm, in a quiet village, or in a hermit’s cave. In order to procure a quantity of false, perishable goods he has sold the only true, lasting good, his own independence. He depends on them, he worries about them, he spends most of his life’s energy looking after them. The rich man believes he possesses his big house, his expensive clothes, his horses and his bank accounts.
Live without conventions, which are artificial and false escape complexities and extravagances: only so can you live a free life. All should live naturally, he said, for what is natural is normal and cannot possibly be evil or shameful. He was a philosopher who wrote plays and poems and essays expounding his doctrine he talked to those who cared to listen he had pupils who admired him. But he was the first who ever did so by choice, out of principle.ĭiogenes was not a lunatic. He was not the first to inhabit such a thing. It was a storage jar made of earthenware, no doubt discarded because a break had made it useless. People called him The Dog and called his philosophy Cynicism (doggishness) he spent much of his life in the rich, lazy, corrupt Greek city of Corinth, mocking and satirizing its people, and occasionally converting one of them. So he had one blanket ─ to dress him in the daytime and cover him at night ─ and he slept in a cask. All we require, since nature did not dress us properly, is one garment to keep us warm, and some shelter from rain and wind. No one needs beds and chairs and such furniture: the animals live healthy lives and sleep on the ground. What good is a house? No one needs privacy natural acts are not shameful we all do the same things, and need not hide them. He thought everybody lived far too elaborately, expensively, anxiously. It was not a house, not even a squatter’s hut. They were not quite sure whether he was mad or not He knew they were mad, each in a different way they amused him. Sometimes they threw bits of food, and got scant thanks sometimes a mischievous pebble, and got a shower of stones and abuse. They would throw sharp questions at him and get sharp answers. As the market place filled up with shoppers and merchants and slaves and foreigners, he had strolled through it for an hour or two. Having no work to go to and no family to provide for, he was free. He had opened his eyes with the sun at dawn, scratched, done his business like a dog at the roadside, washed at the public fountain, begged a piece of breakfast bread and a few olives, eaten them squatting on the ground, and washed them down with a few handfuls of water scooped from the spring. Lying on the bare earth, shoeless, bearded, half-naked, he looked like a beggar or a lunatic.