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.
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The guy lived in a barrel, he couldn’t be right about everything.
That also serves as a response to his blabbering.
“Aren’t you ashamed that you should have worse intentions for yourself than nature had?”
“My dude, you literally live in a barrel. And cover yourself already.”
It must be a sad and lonely life not being able to enjoy a cute boy in a skirt
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 RightsRights 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).Just a heads up: you put the closing parenthesis and period inside the hyperlink you posted.
Nbd, and good comment, just letting you know.
UI dependant bug I guess because it looks normal on the default web interface.
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.
Nature cared so much about this questions that it gave sentience to itself to think about it.
very disappointed in Diogs on this one.
Cancel him ! /S
his contract for the next 3 seasons of “Lookout (for) Diogenes!” is cancelled.
Yeah but does he run Arch?
I got a feeling that if he was alive today he’d be telling you to get off the computer and touch grass.
Diogenes said I could have pizza rolls.
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).
Yes, I did read it. I’m going to need a source that says that was written by Diogenes Laertius quoting sometime else, not a quote of him, and he was quoting Diogenes of Sinope and not one of the other “pretty much all of the famous Greek philosophers”.
Maybe you should brush up on basic logic with Aristotle.
Well lucky for us, the book is so old that it’s long out of copyright, and additionally, the screenshot includes a precise location within that book (6.65, likely referring to Book 6, paragraph 65).
Here’s the book:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Eminent_Philosophers/Book_VI#Diogenes
Please verify for yourself that paragraph 65 does indeed relay the same story as presented above, so that we can all be safe in the assumption that “he” in that paragraph does indeed refer to Diogenes of Sinope, not Diogenes Laertius.
That’s better. I guess the Aristotle helped with making coherent arguments.
This comment should be automatically linked to anyone on this platform saying the average Lemmy poster is smarter or less sheepish in their behavior than the average reddit poster. People are legit downvoting you for being right and having sources to back up your argument.
People are the same everywhere you go. Everyone thinks they’re smarter, kinder, and better educated than “those guys over there”. Lemmy is no exception.
Lol
Oof. Was not aware of that one.
I saw the meme as more this specific lesson (above) that he was on about.
I don’t know any single person I’m willing to listen to completely. People are flawed, ignorant, and often stupid.
Radical Materialist Feminism, interesting.
“Were I not Alexander, I would want to be Diogenes.”
Diogenes: “I feel the same way, bro. I would want to be me too.”
Usually it’s translated as “step/stand out of my sun” (just in case someone is wondering which light is meant)
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.
That’s not true. For a long time he owned a clay cup even though he didn’t need it
Mhmm. Gross.
He just had that Dog Philosopher in him.
No I think philosophy is cool actually
I’m being facetious with this, but what philosophers do you like?
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.
Be the man Marcus Aurelius thinks you can be
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.
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.
His sister, yeah. Nietzsche himself, when in an insane asylum at the end of his life, ordered all anti-semites to be shot, which, as a late 19th century German man, is pretty fucking based. He had moments of what we would see as anti-semitism himself, but generally of odd and occasional stereotyping (“All Jews become mawkish when they moralize”) rather than a distinct and exclusionary racial-prejudice of the type we’re used to seeing from antisemites.
He was actually pretty religious, though,
No, he was definitely an atheist.
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.
This is somewhat correct - when Nietzsche writes of the death of God, he is speaking of the absence of a central morality in a world that is rapidly casting off its former superstitions. The thing is that Nietzsche does not see that alone as a good thing - with the death of God, the old ways of thinking persist, but now with a hollowness that renders their previous purpose superfluous - like a trained animal working a pellet dispenser long after it has broke. The death of God, thus, will lead to a period of true nihilism, in which many who are unable to cope with the world drown in purposelessness- knowingly or unknowingly. But it is also an opportunity - for a revaluation of morality, for men of great spirit to found new ways without the chains of the old dragging them down - the Overman (or Overmen).
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
Nietzsche is fond of intentional self-contradiction, in addition to having his ideals develop considerably over the course of his works, so he’s not always the easiest author to pin down, but the death of God as both warning and opportunity is pretty widely accepted.
DEAD ARE ALL THE GODS: NOW DO WE DESIRE THE OVERMAN TO LIVE.
Well I think Karl Marx agrees on some way. But when you are BFFs with Engels and enjoy Fox Hunts as a pass time, are you eating the rich or just saying everyone should eat like the rich?
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.
Camus! Just enjoy everything! Rebel against meaning!
But have you asked yourself why?
EXACTLY! You see my point!?
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.
There are characters like this in New Orleans. They just get by and get high with the community. Homeless people really help each other out down there too
Thanks for a nice read!
I always say, eating the rich would be disgusting. My proposition is to ground them up and use them as fertiliser. Preferably we grind them alive.
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He was pretty cool with slavery though.
At least he was also captured and sold as a slave. Moreover, Dio Chrysostom chose him as his anti-slavery champion in Diogenes or On Servants.
Diogenes argues that it is better not to have slaves at all, observing that:
… nature has made each man a body that is sufficient for looking after himself. — Dio, Oration 10.10
Child of his time. A working society without slaves wasn’t imaginable.
Also slavery was typically
nowhere near asa different sort of brutal in that era. Still brutal and terrible, but not “working people to death and then shipping in more people to work to death” brutal.Edit: changed my wording because slavery has always been fucking horrible, e.g. eunuchs
Yeah, you got Sundays off and could keep property. Still not a good practice and I don’t agree that society wouldn’t have been able to function without it (maybe mining)
It’s not about if it would’ve been possible, it’s whether people could imagine that it’d be possible.
There’s also that another apocrypha of him and Plato. Plato once sarcastically claimed that men were “featherless bipeds”. Diogenes later showed up with a chicken, whose feathers had been plucked, “Here is Plato’s man!”
Eat them with all that well deserved spit on their faces?
Not to kink shame but that’s pretty unsanitary.
Kinky. Sanitary. Pick one.
Behold, a man!
This is back in a time where like 0.1% of the population was literate.
Did he mean Dionysus?
my boy
