Diogenes
The philosopher Alexander the Great envied
Description
Sometime around 336 BCE, in the Greek city of Corinth, Alexander of Macedon — already the most powerful man in the Greek world at twenty years old, soon to be the most powerful man in the known world — went to find a philosopher who had refused to come and pay him court. The philosopher was Diogenes of Sinope, then perhaps in his seventies, an Athenian exile who had been living for decades in extreme poverty in a city that tolerated him without entirely understanding what he was doing. The standard biographical account, repeated across multiple ancient sources, places the meeting in a public space where Diogenes was sunbathing. Alexander introduced himself, offered to grant any favor the philosopher might want, and asked what he could do for him. Diogenes is reported to have answered: “Stand a little out of my sun.”
The exchange is one of the most quoted in ancient philosophy. Alexander’s reply, in the standard version, was that if he were not Alexander, he would want to be Diogenes. The story may not have happened in the form the historians give it; the multiple ancient sources do not entirely agree on the details, and the version that has survived has the polish of a story refined by repeated telling. What survived in the canon is the figure of Diogenes who would have said it. That figure — the philosopher who lived in a barrel, who refused everything the polite Greek world offered him, who used his life as a continuous public demonstration of what the polite Greek world had wrong — has continued to fascinate readers from antiquity to the present.
Diogenes was the most famous representative of the philosophical movement known as Cynicism, a school whose name is the source of the modern English word and whose actual content has very little to do with what cynicism now means. The Cynics — Diogenes, his teacher Antisthenes, the later figures Crates and Hipparchia — argued that conventional values had largely been imposed on people by accident of birth and custom, that the natural condition of human beings was simpler and more honest than the elaborate Greek civic order, and that the philosopher’s task was to live in a way that demonstrated the difference. The demonstration involved a great deal of refusing — refusing wealth, refusing political office, refusing the conventional courtesies, refusing even basic privacy when it conflicted with what nature seemed to require.
The question we’re asking: what did Diogenes actually argue and demonstrate, what did Cynicism mean as a philosophical position, and how has the figure survived two and a half millennia?
What we’ll see: the historical Diogenes, the philosophical position the Cynics held, the relationship with the Stoics that followed, and the long career of the figure.
Table of contents
01A counterfeiter goes into exile
The biographical material on Diogenes is unusually unreliable. The main source, Diogenes Laërtius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers, was written several centuries later and depends on earlier sources that no longer survive. The historical core is roughly this: Diogenes was born in Sinope on the Black Sea coast around 412 BCE. His father was an official involved in minting the city’s coinage. Diogenes was implicated in a coinage scandal the standard account says he and his father defaced the city’s coins — and was exiled.
The exile sent him to Athens, where he attached himself to Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates who had developed a position emphasizing virtue and the rejection of pleasure. Antisthenes initially tried to drive him away with a stick. Diogenes responded that no stick was hard enough to drive him away from a philosopher he wanted to listen to. The pattern the rebuff, the refusal to be rebuffed, the willingness to absorb humiliation would characterize his philosophical career.
02The philosophical position
The Cynic position can be reduced to a small number of claims. Most of what people pursued in ordinary life — wealth, status, comfort, social approval — were not goods in any defensible sense. They were preferences installed by convention, and they made people unfree by making them dependent on things outside their control. The good life required reducing one’s dependencies as much as possible. The path was askesis, training — a continuous practice of doing without, demonstrating that one did not need what one was supposed to need.
The implication was a sustained critique of Greek civic institutions. The Cynics argued against marriage, private property, military service, the distinctions between Greeks and barbarians, men and women, citizens and slaves. The Cynics were not interested in reforming institutions, only in showing that the institutions themselves were not necessary to human well-being.
03Cosmopolitan, Stoic, and what the school passed on
Diogenes is credited with the first known use of the term cosmopolitan. When asked where he was from, he answered that he was a citizen of the world. The Cynic argument was that conventional civic identities — Athenian, Spartan, Corinthian — were arbitrary accidents of birth that should not constrain who a person was. The natural human community was the whole human race, not the particular city. The term would have a long career in subsequent philosophy, particularly in the Stoic and Enlightenment traditions.
The Stoic school that emerged a generation after Diogenes inherited substantial elements of the Cynic position while moderating its public performance. Zeno of Citium, who founded the Stoa around 300 BCE, had been a student of Crates, who had been a student of Diogenes. The lineage is clear in the Stoic argument that virtue is the only true good and that external goods are matters of indifference. The differences are also clear: the Stoics built a respectable school within the Greek and later Roman civic order; the Cynics had refused the order entirely.
04What survives, twenty-four centuries on
The figure of Diogenes has survived in a way that very few ancient philosophers have. His position has not been preserved in a body of canonical writing — the books he is said to have written are lost, and what we know about his arguments comes from secondary sources written centuries later. What has survived is the figure itself: the philosopher in the barrel, the lantern in the daylight, the dismissal of Alexander, the long career of demonstrative refusal. The figure has been more durable than the texts, partly because the figure was always the point.
The modern usage of the word cynicism has drifted substantially from the ancient sense. Contemporary cynicism implies a kind of weary distrust of human motives, a settled conviction that idealism is foolish and that everyone is acting in their own interest. The ancient Cynics were not cynical in this sense. They were idealists of an unusually demanding kind, who believed that virtue was possible and accessible to anyone willing to undertake the necessary training. Their critique of conventional values was not nihilistic; it was the opposite an insistence that the values worth pursuing were higher and more demanding than the conventional ones, and that the path to them required the kind of public refusal that Diogenes practiced.
05Conclusion
Diogenes died in Corinth around 323 BCE, the same year as Alexander, at an age somewhere between eighty and ninety. His tomb was reportedly marked by a column with a marble dog on top the Greek word kuon, dog, was the source of the term Cynic, originally an insult Diogenes had accepted as a description.