The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic

"I don’t think Diogenes had been given enough airtime until very recently, and now that’s happening. I regret not including him in my Little History of Philosophy . I should have done, but perhaps in the back of my mind I felt he was a bit risqué for a younger readership—you know, he famously masturbated and defecated in public and was renowned for being provocative and obnoxious. He’s the great performative philosopher, up there in that respect with Socrates . But Socrates gets all the attention. He was sometimes known as the mad Socrates. Socrates didn’t write anything down, but lived the life of a philosopher and died rather than compromise his conscience. Diogenes famously thought that human beings don’t need much to be happy, and owned just a cloak and a stick—he had a cup too at first, but he threw that away when he saw a boy drinking water with his hands and realised he didn’t really need it. Diogenes allegedly lived in a barrel at the edge of the city of Athens. One of the things I like about this very short book by Roubineau is that he has four or five pages discussing whether Diogenes did actually live in a barrel. It was more likely a big clay storage jar, and he wasn’t unusual in that, actually. There is a kind of resonance with contemporary Britain in the sense that homelessness became an issue in fifth-century Athens as a result of certain political decisions about going to war and the insistence that everyone lived within the city walls. A number of people were forced to live in very unsuitable accommodation, including these earthenware storage jars that—although smelly—offered protection from the elements. Yes, or maybe sleeping in a skip or a wheelie bin. A car sounds a bit luxurious. Diogenes was not doing it because he had to, but as a kind of philosophical statement. He enacted his philosophy and was very critical of philosophers who didn’t. There’s a quotation from him: Those who have virtue always in their mouths, and neglect it in practice, are like a harp, which emits a sound pleasing to others, while itself is insensible of the music. So Plato , to Diogenes, was like a harp, because he didn’t really live his philosophy, he just talked about it. Whereas for Diogenes, the whole thing was that if you believe it, you should do it. He was an environmentalist too. He was also arguably the first cosmopolitan, the first to say that he was a ‘citizen of the world’ when people asked where he was from. And he tried to live consistently as his own person, not accepting the values of those around him. Again, we know of him not from his own writings, but from the stories about him that other people wrote down. When asked about what should happen to him after he died, he basically said that he didn’t care, and the punchline implied that he would be just as happy to be torn apart by animals after death as buried. But Roubineau tells us that his wishes weren’t actually fulfilled—that there was a grave. All this really complements the book I recommended last year, How to Say No , which is more of a collection of anecdotes told by ancient authors of Diogenes; Roubineau’s book puts all that in the context of a life story, told in 106 pages. So it’s a good, quick read about somebody who embodied his philosophy. Diogenes was a bit like Joseph Beuys. Do you know Joseph Beuys? For one of his performance art pieces, he shut himself in a room with a coyote. That’s the kind of thing I could imagine Diogenes doing. He famously walked about an Athenian marketplace with a lit lamp in daylight, inviting people by his actions to ask what on earth he was doing. His answer was that he was looking for an honest man in Athens and hadn’t yet found one. You could imagine someone doing this outside parliament. There’s a great anti-Brexit protester, Steve Bray, who stands outside and shouts at Tory politicians as they walk into parliament. That’s the same kind of anarchic spirit, a bit punk, a bit unexpected, as Diogenes displayed in the ancient world. And Diogenes clearly had a good sense of humour – a rarity amongst philosophers."