How to Say No: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Cynicism

"This is a personal favorite. Diogenes the Cynic was a real character and this book, How to Say No , is in the Princeton series ‘Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers ‘, which was commissioned by the editor Rob Tempio. These books have selections from great thinkers of the Classical Age, introduced by academics. You get a particular take and a curated selection of writing by them, which is brilliant. This one is my favorite so far. Diogenes was Plato’s contemporary. When somebody asked, ‘How would you describe Diogenes?’ the response was ‘Socrates gone insane.’ As Mark Usher, the classicist who introduces him in this book demonstrated them in creative and often amusing or shocking ways, he showed as well as said, as it were. He famously walked around Athens with a lamp that was lit and when people stopped him in the marketplace and asked what on earth he was doing, he’d say, ‘I’m looking for an honest man in Athens and I haven’t found one yet.’ He lived a very frugal existence. He slept in a barrel—well, they say it was a barrel but it was actually probably an amphora—just outside Athens and had only a cloak as a possession. He originally had a wooden bowl to drink from as well but when he saw a boy drinking from a waterfall with his hands, he realized he didn’t need it and got rid of it. He famously masturbated and defecated in public and defied other conventions too. At the same time, he was a cosmopolitan in the sense that he didn’t identify with coming from a particular place. When people said, ‘Where are you from?’ He’d say he was from the cosmos. So he was very provocative in the way he operated. “When somebody asked, ‘How would you describe Diogenes?’ the response was ‘Socrates gone insane.’” There are so many stories about him. One of my favorites was what he did when he was called a dog because of the things he did in public and how he lived, a bit like a wild dog. Some boys were teasing him and chased after him, calling him Diogenes the dog—which is what ‘cynic’ means it’s from the Greek for dog. His reaction was to lift his rear leg and piss on them. He was a comedian. Plato, in his school of philosophy, was a little pretentiously defining the nature of what a human being was as a ‘featherless biped.’ Most bipeds have got feathers; we are a featherless biped. Diogenes appeared at the back of the hall with a plucked chicken, waving it around saying ‘Here, I’ve got a man!’ as a counterexample to Plato’s generalization about what a man is. Plato then refined his definition and said something like ‘human beings are featherless bipeds with flat fingernails, not claws.’ It was just a very visual, performative way of doing that. That’s what I mean by saying he was a performance artist. He was also one of the very few philosophers with a good sense of humor. Another famous story about him is when Alexander the Great came to visit him. Alexander had been taught by Aristotle and was interested in philosophy. He was very pleased to meet this profound thinker who managed to get by with almost nothing and made a virtue out of not needing anything, and not needing to abide by human conventions or the normal conventions of Athens. Alexander the Great said ‘I’m the most powerful person in the world at the moment. What would you like? I can give you anything.’ And Diogenes’ response was supposedly, ‘Could you move because your shadow is blocking the sun?’ Alexander the Great was then supposed to have said, ‘If I wasn’t Alexander the Great I’d have loved to be Diogenes’ to which Diogenes replied, ‘if I wasn’t Diogenes I’d have loved to be Diogenes too.’ Like a modern comedian, he made these fast-thinking quips which have got a degree of profundity about them as well. When somebody asked him, ‘what kind of wine do you like drinking?’ he said, ‘other people’s.’ Diogenes didn’t write; he was written about. In that sense, he was like Socrates. This book is a collection of the very few things written about him, together with other things written by Seneca and other people who were influenced by the Cynics. It has an excellent, very short introduction by Mark Usher that really gets to the point of what Diogenes did, why he was interesting and why he might be interesting to us today. I don’t know how tongue-in-cheek this is, but it includes his advocacy of the ‘less is more’ approach and Diogenes as an early de-clutterer because he got rid of all his possessions. So this book is quite light and often funny, nice as a balance to a certain sort of po-faced philosophy that takes itself very seriously. That’s really the essence of what Diogenes was, he was deflationary. A lot of the time, he was holding a mirror up to other people and saying, ‘It doesn’t have to be like that. Look how ridiculous you are.’ At the same time, Diogenes was embracing what would seem to us now a minimalist lifestyle that might make sense transferred to today. There is an important difference between needs and wants and we would do well to remember that. We don’t need that much to survive and live quite a worthwhile life, Diogenes thought, but we might want loads of other stuff and that’s the attitude we have to combat. It depends on where you’re doing that as to how feasible it is, but Diogenes did that kind of thing without worrying about what other people thought. In fact, he was probably the father of that way of thinking because he had one cloak. Most people have lots of clothes and he had just one cloak. I think he may have had a backpack, which he kept his bowl in, but then he jettisoned that too."