Diogenes in anecdotes

Painting of the Greek philosopher Diogenes, Rembrandt style,
by the OpenAI program DALL.E (to my mind it is not Diogenes
but Plato at a later age)

Actually, Diogenes’s whole life as a philosopher, so the period after his arrival in Athens until his death in Corinth, was a kind of performance, and since Diogenes lived from then on most of his life on the streets, we can see him as a kind of philosophical street performer. But what did he actually do? And what were his philosophical views? Diogenes did not write down any theory or view on life and since no one during or just after his life time wrote his biography (Diogenes Laërtius wrote his biography only seven centuries later), we know about Diogenes’s life and views only from anecdotes. But that these anecdotes were told and handed down through the ages, shows how famous the man was. He made a big impression on others by what he did and said, already during his life.
We can best characterize Diogenes’s view on life as anti-authoritarian, unconventional, practical and concrete. He broke rules that everybody else accepted as normal; he had no respect for authority; abstract things didn’t exist for him. I have given already an example of Diogenes’s anti-authoritarianism in my blog last week, when he said to Alexander the Great “Stand out of my sunlight”. Although then Alexander hadn’t earned yet the epithet “the Great”, he had already conquered the Greek city states and was already a mighty man.
We can see Diogenes’s practical and concrete views in several anecdotes about his discussions with Plato. Plato had defined man as an upright biped without feathers. So Diogenes took a picked chicken and said: Look, Plato’s man! Therefore, Plato changed his definition to: “Man is an upright, featherless biped with broad, flat nails”. Plato is also known by his theory of forms or ideas. It says that there exist abstract forms (ideas) of everything in the world. The concrete objects are reflections of the abstract forms. So, a table is the concrete expression of the form of “tablehood”; a measuring cup is the reflection of “measuring-cup-hood”, etc. Once when Plato was talking about this, Diogenes said: “Plato, I see only a table and a measuring cup, but no tablehood and measuring-cup-hood.” (Plato replied then: “You do have the eyes to see tables and measuring cups, but not the brains to behold tablehood and measuring-cup-hood.”) Also known is the anecdote that Diogenes went to look for Plato’s man with a lantern in his hand, in broad daylight. In this way, Diogenes not only ridiculed Plato’s abstractionism, but he also wanted to say that he found the ethical question what it means to be a good man more important than the ontological question what man is.
Diogenes broke the rules. By doing so, he questioned them. He often ate in public, which was considered taboo then. When he was told that it was inappropriate, he replied that it is appropriate to eat when you are hungry and that now he was hungry.
A few more anecdotes:
- When Antisthenes, Diogenes’s tutor in Athens was ill and said “Who will deliver me from these evils?” Diogenes, who had come to visit him, “This,” said he, presenting him a knife, “soon enough, if thou wilt.” “I do not mean from my life,” Antisthenes replied, “but from my sufferings.” (quoted from Montaigne, Essays II-37).
- Or another one, quoted by Montaigne: “A man harbours anger by concealing it, as Diogenes told Demosthenes, who, for fear of being seen in a tavern, withdrew himself the more retiredly into it: ‘The more you retire backward, the farther you enter in.’ ” (II-31)
- Someone was enthusiastically talking about the celestial bodies, but Diogenes asked him: “How long ago was it that you arrived from the sky?” In other words: Don’t speak about what you haven’t seen from nearby.
- During a lecture Diogenes begins to eat: You cannot live on beautiful words.
- Diogenes destroyed the single wooden bowl he possessed on seeing a peasant boy drink from the hollow of his hands. He then exclaimed: “Fool that I am, to have been carrying superfluous baggage all this time!”
- When Diogenes was approached for masturbating in public, he would say “If only it were as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing one’s stomach…”
- Diogenes, washing the dirt from his vegetables, saw the philosopher Aristippus passing and said to him, “If you had learnt to make these your diet, you would not have to flatter kings,” to which Aristippus replied, “And if you knew how to associate with men, you would not be washing vegetables.” There is also another version of this anecdote: Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus to Diogenes, “If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils,” to which Diogenes replied: “Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king".
- When Diogenes wanted money, he used to say, that he redemanded it of his friends, not that he demanded it.
- They asked Diogenes what time of the day one should eat, and he replied: “The rich eats whenever he wants, the poor whenever he has.”
“Nothing is as practical as a good theory,” the psychologist Kurt Lewin said, but if it would depend on Diogenes, it would be rather the other way round.

Sources
- Inger N.I. Kuin, Diogenes. Leven en denken van een autonome geest. Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak&Van Gennep; 2022
- “Diogenes” in Wikipedia
- Anecdotes of Diogenes and other websites