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.
191Lemmy is going to hate this one…
78It must be a sad and lonely life not being able to enjoy a cute boy in a skirt
28Wow, 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.
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Lol
5Oof. Was not aware of that one.
4I 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.
2Radical Materialist Feminism, interesting.
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“Were I not Alexander, I would want to be Diogenes.”
21Diogenes: "I feel the same way, bro. I would want to be me too."
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Usually it's translated as "step/stand out of my sun" (just in case someone is wondering which light is meant)
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Diogenes was, by all accounts, a gross-ass motherfucker.
...but I like his revolutionary spirit.
82He 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.
57That's not true. For a long time he owned a clay cup even though he didn't need it
23Mhmm. Gross.
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He just had that Dog Philosopher in him.
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No I think philosophy is cool actually
51I'm being facetious with this, but what philosophers do you like?
18Nietzsche 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.
22Well 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?
10Camus! Just enjoy everything! Rebel against meaning!
5One 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.
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But have you asked yourself why?
4EXACTLY! You see my point!?
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47Yeah... 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.
21It'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.
37There 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
6Thanks for a nice read!
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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.
17When the mob starts up and actually starts eating the rich. I'm going to surprise sex so many rich women.
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He was pretty cool with slavery though.
12At 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
32Child of his time. A working society without slaves wasn't imaginable.
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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!"
11Behold, a man!
8Eat them with all that well deserved spit on their faces?
Not to kink shame but that's pretty unsanitary.
8Kinky. Sanitary. Pick one.
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This is back in a time where like 0.1% of the population was literate.
7Did he mean Dionysus?
4my boy
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