![]() Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone to sea? Emigrated? – Thus they shouted and laughed, one interrupting the other. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. The Cynic Diogenes of Sinope appears in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (1882) as der tolle Mensch (‘the crazy man’) who proclaims the death of God it is a canonical scene of modern philosophy: Haven’t you heard of that madman who in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly: ‘I’m looking for God! I’m looking for God!’ Since many of those who did not believe in God were standing around together just then, he caused great laughter. In the wake of a great deal of critical work in recent years, excavating Nietzsche’s Cynicism, two questions are worth asking afresh: how far did the identification go? And what did his philosophy hope to gain, and risk losing, by it? ‘Diogenes Laertiades’ was how Nietzsche signed himself in a letter to a friend in his late 20s: ‘son of Laertius’, or literally ‘sprung from Laertius’, ie from Diogenes Laertius. When Alexander the Great announced himself: ‘I am Alexander the great king,’ Diogenes replied: ‘I am Diogenes the dog.’įor Friedrich Nietzsche – steeped in the Classics – the Cynics, and the much later account of them in the gossipy collection of anecdotes The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius (no relation to Diogenes of Sinope), were attractive material long before he parted company with an academic career to practise a more abrasive public philosophy of his own. Seeing a youth scoop up water in the hollow of his hand, he threw away the wooden cup he had been using, pleased to see that he did not need it. They were notoriously without shame – pissing and satisfying their sexual needs in public, like the dogs ( kynes) from which their name partly derived.ĭiogenes himself was said to have slept in a tub or a shack in the Athenian marketplace. ![]() Diogenes of Sinope ( c404-323 BCE) and his followers claimed independence from conventional material desires and the normal turmoil of emotional life. Ancient Cynicism was an eccentric model for practising a philosophical life. ![]()
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