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.
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The guy lived in a barrel, he couldn’t be right about everything.
That also serves as a response to his blabbering.
“Aren’t you ashamed that you should have worse intentions for yourself than nature had?”
“My dude, you literally live in a barrel. And cover yourself already.”
It must be a sad and lonely life not being able to enjoy a cute boy in a skirt
He should be ashamed to think nature doesn’t make mistakes. Although, and not to “it was a different time” this, he probably didn’t know about cancer and had some other excuse for birth defects.
He should be ashamed of even believing nature had any sort of will or intentionality. Nature doesn’t care about what Diogenes, or any human for that matter, has to say about nature.
Nature cared so much about this questions that it gave sentience to itself to think about it.
Yeah but does he run Arch?
I got a feeling that if he was alive today he’d be telling you to get off the computer and touch grass.
Diogenes said I could have pizza rolls.
very disappointed in Diogs on this one.
Cancel him ! /S
his contract for the next 3 seasons of “Lookout (for) Diogenes!” is cancelled.
Wow, 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.
Did you actually read those articles? The latter was a biographer of the former (among others – he wrote about pretty much all of the famous Greek philosophers).
Yes, I did read it. I’m going to need a source that says that was written by Diogenes Laertius quoting sometime else, not a quote of him, and he was quoting Diogenes of Sinope and not one of the other “pretty much all of the famous Greek philosophers”.
Maybe you should brush up on basic logic with Aristotle.
Well lucky for us, the book is so old that it’s long out of copyright, and additionally, the screenshot includes a precise location within that book (6.65, likely referring to Book 6, paragraph 65).
Here’s the book:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Eminent_Philosophers/Book_VI#Diogenes
Please verify for yourself that paragraph 65 does indeed relay the same story as presented above, so that we can all be safe in the assumption that “he” in that paragraph does indeed refer to Diogenes of Sinope, not Diogenes Laertius.
That’s better. I guess the Aristotle helped with making coherent arguments.
This comment should be automatically linked to anyone on this platform saying the average Lemmy poster is smarter or less sheepish in their behavior than the average reddit poster. People are legit downvoting you for being right and having sources to back up your argument.
People are the same everywhere you go. Everyone thinks they’re smarter, kinder, and better educated than “those guys over there”. Lemmy is no exception.
Lol
Oof. Was not aware of that one.
I 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.
Radical Materialist Feminism, interesting.
“Were I not Alexander, I would want to be Diogenes.”
Usually it’s translated as “step/stand out of my sun” (just in case someone is wondering which light is meant)
Diogenes was, by all accounts, a gross-ass motherfucker.
…but I like his revolutionary spirit.
He 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.
That’s not true. For a long time he owned a clay cup even though he didn’t need it
Mhmm. Gross.
Yeah… 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.
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.
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He was pretty cool with slavery though.
Child of his time. A working society without slaves wasn’t imaginable.
Also slavery was typically
nowhere near asa different sort of brutal in that era. Still brutal and terrible, but not “working people to death and then shipping in more people to work to death” brutal.Edit: changed my wording because slavery has always been fucking horrible, e.g. eunuchs
Yeah, you got Sundays off and could keep property. Still not a good practice and I don’t agree that society wouldn’t have been able to function without it (maybe mining)
It’s not about if it would’ve been possible, it’s whether people could imagine that it’d be possible.
Behold, a man!
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!”
This is back in a time where like 0.1% of the population was literate.
Did he mean Dionysus?
my boy
