• nehal3m@sh.itjust.works
    183·
    12 days ago

    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.

    • Godort@lemm.ee
      53·
      12 days ago

      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.

      • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        12 days ago

        Nietzsche 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.

      • Copernican@lemmy.world
        121·
        12 days ago

        Well 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?

      • nomous@lemmy.world
        5·
        12 days ago

        One 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.

  • masquenox@lemmy.world
    18·
    12 days ago

    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.

  • hOrni@lemmy.world
    141·
    11 days ago

    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.

    • 100_kg_90_de_belin @feddit.it
      30·
      12 days ago

      At 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

      • disgrunty@lemmy.world
        9·
        12 days ago

        Also slavery was typically nowhere near as a 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

  • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
    8·
    11 days ago

    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!”