Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

by Pamela Mensch

  Although the Cynic philosopher was evidently a figure known in the Middle Ages39 from a variety of Arabic and Latin sources (e.g., Cicero, Valerius Maximus, Seneca, Macrobius), it is important to note that the modern history of his reception begins with the recovery of Book 6 of Diogenes Laertius—hitherto unavailable in Western Europe—in Ambrogio Traversari’s Latin translation (1433) and the first printing of the Greek text (Basel, 1533). In the early sixteenth century, the publication of Cynic-inspired literary texts such as the Latin translations of Lucian by Erasmus and Thomas More and Rabelais’s Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1530s) ignited an unprecedented vogue for Menippean satire throughout Renaissance Europe. Ironically, the enormous popularity of Lucian’s Menippean works, which inspired original satires as well as imitations and translations in the vernacular languages, would make his reception the primary literary mode for the survival of Cynicism in Europe. Also important were anthologies of apothegms, a popular Renaissance genre (an influential example is Erasmus’ Adages); these routinely gave more entries to Diogenes of Sinope than to any other philosopher. Antisthenes, Crates, and even Demonax were also well represented. It was in this cultural context that Velázquez chose to paint a full-length portrait of Menippus (now in the Prado, Madrid).

  ***

  What is the moral of our story for someone about to read Book 6 of Diogenes Laertius, perhaps for the first time? I won’t gainsay its repetition, disorder, and sometimes contradictory character: it often seems unfinished or in need of an editor. It is worth noting, however, that this work-in-progress quality is not inappropriate to the subject matter of Book 6, since Cynicism has always been a philosophy-in-the-making, not a finished, unified theoretical system.

  Diogenes is, as we would expect, up front about this: to someone who reproached him, saying “Though you know nothing, you philosophize” he responded with disarming honesty: “Even if I do pretend to wisdom (sophia), that in itself is philosophy” (6.64).

  The fascination exerted by the iconic figure of Diogenes freely dispensing his topsy-turvy, carnivalesque wisdom while living in his doghouse—more accurately, a pithos, a large, abandoned wine cask—is the most obvious reason for the longevity of Cynicism as a cultural phenomenon. And the key to this figure’s staying power is his philosophical use of humor. The biggest mistake a reader of Book 6 could make would be to ignore that humor or to treat it as merely incidental to the philosophy. The whole idea of the spoudogeloios40 (i.e., seriocomic) figure or voice—probably the Cynics’ single most influential literary innovation—is to call into question what we take seriously and why by using humor as a means of perception and of altering perceptions. As Wittgenstein famously observed, “Humor ist keine Stimmung, sondern eine Weltanschauung”:41 “Humor is not a feeling, but a way of viewing the world.”

  This can make Diogenes’ humor seem surprisingly modern. To give only one example: when Diogenes was asked why he was begging alms of a statue, he replied, “To get practice in being turned down” (6.49). Now, this is still funny more than two millennia later, but there is also a lot of philosophy in it—as befits Diogenes’ seriocomic stance toward the world and his audience—since doing without (or getting turned down) and not caring exemplifies practical Cynicism: philosophy as a survival strategy. It recalls what Crates says he gained from philosophy: “a quart of lupines and to care for nothing” (6.86). Crates’ line, in turn, coheres with Diogenes’ response when asked what he had gotten out of philosophy—never an easy question for a philosopher: “If nothing else, I’m prepared for whatever happens” (tukhe: 6.63).42

  All these responses could be taken to presuppose a story told about Antisthenes by Diogenes Laertius: once, when he was ill and in great pain, he called out, “Who would free me from my pains?” When Diogenes shows him a dagger, Antisthenes sees that the pupil requires instruction: “I said from my pains, not from my life!” (6.18–19). Nietzsche observes of this anecdote: “A very profound statement: one cannot get the better of the love of life by means of a dagger. Yet that is the real suffering. It is obvious that the Cynic clings to life more than the other philosophers: ‘the shortest way to happiness’43 is nothing but the love of life in itself and complete needlessness with reference to all other goods.”44

  ***

  If Diogenes Laertius is our most important source by far, it is because in transmitting the largest chunk we have of the anecdotal tradition in all its messy, canine profusion, he succeeds—perhaps by chance more than design45—in catching the Janus-faced philosopher in the act of pretending to wisdom (i.e., philosophizing) more often than any other source; and in so doing, he shows us what Lucian must have meant when he said of Menippus, the only author expressly called spoudogeloios in antiquity: “he bites even when he wags his tail.”46

  1 That is, Monimus, Onesicritus, Metrocles, Hipparchia, and Menedemus.

  2 Thomas R. Walsh, Fighting Words and Feuding Words: Anger and the Homeric Poems (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2005); M. Faust, “Die Künstlerische Verwendung von Kúwr ‘Hand’ in Den Homerischen Eyen,” Glotta 48, no. 1 (1970): 8–31.

  3 For Lucian and Menippean satire, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. C. Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), ch. 4; R. Bracht Branham, Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Joel C. Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

  4 R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, eds., The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), ed. B. Williams, trans. J. Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), sect. 377: “We who are homeless—Among Europeans today there is no lack of those who have a right to call themselves homeless in a distinctive and honorable sense: it is to them in particular that I commend my secret wisdom and gaya scienza.” Once, when Diogenes was reproached for having been exiled from his hometown, he responded: “But it’s thanks to that, you fool, that I became a philosopher!” (6.49).

  5 Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, L’Ascèse cynique: Un Commentaire de Diogène Laërce VI, 70–71 (2nd ed.; Paris: Vrin, 2001).

  6 Dedicated to Voltaire.

  7 Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting, Der Kynismus des Diogenes und der Begriff des Zynismus (Munich: Fink, 1979). This work deserves to be much better known than it is.

  8 Louisa Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 131–32.

  9 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. M. Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

  10 Michel Foucault, Le courage de la vèritè: Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II: Cours au Collège de France, 1984, ed. F. Gros. (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales/Gallimard, 2009). Foucault’s lectures were eventually published in English as The Courage of Truth, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

  11 Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment, 136.

  12 Timothy Bewes, Cynicism and Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1997); William Chaloupka, Everybody Knows: Cynicism in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Alan Keenan, Democracy in Question (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003); David Mazella, The Making of Modern Cynicism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); Benjamin Schreier, The Power of Negative Thinking: Cynicism and the History of Modern American Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009); Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment; Sharon A. Stanley, The French Enlightenment and the Emergence of Modern Cynicism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

  13 Activity that produced at least one undeniable Cynic masterpiece, Diderot’s seriocomic/spoudogeloios (i.e., comic-philosophical) Rameau’s Nephew, which the author called a “satire” and Goethe, writing to Schiller (December 21, 1804), called “a bomb that exploded in the middle of French literature”;
it is cited and discussed by Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting, “Diogenes at the Enlightenment: The Modern Reception of Cynicism,” in Branham and Goulet-Cazé, The Cynics, 352. For analysis of the Cynic Enlightenment and the emergence of “cynicism” among the philosophes, see the excellent studies by Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment, and Stanley, The French Enlightenment and the Emergence of Modern Cynicism.

  14 As Niehues-Pröbsting has shown (“Diogenes at the Enlightenment,” 329–65).

  15 “That Nietzsche still used one word, Cynismus, and did not distinguish between Kynismus (i.e., ancient Cynicism) and Zynismus (i.e., modern cynicism) demonstrates the unity [of the history of Cynicism] until the end of the nineteenth century”: Niehues-Pröbsting, “Diogenes and the Enlightenment,” 354. To mistranslate Cynismus as lowercase “cynicism,” as the Cambridge edition of Ecce Homo does, is not to obscure Nietzsche’s point but to obliterate it. See also R. Bracht Branham, “Nietzsche’s Cynicism: Uppercase or Lowercase?” in Nietzsche and Antiquity, ed. Paul Bishop (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2004), 170–81.

  16 As E. S. Haldane observes, Hegel delivered his lectures “first in Jena in 1805–1806, then in Heidelberg in 1816–1817 and 1817–1818, and the other six times in Berlin between the years 1819 and 1830. He had begun the tenth course on the subject in 1831 when death cut his labours short.” G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (London, 1892), v.

  17 Ibid., 479.

  18 See Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, whose meticulous analysis makes this fact radiantly clear: Les ‘Kynica’ du Stoïcisme (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2003). For a review, see R. Bracht Branham, “School for Scandal: The Cynic Origins of Stoicism,” Ancient Philosophy 26 (2004): 443–47.

  19 For analysis, see R. Bracht Branham, “Defacing the Currency: Diogenes’ Rhetoric and the Invention of Cynicism,” in Branham and Goulet-Cazé, The Cynics, 81–104.

  20 See Mazella, The Making of Modern Cynicism, 15–16.

  21 This is not to deny the interest of Mazella’s discussion of D’Israeli’s attack on Hobbes (ibid., 15–16 and 170–84), but to stress that the epithet “Cynic” was profoundly ambivalent from the very beginning—it could have been worn as a badge of honor by Diogenes, but in so doing he was reversing its conventional use as an expression of real contempt. (The Cynics’ adoption of the term exemplifies what linguists call a “reclaimed epithet.”) Niehues-Pröbsting (Der Kynismus des Diogenes, 195–213) argues that the modern idea of cynics as Machiavellian is anticipated by Lucian in his treatment of Peregrinus Proteus as a philosophical-religious entrepreneur in his satire On the Death of Peregrinus.

  22 R. Bracht Branham, “Satire,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. R. Eldridge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 139–59.

  23 See Mazella, The Making of Modern Cynicism, ch. 6, on Cynicism, Dandyism, and Wilde.

  24 For example, DL 6.35: “valuable things were exchanged for what was worthless, and vice versa—for a statue was sold for three thousand drachmas, but a quart of barley flour for two coppers.”

  25 Bierce’s “cynical lexicography” was part of his journalistic repertoire for decades and eventually appeared as a volume of his collected works, i.e., The Devil’s Dictionary (1911); earlier installments had been entitled The Demon’s Dictionary, The Cynic’s Wordbook, and The Cynic’s Dictionary. See The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary, ed. D. E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), xv. Bierce wanted to retain the word “Cynic” for the title of his collected lexicography, only to be informed that his idea had already been stolen—presumably by a cynic: “the stuff has been a rich mine for a plagiarist for a many a year” (ibid., xxi). For Cynic theft (i.e., rejection of conventional property rights), see Branham, “Defacing the Currency,” 93–94.

  26 See Mazella, The Making of Modern Cynicism, ch. 5.

  27 See Stanley, The French Enlightenment and the Emergence of Modern Cynicism, ch. 4.

  28 Niehues-Pröbsting, “Diogenes at the Enlightenment,” 347.

  29 Mazella, The Making of Modern Cynicism, 21.

  30 Niehues-Pröbsting, “Diogenes at the Enlightenment,” 329–31; Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment, 133.

  31 Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment, 185–88. Shea’s work is unusual for the subtlety and thoroughness of its grasp of both the ancient and modern traditions of Cynicism, as seen, e.g., in her analyses of Diderot, Sloterdijk, and Foucault.

  32 For detailed analysis of the ancient debate, see Goulet-Cazé, “Was Cynicism a Philosophy?” in Branham and Goulet-Cazé, The Cynics, 21–27.

  33 For detailed analysis of what “defacing the currency” meant in practice, see Branham, “Defacing the Currency,” 81–104.

  34 W. D. Desmond, The Greek Praise of Poverty: The Origins of Ancient Cynicism (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).

  35 See John L. Moles, “Cynic Cosmopolitanism,” in Branham and Goulet-Cazé, The Cynics, 105–20.

  36 E.g., Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2007).

  37 See Branham on Mary Douglas (1968) in “Defacing the Currency,” 94–95.

  38 Cf. Lucian’s Cynical praise of the old comic poets for “mocking all that’s holy”: Branham, Unruly Eloquence, 36. The Cynic principle of using any place for any purpose is an explicit denial of sacred space: the implication is that space is ethically neutral in all directions.

  39 See Sylvain Matton, “Cynicism and Christianity from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance,” in Branham and Goulet-Cazé, The Cynics, 240–64.

  40 For the concept, see Branham, Unruly Eloquence, ch. 1, “The Rhetoric of Laughter”; for the word spoudogeloios, see ibid., 227n31.

  41 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen (1948), ed. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977).

  42 Branham, “Defacing the Currency,” 91.

  43 The conception of Cynicism as a shortcut to happiness was part of its self-description in antiquity—and an implicit criticism of other schools. Cf. Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting, “Der ‘Kurze Weg’: Nietzsche’s ‘Cynismus,’” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 24, no. 1 (1980): 103–22.

  44 Niehues-Pröbsting, “Diogenes at the Enlightenment,” 356–57.

  45 To our horror, Diogenes Laertius confesses at one point that “many other sayings are attributed to him, which it would take long to recount” (6.69)—we would love to know what those were.

  46 Lucian, Menippus (33), quoted in Branham, Unruly Eloquence, 36.

  Zeno of Citium: Cynic Founder of the Stoic Tradition

  A. A. Long

  There are two philosophers named Zeno in Diogenes’ collection of lives. The older one, famous for his paradoxes, was a citizen of Elea in southern Italy and lived during the fifth century BC. The younger Zeno, who is the subject of this chapter, hailed from the Cypriot city of Citium (modern Larnaka), immigrated to Athens as a young man, and founded the Stoic school of philosophy there at the end of the fourth century. This Zeno’s adherents were originally called Zenonians, following the common practice of naming a school after its founder, but the name did not stick. The younger Zeno, in the words of Diogenes:

  used to give his lectures while walking up and down in the Painted Stoa … hoping to keep the place clear of crowds…. It was there that under the Thirty [Tyrants], fourteen hundred citizens had been put to death. People now went there to hear Zeno, and this is why they were called Stoics. The same name was given to his followers, who had originally been called Zenonians, as Epicurus says in his letters (7.5).

  Since Epicurus was a few years older than Zeno, who outlived him, we can probably infer that Zeno’s students were already being called Stoics during the latter’s lifetime.

  As presented by Diogenes, Zeno is an intriguingly ambiguous figure. We see it immediately in the story about his collecting followers while simultaneously discouraging bystanders. Diogenes does not tell us what Zeno lectur
ed on, but the subject matter must have been lively enough to attract a crowd of curious listeners. We can plausibly identify the gist of it from Zeno’s first and most famous—or rather infamous—publication, entitled Republic. In this work of utopian political theory, Zeno presented proposals that would, if implemented, completely undermine the foundations of a traditional Greek polis and its cultural norms. Currency, courts of law, temples, gymnasia, and traditional education would be abolished. The nuclear family would be prohibited. Sexual relations would be based simply on mutual consent. Unisex clothing and partial nudity would be required of everyone. Ethical goodness would be the only criterion for citizenship, freedom, and friendship. From elsewhere we know that Zeno also challenged sexual taboos by permitting incest, recommending virtuous teachers to practice bisexual pedophilia, and elevating Eros to the role of the community’s tutelary divinity.1

  Diogenes reports that Zeno wrote the Republic under the influence of his first teacher, the Cynic Crates (7.4). This rings true, for many of Zeno’s proposals recall Cynic contempt for conventional values and advocacy of “nature” as the appropriate standard. If Zeno lectured on these themes, we can understand people’s eagerness to hear him. Yet Diogenes tucks his account of Zeno’s shocking Republic into an appendix after ending the life proper with a typically elaborate account of Zeno’s death. In the intervening episodes of the ensuing biography there is no trace of the social and sexual iconoclasm of the Republic. Zeno comes across as surly, prudish, and caustic, but no radical or intriguing cultural commentator.