Is Diogenes just a meme? As someone with little philosophical background how can I into his ideas as well as the ideas he was refuting ?
There's not enough surviving material to really "get into" Cynicism, but if your curious enough of their ideas filter down into Stoicism, so I'd recommend reading that - Stoics like Epictetus quote Diogenes a lot and use some of his sayings/general life to illustrate points they want to make.
General idea is that human relations are inauthentic, and that we should instead live according to nature. Stoics expanded on the last part to be less "eschewing social customs" and more "understand how the world works and bear no illusions about it".
Anyway that's my take, I'm by no means a scholar in this regard I focused on Plato and Aristotle, but hope this helps!
>>8272883
There is no way that plato cup story is real. That's too fucking gold.
>>8272883
He was autistic
>>8272883
Laugh at Plato?
>>8272904
To expand, Diogenes was in some respects a performance artist whose main goal was to expose people phonyness and petty vanity. So his battles with Plato were partially to make him look foolish while he was trying to ambitiously build this intellectual empire. Diogenes' intellectual legacy lays more with his influence on the Stoics, who were to become major intellectual players in both Greek and Roman intellectual culture.
>>8272927
>privileged heterosexual white male can role-play as a degenerate to prove a point
we've come a long way
>>8272953
I sure do love autological sarcasm.
>>8272985
did you mean ironic self referential sarcasm?
>>8272953
>Implying Diogenes wasn't criticized
You are as soft as a sjw if you think you need them to approve in order for you to be a bum.
>>8272883
There are the cynic epistles but they are of Roman origin and appeared quite a bit later than Diogenes. To some degree it is silly to ignore the obvious requirements of the cynic life but pine for the full texts. That may not be what you are doing but it definitely is what I do.
>>8272911
It was pretty great senpai.
OWC's Diogenes is good.
https://www.amazon.com/Diogenes-Cynic-Sayings-Anecdotes-Moralists/dp/0199589240
Was Diogenes the greatest troll of all time?
Try Cynismes by Michel Onfray
by the way what do you guys think about Michel Onfray?
>>8272883
https://www.mediafire.com/?zp2ppnxjwj28c
Read some actual works on him, he's far more than a meme.
>/lit/
>>praises diogenes
>>>rejects historical materialism
>>8272953
best post award goes to...
all I know is that he told Alexander to fuck off and stop blocking the sunlight
School me /lit/
>>8272927
Basically, Diogenes continues the actual philosophy of Socrates, while Plato uses him as a sock puppet.
Diogenes - The first stirnerposter
>>8275726
He's a clown
One day >>8277064 will actually read Stirner and feel ashamed of himself.
>inb4 >shame
>>8277091
>shame
>>8272927
>>8277055
You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power--how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live--is not that just endeavoring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"--how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise-- and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves--Stoicism is self-tyranny--Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature? . . . But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima.
