Philosophers Who are No Philosophers

Ἀμαθία (ignorance) was a natural result of the Cynic indifference. "Diogenes, being asked who were the noblest men, said, 'Those despising wealth, learning, pleasure and life; esteeming above them poverty, ignorance, hardship and death'" (Stobaeus, Flor. 3, 86, 19; 3, 89, 4). "They (Cynics) also dispense with the ordinary subjects of instruction. At least Antisthenes used to say that those who had attained discretion had better not study reading and writing (γράμματα), lest they should be perverted by alien influences. So they get rid of geometry and music and all such studies" (D.L. 6, 103). "He (Diogenes) held that we should neglect music, geometry, astronomy and the like studies as useless and unnecessary" (D. L. 6, 73). The word "music" as used here probably includes in its meaning reading and writing, poetry and literature. This idea does not appear to belong to early Cynicism, for the earliest Cynics are represented as quoting and paraphrasing Homer and other poets. Crates is said to have been a man of considerable education (Stobaeus, Flor. 3, 95, 21).

Tatian calls the Cynics "philosophers who are no philosophers" (Address to the Greeks 3). "He (Diogenes) was great at pouring scorn on his contemporaries. The school of Euclides he called bilious and Plato's lectures a waste of time" (D. L. 6, 24). "It was against the sophists, who wanted to be looked up to and thought they knew more than other man, that he (Diogenes) railed in particular" (Dio Chrysostom 6, 21). "The most ignorant of the rhetoricians ... all rush into Cynicism. They adopt the staff, the long hair, the ignorance that goes with these, the impudence, the insolence and everything of the sort" (Julian 7, 225). Dio Cassius says of the Cynics at Rome in the 1st century A. D.: "They are full of empty boasting, and if one of them grows a long beard and elevates his eyebrows, and throws his τριβώνιον over his shoulder and goes barefooted he claims straightway wisdom and courage and righteousness, and gives himself great airs, though he may not know his letters nor, as the saying goes, how to swim. They despise every one, and call the man of good family effeminate, the low-born poor-spirited, the handsome man a debauchee, the ugly person simple-minded, the rich covetous and the poor greedy" (65, 13, -translation of D. R. Dudley).

Image: Sculpture of Diogenes by Émile André Boisseau (1842–1923)
Photograph by Dornicke CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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