by Bruce E. R. Thompson.
There is no person more unglamorous than a philosopher. Investment bankers can be glamorous; computer programmers can be glamorous; even dock workers and ditch diggers can clean up nicely and be glamorous. But philosophers are pretty universally despised, and logicians most of all. Philosophers cease to be glamorous the moment they open their mouths, no matter how they are dressed.
Of course, it is beyond dispute that philosophers don’t dress well. Socrates was notoriously ragged, and he is only the first example. His counterpart in Islamic culture, the legendary wise fool, Nasrudin, wore clothes so patched and moth eaten that he was once turned away from a banquet to which everyone in town had been invited. Undeterred, he managed to borrow a decent robe from one of his students and went again to the banquet hall. This time he was admitted; but, no sooner had he been served a nice greasy plate of roast chicken than he began smearing the gravy into his newly borrowed robe. “What on earth are you doing?” shrieked the guest sitting next to him. “Well,” Nasrudin explained, “it was not I who was invited to the banquet. It was the robe. So I thought it was the robe that deserved to have the food.”
When, in the course of his conquests, Alexander the Great reached Taxila (in the Punjab) he learned of an especially wise philosopher named (in Greek) Dandamis who lived nearby. He summoned the philosopher to visit him. Alexander’s messenger returned to say that the philosopher had refused to come. Dandamis sent back the message that he already had all he needed, and that he therefore had nothing to gain by visiting Alexander. “If Alexander feels he has something to gain by our meeting,” the philosopher had replied, “then he is welcome to visit, but he must come to me.” So Alexander went to visit the philosopher. The philosopher turned out to be so poor (in terms of material possessions) that he did not even own a suit of clothes! Alexander formed the impression that all of the philosophers of India were naked. Some of them are. For example, members of the Digambara sect of Jainism traditionally wear no clothes. The term “digambara” means “clothed in sky.”
Even in China the legendary philosopher known as Lao Tzu was not famous for dressing well. Indeed, his most devoted followers preferred to avoid the society of other humans and lived as hermits in the woods dressed in rags or animal skins.
But perhaps the least glamorous of all philosophers was the Greek philosopher Diogenes, known as Diogenes the Dog. As a young man in Sinope Diogenes joined his father’s business minting coins. Legend has it that he visited the Oracle at Delphi and was told that it was his destiny to “debase the currency.” However, when he attempted to take the oracle’s pronouncement literally, he was caught mixing silver with lead and was consequently banished. He journeyed to Athens no doubt thinking that it is a bad idea to take oracles literally.
In Athens he was attracted by the teachings of Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates. He began following Antisthenes around Athens, refusing to be driven off even after Antisthenes beat him with a stick. It has been suggested that it was this incident that earned him the appellation “the dog.”
Athens had by that time acquired a reputation as a place where a seeker of knowledge could get an honest education. Teachers, known as sophists, or “wise ones,” would travel from town to town offering to educate young men in the skills needed to succeed in public life. Largely this meant the arts of public speaking and persuasion, and sometimes a smattering of mathematical, medical, and material knowledge such as might be needed for designing military weapons and defenses, and for treating illnesses. In an earlier era such learned men served as advisors to kings. They occasionally trained an apprentice to take over as king’s advisor after their death. But with the democratization of cities like Athens, and with the growth of trade and finance, the demand for knowledge was no longer just restricted to royalty. Any well-to-do merchant might wish for his sons to be educated, the better to take over the family business.
Sophistry was a profession well-suited to shysters and con artists. It is difficult for students to judge the quality of the education that they are receiving until after they have acquired enough proficiency to know the difference between complex concepts and incoherent blather. Even now a fortune can be made selling feel-good pseudo-knowledge in the form of self-help books and motivational training seminars. The sophists were the motivational speakers of their day. They claimed to sell the same thing that colleges and self-help books still claim to sell: success through self-improvement. The Greek term for this was arête. Athens was a place where arête was in high demand, so it was equally a place that attracted a great many shysters who claimed to teach it. Sophistry thus acquired a bad name, and the word today means “deceitful persuasion.”
Fortunately for Athens, they had something that no other city in ancient Greece had: they had a gadfly. It was typical that, when a new sophist came to town, he would give a speech in the public square. He would give a sampling of the knowledge he was offering and a demonstration of his skill in wielding that knowledge. At the end of the speech, he would take a few questions and then take subscriptions for the course he was planning to teach. In the absence of cable streaming services, such public speeches were very popular, and always well attended. A sophist would plan to be in town only long enough to teach his course. Then, before his students could discover that they still knew nothing useful (and before their fathers could demand that their subscription fees be returned), the “sophist” would be off to the next town.
In Athens things often went differently. At the end of a public speech, when it was time for questions, an elderly craftsman—a sculptor by trade, still covered in the dust of his workshop—would step forward and beg to ask a few questions. Although he was only a sculptor, Socrates was shrewd and well-read. His questions tended to focus on the meanings of words. He would ask questions like, “You said just now that your training will give your students the ability to argue for ‘justice’ for themselves. I was wondering just what you meant by ‘justice’. Can you give me some definition of that?” He would then argue with the sophist until either the sophist gave a coherent definition or (as was often the case) the sophist was shown to be as ignorant as his audience. In the former case the fathers of aspiring sons would then step forward and pay their subscription fees. In the latter case the “sophist” would be tarred and feathered and driven out of town. Socrates made many friends among the wealthy merchants and aristocrats whose sons received solid educations because of him. They were willing to overlook his shabby clothes and they even welcomed him into their homes.
With the shysters out of the way, a few visiting sophists discovered that they had enough subscribers that they could extend their stay. Plato, who was an Athenian himself and never wanted to leave, founded a permanent school in Athens. It was known as the Academy since it met at a temple built to honor the mythic hero Academus. Young men from other places began journeying to Athens rather than wait for the best sophists to come to them. A young man from Macedonia named Aristotle became so proficient at the Academy that it was presumed he would take over leadership of the institution. Ethnic prejudice appears to have prevented this, so he founded a competing school known as the Lyceum instead. Somewhat later another visitor, Zeno of Citium, also decided to stay. He set up his school in a merchant’s stall in the marketplace. The Greek word for a marketplace stall was stoa, so his school came to be called the Stoa, and the brand of philosophy taught there was called “stoicism.” The Academy, the Lyceum, and the Stoa were the first established educational institutions in the Western world. With their reputations on the line, they were careful to ensure that their teachers were qualified and competent.
When Diogenes arrived in Athens most of this history was still in the future. The Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta was over. Sparta had installed a puppet government in Athens headed by thirty autocrats who would be likely to be sympathetic to Sparta’s interests. The Thirty were so unpopular in Athens that they were quickly overthrown; but, unfortunately for Socrates, many of his wealthy patrons were among the Thirty. The restored democracy arrested Socrates and tried him on charges of teaching impious doctrines that corrupted the sons of his patrons. Once judged guilty, Socrates refused to be exiled, so he was put to death instead.
With the death of Socrates, and the permanent schools not yet been established, Athens found itself in need of another gadfly. Diogenes the Dog stepped into that role. Like Socrates, he was “dogged” in his pursuit of truth, often worrying an idea to death as if it were a bone. But, if Socrates was unglamorous, Diogenes was anti-glamorous. Antisthenes had taught that philosophy is not just what a person says or thinks, but what a person does and how a person lives. Emulating Socrates, Antisthenes preached a simple life, eschewing wealth, possessions, and social status. Diogenes became the primary advocate of this line of thinking; but Diogenes took it to extremes. He wandered the streets begging for his food, and he slept wherever he wanted. During inclement weather he took shelter in an empty wine jar that lay in a back alley. (Ceramic jars, or pithoi, were large enough for a man to fit inside comfortably.)
The Greek word for dog is kuon. The adjectival form of the word, kunos, meaning “like a dog,” is the root from which the doctrine advocated by Diogenes derives its name: cynicism. Cynicism is an extreme version of Skepticism. While skeptics believe that nothing can be proven, and so conclude that nothing can be known, cynics believe that all utterances fall short of the truth. Thus, nothing true can even be spoken. Skeptics believe that all assertions are doubtful; cynics believe that all assertions are false.
Diogenes, like Socrates, became obsessed with the meanings of words. This led him to a larger question: how can words have meaning at all? He found he was unable to answer this question. Faithful to his commitment to live his philosophy, he gave up speaking. He took to urinating in public, wearing no clothes, and growling and barking like a dog. In this way he fulfilled the Oracle’s prophesy. He debased the “common currency” of human interactions: language itself.
The Cynics welcomed both men and women in their ranks. One of the first female philosophers known to history was Hipparchia of Maroneia. She was no beautiful, cultured, well-educated courtesan. She was no more glamorous than other followers of Diogenes. She and her husband, Crates, lived on the streets, begging for food and engaging in philosophical dialogue with anyone who would take the time to talk to them.
It is not just because philosophers dress poorly that philosophers are unglamorous. Philosophers are unglamorous because it is our calling to be gadflies. In all cultures, across all centuries, philosophers of every race and gender are committed to being annoying pests. It is our job to challenge orthodoxies, expose ignorance, and chew on ideas beyond the point that anyone is willing to listen to us. While never being offended by criticism ourselves, we can be brutally honest in criticizing the ideas of others.
No wonder we are so rarely invited to celebrity gatherings and cocktail parties.
Disclaimer: Very little is known about the life of Diogenes and many of the stories about him are probably apocryphal (defined as “true only in the sense that it would be a shame for them to be false.”) Some stories are so unsupported by contemporary evidence that no responsible scholar will vouch for them. The above essay makes no claim to being a work of responsible scholarship.