Humans are animals and lived for a very long time without most of the social norms we take for granted. It may be surprising that such a person is called a philosopher, but his intention was to raise a point about the need for social norms. When asked about his public masturbation, he would quip that “If only it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing my belly.” He would eat in the marketplace (nobody was supposed to), spit or urinate on people who were rude to him, masturbate in public, and defecate in inappropriate places. He took his beliefs seriously to the point of public indecency. And the philosopher who purposefully broke one of his only possessions-a cup-after seeing a child drink water with his hands (“Fool that I am, to have been carrying superfluous baggage all this time!”)? Diogenes again. If you have ever heard the famous story of a philosopher who had the audacity to tell Alexander the Great to move out of his way because he was blocking his sun? Yes, that was Diogenes. He’d say that “humans have complicated every simple gift of the gods.” He had no respect for social norms and thought humans should live in the simplest way possible and disdained much of what “civilization” supposedly offers us. Diogenes lived in a tub and owned nearly nothing. The spirit of Cynicism is best illustrated by its founder, Diogenes, who is one of the most fascinating characters in all of philosophy. A Cynic is the opposite, he does not obey anything that he does not consider good or natural. Unlike Cynicism, Stoicism sees many human constructs like laws and customs as natural and encourages obeying them as part of living naturally. The Cynics had a much more basic view of what is natural and therefore lived ascetically. Both schools believed human reason is considered capable of determining what the will of nature is, however they came to different conclusions about what is natural. The philosophy of Cynicism, as a way of life and thinking was founded by Diogenes of Sinope circa 380 BC, and like Stoicism later on, emphasized the value in living virtuously and in agreeance with nature. As Juvenal would say in his Satires, the Stoics “differ from the Cynics only by a tunic.” And it should go without saying that the definition of both terms have been brutally mangled by the passage of time-Stoicism doesn’t mean “emotionless” just as the Cynics weren’t “snarky and negative.” In fact, Stoicism descends directly from Cynicism and both of which descend from Socrates. The relationship between Stoicism and Cynicism, two of the older schools of philosophy, is a complicated one that has evolved over hundreds of years.
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