‘Why, then,’ someone asked, ‘do you not die?’ ‘Because,’ he replied, ‘it makes no difference.’” Thales, Diogenes reports, “said that there was no difference between life and death. Diogenes also considers Thales to be a sort of inflection point between the earliest “sages” and the self-proclaimed “philosophers” who followed after them. The conversation involves an anonymous questioner and Thales of Miletus (active in the early sixth-century and regarded by Aristotle as the first Greek philosopher). But in one of his more somber moods, when arguing “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die,” Montaigne offers what seems to me an exemplary reading of an exchange from Book 1 of the Lives.
Diogenes of sinope cause of death full#
Montaigne’s essays are full of morsels from the Lives, many of which he misremembers or simply rewrites to fit his purposes. Montaigne is in some ways Diogenes’ target audience: hungry for gossip, a little credulous, and thoroughly committed to the premise that a philosopher’s personal life reveals things about the worth of his ideas.
Diogenes of sinope cause of death professional#
The outsized disdain this has engendered in some commentators has just a whiff of the professional academic’s contempt for amateurism.īeams inscribed with Greek and Latin maxims in Montaigne’s tower, to where he retreated in 1571 to set about living the life philosophical (Château de Montaigne, Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, Dordogne, France). In these moments of spontaneous versification, Diogenes has the air of an excitable enthusiast – more passionate perhaps than self-aware, but likable all the same for his eagerness to share his latest turn of phrase. But by including them, he gives us a rare hint about his character – and we’ll take as many of those as we can get. Paton, editor of the Loeb Greek Anthology: see Further Reading.įair enough: Diogenes’ poems suck.
Others have been harsher still: one critic called Diogenes’ original poetry, which is sprinkled throughout the Lives, “perhaps the worst verses ever published.” The words of W.R. Hegel to dismiss the Lives in the 19 th century as containing “bad anecdotes extraneous to the matter in hand”. Perhaps that is what led the uncompromising German philosopher G.W.F. How does it help us to know that Zeno of Citium, founder of the Stoic school of philosophy, liked figs? And it’s not even clear that his anecdotes always reveal much about the philosophy at issue.
If you want rigorous historical accuracy and meticulously cited sources, look elsewhere. 334 –272) takes a contemplative walk far from the madding crowd (from Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy, 1655–61).ĭiogenes’ approach to philosophy has been alternately the object of passionate scorn and of devoted affection, according mostly to the fashions of the times and places in which the Lives have been read. Did they practice what they preached? How did that work out for them? The Stoics and the Epicureans and the Cynics talked a big game. The Lives presents its subjects as complete individuals, whose philosophical outlook was bound up with their personalities and whose truest teaching was revealed by their lives.
The details of Miller’s translation are given under Further Reading. “Diogenes seems… to assume that a vignette or a telling anecdote may reveal more about the essential character of a philosopher than the canonic writings that generations have intensively studied,” writes James Miller. That’s almost the whole point of the Lives: it’s a collection of biographical sketches and philosophical doctrines, a survey not just of philosophical schools but of the kinds of people who founded and attended them. He himself would probably have thought it did. He may have been from Nicaea, in what is now Turkey. It is generally thought that he lived and wrote in the early 3 rd century AD. We know next to nothing about the life of the man who wrote Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. It’s ironic that Diogenes Laertius, biographer extraordinaire, had no biographer of his own.
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