O Diogenes! An apostrophe for an object-oriented cynicism

Will Daddario

The What: O Diogenes! (diogenesO)

Barrels, dogs, coined currency

(counterfeit and legitimate), lanterns,

olive oil, wine, bowls, sticks: these things

gather around Diogenes the Cynic (c.412 -

323 BCE) with striking conclusiveness.

Consult the treatises on his work, from

Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent

Philosophers to Michel Foucault’s

lectures on the courage of truth, and the

paintings of his encounters, such as the

engraving by the Anonymous, 17th-century Italian master to the right, Girolamo

Forabosco’s Diogenes Drinking from the Palm of his Hand and Throwing away his Bowl from

the same period, and Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Diogenes (1860), and there you’ll find them.

Often, however, these things are upstaged in the historical record by the human figures

conversing with Diogenes, the acerbic and pithy sayings of the “mad Socrates” himself, and

the philosophical genealogies that place Diogenes in the Cynic school along with his master,

Antisthenes, and everyone who came after, from Crates to, some say, Nietzsche. This paper

calls for a return to Cynicism and to Diogenes, but the route it will take privileges the non-

human objects that have been occluded by the great figure but that, nonetheless, continue

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to shape the stories we hear of the enigmatic (so-called) dog-philosopher. Indeed, my

primary claim is that the historical figure known as Diogenes of Sinope matters little but

that the assemblage of things that has accrued over time in the oral, written, and visual

record—barrels, dogs, lanterns, Diogenes himself, etc.—have a great deal to teach us about

performance philosophy, living an ethical life, and the artistry of historical interpretation. I

call this assemblage of things O Diogenes! or, where more grammatically consonant,

diogenesO.

Yes, I’m making all sorts of puns here. I intend them in the spirit of philosophical

weaponry that Gilles Deleuze mentions in his discussion of Cynic and Stoic humor in The

Logic of Sense.1 O Diogenes! leads to an object-oriented cynicism, and diogenesO is Diogenes

raised to a greater power through the vibrancy of those objects that have gathered around

him. O Diogenes! is also an apostrophe in the Ancient Greek poetical sense of an address to

an imaginary entity (O Black Night!), and I make that address here for two reasons. First,

diogenesO is a construct of mine, and yet it is no less imaginary than the figure historians

have constructed over the years in an attempt to trace the lines of Ancient Greek

philosophical thought. If performance philosophy can be of use to the field of theatre

history, then perhaps it can be so by embracing speculation and disciplined fantasy instead

of sidestepping it in the pursuit of historical accuracy.2 Second, the poetical apostrophe

amounts to something like a manifesto, an urgent plea to the forces that be. My plea (O

1 "Humor is the art of the surface, which is opposed to the old irony, the art of depths and heights. The Sophists and Cynics had already made humor a philosophical weapon against Socratic irony; but with the Stoics, humor found its dialectics, its dialectical principle or its natural place and its pure philosophical concept" (9).2 For more on this idea, in general, and disciplined fantasy, in particular, see my essay, “Adorno, Baroque, Gardens, Ruzzante: Rearranging Theatre Historiography,” in Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter, eds. Rosemarie Bank and Michal Kobialka (Bristol: Palgrave, Forthcoming).

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Diogenes!) demands renewed attention to Cynic philosophical practices because the

parrhesiastic discourses, presence of mind, and withering wit sustaining them might be

able to fight our contemporary malaise in, for example, academia where I am a cynic if I

vocally disagree with the myopic agenda set out at faculty meetings. In truth, I’d be a cynic

only if I shit on the conference table when it was my turn to speak and explained that I was

just being a team player, only my shit was anal/colonal [sic.] and not mental/verbal. O

Diogenes! carries with it an open question about whether or not such gestures are possible

and/or necessary in the present. What does cynicism mean today? Certainly we don’t

know, but a historico-philosophical analysis of diogenesO can help us begin to figure it out.

The How and the So What: Objects and Things

This object-oriented cynicism relies on an exploratory research methodology that

this ASTR conference invites, one that focuses on the what more than the who. In addition

to accessing historical research on the trade routes of Black Sea cities in the fifth century

BCE, the natural resources mined at that time for financial gain, and the relationships

between Ancient Greeks and their animal companions, I have built my argument in this

essay upon the work of two philosophers. First, I have relied on Theodor W. Adorno’s

challenge posed in Negative Dialectics (1966) that “[w]e are not to philosophise about

concrete things; we are to philosophise, rather, out of these things” (33).3 To see beyond

the semblance of mastery professed by proponents of rational identity thinking and the

nefarious manipulations of instrumental reason, Adorno developed a method of immanent

dialectical criticism that commenced with the nonconceptual object instead of the concept.

3 For a detailed treatment of this and other Adornian concerns, see Adorno and Peformance, eds. Will Daddario and Karoline Gritzner (Bristol: Palgrave, 2014).

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Through this method, Adorno showed his lifelong affinity to Walter Benjamin’s

pronouncements in the Arcades Project that the world is indeed ordered within each object

and that, by extension, philosophical knowledge will come from wrestling ceaselessly with

the objects we encounter. Second, and much more actively in this paper, I think in

proximity to Tristan Garcia’s formulations made in his recent Form and Object (Forme et

Objet 2011, translated 2014). There, the French philosopher reinvents what Quentin

Meillassoux calls a post-Hegelian, speculative encyclopedism. As a metaphysical treatise

derived from a flat (the flattest?) ontology, I would not say that I “use” Garcia’s ideas.

Instead, I plant myself in proximity to his implicit argument that in order to think things,

we must begin from the understanding that a thing’s value may in way correspond to the

value placed on it by human systems of valuation and at least entertain the possibility that

no thing carries more implicit value than anything else.4 Beyond this, we might also reflect

on the truth that all objects yield multiperspectival glimpses of the world when placed into

4 Ioana has astutely pointed out a possible problem with this statement: “The last part of this seems unproblematic, but the first I am not so sure about. It seems to me that this is exactly the phenomenon we are encountering in the neoliberal age (or the age of the world picture, in Heidegger’s terminology): “countless objects everywhere of equal value” (as Heidegger put it) -- of equal intrinsic value because they are equally disposable (but of differentiated monetary value once they’re put in circulation on the market). I don’t know if this is something to be celebrated…” She is correct that the neoliberal “equalization” of all things should not be celebrated. In response, I call attention to Garcia’s distinction between “value” and “valuation,” which he makes in Book 2 of Form and Object (see specifically pp. 332-36). Another paper would be required to treat this matter in detail, but I’ll offer a brief explanation here.

“Valuation” is the term Garcia uses to denote the projection of self interest placed upon objects. It is, in other words, the result of the action of the market and, arguably, the neoliberal order of things. The projection of these valuations on top of objects leads to the appearance of a “flat universe,” an economic plane of relativity that leads, on the one hand, to indifference and, on the other hand, to valuations inflated by the desires of the few at the expense of the many (certain objects are valued more than others). Opposed to “valuation,” Garcia discovers “value,” which exists in the object. An object’s value is part of the object, not something donated to the object by an individual. Value is, in other words, situated in things themselves, he says; value is objective insofar as value is an intensity of a thing. “But the intensification of things,” he writes, “belongs neither to things nor to the one who evaluates them; intensities are situated in things without those intensities being there. When one claims that a face is beautiful, the face is doubled by itself, as if it were intensely what it is” (335). As such, he says that I “find” value in something. The value already exists, but “someone must activate it and find it” (336).

Here, then, I am claiming to find truth in diogenesO. By assembling this figure I am activating that truth. It is not the case this figure is equally as truthful as Diogenes of Sinope, since I am claiming that the latter has less value than the former. But, in terms of the sense of things in the world (which I explain in the main body of the paper), both Diogenes and diogenesO go into the world alone, equally.

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new collections with one another. I will return to Garcia’s work in more detail later on, but I

would like to offer a brief overview of his main ideas here so as to orientate readers

unfamiliar with his contributions to the world of “speculative realism.”

Garcia’s object-oriented ontology relies on a distinction between objects and things.

To unconceal the distinction, Garcia mobilizes the terms “being” and “comprehending,”

which both receive considerable revision: “Being this or that is belonging to this or that,

being in this or that. We say that this or that ‘comprehends’ that which is this or that” (105).

As such, “Being is being comprehended. Comprehending is being been. The active sense of

one is the passive sense of the other” and “Comprehending is having something inside itself

[...] Being is belonging to something [...] Being is entering” (105, 107).

A thing, for Garcia, “is nothing other than the difference between that which is in this

thing and that in which this thing is.” Where we think things, we appraise the elegantly

simple relationship between these two “senses,” being comprehended and being been,

where “sense” rhymes conceptually with the Deleuzian sens, a directionality that lends

itself to movement and differential thinking. Each thing, for Garcia, enters alone into

something-other-than-a-thing, which he calls the world and also refers to as the form of a

thing, the negative that shapes each thing singularly.

Where we concern ourselves with objects, however, we need to switch modes and

consider not the singular relationship between something and the world but, rather, the

complex network of relations that constitute what Garcia calls “big things,” those things

“whose composition is differentiated and swollen with other things” (86). The Universe is

that which Garcia names “the biggest thing,” insofar as it is swollen with all other things. In

this way, the Universe is an object that contains quarks, neutrinos, atoms, molecules, cows,

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clowns, the possibility of a cow-clown, stars, thoughts of unicorns, this essay, the

impending ASTR conference, etc., etc., etc. If, however, we flip from object thinking back to

thing thinking and consider the Universe not as an object swollen with all things but as a

singular thing entering alone into the world, then we see that the Universe is, in one sense,

no different from a grain of sand, which, too, enters alone into the world. Book 1 of Form

and Object deals with the formal realm in which all things—like the Universe and a grain of

sand—are equal, insofar as they are all nothing other than the difference between what is

in them (matter, other things) and what they are in (the world); Book 2 treats the

sequences of being and comprehension that connect things to other things in the objective

Universe as well as the ways in which we tend to mistake objects for forms, thus investing

them with powers greater than perhaps they deserve.

In what follows here, I want to elaborate on some things that are in diogenesO in

order to reveal that which diogenesO is in. Doing this will, in turn, lead us to the primary

concern of Diogenes the Cynic, which I understand to be a concern with his container, with

that which comprehends him. In other words, Diogenes’ philosophical practice worked

ceaselessly to draw people’s attention to the systems in which they were contained and

that, to a large extent, formed their daily actions but that remained hidden or untroubled

by ignorance and (sometimes willful, sometimes enforced) enslavement to commerce. In

the present moment, an object-oriented cynicism may help us to reflect on the senses of

“being comprehended” and “being been” that we embody, both in terms of theatre-

historical scholarship, academia, and life, in the broadest meaning of that term. Obviously,

this short paper does not provide enough space to pursue each of these claims in the detail

each deserves, but it can provide a starting point for conversations about cynic

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philosophical practices (both historically and in the present), object-oriented research

methods, and the mission of performance philosophy, which I understand to be an ethical

investigation into the doing of life.

Συλλογή

Instead of an encyclopedia of objects, I offer a modest collection ( ) of συλλογή

some of the things that have gathered around Diogenes the Cynic.

1. Coined Currency ( )νόμισμα

In “Myth and Ritual at Sinope: From Diogenes the Cynic to Sanape the Amazon,”

David Braund queries the origins of the name that Diogenes carried around with him. Did

the town take its name from Ares’ daughter, Sinope, a figure variously acknowledged as a

nymph and an Amazon bearing the additional name of Sanape? Affirmative evidence for

this claim comes from the fact that coins in Sinope carried the face of this particular

nymph/Amazon (20). But the story told by this particular image is more complicated than

it may appear. One of Heracles's trials led him to the town of Sinope where he defeated the

Amazons who had settled there (19). Heracles's victory ensured the establishment of Greek

ideals in this outpost along the Black Sea (which would quickly become a superior node in

the circuit of commerce). The face stamped onto the coin may stand in as a marker of this

transition from Amazon- to Greek-controlled Sinope. The money that built Sinope into a

powerhouse of trade carried in its very appearance a history of territorial domination

rationalized through a desire for economic gain.

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Perhaps most famous of the stories related to Diogenes is the response he received

from Delphi when he asked the gods what he was to do within himself: “change, alter the

value of the currency.” This enigmatic response, prefaced by Braund’s insight into the

image on the coin face, leads to a significant conclusion. As Michel Foucault emphasized in

his lectures from 7 March 1984, “Nomisma [ ] is currency; νόμισμα nomos [ ] is the νόμος

law. To change the value of the currency is also to adopt a certain standpoint towards

convention, rule, or law” (227) Thus, Diogenes’ attempt to reveal the blindness incurred

through unreflective habitual behavior and untroubled acquiescence to custom in general

contains a specific antipathy toward the domination of territory and native peoples for the

purpose of increasing wealth. As Diogenes (ostensibly) declared, the love of money is the

“mother-city of all evils” (Diogenes Laertius 53).

The figure on the coin carries additional significance. Braund’s essay contains a

commentary on a Scholiast's note appended to a document written by Apollonius of

Rhodes. The note reads, "heavy-drinking women are called Sanapai by the Thracians, a

dialect that the Amazons use too, the city was called Sanape, and later by corruption,

Sinope" (cit. 17). One conclusion made possible by this note is that the town not only

carries with it the history of territorial domination but also its future reliance on trade in

the wine market. The coins thus establish a Greek-dominant history while simultaneously

shaping a future made possible through commerce and the further domination of workers.

When we read, therefore, that either Diogenes or his father falsified currency thus leading

to their family’s expulsion from Sinope, we understand why this change of venue mattered

little to Diogenes. Exiled yes, but, as the philosopher famously replied, “I condemned them

to remain where they were!” (cit. Braund 14). Left to stamp their currency with the blind

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allegiance to harmful custom, Diogenes moved on to Athens, though he always carried his

birthplace in his name.

2. Wine, oil, cinnabar

Walter Leaf declares that “Sinope—now the decayed Turkish town of Sinub, [was]

once the queen of all the Greek colonies which surrounded the Black Sea” (1). His 1916

study “The Commerce of Sinope” forwards the argument that, against many claims to the

contrary, Sinope forged its wealth through sea-trading routes and not over-land routes.5

Once established, thanks in large part to the Greek occupation, Sinope could market its

considerable natural resources and the principal exports of wine and oil. Wine, as the

Sinope/Sanape name entails, flowed out in prodigious quantities, as did olive oil which had

many uses including acting as fuel for lanterns.

This knowledge leads us back to another oft-repeated anecdote about Diogenes. The

philosopher was once spotted roaming around the Athenian marketplace in broad daylight

with a lantern in his hand. When asked what he was doing, he replied that he was searching

for an honest man. The lantern, a symbol of intelligence, was reduced through his antics to

a useless tool rendered absurd by the Sun’s greater luminosity, and thus reinforced his

underlying message about the absence of honesty and truth in the actions of Athenian

citizens. Jacob Jordaens the Elder’s Diogenes Searching for an Honest Man (1642), Giovanni

Benedetto Castiglione’s similarly titled painting (c.1646), and even the satirical cartoon,

“Diogenes Still Looking” by Thomas Nast (1876) offers a glimpse of this scene. In each of

those images, however, the lantern acquires a modern shape, thus adding to the slippage

5 Leaf cites the impassibility of the near-by mountain passes, especially during winter months, as the primary evidence for establishing trade routes on the Black Sea as well as the existence of the only safe harbor on that body of water.

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between historical facticity and contemporary usage: we can presume the scene was re-

presented in order to address a similar lack of intelligence and honest in the contemporary

Belgium, Rome, and Washington, D.C. of the three artists. William Groper’s early-

twentieth-century painting Diogenes (exact date unknown), by distinction, presents a

faithful likeness of the 5th-century BCE oil lamp despite its otherwise modernist aesthetic.

This tiny detail reminds us that Diogenes’

lamp would have been filled with olive

oil, and brings our attention back to the

philosopher’s critique of his hometown.6

That is to say, the anecdote with the

lantern relies on the knowledge that

while oil might sell to light the lamps of

the well-off it could not possibly lead to

honesty. Neither a lamp nor its fuel can substitute for the true light of day, which for

Diogenes was always synonymous with Truth. By extension, while Sinope and the Greek

capital might become wealthy from its trade in oil, it will never truly benefit

(philosophically) from its labor.

Leaf’s essay lingers for quite a long time on archaeological discoveries of and textual

references to a substance known as Sinopic (μίλτος miltos), which apparently earned

Sinope great wealth. Here is Leaf’s elaboration:

It seems that miltos was a trade-name covering all sorts of red pigments derived

from the earth. In many cases it included clays coloured with oxide of iron or similar

6 See Eric C. Lapp, “Clay Lamps Shed New Light on Daily Life in Antiquity,” Near Eastern Archaeology vol. 67, no. 3 (Sept. 2004): 174-175.

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matters, and may be translated by our 'ruddle,' the Latin rubrica. But it included also

the finest, most brilliant and most durable of all red pigments, namely vermilion,

which is given directly by the mineral cinnabar, the native ore of mercury; and I feel

no doubt that the Sinopic miltos was in fact cinnabar. As a matter of trade it was

called miltos; but the men of science knew it by the foreign name of . κιννάβαρι

(11)

This mineral, used primarily as a vermilion pigment in the adornment of royal and

aristocratic houses (also tombs), carries all the same dangers as mercury. Melted down, the

mineral releases toxic fumes that lead to mercury poisoning and, soon thereafter, death.

This brief geological sidebar brings us back in a round-about way to Diogenes the Cynic.

Though etymology, historiography, and artistic iconography promotes (successfully and

with merit) the notion that the term “Cynic” comes from the Greek word κυνικός

(kynikos), or hound-like (dog-like), the prominence of in Sinope presents an κινναβαρι

intriguing pun on the word Cynic. K , yes, but perhaps Diogenes was also like υνικός

in two senses. First, his apparent derangement and the poverty of his life, or, κινναβαρι

more accurately, the closeness of his life to death, links him to the substance known to

cause mortal insanity. This connection also sheds new light on Plato’s answer to the

question, “What sort of man do you consider Diogenes to be”: “A Socrates gone mad”

(Diogenes Laertius 55). Second, the very substance that put Sinope on the map is

preserved, through this pun, in the appellation Diogenes the Cyn-ic, the philosopher who

disdained his hometown's reliance on a commercial system that relied on the exploitation

of human laborers, slaves, those who were forced to mine the .κιννάβαρι

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3. Barrels

To ship their goods across the sea-routes, the citizens of Sinope (and all the other

Greek cities) fashioned great earthenware jars called (πίθος pithos). The existence of this

object points to another common, but historically inaccurate, aspect of Diogenes’s Life,

namely the fact that he lived in a barrel. Braund clarifies matters for us:

For everyone “knows”, of course, that Diogenes lived in a barrel . . . But he did not

live in a barrel. While barrels are familiar as bulk containers in the modern world,

they were less ubiquitous in antiquity, especially outside northern Europe. In fact

our ancient sources show Diogenes as the resident not of a barrel but of a large

storage-jar, a pithos, made of fired clay not wood. (13)

This distinction matters for more reasons than simple empirical accuracy. Since the πίθος

was quite expensive to make, its lifetime likely served to house a number of goods,

including wine, oil, cinnabar, Diogenes himself, and dogs. That is, if they fell into any kind of

disrepair they were converted to kennels. And thus we are once again face-to-face with

, the dog-like nature of Diogenes. While it seems that historians and philosophers κυνικός

have made at least implicit connections between Diogenes’ chosen dwelling place—not to

mention painters such as those already named, Hans Döring (Alexander the Great and

Diogenes, 1500-1560), Pierre François de Goessin (Alexander and Diogenes, 1803), and

Pierre Puget (Meeting of Alexander the Great and Diogenes, 1689)—few have lingered on

the possibility that Diogenes’s abode reduced his body to the same living space as the

goods that were circulated through the Greek territory. Diogenes seems to have recognized

his own body as a similar commodity, or at least as something caught up in the same flows

of commerce as those inanimate objects. As such, while I would agree that a home πίθος

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renders explicit the connection between the Cynic philosopher and the dog, while also

stressing an ascetic renunciation of superfluity, it also presents us with a spatial question:

what forces contained (comprehended) Diogenes?

4. Dogs

I will not go into much detail about dogs because the connection between Diogenes

and this particular animal is well known, and yet the presence of a non-human animal life

deserves its own treatment. Steven H. Lonsdale surveys numerous Ancient Greek texts for

references to the relationship between humans and dogs and finds many intriguing

citations. One of the most interesting leads us into Xenophon’s Κυνηγετικός (Cynegeticus,

“related to hunting”) where the author includes a detailed account of hunting dogs’ names.

“As examples he gives 'Psyche' (soul), 'Chara' (joy), 'Hybris’, 'Methepon' (helper), 'Lailaps'

(whirlwind). [...] The dog was regarded not as a creature possessing a complete, quasi-

human personality but as exemplifying some generalized quality or force” (cit. Lonsdale

149-50). Following this reference, Lonsdale acknowledges that dogs “are conceived as

independent entities incorporating, as their names suggest, some abstract force” (151-52).

This force may at times even acquire magical properties, a potentiality that receives

support from the fact that in Ancient Greece “the dog was a magical creature with

therapeutic functions. In the cult of Asklepios dogs were sometimes an integral part of the

cure. They licked invalids back to health, and it was a sure sign of imminent recovery if a

patient dreamed about a dog” (150).

Though it is true that the Ancient Greeks assiduously distinguished between human

and non-human life-forms, Lonsdales findings demand that we rethink the pejorative

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meaning of the phrase “dog-philosopher.” Diogenes the Cynic was not only committed to a

life practice of ascetic simplicity and truth—such that his actions, from masturbating to

defecating in public, resembled those of the roaming dogs—he was also enchanted with a

general force and his teachings with a curative power. Take, for example, Diogenes’

rebuttal to Plato’s who styled him a dog, “Quite true, for I come back again and again to

those who have sold me” (Diogenes Laertius 41). On the one hand, this reference speaks to

Diogenes’ faithfulness to those who “keep” him, such as his students. On the other hand, as

is more explicit in this quotation, Diogenes returns to even those who have tried to get rid

of him. Consider the way he “returns” to Sinope through his constant critique of commerce,

or the way his teachings would return to his students even after they tried to run away

from his forceful words. Taken to a more extreme level, Diogenes might act the dog by

preying on his own kind, not by eating them per se, as might a ravenous and scavenging

dog, but by hunting them down in the public space to reveal their ignorances before the

multitude.

In this light, I’ll end with Diogenes Laertius’ recollection of Diogenes’ response to

the question of what kind of hound he was: “When hungry, a Maltese; when full, a

Molossian—two breeds which most people praise, though for fear of fatigue they do not

venture out hunting with them. So neither can you live with me, because you are afraid of

the discomforts” (57)

O Diogenes! : That which is in him and that in which he is

To offer an example of a “big thing,” Garcia conjures the crude sponge assembled by

primates to clean foodstuffs. Though a thing unto itself, the sponge is really only the

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aggregate of “fifteen or sixteen leaves, stems, twigs, and the intention of washing the sweet

potato” (86). Since the sponge “can only exist through the leaves and its other elements, as

a greater and secondary thing, a ‘thing of things’, pregnant with other things,” it becomes a

kind of “world substitute,” “The sponge is the ‘microcosm’ of the components of the sponge,

like the flower is the microcosm of the petal, or the word the microcosm of letters” (87).

O Diogenes! is akin to the primate’s sponge. He is a thing, but a thing that is in reality

an aggregate of many other things. Formally, this imaginative construction exists just as

much as the historical figure, the barrel he lived in, and the words he spoke. Objectively,

however, this construction only exists through the objects that make it up. To understand

diogenesO, we must understand the things that make him up. Furthermore, diogenesO is a

big thing, a world-ersatz, a microcosm. When we explore it, we make new understandings

of the philosophical insights for which Diogenes the historical figure was known. For

example, when asked where he lived (which city-state he was a citizen of), Diogenes

famously replied that he was (κοσμοπολίτης cosmopolitos), a citizen of the cosmos, the

world. On the surface, this answer comes as a rebuke to kings and emperors who claim to

rule mankind. Nobody rules Diogenes other than the order of the world, the laws of nature,

the unwritten word. (Consider, for example, that Diogenes carries his philosophy with him

in his name, that he is “born of God” and considers no other parentage to hold sway over

him.) Beyond this, however, once placed in proximity to Garcia’s system of things and

objects, Diogenes’ statement reveals a concern with all the things that make him up and

with the thing that he makes up. If he works constantly to understand what he makes up,

the bigger “sponge” he is a part of, then we can read his philosophical riddles as mandates

to rethink the orders to which we subscribe and the objects we consume.

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In a future version of this paper, I want to explore this idea more by examining the

traces of Diogenes’ lost play, Thyestes. The downfall of the title character in that myth

comes when he realizes that he has just eaten his own children. The horror of such a deed

would have struck Ancient Greeks immediately. For them, the pursuit of justice and ethical

living required men to mind the line separating humans from animals, which included the

careful treatment of the body after death. Herodotus takes up the taboo of cannibalism

more specifically in his Histories (Book 3, chapter 38) where he discusses a meeting

between Darius and some Greeks. There, the Persian ruler asked the Greeks “how much

money it would take for them to be prepared to eat the corpses of their fathers; they

replied they would not do that for any amount of money.” Herodotus concludes from this

that Pindar was right to say that custom is king of all, which is to say that human laws rule

and should not be thwarted. Thus, when Thyestes falls, he falls from humanity to

something more base, to the realm of animals who feed on dead animals, sometimes even

from the same species. For Diogenes, however, the play seems to have presented an

opportunity to challenge the very customs that the Greeks held so dear. Do we not all “eat

our own dead” when we consume goods that were produced or harvested at the expense of

workers’ lives, such as the ? Combined with his open declarations elsewhere κινναβαρι

that eating human flesh holds no difference than eating any other flesh, I would like to

show how Diogenes’ theatrical works pursued his Cynical philosophy and simultaneously

fought against societal custom as well as theatrical convention.

Historians flinch at that which is unsubstantiated, doubtful, and fanciful. Where

cynicism is concerned, there is a double problem. First, of all the Ancient philosophies,

Cynicism rarely counts as a school because there was no dogmatic teaching (only dog-

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barking). Diogenes of Sinope seems as real as Plato’s Socrates: at best, an artistic persona

composed for pedagogical and psychagogical purposes, the thrust of which is lost today; at

worst, someone entirely made up and, therefore, not real at all. Second, Diogenes leaves

behind him only fragments. If we act as though he was a real living person, we can only

construct his reality from the odd phrase and anecdote. Thus, historians give him a wide

birth. Theatre Historians don’t touch him at all, despite his proximity to the Golden Age of

Athenian drama. But the method of analysis rehearsed here finds a way of organizing the

fragments and the fancy into a compelling situation.

This situation is the same that Garcia picks up in Form and Object, an elegantly

simple interplay between that which is in something and that in which the thing is.

Mapping these two senses, which determine the identity of any given thing, leads to a

renewed understanding of the systems in which we play a part, either willfully or

ignorantly. O Diogenes! begins to reveal the way that human life has relied upon the

domination of other humans and that, in this way, the most rational and intelligent of

people succumb to the most base tendencies of wild animals. In the present, we hear the

word cynic as a synonym for skeptical, defeatist, or antisocial. We read that, given the

standstill of politics-as-usual, we are forgiven for our cynicism about politics, or, to the

contrary, that cynical attitudes toward politics ensure the health of the status quo. To re-

think philosophical cynicism, however, as the art of revealing both that which

comprehends us and also that which we comprehend, leads to a completely different

manner of engagement with the world. Perhaps now is the time to renew the art of

exaggeration and outrageously bold public speech, to redefine civility in terms of the work

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required to demolish the semblance of normality that shapes all interactions from faculty

meetings to academic conferences and the classroom.

Regardless of whether we are ready or not to remake cynicism in the likeness of

Diogenes, we should mind the teachings that come from O Diogenes! Namely, that we are

nothing more than the objects that make us up and that which we make up. If we cease to

scrutinize that which we consume, then we’ll never understand that which consumes us,

and thus we’ll live blindly within the acquired habits and rationalizations that shape us.

Girolamo Forabosco, Diogenes Drinking from the Palm of his Hand and Throwing away his

Bowl.

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Jean-Léon Gérôme, Diogenes (1860)

Jacob Jordaens the Elder, Diogenes Searching for an Honest Man (c.1642)

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Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Diogenes Seeking an Honest Man (1646)

Thomas Nast, Diogenes Still Looking (1876)

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Hans Döring, Alexander the Great and Diogenes (1500-1560),

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Pierre François de Goessin, Alexander and Diogenes (1803)

Pierre Puget, Meeting of Alexander the Great and Diogenes (1689)

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