• nehal3m@sh.itjust.works
    147·
    17 days ago

    According to legend, Alexander the Great came to visit the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope. Alexander wanted to fulfill a wish for Diogenes and asked him what he desired. As told by Diogenes Laërtius, Diogenes replied, “Stand out of my light.”

    One day while he was eating a frugal dish of lentils, he was challenged by the philosopher Aristippus, who, for his part, led a golden life as he was one of the king’s courtiers. Aristippus scornfully told him: “See, if you learned to crawl before the king, you wouldn’t have to settle for rubbish like this vulgar dish of lentils!” Diogenes replied: “If you’d learned to make do with lentils, you wouldn’t have to crawl before the king!”

    Big dick energy. Love this guy.

      • zaph@sh.itjust.works
        19·
        17 days ago

        He should be ashamed to think nature doesn’t make mistakes. Although, and not to “it was a different time” this, he probably didn’t know about cancer and had some other excuse for birth defects.

        • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
          20·
          17 days ago

          You can’t fully extract yourself from your cultural environment, exceptional philosophers like him already managed to do that a lot more than commoners but he missed other things, it’s to be expected. Reminds me of the people who wrote the first Men’s Rights Rights of Man and of the Citizen during the French revolution which was incredible progress and yet they voluntarily ignored women, despite women fighting to be mentioned (like her https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympe_de_Gouges).

          • twig@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            4·
            16 days ago

            Just a heads up: you put the closing parenthesis and period inside the hyperlink you posted.

            Nbd, and good comment, just letting you know.

            • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
              1·
              16 days ago

              UI dependant bug I guess because it looks normal on the default web interface.

        • dustyData@lemmy.world
          43·
          17 days ago

          He should be ashamed of even believing nature had any sort of will or intentionality. Nature doesn’t care about what Diogenes, or any human for that matter, has to say about nature.

        • MacN'Cheezus@lemmy.todayEnglish
          22·
          16 days ago

          Did you actually read those articles? The latter was a biographer of the former (among others – he wrote about pretty much all of the famous Greek philosophers).

          • roscoe@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            3·
            16 days ago

            Yes, I did read it. I’m going to need a source that says that was written by Diogenes Laertius quoting sometime else, not a quote of him, and he was quoting Diogenes of Sinope and not one of the other “pretty much all of the famous Greek philosophers”.

            Maybe you should brush up on basic logic with Aristotle.

            • MacN'Cheezus@lemmy.todayEnglish
              2·
              16 days ago

              Well lucky for us, the book is so old that it’s long out of copyright, and additionally, the screenshot includes a precise location within that book (6.65, likely referring to Book 6, paragraph 65).

              Here’s the book:

              https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Eminent_Philosophers/Book_VI#Diogenes

              Please verify for yourself that paragraph 65 does indeed relay the same story as presented above, so that we can all be safe in the assumption that “he” in that paragraph does indeed refer to Diogenes of Sinope, not Diogenes Laertius.

      • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        16 days ago

        I saw the meme as more this specific lesson (above) that he was on about.

        I don’t know any single person I’m willing to listen to completely. People are flawed, ignorant, and often stupid.

  • hOrni@lemmy.world
    151·
    16 days ago

    I always say, eating the rich would be disgusting. My proposition is to ground them up and use them as fertiliser. Preferably we grind them alive.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
    8·
    16 days ago

    There’s also that another apocrypha of him and Plato. Plato once sarcastically claimed that men were “featherless bipeds”. Diogenes later showed up with a chicken, whose feathers had been plucked, “Here is Plato’s man!”