Clash of Diogenes of Sinope and Plato of Athens

Time for an amusing Ancient Greek philosophers anecdote. This one is about the clash between Diogenes of Sinope (d 323 BCE) and the famed Athenian philosopher Plato.

According to Diogenes Laëtius (no relation – he lived about 500 years after but preserved ancient sources), Plato had defined men as featherless bipeds. This provoked the OG Diogenes to pluck all the feathers off a chicken, bust into Plato’s school, and declare “here is Plato’s man!”.

Okay, so maybe funnier if you were there. But to get the joke we also need to understand where Plato was coming from and why Mr. D was picking on him. Plato was very concerned about the identity of things — animals, minerals, ideas, etc. In his attempt to define humans, Plato perhaps did what he always did, which was to imagine that this world’s material occupants (including men) were merely shadows, coarse representations of another “realer” existence in some other dimension. By poking at Plato’s definition, Diogenes was ridiculing Plato’s arguments about identity being permanent and objective.

In this, Diogenes was one of the leaders of the Ancient Greek school of Cynicism, which often aimed to tear down social conventions, as well as many philosophers’ ideas about objective reality. The word “cynic” has its etymology from the Greek word “kynikos” the adjective for “kyon” or dog. Diogenes et al thought humans should live closer to the natural state that dogs do — they don’t have social conventions or pretensions and do not aspire to collect wealth. If this concordance-with-nature thing sounds familiar to you, it might be reminding you of Stoic philosophy. Indeed, Diogenes eventually had a student named Zeno, who became a founder of the “I go with the flow of nature” Stoic philosophy.