Although it seems many people thought he was simply mentally ill, Diogenes would have claimed he was living a completely honest life and others should have the courage to do the same. Diogenes, however, confronted the citizens of Athens daily with their lifelessness and shallow values, emulating his hero Socrates whom he never met but would have learned of from Antisthenes. Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave is devoted to this very theme. He was not the first philosopher to make this claim Heraclitus, Xenophanes, and, most famously, Socrates all pointed out the need for human beings to wake from their dream state to full awareness of themselves and the world. Everyone, he claimed, was trapped in this make-believe world which they insisted was reality and, because of this, people were living in a kind of dream state. He was known for brutal honesty in conversation, paid no attention to any kind of etiquette regarding social class, and seems to have had no problem urinating or even masturbating in public and, when criticized, pointed out that such activities were normal and that everyone engaged in them but hid in private what he did openly.Īccording to Diogenes, society was an artificial contrivance set up by human beings which did not accord well with truth or virtue and could not in any way make someone a good and decent human being and so follows the famous story of Diogenes holding the light up to the faces of passers-by in the market place looking for an honest man or a true human being.
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