Socrates, Cynics and Flat-Nailed, Featherless Bipeds
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Socrates, Cynics and Flat-Nailed, Featherless Bipeds
There’s a story that
would have taken place (assuming it’s true) not long after the death of
Socrates. Plato set out to define “human being” and announced the
answer: “featherless biped.” When Diogenes of Sinope heard the news he
came to Plato’s school, known as the Academy, with a plucked chicken,
saying, “Here’s the Platonic human!” Naturally, the Academy had to fix
its definition, so it added the phrase “with flat nails.”
Cynics like Diogenes behaved not as the authors of theories but as performers of wisdom. They were philosophers in action, notable for existing rather than for their accounts of existence.
This story is widely
told, and not just because it has a punch line. It represents
philosophers as always having belonged to two very different types; and
it’s worth remembering how far back the division goes. Recently Robert
Frodeman and Adam Briggle wrote a column for The Stone, “When Philosophy Lost its Way,”
that argued philosophy ceased to be what Socrates had made of it
sometime around the late 19 century, when it became professionalized
within the institution of the modern university. But there was already a
divergence between two ways of being a philosopher long before — in the
generation after Socrates — and two kinds of inspiration that Socrates
represented for the philosophers who lived after him.
Diogenes of Sinope,
better known as “Diogenes the Cynic,” considered himself Socratic. If he
never met Socrates, he knew philosophers who had. Plato himself called
Diogenes “a maddened Socrates,” and if there’s praise in that
description it is grudging praise; even so it puts Diogenes somewhere in
the Socratic legacy. And stories like the one about the plucked bird
bring the two together for a stark contrast. They represent two ancient
ideas of what a philosopher should be.
This anecdote alone
points to several differences between the two ideas of philosophizing.
We associate Plato’s name with the Academy, the name of the gymnasium at
which he founded his school (and later, because of him, a name
synonymous with “school”). The anecdote suggests an institution at
which some people were teachers and others learned from them, and became
philosophers by virtue of having learned from authorities. This is the
side of philosophy that tries to systematize knowledge.
The anecdote also
tells us that philosophers at this institution had a project to
complete. It apparently involved defining terms. According to a comedy
written in Plato’s time, students trained by defining “the pumpkin” — a
joke at Plato’s expense, no doubt, but a joke that made fun of the
enterprise of classification and definition and therefore tells us that
enterprise was under way at the Academy.
Now in print
The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments
An anthology of essays from The Times’s philosophy series, published by Liveright.
Diogenes gets the
better of the plucked chicken exchange; it sounds, in fact, like a story
that later Cynic philosophers circulated. After all Diogenes is right
that a plucked chicken is a biped and has no feathers and so disproves
the Academy’s definition. On the other hand the philosophers in the
Academy keep their dignity. As if they didn’t know they were being made
fun of, they looked up from the chicken in the room and fiddled with
their definition to improve it.
When philosophers
gather together they can build on one another’s insights and improve on
past accomplishments. Plato’s dialogues offer glimpses of how philosophy
would have been practiced at his school, as a collective and
cooperative quest for the demarcation of “species” or “kinds” of things.
Moral terms, political concepts and biological entities were
investigated and defined. Pumpkins, no; human being, yes; human as
featherless biped, maybe. In fact “featherless biped” conjures up an
enterprise of taxonomy. First you sort animals by the number of feet
they have, which means you have a category for spiders with eight, flies
with six, horses with four, and so on. Then among the genus of
two-legged animals you separate the species with wings from the naked
species.
Plato’s alleged name
for Diogenes, “maddened Socrates,” also suggests taxonomy. You start
with the Socrates type and distinguish the sane examples from crazies
like Diogenes. A sane Socrates presumably was someone like Plato
himself, joining with other philosophers in cooperative study,
organizing a project, even proposing to articulate all bodies of
knowledge together. Crazy philosophers, like Diogenes, carried a lit
lamp in the daytime and not only ate in public, but masturbated in
public too, expressing the wish that it was as easy to treat hunger by
rubbing his stomach.
These gestures and
anecdotes might strike you as not enough to count as philosophy. This is
John Cooper’s reason for leaving the Cynics out of his engaging study
of ancient philosophical ethics, “Pursuits of Wisdom,” a book that
promises to be about “ways of life in ancient philosophy.” Cooper’s
point is that vivid personal lives do not make up for the absence of
that rationality and systematic argumentation that characterize the true
philosophers of antiquity.
Beards mangy, posture slumped, dressed in one big rough cloth and resting on a walking stick, the Cynics wandered through the Roman world as its image of the freethinker, never at home.
Being a few sandwiches
shy of an intellectual picnic, Diogenes cannot be said to wax
philosophical.
In the world of philosophical theories, he comes along
with a counterexample here and there or a sneer at someone else’s idea.
The plucked chicken shows where Plato’s theory went wrong. Diogenes
supposedly walked through Athens with a lit lamp in daylight “looking
for a human being” in another sort of rebuke to the same Academic
project. (The story is often told, erroneously, to say that he’s seeking
“an honest man,” but the problem is even more urgent than that.) To a
Cynic, using a lamp at noontime is no more ridiculous a way of finding
human beings than defining them is.
In the later centuries
of antiquity, into the years of the Roman Empire, the Academic and
Cynic philosophers were both popularly presented as philosophical types.
An irresistible book by Paul Zanker, “The Mask of Socrates,” shows
plentiful examples of both types, dating from Hellenistic Greece well
into imperial Rome. Plato, and the Platonists after him, and the
Peripatetic philosophers who came after Aristotle, and the Stoics who
took themselves to be Socratics – in fact, just about all the later
philosophers who organized themselves into schools of thought – appeared
before the Hellenistic and Roman worlds as serious gentlemen. As seen
in busts and statues, these philosophers dressed soberly and grew full,
well-tended beards. Their foreheads were sometimes furrowed with the
work of contemplating philosophy, but this was a permissible variation
on being a gentleman and upright citizen.
Then there were other
graven images of philosophers during those same years that we can
classify as legacies of the Cynics. Beards mangy, posture slumped,
dressed in one big rough cloth and resting on a walking stick, the
Cynics wandered through the Roman world as its image of the freethinker,
never at home – not even in a philosophical theory — but
“cosmopolitan,” to use a word the Cynics invented: citizens of the
world, meaning that they didn’t belong anywhere in particular.
Counterculturalism was their instinct even if it was a negative impulse.
Diogenes was asked what was most beautiful and answered parrhesia —
“candor, freedom of speech” — but the word literally means “saying
everything,” and the Cynic had to be ready to say anything at all,
improvising philosophy under all circumstances.
In their role as
walking counterexamples, the Cynics mattered more as who they were than
for the content of anything they said. In this sense Cooper is right to
separate them from the ancient traditions of moral theory. In the human
drama, they behaved not as the authors of theories but as performers of
wisdom. We know them anecdotally because they lived anecdotally, as the
subjects of retold tales. They were philosophers in action, notable for
existing rather than for their accounts of existence.
When Christianity
became legal in the Roman Empire, Platonism gave the early church’s
thinkers a vocabulary for understanding the divine, helped to explain
how divinity offered guidance to human beings, and suggested how human
beings might aspire to divinity. But the countercultural appeal of
Socrates also affected Christians, who would remember the persecutions
against them long after they had ceased being persecuted. Reading about
Socrates you could believe that you might be right about your course of
action even with the world against you, and Christian hermits who wanted
to immerse themselves in their faith saw the Cynics as their best
models.
Philosophy has pulled
in both directions, systematic and subversive, for as long as it has
remembered Socrates. It doesn’t forget him by inclining one way or the
other. The Academy had the originality to envision an intellectual
society – what a university still is, at its best – distinguished by the
virtues of modesty and self-control, always ready to usher new students
into the tradition. Philosophy as a tradition would have withered
without an academy to live in. If it sometimes appears to be withering
within the academy, that is because the subversive side of Socrates has
its appeal: the virtues of the eccentric, above all eccentric courage,
and the willingness to make your life an improvisation.
The Cynics need a
nearby academy, if only as a place to throw their plucked chickens, but
the academy needs nearby cynics too, if only as walking advertisements
for philosophy as a serious study, reminders that this is a subject
people fall in love with.
Nickolas Pappas
teaches philosophy at City College and the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York. He is the author, most recently, of “The Philosopher’s New Clothes.”
Now in print: “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,”
An anthology of essays from The Times’s philosophy series, edited by
Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.
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