Examined Lives_ From Socrates to Nietzsc - By James S. Miller Page 0,34

whether he could do anything for him. ‘Yes,’ replied the philosopher. ‘Stand aside. You’re keeping the sun off me.’”

His audience with Diogenes over, Alexander retreated, and his entourage began to joke about the Cynic. “You may say what you like,” remarked the king, “but if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.”

As a modern biographer of Alexander remarks, “This shows shrewd percipience. Both men shared (and surely recognized in each other) the same quality of stubborn and alienated intransigence. But whereas Diogenes had withdrawn from the world, Alexander was bent on subjugating it: they represented the active and passive forms of the identical phenomenon. It is not surprising, in the circumstances, that their encounter should have been so abrasive”—or the subject of so much subsequent lore.

According to anecdotes preserved in the Arab tradition, the two men struck up some kind of continuing relationship. “Alexander [once] came to visit him while he was asleep and kicked him with his foot and then said to him, ‘Get up, I have just conquered your city.’

“Diogenes replied, ‘Conquering cities is not to be held against kings, but kicking is how donkeys act.’ ”

On another occasion, a messenger from Alexander invited Diogenes to come see the king, but the philosopher refused, instructing the messenger to tell the king, “That which prevents you from coming to us is that which prevents us from coming to you.”

The messenger imagined the king’s response: “So what prevents me and what prevents you?”

“You are too powerful to need me—and I am too self-sufficient to need you.”

If Alexander functions as a political foil for Diogenes in the literature, then Plato is his philosophical nemesis. They say he considered Plato’s lectures a waste of time and ridiculed the dialectical form of teaching, which demanded that students carefully define key terms. Once, when “Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded, Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, ‘Here is Plato’s man.’ In consequence of which there was added to the definition, ‘having broad nails.’ ”

Another time Plato was conversing about the Forms and using the nouns tablehood and cuphood. “ ‘Table and cup I see,’ ” said Diogenes, “ ‘but your tablehood and cuphood, Plato, I nowhere see.’ ”

Once, Plato saw Diogenes washing a head of lettuce and said to him, “Had you paid court to Dionysius”—the Sicilian tyrant Plato supposedly tried, more than once, to tutor and advise—“you wouldn’t now be washing lettuces.” Replied Diogenes: “If you had washed lettuces, you wouldn’t have paid court to Dionysius.”

The implication is clear: It is Diogenes, and not Plato, who represents the life of the philosopher in its purest form. Unlike the Cynic, Plato is seduced by his cleverness, is vainglorious in his pursuit of superfluous scientific knowledge, and is beholden to rich and powerful friends. In other words, Plato lacks integrity, and it is Diogenes who is truly following in the footsteps of Socrates.

While Diogenes regarded Plato as a hypocrite, Plato saw Diogenes as “a Socrates gone mad”—and by Plato’s standards, he certainly was. In some ways, the Cynic resembles not Socrates but the figure of Callicles, whom Plato portrays as an amoral egoist in his dialogue about Diogenes’ first teacher, Gorgias. Diogenes, like Plato’s Callicles, declares that he shall do all things according to nature, no matter how shameful they seem. A proponent of freedom in all things, the amoralist is silenced not by the force of dialectical argument—which he, like Diogenes, scorns as so much quibbling—but rather by the sense of shame Socrates finally elicits when he dares Callicles to condone the practices of a boy who takes the active role in a homosexual affair with an older man. The freethinking orator hasn’t flinched at the prospect of cruelty or murder—but he can’t help but flinch at this idea: “Aren’t you ashamed, Socrates, to lead the argument into a topic like this?” Even for the proponent of freedom in all things, as Plato represents him, it seems that some acts are simply beyond the pale—whether by nature or by convention scarcely seems to matter.

It is not at all clear whether Diogenes would have been susceptible to being shamed in this manner. The anecdotal evidence is contradictory. On the one hand, the Cynic is shown exploiting the rhetoric of shame himself in a series of maxims preserved by the Greek historians: “Seeing a young man behaving effeminately, Diogenes said, ‘Are you not ashamed … that your own intention about yourself