Look who thinks he’s nothing. All these blacks and whites make existence grey. The certainties, the rectitudes, the stridencies, are like a cloud cover interdicting the light, halting it in its natural course to us, and trapping the world in a dense foggy dread. It sometimes seems as if the more people make a claim to clarity, the more unclear things become. The unsure people begin to look perversely attractive, insofar as they represent minds not yet closed. But hold on. How can anyone not be sure about the evils that we face? Are they blind or are they stupid or are they bought? It is a fair question, except for its naivete about the actual processes of opinion formation, which leave us all not only in disagreement, which is one of the sweetest features of life with other people, but also in the tragi-comic position of building an absolute view out of a partial perspective. I do not mean to hold myself above the ferocity of our absolutist mood. I, too, know that I am right. For this reason, I have been trying to lower my own temperature as history is demanding only fevers. In this new era of atrocities, some of them close to home, I strain not to become the slave of my feelings. I find myself grateful to people who maintain their composure and even hide their thoughts. I believe that interstices must be created between the emergencies, so that a man’s soul does not shrivel. Not escapism; just some escapes. Something a little tender, a little alien, a little private, a little serene; stimulation without pain; a rupture in the ambient anxiety and a break into a less bruising variety of seriousness — a kind of spiritual furlough, in the knowledge that the crises and the controversies will still be there when we return with renovated selves. People cannot serve well who are spent. When a new life of Diogenes the Cynic arrived in the mail a few weeks ago, I saw my opportunity. Here was a swift transit to another planet, a flight from breaking news to the unbreaking stuff, a promise of mental diversification and refreshment. It was also a reason for taking Diogenes Laertius off the shelf: Lives of the Eminent Philosophers is the most mentally diversifying book I know. It is a vast compendium of biographical anecdotes about seventy-three ancient Greek seekers of wisdom; Plato gets an entire chapter, Monimus gets half a page. (“Monimus was so grave that he disdained mere opinion and sought only the truth.” Go, Monimus!) The tales are delightful, vexing, colorful, and hilarious, and somehow the panoply of the doctrines pokes through them. Diogenes Laertius, who appears to have lived in the first half of the third century CE, included among his subjects Diogenes the Cynic, who was born in Sinope on the Black Sea at the end of the fifth century BCE and died in Corinth in the second decade of the fourth century BCE, though he is best known for the years he spent in Athens. I turned to those pages. Exiled from Sinope for a financial crime, Diogenes the Cynic lived on the streets of Athens in a ceramic jar or tub. He begged for his sustenance. In his itinerant life he carried a staff and a knapsack and a lamp lit even in daylight to guide him in his famous search “for a man.” He kept a dog. (“Cynic” means “dog-like”, and Diogenes was flattered by the epithet, because many of his ethical values were derived from his admiring observations of the behavior of dogs.) He wore only a cloak, which he folded doubly in a way that became the fashion for his disciples. He was the first to call himself a cosmopolite, a citizen of the world. He was a defiant outsider, a devastatingly candid non-conformist, a great master of impudence. He especially enjoyed tangling with Plato. When someone pointed out that the Sinopeans had sentenced him to exile, Diogenes replied: “And I sentenced them to stay at home.” When pirates captured him and put him up for sale in Crete, he was asked to describe his greatest skill. “Ruling over men,” he said, and pointing to a buyer he added: “Sell me to him; he needs a master.” He declined to leave his jar when Alexander the Great came to Corinth, so the conqueror came to the jar and asked if there was anything he could do for its indigent inhabitant. “Yes,” Diogenes replied. “You could stand a little out of my sun.” In his teachings — his contempt for material things, his radical austerity, his tolerance for hardship, his aspiration to a virtuous life lived in harmony with nature — Diogenes was the early ancestor of the Stoics, though he was innocent of the hypocrisy that tarred many of them. He was a pioneer in the notion of philosophy as a way of life, and he fanatically practiced his conception of it. I have always treasured this particular remark: “even if I do pretend to wisdom, that in itself is philosophy.” I take this to mean that the hunger for wisdom is itself wise and the thirst for philosophy is itself philosophical. Why would one aspire to these dispensations if one were not already touched by the spiritual refinement that they promise? Aiming high is already a way of reaching high. The spiritual climate in which one chooses to toil will determine the success or the failure of one’s exertions — but if one has chosen a spiritual climate that pressures one’s powers and situates one’s struggles at a significant elevation, then total failure is no longer a possibility. Spiritual fulfillment is infrequent, and not the only kind of spiritual success. The ambition can be its own reward. The real spiritual defeat is shallowness. What struck me in my recent reading about Diogenes was his conception of charity. Diogenes Laertius records that “when some people
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence