Ancient Greek and Roman · c. 380 BCE
Cynicism
Overview
Reject convention, wealth and status. Live simply, in public if you have to, according to nature rather than reputation.
Diogenes treats custom as a costume. Rank, fine clothes, the script of what a respectable person owes the room: he sets them in the street and asks what they are for. If the answer is only reputation, they are not nature. Nature, for a Cynic, is the part of a life that remains when the applause is gone.
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The shamelessness is a method, not a hobby. He lives in public so the hidden bargain becomes visible. A person who needs the crowd’s permission to eat, sleep or tell the truth is not free. Freedom here is having little enough that a threat to your status has nothing to grip.
Later Stoics inherit the line and soften the theater. The Cynic version stays harsher. It does not ask you to be polite about a custom that exists to sort people into those who count and those who do not. It asks you to live in a way the sorting cannot buy.
Where it answers
How should we act?
Set down status, wealth and the script. Live simply.
Who should govern?
Most of what a city calls necessary is status. I can set it down.
Key terms
- Parrhesia
- Frank speech: saying what is true even when it offends the powerful.
- Autarkeia
- Self-sufficiency: needing as little as possible from other people or from luck.
- Askesis
- Training through chosen hardship, so that little can shake you.
- Living according to nature
- Following what humans really need, not custom, wealth or reputation.
In their words
“Stand a little out of my sun.”
Further reading
- Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, book 6 · Diogenes Laertius
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A plain reference you can paste into notes or an essay:
Quest2Reason. “Cynicism.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/ideas/cynicism. Accessed 13 November 2026.