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Thread: Great Trolls of History - Vol 1: Diogenes of Sinope

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    Korpsy Knievel's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by hkkmr View Post
    I always felt it was kinda of wierd that living in nature meant poverty or asceticism for some people but I guess it's natural for such a event to occur. However, I think it's just as natural to be extravagant or moderate or whatever.
    It's also possible to be ostentatious with privation and ascetism. See Kafka's Hunger Artist or the thousands of penitents worldwide who spill their own blood to honor the feasts of saints.

    Man's absurdities are as natural as man's reason
    The absurd is merely imperfections in man's receptivity to and rationalization about the ontic. As such it is an aspect of reason wherein paradoxical quandries result from the self-entanglement of its limitations.

    I think in many ways, Diogenes denied the natural order of man, and the natural phenomena that created etiquette and social order.
    To paraphrase something Gibbon said and Diogenes would have affirmed, most people learn through imitation and repetition. This observation extends neatly to absorption of transmitted social values. Since Diogenes transgressed mores for didactic effect, such as writing approvingly of incest and cannibalism (which, while taboo to the Greeks, were traditional values among, respectively, ancient Egyptian royalty and the legendary Androphagoi) his actions were meant to point out that the average person's conception of ethics is a traditional inheritance whose premises are largely unexamined. It does not necessarily comprise strictures aligned with an ultimate morality, but instead its injunctions are cultural artifacts received from and repeated among family, authorities, and peers. Let's examine this again:
    Diogenes’ sense of shamelessness is best seen in the context of Cynicism in general. Specifically, though, it stems from a repositioning of convention below nature and reason.
    To draw a parallel with the assertion that ontogeny begets phylogeny, ontology begets philosophy, including that of ethics, and so Diogenes both acknowledged that societal codes are an emergent aspect of man's nature that develop within a framework of historical intersubjectivity. However, he also noted that they are absurd for failing to demonstrate, in their multifarious appearances from one culture to another and in their continuous transmission from each generation to the next, any nonreducible substance that best reflects universal law. The same arguments can be made for his general attacks on unjustifiable dogmatism.

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