Hegel was wrong to write of Diogenes that ‘we have only anecdotes to relate [about him]’ and of the Cynics that ‘they are worthy of no further consideration in philosophy’.1 Quips and witticisms always signify more than appears on the surface. Cynical philosophy is possessed of a resolute will to say no, to flush out the conformism of customary behaviour. The Cynic is the emblematic figure of the authentic philosopher defined as ‘the bad conscience of their age’.2 Preferable to the obsessive idealism of Hegel is Nietzsche’s fixation with the thinker as dynamite, ‘a terrible explosive, endangering everything’, through whose power he can attain to the Gay Science, the science of joy and jubilation.3 Armed with the Nietzschean definition of Cynicism as ‘the highest thing achievable on earth’, we can calmly approach those regions traversed by Diogenes; through it we will find the impertinence needed for every new positivity.4
Our age of unyielding melancholy nevertheless bows before every possible illusion. The Cynical aesthetic of Diogenes is an antidote to this drift toward obscurantism; it is a will to lucidity. The demand of the Cynics is for everyday life to be shaped into an improvised but sober and pure form, purged of the dross and affectations of civilization. They want to sap confidence in the ideals that are the principles of illusion: the sacred, convention, custom, passivity. This demand is supported by a positive project of experimenting with a natural life as the condition of possibility of an aesthetics of the self, of a salutary pedagogy of despair. Diogenes, that ‘Socrates gone mad’, would no doubt have accepted the invitation of Montaigne – for whom ‘our most great and glorious achievement is to live our life fittingly’ – to create his own life.5
The Cynic is profoundly animated by the desire for an aesthetic resolution to the problem of existence. His drive is architectonic: better the enjoyment of a life under the sign of pure joy, of simple pleasure, than the despair of an everyday life of repetition, of the same. To an interlocutor who said to him that life is an evil, Diogenes replied: ‘Not life itself, but living ill.’6
The philosopher in a barrel – although an amphora would be more appropriate, the barrel being a French invention – was to find a pedagogic use for food. The key to the theoretical edifice of the Cynics is the affirmation of the absolute superiority of the natural order over all others. Civilization is a helpmate of perversion: it filters out positive innocence and crystallizes the corruption of the real, transformed into a hideous object around which gravitate prohibitions, scandals and complexes. Artifice is to be banished. The project of Diogenes is ‘the return to a state of nature’ and nutrition is marked by this desire:
In their theory and daily practice, the Cynics actually put into question not just the city, but society and civilization as well. Their protest is a generalized critique of the civilized state. It arose in the fourth century with the crisis of the city, and one of its major themes is the return to a savage state. In negative terms, it is the denigration of city life and the refusal of the material goods produced by civilization. In positive terms, it is an effort to rediscover the simple life of the first men who drank spring water and fed on acorns they gathered or plants they reaped.7
The Cynics’ rebellion is directed against the norm, against tradition; commonplaces, whether of politics, morals or social rules, are swept away. Foodstuffs are a stake in this aesthetics of negation.
To the consensus of the cooked, which governs nutritive custom, Diogenes opposes an unbridled alimentary nihilism, distinguished above all by the rejection of fire, of Prometheus as the symbol of civilization. The first principle of the Cynical dialectic is the raw. The barbarization of the Cynics – the expression comes from Plutarch – uses omophagy as the basis of the deconstruction of the system of values on which civilization rests. Marcel Detienne asks:
What, in fact, is omophagy, but a way of refusing the human condition as it is defined by the Promethean sacrifice and imposed by the rules of conduct prescribed by the use of the skewer and the cauldron. By eating raw meat . . . the aim is to act in the manner of beasts . . . in order to escape the politico-religious condition . . . via the low road, on the side of bestiality.8
Diogenes will go as far as the most sacrilegious transgressions: where others consume cooked meat, he wants blood; he wants his meat dripping. Detienne sees in this concern a commitment to ‘the deconstruction of the dominant anthropology model’.9 To refuse to eat cooked flesh, which means above all to reject the fire that cooking requires, is at the same time to oppose the civilization based on that fire.10 The model for the Cynics is the beast, the animal. Time and again the anecdotes about Diogenes testify to his desire to learn from animals – dogs, obviously, but also horses, lions, mice, fish, birds and grazing animals. If we are to believe the stories passed down by Theophrastus, Diogenes opted for the ascetic life, the renunciation of the easy pleasures of civilization, after watching a mouse running about, transforming itself in his eyes into a model of wisdom.
In this mimicry, Diogenes will not be satisfied with his bloody flesh. Diogenes Laërtius writes that he even saw
no impropriety . . . in touching human flesh, this, he said, being clear from the custom of some foreign nations. Moreover, according to right reason, as he put it, all elements are contained in all things and pervade everything: since not only is meat a constituent of bread, but bread of vegetables; and all other bodies also, by means of certain invisible passages and particles, find their way in and unite with all substances in the form of vapour.11
Thus a closeness to, even a kinship with animals is ensured, and not just any animals but the most cruel, the most savage carnivores, such as wolves, which, if we are to believe Plato, originate in allelophagy: ‘anyone who has tasted even a single morsel of human entrails mixed in among those of other sacrificial offerings is bound to become a wolf’.12 Nothing is more noxious than human fodder. In acting this way, Diogenes knows what he is doing – he ceases to be a man and bases himself on his animality. At the same time he introduces the seeds of an apocalypse in a civilization that does not tolerate cannibalism other than in its ritualized forms or as the only solution to a lack of food. Nowhere but in Diogenes is anthropophagy a considered act in the realm of the immanent. Tolerated, encouraged and supported when it is part of magical, religious or ritualized criminal eating, cannibalism is integrated into the multiplicity of social modalities, assuaging vengeance after tribal warfare, juridical sanction (Tartars concerned for the rights of Crusaders deceived by their wives while they were travelling to Jerusalem), a solution to get around the want of nutrition. But from the point of view of a social nihilist, it seems that the allelophagy of Diogenes is unique, without antecedent or descendant.
Diogenes’ taste for blood does not exclude a practical vegetarianism. Diogenes Laërtius recounts the philosopher’s experiment with human flesh. We do not know if he succeeded in overcoming his repugnance in this regard, but even if it did take place the experiment did not become a habit. It was rather a ‘happening’ in the Greek city. The anecdotes handed down about Diogenes reveal him as a greater fan of olives and wild berries than leg of human.
The Cynical eulogy on the simple life could be easily accommodated to the simple frugality of life under the Hellenic sun. On numerous occasions Diogenes set himself up as a peaceable gatherer of fruit and roots. He drank fresh spring water from fountains, and the corners of his mouth glistened more often with bright, clear water than with provocative haemoglobin.
According to Diogenes the provision of food is simple: nature provides enough produce for us to be content with gathering. He repudiates the kind of evolution that leads from improvisation to planning, from wandering to settling down, from the nomadism of grazing to the sedentary life of breeding animals. He places himself prior to civilization, before the choice of habitat that restricts walking, the freedom of the journey. To gather your food is to condemn yourself to the imagination, to submit to chance and to refuse security. May I not, asks the Cynic, make ‘the food of my choice the easiest procurable?’13 You must limit your needs to those of nature. Dio Chrysostom reports that Diogenes
scorned those who would pass by a spring when thirsty and move heaven and earth to find where they could buy Chian or Lesbian wine; and he used to say that such persons were far sillier than cattle, since these creatures never pass by a spring or a clear brook when thirsty or, when hungry, disdain the tenderest leaves or grass enough to nourish them.14
In this way he practised a healthy life, a precondition for longevity.
A happy life on earth is possible through economizing on the useless and luxurious. The satisfaction of natural and necessary desires – the Epicurean imperative – paves the way for a naive joy, a pleasure in being. In fact, men are unhappy because they ‘require honeyed cakes, unguents and the like’.15 Frugality is another dietetic imperative. Water is the symbol of Diogenes’ asceticism. Simplicity is the foundation of alimentary truth. He says:
I get enough nourishment from apples, millet, barley and vetch seeds, which are the cheapest of the legumes, from acorns cooked in ashes and the fruit of cornel berries . . . food that provides enough nourishment for even the largest of beasts.16
In a letter to his disciple Monimus, Diogenes passes on the lessons that he learned from his master Antisthenes:
the cups we drink from are not costly, but made from meagre clay. Let us take spring water for our drink, bread for our food, and salt or cress for seasoning. That was how I learned to eat and drink from my teacher Antisthenes, not that these aliments are to be despised – rather that they are better than the others and more likely to be found on the path to happiness.17
Several years of practising this asceticism, this philosophical life, led him to conclude that ‘I ate and drank these aliments not as a form of exercise but for pleasure.’18
If the dietary practice of the Cynics implies a purification of the manner of eating and drinking, it also invites a simplification of the rites that govern them – neither organized feasts, nor specialized rooms reserved for that purpose of concentrating on activities of the mouth. Diogenes attacks the prejudice that says actions aimed at the satisfaction of a desire or the acquisition of a pleasure should take place behind closed doors. The Cynic initiates a politics of the displayed and exhibited body, as opposed to one that is hidden and shut away. Here again the desire for excess confirms the pedagogic character of Diogenes. Hence he did not hesitate to masturbate in public and to retort to those whose conscience he offended: ‘I only wish it were as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing my empty stomach.’19 He was no more averse to coupling in public, arguing that something so simple and natural could very well be performed before the whole world. Masturbation, copulation, why not nutrition? Totally shameless, he brought nutrition out of confined areas and placed it in the public space before the scandalized eyes of model citizens, who were accustomed to hiding away their meals as taboo rites.20
No life can attain beauty without a death that lives up to it. That of Diogenes is related to nourishment. There are several traditional versions of the way the philosopher took leave of the world. One claims that he finished with life by voluntarily holding his breath: in other words, mastery. Another states that he was the victim of a dog in a dispute over a raw octopus. According to the latter version he won the fight with the dog and succumbed to indigestion after consumption of his booty, in other words, punishment for the transgression of alimentary rules – unless it is a way of giving weight to the Cynical practices of the master. Plutarch reports the facts in this way:
Diogenes ventured to eat a raw octopus in order to put an end to the inconvenience of preparing cooked food. In the midst of a large throng he veiled his head and, as he brought the flesh to his mouth, said, ‘It is for you that I am risking my life.’21
Shortly before dying, he asked that after his passing he be thrown into the outdoors without a burial, where he would be prey to wild beasts, or that he be tipped in some ditch and covered with a little dirt.22 The burial that would be given him by dogs, vultures, the sun and the rain seemed to him appropriate to complete a life of Cynical asceticism. When you consider how passionately Antigone fought to prevent her brother’s body from being left ‘for the carrion birds to defile and feast on’ and how great was the horror of an unburied body, you can see the extent of the transgression that the philosopher desired.23 In fact, in an ultimate reversal, Diogenes wished that in this way his body would be absorbed by some animal – a companion of fortune – so he could participate in the natural cycle, becoming merged with the elements. The eater of raw animals, Diogenes was to be eaten raw by animals. Animal among the animals. True to himself, then: even in death he continued to make food of all meat, and meat of all food. So there was no question of anything but this perpetual dialectic: eat, live/die, be eaten. Consumption, digestion, an infernal couple that proves the truth of the eternal return of things under the sign of the alimentary: nourishment as an argument for the eternal cycle.
In his diligence in merging ethics and aesthetics, in forging his existence into a work of art deriving from his pure will, Diogenes founded a logic of the use of the self where the mouth is the orifice of truth and meaning in spite of the silence demanded by every gastronomic operation. Taking nourishment rises to symbolic status and is integrated into the Cynical, nihilist enterprise. Lucian of Samosata had his Cynic say that his aspirations ‘are . . . considerably different from other people’s’, and, further on, ‘[I] lead a quiet life, doing as I will and keeping the company I want’.24 This is why we must not be surprised to see the philosopher enter the theatre via the exit, or walking backwards under the portico. He responds to those who object: ‘This . . . is what I have been doing all my life.’25
Raw meat, the provocative taste of blood, the call to cannibalism, a frugal life, and meals taken publicly on the agora all testify to a powerful drive to nihilism – a negative moment supported by an ascetic will, a positive moment within the logic of Cynicism. From this point of view nourishment has the function of illustrating the claims of nature, of furnishing immanent arguments: it expresses the refusal of one world, that of artifice, at the same time as the desire for another, that of simplicity. Diogenes and his octopus show that there can be no innocent dietetics.