Diogenes, various philosophers, and the Ascetic Life

Here's a new ancient philosopher for your collection:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope

In the Ancient period, it kind of reads to the undergraduate philosophy student something like a Charles Dickens' novel: there are all kinds of 2 dimensional characters which crop up and then are quickly forgotten. The 2D ness of them is that they only have the one idea and then they're out. It's no help that the names are exotic and foreign.

I wrote on this blog that I had to spend time in front of the mirror practicing to say "Prolegomena." Well, reading about the Ancients can sometimes be like this.

Another thing about the undergraduate philosophy student is his insatiable wikipedia-bombing in this day and age; which is absolutely no different from anyone anywhere in the United States who is curious about anything.


From skimming this article about Diogenes, you can see he was a poor philosopher. The philosophical concept of having nothing (poverty) is the ascetic life. The ascetic life is getting rid of not only your goods and (often) your ability to get goods, but also your mental (need) want for goods.

This gets fascinating for 20th century Americans and Westerners who have made a culture of consumption.

Among the philosophers and do-gooders who lived the ascetic life are of course (in no particular order):

Jesus Christ
Mahatma Gandhi
Eugene Victor Debs (I want to talk about this, the answer is sort of, but still)
For that matter, a great many Communists including Marx, and the Chinese and Russians
The Stoics
Later, from the Stoics work, my main man Spinoza
The Cynics (the article says Diogenes was working from them)
Schopenhauer
Eckart Tolle & August Turak (speaker for the SKS)


And the list goes on and on. The ascetic lifestyle is associated necessarily with self-control. The way this works is we all want stuff, and we keep wanting stuff, and the only way to satiate this comes from within, from within our individual selves.

The Cynics' article on Wikipedia says the school of philosophers were cynical about getting joy from goods. In his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (I am pretty sure it's in this one), Spinoza talks about the vanitas, which is latin for vanities, which is all this stuff we're talking about. He makes a similar move in the Ethics about the passions: get rid of them and control yourself.

Easier said than done!

One of the critiques of getting rid of your desires is that doing so is a performative contradiction (see earlier blog post and discussion thereof); to the extent "I desire nothing" becomes the desire to desire nothing.

Schopenhauer, we learned in 19th century philosophy, sees a way out of this in music; and to the extent that Feuerbach and Spinoza think that thought only works with thought, they believe this too. The Existentialists (Heidegger, Camus, and Sartre) hit on this a little bit with the creation of the world through experience.

It works like this: think of your favorite song and how you feel when you listen to that song. At the time when you feel that elevation and you don't want to do anything else, to the extent that you are completely satisfied and don't want anything else, that's what Feuerbach, Spinoza and the philosopher in question, Schopenhauer; that's what they think is the joy of living (francophiles: the joi de vivre). They don't think you can get it from consuming, consuming, consuming.