This book, by Jean-Manuel Roubineau, translated by Malcolm DeBevoise, is, as its title suggests, a biographical & philosophical portrait of Diogenes - the punkest punk who ever punked before punk was even a twinkle in history's eye. I've been waiting a long time for a book like this about exactly this thinker - it fills in perfectly the missing link between my understandings of the organic human animal & the dedicated Socratic lifestyle.
Diogenes was a contemporary of Plato (who nicknamed him "the mad Socrates", or, less generously, "the Dog", which is where from the Greek the Cynic school gets its name) but on the completely opposite end of the socio-philosophical spectrum. He (that is, Diogenes) saw civilisation as a vanity that curtailed human freedom; the truest, free-est form of human life, as he saw it, was to accept & embody its animal nature. Which he did. He lived in a large pottery jar in the middle of Athens, begged for his food from passers-by, insulted anyone when he felt like it,* and made a consistent habit of masturbating in public. While the spurious anecdotes & witty apothegms of Diogenes are well-covered in other books however, Jean-Manuel in this one makes a concerted effort to uncover the reality of the man behind the myth - we follow him from his youth in a middle-class family in Sinope, to his father's legal trouble for currency fraud, to his period as a famous homeless thinker, his enslavement, and once freed the closing chapter in his life as tutor to some aristocratic kids. We get a portrait of a man of great integrity and utter optimism - wherever his fortune led him, that is what and where he operated from. He was often critical of the prevailing method of political governance in Athens, which he characterised not as true democracy but rather ochlocracy [i.e. government by an inconstant & unreasoning populace]; and just as much a pain in the arse to the dominant philosophical schools with his characteristic method of uncovering common-sense gaping holes in their systems. None of his writings (of which there were, apparently, many - including one called The Republic, in opposition to Plato's, which I only wish we had the chance to read today) survive, but he was far from a base contrarian - he had a holistic and systematic philosophy of his own, which as far as I can gather from this biography would be considered radically anti-capitalist and pro-free love (as he famously endorsed the flouting of all sexual taboos, including incest etc, so long as there was mutual adult consent); rooted in the idea that embracing the reality that humankind is still animalkind liberates us most fully. I think that were Diogenes alive today he would be a voluntarily street-sleeping street-wanking publicly-perceived maniac who nonetheless gets flown out worldwide for the occasional TED-Talk conversation with Slavoj Žižek or whoever. I would pay good money to watch a conversation of that ilk. Maybe I'll be able to in the New Jerusalem, who knows (this post is not the place for a robust discussion of trans-religio-philosophical universalism).
Anyway. If your interest in Diogenes is largely superficial and you just want to know about the funny/profound things he said and did, I would rather recommend you buy one of the several books catering to that - but if you want a more nuanced picture of the man as a man in his historical context, this is without comparison.
* One of my favourite anecdotes about Diogenes is that once a rich man invited him back to his house to view all his bourgeois collected items. Having seen everything in the house, Diogenes spat in the man's face, excusing himself with the explanation "I was surrounded by so much beauty I didn't know where else to spit." Another great anecdote is when Alexander the Great, on a visit to Athens, sought out a meeting with this most countercultural of philosophers; and, as he stood over Diogenes (as he lay in his jar) asked if he could do anything for him, the Dog replied "yes. Get out of my sunlight." Based as fuck.
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