E. M. Cioran On Diogenes

Diogenes did not know what a man must lose in order to dare to cast aside all conventions. No one knows what Diogenes lost by becoming a man who allows himself everything, who put into practice his most intimate thoughts with such supernatural audacity as some god of knowledge might, lustful and at the same time chaste. History knows no greater sincerity; this is perhaps the extreme case of frankness and clarity of mind, and at the same time an example of what we could become if upbringing and hypocrisy did not restrain our desires and actions.
“One day a man let him into a richly furnished house and said to him: ‘Above all, do not spit on the floor.’ Diogenes, who just wanted to spit, spat in his face, shouting that this was the only dirty place in the whole house where he could satisfy his desire” (Diogenes La;rtius).
What person, being received in a rich house, has not regretted that he does not have an ocean of saliva to drown in it all the owners existing on earth? And on the other hand, who has not swallowed his small spit out of fear that it would fall on the face of a respectable, fat thief? We are all ridiculously timid and cautious: cynicism is not taught in schools. Pride neither.
Menippus, in his book The Valor of Diogenes, recounts that he was captured and sold into slavery, and there they asked what he could do. Diogenes replied: “To manage,” and shouted to the herald: “So ask, whoever wants to buy a master for himself!”
A man, boldly confronting Alexander and Plato; a resident of the famous barrel and owner of the celebrated lantern, who made false money in his youth (can there be a more suitable trade for a Cynic?), what experience did he acquire, this man, by interacting with his fellows? Certainly, the same as all of us, with some, however, difference: the only object of his thoughts and his contempt was man. Free from the distorting prisms of any morality or metaphysics, he occupied himself only with stripping man of his garments to show him even more naked and disgusting than he appears in any comedies, in any apocalypses.
“Socrates, gone mad”—that is how Plato called him. “Socrates, become sincere”—that is how he should have been called. Socrates, renouncing Good, conventions, and society, Socrates, who finally became only a psychologist. Yet Socrates—despite all his greatness—submits to conventions; he remains a teacher, a model for imitation. And only Diogenes proposes nothing; the essence of his behavior—as indeed the essence of Cynicism—is determined by the gut-fearing of becoming a man, of becoming a laughingstock.
A thinker, who has renounced illusions about human reality, renounced the tricks of mysticism, but wishes to remain within this world, comes to a worldview in which wisdom, bitterness, and farce are mixed.
The very fact that the greatest connoisseur of the human race was called “the dog” proves that man never had enough courage to reconcile himself with his own image and that he always rudely rejected the truth. Diogenes eradicated all pose in himself. How monstrous he became in the eyes of others! For to take an honorable place in philosophy, one must be a comedian, one must respect the play of ideas and be inspired by imaginary problems. In any case, man as such is not your concern, gentlemen philosophers! This is what Diogenes La;rtius said:
“At the Olympic Games, the herald proclaimed: ‘Dioxippus has conquered men.’ To which Diogenes replied: ‘He conquered slaves, and men are my concern.’”
Indeed, he, having nothing but a knapsack, the poorest of the poor, a true saint in the field of mockery, conquered men as no one else, with a weapon far more terrible than that of conquerors. We should rejoice at the chance of his birth before the Christian era. Otherwise, who knows—might he, wishing to renounce the world and succumbing to the unhealthy temptation of an extra-human adventure, have become merely an ordinary ascetic, canonized after death, and safely lost in the calendar among other blessed? Then he would have become a real madman, he, a normal man, belonging to no teaching, no doctrine. By presenting the image of an unprepossessing man, he alone showed us that we all are so. Religion, hostile to the arguments of evidence, did not wish to recognize the merits of Cynicism. But now it is time to oppose the truths of the Son of God with the truths of the “heavenly dog,” as one of his contemporaries called Diogenes.