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Learning to Master the Hedonistic Calculus

The food in Epicurus' Garden
For the wise, hunger is the best seasoning.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

The Epicureans put pleasure at the centre of their philosophy. For centuries, they presented the main alternative to Stoicism as a comprehensive way of life. With an appealing message elevated and propagated by poets such as Horace, Lucretius, and Virgil, Epicureanism vied with Stoicism for the hearts and minds of Roman elites.

So, who was Epicurus, and what did he have to teach us?

The Garden School

Epicurus of Samos (341–270 BCE) and Zeno of Citium (the founder of Stoicism) were almost exact contemporaries in Athens but may never have met. A few years before Zeno began teaching, Epicurus founded a school of philosophy in a garden outside the city’s Dipylon gates. This school, called ‘the Garden’, dedicated itself to attaining happiness through the exercise of reason, and, in a highly sexist and stratified society, admitted both women and slaves.

Life in the Garden was not as you might imagine. Epicurus was content with bread and water and famously asked a friend to send him a little cheese so that, when he wished, he might feast. Far more important than luxury was friendship. ‘Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life,’ he wrote, ‘by far the most important is friendship.’ Thus, the Garden was more of a live-in community, or fellowship, than a school—influenced, no doubt, by Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum.

Although the most famous, Epicurus was not the first philosopher to make pleasure the highest good. A century earlier, Aristippus of Cyrene, a student of Socrates, had advocated a more immediate and sensual form of hedonism. The irony is that Aristippus lived rather more like our idea of an Epicurean, while the moderate Epicurus lived more like our idea of an Aristotelian—or simply our idea of a philosopher.

Pleasure as the Highest Good

According to Epicurus, reason leads to the conclusion that pleasure is good and pain bad, and that pleasure and pain are the ultimate measures of good and bad. This has often been misconstrued as a rampant call for unbridled hedonism, rather than the absence of physical and mental suffering that Epicurus actually had in mind. He referred to freedom from bodily pain as aponia, and to freedom from mental disturbance as ataraxia. His highest pleasure, then, looked more like tranquillity than ecstasy. 

Indeed, Epicurus explicitly warned against overindulgence, since overindulgence so often leads to pain. ‘The pleasant life,’ he wrote in the Letter to Menoeceus (the most important of his three surviving letters), ‘is produced not by a string of drinking bouts and revelries, nor by the enjoyment of boys and women, nor by fish and other items on an expensive menu, but by sober reasoning.’

Pleasure is the highest good, and all else that is good is so only by virtue of the immediate or deferred pleasure that it can procure. The behaviour of infants confirms that human beings instinctively pursue pleasure. All our actions, including those that may be construed as virtuous or altruistic, are, in the final analysis, aimed at obtaining pleasure for ourselves. Just as we can instantly sense whether something is hot or cold, or colourful or dull, so we can instantly sense whether something is pleasurable or painful.

Even so, not everything that is pleasurable ought to be pursued, and not everything that is painful ought to be avoided. Instead, a kind of hedonistic calculus ought to be applied to determine which things are most likely to result, over time, in the greatest pleasure and least pain—and it is above all with this arithmetics of pleasure that people struggle.

Lesson 1: The Two Types of Pleasure

To help us along, Epicurus began by distinguishing between two types of pleasure, ‘moving pleasures’ and ‘static pleasures’. Moving pleasures involve the satisfying of a desire—for example, tucking into a meal when hungry. Static pleasures, on the other hand, involve the state of having had a desire satisfied—for example, feeling sated after having eaten the meal. According to Epicurus, static pleasures are better than moving pleasures because they free us from the pain of need or want.

Lesson 2: The Three Classes of Desire

Because pleasure often arises from the satisfaction of desire and pain from its frustration, Epicurus also distinguished between three classes of desire: natural and necessary desires, such as those for food and shelter, which are hard to eliminate but naturally limited and both easy and highly pleasurable to satisfy; natural but non-necessary desires such as those for luxury food and housing, which offer ever diminishing returns; and vain desires such as those for fame and fortune, which, being inculcated by society, are not naturally limited and neither easy nor highly pleasurable to satisfy.

Epicurus advised that desires of the first class ought to be satisfied, desires of the second class can be satisfied if doing so is easy, but desires of the third class should be entirely eliminated. ‘If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.’ Modern life has multiplied vain desires beyond anything that Epicurus could have imagined. The problem with vain desires, such as acquiring the next thing or gaining another thousand followers, is not merely that they are more difficult to satisfy, but that they have no natural point of satisfaction.

Lesson 3: The Two Greatest Fears

Epicurus divided pleasures and pains into physical and mental, and argued that fear of the future, especially fear of the gods and fear of death, are the greatest obstacles to happiness.

Although the gods exist, they have absolutely no concern for, or even awareness of, humankind. Indeed, for the gods to involve themselves in the menial matters of men would be to perturb the supreme happiness and tranquillity that characterises and defines them. Instead of fearing the gods, we would do better to emulate them in their supreme removal and detachment.

Neither should we fear death, and this for two main reasons. First, Epicurus, drawing on Democritus, held that everything in the universe, including the human body and mind, is ultimately composed of atoms. Our death entails the disintegration of both body and mind and the re-dispersion of their atoms. As there is no longer any person to be troubled, death cannot trouble us after we are dead. And if death cannot trouble us after we are dead, neither should it trouble us while we are still alive. Second, the eternity that comes before our birth is not regarded as an evil; therefore, neither should the eternity that comes after our death. These two arguments are early formulations, respectively, of the ‘no subject of harm’ argument and the ‘symmetry’ argument, which have both, more or less, withstood the test of time.

Epicurus’ Own Death

Epicurus died at the age of 72 from the complications of renal colic (kidney stones), which is associated with one of the most intense of all bodily pains. On the last day of his life, he purportedly penned this letter to his friend and follower, the political grandee Idomeneus, which is nothing if not a testament to the overriding powers of philosophy:

I have written this letter to you on a happy day to me, which is also the last day of my life. For I have been attacked by a painful inability to urinate, and also dysentery, so violent that nothing can be added to the violence of my sufferings. But the cheerfulness of my mind, which comes from the recollection of all my philosophical contemplation, counterbalances all these afflictions. And I beg you to take care of the children of Metrodorus [Idomeneus’ brother-in-law], in a manner worthy of the devotion shown by the young man to me, and to philosophy.

The philosopher of pleasure died in agony—and called it a happy day.

Some three centuries later, Seneca, in his Letters to Lucilius, compared his relationship with Lucilius to that between Epicurus and Idomeneus. ‘Who would have known of Idomeneus,’ he asks, ‘had not the philosopher thus engraved his name in those letters of his? All the grandees and satraps, even the king himself … are sunk in deep oblivion.’

When all is forgotten, only the humble philosopher will be remembered.

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Why Friendship Is Essential to a Good Life

Plato and Aristotle, detail from The School of Athens by Raphael
‘Plato is dear, but dearer still is truth’—a saying that captures Aristotle’s willingness to disagree with his teacher in the pursuit of truth, and his conviction that genuine friendship need never fear honest disagreement.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

We have never had so many ways of connecting with other people, and yet so few close friends.

Many of us have hundreds or even thousands of online contacts, but no one we could call in the middle of the night. We move cities, change jobs, change partners, and change phones without thinking twice, and our friendships often prove just as disposable.

Aristotle would have regarded this not merely as a social problem, but as a human tragedy.

‘Without friends,’ he writes in the Nicomachean Ethics, ‘no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.’

It is a remarkable claim.

Most of us think that, given enough money, success, health, freedom, and comfort, we could muddle along well enough on our own. Aristotle thought otherwise. Friendship is not simply one of life’s pleasures. It is one of its necessities.

Why We Need Friends

The ancient Greeks had several words for love, including eros for passionate or romantic love, and philia (the root of ‘bibliophile’ and ‘anglophile’) for friendship.

For Aristotle, philia is a virtue which is ‘most necessary with a view to living … for without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.’ 

Philia underpins not only personal happiness but the very health of the state. Friendship fosters trust, cooperation, generosity, forbearance, and even justice—for when friendship exists, justice is scarcely needed.

But friendship is not simply for enjoying and getting along. In its highest form, it is a vehicle of virtue, helping us to become better people.

The Three Forms of Friendship

Aristotle begins with a broad or minimal concept of philia. For one person to be friends with another, it is necessary, simply, ‘that [they] bear good will to each other, without this escaping their notice’.

A person may bear goodwill to another for one of three reasons: that they are useful; that they are pleasant; or that they are good—that is, rational and virtuous.

Friendships of utility are based on mutual advantage. We enjoy one another’s company because each has something to offer the other. Such friendships are common in business, politics, and everyday life, and there is nothing wrong with them. But remove the advantage, and they usually disappear.

Friendships of pleasure are based on enjoyment. We like another person’s wit, humour, charm, or shared interests. These friendships are especially common among the young, whose lives are often governed more by feeling than by settled character. They, too, tend to fade as tastes and circumstances change.

The highest form of friendship is based not on usefulness or pleasure, but on virtue. ‘Perfect friendship’, says Aristotle, is ‘the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue.’

Perfect friends are drawn to each other not because they expect anything in return, but because they genuinely admire and value one another’s character. They love their friend not for what he has or provides, but for who he is. 

Now those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of their nature and not incidentally; therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good—and goodness is an enduring thing … And such a friendship is as might be expected permanent, since there meet in it in all the qualities that friends should have.

Another Self

A perfect friend, says Aristotle, is ‘another self’.

This does not mean someone who merely resembles us or always agrees with us. It means someone who cares enough, or is noble enough, to disagree with us and challenge us.

A true friend shares our deepest values, but also helps us to live up to them. We become better not by admiring virtue from afar, but by practising it together. Friendship is not merely the reward of virtue; it is one of the principal ways in which virtue is cultivated.

Every act of friendship is also an exercise in virtue. In being patient with our friend, we become more patient ourselves. In speaking honestly, we become more honest. In encouraging what is best in another person, we strengthen what is best in ourselves. Our good and their good are no longer competing like fishmongers: each one’s happiness adds to that of the other. We become, in the deepest sense, another self.

We may find an illustration of this ideal in Plato’s Phaedrus. Socrates and Phaedrus spend an afternoon walking in the Attic countryside while reflecting on the soul, love, and the art of persuasion. Their friendship is grounded not merely in pleasure, but in a shared pursuit of truth. At the end of their conversation, Phaedrus responds to Socrates’ prayer with the simple request: ‘Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.’ Whether or not Aristotle had this dialogue in mind, it beautifully embodies his conception of perfect friendship.

Why Friendship Is Rare

Unfortunately, perfect friendship is uncommon.

First, it requires good character, and good character is itself uncommon. Second, it demands something that has always been scarce and may never have been scarcer than today: time.

Friendship cannot be hurried.

People only come to know one another by sharing experiences, surviving disappointments, forgiving offences, and gradually learning that they can be trusted. Like character itself, friendship grows slowly.

We live in a culture that prizes speed, convenience, novelty, and consumer choice. Relationships, like everything else, are expected to fit around our schedules and satisfy our needs. Friendship asks something very different of us. It requires attention, loyalty, respect, forbearance, and sometimes considerable sacrifice.

The Courage to Be Known

There is another difficulty.

Many of us have become so unaccustomed to genuine friendship that, when we encounter its possibility, we instinctively retreat from it.

A true friend is not simply someone who makes us feel better. He knows us. He sees through our pretences. He notices when we deceive ourselves. He quietly expects us to become better than we are.

That can be deeply unsettling.

We often say that we want people to accept us exactly as we are. Aristotle might have replied that a friend accepts us as we are while refusing to leave us there.

Perhaps that is why perfect friendship is so rare. It demands not only affection, but humility; not only loyalty, but the willingness to be changed.

Nowadays, it is all too easy to retreat into comfortable mediocrity.

Friendship and Happiness

Throughout the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that happiness lies not in pleasure or success, but in living according to reason and virtue.

Friendship is one of the principal ways in which this becomes possible.

A good friend encourages what is best in us, restrains what is worst, and accompanies us in the long and difficult work of becoming the person we are capable of being. If we abandon a true friend, really, it is our own self that we are abandoning.

We tend to think of friendship as one of life’s pleasures.

Aristotle thought of it as one of life’s disciplines.

A good friend does not simply make us happier.

He helps us become better and bigger.

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Given the Choice, Who Would You Be in Your Next Life?

The Last Judgement, by Michelangelo.
The responsibility lies with the chooser; God is not responsible. — Republic X

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Plato concludes The Republic with the myth of Er, a timeless story of death, judgment, reincarnation, and the soul’s freedom to choose its destiny. This fresh retelling and interpretation explores why it remains one of the greatest philosophical myths ever told.

The Myth of Er has had an enduring influence on the Western imagination, shaping, among other things, our inherited ideas of heaven, hell, and moral destiny. Although Plato presents the story as told by Socrates at the end of The Republic, it draws on older Greek and Near Eastern traditions of judgment after death, cosmic order, and the journey of the soul.

The Myth of Er

Er, a soldier from Pamphylia, was slain in battle. Twelve days later, as his body lay on the funeral pyre, he returned to life and told those around him what he had seen in the interval between death and rebirth.

During those twelve days, his soul had journeyed to a strange meadow marked by four openings: two leading upward into the heavens, and two descending into the earth below.

Judges sat in this meadow and assigned souls according to their conduct in life. The just were directed to the right and upward, ascending through one of the openings into the heavens; the unjust were directed to the left and downward, descending into the earth.

At the same time, other souls were returning. Bright, cheerful souls descended from above, having completed a thousand-year reward in the heavens. They spoke joyfully of what they had experienced. By contrast, other souls rose up from below, exhausted and in pain, describing a thousand-year punishment in the depths of the earth.

When Er approached the judges, he was told that he was not to be judged. Instead, he was to observe and later report what he had seen to humanity.

After seven days in the meadow, the souls set out on a further journey of five days, eventually arriving at the Spindle of Necessity.

This was a vast column of light, brighter than anything they had ever seen, extending through the cosmos and holding together the movements of the sun, moon, planets, and stars. The structure of the heavens rotated like a spindle, with concentric circles turning within one another.

At its centre stood Necessity, or Ananke, attended by her three daughters, the Fates. In each of the celestial circles sat a Siren, each producing a single note, so that together they formed a cosmic harmony.

When all the souls had gathered, a prophet announced:

“Hear the word of Lachesis, daughter of Necessity. Mortal souls, you are entering a new cycle of life and death. Your destiny will not be assigned to you, but chosen by you. The one who draws the first lot shall choose first; and the life chosen shall become his fate.”

The souls then came forward in order and selected their next lives from a vast assortment of human and animal forms.

The first to choose, having seen neither reward nor punishment in a way that had truly reshaped him, hastily selected the life of a tyrant. Only later did he discover that this life entailed horrors he had failed to foresee, including the destruction of his own family. His earlier virtue had been habitual rather than reflective; he had never truly understood what made a life good.

By contrast, many of those returning from punishment in the underworld, having suffered greatly, now chose more moderate and balanced lives. But their choices were often driven by fear and aversion rather than understanding.

Last of all came Odysseus, the man of many ways. Having experienced the extremes of fortune and glory, he searched for a long time before finding the life of an ordinary private man, overlooked by everyone else. Delighted with his discovery, he remarked that he would have made the same choice even if he had been first to choose.

Once all souls had chosen, they travelled to the plain of Forgetfulness. There they encamped by the River Lethe. Each soul was required to drink from the river, and in doing so forgot everything it had previously known. Some, still unsteady from desire or confusion, drank more than they needed.

In the night, as they slept, the souls rose upward like stars and were reborn into their chosen lives. At that moment, Er awoke to find himself once again on his funeral pyre.

Interpretation of the Myth

At the beginning of The Republic, Plato’s brother Glaucon challenges Socrates with a stark claim: most people are not just; they merely behave justly when it is advantageous to do so. If they could act unjustly without consequence, they would.

In response, Socrates constructs an elaborate account of justice—not as social convention or reputation, but as something belonging to the inner structure of the soul. Just as health is not merely the appearance of the body but its proper functioning, justice is the harmonious ordering of the self. An unjust soul, however successful it may appear externally, is internally disordered.

The myth of Er comes at the end of this argument, and one of its purposes is to show that justice does, in the end, prevail. Although the just may suffer and the unjust prosper in this life, each soul ultimately receives its due. In this sense, the myth answers Glaucon’s challenge: justice is not merely socially convenient, but intrinsically valuable, because it orders the soul. The myth suggests that such a soul is ultimately rewarded.

But the myth does something more than reassure us that justice is eventually rewarded and injustice punished. It explores something more unsettling: how easily souls can misjudge what is good for them, even after they have seen the consequences of their choices.

The problem Plato is concerned with is not only moral weakness, but moral blindness. Even a thousand years in heaven or hell does not guarantee wisdom. Some souls, having endured punishment, choose more carefully; others, despite every opportunity to learn, repeat their mistakes. Experience alone is not enough. Suffering may teach caution, but only philosophy teaches understanding.

Within this framework, justice is not simply about behaving correctly, but about forming a soul capable of recognising what is truly good. Without such understanding, even freedom of choice can become dangerous. The tyrant’s error lies not merely in his lust for power, but in his ignorance about the kind of life he is selecting. His failure is epistemic before it is moral.

Yet reward and punishment alone are not enough. The deeper concern of the myth is the formation of character. We do not choose wisely merely because we have suffered, nor because we have prospered, but because we have learnt to distinguish appearance from reality and the merely desirable from the truly good.

Odysseus, at the end of the myth, provides the final illustration. Having experienced the extremes of human life, he passes over lives of power and renown to choose that of an ordinary private man. It is one of the most quietly profound moments in Greek literature. The greatest of heroes no longer seeks greatness, but peace. His choice suggests that wisdom lies not in acquiring more, but in learning what is enough.

In the end, the myth of Er is less a literal description of the afterlife than a meditation on justice, character, and choice. Plato affirms that justice is ultimately rewarded, but he also insists that reward alone is not enough. A good life depends not merely on receiving one’s due, but on acquiring the wisdom to recognise what is truly worth choosing.

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Nietzsche on Master and Slave Morality—and Why You May Be Both

A greek marble statue juxtaposed with a crucifix.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 16 August 2026.

In 1885, Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth married Bernhard Förster, a high school teacher turned German nationalist and rabid antisemite. Nietzsche so disapproved that he did not attend the wedding.

In 1886, Förster and Elisabeth left for Paraguay with fourteen German families to establish a vegetarian and teetotal colony, Nueva Germania, that admitted only ‘racially pure’ Germans. While Elisabeth played the princess, the heavily indebted Förster drank heavily and became depressed. In 1889, he committed suicide in a hotel room in San Bernardino.

Nietzsche looked upon nationalism and democracy as the successors of the ‘slave morality’ of Christianity. Instead, he championed the ideal of the ‘good European’, a cosmopolitan, supra-national individual who transcends petty national and religious prejudices and strives to unite Europe through a new, higher cultural synthesis. In 1886, the year that Elisabeth left for Paraguay, he wrote to his mother from the Swiss Alps, ‘Even if I should be a bad German, I am at all events a very good European.’

Despite his contempt for nationalism, Nietzsche’s philosophy would later be appropriated by German nationalists and Nazis, helped along by Elisabeth after his collapse into insanity. Nietzsche held every herd in contempt, whether Christian, democratic, or nationalist. But he reserved his highest contempt for the nationalist herd.

Herd Mentality

In 1886, Nietzsche broke with his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner, an antisemite who had been publishing antisemitic literature and propaganda while neglecting Nietzsche’s work.

In that year, Nietzsche also published a new book, Beyond Good and Evil (1886). As the title suggests, this is not a work of normative ethics (what is good and evil) but of meta-ethics (what is meant by ‘good’ and ‘evil’). Nietzsche portrays the life-denying Western religion, morality, and philosophy as rooted in a ‘herd mentality’, and calls for the abandonment of binary morality. After the death of God, there can no longer be a universal perspective. Therefore, there can no longer be an objective truth. Although philosophical systems purport to be objective, they are no more than the ‘involuntary and unconscious memoirs’ of their prejudiced authors. ‘Truth’ is no more than ‘the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live’.

Master vs Slave Morality

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche also introduces the dichotomy between master and slave morality. Slave morality is often confused with herd mentality, but can be understood more precisely as a component and expression of herd mentality. If slave morality arises out of the resentment-driven inversion of values created by the weak in revenge against the strong, herd mentality is the broader mediocrity that enforces conformity and suppresses individuality.

For Nietzsche, modern society represents the triumph of Judeo-Christian slave morality over the older Greco-Roman master morality. Master morality originates in the strong, and is marked by values such as pride, nobility, courage, truthfulness, health, creativity, and joy. The Homeric era of Achilles and Odysseus was a pure expression of master morality, a time when actions were either noble or base, rather than good or evil.

Achilles does not apologise for seeking kleos, or glory. Homer does not ask his heroes to be humble or compassionate. Their virtues are precisely those qualities which distinguish them from other men: courage, strength, cunning, eloquence, and the capacity for magnificent deeds. The Greek word aretē, usually translated as ‘virtue’, originally carried the broader sense of excellence, and in Aristotle virtue blends with excellence. Aristotle doesn’t even know what forgiveness means—because the concept hadn’t quite been invented.

So, too, any one can get angry—that is easy—or give or spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for every one, nor is it easy; wherefore goodness is both rare and laudable and noble. —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Slave morality, in contrast, is the envious and vengeful reaction of the mild and mediocre to the oppression of the masters, to create an inverted morality by turning their weakness into virtue and the virtues of the masters into vice.

Thus, slave morality is marked by values such as humility, meekness, conformity, patience, compassion, and pity. Christianity is called the religion of pity, which deprives us of strength and makes suffering contagious. In master morality, the good is whatever is good for the masters; in slave morality, it is whatever constrains and emasculates the masters. By pretending that humility and docility are a moral choice, slave morality manufactures an ideal out of impotence and subjugation. Thus, pride becomes a vice or sin, humility is elevated into a supreme virtue, and the son of God washes the feet of his disciples and allows himself to be crucified like a common criminal.

What This Means in Us

Slave morality is a cynical and pessimistic inverse morality that involves the systematic subversion of the old, natural master morality. It seeks not to transcend master morality, but, through ‘priestly vindictiveness’, to emasculate and enslave the strong by persuading them that their strength is an evil. Democracy, with its fixation on equality, is in fact the heir to Christianity, even if most democrats would rather trace their lineage to Ancient Athens. God may be dead, but Christian values survive God, sometimes in other forms.

But for all that, the old Greco-Roman morality, because it reflects reality and the natural impulse, cannot be vanquished, and vies with the inverted Judeo-Christian morality. Modern man is confused because he has constantly to juggle their contradictions, while himself being neither Christian nor Ancient but drifting in an ill-defined no-man’s land. Thus, he is taught to admire humility, while being told to believe in himself. He condemns pride, but values ambition. He insists upon equality while idolising exceptional athletes, artists, and entrepreneurs. He preaches self-sacrifice, but also self-realisation; contentment, but also achievement; meekness, but also assertiveness. In sum, he wants to be good, while also wanting to be great.

But might these two things be incompatible?

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Diogenes the Cynic and the Philosophy of the Dog

Alexander the Great before Diogenes the Cynic
Alexander the Great bows before Diogenes the Cynic.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 18 August 2026.

Plato is said to have called Diogenes the Cynic ‘a Socrates gone mad’. It is easy to see why. Diogenes lived in a storage jar, begged for his food, masturbated in public, mocked Plato to his face, and told Alexander the Great to get out of his sunshine.

But there was a philosophy behind the madness. Diogenes did not merely question the conventions by which people lived. He attempted to strip them away altogether—and to live out the consequences.

Exiled to Athens

Diogenes (c. 412–323 BCE) was born in Sinope, a Greek colony on the Black Sea coast of modern-day Turkey. After being exiled for having defaced the city’s coinage, he moved to Athens, took up the life of a beggar, and made it his mission to metaphorically deface the coinage of custom and convention—which, he maintained, was the false currency of morality.

The story about defacing coinage may have been no more than a play on words, since, in Greek, the word for ‘money’, nomisma, sounds like, and is derived from, the word for ‘custom’, nomos. However, archaeologists have unearthed defaced mid-fourth-century coins from Sinope, making the literal story harder to dismiss.

In Athens, Diogenes attached himself to Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates who taught that virtue, rather than wealth or pleasure, is sufficient for happiness. According to tradition, Antisthenes initially tried to drive him away, even threatening him with his staff. Like all the best students, Diogenes simply refused to leave.

If Socrates had shown that a good life required examining our assumptions, Diogenes went further. He asked what might happen if, having examined our assumptions, we outright discarded them.

The Philosophy of the Dog

Diogenes disdained the need for conventional shelter and other corrupting ‘dainties’ and chose instead to sleep in a large storage jar and get by on a diet of chickpeas, lupins, and assorted vegetables. He used to beg for the bare necessities, including from statues—explaining to passers-by that he was thereby practising for rejection.

According to another famous story, he possessed a wooden cup until he saw a boy drinking water from his cupped hands. ‘A child has bested me in simplicity,’ he exclaimed, throwing away his cup.

Diogenes held that human beings had much to learn from the artlessness of dogs, which, unlike us, had not ‘complicated every simple gift of the gods’. The term ‘Cynic’ derives from the Greek for ‘dog-like’, kynikos—or perhaps from Antisthenes’ association with the Cynosarges, a gymnasium near the Temple of Herakles for the use of Athenians born of foreign mothers.

He placed nature and reason firmly above custom and convention, which he held to be incompatible with happiness. It is natural for human beings to act in accordance with reason, and reason dictates that human beings ought to live in accordance with nature. Instead of wasting our substance in the pursuit of wealth or renown, we ought to have the sense and courage to live like animals or gods, revelling in life’s simplest pleasures, which are also its greatest, without bond or fear.

When people called him a dog, he took this as a badge of pride—for the less he needed from the world, the less the world could take from him.

The Philosophy of Shamelessness

His freedom extended even to shame. Diogenes taught that, if an act is not shameful in private, it should not become shameful merely because it is performed in public. Convention had taught people to be ashamed of things that were natural while remaining remarkably unashamed of vices such as greed and vanity.

Thus, upon being challenged for masturbating in the marketplace, in full view of everyone, he replied, ‘If only it were so easy to soothe hunger by rubbing an empty belly.’

This was not simple exhibitionism, but an extreme form of philosophical training, or askesis. Like later Cynics, Diogenes deliberately exposed himself to discomfort, rejection, ridicule, heat, cold, and hunger to strengthen himself against them. 

In the deep winter, he would strip naked and embrace bronze statues. One day, upon seeing this, a Spartan asked him whether he was cold. When he said that he was not, the Spartan replied, ‘Well, then, what’s so impressive about what you’re doing?’ A contempt for comfort is one of the many things that the Spartans and the Cynics held in common.

Diogenes vs Plato

Although he privileged reason, Diogenes despised abstract philosophy of the kind practised at Plato’s Academy.

When, to great acclaim, Plato defined a human being as ‘an animal, biped, and featherless’, Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it to the Academy with the words, ‘Behold! I have brought you Plato’s man.’ Plato consequently refined his definition, adding ‘with broad nails’—even though he would probably have known of monkeys, and perhaps even seen one.

One day, Diogenes asked Plato for a handful of figs from his garden. When Plato had a whole bushel sent out, he muttered, ‘Typical Plato.’

Like Socrates, Diogenes favoured living dialogue over the dead word. When a certain Hegesias asked to borrow one of his writing tablets, he replied, ‘You are a simpleton, Hegesias; you do not choose painted figs, but real ones; and yet you pass over the true training and would apply yourself to written rules.’

For Diogenes, philosophy was not something you read or wrote about. It wasn’t even something you believed in. It was something that you courageously enacted and lived out.

Diogenes’ greatest argument was not a tome like Plato’s Republic, but himself, the life that he led. The jar, the begging, the public masturbation were demonstrations designed to expose the absurdity of blind convention. Whereas Socrates had questioned people, Diogenes interrogated life itself.

Looking for a Human Being

Diogenes was not easily impressed by his fellow men and women.

He used to stroll around Athens in broad daylight brandishing an ignited lamp. Whenever curious people stopped to ask what he was doing, he would reply, ‘I am looking for a human being.’ It was a case of a dog searching for a supposedly rational being—and finding one only in himself.

On other occasions, Diogenes would walk backwards through the streets or enter the theatre against the flow of people leaving. When a large enough crowd had gathered to laugh at him, he would turn on them: ‘Why do you mock, when you’ve spent your whole life walking backwards? I, at least, am able to turn around.’

Nietzsche’s parable of the madman in The Gay Science is almost certainly inspired by Diogenes. In both cases, the madman carries a lamp in broad daylight and is laughed at by the crowd—but it is, of course, the madman who has the last laugh.

Diogenes and Alexander

The most famous encounter in the history of Cynicism, though it may be apocryphal, perfectly captures Diogenes. Alexander the Great came to visit him one morning while he was basking in the sun. The most powerful man in the Greek world, and soon the entire known world (oikoumenē, ‘the inhabited earth’), stood before the bedraggled philosopher and asked whether there was anything he might do for him.

‘Yes,’ replied Diogenes. ‘Stand out of my sunshine.’

According to the story, Alexander was so impressed that he declared, ‘If I were not Alexander, I should wish to be Diogenes.’

Diogenes, for his part, would never have wished to be Alexander.

Citizen of the World

Diogenes’ rejection of convention extended beyond wealth, status, and respectability to political identity itself.

Asked where he came from, he reportedly answered, kosmopolitēs—‘a citizen of the world’—thereby coining the Greek word that became our ‘cosmopolitan’.

This would sound radical in some parts of modern-day Britain or America, let alone in a Greek world organised around city-states, in which citizenship determined a person’s identity, loyalties, rights, and obligations. Diogenes had been driven out of his own city, and sublimed his exile into universal citizenship.

Diogenes influenced Crates of Thebes, a wealthy man who abandoned his fortune to become a Cynic. Crates in turn taught Zeno of Citium, who went on to found Zenonism—better known as Stoicism. The Cynic ideal of living according to nature, freedom from external goods, and cosmopolitanism thus passed, in modified form, into one of the most influential movements of the ancient world. The inheritance of the man who inhabited a jar lived on in the emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations remain, today more than ever, a bestseller.

A Socrates Gone Mad?

Diogenes eventually settled in Corinth, where he died in 323 BCE—the same year as Alexander the Great in Babylon.

Asked how he wished to be buried, he replied that his body should simply be thrown outside the city wall. When his friends protested that wild animals would devour it, he told them to leave him a stick to drive them away. ‘But you will be dead,’ they objected. ‘Then what harm can the animals do me?’

After his death, the Corinthians honoured him with a pillar surmounted by a dog of Parian marble.

Plato’s alleged description of Diogenes as ‘a Socrates gone mad’ captured something real. Like Socrates, Diogenes challenged received opinion, cared little for wealth or status, practised philosophy in public, and believed that the state of one’s soul mattered more than conventional success. But Diogenes removed almost every restraint that remained in Socrates. He turned philosophical independence into homelessness, Socratic questioning into public theatre, simplicity into radical poverty, and indifference to opinion into shamelessness.

Did he take philosophy too far? I often think that, had I lived in a warmer climate, I too might have had the courage of a Diogenes.

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