Finding Socrates: The School Of Cynicism

Unless you are a member of the fourth school of Cynicism, which would like to argue otherwise. In “Finding Socrates”, the school of Cynicism is presented by Diogenes and his dog Cynic. Diogenes starts off the conversation talking about how we attempt to communicate and use our words to convey personal messages and teachings, when ultimately “Its is hopeless.” He adds “Nature teaches without words. To use words is to already distort reality”, and that we are only able to communicate because “we have had the luck of having similar experiences.” Regardless of the words, illustrations, or long thought out portrayals depicting what it’s like from another’s point of view, we will never truly understand, because we ourselves have not gone through

We eat a meal, while others around us starve.”, while out in nature, “Trees drink in water and sunlight, without any words for what they do. Nature seems to be a place of wisdom and understanding.” Diogenes, and the school of Cynicism, believe everything we need in life, and all that is wise, we are able to learn and draw from nature, while we as humans tend to think better of ourselves, and complicate the narrative. On page 108 - 109 of Hadot, he puts it plainly, “The Cynics’ break with the world, by contrast, was radical. They rejected what most people considered the elementary rules and indispensable conditions for life in society: cleanliness, pleasant appearance, and courtesy.” Cynics were one with nature, and could care less how you or anyone else felt about their actions, as they were living by the laws and teachings of the land. This is why everywhere Diogenes traveled in “Finding Socrates”, he was accompanied by his companion

We have Epicureanism finding pleasures in the everyday, Skepticism questioning everything, Stoicism going along with fate, and Cynics as the followers of nature; each school providing a different outlook on life and a new perspective on how to go about and perceive the world. Personally, my views tend to be more aligned with that of the Skeptics. The ideals of the Skeptics appear to be the wisest about the world, in that they do not trust the world. Just because something is the way it is today, doesn’t mean it will continue to be that way tomorrow. Of course, the laws of reason and understanding present a convention which is useful for many of our daily needs, but it often times becomes easy to fall reliant on convention, and that is when the world loves to through in a curveball. The Cynics I agree with on the fact that everything we know comes from the experiences we’ve had, but their ideas fall weak for me as they are too blindly led by nature and fail to adopt into new ways of thinking and the evolution of society. Stoics seem to be too indifferent about the ways of the world in that they let everything that happens fall into fate. There are many extremely horrific events that have occurred throughout human history, and I would like to think some of them were made by poor reasoning of what is good or