The Stone

Socrates, Cynics and Flat-Nailed, Featherless

Bipeds
By
Nickolas Pappas
April 4, 2016 3:21 am April 4, 2016 3:21 am

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other

thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
Theres a story that would have taken place (assuming its true) not
long after the death of Socrates. Plato set out to define human
being and announced the answer: featherless biped. When
Diogenes of Sinope heard the news he came to Platos school, known
as the Academy, with a plucked chicken, saying, Heres the Platonic
human! Naturally, the Academy had to fix its definition, so it added
the phrase with flat nails.
Cynics like Diogenes behaved not as the authors of theories
but as performers of wisdom. They were philosophers in
action, notable for existing rather than for their accounts of
existence.
This story is widely told, and not just because it has a punch line. It
represents philosophers as always having belonged to two very
different types; and its worth remembering how far back the division
goes. Recently Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle wrote a column
for The Stone, When Philosophy Lost its Way, that argued
philosophy ceased to be what Socrates had made of it sometime
around the late 19 century, when it became professionalized within

the institution of the modern university. But there was already a

divergence between two ways of being a philosopher long before in
the generation after Socrates and two kinds of inspiration that
Socrates represented for the philosophers who lived after him.
Diogenes of Sinope, better known as Diogenes the Cynic,
considered himself Socratic. If he never met Socrates, he knew
philosophers who had. Plato himself called Diogenes a maddened
Socrates, and if theres praise in that description it is grudging
praise; even so it puts Diogenes somewhere in the Socratic legacy.
And stories like the one about the plucked bird bring the two together
for a stark contrast. They represent two ancient ideas of what a
philosopher should be.
This anecdote alone points to several differences between the two
ideas of philosophizing. We associate Platos name with the
Academy, the name of the gymnasium at which he founded his school
(and later, because of him, a name synonymous with school). The
anecdote suggests an institution at which some people were
teachers and others learned from them, and became philosophers by
virtue of having learned from authorities. This is the side of
philosophy that tries to systematize knowledge.
The anecdote also tells us that philosophers at this institution had a
project to complete. It apparently involved defining terms. According
to a comedy written in Platos time, students trained by defining the
pumpkin a joke at Platos expense, no doubt, but a joke that made
fun of the enterprise of classification and definition and therefore
tells us that enterprise was under way at the Academy.
Diogenes gets the better of the plucked chicken exchange; it sounds,
in fact, like a story that later Cynic philosophers circulated. After all
Diogenes is right that a plucked chicken is a biped and has no

feathers and so disproves the Academys definition. On the other

hand the philosophers in the Academy keep their dignity. As if they
didnt know they were being made fun of, they looked up from the
chicken in the room and fiddled with their definition to improve it.
When philosophers gather together they can build on one anothers
insights and improve on past accomplishments. Platos dialogues
offer glimpses of how philosophy would have been practiced at his
school, as a collective and cooperative quest for the demarcation of
species or kinds of things. Moral terms, political concepts and
biological entities were investigated and defined. Pumpkins, no;
human being, yes; human as featherless biped, maybe. In fact
featherless biped conjures up an enterprise of taxonomy. First you
sort animals by the number of feet they have, which means you have
a category for spiders with eight, flies with six, horses with four, and
so on. Then among the genus of two-legged animals you separate the
species with wings from the naked species.
Platos alleged name for Diogenes, maddened Socrates, also
suggests taxonomy. You start with the Socrates type and distinguish
the sane examples from crazies like Diogenes. A sane Socrates
presumably was someone like Plato himself, joining with other
philosophers in cooperative study, organizing a project, even
proposing to articulate all bodies of knowledge together. Crazy
philosophers, like Diogenes, carried a lit lamp in the daytime and not
only ate in public, but masturbated in public too, expressing the wish
that it was as easy to treat hunger by rubbing his stomach.
These gestures and anecdotes might strike you as not enough to
count as philosophy. This is John Coopers reason for leaving the
Cynics out of his engaging study of ancient philosophical ethics,
Pursuits of Wisdom, a book that promises to be about ways of life
in ancient philosophy. Coopers point is that vivid personal lives do

not make up for the absence of that rationality and systematic

argumentation that characterize the true philosophers of antiquity.
Beards mangy, posture slumped, dressed in one big rough
cloth and resting on a walking stick, the Cynics wandered
through the Roman world as its image of the freethinker,
never at home.
Being a few sandwiches shy of an intellectual picnic, Diogenes
cannot be said to wax philosophical. In the world of philosophical
theories, he comes along with a counterexample here and there or a
sneer at someone elses idea. The plucked chicken shows where
Platos theory went wrong. Diogenes supposedly walked through
Athens with a lit lamp in daylight looking for a human being in
another sort of rebuke to the same Academic project. (The story is
often told, erroneously, to say that hes seeking an honest man, but
the problem is even more urgent than that.) To a Cynic, using a lamp
at noontime is no more ridiculous a way of finding human beings than
defining them is.
In the later centuries of antiquity, into the years of the Roman
Empire, the Academic and Cynic philosophers were both popularly
presented as philosophical types. An irresistible book by Paul Zanker,
The Mask of Socrates, shows plentiful examples of both types,
dating from Hellenistic Greece well into imperial Rome. Plato, and the
Platonists after him, and the Peripatetic philosophers who came after
Aristotle, and the Stoics who took themselves to be Socratics in
fact, just about all the later philosophers who organized themselves
into schools of thought appeared before the Hellenistic and Roman
worlds as serious gentlemen. As seen in busts and statues, these
philosophers dressed soberly and grew full, well-tended beards. Their
foreheads were sometimes furrowed with the work of contemplating
philosophy, but this was a permissible variation on being a gentleman

and upright citizen.

Then there were other graven images of philosophers during those
same years that we can classify as legacies of the Cynics. Beards
mangy, posture slumped, dressed in one big rough cloth and resting
on a walking stick, the Cynics wandered through the Roman world as
its image of the freethinker, never at home not even in a
philosophical theory but cosmopolitan, to use a word the Cynics
invented: citizens of the world, meaning that they didnt belong
anywhere in particular. Counterculturalism was their instinct even if
it was a negative impulse. Diogenes was asked what was most
beautiful and answered parrhesia candor, freedom of speech
but the word literally means saying everything, and the Cynic had
to be ready to say anything at all, improvising philosophy under all
circumstances.
In their role as walking counterexamples, the Cynics mattered more
as who they were than for the content of anything they said. In this
sense Cooper is right to separate them from the ancient traditions of
moral theory. In the human drama, they behaved not as the authors of
theories but as performers of wisdom. We know them anecdotally
because they lived anecdotally, as the subjects of retold tales. They
were philosophers in action, notable for existing rather than for their
accounts of existence.
When Christianity became legal in the Roman Empire, Platonism gave
the early churchs thinkers a vocabulary for understanding the divine,
helped to explain how divinity offered guidance to human beings, and
suggested how human beings might aspire to divinity. But the
countercultural appeal of Socrates also affected Christians, who
would remember the persecutions against them long after they had
ceased being persecuted. Reading about Socrates you could believe
that you might be right about your course of action even with the

world against you, and Christian hermits who wanted to immerse

themselves in their faith saw the Cynics as their best models.
Philosophy has pulled in both directions, systematic and subversive,
for as long as it has remembered Socrates. It doesnt forget him by
inclining one way or the other. The Academy had the originality to
envision an intellectual society what a university still is, at its best
distinguished by the virtues of modesty and self-control, always
ready to usher new students into the tradition. Philosophy as a
tradition would have withered without an academy to live in. If it
sometimes appears to be withering within the academy, that is
because the subversive side of Socrates has its appeal: the virtues of
the eccentric, above all eccentric courage, and the willingness to
make your life an improvisation.
The Cynics need a nearby academy, if only as a place to throw their
plucked chickens, but the academy needs nearby cynics too, if only
as walking advertisements for philosophy as a serious study,
reminders that this is a subject people fall in love with.

Nickolas Pappas teaches philosophy at City College and the Graduate

Center of the City University of New York. He is the author, most
recently, of The Philosophers New Clothes.