On Being Cosmopolitan by Anthony Levin

It took me six weeks of voluntary dispossession and two weeks of living in Parma, Italy before I wholly understood why Diogenes is at all important - why he is relevant to the quest for contentment in the West and why we should embrace him. I arrived without a job, a home or the ability to converse. Within two weeks I had conquered two out of three.

Diogenes of Sinope was an ancient Greek philosopher touted by Plato as ‘A Socrates Gone Mad’. He taught that wisdom and happiness belong to the man who is independent of society. He lived part of his life in a makeshift bathtub. “Humans have complicated every simple gift of the gods” he said. We may blame the bastards of Epicurus for lavishing the notion that pleasure means hedonism and owning more and more things. But pleasure was not a virtue taught by either Diogenes or Plato’s understudy, Aristotle. Diogenes found pleasure and happiness in the simplest of experiences. He is credited as being the first Western philosopher to actively disavow material possessions and to describe himself as ‘cosmopolitan’, which in Ancient Greek (kosmopolites) literally means ‘a citizen of the world’ – a member of a global community.

We can live by Diogenes’ example because he represents the fundamental difference between society and community. He refused to accept the customs of his time at face value. In doing so, he fearlessly forged his own metaphysical path amidst a marketplace society replete with protocols and hierarchies, regionalisms and birthrights. Little has changed. We live in a hyper-real mass-consumption reality which continues to tell us we can buy our way to happiness long after we have exposed that fallacy. For that reason, Diogenes is as relevant today as he was during his rivalry with Plato. Despite what we pay for them first or second-hand, the things we buy - our possessions - never really hold any monetary value. They may be utilitarian, but it’s the unfavourable conditions they insulate against that make them seem valuable. This is, in effect, a fear of their non-possession – which admits a kind of inverse quality. But this too is an illusion, a part of the duality of consumerism. Non-possession can give us the greatest clarity about what we really need. When taking risks like moving to a new city, if we ask ourselves ‘what is the worst that could happen’, often the answer is not all that bad. We have friends who can help us, families who can support us. There are places we can go where we won’t be treated as madmen simply because we’ve run out of money. Even after all the things are gone, there remain the ghostly tannins of our social tentacles. They touch the people we love all around the world. Community exists in our connectedness.

But what about those without homes or families, those who live like dogs, the ones we walk briskly past, the ones who seem insane? Without the conventional markers of civilisation, are we capable of recognising a Diogenes in our midst? Would we know him as he went bin-diving for bones?

I have never been homeless. But in the last year abroad I have been down to my last $40. I have eaten whatever I could find in the cupboard because I couldn’t afford to buy food (proverbially, ‘cupboard-diving’). There are always degrees of deprivation. As a lawyer I worked closely with the homeless in Sydney. Many of them were neatly-dressed and clean. Some were suffering from mental illness. Some were trapped in cycles which no soup kitchen could undo. Even legal assistance was often a matter of putting out fires. To call these people ‘citizens of the world’ sounds patronising - another psychogenic fugue allowing us to walk on by. Not everyone chooses homelessness because of some higher-order philosophy and looking for a misanthropic buddha behind the eyes is facile. And yet we are them. Our needs are theirs. Love, food, shelter. How we seek them out is up to each of us. Socrates told us ‘He who would move the world must first move himself.’ His rival, Diogenes, moved himself to Athens and Cynicism was born. When we move ourselves to subvert a norm, however small, we are going some way to moving the whole world.