The Cynic as Cosmopolitan Animal

Abstract

There is an old story, long a favourite, about the difficulty of saying what a human is. Plato, the account goes, was asked to define the term ‘man’, and he replied that man is a featherless biped. Shortly afterward, Diogenes the Cynic brought him a plucked chicken, saying, ‘I have brought you a man’. We can only imagine Diogenes’ flourish as he displayed his counterexample; he certainly would have taken pleasure in showing an animal to satisfy Plato’s definition of man.¹ Diogenes delighted in displays of bathos, but his move is not merely deflationary. The point that man might be closer to an animal, or more interchangeable with an animal, than Plato would care to admit, is the butt of Diogenes’ joke as well as the foundation of his philosophy. Long before the cultural formations we have come to call humanism and posthumanism, Diogenes considered the human as a kind of animal, and thought of the animal as a model for human life. Diogenes’ actions and claims — his defiance of everyday Athenian life, his insistence on living on the periphery of the polis, his foundational account of cosmopolitanism — follow from his commitment to animal life. Animal life, in other words, is a first principle of his philosophy. For those of us interested in thinking about what place animal life might have in cosmopolitanism, Diogenes the Cynic offers an alluring place to start, not only because he invents the term ‘cosmopolitan’, but also because his cosmopolitanism is fundamentally animal, as I will explain in more detail below.