/lit/ - Literature

>>5104535
>Think of it this way, it's easy to pay lip service to non-attachment when you're a beggar who has nothing. Like a guy who is insecure and ugly as fuck saying he is a virgin out of purity and non-attachment...wink wink
Diogenes could have easily lived under comfortable patronage, but he didn't. He also repeatedly risked his life with his parrhesia.

>It's much harder to pull a Marcus Aurelius and be non-attached in the face of overwhelming temptation. Aurelius could literally fuck any person he wanted, any time, anywhere, and disgrace himself like most of the emperors did. But he didn't.
He also could have given up his power and live a simple life, but he didn't.

>Stoicism is concerned with your inner life, not your outter life. If you are born to be a king then do it with virtue. If you are born to be poor as shit, then do that with virtue.
That's my point. It's this sort of rhetoric that provides the easy way out. "I may drive a Maserati, but I'm not attached to it, trust me on this" while with Cynicism there is no cheating. You can't have your cake and eat it too. It's obvious you're not attached to your Maserati because you don't have one. Stoicism is the gateway to lazy excuses in the pursuit of virtue.

>There's nothing inherently virtuous about austerity and poverty or hippie life.
There is. To not engage with decadence per definition removes the chance of getting attached to it, while the late Stoic approach provides a lot more risk. The Stoics realised this, they were just mostly too worldly and not dedicated enough to pursue this path. They wanted virtue without sacrificing the trappings of society and therefore had to make up all kind of justifications on how to do that.

Plato was discoursing on his theory of ideas and, pointing to the cups on the table before him, said while there are many cups in the world, there is only one `idea' of a cup, and this cupness precedes the existence of all particular cups.

"I can see the cup on the table," interupted Diogenes, "but I can't see the `cupness'".

"That's because you have the eyes to see the cup," said Plato, "but", tapping his head with his forefinger, "you don't have the intellect with which to comprehend `cupness'."

Diogenes walked up to the table, examined a cup and, looking inside, asked, "Is it empty?"

Plato nodded.

"Where is the `emptiness' which procedes this empty cup?" asked Diogenes.

Plato allowed himself a few moments to collect his thoughts, but Diogenes reached over and, tapping Plato's head with his finger, said "I think you will find here is the `emptiness'."

>>5035239