oon going to be turned the other way up.'

He remains the permanent and unsurpassed type of one way of grappling
with the horror of life. Fear nothing, desire nothing, possess nothing:
and then Life with all its ingenuity of malice cannot disappoint you. If
man cannot enter into life nor yet depart from it save through agony and
filth, let him learn to endure the one and be indifferent to the other.
The watchdog of Zeus on earth has to fulfil his special duty, to warn
mankind of the truth and to set slaves free. Nothing else matters.

The criticism of this solution is not that it is selfish. It is not. The
Cynic lives for the salvation of his fellow creatures. And it is worth
remembering that before the Roman gladiatorial games were eventually
stopped by the self-immolation of the monk Telemachus, two Cynic
philosophers had thrown themselves into the arena in the same spirit.
Its weakness lies in a false psychology, common to all the world at that
time, which imagined that salvation or freedom consists in living
utterly without desire or fear, that such a life is biologically
possible, and that Diogenes lived it. To a subtler critic it is obvious
that Diogenes was a man of very strong and successful ambitions, though
his ambitions were different from those of most men. He solved the
problem of his own life by following with all the force and courage of
his genius a line of conduct which made him, next to Alexander, the most
famous man in Greece. To be really without fear or desire would mean
death, and to die is not to solve the riddle of living.

The difference between the Cynic view of life and that of Plato's
_Republic_ is interesting. Plato also rejected the most fundamental
conventions of existing society, the accepted methods of government, the
laws of property and of marriage, the traditional religion and even the
poetry which was a second religion to the Greeks. But he rejected the
existing culture only because he wanted it to be better. He condemned
the concrete existing city in order to build a more perfect city, to
proceed in infinite searching and longing towards the Idea of Good, the
Sun of the spiritual universe. Diogenes rejected the civilization which
he saw, and admitted the reality of no other. His crude realistic
attitude of mind had no use for Plato's 'Ideas'. 'I can see a table,' he
said; 'I cannot see Tabularity' (+trapezotes+). 'I know Athens and
Corinth and other cities, and can see that they ar