INTERVIEW ABOUT "ANARCHY AND ANARCHISMS"

Interviewer: You’ve just written and published a new book called “Anarchy and Anarchisms”. What is the book about and why have you written it?

Anarxistica: The book showcases some examples of things that are either called anarchism by some people today, things like anarchoprimitivism and anarchafeminism, and other things, such as a practical appraisal of how Jesus of Nazareth lived and what he taught or the writings of Chinese Daoists or the meditative lifestyle of Zen Buddhists or the philosophy of self-creation espoused by Friedrich Nietzsche, and uses them to look at the ideas “anarchy” and “anarchism” to ask what they are and what they mean. So, from this angle, its a book about these things that hopes to inspire readers to think about them for themselves.

But there’s another reason for writing the book besides this and that’s to make an argument for anarchism not as some political set of beliefs or goals but as a kind of personal virtue, an ethics of living, a lived character which shows who we are. For me, anarchism can never be relegated to being a set of ideas. For me its something you live and who you are. It comes up from your insides and flows out into the world. Its much, much more than just some ideology to be put on like a coat or cast aside like an old sweater.

Interviewer: Are you against a more traditional description of “anarchism” then as a political desire for no government or the abolition of police and prisons, for example?

Anarxistica: No, not at all. But I do want to go much deeper into the mentality that leads to such conclusions and where it comes from. My context for anarchism is much wider than many others who claim the description “anarchist” today. In addition, many of the more traditional anarchists of 19th century anarchism, those we might think of as having founding roles in what became anarchism, were philosophical people who wanted to give some kind of reasoned or explicatory basis for why they came to the conclusion that anarchism was a reasonable answer to the question, “How should human beings live one with another?” So when people today talk about their political desires - the end of top down government, abolition of police and prisons, etc, - I understand why people come to those conclusions but I want to do work underneath such conclusions and positions and make an argument for why we come to them thinking of us as intelligent beings who live in the world.

Interviewer: You say your context for anarchism is much wider than that of many others who talk about anarchism. What is that context?

Anarxistica: The short version is that it is the cosmos. This I regard as essentially anarchy. Here “anarchy” does not mean “chaos” however or, at least, it does not mean “chaos” understood as the opposition of “order”. In fact, I do not see “chaos” and “order” as opposites but, as a Daoist would, as one thing always entailing the other. It would be very binary thinking to see them as opposites where such thinking is not necessary. Order and chaos can then be seen as versions of the same thing or components of a necessary whole and applied to the cosmos and so everything in it. This is my context of anarchy - and anarchism is what I argue to be an appropriate human response to it, its nature and its manner of operation.

Interviewer: This is a very philosophical or even spiritual conception of anarchy and anarchism. What would you say about this?

Anarxistica: Its a description I would agree with and own. My influences for it are those kinds of influences, things such as a reading of Chinese Daoism and Zen Buddhism or activities of Jesus of Nazareth, things which had spiritual and even philosophical bases but which resulted in certain kinds of lifestyles and practices, and so I see no shame in that. Philosophical and spiritual thought are two types of thought which are remarkably common throughout human history and so they must be attenuating something in the human being that finds itself in need of expression. One thing that is very important to me is having authenticity in our conversations and in our thinking about things. So I feel no shame if my conception of anarchy or anarchism ultimately comes from philosophical or spiritual roots. What’s more important is to be honest and to explain oneself as clearly and honestly as one can and let your authenticity speak for itself. That will do so not only in terms of what it is you say you want but also in terms of where it comes from. 

Interviewer: What do you think are the prospects for anarchism in the world we live in today and where does your conception of anarchism fit into this?

Anarxistica: This is where I say it depends on what you think anarchy and anarchism are. The political anarchist sees anarchism as a list of things they want to bring to pass. They emphasize direct action and taking things into your own hands. Anarchism, on these terms, fails if the things that are wanted do not come to pass. In addition, such anarchism is inherently about conflict and perhaps even violent conflict. Often such anarchism is based on anger and its not anger that I would condemn at all because its anger thats been earned by decades and even centuries of one kind of a person’s domination of another. People are angrily crying out for freedom from oppression and from their literal exploitation and coercion to serve other people’s purposes with the threat that they might even lose their lives if they don’t comply. One cannot condemn and so deny that. One must be open about the problem before one can attempt a solution. One must recognise the pain and anger and the justice it cries out for.

But I think we need to take the bull by the horns and be realistic though. Are the governments of the world going to fall overnight, regardless of how oppressive and how much the tools of capitalists and simple crooks they are? No. Are police and armies just going to put down their guns? No. Are prisons just going to open the doors and then close down? No. Are possessive capitalists going to turn into people who renounce property? No. I think anarchists need to think a lot more closer to home than this. They need to start with themselves and manifest anarchism in their own lives and choices - and not to forget in their own relationships with other people. My view is that the best chance anarchism has is when other people see anarchists living as anarchists and come to the conclusion that it is a better way to live. Now this might include protests, strikes, boycotts and opposing the cruel actions of authoritarians and capitalists. I am not saying these should stop or that they are wrong. In fact, they are often necessary. I’d particularly be in favour of continuous micro-refusals to go along with the prevailing authoritarian and capitalist narrative in society. You should not always do as you are told and its essential that you don’t. But I am saying that anarchism must always be more than such actions, big or small. It must be the life lived as an anarchist existence that examples the values it claims it wants to see victorious in the end. The means is the end and the end is the means.

Interviewer: Can anarchism ever win?

Anarxistica: Again, it depends on your terms. Anarchism wins a million times a day all over the world if you think anarchism is cooperation, helping someone in need, opposing those who want to dominate, coerce or oppress. For, everywhere, all over the world, people do those things every day. Those who think of “anarchism” as toppling the government and only toppling the government, however, have, in my view, completely missed the point. We do not topple the government for its own sake but because it is in the furtherance of values we already live out in our own lives and want to spread as widely in their effects as possible. Anarchism, at least as I understand it, is not just ending physical domination but is ending the idea of domination as a thought anyone would ever have. And so, to come back to your question, my anarchism isn’t about “winning” as if just winning were enough. Its about being but, more than that, its about becoming. Its about becoming non-dominating, non-coercive, non-exploitative. Its about becoming compassionate, peace-loving, cooperative. Its about becoming people for whom “winning” is not even on their radar anymore. Any “win” in a physical conflict that did not also achieve that becoming would be just another battle in an ongoing war. The aim of my anarchism is an end to war.

Interviewer: You discuss a number of different kinds of anarchism in your book. Is there one kind that you favour or would recommend?

Anarxistica: No, there isn't. I am a convinced anarchist. Its not my job to tell you what to do or think. That is strictly a matter for you. I believe in quite a strict notion of personal responsibility when it comes to this. Modern, liberal society breeds lazy people and it wants to lull them into a sleep which about dependency. Because then they are more easily controlled. I take an opposing view. You are responsible for you and no one can take that away. Part of what this means is that you must decide for yourself how you will live and I think that this is one of our best defences against dictatorship and control - when people take responsibility for themselves. So I encourage education. I encourage discussion and conversation. I encourage learning from others and getting to know what other people think about things. But they can’t tell you what to do. They can’t say, “We are doing this now.” What you are doing is up to you - in the context of a whole load of other people who have needs too, of course. So I don’t recommend this view or that although I may certainly say what convinces me and why. I say that if we are all thinkers and talkers who take responsibility for ourselves seriously then we will work something out we can all find mutually beneficial. 

Interviewer: In part of your book you discuss the anarchoprimitivism of John Zerzan which says civilisation is the problem. Do you agree with him in this? How could you possibly convince millions of people that going backwards is an improvement?

Anarxistica: By convincing them that people are very, very fallible and that they make mistakes, sometimes terrible mistakes. In fact, is there a person alive who isn’t already aware of this? All that needs to be done, then, is to convince them that civilisation is one of these mistakes, a mistake so disastrous its now clear it threatens life on the planet generally. If you think that is true then you cannot avoid the conclusion that it is our fault and that, consequently, we need to change. 

This is another area where I think people need to examine their thinking. We like to use words like “progress” and to designate our past selves “primitive” but we are our past selves. Just because we have carpeted our caves and now travel around in cars rather than animal skins it doesn’t make this “progress”. What do you do when the creature creates myriad ways to destroy itself? Do you let it carry on? Give control of it to a few, self-interested examples? Or do you say, “Stop! Look at what we are doing and have done. Look at what will happen if we continue”? I think we say the latter. I think we own up to all this destruction done in civilisation’s name by those who use the term “civilised” as if it were a badge of honour when, in reality, its a badge of shame, something people who went around almost naked in the streets 2300 or 2400 years ago thought was corrupting and illegitimate even then! Civilisation is that thing which is killing us and everything else. The notion it might then be reformed or is even our saviour then becomes simply nonsensical. We need a total revolution of our values and I think anarchism set in a cosmos of anarchy is what that is. I also, by the way, think that surviving is an improvement on slow, but rapidly increasing, suicide. Even better than that would be a reason to survive. A few decades more life so that authoritarians can control us for longer is no achievement to be proud of and neither is that reality soothed because you have Netflix and an XBox whilst, down the street, people look in the bins for their next meal. Seriously, fuck civilisation!

Interviewer: Your book also contains a chapter on “identity”. This is certainly a hot topic today but why is it in a book about anarchism?

Anarxistica: Because, in many ways, this is where it all starts for me, in questions of who we are, where we are, what this situation is. You cannot decide what, if anything, you should do if you haven’t given these things a description which then is a context for your own action. So questions such as these matter a great deal because they set the scene for who you are, where you are and what is to be done. In fact, on an intellectual level, we might see this as simply another way to view the whole. This is important, then, because it shows us our thoughts about ourselves, each other, and where we are. But it also shows them up as thoughts, as interpretations, opinions and beliefs, as things which need not be what they are. I think this view will probably upset quite a lot of people because they become very attached to what I have come to think of as fictions of and about ourselves but I must admit that I can now see such things in no other way. Human beings, for me, are those beings who tell themselves stories and then do their utmost, often regardless of circumstances, to convince themselves that they are true. They think that if they believe hard enough they will be. But I think when we do that we’re always wrong. Its fictions, nothing more. Once we admit to that, we can get to what they are for and where they take us. And that will be a good thing.

Interviewer: This almost sounds like an existential view of life, that people fight themselves in their various existences as they try to survive.

Anarxistica: I think that’s often true and I think the struggle is often to be authentic people in a world that begs you to be anything but authentic because it tells you that that is the only way to get to tomorrow, by constantly betraying yourself. I take the view that it would be better to be authentically me, and authentically free as me, for one day - and not see tomorrow - than to have lived an inauthentic life in which I was constantly coerced to be something else. This is to say that freedom comes from within and is not just about the material conditions of our existence, important as they, of course, are. I see this as being important to everyone although issues such as the current persecution of trans people is something which raises it to my consciousness again and again, as only one example. It is a basic freedom that people should be allowed to be who they are. All anarchists should fight for this even as they do for groups and communities.

Interviewer: What would you like to happen as a result of the book?

Anarxistica: I would be happy if anyone read it and thought about the issues it raises for themselves. That’s my only ambition, such as it is. People certainly don’t have to agree with me. And if they disagree with me, having thought about the issues I raise and for reasons of their own, then that’s a success as well. We all win from people who think, take responsibility and act with virtue. We all lose when they don’t.

You can read or download “Anarchy and Anarchisms” for free HERE!

ANARCHISM IS NOT SOCIALISM AND ITS NOT CIVILISATION

I have been reading the works of two differing anarchists, the American Lucy Parsons and the Italian Errico Malatesta. Both are regarded by modern students of anarchism as genuine anarchist voices from the past. But when I read them I have problems and they are problems I have with those who conceive of anarchism generally as a matter of human, political action generally. These problems are not concerned with their words condemning the actions of government and the human lack of need for such an entity. Both equally well expose government as the exploiter of the many for the benefit of the privileged few, and for the capitalist class in general, equally well. Both show how government and corruption by capital interests are unavoidable bedfellows just the same. On this, we have no disagreement. 

                                   Lucy Parsons and Errico Malatesta

It is, however, when we come to what replaces this in their various rhetorics that the differences emerge. Parsons, for example, talks about our need to be “civilised” as if “civilisation”, and the values of such a thing, were our friend. Malatesta, on the other hand, whilst keen to remove the yoke of government, is equally keen to replace it with another yoke called “solidarity” or, in other places, “voluntary solidarity” although, in that latter formulation, it is not clear that this is voluntary since, throughout his 1891 pamphlet “Anarchy”, he seems to argue for its necessity in replacing government in society rather than our ability to forego it. Indeed, Malatesta in that same document suggests that the “freedom” he and anarchists like him want is “not an absolute metaphysical, abstract freedom”, something which he imagines can be perverted into oppression, but the freedom “which is the conscious community of interests”. Malatesta imagines that if we had this then we would have the freedom which is each member of society chipping in and doing their bit quite willingly and cooperatively.

Yet my mind goes back to one of my imagined forebears in spiritual and philosophical anarchism - Diogenes the Cynic. Judged by the civilised and - let us speak plainly - socialist standards of Lucy Parsons and Errico Malatesta was Diogenes, who defaced coinage, took advantage of whatever natural food and shelter he could find and lived a mostly solitary life [albeit he mingled with others] an anarchist? By their standards, no. But this then becomes exactly the point at issue and that point is the values involved. There is a certain type of anarchist - Malatesta and Parsons may well be two examples of such - for whom anarchism is basically socialism and for such people these two are not so much constant bedfellows as they are regarded as the same thing. I am not one of these people and, for me, anarchism neither implies nor requires socialism - nor is socialism necessarily anarchism at all. There are obvious 20th century examples of why this is so. Russia and the Soviet Union, for example, might have been socialist but this was not anarchism. And, to be honest, I find it just as hard to imagine how state socialism, which is what any socialism founded on the basis of national borders would be, is any kind of anarchism at all. 

Yet this is not the root of the problem. For the root of the problem we need to go beyond the reordering of the deckchairs on the Titanic of society that those such as Parsons and Malatesta undertake. Such people survey society and see oppression, poverty, squalor, the domination, economic and political, of some by others, and they condemn it as unjust, unnecessary and unconscionable. I am with such people entirely when they do that and largely for the reasons that they give. A modern, capitalist state is an engine of exploitation that aims to profit a few at the expense of the many and no genuine anarchist could stomach its continuance for any longer than it takes to replace it. However, for all its many irredeemable faults, such a political organisation of society has obviously had certain consequences. It has created a certain kind of civilisation, the kind we see around us today. Indeed, such states have been precisely the process of ever deeper and more thoroughgoing “civilisationing” of human society. This has created not just certain material conditions as the contexts for increasing numbers of lives but a whole raft of expectations - civilised expectations - which certain self-proclaimed anarchists have then seemed to take up and take over as if these were to be incorporated in something properly called anarchism. Diogenes had expressed anarchism as a rejection of civilisation at the level of a 4th century BCE Greek city state. In recent centuries, we’ve had anarchists who wanted to anarchise 19th, 20th and 21st century civilisation rather than to replace or ignore it.

In order not to be misunderstood at this point I should like to make it plain that, contrary to notable anarchists of past and present, people like Parsons and Malatesta, I want to question if the anarchist progress we seek is simply a matter of the political reorganisation of society for the purpose of retaining the imagined benefits of civilisation but by means more politically palatable and justifiable. Should government be kicked out and “solidarity” [which is really Malatesta’s word for socialism] be put in its place, are we any better off? Are we more free? Is this anarchy? What, to question Lucy Parsons, has being “civilised” got to do with any of this when someone like Diogenes [and perhaps also the proto-Daoists] would have told us that being civilised was exactly the problem? Is there a place here for the naive idealisms of those who would tell us that, were human beings set free from the yoke of government, a sentimental feeling would descend upon them and then all human beings together would suddenly work as one for the good of all, old enmities forgotten and old values set aside? It is true to say that both Parsons and Malatesta point out that a good deal of education might need to take place before such things could be achieved - and surely both do realise that people are educated primarily by that which they become used to - but a fundamental question remains in place for both of them and all those like them who see anarchism as the work of political reorganisation of society: does your kind of freedom give me, and any others, the freedom to ignore the context you wish to impose upon things and to mind our own business? Those who care about political organisation will, it seems to me, insist on their preferred options for they are saying its something we must determine, create and keep in place. Such things are a form of civilisation.

So, as I read Parsons and Malatesta, I am not always so sure that their version of freedom leaves us what I would call anarchistically free. They both seem to want a de facto political organisation to be the case in the world. They both configure the world socially and want to determine the context for social interaction taking place to provide for the needs of human beings. In short, they both, and certainly not only they in the history of political anarchism, imagine civilisation continuing, if in ways more politically suitable to their tastes. They are, I think, thinking of people as classes and imagining the world based on what they regard as the right relationships between these classes. They have become obsessed with a certain kind of political theorising, one that focuses on a socialist/capitalist binary opposition. This is their first, and a fatal, mistake, one the Daoists of old did not imagine when they imagined the Daoist idyll, as they sometimes did. Their thinking has been shaped by the world of their experience and its values in a way they might not have realised so that what civilisation wants they want too - but just by better means, as they see it. 

Yet people are not classes. People are individuals. People may think for themselves, act for themselves and decide their own needs and priorities in life for themselves. Indeed, most of us would imagine some kind of coercion to be taking place where such things were inhibited. Civilisation has told people that certain standards and certain things are things that they should expect to have and be induced to want and, in some but not all cases, anarchists, perhaps persuaded by the need to have a convincing rhetoric for civilised people, seem to want them too. But I can’t go along with them. Civilisation, its values and its tendencies, are the problem and not the solution. An anarchised civilisation is a contradiction in terms. Its anarchy or civilisation, as the first anarchists suggested, and not anarchy and civilisation. You can’t have anarchy and an organised economy for anarchy says things will organise themselves without it being any kind of organisation at all. So you might have to choose between anarchy and Netflix rather than imagining you can have both. You might have to do without mobile communications devices if you want social justice and equality. You might have to source your own food and maintain your own shelter and do without wasting your time watching You Tube videos if you want an end to government.

I am, of course, suggesting that anarchism, anarchistically configured, does not concern itself with the world. That, in fact, is exactly what the anarchy of nature is [and so often the anarchy of those taking their cues from nature as the first anarchists did]. It is not concerned with how things turn out for everyone or the prosecution of an ideologically acceptable plan for the world. It has no plan: it just takes place for it is not civilised. It is at odds with that kind of anarchism which is a political motivation for the pursuance of social and organisational goals. Anarchy has no goals and anarchism is merely the practice of life where one is free - and not least free from civilisation and its centralising tendencies. In this, I have no doubt that human solidarity would be a good thing in many cases and I don’t think that, in every case, “civilised” values are uniformly bad. Yet neither do I think that these are things that should be mandated or should be goals. There shouldn’t be any goals: this is anarchy! If any given person is not free to not want what you want, to not act as someone else prescribes, than I see no anarchy here. I see the coerced compromises of civilisation [even a socialist civilisation!] which become the hegemonies of a privileged few or the forced customs of collectives - and I see both as equally undesirable. So anarchism for me is the dissolution of borders and the annihilation of countries and the concept of nationality. It is a revaluing of all values, as Nietzsche described it, because anarchism is, first and foremost, a matter of values and not of politics and political organisation. It is about each person at the personal level and not about how people are organised when thought of as groups or classes of person. Anarchy, first of all, is the situation we as living human beings are in, a state and condition of our existence, and not something we may or may not create. Anarchism that rushes straight to how society is politically ordered is more concerned with ideological organisation than anarchy’s disorder as order. It is anarchism that has forgotten that no leaders means no leadership except that which each being has as a part of its own constitution.

But now you’re scared because my anarchism seems a lot more anarchic than yours. Its dangerous and not safe. Its anarchy that you don’t control! [What else would anarchy be?!] You might actually have to take responsibility for the whole of your life under my description of such an anarchism. The safety net is hard to see here. But did Diogenes talk about a safety net? Did Zhuangzi imagine us worrying about medical care for society? Civilisation does that, promising you long life and peace so long as you participate in its game. Do you believe this lie it cannot demonstrate in practice? Anarchy and anarchism, on the other hand, now becomes the spiritual and philosophical thing I have been claiming all along it is exactly because of this: it is a matter of differing values. Its a matter of asking what your life is and how it comes to be and you can’t go any further with anarchy and anarchism until you have answered this question. Many, of course, well known anarchists included, never ask this question and assume that civilisation, and the values it promotes and supposes, is what life is all about: what it provides, an imagined anarchist society should also provide. Therefore, such people never question if civilisation has got life right or not and neither do they ask how civilising activities have shaped and affected the people it has maintained and supported. Yet its exactly that that the spiritual and philosophical anarchists do put in question. Is life about its length, as a civilised person might maintain, or its quality regardless of length, as a spiritual and philosophical anarchist might maintain, for example? Is it about “social wealth”, as the civilised Malatesta suggests, or individual freedom in a world that is a natural anarchy, as a spiritual and philosophical anarchist might suggest?

Be of no doubt that where you land in answering these questions will determine what values you have. For me, anarchism must be more thoroughgoing than wanting to supply the same kind of life to people, albeit one with more equal distribution of resources in a world more free of coercion, on better political terms. As I have already described it, this type of anarchism seems little more than reorganising deckchairs on the Titanic so that everybody gets a bit more of the sun on the way down. This, it seems to me, whilst not a bad outcome, is an inadequate one and one in which anarchism is reduced to a political theory and so restricted from being genuine anarchism. As my metaphor suggests, its an epic missing of the point. Such a genuine anarchism would be an anarchism of values and goals, a real freedom rather than a freedom to be told to live in another way that isn’t like the old way you were told to live in before. Enforced socialism is no more anarchism than statism, government or capitalism is. Genuine anarchism is self-knowledge, self-education and self-determination, albeit in a world where you are not the only thing that exists.

You might reply that socialist civilisation is better than capitalist civilisation though and I wouldn’t really disagree. But I’m an anarchist and not a socialist and anarchism is not socialism! I believe in freedom pushed to its farthest possibilities and that means freedom from societal values, from civilising, as much as it means freedom to share values with others. It means freedom from the centralising tendencies of the socialist human being as much as the capitalist one and we may note here that both might equally want “civilisation”, regardless of their other profound differences, for civilisation services both equally well. It means noting that civilisation itself is far from a benign outcome of human existence and activity, one that has, in myriad ways, produced multiple forms of harm. Even as I write this there is a global panic about Covid-19, a corona virus, the spread of which has been magnified and enabled many times over by the existence of civilisation even whilst that same civilisation argues over how, or even whether, to stop its spread. This has all been made incredibly more complicated by civilised people’s need to carry on with their civilised lives, the form of life many of them are now entrapped within in their metropolitan existence. Numerous civilised people have hoarded supplies leaving the most vulnerable with little or nothing. “Yay!” for civilised values and the world it has created by creating networks people could take advantage of in order to hoard. Such forced centralisation, a by-product of the civilisation project, has endangered us all. It is not clear that socialism would have saved us either although in more socially-minded countries they seem to have got it under control better than those not so socially-minded.

This is but one current example and I encourage everyone to think about civilisation and the pitfalls of its existence and the problems it creates. They are things at least some anarchist forebears thought were destructive of a proper humanity. I also encourage people to compare it to the anarchism of actionless action that I have spoken to in my series of books on the subject of anarchy. My argument here, as part of that wider argument, has been that anarchism is not socialism even though anarchists may choose to act socially or even out of social concern. It has also been that anarchy and civilisation are two very different and, in my view, incompatible things. If you look at the characteristics of anarchy as I have discussed it in four books it is not something deliberately organised with set aims and purposes or desired outcomes. Anarchy, and so any anarchism that models its manner of operation, has no desired outcomes but only the outcomes that can, at any given time and place, happen. 

Accepting this would, no doubt, require a change of mind in a great many who now consider themselves anarchists yet who would also not like to lose the relatively comfortable, civilised lifestyles that they have been in receipt of thanks to civilisation - if they can help it at all. Unfortunately, though, they must choose. This is because anarchism, whilst being about the exploited workers on poverty wages and the corporate conglomerates who wants to poison your land so that its executives can become billionaires, is also about whether having a mobile phone is compatible with social justice or if owning luxury possessions is compatible with the world taking place as it can without desire or intention. I think its not and so I see civilisation and anarchy as antagonistic as Diogenes did and as the first Daoists did, those who placed simplicity far above civilisation - thought of as values. They were those who thought the antidote to civilisation's ills was simplicity. So I see civilisation as the problem rather than, as sadly all too many do, as the standard. And so I see authentic anarchist living, the practice of an anarchist life, as not something that civilisation gets to define or standardise. “Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without,” The Buddha is reported to have said. Doing so, it seems to me, he suggested that organising the world, even in ways we might imagine better, is not our concern. And besides, it will organise itself anyway along much more properly uncivilised, anarchist lines. All by itself. That is what I think Cynics and Daoists alike once understood very well.

And its the only way it can.

This is an extract from the fourth and final book in my series on spiritual and philosophical anarchism called There is Nothing to Stick to. It will be titled The Spiritual Anarchist's Philosophical Handbook. The three volumes published so far can be read here. 

ANARCHIST LITURGY

What follows in this blog is the brief contents of an anarchist liturgy. Both terms perhaps need some explanation, not least from my perspective in even presenting such a thing. Over at least the past year I have been working on writing three books under the title There is Nothing to Stick to which, as they turned out, became the basis for what I eventually conceived of as a philosophical and spiritual form of anarchism. This was based on a conception of all of existence rather than the political circumstances on one tiny planet, our planet, although, as is the nature of the thinking that went into it, it inevitably connected one with the other intimately. Anarchism, then, is consequently my description for the state of all existence everywhere and not simply a political thing related to human activity. When I describe something as anarchist in this sense, as with the liturgy below, I am using anarchy in this sense, the widest most spiritual and philosophical sense possible. "Liturgy," on the other hand, is used in a religious sense [although in my case not at all religiously] as a form of linguistic ritual and participation in something greater. You can, I hope, already see why this might be useful given my conception of anarchy. The purpose of such liturgy, here certainly spiritual and mysterious, is to give a form of words to our participation in the great anarchy which is existence itself. 

A word about the text. The text itself is not my own words or ideas although, in a few cases, I have rewritten a prior translation for what I regarded as better clarity. The text comes from numerous ancient texts such as the Tao Te Ching, the Zhuangzi, the Dhammapada, the "six words" of Tilopa, some words ascribed to Jesus of Nazareth, and one or two other [Zen] Buddhist texts such as Faith in Mind and the Mind Inscription. Here sources are important in that where something comes from gives it a context and also not important in that things should be judged on their content and not their identity. In short, do not let their provenance in Taoism, in Zen or elsewhere disturb you. What matters, if anything, is what they say and what they mean. They express a worldview, an ethic, an attitude, a practice of life, at once spiritual, philosophical, anarchist. My practice in using them is simply to read through them, which takes a few short minutes, and to silently ponder them. But you may use them as you like. There are no rules. This is offered to readers humbly for their thought and consideration. If it is of use and stimulates further thought and meditation - good! If it does not, also good! You can read how and why I came to such ideas by clicking the link to my more fleshed out thinking above or by reading other articles from this website.

Peace to you all.

It is said that in olden times those who ruled everything under Heaven wanted nothing and the world was fulfilled; they practised non-action and the whole of life was transformed; they were immensely deep in their stillness and the many families of the world were calm.

The action of non-action is called Heaven.

The words of non-action are called Virtue.

To love all humanity and to bring success to them is called benevolence.

To unite that which is not united is called greatness. 

To go beyond barriers and boundaries is called open-handedness. 

To have a vast multitude of diverse things is called wealth. 

To have and to hold Virtue is called guidance. 

To grow in maturity in Virtue is called stability. 

To be aligned with the Tao is called completion. 

To refuse to allow anything external which distracts you is called perfection. 

The one who clearly perceives these ten things will also be magnanimous in their ventures and their actions will benefit all life.

At the great Origin there was nothing, nothing, no name. 

The Whole arose from it; there was One without form. 

In taking different forms, it brought life and became known as Virtue. 

Before any shape was given their roles were assigned, various and diverse but all linked to one another. 

This was their lot. 

The forces worked on and things were created, they grew and took distinct shapes, and these were called ‘bodies’. 

The bodies contained spirits, each distinct and mortal. 

This is what we call the innate nature. 

Train this innate nature and it will return to Virtue; Virtue at its best is identical with the Origin. 

Being of the One is to be ultimately formless and this formlessness is vast. 

This is like the opening and shutting of a bird's beak, where the opening and shutting is like Heaven and Earth united. 

This unity is chaotic and disorderly; it looks stupid or foolish. 

This is known as Mysterious Virtue, being, without knowing it, part of the great Submission. 

Let me tell you about the way: 

There is a way that leads to vision, 

A way that confuses confusion. 

At the end of this way there is no sorrow, 

This way leads away from the world, 

But it is you who must make the effort to walk this way

Because you must follow the way to become free. 

And this is that way: 

Everything is transient, 

Everything is sorrow, 

Everything is unreal: 

This is the way.

Therefore:

Don’t remember, don’t project, don’t think.              

Don’t analyse, don’t control, let go.

No past, no future, no now.

No solution, no intention, no attachment.

This is the way.

Congratulations to the person who has toiled and has found life!

Follow the way of water and not a way of your own!

If you want the way to appear,

Be neither for nor against.

For and against opposing each other - 

This is the mind’s disease.

Without recognising the mysterious principle

It is useless to practice quietude.

Do not seek the real;

Just extinguish your views.

Living and dying while forgetting desire —

This is original nature.

Life is not life

And death is not death. 

The way makes no such distinctions. 

Things are not as they appear;

Yet neither are they otherwise. 

So you should only cease to cherish your opinions. 

In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.

In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.

Less and less is done 

Until actionless action is achieved.

When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.

The world is ruled by letting things take their course.

It cannot be ruled by interfering.

Practice non-action.

Work without doing.

There is nothing to stick to.

Be passersby. 

AN UNAPOLOGETICALLY PERSONAL AND SPIRITUAL EPISTLE FROM THE ANARCHIC EAST

Dear reader, grace and peace to you and thank you for reading this far into this project. This project itself began by quoting several sayings from the Chinese, Taoist text, the Tao Te Ching here. It was not remotely my intention in doing that either to promote Taoism or to make my readers Taoists. Put most simply, I am indifferent about whether that appeals to my readers or not. But I did make use of it because, when I read it, it opened up a new experience of life for me, a life that was not about rules and right and wrong and canonised directions or decisions but that was about flexibility to circumstances, flowing with life like water, simplicity, humility and a natural, dispassionate compassion for all things. I was taught not to strive and struggle and resist the things around me but to become soft and flow with them. All things pass, I came to understand, and the nature of nature is change. 

According to the earliest Taoist texts, when human nature is aligned with the rest of nature, order and harmony are the result. Taoism is, in this sense, a therapeutic understanding of existence. From this perspective, the purpose of the kind of self-cultivation the Tao Te Ching and Taoism itself recommends, something which also accords with the thoughts of many others I covered so far this project which have broadly promoted an anarchic ‘self-creation’, is to return to a mode of existence that is natural, but that has been obscured by social conditioning. This is essentially what the Cynics of the Greek world complained about too, that being less natural was bad and that being more natural was good. One Taoist remedy, repeating certain actions such as physical exercises or meditation, in such an understanding, is a way of training the body so that it is free to react in a spontaneous, natural way. It is similar to the experience of practicing one's shots in basketball and then making a key basket in the big game — the preparation through repetition makes it possible to act, at a certain moment, without thinking, in pure spontaneity. This accords well with the training aspect to this common to Taoism and to Cynicism, which acquaints one with nature, reality, in order to mimic it, just as it comes to be, and with the habitual practice of those such as Nietzsche, Cage and Goldman in There is nothing to stick to who, all in their own ways, exhorted human beings to more natural lives - and to practices and not simply beliefs.

Yet it is clearly the case that, throughout history, human beings can deviate, and have deviated, from the natural chaos of things, their natural law and order, and have gone after artificial and conventional things of their own imagining. When they do so, often they have brought destruction upon themselves and those around them. Confucian scholars, who were rivals to the Taoist scholars who wrote the Tao Te Ching, were criticized there for imposing rules and social expectations upon people. According to the Tao Te Ching, social mores, the artificiality and conventionality of human culture and threats of punishment, cause more harm than good, as they are methods of forcing appropriate behaviour rather than allowing it to occur spontaneously and naturally which is the Taoist wisdom on such things. That we naturally become the change we seek from such teaching is, in fact, the point of it. This way is to change yourself naturally - rather than to be pushed this way and that and beaten into shape artificially - which is the target in view. Authenticity here matters. It is especially the point where knowledge and knowingness is foreign and innocence is nature in its manner of operation. This is to flow with the river rather than to swim against its current because you are possessed by the idea that you know better. 

So, in this case, the only way to encourage appropriate behaviour is by modelling it. If, for example, a ruler is a person of impeccable character, those he leads will naturally follow. But how is the ruler to become the ideal role model, thus insuring harmony for his empire? As an 8th century Taoist master said to a Tang emperor, "Who governs his body, governs the country." The way forward, then, is to practice self-cultivation and to engage in self-examination. To live according to a nature which gives us nothing to stick to will not come all by itself. It will involve us forgetting a great many things. In fact, one thing common to all the thinkers and thought I have highlighted in this project is that human cultures, in their knowingness, have, in some way or to some extent, usurped a more natural mode of life we should rediscover by imposing things upon us we should forget. But this is not a matter of going back, as if it were better in the old days: it was always available to us and it still is today. It is not a matter of time or place but it is a matter of attitude, orientation and habitual practice. It is a matter of us having all we need if only we can let go of the things erroneously added.

In Taoism the central idea regarding nature and the natural is relationship. We cannot approach nature as a thing to be mastered but only as a partner in a relationship. The goal is to become a natural part of the anarchic environment. The way to discover that environment is to turn to nature in its manner of operation. For this reason early Taoist philosophers left the cities to learn from nature and primitive people living in remote mountain villages. They hoped to eventually bring human civilization into the natural chaotic state much as the Cynics did around the same time but in Greece and the Hellenistic and Roman empires instead of in China. In Taoism nature is taken to be infinitely wise, infinitely complex, and infinitely irrational. It is divine chaos or anarchy, not divine order. Yet, as chaos, it is order. One must take a personal yielding stance and abandon all intellectual preconceptions and culturally-inculcated habits. The goal is wu wei, acting without action, or non-action, doing nothing contrary to nature but existing as it exists. Nature does not need to be perfected or improved or subjected to human ideas of order. It is we who need to change; it is we who need to come into accord with it. It is we who need to attain to its naturalistic rhythms and not us who need to impose our measuring, instrumentalising mentality upon it.

Part of the Taoist aim in this is to sidestep the observed dualities of life. To this end Taoism historically rejected all dichotomies, even the most fundamental one of being versus non-being. The goal of Taoism is to attain that which precedes duality. The only way to discover this original source is to observe nature. During peak experiences in nature, the deep meets the deep. Yet the Tao, which we may think of as nature, is a divine chaos, not a random accident. It is fertile, undifferentiated, and teeming with unrealised creation. It is the mother of everything in nature as nature births itself; it is a great darkness that operates spontaneously to give birth and life to all things. Taoists, as naturalists, seek not to be saved or to win, but rather to return to the original source of ‘the Ten Thousand Things’ which is the term the Tao Te Ching uses for the superfluity of things in nature. They see creation not as a single event, but an ongoing process that has no beginning and no end. Its divine play is taking place right here and right now. The wise person becomes like an animal or a child, participating joyfully in the profoundly irrational and anarchic (dis)order. He or she learns to trust or accept the chaos. Is that not what being ‘natural’ would amount to?

Consequently, Taoists have always avoided anthropocentrism for they recognise that we are just one of many things and not a special thing, a chosen thing nor a necessary thing. Unlike other spiritualities, they have never lost their animal gods. Ancient Chinese shamans put on animal masks in order to communicate with these animal gods. Their spirit-animals were links between the worlds of people, ancestors, and gods. There was a tradition of animal frolics during which one became a particular animal, such as a crane or a bear. These rituals are still meaningful. Taoists speak of a direct knowing that resonates in the belly when one has direct contact with nature. It is not with the head but with the belly that one can participate in the sacred madness of the ancestral gods. It is only with the belly that one can appreciate the eternal flux and the underlying unity of the Ten Thousand Things. This is not to say, however, that we knowing moderns, fixated with ‘the intrinsic nature of reality’, have to take this literally and too seriously as if what can be empirically demonstrated is all that matters. How do we ‘empirically demonstrate’ a feeling or an idea or a context? Instead, we should appreciate it for its poetic, postmetaphysical resonances and for the relationship it signifies with things beyond us that are not about reified concepts of knowledge or understanding or truth. Here context is much more important and flowing with things that are all around us, rather than classifying them in a table or chart, is appropriate behaviour. If human beings are not chosen or special or necessary and if, instead, they are just beings in an environment, then that becomes the important thing.

The idea to write this particular essay came to me because I held a poll on my account on the social media service, Twitter, some time ago. In that poll I asked respondents what it was they believed in. I gave them the choices of ‘the Good’, ‘God’, however they chose to define it, ‘nature’ and ‘evil’. 73% of the responses chose ‘nature’ and yet, as I never enquired as to what those voting anonymously meant by ‘nature’, I have no idea what they think they were voting for. I suspect that not too many of them were very sure either but that the other options seemed even less appealing, as they conceive of them, than nature did. In this project I am trying to fill out some ideas about what ‘nature’ might refer to and what some of the consequences then are, including what living ‘according to nature’ might then entail. Having read the essays in this project and thought about it some more, I wonder, then, if quite as many might then still choose nature as a consequence? Then again, it may be that some who chose ‘nature’ might have thought that it entailed god, the good and evil as well although, in my view, at least two of those are ruled out specifically once we take the view that nature does not speak, has no opinions and has no canonical function at all.

Yet the third, god, is not, a priori, ruled out and I note that Taoism, my own personal impetus to begin this project, does not formally disdain the notion of gods although neither does it specifically focus on them as the point of what it is about or what it does. This, I think, is wise for we cannot rule out the notion of god even if, as I have written about in my essay Endless Impossible which I will post in the near future, the idea of gods as persons seems vaguely absurd. Yet there are other ways to understand divinity, if understanding it is what we are supposed to do with it, and I’m not sure at all that it is. One way, in fact, has been to think of it as something very like nature and Taoism, in this regard, is quite mysterious in regard to what ‘the Tao’ may refer to. That it is not a person or being seems clear but, as with the Jewish God of the Hebrew Bible, it seems we can say more about what it is not than about what it is. For we hopefully more natural, more flowing with nature, more antiepistemological folk, I would hope that we can lose any possible anxiety about that. There are things we do not need to know and things that wisdom dictates are not necessary to our existence in a harmony of all things. This, I suggest, is one such. As Richard Rorty has informed us earlier in this project, there are some vocabularies which go out of date and become useless to us for they are speaking a language which now appears inadequate in the light of our current beliefs and with what we regard as our direction of travel. 

So in what has come before in the blogs previous to this one I have taken a naturalistic spiritual tradition, Taoism, added in some antimetaphysical and hermeneutic philosophy of self-creation from Nietzsche, sprinkled in some of the artistic and aesthetic practices of the Zen Buddhist, John Cage, mixed in a dash of the anarchic politics of Emma Goldman flavoured with a little Cynicism from ancient Greece, and here baked it together with Richard Rorty’s antiepistemological pragmatism, the Cynic-flavoured Judaism of Jesus of Nazareth, some humanistic musings on our experiences of nature, and extrapolated it all back in a naturalistic, Taoist direction. In doing so I have not, I think, obligated you to become a Taoist, a Nietzschean, a Cagian musician, an anarchist, a pragmatist of especially Rortian bent, a follower of Jesus, an incurable romantic for natural vistas or engaging with the elements or, in fact, anything else. The whole point of this project, initially entitled “There is nothing to stick to”, a phrase which remains the motto at the heart of what has been going on, is exactly that there is nothing to stick to. Yes, I really mean it. I really do mean in the face of lots of potential readers who have been taught to believe and who, consequently, feel in their bellies, that there is, in fact, much to stick to that, actually, there isn’t. What we have been schooled in is a form a life but only a form of life. It is a culture but it is not nature. It is The Matrix but it is not the world outside it. Here Rorty’s hopeful, future-oriented pragmatism shines a searchlight on our future and asks us where we want to go which might, to some, seem quite a strange and, perhaps, even unasked question in a world in which, so often, things are set out before us as the conventions to follow, the guidelines inside of which we must stay put, if we do not want to be seen as weird, or strange, or idiosyncratic or even dangerous. 

Yet one message of this project is that it is one of possibility, of opportunity and of self-creation. We are, none of us, limited by what we are told we can be. We are limited only by what we can be and that may be something as yet unimagined simply because, as people of culture but not of nature, it has never occurred to us that we could be anything except that which we were told or that which human culture guided us to accept as the natural order of things. But nature is not order; nature is anarchic disorder. If we open our eyes to that and disentangle ourselves from cultural anchors which try to resist and control nature’s less interested existence, who knows what might come to be?

So please remember: there is nothing to stick to.

On another occasion I once wrote a short book for myself full of Taoist texts and other things of my own creation. At its beginning I wrote this poem which was meant to bring together a number of Taoist views in a compact way:

Something from Nothing.

Nothing from Something,

Ever Returning,

The Unending Tao.

With a Mind like the Seashore,

Devoid of Intention,

With Actionless Action,

We Flow like the Stream.

All Knowledge is Empty,

All Striving is Useless,

All Time is Deceiving,

All Separateness False.

Walk the Way of Humility,

Abide in Simplicity,

Be the child of Compassion,

Be at one with the Tao.

Reading it, we can pick out several themes:

1. That something comes from nothing and something goes back to nothing in a circular process of return.

2. That “the Tao”, which means “the way”, is the term for the whole, things being thought of as a holism.

3. That the mind is thought of as a seashore which should not cling to thoughts but let them be washed away without any concern.

4. That the natural principle of “actionless action” is maintained and upheld.

5. That imagery of a river flowing and of being “like water”, as in the Tao Te Ching, is used as a metaphor for human living.

6.That life is not a matter of either knowing or striving in the sense that it is not about either the imagined knowledge, truth or understanding gained or the effort one puts into life.

7. That time is an irrelevant invention and that events do not happen on a timeline.

8. That the separateness and objectivity of things is illusory.

9. That humility, simplicity and compassion are recommended as ways to live.

Yet, after some thought on what has already gone before in this project, we can add a few more ideas to this simple and compact list to flesh it out a little and give a fuller expression of Taoist proclivities:

1. There is a concentration on the present and a consequent de-emphasis of both past and future which dissolves any notion of the diachronic narrativisation of either the self or events.

2. There is a focus on emptiness and particularly emptying the self of thoughts, narratives and emotions. Emptiness is regarded as openness.

3. Consequently, the self is thought to be illusory, a fiction.

4. Malleability and flexibility are promoted as beneficial life traits.

5. Peace is the goal of life, both within the individual and, due to its view of all things, within the context of a harmony of all things together.

6. Life is not thought to be about possession - either of anything in particular or in general.

7. Due to its abandonment of the self and the consequent de-emphasis of the individual ego, there is a greater affirmation of everything else instead and a rebalancing and recontextualisation of things in relation to other things. In the difference of all things, a completeness is seen.

8. There is no set of rules or morals, nor any algorithm for deciding such things.

9. There is a sensibility, a kind of being, that is beyond words.

10. The existence of all things is not thought something that is yours to control.

What stands out to me about all this is how some of the key imagery of Taoism, water, the seashore, emptiness, is not exactly imagery which promotes what many, especially in the West which is my main personal frame of reference, would regard as “moral” in such places. An attitude to life which can easily be characterised as “go with the flow” does not seem too morally robust and might easily be imagined to be completely inadequate to a world of criminality, viciousness and hate. Yet here we must remember that Taoism is not primarily a morality but is, instead, a way of living and a way of understanding all things in one. It is actually an anarchic amorality, it is naturalistic and seeks to site human beings in the context of, and in relationship to, all others things. As such, in the Tao Te Ching we read the following:

"When the great Tao is forgotten, kindness and morality arise. When wisdom and intelligence are born, the great pretense begins. When there is no peace within the family, filial piety and devotion arise. When the country is confused and in chaos, loyal ministers appear." (Tao Te Ching, 18)

Here the world of which we are aware, the world of contention, arises only because the Tao has been forgotten, buried by other things. Yet it is when we forget such things as I have mentioned above as being core aspects of Taoism that we begin to need things like morality or, even worse, law. We see a similar thought made mention of in the past in the words of Dr Martin Luther King when he says:

"While it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless."

Here it is law which cannot mandate a morality but can restrain those determined to impugn it. Taoism, on the other hand, reminds us that it is only when the Tao is forgotten that people need morality to separate right from wrong and better from worse in the first place. But even then, as Dr King said, there are still those who need law to remind them of the civilised need for morality. Taoism itself is about a proclivity, an attitude, a disposition. It is fundamentally one of letting go. It says that if we live in humility, compassion and simplicity with all things without striving for this or that, without a desire to possess, then the result will be more peace. So it implies, if not directly says, that morality is an observed need if, and only if, you do not do this. It is when you forget or cover over the anarchic disorder of the universe that then you have to start the messy business of right and wrong, something which in Taoism’s naturalistic view only comes into focus once the amoral, non-purposive harmony of all things is forgotten.

DIOGENES AND NOTHING TO STICK TO: THE DOG WHO DENIES CIVILISATION

The history of Diogenes of Sinope, peripatetic philosopher, rascal and hound, is now told in numerous tales which, we must state frankly, may or may not be true. Put bluntly, who knows? Who now, millennia later than a man claimed to have lived between roughly 412-323 BCE, can even hazard a guess? Yet we do know that he was remembered and that writers and biographers in the Hellenistic Roman world were interested in memorialising the man known as a dog and that he was someone famous in that world for the anecdotes told about him and the character revealed in them. This, in itself, is something noteworthy for it is not the fate of every, or even most, human beings to be remembered centuries, let alone millennia, after their death.

One person who took it upon himself to record a broad swathe of the history of Greek philosophers was Diogenes Laertius. He was likely active in the first half of the third century CE and so at least 500-550 years after Diogenes had lived. In his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, which is now our major secondary source for Greek philosophy and philosophers, he recorded, in ways most experts think largely impartial and unexpanded, although certainly also largely uncritically, the details of the lives, opinions, sayings and deeds of Greek philosophers as much as he was aware of them. Often there would be differences of opinion - some said this happened, others said that, etc., - but Diogenes Laertius would then simply record the variants he was aware of and leave it to readers to decide what to do with the information. His book is not a philosophical book and neither does he himself set out to discover the truth of the matters he reports. Instead, he supplies a compendium of tales and leaves it largely at that. I have, so far, spoken about “his book”. But, in fact, Diogenes Laertius wrote 10 books in what was, in reality, a multi-volume work. Some philosophers, such as Plato or Epicurus, get a volume all to themselves [books 3 and 10 respectively] whereas others cover the notables from philosophical schools such as the Stoics or the Pythagoreans, etc. It is in book 6 that Diogenes Laertius turns his attention to The Cynics and the second philosopher he deals with under this rubric is Diogenes of Sinope. I want to survey this material now to present a picture of that philosopher whom, so it is said, even Alexander the Great wished to be if he could not be Alexander.

Diogenes was originally the son of a banker, Hicesias, on the southern coast of the Black Sea which is now northern Turkey but which was then colonised by Greeks. It is said that during his time in Sinope working with his father the currency that his father was in charge of, this being the coins that he was responsible for minting, became deliberately debased, making them worthless. For this his father, or Diogenes, or both of them, were imprisoned and banished respectively. Diogenes lost all his possessions and his citizenship as a result of this incident, for which he was exiled, and which has since been historically verified through archaeology in modern day Sinop which has revealed lots of coins which were deliberately debased in the mid 4th century BCE. This, as one powerful, and likely truthful, incident is extrapolated as an explanation of the later public character of Diogenes, a man who would debase and destroy the numismatic lifeblood of civilisation itself and attempt to make commerce impossible. Indeed, this very story of the currency being defaced was later metaphorically applied to Diogenes’ activity more generally and he was regarded as the debaser and defacer of civilisation itself.

After his exile from Sinope, and as a stateless individual, Diogenes next turned up in Athens where it is said he attached himself to the philosopher Antisthenes. Antisthenes had been a student of Socrates himself, a revered philosophical figure of the time and one in whose shadow many later philosophers would stand. Yet it seems that Antisthenes was not keen to accept Diogenes as his student and even took to beating him with a stick in order to dissuade him. Yet the tale told about this makes sure to tell us that Diogenes was steadfast and resolute in his desire to be taught by the words of such an eminent philosophical figure. This is presented as Diogenes being desirous of both virtue and wisdom when he says, “Strike, for you will not find any stick hard enough to drive me away as long as you continue to speak." 

At this point we learn of Diogenes’ “simple mode of life”, something explained as one consequence of his loss of possessions, citizenship and exile but also as a result of his observance, and learning from, nature. So we are told that Diogenes learns to wander about without worrying where he will sleep from a mouse and that he utilised his cloak, his only garment, as a bed. He carried a wallet, a bag over his shoulder, to carry scraps of food and used the natural environment as his dining room, his meeting room and his bedroom. Also related here is that, being unable to secure permanent accommodations, he made use of a discarded cask or barrel for such purposes and without any hint of shame or disgrace in his homeless state. Seeing a child drinking water out of its hands, Diogenes learns to do without a cup and, in similar wise, he learns to use a hunk of bread as a spoon, dispensing with the latter utensil as well. Here “simplicity” was an express aim of the virtue of Diogenes. Being constantly outside in such circumstances, it is related that Diogenes took to purposely innuring himself to environmental conditions, rolling in hot sands in summer and embracing snow covered statues in winter, the better to deal with extremes of temperature. He also wore no shoes. In matters of sustenance he was said to content himself with plain food and drinking only water. In matters of bodily functions, including masturbation, he carried them out in the open air and where he might be seen, such as in the marketplace, again without shame or disgrace as any other innocent creature might do. It seems Diogenes did not favour marriage as is expressed in the anecdote in which he replied to a questioner asking when a man should marry, "Young men ought not to marry yet, and old men never ought to marry at all." He did not practice a pride in appearance or the flattering of others by such means and is reported to have said to a youth smartening himself up very carefully, ''If you are doing that for men, you are miserable; and if for women, you are profligate." Diogenes in his habitual appearance and practices, then, disdained common yet artificial standards in favour of an uncivilised life.

What Diogenes is not presented as is a man shy of expressing opinions or as one who hides himself away from the business or discourse of others. As one old English translation of the account of Diogenes Laertius puts it, “He was very violent in expressing his haughty disdain of others.” Diogenes, in fact, is presented as someone very clever with words and a master of the put down. On numerous occasions he is depicted bandying words with others, from slavers to people who are hosting him to notables such as Plato, and on each occasion he showcases a caustic wit which is often deeply critical of some thought or idea or current practice whilst utilising clever wordplay at the same time. For example, he calls the “discussions” Plato has [which is to say his philosophy, in Greek his ‘diatribe’] “disguises” [in Greek ‘katatribe’] intending to suggest that what Plato and his hearers regard as the greatest of philosophies, philosophies which are revealing the order of things are, in fact, shrouds thrown over reality which turn it into something it is not. Diogenes is also notable for numerous broadly political observations which are critical of the “civilised” context of a Greek city such as Athens. He criticises the Dionysian festivals which were at the heart of Greek cultural life, the Olympic games which were of similar stature in Greek cultural life and denounces demagogues as “ministers of the multitude”. Sometimes he is dismissive of human beings in general as when he is reported to have thought of them as the most stupid beings of all or as in when, asked where in Greece he saw human beings, he answers “Nowhere”. In general terms it can be said that there are many examples of sayings where Diogenes bewails the fact that human beings do not attend to their virtue, which is a matter of asking what is really valuable for human beings in who they are and how they live, or to its pursuit and that he denigrates human beings generally for that fact.

We can see examples of this type of thinking in examples such as the following:

He used also to say, "That the musicians fitted the strings to the lyre properly, but left all the habits of their soul ill-­arranged." And, "That mathematicians kept their eyes fixed on the sun and moon, and overlooked what was under their feet." “That orators were anxious to speak justly, but not at all about acting so." Also, "That misers blamed money, but were preposterously fond of it." He often condemned those who praise the just for being superior to money, but who at the same time are eager themselves for great riches. He was also very indignant at seeing men sacrifice to the Gods to procure good health, and yet at the sacrifice eating in a manner injurious to health.”

One thing exampled primarily in these anecdotes is Diogenes’ preference for practice over discussion. Diogenes was not a man who extemporised at great length about theoretical ideas regarding virtue or philosophy or politics. In fact, one of his criticisms of Plato, and one of his caricatures of him, was as a talker. In another story we learn that Diogenes, being read out huge passages at length, exclaimed to those about him, “Be of good cheer, my friends, I see land!” when the reading stopped. He, in distinction, was a man who concentrated very much on the practical, the living, the doing. The virtuous life for Diogenes, and he is presented as one who sought it, for all his antagonistic activities in dialogue with Greek civilisation, was one you lived and not one you wrote books about or gave lectures about. We can, then, imagine Diogenes wanting to observe how someone lived to judge their virtue rather than being told to read a book someone had written about it or to attend one of their lectures. We may also see his manner of living as the substance of his philosophy and his practice of virtue. He extended this practical cast of mind even to himself, of course, and seems to have seen his own, often arrogant pronouncements or put downs as teaching for the masses he regarded as unenlightened in matters of virtue. For example, a story is told of Diogenes becoming a prisoner and being sold as a slave. When asked what he can do as a potential slave he answers “Govern men.” He then goes on to tell the master of the sale to announce him to potential buyers as “a master” that a buyer may purchase for himself. 

Diogenes’ virtue was very anti-civilisation and anti-customary. He seems to have argued that all things belong to the wise and the following argument is provided:

“Everything belongs to the gods; and wise men are the friends of the gods. All things are in common among friends; therefore everything belongs to wise men."

Here, although Diogenes acknowledged the gods, which were ubiquitously recognised throughout the world of his day, he was no fan of superstition. An example here is a tale told about a woman who bent down to honour the gods and exposed herself at which point Diogenes made a pithy comment about the god standing behind her and seeing her so exposed. His point, of course, was that such a thing was mere superstition and, as such, a nonsense. In the same way, in another anecdote, he disdained the notion of purificatory ablutions. Diogenes likewise despised logic which was logic for the sake of upholding the principle of logic, logic being a human theory and not the practice of nature. So it being argued logically that Diogenes had horns, in one anecdote, he puts his hand on his forehead in an attempt to find them and exclaims that he cannot see them. 

But although Diogenes opposed many customs and theoretical aspects of civilisation, examples here might be money which he opposed with poverty, law which he opposed with the workings of nature and superstition which he opposed with everyday experience, he was a man who did use reason and his virtue was not presented as unreasonable. Indeed, we may argue that all Diogenes actually did was argue for the folly of the things people had come to believe, as exampled in the way that they lived, and the sense or reason of the things he showed them instead. The whole point of Diogenes’ attitude and approach to virtue was that it was not found in codes and laws and customary practices which were entirely artificial in their basis and origin. What is there in front of you in nature, so he thought, is virtue enough. It is this which is our teacher. It is this which makes us human. Consider, for example, the anecdote in which Diogenes is asked what the proper time for supper is. He replies, “If you are a rich man, whenever you please; and if you are a poor man, whenever you can.” The point is that there is no “proper time for supper”. There never was, regardless of what civilised customs and practices now say. You can eat when you are hungry, or when you obtain food, whatever time it is.

It is at the heart of Diogenes’ conception of virtue that he regards the human beings of his experience as those who value the wrong things. So, for example, they value what happens in dreams as portentous for them - but they do not so value their waking thoughts and neither do they examine them nearly so seriously. Likewise, they complain to the gods regarding their luck and yet they value the wrong things in life and would not know good fortune from bad in the things that occurred to them anyway. In this, Diogenes makes the point that if you use the wrong measure your whole system of valuation is askew. Thus Diogenes’ thinking that “an easy life had been given to man by the gods, but that it had been overlaid by their seeking for honey, cheesecakes, and unguents, and things of that sort.” Diogenes’ point is that by building artificiality as an edifice on top of man as an animal in nature they had transformed and diverted the course of their lives into unnatural things. In a real sense, his claim is that human beings have replaced nature with the artificial. But, of course, in doing so, and as habitual creatures who manufacture “the normal”, they take the artificial then as exactly that which is “normal”, natural itself. This is why Diogenes repeatedly states throughout the anecdotes about him that he sees no human beings wherever he goes and why he is reported to have gone around in the daylight with a lantern claiming to be looking for one. That which is artificial, that which has been recreated on the basis of its own error-strewn imaginings, cannot be that which is natural. It has now transformed itself and lives opposed to that which it formerly was. Diogenes is only called a dog because human beings have so changed themselves that they no longer recognise themselves in him. They recognise him as closer to a feral beast that lives in nature - in distinction to their artificial selves. 

It should be pointed out that although it may not be the case Diogenes chose his poverty or his lifestyle, considering the story we have of him originally as the son of what we must assume was a relatively wealthy banker, once he found himself an exile and a stateless person without wealth or property he certainly embraced these as a means to true virtue, actively glorying in being a “cosmopolites” or citizen of the world as he referred to himself. We have ample evidence in the anecdotes collected by Diogenes Laertius for his contempt for civilisation, and often for specific examples of the civilised, people and things, to maintain that, thereafter, his poverty was a choice and one he saw as beneficial both to his living and promotion of virtue. We may even suggest, not quite scurrilously, that the poverty came first and the story about defacing the currency was tacked on later to provide a concrete example of Diogenes’ disdain for both wealth and commerce from the point of view of virtue. This was something that came to be a solid Cynic trait as others, such as the wealthy Cynic, Crates, would later be said to give their vast wealth away for the sake of their Cynic practice. Certainly the story about defacing the currency gives Diogenes’ Cynic practice nothing but plaudits in its retelling and provides him with solid credentials as a seeker after Cynic virtue. 

Diogenes was a man of zero wealth or financial means in his wanderings around Greece and that which he stood for was an entirely non-economic way of life, a natural way of life in which there simply is no currency and so no commerce. This, in fact, is why the coin defacing story is so important for it sets Diogenes up as one who wishes to negate the very basis of civilisation: the obligation of buying and selling and the amassing of wealth through this means. Diogenes himself begged out of necessity and what undermines or defeats the purpose of commerce more than the notion that you should just give something to someone because you can or because you want to and not because you are required to by some artificial, and artificially instigated, obligation? Here we should note it is reported that Diogenes called covetousness “the metropolis of all evils” and that he simply stood for things like simplicity, frugality and subsistence in its stead. We might observe here that you do not find any other beings hoarding huge amounts of stuff beyond their abilities to utilise. Yet those who call themselves human beings will often collect any number of things they even forget they possess. This is but empty, pointless greed which does not lead to any form of virtue.

Ways of living we learn from Diogenes:

Cosmopolites. He claimed allegiance to a world community.

No money. He defaced currency, physically and metaphorically, and claimed wealth and virtue were incompatible.

Askesis. He claimed philosophy and virtue were found in practice not theorizing. What matters is how you live.

Poverty. He welcomed it as a teacher that would lead the individual into virtue and as one that encouraged the individual to take up virtuous forms of life.

Shamelessness. He saw the conventions of the civilised as artificial, empty, pointless and corrupting of humanity.

Self-sufficiency. He thought one should be responsible for leading oneself into virtuous and philosophical ways and that one could do so on one’s own initiative.

Lamp. He taught that one should shine a light on others, both in their unnatural leanings and in the giving of examples for their virtuous prosperity.

Diogenes was not one that taught there was something to stick to. In Greek terms he opposed nomos, law, with physis, nature. If anything, he taught that you should be what you are rather than creating yourself as something that you are not. He was, thus, a naturalist in this sense and in the sense that he promoted a virtue that was anti-artificiality. He took his existence as it came and lived simply, at a subsistence level, from day to day. He was one who thought that what was important was not simply living but living well where this means living simply in accordance with nature, something which, in practice, means taking off the clothes of artificiality rather than putting something on. Thus, his near nakedness, having only a cloak, is also symbolic of the nature he valued and found meaningful. And he did find it meaningful as this final anecdote explains:

When a man said to him, “I am not calculated for philosophy," he said, “Why then do you live, if you have no desire to live properly?"