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Was Diogenes an authentic person? An existential reflection
Popular explorations of what it means to be an authentic person often include ideas such as “living in accordance with our own values and ideals”, “despite challenging circumstances” and “regardless of other people’s opinions”. Some people may also include “unique, idiosyncratic preferences” in their definitions.
This may be why Diogenes of Sinope, the ancient Socratic philosopher, is often heralded as an example of radical authenticity, based on the way he lived through his own philosophy.
He is known as the founder of Cynicism and considered to have influenced later schools of thought such as Stoicism in their consideration of the importance of personal autonomy.
Diogenes “put forward not a systematic philosophy but a systematic challenge”. He challenged those who didn’t think for themselves and rejected the need for material possessions. He is also known for living on a barrel, surviving by begging and owning close to nothing. He was provocatively contrarian and stubbornly self-sufficient.
The question is: was he an inspiring figure of self-reliance and authenticity like some modern commentators point out? An example to follow in our quest for finding our true selves and our path in life?
To explore these questions, I lean on the work of existentialists and humanistic philosophers who studied authenticity through a multidimension of ideas.
Authenticity as becoming
For Nietzsche, authentic living is not a fixed state as much as a process of becoming. He believed in the will to power as the basic energy moving humans to strive to express themselves and “become who they are”.
He thought we should embrace our unique desires and use our actions to express ourselves through them, as well as embracing the pain we encountered on the way. Loving it, actually.
Kierkegaard also saw authenticity as an ongoing project of “becoming who you truly are.” For Kierkegaard, this involved a leap of faith: a courageous commitment to feel “the dizziness of freedom” on the way to find “the truth that is true for me”.
He saw attaching itself into fixed roles or external accomplishments as distractions from the dread of this inquiry, which drives us into despair, a sickness of the spirit.
The authentic person instead takes full responsibility for their existence and strives to become their own true self through reflection and commitment.
Was Diogenes expressing his will to power and becoming who he was through his acts? Did he make a courageous leap of faith to become the great cynic that didn’t need anyone?
Or was he stuck with his values of renunciation and rejection? Was he a process of becoming, or did he simply become one day, and left it at that?
An authentic person is free to make choices
To be authentic, we need to be unconstrained to make our own choices. Others can limit our choices and limit our authenticity and growth. For social critic bell hooks “being oppressed means the absence of choices”.
But perhaps as constraining as limits imposed by others are those we impose on ourselves.
People often think that “having a personality” is a mark of an authentic person. But as Gabor Mate says, “much of what we call personality are only coping mechanisms a person acquired in childhood”. And these coping mechanisms, this “personality” ironically limit the potential of our person and its expression.
Simone de Beauvoir expressed it best in her childhood memoir. Reflecting on her best friend Zaza she explained “she was said to have a personality: that was her supreme advantage. I preferred owning the universe than having a single face”.
As we grow and experience difficulties our “personality” emerges to ward us off those difficulties again. This limits our human potential which “may project into an empty sky that it is to fill”. Given a choice between the universe and a self-image, we should have an easy choice – to grow into who we may become through the power of free choice.
We are tempted to see Diogenes as radically free. He did what he wanted when he wanted, since he did not need to conform to societal rules in exchange of material possessions or societal acceptance.
Was Diogenes then truly a free man? Or was he constrained by his own designed image of a free man?
Given a choice of a nice house, a great job or enriching love, he had to say no, or he would lose the self-image he so painstakingly had created of the great cynic.
He was limited by his own image. And that, for existentialists, would have made him inauthentic.
Was Diogenes then truly a free man? Or was he constrained by his own designed image of a free man?
An authentic person is unfazed by the ambiguity of life
Authenticity is a process of becoming and it’s founded on freedom.
The problem is that freedom is a complicated, slippery concept.
Ambiguity sits at the core of authentic freedom in the eyes of existentialists such as Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. They lived by this example: they constantly changed their minds through their lifetime as they matured, experienced ethical dilemmas and emerged as human beings through the process.
Sartre brought his thinking about freedom and authenticity to life in novels such as “The Age of Reason”. Set in late 1930’s Paris, characters embrace different lifestyles pursuing different versions of freedom, but end up discontent.
This is because authenticity is ultimately ambiguous, difficult, incomplete, insecure, uncertain and ever-changing. To be authentic is to embrace these facts and be willing to think and re-think. To be willing to face the anxiety that comes from being free to make our choices and suffer the consequences of them.
This is why people willingly give their freedom away. Sartre called this “bad faith”: a pretense that our choices are limited by things out of our control, or the embracing of roles that determine our behaviours.
Perhaps the clearest example of bad faith in this novel is Brunet, who having joined the Communist party has no thinking left to do, no ambiguity to worry about. He feels secure, but only because he has traded his freedom away. As he says to his friend Mathieu “take one step further, renounce your freedom: and everything shall be rendered unto you”.
But this doesn’t make political affiliation bad faith either. Apathy and inaction is still a choice we’re making. As Beauvoir says “there is hardly a sadder virtue than resignation” (as quoted by Skye Cleary).
Authenticity is ultimately ambiguous, difficult, incomplete, insecure, uncertain and ever-changing.
It’s complicated. And the willingness to engage with it is what facilitates authentic becoming.
Was Diogenes able to tolerate the ambiguity of freedom and existence? It seems that his uncomfortable life did at least offer some comforts: to always be right in his own mind, to always know what he should do. Existentialists would argue that isn’t authentic, brave or genuinely human.
To be authentic we need to grow with and alongside others
Finally, authenticity is something we express through others.
Philosophical schools across the world place others and the world at large at the core of the individual enquiry.
Ubuntu is a concept in African philosophy that translates as “I am because we are”. The core idea is that our identity and experience is inseparable from that of those around us, who foster our growth. Like Professor James Ogude says “agency does not only reside in individualistic self determining and autonomous bodies, but more importantly, in relationally, constituted social persons”.
European phenomenologists came to the same conclusion. Ernesto Spinelli sums it up as “I can only know who I am by comparing some assumed aspect of myself to that which I have interpreted as existing in others”.
Sartre – influenced by phenomenology – expressed this idea of a balance between individual and social existence in the idea of being-for-oneself and being-for-others. Growing around others in “healthy friction” is what makes us. As Skye Cleary explains simply of this Sartrean concept: too much being-for-oneself would make us intolerable, too much being-for-others, a doormat. Neither is truly authentic.
“Agency does not only reside in individualistic self determining and autonomous bodies, but more importantly, in relationally, constituted social persons”.
Professor James Ogude
We exalt Diogenes as authentic and real in Western philosophy since he was such an individual. He didn’t care what others think, nor of social conventions. He defined himself on his own accord.
And yet, it’s impossible to miss that he still necessarily defined himself through others. It was the rejection of others that defined him, constrained him, limited his choices. Him, more than anyone else perhaps really cared what others thought, but made a big theatre out of it and ultimately deceived himself through it.
This was well understood by Nietzsche, who exalted friendship “as the highest feeling”. He tells the story of a Macedonian kind who gave an Athenian philosopher a large of sum of money, and the philosopher rejected. To this the king said “has he no friend”. To Nietzsche, this shows the king was disappointed that the sage was so full of pride it was incapable of friendship.
Who was Diogenes, and what was up with him?
My conclusion is that nobody should aspire to be more like Diogenes. Who wants to choose to live in squalor, hunger, ridicule, rejection, ostracised from others, all in exchange for the cultivation of a self-image?
For Simone de Beauvoir, Diogenes would be a “serious man”. A person living a defective existence that avoids existential anxiety through the living of an idea as their everything. She said “the serious man knows his freedom but remains chained”. Sartre depicted serious men in his novels, such as Brunet above mentioned, or the Autodidact in “Nausea”, who reads a library in alphabetical order.
This neurotic, narcissistic attitude of Diogenes would not have deceived Karen Horney either who would have no trouble seeing in him an extreme version of a “self-sufficiency” neurotic trend: “necessity to never to need anybody, or to yield to any influence, or to be tied down to anything…dread of ties, closeness, love…separatedness the only source of security”.
It’s likely that difficult experiences as an exile made Diogenes fixed on this undesirable state. And it’s not without merit to recognise the provocation he left and inspired those around him.
Perhaps, given a chance to mentor him at an important time, we could have offered him this beautiful thought from Foster: “Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die”.
“The serious man knows his freedom but remains chained”
Simone de Beauvoir
References
Bibliography
Nietzsche, F. translated by Kaufman, W. (1974) The Gay Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bakewell, S. (2016) At the existentialist café: freedom, being, and apricot cocktails. London: Vintage.
Cleary, S. (2022) How to be you: Simone de Beauvoir and the art of authentic living. New York: St. Martin’s Essentials.
Maté, G. (2011) When the body says no: exploring the stress-disease connection. London: Vermilion.
Sartre, J.-P. (1963) Nausea. London: Penguin Modern Classics.
(original French version is 1938.)
Sartre, J.-P. (1945) The age of reason. London: Penguin Books.
Spinelli, E. (2005) The interpreted world: an introduction to phenomenological psychology. 2nd ed. London: Sage.
de Beauvoir, S. (1958) Memoirs of a dutiful daughter. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Horney, K. (1942) Self-analysis. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Podcasts
West, S. (2022) “Nietzsche – The creation of meaning”, Philosophize This!, Episode #159. Available at: https://philosophizethis.org/ (Accessed: 29 July 2025).
West, S. (2017) “Kierkegaard on anxiety”, Philosophize This!, Episode #079. Available at: https://philosophizethis.org/ (Accessed: 29 July 2025).
