The Old Greeks had various quasi-religious raggedly clothed cynics wandering about rejecting society in favour of inner self-sufficiency. They had a lot in common with the Jains and other further eastern religion and philosophy. They were idealist in the sense that the big idea of renunciation led to everything else. Diogenes was the most famous, described by Plato as 'Socrates gone mad'. There were some great jokes like this one:
… the tyrant Pisistratus was touring Attica when he passed an old peasant working the thin soil. Wondering what taxes he might be able to demand from the man, Pisistratus asked the man what his farm produced. "Terrible pains" came the reply. (Desmond 2005: 2) My view is that social cynicism precedes us as thinkers and that a modern cynic looks for the constructors of this rather than retreats into herself and thus being constructed out of the change cycle. This is because science has changed what we can know. Any inner retreat to 'rationality' is actually Gnostic now, a return to nothingness - other than for temporary subjective review. This is because we know the earth is finitely doomed and that technology could see us through to an actual and potentially very different future in which we make a creative rationality. -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
