← All schools🏺 c. 4th century BC
Cynicism
Living in a jar and telling Alexander to step out of the sunlight — a philosophy argued by way of life itself.
The Cynics left almost no systematic writing, because their claim was that philosophy lives in a way of life, not in books. Diogenes carried a lamp in daylight "looking for an honest man," treating custom, property and respectability as illusions to be punctured. "Cynic" — dog-like — began as an insult; they wore it gladly. Zeno later absorbed this radical contempt for externals into Stoicism, domesticating it into an ethics one could practice inside an empire; meanwhile the modern sense of "cynicism" — believing in nothing — has drifted to nearly the opposite of the ancient one.