kynismos

Greek kynismos (dog-ism) came from kyon (dog). The Cynics — the Dog Philosophers — were a school founded in the 4th century BCE by Antisthenes, a student of Socrates, and made famous by Diogenes of Sinope. Diogenes reportedly lived in a ceramic pithos (large storage jar) in Athens, rejected all conventions of polite society, and called himself a dog. When Alexander the Great visited him and asked what he could give him, Diogenes reportedly replied: 'Stand out of my sunlight.' He owned nothing and wanted nothing.

The Cynics argued that virtue alone was the good, and that virtue required freedom from social convention, reputation, wealth, and power. Everything civilization prized — political office, fine food, reputation, sexual propriety — was indifferent to the virtuous life or actively destructive of it. The Cynic mode was to demonstrate this by rejecting it publicly and conspicuously, as a dog sleeps where it wants and takes what it finds.

The word's meaning drifted dramatically between ancient and modern. Ancient cynicism was a positive philosophy: virtue through radical freedom from convention. Modern cynicism — the belief that people's motives are always selfish, that idealism is delusion — is roughly the opposite of ancient Cynicism. The ancient Cynic rejected wealth and convention for virtue; the modern cynic doubts that virtue exists at all.

The transformation happened slowly through the Roman period and Middle Ages. The Stoic school (founded by Zeno, a Cynic student) absorbed the positive elements of Cynicism and systematized them. What remained of popular Cynicism was the biting, the bark — the dog's hostility to social pretension without the underlying philosophy of virtue. The dog became a skeptic and then a misanthrope.