Names Without Essence: Diogenes, Nietzsche, and the Fiction of Definition

Introduction: The Limits of Definition

In the history of philosophy, few issues have proven more elusive than the problem of definition. What does it mean to define something? Is a definition a mere verbal convenience, or does it capture the true essence of a thing? Two radically different figures—Diogenes the Cynic and Friedrich Nietzsche—gesture provocatively toward the same unsettling conclusion: language, far from offering clarity, often obscures the nature of what it seeks to describe. Diogenes famously upended Plato’s definition of man as a “featherless biped” by presenting a plucked chicken and declaring, “Here is Plato’s man.” Nietzsche, in On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, calls language a “mobile army of metaphors,” exposing the fiction at the heart of naming.

This article investigates how these two provocateurs challenge the presumed stability between word and world. Their gestures—mockery and philosophical skepticism—disclose not merely the failure of language to capture essence, but also its latent capacity for reinvention. What do Diogenes and Nietzsche reveal about how language functions, breaks, and repairs itself?

Diogenes vs. Plato: Definition and Disruption

Plato’s Academy aimed to map the world through reason and form. In this context, defining man as a “featherless biped” seemed a tidy encapsulation of human nature. Diogenes, ever the disruptor, plucked a chicken and paraded it before the assembled students, announcing, “Behold, Plato’s man!”¹

This gesture was not just a prank. It exposed the emptiness of essentialist definitions—the presumption that language can distill the truth of things into fixed conceptual forms. Diogenes’s parody functions as an early critique of linguistic idealism. The mock definition draws attention to the arbitrary markers used to classify reality. If one can meet the definition of “man” merely by being featherless and bipedal, then language clearly fails to bind itself to essence.

In modern terms, this aligns with Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist insight that signs do not derive meaning from their referents but from their differential position within a system. “Man” means what it does not because it captures a real essence, but because it stands in opposition to “animal,” “woman,” “god,” and so on.² Diogenes, centuries earlier, performs this critique—not by theory, but through embodied satire.

Nietzsche’s Worm: The Metaphor of Naming

Friedrich Nietzsche extends this skepticism in a more explicitly philosophical register. In On Truth and Lies, he observes that humans “designate only the relations of things to men,” and calls all concepts “illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.”³ One of his most vivid metaphors involves the confusion between “snake” and “worm”—two creatures that resemble each other in form but differ profoundly in meaning:

“We speak of a snake: this designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary differentiations!”

This example illustrates the metaphorical and provisional nature of naming. “Snake” and “worm” are not natural kinds but linguistic artifacts, shaped by human perception and purpose. Nietzsche insists that names never correspond to essences; they are, at best, practical metaphors hardened by habit.

This is precisely Diogenes’s move: he shows that Plato’s definition, meant to point to “man,” fails because it allows chickens. The plucked chicken is to Plato as the worm is to Nietzsche’s snake — both unmask the gap between word and world. Language pretends to precision but rests on analogy and expedience.

Yet Nietzsche’s tone carries more existential weight. For him, the collapse of naming is not comic but tragic—a revelation that what we take for truth is built upon shared delusion. Still, there’s a curious asymmetry in his view. He recognizes the arbitrariness of signs but fails to credit the system’s ongoing resilience. The “truth” of language, however metaphorical, is sustained by collective, iterative acts of disambiguation. Language may be illusion, but it is a socially refined one.

Language as Adaptive System: Beyond Cynicism

Where Nietzsche offers despair, Diogenes implies play. Plato’s original definition of man, after being mocked, was quietly revised: “a featherless biped with broad nails.”⁴ This postscript to the anecdote reveals something essential about language: its responsiveness to critique. Mockery, here, does not destroy meaning—it recalibrates it.

Saussure’s account helps explain this phenomenon. Although signs are arbitrary, they stabilize through use and opposition.⁵ Language evolves not by revealing ultimate truths but by adapting to communicative failures. A bad definition prompts a better one; a confusing term is clarified in context.

Wittgenstein, too, enters this lineage with his notion of “language-games.” Meaning is not found in correspondence with reality but in the use of words within specific forms of life.⁶ “Man” means one thing in biology, another in poetry, and yet another in everyday speech. Paraphrasing Aristotle: “Man is said in many ways.” What holds the term together is not its essence, but its utility within varied but related practices.

Who Owns Language? Experts vs. Speakers

A deeper issue emerges: who gets to define? Philosophers like Plato act as linguistic legislators, crafting definitions from above. Yet language belongs not to experts but to its speakers. Diogenes, in mocking Plato, assumes the voice of common sense—or better, of language itself—resisting elite control over meaning.

Linguistic change often comes from below, shaped by usage more than decree. New meanings emerge not from philosophical insight but from pragmatic need. The many redefines “man” more effectively than the wise. This tension persists today between Grammarians and language users.

From Metaphysics to Pragmatics: A Synthesis

Both Diogenes and Nietzsche challenge the idea that words can capture essence. Yet they differ in tone and implication. Diogenes, though caustic, triggers linguistic repair through performance. Nietzsche, more melancholic, portrays language as a ruinous edifice built on forgotten lies.

Still, there is common ground. Both view naming as non-transparent, a matter of negotiation rather than revelation. Language does not “tell the truth” in any final sense—but it works. It adapts, adjusts, and survives.

This is where Saussure and Derrida extend the lineage. Saussure’s system of differences and Derrida’s différance each radicalize the view that meaning is never present in the sign, only deferred and differentiated.⁷ Language does not reflect reality—it constructs it.

Conclusion: Language, Laughter, and Survival

Diogenes exposes language’s pretensions by turning philosophy into slapstick. Nietzsche deconstructs its illusions with surgical precision. Both confront the instability of naming. But while Nietzsche gazes into the abyss of linguistic arbitrariness, Diogenes laughs—and in that laughter, we glimpse something vital.

Nietzsche is right to say there is metaphor and arbitrariness at the root of language. But language is not helpless. It contains a built-in repair mechanism: the collective, unconscious intelligence of its users. While Nietzsche emphasizes the fictionality of all naming, we might wisely add: language survives not by being true, but by being useful.⁸

When “snake” and “worm” overlap, speakers respond—not by abandoning speech but by clarifying, inventing, negotiating. The instability of language is not a flaw, but its strength. It permits evolution, misunderstanding, and understanding all at once. In this view, truth becomes not an essence captured in words but a shared metaphor—refined through laughter, error, and time.

Notes

1. Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VI.40.
2. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 120.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), 84.
4. Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VI.40.
5. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 67.
6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), §23.
7. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 11–12.
8. This formulation echoes Roy Harris’s view in The Language-Makers (London: Duckworth, 1980), that “language is a function, not a form.”