Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

by Pamela Mensch

  Or finally, instead of designating either the ancient or modern philosophical perspective, is the term meant to evoke an eccentric literary tradition of philosophical satire and performance art associated, above all, with Menippus and Lucian?3 This tradition—as the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has taught us—finds rich sources of humor in philosophers philosophizing, as in Lucian’s Philosophers for Sale!, in which the founding fathers of Greek philosophy are auctioned off as slaves with Zeus and Hermes as the auctioneers.

  Separately, why does being “cynical” seem to mean one thing when applied to ourselves (it’s good to be free of illusions) and another when applied to someone else (it’s unfortunate to be disillusioned and have nothing to believe in)? Is nothing sacred? If contemporary culture and society seem designed to breed “cynicism,” is being cynical therefore the hallmark of contemporary authenticity—the only possible honest response to a morally bankrupt present? Or is it the antithesis—an expression of our own bad faith, our collusion in the collective swindle?

  In any case, the Janus-faced nature of Cynicism/cynicism is not a product of the modern world’s complexity. The term was already bivalent in antiquity, distinctly affirmative in some contexts—as when Diogenes identifies himself to Alexander the Great as “Diogenes the Dog”—and pejorative in others—as when people throw bones at him, or otherwise treat him “like a dog.” And this dialogical quality extends to the nature of Cynic philosophy itself, which finds expression not in the Socratic scrutiny of definitions and examples or in systematically argued treatises like Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics but in a series of deliberate philosophical provocations that emerge from Diogenes’ attempt to live “according to nature” while embedded in the culture of Athens in the fourth century BC.

  But what exactly was Diogenes’ relation to the philosophical culture of his day? Was he the prodigal son of the Socratic tradition, but one who never did come home again, choosing instead to live in his barrel as one “of those who have a right to call themselves homeless in a distinctive and honorable sense,” as Nietzsche would say?4 Is that why, when asked what sort of person Diogenes was, Plato replied simply: “A Socrates—gone mad”? In that case, the ancient doxographers were onto something when they linked him to Socrates by casting him as the pupil of Antisthenes, who was with Socrates the day he drank the hemlock. Or did Diogenes—when propelled into exile from Sinope, his hometown on the Black Sea—bring something fundamentally new to Plato’s Athens? Did he reject Socrates’ intellectualist conception of human excellence—the doctrine that “virtue is knowledge”—in favor of a somatic ideal? This construction of human flourishing is what Foucault would call a “practice of the self”: an askesis, or physical discipline, that serves a moral purpose such as self-sufficiency and happiness. Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé has persuasively argued for the latter interpretation in her monograph L’Ascèse cynique.5 Unfortunately, the primary sources we would use to answer such questions—the Cynic classics written by or about Diogenes, Crates et al.—are lost and survive only in anecdotes and aphorisms cited by much later authors, most notably Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers.

  While collaborating with Goulet-Cazé and thirteen other scholars on a collective history of Cynic philosophy and its reception in Europe, I became increasingly aware—thanks to the work of Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting in particular—that Cynicism was far more important to the emergence of specifically modern forms of thought than was generally acknowledged. It made me wonder why specialists in modern literature, philosophy, and political theory were not giving the dogs the attention they deserved. After all, as Nietzsche wrote in Human, All Too Human (1878):6 “The Modern Diogenes: Before one searches for man, one must have found the lantern. Won’t it have to be the Cynic’s lantern?”

  Some twenty years later, things look very different. Following the publication of Niehues-Pröbsting’s pioneering work on the nature of Diogenes’ Cynicism (Kynismus) and how it devolved in the modern period into cynicism (Zynismus)7 came the unexpected interventions of two high-profile thinkers.8 In 1983 Peter Sloterdijk published Kritik der zynischen Vernunft,9 which became the best-selling work of philosophy published in Germany since World War II; a year later Michel Foucault gave five lectures on Cynicism at the Collège de France, which brought to conclusion a two-year course on the history of parrhesia (or “freedom of speech”)—which Diogenes of Sinope calls “the finest thing in the world.”10

  While both philosophers acknowledge their debt to Niehues-Pröbsting,11 neither knew of the other’s work. Looking back, I now realize that my colleagues and I—along with Foucault and Sloterdijk—were unknowingly collaborating in the most important revival of interest in Cynicism and its modern reception since the Enlightenment, one that continues to this day and has already given rise to a series of important books, particularly on the afterlife of Cynicism and the origins and nature of its modern doppelgänger, “cynicism.”12

  But why the recent surge of interest? After all, following the flurry of activity associated with the Enlightenment—scholarly, literary, and philosophical, among the philosophes and their contemporaries in Germany13—in the course of the nineteenth century Diogenes’ role as guard dog of the School of Athens was somehow forgotten. Among philosophers there were important exceptions, most notably Nietzsche, whose interest in the dogs grew as his thought matured.14 In his late biographical essay, Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are (1888), he boasts ironically that his own books attain, here and there, “the highest that can be attained on earth—Cynismus.”15

  But Hegel’s dismissive treatment of the Cynics, however superficial, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy,16 set the tone for academic philosophy in the nineteenth century: “There is nothing particular to say of the Cynics, for they possess but little Philosophy, and they did not bring what they had into a scientific system.”17 Hegel was looking for a system and could not manage to find one latent in the seriocomic deeds and sayings of Diogenes and Crates, but Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus could and did. Of course they had the Cynic classics, and Zeno, according to Diogenes Laertius (7.2–4), was converted to philosophy by a chance encounter with Crates: Chrysippus and Zeno’s philosophical response to the exemplary lives and utterances of Diogenes of Sinope and Crates is now known as Stoicism. Pace Hegel, to sever Stoicism from its roots in Cynicism is to render it incomprehensible on its own terms,18 although it is true that some of the essential ingredients of Cynicism, most notably its philosophical use of shameless satiric humor (as seen, for example, in Diogenes’ defense of masturbating in public: 6.46),19 did not survive the translation into the more respectable philosophy of Zeno, Chrysippus, and Cleanthes.

  It may be expected that the age of Victoria was not particularly receptive to the unruly hounds of Athens and their habit of frank truth-telling, but attempts to use the Oxford English Dictionary to pinpoint the moment at which Diogenes’ Cynicism is degraded into its specifically modern form can be tricky. One scholar20 cites the following example as evidence of the newly emergent modern meaning: “(1814) I. D’Israeli Quarrels Auth. III. 16 Our cynical Hobbes had no respect for his species.” But this usage is perfectly traditional and true both of Hobbes and of Diogenes, who agreed on at least one thing: the animal nature of man.21 In fact, the OED’s characterization of modern usage—“cynical, adj. Now esp. disposed to disbelieve in human sincerity or goodness; sneering”—isn’t actually borne out by the examples it cites. Only one fits this description: “(1875) F. W. Farrar Silence & Voices iii. 65 A cynical journalism which sneered at every belief.” What does happen over time is that the association of Cynic/Cynical with a school of Greek philosophy and its governing canine metaphor—emblematic of Cynic teachings on multiple levels—is slowly forgotten. The rich legacy of Cynic satire as the primary means of deconstructing conventional morality—so successfully revived and reinvented by authors as various as Rabelais, Erasmus, Swift, and Diderot22—is reduced to a journa
listic “sneer,” like the Cheshire Cat reduced to his grin.

  Yet we know the distinctly modern meaning of lowercase cynicism when we hear it, as it is memorably and precisely expressed by Oscar Wilde when he has a character (Lord Darlington) in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893) observe: “a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”23 This definition is an almost exact inversion of the way Diogenes is represented in the anecdotal tradition in Diogenes Laertius, namely, as acutely aware that price and value rarely cohere—at least, according to the Cynics’ criteria, as his repeated mockery of the logic of exchange-value demonstrates:24 for Diogenes of Sinope, use-value always trumps exchange-value.

  Of course, the philological approach to the emergence of new meanings—that is, ways of using a word—has its limits. It is clear from the examples of Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Bierce (1842–1914) that both the ancient and modern meanings were still alive in the late nineteenth century and could be played off against each other, as Bierce does in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)25 when he defines the Cynic as “a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.” The all-but-forgotten term of abuse “blackguard,” which can serve as a noun (“scoundrel”) or a verb (“to revile”), serves to acknowledge the nineteenth-century devaluation of the “Cynic,” whose moral clarity is then vindicated in a witty reversal of that reductive judgment.

  The two most important contexts for understanding the devaluation of the “Cynic” by some nineteenth-century writers are: (1) the reaction against the French Revolution, in which the philosophes are caricatured as cynical, destructive thinkers by conservatives like Burke;26 and (2) the modern discourse of money and commerce, which begins in the Enlightenment but accelerates with the rise of the industrial economy of the nineteenth century.27 In the latter context, Cynicism takes precisely the form in which Wilde’s aphorism casts it—a way of thinking that seems to reduce all questions of value to matters of price, which in turn is determined not by individuals or by reason, but by the impersonal forces of a modern market economy. Indeed, the brutal new realities of an industrialized society have proven a fertile breeding ground for modern “cynics” of every stripe from the robber barons to Bernie Madoff.

  In order to survive in this environment, one must learn lowercase cynicism as a modus vivendi. These specifically early-nineteenth-century forms of reaction—“the slandering of the Enlightenment’s representatives as cynics by the Counter-Enlightenment,”28 on the one hand, and the fear of the demoralizing effect of modern commerce, on the other—presuppose a larger cultural shift identified by David Mazella in his indispensable study of the modern meanings of Cynicism: “the single largest factor in the transformation of the Cynic between the early modern through the Enlightenment period was the collapse of rhetorical humanism’s stratified model of face-to-face interaction, and its replacement by the new, post-rhetorical configuration of power and publicity demanded by a vernacular print culture.”29 What this means in practice is that the walking, talking philosopher of antiquity, so lovingly reimagined by Renaissance authors, is slowly disassembled only to reappear as a set of disparate texts and discourses available for appropriation, however tendentious or alien to the ancient figure of Diogenes. Only a few, rare philosophers who are also artists of contempt, like Nietzsche or Diderot, could still grasp the tradition as a living whole in all its motley contradictions and make it their own.

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  But as important as the bifurcation of Cynicism into a modern, reactive disposition and an ancient philosophical position is to its post-Enlightenment trajectory, it is the splitting off of philosophy from the life of the philosopher and the relegation of the latter to a matter of merely “biographical” interest that explains the philosophical decline of the dogs in the wake of Hegel.30 The contrast between this characteristically modern, more academic conception of philosophy with that of Diogenes Laertius, who delights in the ways philosophers’ lives (and deaths) can mock or vindicate their philosophizing, could not be clearer. And it is precisely this more practical, existential understanding of philosophy as a source of models for how to live—not simply how to think or argue—that explains the great appeal the Cynics had for Renaissance humanists and Enlightenment philosophes, as well as for contemporaries like Foucault and Sloterdijk, impatient to free philosophy from the confines of academe. In their hands, Diogenes becomes a means of rediscovering what Foucault calls “the scandalous banality of philosophy” in our own time.31

  It is true, however, that even in antiquity the Cynics’ standing as philosophers was contested from the very beginning: their explicit emphasis on praxis over abstract theory wittily conveyed (in Diogenes Laertius) by Diogenes of Sinope’s mockery of academic philosophizing in the style of Plato (e.g., the theory of forms: 6.53) or Aristotle (e.g., syllogistic reasoning: 6.37 and 68) invited counterattacks. Indeed, their adversaries charged that Cynicism was merely a way of life and denied their status as philosophers who formed a legitimate school (hairesis). Not only did Diogenes denounce such canonical disciplines as music, geometry, and astronomy—all of which were taken with the utmost seriousness by Plato and Aristotle—as “useless and unnecessary” (6.73), but—so argued the critics—the Cynics lacked a coherent set of beliefs or clear conception of their own telos (or philosophical goal).

  But as Goulet-Cazé observes, not only do the Cynics consider themselves unequivocally to be philosophers, “they challenged all others to the title.”32 And their conception of philosophy as an antipolitical activity is exemplified in Diogenes’ mission: “to deface the currency”33—which meant nothing less than living in contradiction to one’s time, making the Cynic philosopher into a walking, talking, philosophical provocation and moral exemplum at once. It was, in fact, Diogenes’ quixotic determination to make his life into a demonstration of his philosophy, living “according to nature” in full public view—eating, urinating, defecating, masturbating, sleeping, begging, and teaching on the streets of Athens and Corinth—that made him both an intellectual scandal and a touchstone of philosophic authenticity rivaled only by Socrates.

  While Cynicism never was institutionalized as a school like the Stoa or the Academy, it was the closest the ancient world ever came to a popular philosophical movement open to all. The Cynics considered gender and class irrelevant to the practice of philosophy, and poverty as positively edifying;34 similarly, the traditional Greek conception of human identity that entailed belonging to a polis (or “fatherland”) was rejected in favor of “cosmopolitanism,”35 of being a “citizen of the world,” perhaps Diogenes’ most far-reaching invention.

  But what makes the idea that Cynicism was something less than a philosophy so risible in retrospect is the remarkable story of its reception: how many philosophers have coined as many philosophically productive concepts as Diogenes or provoked as many philosophers and satirists to reflection? I have already mentioned cosmopolitanism, which has become a veritable branch of study in its own right for philosophers, political theorists, and social scientists—and spawned a voluminous scholarly literature.36

  In addition, I would single out three ideas as fundamental to the Cynics’ afterlife: first, the founding metaphysical claim that nature, not culture (i.e., the gods and laws of society), is the unique source of ethical value, the sole oracle on how to live. As adapted first by Stoics and later by Romantics like Rousseau and, in our own time, by ecologists, animal rights advocates, and other biophiliacs, the significance of this idea in an age of mountaintop removal and global meltdown could hardly be exaggerated. Second, the practical, ethical corollary of this claim: a mental and physical regimen (askesis), designed to free the human animal from the misguided and superfluous demands of society by making him as adaptable and self-sufficient as his creaturely nature allows. This idea has appealed to ascetics and social rebels from ancient Christians to contemporary survivalists. The third idea is entailed by the first two: the need for active resistance to the
“social control of cognition”37 through defiant acts of parrhesia (i.e., truth-telling) to those in power (e.g., Alexander the Great) and the innovation of a seriocomic literature designed to deface the idols of the tribe—myth, religion, law and custom, and, not least, philosophy as conventionally conceived. The sacred—society’s most successful means of masking and manipulating power—must be left no place to hide.38 To this end, the Cynics made laughter and fearless speech the hallmark of the true philosopher.

  It is important to remember that “ancient Cynicism” actually refers to a process of transmission and reception that begins (for us) with Greek authors in the Roman empire such as Plutarch (c. 50–120 AD), Dio Chrysostom (fl. mid-first century AD), Lucian (c. 120–180 AD) and, of course, Diogenes Laertius (fl. early third century AD). When we first meet the Cynic Diogenes in the pages of our primary extant source (Book 6 of Diogenes Laertius), his image and its meaning have been shaped by oral and written traditions for more than five hundred years: Diogenes is always already a product of reception. Thus, unlike Plato and Platonism, there is no Cynicism apart from the history of its reception.

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  From the beginning, that reception was markedly ambivalent: Lucian, for example, the great Greek satirist, took a scathing, even “cynical,” view of the practicing Cynics of his own day (in, for example, On the Death of Peregrinus and The Runaways), even while reviving and ventriloquizing the legendary Cynics of old in his Menippean works—such as Menippus, Icaromenippus, Dialogues of the Dead, and Philosophers for Sale! Some associations of the modern concept “cynicism” (which does, in fact, derive from ancient Cynicism)—irreverence, superiority, shamelessness—were always there and critics were happy to pounce on them. Beginning at least with Augustine (City of God 14.20.23), there was among Christians a deep suspicion of Cynic shamelessness, which may be an indisputable canine virtue but is an affront to the doctrine of original sin. That did not stop Dante from placing Diogenes among the greatest philosophers in the first circle of the Inferno, the limbo reserved for virtuous pagans; or Boccaccio in his On the Fall of Great Men (De casibus virorum illustrium: 1355–1360) from citing Diogenes cheek-by-jowl with John the Baptist!