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148 4 The Cynic and the True Life In the preceding chapter we saw various forms of philosophical activity and philosophical life that created a space alongside the general political and social practices of life in the Hellenistic-Roman world. Philosophy as an activity inhabited a part of the day, determined certain relationships, and introduced various practices into the everyday existence of an individual . The philosopher was someone who used parrhēsia to care for these individuals. The foundation of philosophical parrhēsia is the care of the self, the conversion and salvation of the self that results in an art of living, an art for transforming the world into the testing ground for one’s selfrelation . Because the philosopher had mastered the art of care of the self, he was capable of governing others and caring for them up to the point at which they were able to govern and care for themselves. In this experience of philosophy, the domain of bios, of social-political life and action, was essentially a testing ground—it was traversed by techniques, by an askēsis, through which the individual cultivated and preserved his self-mastery and tranquility. One might describe this philosophical work, these relationships of governmentality, and this testing process as an “outside within” or an area “alongside” the norm because they constituted a way of living the same life, in the same world as the others, but of living that life and inhabiting that world otherwise, by maintaining a very different relationship to oneself. However, there was another significant philosophical development which took its cue from the Socratic-Platonic event and which bridged the gap between that event and the formation of the Christian pastorate: Cynicism. Cynicism was different from other philosophical practices in a number of ways (and they all differ from each other in various ways), but primarily in the fact that it constituted itself as a radical rejection of the social-political world. For the Cynic, it is not just that this world is full of error and false opinion, but that it is essentially false, that the social-political world is necessarily opposed to the truth. Therefore, the Cynic practices a form of bios that is true to nature, a natural life completely other than conventional forms of life. For the Cynic, reason (logos) emerges from the natural passions, desires, instincts, and needs of the body, and it leads one back to nature as the source and destination of individual life. The Cynic takes up the true, natural life through a particular experience of the body. The body is confined and falsified by social cus- toms and values. Therefore the body—the space it inhabits, the time it moves through—must be stripped of every aspect of falsehood, rhetoric. In other words, rhetoric is not just artificially ornamental language; it is the artificial falsification of life through the addition of unnecessary adornments. Bodily, existential rhetoric is constituted by culture, society, custom. The true life, then, is an “outside,” an other which does not inhabit the world of everydayness but remains outside of it as a permanent challenge to it. The bodily presence of the Cynic is a physical, material affront to the society it resists. Furthermore, the Cynic unites in the most radical way parrhēsia and the true life. The Cynic recognizes himself and is recognized by the others as the parrhēsiast par excellence. In this chapter I will summarize some elements of Foucault’s consideration of Cynicism, particularly the Cynic variation on the themes of care of the self, the true life (alēthēs bios), parrhēsia, and otherness.1 The figure of the Cynic and the practices of care that define his existence play a central role in the history of the subject for a number of reasons. First, it is the Cynic who pushes to its limits the practice of the true life and the otherness of the bios philosophicos as the true life. Cynic parrhēsia is a mission to proclaim the truth, to manifest the truth in word, in deed, and in the very body of the Cynic, which appears as the “scandal of the truth.”2 The radicality of this project and the philosophical-spiritual reaction against it is an important part of the historical process through which philosophy will be despiritualized and will become, rather than a way of life, a theoretical, scholastic discipline. In other words, Foucault thinks that the radicality of Cynicism as a...

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