Cynics and Skeptics

The ancient Cynics have been accessible to twentieth-century English readers ever since Donald R. Dudley’s History of Cynicism was published in 1937, along with the still-standard Loeb translation of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by R. D. Hicks dating back to 1925. Nonetheless, the Cynics, and especially their philosophic founder and icon, Diogenes of Sinope, remained an interesting if murky backwater of philosophical history until the 1970s and 1980s. Those were the decades when academic philosophy was overtaken by the social, political, and historical currents that helped create its more literarily inclined Other, which goes by names like “post-structuralism,” “French theory,” “critical theory,” “anti-foundationalism,” and so forth.¹

These were also the decades when Anglo-American literary scholars, inspired by that period’s characteristic mash-up of structuralist anthropology, linguistics, and Frankfurt School-style critique of ideology, began to raid the attic of philosophical history, to try on some of the outfits that philosophy had discarded.² Ironically, post-structuralist theory’s blending of philosophy and literature helped to recreate the Cynics—perhaps the most anti-theoretical movement in the history of philosophy—in a new guise for a new generation of scholarly readers now primed with Bakhtin, Derrida, and Foucault.

We could call this latest version of the return to Cynicism both a “use” and “abuse” of philosophic history. But more important, the careful historical and contextual scholarship of a Dudley will often sit inert until other writers find compelling reasons to rework the past, creating, in effect, a new version by overwriting previous texts. This is how, for example, we get such period-specific images of the Cynic philosopher as a Stoicized would-be elitist (Epic-tetus) at one historical moment, and a Rousseauian man of feeling (Wieland) at a much later one. But even apart from such total re-creations of earlier philosophy, the more piecemeal forms of anecdotal or biographical scholarship of a Diogenes Laertius or a Bayle may also serve their own purposes, stockpiling the materials of philosophy for later use.

The books under review by Louisa Shea and Christian Thorne both describe a long-term process of philosophic preservation and reactivation, but in doing so they must also risk engaging in the process themselves. Both studies invoke the problem of philosophic emulation: how best to imitate the example of an earlier philosopher in a new and alien context? One of the biggest obstacles to this practice of emulation is the transformation of philosophy Pierre Hadot identifies, in which the once-dominant notion of ancient philosophy—“philosophy as a way of life”—was gradually superseded by the theoretical, argumentative, and technical forms of philosophy that began to overtake the earlier view as early as the Platonic academy and the Aristotelian school.³ Since that time, these theoretical notions have so dominated philosophy and its historiography that they have largely obscured movements like the ancient Cynics or Skeptics, which stressed the practical and ethical aspects of philosophy rather than doctrines or theories.⁴ Hadot’s revisionist account of philosophic history helps to ground both Shea’s and Thorne’s treatments of their respective movements, since Hadot’s work was an acknowledged inspiration for Foucault’s readings of ancient philosophy, while also appearing in important (through surprisingly circumscribed) ways in Thorne’s discussion of Sextus Empiricus.⁵

What is at stake in these competing definitions of philosophic practice is whether reading philosophy can lead to a radically different kind of life or thought, either for the philosopher or the public. Shea describes the continuing appeal of the ancient Cynics for writers of both the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, and explores the problems, as well as opportunities, created when writers try to adapt earlier philosophical principles, like “the philosophic life,” to present-day circumstances. In a pricklier vein, Thorne demonstrates his own affinities with skepticism by critiquing most of his fellow skeptics from Montaigne through...