Be More Cynical

cyn-ic (sin’ik) n. 1. A person who believes all people are motivated by selfishness. 2. Cynic. A member of a sect of ancient Greek philosophers who believed virtue to be the only good and self-control to be the only means of achieving virtue. -cynic adj. 1. Cynical. 2. Cynic. Of or relating to the Cynics or their beliefs. [Latin cynicus, Cynic philosopher, from Greek kunikos, from kuon, kun-, dog. See kwon- in Appendix.]

—American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

The problem with Cynicism (or is it “cynicism”?), as both word and concept, is that it is Janus-faced, and it is often hard to say which way it is looking. Is it looking back to an ancient philosophical tradition (known in German as Kynismus and in English by the capitalized form “Cynicism”), or forward to the modern perspective that can be derived from it (known in German as Zynismus and in English by the lowercase spelling “cynicism”)? If the former, which features of the complex figures of Antisthenes, Diogenes, Crates, Menippus et al. does it foreground? Is it the rigorist self-fashioning of Diogenes, reducing his bodily needs to the biological minimum in the pursuit of moral autonomy? Or, rather, his public demonstrations of exactly what living “according to nature” entails, which in their shameless indifference to the manners and mores dictated by convention earned him the derisive epithet “dog” [kuon], a choice term of abuse as old as the Iliad? And, if the latter, is it meant to express the freedom from collective illusions and prejudices that a “cynic” attains by “seeing through” the idols of the tribe, or does it serve instead to evoke a state of disillusionment and alienation that seems to make the postmodern cynic incapable of taking anything with the requisite seriousness? Or does it evoke neither the ancient nor the modern perspective, but rather a tradition of philosophical satire and performance art associated, above all, with Menippus and Lucian, which finds in philosophers philosophizing a rich source of humor, as in Lucian’s Philosophers for Sale!, in which Zeus and Hermes auction off the founding fathers of Greek philosophy as slaves? And be that as it may, why does being “cynical” seem to mean one thing when applied to ourselves—isn’t it good to be free of illusions?—and another when applied to someone else—isn’t it unfortunate to be disillusioned and have nothing to believe in? Is nothing sacred? And if contemporary culture and society seem designed to breed “cynicism,” is being cynical therefore the hallmark of contemporary authenticity, as the only possible honest response to a morally bankrupt present; or, rather, its antithesis, an expression of our own bad faith, our collusion in the collective swindle?

The Janus-faced nature of Cynicism/cynicism isn’t, however, 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 the philosopher or otherwise treat him “like a dog.” And this bivalence extends to the nature of Cynic philosophy itself, which finds expression in neither the Socratic scrutiny of definitions and examples nor systematically argued treatises like Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, but in a series of paradoxes that emerge from Diogenes’s attempt to live “according to nature” while embedded in the culture of Athens in the fourth century BCE.

But just how embedded was he? Was Diogenes the prodigal son of the Socratic tradition, who never did come home again? Is that why, when asked what sort of person Diogenes was, Plato replied simply: “A Socrates—gone mad”? Were the ancient doxographers onto something when they linked him to Socrates by casting him as the pupil of Antisthenes, who was with Socrates the day he...