Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon (Parallax)

285 Pages·2010·1.786 MB·English

by  Shea, Louisa

The Cynic Enlightenment
parallax              re-visions of culture   
                               and society
Stephen G. Nichols, Gerald Prince, and Wendy Steiner
series editors
The Cynic
Enlightenment
Diogenes in the Salon
Louisa Shea
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
© 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2010
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shea, Louisa, 1974–
The cynic enlightenment : Diogenes in the salon /
Louisa Shea.
p. cm. — (Parallax : re-visions of culture and society)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-8018-9385-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8018-9385-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Cynicism. 2. Diogenes, d. ca. 323 B.C. 3. Enlightenment.
I. Title.
b809.5.s54 2009
149—dc22 2009011827
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For my father and my mother
William and Evelyn Shea
“What sort of a man do you consider Diogenes to be?”
“A Socrates gone mad,” replied Plato.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xix
1 Ancient Rascals: Diogenes of Sinope and the Cynic
Tradition 1
one Eighteenth-Century Cynicisms
2 Taming Wild Dogs: The Polite Education of
Monsieur Diogène 23
3 Menippus on the Loose, or Diderot’s Twin Hounds 45
4 Diogenes’ Lost Republic: From Philodemus to
Wieland and Rousseau 74
5 Français, encore un effort! Sade’s Cynic Republic 106
two Theory Turns Cynical: Diogenes after the
Frankfurt School
6 Cynicism and the Dialectic of Enlightenment 131
7 Mystic Carnival: Sloterdijk’s Cynic Enlightenment 146
8 Cynicism as Critical Vanguard: Foucault’s Last
Lecture Course 169
Conclusion 193
Notes 201
Bibliography 237
Index 253
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Preface
Ancient Cynicism has survived in the popular imagination as a set of stock im-
ages: Diogenes, ill-clad and grumpy, lounging in his tub, or old and haggard,
wandering the streets of Athens in broad daylight, lantern in hand. Little else
has subsisted outside of scholarly discourse. The word cynic now bears only a
vague and uncertain relationship to the famous Greek Cynic Diogenes; it has
come to signify, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, “a person who
believes that people are motivated purely by self-interest rather than acting for
honorable or unselfish reasons.”1 But cynic did not always denote a self-seeking
and ruthless individual. The word, which derives from the Greek kyon, mean-
ing “dog,” originally designated a group of ancient Greek philosophers who
prided themselves on behaving like hounds, the better to bark at the follies of
their age.
The movement, which took root in fourth-century BCE Athens with An-
tisthenes and Diogenes of Sinope, has always held an ambiguous place in the
history of philosophy: fiercely opposed to any form of theoretical abstraction
or institutional organization and famous for defying all codes of decency, it
survived on the margins of the Academy and the Lyceum as a movement of
lone, public haranguers. Early commentators looked on it with an odd mix-
ture of admiration and scorn: Epictetus and the emperor Julian sought to
salvage it from opprobrium by ridding it of its more problematic and populist
features and elevating it to the status of a universal philosophy, but the strategy
failed to make Cynicism palatable to medieval Christianity, let alone to the vi-
tuperative verve of Counter-Reformation moralists such as François Garasse or
Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac. By the seventeenth century the Cynics had gained
a reputation as moral and religious pariahs; by the nineteenth century they had
lost not only their moral but also their philosophical credibility. In his lectures
on the history of philosophy, Hegel sounded the death knell of Cynicism as a
philosophy worthy of serious scholarly attention, dismissing the ancient sect as
theoretically unfit to enter the canon of modern philosophy: “There is nothing
particular to say of the Cynics, for they possess but little philosophy, and they
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