Artful Immorality – Variants of Cynicism

Daniel Scott Mayfield

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783110431834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

When a term is overused, it tends to fall out of fashion. Cynicism seems to be an exception. Its polytropic versatility apparently prevents any discontinuation of its application. Everyone knows that cynicism denotes that which is deemed deleterious at a given time; and every time will specify its toxicities – the apparent result being the term's non-specificity. This study describes the cynical stance and statement so as to render the term's use scholarly expedient.
Close readings of textual sources commonly deemed cynical provide a legible starting point. A rhetorical analysis of aphorisms ascribed to the arch-Cynic Diogenes facilitates describing the design of cynical statements, as well as the characteristic features of the cynical stance. These patterns are identifiable in later texts generally labeled cynical – above all in Machiavelli's Principe. With recourse to the Diogenical archetype, cynicism is likewise rendered describable in Gracián's Oráculo manual, Diderot's Le neveu de Rameau, and Nietzsche's Posthumous Fragments.
This study's description of cynicism provides a phenomenon otherwise considered amorphous with distinct contours, renders transparent its workings, and tenders a dependable basis for further analyses.

1. Artful Immorality: Imprimis

The first impulse is almost always good, one must suppress it.

Talleyrand (qtd. in: Niehues-Pröbsting KYN 353; trans. mine)

The statement is first – a refined immorality, cultivated brutality, acute animality, ingenious uncultivation, artful bestiality, erudite inhumanity. Granted, the above remark is not the most unpleasant imaginable, does not exploit the potentials sophisticated ruthlessness affords; but then, such may not be the adequate commencement for a work of scholarship, even on cynicism. The texts here studied are among the highpoints of Western literature since the Renaissance – also as regards (and, arguably, not least due to) their cynicism. This first part will do what introductions are designed to do – to serve as a succinct outline, while giving the reader a sense of the endeavor even so.

1.1. Method

Yet is conceptual history the only and sufficient legitimization for the status of the concept?

Is it not necessary to also keep in mind that there is a high degree of indifference

between the concept and its history?

Blumenberg (Legitimität 29; trans. mine)

[T]hat no morality, but also no anti-morality is thinkable without the might

of [various forms of] rhetoric, which aid them in asserting themselves,

[and] indeed shape them already in their specific content.

Schulz-Buschhaus (M&P 247; trans. mine)1

What Bergson says about the comic – that it “has a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to bob up again” (1) – may be applied to cynicism, the same as his procedural remark: “We shall disdain nothing we have seen. Maybe we gain from this prolonged contact […] something more flexible than an abstract definition” (1). Concerning cynicism, this study’s purpose is to be descriptive; for, as everyone knows, moral valuations are best left to whosoever might feel called upon. Also, the analysis herein is not historical in tendency – it is not a study of influence, nor is its focus conceptual history; rather, this endeavor tenders an alternative reading, wherefore it may be described as a hermeneutic effort resting on philological groundwork; as a rhetorico-structural analysis balanced by discursive deliberations. Conversely, most inquiries in this field proceed by initially defining cynicism (historically, ethically, etc.), followed by an attempt at making a given time, writer, or formation fit the definition; such attempts assume they know what ‘cynicism’ is, then decree how it had better be – naturally finding it wanting. Surveying the studies extant, the query ‘what is cynical’ does not seem to be answered by recourse to everyday definitions thereof.2 This study proposes that two aspects discernible in remarks received as cynical be treated in an analytical manner, in order to describe what is constitutively a simultaneity in cynicism: the confluence of, in abstract terms, a civilized form with an ‘uncivilized’ content – the former is analyzable with tropical and topical approaches, via a combination of rhetorical terms and a hermeneutic modus; the content axis of ‘uncultivation’ requires the two complementary methods of discourse analysis (in a loosely Foucauldian sense) and intellectual history (specifically as refined by Blumenberg’s praxis).3

As to the presuppositions in approaching the cynical stance, analyzing Ancient Cynicism reveals a tendency that does not require a consistent, teleological movement, tradition, or school – to say nothing of a founder. Thus, this study suggests taking ‘Diogenes’ in the way he has ever been taken: as a figure of thought, a fictional locus of projection, identification, appropriation, rejection in the name of propriety.4 As to ‘anthropological constants’, Cynicism renders problematic – in an active, self-assertive, verbally aggressive manner – a basic assumption underlying every stage and any form of social order, namely ‘what it is to be human’.5 The answers to this query vary over time; hence, these responses are comparable. In line with its subject matter, this study traces and treats elemental human queries such as contingency and determinism, nature and culture, adaptation and imitation, individual and society – with the respective ‘and’ denoting an oscillation, osmosis, coalescence. This, in turn, is reflected in cynicism’s liminality: living in the midst of society à part, endorsing a form of cultivation against culture – without finally overturning the latter. Cynicism is, then, an incisive perspective on a given society, culture, morality, tradition, discursivity from within – and precisely therefore subject to attempts at total incorporation, or thorough excision. Still, the perdurability of ‘cynicism’ (in any sense) is grounded in its adaptation and adaptability – and, not least, in the myriad attempts at overcoming cynicism by reintegrating, purging, excising, or condemning it to oblivion; for incorporations found it indigestible, expurgations stressed what they had aimed to expurgate, excisions created a counterforce of equal strength, and attempts applying damnatio memoriae came up against a most basic human capacity for remembering negative advertisement all the better.

To conclude these procedural remarks, a more general comment as to method may be pertinent. It is the premise of this study that the humanities would consolidate by focusing on their forte, meaning, to return to what has ever been theirs – the text itself. Given a topic as volatile as cynicism, the task of turning to the texts themselves is paramount. The natural aim of this study is to have as diligent a recourse to the sources as possible.

1.2. Brief Overview Of Research In Cynicism

[B]ut the answer to everything is often that one may be rather economical with what has been

handed down. There is, of course, a great hermeneutical chance in this also,

and of this we here avail ourselves unscrupulously.

Sloterdijk (304n.; trans. mine)

Commencing around the early 1980s, scholarly interest in cynicism was on the rise – evidenced by Niehues-Pröbsting’s early, Foucault’s and Sloterdijk’s later analyses; the latter’s efforts led to an increase of related studies in the 1990s and beyond (cf. Stanley “Retreat” 385; 388). Niehues-Pröbsting’s analyses are comprehensive. Foucault’s and Sloterdijk’s work is informed by one strand of Cynicism’s reception, the Stoic-Enlightenment one; while the former describes Epictetus’ Stoic ‘Cynicism’ meticulously, Sloterdijk’s essayism caters to a popular taste for dichotomies.6 Specifically in the Anglophone world, the latter’s efforts inspired a surge of studies – of which virtually all took his work as their starting point; after Sloterdijk at least, there seems to be a nigh universal consensus to ignore the phenomenon of cynicism itself, and focus instead on its “special virulence” (Stanley EMC 177).7 The gross of these studies does not intend to describe cynicism, but to discredit it – as if that were necessary.8 The discernible added value of Sloterdijk’s Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (1983) may be to have re-popularized the apparently fashionable genre of broad-spectrum, noninvasive philosophizing in the public sphere. These are his views:

Cynicism is the enlightened false consciousness. It is the modernized unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its Enlightenment lesson, but it has not implemented it and it probably could not implement it. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness is not affected by any ideology critique: its falsehood is already reflexively cushioned. (Sloterdijk 37f.; trans. mine)

Enlightenment does not simply enter social consciousness as an unproblematic bringer of light. Where it takes effect, a twilight results, a deep ambivalence. We will characterize it as an atmosphere in which, amid a ravel of factual self-preservation alongside moral self-denial, the cynical crystallization takes place. (64; trans. mine)

Ancient Kynicism, the primary, aggressive one, was a plebeian antithesis against idealism. Modern cynicism, however, is the masters’ antithesis against their own idealism as ideology and as masquerade. […] The cynicism of the masters is an impertinence that has switched sides. (222; trans. mine)9

These claims are to expedite his desired schism between a ‘good’ Ancient Cynic and a depraved modern version, allowing for the stylization of the ‘kynical’ idol by projecting unto him all that Sloterdijk deems good in this world – rendering the ‘kynic’ a messianic prophet, a completer and enforcer, instigating hope, chalking up the salvific path, leading the ultima ratio into the last resort:

The cynicism of the means, which characterizes our ‘instrumental reason’ (Horkheimer), may only be compensated by a return to the kynicism of the ends. This means: leave-taking from the spirit of the long-term objectives, realization of the original futility of life, containment of the desire for power and the power of desire – in a word: to grasp Diogenes’ legacy. (Sloterdijk 366; trans. mine)

Yet this part eulogy, part encomium of Ancient Cynicism – hinging also on a perceived duality of (Ancient) activity and (modern) passivity (cf. 34f.) – creates a schizophrenic concoction that, in its totalizing claim, vitiates the division. Sloterdijk is his own best customer: his usage of the term ‘cynicism’ proves his thesis as to cynicism’s supposedly ‘diffuse’ quality (cf. 33; 34; 41; 180; 225; 369), inconveniently disqualifying his initial claim aiming at rendering distinctive his attempt:

It infringes upon [common] linguistic usage to designate cynicism as a universal and diffuse phenomenon; in the general view, cynicism is not diffuse, but distinctive, not universal, but remote and highly individualized. (Sloterdijk 34; trans. mine)

If that was the case in 1983, it is so no longer, as almost all of Sloterdijk’s follow-ups prove – everything and anyone is ‘cynical’, “[i]n our cynical age” (Chaloupka 52). All told, these classifications do not seem rewarding from a descriptive viewpoint – being not only prescriptive, but proscriptive. The Critique of Cynical Reason does not provide dependable footing if the task is to describe cynicism as such – meaning, without recourse to value judgments and moral indignation.

The groundwork for this study is referenced in an unlikely place. At the very end of his efforts, Sloterdijk acknowledges having been informed by one study to such an extent that he feels unable to indicate precisely where such influencing occurred (cf. 954); but Niehues-Pröbsting’s analysis Der Kynismus des Diogenes und der Begriff des Zynismus (1979), from which he alleges to be drawing, should reasonably have rendered impossible Sloterdijk’s later attempts at dichotomizing and then ‘diffusing’ cynicisms (cf. 34). This is reflected in the incredulity with which Niehues-Pröbsting finds himself defending his work against the claims of the book he supposedly influenced – not, indeed, upholding his own case after having been criticized, but having to defend against the absence of his argument in a work that else claims to have been influenced by his:

In this bo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Band 8
• Title
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• 1. Artful Immorality: Imprimis
• 2. Ancient Cynicism
• 3. The Close Readings
• 4. Morality’s Contingency
• Scribal Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Index
• Fußnoten