Legend has it that the young
Alexander
of Macedonia one day sought out Diogenes, whose fame had made him curious.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
The subject matter demands it, and after we have spoken about oral matters, our presentation, for better or for worse, must go through its anal phase before we come to the genitals.
To speak of the fart is not difficult insofar as it represents a sound that always means something in social situations.
Witnesses of a fart in- evitably interpret the sound.
All in all, the semantics of the fart is a rather compli- cated problem, a problem that is seriously neglected by linguistics and communi- cation research.
The scale of meaning stretches from awkwardness to contempt, from humorous intentions to lack of respect.
Teachers, professors, speakers, and conference participants all know the torture of having to stifle a fart because such a sound expresses something that, in reality, one does not want to say.
Could it aid our empathy with politicians if, in listening to their speeches, we were to think more often that they are possibly at that very moment concentrating on subduing a fart that has been wanting to interrupt their talk?
The art of the vague statement is related to the art of unobtrusive flatulence: Both are diplomacy.
Semiotically, we assign the fart to the group of signals, that is, of signs, which neither symbolize nor depict something but rather point to a situation. When the locomotive whistles, it warns about its approach and possible danger. The fan conceived as a signal shows that the lower body is in full action, and in situations where any reference to such regions is absolutely undesirable, this can have ta consequences. Ernst Jiinger noted in his Paris Diary about his reading ot tn historian Flavius Josephus's Jewish War:
Here I again came upon a passage in which the beginning of unrest in Jerusalem under Cumanus is described (II, 12). While the Jews
CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST ? 151
gathered for the festival of unleavened bread, the Romans positioned a cohort above the hall of columns in the temple to keep an eye on the crowd. One of the soldiers in the cohort pulled up his coat, and with a mocking bow turned his
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behind to the Jews and "let forth an indecent sound corresponding to his position. " That triggered a clash that cost ten thousand lives, so that one can speak of the most fateful fart in world history. (Strahlungen, vol. II, pp. 188-89)
The cynicism of the Roman soldier, whose fart was a political provocation and
4a"blasphemy"inthetemple, findsacounterpartinJiinger'scommentary,which
5Here we come to the whole of the matter. As children of an anal culture, we all have a more or less disturbed relation to our own shit. The splitting off of our consciousness from our own shit is the deepest training in order; it tells us what must happen privately and under wraps. The relation that is drummed into people with regard to their own excretions provides the model for their behavior with
all sorts of refuse in their lives. Hitherto, refuse was systematically ignored. Only under the sign of modern ecological thinking do we find ourselves forced to be- come conscious again of our refuse. High theory discovers the category "shit";
a new stage of the philosophy of nature thereby comes due, a critique of the hu- man being as a hyperproductive shit-accumulating industry-animal. Diogenes is the only Western philosopher who we know consciously and publicly performed his animal business, and there are reasons to interpret this as a component of a pantomimic theory. It hints at a consciousness of nature that assigns positive values to the animal side of human beings and does not allow any dissociation of what is low or embarrassing. Those who do not want to admit that they produce refuse and that they cannot choose to do anything else risk suffocating one day
in their own shit. Everything suggests that Diogenes of Sinope should be admitted to the Ancestral Gallery of Ecological Consciousness. The grand act of ecology
lr
> the history of ideas that will have an impact as far as philosophy, ethics, and Politics are concerned will be to transform the phenomenon of refuse into a "high" heme. From now on it is no longer an onerous secondary phenomenon but is recognized as a basic principle. With this, the last hidden positions of idealism and dualism are really broken down. Shit has to be encountered in another way.
]s now necessary to rethink the usefulness of the unuseful, the productivity of
le
te and to recognize our responsibility also for what is unintended. Kynical phil- 6 sophersarethosewhodonotgetnauseated. Inthistheyarerelatedtochildren, crosses over into the area of theoretical cynicism.
Shit, Refuse
unproductive, philosophically speaking: to unlock the positivity of the nega-
0do not yet know anything about the negativity of their excrement.
152 ? CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST
? ? ? The Scepter. What we conjecture where we don't see anything, that rules the world.
Genitals
These are the geniuses among the organs of the lower half of the body. When they have collected enough experience, they can tell fine stories about how things really are in the big and the small world. They are like the wire pullers in the dark the shark song in the Threepenny Opera says cannot be seen. But in their hands all threads finally come together. In the beginning, Freudian psychoanalysis was accused, among other things, of cynicism because it taught that everything human beings do can be reduced in the final analysis to sexual impulses and their detor mations. This is, of course, a malicious misunderstanding even though it has grain of truth. In fact, psychoanalysis does adopt something of the kynical im pulse in its theoretical procedure, namely, a resoluteness not to let the naked tru that hides behind cultural disguises elude it. As long as it was customary to se
CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST ? 153
omething low and dirty in sexuality, it was also only a small step to confusing the kynical drive in psychoanalysis toward truth with cynicism, which tries to re- duce everything "higher" to the lowest denominator. Then cynicism would
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be just
variant of nihilism, and Freud would have preached a materialism that unduly
7emphasizes the animal in human beings. However, insofar as psychoanalysis
constitutes a theory supportive of life and humanity, it is not at all cynical but tries, in the spirit of Diogenes (and even more, of Epicure), to heal those fissures that idealistic taboos have opened up in carnal pleasures. If today the figure of Freud is virtually overgrown with objections and doubts about his theory and his person, it should nevertheless not be forgotten how great the liberation is that has emanated from him.
However, after the "sexual revolution" things have not gotten any simpler, and it is precisely enlightened genitals that often have an unhappy consciousness. They now live in the twilight of freedom and have learned that sexual adventures and the art of loving are not the same thing. After the "mutual use of the sexual organs"-as Immanuel Kant, in good enlightened fashion, described the marriage contract-the question often remains: Is that all? And if that is everything, why make such a fuss about it?
Out of liberal sexual roaming, a cynicism easily results for which everything is a matter of indifference. The longer the game lasts, the stronger the impression becomes that what we are really looking for does not exist in this world. In their own way, the genitals know, once they have gone through the school of capa- ciousness, about the modern "frosts of freedom. " They begin to get scared of ex- aggerations. The suspicion grows that they too are on the best path toward becom- ing respectable, if respectability means a mixture of reasonableness, cynicism, and resignation.
Enlightenment disillusions, and where disillusionment becomes widespread,
self-experience in the ecstasy that shows us in clear moments who we can really
be dies. This is the most sensitive point in advanced civilization. The more ideals
disintegrate and the positing of meaning from "above" fails, the more we will be
forced to listen to the life energies that bear us along. Whether they can carry us,
'hat is the question, for they can only do so when they flow without obstruction.
0-eling" described by Romain Rolland as the basis of religious consciousness and they flow? Does life live? Are orgasms really our signposts to that "oceanic
that our great theoretician of the libido, Sigmund Freud, refused to acknowledge e cause he had not directly experienced it? Notes
? borrow this concept from Ivan Illich and transfer it to the area of epistemology.
? [A progressive children's theater group in Berlin-Trans. ]
? Napoleon Bonaparte, who was admired by many because of his realistic cynicism (see chapter
aed
' * 'n his sarcastic New Year's Day speech in 1814: "What is a throne anyway? Four pieces
154 ? CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST
of gilded timber and a shred of velvet? -No, the throne is a man, and I am this man. " The langua? of a cynic, who behaves like an upstart, i. e. , awkwardly matter-of-fact, toward ceremony ("fuss"i and legitimacy ("paper").
4. Later (see chapter 8) I explain blasphemy as a phenomenon related to religious cynicism 5. See on this point the sixth cardinal cynicism (chapter 8).
6. Here we see that cynicism arises from a reversal of kynicism. The cynic feels nauseated in prjn
ciple: for him, everything is shit; his overdisappointed superego does not see the good in the shit Hence his nausee.
7. The connections between psychoanalysis and cynicism will be touched on in three places it this book; in chapter 8 ("Sexual Cynicism" and "The Cynicism of Knowledge") and in chapter 13 Excursus 2 ("The Ice Dogs: On the Psychoanalysis of the Cynic").
Chapter 7
The Cabinet of Cynics
In the cabinet of cynics, there are no individualized personalities but rather types, that is, social characters and characters of a period. When we examine them, it does no harm to imagine them as dolls in a cabinet of wax figures where promi- nent historical personages meet. On our tour we also encounter literary figures who can be used to demonstrate archetypal features of cynical consciousness. Only the first two we find exhibited here--both figures of antiquity--actually lived: Diogenes of Sinope, the ancestral father of the species, and Lucian of Samosata on the Euphrates. The two modern figures, Goethe's Mephistopheles and Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, are by contrast figures created by poets out of the material of cynical experience. In plasticity, they have everything the historical personalities have. As pure types there is something impersonal, im- mortal, about them, and in this they resemble
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Diogenes and Lucian, of whom we likewise possess only silhouettes with none of the details that distinguish real in- dividuals from their types. At the end of this series, we find, as representative of the present, a quite faceless figure that resembles everybody and nobody. It is called Anyone (das Man); Martin Heidegger has polished and abstracted it. It reminds one a little of the figures of the painter De Chirico, mannequins with empty, round heads and artificial limbs, geometrically shaped, which look like human beings, but only "look like" because they lack "authenticity. "
We will keep the tour through the historical cabinet as short as possible, first, because museums are fatiguing and second, because the main points can be demonstrated by a few examples. By rights, of course, many other faces would nave to crop up --Antisthenes, Crates, Aristophanes, Francois Villon, Rabelais,
155
156 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
? Heinrich Zille, Dog theater on a fairground in Berlin around 1900.
Machiavelli, Eulenspiegel, Castruccio Castracani, Sancho Panza, Rameau's
1nephew, Frederick II of Prussia, de Sade, Talleyrand, Napoleon, Biichner,
Grabbe, Heine, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Cioran, and many more. Some of them will be mentioned in other parts of this book. The whole of Part V, Historical Main Text, is indirectly devoted to the German kynics and cynics of the early twentieth century.
We join our museum guide, who, before each of the figures, insists on making educated comments on the historical significance of the gentlemen depicted. It is clear that philosophy is his passion and that he belongs to that species of people who like to show off their education. That means that from now on we will have to grit our teeth. The man really wants to teach us something. Nothing is worse than a museum guide who, in all seriousness, wants to instruct his visitors. Such a dilettante lacks the professional philosopher's fear of philosophy. But have cour- age! Haven't we already survived unscathed quite different attempts to make us smarter? Avanti!
Diogenes of Sinope: Human Dog, Philosopher, Good-for-Nothing
Once he called out loud: Hey there, people! and as they ran up to him, he worked them over with his staff with the words: I called for people, not riff-raff!
To approach one another with a smile full of "understanding" would be a misun-
derstanding. Diogenes, who we have before us here, is not at all an idylh?
dreamer in his tub but a dog that bites when he feels like it.
2He is one of those
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 157
? Diogenes, Democritus, and two fools standing around the globe. From the Narren- schiff (The ship of fools), 1497. who simultaneously bark and bite and do not pay much attention to proverbs. His
bite sank so deep into the most highly treasured values of Athenian civilization
that since then no satirist could be trusted. The memory of his bites belongs to
the most vivid impressions retained from antiquity. For this reason, the humorous
approval of this philosopher by many an ironically minded citizen almost always
rests on a belittling misunderstanding. In the citizen there is a caged wolf who
sympathizes with the biting philosopher. But Diogenes sees above all the citizen
? n his sympathizer, and he bites all the same. Theory and praxis are incalculably
interwoven in his philosophy and there is no room for mere theoretical agree-
ment. Even mere practical imitation would not please him; he would probably
think it was stupid. He is impressed only by characters whose presence of mind,
quick wit, alertness, and independent feeling toward life are a match for his. His
su
ggestive success rests not least of all on the fact that he was a teacher who Wanted no pupils who imitated him. In this he resembles the Japanese Zen Masters, whose effect is achieved by teaching through nonteaching.
We could not picture his external appearance today or gain an impression of
158 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
his effect on the Athenian environment if we did not have the visual instruction
3of the hippies, freaks, globetrotters, and metropolitan Indians. He is a wild,
witty, cunning sort. Part of the standard picture, as it is handed down from antiq- uity, is that the kynic must be without
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possessions --mostly involuntarily by birth, then, on top of that, voluntarily, whereby an impression of sovereignty arises. Everything kynics own, they carry with them. For Diogenes and his kind this means an all-weather coat, a staff, a knapsack with the smallest personal effects, including probably a toothpick, a pumice for cleansing the skin, a drinking vessel made of wood. The feet are in sandals. This outfit, when it was chosen by free citizens, was somewhat shocking, especially at a time when it was considered dis- graceful for an Athenian to appear in public unaccompanied by slaves. That Di- ogenes had a beard is self-evident, even if it is not so much a matter of a proper
4beard, but rather of the unshavenness of many decades.
Diogenes' influence on his contemporaries, however, was not a question of
aesthetics. A disheveled appearance says little when, on the other hand, it is known that the Athenian upper-class whores granted the unkempt philosopher ex- clusive and unpaid favors that other poor suckers at most only dreamed about. Between Lai's and Phryne, the star courtesans of the Attic capital, and Diogenes, it seems there were laws of giving and taking that the normal citizen, who has to pay cash for everything, does not understand.
To call him an ascetic would be incorrect because of the false undertones the word asceticism has assumed through a thousand-year-long masochistic misun- derstanding. We have to rid the word of its Christian connotations to rediscover its fundamental meaning. As free of need as Diogenes appears, he could be taken rather as the original father of the idea of self-help, and thus as an ascetic in the sense that he was a self-helper by distancing himself from and being ironic about needs for whose satisfaction most people pay with their freedom. He, who provided the impulse for kynicism, introduced the original connection between happiness, lack of need, and intelligence into Western philosophy--a theme that can be found in all vita simplex movements in world cultures. As the original hip- pie and proto-Bohemian, Diogenes has left his mark on the European tradition of intelligent living. His spectacular poverty is the price of freedom; that must be understood. If he could be well-off without sacrificing his freedom, he would not have objected at all. But no wise man can let himself be made a fool of by so-called needs. Diogenes taught that the wise man too eats cake, but only if he can just as well do without it.
A dogmatism of poverty does not come into question; it is rather a matter of discarding false weights, which hinder one's freedom of movement. Self-torture is definitely a stupidity for Diogenes. Still more stupid, of course, from his point of view are those who spend their whole lives running after something they al- ready have. Citizens struggle with the chimera of ambition and strive for riches
THE CABINET OF CYNICS D 159
? G. J. Caraglio after Parmigianino, Diogenes with the "Platonic human,"around 1530-40.
that, in the last analysis, they cannot enjoy any more than what is enjoyed in the elementary pleasures of the kynical philosopher as a daily recurring matter of course: lying in the sun, observing the goings-on in the world, being glad, and having nothing to wait for.
Since Diogenes was one of those philosophers of life for whom life is more
important than writing, it is understandable why not a single authentic line from
him has been preserved. Instead, a garland of anecdotes lives on around him that
say more about his influence than any writing could do. Whether he really com-
posed some writings, such as a Politics and the seven tragedy-parodies, as
claimed by tradition, is left aside here. In any case, his significance does not lie
ln
became a mythical figure. Witty and instructive stories buzz around him, as they
writings. His existence is absorbed in the anecdotes he provoked. In them he
160 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
do around his colleague, Mullah Nasrudin, in the Sufian satire. Precisely that proves his real existence. The most vital people thrust themselves on their con- temporaries and even more on posterity as projection-figures and attract a definite direction of fantasy and thinking to themselves. They stimulate people's curiosity as to what it would be like to be in the skin of such a philosopher. Thereby they not only gain pupils but also attract people who carry their living impulse further. This curiosity with regard to Diogenes' existence seized even the greatest military hero of antiquity, Alexander of Macedonia, who is reputed to have said that he would want to be Diogenes if he were not Alexander. This shows the heights, both
5political and existential, to which the philosopher's influence reached.
In the attempt to express Diogenes' intentions in modern language, we auto- matically approach existential philosophy. However, Diogenes does not talk about existence, decision, absurdity, atheism, and such key words of modern ex-
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istentialism. The ancient Diogenes is ironic about his philosopher colleagues, poking fun not only at how they torture themselves with problems but also at their credulity regarding concepts. His existentialism does not go primarily through the head; he experiences the world as neither tragic nor absurd. There is not the slightest trace of the melancholy around him, which clings to all modern existen- tialism. His weapon is not so much analysis as laughter. He uses his philosophical
competence to mock his serious colleagues. As anti-theoretician, anti-dogmatist, anti-scholar, he emits an impulse that resounds everywhere where thinkers strive for a "knowledge for free people," free also from the strictures of a school, and with this he begins a series in which names like Montaigne, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Feyerabend, and others appear. It is a line of philosophizing that suspends the es- prit de serieux. How Diogenes' existentialism is to be understood is still best shown in the anecdotes. The danger of underestimating the philosophical content of kynicism, precisely because it has been handed down "only" anecdotally, is great. That even great spirits of the caliber of Hegel and Schopenhauer have fallen into this trap can be gleaned from their presentations of the history of philosophy. Hegel above all was blind to the theoretical content of a philosophy that finds ulti- mate wisdom precisely in not having a theory for the decisive things in life and that teaches instead to undertake the risk of existence consciously and serenely-
1.
Legend has it that the young Alexander of Macedonia one day sought out Diogenes, whose fame had made him curious. He found him taking a sunbath, lying lazily on his back, perhaps close to an Athenian sportsfield; others say he was gluing books. The young sovereign, in an effort to prove his generosity- granted the philosopher a wish. Diogenes' answer is supposed to have been: "Stop
7blocking my sun! " That is perhaps the most well known philosophical anecdote
from Greek antiquity, and not without justice. It demonstrates in one stroke wha antiquity understands by philosophical wisdom -- not so much a theoretical knowl- edge but rather an unerring, sovereign spirit. The wise man of long ago knew bes
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 161
? ? Johannes Platner, Diogenes and Alexander, 1780.
of all the dangers of knowledge that lie in the addictive character of theory. All too easily they draw intellectuals into the ambitious stream where they succumb to intellectual reflexes instead of exercising autonomy. The fascination of this anecdote lies in the fact that it shows the emancipation of the philosopher from the politician. Here, the wise man is not, like the modern intellectual, an accom- plice of the powerful, but turns his back on the subjective principle of power, am-
8bition, and the urge to be recognized. He is the first one who is uninhibited
enough to say the truth to the prince. Diogenes' answer negates not only the desire for power, but the power of desire as such. It can be interpreted as an abridgment ? f a theory of social needs. Socialized human beings lost their freedom when their educators succeeded in instilling wishes, projects, and ambitions in them. These
atter separate them from their inner time, which knows only the Now, and draw them into expectations and memories. Alexander, whose hunger for power drove him to the borders of India, found his master in an outwardly insignificant, indeed, a down-and-out philosopher. In
eality, life js n o t t0 ^ found with the activists or in the mentality of security.
re
, the Alexander anecdote comes close to Jesus' simile about the birds in the avens who neither sow nor harvest yet live as the freest creatures under God's
-? ',
162 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
heaven. Diogenes and Jesus are united in their irony directed at social labor that exceeds the necessary measure and merely serves to extend power. What for Je- sus was taught by the birds was for Diogenes taught by a mouse; it became his
9 model for self-sufficiency.
2. Just as the Alexander anecdote highlights the philosopher's attitude toward
the powerful and the insatiable, the famous episode with the lantern illustrates his
stance vis-a-vis his fellow citizens in Athens. One day, in broad daylight, the phi-
losopher lit a lamp and, as he was asked on his way through the town what he
was doing, his answer was, Tm looking for people. " This episode provides the
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masterpiece of his pantomimic philosophy. The seeker of people with his lantern does not couch his doctrine in a complicated, cultivated language. Seen in this light, Diogenes would certainly be the most humanitarian philosopher of our tra- dition, popular, graphic, exoteric, and plebeian, to a certain extent the great
10
Grock
didactic procedure, just as biting --indeed, misanthropic --do his ethics turn against the inhabitants of the polis. Laertius emphasizes the special talent of our philosopher to show contempt--a sure sign of a strong, morally critical irritabil- ity. He pursues an idea of humanity that he scarcely finds realized in his fellow human beings. If true human beings are those who remain in control of their desires and live rationally in harmony with nature, it is obvious that urbanized, social human beings behave irrationally and inhumanely. They indeed require the philosopher's light even in daylight to orient themselves in the world. As a moral- ist, Diogenes appears in the role of the doctor of society. His harshness and roughness since that time have been interpreted ambiguously, either as poisons or as medicine. Where the philosopher appears as therapist, he inevitably encoun-
? of antiquity. However, as affably as Diogenes behaves in his existential
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 163
? 9iu&ro tHompfies
G. Ehinger after Johann Heinrich Schonfeld, Quaero homines, first third of the
eighteenth century.
ters resistance from those who refuse his help, or, even more likely, denounce him as a troublemaker or as the one who really needs to be healed --a structure that can be observed everywhere today where therapists confront the disease- producing relations of their society. In a way that inevitably reminds one of Rous- seau, the philosopher with the lantern declares his fellow citizens to be social crip- ples, misformed, addicted beings who in no way correspond to the image of the autonomous, self-controlled, and free individual according to which the philoso- pher tries to shape his own life. This is the therapeutic foil to social unreason. In its exaggeration there is a misanthropic side, just as its practical effect may be to balance and humanize. This ambivalence cannot be resolved theoretically, and whether Diogenes as a person was more misanthrope than philanthrope, whether m his satire there was more cynicism than humor, more aggression than cheerful-
164 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
ness, can in any case no longer be decided from our historical distance. I believe everything points toward underscoring in the figure of Diogenes the sovereign, humorous philosopher of life who, in Erich Fromm's words, is driven by a bi- ophilic disposition to sarcastically take human stupidities to task. Enlightenment in antiquity tends to manifest itself in quarrelsome figures who are capable of reacting in an uncivil way to the spectacle of false living.
Diogenes appears in the period of the decay of the Athenian urban community. It is the eve of Macedonian rule with which the transition to Hellenism begins. The old, small-scale, patriotic ethos of the polis is caught in its own dissolution, which loosens the bonds of individuals to their citizenship. What was earlier the only conceivable place for sensible life now shows its obverse side. The city now becomes a melting pot of absurd customs, a hollow political mechanism whose functioning can now, all at once, be seen through as if from the outside. All but the blind must recognize that a new ethos and a new anthropology are now needed. One is no longer a narrow-minded citizen of a random city-community but must understand oneself as an individual in an extended cosmos. To this ex- tended cosmos corresponds, geographically the new, broad trading network of the dawning Macedonian world empire; culturally, the Hellenistic civilization around the eastern Mediterranean; existentially, the experience of emigration, of migration, of being an outsider. Of Diogenes it is said: "Asked about his hometown, he answered: 'I am a citizen of the world! ' " (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 63). This grandiose new concept contains the boldest answer in antiquity to its most unsettling experience: reason's becoming homeless in the social world and the separation of the idea of true living from the empirical communities. Where socialization for the philosopher becomes synonymous with the un- reasonable demand to be satisfied with the partial reason of one's own random cul- ture and to join in the collective irrationality of one's society, there, the kynic's refusal has a Utopian significance. With their demand for a rational vitality, those who refuse shut themselves in against objective absurdities. The kynic thus sa- crifices his social identity and forgoes the psychic comfort of unquestioned mem- bership in a political group in order to save his existential and cosmic identity. He individualistically defends the universal against the--at best--half-rational collective particular that we call state and society. In the concept of citizen of the world, ancient kynicism passes on its most valuable gift to world culture. "The only true order of state I find is in the cosmos" (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, P- 72). Cosmopolitan sages as bearers of living reason will accordingly only be able to integrate themselves unreservedly into a society when it has become a
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
world- polis. Until then, their role is inevitably that of subversives; they remain the biting conscience of every dominating self-satisfaction and the affliction of every local narrowing.
ic tures, further reports that our philosopher, in order to prove his autonomy, made
3. The legend of Diogenes, which also provides us with all kinds of funny p
'
vsl
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 165
his home in a vat or a tub, whether that sounds like a fairy tale or not. The expla-
nation that possibly it was not a vat in our sense of the word but rather a cistern
or a walled container for water or grain hardly detracts from this story. For no
matter how the ominous vat was shaped, what is important here is not its appear-
ance but what it signifies when, in the middle of the world-city, Athens, a man
who was held to be wise decided to "live" in it. (He is also said to have slept under
the roof of the hall of columns of Zeus, ironically remarking that the Athenians
had probably erected the building especially for him as an abode. ) Alexander the
Great is said to have stood before the philosopher's residential container and cried
out with admiration: "O vat full of wisdom! " What Diogenes demonstrates to his
fellow citizens through his life-style would be designated now as a "regression
to the level of an animal. " Because of this, the Athenians (or perhaps it was the
Corinthians) derogatorily called him "dog," for Diogenes had reduced his re-
quirements to the living standards of a domestic pet. In doing so, he had freed
himself from civilization's chain of needs. He thus also turned the Athenians'
nickname around against them and accepted the insult as the name of his phi-
11
losophy.
One must recall this when one hears the quintessence Diogenes is supposed
to have drawn from his doctrine: "To the question of what gain philosophy had
brought him, he said, if nothing else, then at least, to be prepared for every vicis-
situde" (DiogenesLaertius, vol. VI, p. 63). Sages show that they can live literally
anywhere because, in any place, they are in harmony with themselves and the
"laws of nature. " To the present day, this is the decisive attack against the ideol-
ogy of "Home Beautiful" and comfortable estrangement. This does not necessar-
ily mean that Diogenes would have to nourish resentment against comfort and
cosy homes. However, those who want to be "prepared for every vicissitude"
would understand comfort as a passing episode, like any other situation. That the
philosopher was serious about this view, he could, of course, prove to his fellow
citizens only in the tub because a comfortably situated Diogenes would never
have had as great an impact as this impoverished, declassed wiseman at the nadir
of architecture. In the later Stoa, where in matters of possession kynical princi-
ples were cited absolutely {habere ut non: have as if you did not have), one often
dw w
consciousness, as later, on Christian soil, the Franciscans first were able to do ^gain. In a modern language, what in Diogenes upset his contemporaries could
be
id not know how it was really intended, for one indeed "had" and, seen on the hole, Stoicism was a philosophy of the comfortable. Diogenes, however, really as without possessions and he could convincingly shake his contemporaries' expressed succinctly: "rejection of the superstructure" (Uberbau- Vetr n
weigerung) . Superstructure in this sense would be what civilization offers
way of comfortable seductions to entice people to serve its ends: ideals, ideas
? ut duty, promises of redemption, hopes for immortality, goals for ambition,
tions of power, careers, arts, riches. From a kynical perspective, they are all
166 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
? Francisco de Goya, You Will Not Find Him.
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compensations for something a Diogenes does not let himself be robbed of in the first place: freedom, awareness, joy in living. The fascination of the kynical mode of life is its astounding, indeed almost unbelievable serenity. Those who have subjected themselves to the "reality principle" watch, perplexed and annoyed at the same time, but also fascinated, the activities of those who, so it seems, have taken the shorter path to authentic life and who avoid the long detour of culture to the satisfaction of needs. "Like Diogenes, who used to say, it is divine not ? need anything, and semidivine to only need little" (Diogenes Laertius, vol. * ' p. 105). The pleasure principle functions for the wise in a way similar to that normal mortals, however, not because they get pleasure from the possession
THE CABINET OF CYNICS D 167
biects, but because they realize how dispensable objects are, and thus they re-
main in the continuum of vital contentedness. With Diogenes, this pleasure
nvraniid, in which one only surrenders a lower form of pleasure in favor of a
higher form, is evident. Yet here lies also the easily misunderstood point in kyni-
13
cal ethics: It easily finds followers among masochistically inclined people who,
through asceticism, get a chance to express their resentment against what is living (lebendig)- This ambivalence will mark out the further course of kynical sects. With Diogenes, kynical serenity still speaks for itself. It is the riddle on which those who suffer under an all-too-well-known "discontent in the culture" labor, including Sigmund Freud, who went so far as to claim that happiness was not provided for in the plan of creation. Would not Diogenes, the protokynic, be the most appropriate person to stand as a living witness against the great psycholo- gist's resignation (a mild variant of cynicism? )?
4. The political barb of the kynical offensive only reveals itself in a last group of anecdotes about Diogenes the shameless, Diogenes the "political animal. " Now, this has nothing to do with what Aristotle understands by zoon politikon, the human being as a social entity that can only experience its individuality in rela- tion to society. The expression "animal" is to be taken more literally than the translation of zoon as "living being" allows. The emphasis is on animality, the ani- mal side and animal basis of human existence. "Political animal": This term out-
14
lines the platform of an existential anti-politics.
cal animal, loves life and demands a natural, not an exaggerated, but an honorable place for the animal side. Where the animal side is neither suppressed nor exces- sively elevated, a "discontent in the culture" becomes impossible. Life energy must rise from below and flow unobstructedly, even in the wise. For the person who loves life, like Diogenes, the "reality principle" takes on a different form. Ordinary realism stems from fearfulness and a peevish putting up with necessities
15
that the "system of needs"
tion, Diogenes lived to a ripe old age, more than ninety years. For a philosopher who was a student of ethics and regarded only embodiment as valid, this fact func-
16
gnawing on the raw bone of an ox; this is surely the version told by his opponents,
what Diogenes extended the critical spark against civilization even to eating cus- oms, playing off the raw against the cooked, and therefore could have been a ? rerunner of the modern proponents of raw foods and natural diet. According
0>ch, of course, would be an excellent proof of his superiority in living as in dying.
Diogenes' shamelessness cannot be understood at first glance. Although it ms to be explained on the one hand by a philosophy of nature (naturalia non
tions like a proof in his favor.
Some say that Diogenes poisoned himself by
ho maliciously emphasize the risks of a simple life. Perhaps they reveal thereby
,ee
the version disseminated by his pupils, Diogenes died by holding his breath,
Diogenes, the shameless politi-
prescribes for socialized beings. According to tradi-
168 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
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sunt turpia), its real point lies in the political, sociotheoretical arena. Shame is the most intimate social fetter, which binds us, before all concrete rules of con- science, to universal standards of behavior. Existential philosophers, however cannot remain satisfied with the socially prescribed conditioning in shame. They return once more to the beginning of the process. What a person really has to be ashamed of is by no means settled by social conventions, especially because soci-
17
ety itself is suspected of being based on perversions and irrationalities.
kynic thus serves notice on being led by the nose by deeply engrained command- ments regarding shame. The customs, including those dealing with shame, could after all be perverted. Only an examination following the principles of nature and reason can give them a secure foundation. The political animal breaks through the politics of ashamedness. It demonstrates that people as a rule are ashamed for the wrong reasons, for their physis, their animal sides (which, in fact, are inno- cent), while they remain unmoved by their irrational and ugly practices, their greed, unfairness, cruelty, vanity, prejudice, and blindness. Diogenes turns the tables. He literally shits on the perverted norms. Before the eyes of the Athenian market public, he used to do "what concerns not only Demeter but also Aphrodite" {Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 69) --translated: shitting, pissing, masturbating (possibly fornicating too). The later Platonic and Christianized tradition, which suffocated the body under shame, of course, could see only scandal in this, and centuries of secularization were necessary before the philosophical core of sig- nificance in these gestures could be approached. Psychoanalysis has done its bit for this rediscovery by inventing a language in which anal and genital "phenomena" can be spoken about in public. Precisely this, on a pantomimic level, was demonstrated by Diogenes for the first time. If wise persons are eman- cipated beings, they must have dissolved the internal instances of oppression in themselves. Shame is a main factor in social conformisms, the switch point where external controls are transformed into internal controls. With his public mastur- bation, Diogenes committed a shamelessness by means of which he set himself in opposition to the political training in virtue of all systems. It was a frontal attack on all politics of the family, the core of all conservatism. Because, as tradition ashamedly has it, he sang his wedding song with his own hands, he was not sub- ject to the compulsion to get married to satisfy his sexual needs. Diogenes taught masturbation by practical example, as cultural progress, mind you, not as regres- sion to the animalistic. According to the wiseman, one should let the animal live, insofar as it is a condition of the human. The serene masturbator ("If only one could also drive away hunger by rubbing the belly") breaks through the conserva- tive sexual economy without vital losses. Sexual independence remains one of tn
18
rinC1
Diogenes, the political animal, raises existential presence of mind to a p
pie that finds its most concise expression in the phrase "Be prepared for anything- In a world of incalculable risks, where accidents and changes make it too difticu
most important conditions of emancipation.
The
? ,
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 169
to plan
ophilic individual is left with scarcely any other way out than this streamlined phrase. Politics is that activity in which one has to be ready for anything. Social life is not so much a safe retreat as the source of all dangers.
Presence of mind then becomes the secret of survival. Those who need little can maneuver against political fate when they have to live in times in which poli- tics determines our fate. Politics is also the sphere in which people beat each other over the head because of the competition for nonessentials. The full repercussions of kynical anti-politics first become clear in times of crisis.
If we now pass on to the next figure in our cabinet of cynics, we will see how things become complicated as soon as the philosophers, or better, the intellec- tuals, no longer keep to kynical abstinence but seek bourgeois comfort and, at the same time, try to reserve the prestige of the philosopher for themselves. Di- ogenes, who embodies his doctrine, is still an archaic figure; "modernity" begins with splits, inconsistencies, and ironies.
Lucian the Mocker, or: Critique Changes Sides
You are very much mistaken if you believe that there are antiq- uities. Antiquity is only now beginning to emerge. Novalis
We encounter this man from Samosata on the Euphrates, a Syrian by birth, who has a place of honor in the history of evil tongues --half a millenium later --in a thoroughly transformed cultural setting. On his life in brief:
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After an unsuccessful attempt at sculpturing, Lucian (born about 120 A. D. ) became a rhetorician, a profession that scarcely has a parallel in our time and that has been not inappropriately translated as "concert speaker. " Thus, like Poseidonius and Paulus a great traveller and wan- derer, he moved across the country, through the entire Mediterranean region as far as Gaul, making showy and pompous speeches; and al- though he did not speak Greek without an accent, he had considerable success. But he was too clever, too restless, and intellectually not mod- est enough to be content with success on the podium and the applause of the elegant world. Thus, in his fortieth year, he turned to varied sa- tirical writing, or, as we would say, moralistic essays. It is they, of his life and works, that have stood the test of time. In later years he ac- cepted a position as public servant of the Roman Empire in Egypt, thereby letting himself in for something he himself had mocked not a little, namely, a secure salary and domiciled settledness. The last date
ar|
d where the old order can no longer deal with the new events, the bi-
ln
Aurelius (17 March 180 A. D. ). It is surmised, since it is not known
his life that can be fixed is the death of the emperor, Marcus
170 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
precisely, that he died soon after. (Otto Seel, afterword to Lukian, Gesprache der Gotter und Meergotter, der Toten und der Hetdren [Stuttgart, 1956], pp. 241-42)
It could be contended that in Lucian's time, the seed of the protokynic germi- nated in a puzzling way. An author during the middle period of the Roman em-
19
perors, a contemporary of the Stoic emperor, Marcus Aurelius,
important, though the most malicious, witness of the fact that one of the most powerful impulses in Western philosophy had issued from the apparent satyrical play of the kynical polemic against civilization. Indeed, after a good half a millenium, kynicism for the first time had found within the Roman Empire a truly ideal soil, a situation of flourishing alienation in which it inevitably expanded in all directions. The "dogs" had begun to howl in large packs, and moralistic resis- tance against the social and human circumstances in the empire had swelled to a powerful spiritual current. The kynicism of the time of the emperors has been called the hippie and escapist movement of antiquity (Hochkeppel). To the extent the empire transformed itself into a colossal bureaucratic apparatus whose inner and outer workings an individual could not fathom or influence, its ideological power to integrate and its capacity to rouse feelings of citizenship and commit- ment to the state had to dissipate.
Semiotically, we assign the fart to the group of signals, that is, of signs, which neither symbolize nor depict something but rather point to a situation. When the locomotive whistles, it warns about its approach and possible danger. The fan conceived as a signal shows that the lower body is in full action, and in situations where any reference to such regions is absolutely undesirable, this can have ta consequences. Ernst Jiinger noted in his Paris Diary about his reading ot tn historian Flavius Josephus's Jewish War:
Here I again came upon a passage in which the beginning of unrest in Jerusalem under Cumanus is described (II, 12). While the Jews
CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST ? 151
gathered for the festival of unleavened bread, the Romans positioned a cohort above the hall of columns in the temple to keep an eye on the crowd. One of the soldiers in the cohort pulled up his coat, and with a mocking bow turned his
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behind to the Jews and "let forth an indecent sound corresponding to his position. " That triggered a clash that cost ten thousand lives, so that one can speak of the most fateful fart in world history. (Strahlungen, vol. II, pp. 188-89)
The cynicism of the Roman soldier, whose fart was a political provocation and
4a"blasphemy"inthetemple, findsacounterpartinJiinger'scommentary,which
5Here we come to the whole of the matter. As children of an anal culture, we all have a more or less disturbed relation to our own shit. The splitting off of our consciousness from our own shit is the deepest training in order; it tells us what must happen privately and under wraps. The relation that is drummed into people with regard to their own excretions provides the model for their behavior with
all sorts of refuse in their lives. Hitherto, refuse was systematically ignored. Only under the sign of modern ecological thinking do we find ourselves forced to be- come conscious again of our refuse. High theory discovers the category "shit";
a new stage of the philosophy of nature thereby comes due, a critique of the hu- man being as a hyperproductive shit-accumulating industry-animal. Diogenes is the only Western philosopher who we know consciously and publicly performed his animal business, and there are reasons to interpret this as a component of a pantomimic theory. It hints at a consciousness of nature that assigns positive values to the animal side of human beings and does not allow any dissociation of what is low or embarrassing. Those who do not want to admit that they produce refuse and that they cannot choose to do anything else risk suffocating one day
in their own shit. Everything suggests that Diogenes of Sinope should be admitted to the Ancestral Gallery of Ecological Consciousness. The grand act of ecology
lr
> the history of ideas that will have an impact as far as philosophy, ethics, and Politics are concerned will be to transform the phenomenon of refuse into a "high" heme. From now on it is no longer an onerous secondary phenomenon but is recognized as a basic principle. With this, the last hidden positions of idealism and dualism are really broken down. Shit has to be encountered in another way.
]s now necessary to rethink the usefulness of the unuseful, the productivity of
le
te and to recognize our responsibility also for what is unintended. Kynical phil- 6 sophersarethosewhodonotgetnauseated. Inthistheyarerelatedtochildren, crosses over into the area of theoretical cynicism.
Shit, Refuse
unproductive, philosophically speaking: to unlock the positivity of the nega-
0do not yet know anything about the negativity of their excrement.
152 ? CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST
? ? ? The Scepter. What we conjecture where we don't see anything, that rules the world.
Genitals
These are the geniuses among the organs of the lower half of the body. When they have collected enough experience, they can tell fine stories about how things really are in the big and the small world. They are like the wire pullers in the dark the shark song in the Threepenny Opera says cannot be seen. But in their hands all threads finally come together. In the beginning, Freudian psychoanalysis was accused, among other things, of cynicism because it taught that everything human beings do can be reduced in the final analysis to sexual impulses and their detor mations. This is, of course, a malicious misunderstanding even though it has grain of truth. In fact, psychoanalysis does adopt something of the kynical im pulse in its theoretical procedure, namely, a resoluteness not to let the naked tru that hides behind cultural disguises elude it. As long as it was customary to se
CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST ? 153
omething low and dirty in sexuality, it was also only a small step to confusing the kynical drive in psychoanalysis toward truth with cynicism, which tries to re- duce everything "higher" to the lowest denominator. Then cynicism would
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be just
variant of nihilism, and Freud would have preached a materialism that unduly
7emphasizes the animal in human beings. However, insofar as psychoanalysis
constitutes a theory supportive of life and humanity, it is not at all cynical but tries, in the spirit of Diogenes (and even more, of Epicure), to heal those fissures that idealistic taboos have opened up in carnal pleasures. If today the figure of Freud is virtually overgrown with objections and doubts about his theory and his person, it should nevertheless not be forgotten how great the liberation is that has emanated from him.
However, after the "sexual revolution" things have not gotten any simpler, and it is precisely enlightened genitals that often have an unhappy consciousness. They now live in the twilight of freedom and have learned that sexual adventures and the art of loving are not the same thing. After the "mutual use of the sexual organs"-as Immanuel Kant, in good enlightened fashion, described the marriage contract-the question often remains: Is that all? And if that is everything, why make such a fuss about it?
Out of liberal sexual roaming, a cynicism easily results for which everything is a matter of indifference. The longer the game lasts, the stronger the impression becomes that what we are really looking for does not exist in this world. In their own way, the genitals know, once they have gone through the school of capa- ciousness, about the modern "frosts of freedom. " They begin to get scared of ex- aggerations. The suspicion grows that they too are on the best path toward becom- ing respectable, if respectability means a mixture of reasonableness, cynicism, and resignation.
Enlightenment disillusions, and where disillusionment becomes widespread,
self-experience in the ecstasy that shows us in clear moments who we can really
be dies. This is the most sensitive point in advanced civilization. The more ideals
disintegrate and the positing of meaning from "above" fails, the more we will be
forced to listen to the life energies that bear us along. Whether they can carry us,
'hat is the question, for they can only do so when they flow without obstruction.
0-eling" described by Romain Rolland as the basis of religious consciousness and they flow? Does life live? Are orgasms really our signposts to that "oceanic
that our great theoretician of the libido, Sigmund Freud, refused to acknowledge e cause he had not directly experienced it? Notes
? borrow this concept from Ivan Illich and transfer it to the area of epistemology.
? [A progressive children's theater group in Berlin-Trans. ]
? Napoleon Bonaparte, who was admired by many because of his realistic cynicism (see chapter
aed
' * 'n his sarcastic New Year's Day speech in 1814: "What is a throne anyway? Four pieces
154 ? CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST
of gilded timber and a shred of velvet? -No, the throne is a man, and I am this man. " The langua? of a cynic, who behaves like an upstart, i. e. , awkwardly matter-of-fact, toward ceremony ("fuss"i and legitimacy ("paper").
4. Later (see chapter 8) I explain blasphemy as a phenomenon related to religious cynicism 5. See on this point the sixth cardinal cynicism (chapter 8).
6. Here we see that cynicism arises from a reversal of kynicism. The cynic feels nauseated in prjn
ciple: for him, everything is shit; his overdisappointed superego does not see the good in the shit Hence his nausee.
7. The connections between psychoanalysis and cynicism will be touched on in three places it this book; in chapter 8 ("Sexual Cynicism" and "The Cynicism of Knowledge") and in chapter 13 Excursus 2 ("The Ice Dogs: On the Psychoanalysis of the Cynic").
Chapter 7
The Cabinet of Cynics
In the cabinet of cynics, there are no individualized personalities but rather types, that is, social characters and characters of a period. When we examine them, it does no harm to imagine them as dolls in a cabinet of wax figures where promi- nent historical personages meet. On our tour we also encounter literary figures who can be used to demonstrate archetypal features of cynical consciousness. Only the first two we find exhibited here--both figures of antiquity--actually lived: Diogenes of Sinope, the ancestral father of the species, and Lucian of Samosata on the Euphrates. The two modern figures, Goethe's Mephistopheles and Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, are by contrast figures created by poets out of the material of cynical experience. In plasticity, they have everything the historical personalities have. As pure types there is something impersonal, im- mortal, about them, and in this they resemble
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Diogenes and Lucian, of whom we likewise possess only silhouettes with none of the details that distinguish real in- dividuals from their types. At the end of this series, we find, as representative of the present, a quite faceless figure that resembles everybody and nobody. It is called Anyone (das Man); Martin Heidegger has polished and abstracted it. It reminds one a little of the figures of the painter De Chirico, mannequins with empty, round heads and artificial limbs, geometrically shaped, which look like human beings, but only "look like" because they lack "authenticity. "
We will keep the tour through the historical cabinet as short as possible, first, because museums are fatiguing and second, because the main points can be demonstrated by a few examples. By rights, of course, many other faces would nave to crop up --Antisthenes, Crates, Aristophanes, Francois Villon, Rabelais,
155
156 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
? Heinrich Zille, Dog theater on a fairground in Berlin around 1900.
Machiavelli, Eulenspiegel, Castruccio Castracani, Sancho Panza, Rameau's
1nephew, Frederick II of Prussia, de Sade, Talleyrand, Napoleon, Biichner,
Grabbe, Heine, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Cioran, and many more. Some of them will be mentioned in other parts of this book. The whole of Part V, Historical Main Text, is indirectly devoted to the German kynics and cynics of the early twentieth century.
We join our museum guide, who, before each of the figures, insists on making educated comments on the historical significance of the gentlemen depicted. It is clear that philosophy is his passion and that he belongs to that species of people who like to show off their education. That means that from now on we will have to grit our teeth. The man really wants to teach us something. Nothing is worse than a museum guide who, in all seriousness, wants to instruct his visitors. Such a dilettante lacks the professional philosopher's fear of philosophy. But have cour- age! Haven't we already survived unscathed quite different attempts to make us smarter? Avanti!
Diogenes of Sinope: Human Dog, Philosopher, Good-for-Nothing
Once he called out loud: Hey there, people! and as they ran up to him, he worked them over with his staff with the words: I called for people, not riff-raff!
To approach one another with a smile full of "understanding" would be a misun-
derstanding. Diogenes, who we have before us here, is not at all an idylh?
dreamer in his tub but a dog that bites when he feels like it.
2He is one of those
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 157
? Diogenes, Democritus, and two fools standing around the globe. From the Narren- schiff (The ship of fools), 1497. who simultaneously bark and bite and do not pay much attention to proverbs. His
bite sank so deep into the most highly treasured values of Athenian civilization
that since then no satirist could be trusted. The memory of his bites belongs to
the most vivid impressions retained from antiquity. For this reason, the humorous
approval of this philosopher by many an ironically minded citizen almost always
rests on a belittling misunderstanding. In the citizen there is a caged wolf who
sympathizes with the biting philosopher. But Diogenes sees above all the citizen
? n his sympathizer, and he bites all the same. Theory and praxis are incalculably
interwoven in his philosophy and there is no room for mere theoretical agree-
ment. Even mere practical imitation would not please him; he would probably
think it was stupid. He is impressed only by characters whose presence of mind,
quick wit, alertness, and independent feeling toward life are a match for his. His
su
ggestive success rests not least of all on the fact that he was a teacher who Wanted no pupils who imitated him. In this he resembles the Japanese Zen Masters, whose effect is achieved by teaching through nonteaching.
We could not picture his external appearance today or gain an impression of
158 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
his effect on the Athenian environment if we did not have the visual instruction
3of the hippies, freaks, globetrotters, and metropolitan Indians. He is a wild,
witty, cunning sort. Part of the standard picture, as it is handed down from antiq- uity, is that the kynic must be without
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possessions --mostly involuntarily by birth, then, on top of that, voluntarily, whereby an impression of sovereignty arises. Everything kynics own, they carry with them. For Diogenes and his kind this means an all-weather coat, a staff, a knapsack with the smallest personal effects, including probably a toothpick, a pumice for cleansing the skin, a drinking vessel made of wood. The feet are in sandals. This outfit, when it was chosen by free citizens, was somewhat shocking, especially at a time when it was considered dis- graceful for an Athenian to appear in public unaccompanied by slaves. That Di- ogenes had a beard is self-evident, even if it is not so much a matter of a proper
4beard, but rather of the unshavenness of many decades.
Diogenes' influence on his contemporaries, however, was not a question of
aesthetics. A disheveled appearance says little when, on the other hand, it is known that the Athenian upper-class whores granted the unkempt philosopher ex- clusive and unpaid favors that other poor suckers at most only dreamed about. Between Lai's and Phryne, the star courtesans of the Attic capital, and Diogenes, it seems there were laws of giving and taking that the normal citizen, who has to pay cash for everything, does not understand.
To call him an ascetic would be incorrect because of the false undertones the word asceticism has assumed through a thousand-year-long masochistic misun- derstanding. We have to rid the word of its Christian connotations to rediscover its fundamental meaning. As free of need as Diogenes appears, he could be taken rather as the original father of the idea of self-help, and thus as an ascetic in the sense that he was a self-helper by distancing himself from and being ironic about needs for whose satisfaction most people pay with their freedom. He, who provided the impulse for kynicism, introduced the original connection between happiness, lack of need, and intelligence into Western philosophy--a theme that can be found in all vita simplex movements in world cultures. As the original hip- pie and proto-Bohemian, Diogenes has left his mark on the European tradition of intelligent living. His spectacular poverty is the price of freedom; that must be understood. If he could be well-off without sacrificing his freedom, he would not have objected at all. But no wise man can let himself be made a fool of by so-called needs. Diogenes taught that the wise man too eats cake, but only if he can just as well do without it.
A dogmatism of poverty does not come into question; it is rather a matter of discarding false weights, which hinder one's freedom of movement. Self-torture is definitely a stupidity for Diogenes. Still more stupid, of course, from his point of view are those who spend their whole lives running after something they al- ready have. Citizens struggle with the chimera of ambition and strive for riches
THE CABINET OF CYNICS D 159
? G. J. Caraglio after Parmigianino, Diogenes with the "Platonic human,"around 1530-40.
that, in the last analysis, they cannot enjoy any more than what is enjoyed in the elementary pleasures of the kynical philosopher as a daily recurring matter of course: lying in the sun, observing the goings-on in the world, being glad, and having nothing to wait for.
Since Diogenes was one of those philosophers of life for whom life is more
important than writing, it is understandable why not a single authentic line from
him has been preserved. Instead, a garland of anecdotes lives on around him that
say more about his influence than any writing could do. Whether he really com-
posed some writings, such as a Politics and the seven tragedy-parodies, as
claimed by tradition, is left aside here. In any case, his significance does not lie
ln
became a mythical figure. Witty and instructive stories buzz around him, as they
writings. His existence is absorbed in the anecdotes he provoked. In them he
160 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
do around his colleague, Mullah Nasrudin, in the Sufian satire. Precisely that proves his real existence. The most vital people thrust themselves on their con- temporaries and even more on posterity as projection-figures and attract a definite direction of fantasy and thinking to themselves. They stimulate people's curiosity as to what it would be like to be in the skin of such a philosopher. Thereby they not only gain pupils but also attract people who carry their living impulse further. This curiosity with regard to Diogenes' existence seized even the greatest military hero of antiquity, Alexander of Macedonia, who is reputed to have said that he would want to be Diogenes if he were not Alexander. This shows the heights, both
5political and existential, to which the philosopher's influence reached.
In the attempt to express Diogenes' intentions in modern language, we auto- matically approach existential philosophy. However, Diogenes does not talk about existence, decision, absurdity, atheism, and such key words of modern ex-
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istentialism. The ancient Diogenes is ironic about his philosopher colleagues, poking fun not only at how they torture themselves with problems but also at their credulity regarding concepts. His existentialism does not go primarily through the head; he experiences the world as neither tragic nor absurd. There is not the slightest trace of the melancholy around him, which clings to all modern existen- tialism. His weapon is not so much analysis as laughter. He uses his philosophical
competence to mock his serious colleagues. As anti-theoretician, anti-dogmatist, anti-scholar, he emits an impulse that resounds everywhere where thinkers strive for a "knowledge for free people," free also from the strictures of a school, and with this he begins a series in which names like Montaigne, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Feyerabend, and others appear. It is a line of philosophizing that suspends the es- prit de serieux. How Diogenes' existentialism is to be understood is still best shown in the anecdotes. The danger of underestimating the philosophical content of kynicism, precisely because it has been handed down "only" anecdotally, is great. That even great spirits of the caliber of Hegel and Schopenhauer have fallen into this trap can be gleaned from their presentations of the history of philosophy. Hegel above all was blind to the theoretical content of a philosophy that finds ulti- mate wisdom precisely in not having a theory for the decisive things in life and that teaches instead to undertake the risk of existence consciously and serenely-
1.
Legend has it that the young Alexander of Macedonia one day sought out Diogenes, whose fame had made him curious. He found him taking a sunbath, lying lazily on his back, perhaps close to an Athenian sportsfield; others say he was gluing books. The young sovereign, in an effort to prove his generosity- granted the philosopher a wish. Diogenes' answer is supposed to have been: "Stop
7blocking my sun! " That is perhaps the most well known philosophical anecdote
from Greek antiquity, and not without justice. It demonstrates in one stroke wha antiquity understands by philosophical wisdom -- not so much a theoretical knowl- edge but rather an unerring, sovereign spirit. The wise man of long ago knew bes
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 161
? ? Johannes Platner, Diogenes and Alexander, 1780.
of all the dangers of knowledge that lie in the addictive character of theory. All too easily they draw intellectuals into the ambitious stream where they succumb to intellectual reflexes instead of exercising autonomy. The fascination of this anecdote lies in the fact that it shows the emancipation of the philosopher from the politician. Here, the wise man is not, like the modern intellectual, an accom- plice of the powerful, but turns his back on the subjective principle of power, am-
8bition, and the urge to be recognized. He is the first one who is uninhibited
enough to say the truth to the prince. Diogenes' answer negates not only the desire for power, but the power of desire as such. It can be interpreted as an abridgment ? f a theory of social needs. Socialized human beings lost their freedom when their educators succeeded in instilling wishes, projects, and ambitions in them. These
atter separate them from their inner time, which knows only the Now, and draw them into expectations and memories. Alexander, whose hunger for power drove him to the borders of India, found his master in an outwardly insignificant, indeed, a down-and-out philosopher. In
eality, life js n o t t0 ^ found with the activists or in the mentality of security.
re
, the Alexander anecdote comes close to Jesus' simile about the birds in the avens who neither sow nor harvest yet live as the freest creatures under God's
-? ',
162 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
heaven. Diogenes and Jesus are united in their irony directed at social labor that exceeds the necessary measure and merely serves to extend power. What for Je- sus was taught by the birds was for Diogenes taught by a mouse; it became his
9 model for self-sufficiency.
2. Just as the Alexander anecdote highlights the philosopher's attitude toward
the powerful and the insatiable, the famous episode with the lantern illustrates his
stance vis-a-vis his fellow citizens in Athens. One day, in broad daylight, the phi-
losopher lit a lamp and, as he was asked on his way through the town what he
was doing, his answer was, Tm looking for people. " This episode provides the
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masterpiece of his pantomimic philosophy. The seeker of people with his lantern does not couch his doctrine in a complicated, cultivated language. Seen in this light, Diogenes would certainly be the most humanitarian philosopher of our tra- dition, popular, graphic, exoteric, and plebeian, to a certain extent the great
10
Grock
didactic procedure, just as biting --indeed, misanthropic --do his ethics turn against the inhabitants of the polis. Laertius emphasizes the special talent of our philosopher to show contempt--a sure sign of a strong, morally critical irritabil- ity. He pursues an idea of humanity that he scarcely finds realized in his fellow human beings. If true human beings are those who remain in control of their desires and live rationally in harmony with nature, it is obvious that urbanized, social human beings behave irrationally and inhumanely. They indeed require the philosopher's light even in daylight to orient themselves in the world. As a moral- ist, Diogenes appears in the role of the doctor of society. His harshness and roughness since that time have been interpreted ambiguously, either as poisons or as medicine. Where the philosopher appears as therapist, he inevitably encoun-
? of antiquity. However, as affably as Diogenes behaves in his existential
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 163
? 9iu&ro tHompfies
G. Ehinger after Johann Heinrich Schonfeld, Quaero homines, first third of the
eighteenth century.
ters resistance from those who refuse his help, or, even more likely, denounce him as a troublemaker or as the one who really needs to be healed --a structure that can be observed everywhere today where therapists confront the disease- producing relations of their society. In a way that inevitably reminds one of Rous- seau, the philosopher with the lantern declares his fellow citizens to be social crip- ples, misformed, addicted beings who in no way correspond to the image of the autonomous, self-controlled, and free individual according to which the philoso- pher tries to shape his own life. This is the therapeutic foil to social unreason. In its exaggeration there is a misanthropic side, just as its practical effect may be to balance and humanize. This ambivalence cannot be resolved theoretically, and whether Diogenes as a person was more misanthrope than philanthrope, whether m his satire there was more cynicism than humor, more aggression than cheerful-
164 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
ness, can in any case no longer be decided from our historical distance. I believe everything points toward underscoring in the figure of Diogenes the sovereign, humorous philosopher of life who, in Erich Fromm's words, is driven by a bi- ophilic disposition to sarcastically take human stupidities to task. Enlightenment in antiquity tends to manifest itself in quarrelsome figures who are capable of reacting in an uncivil way to the spectacle of false living.
Diogenes appears in the period of the decay of the Athenian urban community. It is the eve of Macedonian rule with which the transition to Hellenism begins. The old, small-scale, patriotic ethos of the polis is caught in its own dissolution, which loosens the bonds of individuals to their citizenship. What was earlier the only conceivable place for sensible life now shows its obverse side. The city now becomes a melting pot of absurd customs, a hollow political mechanism whose functioning can now, all at once, be seen through as if from the outside. All but the blind must recognize that a new ethos and a new anthropology are now needed. One is no longer a narrow-minded citizen of a random city-community but must understand oneself as an individual in an extended cosmos. To this ex- tended cosmos corresponds, geographically the new, broad trading network of the dawning Macedonian world empire; culturally, the Hellenistic civilization around the eastern Mediterranean; existentially, the experience of emigration, of migration, of being an outsider. Of Diogenes it is said: "Asked about his hometown, he answered: 'I am a citizen of the world! ' " (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 63). This grandiose new concept contains the boldest answer in antiquity to its most unsettling experience: reason's becoming homeless in the social world and the separation of the idea of true living from the empirical communities. Where socialization for the philosopher becomes synonymous with the un- reasonable demand to be satisfied with the partial reason of one's own random cul- ture and to join in the collective irrationality of one's society, there, the kynic's refusal has a Utopian significance. With their demand for a rational vitality, those who refuse shut themselves in against objective absurdities. The kynic thus sa- crifices his social identity and forgoes the psychic comfort of unquestioned mem- bership in a political group in order to save his existential and cosmic identity. He individualistically defends the universal against the--at best--half-rational collective particular that we call state and society. In the concept of citizen of the world, ancient kynicism passes on its most valuable gift to world culture. "The only true order of state I find is in the cosmos" (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, P- 72). Cosmopolitan sages as bearers of living reason will accordingly only be able to integrate themselves unreservedly into a society when it has become a
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
world- polis. Until then, their role is inevitably that of subversives; they remain the biting conscience of every dominating self-satisfaction and the affliction of every local narrowing.
ic tures, further reports that our philosopher, in order to prove his autonomy, made
3. The legend of Diogenes, which also provides us with all kinds of funny p
'
vsl
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 165
his home in a vat or a tub, whether that sounds like a fairy tale or not. The expla-
nation that possibly it was not a vat in our sense of the word but rather a cistern
or a walled container for water or grain hardly detracts from this story. For no
matter how the ominous vat was shaped, what is important here is not its appear-
ance but what it signifies when, in the middle of the world-city, Athens, a man
who was held to be wise decided to "live" in it. (He is also said to have slept under
the roof of the hall of columns of Zeus, ironically remarking that the Athenians
had probably erected the building especially for him as an abode. ) Alexander the
Great is said to have stood before the philosopher's residential container and cried
out with admiration: "O vat full of wisdom! " What Diogenes demonstrates to his
fellow citizens through his life-style would be designated now as a "regression
to the level of an animal. " Because of this, the Athenians (or perhaps it was the
Corinthians) derogatorily called him "dog," for Diogenes had reduced his re-
quirements to the living standards of a domestic pet. In doing so, he had freed
himself from civilization's chain of needs. He thus also turned the Athenians'
nickname around against them and accepted the insult as the name of his phi-
11
losophy.
One must recall this when one hears the quintessence Diogenes is supposed
to have drawn from his doctrine: "To the question of what gain philosophy had
brought him, he said, if nothing else, then at least, to be prepared for every vicis-
situde" (DiogenesLaertius, vol. VI, p. 63). Sages show that they can live literally
anywhere because, in any place, they are in harmony with themselves and the
"laws of nature. " To the present day, this is the decisive attack against the ideol-
ogy of "Home Beautiful" and comfortable estrangement. This does not necessar-
ily mean that Diogenes would have to nourish resentment against comfort and
cosy homes. However, those who want to be "prepared for every vicissitude"
would understand comfort as a passing episode, like any other situation. That the
philosopher was serious about this view, he could, of course, prove to his fellow
citizens only in the tub because a comfortably situated Diogenes would never
have had as great an impact as this impoverished, declassed wiseman at the nadir
of architecture. In the later Stoa, where in matters of possession kynical princi-
ples were cited absolutely {habere ut non: have as if you did not have), one often
dw w
consciousness, as later, on Christian soil, the Franciscans first were able to do ^gain. In a modern language, what in Diogenes upset his contemporaries could
be
id not know how it was really intended, for one indeed "had" and, seen on the hole, Stoicism was a philosophy of the comfortable. Diogenes, however, really as without possessions and he could convincingly shake his contemporaries' expressed succinctly: "rejection of the superstructure" (Uberbau- Vetr n
weigerung) . Superstructure in this sense would be what civilization offers
way of comfortable seductions to entice people to serve its ends: ideals, ideas
? ut duty, promises of redemption, hopes for immortality, goals for ambition,
tions of power, careers, arts, riches. From a kynical perspective, they are all
166 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
? Francisco de Goya, You Will Not Find Him.
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compensations for something a Diogenes does not let himself be robbed of in the first place: freedom, awareness, joy in living. The fascination of the kynical mode of life is its astounding, indeed almost unbelievable serenity. Those who have subjected themselves to the "reality principle" watch, perplexed and annoyed at the same time, but also fascinated, the activities of those who, so it seems, have taken the shorter path to authentic life and who avoid the long detour of culture to the satisfaction of needs. "Like Diogenes, who used to say, it is divine not ? need anything, and semidivine to only need little" (Diogenes Laertius, vol. * ' p. 105). The pleasure principle functions for the wise in a way similar to that normal mortals, however, not because they get pleasure from the possession
THE CABINET OF CYNICS D 167
biects, but because they realize how dispensable objects are, and thus they re-
main in the continuum of vital contentedness. With Diogenes, this pleasure
nvraniid, in which one only surrenders a lower form of pleasure in favor of a
higher form, is evident. Yet here lies also the easily misunderstood point in kyni-
13
cal ethics: It easily finds followers among masochistically inclined people who,
through asceticism, get a chance to express their resentment against what is living (lebendig)- This ambivalence will mark out the further course of kynical sects. With Diogenes, kynical serenity still speaks for itself. It is the riddle on which those who suffer under an all-too-well-known "discontent in the culture" labor, including Sigmund Freud, who went so far as to claim that happiness was not provided for in the plan of creation. Would not Diogenes, the protokynic, be the most appropriate person to stand as a living witness against the great psycholo- gist's resignation (a mild variant of cynicism? )?
4. The political barb of the kynical offensive only reveals itself in a last group of anecdotes about Diogenes the shameless, Diogenes the "political animal. " Now, this has nothing to do with what Aristotle understands by zoon politikon, the human being as a social entity that can only experience its individuality in rela- tion to society. The expression "animal" is to be taken more literally than the translation of zoon as "living being" allows. The emphasis is on animality, the ani- mal side and animal basis of human existence. "Political animal": This term out-
14
lines the platform of an existential anti-politics.
cal animal, loves life and demands a natural, not an exaggerated, but an honorable place for the animal side. Where the animal side is neither suppressed nor exces- sively elevated, a "discontent in the culture" becomes impossible. Life energy must rise from below and flow unobstructedly, even in the wise. For the person who loves life, like Diogenes, the "reality principle" takes on a different form. Ordinary realism stems from fearfulness and a peevish putting up with necessities
15
that the "system of needs"
tion, Diogenes lived to a ripe old age, more than ninety years. For a philosopher who was a student of ethics and regarded only embodiment as valid, this fact func-
16
gnawing on the raw bone of an ox; this is surely the version told by his opponents,
what Diogenes extended the critical spark against civilization even to eating cus- oms, playing off the raw against the cooked, and therefore could have been a ? rerunner of the modern proponents of raw foods and natural diet. According
0>ch, of course, would be an excellent proof of his superiority in living as in dying.
Diogenes' shamelessness cannot be understood at first glance. Although it ms to be explained on the one hand by a philosophy of nature (naturalia non
tions like a proof in his favor.
Some say that Diogenes poisoned himself by
ho maliciously emphasize the risks of a simple life. Perhaps they reveal thereby
,ee
the version disseminated by his pupils, Diogenes died by holding his breath,
Diogenes, the shameless politi-
prescribes for socialized beings. According to tradi-
168 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
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sunt turpia), its real point lies in the political, sociotheoretical arena. Shame is the most intimate social fetter, which binds us, before all concrete rules of con- science, to universal standards of behavior. Existential philosophers, however cannot remain satisfied with the socially prescribed conditioning in shame. They return once more to the beginning of the process. What a person really has to be ashamed of is by no means settled by social conventions, especially because soci-
17
ety itself is suspected of being based on perversions and irrationalities.
kynic thus serves notice on being led by the nose by deeply engrained command- ments regarding shame. The customs, including those dealing with shame, could after all be perverted. Only an examination following the principles of nature and reason can give them a secure foundation. The political animal breaks through the politics of ashamedness. It demonstrates that people as a rule are ashamed for the wrong reasons, for their physis, their animal sides (which, in fact, are inno- cent), while they remain unmoved by their irrational and ugly practices, their greed, unfairness, cruelty, vanity, prejudice, and blindness. Diogenes turns the tables. He literally shits on the perverted norms. Before the eyes of the Athenian market public, he used to do "what concerns not only Demeter but also Aphrodite" {Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 69) --translated: shitting, pissing, masturbating (possibly fornicating too). The later Platonic and Christianized tradition, which suffocated the body under shame, of course, could see only scandal in this, and centuries of secularization were necessary before the philosophical core of sig- nificance in these gestures could be approached. Psychoanalysis has done its bit for this rediscovery by inventing a language in which anal and genital "phenomena" can be spoken about in public. Precisely this, on a pantomimic level, was demonstrated by Diogenes for the first time. If wise persons are eman- cipated beings, they must have dissolved the internal instances of oppression in themselves. Shame is a main factor in social conformisms, the switch point where external controls are transformed into internal controls. With his public mastur- bation, Diogenes committed a shamelessness by means of which he set himself in opposition to the political training in virtue of all systems. It was a frontal attack on all politics of the family, the core of all conservatism. Because, as tradition ashamedly has it, he sang his wedding song with his own hands, he was not sub- ject to the compulsion to get married to satisfy his sexual needs. Diogenes taught masturbation by practical example, as cultural progress, mind you, not as regres- sion to the animalistic. According to the wiseman, one should let the animal live, insofar as it is a condition of the human. The serene masturbator ("If only one could also drive away hunger by rubbing the belly") breaks through the conserva- tive sexual economy without vital losses. Sexual independence remains one of tn
18
rinC1
Diogenes, the political animal, raises existential presence of mind to a p
pie that finds its most concise expression in the phrase "Be prepared for anything- In a world of incalculable risks, where accidents and changes make it too difticu
most important conditions of emancipation.
The
? ,
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 169
to plan
ophilic individual is left with scarcely any other way out than this streamlined phrase. Politics is that activity in which one has to be ready for anything. Social life is not so much a safe retreat as the source of all dangers.
Presence of mind then becomes the secret of survival. Those who need little can maneuver against political fate when they have to live in times in which poli- tics determines our fate. Politics is also the sphere in which people beat each other over the head because of the competition for nonessentials. The full repercussions of kynical anti-politics first become clear in times of crisis.
If we now pass on to the next figure in our cabinet of cynics, we will see how things become complicated as soon as the philosophers, or better, the intellec- tuals, no longer keep to kynical abstinence but seek bourgeois comfort and, at the same time, try to reserve the prestige of the philosopher for themselves. Di- ogenes, who embodies his doctrine, is still an archaic figure; "modernity" begins with splits, inconsistencies, and ironies.
Lucian the Mocker, or: Critique Changes Sides
You are very much mistaken if you believe that there are antiq- uities. Antiquity is only now beginning to emerge. Novalis
We encounter this man from Samosata on the Euphrates, a Syrian by birth, who has a place of honor in the history of evil tongues --half a millenium later --in a thoroughly transformed cultural setting. On his life in brief:
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After an unsuccessful attempt at sculpturing, Lucian (born about 120 A. D. ) became a rhetorician, a profession that scarcely has a parallel in our time and that has been not inappropriately translated as "concert speaker. " Thus, like Poseidonius and Paulus a great traveller and wan- derer, he moved across the country, through the entire Mediterranean region as far as Gaul, making showy and pompous speeches; and al- though he did not speak Greek without an accent, he had considerable success. But he was too clever, too restless, and intellectually not mod- est enough to be content with success on the podium and the applause of the elegant world. Thus, in his fortieth year, he turned to varied sa- tirical writing, or, as we would say, moralistic essays. It is they, of his life and works, that have stood the test of time. In later years he ac- cepted a position as public servant of the Roman Empire in Egypt, thereby letting himself in for something he himself had mocked not a little, namely, a secure salary and domiciled settledness. The last date
ar|
d where the old order can no longer deal with the new events, the bi-
ln
Aurelius (17 March 180 A. D. ). It is surmised, since it is not known
his life that can be fixed is the death of the emperor, Marcus
170 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
precisely, that he died soon after. (Otto Seel, afterword to Lukian, Gesprache der Gotter und Meergotter, der Toten und der Hetdren [Stuttgart, 1956], pp. 241-42)
It could be contended that in Lucian's time, the seed of the protokynic germi- nated in a puzzling way. An author during the middle period of the Roman em-
19
perors, a contemporary of the Stoic emperor, Marcus Aurelius,
important, though the most malicious, witness of the fact that one of the most powerful impulses in Western philosophy had issued from the apparent satyrical play of the kynical polemic against civilization. Indeed, after a good half a millenium, kynicism for the first time had found within the Roman Empire a truly ideal soil, a situation of flourishing alienation in which it inevitably expanded in all directions. The "dogs" had begun to howl in large packs, and moralistic resis- tance against the social and human circumstances in the empire had swelled to a powerful spiritual current. The kynicism of the time of the emperors has been called the hippie and escapist movement of antiquity (Hochkeppel). To the extent the empire transformed itself into a colossal bureaucratic apparatus whose inner and outer workings an individual could not fathom or influence, its ideological power to integrate and its capacity to rouse feelings of citizenship and commit- ment to the state had to dissipate.
