The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon Natania Meeker (bio) Louisa Shea. The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. xx+262pp. ISBN 978-0-8018-9385-8. In her appealingly ambitious study of Cynicism in the eighteenth century (and beyond), Louisa Shea perceptively articulates the tensions that have long structured debates around the social effects of philosophical critique. Shea is interested in the “Cynic legacy,” as she calls it, for the role that this inheritance plays in enabling eighteenth-century writers in France and Germany to test the limits of their own intellectual commitments. The figure of Diogenes—defacer of norms and, as Shea helpfully reminds us, of currencies—serves as a crucial point of reference for a wide range of writers seeking, during the Enlightenment and well into the twentieth century, to imagine (and later, to rethink) the position of the public intellectual. But Diogenes, as a critic and a rascal, is not just dogged in his attacks on social conventions but actively doglike: his reported bouts of public urination and masturbation, his shamelessness and poverty, his disrespect for authorities of all kinds (religious, political, and philosophical), make Cynicism particularly resistant to co-optation, even (or perhaps especially) by its “heirs.” In this sense, the Cynic legacy remains defined by ambivalence, and necessarily so. As Shea argues, the Enlightenment period bears witness to the return to circulation of the coin of Cynicism, in the salons and among the philosophes, in France as well as in Germany. But the attempt to make of Diogenes the representative of an engaged and enlightened philosophy quickly becomes, as Shea portrays it, an effort to domesticate the Dog. Shea shows how the eighteenth-century reception of Cynicism [End Page 395] is significant not only for its successes but also for its failures, as a philosophical Cynicism gradually assumes the more familiar, and yet more scurrilous, posture of contemporary cynical apathy. In her reading of the modern cynic in opposition to his ancient Cynical progenitors, Shea makes elegant use of Peter Sloterdijk’s critique of Zynismus—an “enlightened false consciousness” that ends in disillusionment and inaction—as the product of the Enlightenment, rather than its antithesis (Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], 5). Yet Zynismus is itself both the antithesis and the product of the Cynical tradition from which it derives its name. What does it mean to deface a philosophical tradition that locates its own point of origin in an act of defacement: namely, the injunction to “adulterate the coinage” (parakharattein to nomisma) uttered by the Delphic oracle to the young Diogenes? Shea provocatively opens up this question, although her answers tend, perhaps unavoidably, to emphasize the virtuous arduousness of the turn to Cynicism, occasionally at the expense of some of the outrageous roguishness that has made Diogenes both fascinating and horrifying to more respectable philosophers. Her systematic and engaging presentation of the principles of ancient Cynicism works to underline the difficulties inherent in any attempt to determine exactly what it is that Cynics might effectively pass on to those who aim to receive their message. Among the “competing images of the Cynics” who “vie for centre stage,” Shea identifies three in particular: that of the ascetic and disciplined Cynic, dedicated to moral simplicity and to the promotion of the public welfare; that of the unprincipled Cynic, without dignity and without constraints; and finally, that of the satirical Cynic, who laughs at the other two (19). Shea’s reading of the Cynic legacy in the eighteenth century is in many ways a reading of the Enlightenment as a negotiation among the multiple faces visible in ancient portraits of the Cynics, a negotiation that appears eventually to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, only to surface again in the writings of Sloterdijk and Foucault, towards the end of the twentieth century. Shea places Diogenes at the very heart of the Enlightenment, contextualizing and illuminating the references to him and to his sect that appear in the work of d’Alembert, Diderot, Wieland, Rousseau (condemned as a false Cynic by Voltaire), and Sade, among others. Shea reads these...