Cynicism, Menippean Satire, and the Critic: Whose Diogenes?
Unlike the mud that the polemicist can fling, and just because some of it always sticks: et aliquid adhaerebit, cynicism tends to slide.[1]
And if Nietzsche praises the cynic not just generically but by name in Human, All too Human, reminding us of the “darling vanity [liebe Eitelkeit]”[2] and resentment behind much of our talk of “human dignity” and demand for equality, “the cynic,” by contrast “thinks differently concerning the matter, because he despises honor: and so Diogenes was for some time a slave and tutor.”
Monsiau, Alexander visiting Diogenes
The shadow, flatly honest, articulates Nietzsche’s parrhesia or Redlichkeit, lacking both flattery and consideration for the other, owing to fear or to hope or simple unimaginativeness and at the same time, the shadow’s one wish also reflects the perspectival or shifting condition of happiness. Thus we may recall that the primary advantage of living in Diogenes’ tub or barrel was that one could roll it to and fro and, green before its time, turn it towards the sun as needed. It can almost seem that this is the same perspectival ecstasy that appears in a more ‘jubilant’ form at the end of Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason.[4]
The cynic Diogenes of Sinope also figures, centrally so, in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. Without even bothering to unpack his complicated Aeschylean reference to the “‘waves of uncountable laughing,’”[5] or the significance of his cynical reflection upon the patently cynical effects of laughter on traditional (Sloterdijk would say academic) philosophy, Nietzsche here emphasizes the “economy” of life, its physio-ecology. As Nietzsche writes regarding the meaning of life: “in the long run every one of those great teachers of a purpose [to life] was vanquished by laughter, reason, and nature; the short tragedy always succumbed again and returned into the eternal comedy of existence.”[6] Sketching the birth of tragedy out of the spirit of music, qua folk and founding politico-theological song but also qua the erotic viscerality of the satyr cult, Nietzsche in his first book asked us to reflect on the juxtaposition of Archilochus and Homer as the ancients ranked these two together.[7] The comment is a cynical one just where Homer offered a handbook for life (and how to be Greek) and Archilochus did “things with words” (just to take Austin beyond his imaginings), as words today still “work,” namely by way of pornography and more cynically and savagely still, by way of its sometimes mortal, moral consequences using the results of confession and thus exposure contra convention. By these means Lycambes and his two daughters were said to have been driven to suicide by Archilochus’ poetry.[8]
In this sense, the phenomenon named “cyber-bullying” is only the latest and, given the nature of the world-wide-web, by far the most vulgar instantiation of a tradition that has been ongoing, uninterruptedly so, since Archilochus and doubtless all the way back to Lascaux. In addition to the complex allusion to the satirical and parodic in the preface added to the second edition of the Gay Science (expanded by a fifth book along with a series of mocking rhymes, “Songs of Prince Vogelfrei”),[9] Nietzsche can be supposed to have begun his explicitly provençal parody (I have to say explicitly provençal because no one took the joke — as Nietzsche himself complained)[10] with a reference to Diogenes but not less, so I argue, with reference to Lucian of Samosata, where Nietzsche bitingly writes “Pursue your best or your worst desires, and above all perish!”[11]
Nietzsche’s Lucianic wit reminds us of the rarity, of the very Diogenes-like impossibility that would be needed just to identify anyone adequate to the challenge of sufficiently “mocking” the reader, the “you” in question, thereby “bringing home to you the limits of your boundless, flylike, frog wretchedness. To laugh about oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh out of the whole truth, heretofore even the best had too little sense for the truth and the most gifted much too little genius …”[12]
Later in the text, Nietzsche goes on to allude to Diogenes, identified by the epithet of “the world-despising Athenian philosopher” and Alexander, here invoked as “that Macedonian king” who upon giving Diogenes “a talent” as a gift and having it handed back to him, “What? said the king, has he then no friend?”[13] It is hard to give an exposition of this aphorism as it is in general difficult to read Nietzsche (as one tends to realize only in retrospect)[14] and Alexander’s query is not unlike Diogenes’ own self-talk).[15]
Gaspard de Crayer, Alexander and Diogenes
As Nietzsche reminds us, “The Greek philosophers went through life with the secret feeling that there were far more slaves than one might suppose — meaning that everyone who was not a philosopher was a slave. Their pride overflowed at the thought that even the most powerful men on earth belonged among their slaves.”[16]
The dyadic Greek view of mastery and self-sovereignty on display in this encounter serves as a foil for Nietzsche’s reflections on the friend. Both references are complicated in themselves and in this locus but these same reflections recur in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and both The Gay Science[17] and Thus Spoke Zarathustra would be composed under the sign of friendship or love).[18] And then there is Diogenes’ signal appearance in the marketplace as the mad man who “seeks God.”[19]
The dyadic Greek view of mastery and self-sovereignty on display in this encounter serves as a foil for Nietzsche’s reflections on the friend. Both references are complicated in themselves and in this locus but these same reflections recur in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and both The Gay Science[17] and Thus Spoke Zarathustra would be composed under the sign of friendship or love).[18] And then there is Diogenes’ signal appearance in the marketplace as the mad man who “seeks God.”[19]
It has been difficult to take Sloterdijk seriously and arguably for the same reason, it has been even more difficult for many readers to parse his humor.
And just as it was said to have been hard to “get” Diogenes the Cynic in his own day, or indeed, as the madman in Nietzsche’s reincarnation of Diogenes in his The Gay Science, Nietzsche himself confuses us, perhaps because he takes his Diogenes out of the Athenian polis, and his locus by the porch of Cybele’s temple and translates him into a German town on market day. And Diogenes confuses us. In addition to the barrel, in addition to the public masturbation, there is also the question of money.
For Diogenes was an honest man but only faute de mieux. And of course we could have guessed this, we good readers of Plato, remembering as we philosophers do the importance of money for Plato (did you inherit it? did you earn it?), solving the problem of cupidity and corruption by abolishing money, at least for the rulers. Diogenes the cynic began not as a penniless beggar but a bankers’ son who suffered the “price of truth” as it were. False coins were traded for true, after having been, so one assumes, suitably ‘antiqued’ (recalling Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Jim’s trick for aging a counterfeit quarter with a potato “so anybody in town would take it in a minute”). Diogenes Laertius tells us that Diogenes of Sinope “went into exile because his father was entrusted with the money of the state and adulterated the coinage.”[20] Thus the child suffers from the sins of the father or for his own part in the crime, consulting the oracle at Delphi to be told in the enigmatic fashion of the oracle (and this sheds heaps of light on Nietzsche’s ‘revaluation of values’), to “adulterate the coin.”[21]
Nietzsche places his madman in the marketplace with a lantern in the full light of morning not only to say that we today would classify Diogenes as mad (as we could already have heard in Swift’s Tale of a Tub)[22] but for the self-same reason that Diogenes lodged his barrel or tub in the agora, that is to say: not merely for the sake of political impact or to be in the center of things, and not merely the better to beg. Nietzsche’s mad man runs to the market place in order to proclaim, “I seek God! I seek God!” and Diogenes found his tub (or barrel to think as the French do, or more accurately still as this was Greece, a rather large amphora) in a temple dedicated to Cybele.[23] As in Empedocles Katharmoi, Cybele is associated with love and Diogenes was reputed to have enjoyed the favors of her temple’s priestesses or prostitutes, for nothing is more seductive to seductresses than the ascetic, so both Lacan and Nietzsche have reminded us that denial is the original discourse of mastery. The same locus in the marketplace, disattending to both men and to women, also makes for the association with Diogenes’ dog-like characterization.
John William Waterhouse, Diogenes
The same locus also makes for the association with the dog-like characterization we began with and of which details Sloterdijk is so fond: not only urination and defecation in public but also masturbation. We are led to think of Cybele’s association with love, as this is how Diogenes might have come to sport with temple love priestesses or prostitutes, if indeed he did, as they are both there for the money and nothing is more seductive to seductresses than the ascetic (this would be the original discourse of mastery).
The economic horizon of the market is also the reason that the madman appears in the “bright morning hours.”[24] Early morning is the best time for going to market: the vendors are still eager, their best goods have not yet been picked over, and they are not yet thinking of packing up to leave — i.e., this is the fabled hour that has “gold in its mouth.” It is in the market where one would expect to find “those who did not believe in God” “standing around.”[25] These are men of the world, cynical in the sense Sloterdijk contrasts with the kynic, and cynical for reasons all of us likely share. Thus they laugh at the madman in their midst, Diogenes with his lantern, full of enlightened false consciousness especially about religion, especially in the face of the only things that matter such as market goods and market values.
Hence distant as we suppose that we are from Nietzsche’s market bystanders, we continue to be animated by the same values as we deny any consideration of even the prospect of changing the world in any way. Impossible in advance we say: think of the cost! Scholars and those who publish in the New York Times take corporate viewpoints as their own, with the plural pronoun to go with it. We cannot afford to stop fishing the oceans dry, to give up genetically modified seeds (how will farmers go on if they cannot buy seed from Monsanto!?) nor can we afford stop the devastations of mining nor to stop drilling for oil, exploiting shale fields, coal fields, we cannot stem the forces of deforestation, we cannot change factory farming practices, and so on and on.
Can’t be done. 
And as for seeking God — “Has he got lost, asked one? Did he lose his way, like a child? asked another? Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated — Thus they laughed and yelled.”[26] Once again, this time without Aeschylus, “waves of uncountable laughing.” For the proximate reason the madman runs to the market place in search of God turns out to be because that’s where the church is: rather as Diogenes finds himself beside the temple of Cybele, the mother of the gods.
For topological, architectural, geo-political reasons, markets are set up alongside churches as Nietzsche knew, and if there is more than one church there can be more than one market. Those gathered around in the early morning are dedicated to the same convictions that lead Nietzsche’s madman to indict them, answering them: “Whither is God?” he cried, “I will tell you. We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers.”
As it starts, the madman’s speech is indistinguishable from the kind of talk Nietzsche’s father might have given, the kind of talk any Christian who finds himself on Good Friday or Holy Saturday in a church will hear from any preacher worth his (or her) theological salt. “God is dead and we have killed him — you and I.” From here, it is an easy move for the madman to break into one church after another, cynically “desecrating” them by simply playing his requiem aeternam deo: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”[27]
Nietzsche’s madman can thus be read as a 19th century Diogenes Laertius, cynically cynical or even, if one wishes, as Eugen Biser and Paul Valadier have reminded us, sympathetic about the death of God — “What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives.”[28]
But who is Diogenes? I have paired, in short order (without even mentioning Diogenes of Sinope and Diogenes Laertius), Diogenes and Lucian, Diogenes and Swift, Diogenes and Nietzsche, Diogenes and Sloterdijk.
We should know something of the cynic tradition from those who teach us the meaning of satire, those who teach about Menippus (nothing to read), Lucian (too much to read), and thus to Diogenes as scholars like Bakhtin and Northrop Frye could tell us. In other centuries (and this is why we need the word postmodern, whether we like it or not), authors used satire to do the same, rather like Sloterdijk. Was our Diogenes just a prankster, or, more insidiously, a charlatan, or, more esoterically, was he a practitioner of that strangely foreign askesis that we think we know (from reading Foucault) but cannot imagine (if we have ever bothered to read beyond Foucault to Hadot or as distilled in Ivan Illich’s scholastic and beautiful reprise of the Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor, In the Vineyard of the Text).[29]
It matters that Jonathan Swift was the dean of St. Patrick’s and it also matters that Sloterdijk tells us about the clerical esotericism of the abbots (though he might, of course, have been speaking of the Jesuits), humming Heine’s
I know the style, I know the textAnd also their lordships, the authors.I know they secretly drank wineand publicly preached water. [30]
Given such associations, it is a simple thing to proclaim that one should be cynical about cynicism. For good reason: for no sooner are the cynic’s concerns or claims described than they are conflated, even more commonly forgotten, an anti-deipnosophistical characteristic not unlike the related characterizing terminology of Menippean satire[32] as Nietzsche refers to this kind of satire at the conclusion of his Ecce Homo to crown his own writerly achievements in “What I owe the Ancients.”
For just this sliding, or as Nietzsche would say, for this decadent reason, the critic Northrop Frye was rightly uneasy about his own reprise of Dryden’s language of “Menippean Satire.”[33] For his own part (as we should but might not recall), Frye had already “chosen” for an alternate, writing
“Menippean satire” is clumsy and obsolete: words to describe species of the form are too limited: “Anatomy” is English, comprehensive and accurate.[34]The point made here already works in Frye’s title: The Anatomy of Criticism.
But even with this and even given Frye’s one-time extraordinary influence, the term “Anatomy” did not manage to take, not then, not now, and his contemporaries duly mocked him for the awkwardness of speaking of “Menippean Satire,” of which, in turn, his critics said what Frye had said about it (for all the good it did for Frye who is routinely ignored in favor of the recent enthusiasm for his colleague Marshall McLuhan).
Branded as Frye would come to be not with own coin but and much rather with with the one he resurrected — it is dangerous to give blood to the ghosts, as the cybernetician or systems thinker Warren McCulloch would say, “Don’t bite my finger, look where I am pointing”),[35] Frye would have had to have been to be disappointed at the results, as Howard Weinbrot cites Frye as musing, slightly self-ironically and slightly not so ironically, in 1975 that prior to his characterization of Menippean satire
“there was not one in a thousand university English teachers of Gulliver’s Travels who knew what Menippean satire was: now there must be two or three.’”[36]
It goes without saying in this feast of cynicism that Weinbrot misses Frye’s point, supposing it as a bit of self-serving modesty. Thus one overlooks the retrospective context that perhaps only a Frye (or a Dryden expert) might have had in mind. That Frye’s choosing for what he, in a metonymic riff on Robert Burton named “Anatomy” contra Dryden’s “Menippean Satire,” has effectively vanished from the reception of his Anatomy of Criticism boggles the mind. But the point of this is perhaps the retrospective point Frye is making here from one in a thousand to two or three.[37] It is just a fitting irony that this higher level point has still to go begging.
Cynics, as Frye reflectively reminds us “are usually associated with the role of philosophical Thersites.”[38]
And Frye’s point, as the above series of reflection should have put us on notice, takes some unpacking: “Diogenes as he is depicted in Lyle’s Campaspe” [a play, we may here interject, with which Sloterdijk might have some sympathy, inasmuch as it] shows that “Plato and Aristotle are bores,” thereby setting up the backdrop against which “an Elizabethan clown of the malcontent type” is first able to steal “the show.”[39] Frye’s claim is that this kind of clownery only works as philosophy: “cynicism is a philosophy, and one that may produce the strange spiritual pride of the Peregrinus of whom Lucian makes so searching and terrible an analysis. In the Sale of Lives the cynic and the skeptic are auctioned in their turn, and the latter is the last to be sold, dragged off to have his very skepticism refuted, not by argument but by life.”[40]
So, Where are the cynics?
A question to ask generically and just in order to be able to ask with Sloterdijk, Where are the kynics?
A question to ask generically and just in order to be able to ask with Sloterdijk, Where are the kynics?
With this question I can hardly be suggesting that there are no or too few studies on offer. It is increasingly common for an author to write that “little has been said” and at the same time to read, sometimes by the pen of the very same author, that “it is impossible to read” all that has been written as there is so much that has been written. And so one says “little has been said” and means “little has been read.” This may be the real Americanization of the academy, what Sloterdijk calls “the fad phase” and predicts against it (though I would not be sure, given the current transformation of European education in the surface image of the American university that this prediction has landed right side up), suggesting more trenchantly, perhaps against Feyerabend and his famously multiple university appointments, that as “soon as American syncretism comes and goes here and the first titillation of anything goes has worn, off, perhaps the charms of clarity too will be valued. In the long run, murky mixtures are unpleasant, where ‘anything goes,’ nothing matters anymore, but we have to grit our teeth and bear it.”[41]
Given the ascendancy of analytic philosophy and its demand for “clarity” as against “murky mixtures,” Sloterdijk may not have won this round. But that’s ok, other authors tells us that there is no such thing as a distinction between the now dominant strain of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy — whatever that once meant — just “good” and “bad” philosophy. Still the mainstream (that would be the analytic) folk will not likely be reading Sloterdijk, for they will say that they “don’t understand it,” and they will mean by that what Gershom Scholem meant when he said, speaking of Adrien Turel, “that he had understood literally not one word” of his utterances.”[42]
The cynic taste turns out to be one of the oldest on offer, even Plato had the sensibility for it and so one author informs that not “for nothing did Plato label him a ‘Socrates out of his Senses.’”[43] The taste for the cynic goes hand in glove with intellectual culture throughout the ages, in fact, if one reads, as one should, one’s Niehues-Pröbsting[44] (and others such as Cazé-Goulet and Banham but also Frye as we have seen), the best of past generations and other cultures seemed to have known their ancient cynics and their satirists, even the Menippean Lucian already mentioned above.[45] That is to say, they knew them by their works, genre and style, and above all as a teaching and as a discipline, entailing that one might, as we see in Sloterdijk, call them by name when they appear on the scene as happens from time to time.
On Nietzsche and the cynics in particular, as I have suggested, we know to be sure a good deal. But it may be that we still need to add a bit more. Thus Sloterdijk begins the first of his “Eight Unmaskings” by reviewing the critique of revelation manifest in Nietzsche’s good critical reflection “What? The miracle merely an error of interpretation? A lack of philology?”[46] And this reader, this current author, could not but wish for somewhat more Nietzsche[47] or at least more “philology.” In this locus we like to imagine Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil as being about more than the morality claims that compel him to write a cynically polemical sequel (this polemical sequel would be his On the Genealogy of Morals, a book written just because of the failure of his readers, at that time and still, to grasp the philological resonance of any book subtitled, as Beyond Good and Evil was, A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future).[48] Nietzsche indeed had already introduced the concept of “schlechte Interpretationskunst,” i.e., bad hermeneutics (or philology) as “interpretation, not text,”[49] taken with regard not to the traditional object of the arts of interpretation (the word of God, the word of Plato, Aristotle, or Augustine) but the “laws of nature themselves,” which means that Nietzsche himself begins with physics, a very virile science for Sloterdijk, and mystical too (if we count the bomb (or bombs) which Sloterdijk in an odd parallel to Baudrillard compares to the Buddha)[50] rather than and only with regard to “Christian civilization, Holy Scripture.”[51]
But that inscribes Nietzsche in far too many squares for Sloterdijk and here in this text he seems to prefer to keep him nicely tied up.
For his part, following Niehues-Pröbsting, Bracht Banham tells us that Nietzsche used only the term “Zynismus”[52] but this is a dangerously modernist imprecision, or just the effects of citing a German term — dashed all by itself — in an English text. In original context and contextualization, Niehues-Pröbsting is both precise and wide-reaching (this is not easy) and Banham with his many riches is imprecise perhaps and only for the sake of rhetoric and perhaps owing to Sloterdijk’s influence but more than likely owing to the difficulty of reading both the cynics themselves and Nietzsche to boot (logically speaking, conjunctions entail a lot of inclusions: there are no exclusive or even partially exclusive conjunctions). Thus as with Niehues, it is exactly right to say that Nietzsche does not distinguish (as Sloterdijk does) between Kynic and Cynic but it is an error to suggest that he invokes Zynismus simply because he doesn’t use the term, not because he would not have known the word but because Nietzsche was a classical philologist.
Classically 19th-Century in many ways (if his own field has yet to recognize his contributions as such)[53] Nietzsche employs the term Cynismus and Cyniker starting with his perfectly classical contrastive reference to cynics and philosophers, animals and humanity at the start of his 2nd Untimely Meditation, On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,[54] where he speaks about the happiness of the herd animal, of animal happiness, a happiness he later will reprise as “das Allgemeine Grüne Weide-Glück der Heerde” (BGE §44) — the happiness of green pastures.
April Dandelions; front lawn, Munich's Glyptothek. Photo: Babette Babich
Overall however what is problematic is the fractured insularity of those who undertake to write about “Nietzsche and laughter” and who do not mean thereby to be speaking of “Nietzsche and parody” and neither of which seem willing to engage those who address “Nietzsche and Menippean satire” (a version of this will be, and this conjunction is mostly limited to literary critics, those who speak of Nietzsche and Bahktin) let alone what remains for those who write, such as Niehues-Pröbsting and others, about Nietzsche and cynicism. Hence those of us like myself who have wondered about Lucian in this context (as Sloterdijk also brings him in), which for me (and together with Empedocles in the same constellation) offers a side of Zarathustra beyond jackboots, the transhuman, and the overman as capitalist phantasm à la Howard Roark and Ayn Rand’s juvenile fantasy world of economics. Overall, as this last example makes plain, one appears to be left with what can only seem smaller and smaller beer.
Following Niehues-Pröbsting as he rightly does and as very clearly acknowledged,[55] Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason thus takes us back to the cur, Diogenes but not by way of Mr. Nietzsche (although and to be sure: Nietzsche’s picture has pride of place as the first in this book of pictures).[56] Instead Sloterdijk takes us through the enlightenment, the very idea: this includes Adorno as much as Kant, the Marquis de Sade, and Marx, with Freud and numerous authors playing more or less bit parts along the way. Troublesomely in an otherwise very fluid translation we are handicapped by the preferences of the translator (translation, all translation, as Heidegger reminded us, as we had also heard this in a more baroque expression in Nietzsche, with tempo and color no less, is always interpretation which is why many things do not translate at all). Thus we have a problem with “die verlorene Frechheit,” as we inevitably must, but especially as rendered into English as “cheekiness,” for which we are advised to follow, in Proust’s footsteps now, transposed register or three: “‘In Search of Lost Cheekiness.’”[57] Later we will also have cause to note the trouble the translator seemingly had with Sloterdijk’s allusions to Heidegger, odd in this case inasmuch as Heidegger’s Being and Time had of course been accessible in English for more than two decades.[58]
With Sloterdijk’s Diogenes we encounter the above mentioned distinction between the kynical (this will be as we recall Niehues-Pröbsting, the Greeks, Diogenes but also Crates, Antisthenes, etc.) and the cynical (this will be us writing about Diogenes or Crates and by the same token, also about Sloterdijk himself who arms himself against critique by introducing an equivocal shifting already and in advance).[59]
Now the advantage of cynicism is precisely the weakness with which I began: it slides. Cynicism plays with paradox and dissonance. And this is both Sloterdijk’s opening and sustained gambit.
So what is left? “The philosophizing town bum answers Plato’s subtle theory of eros by masturbating in public?”[60] And again, his “Majesty, the Baby,”[61] the spoiled boy: “the kynic farts, shits, pisses, masturbates on the street, before the eyes of the Athenian market. He shows contempt for fame, ridicules the architecture, refuses respect, parodies the stories of the gods and heroes, eats raw meat and vegetables, lies in the sun, fools around with the whores and says to Alexander the Great that he should get out of his sun.”[62] Thus we hear that the “material, the alert body begins to actively demonstrate its sovereignty. The excluded lower element goes to the market place and challenges the higher element. Feces, urine, sperm.”[63]
It will do, I hope, to note that this list of bodily functions, especially the noises that go with them, but also every part of a delight in upturning or shocking social convention corresponds to the sentimental conviction held by most teenage boys that these indeed are the funniest and best and most enjoyable things ever, peeing mighty streams in competition with the gods (or just one’s friends), shitting (or even just talking about it), and then there is sperm, just the word (and the ecstatic salaciousness of its production, a kind of sublimated anal phase, nose picking can come in for a lesser second place). Nor do I fail to recognize that most men, especially those in the military industrial complex, are secretly persuaded that such teenage insights constitute the ongoing truth of the world.
The Drunken Hercules, Herculaneum, Italy, 1st Century, C.E.
Withal we have, as noted, the “cynical” focus on urination, as an “achievement,” perhaps for someone who has seen and laughed himself to pieces over the Belgo-Flemish Manneken pis once too often and has grown up and is now in search not of a less touristic, but a more mature, more robust yet similarly manageable image, similarly voyeuristic and similarly silly icon (I am thinking of the “squints” or satires, or silloi as I say this, although one should not as the connection is metonymic one).
Thus, like Nietzsche, Sloterdijk likes to refer to bodily functions but, like Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, Sloterdijk dares to go further (he is explicit where Nietzsche, remember that 19th Century classicist bit? is allusive), favors urination (again like Nietzsche)[64] but also like Freud (especially in Freud’s particular enthusiasm for Hercules’ Augean efforts, thus Sloterdijk captions the image of the half life-size statue of the “Drunken Hercules” in his text not in some supposedly objective art-historical catalogue fashion, but with the very basic Hercules pissing.[65]
Sloterdijk let it be again underscored goes much further than Nietzsche would ever have done. Inasmuch as Sloterdijk is a child of the ’68 generation and therefore takes the modality of shock — even his concluding reference to Thomas Mann’s “pleural shock”[66] maintains this aspect — with a naïve trust that only a child of the sixties (even the sixties in Germany) will be able to muster. Nor can one study this, one has to have lived through this generation of resistance and its optimism of the sort that believes that by changing one’s clothes, or going without them, that by flouting sexual conventions, and going without them, by transcendental meditation and yoga, and natural food, and above all with a certain memorable music, one can for the first and really change the world.
By pissing? Sure. Why not? It’s something anyone can do (and it is a genuine sign of the loss of vitality when, due to illness or else age, this is not so) and of course, this is also the origin of the fantasy of penis envy. Boys and men are mightily persuaded (and will not be disabused of this faith) that women long for nothing but this very floppy appendage and its marvelous powers. Swift emphasizes these powers as an “event,” as part of his adventures among the Lilliputians, not just once[67] but twice and again and no less and to save the day (and then goes on — what more could Freud’s heart have desired? — to make a capital case of it, complaining that he is subsequently, and unfairly: he’s a hero isn’t he? and all too literally brought up on charges for it).[68] The special characteristic of his Gulliver among the Lilliputians yields the perfect male fantasy whereby everyone runs to either side when, as Swift suggests, they can anticipate his intentions from his gestures, and he opens his trousers. There you have it and so too does Sloterdijk exult in the heroic, the oversize, the Rabelaisian fantasy, and he knows it: “But urine in the academy! That would be the total dialectic tension, the art of pissing against the idealist wind.”[69] The sentence is incomplete and Diogenes, wiry and tough as he may be, is no Hercules and pissing, like spitting, into the wind is messy.
The lovely book jacket of Frank Boyle's equally marvelously titled Swift as Nemesis. See endnote refs below!
Which is the point for Sloterdijk.
We are to rehabilitate sexuality (so long as we don’t ask whose sexuality) and celebrate laughter — as long as we don’t ask who is laughing, and have not yet reflected, as Nietzsche muses that “even laughter may yet have a future”[70] while yet reminding us that “for the meantime, the comedy of existence has not yet ‘become conscious’ of itself”[71] but for Sloterdijk as for Odo Marquard, Steffen Dietzsch, and many others, the reason is less what Nietzsche diagnoses as a sufficiency “of truth” but because of all those who, every single one of those evil spoilsports, conspire to make us stop. Otherwise, of this we are sure, we’d all be laughing. But what would does it mean to read of laughing to death? What happens when one splits one’s sides? There is an edge to the liberation, it would seem.
Offering us a critique, and despite some who, not incorrectly ally him with Habermas, Sloterdijk plays off Marcuse but more so Adorno and still more fondly Benjamin, but he reads not only Kant as Adorno does and not only Goethe as every German cannot help doing, but also ancient philosophers in context, which is to say to a degree that has only in the interim become less rather than more in fashion — it is Niehues-Pröbsting who reminds us that it was Hegel who began our contemporary habit of excluding or writing the cynics out of today’s standard accounts of the history of philosophy, whereas
before this shift, the transmission of biographies had a large place in the historiography of philosophy for the life of the philosopher was believed to be of exemplary character and thus a verification of the doctrine.[72]
As Niehues-Pröbsting glosses Hegel (and we have all had an education in the wake of the same, with what for Nietzsche, at least when it came to his professional reputation, were simply fatal consequences for classical philology as such),
For those philosophers who did not leave behind theoretical works and who became part of the tradition only by virtue of their exemplary individuality or their idiosyncratic personalities, this meant exclusion from the history of philosophy.[73]
This reference to Hegel is itself indispensable for a critical reading of Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Although this reference is not and to be sure, Niehues-Pröbsting’s own reference it is salutary to mention it inasmuch as Nietzsche who puts Niehues-Pröbsting’s emphasis in relief, as Nietzsche characterizes the tragic age of the Greeks not in terms of doctrine, which no subsequent philosopher has ever had trouble refuting but the irrefutable that is personality per se. Thus Nietzsche summarizes his approach in the second preface affixed to his unpublished text,
Here however are selected the teachings in which the most personal aspects of a philosopher resonate the most [by contrast with the tendency in other handbooks] of complete abnegation of the personal.[74]
This same characterization, already implicit given Nietzsche’s philologist’s engagement with Diogenes Laertius is thus contra Hegel, an opposition to Hegel in the same spirit otherwise to be seen in Nietzsche’s first untimely meditation on the historiographical stylization of David Strauss.
The same contextualization and a good deal more range to boot is indispensable for a reading of Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason. Indeed we need a great deal more than philosophy alone and Sloterdijk exemplifies the trifecta of disciplinary expertise that once upon a time was and had to be a condition sine qua non for a German academic, after the fashion of the same Faust of whom Sloterdijk is so fond who studied as the famous doctor recounts the list at the outset “philosophy, the law as well as medicine,” with the wry fourth addition of the justly famous, “und leider auch Theologie.”
Frye would have been happy to remind us that this array of learned reference and its associated world of contextual allusion sets Sloterdijk beyond the average scholar while and given Sloterdijk’s tone also placing him in the company of the “Menippean satirist, dealing with intellectual themes and attitudes,” who displays “his exuberance in intellectual ways, by piling up an enormous mass of erudition about his theme or in overwhelming his pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon.”[75]
This essay is the first section of a version, longer and with images otherwise lacking, of the published book chapter Babette Babich, “Sloterdijk’s Cynicism: Diogenes in the Marketplace” in: Stuart Elden, ed., Sloterdijk Now (Oxford: Polity, 2011), pp. 17-36; 186-189.
The reader is advised, urged, encouraged to pick up the entire collection -- for the sake of Stuart Elden's -- as ever -- magisterial introduction and for the sake of the other contributions.
The book, as we are featuring book covers here, looks like this:
Notes
[1] This sliding is of course a variable affair and it depends more or less, on one’s background. See for example the collection edited by R. Bracht Branham & Marie-Odile Goulet-Gazé, The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and its Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), which developed out of the earlier proceedings of a colloquium edited by Goulet-Caze and R. Goulet, Le Cynisme Ancien et ses Prolongements (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993) as well as Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting’s magisterial Der Kynismus des Diogenes und der Begriff des Zynismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988) and Niehues-Pröbsting, “The Modern Reception of Cynicism: Diogenes in the Enlightenment,” in Branham and Goulet-Cazé, pp. 329-365 and Donald R. Dudley, A History of Cynicism: From Diogenes to the Sixth Century A.D. (Hildesheim, Georg Olms Verlagsbuch-handlung, 1967 [1937]).
[2] Nietzsche, Kritische Studien-Ausgabe (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980) Vol 2, p. 296; HH I, §457. Diogenes was said to have been captured by pirates and sold as a slave where he lived (and died) in Corinth.
[3] Nietzsche, KSA MA II, Vol 2, p. 704.
[4] Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 547
[6] Ibid.,; cf. GS §36, §67.
[7] Nietzsche, KSA, Vol. 1, p. 48, BT § 6. Diogenes Laertius reports that Heraclitus thought that Homer and Archilochus deserved to be thrown out of the Olympic contests and flogged.
[8] See for one discussion, C. Carey “Archilocus and Lycambes,” Classical Quarterly” New Series, Vol. 36, No. 1 (1986): 60-67.
[9] “‘Incipit tragoedia’ we read at the end … Beware! Something downright wicked and malicious is announced here: incipit parodia, there can be no doubt…” Nietzsche, KSA, Vol. 3, p. 346, GS §i; cf. GS §342.
[10] I compare The Birth of Tragedy and The Gay Science in Babich, Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), pp. 37-74.
[11] Nietzsche, KSA, Vol. 3, p. 370; GS §1. Lucian features Diogenes as alter ego in his dialogues, see for instance, his Dialogues of the Dead, Lucian and Polydeuces, where he also refers to Menippus (and we owe much of our sense of Menippus to just these references). See for a discussion in the context of an overall reflection on the cynical provocations of the late Ivan Illich, Babich, “Education and Exemplars: Learning to Doubt the Overman” in: Paul Fairfield, ed., Education, Dialogue and Hermeneutics (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 125-149 and, in a more focused fashion in French in Babich, « Le Zarathoustra de Nietzsche et le style parodique. A propos de l’hyperanthropos de Lucien et du surhomme de Nietzsche. » Diogène. Revue internationale des sciences humaines, 232 (October 2010): 70-93 and Babich, “On Nietzsche’s Empedocles / Zarathustra and Lucian’s Hyperanthropos / Übermensch or «Love and Kisses to All the World»” in: Horst Hutter, ed., Becoming Loyal to the Earth: Nietzsche’s Teaching as a Therapy for Political Culture (London: Continuum, 2013).
[12] Nietzsche, KSA, Vol. 3, p. 370; GS §1. Here one sees again the indispensability of a reference to Lucian, as one can also note in the opening lines of On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, with its analogy between human beings and insects.
[13] The aphorism title is here as in most cases indispensable: In Honor of Friendship. Nietzsche, KSA, Vol. 3, p. 425; GS §61.
[14] See for a discussion of this complexity with reference to one of Nietzsche’s supposedly most obvious anti-semitic loci and with a clear applicability to cynical tactics, Babich, “The Genealogy of Morals and Right Reading: On the Nietzschean Aphorism and the Art of the Polemic,” in: Christa Davis Acampora, ed., Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), pp. 171-190.
[15] See for a discussion of this kind of discourse with one’s self, Nietzsche will say with one’s heart, Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), which it is safe to say may prove more helpful that the wide range of commentary on the question: “But why doth Zarathustra speak otherwise unto his pupils — than unto himself?” for which array of references I will only cite, and only pars pro toto, Lawrence Lambert, “Zarathustra and his Disciples,” Nietzsche-Studien (1979): 309-333.
[16] Nietzsche, KSA, Vol. 3, pp. 389-390; GS §18.
[17] I discuss the significance of this constellation in “Nietzsche’s ‘Gay Science,’” Babich, Words in Blood, Like Music, pp. 55f.
[18] See David B. Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche (Lanham, Md. Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) for a discussion of Nietzsche’s longing for what he calls the “alchemical trick” of turning “this muck into gold.” Nietzsche’s language, in perfect consonance with Sloterdijk but also with the generally German character is Koth. See also for a discussion of Allison’s analysis, Frances Nesbitt Oppel, Nietzsche on Gender: Beyond Man and Woman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), pp. 120ff.
[19] Nietzsche, KSA, Vol. 3, p. 480; GS §125.
[20] Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925), Vol. II, 23.
[21] This is an old and complicated tale: “Γνῶθι σεαυτὸν, καὶ τὸ νόμισμα παραχάραξον — such according to Suidas were two Pythian precepts.” Gardner, “Diogenes and Delphi,” The Classical Review, Vol. 7, No. 10 (Dec., 1893): 437-439, here 437.
[22] According to Swift (and unlike Heraclitus’s intentions for Homer and Archilochus(, “Epicurus, Diogenes, Apollonius, Lucretius, Paracelsus, Des Cartes, and others; who, if they were now in the world, tied fast, and separate from their followers, would in this, our undistinguishing age, incur manifest danger of phlebotomy, and whips, and chains, and dark chambers, and straw.” Swift, A Tale of a Tub: Written for the Universal Improvement of Mankind (London: Thomas Tegg, 1911 [1697]) p. 192. See on Swift, W. B. Carnochan, “Swift’s Tale: On Satire, Negation, and the Uses of Irony,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Autumn, 1971): 122-144. Swift mentions Diogenes by name along with others such as Epicurus and Lucretius. Below we shall have cause to note the connection between Swift’s Gulliver and Diogenes. It has been argued that Gulliver plays the part of Diogenes among the Lilliputians when they chain him to a temple not just because the temple is the largest place but because in that configuration he is like a dog. See Dieter Fuchs, “Diogenes the Cynic, Alexander the Great, and Menippean Satire in Gulliver’s Travels,” in: Werner von Koppenfels et al., eds., Antike und Abendland (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), pp. 65-76. I add Empedocles along with Lucian to the mix, see Babich, “«Love and Kisses to the Whole World»: Nietzsche’s Empedocles/Zarathustra and Lucian’s Übermensch,” in: Horst Hutter, ed., Becoming Loyal to the Earth: Nietzsche’s Teaching as a Therapy for Political Culture (London: Continuum, 2011).
[23] Cybele, the Phyrgian mother goddess, Great mother, or indeed as a collectivity, as the “mothers of being,” as Nietzsche invokes her in allusion to Goethe in the Birth of Tragedy, is associated with the same orgiastic rites of music Nietzsche discusses. See for a discussion and further references, Noel Robertson, “The Ancient Mother of the Gods: A Missing Chapter in the History of Greek Religion,” in Maarten Jozef Vermaseren, Eugene Lane, eds., Cybele, Attis and Related Cults: Essays in Memory of M.J. Vermaseren (Leiden: Brill, 1996), pp. 241-304, and for a discussion of the instruments associated with her rites in Grece as well as Rome, see Kirk Summers, “Lucretius’ Roman Cybele,” Ibid., pp. 337-336 as well as Panayotis Patis, “Le “Élément orgiastique dans le culte de Cybèle, Ibid., pp. 193-222. Cybele is associated with the sort of music that would have perturbed Plato indicated by a range of instruments, such as drums and a rhombus, an instrument often called a bullroarer and described as “an oblong piece of wood to which a cord is attached.” Cited in Summers, p. 369. As Summers here remarks “Both the Greeks and the Romans considered it an efficacious love charm when the instrument was spun and words were chanted.”
[24] Nietzsche, KSA, Vol. 3, p. 480; GS §125.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid. Note here, thus Nietzsche’s later preface can say incipit parodia, the parallel to Zarathustra and the kind of response his crowds tend to give him, when they pay attention at all.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid. Paul Valadier, Nietzsche et la critique du christianisme (Paris: Les Editions du cerf, 1974) See also, Peter Köster’s Kontroversen um Nietzsche: Untersuchungen zur theologischen Rezeption (Zurich: Theolo-gischer Verlag Zürich, 2003) and Bruce Ellis Benson, Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith (Bloomington: Indiana, 2008). See too Eugen Biser’s most recent book on this theme: Nietzsche: Zerstörer oder Erneuerer des Christentums (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002).
[29] Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
[30] This is a major theme for Sloterdijk and one can wonder about its motivations beyond its obvious truth: can one oneself follow one’s own counsel? Do what I say, not what I do? Read my books, as Mary Daly would say, a female kynic if there ever was one, but not perhaps of the sort Sloterdijk or most of us would have imagined. The cynic is born of the paradox and offers, if one follows the notion of ancient practice, of philosophy as a way of life in Hadot’s spirit more than in that of Alexander Nehamas or Wilhelm Schmidt or indeed Foucault, but that also means, in Nietzsche’s spirit and it is not for nothing that in just this context Hadot, who like Sloterdijk reads Goethe, turns to Nietzsche. See Babich, “Great Men, Little Black Dresses, & the Virtues of Keeping One’s Feet on the Ground,” MP: An Online Feminist Journal, Vol. 3, Issue 1 (August 2010): 57-78, esp. pp. 60-65 for a brief discussion of Daly who well and truly “pissed against the wind” in academe, to appropriate Sloterdijk’s own turn of phrase (Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 105) with just the results that such actions usually bring one (and they do not usually bring one fame, recognition, or an academic chair, all advantages for Sloterdijk as many of those who write on his work have noted).
[31] I do not here mean to suggest that one does not have an excellent description on offer in Sloterdijk’s “Cabinet of Cynics,” pp. 155ff or in Niehues-Pröbsting, already cited above and to whom Sloterdijk rightly and invaluably refers us.
[32] Of course it is hard to find a fair reception of Menippean satire in Nietzsche. Thus Frances Nesbitt Oppel, contends that “Zarathustra is a late — very late — instantiation of Menippean satire” but suggests that this is “impossible to prove, because we have no examples of the model genre.” Nietzsche on Gender: Beyond Man and Woman (University of Virginia Press, 2005), p. 132. Alas poor Northrop Frye, we did not know him well, or perhaps never read him to begin with, but that was also to have been the point of his reflections on the fate of the term as such even for professors of literature – why he fare any better with scholars of gender even if they write on Nietzsche? And why should they read Lucian one might also wonder, even if they have read the same Sterne Nietzsche sends them to. Better on Nietzsche and Menippean satire, including a reference to Bakhtin (the other side of Frye) is Gary Shapiro who at least gets the Fryean cena or Bakhtinian festival as central to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’s, at least to that quintessential parody of Zarathustra qua in the fourth privately circulated, nothing like a joke among friends, book.
[33] Which Dryden in turn introduces in order to talk about Varro because this is how Varro characterizes himself, naming his own work Menippean after “Menippus the Gardarenian” cited in Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 25. But, like Diogenes our cynic, Menippus hails from Sinope.
[34] Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 36; cf. p. 86.
[35] It is relevant to add that McCulloch was a friend of Gotthard Günther, who is discussed below.
[36] Frye, May 14, 1975, date and citation from Howard D. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 11.
[37] Such wry ruefulness is also to be counted off in John Donne’s second thought in his Song, on the prospect of finding a woman “true and fair,” “Though she were true when you met her, / And last till you write your letter, Yet she / Will be / False, ere I come, to two or three.”
[38] Northrop Frye, Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962, Germaine Warkentin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 28, cf. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 230.
[39] Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 230.
[40] Frye, Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962, p. 28, cf. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 230.
[41] Sloterdijk, The Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 87.
[42] Gershom Sholem, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem, cited in Sloterdijk, The Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 459. For my part, my confessional allegiances are clear and I am above all fond of footnotes and suggest the reader follow some of them further, as such further reading is the point of having footnotes at all both with regard to the current topic and to go beyond it.
[43] David Mazella, “Diogenes the Cynic in the Dialogues of the Dead of Thomas Brown, Lord Lyttelton, and William Blake,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Volume 48, Number 2 (Summer 2006): 102-122; here, p. 105.
[44] See Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting, Der Kynismus des Diogenes und der Begriff des Zynismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1988) as well as Niehues-Pröbsting, “The Modern Reception of Cynicism: Diogenes in the Enlightenment,” in R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, eds., The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) pp. 329-365.
[45] Annette C. Baier makes this circumstance the theme of her own odyssey of discovery with respect to Lucian, of whom she had manifestly heard very little until she received an email from an Italian scholar asking just which of Lucian’s dialogues Hume had been reading at the time of his death. Defending her own innocence she observes that “although Lucian was widely read in Hume’s day, the overlap between readers of Hume these days, and readers of Lucian, seems to have been almost nil.” Baier, Death and Character: Further Reflections on Hume (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 103; cf. pp. 100ff.
[46] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 23. See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil §47 and cf. KSA 13, 15 [82], p. 456 and later, which is also offered in the context of Nietzsche’s very phenomenological critique of causality and psychologism on the model of “inner experience” Ibid., 15 [90], p. 460. See also on the conjunction of miracles and scholarship, Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
[47] This is, of course, the author who also brought us Der Denker auf der Bühne: Nietzsches Materialismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986) and the relevance of this point is plain to Sloterdijk himself and thus Erik Alliez effectively draws him out on the topic of the so-called “Sloterdijk Affair,” surrounding the reception of Sloterdijk’s Regeln für den Menschenpark Ein Antwortschreiben zu Heideggers Brief über den Humanismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999) with the provocation “it’s even argued that a radical neoconservatism is at issue, reference being made to the most “dubious” pages of the most “irresponsible” of philosophers: Nietzsche . . . Quod erat demonstrandum.” Erik Alliez, “Living Hot, Thinking Coldly: An Interview with Peter Sloterdijk,” Cultural Politics, Vol. 3, Issue 3 (2007): 307-326, here p. 307. For the persistence of Habermas’s anxiety concerning the danger, whether “infectious” or contagious in Habermas’s language or not, see the contributions, including Habermas’s own, to Babich, ed., Nietzsche, Habermas, and Critical Theory (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 2004).
[48] But to catch that resonance one would have to have read not every word of Zarathustra but every word of his first book The Birth of Tragedy in both its instaurations (Out of the Spirit of Music as well as Or Pessimism and Hellenism along with its associated conflict. Not just Mary Daly’s word when she speaks for all academics with her kynical imperative “Read my book,” but in Nietzsche’s case read my reviews and chew every word, over and over again. For more on the late Mary Daly and the reception of her work see the first sections of my essay, already cited above, “Great Men, Little Black Dresses, and th Virtues of Keeping Your Feet on the Ground.” This and other essays can be found via search, which will take you to links to the full text, in this case: Here>
49] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §22. I discuss this text in particular in Babich, “Ex aliquo nihil: Nietzsche on Science and Modern Nihilism,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 84-2 (Spring 2010): 231-256.
49] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §22. I discuss this text in particular in Babich, “Ex aliquo nihil: Nietzsche on Science and Modern Nihilism,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 84-2 (Spring 2010): 231-256.
[50] “The Bomb is really the only Buddha that Western reason could understand. Its calm and its irony are infinite. … As with Buddha, everything that could be said is said through its existence.” Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, pp. 131-132. If not Baudrillard, then perhaps Virilio, if not either, perhaps Günter Wohlfahrt?
[51] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 23.
[52] Bracht Banham, “Nietzsche’s Cynicism: Upper or Lower Case,” in: Paul Bishop, ed., Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Ttradition, (Rochester: Camden House, ) pp. 170-181, here p. 171. I am as exigent on Nietzsche’s German orthography only because Banham is himself a literary scholar of considerable exigence. Banham knows better, this I know, because he refers to Niehues-Pröbsting who gives us this distinction and the full breadth of historical, hermeneutic context in the process. Thus it is also important to say that when Banham then takes Niehues-Pröbsting’s reading to task as a reading of the ultimate value of life in balance by citing Diogenes Laertius own textual gloss (Banham, “Nietzsche’s Cynicism,” pp. 174-175) he overlooks the Cynic value of life as Nietzsche takes it, perhaps free enough to leave at the right time (Diogenes is said to have died by choice by the expedient of refraining from breath) but as fundamentally life-affirming. We miss in this the important emphasis on practice as Hadot even more than Foucault has helped us understand the ancient notion of askesis. As such a practice, cynicism is not pessimism. And this is of course Nietzsche’s own emphasis in The Gay Science on The Thought of Death as impossibly, distractedly distant from the common man and his own aspiration to make that more not less so, as an affirmation of life. (GS §278)
[53] See however and by contrast, for a discussion of Nietzsche’s contributions to mainstream classical philology, Babich, “ ‘The Science of Words or Philology: Music in The Birth of Tragedy and The Alchemy of Love in The Gay Science,” in: Tiziana Andina, ed., Revista di estetica. n.s. 28, XLV (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 2005), pp. 47-78. Christian Benne, Nietzsche und die historisch-kritische Philologie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005) as well as James Porter’s earlier study Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) the ambivalence of which (and it is significant that Porter is a conventionally successful, by contrast with Nietzsche, classicist writing on current issues as well) is dramatically articulated by the second, companion text published in the same year: The Invention of Dionysus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
[54] Nietzsche, KSA 1, p. 249. He will repeat this in the very last section of Schopenhauer as Educator.
[55] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. lx.
[56] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. xxviii.
[57] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, pp. 101ff.
[58] Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1965).
[59] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 3.
[60] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 101.
[61] Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” SE, [1914], 14: 81-105; p. 19.
[62] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 103-104.
[63] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 103-104.
[64] See Richard Perkins, “A Giant and Some Dwarves: Nietzsche’s Unpublished Märchen on the Exception and the Rule,” Marvels and Tales: Fairy-Tale Studies, 11/1-2 (1997): 61-73.
[65] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 105.
[66] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, pp. 529 ff. For a good discussion of the sense of irony here on offer in Sloterdijk’s reading of Mann’s Zauberberg, see Nehamas’s first chapter, “Platonic Irony: Author and Audience” in his The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
[67] Gulliver reports upon the inconveniences of being bound and the need within such constraints to answer the call of nature, his bonds loosened somewhat he tell us, “I was able to turn upon my right, and to ease myself with making water; which I very plentifully did, to the great astonishment of the people; who, conjecturing by my motion what I was going to do, immediately opened to the right and left on that side, to avoid the torrent, which fell with such Noise and Violence from me.” Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (London: Jones & Company, 1826), p. 11.
[68] The issue concerns “The Emperor’s Apartments set on fire by accident, the author instrumental in saving the rest of the palace” Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, p, 51. The incident in question together with the requisite justifications (the buckets used by the fire brigade are miniscule, he didn’t have his coat with him to stifle the fire in the fashion, he had drunk a quantity of particularly diuretic wine which he had “by the luckiest chance in the world” not yet voided and which he “then voided in such a quantity, and applied so well to the proper places that in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished.” Ibid., p. 59.
[69] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 105.
[70] Nietzsche, KSA 1, p. 370; GS §1.
[71] Ibid.
[72] Niehues-Pröbsting, “The Modern Reception of Cynicism,” p. 330.
[73] Ibid., p. 331.
[74] Nietzsche, Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen, KSA 1, 803.
[75] Frye, Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, p. 85.
No comments:
Post a Comment