The Ethic of Spectacular Cynicism

“Look at how philosophers die, it’s very important.” This statement places all of knowledge and action as aesthetic or spectacular. This is true when action and knowledge are only reproductions of an aesthetic form of intelligence. Importance is an ethical determination on the image the philosopher is replicating or representing.

This epistemology makes ∀philosophers inauthentic. It assumes a teleology of aesthetics, that philosophy is but a mechanism to fatten the ontological value of the philosopher’s ego in the eyes of the social/historical.

As a judgement on the validity of their knowledge it means nothing. It would be saying Claim ∧ Character → Claim, or a good claim and a good character make up the truth value of the claim.

Claim	Character	Claim ∧ Character	Claim ∧ Character → Claim
T	T	T	T
T	F	F	T
F	T	F	T
F	F	F	T

The statement is tautologically true, making it logically redundant. The claim or knowledge can be accurate or not, combining the two in an iff statement shows nothing of the truth of knowledge.

The “smoking doctor” example makes this clear: a cigarette smoking doctor is still correct in his prescription of “cigarettes are bad”, his consent in “bad” action does not contradict nature. The fact that Heidegger was a “bonafide Nazi” doesn’t falsify phenomenology.

However, knowledge is not the subject of the Cynic, it is the polis. The Cynic is a permanent antithesis to the behaviour, and thus aesthetics, of the polis. The Cynic’s antithetical substance works to deteriorate the ontological weight, or Cartesian gradations of reality or value in both a market and non-market sense aesthetic, of the spectacle. The spectacle is an ideal that “gains reality” through contingent consent of its images. This aesthetic forms a convention or a model of behaviour which is used to generate morality, or as Debord specifies “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”¹

The Cynic differs from the Stoic in this crucial point. The Cynic as an antithetical character to society needs it as a subject. Their point is not harmony, it is discord. It acknowledges that life is inconvenient, “a state that registers one’s implication in the pressures of coexistence”² and uses that inconvenience as a rhetorical tool to combat in essence the act of acculturation to whatever culture convention demands. In this vein, it is crucial to emphasise that the antithesis is not a negation of spectacle, but an autocannibalism. Like Ouroboros forever consuming its tail, the Cynic is forever producing Spectacle to defeat it. It is rare, even in its postmodern form, that Cynics work to resolve this dialectic and produce knowledge. Cynicism is a rhetorical philosophy, venerating the performance of disclosure towards the natural.

To be a cynic is not just to ascribe to the aesthetic of Diogenes, but to embody this ethic. The cynic centre is the metaethical postulate of life as a mode of nature, thus we ought to live in accordance with it. The ought captures the nature of the Cynic authenticity, which under that command of the sublime nature is beyond the sphere of reason.

This authenticity begins in self-disclosure for the ancient cynics. When Crates strips away his clothes to reveal his deformed body saying “this is all I have to give” when responding to Hipparchia’s declaration of love, he embodies authenticity as good. Crates is unsexy (disagreeing with the form of sexuality), his performance of the sexual is separated from the love industry’s convention. His action is sublime, the instantaneous elysian in awe of the reality, edified through its vulgarity.
Lucian’s critique of Peregrinus represents the aesthetic cynic: “he wore his hair long by now, dressed in a dirty mantle, had a wallet slung at his side, the staff was in his hand, and in general he was very histrionic in his get-up—manifesting himself to them in this guise, he said that he relinquished to the state all the property which had been left him by his father of blessed memory”.³

The protean critique is unfair, as Proteus is simply a servant of Poseidon who liked to sleep with seals. While he does shapeshift, the shapeshifting of Peregrinus is for the end of attention, or amplifying the spectacle, rather than Proteus’s defence against harm for Menelaus.⁴ Peregrinus has a lack of authenticity, driven by Lucian’s critique that his protean philosophy is distinctly for affirmation. Peregrinus disguises himself in service of the benefits of the spectacle of cynicism, not for authentic nature. His physical polemic performance is in reference to the cynic, drawing from its aesthetic value and not from its ethical foundation. In the same sense Symeon the Fool embodies the same protean quality. Symeon performs the spectacle of cynicism for the wrong end, with Christ as the embodiment of the spectacle (or he is God or nature in the Spinozisian sense and thus agrees). Diogenes’ provocative acts—masturbating in the marketplace, urinating on passersby, living in a pithos, telling Alexander to “stand out of my sunlight”—were fundamentally different from Peregrinus’ self-immolation. Where Peregrinus sought to create spectacle that would elevate his image, Diogenes created spectacle precisely to demolish the value of image itself. His performances weren’t designed to garner admiration but to expose the hollowness of social conventions and the artificial nature of societal values.⁵

In Debordian terms, these cynics were practising “détournement” two millennia before the Situationists formalised the concept—appropriating spectacular mechanisms to subvert spectacle itself.⁶ When Diogenes walked through Athens with a lamp in daylight “looking for an honest man,” he wasn’t seeking fame but exposing the dishonesty of those who did.⁷
The cynic’s deliberate assaults on social convention align with what Nietzsche would later frame as the conflict between Apollonian order and Dionysian chaos. “Apollo is the spectacular and selective image of Dionysus,” the attempt to impose rational order on chaotic nature.⁸ The cynics were clearly on the Dionysian side of this dichotomy.
Dionysus himself epitomises this cynical contradiction. His mythological birth—whether “twice-born” after his mother’s death or “thrice-born” in the Orphic tradition where he’s cannibalised by Titans—begins with exposure to moral tyranny. When Hera murders his mother for infidelity, she acts not from justice but from passion, her chaos, her passion driven in her innate desire for sexual monopoly is Hera’s true engine. From this genesis Dionysus becomes the god of wine who lives “beyond good and evil.”⁹

Diogenes wasn’t hedonistic, though. His praxis demanded an asceticism: “he has the most who is most content with the least.”⁸ He venerated natural pleasure while rejecting the “hedonic treadmill” of spectacular desires. The hedonic treadmill demands avarice, promiscuity, and the cultivation of spectacle through fame. Diogenes understood the psychological bias of belief that being “a belief is just a repeated thought”. The belief driven in the repetition of super-structural phenomena, is the system of enslavement. There is no canonical ontology of cynicism, being is ephemeral and the only ontology is the feeling or listening to the Prelude in Em by Chopin or the experience of psychedelics (or a lot of weed), the meditative conclusion of lokottara (Buddhism-ish¹¹). Through these moments we find the cynic, through the harmonic/artistic expression of the collective unconscious. The western samasana (Cynic) has a weaker asceticism but still venerates the same ideal.

The Cynic lives in the moment instantaneously beyond the present, equally creating identity through action while venerating the chaos of nature. The anti-idealism, anti-order almost anarchistic undercurrent of cynicism has a power. In our hypermediated world, the cynical anticipates its own recuperation through invalidating the concept entirely. The cannibalism of the spectacle in service of reality is something humanity should embody. Authenticity is lost in the spectacle of mass media. “Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”¹²

References

¹ Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Black & Red, 1967.
² Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. On the Inconvenience of Other People, 2016.
³ Lucian. “The Passing of Peregrinus.” Lucian: Selected Works. Translated by A. M. Harmon, Loeb Classical Library, 1936.
⁴ Homer. The Odyssey. Book 4, lines 365-570.
⁵ Diogenes Laertius. Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Book VI, “Diogenes of Sinope,” section 37-38.
⁶ Debord, Guy and Gil Wolman. “A User’s Guide to Détournement.” Les Lèvres Nues, 1956.
⁷ Diogenes Laertius. Lives of the Eminent Philosophers.
⁸ Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. 1872.
⁹ Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. 1886.
¹⁰ Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1958.
¹¹ The Dhammapada. Translated by Juan Mascaró, Penguin Classics, 1973.

¹²Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. 1882, section 125.