The ideal Cynic acts as a critic of society, exposing its excesses and encouraging a healthier relationship with nature. This is the virtue Diogenes of Sinope embodied through his aesthetic lifestyle and constant challenges to etiquette and dogma. Of course, these days the word cynic has an entirely different meaning that indicates a person who habitually assumes the worst about others and the world. While both meanings of Cynic promote suspicion towards accepted doctrine and practice, the former encourages action that reveals a better lifestyle, while the latter generally leads to resigned acceptance of corruption.
These days cynicism (in the latter sense of the term) seems rampant. One only needs to glance at our social and political dialogue to know that many people see their opponents—on whatever issue—as irreducibly evil. That form of cynicism ends up supporting dogma, since if one’s opponents are malevolent one is justified in not listening to them. A recovery of the original meaning of Cynic seems to be in order, if for no other reason than that it will (hopefully) shake people out of their complacency by encouraging them to reengage the public sphere. Here are several papers that discuss the original Cynic philosophy.
- Gerard Raunig, “Singers, Cynics, Molecular Mice: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary Activism,” Theory, Culture & Society, December 2014.
- Ian Cutler, “A Tale of Two Cynics: The Philosophic Duel Between Jesus and the Woman from Syrophoenicia,” Philosophical Forum, Winter 2010.
- Samantha Zacher, “Sir Gowther’s Canine Penance: Forms of Animal Asceticism from Cynic Philosophy to Medieval Romance,” Chaucer Review, 2017.
- Sergei Prozorov, “Foucault’s Affirmative Biopolitics: Cynic Parrhesia and the Biopower of the Powerless,” Political Theory, December 2017.
- Paul Rhodes Eddy, “Jesus as Diogenes? Reflections on the Cynic Jesus thesis,” Journal of Biblical Literature, Fall 1996.
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No matter if you perceive people as “irreducibly evil”, you still need to justify why and how they are evil.
Thus, there is no changes to course of discussion! The reasoning…
See also “ad hominem” fallacies…