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Dogs with Sharp Teeth: the Cynic in Western Discourse

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Dogs with Sharp Teeth: the Cynic in Western Discourse Dogs with Sharp Teeth: The Cynic in Western Discourse What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” ― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan Current thought on semantic change recognizes that language is continually and systematically altered by speakers’ use of it. In the wake of the account given by Bloomfield (1933), linguists and philosophers have attempted to explain various diachronic semantic processes, such as metaphor and metonymy, and the factors that cause them. In the English language, there are a number of cases in which the meaning of a word has changed to such an extent that the modern meaning and its ancestor may contrast strikingly, or even diametrically oppose one another. To take one salient example, the noun cynic has two commonly recognised meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the first as ‘one of a sect of philosophers in ancient Greece... marked by an ostentatious contempt for ease, wealth, and the enjoyments of life’. In the same entry, the alternative meaning is given as ‘...one who shows a disposition to disbelieve in the sincerity or goodness of human motives and actions, and is wont to express this by sneers and sarcasms’. The Macquarie Encyclopedic Dictionary divides these meanings between two entries, rendering orthographically the distinction between the classical, philosophical Cynic, and the modern, sneering cynic. In the words of Luis Navia, ‘the Cynics were not cynical, nor are modern cynics authentic Cynics’ (6). Although these meanings are polysemous, it is not immediately clear how the two are related, and a diachronic account of how the latter meaning emerged from the former is the subject of the present discussion. Drawing on the analysis offered by Sloterdijk (1987), it is argued that the meaning of cynic, along with that of the derived abstract noun cynicism, has undergone a process of degeneration and broadening, driven by psychological and socio-cultural forces operating on latent contradictions in the original sense of the word, with the literary works of Lucian of Samosata and the Marquis de Sade, among others, offering clear snap-shots of such changes as they took place. Although it is clear that the word cynic is derived from the Greek root kyon (‘dog’), there are two alternative accounts of how this derivation occurred. Diogenes Laertius, an early source on the Cynic sect of philosophy, identifies Antisthenes as its founder and speculates that the temple where he taught, the Cynosarges (‘place of the agile dog’) in Athens, gave the sect its name. In his Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Klein asserts that this is the correct explanation. However, Dudley, citing evidence from Aristotle, contends that ‘the original kyon was undoubtedly Diogenes’, the latter being a later philosopher from Sinope renowned for his dog-like shamelessness and frugality (5). Although Laertius also attributes these characteristics to Antisthenes, and describes the Cynic Diogenes as a pupil of the former, Dudley argues from the historical disparity between their lifetimes that an association between the two likely did not exist, and was invented by Greek writers prior to Laertius. According to Navia, cynic was straightforwardly derived from kyon in the sense of like-a-dog, and attributed pejoratively to Diogenes by other men upon viewing his unorthodox practices, such as eating and defecating in public. Thus one account holds that cynic derived from the name of a place, while in the other it developed by theriomorphism. For Navia, there is insufficient evidence to choose between either side of this ‘double doxographical and historical tradition’, except to conclude that both played a role in the meaning of cynicism as interpreted by scholars since antiquity, and which appear to ‘converge into a focal point that was and is best symbolized by the figure of a dog’ (15-16). Regardless of whether this was original source of the modern meaning of cynic, it is well- attested by Laertius and more recent scholars, such as Sayre, Desmond, and Shea, that the comparison Athenians drew between the behaviour of Diogenes of Sinope and that of dogs played an important role in the development of the meaning of cynic as it related to the philosophical sect in antiquity. Thus, analogy is observed as a key process early in the semantic history of the word. Within the lifetime of Diogenes, the term cynic underwent a socially mediated process of reappropriation and elevation. Reappropriation, which may be described as ‘the process of taking possession of a slur previously used exclusively by dominant groups to reinforce a stigmatized group’s lesser status’, is familiar to modern readers in cases such as that of ‘queer’ and ‘nigger’ the connotations of which have changed following their reappropriation by sexual and ethnic minority groups (Galinsky et al. 2020-2022). A similar process appears to have taken place where cynic, formerly used pejoratively, came to designate a flourishing philosophical school. Although it had been used by Athenian citizens to mock and scorn the followers of Diogenes, the latter ‘wittily adopted the opprobrium for themselves’, developing its analogical meaning further by recording or otherwise inventing many chreia, or anecdotes, in which the virtues of Diogenes and other Cynics are compared, approvingly, with those of dogs (Shea 4-7). Indeed, by the time of Epictetus, the term Cynic ‘had come to be invested with an aura of spiritual and intellectual excellence and earnestness... the Cynic became, at least in the minds of those who idealized the Cynic way of life, al holy man devoted to the practice of philosophy’ (Navia, 15). For the early Cynics, the meaning of their sect was elaborated in a cluster of analogies, which served for a de-facto set of principles which classical Cynicism entailed. Aristotle describes a number of these principles and their connection to the analogy: There are four reasons why the Cynics are so named. First because of the indifference of their way of life, for they make a cult of indifference and, like dogs, eat and make love in public, go barefoot, and sleep in tubs and at cross-roads. The second reason is that the dog is a shameless animal, and they make a cult of shamelessness, not as being beneath modesty, but as superior to it. The third reason is that the dog is a good guard, and they guard the tenets of their philosophy. The fourth reason is that the dog is a discriminating animal which can distinguish between its friends and enemies. So do they recognize as friends those who are suited to philosophy, and receive them kindly, while those unfitted they drive away, like dogs, by barking at them. (Aristotle, quoted in Dudly, 5) To the above might be added cosmopolitanism (Navia), as dogs recognize no nation-state; parrhesia, or freedom of speech and criticism, as dogs set their ‘teeth in rascals’ (Shea); the privileging of physis, or nature, over nomos, or law; autarkeia, or self-sufficiency; apatheia, or indifference to hardship; askesis, or discipline; and atyphia, or clarity of mind (Shea, 9). In the anecdotes of Cynics recorded by Diogenes Laertius, these terms recur frequently as organizing principles for Cynicism itself. Another significant aspect of classical Cynicism, and one that would play a constitutive role in the culturally-mediated transformation of its meaning, from the end of the Hellenistic period and through the first and second centuries CE, was the centrality of satire to Cynicism as a philosophical movement. Although the writings of the Cynics did not consistently adopt the satirical form until the works of Menippus circa the third century BCE, it is clear that the use of satire as a literary genre developed directly from the central Cynic principle of parrhesia and their contempt for what they regarded as the arbitrariness and artificiality of human values. According to Dudley, it is in the satirical writings of Menippus that ‘the Cynic spirit of mockery of human values’ first finds its literary form. In its influence on the works of Roman authors such as Varro and Lucian, Menippean satire preserved and transmitted the principle of parrhesia and the ‘sarcasm and ridicule, denunciation and condemnation’, characteristic of Cynicism, through the literary mainstream of antiquity (Navia, 27). It is for this reason that Sloterdijk counts Lucian among his Cabinet of Cynics, even as he opposes the satirical Cynicism of Lucian to the ascetic Cynicism of contemporaries such as Peregrinus Proteus, who Lucian viciously mocks in his Menippean satire The Death of Peregrinus. Further, as Sloterdijk correctly claims, this opposition represents a key turning point in the development of the meaning of Cynicism. Where the distinction between classical and modern cynicism is conventionally rendered orthographically with a capitalized C in English, Sloterdijk writing in German opts to distinguish the classical, virtuous aspects of Kynismus from its modern, nihilistic derivative Zynismus. Although Navia detects elements of the arrogance and opportunism that characterize modern cynicism emerging in Cynicism as it was practiced by Bion in the third century BCE, for Sloterdijk a radical break between Kynismus and Zynismus is observed in the second century CE. During this period of social unrest in Roman territories and colonies, the Cynic cult expanded in a ‘situation of flourishing alienation’ (Sloterdijk, 170). This popular Cynicism, which retained the stern moralism and shocking antics of Diogenes, preserved little of its philosophical heritage, and became a subject of attack for authors, such as Varro, who was nicknamed the Roman Cynic, and Lucian, who had inherited the satirical element of Cynicism from Menippus. In Sloterdijk’s words, at this time the Cynical tradition split between the ‘existential direction’ of popular Cynicism, and the ‘satirical-intellectual direction’ represented by Lucian (Sloterdijk, 172).
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