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Louisa Shea. The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. 262 pages.
In The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon, Louisa Shea follows the trajectory of what she calls "philosophical Cynicism," which names the appropriation of Diogenes the Cynic, from the eighteenth century onward, as a model for philosophical conduct capable of effecting real social change. Shea announces this driving concern at the outset:
One key argument of this book is that much of the interest generated by Cynicism in the eighteenth century as in the twentieth derives from internal tensions in the search for an appropriate language in which to communicate social criticism (how much of the Cynic's bite could one, and should one, make use of?) and from philosophers' deeply felt need for an ethical basis from which to engage in criticism. (xii)
Though the grammar of Shea's sentence ropes together the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries as equally invested in the two objectives she lists (social criticism's language and its ethical basis), in practice her analysis suggests that each period sees an emphasis placed on one at the expense of the other. In other words, Shea tends to describe the philosophes (and their peers) as searching for an appropriate language for the project of social criticism, while Foucault and Sloterdijk, closed in by the well-rehearsed critiques of Enlightenment thought, feel much more urgently the need for an ethical basis from which they might break through the traps laid by instrumentalized reason.
Diogenes is a compelling figure to turn to in search of the language and ethics of social criticism. A Greek philosopher and contemporary of Plato, he is known to later ages by way of a rich anecdotal tradition. These stories- influenced as they have been by both admirers and detractors of Diogenes' peculiar lifestyle-collectively depict a man who exercised autonomy through rigorous self-training in material and social abjection. He lived in a barrel, sought out physical hardship, and embraced shamelessness as a means of purging himself of false social values. A public masturbator who wished it were as easy to satisfy hunger by rubbing his belly, Diogenes practiced an ethics in which the pursuit of personal virtue becomes the enabling condition for a particularly confrontational philanthropy: to...