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From Equality to Pluri-elitism: Terms of a Debate
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14165 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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1 / 1988 |
4,440 Words |
| Author
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Virgil Nemoianu
Virgil Nemoianu is professor of English and comparative
literature at the Catholic University of America. Among his
books are The Taming of Romanticism (Harvard, 1985) and A
Theory of the Secondary (Johns Hopkins, 1989). He and Robert
Royal have just edited a collection of essays, Canons at John
Benjamins (Amsterdam and Philadelphia).
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The title of a recently published and already celebrated German book, A Critique of Cynical Reason, has begun to invite comparison with the works of one of the greatest among the great. Peter Sloterdijk is in fact a cocky young man who deals much less with abstractions, and more with concrete situations in social history, literature, and psychology. The anxious reader will easily allow himself to be captivated by the author's marvelous analyses of symptoms; it is not hard to follow his fanciful lucubrations on the roots of evil in modern societies or even share his hope for an ironic, ribald, and peaceful anarchism of the future. A more attentive glance, however, will discover below these colorful surface structures a graver and more anxious project: how to preserve individuality in a world dominated by equality. When is equality oppressive? When can it be beneficial? Before we can hear what Sloterdijk insinuates, let us first reckon with his flamboyant theatrics, because they are well worth paying a little entrance fee.
Sloterdijk's argument is based on an original distinction between kynismus and zynismus. The second of the terms, rooted in the usual cynicism, represents the contemptuous use of naked force, independently of conventions, traditions, and scruples; it is an attitude fostered by disbelief in goodness and sincerity, while aggressively furthering selfish goals. In German as well as in English this reprehensible, or at least dubious, human attitude got its name from a philosophical school in ancient Greece, founded in the fourth century B.C. by Diogenes of Sinope and continued off and on for almost ten centuries by figures such as Crates of Thebes, Bion of Borysthenes, and Menippus the Gadarene. While many of those who later claimed that they belonged to this school were a "riff-raff of confidence tricksters and professional beggar preachers," as they were once called, cynical concepts can be recognized in the works of distinguished thinkers such as Dio Chrysostomos, Zeno, Epictetus, Lucian, and Julian. The name of the movement came from kynikos (canine), the adjective form of kyon, the Greek word for "god." Diogenes and the early cynics believed that human life should be natural, even animal-like, in rejecting the fetters of artificiality, external goods, inhibitions, and ambitions. The desirable life was, according to them, one of moral and spiritual search, with a rejection of society and an assumption of freedom to the point of shamelessness. This radical autonomy was to go hand-in-hand with a ruthlessly grinning exposure of cant and social hypocrisy. With his term kynismus, Sloterdijk proposes a return to the semantical root and original philosophical doctrine as well as to its psychological and social attitudes, which he sees as the opposite pole to common cynicism. What the two have in
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