Episode #249 ... The Trap of Modern Cynicism - Peter Sloterdijk

Philosophize This! - Stephen West

This episode explores Peter Sloterdijk's critique of modern cynicism, contrasting it with ancient Cynicism through Diogenes. It examines how widespread cynicism functions as a psychological defense mechanism and ideologi

Key takeaways

• Modern cynicism is a survival strategy, not just pessimism

Transcript preview

Hello everyone I'm Stephen West. This is philosophers this. Patreon.com slash philosophers this. Philosophical writing on Substack at Philosophize this on there as well. Been writing totally new, to the point philosophy articles on topics I think really matter on there. I'm about to post a second one here in a couple days. Thanks for supporting if that's something you're interested in reading, but either way I hope you love the show today. So if you've been a fan of philosophy for a while now, maybe at some point you've heard the stories about a guy named Diogeniesies who used who used to live in a Maybe you've even heard the stories of all the wacky stuff he used to get caught up in over the years. Like the time Alexander the Great came to town, and when he asked specifically to meet Diogenes in the street, and he asked him if there was anything he could do for him as the most powerful person in the world at the time. Diogenes says to him, yeah, there is one thing you could do for me. Can you move about four feet to your left? You're a block in the sun for my sun bathing right now. Maybe you've heard the story of the time that he plucked a chicken. to show them how wrong they were about their definition of what a human being is. Maybe you've even heard the stories of his, let's call it public self-fladulation, because he was a bad Diogenes that day apparently. My point is no doubt you've heard about this guy that had a pretty bizarre form of protest towards the world, someone part of one of the four big schools of Hellenistic thought. There was of course stoicism, epicentism, there was of someone in the school of cynicism. Now cynicism at the time at the time was something was something was something centered around was something centered around was something centered around, was something social norms, meaning the kind of things that otherwise guide most people as they go about their everyday life, the cynics might ask, are these things that are holding people back in important ways? But this definition of cynicism would not be a very good one if you want to describe what we usually mean when we talk about a cynic in today's world, what you might call a modern cynic, the kind of cynic your uncle is, the kind of cynic that looks out at a world they see is corrupt and totally broken, and then for any number of reasons, say it's pointless to even try to change anything Well, there's a good reason why this attitude is something we see during this time we're living in particular. And there's good reasons why this wasn't such a common attitude during the time of Diogenes. In fact, by the end of all this, the example of Diogenes is going to show us a lot of what's missing from this modern form of thinking about it. By the end of this episode we're going to have talked about a couple different things here. One, the reasons why the modern cynicic is not, is not that in practice a lot of people never find a way out of. We'll talk about the greater effects of widespread cynicism when it begins to infect things like our language and our institutions. We'll talk about how cynicism can exhaust a society in ways that lead to things like fascism, with the Weymah Republican Germany being a very clear example of this in the recent past. All of this, laid out through one of the gold standards when it comes to this whole line of conversation. We're going through Peter Slaughter Dyke's critique of cynical reason. And now we think cynicism during our time is something far more is something far more than just more than just more than just that thinks he's got the whole world figured out. Modern cynicism has become the primary mode of operation for our world in ways that are difficult to see if it's the only thing you've ever known. Let's get into it though out of respect to your time. See most of us in the modern world exist on something like a spectrum of cynicism. Everyone's a little cynical every once in a while. And before we get into some of the less obvious forms it can take, it's definitely useful to look at the version of a cynic that you might run into on any given day. It's a person. It's a person. It's a person who's a person who's a person who's a person who's a person who's a world events, corporate world, love, relationships, whatever it is. Their whole approach can be summed up by the mantra that they love to repeat to themselves, that things are really messed up out there. But hey, what can you really do about it? That's just the way the world is. Again, starting with the most visible example here, because it's kind of fun to. It's very possible in today's world, Slaughterdike thinks to run into someone who uses cynicism as a kind of psychological defense mechanism in their own life. The idea is I've looked out of other people, I see through how compromised everything truly is. Once again, governments corrupted by power, corporations are greedy, doesn't really matter what the specific theory is. The point for the modern cynic is that the problems we're dealing with are so massive, and the system to even potentially fix them is so broken, that any of these morons out there that are still trying to do things to make the world a better place, they're either uneducated about how bad it really is, naive about the impact their personal efforts can actually bring about. Mainly, mainly though the big the big crime of most people most people most people most people most people most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most people, most is that they just aren't ready to be as realistic as I'm being that this is the way the world really works. It's in this way that cynicism and someone often pretends on the surface like it's a kind of maturity, like I'm the one willing to be the adult in the room, while the rest of you go around and cosplay like you're actually going to change something. But for Slaughterdike this is far from being the mature, well thought out way of seeing the world that they think it is. And the reality is what this take is really good at doing, the true reason, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is that intellectually superior to everyone else around them without having to do the work of continuing to critique their own positions. They get to live their life every day, rejecting the whole system as a lie, mock anyone who still approaches life in a sincere way about it. And then the real modern cynical move he thinks that's different than how Diogenies lived is that after doing all this, they get to wake up the next day and still go back to work and participate, benefiting from the whole thing they think is broken and not feel utterly ridiculous while they're doing it. So to be clear here, for slaughter here, for slaughter here, for slaughter here, for A modern cynics far from someone who's just nihilistic. After all, they still live their life based on values that they call a kind of realism, where apparently there's no alternative way for them to be living. And being a cynic isn't just simply being a pessimist for him, because pessimism's just a negative expectation about where things are headed. No, the modern cynics doing something far more specific here. They take that negative view of where things are going. Then they turn it into a survival strategy. Then they use it to justify, functioning inside the world they claim to see through. charity, like they're the smartest person in the room for noticing what's wrong, and like any hope about the world is naive. In other words, cynicism allows for someone to feel like they're a morally serious person. When if you just look at their actions, they're really doing next to nothing. They're just describing what the problems in the world are. And as Slaughterdike puts it, these are people that are usually pretty well off in life, but they're miserable, and they may be right in a sense that there's a lot of things that are messed up out there. But these become people, gets turned into the very thing that keeps them assisting it and reproducing it in the world every day. Real quick though, for whatever it's worth here, this isn't how earlier versions of ideology critique expected this whole situation to go down. I mean it's a fair question, why is this attitude so common to come across in the 20th and 21st centuries in particular? Throughout history people have always lived in messed up situations. And for a lot of thinkers, the hope over the centuries has been, that if we can just find a way to educate people about it, you know if we can show them, if we can show them the corruption, if we can show them the corruption, if we can that they'd have no choice at that point but to find a way to stop living in the illusion. Thinking is you show people how the institution actually works and the truth will have to spark some kind of liberation from it, maybe even a revolution in the eyes of some of the more optimistic thinkers here. But Slaughterdeck makes the point that this is not the problem we're dealing with anymore. That this particular reaction of modern cynicism that we're talking about shows us a brand new modulation of ideology that we never knew existed until very recently. of the person in the modern world who knows they're living inside a lie, feels the contradiction firsthand, and then still finds a way to keep living inside of it every day. And for whatever it's worth, this will be the same general move we're going to see when cynicism exists at other scales of reality, like when it becomes embedded at the level of institutions. We'll talk about that in a minute. But this is why modern cynicism, he thinks is something that could be best understood, is both a great success of the Enlightenment going on at the exact same time. It's a success, it's a success, have learned how to see through things better than ever before. We've never lived in a time where more people have had access to strong critiques of the institutions are living in. And even beyond institutions, a lot of the old ideals people used to live by just don't hold up in the same way they used to either. Religion, power, morality, the self, even the very concept of the truth.