Interlude IX. Standing in the sun + Cynicism

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude VIII. Foucault - part 3

Standing in the sun.

Just before I got off my bus this morning on my way to breakfast, my strange-dar (I don’t think that coinage is likely to catch on) picked up a person standing in the street with his shirt open and half off. After breakfast I walked over to catch a different bus home and the guy was still standing in the same place. I then noticed that he was also barefoot. He was with a small pack of very stoned street people (this was in the Haight-Ashbury). Mostly I was impressed by his ability to stand at all.

The delay until my bus arrived gave me some time to consider this person. It was a delightful day, sunny but not really warm, with a light breeze. Between all his bare skin and his state of intoxication, I doubt that anyone around was seizing the moment to the degree that he was. If you could wire people for sensory experiences the way you can for an EKG, his chart would be off the chart compared with everyone else around, including me. Thinking about this reminded me of envying dogs frolicking in a fountain on a hot day.

I suspect Michel Foucault saw the rest of us as cut off from experience -- bundled up and well shod, as he welcomed experience barefoot and bare-chested. Manic bipolar people probably see the rest of us this way as well. Likewise junkies. I’m not sure about the autistic, it probably depends on where on the spectrum they fall and how well they can manage their day to day lives. If the goal of life in this reality is to maximize experience (and I don’t know how you could honestly argue that that isn’t a reasonable goal) then I’ve not been doing a very good job. To perform an Erickson style evaluation of my life with this standard in mind would result in a very poor outcome.

Another way to do this would be to consider what you are likely to regret on your deathbed. I can’t really imagine myself regretting not accumulating wealth and power and honors or wives or children. But I also can’t honestly imagine someone regretting standing barefoot and bare-chested and stoned in the street on a perfect autumn day; or regretting problematic orgasms; or too many opium dreams. This doesn’t really make me want to trade places with anyone, but it does make me a little less quick to judge.

Cynicism.

A day after writing the above I realized this is the perfect time for a shout-out to the Cynics -- the often neglected Hellenistic school of philosophy. People (here meaning Ryecroft and me) quote the Stoics and Epicureans but rarely if ever the Cynics. Like “epicurean,” even the meaning of the word “cynic” has been twisted over the millennia. “Cynic” is simply the Greek word for “dog” and this is the best, most intuitively named, of any philosophical school ever. A good Cynic acts more or less as a dog would -- he takes his pleasure as it comes and doesn’t worry about much else. Not that dissimilar from my Tao of Puppy idea, except with the focus on adult dogs, not puppies.

I bring them up here because my man “standing in the sun” is a good example of Cynic virtue, at least to an extent. Athenian Cynics were known to copulate and masturbate in public. The current underclass of people who prefer to live by dumpster diving could also be seen as good Cynics. Here’s Wiki’s short description: 

For the Cynics, the purpose of life was to live in virtue, in agreement with nature. As reasoning creatures, people could gain happiness by rigorous training and by living in a way which was natural for humans, rejecting all conventional desires for wealth, power, sex, and fame. Instead, they were to lead a simple life free from all possessions.

From a more detailed Wiki description I'm also going to quote this item for reasons that will become clear in a later Foucault section (part 6): "The goal of life is Eudaimonia and mental clarity or lucidity (ἁτυφια) - freedom from τύφος (smoke) which signified ignorance, mindlessness, folly, and conceit."

And going a little deeper in Wiki:

Eudaimonia..., sometimes anglicized as eudaemonia or eudemonia /juːdɨˈmoʊniə/, is a Greek word commonly translated as happiness or welfare; however, "human flourishing" has been proposed as a more accurate translation.[1]Etymologically, it consists of the words "eu" ("good") and "daimōn" ("spirit"). It is a central concept in Aristotelian ethics and political philosophy, along with the terms "aretē", most often translated as "virtue" or "excellence", and "phronesis", often translated as "practical or ethical wisdom".[2] In Aristotle's works, eudaimonia was (based on older Greek tradition) used as the term for the highest human good, and so it is the aim of practical philosophy, including ethics and political philosophy, to consider (and also experience) what it really is, and how it can be achieved.

Diogenes of Sinope was the St Paul of the Cynics and he is responsible for my favorite story in all of philosophy (I like my version better than the one in Wiki): Diogenes heard that Plato was going to be lecturing in the Academy on Socrates’ definition of man as “a featherless biped” -- a definition Plato was very pleased with -- so he tossed a plucked chicken over the wall of the Academy. From what little I’ve read so far of both French and German academic philosophy in the years around WW2, a modern Diogenes would have wrecked his rotator cuff tossing figurative plucked chickens into the universities of the time. Not that this really distinguishes this period...

Next: Interlude X. Foucault - part 4 - Heidegger & Althusser.