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Cynic Nihilism

I am thinking of the first night of Diogenes [. . .] as long as philosophers do not muster the courage to seek an entirely different lifestyle and demonstrate it by their own example, they will come to nothing.

(Nietzsche, unpublished fragment from notebook of 1874)¹

Zarathustra admits to his animals that, having once seen the great and the good among men unclothed, his realization of the all-too-human smallness of even the best made him sick. This nausea at man, however, is revealed later as a snake that, having crawled into Zarathustra’s throat and bitten fast, is choking him. Nobody can help Zarathustra by pulling it out. Only by biting the head off the serpent can Zarathustra finally cure himself of his nihilism – which at bottom is nothing other than his disgust at the animality, the utter this-worldliness, of man (Nietzsche 2006: 71, 127, 75; see also Nietzsche 2005: 83–4).

If Zarathustra initially finds the sight of the best when stripped of their clothes a cause for despair, the Cynics of Antiquity found in the unadorned body rather the affirmation of existence. That the naked body reveals conventional estimations of who is the best as nothing – stripped of his robes in the manner of the Cynic Diogenes, even Alexander the Great is shown as a man like any other – is not a crisis for the Cynics, but rather a reason for celebration. For the reduced existence of the one who goes naked and unadorned is closer to the truth of existence. Nietzsche (2006: 80) claims that truthful is the one who has ‘broken his revering heart’, who will never be persuaded to be like the ‘comfortable ones’, and who is ‘fearless and fearsome, great and lonely’. As we shall see, Nietzsche could have been describing Diogenes when he wrote these lines.

Ancient Cynicism presents us with a form of nihilism that calls into question a too easy identification of nihilism with the loss of world. For the nihilism of the Cynics underpinned not passivity and other-worldliness but the most militant care for the world. The Cynics conceived truth as entirely other than the truth of the world, finding it rather in the true life. The true life in Cynicism is a nihilism not of the world – the Cynic, engaged in a combative care for all men, could not be less interested in the elsewhere – but of the law (nomos). Indeed, only by stripping away the laws (nomoi) can the true life as universal friendship be found. The Cynic struggles to reveal the truth of existence itself, which is the truth of being as being-in-common, that the divisions of customary morality hide. This simple truth of being means that very little in the way of life is needed for the truth and very little truth is necessary for life (Foucault 2011: 190). Yet if truth is simple, indeed the simplest thing, because it must be lived it is not easy to attain. The true life is not everyday existence that merely follows a moral code imposed from the outside; it is rather a life that forms itself by truth and a truth which is found only by following a way of life. But this life is the hardest and, although all are called to it, only a few will pass the test: ‘The necessity of commitment for the philosopher – if, as is the case, philosophy is actual and remains only as work – is simultaneously the necessity of exposure’ (Heidegger 1988: 39).

Cynicism is the most misunderstood and neglected of the ancient philosophical schools, partly because it was not a school, passing on little in the way of doctrine and relying instead on tales of exemplary lives (Julian 1992: 19). But in Antiquity the Cynic was a well-known and formidable figure.² Even Alexander the Great, on his conquest of Corinth, sought out Diogenes of Sinope. Having found him sunbathing, Alexander is recorded by Plutarch (2012) and Diogenes Laertius (1991) as saying that if he had not been Alexander then he would have liked to have been Diogenes – the same Diogenes who lived naked in a barrel. By Plutarch’s account, Diogenes did not return the favour, telling Alexander that, if he were Alexander, he too would wish to be Diogenes.

Semi-mythical figure that Diogenes may be, the tales of this philosophical hero as passed down in the Cynic tradition give us a clear sense of Cynicism in Antiquity as a body of truth. One theme in particular stands out as singular in Cynicism: the relationship of the Cynic to political power. Diogenes was not only indifferent to imperial power – hence his snub of Alexander – but was also proudly apolis, without a state, a term used by Epictetus (2010) in his description of the Cynic life. Contrary to the received wisdom of Antiquity, pity the one who is condemned, as Diogenes put it, to the domesticated life of the citizen (Diogenes Laertius 1991: 51). It therefore was not an accident that this naked, destitute, ignominious exile was the first to call himself a kosmopolitês, a ‘citizen’ of the world (Diogenes Laertius 1991: 65; Julian 1992: 238). In fact, only a Cynic could have adopted this stance, for cosmopolitanism could not have come into being without the negation of the state, of the empires and polities that divide humanity.

As the state was first devalued, the ‘brotherhood of man’, as the Stoics – much influenced by the Cynics – later called it, became capable of being valued. The Cynic’s cosmopolitanism, then, while it identifies him, as we shall see, with world understood as the universality of being, distances him from cosmos as a universe of assigned places. The Cynic negates the stations that characterize cosmos, which is why he finds himself the brother of all. To have neither citizenship nor a slave is to subtract oneself from the nomos of the world as it is expressed in the rankings of cosmos.³ Neither free man nor slave, the Cynic is thereby a-cosmic, also. The phusis he lives according to is not, as it is usually understood, ‘natural law’ (this Stoic notion is developed fully long after Diogenes) but rather his essential freedom from any law, even those laws of nature that apply to his very body. This is clear from Epictetus’s account of the ideal Cynic: the body is a slave to disease, and therefore not free, but is there nothing in man’s possession that is free? ‘And who is able to compel you to assent to that which appears false? No man. And who can compel you not to assent to that which appears true? No man. By this then you see that there is something in you naturally free [. . .] Wretched men, work out this, take care of this, seek for good here’ (Epictetus 2010: 252).

The Cynics’ freedom, is, as Heidegger would have it (not that Heidegger ever had anything to say about the Cynics), a freedom for ground as that which, in Dasein, is precisely groundless rather than law-like. The Cynics are clearly the point of emergence of this decisive shift away from nomos since Socrates, who the first Cynic (Antisthenes) had been a student of and whom all Cynics revered, never himself calls nomos into question. To the contrary: as we know from the Crito, Socrates argues that the laws of the city are effectively his parents and should never be disobeyed, even unto death. It is true that Socrates questions whether the demos can have any relation to truth, arguing in his apology that he had never sought to practice his truth-telling in the Assembly since this would certainly have led to his death. So the questioning of the democratic form of the polity (which, besides, was customary for the Athenian aristocracy) is already present in Socrates, but the polis is as yet excluded from this questioning – and with it the nomoi as such. The laws of democratic regimes may not be the best, but the just polity will have good laws. The Cynic radicalization of Socratic questioning is nowhere more apparent than in their very different relationship to the polis, which the Cynics rejected.

In pursuing the true life, the Cynic finds himself in a position of radical exteriority to custom, which, after all, is not founded in truth but precisely in convention.⁴ The true life turns out to be radically nihilistic, finding that nothing much of everyday life has any relation to truth. The Cynic therefore spurns the customary laws which stipulate that one should take a wife, have children, eat and have sex only in private, and so on. Diogenes, infamously, scorns all of this as having no foundation in ‘nature’ (phusis), even to the extent of masturbating in the marketplace. To crown it all, the Cynic will be contemptuous of the citizenship that, in Aristotle’s view (Politics, Book 1, ch. 2), is the very essence of what is proper to man and what distinguishes him from a wild animal.

From where did this radicalization spring? There are a number of possibilities. Foucault (2011) argues that the Cynics simply took the Socratic will to truth more seriously by applying it to their entire existence rather than merely to their logos. As Foucault was well aware, there was much in Socrates that pointed already to philosophy as a way of life and to truth as the living of a true life, albeit minus the scandalous element central to Cynicism. The Cynic insistence on the indifference of the true life to convention was already a Socratic theme, as Plato’s Gorgias makes clear. At the end of the Gorgias, Socrates recounts a myth of the judgements given to souls on their death, judgements which Zeus insists be passed on naked bodies such that the wealth and rank of the deceased should not blind the judges to the true state of their souls. For Socrates, however, the truth as manifest in the unadorned body has to wait for the hereafter, whereas Cynic nudity is lived.

In Foucault’s telling (2011: 172), the connection between truth and existence in Cynicism is threefold. First, the Cynic mode of existence is a precondition of truth-telling. It is not possible to tell the truth while still invested in customary ways of life or while remaining beholden to power. Second, in its negating function, the Cynic form of life makes space for truth-telling. Having stripped away conventions, even his clothes, the Cynic distinguishes what is true in existence (e.g. equality of embodiment) from what is not (the forms of dress that establishes ranks between bodies). Third, Cynic existence manifests truth through the style it gives to life – the actions, even the naked body, of the Cynic makes truth visible, is literally an embodiment of the truth. Finally, truth and existence come together in ‘the work of the truth of self on self’ (2011: 310). The Cynic must constantly take the true measure of himself, of what he can do. Epictetus (2010: 253) compares the Cynic to an athlete who must examine himself in the mirror, seeing how strong he has become and what remains to be done. The true life involves telling oneself the truth in order to change.⁵

The true life that the Cynic practices in these ways is however only the notion of the true life common to all ancient philosophy taken to its limits: a kind of ‘carnivalesque continuity of the theme’ that ends up reversing this theme, as Foucault shows (2011: 228). Thus the true life as a sovereign life – an entirely classical theme – becomes the life so sovereign that, dispensing with everything external to the soul beyond the body’s most basic needs, it is transformed into a life of begging, even slavery. In this way, Cynicism is the sword that divides: shocking the philosophical conscience by revealing that it takes an entirely other life to remain true to the principles of the true life. The true life is an other life; life changes when the true life is actually lived (Foucault 2011: 244–5; 314).⁶ As Diogenes responded when confronted with having falsified the currency in his native Sinope: ‘That was the time when I was such as you are now; but such as I am now, you will never be’ (Diogenes Laertius 1991: 59).

Although an ascetic, in no way does the Cynic see life as an evil. Diogenes Laertius (1991: 21 and 57) has both Antisthenes and Diogenes state this explicitly: Antisthenes when, seeking relief from terrible pain, refuses the offer of a dagger with the rejoinder that he wants to be relieved only of pain, and Diogenes says that not life but living ill is what is evil. Rather than being tired of life and resentful at the strong, the Cynics’ nihilism with regard to custom was itself a test of strength and force of life. Indeed, in his agonistic fervour to be the best at living according to phusis, the Cynic appears to remain very Greek, except that, as we shall see, this competitive streak is connected more to his profound philanthropy, to his friendship of all humanity, than to the agonistic drive for individual glory. In the Emperor Julian’s account (1992: 61) of the Cynics, for instance, Diogenes’s legendary public displays of his natural functions is not described as self-interested but as motivated by care: ‘When Diogenes made unseemly noises or obeyed the call of nature or did anything else of that sort in the marketplace, as they say he did, he did so because he was trying to trample on the conceit of [man]’. Zarathustra, in this sense, is like an echo of Diogenes: ‘I walk among these people and keep my eyes open; they do not forgive me that I am not envious of their virtue’ (Nietzsche 2006: 133).

Phusis

The decisive injunction for the Cynic of Antiquity, hence the famous quote that the Cynic tradition places on the lips of Diogenes, was to live according to phusis rather than nomos. The Sophists too (as we know from Plato’s dialogues the Gorgias and the Protagoras) argued that nomos is only convention rather than anything given by phusis, but they, unlike the Cynics, used this argument for purely rhetorical gains. They certainly did not live according to it as the Cynics sought to. Reflecting on what phusis signified in Greek Antiquity is therefore of critical importance to understanding the Cynic life. As Heidegger argued in his Introduction to Metaphysics (2000: 14–19; see also 1992b: 139), phusis should not be translated as nature in our Latinized sense of the term (natura means birth). Greek phusis is rather to grow or become; what emerges from itself in the manner of the blossoming of the flower – namely ‘Being itself, by virtue of which beings first become and remain observable’. According to Heidegger (2000: 15), then, the Greeks did not first experience phusis in natural processes but rather encountered these processes in phusis: ‘only on the basis of this disclosure [of beings] could they then take a look at nature in the narrower sense’ as something only ‘physical’ (2000: 16). Phusis is a name for Being.⁷

The fundamental connection between truth and being for the Greeks was one of Heidegger’s recurrent themes (e.g. 2000: 107–10; 1992b: 26; 2002b: 63–5). Truth is aletheia: in Heidegger’s translation Erschlossenheit, unconcealment, or Unverborgenheit, unhiddenness. The word aletheia is derived from the river Lethe, the river of oblivion in Hades. A-letheia is therefore given in the negative form as a description of being as what is not in oblivion, as what comes to unconcealment. This, for Heidegger, is also the sense of phusis. Being and truth say the same thing. Our representational concept of truth – truth as correspondence (adaequatio) of our representations with some external object – is, according to Heidegger, entirely foreign to the Greeks.⁸ Greek being is that which comes to stand in unconcealment of its own accord, not because a subject has comprehended it: ‘[Phusis] signifies precisely a being which has the [arche] of its Being in itself rather than, as is the case with [poiesis] ... by means of human knowledge and production’ (2003: 146). It is Being, not human being, that ‘asserts its truth in what its projection allows to be seen’, or, to put it another way, truth is a trait of beings themselves, not of the correctness of the human gaze (1990: 159; 1998c: 177).

For Heidegger this means that the question of truth does not belong, as is customary, to logic and epistemology but properly (and originally for the Greeks) to ontology. Being-true is not a matter of propositions about or knowledge of beings, not a matter of grasping of beings in thought, but rather a property of beings themselves (2002b: 55). Being-true, for the Greeks, is the most proper mode of being (2002b: 61–2). In propositional truth-claims about beings we only ‘preserve and secure’ this primordial truth of the unconcealment of beings (2002b: 64). What is seized in knowledge is nothing other than beings ‘being-there-in-themselves’, their presence as this ‘offers itself without distortion’. What knowledge appropriates is only this prior ‘truth of beings’, namely their unconcealedness (aletheia) (2003: 191, emphasis added). As Aristotle says in Book 9 of the Metaphysics (1051b): ‘It is not because we think truly that you are pale that you are pale, but because you are pale that we who say this have the truth’. And already in Book 2 (993b): ‘as each thing is in respect of being, so it is in respect of truth’. This means that it is right to call philosophy ‘a knowledge of truth’ (993b). Philosophy does not yet, as later it will, misunderstand its vocation as a theory of truth understood as knowledge. Rather, philosophy can have knowledge of truth, as beings in their unveiledness (Heidegger 2002b: 76).

If truth is ‘letting be seen’, what shows itself, then untruth is distortion, a showing that twists what is shown (Heidegger 2003: 350; 2002b: 64). The Cynics sought to define themselves by truth-telling. And what truth did they tell? Nothing esoteric, nothing otherworldly: only that men as they live customarily live in error. Distortion is what they must then have seen in nomos, in convention. Custom is not in truth but in semblance. The state, as the embodiment of nomos, appears to be, which is to say that what comes to appearance appears by way of distortion rather than in self-showing being (phusis).

In the Sophist, Plato suggested that there is a showing that conceals, the pseudes logos of sophistry. What false speech shows is not nothing – the image really is, as an image – but it does not appear as it really is and in this sense is not only incorrect but leads astray (Heidegger 2003: 282, 297, 418; 2002b: 64, 69). When Alexander appears before Diogenes, convention would have it that he is a great King, perhaps the greatest. Diogenes, by contrast, in telling Alexander to step out of his light, sees only a man, which is indeed all that phusis, as opposed to nomos, gives of Alexander. While the great King is in some way (nomos too reveals, only its revelation is a distortion), Diogenes chooses to acknowledge only what is unconcealed by being ‘itself’ of the potentate standing over him. For if truth for the Greeks is aletheia, then true speech ‘discloses the thing addressed for what it is’ (Heidegger 2003: 353; see also 418). The logos is always about something, and therefore can only either disclose or distort (Heidegger 2003: 417).

For Heidegger (2002b: 65, 69), truth as unconcealment – being as being-true – leads the Greeks to being as constant presence. Thus for Aristotle, accidental beings (beings that alter – such as the paleness of Socrates – rather than those that undergo substantial change – such as the acorn that becomes an oak), can have no proper relation to truth since what they are unveiled as may change at any moment, leading to the ever-present possibility of untruth. While Aristotle is the first to really think time he does not manage to align it with truth: ‘As regards things which cannot be otherwise the same opinion is not sometimes true and sometimes false, but the same opinions are always true or always false’ (Metaphysics, Book 9: 1051b). Indeed, working from being as constant presence, that being is most true that, incapable of any relation to anything else, can never change; a being that thereby can never be mistaken for something other than it is (Heidegger 2002b: 70–1). This non-relational being that is never presented as something but which manifests only itself is the highest and purest being, absolutely unmediated – the Philosopher’s God.

Truth as aletheia is therefore still inside Heidegger’s forgetting of Being: while the Greeks, unlike the moderns, saw that truth is always a question of being, they did not yet question being sufficiently. Asking the leading question of ontology (‘what is the being of beings?’), they did not yet ask the fundamental question, the question of Being ‘itself’. ‘Our more radical conception of the problem’, writes Heidegger (2002b: 73), ‘means that, if beings are to be discoverable and determinable at all, being must be constantly deconcealed’. For Heidegger, unlike for his Greeks, what is constant is not presence but deconcealment, not beings but Being. Indeed, permanent presence can only be encountered in and through mortal, finite time. The idea of permanence is first given to us in our everyday relation to beings, especially the being that we ourselves are. For it is our own experience of self-constancy that is the source of our understanding of permanent presence (2002b: 122).⁹

Yet despite this difference from the Greeks, Heidegger’s truth as the truth of Being remains Greek, and for good reason: notwithstanding the forgetting of Being, it remains the case that philosophy (Heidegger’s too) is only able to distinguish itself from sophistry by shaping its bios, its form of life, according to Being rather than appearance. Heidegger does not have the Cynic in mind in the following passage, but it applies perhaps best of all to him:

The philosopher, as the representative of this radical research, has absolutely and purely decided in favour of substance over semblance ... The sophist [by contrast] has made a decision in favour of form, in favour of [an] aesthetic ideal of human existence, i.e., actually in favour of an unconcern with substantive content, whereas the philosopher has a [proairesis, decision] ... in favour of the [bios] of ... uncoverdness in itself (2003: 149).

Foucault’s Cynics

And how is it possible that a man who has nothing, who is naked, houseless, without a hearth, squalid, without a slave, without a city, can pass a life that flows easily? See, God has sent you a man to show you that it is possible?

(Epictetus 2010: 146)

Foucault’s genealogy of ancient parrhēsia (the courage of truth), the topic of his last lectures at the Collège de France shortly before his death in 1984, seizes on Cynicism and finds something singular there where his history of truth is concerned. Foucault locates in ancient Cynicism another way of philosophy to the path of ‘Platonism’. This is philosophy as a way of life.

Ancient philosophy as bios rather than logos had of course not been forgotten, as for example in the work of Pierre Hadot (see 2002) that Foucault himself was influenced by.¹⁰ But for Foucault (2010: 286) the real alternative to Platonism in Antiquity is not philosophy as a way of life as such: neither Epicureanism (the natural philosophy that Nietzsche, for example in The Anti-Christ §58, takes to be the chief opponent of Platonism in Antiquity), nor Stoicism, but Cynicism is what really escapes metaphysical capture. The contrast with Platonism in the Cynic tradition is explicit and extreme. Take the Platonic figure of the philosopher king, for example: while Plato sought to make the tyrant of Syracuse worthy of kingship by teaching him philosophy, Diogenes is always portrayed by the Cynics as treating claims to kingship with utter derision. And if Plato sought to confront the Prince with the truth in order to change him then Diogenes told the Prince the truth in order to ridicule him. Who could be further removed from the model of the philosopher king than the anti-king Diogenes? This is anti-Platonism at its purest (Foucault 2010: 287).

What especially interests Foucault in Cynicism, then, is that here we arrive at the maximum remove from the philosophical logos without in any way rejecting this logos (which would remain tied to it as its negation, which is the problem faced by anti-philosophy). With Diogenes, philosophical truth-telling, while retained, is nonetheless reduced entirely to the truth as made manifest in the here and now: as literally embodied truth. Diogenes does not confront the Prince with his logos but with his nakedness, homelessness and rudeness. This is not a philosophical telling of the truth to power but a ‘philosophical being true’ in the face of power (Foucault 2010: 287, emphasis added). From this perspective, philosophy’s problem is not the truth of politics but of remaining a subject of truth in the face of politics. Philosophy’s truth in relation to politics is a matter of ergon (act) not logos (discourse), and in relation to ethos rather than the polis (Foucault 2010: 319–20). This is truth-telling that lives the truth rather than persuading of the truth, which is the way of rhetoric and therefore of sophistry (Foucault 2010: 320, 343).

Heidegger had already noticed from his reading of Plato’s Sophist (2003: 168) that Socrates sees the ‘real philosopher’, in contradistinction to the Sophist, as the one who actually lives the life of philosophy, which is to live in truth (aletheia) (2003: 262). The true philosopher, as Plato says, looks ‘down from above on the bios of those who are beneath’ him. Heidegger notes that the word zoē – life in the sense of everything that moves and grows – is not used here by Plato, but rather bios: ‘life in the sense of existence, the leading of a life, which is characterized by a determinate telos, a telos functioning for the bios itself as an object of praxis. The theme of the philosopher is thus the bios of man ...’ (2003: 168).

Less this looking down on the bios by the true philosopher be mistaken for purely passive contemplation, what is implied here, argues Heidegger (2003: 168), is that in order to be able to properly see bios, the philosopher himself must have achieved a bios that enables a view of existence in general. The philosopher can only see the bios, the ‘being-there’, of human existence for what it is once his own life is fully formed by the bios of philosophy.¹¹ He can only see the truth when he lives the truth.

In Cynicism, philosophy understood as bios takes a unique path. By radicalizing the Socratic injunction to care for the self, which for Socrates is to take care of the capacity for truth that is the soul, the Cynic displaces the will to truth from discourse to existence, from the logos to life. The Cynic is the first subject to seek actually to live the truth. After all, as Diogenes remarked, even Socrates went home in the evening to his bed and slippers (Foucault 2011: 258). Socrates’s life simply had too much in common with conventional existence to be the true life. Customary lives cannot access the true life – this is the nihilism of Cynicism and the entirely positive relation of this nihilism to truth.

Foucault demonstrates (2011: 219–28) that the Platonic principles of truth (alētheia), namely truth as that which is clear, pure, straight and unchanging, when applied to the life of the Cynic rather than to propositions about the world, took on a very different sense from metaphysical truth. The true life (alēthēs bios) in Platonism is an unconcealed life, an unalloyed life, a life of rectitude that accords with the nomos, and, finally, a self-identical life defined by its independence and self-mastery. Yet with the Cynics, this metaphysical existence is overcome not through being rejected or inverted but through its intensification, through ‘making the theme of the true life grimace’ (2011: 227). Using the Cynics’ own metaphor of changing the value of the currency (parakharattein to nomisma), Foucault notes that the Cynics do not find a true life elsewhere, but play with the true life that they find in Platonism in a way that profoundly transvalues it from within (2011: 228).¹² Perhaps this is why Diogenes Laertius (1991: 55) has Plato saying that Diogenes the Cynic is a Socrates gone mad.

Taking the theme of the unconcealed life that has nothing to hide or be ashamed of, first; the Cynics radicalized this theme with the shameless life, the life without modesty that is a dog’s life (κυνικός – kynikos – meant dog-like) in that it was carried out entirely in public, hiding nothing (Foucault 2011: 243). Second, the pure life without admixture or dependency became with the Cynic the utterly indifferent life of active poverty, a living that needed nothing, not even a cup to drink from (2011: 244). The paradox here is that the pure and self-sufficient life, which in Platonism was a life of beauty, was thereby transformed into its opposite: a life of ugly destitution, even begging (2011: 259). This adoxia (dishonour) was a profound reversal of Greek ethics (2011: 261). Third, the straight life lived in line with the nomoi, the laws of the city, became the life that obeyed only nature, copulating in public if needs be. As such, the straight, true life ended up being not the life of the citizen but animal existence, the very thing that the philosophical-humanist tradition always defined itself against (2011: 264). The animalistic existence of the Cynic was not some return to nature’s laws, then, but rather a direct, if extreme, result of philosophical truth-telling put into practice. Cynic animality was no original nature to be recovered but rather a way of relating to oneself in the form of an ongoing test: ‘Animality is not a given; it is a duty’ (2011: 265).¹³ Finally, the tranquillity of the sovereignly self-same life became the aggressive polemicizing of a life that remained identical with itself only through its confrontation with everyday life.

Foucault sees the metaphysical conception of truth being transformed in Cynic existence not so much through the mutation of metaphysical principles as through the shift in their sphere of application away from the logos. By giving a form to existence rather than a truth of the world, metaphysical truth becomes a principle of differentiation in which the true life is shown to be radically other than everyday existence: ‘With this idea that the true life is an other life (vie autre), I think we arrive at a particularly important point in the history of Cynicism, in the history of philosophy, certainly in the history of Western ethics’ (2011: 244). The other life (the life of truth) is not lived in another (true) world but rather radically changes this life (2011: 245). While Platonism poses the question of the other world, Socrates, at least as he was taken up in Cynicism, poses the question of the other life. And indeed, for Foucault, this division is internal to Plato’s dialogues themselves. For while the Alcibiades, the urtext of the Neoplatonists, takes Socratic care of self towards the question of what this self is, finding its answer in the immortal soul, the Laches rather asks what this care looks like. As Socrates says at the end of the dialogue: ‘I maintain, my friends, that every one of us should seek out the best teacher whom he can find, first for ourselves, who are greatly in need of one, and then for the youth, regardless of expense or anything. But I cannot advise that we remain as we are.’ So the being of the self is one question of the dialogues, but the existence of care is another. The former takes the first steps towards the other world, the latter towards giving (another) form to life (2011: 246). This latter path, however, has been largely eclipsed.

Philosophy has forgotten that it was not only a form of true discourse but also a way of life, truth as a mode of existence. Foucault even considers (2011: 235), after Heidegger, whether this was its destiny. But very differently from Heidegger, Foucault offers some concrete reasons for this forgetting, which are not only internal to metaphysics itself (and in this sense Foucault [2010: 350] rejects the whole idea of philosophy having a radical origin in forgetting). First, Christianity to some extent colonized the Cynics’ challenge of the true life from the end of Antiquity onwards and, second, the institutionalization of truth-telling practices in scientific institutions has further erased the theme of the true life in modernity (2011: 235).

Apolis

We without homeland – yes! But let’s exploit the advantages of our situation and, far from being ruined by it, draw full benefit of the open air and the magnificent abundance of light.

(Nietzsche 2003: 97)

The nihilism of the Cynics was productive of nothing less than a new, and indeed unprecedented, historical figure: the brotherhood of man. For what the Cynic negated above all was the polis. The Cynics wandered from city to city in a way that was unthinkable for a Greek citizen wedded to his polis by birth and living in mortal dread of exile.¹⁴ By contrast, ‘When someone reproached him with his exile, [Diogenes’s] reply was, “No, it was through that, you miserable fellow, that I came to be a philosopher”’. Similarly, when reminded ‘that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, “And I them”, said he, “to home-staying”’ (Diogenes Laertius 1991: 51).¹⁵ If for Aristotle the state is what is proper to man, for Cynicism the true life must keep its distance from the state. Thus Nietzsche (2006: 104) is displaying his Cynic credentials when Zarathustra condemns the state as a ‘hypocrite hound’ that, speaking with ‘smoke and bellowing’, likes to make believe ‘that it speaks from the belly of things.¹⁶ For it wants absolutely to be the most important animal on earth, this state; and people believe it, too’.

This difference between the Platonic and Cynic view on the proper relation of the philosopher to power are staged in the Cynic tradition in a supposed encounter between Plato and Diogenes. Diogenes Laertius (1991: 51) records that:

Observing Plato one day at a costly banquet taking olives, ‘How is it’, he said, ‘that you the philosopher who sailed to Sicily for the sake of these dishes, now when they are before you do not enjoy them?’ ‘No, by the gods, Diogenes’, replied Plato, ‘there also for the most part I lived upon olives and such like’. ‘Why then’, said Diogenes, ‘did you need to go to Syracuse? Was it that Attica at that time did not grow olives?’

As detailed in his seventh letter, Plato had journeyed to Sicily in the failed attempt to convert the Tyrant of Syracuse (Dionysus the Younger) to philosophy, and thereby to fulfil the task of making rulers into philosophers if philosophers cannot themselves be rulers. But for Diogenes this was clearly a useless task, hence his retort about the olives – Plato may just as well have stayed home and saved himself the effort. Yet this cynicism with regard to the Platonic project of the reform of political power is a peculiar form of indifference. Diogenes is indifferent to power, yes, but his indifference has a political edge – his insouciance towards Alexander could easily have cost him his life. While the Cynic must remain in a position of radical exteriority to power, he still has something to say to power. Although this saying is nothing pedagogical, as in the Platonic schema, but rather polemical, it remains the case that the Cynic needs power in order to find the courage of truth.¹⁷

Unlike Plato, who operates as advisor to Dionysius and therefore adapts to the post-political reality of kingship by seeking to form the Prince’s soul, the Cynics continue to stage the relation between parrhēsia and power in the public arena, the agora. Diogenes, radicalizing the Socratic gesture, confronts Alexander on the street (Foucault 2010: 291). The Cynics are therefore like an echo of the politics of the city in a post-political age, indeed right up to and through the Roman Empire (Foucault 2010: 292). This difference between Plato and Diogenes is staged by Diogenes Laertius in another version of the, no doubt apocryphal, encounter between the two philosophers. Diogenes is seen by Plato washing his salad. Plato says to Diogenes: if you had heeded Dionysius’s request you would not need to wash your own salad. Diogenes replies: if you had learned to wash your own salad you would not have become the slave of Dionysius. As Foucault (2010: 292) sees it, this story gets to the heart of the Platonic–Cynic divide in the Socratic philosophical inheritance: should philosophy privately address the Prince’s soul or should it publically criticize the Prince’s actions? Should philosophy be a true discourse or a true life?

Given that his vocation was living a true life, the great test of the Cynic was his capacity for parrhēsia, the courage of truth. And truth never requires more courage than when it is spoken to power. Was the Cynic sufficiently committed to the truth to tell it even to the face of the king (hence the plethora of, no doubt, partly apocryphal stories of Diogenes standing up to Alexander)? To the fixed, indeed metaphysical, ‘I am’ of constituted state power, as exemplified in Alexander’s ‘I am the king’, the Cynic will echo Diogenes’s defiance, which amounts to saying: ‘you are only a man like me’. Cynic contempt for constituted political power will not seek to reconstitute that power differently or elsewhere, but rather to expose it as groundless. Diogenes wonders who the true king is given that Diogenes is truly independent while Alexander relies on advisers, soldiers and slaves in order to exercise his power (Dio Chrysostom 1932: 172). Similarly, as we saw earlier, to tell the great man to get out of one’s sun is a demonstration that he, Alexander, is just a body (one that in this case is blocking the light) and that the ‘kingship’ attached to that body is but an illusion (albeit one with real effects).

The cosmopolitan aspect of Cynicism, then, is not directly aimed at. The Cynic is apolis before he is a kosmopolitês. Although the Cynic tradition will refer to a divine calling by making Diogenes, like Socrates, the recipient of an oracular injunction, in truth the Cynic discovers his mission to care for all men as an accidental effect of actually living the true life of philosophy. Foucault (2011: 301), inverting this order of priority, finds that the negations of the Cynic are, in the end, nothing other than the negative condition for his positive mission of universal care. But we should reverse this: having reduced his existence, in the name of the truth of that existence, to the status of apolis, the Cynic finds that he is brother to all and that that which separates him from other men has no ground in being.¹⁸ There is, in fact, nothing that divides the sons of Zeus. When one’s bios, one’s form of life, is only its (literally, in Diogenes’s case) naked existence, then the differences of citizenship, based as they are in customs that veil existence, evaporate into the ether.

Although it is a naked existence, the life of the Cynic is not a natural life. It is made rather than born. Human artifice is not the problem, so much as artifice that has no relation to truth. This is shown in the relationship of the Cynic to the city. The Cynic, although he is an exile from his own city, does not flee the city as such. In moving from city to city he shows that he is not interested in recovering some pre-political state of innocence. To abandon the city would be to remain captured by the polis in the form of an exclusion from it. Only by remaining in the polis as one who flaunts his lack of citizenship can the Cynic demonstrate that his life has not been captured by the polis. The Cynic remains in the city in order to boast that he has made his exclusion from it his own, setting up home in the marketplace to harangue passers-by for the sake of the philosophical life. The Cynic must tell the truth, and he must stay in the city to do so.¹⁹

Nor is the Cynic’s life anything like a passive or default existence – the Cynic is a master of poverty. He works on his poverty, and never ceases working on it. It is a rigorous practice, training, askēsis. ‘A child has beaten me in economy’ says a clearly competitive Diogenes, on the realization that, when drinking from the fountain he, like the boy in question, does not even need a cup. The parred-down existence of the Cynic is the form that he gives to his life, not his life in some more primordial state. Indeed, in refusing any distinction between his naked body and his mode of existence, the Cynic overcomes the division of natural life (zoē) and form of life (bios) that is produced by the polis, with its separation of the daily life of the household from the political life of the city.

But that his nudity is inextricably tied to the bios – the form – that he gives to his life, means that the Cynic’s life is not, as contemporary thought might imagine it, a life that has rediscovered the body. In his active poverty, his stripping away of hearth and homeland, the Cynic does not discover the body but the soul.²⁰ The body is still a slave, as Epictetus notes (2010: 252), only the soul can be free. This soul is not the metaphysical soul that survives death, but rather the soul as the capacity for truth. The Cynic, parrhesiast par excellence, does not fear death, but not because of the eternity of the soul, rather because the passing of the body is nothing compared to the disfigurement of the soul that has lost its relation to truth. In this the Cynics were disciples of Socrates, whose final discourse on the eternity of the soul in the Phaedo is only a consoling afterword, as it were, to the Apology in which Socrates leaves no doubt that he has never feared death because his mission to tell the truth (in order to care for his soul) is much more important to him. The parrhesiast (the one with the courage of truth) does not despise death because this life has no value, but because his mortal existence is ensouled rather than merely embodied. And nothing damages the soul’s capacity for truth like the fear of death. Indeed, Dio Chrysostom’s sixth discourse (1932) on tyranny makes this fear the chief difference between Alexander and Diogenes. It is therefore the affirmation of the true life that is at stake in the risky exercise of speaking truth to power, not some death-drive.²¹

In this way, the Cynic’s life is something like a counterpoint made of human existence to the existence of the state as that most metaphysical of entities. ‘What state would listen to Zarathustra’s advice: “Let yourself therefore be overthrown”’, asks Deleuze (1983: 138). The difference between the metaphysical experience of the timelessly true world and the Cynic experience of the true life is that change is the Cynic’s test of truth, not permanence. Yet neither is this change some generalized, still metaphysical, becoming. It is the transformation of life, that, working from within the metaphysical model of the sovereign life, transforms it beyond recognition. Where the sovereign is that self-same entity that endures unchanging, surviving the predations of time (‘The King is dead, long live the King!’), the Cynic displaces sovereign self-sameness with the sovereignty of mortal existence. He posits nothing other than his exposed life, which can be killed at any moment. To tell Alexander to get out of one’s light is to take a stand on that which is most vulnerable and fleeting – a life entirely subject to sovereign power. But that life which claims for itself what is most fragile and contingent in its living turns out to be the one that fears least, to be the truly sovereign life.

Unlike the reach of kings, this form of life is also genuinely universal – bare life, the life that has been exposed to sovereign power, has a far broader scope than any empire ever could. The Cynic can be the friend of all men because all men are captured by sovereign power, both those foreigners who are excluded from it (and therefore included in the form of an exclusion) and those who are included as citizens. The Cynic has no country not because he points to a more universal inclusion than the polis, one that might encompass all men in the form of a kosmopolis, but because, as apolis, he practices the destitution of political inclusion itself.²² In taking the philosophical will to truth to the utmost by actually living it, the Cynic finds not some more universal identity above his bare life, rather the universality of bare life itself. But this bare life, as exposure to the sovereign, is something that he appropriates rather than something that is proper to him. That the Cynic subtracts his existence from the polis means not only that he does not sublate it into something higher but also that he does not ground it in some nature. The Cynic constitutes the universal precisely there where there is no longer any identity:

And this man, of whom one demands detachment from every particular tie of family, homeland, and civic and political responsibility, is freed from these ties only so that he can accomplish the great task of ethical universality, which is not the political universality of the group (city, or State, or even the whole of humankind), but the universality of all men. An individual bond with individuals, but with all individuals, is what characterizes [. . .] the Cynic’s bond with all the other men who make up humankind. (Foucault p. 302)

A good example of this Cynic refusal of any particular identity in the name of universality – indeed, in the name precisely of the brotherhood of men – is the Cynics’ injunction on marriage. There is a long passage in the section of Epictetus’s Discourses (2010) that he devotes to Cynicism (ch. 22 of Book 3) on this. Epictetus, presenting the Cynic position on marriage (which is here opposite to the Stoic one), informs us that the Cynic must not marry. Husbands must take care of their households while the Cynic must be free to go abroad among all men without the hindrance of private duties: ‘are those men greater benefactors to society who introduce into the world to occupy their own places two or three grunting children, or those who superintend as far as they can all mankind ...?’ For Foucault, the Cynic’s refusal of marriage is then really nothing other than the reverse side of the positive mission the Cynic has received to care for all men (2011: 301). And this goes not only for the Cynic’s lack of family but also for his lack of a homeland: ‘The only true commonwealth, [Diogenes] said, was that which is as wide as the universe’ (Diogenes Laertius 1991: 75).

Although the positive mission of care is only the other side of the coin of Cynic nihilism, this nihilism, as the stripping of all that has no relation to truth, is fundamental. Renunciation is what enables the Cynic to take care of others. But this is not a self-renunciation. The Cynic will fundamentally take care of himself through all his renunciations.²³ ‘Go ahead and love your neighbours as you love yourselves’, Zarathustra says (Nietzsche 2006: 137), ‘but first be the kind of people who love themselves’. This care for himself will enable the Cynic to be useful to others: ‘For pirates, well aware as they are how worthless is the life they lead, take cover in desert places as much from shame as from the fear of death: whereas the Cynics go up and down in our midst subverting the institutions of society’ (Julian 1992: 87).

Unlike the sage, who retreats to his cave, all wrapped up in his wisdom, the Cynic is so concerned with his mission of care that he will not only be found in the marketplace, but will actually set up home there. Even the Cynic’s death is a public and edifying spectacle. Peregrinus Proteus, a second century Cynic, immolated himself at the Olympic games and Lucian the Cynic-baiter had this to say about it: ‘if a fiery end is so attractively Heraclean, what was to prevent his quietly selecting some well-wooded mountain top and doing his cremation all by himself [. . .] But no: he must roast in full concourse, at Olympia, as it might be on a stage’. Yet even Lucian must admit that Peregrinus ‘says, of course, that it is all for the benefit of the human race – to teach them to scorn death and to show fortitude in trying circumstances’ (Lucian 1968: 374–5).

The popular character of Cynic philosophy, the fact that it required no special education and was practiced by fullers, joiners and cobblers (Lucian 1968: 99), in addition to its reduction of customary hierarchies, reflected the Cynics’ confidence that what is good for one is good for all. Yet this confidence does not lead to a purely didactic relation to others. Rather, the Cynic actively binds himself to all men by way of his sufferings: he must love those who beat him as if he were ‘the father and brother of all’ (Epictetus 2010: 253). If he does not renounce himself, the Cynic does sacrifice himself in the sense that he devotes himself to others by inviting their scorn. And this self-sacrificial life is also where the Cynic finds his joy and purpose in existence, hence the Cynics’ devotion to Heracles, the only hero who struggles and suffers (Epictetus 2010: 278–9, 281). Long before Zarathustra, the Cynic is ‘the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering’ (Nietzsche 2006: 174).

Foucault (2011: 275) contrasts the care of others characteristic of the sage who merely gives himself as an example to others, and the interventionism of the Cynic, who must go from door to door. And contrary to the care that, following Socrates, is applied to each individual as an individual, the Cynic’s care is much more a social struggle, a constant public polemic, because it is not only a battle against individual vices but against all those customs, conventions and laws that afflict humanity at large (2011: 280). The Cynic thus seeks to change not only the ethos of the individual but also the collective way of life, he ‘aspires to change the world’ much more than to give his followers a happy life in the manner of Epicureanism (2011: 285). Indeed, to the extent that he is a universalist, believing that all men are on the wrong path and addressing this judgement to all, the transformation of individual existence that the Cynic seeks cannot but change the world (2011: 315).²⁴ The other life of the Cynic opens on to the other world: not the world beyond but ‘an other life for an other world’ (2011: 287).

The Cynic is apolis, he must have no country, because human laws themselves, and not only the laws of particular cities, are his target. His struggle is thereby for all humanity (Foucault 2011: 281).²⁵ The Cynic, says Epictetus, is the scout (kataskopos) for humankind, and the fact of being without family, property, or country makes this duty to all people much easier to carry out – for scouts, in travelling on ahead to warn of danger, must travel light.²⁶ Although he will be in the vanguard in finding out what is favourable and harmful for humanity, nonetheless the Cynic must return to tell the truth of what he has seen to all (Foucault 2011: 167). In telling of the philosophical vocation through the theme of a return to the unenlightened place, Plato’s analogy of the cave is taken to its uttermost in Cynicism. And, just as in Plato’s analogy, the Cynic does not expect anyone to thank him for this mission of care. Unlike the man of ressentiment, who wants to be loved but does not know how to love (Deleuze 1983: 118)²⁷, the Cynic will express his love for his fellow man by making himself as unlovable as possible: ‘Thus speaks all great love; it overcomes even forgiveness and pitying’ (Nietzsche 2006: 69).

After Socrates, Diogenes’s mission of care is not one he chooses but one which is given to him originally by the Pythic god. According to Seneca, upon his exile from Sinope Diogenes consulted the Delphic oracle and received his vocation to change the value of the currency.²⁸ Unlike Socrates, however, there seems to have been little need in Diogenes’s mind to test the oracle. Nomisma (money) is taken in its similarity to nomos and a lifelong vocation to devalue the nomoi and to restore the true value of life’s currency – phusis – begins. Where Socrates’s mission remains related to the esoterism of wisdom – if I am indeed the wisest man then what does this say about wisdom? – Diogenes’s vocation, as he who points to the simple truth of being-with, is exoteric through and through.

The belief in divine appointment seems to have been widely shared in Cynicism, as indicated by Epictetus’s account. Epictetus’s Stoicism was the choice of a philosophical way of life, but Epictetus, against his tendency to read Stoic themes back into the Cynic life, emphasizes that the true Cynic cannot be self-appointed (Foucault 2011: 292–6). However, although the Cynic is called to care, as with Socrates, this vocation is found only in the test by which the Cynic recognizes himself; it bears no external signs. Paul’s rebuke (1 Cor. 1.22) of both Athens, where the Greeks seek wisdom, and Jerusalem, where the Jews look for signs, is in this sense anticipated in the Cynic life. Just as Paul proposes preaching Christ crucified in place of both philosophy and the study of the law, so too the Cynic emphasizes the true life as something that must actually be lived.²⁹ As Badiou (2009a: 508), the thinker par excellence of the militant life, puts it in a different context: ‘It is not enough to identify a trace’ of an event and of the truth procedure the possibility of which it opens up. Rather, ‘One must incorporate oneself into what the trace authorizes in terms of consequences. This point is crucial’.

The universalism of the Cynics stood in stark contrast to the other ancient philosophical schools, which all saw philosophy as something for the few rather than the many.³⁰ As militant, universalist and the one who opposes the laws of men, is the Cynic a model for Paul?³¹ For, like Paul’s, Cynic militancy is ‘militancy in the open’, ‘a militancy addressed to absolutely everyone’ and a ‘militancy in the world and against the world’ (Foucault 2011: 284–5).³²

Negation

What appears only shines forth in its appearance to the extent that it subtracts itself from the local laws of appearing.

(Badiou 2009a: 513)

The function of the universal in the Cynics is negation. In this the Cynics are certainly kindred spirits of Paul; for in Paul’s estimation (Gal. 3.28), too, there is neither slave nor free; male nor female; Jew nor Greek. Paul is not proposing some more universal identity above these particularities (‘Christian’ is not an identity available to him) but rather negating them – subjecting them to indifference without replacing them with something else (which is where his negation differs from the Hegelian negation of the negation). Between the Cynics and Paul there is a shared indifference to difference that does not posit a new difference: the Cynic is apolis; the believer is neither Jew nor Greek.

From the start, then, nihilism has had an apocalyptic (unveiling) function which ties it closely to the messianic tradition – what it reveals is the groundlessness of all powers and principalities.³³ If this was the Cynics’ mission, it was certainly also Paul’s, the difference being that the Cynic will himself be the true king rather than the one who pronounces the Messiah’s kingship.³⁴ Nonetheless, like the Christian Messiah, the Cynic will both reveal and at the same time hide his true kingship. When Diogenes realized he had won over a crowd with his discourse he immediately ‘ceased speaking and, squatting on the ground, performed an indecent act’. The crowd’s pleasure immediately turned to scorn and he was once again dismissed as crazy. Dio Chrysostom (1932: 399), who tells this story, likens Diogenes to a water-snake that, having been spotted, quietly slips beneath the surface of the water: ‘and again the sophists raised their din, like frogs in a pond when they do not see the water-snake’.

The significance of negation to the true life is already visible in the life of Socrates. Socrates’s daemon never gives him positive guidance, but intervenes only to indicate what he should not do, for example not to participate in political life. But it is in Plato’s Sophist that the positive power of negation is first thought. Plato here decides that difference cannot be thought as the mere privation of identity.³⁵ From this momentous decision flows the key finding of the dialogue – that non-being is. Against Parmenides, for whom non-being is unthinkable, difference must be thought positively; there must be a proper idea of difference, which Plato names ‘otherness’ (ἕτερον). To say that movement is not rest is more than to say, negatively, that it is non-identical with rest, but, affirmatively, that it is other than rest.³⁶

For Badiou in Logics of Worlds (2009a), the thinking of non-being requires seeing that every being is marked by contingency, by the fact that it need not have appeared in the world in question (we will see in a discussion to come later that, for Badiou, there is no World, only an infinity of worlds). Take any being in any world at all: once everything has been said that can be said about it, there will still remain its ultimate ‘indifference to its worldly site’ (2009a: 322). This means that for every being there remains something that is not conveyed in its worldly appearance; every being-there contains something that is not there. Badiou terms this a ‘reserve’ of being which is ‘subtracted from appearance’ and which constitutes ‘a real point of inexistence’ in existence, specifically an inexistent that every existent – every being-there – posseses (2009a: 322–3).

Consider, for example, the case of Diogenes while recalling that Badiou (2009a: 324) sees the inexistent as precisely what ‘testifies, in the sphere of appearance, for the contingency of being-there’. By subtracting himself from the polis, Diogenes demonstrates that his being-there in the world of the citizen is, in at least one point, entirely contingent rather than the natural necessity Aristotle took it for. But while Diogenes can gesture towards this point of inexistence in every citizen, he can do so only negatively – by revealing as much as possible inthe world of the city of the bare existence that survives his subtraction of himself from the world of the city. In this sense the life of the Cynic marks the site of an inexistent, given that the inexistent is always ‘suspended between (ontological) being and [. . .] (logical) non-being’ (2009a: 324). Diogenes is in the city, yet in the world of the citizen he is not. But there is more: for Diogenes is not merely caught between his being and his appearing (there, in the city). Diogenes in fact succeeds in shattering the logic of appearing of citizenship, the transcendental of the polis. The name Diogenes signals an event in the world of the polis – an event precisely because it changes the transcendental arrangement of that world. For after Diogenes, a new figure emerges – the cosmopolitan – that, according to the logic of the city, cannot exist. And there can be ‘no stronger transcendental consequence than the one which makes what did not exist in a world appear within it’ (Badiou 2009a: 376).

This leads on to the crucial question of how such change is possible in a world. For Badiou (2009a: 357), real change can no more be explained by phenomenology than ontology. If the source of change is not to be found in being qua being (which, as pure multiplicity – the void – is absolutely immobile), then neither is it to be located in what the logic of a world allows to appear. To be sure the transcendental of a world modifies objects in the sense that, in including them within the time of that world, their appearance is always a becoming. But this becoming is prescribed by the transcendental – it is rule-governed, authorized – and so is in no sense real change (2009a: 359). An exception to both being and appearing is required if a world is to be transformed.

This exception, in Badiou’s thinking, is the coming to existence of the inexistent. It occurs when being, which functions normally as the invisible ontological support for objects in a world, ‘rises “in person” to the surface of objectivity’ (2009a: 360). This ‘mixture of pure being and appearing’, which is really the revelation of the void that haunts all beings, is possible when a being ‘lays claim to appearing in such a way that it refers to itself, to its own transcendental indexing’ (2009a: 360). Rather than being merely objectified by the logic of the world in question, this being reflexively ‘self-objectivates’ by presenting itself as one of its elements, thereby being caught up in the logic of which it is the ontological support or, to put the same point differently, becoming ‘the ontological support of its own appearance’ (2009a: 362–3). Basically, it makes itself appear (2009a: 452). We have here the ‘subversion of appearing by being’ that we needed in order to account for real change. But, contravening the laws of being as it does (for Badiou, the laws of being are mathematical, captured in a Cantorian set-theory which forbids a being from constituting a reflexive set), such a rising of being, though its consequences can literally change a world, appears only immediately to disappear. Developing his central concept of the event, Badiou calls this a ‘site’. Was the encounter between Diogenes and Alexander, semi-mythical as it may be, just such a site – a true ‘insurrection of existence’ (2009a: 373) that each Cynic sought thereafter to be faithful to? In this connection it is worth recalling one of Badiou’s transcendental maxims:

If what was worth nothing comes, in the guise of an eventual consequence, to be worth everything, then an established given of appearing is destroyed. What seemed to support the cohesion of the world is abruptly turned to nothing. Thus, if transcendental indexing is indeed the (logical) base of the world, it is with good reason that we can say, along with the Internationale: ‘The earth shall rise on new foundations’. (2009a: 379–80)

For while the site itself must be local, destroying a customary evaluation in one of its points only, it nonetheless forces a new arrangement of existence in the world – of what exists and what does not. Event-sites thus ‘de-compose’ worlds, are ‘in exception’ to them or constitute a ‘dysfunction’ of them (2009a: 385 and 386). So it is that ‘the world may be accorded the chance – mixing existence and destruction – of an other world’ (2009a: 380).

Returning to the question of negation in Plato’s Sophist: Heidegger believes Plato’s discussion of apophasis in this dialogue to be the place where negation is first seen ‘positively’, which for Heidegger means: not as other than truth, but as revealing in its own way. There is ‘a denial that discloses’ because being is always ‘being-in-relation-to’ and not because, as in Hegelian logic, negativity is only a transitional stage in the dialectic (Heidegger 2003: 387–8). Being in the Sophist includes being with one another, the possibility to be affected by one another (2003: 331–2), which is how, in Heidegger’s reading, Plato begins to grapple with the problem of non-being in this crucial dialogue. If being includes that which is not then this is because change and possibility are within being, and this dunamis is the expression of how beings are always in a relation to the other such that ‘every being, insofar as it is, is itself and something other’ (2003: 329).³⁷ Indeed, the relation is still more original than the other since, in each and ‘every case, the other is possible only as other-than’. In the other the relation-to is always already found (2003: 377). If Being is that which is most original, then Being is being-in-relation. (Unlike Aristotle, Plato is not considering the being of movement as such. The other in beings is not their possibility of being-other – potentiality – but rather their relation to the other, their being-with.)

Even timeless beings, insofar as they are known in a soul itself defined by motion (the capacity to affect and be affected), are thereby included in becoming, finding themselves in a dynamic relation with that which they are not (2003: 333). What is moved and this movement itself both belong to beings,³⁸ and this means that the meaning of Being itself must be reworked to include not only that which is but also that which is not (2003: 334). If everything remained unmoved, as Parmenides held, then mind (nous) and life (zoē), and with them all knowledge (noein) itself, would be impossible. And by Plato’s own account, being is the idea (that which a being presents of itself, its outward appearance), such that a being that cannot be known is no being at all (2003: 337). On the other hand, however, if Heraclitus is right that being is only movement, if everything is in motion, then, equally, nothing could be known (there could be no self-sameness, no identity, to know) and Being could not be.³⁹ Given the impossibility of either rest or motion, being or becoming, as names for Being, we are compelled to think both together (2003: 338). And, after all, both stasis and kinesis are (2003: 340).

What both beings and the non-being of movement share in, then, is Being. Being is the koinonia, the communion, the with in being-with. Against the Neoplatonists, who took from this very same argument of the Sophist (that non being is) the implication that true being is beyond beings, Heidegger finds in Plato’s dialogue an account of Being as rather that which is closest to beings. And the pervasive presence of the other in all beings (not beyond them) means that Being is not only not self-identical presence but that everything is both a being and a non-being at the same time. As Heidegger translates Plato on this point: ‘insofar as it is the others, to that extent it precisely is not’ (2003: 385). In sum, the being of non-beings – the elusive quarry of the dialogue – can be understood only by way of the koinonia, the being-together of beings (2003: 386).⁴⁰ Just because, as Parmenides saw, all beings are (the universal character of presence) does not mean that we can understand Being in this ontical way as the totality of present beings, as pure presence (2003: 395). The Being of the ‘not’, of non-being, is not an absence that points us either to pure nothingness or to an otherworldly source of Being but rather ‘the presence of the Being-in-relation-to’ (2003: 387). Being is co-presence, and only the ‘not’ and negation can disclose this. The ‘not’, negation, is nothing negative but is rather a positive letting be seen, which means that it is fundamental to aletheia, to truth as unconcealment (2003: 388).⁴¹

Negating citizenship in the name of universal friendship, the Cynics indicated that equality is ontological before it is legal. We are used to hearing that inequality is natural and equality only political, but, in truth, communion of being is more primordial than differences between beings. Heidegger (2003: 292) called this the ‘equiprimordiality’ of Being and Deleuze (1994: 37) the ‘univocity’ – which also signifies equality – of being. For Badiou, this ontological truth provides the basis of his universalism: being is the generic set, the set without qualities or the set whose predicate is to have no predicates; a set which, as precisely open, is thereby for all.

The truth of being is that everything is equally, even that which is most lowly and fleeting.⁴² Awareness of this truth defeats the ordo (the hierarchy) of beings that metaphysics establishes. Metaphysical being, inasmuch as it is defined as presence, as that which is present-at-hand, makes beings that always are more in being than those that only become (and therefore are not) – hence the highest being as the eternity of Aristotle’s God, which is precisely the unmoved mover.⁴³ If such hierarchization of being inevitably legitimates sovereign power, the Cynics’ negations rather enable an ontology that subverts sovereignty. This means that the will to truth in Cynicism can never lead to a crisis of truth – to nihilism. The will to truth is a crisis for truth only in the sense that it reveals that the highest being as eternal being (God) or as sovereign being (State) is not true. But the truth of being as equality of being is immune to this revelation, which it already knows and which is indeed its truth.

It is for this very reason that Badiou, for whom truth and being also say the same thing,⁴⁴ calls for the recognition that ‘there is only one world’. One world is here not an ontological claim (for Badiou, the One is not) but a political claim – it is a world in which I take all other people as belonging to the same world as me. That this world is constituted by ‘an unlimited set of differences’ is not at issue here since what is significant is that these different human beings are equally different (Badiou 2010: 63). The unity of the world, then, ‘is one of living and acting beings existing in the same world with others’; ‘we can agree and disagree about things. But on the absolute precondition that they exist exactly as I do – in other words in the same world’ (2010: 61).

In Logics of Worlds, Badiou has formalized this insight in terms of a phenomenology (a being-there) of how beings appear in any given world (the world of the polis, for example, or that of the boardroom, or indeed any ‘world’ whatever). That which determines where beings appear on a spectrum from maximal intensity to invisibility in any world is the logic of that world, which Badiou names the transcendental of the situation. Being other than the objects whose appearance it regulates (regulation is the word, since the transcendental of a world, in establishing a relation, properly creates nothing), the logic of a world does not itself appear, remaining entirely anonymous (2009a: 326–7). To appear in a world is to be seized by its logic. For example, in the polis, given its transcendental of citizenship, the native freeborn man appears brightly, while the slave, though equally an existent in the polis, fails to appear at all. But the hierarchical logic of a world does not change the fact that the beings in that world are rendered visible or invisible only on the basis of this logic (which itself ‘is’ not) and not according to their existence. The Cynics, too, pointed to the inexistence of the logic of their world – the king is not, only Alexander exists, and no more or less than anyone else.

But like the subjects of Badiou’s truth procedures, this negation proceeds, positively, by way of the affirmation of a new body of truth. Diogenes is not content to sneer at citizenship but positively revels in his slavery to poverty, indeed even in slavery itself. And for the ancients, slavery was the very antithesis of the status of the citizen as a free man. As Foucault reminds us (2011: 260), in the slave market Diogenes lies on his belly like a fish, the better to play the role of merchandize for sale. Even when free, Diogenes scandalizes citizens with his ugly poverty, which manifests a very slave-like lack of autonomy. He is a beggar, after all, and this was even more shocking than slavery in Graeco-Roman culture, given that begging is an absolute dependency on others beyond all ownership and contract (Foucault 2011: 260). Cynic nihilism was a scandalous form-of-life, but its scandal, though unthinkable without the rejection of the highest values of Antiquity, nonetheless amounted to a conviction that slavish poverty and the lack of citizenship was an affirmative negation. As an exposed life, the life of the Cynic was a manifestly mortal existence; it was thereby a true life.

Nietzsche too imagined Diogenes of Sinope as a figure of truth. The madman who enters the market place in The Gay Science (2001: 119–20) with lit lamp on a bright morning seeking God, the same one who pronounces the death of God, is clearly a modern Diogenes (who tradition similarly has searching with a lantern in broad daylight). Diogenes seeks a man (indeed, Diogenes is forever failing to find men, especially when surrounded by many of them); Nietzsche’s madman seeks God. Neither find him; and that is Nietzsche’s point. The quest for the truth of man might well require the Cynic’s lantern – cynicism. Man, for Nietzsche, is an animal that only cynicism with regard to all humanist pretensions of his being god-like can expose.⁴⁵ ‘God’, for Nietzsche, is then shorthand for an entire humanist tradition that has preferred the lie of other-worldliness (expressed in the refusal to see man as the animal he is) to the beautiful but terrible truth of this world. In this light, Nietzsche’s claim that Cynicism is the highest thing that can be attained on earth acquires a clearer sense. This reading gains support in an unpublished late note: ‘Life’s worthlessness was recognized in Cynicism, and yet it was not yet turned against life’ (cited in Niehues-Pröbsting 1996: 358).

***

The philosophical life, the will to truth as bios, discovers that nothing much of life is true, but it makes a virtue of this corrosive nihilism. Or, as Foucault (2011: 190) puts it, ‘Cynicism constantly reminds us that very little truth is indispensable for whoever wishes to live truly and that very little life is needed when one truly holds to the truth’. Among other things, Foucault is carrying on a conversation with Nietzsche, saying that he was only halfway right that philosophy, as the will to truth, will lead us to perish from the truth. By his own reckoning, Nietzsche had seen just how little truth the Cynic needed – Nietzsche’s Cynic recognizes life’s worthlessness – but this is only something, negatively, that the Cynic does not turn against life. Foucault, however, establishes that, positively, Cynicism’s parring down of existence gave the Cynic precisely the courage of his truth. The nihilism engendered by the will to truth finds, in the Cynic, an opportunity rather than an obstacle. The Cynic is the Overman of Antiquity.⁴⁶

The will to truth, then, is not the identity that Nietzsche suggests it is. If we take Deleuze’s restatement (1983: 96) of Nietzsche’s will to truth, we see that, where the Cynic is concerned, it is a poor fit: ‘we always come up against the virtuism of the one who wills the truth: one of his favourite occupations is the distribution of wrongs, he renders responsible, he denies innocence, he accuses and judges life, he denounces appearances’. Contrary to this description of the man who wills the truth, the Cynic with the will of the truthful is not a man of law. Yes he accuses, yes he denounces appearances, but he does not distribute wrongs. He might judge but he is not interested in punishment. And if anything is responsible it is the laws, not those who break them. People, for the Cynic, are not guilty, even if they are lacking in virtue. This is why the Cynic is able to befriend everyone.

The Cynic is the first to befriend all people because he does not subordinate being-with to being-there. Such a prioritization of place is of course the decisive move in Heidegger’s philosophy, which in this sense risks following Nietzsche’s in deciding for the national gods (this is what Levinas termed Heidegger’s paganism of place). But as we have seen from our discussion of their negation of the polis, the Cynics do not divide being by place. Being-there can be negated, and although this negation remains dependent on what it negates, its creative deed is that it constitutes a being-with that knows no such bounds, and no national gods.

¹Cited in Jensen (2004: 183).

²‘And as for the Cynics, as they are called, it is true that the city contains no small number of the sect’ mentions Dio Chrysostom (1932: 181) about Alexandria in the first century. In the second century Lucian (1968: 99–100) bemoans this ‘vile race’ that ‘bawl and bark and bray against all comers’. The Emperor Julian is still denouncing them in the fourth century.

³When upon his exile Diogenes was abandoned by his slave, he announced: ‘If Manes can live without Diogenes, why not Diogenes without Manes?’ (Seneca 2007: 125).

⁴‘Each particular [social] obligation is conventional and can border on the absurd; the only thing that is grounded is the obligation to have obligations, “the whole of obligation”; and it is not grounded in reason’ (Deleuze 1991: 108).

⁵See Dio Chrysostom (1932: 101).

⁶Another possible source of Cynic radicalization with regard to the nomoi is latent already in Presocratic philosophy – for example in Parmenides, the way of being involves rejecting the way of semblance, and custom is the first casualty of this way. Heraclitus, meanwhile (in Burnet 1908: 153), refers to universal being in Fragment 114: ‘Those who speak with understanding must hold fast to what is common to all as a city holds fast to its law, and even more strongly. For all human laws are fed by the divine one. It prevails as much as it will, and suffices for all things with something to spare.’

⁷Foucault, however, persists with the usual ‘nature’ (see, for example, 2011: 263). But that being is a better translation than nature is clear as much in the Stoic School as in the Cynics, where the notion of living according to phusis in Chrysippus, for example, means our individual nature as well as the nature of the universe (Diogenes Laertius 1991: 195).

⁸As Heidegger notes elsewhere (1990: 8), even Kant’s Copernican revolution in knowledge, by which the object now agrees with the subject rather than vice versa, continues to assume this correspondence model of truth.

⁹Compare with Descartes (1911: 16), for whom it is the other way round:

‘Hence there remains only the idea of God, concerning which we must consider whether it is something which cannot have proceeded from me myself. By the name of God I understand a substance that is infinite, eternal, immutable, independent, all-knowing, [and] all-powerful [...] Now all these characteristics are such that the more diligently I attend to them, the less do they appear capable of proceeding from me alone; hence [. . .] we must conclude that God necessarily exists.’

¹⁰Although Foucault’s interest in philosophy as a way of life in Antiquity was undoubtedly influenced by Hadot, Foucault’s concern, as a genealogist, is with the link of this ancient philosophical ethos and the present. Hadot’s concerns, by contrast, are more conventionally historical.

¹¹Indeed, as Heidegger points out in a discussion of the Phaedrus (2003: 221), even the rhetoric taught and deployed by the Sophist is redeemable for Plato if it is founded on the true life of philosophy. Once given the foundation of true speech (parrhēsia) and, no longer limited to the political speeches given in court or in the Assembly, once it becomes a speech which relates to every moment, then even rhetoric becomes, in Plato’s words, ‘a know-how in guiding the existence of others by means of speaking with them’.

¹²Foucault notes (2011: 227) that in this expression ‘change the value of the currency’ (parakharattein to nomisma), the verb parakharattein signifies change or alteration rather than devaluation.

¹³And here Foucault sees that Cynicism was never a valorization of the laws of nature as such, something which his conventional translation of phusis as ‘nature’ prevents him from getting to more directly. Contra Foucault (2011: 282), even the Cynics’ censure of Prometheus for giving fire to humanity bemoans not the loss of some primordial naturalness but rather the ‘softness and love of luxury’ that resulted (Dio Chrysostom 1932: 264–5).

¹⁴‘What do you gain by travelling about in all directions and wearing out the very mules you ride?’ ‘Like [the impious Galileans] you have abandoned your country, you wander about all over the world’ (Julian 1992: 123)

¹⁵Dio Chrysostom, for a time a Cynic in the first century, also embraced his banishment from Rome under Domitian: ‘the thought came to me that exile is not altogether injurious or unprofitable, nor staying at home a good and praiseworthy thing’ (1932: 92 and 96).

¹⁶Zarathustra is often portrayed like a Cynic: ‘I a crawler? Never in my life have I crawled before the mighty [and] a meagre bed warms me more than a rich one, for I am jealous of my poverty, and in winter it is most faithful to me’ (Nietzsche 2006: 138). Zarathustra is also proud of being an exile from all fatherlands (2006: 163). There are differences, however. Zarathustra’s love is not for humanity but for his friends of the future: ‘This is what my great love of the farthest demands: do not spare your neighbour! Human being is something that must be overcome’; ‘What fatherland! There our helm wants to steer, where our children’s land is!’ (2006: 172). In the final part of Zarathustra (2006: 231) there is also this: ‘When I came to mankind for the first time, I committed the hermit’s folly, the great folly: I situated myself in the marketplace.’ Finally, courage, for Zarathustra (2006: 233), is also something other than parrhēsia: ‘Do you have courage, oh my brothers? Are you brave of heart? Not courage before witnesses, but the courage of hermits and eagles, which not even a god looks at any more.’

¹⁷Hegel expresses this point negatively in the Philosophy of Right (1991: §195), arguing that Diogenes was determined by the opinions he railed against. Nietzsche (2014: 295) too argued that the Cynic derives his happiness from his contrariness.

¹⁸Aristotle’s famous description (in his Politics, Book 1, ch. 2) of the apolis as someone who, in his self-sufficiency, is like a god or a beast rather than a man has led much commentary on Cynicism to see the Cynic as seeking a god-like existence. But what allows us to think that the Cynics would have accepted Aristotle’s capture of human existence in the polis in the first place? Foucault’s reading enables us to see the Cynics’ rejection of the polis not as the attempted transcendence of human being but rather as its absolute affirmation free from any qualifying predicates such as ‘political animal’.

¹⁹As Nietzsche (2014: 30) puts it, the Cynic is forced to speak ‘in front of witnesses’.

²⁰Epictetus (2010: 250) tells us that it is the Cynic’s duty to say, like Socrates: ‘you seek for prosperity and happiness where they are not, and if another shows you where they are, you do not believe him. Why do you seek it without? In the body? It is not there’.

²¹In this sense, the Cynic life, despite its being defined by the negation of the polis, is also not dialectical in the Hegelian sense (where the negation of the negation is the mediation effected by the universal). The universalism of the Cynic cannot be expressed in the following Hegelian terms: in being negatively not of the polis, the Cynic is at the same time positively indifferent to all identities. It is rather the affirmation of the negation that is at stake in the Cynic life. In negating the polis the Cynic constitutes a new form of life that he positively identifies with. The singularity of Cynic existence is what emerges from the negation of the polis, not some empty universality. Cynic universality, then, is not its abstractness but that it is addressed to all. As Deleuze (1983: 179–80; see also 198) says in another context, it ‘is only as power of affirming (love) that the negative attains its highest degree’. If the Cynics lived this positivity of the negative, then Deleuze believes that Nietzsche thought it, opposing it to the Hegelian positivity of the negative.

²²Crates is recorded in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives (1991: 97) as saying: ‘When Alexander inquired whether he would like his native city to be rebuilt, [Crates’] answer was, “Why should it be? Perhaps another Alexander will destroy it again.” Ignominy and Poverty he declared to be his country, which Fortune could never take captive. He was, he said, a fellow-citizen of Diogenes.’

²³‘While I was uttering these and similar upbraidings of all others, but first and foremost of myself, at times, when at a loss, I would have recourse to an ancient appeal made by a certain Socrates’ (Dio Chrysostom 1932: 101).

²⁴See Dio Chrysostom (1932: 100): ‘And the opinion I had was that pretty well all men are fools, and that no one does any of the things he should do’

²⁵Demonax, a second century Cynic, is recorded by Lucian as defending himself for refusing initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries in precisely these terms: if the Mysteries are bad, Demonax will have to tell all to warn people off; if they are good he will have to share the good news with everybody. He will thus divulge the Mysteries hupo philanthropias (for the love of humanity) (Foucault 2011: 169).

²⁶It is this scouting mission, indeed, that is inseparable from his scandalous publicity. The Cynic hides nothing, living his life in full view, because veiling one’s existence is to be fearful of the opinions of others, ‘and when then a man fears these things, is it possible for him to be bold [enough] with his whole soul to superintend men?’ (Epictetus 2010: 249). So even in his care for all people, the Cynic will only care for that which is of concern to people in general. He shall not tell them to honour the city’s particular gods, for example, only question them as to why they bother with mere externals such as reputation and possessions. Even in his care the Cynic is resolutely universalistic, focusing negatively on the inessentials of human existence.

²⁷‘All great love does not want love – it wants more’ (Nietzsche 2006: 238).

²⁸Dio Chrysostom (1932: 98) also claimed to have been advised by the oracle to take up the Cynic life with the injunction to wander ‘to the uttermost parts of the earth’.

²⁹The Cynic Demetrius, as recorded by his friend Seneca (2011: 85), had the following saying on this point: ‘[one gains] more by having a few wise precepts ready and in common use than by learning many without having them at hand’. Demetrius, according to Seneca (2011: 86), discounted what we would call scientific knowledge of the world, ‘which we should not profit by knowing’. Rather, the one who would make progress in philosophy needs only a few simple rules which he should cling to ‘and make part of himself’ (ibid.). We also know from Lucian (1968: 190) that the Cynics ‘avoided the study of natural philosophy’ and, to the extent that they ‘devoted themselves to speculation, [did so] solely for practical ends’. Diogenes Laertius (1991: 107) too refers to the Cynics’ exclusion of logic and physics from philosophy, which they took to be exclusively concerned with ethics. As the Cynic Deomonax put it: ‘You go to great pains over the subject of the cosmic order, but you are completely unconcerned about your own internal disorder’ (in Foucault 2011: 239).

³⁰The popular nature of Cynicism is particularly repugnant to Lucian (1968: 99), who writes that they are ‘composed for the most part of serfs and menials, creatures whose occupations have never suffered them to become acquainted with philosophy; whose earliest years have been spent in drudgery in the fields, in learning those base acts for which they are most fitted – the fuller’s trade, the joiners’, the cobbler’s – or in carding wool’

³¹The similarity has often been noted. See, for example, A. J. Malherbe (1970) and F. Gerald Downing (1998).

³²Earlier, in The Government of Self and Others (2010: 277), Foucault had already emphasized that parrhēsia involves addressing oneself to all. Discussing Plato’s discourse to the tyrant of Syracuse (as recounted in Letter VII), Foucault notes Plato’s description of his advice to Dionysius the Younger as addressed not only to him but to everyone.

³³‘vis-à-vis kings of the world, crowned kings sitting on their thrones, [the Cynic] is the anti-king who shows how hollow, illusory, and precarious the monarchy of kings is’ (Foucault 2011: 275). Foucault sees this unveiling function of Cynic anti-kingship as ‘at the very centre of the Cynic experience and the Cynic life as true life and other life’ (ibid.).

³⁴The constant retelling of the encounter between Diogenes and Alexander in the Cynic tradition is clearly aimed at this point. Diogenes, not Alexander, is the true king:

‘[Diogenes] went on to tell the king that he did not even possess the badge of royalty. And Alexander said in amazement, “Did you not just declare that the king needs no badges?” “No indeed,” he replied; “I grant that he has no need of outward badges such as tiaras and purple raiment – such things are of no use – but the badge which nature gives is absolutely indispensable.”’ (Chrysostom 1932: 197)

³⁵This is also Deleuze’s position in his discussion of Plato’s Sophist in Difference and Repetition (1994: 63–4): ‘non-being is not the being of the negative; rather it is the being of the problematic, the being of problem and question. Difference is not the negative; on the contrary, non-being is Difference’. This conception of non-being as the being of difference is then opposed (1994: 268) to the Hegelian dialectic, which ‘substitutes the labour of the negative for the play of difference’. Instead of being, positively, the being of problems and questions, non-being in the Hegelian schema is the being of the negative.

³⁶For Badiou (2009a: 105 and 124), the negation of being-there, which is to appear in a world, is rather thinkable on the basis of the being qua being, which, while it is there in a world, may not appear in it if its existence ‘is nil according to the transcendental of that world’. Thus not-being-there has no being, but is rather a measure of (in)appearing. This is also Badiou’s thought of death, which is not an event in being (and in this sense is not) but rather a matter of ceasing to appear relative to the world (2009a: 269–70). Crucially, from this perspective, death is not to be confused with nothingness (2009a: 328). To have been is still in being; it is not nothing.

³⁷Or, expressed in Hegelian terms, every being is ‘one only for another; and because it is for another, the one is itself an other’ (Heidegger 1988: 93). The being-in-itself is therefore absolute negation, ‘in which the thing differentiates itself from all others and in this differentiation is for another ... [indeed] has its essence in the other. The relation to the other belongs essentially to being-for-itself’ (1988: 94).

³⁸Similarly for Deleuze’s Bergson (1991: 48): ‘It is only to the extent that movement is grasped as belonging to things as much as consciousness that it ceases to be confused with psychological duration, whose point of application it will displace, thereby necessitating that things participate directly in duration itself.’

³⁹‘Everywhere, wherever and however we are related to beings of every kind we find identity making its claim on us. If this claim were not made, beings could never appear in their Being’ (Heidegger 1969: 26).

⁴⁰‘Identity appears as a unity. But that unity is by no means the stale emptiness of that which, in itself without relation, persists in monotony’. Mediation is what prevails in the unity of identity (Heidegger 1969: 25).

⁴¹Heidegger returns to the theme of the difference between the ‘not’ and no-saying in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1998a: 272–3). The ‘no’ that recognizes itself as affirming the primordial truth of the ‘not’ in letting being be is entirely other than the ‘wilful assertion of the positing power of subjectivity’. For ‘Nihilation unfolds essentially in being itself, and not at all in the existence of the human being’.

⁴²Deleuze (1994: 40) attributes this insight to Spinoza, also: ‘Any hierarchy or pre-eminence is denied in so far as substance [Spinoza’s term for being] is equally designated by all the attributes in accordance with their essence, and equally expressed by all the modes in accordance with their degree of power.’

⁴³Plato had already argued in his allegory of the cave (Republic, Book 7, 515 d3/4) that those who turn away from the flickering shadows contemplate that which ‘is more in being’. The ideas (forms) seen outside the cave in the true light of day go beyond what is transitorily present towards what, in showing itself, is immediately and enduringly present. Just as Aristotle after him, Plato names the highest and first cause of these ideas (namely the sun in the cave allegory) not only ‘the good’ but also τό θεῖον (the divine) (Heidegger 1998c: 180). For a modern statement of this same logic take Descartes (1911: 15), for whom that idea: ‘by which I understand a supreme God, eternal, infinite, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, and Creator of all things which are outside of Himself, has certainly more objective reality in itself than those ideas by which finite substances are represented’.

⁴⁴Being, as void, is not predicated, and the Event, as the upsurge of Being in a situation, is that from which all truth procedures, which are therefore indifferently ‘for all’, stem.

⁴⁵Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Hughes 1997: 7–8) provides a good example of this pretension:

‘Nothing was closer to the gods/ Than these humble beings [fish, beasts. birds]/ [. . .] Till man came./ Either the Maker/ Conceiving a holier revision/ Of what he had already created/ Sculpted man from his own ectoplasm,/ Or earth/ Being such a new precipitate/ Or the etheric heaven/ Cradled in its dust unearthly crystals. [. . .] In this way the heap of all disorder/ Earth/ Was altered./ It was adorned with the godlike novelty/ Of man.’

⁴⁶Foucault hints at this connection (2011: 308): ‘Cynic sovereignty establishes the possibility of the blessed life in a relation of self to self in the form of acceptance of destiny ... The Cynic says yes to his own destiny.’ We are being reminded here of Nietzsche’s amor fati.