The Dangers of Cynicism

By Jeffrey Jurgens

“In the circle around Socrates, there were men like Alcibiades and Critias—God knows, by no means the worst among his so-called pupils—and they had turned out to be a very real threat to the polis, and this not by being paralyzed by the electric ray but, on the contrary, by having been aroused by the gadfly. What they had been aroused to was license and cynicism.”

--Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations”

Hannah Arendt regards Socrates as an apt model for the kind of thinking she admired and championed. He was, in her words, “a citizen among citizens,” a man who thought “without becoming a philosopher.” For rather than imparting a substantive notion of virtue or truth, he sought to “unfreeze” sedimented concepts like justice, courage, and happiness so that his interlocutors might examine them anew.

[caption id="attachment_15738" align="alignleft" width="300"] Source: Britannica[/caption]

For Arendt, Socrates’ thinking is neatly conveyed by two key similes—the gadfly and the electric ray—that were sometimes used to describe him. On the one hand, Socrates was like a gadfly because he woke his fellow citizens from the slumber of their thoughtlessness and aroused them to reflection. On the other, he was like an electric ray because he paralyzed those same citizens with the perplexities that he felt himself. He interrupted their unexamined judgements, opening them to doubt and uncertainty, without offering a judgment of his own.

The images of the gadfly and the electric ray may seem contradictory, but in Arendt’s estimation, they fittingly reflect the larger paradoxes that define the activity of thinking. She follows Socrates in insisting that even though thinking makes life full and worthwhile, it does not in and of itself lead to definite resolutions or tangible results. Many of Plato’s Socratic dialogues are in fact aporetic: they evoke a sense of abiding impasse, largely because the discussion “either leads nowhere or…goes around in circles.” In seeking to disabuse his interlocutors of their routine assumptions, Socrates does not settle arguments as much as set them in perpetual motion.

Yet the implications of such result-less meditation, Arendt cautions, are not necessarily benign. Indeed, “thinking inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements for good and evil, in short on those customs and rules of conduct we treat of in morals and ethics.” The activity of thinking, in other words, always contains within it the seeds of nihilism, the potential negation of all currently prescribed convictions. In the Socratic dialogues, such rejection and disavowal were embodied in the cynicism of Alcibiades and Critias. These men were far from unintelligent, but they were not satisfied with a mode of thinking that refrained from establishing a “positive” doctrine. They accordingly transformed non-results into negative results: “if we cannot define what piety is, [then] let us be impious.”

We could find many instances of such cynical inversion in American public and political life (as when the Republicans recently invited Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress on the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran). Yet Arendt’s account suggests that cynicism is troubling not simply because it is dogmatic, distrustful, and narrowly self-interested. Instead, Arendt casts cynicism as the result of a short-circuited, prematurely truncated thinking process. Cynics like Alcibiades and Critias have been perturbed by the gadfly of thought, but they do not linger—temporarily paralyzed—within the perplexities that such thought might generate. Rather than sustaining the reflections they have already begun, they merely invert old values and declare them “new.” Yet such new values are likely, in Arendt’s words, to “be used as sleepily, with the same unthinking routine, as the old values.” They become mere surrogates for examination, shortcuts that obviate the need for further reflection.

[caption id="attachment_14947" align="alignright" width="300"] Source: Jewish Currents[/caption]

If this is the case, however, then cynicism is not far removed from that fateful “inability to think” that Arendt observed in Adolf Eichmann. Like Eichmann, cynics insulate themselves from the human inclination and need to engage in self-examination. They preempt the “two-in-one,” the soundless solitary dialogue with oneself, which lies at the foundation of human consciousness and conscience. As a result, they are less likely to account for—and judge—their actions in a manner that might prevent them, in a crucial moment, from committing evil deeds.

Arendt’s writing consistently alerts us to the dangers of thoughtlessness. In her treatment of Socrates, however, she suggests that abridged thinking—and the cynicism that often results from it—is hardly less threatening.

(Featured Image Source: Fine Art America)