Gocyinc.com is the world’s first and currently the only blog that informs not only about history, but about current livable cynicism.On this page I give you all important informations about cynicism, the cynical art of living and the development of cynicism from its beginnings in antiquity to the present.
But knowledge transfer is not the main purpose of this website. A very good short summary of the philosophy of cynicism can be found here. But my page wants to do more than just inform. My page is an invitation.
At our time our freedom is threatened by increasingly sophisticated and total biopolitics of the global ruling elites. You will learn through cynicism a successful method of resistance practiced over the millennia.
The goal is to live a powerful happy life. In the end the greatest ruler in the world might come to you to ask what he can do for you. And your honest and kind answer would be:
“Nothing, really. But it would be nice if you could get out of the sun.”
As Diogenes, the most famous cynic so far, answered Alexander the Great. The ruler, if honest, would have to answer:
“If I didn’t have to be the ruler of the world, I wanted to be you.”
And you could end the conversation with him with the sentence:
“If I didn’t have to be myself, I still wanted to be myself”.
What is cynicism about?
First of all, we Cynics have little in common, other than the etymology of cynic, with those sarcastic ankle chompers, who are also called Cynics today.
Cynicism as an art of living
Cynicism means a way of living, originated with Socrates, hundreds of years before our era among the Greeks. Don’t just let yourself be driven by the zeitgeist, but lead your very own life. That lifts you out of the mass of followers. You learn to live a beautiful powerful life.
The ethics behind the cynical way of life
At the time when Cynicism emerged as an art of living, ethics was not yet understood to mean the distinction between good and evil. It was not about becoming a do-gooder, but solely about achieving happiness. The Greeks called this eudaimonia. Better than the common translation of eudaimonia with happiness, which has been common for centuries, is perhaps “flourishing”. Literally translated, it means “to be surrounded by good spirits.” Instead of happiness we better speak of “wholesomeness”, “flourishing” or the German word “Seligkeit1The German word “Seligkeit” originally means the stay at the mythical lake, the place where both the unborn and the deceased souls are united..” But perhaps the best thing is, we stay right with Eudaimonia.
What are virtues?
Now the Greeks were convinced that in order to achieve eudaimonia, one must learn and practice certain virtues. It is important to note that virtue does not mean something that one simply has, but that it is a process to develop virtues.
Most people think of “virtue” as the obligation to maintain a high moral standard, to be a good person. But I just said that ancient virtue ethics in general, and the Cynics and Stoics in particular, are not about becoming good. And this is because we are already good, by nature.
The practice of virtue is not an unpleasant duty, but will give you pleasure
The goal of a life led with the help of virtues is not to become as good a person as possible, but as happy a person as possible, to realize eudaimonia. The German word for virtue, “Tugend,” originally meant power. So practicing virtues support your will to power, are empowerment, not altruistic self-denial. The more powerful you are, it is the conviction of cynics and stoics alike, the more happy you become, the more you achieve eudaimonia. By power we mean everything that is really ours, that no one can take away from us, that we have at our disposal even in chains, even as slaves. Other things, like money, political influence, health, recognition, etc., is not in our power alone. It can be taken away from us, we can lose it.
Plato named four so-called cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. These four virtues were later adopted by the Stoics as well. After all, less to consider than the Jewish 10 Commandments.
But we Cynics, whose beginnings go back to Socrates and his pupil Antisthenes and who, by the way, were much more famous than Plato during his lifetime, manage with only two:
Parrhesia and revaluation of all prevailing values.
This blog is about learning and practicing these two virtues to achieve eudaimonia.
You will soon understand that the other virtues are derived from the two. In fact, there is even only one virtue, parrhesia, that is, self-actualization or, to speak with Nietzsche, The Will to Might.
The Revaluation of all values is an important but auxiliary virtue to achieve your might im Widerstand gegen die herrschende Politik. Telling the truth about oneself again does not mean the moral claim not to lie. Not lying is the opposite of Parrhesia, but self-denial.
Beyond altruism
If there were a mortal sin for cynics, it would be altruism. Because altruism means exactly the opposite of parrhesia: it means acting selflessly.
Beyond existentialism
But as much as we reject altruism, that is, selfless action, we also differ clearly from existentialists, such as Sartre developed in France. The core statement of existentialism is:
Existence precedes essence!
According to Sartre we would come freely to the world, that means here quasi like a blank sheet.
There is no self that we can unfold, so there is no self-discovery, or self-awareness. Rather, it is our task to invent ourselves.
If we simply believe the existentialists for a moment that this is possible at all, however, we are immediately faced again with the old problem, which is hardly different from the problem of the original sin, that Paul imputed to human beings: we must develop an ethic that distinguishes between good and evil.
It is true that existentialists do not have to fight the original sin in us, as the Pauline Christians did, but they cannot rely on their “self” either. Because this they must first invent and construct by the existence out of the empty freedom. This empty freedom is hell. The atheist Sartre also sees it that way. Because we all are condemned to this freedom, he thinks. Condemned, namely, to have to distinguish between good and evil.
No Stoicism and Cynicism without God
From what has been said so far, it should be clear now, that there can be no stoicism or cynicism without God. Whereby the cynics speak here of nature.
We are good by nature! So our conviction.
But this conception of nature does not coincide with the today prevailing conception of nature of the Enlightenment. For the nature of the Enlightenment is blind, knows no telos, but only the Principle of sufficient reason. Nothing good can come from it, but only the blind coincidence.
We know a better way to achieve eudaimonia:
Go cynic!
Keep reading:
- 1The German word “Seligkeit” originally means the stay at the mythical lake, the place where both the unborn and the deceased souls are united.