Cynics

Cynicism originates in the philosophical schools of ancient Greece that claim a Socratic lineage. To call the Cynics a “school” though, immediately raises a difficulty for so unconventional and anti-theoretical a group. Their primary interests are ethical, but they conceive of ethics more as a way of living than as a doctrine in need of explication. As such askēsis—a Greek word meaning a kind of training of the self or practice—is fundamental. The Cynics, as well as the Stoics who followed them, characterize the Cynic way of life as a “shortcut to virtue” (see Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 104 and Book 7, Chapter 122). Though they often suggest that they have discovered the quickest, and perhaps surest, path to the virtuous life, they recognize the difficulty of this route.

The colorfulness of the Cynic way of life presents certain problems. The triumph of the Cynic as a philosophical and literary character complicates discussions of the historical individuals, a complication further troubled by a lack of sources. The evidence regarding the Cynics is limited to apothegms, aphorisms, and ancient hearsay; none of the many Cynic texts have survived. The tradition records the tenets of Cynicism via their lives. It is through their practices, the selves and lives that they cultivated, that we come to know the particular Cynic ēthos.

1. History of the Name

The origin of the Cynic name kunikos, a Greek word meaning “dog-like”, is a point of contention. Two competing stories explain the source of the name using the figure of Antisthenes (who Diogenes Laertius identifies controversially as the original Cynic), and yet a third explanation uses the figure of Diogenes of Sinope. First, Antisthenes is said to have taught in the Cynosarges, which is a Greek word that might mean “White Dog,” “Quick Dog,” or even “Dog’s Meat”. The Cynosarges is a gymnasium and temple for Athenian nothoi. "Nothoi" is a term that designates one who is without Athenian citizenship because of being born to a slave, foreigner, or prostitute; one can also be nothoi if one’s parents were citizens but not legally married. According to the first explanation, the term Cynic would, then, derive from the place in which the movement’s founder worshipped, exercised, and, most importantly, lectured. Such a derivation is suspect insofar as later writers could have created the story through an analogy to the way in which the term “Stoic” came from the Stoa Poikilē in which Zeno of Citium taught. Though nothing unquestionably links Antisthenes or any other Cynic to the Cynosarges, Antisthenes was a nothos and the temple was used for worshipping Hercules, the ultimate Cynic hero.

A second possible derivation comes from Antisthenes’ alleged nickname Haplokuōn, a word that probably means a dog “pure and simple”, and is presumably referring to his way of living. Though Antisthenes was known for a certain rudeness and crudeness that could have led to such a name, and later authors, including Aelian, Epictetus, and Stobaeus, identify him as a kuōn, or dog, his contemporaries, such as Plato and Xenophon, do not label him as such. This lack lends some credence to the notion that the term kunikos was applied to Antisthenes posthumously, and only after Diogenes of Sinope, a more illustrious philosopher-dog, had arrived on the scene.

If Antisthenes was not the first Cynic by name, then the origin of the appellation falls to Diogenes of Sinope, an individual well known for dog-like behavior. As such, the term may have begun as an insult referring to Diogenes’ style of life, especially his proclivity to perform all of his activities in public. Shamelessness, which allowed Diogenes to use any space for any purpose, was primary in the invention of “Diogenes the Dog.”

The precise source of the term “Cynic” is, however, less important than the wholehearted appropriation of it. The first Cynics, beginning most clearly with Diogenes of Sinope, embraced their title: they barked at those who displeased them, spurned Athenian etiquette, and lived from nature. In other words, what may have originated as a disparaging label became the designation of a philosophical vocation.

Finally, because Cynicism denotes a way of living, it is inaccurate to equate Cynicism with the other schools of its day. The Cynics had no set space where they met and discoursed, such as the Garden, the Lyceum, or the Academy; for Diogenes and Crates, the streets of Athens provide the setting for both their teaching and their training. Moreover, the Cynics neglect, and very often ridicule, speculative philosophy. They are especially harsh critics of dogmatic thought, theories they consider useless, and metaphysical essences.

 2. Major Figures and the Cynic Lineage

The major figures within Cynicism form the pivotal points within a lineage traced from Antisthenes, Socrates’ companion and a major interlocutor in the Socratic dialogues of Xenophon (see especially his Memorabilia and Symposium), through his student, Diogenes of Sinope, to Diogenes’ pupil Crates, and from Crates to both Hipparchia of Maronea, the first known woman Cynic philosopher, and Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism.

Some others among the more notable Cynics include Metrocles of Maronea, brother to Hipparchia and pupil of Crates, Menippus, Demonax of Cyprus, Bion of Borysthenes, and Teles. Thinkers heavily influenced by Cynic thought include Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes of Assos, Aristo of Chios, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, Dio Chrysostom, and the emperor Julian.

The Socratic schools tend to trace their lineage directly back to Socrates and the Cynics are no exception. As such, the historical authenticity of this heredity is suspect. Nevertheless, it accurately tracks a kind of intellectual transmission that begins with Antisthenes and is passed on to Diogenes, Crates, and Zeno. Cynics seem to have survived into the third century CE; two of Julian’s orations from 361 CE disparage the Cynics of his day for lacking the asceticism and hardiness of “real” Cynics. As a “school” of thought, Cynicism ends in the sixth century CE, but its legacy continues in both philosophy and literature.

 3. Cynic Ethics

Foremost for understanding the Cynic conception of ethics is that virtue is a life lived in accord with nature. Nature offers the clearest indication of how to live the good life, which is characterized by reason, self-sufficiency, and freedom. Social conventions, however, can hinder the good life by compromising freedom and setting up a code of conduct that is opposed to nature and reason. Conventions are not inherently bad; however, for the Cynic, conventions are often absurd and worthy of ridicule. The Cynics deride the attention paid to the Olympics, the “big thieves” who run the temples and are seen carrying away the “little thieves” who steal from them, politicians as well as the philosophers who attend their courts, fashion, and prayers for such things as fame and fortune.

Only once one has freed oneself from the strictures that impede an ethical life can one be said to be truly free. As such, the Cynics advocate askēsis, or practice, over theory as the means to free oneself from convention, promote self-sufficiency, and live in accord with nature. Such askēsis leads the Cynic to live in poverty, embrace hardship and toil, and permits the Cynic to speak freely about the silly, and often vicious, way life is lived by his or her contemporaries. The Cynics consistently undermine the most hallowed principles of Athenian culture, but they do so for the sake of replacing them with those in accord with reason, nature, and virtue.

 a. Living in Accord with Nature and Opposing Conventions

Though the imperative to live life in accord with nature is rightly associated with Stoicism, the Stoics are following a Cynic lead. Diogenes of Sinope fervently rejects nomos, or convention, by showing the arbitrary and frequently amusing nature of Athenian social, religious, and political mores and trampling the authority of religious and political leaders. Fundamental to this is a redefinition of what is worthy of shame. Diogenes’ body is disorderly, a source of great shame among the Athenians and the reservoir for the principle of shamelessness among the Cynics.

Diogenes uses his body to upend the conventional association of decorum with the good. He breaks etiquette by publicly carrying out activities an Athenian would typically perform in private. For example, he eats, drinks, and masturbates in the marketplace, and ridicules the shame felt when one’s body is unruly or clumsy. This does not mean, however, that there is nothing about which a person ought to feel shame. For example, in Lives of Emminent Philosophers, one finds the following anecdote: “Observing a fool tuning a harp, ‘Are you not ashamed,’ he said, ‘to give this wood concordant sounds, while you fail to harmonize your soul with your life?’ To one who protested ‘I am unfit to study philosophy,’ Diogenes said, ‘Why then live, if you do not care to live well?’” (Diogenes Laertius, Book 6, Chapter 65; R.D. Hicks’ translation is altered for this article.)

As Diogenes ’ reappraisal of shame suggests, the Cynics are not relativists. Nature replaces convention as the standard for judgment. The Cynics believe that it is through nature that one can live well and not through conventional means such as etiquette or religion. One reads that Diogenes of Sinope “would rebuke men in general with regard to their prayers, declaring that they asked for things which seemed to them to be good, not for such as are truly good” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 43). This captures the crux of the Cynic notion of living in accord with nature and contrary to convention. Praying for wealth, fame, or any of the other trappings convention leads one to believe are good is a mistaken enterprise. Life, as given by nature, is full of hints as to how to live it best; but humans go astray, ashamed by petty things and striving after objects, which are unimportant. Consequently, their freedom is hindered by convention.

 i. Freedom and Parrhēsia

The Cynics clearly privilege freedom, but not merely in a personal sense as a kind of negative liberty. Instead, freedom is advocated in three related forms: eleutheria, freedom or liberty, autarkeia, self-sufficiency, and parrhēsia, freedom of speech or frankness. Their conception of freedom has some shared aspects with other ancient schools; the notion of autonomy which derives from the imperative that reason rule over the passions is found in the ethics of multiple Classical and Hellenistic thinkers. A specifically Cynic sense of freedom, though, is evident in parrhēsia.

An element of parrhēsia, which can be overlooked when it is defined as free or frank speech, is the risk that accompanies speaking so freely and frankly. Legendary examples of the Cynic’s fearlessly free speech occur in Diogenes of Sinope’s interchanges with Alexander the Great. One such example is the following: “When he was sunning himself in the Craneum, Alexander came and stood over him and said, ‘Ask of me any boon you like.’ To which he replied, ‘Stand out of my light’” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 28). At another point, Alexander pronounces his rank to Diogenes of Sinope by saying, “I am Alexander the Great King.” Diogenes responds with his own rank, “I am Diogenes the Cynic,” which is to say “Diogenes the Dog” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 60).

The examples above demonstrate the unique confluence of humor, fearless truth telling, and political subversion which distinguishes the Cynic way of living. With a few notable exceptions, the philosophers of antiquity can be found at some time or another in the company of rulers (Plato, Aeschines, and Aristippus all attended the court of Dionysius, Xenophon is intimately associated with Cyrus, Aristotle with the Macedonian ruling family, and so on). The Cynics, however, made it a point to shun such contact. The Cynics strive for self-sufficiency and strength, neither of which is capable of being maintained once one enters into the conventional political game. The life of an impoverished, but virtuous and self-sufficient philosopher is preferable to the life of a pampered court philosopher.

Diogenes Laertius writes that, “Plato saw [Diogenes of Sinope] washing lettuces, came up to him and quietly said to him, ‘Had you paid court to Dionysius, you wouldn’t now be washing lettuces,’ and [Diogenes] with equal calmness answered, ‘If you had washed lettuces, you wouldn’t have paid court to Dionysius’” (Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 58). The lesson of this exchange is clear: whereas Plato views paying court as freeing one from poverty, the Cynic sees poverty as freeing one from having to pay court to a ruler. This second sense of freedom so forcefully advocated by the Cynics, comprises both autarkeia, or self-sufficiency, and parrhēsia, or the freedom to speak the truth: something one at court is never free to do. It is no surprise, then, that when asked what is “the most beautiful thing in the world,” Diogenes replied, “Parrhēsia.” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 69.)

 ii. Training and Toughness

In order to live the Cynic life, one had to be inured to the various physical hardships entailed by such freedom. This required, then, a life of constant training, or askēsis. The term askēsis, defined above as a kind of training of the self but which also means “exercise” or “practice,” is appropriated from athletic training. Instead of training the body for the sake of victory in the Olympic Games, on the battlefield, or for general good health, the Cynic trains the body for the sake of the soul.

The examples of Cynic training are multiple: Antisthenes praised toil and hardship as goods; Diogenes of Sinope walked barefoot in the snow, hugged cold statues, and rolled about in the scalding summer sand in his pithos; Crates rid himself of his considerable wealth in order to become a Cynic. The ability to live without any of the commodities usually mistaken for necessities is liberating and beneficial. It is also, however, a difficult lesson: “[Diogenes of Sinope] used to say that he followed the example of the trainers of choruses; for they too set the note a little high, to ensure that the rest should hit the right note” (Diogenes Laertius, Book 6, Chapter 35).

 4. Cosmopolitanism

The Cynics are not always given credit when it comes to the notion of cosmopolitanism, for the origin of this term is at times ascribed to Stoicism. Moreover, when it is attributed to Cynicism, it is often characterized as a negative tenet that gains content only once it is transplanted into Stoic doctrine (see John L. Moles’ discussion of “Cynic Cosmopolitanism” in The Cynics). However, cosmopolitanism can be fully understood within its Cynic context if it is taken as more than an oxymoron or a pithy retort: “Asked where he came from, [Diogenes of Sinope] said, ‘I am a citizen of the world [kosmopolitēs]’” (Diogenes Laertius, Book 6, Chapter 63). In this last quote, Diogenes is responding to a question calling for him to state his origin with what seems to be a neologism. To be a politēs is to belong to a polis, to be a member of a specific society with all of the benefits and commitments such membership entails. By not responding with the expected “Sinope,” Diogenes is renouncing his duty to Sinopeans as well as his right to be aided by them. It is important to note that Diogenes does not say that he is apolis, that is, without a polis; he claims allegiance to the kosmos, or the universe.

The Cynics, then, cast the notion of citizenship in a new light. To the Greek male of the Classical and Hellenistic period, citizenship was of utmost value. The restrictions on citizenship made it a privilege and these exclusions are, to the Cynic, absurd. Under cosmopolitanism, the Cynic challenges the civic affiliation of the few by opening the privilege to all. General national affiliation was likewise esteemed, and Diogenes’ cosmopolitan response is therefore also a rejection of the limitations of such a view.

Finally, cosmopolitanism revises the traditional conception of the political duties of an individual. As such, the Cynic is freed to live according to nature and not according to the laws and conventions of the polis. The conventional polis is not just rejected but replaced. This has important ethical connections to the notion of living in accord with nature, and can likewise be seen as an important precursor to the Stoic understanding of physis, or nature, as identical to the kosmos, or universe.

 5. The Cynic Legacy

The first and most direct Cynic influence is upon the founding of Stoicism. One story, preserved in Diogenes Laertius, tells of Zeno of Citium reading a copy of Xenophon’s Memorabilia in a bookshop while shipwrecked in Athens. He became so taken with the figure of Socrates that he asked the bookseller where he might find such a man. At just that moment, Crates passed by, and the bookseller pointed him out as the one to follow.

Though this, like many of Diogenes Laertius’ stories, may strike one as too propitious to be historically accurate, it preserves the way in which the primary tenets of Stoicism emerge out of Cynicism. The primacy of ethics, the sufficiency of virtue for happiness, the cultivation of indifference to external affairs, the definition of virtue as living in accord with nature, and the importance placed on askēsis, all mark the shared terrain between the Cynics and the Stoics. Indeed, when various Stoic thinkers list the handful of Stoic sages, Cynics, and especially Diogenes of Sinope, are typically among them. Epictetus in particular advocates the Cynic stance, but warns against taking up lightly something so difficult (see Discourses 3.22).

Within political philosophy, the Cynics can be seen as originators of anarchism. Since humans are both rational and able to be guided by nature, it follows that humans have little need for legal codes or political affiliations. Indeed, political associations at times require one to be vicious for the sake of the polis. Diogenes’ cosmopolitanism represents, then, a first suggestion that human affiliation ought to be to humanity rather than a single state.

The impact of Cynicism is also felt in Christian, Medieval, and Renaissance thought, though not without a good deal of ambivalence. Christian authors, for example, praise the Cynics for their self-discipline, independence, and mendicant lifestyle, but rebuke the bawdy aspects of Cynic shamelessness.

Finally, the mark of the Cynic is found throughout the texts of literature and philosophy. Menippean Satire has a clear debt, and Diogenes of Sinope in particular appears as a character in literary and philosophical contexts; Dante, for example, situates Diogenes with other virtuous but pagan philosophers in the first level of hell and Nietzsche is especially fond of both Diogenes and the Cynic attitude. One striking example occurs in section 125 of The Gay Science. Here Nietzsche alludes to the anecdote wherein Diogenes searches for a human being with a lit lamp in daylight (D.L. 6.41). In his own rendition, Nietzsche tells the story of the madman who entered the marketplace with a lit lamp on a bright morning seeking God. It is this same madman who pronounces that God is dead.

The Plague, a novel by Albert Camus

Introduction

The Plague (French: La Peste) is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers to fugitives, all help to show the effects the plague has on a populace.

The novel is believed to be based on the cholera epidemic that killed a large percentage of Oran's population in 1849 following French colonization, but the novel is placed in the 1940s. Oran and its environs were struck by disease multiple times before Camus published this novel. According to a research report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Oran was decimated by the plague in 1556 and 1678, but all later outbreaks, in 1921 (185 cases), 1931 (76 cases), and 1944 (95 cases), were very far from the scale of the epidemic described in the novel.

The Plague is considered an existentialist classic despite Camus' objection to the label. The narrative tone is similar to Kafka's, especially in The Trial whose individual sentences potentially have multiple meanings, the material often pointedly resonating as stark allegory of phenomenal consciousness and the human condition.

Camus included a dim-witted character misreading The Trial as a mystery novel as an oblique homage. The novel has been read as a metaphorical treatment of the French resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II Additionally, he further illustrates the human reaction towards the "absurd". The Plague represents how the world deals with the philosophical notion of the Absurd, a theory that Camus himself helped to define.

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Few writers kept their work as close to the subject of death as did Albert Camus, one of the greatest novelists and essayists of the 20th century, who met his own end in a road accident 55 years ago this week, on the Lyon-Paris Route Nationale 6.

Of all Camus’ novels, none described man’s confrontation – and cohabitation – with death so vividly and on such an epic scale as La Peste, translated as The Plague. Most of us read The Plague as teenagers, and we should all read it again. And again: for not only are all humankind’s responses to death represented in it, but now – with the advent of Ebola – the book works on the literal as well as metaphorical level.

Camus’ story is that of a group of men, defined by their gathering around and against the plague. In it we encounter the courage, fear and calculation that we read or hear in every story about West Africa’s efforts to curtail and confront Ebola; through its narrator, Dr Rieux, we can identify with the hundreds of Cuban doctors who went immediately to the plague’s Ground Zero, and those such as the Scottish nurse currently fighting for her life at the Royal Free Hospital in London.

I think Camus intended such a literal – as well as allegorical - reading. It is generally agreed that the pestilence he describes signifies the Third Reich. Writing in 1947, as the world whooped victory and “Never Again”, Camus insisted that the next plague “would rouse up its rats again” for “the bane and enlightenment of men”. But Camus was also aware of the great cholera epidemic in Oran, Algeria – where the novel is set – in 1849, and of others in his native district of Mondovi in the Algerian interior.

But there is another reason we should all re-read La Peste (preferably in French or the English translation by Stuart Gilbert, a work of literature in itself). Like every good metaphorical or allegorical work, it can represent beyond its intentions; including pestilences both moral and metaphorical that have happened after Camus’ own lifetime. The critic John Cruikshank insists that La Peste is also a reflection on “man’s metaphysical dereliction in the world”, in which case the applications are endless, and up to us. So it is worth reflection on this anniversary of his death: what would the plague signify now?

Nowadays, I think, La Peste can tell the story of a different kind of plague: that of a destructive, hyper-materialist, turbo-capitalism; and can do so as well as any applied contemporary commentary. In fact especially so, for this reason: the Absurd. Our society is absurd, and Camus’ novel examines – among many other things, and for all its moralising – our relationship to the absurdity of modern existence. It can describe very well the plague in a society which blares its phantasgmagoria across the poor world so that millions come, aboard tomb ships or across murderous deserts, in search of its empty promises; and which even destroys the constant against which Camus measured human mortality: nature.

Essential to Camus’ existential isolation was the discrepancy between the power and beauty of nature, and the desolation of the human condition. From his earliest days, he loved the sea and deserts, and saw man’s mortality in the light of their indifferent vastness.

The master of the 20th-century absurd, Samuel Beckett, was born seven years before Camus, but was active in the French resistance at the same time. In Beckett’s Happy Days, Winnie meditates that “Sometimes it is all over for the day, all done, all said, all ready for the night, and the day not over, far from over, the night not ready, far from ready”. In this place, as in the wait for Godot, there is no purposeful human agency.

In La Peste, however, absurdity is a source of value, values and even action. The group of men gathered around the narrative represent, it feels, all human response to calamity. Each takes his turn to tell it, although it is the doctor, Rieux – the hidden narrator – who battles the pestilence with his work, medicine, just as Camus tried to battle first injustice, later fascism, with his labour in words.

The difference from Beckett is this: as the hunter for Beckett’s Molloy concludes: “Then I went back to the house and wrote. It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining” – ergo, even the narration is self-negating. But Camus’ characters in La Peste illustrate that, although they know they are powerless against plague, they can bear witness to it, and this is in itself of value. When he accepted the Nobel prize for literature in 1957, Camus’ magnificent speech urged that it was the honour and burden of the writer “to do so much more than write”.

Camus saw no dichotomy between the emptiness which lies at the heart of L’Etranger, and the endeavours of La Peste. He wrote once about “the wine of the absurd and the bread of indifference which will nourish [man’s] greatness”. The fact of absurd powerlessness is no reason not to act; Camus, for all his deep sense of the absurd, urges us to action.

But there was no moral place for humankind in nature. The distance of nature’s power and beauty is almost a form of torture: in Camus’ first major novel, La Mort Heureuse, Mersault ponders the “inhuman beauty of the April morning”. Only one letter separates Mersault’s name from that of his more complex and ambiguous sucessor, Meursault, anti-hero of L’Etranger: he is a man of many questions but no answers. Yet even Meursault deduces that in killing an Arab on the beach: “I understand that I had destroyed the harmony of the day”.

But why does La Peste speak so loudly to us now? Camus wrote early on, in an essay entitled Le Desert, about “repugnant materialism”. He was on a track of vital import to us now, in a world of materalism so repugnant it has become a plague. Everything mankind does in a turbo-capitalist age, with his ravaging of nature, “destroys the harmony of the day”.

Every bleat of the politicians echoes those in authority during Camus’ fictitious plague in Oran: “There are no rats in the building”, insists the janitor as they die around him. The newspapers rally the populace with news that the pestilence is under control when it is not.

Camus offers us a way of abandoning our pointless quest for “oneness” with ourselves, but carrying on nevertheless, fighting: For some ill-defined moral justice, even though we have ceased to be able to define it. At the conclusion to La Peste, Rieux – whose wife has died of illness elsewhere, unconnected with the pestilence – watches families and lovers reunite when the gates of Oran are finally opened. He wonders – in the wake of so much suffering and pointless struggle – whether there can be peace of mind or fulfilment without hope, and concludes that yes, perhaps there can, for those “who knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love”.

These are the people “whose desires are limited to man, and his humble yet formidable love” and who “should enter, if only now and again, into their reward”. But Rieux has already qualified these words before he has written them, a few lines earlier. “But for those others”, he says, “who aspired beyond and above the human individual towards something they could not even imagine, there had been no answer”.

No answer. No description, even, of what that “something” else might be. And yet it nags, it makes demands of us, and those who identify with Rieux know what it is, though we have abandoned a definition. Pointless, but imperative; political to a degree, but impatient with politics; moral certainly, but uneasily – and with serious regard to that vastness in nature against which our mortality measures itself, but which we are now killing.

Something to ponder further, then - as I did as I drove on Sunday up what is now Autoroute 6 between Lyon and Paris with a little trepidation on the anniversary itself, past Villeblevin, where the Facel Vega sports car driven by Camus’ friend Michel Gallimard crashed both men to their deaths.

Theodor Adorno , life and thought

Introduction 

Theodor Adorno; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; (September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German philosopher, sociologist, and composer known for his critical theory of society.

He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Freud, Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. He is widely regarded as one of the 20th century's foremost thinkers on aesthetics and philosophy, as well as one of its preeminent essayists. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Minima Moralia (1951) and Negative Dialectics (1966)—strongly influenced the European New Left.

Amidst the vogue enjoyed by existentialism and positivism in early 20th-century Europe, Adorno advanced a dialectical conception of natural history that critiqued the twin temptations of ontology and empiricism through studies of Kierkegaard and Husserl. As a classically trained pianist whose sympathies with the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg resulted in his studying composition with Alban Berg of the Second Viennese School, Adorno's commitment to avant-garde music formed the backdrop of his subsequent writings and led to his collaboration with Thomas Mann on the latter's novel Doctor Faustus, while the two men lived in California as exiles during the Second World War. Working for the newly relocated Institute for Social Research, Adorno collaborated on influential studies of authoritarianism, antisemitism and propaganda that would later serve as models for sociological studies the Institute carried out in post-war Germany.

Upon his return to Frankfurt, Adorno was involved with the reconstitution of German intellectual life through debates with Karl Popper on the limitations of positivist science, critiques of Heidegger's language of authenticity, writings on German responsibility for the Holocaust, and continued interventions into matters of public policy. As a writer of polemics in the tradition of Nietzsche and Karl Kraus, Adorno delivered scathing critiques of contemporary Western culture. Adorno's posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, which he planned to dedicate to Samuel Beckett, is the culmination of a lifelong commitment to modern art which attempts to revoke the "fatal separation" of feeling and understanding long demanded by the history of philosophy and explode the privilege aesthetics accords to content over form and contemplation over immersion.

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Adorno obtained a degree in philosophy from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt in 1924. His early writings, which emphasize aesthetic development as important to historical evolution, reflect the influence of Walter Benjamin’s application of Marxism to cultural criticism. After teaching two years at the University of Frankfurt, Adorno immigrated to England in 1934 to escape the Nazi persecution of the Jews. He taught at the University of Oxford for three years and then went to the United States (1938), where he worked at Princeton (1938–41) and then was codirector of the Research Project on Social Discrimination at the University of California, Berkeley (1941–48). Adorno and his colleague Max Horkheimer returned to the University of Frankfurt in 1949. There they rebuilt the Institute for Social Research and revived the Frankfurt school of critical theory, which contributed to the German intellectual revival after World War II.

One of Adorno’s themes was civilization’s tendency to self-destruction, as evinced by Fascism. In their widely influential book Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947; Dialectic of Enlightenment), Adorno and Horkheimer located this impulse in the concept of reason itself, which the Enlightenment and modern scientific thought had transformed into an irrational force that had come to dominate not only nature but humanity itself. The rationalization of human society had ultimately led to Fascism and other totalitarian regimes that represented a complete negation of human freedom. Adorno concluded that rationalism offers little hope for human emancipation, which might come instead from art and the prospects it offers for preserving individual autonomy and happiness. Adorno’s other major publications are Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949; Philosophy of Modern Music), The Authoritarian Personality (1950, with others), Negative Dialektik (1966; Negative Dialectics), and Ästhetische Theorie (1970; “Aesthetic Theory”).

Fallacious appeals to authority

Intruduction

In reasoning to argue a claim, a fallacy is reasoning that is evaluated as logically incorrect and that undermines the logical validity of the argument and permits its recognition as unsound. Regardless of their soundness, all registers and manners of speech can demonstrate fallacies.

Because of their variety of structure and application, fallacies are challenging to classify so as to satisfy all practitioners. Fallacies can be classified strictly by either their structure or content, such as classifying them as formal fallacies or informal fallacies, respectively. The classification of informal fallacies may be subdivided into categories such as linguistic, relevance through omission, relevance through intrusion, and relevance through presumption. On the other hand, fallacies may be classified by the process by which they occur, such as material fallacies (content), verbal fallacies (linguistic), and again formal fallacies (error in inference). In turn, material fallacies may be placed into the more general category of informal fallacies as formal fallacies may be clearly placed into the more precise category of logical or deductive fallacies[clarification needed]. Yet, verbal fallacies may be placed in either informal or deductive classifications; compare equivocation which is a word or phrase based ambiguity, e. g. "he is mad", which may refer to either him being angry or clinically insane, to the fallacy of composition which is premise and inference based ambiguity, e. g. "this must be a good basketball team because each of its members is an outstanding player".

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Fallacious appeals to authority take the general form of:

• 1. Person (or people) P makes claim X. Therefore, X is true.

A fundamental reason why the Appeal to Authority can be a fallacy is that a proposition can be well supported only by facts and logically valid inferences. But by using an authority, the argument is relying upon testimony, not facts. A testimony is not an argument and it is not a fact.

Now, such testimony might be strong or it might be weak the better the authority, the stronger the testimony will be and the worse the authority, the weaker the testimony will be. Thus, the way to differentiate between a legitimate and a fallacious appeal to authority is by evaluating the nature and strength of who is giving the testimony.

Obviously, the best way to avoid making the fallacy is to avoid relying upon testimony as much as possible, and instead to rely upon original facts and data. But the truth of the matter is, this isnt always possible: we cant verify every single thing ourselves, and thus will always have to make use of the testimony of experts. Nevertheless, we must do so carefully and judiciously.

The different types of the Appeal to Authority are:

• Legitimate Appeal to Authority
• Appeal to Unqualified Authority
• Appeal to Anonymous Authorit
• Appeal to traditions
• Appeal to numbers 

 Logical Fallacies | Legitimate Appeal to Authority »

Fallacy Name:
Legitimate Appeal to Authority

Alternative Names:
None

Category:
Fallacy of Relevance > Appeals to Authority

Explanation:

Not every reliance upon the testimony of authority figures is fallacious. We often rely upon such testimony, and we can do so for very good reason. Their talent, training and experience put them in a position to evaluate and report on evidence not readily available to everyone else.

But we must keep in mind that for such an appeal to be justified, certain standards must be met:

• 1. The authority is an expert in the area of knowledge under consideration.

• 2. The statement of the authority concerns his or her area of mastery.

• 3. There is agreement among experts in the area of knowledge under consideration.

Examples and Discussion:
Lets take a look at this example:

• 4. My doctor has said that medicine X will help my medical condition. Therefore, it will help me with my medical condition.

Is this a legitimate appeal to authority, or a fallacious appeal to authority? First, the doctor has to be a medical doctor a doctor of philosophy simply wont do. Second, the doctor has to be treating you for a condition in which she has training it isnt enough if the doctor is a dermatologist who is prescribing you something for lung cancer. Finally, there has to be some general agreement among other experts in this field if your doctor is the only one using this treatment, then the premise does not support the conclusion.

Of course, we must keep in mind that even if these conditions are fully met, that does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion. We are looking at inductive arguments here, and inductive arguments do not have guaranteed true conclusions, even when the premises are true. Instead, we have conclusions which are probably true.

An important issue to consider here how and why anyone might be called an expert in some field. It isnt enough to simply note that an appeal to authority is not a fallacy when that authority is an expert, because we need to have some way to tell when and how we have a legitimate an expert, or when we just have a fallacy.

Lets look at another example:

• 5. Channeling the spirits of the dead is real, because John Edward says he can do it and he is an expert.

Now, is the above a legitimate appeal to authority, or a fallacious appeal to authority? The answer rests with whether or not it is true that we can call Edward an expert on channeling the spirits of the dead. Lets do a comparison of the following two examples to see if that helps:

• 6. Professor Smith, shark expert: Great White Sharks are dangerous.

• 7. John Edward: I can channel the spirit of your dead grandmother.

When it comes to the authority of Professor Smith, it isnt so hard to accept that he might be an authority on sharks. Why? Because the topic that he is an expert on involves empirical phenomena; and more importantly, it is possible for us to check on what he has claimed and verify it for ourselves. Such verification might be time consuming (and, when it comes to sharks, perhaps dangerous!), but that is usually why an appeal to authority is made in the first place.

But when it comes to Edward, the same things cannot really be said. We simply do not have the usual tools and methods available to us to verify that he is, indeed, channeling someones dead grandmother and thereby getting information from her. Since we have no idea how his claim might be verified, even in theory, it simply isnt possible to conclude that he is an expert on the subject.

Now, that does not mean that there cannot be experts or authorities on the behaviorof people who claim to channel the spirits of the dead, or experts on the social phenomena surrounding belief in channeling. This is because the claims made by these so-called experts can be verified and evaluated independently. By the same token, a person might be an expert on theological arguments and the history of theology , but to call them an expert on god would just ben begging the question .

« Appeal to Authority Overview | Appeal to Unqualified Authority »

Name:
Appeal to Unqualified Authority

Alternative Names:
Argumentum ad Verecundiam

Category:
Fallacies of Relevance > Appeals to Authority

Explanation:
An appeal to an Unqualified Authority looks much like a legitimate appeal to authority, but it violates at least one of the three necessary conditions for such an appeal to be legitimate:

• 1. The authority is an expert in the area of knowledge under consideration.

• 2. The statement of the authority concerns his or her area of mastery.

• 3. There is agreement among experts in the area of knowledge under consideration.

People dont always bother to think about whether these standards have been met. One reason is that most learn to defer to authorities and are reluctant to challenge them this is the source of the Latin name for this fallacy, Argumentum ad Verecundiam, which means argument appealing to our sense of modesty. It was coined by John Locke to communicate how people are browbeaten by such arguments into accepting a proposition by the testimony of an authority because they are too modest to base a challenge on their own knowledge.

Authorities can be challenged and the place to start is by questioning whether or not the above criteria have been met. To begin with, you can question whether or not the alleged authority really is an authority in this area of knowledge.

It isnt uncommon for people to set themselves up as authorities when they dont merit such a label.

For example, expertise in the fields of science and medicine require many years of study and practical work, but some who claim to have similar expertise by more obscure methods, like self-study. With that, they might claim the authority to challenge everyone else; but even if it turns out that their radical ideas are right, until that is proven, references to their testimony would be a fallacious.

Examples and Discussion:
An all-too-common example of this is movie stars testifying on important matters before Congress:

• 4. My favorite actor, who appeared in a movie about AIDS, has testified that the HIV virus doesnt really cause AIDS and that there has been a cover-up. So, I think that AIDS must be caused by something other than HIV and the drug companies are hiding it so that they can make money from expensive anti-HIV drugs.

Although there is little evidence to support the idea, perhaps it is true that AIDS is not caused by HIV; but that is really beside the point. The above argument bases the conclusion on the testimony on an actor, apparently because they appeared in a movie on the topic.

This example might seem fanciful but many actors have testified before Congress based on the strength of their movie roles or pet charities. This doesnt make them any more of an authority on such topics than you or I. They certainly cant claim the medical and biological expertise to make authoritative testimony on the nature of AIDS. So just why is it that actors are invited to testify before Congress on topics other than acting or art?

A second basis for challenge is whether or not the authority in question is making statements in his or her area of expertise.

Sometimes, it is obvious when that is not happening. The above example with actors would be a good one - we might accept such a person as an expert on acting or how Hollywood works, but that doesnt mean they know anything about medicine.

There are many examples of this in advertising indeed, just about every bit of advertising which uses some sort of celebrity is making a subtle (or not-so-subtle) appeal to unqualified authority. Just because someone is a famous baseball player doesnt make them qualified to say which mortgage company is best, for instance.

Often the difference can be much more subtle, with an authority in a related field making statements about an area of knowledge close to their own, but not quite close enough to warrant calling them an expert. So, for example, a dermatologist might be an expert when it comes to skin disease, but that doesnt mean that they should be accepted as also being an expert when it comes to lung cancer.

Finally, we can challenge an appeal to authority based on whether or not the testimony being offered is something which would find widespread agreement among other experts in that field. After all, if this is the only person in the entire field making such claims, the mere fact that they have expertise doesnt warrant belief in it, especially considering the weight of contrary testimony.

There are entire fields, in fact, where there is widespread disagreement on just about everything psychiatry and economics are good examples of this. When an economist testifies to something, we can be almost guaranteed that we could find other economists to argue differently. Thus, we cannot rely upon them and should look directly at the evidence they are offering.

« Legitimate Appeal to Authority | Appeal to Anonymous Authority »

Fallacy Name:
Appeal to Anonymous Authority

Alternative Names:
Hearsay
Appeal to Rumor

Category:
Fallacy of Weak Induction > Appeals to Authority

Explanation:

This fallacy occurs whenever a person claims we should believe a proposition because it is also believed or claimed by some authority figure or figures but in this case the authority is not named.

Instead of identifying who this authority is, we get vague statements about experts or scientists who have proven something to be true.

This is a fallacious Appeal to Authority because a valid authority is one who can be checked and whose statements can be verified. An anonymous authority however, cannot be checked and their statements cannot be verified.

Examples and Discussion:

We often see the Appeal to Anonymous Authority used in arguments where scientific matters are at question:

• 1. Scientists have found that eating cooked meat causes cancer.2. Most doctors agree that people in America take too many unnecessary drugs.

Either of the above propositions may be true but the support offered is completely inadequate to the task of supporting them. The testimony of scientists and most doctors is only relevant if we know who these people are and can independently evaluate the data which they have used.

Sometimes, the Appeal to Anonymous Authority doesnt even bother to rely upon genuine authorities like scientists or doctors instead, all we hear about are unidentified experts:

• 3. According to government experts, the new nuclear storage facility poses no dangers.4. Environmental experts have demonstrated that global warming does not really exist.

Here we dont even know if the so-called experts are qualified authorities in the fields in question and that is in addition to not knowing who they are so we can check the data and conclusions.

For all we know, they have no genuine expertise and/or experience in these matters and have only been cited because they happen to agree with the speakers personal beliefs.

Sometimes, the Appeal to Anonymous Authority is combined with an insult:

• 5. Every open-minded historian will agree that the Bible is relatively historically accurate and that Jesus existed.

The authority of historians is used as a basis to argue that the listener should believe both that the Bible is historically accurate and that Jesus existed. Nothing is said about who the historians in question are as a result, we cannot check for ourselves whether or not these historians have a good basis for their position.

The insult comes in via the implication that those who believe the claims are open-minded and, therefore, those who dont believe arent open-minded. No one wants to think of herself as being closed-minded, so an inclination to adopt the position described above is created. In addition, all historians who reject the above are automatically excluded from consideration because they are simply closed-minded.

This fallacy can also be used in a personal way:

• 6. I know a chemist who is an expert in his field, and according to him evolution is nonsense.

Who is this chemist? What field is he an expert in? Does his expertise have anything at all to do with a field which relates to evolution? Without that information, his opinion about evolution cannot be regarded as any reason to doubt evolutionary theory.

Sometimes, we dont even get the benefit of an appeal to experts:

• 7. They say that crime is increasing because of a lax court system.

This proposition may be true, but who is this they who says so? We dont know and we cannot evaluate the claim. This example of the Appeal to Anonymous Authority fallacy is particularly bad because it is so vague and vacuous.

The Appeal to Anonymous Authority fallacy is sometimes called an Appeal to Rumor and the above example shows why. When they say things, that is just a rumor it might be true, or it might not be.

We cannot accept it as true, however, without evidence and the testimony of they cannot even begin to qualify.

 Prevention and Treatment:

Avoiding this fallacy can be difficult because we all have heard things that have led to our beliefs, but when called upon to defend those beliefs we cant find all of those reports to use as evidence. Thus, it is very easy and tempting to simply refer to scientists or experts.

This isnt necessarily a problem provided, of course, that we are willing to make the effort to find that evidence when asked. We should not expect anyone to believe it just because we have cited the so-called authority of unknown and anonymous figures. We also shouldnt jump on someone when we see them doing the same. Instead, we should remind them that an anonymous authority isnt sufficient to get us to believe the claims in question and ask them to provide more substantive support.