Work · Phenomenology & Hermeneutics
Critique of Cynical Reason
Modern cynicism as “enlightened false consciousness” – answered by the cheeky kynicism of Diogenes.
Introduction
Sloterdijk’s first major book, published by Suhrkamp in 1983 in two volumes, roughly two hundred years after Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), and an unexpected bestseller. Modern cynicism, he argues, is the attitude of people who see through ideologies and carry on regardless – “enlightened false consciousness”. Against it he sets the plebeian, bodily “kynicism” of Diogenes, who answered the powerful with mockery and provocation rather than arguments. A long part of the book is a panorama of the Weimar Republic as the classic period of modern cynicism. Its essayistic style, between philosophy, cultural history and satire, made Sloterdijk widely known.
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