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This closing chapter breaks down the single most audible quality of Dada: its ringing laughter, which functioned as regenerative and greater than laughter in its limited satirical form. The potential of laughter’s obtaining of philosophical meaning has been described as ‘one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world’, potentially putting thought into contact with the exterior, and its complexity gives rise to its multiplicity of meanings. The reading here draws on Rabelais on laughter, and introduces Diogenes of Sinope as the Dada prototype from antiquity, the manifestation ahead of Huelsenbeck of those ‘quarrelsome figues … capable of reacting in an uncivil way to the spectacle of false living’.

The introductory chapter delivers the core critical-theoretical arguments of the book. It starts with a broad characterization of modern cynicism and a critical account of the main features of early philosophical Cynicism from which it derives and departs. (In English, the capital C conventionally distinguishes the ancient from the modern form.) The focus then moves to the ‘present time’ of the title (1840 till now) and to the terms on which the book looks to describe a function for cynicism as a set of linguistic practices aimed at calibrating a plausible, sufficiently robust articulation of ideals. A substantial section of the argument deals with the variety of psychological models for defining and interpreting cynicism, identifying what they have in common and the basis they offer collectively for a ‘normative’ view of psychology.

This chapter turns to one of the most flexible and complex political effects of cynicism: its taking of distance on the politics of the nation state. It starts by re-reading the old story of cosmopolitanism’s point of origin in the claim of Diogenes of Sinope to be ‘not a citizen’ of Athens, or any other city state, but kosmopolites, a citizen of the world. It examines the difference between the classical historical literature, in the main, wary of giving Diogenes credit for advocating universal humanitarianism, and the more-and-less critical uses made of classical history by twentieth- and twenty-first-century political theorists. On that basis, the chapter traces the lines of a specifically ‘cynic cosmopolitanism’ as it finds expression within two literary writers looking to challenge the role, and the rights, of Englishness in an international frame: George Eliot (as she turns away from ‘moral realism’, at the end of her writing career, towards more experimental engagement with the form of the character sketch), and Ford Madox Ford, as he develops and revises his literary ‘Impressionism’ during and immediately after the First World War. For both, cosmopolitanism was less a moral matter than one of psychology, requiring an internal balance to be found, in one’s own mind, between idealism and a bracingly cynical realism.

This chapter looks to provide a more thorough account than has yet been offered of how far, and to what ends, Friedrich Nietzsche’s sceptical ‘realism’ was fashioned with an eye on Cynic styles of argument. Starting with the reappearance of Diogenes of Sinope in The Gay Science, it explores the histrionic characterization of dertolle Mensche and his ‘untimeliness’ in ways that open up Nietzsche’s sense of the typology and stylistic gambits of Cynicism as helpful but inadequate models for the lived practice of philosophy. The focus then moves to how Cynicism helps to drive Nietzsche’s thinking in two main respects: first, his attempts to articulate what may be required to be ‘free-spirited’ in one’s philosophizing and fashion a philosophical style in the assumption of that freedom; and, second, the important role of Cynicism in the articulation of the genealogy of morality.

This chapter begins with an overview of the legacy of Socratic humor within Stoic and Epicurean philosophy in order to indicate how this legacy continued to be debated beyond the classical period. It then turns to Diogenes of Sinope and the topic of Cynic humor more broadly. Using Xenophon’s Symposium (and, in particular, Xenophon’s depiction of Antisthenes’s use of humor in that work), it is argued that Cynic humor possesses a plausibly Socratic connection. Looking to Lucian’s Demonax then illustrates how such Cynic humor more closely resembles the direct forms of mockery found in Aristophanes and (occasionally) in Xenophon, rather than the indirect forms of irony associated with the Platonic Socrates. The final section of the chapter analyzes how such Cynic humor is linked to the Cynic attempt to live in accordance with nature.

Historians of philosophy (such as Hegel, Hadot, Cooper, among others) tend to marginalize the ancient Cynics as philosophically uninteresting, and moreover as irrelevant for a proper understanding of the sense in which philosophy in antiquity used to be a way of life. To be sure, the Cynics lived very distinctive and unconventional lives, but whatever it was that they were doing, it cannot have been—so the historians claim—a conduct rooted in philosophical reason and argument. This paper first musters the grounds typically given for this kind of deflationary view and then proceeds to examine the sparse but nevertheless suggestive evidence about ancient Cynicism that the (predominantly Stoic) doxographical tradition handed down to us. In the end, it comes to a conclusion that is diametrically opposed to the prevailing opinion of the cynics as inconsequential non-philosophers.

Lucian of Samosata is an invaluable source for the activities of the philosophical schools in the 2nd century CE and their attitudes to laughter. But he can also be understood as a philosopher in his own right, especially for his views on the value of laughter in philosophy and on the potential of laughter as philosophy. This chapter analyzes these views in order to show that Lucian’s writings form a key stage in the history of laughter’s place in philosophical thought. Two prominent forms of philosophical laughter in Lucian are analyzed side by side: the improvisational, inclusive laughter of Demonax, and the exhibitionist, exclusive laughter of the Cynics, (Lucian’s) Diogenes in particular. This chapter argues that Demonax’s laughter ultimately comes closer to Lucian’s own mode of philosophical laughter than Diogenes’ laughter.