Cynicism and the Germans. An inquiry on the Germanic sources in Foucault’s The Courage of Truth

Abstract

When starting to trace in The Courage of Truth the initial guidelines to devise a transhistoricity of Cynicism, which would imply tracking down several cynical manifestations from the Alexandrian period to the present day, Foucault states he lacks works in which such a project has been proposed and adds that he hardly knows about four texts from Germanic sources belonging to the second half of the 20th century, which at least address the relationship between classic Cynicism and the alleged modern Cynicism. Among these four texts, Foucault confesses that he has only read three of them: The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich, Parmenides und Jona by Klaus Heinrich and Moral und Hypermoral by Arnold Gehlen, works that make the French philosopher wonder about the particular interest of German philosophy in the cynical phenomenon. The purpose of the present article is to carry out an exploration into these sources to clarify how this phenomenon is understood in such works in order to give an account of their influence, by concordance or confrontation, on the original Foucauldian conception of Cynicism.