![]() I, the cynic, say that you did so because it made you look good. Broadly described, a cynic is a person given to casting doubt on the motives that drive other people.įor example, you may say that you gave a sizable donation to rebuilding Notre Dame because you care about its enduring religious, historic and cultural significance in and beyond France. Doing it occasionally, doing it tactically, even, can be very constructive and it's those constructive uses that really interest me.īefore I go further: what is it? In its main modern sense, cynicism is a characterisation of a habitual way of talking and, if you take it seriously, habitual turn of mind. Doing that too often is likely to get us into trouble. I think we should take a more relaxed view.Ĭynicism, as I see it, is part of the range of ways in which we may choose to engage with others, is something most of us resort to on occasion, most often because we want to inject a bit of energy or aggro into a discussion. Unless, that is, the person you're talking with has been reading recent radical philosophy, in which case they may leap to the assumption that you want a heftier amount of it in our culture. When people hear that you're working on cynicism, they tend to make one or two assumptions: that you're diagnosing an unhealthy amount of it in our culture and that you think we'd be better off without it – there being a great many books on that, along those lines, in recent years, many of them directed towards American situations. I'm a literary critic, but the kinds of public speech and argument that interest me go beyond literature into philosophy, politics and especially the kinds of writing that are often described in my field as public moralism. I'd like to talk today about the ideas in a book that I've just published during lockdown with Oxford University Press, The Function of Cynicism at the Present Time and, in particular, about what it has to say about the ways in which our cultures of public debate tend to work. I'm the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy, the UK's voice for the humanities and social sciences. Professor Helen Small FBA considers the characteristic features of cynicism, its origins and development as a philosophical branch and what role it has played in public moralism, from the 19th century onward. ![]() ![]() ![]() Sprite-icon-accessible-parking sprite-icon-analysis sprite-icon-apple-podcasts sprite-icon-arrow-up sprite-icon-audio-description sprite-icon-baby-changing-facilities sprite-icon-british-sign-language sprite-icon-caret sprite-icon-chevron-in-circle sprite-icon-chevron sprite-icon-comment sprite-icon-cross sprite-icon-deezer sprite-icon-disabled-parking sprite-icon-down-block-arrow sprite-icon-download sprite-icon-external Facebook sprite-icon-google-podcasts sprite-icon-hearing-loop sprite-icon-instagram LinkedIn sprite-icon-live-subtitling sprite-icon-medium sprite-icon-menu sprite-icon-minus-in-circle sprite-icon-news sprite-icon-online-and-in-person sprite-icon-online-event sprite-icon-open-quote sprite-icon-padlock sprite-icon-pause sprite-icon-play sprite-icon-plus-in-circle sprite-icon-podcast-addict sprite-icon-press-release sprite-icon-quote sprite-icon-right-arrow sprite-icon-search sprite-icon-soundcloud-blank sprite-icon-soundcloud sprite-icon-spotify sprite-icon-stitcher sprite-icon-subtitles Twitter sprite-icon-up-block-arrow Vimeo sprite-icon-warning sprite-icon-wheelchair-accessible-venue sprite-icon-youtube ![]()
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