Source: http://www.ellipsis.cx/~kortbein/blog/index.php?base=328
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 23:07:03+00:00

Document:
… I don't know if there is a relation between skepticism and cynicism. It would be nice if there was a clear one, for my sake, since I was prompted to think about this by working on someone with views about skepticism which are odd and which might be more amenable to being understood in a different frame. A contrast between public and private is very important in that context of mine as well, which is what helped make the frame of cynicism seem workable. In a social-political or moral setting, one mode of cynicism would be to act, like a politician does, on the basis of crude calculations of costs, benefits, and interests, especially self-interest, to play to voters' vices and fears and ignorance rather than their better selves, and so on—most perniciously so while superficially, outwardly, publicly, appearing not to. In the case of morality, something similar could be described, and there 'public' would have to do with the endorsement of shared norms for conduct. A view like Hobbes' that sees moral norms as binding on us, but by reason of our individual self-interest best being served by subjection to them, is usually regarded as a not-too-covert expression of cynicism, as a result of which people who wish to avoid cynicism, say because they believe in a stronger or more genuine source for moral conduct than fear of punishment, fear of being found out, tend to make themselves out to be capable of seeing that there's more to life. So there's some kind of relationship between cynicism and realism, thus knowledge, insofar as we tend to think that a person can become cynical by 'seeing too much', being around the block too many times, seeing behind facades that most people can't or don't get a chance to see behind. The more realist a view is, the more it puts pressure on any credibly sustainable attitude distinct from cynicism to back itself up, because there's seemingly nowhere believable to 'go'—which is why 'idealist' is a typical counterpart to 'cynic', because the grounds for the former tend to be non-materialist, non-realist (but 'realist' in a 'higher sense', cognizant of true realities, etc.), to go beyond what is or could be known in the usual way (a buildup in awareness of which, without suitable counterbalance, is what can generate cynics—world ain't pretty). Moral nihilism would appear there, i think, as the real opposite to idealism, sort of as stemming from a belief that absent idealism's guarantees, a default cynical realism must collapse. I'm not sure what that would mean or would have to mean—I suppose the Nietzsche line on it is that whatever their credibility, 'higher values' generated life- and action-sustaining convictions, so that when they are no longer credible, it becomes a question whether any really significant action, modes of life, etc., will remain viable or (for new ones, a need for which is probably entailed by a loss of credibility of old values) will be capable of being found. I think in that case 'cynicism' would make sense to situate between the poles of idealism and nihilism. That would suit my other external considerations, at least; the other big factor in the context I'm thinking of, is that I'd like to locate what I'm doing relative to 'ordinary life' as it contrasts with philosophy. You said that people might tend to sort into cynics or idealists, not in a middle. My thought has been that ordinary life might, for a lot of people, make a middle position available just in virtue of the way ordinary life tends to go, the way knowledge tends to play a role in it day to day. There are 'higher values' on the horizon in ordinary life, but it often has more to do with just moving along, keeping things going. Even just getting by is something that seems possible within the scope of a non-cynical attitude. So I'm interested in determining whether it makes sense, in that setting, to view cynicism as more like a do-not-touch-on-pain-of-electrocution pole, or more as a disagreeable but certainly livable possibility of ordinary life. Then its counterpart would, within the ambit of ordinary life, not necessarily be idealistic, but at least noncynical. Think of it like the contrast between a person who, in midlife, remains open versus a person who has become closed off. Outside both of them, there's still a person who goes far beyond and a person who actively makes things worse.
For application to philosophy, I guess you could say that I have been seeking to model a kind of cynicism suiting philosophy, certainly an academic-scholarly-professional one, on the political model. So, it appears to be easy to engage in philosophy cynically in that sense, trading on its high reputation when dealing with students and non-philosophers but not really credibly holding much belief in it. Not believing what you're saying, basically, as a philosopher. Or, if this is coherent, thinking that you do, when from an outside perspective (the kind a non-philosopher might have, looking into what philosophers do and wondering how anyone could take it so seriously) that just isn't believable.
'Just be done': or, better, the language does it. For 'no people', it could just as well be said that the language described in §48 has no use, but it could have one.
§48's color-square language-game contrasts with the other major games in the Investigations in giving little to no hint of the people (one must imagine) playing it. As it is an abstraction, the players are an afterthought, or, say, some things about gameplay are still to be determined. Or may be. (Wittgenstein gestures at some relevant circumstances in §49b). Of course, the language 'serves to represent combinations of colored squares on a surface', as language (2) was 'meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B'. And that can, as it were, just be done, without taking the players into account. —But §49b does invoke the idea of a move in a game. Akin, one might want to say, to some notion of validity or invalidity.
Odd that there aren't more denunciations of the eisegetes among Wittgensteinians.
—The patterning there is akin to that of the introduction of the color-square game in §48, where an application of 'the method of §2' to the account just quoted from the Theaetetus follows a quick, separate grammatical investigation in §47 (cf. §156b–g). But it's not obvious (?) whether there is a corresponding source for an 'account' in the case of the 'reading' interpolation—not that I know whether there need be. It seems significant that Wittgenstein chooses to punctuate his text's return to 'the method of §2' with another substantial external quotation of an idea he can just as well self-cite—as he does parenthetically at §46c. —But is §157 (the reading-machines) a 'return to "the method of §2"'?

References: §48

§48
 §49
 §49
 §48
 §2
 §47
 §156
 §2
 §46
 §157
 §2