In substance, bourgeois moral literature already exercises a
critique
of cynicism.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason
This unmasking is to be understood as grounding.
The typical unmasking gesture in Marx's critique is therefore inversion: turning consciousness around from its head onto its feet.
Feet means here knowledge of one's place in the production process and in the class structure.
That consciousness must be consid- ered unmasked that does not want to know about its "social being," its function in the whole, and therefore persists in its mystification, its idealistic split.
In this sense, Marxist critique deals successively with the mystifications of religion, aes- thetics, justice, welfare, morality, philosophy, and science.
Besides the critique of mystified consciousneses, Marx's theory harbors a sec- ond far-reaching variant of ideology critique, which has shaped the critical style of Marxism, its polemical sharpness: the theory of the character mask. As a the- ory of masks, it distinguishes a priori between persons as individuals and as bearers of class functions. In doing so it remains a little unclear which side is respectively the mask of the other--the individual the mask of the function, or the function the mask of individuality. The majority of critics have for good rea- sons, chosen the antihumanist version, the conception that individuality is the mask of the function. Thus, there may well exist humane capitalists-as the his- tory of bourgeois philanthropy proves--against whom Marxist critics have vehe- mently polemicized. They are humane merely as individual masks of social inhu- manity. According to their social being, they regain, in spite of this, personifications of the profit interest, character masks of capital. Indeed, in some respects they are, for the agitators, worse than the worst exploiters because they
? 38 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
nourish the laborer's patriarchal mystification. "Bourgeois" role theory provides the mirror image of this theory by conceiving social functions ("roles") as masks with which individuality covers itself in order, at best, to even "play" with them.
Of course, workers' consciousness is also initially mystified. Its education un- der the principles of the ruling ideologies allows no other possibility. At the same time, it finds itself at the beginning stages of realism: because it performs immedi- ate labor. With realistic instinct, it suspects the swindle going on in the heads of "those at the top. " It stands on bare ground. For this reason, Marx, here remarka- bly optimistic, believes that workers' consciousness is capable of an extraordinary learning process, in whose course the proletariat acquires a sober view of its so- cial position and political power--and then sets this consciousness into revolu- tionary practice, of whatever kind. In the transposition, consciousness gains a new quality.
Here, proletarian enlightenment makes the leap from a theoretical to a practi- cal change; it abandons the privacy of false or true "mere" thoughts in order to organize itself publicly as a new, true class consciousness-true because it under- stands its vital interests and aggressively works its way out of exploitation and repression. Enlightenment would reach completion practically, as the dissolution of class society. Here, the fundamentally ambiguous character of Marx's "theory" is revealed. On the one hand, it reifies every consciousness into a function of the social process; on the other, it wants to make possible the liberation of conscious- ness from mystification. If one understands Marxism as a theory of liberation, one emphasizes the emancipative formation of proletarian consciousness and that of its allies. This view leads into the open, into the formative "subjectivity" of the (allegedly) last oppressed class. If this class liberates itself from its stifling posi- tion, it creates the precondition for the real emancipation (from the exploitation
4
of labor) of everyone. The self-liberation of the slave, in an ideal dialectic, should lead to the liberation of the master from the constrictions of being master. Those who want to see Marx as a "humanist" emphasize this aspect. At its center is the anthropology of labor. Laborers would gain their "selves" only when they enjoy the products on which they have expended their energy, and no longer have to relinquish the surplus value to the rulers. In this thought model, emancipation appears as the self-appropriation of the productive subjects in their products. (Of course, one would like to know what idealism really is if this is not thought out idealistically. )
From a second perspective, an "antihumanist," "realist" strand emerges from Marx's critique. Its emphasis is not on the dialectic of liberation but rather on the mechanisms of universal mystification. If every consciousness is precisely as false as corresponds to its position in the process of production and domination, it necessarily remains captive to its own falsity, as long as the process is taking place. And that the process is in full motion is constantly emphasized by Marx- ism. Here the hidden functionalism in Marxian theory goes into effect. For this
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 39
functionalism, there is to the present day no sharper formulation than the famous phrase "necessarily false consciousness. " From this viewpoint, false conscious- ness is reined into its place in the system of objective delusions. False being is a function of the process.
Here, Marxist system-cynicism comes very close to that of bourgeois func- tionalists, but there is a reversal of the premises. For bourgeois functionalists re- gard the functioning of social systems of action as guaranteed only when certain fundamental norms, attitudes, and goals are accepted and obeyed in blind identi- fication by the members of the systems. It is in the interest of the system itself that these identifications are conceived of flexibly (and indeed sometimes even re- vised) by individual deviants so that the system does not, by being too rigid, lose its ability to adapt to new situations. To this extent, a certain degree of irony and a niche for the revolutionarily inclined actually would be indispensable for every developing system. Naturally, functionalism not only denies human conscious- ness its right to emancipation; it also denies the meaning of such emancipation from norms and compulsions, for emancipation leads, according to functional- ism, directly into nothingness, into an empty individualism, an amorphous chaos, and the loss of structure in society. That there is a grain of truth in this is demon- strated in the most drastic possible way by the socialist social orders in the Eastern Bloc. They provide the functionalist proof in a social laboratory: that an "ordered" social existence is conceivable only under the constraints of functional, purpose- ful lies. In the cultural politics and ethical drilling of labor and militarism in so- cialist countries, the functional cynicism of Marx's theory of ideology is displayed in a horrifyingly clear way. In those societies the idea of freedom in an existential, self-reflective enlightenment vegetates on a barbaric level; it is no wonder that the emancipative resistance, which somewhat unhappily calls itself dissidence, manifests itself as religious opposition. In socialism, that individual block to reflection (which the conservatives and neoconservatives in the West have long dreamed about) is practiced officially. Socialist countries put the drilling of values into practice with breathtaking radicalness. The element of minimal deviation, in the meantime, is also officially planned, ever since jeans have been made in peo- ple's factories and jazz has been played in Dresden. Viewed structurally, the Party dictatorships in the East constitute the paradise of Western conservatism. The great conservative, Arnold Gehlen, did not admire the Soviet Union for nothing, a fact that can be compared with Adolf Hitler's full, but hidden, respect for the apparatus of the Catholic church.
Marxist functionalism remains remarkably blind to its own artfulness. In a modernization of deception, it uses the elements of truth in socialist doctrine as a new ideological bonding agent. The modernization of the art of lying is based ? n schizoid finesse; one lies by telling the truth. One practices a split in conscious- ness until it seems normal that socialism, previously a language of hope, becomes an ideological wall, behind which hopes and future prospects disappear.
40 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
Only in Marx's ideology critique can the trace of later cynical finesse be dis- covered in its beginnings. If ideology really meant "necessarily false conscious- ness," and (no irony intended) there was nothing other than the right mystifica- tions in the right head, then it has to be asked how the critic can claim to have escaped the vicious circle of deceptions. By going over to the side of the de- ceivers? Dialectical critique sees itself as the only light in the darkness of "true falsities. " However, in this, dialectical critique demands more of a fruitful thought than it can provide. The discovery of labor and the logic of production, despite their fundamental importance, do not provide a master key to all questions about existence, consciousness, truth, and knowledge. For this reason, "bour- geois" countercritique, for the most part, had an easy game with Marxism in its weakest point: the crude level of its theory of science and knowledge.
Critique of Moral Illusion
The roots of moral enlightenment reach back furthest of all into the past--and for good reasons. For with regard to morality, the deepest question of all enlighten- ment is decided: the question of the "good life. " That human beings are not really what they pretend to be is an age-old motif of critical moral thinking. Jesus provided the model in his attack against those who harshly judge others: "How wilt thou say to thy brother, 'Let me pull the splinter out of thine eye,' when, be- hold, a plank is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite! " (Matthew 7:4-5).
The critique in the New Testament already assumes an "artful" doubling: wolves in sheep's clothing, moralists with a plank in their eye, Pharisaism. From its first moment, this critique of morality proceeds metamorally, here: psycholog- ically. It assumes as a basic principle that the "outward" moral appearance is de- ceptive. A closer inspection would show how moralists in fact do not serve the law, but cover up their own lawlessness by criticizing others. Matthew 7:4 con- tains psychoanalysis in a nutshell. What disturbs me in others is what I myself am. However, as long as I do not see myself, I do not recognize my projections as the outward reflection of my own plank, but as the depravity of the world. In- deed, the "reality component of the projection," as psychoanalysts would say to- day, should not be my first concern. Even if the world really is depraved, I should be concerned about my own defects first. What Jesus teaches is a revolutionary self-reflection: Start with yourself, and then, if others really need to be "enlight- ened," show them how by your own example. Of course, under the normal condi- tions in the world, things proceed the other way around: The lawgivers start with others and it remains uncertain whether they will also get around to themselves- They refer to laws and conventions that are supposedly absolute. But the wolves in sheep's clothing enjoy looking at these laws and conventions more or less from above and from outside. Only they are still allowed to know about the ambiva- lence of things. Only they, because they are lawgivers, feel the breath of freedom
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 41
beyond the legislation. The real sheep are forced under the either/or. For no state can be "made" with self-reflection and with irony directed against the existing or- der. States are always also coercive apparatuses that cease to function when the sheep begin to say "I" and when the subjugated free themselves from conventions through reflection. As soon as "those at the bottom" gain the knowledge of am- bivalence, a wrench is thrown into the works-enlightenment against the au- tomatism of obedience and achievement.
Christian ethics of self-reflection, the return to oneself in making judgments, is political dynamite. Since the "freedom of a Christian person" suspends every naive belief in norms, Christian cooperation and Christian coexistence are no longer possible on the basis of state government (Staatlichkeit, civitas), that is, of coerced communality, but only on the basis of community (Gesellschaftlich- keit, communitas, societas: communism, socialism). The real state needs blind subjects, whereas society can understand itself only as a commune of awakened individualities. This establishes the deep bond between Christianity and com- munism, of which the anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tried to remind us. For the rules according to which life in the anarchist commune is ordered are free, self-imposed bonds, not alien, hierarchically imposed laws. The commune dreams of a permanent renewal of the law through consensus.
The original idea of the church still contains something of this communio- model. Of course, this model degenerates quickly in the transition to the or- ganized church. Thereafter it lives on, estranged and truncated, in the great reli- gious orders. The official church, however, develops more and more into a parody of the state and into a coercive apparatus of wondrous proportions. This schizophrenia was rationalized for millennia to come by the church's teacher, Saint Augustine, in his doctrine of the "two kingdoms," the divine and the tem- poral-which the Augustinian monk, Luther, continued to maintain. That in this doctrine, Augustine applies the concept civitas to the religious community signals its political corruption. It may seem curious but understandable that only with the modern movements toward democracy has a fundamental Christian thought again come into political play. Western democracies are basically permanent parodies oi religious anarchism, peculiar mixtures of coercive apparatuses, and orders of freedom. In them the rule applies: an illusory ego for everyone.
Herein lies at the same time the Catholic irony in the modern world. For
Catholicism, with its dogma and its absolutist organization, protrudes into a liber-
alized social order like an archaic hulk. It is still against the temporal order only
n
the sense that it maintains its perverse alliance with the centralized power of states, just as it had done with the western Roman Empire, northern European eudalism, and with the absolutism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. at is why today's central powers, which have at least learned to play the liberal S me a little, are somewhat embarrassed in their relations to the openly
42 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
authoritarian Vatican. Only with Mussolini's fascism could Catholicism be brought back into the loathsome modernity of the concordats.
This preamble is perhaps useful for understanding the point of departure for the later critique of morality. In the course of its history, Christianity repudiates its own moral structure, a structure of self-reflection superior to conventions. In a word, it itself becomes a conventional coercive organization. It thus degenerates from the free standpoint of metaethics, which, with a clear view of reality and with a love full of reason, says what one should do, to the trite standpoint of "Thou shalt. " Originally directed against Pharisaism, it has become through its political success the most hypocritical ideology the world has ever known.
This has been generally well known in Europe since the late Middle Ages. Since that time, the wolves in Christian sheep's clothing have been distinguished from the sheep and from those exceptional people who, in spite of Christianity, made something of the opportunities it offered. Since the end of the Middle Ages, that is, ever since written documents have recorded the voice of the people and their realism, a good proportion of the people have not let themselves be deceived about this split in morality. The lustful monk, the bellicose prelate, the cynical cardinal, and the corrupt pope are standard figures in popular realism. No "theo- retical" critique has been able to add anything essential to this satirical approach. The unmasking of the clergy belongs to Catholicism like laughter to satire. In laughter, all theory is anticipated.
The critique of morality, however, has not advanced as laughter, and this is connected with the role of Protestantism in the renovation of moralism. Catholi- cism can be content in the last analysis with satire on the clergy. Protestantism, by contrast, must push the critique of morality forward to the exposure of the lay- person, of the fake Christian, and consequently, of everyone. The French En- lightenment directs its moral satire against the personnel in the Catholic specta- cle, the nuns, priests, the all too pious virgins and all too holy prelates. Heinrich Heine's attacks too are directed against Catholicism and can remain satirical. All this is innocuous compared with the critique of the morality internalized by Prot- estant laypeople. How good-natured Diderot's cutting jokes are compared with the critique of Christianity exercised by the son of a Lutheran pastor, Friedrich Nietzsche! There is a clear difference of degree and also a healthy distance be- tween the Roman Catholic and the Protestant Germanic Enlightenment. For the special complications of religious existence are ultimately reserved in Catholi- cism for the clergy. In Protestant countries, the critique of morality necessarily leads to the self-exposure of whole societies and classes. In such countries, partic- ularly in northern Germany and North America, moral enlightenment is therefore unthinkable without sociomasochist components. A second fertile ground is emancipated Judaism--Marx, Heine, Freud, Adorno, among others--which, as Hannah Arendt has shown convincingly, retains a certain outsider viewpoint
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES D 43
? Simplicitas (genuine Simplicity) conquers Fraus (Fraud). Strasbourg Cathedral, window 45, inset 7.
predisposed toward critique even though it is strongly assimilated into bourgeois society.
The critique of morality pursues essentially three strategies: uncovering a sec- ond set of rules (double standard); inversion of being and illusion; and reduction to a realistic original motive.
The uncovering of the second set of rules is the simplest procedure, since those roles are immediately apparent through mere observation. Jesus said, "You will recognize them by their fruits. " The test of life is decisive. Enlightenment does nothing more than eavesdrop on likely wolves in their dressing rooms, where they put on and take off their sheep's clothing. One has only to hide behind a curtain or under the bed and watch what happens when the suspected wolves are alone together. In this, sexual unmasking has a special value: The abbot who has to hide
44 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
in the bedroom closet from the husband returning home; the upright family man who is seen in the dark street disappearing into the house with the red light; the prime minister who forgets his glasses in the brothel. "Can one also sort out grapes from the thorns, or figs from the thistles? " This "flagrant literature" could bear the title of one of the most well known "pornographic" books of eighteenth- century Enlightenment: Mirabeau's The Aired Curtain. In all these works, cri- tique did not yet deviate from a sensual, satirical approach.
In this tradition, moral duplicity itself was long regarded as a moral fact, as scandal. Only a cynical man-of-the-world attitude could go so far as to shrug its shoulders about it and soberly accept it as a mere fact. Worldly knowledge recog- nizes the moral world as a compositum of two worlds: There probably has to be a worldview for practical men who must be strong enough to get their hands dirty in political practice without getting dirty themselves, and even if they do, who cares? And a second worldview for youths, simpletons, women, and sensitive souls, for whom "purity" is just the right thing. One could call it a division of labor among temperaments, or the ugliness of the world; worldly knowledge knows how to calculate with both.
In the inversion of being and illusion, critique first separates the facade from the core, in order then to attack the latter as the actual exterior. The most impor- tant points of attack are provided by the nerve centers of Christian morality, in goodness as well as in evil: the ethics of compassion and altruism (the command- ment to love one's neighbor). Here again, enlightenment tries to outflank decep- tion with suspicion; indeed, it even denies, not unrealistically, the possibility of a perfect deception of a mentally alert enlightener: "One lies with the mouth, but with the grimace that one makes in doing so, one says the truth after all" (Nietzsche, Werke in zwei Banden, 4th ed. Munich, 1978, vol. II, p. 73). The "core" does not remain hidden. The "psychologist" (in Nietzsche's sense) sees the self-pity and resentment shining through the compassion that is shown. A form of egoism shines through every act of altruism. The psychology of the courtly age had an edge on bourgeois thinking with these observations. La Rochefoucauld had already skillfully uncovered the game of self-love (amour-propre) in all its masks of fellowship and morality. Following La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche's cri- tique of Christianity could achieve the stage of maturity, that is, the stage of utter nakedness. The more hollow the lie of altruism revealed itself to be in capitalist society, in which striving for profit and utilitariansm imposed themselves more and more brutally, the easier it was for critical, naturalistic thought to suggest that everyone is his own closest neighbor. But Schiller says: The upright man thinks of himself last (Wilhelm Tell). Nietzsche hears the nonsense ringing through Schiller's idealism; he speaks mercilessly of the "moral trumpeter from Sackingen. " The naturalist claims to know that everyone, whether upright or not, thinks of himself first and last. Indeed, every attempt to think of others "first" is bound to fail because thinking cannot leave its domicile in the ego. To deny the
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 45
Ferdinand Dietz, Falsitas, model of a garden figure for Seehof Castle near Bamberg.
primacy of self-love would mean to invert all relations; Nietzsche accuses Chris- tianity of this original falsification, this fundamental distortion, with disquieting sharpness. Bourgeois morality tries to maintain an illusion of altruism, whereas in all other areas bourgeois thinking has long since assumed a theoretical as well as an economic egocentrism.
Nietzsche's critique --apart from the religious "poisoning" by his family --is a
reaction against the morally stifling atmosphere of the late nineteenth century
when international imperialisms, in the disguise of idealism and a worn out Chris-
tian bearing, were setting out to subjugate the rest of the world. The First World
War was secretly hoped for by countless contemporaries who expected a "moral
cleansing" from it. The edifying lies of Christianized imperialism had become too
5
suffocating. The resonance Nietzsche enjoyed among imperialists had its moral
foundation in the cynicism of self-disinhibition; this cynicism makes a continuum between a subtle philosophy and a brutal politics possible for the first time. The night into confession is one of the characteristic movements of modern conscious- ness, which tries to shake off the existential ambiguities of all morality. It is this flight that opens moral consciousness for cynicism on a broad front.
? The third strategy concludes the process of unmasking with the discovery of
46 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
an original motive. The French moralists called it self-love (amour-propre); Nietzsche called it the will to power. If Marxism spoke in psychological terms (which, according to its logic, it cannot do), it would call the original motive the striving for profit. But it argues in nonpsychological terms; the striving for profit falls in the last instance behind the character mask, so that the capitalist as an in- dividual may be as miserly or as selfless as he likes. For its part, psychoanalysis, having developed in the climate of Nietzsche and the neoromantics, encounters final motives that have nothing to do with altruism and idealism. Important in psy- choanalysis is the dialectical moment in the theory of drives, which assumes a two-pronged drive-nature: ego drives and sexual drives - i n the later version, life drive and death drive.
The exposure of morality becomes explosive when it is not exercised by pri- vate persons on private persons (or as admission in the context of a confessional relation). Since the eighteenth century, enlighteners have concerned themselves--as defenders of "true morality," whatever that may be--with the morality of those who rule. Here, for the first time, the critique of morality shows its political barbs. From this line of critique comes a whole literature about the gluttony of tyrants and the unmasking of the aristocracy's corruption. Schiller's Robbers and Lessing's Emilia Galotti are the best known examples of this genre.
The moralism in the bourgeois sense of decency put aristocratically refined im- moralism into the position of the politically accused.
In substance, bourgeois moral literature already exercises a critique of cynicism. It describes states of consciousness in which unethical life (Unsittlichkeit) is self-reflective. But bour- geois thinking all too naively assumes it is possible to subordinate political power to moral concepts. It does not anticipate that one day, when it has itself come to power, it will end up in the same ambivalence. It has not yet realized that it is only a small step from taking moral offense to respectable hypocrisy. Heinrich Heine fought in vain against the narrow-minded moralism of bourgeois Enlight- enment. The German public could not follow his kynical-satirical protest.
One of the characteristics of German Enlightenment is that under the influence of petit-bourgeois Protestantism, it seldom mustered the power to be cheeky. Where the public itself did not resist, there were courts to exercise censorship. Only in the twentieth century has impudent cheekiness--the sociopsyetiological foundation of an enlightenment on the offensive that does not first ask the authori- ties whether it is welcome--created subcultural niches for itself in cabaret and in Bohemianism. It failed lamentably to ally itself with the main force of social op- position, the workers' movement. For in the latter, the political moral critique of the ruling strata was transformed into something that could easily be taken for petit-bourgeois morality.
The workers' movement rarely examined itself from the perspective of moral critique. Also, at first, its demands were so persuasive that only the political reac- tion could have an interest in suspecting something "behind" them. The complex
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 47
moral area of envy and social resentment was in fact treated instead from the per- soective of an antisocialistically inspired thinking, from Nietzsche to Schoeck. However, since the relative historical success of the worker's movement, its original ingenuousness has evaporated. It too has long since been infected by am- bivalences. But whether as "social partner" in the West, or as state power in the East, it does not want to acknowledge anything other than a purely political "will to power" in its own ranks. This is the reason for its moral weakness. Indeed, Marxism has denounced the impulses of Nietzsche and the depth psychologies with all its might, and every personal encounter with people from the Eastern sphere of influence proves how astoundingly prepsychological the mentality is in which they are kept, as if two of the greatest psychologists of modernity, Dostoy- evsky and Tolstoy, had not been Russians. The state based on force presupposes blind subjects. It does everything it can to keep powers of reflection that have long been available from becoming effective.
Critique of Transparency
Under this heading we discuss the discovery of the unconscious, which, as will be shown, represents a necessary consequence of the modern process of enlight- enment. One of the virtually reactionary myths of the twentieth century is that
6
Sigmund Freud is the "discoverer of the unconscious. "
only falsifies historical truth but also burdens the history of enlightenment with an absurd and inexplicable asymmetry and retardation in the investigation of the unconscious. How could enlightenment have investigated consciousness criti- cally and empirically without encountering its "other side"?
More about real discovery of the unconsciousness: The beginnings of a sys-
tematic treatment of the unconscious are to be found--self-evidently, I am
tempted to say-in the classical Age of Enlightenment. As Henry F. Ellenberger
has shown, the history of methodically controlled encounters with the uncon-
scious began in the last third of the eighteenth century. At that time, in the middle
of an obscurantist atmosphere (Cagliostro and others), a systematic experimenta-
tion with healing through suggestion started and made its first practical break-
through with Franz Anton Mesmer's alleged "animal magnetism," even if Mes-
m
a failure. Enlightenment depth psychology was born in 1784, three years after
ants Critique of Pure Reason, when a French aristocrat discovered so-called
magnetic sleep, which came to be called hypnosis in the nineteenth century. The
marquis of Puysegur, artillery officer of Strasburg, pupil of Mesmer, and lord
0
e
anifestation that seemed similar to sleepwalking and therefore was dubbed "arti-
C1
al somnambulism. " This was a state of deep trance in which, paradoxically,
er s "fluidical" theory was regarded by his contemporaries and by posterity as
a large country estate in the village of Buzancy near Soisson, observed, during
Philanthropic medical treatment of one of his peasants, a previously unknown
The legend of Freud not
48 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
"1
? Les effets du magnetisme . . . animal. The blunderer Mesmer puts Parisian soci- ety along with its dogs into convulsive shock. Caricature of "Mesmermania" around 1780-85.
a peculiar clairvoyance and power of expression could be observed in the patient, which far exceeded what they were capable of when awake. What was particu- larly important in all this was the discovery that hypnotized persons proved to be "doctors of themselves" in that they could purposefully and clearly name the causes of their sicknesses about which they normally would not have been able to say anything at all. They uncovered "pathogenic secrets" in themselves, re- vealed hidden roots of their suffering, made suggestions about their own treat- ment, and, moreover, they not infrequently showed excellent character traits that the "surface personality" did not have.
The procedure had a grave disadvantage, for which reason, later enlighten- ment tried to repress this more than a century old "episode": After the procedure, the patients had forgotten everything they had experienced. Through the "posthypnotic amnesia," as it was later called, they were at the mercy of the mag- netizer, who could profit from their excursions into the unconscious. Still in a trance, they had to submit themselves to the healing commands of the magnetizer, who transposed the knowledge he had gained in the session about the patient's problematic into hypnotic instructions. These were supposed to remain effective in the unconscious for the patient's own good. Understandably, later enlighten- ment did not want to be involved with such procedures based entirely on authority and trust. After all, psychologically speaking, enlightenment always meant an ad- vance in the training of mistrust--in the construction of an ego concerned about self-assertion and control of reality. Freud's methodology can be summarized, in a way, as the attempt to keep the path to the unconscious open without using hyp-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 49
osis. One may consider whether, in Freud's procedure, a finesse born of mistrust ? not at work: Naive and reflected at the same time, it has recourse to the "offspring" and "representatives" of an unconsciousness otherwise thought of as closed. Whether this closedness is not also an effect of the mistrustful method is a question not posed here.
Like Mesmer, Puysegur knew that in the hypnotic treatments his personality was the actual agent, or more precisely, it was the intimate relation established between himself and the patient. This "rapport"--in more recent terminology, transference-served as the medium of a methodical and successful depth- psychological praxis. This procedure was continually developed and practiced in credible forms at least until the middle of the nineteenth century. Schopenhauer could still state that this discovery was possibly the most important in the entire history of the human mind, even if it at first posed more puzzles for reason than it resolved. Here was the real breakthrough to a secularized depth psychology that could free its knowledge from the conventional religious and pastoral study of souls (whose psychological competence was, in fact, confirmed by a nonsacral approach to the unconscious). The uncovering of the unconscious touches on that area in which the counterintuitions of ancient esoterics meet with the structure of specifically modern knowledge, which in its own way is, in principle, con- structed counterintuitively. Of course, in the last instance, both must still seek the connection with "direct experience. "
All this says that at least since the late eighteenth century, the illusion of a transparent human self-consciousness has been systematically destroyed. Som- nambulant phenomena provide provocative proofs that consciousness does not know everything about itself. In the state of magnetic lucidity, a zone of knowl- edge speaks that remains inaccessible to surface consciousness. The old "rational psychology" with its theory of memoria, of the capacity to remember, is no longer compatible with this view of consciousness. In the process of enlightenment, hu- man beings become more and more deeply involved in the self-evidence of the enigma that "there is still something else there. " Like an internal gremlin, it manifests itself in such a way that it cannot be directly grasped. If one looks closely, it has already disappeared. It follows consciousness like a shadow or like its double, who never agrees to an encounter with the first ego. But it constantly follows the first ego without ever revealing its name. Its emotional mode of ap- pearance is the uncanny and the fear of going mad-two themes that are not the exclusive property of romanticism.
Hypnosis served the first depth psychology as the royal road to the uncon- scious. It was with regard to these phenomena that nineteenth-century enlighten- ment committed one of its worst mistakes. It misinterpreted the lively interest of reactionary, aristocratic, and religious circles in unconscious phenomena as evi- dence that all this was merely antienlightenment hocus-pocus. Indeed, Mes- merism and hypnosis soon sank into the spiritul underground and landed finally
50 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
in annual fairs and variety shows, where trickery prevails. Enlightenment was for a long time not clearheaded enough to comprehend that when antienlightenment shows such a strong interest in something it must be important. The later religious spiritualism and the carnival occultism were in fact antienlightenment in practice, but only because they obscured the realistic core of the matter: the breakthrough from memoria to the unconsciousness structure, from conscious experience to the unconscious "grammar of feelings. "
From the start, the bourgeois-positivistic fraction of enlightenment was un- comfortable about the unpredictable, subversive dimensions of the new category, the unconscious. With it, the motif of critical self-reflection was introduced into civilization in a way that could not please those who held themselves to be the representatives of civilization. If every ego is underlaid by an unconscious, then that is the end of the self-satisfaction of a consciousness that thinks it knows itself, and thus knows how to value itself. The "unconscious" touched on the cultural narcissism of all social classes. At the same time, its discovery dissolves the basis of all previous philosophies of consciousness. From now on, the word "naivete" gains a new, more unfathomable meaning, because the abyss above which it hovers is more clearly seen.
Something of this sort must have been in Freud's mind when he composed his oft-quoted aphorism about the "three mortifications" that human self-esteem has had to suffer in the process of modern research: the Copernican revolution, which denied the earth's place in the center of the universe; the Darwinian theory of evo- lution, which included human beings in the chain of animal species and claimed for them precarious kinship with the great apes; and finally, psychoanalysis, which shattered the naive opinion that every ego knows itself best because of its immediate proximity. From now on, everyone is furthest from himself. Under all rationality and all consciousness there extends a vast space of irrationality and unconscious programming that everywhere interferes deceptively with conscious speech and action. The Freudian concept of "rationalization" contains an enor- mous irony: with the title ratio, those explanations and pseudojustifications are now designated with which consciousness covers up its self-delusions. The ratio- nal appears as the lid on private and collective irrationality.
Today, the further course, particularly the reorientation of depth- psychological research from its beginnings in hypnosis to the interpretation of dreams and the later branching out of various schools of depth psychology can be assumed to be largely known. Freud designated the dream as his via regia to the unconscious. Through it he developed a "technique of reading" that later proved useful in many other manifestations such as neurotic symptoms, sexual disturbances, and artistic creations. Even manifestations such as humor and jokes, accidents, and the choice of partners are now ordered in a relational system structured by the unconscious. The extension of these dynamic interpretations from psychopathology to everyday cultural phenomena demonstrates the full im-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES Q 51
plications of the critique. Besieged transparency must now accept that behind ev- ery possible fact of consciousness, dynamic causal rules of the unconscious are uncovered that influence its form. Bourgeois (and also proletarian) idealism ob- served bitterly that psychoanalysis wanted to "encroach" on the artist's soul and the work of art, that somehow the psychodynamics of a convoluted mother com- plex was allegedly at work in Goethe's lyrics: For idealism that was worse than bolshevism. The Bolshevists themselves saw in everything that was about to shake their facade of consciousness nothing other than the last scream of bour- geois decadence.
Behind these attitudes toward psychoanalysis there is the desperate defense of the transparency of consciousness, that is, of the claim that the ego knows itself better than anyone else does and is master of the rules of its own exercise of rea- son. For once one accepts through existential self-reflection the reality of one's own unconscious, then, after this change of viewpoint, not only do sexual repres- sions and traumatic scars break open, but also, in the course of self-experience, the inner "shadows" collectively become longer and longer. The entire existential relation to "negativity" must be revised, and, with logical, political, and emo- tional pain, the negative self can emerge, with its sores, its destructiveness, and its ugliness. The ego stands before the monstrous demand: to recognize that it is also what it absolutely believes itself not to be. The more conventional conscious- ness is, the more embittered will be its refusal to look into this mirror. Thus the resistance against dynamic psychology comes especially from those who believe they have something to lose through "analysis. " They shout loudest of all that they "don't need all that stuff. "
The psychoanalytic technique of reading has become very widespread in West- ern civilization. Especially in the United States over the past decades it has be- come dreadfully trivialized and turned into a social game in which the winner is the one who detects the most ulterior motives and neurotic hidden meanings be- hind everyday appearances in one's own life, as well as in the lives of others. This chronic analysis of oneself and others, which has become something of a sport, leads to at least two false attitudes. It leads, first, to hopeless intellectualization of psychoanalysis, which has thereby become a refuge for emotional coldness and symptomatic rationalism that has found in it the right means to remain entirely unchanged while giving the impression of being something else. Second it leads to an overemphasis of the infantile, which can be subtly reinforced by being con- tinually linked with the present. There is no guarantee that the "dialectic" works positively and that every regression will be canceled out by a corresponding progression. Woody Allen's urban neurotic seems to have gotten off relatively lightly. Psychoanalysis is certainly not a priori, as Karl Kraus has sarcastically remarked, the illness that pretends to be its own cure; but it can easily become so since it continually tends to underrestimate the power of the neurosis that would rather gaze into the mirror than resolutely face the here and now.
52 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
By no means does psychoanalysis encounter everywhere suffering individuals who want to be healed at any cost. Their sufferings fit into a dynamics of self- maintenance in a very complicated way. This dynamics cooperates with the am- bivalence of the healing hand that, for its part, can often only be effective when it stands with one foot on the side of the suffering against which it seems to strug- gle. Here begins a drawn-out game of artfulness - on both sides of the therapeutic relationship. One often does not know whether it is not actually the fish who catches the angler.
The category of the unconscious (better, of the "unconscious structure") is probably the most successful figure of thought in the human sciences of our cen- tury. With this self-reflective concept, the most significant advances in basic re- search into the human being and human civilization have been made. Without this concept, modern anthropology would be just as unthinkable as structural mythol- ogy, modern theory of grammar just as unthinkable as behavioral physiology and the theory of human biograms. With regard to unconscious regulating mechan- isms of human culture and social as well as individual behavior, the human sciences open up an unparalleled reflective attack on everything that, in the hu- man sphere, is "hidden programming" and not conscious behavior.
Here, the most powerful dawning of reflection in the history of human con- sciousness is taking place despite the inclination of some researchers to empha- size the invariance and unchangeability of unconscious structures. Every transpo- sition into consciousness, every reflection, strikes, no matter how gently, on the "rock of the unconscious. " And only in the light of consciousness can it be clarified where enlightenment can be a school of change, and where it can demon- strate its insightfulness by letting happen what cannot be changed.
The psychology of early enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the later schools of dynamic psychology, and all other systems concerned with uncon- scious structures in the area of human orders have made available such a powerful potential for reflection that it will be a long time before we will be able to see how human societies change when they begin to live continually with such reflecting forces. All these disciplines have built up a methodical network of self-experience that even the world religions have been scarcely able to create, with the exception of those great, meditative schools of metareligiosity whose aim has been to pro- mote consciousness-raising and that, today, significantly, are approaching the reflective psychologies: Zen Buddhism, Sufism, Tantra, Yoga, and others. The only question is whether the political central powers and the energies of repres- sion and divisiveness will succeed, on the macro- as well as the microlevel, in chaining the powers of conscious life that already have been half-awakened from slumber. Neoconservatism has long since seen the gathering danger for the repressive capacities of states and capitals; it senses that the time of conscious- nesses has come. Its strength lies in the fact that people have, in addition to a realistic fear of war and crisis, a "fear of freedom" (Erich Fromm) -- fear of them-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES U 53
elves and their own possibilities. It is this fear that makes them listen to the in- idious denunciation of the "dear ego" (Hans Maier) and of "self-realization" as ism (j0hn Paul II during his visit to Germany, particularly in his sermon in
Altotting).
Critique of Natural Illusion
Every unmasking critique knows itself to be in an intimate relation with what is "really the case" below the surface. On all sides, human consciousness is invited to deceive itself and to be content with mere illusion. For enlightenment, there- fore, it is always the second look that is decisive because it overcomes the first impression. If things were generally as they immediately seem, investigation and science would be superfluous. There would be nothing to look for, look through, or look into. But science and enlightenment have a detective-like relation to real- ity. The tension between the search and what is given is particularly radicalized in the case of human and social phenomena. For here, everything that is "given" (gegeberi) is simultaneously in a certain way only "ostensible" (vorgeblich) and artificial. Human life moves a priori in a natural artificiality and an artificial natu- ralness (Plessner). This realization is part of the great achievement of enlighten- ment's reflection on culture. It shows that human beings, as they are, live "unnatu- rally. " What was natural in them was "lost" and became "distorted" and "misshapen" through civilization. Human individuals are never in the "center of their beings," but rather stand beside themselves as persons other than who they "really" are or could be. These insights are today common knowledge in philo- sophical anthropology. In the meantime, they have been morally neutralized and have become detached structural viewpoints. At the beginning of this discovery, however, the thought of unnaturalness possessed enormous value for moral at- tacks. Its explosive power was great as long as the belief in a "good Nature" seemed to be unshaken. One of the battle cries of bourgeois society during its up- rising against the aristocratic world order was: "Nature! Nature! "
One can see the consequences of this discovery of unnaturalness in Rousseau's critique of human beings in society. It possesses both a critical-negative and a utopian-positive side; one could also say: a destructive politics and a constructive pedagogy. Rousseau diagnosed a total degeneration, a complete fall of humanity
rom "Nature" in the society of the eighteenth century. All spontaneity had been
tnrou
^naturalized
gh convention, all naivete had been replaced by finesse, all d been glossed over by facades of social intercourse, etc. Rousseau's ye tor these things was excessively sharp in a way that only an offended bour- geois perception, wanting to register its rights to life, could be in an aristocrati- y fabricated social order. The social theater of the ancien regime was becom-
g more transparent and absurd every day. Whereas the aristocracy treated its
"cerity
na
or
m of life with irony, bourgeois cultural values (Gemutskultur) treated the
54 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
artificial convolutions in that form of life with disgust. Consequently, Rousseau's critique met with tremendous approval from his contemporaries. In his depiction of social denaturalization, not only did the up and coming bourgeoisie feel confirmed in its most elementary social feeling, but also the more sensitive part of the aristocratic intelligentsia knew itself in the main to be correctly portrayed in this critique. Here the universal law of "sensitive critique" applies: The critique is accepted by those who in any case are less touched by it, but its main targets seem to be looking into a blind mirror that says absolutely nothing to them. The agreement of intelligent aristocrats with Rousseau's critique was an important cat- alyst for their philanthropic activity, with which they tried to buy off their guilty consciences about benefiting from the status quo. The first rational depth psychol- ogy, as mentioned earlier, was indeed an offshoot of aristocratic Rousseauianism. What came to light in its healing procedure could be taken without further ado as proof of the inner "healing powers of nature. " The possible destructiveness of the unconscious and the "dark side of nature" first came to the notice of the follow- ing generation of romantics and were interpreted in an increasingly conservative- pessimistic way (see E. T. A. Hoffmann, Joseph von Eichendorff, and many others).
A political stance follows directly from this analysis: in the name of the natural against the system of compulsions, on the side of the bourgeois-honest heart against aristocratic-artful deceptiveness, on the side of the free social contract against the old feudal relations based on coercion. The new society wanted to be an order in which all agreed, to their mutual advantage, on a peaceful and diligent life together according to a model based on nature and mutual sympathy. As har- monious and affable as that sounded, some representatives of the ancien regime were still sensitive enough to hear the insurrection of hell in this program. With horrified satisfaction, conservatives saw the French Revolution degenerate into terror and war. Nothing since then has nourished the conservative image of hu- manity more strongly. It thinks it knows that human nature, set loose here and now, deserves no optimism or glowing phrases. Conservative thinking in this in- stance behaves positivistically. Without first asking about contexts, it notes that, all too often, human beings behave egoistically, destructively, greedily, un- wisely, and asocially. Indeed, for this reason, criminality was and is so extremely important for all kinds of conservatism, because "short-circuited thinking" finds in it the final proof for a pessimistic view of humanity that, in turn, provides the basis for an authoritarian, strictly disciplining politics. From this viewpoint, there "exist" in nature criminals, idiots, malcontents, egoists, and rebels, just as there exist trees, cows, kings, laws, and heavenly bodies. The Christian doctrine of original sin here joins forces with the conservative, pessimistic understanding of nature. According to this doctrine, human beings, simply because they are born of woman, live in the world as defective creatures.
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 55
Rousseau's philosophy sees all this in advance. It knows that one has to get around pessimism by demonstrating how human beings become what they are so- cially. That there are human beings who behave nastily, greedily, unwisely, de- structively, etc. , proves nothing about their essential being. Here, in Rousseau, we find perhaps the most important figure of thought in moral-political enlighten- ment: the theory of the innocent victim.
The evidence introduced for political pessimism; the criminal, the lunatic, and the asocial individual, in a word, the second-rate citizen --these are not by nature as one finds them now but have been made so by society. It is said that they have never had a chance to be as they would be according to their nature, but were forced into the situation in which they find themselves through poverty, coercion, and ignorance. They are victims of society.
This defense against political pessimism regarding human nature is at first con- vincing. It possesses the superiority of dialectical thinking over positivistic think- ing. It transforms moral states and qualities into processes. Brutal people do not "exist," only their brutalization; criminality does not "exist," only criminalization; stupidity does not "exist," only stupefaction; self-seeking does not "exist," only training in egoism; there are no second-rate citizens, only victims of patroniza- tion. What political positivism takes to be nature is in reality falsified nature: the suppression of opportunity for human beings.
Rousseau knew of two aids who could illustrate his point of view, two classes of human beings who lived before civilization and, consequently, before perver- sion: the noble savage and the child. Enlightenment literature develops two of its most intimate passions around these two figures: ethnology and pedagogy. To the present day nothing has essentially changed in this approach. Literarily, this dou- ble passion precipitates two extensive genres: exotic travel literature and later ethnology on the one hand, and the educational novel and the literature on peda- gogy and child development on the other. The primitive peoples, about whom the European explorers from Columbus to Bougainville and Captain Cook reported, provide an enlightenment, which was gradually becoming more political, the ur- gently needed evidence for its view that, roughly stated, things can "proceed differently" --peacefully, reasonably, humanely, sensuously, without aristoc- racy, without war, without exploitation, without wigs, without lettres de cachet. The noble savages in the South Seas are like an Archimedean point through which one can playfully dislodge the claim of European social orders to be ordained by God and therefore unexcellable. Something different does exist; at the same time, it is better.
Besides the critique of mystified consciousneses, Marx's theory harbors a sec- ond far-reaching variant of ideology critique, which has shaped the critical style of Marxism, its polemical sharpness: the theory of the character mask. As a the- ory of masks, it distinguishes a priori between persons as individuals and as bearers of class functions. In doing so it remains a little unclear which side is respectively the mask of the other--the individual the mask of the function, or the function the mask of individuality. The majority of critics have for good rea- sons, chosen the antihumanist version, the conception that individuality is the mask of the function. Thus, there may well exist humane capitalists-as the his- tory of bourgeois philanthropy proves--against whom Marxist critics have vehe- mently polemicized. They are humane merely as individual masks of social inhu- manity. According to their social being, they regain, in spite of this, personifications of the profit interest, character masks of capital. Indeed, in some respects they are, for the agitators, worse than the worst exploiters because they
? 38 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
nourish the laborer's patriarchal mystification. "Bourgeois" role theory provides the mirror image of this theory by conceiving social functions ("roles") as masks with which individuality covers itself in order, at best, to even "play" with them.
Of course, workers' consciousness is also initially mystified. Its education un- der the principles of the ruling ideologies allows no other possibility. At the same time, it finds itself at the beginning stages of realism: because it performs immedi- ate labor. With realistic instinct, it suspects the swindle going on in the heads of "those at the top. " It stands on bare ground. For this reason, Marx, here remarka- bly optimistic, believes that workers' consciousness is capable of an extraordinary learning process, in whose course the proletariat acquires a sober view of its so- cial position and political power--and then sets this consciousness into revolu- tionary practice, of whatever kind. In the transposition, consciousness gains a new quality.
Here, proletarian enlightenment makes the leap from a theoretical to a practi- cal change; it abandons the privacy of false or true "mere" thoughts in order to organize itself publicly as a new, true class consciousness-true because it under- stands its vital interests and aggressively works its way out of exploitation and repression. Enlightenment would reach completion practically, as the dissolution of class society. Here, the fundamentally ambiguous character of Marx's "theory" is revealed. On the one hand, it reifies every consciousness into a function of the social process; on the other, it wants to make possible the liberation of conscious- ness from mystification. If one understands Marxism as a theory of liberation, one emphasizes the emancipative formation of proletarian consciousness and that of its allies. This view leads into the open, into the formative "subjectivity" of the (allegedly) last oppressed class. If this class liberates itself from its stifling posi- tion, it creates the precondition for the real emancipation (from the exploitation
4
of labor) of everyone. The self-liberation of the slave, in an ideal dialectic, should lead to the liberation of the master from the constrictions of being master. Those who want to see Marx as a "humanist" emphasize this aspect. At its center is the anthropology of labor. Laborers would gain their "selves" only when they enjoy the products on which they have expended their energy, and no longer have to relinquish the surplus value to the rulers. In this thought model, emancipation appears as the self-appropriation of the productive subjects in their products. (Of course, one would like to know what idealism really is if this is not thought out idealistically. )
From a second perspective, an "antihumanist," "realist" strand emerges from Marx's critique. Its emphasis is not on the dialectic of liberation but rather on the mechanisms of universal mystification. If every consciousness is precisely as false as corresponds to its position in the process of production and domination, it necessarily remains captive to its own falsity, as long as the process is taking place. And that the process is in full motion is constantly emphasized by Marx- ism. Here the hidden functionalism in Marxian theory goes into effect. For this
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 39
functionalism, there is to the present day no sharper formulation than the famous phrase "necessarily false consciousness. " From this viewpoint, false conscious- ness is reined into its place in the system of objective delusions. False being is a function of the process.
Here, Marxist system-cynicism comes very close to that of bourgeois func- tionalists, but there is a reversal of the premises. For bourgeois functionalists re- gard the functioning of social systems of action as guaranteed only when certain fundamental norms, attitudes, and goals are accepted and obeyed in blind identi- fication by the members of the systems. It is in the interest of the system itself that these identifications are conceived of flexibly (and indeed sometimes even re- vised) by individual deviants so that the system does not, by being too rigid, lose its ability to adapt to new situations. To this extent, a certain degree of irony and a niche for the revolutionarily inclined actually would be indispensable for every developing system. Naturally, functionalism not only denies human conscious- ness its right to emancipation; it also denies the meaning of such emancipation from norms and compulsions, for emancipation leads, according to functional- ism, directly into nothingness, into an empty individualism, an amorphous chaos, and the loss of structure in society. That there is a grain of truth in this is demon- strated in the most drastic possible way by the socialist social orders in the Eastern Bloc. They provide the functionalist proof in a social laboratory: that an "ordered" social existence is conceivable only under the constraints of functional, purpose- ful lies. In the cultural politics and ethical drilling of labor and militarism in so- cialist countries, the functional cynicism of Marx's theory of ideology is displayed in a horrifyingly clear way. In those societies the idea of freedom in an existential, self-reflective enlightenment vegetates on a barbaric level; it is no wonder that the emancipative resistance, which somewhat unhappily calls itself dissidence, manifests itself as religious opposition. In socialism, that individual block to reflection (which the conservatives and neoconservatives in the West have long dreamed about) is practiced officially. Socialist countries put the drilling of values into practice with breathtaking radicalness. The element of minimal deviation, in the meantime, is also officially planned, ever since jeans have been made in peo- ple's factories and jazz has been played in Dresden. Viewed structurally, the Party dictatorships in the East constitute the paradise of Western conservatism. The great conservative, Arnold Gehlen, did not admire the Soviet Union for nothing, a fact that can be compared with Adolf Hitler's full, but hidden, respect for the apparatus of the Catholic church.
Marxist functionalism remains remarkably blind to its own artfulness. In a modernization of deception, it uses the elements of truth in socialist doctrine as a new ideological bonding agent. The modernization of the art of lying is based ? n schizoid finesse; one lies by telling the truth. One practices a split in conscious- ness until it seems normal that socialism, previously a language of hope, becomes an ideological wall, behind which hopes and future prospects disappear.
40 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
Only in Marx's ideology critique can the trace of later cynical finesse be dis- covered in its beginnings. If ideology really meant "necessarily false conscious- ness," and (no irony intended) there was nothing other than the right mystifica- tions in the right head, then it has to be asked how the critic can claim to have escaped the vicious circle of deceptions. By going over to the side of the de- ceivers? Dialectical critique sees itself as the only light in the darkness of "true falsities. " However, in this, dialectical critique demands more of a fruitful thought than it can provide. The discovery of labor and the logic of production, despite their fundamental importance, do not provide a master key to all questions about existence, consciousness, truth, and knowledge. For this reason, "bour- geois" countercritique, for the most part, had an easy game with Marxism in its weakest point: the crude level of its theory of science and knowledge.
Critique of Moral Illusion
The roots of moral enlightenment reach back furthest of all into the past--and for good reasons. For with regard to morality, the deepest question of all enlighten- ment is decided: the question of the "good life. " That human beings are not really what they pretend to be is an age-old motif of critical moral thinking. Jesus provided the model in his attack against those who harshly judge others: "How wilt thou say to thy brother, 'Let me pull the splinter out of thine eye,' when, be- hold, a plank is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite! " (Matthew 7:4-5).
The critique in the New Testament already assumes an "artful" doubling: wolves in sheep's clothing, moralists with a plank in their eye, Pharisaism. From its first moment, this critique of morality proceeds metamorally, here: psycholog- ically. It assumes as a basic principle that the "outward" moral appearance is de- ceptive. A closer inspection would show how moralists in fact do not serve the law, but cover up their own lawlessness by criticizing others. Matthew 7:4 con- tains psychoanalysis in a nutshell. What disturbs me in others is what I myself am. However, as long as I do not see myself, I do not recognize my projections as the outward reflection of my own plank, but as the depravity of the world. In- deed, the "reality component of the projection," as psychoanalysts would say to- day, should not be my first concern. Even if the world really is depraved, I should be concerned about my own defects first. What Jesus teaches is a revolutionary self-reflection: Start with yourself, and then, if others really need to be "enlight- ened," show them how by your own example. Of course, under the normal condi- tions in the world, things proceed the other way around: The lawgivers start with others and it remains uncertain whether they will also get around to themselves- They refer to laws and conventions that are supposedly absolute. But the wolves in sheep's clothing enjoy looking at these laws and conventions more or less from above and from outside. Only they are still allowed to know about the ambiva- lence of things. Only they, because they are lawgivers, feel the breath of freedom
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 41
beyond the legislation. The real sheep are forced under the either/or. For no state can be "made" with self-reflection and with irony directed against the existing or- der. States are always also coercive apparatuses that cease to function when the sheep begin to say "I" and when the subjugated free themselves from conventions through reflection. As soon as "those at the bottom" gain the knowledge of am- bivalence, a wrench is thrown into the works-enlightenment against the au- tomatism of obedience and achievement.
Christian ethics of self-reflection, the return to oneself in making judgments, is political dynamite. Since the "freedom of a Christian person" suspends every naive belief in norms, Christian cooperation and Christian coexistence are no longer possible on the basis of state government (Staatlichkeit, civitas), that is, of coerced communality, but only on the basis of community (Gesellschaftlich- keit, communitas, societas: communism, socialism). The real state needs blind subjects, whereas society can understand itself only as a commune of awakened individualities. This establishes the deep bond between Christianity and com- munism, of which the anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tried to remind us. For the rules according to which life in the anarchist commune is ordered are free, self-imposed bonds, not alien, hierarchically imposed laws. The commune dreams of a permanent renewal of the law through consensus.
The original idea of the church still contains something of this communio- model. Of course, this model degenerates quickly in the transition to the or- ganized church. Thereafter it lives on, estranged and truncated, in the great reli- gious orders. The official church, however, develops more and more into a parody of the state and into a coercive apparatus of wondrous proportions. This schizophrenia was rationalized for millennia to come by the church's teacher, Saint Augustine, in his doctrine of the "two kingdoms," the divine and the tem- poral-which the Augustinian monk, Luther, continued to maintain. That in this doctrine, Augustine applies the concept civitas to the religious community signals its political corruption. It may seem curious but understandable that only with the modern movements toward democracy has a fundamental Christian thought again come into political play. Western democracies are basically permanent parodies oi religious anarchism, peculiar mixtures of coercive apparatuses, and orders of freedom. In them the rule applies: an illusory ego for everyone.
Herein lies at the same time the Catholic irony in the modern world. For
Catholicism, with its dogma and its absolutist organization, protrudes into a liber-
alized social order like an archaic hulk. It is still against the temporal order only
n
the sense that it maintains its perverse alliance with the centralized power of states, just as it had done with the western Roman Empire, northern European eudalism, and with the absolutism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. at is why today's central powers, which have at least learned to play the liberal S me a little, are somewhat embarrassed in their relations to the openly
42 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
authoritarian Vatican. Only with Mussolini's fascism could Catholicism be brought back into the loathsome modernity of the concordats.
This preamble is perhaps useful for understanding the point of departure for the later critique of morality. In the course of its history, Christianity repudiates its own moral structure, a structure of self-reflection superior to conventions. In a word, it itself becomes a conventional coercive organization. It thus degenerates from the free standpoint of metaethics, which, with a clear view of reality and with a love full of reason, says what one should do, to the trite standpoint of "Thou shalt. " Originally directed against Pharisaism, it has become through its political success the most hypocritical ideology the world has ever known.
This has been generally well known in Europe since the late Middle Ages. Since that time, the wolves in Christian sheep's clothing have been distinguished from the sheep and from those exceptional people who, in spite of Christianity, made something of the opportunities it offered. Since the end of the Middle Ages, that is, ever since written documents have recorded the voice of the people and their realism, a good proportion of the people have not let themselves be deceived about this split in morality. The lustful monk, the bellicose prelate, the cynical cardinal, and the corrupt pope are standard figures in popular realism. No "theo- retical" critique has been able to add anything essential to this satirical approach. The unmasking of the clergy belongs to Catholicism like laughter to satire. In laughter, all theory is anticipated.
The critique of morality, however, has not advanced as laughter, and this is connected with the role of Protestantism in the renovation of moralism. Catholi- cism can be content in the last analysis with satire on the clergy. Protestantism, by contrast, must push the critique of morality forward to the exposure of the lay- person, of the fake Christian, and consequently, of everyone. The French En- lightenment directs its moral satire against the personnel in the Catholic specta- cle, the nuns, priests, the all too pious virgins and all too holy prelates. Heinrich Heine's attacks too are directed against Catholicism and can remain satirical. All this is innocuous compared with the critique of the morality internalized by Prot- estant laypeople. How good-natured Diderot's cutting jokes are compared with the critique of Christianity exercised by the son of a Lutheran pastor, Friedrich Nietzsche! There is a clear difference of degree and also a healthy distance be- tween the Roman Catholic and the Protestant Germanic Enlightenment. For the special complications of religious existence are ultimately reserved in Catholi- cism for the clergy. In Protestant countries, the critique of morality necessarily leads to the self-exposure of whole societies and classes. In such countries, partic- ularly in northern Germany and North America, moral enlightenment is therefore unthinkable without sociomasochist components. A second fertile ground is emancipated Judaism--Marx, Heine, Freud, Adorno, among others--which, as Hannah Arendt has shown convincingly, retains a certain outsider viewpoint
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES D 43
? Simplicitas (genuine Simplicity) conquers Fraus (Fraud). Strasbourg Cathedral, window 45, inset 7.
predisposed toward critique even though it is strongly assimilated into bourgeois society.
The critique of morality pursues essentially three strategies: uncovering a sec- ond set of rules (double standard); inversion of being and illusion; and reduction to a realistic original motive.
The uncovering of the second set of rules is the simplest procedure, since those roles are immediately apparent through mere observation. Jesus said, "You will recognize them by their fruits. " The test of life is decisive. Enlightenment does nothing more than eavesdrop on likely wolves in their dressing rooms, where they put on and take off their sheep's clothing. One has only to hide behind a curtain or under the bed and watch what happens when the suspected wolves are alone together. In this, sexual unmasking has a special value: The abbot who has to hide
44 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
in the bedroom closet from the husband returning home; the upright family man who is seen in the dark street disappearing into the house with the red light; the prime minister who forgets his glasses in the brothel. "Can one also sort out grapes from the thorns, or figs from the thistles? " This "flagrant literature" could bear the title of one of the most well known "pornographic" books of eighteenth- century Enlightenment: Mirabeau's The Aired Curtain. In all these works, cri- tique did not yet deviate from a sensual, satirical approach.
In this tradition, moral duplicity itself was long regarded as a moral fact, as scandal. Only a cynical man-of-the-world attitude could go so far as to shrug its shoulders about it and soberly accept it as a mere fact. Worldly knowledge recog- nizes the moral world as a compositum of two worlds: There probably has to be a worldview for practical men who must be strong enough to get their hands dirty in political practice without getting dirty themselves, and even if they do, who cares? And a second worldview for youths, simpletons, women, and sensitive souls, for whom "purity" is just the right thing. One could call it a division of labor among temperaments, or the ugliness of the world; worldly knowledge knows how to calculate with both.
In the inversion of being and illusion, critique first separates the facade from the core, in order then to attack the latter as the actual exterior. The most impor- tant points of attack are provided by the nerve centers of Christian morality, in goodness as well as in evil: the ethics of compassion and altruism (the command- ment to love one's neighbor). Here again, enlightenment tries to outflank decep- tion with suspicion; indeed, it even denies, not unrealistically, the possibility of a perfect deception of a mentally alert enlightener: "One lies with the mouth, but with the grimace that one makes in doing so, one says the truth after all" (Nietzsche, Werke in zwei Banden, 4th ed. Munich, 1978, vol. II, p. 73). The "core" does not remain hidden. The "psychologist" (in Nietzsche's sense) sees the self-pity and resentment shining through the compassion that is shown. A form of egoism shines through every act of altruism. The psychology of the courtly age had an edge on bourgeois thinking with these observations. La Rochefoucauld had already skillfully uncovered the game of self-love (amour-propre) in all its masks of fellowship and morality. Following La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche's cri- tique of Christianity could achieve the stage of maturity, that is, the stage of utter nakedness. The more hollow the lie of altruism revealed itself to be in capitalist society, in which striving for profit and utilitariansm imposed themselves more and more brutally, the easier it was for critical, naturalistic thought to suggest that everyone is his own closest neighbor. But Schiller says: The upright man thinks of himself last (Wilhelm Tell). Nietzsche hears the nonsense ringing through Schiller's idealism; he speaks mercilessly of the "moral trumpeter from Sackingen. " The naturalist claims to know that everyone, whether upright or not, thinks of himself first and last. Indeed, every attempt to think of others "first" is bound to fail because thinking cannot leave its domicile in the ego. To deny the
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 45
Ferdinand Dietz, Falsitas, model of a garden figure for Seehof Castle near Bamberg.
primacy of self-love would mean to invert all relations; Nietzsche accuses Chris- tianity of this original falsification, this fundamental distortion, with disquieting sharpness. Bourgeois morality tries to maintain an illusion of altruism, whereas in all other areas bourgeois thinking has long since assumed a theoretical as well as an economic egocentrism.
Nietzsche's critique --apart from the religious "poisoning" by his family --is a
reaction against the morally stifling atmosphere of the late nineteenth century
when international imperialisms, in the disguise of idealism and a worn out Chris-
tian bearing, were setting out to subjugate the rest of the world. The First World
War was secretly hoped for by countless contemporaries who expected a "moral
cleansing" from it. The edifying lies of Christianized imperialism had become too
5
suffocating. The resonance Nietzsche enjoyed among imperialists had its moral
foundation in the cynicism of self-disinhibition; this cynicism makes a continuum between a subtle philosophy and a brutal politics possible for the first time. The night into confession is one of the characteristic movements of modern conscious- ness, which tries to shake off the existential ambiguities of all morality. It is this flight that opens moral consciousness for cynicism on a broad front.
? The third strategy concludes the process of unmasking with the discovery of
46 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
an original motive. The French moralists called it self-love (amour-propre); Nietzsche called it the will to power. If Marxism spoke in psychological terms (which, according to its logic, it cannot do), it would call the original motive the striving for profit. But it argues in nonpsychological terms; the striving for profit falls in the last instance behind the character mask, so that the capitalist as an in- dividual may be as miserly or as selfless as he likes. For its part, psychoanalysis, having developed in the climate of Nietzsche and the neoromantics, encounters final motives that have nothing to do with altruism and idealism. Important in psy- choanalysis is the dialectical moment in the theory of drives, which assumes a two-pronged drive-nature: ego drives and sexual drives - i n the later version, life drive and death drive.
The exposure of morality becomes explosive when it is not exercised by pri- vate persons on private persons (or as admission in the context of a confessional relation). Since the eighteenth century, enlighteners have concerned themselves--as defenders of "true morality," whatever that may be--with the morality of those who rule. Here, for the first time, the critique of morality shows its political barbs. From this line of critique comes a whole literature about the gluttony of tyrants and the unmasking of the aristocracy's corruption. Schiller's Robbers and Lessing's Emilia Galotti are the best known examples of this genre.
The moralism in the bourgeois sense of decency put aristocratically refined im- moralism into the position of the politically accused.
In substance, bourgeois moral literature already exercises a critique of cynicism. It describes states of consciousness in which unethical life (Unsittlichkeit) is self-reflective. But bour- geois thinking all too naively assumes it is possible to subordinate political power to moral concepts. It does not anticipate that one day, when it has itself come to power, it will end up in the same ambivalence. It has not yet realized that it is only a small step from taking moral offense to respectable hypocrisy. Heinrich Heine fought in vain against the narrow-minded moralism of bourgeois Enlight- enment. The German public could not follow his kynical-satirical protest.
One of the characteristics of German Enlightenment is that under the influence of petit-bourgeois Protestantism, it seldom mustered the power to be cheeky. Where the public itself did not resist, there were courts to exercise censorship. Only in the twentieth century has impudent cheekiness--the sociopsyetiological foundation of an enlightenment on the offensive that does not first ask the authori- ties whether it is welcome--created subcultural niches for itself in cabaret and in Bohemianism. It failed lamentably to ally itself with the main force of social op- position, the workers' movement. For in the latter, the political moral critique of the ruling strata was transformed into something that could easily be taken for petit-bourgeois morality.
The workers' movement rarely examined itself from the perspective of moral critique. Also, at first, its demands were so persuasive that only the political reac- tion could have an interest in suspecting something "behind" them. The complex
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 47
moral area of envy and social resentment was in fact treated instead from the per- soective of an antisocialistically inspired thinking, from Nietzsche to Schoeck. However, since the relative historical success of the worker's movement, its original ingenuousness has evaporated. It too has long since been infected by am- bivalences. But whether as "social partner" in the West, or as state power in the East, it does not want to acknowledge anything other than a purely political "will to power" in its own ranks. This is the reason for its moral weakness. Indeed, Marxism has denounced the impulses of Nietzsche and the depth psychologies with all its might, and every personal encounter with people from the Eastern sphere of influence proves how astoundingly prepsychological the mentality is in which they are kept, as if two of the greatest psychologists of modernity, Dostoy- evsky and Tolstoy, had not been Russians. The state based on force presupposes blind subjects. It does everything it can to keep powers of reflection that have long been available from becoming effective.
Critique of Transparency
Under this heading we discuss the discovery of the unconscious, which, as will be shown, represents a necessary consequence of the modern process of enlight- enment. One of the virtually reactionary myths of the twentieth century is that
6
Sigmund Freud is the "discoverer of the unconscious. "
only falsifies historical truth but also burdens the history of enlightenment with an absurd and inexplicable asymmetry and retardation in the investigation of the unconscious. How could enlightenment have investigated consciousness criti- cally and empirically without encountering its "other side"?
More about real discovery of the unconsciousness: The beginnings of a sys-
tematic treatment of the unconscious are to be found--self-evidently, I am
tempted to say-in the classical Age of Enlightenment. As Henry F. Ellenberger
has shown, the history of methodically controlled encounters with the uncon-
scious began in the last third of the eighteenth century. At that time, in the middle
of an obscurantist atmosphere (Cagliostro and others), a systematic experimenta-
tion with healing through suggestion started and made its first practical break-
through with Franz Anton Mesmer's alleged "animal magnetism," even if Mes-
m
a failure. Enlightenment depth psychology was born in 1784, three years after
ants Critique of Pure Reason, when a French aristocrat discovered so-called
magnetic sleep, which came to be called hypnosis in the nineteenth century. The
marquis of Puysegur, artillery officer of Strasburg, pupil of Mesmer, and lord
0
e
anifestation that seemed similar to sleepwalking and therefore was dubbed "arti-
C1
al somnambulism. " This was a state of deep trance in which, paradoxically,
er s "fluidical" theory was regarded by his contemporaries and by posterity as
a large country estate in the village of Buzancy near Soisson, observed, during
Philanthropic medical treatment of one of his peasants, a previously unknown
The legend of Freud not
48 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
"1
? Les effets du magnetisme . . . animal. The blunderer Mesmer puts Parisian soci- ety along with its dogs into convulsive shock. Caricature of "Mesmermania" around 1780-85.
a peculiar clairvoyance and power of expression could be observed in the patient, which far exceeded what they were capable of when awake. What was particu- larly important in all this was the discovery that hypnotized persons proved to be "doctors of themselves" in that they could purposefully and clearly name the causes of their sicknesses about which they normally would not have been able to say anything at all. They uncovered "pathogenic secrets" in themselves, re- vealed hidden roots of their suffering, made suggestions about their own treat- ment, and, moreover, they not infrequently showed excellent character traits that the "surface personality" did not have.
The procedure had a grave disadvantage, for which reason, later enlighten- ment tried to repress this more than a century old "episode": After the procedure, the patients had forgotten everything they had experienced. Through the "posthypnotic amnesia," as it was later called, they were at the mercy of the mag- netizer, who could profit from their excursions into the unconscious. Still in a trance, they had to submit themselves to the healing commands of the magnetizer, who transposed the knowledge he had gained in the session about the patient's problematic into hypnotic instructions. These were supposed to remain effective in the unconscious for the patient's own good. Understandably, later enlighten- ment did not want to be involved with such procedures based entirely on authority and trust. After all, psychologically speaking, enlightenment always meant an ad- vance in the training of mistrust--in the construction of an ego concerned about self-assertion and control of reality. Freud's methodology can be summarized, in a way, as the attempt to keep the path to the unconscious open without using hyp-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 49
osis. One may consider whether, in Freud's procedure, a finesse born of mistrust ? not at work: Naive and reflected at the same time, it has recourse to the "offspring" and "representatives" of an unconsciousness otherwise thought of as closed. Whether this closedness is not also an effect of the mistrustful method is a question not posed here.
Like Mesmer, Puysegur knew that in the hypnotic treatments his personality was the actual agent, or more precisely, it was the intimate relation established between himself and the patient. This "rapport"--in more recent terminology, transference-served as the medium of a methodical and successful depth- psychological praxis. This procedure was continually developed and practiced in credible forms at least until the middle of the nineteenth century. Schopenhauer could still state that this discovery was possibly the most important in the entire history of the human mind, even if it at first posed more puzzles for reason than it resolved. Here was the real breakthrough to a secularized depth psychology that could free its knowledge from the conventional religious and pastoral study of souls (whose psychological competence was, in fact, confirmed by a nonsacral approach to the unconscious). The uncovering of the unconscious touches on that area in which the counterintuitions of ancient esoterics meet with the structure of specifically modern knowledge, which in its own way is, in principle, con- structed counterintuitively. Of course, in the last instance, both must still seek the connection with "direct experience. "
All this says that at least since the late eighteenth century, the illusion of a transparent human self-consciousness has been systematically destroyed. Som- nambulant phenomena provide provocative proofs that consciousness does not know everything about itself. In the state of magnetic lucidity, a zone of knowl- edge speaks that remains inaccessible to surface consciousness. The old "rational psychology" with its theory of memoria, of the capacity to remember, is no longer compatible with this view of consciousness. In the process of enlightenment, hu- man beings become more and more deeply involved in the self-evidence of the enigma that "there is still something else there. " Like an internal gremlin, it manifests itself in such a way that it cannot be directly grasped. If one looks closely, it has already disappeared. It follows consciousness like a shadow or like its double, who never agrees to an encounter with the first ego. But it constantly follows the first ego without ever revealing its name. Its emotional mode of ap- pearance is the uncanny and the fear of going mad-two themes that are not the exclusive property of romanticism.
Hypnosis served the first depth psychology as the royal road to the uncon- scious. It was with regard to these phenomena that nineteenth-century enlighten- ment committed one of its worst mistakes. It misinterpreted the lively interest of reactionary, aristocratic, and religious circles in unconscious phenomena as evi- dence that all this was merely antienlightenment hocus-pocus. Indeed, Mes- merism and hypnosis soon sank into the spiritul underground and landed finally
50 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
in annual fairs and variety shows, where trickery prevails. Enlightenment was for a long time not clearheaded enough to comprehend that when antienlightenment shows such a strong interest in something it must be important. The later religious spiritualism and the carnival occultism were in fact antienlightenment in practice, but only because they obscured the realistic core of the matter: the breakthrough from memoria to the unconsciousness structure, from conscious experience to the unconscious "grammar of feelings. "
From the start, the bourgeois-positivistic fraction of enlightenment was un- comfortable about the unpredictable, subversive dimensions of the new category, the unconscious. With it, the motif of critical self-reflection was introduced into civilization in a way that could not please those who held themselves to be the representatives of civilization. If every ego is underlaid by an unconscious, then that is the end of the self-satisfaction of a consciousness that thinks it knows itself, and thus knows how to value itself. The "unconscious" touched on the cultural narcissism of all social classes. At the same time, its discovery dissolves the basis of all previous philosophies of consciousness. From now on, the word "naivete" gains a new, more unfathomable meaning, because the abyss above which it hovers is more clearly seen.
Something of this sort must have been in Freud's mind when he composed his oft-quoted aphorism about the "three mortifications" that human self-esteem has had to suffer in the process of modern research: the Copernican revolution, which denied the earth's place in the center of the universe; the Darwinian theory of evo- lution, which included human beings in the chain of animal species and claimed for them precarious kinship with the great apes; and finally, psychoanalysis, which shattered the naive opinion that every ego knows itself best because of its immediate proximity. From now on, everyone is furthest from himself. Under all rationality and all consciousness there extends a vast space of irrationality and unconscious programming that everywhere interferes deceptively with conscious speech and action. The Freudian concept of "rationalization" contains an enor- mous irony: with the title ratio, those explanations and pseudojustifications are now designated with which consciousness covers up its self-delusions. The ratio- nal appears as the lid on private and collective irrationality.
Today, the further course, particularly the reorientation of depth- psychological research from its beginnings in hypnosis to the interpretation of dreams and the later branching out of various schools of depth psychology can be assumed to be largely known. Freud designated the dream as his via regia to the unconscious. Through it he developed a "technique of reading" that later proved useful in many other manifestations such as neurotic symptoms, sexual disturbances, and artistic creations. Even manifestations such as humor and jokes, accidents, and the choice of partners are now ordered in a relational system structured by the unconscious. The extension of these dynamic interpretations from psychopathology to everyday cultural phenomena demonstrates the full im-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES Q 51
plications of the critique. Besieged transparency must now accept that behind ev- ery possible fact of consciousness, dynamic causal rules of the unconscious are uncovered that influence its form. Bourgeois (and also proletarian) idealism ob- served bitterly that psychoanalysis wanted to "encroach" on the artist's soul and the work of art, that somehow the psychodynamics of a convoluted mother com- plex was allegedly at work in Goethe's lyrics: For idealism that was worse than bolshevism. The Bolshevists themselves saw in everything that was about to shake their facade of consciousness nothing other than the last scream of bour- geois decadence.
Behind these attitudes toward psychoanalysis there is the desperate defense of the transparency of consciousness, that is, of the claim that the ego knows itself better than anyone else does and is master of the rules of its own exercise of rea- son. For once one accepts through existential self-reflection the reality of one's own unconscious, then, after this change of viewpoint, not only do sexual repres- sions and traumatic scars break open, but also, in the course of self-experience, the inner "shadows" collectively become longer and longer. The entire existential relation to "negativity" must be revised, and, with logical, political, and emo- tional pain, the negative self can emerge, with its sores, its destructiveness, and its ugliness. The ego stands before the monstrous demand: to recognize that it is also what it absolutely believes itself not to be. The more conventional conscious- ness is, the more embittered will be its refusal to look into this mirror. Thus the resistance against dynamic psychology comes especially from those who believe they have something to lose through "analysis. " They shout loudest of all that they "don't need all that stuff. "
The psychoanalytic technique of reading has become very widespread in West- ern civilization. Especially in the United States over the past decades it has be- come dreadfully trivialized and turned into a social game in which the winner is the one who detects the most ulterior motives and neurotic hidden meanings be- hind everyday appearances in one's own life, as well as in the lives of others. This chronic analysis of oneself and others, which has become something of a sport, leads to at least two false attitudes. It leads, first, to hopeless intellectualization of psychoanalysis, which has thereby become a refuge for emotional coldness and symptomatic rationalism that has found in it the right means to remain entirely unchanged while giving the impression of being something else. Second it leads to an overemphasis of the infantile, which can be subtly reinforced by being con- tinually linked with the present. There is no guarantee that the "dialectic" works positively and that every regression will be canceled out by a corresponding progression. Woody Allen's urban neurotic seems to have gotten off relatively lightly. Psychoanalysis is certainly not a priori, as Karl Kraus has sarcastically remarked, the illness that pretends to be its own cure; but it can easily become so since it continually tends to underrestimate the power of the neurosis that would rather gaze into the mirror than resolutely face the here and now.
52 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
By no means does psychoanalysis encounter everywhere suffering individuals who want to be healed at any cost. Their sufferings fit into a dynamics of self- maintenance in a very complicated way. This dynamics cooperates with the am- bivalence of the healing hand that, for its part, can often only be effective when it stands with one foot on the side of the suffering against which it seems to strug- gle. Here begins a drawn-out game of artfulness - on both sides of the therapeutic relationship. One often does not know whether it is not actually the fish who catches the angler.
The category of the unconscious (better, of the "unconscious structure") is probably the most successful figure of thought in the human sciences of our cen- tury. With this self-reflective concept, the most significant advances in basic re- search into the human being and human civilization have been made. Without this concept, modern anthropology would be just as unthinkable as structural mythol- ogy, modern theory of grammar just as unthinkable as behavioral physiology and the theory of human biograms. With regard to unconscious regulating mechan- isms of human culture and social as well as individual behavior, the human sciences open up an unparalleled reflective attack on everything that, in the hu- man sphere, is "hidden programming" and not conscious behavior.
Here, the most powerful dawning of reflection in the history of human con- sciousness is taking place despite the inclination of some researchers to empha- size the invariance and unchangeability of unconscious structures. Every transpo- sition into consciousness, every reflection, strikes, no matter how gently, on the "rock of the unconscious. " And only in the light of consciousness can it be clarified where enlightenment can be a school of change, and where it can demon- strate its insightfulness by letting happen what cannot be changed.
The psychology of early enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the later schools of dynamic psychology, and all other systems concerned with uncon- scious structures in the area of human orders have made available such a powerful potential for reflection that it will be a long time before we will be able to see how human societies change when they begin to live continually with such reflecting forces. All these disciplines have built up a methodical network of self-experience that even the world religions have been scarcely able to create, with the exception of those great, meditative schools of metareligiosity whose aim has been to pro- mote consciousness-raising and that, today, significantly, are approaching the reflective psychologies: Zen Buddhism, Sufism, Tantra, Yoga, and others. The only question is whether the political central powers and the energies of repres- sion and divisiveness will succeed, on the macro- as well as the microlevel, in chaining the powers of conscious life that already have been half-awakened from slumber. Neoconservatism has long since seen the gathering danger for the repressive capacities of states and capitals; it senses that the time of conscious- nesses has come. Its strength lies in the fact that people have, in addition to a realistic fear of war and crisis, a "fear of freedom" (Erich Fromm) -- fear of them-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES U 53
elves and their own possibilities. It is this fear that makes them listen to the in- idious denunciation of the "dear ego" (Hans Maier) and of "self-realization" as ism (j0hn Paul II during his visit to Germany, particularly in his sermon in
Altotting).
Critique of Natural Illusion
Every unmasking critique knows itself to be in an intimate relation with what is "really the case" below the surface. On all sides, human consciousness is invited to deceive itself and to be content with mere illusion. For enlightenment, there- fore, it is always the second look that is decisive because it overcomes the first impression. If things were generally as they immediately seem, investigation and science would be superfluous. There would be nothing to look for, look through, or look into. But science and enlightenment have a detective-like relation to real- ity. The tension between the search and what is given is particularly radicalized in the case of human and social phenomena. For here, everything that is "given" (gegeberi) is simultaneously in a certain way only "ostensible" (vorgeblich) and artificial. Human life moves a priori in a natural artificiality and an artificial natu- ralness (Plessner). This realization is part of the great achievement of enlighten- ment's reflection on culture. It shows that human beings, as they are, live "unnatu- rally. " What was natural in them was "lost" and became "distorted" and "misshapen" through civilization. Human individuals are never in the "center of their beings," but rather stand beside themselves as persons other than who they "really" are or could be. These insights are today common knowledge in philo- sophical anthropology. In the meantime, they have been morally neutralized and have become detached structural viewpoints. At the beginning of this discovery, however, the thought of unnaturalness possessed enormous value for moral at- tacks. Its explosive power was great as long as the belief in a "good Nature" seemed to be unshaken. One of the battle cries of bourgeois society during its up- rising against the aristocratic world order was: "Nature! Nature! "
One can see the consequences of this discovery of unnaturalness in Rousseau's critique of human beings in society. It possesses both a critical-negative and a utopian-positive side; one could also say: a destructive politics and a constructive pedagogy. Rousseau diagnosed a total degeneration, a complete fall of humanity
rom "Nature" in the society of the eighteenth century. All spontaneity had been
tnrou
^naturalized
gh convention, all naivete had been replaced by finesse, all d been glossed over by facades of social intercourse, etc. Rousseau's ye tor these things was excessively sharp in a way that only an offended bour- geois perception, wanting to register its rights to life, could be in an aristocrati- y fabricated social order. The social theater of the ancien regime was becom-
g more transparent and absurd every day. Whereas the aristocracy treated its
"cerity
na
or
m of life with irony, bourgeois cultural values (Gemutskultur) treated the
54 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
artificial convolutions in that form of life with disgust. Consequently, Rousseau's critique met with tremendous approval from his contemporaries. In his depiction of social denaturalization, not only did the up and coming bourgeoisie feel confirmed in its most elementary social feeling, but also the more sensitive part of the aristocratic intelligentsia knew itself in the main to be correctly portrayed in this critique. Here the universal law of "sensitive critique" applies: The critique is accepted by those who in any case are less touched by it, but its main targets seem to be looking into a blind mirror that says absolutely nothing to them. The agreement of intelligent aristocrats with Rousseau's critique was an important cat- alyst for their philanthropic activity, with which they tried to buy off their guilty consciences about benefiting from the status quo. The first rational depth psychol- ogy, as mentioned earlier, was indeed an offshoot of aristocratic Rousseauianism. What came to light in its healing procedure could be taken without further ado as proof of the inner "healing powers of nature. " The possible destructiveness of the unconscious and the "dark side of nature" first came to the notice of the follow- ing generation of romantics and were interpreted in an increasingly conservative- pessimistic way (see E. T. A. Hoffmann, Joseph von Eichendorff, and many others).
A political stance follows directly from this analysis: in the name of the natural against the system of compulsions, on the side of the bourgeois-honest heart against aristocratic-artful deceptiveness, on the side of the free social contract against the old feudal relations based on coercion. The new society wanted to be an order in which all agreed, to their mutual advantage, on a peaceful and diligent life together according to a model based on nature and mutual sympathy. As har- monious and affable as that sounded, some representatives of the ancien regime were still sensitive enough to hear the insurrection of hell in this program. With horrified satisfaction, conservatives saw the French Revolution degenerate into terror and war. Nothing since then has nourished the conservative image of hu- manity more strongly. It thinks it knows that human nature, set loose here and now, deserves no optimism or glowing phrases. Conservative thinking in this in- stance behaves positivistically. Without first asking about contexts, it notes that, all too often, human beings behave egoistically, destructively, greedily, un- wisely, and asocially. Indeed, for this reason, criminality was and is so extremely important for all kinds of conservatism, because "short-circuited thinking" finds in it the final proof for a pessimistic view of humanity that, in turn, provides the basis for an authoritarian, strictly disciplining politics. From this viewpoint, there "exist" in nature criminals, idiots, malcontents, egoists, and rebels, just as there exist trees, cows, kings, laws, and heavenly bodies. The Christian doctrine of original sin here joins forces with the conservative, pessimistic understanding of nature. According to this doctrine, human beings, simply because they are born of woman, live in the world as defective creatures.
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 55
Rousseau's philosophy sees all this in advance. It knows that one has to get around pessimism by demonstrating how human beings become what they are so- cially. That there are human beings who behave nastily, greedily, unwisely, de- structively, etc. , proves nothing about their essential being. Here, in Rousseau, we find perhaps the most important figure of thought in moral-political enlighten- ment: the theory of the innocent victim.
The evidence introduced for political pessimism; the criminal, the lunatic, and the asocial individual, in a word, the second-rate citizen --these are not by nature as one finds them now but have been made so by society. It is said that they have never had a chance to be as they would be according to their nature, but were forced into the situation in which they find themselves through poverty, coercion, and ignorance. They are victims of society.
This defense against political pessimism regarding human nature is at first con- vincing. It possesses the superiority of dialectical thinking over positivistic think- ing. It transforms moral states and qualities into processes. Brutal people do not "exist," only their brutalization; criminality does not "exist," only criminalization; stupidity does not "exist," only stupefaction; self-seeking does not "exist," only training in egoism; there are no second-rate citizens, only victims of patroniza- tion. What political positivism takes to be nature is in reality falsified nature: the suppression of opportunity for human beings.
Rousseau knew of two aids who could illustrate his point of view, two classes of human beings who lived before civilization and, consequently, before perver- sion: the noble savage and the child. Enlightenment literature develops two of its most intimate passions around these two figures: ethnology and pedagogy. To the present day nothing has essentially changed in this approach. Literarily, this dou- ble passion precipitates two extensive genres: exotic travel literature and later ethnology on the one hand, and the educational novel and the literature on peda- gogy and child development on the other. The primitive peoples, about whom the European explorers from Columbus to Bougainville and Captain Cook reported, provide an enlightenment, which was gradually becoming more political, the ur- gently needed evidence for its view that, roughly stated, things can "proceed differently" --peacefully, reasonably, humanely, sensuously, without aristoc- racy, without war, without exploitation, without wigs, without lettres de cachet. The noble savages in the South Seas are like an Archimedean point through which one can playfully dislodge the claim of European social orders to be ordained by God and therefore unexcellable. Something different does exist; at the same time, it is better.
