No More Learning

Ac- cording to Karl August Wittfogel's report, in the autumn of 1932, a scene was played out in Berlin in which the spirit of strategic cynicism is thrown more luridly into relief than in any satire, no matter how biting. It contains the essence of the whole age: the escalation of strategy into the diabolical; the crystallization of doublethink into perfect cynicism; the everlasting being-in-the-right of the simultaneously iron and nimble tactician in a reality where things always happen differently from how the grand tactician thought.
It was a 7 November celebration in the embassy on Unter den Linden. One of those gala celebrations with caviar and vodka and all that. I stood around with Grosz, Piscator, Brecht--I no longer know if it was them, but anyway, that sort. Suddenly, someone came and said, "Radek is here. " I left the others and looked for Radek, asked him--we knew each other from Malik--: "Do you know what is happening here in Germany? "--"What? "--"If things go on like this, Hitler will come to power and everything will go under. "--"Yes, but you have to under- stand that. That has to come. The German workers will take on two years of Hitler. " (Quoted after Mathias GrefFrath, Wasserzeichen der Despotic Ein Portrait von Karl August Wittfogel, in Transatlantik [February 1981], p. 37)
This says, in effect: Besides the surface propaganda in favor of antifascism, the united front, etc. , Moscow had already thought out a second line that allowed the supertactician, Radek, to bet on Hitler just like someone bets on a catastrophe. Thus, one could fight against him and nonetheless still find something good in his probable victory: that, as it was thought, he was specially suitable to bring about the total bankruptcy of the system. This form of double strategy gives the Com- munists' rhetoric of crisis in 1932 an inflammatory tone-for the worse things get
526 D WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS
for the "system," the better it is for those who want to see its end. In the Com- munists' "diagnoses" a positivistic grand-tactical spirit is mixed with malicious joy and open catastrophile gratification. Thus, the Rote Fahne wrote on January 1, 1932:
Storm year 1932!
The capitalist world takes leave of the year 1931 with an annihilating declaration of bankruptcy: with the report of the Special Advisory Committee of the Bank for International Reparation Payments . . . that . . . has investigated Germany's economy and financial position. There is no document from a capitalist pen that, with such unconcealed pessimism, ascertains the downfall of capitalism and outlines its con- tradictions and its manifestations of putrefaction with such somber colors. . . . The financial bankruptcy of Germany, however, will re- bound on the creditor countries and conjure up new worldwide catas- trophes. . . .
But the imperialist bandits who see a way out of the crisis in a new world carnage forget that, with the fury of war, they simultaneously un- leash the powers of the revolution. (Dokumente zur Deutschen Geschichte, pp. 49-50)
Here, a masochistic form of thinking has transformed itself into a strategic consciousness. The leaves feverishly approach the caterpillar in the expectation that they will win something of the caterpillar ego if they only let themselves be devoured patiently enough. What are then "two years of Hitler," if afterward we get our turnl What Rathenau had described as a soothsayer in 1912 (tactics, diplomacy, deception down to the "shopkeeper") has been realized here on a large scale.
In the middle of the crisis, the strategist carousel turns all the more quickly. Every rider outlines from his or her carousel horse a grand view, and from this develops tactics for getting the whole. Social democracy grasps the total scene as one in which it is "condemned" to play the double role of the doctor and the willing heir at the sickbed of capitalism. The Communists interpret the situation as the agony of capitalism, whose death can only be a question of time, so that the collapse will be accelerated by those who, on the one hand, fight against the Fascist healing sorcery, and at the same time, however, bank on the eventuality that fascism will inject the dose of poison into capitalism that puts the "system" out of its misery, leaving the Communist party as the happy heir. One side wants to ameliorate the crisis, and the other wants to push it to the revolutionary extreme.
Both draw up their account not only without the innkeeper but also without his parasites. For, on the opposing side, the Fascists and the bourgeoisie, too, the tool and its user, lead each other astray. On the one hand, large sections of Ger- man economic leadership swing around to the Nazi line because they believe that
WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS ? 527
? OlafGulbransson: "I'm sorry, sir, the pure Aryan noses are unfortunately already all sold out. " Simplicissimus, February 26, 1933.
one has to go along with the Hitler course in order to be able to hold onto the course of industry and that of the "general interest" ("taming tactics"). Hitler, for his part, knows that he has to make the industrialists believe that in him they have found the tool that will realize their political goals. Only if they believe that can he, in turn, make them into tools of his global vision, and melt down the "econ- omy" into his "block" and his frequently conjured hard-as-steel "body of the peo- ple," which will climb out of the trenches and the graves of the First World War so as to finally roll over the quickly subdued land as radiant victor. Then Hitler's period as dissimulator would also have an end; then he would finally be able to be completely as he felt himself to be: the chosen one of the "prophecy," the emis- sary of the dead, the double and spirit of revenge. He, the "adventurer" (Braun), the drummer, the charlatan, who was certified by everyone as hysterical and his- trionic, proved himself, on the carousel of tacticians and semirealists, to be the only full realist, that is, the only one who knew how to pursue their aims not only as politician but also as psychologist and dramatist. He not only practiced the art
528 ? WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS
? November 1933. New respectability. The lesser evil patronizes the greater evil.
of deception but also saw the necessity of enticing those who were prepared to be deceived with a show of seriousness and idealism. He knew how to handle the collective will to illusion by creating the backdrops before which the people could let themselves be deceived to their heart's desire. The illusion into which the one who is ready to be deceived thinks of falling will serve the defrauded one simul- taneously as an excuse and, in the end, as an explanation why everything had to happen as it did.
Notes
1. ["Double decision" (Doppelbeschluss) was the name given by Helmut Schmidt to his govern- ment's two-pronged decision regarding NATO to (1) continue disarmament talks with the Soviet Un- ion, and (2) simultaneously to "rearm" with new, deadlier missiles. --Trans. ]
Epilogue
The Pleural Shock: On the Archetype of Weimar Laughter
"I know death, I am an old employee of his. People overesti- mate him, believe me. I can tell you, it's almost nothing. . . . We come out of the dark and go into the dark, in the middle lie events, but beginning and end, birth and death, are not ex-
perienced by us. They do not have any subjective character. As processes, they fall entirely within the sphere of the objective.
That is how it is with them. " This was the privy councillor's way of providing solace.
Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg
To the image of Weimar belong spiritual states that perhaps address sarcasm and the sense for irony but not the sense of humor. A nation that has just lost a war and two million killed in action will not find laughing all that easy. That one of the first satirical periodicals after the war, a Dada publication, could call itself Der blutige Ernst (Bloody earnest) indicates the direction of Weimar humorous culture. In the laughter of this decade, gaiety has to step over dead bodies, and in the end, people will laugh about the thought of corpses to come. When Gustav Regler returned in 1929 to Berlin from a trip to France, he heard this new laughter
? Employees' Smiles, 1929.
529
530 ? EPILOGUE
for the first time, with which the master men of 1933 would come into power, that power-through-joy laughter that droned out of the fighting egos and heroic prostheses: Regler saw a hunchback who carried in front of his belly a drum, on which he beat and sang:
"There was once a Communist
who didn't know what a Nazi is,
He went into a brown house,
and, without any bones, he came out! Hahahaha! "
There was scarcely any public laughter in these years that would not have been
laughter about horrors and against enemies, real or imaginary. It belonged either
to the distracted victims who tried to raise themselves with laughter above the
threats, or to those who, in the style of this Nazi newspaper seller, laughed at the
2
victims in advance.
It was Thomas Mann who like no other perceived the challenge of cynical
laughter to humor. Even at the beginning of the Weimar Republic, he tried to penetrate the new Zeitgeist at the end of the bourgeois age and to provide a concept of what it means to live in a "modern" world and "to go with the times" without losing oneself fully in the accommodation to the "bad new world. " In the rarefied air of the Zauberberg (The magic mountain), Thomas Mann settled accounts with the neocynical Weimar Zeitgeist. This has gone unnoticed by many readers who believe that these Davos conversations in the heights are nothing other than the last cultivated bourgeois intellectual niceties without any social binding force. In reality, Thomas Mann wrestled with the task of taking up the spirit of accommo- dation, collaboration, and affirmation, which in this century had been irresistibly caught in cynical waters, and of presenting a "positive conviction" that is not based on the pseudosovereign affirmation of deadly, matter-of-fact givens. On the magic mountain, as if for the last time, images of a humanity flourish, a humanity that remains spiritually alive without becoming cynical. A last positiveness is hinted at that is still not cynical positivism. It is a humanity that can no longer exist in the "low country. " The Davos heights correspond to the psychic zone where the drama of the magic mountain is played out. Here, a humorist tries to climb once more, higher than the highest peaks of cynicism. Of the latter's breathtaking summits, anyone can be convinced who, in the speeches of the grand cynic, the privy councillor Behrens, hears the hounds of death howling. It is he who, in this rarefied atmosphere, leads the way and sets the mood. On the magic mountain, cynicism reigns, and it is due, above all, to the inspired convolutions of Mann's prose that this book has not been understood, as explicitly as it should be, as the decisive dispute between two forms of "sublation" and irony. Here, the older humorous, ironic tradition wrestles with the irony of the modern Hey! - we're-alive syndrome. Instead of the cynical leap into the melee, here, an ironist
1
EPILOGUE ? 531
of the old school tries to raise himself above the tumult. He coquets, to be sure, with the modern "thrownness" and the cynically alert letting-oneself-be-carried- along, for the hero of this story, too, surrenders himself to his adventure on the magic mountain and lets himself be borne by the current of the rarefied air of the times. But in him arises something that is not merely driven along without any anchor but a presentiment of what earlier was called Bildung (cultivation) --a breath of the higher self, of humanity and of the affirmation of life in the face of all the "debauched" temptations toward regression and death.
The physiognomy of Weimar laughter was captured by Thomas Mann at least three times. And every time, it is a laughter that makes itself autonomous and no longer belongs to the one who is laughing. When, as on the mountain of tubercu- losis patients, the horrible and the ridiculous come too close to one another, a laughter breaks out for which we are no longer responsible. We do not laugh this way as long as we can assume responsibility for ourselves. We laugh this way when we are suddenly seized by an understanding that reaches more deeply into us than our civilized ego is allowed to acknowledge. The hero of the story, Hans Castorp, newly arrived, laughs this way when his cousin tells him with the driest of matter-of-factness how the corpses are brought into the valley in winter by bobsled.
"Well, I'll be! " cried Hans Castorp. And suddenly, he was caught in laughter, in a strong, uncontrollable laughter that shook his breast and distorted his face, which was somewhat stiff from the cool wind, into a quietly aching grimace. "With a bobsled! And you tell me that with complete calm? You have become quite cynical in these last five months! "
"Not at all cynical," answered Joachim, shrugging his shoulders. "How so? It's all the same to the corpses . . . By the way, it could well be that one becomes cynical up here with us. Behrens himself is also an old cynic --an excellent chap on the side, an old corps student and brilliant operator, so it seems. You'll like him. Then there's Krokowski, the assistant-a quite clever something. His activity is em- phasized in the brochure. He undertakes a dismantling of the soul with the patients. "
"What does he do? Dismantling of the soul? That's repulsive! " cried Hans Castorp, and now his gaiety took the upper hand. He was no longer master of it. After all the rest, the dismantling of souls had taken him over so fully, and he laughed so much that the tears ran down un- der the hand with which, leaning forward, he covered his eyes. (Der Zauberberg [Berlin, 1974], pp. 10-11)
Later, Uncle James Tienappel, too, the consul who appears on the magic mountain as a visitor, will burst out laughing in a similar way when Hans tells him the everyday details of sanatorium life, such as the formation of tubercles,
532 ? EPILOGUE
pneumotomies, lung removals, and gangrene of the lungs. He will sense that the human being in this world has lost the capacity to be disturbed about anything at all.
The boldest, most horrifying, and most apt laughter for the times, however, is the obscene, diabolical shock laughter of Anton Karlowitsch Ferge. This atro- cious laughter, which broke out in him during a lung operation, almost cost him his life. It was a matter of pleural shock, which can occur in such operations. Let us hear Ferge's report of this vulgar (hundsfottisch) experience, in which the laugher no longer recognized himself in his laughter, just as if a stranger within him was laughing himself to death.
Herr Ferge's good-tempered gray eyes opened wider and his face be-
came sallow every time he came to speak of the event that for him must
have been terrible. "Without anesthetic, gentlemen. Good, our kind can-
not bear that, it is forbidden in this case. One understands and finds
oneself to be reasonable in the matter. But the local does not go deep,
gentlemen, only the outer flesh is made numb by it. One feels it as one
is cut open, admittedly only a pressing and squeezing. I lie with co-
vered face, so that I don't see anything, and the assistant holds me on
the right side and the matron on the left. It is as if I am being pressed
and squeezed, that is, the flesh that is opened and pushed back with
clamps. But then I hear Herr Hofrat say: "Well, then," and at this mo-
ment, gentlemen, he begins to tap on the pleura with a blunt
instrument --it has to be blunt so that it does not pierce through prema-
turely. He palpates it in order to find the right place where he can
pierce and let in the gas, and while he is doing this, while he is moving
up and down on my pleura with the instrument, gentlemen, gentlemen!
then I was done for, it was the end of me, something indescribable hap-
pened to me. The pleura, gentleman, should not be touched, it should
not and does not want to be touched. That is taboo. It is covered with
flesh, isolated and unapproachable, once and for all. And now, he had
uncovered it and palpated it. Gentlemen, than I felt sick. Terrible, gen-
tlemen, I never would have thought that such a sevenfold horrible and 3
bitchy (hundsfottisch) mean feeling could exist at all on earth outside of hell! I fell into unconsciousness --into three unconsciousnesses at once, one green, one brown and one violet. Besides that, it stank in this unconsciousness. The pleural shock threw itself onto my sense of smell, gentlemen. It smelled to high heaven of hydrogen sulfide as it must smell in hell, and in all this, I heard myself laughing, while I was kick- ing the bucket, but not like a human being laughs, but rather, that was the most disgraceful and nauseating laughter I have heard in all my life, for the palpation of the pleura, gentlemen, that is as if one were being tickled in the utmost shameless, most exaggerated and most inhuman way. That's the way it is, not otherwise, with this damned disgrace and
EPILOGUE ? 533
torment, and that is the pleural shock that dear God may spare you. " {Der Zauberberg, pp. 374-75)
Notes
1. Regler, Das Ohrdes Malchus, p. 158: "I now saw what he was selling: it was the rag Dr. Goeb- bels edited, Der Angriff [The attack]. 'Murderer in broad daylight,' I said. "
2. See chapter 13 ("Dada Laughter"), chapter 16 ("Hitler's Laughter"), chapter 24 ("Employee's Smiling").
3. Hundsfott designates the genitals of the female dog; hundsfottisch: shameless, like a dog in heat.
Conclusion
Under Way toward a Critique of Subjective Reason
What goes under today, tired, Rises tomorrow, newly born. Some things stay lost in night--
Take care, stay alert and lively.
J. V. Eichendorff, Zwielicht (1815)
Perhaps it is only this:
my heart gradually attracts the buzzards
He who no longer sees any land on the left,
for him the earth soon races
like a worn-out tire toward the eternal rubbish dumps -- Doodleloodoot, now don't run straight away
to mama with your devastations.
Peter Ruhmkorf, Selbstportrait (1979)
Right at the beginning of the history of European philosophy, a laughter rose up that renounced its respect for serious thinking. Laertius tells how the pro- tophilosopher, Thales, the father of the Ionian philosophy of nature and the first in the series of men who personify Western ratio, once left his house in Miletus, accompanied by an old servant, to devote himself to the study of the heavens. Along the way, he fell into a ditch. "The woman then called out the following words to the one who was crying out: 'You can't even see, Thales, what lies before your feet, and you fancy that you know what is in the heavens. '"
This mockery inaugurates a second, largely invisible, dimension of the history of philosophy that is inaccessible to historiography, namely, the history of the "sublation" (Aufhebung) of philosophy. It is more a tradition of physiognomic, eloquent gestures than of texts. Nevertheless, it is a tradition just as densely and reliably woven as the tradition in which the great doctrines were recorded, handed down, and practiced. In this tendentially mute tradition, a number of fixed gestures appear that, through the millennia, recur with the archetypal force of perseverance and adaptability of primitive motifs: a skeptical shaking of the head;
534
CONCLUSION D 535
a malicious laugh; a return with a shrug of the shoulders to things that lie closer to hand; a realist astonishment at the helplessness of those who are the most intel- ligent; a stubborn insistence on the seriousness of life against the frivolous word garlands of abstraction. Here what gives philosophical thinking its greatness is exposed as an expression of weakness --as the inability to be small and as the ab- sence of spirit from the most obvious.
In the present essay on the structure and dynamic of cynical phenomena, this history of the sublation of philosophy was given firmer contours. It was related how, in the kynicism of Diogenes of Sinope, the laughter about philosophy itself became philosophical. I wanted to show how in the pantomimes and wordplays of the philosopher from the tub, the Gay Science was born, which saw the earnest- ness of the false life recur in the false earnestness of philosophy. With this, the satirical resistance of conceptually informed existence against the presumptuous concept and against a teaching that has been blown up into a form of life begins. Socrates mainumenos embodies in our tradition an impulse giver who denounces idealistic alienation at the moment of its emergence. In this, he went so far as to use his whole existence as a pantomimic argument against philosophical inver- sions. Not only did he react extremely sensitively and coarsely to the moral absur- dities of higher civilization; he was also the first to recognize the danger embodied in Plato, that the school will subjugate life, that the artificial psychosis of "abso- lute knowledge" wants to destroy the vital connection between perception, move- ment, and understanding, and that, in the grandiose earnestness of idealistic dis- course, nothing other than that earnestness returns with which life most lacking in spirit stifles itself with its "cares," its "will to power," and its enemies, "with whom one cannot fool around. "
In Diogenes' antiphilosophical jokes, an ancient variant of existentialism takes
on a form Heinrich Niehues-Probsting has called, with a very happy phrase bor-
rowed from Gigon, the "kynical impulse. " He means the sublation of philosophiz-
ing in mentally alert life oriented simultaneously toward nature and reason.
From
this source springs the critical existentialism of satirical consciousness that cuts
through the space of respectably presented European philosophies as if it were
its secret diagonal. An agile, worldly-wise intelligence had always rivaled the
stodgy discourses of serious theologists, metaphysicians, moralists, and ideo-
1
logues. Even the mightily eloquent dialectician, Marx, who wanted to heal the
world of its inversions, and the despairing ironist, Kierkegaard, who burst open the false sovereignty of having-understood-everything with the principle of "existence"--they too stepped as latecomers into the age-old tradition of perpetual sublations of philosophy. After Marx, Kierkgaard, and Nietzsche, only those efforts of thought still deserve a universal hearing that promise to keep step with the ironic, practical, and existential sublations of philosophy. For more than one hundred years, critical philosophy has no longer possessed enough self-certainty to let itself be caught sojourning any longer by its traditional serious naivetes.
536 ? CONCLUSION
Therefore, since then, for its part, it has exerted itself in rivalry with those real- isms about which it has embarrassed itself since the days of the Miletian maid. Philosophical thinking peddles its wares today at a fair of self-sublations and falls head over heels in its eagerness to find favor with ironic, pragmatic, and strategic realisms. The risk of such realistic metamorphoses is obvious: It can easily end up by substituting the bad with something worse. It is a short step from the kynical "sublation" of philosophy to the cynical self-denial of what great philosophy had embodied in its best aspects.
Life caught between myth and everyday reality was once confronted by philos- ophy as that which, through its understanding of the "good life," its social forms, and its moral-cosmic premises, was unambiguously cleverer. It lost its prestige to the extent that it lost its evident advantage in cleverness to "normal life. " In the transition from archaic teachings of wisdom to philosophy based on argument, it itself was engulfed in the twilight of alienation from life. It had to accept that the independent cleverness theories of pragmatics, economics, strategy, and poli- tics proved themselves to be its better, until, with its logical niceties, it became infantile and academic, and stood there as the Utopian idiot with its reminiscences about great ideals. Today philosophy is surrounded on all sides by maliciously clever empiricisms and realistic disciplines that "know better. " If these latter really did know what is better, perhaps not much would be lost with the downfall of philosophy. Since, however, today's scientific disciplines and doctrines of cleverness without exception can be suspected of providing knowledge that ag- gravates our situation rather than improves it, our interest turns back to what has not received its due by any previous sublation of philosophy. In a world full of injustice, exploitation, war, resentment, isolation, and blind suffering, the "subla- tion" of philosophy by the clever strategies of such a life brings forth also a painful lack of philosophy. This is documented by, among other things, the neoconserva- tive hunger for meaning today. The "false life" that already gloried in overcoming philosophy and metaphysics had never understood the contradiction of philoso- phy to such a life. Philosophy demands of life what Thales had described as "what is difficult": to know thyself.
At this point the ironies are reversed. Great philosophy has always taken life more seriously than the "seriousness of life" has taken philosophy. The latter's ba- sic attitude toward life was always a deeply respectful overtaxing: It reminded life of undreamed of capacities for self-ascent into the universal. The firmly estab- lished distance between great and small spirits, which has existed since the "age of the turning point" of the high cultures (about 500 B. C. ), became the stimulus of philosophical, anthropological systems of exercise and theories of develop- ment. The classical "know thyself contained the presumptuous demand of a previously unknown disciplinary self-limitation of individuals in connection with an equally unparalleled heightening of their cosmic self-understanding. From this height, everyday consciousness, with its acquired practical tricks, its short-
CONCLUSION ? 537
winded conventionality, and its helplessness in the face of the emotions, appeared as an unrespectable, immature preliminary form of developed reason. From then on, philosophy struggled with everyday consciousness with the aim of getting the better of its partly dull, partly cunning refusal to grow up in a philosophical sense, that is, of consciously shifting it into "meaningful wholes. " Therefore, classical philosophy, centered on "know thyself," is essentially exercise and pedagogy. The commandment of self-knowledge aimed at a self-assimilation of reflecting in- dividuals into well-ordered social and natural wholes--with the unexpressed promise that the human being, even when the state of social affairs is an affront to every thought of a rational order, many know itself to be bound into a deeper, natural-cosmic happening of reason. With "know thyself," classical philosophy promised the individual that, on the way inward, he or she would discover a com- mon denominator for world and self. In this way, it secured for itself an unexcell- able binding force that reliably bound existence together with reflection. That is why, for Thales, knowledge of the heavens and self-investigation could proceed directly parallel to each other. For as long as philosophy was able to believe in a synchronizing of experiences of the world and of the self, the principle of "know thyself could be spun out to an encyclopedia of knowledge, just as the encylope- dia could be compressed into "know thyself. " The classical systems drew their pathos from the certainty that worldly and self-experience had to converge under the sign of the "absolute. " They could still proceed from the premise that reflec- tion and life, theoretical and practical reason, could never completely separate themselves from each other because all knowing found an ultimate regulative in
the self-knowledge of the knowers.
In modernity, the brackets that in classical thinking held reflection and life to- gether burst apart. It becomes increasingly clear to us that we are at the point of losing the common denominator of self-experience and world experience. Even the most honorable postulate of self-knowledge today is suspected of having been naive, and what once appeared as the summit of reflectedness is today confronted by the suspicion that it was possibly only a chimera that arose through the misuse of metaphors of reflection. The greater part of present-day object knowledges has, in fact, freed itself from any relation to a self and confronts our conscious- ness in that extracted matter-of-factness from which no path is any longer bent "back" to a subjectivity. Nowhere does an ego experience it-"self" in modern scientific knowledge. Where this ego still bends over itself, with its obvious ten- dency to a worldless inwardness, it leaves reality behind. Thus, for present-day thinking, inwardness and outwardness, subjectivity and things, have been split into "alien worlds"; at the same time, the classical premise of philosophizing falls away. "Know thyself has long since been understood by modern people as an invitation to an ego trip for an escapist ignorance. Modern reflection expressly renounces any competency in embedding subjectivites without rupture into objec- tive worlds. What it uncovers is rather the gulf between both. The "self knows
538 D CONCLUSION
itself to be connected in a mysterious way to a "world," without being able to recognize itself in it in the sense of Greek cosmology. And no "mediating" authorities, such as social psychology or neurophysiology can alter anything in this regard. Modern self-reflection, in spite of all its "turnings back," thus can no longer "arrive home. " The subjects do not know themselves as "at home with themselves," either in themselves or in their environments. For radical thinking in modernity, at the self pole, emptiness exposes itself, and at the world pole, es- trangement. How an emptiness is supposed to recognize "itself in a stranger can- not be imagined by our reason no matter how hard we try.
Here, a, so to speak, non-Euclidean reflectiveness is astir that can no longer circle about the selfness of the self. If the movements of reflection in classical phi- losophy could be depicted in the structure of Homer's Odysseus, in which a wan- dering hero returns home via a thousand false paths across the whole world, in order there to be re-cognized by his woman, that is, by his "soul," then the reflec- tions of modern thinking in no way still find their way back "home. " They either move on the spot in essenceless flurries, drained of experience, or they drift on, like the eternal Jew or the Flying Dutchman, without hope of arriving, through the perpetually alien. The Odysseus of today no longer finds his Ithake; his Pene- lope has long forgotten him, and if even today she still unravels at night what was woven during the day, for fear of "finishing," that does not hinder her from losing, in the faces of her innumerable wifeless beaus, the face of teh "one" who might return. Even if Odysseus really found his way back to where he came from, no re-cognition would take place, and his own starting point would have to confront him as something as alien as the other tracts of land on his wanderings. For the modern subject, a "vagabond in existence," there is no longer any return home to the "identical. " What appeared to us as our "own" and as "origin," as soon as we "turn around," has always altered and been lost.
In view of these developments, the claim of classical philosophy to be more "serious" than mere life does not look good. Since modern thinking no longer en- trusts itself with the translation of self-knowledge into worldly knowledge, and of world experience into self-experience, philosophy has had to withdraw from theories of "objective reason" into those of "subjective reason. " The ground is thus taken from under the feet of the ancient holistic pathos, and philosophy sinks into the apparent truncatedness and groundlessness of the subjective. The truth is, however, that this subjective element establishes and unfolds itself in the process of modern civilization to such an extent that it was able to gain as much of a foot- hold as seemed necessary for its self-preservation. "Subjectivity" cast its nets over the "object" worlds and transformed excessively powerful first nature into a tamed second nature. Herein lies the source of modernity: The latter fosters the unfold- ing of the "subjective" to the relatively objective, of that which has no foothold to something that provides for itself its own foothold--the transformation of the world's wildness into what we make and think through. Modern philosophies that
CONCLUSION ? 539
set themselves the task of grasping these transformations are those we rightly think of as the "rational" philosophies: social philosophies, philosophies of science, philosophies of labor, of technology, of language. They link up directly with the producing, acting, thinking, and speaking of a subjectivity that has be- come sure of itself. Therefore, philosophy that does not speculate past the struc- tures of the modern world is basically practical philosophy. As such, it must equate what is intelligible in the world with what is rationally feasible, thinkable, examinable, and articulable. In the theory of subjective reason, the world is paraphrased as the content of our doings. Subjectivity has been turned fully into praxis.
The glaring poverty of modern practical philosophy, which would really like to produce something sound, above all, a universally binding, rigorously grounded ethics, and cannot for the life of it manage to do so, is, however, noth- ing other than the poverty of subjective reason as such. The latter finds a foothold in itself only to the extent that it uninterruptedly pursues its activistic fury of "praxis. " Modern reason knows itself to be tied to the back of the praxis tiger. As long as the latter runs its course in a predictable way, subjective reason re- mains in relative balance. But woe betide when it gets caught in one of its notori- ous crises and becomes frenzied due to resistances or profitable prey. Then it lets its praxis rider know that with ethical tranquilizers alone, a predatory animal of its dimensions cannot be brought under control. Practical philosophy that tries to be respectable thus develops against its will into a seminar for modern tiger management. There it is discussed whether it is possible to talk reasonably with the beast or whether it would be better if a few of the tendentially dispensable riders were sacrificed to the stubborn systemic brute. In these taming conversa- tions of subjective reason with the praxis tiger, cynicism is inevitably in play, which, with the appeal to reason, lets it be known with a wink that it did not mean it so seriously. The superficial view of things, in addition, confirms this stance. Where thinking has to agonize, especially over the projects of praxis that were unleashed with its own aid and have become autonomous, there subjective rea- son, even as reason, is treated with irony and suspected of being merely subjec- tivity that keeps on tearing along. With incessant irony, modern philosophizing, which had once been so sure of itself, shrinks to a circuslike rationalism that, in its efforts to train the praxis tiger, proves itself to be embarrassingly helpless. If the philosophers themselves, in time, also become somewhat addled in this occu- pation, then, given how things are, it is no wonder. In order to visualize the curi- osity, philosophy, in the modern world, one has to recall an ancient episode, when a Greek Diadochian prince, to reciprocate for the gift of two elephants from an Indian maharaja, sent back two very sensible philosophers.
In the twilight of late enlightenment, the insight gains shape that our "praxis," which we always held to be the most legitimate child of reason, in fact, represents the central myth of modernity. The demythologization of praxis that thereby falls
540 ? CONCLUSION
due forces radical corrections in the self-understanding of practical philosophy. The latter must now become clear about the grave extent to which it had been taken in by the myth of activity and how blindly it had given itself over to its alli- ance with rational activism and constructivism. In this blinding, practical reason could not see that the highest concept of behavior is not "doing" but "letting things be," and that it achieves its utmost not by reconstructing the structures of our do- ing but by penetrating the relations between doing and desisting. Every active deed is etched in the matrix of passivity; every act of disposing over something remains dependent on the stable massiveness of what is not at our disposal; every change is borne also by the reliable perseverance of what is unchanged; and everything that is calculated rests on the indispensable base of what is unpredicta- bly spontaneous.
At this point, the most modern reflection of the classical "know thyself is re- covered. It leads us in a quasi-neoclassical movement of thought to the point where we can see how the producing, reflecting, active self is inlaid in a passive self that cannot be manipulated by any deed. All subjectivities, competences, acti- visms, and illusions of doers are still borne by this deeper layer. And no matter how much activity belongs to our essence, it nevertheless has basically the struc- ture of "letting-oneself-do. " The insight that "feasibility" has structural limits, has, since its processing by enlightenment, lost its antienlightenment tone and by no means necessarily ends up in the maliciously joyful impotence philosophies with which the conservatism of the church has long since pursued its business. Now it can be revealed that reason and praxis do not belong exclusively together, but that in a nonpraxis, a refraining from acting, a letting happen and a noninter- vention, higher qualities of insight can come to expression than in any deed, no matter how well thought through.
Our ancient main witness, Diogenes of Sinope, the illuminated beggar, the self-sufficient, ironic representative of the pathos of nature, is to be cited one last time, he who, with his "restraint," had founded a model for those ancient Euro- pean virtues of forbearance, from which modernity, with its activist ethos of self- assertion has turned away as radically as possible. Among the innumerable anec- dotes documenting the impulse of his teaching, one in particular shines forth with profundity:
He praised those who want to marry and do not, those who want to sail off and do not, those who want to be active in affairs of state and re- frain from doing so, who want to educate children and do not, who pre- pare themselves to enter into the services of a prince and hold off. (Di- ogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 29)
Here, a puzzling oriental, indeed Asiatic component comes into the world feel- ing of this man, which had made its way from the far-off corner of the Black Sea to the Western metropolis of Athens. It suggests that where we have not done any-
CONCLUSION ? 541
thing, no tiger is on the prowl from which we would have difficulty dismounting. Those who can let things be are not pursued from behind by projects that have taken on a life of their own; those who exercise the praxis of abstention do not get caught in the self-continuation automatism of unleashed activisms. In that Di- ogenes, as they say, placed "nature against the law," he anticipated the principle of self-regulation and restricted active interventions to an extent "in accord with nature. " Imbued with the spontaneous flourishing of structures, he put his trust in entelechy and renounced "projects. " Although ancient kynicism, with its Socratic conviction that virtue is learnable, seems to stress the efforts of the "sub- ject," it nevertheless knew very well that only through forbearance and tranquil- lity would subjective reason be capable of hearing an "objective" reason within itself. The great thinking of antiquity is rooted in the experience of enthusiastic tranquillity when, on the summit of having-thought, the thinker steps aside and lets himself be permeated by the "self-revelation" of truth. Human openness for what we today --with both sympathy and nostalgia--call "objective reason," for the ancients was based in "cosmic passivity" and in the observation of how radical thinking can make up its unavoidable belatedness in relation to the pregiven world and, by virtue of its experience of being, reaches the same height as the "whole. " This culminates in the classical temerities of world reason or the logos that, to use Heidegger's words, lets itself "be given to think" what is thinkable by being itself.
That modernity has had to take leave of theories of objective reason follows from the fundamentally altered relation to the world of modern thinking. Subjec- tive reason feels it as unbearable audacity when the logos doctrines demand that we relinquish our "own interests" and assimilate ourselves into a great "whole" -- roughly, in the same way the parts of a totality that benevolently took care of all would have to subordinate themselves to that totality. It is impossible to still think of subjectivity in its relation to the world according to the model of the part and the whole. Subjectivity understands itself unquestioningly as a "world for itself," and if today we even had to lose the harmonistic idea of the individual as a microcosmic mirror of the macrocosmos, modern subjectivity would neverthe- less be distinguished as a stubborn microchaos in a universal connection that is inaccessible to the concepts of reason. We have focused essentially on subjec- tivity because we could not believe in the sense and well-meaning of a whole, even if we wanted to. Said drastically, we have subjectivized ourselves as subjects because we have experienced the whole as disunion, nature as the source of horrid shortages, and the social world as world war. This is what has awakened a suspi- cious alertness in modern consciousness against importunate holistic doctrines, with which the world's misery is supposed to be presented as harmony and in- dividual claims on life are supposed to be talked into self-sacrifice. The conven- tional theories of objective reason are compromised by the fact that they have been seen through as tricks in the service of orders of domination. Little by little,
542 ? CONCLUSION
they are supposed to feed the internalization of sacrifices to the members of soci- ety for the sake of social wholes that in the end usually remain so relentlessly against the individuals that one would think they had never made their sacrifices. It is no accident that the enlightenment began with skepticism about the effective- ness of religious sacrifice and with the exposure of priestly sacrificial swindles. Once such a suspicion has become firm, it will scarcely still occur to individuals to sacrifice "themselves" or "something" of themselves. It was modern enlighten- ment that taught us to turn back the process of the internalization of sacrifice step by step, until our life appeared in lurid individualization, not sacrificed, but also unconnected with the impossible "great whole"-as aggregate of the pure will to live in the armaments of subjective reason, which no longer lets itself be taken in by anything and demands everything from existence.
In its legitimate disassembly of the great world images of objective reason, en- lightenment runs the danger of destroying not only the ideological pretenses of the fraud of sacrifice but also the inheritance of a passivistic consciousness with- out which practical reason cannot really be called reason. In its best moments, classical "logocentric" thinking also knew that its visions of "objective" world rea- son cannot be forced into a consistent campaign of thinking but light up like mo- ments of happiness when "the possible has been done" and the greater connection becomes visible between deed and forbearance. Where therefore the thought of totalities pervaded by reason seriously emerges, thinkers show that beyond their active efforts, they know the passive reason of an integrating letting-be. Accord- ingly, the idea that the whole world is a symphonic process can also be read as the cipher for the subjective capacity for the utmost relaxation in a relation to the world that is no longer colored by animosity. Those who can "let themselves go" in a cosmic structure as if at home aim not at their self-mutilation in favor of a Moloch totality but at a creative flowing into what is possible and an unaffected self-preservation and self-elevation of existence. Such an aim obviously cor- responds to the interests of even the most subjective reason.
Here, what I want to call not the dialectic but the irony of enlightenment sets in. With its activistic storming of doing, planning, and thinking for oneself, it was so successful for two centuries that in the meantime it can scarcely still bear its own success. Ironically, where modern subjective reason becomes enmeshed in the gears of subjective interests, reason succumbs, whereas where subjective rea- son effects something in accord with reason, subjectivities have faded into the background. Empirical subjectivity is at least just as far removed from subjective reason as the latter is from an "objective" reason. Each, viewed from the stand- point of "mere life," is just as much "idealistically" exaggerated. In social reality, subjective reason is taken in by private reason and thereby pulled down from its beautiful universality to the ground of a thousand chaotically juxtaposed in- dividual strategies. Today it can be seen that the modern constructions of a sub-
jective reason were no less Utopian than the visions of an objective reason were
1
CONCLUSION ? 543
in antiquity and the Middle Ages. For subjective reason is nothing without a co- herent universal subject. Accordingly, in modern thinking, the same spook of a "total subject" wanders, which is supposed to bear the entire rational potential of reason within itself. In this, the universalism of enlightenment soars as high as any thinking that aims at the whole ever could. It lives from the idea of a com- municative total mediation in which all privacies would be melted into a planetary conversation. Without its communicative-pathetic core, subjective reason would have nothing to counterpose to its reduction to the format of private reason in the service of individual, group, and systemic egoisms. Only with the anticipation of universal understanding can enlightenment refrain from the war of individual strategies and save itself in the universal. Since having dissolved social communi- cation under the sign of myth, enlightenment must rely on the myth of communi- cation. In communication, the struggling individual strategies would be so softened and relaxed that they could flow into rational agreements. In this way, a structure arises similar to what was observed in the relation between the in- dividual and "objective reason. " Only through the individuals becoming con- sciously passive and tranquil does the universal prevail against the particular, the objective against the subjective, experience against mere imagination. Only they can expect something rational from communication who have already conceded, in classical passivity and deep yieldingness, to the universal, a precedence to the process of reaching agreement over the motives of its participants. Otherwise, no matter how much mutual understanding was undertaken, it would only become
manifest that we cannot reach agreement with each other. If the inability to sub- jugate oneself is a characteristic structure of modern subjective autonomy, sub- jective reason must at least be allowed to demand that the subjects subjugate them- selves to the priority of communication over those communicating, and of experiences over "needs. " Otherwise, it would lose its credentials as reason.
The critique of cynical reason has shown how "subjects" who have become both hard and agile in existential and social strictures of struggle have given the universal the cold shoulder and have not hesitated to repudiate all high cultural ideals when it was a matter of self-preservation. "Pugnacious reason" is from the start an activist and untranquil reason that at no price lets itself be made fluid and never subjects itself to the precedence of what is common, universal, and encom- passing. Under these conditions, the efforts of practical philosophy are confined within depressingly narrow limits. Practical reason, which attempts to guide the undertakings of subjectivities, runs as if in vain up against the unpliable self- insistence of millions of fragmented centers of private reason. The latter want to subject every rationality to private conditions and act as if enlightenment has no right to intrude into certain reserved places where secret strategies are spun. Sub-
jective reason that has regressed to private reason always bears within itself a will to night (Ernst Weiss), a cunning not-wanting-to-know about connections, a making-itself-inaccessible to the demands of universality and a strategic harden-
544 D CONCLUSION
ing, made clever by life, against all sirens' melodies of communication and recon- ciliation. Indeed, "respectable" individual strategies may occasionally "negoti- ate," but where the inner strategists look over the shoulders of the dialogue part- ners, there the "communication" is also strategically perverted. Productive communication already eludes calculable feasibility and, where it succeeds, has the structure of letting-oneself-communicate. The cynicism analysis, by contrast, describes the interactions of subjectivism that cannot unwind, of highly armed centers of private reason, conglomerations of power bristling with weapons and science-supported systems of hyperproduction. None of them would even dream of bending to a communicative reason; rather, under the pretense of communica- tion, they want to subjugate the latter to its private conditions.
Under the pressure of suffering in the most recent crises, members of our civilization see themselves forced, quasi-neoclassically, to repeat the "know thy- self," and in this they discover their systematic inability to communicate in the way that would guarantee true de-escalation. The subjective that cannot "mirror" itself in any "whole" nevertheless encounters itself in countless analogous subjec- tivities that, similarly worldless and encapsulated, pursue only their "own" goals and that, where they interact with others, are only bound to each other, precari- ously and subject to revocation, in "antagonistic cooperation. " The renewed "know thyself produces an image of incurable self-preservation that is merci- lessly thrown back onto every "self by all others. Hence, if in modernity, worldly and self-experience converge in spite of all sundering, they do so under the condi- tion that the struggles of self-preservation of privatized subjective reason in- wardly as well as outwardly, psychologically as well as technologically, in the intimate domain as well as in political spheres, have generated the same isolation of subjects, the same iciness, the same polemical, strategic subjectivisms, and the same quick-footed denial of high-cultural ethical ideals. I have tried to develop a language in which one can speak about both spheres with the same expressions. In the analysis of cynicism, the language of self-experience is again directly syn-
chronized with the language of worldly experience--assuming we wanted to make the self side speak in an extremely honest way, the world side in a ruthlessly clear way.
So much is obvious: that the cynicism analysis aims at a critique of subjective reason without immediately wanting to return to the lost illusions of an objective reason. This would mean fighting against one false respectability with another. The critique of "cynical reason" therefore argues immanently and "dialectically. " In overview of the course of enlightenment it recapitulates the inner contradic- tions in enlightenment and repeats the ironic "labor on the superego," or better, the combative "labor on the ideal" that inevitably falls due under the predomi- nance of strategic subjectivities in class and military societies. In this we have dealt with the "cultural struggle" for the great ideals, whose validity or worthless- ness decides the existence or decay of personal and collective integrity: heroic
CONCLUSION ? 545
courage, the legitimacy of power, love, the medical arts, praise of the living, truth, authenticity, obedience to experience, just exchange. In this order, we have sketched phenomenologically the various worlds of values, with their inner rup- tures and struggles. One must have once taken these ideals seriously, without reservation, in order to be able to empathize with the drama of their satirical accu- sation by kynical resistance and with the tragicomedy of their self-denial by the serious cynicism of the will to power and profit. Those who have never respected such ideals and orient themselves, in their own twilight, toward their ambiguity, will never understand the necessity of the questions posed here: where these am- biguities come from and which experiences had to dull the once uncomplicated "shining" light of enlightenment to the overproblematic twilight of late moder- nity. Thus, the critique of subjective reason as well as that of strategic reason, of strategic as well as cynical "reasson," leads through a manifold convoluted odyssey of ambivalences whose threads, the closer we come to the present, entan- gle themselves all the more in threatening complexity.
"Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment. " In this way, Immanuel Kant had formulated the slogan of the still self-certain, modern, subjective doctrine of reason in his famous essay of 1784, What Is Enlightenment? With skeptical optimism, this reason thought itself capable, through subjective efforts, of coping with the tendencies of the world that did not "yet" obey the standards of reason. One's own ability to know, summoned by Kant, is based on the vital quality of a courage that is alien to the modern despair about the "state of affairs. " Although Kant forbade us to think of "objective goals" in nature, his philosophizing orients itself, to be sure, not to- ward an overarching world reason but toward the confidence in our ability to bring reason into the state of the world. Secretly, classical enlightenment too as- sumes that the "nature of things," as if it were already prepared to bend to our aims, has already come the greatest part of the way toward the efforts of subjec- tive reason. By connecting the use of the understanding directly to courageous self-confidence, Kant betrays that although reason is supposed to be restricted critically and discreetly to achievements of subjectivity, he relies in his extracriti- cal relation to the world on a great, mute "accommodation" of nature to reason. It is courage that allows enlightenment thinking to imagine a rational guidance of the state of the world. This courage hints at that forbearance in which the ac- tivity of enlightenment, too, must know itself to be structurally embedded. Wher- ever enlightenment shows promise of success, it has the structure of a coura- geous, spontaneous letting-oneself-think-and-do that relies on the possibility that our knowing and activity do not blindly and subjectively race past all tendencies of reality, but creatively and adeptly join up with strivings and forces of the world in order in the end "to make something more out of it," in the sense of rational goals.
In view of past and threatening world catastrophes, today's historically frus-
546 D CONCLUSION
trated life feeling may no longer really believe in this. Often it shows itself to be extremely uncourageous in "making use of its own understanding. " Since they have to a large extent lost their courage to reason, the heirs of enlightenment to- day, nervous, doubting, and forcibly without illusions, are on the way to a global cynicism. Only in the form of derision and renunciation do references to the ideals of a humane culture still seem bearable. Cynicism, as enlightened false consciousness, has become a hard-boiled, shadowy cleverness that has split cour- age off from itself, holds anything positive to be fraud, and is intent only on some- how getting through life. He who laughs last, laughs as if in pleural shock. Cyni- cal consciousness adds up the "bad experiences" of all times and lets only the prospectless uniformity of hard facts prevail.