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.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
It has to be so.
You only get out of the dirt if you get yourself dirty.
And we want to get out!
I write: We. Do you understand me? I leave you now in order to stay with you. Will you continue to love me? "
520 ? POSTCOITAL TWILIGHT
Fabian sat quite still. It became progressively darker. His heart ached. He held onto the studs of the armchair as if he were resisting forces that wanted to tear him away. He pulled himself together. The letter lay on the carpet and shone in the dark.
"But I wanted to change, Cornelia," said Fabian, (p. 125)
Chapter 26
Weimar Double Decisions, or: Matter- of-Factness unto Death
Total onlooker--you have been seen through totally. Gustav Wangenheim, Die Mausefalle (1931)
The year is 1932. The cards have been shuffled for the last game. For the insight- ful it is clear that the horizon has already closed. The alternatives from now on will rear up in dull rage or helpless mind games, but events can no longer be averted. The year 1932 is a chaotic, inconceivably complicated one. It forms the last piece of the crisis complex of 1930-32, about which Ludwig Marcuse said rightly that it is more difficult to describe than an entire century would be.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
This year uses up three chancellors after the cabinet of the Centrist politician, Briining, had collapsed in May. At that time, Goebbels notes in his diary:
[5 May 1932]
It's already beginning. It is really enjoyable. In the party, we must now be absolutely quiet. We have to play at being disinterested. . . .
[13 May 1932]
The crisis goes on according to program. . . .
[30 May 1932]
The bomb has burst. At noon Briining handed over the dismissal of the entire cabinet to the Reich president. The system is collapsing. {Die un- geliebte Republik. Dokumente zur Innen- und aussenpolitik Weimars 1918-1933, ed. W. Michalka and G. Niedhart [Munich, 1980], pp. 327-28)
In both the subsequent cabinets, there are, to be sure, still no Nazis, but all the more "disinterested" and party less politicians, who in earnest already go about depoliticizing politics. Under Papen and Schleicher, the "matter-of-fact
521
522 ? WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS
ministers" dominate, who have "freed" themselves from narrow party ties so as to better administer the interest of the "whole"-of course, in close association with German nationals who represent in the governments, if not the interests of the whole, at least of the whole of heavy industry. In 1932, the entire voting popu- lation is called to the ballot box three times, once in April to elect the president and again in July and November for the Reichstag, which staggers on unable to act, especially after the July elections made the Nazis into the strongest party. In the presidential election, the choice is between Hindenburg and Hitler, and the choice, of course, also with the help of the still "sensible" Social Democrat votes, falls on the "lesser evil" that, nine months later, hands over the proclamation of appointment to the greater evil. The Prussian Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) prime minister, Otto Braun, wrote in Vorwarts, the party organ, on March 10:
For the electors there remains only one alternative: Hindenburg or Hit- ler. Can the choice be difficult? Look at both men. Hitler, this proto- type of the political adventurer. . . . Opposing him, Hindenburg. The embodiment of calm and constancy, of male loyalty and sacrificing duti- fulness for the whole of the people . . . filled with a Kantian feeling of duty. . . . I will vote for Hindenburg and I appeal to the millions of voters . . . Do the same, beat Hitler, vote for Hindenburg.
Braun's appeal is a masterpiece of late-Weimar tactics: doublethink, double
1roleplay, double decisions. One creates the false impression of having thought
through the situation to the last detail and then votes, with the entire pathos of apparent responsibility, for the purportedly "lesser evil. " No one has analyzed So- cial Democratic ambiguity better than the Social Democrat, Fritz Tarnow, at the Leipzig SPD party congress in 1931.
Well, we stand indeed at capitalism's sickbed not only as a diagnosti- cian but also --now, what should I say? --as a doctor who wants to cure, or as a joyful heir who cannot wait for the end and most of all would like to help things along with a little poison? Our whole situation is ex- pressed in this image. (Dokumente zur Deutschen Geschichte, 1929-33, ed. W. Ruge and W. Schumann [Frankfurt, 1977], p. 39)
Tarnow describes precisely the unholy Left alternative between tragic respect- ability and cynicism. By now, we know these medical metaphors all too well. Had not Hitler repeatedly spoken of a political "tuberculosis" from which the patient does not die immediately but which progresses "stealthily" and uncannily if the "bitter fortune" of the crisis does not bring the sickness to a head? Erich Miihsam, by contrast, had already referred to the double role of the doctor, who simultane- ously operates on and exterminates the patient (chapter 20). Now, because the
WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS ? 523
crisis has surfaced in the most violent form, the double game becomes fully clear even to the players. Tarnow goes on. We are condemned, it seems to me, to be the doctor, who seriously wants to cure, and nevertheless maintain the feeling that we are heirs who as soon as possible want to receive the entire estate of the capital- ist system. This double role, doctor and heir, is a damned difficult task. We could save ourselves many a quarrel in the party if we were con- tinually conscious of this double role. Sometimes some think that the needy situation of those who rely on the patient getting better demands that we do everything to heal the patient (capitalism); others think that now, when it is already gasping, is the right moment to give it the coup de grace.
Tarnow now gives his vote: He pleads for the role of the doctor and advocates humanitarian, medically respectable tactics, rather than the cynicism of the heir.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
It is not so much the patient who arouses our sympathy, but the masses who stand behind it. When the patient gasps, the masses out there go hungry. If we know that and know of a medicine--even if we are not convinced that it will cure the patient but will at least ameliorate its rat- tling, so that the masses out there again get something to eat--then we will give the patient the medicine and, at that moment, not think too much about the fact that we are heirs and await the patient's impending end. (p. 39)
These Social Democratic seesaw tacticians and double role players, however, entered with harsh rhetorics into the defensive alliance against fascism that was formed in 1932 under the dangerous-sounding name "Iron Front" and which was to bring together the SPD, the trade unions, the Reich's Banner, and some repub- lican groups. Already at that time, Ossietzky pronounced that only some sections deserved the epithet "iron," whereas other sections were "made of more pliable stuff and some are no better than pancake batter" (ibid. p. 52).
In 1932, the number of unemployed had risen to over 6 million, of which 3. 8 million were in Prussia, and almost half a million in Berlin alone. The welfare offices had registered seven million needy recipients for winter aid. The crisis had created the scenario in which the role of savior was to be assigned to one among all the deceivers, strategists, double role players, and gamblers with responsi- bility.
The Reich's capital was feverish. Every night, corpses were delivered to the police. Sometimes they bore on their bloody coats the sign of the republican flag, sometimes the Communist Soviet star, sometimes the swastika, sometimes simply the number of the state police. More often, however, they bore only the signs of despair in their faces, that light green, the color given to them by the gas they had gulped. . . .
September 30 Tag* 38-S&. Wocke
524 ? WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS
? ? ? ? 21 22 23 24 0<mr! <<>r>>tse Fl-eBas Sonnalmnd aoiwtag
|:. :,," ? p. ;=*J. :
Qi<< Jijgomt I_<<rsln>> und 1 i fT>>>>r*ohS>>ri I
One must have seen the general misery so closely in order to fall prey all too easily to a revolutionary idea. . . . All views were sim- plified to one sentence: It can't go on like this anymore! . . . Every suicide who was carried out of his gas-filled flat seemed to raise himself a last time from the stretcher and point his finger at those standing about. (Gustav Regler, Das Ohr des Malchus [Frankfurt, 1975], pp.
178-79, 182)
The great "joint thinking" now began to bear fruit. Those who had learned to "think in terms of relationships," who had studied the Great Dialectic, had thought through Napoleon's example, and had practiced looking down from the general's hill, now found themselves in the position of the leaf that joins in the ecstasy of the "will to power" that drives the caterpillar to devour. Even one's own defeat then looks like mere tactics. Regler tells of a trade union functionary he met in mid-January 1933: "Just let him come to power," he said regarding Hitler. "In eight months, he will be bankrupt" (ibid. , p. 189). Thinking: And then it's our
to die StMscMl
WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS ? 525
turn. Similar models of thinking are firmly evidenced in the Communist party. In July 1932, the chairman, Thalmann, is outraged when SPD functionaries ask KPD leaders whether they are at all serious about the anti-Fascist united front. Hitler's pack of officers and princes had declared that it wants to exter- minate, hang, behead and break the Communist movement on the wheel. And in view of this fact, in view of the danger that Germany could become a land of gallows and pyres, we Communists are deemed to be not in earnest about the anti-Fascist, the proletarian united front. (Dokumente zur Deutschen Geschichte, p. 65)
Nevertheless, the question is correctly posed and the answer is not free of hypocrisy. For the questioner as well as the respondent have for a long time been speaking the language of doublethink and know all too well that every politician, in addition to what he says, calculates on a second level. For many Communists, the united front was a respectable fiction they themselves, with a second cynical look, easily saw through. Even its protagonists did not really "believe" in it. 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
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
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.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
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
2victims 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
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
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
1EPILOGUE ? 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
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
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.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
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-
1logues. 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
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
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.
I write: We. Do you understand me? I leave you now in order to stay with you. Will you continue to love me? "
520 ? POSTCOITAL TWILIGHT
Fabian sat quite still. It became progressively darker. His heart ached. He held onto the studs of the armchair as if he were resisting forces that wanted to tear him away. He pulled himself together. The letter lay on the carpet and shone in the dark.
"But I wanted to change, Cornelia," said Fabian, (p. 125)
Chapter 26
Weimar Double Decisions, or: Matter- of-Factness unto Death
Total onlooker--you have been seen through totally. Gustav Wangenheim, Die Mausefalle (1931)
The year is 1932. The cards have been shuffled for the last game. For the insight- ful it is clear that the horizon has already closed. The alternatives from now on will rear up in dull rage or helpless mind games, but events can no longer be averted. The year 1932 is a chaotic, inconceivably complicated one. It forms the last piece of the crisis complex of 1930-32, about which Ludwig Marcuse said rightly that it is more difficult to describe than an entire century would be.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
This year uses up three chancellors after the cabinet of the Centrist politician, Briining, had collapsed in May. At that time, Goebbels notes in his diary:
[5 May 1932]
It's already beginning. It is really enjoyable. In the party, we must now be absolutely quiet. We have to play at being disinterested. . . .
[13 May 1932]
The crisis goes on according to program. . . .
[30 May 1932]
The bomb has burst. At noon Briining handed over the dismissal of the entire cabinet to the Reich president. The system is collapsing. {Die un- geliebte Republik. Dokumente zur Innen- und aussenpolitik Weimars 1918-1933, ed. W. Michalka and G. Niedhart [Munich, 1980], pp. 327-28)
In both the subsequent cabinets, there are, to be sure, still no Nazis, but all the more "disinterested" and party less politicians, who in earnest already go about depoliticizing politics. Under Papen and Schleicher, the "matter-of-fact
521
522 ? WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS
ministers" dominate, who have "freed" themselves from narrow party ties so as to better administer the interest of the "whole"-of course, in close association with German nationals who represent in the governments, if not the interests of the whole, at least of the whole of heavy industry. In 1932, the entire voting popu- lation is called to the ballot box three times, once in April to elect the president and again in July and November for the Reichstag, which staggers on unable to act, especially after the July elections made the Nazis into the strongest party. In the presidential election, the choice is between Hindenburg and Hitler, and the choice, of course, also with the help of the still "sensible" Social Democrat votes, falls on the "lesser evil" that, nine months later, hands over the proclamation of appointment to the greater evil. The Prussian Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) prime minister, Otto Braun, wrote in Vorwarts, the party organ, on March 10:
For the electors there remains only one alternative: Hindenburg or Hit- ler. Can the choice be difficult? Look at both men. Hitler, this proto- type of the political adventurer. . . . Opposing him, Hindenburg. The embodiment of calm and constancy, of male loyalty and sacrificing duti- fulness for the whole of the people . . . filled with a Kantian feeling of duty. . . . I will vote for Hindenburg and I appeal to the millions of voters . . . Do the same, beat Hitler, vote for Hindenburg.
Braun's appeal is a masterpiece of late-Weimar tactics: doublethink, double
1roleplay, double decisions. One creates the false impression of having thought
through the situation to the last detail and then votes, with the entire pathos of apparent responsibility, for the purportedly "lesser evil. " No one has analyzed So- cial Democratic ambiguity better than the Social Democrat, Fritz Tarnow, at the Leipzig SPD party congress in 1931.
Well, we stand indeed at capitalism's sickbed not only as a diagnosti- cian but also --now, what should I say? --as a doctor who wants to cure, or as a joyful heir who cannot wait for the end and most of all would like to help things along with a little poison? Our whole situation is ex- pressed in this image. (Dokumente zur Deutschen Geschichte, 1929-33, ed. W. Ruge and W. Schumann [Frankfurt, 1977], p. 39)
Tarnow describes precisely the unholy Left alternative between tragic respect- ability and cynicism. By now, we know these medical metaphors all too well. Had not Hitler repeatedly spoken of a political "tuberculosis" from which the patient does not die immediately but which progresses "stealthily" and uncannily if the "bitter fortune" of the crisis does not bring the sickness to a head? Erich Miihsam, by contrast, had already referred to the double role of the doctor, who simultane- ously operates on and exterminates the patient (chapter 20). Now, because the
WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS ? 523
crisis has surfaced in the most violent form, the double game becomes fully clear even to the players. Tarnow goes on. We are condemned, it seems to me, to be the doctor, who seriously wants to cure, and nevertheless maintain the feeling that we are heirs who as soon as possible want to receive the entire estate of the capital- ist system. This double role, doctor and heir, is a damned difficult task. We could save ourselves many a quarrel in the party if we were con- tinually conscious of this double role. Sometimes some think that the needy situation of those who rely on the patient getting better demands that we do everything to heal the patient (capitalism); others think that now, when it is already gasping, is the right moment to give it the coup de grace.
Tarnow now gives his vote: He pleads for the role of the doctor and advocates humanitarian, medically respectable tactics, rather than the cynicism of the heir.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
It is not so much the patient who arouses our sympathy, but the masses who stand behind it. When the patient gasps, the masses out there go hungry. If we know that and know of a medicine--even if we are not convinced that it will cure the patient but will at least ameliorate its rat- tling, so that the masses out there again get something to eat--then we will give the patient the medicine and, at that moment, not think too much about the fact that we are heirs and await the patient's impending end. (p. 39)
These Social Democratic seesaw tacticians and double role players, however, entered with harsh rhetorics into the defensive alliance against fascism that was formed in 1932 under the dangerous-sounding name "Iron Front" and which was to bring together the SPD, the trade unions, the Reich's Banner, and some repub- lican groups. Already at that time, Ossietzky pronounced that only some sections deserved the epithet "iron," whereas other sections were "made of more pliable stuff and some are no better than pancake batter" (ibid. p. 52).
In 1932, the number of unemployed had risen to over 6 million, of which 3. 8 million were in Prussia, and almost half a million in Berlin alone. The welfare offices had registered seven million needy recipients for winter aid. The crisis had created the scenario in which the role of savior was to be assigned to one among all the deceivers, strategists, double role players, and gamblers with responsi- bility.
The Reich's capital was feverish. Every night, corpses were delivered to the police. Sometimes they bore on their bloody coats the sign of the republican flag, sometimes the Communist Soviet star, sometimes the swastika, sometimes simply the number of the state police. More often, however, they bore only the signs of despair in their faces, that light green, the color given to them by the gas they had gulped. . . .
September 30 Tag* 38-S&. Wocke
524 ? WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS
? ? ? ? 21 22 23 24 0<mr! <<>r>>tse Fl-eBas Sonnalmnd aoiwtag
|:. :,," ? p. ;=*J. :
Qi<< Jijgomt I_<<rsln>> und 1 i fT>>>>r*ohS>>ri I
One must have seen the general misery so closely in order to fall prey all too easily to a revolutionary idea. . . . All views were sim- plified to one sentence: It can't go on like this anymore! . . . Every suicide who was carried out of his gas-filled flat seemed to raise himself a last time from the stretcher and point his finger at those standing about. (Gustav Regler, Das Ohr des Malchus [Frankfurt, 1975], pp.
178-79, 182)
The great "joint thinking" now began to bear fruit. Those who had learned to "think in terms of relationships," who had studied the Great Dialectic, had thought through Napoleon's example, and had practiced looking down from the general's hill, now found themselves in the position of the leaf that joins in the ecstasy of the "will to power" that drives the caterpillar to devour. Even one's own defeat then looks like mere tactics. Regler tells of a trade union functionary he met in mid-January 1933: "Just let him come to power," he said regarding Hitler. "In eight months, he will be bankrupt" (ibid. , p. 189). Thinking: And then it's our
to die StMscMl
WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS ? 525
turn. Similar models of thinking are firmly evidenced in the Communist party. In July 1932, the chairman, Thalmann, is outraged when SPD functionaries ask KPD leaders whether they are at all serious about the anti-Fascist united front. Hitler's pack of officers and princes had declared that it wants to exter- minate, hang, behead and break the Communist movement on the wheel. And in view of this fact, in view of the danger that Germany could become a land of gallows and pyres, we Communists are deemed to be not in earnest about the anti-Fascist, the proletarian united front. (Dokumente zur Deutschen Geschichte, p. 65)
Nevertheless, the question is correctly posed and the answer is not free of hypocrisy. For the questioner as well as the respondent have for a long time been speaking the language of doublethink and know all too well that every politician, in addition to what he says, calculates on a second level. For many Communists, the united front was a respectable fiction they themselves, with a second cynical look, easily saw through. Even its protagonists did not really "believe" in it. 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
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
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.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
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
2victims 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
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
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
1EPILOGUE ? 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
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
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.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
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-
1logues. 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
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
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.
