No More Learning

By focusing on cynicism as a central feature of the postmodern condition in the 1970s and 1980s and by searching for strategies to resist it, Sloterdijk attempts to theorize that which has often remained submerged in the recent debate about modernity and postmoder- nity: the pervasive sense of political disillusionment in the wake of the 1960s and the pained feeling of a lack of political and social alternatives in Western societies today. After all, the 1960s in West Germany--against the arguments of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment--were once labeled a second ex- panded enlightenment that seemed to promise a major and long-lasting realign- ment in the country's political culture based on what Sloterdijk calls, with a sense of loss, the "public dispute about true living" (Preface). In the German context where illiberalism and reaction are usually perceived to be responsible for the march into fascist barbarism, the notion of Aufklarung carried a great potential of Utopian hopes and illusions with it at that time, both in relation to radical social and cultural change anticipated for the future and with regard to Germany's at- tempts to come to terms with its fascist past. Cynicism and resignation are there- fore indeed dangers for a generation that had its formative political experiences in the 1960s and that has since then seen its hopes not so much dashed as crumble and fade away. The situation is even worse for the subsequent generation, the no- future kids and dropouts (Aussteiger) of the 1970s who were too young then to feel anything but contempt today for the 1960s nostalgia of their elders who have the jobs, while they face diminished opportunities and an increasingly bleak labor market. While Sloterdijk's analysis is rooted in his perceptions of German cul- ture, it seems fairly clear that the German case of political disillusionment, cyni-
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cism, and an atrophied trust in the future has parallels in other Western countries today. In a certain sense, the growth of cynicism during the 1970s actually provided the cultural soil for the revival of the ideological conservatism of the 1980s, which has filled the void left by the post-1960s disillusionment with a simulacrum of homely old values.
Thus Sloterdijk perceives a universal, diffuse cynicism as the predominant mindset of the post-1960s era, and he takes the cynic not as the exception but rather as an average social character, fundamentally asocial, but fully integrated into the work-a-day world. Psychologically he defines him as a borderline melan- cholic able to channel the flow of depressive symptoms and to continue function- ing in society despite constant nagging doubts about his pursuits. I suspect that Sloterdijk's cynicism is less widespread than he might want to claim. But as an analysis of the prevailing mindset of a generation of middle-aged male profes- sionals and intellectuals, now in their late thirties to mid-forties and in increas- ingly influential positions, Sloterdijk's observations are perceptive and to the point. And who could resist the brilliance of an aphorism such as the following, which pinpoints this new unhappy sensibility:
Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, un- happy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both success- fully and unsuccessfully. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well- off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered, (chapter 1)
Given this modernization of false consciousness, the old strategies of the Enlightenment--from the public exposure of lies to the benign correction of error to the triumphant unveiling of a structurally necessary false consciousness by ideology critique --will no longer do. They will no longer do not only because the false consciousness they attack is already reflexively buffered, nor simply be- cause ideology critique in the Marxian tradition, that once most radical heir to the Enlightenment, has mutated into a theory of political legitimation in the Soviet bloc. Even more objectionable to Sloterdijk is the subjective side of ideology cri- tique, which always rests on a problematic reification and depersonalization of the opponent in the first place: enlightenment as a war of consciousness aimed at annihilating the opponent. Thus the focus on the place of subjectivity in ideol- ogy critique reveals how the dialectic of domination and exclusion was always already inscribed into the enlightenment, vitiating its claims to universal emanci- pation. In this far-reaching critique of the deadly mechanisms of ideology cri- tique, Sloterdijk actually continues in an important tradition of Western Marxism that reaches back to Marx himself: the critique of reification. However, he gives it a Nietzschean twist by focusing not on reification through the commodity form
FOREWORD ? xiii
(which he accepts in a weaker, nontotalizing version), but on reification of self and other in presumably enlightened discourse practices.
One of the consequences of Sloterdijk's concern with the subjective effects of cynical reason is that he attempts to address the creeping political disillusionment of the post-1960s era on an existential, subjective level rather than disembodying it into the realm of universal norms or agonistic, free-floating language games without subjects. One need not be fully convinced of Sloterdijk's somatic strate- gies for overcoming this enlightened false consciousness to see that his analysis of the post-1960s intellectual works as a productive irritant both against the defenders of a Habermasian modernity and against the advocates of a Nietzschean schizo-postmodernity. By addressing the problem of cynical disillusionment head-on and by articulating the basic intellectual problem of our time as that of an "enlightened false consciousness" rather than attacking or defending enlight- ened rationality, Sloterdijk's essay cuts across the false oppositions, accusations, and counteraccusations that have marred the modernity-postmodernity debate, pushing it ever deeper into a cul-de-sac. From an American perspective one might say that Sloterdijk offers us a sustained polemical reflection on a modernity gone sour and a postmodernity unable to stand on its own feet without constant groping back to what it ostensibly opposes. Rather than seeing enlightenment as the source of all evil in a perspective which became prevalent in France in the post-68 era or condemning the poststructuralist critique of reason as inescapably irrationalist and conservative, Sloterdijk engages the hostile camps in a dizzying dance in which frozen positions are productively set in motion and in which a new figura- tion of postmodernity emerges, a figuration that seems both more promising and less exclusive than most of the current accounts would seem to permit.
Sloterdijk's questions would then read something like this: How can intellec- tuals be Aufklarer at this precise moment in history? What has happened to en- lightenment, to the ideal of rational discourse since the 1960s, and how do we evaluate the strong antirationalist impulse visible in all Western countries today? How does the political and cultural experience of the 1960s stack up against the catastrophic history of the earlier twentieth century? Was the New Left's belief in a regeneration of the enlightenment perhaps naive in the first place? How and in what form can the values of the Enlightenment tradition be sustained in an age that has become more and more disillusioned with me project of enlightened modernity? What forces do we have at hand against the power of instrumental reason and against the cynical reasoning of institutionalized power? How do we define the subject of Aufklarung today? How can one remain an Aufklarer if the Enlightenment project of disenchanting the world and freeing it from myth and superstition must indeed be turned against enlightened rationality itself? How can we reframe the problems of ideology critique and of subjectivity, falling neither for the armored ego of Kant's epistemological subject nor for the schizosubjec- tivity without identity, the free flow of libidinal energies proposed by Deleuze and
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Guattari? Where in history do we find examples that would anticipate our intellec- tual dilemma? How can historical memory help us resist the spread of cynical amnesia that generates the simulacrum side of postmodern culture? How can we avoid paralysis, the feeling of history at a standstill that comes with Critical The- ory's negative dialectic as much as with the positing of a carceral continuum that occupies central space in recent French accounts of posthistoire?
No doubt, Sloterdijk wants to be an Aufklarer. He advocates a type of enlight- enment that is enlightened about itself. He rejects the new fundamentalism of con- servatives and neoconservatives, and he criticizes the universalist claims of the classical Enlightenment. Thus he accepts certain important tenets of the post- structuralist critique of the Enlightenment, especially in its Foucaultian version. But he never falls for the facile and fashionable collapsing of reason and totalitari- anism, nor for the obsessive French focus, since the 1970s, on incarceration and le monde concentrationnaire, the world as concentration camp. (In a curious way this concern of French intellectuals displays the same fixation on the past of which they accuse German Left intellectuals whose obsession with fascism allegedly blinds them to the threat posed by the Soviet Union and the world of the Gulag. ) Just as Sloterdijk rejects the timeworn Lukacsian argument that all the roads of irrationality lead into fascism, he also disagrees with "the French position. " He refuses to accept the surreptitiously teleological notion that all enlightenment ends in the Gulag or in a concentration camp, which is itself nothing but the reverse of the myth of revolution and emancipation that prevailed in the self- understanding of French intellectuals from Voltaire via Zola to Sartre. To the German critic who was nurtured on Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse in the 1960s, such a one-dimensional proposition could only appear as the dialectic of enlightenment revisited--except that contrary to much of the French Nietz- scheanism of the 1970s, Horkheimer and Adorno always held on to a substantive notion of reason and truth that remained, in Kantian terms, the condition of possi- bility of Critical Theory itself.
While Sloterdijk takes freely from both Critical Theory and poststructuralism, his position remains crucially ambivalent in that he has as much trouble with the "truth" of Critical Theory as with the total dissolution of truth, reason, and subjec- tivity in certain radical forms of poststructuralism. His text oscillates provoca- tively between Frankfurt and Paris. At times it appears to blend Critical Theory with poststructuralism; at others it rather seems to operate like a collage of vari- ous theoretical objets trouves. At any rate, Sloterdijk's intention is to move be- yond the propositions of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and to evade the post- Nietzschean compulsion to collapse knowledge and power. In that aim--and only in the aim--he might be said to approach Habermas, whose model of consensus and free dialogue he accepts as a "heeling fiction" (chapter 2) but rejects as an adequate description of the post-1960s status quo. In an era of widespread diffuse cynicism in which the traditional subject of critical knowledge and all central per-
FOREWORD ? xv
spectives of critique seem to have been pulverized, Sloterdijk constructs a new model of localized conflict that seeks literally to embody another reason, another enlightenment, another subjectivity. He proposes to turn the disillusionment with enlightened modernity away from melancholy and cynicism and to make lost illu- sions productive for an enlightened thought on anodier level. He wants to achieve this goal by reclaiming a tradition of rationality from which the modern scientific enlightenment, much to its detriment, has cut itself loose: the tradition of kyni- cism, embodied in Diogenes, who privileged satirical laughter, sensuality, the politics of the body, and a pleasure-oriented life as forms of resistance to the mas- ter narratives of Platonic idealism, the values of me polis, and the imperial claims of Alexander the Great.
II
Nevertheless, Sloterdijk's starting point remains Adorno and Horkheimer's pes- simistic work and its radical critique of instrumental reason and identity metaphysics. The Critique of Cynical Reason could indeed be read as a post- modern pastiche of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, a pastiche, however, that re- tains me memory of the pain and anger of Adorno's melancholy science and that sympathizes with the rejection of a patriarchal world in which reason has become a strategic tool for the domination of inner and outer nature. If it is pastiche, how- ever, it is not so in the sense that Jameson has defined as one of the major modes
2
ofpostmodernculturalproduction. Jamesonseespasticheasimitatingapeculiar
mask, as speech in a dead language, as a neutral practice of mimicry that has abandoned the satirical impulse still inherent in parody, that major stylistic strategy of modernism out of which pastiche is said to evolve. And he goes on to claim that producers of culture today "have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up
3
in the imaginary museum of a now global cultulre. " Jameson clearly sees post-
modern pastiche negatively as a "random cannibalization of all styles of the past," and much of postmodernism can indeed be described in this way. In fact, even Sloterdijk could be said to cannibalize a number of different styles and modes of expression-the polished aphorism, the anecdote, the suggestive style of the feuilleton, satire, serious philosophical discourse, the discourses of literary and intellectual history-mixing mem in a kind of patchwork that prevents the emer- gence of a unitary style in the traditional modernist sense and that evades the re- quirements of a rigorous philosophical discourse.
But this is also the point where Sloterdijk's pastiche is no longer grasped by Jameson's characterizations. The Critique of Cynical Reason is not "blank
4
parody, a statue with blind eyeballs. "
very beginning, with a combative impulse, and his text asserts a notion of an em- bodied subjectivity. Memory and anamnesis keep it from going blind, and the
Sloterdijk's pastiche is endowed, from the
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kynical impulse of Frechheit makes this pastiche come alive as self-assertive body. It is a philosophical pastiche that remains self-consciously satirical and never denies its substantive ties to the tradition of literary modernism and the historical avant-garde. Rather than postmodern in Jameson's sense, suspended, as it were, in the gap between signifier and signified, Sloterdijk's relationship to the discourses of various disciplines and media is Brechtian, even though without Brecht's Leninist politics, in that it has definite purposes, makes contingent argu- ments, and uses traditions critically to its own advantage. In this sense, Sloter- dijk's work could be claimed for a critical and adversarial postmodernism, a post- modernism of resistance, as some critics have called it.
At the same time, Sloterdijk's text is postmodern in yet another sense. The Cri- tique of Cynical Reason lacks the metaphysical backlighting that still hovers on the horizon of Adorno's critique of the metaphysics of reason, and that in general haunts much of literary and philosophical modernism. Thus in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, mat central text of philosophical high modernism, the struggle of reason against mythic nature that brings about the inescapably fatal reversal of reason into myth, of self-preservation into self-denial, is itself a metaphysical figure. Adorno's relation to metaphysics as the pretext of his critical work is as emphatically strong as Derrida's two decades later. Both Critical Theory and deconstruction, primarily through their readings of Nietzsche, actually ground a whole philosophy of history in their ideas about the rise and fall of metaphysics. But as Sloterdijk says, this notion of a breakdown, of a collapse, is today inade- quate: "Metaphysical systems do not 'fall,' but fade, seep away, stagnate, become boring, old hat, unimportant, and improbable. " (chapter 10, n. 16).
Instead of a totalizing unraveling of enlightenment and Western metaphysics (interpreted along the lines, say, of "phallogocentrism") or of an equally one- sided normative defense of enlightened modernity (interpreted along the lines of communicative reason), Sloterdijk gives us an account of the operations of en- lightened reason in history as a series of combative constellations without ground, without beginning and without telos: enlightenment as the eternal return of the same. As he tries to avoid any teleological account of the history of enlighten- ment, he presents us with the ineradicable return of the struggle between opposing consciousnesses: the cynicism of power and its institutions (in the realms of poli- tics, the military, religion, knowledge, sexuality, and medicine) vs. the kynical revolt from below, which responds to the cynicism of domination with satirical laughter, defiant body action, or strategic silence. Sloterdijk's description of cyni- cism and kynicism, repression and resistance, as a constant of history can be criti- cized as lacking historical specificity, but given the parameters of the current de- bate on postmodernity it has the advantage of making the fear of total closure suddenly appear to be as delusive and irrelevant as the hope for total emancipa- tion, the first actually being nothing so much as a binary reversal of the latter, a reversal of the messianic millenarianisms of the early twentieth century into the
FOREWORD ? xvii
catastrophic dystopias of our own time. Sloterdijk would be the last to forget the experiences of twentieth-century totalitarianisms; after all, his thought is grounded in the tortured insights of Critical Theory and cannot be accused of amnesia. But he does refuse the metaphysics of totality that still characterizes so much of contemporary European thought, even if in the form of radical negation. He refuses it in order to salvage the discourse of emancipation, shorn of its universalist claims and brought down to a localizable human dimension. With Adorno, Sloterdijk insists that one of the main problems with the Enlightenment was its inability to include the body and the senses in its project of emancipation. He therefore attempts to reconstitute Aujklarung on the limited basis of what he calls physiognomic thought, embodied thought, arguing for enlightenment as Selbsterfahrung rather than self-denial. The mythic model for the kind of somatic anarchism he advocates is the Greek kynic Diogenes, the plebeian outsider inside the walls of the city who challenged state and community through loud satirical laughter and who lived an animalist philosophy of survival and happy refusal.
But let's make no mistake. We are not just facing a return of the tired existen- tialist notion of the individual vs. society, the outsider vs. the group, the margin vs. the center. Nor is Sloterdijk's resurrection of Diogenes merely a nostalgia for the protest strategies of the 1960s shorn of their collective dimension and reduced to a kind of Stirnerian philosophy of the individual, self-identical body. Sloterdijk fully grasps the dialectic of exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, body and power, and the reproach, often leveled against him, that he constructs a merely binary opposition between cynicism and kynicism simply misses the mark. After all, the cynic as disillusioned and pessimistic rationalist is as far beyond the belief in idealism, stable values, and human emancipation as the kynic is. Thus rather than positing a binary opposition of cynicism vs. kynicism, Sloterdijk postulates the split within the cynical phenomenon itself, which pits the cynical reason of domination and self-domination against the kynic revolt of self-assertion and self- realization. He mobilizes the kynical potential of the Diogenes tradition against a prevailing cynicism that successfully combines enlightenment with resignation and apathy. But it is precisely the moment of a disillusioned enlightenment in cynicism itself that-and this must be Sloterdijk's hope-might make it suscepti- ble to the temptation of kynical self-assertion. Here it becomes clear that Sloter- dijk's Diogenes strategy is directed primarily at those who still suffer, however subliminally, from enlightened false consciousness, not at the real cynics of domination or at those leaders of the contemporary world who mistake their own cynical politics for a return to old values, a form of unenlightened cynicism to which Sloterdijk pays scant attention. Sloterdijk is right in reminding us that the domination through instrumental or cynical reason can never be total and that the masochism of refusal or the melancholy about an irrevocable loss of happiness, that double heritage of Critical Theory, has today lost its offensive potential and reinforces the enlightened false consciousness it should help to dismantle.
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Thus Sloterdijk answers Adorno's melancholy science with a kind of Erheiterungsarbeit, a "work that entertains" (Preface) and is based on what he calls the "embodying of reason" (Preface). He carnivalizes the frozen landscape of negative dialectics, and mobilizes the kynical body of Diogenes against the cunning of Odysseus, that master-cynic of the Dialectic of Enlightenment who pays the price of self-denial in order to survive in his struggles with the mythic powers, the Cyclops and the Sirens. Where Adorno's Odysseus embodies what Sloterdijk calls "self-splitting in repression" (chapter 8), the ultimately unhappy consciousness of the modern cynic, Diogenes comes to represent the "self- embodiment in resistance" (chapter 8), an enlightened affirmation of a laughing, excreting, and masturbating body that actually undercuts the modern notion of a stable identity, attacks the armored, self-preserving, and rationalizing ego of capitalist culture, and dissolves its strict separations of inside and outside, private and public, self and other.
On one level Sloterdijk's return to the kynic body may appear as a merely adolescent and regressive gesture whose potential for effective resistance is a pri- ori contained and even vitiated by the way in which sexuality, the body, the cor- poreal have been deployed, instrumentalized, and co-opted by the contemporary culture industry. If, as Sloterdijk would have to be the first to admit, the body itself is a historical construct, how can the mere impudence of the postmodern Diogenes hope to break through the layers of reification and power inscriptions which Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault have so cogently analyzed? And how would Sloterdijk counter a Foucaultian claim that the resistance of the self- conscious body is produced by the culture of cynicism itself as a regenerating and legitimating device? It is indeed questionable to what extent Diogenesian protest gestures could be more effective politically than traditional ideology critique combined with organized mass protests and group politics. Unless, of course, Di- ogenes's aim were to create a "counterpublic sphere," a kind of Gegenoffentlich- keit as Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge have theorized it. Precisely this broader dimension is absent from Diogenes's politics.
But the return to the body in Sloterdijk is never an end in itself, and we may have to look for its politics on another level. Enlightenment as Selbsterfahrung through the body tries to unearth a register of subjectivity buried in the civilizing process that produced the Western self-identical subject over the centuries. To that rational male subject, whose ultimate manifestation for Sloterdijk is the nu- clear bomb and its identity of self-preservation and self-destruction, Sloterdijk opposes an alternative subjectivity, a vision of an actual softening and liquefying of subjects:
Our true self-experience in original Nobodiness remains in this world buried under taboo and panic. Basically, however, no life has a name. The self-conscious Nobody in us--who acquires names and identities
FOREWORD ? xix
only through its social birth --remains the living source of freedom. The living Nobody, in spite of the horror of socialization, remembers the energetic paradises beneath the personalities. Its life soil is the mentally alert body, which we should call not nobody but yesbody and which is able to develop in the course of individuation from an areflexive "nar- cissism" to a reflected "self-discovery in the world-cosmos. " In this No- body, the last enlightenment, as critique of the illusion of privacy and egoism, comes to an end. (chapter 3)
It is in the discussion of this self-conscious nobody that both Sloterdijk's closeness to and distance from Adorno become emblematically visible. He reinterprets the famous passage in Homer's Odyssey where Odysseus, in a lightning flash of fore- sight, answers the Cyclops's request for his name by saying: "Nobody is my name. " This ruse saves Odysseus's and his companions' lives because the blinded Cyclops fails to get help from his peers when he tells them: "Friends, nobody slays me with cunning," thus causing them to walk away laughing and to ignore his predicament.
For Adorno, it is all in the name. In the struggle of reason against the mythic powers of nature, the very act of physical self-preservation implies the sacrifice of the self. Identity appears as based on self-denial, an argument Adorno makes even more powerfully in his reading of the Siren episode in the Odyssey. For Sloterdijk, on the other hand, it is all in the conscious body. Rather than seeing Odysseus's denial of his identity as a fatal first step in the constitution of Western subjectivity, Sloterdijk emphasizes the positive aspect of physical survival, and in a Brechtian move he praises the discovery of nobodiness in the moment of dan- ger as a welcome expansion of subjectivity: "The Utopia of conscious life was and remains a world in which we all have the right to be Odysseus and to let that No- body live. " (chapter 3) In emphasizing the importance of experiencing prein- dividual emptiness, the nobody, Sloterdijk moves toward a realm of non-Western mysticism that would have been quite foreign to Adorno's historically rooted reflection. At the same time it is significant that Sloterdijk does want to rescue Odysseus, that prototype of Western rationality, for the kind of alternative en- lightenment that he has in mind. He advocates the expansion of the rational self into the body and through the body to a state of nondifferentiation that would, however, remain in constant tension with kynical self-assertion. Contrary to Bud- dhist asceticism, which aims at a transcendence of the individual body, contrary also to a Nietzschean negation of individuation, Sloterdijk maintains an affirma- tion of the body as "yesbody," and it is the permanent oscillation, as it were, be- tween yesbody and nobody that undermines the pathology of identity and guaran- tees the expansion of the boundaries of subjectivity, Sloterdijk's central concern.
Sloterdijk's concept of a new, kynical subjectivity aims at nothing less than a new, postindustrial reality principle that contrary to the Deleuzian scheme of the schizobody would acknowledge the necessary and productive contradiction be-
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tween a unified physical body and processes of psychic deterritorialization. In an age in which traditional rationality has revealed itself as the "principle of self- preservation gone wild" (chapter 9) and the political pathology of overkill presents itself as realism, Sloterdijk sees the only chance for survival in a reversal of the civilizing process itself, which has created the dominant Western mindset of "hard subjects, hard facts, hard politics, and hard business" (chapter 9). To the privileging of distance and objectification in the culture of modernity, Sloterdijk's physiognomic thought opposes a sense of warmth and intimacy, convivial knowl- edge, and a "libidinous closeness to the world that compensates for the objectify- ing drive toward the domination of things" (chapter 6). Here it becomes clear that his approach shares much common ground with critiques of Western rationality and patriarchy as they have been articulated in ecological, psychoanalytic, and feminist discourse. But this is also where a number of problems emerge. When Sloterdijk claims that we are the bomb, the fulfillment of the Western subject, he clearly has the reified, rational male subject in mind. The question of women's subjectivity and its relationship to the cynicism-kynicism constellation is never really explored, and the presentation of Phyllis and Xanthippe as female kynics is, to put it mildly, disappointing. What are women to do while Diogenes "pisses
against the idealist wind," and how do they participate in or counteract the cyni- cism of domination? Is kynicism really the only possible way of acting and speak- ing in a different voice? I think Sloterdijk could have strengthened his case by focusing more thoroughly on the problem of gender and by asking himself to what extent his critique of male identity pathology might actually be indebted to femi- nist perspectives. A politics of a new subjectivity today makes sense only if gen- der difference is explored and theorized. Otherwise one runs the danger of reproducing the exclusionary strategies of the Enlightenment yet another time. Important as the argument for a new politics of subjectivity is, Sloterdijk's male kynicism remains ultimately unsatisfactory.
But then one might want to go further and ask whether the cynicism-kynicism constellation is not itself the problem. The very strength of Sloterdijk's construction--the fact that he avoids a merely binary opposition-may also imply a weakness. I am not only referring here to the fact that the kynical attack on the cynicism of domination itself has to rely inevitably on a heavy dose of cynicism. Such cynicism of the kynic is, of course, not in the service of domination. It nevertheless depends on the logic of hostility that the new reality principle of a softened, flexible subjectivity is supposed to overcome. It is difficult for me to imagine a nonhostile, nonobjectifying satirical laughter, and Sloterdijk never really addresses the question of what kynics actually do to the persons they laugh at. The question here would be whether Sloterdijk's immanent dialectic of cynicism-kynicism does not ultimately hold him captive to what he wants to overcome.
If that were the case, the possibility emerges that the kynic may himself be sim-
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ply a cynic in disguise. Throughout his book, Sloterdijk describes Diogenes as something of a loner, and when he talks about his new physiognomic thought he praises the conviviality with things rather than that with human beings. The whole spectrum of what the Germans call Beziehungsprobleme (the politics of the per- sonal), which has occupied so much space in the psychopolitics of the 1970s, seems strangely blocked out. What about cynicism and ways of overcoming it in the relations between lovers and friends, husbands and wives, children and par- ents? What about relations at the workplace, in institutions, in leisure activities? Instead of a plausible focus on intersubjective relations, the ultimate testing ground of any new subjectivity, we get Sloterdijk's odd suggestion that we should take the bomb as the Buddha of the West, the source of negative illuminations, of enlightening Selbsterfahrung. What the Cyclops was for Odysseus, so it seems, the bomb is for us: the moment of danger in which we find our own nobodiness, in which we understand what it would be like "to explode into the cosmos with a complete dissolution of the self (chapter 5). Here Sloterdijk's con- structive project to transform the reality principle itself by abandoning the "armed subjectivity of our callousness ratio (chapter 9) and by creating a new subjec- tivity, a new reason, veers off into a well-known male fascination with the ma- chinery of technological destruction. Sloterdijk's meditations on the bomb, which to him are pivotal to achieving the desired breakthrough to the new horizon of another enlightenment, turn the movement of his own thought back into the cold current of cynicism he had set out to escape, and he comes dangerously close to rewriting the romantic death wish in its postmodern form. When Sloterdijk ap- proximates Diogenes' satirical laughter to the mocking smile of the bomb and talks about the "pandemonium and laughter . . . at the core of the igniting ex- plosive mass" (chapter 5), the kynic can no longer be distinguished from the cynic. Is Sloterdijk displaying kynical strategies or cynical attitudes? It is any- body's guess.
If indeed the cosmic laughter of the nuclear holocaust were the ultimate chance for realizing the kynical nobody, then one might want to rely after all and against better insight on the precarious rationality of overkill and madness as a strategy of survival. Perhaps there was always already too much rather than too little nobodiness in the dominant Western forms of rationality and subjectivity. Per- haps Adorno was right after all when his terrified gaze saw nothing but destructive self-denial in Odysseus's tricksterism.
Ill
However, the Critique of Cynical Reason does not simply invalidate itself here as an effective critique of contemporary culture. Its analysis of postenlightened cynicism penetrates to the core of the contemporary malaise, and the new "gay science" Sloterdijk proposes is never so gay as to make us forget the wounds and
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vulnerabilities from which it springs. Certainly, the critique of postmodern cyni- cism as enlightened false consciousness can stand apart from the somatic strate- gies of Diogenes' new gay science. It is striking though to see how Sloterdijk's text oscillates strangely between an apocalyptic sensibility and a metaphysics of disaster on the one hand and the hope for self-realization in a new enlightenment, a philosophy of survival, on the other. In that oscillation Sloterdijk's text yields to the pressures of the German culture of the missile crisis, the Aussteiger (dropouts), and the antinuke movement of the early 1980s, a culture of an apocalyptic consciousness which is quite reminiscent of certain apocalyptic trends in Weimar culture and which, in typically German ways, takes Baudrillard
5
at his word when he claims that the real nuclear event has already taken place. Although the Diogenes in Sloterdijk ultimately keeps him from embracing a
6
postmodern aesthetics of collective suicide as the last chance of self-realization, his views on history come problematically close to the German prophecy of apoc- alypse. This is true not only for his meditations on the bomb and the speculations about the promises of the nobody, but more importantly for the ways in which he interprets Weimar as the Grunderzeit of modern cynicism and strategically places this "Historical Main Text", which comprises almost one-fourth of the total work, at the very end of his book.
Ostensibly, Sloterdijk returns to Weimar because it was in those fourteen years between the humiliations of a lost war resulting in Versailles and Hitler's ascent to power that the cynical structure first emerged as culturally dominant. While today's cynicism is bureaucratic and apathetic, anesthetized, as it were, to its own pains, the culture of Weimar is still fully conscious of the losses and sufferings that come with modernization. Nevertheless Sloterdijk speaks emphatically of a "reconstructed proximity of experience" (chapter 12) between Weimar and the present, and he argues that it needed the cynicism of our own time to read Weimar culture as representing a "summit of cynical structures" (chapter 12). Sloterdijk rejects both the nostalgic-archaeological approach to Weimar culture, which played such a large role in the cultural constitution of the New Left in Germany, and the apologetic political approach, which sees Weimar only as a temporal prefascism, an "augury of political ethics" (chapter 12), only good to teach FRG and GDR "Democrats" how to avoid the mistakes of the past. While Sloterdijk sees those views of Weimar as projections, "images in a historical gallery of mir- rors" (chapter 12), he claims to offer a historically more adequate account of Wei- mar culture. I agree by and large with his critique of accounts of Weimar as nostalgia and apologia, and I find his focus on Weimar cynicism fascinating, novel in its insistence on the centrality of the phenomenon, and often brilliant. It is hard to forget Sloterdijk's analyses of Heidegger's "Man" (Anyone) or of the ambivalences of Dada and its semantic cynicism, his descriptions of the historical and physical contingencies of Weimar subjectivities, the trauma of the trenches and the reality of prostheses, the "cubist mentality" and the "cosmetic realism" of
FOREWORD ? xxiii
the emerging Angestelltenkultur (white-collar culture) as Kracauer has called it. Weimar cynicism appears here as the result of a fundamental crisis of male iden- tity after defeat, and Sloterdijk is certainly right in presenting (not unlike Klaus Theweleit) the major front formations on the Right and on the Left as attempts to restore masculinity, to shore up a sense of identity and boundaries, both psy- chologically and politically. He never discusses how Weimar women figure in this struggle, but for once the masculine inscriptions in cynicism and kynicism (e. g. , the section on Brecht and sexual cynicism) are made quite explicit in the Weimar sections of the book.
And yet, one may want to ask whether there is not a hidden agenda to Sloter- dijk's account of Weimar as well, whether we have not just entered another room in the same historical gallery of mirrors from which Sloterdijk wants us to escape. That in itself would not be a criticism so much as an acknowledgment that no historical narrative will ever be entirely free from the interests and pressures of the present. But it is die nature of the pressures that makes me skeptical about Sloterdijk's account. If indeed there is a tension in his writing between catas- trophism and hope, which many of us would probably share in our own percep- tions of the contemporary world, then this crucial chapter on Weimar cynicism would actually tend to obliterate that tension and lock us into the catastrophic mentality, abolishing all ambivalence and ultimately closing down the space for kynical resistance.
Sloterdijk analyzes Weimar cynicism cogently as a symptom of cultural pathology, representative of times of declining class domination, of the "decadence and indiscriminate disinhibition of the ruling strata. " Even if one does not espouse a teleological view of history, it is difficult to forget that Weimar cynicism did end in fascism and the holocaust. Sloterdijk himself is the first to admit that the cynical disposition of a whole culture is typically found in prewar periods in which neither intelligence nor good intentions may be enough to stop the race toward disaster. What good, then, can Diogenes do today? How would his satirical laughter differ from that hellish laughter of the apocalypse the chilling effects of which Thomas Mann invoked in Doktor Faustus ? Is Sloterdijk not again flirting with catastrophe? If Weimar were indeed the model for the present, would that not make our fate just as inescapable as today's prophets of nuclear disaster in Germany like to proclaim? After all, the holocaust already took place.
It seems to me that Sloterdijk's fascination with Weimar cynicism, to which we owe some of the best writing about Weimar in recent years, locks him into a teleological view of contemporary developments despite himself. Since he never elaborates in any detail on the implied historical comparison between Wei- mar and contemporary culture, it is difficult for the reader to escape the conclu- sion that our fate has already been sealed, with or without Diogenes. Only such a comparison could dispel the temptation of cultural despair and give us some in- dication whether Sloterdijk's critique of identity pathology and his project of de- veloping a new reality principle is more than wishful thinking. But it is precisely
xxiv ? FOREWORD
this project that poses a significant challenge to contemporary thought and politics
in which the very real deconstructions of multinational capitalism and French the-
ory face off with conservative attempts to reconstruct the basics in education, so-
cial life, and international politics. Unless critical intellectuals understand the
new appeal of old values as new, rather than simply as a continuation of "bour-
geois" identity formation and ideology, the genuine insights of poststructuralist
theory will come to naught. The challenge posed by the Critique of Cynical Rea-
son to deconstructionists and reconstructionists alike has been well put by Leslie
Adelson in a very perceptive review of Sloterdijk's book. The central question
is "how to relinquish the obsession with a fixed identity opposed to all Others with-
out abandoning whatever identity is needed, first to perceive and then to end very 7
real and institutionalized forms of oppression. " Sloterdijk hopes to achieve this with the help of Diogenes and a regeneration of the kynical impulse, a solution that may fall short of the forbidding complexities of the task. But however limited one may hold the Diogenes strategy to be in a broader political sense, Sloterdijk is not a renegade of the Enlightenment, and he does not simply advocate carnival on the volcano. In his concluding pages, he finally does reject the temptation of apocalypse, and he denounces the boom in disaster prophecies itself as an outflow of cynicism. It is here that he returns unabashedly to the Kant of "Was ist Auf- klarung? " of 1784: "Sapere aude! remains the motto of an enlightenment that, even in the twilight of the most recent dangers, resists intimidation by catas- trophe. Only out of its courage can a future still unfold that would be more than the expanded reproduction of the worst in the past" (Conclusion). This minimal- ism of hope in the face of maximal possible catastrophe renders an aspect of our postmodernity that it is as important to recognize and to nurture as it is to criticize that enlightened false consciousness that Sloterdijk impels us to acknowledge as one of the most dangerous symptoms of our culture. The historical truth content of Sloterdijk's book lies precisely in the tensions and oscillations between apoca- lypse and hope that the text refuses to reconcile.
Notes
1. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1983), p. 216. It should be said that Foucault speaks only to a minor, if well-known text in Kant's oeuvre. The fact that Kant's subject is ultimately as unhistorical and universal as that of Descartes and partakes in the same problematic trajectory of the construction of Western rationality was already well worked out by Adorno and has recently been substantiated in new ways by Hartmut and Gemot Bohme in Das Andere der Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main, 1983). Nevertheless, Foucault's brief observations here point to his own com- mitment to a form of enlightenment that has not severed all its ties to the by now notorious siecle des lumieres.
2. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146(July/August 1984):53-92.
3. Ibid. , p. 65.
FOREWORD D xxv
4. Ibid.
5. In: Der Tod der Moderne. Eine Diskussion (Tubingen, 1983), p. 104.
6. For a critique of Baudrillard and Lyotard and their reception in West Germany, see Klaus R.
Scherpe, "Dramatisierung und Entdramatisierung des Untergangs: Zum asthetischen Bewusstsein von Moderne und Postmoderne," in Andreas Huyssen and Klaus R. Scherpe, eds. , Postmoderne: Zeichen eines kulturellen Wandels (Rowohlt, 1986), pp. 270-301. American translation in Cultural Critique 5 (Winter 1986-87).
7. Leslie A. Adelson, "Against the Enlightenment: A Theory with Teeth for the 1980s," German Quarterly 57(Fall 1984):631.
Preface
Beat the drum and have no fear And kiss the camp follower!
That is the whole of science,
That is the deepest of books' meaning. Heinrich Heine, Doktrin
The great defect of German thinkers
is that they have no sense
for irony, cynicism, the grotesque,
contempt, and mockery.
Otto Flake, Deutsch-Franzosisches
(1912)
For a century now philosophy has been lying on its deathbed, but it cannot die because it has not fulfilled its task. Its farewell thus has been tortuously drawn out. Where it has not foundered in the mere administration of thoughts, it plods on in glittering agony, realizing what it forgot to say during its lifetime. Faced with its demise, it would like now to be honest and reveal its last secret. It con- fesses: The great themes, they were evasions and half-truths. Those futile, beauti- ful, soaring flights--God, Universe, Theory, Praxis, Subject, Object, Body, Spirit, Meaning, Nothingness -- all that is nothing. They are nouns for young peo- ple, for outsiders, clerics, sociologists. "Words, words --nouns. They need only to open their wings, and millennia fall out of their flight. " (Gottfried Benn, Epilog und lyrisches Ich).
The last philosophy, willing to confess, treats such things under a historical rubric--together with the sins of youth. Their time has come. In our thinking there is no longer any spark of the uplifting flight of concepts or of the ecstasies of understanding. We are enlightened, we are apathetic. No one talks anymore of a love of wisdom. There is no longer any knowledge whose friend (philos) one could be. It does not occur to us to love the kind of knowledge we have; rather we ask ourselves how we might contrive to live with it without becoming ossified.
What is presented here under a title that alludes to the great traditions is a medi- tation on the sentence "Knowledge is power. " This is the sentence that dug the grave of philosophy in the nineteenth century. It sums up philosophy and is at the same time its first confession, with which the century-long agony begins. This sentence brings to an end the tradition of a knowledge that, as its name indicates,
XXVI
PREFACE ? xxvii
was an erotic theory --the love of truth and the truth through love (Lie- beswahrheii). From the corpse of philosophy arose the modern sciences and the- ories of power in the nineteenth century in the form of political science, theory of class struggle, technocracy, vitalism, and in every form armed to the teeth. "Knowledge is power (Wissen ist Macht). " This sentence fixed the course for the unavoidable politicization of thinking. Those who utter the sentence reveal the truth. However, with the utterance they want to achieve more than truth: They want to intervene in the game of power.
At the same time as Nietzsche began to expose a will to power behind every will to know, the old German social democracy exhorted its members to partici- pate in the race for knowledge that is power. Where Nietzsche's insights were in- tended to be "dangerously" cold and without illusions, social democracy behaved pragmatically --and exhibited a middle-class joy in cultivation. Both spoke of power: Nietzsche by undermining bourgeois idealism with vitalism; the Social Democrats by seeking to gain access to the middle classes' opportunities for power through "cultivation. " Nietzsche taught a realism that was supposed to make it easy for the upcoming generations of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois to take their farewell from idealistic absurdities, which curbed the will to power. Social democracy strove for participation in an idealism that to that point had car- ried the promise of power within itself. In Nietzsche the middle classes could study the subtleties and clever crassness of a will to power that had lost its ideals, while the workers' movement looked furtively at an idealism that better suited its still naive will to power.
Around 1900 the radical left wing had caught up with the right-wing cynicism of the masters. The race between the cynical-defensive consciousness of the old bearers of power and the Utopian-offensive consciousness of the new bearers created the political-moral drama of the twentieth century. In the race for the hardest awareness of hard facts, the Devil and Beelzebub trained one another. Out of the competition of consciousnesses arose that twilight characteristic of the present: the mutual spying out of ideologies, the assimilation of antagonisms, the modernization of fraud-in short, that situation that forces the philosopher into the void where liars call liars liars.
We detect a second aspect in Nietzsche that is relevant to contemporary times, after the first, Fascist, Nietzsche wave has ebbed. Once more it becomes clear how Western civilization has worn out its Christian costume. After the decades of reconstruction and the decade of Utopias and "alternatives," it is as if a naive elan had suddenly been lost. Catastrophies are conjured up, new values find ready markets, like all analgesics. However, the times are cynical and know: New values have short lives. Being concerned, caring about people, securing peace, feeling responsible, caring about the quality of life and about the environment- none of that really works. Just bide your time. Cynicism stands ready in the back-
xxviii ? PREFACE
? Neo-"Cyniker. " Nietzsche, the thinker of ambivalence.
ground, until the palaver has stopped and things take their course. Our lethargic modernity certainly knows how to "think historically," but it has long doubted that it lives in a meaningful history. "No need for world history. "
The eternal recurrence of the Same, Nietzsche's most subversive thought -- cosmologically untenable, but culturally and morphologically fruitful --is an apt
1
description of a resurgence of "kynical" ("kynisch") motives that had developed
to conscious life especially during the time of the Roman emperors, but also to some extent in the Renaissance. The Same: Those are the rappings of a sober, pleasure-oriented life that has learned to live with circumstances. To be ready for
PREFACE ? xxix
anything, that makes one invulnerably clever. Live in spite of history; existential reduction; socialization "as if; irony about politics; mistrust toward "plans. " A new heathen culture that does not believe in life after death and so must seek life before death.
Nietzsche's decisive self-characterization, often overlooked, is that of a "cynic" (Cyniker); with this he became, next to Marx, the most momentous thinker of the century. Nietzsche's "cynicism" (Cynismus) offers a modified ap- proach to "saying the truth": It is one of strategy and tactics, suspicion and disinhi- bition, pragmatics and instrumentalism--all this in the hands of a political ego that minks first and foremost about itself, an ego that is inwardly adroit and outwardly armored.
The violent, antirationalistic impulse in Western countries is reacting to an in- tellectual state of affairs in which all thinking has become strategy; this impulse shows a disgust for a certain form of self-preservation. It is a sensitive shivering from the cold breath of a reality where knowledge is power and power is knowl- edge. In writing, I have thought of readers, have wished for readers, who feel this way; this book, I think, could have something to say to them.
The old social democracy had announced the slogan Knowledge is Power as a practical and reasonable prescription. It did not think too much about it. The message was simply that one has to learn something real so that life will be better later. A petit-bourgeois belief in schooling had dictated the slogan. This belief is disintegrating today. Only for our cynical young medicos is there still a clear link between study and standard of living. Almost everyone else lives with the risk of learning without prospects. Those who do not seek power will also not want its knowledge, its knowledge-armaments, and those who reject both are secretly no longer citizens of this civilization. Countless numbers of people are no longer prepared to believe that one first has to "learn something" so that things will be better later. In these people, I believe, a suspicion is growing that was a certainty in ancient cynicism (Kynismus): that things must first be better before you can learn anything sensible. Socialization through schooling, as it takes place here, and in Western societies, in general, is a priori stupefaction, after which scarcely any learning offers a prospect that things sometime or other will im- prove. The inversion of the relation between life and learning is in the air: the end of the belief in education, the end of European Scholasticism. That is what conservatives as well as pragmatists, voyeurs of the decline as well as well- meaning individuals alike find so eerie. Basically, no one believes anymore that today's learning solves tomorrow's "problems"; it is almost certain rather that it causes them.
Why a "Critique of Cynical Reason"? How can I defend myself against the charge of having written a thick book at a time when even thinner books are con- sidered impudent? As is proper, we should distinguish the occasion from the rea- son and the motive.
xxx ? PREFACE
The Occasion
This year (1981) is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason--a date in world history. Seldom has there been a jubilee as dull as this one. It is a sober celebration; the scholars keep to themselves. Six hundred Kant experts gathered in Mainz--that does not produce a carnival at- mosphere, at most endless paper streamers. An imagination would be useful: to picture what would happen if the celebrated figure were to appear among the con- temporaries . . . Is it not a sad festival where the invited guests secretly hope that the person being celebrated is prevented from appearing because those who constantly invoke him would have to be ashamed on his arrival? How would we look to the penetratingly human eye of the philosopher?
Who could bring himself to give Kant a summary of history since 1795, the year in which the philosopher published his essay On Perpetual Peace? Who would have the nerve to inform him about the state of the Enlightenment--the emancipation of humanity from "self-imposed dependency"? Who would be so frivolous as to explain to him Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach"? I imagine that Kant's splendid humor would help us out of our stunned state. He was, after all, an individual of the late eighteenth century, when even the rationalists were not yet as rigid as some today who pretend to be so free and easy.
Scarcely anyone has occupied himself with Kant without touching on the enigma of his physiognomy. Applying the Roman rule of thumb mens sana in cor-
2
poresano doesnothelpusgrasphisappearanceatall. Ifitistruethatthe"Spirit"
seeks the appropriate body, in Kant's case it must have been a spirit who found pleasure in physiognomic ironies and psychosomatic paradoxes; a spirit who hid a great soul in a small, gaunt body, an upright stride under a bent back, and a gregarious, delicately cordial humor in a hypochondriacal, compulsive tempera- ment, as if to play a joke on the later devotees of the vital and the athletic.
The physiognomic enigma of Kant is scarcely solved through his personality but rather through his position in the history of ideas and of sensuousness. The Age of the Enlightenment pushed the dialectic of understanding and sensuousness to the breaking point. The traces of such tensions run through the whole of Kant's work. The language of his main works reveals the violence that the process of thinking--especially in a German mind--inflicts on the sensuous. The fact that a poet like Gottfried Benn, himself stamped by the spirit of the century of natural science, could strike back against such violence by rebuking the philosopher for being a "violator of the intellect" shows how modern cynicism can become the sounding board for cogent insights against the erstwhile greatness of Knowing (Erkenntnis) that aims at the notoriously broken relation between intellect and sensuousness. Robert Musil, surely a guarantor of rationality even beyond the limits in which it feels secure, has captured the experience of a reading of Kant in a memorable passage of his Confusions of the Pupil Torless.
PREFACE ? xxxi
In fact, Torless that very morning had bought the Reclam edition of that volume that he had seen at his professor's and used the first recess to begin reading it. However, because of the profusion of brackets and footnotes he didn't understand a single word, and, when he conscien- tiously followed the sentences with his eyes, it was as if an old bony hand were slowly screwing his brain out of his head.
When he stopped in exhaustion after about half an hour, he had only reached the second page, and sweat stood on his brow.
But then he gritted his teeth and read again one page further, until the recess was over.
By evening, however, he did not even want to touch the book. Fear? Repulsion? He didn't quite know. Only one thing tortured him with burning clarity, that the professor, this person, who didn't look like much, had the book lying around openly in his room, as if it were for him a daily conversation, (pp. 84-85)
The delicate empiricism of this sketch awakens understanding of two things: the fascination of the book and the pain it inflicts on sensitive young readers. Does not an ingenuous contact with Kantian thinking, with philosophical thinking in general, contain the risk of exposing a young consciousness to a violent and sud- den aging? What of a youthful will to know is preserved in a philosophy that makes one dizzy with its bony spiraling turns of the screw? Is what we want to know found at the top end of the screw? Are we ourselves not perhaps so twisted at the head of the screw that we will be satisfied with what we now think we know? And what does it mean that people for whom Kantian thinking is "daily conversa- tion" don't "look like much"? Does it mean that philosophy no longer leaves any trace in life and that reality is one thing and philosophy is something hopelessly different?
From die style of philosophers physiognomic forms look out at us, forms in which reason has hidden aspects of its essential character. To be "reasonable" means to put oneself into a special, rarely happy relation to the sensuous. "Be reasonable" means, practically speaking, do not trust your impulses, do not listen to your body, learn control, starting with your own sensuousness. But intellect and sensuousness are inseparable. Torless's outbreak of sweating after two pages of the Critique of Pure Reason contains as much truth as the whole of Kantianism. The understood mutual interaction of physis and logos is philosophy, not what is spoken. In the future, only a physiognomist can be a philosopher who does not lie. Physiognomic thinking offers a chance to escape from the regime of disem- bodied and tiierefore evil minds. To announce a new critique of reason also means to have a philosophical physiognomy in mind; that is not, as with Adorno, "aes- thetic theory," but a theory of consciousness with flesh and blood (and teeth).
As things are, there are grounds not for a celebratory writing (Festschrift) but rather for a writing celebration (Schriftfest) that makes a long detour around the
xxxii D PREFACE
celebrated person out of a liking for the author. "I don't want to say how things lie. /I want to show you how the matter stands" (Erich Kastner).
The Reason
If it is discontent in our culture that provokes criticism, there would be no age quite so disposed to criticism as ours. Yet the critical impulse has never been more strongly inclined to let itself be overpowered by a sour temperament. The tension between what wants to "criticize" and what should be "criticized" is so taut that our thinking is becoming much more morose than precise. No capacity of thought keeps pace with what is problematic. Hence the self-abdication of cri- tique. In the utter indifference toward all problems lies the ultimate premonition of how it would be to be their equal. Because everything has become problematic, everything is also somehow a matter of indifference. This thread should be fol- lowed. It leads to a place where one can speak of cynicism and "cynical reason. "
To speak of cynicism means to expose a spiritual, a moral scandal to critique; following that, the conditions for the possibility of the scandalous are unraveled. "Critique" undergoes a movement that at first fully lives out its positive and nega- tive interest in the object, only in the end to run up against elementary structures of moral consciousness that are brought to expression "beyond good and evil. " The times are cynical everywhere you turn, and it is time to develop the connec- tion between cynicism and realism from first principles.