He is one of the
tightrope
walkers between fascism and a stoic humanism who elude simple labeling.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason
.
.
How is natural science possible?
is the key question that opens the way.
He gives the answer: through the forms of contemplation, time and space .
.
.
and through the equally a priori forms of understand-
ing . . . the categories through which it works up experience (p. 54). On the basis of this mental equipment, natural science, as knowledge of appearances, is possible. . . .
He discovers the second realm in the experience of ethical law, that omnipotent, unconditional (categorical) imperative that gives the will direction. . . . Theoretical reason of the first realm cannot enter this realm; here, the higher, practical reason reigns that opens up the super- sensuous to the life of the will. . . .
In Kant's ordering, the borders separate the first realm completely from the second. But is such a separation bearable? Kant himself forced an opening through. In the third realm it is a matter of "feeling," of the subjugation of the objects of experience to the goal by means of the power of judgment. This is the aesthetic and functional realm, (pp. 55-56)
But one would try in vain to find in Kant enlightenment about the dimension that cuts most deeply into the life of the present. "In the fourth realm (Reich), we enter a new land that opens up technology to us. " The Fourth Reich is that of in- ventions, those things that have been brought into existence only by human be- ings, the immeasurable potential of what can still be invented and realized. Ac- cording to Dessauer, technology means nothing other than to call the slumbering shapes of the Fourth Reich into reality through invention. It is as if technology reached over into the sphere of the Ding an sich (thing in itself), which according to Kant is inaccessible to us, in order to create out of this sphere previously nonex- isting objects of experience, machines. The machine, however, is no Ding an sich, no creature "out there" whose possibility of existence cannot be reached by
456 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? Heinrich Hoerle, Monument to the Unknown Prostheses, 1930. (Reproduced by permission of the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal. )
any understanding, but rather is there through us. At the same time, what "func- tions" in it is not only from us; there is in it a "power that does not come from me" (Dessauer, p. 60). World-revolutionizing power can be immanent in inven- tions. Dessauer refers, for example, to the ontological puzzle of X rays, which, although a material natural phenomenon, can be produced only by human inter- vention. They constitute a new form of energy that did not previously exist. In- ventions of this quality are ontological enrichments in the inventory of existence--whereby humanity is allotted the role of coauthor of the existing. Through humanity, creation augments itself. Nature provides only the material for the human elevation of the pregiven into a technical supernature.
Everything invented and built by human beings, however, encounters human- ity from the outside like a power of nature-
like mountains, the gulf stream. . . . People have to react. Whoever lives in the mountains lives in accord with the mountains. . . . The power of technology is thus. . . .
. . . The power of newly created forms of technology possesses ba- sically the same autonomy as the creation of a mountain, a river, an ice age or a planet. This fact intensifies the already deeply disturbing extent of a continuing creation, to which we are witnesses and, even more, in which we participate. It is a monstrous fate to be an active participant in creation in such a way that things that have been created by us re- main in the visible world having an effect with an unimaginable autono-
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 457
? Favorable news from the Fourth Reich: "The rota-arm (from Engineer Meyer of the Rotaworks in Aachen) is somewhat lighter and more agreeable than the Jagen- berg arm. In its flexibility, it far exceeds that of the human arm. " Here, the worka- day arm with the adjustable working claw is juxtaposed with the Sunday arm with its attractive imitation hand.
mous power: The greatest earthly experience of mortal beings, (pp. 65-66)
This philosophy of technology pretends to be heroically optimistic because it conceives of humanity as the ongoing creator of the cosmos. It is never allowed to resign before the overpowering misery, but must bring over more and more new shapes out of that Fourth Reich in which the solutions to all urgent problems already stand ready, slumbering, and only "await" their discovery. Thus, beside nature there grows a "dynamically pulsating metacosmos," "created" by human beings.
Do we have to point out the absurd aspects of this philosophy? Its deception- once again --lies in the concept of the subject. The subject's heroism is nothing other than the refusal to conceive any distress or suffering as its "own. " The ego becomes heroic because it is too cowardly to be weak. It "sacrifices" because it hopes to gain something. Technology thus appears as the promise of a total solu- tion to problems. One day, the philosopher implies, technology will have worked off all misery. In an astoundingly shortsighted way, he overlooks the destructive aspect of "invention. " The fighting subject made of heroism and steel has to be blind to its own destructiveness. The more it threatens to break under the massive suffering of the technical, dominated world, the more optimistically it simulates the heroic pose. At the heart of this theory stands a subject who can no longer suffer because it has become wholly prosthesis.
Excursus 5: Total Prosthesis and Technical Surrealism
A diagnostic history of ideas owes a great deal to that cynical garrulousness of historical persons from whom an inner urge and the external compulsion of crisis force out statements that better controlled individuals would never let pass their
458 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
lips. Often they are screwballs who prefer to speak when so-called normal people think it cleverer to be silent. One of these compulsive talkers who supercleverly reveal something that otherwise nobody would be able to uncover so easily is the "expressionist philosopher" (Scholem) Adrien Turel. In 1934 he published, under the sign of the new German spirit, a ludicrous book: Technokratie, Autarkie, Genetokratie (Technocracy, autarky, genetocracy), in which curious detailed knowledge combines with megalomaniac, expansive perspectives to form a mys- terious, idiosyncratic speculation.
No conventional categorization can be applied to this text; it is neither mono-
graph nor essay nor theorem nor manifesto. As a singular document of a theoreti-
cal surrealism, it eludes all classification. Its tone is serious and pompous, at the
same time, noncommital in its apparently playful inclination to combine the most
disparate things. Statements about nomadic and agrarian existence slide over as
in a game into thoughts on industrialism, metallurgy, and quantum theory, clima-
tology and the philosophy of time, subzero physics and astronomy --from the
Aurignac cave dwellers to mathematical description of geopolitical power struc-
tures. At this market fair of a confused intellect, in which Turel, like an
3
Achternbusch for the philosophy of history, calls out his insights, rare "gems"
are to be found--combinations of prosthesis theory and philosophy of technology that cause one to prick up one's ears.
Technology is only a prosthesis; the labor we employ in technology is never anything else than a great offloading of compulsions to surrender our authentic essence in order to grasp the zones and concerns of other kinds of essences without thereby also having to give up our human- ness, our Germanness. (p. 34)
Turel dreams, insanely realistically, of a new level of Western technocracy that secures for itself "as a class of generals and leaders," a total domination over the strivings of the rest of the world to catch up --he is referring in particular to Japan, which, according to Turel, has already stolen European models of thinking, prostheses, technologies. Only that would be the "social psychology of the com- ing age. " Philosophy itself, in processing thought models, elevates itself
to a bold system of prostheses that will be indispensable in the future and that is to be placed beside the prosthetic system of the airplane, the submarine, the automobile, etc. , as at least their equal, (p. 34)
If it is a fact that we will no longer be able to protect the great blan- ket patent of our technical and scientific prosthetic system from the clutches of the second zone, and in the foreseeable future, also the third zone [today, we would say Second and Third Worlds;-Author], quite independently of whether we ourselves betray the methods of fabrica- tion to these zones . . . then, on the other hand, it is not to be forgot- ten that we, out of ourselves, produce, create at least an enormous new
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II D 459
increase in the style of prosthesis produced by machine to date, which can be called globally the total prosthesis of a technical kind. . . .
This technical prosthetic system, which is a typically masculine achievement, can only be compared with the prenatal, complete en- closure in the body of the mother.
All people, no matter of what sex(! ), were initially, in their prenatal period, caught in the great prototype of every nourishing landscape, ev- ery protective sphere, every prison, too, i. e. , they have experienced the enclosure in the body of a mother. The masculine counterpart to this is the development of technocratic prostheses, of power, of financial power and of the technical apparatuses for a complete capsule system in which individual people seem to be enclosed for better or worse. . . .
When the British fly over the Himalayas in the total prostheses of their fighter planes, and do so completely systematically with entire squadrons, that is no crazy record setting, nor is it money out the win- dow, but rather, it is for all India a symbol of the superior prosthetic power of Britain and Europe, (pp. 59-60)
How confused does a thinker have to be to see so clearly? Madness sees through the method completely. For the rest, those who cannot follow Turel can console themselves with Gershom Scholem's analysis; he knew the author per- sonally and, as early as the twenties, "understood literally not one word" of his utterances (Von Berlin nach Jerusalem, pp. 157-58).
Notes
1. H. Goetz, Erwin Piscator in Selbstzeugnissen undBilddokumenten (Hamburg, 1974), pp. 18f. 2. [Grotaz is an acronym from "grosster Techniker aller Zeiten" and a play on Goring's
megalomaniac, insulting nickname "Grofaz". --Trans. ]
3. [Achternbusch is a German film director. --Trans. ]
Chapter 20
Political Algodicy:
Cynical Cosmologies and the Logic of Pain
What is all this racket from constructions, ships, mines, battles and books seen from outer space: in comparison with the earth's crust, nothing!
Oswald Spengler, Urfragen (Munich, 1965)
Even if the hard Nazi sport subjects proclaimed their sympathies with prosthetic life under the mask of vitalism and in this way sought to counter pain through denial, in the end they, too, could not evade the question of the meaning of pain. Like nothing else, pain, which can announce death, challenges metaphysical meaning. The latter wants to know what the immeasurable suffering of this cen- tury means, who is responsible for it, and to what whole it could contribute.
Everyday understanding, made safe through routine from thoughts that are too deep, does not let itself get caught in such discussions. It thus remains protected from explicit cynicism. Mostly it does not say anything more than "that's life. " But those who take on the question and risk having an "opinion" about suffering are drawn into a region where one has to very sure of one's metaphysical views, or else become cynical.
Algodicy means a metaphyscial interpretation of pain that gives it meaning. In modernity it takes the place of theodicy, as its converse. In the latter, it was asked, How are evil, pain, suffering, and injustice to be reconciled with the exis- tence of God? Now the question is, If there is no God and no higher meaning, how can we still bear the pain? The function of politics as substitute theology im- mediately becomes clear. The nationalists as a rule did not hesitate for a moment to claim that the immeasurable suffering of the war had been meaningful as sac- rifice for the Fatherland. The momentum of such claims was hindered solely by the fact that the lost war and the victors' dictatorship in peacetime, as well as the disappointed revolution, put this nationalist offer of meaning into question. One might consider whether the much-quoted legend of the dagger thrust was a
460
a biological "grand
view" for himself.
Heroes fall
and sons leave their mothers. They are all
simple laws.
The breathing and batting of an eyelid in a colossal happening. (Wailing)
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 461
desperate rescue attempt for the political algodicy of the Right. For to realize that Germany would lose the war could be expected from even the densest nationalist. But to admit that "everything had been for nothing" and that the untold torments had no political meaning at all --for many contemporaries that was unbearable. The legend of the dagger thrust was no naive myth but a willed self-delusion of the Right. Their effort is also witnessed by Hitler's "bitter fortune. "
Those who ask for the meaning of the suffering in the First World War were drawn by the question into a region where politics, natural philosophy, and medi- cal cynicism met. Scarcely any speaker in those years refrained from medical metaphors: sickness, cancerous growths, operations, and healing through crisis. In Mein Kampf, Hitler spoke of the violent catastrophe that was to be preferred to a creeping political tuberculosis. The medical metaphors of the Right were in- tended to eliminate the sickness as well as the enemy within with "steel and radia- tion. " The Left at least registered the double danger of the sickness.
If, however, the revolutionary proletariat wants to be the doctor who has to take on the operation that is recognized as being unavoidable, then it is not allowed to continually soil its hands in the open festering sores of the sickness. For then, during the operation, the surgeon him- self would carry the poisonous substances into the body of the patient again, so vitiating his task of ridding the patient of them. (Erich Miih- sam, Wahrhaftigkeit, in Fanal 2 [1928])
The well-meaning cool gaze of the natural philosopher is superior to that of the doctor, for the former orders human distress into a cosmic functional relation. Before the gaze of the biologist and all the more before that of the astronomer, the miniscule convulsions of humanity melt into insignificance--as if they were only ornaments in the vast game of waxing and waning. Rudolf G. Binding, in his poems Stolz und Trauer (Pride and sadness, 1922), tried to appropriate such
Here, too, is the quintessence of heroic hardening, assent, "pride," a solid- block ego that becomes a heroic, sensible machine-for-itself. Nazi schoolbooks treasured it.
The political algodicies proceed according to an elementary schema: with- drawal from feelings of empathy into a pure, observational coldness. In this exer-
462 ? POLITICAL ALGODICY
? Ernst Jiinger, Steel eroticist, 1930. "The longer the war lasted, the more sharply did it shape sexual love into its form. . . . The spirit of the battle of material . . . produced men the world had never seen before . . . steel natures, put into action in battle in its most horrible form. . . . There, a ready femininity paraded in long rows, the lotus blossoms of asphalt, Brussels. . . . There, only steel-like character could stand without being worn down in the turmoil. These bodies that turned to love were pure function. " Der Kampfals inneres Erlebnis (Struggle as inner experience), 1933, pp. 33-34.
rise, Ernst Jiinger became a complete virtuoso.
He is one of the tightrope walkers between fascism and a stoic humanism who elude simple labeling. Nevertheless, Jiinger is unmistakeably one of the master thinkers of modern cynicism, in whom cold posturing and sensitive perception are not mutually exclusive. Ideologically, he practices an aestheticizing political biology, a subtly functionalist termite- philosophy. He, too, can be reckoned among the enthusiasts of the hard subject who can stand the storm of steel. His coldness is the price of staying awake in the middle of the horror. It qualifies him as a precise witness of what has hap- pened in our century by way of modernizing horror. To bury Jiinger under an all too crude suspicion of fascism would thus be an unproductive attitude toward his work. If there exists an author in our century who fits Benjamin's formula of a "secret agent," Jiinger must be it. Like scarcely any other, he took up a listening
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 463
post in the middle of Fascist structures of thinking and feeling. His contemplative hardness combines with a pronounced readiness to speak out as witness of his own experiences. If, on the one hand, Jiinger confesses to pre-Fascist tendencies, then, with his "hunger for experience," he reveals a quality that no other Fascist possessed; in general, this quality represents a spirit of mature openness to the world and liberality with which today a New Left would identify itself.
In the prose sketches of Das Abenteuerliche Herz (The Adventurous Heart), there is a passage that clarifies lunger's biological algodicy:
From the beach plays, 2 Zinnowitz
In the dense brush behind the dunes, in the middle of the swath of reed, I captured a happy picture on my usual walk: the large leaf of a trem- bling poplar into which a circular hole had been broken. From the edge of the hole, a dark green fringe seemed to hang down that, on closer observation, revealed itself to be a row of tiny caterpillars eagerly suck- ing the leaf juice with their mandibles. A short time ago, a deposit of butterfly's eggs must have hatched there; the young brood had expanded like a bushfire on its nourishing soil.
The peculiarity of this sight consisted in the painlessness of the de- struction it mirrored. Thus, the fringe gave the impression of hanging threads of the leaf itself, which seemed to have lost none of its substance. Here it was so open to view how the double bookkeeping of life balances out. I had to think of the solace Conde gave to Mazarin, who was weep- ing over the six thousand dead at the battle of Freiburg: "Bah, in a single
1
night in Paris more people give their lives than this action cost. "
This attitude of the battle leader, which sees the change behind the
burning, has long struck me as the sign of a higher healthiness about life that does not shrink back from the bloody incision. Thus, I ex- perience pleasure when I think of the phrase consumption forte, strong consumption, which so angered Chateaubriand and which Napoleon oc- casionally used to murmur in those moments of the battle when the general was inactive, in which all reserves are on the march, while the front, under attack from mounted squadrons and the fire of artillery that has been moved up, melts as if under a tempest of steel and fire. They are words one does not want to be without, snippets of inner mono- logues at the smelting ovens that glow and vibrate while, in smoldering blood, the spirit distills into the essence of a new century.
This language is founded on a trust in life that knows no empty spaces. The sight of its fullness causes us to forget the secret sign of pain that separates the two sides of the equation--just as here, the gnawing labor of the mandibles separates caterpillar and leaf. (Aben- teuerliches Herz, second version, pp. 61-62)
Junger's general's perspective also resembles that of a biologist. For this rea- son, something of the recognition of the great pulsing of life between procreation
464 ? POLITICAL ALGODICY
and death creeps into his political sentiments. However, he ignores the threshold that separates natural death from a political death by violence. He thus transfers biological observations to the great warring "organisms" that strike out at one an- other in struggles of hegemony and survival. With full consciousness, Jiinger blurs the boundaries between zoology and sociology. The war is, in fact, a phenomenon of the "spiritual animal realm" [Hegel;-Trans. ]. Jiinger thus pro- vokes us as a political entomologist. His psychological sleight of hand consists in simultaneously assuming the standpoint of the insect and the scientist. He thinks himself not only into the devouring caterpillar but also into the devoured leaf. He goes with his sense organs to the front, which melts into fire. With the cold organs of thinking, however, he stands at the same time on the general's hill from which vantage point the battle offers itself as an aesthetic drama. This double ego corresponds to that of a political schizophrenic. "Fear eats up souls. " The hor- rors of the war have eaten away his soul, the shell saves itself on a cold star from where his dead ego observes its own survival.
Gazing at the stars was a typical form of Weimar algodicy. Its main author,
almost forgotten today, is the astronomer Bruno H. Buergel, very popular in his
own time, Weimar celestial authority number one, a Sunday philosopher who,
with humorously melancholy observations on humanity in the universe, had
gathered a congregation of hundreds of thousands of readers about him. In the
political realm, he was an author of "class conciliation," of compromise between
labor and entrepreneurs. For decades, he practiced his astronomy as a kind of
pastoral care for the confused petit-bourgeoisie. His Celestial Science, which was
even reprinted recently, sold a fantastic number of copies. His autobiography,
too, Vom Arbeiter zum Astronomen (From worker to astronomer [1919]) had sold
2
In one part of his Du unddas Weltall. Ein Weltbild von Bruno H. Buergel (You and the universe. A world picture by Bruno H. Buergel [1930]), we find the natural-philosophical confession of the author under the heading "The Great Law. " In the soul-destroying or elevating spaciousness (according to your taste) of astronomical ways of thinking, the political-moral cramps of Weimar "micropolitics" loosen up. The inner desert, however, grows relentlessly. Does Buergel not further, in a humorous chatty tone, the subjects' self-freezing? What Buergel speaks of as the "great law" is the wave phenomenon he attempts to follow from electrical and acoustic vibrations into the transformation of human cultures.
Unrelentingly, wave crest and wave trough follow each other. Now above, now descending to the trough, striving to ascend again, again in the trough and, finally, noiselessly petering out in the sand. The leaf falls, its time has come, its definition has reached its end, it sinks to the great layer of humus from which new life will arise. . . .
a hundred thousand copies by the beginning of the thirties.
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 465
All goings-on vibrate in waves everywhere. In a thousand forces, it swings up and down. Sound waves carry over from the bell tower of the small maritime chapel; . . . light waves whiz in a flight as quick as thought from faraway stars down to the small globe earth; electrical waves surge around me, making their way from high masts, over land and sea, broadcasting human wit and human stupidity as far as the far- thest outposts of civilization.
Waves full of mysterious wonder surge around us. They bring the great law into being in the small ego. . . .
His (W. Fliess's) tireless research uncovered the marvelous law that these two different life substances, these female and male cells, have differing life spans, that the male substance is characterized by a twenty-three day period, the female substance by a twenty-eight day period. This pulsation of changing life energies can be clearly felt withinus. . . .
And out of days comes the year. That too a mighty wave in earthly happenings! . . . But day and year peter out, tiny ripples on the sea of eternity. . . .
Cultures that leave their mark on the globe for centuries are also trains of waves in humanity. Thousands of years ago, the old culture of the Chinese came and went, that of the Indians, that of the Egyp-
tians. . . . Many waves of cultures saw old Mother Earth come roar- ing over them; they came and went like summer and winter. . . . It seems . . . as if the culture of our age, the culture of Europe, is be- ginning to decline. [There follows a footnote that refers to Oswald Spengler's "significant work. "] (pp. 48-51, 53)
Buergel emphasizes that even the "eternal stars" do not represent any exception to the law of waxing and waning. Our sun, too, will be extinguished "so that on this tiny star, earth, everything will sink into night and ice, into the silence of eter- nal death" (p. 65).
In the melancholy spaciousness of astronomical observations, a deep layer of Weimar life feeling is mirrored. The subjects collaborate instinctively with that which annihilates them and makes them insignificant. They train themselves in inhuman perspectives. They flee into the cold and vastness. Their affirmations are directed toward everything that is not them-"selves," toward everything that helps this iced-over ego to forget itself in the great whole.
Who offers resistance to this training in self-forgetting? Did the Weimar Left understand how to stem the impulse of cynical cosmology and political biology? Even today, the historian stands perplexed before the perplexity of leftist slogans of that time. The Left, too, strove as well as it could to become a "solid block. " Here, too, the "line," "character," the "will of iron" dominated. Walter Benjamin was one of the few who systematically sought contact with the experiences, materials, and ways of thinking and reacting of the "other side. " Like scarcely
466 ? POLITICAL ALGODICY
any other, he mastered the art of rethinking--the rescue of experience from the monopoly of reactionary twaddle. The masterpiece of such rethinking is to be found at the end of his book Einbahnstrasse (One-way street; 1928), where he ventured into the lion's den in order to speak of things that otherwise were ap- propriated by the military Right--about war experiences and the blood wedding of human technology and the cosmos. With a small twist, he succeeds in uncover- ing the spiritlessness in bourgeois philosophy of technology: Mastery of nature is not the significance of technology but rather the clever mastery of the relation between humankind and nature.
On the planetarium If, as Hillel once had to do with the Jewish doctrine, one had to express
the doctrine of antiquity very briefly, standing on one leg, the sentence would have to read: "The earth will belong to them alone who live from the forces of the cosmos. " Nothing distinguishes the human being of an- tiquity from the human being of modernity more than the former's sur- render to a cosmic experience the latter hardly knows. Its disappearance can already be noticed in the blossoming of astronomy at the beginning of modern times. . . . Antiquity's way of dealing with the cosmos was effected differently: in ecstasy. Ecstasy is, indeed, the only experience in which we reassure ourselves about what is nearest to us and what is farthest from us, and never the one without the other. That means, however, that the human being can communicate ecstatically with the cosmos only in a community. It is the threatening error of modernity to regard this experience as irrelevant or avoidable and to leave it to the individual as revelry on beautiful starry nights. No, it becomes due
over and over again, and then peoples and lineages elude it just as little as in the last war, when it made itself felt in the most fearful way, as an attempt at a new, unheard-of wedding with the cosmic powers. Masses of people, gases, electrical forces were set free, high-frequency currents traversed the countryside, new stars lit up in the sky, airspace and the depths of the sea hummed with propellors, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were bored into Mother Earth. This great wooing of the cosmos took place for the first time on a planetary scale, namely, in the spirit of technology. However, because the greed for profit of the ruling class thought of atoning for its will to profit with it, technology betrayed humanity and transformed the bridal setting into a sea of blood. Domination of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the meaning of all technology. But who would want to trust a disciplinary master who explained that the meaning of education is the domination of chil- dren by adults? . . . The thrill of genuine cosmic experience is not bound to that tiny fragment of nature that we are used to calling "na- ture. " In the nights of annihilation during the last war, a feeling shook the frame of humanity that resembled the fortune of epileptics. And the revolts that followed this feeling were the first attempt to bring the new
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 467
body under its control. The power of the proletariat is the measure of its becoming healthy. If its discipline does not grab this body to the marrow, no pacifist reasoning will be able to save it. What is living will only overcome the tumult of annihilation in the ecstasy of creation, (pp. 123-26)
Benjamin succeeds in doing something no mere analyst of struggle, strategist, or ideologue of hardness could do. In the course of his meditation, a piece works itself loose from the hardening cramp of the subject. Ecstasy, the dissolution of the ego, is recognized as the precondition for cosmic communication. At the same time, it provides a presentiment of the reconciliation of human beings with one another. The ambiguity of the topic does not let go of Benjamin either. He speaks of proletarian discipline that has to grab the social body "to the marrow. " The en- tire contradiction lies there openly in a nutshell. From the ecstasy of creation to strict discipline, there is no easy path. Fascism had brought ecstasy and discipline together insofar as it mobilized the tumult of power and ecstasies of destruction in its columns. It organized not only the interests of big capital but also a piece of political mysticism. Benjamin's thought-play tries to rival the Fascist threat by pointing out to the Left the necessity of tearing the ideological weapons and the psychological principle of fascism out of its hands.
Among the few philosophers of the time who did not seek the individual's sal- vation in hardenings, coolings, and solidifications, Max Scheler assumes a spe- cial place. He, too, was a great ambiguist, "double agent," and subversive citizen who took joy in confessing. The war had twisted his head, too, and moved him to horrifying exercises in thinking that affirmed war and Teutonic tumult (Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg [The genius of war and the German war], Leipzig, 1915). Later, as one of few, he expressly moved away from such "armed service with the pen," as Thomas Mann said about his own case. By 1921, in his protest against the German plague-spirit of "fulfillment of duty at any cost," he had long ceased to use martial language: "On the Betrayal of Joy. " There he provides psychological and moral arguments for an annihilating critique of the Nazi doctrine of felicity well in advance of what came later, that is, that lying philosophy of strength through joy with which the populist labor service (Arbeits- dienst) secured domination over unhappy dispositions. The Nazis knew how to mobilize the hunger for something positive that drives unhappy and disoriented individuals to become "involved" and to join ranks, to work together at a "recon- struction. " Scheler sees that all this can lead nowhere. When unhappy people "reconstruct" and get "involved," they only spread their unhappiness. " 'Only happy people are good,' Marie Ebner-Eschenbach once said rightly" (Scheler, Liebe und Erkenntnis, 2nd ed. [1970], p. 72).
As has been shown, a peculiarly ironic or cynically hard affirmation of evils as valid and ineluctable realities is part of the Weimar Zeitgeist. In the Yes, a
468 D POLITICAL ALGODICY
defensive tendency easily comes to the fore: an armoring of the ego against its suffering, a No to what would be subjective truth, No to inner wounds, to weak- ness and neediness. One begins to see this more clearly when one employs Scheler's important algodicy writing of 1916, Vom Sinn des Leidens (On the meaning of suffering) for the purpose of contrast. In this text, Scheler collects ele- ments of another ethics and politics --not hardening against suffering but exten- sion of the Yes and of recognition even to our pain. This, however, according to Scheler, is possible only in a religiously grounded life that, in its deepest spiritual layers feels itself as something indestructibly secure in Being. Scheler refers to this as "blissfulness" {Seligkeit). The secret of such an ability to suffer thus lies not in the hardening of the ego, not in political algodicies of the solid block, strength-through-joy, iron front, shoulder-to-shoulder, steel-ego, recon- struction ego type, but in the buried and forgotten Christian principle that Tolstoy revived: Do not resist evil.
An enormous relaxation of tension that in itself had to have the effect of a redemption, a relaxation through straightforward recognition, through the naive expression of pain and suffering. No longer any ancient arro- gant suffering that glories in suffering because its magnitude measures one's own power. . . . But also no pride in hiding it from oneself or others under an appearance of equanimity or under the rhetorics of suffering and dying "wisemen. " The scream of the suffering creature that was restrained for so long reverberates again freely and harshly through the universe. The deepest suffering, the feeling of being cut off from God, is expressed freely by Jesus on the cross. "Why have you forsaken me? " And no more reconstruction whatsoever: Pain is pain, evil is evil; pleasure is pleasure; and positive blissfulness, not merely "peace" or Buddha's "redemption of the heart," is the good of all goods. Also no blunting, but a soul-assuaging suffering through of the suffering in sympathy for oneself and for others! " (pp. 64-65)
Every polemical subjectivity arises in the final analysis from the struggles of denial of egos against pain, which they inevitably encounter as living beings. They carry on "reconstruction," armament, wall building, fencing in, demarca- tion, and self-hardening in order to protect themselves. However, within them, the fermentation goes on unceasingly. Those who build up and arm will one day "build down" and let loose.
Notes
1. This Gallic cynicism is related also of Napoleon after the battle of Prussian Eylau.
2. On Buergel, see Sloterdijk, Literatur und Lebenserfahrung. Autobiographien der 20er Jahre
(Munich, 1978), pp. 67ff.
ing . . . the categories through which it works up experience (p. 54). On the basis of this mental equipment, natural science, as knowledge of appearances, is possible. . . .
He discovers the second realm in the experience of ethical law, that omnipotent, unconditional (categorical) imperative that gives the will direction. . . . Theoretical reason of the first realm cannot enter this realm; here, the higher, practical reason reigns that opens up the super- sensuous to the life of the will. . . .
In Kant's ordering, the borders separate the first realm completely from the second. But is such a separation bearable? Kant himself forced an opening through. In the third realm it is a matter of "feeling," of the subjugation of the objects of experience to the goal by means of the power of judgment. This is the aesthetic and functional realm, (pp. 55-56)
But one would try in vain to find in Kant enlightenment about the dimension that cuts most deeply into the life of the present. "In the fourth realm (Reich), we enter a new land that opens up technology to us. " The Fourth Reich is that of in- ventions, those things that have been brought into existence only by human be- ings, the immeasurable potential of what can still be invented and realized. Ac- cording to Dessauer, technology means nothing other than to call the slumbering shapes of the Fourth Reich into reality through invention. It is as if technology reached over into the sphere of the Ding an sich (thing in itself), which according to Kant is inaccessible to us, in order to create out of this sphere previously nonex- isting objects of experience, machines. The machine, however, is no Ding an sich, no creature "out there" whose possibility of existence cannot be reached by
456 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? Heinrich Hoerle, Monument to the Unknown Prostheses, 1930. (Reproduced by permission of the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal. )
any understanding, but rather is there through us. At the same time, what "func- tions" in it is not only from us; there is in it a "power that does not come from me" (Dessauer, p. 60). World-revolutionizing power can be immanent in inven- tions. Dessauer refers, for example, to the ontological puzzle of X rays, which, although a material natural phenomenon, can be produced only by human inter- vention. They constitute a new form of energy that did not previously exist. In- ventions of this quality are ontological enrichments in the inventory of existence--whereby humanity is allotted the role of coauthor of the existing. Through humanity, creation augments itself. Nature provides only the material for the human elevation of the pregiven into a technical supernature.
Everything invented and built by human beings, however, encounters human- ity from the outside like a power of nature-
like mountains, the gulf stream. . . . People have to react. Whoever lives in the mountains lives in accord with the mountains. . . . The power of technology is thus. . . .
. . . The power of newly created forms of technology possesses ba- sically the same autonomy as the creation of a mountain, a river, an ice age or a planet. This fact intensifies the already deeply disturbing extent of a continuing creation, to which we are witnesses and, even more, in which we participate. It is a monstrous fate to be an active participant in creation in such a way that things that have been created by us re- main in the visible world having an effect with an unimaginable autono-
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 457
? Favorable news from the Fourth Reich: "The rota-arm (from Engineer Meyer of the Rotaworks in Aachen) is somewhat lighter and more agreeable than the Jagen- berg arm. In its flexibility, it far exceeds that of the human arm. " Here, the worka- day arm with the adjustable working claw is juxtaposed with the Sunday arm with its attractive imitation hand.
mous power: The greatest earthly experience of mortal beings, (pp. 65-66)
This philosophy of technology pretends to be heroically optimistic because it conceives of humanity as the ongoing creator of the cosmos. It is never allowed to resign before the overpowering misery, but must bring over more and more new shapes out of that Fourth Reich in which the solutions to all urgent problems already stand ready, slumbering, and only "await" their discovery. Thus, beside nature there grows a "dynamically pulsating metacosmos," "created" by human beings.
Do we have to point out the absurd aspects of this philosophy? Its deception- once again --lies in the concept of the subject. The subject's heroism is nothing other than the refusal to conceive any distress or suffering as its "own. " The ego becomes heroic because it is too cowardly to be weak. It "sacrifices" because it hopes to gain something. Technology thus appears as the promise of a total solu- tion to problems. One day, the philosopher implies, technology will have worked off all misery. In an astoundingly shortsighted way, he overlooks the destructive aspect of "invention. " The fighting subject made of heroism and steel has to be blind to its own destructiveness. The more it threatens to break under the massive suffering of the technical, dominated world, the more optimistically it simulates the heroic pose. At the heart of this theory stands a subject who can no longer suffer because it has become wholly prosthesis.
Excursus 5: Total Prosthesis and Technical Surrealism
A diagnostic history of ideas owes a great deal to that cynical garrulousness of historical persons from whom an inner urge and the external compulsion of crisis force out statements that better controlled individuals would never let pass their
458 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
lips. Often they are screwballs who prefer to speak when so-called normal people think it cleverer to be silent. One of these compulsive talkers who supercleverly reveal something that otherwise nobody would be able to uncover so easily is the "expressionist philosopher" (Scholem) Adrien Turel. In 1934 he published, under the sign of the new German spirit, a ludicrous book: Technokratie, Autarkie, Genetokratie (Technocracy, autarky, genetocracy), in which curious detailed knowledge combines with megalomaniac, expansive perspectives to form a mys- terious, idiosyncratic speculation.
No conventional categorization can be applied to this text; it is neither mono-
graph nor essay nor theorem nor manifesto. As a singular document of a theoreti-
cal surrealism, it eludes all classification. Its tone is serious and pompous, at the
same time, noncommital in its apparently playful inclination to combine the most
disparate things. Statements about nomadic and agrarian existence slide over as
in a game into thoughts on industrialism, metallurgy, and quantum theory, clima-
tology and the philosophy of time, subzero physics and astronomy --from the
Aurignac cave dwellers to mathematical description of geopolitical power struc-
tures. At this market fair of a confused intellect, in which Turel, like an
3
Achternbusch for the philosophy of history, calls out his insights, rare "gems"
are to be found--combinations of prosthesis theory and philosophy of technology that cause one to prick up one's ears.
Technology is only a prosthesis; the labor we employ in technology is never anything else than a great offloading of compulsions to surrender our authentic essence in order to grasp the zones and concerns of other kinds of essences without thereby also having to give up our human- ness, our Germanness. (p. 34)
Turel dreams, insanely realistically, of a new level of Western technocracy that secures for itself "as a class of generals and leaders," a total domination over the strivings of the rest of the world to catch up --he is referring in particular to Japan, which, according to Turel, has already stolen European models of thinking, prostheses, technologies. Only that would be the "social psychology of the com- ing age. " Philosophy itself, in processing thought models, elevates itself
to a bold system of prostheses that will be indispensable in the future and that is to be placed beside the prosthetic system of the airplane, the submarine, the automobile, etc. , as at least their equal, (p. 34)
If it is a fact that we will no longer be able to protect the great blan- ket patent of our technical and scientific prosthetic system from the clutches of the second zone, and in the foreseeable future, also the third zone [today, we would say Second and Third Worlds;-Author], quite independently of whether we ourselves betray the methods of fabrica- tion to these zones . . . then, on the other hand, it is not to be forgot- ten that we, out of ourselves, produce, create at least an enormous new
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II D 459
increase in the style of prosthesis produced by machine to date, which can be called globally the total prosthesis of a technical kind. . . .
This technical prosthetic system, which is a typically masculine achievement, can only be compared with the prenatal, complete en- closure in the body of the mother.
All people, no matter of what sex(! ), were initially, in their prenatal period, caught in the great prototype of every nourishing landscape, ev- ery protective sphere, every prison, too, i. e. , they have experienced the enclosure in the body of a mother. The masculine counterpart to this is the development of technocratic prostheses, of power, of financial power and of the technical apparatuses for a complete capsule system in which individual people seem to be enclosed for better or worse. . . .
When the British fly over the Himalayas in the total prostheses of their fighter planes, and do so completely systematically with entire squadrons, that is no crazy record setting, nor is it money out the win- dow, but rather, it is for all India a symbol of the superior prosthetic power of Britain and Europe, (pp. 59-60)
How confused does a thinker have to be to see so clearly? Madness sees through the method completely. For the rest, those who cannot follow Turel can console themselves with Gershom Scholem's analysis; he knew the author per- sonally and, as early as the twenties, "understood literally not one word" of his utterances (Von Berlin nach Jerusalem, pp. 157-58).
Notes
1. H. Goetz, Erwin Piscator in Selbstzeugnissen undBilddokumenten (Hamburg, 1974), pp. 18f. 2. [Grotaz is an acronym from "grosster Techniker aller Zeiten" and a play on Goring's
megalomaniac, insulting nickname "Grofaz". --Trans. ]
3. [Achternbusch is a German film director. --Trans. ]
Chapter 20
Political Algodicy:
Cynical Cosmologies and the Logic of Pain
What is all this racket from constructions, ships, mines, battles and books seen from outer space: in comparison with the earth's crust, nothing!
Oswald Spengler, Urfragen (Munich, 1965)
Even if the hard Nazi sport subjects proclaimed their sympathies with prosthetic life under the mask of vitalism and in this way sought to counter pain through denial, in the end they, too, could not evade the question of the meaning of pain. Like nothing else, pain, which can announce death, challenges metaphysical meaning. The latter wants to know what the immeasurable suffering of this cen- tury means, who is responsible for it, and to what whole it could contribute.
Everyday understanding, made safe through routine from thoughts that are too deep, does not let itself get caught in such discussions. It thus remains protected from explicit cynicism. Mostly it does not say anything more than "that's life. " But those who take on the question and risk having an "opinion" about suffering are drawn into a region where one has to very sure of one's metaphysical views, or else become cynical.
Algodicy means a metaphyscial interpretation of pain that gives it meaning. In modernity it takes the place of theodicy, as its converse. In the latter, it was asked, How are evil, pain, suffering, and injustice to be reconciled with the exis- tence of God? Now the question is, If there is no God and no higher meaning, how can we still bear the pain? The function of politics as substitute theology im- mediately becomes clear. The nationalists as a rule did not hesitate for a moment to claim that the immeasurable suffering of the war had been meaningful as sac- rifice for the Fatherland. The momentum of such claims was hindered solely by the fact that the lost war and the victors' dictatorship in peacetime, as well as the disappointed revolution, put this nationalist offer of meaning into question. One might consider whether the much-quoted legend of the dagger thrust was a
460
a biological "grand
view" for himself.
Heroes fall
and sons leave their mothers. They are all
simple laws.
The breathing and batting of an eyelid in a colossal happening. (Wailing)
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 461
desperate rescue attempt for the political algodicy of the Right. For to realize that Germany would lose the war could be expected from even the densest nationalist. But to admit that "everything had been for nothing" and that the untold torments had no political meaning at all --for many contemporaries that was unbearable. The legend of the dagger thrust was no naive myth but a willed self-delusion of the Right. Their effort is also witnessed by Hitler's "bitter fortune. "
Those who ask for the meaning of the suffering in the First World War were drawn by the question into a region where politics, natural philosophy, and medi- cal cynicism met. Scarcely any speaker in those years refrained from medical metaphors: sickness, cancerous growths, operations, and healing through crisis. In Mein Kampf, Hitler spoke of the violent catastrophe that was to be preferred to a creeping political tuberculosis. The medical metaphors of the Right were in- tended to eliminate the sickness as well as the enemy within with "steel and radia- tion. " The Left at least registered the double danger of the sickness.
If, however, the revolutionary proletariat wants to be the doctor who has to take on the operation that is recognized as being unavoidable, then it is not allowed to continually soil its hands in the open festering sores of the sickness. For then, during the operation, the surgeon him- self would carry the poisonous substances into the body of the patient again, so vitiating his task of ridding the patient of them. (Erich Miih- sam, Wahrhaftigkeit, in Fanal 2 [1928])
The well-meaning cool gaze of the natural philosopher is superior to that of the doctor, for the former orders human distress into a cosmic functional relation. Before the gaze of the biologist and all the more before that of the astronomer, the miniscule convulsions of humanity melt into insignificance--as if they were only ornaments in the vast game of waxing and waning. Rudolf G. Binding, in his poems Stolz und Trauer (Pride and sadness, 1922), tried to appropriate such
Here, too, is the quintessence of heroic hardening, assent, "pride," a solid- block ego that becomes a heroic, sensible machine-for-itself. Nazi schoolbooks treasured it.
The political algodicies proceed according to an elementary schema: with- drawal from feelings of empathy into a pure, observational coldness. In this exer-
462 ? POLITICAL ALGODICY
? Ernst Jiinger, Steel eroticist, 1930. "The longer the war lasted, the more sharply did it shape sexual love into its form. . . . The spirit of the battle of material . . . produced men the world had never seen before . . . steel natures, put into action in battle in its most horrible form. . . . There, a ready femininity paraded in long rows, the lotus blossoms of asphalt, Brussels. . . . There, only steel-like character could stand without being worn down in the turmoil. These bodies that turned to love were pure function. " Der Kampfals inneres Erlebnis (Struggle as inner experience), 1933, pp. 33-34.
rise, Ernst Jiinger became a complete virtuoso.
He is one of the tightrope walkers between fascism and a stoic humanism who elude simple labeling. Nevertheless, Jiinger is unmistakeably one of the master thinkers of modern cynicism, in whom cold posturing and sensitive perception are not mutually exclusive. Ideologically, he practices an aestheticizing political biology, a subtly functionalist termite- philosophy. He, too, can be reckoned among the enthusiasts of the hard subject who can stand the storm of steel. His coldness is the price of staying awake in the middle of the horror. It qualifies him as a precise witness of what has hap- pened in our century by way of modernizing horror. To bury Jiinger under an all too crude suspicion of fascism would thus be an unproductive attitude toward his work. If there exists an author in our century who fits Benjamin's formula of a "secret agent," Jiinger must be it. Like scarcely any other, he took up a listening
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 463
post in the middle of Fascist structures of thinking and feeling. His contemplative hardness combines with a pronounced readiness to speak out as witness of his own experiences. If, on the one hand, Jiinger confesses to pre-Fascist tendencies, then, with his "hunger for experience," he reveals a quality that no other Fascist possessed; in general, this quality represents a spirit of mature openness to the world and liberality with which today a New Left would identify itself.
In the prose sketches of Das Abenteuerliche Herz (The Adventurous Heart), there is a passage that clarifies lunger's biological algodicy:
From the beach plays, 2 Zinnowitz
In the dense brush behind the dunes, in the middle of the swath of reed, I captured a happy picture on my usual walk: the large leaf of a trem- bling poplar into which a circular hole had been broken. From the edge of the hole, a dark green fringe seemed to hang down that, on closer observation, revealed itself to be a row of tiny caterpillars eagerly suck- ing the leaf juice with their mandibles. A short time ago, a deposit of butterfly's eggs must have hatched there; the young brood had expanded like a bushfire on its nourishing soil.
The peculiarity of this sight consisted in the painlessness of the de- struction it mirrored. Thus, the fringe gave the impression of hanging threads of the leaf itself, which seemed to have lost none of its substance. Here it was so open to view how the double bookkeeping of life balances out. I had to think of the solace Conde gave to Mazarin, who was weep- ing over the six thousand dead at the battle of Freiburg: "Bah, in a single
1
night in Paris more people give their lives than this action cost. "
This attitude of the battle leader, which sees the change behind the
burning, has long struck me as the sign of a higher healthiness about life that does not shrink back from the bloody incision. Thus, I ex- perience pleasure when I think of the phrase consumption forte, strong consumption, which so angered Chateaubriand and which Napoleon oc- casionally used to murmur in those moments of the battle when the general was inactive, in which all reserves are on the march, while the front, under attack from mounted squadrons and the fire of artillery that has been moved up, melts as if under a tempest of steel and fire. They are words one does not want to be without, snippets of inner mono- logues at the smelting ovens that glow and vibrate while, in smoldering blood, the spirit distills into the essence of a new century.
This language is founded on a trust in life that knows no empty spaces. The sight of its fullness causes us to forget the secret sign of pain that separates the two sides of the equation--just as here, the gnawing labor of the mandibles separates caterpillar and leaf. (Aben- teuerliches Herz, second version, pp. 61-62)
Junger's general's perspective also resembles that of a biologist. For this rea- son, something of the recognition of the great pulsing of life between procreation
464 ? POLITICAL ALGODICY
and death creeps into his political sentiments. However, he ignores the threshold that separates natural death from a political death by violence. He thus transfers biological observations to the great warring "organisms" that strike out at one an- other in struggles of hegemony and survival. With full consciousness, Jiinger blurs the boundaries between zoology and sociology. The war is, in fact, a phenomenon of the "spiritual animal realm" [Hegel;-Trans. ]. Jiinger thus pro- vokes us as a political entomologist. His psychological sleight of hand consists in simultaneously assuming the standpoint of the insect and the scientist. He thinks himself not only into the devouring caterpillar but also into the devoured leaf. He goes with his sense organs to the front, which melts into fire. With the cold organs of thinking, however, he stands at the same time on the general's hill from which vantage point the battle offers itself as an aesthetic drama. This double ego corresponds to that of a political schizophrenic. "Fear eats up souls. " The hor- rors of the war have eaten away his soul, the shell saves itself on a cold star from where his dead ego observes its own survival.
Gazing at the stars was a typical form of Weimar algodicy. Its main author,
almost forgotten today, is the astronomer Bruno H. Buergel, very popular in his
own time, Weimar celestial authority number one, a Sunday philosopher who,
with humorously melancholy observations on humanity in the universe, had
gathered a congregation of hundreds of thousands of readers about him. In the
political realm, he was an author of "class conciliation," of compromise between
labor and entrepreneurs. For decades, he practiced his astronomy as a kind of
pastoral care for the confused petit-bourgeoisie. His Celestial Science, which was
even reprinted recently, sold a fantastic number of copies. His autobiography,
too, Vom Arbeiter zum Astronomen (From worker to astronomer [1919]) had sold
2
In one part of his Du unddas Weltall. Ein Weltbild von Bruno H. Buergel (You and the universe. A world picture by Bruno H. Buergel [1930]), we find the natural-philosophical confession of the author under the heading "The Great Law. " In the soul-destroying or elevating spaciousness (according to your taste) of astronomical ways of thinking, the political-moral cramps of Weimar "micropolitics" loosen up. The inner desert, however, grows relentlessly. Does Buergel not further, in a humorous chatty tone, the subjects' self-freezing? What Buergel speaks of as the "great law" is the wave phenomenon he attempts to follow from electrical and acoustic vibrations into the transformation of human cultures.
Unrelentingly, wave crest and wave trough follow each other. Now above, now descending to the trough, striving to ascend again, again in the trough and, finally, noiselessly petering out in the sand. The leaf falls, its time has come, its definition has reached its end, it sinks to the great layer of humus from which new life will arise. . . .
a hundred thousand copies by the beginning of the thirties.
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 465
All goings-on vibrate in waves everywhere. In a thousand forces, it swings up and down. Sound waves carry over from the bell tower of the small maritime chapel; . . . light waves whiz in a flight as quick as thought from faraway stars down to the small globe earth; electrical waves surge around me, making their way from high masts, over land and sea, broadcasting human wit and human stupidity as far as the far- thest outposts of civilization.
Waves full of mysterious wonder surge around us. They bring the great law into being in the small ego. . . .
His (W. Fliess's) tireless research uncovered the marvelous law that these two different life substances, these female and male cells, have differing life spans, that the male substance is characterized by a twenty-three day period, the female substance by a twenty-eight day period. This pulsation of changing life energies can be clearly felt withinus. . . .
And out of days comes the year. That too a mighty wave in earthly happenings! . . . But day and year peter out, tiny ripples on the sea of eternity. . . .
Cultures that leave their mark on the globe for centuries are also trains of waves in humanity. Thousands of years ago, the old culture of the Chinese came and went, that of the Indians, that of the Egyp-
tians. . . . Many waves of cultures saw old Mother Earth come roar- ing over them; they came and went like summer and winter. . . . It seems . . . as if the culture of our age, the culture of Europe, is be- ginning to decline. [There follows a footnote that refers to Oswald Spengler's "significant work. "] (pp. 48-51, 53)
Buergel emphasizes that even the "eternal stars" do not represent any exception to the law of waxing and waning. Our sun, too, will be extinguished "so that on this tiny star, earth, everything will sink into night and ice, into the silence of eter- nal death" (p. 65).
In the melancholy spaciousness of astronomical observations, a deep layer of Weimar life feeling is mirrored. The subjects collaborate instinctively with that which annihilates them and makes them insignificant. They train themselves in inhuman perspectives. They flee into the cold and vastness. Their affirmations are directed toward everything that is not them-"selves," toward everything that helps this iced-over ego to forget itself in the great whole.
Who offers resistance to this training in self-forgetting? Did the Weimar Left understand how to stem the impulse of cynical cosmology and political biology? Even today, the historian stands perplexed before the perplexity of leftist slogans of that time. The Left, too, strove as well as it could to become a "solid block. " Here, too, the "line," "character," the "will of iron" dominated. Walter Benjamin was one of the few who systematically sought contact with the experiences, materials, and ways of thinking and reacting of the "other side. " Like scarcely
466 ? POLITICAL ALGODICY
any other, he mastered the art of rethinking--the rescue of experience from the monopoly of reactionary twaddle. The masterpiece of such rethinking is to be found at the end of his book Einbahnstrasse (One-way street; 1928), where he ventured into the lion's den in order to speak of things that otherwise were ap- propriated by the military Right--about war experiences and the blood wedding of human technology and the cosmos. With a small twist, he succeeds in uncover- ing the spiritlessness in bourgeois philosophy of technology: Mastery of nature is not the significance of technology but rather the clever mastery of the relation between humankind and nature.
On the planetarium If, as Hillel once had to do with the Jewish doctrine, one had to express
the doctrine of antiquity very briefly, standing on one leg, the sentence would have to read: "The earth will belong to them alone who live from the forces of the cosmos. " Nothing distinguishes the human being of an- tiquity from the human being of modernity more than the former's sur- render to a cosmic experience the latter hardly knows. Its disappearance can already be noticed in the blossoming of astronomy at the beginning of modern times. . . . Antiquity's way of dealing with the cosmos was effected differently: in ecstasy. Ecstasy is, indeed, the only experience in which we reassure ourselves about what is nearest to us and what is farthest from us, and never the one without the other. That means, however, that the human being can communicate ecstatically with the cosmos only in a community. It is the threatening error of modernity to regard this experience as irrelevant or avoidable and to leave it to the individual as revelry on beautiful starry nights. No, it becomes due
over and over again, and then peoples and lineages elude it just as little as in the last war, when it made itself felt in the most fearful way, as an attempt at a new, unheard-of wedding with the cosmic powers. Masses of people, gases, electrical forces were set free, high-frequency currents traversed the countryside, new stars lit up in the sky, airspace and the depths of the sea hummed with propellors, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were bored into Mother Earth. This great wooing of the cosmos took place for the first time on a planetary scale, namely, in the spirit of technology. However, because the greed for profit of the ruling class thought of atoning for its will to profit with it, technology betrayed humanity and transformed the bridal setting into a sea of blood. Domination of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the meaning of all technology. But who would want to trust a disciplinary master who explained that the meaning of education is the domination of chil- dren by adults? . . . The thrill of genuine cosmic experience is not bound to that tiny fragment of nature that we are used to calling "na- ture. " In the nights of annihilation during the last war, a feeling shook the frame of humanity that resembled the fortune of epileptics. And the revolts that followed this feeling were the first attempt to bring the new
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 467
body under its control. The power of the proletariat is the measure of its becoming healthy. If its discipline does not grab this body to the marrow, no pacifist reasoning will be able to save it. What is living will only overcome the tumult of annihilation in the ecstasy of creation, (pp. 123-26)
Benjamin succeeds in doing something no mere analyst of struggle, strategist, or ideologue of hardness could do. In the course of his meditation, a piece works itself loose from the hardening cramp of the subject. Ecstasy, the dissolution of the ego, is recognized as the precondition for cosmic communication. At the same time, it provides a presentiment of the reconciliation of human beings with one another. The ambiguity of the topic does not let go of Benjamin either. He speaks of proletarian discipline that has to grab the social body "to the marrow. " The en- tire contradiction lies there openly in a nutshell. From the ecstasy of creation to strict discipline, there is no easy path. Fascism had brought ecstasy and discipline together insofar as it mobilized the tumult of power and ecstasies of destruction in its columns. It organized not only the interests of big capital but also a piece of political mysticism. Benjamin's thought-play tries to rival the Fascist threat by pointing out to the Left the necessity of tearing the ideological weapons and the psychological principle of fascism out of its hands.
Among the few philosophers of the time who did not seek the individual's sal- vation in hardenings, coolings, and solidifications, Max Scheler assumes a spe- cial place. He, too, was a great ambiguist, "double agent," and subversive citizen who took joy in confessing. The war had twisted his head, too, and moved him to horrifying exercises in thinking that affirmed war and Teutonic tumult (Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg [The genius of war and the German war], Leipzig, 1915). Later, as one of few, he expressly moved away from such "armed service with the pen," as Thomas Mann said about his own case. By 1921, in his protest against the German plague-spirit of "fulfillment of duty at any cost," he had long ceased to use martial language: "On the Betrayal of Joy. " There he provides psychological and moral arguments for an annihilating critique of the Nazi doctrine of felicity well in advance of what came later, that is, that lying philosophy of strength through joy with which the populist labor service (Arbeits- dienst) secured domination over unhappy dispositions. The Nazis knew how to mobilize the hunger for something positive that drives unhappy and disoriented individuals to become "involved" and to join ranks, to work together at a "recon- struction. " Scheler sees that all this can lead nowhere. When unhappy people "reconstruct" and get "involved," they only spread their unhappiness. " 'Only happy people are good,' Marie Ebner-Eschenbach once said rightly" (Scheler, Liebe und Erkenntnis, 2nd ed. [1970], p. 72).
As has been shown, a peculiarly ironic or cynically hard affirmation of evils as valid and ineluctable realities is part of the Weimar Zeitgeist. In the Yes, a
468 D POLITICAL ALGODICY
defensive tendency easily comes to the fore: an armoring of the ego against its suffering, a No to what would be subjective truth, No to inner wounds, to weak- ness and neediness. One begins to see this more clearly when one employs Scheler's important algodicy writing of 1916, Vom Sinn des Leidens (On the meaning of suffering) for the purpose of contrast. In this text, Scheler collects ele- ments of another ethics and politics --not hardening against suffering but exten- sion of the Yes and of recognition even to our pain. This, however, according to Scheler, is possible only in a religiously grounded life that, in its deepest spiritual layers feels itself as something indestructibly secure in Being. Scheler refers to this as "blissfulness" {Seligkeit). The secret of such an ability to suffer thus lies not in the hardening of the ego, not in political algodicies of the solid block, strength-through-joy, iron front, shoulder-to-shoulder, steel-ego, recon- struction ego type, but in the buried and forgotten Christian principle that Tolstoy revived: Do not resist evil.
An enormous relaxation of tension that in itself had to have the effect of a redemption, a relaxation through straightforward recognition, through the naive expression of pain and suffering. No longer any ancient arro- gant suffering that glories in suffering because its magnitude measures one's own power. . . . But also no pride in hiding it from oneself or others under an appearance of equanimity or under the rhetorics of suffering and dying "wisemen. " The scream of the suffering creature that was restrained for so long reverberates again freely and harshly through the universe. The deepest suffering, the feeling of being cut off from God, is expressed freely by Jesus on the cross. "Why have you forsaken me? " And no more reconstruction whatsoever: Pain is pain, evil is evil; pleasure is pleasure; and positive blissfulness, not merely "peace" or Buddha's "redemption of the heart," is the good of all goods. Also no blunting, but a soul-assuaging suffering through of the suffering in sympathy for oneself and for others! " (pp. 64-65)
Every polemical subjectivity arises in the final analysis from the struggles of denial of egos against pain, which they inevitably encounter as living beings. They carry on "reconstruction," armament, wall building, fencing in, demarca- tion, and self-hardening in order to protect themselves. However, within them, the fermentation goes on unceasingly. Those who build up and arm will one day "build down" and let loose.
Notes
1. This Gallic cynicism is related also of Napoleon after the battle of Prussian Eylau.
2. On Buergel, see Sloterdijk, Literatur und Lebenserfahrung. Autobiographien der 20er Jahre
(Munich, 1978), pp. 67ff.
