The power of
technology
is thus.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason
It employs truth as a decoy and amiabil-
452 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
ity as bait. At the volatile center of its agitation lies the intimate complicity with the instincts for self-preservation in the confused masses. Its revolution promises complete "superiority" to the sportsmanlike prosthetic subject. Fascism appears here as the uprising of the prosthesis egos against "liberal" civilization, in whose "disorder" they at least still had a small chance of being "themselves. " In a violent flight to the fore, they outdo the system from which they arise. The secret of their self-preservation is hidden in the total abolition of everything that ever reminded one of a self. National socialism established itself as national functionalism.
The brisk prosthesis of the new state needed nursing and the relaxation of ten- sion. It was supposed to find both on the Fascist holiday. The sea was always good for uplifting thoughts, even for Nazi eminences seeking recuperation. On the beach, one can reflect even better on the Goethe of the machines. I quote some lines from Kurt Schuder's book of 1940: Granit und Herz. Die Strassen Adolf Hitlers--ein Dombau unsererZeit (Granite and heart. Adolf Hitler's roads --a ca- thedral construction of our times; Braunschweig).
In the summer of 1938 I was in Westerland. You have to imagine Westerland as a place where you can find almost everything you are looking for: recuperation, rest, the spicy North Sea air . . . and just as spicy and benevolently stern the North Sea waves . . . which de- velop . . . that famous surf that is such a welcome gift to every guest on the North Sea.
Among them, important and intellectually influential men(! ) from throughout Germany can be found. They know that what little time they have for recuperation can best be spent at the seaside, which, as far as health is concerned, always proves itself to be more than a timesaver. (P-7)
There, Schuder met an "influential man" with whom he was able to speak about "two great cultural manifestations in the people": "technology and industry" and "spiritual life. " The "influential man" had "creative views" on these topics that the author attempts to summarize.
The deed is first and last. The deed is the sole true content of human life. The deed is, of course, also the most difficult thing, for it demands courage. . . . (p. 8)
We technicians, who begin with the substances, have to wed our
spirits to the substances. . . . By the way, Goethe was one of the
2
greatest technicians of all time (Grotaz) if one proceeds from this
spiritual foundation of technology. . . . He even foresaw the electrical television. . . . (p. 9)
. . . Instead of sounding battle together as Goethe did, we have marched divided and the remarkable figures of spirit-only and technology-only resulted, to put it briefly, (p. 10)
. . . And without this comradeship with the machine no person
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II D 453
could live today, to say nothing of a people. . . . It serves and serves again. --In it we have to honor the thought of serving as such. This serving, however, is the highest ethical idea and deed, and so, the ma- chine converts this idea into deed. . . . ( ! )
Of course, iron is hard and the machine is not made out of sugar. But the law of life is steel and not sugar, not porridge and puree. And only the heart and the soul made of steel achieve life. . . . (p. 12)
The machine is thus thoroughly in accord with the human being, a thing that corresponds to the human essence; only when we create this inner connection have we overcome the curse of the world, material- ism. And this is indeed one of the great achievements of the new Ger- many: the introduction of technology into the soul. . . so that it no longer has to stand outside freezing. . . .
The technician spoke at length and penetratingly. . . .
And refreshed as if by a chalybeate bath, I go to the beach, breathe the sea air in blissfully that likewise refreshes the lungs like steel, (p.
14)
With unheard-of explicitness, the reshaping of human self-experience under the guiding star of the functional relation of the machine is recommended here as the Fascist way into modernity. This self-"reflection" of the living in steel and of "feeling" in hardness at the same time forms the basis for the cynical readiness of these philosophers of hardness to confess. They say everything now, but not so as to correct themselves, not to become "soft" and to think things over again. They seem not to notice that with every word, they give themselves away. They talk as if they were confessing, but without a single spark of insight. They admit everything so as not to compromise in anything. They want to become what their comrade, the machine, already is: men of steel. If images can convey something of the attitude toward life and political style, then the expressions Hitler's stirrup- holder, Alfred Hugenberg, chose in 1928 betray everything about what is to come.
What we need is not a mush but a solid block. In a mush we will per- ish; with the block, victory and reconstruction is a trifle. . . . We will be a block when the iron clamp of Weltanschauung binds us together and, in its embrace, causes everything soft and fluid to solidify and coa- lesce into rock. Those who could hinder us on the way to this goal
must step aside or allow themselves to be melted down. {Berliner Lokalanzeiger, 26-28 August 1928)
Excursus 4. The Fourth Reich-before the Third
In 1927, a Frankfurt philosophy professor, Friedrich Dessauer, presented a book entitled Philosophic der Technik. Das Problem der Realisierung (Philosophy of
454 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? tScncralinfpcFror fiir bag beutfdpe Strajjennjcfen "Concrete and stone are material things.
Man gives them form and spirit.
National Socialist technology possesses in all material achievement ideal content.
Berlin, February 1940 General Inspector for the German Road System. "
technology. The problem of realization) in which he promised a "critical metaphysics" of technology. He turned against the technology Luddites who, in a merely superficial defense, regard technology as a "parvenu" of our civilization. Dessauer pursued the transition that runs through the epoch like a main theme, from resistance to affirmation, from resentment to "positive understanding. "
Affirmation itself constitutes the core of technical knowledge:
Humankind can fly but not because it, say, denies or suspends gravita- tion but by penetrating it in an intellectual process and, expressed pic- torially, coming to the other side of the matter. On the first side, it is its servant, on the other its master. . . .
Thus, gravitation is overcome, not denied. . . . Complete affirma- tion of everything that corresponds to the laws of nature and an un- swerving persistence in the framework of what is given by the laws of nature characterize the means, (pp. 40-41)
The affirmation of the so-called laws of nature serves the interest of controlling them; if they are controlled, they can serve human goals. When Dessauer calls for an affirmation of technology, this means the affirmation of affirmation-
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 455
domination of the means of domination. In the double Yes, the steel subject of the future stirs; it is inseparable from an increased domination by this subject of itself: for this reason, the masters' theory of that period talks incessantly of hero- ism. This mean nothing other than increased self-coercion; the rhetorics of cour- age here means to risk a higher degree of self-mashing.
The machine, for its part, emits a Yes to its inventor as soon as the latter sees that "it works. " As soon as it has "stepped into existence," it possesses a particular ontic quality: It embodies something that did not occur in nature but now exists because the spirit of invention has made it--like a new shape in creation. "We are in the middle of a day of creation" (p. 52).
What does the Fourth Reich mean?
Kant, with a consciousness of an all-encompassing view of the world, distinguished three realms (Reiche) from one another. The first is that of natural science; he called the work, "Critique of Pure 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.
452 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
ity as bait. At the volatile center of its agitation lies the intimate complicity with the instincts for self-preservation in the confused masses. Its revolution promises complete "superiority" to the sportsmanlike prosthetic subject. Fascism appears here as the uprising of the prosthesis egos against "liberal" civilization, in whose "disorder" they at least still had a small chance of being "themselves. " In a violent flight to the fore, they outdo the system from which they arise. The secret of their self-preservation is hidden in the total abolition of everything that ever reminded one of a self. National socialism established itself as national functionalism.
The brisk prosthesis of the new state needed nursing and the relaxation of ten- sion. It was supposed to find both on the Fascist holiday. The sea was always good for uplifting thoughts, even for Nazi eminences seeking recuperation. On the beach, one can reflect even better on the Goethe of the machines. I quote some lines from Kurt Schuder's book of 1940: Granit und Herz. Die Strassen Adolf Hitlers--ein Dombau unsererZeit (Granite and heart. Adolf Hitler's roads --a ca- thedral construction of our times; Braunschweig).
In the summer of 1938 I was in Westerland. You have to imagine Westerland as a place where you can find almost everything you are looking for: recuperation, rest, the spicy North Sea air . . . and just as spicy and benevolently stern the North Sea waves . . . which de- velop . . . that famous surf that is such a welcome gift to every guest on the North Sea.
Among them, important and intellectually influential men(! ) from throughout Germany can be found. They know that what little time they have for recuperation can best be spent at the seaside, which, as far as health is concerned, always proves itself to be more than a timesaver. (P-7)
There, Schuder met an "influential man" with whom he was able to speak about "two great cultural manifestations in the people": "technology and industry" and "spiritual life. " The "influential man" had "creative views" on these topics that the author attempts to summarize.
The deed is first and last. The deed is the sole true content of human life. The deed is, of course, also the most difficult thing, for it demands courage. . . . (p. 8)
We technicians, who begin with the substances, have to wed our
spirits to the substances. . . . By the way, Goethe was one of the
2
greatest technicians of all time (Grotaz) if one proceeds from this
spiritual foundation of technology. . . . He even foresaw the electrical television. . . . (p. 9)
. . . Instead of sounding battle together as Goethe did, we have marched divided and the remarkable figures of spirit-only and technology-only resulted, to put it briefly, (p. 10)
. . . And without this comradeship with the machine no person
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II D 453
could live today, to say nothing of a people. . . . It serves and serves again. --In it we have to honor the thought of serving as such. This serving, however, is the highest ethical idea and deed, and so, the ma- chine converts this idea into deed. . . . ( ! )
Of course, iron is hard and the machine is not made out of sugar. But the law of life is steel and not sugar, not porridge and puree. And only the heart and the soul made of steel achieve life. . . . (p. 12)
The machine is thus thoroughly in accord with the human being, a thing that corresponds to the human essence; only when we create this inner connection have we overcome the curse of the world, material- ism. And this is indeed one of the great achievements of the new Ger- many: the introduction of technology into the soul. . . so that it no longer has to stand outside freezing. . . .
The technician spoke at length and penetratingly. . . .
And refreshed as if by a chalybeate bath, I go to the beach, breathe the sea air in blissfully that likewise refreshes the lungs like steel, (p.
14)
With unheard-of explicitness, the reshaping of human self-experience under the guiding star of the functional relation of the machine is recommended here as the Fascist way into modernity. This self-"reflection" of the living in steel and of "feeling" in hardness at the same time forms the basis for the cynical readiness of these philosophers of hardness to confess. They say everything now, but not so as to correct themselves, not to become "soft" and to think things over again. They seem not to notice that with every word, they give themselves away. They talk as if they were confessing, but without a single spark of insight. They admit everything so as not to compromise in anything. They want to become what their comrade, the machine, already is: men of steel. If images can convey something of the attitude toward life and political style, then the expressions Hitler's stirrup- holder, Alfred Hugenberg, chose in 1928 betray everything about what is to come.
What we need is not a mush but a solid block. In a mush we will per- ish; with the block, victory and reconstruction is a trifle. . . . We will be a block when the iron clamp of Weltanschauung binds us together and, in its embrace, causes everything soft and fluid to solidify and coa- lesce into rock. Those who could hinder us on the way to this goal
must step aside or allow themselves to be melted down. {Berliner Lokalanzeiger, 26-28 August 1928)
Excursus 4. The Fourth Reich-before the Third
In 1927, a Frankfurt philosophy professor, Friedrich Dessauer, presented a book entitled Philosophic der Technik. Das Problem der Realisierung (Philosophy of
454 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? tScncralinfpcFror fiir bag beutfdpe Strajjennjcfen "Concrete and stone are material things.
Man gives them form and spirit.
National Socialist technology possesses in all material achievement ideal content.
Berlin, February 1940 General Inspector for the German Road System. "
technology. The problem of realization) in which he promised a "critical metaphysics" of technology. He turned against the technology Luddites who, in a merely superficial defense, regard technology as a "parvenu" of our civilization. Dessauer pursued the transition that runs through the epoch like a main theme, from resistance to affirmation, from resentment to "positive understanding. "
Affirmation itself constitutes the core of technical knowledge:
Humankind can fly but not because it, say, denies or suspends gravita- tion but by penetrating it in an intellectual process and, expressed pic- torially, coming to the other side of the matter. On the first side, it is its servant, on the other its master. . . .
Thus, gravitation is overcome, not denied. . . . Complete affirma- tion of everything that corresponds to the laws of nature and an un- swerving persistence in the framework of what is given by the laws of nature characterize the means, (pp. 40-41)
The affirmation of the so-called laws of nature serves the interest of controlling them; if they are controlled, they can serve human goals. When Dessauer calls for an affirmation of technology, this means the affirmation of affirmation-
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 455
domination of the means of domination. In the double Yes, the steel subject of the future stirs; it is inseparable from an increased domination by this subject of itself: for this reason, the masters' theory of that period talks incessantly of hero- ism. This mean nothing other than increased self-coercion; the rhetorics of cour- age here means to risk a higher degree of self-mashing.
The machine, for its part, emits a Yes to its inventor as soon as the latter sees that "it works. " As soon as it has "stepped into existence," it possesses a particular ontic quality: It embodies something that did not occur in nature but now exists because the spirit of invention has made it--like a new shape in creation. "We are in the middle of a day of creation" (p. 52).
What does the Fourth Reich mean?
Kant, with a consciousness of an all-encompassing view of the world, distinguished three realms (Reiche) from one another. The first is that of natural science; he called the work, "Critique of Pure 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
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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.
