An
assessment
of Nietzsche will always depend strongly on how one conceives of the "will to power.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
Without
knowing it and, for the most part, even without wanting to know it (in this country
even with an outraged resoluteness not to recognize it), the New Left is an ex-
istential Left, a neokynical Left--I risk the expression: a Heideggerian Left. This
is, particularly in the land of Critical Theory, which has hung an almost im-
penetrable taboo on the "fascist" ontologist, a rather piquant discovery. But who
has exhaustively and rigorously investigated the processes of repulsion between
the existential tendencies and Left-Hegelian critical social research? Is there not
a wealth of hidden similarities and analogies between Adorno and Heidegger?
What grounds are there for their striking refusal to communicate with one an-
sother? science"?
And Diogenes? Did his existential-ontological adventure pay off for him? Has his lantern found people? Has he succeeded in instilling the unspeakably simple m our heads? I think he himself doubts it. He will consider whether he should not give up the enterprise of philosophy altogether. It makes no headway against the sad complicatedness of circumstances. The strategy of collaborating in order to change entangles the changer in the collective melancholy. In the end, those who were the more fully alive are only sadder, and it could hardly be otherwise.
Who could say which of the two had formulated the more "melancholy
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Diogenes probably will resign one day from his professorship; soon after, we will find a notice on the bulletin board saying that Professor X's lectures are canceled until further notice. Rumor has it that he was seen in an army surplus store where he bought himself a sleeping bag. He was last reported seen sitting on a garbage bin, pretty drunk and giggling to himself like someone whose head is not quite in order.
Notes
1. The enormous interest shown by intellectuals in de Sade betrays a progressive dawning in which bourgeois cynicism begins to recognize itself again in late-aristocratic cynicism. It could be that in the future, Flaubert will take the place of de Sade.
2. "Those who give me a gift, I wag my tail at, those who give me nothing, I bark at, and scoun- drels I bite" (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 60).
3. [The metropolitan Indians (also mentioned in chapter 5) were a movement in the second half of the seventies in Western Europe of fringe dwellers who emulated American Indian culture and wanted to subvert the capitalist urban culture from within with (unarmed) cultural guerrilla tactics. As such, they are the politicized forerunners of the punks. -- Trans. ]
4. Shaving was a custom of the Macedonia military, taken over by Hellenic and Roman society. From then on the beard becomes a philosophical status symbol, a sign of nonconformism.
5. A modern counterexample: "No one should let himself be infected by the scientists of the Club of Rome, who have told us that we should turn back to a simple life. For this we have not come into office and we also do not work towards this. Diogenes could live in a tub and was satisfied with that. But he was a philosopher, and most of the time we are not. " Here we have Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in 1976, who is speaking as a cynic warning us about the kynics.
6. See Hegel, Vorlesungen tiber die Geschichte der Philosophie. Collected Works, vol. 18 (Frankfurt, 1971), pp. 551ff. 7. Another version shifts this story to Corinth. The sources are few and fragmentary. For this reason one wants to lay every tiny particle recovered on the philologist's assaying scales and carefully weigh every letter. However, the ultimate wisdom often lies in not taking what has been handed down too literally. In this there is also a great hermeneutical chance, and we make unrestrained use of it.
8. See Regis Debray, who recognizes that a cultural history of scientific claims, to be properly founded, must be built on the basis of a sociology of ambitions. Le pouvoir intellectuel en France (Paris, 1979).
9. ". . . which neither sought a place to rest nor avoided the dark, nor showed any desire for so-called delicacies. That gave him a helpful tip for his needy situation. " (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 22).
10. [A famous German clown of the twentieth century--Trans. ]
11. There is one derivation of kynicism from kyon, the Greek for "dog," and another from the gymnasion Kynosarges in which Diogenes' purported teacher, Antisthenes, is said to have taught. 12. Words like drop-out, Aussteiger [escapist; literally, one who climbs out, "alighter"; --Trans. ]
and others hint in the same direction.
13. Kynicism even begins historically with an apparent enmity toward pleasure, if it is true that
Antisthenes "would rather have gone mad than feel pleasure. " Self-control, however, is not self- torture.
14. Laertius maintains that there was a writing by Diogenes on the state (Politeia). Like every- thing else, it has been lost. Its possible content can easily be surmised, however. The idea of a world- state, in which the later Stoic political philosophy culminates, is of kynical origin.
15. [This phrase comes from Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Part 3, section 2. -Trans. ]
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16. Here an enticing comparison with the doctrine of long life in Chinese Taoism could be filled out. Meiner's edition of Laertius gives Diogenes' life span as 404-323 B. C. , i. e. , eighty-one years. 17. With Diogenes, under the slogan Remint the Coins, there begins what will be called by the neokynic Nietzsche "the revaluing of all values," the cultural revolution of the "naked truth. " Nietzsche, of course, ruins the point. His revaluation turns the kynical rejection of power into a will to power; with this he changes sides and provides the powerful with a philosophy of disinhibition. 18. Feminism thus has an originally kynical side; indeed, it is perhaps the present-day core of neokynicism. For example, it encourages women to discover masturbation so as to detach themselves
from the compulsions of marriage.
19. Helmut Schmidt still cites his ethics.
20. This image prevails from about the time of Nero. In Cicero's time, the sects, which dominated
the ideological scene for a hundred years, are scarcely mentioned.
21. The interpretation of the late-ancient existential anxiety-among other things, a premise of
Christianity--is still a challenge to psychohistory.
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22. Modern analogy: rival depth-psychological sects (Freudians, Jungians, Reichians, Adlerians,
Janovians, Perlsians, Lacanians, etc. ).
23. Christoph Martin Wieland, too, the best scholar of kynicism in eighteenth-century Germany
and the translator of Lucian, probably sensed that there was something inauthentic in Lucian's con- tempt for Peregrinus. In his novel, Die geheime Geschichte des Peregrinus Proteus (The secret story of Peregrinus Proteus) (1788-89), he thus draws a kinder picture of the philosopher.
24. See chapter 23, "On the German Republic of Impostors," as well as the section in chapter 10 entitled "Knowledge of War and Espionage. "
25. Recall the theses on art as the form of expression of bourgeois neokynicism in chapter 5. The arts possessed an exceptional capacity to process negativity. The concept "realism" refers to this in- vestigatory power of art.
26. Since Marx we know that the moving force that plunges modernity into its apparent progres- sive historicity is based on the alliance between capital and science. At the same time we are forced to distinguish more sharply between continuance (Fortgang) and progress (Fortschritt).
27. ". . . you call. . . evil": The Devil is not only an evolutionist but also a nominalist. "Evil" understands itself in another way: as a "power," as a phenomenon of energy, as a position in a natural polarity. Konrad Lorenz, still arguing in the schema of evolution, nowadays treats the phenomenon of aggression consistently from this standpoint: "so-called evil. " 28. Not actionism but "contemplative praxis," to act in order to become conscious.
29. Nietzsche, who initially again consciously called himelf a Cyniker, also coined the phrase "live dangerously. " It is the motto of kynical empiricism toward which Faust orients himself.
30. In its sharpest formulations, Adorno's Minima Moralia, the main work of moral critique in postwar German philosophy, speaks without reserve of the disgrace of surviving; it would be short- sighted to understand this merely as the reaction to Jewish experiences in those years (1943 on). On the morality of survival see also Elias Canetti, Masse undMacht (Munich, 1976) (Crowds and power; 1962).
31. In chapter 10, the way of seeing that leads to the "black empiricism" of the enlightenment sciences will be described. 32. "Boogie-woogie of the hormones" (Arthur Miller).
33. We are reading it here without regard to its context in the novel.
34. One hundred years after Dostoyevsky wrote this, the full implications of this reflection seem
to be coming to light, since, in Western leftist traditions, a departure from the "spirit of the (Christian) Utopia" is being carried out with a previously unknown profundity and since the intelligentsia ex- periences, directly and on its own responsibility, the ineluctability of the principle of power and of the reason of state. The Left in political power: With this, moral-political and psychic complications with a new degree of complexity begin.
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35. "The world is everything that is the case," positivism will say later. If one takes the expression "the case is" somewhat more generously, the great realists of the nineteenth century are thoroughly positivistic--or at least "on the way" to positivism. For Marx, class struggles (although a universal concept) are the case; for Nietzsche, the will to power; for Freud, drives.
36. That is certainly no longer the biblical Jesus but a Jesus from the perspective of Judas, a Judas who seeks disburdening. His tragic cynicism evades an unbearable guilt; psychoanalytically, this probably belongs to the psychodynamic of the patricidal son, who can continue to live without suffocating on his guilt only by finding reasons for why he had to kill.
37. Here we approach the third level of the development of the concept of cynicism which will be presented in Part III. 38. Historicism contributes something decisive to this by educating us to see all phenomena of consciousness as a "product of their time"; it can easily be combined with psychologism as well as sociologism.
39. For this reason, conservatives often have a clear consciousness of "semantics. "
40. See "Minima Amoralia," in chapter 9.
41. Applied to the area of (church) politics, this dualism is expressed as power and spirit.
42. Overcoming of nihilism? "The results of the overcoming . . . are always worse than what
is overcome"; Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt, 1966), p. 371.
43. Christian substitute: One does it for the good of others.
44. Only once has Diogenes been seen in this way in modernity. Nietzsche's metaphysical happen-
ing in which the "crazy person" with the lantern announces: "God is dead" was the signal of neo- kynicism.
45. In Part IV, I pursue this "translation" further and investigate what subjugation and being sub- jugated mean for epistemology.
46. Mephistopheles: "If I had not reserved fire for myself/1 would have nothing apart for myself. "
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47. [Heidegger's term has many connotations. Verfallen can mean "degenerated," "lapsed," "decayed," "addicted," "fallen. " The sense of having fallen ("fallenness") into the habit of everyday- ness seems to predominate. --Trans. ]
48. Nihilism? For a long time, the Marxist critique of Heidegger wanted to see in him nothing other than the swan song of the decadent bourgeoisie that had been left stranded even by the will to a future. Heidegger as speaker for a fascistoid nihilism and cult of death? Hardly. Rather, he con- tributed an impulse against the socialisms of the "great tomorrow," against Utopias of endless sacrifice.
49. Here I take up a motif of Michel Foucault's.
50. Concreteness does not exclude vagueness.
51. [Unbehaustheit recalls, among other things, Diogenes and his tub and suggests the original-
fundamental insecurity of all existence, naked ejection into the world. --Trans. ]
52.
An assessment of Nietzsche will always depend strongly on how one conceives of the "will to power. " Encouragement to imperial cynicism? Cathartic confession? Aesthetic motto? Self- correction of an inhibited person? Vitalistic slogan? Metaphysics of narcissism? Propaganda of disin-
hibition?
53. This is a modern equivalent for the Delphic "Know thyself. " The Freudian ego is attributable
rather to Anyone. Is the psychoanalyzed person an accommodated person, someone cut down to size? 54. This reflected amoralism, which, paradoxically, carries the mute promise of an authentic ethi- cal life within it, has found its opponent in socialist moralism. The more recent Critical Theory has also renounced the sensitivistic quasi-amoralism of Adorno's "aesthetic theory" and steers with direct argumentation toward a positive ethics. That may signify an advance in a certain respect--if it avoids falling behind the radical modernity of existential and aesthetic amoralism. The latter already works on modern experiences with every morality and all categorical imperatives: Because these forms of "Ought" result in idealistic overexertions, imperative ethics comes with its own gravedigger-
skepticism, resignation, cynicism. Moralism, with its "you should" inevitably drives us into an "I
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 213
can't. " Amoralism, by contrast, which proceeds from the "you can," realistically banks on the chance that what "I can" in the end will also be the right thing. The turn to practical philosophy that happily characterizes every present-day fundamental thinking that is world-wise should not tempt us to again let loose at being with a categorical imperative. Kynical reason, therefore, develops a nonimperative ethics that encourages the Can, instead of entangling us in the depressive complications of the Ought.
55. Recently, Hermann Morchen's extended study of Heidegger and Adorno has taken on these questions.
II. Phenomenological Main Text
Chapter 8
The Cardinal Cynicisms
In hasty ill humor, I have ripped the fig leaves from some naked thoughts.
Heinrich Heine, preface to Germany, a Winter's Tale
From what we have seen then, the concept of cynicism contains more than a first glance would lead us to expect. It is one of those things that, if given an inch, will take a mile. Our curiosity aroused, we wanted at first to "see what's really in it," and thereby --we noticed it too late--we experienced something that bog- gles our minds. We wanted to learn something about cynicism and discovered in doing so that it has long since brought us under its domination.
To this point, we have presented the concept of cynicism in two versions, and a third clearly emerges after chapter 7, "The Cabinet of Cynics. " The first says: Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness--unhappy consciousness in modern- ized form. Our approach here is intuitive, starting with a paradox; it articulates an uneasiness that sees the modern world steeped in cultural insanities, false hopes and their disappointment, in the progress of madness and the suspension of reason, in the deep schism that runs through modern consciousnesses and that seems to separate the rational and the real, what we know and what we do, from each other for all time. In the description we achieved a pathography that probed schizoid phenomena. It tried to find words for the perversely complicated struc- tures of a consciousness that has become reflective and is almost more melancholy than false; it is a consciousness that, under the compulsions of self-preservation, continues to run itself, though run down, in a permanent moral self-denial.
In the second version, the concept of cynicism assumes a historical dimension. A tension becomes apparent that, in the ancient critique of civilization, had first found expression under the name of kynicism: the urge of individuals to maintain
217
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themselves as fully rational living beings against the distortions and semirationali- ties of their societies. Existence in
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resistance, in laughter, in refusal, in the appeal to the whole of nature and a full life. It begins as plebeian "individualism," panto- mimic, wily, and quick-witted. Some of this trickles through to the more serious Stoa; iridescent transitions to Christianity are effected but die out to the extent that Christian theology negates and even damns the ancient-heathen inheritance. We reserved the concept of cynicism for the reply of the rulers and the ruling cul- ture to the kynical provocation. They definitely see that there is an element of truth in it, but proceed with oppression. From now on, they know what they do.
The concept here undergoes a split into the dichotomy: kynicism-cynicism that, in substance, corresponds to resistance and repression, or more precisely, self-embodiment in resistance and self-splitting in repression. The phenomenon of kynicism is thereby separated from its historical origin and becomes a type that crops up again and again historically whenever, in crisis civilizations and civiliza- tion crises, consciousnesses clash with each other. Kynicism and cynicism are, accordingly, constants in our history, typical forms of a polemical consciousness "from below" and "from above. " In them, the opposition of high culture and peo- ple's culture is lived out as the exposure of paradoxes within high- cultural ethics.
Here, the third version of the concept of cynicism continues on to a phenome- nology of polemical forms of consciousness. The polemic always revolves around the correct conception of the truth as "naked" truth. Cynical thinking, namely, can arise only when two views of things have become possible, an official and an unofficial view, a veiled and a naked view, one from the viewpoint of heroes and one from the viewpoint of valets. In a culture in which one is regularly told lies, one wants to know not merely the truth but the naked truth. Where that cannot be that is not allowed to be, one has to draw out what the "naked" facts look like, no matter what morality has to say about it. In a certain way, "ruling" and "lying" are synonyms. The truth of rulers and that of servants are different.
In this phenomenological sighting of contestable forms of consciousness, we must "sublate" (aufheben) the bias in favor of the kynical standpoint. At first, we will have to patiently and somewhat dryly look at how, in six great arenas of values-the military, politics, sexuality, medicine, religion, and knowledge (the- ory)--kynical and cynical consciousnesses confront, attack, retaliate against each other, qualify each other, provoke each other, and finally get to know and neutral- ize each other. In the cardinal cynicisms, the contours of a combative history of ideas emerge. Such a history describes that "labor on the ideal" that stands at the heart of high-cultural ethics. That this is not a "phenomenology of spirit" in the
1Hegelian sense will become clear.
phenomenology apart from the irrepressible philosophical battle cry: "Let's get down to things! "
Likewise, it has little to do with Husserlian
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 219
? Heinrich Zille, Riesenprogramm (Gigantic program). Variety tent on a Berlin fair- ground around 1900.
Military Cynicism
Five minutes' cowardice is better than a life long dead.
Soldier's saying
Even the Prussian prime minister, von Bismarck, was horrified by the atrocities. "War is hell, and whoever lets it loose with the stroke of a quill is a devil! " he exclaimed, without consider- ing how tirelessly he himself had contributed to it! 2 W. Stieber
Anthropological research says that flight is older than attack. Accordingly, the
human being would be, admittedly, partly predator (hunter), but not a priori a
warring animal. Nevertheless the discovery of weapons --for beating, throwing,
shooting (development of distance, neocortical development)--plays a key role
in anthropogenesis. If one can assume anything at all about the original tendency
of the human psyche regarding struggle and war, one can assume at least this
much: It prefers avoidance to striking. "Cowardly but happy" (G. Kleemann, sub-
title: Why the contemporary primitive human being does not want to fight;
Frankfurt-Berlin-Vienna, 1981). Those who avoid can initially better secure their
chances for survival than those who confront. If cowardice is neutrally under-
stood as the primary inclination to avoid confrontation, in the economy of human
dr
than to hold one's ground. "The smarter person yields. "
'ves it must have priority over the desire to fight. Initially it is smarter to flee
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But at some point in the process of civilization it becomes smarter to stand firm than to flee. How this came to be is not our topic here --a couple of historical con- ceptual lumps may mark out the problem: ecological competition, increase in population density, neolithic revolution, the division between mobile herding cul- tures and sedentary agricultural cultures, and so on. The path to "history," to higher cultures, leads through the militarization of tribes and beyond to the state.
Military cynicism can emerge when three male martial character types have assumed clear contours in a society: the hero, the hesitater, and the coward. (This can even be seen in a rudimentary form in animal species with high intraspecies aggression, e. g. , in deer populations. ) An unambiguous hierarchy of values is es- tablished at whose summit the hero stands; everyone should be basically like him. Heroism is internalized as a model by the males in a combative civilization. But hereby, a new sociopsychological training of human beings also becomes neces- sary, with the aim of acquiring a distribution of martial temperaments not found in nature. Cowardice, present in large quantities as raw material and in everyone, must be reworked into battle-hungry heroism, or at least into brave, battle-ready hesitancy. All training of soldiers in the history of combative civilizations works to produce this unnatural alchemy. The noble family contributes to it just as much as the armed peasant family, as do, later, royal courts, military schools, barracks, and public morals. Heroism became and remained, in part to the present day, a dominant cultural factor. The cult of the aggressive, triumphant warrior runs through all of recorded history. Where we begin to find written records, there is a high probability that it is the story of a hero, of a warrior who has been through many adventures. Where written records are not found, tales of heroes
3continue indefinitely back to obscure oral origins.
of those fighters who intervened in European history as early Carolingian ar- mored knights wrote about themselves so glowingly in chivalrous poetry, fas- cinating stories of the great warriors in the times of migrations (the era of the Nibelungen) were told by the tribes.
The division of labor in military temperaments seems to make sense in social terms. The three types represent the advantages of three different "tactics" or styles of fighting. Heroes make use of the advantages that attack offers in many situations where there is a compulsion to fight. Thus, attack is the best defense. Hesitaters constitute the main mass of a "reasonable middle position"; they fight when they have to, and then they fight energetically, but they also know how to curb the danger that can come from the bravado of heroes. Cowards, finally, can occasionally save themselves when all others who "stand firm" are doomed to per- ish. But that is not supposed to be mentioned, and the coward must be held in con- tempt because otherwise the alchemy that is held to make battle-hungry fighters out of timid deserters cannot succeed. Mercilessly, the heroic model of the mili- tary group of men is forced on all. The hero stands in the limelight; to him, the demigod in armor, all honor, acclamation, and esteem are accorded.
Long before the descendants
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 221
There are three attitudes of consciousness to this psychic ideal and exemplary ? mage, according to which one you are. The hero, whenever success raises him above self-doubt, experiences himself as the one who lives at the zenith of his own ideal, radiant and self-confident, a man who can fulfill his own and collective dreams. He will sense the "glory" of a demigod in himself; the thought of losing does not enter his mind. Hence the breathtaking bigmouthedness of heroes who are certain of victory, at the beginning of the battle and after the victory. It speaks for the psychology of the war- experienced Romans that they granted the returned
triumphant general a victory procession through his town, where he could ex- perience his own deification in the state-- and with him, the people who in this way learned to stay "in love with success"; but they also put a slave on the victor's chariot who continually had to call him: "Reflect, victor, that you are mortal! " This apotheosis of the victor, the cult of success, of divinity through battle, and of happy success is part of the sociopsychological inheritance of humanity from antiquity--and even today, this experience is repeatedly staged and peddled from sports fields to the Olympics. Pictorially, heroes are almost always represented as youths; the misfortune of heroes is that they die young.
The second attitude toward the ideal is that of the hesitater, of the relative hero.
He probably sees himself as someone who fulfills and obeys the morality of the
hero but who does not enjoy the glamor of success. To be sure, the ideal rules
him, but it does not make him into an exemplary case. He fights and dies when
there is no way out of it, and he can console himself with the certainty that he
is prepared to do what is necessary. He does not feel the continual need to prove
himself as does the topnotch hero, who must even seek out danger simply to keep
4
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up his self-image. The hesitater, however, pays for this with a certain medi-
ocrity; he is neither right at the top nor right at the bottom, and when he dies his name is summarily listed among the dead heroes. Perhaps it is a good sign that modern armies cultivate, right up to the top ranks, the soldier of the hesitater type (obedience plus thinking for oneself, the "citizen in uniform"), one who does not have an inner urge to fight. Only in certain military and political leaders is there still a tendency toward the characteristic offensive mentality --"falcons," heroes of armament, those hooked on hegemony.
The third stance toward the heroic ideal is adopted by the coward. Of course, under the unavoidable pressure of the heroic image, he must seek refuge in the hesitatingly brave masses. He must hide the fact that he is really the anti-hero; he must camouflage himself and make himself as unobtrusive as possible. As muddler, improvisor, and man of few words, he cannot even afford to internalize the image of the hero in any rigid way because otherwise self-contempt would crush him. In him, a slight decomposition of the "superego" is already under way. In the coward's consciousness lie simultaneously the germs of military kynicism and of a higher critical realism! For through his experience and self- experience,
222 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
the coward is forced to reflect and look twice. He can confess his cowardice aloud just as little--otherwise he would be even more despised --as he can simply give it up. In him, to be sure often poisoned by a drop of self-contempt, a critical potential against the ethics of heroes begins to grow. Because he himself has to dissemble, he will be more sensitive to the pretense of others. When heroes and hesitaters succumb to a superior power, the coward, who allows himself to flee, is the sole survivor. Hence the sarcastic saying: Horses are the survivors of heroes.
We now drop the fiction that we are speaking of a socially homogeneous army. It becomes volatile for soldiers' cynicism when consideration is given to military hierarchies, which correspond roughly to the class structure of society. In feudal military structures we find, besides the troop of knightly heroes, mostly an ac- quired troop of paid knights or mercenaries and below them the troop of orderlies and aides. Each of these groups also has its own combat morality that corresponds approximately to the three military temperaments. For the knight, combat, even if it is about tangible material interests, belongs to his social status and to the aristocratic self-image. In his combat morality, therefore, "honor" must be given special consideration. Where honor is at stake, there is an excess of motivation over and above the small and concrete causes--up to fighting for the sake of fighting. This is not the case with mercenaries, who have made war their profes- sion: the motley mob of the times of the mercenaries, paid knights, but mainly infantry, foot troops, peasants' sons from Switzerland bought to engage in wars, etc. Their motive to fight cannot be heroic because the paid soldier (Italian soldi, money) conceives of war as a workplace, not as a heroes' stage, which does not exclude collaborating with the military spectacle of heroes or even a certain hero- ism lowered to the level of a craft. Mercenaries are professional hesitaters. They wage war because war feeds them, and they intend to survive the skirmishes. The metier as such is already dangerous enough; one does not have to, in addition, challenge death with heroic frills. At the lower end of the hierarchy, finally, the orderly fights, above all because an accident of birth made him the serf of a knight who, without him, could neither mount nor dismount a horse and could not even get out of his armor without help. The aides act as a kind of a military proletariat whose invisible and unappreciated labor is sublated in the victories of their
masters like swallowed surplus value. Entanglements in masculine ideals aside, the servant has no "intrinsic" motivation to fight except, as far as possible, to keep himself alive during the fighting. For him it would be realistic to be cowardly from the bottom of his heart.
The military cynical process can now be set into motion, and as always it be- gins at the lower kynical-realistic position. Sancho Panza is its first "great" representative. Without much reflection, this clever little peasant knows that he has a right to cowardice, just as his poor noble master, Don Quixote, has a duty
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 223
? Gustave Dore, Don Quixote.
toward heroism. But those who view the heroism of the master with Sancho Panza's eyes inevitably see the craziness and blindness of heroic consciousness. This cheeky military enlightenment, which Cervantes unrelentingly lays out, re- veals that the old desire for a hero's fight is an anachronism and that all purport- edly noble occasions to fight are nothing more than pure projections of the knight's imagination. Thus windmills stand for giants, prostitutes for ladies to be heroically loved, and so forth. To be able to see this, the narrator himself requires the realistic, foot soldier's, plebeian perspective --and beyond this social permis- sion to speak a language befitting this perspective. This could not have happened before the late Middle Ages, when the knights lost their technical superiority in weaponry to the plebeian infantry and when armed mobs of peasants more and more frequently served troops of knightly heroes annihilating defeats. Since the fourteenth century, the heroic star of armored horse combat was in any case in descent. With this, the
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moment had arrived when anti-heroism found its language and when the cowardly view of heroism became publicly possible. Once the
224 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
? Thomas Rowlandson, The Two Kings of Terror. English caricature of Napoleon's defeat at Leipzig, 1813.
masters had to swallow their first defeats, the servants sensed their real power. Now, one can laugh realistically.
The constitutions of armies after the Middle Ages up to Napoleonic times, in- deed even up to contemporary times, reveal a paradoxical distortion of the origi- nal connections between combat morality and the type of weaponry. The ancient hero was a lone fighter just as the knight was in feudalism. He sought to prove himself in the duel, but best of all in the constellation of one against many. Mod- ern warfare, however, tendentially depreciates the individual fight. Wars are decided by formations and mass movements. Using the Roman legion as its model, the modern organization of armies pushes the genuinely heroic functions--combined assault, standing firm, man-to-man combat, etc. -toward the bottom. This means that the demands made of heroes fall more and more on those, who, according to their nature and motivation, tend to be hesitaters or cowards. In modern infantries, then, a schizoid drill in heroism --the instilling of an anonymous and unacknowledged courage to die --must be carried out. The top officers, who by virtue of their strategic position, are not as endangered, shove the risk of heroism, death in the front line, more and more onto those who actually have nothing at stake in the war and who often were only acquired as troops ac- cidentally or by force (compulsory conscription, extortion of the poor, entice-
5As soon as some space had been made in modern soldiery for the well-founded realism of the cowards (kynicism), the military cynical process is stepped up to a higher level: the answer to it now comes from the modern cynical realism of ment with alcohol, a way out for superfluous peasants' sons, etc. ).
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 225
royalty. Of course, this realism also knows that not one of the poor devils in uni- form can have heroic motives. But they should be heroes nevertheless and look the so-called hero's death in the face, as normally only aristocrats do. For this reason, armies after the Middle Ages are the first social organs that methodically cultivate schizophrenia as a collective condition. In them, the soldier is not "him- self but another, a piece of the heroic machinery. From time to time it also hap- pens that a leader lets his mask fall and reveals that he indeed sympathizes with the poor devils' wish to live, but he cannot acknowledge this wish. "Dogs, do you want to live forever! " The cynic has thoroughly understood his kynical dogs, but nevertheless people have to die. When Frederick II of Prussia speaks thus, in a patriarchal, humorous tone of voice, we are listening to an enlightened master's consciousness in the second round. It has understood the hero humbug but needs the hero's death for the time being as a political tool --here, for the sake of Prus- sia's glory. On this note, have fun being blown to smithereens! From now on, all battles, no matter how nobly advertised, are overshadowed by this cynical self- denial.
The modern development of types of weaponry contributes a good deal, directly and indirectly, to the tension between the consciousness of heroes and that of cowards. In the dispute between cavalry, infantry, and artillery over precedence, this tension has a subliminal effect. For it generally holds that the more horrifyingly a weapon works even from a distance, the more cowardly, in principle, its user can be.
knowing it and, for the most part, even without wanting to know it (in this country
even with an outraged resoluteness not to recognize it), the New Left is an ex-
istential Left, a neokynical Left--I risk the expression: a Heideggerian Left. This
is, particularly in the land of Critical Theory, which has hung an almost im-
penetrable taboo on the "fascist" ontologist, a rather piquant discovery. But who
has exhaustively and rigorously investigated the processes of repulsion between
the existential tendencies and Left-Hegelian critical social research? Is there not
a wealth of hidden similarities and analogies between Adorno and Heidegger?
What grounds are there for their striking refusal to communicate with one an-
sother? science"?
And Diogenes? Did his existential-ontological adventure pay off for him? Has his lantern found people? Has he succeeded in instilling the unspeakably simple m our heads? I think he himself doubts it. He will consider whether he should not give up the enterprise of philosophy altogether. It makes no headway against the sad complicatedness of circumstances. The strategy of collaborating in order to change entangles the changer in the collective melancholy. In the end, those who were the more fully alive are only sadder, and it could hardly be otherwise.
Who could say which of the two had formulated the more "melancholy
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Diogenes probably will resign one day from his professorship; soon after, we will find a notice on the bulletin board saying that Professor X's lectures are canceled until further notice. Rumor has it that he was seen in an army surplus store where he bought himself a sleeping bag. He was last reported seen sitting on a garbage bin, pretty drunk and giggling to himself like someone whose head is not quite in order.
Notes
1. The enormous interest shown by intellectuals in de Sade betrays a progressive dawning in which bourgeois cynicism begins to recognize itself again in late-aristocratic cynicism. It could be that in the future, Flaubert will take the place of de Sade.
2. "Those who give me a gift, I wag my tail at, those who give me nothing, I bark at, and scoun- drels I bite" (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 60).
3. [The metropolitan Indians (also mentioned in chapter 5) were a movement in the second half of the seventies in Western Europe of fringe dwellers who emulated American Indian culture and wanted to subvert the capitalist urban culture from within with (unarmed) cultural guerrilla tactics. As such, they are the politicized forerunners of the punks. -- Trans. ]
4. Shaving was a custom of the Macedonia military, taken over by Hellenic and Roman society. From then on the beard becomes a philosophical status symbol, a sign of nonconformism.
5. A modern counterexample: "No one should let himself be infected by the scientists of the Club of Rome, who have told us that we should turn back to a simple life. For this we have not come into office and we also do not work towards this. Diogenes could live in a tub and was satisfied with that. But he was a philosopher, and most of the time we are not. " Here we have Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in 1976, who is speaking as a cynic warning us about the kynics.
6. See Hegel, Vorlesungen tiber die Geschichte der Philosophie. Collected Works, vol. 18 (Frankfurt, 1971), pp. 551ff. 7. Another version shifts this story to Corinth. The sources are few and fragmentary. For this reason one wants to lay every tiny particle recovered on the philologist's assaying scales and carefully weigh every letter. However, the ultimate wisdom often lies in not taking what has been handed down too literally. In this there is also a great hermeneutical chance, and we make unrestrained use of it.
8. See Regis Debray, who recognizes that a cultural history of scientific claims, to be properly founded, must be built on the basis of a sociology of ambitions. Le pouvoir intellectuel en France (Paris, 1979).
9. ". . . which neither sought a place to rest nor avoided the dark, nor showed any desire for so-called delicacies. That gave him a helpful tip for his needy situation. " (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 22).
10. [A famous German clown of the twentieth century--Trans. ]
11. There is one derivation of kynicism from kyon, the Greek for "dog," and another from the gymnasion Kynosarges in which Diogenes' purported teacher, Antisthenes, is said to have taught. 12. Words like drop-out, Aussteiger [escapist; literally, one who climbs out, "alighter"; --Trans. ]
and others hint in the same direction.
13. Kynicism even begins historically with an apparent enmity toward pleasure, if it is true that
Antisthenes "would rather have gone mad than feel pleasure. " Self-control, however, is not self- torture.
14. Laertius maintains that there was a writing by Diogenes on the state (Politeia). Like every- thing else, it has been lost. Its possible content can easily be surmised, however. The idea of a world- state, in which the later Stoic political philosophy culminates, is of kynical origin.
15. [This phrase comes from Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Part 3, section 2. -Trans. ]
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16. Here an enticing comparison with the doctrine of long life in Chinese Taoism could be filled out. Meiner's edition of Laertius gives Diogenes' life span as 404-323 B. C. , i. e. , eighty-one years. 17. With Diogenes, under the slogan Remint the Coins, there begins what will be called by the neokynic Nietzsche "the revaluing of all values," the cultural revolution of the "naked truth. " Nietzsche, of course, ruins the point. His revaluation turns the kynical rejection of power into a will to power; with this he changes sides and provides the powerful with a philosophy of disinhibition. 18. Feminism thus has an originally kynical side; indeed, it is perhaps the present-day core of neokynicism. For example, it encourages women to discover masturbation so as to detach themselves
from the compulsions of marriage.
19. Helmut Schmidt still cites his ethics.
20. This image prevails from about the time of Nero. In Cicero's time, the sects, which dominated
the ideological scene for a hundred years, are scarcely mentioned.
21. The interpretation of the late-ancient existential anxiety-among other things, a premise of
Christianity--is still a challenge to psychohistory.
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22. Modern analogy: rival depth-psychological sects (Freudians, Jungians, Reichians, Adlerians,
Janovians, Perlsians, Lacanians, etc. ).
23. Christoph Martin Wieland, too, the best scholar of kynicism in eighteenth-century Germany
and the translator of Lucian, probably sensed that there was something inauthentic in Lucian's con- tempt for Peregrinus. In his novel, Die geheime Geschichte des Peregrinus Proteus (The secret story of Peregrinus Proteus) (1788-89), he thus draws a kinder picture of the philosopher.
24. See chapter 23, "On the German Republic of Impostors," as well as the section in chapter 10 entitled "Knowledge of War and Espionage. "
25. Recall the theses on art as the form of expression of bourgeois neokynicism in chapter 5. The arts possessed an exceptional capacity to process negativity. The concept "realism" refers to this in- vestigatory power of art.
26. Since Marx we know that the moving force that plunges modernity into its apparent progres- sive historicity is based on the alliance between capital and science. At the same time we are forced to distinguish more sharply between continuance (Fortgang) and progress (Fortschritt).
27. ". . . you call. . . evil": The Devil is not only an evolutionist but also a nominalist. "Evil" understands itself in another way: as a "power," as a phenomenon of energy, as a position in a natural polarity. Konrad Lorenz, still arguing in the schema of evolution, nowadays treats the phenomenon of aggression consistently from this standpoint: "so-called evil. " 28. Not actionism but "contemplative praxis," to act in order to become conscious.
29. Nietzsche, who initially again consciously called himelf a Cyniker, also coined the phrase "live dangerously. " It is the motto of kynical empiricism toward which Faust orients himself.
30. In its sharpest formulations, Adorno's Minima Moralia, the main work of moral critique in postwar German philosophy, speaks without reserve of the disgrace of surviving; it would be short- sighted to understand this merely as the reaction to Jewish experiences in those years (1943 on). On the morality of survival see also Elias Canetti, Masse undMacht (Munich, 1976) (Crowds and power; 1962).
31. In chapter 10, the way of seeing that leads to the "black empiricism" of the enlightenment sciences will be described. 32. "Boogie-woogie of the hormones" (Arthur Miller).
33. We are reading it here without regard to its context in the novel.
34. One hundred years after Dostoyevsky wrote this, the full implications of this reflection seem
to be coming to light, since, in Western leftist traditions, a departure from the "spirit of the (Christian) Utopia" is being carried out with a previously unknown profundity and since the intelligentsia ex- periences, directly and on its own responsibility, the ineluctability of the principle of power and of the reason of state. The Left in political power: With this, moral-political and psychic complications with a new degree of complexity begin.
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35. "The world is everything that is the case," positivism will say later. If one takes the expression "the case is" somewhat more generously, the great realists of the nineteenth century are thoroughly positivistic--or at least "on the way" to positivism. For Marx, class struggles (although a universal concept) are the case; for Nietzsche, the will to power; for Freud, drives.
36. That is certainly no longer the biblical Jesus but a Jesus from the perspective of Judas, a Judas who seeks disburdening. His tragic cynicism evades an unbearable guilt; psychoanalytically, this probably belongs to the psychodynamic of the patricidal son, who can continue to live without suffocating on his guilt only by finding reasons for why he had to kill.
37. Here we approach the third level of the development of the concept of cynicism which will be presented in Part III. 38. Historicism contributes something decisive to this by educating us to see all phenomena of consciousness as a "product of their time"; it can easily be combined with psychologism as well as sociologism.
39. For this reason, conservatives often have a clear consciousness of "semantics. "
40. See "Minima Amoralia," in chapter 9.
41. Applied to the area of (church) politics, this dualism is expressed as power and spirit.
42. Overcoming of nihilism? "The results of the overcoming . . . are always worse than what
is overcome"; Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt, 1966), p. 371.
43. Christian substitute: One does it for the good of others.
44. Only once has Diogenes been seen in this way in modernity. Nietzsche's metaphysical happen-
ing in which the "crazy person" with the lantern announces: "God is dead" was the signal of neo- kynicism.
45. In Part IV, I pursue this "translation" further and investigate what subjugation and being sub- jugated mean for epistemology.
46. Mephistopheles: "If I had not reserved fire for myself/1 would have nothing apart for myself. "
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47. [Heidegger's term has many connotations. Verfallen can mean "degenerated," "lapsed," "decayed," "addicted," "fallen. " The sense of having fallen ("fallenness") into the habit of everyday- ness seems to predominate. --Trans. ]
48. Nihilism? For a long time, the Marxist critique of Heidegger wanted to see in him nothing other than the swan song of the decadent bourgeoisie that had been left stranded even by the will to a future. Heidegger as speaker for a fascistoid nihilism and cult of death? Hardly. Rather, he con- tributed an impulse against the socialisms of the "great tomorrow," against Utopias of endless sacrifice.
49. Here I take up a motif of Michel Foucault's.
50. Concreteness does not exclude vagueness.
51. [Unbehaustheit recalls, among other things, Diogenes and his tub and suggests the original-
fundamental insecurity of all existence, naked ejection into the world. --Trans. ]
52.
An assessment of Nietzsche will always depend strongly on how one conceives of the "will to power. " Encouragement to imperial cynicism? Cathartic confession? Aesthetic motto? Self- correction of an inhibited person? Vitalistic slogan? Metaphysics of narcissism? Propaganda of disin-
hibition?
53. This is a modern equivalent for the Delphic "Know thyself. " The Freudian ego is attributable
rather to Anyone. Is the psychoanalyzed person an accommodated person, someone cut down to size? 54. This reflected amoralism, which, paradoxically, carries the mute promise of an authentic ethi- cal life within it, has found its opponent in socialist moralism. The more recent Critical Theory has also renounced the sensitivistic quasi-amoralism of Adorno's "aesthetic theory" and steers with direct argumentation toward a positive ethics. That may signify an advance in a certain respect--if it avoids falling behind the radical modernity of existential and aesthetic amoralism. The latter already works on modern experiences with every morality and all categorical imperatives: Because these forms of "Ought" result in idealistic overexertions, imperative ethics comes with its own gravedigger-
skepticism, resignation, cynicism. Moralism, with its "you should" inevitably drives us into an "I
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can't. " Amoralism, by contrast, which proceeds from the "you can," realistically banks on the chance that what "I can" in the end will also be the right thing. The turn to practical philosophy that happily characterizes every present-day fundamental thinking that is world-wise should not tempt us to again let loose at being with a categorical imperative. Kynical reason, therefore, develops a nonimperative ethics that encourages the Can, instead of entangling us in the depressive complications of the Ought.
55. Recently, Hermann Morchen's extended study of Heidegger and Adorno has taken on these questions.
II. Phenomenological Main Text
Chapter 8
The Cardinal Cynicisms
In hasty ill humor, I have ripped the fig leaves from some naked thoughts.
Heinrich Heine, preface to Germany, a Winter's Tale
From what we have seen then, the concept of cynicism contains more than a first glance would lead us to expect. It is one of those things that, if given an inch, will take a mile. Our curiosity aroused, we wanted at first to "see what's really in it," and thereby --we noticed it too late--we experienced something that bog- gles our minds. We wanted to learn something about cynicism and discovered in doing so that it has long since brought us under its domination.
To this point, we have presented the concept of cynicism in two versions, and a third clearly emerges after chapter 7, "The Cabinet of Cynics. " The first says: Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness--unhappy consciousness in modern- ized form. Our approach here is intuitive, starting with a paradox; it articulates an uneasiness that sees the modern world steeped in cultural insanities, false hopes and their disappointment, in the progress of madness and the suspension of reason, in the deep schism that runs through modern consciousnesses and that seems to separate the rational and the real, what we know and what we do, from each other for all time. In the description we achieved a pathography that probed schizoid phenomena. It tried to find words for the perversely complicated struc- tures of a consciousness that has become reflective and is almost more melancholy than false; it is a consciousness that, under the compulsions of self-preservation, continues to run itself, though run down, in a permanent moral self-denial.
In the second version, the concept of cynicism assumes a historical dimension. A tension becomes apparent that, in the ancient critique of civilization, had first found expression under the name of kynicism: the urge of individuals to maintain
217
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themselves as fully rational living beings against the distortions and semirationali- ties of their societies. Existence in
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resistance, in laughter, in refusal, in the appeal to the whole of nature and a full life. It begins as plebeian "individualism," panto- mimic, wily, and quick-witted. Some of this trickles through to the more serious Stoa; iridescent transitions to Christianity are effected but die out to the extent that Christian theology negates and even damns the ancient-heathen inheritance. We reserved the concept of cynicism for the reply of the rulers and the ruling cul- ture to the kynical provocation. They definitely see that there is an element of truth in it, but proceed with oppression. From now on, they know what they do.
The concept here undergoes a split into the dichotomy: kynicism-cynicism that, in substance, corresponds to resistance and repression, or more precisely, self-embodiment in resistance and self-splitting in repression. The phenomenon of kynicism is thereby separated from its historical origin and becomes a type that crops up again and again historically whenever, in crisis civilizations and civiliza- tion crises, consciousnesses clash with each other. Kynicism and cynicism are, accordingly, constants in our history, typical forms of a polemical consciousness "from below" and "from above. " In them, the opposition of high culture and peo- ple's culture is lived out as the exposure of paradoxes within high- cultural ethics.
Here, the third version of the concept of cynicism continues on to a phenome- nology of polemical forms of consciousness. The polemic always revolves around the correct conception of the truth as "naked" truth. Cynical thinking, namely, can arise only when two views of things have become possible, an official and an unofficial view, a veiled and a naked view, one from the viewpoint of heroes and one from the viewpoint of valets. In a culture in which one is regularly told lies, one wants to know not merely the truth but the naked truth. Where that cannot be that is not allowed to be, one has to draw out what the "naked" facts look like, no matter what morality has to say about it. In a certain way, "ruling" and "lying" are synonyms. The truth of rulers and that of servants are different.
In this phenomenological sighting of contestable forms of consciousness, we must "sublate" (aufheben) the bias in favor of the kynical standpoint. At first, we will have to patiently and somewhat dryly look at how, in six great arenas of values-the military, politics, sexuality, medicine, religion, and knowledge (the- ory)--kynical and cynical consciousnesses confront, attack, retaliate against each other, qualify each other, provoke each other, and finally get to know and neutral- ize each other. In the cardinal cynicisms, the contours of a combative history of ideas emerge. Such a history describes that "labor on the ideal" that stands at the heart of high-cultural ethics. That this is not a "phenomenology of spirit" in the
1Hegelian sense will become clear.
phenomenology apart from the irrepressible philosophical battle cry: "Let's get down to things! "
Likewise, it has little to do with Husserlian
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? Heinrich Zille, Riesenprogramm (Gigantic program). Variety tent on a Berlin fair- ground around 1900.
Military Cynicism
Five minutes' cowardice is better than a life long dead.
Soldier's saying
Even the Prussian prime minister, von Bismarck, was horrified by the atrocities. "War is hell, and whoever lets it loose with the stroke of a quill is a devil! " he exclaimed, without consider- ing how tirelessly he himself had contributed to it! 2 W. Stieber
Anthropological research says that flight is older than attack. Accordingly, the
human being would be, admittedly, partly predator (hunter), but not a priori a
warring animal. Nevertheless the discovery of weapons --for beating, throwing,
shooting (development of distance, neocortical development)--plays a key role
in anthropogenesis. If one can assume anything at all about the original tendency
of the human psyche regarding struggle and war, one can assume at least this
much: It prefers avoidance to striking. "Cowardly but happy" (G. Kleemann, sub-
title: Why the contemporary primitive human being does not want to fight;
Frankfurt-Berlin-Vienna, 1981). Those who avoid can initially better secure their
chances for survival than those who confront. If cowardice is neutrally under-
stood as the primary inclination to avoid confrontation, in the economy of human
dr
than to hold one's ground. "The smarter person yields. "
'ves it must have priority over the desire to fight. Initially it is smarter to flee
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But at some point in the process of civilization it becomes smarter to stand firm than to flee. How this came to be is not our topic here --a couple of historical con- ceptual lumps may mark out the problem: ecological competition, increase in population density, neolithic revolution, the division between mobile herding cul- tures and sedentary agricultural cultures, and so on. The path to "history," to higher cultures, leads through the militarization of tribes and beyond to the state.
Military cynicism can emerge when three male martial character types have assumed clear contours in a society: the hero, the hesitater, and the coward. (This can even be seen in a rudimentary form in animal species with high intraspecies aggression, e. g. , in deer populations. ) An unambiguous hierarchy of values is es- tablished at whose summit the hero stands; everyone should be basically like him. Heroism is internalized as a model by the males in a combative civilization. But hereby, a new sociopsychological training of human beings also becomes neces- sary, with the aim of acquiring a distribution of martial temperaments not found in nature. Cowardice, present in large quantities as raw material and in everyone, must be reworked into battle-hungry heroism, or at least into brave, battle-ready hesitancy. All training of soldiers in the history of combative civilizations works to produce this unnatural alchemy. The noble family contributes to it just as much as the armed peasant family, as do, later, royal courts, military schools, barracks, and public morals. Heroism became and remained, in part to the present day, a dominant cultural factor. The cult of the aggressive, triumphant warrior runs through all of recorded history. Where we begin to find written records, there is a high probability that it is the story of a hero, of a warrior who has been through many adventures. Where written records are not found, tales of heroes
3continue indefinitely back to obscure oral origins.
of those fighters who intervened in European history as early Carolingian ar- mored knights wrote about themselves so glowingly in chivalrous poetry, fas- cinating stories of the great warriors in the times of migrations (the era of the Nibelungen) were told by the tribes.
The division of labor in military temperaments seems to make sense in social terms. The three types represent the advantages of three different "tactics" or styles of fighting. Heroes make use of the advantages that attack offers in many situations where there is a compulsion to fight. Thus, attack is the best defense. Hesitaters constitute the main mass of a "reasonable middle position"; they fight when they have to, and then they fight energetically, but they also know how to curb the danger that can come from the bravado of heroes. Cowards, finally, can occasionally save themselves when all others who "stand firm" are doomed to per- ish. But that is not supposed to be mentioned, and the coward must be held in con- tempt because otherwise the alchemy that is held to make battle-hungry fighters out of timid deserters cannot succeed. Mercilessly, the heroic model of the mili- tary group of men is forced on all. The hero stands in the limelight; to him, the demigod in armor, all honor, acclamation, and esteem are accorded.
Long before the descendants
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 221
There are three attitudes of consciousness to this psychic ideal and exemplary ? mage, according to which one you are. The hero, whenever success raises him above self-doubt, experiences himself as the one who lives at the zenith of his own ideal, radiant and self-confident, a man who can fulfill his own and collective dreams. He will sense the "glory" of a demigod in himself; the thought of losing does not enter his mind. Hence the breathtaking bigmouthedness of heroes who are certain of victory, at the beginning of the battle and after the victory. It speaks for the psychology of the war- experienced Romans that they granted the returned
triumphant general a victory procession through his town, where he could ex- perience his own deification in the state-- and with him, the people who in this way learned to stay "in love with success"; but they also put a slave on the victor's chariot who continually had to call him: "Reflect, victor, that you are mortal! " This apotheosis of the victor, the cult of success, of divinity through battle, and of happy success is part of the sociopsychological inheritance of humanity from antiquity--and even today, this experience is repeatedly staged and peddled from sports fields to the Olympics. Pictorially, heroes are almost always represented as youths; the misfortune of heroes is that they die young.
The second attitude toward the ideal is that of the hesitater, of the relative hero.
He probably sees himself as someone who fulfills and obeys the morality of the
hero but who does not enjoy the glamor of success. To be sure, the ideal rules
him, but it does not make him into an exemplary case. He fights and dies when
there is no way out of it, and he can console himself with the certainty that he
is prepared to do what is necessary. He does not feel the continual need to prove
himself as does the topnotch hero, who must even seek out danger simply to keep
4
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up his self-image. The hesitater, however, pays for this with a certain medi-
ocrity; he is neither right at the top nor right at the bottom, and when he dies his name is summarily listed among the dead heroes. Perhaps it is a good sign that modern armies cultivate, right up to the top ranks, the soldier of the hesitater type (obedience plus thinking for oneself, the "citizen in uniform"), one who does not have an inner urge to fight. Only in certain military and political leaders is there still a tendency toward the characteristic offensive mentality --"falcons," heroes of armament, those hooked on hegemony.
The third stance toward the heroic ideal is adopted by the coward. Of course, under the unavoidable pressure of the heroic image, he must seek refuge in the hesitatingly brave masses. He must hide the fact that he is really the anti-hero; he must camouflage himself and make himself as unobtrusive as possible. As muddler, improvisor, and man of few words, he cannot even afford to internalize the image of the hero in any rigid way because otherwise self-contempt would crush him. In him, a slight decomposition of the "superego" is already under way. In the coward's consciousness lie simultaneously the germs of military kynicism and of a higher critical realism! For through his experience and self- experience,
222 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
the coward is forced to reflect and look twice. He can confess his cowardice aloud just as little--otherwise he would be even more despised --as he can simply give it up. In him, to be sure often poisoned by a drop of self-contempt, a critical potential against the ethics of heroes begins to grow. Because he himself has to dissemble, he will be more sensitive to the pretense of others. When heroes and hesitaters succumb to a superior power, the coward, who allows himself to flee, is the sole survivor. Hence the sarcastic saying: Horses are the survivors of heroes.
We now drop the fiction that we are speaking of a socially homogeneous army. It becomes volatile for soldiers' cynicism when consideration is given to military hierarchies, which correspond roughly to the class structure of society. In feudal military structures we find, besides the troop of knightly heroes, mostly an ac- quired troop of paid knights or mercenaries and below them the troop of orderlies and aides. Each of these groups also has its own combat morality that corresponds approximately to the three military temperaments. For the knight, combat, even if it is about tangible material interests, belongs to his social status and to the aristocratic self-image. In his combat morality, therefore, "honor" must be given special consideration. Where honor is at stake, there is an excess of motivation over and above the small and concrete causes--up to fighting for the sake of fighting. This is not the case with mercenaries, who have made war their profes- sion: the motley mob of the times of the mercenaries, paid knights, but mainly infantry, foot troops, peasants' sons from Switzerland bought to engage in wars, etc. Their motive to fight cannot be heroic because the paid soldier (Italian soldi, money) conceives of war as a workplace, not as a heroes' stage, which does not exclude collaborating with the military spectacle of heroes or even a certain hero- ism lowered to the level of a craft. Mercenaries are professional hesitaters. They wage war because war feeds them, and they intend to survive the skirmishes. The metier as such is already dangerous enough; one does not have to, in addition, challenge death with heroic frills. At the lower end of the hierarchy, finally, the orderly fights, above all because an accident of birth made him the serf of a knight who, without him, could neither mount nor dismount a horse and could not even get out of his armor without help. The aides act as a kind of a military proletariat whose invisible and unappreciated labor is sublated in the victories of their
masters like swallowed surplus value. Entanglements in masculine ideals aside, the servant has no "intrinsic" motivation to fight except, as far as possible, to keep himself alive during the fighting. For him it would be realistic to be cowardly from the bottom of his heart.
The military cynical process can now be set into motion, and as always it be- gins at the lower kynical-realistic position. Sancho Panza is its first "great" representative. Without much reflection, this clever little peasant knows that he has a right to cowardice, just as his poor noble master, Don Quixote, has a duty
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 223
? Gustave Dore, Don Quixote.
toward heroism. But those who view the heroism of the master with Sancho Panza's eyes inevitably see the craziness and blindness of heroic consciousness. This cheeky military enlightenment, which Cervantes unrelentingly lays out, re- veals that the old desire for a hero's fight is an anachronism and that all purport- edly noble occasions to fight are nothing more than pure projections of the knight's imagination. Thus windmills stand for giants, prostitutes for ladies to be heroically loved, and so forth. To be able to see this, the narrator himself requires the realistic, foot soldier's, plebeian perspective --and beyond this social permis- sion to speak a language befitting this perspective. This could not have happened before the late Middle Ages, when the knights lost their technical superiority in weaponry to the plebeian infantry and when armed mobs of peasants more and more frequently served troops of knightly heroes annihilating defeats. Since the fourteenth century, the heroic star of armored horse combat was in any case in descent. With this, the
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moment had arrived when anti-heroism found its language and when the cowardly view of heroism became publicly possible. Once the
224 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
? Thomas Rowlandson, The Two Kings of Terror. English caricature of Napoleon's defeat at Leipzig, 1813.
masters had to swallow their first defeats, the servants sensed their real power. Now, one can laugh realistically.
The constitutions of armies after the Middle Ages up to Napoleonic times, in- deed even up to contemporary times, reveal a paradoxical distortion of the origi- nal connections between combat morality and the type of weaponry. The ancient hero was a lone fighter just as the knight was in feudalism. He sought to prove himself in the duel, but best of all in the constellation of one against many. Mod- ern warfare, however, tendentially depreciates the individual fight. Wars are decided by formations and mass movements. Using the Roman legion as its model, the modern organization of armies pushes the genuinely heroic functions--combined assault, standing firm, man-to-man combat, etc. -toward the bottom. This means that the demands made of heroes fall more and more on those, who, according to their nature and motivation, tend to be hesitaters or cowards. In modern infantries, then, a schizoid drill in heroism --the instilling of an anonymous and unacknowledged courage to die --must be carried out. The top officers, who by virtue of their strategic position, are not as endangered, shove the risk of heroism, death in the front line, more and more onto those who actually have nothing at stake in the war and who often were only acquired as troops ac- cidentally or by force (compulsory conscription, extortion of the poor, entice-
5As soon as some space had been made in modern soldiery for the well-founded realism of the cowards (kynicism), the military cynical process is stepped up to a higher level: the answer to it now comes from the modern cynical realism of ment with alcohol, a way out for superfluous peasants' sons, etc. ).
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 225
royalty. Of course, this realism also knows that not one of the poor devils in uni- form can have heroic motives. But they should be heroes nevertheless and look the so-called hero's death in the face, as normally only aristocrats do. For this reason, armies after the Middle Ages are the first social organs that methodically cultivate schizophrenia as a collective condition. In them, the soldier is not "him- self but another, a piece of the heroic machinery. From time to time it also hap- pens that a leader lets his mask fall and reveals that he indeed sympathizes with the poor devils' wish to live, but he cannot acknowledge this wish. "Dogs, do you want to live forever! " The cynic has thoroughly understood his kynical dogs, but nevertheless people have to die. When Frederick II of Prussia speaks thus, in a patriarchal, humorous tone of voice, we are listening to an enlightened master's consciousness in the second round. It has understood the hero humbug but needs the hero's death for the time being as a political tool --here, for the sake of Prus- sia's glory. On this note, have fun being blown to smithereens! From now on, all battles, no matter how nobly advertised, are overshadowed by this cynical self- denial.
The modern development of types of weaponry contributes a good deal, directly and indirectly, to the tension between the consciousness of heroes and that of cowards. In the dispute between cavalry, infantry, and artillery over precedence, this tension has a subliminal effect. For it generally holds that the more horrifyingly a weapon works even from a distance, the more cowardly, in principle, its user can be.
