They often
neglected
to investigate systematically the knowledge of domination in the hegemonic powers.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason
Precisely in the case of the proletarian ego, the fictions were weaker than the realisms.
The programmers of political identity fought with each other from the beginning and got entangled in their printouts.
The unified proletarian class ego is not a reality but a myth.
One recognizes this myth easily when one observes the programmers in their public activities; indeed, for a while they called them- selves, with refreshing candor, propagandists, disseminators of ideology.
What also has played a role in the collapse of the socialist programming of identity is the psychological naivete of the old concept of politics. Socialism, es- pecially in Western nations, has not known how to convincingly orchestrate the pleasure in making politics oreven the prospect of lessening suffering at the hands of politics. Its psychopolitics remained almost everywhere on a crude level; it could mobilize rage, hope, longing, and ambition but not what would have been decisive, namely, the pleasure in being a proletarian. Precisely that, according to the socialist concept of the proletariat, is not at all possible since proletarian existence is defined negatively: to have nothing besides offspring and to remain excluded from better chances and the riches of life. Positive ego can only be achieved by deproletarianization. Only in the revolutionary Prolet-Cult, which blossomed in Russia shortly after the October Revolution, was there something like a direct class narcissism, a self-celebration of the proletariat that soon had to wither under its own plaintiveness and mendacity. However, in political nar- cissism, just as in private narcissism, to be "better" is everything. Noblesse oblige. But can one say: proletariat oblige?
The proletarian ego, which follows in the footsteps of the bourgeois ego and registers its claims to an inheritance, possesses the class experience of working people who are beginning to overcome their political muteness. Every ego, in or- der to manifest itself and to stand up to public scrutiny, requires a solid nucleus, a pride of ego, which can endure having to appear before others. The greatest breakthrough for the people came when they discovered the language of human rights for themselves. These rights were articulated from the peasant wars of 1525 up until the modern Russian and Polish resistances as the rights of Chris- tians. In the traditions based on the American and French revolutions, they are understood as temporal natural rights.
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES U 71
The elevated feeling, composed of indignation and a claim to freedom, of be- ing not a slave (robot) but also a human being, gave the early workers' movement its moral, psychological, and political strength, a strength that grew even more under repression. (For this reason, the socialist movement had a competitor in the Christian workers' movement, which pursued the same motive: the feeling of being a meaningful human being, politically and legally, but to be sure, without the revolutionary element. ) For as long as the misery of the proletariat was so horrifying, as nineteenth-century documents substantiate, even the discovery of the feeling for human rights had to give the laborer a political ego nucleus. This gives early and naive socialism a nostalgic charm, a moving, political humanism filled with truth. But a sobering up comes about in the dispute over the correct interpretation of human rights. In the late nineteenth century, the age of strategy, of division, of revision, and of fraternal conflict begins. The consciousness of hu- man rights frayed in the gear wheels of the logic of party and struggle. It lost its capacity to sustain in the proletariat an elevated feeling firmly grounded in the public sphere when the socialist currents began to slander each other.
Social democracy had already tried somewhat earlier in its cultural politics (Bildungspolitik) to stimulate the nerve of class narcissism by broadcasting the slogan Knowledge Is Power. With this, the claim to its own class culture begins, a class culture rooted in the recognition that without a class-specific creativity and a superior "morality" and cultivation, no socialist state can be set up. "Knowledge is power"--this statement can also mean that socialism finally began to sense the secret of the relation between narcissistic pleasure in culture and political power. "Being poor is no guarantee at all of being good and clever" (E. Kastner, Fabian, 1931).
In the heyday of the workers' movement, the consciousness of human rights was outbid by a proletarian pride in accomplishment that, for good reason, made reference to the labor, diligence, and power of the class. Its knowledge of power culminated in the sentence: All wheels stand still, if our strong arms so will. In the pathos of the general strike, something of the elevated feeling of class power and the domination of production lived on --only, of course, under the almost al- ways unrealistic assumption of proletarian unity. The latter was broken because vital interests and political interests could never coincide in the proletariat. Yet even the strength of a latent consciousness of the general strike and labor in the long run does not suffice to stabilize an elevated class feeling. The bleakness of everyday life is more powerful than the political learning in the dramatic episodes ? f class history. In the last instance, the consciousness of power and labor alone cannot sustain pride in a culture that can perpetually renew itself.
The regenerability of elevated feelings is rooted in the cultural and existential creativity of a class. In the end, mere power becomes boring even to itself. Where the pleasure in politics reduces to the ambition of those who rule, a vital resistance ? f the masses is, in the long run, unavoidable. But in this lies also the germ of
72 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
an objective proletarian feeling of inferiority. Wage labor creates abstract value. It is productive without being creative. The idiocy of industrial labor erects in the meantime an impenetrable wall against a true class narcissism of the proletariat. The cultural hegemony of those who produce, however, could only grow out of such a class narcissism. By contrast, a cultural system based on a crude ideology of labor is incapable of acquiring the most valuable inheritance of aristocratic and bourgeois culture: the pleasure politics of a creative life. The socialist way of in- heriting has intensified the old deficiencies and diminished the old privileges. In a civilization of the "good life," to inherit from the nobility and the bourgeoisie can only mean avoiding the deficiencies of the predecessors and appropriating their strengths. Anything else would not be worth the trouble.
I will forgo presenting the establishment of inwardness in other areas--erotics, ethics, aesthetics-in the way in which I have briefly attempted to present it in the instance of the paradoxical inwardness of class narcissisms. In any case, the scheme of the critique would be the same: investigation of collective program- ming and self-programming. Today the sociocultural conditioning of the sexes is a common topic of discussion. The naive masculinity and femininity in the members of less-developed cultures may strike us as charming; in our own con- text we trip over the "stupid" factor in the results of such training. Today it can be expected of everyone to know that masculinity and femininity are formed in drawn-out social self-training, just like class consciousnesses, professional ethics, character, and personal tastes. Every person goes through years of appren- ticeship in inwardness, every newborn child years of apprenticeship in gender identity. Later, in becoming aware of oneself, men and women discover a spon- taneity of feeling constituted in such and such a way: I like her; I don't like him; those are my impulses; this turns me on; those are my wishes; I can satisfy them to this extent. From the first look we take at our experiences we believe we can say who we are. The second look will make it clear that education is behind every particular way of being. What seemed to be nature, on closer observation reveals itself as code. Why is that important? Well, those who enjoy advantages from their programming and that of others, naturally feel no impulse to reflect. But those who suffer disadvantages will refuse in the future to make sacrifices based on a mere training in bondage. The disadvantaged are immediately motivated to reflect. One can say that the universal discontent in relations between the sexes today has led to a strong increase in the readiness to reflect on the causes of problematic relationships --in both sexes. Wherever one gets "involved" with problems, one finds both sides sunk in reflection.
And after reflection? Well, I know no one who could be said to be "finished with reflecting. " The "labor" of reflection never ends. It appears to be infinite; of course, I believe it is a "benign infinity," which implies growth and maturation. In innumerable respects, people have reasons to get to know themselves better.
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 73
? Pellegrino Tibaldi, Polyphem, around 1555.
Whatever we may be, for better or for worse, we are thus initially and "naturally"
11
"idiots of the family," in the broadest sense: educated people. In the last in-
stance, enlightenment has to do with the idiocy of the ego. It is difficult to disperse inner automatisms; it takes effort to penetrate the unconscious. A permanent criti- cal self-reflection would be necessary in the end to counter the tendency to sub- merge oneself in new lacks of awareness, new automatisms, new blind identifica- tions. Life, which also searches for new stability through revolutions and moments of awareness, obeys an inclination to inertia. The impression can thus arise that the history of spirit (Geistesgeschichte) constitutes a simple dance of ideologies and not a systematically worked out movement of human cultures from immaturity and delusion. In the twilight of "postenlightenment," the idiocy of egos twists itself into postures that are more and more artful and more and more convoluted --into a conscious unconsciousness, into defensive identities.
The mania for "identity" seems to be the deepest of the unconscious program- mings, so deeply buried that it evades even attentive reflection for a long time. A formal somebody, as bearer of our social identifications, is, so to speak, pro- grammed into us. It guarantees in almost every aspect the priority of what is alien over what is one's own. Where "I" seem to be, others always went before me in order to automatize me through socialization. Our true self-experience in original Nobodiness remains in this world buried under taboo and panic. Basically, how- ever, no life has a name. The self-conscious nobody in us --who acquires names and identities only through its "social birth"-remains the living source of free- dom. The living Nobody, in spite of the horror of socialization, remembers the energetic paradises beneath the personalities. Its life soil is the mentally alert body, which we should call not nobody but yesbody and which is able to develop m the course of individuation from an areflexive "narcissism" to a reflected "self-
74 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
discovery in the world cosmos. " In this Nobody, the last enlightenment, as cri- tique of the illusion of privacy and egoism, comes to an end. If mystical advances into such "innermost" zones of preindividual emptiness used to be exclusively a matter for meditative minorities, today there are good reasons for hoping that in our world, torn by struggling identifications, majorities for such enlightenment will finally be found.
It is not infrequently necessary for the pure interest in surviving to be able to be Nobody. The Odyssey demonstrates this in its funniest and most grandiose pas- sage. Odysseus, the mentally alert hero, in the decisive moment of his wanderings after fleeing from the cave of the blinded Cyclops, calls to him: It was Nobody who blinded you! In this way, one-eyedness and identity can be overcome. With this call, Odysseus, the master of clever self-preservation, reaches the summit of mental alertness. He leaves the sphere of primitive moral causalities, the web of revenge. From then on he is safe from the "envy of the gods. " The gods mock Cyclops when he demands that they take revenge. On whom? On Nobody.
The Utopia of conscious life was and remains a world in which we all have the right to be Odysseus and to let that Nobody live, in spite of history, politics, na- tionality, and Somebodiness. In the shape of our bodies, we should embark on the wanderings of a life that spares itself nothing. When in danger, mentally and spiritually alert persons discover Being-as-Nobody in themselves. Between the poles of Nobodiness and Somebodiness, the adventures and vicissitudes of con- scious life are strung. In conscious life, every fiction of an ego is dissolved once and for all. For this reason, Odysseus, and not Hamlet, is the true founding father of modern and everlasting intelligence.
Notes
1. This holds for Bruno Bauer's classic polemic, Theologische Schamlosigkeiten (1841), in Bauer, Feldziige der reinen Kritik, ed. H. M. Sass (Frankfurt, 1968).
2. There is already a precursor of this doctrine among Greek Sophists: Critias.
3. The extension of the Kantian critique always proceeded from the narrowness of its physically oriented concept of experience. Whenever one moved beyond Kant, one did so in the name of an en- riched concept of experience that was extended to historical, cultural, symbolic, emotional, and reflective phenomena.
4. [See Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. -Trans. ]
5. At one point in chapter 5 I will hint at the relation that could exist between present-day, re- spectable cynicism of the politics of armament and peace and a third world war.
6. In chapter 8 ("The Cynicism of Knowledge"), I will describe Freud as the protagonist of a kynical theory. See in the same chapter, "Sexual Cynicism. " [See also by Peter Sloterdijk, Der Zauberbaum. Die Entstehung der Psychoanalyse imjahr 1785 (Frankfurt am Main, 1985). --Trans. 1
7. It is the cultural strategy of all neoconservativisms. See chapters 15, 16, and 23 ("Political Coueism").
8. [See also by Peter Sloterdijk, Der Denker aufder Btihne. Nietzsches Materialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1986). --Trans. ]
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 75
9. Most recently, Jean Plumyene has impressively sketched the drama of early nationalisms: Les nations romantiques. Histoire du nationalisme, vol. 1 (Paris, 1979).
10. Its development can be studied through the example of the "individualist" anarchism inspired by Stirner.
11. [This refers to a phrase from Marx concerning "rural idiocy. " Initially we cannot help having been made by the family into the "idiots" we are. -Trans. ]
Chapter 4
After the Unmaskings: Cynical Twilight. Sketches for the Self-repudiation of the Ethos of Enlightenment
You are still there! No, that is unheard of, Disappear, we have after all enlightened!
The pack of devils, it does not ask for rules.
We are clever enough, and still Tegel is haunted.
Goethe, Faust I, Walpurgisnacht
"I look on, is that nothing? "
"Who can be helped by it? "
"Who can be helped? " said Fabian.
Erich Kastner, Fabian (1931) For they know what they do.
Ernst Ottwald, Denn sie wissen, was sie tun (1931)
These eight turbulent and hard-won advances of reflective enlightenment have made history just like the great breakthroughs in natural science and technology with which they have combined in the last 250 years into a permanent industrial and cultural revolution. Just as urbanization, motorization, electrification, and the information revolution have radically altered life in societies, so the labor of reflection and critique has structurally broken up consciousnesses and forced a new, dynamic constitution on them. "Nothing is solid anymore. " It has plowed up an intellectual-psychic field on which old forms of tradition, identity, and character can no longer exist. Its effects add up to the complex of a modernity in which life knows itself to be at the mercy of a continuum of crisis.
Enlightened Prevention of Enlightenment
Enlightenment has certainly been enormously successful. In its arsenal, the weapons of critique stand ready; those who want to view these even in isolation would have to think that a party so armed would inevitably win the "struggle of opinions. " But no party can appropriate these weapons solely for itself. Critique does not have a unified bearer but rather is splintered into a multitude of schools, factions, currents, avant-gardes. Basically, there is no unified and unambiguous enlightenment "movement. " One feature of the dialectic of enlightenment is that
76
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT D 77
"This is what they have refused to accept from me . . . these ignoramuses! "
it was never able to build a massive front; rather, early on, it developed, so to speak, into its own opponent.
As shown in the second preliminary reflection, enlightenment is broken by the resistance of opposing powers (hegemonic power, tradition, prejudice). Because knowledge is power, every hegemonic power challenged by "another knowledge" must try to stay in the center of knowledge. However, not every power is the right center for every knowledge. Reflective knowledge cannot be separated from its subject. Thus, only one means remains available to hegemonic powers: to sepa- rate the subjects of possible oppositional power from the means of their self- reflection. This is the reason for the age-old history of "violence against ideas". It is violence neither against persons nor against things in the trivial sense; it is violence against the self-experience and the self-expression of persons who are in danger of learning what they should not know. The history of censorship can be summarized in this phrase. It is the history of the politics of antireflection. At that moment when people become ripe for experiencing the truth about them- selves and their social relations, those in power have always tried to smash the mirrors in which people would recognize who they are and what is happening to
them.
Enlightenment, no matter how impotent the mere means of reason seem, is subtly irresistible, like the light, after which, in sound mystical tradition, it is named: les lumieres, illumination. Light is unable to reach only those places where obstacles block its rays. Thus, enlightenment tries first to light the lamps and then to clear the obstacles out of the way that prevent the light's diffusion.
? 78 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
In and of itself, light cannot have any enemies. It thinks of itself as a peacefully illuminating energy. It becomes bright where surfaces reflect it. The question will be, Are these reflecting surfaces really the final targets of illumination, or are these surfaces interposed between the source of enlightenment and its intended recipients? In the language of the eighteenth-century Freemasons, the obstacles that disturbed or blocked the light of knowledge had a threefold name: supersti- tion, error, and ignorance. They were also called the three "monsters. " These monsters were real powers with which one had to contend and which the Enlight- enment took it upon itself to provoke and overcome. Enthusiastically and naively, the early enlighteners presented themselves to the powers-that-be in the name of their struggle for light and demanded free passage.
However, they never really got a clear view of the "fourth monster," the actual and most difficult opponent. They attacked the powerful but not their knowledge.
They often neglected to investigate systematically the knowledge of domination in the hegemonic powers. This knowledge always has the structure of a double knowledge: one for the rules of conduct of power and one for the norms of general consciousness.
The consciousness of those who rule is that "reflecting surface" that is decisive for the course and diffusion of enlightenment. Thus, enlightenment brings power truly to "reflection" for the first time. Power reflects in the double sense of the word: as self-observation and as refraction (Brechung) and return (Zurucksen- dung) of the light.
Those who rule, if they are not "merely" arrogant, must place themselves stu- diously between enlightenment and its addressees in order to prevent the diffusion of a new power of knowledge and the genesis of a new subject of knowledge about power. The state must know the truth before it can censor it. The tragedy of the old social democracy is that, of the hundred meanings of the statement "Knowl- edge is power," it had consciously recognized only a few. It continually failed to recognize which knowledge it is that really gives power and what kind of power one must be and have in order to gain the knowledge that expands power.
In French conservatism and royalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there occasionally was resentful speculation about how the revolution of 1789 could have been "avoided. " This reactionary gossip has at least one very interest- ing aspect: Monarchical conservatism hits the nerve of a cynically studious poli- tics of hegemonic power. The train of thought is very simple: If the monarchy had fully exhausted its capacities for reform; if it had learned to deal flexibly with the facts of the bourgeois economic order; if it had made the new economy the basis of its domestic policy, etc. --then perhaps things would not have had to hap- pen as they did. Royalists, if they are intelligent, would be the first to admit that Louis XV and Louis XVI were partly responsible through their mistakes and po- litical impotence, for the disaster. But they by no means therefore renounce the
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT D 79
? Frederick II at his writing desk in his study, in the company of his dogs.
idea of monarchy as such because they justifiably assume the possibility of a "despotism capable of learning. " The politically hollow head of France in the eighteenth century allowed knowledge about power to form an extramonarchical center.
If one looks more closely, the chain of events of the actual revolutionary hap-
penings begins with a touching and oppressive display: The hegemonic power
tried at the last moment to approximate the people's knowledge about its problems
ln or
der to take back the reins, which had slipped from its grasp. This is the sig- nificance of those famous "complaint books" that, on the eve of the revolution and at the bidding of the crown, were supposed to be written by every county and bor- ough so that in the highest places, the real distress and wishes of the people could
80 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
finally become known. In an act of patriarchal humility, whereby the people played their role with high hopes, and a political-erotic beating of the heart, the monarchy conceded that it needed to learn more. It let it be known that from then on it was willing to become also the center of that knowledge and of those political needs whose splintering off into a revolutionary center it had tolerated for too long. But precisely in doing this, the crown set the ball of a revolutionary causal- ity rolling, for whose momentum the system had no inherent brake.
In the great Continental monarchies of the eighteenth century, a different style of government had prevailed--a "patriarchal enlightenment. " The monarchies of Prussia, Austria, and Russia had leaders who were willing to learn. Thus, one talks of an enlightenment under Peter, Frederick, and Joseph, whereas one can- not, much as one might like to, speak of an enlightenment under Louis. In the countries of "enlightened despotism," a semiconservative development planning was effected from above; from this planning emanated, in the final analysis, the impulse for modern planning ideas, which everywhere attempted to combine a maximum of social stability with a maximum expansion of power and production. Contemporary "socialist" systems still work completely in the style of enlightened absolutism, which calls itself "democratic centralism" or a "dictatorship of the proletariat" or whatever other euphemisms there are.
In these things, the German example has an ambivalent prominence. Nevertheless, German enlightenment does possess not only representatives such as Lessing and Kant but also Frederick II of Prussia, who must be counted among the clever minds of the century. As a prince, he was completely a child of the Age of Enlightenment and author of an anti-Machiavelli text who condemned the openly cynical technique of domination in the older statecraft; as a monarch, he had to become the most self-reflective embodiment of modernized knowledge about ruling. In his political philosophy, the new clothes of power were tailored,
1
the art of repression was schooled in the Zeitgeist. Frederick's new cynicism was
camouflaged by melancholy because he strove for personal integrity by trying to apply the Prussian-ascetic politics of obedience to himself. With a formal, and partly also with an existential consistency, he transferred the idea of service to the crown, designating the king the "first servant of the state. " Here the deper- sonalization of power begins, and it reaches its peak in modern bureaucracy.
Frederick's melancholy shows how in enlightened despotism a certain "tragic" tone must emerge, a tone, incidentally, that lent many admirers of Prussia a se- cret, sentimental identity. It still feeds the present-day nostalgia for Prussia, this outgrowth of a social-liberal, bureaucratic romanticism. The German enlighten- ment, more than any other, senses the schizoid split in itself; it knows about things that it may not live out; it possesses a knowledge whose real subject it cannot be. It absorbs insights in order to prevent them from advancing to the egos, which would without fail act according to them, if they only possessed them. In this
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 81
Pofiltfcfjer (gierfan^.
E. Schalk, Political Juggling Act (literally, egg dance). Caricature of Bismarck as Minister for Conflict. Frankfurter Latern, 1863.
schizoid melancholy, the main thread of recent German history already begins to unravel--the demoralization of bourgeois enlightenment by an intelligent hegemonic power.
Otto von Bismarck was the second great cynical force in German modernity, a figure of repression highly capable of thinking. As creator of the "delayed na- tion" (1871), he was at the same time the one who tried to turn back the domestic political clock of this nation by half a century. He undertook the denial of evolu- tion on a grand scale. He strove to maintain standards for the political denial of rights that no longer corresponded to the balance in sources of power in his time. He repressed not only the political will of the old Fourth Estate, which had long since begun to articulate itself (social democracy), but also that of the Third Es- tate, of bourgeois liberalism. Bismarck hated liberalism (Freisinn, sense of free- dom) possibly even more than the "red hordes" of social democracy. Even in po-
? 82 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
litical Catholicism (the center party), he sensed the claim to a political ego that provoked his cynicism. The place where these political egos wanted to speak their mind, the Prussian parliament (later the Reichsparlament), he called realistically and contemptuously a "gossip shop," for the real decisions were always made solely by him and the crown. Here, the main thread of German masters' cynicism becomes a strong rope. "Reason and argue as much as you want, but obey! " Here the road begins that leads from the "gossip shop" of Bismarck's time to the demoralized and chaotic parliamentarism of the Weimar period.
It remains to be considered whether in Social-Democratic periods the diffusion of identity of enlightenment must proceed more strongly than ever. As soon as "enlightened" governments are established, the schizoid tension within the subject of power is intensified; the subject must split off its own knowledge of enlighten- ment and get involved in the melancholy realism of governing --it must learn the art of the second-worst evil. No merely moral consciousness and no loyalty to principles will be able to cope with the intricate realisms of the exercise of power. Not without intention, I explained in the Preface that the critique of cynical reason is a meditation on the statement "Knowledge is power. " It was a slogan of the old social democracy; the critique as a whole thus leads to a meditative grounding and dissolution of the core of social democracy: pragmatic political reason. As pragmatics, it respects the given order against which, as reason, it continues to revolt. Only under the sign of a critique of cynicism can the worn-out counterpo- sition of theory and praxis be superseded; only it can leave the schoolboy dialectic of "ideal" and "reality" behind. Under the sign of a critique of cynical reason, en- lightenment can gain a new lease on life and remain true to its most intimate pro-
ject: the transformation of being through consciousness.
To continue enlightenment means to be prepared for the fact that everything that in consciousness is mere morality will lose out against the unavoidable amoralism of the real. Is this not what social democracy is learning today in that,
2 almostagainstitswill,itisbecomingcaughtupintheGreatDialectic? Thispain
of learning is one of the three main factors in the self-denial of present-day en-
3
lightenment.
Enlightenment experiences its main refractive break (Brechnung) in the politi-
cal cynicism of the hegemonic powers. For knowledge is power, and power, when forced to fight, leads to the splitting of knowledge into livable and nonliva- ble knowledge. This appears only superficially as an opposition between "real- ism" and "idealism. " In truth, a schizoid and an antischizoid realism oppose each other here. The first appears respectable, the second cheeky. The first assumes responsibility for what one cannot be responsible for; the second irresponsibly champions the cause for what one can be responsible for. The first, so it says, wants to secure survival; the second wants to save the dignity of life from the en- croachments of the realism of power.
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 83
Breaks in Enlightenment
Besides the main fracture of enlightenment through the hegemonic powers' poli- tics of antireflection, which consciously tries to preserve the naivete of others, we observe further breaks and unevennesses in the development of enlightenment that maneuvers it to the edge of self-denial.
The Breaking through Time
Enlightenment is a process in time, a form of evolution. It uses up life-time in the case of individuals, process-time in the case of institutions. Nothing hap- pens overnight with it, although jumps and abrupt awakenings are not foreign to it. Its rhythm is difficult to predict, and it varies infinitely according to inner and outer conditions and resistances. Analogous to the image of the flame, its energy is most intense at the center and dies down at the periphery. Starting from the pioneers and masters of reflective intelligence in philosophy and the arts, its im- pulse is refracted initially in the milieu of the intelligentsia with its inertia, then in the world of social labor and politics, further in the countless private spheres split off from the universal, and is finally reflected back by pure misery that can no longer be enlightened.
Biographically, enlightenment knows many stages and steps that earlier were strikingly represented in the esoteric movements. In the old Freemasonry, an in- itiation process was staged that was intended to represent the sequence of matura- tion, reflection, practice, and illumination. This indispensable biographical sys- tem of stages of enlightenment as initiation is corrupted in modern pedagogy; the system of stages lives on only superficially in the graduated order of the educa- tional system and in the sequence of school years and semesters. The curricula in modern schools are parodies of the idea of development. In the old Humboldt- ian university, with its "authoritarian" relation between teachers and learners and its student freedoms, a trace of that biographical consolidation and an opportunity for personal initiation into knowledge still lived on. In the modern educational system, the idea of embodied knowledge in those who teach as well as in those who study is lost. The professors are really not "confessors" but coaches in courses for the acquisition of a knowledge removed from life. The universities and schools practice a schizoid role playing in which an unmotivated, prospect- less but intelligent youth learns to keep up with the general standards of enlight- ened meaninglessness.
In the temporal refraction of enlightenment, we distinguish a biographical and a sociological dimension. Each new generation requires its own time to process in its own rhythm what has already been achieved. But since schizoid culture works toward a depersonalization of enlightenment, an enlightenment without embodied enlighteners, a great big groan issues from modern schools. Its "ap-
84 ? AFTER THE UNMASK1NGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
? Georg Scholz, Industrial Farmers, 1920. (Reproduced by permission of the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal. )
paratus of enlightenment" confronts youth from the position of an opponent. If there were no teachers who desperately made every effort for enlightenment in spite of instruction and who invested their vital energies in the pedagogic process in spite of conditions, scarcely any pupils would still experience what school should be about. The more systematically education is planned, the more it is a matter of accident or luck whether education as initiation into conscious living still takes place at all.
With the sociological breaking of enlightenment in time, it is the "province"- in the concrete as well as metaphorical sense --that resists the impulse of enlight- enment with its inertia. Province means accommodation to repressions and hard- ships that actually no longer exist. Only in the idle motion of habituation and self-
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT U 85
repression do they remain effective--unnecessarily. In the age of advanced
jj? ntenment one really feels for the first time how deadly substanceless misery
and how wretched outmoded unhappiness are. The province has taken part in
modernization without participating in liberalization; it has gone along and yet
remained behind. Today this picture is, of course, changing. A relative inversion
in the tendencies of urban and rural consciousness can be distinguished; certain
signs make it clear that a stifling retardation is not the same as an insightful not-
wanting-to-go-further. A new provincial consciousness emphasizes that enlight-
enment cannot pledge itself for all time to a blind alliance with the scientific-
technical-industrial complex, even if the latter has been its inseparable companion
for centuries. The social forefront of enlightenment today aims at a qualification
of that technical enlightenment with whose unleashing the hot phase of our history
began. In it can be discovered traces of myth, dreams of a rational-magical mas-
tery of nature, omnipotence fantasies of political engineers. In the culture of tech-
nology, urban imperialisms are realized. Increasingly, voices of considerable
theoretical weight--from Toynbee to Wittfogel --have elaborated on a premoni-
tion of how the future of urban and industrial civilizations could be called the new
4 province.
The Breaking by the Party
Those who inquire after the political subject of enlightenment become lost in a maze. The split in motivations for enlightenment between liberalism and social- ism, the latter of which in turn branches into authoritarian-Communist, Social Democratic, and anarchist currents, goes back to basic principles. Each party has loudly claimed for itself a special relation, indeed, an intimate identity with en- lightenment and science. Liberalism bears in its very name not only economic freedom but also civil freedom and freedom of thought; social democracy has presented itself for ages now as the party for the rational guidance of social de- velopments; and communism steals the show by presenting itself as the current in which partiality {Parteilichkeit) and insight into truth have become one. Whom should we believe? For those who are still free enough to pose the question, there 's probably no alternative than to resort to one's own reflection, whereby poten- tially a new enlightenment party, that of "one's own opinion," could arise. Those free enough to do this are possibly also free enough to agree with the antiparty impulse of anarchism that attacks all parties as surrogates of the state and accuses them of being mechanisms of stupefaction and apparatuses for recruiting the fatu- ous electorate. The wonderful-sounding dialectical phrase about "truth and par- tiality" thus remains a pipe dream --until one can discover an impartial party that serves universal life interest by intervening in the blind mechanisms of self-
destruction.
86 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
The Breaking by Sectors
Especially the advanced thrusts of enlightenment that question the fictions of a clear self-consciousness, of nature, and identity are unhesitatingly opposed even today by great social powers that operate with these fictions. This can easily be demonstrated in the case of depth-psychological enlightenment, which became involved in a battle on two fronts with other fractions of enlightenment; the latter performed a thorough job of counterenlightenment on it. On one side, the psy- chology of the unconscious was unrelentingly "disproved" and accused of being mythology by scientism and natural-scientific medicine; on the other side, it was denounced by official Marxism as a symptom of bourgeois irrationalist decadence.
Psychological and political enlightenment are, in fact, opponents in that they not only compete for the free energies of individuals but also often come into conflict at the heart of the matter. As soon as proclivities for a party coagulate in identities, so that individuals do not merely support a party but become a party, psychological reflection must inevitably have a decomposing effect on such arti- ficial naivete. It thereby slips into the role of an unwelcome enlightenment. Con- versely, psychological enlightenment puts itself in a bad light when it starts to be- come a Weltanschauung, a school of opinion, an ideology, or even a sect. One sees this in the many pitiful squabbles and dogmatisms of a new psychological orthodoxy as well as in the ossifications and demarcations of a psychologizing subculture. It becomes really scandalous when psychologists --for example, C. G. Jung--through a combination of ambition and naivete have tried to win favor with political currents such as fascism. Instead of providing a psychology of authority and an illumination of political masochism, the leaders of schools of psychology have been inclined to taste the sweetness of authority and to use masochistic mechanisms to their own advantages.
The Break in Intelligence
I just indicated that the alliance of enlightenment with the process of natural- scientific, technical civilization is no longer unambiguous. The philosophy of en- lightenment still hesitates to annul the coerced alliance and to seek a new relation to the sciences. The modern equation of reason and science is too powerful for philosophy - if it does not want to destroy itself--to simply push aside the advan- tages of the sciences. Nevertheless, the signs of the times indicate a twilight of the scientific idols. Since the time of European romanticism, so-called irration- alist currents have repeatedly resisted the process of modern rationalism. The present also is experiencing such a wave of antirationalism in which the motifs of "another kind of reason" combine with each other--motifs of a logic of feelings and mysticism, of meditation and critical self-reflection, of myth and a magical worldview. It would probably be wasted time to try to sort out the grain from the
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 87
chaff- Time will tell which impulses survive the fad phase. As soon as American syncretism comes and goes here and the first titillation of anything goes has worn 0ff perhaps the charms of clarity too will again be valued. In the long run, murky mixtures are unpleasant; where "anything goes," nothing matters anymore, but we have to grit our teeth and bear it.
Beyond the mechanics of pendulum swings between fascination and boredom, enlightenment still has the task of assigning an appropriate place in our culture to the sciences. A prerequisite for this would be the clarification of the relation- ship between types of intelligence--particularly of various opposing kinds of cleverness such as science and wisdom, learnedness and presence of mind.
The distancing of the types of intelligence from each other that in modern rea- son are only illusorily brought together in the unity of rationality, has long been obvious. What Georg Lukacs, for example, attacked as "irrationalism" in modern bourgeois thinking--the "destruction of reason"-contains in its basic impulse a fully justified separation of "another" kind of intelligence from the hegemony of rationalism and natural science. The only bad thing here is that irrationalism from Bergson to Klages took itself much too seriously. It fell over itself with its preten- sions to respectability and struck up the solemn tone of a priest where a great phil- osophical buffoonery would have been just the right thing. In pronounced irra- tionalist literature one often finds a mixture of theorizing melancholy and self-pretension. Still, Bergson did, at least, write about laughter.
The bourgeois compulsion for respectability spoiled the satirical, poetical, and ironic possibilities of irrationalism. Those who see the "Other" should also tell it otherwise. But those who present what they have "grasped" beyond the limits of a narrower rationality, claiming nothing less than validity of the most respecta- ble insights, degrade both the irrational and the rational. Thus, Gottfried Benn struck at the heart of oracle-irrationalism when he said that in Germany thinkers who cannot master their world-pictures linguistically are usually called vi- sionaries.
Respectable conservatism has known much of this for a long time. Under its
frequently demagogic wailing about the evils of progress, it has preserved the in-
sight that the modern kind of knowledge has little to do with that state of human
maturity that is called wisdom by all great teachers. Wisdom is not dependent on
the level of the technical mastery of the world; conversely, the latter presupposes
the former when the process of science and technology moves toward an insane
state of affairs-as we are observing today. With the aid of Buddhist, Taoist, and
original Christian, Indian, and American Indian intelligence, no production lines
a
nd no satellites can be built. However, in the modern type of knowledge, that
awareness of life dries up from which the old teachings of wisdom take their inspi- ration, in order to speak of life and death, love and hate, antagonism and unity, individuality and cosmos, manliness and womanliness. One of the most important motifs in the literature of wisdom is a warning against false cleverness, against
88 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
"head" knowledge and learnedness, against thinking in terms of power and arro- gant intellectuality.
Breaking Down Half-Open Doors
In spite of all inhibitions, breaks, and self-doubt in the course of its development, enlightenment has unleashed an enormous potential for reflection. This is un- mistakable even in the present phase of demoralization. The penetration of science, psychology, and schooling into large areas of social life has brought strong means of reflection, especially into the heads of the intelligentsia and state employees. The diffusion of power in the modern state has led to an extraordinary dissemination of the knowledge of power, which simultaneously intensifies the cynicism of the knowledge of power, as sketched earlier, that is, the self-denial of morality and the splitting off of insights that cannot be lived out into a diffuse collective mentality. Here we flesh out our initial thesis: Discontent in our culture appears today as universal, diffuse cynicism.
With the diffusion of cynicism to a collective mentality of intelligence in the gravitational field of the state and the knowledge of power, the erstwhile moral foundations of ideology critique collapse. Critics, as Walter Benjamin notes in his aphorism of 1928 (see the Preface), have long since blended together with what is to be criticized, and that distance that would be created by morality has been lost through a general muddling along in immorality, semimorality, and the morality of lesser evils. Cultivated and informed people of today have become aware of the essential model of critique and the procedure of unmasking without having been shaken. The existence of such models of critique is perceived today as a contribution to the sad complicatedness of relations in the world rather than as an impulse for an existential self-reflection. Who today is still an enlightener? The question is almost too direct to be decent.
There is, to be concise, not only a crisis of enlightenment, not only a crisis of the enlighteners, but even a crisis in the praxis of enlightenment, in commit- ment to enlightenment. Today, the word "committed" is said with a mixture of acknowledgment and indulgence, as if it were a fragile sediment from a younger psychological layer that has to be handled with the utmost care. It is almost as if our sympathy goes less to those for whom another commits himself or herself than to the commitment itself in its rarity and fragile naivete. Who does not known this from his or her feelings toward the so-called alternative movements? Something similar can be seen in France, where the younger generation of intel- ligentsia, apres Sartre, is experiencing the dissolution of the old foundations of political moralism that constituted leftist identity. Commitment? "Takes place in the ivory tower. The committed sit there actively" (Ludwig Marcuse).
In that the moral foundation of enlightenment is decomposing because the modern state simultaneously demoralizes the enlightened and makes public ser-
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 89
vants of them, the perspectives of what was earlier called commitment are becom- ing blurred. When someone tries to "agitate" me in an enlightened direction, my first reaction is a cynical one: The person concerned should get his or her own shit together. That is the nature of things. Admittedly, one should not injure good will without reason; but good will could easily be a little more clever and save me the embarrassment of saying; "I already know that. " For I do not like being asked, "Then why don't you do something? "
Things have been this way now for a long time: The "committed" enlightener breaks down doors that, admittedly, are not completely open, but they also no longer have to be broken down. It can go so far that one knows more about moral conditions as a cynic than as a committed person. Since Erich Kastner, the tone of satire in modern enlightenment is reflectively tinged and hits its mark with a melancholy, coquettish spin, if it still wants to hit the mark at all. Today's jokers are anything but committed, and they can profit from the inflated price of laughter insofar as buffoonery suits the spirit of the times better than does good old nasty satire. The last defenders of ideology critique are inspired buffoons, such as Otto, in whom one finds little sociology but a good deal of mental alertness.
Besides "commitment," and entwined with it, we find in our memory another
recent sediment--the experience of the student movement, scarcely settled, with
its ups and downs of courage and depression. This most recent sediment in the
history of political vitality forms an additional veil over the old feeling that some-
thing ought to be done about this world. The dissolution of the student movement
must interest us because it represents a complex metamorphosis of hope into real-
ism, of revolt into a clever melancholy, from a grand political denial into a
thousand-faceted, small, subpolitical affirmation, from a radicalism in politics
into a middle course of intelligent survival. I do not really believe in the end of
enlightenment merely because the spectacle has come to an end.
What also has played a role in the collapse of the socialist programming of identity is the psychological naivete of the old concept of politics. Socialism, es- pecially in Western nations, has not known how to convincingly orchestrate the pleasure in making politics oreven the prospect of lessening suffering at the hands of politics. Its psychopolitics remained almost everywhere on a crude level; it could mobilize rage, hope, longing, and ambition but not what would have been decisive, namely, the pleasure in being a proletarian. Precisely that, according to the socialist concept of the proletariat, is not at all possible since proletarian existence is defined negatively: to have nothing besides offspring and to remain excluded from better chances and the riches of life. Positive ego can only be achieved by deproletarianization. Only in the revolutionary Prolet-Cult, which blossomed in Russia shortly after the October Revolution, was there something like a direct class narcissism, a self-celebration of the proletariat that soon had to wither under its own plaintiveness and mendacity. However, in political nar- cissism, just as in private narcissism, to be "better" is everything. Noblesse oblige. But can one say: proletariat oblige?
The proletarian ego, which follows in the footsteps of the bourgeois ego and registers its claims to an inheritance, possesses the class experience of working people who are beginning to overcome their political muteness. Every ego, in or- der to manifest itself and to stand up to public scrutiny, requires a solid nucleus, a pride of ego, which can endure having to appear before others. The greatest breakthrough for the people came when they discovered the language of human rights for themselves. These rights were articulated from the peasant wars of 1525 up until the modern Russian and Polish resistances as the rights of Chris- tians. In the traditions based on the American and French revolutions, they are understood as temporal natural rights.
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES U 71
The elevated feeling, composed of indignation and a claim to freedom, of be- ing not a slave (robot) but also a human being, gave the early workers' movement its moral, psychological, and political strength, a strength that grew even more under repression. (For this reason, the socialist movement had a competitor in the Christian workers' movement, which pursued the same motive: the feeling of being a meaningful human being, politically and legally, but to be sure, without the revolutionary element. ) For as long as the misery of the proletariat was so horrifying, as nineteenth-century documents substantiate, even the discovery of the feeling for human rights had to give the laborer a political ego nucleus. This gives early and naive socialism a nostalgic charm, a moving, political humanism filled with truth. But a sobering up comes about in the dispute over the correct interpretation of human rights. In the late nineteenth century, the age of strategy, of division, of revision, and of fraternal conflict begins. The consciousness of hu- man rights frayed in the gear wheels of the logic of party and struggle. It lost its capacity to sustain in the proletariat an elevated feeling firmly grounded in the public sphere when the socialist currents began to slander each other.
Social democracy had already tried somewhat earlier in its cultural politics (Bildungspolitik) to stimulate the nerve of class narcissism by broadcasting the slogan Knowledge Is Power. With this, the claim to its own class culture begins, a class culture rooted in the recognition that without a class-specific creativity and a superior "morality" and cultivation, no socialist state can be set up. "Knowledge is power"--this statement can also mean that socialism finally began to sense the secret of the relation between narcissistic pleasure in culture and political power. "Being poor is no guarantee at all of being good and clever" (E. Kastner, Fabian, 1931).
In the heyday of the workers' movement, the consciousness of human rights was outbid by a proletarian pride in accomplishment that, for good reason, made reference to the labor, diligence, and power of the class. Its knowledge of power culminated in the sentence: All wheels stand still, if our strong arms so will. In the pathos of the general strike, something of the elevated feeling of class power and the domination of production lived on --only, of course, under the almost al- ways unrealistic assumption of proletarian unity. The latter was broken because vital interests and political interests could never coincide in the proletariat. Yet even the strength of a latent consciousness of the general strike and labor in the long run does not suffice to stabilize an elevated class feeling. The bleakness of everyday life is more powerful than the political learning in the dramatic episodes ? f class history. In the last instance, the consciousness of power and labor alone cannot sustain pride in a culture that can perpetually renew itself.
The regenerability of elevated feelings is rooted in the cultural and existential creativity of a class. In the end, mere power becomes boring even to itself. Where the pleasure in politics reduces to the ambition of those who rule, a vital resistance ? f the masses is, in the long run, unavoidable. But in this lies also the germ of
72 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
an objective proletarian feeling of inferiority. Wage labor creates abstract value. It is productive without being creative. The idiocy of industrial labor erects in the meantime an impenetrable wall against a true class narcissism of the proletariat. The cultural hegemony of those who produce, however, could only grow out of such a class narcissism. By contrast, a cultural system based on a crude ideology of labor is incapable of acquiring the most valuable inheritance of aristocratic and bourgeois culture: the pleasure politics of a creative life. The socialist way of in- heriting has intensified the old deficiencies and diminished the old privileges. In a civilization of the "good life," to inherit from the nobility and the bourgeoisie can only mean avoiding the deficiencies of the predecessors and appropriating their strengths. Anything else would not be worth the trouble.
I will forgo presenting the establishment of inwardness in other areas--erotics, ethics, aesthetics-in the way in which I have briefly attempted to present it in the instance of the paradoxical inwardness of class narcissisms. In any case, the scheme of the critique would be the same: investigation of collective program- ming and self-programming. Today the sociocultural conditioning of the sexes is a common topic of discussion. The naive masculinity and femininity in the members of less-developed cultures may strike us as charming; in our own con- text we trip over the "stupid" factor in the results of such training. Today it can be expected of everyone to know that masculinity and femininity are formed in drawn-out social self-training, just like class consciousnesses, professional ethics, character, and personal tastes. Every person goes through years of appren- ticeship in inwardness, every newborn child years of apprenticeship in gender identity. Later, in becoming aware of oneself, men and women discover a spon- taneity of feeling constituted in such and such a way: I like her; I don't like him; those are my impulses; this turns me on; those are my wishes; I can satisfy them to this extent. From the first look we take at our experiences we believe we can say who we are. The second look will make it clear that education is behind every particular way of being. What seemed to be nature, on closer observation reveals itself as code. Why is that important? Well, those who enjoy advantages from their programming and that of others, naturally feel no impulse to reflect. But those who suffer disadvantages will refuse in the future to make sacrifices based on a mere training in bondage. The disadvantaged are immediately motivated to reflect. One can say that the universal discontent in relations between the sexes today has led to a strong increase in the readiness to reflect on the causes of problematic relationships --in both sexes. Wherever one gets "involved" with problems, one finds both sides sunk in reflection.
And after reflection? Well, I know no one who could be said to be "finished with reflecting. " The "labor" of reflection never ends. It appears to be infinite; of course, I believe it is a "benign infinity," which implies growth and maturation. In innumerable respects, people have reasons to get to know themselves better.
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 73
? Pellegrino Tibaldi, Polyphem, around 1555.
Whatever we may be, for better or for worse, we are thus initially and "naturally"
11
"idiots of the family," in the broadest sense: educated people. In the last in-
stance, enlightenment has to do with the idiocy of the ego. It is difficult to disperse inner automatisms; it takes effort to penetrate the unconscious. A permanent criti- cal self-reflection would be necessary in the end to counter the tendency to sub- merge oneself in new lacks of awareness, new automatisms, new blind identifica- tions. Life, which also searches for new stability through revolutions and moments of awareness, obeys an inclination to inertia. The impression can thus arise that the history of spirit (Geistesgeschichte) constitutes a simple dance of ideologies and not a systematically worked out movement of human cultures from immaturity and delusion. In the twilight of "postenlightenment," the idiocy of egos twists itself into postures that are more and more artful and more and more convoluted --into a conscious unconsciousness, into defensive identities.
The mania for "identity" seems to be the deepest of the unconscious program- mings, so deeply buried that it evades even attentive reflection for a long time. A formal somebody, as bearer of our social identifications, is, so to speak, pro- grammed into us. It guarantees in almost every aspect the priority of what is alien over what is one's own. Where "I" seem to be, others always went before me in order to automatize me through socialization. Our true self-experience in original Nobodiness remains in this world buried under taboo and panic. Basically, how- ever, no life has a name. The self-conscious nobody in us --who acquires names and identities only through its "social birth"-remains the living source of free- dom. The living Nobody, in spite of the horror of socialization, remembers the energetic paradises beneath the personalities. Its life soil is the mentally alert body, which we should call not nobody but yesbody and which is able to develop m the course of individuation from an areflexive "narcissism" to a reflected "self-
74 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
discovery in the world cosmos. " In this Nobody, the last enlightenment, as cri- tique of the illusion of privacy and egoism, comes to an end. If mystical advances into such "innermost" zones of preindividual emptiness used to be exclusively a matter for meditative minorities, today there are good reasons for hoping that in our world, torn by struggling identifications, majorities for such enlightenment will finally be found.
It is not infrequently necessary for the pure interest in surviving to be able to be Nobody. The Odyssey demonstrates this in its funniest and most grandiose pas- sage. Odysseus, the mentally alert hero, in the decisive moment of his wanderings after fleeing from the cave of the blinded Cyclops, calls to him: It was Nobody who blinded you! In this way, one-eyedness and identity can be overcome. With this call, Odysseus, the master of clever self-preservation, reaches the summit of mental alertness. He leaves the sphere of primitive moral causalities, the web of revenge. From then on he is safe from the "envy of the gods. " The gods mock Cyclops when he demands that they take revenge. On whom? On Nobody.
The Utopia of conscious life was and remains a world in which we all have the right to be Odysseus and to let that Nobody live, in spite of history, politics, na- tionality, and Somebodiness. In the shape of our bodies, we should embark on the wanderings of a life that spares itself nothing. When in danger, mentally and spiritually alert persons discover Being-as-Nobody in themselves. Between the poles of Nobodiness and Somebodiness, the adventures and vicissitudes of con- scious life are strung. In conscious life, every fiction of an ego is dissolved once and for all. For this reason, Odysseus, and not Hamlet, is the true founding father of modern and everlasting intelligence.
Notes
1. This holds for Bruno Bauer's classic polemic, Theologische Schamlosigkeiten (1841), in Bauer, Feldziige der reinen Kritik, ed. H. M. Sass (Frankfurt, 1968).
2. There is already a precursor of this doctrine among Greek Sophists: Critias.
3. The extension of the Kantian critique always proceeded from the narrowness of its physically oriented concept of experience. Whenever one moved beyond Kant, one did so in the name of an en- riched concept of experience that was extended to historical, cultural, symbolic, emotional, and reflective phenomena.
4. [See Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. -Trans. ]
5. At one point in chapter 5 I will hint at the relation that could exist between present-day, re- spectable cynicism of the politics of armament and peace and a third world war.
6. In chapter 8 ("The Cynicism of Knowledge"), I will describe Freud as the protagonist of a kynical theory. See in the same chapter, "Sexual Cynicism. " [See also by Peter Sloterdijk, Der Zauberbaum. Die Entstehung der Psychoanalyse imjahr 1785 (Frankfurt am Main, 1985). --Trans. 1
7. It is the cultural strategy of all neoconservativisms. See chapters 15, 16, and 23 ("Political Coueism").
8. [See also by Peter Sloterdijk, Der Denker aufder Btihne. Nietzsches Materialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1986). --Trans. ]
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 75
9. Most recently, Jean Plumyene has impressively sketched the drama of early nationalisms: Les nations romantiques. Histoire du nationalisme, vol. 1 (Paris, 1979).
10. Its development can be studied through the example of the "individualist" anarchism inspired by Stirner.
11. [This refers to a phrase from Marx concerning "rural idiocy. " Initially we cannot help having been made by the family into the "idiots" we are. -Trans. ]
Chapter 4
After the Unmaskings: Cynical Twilight. Sketches for the Self-repudiation of the Ethos of Enlightenment
You are still there! No, that is unheard of, Disappear, we have after all enlightened!
The pack of devils, it does not ask for rules.
We are clever enough, and still Tegel is haunted.
Goethe, Faust I, Walpurgisnacht
"I look on, is that nothing? "
"Who can be helped by it? "
"Who can be helped? " said Fabian.
Erich Kastner, Fabian (1931) For they know what they do.
Ernst Ottwald, Denn sie wissen, was sie tun (1931)
These eight turbulent and hard-won advances of reflective enlightenment have made history just like the great breakthroughs in natural science and technology with which they have combined in the last 250 years into a permanent industrial and cultural revolution. Just as urbanization, motorization, electrification, and the information revolution have radically altered life in societies, so the labor of reflection and critique has structurally broken up consciousnesses and forced a new, dynamic constitution on them. "Nothing is solid anymore. " It has plowed up an intellectual-psychic field on which old forms of tradition, identity, and character can no longer exist. Its effects add up to the complex of a modernity in which life knows itself to be at the mercy of a continuum of crisis.
Enlightened Prevention of Enlightenment
Enlightenment has certainly been enormously successful. In its arsenal, the weapons of critique stand ready; those who want to view these even in isolation would have to think that a party so armed would inevitably win the "struggle of opinions. " But no party can appropriate these weapons solely for itself. Critique does not have a unified bearer but rather is splintered into a multitude of schools, factions, currents, avant-gardes. Basically, there is no unified and unambiguous enlightenment "movement. " One feature of the dialectic of enlightenment is that
76
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT D 77
"This is what they have refused to accept from me . . . these ignoramuses! "
it was never able to build a massive front; rather, early on, it developed, so to speak, into its own opponent.
As shown in the second preliminary reflection, enlightenment is broken by the resistance of opposing powers (hegemonic power, tradition, prejudice). Because knowledge is power, every hegemonic power challenged by "another knowledge" must try to stay in the center of knowledge. However, not every power is the right center for every knowledge. Reflective knowledge cannot be separated from its subject. Thus, only one means remains available to hegemonic powers: to sepa- rate the subjects of possible oppositional power from the means of their self- reflection. This is the reason for the age-old history of "violence against ideas". It is violence neither against persons nor against things in the trivial sense; it is violence against the self-experience and the self-expression of persons who are in danger of learning what they should not know. The history of censorship can be summarized in this phrase. It is the history of the politics of antireflection. At that moment when people become ripe for experiencing the truth about them- selves and their social relations, those in power have always tried to smash the mirrors in which people would recognize who they are and what is happening to
them.
Enlightenment, no matter how impotent the mere means of reason seem, is subtly irresistible, like the light, after which, in sound mystical tradition, it is named: les lumieres, illumination. Light is unable to reach only those places where obstacles block its rays. Thus, enlightenment tries first to light the lamps and then to clear the obstacles out of the way that prevent the light's diffusion.
? 78 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
In and of itself, light cannot have any enemies. It thinks of itself as a peacefully illuminating energy. It becomes bright where surfaces reflect it. The question will be, Are these reflecting surfaces really the final targets of illumination, or are these surfaces interposed between the source of enlightenment and its intended recipients? In the language of the eighteenth-century Freemasons, the obstacles that disturbed or blocked the light of knowledge had a threefold name: supersti- tion, error, and ignorance. They were also called the three "monsters. " These monsters were real powers with which one had to contend and which the Enlight- enment took it upon itself to provoke and overcome. Enthusiastically and naively, the early enlighteners presented themselves to the powers-that-be in the name of their struggle for light and demanded free passage.
However, they never really got a clear view of the "fourth monster," the actual and most difficult opponent. They attacked the powerful but not their knowledge.
They often neglected to investigate systematically the knowledge of domination in the hegemonic powers. This knowledge always has the structure of a double knowledge: one for the rules of conduct of power and one for the norms of general consciousness.
The consciousness of those who rule is that "reflecting surface" that is decisive for the course and diffusion of enlightenment. Thus, enlightenment brings power truly to "reflection" for the first time. Power reflects in the double sense of the word: as self-observation and as refraction (Brechung) and return (Zurucksen- dung) of the light.
Those who rule, if they are not "merely" arrogant, must place themselves stu- diously between enlightenment and its addressees in order to prevent the diffusion of a new power of knowledge and the genesis of a new subject of knowledge about power. The state must know the truth before it can censor it. The tragedy of the old social democracy is that, of the hundred meanings of the statement "Knowl- edge is power," it had consciously recognized only a few. It continually failed to recognize which knowledge it is that really gives power and what kind of power one must be and have in order to gain the knowledge that expands power.
In French conservatism and royalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there occasionally was resentful speculation about how the revolution of 1789 could have been "avoided. " This reactionary gossip has at least one very interest- ing aspect: Monarchical conservatism hits the nerve of a cynically studious poli- tics of hegemonic power. The train of thought is very simple: If the monarchy had fully exhausted its capacities for reform; if it had learned to deal flexibly with the facts of the bourgeois economic order; if it had made the new economy the basis of its domestic policy, etc. --then perhaps things would not have had to hap- pen as they did. Royalists, if they are intelligent, would be the first to admit that Louis XV and Louis XVI were partly responsible through their mistakes and po- litical impotence, for the disaster. But they by no means therefore renounce the
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT D 79
? Frederick II at his writing desk in his study, in the company of his dogs.
idea of monarchy as such because they justifiably assume the possibility of a "despotism capable of learning. " The politically hollow head of France in the eighteenth century allowed knowledge about power to form an extramonarchical center.
If one looks more closely, the chain of events of the actual revolutionary hap-
penings begins with a touching and oppressive display: The hegemonic power
tried at the last moment to approximate the people's knowledge about its problems
ln or
der to take back the reins, which had slipped from its grasp. This is the sig- nificance of those famous "complaint books" that, on the eve of the revolution and at the bidding of the crown, were supposed to be written by every county and bor- ough so that in the highest places, the real distress and wishes of the people could
80 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
finally become known. In an act of patriarchal humility, whereby the people played their role with high hopes, and a political-erotic beating of the heart, the monarchy conceded that it needed to learn more. It let it be known that from then on it was willing to become also the center of that knowledge and of those political needs whose splintering off into a revolutionary center it had tolerated for too long. But precisely in doing this, the crown set the ball of a revolutionary causal- ity rolling, for whose momentum the system had no inherent brake.
In the great Continental monarchies of the eighteenth century, a different style of government had prevailed--a "patriarchal enlightenment. " The monarchies of Prussia, Austria, and Russia had leaders who were willing to learn. Thus, one talks of an enlightenment under Peter, Frederick, and Joseph, whereas one can- not, much as one might like to, speak of an enlightenment under Louis. In the countries of "enlightened despotism," a semiconservative development planning was effected from above; from this planning emanated, in the final analysis, the impulse for modern planning ideas, which everywhere attempted to combine a maximum of social stability with a maximum expansion of power and production. Contemporary "socialist" systems still work completely in the style of enlightened absolutism, which calls itself "democratic centralism" or a "dictatorship of the proletariat" or whatever other euphemisms there are.
In these things, the German example has an ambivalent prominence. Nevertheless, German enlightenment does possess not only representatives such as Lessing and Kant but also Frederick II of Prussia, who must be counted among the clever minds of the century. As a prince, he was completely a child of the Age of Enlightenment and author of an anti-Machiavelli text who condemned the openly cynical technique of domination in the older statecraft; as a monarch, he had to become the most self-reflective embodiment of modernized knowledge about ruling. In his political philosophy, the new clothes of power were tailored,
1
the art of repression was schooled in the Zeitgeist. Frederick's new cynicism was
camouflaged by melancholy because he strove for personal integrity by trying to apply the Prussian-ascetic politics of obedience to himself. With a formal, and partly also with an existential consistency, he transferred the idea of service to the crown, designating the king the "first servant of the state. " Here the deper- sonalization of power begins, and it reaches its peak in modern bureaucracy.
Frederick's melancholy shows how in enlightened despotism a certain "tragic" tone must emerge, a tone, incidentally, that lent many admirers of Prussia a se- cret, sentimental identity. It still feeds the present-day nostalgia for Prussia, this outgrowth of a social-liberal, bureaucratic romanticism. The German enlighten- ment, more than any other, senses the schizoid split in itself; it knows about things that it may not live out; it possesses a knowledge whose real subject it cannot be. It absorbs insights in order to prevent them from advancing to the egos, which would without fail act according to them, if they only possessed them. In this
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT ? 81
Pofiltfcfjer (gierfan^.
E. Schalk, Political Juggling Act (literally, egg dance). Caricature of Bismarck as Minister for Conflict. Frankfurter Latern, 1863.
schizoid melancholy, the main thread of recent German history already begins to unravel--the demoralization of bourgeois enlightenment by an intelligent hegemonic power.
Otto von Bismarck was the second great cynical force in German modernity, a figure of repression highly capable of thinking. As creator of the "delayed na- tion" (1871), he was at the same time the one who tried to turn back the domestic political clock of this nation by half a century. He undertook the denial of evolu- tion on a grand scale. He strove to maintain standards for the political denial of rights that no longer corresponded to the balance in sources of power in his time. He repressed not only the political will of the old Fourth Estate, which had long since begun to articulate itself (social democracy), but also that of the Third Es- tate, of bourgeois liberalism. Bismarck hated liberalism (Freisinn, sense of free- dom) possibly even more than the "red hordes" of social democracy. Even in po-
? 82 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
litical Catholicism (the center party), he sensed the claim to a political ego that provoked his cynicism. The place where these political egos wanted to speak their mind, the Prussian parliament (later the Reichsparlament), he called realistically and contemptuously a "gossip shop," for the real decisions were always made solely by him and the crown. Here, the main thread of German masters' cynicism becomes a strong rope. "Reason and argue as much as you want, but obey! " Here the road begins that leads from the "gossip shop" of Bismarck's time to the demoralized and chaotic parliamentarism of the Weimar period.
It remains to be considered whether in Social-Democratic periods the diffusion of identity of enlightenment must proceed more strongly than ever. As soon as "enlightened" governments are established, the schizoid tension within the subject of power is intensified; the subject must split off its own knowledge of enlighten- ment and get involved in the melancholy realism of governing --it must learn the art of the second-worst evil. No merely moral consciousness and no loyalty to principles will be able to cope with the intricate realisms of the exercise of power. Not without intention, I explained in the Preface that the critique of cynical reason is a meditation on the statement "Knowledge is power. " It was a slogan of the old social democracy; the critique as a whole thus leads to a meditative grounding and dissolution of the core of social democracy: pragmatic political reason. As pragmatics, it respects the given order against which, as reason, it continues to revolt. Only under the sign of a critique of cynicism can the worn-out counterpo- sition of theory and praxis be superseded; only it can leave the schoolboy dialectic of "ideal" and "reality" behind. Under the sign of a critique of cynical reason, en- lightenment can gain a new lease on life and remain true to its most intimate pro-
ject: the transformation of being through consciousness.
To continue enlightenment means to be prepared for the fact that everything that in consciousness is mere morality will lose out against the unavoidable amoralism of the real. Is this not what social democracy is learning today in that,
2 almostagainstitswill,itisbecomingcaughtupintheGreatDialectic? Thispain
of learning is one of the three main factors in the self-denial of present-day en-
3
lightenment.
Enlightenment experiences its main refractive break (Brechnung) in the politi-
cal cynicism of the hegemonic powers. For knowledge is power, and power, when forced to fight, leads to the splitting of knowledge into livable and nonliva- ble knowledge. This appears only superficially as an opposition between "real- ism" and "idealism. " In truth, a schizoid and an antischizoid realism oppose each other here. The first appears respectable, the second cheeky. The first assumes responsibility for what one cannot be responsible for; the second irresponsibly champions the cause for what one can be responsible for. The first, so it says, wants to secure survival; the second wants to save the dignity of life from the en- croachments of the realism of power.
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Breaks in Enlightenment
Besides the main fracture of enlightenment through the hegemonic powers' poli- tics of antireflection, which consciously tries to preserve the naivete of others, we observe further breaks and unevennesses in the development of enlightenment that maneuvers it to the edge of self-denial.
The Breaking through Time
Enlightenment is a process in time, a form of evolution. It uses up life-time in the case of individuals, process-time in the case of institutions. Nothing hap- pens overnight with it, although jumps and abrupt awakenings are not foreign to it. Its rhythm is difficult to predict, and it varies infinitely according to inner and outer conditions and resistances. Analogous to the image of the flame, its energy is most intense at the center and dies down at the periphery. Starting from the pioneers and masters of reflective intelligence in philosophy and the arts, its im- pulse is refracted initially in the milieu of the intelligentsia with its inertia, then in the world of social labor and politics, further in the countless private spheres split off from the universal, and is finally reflected back by pure misery that can no longer be enlightened.
Biographically, enlightenment knows many stages and steps that earlier were strikingly represented in the esoteric movements. In the old Freemasonry, an in- itiation process was staged that was intended to represent the sequence of matura- tion, reflection, practice, and illumination. This indispensable biographical sys- tem of stages of enlightenment as initiation is corrupted in modern pedagogy; the system of stages lives on only superficially in the graduated order of the educa- tional system and in the sequence of school years and semesters. The curricula in modern schools are parodies of the idea of development. In the old Humboldt- ian university, with its "authoritarian" relation between teachers and learners and its student freedoms, a trace of that biographical consolidation and an opportunity for personal initiation into knowledge still lived on. In the modern educational system, the idea of embodied knowledge in those who teach as well as in those who study is lost. The professors are really not "confessors" but coaches in courses for the acquisition of a knowledge removed from life. The universities and schools practice a schizoid role playing in which an unmotivated, prospect- less but intelligent youth learns to keep up with the general standards of enlight- ened meaninglessness.
In the temporal refraction of enlightenment, we distinguish a biographical and a sociological dimension. Each new generation requires its own time to process in its own rhythm what has already been achieved. But since schizoid culture works toward a depersonalization of enlightenment, an enlightenment without embodied enlighteners, a great big groan issues from modern schools. Its "ap-
84 ? AFTER THE UNMASK1NGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
? Georg Scholz, Industrial Farmers, 1920. (Reproduced by permission of the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal. )
paratus of enlightenment" confronts youth from the position of an opponent. If there were no teachers who desperately made every effort for enlightenment in spite of instruction and who invested their vital energies in the pedagogic process in spite of conditions, scarcely any pupils would still experience what school should be about. The more systematically education is planned, the more it is a matter of accident or luck whether education as initiation into conscious living still takes place at all.
With the sociological breaking of enlightenment in time, it is the "province"- in the concrete as well as metaphorical sense --that resists the impulse of enlight- enment with its inertia. Province means accommodation to repressions and hard- ships that actually no longer exist. Only in the idle motion of habituation and self-
AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT U 85
repression do they remain effective--unnecessarily. In the age of advanced
jj? ntenment one really feels for the first time how deadly substanceless misery
and how wretched outmoded unhappiness are. The province has taken part in
modernization without participating in liberalization; it has gone along and yet
remained behind. Today this picture is, of course, changing. A relative inversion
in the tendencies of urban and rural consciousness can be distinguished; certain
signs make it clear that a stifling retardation is not the same as an insightful not-
wanting-to-go-further. A new provincial consciousness emphasizes that enlight-
enment cannot pledge itself for all time to a blind alliance with the scientific-
technical-industrial complex, even if the latter has been its inseparable companion
for centuries. The social forefront of enlightenment today aims at a qualification
of that technical enlightenment with whose unleashing the hot phase of our history
began. In it can be discovered traces of myth, dreams of a rational-magical mas-
tery of nature, omnipotence fantasies of political engineers. In the culture of tech-
nology, urban imperialisms are realized. Increasingly, voices of considerable
theoretical weight--from Toynbee to Wittfogel --have elaborated on a premoni-
tion of how the future of urban and industrial civilizations could be called the new
4 province.
The Breaking by the Party
Those who inquire after the political subject of enlightenment become lost in a maze. The split in motivations for enlightenment between liberalism and social- ism, the latter of which in turn branches into authoritarian-Communist, Social Democratic, and anarchist currents, goes back to basic principles. Each party has loudly claimed for itself a special relation, indeed, an intimate identity with en- lightenment and science. Liberalism bears in its very name not only economic freedom but also civil freedom and freedom of thought; social democracy has presented itself for ages now as the party for the rational guidance of social de- velopments; and communism steals the show by presenting itself as the current in which partiality {Parteilichkeit) and insight into truth have become one. Whom should we believe? For those who are still free enough to pose the question, there 's probably no alternative than to resort to one's own reflection, whereby poten- tially a new enlightenment party, that of "one's own opinion," could arise. Those free enough to do this are possibly also free enough to agree with the antiparty impulse of anarchism that attacks all parties as surrogates of the state and accuses them of being mechanisms of stupefaction and apparatuses for recruiting the fatu- ous electorate. The wonderful-sounding dialectical phrase about "truth and par- tiality" thus remains a pipe dream --until one can discover an impartial party that serves universal life interest by intervening in the blind mechanisms of self-
destruction.
86 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
The Breaking by Sectors
Especially the advanced thrusts of enlightenment that question the fictions of a clear self-consciousness, of nature, and identity are unhesitatingly opposed even today by great social powers that operate with these fictions. This can easily be demonstrated in the case of depth-psychological enlightenment, which became involved in a battle on two fronts with other fractions of enlightenment; the latter performed a thorough job of counterenlightenment on it. On one side, the psy- chology of the unconscious was unrelentingly "disproved" and accused of being mythology by scientism and natural-scientific medicine; on the other side, it was denounced by official Marxism as a symptom of bourgeois irrationalist decadence.
Psychological and political enlightenment are, in fact, opponents in that they not only compete for the free energies of individuals but also often come into conflict at the heart of the matter. As soon as proclivities for a party coagulate in identities, so that individuals do not merely support a party but become a party, psychological reflection must inevitably have a decomposing effect on such arti- ficial naivete. It thereby slips into the role of an unwelcome enlightenment. Con- versely, psychological enlightenment puts itself in a bad light when it starts to be- come a Weltanschauung, a school of opinion, an ideology, or even a sect. One sees this in the many pitiful squabbles and dogmatisms of a new psychological orthodoxy as well as in the ossifications and demarcations of a psychologizing subculture. It becomes really scandalous when psychologists --for example, C. G. Jung--through a combination of ambition and naivete have tried to win favor with political currents such as fascism. Instead of providing a psychology of authority and an illumination of political masochism, the leaders of schools of psychology have been inclined to taste the sweetness of authority and to use masochistic mechanisms to their own advantages.
The Break in Intelligence
I just indicated that the alliance of enlightenment with the process of natural- scientific, technical civilization is no longer unambiguous. The philosophy of en- lightenment still hesitates to annul the coerced alliance and to seek a new relation to the sciences. The modern equation of reason and science is too powerful for philosophy - if it does not want to destroy itself--to simply push aside the advan- tages of the sciences. Nevertheless, the signs of the times indicate a twilight of the scientific idols. Since the time of European romanticism, so-called irration- alist currents have repeatedly resisted the process of modern rationalism. The present also is experiencing such a wave of antirationalism in which the motifs of "another kind of reason" combine with each other--motifs of a logic of feelings and mysticism, of meditation and critical self-reflection, of myth and a magical worldview. It would probably be wasted time to try to sort out the grain from the
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chaff- Time will tell which impulses survive the fad phase. As soon as American syncretism comes and goes here and the first titillation of anything goes has worn 0ff perhaps the charms of clarity too will again be valued. In the long run, murky mixtures are unpleasant; where "anything goes," nothing matters anymore, but we have to grit our teeth and bear it.
Beyond the mechanics of pendulum swings between fascination and boredom, enlightenment still has the task of assigning an appropriate place in our culture to the sciences. A prerequisite for this would be the clarification of the relation- ship between types of intelligence--particularly of various opposing kinds of cleverness such as science and wisdom, learnedness and presence of mind.
The distancing of the types of intelligence from each other that in modern rea- son are only illusorily brought together in the unity of rationality, has long been obvious. What Georg Lukacs, for example, attacked as "irrationalism" in modern bourgeois thinking--the "destruction of reason"-contains in its basic impulse a fully justified separation of "another" kind of intelligence from the hegemony of rationalism and natural science. The only bad thing here is that irrationalism from Bergson to Klages took itself much too seriously. It fell over itself with its preten- sions to respectability and struck up the solemn tone of a priest where a great phil- osophical buffoonery would have been just the right thing. In pronounced irra- tionalist literature one often finds a mixture of theorizing melancholy and self-pretension. Still, Bergson did, at least, write about laughter.
The bourgeois compulsion for respectability spoiled the satirical, poetical, and ironic possibilities of irrationalism. Those who see the "Other" should also tell it otherwise. But those who present what they have "grasped" beyond the limits of a narrower rationality, claiming nothing less than validity of the most respecta- ble insights, degrade both the irrational and the rational. Thus, Gottfried Benn struck at the heart of oracle-irrationalism when he said that in Germany thinkers who cannot master their world-pictures linguistically are usually called vi- sionaries.
Respectable conservatism has known much of this for a long time. Under its
frequently demagogic wailing about the evils of progress, it has preserved the in-
sight that the modern kind of knowledge has little to do with that state of human
maturity that is called wisdom by all great teachers. Wisdom is not dependent on
the level of the technical mastery of the world; conversely, the latter presupposes
the former when the process of science and technology moves toward an insane
state of affairs-as we are observing today. With the aid of Buddhist, Taoist, and
original Christian, Indian, and American Indian intelligence, no production lines
a
nd no satellites can be built. However, in the modern type of knowledge, that
awareness of life dries up from which the old teachings of wisdom take their inspi- ration, in order to speak of life and death, love and hate, antagonism and unity, individuality and cosmos, manliness and womanliness. One of the most important motifs in the literature of wisdom is a warning against false cleverness, against
88 ? AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
"head" knowledge and learnedness, against thinking in terms of power and arro- gant intellectuality.
Breaking Down Half-Open Doors
In spite of all inhibitions, breaks, and self-doubt in the course of its development, enlightenment has unleashed an enormous potential for reflection. This is un- mistakable even in the present phase of demoralization. The penetration of science, psychology, and schooling into large areas of social life has brought strong means of reflection, especially into the heads of the intelligentsia and state employees. The diffusion of power in the modern state has led to an extraordinary dissemination of the knowledge of power, which simultaneously intensifies the cynicism of the knowledge of power, as sketched earlier, that is, the self-denial of morality and the splitting off of insights that cannot be lived out into a diffuse collective mentality. Here we flesh out our initial thesis: Discontent in our culture appears today as universal, diffuse cynicism.
With the diffusion of cynicism to a collective mentality of intelligence in the gravitational field of the state and the knowledge of power, the erstwhile moral foundations of ideology critique collapse. Critics, as Walter Benjamin notes in his aphorism of 1928 (see the Preface), have long since blended together with what is to be criticized, and that distance that would be created by morality has been lost through a general muddling along in immorality, semimorality, and the morality of lesser evils. Cultivated and informed people of today have become aware of the essential model of critique and the procedure of unmasking without having been shaken. The existence of such models of critique is perceived today as a contribution to the sad complicatedness of relations in the world rather than as an impulse for an existential self-reflection. Who today is still an enlightener? The question is almost too direct to be decent.
There is, to be concise, not only a crisis of enlightenment, not only a crisis of the enlighteners, but even a crisis in the praxis of enlightenment, in commit- ment to enlightenment. Today, the word "committed" is said with a mixture of acknowledgment and indulgence, as if it were a fragile sediment from a younger psychological layer that has to be handled with the utmost care. It is almost as if our sympathy goes less to those for whom another commits himself or herself than to the commitment itself in its rarity and fragile naivete. Who does not known this from his or her feelings toward the so-called alternative movements? Something similar can be seen in France, where the younger generation of intel- ligentsia, apres Sartre, is experiencing the dissolution of the old foundations of political moralism that constituted leftist identity. Commitment? "Takes place in the ivory tower. The committed sit there actively" (Ludwig Marcuse).
In that the moral foundation of enlightenment is decomposing because the modern state simultaneously demoralizes the enlightened and makes public ser-
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vants of them, the perspectives of what was earlier called commitment are becom- ing blurred. When someone tries to "agitate" me in an enlightened direction, my first reaction is a cynical one: The person concerned should get his or her own shit together. That is the nature of things. Admittedly, one should not injure good will without reason; but good will could easily be a little more clever and save me the embarrassment of saying; "I already know that. " For I do not like being asked, "Then why don't you do something? "
Things have been this way now for a long time: The "committed" enlightener breaks down doors that, admittedly, are not completely open, but they also no longer have to be broken down. It can go so far that one knows more about moral conditions as a cynic than as a committed person. Since Erich Kastner, the tone of satire in modern enlightenment is reflectively tinged and hits its mark with a melancholy, coquettish spin, if it still wants to hit the mark at all. Today's jokers are anything but committed, and they can profit from the inflated price of laughter insofar as buffoonery suits the spirit of the times better than does good old nasty satire. The last defenders of ideology critique are inspired buffoons, such as Otto, in whom one finds little sociology but a good deal of mental alertness.
Besides "commitment," and entwined with it, we find in our memory another
recent sediment--the experience of the student movement, scarcely settled, with
its ups and downs of courage and depression. This most recent sediment in the
history of political vitality forms an additional veil over the old feeling that some-
thing ought to be done about this world. The dissolution of the student movement
must interest us because it represents a complex metamorphosis of hope into real-
ism, of revolt into a clever melancholy, from a grand political denial into a
thousand-faceted, small, subpolitical affirmation, from a radicalism in politics
into a middle course of intelligent survival. I do not really believe in the end of
enlightenment merely because the spectacle has come to an end.
