Reason that maintains us without
extending
us was not reason at all.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
However, a trick lurks in this acknowledgment of the conflict.
For this acknowledgment is made only by the party who regards itself as the vic- tor in the dispute, not by the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
loser. It could be that our European dialectics since Heraclitus have all been victor's fantasies that try to conclude something like a peace treaty in the so-called synthesis; to be sure, it is a kind of dictated peace, in which the loser is supposed to come to terms with and be assimilated into the new order. In the jargon of dialectics, this means that a universal will be erected over an antagonism. What really happens thereby is the reinterpretation of po- lemics as dialectics, that is, the summarizing of a dispute by the victor. The latter models the history of the struggle as the development and progress toward its own position. The consciousness of the conquered party no longer speaks explicitly in the victor's resume but only as a subordinated "moment. " Its contribution is "sublated"; it itself remains below. The victor is thus, viewed structurally, a dou- ble ego, namely, first and third, and in the function of the third, it swallows up
16
But that means, metaphorically speaking: In the dispute between
to a certain extent the arguments, powers, and rights of the second. Weltgeist operates like a cannibal who devours opposed consciousness and gains its sovereignty by digesting them. This "positive" dialectic functions as the sup- pression of the second party; indeed, precisely speaking, it functions as the sec-
ond subjugation of what had already once opposed the first. (For the second posi- tion, the antithesis, emerges in reality not as a dueling partner of equal status or as the other extreme but as a revolt against an already established hegemonic power. )
The positive dialectic thus does not leave the realm of polemics but ends the dispute with a victor's dictate. With this it always intervenes in a polemical happening --and, as a rule, on the side of the hegemonic power and ruling con- sciousness. It reinforces the Above-Below, Good-Evil, Ego-Id structures from the viewpoint of the dominant position at the expense of the underdog. With this comes a pronouncedly ironical result: Positive dialectics from Plato to Lenin in practice function as obstacles to and falsifications of what they have taken as their topic: the productive dispute and the equalizing of forces.
It is on this experience that Adorno's bold inversion of the tradition of dialec-
Hegel's
TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS ? 373
tics is based. This inversion mistrusts the victor ideology of the higher synthesis. In reality, the victories of the "universal" do not bring any relaxation of tensions; the negation remains just as unproductive as the negation of the negation. The "sublations" are a lie; nothing better comes afterward. The more "dialectical" par- ties, blocs, ideologies raise themselves against each other, the more the spirit of deadlock, control, and rigidification triumphs under cover of hectic production and armament. Living things increasingly become weapons and tools. To the ex- tent that, directly or indirectly, everything becomes struggle and business, war and exchange, weapon and commodity, the living element, for whose develop- ment and enhancement, according to the conception of dialectics, conflict is bene- ficial, dies. In the end, dialectics is no longer even seemingly the form of move- ment of reason in historical conflicts, but--if we think of Stalin's use of dialectics --it becomes an instrument of artful, calculating paranoia. War is not at all the father of all things but rather their obstructor and annihilator. Adorno's correction of dialectical theory is consistent in taking its starting point in the dubi- ous "synthesis":
The formulation "negative dialectics" offends against tradition. As early as Plato, dialectics wants to create something positive with the means of thinking called negation; the figure of a "negation of the negation" later designated this concisely. The book wants to liberate dialectics from this sort of affirmative essence. {Negative Dialectics [Frankfurt, 1966], p. 7)
Negatively conceived dialectics works toward a Universal Polemics without saying so. If the first party is the "idealism" of the hegemonic powers and the sec- ond is the "materialism" of the oppressed, then the third, which emerges from the dispute, is basically the first again, but worse. The erection of a universal over antagonisms always leads to the same thing. Certainly, something "moves" in do- ing this but plus ca change, plus c'est la mime chose: Adorno's negative turn against traditional dialectics amounts to a denial of what in today's predominant "dialectical" doctrine, Marxism- Leninism, is a mere lie. However powerful and productive his realistic side may be (he indeed has all the themes of the aforemen- tioned fivefold antithesis to Hegel, that is, everything that today we call "realistic" --the existential moment, however, only in a mutilated form), Adorno was not realistic enough in a decisive point: He did not bring about the withdrawal of dialectics from ontology in a satisfying, rationally well-ordered form.
This withdrawal, we maintain, must lead to a Universal Polemics that pene- trates the dispute in its social dynamics and evolutionary function. A theory that after Hegel wants to call itself dialectical has to achieve this, nothing more or less. Marx made a start with this. He presented a history of philosophy that makes sense only when it is understood as a first attempt at a rational Universal Po- lemics. The central idea of his theory, that all previous human history is a history
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
374 D TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS
of class struggles, shows Marx's attempt to liberate dialectics from its idealistic inheritance and to ground it realistically and empirically as theory of reality, that is, as Universal Polemics. Nevertheless, the dilemma of dialectics was repeated in Marx himself. He provided not only a Universal Polemics but, within this, also a false proof as to why his position had to be the victorious one. Marx, too, produced a victor's fantasy (in advance); that is, he falsified polemics again into dialectics. The expropriation of the expropriators is meant to establish something universal over the antagonism between the exploited and the exploiters, namely, the just distribution of wealth. The means for doing this, however, are not univer- sal but a new polemic, the oppression of the oppressor, the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx's thinking, itself dictatorial, affirms this dictatorship. For Marx, too, dialectics serves as a "positive" artificial means, party and arbiter, first and third at the same time. However realistic Marx was as inaugurator of a Universal Polemics, he remained unrealistic with regard to the aims and results of the struggles he postulated. What today we encounter as so- called one-party systems are the malformed offspring of this truncated rationalism: parties that have gone so far in the victor's fantasy that they believe they have now integrated the second position and sublated it into the one, unique, higher synthesis. The party as the whole. The pole as integral. The moment as totality. Precisely that is the schema in which, in Marx's own words, the "whole shit" has to start "all
over again. "
What began as an attempt to avoid the dualistic danger of paranoia by means
of a dialectical acknowledgment of the one as well as the other in the last moment becomes a new onesidedness that forces new dualisms.
Marx's attempt to ground a rational Universal Polemics must be regarded as having failed, in reality just as much as in theory; his lasting achievement lies in the attempt itself. Our only choice is to rationally carry on his attempt. Human history is really also a history of struggles, as Marx emphasized, but whether he was right in identifying all historical struggles as class struggles is more than questionable. The world polemics we see before us as world history reveals rather the image of enormous interethnic, international, and interimperial conflicts, crisscrossed and overlaid, of course, by the fact that the subjects of conflict in themselves are mostly class societies --at least in the historical period we identify in general with the history of the state, i. e. , hierarchical societies of domination. However, no sophistry will ever be in a position to present the human history of war in such a way that it corresponds completely to the history of class struggles. Class society, too, is just as much a product of war as war is the product of class society. Here, the historical facts count, and in the conflict between fact and the- ory, we will always have to say, going against Hegel, all the worse for the theory. War is older than class society, and struggles between class societies are not class struggles per se. A Universal Polemics, in contrast to Marx, enjoys the advantage of being able to afford these clear distinctions from the beginning. It can do this
TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS ? 375
because it does not want to be a victor's fantasy and has no interest in proving
the necessary and historically "due" triumph of one party. Even less is it com-
pelled to construe subjects of conflict that cannot be found, as Marxism did when
it postulated a militant proletariat as the world-historical conflictual partner of the
bourgeoisie. Universal Polemics can even go a step further in historical descrip-
tion than Historical Materialism; namely, it can investigate the polemical style
of the dialectician as one of the most important phenomena in the modern history
of conflict. It shows what happens when a party founds its struggles on a "dialecti-
cal" theory. Positive dialectics, for its part, remains an object for Universal Po-
17
lemics.
Adorno's great intervention relates to this point. Only a negative dialectics
would cease to be the legitimating ideology of a party that dreams of itself as vic- tor and as the whole. Only with this can misuse of dialectics cease. If its rational core has been laid bare as Universal Polemics, its lying side can and must disap- pear. Then it will no longer perform dogmatic services for anyone. It will no longer be a weapon, an ideology, an instrument of propaganda, but will become what it falsely understood itself to be: an instrument for the description of reality, history, and of the conflicts of consciousnesses. When Adorno, as he said, put his cards openly on the table, he executed the gesture that had long since been due in the overripe tradition of dialectics. As negative dialectics, it openly gives up the attempt to compulsively be in the right and to celebrate the force of the victor as a higher synthesis. Critical Theory was the attempt to come into the in- heritance of dialectics without spinning victor's fantasies. In it, the legacy of those who have been violated and beaten down gains expression. It raises for the first time in a consistent way the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
demand that human history be written that the un- happy ones who perished as victims appear not simply as "dung" (see chapter 7, the section on the Grand Inquisitor) and that historiography not repeat the vio- lence and injustice that happened in past struggles through its mode of examining.
Is that all? Can we be satisfied as soon as dialectics has been turned back out of ontology into the domain of Universal Polemics? Is its rational core constituted only by this polemics? Was everything else only fine phrases and arrogance? It remains to be shown that what we call dialectics has a second root that remains firmly anchored even when we have to pull out the first. We find the second root when we listen a little to the ontological and natural-philosophical claims of di- alectics. Sooner or later in the self-presentation of dialectics, the assertion is in- evitably made that it is the science of "becoming" and that becoming, in turn, is the "great law" of reality. And then without fail soon after comes the touchingly naive example of the plant that becomes a seedling out of the seed, whereby the seed disappears and transforms itself into the plant that it gives forth; the latter, in turn, produces the seed, which leaves the plant, is carried away, and ger- minates anew, while the old plant dies, just as waning is in general the obverse
376 ? TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS
side of becoming. Have we not, without noticing it, changed over from social po- lemics to natural philosophy and biology? To be sure, we have changed terrain but not without noticing it. For the so-called dialectics of nature has always been the Achilles' heel of this line of thinking. Especially since Hegel, we can amuse ourselves with certain assertions: The flower is the antithesis of the bud, whereas the "fruit (now) declares the flower to be a false existence of the plant" (The Phenomenology of Spirit). Conceptual sorcery? Rhetorical hyperbole? Analysis really does not have a hard job here of demonstrating a misuse of language. The mockery of the critics lies to hand and is justified. However, it should not make us blind to the significant idea provided by the example. Naive as it sounds, it hints at a naive and original fundamental layer of philosophizing that cannot be completely dissolved by any dialectical or analytic artfulness, no matter how sophisticated. For this example is looking at the cycle of life and the great and universal transformation of appearances between becoming, existence, and wan- ing. The old tradition of wisdom --the prescientific tradition --has these phenomena constantly in mind: It sees the change of seasons, the rhythm of day and night, the recurrence of waking and sleeping, the in and out of breathing, the alternation of light and shade. In the center of these polar phenomena it finds the play of the sexes --which at the same time provides the model for the expansion of the polar dyads into the dialectical triad. For in the encounter of the masculine and the feminine, the child emerges, the "synthesis" of father and mother, egg
and sperm, love and law, and so on.
I think that these naive observations show what dialectics tried to base itself
on in its positive aspect. Namely, for a long time, it borrowed its ontological prin- ciples from an original philosophy of life that had the play of antagonistic world forces and dualities in mind. What calls itself dialectics is, in reality, a rhythmics or a philosophy of polarity. Through pure observation, it tries to grasp life and the cosmos as the untiring change of phases and states of being in their coming and going --such as ebb and flow, the cycles of the stars, joy and sadness, life and death. This great rhythmics understands all phenomena without exception as pul- sations, phases, cadences. It recognizes in them the to and fro of the One, of the cosmic principle in its natural and unavoidable turnings. That everything in the world has its counterpart, that circumstances move in an eternal flow and cycle, and that the extremes transform themselves into each other-these are the great, unshakable visions this rhythmics achieves. The "dialectic" of Heraclitus-the first and probably also the only European dialectic that is a pure philosophy of polarity without becoming a polemic, therefore also contemplative and mysteri- ous, not wanting to convince and not intended for the disputatious dialogue- corresponds completely to this type of wisdom:
TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS ? 377
Opposites strive for unity, from variety arises the most beautiful har- mony, and everything arises on the basis of discord.
Connection: whole and not-whole, convergent striving and divergent striving, ringing in unison and ringing differently, and from everything one thing, and from one thing everything.
Both and precisely that is always in us: living and dead, the awake and the sleeping, and young and old. The one is transformed into the other, and in the new change, the latter again becomes the former.
We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are, and we are not. (Selection of quotations from Antike Geisteswelt. Eine Sammlung Klassischer Texte, ed. W. Riiegg [Frankfurt, 1980], pp. 92-93)
Such a view of the world totality still possesses the coolness and greatness of
a First Philosophy. It has a reflective, not an argumentative, meaning. It is taught
for everybody and for nobody, not persuading, at most giving hints; it could also
be left completely unsaid, and under no circumstances does it want to be
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
"defended" like an opinion or a position. Its speech is like an attuning to a rhyth- mic, pulsing cosmos. The world after all possesses its own gait and breathing, and this earliest philosophy of polarity was only an unresisting breathing with the in and out of the world. Between the "world law" of polarities and their under- standing by the philosopher there is no gap. Thinkers, or better, "see-ers," do not assume their "own" position and do not distinguish themselves as knowing sub- jects from known phenomena. In the great world of these pulsations and polar transformations, they do not appear as egos that could separate themselves from this world and thereby fall into error. Everything they say also goes through them, and it would be so whether they said it or not. As a final consequence, we would have to call such a doctrine of polarity a philosophy without a subject. Wherever this view reigns, there are basically only the rhythms, only the to and fro of energies and opposed poles; for the separate ego of the human being there remains no self-contained sphere. In relation to these rhythms, there is for human beings only one valid stance: surrender. Understanding means to be in accord with. Those who see that the world is harmony in strife will not struggle against it. Wherever insight reigns, the subject of struggle has already faded. If, how- ever, dialectics in this sense may really be called the "highest theory," it seems
to be argumentatively completely defenseless. In its free-floating contemplation, it has relaxed to the most serene of all unprovability. Such wisdom is thus in no
w18
If it is at all correct to call such philosophy of polarity dialectics
m any case of a cosmological-contemplative theory. In it there is nothing that re- minds one of the more modern "dialectical" subject-object relation. With respect to the polarities, human beings do not have a contradiction of their "own"; human beings do not face the polarities as a subject faces a thing; the individual human being can be at most a pole, subject among subjects, force among forces --
ay polemics but rather attunement and rhythmization.
it is a matter
378 ? TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS
? Rene Magritte, Hegel's Holiday, 1959. ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. Paris/V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
inserted simultaneously unresistingly and actively in whatever happens. It is not endowed with the characteristic of counterposing itself to being as the self- glorying, autarkic other (subject). This begins only when the human world has become autonomous, when, with higher degrees of civilization and socialization, the polemical principle becomes tense and heats up, when oppression, violence, enmity, domination, war, ideology, martial arts, strategy, etc. , begin to form corresponding polemical subjects. These subjects undertake intensively the split- ting off of the other "pole" and make of it an "object. " This corresponds roughly to the polemicization of the id treated earlier. We then are no longer concerned merely with rhythms and polar oppositions but with military, political, social, ideological animosities. The principle of enmity encroaches on the formerly neu- tral poles. The force-force relation becomes ego-id, subject-object. From now on, the respective negative should no longer even show its face. In the polemics, the backlash of the other side should be put out of action. Thereby, however, the world of rhythmics is destroyed. Polemical dialectics, to be sure, tries to preserve a residue of polarity by emphasizing that the transit through the opposite pole is necessary. In fact, however, it affirms and carries on the polemics because it feels itself capable of a victory over the opposed principle. The reconciliations that di- alectics thought out for itself were second dominations, and the syntheses in thought had the function of disarming the second party and subordinating it. Only in logic does "negation of the negation" sound neutral and just. Only in logic can it seem that the antithesis has received its due before the negation of the negation brings about a synthesis. In reality, it is a matter of a preventive negation of the negation --in other words, the suffocation of the antithesis at its source. The an- tithesis does not unfold itself to an opposing pole but remains a mere "potential," TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS ? 379
a suffocated and sleeping negation. For this reason, Adorno's negative dialectics designates not a "late degeneration" but a fundamental trait of dialectics.
Negative dialectics recognizes finally the dialectics of hindering. Hindering is the only ingredient that can be brought into the world of rhythms by the "sub- jects. " Wherever people's lives succeed, it happens not so much through combat- ive self-insistence but because they develop cultures in which rhythmical shapes can come into play without our
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
interference. Creative life flourishes wherever we renounce our capacity to hinder. Thus, there are surely no hindered geniuses, just geniuses at hindering.
The "subject," born of manifold hindering and threatening of itself, can only interfere everywhere as hinderer, combatant, and producer of "objects. " In soci- ety, it arises out of the thousands of large and small restrictions, denials, defini- tions, enmities, inhibitions, and alien regulations that merge into its "identity. " To attack the subject means to drive it all the more into itself.
In exoteric form we recognize this only since the total arming of modern politi- cal subjects has brought the global destruction of the world into practical reach. The apparently most simple abstraction "struggle"("which expresses an ancient
19
relation valid for all societies"; Marx)
for the first time. Only at the peak of modernity does the identity of subjectivity and armament reveal itself to us. Only here do we have to do with "struggle as such," "struggle sans phrase. " What the great esoteric doctrines of this world have carried through the millennia with mysterious exuberance as their dangerous se- cret now steps out into the light of a demystified reflection in which we can say serenely what our defensiveness means. Only in modernity has life frozen so much into the defense of subjects that our thinking, late but not in vain, can achieve the true universal concept for such subjectivity. How life could really be becomes more deeply forgotten day by day in the unfolded system of hindrances. We could only be helped by that which helps us to disarm as subjects-on every level, in every sense. However, insofar as the liquefaction of subjects, which was always the con- cern of inspired thinking, remains the decisive task of practical reason, philoso- phy too as theory of reason, also gains with this, its ultimate norm. A rationality that has offered its services to the hardening of subjects is already no longer ratio- nal.
Reason that maintains us without extending us was not reason at all. Thus, mature rationality cannot elude "dialectical" becoming. In the end, the most rigor- ous thinking, as the mere thinking of a subject, must go beyond itself. It does not matter whether in this we bank on the self-reflection of a philosophy of conscious- ness, on the "communicative action" of a philosophy of language, metareligiously on meditative fusion, or aesthetically on playful transcendence: A rational-that is, a physiognomically sympathetic-reason will unconstrainedly intercept the decision from the inclinations of our bodies.
is therefore practically true for us today
380 ? TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS
Notes
1. Those who do not understand this in time get onto the wrong track in many sciences. Many researchers have begun to study, say, art and literature as lovers of the "objects" and then, as profes- sors, only act out their hate against them because they fall into the stance of polemics, of nonsurrender to the objects, by having chosen the wrong type of exactitude.
2. There is a long tradition of attempts to confront two types of sciences or forms of knowledge: understanding or explanatory sciences, exact or inexact, sciences of the general or the particular, sciences of intellectual or natural objects, scientiae or artes. These oppositions are, to be sure, "plausi- ble," but the history of science shows that they become blurred. The present trend is toward a unified science (of the type of polemical objectification).
3. Thus, the enormous dislocations that have broken out today in basic physical, cosmological, and biological research in no way arise from some methodological considerations or other, but result rather from the scientist's being torn into the fascinating refractoriness of "things themselves. "
4. The conflict between intellect and feeling that typified the Enlightenment derives in part from the contest between the two tendencies: distancing and surrender, precedence of the subject, prece- dence of the object. All distance philosophers, from Descartes to Sartre, have therefore seriously dis- cussed the equally monstrous and characteristic question of how the ego can possibly establish whether, in the domain of non-ego, there exist other egos; thus, the problematic of "alien subjec- tivity. "
5. Heinrich Heine uses the overcoming of dualism as the foundation of his popular philosophical account Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (On the history of religion and philosophy in Germany; 1835). 6. On this point, the Faust myth has something in common with the equally fascinating Don Juan myth. Both were allowed to go to excess. One sees what happens to them: in the end, the punishment of hell.
7. Were not also "pantheists" for a long time held pointblank to be worshippers of the Devil? "Whether among those whom the Devil himself has paid to annihilate all divine and human right some- one is to be found who in this work of destruction has been more active than this . . . swindler? " asks the Jena theology professor, Musaeus, with regard to Spinoza! Another Christian propagandist finds a work of Spinoza's to be "full of sacrilege and godlessness, truly worthy of being thrown back into the darkness of hell from where it has come into the light to damage and disgrace
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
humankind. " Quoted after W. Weischedel, Die philosophische Hintertreppe. 34 grosse Philosophen in Alltag unci Denken, 8th ed. (Munich, 1981), p. 159.
8. It also gives cause for reflection that so-called anti-Semitism waxed strongest in the epoch when Jews gained an aggressive self-proclamation [coming out; --Trans. ] through the Zionist move- ment. This, of course, can be reversed. 9. For this reason, the famous Freudian comparison of psychoanalysis with the draining of the Zuidersee is, strictly speaking, erroneous; it is still too colored by engineering, conceived too much according to the model of polemical medicine (sickness as enemy). The id-sea never dries up-but is it not already a lot when one has learned to sail on it? 10. This alludes to the first volume of the three-volume recollections of the conservative Munich Weltanschauung writer, Oskar A. H. Schmitz, Die Geister des Houses, Jugenderinnerungen (Munich, 1925)-remarkable above all because Schmitz had undergone a psychoanalytic cure with Freud's pupil, Abraham, and tried to integrate experiences from his (failed) analysis into his autobiog- raphy. Some comments on Schmitz are also to be found in my book Literatur und Lebenserfahrung- Autobiographien der 20er Jahre (Munich, 1978, pp. 229ff.
11. Not: "What is dialectics? " For those who pose this question do not begin where they really stand intellectually, namely, at the insight that they are participating in the dispute around dialectics,
TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS ? 381
so to speak, moving in the dialectic of the dialectic. Those who pose this question will probably remain stuck with it.
12. Dialectics would then be restricted to the group of statements that can have antitheses, that is, to "problematic" statements with metaphysical or normative contents with which one can in fact at first, and even in the long run, provide grounds for this view just as well as for that view. Besides this, there is a broad group of statements that cannot have antitheses, which are not problematic, but which can or must be unambiguously decided one way or the other. These would be statements with- out metaphysical or normative content, thus, either purely empirical or purely logical assertions. There can be no argument about them. Conclusion: Where people argue, metaphysics or ethics is in- volved. Kant's transcendental dialectics describes the sphere of assertions capable of antithesis as a sphere of metaphysical illusion; accordingly, he is the model of a thinker who thinks dialectically and nondialectically at the same time.
13. Hegel's ruins repeatedly attract the interest of critical squatters; they are regularly followed by positivistic eviction orders.
14. Therefore, H. G. Gadamer's thesis that dialectics has to be "taken back" into dialogics and hermeneutics is aesthetically truncated. The polemical far exceeds the dialogical. Who would think of a "hermeneutics of war"? Of a theory of "armed argumentation"? Of a "dialogic" of the breaking off of dialogue--to say nothing of the absurdities of a "hermeneutics of capital" or a "dialogic of ad- ministration"?
15. See chapter 2.
16. With Hegel, who has worked himself incomparably deeply into the schizophrenia of this dou- ble ego, there are even grammatical reflexes of this structure, sentences whose subjects stand in the first person, the predicate in the third person.
17. See chapter 8, the second section; chapter 7, "The Grand Inquisitor"; chapter 9, "Exchange Cynicism"; chapter 3, "Critique of the Idealistic Superstructure"; chapter 4, "Marxist Elegy"; as well as chapter 26.
18. Because I have no philological intentions, I have not tracked it down in a specific philosopher, but have constructed it in its ideal-typical form; however, I have done this in such a way that Asiatic rather than European figures of thought- insofar as I can say anything about them-shine through.
19. This formulation in Marx (in the introduction to the Grundrisse) refers to the abstract concept of labor developed by Adam Smith. Ironically, the dialectician, Marx, has not provided us with even the most simple general concept of the polemical. He would only have been able to furnish this if he had "developed further" not only from philosophy to the critique of political economy, but also from the latter back to philosophy. In this gap, Lenin's principled terrorism was able to fatefully unfurl.
IV. Historical Main Text
384 ? THE WEIMAR SYMPTOM
The Weimar Symptom:
Models of Consciousness in German Modernity
On the whole, a reading of the thing induces fear, and that not so much because of the horrors but rather because of the com- plete security with which the secret contract that exists between people is broken. The impression is roughly as if someone in the room would raise their voice and say, "Since we are now as animals together among ourselves . . . " Ernst Jiinger, Grausame Biicher, in Das abenteuerliche Herz
Cynicism, as has been shown, forms a basic figure of the revocation of values in the historical process of combatant consciousnesses. In it, the "ideologies" awaken to themselves. Ostentatiously, they scintillate in malevolent ineluctabil-
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ity. In the course of history, periods that are especially prone to cynicism emerge, said Marxistically, periods of declining class domination--epochs of an ideology that has become reflexive in which the norms and dogmas of culture, buffered by self-irony, begin to play with their inner contradictions. In human history to date, the becoming-reflective of false and malevolent states of consciousness was al- ways a culturally pathological symptom--an expression of the fact that the ruling strata had entered into a morbid stage tending to decadence and indiscriminate disinhibition. In this point, Oswald Spengler, no matter what one thinks of him, has made statements of perplexing physiognomic precision. It is a matter of late
periods, when original forces, value-stable naivete, and more primitive tensions of will in a culturally dominating stratum have been consumed by strategic learn- ing processes. Cynically disposed, therefore, are the times of hollow gestures and artfully prearranged phraseology where, under very official word, private reser- vations, opposed worlds, and ironies are hidden and where, under public an- nouncements, mute submonologues flow, about which only the initiated, the cocorrupted, codecadent, coironist knows something. The smile of the augurs is also the smile of declining ruling classes.
My essay on the Weimar Republic consciously avoids the pathographic vocabulary of cultural critique just as much as the hypocritical soundness of those all too self-certain philosophies of history that straightaway talk of decadence and putrefaction as soon as the individuals in a culture become more reflective, sensi- tive, fractured, and conscious of problems. The phenomenon of reflective ideol- ogy is not quite identical with degeneration. When naivete declines and soberness ascends, that does not have to mean the decline of the West. In any case, moralism and swamp metaphors do not suffice. Even Ernst Bloch, who has also written more subtle things on this problem in general and on the "Weimar Symptom" in particular (in Inheritance of These Times), sometimes speaks from this somewhat
THE WEIMAR SYMPTOM D 385
too certain, too "healthy" perspective: "putrefying ideology in the declining times of a class society . . . already conscious false consciousness, consequently de- ception" (Das Prinzip Hoffnung, vol. I, p. 169). This way of seeing presumes a psychostructure in which it would be just a short step from the uncovering of the "swindle," that is, from the making conscious of the "putrefying ideology" to the pithy truth. Today's situation is far removed from this, psychologically as well as sociologically, and today scarcely anybody still deludes himself that he has a firm relationship with the truth. A pre- or postmorbid stage expands into a new normality. After a hundred-year-long crisis, the word "crisis" is as wilted as the individuals who once were supposed to be shaken up by it. The modern, reflec- tively cynical structures have obviously survived the motley phases of decadence: The gray cynicisms of modern matter-of-factness too are still cynicisms, even when they no longer have anything of the great pose of aristocratic morbidity, of aestheticism, or dandyism or of the spiritually decayed life-style of overbred late-bourgeois individualities. We live today in a cynicism from which absolutely no flowers of evil sprout, no grand cold gazes and fireworks in the abyss. Instead, cement cities, bureau-democracy, listlessness, endless mediocrity, administra- tion of deplorable states of affairs, lamenting prattle about responsibility, miserly pessimism, and insipid ironies. It may be that we will have to put up with this "spirit" for a long time. That is a mentality that is not even decadent because it was not preceded by any high point from which it could decline. What today is cynical has long since been sliding along unperturbed in this style. As we have said, there is no longer any "exposure" that corresponds to reflec- tive ideology. No critique can cope with gelatinous realism, for critique cannot achieve any validity when it is not confronted by an ignorance. In diffusely cyni- cal consciousness, no genuine ignorance reigns, only an inner splintering, un- reachable by any sort of enlightenment, and a conscious semidarkness that in its gloom still finds the energy, God knows where, to go on. Even a critique that it- self becomes cynical in order to smash the predominating cynicism is deflected. In exactly this way, incidentally, we could summarize critique in the Weimar Republic in the shortest possible formula.
The Weimar Republic is one of those historical phenomena through which we can best study how the modernization of a society has to be paid for. Enormous technical achievements are exchanged for an increasing uneasiness, in the uncul- ture; conveniences of civilization for the feeling of meaninglessness. Huge enter- prises shoot up, but in the half-shadow the question remains: What is the meaning of it all, and what does it have to do with me? In the intelligentsia, which con- sciously went through and participated in the process, there is no longer anywhere a "false consciousness" in the simple sense but rather dissolute consciousness on all sides. Because nothing is "sacred" to this consciousness anymore, it becomes greedy. A world of instruments lies at the feet of this amorphous and imprecise greed, but it finds no real enjoyment in them.
386 ? THE WEIMAR SYMPTOM
In the Weimar culture--as I hinted in chapter 1 --cynicism finds a more salient language than today. Then cynicism was acidic and productive, whereas today it expresses itself only in the no-thanks style, sullenly or bureaucratically. For the leaders of Weimar culture, in spite of everything that happened, reveal an inti- mate proximity to the heights of values
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
and the ideals of the metaphysical tradi- tions, whose collapse is now writ large in thousands of bold and fresh, aggressive disillusionments and dismantlings. Kynical and cynical elements are to be found in almost all the progressive aesthetics of the time, not to mention the petit- bourgeois phenomena of disinhibition on the martial-political level (fascism). Among the productive spirits of the time there are not a few who take it on them- selves to articulate their disappointments, their derision, and their new, grand coldness in aggressive art forms. They create an expressive language in which negativity and modernity, unhappiness and conscious contemporaneity become almost identical. From this circle come grand poses, individuals holding firm in a glaringly unholy reality. Here, the First World War can still be seen as an event in the history of metaphysics --in a certain way as the militaristic commentary on Nietzsche's "God is dead. " The ego after the war is an inheritance without testa- ment and is almost inevitably doomed to cynicism. Once again, it throws itself into grand expressive postures: aesthetic autonomy in dismemberment; destruc- tion of oneself in the general destruction; a superior mien even when being torn apart; cold affirmation of relations that deny our dream of life; the coldness of the world outdone by the coldness of art. Weimar art cynics train themselves to play masters of the situation, while the situation in fact is one in which things have gotten out of control and sovereignty is no longer possible. They practice elevat- ing themselves above the absurd, the inconceivable, and above what has long since been seen through. They impudently place their poses against the equally overwhelming and mediocre destiny of the period: cynically allowing themselves to be swept along--Hey, we're alive. The modernization of unhappy con- sciousness.
Chapter 12
Weimar Crystallization: Transition of a Period from Recollection into History
Three-quarters of your literature and your entire philosophy are expressions ofdiscontent.
Bruno Frank, Politische Novelle (1928)
In the course of the decade during which I have occupied myself with Weimar culture, an initially very quiet mistrust regarding research on the Weimar period developed that gradually has been transformed into a well-founded theoretical doubt. The more I read, the more uncertain I become about whether we are at all in a position to say anything sensible about the culture and the consciousness of those years from 1918 to 1933. The more research undertaken, the clearer this doubt becomes. The existence of a series of exceptional scientific analyses and accounts does not change this in any way. The doubt is related not to the possibil- ity of giving a historically critical account of this or that aspect of the cultural life of this time but to our ability to assume a sensible stance toward our continuity and discontinuity with Weimar. This can be understood as the expression of a dis- quiet stemming from the "philosophy of history. "
There are two easily distinguishable points of access to Weimar: a nostalgic- archaeological one and an apologetic- political one. The first leads through the literature consisting of memoirs to the oral tradition of older people and finally to the projective curiosity of present-day marginal political groups. According to this perspective, there was a time in Germany when life was "still interesting," when politics and culture proceeded dramatically, vitally, tumultuously, full of ups and downs --as if histrionics had been the common denominator of a whole gamut of social manifestations of life- from expressionism to Marlene Dietrich's spectacular legs in The Blue Angel, from the bloody comedy about the Hitler putsch in 1923 to The Threepenny Opera, from the impressive Rathenau burial in 1922 to the villainous staged arson against the Reichstag in 1933. The perma-
387
388 ? WEIMAR CRYSTALLIZATION
nent crisis, spoken about by everyone, proved itself to be a good director who knew how to arrange eye-catching effects. In addition to the nostalgia of the recollectors, we also observe a pronounced homesickness on the left for the Wei- mar Republic, where there was indeed a highly remarkable spectrum of political culture--from the leftist liberalism of Tucholsky, Ossietzky, Kastner, Heinrich Mann, etc. , to authors and sympathizers of social democracy and communism up to the leftist radicals, anarchists, and independent Marxists such as Benjamin Korsch,Brecht,anduptotheearlyCriticalTheory . . . TheWeimarRepublic became something like a playground for leftist historicism, an exercise field for retrospective allegiances and commitments, as if it were useful to know, at least after the event, to which side one would have beaten a path. Because the connec- tion to the ideas and potentials of Weimar culture was cut off by the Third Reich and the restoration of the Adenauer period, the New Left had to construct a quasi- archaeological access to the buried layers of German political culture. Archival work, skimming, reading; what came to light was impressive: An interrupted tra- dition had to, in a certain sense, exhume itself, and discovered to its surprise that everything had already been there once before--our entire intellectual "identity"
under the rubble.
The second point of access to Weimar chooses fascism, the rule of national socialism, as its perspective. Here, the interest is almost completely apologetic and didactic: why this or that party or person had to act in that way; why Nazi
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
fascism could not have been stopped or how it could have been hindered; why everything was as terrible as it was. Weimar appears in this light as prefascism, the period before Hitler. This how-was-it-possible literature already comprises libraries. In it, Weimar functions as an augury of political ethics-what flourishes when a democratic middle is lacking, when illiberal forces become too strong, when the workers' parties mutilate each other, when monopoly capital does not know how to go on, etc. A line of authors knew "even then" the truth, but unfor- tunately did not gain influence; another line, admittedly, made "errors," back then, but today it knows the correct view. Weimar thus serves on all sides as a political-moral history class from which everyone can learn. Democrats in East and West Germany compete against one another in the posture of those who have learned from the mistakes of the past. Because today the generation of eyewit-
nesses is aging and dying out, nothing stands in the way of a political pedagogi- fication of those years anymore -- except perhaps the academicization.
Doubts arise concerning both ways of proceeding. Could it not be the case that to date only a research in the "mirror stage" [Lacan; --Trans. ] has resulted from them, which lingers under the spell of naive relations of "interests" to the "object. Projection, apologetics, overcoming, nostalgia, salvation: They are all positions and images in a historical gallery of mirrors. "What you call the spirit of the times / That is the masters' own spirit / In which the times mirror one another" (Faust
WEIMAR CRYSTALLIZATION ? 389
I). Is then the "object Weimar" visible at all for us? Can we already try out ways of seeing other than merely nostalgic, projective, apologetic, and didactic ones? I think the specific forms of consciousness of Weimar culture are beginning to become visible for us again through the prism of the cynicism of our time, which is now coming into its own. The clearer the modern cynical structure be- comes for us, the more we gain the optics that belongs to the innermost core of the object. We then see the Weimar culture as the essential "founding period" of this cynical structure in its culturally dominating dimension. Back then for the first time, strategic immoralisms seeped out of the previously hermetically sealed milieus into collective consciousness, and what previously was regarded as the trade secrets of realpolitik, of diplomacy, chiefs of staff, secret services, or- ganized crime, prostitution, and the direction of enterprises is now taken up by a blatant rage for the truth and placed irrevocably in the twilight of "open secrets. "
As long as we do not explicitly grasp what cynicism is, the essence of Weimar culture must escape us. Our self- reflection, therefore, has precedence over historiography. As naive historiography, it has already come up against its limits. Only a more precise self-reflection again makes possible a more profound histori- cal experience--if we then think it is necessary. But conversely, one must have absorbed in long studies the specific scent of Weimar and Fascist cynicism in or- der to recognize that structures are at work in them that live on and connect us with our past. Historical objects do not simply "exist"--they emerge through the development of the eye.
Another doubt about the usual accounts of Weimar is a pure reflex of the study of the sources. In reading the documents, the impression is awakened that many texts of that time were written on a far more elevated plane of reflection, insight, and expression than the later cultural histories "about" them. The latter often profit only through distance in time, and their only way of being cleverer comes from the later perspective. That is, however, the insidiousness of the Weimar ob- ject. We cannot simply talk about this period as if its contemporaries had not al- ready said enough about themselves. In its extraordinary achievements in articu- lation, Weimar culture, in spite of many counterexamples, stands before us as the most self-aware epoch of history; it was a highly reflective, thoughtful, imagina- tive, and expressive age that is thoroughly plowed up by the most manifold self- observations and self-analyses.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
loser. It could be that our European dialectics since Heraclitus have all been victor's fantasies that try to conclude something like a peace treaty in the so-called synthesis; to be sure, it is a kind of dictated peace, in which the loser is supposed to come to terms with and be assimilated into the new order. In the jargon of dialectics, this means that a universal will be erected over an antagonism. What really happens thereby is the reinterpretation of po- lemics as dialectics, that is, the summarizing of a dispute by the victor. The latter models the history of the struggle as the development and progress toward its own position. The consciousness of the conquered party no longer speaks explicitly in the victor's resume but only as a subordinated "moment. " Its contribution is "sublated"; it itself remains below. The victor is thus, viewed structurally, a dou- ble ego, namely, first and third, and in the function of the third, it swallows up
16
But that means, metaphorically speaking: In the dispute between
to a certain extent the arguments, powers, and rights of the second. Weltgeist operates like a cannibal who devours opposed consciousness and gains its sovereignty by digesting them. This "positive" dialectic functions as the sup- pression of the second party; indeed, precisely speaking, it functions as the sec-
ond subjugation of what had already once opposed the first. (For the second posi- tion, the antithesis, emerges in reality not as a dueling partner of equal status or as the other extreme but as a revolt against an already established hegemonic power. )
The positive dialectic thus does not leave the realm of polemics but ends the dispute with a victor's dictate. With this it always intervenes in a polemical happening --and, as a rule, on the side of the hegemonic power and ruling con- sciousness. It reinforces the Above-Below, Good-Evil, Ego-Id structures from the viewpoint of the dominant position at the expense of the underdog. With this comes a pronouncedly ironical result: Positive dialectics from Plato to Lenin in practice function as obstacles to and falsifications of what they have taken as their topic: the productive dispute and the equalizing of forces.
It is on this experience that Adorno's bold inversion of the tradition of dialec-
Hegel's
TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS ? 373
tics is based. This inversion mistrusts the victor ideology of the higher synthesis. In reality, the victories of the "universal" do not bring any relaxation of tensions; the negation remains just as unproductive as the negation of the negation. The "sublations" are a lie; nothing better comes afterward. The more "dialectical" par- ties, blocs, ideologies raise themselves against each other, the more the spirit of deadlock, control, and rigidification triumphs under cover of hectic production and armament. Living things increasingly become weapons and tools. To the ex- tent that, directly or indirectly, everything becomes struggle and business, war and exchange, weapon and commodity, the living element, for whose develop- ment and enhancement, according to the conception of dialectics, conflict is bene- ficial, dies. In the end, dialectics is no longer even seemingly the form of move- ment of reason in historical conflicts, but--if we think of Stalin's use of dialectics --it becomes an instrument of artful, calculating paranoia. War is not at all the father of all things but rather their obstructor and annihilator. Adorno's correction of dialectical theory is consistent in taking its starting point in the dubi- ous "synthesis":
The formulation "negative dialectics" offends against tradition. As early as Plato, dialectics wants to create something positive with the means of thinking called negation; the figure of a "negation of the negation" later designated this concisely. The book wants to liberate dialectics from this sort of affirmative essence. {Negative Dialectics [Frankfurt, 1966], p. 7)
Negatively conceived dialectics works toward a Universal Polemics without saying so. If the first party is the "idealism" of the hegemonic powers and the sec- ond is the "materialism" of the oppressed, then the third, which emerges from the dispute, is basically the first again, but worse. The erection of a universal over antagonisms always leads to the same thing. Certainly, something "moves" in do- ing this but plus ca change, plus c'est la mime chose: Adorno's negative turn against traditional dialectics amounts to a denial of what in today's predominant "dialectical" doctrine, Marxism- Leninism, is a mere lie. However powerful and productive his realistic side may be (he indeed has all the themes of the aforemen- tioned fivefold antithesis to Hegel, that is, everything that today we call "realistic" --the existential moment, however, only in a mutilated form), Adorno was not realistic enough in a decisive point: He did not bring about the withdrawal of dialectics from ontology in a satisfying, rationally well-ordered form.
This withdrawal, we maintain, must lead to a Universal Polemics that pene- trates the dispute in its social dynamics and evolutionary function. A theory that after Hegel wants to call itself dialectical has to achieve this, nothing more or less. Marx made a start with this. He presented a history of philosophy that makes sense only when it is understood as a first attempt at a rational Universal Po- lemics. The central idea of his theory, that all previous human history is a history
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
374 D TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS
of class struggles, shows Marx's attempt to liberate dialectics from its idealistic inheritance and to ground it realistically and empirically as theory of reality, that is, as Universal Polemics. Nevertheless, the dilemma of dialectics was repeated in Marx himself. He provided not only a Universal Polemics but, within this, also a false proof as to why his position had to be the victorious one. Marx, too, produced a victor's fantasy (in advance); that is, he falsified polemics again into dialectics. The expropriation of the expropriators is meant to establish something universal over the antagonism between the exploited and the exploiters, namely, the just distribution of wealth. The means for doing this, however, are not univer- sal but a new polemic, the oppression of the oppressor, the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx's thinking, itself dictatorial, affirms this dictatorship. For Marx, too, dialectics serves as a "positive" artificial means, party and arbiter, first and third at the same time. However realistic Marx was as inaugurator of a Universal Polemics, he remained unrealistic with regard to the aims and results of the struggles he postulated. What today we encounter as so- called one-party systems are the malformed offspring of this truncated rationalism: parties that have gone so far in the victor's fantasy that they believe they have now integrated the second position and sublated it into the one, unique, higher synthesis. The party as the whole. The pole as integral. The moment as totality. Precisely that is the schema in which, in Marx's own words, the "whole shit" has to start "all
over again. "
What began as an attempt to avoid the dualistic danger of paranoia by means
of a dialectical acknowledgment of the one as well as the other in the last moment becomes a new onesidedness that forces new dualisms.
Marx's attempt to ground a rational Universal Polemics must be regarded as having failed, in reality just as much as in theory; his lasting achievement lies in the attempt itself. Our only choice is to rationally carry on his attempt. Human history is really also a history of struggles, as Marx emphasized, but whether he was right in identifying all historical struggles as class struggles is more than questionable. The world polemics we see before us as world history reveals rather the image of enormous interethnic, international, and interimperial conflicts, crisscrossed and overlaid, of course, by the fact that the subjects of conflict in themselves are mostly class societies --at least in the historical period we identify in general with the history of the state, i. e. , hierarchical societies of domination. However, no sophistry will ever be in a position to present the human history of war in such a way that it corresponds completely to the history of class struggles. Class society, too, is just as much a product of war as war is the product of class society. Here, the historical facts count, and in the conflict between fact and the- ory, we will always have to say, going against Hegel, all the worse for the theory. War is older than class society, and struggles between class societies are not class struggles per se. A Universal Polemics, in contrast to Marx, enjoys the advantage of being able to afford these clear distinctions from the beginning. It can do this
TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS ? 375
because it does not want to be a victor's fantasy and has no interest in proving
the necessary and historically "due" triumph of one party. Even less is it com-
pelled to construe subjects of conflict that cannot be found, as Marxism did when
it postulated a militant proletariat as the world-historical conflictual partner of the
bourgeoisie. Universal Polemics can even go a step further in historical descrip-
tion than Historical Materialism; namely, it can investigate the polemical style
of the dialectician as one of the most important phenomena in the modern history
of conflict. It shows what happens when a party founds its struggles on a "dialecti-
cal" theory. Positive dialectics, for its part, remains an object for Universal Po-
17
lemics.
Adorno's great intervention relates to this point. Only a negative dialectics
would cease to be the legitimating ideology of a party that dreams of itself as vic- tor and as the whole. Only with this can misuse of dialectics cease. If its rational core has been laid bare as Universal Polemics, its lying side can and must disap- pear. Then it will no longer perform dogmatic services for anyone. It will no longer be a weapon, an ideology, an instrument of propaganda, but will become what it falsely understood itself to be: an instrument for the description of reality, history, and of the conflicts of consciousnesses. When Adorno, as he said, put his cards openly on the table, he executed the gesture that had long since been due in the overripe tradition of dialectics. As negative dialectics, it openly gives up the attempt to compulsively be in the right and to celebrate the force of the victor as a higher synthesis. Critical Theory was the attempt to come into the in- heritance of dialectics without spinning victor's fantasies. In it, the legacy of those who have been violated and beaten down gains expression. It raises for the first time in a consistent way the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
demand that human history be written that the un- happy ones who perished as victims appear not simply as "dung" (see chapter 7, the section on the Grand Inquisitor) and that historiography not repeat the vio- lence and injustice that happened in past struggles through its mode of examining.
Is that all? Can we be satisfied as soon as dialectics has been turned back out of ontology into the domain of Universal Polemics? Is its rational core constituted only by this polemics? Was everything else only fine phrases and arrogance? It remains to be shown that what we call dialectics has a second root that remains firmly anchored even when we have to pull out the first. We find the second root when we listen a little to the ontological and natural-philosophical claims of di- alectics. Sooner or later in the self-presentation of dialectics, the assertion is in- evitably made that it is the science of "becoming" and that becoming, in turn, is the "great law" of reality. And then without fail soon after comes the touchingly naive example of the plant that becomes a seedling out of the seed, whereby the seed disappears and transforms itself into the plant that it gives forth; the latter, in turn, produces the seed, which leaves the plant, is carried away, and ger- minates anew, while the old plant dies, just as waning is in general the obverse
376 ? TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS
side of becoming. Have we not, without noticing it, changed over from social po- lemics to natural philosophy and biology? To be sure, we have changed terrain but not without noticing it. For the so-called dialectics of nature has always been the Achilles' heel of this line of thinking. Especially since Hegel, we can amuse ourselves with certain assertions: The flower is the antithesis of the bud, whereas the "fruit (now) declares the flower to be a false existence of the plant" (The Phenomenology of Spirit). Conceptual sorcery? Rhetorical hyperbole? Analysis really does not have a hard job here of demonstrating a misuse of language. The mockery of the critics lies to hand and is justified. However, it should not make us blind to the significant idea provided by the example. Naive as it sounds, it hints at a naive and original fundamental layer of philosophizing that cannot be completely dissolved by any dialectical or analytic artfulness, no matter how sophisticated. For this example is looking at the cycle of life and the great and universal transformation of appearances between becoming, existence, and wan- ing. The old tradition of wisdom --the prescientific tradition --has these phenomena constantly in mind: It sees the change of seasons, the rhythm of day and night, the recurrence of waking and sleeping, the in and out of breathing, the alternation of light and shade. In the center of these polar phenomena it finds the play of the sexes --which at the same time provides the model for the expansion of the polar dyads into the dialectical triad. For in the encounter of the masculine and the feminine, the child emerges, the "synthesis" of father and mother, egg
and sperm, love and law, and so on.
I think that these naive observations show what dialectics tried to base itself
on in its positive aspect. Namely, for a long time, it borrowed its ontological prin- ciples from an original philosophy of life that had the play of antagonistic world forces and dualities in mind. What calls itself dialectics is, in reality, a rhythmics or a philosophy of polarity. Through pure observation, it tries to grasp life and the cosmos as the untiring change of phases and states of being in their coming and going --such as ebb and flow, the cycles of the stars, joy and sadness, life and death. This great rhythmics understands all phenomena without exception as pul- sations, phases, cadences. It recognizes in them the to and fro of the One, of the cosmic principle in its natural and unavoidable turnings. That everything in the world has its counterpart, that circumstances move in an eternal flow and cycle, and that the extremes transform themselves into each other-these are the great, unshakable visions this rhythmics achieves. The "dialectic" of Heraclitus-the first and probably also the only European dialectic that is a pure philosophy of polarity without becoming a polemic, therefore also contemplative and mysteri- ous, not wanting to convince and not intended for the disputatious dialogue- corresponds completely to this type of wisdom:
TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS ? 377
Opposites strive for unity, from variety arises the most beautiful har- mony, and everything arises on the basis of discord.
Connection: whole and not-whole, convergent striving and divergent striving, ringing in unison and ringing differently, and from everything one thing, and from one thing everything.
Both and precisely that is always in us: living and dead, the awake and the sleeping, and young and old. The one is transformed into the other, and in the new change, the latter again becomes the former.
We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are, and we are not. (Selection of quotations from Antike Geisteswelt. Eine Sammlung Klassischer Texte, ed. W. Riiegg [Frankfurt, 1980], pp. 92-93)
Such a view of the world totality still possesses the coolness and greatness of
a First Philosophy. It has a reflective, not an argumentative, meaning. It is taught
for everybody and for nobody, not persuading, at most giving hints; it could also
be left completely unsaid, and under no circumstances does it want to be
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
"defended" like an opinion or a position. Its speech is like an attuning to a rhyth- mic, pulsing cosmos. The world after all possesses its own gait and breathing, and this earliest philosophy of polarity was only an unresisting breathing with the in and out of the world. Between the "world law" of polarities and their under- standing by the philosopher there is no gap. Thinkers, or better, "see-ers," do not assume their "own" position and do not distinguish themselves as knowing sub- jects from known phenomena. In the great world of these pulsations and polar transformations, they do not appear as egos that could separate themselves from this world and thereby fall into error. Everything they say also goes through them, and it would be so whether they said it or not. As a final consequence, we would have to call such a doctrine of polarity a philosophy without a subject. Wherever this view reigns, there are basically only the rhythms, only the to and fro of energies and opposed poles; for the separate ego of the human being there remains no self-contained sphere. In relation to these rhythms, there is for human beings only one valid stance: surrender. Understanding means to be in accord with. Those who see that the world is harmony in strife will not struggle against it. Wherever insight reigns, the subject of struggle has already faded. If, how- ever, dialectics in this sense may really be called the "highest theory," it seems
to be argumentatively completely defenseless. In its free-floating contemplation, it has relaxed to the most serene of all unprovability. Such wisdom is thus in no
w18
If it is at all correct to call such philosophy of polarity dialectics
m any case of a cosmological-contemplative theory. In it there is nothing that re- minds one of the more modern "dialectical" subject-object relation. With respect to the polarities, human beings do not have a contradiction of their "own"; human beings do not face the polarities as a subject faces a thing; the individual human being can be at most a pole, subject among subjects, force among forces --
ay polemics but rather attunement and rhythmization.
it is a matter
378 ? TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS
? Rene Magritte, Hegel's Holiday, 1959. ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. Paris/V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
inserted simultaneously unresistingly and actively in whatever happens. It is not endowed with the characteristic of counterposing itself to being as the self- glorying, autarkic other (subject). This begins only when the human world has become autonomous, when, with higher degrees of civilization and socialization, the polemical principle becomes tense and heats up, when oppression, violence, enmity, domination, war, ideology, martial arts, strategy, etc. , begin to form corresponding polemical subjects. These subjects undertake intensively the split- ting off of the other "pole" and make of it an "object. " This corresponds roughly to the polemicization of the id treated earlier. We then are no longer concerned merely with rhythms and polar oppositions but with military, political, social, ideological animosities. The principle of enmity encroaches on the formerly neu- tral poles. The force-force relation becomes ego-id, subject-object. From now on, the respective negative should no longer even show its face. In the polemics, the backlash of the other side should be put out of action. Thereby, however, the world of rhythmics is destroyed. Polemical dialectics, to be sure, tries to preserve a residue of polarity by emphasizing that the transit through the opposite pole is necessary. In fact, however, it affirms and carries on the polemics because it feels itself capable of a victory over the opposed principle. The reconciliations that di- alectics thought out for itself were second dominations, and the syntheses in thought had the function of disarming the second party and subordinating it. Only in logic does "negation of the negation" sound neutral and just. Only in logic can it seem that the antithesis has received its due before the negation of the negation brings about a synthesis. In reality, it is a matter of a preventive negation of the negation --in other words, the suffocation of the antithesis at its source. The an- tithesis does not unfold itself to an opposing pole but remains a mere "potential," TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS ? 379
a suffocated and sleeping negation. For this reason, Adorno's negative dialectics designates not a "late degeneration" but a fundamental trait of dialectics.
Negative dialectics recognizes finally the dialectics of hindering. Hindering is the only ingredient that can be brought into the world of rhythms by the "sub- jects. " Wherever people's lives succeed, it happens not so much through combat- ive self-insistence but because they develop cultures in which rhythmical shapes can come into play without our
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
interference. Creative life flourishes wherever we renounce our capacity to hinder. Thus, there are surely no hindered geniuses, just geniuses at hindering.
The "subject," born of manifold hindering and threatening of itself, can only interfere everywhere as hinderer, combatant, and producer of "objects. " In soci- ety, it arises out of the thousands of large and small restrictions, denials, defini- tions, enmities, inhibitions, and alien regulations that merge into its "identity. " To attack the subject means to drive it all the more into itself.
In exoteric form we recognize this only since the total arming of modern politi- cal subjects has brought the global destruction of the world into practical reach. The apparently most simple abstraction "struggle"("which expresses an ancient
19
relation valid for all societies"; Marx)
for the first time. Only at the peak of modernity does the identity of subjectivity and armament reveal itself to us. Only here do we have to do with "struggle as such," "struggle sans phrase. " What the great esoteric doctrines of this world have carried through the millennia with mysterious exuberance as their dangerous se- cret now steps out into the light of a demystified reflection in which we can say serenely what our defensiveness means. Only in modernity has life frozen so much into the defense of subjects that our thinking, late but not in vain, can achieve the true universal concept for such subjectivity. How life could really be becomes more deeply forgotten day by day in the unfolded system of hindrances. We could only be helped by that which helps us to disarm as subjects-on every level, in every sense. However, insofar as the liquefaction of subjects, which was always the con- cern of inspired thinking, remains the decisive task of practical reason, philoso- phy too as theory of reason, also gains with this, its ultimate norm. A rationality that has offered its services to the hardening of subjects is already no longer ratio- nal.
Reason that maintains us without extending us was not reason at all. Thus, mature rationality cannot elude "dialectical" becoming. In the end, the most rigor- ous thinking, as the mere thinking of a subject, must go beyond itself. It does not matter whether in this we bank on the self-reflection of a philosophy of conscious- ness, on the "communicative action" of a philosophy of language, metareligiously on meditative fusion, or aesthetically on playful transcendence: A rational-that is, a physiognomically sympathetic-reason will unconstrainedly intercept the decision from the inclinations of our bodies.
is therefore practically true for us today
380 ? TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS
Notes
1. Those who do not understand this in time get onto the wrong track in many sciences. Many researchers have begun to study, say, art and literature as lovers of the "objects" and then, as profes- sors, only act out their hate against them because they fall into the stance of polemics, of nonsurrender to the objects, by having chosen the wrong type of exactitude.
2. There is a long tradition of attempts to confront two types of sciences or forms of knowledge: understanding or explanatory sciences, exact or inexact, sciences of the general or the particular, sciences of intellectual or natural objects, scientiae or artes. These oppositions are, to be sure, "plausi- ble," but the history of science shows that they become blurred. The present trend is toward a unified science (of the type of polemical objectification).
3. Thus, the enormous dislocations that have broken out today in basic physical, cosmological, and biological research in no way arise from some methodological considerations or other, but result rather from the scientist's being torn into the fascinating refractoriness of "things themselves. "
4. The conflict between intellect and feeling that typified the Enlightenment derives in part from the contest between the two tendencies: distancing and surrender, precedence of the subject, prece- dence of the object. All distance philosophers, from Descartes to Sartre, have therefore seriously dis- cussed the equally monstrous and characteristic question of how the ego can possibly establish whether, in the domain of non-ego, there exist other egos; thus, the problematic of "alien subjec- tivity. "
5. Heinrich Heine uses the overcoming of dualism as the foundation of his popular philosophical account Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (On the history of religion and philosophy in Germany; 1835). 6. On this point, the Faust myth has something in common with the equally fascinating Don Juan myth. Both were allowed to go to excess. One sees what happens to them: in the end, the punishment of hell.
7. Were not also "pantheists" for a long time held pointblank to be worshippers of the Devil? "Whether among those whom the Devil himself has paid to annihilate all divine and human right some- one is to be found who in this work of destruction has been more active than this . . . swindler? " asks the Jena theology professor, Musaeus, with regard to Spinoza! Another Christian propagandist finds a work of Spinoza's to be "full of sacrilege and godlessness, truly worthy of being thrown back into the darkness of hell from where it has come into the light to damage and disgrace
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
humankind. " Quoted after W. Weischedel, Die philosophische Hintertreppe. 34 grosse Philosophen in Alltag unci Denken, 8th ed. (Munich, 1981), p. 159.
8. It also gives cause for reflection that so-called anti-Semitism waxed strongest in the epoch when Jews gained an aggressive self-proclamation [coming out; --Trans. ] through the Zionist move- ment. This, of course, can be reversed. 9. For this reason, the famous Freudian comparison of psychoanalysis with the draining of the Zuidersee is, strictly speaking, erroneous; it is still too colored by engineering, conceived too much according to the model of polemical medicine (sickness as enemy). The id-sea never dries up-but is it not already a lot when one has learned to sail on it? 10. This alludes to the first volume of the three-volume recollections of the conservative Munich Weltanschauung writer, Oskar A. H. Schmitz, Die Geister des Houses, Jugenderinnerungen (Munich, 1925)-remarkable above all because Schmitz had undergone a psychoanalytic cure with Freud's pupil, Abraham, and tried to integrate experiences from his (failed) analysis into his autobiog- raphy. Some comments on Schmitz are also to be found in my book Literatur und Lebenserfahrung- Autobiographien der 20er Jahre (Munich, 1978, pp. 229ff.
11. Not: "What is dialectics? " For those who pose this question do not begin where they really stand intellectually, namely, at the insight that they are participating in the dispute around dialectics,
TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS ? 381
so to speak, moving in the dialectic of the dialectic. Those who pose this question will probably remain stuck with it.
12. Dialectics would then be restricted to the group of statements that can have antitheses, that is, to "problematic" statements with metaphysical or normative contents with which one can in fact at first, and even in the long run, provide grounds for this view just as well as for that view. Besides this, there is a broad group of statements that cannot have antitheses, which are not problematic, but which can or must be unambiguously decided one way or the other. These would be statements with- out metaphysical or normative content, thus, either purely empirical or purely logical assertions. There can be no argument about them. Conclusion: Where people argue, metaphysics or ethics is in- volved. Kant's transcendental dialectics describes the sphere of assertions capable of antithesis as a sphere of metaphysical illusion; accordingly, he is the model of a thinker who thinks dialectically and nondialectically at the same time.
13. Hegel's ruins repeatedly attract the interest of critical squatters; they are regularly followed by positivistic eviction orders.
14. Therefore, H. G. Gadamer's thesis that dialectics has to be "taken back" into dialogics and hermeneutics is aesthetically truncated. The polemical far exceeds the dialogical. Who would think of a "hermeneutics of war"? Of a theory of "armed argumentation"? Of a "dialogic" of the breaking off of dialogue--to say nothing of the absurdities of a "hermeneutics of capital" or a "dialogic of ad- ministration"?
15. See chapter 2.
16. With Hegel, who has worked himself incomparably deeply into the schizophrenia of this dou- ble ego, there are even grammatical reflexes of this structure, sentences whose subjects stand in the first person, the predicate in the third person.
17. See chapter 8, the second section; chapter 7, "The Grand Inquisitor"; chapter 9, "Exchange Cynicism"; chapter 3, "Critique of the Idealistic Superstructure"; chapter 4, "Marxist Elegy"; as well as chapter 26.
18. Because I have no philological intentions, I have not tracked it down in a specific philosopher, but have constructed it in its ideal-typical form; however, I have done this in such a way that Asiatic rather than European figures of thought- insofar as I can say anything about them-shine through.
19. This formulation in Marx (in the introduction to the Grundrisse) refers to the abstract concept of labor developed by Adam Smith. Ironically, the dialectician, Marx, has not provided us with even the most simple general concept of the polemical. He would only have been able to furnish this if he had "developed further" not only from philosophy to the critique of political economy, but also from the latter back to philosophy. In this gap, Lenin's principled terrorism was able to fatefully unfurl.
IV. Historical Main Text
384 ? THE WEIMAR SYMPTOM
The Weimar Symptom:
Models of Consciousness in German Modernity
On the whole, a reading of the thing induces fear, and that not so much because of the horrors but rather because of the com- plete security with which the secret contract that exists between people is broken. The impression is roughly as if someone in the room would raise their voice and say, "Since we are now as animals together among ourselves . . . " Ernst Jiinger, Grausame Biicher, in Das abenteuerliche Herz
Cynicism, as has been shown, forms a basic figure of the revocation of values in the historical process of combatant consciousnesses. In it, the "ideologies" awaken to themselves. Ostentatiously, they scintillate in malevolent ineluctabil-
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ity. In the course of history, periods that are especially prone to cynicism emerge, said Marxistically, periods of declining class domination--epochs of an ideology that has become reflexive in which the norms and dogmas of culture, buffered by self-irony, begin to play with their inner contradictions. In human history to date, the becoming-reflective of false and malevolent states of consciousness was al- ways a culturally pathological symptom--an expression of the fact that the ruling strata had entered into a morbid stage tending to decadence and indiscriminate disinhibition. In this point, Oswald Spengler, no matter what one thinks of him, has made statements of perplexing physiognomic precision. It is a matter of late
periods, when original forces, value-stable naivete, and more primitive tensions of will in a culturally dominating stratum have been consumed by strategic learn- ing processes. Cynically disposed, therefore, are the times of hollow gestures and artfully prearranged phraseology where, under very official word, private reser- vations, opposed worlds, and ironies are hidden and where, under public an- nouncements, mute submonologues flow, about which only the initiated, the cocorrupted, codecadent, coironist knows something. The smile of the augurs is also the smile of declining ruling classes.
My essay on the Weimar Republic consciously avoids the pathographic vocabulary of cultural critique just as much as the hypocritical soundness of those all too self-certain philosophies of history that straightaway talk of decadence and putrefaction as soon as the individuals in a culture become more reflective, sensi- tive, fractured, and conscious of problems. The phenomenon of reflective ideol- ogy is not quite identical with degeneration. When naivete declines and soberness ascends, that does not have to mean the decline of the West. In any case, moralism and swamp metaphors do not suffice. Even Ernst Bloch, who has also written more subtle things on this problem in general and on the "Weimar Symptom" in particular (in Inheritance of These Times), sometimes speaks from this somewhat
THE WEIMAR SYMPTOM D 385
too certain, too "healthy" perspective: "putrefying ideology in the declining times of a class society . . . already conscious false consciousness, consequently de- ception" (Das Prinzip Hoffnung, vol. I, p. 169). This way of seeing presumes a psychostructure in which it would be just a short step from the uncovering of the "swindle," that is, from the making conscious of the "putrefying ideology" to the pithy truth. Today's situation is far removed from this, psychologically as well as sociologically, and today scarcely anybody still deludes himself that he has a firm relationship with the truth. A pre- or postmorbid stage expands into a new normality. After a hundred-year-long crisis, the word "crisis" is as wilted as the individuals who once were supposed to be shaken up by it. The modern, reflec- tively cynical structures have obviously survived the motley phases of decadence: The gray cynicisms of modern matter-of-factness too are still cynicisms, even when they no longer have anything of the great pose of aristocratic morbidity, of aestheticism, or dandyism or of the spiritually decayed life-style of overbred late-bourgeois individualities. We live today in a cynicism from which absolutely no flowers of evil sprout, no grand cold gazes and fireworks in the abyss. Instead, cement cities, bureau-democracy, listlessness, endless mediocrity, administra- tion of deplorable states of affairs, lamenting prattle about responsibility, miserly pessimism, and insipid ironies. It may be that we will have to put up with this "spirit" for a long time. That is a mentality that is not even decadent because it was not preceded by any high point from which it could decline. What today is cynical has long since been sliding along unperturbed in this style. As we have said, there is no longer any "exposure" that corresponds to reflec- tive ideology. No critique can cope with gelatinous realism, for critique cannot achieve any validity when it is not confronted by an ignorance. In diffusely cyni- cal consciousness, no genuine ignorance reigns, only an inner splintering, un- reachable by any sort of enlightenment, and a conscious semidarkness that in its gloom still finds the energy, God knows where, to go on. Even a critique that it- self becomes cynical in order to smash the predominating cynicism is deflected. In exactly this way, incidentally, we could summarize critique in the Weimar Republic in the shortest possible formula.
The Weimar Republic is one of those historical phenomena through which we can best study how the modernization of a society has to be paid for. Enormous technical achievements are exchanged for an increasing uneasiness, in the uncul- ture; conveniences of civilization for the feeling of meaninglessness. Huge enter- prises shoot up, but in the half-shadow the question remains: What is the meaning of it all, and what does it have to do with me? In the intelligentsia, which con- sciously went through and participated in the process, there is no longer anywhere a "false consciousness" in the simple sense but rather dissolute consciousness on all sides. Because nothing is "sacred" to this consciousness anymore, it becomes greedy. A world of instruments lies at the feet of this amorphous and imprecise greed, but it finds no real enjoyment in them.
386 ? THE WEIMAR SYMPTOM
In the Weimar culture--as I hinted in chapter 1 --cynicism finds a more salient language than today. Then cynicism was acidic and productive, whereas today it expresses itself only in the no-thanks style, sullenly or bureaucratically. For the leaders of Weimar culture, in spite of everything that happened, reveal an inti- mate proximity to the heights of values
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
and the ideals of the metaphysical tradi- tions, whose collapse is now writ large in thousands of bold and fresh, aggressive disillusionments and dismantlings. Kynical and cynical elements are to be found in almost all the progressive aesthetics of the time, not to mention the petit- bourgeois phenomena of disinhibition on the martial-political level (fascism). Among the productive spirits of the time there are not a few who take it on them- selves to articulate their disappointments, their derision, and their new, grand coldness in aggressive art forms. They create an expressive language in which negativity and modernity, unhappiness and conscious contemporaneity become almost identical. From this circle come grand poses, individuals holding firm in a glaringly unholy reality. Here, the First World War can still be seen as an event in the history of metaphysics --in a certain way as the militaristic commentary on Nietzsche's "God is dead. " The ego after the war is an inheritance without testa- ment and is almost inevitably doomed to cynicism. Once again, it throws itself into grand expressive postures: aesthetic autonomy in dismemberment; destruc- tion of oneself in the general destruction; a superior mien even when being torn apart; cold affirmation of relations that deny our dream of life; the coldness of the world outdone by the coldness of art. Weimar art cynics train themselves to play masters of the situation, while the situation in fact is one in which things have gotten out of control and sovereignty is no longer possible. They practice elevat- ing themselves above the absurd, the inconceivable, and above what has long since been seen through. They impudently place their poses against the equally overwhelming and mediocre destiny of the period: cynically allowing themselves to be swept along--Hey, we're alive. The modernization of unhappy con- sciousness.
Chapter 12
Weimar Crystallization: Transition of a Period from Recollection into History
Three-quarters of your literature and your entire philosophy are expressions ofdiscontent.
Bruno Frank, Politische Novelle (1928)
In the course of the decade during which I have occupied myself with Weimar culture, an initially very quiet mistrust regarding research on the Weimar period developed that gradually has been transformed into a well-founded theoretical doubt. The more I read, the more uncertain I become about whether we are at all in a position to say anything sensible about the culture and the consciousness of those years from 1918 to 1933. The more research undertaken, the clearer this doubt becomes. The existence of a series of exceptional scientific analyses and accounts does not change this in any way. The doubt is related not to the possibil- ity of giving a historically critical account of this or that aspect of the cultural life of this time but to our ability to assume a sensible stance toward our continuity and discontinuity with Weimar. This can be understood as the expression of a dis- quiet stemming from the "philosophy of history. "
There are two easily distinguishable points of access to Weimar: a nostalgic- archaeological one and an apologetic- political one. The first leads through the literature consisting of memoirs to the oral tradition of older people and finally to the projective curiosity of present-day marginal political groups. According to this perspective, there was a time in Germany when life was "still interesting," when politics and culture proceeded dramatically, vitally, tumultuously, full of ups and downs --as if histrionics had been the common denominator of a whole gamut of social manifestations of life- from expressionism to Marlene Dietrich's spectacular legs in The Blue Angel, from the bloody comedy about the Hitler putsch in 1923 to The Threepenny Opera, from the impressive Rathenau burial in 1922 to the villainous staged arson against the Reichstag in 1933. The perma-
387
388 ? WEIMAR CRYSTALLIZATION
nent crisis, spoken about by everyone, proved itself to be a good director who knew how to arrange eye-catching effects. In addition to the nostalgia of the recollectors, we also observe a pronounced homesickness on the left for the Wei- mar Republic, where there was indeed a highly remarkable spectrum of political culture--from the leftist liberalism of Tucholsky, Ossietzky, Kastner, Heinrich Mann, etc. , to authors and sympathizers of social democracy and communism up to the leftist radicals, anarchists, and independent Marxists such as Benjamin Korsch,Brecht,anduptotheearlyCriticalTheory . . . TheWeimarRepublic became something like a playground for leftist historicism, an exercise field for retrospective allegiances and commitments, as if it were useful to know, at least after the event, to which side one would have beaten a path. Because the connec- tion to the ideas and potentials of Weimar culture was cut off by the Third Reich and the restoration of the Adenauer period, the New Left had to construct a quasi- archaeological access to the buried layers of German political culture. Archival work, skimming, reading; what came to light was impressive: An interrupted tra- dition had to, in a certain sense, exhume itself, and discovered to its surprise that everything had already been there once before--our entire intellectual "identity"
under the rubble.
The second point of access to Weimar chooses fascism, the rule of national socialism, as its perspective. Here, the interest is almost completely apologetic and didactic: why this or that party or person had to act in that way; why Nazi
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
fascism could not have been stopped or how it could have been hindered; why everything was as terrible as it was. Weimar appears in this light as prefascism, the period before Hitler. This how-was-it-possible literature already comprises libraries. In it, Weimar functions as an augury of political ethics-what flourishes when a democratic middle is lacking, when illiberal forces become too strong, when the workers' parties mutilate each other, when monopoly capital does not know how to go on, etc. A line of authors knew "even then" the truth, but unfor- tunately did not gain influence; another line, admittedly, made "errors," back then, but today it knows the correct view. Weimar thus serves on all sides as a political-moral history class from which everyone can learn. Democrats in East and West Germany compete against one another in the posture of those who have learned from the mistakes of the past. Because today the generation of eyewit-
nesses is aging and dying out, nothing stands in the way of a political pedagogi- fication of those years anymore -- except perhaps the academicization.
Doubts arise concerning both ways of proceeding. Could it not be the case that to date only a research in the "mirror stage" [Lacan; --Trans. ] has resulted from them, which lingers under the spell of naive relations of "interests" to the "object. Projection, apologetics, overcoming, nostalgia, salvation: They are all positions and images in a historical gallery of mirrors. "What you call the spirit of the times / That is the masters' own spirit / In which the times mirror one another" (Faust
WEIMAR CRYSTALLIZATION ? 389
I). Is then the "object Weimar" visible at all for us? Can we already try out ways of seeing other than merely nostalgic, projective, apologetic, and didactic ones? I think the specific forms of consciousness of Weimar culture are beginning to become visible for us again through the prism of the cynicism of our time, which is now coming into its own. The clearer the modern cynical structure be- comes for us, the more we gain the optics that belongs to the innermost core of the object. We then see the Weimar culture as the essential "founding period" of this cynical structure in its culturally dominating dimension. Back then for the first time, strategic immoralisms seeped out of the previously hermetically sealed milieus into collective consciousness, and what previously was regarded as the trade secrets of realpolitik, of diplomacy, chiefs of staff, secret services, or- ganized crime, prostitution, and the direction of enterprises is now taken up by a blatant rage for the truth and placed irrevocably in the twilight of "open secrets. "
As long as we do not explicitly grasp what cynicism is, the essence of Weimar culture must escape us. Our self- reflection, therefore, has precedence over historiography. As naive historiography, it has already come up against its limits. Only a more precise self-reflection again makes possible a more profound histori- cal experience--if we then think it is necessary. But conversely, one must have absorbed in long studies the specific scent of Weimar and Fascist cynicism in or- der to recognize that structures are at work in them that live on and connect us with our past. Historical objects do not simply "exist"--they emerge through the development of the eye.
Another doubt about the usual accounts of Weimar is a pure reflex of the study of the sources. In reading the documents, the impression is awakened that many texts of that time were written on a far more elevated plane of reflection, insight, and expression than the later cultural histories "about" them. The latter often profit only through distance in time, and their only way of being cleverer comes from the later perspective. That is, however, the insidiousness of the Weimar ob- ject. We cannot simply talk about this period as if its contemporaries had not al- ready said enough about themselves. In its extraordinary achievements in articu- lation, Weimar culture, in spite of many counterexamples, stands before us as the most self-aware epoch of history; it was a highly reflective, thoughtful, imagina- tive, and expressive age that is thoroughly plowed up by the most manifold self- observations and self-analyses.
