No More Learning

With his radical biblicism, Luther rejected the church's claim to authority. This repudiation then repeats itself on the higher level through biblicism itself. For text remains text, and every assertion that it is divinely inspired can, in turn, be only a human, fallible assertion. With every attempt to grasp the absolute source, critique comes up against relative, historical sources that only ever assert the Absolute. The miracles spoken about in the Bible to legitimate God's power are only reports of miracles for which there are no longer any means of verifica- tion. The revelatory claim is stuck in a philological circle.
In his defense of the Reimarus writings in 1777 (On the Proof of the Spirit and of the Power), Lessing unmasked in a classic manner the revelatory claim as a mere assertion. The main thesis reads: "Accidental historical truths can never be- come the proof of necessary truths of reason. " His argumentation:
Consequently, if I do not have anything historical to counter the claim that Christ awakened a dead person, must I therefore accept as true that God has a son who is of the same essence? What is the connection be- tween my incapacity to counter anything substantial against the evidence of the former and my commitment to believe something my reason resists?
If I do not have anything historical to counter the claim that Christ himself rose from the dead, must I therefore accept as true that pre- cisely this resurrected Christ was the son of God?
That Christ, against whose resurrection I have nothing of importance historically to counter, presented himself as the son of God so that his followers for this reason held him to be so; all that I believe with my whole heart. For these truths, as truths of one and the same class, fol- low quite naturally from one another.
But now to jump with this historical truth over into a completely different class of truths and demand of me that I should restructure all my metaphysical and moral concepts accordingly, to expect of me, be-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 25
cause I cannot counter the resurrection of Christ with credible evidence, that I alter all my basic ideas about the essence of divinity accordingly; if that is not a transition to another logical category (metdbasis eis alio genos), then I do not know what Aristotle understood by this desig- nation.
One says, of course: But precisely that Christ, about whom you must historically allow to be true that he raised the dead, that he himself rose from the dead, has himself said that God has a son of the same essence and that he is this son.
That would be quite good. If only it were historically certain also that Christ in fact said this.
If one wanted to pursue me and say: "But indeed! That is more than historically certain; for inspired chronologists, who cannot err, assure us of it": But again it is unfortunately only historically certain that these chronologists were inspired and could not err.
That, that is the terrifyingly wide gap over which I cannot come, no matter how often and how earnestly I have attempted to leap over it. If someone can help me over it, then do so! I ask him, I beg him. He would earn a divine reward through me.
Human knowledge is forced to retreat into the limits of historiography, philol- ogy, and logic. Something of this painful retreat appears in Lessing, who does not disingenuously aver that his heart would willingly remain more credulous than his reason allows. With the question "How can one know that? ", enlighten- ment severs the roots of revelatory knowledge quite elegantly, without being par- ticularly aggressive. With the best will, human reason cannot find anything in the sacred text but historical, human-made assumptions. With a simple philological query, the claim of absoluteness made by tradition is annihilated.
No matter how convincing the historical-philological critique of the Bible may be, the confessional absolutism of organized religion does not want to ac- knowledge that according to the rules of the art, it is suspended. Its absolutism simply continues to "exist," not, to be sure, as if this suspension and this exposure had never happened, but as if there were no consequences to be drawn from them, except one; namely that one must study and excommunicate the critics. Only after the fundamental critique of modern times does theology completely board the ship of fools of so-called belief and drift farther and farther from the banks of literal critique. In the nineteenth century, the churches gave the signal for merg- mg postcritical irrationalism with political reaction. Like all institutions imbued with the will to survive, they knew how to weather the "dissolution" of their foun-
ations. From now on, the concept of 'existence' stinks of the cadaveric poison ? t Christianity, of the rotting after-life, of what, in spite of critique, has been criti- -ized. Since then, theologians have had an additional trait in common with ynics: the sense for naked self-preservation. They have made themselves com-
26 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
fortably at home in the tub of a dogmatics riddled with holes until the Day of Judgment.
Critique of Religious Illusion
Deception always goes further than suspicion.
La Rochefoucauld
In a strategically clever move, enlightenment's critique of the religious phenome- non concentrates on God's attributes; only secondarily does it tackle the sticky "question of existence. " Whether God "exists" is not the basic problem; what is essential is what people mean when they maintain that he exists and that his will is thus and thus.
Initially, then, it is important to find out what they pretend to know of God besides his existence. Religious traditions provide the material for this. Because God is not "empirically" observable, the assignment of divine attributes to human experience plays the decisive role in the critique. Religious doctrine can, under no circumstances, evade this point, except by opting for a radical cult theology or, more consistently, for the mystical thesis of an unnameable God. This logi- cally consistent consequence for a philosophy of religion would offer adequate protection against enlightenment's detectivelike inquiries into human fantasies about God that shine through in the attributes. However, with mystical renuncia- tion, religion cannot become a social institution; it lives from the fact that it presents established narratives (myths) and standardized attributes (names and images), as well as stereotyped ways of behaving toward the holy (rituals), in reliably recurring forms.
One thus has only to examine these presentations more closely to track down the secret of their fabrication. The Bible provides the critic of religion with the decisive reference. Genesis 1:27: "And God created Man according to His image, in the image of God created He him. " Without doubt, this "image" relation can also be interpreted the other way around. From then on it is no mystery where the images come from; humans and their experiences are the material from which the official dreams about God are made. The religious eye projects earthly images into heaven.
One of these primary projections (how could it be otherwise? ) comes from the realm of images related to family and procreation. In polytheistic religions one finds intricate, often downright frivolous family sagas and affairs involving the procreation of deities --which one can readily study in Greek, Egyptian, and Hindu gods. That the human power of imagination proceeded too discreetly in picturing the heavenly populations will be maintained by no one. Even the sub- lime and theologically ambitious Christian doctrine of the Trinity is not free of family and procreation fantasies. Its particular refinement, however, has Mary
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 27
getting pregnant by the Holy Ghost. Satire has recognized this challenge. The doctrine is intended to avoid the idea that a sexually constituted bond exists be- tween father and son. The Christian God may well "procreate," but he does not copulate; for this reason the Creed says, with true subtlety: genitum, non factum.
Closely related to the idea of procreation is that of authorship, of Creation, which is attributed particularly to the superior and monotheistic gods. Here, hu- man experience is mixed in with production, rooted in agrarian and artisanal ac- tivity. In their labor, human beings experienced themselves prototypically as cre- ators, as authors of a new, previously nonexisting effect. The more the world became mechanized, the more the idea of God was transferred from the biological conception of procreation to that of production. Accordingly, the procreating God became increasingly a world manufacturer, the original producer.
The third primary projection is that of succor, among the constitutive images of religious life perhaps the most important. The greater part of religious pleas are addressed to God as helper in the distress of life and death. Because, however, God's succor presupposes his power over worldly events, the fantasy of the helper is blended with human experiences in protecting, caring, and ruling. The popular image of Christ shows him as the Good Shepherd. In the course of the history of religion, the gods have been assigned jurisdictions and responsibilities, whether in the form of sectoral sovereignty over a natural element such as sea, river, wind, forest, and grain, or in the form of general rule over the created world. Political experiences obviously permeate these projections. The power of God is analogous to the functions of chiefs and kings. The religion of feudal soci- ety is the most open with its political projection of God in that it unhesitatingly institutes God as the highest feudal lord and addresses him with the feudal title of "Lord. " In English, one still says "My Lord. " Anthropomorphism or sociomor- phism is revealed most naively where pictorial representations of the gods were attempted. For this reason, religions and theologies that have reflected on this have promulgated a strict prohibition of images: They recognized the danger of reification. Judaism, Islam, and also certain "iconoclastic" factions of Christianity have, on this point, exercised an intelligent continence. Enlightenment satire amused itself over African deities, for whom a black skin was just as self-evident as were slanted eyes for Asiatic idols. It entertained itself with the thought of how ? ions, camels, and penguins would probably imagine their dear God: as lion, camel, and penguin.
With this discovery of projective mechanisms, critique of religion provided enlightenment with a sharp weapon. Without great trouble it can be shown that the mechanism of projection is basically always the same, whether it is a matter ? r sensual naive notions like slanted eyes and white, grandfatherly beards or of subtle attributes such as personality, original authorship, permanence, or fore- knowledge. In all this, consistent critique of religion leaves the question of the
existence of God" untouched. Part of its rational tact is not to go beyond the area
28 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
defined by the question, "What can I know? " The critique first suffered a dogmatic regression when it itself jumped over the limits of knowledge with its own nega- tively metaphysical statements and began to profess a clumsy atheism. From then on, representatives of organized religion could point with satisfaction to an ap- proximation between the "atheistic Weltanschauung" and the theological; for where a frontal contradiction comes to a standstill, there is no progress beyond the limits of both positions -- and institutions interested, above all, in self- preservation do not need anything more.
Besides the anthropological exposure of God projections, enlightenment has used, since the eighteenth century, a subversive second strategy, in which we dis- cover the germ of modern theory of cynicism. It is known as the theory of priests' deception. Here enlightenment approaches religion through an instrumentalist perspective by asking, Whom does religion serve, and what function does it serve in the life of society? The enlighteners were not at a loss for the--apparently simple--answer. In any case, they only needed to look back on a thousand years of Christian religious politics, from Charlemagne to Richelieu, to read the answer from the bloody tracks of religiously tinged violence.
All religions are erected on the ground of fear. Gales, thunder,
storms . . . are the cause of this fear. Human beings, who felt impo- tent in the face of such natural events, sought refuge in beings who were stronger than themselves. Only later did ambitious men, artful
politicians and philosophers begin to take advantage of the people's gul- libility. For this purpose they invented a multitude of equally fantastic and cruel gods, who served no other purpose than to consolidate and maintain their power over people. In this way various cult forms arose that ultimately aimed only at stamping a kind of transcendental legality on an existing social order. . . . The basis of all cult forms consisted in the sacrifice the individual had to make for the well-being of the community. . . . So it is no wonder that, in the name of
God, . . . the great majority of human beings are oppressed by a small group of people who have made religious fear into an effective ally. (Therese Philosophe, Ein Sittenbild aus dem 18. Jahrhundert, ver-
fasst von dem intimen Freund Friedrichs des Grossen, dem Marquis d'Argens [A picture of morals in the eighteenth century, written by the intimate friend of Frederick the Great, the Marquis d'Argens]; trans. J. Fiirstenauer (Darmstadt, no date); the authorship remains unclear, since it is based only on a remark of the Marquis de Sade; quotation from pp. lllff. )
This is an instrumentalist theory of religion that is quite blunt. Admittedly, it too attributes the genesis of religions to human helplessness (projection of the helper). What is significant about it, however, is that we find in it the break- through to an openly reflective instrumentalist logic. Questioning the function and
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES d 29
application of religion is the future dynamite of ideology critique, the seeds of the crystallization of modern, self-reflective cynicism.
For the enlightener, it is easy to say why religion exists: first, to cope with ex- istential fears, and second, to legitimate oppressive social orders. At the same time, this implies historical sequence, as the text explicitly emphasizes: "Only later . . . " The exploiters and users of religion must be of a different caliber than the simple and fearful believers. The text chooses its expressions accordingly: It talks of "ambitious men" and "artful politicians and philosophers. " The expression "artful" cannot be taken seriously enough. It tries to capture an areligious con- sciousness that uses religion as an instrument of domination. Religion has the sole task of establishing a permanent, mute willingness to sacrifice in the hearts of the subjugated.
The enlightener presumes that the rulers know this and let it work to their ad- vantage with conscious calculation. Artfulness (Raffinesse, finesse) expresses just that: "refinement" in the knowledge of domination. The consciousness of those in power has grown out of religious self-deception; it lets the deception go on working, but to its advantage. It does not believe, but it lets others believe. There have to be many fools so that the few can remain the clever ones.
I maintain that this enlightenment theory of religion represents the first logical
2
construction of modern, self-reflective master cynicism. However, this theory
was not able to explicate its own structure and implications and, in the course of theoretical development, it perished. In general, the prevailing opinion is that ideology critique did not find its valid form until Marx and that the systems of Nietzsche, Freud, and others continued to elaborate that form. The textbook opinion about the theory of priests' deception says that the approach was inade- quate and was justifiably superseded by the more "mature" forms of sociological and psychological critique of consciousness. That is only partially true. It can be shown that this theory includes a dimension that sociological and psychological critiques not only failed to grasp, but to which they remained completely blind when it began to manifest itself within their own domain: the "artful dimension. "
The theory of deception is, in its reflective aspect, more complex than the politico-economic and the depth-psychological exposure theory. Both theories lo- cate the mechanism of deception behind false consciousness: It is deceived, it de- ceives itself. The deception theory, by contrast, assumes that one can view the mechanism of error along two axes. It is possible that one can suffer a delusion and also, undeluded, use it against others. This is precisely what the thinkers of the rococo and the Enlightenment had in mind-of whom, by the way, not a few had occupied themselves with ancient kynicism (e. g. , Diderot, Christoph Wie- land). They call this structure, for lack of a more developed terminology, "artful- ness" (Raffinesse), which is allied with "ambition. " Both are qualities that were common in descriptions of human nature in the courtly and urban spheres of that time. In fact, this deception theory entails a great logical discovery --a break-
30 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
through in ideology critique to the concept of a self-reflective ideology. All other ideology critique possesses a striking tendency to patronize the "false conscious- ness" of others and to regard it as a kind of blindness. The deception theory, by contrast, develops a level of critique that concedes that the opponent is at least equally intelligent. It views the opposing consciousness as a serious rival, instead of commenting on it condescendingly. Thus, since the late eighteenth century, philosophy holds in its hands the beginnings of the thread of a multidimensional ideology critique.
To portray the opponent as an alert, reflecting deceiver, as an artful "politi- cian," is both naive and cunning. In this way one gets at the construction of an artful consciousness by an even more artful consciousness. The enlightener out- does the deceiver by rethinking and unmasking (entlarveri) the latter's maneuvers. If the deceiving priest or ruler has an artful mind, that is, if he is a modern ruler- cynic, then, in relation to him, the enlightener is a metacynic, an ironist, a satirist. The enlightener can masterfully reconstruct the machinations of the deception in the opponent's mind and explode them with laughter: "You don't want to take us for suckers, do you? " This is scarcely possible unless there is a certain reflective tight spot in which the consciousnesses are a good match for each other. In this climate, enlightenment leads to a training in mistrust that strives to outdo decep- tion through suspicion.
The artful contesting of deception with suspicion can also be demonstrated in the passage quoted earlier. Its special irony becomes recognizable only when one knows who is speaking. The speaker is an enlightened priest, one of those modern and skillful abbots of the eighteenth century who embellish the amatory novels of the time with their erotic adventures and rational small talk. As an expert in false consciousness by profession so to speak, he blabs indiscreetly. The scene is set up as if this cleric, in his critique of the clergy, forgets that he is also speak- ing of himself. The (probably) aristocratic author speaks all the more through him. He remains blind to his own cynicism. He has joined sides with reason, primarily because reason does not raise any objections to his sexual desires. The setting for the spicy statements criticizing religion is the love nest he has just shared with the alluring Madame C. And all of us, the narrator Therese, the recip- ient of her confidential sketches, and the intimate public, stand behind the bed curtains and see and hear the whisperings of enlightenment: all of this is enough to make you lose your mind--of course, as Heinrich Mann said in his Henri Quatre, "to the great advantage of the remaining senses. "
The point of the abbot's reflections is to clear away the religious hindrances to "lust. " The charming lady has just teased him: "Very well, my dear, what about religion? It forbids us the joys of lust very decisively, except in the state of mar- riage. " One part of the abbot's reply is given in the preceding quotation. For his own sensuousness, he makes use of the exposure of religious prohibitions --
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 31
? Secret with amorous observer. Detail from an engraving after a painting by Bau- douin, around 1780.
however, with the reservation of strict discretion. Here, in the superartful argu- ment of the enlightener, his own naivete emerges. The monologue turns into the following dialogue:
"You see, my dear, there you have my sermon on the chapter of reli- gion. It is the fruit of no less than twenty years of observation and reflection. I have always tried to separate truth from lie, as prescribed by reason. We should conclude from this, I believe, that the pleasure that binds us to each other so tenderly, my friend, is pure and innocent. Does not the discretion with which we surrender ourselves to it guaran- tee that it does not injure God or humanity? Of course, without this dis- cretion such pleasures could cause a dreadful scandal. . . . Our exam- ple could, after all, confuse unsuspecting young souls and mislead them so that they would neglect their duties to society. "
"But," the lady objected justifiably, it seemed to me, "if our plea- sures are so innocent, as I would like to believe they are, why shouldn't we let them be known to all the world? What harm could there be in sharing the golden fruits of sensual pleasure with our fellow human be- ings?
Didn't you yourself tell me repeatedly that there is no greater hap- piness for human beings than to make others happy? "
"Indeed, I said that, my dear," the abbot admitted. "But that doesn't mean that we are allowed to disclose such secrets to the rabble. Don't you realize that the minds of these people are vulgar enough to misuse what seems so sacred to us? You cannot compare them to those who
32 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
? Punished Curiosity. Hydraulic humor and true adventure. Engraving by G. de Cari.
are able to think rationally. . . . In ten thousand people there will scarcely be twenty who can think logically. . . . That is the reason we must be careful with our experiences. " (pp. 113-15)
Hegemonic powers, once they have been induced to start talking, cannot stop themselves from letting out all their trade secrets. Once discretion is assured, they can be marvelously honest. Here, in the words of the abbot, a hegemonic power rouses itself to a truly insightful confession in which can also be heard a large part of Freudian and Reichian theory. But the enlightened privileged also know exactly what would happen if everyone thought the way they do. For that reason, the awakened knowledge that rulers have places discreet limits on itself. This knowledge foresees social chaos if ideologies, religious fears, and conformities were to disappear overnight from the minds of the multitude. Itself without any illusions, it realizes the functional necessity of illusions for the social status quo. This is the way enlightenment works in the minds of those who have recognized the origin of power. Its caution and its discretion are completely realistic. There is in enlightenment a breathtaking soberness in which it understands that the "golden fruits of sensual pleasure" thrive only in the status quo that puts the chances for individuality, sexuality, and luxury in the laps of the few. It was in part to such secrets of a weary power that Talleyrand referred when he com- mented that only those who lived before the revolution really got to taste the sweetness of life.
Perhaps it is significant that it is the lustful and inquiring lady who artlessly claims the sweet fruits of sensual pleasure for all and who recalls the happiness
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 33
of sharing, whereas the realistic abbot insists on secrecy and discretion as longas the "rabble" are not mature enough for such sharing? Perhaps we are hearing from the lady the feminine voice, the voice of democratic principles, of erotic liberality-Madame Sans-Gene of politics. She simply does not understand that desire is sensual pleasure in the world, nor does she understand why something that is so abundant has to be searched out in such roundabout ways.
At the beginning of his Wintermarchen, Heinrich Heine takes up this argument concerning liberality. He puts the "old chant of self-denial," which rulers let the foolish folk sing, in its place in the system of oppression:
I know the style, I know the text And also their lordships, the authors; I know they secretly drank wine
And publicly preached water.
Here, the motifs are collected together: "textual critique," ad hominem argu- ment, the artful outdoing of artfulness. Beyond this there is the spirited turn from the elitist program of masters' cynicism to the popular chanson.
There grows enough earthly bread
For all humanity's children.
No less, roses and myrtle, beauty and joy And sweet peas as well.
Yes, sweet peas for everybody As soon as the pods burst! Heaven we leave
To the angels and sparrows.
In Heine's poetic universalism, the adequate answer of classical Enlightenment to Christianity appears: It takes Christianity as knowledge, instead of leaving it to the ambiguities of faith. The Enlightenment surprises religion by taking it more seriously in its ethos than religion takes itself. Thus, the slogans of the French Revolution sparkle at the beginning of modernity as the most superbly Christian abolition of Christianity. It is the unsurpassable rationality and human character ? f the great religions that allows them to flower again and again from their re- juvenable kernels. Realizing this, all forms of critique aimed at abolition see that
ey have to handle religious phenomena carefully. Depth psychologies have
m
* so in the denial of religion. Religion could be counted among those "illusions"
ade it clear that illusions are at work not only in religious wish-imagery, but
at have a future on the side of enlightenment because no merely negative cri- 10
ea
'ly an incurable "ontological psychosis" (Ricoeur), and the furies of critique
<ue and no disillusion can ever do them complete justice. Perhaps religion is
34 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
? Metaphysical border traffic.
aimed at abolition must become exhausted from the eternal recurrence of what has been abolished.
Critique of Metaphysical Illusion
In the first two critiques we have observed the operational scheme of enlighten-
ment: self-limitation of reason--accompanied by renewed glances beyond the
border, whereby one takes the liberty of small trips "across the border," with pri-
vate provisos such as "discretion. " In the critique of metaphysics, things proceed
in basically the same way. It can do nothing more than remind human reason of
its own limitations. It pursues the thought that reason is indeed capable of posing
metaphysical questions but is incapable of settling them conclusively through its
own resources. It is the great achievement of Kantian enlightenment to have
shown that reason functions reliably only under the conditions of experiential
3
knowledge. With anything that goes beyond experience, it necessarily over-
reaches its basic capacities. It is a part of its essential character to want to do more than it can. Once the logical critique has taken place, therefore, fruitful proposi- tions concerning objects beyond the empirical are no longer possible. Of course, metaphysical ideas like God, soul, and universe inevitably intrude into thought, but they cannot be treated in any conclusive manner through the means given to thought. There would be some hope, if such ideas were empirical; but since they are not there is no hope that reason will ever "come to terms" with these topics. The rational apparatus is, of course, equipped for an incursion into these prob-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES D 35
lems, but not to return from such excursions into the "beyond" with any clear, unequivocal answers. Reason sits, so to speak, behind a grating through which it believes it gains metaphysical insights, but what at first seems to be "Knowl- edge" (Erkenntnis) proves to be self-deception under the light of critique. To a certain extent, reason has to be taken in by the illusion that it itself has created in the form of metaphysical ideas. By ultimately coming to recognize its own limits and its own futile play with the expansion of those limits, it unmasks its own efforts as futile. This is the modern form of saying: I know that I know noth- ing. This knowledge entails, in a positive sense, only the knowledge of the limits of knowledge. Whoever then continues with metaphysical speculation is exposed as a border violator, as a "starving wretch longing for the unattainable. "
All metaphysical alternatives are of equal value and undecidable: determinism versus indeterminism; finiteness versus infinitude; the existence of God versus the nonexistence of God; idealism versus materialism; and so forth. In all such questions there are (at least) two logically necessary possibilities, which are equally well or equally poorly founded. One need not, should not, must not "make a decision" as soon as one has recognized both alternatives as reflections of the structure of reason. For any decision implies a metaphysical, dogmatic regres- sion. Of course, we must make a distinction here: Metaphysical thinking be- queaths an invaluable inheritance to enlightenment, namely, the remembrance of the connection between reflection and emancipation, a connection that remains valid even when the grand systems have collapsed. For that reason, enlighten- ment was always at the same time logic and more than logic, reflective logic. Self- enlightenment is possible only for those who know what world whole they are a "part" of. For this reason, social and natural philosophies today have taken over the legacy of metaphysics, to be sure with the required intellectual discretion.
This is also the reason why enlightenment cannot be identical with a theory of faulty thinking that has a long tradition from Aristotle up to Anglo-Saxon lan- guage philosophy. Enlightenment never has been concerned only with the un- masking of projections, logical leaps, errors in inference, fallacies, the elision of logical categories, false premises, and interpretations, etc. , but, above all, with the self-experience of the human being in the labor it costs to critically dissolve naive world- and self-images. The authentic tradition of enlightenment thus al- ways felt alienated by the attempts of modern logical-positivistic cynicism to confine thinking completely to the tub of pure analysis. But it is worthwhile shed- ding light on the fronts. The logical positivists, who smile derisively at the great themes of the philosophical tradition by referring to them as "illusory problems," radicalize one of the tendencies characteristic of enlightenment. The turn away from the "great problems" is kynically inspired. Is not Wittgenstein really the Di- ogenes of modern logic and Carnap the desert hermit of empiricism (Empirie)? It is as if they, with their strict, intellectual asceticism, wanted to force the care- lessly garrulous world to repent, this world to which logic and empiricism do not
36 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
mean ultimate revelations and that, unaffected in its hunger for "useful fictions," continues to behave as if the sun does, in fact, revolve around the earth and as if the mirages of "imprecise" thinking are, in fact, good enough for our practical life.
Critique of the Idealistic Superstructure
Marx's critique takes a clear step beyond all previous critiques: It aims at an in- tegral "critique of heads. " It insists on putting the heads back on the whole of the living and laboring bodies: That is the meaning of the dialectic of theory and praxis, brain and hand, head and belly.
Marx's critique is guided by a realistic perspective on the social labor processes. What goes on in the heads of people, it says, remains "in the last in- stance" determined by the social function of the heads in the economy of social labor as a whole. For that reason, socioeconomic critique has little respect for what consciousnesses say about themselves. Its motive is always to find out what the case is "objectively. " Thus it asks each consciousness what it knows of its own position in the structure of labor and domination. And because, in doing so, it usually meets with a tremendous amount of ignorance, it gains here its point of attack. Because social labor is subject to a class structure, Marx's critique exa- mines each consciousness in terms of what it achieves as "class consciousness" and what it itself knows about this achievement.
In the system of bourgeois society three objective class consciousnesses can be distinguished initially: that of the bourgeoisie (capitalist class), that of the proletariat (the producer class), and that of the intermediate functionaries (the middle "class") --with which the consciousness of the superstructure laborers, a group of scientists, judges, priests, artists, and philosophers with an indistinct class profile mixes ambiguously.
With regard to the traditional intellectual laborers, it becomes immediately ap- parent that they usually view their activities in a completely different way than they should according to Marx's model. Intellectual laborers usually know next to nothing about their role in the economy of social labor and domination. They remain far removed from the "ground of hard facts," live with their heads in the clouds, and view the sphere of "real production" from an unreal distance. They exist thus, according to Marx, in a world of global, idealistic mystification. In- tellectual "labor" (even the designation is an attack) wants to forget that it is also, in a specific sense, labor. It has got used to not asking about its interplay with material, manual, and executive labor. The entire classical tradition, from Plato to Kant, thus neglects the social base of theory: slave economy, serfdom, rela- tions of subjugation in labor. Instead, this tradition bases itself on autonomous intellectual experiences that motivate its activity: the striving for truth, virtuous consciousness, divine calling, absolutism of reason, genius.
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 37
Lafolie des hommes ou le monde a rebours (human folly or the world on its head).
Against this, it must be asserted that labor is an elementary relation of life, which a theory of the real has to take into account. Wherever it shows itself un- willing to do so, and wants to transcend these foundations, an unmasking is called for. This unmasking is to be understood as grounding. The typical unmasking gesture in Marx's critique is therefore inversion: turning consciousness around from its head onto its feet. Feet means here knowledge of one's place in the production process and in the class structure. That consciousness must be consid- ered unmasked that does not want to know about its "social being," its function in the whole, and therefore persists in its mystification, its idealistic split. In this sense, Marxist critique deals successively with the mystifications of religion, aes- thetics, justice, welfare, morality, philosophy, and science.
Besides the critique of mystified consciousneses, Marx's theory harbors a sec- ond far-reaching variant of ideology critique, which has shaped the critical style of Marxism, its polemical sharpness: the theory of the character mask. As a the- ory of masks, it distinguishes a priori between persons as individuals and as bearers of class functions. In doing so it remains a little unclear which side is respectively the mask of the other--the individual the mask of the function, or the function the mask of individuality. The majority of critics have for good rea- sons, chosen the antihumanist version, the conception that individuality is the mask of the function. Thus, there may well exist humane capitalists-as the his- tory of bourgeois philanthropy proves--against whom Marxist critics have vehe- mently polemicized. They are humane merely as individual masks of social inhu- manity. According to their social being, they regain, in spite of this, personifications of the profit interest, character masks of capital. Indeed, in some respects they are, for the agitators, worse than the worst exploiters because they
? 38 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
nourish the laborer's patriarchal mystification. "Bourgeois" role theory provides the mirror image of this theory by conceiving social functions ("roles") as masks with which individuality covers itself in order, at best, to even "play" with them.
Of course, workers' consciousness is also initially mystified. Its education un- der the principles of the ruling ideologies allows no other possibility. At the same time, it finds itself at the beginning stages of realism: because it performs immedi- ate labor. With realistic instinct, it suspects the swindle going on in the heads of "those at the top. " It stands on bare ground. For this reason, Marx, here remarka- bly optimistic, believes that workers' consciousness is capable of an extraordinary learning process, in whose course the proletariat acquires a sober view of its so- cial position and political power--and then sets this consciousness into revolu- tionary practice, of whatever kind. In the transposition, consciousness gains a new quality.
Here, proletarian enlightenment makes the leap from a theoretical to a practi- cal change; it abandons the privacy of false or true "mere" thoughts in order to organize itself publicly as a new, true class consciousness-true because it under- stands its vital interests and aggressively works its way out of exploitation and repression. Enlightenment would reach completion practically, as the dissolution of class society. Here, the fundamentally ambiguous character of Marx's "theory" is revealed. On the one hand, it reifies every consciousness into a function of the social process; on the other, it wants to make possible the liberation of conscious- ness from mystification. If one understands Marxism as a theory of liberation, one emphasizes the emancipative formation of proletarian consciousness and that of its allies. This view leads into the open, into the formative "subjectivity" of the (allegedly) last oppressed class. If this class liberates itself from its stifling posi- tion, it creates the precondition for the real emancipation (from the exploitation
4
of labor) of everyone. The self-liberation of the slave, in an ideal dialectic, should lead to the liberation of the master from the constrictions of being master. Those who want to see Marx as a "humanist" emphasize this aspect. At its center is the anthropology of labor. Laborers would gain their "selves" only when they enjoy the products on which they have expended their energy, and no longer have to relinquish the surplus value to the rulers. In this thought model, emancipation appears as the self-appropriation of the productive subjects in their products. (Of course, one would like to know what idealism really is if this is not thought out idealistically. )
From a second perspective, an "antihumanist," "realist" strand emerges from Marx's critique. Its emphasis is not on the dialectic of liberation but rather on the mechanisms of universal mystification. If every consciousness is precisely as false as corresponds to its position in the process of production and domination, it necessarily remains captive to its own falsity, as long as the process is taking place. And that the process is in full motion is constantly emphasized by Marx- ism. Here the hidden functionalism in Marxian theory goes into effect. For this
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 39
functionalism, there is to the present day no sharper formulation than the famous phrase "necessarily false consciousness. " From this viewpoint, false conscious- ness is reined into its place in the system of objective delusions. False being is a function of the process.
Here, Marxist system-cynicism comes very close to that of bourgeois func- tionalists, but there is a reversal of the premises. For bourgeois functionalists re- gard the functioning of social systems of action as guaranteed only when certain fundamental norms, attitudes, and goals are accepted and obeyed in blind identi- fication by the members of the systems. It is in the interest of the system itself that these identifications are conceived of flexibly (and indeed sometimes even re- vised) by individual deviants so that the system does not, by being too rigid, lose its ability to adapt to new situations. To this extent, a certain degree of irony and a niche for the revolutionarily inclined actually would be indispensable for every developing system. Naturally, functionalism not only denies human conscious- ness its right to emancipation; it also denies the meaning of such emancipation from norms and compulsions, for emancipation leads, according to functional- ism, directly into nothingness, into an empty individualism, an amorphous chaos, and the loss of structure in society. That there is a grain of truth in this is demon- strated in the most drastic possible way by the socialist social orders in the Eastern Bloc. They provide the functionalist proof in a social laboratory: that an "ordered" social existence is conceivable only under the constraints of functional, purpose- ful lies. In the cultural politics and ethical drilling of labor and militarism in so- cialist countries, the functional cynicism of Marx's theory of ideology is displayed in a horrifyingly clear way. In those societies the idea of freedom in an existential, self-reflective enlightenment vegetates on a barbaric level; it is no wonder that the emancipative resistance, which somewhat unhappily calls itself dissidence, manifests itself as religious opposition. In socialism, that individual block to reflection (which the conservatives and neoconservatives in the West have long dreamed about) is practiced officially. Socialist countries put the drilling of values into practice with breathtaking radicalness. The element of minimal deviation, in the meantime, is also officially planned, ever since jeans have been made in peo- ple's factories and jazz has been played in Dresden. Viewed structurally, the Party dictatorships in the East constitute the paradise of Western conservatism. The great conservative, Arnold Gehlen, did not admire the Soviet Union for nothing, a fact that can be compared with Adolf Hitler's full, but hidden, respect for the apparatus of the Catholic church.
Marxist functionalism remains remarkably blind to its own artfulness. In a modernization of deception, it uses the elements of truth in socialist doctrine as a new ideological bonding agent. The modernization of the art of lying is based ? n schizoid finesse; one lies by telling the truth. One practices a split in conscious- ness until it seems normal that socialism, previously a language of hope, becomes an ideological wall, behind which hopes and future prospects disappear.
40 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
Only in Marx's ideology critique can the trace of later cynical finesse be dis- covered in its beginnings. If ideology really meant "necessarily false conscious- ness," and (no irony intended) there was nothing other than the right mystifica- tions in the right head, then it has to be asked how the critic can claim to have escaped the vicious circle of deceptions. By going over to the side of the de- ceivers? Dialectical critique sees itself as the only light in the darkness of "true falsities. " However, in this, dialectical critique demands more of a fruitful thought than it can provide. The discovery of labor and the logic of production, despite their fundamental importance, do not provide a master key to all questions about existence, consciousness, truth, and knowledge. For this reason, "bour- geois" countercritique, for the most part, had an easy game with Marxism in its weakest point: the crude level of its theory of science and knowledge.
Critique of Moral Illusion
The roots of moral enlightenment reach back furthest of all into the past--and for good reasons. For with regard to morality, the deepest question of all enlighten- ment is decided: the question of the "good life. " That human beings are not really what they pretend to be is an age-old motif of critical moral thinking. Jesus provided the model in his attack against those who harshly judge others: "How wilt thou say to thy brother, 'Let me pull the splinter out of thine eye,' when, be- hold, a plank is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite! " (Matthew 7:4-5).
The critique in the New Testament already assumes an "artful" doubling: wolves in sheep's clothing, moralists with a plank in their eye, Pharisaism. From its first moment, this critique of morality proceeds metamorally, here: psycholog- ically. It assumes as a basic principle that the "outward" moral appearance is de- ceptive. A closer inspection would show how moralists in fact do not serve the law, but cover up their own lawlessness by criticizing others. Matthew 7:4 con- tains psychoanalysis in a nutshell. What disturbs me in others is what I myself am. However, as long as I do not see myself, I do not recognize my projections as the outward reflection of my own plank, but as the depravity of the world. In- deed, the "reality component of the projection," as psychoanalysts would say to- day, should not be my first concern. Even if the world really is depraved, I should be concerned about my own defects first. What Jesus teaches is a revolutionary self-reflection: Start with yourself, and then, if others really need to be "enlight- ened," show them how by your own example. Of course, under the normal condi- tions in the world, things proceed the other way around: The lawgivers start with others and it remains uncertain whether they will also get around to themselves- They refer to laws and conventions that are supposedly absolute. But the wolves in sheep's clothing enjoy looking at these laws and conventions more or less from above and from outside.