That is the reason for the stagnation of
Critical
Theory.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason
Their time has come.
In our thinking there is no longer any spark of the uplifting flight of concepts or of the ecstasies of understanding.
We are enlightened, we are apathetic.
No one talks anymore of a love of wisdom.
There is no longer any knowledge whose friend (philos) one could be.
It does not occur to us to love the kind of knowledge we have; rather we ask ourselves how we might contrive to live with it without becoming ossified.
What is presented here under a title that alludes to the great traditions is a medi- tation on the sentence "Knowledge is power. " This is the sentence that dug the grave of philosophy in the nineteenth century. It sums up philosophy and is at the same time its first confession, with which the century-long agony begins. This sentence brings to an end the tradition of a knowledge that, as its name indicates,
XXVI
PREFACE ? xxvii
was an erotic theory --the love of truth and the truth through love (Lie- beswahrheii). From the corpse of philosophy arose the modern sciences and the- ories of power in the nineteenth century in the form of political science, theory of class struggle, technocracy, vitalism, and in every form armed to the teeth. "Knowledge is power (Wissen ist Macht). " This sentence fixed the course for the unavoidable politicization of thinking. Those who utter the sentence reveal the truth. However, with the utterance they want to achieve more than truth: They want to intervene in the game of power.
At the same time as Nietzsche began to expose a will to power behind every will to know, the old German social democracy exhorted its members to partici- pate in the race for knowledge that is power. Where Nietzsche's insights were in- tended to be "dangerously" cold and without illusions, social democracy behaved pragmatically --and exhibited a middle-class joy in cultivation. Both spoke of power: Nietzsche by undermining bourgeois idealism with vitalism; the Social Democrats by seeking to gain access to the middle classes' opportunities for power through "cultivation. " Nietzsche taught a realism that was supposed to make it easy for the upcoming generations of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois to take their farewell from idealistic absurdities, which curbed the will to power. Social democracy strove for participation in an idealism that to that point had car- ried the promise of power within itself. In Nietzsche the middle classes could study the subtleties and clever crassness of a will to power that had lost its ideals, while the workers' movement looked furtively at an idealism that better suited its still naive will to power.
Around 1900 the radical left wing had caught up with the right-wing cynicism of the masters. The race between the cynical-defensive consciousness of the old bearers of power and the Utopian-offensive consciousness of the new bearers created the political-moral drama of the twentieth century. In the race for the hardest awareness of hard facts, the Devil and Beelzebub trained one another. Out of the competition of consciousnesses arose that twilight characteristic of the present: the mutual spying out of ideologies, the assimilation of antagonisms, the modernization of fraud-in short, that situation that forces the philosopher into the void where liars call liars liars.
We detect a second aspect in Nietzsche that is relevant to contemporary times, after the first, Fascist, Nietzsche wave has ebbed. Once more it becomes clear how Western civilization has worn out its Christian costume. After the decades of reconstruction and the decade of Utopias and "alternatives," it is as if a naive elan had suddenly been lost. Catastrophies are conjured up, new values find ready markets, like all analgesics. However, the times are cynical and know: New values have short lives. Being concerned, caring about people, securing peace, feeling responsible, caring about the quality of life and about the environment- none of that really works. Just bide your time. Cynicism stands ready in the back-
xxviii ? PREFACE
? Neo-"Cyniker. " Nietzsche, the thinker of ambivalence.
ground, until the palaver has stopped and things take their course. Our lethargic modernity certainly knows how to "think historically," but it has long doubted that it lives in a meaningful history. "No need for world history. "
The eternal recurrence of the Same, Nietzsche's most subversive thought -- cosmologically untenable, but culturally and morphologically fruitful --is an apt
1
description of a resurgence of "kynical" ("kynisch") motives that had developed
to conscious life especially during the time of the Roman emperors, but also to some extent in the Renaissance. The Same: Those are the rappings of a sober, pleasure-oriented life that has learned to live with circumstances. To be ready for
PREFACE ? xxix
anything, that makes one invulnerably clever. Live in spite of history; existential reduction; socialization "as if; irony about politics; mistrust toward "plans. " A new heathen culture that does not believe in life after death and so must seek life before death.
Nietzsche's decisive self-characterization, often overlooked, is that of a "cynic" (Cyniker); with this he became, next to Marx, the most momentous thinker of the century. Nietzsche's "cynicism" (Cynismus) offers a modified ap- proach to "saying the truth": It is one of strategy and tactics, suspicion and disinhi- bition, pragmatics and instrumentalism--all this in the hands of a political ego that minks first and foremost about itself, an ego that is inwardly adroit and outwardly armored.
The violent, antirationalistic impulse in Western countries is reacting to an in- tellectual state of affairs in which all thinking has become strategy; this impulse shows a disgust for a certain form of self-preservation. It is a sensitive shivering from the cold breath of a reality where knowledge is power and power is knowl- edge. In writing, I have thought of readers, have wished for readers, who feel this way; this book, I think, could have something to say to them.
The old social democracy had announced the slogan Knowledge is Power as a practical and reasonable prescription. It did not think too much about it. The message was simply that one has to learn something real so that life will be better later. A petit-bourgeois belief in schooling had dictated the slogan. This belief is disintegrating today. Only for our cynical young medicos is there still a clear link between study and standard of living. Almost everyone else lives with the risk of learning without prospects. Those who do not seek power will also not want its knowledge, its knowledge-armaments, and those who reject both are secretly no longer citizens of this civilization. Countless numbers of people are no longer prepared to believe that one first has to "learn something" so that things will be better later. In these people, I believe, a suspicion is growing that was a certainty in ancient cynicism (Kynismus): that things must first be better before you can learn anything sensible. Socialization through schooling, as it takes place here, and in Western societies, in general, is a priori stupefaction, after which scarcely any learning offers a prospect that things sometime or other will im- prove. The inversion of the relation between life and learning is in the air: the end of the belief in education, the end of European Scholasticism. That is what conservatives as well as pragmatists, voyeurs of the decline as well as well- meaning individuals alike find so eerie. Basically, no one believes anymore that today's learning solves tomorrow's "problems"; it is almost certain rather that it causes them.
Why a "Critique of Cynical Reason"? How can I defend myself against the charge of having written a thick book at a time when even thinner books are con- sidered impudent? As is proper, we should distinguish the occasion from the rea- son and the motive.
xxx ? PREFACE
The Occasion
This year (1981) is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason--a date in world history. Seldom has there been a jubilee as dull as this one. It is a sober celebration; the scholars keep to themselves. Six hundred Kant experts gathered in Mainz--that does not produce a carnival at- mosphere, at most endless paper streamers. An imagination would be useful: to picture what would happen if the celebrated figure were to appear among the con- temporaries . . . Is it not a sad festival where the invited guests secretly hope that the person being celebrated is prevented from appearing because those who constantly invoke him would have to be ashamed on his arrival? How would we look to the penetratingly human eye of the philosopher?
Who could bring himself to give Kant a summary of history since 1795, the year in which the philosopher published his essay On Perpetual Peace? Who would have the nerve to inform him about the state of the Enlightenment--the emancipation of humanity from "self-imposed dependency"? Who would be so frivolous as to explain to him Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach"? I imagine that Kant's splendid humor would help us out of our stunned state. He was, after all, an individual of the late eighteenth century, when even the rationalists were not yet as rigid as some today who pretend to be so free and easy.
Scarcely anyone has occupied himself with Kant without touching on the enigma of his physiognomy. Applying the Roman rule of thumb mens sana in cor-
2
poresano doesnothelpusgrasphisappearanceatall. Ifitistruethatthe"Spirit"
seeks the appropriate body, in Kant's case it must have been a spirit who found pleasure in physiognomic ironies and psychosomatic paradoxes; a spirit who hid a great soul in a small, gaunt body, an upright stride under a bent back, and a gregarious, delicately cordial humor in a hypochondriacal, compulsive tempera- ment, as if to play a joke on the later devotees of the vital and the athletic.
The physiognomic enigma of Kant is scarcely solved through his personality but rather through his position in the history of ideas and of sensuousness. The Age of the Enlightenment pushed the dialectic of understanding and sensuousness to the breaking point. The traces of such tensions run through the whole of Kant's work. The language of his main works reveals the violence that the process of thinking--especially in a German mind--inflicts on the sensuous. The fact that a poet like Gottfried Benn, himself stamped by the spirit of the century of natural science, could strike back against such violence by rebuking the philosopher for being a "violator of the intellect" shows how modern cynicism can become the sounding board for cogent insights against the erstwhile greatness of Knowing (Erkenntnis) that aims at the notoriously broken relation between intellect and sensuousness. Robert Musil, surely a guarantor of rationality even beyond the limits in which it feels secure, has captured the experience of a reading of Kant in a memorable passage of his Confusions of the Pupil Torless.
PREFACE ? xxxi
In fact, Torless that very morning had bought the Reclam edition of that volume that he had seen at his professor's and used the first recess to begin reading it. However, because of the profusion of brackets and footnotes he didn't understand a single word, and, when he conscien- tiously followed the sentences with his eyes, it was as if an old bony hand were slowly screwing his brain out of his head.
When he stopped in exhaustion after about half an hour, he had only reached the second page, and sweat stood on his brow.
But then he gritted his teeth and read again one page further, until the recess was over.
By evening, however, he did not even want to touch the book. Fear? Repulsion? He didn't quite know. Only one thing tortured him with burning clarity, that the professor, this person, who didn't look like much, had the book lying around openly in his room, as if it were for him a daily conversation, (pp. 84-85)
The delicate empiricism of this sketch awakens understanding of two things: the fascination of the book and the pain it inflicts on sensitive young readers. Does not an ingenuous contact with Kantian thinking, with philosophical thinking in general, contain the risk of exposing a young consciousness to a violent and sud- den aging? What of a youthful will to know is preserved in a philosophy that makes one dizzy with its bony spiraling turns of the screw? Is what we want to know found at the top end of the screw? Are we ourselves not perhaps so twisted at the head of the screw that we will be satisfied with what we now think we know? And what does it mean that people for whom Kantian thinking is "daily conversa- tion" don't "look like much"? Does it mean that philosophy no longer leaves any trace in life and that reality is one thing and philosophy is something hopelessly different?
From die style of philosophers physiognomic forms look out at us, forms in which reason has hidden aspects of its essential character. To be "reasonable" means to put oneself into a special, rarely happy relation to the sensuous. "Be reasonable" means, practically speaking, do not trust your impulses, do not listen to your body, learn control, starting with your own sensuousness. But intellect and sensuousness are inseparable. Torless's outbreak of sweating after two pages of the Critique of Pure Reason contains as much truth as the whole of Kantianism. The understood mutual interaction of physis and logos is philosophy, not what is spoken. In the future, only a physiognomist can be a philosopher who does not lie. Physiognomic thinking offers a chance to escape from the regime of disem- bodied and tiierefore evil minds. To announce a new critique of reason also means to have a philosophical physiognomy in mind; that is not, as with Adorno, "aes- thetic theory," but a theory of consciousness with flesh and blood (and teeth).
As things are, there are grounds not for a celebratory writing (Festschrift) but rather for a writing celebration (Schriftfest) that makes a long detour around the
xxxii D PREFACE
celebrated person out of a liking for the author. "I don't want to say how things lie. /I want to show you how the matter stands" (Erich Kastner).
The Reason
If it is discontent in our culture that provokes criticism, there would be no age quite so disposed to criticism as ours. Yet the critical impulse has never been more strongly inclined to let itself be overpowered by a sour temperament. The tension between what wants to "criticize" and what should be "criticized" is so taut that our thinking is becoming much more morose than precise. No capacity of thought keeps pace with what is problematic. Hence the self-abdication of cri- tique. In the utter indifference toward all problems lies the ultimate premonition of how it would be to be their equal. Because everything has become problematic, everything is also somehow a matter of indifference. This thread should be fol- lowed. It leads to a place where one can speak of cynicism and "cynical reason. "
To speak of cynicism means to expose a spiritual, a moral scandal to critique; following that, the conditions for the possibility of the scandalous are unraveled. "Critique" undergoes a movement that at first fully lives out its positive and nega- tive interest in the object, only in the end to run up against elementary structures of moral consciousness that are brought to expression "beyond good and evil. " The times are cynical everywhere you turn, and it is time to develop the connec- tion between cynicism and realism from first principles. What did Oscar Wilde mean by his blase statement: "I am not at all cynical, I am only experienced-- that's pretty much the same thing"? Or Anton Chekov, who gloomily remarked: "No cynicism can outdo life"?
In the course of reflection, the well-known ambiguity in the concept of critique breaks down; at first it means to make and substantiate judgments, to judge, to condemn; then to investigate the foundations for the formation of judgments. However, if one is talking about cynical "reason," then initially this formula com- pletely takes cover behind irony.
What can critique achieve today? What can it still hope for in a time that is so sick of theory? Let us first hear Walter Benjamin's answer:
Fools, who complain about the demise of critique. For its time has long since run out. Critique is a matter of proper distance. It is at home in a world where perspectives and prospects are important and where it was still possible to assume a point of view. In the meantime, things have become much too close for comfort for human society. "Disinterested- ness," the "unbiased perspective," have become lies, if not the com- pletely naive expression of plain incompetence. {Einbahnstrasse [1928] 1969, p. 95)
PREFACE ? xxxiii
In a system that feels like a cross between prison and chaos, there is no stand- point for a description, no central perspective for a compelling critique.
In the shattered world of multiple perspectives, the "grand views" of the whole, in fact, belong more to simple souls than to those who are enlightened and edu- cated by the given order of things. No enlightenment can occur without destroy- ing the effect, thinking-from-a-point-of-view, and without dissolving conven- tional morals. Psychologically this goes hand in hand with a scattering of the ego, literarily and philosophically, with the demise of critique.
But how is the contradiction to be explained that the most important renais- sance of critique in the twentieth century is connected with the name of Walter Benjamin, who, on the one hand, convincingly demonstrated that critique's hour had come, and, on the other hand, participated with such far-reaching impact in the school of Critical Theory? It is impossible, so he says, to assume a "stand- point" because things have become much too close for comfort for us. But from a standpoint of having no standpoint, which has still to be more closely defined, critique has made impressive progress. From where, then, does critique speak? From what perspectives? In whose name?
I believe that Critical Theory has found a provisional ego for critique and a "standpoint" that provides it with perspectives for a truly incisive critique-a standpoint that conventional epistemology does not consider. I am inclined to call it a priori pain. It is not the basis of elevated, distanced critique that achieves grand overviews but a stance of extreme closeness --micrology.
If things have become too close for comfort for us, a critique must arise that expresses this discomfort. It is not a matter of proper distance but of proper prox- imity. The success of the word "concernedness" (Betroffenheit) grows from this soil; it is the seed of Critical Theory that germinates in new forms today, even among those who have scarcely heard of it. Regarding the "concerned," would it not be fascinating to find out where they get their critical model? Anyway, in the manner of their "being concerned," the defects of the forgotten source reappear.
Because the sovereignty of minds (Kopfe) is always false, the new critique pre- pares to slip from the mind into the whole body. Enlightenment tries to move from top to bottom --politico-culturally as well as psychosomatically. To discover the living body as a sensor of the world is to secure a realistic foundation for phil- osophical knowledge of the world. This is what Critical Theory had begun to do, hesitatingly, often aesthetically encoded, hidden in all kinds of squeamishness.
Critical Theory was based on the presupposition that we know this world a pri- ori, through Weltschmerz. What we perceive of the world can be ordered in psy- chosomatic coordinates of pain and pleasure. Critique is possible inasmuch as pain tells us what is "true" and what is "false. " In holding this view, Critical The- ory makes the usual "elitist" assumption of an intact sensibility. This characterizes its strength and its weakness; it establishes its truth and restricts the scope of its
xxxiv ? PREFACE
validity. One must, in fact, be able to muster so much elitist sensibility. It is nourished by an aversion to the deadly poison of normality in a country of hard heads and armored souls. One should not even try to convince certain opponents; there is a generality of "truth" that is an alibi for lack of understanding. Where the capacity for reason is not based on sensitive self-reflection, no argumentation, not even one based on the most solid theory of communication, will be able to bring it about.
On this "sensitive" point, Critical Theory was never able to get along well with the logicians among its opponents. To be sure, there are thinkers whose minds (Kopfe) are so energetic, whose nervous structures are so hardened, that to them, the entire approach of Critical Theory must seem lachrymose. "Sensitive" theory is suspect. In fact, its founders, especially Adorno, had an exclusively narrow concept of the Sensitive --a presupposition of the highest spiritual irascibility and aesthetic schooling that could never be rationalized; its aesthetics ran just along the threshold of nausea toward everything and anything. There was scarcely any- thing that took place in the "practical" world that did not inflict pain on it or was spared being suspected of brutality. For it, everything was somehow chained like an accomplice to "false living" in which there is "no true living. " Above all, it sus- pected everything that seemed to be pleasure and consent as being swindle, re- lapse, and "false" relief. It was inevitable that Critical Theory, particularly in the person of Adorno, came to feel the backlash of its exaggerations. The embodying of reason for which it had prepared the ground with the highest sensibility could not stop at the limits within which it was constrained by its initiators. What is hap- pening today shows how many faces critique issuing from bodily vitality can assume.
Adorno belonged to the pioneers of a renewed critique of cognition that as- sumes an emotional a priori. In his theory the motifs of a crypto-Buddhist spirit are at work. Those who suffer without becoming hardened will understand; those who can hear music in moments of clarity see across to the other side of the world. The conviction that the real is written in the hand of suffering, coldness, and hardness determines the way this philosophy approaches the world. Although it scarcely believed in a change for the better, it did not give in to the temptation to desensitize itself or to get used to the given order of things. To remain sensitive was, as it were, a Utopian stance --to keep the senses sharpened for a happiness that will not come, a stance that nevertheless, by being prepared for happiness, protects us from the worst kind of brutalizations.
Politically, and in its nerve endings, this aesthetic, this "sensitive" theory, is based on a reproachful attitude, composed of suffering, contempt, and rage against everything that has power. It makes itself into a mirror of the evil in the world, of bourgeois coldness, of the principle of domination, of dirty business and its profit motive. It is the masculine world that it categorically rejects. It is inspired by an archaic No to the world of the fathers, legislators, and profiteers.
PREFACE D xxxv
Its basic prejudice is that only evil power against the living can come from this world.
That is the reason for the stagnation of Critical Theory. The offensive maneuver of refusing to collaborate has long been ineffective. The masochistic element has outdone the creative element. The impulse of Critical Theory is be- coming mature enough to burst open the strictures of negativism. In its heyday, Critical Theory found its adherents among those who could instinctively share their a priori pain with it. Still, in a generation that began to discover what its parents had done or approved, there were many such people. And because they were many, there was once again in the mid-sixties in Germany a thin thread of political culture --public dispute about true living.
The revival of the great impulse depends on a self-reflection by the intelligent- sia that was once inspired by it. In this sensitive critique, there is a paralyzing resentment. The refusal nourishes itself on an archaic rage against "masculinity," that cynical sense for facts exhibited by political as well as scientific positivists. Adorno's theory revolted against the collaborative traits embedded in the "practi- cal attitude. " His theory tried, by means of a conceptual balancing act, to construe a knowledge that would not be power. It took refuge in the realm of the mother, in the arts, and encoded longings. "Pictures prohibited"--do not tread with the whole foot. Defensive thinking characterizes its style-the attempt to defend a re- serve where memories of happiness are bound exclusively with a Utopia of the feminine. In an early work, Adorno once disclosed his emotional-epistemological secret almost without camouflage. In a few heartrending lines he wrote about cry- ing in response to Schubert's music, about how tears and knowing (Erkenntnis) are connected. This music makes us cry because we are not like it, not something complete, which turns toward the lost sweetness of life like a distant quotation.
Happiness can only be thought of as something lost, as a beautiful alien. It can-
not be anything more than a premonition that we approach with tears in our eyes
without ever reaching it. Everything else belongs to "false living" anyway. What
dominates is the world of the fathers, who are always appallingly in agreement
with the granite of abstractions, now solidified into a system. With Adorno, the
denial of the masculine went so far that he retained only one letter from his
3
father's name, W. The path to the meadow (Wiesengrund), however, does not
exactly have to be the wrong one (Holzweg).
Since the dissolution of the student movement we have been experiencing a lull in theory. There is, it is true, more erudition and sophistication than ever be- fore, but the inspirations are sterile. The optimism of "those days," that vital in- terests could be combined with efforts in social theory, has pretty much died out. Without this optimism it becomes quickly apparent how boring sociology can be. For those in the enlightenment camp, after the debacle of leftist actionism, terror, and its intensification in antiterror, the world turned topsy-turvy. The enlighten-
xxxvi D PREFACE
ment camp wanted to make it possible for everyone to mourn German history but ended in its own melancholy. Critique seems to have become even more impossi- ble than Benjamin thought. The critical "attitude" turns nostalgically inward to a kind of philological gardening where Benjaminian irises, Pasolinian flowers of evil, and Freudian deadly nightshade are cultivated.
Critique, in any sense of the word, is experiencing gloomy days. Once again, a period of pseudocritique has begun, in which critical stances are subordinated to professional roles. Criticism with limited liability, petty enlightenment as a factor in success --a stance at the junction of new conformisms and old ambitions. Already in Kurt Tucholsky's work, "in those days," the hollowness of a critique that tried to drown out its own disillusionment could be felt. Such a critique real- izes that having success is a long way from having an effect. It writes brilliantly but in vain, and that can be heard through everything. From these almost univer- sal experiences, the latent cynicisms of present-day enlighteners are nourished.
Pasolini spiced up the dull pseudocritique a bit in that he at least designed a convincing costume: that of the buccaneer--pirate writings. The intellectual as buccaneer--not a bad dream. We have scarcely ever seen ourselves that way. A homosexual gave the warning signal against the effeminization of critique. Like Douglas Fairbanks leaping around in the cultural rigging, with drawn sword, sometimes the conqueror and sometimes the conquered, knocked about unpre- dictably on the seas of social alienation. The blows fall on all sides. Because the costume is amoral, it fits morally like a second skin. The buccaneer cannot as- sume fixed standpoints because he is constantly moving between changing fronts. Perhaps Pasolini's image of the pirate intellect can reflect light on Brecht, I mean on the young, bad Brecht, not the Brecht who believed he had to conduct classes on the Communist galley.
The offensive posture in the myth of the buccaneer is inviting. One reservation might be the illusion that the intelligentsia is based on brawling as such. In fact, Pasolini is a beaten person, like Adorno. It is the a priori pain --it makes even the simplest things in life difficult for a person--that opens his eyes critically. There is no significant critique without significant defects. It is the critically wounded in a culture who, with great effort, find something healing, who con- tinue to turn the wheel of critique. Adorno dedicated a well-known essay to Hein- rich Heine, Die Wunde Heine {The sore, Heine). This sore is nothing other than the one that bores away in any significant critique. Among the great critical achievements in modern times, sores open up everywhere: the sore, Rousseau; the sore, Schelling; the sore, Heine; the sore, Marx; the sore, Kierkegaard; the sore, Nietzsche; the sore, Spengler; the sore, Heidegger; the sore, Theodor Less- ing; the sore, Freud; the sore, Adorno: Out of the self-healing of deep sores come critiques that serve epochs as rallying points for self-knowledge. Every critique is pioneering work on the pain of the times (Zeitschmerz) and a piece of exem- plary healing.
PREFACE ? xxxvii
It is not my ambition to enlarge this honorable infirmary of critical theories. It is time for a new critique of temperaments. Where enlightenment appears as a "melancholy science" (Adorno-Trans), it unintentionally furthers melancholic stagnation. Thus, the critique of cynical reason hopes to achieve more from a work that cheers us up, whereby it is understood from the beginning that it is not so much a matter of work but rather of relaxation.
The Motive
It will already have been noticed that the justification is a bit too deliberate to be quite true. I realize that I might be giving the impression that I am trying to save "enlightenment" and Critical Theory. The paradoxes of the rescue method will ensure that this first impression does not last.
It might seem at first that enlightenment necessarily ends in cynical disillusion- ment, but the page is soon turned and the investigation of cynicism becomes the foundation for a healthy freedom from illusions. Enlightenment was always disil- lusionment in the positive sense, and the more it advances, the closer the moment approaches when reason tells us to attempt an affirmation. A philosophy in the spirit of Yes also includes the Yes to the No. This is neither a cynical positivism nor an "affirmative" attitude. The Yes I mean is not the Yes of the defeated. If there is a trace of obedience in this Yes, it is of the only kind of obedience that can be expected from enlightened people, namely, the obedience to their own ex- perience.
European neurosis sees happiness as its goal and an effort of reason as a way to achieve it. This compulsion has to be overcome. The critical addiction to mak- ing things better has to be given up --for the sake of the good, from which one so easily distances oneself on long marches. Ironically, the aim of the most criti- cal effort is the most ingenuous release.
Shortly before Adorno died there was a scene in a lecture hall at Frankfurt University that fits like a key into the analysis of cynicism begun here. The philos- opher was just about to begin his lecture when a group of demonstrators prevented him from mounting the podium. Such scenes were not unusual in 1969. On this occasion something happened that required a closer look. Among the disrupters were some female students who, in protest, attracted attention to themselves by exposing their breasts to the thinker. Here, on one side, stood naked flesh, exer- cising "critique"; there, on the other side, stood the bitterly disappointed man without whom scarcely any of those present would have known what critique meant-cynicism in action. It was not naked force that reduced the philosopher
4
inextricably mixed in this scene in a way that is quite typical for cynicisms. Cyni-
to muteness, but the force of the naked.
Right and wrong, truth and falsity were
xxxviii ? PREFACE
cism ventures forth with naked truths that, in the way they are presented, contain something false.
Wherever deceptions are constitutive for a culture, wherever life in society
succumbs to a compulsion for lying, there really speaking the truth has an element
of aggression, an unwelcome exposure. Nevertheless the instinct for disclosure
is stronger in the long run. Only a radical nakedness and bringing things out in
the open can free us from the compulsion for mistrustful imputations. Wanting
to get to the "naked truth" is one motive for a desperate sensuousness, which
wants to tear through the veil of conventions, lies, abstractions, and discretions
in order to get to the bottom of things. I want to pursue this theme. A mixture
of cynicism, sexism, "matter-of-factness," and psychologism constitutes the
mood of the superstructure in the West, a twilight mood, good for owls and phi-
5
losophy.
At the bottom of my motivations is a childlike veneration for what, in the Greek sense, was called philosophy - for which, moreover, a family tradition of reverence is partly responsible. My grandmother, a teacher's daughter from an idealistic home, often recounted proudly and respectfully that it was Kant who wrote Critique of Pure Reason and Schopenhauer The World as Will and Representation. And perhaps there are even more such magical books in the world that we cannot read because they are too difficult, but which we must ad- mire from the outside like something from someone very great.
Is there no philosophy that does not screw our brains from our heads with its "old bony hand"? The dream that I pursue is to see the dying tree of philosophy bloom once again, in a blossoming without disillusionment, abundant with bi- zarre thought-flowers, red, blue, and white, shimmering in the colors of the be- ginning, as in the Greek dawn, when theoria was beginning and when, inconceiv- ably and suddenly, like everything clear, understanding found its language. Are we really culturally too old to repeat such experiences?
The reader is invited to sit for a while under this tree, which, strictly speaking,
cannot exist. I promise to promise nothing, above all, no New Values. The cri-
tique of cynical reason, to quote Heinrich Heine's characterization of the
Aristophanean comedies, endeavors to pursue the "deep idea of world annihila-
tion" on which the Gay Science is based, "which from there, like a fantastically
ironic magic tree, shoots up with blossoming thought-ornaments, singing nightin-
6 gale nests and clambering monkeys" {Die Bdder von Lucca)
Munich, Summer 1981
PREFACE ? xxxix
Notes
1. [Zynismus and Kynismus are alternative spellings of "cynicism," to which the author has given systematic conceptual meaning. I render Kynismus, the cheeky, positive side of cynicism, as "kyni- cism," etc. -Trans. ]
2. [A healthy mind in a healthy body-Trans. ]
3. [This is a pun on Adorno's father's name, Weisengrund. Wiesengrund, literally translated, means "meadowland. "--Trans. ]
4. I will return to this in chapter 5 ("Bourgeois NeoKynicism: The Arts").
5. [See the closing lines of the preface to Hegel's Philosophy of Right-Trans. ]
6. Heine, Samtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb (Munich, 1969), vol. II, p. 466.
Acknowledgments
Because I owe a work on the problem of cynicism more than a mere note can make clear, I especially want to refer to the best study of the history of ideas on this subject: Heinrich Niehues-Probsting, Der Kynismus des Diogenes und der Begriff des Zynismus (Munich, 1979), which offers, in addition, helpful bibliographic orientations. Moreover, the basic elements of theses for a new interpretation of Nietzsche that are strewn throughout the present work can be compared with an article by the same author: "Der 'Kurze Weg': Nietzsches 'Cynismus'," in Archiv
fur Begriffsgeschichte, vol. 24, no. 1 (Bonn, 1980), pp. 103ff.
I am indebted to Professor Jochen Schulte-Sasse of Minneapolis for invaluable stimulation regarding the understanding of structures of neoconservative ideolog- ical formations in the United States, suggestions that in a mediated way have gone into my construction of the concept of cynicism and into the notion of self-denial (Selbstdementi). Professor Karl-August Wirth of Munich advised me most kindly
on the selection of some of the illustrations.
Finally, I want to thank my friends who, with their encouragement and objec-
tions, their support and criticism, are present in and between the lines of this book.
Theory and History of Literature
6.
5. 4. 3.
Jacques Attali Noise
Peter Szondi On Textual Understanding and Other Essays Georges Bataille Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939
Tzvetan Todorov Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle Ross Chambers Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction
Edited by John Fekete The Structural Allegory: Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought
Jean-Francois Lyotard The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
Erich Auerbach Scenes from the Drama of European Literature
Volume Volume Volume V olume V olume
V olume V olume
V olume V olume Volume
V olume
V olume V olume Volume
Volume
V olume 1. Tzvetan Todorov Introduction to Poetics
16. 15. 14. 13. 12.
11. 10. 9.
Mikhail Bakhtin Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics temporary Criticism 2nd ed. , rev.
Edited by Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America
Vladimir Propp Theory and History of Folklore
Peter Burger Theory of the Avant-Garde
Hans Robert Jauss Aesthetic Experience and Literary Her- meneutics
8.
7. Paul de Man Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Con-
2. Hans Robert Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception
Part One Sightings: Five Preliminary Reflections
Chapter 1
Cynicism: The Twilight of False Consciousness
And indeed no longer was anyone to be seen who stood behind everything. Everything turned continually about itself. Interests changed from hour to hour. Nowhere was there a goal any- more. . . . The leaders lost their heads. They were drained to the dregs and calcified. . . . Everyone in the land began to no- tice that things didn't work anymore. . . . Postponing the col- lapse left one path open.
Franz Jung, Die Eroberung der Maschinen (1921)
1
The discontent in our culture
sal, diffuse cynicism. The traditional critique of ideology stands at a loss before this cynicism. It does not know what button to push in this cynically keen con- sciousness to get enlightenment going. Modern cynicism presents itself as that state of consciousness that follows after naive ideologies and their enlightenment. In it, the obvious exhaustion of ideology critique has its real ground. This critique has remained more naive than the consciousness it wanted to expose; in its well- mannered rationality, it did not keep up with the twists and turns of modern con- sciousness to a cunning multiple realism. The formal sequence of false conscious- ness up to now--lies, errors, ideology--is incomplete; the current mentality requires the addition of a fourth structure: the phenomenon of cynicism. To speak of cynicism means trying to enter the old building of ideology critique through a new entrance.
It violates normal usage to describe cynicism as a universal and diffuse phenomenon; as it is commonly conceived, cynicism is not diffuse but striking, not universal but peripheral and highly individual. The unusual epithets describe something of its new manifestation, which renders it both explosive and unas- sailable.
The ancient world knows the cynic (better: kynic) as a lone owl and as a provocative, stubborn moralist. Diogenes in the tub is the archetype of this figure. In the picture book of social characters he has always appeared as a distance- creating mocker, as a biting and malicious individualist who acts as though he needs nobody and who is loved by nobody because nobody escapes his crude un-
has assumed a new quality: It appears as a univer-
3
4 ? CYNICISM: THE TWILIGHT OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
masking gaze uninjured. Socially he is an urban figure who maintains his cutting edge in the goings-on of the ancient metropolises. He could be characterized as the earliest example of declassed or plebeian intelligence. His "cynical" turn against the arrogance and the moral trade secrets of higher civilization presup- poses the city, together with its successes and shadows. Only in the city, as its negative profile, can the figure of the cynic crystallize in its full sharpness, under the pressure of public gossip and universal love-hate. And only the city can as- similate the cynic, who ostentatiously turns his back on it, into the group of its outstanding individuals, on whom its liking for unique, urbane personalities depends.
The fertile ground for cynicism in modern times is to be found not only in ur- ban culture but also in the courtly sphere. Both are dies of pernicious realism through which human beings learn the crooked smile of open immorality. Here, as there, a sophisticated knowledge accumulates in informed, intelligent minds, a knowledge that moves elegantly back and forth between naked facts and con- ventional facades. From the very bottom, from the declassed, urban intelligent- sia, and from the very top, from the summits of statesmanly consciousness, sig- nals penetrate serious thinking, signals that provide evidence of a radical, ironic treatment (Ironisierung) of ethics and of social conventions, as if universal laws existed only for the stupid, while that fatally clever smile plays on the lips of those in the know. More precisely, it is the powerful who smile this way, while the kynical plebeians let out a satirical laugh. In the great hall of cynical knowledge the extremes meet: Eulenspiegel meets Richelieu; Machiavelli meets Rameau's nephew; the loud Condottieri of the Renaissance meet the elegant cynics of the rococo; unscrupulous entrepreneurs meet disillusioned outsiders; and jaded sys- tems strategists meet conscientious objectors without ideals.
Since bourgeois society began to build a bridge between the knowledge of those at the very top and those at the very bottom and announced its ambition to ground its worldview completely on realism, the extremes have dissolved into each other. Today the cynic appears as a mass figure: an average social character in the upper echelons of the elevated superstructure. It is a mass figure not only because advanced industrial civilization produces the bitter loner as a mass phenomenon. Rather, the cities themselves have become diffuse clumps whose power to create generally accepted public characters has been lost. The pressure toward individualization has lessened in the modern urban and media climate. Thus modern cynics --and there have been mass numbers of them in Germany, especially since the First World War --are no longer outsiders. But less than ever do they appear as a tangibly developed type. Modern mass cynics lose their in- dividual sting and refrain from the risk of letting themselves be put on display. They have long since ceased to expose themselves as eccentrics to the attention and mockery of others. The person with the clear, "evil gaze" has disappeared into the crowd; anonymity now becomes the domain for cynical deviation. Mod-
CYNICISM: THE TWILIGHT OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS D 5
em cynics are integrated, asocial characters who, on the score of subliminal illu- sionlessness, are a match for any hippie. They do not see their clear, evil gaze as a personal defect or an amoral quirk that needs to be privately justified. Instinc- tively, they no longer understand their way of existing as something that has to do with being evil, but as participation in a collective, realistically attuned way of seeing things.
What is presented here under a title that alludes to the great traditions is a medi- tation on the sentence "Knowledge is power. " This is the sentence that dug the grave of philosophy in the nineteenth century. It sums up philosophy and is at the same time its first confession, with which the century-long agony begins. This sentence brings to an end the tradition of a knowledge that, as its name indicates,
XXVI
PREFACE ? xxvii
was an erotic theory --the love of truth and the truth through love (Lie- beswahrheii). From the corpse of philosophy arose the modern sciences and the- ories of power in the nineteenth century in the form of political science, theory of class struggle, technocracy, vitalism, and in every form armed to the teeth. "Knowledge is power (Wissen ist Macht). " This sentence fixed the course for the unavoidable politicization of thinking. Those who utter the sentence reveal the truth. However, with the utterance they want to achieve more than truth: They want to intervene in the game of power.
At the same time as Nietzsche began to expose a will to power behind every will to know, the old German social democracy exhorted its members to partici- pate in the race for knowledge that is power. Where Nietzsche's insights were in- tended to be "dangerously" cold and without illusions, social democracy behaved pragmatically --and exhibited a middle-class joy in cultivation. Both spoke of power: Nietzsche by undermining bourgeois idealism with vitalism; the Social Democrats by seeking to gain access to the middle classes' opportunities for power through "cultivation. " Nietzsche taught a realism that was supposed to make it easy for the upcoming generations of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois to take their farewell from idealistic absurdities, which curbed the will to power. Social democracy strove for participation in an idealism that to that point had car- ried the promise of power within itself. In Nietzsche the middle classes could study the subtleties and clever crassness of a will to power that had lost its ideals, while the workers' movement looked furtively at an idealism that better suited its still naive will to power.
Around 1900 the radical left wing had caught up with the right-wing cynicism of the masters. The race between the cynical-defensive consciousness of the old bearers of power and the Utopian-offensive consciousness of the new bearers created the political-moral drama of the twentieth century. In the race for the hardest awareness of hard facts, the Devil and Beelzebub trained one another. Out of the competition of consciousnesses arose that twilight characteristic of the present: the mutual spying out of ideologies, the assimilation of antagonisms, the modernization of fraud-in short, that situation that forces the philosopher into the void where liars call liars liars.
We detect a second aspect in Nietzsche that is relevant to contemporary times, after the first, Fascist, Nietzsche wave has ebbed. Once more it becomes clear how Western civilization has worn out its Christian costume. After the decades of reconstruction and the decade of Utopias and "alternatives," it is as if a naive elan had suddenly been lost. Catastrophies are conjured up, new values find ready markets, like all analgesics. However, the times are cynical and know: New values have short lives. Being concerned, caring about people, securing peace, feeling responsible, caring about the quality of life and about the environment- none of that really works. Just bide your time. Cynicism stands ready in the back-
xxviii ? PREFACE
? Neo-"Cyniker. " Nietzsche, the thinker of ambivalence.
ground, until the palaver has stopped and things take their course. Our lethargic modernity certainly knows how to "think historically," but it has long doubted that it lives in a meaningful history. "No need for world history. "
The eternal recurrence of the Same, Nietzsche's most subversive thought -- cosmologically untenable, but culturally and morphologically fruitful --is an apt
1
description of a resurgence of "kynical" ("kynisch") motives that had developed
to conscious life especially during the time of the Roman emperors, but also to some extent in the Renaissance. The Same: Those are the rappings of a sober, pleasure-oriented life that has learned to live with circumstances. To be ready for
PREFACE ? xxix
anything, that makes one invulnerably clever. Live in spite of history; existential reduction; socialization "as if; irony about politics; mistrust toward "plans. " A new heathen culture that does not believe in life after death and so must seek life before death.
Nietzsche's decisive self-characterization, often overlooked, is that of a "cynic" (Cyniker); with this he became, next to Marx, the most momentous thinker of the century. Nietzsche's "cynicism" (Cynismus) offers a modified ap- proach to "saying the truth": It is one of strategy and tactics, suspicion and disinhi- bition, pragmatics and instrumentalism--all this in the hands of a political ego that minks first and foremost about itself, an ego that is inwardly adroit and outwardly armored.
The violent, antirationalistic impulse in Western countries is reacting to an in- tellectual state of affairs in which all thinking has become strategy; this impulse shows a disgust for a certain form of self-preservation. It is a sensitive shivering from the cold breath of a reality where knowledge is power and power is knowl- edge. In writing, I have thought of readers, have wished for readers, who feel this way; this book, I think, could have something to say to them.
The old social democracy had announced the slogan Knowledge is Power as a practical and reasonable prescription. It did not think too much about it. The message was simply that one has to learn something real so that life will be better later. A petit-bourgeois belief in schooling had dictated the slogan. This belief is disintegrating today. Only for our cynical young medicos is there still a clear link between study and standard of living. Almost everyone else lives with the risk of learning without prospects. Those who do not seek power will also not want its knowledge, its knowledge-armaments, and those who reject both are secretly no longer citizens of this civilization. Countless numbers of people are no longer prepared to believe that one first has to "learn something" so that things will be better later. In these people, I believe, a suspicion is growing that was a certainty in ancient cynicism (Kynismus): that things must first be better before you can learn anything sensible. Socialization through schooling, as it takes place here, and in Western societies, in general, is a priori stupefaction, after which scarcely any learning offers a prospect that things sometime or other will im- prove. The inversion of the relation between life and learning is in the air: the end of the belief in education, the end of European Scholasticism. That is what conservatives as well as pragmatists, voyeurs of the decline as well as well- meaning individuals alike find so eerie. Basically, no one believes anymore that today's learning solves tomorrow's "problems"; it is almost certain rather that it causes them.
Why a "Critique of Cynical Reason"? How can I defend myself against the charge of having written a thick book at a time when even thinner books are con- sidered impudent? As is proper, we should distinguish the occasion from the rea- son and the motive.
xxx ? PREFACE
The Occasion
This year (1981) is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason--a date in world history. Seldom has there been a jubilee as dull as this one. It is a sober celebration; the scholars keep to themselves. Six hundred Kant experts gathered in Mainz--that does not produce a carnival at- mosphere, at most endless paper streamers. An imagination would be useful: to picture what would happen if the celebrated figure were to appear among the con- temporaries . . . Is it not a sad festival where the invited guests secretly hope that the person being celebrated is prevented from appearing because those who constantly invoke him would have to be ashamed on his arrival? How would we look to the penetratingly human eye of the philosopher?
Who could bring himself to give Kant a summary of history since 1795, the year in which the philosopher published his essay On Perpetual Peace? Who would have the nerve to inform him about the state of the Enlightenment--the emancipation of humanity from "self-imposed dependency"? Who would be so frivolous as to explain to him Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach"? I imagine that Kant's splendid humor would help us out of our stunned state. He was, after all, an individual of the late eighteenth century, when even the rationalists were not yet as rigid as some today who pretend to be so free and easy.
Scarcely anyone has occupied himself with Kant without touching on the enigma of his physiognomy. Applying the Roman rule of thumb mens sana in cor-
2
poresano doesnothelpusgrasphisappearanceatall. Ifitistruethatthe"Spirit"
seeks the appropriate body, in Kant's case it must have been a spirit who found pleasure in physiognomic ironies and psychosomatic paradoxes; a spirit who hid a great soul in a small, gaunt body, an upright stride under a bent back, and a gregarious, delicately cordial humor in a hypochondriacal, compulsive tempera- ment, as if to play a joke on the later devotees of the vital and the athletic.
The physiognomic enigma of Kant is scarcely solved through his personality but rather through his position in the history of ideas and of sensuousness. The Age of the Enlightenment pushed the dialectic of understanding and sensuousness to the breaking point. The traces of such tensions run through the whole of Kant's work. The language of his main works reveals the violence that the process of thinking--especially in a German mind--inflicts on the sensuous. The fact that a poet like Gottfried Benn, himself stamped by the spirit of the century of natural science, could strike back against such violence by rebuking the philosopher for being a "violator of the intellect" shows how modern cynicism can become the sounding board for cogent insights against the erstwhile greatness of Knowing (Erkenntnis) that aims at the notoriously broken relation between intellect and sensuousness. Robert Musil, surely a guarantor of rationality even beyond the limits in which it feels secure, has captured the experience of a reading of Kant in a memorable passage of his Confusions of the Pupil Torless.
PREFACE ? xxxi
In fact, Torless that very morning had bought the Reclam edition of that volume that he had seen at his professor's and used the first recess to begin reading it. However, because of the profusion of brackets and footnotes he didn't understand a single word, and, when he conscien- tiously followed the sentences with his eyes, it was as if an old bony hand were slowly screwing his brain out of his head.
When he stopped in exhaustion after about half an hour, he had only reached the second page, and sweat stood on his brow.
But then he gritted his teeth and read again one page further, until the recess was over.
By evening, however, he did not even want to touch the book. Fear? Repulsion? He didn't quite know. Only one thing tortured him with burning clarity, that the professor, this person, who didn't look like much, had the book lying around openly in his room, as if it were for him a daily conversation, (pp. 84-85)
The delicate empiricism of this sketch awakens understanding of two things: the fascination of the book and the pain it inflicts on sensitive young readers. Does not an ingenuous contact with Kantian thinking, with philosophical thinking in general, contain the risk of exposing a young consciousness to a violent and sud- den aging? What of a youthful will to know is preserved in a philosophy that makes one dizzy with its bony spiraling turns of the screw? Is what we want to know found at the top end of the screw? Are we ourselves not perhaps so twisted at the head of the screw that we will be satisfied with what we now think we know? And what does it mean that people for whom Kantian thinking is "daily conversa- tion" don't "look like much"? Does it mean that philosophy no longer leaves any trace in life and that reality is one thing and philosophy is something hopelessly different?
From die style of philosophers physiognomic forms look out at us, forms in which reason has hidden aspects of its essential character. To be "reasonable" means to put oneself into a special, rarely happy relation to the sensuous. "Be reasonable" means, practically speaking, do not trust your impulses, do not listen to your body, learn control, starting with your own sensuousness. But intellect and sensuousness are inseparable. Torless's outbreak of sweating after two pages of the Critique of Pure Reason contains as much truth as the whole of Kantianism. The understood mutual interaction of physis and logos is philosophy, not what is spoken. In the future, only a physiognomist can be a philosopher who does not lie. Physiognomic thinking offers a chance to escape from the regime of disem- bodied and tiierefore evil minds. To announce a new critique of reason also means to have a philosophical physiognomy in mind; that is not, as with Adorno, "aes- thetic theory," but a theory of consciousness with flesh and blood (and teeth).
As things are, there are grounds not for a celebratory writing (Festschrift) but rather for a writing celebration (Schriftfest) that makes a long detour around the
xxxii D PREFACE
celebrated person out of a liking for the author. "I don't want to say how things lie. /I want to show you how the matter stands" (Erich Kastner).
The Reason
If it is discontent in our culture that provokes criticism, there would be no age quite so disposed to criticism as ours. Yet the critical impulse has never been more strongly inclined to let itself be overpowered by a sour temperament. The tension between what wants to "criticize" and what should be "criticized" is so taut that our thinking is becoming much more morose than precise. No capacity of thought keeps pace with what is problematic. Hence the self-abdication of cri- tique. In the utter indifference toward all problems lies the ultimate premonition of how it would be to be their equal. Because everything has become problematic, everything is also somehow a matter of indifference. This thread should be fol- lowed. It leads to a place where one can speak of cynicism and "cynical reason. "
To speak of cynicism means to expose a spiritual, a moral scandal to critique; following that, the conditions for the possibility of the scandalous are unraveled. "Critique" undergoes a movement that at first fully lives out its positive and nega- tive interest in the object, only in the end to run up against elementary structures of moral consciousness that are brought to expression "beyond good and evil. " The times are cynical everywhere you turn, and it is time to develop the connec- tion between cynicism and realism from first principles. What did Oscar Wilde mean by his blase statement: "I am not at all cynical, I am only experienced-- that's pretty much the same thing"? Or Anton Chekov, who gloomily remarked: "No cynicism can outdo life"?
In the course of reflection, the well-known ambiguity in the concept of critique breaks down; at first it means to make and substantiate judgments, to judge, to condemn; then to investigate the foundations for the formation of judgments. However, if one is talking about cynical "reason," then initially this formula com- pletely takes cover behind irony.
What can critique achieve today? What can it still hope for in a time that is so sick of theory? Let us first hear Walter Benjamin's answer:
Fools, who complain about the demise of critique. For its time has long since run out. Critique is a matter of proper distance. It is at home in a world where perspectives and prospects are important and where it was still possible to assume a point of view. In the meantime, things have become much too close for comfort for human society. "Disinterested- ness," the "unbiased perspective," have become lies, if not the com- pletely naive expression of plain incompetence. {Einbahnstrasse [1928] 1969, p. 95)
PREFACE ? xxxiii
In a system that feels like a cross between prison and chaos, there is no stand- point for a description, no central perspective for a compelling critique.
In the shattered world of multiple perspectives, the "grand views" of the whole, in fact, belong more to simple souls than to those who are enlightened and edu- cated by the given order of things. No enlightenment can occur without destroy- ing the effect, thinking-from-a-point-of-view, and without dissolving conven- tional morals. Psychologically this goes hand in hand with a scattering of the ego, literarily and philosophically, with the demise of critique.
But how is the contradiction to be explained that the most important renais- sance of critique in the twentieth century is connected with the name of Walter Benjamin, who, on the one hand, convincingly demonstrated that critique's hour had come, and, on the other hand, participated with such far-reaching impact in the school of Critical Theory? It is impossible, so he says, to assume a "stand- point" because things have become much too close for comfort for us. But from a standpoint of having no standpoint, which has still to be more closely defined, critique has made impressive progress. From where, then, does critique speak? From what perspectives? In whose name?
I believe that Critical Theory has found a provisional ego for critique and a "standpoint" that provides it with perspectives for a truly incisive critique-a standpoint that conventional epistemology does not consider. I am inclined to call it a priori pain. It is not the basis of elevated, distanced critique that achieves grand overviews but a stance of extreme closeness --micrology.
If things have become too close for comfort for us, a critique must arise that expresses this discomfort. It is not a matter of proper distance but of proper prox- imity. The success of the word "concernedness" (Betroffenheit) grows from this soil; it is the seed of Critical Theory that germinates in new forms today, even among those who have scarcely heard of it. Regarding the "concerned," would it not be fascinating to find out where they get their critical model? Anyway, in the manner of their "being concerned," the defects of the forgotten source reappear.
Because the sovereignty of minds (Kopfe) is always false, the new critique pre- pares to slip from the mind into the whole body. Enlightenment tries to move from top to bottom --politico-culturally as well as psychosomatically. To discover the living body as a sensor of the world is to secure a realistic foundation for phil- osophical knowledge of the world. This is what Critical Theory had begun to do, hesitatingly, often aesthetically encoded, hidden in all kinds of squeamishness.
Critical Theory was based on the presupposition that we know this world a pri- ori, through Weltschmerz. What we perceive of the world can be ordered in psy- chosomatic coordinates of pain and pleasure. Critique is possible inasmuch as pain tells us what is "true" and what is "false. " In holding this view, Critical The- ory makes the usual "elitist" assumption of an intact sensibility. This characterizes its strength and its weakness; it establishes its truth and restricts the scope of its
xxxiv ? PREFACE
validity. One must, in fact, be able to muster so much elitist sensibility. It is nourished by an aversion to the deadly poison of normality in a country of hard heads and armored souls. One should not even try to convince certain opponents; there is a generality of "truth" that is an alibi for lack of understanding. Where the capacity for reason is not based on sensitive self-reflection, no argumentation, not even one based on the most solid theory of communication, will be able to bring it about.
On this "sensitive" point, Critical Theory was never able to get along well with the logicians among its opponents. To be sure, there are thinkers whose minds (Kopfe) are so energetic, whose nervous structures are so hardened, that to them, the entire approach of Critical Theory must seem lachrymose. "Sensitive" theory is suspect. In fact, its founders, especially Adorno, had an exclusively narrow concept of the Sensitive --a presupposition of the highest spiritual irascibility and aesthetic schooling that could never be rationalized; its aesthetics ran just along the threshold of nausea toward everything and anything. There was scarcely any- thing that took place in the "practical" world that did not inflict pain on it or was spared being suspected of brutality. For it, everything was somehow chained like an accomplice to "false living" in which there is "no true living. " Above all, it sus- pected everything that seemed to be pleasure and consent as being swindle, re- lapse, and "false" relief. It was inevitable that Critical Theory, particularly in the person of Adorno, came to feel the backlash of its exaggerations. The embodying of reason for which it had prepared the ground with the highest sensibility could not stop at the limits within which it was constrained by its initiators. What is hap- pening today shows how many faces critique issuing from bodily vitality can assume.
Adorno belonged to the pioneers of a renewed critique of cognition that as- sumes an emotional a priori. In his theory the motifs of a crypto-Buddhist spirit are at work. Those who suffer without becoming hardened will understand; those who can hear music in moments of clarity see across to the other side of the world. The conviction that the real is written in the hand of suffering, coldness, and hardness determines the way this philosophy approaches the world. Although it scarcely believed in a change for the better, it did not give in to the temptation to desensitize itself or to get used to the given order of things. To remain sensitive was, as it were, a Utopian stance --to keep the senses sharpened for a happiness that will not come, a stance that nevertheless, by being prepared for happiness, protects us from the worst kind of brutalizations.
Politically, and in its nerve endings, this aesthetic, this "sensitive" theory, is based on a reproachful attitude, composed of suffering, contempt, and rage against everything that has power. It makes itself into a mirror of the evil in the world, of bourgeois coldness, of the principle of domination, of dirty business and its profit motive. It is the masculine world that it categorically rejects. It is inspired by an archaic No to the world of the fathers, legislators, and profiteers.
PREFACE D xxxv
Its basic prejudice is that only evil power against the living can come from this world.
That is the reason for the stagnation of Critical Theory. The offensive maneuver of refusing to collaborate has long been ineffective. The masochistic element has outdone the creative element. The impulse of Critical Theory is be- coming mature enough to burst open the strictures of negativism. In its heyday, Critical Theory found its adherents among those who could instinctively share their a priori pain with it. Still, in a generation that began to discover what its parents had done or approved, there were many such people. And because they were many, there was once again in the mid-sixties in Germany a thin thread of political culture --public dispute about true living.
The revival of the great impulse depends on a self-reflection by the intelligent- sia that was once inspired by it. In this sensitive critique, there is a paralyzing resentment. The refusal nourishes itself on an archaic rage against "masculinity," that cynical sense for facts exhibited by political as well as scientific positivists. Adorno's theory revolted against the collaborative traits embedded in the "practi- cal attitude. " His theory tried, by means of a conceptual balancing act, to construe a knowledge that would not be power. It took refuge in the realm of the mother, in the arts, and encoded longings. "Pictures prohibited"--do not tread with the whole foot. Defensive thinking characterizes its style-the attempt to defend a re- serve where memories of happiness are bound exclusively with a Utopia of the feminine. In an early work, Adorno once disclosed his emotional-epistemological secret almost without camouflage. In a few heartrending lines he wrote about cry- ing in response to Schubert's music, about how tears and knowing (Erkenntnis) are connected. This music makes us cry because we are not like it, not something complete, which turns toward the lost sweetness of life like a distant quotation.
Happiness can only be thought of as something lost, as a beautiful alien. It can-
not be anything more than a premonition that we approach with tears in our eyes
without ever reaching it. Everything else belongs to "false living" anyway. What
dominates is the world of the fathers, who are always appallingly in agreement
with the granite of abstractions, now solidified into a system. With Adorno, the
denial of the masculine went so far that he retained only one letter from his
3
father's name, W. The path to the meadow (Wiesengrund), however, does not
exactly have to be the wrong one (Holzweg).
Since the dissolution of the student movement we have been experiencing a lull in theory. There is, it is true, more erudition and sophistication than ever be- fore, but the inspirations are sterile. The optimism of "those days," that vital in- terests could be combined with efforts in social theory, has pretty much died out. Without this optimism it becomes quickly apparent how boring sociology can be. For those in the enlightenment camp, after the debacle of leftist actionism, terror, and its intensification in antiterror, the world turned topsy-turvy. The enlighten-
xxxvi D PREFACE
ment camp wanted to make it possible for everyone to mourn German history but ended in its own melancholy. Critique seems to have become even more impossi- ble than Benjamin thought. The critical "attitude" turns nostalgically inward to a kind of philological gardening where Benjaminian irises, Pasolinian flowers of evil, and Freudian deadly nightshade are cultivated.
Critique, in any sense of the word, is experiencing gloomy days. Once again, a period of pseudocritique has begun, in which critical stances are subordinated to professional roles. Criticism with limited liability, petty enlightenment as a factor in success --a stance at the junction of new conformisms and old ambitions. Already in Kurt Tucholsky's work, "in those days," the hollowness of a critique that tried to drown out its own disillusionment could be felt. Such a critique real- izes that having success is a long way from having an effect. It writes brilliantly but in vain, and that can be heard through everything. From these almost univer- sal experiences, the latent cynicisms of present-day enlighteners are nourished.
Pasolini spiced up the dull pseudocritique a bit in that he at least designed a convincing costume: that of the buccaneer--pirate writings. The intellectual as buccaneer--not a bad dream. We have scarcely ever seen ourselves that way. A homosexual gave the warning signal against the effeminization of critique. Like Douglas Fairbanks leaping around in the cultural rigging, with drawn sword, sometimes the conqueror and sometimes the conquered, knocked about unpre- dictably on the seas of social alienation. The blows fall on all sides. Because the costume is amoral, it fits morally like a second skin. The buccaneer cannot as- sume fixed standpoints because he is constantly moving between changing fronts. Perhaps Pasolini's image of the pirate intellect can reflect light on Brecht, I mean on the young, bad Brecht, not the Brecht who believed he had to conduct classes on the Communist galley.
The offensive posture in the myth of the buccaneer is inviting. One reservation might be the illusion that the intelligentsia is based on brawling as such. In fact, Pasolini is a beaten person, like Adorno. It is the a priori pain --it makes even the simplest things in life difficult for a person--that opens his eyes critically. There is no significant critique without significant defects. It is the critically wounded in a culture who, with great effort, find something healing, who con- tinue to turn the wheel of critique. Adorno dedicated a well-known essay to Hein- rich Heine, Die Wunde Heine {The sore, Heine). This sore is nothing other than the one that bores away in any significant critique. Among the great critical achievements in modern times, sores open up everywhere: the sore, Rousseau; the sore, Schelling; the sore, Heine; the sore, Marx; the sore, Kierkegaard; the sore, Nietzsche; the sore, Spengler; the sore, Heidegger; the sore, Theodor Less- ing; the sore, Freud; the sore, Adorno: Out of the self-healing of deep sores come critiques that serve epochs as rallying points for self-knowledge. Every critique is pioneering work on the pain of the times (Zeitschmerz) and a piece of exem- plary healing.
PREFACE ? xxxvii
It is not my ambition to enlarge this honorable infirmary of critical theories. It is time for a new critique of temperaments. Where enlightenment appears as a "melancholy science" (Adorno-Trans), it unintentionally furthers melancholic stagnation. Thus, the critique of cynical reason hopes to achieve more from a work that cheers us up, whereby it is understood from the beginning that it is not so much a matter of work but rather of relaxation.
The Motive
It will already have been noticed that the justification is a bit too deliberate to be quite true. I realize that I might be giving the impression that I am trying to save "enlightenment" and Critical Theory. The paradoxes of the rescue method will ensure that this first impression does not last.
It might seem at first that enlightenment necessarily ends in cynical disillusion- ment, but the page is soon turned and the investigation of cynicism becomes the foundation for a healthy freedom from illusions. Enlightenment was always disil- lusionment in the positive sense, and the more it advances, the closer the moment approaches when reason tells us to attempt an affirmation. A philosophy in the spirit of Yes also includes the Yes to the No. This is neither a cynical positivism nor an "affirmative" attitude. The Yes I mean is not the Yes of the defeated. If there is a trace of obedience in this Yes, it is of the only kind of obedience that can be expected from enlightened people, namely, the obedience to their own ex- perience.
European neurosis sees happiness as its goal and an effort of reason as a way to achieve it. This compulsion has to be overcome. The critical addiction to mak- ing things better has to be given up --for the sake of the good, from which one so easily distances oneself on long marches. Ironically, the aim of the most criti- cal effort is the most ingenuous release.
Shortly before Adorno died there was a scene in a lecture hall at Frankfurt University that fits like a key into the analysis of cynicism begun here. The philos- opher was just about to begin his lecture when a group of demonstrators prevented him from mounting the podium. Such scenes were not unusual in 1969. On this occasion something happened that required a closer look. Among the disrupters were some female students who, in protest, attracted attention to themselves by exposing their breasts to the thinker. Here, on one side, stood naked flesh, exer- cising "critique"; there, on the other side, stood the bitterly disappointed man without whom scarcely any of those present would have known what critique meant-cynicism in action. It was not naked force that reduced the philosopher
4
inextricably mixed in this scene in a way that is quite typical for cynicisms. Cyni-
to muteness, but the force of the naked.
Right and wrong, truth and falsity were
xxxviii ? PREFACE
cism ventures forth with naked truths that, in the way they are presented, contain something false.
Wherever deceptions are constitutive for a culture, wherever life in society
succumbs to a compulsion for lying, there really speaking the truth has an element
of aggression, an unwelcome exposure. Nevertheless the instinct for disclosure
is stronger in the long run. Only a radical nakedness and bringing things out in
the open can free us from the compulsion for mistrustful imputations. Wanting
to get to the "naked truth" is one motive for a desperate sensuousness, which
wants to tear through the veil of conventions, lies, abstractions, and discretions
in order to get to the bottom of things. I want to pursue this theme. A mixture
of cynicism, sexism, "matter-of-factness," and psychologism constitutes the
mood of the superstructure in the West, a twilight mood, good for owls and phi-
5
losophy.
At the bottom of my motivations is a childlike veneration for what, in the Greek sense, was called philosophy - for which, moreover, a family tradition of reverence is partly responsible. My grandmother, a teacher's daughter from an idealistic home, often recounted proudly and respectfully that it was Kant who wrote Critique of Pure Reason and Schopenhauer The World as Will and Representation. And perhaps there are even more such magical books in the world that we cannot read because they are too difficult, but which we must ad- mire from the outside like something from someone very great.
Is there no philosophy that does not screw our brains from our heads with its "old bony hand"? The dream that I pursue is to see the dying tree of philosophy bloom once again, in a blossoming without disillusionment, abundant with bi- zarre thought-flowers, red, blue, and white, shimmering in the colors of the be- ginning, as in the Greek dawn, when theoria was beginning and when, inconceiv- ably and suddenly, like everything clear, understanding found its language. Are we really culturally too old to repeat such experiences?
The reader is invited to sit for a while under this tree, which, strictly speaking,
cannot exist. I promise to promise nothing, above all, no New Values. The cri-
tique of cynical reason, to quote Heinrich Heine's characterization of the
Aristophanean comedies, endeavors to pursue the "deep idea of world annihila-
tion" on which the Gay Science is based, "which from there, like a fantastically
ironic magic tree, shoots up with blossoming thought-ornaments, singing nightin-
6 gale nests and clambering monkeys" {Die Bdder von Lucca)
Munich, Summer 1981
PREFACE ? xxxix
Notes
1. [Zynismus and Kynismus are alternative spellings of "cynicism," to which the author has given systematic conceptual meaning. I render Kynismus, the cheeky, positive side of cynicism, as "kyni- cism," etc. -Trans. ]
2. [A healthy mind in a healthy body-Trans. ]
3. [This is a pun on Adorno's father's name, Weisengrund. Wiesengrund, literally translated, means "meadowland. "--Trans. ]
4. I will return to this in chapter 5 ("Bourgeois NeoKynicism: The Arts").
5. [See the closing lines of the preface to Hegel's Philosophy of Right-Trans. ]
6. Heine, Samtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb (Munich, 1969), vol. II, p. 466.
Acknowledgments
Because I owe a work on the problem of cynicism more than a mere note can make clear, I especially want to refer to the best study of the history of ideas on this subject: Heinrich Niehues-Probsting, Der Kynismus des Diogenes und der Begriff des Zynismus (Munich, 1979), which offers, in addition, helpful bibliographic orientations. Moreover, the basic elements of theses for a new interpretation of Nietzsche that are strewn throughout the present work can be compared with an article by the same author: "Der 'Kurze Weg': Nietzsches 'Cynismus'," in Archiv
fur Begriffsgeschichte, vol. 24, no. 1 (Bonn, 1980), pp. 103ff.
I am indebted to Professor Jochen Schulte-Sasse of Minneapolis for invaluable stimulation regarding the understanding of structures of neoconservative ideolog- ical formations in the United States, suggestions that in a mediated way have gone into my construction of the concept of cynicism and into the notion of self-denial (Selbstdementi). Professor Karl-August Wirth of Munich advised me most kindly
on the selection of some of the illustrations.
Finally, I want to thank my friends who, with their encouragement and objec-
tions, their support and criticism, are present in and between the lines of this book.
Theory and History of Literature
6.
5. 4. 3.
Jacques Attali Noise
Peter Szondi On Textual Understanding and Other Essays Georges Bataille Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939
Tzvetan Todorov Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle Ross Chambers Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction
Edited by John Fekete The Structural Allegory: Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought
Jean-Francois Lyotard The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
Erich Auerbach Scenes from the Drama of European Literature
Volume Volume Volume V olume V olume
V olume V olume
V olume V olume Volume
V olume
V olume V olume Volume
Volume
V olume 1. Tzvetan Todorov Introduction to Poetics
16. 15. 14. 13. 12.
11. 10. 9.
Mikhail Bakhtin Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics temporary Criticism 2nd ed. , rev.
Edited by Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America
Vladimir Propp Theory and History of Folklore
Peter Burger Theory of the Avant-Garde
Hans Robert Jauss Aesthetic Experience and Literary Her- meneutics
8.
7. Paul de Man Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Con-
2. Hans Robert Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception
Part One Sightings: Five Preliminary Reflections
Chapter 1
Cynicism: The Twilight of False Consciousness
And indeed no longer was anyone to be seen who stood behind everything. Everything turned continually about itself. Interests changed from hour to hour. Nowhere was there a goal any- more. . . . The leaders lost their heads. They were drained to the dregs and calcified. . . . Everyone in the land began to no- tice that things didn't work anymore. . . . Postponing the col- lapse left one path open.
Franz Jung, Die Eroberung der Maschinen (1921)
1
The discontent in our culture
sal, diffuse cynicism. The traditional critique of ideology stands at a loss before this cynicism. It does not know what button to push in this cynically keen con- sciousness to get enlightenment going. Modern cynicism presents itself as that state of consciousness that follows after naive ideologies and their enlightenment. In it, the obvious exhaustion of ideology critique has its real ground. This critique has remained more naive than the consciousness it wanted to expose; in its well- mannered rationality, it did not keep up with the twists and turns of modern con- sciousness to a cunning multiple realism. The formal sequence of false conscious- ness up to now--lies, errors, ideology--is incomplete; the current mentality requires the addition of a fourth structure: the phenomenon of cynicism. To speak of cynicism means trying to enter the old building of ideology critique through a new entrance.
It violates normal usage to describe cynicism as a universal and diffuse phenomenon; as it is commonly conceived, cynicism is not diffuse but striking, not universal but peripheral and highly individual. The unusual epithets describe something of its new manifestation, which renders it both explosive and unas- sailable.
The ancient world knows the cynic (better: kynic) as a lone owl and as a provocative, stubborn moralist. Diogenes in the tub is the archetype of this figure. In the picture book of social characters he has always appeared as a distance- creating mocker, as a biting and malicious individualist who acts as though he needs nobody and who is loved by nobody because nobody escapes his crude un-
has assumed a new quality: It appears as a univer-
3
4 ? CYNICISM: THE TWILIGHT OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
masking gaze uninjured. Socially he is an urban figure who maintains his cutting edge in the goings-on of the ancient metropolises. He could be characterized as the earliest example of declassed or plebeian intelligence. His "cynical" turn against the arrogance and the moral trade secrets of higher civilization presup- poses the city, together with its successes and shadows. Only in the city, as its negative profile, can the figure of the cynic crystallize in its full sharpness, under the pressure of public gossip and universal love-hate. And only the city can as- similate the cynic, who ostentatiously turns his back on it, into the group of its outstanding individuals, on whom its liking for unique, urbane personalities depends.
The fertile ground for cynicism in modern times is to be found not only in ur- ban culture but also in the courtly sphere. Both are dies of pernicious realism through which human beings learn the crooked smile of open immorality. Here, as there, a sophisticated knowledge accumulates in informed, intelligent minds, a knowledge that moves elegantly back and forth between naked facts and con- ventional facades. From the very bottom, from the declassed, urban intelligent- sia, and from the very top, from the summits of statesmanly consciousness, sig- nals penetrate serious thinking, signals that provide evidence of a radical, ironic treatment (Ironisierung) of ethics and of social conventions, as if universal laws existed only for the stupid, while that fatally clever smile plays on the lips of those in the know. More precisely, it is the powerful who smile this way, while the kynical plebeians let out a satirical laugh. In the great hall of cynical knowledge the extremes meet: Eulenspiegel meets Richelieu; Machiavelli meets Rameau's nephew; the loud Condottieri of the Renaissance meet the elegant cynics of the rococo; unscrupulous entrepreneurs meet disillusioned outsiders; and jaded sys- tems strategists meet conscientious objectors without ideals.
Since bourgeois society began to build a bridge between the knowledge of those at the very top and those at the very bottom and announced its ambition to ground its worldview completely on realism, the extremes have dissolved into each other. Today the cynic appears as a mass figure: an average social character in the upper echelons of the elevated superstructure. It is a mass figure not only because advanced industrial civilization produces the bitter loner as a mass phenomenon. Rather, the cities themselves have become diffuse clumps whose power to create generally accepted public characters has been lost. The pressure toward individualization has lessened in the modern urban and media climate. Thus modern cynics --and there have been mass numbers of them in Germany, especially since the First World War --are no longer outsiders. But less than ever do they appear as a tangibly developed type. Modern mass cynics lose their in- dividual sting and refrain from the risk of letting themselves be put on display. They have long since ceased to expose themselves as eccentrics to the attention and mockery of others. The person with the clear, "evil gaze" has disappeared into the crowd; anonymity now becomes the domain for cynical deviation. Mod-
CYNICISM: THE TWILIGHT OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS D 5
em cynics are integrated, asocial characters who, on the score of subliminal illu- sionlessness, are a match for any hippie. They do not see their clear, evil gaze as a personal defect or an amoral quirk that needs to be privately justified. Instinc- tively, they no longer understand their way of existing as something that has to do with being evil, but as participation in a collective, realistically attuned way of seeing things.
