No More Learning

Mephistopheles (whom I regard as a central figure of modern aesthetics) is a child of the idea of development, through which, in the eighteenth century, the age-old questions concerning the theodicy and the transience of phenomena can be posed in a new form and answered with a new logic. So much is certain: that from this time on, evil in the world--death, destruction, and negativities of all kinds-can no longer be interpreted as the punitive or testing interventions of God in human history, as was done by the centuries of Christianity. The secularization, naturali- zation, and objectification of our understanding of the world has made too much progress for theological answers to still be able to satisfy. For more fully devel- oped reason these have become not only logically untenable but, what is more important, existentially implausible. God, devil, and the entire theological nomenclature can at best be taken only symbolically. This is precisely
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what Goethe's drama attempts. It plays with the theological figures under "poetic license. " His irony seizes on a degenerated system of plausibility only to use the old characters to erect a new logic, a new system of meaning. In substance, it is the same logic that underlies the Hegelian conception of the world and of history, the logic of evolution, the logic of a positive dialectic that promises constructive destruction. This thought model guarantees a new era of metaphysical specula- tion. It is borne by the powerful modern evidence that the world moves and that
26
its movement is forward and upward.
Perspective as the necessary price for development, which leads inexorably from the dark beginnings toward radiant goals. Enlightenment is not merely a theory ? f light but, still more, a theory of the movement toward light-optics, dynamics,
Suffering in the world appears from this
Is my proper element.
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organology, theory of evolution. Goethe's devil already practices this new way of seeing that, as we will show, constitutes a foundation of all great modern the- ories that are at least tempted by cynicism. In evolutionism lies the logical root of theorizing cynicisms that cast grand rulers' gazes on reality. In the sciences the- ories of evolution take over the metaphysical inheritance. Only they possess enough logical power to integrate with a comprehensive view the evil, degenera- tion, death, pain, the whole gamut of negativities inflicted on the living. Those who say "development" and affirm the goals of development have found a per- spective that can justify whatever serves development. Evolution (progress) is thus the modern theodicy; it provides the final logical underpinnings for the nega- tive. In the evolutionist's view of what must suffer and perish, modern intellectual cynicism already plays its ineluctable game; for it, the dead are the manure of the future. The death of others appears as the ontological and logical premise for the success of "one's own cause. " In an incomparable manner, Goethe has the Devil express the metaphysically permeated confidence in life of the newly con- ceived dialectic.
FAUST: Very well, who are you then? MEPHISTOPHELES: A part of that force,
that always wills evil and always creates good. FAUST: What is meant by this riddle? MEPHISTOPHELES: I am the spirit that constantly denies,
And that rightly so; for everything which arises, Is worthy of perishing!
Therefore, it would be better if nothing arose. Thus, everything which you call
Sin, destruction, in short, evil,
27
As far as the history of the kynical impulse is concerned, whose tracks we are following, Mephistopheles occupies an ambiguous position within it: with his grand seigneur side, just as with his proclivity for grand theory, he is a cynic; with his plebeian, realistic, and sensuously joyful side, he is kynically oriented. One of the paradoxes of this wordly and ordinary devil of evolution, who can also imitate Eulenspiegel, is that, in relation to Doctor Faust, he is the real enlight- ener. The scholar possesses a series of traits that today would be readily desig- nated as antienlightenment: the esoteric urge to communicate with the spirits be- yond. Interests in magic, and a questionable taste for crossing the limits of huma" reason and demanding too much of it. The person who is not satisfied with tn deficient rationalism and empiricism of human knowledge will really say in tttf end: "Here I stand, a fool so poor; I am as wise as I was before. " At the end o
l wan
the great will to knowledge there is of necessity always "theoretical despair. thinker's heart burns when he realizes that we cannot know what we "really"
'
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w) w. Faust is basically a desperate Kantian who tries to escape the compulsion self-limitation through a magical backdoor. The urge to go beyond the limit emains stronger than the insight into the limitedness of our knowledge. In Faust can already see what Nietzsche and, later, pragmatism will emphasize: that the will to knowledge is always nourished by a will to power. For this reason, ? he will to knowledge can never come to rest in knowledge itself; its urge, accord- ing to its roots, is immeasurable because, behind every knowledge, new puzzles mount up: A priori, knowledge wants to know more. "What one does not know, that is precisely what is needed. / And what one knows, cannot be used. " Wanting-to-know is an offspring of the desire for power, the striving for expan- sion, existence, sexuality, pleasure, enjoyment of the self, and for anesthetizing the necessity of dying. Whatever presents itself as theoretical enlightenment and research, in the nature of things, can never reach its alleged goals because these
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do not belong to the theoretical sphere.
For those who realize this the scientific impulse becomes an aesthetic impulse.
Art is the real Gay Science: It stands, as the last guarantor of a sovereign and realistic consciousness, between religion and science. However, it does not have to, like the former, appeal to faith, but has experience and the vitality of the senses on its side; on the other hand, it does not have to treat the empirically given in such a rigorously truncating way as the latter. The Devil, who, in Goethe's work, guarantees the principle of morally unrestricted experience, entices the despair- ing enlightener into the broad field of life: "So that you, without bonds, free / Ex- perience what life is. " What has been called the amoralism of art-to be allowed to see and say everything -- is really only the obverse side of this new, total empiri- cism. Those who have experienced the despair of the impossible will to knowl- edge can become free for the adventure of conscious living. Experience will never be entirely absorbed by theory-- as presupposed by consistent rationalists.
Experience what life is! The principle of experience, in the last analysis, bursts
all moralism, including that of the scientific method. What life is is grasped by
the researcher not in the theoretical attitude but solely through the leap into life
itself. Mephistopheles serves those who want to take the step beyond theory as
"? agister Ludi: He introduces them to the process of a kynical and cynical empiri-
cism from which alone life experience arises. Come what may, whether morally
good or evil, that is no longer the question. Scientists who hide their will to power
rom themselves and conceive of experience only as knowledge about "objects" o-nnot achieve that knowledge acquired by accumulating experience in the form
aUt a me
journey to the "real" things. For the empirical amoralist, life is not an object
Ves
. kynical empiricists inevitably encounter what is commonly called evil. >wever, they experience in so-called evil an unavoidable side; that puts them 8 t m the middle and above it at the same time. Evil appears to them as some-
29
As soon as they consciously experience their entanglement in the fate of other
dium, a journey, a practical essay, a project of alert existence.
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thing that by its very nature, cannot be anything other than what it is. The proto- types of this "evil," which is stronger than morality (which demands only that the former ought not to be), are free sexuality, aggression, and unconsciousness (in- sofar as the last is to blame for fateful entanglements; compare the model tragedy of unconscious action, Oedipus Rex).
The greatest of all moral shamelessnesses and simultaneously the most un- avoidable of all is to be a survivor. Over shorter or longer causal chains, every living person is a sur-vivor [Uberlebener, literally, over-liver; --Trans. ] whose acts and omissions are connected to the downfall of others. Where such causal chains remain short and direct, one speaks of guilt; where they are more medi- ated, of guiltless guilt or tragedy; where they are strongly mediated, indirect and
30
universal, of bad conscience, uneasiness, tragic feeling toward life.
Faust, too, does not escape this experience. For he becomes not only the se- ducer and lover of Gretchen, but also the one who survives her. Pregnant by him, she murders the child of this love in despair. For her, out of good has come evil, out of sexual surrender, social scandal. The causality of fate, which arises from the mechanism of morality, rolls over her with merciless consistency; despair, confusion, murder, execution. The tragedy can be read as a passionate poetical plea for the widening of moral consciousness: Art is critique of naive, mechani- cal, reactive consciousness. Under the presupposition of naivete, disastrous con- sequences must follow repeatedly from the feelings, morals, identifications, and passions of human beings; only in naivete and unconsciousness can mechanical- moral causality make its game of individuals. But in contrast to Gretchen, who is destroyed by the "tragic" mechanisms, Faust has a master teacher at his side
who keeps him out of the possible causalities of blind, naive despair.
But you are otherwise rather bedeviled. I find nothing in the world more absurd Than a devil who despairs.
In vain Faust imprecates his teacher, who inflicts on him the pain of experienc- ing himself as an accomplice devil. He would gladly banish the Devil back into the shape of the kynical dog, or still further, into that of the snake. But all paths
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back to naivete are closed to him. He has gained the Mephistophelian conscious- ness for himself, which demands that whatever human beings can know about themselves, they should in fact know; it breaks the spell of the unconscious. The aesthetic amoralism of great art implies a school of becoming conscious: Morality works on in naive consciousness like a part of the unconscious; what is uncon- scious, mechanical, unfree in our behavior is the real evil.
Mephisto, as we said, possesses the profile of a kynical enlightener and thus displays a knowledge gained only by those who have risked having a perspective
31
ity, where, emphatically, moral inhibitions must first be left behind in order, lik
on things that is free of morality.
This is shown nowhere better than with sexual- e
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 181
Faust, "without bonds, free," to experience what life is. Mephisto is the first sex- ual positivist in our literature; his way of seeing is already that of sexual kynicism. "It is true, a child is a child, and play is play. " For him it is no secret how the clockwork in the man, Faust, can be wound up: "Only" the vision of the naked woman within him has to be awaked --in modern language, the erotic illusion, the "imago," the sought-after ideal, the sexual schema. The elixir of youth awakes the drive that makes every woman as desirable as Helen. The person who falls in love, as suggested by Goethe's irony, is basically the victim of a chemical reac- tion. More modern cynics or playboys assure us that love is nothing more than
32
a hormonal disturbance.
literarily, belongs to satire; existentially, to nihilism; epistemologically, to reduc- tionism; metaphysically, to (vulgar) materialism. As serene materialist, Mephistopheles professes the animal compulsiveness of love. "Custom or not, it passes too. " Whatever may occur to love-smitten fools by way of elevated gush- ing does not count, insofar as one as proper diabolus always thinks only of one thing: "what chaste hearts cannot do without. "
The attitude of the critical Devil toward the sciences is scarcely less lacking in respect. The entire lifeless, logically ossified, conceptual casuistry of learned stuff does not suit him. If empiricism is his program, then in the kynical, vital form: head over heels into a full life, let one's own experience be the ultimate criterion. His speech encourages one to risk experience, and because he distin- guishes sharply between the gray of theory and the green of life, he finds none of the academic forms of teaching to this taste. Professors are the fools of their own doctrinal structures, in modern language, accessories to their "discourses. " In all faculties vain babblers hang around, who complicate the simplest things to the point of unrecognizability, the jurists no less than the philosophers, the the- ologians by profession, and the medicos with a vengeance.
As a cynical gynecologist, Mephisto relates the pernicious old proverb that all
female diseases are to be "cured from one point. " Our theory devil can, of course,
expect more applause when he brings his semantic cynicism (today: language cri-
tique) into play against the pseudologies and arrogated terminologies of the dis-
ciplines. He sees that incomprehension likes to take refuge in words and that igno-
rance can keep itself afloat longest by having command of a jargon. The Devil
expresses what students feel: that "doctoral stupidity" (Flaubert) is part and parcel
? r the university, which, safe from discovery, smugly reproduces itself there,
what this devil presents in the Collegium logicum (students' scene) on the subject
0n
The cynical bite lies in the "nothing more," which,
the language of philosophers and theologians amounts to a poetical nominalism at stands up to the most rigorous logical reconstruction.
If one takes stock, one recognizes that Goethe's Mephistopheles, in spite of all symbolic concessions, is basically already no longer a Christian devil, but a post- hnstian figure with pre-Christian traits. The modern side in him touches on a actualized antiquity: Dialectic evolutionism (positive destruction, evil that is
re
182 D THE CABINET OF CYNICS
good) touches on a philosophical conception of nature that has more to do with Thales of Miletus and Heraclitus than with Kant and Newton.
The Grand Inquisitor, or: The Christian Statesman as Jesus Hunter and the Birth of the Institutional Doctrine out of the Spirit of Cynicism
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That's it precisely, the "but". . . called Ivan. So that you know, novice: What is senseless is all too necessary on earth. The world is based on the senseless, and without it, probably nothing at all would happen on earth. I know what I know! . . .
. . . According to my lamentable, earthly, Euclidean un- derstanding, I know only that suffering exists but no one is guilty, that everything follows immediately and simply one from the other, that everything flows and evens itself out-- but that is only Euclidean nonsense . . . . What do I gain by the fact that there are no guilty ones, that everything follows immedi- ately and simply one from the other and that I know that--I need retribution, otherwise I will annihilate myself . . . Lis- ten: If all have to suffer and with their suffering procure eter- nal harmony, what do children have to do with that? --Why have they too been caught up in the material and have to serve as the manure for someone's future harmony? Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoyevsky's gloomy Grand Inquisitor, too, is only apparently a figure of the Christian Middle Ages, just as Goethe's Mephistopheles is only apparently still a Christian devil. In reality, both belong to the modernity of the nineteenth cen- tury, the one as aesthetician and evolutionist, the other as representative of a new, cynical political conservatism. Like Faust, the Grand Inquisitor is a retrospective projection of advanced ideological tensions from the nineteenth into the sixteenth century. Intellectually as well as chronologically, he stands closer to figures like Hitler and Goebbels, Stalin and Lunacharsky than to the historical Spanish Inqui- sition. But is it not frivolous to place an honorable Christian cardinal in such com- pany? The defamation weighs heavily and must be justified by strong evidence. This is provided by the Grand Inquisitor's story, as Ivan Karamazov tells it.
The cardinal and Grand Inquisitor of Seville, an ascetic old man of ninety years within whom all life seems to be extinguished except in his eyes a dark em- ber still glows, one day became --as Ivan says in his "fantastic poem"--a witness to the return of Christ. Before the cathedral, Jesus had repeated his miracle of long ago and, with a soft word, had brought a dead child to life. It seems as it the old man had immediately comprehended the significance of this act, but his
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reaction is paradoxical. Instead of paying homage to the returned Lord, he points his bony finger at him and orders the watchman to arrest the man and lock him up in the vault of the Holy Tribunal. In the night, the old man descends the stairs to Jesus in the dungeon and says:
" 'Is it you? You? '
"But receiving no answer, he adds quickly: 'Do not answer, be si-
lent. And, indeed, what can you say? I know too well what you would say. Besides, you have no right to add anything to what you have said already in the days of old. Why, then, did you come to disrupt us? For you have come to disrupt and you know it. But do you know what is going to happen tomorrow? I know not who you are and I don't want to know: whether it is you or only someone who looks like him, I do not know, but tomorrow I shall condemn you and burn you at the stake as the vilest of heretics, and the same people who today kissed your feet, will at the first sign from me rush to rake up the coals at your stake tomorrow. Do you know that? Yes, perhaps you do know it . . . ' " (Trans. David Magarshack [Harmondsworth, 1958], p. 293, modified)
Those who find the Grand Inquisitor's behavior strange will be even more curi- ous about the meaning of the event when they have understood the decisive point with the greatest possible sharpness: In the thinking and action of the old man there is not a trace of dimness or blindness, no error and no misunderstanding. What Jesus had assumed about his crucifiers as grounds for forgiveness --"for they know not what they do"--can in no way be applied to the churchman. He knows what he is doing and he knows it with a downright shocking clarity, regarding which the only remaining question is whether it should be called tragic or cynical. If the Grand Inquisitor knows what he is doing, then he must be acting for reasons of overpowering gravity, reasons that are strong enough to dislodge the religious faith he outwardly represents. The old man does in fact give Jesus his reasons. To be concise, his speech is the reply of a politician to the founder of a religion. Seen somewhat more deeply, it is a settling of accounts of anthropol- ogy with theology, of administration with emancipation, of the institution with the individual.
We have just heard the main accusation against the returned one: He has come
to disrupt. " In what? The Inquisitor blames his Savior for returning precisely at
that moment when the Catholic Church, through the terror of the Inquisition, was
about to stamp out the last sparks of Christian freedom and was almost able to
delude itself into believing that it had completed its work: establishing domination
"rough the "true religion. " Having become completely unfree (in the religious-
Political sense), the people of this time are more than ever convinced that they
a
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Wl
H make us free? The Grand Inquisitor, however, can see through this decep-
re free. Did they not possess the truth? Had not Christ promised that the truth
184 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
tion. He is proud of his realism; as representative of the victorious church, he claims not only to have completed Jesus' work but still more, to have improved it! For Jesus, so he says, did not know how to think politically and had not com- prehended what human nature in a political respect required: namely, domina- tion. In the speech of Dostoyevsky's cardinal to his silent prisoner, we discover one of the origins of modern institutionalism, which, in this passage, and perhaps only in this passage, admits in a remarkably open way its cynical basis in con- scious deception that appeals to necessity. The powerful, according to Dostoyevsky's profound and vertiginous reflections, make the following calcu- lations:
Only a few possess the courage to be free, as Jesus demonstrated when he an- swered the question of the tempter in the desert (concerning why he did not, al- though he was hungry, transform stones into bread): "Man does not live by bread alone. " Only a few have the power to overcome hunger. The many, in all ages, will reject the offer of freedom in the name of bread. In other words, people in general are in search of disburdenment, ease, comfort, routine, security. Those invested with power can, in all ages, confidently assume that the great majority have a horror of freedom and know no deeper urge than to surrender their free- dom, to erect prisons around themselves, and to subjugate themselves to idols old and new. What can the master Christians, the representatives of a religion of free- dom, do in such a situation? The Grand Inquisitor understands his assuming power as a kind of self-sacrifice.
"But we shall tell them that we do your bidding and rule in your name. We shall deceive them again, for we shall not let you come near us again. That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to lie. " (Ibid. , p. 297)
We are witnesses here of a unique, strangely convoluted thought experiment in which the paradoxes of modern conservatism are hatched. The churchman raises an anthropological protest against the unreasonable demand of freedom that the founder of the religion has left behind. For human life, frail as it is, needs first of all an ordered framework of habit, certainty, law, and tradition --in a word, social institutions. With breathtaking cynicism the Grand Inquisitor ac- cuses Jesus not of having abolished the discomfort of freedom but of having ag- gravated it.
He has not accepted human beings as they are but has overstrained them with his love. To this extent, the later masters of the church have superseded Christ in their sort of love of humanity-which is thoroughly pervaded by con- tempt and realism. For they take human beings as they are: childlike and childish, indolent and weak. The system of a ruling church, however, can only be erected on the shoulders of people who take the moral burden of conscious deception on themselves, that is, priests who consciously preach the opposite of the actual teachings of Christ, which they have understood precisely. To be sure, they speak
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the Christian language of freedom, but they serve the system of needs --bread, order, power, law --that makes people submissive. The concept of freedom, as the Grand Inquisitor knows, is the fulcrum in the system of oppression: The more repressive it is (Inquisition, etc. ), the more violently must the rhetoric of freedom be hammered into people's heads. Precisely this is the ideological stamp of all modern conservatisms in the East as well as in the West. They are all based on pessimistic anthropologies according to which the striving for freedom is nothing more than a dangerous illusion, a mere basically insubstantial urge that glosses over the necessary and ineluctable institutional ("bound") character of human life. Wherever in the world today theories of freedom and emancipation make them- selves heard, they are repudiated with words like the following from the Grand Inquisitor.
"But here, too, your judgement of people was too high, for they are slaves, though rebels by nature. Look around you and judge: fifteen centuries have passed, go and have a look at them: whom have you raised up to yourself? I swear, human beings have been created weaker and baser creatures than you thought them to be! . . . I n respecting them so greatly, you acted as though you ceased to feel any compassion for them. " (Ibid. , p. 300 modified)
This is, still formulated in moral clauses, the Magna Charta of a theoretical conservatism on an "anthropological" foundation. Arnold Gehlen probably would have undersigned it without hesitation. Even the rebellious element in human be- ings is included as a natural constant in the calculations of this detached pessi- mism. Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor speaks as conservative politician and ideo- logue of the nineteenth century, looking back on the storms of European history since 1789.
"They will tear down the temples and drench the earth with blood. But they will realize at last, the foolish children, that although they are re- bels, they are impotent rebels who cannot bear their own rebel-
lion. . . . unrest, confusion, and unhappiness --that is the lot of people 34
today. " (Ibid. , pp. 300-1, modified)
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But that is not enough. The final ascent to the "yawning heights" (Sinoviev) of a cynically conceived conservative politics still lies before us: when the Grand Inquisitor reaches his most extreme confession; when power tells its trade secrets m the most shameless and audacious way. That is a moment of that higher shame- 'essness through which inbred disingenuousness finds its way back to truth. In the mouth of the Grand Inquisitor, Dostoyevsky's reflections cross the cynical thresh- old beyond which there is no way back for the no longer naive consciousness. He admits that the church long ago consciously sealed a pact with the Devil, that tempter in the desert, whose offer of worldly domination Jesus himself had re-
186 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
? The Hamburg Faust Ensemble on tour in Moscow. Mephistophiles, Gustav Grund- gens, meets Boris Pasternak.
jected at that time. According to the cardinal's admission, the church has, with open eyes, gone over to the Devil's camp --at that time it decided to take the sword of worldly power into its own hands (in the time of Charlemagne). It paid for it with an unhappy consciousness and a chronically split conscience. But that it had to do it, is, in spite of everything, beyond question for the church politician. He speaks like someone who knows that he has sacrificed a great deal, and as it could not be otherwise, it is a sacrifice on the altar of the future, nourished by the "spirit of Utopia. " This is a sign that allows us to date this thought with certainty in the nineteenth century, which made every form of evil thinkable if only it served a "good purpose. " The Grand Inquisitor is enraptured with the vision of a humanity united by Christianity, welded together by power and inquisition. This vision alone gives him something to hold on to and hides his cynicism from himself, or better, ennobles it to a sacrifice. Millions upon millions of people will happily enjoy their existence, free from all guilt, and only the powerful, who make the sacrifice of exercising cynical domination will be the last unhappy ones.
"For we alone, we who guard the mystery, we alone shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy infants and one hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of knowl- edge of good and evil. " (Ibid. , p. 304)
Perplexing analogies between Goethe and Dostoyevsky now become visible: Both talk of a pact with the Devil; both conceive of evil as immanence; both re- habilitate Satan and acknowledge his necessity. Dostoyevsky's devil, too -- stated concisely, the principle of power, world dominion --is conceived as a part of a
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power that wills evil but brings forth "good"; for good is also supposed to arise finally from the Grand Inquisitor's gloomy labor as his concluding Utopia shows. In both cases, to conclude a pact with the Devil means nothing more than to be- come a realist, that is, to take the world and people as they are. And in both cases it is a matter of the power that must be dealt with by all those who let themselves in for this kind of realism. With Faust, this is the power of knowledge; with the Grand Inquisitor, the knowledge of power.
Knowledge and power are the two modes by which one reaches the modern
state beyond good and evil, and in that moment when our consciousness takes the
step into this beyond, cynicism is unavoidably on the scene--with Goethe, aes-
thetically; with Dostoyevsky, morally and politically; with Marx, embodied in
a philosophy of history; with Nietzsche, psychologically and vitalistically; with
Freud, sexually and psychologically. Here we have zeroed in on the point where
cynicism and enlightenment touch. For enlightenment furthers the empirical-
realistic disposition, and where this advances without obstruction it inevitably
leaves the limits of morality behind. "Realistic" thinking must constantly use an
amoral freedom in order to attain clarity. A science of reality becomes possible
only where metaphysical dualism has been ruptured, where the inquiring spirit
has constructed a consciousness beyond good and evil, where, without
metaphysical and moral prejudice, neutral and tedious, it searches for what is the
35 case.
Would the Grand Inquisitor then be a cofounder of positivistic political science that takes humankind empirically and from its circumstances determines the kind of political institutions that are necessary for its survival? For Dostoyevsky, the institution of church is only representative of those coercive institutions that regu- late social life, their apex being occupied by the state and the army. It is the spirit of these institutions that is abhorred by any recollection of the magnificent primi- tive Christian freedom. It is not religion as religion that has to burn the returned Christ, but religion as Church, as analogue of the state, as institution; it is the state that fears the civil disobedience the religious are capable of; it is the army that condemns the spirit of Christian pacifism; it is the masters of the world of work who have a horror of people who place love, celebration of life, and creativity higher than slaving for the state, the rich, the army, etc.
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Accordingly, must the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky's narrative burn Jesus, the meddler, as he intended? To be perfectly consistent, yes. But let us hear how the story ends as Ivan Karamazov tells it.
"I intended to end it as follows: When the Inquisitor has finished speak- ing, he waits for some time for the prisoner's reply. His silence dis- tresses him. He sees that the prisoner has been listening intently to him all the time, looking gently into his face and evidently not wishing to say anything in reply. The old man would like him to say something, 188 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
however bitter and terrible. But he suddenly approaches the old man and kisses him gently on his bloodless, aged lips. That is his entire an- swer. The old man gives a start. There is an imperceptible movement at the corners of his mouth; he goes to the door, opens it and says to him: 'Go, and come no more--don't come at all --never, never! ' And he lets him out into 'the dark streets and lanes of the city. ' The prisoner goes away. " (Ibid. , p. 308, modified)
Dostoyevsky obviously guards against giving an unambiguous solution, prob- ably because he saw that, one way or the other, the game is not over. For a mo- ment, nevertheless, the church politician must admit defeat; for one second he sees the "Other," the infinite affirmation that includes even him and that neither judges nor condemns. Dostoyevsky's Jesus loves not only his enemy but, what
36
is considerably more complicated, also him who betrays and perverts him. However one may interpret the open end of the drama, it in any case demonstrates that Dostoyevsky recognizes a conflict between two principles or forces that bal- ance each other; indeed, even more, they neutralize each other. By suspending any decision, he puts himself de facto in the region beyond good and evil, that is, in that area where we can do nothing more than take facts and reality "posi- tively," as they are. Institutions follow their own logic, religion follows another, and the realist is well advised to seriously take both into account, without forcing a decision for one side or the other. The actual result of the Grand Inquisitor's cynical reasoning is not so much the self-exposure of the church politician, but the discovery that good and evil, end and means can be interchanged. This result cannot be overemphasized. With it, we slide inevitably into the area of cynicism. For it means nothing less than that religion can just as easily be made an instru- ment of politics as politics can be made an instrument of religion. Because this is so, everything that was held to be absolute now comes into a relative light. Everything becomes a question of the lighting, the viewing angle, the projection, the purpose intended. All absolute anchoring is gone; the age of moral teetering begins. Beyond good and evil we by no means find, as Nietzsche assumed, a radi- antly vital amoralism but rather an infinite twilight and a fundamental ambiva- lence. Evil becomes so-called evil as soon as it is thought of as a means to good; good becomes so-called good as soon as it appears to be something disruptive (Je- sus as disrupter), destructive in the sense given to it by the institutions. Good and evil, viewed in a metaphysical light, transmute unflinchingly into each other, and those who have come so far as to see things this way gain a tragic view that, as
37
we show here, is really a cynical view.
For as soon as the metaphysical distinction between good and evil becomes
outmoded and everything that exists appears neutral in a metaphysical sense, only then does modernity, as we refer to it, really begin: It is the age that can no longer conceive of any transcendental morality and that, consequently, finds it impossi-
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 189
ble to distinguish neatly between means and ends. From then on, all statements about ends (and especially about final ends) appear as "ideologies," and what earlier were ideals and moral doctrines are now transparent and useful "intellec- tual" apparatuses. Morals and consciousnesses of values consequently can be
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studied like things, namely, as subjective entities.
nology will use the concept "subjective factor") is thus no longer the wholly Other, the opposed principle, in relation to external being, but is itself a part of being, a part of reality. One can study it, describe it historically, pull it apart ana- lytically, and--the decisive point--use it politically and economically. From this moment on, a new hierarchy arises: on the one hand, the naive, the believers in values, the ideologized, the deceived, the victims of their "own" imaginations, in a word, the people with "false consciousness," the manipulated and the manipula- t e . This is the mass, the "spiritual realm of animals" [Hegel; --Trans. ]. The re- gion of false and unfree consciousness. All those have succumbed to it who do not possess the great, free "correct consciousness. " But who has the "correct con- sciousness"? Its bearers are to be found in a reflecting elite of nonnaive people who no longer believe in values, who have overcome ideology, and have dis- solved the deception. They are the ones who are no longer manipulable, who think beyond good and evil. Everything now depends on whether this intellectual hierarchy is also a political hierarchy, thus on whether the
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nonnaive people are, in relation to the naive, the rulers. With the Grand Inquisitor the answer would be a clear-cut yes. However, are all enlightened people, all realists, all nonnaive people essentially Grand Inquisitors, that is, ideological manipulators and moral deceivers who use their knowledge about things to rule others, even if for their purported good? Well, it is in our own interest not to demand a quick answer to this question.
The Grand Inquisitor, as we said, is a prototype of modern (political) cynics. His bitter anthropology prompts him to believe that human beings must be and want to be deceived. Human beings require order, which in turn requires domina- tion, and domination requires lies. Those who want to rule must accordingly make conscious use of religion, ideals, seduction, and (if necessary) violence. For them, everything, even the sphere of ends, becomes a means; modern grand
39
Nevertheless, in spite of all this, one cannot say that they are obscurantists. In the framework of Dostoyevsky's story, the role of realist falls to those who sur- render their insights. Their garrulous cynicism thus remains an absolutely in- dispensable factor for the process of truth. If they were really just deceivers, they would keep silent. However, in the final analysis, they too think that they are do- wig the right thing even if they employ crooked means to this end. Their maxims resemble Claudel's motto: God writes straight even on crooked lines. "In the last
^stance," they have not given up the tendency toward "good. " Made to speak,
me
politicians are total "instrumentalists" and disposers of values.
y give an account of their motives, and their confessions, although giddying,
Consciousness (a later termi-
190 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
are invaluable contributions to the search for truth. In a roundabout way, cynics contribute what they can toward enlightenment; indeed, without their spectacu- lar, amoral, and evilly clever self-exposures, this entire area would remain im- penetrable. Precisely because an impression of "naked" reality can only be gained from a standpoint beyond good and evil, we must rely in the search for truth on the "amoral," self-reflective statements of those who have assumed such stand- points. From Rousseau to Freud, existentially crucial knowledge has been ex-
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pressed in the form of confessions .
what is really the case. Cynicism speaks of what is behind the facade; that be- comes possible when the feeling of shame ceases. Only when individuals have taken the step beyond good and evil for themselves can they make a productive confession. But when they each say, "/am thus," they mean basically, "/? is thus. " My "sins" fall not on me but on it within me; they are only sinful illusions. In reality, my evil is only a part of universal reality, where good and evil disappear in a grand neutrality. Because truth means more than morality, amoralists justifia- bly do not necessarily feel themselves to be bad; they serve a higher authority than morality.
From this perspective, the Grand Inquisitor becomes a figure typical of the ep- och. His thinking is dominated by two antagonistic motives that simultaneously conflict with and condition each other. As realist (positivist), he has left the dual-
41
ism of good and evil behind.
more grimly. Half of him is an amoralist, the other a hypermoralist; on the one hand cynic, on the other dreamer; here freed from all scruples, there bound to the idea of an ultimate good. In praxis, he does not recoil from any cruelty, in- famy, or deception; in theory, the highest ideals rule him. Reality has taught him to be a cynic, pragmatist, and strategist; however, because of his intentions, he feels himself to be goodness incarnate. In this fragmentation and double- tonguedness we recognize the basic structure of "realistic" grand theories of the nineteenth century. They obey a compulsion to compensate for every gain in real- ism (amoralism) with an assault on Utopia and substitute morality, as if it were unbearable to accumulate so much power of knowledge and knowledge of power if "extremely good" ends did not justify this accumulation. The Grand Inquisitor's speech reveals to us at the same time where these extremely good ends --which
justify everything--come from: from the historical future. At the end of "history," "thousands of millions of happy infants" will populate the world--coerced into their happiness and enticed into paradise by the few who rule them. However, until then we have a long way to go, a way that will be lined by countless pyres. But since the end is considered absolutely right, no price seems too high to reach it. If the end is absolutely good, its goodness must rub off even on the most horri- ble means that have to be employed along the way. Here total instrumentalism, there Utopia: That is the form of a new, cynical theodicy. Human suffering thereby is attributed an overarching historical tendency:
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Suffering becomes,
One has to go behind the facade to recognize
As a man of Utopia, he holds on to realism all the
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 191
frankly put, an unavoidable function of progress; suffering is strategy-- mind you, suffering in the form of causing to suffer (Inquisition). The strategist suffers only insofar as he knows that he consciously deceives.
The reason for presenting the Grand Inquisitor here now becomes clear: He is really a bourgeois philosopher of history with a Russian Orthodox profile, a tragically vilified crypto-Hegelian. If one wants to imagine the worst conse- quence, one must imagine what would happen if a Russian politician like the Grand Inquisitor came face to face with the most powerful and most "realistic" philosophy of history in the nineteenth century: Marxism. But it is not necessary to imagine this because the encounter between the Great Inquisition and Marxism has in fact taken place; we need only to page through the East European history of this century to come across at least two larger-than-life hybrid figures of the type Marxist-Grand Inquisitor, utopian-grand cynic. Whether this encounter was necessary or was based on a misunderstanding is beside the point. From a histori- cal perspective, the coalescence of Marxist ideology and Grand Inquisition can- not be retracted, even if good reasons could be given to show why the russification of Marxism actually represents a curiosity, namely, the reckless, illegitimate per- version of a theory of liberation into an instrument of the most rigorous oppres- sion. This process can only become understandable from the cynically inverted optics of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor. Only such optics gives a logically ex- plicit model for interpreting the phenomenon: Those who want to rule use the truth in order to lie. Those who deceive the masses in the name of truth --and Marxism undeniably possesses strong elements of truth--risk, at least in theory, no repudiation. However, like the Grand Inquisitor, modern rulers must say to a returned Marx: We will no longer let you come into our midst; we will cite you as our authority, but only on the irrevocable condition that you "never, never" come again! For no matter who came-- "HE" himself or only his "image"--he would inevitably be a troublemaker and we know all too well what happens with such people.
Is the reasoning of the Grand Inquisitor supposed to have revealed a basic con- tradiction between the spirit of "truth" and the spirit of "institutions"? Is it sup- posed to be a universal "law" that in the attempt to make the "truth" into a "state religion," truth must turn itself into its complete opposite? Does not everything speak for the view that the Grand Inquisitor's logic has triumphed, according to which a returned Jesus would be burned on the pyre of the Holy Inquisition, a returned Nietzsche perish in the gas chambers, a returned Marx rot alive in a Siberian labor camp? Is there a law that regulates such cynically tragic in- versions?
The nineteenth century, we have said, is the epoch of the great, realistic the- ories that fix a "down-to-earth" gaze, unconcerned about good and evil, on that Part of the world that is relevant for human beings: history, the state, power, class struggles, ideologies, natural forces, sexuality, the family. All these bodies of
192 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
knowledge are now ordered into a great theoretical arsenal, into the tool em rium of practical interests. "Knowledge is power," says the workers' moverne But to the extent that, on the one side, the instruments are stacked up, on the oth the plans grow. Here the tools, there the designs; here the matter-of-fact, neutr I ized means, there the grandiose, Utopian good ends. Here the facts, there th values. This, in outline, is the self-understanding of modern instrumentalism n pragmatism. With one foot in the area beyond good and evil, one feels around with the other foot for a firm stand in (utopian) morality. Concisely stated: The nineteenth century develops a first form of modern cynical consciousness that links a rigorous cynicism of means with an equally rigid moralism of ends. For as far as the ends were concerned, scarcely anyone risked imagining a real region beyond good and evil-for that would be "nihilism. " Resisting nihilism is the real ideological war of modernity. If fascism and communism struggle somewhere on a common front, it is on the front against "nihilism," which with one voice is at-
tributed to "bourgeois decadence. " Common to both is the resoluteness to oppose
the "nihilistic" trend with an absolute value: Here the people's Utopia, there the
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communist Utopia. Both guarantee a final end that sanctifies every means and
that promises to give meaning to existence. However, where radical cynicism of means comes together with a resolute moralism of ends, there, the last residue of moral feeling for the means dies out. Modern, heavily armed moralism works itself up into an unheard-of destructive whirlwind and drives the hell of good in- tentions to an extreme.
This must not be understood as theoretical deduction. To be sure, we have
tried to sketch a logic of modern political catastrophes, but this attempt is
preceded by the real catastrophes. No thinking on its own could summon up
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enough frivolity and despair to come to such conclusions merely out of a "striving for truth. " In fact, basically no human being would be able to imagine devasta- tions of the magnitude of those experienced if they had not actually happened.
In retrospect, attention is just now being drawn to the intellectual preconditions
of the political calamity.