A large part of the suffering is not healed but interned; see L'Ordre
cannibale
(Paris, 1979).
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
Occultism is the too often humorless and cramped
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
drastic defense of metaphysical sensibilities against the exactions of a materialist backdrop ontology and of a repression of one's own "death" in favor of a falsely enlarged and falsely modest ego: black metaphysics, border crossings between the psychotic and spiritual galaxies, black empiricism beyond empiricism. We can predict that these neomythical tendencies will in- crease. They are, in reality, the things that challenge what is traditionally called enlightenment. Enlightenment must be enlightened about what enlightenment dishes up. Catastrophic processes of forgetting follow enlightenment's trium-
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 349
phant "learning processes" like a shadow. Because enlightenment, with its ir- resistable antimetaphysical thrust, has led to a polemical splitting off of death in the first person, it would today be apposite for it to go into the school of the oppo- nent and to learn what is at stake when living beings experience themselves to be in alliance with "powers" that go about their affairs beyond the narrow and simultaneously puffed-up world-subjugating ego.
Espionage against Nature, Artillery Logic, Political Metallurgy
With metals we are at an advantage in Europe and our metallic arts have risen to the highest level. We were the first to trans-
form iron into steel and copper into brass; we invented the gal- vanization of iron and discovered many other useful sciences, so that our artisans have become teachers to the whole world in noble chemistry and mining.
Gottfred Wilhelm Leibniz, Exhortation to the German People to Better Exercise Their Understanding and Their Language
If in numerous sciences, or better, knowledge disciplines, a latent or open decla- ration of enmity on the part of the knower against the objects has been uncovered, the concepts of conventional epistemology--subject, object--appear in another light. Subject means "the subjugated one"; in other languages, therefore, it is the homonym of Untertan (sujet, subject); in rhetoric, the subject is the topic; in po- lice jargon, the suspect. If this "subject" now rises to the nub of modern epistemol- ogies, that is not merely a word displacement. What is hidden behind it is nothing short of a revolution. Subjectivity strives for sovereignty, and to do this the sub- jugated wants to subjugate whatever it can subjugate. We observe a complete inversion--also with regard to suspicion: The suspect (subject) becomes the one who suspects. The subjugated one subjugates the surrounding world and makes it into the epitome of "data," of given facts for itself--given to whom? The com- manding subject. The data give themselves into its hands without its having to give itself back to them. Out of the subjugated arises the ruler over what is given.
This inversion (in latent form probably relatively old, in manifest form a mod- ern phenomenon) constitutes the a priori of the transcendental polemic. The war of the subjects who make the other, opponent or thing, into an object, produces for the first time the foil for the polemical objectivity of the "scientific," enlighten- ment disciplines. The thing that stands against (gegen) me becomes an object (Gegenstand). Every object-if we take it in itself or an sich- is a potential rebel, a counterego or a means in the struggle against me, just as the ego only became the subject in a philosophical sense, a maker of "subjects," as rebel against what subjugates it. In the will to knowledge, interests are always astir that do not ex- haust themselves in knowledge as such but serve the subjects as weapons against
350 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
the objects. "Objective knowledge" in this sense possesses the character of a weapon. (The concept "weapon" appears to me to have precedence over the con- cept "tool"; therefore, a mere critique of instrumental reason does not sufficiently grasp the domain of the polemical. )
Is all this supposed to hold also for the model sciences of modern rationality, the natural sciences? Can the assertion be defended that these sciences viewed na- ture, their object, primarily in a hostile or a hostilely neutral way? Precisely in the natural sciences, and all the more in biological and physical foundational re- search, a relatively "peaceful" self- understanding seems then as now to predomi- nate. But the appearance is deceiving. To be sure, all sciences also possess a con- templative wing, but they do not fly with it. What calls the sciences to life are the imperatives of praxis -- of competition in production, politics, war. One of the philosophical achievements of ecology is the demonstration that, no matter how they understand themselves, the modern natural sciences, as the fundamental sciences of industrial technology, are caught in a process that, if one weighs the facts, can only be described as a war of exploitation and annihilation of advanced civilization against the biosphere. By the way, it was a German-Jewish philoso- pher, Theodor Lessing (whose influence--if one can speak of such a thing--was felt in the time of the Weimar Republic), who laid the foundations for an
21
ecological-philosophical critique of predatory Western industry.
the superpredator can be followed up into the heights of epistemology -- the gaze of the plunderer who roams through organic as well as inorganic nature. Today, we see more and more how futile all attempts are to once again
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
contemplatively neutralize the results of research into nature, as if they were won in order to prop up a "natural scientific world picture. " The political, economic, and military en- tanglements of the natural sciences are all too clear. They were and are the recon- noitering patrol our civilization, desirous of domination, sent out into the previ- ously closed worlds of natural truths. What these patrols and pioneers of natural research have investigated and invented yields in toto something that threatens the existence of the object of research, nature, as a whole.
Am I speaking merely metaphorically here? Not at all. I want to exemplify the polemical character of natural scientific empiricism with the "object," earth, to which all natural sciences, right up to astronomy, refer, and which remains at the heart of our "interest in nature. " It can be relatively easily demonstrated that and how the "earth sciences" are motivated by polemical-practical interests. The ac- tivities of observing the surface of the earth as well as the spying out of the earth's interior serve, in many cases, political and military interests. For this reason, ge- ography belongs more to the domain of strategy and rulers' science, geology more to the domain of weapon technology.
The first accumulation of geographic knowledge probably takes place in the heads of monarchs, conquerors, and generals -- although they do not have to be the ones who carry out the empirical "research. " As political subjects of power,
The tracks of
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 351
however, they have a prime interest in collecting the geographic knowledge of
others --whether they be hunters, seafarers, merchants, or philosophers. The
unity of merchant, investigator, and spy has long been well known. Right at the
beginning of the European tradition of geography, we find a thought-provoking
episode. It is said of the Milesian philosopher of nature, Anaximander, that
around the sixth century (shortly before the beginning of the Ionian uprising and
before the entry of Greece into the decisive years of the Persian Wars), he con-
structed a "philosophical sculpture" (Nebel): "an iron tablet . . . in which the
entire globe, all seas and rivers were engraved" (Herodotus). The tyrant of Mile-
tus took this model of the earth with him on a visit to the Spartans during which
he wanted to request armed help from the Peloponnesian city-state. "Only the map
could make the Spartans at that time comprehend the magnitude and the means
of the Persian Empire. They learned to see themselves from the outside, became
aware of their tiny size and distanced themselves from the war" (Gerhard Nebel,
Die Geburt der Philosophic [Stuttgart, 1967], pp. 37-38). Even then, in the first
moment, the spark jumped from geography to strategic calculation, and if on this
occasion the philosopher maintains an advantage in knowledge over the strategist,
this relation will soon be reversed. Geographic knowledge will be found with
kings and generals, and hardly at all with philosophers. The travel diaries of the
monarchs of the Middle Ages show how at that time the "political ego" of a sys-
tem, its ruler, had to be literally "in search of his subjects. " In precentralized
times, not all scattered corners of a political realm looked onto an unambiguously
localized sovereign center of power ("capital," residence, absolutist castle a la the
Escorial, the Louvre, Versailles). As the most mobile component of the system,
the sovereign had to assert his power through his presence in various places. Only
with the later construction of systems of representation with administrative offices
and police forces does a stationary central power become possible that makes the
political realm, the state's "territory," transparent for the view and measures of
22
administration.
geographic, ethnographic, and demographic details can unite into a store of knowledge. Modern geography, finally, under the star of imperialism (discovery, conquest, missionary intervention, colonization, world trade) draws general in- terest from within the educational strata of capitalist states to itself. It continues the old strategic perspective, only now all the more intensively. For the rest, it is often only the accident of war that founds a new epistemic interest. For lack of usable preliminary work of their own, the U. S. Marines, before the landing of American troops in North Africa, had to ask the civilian population for photos, holiday films, and other information about the characteristics of the coast at the 23
Military-political interest founds a point of focus, around which
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
In the age of strategic satellites and military information
probable landing site.
systems, such archaic methods have become superfluous.
The principal means of spying out the earth's interior is metallurgy. In the "womb of the earth" rest the metals, often doubly inaccessible due to the depth
352 D BLACK EMPIRICISM
of their location and complicated bonding to rock. Behind the discovery, process- ing, and distribution of these difficult materials, a truly enormous pressure of in- terest must be present, as well as an exceptional use value that makes the effort of processing them worthwhile. Metallurgy is the technically central science in the history of war. With bronze and iron, the hot phase of cultural evolution as well as the escalation of the art of weapons and war begins. With the advent of the age of artillery finally, the latter reaches its ultimate sophistication. All deci- sive types of modern weaponry and military systems --tank divisions, air force, rocket bases, naval systems, etc. --are basically nothing more than the gigantic outgrowths of the way in which artillery makes use of metals and explosives:
24
swimming, flying, motorized artillery systems.
edge of metals can demonstrate the original connection between this central earth science and polemics. Knowledge of nature and of war are connected through a pragmatic chain of interests. Before iron weapons can be raised against an enemy, a campaign against the earth's crust must have taken place, a many-pronged, laborious, and dangerous process. Deposits must be dug up, the ore broken up into pieces; the masses are transported to the smelting plant where they are trans- formed through the violence of fire into liquid; the substances are separated and are hardened with new amalgams, mixtures, and coolings; they are heated red-hot once more, forged, formed, polished. Only the will to war is able to subject the natural substances to such transformations with such violence as the technology of smelting and forging requires. In metallurgy, a humanity thinking of war opens up its grand offensive against the given structures of matter. What it inflicts on the metals is nothing other than an anticipation of what it will inflict on the enemy with the metals. If the "Iron Age" (Ovid) begins with the emergence of war-- represented in the sword and the spear, the metallic weapons of striking and stabbing --the epoch before the emergence of gunpowder weapons is the Golden Age of war. With artillery, something like a second discovery of fire takes place in civilization. However, it is not the Promethean sunfire of long ago but a mod- ern volcanic underworld fire. Corresponding roughly to the invention of artillery is the development of the political centralized power and the spatial perspective at the beginning of modern times. For the first time, it allows the opponent to be "mastered" from a distance. Herein lies its functional relation to modern adminis- tration and surveillance. The shell corresponds to the sovereign's gaze and to the
25
Since the Industrial Revolution, which emanated from the English mining dis- tricts, the metallization of society again assumes new dimensions. At the same time, the spying out of the earth's interior proceeds with intermittent leaps. From now on, gigantic mines arise that eat into the blackest depths of the planet's bowels. Miners become the ghostly army of industrial civilization --the exploited exploiters. The laborers of the smelteries were advanced to the elite division of the capitalist attack against the earth's "miserly" crust. In the end, the modern
decisions of a centralized administration.
A political theory of the knowl-
1BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 353
? Illuminating artillery, in Felix Auerbach, Die Physik im Kriege, 3rd ed. (Jena, 1916).
form of economy capitalizes all mineral deposits, and with millions of breaches, borings, and extractions, it pushes on with the mineralogical war against the earth's crust in order to burn the extracted deposits or to work them into tools and weapon systems. Every day, industrial civilizations decide on death sentences against millions upon millions of living beings and millions of tons of substances. In these decisions, the predatory relation of domination of Western cultures to the earth is perfected.
We must take care not to view today's nuclear technology as exceptional. It is, in reality, nothing more than the consistent continuation of the mineralogical- metallurgical attack on the given structures of matter, the purest intensification of polemical theory. Here, there is no discontinuity. The transcendental- polemical framework of our technology comprises the bronze sword just as much as the neutron bomb. At most, the transition from the metal age to the nuclear age signifies a new technological stage within the polemical structure and a new order of magnitude in the offensive means of self-preservation. In order to keep up their war against the Other, modern competition egos and research egos con- quered the previously most secret structural forms and energy sources of matter. In fact, in going
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
beyond the metallurgical explosion of natural substances (ore, etc. ), they even overstepped the threshold of the natural structures of substances
354 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
in order to reach the point where the previously most puzzling cosmic powers were bound. But also on the nuclear level, the mistreatment of matter merely an- ticipates the mistreatment of the enemy. It projects the pressure for enmity be- tween the rival societies (by way of the "relatively autonomous" intermediate step of natural science) onto radioactive matter. What we are prepared to inflict on the enemy if need be sets the standard for which tools of annihilation are to be wrung from nature. What we have intended for the enemy--large-scale blanket annihilation through incineration, contamination, atomization--has to be first in- flicted on the weapon. It is basically only our message to our opponents; it com- municates what we intend to do to them. The weapon is therefore the enemy's proxy in one's own arsenal. Those who forge weapons make it clear to their ene- mies that they will treat them just as mercilessly as they treat the club, the anvil, the grenade, and the warhead. The weapon is already the maltreated opponent; it is the thing-for-you. Those who arm are already at war. This war takes place de facto continually in intervals of hot and cold phases, the latter being misnamed peace. Seen in the polemical cycle, peace means a period of arming, displacement of hostilities onto the metals; war means, accordingly, the implementation and consumption of arms products, the realization of the weapons on the opponent.
On the highest level of polemical technology, our process of enlightenment reaches the point where it takes leave of a thousand-year-old dualistic tradition of metaphysics: The antagonism between res cogitans and res extensa in the cybernetic age becomes altogether invalid. To the extent that the res (substance) that thinks actually can be represented and produced as machine, the antagonism toward the res that exists in space (extension) disappears. In the meantime, there are modern artillery systems that in strategic jargon are called "intelligent muni- tions" or "smart missiles," that is, rockets that perform classic thought functions (perception, decision making) in flight and behave "subjectively" toward the enemy target. The existence of these systems signifies a metaphysical statutory declaration of our civilization: We have, in fact, become in large part subjects who think of themselves as "thinking things," and it is these thinking things that exchange blows in modern warfare. The difference between the hero and his weapon disappears; the megalomaniac self-preservation egos of our culture have externalized their own being as weapon. If, in the end, the self-sacrificing kami- kaze pilots take over the function of the guiding system (res cogitans) in persona, then, in the case of the most advanced weapons of the present day, this heroic subjectivity has become an electronic subjectivity: The manned dive- bomber still presupposed a pilot who consciously took his inevitable death upon himself and demonstrated an ability to die peculiarly reminiscent of that quality described in ancient philosophy. In intelligent munition, this human factor is fully eliminated. A further degeneration of metaphysics to paranoia has come about; "live and let die" is accordingly not only the secret agent's motto but also the principle of mod- ern warfare based on artillery and its extensions. With the "thinking missile," we
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 355
16
reach the final station of the modern displacement of the subject because what
is called subject in modern times is, in fact, that self-preservation ego that with- draws step by step from the living, to the summit of paranoia. Withdrawal, dis- tancing, self-displacement are the driving forces of this kind of subjectivity. Ar- tillery is only one of its manifestations and, especially in the form of electronic, intelligent, atomic munition, is the ultimate outgrowth of self-assertion and world domination from a distance. The modern long-range ego wants to preserve itself without recognizing itself in its own weapon. It must thus be split off from it as far as possible. Intelligent munition satisfies this need. Since its invention, the schizoid structure (the subject in the form of the state and the polemical self- preservation ego) approaches its consummation. The next great war foresees only schizophrenics and machines as combatants. Decisive homunculi in the state, ghostly split administrators of destructive forces, will press the decisive buttons "if it has to be," and heroic robots as well as thinking hell-machines will fall on each other--the experimentum mundi is at an end; humanity was a mistake. En- lightenment can only summarize: Humanity cannot be enlightened because it it- self was the false premise of enlightenment. Humanity does not come up to scratch. It carries within itself the obscuring principle of dissimulation (displace- ment), and where its ego appears there cannot shine what was promised by all enlightenments: the light of reason.
Notes
1. Bernard Law Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, Weltgeschichte der Schlachten und Kriegs- ziige, vol. 1 (Munich, 1975), p. 17. See also his sketch of the tactics warriors use to feel each other out: "A commander must be able to think himself into his adversary or at least try to do that. For this reason, during the war against Hitler, I always had a photo of my adversary in my command vehi- cle. In the desert and then again in Normandy, Rommel was my adversary. I
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
repeatedly studied his face and tried to imagine how he would react to the movements I wanted to implement. Strangely enough, this proved to be useful. "
2. This rather offended Stieber. His memoirs contain a good share of self-justification, but also a dose of revenge against the enemies who had "branded [his] character as 'illiberal, inhuman, even cynical' "; Stieber, Spion des Kanzlers, p. 176. 3. See, by contrast, the lucid polemic of Julien Benda in La trahison des clercs (1927).
4. Here I refrain from making the empirically important differentiations of the various concepts and functions of "intelligence," "research," "science," "philosophy," "critique. " Our reflections belong not to the sociology of intelligence but to the forefront of a (polemical) epistemology.
5. Stieber gathered incriminating evidence that played a role in the Cologne Communist trail. 6. Max Gunzenhauser, Geschichte des geheimen Nachrichtendienstes (Frankfurt, 1968), p. 11. 7. They thereby continually anticipate the free- style ethics of the emergency situation ("Them
or us"); for them, the war is never over.
8. Giinther Nollau, Wie sicker ist die Bundesrepublikl (Munich, 1976), p. 9.
9. Stieber mentions several times that Bismarck said to him, "You're seeing ghosts! "
10. From this comes the following hypothesis: Multiparty systems will be less endangered by par- anoia than one-party systems.
11. "Law as Ideology"; critique finds cores of violence in some phenomena that are generally per-
356 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
ceived under the fiction of freedom: in the wage-labor contract, in the marriage contract, in the "social contract" as such. 12. This is the prominent theme in the writings of the long-lost pupil of Freud, Otto Gross, finally accessible again in the collection entitled Von geschlechtlicher Not zur sozialen Katastrophe, with an appendix by Franz Jung, ed. Kurt Kreiler (Frankfurt, 1980), pp. 27ff. See also in particular, Uber Konflikt und Beziehung, pp. 7Iff.
13. Of course, a medical typology could be imagined that evaluates these aspects very differently: integrative medicine, which does not treat the sickness as the patient's enemy; combative medicine, which behaves toward the sickness exclusively as an adversary.
14. Does a wastepaper basket not play a role at the beginning of the Dreyfus affair?
15. Attali maintains, in continuing Foucault's analyses, that a good deal of the more recent social history of medicine, particularly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is dominated not by doc- tors but by the police.
A large part of the suffering is not healed but interned; see L'Ordre cannibale (Paris, 1979).
16. In the nihilism discussion, which likes to employ a strident vocabulary, one speaks rather of the "collapse," the "fall" of metaphysics. I think these pictures are not apposite, at least not any longer. Metaphysical systems do not "fall," but fade, seep away, stagnate, become boring, old hat, unimpor- tant, and improbable.
17. On this point there are fascinating preliminary reflections by the chief of police during the Wilhelminian period, Wilhelm Stieber. He already consciously practiced police town-hygiene, e. g. , in prostitution and dealing in stolen goods. 18. See on this point the discussions of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor and Heidegger's Anyone, chapter 7.
19. The choice can only be between two types of beyond: an empty one (nihilism) and a full one (spiritualism).
20. And repeatedly, when we think that we have become wise in a new way, through "new ex- periences", we discover that kynical wisdom was there before us. Diogenes Laertius (vol. VI, p. 7) reports of the first kynic, Antisthenes: "To the question as to what one had to learn before all else he replied: To guard against unlearning.
21. Theodor Lessing, Untergang derErde am Geist (Europa und Asien) (Hannover, 1924), a sum- mary of two of his earlier books: Europa und Asien (1914) and Die verfluchte Kultur (1921). See in particular chapter 11, "Der sterbende Pan. " That this book, significant in spite of all its peculiarities, was so crudely misunderstood as "irrationalist" is a part of the traumatic history of Lessing's influence.
22. Suggestions for a history of the political eye can be found in Erik Grawert-May, Zur Geschichte von Polizei- und Liebeskunst. Versuch einer anderen Geschichte des Auges (Tubingen, 1980).
23. This anecdote belongs to the prehistory of the emergence of the modern U. S. secret service.
24. De re metallica (Georg Agricola the Elder, 1556) would be a good title for a social history and a history of science of the metallic civilizations (res publico: the state; res metallica: war).
25. Many stimulating connections between ballistics, the theory of administration, diplomacy, the courier system (predecessor of the postal service), and printing come to mind: telecausal functions that form a new ego.
26. [Verstellung can be rendered as either "displacement" or "dissimulation. " The ambiguity is in- terpretatively significant, here as in psychoanalytic literature. -Trans. ]
Chapter 11
Transcendental Polemic: Heraclitian Meditations
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
War is the father of all things.
Heraclitus
With the following reflections I want to effect a kind of axis rotation within the critical pragmatism that today predominates in epsitemology (C. S. Peirce, J. Habermas, K. O. Apel). If it was the achievement of this pragmatic theory of knowledge to have presented the connections between knowledge and interest, theory and praxis from first principles, plausibly and without metaphysical mort- gages, it is nonetheless infected, I think, with the weakness of a concept of praxis that is too schematic. The preceding reflections may have made it clear why we cannot be satisfied with an epistemology that, on the one hand, assumes only an a priori interest of the type labor, and on the other, a second interest of the type communication (interaction). This is because the polemical-strategic dimension worked out here (just as the diametrically opposed dimension of the erotic and the reconciliatory interest) can at most be implicitly "co-reflected" in the attempt to ground pragmatism. This avenges itself through a deficit of realism and con- creteness. The transcendental polemic (as well as eroticism, which I do not pres- ent in this book) inserts additional dimensions into the network of "aphoristic" epistemically guiding and forming interests. In war we encounter a combination of motives of labor and interaction that cannot at all be comprehended logically with the schematism employed until now. I maintain that polemical-strategic ac- tion and thinking, which are treated by the aforementioned authors only as an ad- dendum and in passing, in fact forms a dimension that encompasses not only the action of labor and governing but also communicative action. This is not taken sufficiently into account by either the older or the more recent Critical Theory. Neither a critique of instrumental reason nor a critique of functionalist reason dis-
357
358 ? TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS
? "Just as I have completed my book, which is meant to finish him off scientifically, he really dies! " Meggendorfer Blatter, 1916.
closes the connection between strategy and cynicism that we here present as the philosophical signature of modernity. Labor and interaction are from the very beginning crisscrossed by war and eros, enmities and reconciliations, decimations and creations. Whatever is sup- posed to be recognized in the interest of labor and interaction, from the very start and always, receives a "theory form" that is also stamped by the polemical or the erotic. What kind of "objectivity" is chosen is emphatically no innocent alterna- tive. It also makes a categorical difference which form of precision is decided on:
TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS ? 359
the precision of the polemicist or that of the lover.
1If that is really an a priori
alternative, there must be a twofold science of all things (and not one basically neutral theory that then, secondarily, as we say, can be used for good or evil pur- poses). Whereas pragmatism formally assumes a homogeneous "community of researchers," the transcendental-polemical view allows us to examine the "war of the researchers" as the condition of that which they work out as truths. Thus, re- search is not so much a means for the neutral illumination of reality as an arms race in theoretical forms. The insights then appear more as weapons than as in- tellectual instruments at the service of labor and communicative understanding, and taken in their aggregate, they constitute not an intellectual treasure or ency- clopedia but an arsenal, a munitions depot (of intelligent cartridges). If we wanted to remain content with a priori interests such as "labor" and "interaction," we would have to refrain from interrogating this "labor" and this "interaction" as to which struggle they serve and which reconciliations they facilitate: in other words, whether the researcher ego confronts the "object" from the stance of generalization, distancing, and domination or from that of individualization, closeness, and surrender. From this viewpoint, the distinction between the "Two
2Cultures" once again makes sense. In the "First Culture" (which predominates),
we observe a primacy of method, of procedure, of the research process over the objects. Here, only that can be an object that falls into the domain covered by the methods and models. If we attribute everything of a methodological nature to the subject, we can speak of a type of knowledge that issues from an elevation of the knower over what is known: the primacy of the subject (that this, curiously enough, holds for the exact and "objective," or better, objectivistic disciplines
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
il- lustrates the connection between determination of the object [Objektfeststellung] and the displacement [dissimulation] of the subject [Subjektverstellung]). This elevation is the price of "objectivity. " At the same time, it is procured at the cost of a methodological constriction or standardization of what the subject is allowed or not allowed to "know. " The idea that all real sciences in the end will only have a correct theory as a problem presupposes at the same time the expectation that the so-called community of researchers in the long run will grow together into an homogeneous army of subjects who will all be stamped by the same methodo- logical dis-placement (dissimulation) with regard to the "things. " Only when the subjects are epistemologically standardized (same "interest," same concepts, same methods) do the statements about the objects coagulate into their final and correct shape (in the sense of these presuppositions). The one cannot be had with- out the other. Where several hypotheses still stand beside one another, a weak- ness on the side of the subject is uncovered--and this subjective weakness gives the things a chance to reveal themselves in their multiple meanings. Stated to the point: The weaker our methods, the better it is for the "things. " As long as there is a multitude of "interpretations," the things are safe from the delusion of the knowers that they had fixed the objects-as known-once and for all. As long as
360 ? TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS
the things are being "interpreted," the memory is also kept alive that the things are also something an sich (in themselves) that has nothing to do with their being known by us.
If we follow this thought to its extreme, we come to the diametrically opposed
pole of forms of knowledge. Here, what Adorno called the "precedence of the
object" holds. If, with the primary of the subject, the agonistic theory must neces-
sarily arise, then, from a way of treating things that acknowledges the precedence
of objects, something comes forth that may bear the name erotic theory. Where
eros is at play, there, and only there, does the "Second Culture" live, and where
it is alive, it assumes the form of an art rather than a technique. Artists and eroti-
cists live under the impression that the things want something from them rather
than that they want something from the things, and that it is the things that entan-
gle them in the adventure of experience. They go to the things, surrender them-
selves to their impression, and as true researchers, feel themselves under their
3spell. For artists and eroticists, the things are the river into which, according to
Heraclitus, they cannot enter twice because the things, although they are the same things, are new in every moment, having flowed further into a new relationship. If love is new every morning, the objects of love, along with it, are also new. In them there is nothing "known," at most familiar. With them, there is no "objec- tivity," only intimacy. If the knower approaches them, it is not as master researcher ("Forsch-Herr") but as neighbor, friend, as someone who has been "drawn in. " For lovers, the things are beautiful, and they know that the "relation- ship" is over when, one day, everything looks as if it had always been the same: constant, everyday, identical, predictable. Where the sense for beauty ceases, war, indifference [Gleich-Giiltigkeit, literally, equal validity;-Trans. ] or death begins. Philosophers have rightly taught that the aesthetic dimension is integral for the truth content of realizations. This refers of course to realizations that have submitted themselves to the precedence of the object. Enlightenment, however, has taught us to mistrust such insights deeply. For enlightenment, if it does not continually correct itself against erotic (aesthetic) experience, the objects are the quintessence of that to which we should not surrender ourselves trustingly be- cause both, trust and surrender, are stances that the compulsions of life and en- lightened realism force out of us. Precedence of the objects would mean to be forced to live with a power over us, and because we, quasi-automatically, identify everything that is above us with that which oppresses us, from the viewpoint of this unenlightened enlightenment, there can be, on the contrary, only a stance or polemical distance. Nevertheless, there is another kind of precedence that is not based on subjugation: The precedence the object enjoys in sympathetic under- standing does not demand that we reconcile ourselves to an inferiority and an alienated position. Its prototype is love. The ability to concede the object a prece- dence would be tantamount to the ability to live and let live (instead of live and let die), and indeed, as an ultimate consequence, also to die and let live (instead
TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS ? 361
of following the impulse to pull everything down into death with us). Only through eros do we become capable of conceding the "object" a precedence. And
4Polemic against the Id, or: Think the Devil Where Id was, Ego should become.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Sigmund Freud
The sketches of the cardinal cynicisms contain the material for a theory of dia- logue and interaction that encompasses the polemical. They describe positions and oppositions in military, political, sexual, medical, religious, and theoretical consciousness that grate against the conventional concept of ideology. In these oppositions, it is not true and false consciousnesses that are counterposed; rather, combative consciousnesses that, on the basis of differing given stances toward the world and toward life situations, find themselves in unavoidable antagonisms with one another. If in the description of kynical and cynical positions, with their reflections and counterreflections, the notion of "stages" being set for an offensive or counteroffensive recurred, it referred to stages for conflict, i. e. , theaters of the noisy and quiet passages of arms of an ineluctably polemical consciousness.
How does a stage arise? Certainly not simply through an antagonism of two "principles. " A dualism would be initially nothing more than a "thought thing," and as such it would have no dramatic force. The dualism would be an sich (in itself) harmless or uninteresting if it were not staged in reality itself. Wherever a dualism emerges, we thus, as a rule, come up against an enmity, a demarcation between Us and Them, and up against the establishing of the predominance of one principle over the opposing principle: Above --Below, Good --Evil, Ego- Id. With this, a real struggle and a real stage arise. On this stage, a dominant in- tellectual position enters first, a nomos-doctrine, an idealism, a "high" and affir- mative theory that presents itself as respectable, stern, and inspired, as if it had been won from higher sources. This is inevitably answered, in the second scene, by a realistic (kynical) antithesis that polemically counterposes the viewpoints and experiences of the underdog, the so-called evil position that is shoved into the id [Es, literally, it; -- Trans. ] (matter). In kynicism, therefore, an ego appears that takes it on itself to be that which the nomos-idealists prohibit, exclude, and despise. With this, kynicism from the plebeian perspective bursts the value sys- tem installed from above without fully ceasing to pay regard to it. This also gives kynicism its obviously aggressive and culturally critical aspect. With kynicism, an acidic element penetrates into culture-the first decomposition of the esprit de serieux with which whatever wants to rule has always surrounded itself. At the same time, it appears to those on top as something sinister and dirty, and the more hegemonic consciousness tries to withdraw to pure heights, the more subver- even if I cease to be, eros wills that Something remain.
362 ? TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS
sively and demonically does the kynical refusal appear on its horizon. From then on, it must seem disgusting that this low, mere It stands up for itself and places an ego of its own sort against my own ego. This anti-ego that giggles forth out of the kynical resistance against the metaphysical idealism of master theories probably also constitutes the core of what our tradition calls the diabolical. The displacement of the concept, from "kynicism" to "cynicism" and its metaphysics, provoked by Christianity (as the mentality of the nihilists or the devotees of the Devil) is, to be sure, no mere accident. For if the metaphysical ego identifies itself with the Above and the Good, then the fact that in the Id- Below-Evil an ego also is astir overcomes it like a shock. "It" obviously is no longer content to be merely mute, low, lethargic matter. That this evil id could also be something for itself-- that is the real metaphysical scandal that, since the late Middle Ages, has been discussed in the form of innumerable analyses of the Devil. Nothing seems to du- alistic consciousness (i. e. , bifurcated and identified with the better half) to be so simultaneously agonizing and fascinating than the presentiment that in the so- called evil and low regions, too, there could live a potent, ready-witted self- consciousness. When Plato declares Diogenes to be raving mad, this betrays, be- sides contempt, a measure of self- protection. This can be regarded as relatively harmless, however, since Diogenes, as reported in anecdotes, knew how to turn the tables so that in the end it was not quite clear who the real crazy was. In Chris- tianity, the antagonism was intensified much more dramatically. Christian con- sciousness, which understood itself to be endowed with the absolute truth through revelation, had to conjure up a non-Christian ego in the image of the Anti- Christ--and thereby simultaneously became caught up in a permanent apprehen- sion that "evil" could even be active within ourselves, quaerens quern devoret (seeking whom it will devour) (1 Peter 5).
Here we have to refer again to Faust, the Devil, and the cynicism of Satan. The story of Doctor Faustus can be understood as a document for the unsettling of the older metaphysical dualism through the new empiricism (whereby under empiricism sexual experience is also included). Art between the Middle Ages and modern times experiments with the possibility of an evil subjectivity "also for us"--and in didactic, morally embellished narratives itself tries out how it would be to live in such an "evil" skin --and what kind of exciting experiences that would bring. I have already described this with the example of the Goethean pact with the Devil. Faust explores the wide world ("so that you, set loose, free / experience what life is") as the Devil's partner, and thus as a probationary devil. Only to the Devil does the world of experience stand open without restriction. Like Goethe, folk literature also does not neglect to describe explicitly the acquaintance of the probationary devil (Faust) with sexual evil:
As Doctor Faustus saw that the years of his promise came day by day to an end, he went about leading a slovenly and
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
epicurean life, and
TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS D 363
called upon seven demonic succubas all of whom he slept with. . . . For he traveled into many kingdoms with his spirit so that he could see all womanly shapes. Of whom he succeeded with two Dutch women, a Hungarian, an Englishwoman, two Swabians, and one Frankish woman, who were paragons of the land. With these demonic women he prac- ticed unchasteness to the end of his life. (Deutsche Volksbilcher, ed. C. O. Conrady [Hamburg, 1968], p. 133) After this, there can be no doubt that "being evil," or the slovenly and epicu- rean life (which, of course, also means "kynical living") pays off to the extent that we can experience what we long since wanted to experience but did not dare. Who can so easily let themselves go to the Devil? The folktale of Doctor Faustus ex- plores, almost uncensored, the lust to try out evil once for oneself. This is a metaphysically dramatic process, because only in this way, at first virtually and then actually, does the integration of the other side, or in other words, the end
5ofdualism,becomepossible. Manynarrativeworksofearlymoderntimesoper-
ate according to this moral schema. The folktale allows itself the exciting experi- ment of lending an ego like our own to what is "authentically" evil. It takes the test jump of fantasy into the Devil's ego. Of course, these stories still have to end badly, and the probationary devil, who allowed himself everything that Christians should not do (in the magical, culinary, sexual, tourist, and theoretical domains) in the end has to be punished as an example. "Thus, whoever does evil, dies. " A classically cynical passage can be found in the Faust book, where the Devil makes a maliciously joyful, satirical speech to the poor doctor before the evil spirits come to tear him apart:
Therefore, my good Faust, it is not good to eat cherries with great men and the Devil; they throw the stems in one's face, as you now see. For this reason you probably would have done well to have gone far away; that would have been good against the shooting. But your arrogant pony kicked you. . . .
. . . Look, you were a beautifully made creature, but the roses, as long as they are carried in the hand and smelled, do not last. Those whose bread you have eaten, their song you must also sing. If you post- pone things until Good Friday, it will soon be Easter. What you have promised has not happened without cause; a roasted sausage has two ends; you cannot walk well on the Devil's ice. You have had an evil way, and evil ways do not let evil ways alone, just as the cat does not stop chasing mice. To do something heavy-handedly causes pitting; be- cause the spoon is new, the cook uses it; afterward, when it gets old,
he shits on it, then finishes eating with it. Is it not so with you? You who were a new cooking spoon of the Devil. . . . So let now my teaching and reminder go to your heart, which for all that is thoroughly doomed. You should not have become so well acquainted with the
364 ? TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS
Devil, especially because, as well as being God's ape, he is a liar and murderer. . . . To put up the Devil requires a clever innkeeper. There is more to dancing than a pair of red shoes. If you had had God in mind and had been satisfied with the talents given to you, you would not have danced to this tune, and you should not have so easily bent to the Devil's will and believed; for whoever believes easily is soon de- ceived.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
drastic defense of metaphysical sensibilities against the exactions of a materialist backdrop ontology and of a repression of one's own "death" in favor of a falsely enlarged and falsely modest ego: black metaphysics, border crossings between the psychotic and spiritual galaxies, black empiricism beyond empiricism. We can predict that these neomythical tendencies will in- crease. They are, in reality, the things that challenge what is traditionally called enlightenment. Enlightenment must be enlightened about what enlightenment dishes up. Catastrophic processes of forgetting follow enlightenment's trium-
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 349
phant "learning processes" like a shadow. Because enlightenment, with its ir- resistable antimetaphysical thrust, has led to a polemical splitting off of death in the first person, it would today be apposite for it to go into the school of the oppo- nent and to learn what is at stake when living beings experience themselves to be in alliance with "powers" that go about their affairs beyond the narrow and simultaneously puffed-up world-subjugating ego.
Espionage against Nature, Artillery Logic, Political Metallurgy
With metals we are at an advantage in Europe and our metallic arts have risen to the highest level. We were the first to trans-
form iron into steel and copper into brass; we invented the gal- vanization of iron and discovered many other useful sciences, so that our artisans have become teachers to the whole world in noble chemistry and mining.
Gottfred Wilhelm Leibniz, Exhortation to the German People to Better Exercise Their Understanding and Their Language
If in numerous sciences, or better, knowledge disciplines, a latent or open decla- ration of enmity on the part of the knower against the objects has been uncovered, the concepts of conventional epistemology--subject, object--appear in another light. Subject means "the subjugated one"; in other languages, therefore, it is the homonym of Untertan (sujet, subject); in rhetoric, the subject is the topic; in po- lice jargon, the suspect. If this "subject" now rises to the nub of modern epistemol- ogies, that is not merely a word displacement. What is hidden behind it is nothing short of a revolution. Subjectivity strives for sovereignty, and to do this the sub- jugated wants to subjugate whatever it can subjugate. We observe a complete inversion--also with regard to suspicion: The suspect (subject) becomes the one who suspects. The subjugated one subjugates the surrounding world and makes it into the epitome of "data," of given facts for itself--given to whom? The com- manding subject. The data give themselves into its hands without its having to give itself back to them. Out of the subjugated arises the ruler over what is given.
This inversion (in latent form probably relatively old, in manifest form a mod- ern phenomenon) constitutes the a priori of the transcendental polemic. The war of the subjects who make the other, opponent or thing, into an object, produces for the first time the foil for the polemical objectivity of the "scientific," enlighten- ment disciplines. The thing that stands against (gegen) me becomes an object (Gegenstand). Every object-if we take it in itself or an sich- is a potential rebel, a counterego or a means in the struggle against me, just as the ego only became the subject in a philosophical sense, a maker of "subjects," as rebel against what subjugates it. In the will to knowledge, interests are always astir that do not ex- haust themselves in knowledge as such but serve the subjects as weapons against
350 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
the objects. "Objective knowledge" in this sense possesses the character of a weapon. (The concept "weapon" appears to me to have precedence over the con- cept "tool"; therefore, a mere critique of instrumental reason does not sufficiently grasp the domain of the polemical. )
Is all this supposed to hold also for the model sciences of modern rationality, the natural sciences? Can the assertion be defended that these sciences viewed na- ture, their object, primarily in a hostile or a hostilely neutral way? Precisely in the natural sciences, and all the more in biological and physical foundational re- search, a relatively "peaceful" self- understanding seems then as now to predomi- nate. But the appearance is deceiving. To be sure, all sciences also possess a con- templative wing, but they do not fly with it. What calls the sciences to life are the imperatives of praxis -- of competition in production, politics, war. One of the philosophical achievements of ecology is the demonstration that, no matter how they understand themselves, the modern natural sciences, as the fundamental sciences of industrial technology, are caught in a process that, if one weighs the facts, can only be described as a war of exploitation and annihilation of advanced civilization against the biosphere. By the way, it was a German-Jewish philoso- pher, Theodor Lessing (whose influence--if one can speak of such a thing--was felt in the time of the Weimar Republic), who laid the foundations for an
21
ecological-philosophical critique of predatory Western industry.
the superpredator can be followed up into the heights of epistemology -- the gaze of the plunderer who roams through organic as well as inorganic nature. Today, we see more and more how futile all attempts are to once again
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
contemplatively neutralize the results of research into nature, as if they were won in order to prop up a "natural scientific world picture. " The political, economic, and military en- tanglements of the natural sciences are all too clear. They were and are the recon- noitering patrol our civilization, desirous of domination, sent out into the previ- ously closed worlds of natural truths. What these patrols and pioneers of natural research have investigated and invented yields in toto something that threatens the existence of the object of research, nature, as a whole.
Am I speaking merely metaphorically here? Not at all. I want to exemplify the polemical character of natural scientific empiricism with the "object," earth, to which all natural sciences, right up to astronomy, refer, and which remains at the heart of our "interest in nature. " It can be relatively easily demonstrated that and how the "earth sciences" are motivated by polemical-practical interests. The ac- tivities of observing the surface of the earth as well as the spying out of the earth's interior serve, in many cases, political and military interests. For this reason, ge- ography belongs more to the domain of strategy and rulers' science, geology more to the domain of weapon technology.
The first accumulation of geographic knowledge probably takes place in the heads of monarchs, conquerors, and generals -- although they do not have to be the ones who carry out the empirical "research. " As political subjects of power,
The tracks of
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 351
however, they have a prime interest in collecting the geographic knowledge of
others --whether they be hunters, seafarers, merchants, or philosophers. The
unity of merchant, investigator, and spy has long been well known. Right at the
beginning of the European tradition of geography, we find a thought-provoking
episode. It is said of the Milesian philosopher of nature, Anaximander, that
around the sixth century (shortly before the beginning of the Ionian uprising and
before the entry of Greece into the decisive years of the Persian Wars), he con-
structed a "philosophical sculpture" (Nebel): "an iron tablet . . . in which the
entire globe, all seas and rivers were engraved" (Herodotus). The tyrant of Mile-
tus took this model of the earth with him on a visit to the Spartans during which
he wanted to request armed help from the Peloponnesian city-state. "Only the map
could make the Spartans at that time comprehend the magnitude and the means
of the Persian Empire. They learned to see themselves from the outside, became
aware of their tiny size and distanced themselves from the war" (Gerhard Nebel,
Die Geburt der Philosophic [Stuttgart, 1967], pp. 37-38). Even then, in the first
moment, the spark jumped from geography to strategic calculation, and if on this
occasion the philosopher maintains an advantage in knowledge over the strategist,
this relation will soon be reversed. Geographic knowledge will be found with
kings and generals, and hardly at all with philosophers. The travel diaries of the
monarchs of the Middle Ages show how at that time the "political ego" of a sys-
tem, its ruler, had to be literally "in search of his subjects. " In precentralized
times, not all scattered corners of a political realm looked onto an unambiguously
localized sovereign center of power ("capital," residence, absolutist castle a la the
Escorial, the Louvre, Versailles). As the most mobile component of the system,
the sovereign had to assert his power through his presence in various places. Only
with the later construction of systems of representation with administrative offices
and police forces does a stationary central power become possible that makes the
political realm, the state's "territory," transparent for the view and measures of
22
administration.
geographic, ethnographic, and demographic details can unite into a store of knowledge. Modern geography, finally, under the star of imperialism (discovery, conquest, missionary intervention, colonization, world trade) draws general in- terest from within the educational strata of capitalist states to itself. It continues the old strategic perspective, only now all the more intensively. For the rest, it is often only the accident of war that founds a new epistemic interest. For lack of usable preliminary work of their own, the U. S. Marines, before the landing of American troops in North Africa, had to ask the civilian population for photos, holiday films, and other information about the characteristics of the coast at the 23
Military-political interest founds a point of focus, around which
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
In the age of strategic satellites and military information
probable landing site.
systems, such archaic methods have become superfluous.
The principal means of spying out the earth's interior is metallurgy. In the "womb of the earth" rest the metals, often doubly inaccessible due to the depth
352 D BLACK EMPIRICISM
of their location and complicated bonding to rock. Behind the discovery, process- ing, and distribution of these difficult materials, a truly enormous pressure of in- terest must be present, as well as an exceptional use value that makes the effort of processing them worthwhile. Metallurgy is the technically central science in the history of war. With bronze and iron, the hot phase of cultural evolution as well as the escalation of the art of weapons and war begins. With the advent of the age of artillery finally, the latter reaches its ultimate sophistication. All deci- sive types of modern weaponry and military systems --tank divisions, air force, rocket bases, naval systems, etc. --are basically nothing more than the gigantic outgrowths of the way in which artillery makes use of metals and explosives:
24
swimming, flying, motorized artillery systems.
edge of metals can demonstrate the original connection between this central earth science and polemics. Knowledge of nature and of war are connected through a pragmatic chain of interests. Before iron weapons can be raised against an enemy, a campaign against the earth's crust must have taken place, a many-pronged, laborious, and dangerous process. Deposits must be dug up, the ore broken up into pieces; the masses are transported to the smelting plant where they are trans- formed through the violence of fire into liquid; the substances are separated and are hardened with new amalgams, mixtures, and coolings; they are heated red-hot once more, forged, formed, polished. Only the will to war is able to subject the natural substances to such transformations with such violence as the technology of smelting and forging requires. In metallurgy, a humanity thinking of war opens up its grand offensive against the given structures of matter. What it inflicts on the metals is nothing other than an anticipation of what it will inflict on the enemy with the metals. If the "Iron Age" (Ovid) begins with the emergence of war-- represented in the sword and the spear, the metallic weapons of striking and stabbing --the epoch before the emergence of gunpowder weapons is the Golden Age of war. With artillery, something like a second discovery of fire takes place in civilization. However, it is not the Promethean sunfire of long ago but a mod- ern volcanic underworld fire. Corresponding roughly to the invention of artillery is the development of the political centralized power and the spatial perspective at the beginning of modern times. For the first time, it allows the opponent to be "mastered" from a distance. Herein lies its functional relation to modern adminis- tration and surveillance. The shell corresponds to the sovereign's gaze and to the
25
Since the Industrial Revolution, which emanated from the English mining dis- tricts, the metallization of society again assumes new dimensions. At the same time, the spying out of the earth's interior proceeds with intermittent leaps. From now on, gigantic mines arise that eat into the blackest depths of the planet's bowels. Miners become the ghostly army of industrial civilization --the exploited exploiters. The laborers of the smelteries were advanced to the elite division of the capitalist attack against the earth's "miserly" crust. In the end, the modern
decisions of a centralized administration.
A political theory of the knowl-
1BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 353
? Illuminating artillery, in Felix Auerbach, Die Physik im Kriege, 3rd ed. (Jena, 1916).
form of economy capitalizes all mineral deposits, and with millions of breaches, borings, and extractions, it pushes on with the mineralogical war against the earth's crust in order to burn the extracted deposits or to work them into tools and weapon systems. Every day, industrial civilizations decide on death sentences against millions upon millions of living beings and millions of tons of substances. In these decisions, the predatory relation of domination of Western cultures to the earth is perfected.
We must take care not to view today's nuclear technology as exceptional. It is, in reality, nothing more than the consistent continuation of the mineralogical- metallurgical attack on the given structures of matter, the purest intensification of polemical theory. Here, there is no discontinuity. The transcendental- polemical framework of our technology comprises the bronze sword just as much as the neutron bomb. At most, the transition from the metal age to the nuclear age signifies a new technological stage within the polemical structure and a new order of magnitude in the offensive means of self-preservation. In order to keep up their war against the Other, modern competition egos and research egos con- quered the previously most secret structural forms and energy sources of matter. In fact, in going
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
beyond the metallurgical explosion of natural substances (ore, etc. ), they even overstepped the threshold of the natural structures of substances
354 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
in order to reach the point where the previously most puzzling cosmic powers were bound. But also on the nuclear level, the mistreatment of matter merely an- ticipates the mistreatment of the enemy. It projects the pressure for enmity be- tween the rival societies (by way of the "relatively autonomous" intermediate step of natural science) onto radioactive matter. What we are prepared to inflict on the enemy if need be sets the standard for which tools of annihilation are to be wrung from nature. What we have intended for the enemy--large-scale blanket annihilation through incineration, contamination, atomization--has to be first in- flicted on the weapon. It is basically only our message to our opponents; it com- municates what we intend to do to them. The weapon is therefore the enemy's proxy in one's own arsenal. Those who forge weapons make it clear to their ene- mies that they will treat them just as mercilessly as they treat the club, the anvil, the grenade, and the warhead. The weapon is already the maltreated opponent; it is the thing-for-you. Those who arm are already at war. This war takes place de facto continually in intervals of hot and cold phases, the latter being misnamed peace. Seen in the polemical cycle, peace means a period of arming, displacement of hostilities onto the metals; war means, accordingly, the implementation and consumption of arms products, the realization of the weapons on the opponent.
On the highest level of polemical technology, our process of enlightenment reaches the point where it takes leave of a thousand-year-old dualistic tradition of metaphysics: The antagonism between res cogitans and res extensa in the cybernetic age becomes altogether invalid. To the extent that the res (substance) that thinks actually can be represented and produced as machine, the antagonism toward the res that exists in space (extension) disappears. In the meantime, there are modern artillery systems that in strategic jargon are called "intelligent muni- tions" or "smart missiles," that is, rockets that perform classic thought functions (perception, decision making) in flight and behave "subjectively" toward the enemy target. The existence of these systems signifies a metaphysical statutory declaration of our civilization: We have, in fact, become in large part subjects who think of themselves as "thinking things," and it is these thinking things that exchange blows in modern warfare. The difference between the hero and his weapon disappears; the megalomaniac self-preservation egos of our culture have externalized their own being as weapon. If, in the end, the self-sacrificing kami- kaze pilots take over the function of the guiding system (res cogitans) in persona, then, in the case of the most advanced weapons of the present day, this heroic subjectivity has become an electronic subjectivity: The manned dive- bomber still presupposed a pilot who consciously took his inevitable death upon himself and demonstrated an ability to die peculiarly reminiscent of that quality described in ancient philosophy. In intelligent munition, this human factor is fully eliminated. A further degeneration of metaphysics to paranoia has come about; "live and let die" is accordingly not only the secret agent's motto but also the principle of mod- ern warfare based on artillery and its extensions. With the "thinking missile," we
BLACK EMPIRICISM ? 355
16
reach the final station of the modern displacement of the subject because what
is called subject in modern times is, in fact, that self-preservation ego that with- draws step by step from the living, to the summit of paranoia. Withdrawal, dis- tancing, self-displacement are the driving forces of this kind of subjectivity. Ar- tillery is only one of its manifestations and, especially in the form of electronic, intelligent, atomic munition, is the ultimate outgrowth of self-assertion and world domination from a distance. The modern long-range ego wants to preserve itself without recognizing itself in its own weapon. It must thus be split off from it as far as possible. Intelligent munition satisfies this need. Since its invention, the schizoid structure (the subject in the form of the state and the polemical self- preservation ego) approaches its consummation. The next great war foresees only schizophrenics and machines as combatants. Decisive homunculi in the state, ghostly split administrators of destructive forces, will press the decisive buttons "if it has to be," and heroic robots as well as thinking hell-machines will fall on each other--the experimentum mundi is at an end; humanity was a mistake. En- lightenment can only summarize: Humanity cannot be enlightened because it it- self was the false premise of enlightenment. Humanity does not come up to scratch. It carries within itself the obscuring principle of dissimulation (displace- ment), and where its ego appears there cannot shine what was promised by all enlightenments: the light of reason.
Notes
1. Bernard Law Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, Weltgeschichte der Schlachten und Kriegs- ziige, vol. 1 (Munich, 1975), p. 17. See also his sketch of the tactics warriors use to feel each other out: "A commander must be able to think himself into his adversary or at least try to do that. For this reason, during the war against Hitler, I always had a photo of my adversary in my command vehi- cle. In the desert and then again in Normandy, Rommel was my adversary. I
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
repeatedly studied his face and tried to imagine how he would react to the movements I wanted to implement. Strangely enough, this proved to be useful. "
2. This rather offended Stieber. His memoirs contain a good share of self-justification, but also a dose of revenge against the enemies who had "branded [his] character as 'illiberal, inhuman, even cynical' "; Stieber, Spion des Kanzlers, p. 176. 3. See, by contrast, the lucid polemic of Julien Benda in La trahison des clercs (1927).
4. Here I refrain from making the empirically important differentiations of the various concepts and functions of "intelligence," "research," "science," "philosophy," "critique. " Our reflections belong not to the sociology of intelligence but to the forefront of a (polemical) epistemology.
5. Stieber gathered incriminating evidence that played a role in the Cologne Communist trail. 6. Max Gunzenhauser, Geschichte des geheimen Nachrichtendienstes (Frankfurt, 1968), p. 11. 7. They thereby continually anticipate the free- style ethics of the emergency situation ("Them
or us"); for them, the war is never over.
8. Giinther Nollau, Wie sicker ist die Bundesrepublikl (Munich, 1976), p. 9.
9. Stieber mentions several times that Bismarck said to him, "You're seeing ghosts! "
10. From this comes the following hypothesis: Multiparty systems will be less endangered by par- anoia than one-party systems.
11. "Law as Ideology"; critique finds cores of violence in some phenomena that are generally per-
356 ? BLACK EMPIRICISM
ceived under the fiction of freedom: in the wage-labor contract, in the marriage contract, in the "social contract" as such. 12. This is the prominent theme in the writings of the long-lost pupil of Freud, Otto Gross, finally accessible again in the collection entitled Von geschlechtlicher Not zur sozialen Katastrophe, with an appendix by Franz Jung, ed. Kurt Kreiler (Frankfurt, 1980), pp. 27ff. See also in particular, Uber Konflikt und Beziehung, pp. 7Iff.
13. Of course, a medical typology could be imagined that evaluates these aspects very differently: integrative medicine, which does not treat the sickness as the patient's enemy; combative medicine, which behaves toward the sickness exclusively as an adversary.
14. Does a wastepaper basket not play a role at the beginning of the Dreyfus affair?
15. Attali maintains, in continuing Foucault's analyses, that a good deal of the more recent social history of medicine, particularly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is dominated not by doc- tors but by the police.
A large part of the suffering is not healed but interned; see L'Ordre cannibale (Paris, 1979).
16. In the nihilism discussion, which likes to employ a strident vocabulary, one speaks rather of the "collapse," the "fall" of metaphysics. I think these pictures are not apposite, at least not any longer. Metaphysical systems do not "fall," but fade, seep away, stagnate, become boring, old hat, unimpor- tant, and improbable.
17. On this point there are fascinating preliminary reflections by the chief of police during the Wilhelminian period, Wilhelm Stieber. He already consciously practiced police town-hygiene, e. g. , in prostitution and dealing in stolen goods. 18. See on this point the discussions of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor and Heidegger's Anyone, chapter 7.
19. The choice can only be between two types of beyond: an empty one (nihilism) and a full one (spiritualism).
20. And repeatedly, when we think that we have become wise in a new way, through "new ex- periences", we discover that kynical wisdom was there before us. Diogenes Laertius (vol. VI, p. 7) reports of the first kynic, Antisthenes: "To the question as to what one had to learn before all else he replied: To guard against unlearning.
21. Theodor Lessing, Untergang derErde am Geist (Europa und Asien) (Hannover, 1924), a sum- mary of two of his earlier books: Europa und Asien (1914) and Die verfluchte Kultur (1921). See in particular chapter 11, "Der sterbende Pan. " That this book, significant in spite of all its peculiarities, was so crudely misunderstood as "irrationalist" is a part of the traumatic history of Lessing's influence.
22. Suggestions for a history of the political eye can be found in Erik Grawert-May, Zur Geschichte von Polizei- und Liebeskunst. Versuch einer anderen Geschichte des Auges (Tubingen, 1980).
23. This anecdote belongs to the prehistory of the emergence of the modern U. S. secret service.
24. De re metallica (Georg Agricola the Elder, 1556) would be a good title for a social history and a history of science of the metallic civilizations (res publico: the state; res metallica: war).
25. Many stimulating connections between ballistics, the theory of administration, diplomacy, the courier system (predecessor of the postal service), and printing come to mind: telecausal functions that form a new ego.
26. [Verstellung can be rendered as either "displacement" or "dissimulation. " The ambiguity is in- terpretatively significant, here as in psychoanalytic literature. -Trans. ]
Chapter 11
Transcendental Polemic: Heraclitian Meditations
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
War is the father of all things.
Heraclitus
With the following reflections I want to effect a kind of axis rotation within the critical pragmatism that today predominates in epsitemology (C. S. Peirce, J. Habermas, K. O. Apel). If it was the achievement of this pragmatic theory of knowledge to have presented the connections between knowledge and interest, theory and praxis from first principles, plausibly and without metaphysical mort- gages, it is nonetheless infected, I think, with the weakness of a concept of praxis that is too schematic. The preceding reflections may have made it clear why we cannot be satisfied with an epistemology that, on the one hand, assumes only an a priori interest of the type labor, and on the other, a second interest of the type communication (interaction). This is because the polemical-strategic dimension worked out here (just as the diametrically opposed dimension of the erotic and the reconciliatory interest) can at most be implicitly "co-reflected" in the attempt to ground pragmatism. This avenges itself through a deficit of realism and con- creteness. The transcendental polemic (as well as eroticism, which I do not pres- ent in this book) inserts additional dimensions into the network of "aphoristic" epistemically guiding and forming interests. In war we encounter a combination of motives of labor and interaction that cannot at all be comprehended logically with the schematism employed until now. I maintain that polemical-strategic ac- tion and thinking, which are treated by the aforementioned authors only as an ad- dendum and in passing, in fact forms a dimension that encompasses not only the action of labor and governing but also communicative action. This is not taken sufficiently into account by either the older or the more recent Critical Theory. Neither a critique of instrumental reason nor a critique of functionalist reason dis-
357
358 ? TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS
? "Just as I have completed my book, which is meant to finish him off scientifically, he really dies! " Meggendorfer Blatter, 1916.
closes the connection between strategy and cynicism that we here present as the philosophical signature of modernity. Labor and interaction are from the very beginning crisscrossed by war and eros, enmities and reconciliations, decimations and creations. Whatever is sup- posed to be recognized in the interest of labor and interaction, from the very start and always, receives a "theory form" that is also stamped by the polemical or the erotic. What kind of "objectivity" is chosen is emphatically no innocent alterna- tive. It also makes a categorical difference which form of precision is decided on:
TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS ? 359
the precision of the polemicist or that of the lover.
1If that is really an a priori
alternative, there must be a twofold science of all things (and not one basically neutral theory that then, secondarily, as we say, can be used for good or evil pur- poses). Whereas pragmatism formally assumes a homogeneous "community of researchers," the transcendental-polemical view allows us to examine the "war of the researchers" as the condition of that which they work out as truths. Thus, re- search is not so much a means for the neutral illumination of reality as an arms race in theoretical forms. The insights then appear more as weapons than as in- tellectual instruments at the service of labor and communicative understanding, and taken in their aggregate, they constitute not an intellectual treasure or ency- clopedia but an arsenal, a munitions depot (of intelligent cartridges). If we wanted to remain content with a priori interests such as "labor" and "interaction," we would have to refrain from interrogating this "labor" and this "interaction" as to which struggle they serve and which reconciliations they facilitate: in other words, whether the researcher ego confronts the "object" from the stance of generalization, distancing, and domination or from that of individualization, closeness, and surrender. From this viewpoint, the distinction between the "Two
2Cultures" once again makes sense. In the "First Culture" (which predominates),
we observe a primacy of method, of procedure, of the research process over the objects. Here, only that can be an object that falls into the domain covered by the methods and models. If we attribute everything of a methodological nature to the subject, we can speak of a type of knowledge that issues from an elevation of the knower over what is known: the primacy of the subject (that this, curiously enough, holds for the exact and "objective," or better, objectivistic disciplines
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
il- lustrates the connection between determination of the object [Objektfeststellung] and the displacement [dissimulation] of the subject [Subjektverstellung]). This elevation is the price of "objectivity. " At the same time, it is procured at the cost of a methodological constriction or standardization of what the subject is allowed or not allowed to "know. " The idea that all real sciences in the end will only have a correct theory as a problem presupposes at the same time the expectation that the so-called community of researchers in the long run will grow together into an homogeneous army of subjects who will all be stamped by the same methodo- logical dis-placement (dissimulation) with regard to the "things. " Only when the subjects are epistemologically standardized (same "interest," same concepts, same methods) do the statements about the objects coagulate into their final and correct shape (in the sense of these presuppositions). The one cannot be had with- out the other. Where several hypotheses still stand beside one another, a weak- ness on the side of the subject is uncovered--and this subjective weakness gives the things a chance to reveal themselves in their multiple meanings. Stated to the point: The weaker our methods, the better it is for the "things. " As long as there is a multitude of "interpretations," the things are safe from the delusion of the knowers that they had fixed the objects-as known-once and for all. As long as
360 ? TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS
the things are being "interpreted," the memory is also kept alive that the things are also something an sich (in themselves) that has nothing to do with their being known by us.
If we follow this thought to its extreme, we come to the diametrically opposed
pole of forms of knowledge. Here, what Adorno called the "precedence of the
object" holds. If, with the primary of the subject, the agonistic theory must neces-
sarily arise, then, from a way of treating things that acknowledges the precedence
of objects, something comes forth that may bear the name erotic theory. Where
eros is at play, there, and only there, does the "Second Culture" live, and where
it is alive, it assumes the form of an art rather than a technique. Artists and eroti-
cists live under the impression that the things want something from them rather
than that they want something from the things, and that it is the things that entan-
gle them in the adventure of experience. They go to the things, surrender them-
selves to their impression, and as true researchers, feel themselves under their
3spell. For artists and eroticists, the things are the river into which, according to
Heraclitus, they cannot enter twice because the things, although they are the same things, are new in every moment, having flowed further into a new relationship. If love is new every morning, the objects of love, along with it, are also new. In them there is nothing "known," at most familiar. With them, there is no "objec- tivity," only intimacy. If the knower approaches them, it is not as master researcher ("Forsch-Herr") but as neighbor, friend, as someone who has been "drawn in. " For lovers, the things are beautiful, and they know that the "relation- ship" is over when, one day, everything looks as if it had always been the same: constant, everyday, identical, predictable. Where the sense for beauty ceases, war, indifference [Gleich-Giiltigkeit, literally, equal validity;-Trans. ] or death begins. Philosophers have rightly taught that the aesthetic dimension is integral for the truth content of realizations. This refers of course to realizations that have submitted themselves to the precedence of the object. Enlightenment, however, has taught us to mistrust such insights deeply. For enlightenment, if it does not continually correct itself against erotic (aesthetic) experience, the objects are the quintessence of that to which we should not surrender ourselves trustingly be- cause both, trust and surrender, are stances that the compulsions of life and en- lightened realism force out of us. Precedence of the objects would mean to be forced to live with a power over us, and because we, quasi-automatically, identify everything that is above us with that which oppresses us, from the viewpoint of this unenlightened enlightenment, there can be, on the contrary, only a stance or polemical distance. Nevertheless, there is another kind of precedence that is not based on subjugation: The precedence the object enjoys in sympathetic under- standing does not demand that we reconcile ourselves to an inferiority and an alienated position. Its prototype is love. The ability to concede the object a prece- dence would be tantamount to the ability to live and let live (instead of live and let die), and indeed, as an ultimate consequence, also to die and let live (instead
TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS ? 361
of following the impulse to pull everything down into death with us). Only through eros do we become capable of conceding the "object" a precedence. And
4Polemic against the Id, or: Think the Devil Where Id was, Ego should become.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Sigmund Freud
The sketches of the cardinal cynicisms contain the material for a theory of dia- logue and interaction that encompasses the polemical. They describe positions and oppositions in military, political, sexual, medical, religious, and theoretical consciousness that grate against the conventional concept of ideology. In these oppositions, it is not true and false consciousnesses that are counterposed; rather, combative consciousnesses that, on the basis of differing given stances toward the world and toward life situations, find themselves in unavoidable antagonisms with one another. If in the description of kynical and cynical positions, with their reflections and counterreflections, the notion of "stages" being set for an offensive or counteroffensive recurred, it referred to stages for conflict, i. e. , theaters of the noisy and quiet passages of arms of an ineluctably polemical consciousness.
How does a stage arise? Certainly not simply through an antagonism of two "principles. " A dualism would be initially nothing more than a "thought thing," and as such it would have no dramatic force. The dualism would be an sich (in itself) harmless or uninteresting if it were not staged in reality itself. Wherever a dualism emerges, we thus, as a rule, come up against an enmity, a demarcation between Us and Them, and up against the establishing of the predominance of one principle over the opposing principle: Above --Below, Good --Evil, Ego- Id. With this, a real struggle and a real stage arise. On this stage, a dominant in- tellectual position enters first, a nomos-doctrine, an idealism, a "high" and affir- mative theory that presents itself as respectable, stern, and inspired, as if it had been won from higher sources. This is inevitably answered, in the second scene, by a realistic (kynical) antithesis that polemically counterposes the viewpoints and experiences of the underdog, the so-called evil position that is shoved into the id [Es, literally, it; -- Trans. ] (matter). In kynicism, therefore, an ego appears that takes it on itself to be that which the nomos-idealists prohibit, exclude, and despise. With this, kynicism from the plebeian perspective bursts the value sys- tem installed from above without fully ceasing to pay regard to it. This also gives kynicism its obviously aggressive and culturally critical aspect. With kynicism, an acidic element penetrates into culture-the first decomposition of the esprit de serieux with which whatever wants to rule has always surrounded itself. At the same time, it appears to those on top as something sinister and dirty, and the more hegemonic consciousness tries to withdraw to pure heights, the more subver- even if I cease to be, eros wills that Something remain.
362 ? TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS
sively and demonically does the kynical refusal appear on its horizon. From then on, it must seem disgusting that this low, mere It stands up for itself and places an ego of its own sort against my own ego. This anti-ego that giggles forth out of the kynical resistance against the metaphysical idealism of master theories probably also constitutes the core of what our tradition calls the diabolical. The displacement of the concept, from "kynicism" to "cynicism" and its metaphysics, provoked by Christianity (as the mentality of the nihilists or the devotees of the Devil) is, to be sure, no mere accident. For if the metaphysical ego identifies itself with the Above and the Good, then the fact that in the Id- Below-Evil an ego also is astir overcomes it like a shock. "It" obviously is no longer content to be merely mute, low, lethargic matter. That this evil id could also be something for itself-- that is the real metaphysical scandal that, since the late Middle Ages, has been discussed in the form of innumerable analyses of the Devil. Nothing seems to du- alistic consciousness (i. e. , bifurcated and identified with the better half) to be so simultaneously agonizing and fascinating than the presentiment that in the so- called evil and low regions, too, there could live a potent, ready-witted self- consciousness. When Plato declares Diogenes to be raving mad, this betrays, be- sides contempt, a measure of self- protection. This can be regarded as relatively harmless, however, since Diogenes, as reported in anecdotes, knew how to turn the tables so that in the end it was not quite clear who the real crazy was. In Chris- tianity, the antagonism was intensified much more dramatically. Christian con- sciousness, which understood itself to be endowed with the absolute truth through revelation, had to conjure up a non-Christian ego in the image of the Anti- Christ--and thereby simultaneously became caught up in a permanent apprehen- sion that "evil" could even be active within ourselves, quaerens quern devoret (seeking whom it will devour) (1 Peter 5).
Here we have to refer again to Faust, the Devil, and the cynicism of Satan. The story of Doctor Faustus can be understood as a document for the unsettling of the older metaphysical dualism through the new empiricism (whereby under empiricism sexual experience is also included). Art between the Middle Ages and modern times experiments with the possibility of an evil subjectivity "also for us"--and in didactic, morally embellished narratives itself tries out how it would be to live in such an "evil" skin --and what kind of exciting experiences that would bring. I have already described this with the example of the Goethean pact with the Devil. Faust explores the wide world ("so that you, set loose, free / experience what life is") as the Devil's partner, and thus as a probationary devil. Only to the Devil does the world of experience stand open without restriction. Like Goethe, folk literature also does not neglect to describe explicitly the acquaintance of the probationary devil (Faust) with sexual evil:
As Doctor Faustus saw that the years of his promise came day by day to an end, he went about leading a slovenly and
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
epicurean life, and
TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS D 363
called upon seven demonic succubas all of whom he slept with. . . . For he traveled into many kingdoms with his spirit so that he could see all womanly shapes. Of whom he succeeded with two Dutch women, a Hungarian, an Englishwoman, two Swabians, and one Frankish woman, who were paragons of the land. With these demonic women he prac- ticed unchasteness to the end of his life. (Deutsche Volksbilcher, ed. C. O. Conrady [Hamburg, 1968], p. 133) After this, there can be no doubt that "being evil," or the slovenly and epicu- rean life (which, of course, also means "kynical living") pays off to the extent that we can experience what we long since wanted to experience but did not dare. Who can so easily let themselves go to the Devil? The folktale of Doctor Faustus ex- plores, almost uncensored, the lust to try out evil once for oneself. This is a metaphysically dramatic process, because only in this way, at first virtually and then actually, does the integration of the other side, or in other words, the end
5ofdualism,becomepossible. Manynarrativeworksofearlymoderntimesoper-
ate according to this moral schema. The folktale allows itself the exciting experi- ment of lending an ego like our own to what is "authentically" evil. It takes the test jump of fantasy into the Devil's ego. Of course, these stories still have to end badly, and the probationary devil, who allowed himself everything that Christians should not do (in the magical, culinary, sexual, tourist, and theoretical domains) in the end has to be punished as an example. "Thus, whoever does evil, dies. " A classically cynical passage can be found in the Faust book, where the Devil makes a maliciously joyful, satirical speech to the poor doctor before the evil spirits come to tear him apart:
Therefore, my good Faust, it is not good to eat cherries with great men and the Devil; they throw the stems in one's face, as you now see. For this reason you probably would have done well to have gone far away; that would have been good against the shooting. But your arrogant pony kicked you. . . .
. . . Look, you were a beautifully made creature, but the roses, as long as they are carried in the hand and smelled, do not last. Those whose bread you have eaten, their song you must also sing. If you post- pone things until Good Friday, it will soon be Easter. What you have promised has not happened without cause; a roasted sausage has two ends; you cannot walk well on the Devil's ice. You have had an evil way, and evil ways do not let evil ways alone, just as the cat does not stop chasing mice. To do something heavy-handedly causes pitting; be- cause the spoon is new, the cook uses it; afterward, when it gets old,
he shits on it, then finishes eating with it. Is it not so with you? You who were a new cooking spoon of the Devil. . . . So let now my teaching and reminder go to your heart, which for all that is thoroughly doomed. You should not have become so well acquainted with the
364 ? TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS
Devil, especially because, as well as being God's ape, he is a liar and murderer. . . . To put up the Devil requires a clever innkeeper. There is more to dancing than a pair of red shoes. If you had had God in mind and had been satisfied with the talents given to you, you would not have danced to this tune, and you should not have so easily bent to the Devil's will and believed; for whoever believes easily is soon de- ceived.
