This legacy of bad faith has been passed on from the Christian structure of mentality to practi- cally everything that has arisen as ideology and
Weltanschauung
on Western soil in the time since Christ.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
(Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit, Dokumente des Niirnberger Arz- teprozesses, ed.
A.
Mitscherlich and F.
Mielke [Frankfurt, 1962], p.
13)
Mitscherlich shows that behind the criminal leaders stood a large medical ap- paratus that had already step by step advanced to a considerable extent the trans- formation of patients into human raw material. The criminal doctors "only" had to take one more cynical leap in the direction in which they were already headed. What today goes on quietly without being seriously disturbed by anyone--torture research, genetic and prosthetic research, military-biological and war- pharmacology research --already has within it everything that will provide the tools for the medical fascism of tomorrow. The horrifying living experiments and notorious collections of skeletons in Nazi medicine will be "nothing by compari- son. " "Nothing by comparison": That is cynical one-upmanship, yet it simply ar- ticulates a tendency of reality. In the area of cleverly thought out cruelty, the twenty-first century has already begun.
What will help against the masters' helping profession of today and tomorrow? Several answers are conceivable.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
First, from a society with the will to live and from its philosophy--to the extent that it captures the will to live of its time in concepts--must come an offensive that rehabilitates the idea of the "good doctor" and brings a "helping at the source" into battle against the universal, diffuse cynicism of modern medicine. What good help and what a real healer are, medicine by itself has never been able to define. A social order like ours furthers almost by necessity a medicine that, in turn, tends to further the system of sicknesses and of making people sick rather than life in good health.
Second, only self-help helps against masters' helpers. The only defense against false or questionable help is to have no need for it. Moreover, for a long time now we have been able to observe how capitalist masters' medicine attempts to THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 275
bring self-help traditions in folk medicine under its domination--after centuries of defamation and rivalry--by absorbing them as part of orthodox medical rea- son. ("It's been scientifically proven: There really is something in some herbs! ") The interest of the institutionalized medical profession works with all possible means toward a state of affairs in which everything corporeal will be totally medicalized--from occupational medicine, sport medicine, sexual medicine, digestive medicine, nutritional medicine, fitness medicine, accident medicine, criminal medicine, and war medicine to the medicines covering the competency to supervise healthy and unhealthy breathing, walking, standing, learning and newspaper reading, to say nothing of pregnancy, birth, dying, and other caprioles of human corporeality. The "health" system is heading toward a state of affairs in which the masters' medical control of the somatic dimension will become totalitarian. A point can be imagined at which private bodily competencies will be expropriated completely. In the end, one will have to attend urological classes to learn how to piss correctly. The central question in the current medical- cynical process is whether "orthodox medicine" will be able to destroy the lay helper movements that have arisen for numerous cultural reasons (self-actualization, the women's movement, ecology, rural communes, new religions, etc. ). This ques- tion runs parallel to the question of the intramedical chances of "political" tenden- cies in professional medicine: psychosomatic internal medicine, occupational medicine, gynecology, psychiatry, and so on. These are the professional medical disciplines that, for logical reasons concerning their occupations, should know best that everything they do runs the risk of harming more than helping, as long as another direction for helping--coming from life, freedom, and conscious- ness--is not pursued.
Third, in the last instance, only the conscious embodying of our fragility, our being sick, our mortality, can help against the medical splitting off of responsibil- ity for our own bodily existence. I do not have to say how difficult that is, for the fear, when it becomes great, makes us all the more inclined to repress our responsibility for the life and death of our own body or to delegate it to doctors, not considering that even the most perfect conservation medicine, in the end, hands back to us the entire responsibility and unsharable pain in our most helpless moment. Those who recognize that the circle of alienation and flight must always finally close in one's own death must also be aware that it would be better to re- verse toward life rather than anesthetization, toward risk rather than security, to- ward embodiment rather than splitting.
Religious Cynicism
And what will you do with the grail when you have found it?
Benjamin Disraeli
276 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
. . . even grinning is mixed in with it, like that of the skull it- self: because the fact that long-planning human beings depart like cattle is also somehow funny.
Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hojfnung (p. 1299)
Suddenly, someone leaves the visible and continuous world common to all and ceases to share existence with us. His breathing has stopped, his movements have ceased. At first, death manifests itself negatively; something is extinguished and passes over into stillness. A little later, this cessation shows also its positive side, the body becomes cold, starts to putrefy, rot. The skeleton then steps forth as the part that resists decomposition longer than the other parts. It takes over the representation of what remains of us in materia, hence the skeleton as death im- ago. The framework of bones symbolizes the end that all who live already carry within themselves. Everyone of us is our own friend Mr. D. , the bony forerun- ning of one's own departure.
From the perspective of this side of death, the only one usually observable, the idea imposes itself on living persons that an invisible force is at work in ani- mated bodies that allows them to breathe, jump about, and remain form-coherent, whereas this invisible something must have departed from the dead, so that they grow stiff and decay. The invisible something stimulates breathing, movement, feeling, alertness, and the maintenance of the body's form --it is the epitome of intensity and energy. Its activity creates, although not visibly or in a way that can be isolated, the most real reality. This invisible force has many names: soul, spirit, breath, ancestors, fire, form, God, life.
Experience teaches that animals like us are born and die, that plants germinate and pass away, and that they too, in their
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
own way, participate in the rhythm of death and life, form constitution and form dissolution. Without doubt, the human "soul" is surrounded by a cosmos of animal and plant life and by mysterious energy subjects that are active behind day and night, storm and calm sky, heat and cold. In nothing does this being surrounded suggest a "domination" of hu- mankind over nature and the environment. Rather, the naked biped appears as a being that is tolerated and endured by the whole, insofar as it controls the inter- actions with the bringers of bounty and danger from the animal and plant world.
Life and death, coming and going, they are initially natural constants, pulsat- ing beats in a rhythm in which what is pregiven outweighs what is added later. In the course of civilization, however, the relation between submission and ac- tion, suffering and doing has shifted --also with regard to the experience of death. What appeared to be an aspect of natural pulsations becomes in more developed societies a more and more profound and more and more embittered struggle be- tween life and death. Death is then no longer so much an event that nothing can influence, but is itself something that our violence and caprice bring about. Its primary image is no longer the unavoidable coming to an end, nor the peaceful
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 277
self-exhaustion or the quiet and unresisted burning down of life's flame, butacon- tested, horrifying happening imbued with premonitions of violence and murder. The more people think of death as being murdered rather than as being peacefuly extinguished, the more violently must the flood of the fear of death swel up in higher and more violent civilizations. For this reason, the historical states and empires, wherever we look, are religious states and empires. They constitute so- cial worlds in which the fear of a violent death is a realistic one. We al have a thousand images of violence before our eyes: surprise attacks, massacres, rapes, public executions, wars, scenes of torture, in which human beings develop them- selves into diabolical fiends in order to extract a maximum of agony from the death of others. In addition, class societies suppress the vital energies of subjects and slaves through physical and symbolic violence in such a way that shadowy hollows of unlived life unfailingly open up in bodies, where wishing, fantasizing, the yearning for the divined otherness of a full life begin to brood. This unlived life combines its Utopian energies with the fears of annihilation that are distiled in the individual in violent societies from infancy onward. Only out of this combi- nation comes the absolute defiance of death in civilized human beings, a defiance that seemingly cannot be dissolved by anything. This is the answer to the pro- foundly terrifying experience of civilization. Our being in society comprises al- most a priori the threat that we will not be allowed to realize the vitality with which we were born. Every socialized life lives with the premonition that its ener- gies, time, willing, and wishing will not be at an end when the death knell rings, Life builds residues-an immense, burning Not Yet that needs more time and fu- ture than is granted to the individual. Life dreams beyond itself and dies ful of defiance. For this reason, the history of higher civilizations vibrates with count- less and boundless Not Yet screams-with a million-voiced No to a death that is not the expiration of the dying embers of life but a violent suffocation of a flame that in any case did not burn as brightly as it could have done in a vital fredom. Since that time, devitalized life in class and military societies ponders its compensations-whether in further lives, as supposed by Hindu consciousness, or in heavenly existence as promised by Christianity and Islam - for the thwarted dreams of their believers. Religion is not primarily the opiate of the people but the reminder that there is more life in us than this life lives. The function of faith is an achievement of devitalized bodies that cannot be completely robbed of the memory that in them much deeper sources of vitality, strength, pleasure, and of the enigma and intoxication of being-there must lie hidden than can be sen in everyday life.
This gives religions their ambiguous role in societies: They can be used to legitimate and double (verdoppelri) oppression (see the Enlightenment's critique of religion in chapter 3, the section entitled "Critique of Religious Illusion"). They can, however, also liberate individuals to a greater power of resistance and creativity by helping them to overcome fear. Thus, depending on circumstances,
278 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
religion can be both an instrument of domination and the core of resistance against domination; a medium of repression and a medium of emancipation; an instrument of devitalization and a precept of revitalization.
The first case of religious Kynicism in the Judeo-Christian tradition has no one less than the original father, Moses, in the role of kynical rebel. He committed the first blasphemy of grand dimensions when, on his return from Mount Sinai, he smashed the tablets; "they were tables of stone, written on by the finger of God" (Exodus 31:18). "And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables" (32:16). Moses, who, with the divine laws under his arm, came down from the mountain and found his people dancing around the Golden Calf, set an example for the religious kynic's behavior with respect to the sacred: He smashed everything that was not spirit but letter, not God but idol, not the living but its representation. It is emphasized that he did this in anger and that it was a holy anger that gave him the right and the necessary impertinence to lay violent hands on God's personal handwriting.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
That needs to be understood. Namely, immediately after he had shattered the tablets, so the bib- lical account says, Moses seized the Golden Calf, melted it in the fire, "ground it to powder, and scattered it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink
of it" (32:20). Later, Moses had to chisel new tablets so that God could inscribe them a second time. He also received from God the commandment: "Thou shalt make no graven images. " Moses' kynical blasphemy came from the knowledge that people are inclined to worship fetishes and to indulge in the idolization of objects. But nothing material can be so holy that it may not be smashed as soon as it becomes apparent that the representations of the sacred have begun to over- shadow the spirit of the religion. In this regard it can happen that no distinction is made between the stone tablets of the dear Lord and the Golden Calf. If it is a representation, or idol, then smite it. That is the spiritual- kynical core of the commandment to make no image of "God. " Image and text can fulfill their func- tions only as long as it is not forgotten that both are material forms and that the "truth," as a material-immaterial structure, must always be written and read anew, that is, materialized and, at the same time, immaterialized anew --which means that every materialization will be shattered whenever it begins to force it-
28
All primary blasphemies are borne by the kynical impulse to not let oneself be made a fool of by any idol. Those who "know" something of the gods know the great rage of Moses and the kynical lightness in dealing with representations of the divine. Religious persons, in contrast to pious persons, are no buffoons of the superego; it knows the laws, and religious persons know that it knows the laws, and they let them speak and they obey them too when it seems appropriate- This distinguishes the primary blasphemy of mystics, the religious, and the kyni- cally alive, from the secondary blasphemies that arise from resentment, uncon-
self into the foreground.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 279
? Max Ernst, The Virgin Disciplines the Christ Child 1926. ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
scious compulsions for vices and an unfree desire to drag down whatever is elevated.
The first cynicism of the religious type likewise is found in the Old Testament. Significantly, it is contained in the story of the first murder in human history --in the story of Cain and Abel. Adam and Eve had two sons among their children. Cain, the firstborn, was a farmer, and Abel, the second, was a shepherd. One day both brought sacrifices to the Lord, Cain from the fruit of his fields and Abel from the youngest of his herd. The Lord, however, welcomed only Abel's offering and
280 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
cast scorn upon Cain's. "And Cain was very wroth and his countenance became distorted . . . Cain talked with Abel his brother: And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? " (Genesis 4:5-9). With this question, the stage for religious cynicism is set. The art of dissimulation, spo- ken of here for the first time, is directly connected with the cynical turning of a
29
violent consciousness against the other.
said, it would have to be cynical -- for, in truth, he does not intend to tell the truth. The communication with the questioner is distorted from the start. Cain could, if he felt he had nothing to lose, answer his God: "Don't be so hypocritical, you know as well as I do where Abel is, for I have killed him with my own hands, and you not only looked on calmly, but even gave me occasion to do it. " Cain's real answer, in its brevity, still has enough cynical bite: "I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? " (Genesis 4:9). An all-knowing and infinitely just God, as Cain's testy retort suggests, should be able to refrain from such prickings of con- science. What kind of God is it who treats people unequally and at the very least provokes them to crime, but then, with pretended innocence, asks questions about what has happened? "God," if one may say so, does not penetrate every con- sciousness. Cain closes off his conscience to this nonpenetrating God (cf. the psy- chology of children who grow up under great fear of punishment). He reacts inso- lently, evasively, impudently. With this first crime, even more than with the fall from grace, as is shown by the myth in the Old Testament, something has hap- pened that makes a deep cleft in the still-fresh creation --things begin to slip away from God. Cruelties occur in the world with which he does not reckon and with whose just atonement he does not yet quite know how to deal. The point of the
Cain story, remarkably enough, seems to be that God, as if he had become pen- sive, not only does not punish the murderer, Cain, but, with the mark of Cain, expressly puts him under his personal protection: "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. " For whatever avenges itself would definitely not be a god at the height of what is possible. The god of the ancient Hebrews has many traits of a bad- tempered, embittered, old man who no longer completely understands the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
world and who, with a jealous and mistrustful countenance, observes everything that goes on down below. Nevertheless, the reprisal for Cain's original crime is post- poned until the Day of Judgment. God grants himself and humankind a respite, and the myths about the Day of Judgment emphasize that a considerable amount of time will elapse before it arrives--the time of a great opportunity. It is the time God needs to become just and the time we need to understand what proper living is. Both mean basically the same thing.
How the Christianization of power in the end phase of the Roman Empire, and even more during the European Middle Ages, led to cynical effects, was indicated earlier in this chapter ("The Cynicism of State and Hegemonic Power"). Catholic masters' cynicism reached its peak at the time of the Crusades, in which the ori-
What can Cain answer? Whatever he
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 281
gins of the Inquisition are to be found. If we express this concisely with the phrase "the persecution of Christians by Christians," this outlines the reflexive-cynical practice of lying by the master church, whose gloomiest representatives -- in the style of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor--do not shrink from incinerating the returned Jesus just as they did those heretics who strove to revive his teachings. They knew precisely what they were doing, and it is probably a romantic simpli- fication to label these gentlemen of the Inquisition Catholic "fanatics," as histori- ography so creepily puts it. Would that not mean to underestimate them and to declare them to be blind agents of a purported "faith" and a rigid "conviction"? Can we seriously attribute such naivetes to powerful and educated representatives of the Christ-religion? Do they not themselves appeal to God incarnate as their idol who had become conspicuous as a rebel and, for his part, stood in the tradi- tion of the founder of a religion who, in a holy rage, had shattered God's own inscribed commandments on the ground? Don't they know? Don't they have to know? And, as inquisitors, don't they have daily impressed on their minds that this religion is based on a call to "imitate Christ"--so that the imitators, precisely when they behave "heretically," are possibly closer to the source than the learned and cynical administrators of the letter?
It has already been shown how Friedrich Schlegel conceived of the kynical dimension of the Christ religion; as religious resistance against the power state, in fact, against every form of raw, unreflective, and egoistically insensitive worldliness. As soon as a power state in the robes of Christianity-whether it be as papacy or as the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation --was established and the brutal world of the masters began to become too impudent, kynical ascetics appeared in the Middle Ages who, with the death skull and the Great Reaper tried to cut the haughty men of the world down to size. They tried to pro- voke power-hungry conquerors of lands to critical self-reflection by pointing out that after they died, they would possess just as much ground as was necessary for burial (a motif in the critique of power that has been kept alive up to Brecht's lyri- cal cynicisms of the 1920s and beyond). The kynical Christianity of the Middle Ages, resolutely committed to reflection and resistance, with its memento mori fought in ever-recurring waves against the tendencies of luxuria and superbia, of bodily lust and unreflecting worldly greed for life. The great reform movements, whose first wave emanated from the Cluniac monasteries and whose influence stretched well into the raw and chaotic warring feudal systems of the tenth and eleventh centuries, appear to me to be indeed kynically inspired in the religious sense. The second great wave, which in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries spread ascetic and mystical experiences into broader circles, also contained kyni- cal elements. It was no different with the beginnings of reform in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the kynical element was even stronger in the great era of the reformations and reformers, among whom Luther ("the Pope is the Devil's
282 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
sow"), who combined in his person kynical prototypes from Moses and David up to Eulenspiegel (his literary contemporary), advanced with a primitive polemical intensity the idea of a self-renewal of religion from the "spirit" and against the idols of tradition.
The late Middle Ages provides examples of the overturning of ascetic motifs --as shown by the following novella:
A beautiful young woman had been wooed by an admirer for a long time, but, for fear of harming her soul and her chastity, she rejected him again and again. Her resistance against the man's wooing was sup- ported by a priest of the town, who continually admonished her to pre- serve her virtue. One day when the priest was forced to leave the town to travel to Venice, he made the woman solemnly pledge not to weaken in his absence. She promised, but on the condition that the priest bring her one of the famous mirrors from Venice. During the priest's ab- sence, she in fact withstood all temptations. After his return, however, she asked for the promised Venetian mirror. Thereupon the priest pulled a skull out from under his robe and thrust it cynically into the young woman's face: "Vain woman, here you see your true face! Con- sider that you must die and that you are nothing before God. " The woman was horrified to the marrow. That same night, she surrendered herself to her suitor and from then on enjoyed with him the joys of love. (Unfortunately, I had to relate this story from memory, since I could not relocate the source; therefore, I can vouchsafe only the gist, but not the wording or detail of the novella. )
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
As soon as Christians recognize themselves in the death skull as in a mirror, they can come to the point where the fear of death recedes before the fear of not having lived. They then understand that it is precisely the climbing into bed with the "whore world" that represents the chance of this irretrievable life.
From the beginning, Christian religion is haunted by a characteristic problem: that of not being able to believe. As organized religion, it is, in its innermost core, already a religion of bad faith, of insincerity, namely, to the extent that it is based not on the imitation of Christ but on the imitation of the imitation, on the legend of Christ, the myth of Christ, the dogma and idealization of Christ. The process of dogmatization is marked by bad faith, for there are two dimensions of unavoid- able uncertainty that, through dogmatization, are deceivingly turned into cer- tainty. First, what was left behind by Jesus was extraordinarily fragmentary and not comprehensible in its authenticity with final certainty, so that it is all too un- derstandable that in the centuries following Jesus' death, the most diverse in- terpretations of Christianness could be developed. The mere fact that they devel- oped demonstrate a certain "tradition of inspiration," that is, a handing down of the original experience the first Christians had shared with Jesus --the experience
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 283
of an unconditional affirmation that, as love and fearlessness, must have made an indelible impression on all those who encountered the early Christians. The dog- matization arises, according to one point of view, in the competitive struggle of various Christian "organizations" and mythologies, none of which can be sure whether, after all, "the spirit" is not also present in the rival Christian organization and mythology. In the obvious and undeniable plurality of "Christendoms," only a primary bad faith can want to establish itself as the sole true faith. This marks the second dimension of bad faith: In the repudiation of alternative Christendoms and in the corresponding "theologicaF- intellectual elaboration of the Christ reli- gion, the antagonism between myth and understanding, between faith and knowl- edge, had to break out--and the more starkly it broke out, the stronger became the tendency to bridge it with disingenuous self-manipulative acts of conscious- ness. In the theological dogmatization of the Christ religion, innumerable lies were told in this dimension of the objectively problematic --as if one believed "one's own faith. " But the history of Christian theology and dogmatics is at least just as much a history of doubting-but-wanting-to-believe as a history of "believ- ing. " Christian theology is the equally immense and spectral attempt to seek cer- tainty precisely where the nature of things does not permit certainty. This theol- ogy has a demonstrable autohypnotic dimension; it begins working on what we today call "ideology," that is, the instrumental use of understanding to paralogi- cally legitimate pregiven aims, interests, and identifications. Even in its first mo- ment, theology is a hybrid construction of faith and doubt that wants to lie its way back into the simplicity of "mere faith. " It formulates "confessions" in a dogmati- cally fixed form, whereas a confession by nature can relate only to what is an im- mediate certainty for confessors, that is, their self-experiences and inwardness: In these they do not find primarily the formulated faith as such; they find doubt, not certainty. What we today call "confession" probably circumscribes the sum of things we doubt rather than the things of which we can be sure.
This legacy of bad faith has been passed on from the Christian structure of mentality to practi- cally everything that has arisen as ideology and Weltanschauung on Western soil in the time since Christ. There is, on our cultural soil, a tradition that teaches how to present what is uncertain per se in the raiment of "conviction," what is believed as something that is known: the confession as a strategic lie.
This inner problematic of bad faith experienced a dramatic escalation in the wrangle of the Catholic Counter- Reformation with the Protestant movements. These movements, if we observe only their intrareligious historical emergence, had become necessary precisely because of the phenomena connected with bad faith, which, in Catholicism, had resulted in an insufferable amount of corruption and deceitfulness. The reforms were concerned with the miserable credibility of "faith," the hollowness, coarseness, and cynicism in the spectacle of the Catholic church. When the Counter-Reformation then armed itself theologically against the Protestant challenge, it inevitably felt a compulsion to reform because it could
284 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
? Honore Daumier, Christian Love--As Practiced in Spain.
not overcome the opponent without studying its "armament" and its critique of Catholicism. From then on, a mute cynical reflexivity increased within Catholic theology, which practiced thinking the opponent's thoughts without letting its own "confessions" show that it had long since known more than it said and "believed. " Talk like the rearguard, think like the vanguard-that became the psychological- strategic secret for the functioning of the Jesuit order, which, like a spiritual mili- tia, constituted the intellectual elite in the struggle against Protestantism. In some areas, this technique is still employed today: The conservative style of ideology --to work with a high degree of consciousness toward an instrumental diminution of one's own intelligence and a self-censorship through artful conventionality--has to the present day something of the former Jesuit manner. In the modern world, being a Catholic really has to be learned for it presupposes the capacity to develop a bad faith of the second degree. Poor Hans Kiing. After such brilliant studies he
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
should have known that the Catholic way of being intelli-
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 285
gent pays off only when one also knows how to decently conceal that one knows too much.
The history of modern "secularization" also touches on cynical phenomena in religion. In this process of "secularization," the partly kynically admonishing, partly cynically intimidating propaganda of skulls and skeletons comes to an end. In a fully militarized, consumption-oriented society of the capitalist (or "so- cialist") type, the memento mori no longer has a chance. In the death's head, no one any longer sees his "true face. " Since the nineteenth century, such death mo- tifs have been forced into a "black romanticism" and have been treated only aes- thetically. The tension between religion and worldly society over what constitutes "real living" has (deceptively) dissolved without residue in favor of the "worldly," political, social, cultural forces. Those who demand "more life," a more "inten- sive life," a "higher life," or a "real life" see themselves, at least since the eigh- teenth century, presented with a series of nonreligious revitalizations that have assumed something from the positive legacy of religion: art, science, erotics, traveling, consciousness of the body, politics, psychotherapy, and the like. All of them can contribute something to the reconstruction of that "full life" that was the dream and memory core of religion. In this sense, it is justifiable to speak of religion as "becoming superfluous. " The living being from whom not so much is taken anymore does not want to get everything back later. Human life that no longer remains so far below its own potentialities has, in fact, less reason to seek a compensatory religiosity. For those for whom "life on earth" is no longer so miserable, heaven itself no longer promises something "completely different. " The principal powers of devitalization--family, state, the military --have, since the nineteenth century, created their own ideologies of revitalization (con- sumerism, sexism, sports, tourism, the cult of violence, mass culture) that the conservative clerical groups cannot match with anything similarly attractive. Modern mass vitalisms contribute a great deal to the circumstance that today's so- cieties, at least on the level of the more robust vital functions, no longer thirst for religion. On the whole, they have become religiously dreamless. When today too little of something is felt, it is expressed in a language of worldly concerns: too little money, too little time, too little sex, too little fun, too little security, and so on. Only recently has a new phrase surfaced: There is too little meaning --and with this neoconservative sob, a "demand for religion" is again heard, a demand that has led to a flourishing trade in meaning, without much feel for the fact that it is the addiction to meaning that gives all sorts of nonsense the opportunity to sell itself as the way to salvation. Only so much is certain: The coarser (so-called material) possibilities of revitalization in our culture, precisely when we avail ourselves of them to some extent, expose deeper levels of our being dead that are not really touched by the vitalism of consumption, sport, disco fever, and free sexuality. This inner level of death is what was earlier called "nihilism," a mixture
286 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
? Standard-bearing trumpeter of the SS Death Head Units.
of disillusionment and violent despair stemming from the feeling of emptiness and arbitrary craving. Without doubt, experiences of this type played a subliminal role in national socialism, that, in some respects, resembles a nihilistic religion. It was, by the way, the only political force in the twentieth century that, in a petu- lant masters' cynical pose, again dared to appropriate for itself the old symbols of the Christian admonition of death: Its ideological vanguard, the SS, chose, not without a good feel for self-representation, the skull and crossbones as its symbol. In matters concerning disinhibition, absolutely nothing can outdo German fas- cism. Fascism is the vitalism of the dead; as political "movement," they want to have their dance. This vitalism of death, which characterizes Western cultural in- stitutions to the present day, is embodied, literarily as well as in reality, in vam- pire figures that, for lack of their own life force, emerge as the living dead among the not yet extinguished to suck their energies into themselves. Once the latter are sucked dry, then they too become vampires. Once they have become devital- ized at their core, they crave the vitality of others.
In Christian times, the appeal to reflect on authentic living runs media vita in morte sumus -- in the midst of life, we are nevertheless already surrounded by death. Today, do we not have to say, conversely, media morte in vita sumus--in the midst of all-pervading death, there is nevertheless something in us that is more alive than is lived by our lifeless life? What do the anxious person, the security person, the wage-labor person, the defense person, the care-laden person, the history person, the planning person know of life? When we add up the contents of our life, we find that there is a lot that is left out and little fulfillment, a lot of dull dreaming and little presence.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 287
Here, life means being not yet dead. To learn to live again leads via a great labor of recollection, but not a labor that only stirs up old stories. The innermost recollection leads not to a story but to a force. To touch this force means to ex- perience a flood of ecstasy. This experience ends up not in a past but in a rapturous now.
The Cynicism of Knowledge
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
What is truth ?
Pontius Pilate
You can trust a statistic only when you have manipulated it yourself.
Winston Churchill
Cleopatra's nose: had it been shorter, then the entire face of the earth would have been changed.
Blaise Pascal
The main thing in life is simply to go freely, lightly, pleasantly, frequently, every evening to the commode. O stercus pretio-
sum! that is the great result of life in all classes.
Denis Diderot, Rameau's Nephew
All culture after Auschwitz, including the penetrating critique of it, is garbage.
T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics
30
Diogenes is the real founder of the Gay Science.
sify. Should he be counted among the philosophers? Is he similar to a "researcher"? Does he remind us of what we call a scientist? Or is he "only" a "popularizer" of knowledges that have been gained elsewhere? None of these labels quite fit. Diogenes' intelligence is nothing like that of professors, and whether it could be compared with that of artists, dramatists, and writers remains uncertain because, as with the kynics in general, nothing of his own work has been handed down. Kynical intelligence did not assert itself in writing, even if, in the good old days of Athenian kynicism, there were supposed to be all sorts of cheeky pamphlets and parodies from the quills of kynics (as suggested by Laer- tius). To make use of intelligence in a kynical way, therefore, probably means to parody rather than propose a theory; it means to be able to find ready answers rather than to brood over insoluble, deep questions. The first Gay Science is satir- ical intelligence. In this it resembles literature more than systematized knowl-
As such, he is not easy to clas-
288 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
edge. Its insights disclose the questionable and ridiculous aspects of the grand, serious systems. Its intelligence is floating, playful, essayistic, not laid out on se- cure foundations and final principles. Diogenes inaugurates the Gay Science by treating serious sciences in a tongue-in-cheek manner. How much truth is con- tained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter
31
that can stand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot stand satire is false. To parody a theory and its proponents is to carry out the experiment of experiments with it. If, as Lenin says, the truth is concrete, then saying the truth must also assume concrete forms, which means, on the one hand, embodiment, and on the other, radical dismantling; what was "concrete" will become even clearer once it has been put through the wringer. Thus, if we are looking for a label for the father of the Gay Science, the first pantomimic materialist, it could be: the satyr capable of thinking. His main theo- retical achievement consists in defending reality against the theorists' delusion 32
that they have conceptualized it.
side of the satyr and satire, of the mobile and mentally alert sense for reality, which is able to restore to the "spirit" its freedom in relation to its own product and to "sublate" (aufheben) the known and the acquired -- in true Hegelian fashion.
Satire as procedure? To the extent that it is an art of intellectual opposition, it can be learned to a certain degree, when its fundamental gestures and turns of expression are investigated. In any case, it takes up a position against whatever might loosely be called "high thinking": idealism, dogmatics, grand theory, Wel- tanschauung, sublimity, ultimate foundations, and the show of order. All these forms of a masters', sovereign, subjugating theory magically attract kynical taunt- ing. Here, the Gay Science finds its playing field. The kynic possesses an unerring instinct for those facts that do not fit into grand theories (systems). (All the worse for the fact? All the worse for the theory? ) Mentally alert, it finds the reply and the counterexample to everything that has been too well thought out to be true. Whenever the ruling and master thinkers present their great visions, the kynical moles set to work--indeed, perhaps what we in our scientific tradition call "cri- tique" is nothing other than a satirical function that no longer understands itself, namely, the realistic undermining from "below" of grand theoretical systems that
33
are experienced as fortresses or prisons
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
(i. e. , the actual methodological core of energy in "critique," as Marx so aptly put it with regard to Hegel) consists in "inverting" things. In the realistic sense that means: from the head onto the feet; but inversion in the other direction can some- times also prove useful: yoga for flatheaded realists.
Inversion --how is it done? In ancient kynical satire, we discover the most im- portant techniques that, incidentally, are related to the conceptual tools of the First Enlightenment (the Sophists). As soon as high theory says order, satire op- poses it with the concept of arbitrariness (and gives examples). If grand theory
Every truth requires a contribution from the
(see chapter 2). The satirical procedure
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 289
tries to speak of laws (nomoi), critique answers by appealing to nature (physis). If the former say cosmos, then the satirists reply, Cosmos may be there where we are not, in the universe, but wherever we human beings turn up, it would be better to speak of chaos. The proponent of order sees the great whole; the kynic sees also the little dismembered pieces. Grand theory looks toward the sublime; satire sees also what is absurd. Elevated Weltanschauung wants to notice only what has been achieved; in kynicism, it is also possible to speak of what has been botched. Idealism sees only the true, the beautiful, and the good, whereas satire takes the liberty of considering what is bent, crooked, or lousy also to be worth talking about. Where dogmatics postulates an unconditional duty toward truth, the Gay Science assumes from the start the right to lie. And where theory de- mands that the truth be presented in discursive forms (argumentatively self- contained texts, chains of sentences), the original critique knows of the possibili- ties of expressing the truth pantomimically and spontaneously. The latter also of- ten recognizes the best in "grand insights" through the jokes that can be made about them. When the guardians of morality perform a great tragedy because Oedipus has slept with his mother, and then believe that therefore the world is no longer in order and the great law of the gods and humankind is in danger, then kynical satire first admonishes us to stay calm. Let us see whether that is really so bad! Who is really harmed by this copulation that goes against the regulations? Only the naive illusion of law. How would it be, however, if human beings did not have to serve the law, but the law had to serve human beings? Did Isocrates not teach that human beings are the measure of all things? Poor Oedipus, don't make such a long face; remember that for the Persians and for dogs, too, mount- ing members of the family is also very much in fashion! Chin up, you old mother- fucker! Here, in Greek antiquity, an epochal threshold in the cultural history of irony has been crossed. The Sophist sages are so sure of being borne by universal principles that they can raise themselves above any mere conventionality. Only an unconditionally "culture-resistant" individual can become free enough for such apparently vice-ridden liberties. Only where the social nomos has already done its work can the deeply civilized person appeal to physis and think of the relaxa- tion of tension.
The master-thinkers let the theater of the world --the display of order, the great "law"--pass review before their mind's eye and cast visions that probably also in- clude pain and the negative but that cause them no pain. An overview is achieved only by those who overlook a lot (A. Gehlen). It is always the pain of others that the theoretical grand views of the "cosmos" call for in payment. According to kynical custom, by contrast, those who suffer by themselves must also scream by themselves. We do not have to see our life from a bird's-eye view or with the eyes of disinterested gods from another planet. Diogenes' anti-philosophy always talks in such a way that we realize that here we see a person in his own skin and he has no intention of leaving it. Whenever he is beaten up, Diogenes hangs a sign
290 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
around his neck with the names of the culprits and walks through the city with it. That is enough theory, enough praxis, enough struggle, and enough satire.
In addition to its quick-witted, mentally alert way of dealing with the official
and linguistically coded cultural wares (theories, systems), kynical anti-
philosophy possesses three essential media by which intelligence can free itself
from "theory" and discourse: action, laughter, and silence. Nothing is achieved
by a mere juxtaposition of theory and praxis. When Marx claims in his famous
eleventh thesis on Feuerbach that philosophers had previously only interpreted
the world in different ways but that the point is to change it (through the world's
becoming philosophical, philosophy's becoming worldly), then, although borne
by a partially kynical impulse, he remains far below the level of an existential di-
alectical materialism. Diogenes, the existentialist, would not be able to stop
laughing about the way in which Marx again throws himself into the business of
34
grand theory.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
hibit a demonstrative silence and, with anarchistic laughter, he would rebuff the impudent demand to make the whole of one's life into a tool of a (good old idealistically) planned "praxis. "
If we wanted to write a history of the kynical impulse in the field of knowledge, it would have to take the form of a philosophical history of satire, or better still, a phenomenology of the satirical mind, as a phenomenology of combative con- sciousness and as a history of what has been thought in the arts (i. e. , as a philo- sophical history of art). Such a history has not been written and would not be necessary if the principles could be made comprehendible without the historical crutch. In any form of erudition, intelligence risks its life. Those who deal with the past risk fading into the past themselves without having understood what they have lost in it. Those who heed these cautions will find sufficient material for a history of the Gay Science hidden in the archives or dispersed in the research liter- ature. Rich traditions offer themselves for rediscovery: a great European silen- tium tradition that was at home not only in the churches, monasteries, and schools but also in the unresearched popular intelligence that is concealed in the eternal silence of the majorities --a silence in which there is also freedom and not merely speechlessness; insight and simplicity, not merely dullness and oppression. There is an even greater European tradition of satire in which the freedoms of art, the carnival, and criticism combined into a many-tongued culture of laughter. Here the main strand of a militant intelligence is probably revealed that bites like the kynical dogs without becoming doggedly pugnacious and that strikes more into its opponent's consciousness with its mockery, irony, inversions, and jokes than
at the opponent himself. Finally, there is an impressive tradition of action in which can be studied the ways in which people have taken their own insights "seri- ously" for the sake of a life whose chances they did not want to waste. That it was frequently an act of resistance is in the nature of things here. The "art of the possible" is not only what statesmen are supposed to master, but always comes
In the presence of so much rage to "change," Diogenes would ex-
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 291
? POLITIQUE. MORALE ET LITT^RAJRE.
J. Grandville, Models of satirical consciousness: the fool with bow and arrow; the Naked Truth. Advertisement for the periodical La Caricature (detail).
into play where people try, with awareness and intelligence, to protect the chance of their life. My favorite examples of such action --apart from some pieces of bravado of the type found in Eulenspiegel, Schweik, and some manifestations of revolutionary praxis --are provided by those emigrants who (especially) in the nineteenth century, set out from a hopelessly hidebound Europe to try their luck in the New World as freer people. In setting out this way there is something of the kynical force of vital intelligence and of the exodus of consciousness into the open world, where life still has a chance to be stronger than the suffocating powers of tradition, society, and conventions. If I were to say which individual action I hold to characterize an intelligence that not only "knows" but also "acts," I would probably choose Heinrich Heine's emigration to Paris in 1831 --this apex of conscious praxis in which a poet subjected his biography to the necessities and chances of the historical moment and left his homeland in order to be able to do what he believed he had to do for his own sake and that of his homeland. "I went because I had to"-and behind this "had to" there were not yet the police (as in the case of Marx and other refugees) but rather the insight that in a conscious life there are moments when we first have to do what we want in order then also to
35
The satirical-polemical-aesthetic dimension in the history of knowledge be- comes important because, in fact, it is the dialectic en marche. With it, the princi- ples of embodiment and resistance penetrate the course of socially organized thinking: the inexpressible individual element; single persons intuitively in touch with their existence; the "nonidentical" conjured up by Adorno; the thing-there
want to do what we have to do.
292 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
that is already mistreated by any mere conceptual designation because it stimu- lates understanding (and only makes a "case of X" out of the singular). Where should this individual reality assure itself better of its existence -- apart from the arts --than in satire, in the ironic dissolution of imposed "orders," in playing with what pretends to be "law," in brief, in the embodiment of this highly nonserious matter that, after all, the living being is? Dialectical thinkers --whether philoso- phers, poets, or musicians --are those in whom polemics and the fierce and uncon- scionable animosity between thoughts and motives already form the inner work- ings of their "thinking" process. Their presence of mind suffices, if one can put it this way, for more than one thought. All great dialectical thinkers and artists thus carry within themselves a disputatious, forward-driving, and creative kynic or cynic that, from within, prescribes movement and provocation for their think- ing. Dialecticians are the movers of thoughts who cannot do otherwise than to give the antithesis to every thesis its due. We observe in them a partly comba- tively unsettled, partly epically measured form of discourse that
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
stems from a feeling for the figural, melodic, and thematic in the composition of thought-in the disguised poet Plato no differently than in the philosophizing musician Adorno, in the grotesque and pompous dialectic of Rabelais as in the uninhibited streaming rhetoric of Ernst Bloch. It would be worth the effort sometime to por-
tray the inner kynical-cynical "partner" of the important masters --whether it be with Diderot or Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard, or Marx, with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, or Foucault. And what really happens when Sartre, the master dialectician of the twentieth century, confronts Flaubert, the grand cynic of the nineteenth century, on the thousands of pages of the Idiot of the Family (a con- frontation so full of philosophical and psychodynamic morsels that it is obviously impossible to talk about it in an incidental manner).
As we have said, kynicism cannot be a theory and cannot have its "own" the- ory. Cognitive kynicism is aform of dealing with knowledge, a form of relativiza- tion, ironic treatment, application, and sublation. It is the answer of the will to live to that which it has suffered at the hands of theories and ideologies-partly a spiritual art of survival, partly intellectual resistance, partly satire, partly "critique. "
"Critical theory" tries to protect life from the false abstractness and violence of "positive" theories. In this sense, the Frankfurt Critical Theory too inherited the kynical portions of those grand theories the nineteenth century handed down to the twentieth --of left Hegelianism with its existentialist and anthropological as well as its historical and sociological aspects, and of Marxism, as well as of Criti- cal Psychology, which became well known especially in the form of psychoanaly- sis. These are all, if properly understood, "theories" that contain within them the kynical form of treating theory (namely, the sublation of theory) and that can be made into "fixed systems" only at the cost of an intellectual regression. Such regressions have happened on a grand scale, and how much stupefaction has been
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 293
perpetrated in the late nineteenth century and the whole of the twentieth by vulgar Hegelianism, vulgar Marxism, vulgar psychology, vulgar existentialism, and vulgar Nietzscheanism is all too crassly shown in recent social history. All these systems of stupefaction have dispatched the reflective agility of "Critical The- ories," established rigid dogmas as "knowledge," and left nothing of kynical sub- lation except arrogant presumption. In fact, the kynical sublation of theory stems from a conscious not-knowing, not from a knowing-better. It releases us to a new and fresh not-knowing, instead of letting us become rigid in certainties. For with "convictions" only the desert grows. Against this, Frankfurt Critical Theory achieved a great deal by attempting again and again to "destupefy" the theoretical inheritance of the nineteenth century and, above all, by trying to save the elements of truth in Marxism from its degeneration in Leninist and, still more, in Stalinist dogmatics.
In its good times, Marxism was really a vehicle of an active intelligence, and it knew how to fertilize all the human sciences with its historical-critical con- sciousness. The materialist conception of history [Kautsky; --Trans. ] has always contained hundreds of possibilities for "another history" and for a history of the Other. A real history of the Other, however, can be written only by those who are the Other and the Others and have decided to let this Otherness live and to fight for the freedom to be allowed to be so. The most significant examples today are the history of "femaleness" and the history of homosexuality. With the relating of their suppression and formation, both come simultaneously to the conscious- ness of a freedom that is now becoming real. By talking about themselves --in his- tory and in the present-- women and homosexuals also celebrate the beginning of a new era that they will be "a part of in a different way than they were previously. History must be like this.
Mitscherlich shows that behind the criminal leaders stood a large medical ap- paratus that had already step by step advanced to a considerable extent the trans- formation of patients into human raw material. The criminal doctors "only" had to take one more cynical leap in the direction in which they were already headed. What today goes on quietly without being seriously disturbed by anyone--torture research, genetic and prosthetic research, military-biological and war- pharmacology research --already has within it everything that will provide the tools for the medical fascism of tomorrow. The horrifying living experiments and notorious collections of skeletons in Nazi medicine will be "nothing by compari- son. " "Nothing by comparison": That is cynical one-upmanship, yet it simply ar- ticulates a tendency of reality. In the area of cleverly thought out cruelty, the twenty-first century has already begun.
What will help against the masters' helping profession of today and tomorrow? Several answers are conceivable.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
First, from a society with the will to live and from its philosophy--to the extent that it captures the will to live of its time in concepts--must come an offensive that rehabilitates the idea of the "good doctor" and brings a "helping at the source" into battle against the universal, diffuse cynicism of modern medicine. What good help and what a real healer are, medicine by itself has never been able to define. A social order like ours furthers almost by necessity a medicine that, in turn, tends to further the system of sicknesses and of making people sick rather than life in good health.
Second, only self-help helps against masters' helpers. The only defense against false or questionable help is to have no need for it. Moreover, for a long time now we have been able to observe how capitalist masters' medicine attempts to THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 275
bring self-help traditions in folk medicine under its domination--after centuries of defamation and rivalry--by absorbing them as part of orthodox medical rea- son. ("It's been scientifically proven: There really is something in some herbs! ") The interest of the institutionalized medical profession works with all possible means toward a state of affairs in which everything corporeal will be totally medicalized--from occupational medicine, sport medicine, sexual medicine, digestive medicine, nutritional medicine, fitness medicine, accident medicine, criminal medicine, and war medicine to the medicines covering the competency to supervise healthy and unhealthy breathing, walking, standing, learning and newspaper reading, to say nothing of pregnancy, birth, dying, and other caprioles of human corporeality. The "health" system is heading toward a state of affairs in which the masters' medical control of the somatic dimension will become totalitarian. A point can be imagined at which private bodily competencies will be expropriated completely. In the end, one will have to attend urological classes to learn how to piss correctly. The central question in the current medical- cynical process is whether "orthodox medicine" will be able to destroy the lay helper movements that have arisen for numerous cultural reasons (self-actualization, the women's movement, ecology, rural communes, new religions, etc. ). This ques- tion runs parallel to the question of the intramedical chances of "political" tenden- cies in professional medicine: psychosomatic internal medicine, occupational medicine, gynecology, psychiatry, and so on. These are the professional medical disciplines that, for logical reasons concerning their occupations, should know best that everything they do runs the risk of harming more than helping, as long as another direction for helping--coming from life, freedom, and conscious- ness--is not pursued.
Third, in the last instance, only the conscious embodying of our fragility, our being sick, our mortality, can help against the medical splitting off of responsibil- ity for our own bodily existence. I do not have to say how difficult that is, for the fear, when it becomes great, makes us all the more inclined to repress our responsibility for the life and death of our own body or to delegate it to doctors, not considering that even the most perfect conservation medicine, in the end, hands back to us the entire responsibility and unsharable pain in our most helpless moment. Those who recognize that the circle of alienation and flight must always finally close in one's own death must also be aware that it would be better to re- verse toward life rather than anesthetization, toward risk rather than security, to- ward embodiment rather than splitting.
Religious Cynicism
And what will you do with the grail when you have found it?
Benjamin Disraeli
276 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
. . . even grinning is mixed in with it, like that of the skull it- self: because the fact that long-planning human beings depart like cattle is also somehow funny.
Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hojfnung (p. 1299)
Suddenly, someone leaves the visible and continuous world common to all and ceases to share existence with us. His breathing has stopped, his movements have ceased. At first, death manifests itself negatively; something is extinguished and passes over into stillness. A little later, this cessation shows also its positive side, the body becomes cold, starts to putrefy, rot. The skeleton then steps forth as the part that resists decomposition longer than the other parts. It takes over the representation of what remains of us in materia, hence the skeleton as death im- ago. The framework of bones symbolizes the end that all who live already carry within themselves. Everyone of us is our own friend Mr. D. , the bony forerun- ning of one's own departure.
From the perspective of this side of death, the only one usually observable, the idea imposes itself on living persons that an invisible force is at work in ani- mated bodies that allows them to breathe, jump about, and remain form-coherent, whereas this invisible something must have departed from the dead, so that they grow stiff and decay. The invisible something stimulates breathing, movement, feeling, alertness, and the maintenance of the body's form --it is the epitome of intensity and energy. Its activity creates, although not visibly or in a way that can be isolated, the most real reality. This invisible force has many names: soul, spirit, breath, ancestors, fire, form, God, life.
Experience teaches that animals like us are born and die, that plants germinate and pass away, and that they too, in their
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
own way, participate in the rhythm of death and life, form constitution and form dissolution. Without doubt, the human "soul" is surrounded by a cosmos of animal and plant life and by mysterious energy subjects that are active behind day and night, storm and calm sky, heat and cold. In nothing does this being surrounded suggest a "domination" of hu- mankind over nature and the environment. Rather, the naked biped appears as a being that is tolerated and endured by the whole, insofar as it controls the inter- actions with the bringers of bounty and danger from the animal and plant world.
Life and death, coming and going, they are initially natural constants, pulsat- ing beats in a rhythm in which what is pregiven outweighs what is added later. In the course of civilization, however, the relation between submission and ac- tion, suffering and doing has shifted --also with regard to the experience of death. What appeared to be an aspect of natural pulsations becomes in more developed societies a more and more profound and more and more embittered struggle be- tween life and death. Death is then no longer so much an event that nothing can influence, but is itself something that our violence and caprice bring about. Its primary image is no longer the unavoidable coming to an end, nor the peaceful
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 277
self-exhaustion or the quiet and unresisted burning down of life's flame, butacon- tested, horrifying happening imbued with premonitions of violence and murder. The more people think of death as being murdered rather than as being peacefuly extinguished, the more violently must the flood of the fear of death swel up in higher and more violent civilizations. For this reason, the historical states and empires, wherever we look, are religious states and empires. They constitute so- cial worlds in which the fear of a violent death is a realistic one. We al have a thousand images of violence before our eyes: surprise attacks, massacres, rapes, public executions, wars, scenes of torture, in which human beings develop them- selves into diabolical fiends in order to extract a maximum of agony from the death of others. In addition, class societies suppress the vital energies of subjects and slaves through physical and symbolic violence in such a way that shadowy hollows of unlived life unfailingly open up in bodies, where wishing, fantasizing, the yearning for the divined otherness of a full life begin to brood. This unlived life combines its Utopian energies with the fears of annihilation that are distiled in the individual in violent societies from infancy onward. Only out of this combi- nation comes the absolute defiance of death in civilized human beings, a defiance that seemingly cannot be dissolved by anything. This is the answer to the pro- foundly terrifying experience of civilization. Our being in society comprises al- most a priori the threat that we will not be allowed to realize the vitality with which we were born. Every socialized life lives with the premonition that its ener- gies, time, willing, and wishing will not be at an end when the death knell rings, Life builds residues-an immense, burning Not Yet that needs more time and fu- ture than is granted to the individual. Life dreams beyond itself and dies ful of defiance. For this reason, the history of higher civilizations vibrates with count- less and boundless Not Yet screams-with a million-voiced No to a death that is not the expiration of the dying embers of life but a violent suffocation of a flame that in any case did not burn as brightly as it could have done in a vital fredom. Since that time, devitalized life in class and military societies ponders its compensations-whether in further lives, as supposed by Hindu consciousness, or in heavenly existence as promised by Christianity and Islam - for the thwarted dreams of their believers. Religion is not primarily the opiate of the people but the reminder that there is more life in us than this life lives. The function of faith is an achievement of devitalized bodies that cannot be completely robbed of the memory that in them much deeper sources of vitality, strength, pleasure, and of the enigma and intoxication of being-there must lie hidden than can be sen in everyday life.
This gives religions their ambiguous role in societies: They can be used to legitimate and double (verdoppelri) oppression (see the Enlightenment's critique of religion in chapter 3, the section entitled "Critique of Religious Illusion"). They can, however, also liberate individuals to a greater power of resistance and creativity by helping them to overcome fear. Thus, depending on circumstances,
278 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
religion can be both an instrument of domination and the core of resistance against domination; a medium of repression and a medium of emancipation; an instrument of devitalization and a precept of revitalization.
The first case of religious Kynicism in the Judeo-Christian tradition has no one less than the original father, Moses, in the role of kynical rebel. He committed the first blasphemy of grand dimensions when, on his return from Mount Sinai, he smashed the tablets; "they were tables of stone, written on by the finger of God" (Exodus 31:18). "And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables" (32:16). Moses, who, with the divine laws under his arm, came down from the mountain and found his people dancing around the Golden Calf, set an example for the religious kynic's behavior with respect to the sacred: He smashed everything that was not spirit but letter, not God but idol, not the living but its representation. It is emphasized that he did this in anger and that it was a holy anger that gave him the right and the necessary impertinence to lay violent hands on God's personal handwriting.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
That needs to be understood. Namely, immediately after he had shattered the tablets, so the bib- lical account says, Moses seized the Golden Calf, melted it in the fire, "ground it to powder, and scattered it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink
of it" (32:20). Later, Moses had to chisel new tablets so that God could inscribe them a second time. He also received from God the commandment: "Thou shalt make no graven images. " Moses' kynical blasphemy came from the knowledge that people are inclined to worship fetishes and to indulge in the idolization of objects. But nothing material can be so holy that it may not be smashed as soon as it becomes apparent that the representations of the sacred have begun to over- shadow the spirit of the religion. In this regard it can happen that no distinction is made between the stone tablets of the dear Lord and the Golden Calf. If it is a representation, or idol, then smite it. That is the spiritual- kynical core of the commandment to make no image of "God. " Image and text can fulfill their func- tions only as long as it is not forgotten that both are material forms and that the "truth," as a material-immaterial structure, must always be written and read anew, that is, materialized and, at the same time, immaterialized anew --which means that every materialization will be shattered whenever it begins to force it-
28
All primary blasphemies are borne by the kynical impulse to not let oneself be made a fool of by any idol. Those who "know" something of the gods know the great rage of Moses and the kynical lightness in dealing with representations of the divine. Religious persons, in contrast to pious persons, are no buffoons of the superego; it knows the laws, and religious persons know that it knows the laws, and they let them speak and they obey them too when it seems appropriate- This distinguishes the primary blasphemy of mystics, the religious, and the kyni- cally alive, from the secondary blasphemies that arise from resentment, uncon-
self into the foreground.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 279
? Max Ernst, The Virgin Disciplines the Christ Child 1926. ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
scious compulsions for vices and an unfree desire to drag down whatever is elevated.
The first cynicism of the religious type likewise is found in the Old Testament. Significantly, it is contained in the story of the first murder in human history --in the story of Cain and Abel. Adam and Eve had two sons among their children. Cain, the firstborn, was a farmer, and Abel, the second, was a shepherd. One day both brought sacrifices to the Lord, Cain from the fruit of his fields and Abel from the youngest of his herd. The Lord, however, welcomed only Abel's offering and
280 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
cast scorn upon Cain's. "And Cain was very wroth and his countenance became distorted . . . Cain talked with Abel his brother: And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? " (Genesis 4:5-9). With this question, the stage for religious cynicism is set. The art of dissimulation, spo- ken of here for the first time, is directly connected with the cynical turning of a
29
violent consciousness against the other.
said, it would have to be cynical -- for, in truth, he does not intend to tell the truth. The communication with the questioner is distorted from the start. Cain could, if he felt he had nothing to lose, answer his God: "Don't be so hypocritical, you know as well as I do where Abel is, for I have killed him with my own hands, and you not only looked on calmly, but even gave me occasion to do it. " Cain's real answer, in its brevity, still has enough cynical bite: "I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? " (Genesis 4:9). An all-knowing and infinitely just God, as Cain's testy retort suggests, should be able to refrain from such prickings of con- science. What kind of God is it who treats people unequally and at the very least provokes them to crime, but then, with pretended innocence, asks questions about what has happened? "God," if one may say so, does not penetrate every con- sciousness. Cain closes off his conscience to this nonpenetrating God (cf. the psy- chology of children who grow up under great fear of punishment). He reacts inso- lently, evasively, impudently. With this first crime, even more than with the fall from grace, as is shown by the myth in the Old Testament, something has hap- pened that makes a deep cleft in the still-fresh creation --things begin to slip away from God. Cruelties occur in the world with which he does not reckon and with whose just atonement he does not yet quite know how to deal. The point of the
Cain story, remarkably enough, seems to be that God, as if he had become pen- sive, not only does not punish the murderer, Cain, but, with the mark of Cain, expressly puts him under his personal protection: "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. " For whatever avenges itself would definitely not be a god at the height of what is possible. The god of the ancient Hebrews has many traits of a bad- tempered, embittered, old man who no longer completely understands the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
world and who, with a jealous and mistrustful countenance, observes everything that goes on down below. Nevertheless, the reprisal for Cain's original crime is post- poned until the Day of Judgment. God grants himself and humankind a respite, and the myths about the Day of Judgment emphasize that a considerable amount of time will elapse before it arrives--the time of a great opportunity. It is the time God needs to become just and the time we need to understand what proper living is. Both mean basically the same thing.
How the Christianization of power in the end phase of the Roman Empire, and even more during the European Middle Ages, led to cynical effects, was indicated earlier in this chapter ("The Cynicism of State and Hegemonic Power"). Catholic masters' cynicism reached its peak at the time of the Crusades, in which the ori-
What can Cain answer? Whatever he
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 281
gins of the Inquisition are to be found. If we express this concisely with the phrase "the persecution of Christians by Christians," this outlines the reflexive-cynical practice of lying by the master church, whose gloomiest representatives -- in the style of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor--do not shrink from incinerating the returned Jesus just as they did those heretics who strove to revive his teachings. They knew precisely what they were doing, and it is probably a romantic simpli- fication to label these gentlemen of the Inquisition Catholic "fanatics," as histori- ography so creepily puts it. Would that not mean to underestimate them and to declare them to be blind agents of a purported "faith" and a rigid "conviction"? Can we seriously attribute such naivetes to powerful and educated representatives of the Christ-religion? Do they not themselves appeal to God incarnate as their idol who had become conspicuous as a rebel and, for his part, stood in the tradi- tion of the founder of a religion who, in a holy rage, had shattered God's own inscribed commandments on the ground? Don't they know? Don't they have to know? And, as inquisitors, don't they have daily impressed on their minds that this religion is based on a call to "imitate Christ"--so that the imitators, precisely when they behave "heretically," are possibly closer to the source than the learned and cynical administrators of the letter?
It has already been shown how Friedrich Schlegel conceived of the kynical dimension of the Christ religion; as religious resistance against the power state, in fact, against every form of raw, unreflective, and egoistically insensitive worldliness. As soon as a power state in the robes of Christianity-whether it be as papacy or as the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation --was established and the brutal world of the masters began to become too impudent, kynical ascetics appeared in the Middle Ages who, with the death skull and the Great Reaper tried to cut the haughty men of the world down to size. They tried to pro- voke power-hungry conquerors of lands to critical self-reflection by pointing out that after they died, they would possess just as much ground as was necessary for burial (a motif in the critique of power that has been kept alive up to Brecht's lyri- cal cynicisms of the 1920s and beyond). The kynical Christianity of the Middle Ages, resolutely committed to reflection and resistance, with its memento mori fought in ever-recurring waves against the tendencies of luxuria and superbia, of bodily lust and unreflecting worldly greed for life. The great reform movements, whose first wave emanated from the Cluniac monasteries and whose influence stretched well into the raw and chaotic warring feudal systems of the tenth and eleventh centuries, appear to me to be indeed kynically inspired in the religious sense. The second great wave, which in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries spread ascetic and mystical experiences into broader circles, also contained kyni- cal elements. It was no different with the beginnings of reform in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the kynical element was even stronger in the great era of the reformations and reformers, among whom Luther ("the Pope is the Devil's
282 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
sow"), who combined in his person kynical prototypes from Moses and David up to Eulenspiegel (his literary contemporary), advanced with a primitive polemical intensity the idea of a self-renewal of religion from the "spirit" and against the idols of tradition.
The late Middle Ages provides examples of the overturning of ascetic motifs --as shown by the following novella:
A beautiful young woman had been wooed by an admirer for a long time, but, for fear of harming her soul and her chastity, she rejected him again and again. Her resistance against the man's wooing was sup- ported by a priest of the town, who continually admonished her to pre- serve her virtue. One day when the priest was forced to leave the town to travel to Venice, he made the woman solemnly pledge not to weaken in his absence. She promised, but on the condition that the priest bring her one of the famous mirrors from Venice. During the priest's ab- sence, she in fact withstood all temptations. After his return, however, she asked for the promised Venetian mirror. Thereupon the priest pulled a skull out from under his robe and thrust it cynically into the young woman's face: "Vain woman, here you see your true face! Con- sider that you must die and that you are nothing before God. " The woman was horrified to the marrow. That same night, she surrendered herself to her suitor and from then on enjoyed with him the joys of love. (Unfortunately, I had to relate this story from memory, since I could not relocate the source; therefore, I can vouchsafe only the gist, but not the wording or detail of the novella. )
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
As soon as Christians recognize themselves in the death skull as in a mirror, they can come to the point where the fear of death recedes before the fear of not having lived. They then understand that it is precisely the climbing into bed with the "whore world" that represents the chance of this irretrievable life.
From the beginning, Christian religion is haunted by a characteristic problem: that of not being able to believe. As organized religion, it is, in its innermost core, already a religion of bad faith, of insincerity, namely, to the extent that it is based not on the imitation of Christ but on the imitation of the imitation, on the legend of Christ, the myth of Christ, the dogma and idealization of Christ. The process of dogmatization is marked by bad faith, for there are two dimensions of unavoid- able uncertainty that, through dogmatization, are deceivingly turned into cer- tainty. First, what was left behind by Jesus was extraordinarily fragmentary and not comprehensible in its authenticity with final certainty, so that it is all too un- derstandable that in the centuries following Jesus' death, the most diverse in- terpretations of Christianness could be developed. The mere fact that they devel- oped demonstrate a certain "tradition of inspiration," that is, a handing down of the original experience the first Christians had shared with Jesus --the experience
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 283
of an unconditional affirmation that, as love and fearlessness, must have made an indelible impression on all those who encountered the early Christians. The dog- matization arises, according to one point of view, in the competitive struggle of various Christian "organizations" and mythologies, none of which can be sure whether, after all, "the spirit" is not also present in the rival Christian organization and mythology. In the obvious and undeniable plurality of "Christendoms," only a primary bad faith can want to establish itself as the sole true faith. This marks the second dimension of bad faith: In the repudiation of alternative Christendoms and in the corresponding "theologicaF- intellectual elaboration of the Christ reli- gion, the antagonism between myth and understanding, between faith and knowl- edge, had to break out--and the more starkly it broke out, the stronger became the tendency to bridge it with disingenuous self-manipulative acts of conscious- ness. In the theological dogmatization of the Christ religion, innumerable lies were told in this dimension of the objectively problematic --as if one believed "one's own faith. " But the history of Christian theology and dogmatics is at least just as much a history of doubting-but-wanting-to-believe as a history of "believ- ing. " Christian theology is the equally immense and spectral attempt to seek cer- tainty precisely where the nature of things does not permit certainty. This theol- ogy has a demonstrable autohypnotic dimension; it begins working on what we today call "ideology," that is, the instrumental use of understanding to paralogi- cally legitimate pregiven aims, interests, and identifications. Even in its first mo- ment, theology is a hybrid construction of faith and doubt that wants to lie its way back into the simplicity of "mere faith. " It formulates "confessions" in a dogmati- cally fixed form, whereas a confession by nature can relate only to what is an im- mediate certainty for confessors, that is, their self-experiences and inwardness: In these they do not find primarily the formulated faith as such; they find doubt, not certainty. What we today call "confession" probably circumscribes the sum of things we doubt rather than the things of which we can be sure.
This legacy of bad faith has been passed on from the Christian structure of mentality to practi- cally everything that has arisen as ideology and Weltanschauung on Western soil in the time since Christ. There is, on our cultural soil, a tradition that teaches how to present what is uncertain per se in the raiment of "conviction," what is believed as something that is known: the confession as a strategic lie.
This inner problematic of bad faith experienced a dramatic escalation in the wrangle of the Catholic Counter- Reformation with the Protestant movements. These movements, if we observe only their intrareligious historical emergence, had become necessary precisely because of the phenomena connected with bad faith, which, in Catholicism, had resulted in an insufferable amount of corruption and deceitfulness. The reforms were concerned with the miserable credibility of "faith," the hollowness, coarseness, and cynicism in the spectacle of the Catholic church. When the Counter-Reformation then armed itself theologically against the Protestant challenge, it inevitably felt a compulsion to reform because it could
284 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
? Honore Daumier, Christian Love--As Practiced in Spain.
not overcome the opponent without studying its "armament" and its critique of Catholicism. From then on, a mute cynical reflexivity increased within Catholic theology, which practiced thinking the opponent's thoughts without letting its own "confessions" show that it had long since known more than it said and "believed. " Talk like the rearguard, think like the vanguard-that became the psychological- strategic secret for the functioning of the Jesuit order, which, like a spiritual mili- tia, constituted the intellectual elite in the struggle against Protestantism. In some areas, this technique is still employed today: The conservative style of ideology --to work with a high degree of consciousness toward an instrumental diminution of one's own intelligence and a self-censorship through artful conventionality--has to the present day something of the former Jesuit manner. In the modern world, being a Catholic really has to be learned for it presupposes the capacity to develop a bad faith of the second degree. Poor Hans Kiing. After such brilliant studies he
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
should have known that the Catholic way of being intelli-
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 285
gent pays off only when one also knows how to decently conceal that one knows too much.
The history of modern "secularization" also touches on cynical phenomena in religion. In this process of "secularization," the partly kynically admonishing, partly cynically intimidating propaganda of skulls and skeletons comes to an end. In a fully militarized, consumption-oriented society of the capitalist (or "so- cialist") type, the memento mori no longer has a chance. In the death's head, no one any longer sees his "true face. " Since the nineteenth century, such death mo- tifs have been forced into a "black romanticism" and have been treated only aes- thetically. The tension between religion and worldly society over what constitutes "real living" has (deceptively) dissolved without residue in favor of the "worldly," political, social, cultural forces. Those who demand "more life," a more "inten- sive life," a "higher life," or a "real life" see themselves, at least since the eigh- teenth century, presented with a series of nonreligious revitalizations that have assumed something from the positive legacy of religion: art, science, erotics, traveling, consciousness of the body, politics, psychotherapy, and the like. All of them can contribute something to the reconstruction of that "full life" that was the dream and memory core of religion. In this sense, it is justifiable to speak of religion as "becoming superfluous. " The living being from whom not so much is taken anymore does not want to get everything back later. Human life that no longer remains so far below its own potentialities has, in fact, less reason to seek a compensatory religiosity. For those for whom "life on earth" is no longer so miserable, heaven itself no longer promises something "completely different. " The principal powers of devitalization--family, state, the military --have, since the nineteenth century, created their own ideologies of revitalization (con- sumerism, sexism, sports, tourism, the cult of violence, mass culture) that the conservative clerical groups cannot match with anything similarly attractive. Modern mass vitalisms contribute a great deal to the circumstance that today's so- cieties, at least on the level of the more robust vital functions, no longer thirst for religion. On the whole, they have become religiously dreamless. When today too little of something is felt, it is expressed in a language of worldly concerns: too little money, too little time, too little sex, too little fun, too little security, and so on. Only recently has a new phrase surfaced: There is too little meaning --and with this neoconservative sob, a "demand for religion" is again heard, a demand that has led to a flourishing trade in meaning, without much feel for the fact that it is the addiction to meaning that gives all sorts of nonsense the opportunity to sell itself as the way to salvation. Only so much is certain: The coarser (so-called material) possibilities of revitalization in our culture, precisely when we avail ourselves of them to some extent, expose deeper levels of our being dead that are not really touched by the vitalism of consumption, sport, disco fever, and free sexuality. This inner level of death is what was earlier called "nihilism," a mixture
286 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
? Standard-bearing trumpeter of the SS Death Head Units.
of disillusionment and violent despair stemming from the feeling of emptiness and arbitrary craving. Without doubt, experiences of this type played a subliminal role in national socialism, that, in some respects, resembles a nihilistic religion. It was, by the way, the only political force in the twentieth century that, in a petu- lant masters' cynical pose, again dared to appropriate for itself the old symbols of the Christian admonition of death: Its ideological vanguard, the SS, chose, not without a good feel for self-representation, the skull and crossbones as its symbol. In matters concerning disinhibition, absolutely nothing can outdo German fas- cism. Fascism is the vitalism of the dead; as political "movement," they want to have their dance. This vitalism of death, which characterizes Western cultural in- stitutions to the present day, is embodied, literarily as well as in reality, in vam- pire figures that, for lack of their own life force, emerge as the living dead among the not yet extinguished to suck their energies into themselves. Once the latter are sucked dry, then they too become vampires. Once they have become devital- ized at their core, they crave the vitality of others.
In Christian times, the appeal to reflect on authentic living runs media vita in morte sumus -- in the midst of life, we are nevertheless already surrounded by death. Today, do we not have to say, conversely, media morte in vita sumus--in the midst of all-pervading death, there is nevertheless something in us that is more alive than is lived by our lifeless life? What do the anxious person, the security person, the wage-labor person, the defense person, the care-laden person, the history person, the planning person know of life? When we add up the contents of our life, we find that there is a lot that is left out and little fulfillment, a lot of dull dreaming and little presence.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 287
Here, life means being not yet dead. To learn to live again leads via a great labor of recollection, but not a labor that only stirs up old stories. The innermost recollection leads not to a story but to a force. To touch this force means to ex- perience a flood of ecstasy. This experience ends up not in a past but in a rapturous now.
The Cynicism of Knowledge
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
What is truth ?
Pontius Pilate
You can trust a statistic only when you have manipulated it yourself.
Winston Churchill
Cleopatra's nose: had it been shorter, then the entire face of the earth would have been changed.
Blaise Pascal
The main thing in life is simply to go freely, lightly, pleasantly, frequently, every evening to the commode. O stercus pretio-
sum! that is the great result of life in all classes.
Denis Diderot, Rameau's Nephew
All culture after Auschwitz, including the penetrating critique of it, is garbage.
T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics
30
Diogenes is the real founder of the Gay Science.
sify. Should he be counted among the philosophers? Is he similar to a "researcher"? Does he remind us of what we call a scientist? Or is he "only" a "popularizer" of knowledges that have been gained elsewhere? None of these labels quite fit. Diogenes' intelligence is nothing like that of professors, and whether it could be compared with that of artists, dramatists, and writers remains uncertain because, as with the kynics in general, nothing of his own work has been handed down. Kynical intelligence did not assert itself in writing, even if, in the good old days of Athenian kynicism, there were supposed to be all sorts of cheeky pamphlets and parodies from the quills of kynics (as suggested by Laer- tius). To make use of intelligence in a kynical way, therefore, probably means to parody rather than propose a theory; it means to be able to find ready answers rather than to brood over insoluble, deep questions. The first Gay Science is satir- ical intelligence. In this it resembles literature more than systematized knowl-
As such, he is not easy to clas-
288 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
edge. Its insights disclose the questionable and ridiculous aspects of the grand, serious systems. Its intelligence is floating, playful, essayistic, not laid out on se- cure foundations and final principles. Diogenes inaugurates the Gay Science by treating serious sciences in a tongue-in-cheek manner. How much truth is con- tained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter
31
that can stand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot stand satire is false. To parody a theory and its proponents is to carry out the experiment of experiments with it. If, as Lenin says, the truth is concrete, then saying the truth must also assume concrete forms, which means, on the one hand, embodiment, and on the other, radical dismantling; what was "concrete" will become even clearer once it has been put through the wringer. Thus, if we are looking for a label for the father of the Gay Science, the first pantomimic materialist, it could be: the satyr capable of thinking. His main theo- retical achievement consists in defending reality against the theorists' delusion 32
that they have conceptualized it.
side of the satyr and satire, of the mobile and mentally alert sense for reality, which is able to restore to the "spirit" its freedom in relation to its own product and to "sublate" (aufheben) the known and the acquired -- in true Hegelian fashion.
Satire as procedure? To the extent that it is an art of intellectual opposition, it can be learned to a certain degree, when its fundamental gestures and turns of expression are investigated. In any case, it takes up a position against whatever might loosely be called "high thinking": idealism, dogmatics, grand theory, Wel- tanschauung, sublimity, ultimate foundations, and the show of order. All these forms of a masters', sovereign, subjugating theory magically attract kynical taunt- ing. Here, the Gay Science finds its playing field. The kynic possesses an unerring instinct for those facts that do not fit into grand theories (systems). (All the worse for the fact? All the worse for the theory? ) Mentally alert, it finds the reply and the counterexample to everything that has been too well thought out to be true. Whenever the ruling and master thinkers present their great visions, the kynical moles set to work--indeed, perhaps what we in our scientific tradition call "cri- tique" is nothing other than a satirical function that no longer understands itself, namely, the realistic undermining from "below" of grand theoretical systems that
33
are experienced as fortresses or prisons
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
(i. e. , the actual methodological core of energy in "critique," as Marx so aptly put it with regard to Hegel) consists in "inverting" things. In the realistic sense that means: from the head onto the feet; but inversion in the other direction can some- times also prove useful: yoga for flatheaded realists.
Inversion --how is it done? In ancient kynical satire, we discover the most im- portant techniques that, incidentally, are related to the conceptual tools of the First Enlightenment (the Sophists). As soon as high theory says order, satire op- poses it with the concept of arbitrariness (and gives examples). If grand theory
Every truth requires a contribution from the
(see chapter 2). The satirical procedure
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 289
tries to speak of laws (nomoi), critique answers by appealing to nature (physis). If the former say cosmos, then the satirists reply, Cosmos may be there where we are not, in the universe, but wherever we human beings turn up, it would be better to speak of chaos. The proponent of order sees the great whole; the kynic sees also the little dismembered pieces. Grand theory looks toward the sublime; satire sees also what is absurd. Elevated Weltanschauung wants to notice only what has been achieved; in kynicism, it is also possible to speak of what has been botched. Idealism sees only the true, the beautiful, and the good, whereas satire takes the liberty of considering what is bent, crooked, or lousy also to be worth talking about. Where dogmatics postulates an unconditional duty toward truth, the Gay Science assumes from the start the right to lie. And where theory de- mands that the truth be presented in discursive forms (argumentatively self- contained texts, chains of sentences), the original critique knows of the possibili- ties of expressing the truth pantomimically and spontaneously. The latter also of- ten recognizes the best in "grand insights" through the jokes that can be made about them. When the guardians of morality perform a great tragedy because Oedipus has slept with his mother, and then believe that therefore the world is no longer in order and the great law of the gods and humankind is in danger, then kynical satire first admonishes us to stay calm. Let us see whether that is really so bad! Who is really harmed by this copulation that goes against the regulations? Only the naive illusion of law. How would it be, however, if human beings did not have to serve the law, but the law had to serve human beings? Did Isocrates not teach that human beings are the measure of all things? Poor Oedipus, don't make such a long face; remember that for the Persians and for dogs, too, mount- ing members of the family is also very much in fashion! Chin up, you old mother- fucker! Here, in Greek antiquity, an epochal threshold in the cultural history of irony has been crossed. The Sophist sages are so sure of being borne by universal principles that they can raise themselves above any mere conventionality. Only an unconditionally "culture-resistant" individual can become free enough for such apparently vice-ridden liberties. Only where the social nomos has already done its work can the deeply civilized person appeal to physis and think of the relaxa- tion of tension.
The master-thinkers let the theater of the world --the display of order, the great "law"--pass review before their mind's eye and cast visions that probably also in- clude pain and the negative but that cause them no pain. An overview is achieved only by those who overlook a lot (A. Gehlen). It is always the pain of others that the theoretical grand views of the "cosmos" call for in payment. According to kynical custom, by contrast, those who suffer by themselves must also scream by themselves. We do not have to see our life from a bird's-eye view or with the eyes of disinterested gods from another planet. Diogenes' anti-philosophy always talks in such a way that we realize that here we see a person in his own skin and he has no intention of leaving it. Whenever he is beaten up, Diogenes hangs a sign
290 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
around his neck with the names of the culprits and walks through the city with it. That is enough theory, enough praxis, enough struggle, and enough satire.
In addition to its quick-witted, mentally alert way of dealing with the official
and linguistically coded cultural wares (theories, systems), kynical anti-
philosophy possesses three essential media by which intelligence can free itself
from "theory" and discourse: action, laughter, and silence. Nothing is achieved
by a mere juxtaposition of theory and praxis. When Marx claims in his famous
eleventh thesis on Feuerbach that philosophers had previously only interpreted
the world in different ways but that the point is to change it (through the world's
becoming philosophical, philosophy's becoming worldly), then, although borne
by a partially kynical impulse, he remains far below the level of an existential di-
alectical materialism. Diogenes, the existentialist, would not be able to stop
laughing about the way in which Marx again throws himself into the business of
34
grand theory.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
hibit a demonstrative silence and, with anarchistic laughter, he would rebuff the impudent demand to make the whole of one's life into a tool of a (good old idealistically) planned "praxis. "
If we wanted to write a history of the kynical impulse in the field of knowledge, it would have to take the form of a philosophical history of satire, or better still, a phenomenology of the satirical mind, as a phenomenology of combative con- sciousness and as a history of what has been thought in the arts (i. e. , as a philo- sophical history of art). Such a history has not been written and would not be necessary if the principles could be made comprehendible without the historical crutch. In any form of erudition, intelligence risks its life. Those who deal with the past risk fading into the past themselves without having understood what they have lost in it. Those who heed these cautions will find sufficient material for a history of the Gay Science hidden in the archives or dispersed in the research liter- ature. Rich traditions offer themselves for rediscovery: a great European silen- tium tradition that was at home not only in the churches, monasteries, and schools but also in the unresearched popular intelligence that is concealed in the eternal silence of the majorities --a silence in which there is also freedom and not merely speechlessness; insight and simplicity, not merely dullness and oppression. There is an even greater European tradition of satire in which the freedoms of art, the carnival, and criticism combined into a many-tongued culture of laughter. Here the main strand of a militant intelligence is probably revealed that bites like the kynical dogs without becoming doggedly pugnacious and that strikes more into its opponent's consciousness with its mockery, irony, inversions, and jokes than
at the opponent himself. Finally, there is an impressive tradition of action in which can be studied the ways in which people have taken their own insights "seri- ously" for the sake of a life whose chances they did not want to waste. That it was frequently an act of resistance is in the nature of things here. The "art of the possible" is not only what statesmen are supposed to master, but always comes
In the presence of so much rage to "change," Diogenes would ex-
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 291
? POLITIQUE. MORALE ET LITT^RAJRE.
J. Grandville, Models of satirical consciousness: the fool with bow and arrow; the Naked Truth. Advertisement for the periodical La Caricature (detail).
into play where people try, with awareness and intelligence, to protect the chance of their life. My favorite examples of such action --apart from some pieces of bravado of the type found in Eulenspiegel, Schweik, and some manifestations of revolutionary praxis --are provided by those emigrants who (especially) in the nineteenth century, set out from a hopelessly hidebound Europe to try their luck in the New World as freer people. In setting out this way there is something of the kynical force of vital intelligence and of the exodus of consciousness into the open world, where life still has a chance to be stronger than the suffocating powers of tradition, society, and conventions. If I were to say which individual action I hold to characterize an intelligence that not only "knows" but also "acts," I would probably choose Heinrich Heine's emigration to Paris in 1831 --this apex of conscious praxis in which a poet subjected his biography to the necessities and chances of the historical moment and left his homeland in order to be able to do what he believed he had to do for his own sake and that of his homeland. "I went because I had to"-and behind this "had to" there were not yet the police (as in the case of Marx and other refugees) but rather the insight that in a conscious life there are moments when we first have to do what we want in order then also to
35
The satirical-polemical-aesthetic dimension in the history of knowledge be- comes important because, in fact, it is the dialectic en marche. With it, the princi- ples of embodiment and resistance penetrate the course of socially organized thinking: the inexpressible individual element; single persons intuitively in touch with their existence; the "nonidentical" conjured up by Adorno; the thing-there
want to do what we have to do.
292 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
that is already mistreated by any mere conceptual designation because it stimu- lates understanding (and only makes a "case of X" out of the singular). Where should this individual reality assure itself better of its existence -- apart from the arts --than in satire, in the ironic dissolution of imposed "orders," in playing with what pretends to be "law," in brief, in the embodiment of this highly nonserious matter that, after all, the living being is? Dialectical thinkers --whether philoso- phers, poets, or musicians --are those in whom polemics and the fierce and uncon- scionable animosity between thoughts and motives already form the inner work- ings of their "thinking" process. Their presence of mind suffices, if one can put it this way, for more than one thought. All great dialectical thinkers and artists thus carry within themselves a disputatious, forward-driving, and creative kynic or cynic that, from within, prescribes movement and provocation for their think- ing. Dialecticians are the movers of thoughts who cannot do otherwise than to give the antithesis to every thesis its due. We observe in them a partly comba- tively unsettled, partly epically measured form of discourse that
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
stems from a feeling for the figural, melodic, and thematic in the composition of thought-in the disguised poet Plato no differently than in the philosophizing musician Adorno, in the grotesque and pompous dialectic of Rabelais as in the uninhibited streaming rhetoric of Ernst Bloch. It would be worth the effort sometime to por-
tray the inner kynical-cynical "partner" of the important masters --whether it be with Diderot or Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard, or Marx, with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, or Foucault. And what really happens when Sartre, the master dialectician of the twentieth century, confronts Flaubert, the grand cynic of the nineteenth century, on the thousands of pages of the Idiot of the Family (a con- frontation so full of philosophical and psychodynamic morsels that it is obviously impossible to talk about it in an incidental manner).
As we have said, kynicism cannot be a theory and cannot have its "own" the- ory. Cognitive kynicism is aform of dealing with knowledge, a form of relativiza- tion, ironic treatment, application, and sublation. It is the answer of the will to live to that which it has suffered at the hands of theories and ideologies-partly a spiritual art of survival, partly intellectual resistance, partly satire, partly "critique. "
"Critical theory" tries to protect life from the false abstractness and violence of "positive" theories. In this sense, the Frankfurt Critical Theory too inherited the kynical portions of those grand theories the nineteenth century handed down to the twentieth --of left Hegelianism with its existentialist and anthropological as well as its historical and sociological aspects, and of Marxism, as well as of Criti- cal Psychology, which became well known especially in the form of psychoanaly- sis. These are all, if properly understood, "theories" that contain within them the kynical form of treating theory (namely, the sublation of theory) and that can be made into "fixed systems" only at the cost of an intellectual regression. Such regressions have happened on a grand scale, and how much stupefaction has been
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 293
perpetrated in the late nineteenth century and the whole of the twentieth by vulgar Hegelianism, vulgar Marxism, vulgar psychology, vulgar existentialism, and vulgar Nietzscheanism is all too crassly shown in recent social history. All these systems of stupefaction have dispatched the reflective agility of "Critical The- ories," established rigid dogmas as "knowledge," and left nothing of kynical sub- lation except arrogant presumption. In fact, the kynical sublation of theory stems from a conscious not-knowing, not from a knowing-better. It releases us to a new and fresh not-knowing, instead of letting us become rigid in certainties. For with "convictions" only the desert grows. Against this, Frankfurt Critical Theory achieved a great deal by attempting again and again to "destupefy" the theoretical inheritance of the nineteenth century and, above all, by trying to save the elements of truth in Marxism from its degeneration in Leninist and, still more, in Stalinist dogmatics.
In its good times, Marxism was really a vehicle of an active intelligence, and it knew how to fertilize all the human sciences with its historical-critical con- sciousness. The materialist conception of history [Kautsky; --Trans. ] has always contained hundreds of possibilities for "another history" and for a history of the Other. A real history of the Other, however, can be written only by those who are the Other and the Others and have decided to let this Otherness live and to fight for the freedom to be allowed to be so. The most significant examples today are the history of "femaleness" and the history of homosexuality. With the relating of their suppression and formation, both come simultaneously to the conscious- ness of a freedom that is now becoming real. By talking about themselves --in his- tory and in the present-- women and homosexuals also celebrate the beginning of a new era that they will be "a part of in a different way than they were previously. History must be like this.
