No More Learning

Mouth, Smiling Maliciously, Crooked
The knowledge of the master cynic is based on a crooked superiority. The power- ful man sees to his advantage, even when he knows that he thereby comes into a morally dubious position. A crooked smile, an evilly clever gesture, easily CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST ? 143
arises out of crooked superiority. This smile defends a bad status quo, an in- justice. The rights of others? Where would we end up? Hunger? What's that? One corner of the mouth, often the left corner, is drawn upward. On the mouth of the
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master, the split in his consciousness becomes visible; the other half knows that there is really nothing to laugh about. One half of the mouth turns knowingly up- ward, so that the other half involuntarily falls contemptuously downward. The worldy realism of the master cynic comes from the wish to save face while getting his hands dirty. This face thus often goes together with polished manners. The cynical smile appears, true to form, embedded in a brazen politeness that restrains itself and reveals that it wants to keep others at a distance as surely as it controls itself.
This is the smile of the heights of power and its melancholy, as it can be seen on high officials, politicians, editors. Best of all, however, one can imagine courtly personages of the rococo with this smile--as, say, the unhappy, unctious man- in-waiting of Louis XV, LeBel, in the film Fanfan the Hussar, whose smile was as crooked as the comma between yes and but.
Mouth, Bitter, Tight
The life experiences of victims are revealed in their bitterness. On their lips, a bitter silence forms. They cannot be tricked anymore. They know how things work. The emphatically disappointed may even gain a small advantage over fate, a space for the play of self-assertion and pride. Lips that are pressed tightly to- gether and narrowed to thin lines because of hardship betray the worldly, ex- perienced side of those who have been duped. Even some children whom life has treated badly have these bitter, tight mouths from which it is so difficult to wangle some sort of consent to anything good. Mistrust is the intelligence of the disad- vantaged. However, the mistrustful can easily make stupid mistakes once more when their bitterness causes them to also pass over what, after all those painful things, would do them good. Happiness will always look like fraud and will seem much too cheap to be worth reaching for. Bound to past experience, the cynically bitter lips know only one thing: that ultimately everything is deception and that no one will ever again bring them to be soft and, blushing, surrender themselves to any temptation of the world's swindle.
Mouth, Laughing Loudly, Big-Mouthed
"hen the cynic smiles melancholically-contemptuously, from the illusionless heights of power, it is characteristic for the kynic to laugh so loudly and un- abashedly that refined people shake their heads. Kynical laughter comes from the mtestines; it is grounded at the animal level and lets itself go without restraint. Those who claim to be realists should, strictly speaking, be able to laugh this
144 ? CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST
Detail from Raphael, The School of Athens, Diogenes on the Steps.
way-this total, uncramping laughter that wipes away illusions and postures. We have to imagine the laugh of the great satirist Diogenes as just such a laugh, and Diogenes is related to the wandering Asiatic monks who presented their pious trickery in the villages and, roaring with laughter, disappeared from the scene when the villagers discovered that the holiness of these holy men was not quite as they had imagined. In the expression of some laughing Buddhas, too, there is something of this animal and, at the same time, ecstatic and realistic belly laugh- ter that frolics about so unselfconsciouslessly in its springs and thrusts that no ego is left in the laughing, only a serene energy that celebrates itself. Those who are too civilized and timid easily get the impression that there could be something demonic, devilish, unserious, and destructive in such laughter. Here is the place to listen carefully. The Devil's laughter has the energy of destruction within it, with crashing crockery and collapsing walls, an evil laughter above the debris. In positive ecstatic laughter, by contrast, the energy of a perplexed affirmation is at play; in spite of its wildness, it sounds contemplative, celebratory. It is also no accident that women rather than men tend to laugh in this way, and the drunken rather than the sober. The devil's energy is the energy that laughs until the others fall silent. In the laughter of Diogenes and Buddha, the ego itself, which had taken things so seriously, laughs itself to death. Of course, that takes a big mouth that can be opened wide without hindrance, not for fine phrases but for a strong vital- ity in which there is more astonishment than pretentiousness. The kind of big'
? CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST ? 145
mouthedness that interests the philosopher is not an active but a passive one, the saying of aaah when we watch fireworks or look at a mountain, or in flashes of genius in which Aha! passes through us. With great insights we want to shout, and what are great insights other than a release from false complicatedness?
Mouth, Serene, Still
In a satisfied face, the lips rest on each other, imperceptibly vibrating. Everything is as it is. There is nothing to say. Diogenes sits mute in the sun and contemplates the stone steps of the market pavilion. Not the shadow of a thought passes through his head. His eyes are immersed in the cosmic flickering of the Greek light. He watches the people going about their business. If it occurred to one of them to sit down in front of him and closely observe his face with an open heart, it could easily happen that that person would suddenly, disconcertedly begin to cry or to laugh for no reason at all. Eye Gazes, Eye Blinkers
The eyes are the organic prototype of philosophy. Their enigma is that they not only can see but are also able to see
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themselves seeing. This gives them a promi- nence among the body's cognitive organs. A good part of philosophical thinking is actually only eye reflex, eye dialectic, seeing-oneself-see. For this, reflecting media, mirrors, water surfaces, metals, and other eyes are necessary, through which the seeing of seeing becomes visible.
The kynical gaze understands itself as looking through a laughable and hollow
show. It would like to put society before a natural mirror in which people recog- nize themselves unveiled and without masks. Diogenes sees through the puffed- up idealism and cultural arrogance of the Athenians. What interests him is not masquerades and idealistic poses, justifications and palliations. He rivets his eyes on the naked facts of nature. In a sense, if he possessed theoretical ambition, he could rate as the first critical positivist. The kynical gaze is always directed at what is naked; it wants to acknowledge the "raw," animal, and simple facts above which the lovers of higher things like to place themselves. Indeed, the original kynic can take pleasure in what is naked and elementary because he experiences m them truth as unconcealedness. For him the usual divisions are invalid; there
! s neither above nor below, neither dirty nor pure. This gaze is open, realistic,
and generous, and it is not embarrassed to look at what is naked; it does not matter whether it is beautiful or ugly, as long as it is natural. The gaze of the master
cynic, by contrast, is unhappily broken, reflectively bent. With this gaze, the hegemonic powers look at their own strategy, recognizing that behind everything mat presents itself as law, a large portion of force and arrogance is hidden. Who should take closer notice of that than those who exercise power and arrogance
146 ? CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST
? Rene Magritte, The False Mirror, 1928. ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
half-heartedly and half-awake? In the melancholy reflection of a master cynic, therefore, there is often a tendency to be cross-eyed. The eyes of marked cynics betray themselves through a touch of cross-eyedness, a slight inward or outward turning of one of the organs. Those who are born cross-eyed and choose the path to science, philosophy, or political practice already appear to be somatically predisposed toward a double vision of things, of essence and illusion, of the con- cealed and the naked. The organ dialectic of their eyes drives them on in this, whereas other thinkers, bound by the myth of normality, like to ignore that they, too, see from two different perspectives and that nobody has two identical eyes. A part of our thinking structure is located in the eyes, particularly the dialectic of right and left, of the masculine and the feminine, of the straight and the crooked.
With intellectuals, an astounding dullness in the eyes is often evident that comes not least of all from the continual violence done to the eyes by having to read things the eyes would not accept if they had their own way. They must serve merely as tools for reading; and it is no wonder when the perspective of such peo- ple, being used to black lines, glides right off from reality. Master cynical knowl- edge, as it collects in intellectual heads, betrays itself through the rigid eye blinkers and a cloudiness and coldness of the gaze. It transfixes things it does not penetrate and to which it does not really grant existence. In such eyes there is an expression that can be compared with the crooked smile. The cynical gaze lets things know that they do not exist as real objects for it, but only as phenomena and information. It looks at them as if they already belonged to the past. It takes them in, registers them, and ponders its self-preservation. Of course it is offended that the things return this gaze; they look back as coldly as they are looked at.
tnw
cannot become warm before the ice melts in the eyes of those who believe were called on to valorize, to administer the world, and to ravage it.
Breasts
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l the modern civilization of media and fashion, an atmospheric concoction of osmetics, pornography, consumerism, illusion, addiction, and prostitution reigns for which the baring and depiction of breasts is typical. In the commodity world, it seems that nothing functions without them anymore. Everyone specu- lates cynically on the addictive reflexes of others. With everything that is sup- posed to look lifelike and arouse desires, they are present, as the universal orna- ments of capitalism. Everything that is dead, superfluous, alienated draws attention to itself with laughing forms. Sexism? If only it were so simple. Adver- tising and pornography are special cases of modern cynicism, which knows that power must make its way through ideals and that the dreams and addictions of others can be simultaneously stimulated and frustrated in order to achieve one's own ends. Politics is not only the art of the possible, as has been said, but just as much the art of seduction. It is the chocolate side of power that assumes first,
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that order must prevail and, second, that the world wants to be deceived. These modern business breasts exist, philosophically speaking, only in them- selves (an sich), as things, not for themselves (fur sick), as conscious bodies. They merely signify a power, an attraction. But what would breasts be for them- selves, independent of their cynical baring on the commodity market? What is their relation to the power and energy emanating from them? Many would prefer to have nothing at all to do anymore with this play of power, attraction, and de- sire. Others embody consciously and frivolously their appeal to the other sex. Something of their consciousness of power is still present in the hackneyed phrase about the "weapons of a woman. " Some are also unhappy because they do not look like the ideal breasts in advertising. They do not feel very good being naked when they do not have the prevailing aesthetic on their side. Some, on the other hand, have the sweetness of ripe pears that have become so heavy and friendly toward themselves that, on an appropriate occasion, they fall from the tree into a hand
they feel recognizes them.
Arses
he arse seems doomed to spend its life in the dark, as the beggar among body Parts. It is the real idiot of the family. However, it would be a wonder if this black
sn
People in the upper strata. If the head were to enter into conversation just once
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eep of the body did not have its own opinion about everything that takes place
higher regions, similar to the declassed who often cast the most sober gaze on
h its antipode, the latter would first stick out its tongue, if it had one. As in
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2the enlightenment film of the Rote Grtitze, Was heisst hier Liebe (What do you
mean by love? ), the arse would say to the higher spheres: I find that our relation- ship is shitty. The arse is the plebeian, the grass-roots democrat, and the cosmopolitan
among the parts of the body-- in a word, the elementary kynical organ. It provides
the solid materialist basis. It is at home on toilets all over the world. The Interna-
tional of Arses is the only worldwide organization that has no statutes, ideology,
or dues. Its solidarity cannot be shaken. The arse crosses all borders playfully,
unlike the head, to which borders and possessions mean a lot. Without any objec-
tion, it squats on this or that chair. To an unspoiled arse, the difference between
3athrone andakitchenstool,abenchandaHolyChairisnotparticularlyimpres-
sive. Now and again, it can also sit on the ground; the only thing it dislikes is standing when it is tired. This proclivity for the elementary and the fundamental predisposes the arse especially to philosophy. It probably registers the nuances, but it would not think of making a fuss like vain heads do when they knock them- selves bloody over the occupation of seats. It never loses sight of what really un- derlies it: the firm ground. In an erotic sense, too, the arse often shows itself to be both sensitive and superior. It does not pretend to be choosier than is neces- sary. Even then, it is the one that easily raises itself above imagined borders and exclusivities. When the famous Arletty was accused of having had sexual rela- tions with members of the German occupation forces, her answer is said to have been: "My heart is French, but my backside is international. " As representative of the kynical principle per se (able to survive anywhere, reduction to the essen- tials), the arse can hardly be brought under government control, although it can- not be denied that many an arsehole has given off nationalistic tones.
Often beaten, kicked, and pinched, the arse has a worldview from below: ple- beian, popular, realistic. Millennia of bad treatment have not passed over it with- out leaving a mark. They have trained it to be a materialist, albeit one with a di- alectical tendency, which assumes that things are shitty but not hopeless. Nothing can cause as much bitterness as the feeling of not being welcome. Only the under- tone of fascination that can be heard through so much maltreatment gives the op- pressed a secret feeling of power. Something about which silence is so stubbornly maintained, even though it cannot be evaded, must have a great power over the spirits. The best energies are often hidden behind the strongest swear words. It is as if all the maltreated backsides are waiting for their hour of revenge in the
rnear future, when everything will again be falling flat on its arse. The feeling f? time is generally one of the special strengths of arses, for very early on they de- velop a feeling for what has to be done immediately, for what can be postponed,
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
at
is really a political art that today is called timing and that has its roots in a praxis
e even children's arses learn, namely, to perform what has to be at the right tim >
not too early and not too late.
and for what a well-padded behind can wait out patiently until doomsday. Th
CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST ? 149
. . . howEulenspiegelshatinabathroominHannoverandclaimeditwasahouse of purity. Woodcut illustration from a popular book, 1515.
The arse triumphs secretly, conscious that without it nothing works. Being there precedes being such and such; first existence, then qualities; first reality, then good and evil, above and below. Thus arses are, in addition to their dialectical-materialist inclinations, also the first existentialists. They practice the existential dialectic in advance: Should one decide in favor of what has to be in any case, or does one choose to revolt against the unavoidable? Even those who decide to let things take their course have decided, as Sartre says, not to decide. Freedom surrenders to necessity. One can, however, also decide against it --not, of course, against the fact that one must, but against the fact that the must can do anything at all with one. One can struggle against it and hold back what has to be; then one becomes, following Camus, the person in revolt. Nobody must must, says Lessing's Nathan, and the popular saying adds: Dying and shitting are the only things one must do. That remains the kynical a priori. The arse is thus, of all bodily organs, the one closest to the dialectical relation of freedom and necessity. It is no accident that psychoanalysis--a thoroughly kynically inspired discipline--devotes subtle investigations to it and names a fundamental anthropo- logical stage, the anal phase, after the experiences and vicissitudes of the arse. Its themes are Can and Cannot, Must and Must not, Have and Hold Back. The Principle of achievement is contained in it. To understand the arse would be there- fore the best preparatory study for philosophy, the somatic propaedeutic. How
? ? 150 ? CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST
many constipated theories we would be spared! Again we meet up with Diogenes He was the first European philosopher who, instead of employing a lot of words in the Athenian market, performed his urgent business. Naturalia non sunt turpia In nature, he says, we find nothing about which we would have to be ashamed Real bestiality and perverted spirits are found where the arrogance of morality and the imbroglio of culture begin. The heads, however, did not want to recog- nize that this was an early climax of reason, a moment in which philosophy had found a balance with the principle of nature. For a moment, it was beyond good and evil and beyond turning up its nose. Respectable thinkers, on the other hand insist on their view; according to them, it can only have been a joke or a provoca- tive dirty trick. They refuse to conjecture that there could be a truth-producing meaning in such a manifestation.
Fart
The theme cannot be excused; indeed, it will get worse. I regret this for all sensi- tive readers, but the fart, even if not emitted, cannot be omitted. Those who do not want to talk about it would also have to have kept silent about the arse. The subject matter demands it, and after we have spoken about oral matters, our presentation, for better or for worse, must go through its anal phase before we come to the genitals. To speak of the fart is not difficult insofar as it represents a sound that always means something in social situations.
Witnesses of a fart in- evitably interpret the sound. All in all, the semantics of the fart is a rather compli- cated problem, a problem that is seriously neglected by linguistics and communi- cation research. The scale of meaning stretches from awkwardness to contempt, from humorous intentions to lack of respect. Teachers, professors, speakers, and conference participants all know the torture of having to stifle a fart because such a sound expresses something that, in reality, one does not want to say. Could it aid our empathy with politicians if, in listening to their speeches, we were to think more often that they are possibly at that very moment concentrating on subduing a fart that has been wanting to interrupt their talk? The art of the vague statement is related to the art of unobtrusive flatulence: Both are diplomacy.
Semiotically, we assign the fart to the group of signals, that is, of signs, which neither symbolize nor depict something but rather point to a situation. When the locomotive whistles, it warns about its approach and possible danger. The fan conceived as a signal shows that the lower body is in full action, and in situations where any reference to such regions is absolutely undesirable, this can have ta consequences. Ernst Jiinger noted in his Paris Diary about his reading ot tn historian Flavius Josephus's Jewish War:
Here I again came upon a passage in which the beginning of unrest in Jerusalem under Cumanus is described (II, 12). While the Jews
CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST ? 151
gathered for the festival of unleavened bread, the Romans positioned a cohort above the hall of columns in the temple to keep an eye on the crowd. One of the soldiers in the cohort pulled up his coat, and with a mocking bow turned his
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behind to the Jews and "let forth an indecent sound corresponding to his position. " That triggered a clash that cost ten thousand lives, so that one can speak of the most fateful fart in world history. (Strahlungen, vol. II, pp. 188-89)
The cynicism of the Roman soldier, whose fart was a political provocation and
4a"blasphemy"inthetemple, findsacounterpartinJiinger'scommentary,which
5Here we come to the whole of the matter. As children of an anal culture, we all have a more or less disturbed relation to our own shit. The splitting off of our consciousness from our own shit is the deepest training in order; it tells us what must happen privately and under wraps. The relation that is drummed into people with regard to their own excretions provides the model for their behavior with
all sorts of refuse in their lives. Hitherto, refuse was systematically ignored. Only under the sign of modern ecological thinking do we find ourselves forced to be- come conscious again of our refuse. High theory discovers the category "shit";
a new stage of the philosophy of nature thereby comes due, a critique of the hu- man being as a hyperproductive shit-accumulating industry-animal. Diogenes is the only Western philosopher who we know consciously and publicly performed his animal business, and there are reasons to interpret this as a component of a pantomimic theory. It hints at a consciousness of nature that assigns positive values to the animal side of human beings and does not allow any dissociation of what is low or embarrassing. Those who do not want to admit that they produce refuse and that they cannot choose to do anything else risk suffocating one day
in their own shit. Everything suggests that Diogenes of Sinope should be admitted to the Ancestral Gallery of Ecological Consciousness. The grand act of ecology
lr
> the history of ideas that will have an impact as far as philosophy, ethics, and Politics are concerned will be to transform the phenomenon of refuse into a "high" heme. From now on it is no longer an onerous secondary phenomenon but is recognized as a basic principle. With this, the last hidden positions of idealism and dualism are really broken down. Shit has to be encountered in another way.
]s now necessary to rethink the usefulness of the unuseful, the productivity of
le
te and to recognize our responsibility also for what is unintended. Kynical phil- 6 sophersarethosewhodonotgetnauseated. Inthistheyarerelatedtochildren, crosses over into the area of theoretical cynicism.
Shit, Refuse
unproductive, philosophically speaking: to unlock the positivity of the nega-
0do not yet know anything about the negativity of their excrement.
152 ? CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST
? ? ? The Scepter. What we conjecture where we don't see anything, that rules the world.
Genitals
These are the geniuses among the organs of the lower half of the body. When they have collected enough experience, they can tell fine stories about how things really are in the big and the small world. They are like the wire pullers in the dark the shark song in the Threepenny Opera says cannot be seen. But in their hands all threads finally come together. In the beginning, Freudian psychoanalysis was accused, among other things, of cynicism because it taught that everything human beings do can be reduced in the final analysis to sexual impulses and their detor mations. This is, of course, a malicious misunderstanding even though it has grain of truth. In fact, psychoanalysis does adopt something of the kynical im pulse in its theoretical procedure, namely, a resoluteness not to let the naked tru that hides behind cultural disguises elude it. As long as it was customary to se
CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST ? 153
omething low and dirty in sexuality, it was also only a small step to confusing the kynical drive in psychoanalysis toward truth with cynicism, which tries to re- duce everything "higher" to the lowest denominator. Then cynicism would
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be just
variant of nihilism, and Freud would have preached a materialism that unduly
7emphasizes the animal in human beings. However, insofar as psychoanalysis
constitutes a theory supportive of life and humanity, it is not at all cynical but tries, in the spirit of Diogenes (and even more, of Epicure), to heal those fissures that idealistic taboos have opened up in carnal pleasures. If today the figure of Freud is virtually overgrown with objections and doubts about his theory and his person, it should nevertheless not be forgotten how great the liberation is that has emanated from him.
However, after the "sexual revolution" things have not gotten any simpler, and it is precisely enlightened genitals that often have an unhappy consciousness. They now live in the twilight of freedom and have learned that sexual adventures and the art of loving are not the same thing. After the "mutual use of the sexual organs"-as Immanuel Kant, in good enlightened fashion, described the marriage contract-the question often remains: Is that all? And if that is everything, why make such a fuss about it?
Out of liberal sexual roaming, a cynicism easily results for which everything is a matter of indifference. The longer the game lasts, the stronger the impression becomes that what we are really looking for does not exist in this world. In their own way, the genitals know, once they have gone through the school of capa- ciousness, about the modern "frosts of freedom. " They begin to get scared of ex- aggerations. The suspicion grows that they too are on the best path toward becom- ing respectable, if respectability means a mixture of reasonableness, cynicism, and resignation.
Enlightenment disillusions, and where disillusionment becomes widespread,
self-experience in the ecstasy that shows us in clear moments who we can really
be dies. This is the most sensitive point in advanced civilization. The more ideals
disintegrate and the positing of meaning from "above" fails, the more we will be
forced to listen to the life energies that bear us along. Whether they can carry us,
'hat is the question, for they can only do so when they flow without obstruction.
0-eling" described by Romain Rolland as the basis of religious consciousness and they flow? Does life live? Are orgasms really our signposts to that "oceanic
that our great theoretician of the libido, Sigmund Freud, refused to acknowledge e cause he had not directly experienced it? Notes
? borrow this concept from Ivan Illich and transfer it to the area of epistemology.
? [A progressive children's theater group in Berlin-Trans. ]
? Napoleon Bonaparte, who was admired by many because of his realistic cynicism (see chapter
aed
' * 'n his sarcastic New Year's Day speech in 1814: "What is a throne anyway? Four pieces
154 ? CONCERNING THE PSYCHOSOMATICS OF THE ZEITGEIST
of gilded timber and a shred of velvet? -No, the throne is a man, and I am this man. " The langua? of a cynic, who behaves like an upstart, i. e. , awkwardly matter-of-fact, toward ceremony ("fuss"i and legitimacy ("paper").
4. Later (see chapter 8) I explain blasphemy as a phenomenon related to religious cynicism 5. See on this point the sixth cardinal cynicism (chapter 8).
6. Here we see that cynicism arises from a reversal of kynicism. The cynic feels nauseated in prjn
ciple: for him, everything is shit; his overdisappointed superego does not see the good in the shit Hence his nausee.
7. The connections between psychoanalysis and cynicism will be touched on in three places it this book; in chapter 8 ("Sexual Cynicism" and "The Cynicism of Knowledge") and in chapter 13 Excursus 2 ("The Ice Dogs: On the Psychoanalysis of the Cynic").
Chapter 7
The Cabinet of Cynics
In the cabinet of cynics, there are no individualized personalities but rather types, that is, social characters and characters of a period. When we examine them, it does no harm to imagine them as dolls in a cabinet of wax figures where promi- nent historical personages meet. On our tour we also encounter literary figures who can be used to demonstrate archetypal features of cynical consciousness. Only the first two we find exhibited here--both figures of antiquity--actually lived: Diogenes of Sinope, the ancestral father of the species, and Lucian of Samosata on the Euphrates. The two modern figures, Goethe's Mephistopheles and Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, are by contrast figures created by poets out of the material of cynical experience. In plasticity, they have everything the historical personalities have. As pure types there is something impersonal, im- mortal, about them, and in this they resemble
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Diogenes and Lucian, of whom we likewise possess only silhouettes with none of the details that distinguish real in- dividuals from their types. At the end of this series, we find, as representative of the present, a quite faceless figure that resembles everybody and nobody. It is called Anyone (das Man); Martin Heidegger has polished and abstracted it. It reminds one a little of the figures of the painter De Chirico, mannequins with empty, round heads and artificial limbs, geometrically shaped, which look like human beings, but only "look like" because they lack "authenticity. "
We will keep the tour through the historical cabinet as short as possible, first, because museums are fatiguing and second, because the main points can be demonstrated by a few examples. By rights, of course, many other faces would nave to crop up --Antisthenes, Crates, Aristophanes, Francois Villon, Rabelais,
155
156 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
? Heinrich Zille, Dog theater on a fairground in Berlin around 1900.
Machiavelli, Eulenspiegel, Castruccio Castracani, Sancho Panza, Rameau's
1nephew, Frederick II of Prussia, de Sade, Talleyrand, Napoleon, Biichner,
Grabbe, Heine, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Cioran, and many more. Some of them will be mentioned in other parts of this book. The whole of Part V, Historical Main Text, is indirectly devoted to the German kynics and cynics of the early twentieth century.
We join our museum guide, who, before each of the figures, insists on making educated comments on the historical significance of the gentlemen depicted. It is clear that philosophy is his passion and that he belongs to that species of people who like to show off their education. That means that from now on we will have to grit our teeth. The man really wants to teach us something. Nothing is worse than a museum guide who, in all seriousness, wants to instruct his visitors. Such a dilettante lacks the professional philosopher's fear of philosophy. But have cour- age! Haven't we already survived unscathed quite different attempts to make us smarter? Avanti!
Diogenes of Sinope: Human Dog, Philosopher, Good-for-Nothing
Once he called out loud: Hey there, people! and as they ran up to him, he worked them over with his staff with the words: I called for people, not riff-raff!
To approach one another with a smile full of "understanding" would be a misun-
derstanding. Diogenes, who we have before us here, is not at all an idylh?
dreamer in his tub but a dog that bites when he feels like it.
2He is one of those
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 157
? Diogenes, Democritus, and two fools standing around the globe. From the Narren- schiff (The ship of fools), 1497. who simultaneously bark and bite and do not pay much attention to proverbs. His
bite sank so deep into the most highly treasured values of Athenian civilization
that since then no satirist could be trusted. The memory of his bites belongs to
the most vivid impressions retained from antiquity. For this reason, the humorous
approval of this philosopher by many an ironically minded citizen almost always
rests on a belittling misunderstanding. In the citizen there is a caged wolf who
sympathizes with the biting philosopher. But Diogenes sees above all the citizen
? n his sympathizer, and he bites all the same. Theory and praxis are incalculably
interwoven in his philosophy and there is no room for mere theoretical agree-
ment. Even mere practical imitation would not please him; he would probably
think it was stupid. He is impressed only by characters whose presence of mind,
quick wit, alertness, and independent feeling toward life are a match for his. His
su
ggestive success rests not least of all on the fact that he was a teacher who Wanted no pupils who imitated him. In this he resembles the Japanese Zen Masters, whose effect is achieved by teaching through nonteaching.
We could not picture his external appearance today or gain an impression of
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his effect on the Athenian environment if we did not have the visual instruction
3of the hippies, freaks, globetrotters, and metropolitan Indians. He is a wild,
witty, cunning sort. Part of the standard picture, as it is handed down from antiq- uity, is that the kynic must be without
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possessions --mostly involuntarily by birth, then, on top of that, voluntarily, whereby an impression of sovereignty arises. Everything kynics own, they carry with them. For Diogenes and his kind this means an all-weather coat, a staff, a knapsack with the smallest personal effects, including probably a toothpick, a pumice for cleansing the skin, a drinking vessel made of wood. The feet are in sandals. This outfit, when it was chosen by free citizens, was somewhat shocking, especially at a time when it was considered dis- graceful for an Athenian to appear in public unaccompanied by slaves. That Di- ogenes had a beard is self-evident, even if it is not so much a matter of a proper
4beard, but rather of the unshavenness of many decades.
Diogenes' influence on his contemporaries, however, was not a question of
aesthetics. A disheveled appearance says little when, on the other hand, it is known that the Athenian upper-class whores granted the unkempt philosopher ex- clusive and unpaid favors that other poor suckers at most only dreamed about. Between Lai's and Phryne, the star courtesans of the Attic capital, and Diogenes, it seems there were laws of giving and taking that the normal citizen, who has to pay cash for everything, does not understand.
To call him an ascetic would be incorrect because of the false undertones the word asceticism has assumed through a thousand-year-long masochistic misun- derstanding. We have to rid the word of its Christian connotations to rediscover its fundamental meaning. As free of need as Diogenes appears, he could be taken rather as the original father of the idea of self-help, and thus as an ascetic in the sense that he was a self-helper by distancing himself from and being ironic about needs for whose satisfaction most people pay with their freedom. He, who provided the impulse for kynicism, introduced the original connection between happiness, lack of need, and intelligence into Western philosophy--a theme that can be found in all vita simplex movements in world cultures. As the original hip- pie and proto-Bohemian, Diogenes has left his mark on the European tradition of intelligent living. His spectacular poverty is the price of freedom; that must be understood. If he could be well-off without sacrificing his freedom, he would not have objected at all. But no wise man can let himself be made a fool of by so-called needs. Diogenes taught that the wise man too eats cake, but only if he can just as well do without it.
A dogmatism of poverty does not come into question; it is rather a matter of discarding false weights, which hinder one's freedom of movement. Self-torture is definitely a stupidity for Diogenes. Still more stupid, of course, from his point of view are those who spend their whole lives running after something they al- ready have. Citizens struggle with the chimera of ambition and strive for riches
THE CABINET OF CYNICS D 159
? G. J. Caraglio after Parmigianino, Diogenes with the "Platonic human,"around 1530-40.
that, in the last analysis, they cannot enjoy any more than what is enjoyed in the elementary pleasures of the kynical philosopher as a daily recurring matter of course: lying in the sun, observing the goings-on in the world, being glad, and having nothing to wait for.
Since Diogenes was one of those philosophers of life for whom life is more
important than writing, it is understandable why not a single authentic line from
him has been preserved. Instead, a garland of anecdotes lives on around him that
say more about his influence than any writing could do. Whether he really com-
posed some writings, such as a Politics and the seven tragedy-parodies, as
claimed by tradition, is left aside here. In any case, his significance does not lie
ln
became a mythical figure. Witty and instructive stories buzz around him, as they
writings. His existence is absorbed in the anecdotes he provoked. In them he
160 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
do around his colleague, Mullah Nasrudin, in the Sufian satire. Precisely that proves his real existence. The most vital people thrust themselves on their con- temporaries and even more on posterity as projection-figures and attract a definite direction of fantasy and thinking to themselves. They stimulate people's curiosity as to what it would be like to be in the skin of such a philosopher. Thereby they not only gain pupils but also attract people who carry their living impulse further. This curiosity with regard to Diogenes' existence seized even the greatest military hero of antiquity, Alexander of Macedonia, who is reputed to have said that he would want to be Diogenes if he were not Alexander. This shows the heights, both
5political and existential, to which the philosopher's influence reached.
In the attempt to express Diogenes' intentions in modern language, we auto- matically approach existential philosophy. However, Diogenes does not talk about existence, decision, absurdity, atheism, and such key words of modern ex-
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istentialism. The ancient Diogenes is ironic about his philosopher colleagues, poking fun not only at how they torture themselves with problems but also at their credulity regarding concepts. His existentialism does not go primarily through the head; he experiences the world as neither tragic nor absurd. There is not the slightest trace of the melancholy around him, which clings to all modern existen- tialism. His weapon is not so much analysis as laughter. He uses his philosophical
competence to mock his serious colleagues. As anti-theoretician, anti-dogmatist, anti-scholar, he emits an impulse that resounds everywhere where thinkers strive for a "knowledge for free people," free also from the strictures of a school, and with this he begins a series in which names like Montaigne, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Feyerabend, and others appear. It is a line of philosophizing that suspends the es- prit de serieux. How Diogenes' existentialism is to be understood is still best shown in the anecdotes. The danger of underestimating the philosophical content of kynicism, precisely because it has been handed down "only" anecdotally, is great. That even great spirits of the caliber of Hegel and Schopenhauer have fallen into this trap can be gleaned from their presentations of the history of philosophy. Hegel above all was blind to the theoretical content of a philosophy that finds ulti- mate wisdom precisely in not having a theory for the decisive things in life and that teaches instead to undertake the risk of existence consciously and serenely-
1. Legend has it that the young Alexander of Macedonia one day sought out Diogenes, whose fame had made him curious. He found him taking a sunbath, lying lazily on his back, perhaps close to an Athenian sportsfield; others say he was gluing books. The young sovereign, in an effort to prove his generosity- granted the philosopher a wish.