No More Learning

Thus, re- search is not so much a means for the neutral illumination of reality as an arms race in theoretical forms. The insights then appear more as weapons than as in- tellectual instruments at the service of labor and communicative understanding, and taken in their aggregate, they constitute not an intellectual treasure or ency- clopedia but an arsenal, a munitions depot (of intelligent cartridges). If we wanted to remain content with a priori interests such as "labor" and "interaction," we would have to refrain from interrogating this "labor" and this "interaction" as to which struggle they serve and which reconciliations they facilitate: in other words, whether the researcher ego confronts the "object" from the stance of generalization, distancing, and domination or from that of individualization, closeness, and surrender. From this viewpoint, the distinction between the "Two
2Cultures" once again makes sense. In the "First Culture" (which predominates),
we observe a primacy of method, of procedure, of the research process over the objects. Here, only that can be an object that falls into the domain covered by the methods and models. If we attribute everything of a methodological nature to the subject, we can speak of a type of knowledge that issues from an elevation of the knower over what is known: the primacy of the subject (that this, curiously enough, holds for the exact and "objective," or better, objectivistic disciplines
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
il- lustrates the connection between determination of the object [Objektfeststellung] and the displacement [dissimulation] of the subject [Subjektverstellung]). This elevation is the price of "objectivity. " At the same time, it is procured at the cost of a methodological constriction or standardization of what the subject is allowed or not allowed to "know. " The idea that all real sciences in the end will only have a correct theory as a problem presupposes at the same time the expectation that the so-called community of researchers in the long run will grow together into an homogeneous army of subjects who will all be stamped by the same methodo- logical dis-placement (dissimulation) with regard to the "things. " Only when the subjects are epistemologically standardized (same "interest," same concepts, same methods) do the statements about the objects coagulate into their final and correct shape (in the sense of these presuppositions). The one cannot be had with- out the other. Where several hypotheses still stand beside one another, a weak- ness on the side of the subject is uncovered--and this subjective weakness gives the things a chance to reveal themselves in their multiple meanings. Stated to the point: The weaker our methods, the better it is for the "things. " As long as there is a multitude of "interpretations," the things are safe from the delusion of the knowers that they had fixed the objects-as known-once and for all. As long as
360 ? TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS
the things are being "interpreted," the memory is also kept alive that the things are also something an sich (in themselves) that has nothing to do with their being known by us.
If we follow this thought to its extreme, we come to the diametrically opposed
pole of forms of knowledge. Here, what Adorno called the "precedence of the
object" holds. If, with the primary of the subject, the agonistic theory must neces-
sarily arise, then, from a way of treating things that acknowledges the precedence
of objects, something comes forth that may bear the name erotic theory. Where
eros is at play, there, and only there, does the "Second Culture" live, and where
it is alive, it assumes the form of an art rather than a technique. Artists and eroti-
cists live under the impression that the things want something from them rather
than that they want something from the things, and that it is the things that entan-
gle them in the adventure of experience. They go to the things, surrender them-
selves to their impression, and as true researchers, feel themselves under their
3spell. For artists and eroticists, the things are the river into which, according to
Heraclitus, they cannot enter twice because the things, although they are the same things, are new in every moment, having flowed further into a new relationship. If love is new every morning, the objects of love, along with it, are also new. In them there is nothing "known," at most familiar. With them, there is no "objec- tivity," only intimacy. If the knower approaches them, it is not as master researcher ("Forsch-Herr") but as neighbor, friend, as someone who has been "drawn in. " For lovers, the things are beautiful, and they know that the "relation- ship" is over when, one day, everything looks as if it had always been the same: constant, everyday, identical, predictable. Where the sense for beauty ceases, war, indifference [Gleich-Giiltigkeit, literally, equal validity;-Trans. ] or death begins. Philosophers have rightly taught that the aesthetic dimension is integral for the truth content of realizations. This refers of course to realizations that have submitted themselves to the precedence of the object. Enlightenment, however, has taught us to mistrust such insights deeply. For enlightenment, if it does not continually correct itself against erotic (aesthetic) experience, the objects are the quintessence of that to which we should not surrender ourselves trustingly be- cause both, trust and surrender, are stances that the compulsions of life and en- lightened realism force out of us. Precedence of the objects would mean to be forced to live with a power over us, and because we, quasi-automatically, identify everything that is above us with that which oppresses us, from the viewpoint of this unenlightened enlightenment, there can be, on the contrary, only a stance or polemical distance. Nevertheless, there is another kind of precedence that is not based on subjugation: The precedence the object enjoys in sympathetic under- standing does not demand that we reconcile ourselves to an inferiority and an alienated position. Its prototype is love. The ability to concede the object a prece- dence would be tantamount to the ability to live and let live (instead of live and let die), and indeed, as an ultimate consequence, also to die and let live (instead
TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS ? 361
of following the impulse to pull everything down into death with us). Only through eros do we become capable of conceding the "object" a precedence. And
4Polemic against the Id, or: Think the Devil Where Id was, Ego should become.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Sigmund Freud
The sketches of the cardinal cynicisms contain the material for a theory of dia- logue and interaction that encompasses the polemical. They describe positions and oppositions in military, political, sexual, medical, religious, and theoretical consciousness that grate against the conventional concept of ideology. In these oppositions, it is not true and false consciousnesses that are counterposed; rather, combative consciousnesses that, on the basis of differing given stances toward the world and toward life situations, find themselves in unavoidable antagonisms with one another. If in the description of kynical and cynical positions, with their reflections and counterreflections, the notion of "stages" being set for an offensive or counteroffensive recurred, it referred to stages for conflict, i. e. , theaters of the noisy and quiet passages of arms of an ineluctably polemical consciousness.
How does a stage arise? Certainly not simply through an antagonism of two "principles. " A dualism would be initially nothing more than a "thought thing," and as such it would have no dramatic force. The dualism would be an sich (in itself) harmless or uninteresting if it were not staged in reality itself. Wherever a dualism emerges, we thus, as a rule, come up against an enmity, a demarcation between Us and Them, and up against the establishing of the predominance of one principle over the opposing principle: Above --Below, Good --Evil, Ego- Id. With this, a real struggle and a real stage arise. On this stage, a dominant in- tellectual position enters first, a nomos-doctrine, an idealism, a "high" and affir- mative theory that presents itself as respectable, stern, and inspired, as if it had been won from higher sources. This is inevitably answered, in the second scene, by a realistic (kynical) antithesis that polemically counterposes the viewpoints and experiences of the underdog, the so-called evil position that is shoved into the id [Es, literally, it; -- Trans. ] (matter). In kynicism, therefore, an ego appears that takes it on itself to be that which the nomos-idealists prohibit, exclude, and despise. With this, kynicism from the plebeian perspective bursts the value sys- tem installed from above without fully ceasing to pay regard to it. This also gives kynicism its obviously aggressive and culturally critical aspect. With kynicism, an acidic element penetrates into culture-the first decomposition of the esprit de serieux with which whatever wants to rule has always surrounded itself. At the same time, it appears to those on top as something sinister and dirty, and the more hegemonic consciousness tries to withdraw to pure heights, the more subver- even if I cease to be, eros wills that Something remain.
362 ? TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS
sively and demonically does the kynical refusal appear on its horizon. From then on, it must seem disgusting that this low, mere It stands up for itself and places an ego of its own sort against my own ego. This anti-ego that giggles forth out of the kynical resistance against the metaphysical idealism of master theories probably also constitutes the core of what our tradition calls the diabolical. The displacement of the concept, from "kynicism" to "cynicism" and its metaphysics, provoked by Christianity (as the mentality of the nihilists or the devotees of the Devil) is, to be sure, no mere accident. For if the metaphysical ego identifies itself with the Above and the Good, then the fact that in the Id- Below-Evil an ego also is astir overcomes it like a shock. "It" obviously is no longer content to be merely mute, low, lethargic matter. That this evil id could also be something for itself-- that is the real metaphysical scandal that, since the late Middle Ages, has been discussed in the form of innumerable analyses of the Devil. Nothing seems to du- alistic consciousness (i. e. , bifurcated and identified with the better half) to be so simultaneously agonizing and fascinating than the presentiment that in the so- called evil and low regions, too, there could live a potent, ready-witted self- consciousness. When Plato declares Diogenes to be raving mad, this betrays, be- sides contempt, a measure of self- protection. This can be regarded as relatively harmless, however, since Diogenes, as reported in anecdotes, knew how to turn the tables so that in the end it was not quite clear who the real crazy was. In Chris- tianity, the antagonism was intensified much more dramatically. Christian con- sciousness, which understood itself to be endowed with the absolute truth through revelation, had to conjure up a non-Christian ego in the image of the Anti- Christ--and thereby simultaneously became caught up in a permanent apprehen- sion that "evil" could even be active within ourselves, quaerens quern devoret (seeking whom it will devour) (1 Peter 5).
Here we have to refer again to Faust, the Devil, and the cynicism of Satan. The story of Doctor Faustus can be understood as a document for the unsettling of the older metaphysical dualism through the new empiricism (whereby under empiricism sexual experience is also included). Art between the Middle Ages and modern times experiments with the possibility of an evil subjectivity "also for us"--and in didactic, morally embellished narratives itself tries out how it would be to live in such an "evil" skin --and what kind of exciting experiences that would bring. I have already described this with the example of the Goethean pact with the Devil. Faust explores the wide world ("so that you, set loose, free / experience what life is") as the Devil's partner, and thus as a probationary devil. Only to the Devil does the world of experience stand open without restriction. Like Goethe, folk literature also does not neglect to describe explicitly the acquaintance of the probationary devil (Faust) with sexual evil:
As Doctor Faustus saw that the years of his promise came day by day to an end, he went about leading a slovenly and
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
epicurean life, and
TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS D 363
called upon seven demonic succubas all of whom he slept with. . . . For he traveled into many kingdoms with his spirit so that he could see all womanly shapes. Of whom he succeeded with two Dutch women, a Hungarian, an Englishwoman, two Swabians, and one Frankish woman, who were paragons of the land. With these demonic women he prac- ticed unchasteness to the end of his life. (Deutsche Volksbilcher, ed. C. O. Conrady [Hamburg, 1968], p. 133) After this, there can be no doubt that "being evil," or the slovenly and epicu- rean life (which, of course, also means "kynical living") pays off to the extent that we can experience what we long since wanted to experience but did not dare. Who can so easily let themselves go to the Devil? The folktale of Doctor Faustus ex- plores, almost uncensored, the lust to try out evil once for oneself. This is a metaphysically dramatic process, because only in this way, at first virtually and then actually, does the integration of the other side, or in other words, the end
5ofdualism,becomepossible. Manynarrativeworksofearlymoderntimesoper-
ate according to this moral schema. The folktale allows itself the exciting experi- ment of lending an ego like our own to what is "authentically" evil. It takes the test jump of fantasy into the Devil's ego. Of course, these stories still have to end badly, and the probationary devil, who allowed himself everything that Christians should not do (in the magical, culinary, sexual, tourist, and theoretical domains) in the end has to be punished as an example. "Thus, whoever does evil, dies. " A classically cynical passage can be found in the Faust book, where the Devil makes a maliciously joyful, satirical speech to the poor doctor before the evil spirits come to tear him apart:
Therefore, my good Faust, it is not good to eat cherries with great men and the Devil; they throw the stems in one's face, as you now see. For this reason you probably would have done well to have gone far away; that would have been good against the shooting. But your arrogant pony kicked you. . . .
. . . Look, you were a beautifully made creature, but the roses, as long as they are carried in the hand and smelled, do not last. Those whose bread you have eaten, their song you must also sing. If you post- pone things until Good Friday, it will soon be Easter. What you have promised has not happened without cause; a roasted sausage has two ends; you cannot walk well on the Devil's ice. You have had an evil way, and evil ways do not let evil ways alone, just as the cat does not stop chasing mice. To do something heavy-handedly causes pitting; be- cause the spoon is new, the cook uses it; afterward, when it gets old,
he shits on it, then finishes eating with it. Is it not so with you? You who were a new cooking spoon of the Devil. . . . So let now my teaching and reminder go to your heart, which for all that is thoroughly doomed. You should not have become so well acquainted with the
364 ? TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS
Devil, especially because, as well as being God's ape, he is a liar and murderer. . . . To put up the Devil requires a clever innkeeper. There is more to dancing than a pair of red shoes. If you had had God in mind and had been satisfied with the talents given to you, you would not have danced to this tune, and you should not have so easily bent to the Devil's will and believed; for whoever believes easily is soon de- ceived. Now, the Devil wipes his mouth and goes on his way: You have made yourself guarantor with your own blood, now the guarantor is to be strangled. You let it go in one ear and out the other. (Ibid. , pp. 137-38)
That is nothing short of a model text for the cynical joke. In proverbs, conser-
vative common sense rubs its hands with glee. For we understand so much at
once: That is not the Devil; no sovereign spirit would speak this way. Rather,
in this way, the unsettled human spirit, at the end of its Faustian excursion, tries,
with bold and blatant sarcasm, to cut itself down to size again and to talk itself
down to the level of narrow-minded morality. Ironically, here the Devil poses as
a moralist who reproaches the poor doctor with how he should have been: well-
mannered, accommodating, pleasing in God's eye. The main reproach, very sig-
nificantly, says that Faust should have been more mistrustful. Herein culminates
this moral sermon, in which "the evil spirit punishes the aggrieved Fausto with
strange mocking, jovial speeches and proverbs. " This address is cynical in the
most modern sense because it contains a sardonic restoration of morality by the
one about whom we know anyway that he offends against it in principle. This
devil's speech is perhaps the first model of modern masters' cynicism as such.
These gentlemen with whom one is ill-advised to eat cherries throw the stems in
one's face. After our Faustian experiment, the structure of self-denying, impera-
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
tive morality is laid bare: Morality is a swindle, but nonetheless it has to be main- tained, does it not? Therefore, we should make sure that the story ends badly.
In the folktale, the doctor is torn apart by bestial spirits, his brain and blood spat- ter the walls, his torn corpse lies on the dungheap. (Does the Devil collaborate with psychopaths, Fascists, perverts? ) It seems that Faust is punished a hundred times more horribly than he sinned. He pays a shocking price for having been allowed to live for twenty-four years --the duration of the pact --beyond good and evil, in a world in which dualism was suspended and everything to do with life
6waspermitted. Initscollapse,theoldmetaphysicaldualismdemonstratesitsfull
pathogenic energy for the first time.
The vision of the diabolical that comes over people is thus closely connected
with the phenomenon of kynicism. It is not the dualistic separation of good and evil, light and darkness as such that produces the great tension through which the Devil becomes strong; rather, there also must be the experience that the "evil side" is filled with a subjective intensity, that is, with intention, awareness, plan. The id is actually already an ego. This is a far-reaching finding: It enables the
TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS ? 365 philosophical description of a metaphysical form of consciousness in crisis to be combined with a psychological description of paranoia. The crisis is triggered by the fact that evil gradually becomes thinkable as one's own ego; the difference be- 7 gins to fade. An implosion is impending. And only under this threat does the splitting off of the Id-below-Evil, which, at the same time, has an ego, become
a violent explosion. Only from then on can the concept "devil" be applied to peo- ple who live among us but are "different" (heretics, magicians, homosexuals, Jews, clever women). The sharp defensive reaction presupposes that defenders are undermined by the presentiment that they could be like "those over there. "
On this mechanism is based Pascal's observation that people who want to play the angel easily become the Devil, more precisely, a devil who declares the opponent to be a devil in order to eliminate him or her with reasons that are all too good. The drama is thus not played out only between a good ego and an evil id. Rather, it comes into its explosive phase through the good ego meeting an opponent who consciously and unrepententingly takes it on itself to be that which dualism dis- criminated against as the evil half, that is, the openly evil, kynical "evil" ("that's the way I am, and I intend to be that way") and consequently, an evil that, viewed carefully, is perhaps no evil at all. (Therefore, some moral revolutions begin with phases of kynical polemic in which the "amoralists" openly plead guilty to what scandalizes the others: Diogenes masturbates in the marketplace; women say, "We had abortions"; men, "Gay is beautiful"; doctors, "We have practiced eu-
8thanasia"; etc. Thus if evil can have an ego, only then does suspicion begin to
plow up one's own moral consciousness. For the ego that hides in the evil id could indeed, because it is ego, also be my ego. Only the repression of this possibility produces the energy of the paranoid projection. With it, the suspicion is blown up out of all proportion. Suspicion wants, at all costs, to again ban evil into the non-ego. It wants to burst the I- You relation that is inevitably given as soon as so-called evil enters as another ego. The diabolical thus manifests itself when an ego wants to defend at any price a dualism that has become untenable. The Devil is a reflexive effect; he arises when something that is already ego should be made into id once again. Every ego can be a mirror for every other ego; those who do not want to see themselves take care that the others do not really ascend into the status of ego. The more unmistakably, however, the other ego has already shown itself to be a fact of life, the more fervent becomes the urge in the denying ego to smash the mirror. Paranoia and antireflective politics have the same structure, although on different levels. That in the course of European history this structure ascended to the dominating ideological reality several times --in the period of the Crusades, in the heretics' and witches' inquisitions, in the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, in the fascisms, in anti-Semitism, in Stalinism-proves the explosiveness of this structure, in which warlike antagonisms, metaphysical dualisms, and paranoid mechanisms coalesce. For this reason, I think, the under- standing of kynicism-as conscious embodiment of that which has been negated,
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
366 ? TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS
excluded, humbled, and declared evil (id) --holds a key to the cynical bestiality with which in our culture the fanatical defenders of the so-called good have distin- guished themselves so remarkably since time immemorial. And perhaps with the help of that doctrine that, of all philosophies, least of all represents a "theory," more insight can be won into that counterposed philosophical tradition that began with Plato and presented itself as the highest possible form of theory as such: di- alectics. For we would like to think that dialectics must remain immune against the dualistic-paranoid temptation. Does it not proceed from what the conscious- ness described earlier does not want to admit: from the conflict of positions and principles? Is it not its fundamental thought that against every thesis an antithesis must emerge and that this, which appears horrible to others, is, in fact, good and correct--for the sake of the synthesis and the "higher" truth born of the struggle?
Before we pursue these ideas, we must discuss the turn the "id" took within psychoanalysis. With both his so-called topographies (i. e. , descriptions of limits and areas on the "map of the soul"), Freud ventured forth into an area that for a long time had been philosophy's territory. Nevertheless, there is no doubt about the fundamental antimetaphysical stance of Freudian analysis. What then has hap- pened with the philosophy of the subject that a psychologist can speak as Freud does about the human person? The ego in Freud is not that of subjectivity philoso- phy. Reduced to a formula, Freudian analysis presupposes that the metaphysical dogma of the unity of the person in its ego has been burst--but how this happens is not our topic here. Only so much is certain: Freud only finds this bursting as a fait accompli and does not himself bring it about. That is his place in the history of ideas.
From then on, in the rubble left after the explosion, several sectors can be staked out: on the one hand, the conscious and the unconscious domain; on the other, more or less superimposed, the districts of the superego in which the laws, norms, standards of conscience, and ideals reside; the districts of the ego, where everyday knowledge, qualifications, conscious competences, recollec- tions, and plans have their space; and finally the districts of the id from which the vital energies, drives, and dreams ascend. Of course, only because the unity of the person posited by metaphysicians is broken do psychologists have a free hand to speak in their way about another unity of the person. They see this unity not as something given but as a task: What is given is the landscape of rubble, strewn with large clumps that have been exploded into the unconscious, inter- laced by the cracks under which the old abuses and pains seethe. Therefore, Freud can say, "Where id was, ego should become. " He envisages draining the unconscious sea, setting up ego controls over what was previously the inner non- ego (id). In this, it is not so much the function of domination by the ego or of control that should be emphasized. In fact, the "sublation" of the id into the ego presupposes in the first place the opposite of domination by the ego, namely, radi- cal recognition of the id without reservation. In fruitful analytic cures (there are, as is well known, also other sorts of cures), it inevitably comes to the emergence
TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS ? 367
0f the id to the point where the ego can be thoroughly washed away by those forces that were previously split off. Thus it can no longer be overlooked that "It" (id) belongs to me even if not yet in the sense of my old ego, marked by control and repression. A new ego-broader, livelier, more dynamically moved by the newly uncovered id space--is called into life, an ego that learns to live with its
9whole history, its traumatic burden, and its madnesses. Cure presupposes the
recognition of the id as the precondition and foundation of life for the mature ego. Wherever that happens, the paranoid structure, the polemicization of the id, must end of its own accord. Thus, in Freudian terminology, a downright philosophical- philanthropic act is also to be discovered: The id is thought of as one's own from the beginning and is set up a priori as still unconscious with an orientation toward the ability of my ego to one day bring light into the darkness. Let us not argue about whether that is exaggerated rationalism or hidden Hegelianism. The point is not that the ego should now become completely the "master of its own house";
10
rather the point lies in the chance that the "spirits of the house" gether under one roof.
learn to live to-
Metapolemic: On the Foundations of European Dialectics in Polemics and Rhythmics
As far as he is able, the author lays his cards on the table; that is in no way the same thing as the game.
Adorno, Preface to Negative Dialectics All kinds of good principles have currency in the world; we
simply neglect to put them into practice.
Pascal, Pensees
Dialectics derives from a polemical tradition that has its beginnings in the Greek
philosophers in the generations before Socrates. In sophistry an art of disputation
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
and logical rhetoric for overwhelming the opponent arose for the first time, in a way in which it has scarcely again come to life in our civilization, except in the
aIf, therefore, "dialectician" is supposed to be the name for someone who performs above average in the art of being in the right, philosophy, but also political reality, would have one problem less. Dialectics would then be only a prettier word for rhetoric and sophistry in the negative sense, for caviling and the unscrupulous use 01
nave experienced dialectics, or something that called itself such, in some such ge of the Scholastics, when likewise, a seasoned art of disputation flourished. logic and language for the purpose of subduing by surprise.
To be sure, many people--philosophers as well as nonphilosophers --must
Wa
declared Hegel to be a crazy charlatan) up to modern analytic philosophy (accord-
y. For, from many a despiser of sophistry in antiquity--to Schopenhauer (who
368 ? TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS
ing to which dialecticians do not know, in the strict sense, what they are saying) and further, to refugees from the Eastern bloc in which a so-called Dialectical Materialism is the ideology of state--an endless series of voices have spoken out as victims, adversaries, and critics of "dialectics. " If, therefore, it is supposed to be a mere art for always being in the right, there must be reasons why some re- main immune to this way of maintaining that one is in the right. If it is only an art of convincing, it cannot be compelling because too many people remain unconvinced --and that since time immemorial! If dialecticians are those who try to force affirmation of their truth, then innumerable people have resisted this at- tempt by counterposing their negation to it in an unmistakable way. The situation presents itself thus for a superficial consideration. This consideration is super- ficial because it is not concerned about contents but holds firm only to the formal aspect: Here, on the one hand, there are thinkers who put their trust in a certain technique of arguing that in the end is supposed to always bring the truth to light. On the other hand, there are thinkers on whom this technique does not work in the sense intended by the dialecticians and who obviously have a counterposed art at their disposal that immunizes them against dialectical "seduction. "
If we call the art of the dialectician "dialectical logic," and the art of those who resist or even repudiate it "analytic logic," we have roughly described the con- frontation that for ages has caused two rival philosophical styles to grate on each other.
This finding, however, is no longer so completely superficial. The surface contains once again the "thing itself. " There is obviously a dispute about dialectics in which two rival "schools," dialecticians (antianalyticians) and analyticians (an- tidialecticians), struggle. And this seems to correspond precisely to assertions made by the dialectical position. If, out of the struggle between the two schools, the "truth" were to be produced, that would be ipso facto a result won out of the dispute of opinions. However, dialectics, even if it receives gratification through this observation, must not want to go so far as to claim a complete victory or an exclusive justification vis-a-vis analysis because otherwise it would not have re- quired any dispute but, from the beginning, without contradiction, would have been able to say of itself "how things are. " Thus, in the truth produced in the dis- pute between dialectics and analytics, analysis must have properly come into its own; if analysis had been totally defeated, dialectics would be in the wrong. Con- versely, analysis too cannot win a total victory because it cannot disqualify dialec- tics from competence in matters concerning dispute.
Thus, if in the dispute between dialectics and analysis --in accordance with the well-known three steps --as synthesis a higher truth should emerge that "sublates (aufhebt) the elements of truth of the one side as well as those of the other, this higher truth must have overcome those aspects of the dialectic that have long since obviously provoked the uprising of a counterposition. Consequently, there is a false element (Moment) in dialectics as soon as it coagulates to a position that is
TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS D 369
defended --otherwise, the continual polemic of analysis against dialectics would not be possible. The nature of this "false moment" in dialectics is basically the only philosophical problem that remains of the legacy of dialectics once the mis- understandings are taken away.
11
The question is thus: What is wrong with dialectics?
for argumentation be disputed? Why is there so much resistance against a "theory" that --we could say, highly realistically --treats experiences such as conflict, con- tradiction, history, development, becoming? Is not the opening up
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
of such "themes" in any case an indispensable gain for philosophy that, once acquired, can provide a measure for every serious competing theory? Is it not to be seen as an advantage when a theory of the real comes so far as to not only dispute with other theories about truth, but also to conceive of the dispute as such --as an un- avoidable presupposition of the search for truth?
However, precisely here, the dilemma of dialectics begins. The analytic reply will say, You are talking of dispute, well and good; but what is meant by that? Your dialectics means the art of conducting an intellectual dispute and grows out of the experience that, in fact, from energetically antithetical discussion, insights are sometimes worked out that lie higher than the theses brought into the dialogue by the discussants at the beginning. If that is what is meant, we are all dialecti-
12
cians, at least with regard to those things about which one can dispute at all. But in fact, you dialecticians mean something much more ambitious than a doc- trine of productive dialogue. It is not simply that you want to talk about how we, as pugnacious theoreticians, work toward better insights through the leveling out of our extreme opposing opinions. The dialectical stimulus indeed begins only where we try to speak of the dispute and contradiction of "things" in reality and as reality. The ground under our feet gets hot when dialectics is understood not as dialogics but as ontology. But where does the boundary run? The disputatious dialogue is not only an imaginary opposition of two statements that meet in a "log- ical space. " But, if the contradictory statements are to "work with each other," it will be first and simultaneously necessary for us, you and me, to "duel" bodily and to use our opinions against each other like sharpened weapons. The antitheti- cal nature of the statements alone does not instigate enmity. Subjects must be found who truly struggle against each other with these statements in reality, with personal presence and psychosomatic intensity. The dispute, although it brings statements into battle against statements, thus does not belong merely to the "in- tellectual" sphere but itself signifies a piece of reality. And with this, the dilemma of dialectics begins. Those who begin to reflect on the dispute of ideas inevitably come to a point where the logical "passes over" (whatever that may mean) into the ontological. In the dispute, a contradiction is not only thought but staged in reality. With this, dialectics has set foot in ontology. Hence, analysis can no longer slam the door shut in its face. Dialectics has put its foot too firmly in the way: Disputatious processes are indeed part of what really exists, and the logic
Why must this doctrine
370 ? TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS
of productive dispute unmistakably reaches over into the ontological domain. Here, something takes place that we can call the ontological putsch of dialectics: Because it has now undeniably penetrated into the ontological domain, it tries, with a bold and arbitrary stroke, to take possession of the entire realm of the exist- ing as its domain. With this, it turns the cosmos into an all-encompassing "dialec- tical process"--as if it were nothing other than a disputatious phenomenon that unrelentingly propels itself through its own dramatic-agonistic self-movement.
Hegel developed this view with an almost devastating consistency and brilliant radicality with regard to almost all phenomena of being. For him, world history is a bloody, seething dispute of the Weltgeist that ultimately culminates in radiant self-knowledge of self-knowledge. This dispute strives--through a powerful chain of self-sunderings and self- surmountings, in search of the concept of itself--toward the moment when it, in Hegel, no longer only seeks but has found, no longer moves forward but flows into the fulfilled moment of "absolute knowl- edge. " Here, dialectics has leapt completely from a doctrine of dialogue over into a doctrine of the world, from a logic over into an ontology, and how all- dominating the dialectical principle has thereby become is revealed in Hegel's in- trepid undertaking to erect anew, from first principles and in the spirit of dialec- tics, even the "science of logic. "
With this ontological inflation of dialectics to the greatest system-construct in the history of European philosophy a point had been reached from which a back- lash became unavoidable. The fates of the Hegelian system, which meanwhile
13
from our distance appears as a ghostly ruin
inevitable turning point clearly enough. Even Hegel's unprecedented dialectical system did not elude the fate of being reduced in turn to a mere position against which powerful and successful oppositions consolidated. What had claimed to be the whole fell back into the position of a "moment," a mere pole of an antagonism. Against the pretensions of self- glorying speculation, a solid and modest spirit of empiricism awoke to an energetic self-consciousness. Against the idealism that had been driven to an extreme, the materialist reaction arose. Against the grandi- osity that had become a system, an existential consciousness articulated itself that provided an account of our relativity and fragility. And, above all, against the he- gemony of theory, a current now made headway that resolutely prescribed for it- self the primacy of praxis. For if Hegel reached a point in his grand view of above-the-world historical processes where the spirit thinks it
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
has come to rest in the unity of reason with reality, the post-Hegelian generations have known and felt nothing more sharply than that reality and reason blatantly diverge and that if the gap were ever to be closed, this would have to be a matter of a praxis that transforms reality and makes it accord with reason.
This fivefold "antithesis" to the system of dialectics (empiricism, materialism, existentialism, primacy of praxis, reason as Not-Yet) characterizes down to the present the situation with which every later philosophical theory, whether it be of idealist metaphysics, indicate the
TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS ? 371
dialectical or analytic, had to debate or come to terms. However, from then on, mere antidialectical "convictions" are even more inadequate for the task. For whatever may come after and against Hegel, it will, whether it wants to or not, fall into the "dialectic of dialectics"-in other words, into the conflict of subjective reason with the collapsed system that had wanted to demonstrate an all-pervading objective reason of conflict.
This conflict begins with a blunt refusal to make dialectics absolute. The dream
of a productive contradiction that everywhere moves through thesis and antithesis
to higher syntheses cannot be pursued. Real being, precisely when it is viewed
in its movements, developments, and struggles, cannot be thought of as, accord-
ing to the model, an enormous disputatious dialogue that strives, through all the
extremes, toward truth. If we say no to this, we demand nothing other than that
dialectics be forced back out of ontology. A complete expulsion is inadmissible
because, as we have said, as disputable theory of dispute, it itself already has a
"foot in the door. " After Hegel, it must accordingly be the concern of philosophy
to reverse the ontological putsch of dialectics without suppressing the scope of
its validity. This demands nothing more or less than a rational (analytic) recon-
14
struction of dialectics in the form of a Universal Polemics. The point in which
the dialectical tradition was great, that is, to disputatiously think the dispute, to think the contradiction in the movements of contradiction--that must be "sub- lated" by a rational theory of dispute. Of course, this sublation, measured against Hegel's claim, is a sinking, said positively, grounding (Erdung), a realistic and illuminating anchoring of this Universal Polemics in universally understandable arguments.
"When two people quarrel, the third is glad. " Through an interpretative un- folding of this saying, the polemical meaning of dialectics can be grasped. In the struggle with each other, the first and second parties consume their powers - - when they are approximately the equal of the other-so that an additional third party could subjugate both with little trouble. In the dialectical dialogue, how- ever, we find no third party but rather only two partners who, as far as possible, work each other over. If both do their job equally well, we can predict that the match will be undecided. If both are skilled polemicists, it will not be impossible for them not only to defend a position that has been thought through and worked out, but even to make an offensive advance against the adversary. However, the picture is suddenly altered when the first party not only goes to battle as a compe- tent polemicist but tries to bepolemicus and arbiter simultaneously. That is pre- cisely the dialectician. As such, the latter leaps out of the position of the partner with equal status into that of the superior third party and then, in its double role as first and third party, quashes the position of the second. It disputes with clever- ness against cleverness, but takes care to remain the cleverer one. It takes up, as we say, the "moments of truth" in the opposing side, subordinates them, and adopts them from a "higher level" as its own. This, however, is legitimate only
372 D TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS
when the second party in turn declares itself not simply to be outdone, but to be
convinced by the third. Thus the third party by its assent again comes closer to
the opponent with whom, on a common higher level, it would have reached agree-
ment. We would then have two "third parties," both of whom could be glad about
the dispute between the first and the second because both would have come out
15
of it winners.
two, there is no third party. For as long as they maintain a balance, we cannot talk of dialectics but have to always call the matter by the appropriate name: dia- logue or disputatious conversation.
The poverty of dialectics is concentrated in the often conjured-up function of synthesis. In the conflict offerees, according to dialectics, the newer and higher entity will be born. However, a trick lurks in this acknowledgment of the conflict. For this acknowledgment is made only by the party who regards itself as the vic- tor in the dispute, not by the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
loser. It could be that our European dialectics since Heraclitus have all been victor's fantasies that try to conclude something like a peace treaty in the so-called synthesis; to be sure, it is a kind of dictated peace, in which the loser is supposed to come to terms with and be assimilated into the new order. In the jargon of dialectics, this means that a universal will be erected over an antagonism. What really happens thereby is the reinterpretation of po- lemics as dialectics, that is, the summarizing of a dispute by the victor. The latter models the history of the struggle as the development and progress toward its own position. The consciousness of the conquered party no longer speaks explicitly in the victor's resume but only as a subordinated "moment. " Its contribution is "sublated"; it itself remains below. The victor is thus, viewed structurally, a dou- ble ego, namely, first and third, and in the function of the third, it swallows up
16
But that means, metaphorically speaking: In the dispute between
to a certain extent the arguments, powers, and rights of the second. Weltgeist operates like a cannibal who devours opposed consciousness and gains its sovereignty by digesting them. This "positive" dialectic functions as the sup- pression of the second party; indeed, precisely speaking, it functions as the sec-
ond subjugation of what had already once opposed the first. (For the second posi- tion, the antithesis, emerges in reality not as a dueling partner of equal status or as the other extreme but as a revolt against an already established hegemonic power. )
The positive dialectic thus does not leave the realm of polemics but ends the dispute with a victor's dictate. With this it always intervenes in a polemical happening --and, as a rule, on the side of the hegemonic power and ruling con- sciousness. It reinforces the Above-Below, Good-Evil, Ego-Id structures from the viewpoint of the dominant position at the expense of the underdog. With this comes a pronouncedly ironical result: Positive dialectics from Plato to Lenin in practice function as obstacles to and falsifications of what they have taken as their topic: the productive dispute and the equalizing of forces.
It is on this experience that Adorno's bold inversion of the tradition of dialec-
Hegel's
TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS ? 373
tics is based. This inversion mistrusts the victor ideology of the higher synthesis. In reality, the victories of the "universal" do not bring any relaxation of tensions; the negation remains just as unproductive as the negation of the negation. The "sublations" are a lie; nothing better comes afterward. The more "dialectical" par- ties, blocs, ideologies raise themselves against each other, the more the spirit of deadlock, control, and rigidification triumphs under cover of hectic production and armament. Living things increasingly become weapons and tools. To the ex- tent that, directly or indirectly, everything becomes struggle and business, war and exchange, weapon and commodity, the living element, for whose develop- ment and enhancement, according to the conception of dialectics, conflict is bene- ficial, dies. In the end, dialectics is no longer even seemingly the form of move- ment of reason in historical conflicts, but--if we think of Stalin's use of dialectics --it becomes an instrument of artful, calculating paranoia. War is not at all the father of all things but rather their obstructor and annihilator. Adorno's correction of dialectical theory is consistent in taking its starting point in the dubi- ous "synthesis":
The formulation "negative dialectics" offends against tradition. As early as Plato, dialectics wants to create something positive with the means of thinking called negation; the figure of a "negation of the negation" later designated this concisely. The book wants to liberate dialectics from this sort of affirmative essence. {Negative Dialectics [Frankfurt, 1966], p. 7)
Negatively conceived dialectics works toward a Universal Polemics without saying so. If the first party is the "idealism" of the hegemonic powers and the sec- ond is the "materialism" of the oppressed, then the third, which emerges from the dispute, is basically the first again, but worse. The erection of a universal over antagonisms always leads to the same thing. Certainly, something "moves" in do- ing this but plus ca change, plus c'est la mime chose: Adorno's negative turn against traditional dialectics amounts to a denial of what in today's predominant "dialectical" doctrine, Marxism- Leninism, is a mere lie. However powerful and productive his realistic side may be (he indeed has all the themes of the aforemen- tioned fivefold antithesis to Hegel, that is, everything that today we call "realistic" --the existential moment, however, only in a mutilated form), Adorno was not realistic enough in a decisive point: He did not bring about the withdrawal of dialectics from ontology in a satisfying, rationally well-ordered form.
This withdrawal, we maintain, must lead to a Universal Polemics that pene- trates the dispute in its social dynamics and evolutionary function. A theory that after Hegel wants to call itself dialectical has to achieve this, nothing more or less. Marx made a start with this. He presented a history of philosophy that makes sense only when it is understood as a first attempt at a rational Universal Po- lemics. The central idea of his theory, that all previous human history is a history
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
374 D TRANSCENDENTAL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDITATIONS
of class struggles, shows Marx's attempt to liberate dialectics from its idealistic inheritance and to ground it realistically and empirically as theory of reality, that is, as Universal Polemics. Nevertheless, the dilemma of dialectics was repeated in Marx himself. He provided not only a Universal Polemics but, within this, also a false proof as to why his position had to be the victorious one. Marx, too, produced a victor's fantasy (in advance); that is, he falsified polemics again into dialectics. The expropriation of the expropriators is meant to establish something universal over the antagonism between the exploited and the exploiters, namely, the just distribution of wealth. The means for doing this, however, are not univer- sal but a new polemic, the oppression of the oppressor, the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx's thinking, itself dictatorial, affirms this dictatorship. For Marx, too, dialectics serves as a "positive" artificial means, party and arbiter, first and third at the same time. However realistic Marx was as inaugurator of a Universal Polemics, he remained unrealistic with regard to the aims and results of the struggles he postulated. What today we encounter as so- called one-party systems are the malformed offspring of this truncated rationalism: parties that have gone so far in the victor's fantasy that they believe they have now integrated the second position and sublated it into the one, unique, higher synthesis. The party as the whole. The pole as integral. The moment as totality. Precisely that is the schema in which, in Marx's own words, the "whole shit" has to start "all
over again. "
What began as an attempt to avoid the dualistic danger of paranoia by means
of a dialectical acknowledgment of the one as well as the other in the last moment becomes a new onesidedness that forces new dualisms.
Marx's attempt to ground a rational Universal Polemics must be regarded as having failed, in reality just as much as in theory; his lasting achievement lies in the attempt itself. Our only choice is to rationally carry on his attempt. Human history is really also a history of struggles, as Marx emphasized, but whether he was right in identifying all historical struggles as class struggles is more than questionable. The world polemics we see before us as world history reveals rather the image of enormous interethnic, international, and interimperial conflicts, crisscrossed and overlaid, of course, by the fact that the subjects of conflict in themselves are mostly class societies --at least in the historical period we identify in general with the history of the state, i. e. , hierarchical societies of domination. However, no sophistry will ever be in a position to present the human history of war in such a way that it corresponds completely to the history of class struggles. Class society, too, is just as much a product of war as war is the product of class society. Here, the historical facts count, and in the conflict between fact and the- ory, we will always have to say, going against Hegel, all the worse for the theory. War is older than class society, and struggles between class societies are not class struggles per se. A Universal Polemics, in contrast to Marx, enjoys the advantage of being able to afford these clear distinctions from the beginning. It can do this
TRANSCENDENT AL POLEMIC: HERACLITIAN MEDIT A TIONS ? 375
because it does not want to be a victor's fantasy and has no interest in proving
the necessary and historically "due" triumph of one party. Even less is it com-
pelled to construe subjects of conflict that cannot be found, as Marxism did when
it postulated a militant proletariat as the world-historical conflictual partner of the
bourgeoisie. Universal Polemics can even go a step further in historical descrip-
tion than Historical Materialism; namely, it can investigate the polemical style
of the dialectician as one of the most important phenomena in the modern history
of conflict. It shows what happens when a party founds its struggles on a "dialecti-
cal" theory. Positive dialectics, for its part, remains an object for Universal Po-
17
lemics.
Adorno's great intervention relates to this point. Only a negative dialectics
would cease to be the legitimating ideology of a party that dreams of itself as vic- tor and as the whole. Only with this can misuse of dialectics cease. If its rational core has been laid bare as Universal Polemics, its lying side can and must disap- pear. Then it will no longer perform dogmatic services for anyone. It will no longer be a weapon, an ideology, an instrument of propaganda, but will become what it falsely understood itself to be: an instrument for the description of reality, history, and of the conflicts of consciousnesses. When Adorno, as he said, put his cards openly on the table, he executed the gesture that had long since been due in the overripe tradition of dialectics. As negative dialectics, it openly gives up the attempt to compulsively be in the right and to celebrate the force of the victor as a higher synthesis. Critical Theory was the attempt to come into the in- heritance of dialectics without spinning victor's fantasies. In it, the legacy of those who have been violated and beaten down gains expression.