The
neobourgeois
generations have modernized their social narcissism.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
Here, in Rousseau, we find perhaps the most important figure of thought in moral-political enlighten- ment: the theory of the innocent victim.
The evidence introduced for political pessimism; the criminal, the lunatic, and the asocial individual, in a word, the second-rate citizen --these are not by nature as one finds them now but have been made so by society. It is said that they have never had a chance to be as they would be according to their nature, but were forced into the situation in which they find themselves through poverty, coercion, and ignorance. They are victims of society.
This defense against political pessimism regarding human nature is at first con- vincing. It possesses the superiority of dialectical thinking over positivistic think- ing. It transforms moral states and qualities into processes. Brutal people do not "exist," only their brutalization; criminality does not "exist," only criminalization; stupidity does not "exist," only stupefaction; self-seeking does not "exist," only training in egoism; there are no second-rate citizens, only victims of patroniza- tion. What political positivism takes to be nature is in reality falsified nature: the suppression of opportunity for human beings.
Rousseau knew of two aids who could illustrate his point of view, two classes of human beings who lived before civilization and, consequently, before perver- sion: the noble savage and the child. Enlightenment literature develops two of its most intimate passions around these two figures: ethnology and pedagogy. To the present day nothing has essentially changed in this approach. Literarily, this dou- ble passion precipitates two extensive genres: exotic travel literature and later ethnology on the one hand, and the educational novel and the literature on peda- gogy and child development on the other. The primitive peoples, about whom the European explorers from Columbus to Bougainville and Captain Cook reported, provide an enlightenment, which was gradually becoming more political, the ur- gently needed evidence for its view that, roughly stated, things can "proceed differently" --peacefully, reasonably, humanely, sensuously, without aristoc- racy, without war, without exploitation, without wigs, without lettres de cachet. The noble savages in the South Seas are like an Archimedean point through which one can playfully dislodge the claim of European social orders to be ordained by God and therefore unexcellable. Something different does exist; at the same time, it is better. What is reasonable can thus also become real. That is all enlighten- ment is trying to say.
From this moment on, the child becomes a political object--to a certain extent, the living security deposit of enlightenment. The child is the "noble savage" in one's own house. Through appropriate education care must be taken in the future
56 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
that innocent children are not made into the same artificial social cripples the previous system produced. Children are already what the new bourgeois humans believe they want to become. Enlightenment was not the first to politicize peda- gogy; it has discovered, however, that children always, and everywhere, are the future security of existing relations. But now children are something more: They carry bourgeois hopes for "another world," for a more humane society. It almost appears as if for the first time a new, politically tinged form of parental love has been developing, concentrated in the wish that one's own children should finally have a better life. Only in a society that felt the shake-up and that committed itself totally to the dynamics of world change and progress can such a form of parental love prosper. A new amalgam of love and "ambition for the child" is thus formed, something that would be meaningless in a stable, stagnant society "without prospects. " Peasant societies do not envision "careers" for their children; they see no prospects other than that of life as a peasant. Ambition in the aristocracy is directed not for the benefit of the child but for that of the aristocratic lineage itself, the family. Bourgeois children are the first to have an anthropological and politi- cal mission.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
How the traditional directing of ambitions in the bourgeois parent- child relationship is currently changing could be the topic of a special investi-
gation.
Of course, Rousseau's optimistic naturalism has a very vulnerable point. The beneficence of nature is something that can be doubted even when one does not hold conservative views. In the beginning things were not all that idyllic; genesis (Ursprung) is downright severe and difficult. It soon becomes clear that the image of origin cannot be understood historically because, on closer investigation, one finds that war, inequality, and harsh conditions of life are widespread in an unyielding nature; there are exceptions but they can scarcely be interpreted as ori- gin and rule. Since then, the question about "good origins" becomes the crux for enlightenment. It becomes more and more clear that this idea of origin has not a temporal but a Utopian reference. The Good is still nowhere to be found, except in the wishful human spirit and in daydreams, which unerringly aim at something even though it does not yet exist. Thus, critical naturalism can survive only when it withers away and reawakes as the "spirit of Utopia"; the origin then serves as an end-vision (Bloch).
Naturalistic thinking, in fact, fundamentally changed its function in the nine- teenth century. The natural sciences provided a concept of nature that was any- thing but idyllic. Especially since Darwin, the bourgeois order, having become imperialistic, used the beast of prey as its political emblem. Nature was used as justification by those who needed to legitimate acts of violence, not by those who spoke for peace. The heraldry of the old aristocracy had also shown a striking sympathy for predatory animals: the eagle, falcon, lion, bear. Long before Rous- seauianism, and in substance opposed to it, there was an aristocratic naturalism
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 57
that was renewed in the bourgeois order when it became powerful as political "bi- ologism. " Nothing can show more clearly that Rousseauian naturalism had been only a momentary stylization of the conception of nature on which a general the- ory of liberation could not support itself securely. Hesitatingly, therefore, en- lightenment began to take leave of the noble savage and the innocent child, a part- ing that, of course, can never lead to a complete break (Bruch) with these "allies. " The child and the savage are beings who have a claim on the sympathy of those who remain true to the idea of enlightenment.
Impulses for self-reflection in the great civilizations come from ethnology even today. Thus, behind the conspicuous present-day cult around the American Indian, there is a good deal of pondering about ideas of nature and the maximal size of societies that want to maintain a reasonable relation to themselves as well as to their environment. And from child psychology, there is still today a steady stream of valuable impulses for reflection on the behavioral patterns in societies that suffer from their unresolved childhoods.
What has remained undamaged in Rousseau's critique is the indispensable ex- posure of a supposedly evil "Nature" as a social fiction. This remains important in the purportedly natural inferiorities concerning race, intelligence, and sex and sexual behavior. When conservatives and reactionaries refer to "Nature" to justify their assertions about the inferiority of woman, the lesser capacities of dark races, the innate intelligence of children from the upper social strata, and the sickness of homosexuality, they have usurped naturalism. It remains the task of critique to refute this. Ultimately critique must at least be able to show that what "Nature" gives us has to be recognized as neutral and nontendentious so that every value judgment and every tendency can without doubt be understood as a cultural phenomenon. Even if Rousseau's "good Nature" has been discredited, he has at least taught us not to accept "bad Nature" as an excuse for social oppression.
However, when one speaks of the "victims of society," the "artful dimension"
quickly comes into the picture again. In the concept of the "victim of society,"
there is a reflective contradiction that can be misused in many ways. Already in
Rousseau, a dubious artfulness is observed that is supposed to conceal a double
standard. That he combined nature and childhood in a new idea of education and,
at
? ng been understood as a discrepancy between theory and practice. Rousseau
was a master of an artful reflexivity that skillfully found fault with others on every
Point but in itself always discovered only the purest of intentions. On the white
Page of this feeling of innocence, the famous confessions were written. In this
osturing there was something that other determined enlighteners, above all
einrich Heine, could not and did not want to follow-even though they do not
the same time, denied his own children and stuck them in an orphanage, has
a v e an terenlightenment.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ything to do with the notorious defamation of Rousseau by the entire coun-
58 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
The vulnerable point in the victim theory is, again, the self-reification of con- sciousness, the establishment of a new naively artful position. This can serve or be felt, depending on the circumstances, as a diversionary trick, as a technique of extortion, or as indirect aggression. Psychology is familiar with the "eternal victim," who exploits this position for disguised aggressions. Also belonging to this category, in a broader sense, are those permanent losers as well as medical and political hypochondriacs who lament that conditions are so terrible that it is a great sacrifice on their part not to kill themselves or emigrate. On the German Left, not least of all under the influence of the sociologized schema of the victim, a certain type of renegade has emerged who feels that it is a dirty trick to have to live in this land without summer and without oppositional forces. Nobody can say that such a viewpoint does not know what it is talking about. Its mistake is that it remains blind to itself. For the accusation becomes bound to misery and magnifies it under the subterfuge of unsuspecting critical observations. With the
obstinacy of a Sophist, in aggressive self-reification, many a "critical" conscious- ness refuses to become healthier than the sick whole.
A second possibility of misusing the victim schema has been experienced by dedicated helpers and social workers when, guided by the best intentions, they try to make prisoners, the homeless, alcoholics, marginal youth, and others aware that they are the "victims of society" who have simply failed to offer enough resistance. The helpers often encounter sensitive resistance to their attempts and have to make it clear to themselves just how much discrimination is present in their own "good will. " The self-esteem and need for esteem in the disadvantaged often forcefully defends itself against the demand for self-reification made on them by every political kind of assistance that argues in this way. Precisely those who are worst off feel a spark of self-assertion, whose extinction would be
justifiably feared if those concerned began to think of themselves as victims, as non-egos. To preserve the dignity of "poor bastards," they alone and on their own accord can say that they are poor bastards. Those who try to put such words into their mouths insult them, no matter how good their intentions may be. It is in the nature of liberating reflection that it cannot be forced. It answers only to indirect assistance.
From this vantage point, the perspective on a life spent in total, unavoidable benightedness becomes possible. Theodor Adorno sketched this when he spoke of an unhappy consciousness in which the down-and-outers inflict on themselves a second time that wrong that circumstances perpetrated against them in order to be able to bear it. Here, an inner reflection takes place that looks like a parody of freedom. From the outside, the phenomenon resembles satisfaction and would, if addressed, probably also refer to itself that way. In memory of his mother, Pe- ter Handke has found a tender formulation in which the sadness of a loving and helpless knowledge lays down arms before reality: "self-contented unhappiness. '
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 59
Enlightenment has neither a chance nor a right to disturb the world's slumber if it looks like this.
Critique of the Illusion of Privacy
Where is this ego then, if it is neither in the body nor in the soul?
Blaise Pascal
The last great attack of critique against illusion aims at the position of the ego be- tween nature and society. We know from the line of thought in the preceding cri- tiques that knowledge (Erkenntnis) does not have to do with human nature pure and simple, but with nature as conception, nature as fabrication, with unnatural nature. In that which is "given in nature" there is always something "given in addi- tion" by human beings. The "labor" of reflection is summarized in this insight. Modernity establishes itself in our minds in the shape of counterintuitive ex- periences that break through naivete and exercise a peculiar compulsion on us to increase our intelligence.
Ideologically, the reference to "Nature" is always significant because it
produces an artificial naivete and ends up as voluntary naivete. It covers up the
human contribution and avers that things are by nature, and from their origins,
in that "order" in which our representations, which are always influenced by "in-
terests," depict them. The rudiments for ideologies of order are hidden in all
naturalisms. Every naturalism begins as involuntary naivete. Initially, we cannot
help thinking that the "order of things" is an objective order. For the first glance
falls on the things and not on the "eyeglasses. " In the work of enlightenment, this
first innocence becomes irretrievably lost. Enlightenment leads to the loss of nai-
vete and it furthers the collapse of objectivism through a gain in self-experience.
It effects an irreversible awakening and, expressed pictorially, executes the turn
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
to the eyeglasses, i. e. , to one's own rational apparatus. Once this consciousness
of the eyeglasses has been awakened in a culture, the old naivete loses its charm,
becomes defensive, and is transformed into narrow-mindedness, which is intent
on remaining as it is. The mythology of the Greeks is still enchanting; that of fas-
cism is only stale and shameless. In the first myth, a step toward an interpretation
of the world was taken; in simulated naivete, an artful stupefaction (Verdum-
mung) is at work--the predominant method of self-integration in advanced social 7
orders. Such an observation touches only superficially on the role of mythology in modernity. For the moment this will suffice. Artful self-stupefaction manifests itself in a whole range of modern naturalisms: racism, sexism, fascism, vulgar biologism, and -- egoism.
To put egoism into this series may, at first glance, seem strange, indeed, even dangerous. Actually, there is in egoism a "natural givenness" of a special kind.
60 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
The critique of egoism (better, the critique of the illusion of privacy) constitutes, I think, the core of all enlightenment in which the self-experience of civilized egos comes to maturity. After it, there can be logically no other uncovering critique, but only "praxis," conscious life.
How does the ego come to its determinations? What constitutes its "character? " What creates the material of its self- experience? The answer runs as follows: The ego is a result of programming. It is formed in emotional, practical, moral, and political drill. "In the beginning was education" (Alice Miller).
Self-experience proceeds in two stages: naive perception and reflection. In the naive stage, no consciousness can do otherwise than to conceive of its character traits, programming, and training as its own. Whether in the case of impressions, feelings, or opinions, at first it must always say: I am so! My feeling is thus, my attitude is thus. I am as / am. In the reflective stage, self-consciousness becomes clear about itself: My programming, my traits, my training are thus; I have been brought up in this way and have become so; my "mechanisms" function thus; what I am and what I am not are both at work in me in this way.
The establishment of inwardness and the creation of the illusion of privacy are the most subversive themes of enlightenment. It is still not really clear today who the social conveyor of this impulse of enlightenment may be. One of the ambiva- lences of enlightenment is that although intelligence can be explained sociologi- cally, educationally, and politically, "wisdom," self-reflection cannot. The sub-
ject of a radical ego enlightenment cannot be socially identified with certainty --even though the procedures of this enlightenment are anchored in reality.
In this point, the majority of societies seem to strive for a conscious nonen-
lightenment. Did not Nietzsche too warn of that "life-destroying enlightenment"
8 thattouchesonourlife-supportingself-delusions? Canweaffordtoshakeupthe
"basic fictions" of privacy, personality, and identity? Be that as it may, in this question both old and new conservatives have come to the hard decision to take the "stance" of defending, against all the demands of reflection, their "unavoidable lies for living," without which self-preservation would not be possible. That they are aided in this by the general fear of self-experience, which competes with curi- osity about self-experience, does not have to be expressly emphasized. Thus the theater of respectable, closed egos goes on everywhere, even where the means have long been available to secure better knowledge. Crosswise to all political fronts, it is the "ego" in society that offers the most resolute resistance against the decisive enlightenment. Scarcely anyone will put up with radical self-reflection on this point, not even many of those who regard themselves as enlighteners. The dance around the golden calf of identity is the last and greatest orgy of counteren- lightenment. Identity is the magic word of a partially hidden, partially open con- servatism that has inscribed personal identity, occupational identity, national identity, political identity, female identity, male identity, class identity, party
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 61
identity, etc. , on its banner. The listing of these essential demands for identity would already suffice to illustrate the pluralistic and mobile character of that which is called identity. But one would not be speaking of identity if it were not basically a question of the fixed form of the ego.
The establishment of inwardness comprises the ego as the bearer of ethics, the erotic, aesthetics, and politics. In these four dimensions, everything that I ex- perience as mine is given to me, though at first "I" was not asked: my norms of behavior, my professional ethics, my sexual patterns, my sensual-emotional modes of experience, my class "identity," my political interests.
Here I want to begin with the last mentioned. By briefly describing the "politi- cal narcissisms" of the aristocracy, the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
bourgeoisie, and the proletariat, I will show how, even in the most "inner" region, where we suppose ourselves to be in the closest "narcissistic" proximity to ourselves, we encounter at the same time the most "external" and most universal. Here, the game of "one's own self with what is "alien" becomes visible in the public heart of personalities. Precisely the analysis of narcissism can show how the other has already got the better of the ego. I look in the mirror and see a stranger who swears that it is me. It is one of the irresistible ironies of enlightenment that it shatters our consciousness with such radical counterintuitions. In concluding this line of thought, I want to simply suggest for consideration the question whether the last level of integration in en- lightenment does not have to be a kind of "rational mysticism. "
The ego enters the political world never as a private individual but as the mem- ber of a group, an estate, or a class. From time immemorial, the members of the aristocracy have known themselves to be "the best. " Their social and political po- sition is based on an open, demonstrative, and self-satisfied relation between power and self-esteem. The political narcissism of the aristocracy is nourished
by this plain, power-conscious presumption. The aristocracy has been allowed to believe that it is favored in every existentially essential respect and is called on
to excel--to be militarily stronger, aesthetically superior, culturally refined, un- broken in vitality (which only with regard to the courtly aristocracy is no longer quite true). Thus in the function of the aristocracy there is initially nothing that would allow one to suggest that political status destroys vitality. In fact, the nobil- ity often tried to base its cultural self-portrait directly on narcissistic pleasure. Its political-aesthetic culture is based on the motif of self-celebration, of the union
of self-consciousness and festival. The everyday form of this narcissistic class consciousness appears in the concept of the noble's honor and in the idea of a no- D 'e life-sry/e. With the smallest affronts to their highly trained sense of honor, aristocrats must demand satisfaction --which precipitates the history of the duel
and symbolic combat in Europe as well as in Asia. Honor was the bond between Motion and public life, between the innermost life of the "best" and the reality 31
? ' greeting, obsequious forms of behavior, and even grammatical structures, life among the "best" as well as in public view of the common people. Rules 62 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
which are unknown in prefeudal languages (the most striking being the honorific forms in Japanese), can be traced back to these claims to domination, honor, and personal pleasure.
The aristocratic programming of a heightened self-consciousness, however, comprises more than just what is too hastily called vanity or arrogance. It pro- vides at the same time a high level of character formation and education that works to form opinions, etiquette, emotionality, and cultural taste. All these mo- ments are still encompassed in the old concept of courtliness (Hoftichkeit, polite- ness). The courtly person (cortegiano, gentilhomme, gentleman, Hofmann) has gone through a training in self-esteem that expresses itself in many ways: in aristocratically pretentious opinions, in polished or majestic manners, in gallant or heroic patterns of feeling as well as in a selective, aesthetic sensitivity for that which is said to be courtly or pretty. The noble, far removed from any self-doubt, should achieve all this with a complete matter-of-factness. Any uncertainty, any doubt in these things signifies a slackening in the nobility's cultural "identity. " This class narcissism, which has petrified into a form of life, tolerates no irony, no exception, no slips, because such disturbances would give rise to unwelcome reflections. The French nobles did not turn up their noses at Shakespeare's "bar- barism" without reason. In his plays one already "smells" the human ordinariness of those who want to stand before society as the best.
With the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, the place of the "best" is awarded anew. The bourgeois ego, in an unprecedented, creative storming to the heights of a new class consciousness won for itself an autonomous narcissism, in whose period of degeneration we are living today; it is for this reason that we have to suffer so much political and cultural depressiveness. The bourgeoisie found its own way of being better than the others, better than the corrupt nobility and the uncultivated mob. At first its class ego raised itself on the feeling of having the better, purer, more rational, and more useful morality in all areas of life, from sexuality to management. For a whole century, the new bourgeoisie wallowed in moralizing literature. In it, a new political collective learns to say "I" in a special way; whether psychologically and aesthetically as in that "sensitivity" that schools itself in natural beauty, intimate sociability, and empathy with heartrending fates; whether politically and scientifically as in that bourgeois public sphere that starts as a
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
republic of the learned in order to end up as a republic of citizens. Literature, the diary, gregariousness, critique, science, and republicanism are all training grounds for a new bourgeois high ego, for a new will to subjectivity. Only here do citizens learn how to have good taste, proper demeanor, opinions, and will- Here, the class-specific, novel high feelings of bourgeois culture are drilled--the
pleasure of being a citizen: the awareness of progress; the pride in having worked up from the bottom and in having come a long way; the pride in being the moral and historical torchbearer; the joy in one's own moral sensibility; the demonstra- tive pleasure in one's own cultivation; the pleasure in having a simultaneously cul-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 63
tivated and naive feeling about nature; the self-admiration of the class for its musi- cal, poetic, and scientific genius; the joy in the feeling of enterprise, invention, and historical movement; finally, the triumph of gaining a political say. Looking back at the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one now gets an idea of the extent to which creative and coquettish narcissism permeates bourgeois cul- ture. At the same time, however, the bourgeoisie also followed the nobility in es- sential respects, not least of all in its concept of honor, through which the duel came into bourgeois life and even into the realm of student life. Without doubt, honor became for the bourgeoisie, too, an essential socionarcissistic factor, with which the national militarization of bourgeois society is connected. That this type of bourgeois is dying out today is felt in every nook and cranny of civilization. Those who still know such a latecomer should regard themselves as ethnologists; with wonder they may hear how the last specimens even today cannot walk through the forest without speaking of God.
The neobourgeois generations have modernized their social narcissism. Since at least the Weimar years, the collective ego tone of the bourgeoisie has been loosening up. A lazier style of ego-being as bourgeois is becoming prevalent everywhere. Today we find the mode of expression of the last surviving cultivated bourgeois horribly artificial, and everyone has had the urge to tell them to their faces that they should not ramble on the way they do, so full of themselves. In the twentieth century we observe a sociopsychological front between two bour- geois ego styles, an older and a newer type, which are extremely allergic to each other. The threshold between the two types runs roughly through the time of the First World War and the following phase of modernization. In the mutual dislike of, say, Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, this front becomes concretely visible.
From a historical perspective, the bourgeoisie is the first class that has learned to say /and that at the same time has the experience of labor. All older class nar- cissisms can base themselves "only" on struggle, military heroism, and the gran- diosity of rulers. When the bourgeois says "I" the idea of the pride of labor, of productive accomplishment can also be heard for the first time. This ego of a "laboring class" introduces a previously unheard of turn toward realism into higher social feelings. Of course, that cannot be seen clearly from the beginning because bourgeois culture was forced to distinguish between poetry and prose, art and life, the ideal and reality. The consciousness of labor in the bourgeois ego ? s still thoroughly split-into an idealistic and a pragmatic fraction. The one ver- sion of the bourgeois comprises the artisan, the trader, the official, the financier, and the entrepreneur, all of whom, in their own way, can claim to know what
abor is. Juxtaposed to them from the beginning, stands a type of bourgeois who oes research, writes poetry, composes and makes music, and philosophizes and
who believes that these activities develop a world that is self-sufficient. It is obvi- ous that these two fractions of the bourgeois ego get on only superficially and come together only in the hollow connection of property and cultivation. They
64 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
? Inscription above the entrance to the concentration camp at Auschwitz: "Labor is liberating. "
create the century-long tension between the good and the evil bourgeois, the ide- alist and the exploiter, the visionary and the pragmatist, the ideally liberated bour- geois and the laboring bourgeois. This tension remains as inexhaustible as that between the world of work and "freedom" in general: Even a large part of social- ism to date has been only the renewal of the inner-bourgeois conflict between the idealistic citoyen and the detestable bourgeois.
But even the bourgeois experience of labor is not so straightforward as the bourgeoisie would like to have it. The bourgeois, who, as subjects of power, say I because they also labor and are creative, express only formally and illusorily the truth for everybody. They want others to forget that their way of laboring is arranged in a questionable way. This holds specially for the genuine bourgeois in the sphere of labor, the entrepreneurs, the capitalists, and financiers. Their consciousness of labor is so inconsistent that, since the late nineteenth century, it is difficult not to speak of lying. For if labor were really what creates a right to a political ego, what about those who labor for bourgeois "laborers"? The situa- tion of the proletariat, which, during a great part of the nineteenth century and in segments of the twentieth, was
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
deprived of its rights, prevented bourgeois soci- ety from coming to rest. Precisely the principle of achievement--success and privileges for the more diligent--became undermined in the course of the de- velopment. "Labor is liberating" was a slogan that sounded more and more cyni- cal with the passing of each decade, until finally it was written above the entrance to Auschwitz.
The pleasure in being a citizen combined in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies with the compulsion to politics in a new kind of political complex of feel- ings that for the past 200 years has seemed to countless individuals to be the inner-
iEIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 65
most and most spontaneous impulse of their ego: the love of the Fatherland. What began as patriotic spontaneity was methodically organized in the nineteenth cen- tury as a political ideology, which in the twentieth century heated up into a politi- cal system of madness. The European nationalisms were indeed complexes of convictions and passions that individuals found in themselves as though given by nature, complexes to which they could say in a primary naivete and honesty: That is me, that is how my innermost self feels, that is how my most intimate political reason stirs itself. For Germans, empathy with such naively wonderful patri- otisms is actually only still possible when we meet people from foreign countries who live in the first dawning of patriotic self-reflection and who can still claim for themselves a primal innocence. How many German left-wingers did not stand bv with a pensive and uneasy smile when Chilean socialist emigres sang songs that ended with the refrain: fatherland or death. It has been a long time since Ger- mans could hear a mutual resonance of progressive and patriotic motives; the reaction has incorporated national feeling for too long.
Two hundred years ago things looked a little different. The first patriotic generations --the French, who after the Revolution felt their national existence threatened by the offensives of European monarchies; the Germans, who offered resistance against the Napoleonic occupation; the Greeks, who engaged in a struggle of liberation against Turkish domination; the disunited and scattered Poles; the Italians in the time of Garibaldi, who felt themselves to be "un- redeemed" under multiple foreign domination--all these could, in their national
9narcissisms, still enjoy, so to speak, a primal innocence. What later with each
decade could be seen more clearly probably still remained hidden to them: That patriotism and nationalism were the conscious self-programming of bourgeois ego pride that, taken seriously, immediately lead to worrisome, indeed calami- tous, developments. It was precisely in Germany that this innocence was lost early on. Already in Napoleonic times, Jean Paul perceived that artful, self- reflectively mandacious element in Fichte's Speeches to the German Nation (1808) that, seen in the light of day, are nothing other than a deliberate program- ming of a consciousness that is not one bit naive but is supposed to be so. That it was Fichte, one of the greatest logicians of self-reflection in modern philoso- phy, who preached the love of fatherland to the Germans, reveals the vile, self- deceptive aspects of the earliest stages in German national feeling. Heinrich Heine also saw what was repulsive and affected in German patriotism from its first moment. National spontaneity was generated through pedagogy, indoctrina- tion, and propaganda until finally loud- mouthed national narcissism exploded militarily out of the ideological test tube in the early twentieth century. It celebrated its greatest triumph in the European storm of emotion and war eupho- ria in August 1914.
Because of its synthetic nature, nationalistic mentality bears up badly when its narcissistic self-programming is disturbed. This is the reason for the rage of the
66 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, which had constricted itself in a chauvinistic and elitist way, against the self- reflective intelligentsia, which purportedly had such "decomposing" effects. In defending against the "decomposition" (Zerset- zung) of its artificial naivete, bourgeois ideology maneuvered itself into a position where it came into conflict with its own previous enlightenment. The cosmopoli- tan composure and universalistic nobleness of enlightenment must have become a thorn in the side of the political narcissism of the patriots. The oft-cited "destruc- tion of reason" (Lukacs) in later bourgeois thinking was deeply rooted in the nar- cissistic self-assertion of the bourgeois class ego against the forces of disillusion- ment that reflection inevitably exercises on it. Thus an alliance had to come about between enlightenment and socialist currents that initially knew how to avoid the willful self-delusion of a mentality of domination.
The principal disturbance of nationalism arose, as could not be otherwise, from the political movement of the old Fourth Estate, the workers'movement. In it, a new political ego took the floor once more. It was no longer a bourgeois ego, but initially and for a long time, it spoke a bourgeois language. Ideologically, so- cialism did not at first require its "own" weapon. It was enough simply to take the bourgeoisie at its word: freedom, equality, solidarity. Only when it became evident that all this was not meant so literally did socialism have to forge its own critical weapon against bourgeois
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ideology, whereby initially it was forced to ad- vance bourgeois ideals against a bourgeois double standard. Only with the theory of class consciousnesses did socialist doctrine elevate itself to a metamoral standpoint.
Ethically, the early workers' movement had every argument on its side, hence its erstwhile moral superiority. It pushed the process that began with bourgeois realism of labor a significant step further. For there is a proletarian consciousness of labor that clearly differs from that of the bourgeois. In it, an archrealistic ex- perience "from the very bottom" wants to gain political expression: One sweats for a whole lifetime and gets nowhere; often there is not even enough to eat, while aggregate social wealth continually grows. One sees it in architecture, in the resi- dences of those who rule, in the construction of cities, in the standard of the mili- tary forces, in the luxury consumption of others. Laborers do not participate in the growth of wealth although they spend their whole lives in producing it. As soon as the laborer says I, things must change.
The political egoformation of the proletariat thus begins and proceeds differ- ently from that of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. The laborer ego intrudes into the public world with neither grandiosity of domination nor moral-cultural hegemony. It possesses no primary narcissistic will to power. All previous work- ers' movements and socialisms failed because they disregarded this condition. In the aristocracy, the will to power is in politics and in life almost identical; it is anchored in the social structure as status narcissism -- whatever is on top automati- cally experiences itself as the best, as political and existential excellence. In the
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES a 67
h ureeoisie, class narcissism already becomes more ambivalent. On the one hand it is linked to a merit that, through a permanent straining of moral, cultural, nd economic creativity, tries to earn cultural hegemony; on the other, it is na- tionalistically degraded. Thus, a will to power is not necessarily a will to govern, as was revealed by the notorious reluctance of the German bourgeoisie in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to get involved in politics; the bourgeois nar- cissisms can remain content with the will to profit, to success, and to "culture. " Finally, for the laborer ego, the will to power and especially the will to govern are only secondary motives, in which calculation rather than passion is at work. From the beginning, proletarian realism has two mutually contradictory dimensions. The first realism says: So that you get what you deserve, you your- self must make the move; "no God, no kaiser, no tribune" will give you what you need; you will only come out of your misery when you wake up politically and being to participate in the game of power--as Pottier said in the Internationale. The second realism knows that politics means being called on to make sacrifices; politics happens at levels where my immediate interests count for nothing and where, according to Lenin, people are counted by the millions. In workers' real- ism, an ancient, deep-rooted mistrust of political politics lives on. The maxim "If you don't concern yourself with politics, then politics will concern itself with you"--the basic formula for the politicization of the proletariat--has indeed been heard by laborers but in the last instance it sounds like cynicism to them, like a well-formulated but vulgar notion. That they are the ones who must pay and sac- rifice for politics is no secret to them. A primal wish, childlike and hyperrealistic at the same time, would be by contrast that such politics finally cease and that, in good conscience, one finally would not have to bother about such things. All "little" people, not only laborers in the narrower sense, have felt the urge to stick out their tongues at the whole of politics. For this reason, in popular realism, jokes about politicians, including those about one's own party big shots, have pro-
voked the heartiest laughter.
The antipolitical streak in laborer's consciousness already knows, of course,
that politics represents a coercive relation that grows out of distress and conflict. Politics arises from a social clinch that can only satisfy those who are a priori the winners-the elite, the rich, the ambitious, those who feel they are the best at making politics. The socialist encouragement of the laborer to get involved in pol- itics thus always means a partial muzzling of proletarian realism. To experience the clinch of classes, parties, and blocs "willingly" would be truly a harsh demand-and something of the kind is often an undertone in socialist politics, in- sofar as they are not already merely a language for new nationalisms.
Herein lies one of the reasons why the political programming of the laborer
ego in the sense intended by ideologists has failed throughout almost the whole ? nd. It is obvious that the workers' movement, wherever it has become strong,
as pushed through wage increases, social security benefits, chances to partici-
68 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
pate, and the first steps toward the redistribution of wealth. To date, however, no ideology has been able to talk it into a real political will to power. Apolitical realism is not so easily deceived. Large-scale political mobilizations of the masses either presuppose wars or have their roots in a fascistoid-theatrical orchestration of the masses. A symptom of this is
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
that people are almost nowhere so nauseated by politics as in the so-called socialist countries, that is, in countries where the laborer ego officially is supposed to be in power. They perceive the party rhetoric largely as a prayerwheel and as a parody of what they really want--a somewhat higher standard of living, a slackening of compulsions to work, liberalizations. It is one of the greatest ironies of modern history that no Western proletariat has been able to generate such spontaneous and disciplined strike movements as the socialist Poles of 1980, whose strike in fact expressed not a will to power but rather the will to reduce suffering at the hands of power. It is the paradigm of proletarian realism--a strike against political politics and against the ideology of the eternal victim.
This paradigm, of course, has its prehistory. In the workers' movement of the nineteenth century, two rival currents competed; these currents were based on the opposing realisms of proletarian consciousness: Marxism and anarchism. Marx- ism outlines the most consistent strategy of a socialist will to power as a will to govern and even goes so far as to support a "duty to power," so long as it is realis- tic to assume the existence of states and state politics. By contrast, anarchism has struggled since the very beginning against the state and political power machines as such. The Social Democratic (later Communist) line thought it knew that the "winning of bread" (Kropotkin) the anarchists talked about could lead only by way of hegemonic power in the state and the economic order. They believed that only as rulers of the state could the "producers" distribute social wealth to themselves indirectly through the state. None of the great Communist theoreticians and poli- ticians foresaw realistically enough that this strategy would probably end up in the exploitation of the workers by the agents of the state and military. In anar- chism, by contrast, the need to be antipolitical and the idea of self-determination were affirmed, and both were radically opposed to the idea: "Oh God! Another state, once again a state! "
The overprogramming of proletarian realism into a "party identity" can be studied since the nineteenth century as if it were a lab experiment. At first, the laborer ego finds in itself feelings of deficiency that can be politically stimulated: undernourishment, legislative demands, an awareness of being disadvantaged, claims on the fruits of one's own labor, etc. These basic motivations are now threaded into various strategies. The strategies are different because it is not clear from the motivations alone which path one can follow the fulfillment of these de- mands. The paths reflect the principal bifurcation in proletarian realism. Thus, against the tendency to class consciousness there is a powerful privatism; against the tendency toward a strategy in the state, a tendency toward a strategy against
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 69
the state; against the parliamentary way, an antiparliamentary way; against the idea of representation, the idea of self- management, and so on. Today, the alter- natives are called authoritarian and libertarian socialism. Splits in the workers' movement are rooted in such oppositions.
The splitting is grounded in objectivity. Those who want to educate the proletarian ego to a party identity do violence to a part of its fundamental ex- periences and motivations. The Communist branch of the workers' movement is, in fact, marked by a characteristically cynical cadre politics in which the leader- ship functions like a "new brain" that demands only precise functioning from the rest of the party body and that often even carries out a putsch against the basic programs of the "old brain. " The weakness in anarchism, on the other hand, is its inability to effectively organize the real life interests of the proletariat, which it surely understands better; for organization is the domain of the authoritarian wing. Under the given conditions, there is no way to realize the ideas of self- management and self-sufficiency--or only on a small scale. It was no accident, therefore, that anarchism addressed not so much the proletarian antipolitical in-
10
The forces causing the split have systematically ruined the workers' move-
ment. Of course these forces not only follow the lines of the primal split as out-
lined here, but are soon involved in a higher dynamic of splitting, a dynamic that
is of a reflective nature. The formation of the proletarian ego is a process that,
even more than the self-formation of the bourgeoisie between the seventeenth and
the nineteenth centuries, takes place in the laboratory of the public sphere. Here,
no naivete is safe from reflection. In the long run, no swindle can occur here.
What was true for nationalism holds even more for socialism. One looks on as
it takes form and as soon as it begins to make politics through fictions, it is struck
by a contradiction --and that by no means merely from the outside but even more
from within. Every exclusive, self-satisfied, and dogmatic self-programming can
and must be broken down. A political movement does not base itself on existential
realism and a science of society without paying a price. As soon as a fraction of
the workers' movement appeared with the claim of knowing and executing the
correct politics, an opposing fraction had to arise that contradicted the first and
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
claimed to have better insight. That is the blind, purely mechanical-reflexive tragedy of the socialist movement. Werner Sombart, a bourgeois economist whose fame today has faded, sarcastically counted at least 130 different varieties of socialism, and a satirist today could easily keep on counting. The splits are the pnce of progress in reflection. Every half-alert person recognizes that party egos are produced in the test tube of propaganda and cannot be congruent with the real- ls
m at the base and the most elementary feelings toward life. One can see it with the naked eye: Here are programs searching for naivetes that are supposed to Kientify themselves. But no politics can, on the one hand, base itself on critique and science and, on the other, set its hopes on naivete and a system of blind devo-
stinct which it wanted to support and strengthen, as petit-bourgeois "revoltism. "
70 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
tion. Because every socialism wants to be a "scientific Weltanschauung," it perma- nently regurgitates its own poison; its realistic stomach spits out the slop of mere dogmatics.
For most people today, the inner-socialist debates from the revisionism dispute of the old social democracy up to the conglomerations of Second, Third, and Fourth Internationals are as curious as the dispute among theologians of the six- teenth century over the interpretation of Holy Communion. They see in them what the historian also discovers through dispassionate research: that the forma- tion of a unified proletarian ego oriented toward its own vital interests has failed. Up to now, the will to live and the will to power have set up two different ac- counts. Precisely in the case of the proletarian ego, the fictions were weaker than the realisms. The programmers of political identity fought with each other from the beginning and got entangled in their printouts. The unified proletarian class ego is not a reality but a myth. One recognizes this myth easily when one observes the programmers in their public activities; indeed, for a while they called them- selves, with refreshing candor, propagandists, disseminators of ideology.
What also has played a role in the collapse of the socialist programming of identity is the psychological naivete of the old concept of politics. Socialism, es- pecially in Western nations, has not known how to convincingly orchestrate the pleasure in making politics oreven the prospect of lessening suffering at the hands of politics. Its psychopolitics remained almost everywhere on a crude level; it could mobilize rage, hope, longing, and ambition but not what would have been decisive, namely, the pleasure in being a proletarian. Precisely that, according to the socialist concept of the proletariat, is not at all possible since proletarian existence is defined negatively: to have nothing besides offspring and to remain excluded from better chances and the riches of life. Positive ego can only be achieved by deproletarianization. Only in the revolutionary Prolet-Cult, which blossomed in Russia shortly after the October Revolution, was there something like a direct class narcissism, a self-celebration of the proletariat that soon had to wither under its own plaintiveness and mendacity. However, in political nar- cissism, just as in private narcissism, to be "better" is everything. Noblesse oblige. But can one say: proletariat oblige?
The proletarian ego, which follows in the footsteps of the bourgeois ego and registers its claims to an inheritance, possesses the class experience of working people who are beginning to overcome their political muteness. Every ego, in or- der to manifest itself and to stand up to public scrutiny, requires a solid nucleus, a pride of ego, which can endure having to appear before others. The greatest breakthrough for the people came when they discovered the language of human rights for themselves. These rights were articulated from the peasant wars of 1525 up until the modern Russian and Polish resistances as the rights of Chris- tians. In the traditions based on the American and French revolutions, they are understood as temporal natural rights.
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES U 71
The elevated feeling, composed of indignation and a claim to freedom, of be- ing not a slave (robot) but also a human being, gave the early workers' movement its moral, psychological, and political strength, a strength that grew even more under repression. (For this reason, the socialist movement had a competitor in the Christian workers' movement, which pursued the same motive: the feeling of being a meaningful human being, politically and legally, but to be sure, without the revolutionary element. ) For as long as the misery of the proletariat was so horrifying, as nineteenth-century documents substantiate, even the discovery of the feeling for human rights had to give the laborer a political ego nucleus. This gives early and naive socialism a nostalgic charm, a moving, political humanism filled with truth. But a sobering up comes about in the dispute over the correct interpretation of human rights. In the late nineteenth century, the age of strategy, of division, of revision, and of fraternal conflict begins. The consciousness of hu- man rights frayed in the gear wheels of the logic of party and struggle. It lost its capacity to sustain in the proletariat an elevated feeling firmly grounded in the public sphere when the socialist currents began to slander each other.
Social democracy had already tried somewhat earlier in its cultural politics (Bildungspolitik) to stimulate the nerve of
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
class narcissism by broadcasting the slogan Knowledge Is Power. With this, the claim to its own class culture begins, a class culture rooted in the recognition that without a class-specific creativity and a superior "morality" and cultivation, no socialist state can be set up. "Knowledge is power"--this statement can also mean that socialism finally began to sense the secret of the relation between narcissistic pleasure in culture and political power. "Being poor is no guarantee at all of being good and clever" (E. Kastner, Fabian, 1931).
In the heyday of the workers' movement, the consciousness of human rights was outbid by a proletarian pride in accomplishment that, for good reason, made reference to the labor, diligence, and power of the class. Its knowledge of power culminated in the sentence: All wheels stand still, if our strong arms so will. In the pathos of the general strike, something of the elevated feeling of class power and the domination of production lived on --only, of course, under the almost al- ways unrealistic assumption of proletarian unity. The latter was broken because vital interests and political interests could never coincide in the proletariat. Yet even the strength of a latent consciousness of the general strike and labor in the long run does not suffice to stabilize an elevated class feeling. The bleakness of everyday life is more powerful than the political learning in the dramatic episodes ? f class history. In the last instance, the consciousness of power and labor alone cannot sustain pride in a culture that can perpetually renew itself.
The regenerability of elevated feelings is rooted in the cultural and existential creativity of a class. In the end, mere power becomes boring even to itself. Where the pleasure in politics reduces to the ambition of those who rule, a vital resistance ? f the masses is, in the long run, unavoidable. But in this lies also the germ of
72 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
an objective proletarian feeling of inferiority. Wage labor creates abstract value. It is productive without being creative. The idiocy of industrial labor erects in the meantime an impenetrable wall against a true class narcissism of the proletariat. The cultural hegemony of those who produce, however, could only grow out of such a class narcissism. By contrast, a cultural system based on a crude ideology of labor is incapable of acquiring the most valuable inheritance of aristocratic and bourgeois culture: the pleasure politics of a creative life. The socialist way of in- heriting has intensified the old deficiencies and diminished the old privileges. In a civilization of the "good life," to inherit from the nobility and the bourgeoisie can only mean avoiding the deficiencies of the predecessors and appropriating their strengths.
The evidence introduced for political pessimism; the criminal, the lunatic, and the asocial individual, in a word, the second-rate citizen --these are not by nature as one finds them now but have been made so by society. It is said that they have never had a chance to be as they would be according to their nature, but were forced into the situation in which they find themselves through poverty, coercion, and ignorance. They are victims of society.
This defense against political pessimism regarding human nature is at first con- vincing. It possesses the superiority of dialectical thinking over positivistic think- ing. It transforms moral states and qualities into processes. Brutal people do not "exist," only their brutalization; criminality does not "exist," only criminalization; stupidity does not "exist," only stupefaction; self-seeking does not "exist," only training in egoism; there are no second-rate citizens, only victims of patroniza- tion. What political positivism takes to be nature is in reality falsified nature: the suppression of opportunity for human beings.
Rousseau knew of two aids who could illustrate his point of view, two classes of human beings who lived before civilization and, consequently, before perver- sion: the noble savage and the child. Enlightenment literature develops two of its most intimate passions around these two figures: ethnology and pedagogy. To the present day nothing has essentially changed in this approach. Literarily, this dou- ble passion precipitates two extensive genres: exotic travel literature and later ethnology on the one hand, and the educational novel and the literature on peda- gogy and child development on the other. The primitive peoples, about whom the European explorers from Columbus to Bougainville and Captain Cook reported, provide an enlightenment, which was gradually becoming more political, the ur- gently needed evidence for its view that, roughly stated, things can "proceed differently" --peacefully, reasonably, humanely, sensuously, without aristoc- racy, without war, without exploitation, without wigs, without lettres de cachet. The noble savages in the South Seas are like an Archimedean point through which one can playfully dislodge the claim of European social orders to be ordained by God and therefore unexcellable. Something different does exist; at the same time, it is better. What is reasonable can thus also become real. That is all enlighten- ment is trying to say.
From this moment on, the child becomes a political object--to a certain extent, the living security deposit of enlightenment. The child is the "noble savage" in one's own house. Through appropriate education care must be taken in the future
56 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
that innocent children are not made into the same artificial social cripples the previous system produced. Children are already what the new bourgeois humans believe they want to become. Enlightenment was not the first to politicize peda- gogy; it has discovered, however, that children always, and everywhere, are the future security of existing relations. But now children are something more: They carry bourgeois hopes for "another world," for a more humane society. It almost appears as if for the first time a new, politically tinged form of parental love has been developing, concentrated in the wish that one's own children should finally have a better life. Only in a society that felt the shake-up and that committed itself totally to the dynamics of world change and progress can such a form of parental love prosper. A new amalgam of love and "ambition for the child" is thus formed, something that would be meaningless in a stable, stagnant society "without prospects. " Peasant societies do not envision "careers" for their children; they see no prospects other than that of life as a peasant. Ambition in the aristocracy is directed not for the benefit of the child but for that of the aristocratic lineage itself, the family. Bourgeois children are the first to have an anthropological and politi- cal mission.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
How the traditional directing of ambitions in the bourgeois parent- child relationship is currently changing could be the topic of a special investi-
gation.
Of course, Rousseau's optimistic naturalism has a very vulnerable point. The beneficence of nature is something that can be doubted even when one does not hold conservative views. In the beginning things were not all that idyllic; genesis (Ursprung) is downright severe and difficult. It soon becomes clear that the image of origin cannot be understood historically because, on closer investigation, one finds that war, inequality, and harsh conditions of life are widespread in an unyielding nature; there are exceptions but they can scarcely be interpreted as ori- gin and rule. Since then, the question about "good origins" becomes the crux for enlightenment. It becomes more and more clear that this idea of origin has not a temporal but a Utopian reference. The Good is still nowhere to be found, except in the wishful human spirit and in daydreams, which unerringly aim at something even though it does not yet exist. Thus, critical naturalism can survive only when it withers away and reawakes as the "spirit of Utopia"; the origin then serves as an end-vision (Bloch).
Naturalistic thinking, in fact, fundamentally changed its function in the nine- teenth century. The natural sciences provided a concept of nature that was any- thing but idyllic. Especially since Darwin, the bourgeois order, having become imperialistic, used the beast of prey as its political emblem. Nature was used as justification by those who needed to legitimate acts of violence, not by those who spoke for peace. The heraldry of the old aristocracy had also shown a striking sympathy for predatory animals: the eagle, falcon, lion, bear. Long before Rous- seauianism, and in substance opposed to it, there was an aristocratic naturalism
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 57
that was renewed in the bourgeois order when it became powerful as political "bi- ologism. " Nothing can show more clearly that Rousseauian naturalism had been only a momentary stylization of the conception of nature on which a general the- ory of liberation could not support itself securely. Hesitatingly, therefore, en- lightenment began to take leave of the noble savage and the innocent child, a part- ing that, of course, can never lead to a complete break (Bruch) with these "allies. " The child and the savage are beings who have a claim on the sympathy of those who remain true to the idea of enlightenment.
Impulses for self-reflection in the great civilizations come from ethnology even today. Thus, behind the conspicuous present-day cult around the American Indian, there is a good deal of pondering about ideas of nature and the maximal size of societies that want to maintain a reasonable relation to themselves as well as to their environment. And from child psychology, there is still today a steady stream of valuable impulses for reflection on the behavioral patterns in societies that suffer from their unresolved childhoods.
What has remained undamaged in Rousseau's critique is the indispensable ex- posure of a supposedly evil "Nature" as a social fiction. This remains important in the purportedly natural inferiorities concerning race, intelligence, and sex and sexual behavior. When conservatives and reactionaries refer to "Nature" to justify their assertions about the inferiority of woman, the lesser capacities of dark races, the innate intelligence of children from the upper social strata, and the sickness of homosexuality, they have usurped naturalism. It remains the task of critique to refute this. Ultimately critique must at least be able to show that what "Nature" gives us has to be recognized as neutral and nontendentious so that every value judgment and every tendency can without doubt be understood as a cultural phenomenon. Even if Rousseau's "good Nature" has been discredited, he has at least taught us not to accept "bad Nature" as an excuse for social oppression.
However, when one speaks of the "victims of society," the "artful dimension"
quickly comes into the picture again. In the concept of the "victim of society,"
there is a reflective contradiction that can be misused in many ways. Already in
Rousseau, a dubious artfulness is observed that is supposed to conceal a double
standard. That he combined nature and childhood in a new idea of education and,
at
? ng been understood as a discrepancy between theory and practice. Rousseau
was a master of an artful reflexivity that skillfully found fault with others on every
Point but in itself always discovered only the purest of intentions. On the white
Page of this feeling of innocence, the famous confessions were written. In this
osturing there was something that other determined enlighteners, above all
einrich Heine, could not and did not want to follow-even though they do not
the same time, denied his own children and stuck them in an orphanage, has
a v e an terenlightenment.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ything to do with the notorious defamation of Rousseau by the entire coun-
58 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
The vulnerable point in the victim theory is, again, the self-reification of con- sciousness, the establishment of a new naively artful position. This can serve or be felt, depending on the circumstances, as a diversionary trick, as a technique of extortion, or as indirect aggression. Psychology is familiar with the "eternal victim," who exploits this position for disguised aggressions. Also belonging to this category, in a broader sense, are those permanent losers as well as medical and political hypochondriacs who lament that conditions are so terrible that it is a great sacrifice on their part not to kill themselves or emigrate. On the German Left, not least of all under the influence of the sociologized schema of the victim, a certain type of renegade has emerged who feels that it is a dirty trick to have to live in this land without summer and without oppositional forces. Nobody can say that such a viewpoint does not know what it is talking about. Its mistake is that it remains blind to itself. For the accusation becomes bound to misery and magnifies it under the subterfuge of unsuspecting critical observations. With the
obstinacy of a Sophist, in aggressive self-reification, many a "critical" conscious- ness refuses to become healthier than the sick whole.
A second possibility of misusing the victim schema has been experienced by dedicated helpers and social workers when, guided by the best intentions, they try to make prisoners, the homeless, alcoholics, marginal youth, and others aware that they are the "victims of society" who have simply failed to offer enough resistance. The helpers often encounter sensitive resistance to their attempts and have to make it clear to themselves just how much discrimination is present in their own "good will. " The self-esteem and need for esteem in the disadvantaged often forcefully defends itself against the demand for self-reification made on them by every political kind of assistance that argues in this way. Precisely those who are worst off feel a spark of self-assertion, whose extinction would be
justifiably feared if those concerned began to think of themselves as victims, as non-egos. To preserve the dignity of "poor bastards," they alone and on their own accord can say that they are poor bastards. Those who try to put such words into their mouths insult them, no matter how good their intentions may be. It is in the nature of liberating reflection that it cannot be forced. It answers only to indirect assistance.
From this vantage point, the perspective on a life spent in total, unavoidable benightedness becomes possible. Theodor Adorno sketched this when he spoke of an unhappy consciousness in which the down-and-outers inflict on themselves a second time that wrong that circumstances perpetrated against them in order to be able to bear it. Here, an inner reflection takes place that looks like a parody of freedom. From the outside, the phenomenon resembles satisfaction and would, if addressed, probably also refer to itself that way. In memory of his mother, Pe- ter Handke has found a tender formulation in which the sadness of a loving and helpless knowledge lays down arms before reality: "self-contented unhappiness. '
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 59
Enlightenment has neither a chance nor a right to disturb the world's slumber if it looks like this.
Critique of the Illusion of Privacy
Where is this ego then, if it is neither in the body nor in the soul?
Blaise Pascal
The last great attack of critique against illusion aims at the position of the ego be- tween nature and society. We know from the line of thought in the preceding cri- tiques that knowledge (Erkenntnis) does not have to do with human nature pure and simple, but with nature as conception, nature as fabrication, with unnatural nature. In that which is "given in nature" there is always something "given in addi- tion" by human beings. The "labor" of reflection is summarized in this insight. Modernity establishes itself in our minds in the shape of counterintuitive ex- periences that break through naivete and exercise a peculiar compulsion on us to increase our intelligence.
Ideologically, the reference to "Nature" is always significant because it
produces an artificial naivete and ends up as voluntary naivete. It covers up the
human contribution and avers that things are by nature, and from their origins,
in that "order" in which our representations, which are always influenced by "in-
terests," depict them. The rudiments for ideologies of order are hidden in all
naturalisms. Every naturalism begins as involuntary naivete. Initially, we cannot
help thinking that the "order of things" is an objective order. For the first glance
falls on the things and not on the "eyeglasses. " In the work of enlightenment, this
first innocence becomes irretrievably lost. Enlightenment leads to the loss of nai-
vete and it furthers the collapse of objectivism through a gain in self-experience.
It effects an irreversible awakening and, expressed pictorially, executes the turn
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
to the eyeglasses, i. e. , to one's own rational apparatus. Once this consciousness
of the eyeglasses has been awakened in a culture, the old naivete loses its charm,
becomes defensive, and is transformed into narrow-mindedness, which is intent
on remaining as it is. The mythology of the Greeks is still enchanting; that of fas-
cism is only stale and shameless. In the first myth, a step toward an interpretation
of the world was taken; in simulated naivete, an artful stupefaction (Verdum-
mung) is at work--the predominant method of self-integration in advanced social 7
orders. Such an observation touches only superficially on the role of mythology in modernity. For the moment this will suffice. Artful self-stupefaction manifests itself in a whole range of modern naturalisms: racism, sexism, fascism, vulgar biologism, and -- egoism.
To put egoism into this series may, at first glance, seem strange, indeed, even dangerous. Actually, there is in egoism a "natural givenness" of a special kind.
60 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
The critique of egoism (better, the critique of the illusion of privacy) constitutes, I think, the core of all enlightenment in which the self-experience of civilized egos comes to maturity. After it, there can be logically no other uncovering critique, but only "praxis," conscious life.
How does the ego come to its determinations? What constitutes its "character? " What creates the material of its self- experience? The answer runs as follows: The ego is a result of programming. It is formed in emotional, practical, moral, and political drill. "In the beginning was education" (Alice Miller).
Self-experience proceeds in two stages: naive perception and reflection. In the naive stage, no consciousness can do otherwise than to conceive of its character traits, programming, and training as its own. Whether in the case of impressions, feelings, or opinions, at first it must always say: I am so! My feeling is thus, my attitude is thus. I am as / am. In the reflective stage, self-consciousness becomes clear about itself: My programming, my traits, my training are thus; I have been brought up in this way and have become so; my "mechanisms" function thus; what I am and what I am not are both at work in me in this way.
The establishment of inwardness and the creation of the illusion of privacy are the most subversive themes of enlightenment. It is still not really clear today who the social conveyor of this impulse of enlightenment may be. One of the ambiva- lences of enlightenment is that although intelligence can be explained sociologi- cally, educationally, and politically, "wisdom," self-reflection cannot. The sub-
ject of a radical ego enlightenment cannot be socially identified with certainty --even though the procedures of this enlightenment are anchored in reality.
In this point, the majority of societies seem to strive for a conscious nonen-
lightenment. Did not Nietzsche too warn of that "life-destroying enlightenment"
8 thattouchesonourlife-supportingself-delusions? Canweaffordtoshakeupthe
"basic fictions" of privacy, personality, and identity? Be that as it may, in this question both old and new conservatives have come to the hard decision to take the "stance" of defending, against all the demands of reflection, their "unavoidable lies for living," without which self-preservation would not be possible. That they are aided in this by the general fear of self-experience, which competes with curi- osity about self-experience, does not have to be expressly emphasized. Thus the theater of respectable, closed egos goes on everywhere, even where the means have long been available to secure better knowledge. Crosswise to all political fronts, it is the "ego" in society that offers the most resolute resistance against the decisive enlightenment. Scarcely anyone will put up with radical self-reflection on this point, not even many of those who regard themselves as enlighteners. The dance around the golden calf of identity is the last and greatest orgy of counteren- lightenment. Identity is the magic word of a partially hidden, partially open con- servatism that has inscribed personal identity, occupational identity, national identity, political identity, female identity, male identity, class identity, party
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 61
identity, etc. , on its banner. The listing of these essential demands for identity would already suffice to illustrate the pluralistic and mobile character of that which is called identity. But one would not be speaking of identity if it were not basically a question of the fixed form of the ego.
The establishment of inwardness comprises the ego as the bearer of ethics, the erotic, aesthetics, and politics. In these four dimensions, everything that I ex- perience as mine is given to me, though at first "I" was not asked: my norms of behavior, my professional ethics, my sexual patterns, my sensual-emotional modes of experience, my class "identity," my political interests.
Here I want to begin with the last mentioned. By briefly describing the "politi- cal narcissisms" of the aristocracy, the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
bourgeoisie, and the proletariat, I will show how, even in the most "inner" region, where we suppose ourselves to be in the closest "narcissistic" proximity to ourselves, we encounter at the same time the most "external" and most universal. Here, the game of "one's own self with what is "alien" becomes visible in the public heart of personalities. Precisely the analysis of narcissism can show how the other has already got the better of the ego. I look in the mirror and see a stranger who swears that it is me. It is one of the irresistible ironies of enlightenment that it shatters our consciousness with such radical counterintuitions. In concluding this line of thought, I want to simply suggest for consideration the question whether the last level of integration in en- lightenment does not have to be a kind of "rational mysticism. "
The ego enters the political world never as a private individual but as the mem- ber of a group, an estate, or a class. From time immemorial, the members of the aristocracy have known themselves to be "the best. " Their social and political po- sition is based on an open, demonstrative, and self-satisfied relation between power and self-esteem. The political narcissism of the aristocracy is nourished
by this plain, power-conscious presumption. The aristocracy has been allowed to believe that it is favored in every existentially essential respect and is called on
to excel--to be militarily stronger, aesthetically superior, culturally refined, un- broken in vitality (which only with regard to the courtly aristocracy is no longer quite true). Thus in the function of the aristocracy there is initially nothing that would allow one to suggest that political status destroys vitality. In fact, the nobil- ity often tried to base its cultural self-portrait directly on narcissistic pleasure. Its political-aesthetic culture is based on the motif of self-celebration, of the union
of self-consciousness and festival. The everyday form of this narcissistic class consciousness appears in the concept of the noble's honor and in the idea of a no- D 'e life-sry/e. With the smallest affronts to their highly trained sense of honor, aristocrats must demand satisfaction --which precipitates the history of the duel
and symbolic combat in Europe as well as in Asia. Honor was the bond between Motion and public life, between the innermost life of the "best" and the reality 31
? ' greeting, obsequious forms of behavior, and even grammatical structures, life among the "best" as well as in public view of the common people. Rules 62 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
which are unknown in prefeudal languages (the most striking being the honorific forms in Japanese), can be traced back to these claims to domination, honor, and personal pleasure.
The aristocratic programming of a heightened self-consciousness, however, comprises more than just what is too hastily called vanity or arrogance. It pro- vides at the same time a high level of character formation and education that works to form opinions, etiquette, emotionality, and cultural taste. All these mo- ments are still encompassed in the old concept of courtliness (Hoftichkeit, polite- ness). The courtly person (cortegiano, gentilhomme, gentleman, Hofmann) has gone through a training in self-esteem that expresses itself in many ways: in aristocratically pretentious opinions, in polished or majestic manners, in gallant or heroic patterns of feeling as well as in a selective, aesthetic sensitivity for that which is said to be courtly or pretty. The noble, far removed from any self-doubt, should achieve all this with a complete matter-of-factness. Any uncertainty, any doubt in these things signifies a slackening in the nobility's cultural "identity. " This class narcissism, which has petrified into a form of life, tolerates no irony, no exception, no slips, because such disturbances would give rise to unwelcome reflections. The French nobles did not turn up their noses at Shakespeare's "bar- barism" without reason. In his plays one already "smells" the human ordinariness of those who want to stand before society as the best.
With the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, the place of the "best" is awarded anew. The bourgeois ego, in an unprecedented, creative storming to the heights of a new class consciousness won for itself an autonomous narcissism, in whose period of degeneration we are living today; it is for this reason that we have to suffer so much political and cultural depressiveness. The bourgeoisie found its own way of being better than the others, better than the corrupt nobility and the uncultivated mob. At first its class ego raised itself on the feeling of having the better, purer, more rational, and more useful morality in all areas of life, from sexuality to management. For a whole century, the new bourgeoisie wallowed in moralizing literature. In it, a new political collective learns to say "I" in a special way; whether psychologically and aesthetically as in that "sensitivity" that schools itself in natural beauty, intimate sociability, and empathy with heartrending fates; whether politically and scientifically as in that bourgeois public sphere that starts as a
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
republic of the learned in order to end up as a republic of citizens. Literature, the diary, gregariousness, critique, science, and republicanism are all training grounds for a new bourgeois high ego, for a new will to subjectivity. Only here do citizens learn how to have good taste, proper demeanor, opinions, and will- Here, the class-specific, novel high feelings of bourgeois culture are drilled--the
pleasure of being a citizen: the awareness of progress; the pride in having worked up from the bottom and in having come a long way; the pride in being the moral and historical torchbearer; the joy in one's own moral sensibility; the demonstra- tive pleasure in one's own cultivation; the pleasure in having a simultaneously cul-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 63
tivated and naive feeling about nature; the self-admiration of the class for its musi- cal, poetic, and scientific genius; the joy in the feeling of enterprise, invention, and historical movement; finally, the triumph of gaining a political say. Looking back at the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one now gets an idea of the extent to which creative and coquettish narcissism permeates bourgeois cul- ture. At the same time, however, the bourgeoisie also followed the nobility in es- sential respects, not least of all in its concept of honor, through which the duel came into bourgeois life and even into the realm of student life. Without doubt, honor became for the bourgeoisie, too, an essential socionarcissistic factor, with which the national militarization of bourgeois society is connected. That this type of bourgeois is dying out today is felt in every nook and cranny of civilization. Those who still know such a latecomer should regard themselves as ethnologists; with wonder they may hear how the last specimens even today cannot walk through the forest without speaking of God.
The neobourgeois generations have modernized their social narcissism. Since at least the Weimar years, the collective ego tone of the bourgeoisie has been loosening up. A lazier style of ego-being as bourgeois is becoming prevalent everywhere. Today we find the mode of expression of the last surviving cultivated bourgeois horribly artificial, and everyone has had the urge to tell them to their faces that they should not ramble on the way they do, so full of themselves. In the twentieth century we observe a sociopsychological front between two bour- geois ego styles, an older and a newer type, which are extremely allergic to each other. The threshold between the two types runs roughly through the time of the First World War and the following phase of modernization. In the mutual dislike of, say, Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, this front becomes concretely visible.
From a historical perspective, the bourgeoisie is the first class that has learned to say /and that at the same time has the experience of labor. All older class nar- cissisms can base themselves "only" on struggle, military heroism, and the gran- diosity of rulers. When the bourgeois says "I" the idea of the pride of labor, of productive accomplishment can also be heard for the first time. This ego of a "laboring class" introduces a previously unheard of turn toward realism into higher social feelings. Of course, that cannot be seen clearly from the beginning because bourgeois culture was forced to distinguish between poetry and prose, art and life, the ideal and reality. The consciousness of labor in the bourgeois ego ? s still thoroughly split-into an idealistic and a pragmatic fraction. The one ver- sion of the bourgeois comprises the artisan, the trader, the official, the financier, and the entrepreneur, all of whom, in their own way, can claim to know what
abor is. Juxtaposed to them from the beginning, stands a type of bourgeois who oes research, writes poetry, composes and makes music, and philosophizes and
who believes that these activities develop a world that is self-sufficient. It is obvi- ous that these two fractions of the bourgeois ego get on only superficially and come together only in the hollow connection of property and cultivation. They
64 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
? Inscription above the entrance to the concentration camp at Auschwitz: "Labor is liberating. "
create the century-long tension between the good and the evil bourgeois, the ide- alist and the exploiter, the visionary and the pragmatist, the ideally liberated bour- geois and the laboring bourgeois. This tension remains as inexhaustible as that between the world of work and "freedom" in general: Even a large part of social- ism to date has been only the renewal of the inner-bourgeois conflict between the idealistic citoyen and the detestable bourgeois.
But even the bourgeois experience of labor is not so straightforward as the bourgeoisie would like to have it. The bourgeois, who, as subjects of power, say I because they also labor and are creative, express only formally and illusorily the truth for everybody. They want others to forget that their way of laboring is arranged in a questionable way. This holds specially for the genuine bourgeois in the sphere of labor, the entrepreneurs, the capitalists, and financiers. Their consciousness of labor is so inconsistent that, since the late nineteenth century, it is difficult not to speak of lying. For if labor were really what creates a right to a political ego, what about those who labor for bourgeois "laborers"? The situa- tion of the proletariat, which, during a great part of the nineteenth century and in segments of the twentieth, was
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
deprived of its rights, prevented bourgeois soci- ety from coming to rest. Precisely the principle of achievement--success and privileges for the more diligent--became undermined in the course of the de- velopment. "Labor is liberating" was a slogan that sounded more and more cyni- cal with the passing of each decade, until finally it was written above the entrance to Auschwitz.
The pleasure in being a citizen combined in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies with the compulsion to politics in a new kind of political complex of feel- ings that for the past 200 years has seemed to countless individuals to be the inner-
iEIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 65
most and most spontaneous impulse of their ego: the love of the Fatherland. What began as patriotic spontaneity was methodically organized in the nineteenth cen- tury as a political ideology, which in the twentieth century heated up into a politi- cal system of madness. The European nationalisms were indeed complexes of convictions and passions that individuals found in themselves as though given by nature, complexes to which they could say in a primary naivete and honesty: That is me, that is how my innermost self feels, that is how my most intimate political reason stirs itself. For Germans, empathy with such naively wonderful patri- otisms is actually only still possible when we meet people from foreign countries who live in the first dawning of patriotic self-reflection and who can still claim for themselves a primal innocence. How many German left-wingers did not stand bv with a pensive and uneasy smile when Chilean socialist emigres sang songs that ended with the refrain: fatherland or death. It has been a long time since Ger- mans could hear a mutual resonance of progressive and patriotic motives; the reaction has incorporated national feeling for too long.
Two hundred years ago things looked a little different. The first patriotic generations --the French, who after the Revolution felt their national existence threatened by the offensives of European monarchies; the Germans, who offered resistance against the Napoleonic occupation; the Greeks, who engaged in a struggle of liberation against Turkish domination; the disunited and scattered Poles; the Italians in the time of Garibaldi, who felt themselves to be "un- redeemed" under multiple foreign domination--all these could, in their national
9narcissisms, still enjoy, so to speak, a primal innocence. What later with each
decade could be seen more clearly probably still remained hidden to them: That patriotism and nationalism were the conscious self-programming of bourgeois ego pride that, taken seriously, immediately lead to worrisome, indeed calami- tous, developments. It was precisely in Germany that this innocence was lost early on. Already in Napoleonic times, Jean Paul perceived that artful, self- reflectively mandacious element in Fichte's Speeches to the German Nation (1808) that, seen in the light of day, are nothing other than a deliberate program- ming of a consciousness that is not one bit naive but is supposed to be so. That it was Fichte, one of the greatest logicians of self-reflection in modern philoso- phy, who preached the love of fatherland to the Germans, reveals the vile, self- deceptive aspects of the earliest stages in German national feeling. Heinrich Heine also saw what was repulsive and affected in German patriotism from its first moment. National spontaneity was generated through pedagogy, indoctrina- tion, and propaganda until finally loud- mouthed national narcissism exploded militarily out of the ideological test tube in the early twentieth century. It celebrated its greatest triumph in the European storm of emotion and war eupho- ria in August 1914.
Because of its synthetic nature, nationalistic mentality bears up badly when its narcissistic self-programming is disturbed. This is the reason for the rage of the
66 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, which had constricted itself in a chauvinistic and elitist way, against the self- reflective intelligentsia, which purportedly had such "decomposing" effects. In defending against the "decomposition" (Zerset- zung) of its artificial naivete, bourgeois ideology maneuvered itself into a position where it came into conflict with its own previous enlightenment. The cosmopoli- tan composure and universalistic nobleness of enlightenment must have become a thorn in the side of the political narcissism of the patriots. The oft-cited "destruc- tion of reason" (Lukacs) in later bourgeois thinking was deeply rooted in the nar- cissistic self-assertion of the bourgeois class ego against the forces of disillusion- ment that reflection inevitably exercises on it. Thus an alliance had to come about between enlightenment and socialist currents that initially knew how to avoid the willful self-delusion of a mentality of domination.
The principal disturbance of nationalism arose, as could not be otherwise, from the political movement of the old Fourth Estate, the workers'movement. In it, a new political ego took the floor once more. It was no longer a bourgeois ego, but initially and for a long time, it spoke a bourgeois language. Ideologically, so- cialism did not at first require its "own" weapon. It was enough simply to take the bourgeoisie at its word: freedom, equality, solidarity. Only when it became evident that all this was not meant so literally did socialism have to forge its own critical weapon against bourgeois
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ideology, whereby initially it was forced to ad- vance bourgeois ideals against a bourgeois double standard. Only with the theory of class consciousnesses did socialist doctrine elevate itself to a metamoral standpoint.
Ethically, the early workers' movement had every argument on its side, hence its erstwhile moral superiority. It pushed the process that began with bourgeois realism of labor a significant step further. For there is a proletarian consciousness of labor that clearly differs from that of the bourgeois. In it, an archrealistic ex- perience "from the very bottom" wants to gain political expression: One sweats for a whole lifetime and gets nowhere; often there is not even enough to eat, while aggregate social wealth continually grows. One sees it in architecture, in the resi- dences of those who rule, in the construction of cities, in the standard of the mili- tary forces, in the luxury consumption of others. Laborers do not participate in the growth of wealth although they spend their whole lives in producing it. As soon as the laborer says I, things must change.
The political egoformation of the proletariat thus begins and proceeds differ- ently from that of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. The laborer ego intrudes into the public world with neither grandiosity of domination nor moral-cultural hegemony. It possesses no primary narcissistic will to power. All previous work- ers' movements and socialisms failed because they disregarded this condition. In the aristocracy, the will to power is in politics and in life almost identical; it is anchored in the social structure as status narcissism -- whatever is on top automati- cally experiences itself as the best, as political and existential excellence. In the
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES a 67
h ureeoisie, class narcissism already becomes more ambivalent. On the one hand it is linked to a merit that, through a permanent straining of moral, cultural, nd economic creativity, tries to earn cultural hegemony; on the other, it is na- tionalistically degraded. Thus, a will to power is not necessarily a will to govern, as was revealed by the notorious reluctance of the German bourgeoisie in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to get involved in politics; the bourgeois nar- cissisms can remain content with the will to profit, to success, and to "culture. " Finally, for the laborer ego, the will to power and especially the will to govern are only secondary motives, in which calculation rather than passion is at work. From the beginning, proletarian realism has two mutually contradictory dimensions. The first realism says: So that you get what you deserve, you your- self must make the move; "no God, no kaiser, no tribune" will give you what you need; you will only come out of your misery when you wake up politically and being to participate in the game of power--as Pottier said in the Internationale. The second realism knows that politics means being called on to make sacrifices; politics happens at levels where my immediate interests count for nothing and where, according to Lenin, people are counted by the millions. In workers' real- ism, an ancient, deep-rooted mistrust of political politics lives on. The maxim "If you don't concern yourself with politics, then politics will concern itself with you"--the basic formula for the politicization of the proletariat--has indeed been heard by laborers but in the last instance it sounds like cynicism to them, like a well-formulated but vulgar notion. That they are the ones who must pay and sac- rifice for politics is no secret to them. A primal wish, childlike and hyperrealistic at the same time, would be by contrast that such politics finally cease and that, in good conscience, one finally would not have to bother about such things. All "little" people, not only laborers in the narrower sense, have felt the urge to stick out their tongues at the whole of politics. For this reason, in popular realism, jokes about politicians, including those about one's own party big shots, have pro-
voked the heartiest laughter.
The antipolitical streak in laborer's consciousness already knows, of course,
that politics represents a coercive relation that grows out of distress and conflict. Politics arises from a social clinch that can only satisfy those who are a priori the winners-the elite, the rich, the ambitious, those who feel they are the best at making politics. The socialist encouragement of the laborer to get involved in pol- itics thus always means a partial muzzling of proletarian realism. To experience the clinch of classes, parties, and blocs "willingly" would be truly a harsh demand-and something of the kind is often an undertone in socialist politics, in- sofar as they are not already merely a language for new nationalisms.
Herein lies one of the reasons why the political programming of the laborer
ego in the sense intended by ideologists has failed throughout almost the whole ? nd. It is obvious that the workers' movement, wherever it has become strong,
as pushed through wage increases, social security benefits, chances to partici-
68 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
pate, and the first steps toward the redistribution of wealth. To date, however, no ideology has been able to talk it into a real political will to power. Apolitical realism is not so easily deceived. Large-scale political mobilizations of the masses either presuppose wars or have their roots in a fascistoid-theatrical orchestration of the masses. A symptom of this is
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
that people are almost nowhere so nauseated by politics as in the so-called socialist countries, that is, in countries where the laborer ego officially is supposed to be in power. They perceive the party rhetoric largely as a prayerwheel and as a parody of what they really want--a somewhat higher standard of living, a slackening of compulsions to work, liberalizations. It is one of the greatest ironies of modern history that no Western proletariat has been able to generate such spontaneous and disciplined strike movements as the socialist Poles of 1980, whose strike in fact expressed not a will to power but rather the will to reduce suffering at the hands of power. It is the paradigm of proletarian realism--a strike against political politics and against the ideology of the eternal victim.
This paradigm, of course, has its prehistory. In the workers' movement of the nineteenth century, two rival currents competed; these currents were based on the opposing realisms of proletarian consciousness: Marxism and anarchism. Marx- ism outlines the most consistent strategy of a socialist will to power as a will to govern and even goes so far as to support a "duty to power," so long as it is realis- tic to assume the existence of states and state politics. By contrast, anarchism has struggled since the very beginning against the state and political power machines as such. The Social Democratic (later Communist) line thought it knew that the "winning of bread" (Kropotkin) the anarchists talked about could lead only by way of hegemonic power in the state and the economic order. They believed that only as rulers of the state could the "producers" distribute social wealth to themselves indirectly through the state. None of the great Communist theoreticians and poli- ticians foresaw realistically enough that this strategy would probably end up in the exploitation of the workers by the agents of the state and military. In anar- chism, by contrast, the need to be antipolitical and the idea of self-determination were affirmed, and both were radically opposed to the idea: "Oh God! Another state, once again a state! "
The overprogramming of proletarian realism into a "party identity" can be studied since the nineteenth century as if it were a lab experiment. At first, the laborer ego finds in itself feelings of deficiency that can be politically stimulated: undernourishment, legislative demands, an awareness of being disadvantaged, claims on the fruits of one's own labor, etc. These basic motivations are now threaded into various strategies. The strategies are different because it is not clear from the motivations alone which path one can follow the fulfillment of these de- mands. The paths reflect the principal bifurcation in proletarian realism. Thus, against the tendency to class consciousness there is a powerful privatism; against the tendency toward a strategy in the state, a tendency toward a strategy against
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 69
the state; against the parliamentary way, an antiparliamentary way; against the idea of representation, the idea of self- management, and so on. Today, the alter- natives are called authoritarian and libertarian socialism. Splits in the workers' movement are rooted in such oppositions.
The splitting is grounded in objectivity. Those who want to educate the proletarian ego to a party identity do violence to a part of its fundamental ex- periences and motivations. The Communist branch of the workers' movement is, in fact, marked by a characteristically cynical cadre politics in which the leader- ship functions like a "new brain" that demands only precise functioning from the rest of the party body and that often even carries out a putsch against the basic programs of the "old brain. " The weakness in anarchism, on the other hand, is its inability to effectively organize the real life interests of the proletariat, which it surely understands better; for organization is the domain of the authoritarian wing. Under the given conditions, there is no way to realize the ideas of self- management and self-sufficiency--or only on a small scale. It was no accident, therefore, that anarchism addressed not so much the proletarian antipolitical in-
10
The forces causing the split have systematically ruined the workers' move-
ment. Of course these forces not only follow the lines of the primal split as out-
lined here, but are soon involved in a higher dynamic of splitting, a dynamic that
is of a reflective nature. The formation of the proletarian ego is a process that,
even more than the self-formation of the bourgeoisie between the seventeenth and
the nineteenth centuries, takes place in the laboratory of the public sphere. Here,
no naivete is safe from reflection. In the long run, no swindle can occur here.
What was true for nationalism holds even more for socialism. One looks on as
it takes form and as soon as it begins to make politics through fictions, it is struck
by a contradiction --and that by no means merely from the outside but even more
from within. Every exclusive, self-satisfied, and dogmatic self-programming can
and must be broken down. A political movement does not base itself on existential
realism and a science of society without paying a price. As soon as a fraction of
the workers' movement appeared with the claim of knowing and executing the
correct politics, an opposing fraction had to arise that contradicted the first and
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
claimed to have better insight. That is the blind, purely mechanical-reflexive tragedy of the socialist movement. Werner Sombart, a bourgeois economist whose fame today has faded, sarcastically counted at least 130 different varieties of socialism, and a satirist today could easily keep on counting. The splits are the pnce of progress in reflection. Every half-alert person recognizes that party egos are produced in the test tube of propaganda and cannot be congruent with the real- ls
m at the base and the most elementary feelings toward life. One can see it with the naked eye: Here are programs searching for naivetes that are supposed to Kientify themselves. But no politics can, on the one hand, base itself on critique and science and, on the other, set its hopes on naivete and a system of blind devo-
stinct which it wanted to support and strengthen, as petit-bourgeois "revoltism. "
70 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
tion. Because every socialism wants to be a "scientific Weltanschauung," it perma- nently regurgitates its own poison; its realistic stomach spits out the slop of mere dogmatics.
For most people today, the inner-socialist debates from the revisionism dispute of the old social democracy up to the conglomerations of Second, Third, and Fourth Internationals are as curious as the dispute among theologians of the six- teenth century over the interpretation of Holy Communion. They see in them what the historian also discovers through dispassionate research: that the forma- tion of a unified proletarian ego oriented toward its own vital interests has failed. Up to now, the will to live and the will to power have set up two different ac- counts. Precisely in the case of the proletarian ego, the fictions were weaker than the realisms. The programmers of political identity fought with each other from the beginning and got entangled in their printouts. The unified proletarian class ego is not a reality but a myth. One recognizes this myth easily when one observes the programmers in their public activities; indeed, for a while they called them- selves, with refreshing candor, propagandists, disseminators of ideology.
What also has played a role in the collapse of the socialist programming of identity is the psychological naivete of the old concept of politics. Socialism, es- pecially in Western nations, has not known how to convincingly orchestrate the pleasure in making politics oreven the prospect of lessening suffering at the hands of politics. Its psychopolitics remained almost everywhere on a crude level; it could mobilize rage, hope, longing, and ambition but not what would have been decisive, namely, the pleasure in being a proletarian. Precisely that, according to the socialist concept of the proletariat, is not at all possible since proletarian existence is defined negatively: to have nothing besides offspring and to remain excluded from better chances and the riches of life. Positive ego can only be achieved by deproletarianization. Only in the revolutionary Prolet-Cult, which blossomed in Russia shortly after the October Revolution, was there something like a direct class narcissism, a self-celebration of the proletariat that soon had to wither under its own plaintiveness and mendacity. However, in political nar- cissism, just as in private narcissism, to be "better" is everything. Noblesse oblige. But can one say: proletariat oblige?
The proletarian ego, which follows in the footsteps of the bourgeois ego and registers its claims to an inheritance, possesses the class experience of working people who are beginning to overcome their political muteness. Every ego, in or- der to manifest itself and to stand up to public scrutiny, requires a solid nucleus, a pride of ego, which can endure having to appear before others. The greatest breakthrough for the people came when they discovered the language of human rights for themselves. These rights were articulated from the peasant wars of 1525 up until the modern Russian and Polish resistances as the rights of Chris- tians. In the traditions based on the American and French revolutions, they are understood as temporal natural rights.
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES U 71
The elevated feeling, composed of indignation and a claim to freedom, of be- ing not a slave (robot) but also a human being, gave the early workers' movement its moral, psychological, and political strength, a strength that grew even more under repression. (For this reason, the socialist movement had a competitor in the Christian workers' movement, which pursued the same motive: the feeling of being a meaningful human being, politically and legally, but to be sure, without the revolutionary element. ) For as long as the misery of the proletariat was so horrifying, as nineteenth-century documents substantiate, even the discovery of the feeling for human rights had to give the laborer a political ego nucleus. This gives early and naive socialism a nostalgic charm, a moving, political humanism filled with truth. But a sobering up comes about in the dispute over the correct interpretation of human rights. In the late nineteenth century, the age of strategy, of division, of revision, and of fraternal conflict begins. The consciousness of hu- man rights frayed in the gear wheels of the logic of party and struggle. It lost its capacity to sustain in the proletariat an elevated feeling firmly grounded in the public sphere when the socialist currents began to slander each other.
Social democracy had already tried somewhat earlier in its cultural politics (Bildungspolitik) to stimulate the nerve of
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
class narcissism by broadcasting the slogan Knowledge Is Power. With this, the claim to its own class culture begins, a class culture rooted in the recognition that without a class-specific creativity and a superior "morality" and cultivation, no socialist state can be set up. "Knowledge is power"--this statement can also mean that socialism finally began to sense the secret of the relation between narcissistic pleasure in culture and political power. "Being poor is no guarantee at all of being good and clever" (E. Kastner, Fabian, 1931).
In the heyday of the workers' movement, the consciousness of human rights was outbid by a proletarian pride in accomplishment that, for good reason, made reference to the labor, diligence, and power of the class. Its knowledge of power culminated in the sentence: All wheels stand still, if our strong arms so will. In the pathos of the general strike, something of the elevated feeling of class power and the domination of production lived on --only, of course, under the almost al- ways unrealistic assumption of proletarian unity. The latter was broken because vital interests and political interests could never coincide in the proletariat. Yet even the strength of a latent consciousness of the general strike and labor in the long run does not suffice to stabilize an elevated class feeling. The bleakness of everyday life is more powerful than the political learning in the dramatic episodes ? f class history. In the last instance, the consciousness of power and labor alone cannot sustain pride in a culture that can perpetually renew itself.
The regenerability of elevated feelings is rooted in the cultural and existential creativity of a class. In the end, mere power becomes boring even to itself. Where the pleasure in politics reduces to the ambition of those who rule, a vital resistance ? f the masses is, in the long run, unavoidable. But in this lies also the germ of
72 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
an objective proletarian feeling of inferiority. Wage labor creates abstract value. It is productive without being creative. The idiocy of industrial labor erects in the meantime an impenetrable wall against a true class narcissism of the proletariat. The cultural hegemony of those who produce, however, could only grow out of such a class narcissism. By contrast, a cultural system based on a crude ideology of labor is incapable of acquiring the most valuable inheritance of aristocratic and bourgeois culture: the pleasure politics of a creative life. The socialist way of in- heriting has intensified the old deficiencies and diminished the old privileges. In a civilization of the "good life," to inherit from the nobility and the bourgeoisie can only mean avoiding the deficiencies of the predecessors and appropriating their strengths.
