Moreover, the basic elements of theses for a new
interpretation
of Nietzsche that are strewn throughout the present work can be compared with an article by the same author: "Der 'Kurze Weg': Nietzsches 'Cynismus'," in Archiv
fur Begriffsgeschichte, vol.
fur Begriffsgeschichte, vol.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
Hence the self-abdication of cri- tique.
In the utter indifference toward all problems lies the ultimate premonition of how it would be to be their equal.
Because everything has become problematic, everything is also somehow a matter of indifference.
This thread should be fol- lowed.
It leads to a place where one can speak of cynicism and "cynical reason.
"
To speak of cynicism means to expose a spiritual, a moral scandal to critique; following that, the conditions for the possibility of the scandalous are unraveled. "Critique" undergoes a movement that at first fully lives out its positive and nega- tive interest in the object, only in the end to run up against elementary structures of moral consciousness that are brought to expression "beyond good and evil. " The times are cynical everywhere you turn, and it is time to develop the connec- tion between cynicism and realism from first principles. What did Oscar Wilde mean by his blase statement: "I am not at all cynical, I am only experienced-- that's pretty much the same thing"? Or Anton Chekov, who gloomily remarked: "No cynicism can outdo life"?
In the course of reflection, the well-known ambiguity in the concept of critique breaks down; at first it means to make and substantiate judgments, to judge, to condemn; then to investigate the foundations for the formation of judgments. However, if one is talking about cynical "reason," then initially this formula com- pletely takes cover behind irony. What can critique achieve today? What can it still hope for in a time that is so sick of theory? Let us first hear Walter Benjamin's answer:
Fools, who complain about the demise of critique. For its time has long since run out. Critique is a matter of proper distance. It is at home in a world where perspectives and prospects are important and where it was still possible to assume a point of view. In the meantime, things have become much too close for comfort for human society. "Disinterested- ness," the "unbiased perspective," have become lies, if not the com- pletely naive expression of plain incompetence. {Einbahnstrasse [1928] 1969, p. 95)
PREFACE ? xxxiii
In a system that feels like a cross between prison and chaos, there is no stand- point for a description, no central perspective for a compelling critique.
In the shattered world of multiple perspectives, the "grand views" of the whole, in fact, belong more to simple souls than to those who are enlightened and edu- cated by the given order of things. No enlightenment can occur without destroy- ing the effect, thinking-from-a-point-of-view, and without dissolving conven- tional morals. Psychologically this goes hand in hand with a scattering of the ego, literarily and philosophically, with the demise of critique.
But how is the contradiction to be explained that the most important renais- sance of critique in the twentieth century is connected with the name of Walter Benjamin, who, on the one hand, convincingly demonstrated that critique's hour had come, and, on the other hand, participated with such far-reaching impact in the school of Critical Theory? It is impossible, so he says, to assume a "stand- point" because things have become much too close for comfort for us. But from a standpoint of having no standpoint, which has still to be more closely defined, critique has made impressive progress. From where, then, does critique speak? From what perspectives? In whose name?
I believe that Critical Theory has found a provisional ego for critique and a "standpoint" that provides it with perspectives for a truly incisive critique-a standpoint that conventional epistemology does not consider. I am inclined to call it a priori pain. It is not the basis of elevated, distanced critique that achieves grand overviews but a stance of extreme closeness --micrology.
If things have become too close for comfort for us, a critique must arise that expresses this discomfort. It is not a matter of proper distance but of proper prox- imity. The success of the word "concernedness" (Betroffenheit) grows from this soil; it is the seed of Critical Theory that germinates in new forms today, even among those who have scarcely heard of it. Regarding the "concerned," would it not be fascinating to find out where they get their critical model? Anyway, in the manner of their "being concerned," the defects of the forgotten source reappear.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Because the sovereignty of minds (Kopfe) is always false, the new critique pre- pares to slip from the mind into the whole body. Enlightenment tries to move from top to bottom --politico-culturally as well as psychosomatically. To discover the living body as a sensor of the world is to secure a realistic foundation for phil- osophical knowledge of the world. This is what Critical Theory had begun to do, hesitatingly, often aesthetically encoded, hidden in all kinds of squeamishness.
Critical Theory was based on the presupposition that we know this world a pri- ori, through Weltschmerz. What we perceive of the world can be ordered in psy- chosomatic coordinates of pain and pleasure. Critique is possible inasmuch as pain tells us what is "true" and what is "false. " In holding this view, Critical The- ory makes the usual "elitist" assumption of an intact sensibility. This characterizes its strength and its weakness; it establishes its truth and restricts the scope of its
xxxiv ? PREFACE
validity. One must, in fact, be able to muster so much elitist sensibility. It is nourished by an aversion to the deadly poison of normality in a country of hard heads and armored souls. One should not even try to convince certain opponents; there is a generality of "truth" that is an alibi for lack of understanding. Where the capacity for reason is not based on sensitive self-reflection, no argumentation, not even one based on the most solid theory of communication, will be able to bring it about.
On this "sensitive" point, Critical Theory was never able to get along well with the logicians among its opponents. To be sure, there are thinkers whose minds (Kopfe) are so energetic, whose nervous structures are so hardened, that to them, the entire approach of Critical Theory must seem lachrymose. "Sensitive" theory is suspect. In fact, its founders, especially Adorno, had an exclusively narrow concept of the Sensitive --a presupposition of the highest spiritual irascibility and aesthetic schooling that could never be rationalized; its aesthetics ran just along the threshold of nausea toward everything and anything. There was scarcely any- thing that took place in the "practical" world that did not inflict pain on it or was spared being suspected of brutality. For it, everything was somehow chained like an accomplice to "false living" in which there is "no true living. " Above all, it sus- pected everything that seemed to be pleasure and consent as being swindle, re- lapse, and "false" relief. It was inevitable that Critical Theory, particularly in the person of Adorno, came to feel the backlash of its exaggerations. The embodying of reason for which it had prepared the ground with the highest sensibility could not stop at the limits within which it was constrained by its initiators. What is hap- pening today shows how many faces critique issuing from bodily vitality can assume.
Adorno belonged to the pioneers of a renewed critique of cognition that as- sumes an emotional a priori. In his theory the motifs of a crypto-Buddhist spirit are at work. Those who suffer without becoming hardened will understand; those who can hear music in moments of clarity see across to the other side of the world. The conviction that the real is written in the hand of suffering, coldness, and hardness determines the way this philosophy approaches the world. Although it scarcely believed in a change for the better, it did not give in to the temptation to desensitize itself or to get used to the given order of things. To remain sensitive was, as it were, a Utopian stance --to keep the senses sharpened for a happiness that will not come, a stance that nevertheless, by being prepared for happiness, protects us from the worst kind of brutalizations.
Politically, and in its nerve endings, this aesthetic, this "sensitive" theory, is based on a reproachful attitude, composed of suffering, contempt, and rage against everything that has power. It makes itself into a mirror of the evil in the world, of bourgeois coldness, of the principle of domination, of dirty business and its profit motive. It is the masculine world that it categorically rejects. It is inspired by an archaic No to the world of the fathers, legislators, and profiteers. PREFACE D xxxv
Its basic prejudice is that only evil power against the living can come from this world. That is the reason for the stagnation of Critical Theory. The offensive maneuver of refusing to collaborate has long been ineffective. The masochistic element has outdone the creative element. The impulse of Critical Theory is be- coming mature enough to burst open the strictures of negativism. In its heyday, Critical Theory found its adherents among those who could instinctively share their a priori pain with it. Still, in a generation that began to discover what its parents had done or approved, there were many such people. And because they were many, there was once again in the mid-sixties in Germany a thin thread of political culture --public dispute about true living.
The revival of the great impulse depends on a self-reflection by the intelligent- sia that was once inspired by it. In this sensitive critique, there is a paralyzing resentment. The refusal nourishes itself on an archaic rage against "masculinity," that cynical sense for facts exhibited by political as well as scientific positivists. Adorno's theory revolted against the collaborative traits embedded in the "practi- cal attitude. " His theory tried, by means of a conceptual balancing act, to construe a knowledge that would not be power. It took refuge in the realm of the mother, in the arts, and encoded longings. "Pictures prohibited"--do not tread with the whole foot. Defensive thinking characterizes its style-the attempt
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
to defend a re- serve where memories of happiness are bound exclusively with a Utopia of the feminine. In an early work, Adorno once disclosed his emotional-epistemological secret almost without camouflage. In a few heartrending lines he wrote about cry- ing in response to Schubert's music, about how tears and knowing (Erkenntnis) are connected. This music makes us cry because we are not like it, not something complete, which turns toward the lost sweetness of life like a distant quotation.
Happiness can only be thought of as something lost, as a beautiful alien. It can- not be anything more than a premonition that we approach with tears in our eyes without ever reaching it. Everything else belongs to "false living" anyway. What dominates is the world of the fathers, who are always appallingly in agreement with the granite of abstractions, now solidified into a system. With Adorno, the denial of the masculine went so far that he retained only one letter from his
3father's name, W. The path to the meadow (Wiesengrund), however, does not
exactly have to be the wrong one (Holzweg).
Since the dissolution of the student movement we have been experiencing a lull in theory. There is, it is true, more erudition and sophistication than ever be- fore, but the inspirations are sterile. The optimism of "those days," that vital in- terests could be combined with efforts in social theory, has pretty much died out. Without this optimism it becomes quickly apparent how boring sociology can be. For those in the enlightenment camp, after the debacle of leftist actionism, terror, and its intensification in antiterror, the world turned topsy-turvy. The enlighten-
xxxvi D PREFACE
ment camp wanted to make it possible for everyone to mourn German history but ended in its own melancholy. Critique seems to have become even more impossi- ble than Benjamin thought. The critical "attitude" turns nostalgically inward to a kind of philological gardening where Benjaminian irises, Pasolinian flowers of evil, and Freudian deadly nightshade are cultivated.
Critique, in any sense of the word, is experiencing gloomy days. Once again, a period of pseudocritique has begun, in which critical stances are subordinated to professional roles. Criticism with limited liability, petty enlightenment as a factor in success --a stance at the junction of new conformisms and old ambitions. Already in Kurt Tucholsky's work, "in those days," the hollowness of a critique that tried to drown out its own disillusionment could be felt. Such a critique real- izes that having success is a long way from having an effect. It writes brilliantly but in vain, and that can be heard through everything. From these almost univer- sal experiences, the latent cynicisms of present-day enlighteners are nourished.
Pasolini spiced up the dull pseudocritique a bit in that he at least designed a convincing costume: that of the buccaneer-- pirate writings. The intellectual as buccaneer--not a bad dream. We have scarcely ever seen ourselves that way. A homosexual gave the warning signal against the effeminization of critique. Like Douglas Fairbanks leaping around in the cultural rigging, with drawn sword, sometimes the conqueror and sometimes the conquered, knocked about unpre- dictably on the seas of social alienation. The blows fall on all sides. Because the costume is amoral, it fits morally like a second skin. The buccaneer cannot as- sume fixed standpoints because he is constantly moving between changing fronts. Perhaps Pasolini's image of the pirate intellect can reflect light on Brecht, I mean on the young, bad Brecht, not the Brecht who believed he had to conduct classes on the Communist galley.
The offensive posture in the myth of the buccaneer is inviting. One reservation might be the illusion that the intelligentsia is based on brawling as such. In fact, Pasolini is a beaten person, like Adorno. It is the a priori pain --it makes even the simplest things in life difficult for a person--that opens his eyes critically. There is no significant critique without significant defects. It is the critically wounded in a culture who, with great effort, find something healing, who con- tinue to turn the wheel of critique. Adorno dedicated a well-known essay to Hein- rich Heine, Die Wunde Heine {The sore, Heine). This sore is nothing other than the one that bores away in any significant critique. Among the great critical achievements in modern times, sores open up everywhere: the sore, Rousseau; the sore, Schelling; the sore, Heine; the sore, Marx; the sore, Kierkegaard; the sore, Nietzsche; the sore, Spengler; the sore, Heidegger; the sore, Theodor Less- ing; the sore, Freud; the sore, Adorno: Out of the self-healing of deep sores come critiques that serve epochs as rallying points for self-knowledge. Every critique is pioneering work on the pain of the times (Zeitschmerz) and a piece of exem- plary healing.
PREFACE ? xxxvii
It is not my ambition to enlarge this honorable infirmary of critical theories. It is time for a new critique of temperaments. Where enlightenment appears as a "melancholy science" (Adorno-Trans), it unintentionally furthers melancholic stagnation. Thus, the critique of cynical reason hopes to achieve more from a work that cheers us up,
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
whereby it is understood from the beginning that it is not so much a matter of work but rather of relaxation.
The Motive
It will already have been noticed that the justification is a bit too deliberate to be quite true. I realize that I might be giving the impression that I am trying to save "enlightenment" and Critical Theory. The paradoxes of the rescue method will ensure that this first impression does not last.
It might seem at first that enlightenment necessarily ends in cynical disillusion- ment, but the page is soon turned and the investigation of cynicism becomes the foundation for a healthy freedom from illusions. Enlightenment was always disil- lusionment in the positive sense, and the more it advances, the closer the moment approaches when reason tells us to attempt an affirmation. A philosophy in the spirit of Yes also includes the Yes to the No. This is neither a cynical positivism nor an "affirmative" attitude. The Yes I mean is not the Yes of the defeated. If there is a trace of obedience in this Yes, it is of the only kind of obedience that can be expected from enlightened people, namely, the obedience to their own ex- perience.
European neurosis sees happiness as its goal and an effort of reason as a way to achieve it. This compulsion has to be overcome. The critical addiction to mak- ing things better has to be given up --for the sake of the good, from which one so easily distances oneself on long marches. Ironically, the aim of the most criti- cal effort is the most ingenuous release. Shortly before Adorno died there was a scene in a lecture hall at Frankfurt University that fits like a key into the analysis of cynicism begun here. The philos- opher was just about to begin his lecture when a group of demonstrators prevented him from mounting the podium. Such scenes were not unusual in 1969. On this occasion something happened that required a closer look. Among the disrupters were some female students who, in protest, attracted attention to themselves by exposing their breasts to the thinker. Here, on one side, stood naked flesh, exer- cising "critique"; there, on the other side, stood the bitterly disappointed man without whom scarcely any of those present would have known what critique meant-cynicism in action. It was not naked force that reduced the philosopher
4inextricably mixed in this scene in a way that is quite typical for cynicisms. Cyni- to muteness, but the force of the naked.
Right and wrong, truth and falsity were
xxxviii ? PREFACE
cism ventures forth with naked truths that, in the way they are presented, contain something false. Wherever deceptions are constitutive for a culture, wherever life in society
succumbs to a compulsion for lying, there really speaking the truth has an element
of aggression, an unwelcome exposure. Nevertheless the instinct for disclosure
is stronger in the long run. Only a radical nakedness and bringing things out in the open can free us from the compulsion for mistrustful imputations. Wanting to get to the "naked truth" is one motive for a desperate sensuousness, which wants to tear through the veil of conventions, lies, abstractions, and discretions in order to get to the bottom of things. I want to pursue this theme. A mixture of cynicism, sexism, "matter-of-factness," and psychologism constitutes the mood of the superstructure in the West, a twilight mood, good for owls and phi-
5losophy.
At the bottom of my motivations is a childlike veneration for what, in the Greek sense, was called philosophy - for which, moreover, a family tradition of reverence is partly responsible. My grandmother, a teacher's daughter from an idealistic home, often recounted proudly and respectfully that it was Kant who wrote Critique of Pure Reason and Schopenhauer The World as Will and Representation. And perhaps there are even more such magical books in the world that we cannot read because they are too difficult, but which we must ad- mire from the outside like something from someone very great.
Is there no philosophy that does not screw our brains from our heads with its "old bony hand"? The dream that I pursue is to see the dying tree of philosophy bloom once again, in a blossoming without disillusionment, abundant with bi- zarre thought-flowers, red, blue, and white, shimmering in the colors of the be- ginning, as in the Greek dawn, when theoria was beginning and when, inconceiv- ably and suddenly, like everything clear, understanding found its language. Are we really culturally too old to repeat such experiences?
The reader is invited to sit for a while under this tree, which, strictly speaking,
cannot exist. I promise to promise nothing, above all, no New Values. The cri-
tique of cynical reason, to quote Heinrich Heine's characterization of the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Aristophanean comedies, endeavors to pursue the "deep idea of world annihila- tion" on which the Gay Science is based, "which from there, like a fantastically ironic magic tree, shoots up with blossoming thought-ornaments, singing nightin- 6 gale nests and clambering monkeys" {Die Bdder von Lucca)
Munich, Summer 1981
PREFACE ? xxxix
Notes
1. [Zynismus and Kynismus are alternative spellings of "cynicism," to which the author has given systematic conceptual meaning. I render Kynismus, the cheeky, positive side of cynicism, as "kyni- cism," etc. -Trans. ]
2. [A healthy mind in a healthy body-Trans. ]
3. [This is a pun on Adorno's father's name, Weisengrund. Wiesengrund, literally translated, means "meadowland. "-- Trans. ]
4. I will return to this in chapter 5 ("Bourgeois NeoKynicism: The Arts").
5. [See the closing lines of the preface to Hegel's Philosophy of Right-Trans. ]
6. Heine, Samtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb (Munich, 1969), vol. II, p. 466.
Acknowledgments
Because I owe a work on the problem of cynicism more than a mere note can make clear, I especially want to refer to the best study of the history of ideas on this subject: Heinrich Niehues-Probsting, Der Kynismus des Diogenes und der Begriff des Zynismus (Munich, 1979), which offers, in addition, helpful bibliographic orientations.
Moreover, the basic elements of theses for a new interpretation of Nietzsche that are strewn throughout the present work can be compared with an article by the same author: "Der 'Kurze Weg': Nietzsches 'Cynismus'," in Archiv
fur Begriffsgeschichte, vol. 24, no. 1 (Bonn, 1980), pp. 103ff.
I am indebted to Professor Jochen Schulte-Sasse of Minneapolis for invaluable stimulation regarding the understanding of structures of neoconservative ideolog- ical formations in the United States, suggestions that in a mediated way have gone into my construction of the concept of cynicism and into the notion of self-denial (Selbstdementi). Professor Karl- August Wirth of Munich advised me most kindly
on the selection of some of the illustrations.
Finally, I want to thank my friends who, with their encouragement and objec-
tions, their support and criticism, are present in and between the lines of this book.
Theory and History of Literature
6.
5. 4. 3.
Jacques Attali Noise
Peter Szondi On Textual Understanding and Other Essays Georges Bataille Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927- 1939
Tzvetan Todorov Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle Ross Chambers Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction
Edited by John Fekete The Structural Allegory: Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought Jean-Francois Lyotard The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
Erich Auerbach Scenes from the Drama of European Literature
Volume Volume Volume V olume V olume
V olume V olume
V olume V olume Volume
V olume
V olume V olume Volume
Volume
V olume 1. Tzvetan Todorov Introduction to Poetics
16. 15. 14. 13. 12.
11. 10. 9.
Mikhail Bakhtin Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics temporary Criticism 2nd ed. , rev.
Edited by Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America
Vladimir Propp Theory and History of Folklore
Peter Burger Theory of the Avant-Garde
Hans Robert Jauss Aesthetic Experience and Literary Her- meneutics
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
8.
7. Paul de Man Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Con-
2. Hans Robert Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception
Part One Sightings: Five Preliminary Reflections
Chapter 1
Cynicism: The Twilight of False Consciousness
And indeed no longer was anyone to be seen who stood behind everything. Everything turned continually about itself. Interests changed from hour to hour. Nowhere was there a goal any- more. . . . The leaders lost their heads. They were drained to the dregs and calcified. . . . Everyone in the land began to no- tice that things didn't work anymore. . . . Postponing the col- lapse left one path open.
Franz Jung, Die Eroberung der Maschinen (1921)
1The discontent in our culture
sal, diffuse cynicism. The traditional critique of ideology stands at a loss before this cynicism. It does not know what button to push in this cynically keen con- sciousness to get enlightenment going. Modern cynicism presents itself as that state of consciousness that follows after naive ideologies and their enlightenment. In it, the obvious exhaustion of ideology critique has its real ground. This critique has remained more naive than the consciousness it wanted to expose; in its well- mannered rationality, it did not keep up with the twists and turns of modern con- sciousness to a cunning multiple realism. The formal sequence of false conscious- ness up to now--lies, errors, ideology--is incomplete; the current mentality requires the addition of a fourth structure: the phenomenon of cynicism. To speak of cynicism means trying to enter the old building of ideology critique through a new entrance.
It violates normal usage to describe cynicism as a universal and diffuse phenomenon; as it is commonly conceived, cynicism is not diffuse but striking, not universal but peripheral and highly individual. The unusual epithets describe something of its new manifestation, which renders it both explosive and unas- sailable.
The ancient world knows the cynic (better: kynic) as a lone owl and as a provocative, stubborn moralist. Diogenes in the tub is the archetype of this figure. In the picture book of social characters he has always appeared as a distance- creating mocker, as a biting and malicious individualist who acts as though he needs nobody and who is loved by nobody because nobody escapes his crude un-
has assumed a new quality: It appears as a univer-
34 ? CYNICISM: THE TWILIGHT OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
masking gaze uninjured. Socially he is an urban figure who maintains his cutting edge in the goings-on of the ancient metropolises. He could be characterized as the earliest example of declassed or plebeian intelligence. His "cynical" turn against the arrogance and the moral trade secrets of higher civilization presup- poses the city, together with its successes and shadows. Only in the city, as its negative profile, can the figure of the cynic crystallize in its full sharpness, under the pressure of public gossip and universal love-hate. And only the city can as- similate the cynic, who ostentatiously turns his back on it, into the group of its outstanding individuals, on whom its liking for unique, urbane personalities depends.
The fertile ground for cynicism in modern times is to be found not only in ur- ban culture but also in the courtly sphere. Both are dies of pernicious realism through which human beings learn the crooked smile of open immorality. Here, as there, a sophisticated knowledge accumulates in informed, intelligent minds, a knowledge that moves elegantly back and forth between naked facts and con- ventional facades. From the very bottom, from the declassed, urban intelligent- sia, and from the very top, from the summits of statesmanly consciousness, sig- nals penetrate serious thinking, signals that provide evidence of a radical, ironic treatment (Ironisierung) of ethics and of social conventions, as if universal laws existed only for the stupid, while that fatally clever smile plays on the lips of those in the know. More precisely, it is the powerful who smile this way, while the kynical plebeians let out a satirical laugh. In the great hall of cynical knowledge the extremes meet: Eulenspiegel meets Richelieu; Machiavelli meets Rameau's nephew; the loud Condottieri of the Renaissance meet the elegant cynics of the rococo; unscrupulous entrepreneurs meet disillusioned outsiders; and jaded sys- tems strategists meet conscientious objectors without ideals.
Since bourgeois society began to build a bridge between the knowledge of those at the very top and those at the very bottom and announced its ambition to ground its worldview completely on realism, the extremes have dissolved into each other. Today the cynic appears as a mass figure: an average social character in the upper echelons of the elevated superstructure. It is a mass figure not only because advanced industrial civilization produces the bitter loner as a mass phenomenon. Rather, the cities themselves have become diffuse clumps whose power to create generally accepted
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
public characters has been lost. The pressure toward individualization has lessened in the modern urban and media climate. Thus modern cynics --and there have been mass numbers of them in Germany, especially since the First World War --are no longer outsiders. But less than ever do they appear as a tangibly developed type. Modern mass cynics lose their in- dividual sting and refrain from the risk of letting themselves be put on display. They have long since ceased to expose themselves as eccentrics to the attention and mockery of others. The person with the clear, "evil gaze" has disappeared into the crowd; anonymity now becomes the domain for cynical deviation. Mod-
CYNICISM: THE TWILIGHT OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS D 5
em cynics are integrated, asocial characters who, on the score of subliminal illu- sionlessness, are a match for any hippie. They do not see their clear, evil gaze as a personal defect or an amoral quirk that needs to be privately justified. Instinc- tively, they no longer understand their way of existing as something that has to do with being evil, but as participation in a collective, realistically attuned way of seeing things. It is the universally widespread way in which enlightened people see to it that they are not taken for suckers. There even seems to be something healthy in this attitude, which, after all, the will to self-preservation generally supports. It is the stance of people who realize that the times of naivete are gone.
Psychologically, present-day cynics can be understood as borderline melan- cholies, who can keep their symptoms of depression under control and can remain more or less able to work. Indeed, this is the essential point in modern cynicism: the ability of its bearers to work--in spite of anything that might happen, and es- pecially, after anything that might happen. The key social positions in boards, parliaments, commissions, executive councils, publishing companies, practices, faculties, and lawyers' and editors' offices have long since become a part of this diffuse cynicism. A certain chic bitterness provides an undertone to its activity. For cynics are not dumb, and every now and then they certainly see the nothing- ness to which everything leads. Their psychic (seelisch) apparatus has become elastic enough to incorporate as a survival factor a permanent doubt about their own activities. They know what they are doing, but they do it
because, in the short run, the force of circumstances and the instinct for self-preservation are speaking the same language, and they are telling them that it has to be so. Others would do it anyway, perhaps worse. Thus, the new, integrated cynicism even has the understandable feeling about itself of being a victim and of making sacrifices. Be- hind the capable, collaborative, hard facade, it covers up a mass of offensive un- happiness and the need to cry. In this, there is something of the mourning for a "lost innocence," of the mourning for better knowledge, against which all action and labor are directed.
ness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlighten- ment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered.
"Enlightened false consciousness": To choose such a formulation seems to be a blow against the tradition of enlightenment. The sentence itself is cynicism in a crystalline state. Nonetheless, it claims an objective (sachlich) validity; its con- tent and its necessity are developed in the present essay. Logically it is a paradox, for how could enlightened consciousness still be false? This is precisely the issue here.
Thus, we come to our first definition: Cynicism is enlightened false conscious- 3
6 ? CYNICISM: THE TWILIGHT OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
To act against better knowledge is today the global situation in the superstruc- ture; it knows itself to be without illusions and yet to have been dragged down by the "power of things. " Thus what is regarded in logic as a paradox and in litera- ture as a joke appears in reality as the actual state of affairs. Thus emerges a new attitude of consciousness toward "objectivity. "
"Enlightened false consciousness": This formulation should be regarded not as an incidental phrase but as a systematic approach, as a diagnostic model. It thus commits itself to a revision of enlightenment; it must clarify its relation to what is traditionally called "false consciousness"; further, it must review the course of enlightenment and the labor of ideology critique, in whose development it was possible for "false consciousness" to reabsorb enlightenment. If this essay had historical intentions, it would be to describe the modernization of false conscious- ness. But the intention here on the whole is not historical but physiognomic: The focus is on the structure of a reflexively buffered false consciousness. Neverthe- less, I want to show that this structure cannot be grasped without localizing it in
4a political history of polemical reflections.
There can be no healthy relation of modern-day enlightenment to its own his-
tory without sarcasm. We have to choose between a pessimism that remains "loyal" to its origins and reminds one of decadence and a lighthearted disrespect in the continuation of the original tasks. As things stand, the only loyalty to en-
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
lightenment consists in disloyalty. This can be partly understood from the posi- tion of its heirs, who look back on the "heroic" times and are necessarily more
5 skeptical of the results. To be an heir always carries a certain "status cynicism"
with it, as is well known from stories about the inheritance of family capital. The retrospective position alone, however, does not explain the particular tone of modern cynicism. Disillusionment with enlightenment is by no means only a sign that epigones can and must be more critical than the founders. The characteristic odor of modern cynicism is of a more fundamental nature-a constitution of con- sciousness afflicted with enlightenment that, having learned from historical ex- perience, refuses cheap optimism. New values? No thanks! With the passing of defiant hopes, the listlessness of egoisms pervades. In the new cynicism, a de- tached negativity comes through that scarcely allows itself any hope, at most a little irony and pity.
In the final analysis, it is a matter of the social and existential limits of enlight- enment. The compulsion to survive and desire to assert itself have demoralized enlightened consciousness. It is afflicted with the compulsion to put up with preestablished relations that it finds dubious, to accommodate itself to them, and finally even to carry out their business. In order to survive, one must be schooled in reality. Of course. Those who mean well call it growing up, and there is a grain of truth to that. But that is not all. Always a bit unsettled and irritable, collaborating consciousness looks around CYNICISM: THE TWILIGHT OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS ? 7
for its lost naivete, to which there is no way back, because consciousness-raising is irreversible.
Gottfried Benn, himself one of the prominent speakers on the structure of mod- ern cynicism, has probably provided the formulation of the century for cynicism, lucid and unabashed: "To be dumb and have a job, that's happiness. " But it is the converse of the sentence that really reveals its full content: "To be intelligent and still perform one's work, that is unhappy consciousness in its modernized form, afflicted with enlightenment. Such consciousness cannot become dumb and trust again; innocence cannot be regained. It persists in its belief in the gravitational pull of the relations to which it is bound by its instinct for self-preservation. In for a penny, in for a pound. At two thousand marks net a month, counterenlight- enment quietly begins; it banks on the fact that all those who have something to lose come to terms privately with their unhappy consciousness or cover it over with "engagements. "
The new cynicism, precisely because it is lived as a private disposition that absorbs the world situation, does not glaringly draw attention to itself in a way that would correspond to the concept itself. It envelops itself in discretion --as we
6will soon see, this is a key word for charmingly mediated alienation. The self-
cognizant accommodation, which has sacrificed its better judgment to "compul- sions," no longer sees any reason to expose itself aggressively and spectacularly. There is a nakedness that no longer has an unmasking effect and in which no "na- ked fact" appears on whose grounds one could position oneself with serene real- ism. There is something lamentable about the neocynical accommodation to given circumstances; it is no longer self-confidently naked. For this reason it is also methodologically quite difficult to bring this diffuse, murky cynicism to expres- sion. It has withdrawn into a mournful detachment that internalizes its knowledge as though it were something to be ashamed of, and as a consequence, it is ren- dered useless for taking the offensive. The great offensive parades of cynical im- pudence have become a rarity; ill-humor has taken its place, and there is no energy left for sarcasm. Gehlen even thought that today not even the English can be cutting any more because their reserves of dissatisfaction have been consumed and the rationing of stocks has begun. The discontent that follows offensives does not open its mouth wide enough for enlightenment to gain anything.
That is one of the reasons why, in later chapters, a disproportionate amount of "cynical material" from the Weimar Republic is cited-in addition to older documents that are also given attention. In the introduction to Part V, I attempt a physiognomy of an epoch. Here a decade is characterized whose first descen- dant was fascism and whose second descendant is us.
To speak of the Weimar Republic means, as it always has, to immerse oneself in social consciousness-raising. For reasons that can be enumerated, Weimar cul- ture was cynically disposed like scarcely any previous culture; it gave birth to an
8 ? CYNICISM: THE TWILIGHT OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
abundance of brilliantly articulated cynicisms, which read like textbook exam- ples. It experienced the pain of modernization more violently and expressed its disillusionment more coldly and more sharply than the present could ever do. We discover in it superb formulations of modern unhappy consciousness, crucially relevant even today; indeed, their general validity is perhaps only today really comprehensible.
A critique of cynical reason would remain an academic glass bead game if it did not pursue the connection between the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
problem of survival and the danger of fascism. In fact, the question of "survival," of self-preservation and self- assertion, to which all cynicisms provide answers, touches on the central problem of holding the fort and planning for the future in modern nation-states. Through various approaches, I attempt to fix the logical locus of German fascism in the convolutions of modern, self-reflective cynicism. This much can be said in ad- vance: In German fascism the typically modern dynamics of psychocultural fear of disintegration, regressive self-assertion, and objective, cold rationality com- bines with a time-honored strain of military cynicism that on German, and espe- cially Prussian, soil enjoys an equally macabre and deep-rooted tradition.
Perhaps these considerations about cynicism, as the fourth configuration of false consciousness, will help to overcome the characteristic speechlessness of genuinely philosophical critique regarding so-called Fascist ideology. Philosophy as a "discipline" has no real thesis about "theoretical fascism" because it basically considers the latter to be beneath all critique. The explanations of fascism as ni- hilism (Rauschning et al. ) or as the product of "totalitarian thinking" remain dif- fuse and imprecise. The "inauthentic," patchwork character of Fascist ideology has already been sufficiently emphasized, and everything it wanted to represent as substantial statements has long since been radically criticized by the individual sciences: psychology, political science, sociology, historiography. For philoso- phy, the programmatic statements of fascism do not even rate as a serious, sub- stantial ideology over which a reflective critique would really have to toil. But herein lies the weak point-of critique. It remains fixated on "serious opponents," and with this attitude it neglects the task of comprehending the ideological tem- plate of "unserious," shallow "systems. " To this day critique has thus not been a match for this modern blend of opinion and cynicism. But since questions of so- cial and individual self-preservation are discussed precisely in such blends, there are good reasons for concerning oneself with their composition. Questions of self-preservation must be approached in the same language as those of self- destruction (Selbstvernichtung). The same logic in the repudiation of morality seems to operate in them. I call it the logic of the "cynical structure," that is, of the self-repudiation of refined ethics. Elucidating this structure will clarify what it would mean to opt for life.
CYNICISM: THE TWILIGHT OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS ? 9
Notes
1. [This alludes to the work by Freud. -Trans. ]
2. The first movement (Aufhebung) of this definition takes place in chapter 5, the second in Part II. 3. [This refers to a subchapter in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. --Trans. ]
4. See the six cardinal cynicisms, chapter 8.
5. [A cynicism deriving from social status (Positionszynismus). --Trans. ]
6. See the second critique of religion, chapter 3.
Chapter 2
Enlightenment as Dialogue: Critique of Ideology as Continuation of the Miscarried Dialogue through
Other Means
Those who speak of cynicism will recall the limits of enlightenment. In this re- spect, focusing on the salient features of Weimar cynicism, apart from the advan- tage of making things clearer, also promises to be fruitful for the philosophy of history. The Weimar Republic represents in the course of German history not only a product of delayed development to nation-state-heavily burdened by the Wilhelminian legacy, the spirit of a cynically illiberal political system--but also a paradigm for "enlightenment miscarried. "
It has often been shown how and why the early champions of republican en- lightenment at that time could not have been anything else but a desperately well intentioned minority of representatives of reason against almost insurmountable odds: massive currents of antienlightenment and hatred for the intelligentsia; an array of antidemocratic and authoritarian ideologies that knew how to effectively organize the public sphere; an aggressive nationalism with a desire for revenge; an unenlightenable confusion of stubborn conservatisms, displaced petty bour- geois, messianic religious sects, apocalyptic political views, and equally realistic and psychopathological rejections of the demands of a disagreeable modernity. The wounds of the war kept getting infected in the smoldering crisis; Nietz- scheanism continued to be rampant--as the most prominent style of thinking for the German-narcissistic sulkiness and for the moody, arrogant, "protestant" rela- tionship to a "bad reality. " The climate of crisislike agitation produced a penetrat- ing psychopolitical oscillation between fear of the future and resentment, unstable pseudorealisms and psychic makeshifts.
To speak of cynicism means to expose a spiritual, a moral scandal to critique; following that, the conditions for the possibility of the scandalous are unraveled. "Critique" undergoes a movement that at first fully lives out its positive and nega- tive interest in the object, only in the end to run up against elementary structures of moral consciousness that are brought to expression "beyond good and evil. " The times are cynical everywhere you turn, and it is time to develop the connec- tion between cynicism and realism from first principles. What did Oscar Wilde mean by his blase statement: "I am not at all cynical, I am only experienced-- that's pretty much the same thing"? Or Anton Chekov, who gloomily remarked: "No cynicism can outdo life"?
In the course of reflection, the well-known ambiguity in the concept of critique breaks down; at first it means to make and substantiate judgments, to judge, to condemn; then to investigate the foundations for the formation of judgments. However, if one is talking about cynical "reason," then initially this formula com- pletely takes cover behind irony. What can critique achieve today? What can it still hope for in a time that is so sick of theory? Let us first hear Walter Benjamin's answer:
Fools, who complain about the demise of critique. For its time has long since run out. Critique is a matter of proper distance. It is at home in a world where perspectives and prospects are important and where it was still possible to assume a point of view. In the meantime, things have become much too close for comfort for human society. "Disinterested- ness," the "unbiased perspective," have become lies, if not the com- pletely naive expression of plain incompetence. {Einbahnstrasse [1928] 1969, p. 95)
PREFACE ? xxxiii
In a system that feels like a cross between prison and chaos, there is no stand- point for a description, no central perspective for a compelling critique.
In the shattered world of multiple perspectives, the "grand views" of the whole, in fact, belong more to simple souls than to those who are enlightened and edu- cated by the given order of things. No enlightenment can occur without destroy- ing the effect, thinking-from-a-point-of-view, and without dissolving conven- tional morals. Psychologically this goes hand in hand with a scattering of the ego, literarily and philosophically, with the demise of critique.
But how is the contradiction to be explained that the most important renais- sance of critique in the twentieth century is connected with the name of Walter Benjamin, who, on the one hand, convincingly demonstrated that critique's hour had come, and, on the other hand, participated with such far-reaching impact in the school of Critical Theory? It is impossible, so he says, to assume a "stand- point" because things have become much too close for comfort for us. But from a standpoint of having no standpoint, which has still to be more closely defined, critique has made impressive progress. From where, then, does critique speak? From what perspectives? In whose name?
I believe that Critical Theory has found a provisional ego for critique and a "standpoint" that provides it with perspectives for a truly incisive critique-a standpoint that conventional epistemology does not consider. I am inclined to call it a priori pain. It is not the basis of elevated, distanced critique that achieves grand overviews but a stance of extreme closeness --micrology.
If things have become too close for comfort for us, a critique must arise that expresses this discomfort. It is not a matter of proper distance but of proper prox- imity. The success of the word "concernedness" (Betroffenheit) grows from this soil; it is the seed of Critical Theory that germinates in new forms today, even among those who have scarcely heard of it. Regarding the "concerned," would it not be fascinating to find out where they get their critical model? Anyway, in the manner of their "being concerned," the defects of the forgotten source reappear.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Because the sovereignty of minds (Kopfe) is always false, the new critique pre- pares to slip from the mind into the whole body. Enlightenment tries to move from top to bottom --politico-culturally as well as psychosomatically. To discover the living body as a sensor of the world is to secure a realistic foundation for phil- osophical knowledge of the world. This is what Critical Theory had begun to do, hesitatingly, often aesthetically encoded, hidden in all kinds of squeamishness.
Critical Theory was based on the presupposition that we know this world a pri- ori, through Weltschmerz. What we perceive of the world can be ordered in psy- chosomatic coordinates of pain and pleasure. Critique is possible inasmuch as pain tells us what is "true" and what is "false. " In holding this view, Critical The- ory makes the usual "elitist" assumption of an intact sensibility. This characterizes its strength and its weakness; it establishes its truth and restricts the scope of its
xxxiv ? PREFACE
validity. One must, in fact, be able to muster so much elitist sensibility. It is nourished by an aversion to the deadly poison of normality in a country of hard heads and armored souls. One should not even try to convince certain opponents; there is a generality of "truth" that is an alibi for lack of understanding. Where the capacity for reason is not based on sensitive self-reflection, no argumentation, not even one based on the most solid theory of communication, will be able to bring it about.
On this "sensitive" point, Critical Theory was never able to get along well with the logicians among its opponents. To be sure, there are thinkers whose minds (Kopfe) are so energetic, whose nervous structures are so hardened, that to them, the entire approach of Critical Theory must seem lachrymose. "Sensitive" theory is suspect. In fact, its founders, especially Adorno, had an exclusively narrow concept of the Sensitive --a presupposition of the highest spiritual irascibility and aesthetic schooling that could never be rationalized; its aesthetics ran just along the threshold of nausea toward everything and anything. There was scarcely any- thing that took place in the "practical" world that did not inflict pain on it or was spared being suspected of brutality. For it, everything was somehow chained like an accomplice to "false living" in which there is "no true living. " Above all, it sus- pected everything that seemed to be pleasure and consent as being swindle, re- lapse, and "false" relief. It was inevitable that Critical Theory, particularly in the person of Adorno, came to feel the backlash of its exaggerations. The embodying of reason for which it had prepared the ground with the highest sensibility could not stop at the limits within which it was constrained by its initiators. What is hap- pening today shows how many faces critique issuing from bodily vitality can assume.
Adorno belonged to the pioneers of a renewed critique of cognition that as- sumes an emotional a priori. In his theory the motifs of a crypto-Buddhist spirit are at work. Those who suffer without becoming hardened will understand; those who can hear music in moments of clarity see across to the other side of the world. The conviction that the real is written in the hand of suffering, coldness, and hardness determines the way this philosophy approaches the world. Although it scarcely believed in a change for the better, it did not give in to the temptation to desensitize itself or to get used to the given order of things. To remain sensitive was, as it were, a Utopian stance --to keep the senses sharpened for a happiness that will not come, a stance that nevertheless, by being prepared for happiness, protects us from the worst kind of brutalizations.
Politically, and in its nerve endings, this aesthetic, this "sensitive" theory, is based on a reproachful attitude, composed of suffering, contempt, and rage against everything that has power. It makes itself into a mirror of the evil in the world, of bourgeois coldness, of the principle of domination, of dirty business and its profit motive. It is the masculine world that it categorically rejects. It is inspired by an archaic No to the world of the fathers, legislators, and profiteers. PREFACE D xxxv
Its basic prejudice is that only evil power against the living can come from this world. That is the reason for the stagnation of Critical Theory. The offensive maneuver of refusing to collaborate has long been ineffective. The masochistic element has outdone the creative element. The impulse of Critical Theory is be- coming mature enough to burst open the strictures of negativism. In its heyday, Critical Theory found its adherents among those who could instinctively share their a priori pain with it. Still, in a generation that began to discover what its parents had done or approved, there were many such people. And because they were many, there was once again in the mid-sixties in Germany a thin thread of political culture --public dispute about true living.
The revival of the great impulse depends on a self-reflection by the intelligent- sia that was once inspired by it. In this sensitive critique, there is a paralyzing resentment. The refusal nourishes itself on an archaic rage against "masculinity," that cynical sense for facts exhibited by political as well as scientific positivists. Adorno's theory revolted against the collaborative traits embedded in the "practi- cal attitude. " His theory tried, by means of a conceptual balancing act, to construe a knowledge that would not be power. It took refuge in the realm of the mother, in the arts, and encoded longings. "Pictures prohibited"--do not tread with the whole foot. Defensive thinking characterizes its style-the attempt
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
to defend a re- serve where memories of happiness are bound exclusively with a Utopia of the feminine. In an early work, Adorno once disclosed his emotional-epistemological secret almost without camouflage. In a few heartrending lines he wrote about cry- ing in response to Schubert's music, about how tears and knowing (Erkenntnis) are connected. This music makes us cry because we are not like it, not something complete, which turns toward the lost sweetness of life like a distant quotation.
Happiness can only be thought of as something lost, as a beautiful alien. It can- not be anything more than a premonition that we approach with tears in our eyes without ever reaching it. Everything else belongs to "false living" anyway. What dominates is the world of the fathers, who are always appallingly in agreement with the granite of abstractions, now solidified into a system. With Adorno, the denial of the masculine went so far that he retained only one letter from his
3father's name, W. The path to the meadow (Wiesengrund), however, does not
exactly have to be the wrong one (Holzweg).
Since the dissolution of the student movement we have been experiencing a lull in theory. There is, it is true, more erudition and sophistication than ever be- fore, but the inspirations are sterile. The optimism of "those days," that vital in- terests could be combined with efforts in social theory, has pretty much died out. Without this optimism it becomes quickly apparent how boring sociology can be. For those in the enlightenment camp, after the debacle of leftist actionism, terror, and its intensification in antiterror, the world turned topsy-turvy. The enlighten-
xxxvi D PREFACE
ment camp wanted to make it possible for everyone to mourn German history but ended in its own melancholy. Critique seems to have become even more impossi- ble than Benjamin thought. The critical "attitude" turns nostalgically inward to a kind of philological gardening where Benjaminian irises, Pasolinian flowers of evil, and Freudian deadly nightshade are cultivated.
Critique, in any sense of the word, is experiencing gloomy days. Once again, a period of pseudocritique has begun, in which critical stances are subordinated to professional roles. Criticism with limited liability, petty enlightenment as a factor in success --a stance at the junction of new conformisms and old ambitions. Already in Kurt Tucholsky's work, "in those days," the hollowness of a critique that tried to drown out its own disillusionment could be felt. Such a critique real- izes that having success is a long way from having an effect. It writes brilliantly but in vain, and that can be heard through everything. From these almost univer- sal experiences, the latent cynicisms of present-day enlighteners are nourished.
Pasolini spiced up the dull pseudocritique a bit in that he at least designed a convincing costume: that of the buccaneer-- pirate writings. The intellectual as buccaneer--not a bad dream. We have scarcely ever seen ourselves that way. A homosexual gave the warning signal against the effeminization of critique. Like Douglas Fairbanks leaping around in the cultural rigging, with drawn sword, sometimes the conqueror and sometimes the conquered, knocked about unpre- dictably on the seas of social alienation. The blows fall on all sides. Because the costume is amoral, it fits morally like a second skin. The buccaneer cannot as- sume fixed standpoints because he is constantly moving between changing fronts. Perhaps Pasolini's image of the pirate intellect can reflect light on Brecht, I mean on the young, bad Brecht, not the Brecht who believed he had to conduct classes on the Communist galley.
The offensive posture in the myth of the buccaneer is inviting. One reservation might be the illusion that the intelligentsia is based on brawling as such. In fact, Pasolini is a beaten person, like Adorno. It is the a priori pain --it makes even the simplest things in life difficult for a person--that opens his eyes critically. There is no significant critique without significant defects. It is the critically wounded in a culture who, with great effort, find something healing, who con- tinue to turn the wheel of critique. Adorno dedicated a well-known essay to Hein- rich Heine, Die Wunde Heine {The sore, Heine). This sore is nothing other than the one that bores away in any significant critique. Among the great critical achievements in modern times, sores open up everywhere: the sore, Rousseau; the sore, Schelling; the sore, Heine; the sore, Marx; the sore, Kierkegaard; the sore, Nietzsche; the sore, Spengler; the sore, Heidegger; the sore, Theodor Less- ing; the sore, Freud; the sore, Adorno: Out of the self-healing of deep sores come critiques that serve epochs as rallying points for self-knowledge. Every critique is pioneering work on the pain of the times (Zeitschmerz) and a piece of exem- plary healing.
PREFACE ? xxxvii
It is not my ambition to enlarge this honorable infirmary of critical theories. It is time for a new critique of temperaments. Where enlightenment appears as a "melancholy science" (Adorno-Trans), it unintentionally furthers melancholic stagnation. Thus, the critique of cynical reason hopes to achieve more from a work that cheers us up,
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
whereby it is understood from the beginning that it is not so much a matter of work but rather of relaxation.
The Motive
It will already have been noticed that the justification is a bit too deliberate to be quite true. I realize that I might be giving the impression that I am trying to save "enlightenment" and Critical Theory. The paradoxes of the rescue method will ensure that this first impression does not last.
It might seem at first that enlightenment necessarily ends in cynical disillusion- ment, but the page is soon turned and the investigation of cynicism becomes the foundation for a healthy freedom from illusions. Enlightenment was always disil- lusionment in the positive sense, and the more it advances, the closer the moment approaches when reason tells us to attempt an affirmation. A philosophy in the spirit of Yes also includes the Yes to the No. This is neither a cynical positivism nor an "affirmative" attitude. The Yes I mean is not the Yes of the defeated. If there is a trace of obedience in this Yes, it is of the only kind of obedience that can be expected from enlightened people, namely, the obedience to their own ex- perience.
European neurosis sees happiness as its goal and an effort of reason as a way to achieve it. This compulsion has to be overcome. The critical addiction to mak- ing things better has to be given up --for the sake of the good, from which one so easily distances oneself on long marches. Ironically, the aim of the most criti- cal effort is the most ingenuous release. Shortly before Adorno died there was a scene in a lecture hall at Frankfurt University that fits like a key into the analysis of cynicism begun here. The philos- opher was just about to begin his lecture when a group of demonstrators prevented him from mounting the podium. Such scenes were not unusual in 1969. On this occasion something happened that required a closer look. Among the disrupters were some female students who, in protest, attracted attention to themselves by exposing their breasts to the thinker. Here, on one side, stood naked flesh, exer- cising "critique"; there, on the other side, stood the bitterly disappointed man without whom scarcely any of those present would have known what critique meant-cynicism in action. It was not naked force that reduced the philosopher
4inextricably mixed in this scene in a way that is quite typical for cynicisms. Cyni- to muteness, but the force of the naked.
Right and wrong, truth and falsity were
xxxviii ? PREFACE
cism ventures forth with naked truths that, in the way they are presented, contain something false. Wherever deceptions are constitutive for a culture, wherever life in society
succumbs to a compulsion for lying, there really speaking the truth has an element
of aggression, an unwelcome exposure. Nevertheless the instinct for disclosure
is stronger in the long run. Only a radical nakedness and bringing things out in the open can free us from the compulsion for mistrustful imputations. Wanting to get to the "naked truth" is one motive for a desperate sensuousness, which wants to tear through the veil of conventions, lies, abstractions, and discretions in order to get to the bottom of things. I want to pursue this theme. A mixture of cynicism, sexism, "matter-of-factness," and psychologism constitutes the mood of the superstructure in the West, a twilight mood, good for owls and phi-
5losophy.
At the bottom of my motivations is a childlike veneration for what, in the Greek sense, was called philosophy - for which, moreover, a family tradition of reverence is partly responsible. My grandmother, a teacher's daughter from an idealistic home, often recounted proudly and respectfully that it was Kant who wrote Critique of Pure Reason and Schopenhauer The World as Will and Representation. And perhaps there are even more such magical books in the world that we cannot read because they are too difficult, but which we must ad- mire from the outside like something from someone very great.
Is there no philosophy that does not screw our brains from our heads with its "old bony hand"? The dream that I pursue is to see the dying tree of philosophy bloom once again, in a blossoming without disillusionment, abundant with bi- zarre thought-flowers, red, blue, and white, shimmering in the colors of the be- ginning, as in the Greek dawn, when theoria was beginning and when, inconceiv- ably and suddenly, like everything clear, understanding found its language. Are we really culturally too old to repeat such experiences?
The reader is invited to sit for a while under this tree, which, strictly speaking,
cannot exist. I promise to promise nothing, above all, no New Values. The cri-
tique of cynical reason, to quote Heinrich Heine's characterization of the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Aristophanean comedies, endeavors to pursue the "deep idea of world annihila- tion" on which the Gay Science is based, "which from there, like a fantastically ironic magic tree, shoots up with blossoming thought-ornaments, singing nightin- 6 gale nests and clambering monkeys" {Die Bdder von Lucca)
Munich, Summer 1981
PREFACE ? xxxix
Notes
1. [Zynismus and Kynismus are alternative spellings of "cynicism," to which the author has given systematic conceptual meaning. I render Kynismus, the cheeky, positive side of cynicism, as "kyni- cism," etc. -Trans. ]
2. [A healthy mind in a healthy body-Trans. ]
3. [This is a pun on Adorno's father's name, Weisengrund. Wiesengrund, literally translated, means "meadowland. "-- Trans. ]
4. I will return to this in chapter 5 ("Bourgeois NeoKynicism: The Arts").
5. [See the closing lines of the preface to Hegel's Philosophy of Right-Trans. ]
6. Heine, Samtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb (Munich, 1969), vol. II, p. 466.
Acknowledgments
Because I owe a work on the problem of cynicism more than a mere note can make clear, I especially want to refer to the best study of the history of ideas on this subject: Heinrich Niehues-Probsting, Der Kynismus des Diogenes und der Begriff des Zynismus (Munich, 1979), which offers, in addition, helpful bibliographic orientations.
Moreover, the basic elements of theses for a new interpretation of Nietzsche that are strewn throughout the present work can be compared with an article by the same author: "Der 'Kurze Weg': Nietzsches 'Cynismus'," in Archiv
fur Begriffsgeschichte, vol. 24, no. 1 (Bonn, 1980), pp. 103ff.
I am indebted to Professor Jochen Schulte-Sasse of Minneapolis for invaluable stimulation regarding the understanding of structures of neoconservative ideolog- ical formations in the United States, suggestions that in a mediated way have gone into my construction of the concept of cynicism and into the notion of self-denial (Selbstdementi). Professor Karl- August Wirth of Munich advised me most kindly
on the selection of some of the illustrations.
Finally, I want to thank my friends who, with their encouragement and objec-
tions, their support and criticism, are present in and between the lines of this book.
Theory and History of Literature
6.
5. 4. 3.
Jacques Attali Noise
Peter Szondi On Textual Understanding and Other Essays Georges Bataille Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927- 1939
Tzvetan Todorov Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle Ross Chambers Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction
Edited by John Fekete The Structural Allegory: Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought Jean-Francois Lyotard The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
Erich Auerbach Scenes from the Drama of European Literature
Volume Volume Volume V olume V olume
V olume V olume
V olume V olume Volume
V olume
V olume V olume Volume
Volume
V olume 1. Tzvetan Todorov Introduction to Poetics
16. 15. 14. 13. 12.
11. 10. 9.
Mikhail Bakhtin Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics temporary Criticism 2nd ed. , rev.
Edited by Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America
Vladimir Propp Theory and History of Folklore
Peter Burger Theory of the Avant-Garde
Hans Robert Jauss Aesthetic Experience and Literary Her- meneutics
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
8.
7. Paul de Man Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Con-
2. Hans Robert Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception
Part One Sightings: Five Preliminary Reflections
Chapter 1
Cynicism: The Twilight of False Consciousness
And indeed no longer was anyone to be seen who stood behind everything. Everything turned continually about itself. Interests changed from hour to hour. Nowhere was there a goal any- more. . . . The leaders lost their heads. They were drained to the dregs and calcified. . . . Everyone in the land began to no- tice that things didn't work anymore. . . . Postponing the col- lapse left one path open.
Franz Jung, Die Eroberung der Maschinen (1921)
1The discontent in our culture
sal, diffuse cynicism. The traditional critique of ideology stands at a loss before this cynicism. It does not know what button to push in this cynically keen con- sciousness to get enlightenment going. Modern cynicism presents itself as that state of consciousness that follows after naive ideologies and their enlightenment. In it, the obvious exhaustion of ideology critique has its real ground. This critique has remained more naive than the consciousness it wanted to expose; in its well- mannered rationality, it did not keep up with the twists and turns of modern con- sciousness to a cunning multiple realism. The formal sequence of false conscious- ness up to now--lies, errors, ideology--is incomplete; the current mentality requires the addition of a fourth structure: the phenomenon of cynicism. To speak of cynicism means trying to enter the old building of ideology critique through a new entrance.
It violates normal usage to describe cynicism as a universal and diffuse phenomenon; as it is commonly conceived, cynicism is not diffuse but striking, not universal but peripheral and highly individual. The unusual epithets describe something of its new manifestation, which renders it both explosive and unas- sailable.
The ancient world knows the cynic (better: kynic) as a lone owl and as a provocative, stubborn moralist. Diogenes in the tub is the archetype of this figure. In the picture book of social characters he has always appeared as a distance- creating mocker, as a biting and malicious individualist who acts as though he needs nobody and who is loved by nobody because nobody escapes his crude un-
has assumed a new quality: It appears as a univer-
34 ? CYNICISM: THE TWILIGHT OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
masking gaze uninjured. Socially he is an urban figure who maintains his cutting edge in the goings-on of the ancient metropolises. He could be characterized as the earliest example of declassed or plebeian intelligence. His "cynical" turn against the arrogance and the moral trade secrets of higher civilization presup- poses the city, together with its successes and shadows. Only in the city, as its negative profile, can the figure of the cynic crystallize in its full sharpness, under the pressure of public gossip and universal love-hate. And only the city can as- similate the cynic, who ostentatiously turns his back on it, into the group of its outstanding individuals, on whom its liking for unique, urbane personalities depends.
The fertile ground for cynicism in modern times is to be found not only in ur- ban culture but also in the courtly sphere. Both are dies of pernicious realism through which human beings learn the crooked smile of open immorality. Here, as there, a sophisticated knowledge accumulates in informed, intelligent minds, a knowledge that moves elegantly back and forth between naked facts and con- ventional facades. From the very bottom, from the declassed, urban intelligent- sia, and from the very top, from the summits of statesmanly consciousness, sig- nals penetrate serious thinking, signals that provide evidence of a radical, ironic treatment (Ironisierung) of ethics and of social conventions, as if universal laws existed only for the stupid, while that fatally clever smile plays on the lips of those in the know. More precisely, it is the powerful who smile this way, while the kynical plebeians let out a satirical laugh. In the great hall of cynical knowledge the extremes meet: Eulenspiegel meets Richelieu; Machiavelli meets Rameau's nephew; the loud Condottieri of the Renaissance meet the elegant cynics of the rococo; unscrupulous entrepreneurs meet disillusioned outsiders; and jaded sys- tems strategists meet conscientious objectors without ideals.
Since bourgeois society began to build a bridge between the knowledge of those at the very top and those at the very bottom and announced its ambition to ground its worldview completely on realism, the extremes have dissolved into each other. Today the cynic appears as a mass figure: an average social character in the upper echelons of the elevated superstructure. It is a mass figure not only because advanced industrial civilization produces the bitter loner as a mass phenomenon. Rather, the cities themselves have become diffuse clumps whose power to create generally accepted
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
public characters has been lost. The pressure toward individualization has lessened in the modern urban and media climate. Thus modern cynics --and there have been mass numbers of them in Germany, especially since the First World War --are no longer outsiders. But less than ever do they appear as a tangibly developed type. Modern mass cynics lose their in- dividual sting and refrain from the risk of letting themselves be put on display. They have long since ceased to expose themselves as eccentrics to the attention and mockery of others. The person with the clear, "evil gaze" has disappeared into the crowd; anonymity now becomes the domain for cynical deviation. Mod-
CYNICISM: THE TWILIGHT OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS D 5
em cynics are integrated, asocial characters who, on the score of subliminal illu- sionlessness, are a match for any hippie. They do not see their clear, evil gaze as a personal defect or an amoral quirk that needs to be privately justified. Instinc- tively, they no longer understand their way of existing as something that has to do with being evil, but as participation in a collective, realistically attuned way of seeing things. It is the universally widespread way in which enlightened people see to it that they are not taken for suckers. There even seems to be something healthy in this attitude, which, after all, the will to self-preservation generally supports. It is the stance of people who realize that the times of naivete are gone.
Psychologically, present-day cynics can be understood as borderline melan- cholies, who can keep their symptoms of depression under control and can remain more or less able to work. Indeed, this is the essential point in modern cynicism: the ability of its bearers to work--in spite of anything that might happen, and es- pecially, after anything that might happen. The key social positions in boards, parliaments, commissions, executive councils, publishing companies, practices, faculties, and lawyers' and editors' offices have long since become a part of this diffuse cynicism. A certain chic bitterness provides an undertone to its activity. For cynics are not dumb, and every now and then they certainly see the nothing- ness to which everything leads. Their psychic (seelisch) apparatus has become elastic enough to incorporate as a survival factor a permanent doubt about their own activities. They know what they are doing, but they do it
because, in the short run, the force of circumstances and the instinct for self-preservation are speaking the same language, and they are telling them that it has to be so. Others would do it anyway, perhaps worse. Thus, the new, integrated cynicism even has the understandable feeling about itself of being a victim and of making sacrifices. Be- hind the capable, collaborative, hard facade, it covers up a mass of offensive un- happiness and the need to cry. In this, there is something of the mourning for a "lost innocence," of the mourning for better knowledge, against which all action and labor are directed.
ness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlighten- ment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered.
"Enlightened false consciousness": To choose such a formulation seems to be a blow against the tradition of enlightenment. The sentence itself is cynicism in a crystalline state. Nonetheless, it claims an objective (sachlich) validity; its con- tent and its necessity are developed in the present essay. Logically it is a paradox, for how could enlightened consciousness still be false? This is precisely the issue here.
Thus, we come to our first definition: Cynicism is enlightened false conscious- 3
6 ? CYNICISM: THE TWILIGHT OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
To act against better knowledge is today the global situation in the superstruc- ture; it knows itself to be without illusions and yet to have been dragged down by the "power of things. " Thus what is regarded in logic as a paradox and in litera- ture as a joke appears in reality as the actual state of affairs. Thus emerges a new attitude of consciousness toward "objectivity. "
"Enlightened false consciousness": This formulation should be regarded not as an incidental phrase but as a systematic approach, as a diagnostic model. It thus commits itself to a revision of enlightenment; it must clarify its relation to what is traditionally called "false consciousness"; further, it must review the course of enlightenment and the labor of ideology critique, in whose development it was possible for "false consciousness" to reabsorb enlightenment. If this essay had historical intentions, it would be to describe the modernization of false conscious- ness. But the intention here on the whole is not historical but physiognomic: The focus is on the structure of a reflexively buffered false consciousness. Neverthe- less, I want to show that this structure cannot be grasped without localizing it in
4a political history of polemical reflections.
There can be no healthy relation of modern-day enlightenment to its own his-
tory without sarcasm. We have to choose between a pessimism that remains "loyal" to its origins and reminds one of decadence and a lighthearted disrespect in the continuation of the original tasks. As things stand, the only loyalty to en-
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
lightenment consists in disloyalty. This can be partly understood from the posi- tion of its heirs, who look back on the "heroic" times and are necessarily more
5 skeptical of the results. To be an heir always carries a certain "status cynicism"
with it, as is well known from stories about the inheritance of family capital. The retrospective position alone, however, does not explain the particular tone of modern cynicism. Disillusionment with enlightenment is by no means only a sign that epigones can and must be more critical than the founders. The characteristic odor of modern cynicism is of a more fundamental nature-a constitution of con- sciousness afflicted with enlightenment that, having learned from historical ex- perience, refuses cheap optimism. New values? No thanks! With the passing of defiant hopes, the listlessness of egoisms pervades. In the new cynicism, a de- tached negativity comes through that scarcely allows itself any hope, at most a little irony and pity.
In the final analysis, it is a matter of the social and existential limits of enlight- enment. The compulsion to survive and desire to assert itself have demoralized enlightened consciousness. It is afflicted with the compulsion to put up with preestablished relations that it finds dubious, to accommodate itself to them, and finally even to carry out their business. In order to survive, one must be schooled in reality. Of course. Those who mean well call it growing up, and there is a grain of truth to that. But that is not all. Always a bit unsettled and irritable, collaborating consciousness looks around CYNICISM: THE TWILIGHT OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS ? 7
for its lost naivete, to which there is no way back, because consciousness-raising is irreversible.
Gottfried Benn, himself one of the prominent speakers on the structure of mod- ern cynicism, has probably provided the formulation of the century for cynicism, lucid and unabashed: "To be dumb and have a job, that's happiness. " But it is the converse of the sentence that really reveals its full content: "To be intelligent and still perform one's work, that is unhappy consciousness in its modernized form, afflicted with enlightenment. Such consciousness cannot become dumb and trust again; innocence cannot be regained. It persists in its belief in the gravitational pull of the relations to which it is bound by its instinct for self-preservation. In for a penny, in for a pound. At two thousand marks net a month, counterenlight- enment quietly begins; it banks on the fact that all those who have something to lose come to terms privately with their unhappy consciousness or cover it over with "engagements. "
The new cynicism, precisely because it is lived as a private disposition that absorbs the world situation, does not glaringly draw attention to itself in a way that would correspond to the concept itself. It envelops itself in discretion --as we
6will soon see, this is a key word for charmingly mediated alienation. The self-
cognizant accommodation, which has sacrificed its better judgment to "compul- sions," no longer sees any reason to expose itself aggressively and spectacularly. There is a nakedness that no longer has an unmasking effect and in which no "na- ked fact" appears on whose grounds one could position oneself with serene real- ism. There is something lamentable about the neocynical accommodation to given circumstances; it is no longer self-confidently naked. For this reason it is also methodologically quite difficult to bring this diffuse, murky cynicism to expres- sion. It has withdrawn into a mournful detachment that internalizes its knowledge as though it were something to be ashamed of, and as a consequence, it is ren- dered useless for taking the offensive. The great offensive parades of cynical im- pudence have become a rarity; ill-humor has taken its place, and there is no energy left for sarcasm. Gehlen even thought that today not even the English can be cutting any more because their reserves of dissatisfaction have been consumed and the rationing of stocks has begun. The discontent that follows offensives does not open its mouth wide enough for enlightenment to gain anything.
That is one of the reasons why, in later chapters, a disproportionate amount of "cynical material" from the Weimar Republic is cited-in addition to older documents that are also given attention. In the introduction to Part V, I attempt a physiognomy of an epoch. Here a decade is characterized whose first descen- dant was fascism and whose second descendant is us.
To speak of the Weimar Republic means, as it always has, to immerse oneself in social consciousness-raising. For reasons that can be enumerated, Weimar cul- ture was cynically disposed like scarcely any previous culture; it gave birth to an
8 ? CYNICISM: THE TWILIGHT OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
abundance of brilliantly articulated cynicisms, which read like textbook exam- ples. It experienced the pain of modernization more violently and expressed its disillusionment more coldly and more sharply than the present could ever do. We discover in it superb formulations of modern unhappy consciousness, crucially relevant even today; indeed, their general validity is perhaps only today really comprehensible.
A critique of cynical reason would remain an academic glass bead game if it did not pursue the connection between the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
problem of survival and the danger of fascism. In fact, the question of "survival," of self-preservation and self- assertion, to which all cynicisms provide answers, touches on the central problem of holding the fort and planning for the future in modern nation-states. Through various approaches, I attempt to fix the logical locus of German fascism in the convolutions of modern, self-reflective cynicism. This much can be said in ad- vance: In German fascism the typically modern dynamics of psychocultural fear of disintegration, regressive self-assertion, and objective, cold rationality com- bines with a time-honored strain of military cynicism that on German, and espe- cially Prussian, soil enjoys an equally macabre and deep-rooted tradition.
Perhaps these considerations about cynicism, as the fourth configuration of false consciousness, will help to overcome the characteristic speechlessness of genuinely philosophical critique regarding so-called Fascist ideology. Philosophy as a "discipline" has no real thesis about "theoretical fascism" because it basically considers the latter to be beneath all critique. The explanations of fascism as ni- hilism (Rauschning et al. ) or as the product of "totalitarian thinking" remain dif- fuse and imprecise. The "inauthentic," patchwork character of Fascist ideology has already been sufficiently emphasized, and everything it wanted to represent as substantial statements has long since been radically criticized by the individual sciences: psychology, political science, sociology, historiography. For philoso- phy, the programmatic statements of fascism do not even rate as a serious, sub- stantial ideology over which a reflective critique would really have to toil. But herein lies the weak point-of critique. It remains fixated on "serious opponents," and with this attitude it neglects the task of comprehending the ideological tem- plate of "unserious," shallow "systems. " To this day critique has thus not been a match for this modern blend of opinion and cynicism. But since questions of so- cial and individual self-preservation are discussed precisely in such blends, there are good reasons for concerning oneself with their composition. Questions of self-preservation must be approached in the same language as those of self- destruction (Selbstvernichtung). The same logic in the repudiation of morality seems to operate in them. I call it the logic of the "cynical structure," that is, of the self-repudiation of refined ethics. Elucidating this structure will clarify what it would mean to opt for life.
CYNICISM: THE TWILIGHT OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS ? 9
Notes
1. [This alludes to the work by Freud. -Trans. ]
2. The first movement (Aufhebung) of this definition takes place in chapter 5, the second in Part II. 3. [This refers to a subchapter in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. --Trans. ]
4. See the six cardinal cynicisms, chapter 8.
5. [A cynicism deriving from social status (Positionszynismus). --Trans. ]
6. See the second critique of religion, chapter 3.
Chapter 2
Enlightenment as Dialogue: Critique of Ideology as Continuation of the Miscarried Dialogue through
Other Means
Those who speak of cynicism will recall the limits of enlightenment. In this re- spect, focusing on the salient features of Weimar cynicism, apart from the advan- tage of making things clearer, also promises to be fruitful for the philosophy of history. The Weimar Republic represents in the course of German history not only a product of delayed development to nation-state-heavily burdened by the Wilhelminian legacy, the spirit of a cynically illiberal political system--but also a paradigm for "enlightenment miscarried. "
It has often been shown how and why the early champions of republican en- lightenment at that time could not have been anything else but a desperately well intentioned minority of representatives of reason against almost insurmountable odds: massive currents of antienlightenment and hatred for the intelligentsia; an array of antidemocratic and authoritarian ideologies that knew how to effectively organize the public sphere; an aggressive nationalism with a desire for revenge; an unenlightenable confusion of stubborn conservatisms, displaced petty bour- geois, messianic religious sects, apocalyptic political views, and equally realistic and psychopathological rejections of the demands of a disagreeable modernity. The wounds of the war kept getting infected in the smoldering crisis; Nietz- scheanism continued to be rampant--as the most prominent style of thinking for the German-narcissistic sulkiness and for the moody, arrogant, "protestant" rela- tionship to a "bad reality. " The climate of crisislike agitation produced a penetrat- ing psychopolitical oscillation between fear of the future and resentment, unstable pseudorealisms and psychic makeshifts.
