That this kynical primitive animal in the end even wants to kill its father and marry its mother--or conversely --that, after all that has happened, is registered
somewhat
with resignation.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
Fascism is the vitalism of the dead; as political "movement," they want to have their dance.
This vitalism of death, which characterizes Western cultural in- stitutions to the present day, is embodied, literarily as well as in reality, in vam- pire figures that, for lack of their own life force, emerge as the living dead among the not yet extinguished to suck their energies into themselves.
Once the latter are sucked dry, then they too become vampires.
Once they have become devital- ized at their core, they crave the vitality of others.
In Christian times, the appeal to reflect on authentic living runs media vita in morte sumus -- in the midst of life, we are nevertheless already surrounded by death. Today, do we not have to say, conversely, media morte in vita sumus--in the midst of all-pervading death, there is nevertheless something in us that is more alive than is lived by our lifeless life? What do the anxious person, the security person, the wage-labor person, the defense person, the care-laden person, the history person, the planning person know of life? When we add up the contents of our life, we find that there is a lot that is left out and little fulfillment, a lot of dull dreaming and little presence.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 287
Here, life means being not yet dead. To learn to live again leads via a great labor of recollection, but not a labor that only stirs up old stories. The innermost recollection leads not to a story but to a force. To touch this force means to ex- perience a flood of ecstasy. This experience ends up not in a past but in a rapturous now.
The Cynicism of Knowledge
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What is truth ?
Pontius Pilate
You can trust a statistic only when you have manipulated it yourself.
Winston Churchill
Cleopatra's nose: had it been shorter, then the entire face of the earth would have been changed.
Blaise Pascal
The main thing in life is simply to go freely, lightly, pleasantly, frequently, every evening to the commode. O stercus pretio-
sum! that is the great result of life in all classes.
Denis Diderot, Rameau's Nephew
All culture after Auschwitz, including the penetrating critique of it, is garbage.
T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics
30
Diogenes is the real founder of the Gay Science.
sify. Should he be counted among the philosophers? Is he similar to a "researcher"? Does he remind us of what we call a scientist? Or is he "only" a "popularizer" of knowledges that have been gained elsewhere? None of these labels quite fit. Diogenes' intelligence is nothing like that of professors, and whether it could be compared with that of artists, dramatists, and writers remains uncertain because, as with the kynics in general, nothing of his own work has been handed down. Kynical intelligence did not assert itself in writing, even if, in the good old days of Athenian kynicism, there were supposed to be all sorts of cheeky pamphlets and parodies from the quills of kynics (as suggested by Laer- tius). To make use of intelligence in a kynical way, therefore, probably means to parody rather than propose a theory; it means to be able to find ready answers rather than to brood over insoluble, deep questions. The first Gay Science is satir- ical intelligence. In this it resembles literature more than systematized knowl-
As such, he is not easy to clas-
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edge. Its insights disclose the questionable and ridiculous aspects of the grand, serious systems. Its intelligence is floating, playful, essayistic, not laid out on se- cure foundations and final principles. Diogenes inaugurates the Gay Science by treating serious sciences in a tongue-in-cheek manner. How much truth is con- tained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter
31
that can stand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot stand satire is false. To parody a theory and its proponents is to carry out the experiment of experiments with it. If, as Lenin says, the truth is concrete, then saying the truth must also assume concrete forms, which means, on the one hand, embodiment, and on the other, radical dismantling; what was "concrete" will become even clearer once it has been put through the wringer. Thus, if we are looking for a label for the father of the Gay Science, the first pantomimic materialist, it could be: the satyr capable of thinking. His main theo- retical achievement consists in defending reality against the theorists' delusion 32
that they have conceptualized it.
side of the satyr and satire, of the mobile and mentally alert sense for reality, which is able to restore to the "spirit" its freedom in relation to its own product and to "sublate" (aufheben) the known and the acquired -- in true Hegelian fashion.
Satire as procedure? To the extent that it is an art of intellectual opposition, it can be learned to a certain degree, when its fundamental gestures and turns of expression are investigated. In any case, it takes up a position against whatever might loosely be called "high thinking": idealism, dogmatics, grand theory, Wel- tanschauung, sublimity, ultimate foundations, and the show of order. All these forms of a masters', sovereign, subjugating theory magically attract kynical taunt- ing. Here, the Gay Science finds its playing field. The kynic possesses an unerring instinct for those facts that do not fit into grand theories (systems). (All the worse for the fact? All the worse for the theory? ) Mentally alert, it finds the reply and the counterexample to everything that has been too well thought out to be true. Whenever the ruling and master thinkers present their great visions, the kynical moles set to work--indeed, perhaps what we in our scientific tradition call "cri- tique" is nothing other than a satirical function that no longer understands itself, namely, the realistic undermining from "below" of grand theoretical systems that
33
are experienced as fortresses or prisons
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(i. e. , the actual methodological core of energy in "critique," as Marx so aptly put it with regard to Hegel) consists in "inverting" things. In the realistic sense that means: from the head onto the feet; but inversion in the other direction can some- times also prove useful: yoga for flatheaded realists.
Inversion --how is it done? In ancient kynical satire, we discover the most im- portant techniques that, incidentally, are related to the conceptual tools of the First Enlightenment (the Sophists). As soon as high theory says order, satire op- poses it with the concept of arbitrariness (and gives examples). If grand theory
Every truth requires a contribution from the
(see chapter 2). The satirical procedure
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 289
tries to speak of laws (nomoi), critique answers by appealing to nature (physis). If the former say cosmos, then the satirists reply, Cosmos may be there where we are not, in the universe, but wherever we human beings turn up, it would be better to speak of chaos. The proponent of order sees the great whole; the kynic sees also the little dismembered pieces. Grand theory looks toward the sublime; satire sees also what is absurd. Elevated Weltanschauung wants to notice only what has been achieved; in kynicism, it is also possible to speak of what has been botched. Idealism sees only the true, the beautiful, and the good, whereas satire takes the liberty of considering what is bent, crooked, or lousy also to be worth talking about. Where dogmatics postulates an unconditional duty toward truth, the Gay Science assumes from the start the right to lie. And where theory de- mands that the truth be presented in discursive forms (argumentatively self- contained texts, chains of sentences), the original critique knows of the possibili- ties of expressing the truth pantomimically and spontaneously. The latter also of- ten recognizes the best in "grand insights" through the jokes that can be made about them. When the guardians of morality perform a great tragedy because Oedipus has slept with his mother, and then believe that therefore the world is no longer in order and the great law of the gods and humankind is in danger, then kynical satire first admonishes us to stay calm. Let us see whether that is really so bad! Who is really harmed by this copulation that goes against the regulations? Only the naive illusion of law. How would it be, however, if human beings did not have to serve the law, but the law had to serve human beings? Did Isocrates not teach that human beings are the measure of all things? Poor Oedipus, don't make such a long face; remember that for the Persians and for dogs, too, mount- ing members of the family is also very much in fashion! Chin up, you old mother- fucker! Here, in Greek antiquity, an epochal threshold in the cultural history of irony has been crossed. The Sophist sages are so sure of being borne by universal principles that they can raise themselves above any mere conventionality. Only an unconditionally "culture-resistant" individual can become free enough for such apparently vice-ridden liberties. Only where the social nomos has already done its work can the deeply civilized person appeal to physis and think of the relaxa- tion of tension.
The master-thinkers let the theater of the world --the display of order, the great "law"--pass review before their mind's eye and cast visions that probably also in- clude pain and the negative but that cause them no pain. An overview is achieved only by those who overlook a lot (A. Gehlen). It is always the pain of others that the theoretical grand views of the "cosmos" call for in payment. According to kynical custom, by contrast, those who suffer by themselves must also scream by themselves. We do not have to see our life from a bird's-eye view or with the eyes of disinterested gods from another planet. Diogenes' anti-philosophy always talks in such a way that we realize that here we see a person in his own skin and he has no intention of leaving it. Whenever he is beaten up, Diogenes hangs a sign
290 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
around his neck with the names of the culprits and walks through the city with it. That is enough theory, enough praxis, enough struggle, and enough satire.
In addition to its quick-witted, mentally alert way of dealing with the official
and linguistically coded cultural wares (theories, systems), kynical anti-
philosophy possesses three essential media by which intelligence can free itself
from "theory" and discourse: action, laughter, and silence. Nothing is achieved
by a mere juxtaposition of theory and praxis. When Marx claims in his famous
eleventh thesis on Feuerbach that philosophers had previously only interpreted
the world in different ways but that the point is to change it (through the world's
becoming philosophical, philosophy's becoming worldly), then, although borne
by a partially kynical impulse, he remains far below the level of an existential di-
alectical materialism. Diogenes, the existentialist, would not be able to stop
laughing about the way in which Marx again throws himself into the business of
34
grand theory.
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hibit a demonstrative silence and, with anarchistic laughter, he would rebuff the impudent demand to make the whole of one's life into a tool of a (good old idealistically) planned "praxis. "
If we wanted to write a history of the kynical impulse in the field of knowledge, it would have to take the form of a philosophical history of satire, or better still, a phenomenology of the satirical mind, as a phenomenology of combative con- sciousness and as a history of what has been thought in the arts (i. e. , as a philo- sophical history of art). Such a history has not been written and would not be necessary if the principles could be made comprehendible without the historical crutch. In any form of erudition, intelligence risks its life. Those who deal with the past risk fading into the past themselves without having understood what they have lost in it. Those who heed these cautions will find sufficient material for a history of the Gay Science hidden in the archives or dispersed in the research liter- ature. Rich traditions offer themselves for rediscovery: a great European silen- tium tradition that was at home not only in the churches, monasteries, and schools but also in the unresearched popular intelligence that is concealed in the eternal silence of the majorities --a silence in which there is also freedom and not merely speechlessness; insight and simplicity, not merely dullness and oppression. There is an even greater European tradition of satire in which the freedoms of art, the carnival, and criticism combined into a many-tongued culture of laughter. Here the main strand of a militant intelligence is probably revealed that bites like the kynical dogs without becoming doggedly pugnacious and that strikes more into its opponent's consciousness with its mockery, irony, inversions, and jokes than
at the opponent himself. Finally, there is an impressive tradition of action in which can be studied the ways in which people have taken their own insights "seri- ously" for the sake of a life whose chances they did not want to waste. That it was frequently an act of resistance is in the nature of things here. The "art of the possible" is not only what statesmen are supposed to master, but always comes
In the presence of so much rage to "change," Diogenes would ex-
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 291
? POLITIQUE. MORALE ET LITT^RAJRE.
J. Grandville, Models of satirical consciousness: the fool with bow and arrow; the Naked Truth. Advertisement for the periodical La Caricature (detail).
into play where people try, with awareness and intelligence, to protect the chance of their life. My favorite examples of such action --apart from some pieces of bravado of the type found in Eulenspiegel, Schweik, and some manifestations of revolutionary praxis --are provided by those emigrants who (especially) in the nineteenth century, set out from a hopelessly hidebound Europe to try their luck in the New World as freer people. In setting out this way there is something of the kynical force of vital intelligence and of the exodus of consciousness into the open world, where life still has a chance to be stronger than the suffocating powers of tradition, society, and conventions. If I were to say which individual action I hold to characterize an intelligence that not only "knows" but also "acts," I would probably choose Heinrich Heine's emigration to Paris in 1831 --this apex of conscious praxis in which a poet subjected his biography to the necessities and chances of the historical moment and left his homeland in order to be able to do what he believed he had to do for his own sake and that of his homeland. "I went because I had to"-and behind this "had to" there were not yet the police (as in the case of Marx and other refugees) but rather the insight that in a conscious life there are moments when we first have to do what we want in order then also to
35
The satirical-polemical-aesthetic dimension in the history of knowledge be- comes important because, in fact, it is the dialectic en marche. With it, the princi- ples of embodiment and resistance penetrate the course of socially organized thinking: the inexpressible individual element; single persons intuitively in touch with their existence; the "nonidentical" conjured up by Adorno; the thing-there
want to do what we have to do.
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that is already mistreated by any mere conceptual designation because it stimu- lates understanding (and only makes a "case of X" out of the singular). Where should this individual reality assure itself better of its existence -- apart from the arts --than in satire, in the ironic dissolution of imposed "orders," in playing with what pretends to be "law," in brief, in the embodiment of this highly nonserious matter that, after all, the living being is? Dialectical thinkers --whether philoso- phers, poets, or musicians --are those in whom polemics and the fierce and uncon- scionable animosity between thoughts and motives already form the inner work- ings of their "thinking" process. Their presence of mind suffices, if one can put it this way, for more than one thought. All great dialectical thinkers and artists thus carry within themselves a disputatious, forward-driving, and creative kynic or cynic that, from within, prescribes movement and provocation for their think- ing. Dialecticians are the movers of thoughts who cannot do otherwise than to give the antithesis to every thesis its due. We observe in them a partly comba- tively unsettled, partly epically measured form of discourse that
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stems from a feeling for the figural, melodic, and thematic in the composition of thought-in the disguised poet Plato no differently than in the philosophizing musician Adorno, in the grotesque and pompous dialectic of Rabelais as in the uninhibited streaming rhetoric of Ernst Bloch. It would be worth the effort sometime to por-
tray the inner kynical-cynical "partner" of the important masters --whether it be with Diderot or Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard, or Marx, with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, or Foucault. And what really happens when Sartre, the master dialectician of the twentieth century, confronts Flaubert, the grand cynic of the nineteenth century, on the thousands of pages of the Idiot of the Family (a con- frontation so full of philosophical and psychodynamic morsels that it is obviously impossible to talk about it in an incidental manner).
As we have said, kynicism cannot be a theory and cannot have its "own" the- ory. Cognitive kynicism is aform of dealing with knowledge, a form of relativiza- tion, ironic treatment, application, and sublation. It is the answer of the will to live to that which it has suffered at the hands of theories and ideologies-partly a spiritual art of survival, partly intellectual resistance, partly satire, partly "critique. "
"Critical theory" tries to protect life from the false abstractness and violence of "positive" theories. In this sense, the Frankfurt Critical Theory too inherited the kynical portions of those grand theories the nineteenth century handed down to the twentieth --of left Hegelianism with its existentialist and anthropological as well as its historical and sociological aspects, and of Marxism, as well as of Criti- cal Psychology, which became well known especially in the form of psychoanaly- sis. These are all, if properly understood, "theories" that contain within them the kynical form of treating theory (namely, the sublation of theory) and that can be made into "fixed systems" only at the cost of an intellectual regression. Such regressions have happened on a grand scale, and how much stupefaction has been
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 293
perpetrated in the late nineteenth century and the whole of the twentieth by vulgar Hegelianism, vulgar Marxism, vulgar psychology, vulgar existentialism, and vulgar Nietzscheanism is all too crassly shown in recent social history. All these systems of stupefaction have dispatched the reflective agility of "Critical The- ories," established rigid dogmas as "knowledge," and left nothing of kynical sub- lation except arrogant presumption. In fact, the kynical sublation of theory stems from a conscious not-knowing, not from a knowing-better. It releases us to a new and fresh not-knowing, instead of letting us become rigid in certainties. For with "convictions" only the desert grows. Against this, Frankfurt Critical Theory achieved a great deal by attempting again and again to "destupefy" the theoretical inheritance of the nineteenth century and, above all, by trying to save the elements of truth in Marxism from its degeneration in Leninist and, still more, in Stalinist dogmatics.
In its good times, Marxism was really a vehicle of an active intelligence, and it knew how to fertilize all the human sciences with its historical-critical con- sciousness. The materialist conception of history [Kautsky; --Trans. ] has always contained hundreds of possibilities for "another history" and for a history of the Other. A real history of the Other, however, can be written only by those who are the Other and the Others and have decided to let this Otherness live and to fight for the freedom to be allowed to be so. The most significant examples today are the history of "femaleness" and the history of homosexuality. With the relating of their suppression and formation, both come simultaneously to the conscious- ness of a freedom that is now becoming real. By talking about themselves --in his- tory and in the present-- women and homosexuals also celebrate the beginning of a new era that they will be "a part of in a different way than they were previously. History must be like this. It must proceed from something and lead to something that lives now and that lays claim to more and more life and rights to life for the Now and Later. What is passe on a vital level cannot be considered passable on the level of living knowledge. The historical is reduced to what has been finished and what has only passed but is not yet over--the unfinished, the imperfect, the inherited evil, the historical hangover. Whenever people and groups set about to finish for themselves such an inherited chapter of the unfinished, then memory and history will become useful forces for them, whether in the individual realm, as in psychotherapy, or in the collective realm, as in struggles for liberation.
This distinguishes an existential historiography from the kind Nietzsche justifiably called "museal" history-a history that serves as distraction and decora- tion rather than as concentration and vitalization. We can call existential histori- ography kynical and museal-decorative historiography cynical. The former tells of all we have come through, battered but not broken--just as the Jewish view of history grew out of the insight into the transitoriness of foreign empires and into its own persistent continuance. In this same way Marxism--in its good times-created a possibility of systematically narrating the history of oppres-
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sions, whether this is called slavery, as in antiquity, serfdom as in the Middle Ages (which, e. g. , in Russia lasted until 1861), or proletarian existence as in the present. But the language in which the history of oppression in the name of Marx- ist ideology will be told one day remains open--in any case, certainly no longer in the language of Marxism;
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perhaps in that of a critique of cynical reason; per- haps in a feminist language; perhaps in a metaeconomic, ecological language. Cynical historiography, by contrast, sees "in all worldly things" only a hopeless cycle; in the life of the peoples, as in the life of individuals, in human life as in organic life in general, it sees a growing, flourishing, withering, and dying: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. "There is nothing new under the sun! " is
36
its motto, and even this is nothing new.
which we have marched and will continue to march, over the bodies of those who were silly enough to believe they could stand in the way of our will to power, our thousand-year Reich, our historical "mission. "
Besides "critical" history, "critical" psychology is the second of the human sciences with a kynically effective barb. Today, with the progressive psy- chologizing of society, that is no longer so readily understandable because for us, the kynical shock of psychological enlightenment already lies in the dim past. At best, we became somewhat aware of the offensive side of psychoanalysis in the Freudo-Marxist spectacles of May 1968 --insofar as we were willing to see any- thing in psychoanalysis other than a great self-mystification of bourgeois society that oppresses, distorts, and manipulates individuals and finally says to them, when, as a result, they don't feel well: Your unconscious is to blame. Only the Freudian Left has transmitted something of the original kynical bit of psychoana- lytic enlightenment in that-- from Wilhelm Reich to Alice Miller --it knew at the same time how to avoid the pitfalls of analytic orthodoxy.
In chapter 6 (the final section), we indicated how the explosive power of psy- choanalysis is initially connected with the fact that Freud equates the unconscious with the domain of sexual secrets. Psychological curiosity was thereby channeled in an extremely successful way toward what has always interested people most of all anyway. As the "unconscious" it was on the whole neutralized and excused, and as sexuality it was, on top of everything else, the most fascinating thing around. Under this banner, the cognitive kynicism of psychoanalysis could breach social consciousness --at first through a small opening, but later there was scarcely anything left of the wall. Then it came out: "Everything you always wanted to know about sex. " Kynics could not possibly fulfill their task more ele- gantly than Freud did. In immaculate prose and dressed in the best English tweed, the Old Master of analysis managed, while maintaining the highest respect, to talk about almost everything that one does not talk about. That in itself is already an Eulenspiegel action without parallel in the history of culture, and it could proba- bly succeed only because Freud personally did not underline the subversive, satir- ical, and rebellious side of his undertaking but on the contrary did his utmost to
Or it sees in history a victory route on
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give his work the appearance of science. The miracle of psychoanalysis is how it so respectably conjures all its objects-- the oral, anal, and genital. It is as if in refined society someone burped at the dinner table and nobody found anything exceptional in it. Freud managed what would leave even Diogenes green with envy: He erected a theory that makes us all, whether we like it or not, into kynics (if not even into cynics).
It happens this way: In the beginning, everyone is a pure, natural being, born from the mother's body into a well-bred society, not knowing what is proper. We grow up as sexually polyvalent, "polymorphously perverse" subjects, and kyni- cism is universally disseminated in our nurseries which at first, in everything lives, thinks, wishes, and acts completely out of our own bodies. Freud imported a kynical phase into the life history of everyone and also found rudimentary expla- nations for why adults still tell cynical jokes or are even inclined to make cynicism their attitude toward life. In every one of us, there was once a primitive dog and a primitive swine, beside which Diogenes is a pale imitation--but we, as well- behaved people, cannot for the life of us remember anything about it. It is not enough that this human primitive animal, as the educators say, "defecates" and performs in front of everybody what we adults do there where only our con- science looks on. Not only does it piss in its diapers and against the wall; this be- ing at times even develops an interest unworthy of a human being in its own excre- ment and does not even shrink from smearing the wall with it. That Diogenes did such things not even his enemies claimed. In all superfluity, this being likes to frequently hold those parts of the body for which adults only know the Latin names and shows in everything a reckless self- conceit, as if it personally and no one else were the center of its world.
That this kynical primitive animal in the end even wants to kill its father and marry its mother--or conversely --that, after all that has happened, is registered somewhat with resignation. Indeed, even when analysts maintain that the Oedipus complex is the universal law of psychic development in human beings, this is accepted like one more piece of bad news among many others. (Later it is noticed that Freud is interested only in the tragic version of the Oedipus myth, not in the kynical dedramatization of the story. ) Af- ter these psychoanalytic revelations, parenthood must unavoidably turn into a bat- tle between philosophical schools. For we have to become a Stoic, when we have the kynic physically right in our own house. If a connection between Freud's ethics and those of Epicure has often been noticed, that is because the Epicurean line was the most successful in finding a compromise between Stoicism and kyni- cism, between moral duty and self-realization, between
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the reality principle and the pleasure principle, between "culture" and those who experience "discontent in it. " Societies in the world era of states send their members continually on those "too long marches" from which the living try to deviate by allowing themselves short cuts.
With respect to our infantile side, we have thus all arisen from kynicism. In
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this point, psychoanalysis does not allow us any evasion. However, it itself be- comes evasive by taking a thoroughly ambivalent stance toward the tension be- tween the infantile and the adult. For it always knows how to arrange things so that the analyst remains respectable while the patient-child remains bestial. He makes a protege, so to speak, out of the kynical-animal side in us, to the extent that we all possess such an analyzable underground. Analysts are those "citizens" who interpret and counsel the still-effective infantile, animal, neurotic, etc. , un- citizenness of others. However, here it seems to be their greatest fear that they themselves will get caught in the undertow of their themes and be seen as just as disreputable as the oral, anal, genital phenomena of life with which they concern themselves. Perhaps, at least in part, the excessive interest in culture that is noticeable in many psychologists comes from this circumstance. They seem pres- sured to constantly prove anew their ability to be cultured --after having already compromised themselves enough through their professional occupation with the infantile and animal aspects of human beings. "Psychological literature" has be- come in the meantime a phenomenon of such dimensions that it can only be dealt with sociologically and statistically. Its primary concern is the self-assurance of modern semicynics in their cultural role. With "cultivation," with books, diplomas, titles, supplementary training and degrees, they try to preserve their rights of citizenship in "official culture" (which, by the way, in any case does not exist). At the same time, this serves the pedantic demarcation of "sicknesses. " There are more than a few psychologists in whose voices a lot of fear, contempt, superciliousness, and aggression can be heard when they use words like narcis- sism, schizophrenia, paranoia, ambivalence, neurosis, psychosis. They are words of demarcation, words for others, words on the high horse of normality. It may, however, be a good sign that today some--I want to say insightful- therapists have decided to let the mask of respectability drop and to give up the role of the respectable portrayer of reality. They have, to their own advantage and that of their patients, come over to the side of the living. For those who have been made ill by reality, the path to being able to get through life well certainly does not lead by way of an accommodation to the Freudian "medium misery" of the average adult.
In the domain of knowledge and the sciences, a number of cynical phenomena have appeared that constitute a counterpart to what, in the preceding section on religious cynicism, I have designated, after Sartre, "bad faith"
(mauvaise foi). These phenomena are the "crooked attitudes" toward truth and knowledge that make these "highest goods" into mere useful items, or even into instruments for lying. Despite all apparent lack of respect, the kynic assumes a basically serious and upright attitude toward truth and maintains a thoroughly solemn relation, sa- tirically disguised, to it. With the cynic, this relation has given way to a thorough flabbiness and agnosticism (denial of knowledge). "What is truth? " asked Pontius Pilate when he sensed that he was just about to commit a crime against it. The
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most harmless among the cynicisms of knowledge is that of the examinees, who build up the most external and contemptuous relation to that which they have to learn, a relation of mere cramming, of rote learning, with the firm intention of forgetting it again after the examination. After that, already less harmless, fol- lows the cynicism of the pragmatists and politicians who, admittedly, like to see that the next generation has acquired its academic foundations, but for the rest proceed from the attitude that theory is theory and that in practice everything looks quite different. Here, all the learning and studying that precede function like pure detour and selection mechanisms, roughly according to the assumption that whoever gets through them successfully can also succeed with the other--even though, as is generally known, study and subsequent occupation often are totally unconnected. Learning is separated cynically and instrumentally from its aims and treated as a mere abstract certificate of qualifications. In some cases, the only thing that links study and occupation is salary, which is set according to the type of highest educational qualification achieved. The "substance" is degraded with cynical realism to a mere prelude, to academic chitchat. How much ethos- decimation and demoralization continually take place here is scarcely measurable --one has only to think of courses that have to do with "values": educa- tion, teacher training, the legal professions, publishing, social work, medicine, and so on. If Mephistopheles could say to Faust that all theory is gray, and green is the golden tree of life, this evidences an optimism that can be developed only by someone who has never passed from study into professional life. For here it becomes clear that theory was probably too rosy and that reality first teaches us what gray really is. But here we are not completely without hope. Course reforms work toward ensuring that the studies too will be just as gray as the prospects to be had after them.
The actual and innermost connection between the sciences and cynicism, how- ever, concerns the structure and the procedure of modern empirical sciences per se. For just as there is a form of cynical correctness in the relations between
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hos- tile individuals, there is also a form of cynical objectivity and methodological strictness in some sciences' and some scientists' way of treating the "facts. " I be- lieve this constitutes the core of what, since the late nineteenth century, we call "positivism. " If this word sounds critical, it is surely not because it designates a scientific mentality that stresses being logically exact and true to the facts and refraining from any sort of speculation. In this sense, positivism would have to be a title of honor rather than a dubious label. But in fact, the point of contention in the positivism debate is not scientific principles but the unprincipledness of science. For there are areas of research - and they are usually those in which the positivists do all the talking-where it does not suffice merely to behave scienti- fically "objectively" with the "facts," but where more is demanded of the scientist than merely the capacity to collect data, produce statistics, and formulate the- orems. There are "objects," in relation to which there is no scientific neutrality
298 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
but only partial and interest-directed forms of investigation --most clearly of all in the entire domain of the human and social sciences (this way of seeing things can be made plausible even with respect to the natural sciences; see chapter 11 "Transcendental Polemic," which indicates the connection between objectifica- tion and the process of making enemies). The dispute around positivism ignited not over its indisputable achievement in clarifying the logical form and the empir- ical basis of strict sciences but over the naive assumption of the positivists that they could open up every "arbitrary" field of research with these means and thus subject every reality to the arbitrariness of a callous researching. The positivist, however, can be suspected not so much of naivete but of cynicism, especially since the days of early, and perhaps really naive, positivism are gone and we have long since been confronted with a positivism in its third generation, which, we can safely say, has been washed in the seven seas. The short formula for the his- tory of science in this century would have to read: The path of scientism leads from positivism to theoretical cynicism (functionalism). When Critical Theory pilloried the "affirmative character" of traditional and positivistic theories, it meant by this that such theories, in their artificial objectivity, betray a cynical as- sent to social relations that, to those who suffer, who sympathize, are concerned, stink to high heaven. In the methodological doctrines of positivism and the new social functionalism, those theoreticians find their organon who, with detached brutality, indirectly and coolly defends existing systems against the individuals who come to grief in them.
Notes
1. If Hegel's Phenomenology is described as a "journey of the weltgeist through history to itself," in this formulation, none of the crucial concepts is acceptable. First, it is no journey because such a thing would have to have a beginning and a goal, which does not hold; "path" metaphors do not adequately grasp history. Second, there is no weltgeist that, simultaneously as combatant and battle follower, has been present through the turnings and struggles of history. Third, there is no world his- tory as narrative of the vicissitudes of a subject that suffered them. Fourth, there is no self that, after some kinds of journeys, histories, or struggles, could arrive at "itself; that would be a pretty ghostly being, a megalomaniac reflexive pronoun that rampages over our natural being-as-self.
2. Wilhelm Stieber, Spion des Kanzlers (The chancellor's spy) (Munich, 1981), p. 135; see also chapter 10, "Black Empiricism. " The quotation suggests a psychoanalytic theory of cynicism that in- terprets cynicism as the expression of an unconscious desire to be punished.
3. Only more recent narrative also includes the civil hero, the hero as rogue (picaro), and even the negative, passive hero.
4. The Arthurian legends discuss the problem of how a hero must constantly earn his status: Erec. His error was to become soft and to fail to expose himself to continual testing.
5. As soon as the soldiers became aware of this, they became suspicious of their leaders. The modern large armies stood and fell with the group of lower commanders and officers who "advanced with the rest. " There supposedly are even statistics from the World Wars that prove that the officers are "sufficiently well" represented among the fallen.
6. This motif will be pursued in chapter 10, ("Black Empiricism"), the final section.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 299
7. Officially sanctioned in part: As late as the war of 1870-71, there were many paid "substitute soldiers" serving in the place of conscripts.
8. Elsewhere I have tried to work out the particular emotional toning of German Fascist cynicism in an interpretation of the Beelitz anecdote from Hitler's Mein Kampf: Der Gefreite Hitler als Anti- Schweijk--Zur Psychodynamik moderner Zersetzungsangst. See Peter Sloterdijk, "Die Krise des Individuums --studiert im Medium der Literatur," in J. Schulte- Sasse (ed. ), Political Tendencies in the Literature of the Weimar Republic (Minneapolis, Minn. , 1982).
9. See chapter 22, "Bright Hour. "
10. [Translation of the French testament: I have nothing, / I have many debts, / I give the rest
to the poor. ]
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11. See also Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, (2nd ed.
New York, 1978), pp. 133ff.
12. See Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs (Paris, 1975), p. 44: "Tout le monde sent le tragique
de cete information: 'L'ordre est retabli. ' " To maintain order is synonymous with mounted charges, opening fire on unarmed people, and killing women and children.
13. It is no accident that Michel Foucault, who stimulated the most penetrating analyses of power, force, and "micropolitics" in our time, at the same time began with the phenomenon of disciplinary force, of punishment, execution, surveillance, and incarceration.
14. Schlegel's sentence also contains the germ of a theory not only of political but also of economic and religious cynicism and the cynicism of knowledge (see the remaining cardinal cynicisms as well as the secondary cynicisms). The unabridged quotation reads: "If the essence of cynicism consists in giving nature priority over art and virtue over beauty and science; without paying regard to the letter, to which the Stoic strictly sticks, but to pay heed only to the spirit, to unconditionally show contempt for all economic value and political glamour, and to bravely maintain the rights of autonomous ca- price: then Christianism would be nothing other than universal cynicism. " Athenaeum. Eine Zeit- schrift von A. W. und Fr. Schlegel I, selected and edited by Curt Griitzmacher (Hamburg, 1969), p. 102.
15. In detailed studies, these coarse classifications prove problematic; e. g. , up until 1918, the Ger- man state, because of its feudal components, etc. , cannot be designated as wholly bourgeois.
16. Aside: I began writing down these notes on cynicism--that a critique of cynical reason would come of it, I did not know at the time--shortly after seeing an interview with the Jewish philosopher and political scientist, Hannah Arendt, which Giinther Gaus had made with her many years before and which was broadcast again on the fifth anniversary of her death in 1980. This conversation, a prime example of relaxed chatting and philosophizing in front of an audience and one of the few exam- ples of intelligence in television, reached its climax when Arendt told of her activity at the Jerusalem trial of the mass murderer Eichmann. One must have heard with one's own ears how this woman aver- red that in studying the many thousands of pages of the transcript of the proceedings, she repeatedly broke out into loud laughter about the peculiar stupidity that had exercised control over innumerable lives. In Arendt's self-aware confession there was something frivolous and kynical in the most precise sense of the word that, after an initial consternation, proved itself to be a liberating and sovereign expression of truth. When Arendt then, as an encore, even made the remark that she often had fun in exile, for she was young and improvising in uncertainty has its own attractions, then I also had to laugh, and with that, this book began to "write itself. "
17. In the People's Democracies, incidentally, we encounter a complementary swindle.
18. I have decided to place money cynicism under the secondary cynicisms. Exchange cynicism, which is treated in chapter 9, appears to me to be an excrescence of the coercions of power.
19. Mature-immature: These are not value judgments but scales of measurement for objective conditions for socialism. If socialism is defined as the liberation of social productivity from capitalist fetters, then late-capitalist relations must first be created that can then be superseded.
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20. See chapter 11. There I attempt to establish a rational dialectics under the concept of universal polemic. At the same time, I provide a critique of the Marxist use of dialectics.
21. This is not a plea for a "productivistic" ideology. Productivity is a multidimensional concept. Incidentally, the newer consciousness of political ecology presupposes the culmination of produc- tivism.
22. Dialectic--as dialectic of obstruction. That is the realistic basis of Adorno's Negative Di- alectics.
23. Kurt Keiler drew my attention to the story of the mouse's indirect suicide. It is contained in the final chapter of Boris Vian's novel, L'Ecume des jours (1946). Here I have changed it around some- what to fit Goliath's tale.
24. Dialectic of perfection: In what is perfect, there is still a flaw; the perfection of the beginning must therefore be excelled by that of the end --by passing through a disorder. This constitutes a basic figure of dialectical fantasies of movement: A first, "lost" summit is regained in the ascent to a second, higher summit.
25. The motif appears not only in the European tradition but also in Hindu and Buddhist legends.
26. Epiphanius is conspicuous as one of the first priests with an obsession about Mary. See The- odor Reik's interpretation, "Der heilige Epiphanius verschreibt sich. (Eine Fehlleistung vor sechzehn Jahrhunderten. )," in Reik, Der eigene und der fremde Gott. Zur Psychoanalyse der religiosen Ent- wicklung (Frankfurt, 1975), pp. 37-56.
27. It is disturbing to only hint at this theme, which would be a book in itself. I hope to be able to write more comprehensively and convincingly on this topic in a later work.
28. This will displease many a dyed-in-the-wool structuralist who is intent on joining in the dance around the golden calf of "language, discourse, and signifier. " The structuralist fetishism of the sig- nifier (signifiant) is no more clever
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than the "logocentric" fetishism of the signified (signifie).
29. See Sartre, L'Etre et le neant (1943), p. 84: "Through the lie, consciousness affirms that it exists by its nature as something hidden to the other, it exploits the ontological duality of ego and alien ego for its own advantage. It is different with mauvaise foi, if, as we have said, it is a lie to one- self. . . . That is, the duality of deceiver and deceived does not exist here. " The God of Cain would accordingly appear as the partner of a self-consciousness that can still deceive itself. Hence only God in genesis.
30. Nietzsche's neokynical "revaluing of all values" extends also to science by taking its objects more cheerfully "than they deserve. "
31. Is not critical rationalism a la Popper an offshoot of satirical fallibilism, mistakenly taken to be respectable?
32. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel remarks with regard to the "Kynical School": "There is nothing much to say about it. The kynics have little philosophical training and they did not manage to construct a system, a science. " As in most cases, here Hegel hits the nail deftly on the head, so that we only have to put it on its feet.
33. Accordingly, "respectable critique," critique that is an instrument and a methodology of the "dominant" theories, is from the start a contradiction in terms. Critique serves subversion, not con- struction. For this reason, fun in using one's intelligence can be generally destroyed in a surefire way. as happens today, by educating students "critically" by force. Then, what could have been their chance appears to them as their enemy.
34. It seems that Marx found his kynical-existential critic in H. Heine --hence the frictions be- tween them; hence also the curse "dog," which plays a striking role in their quarrels.
35. See Heine, Vorrede zu Salon / (1833), in Heine, Sdmtliche Schriften, vol. 3 (Munich, 1971), p. 10.
36. Heine, Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung (1833), in Sdmtliche Schriften, vol. 3 (Munich, 1971), p. 21.
In Christian times, the appeal to reflect on authentic living runs media vita in morte sumus -- in the midst of life, we are nevertheless already surrounded by death. Today, do we not have to say, conversely, media morte in vita sumus--in the midst of all-pervading death, there is nevertheless something in us that is more alive than is lived by our lifeless life? What do the anxious person, the security person, the wage-labor person, the defense person, the care-laden person, the history person, the planning person know of life? When we add up the contents of our life, we find that there is a lot that is left out and little fulfillment, a lot of dull dreaming and little presence.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 287
Here, life means being not yet dead. To learn to live again leads via a great labor of recollection, but not a labor that only stirs up old stories. The innermost recollection leads not to a story but to a force. To touch this force means to ex- perience a flood of ecstasy. This experience ends up not in a past but in a rapturous now.
The Cynicism of Knowledge
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What is truth ?
Pontius Pilate
You can trust a statistic only when you have manipulated it yourself.
Winston Churchill
Cleopatra's nose: had it been shorter, then the entire face of the earth would have been changed.
Blaise Pascal
The main thing in life is simply to go freely, lightly, pleasantly, frequently, every evening to the commode. O stercus pretio-
sum! that is the great result of life in all classes.
Denis Diderot, Rameau's Nephew
All culture after Auschwitz, including the penetrating critique of it, is garbage.
T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics
30
Diogenes is the real founder of the Gay Science.
sify. Should he be counted among the philosophers? Is he similar to a "researcher"? Does he remind us of what we call a scientist? Or is he "only" a "popularizer" of knowledges that have been gained elsewhere? None of these labels quite fit. Diogenes' intelligence is nothing like that of professors, and whether it could be compared with that of artists, dramatists, and writers remains uncertain because, as with the kynics in general, nothing of his own work has been handed down. Kynical intelligence did not assert itself in writing, even if, in the good old days of Athenian kynicism, there were supposed to be all sorts of cheeky pamphlets and parodies from the quills of kynics (as suggested by Laer- tius). To make use of intelligence in a kynical way, therefore, probably means to parody rather than propose a theory; it means to be able to find ready answers rather than to brood over insoluble, deep questions. The first Gay Science is satir- ical intelligence. In this it resembles literature more than systematized knowl-
As such, he is not easy to clas-
288 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
edge. Its insights disclose the questionable and ridiculous aspects of the grand, serious systems. Its intelligence is floating, playful, essayistic, not laid out on se- cure foundations and final principles. Diogenes inaugurates the Gay Science by treating serious sciences in a tongue-in-cheek manner. How much truth is con- tained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter
31
that can stand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot stand satire is false. To parody a theory and its proponents is to carry out the experiment of experiments with it. If, as Lenin says, the truth is concrete, then saying the truth must also assume concrete forms, which means, on the one hand, embodiment, and on the other, radical dismantling; what was "concrete" will become even clearer once it has been put through the wringer. Thus, if we are looking for a label for the father of the Gay Science, the first pantomimic materialist, it could be: the satyr capable of thinking. His main theo- retical achievement consists in defending reality against the theorists' delusion 32
that they have conceptualized it.
side of the satyr and satire, of the mobile and mentally alert sense for reality, which is able to restore to the "spirit" its freedom in relation to its own product and to "sublate" (aufheben) the known and the acquired -- in true Hegelian fashion.
Satire as procedure? To the extent that it is an art of intellectual opposition, it can be learned to a certain degree, when its fundamental gestures and turns of expression are investigated. In any case, it takes up a position against whatever might loosely be called "high thinking": idealism, dogmatics, grand theory, Wel- tanschauung, sublimity, ultimate foundations, and the show of order. All these forms of a masters', sovereign, subjugating theory magically attract kynical taunt- ing. Here, the Gay Science finds its playing field. The kynic possesses an unerring instinct for those facts that do not fit into grand theories (systems). (All the worse for the fact? All the worse for the theory? ) Mentally alert, it finds the reply and the counterexample to everything that has been too well thought out to be true. Whenever the ruling and master thinkers present their great visions, the kynical moles set to work--indeed, perhaps what we in our scientific tradition call "cri- tique" is nothing other than a satirical function that no longer understands itself, namely, the realistic undermining from "below" of grand theoretical systems that
33
are experienced as fortresses or prisons
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(i. e. , the actual methodological core of energy in "critique," as Marx so aptly put it with regard to Hegel) consists in "inverting" things. In the realistic sense that means: from the head onto the feet; but inversion in the other direction can some- times also prove useful: yoga for flatheaded realists.
Inversion --how is it done? In ancient kynical satire, we discover the most im- portant techniques that, incidentally, are related to the conceptual tools of the First Enlightenment (the Sophists). As soon as high theory says order, satire op- poses it with the concept of arbitrariness (and gives examples). If grand theory
Every truth requires a contribution from the
(see chapter 2). The satirical procedure
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 289
tries to speak of laws (nomoi), critique answers by appealing to nature (physis). If the former say cosmos, then the satirists reply, Cosmos may be there where we are not, in the universe, but wherever we human beings turn up, it would be better to speak of chaos. The proponent of order sees the great whole; the kynic sees also the little dismembered pieces. Grand theory looks toward the sublime; satire sees also what is absurd. Elevated Weltanschauung wants to notice only what has been achieved; in kynicism, it is also possible to speak of what has been botched. Idealism sees only the true, the beautiful, and the good, whereas satire takes the liberty of considering what is bent, crooked, or lousy also to be worth talking about. Where dogmatics postulates an unconditional duty toward truth, the Gay Science assumes from the start the right to lie. And where theory de- mands that the truth be presented in discursive forms (argumentatively self- contained texts, chains of sentences), the original critique knows of the possibili- ties of expressing the truth pantomimically and spontaneously. The latter also of- ten recognizes the best in "grand insights" through the jokes that can be made about them. When the guardians of morality perform a great tragedy because Oedipus has slept with his mother, and then believe that therefore the world is no longer in order and the great law of the gods and humankind is in danger, then kynical satire first admonishes us to stay calm. Let us see whether that is really so bad! Who is really harmed by this copulation that goes against the regulations? Only the naive illusion of law. How would it be, however, if human beings did not have to serve the law, but the law had to serve human beings? Did Isocrates not teach that human beings are the measure of all things? Poor Oedipus, don't make such a long face; remember that for the Persians and for dogs, too, mount- ing members of the family is also very much in fashion! Chin up, you old mother- fucker! Here, in Greek antiquity, an epochal threshold in the cultural history of irony has been crossed. The Sophist sages are so sure of being borne by universal principles that they can raise themselves above any mere conventionality. Only an unconditionally "culture-resistant" individual can become free enough for such apparently vice-ridden liberties. Only where the social nomos has already done its work can the deeply civilized person appeal to physis and think of the relaxa- tion of tension.
The master-thinkers let the theater of the world --the display of order, the great "law"--pass review before their mind's eye and cast visions that probably also in- clude pain and the negative but that cause them no pain. An overview is achieved only by those who overlook a lot (A. Gehlen). It is always the pain of others that the theoretical grand views of the "cosmos" call for in payment. According to kynical custom, by contrast, those who suffer by themselves must also scream by themselves. We do not have to see our life from a bird's-eye view or with the eyes of disinterested gods from another planet. Diogenes' anti-philosophy always talks in such a way that we realize that here we see a person in his own skin and he has no intention of leaving it. Whenever he is beaten up, Diogenes hangs a sign
290 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
around his neck with the names of the culprits and walks through the city with it. That is enough theory, enough praxis, enough struggle, and enough satire.
In addition to its quick-witted, mentally alert way of dealing with the official
and linguistically coded cultural wares (theories, systems), kynical anti-
philosophy possesses three essential media by which intelligence can free itself
from "theory" and discourse: action, laughter, and silence. Nothing is achieved
by a mere juxtaposition of theory and praxis. When Marx claims in his famous
eleventh thesis on Feuerbach that philosophers had previously only interpreted
the world in different ways but that the point is to change it (through the world's
becoming philosophical, philosophy's becoming worldly), then, although borne
by a partially kynical impulse, he remains far below the level of an existential di-
alectical materialism. Diogenes, the existentialist, would not be able to stop
laughing about the way in which Marx again throws himself into the business of
34
grand theory.
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hibit a demonstrative silence and, with anarchistic laughter, he would rebuff the impudent demand to make the whole of one's life into a tool of a (good old idealistically) planned "praxis. "
If we wanted to write a history of the kynical impulse in the field of knowledge, it would have to take the form of a philosophical history of satire, or better still, a phenomenology of the satirical mind, as a phenomenology of combative con- sciousness and as a history of what has been thought in the arts (i. e. , as a philo- sophical history of art). Such a history has not been written and would not be necessary if the principles could be made comprehendible without the historical crutch. In any form of erudition, intelligence risks its life. Those who deal with the past risk fading into the past themselves without having understood what they have lost in it. Those who heed these cautions will find sufficient material for a history of the Gay Science hidden in the archives or dispersed in the research liter- ature. Rich traditions offer themselves for rediscovery: a great European silen- tium tradition that was at home not only in the churches, monasteries, and schools but also in the unresearched popular intelligence that is concealed in the eternal silence of the majorities --a silence in which there is also freedom and not merely speechlessness; insight and simplicity, not merely dullness and oppression. There is an even greater European tradition of satire in which the freedoms of art, the carnival, and criticism combined into a many-tongued culture of laughter. Here the main strand of a militant intelligence is probably revealed that bites like the kynical dogs without becoming doggedly pugnacious and that strikes more into its opponent's consciousness with its mockery, irony, inversions, and jokes than
at the opponent himself. Finally, there is an impressive tradition of action in which can be studied the ways in which people have taken their own insights "seri- ously" for the sake of a life whose chances they did not want to waste. That it was frequently an act of resistance is in the nature of things here. The "art of the possible" is not only what statesmen are supposed to master, but always comes
In the presence of so much rage to "change," Diogenes would ex-
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 291
? POLITIQUE. MORALE ET LITT^RAJRE.
J. Grandville, Models of satirical consciousness: the fool with bow and arrow; the Naked Truth. Advertisement for the periodical La Caricature (detail).
into play where people try, with awareness and intelligence, to protect the chance of their life. My favorite examples of such action --apart from some pieces of bravado of the type found in Eulenspiegel, Schweik, and some manifestations of revolutionary praxis --are provided by those emigrants who (especially) in the nineteenth century, set out from a hopelessly hidebound Europe to try their luck in the New World as freer people. In setting out this way there is something of the kynical force of vital intelligence and of the exodus of consciousness into the open world, where life still has a chance to be stronger than the suffocating powers of tradition, society, and conventions. If I were to say which individual action I hold to characterize an intelligence that not only "knows" but also "acts," I would probably choose Heinrich Heine's emigration to Paris in 1831 --this apex of conscious praxis in which a poet subjected his biography to the necessities and chances of the historical moment and left his homeland in order to be able to do what he believed he had to do for his own sake and that of his homeland. "I went because I had to"-and behind this "had to" there were not yet the police (as in the case of Marx and other refugees) but rather the insight that in a conscious life there are moments when we first have to do what we want in order then also to
35
The satirical-polemical-aesthetic dimension in the history of knowledge be- comes important because, in fact, it is the dialectic en marche. With it, the princi- ples of embodiment and resistance penetrate the course of socially organized thinking: the inexpressible individual element; single persons intuitively in touch with their existence; the "nonidentical" conjured up by Adorno; the thing-there
want to do what we have to do.
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that is already mistreated by any mere conceptual designation because it stimu- lates understanding (and only makes a "case of X" out of the singular). Where should this individual reality assure itself better of its existence -- apart from the arts --than in satire, in the ironic dissolution of imposed "orders," in playing with what pretends to be "law," in brief, in the embodiment of this highly nonserious matter that, after all, the living being is? Dialectical thinkers --whether philoso- phers, poets, or musicians --are those in whom polemics and the fierce and uncon- scionable animosity between thoughts and motives already form the inner work- ings of their "thinking" process. Their presence of mind suffices, if one can put it this way, for more than one thought. All great dialectical thinkers and artists thus carry within themselves a disputatious, forward-driving, and creative kynic or cynic that, from within, prescribes movement and provocation for their think- ing. Dialecticians are the movers of thoughts who cannot do otherwise than to give the antithesis to every thesis its due. We observe in them a partly comba- tively unsettled, partly epically measured form of discourse that
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stems from a feeling for the figural, melodic, and thematic in the composition of thought-in the disguised poet Plato no differently than in the philosophizing musician Adorno, in the grotesque and pompous dialectic of Rabelais as in the uninhibited streaming rhetoric of Ernst Bloch. It would be worth the effort sometime to por-
tray the inner kynical-cynical "partner" of the important masters --whether it be with Diderot or Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard, or Marx, with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, or Foucault. And what really happens when Sartre, the master dialectician of the twentieth century, confronts Flaubert, the grand cynic of the nineteenth century, on the thousands of pages of the Idiot of the Family (a con- frontation so full of philosophical and psychodynamic morsels that it is obviously impossible to talk about it in an incidental manner).
As we have said, kynicism cannot be a theory and cannot have its "own" the- ory. Cognitive kynicism is aform of dealing with knowledge, a form of relativiza- tion, ironic treatment, application, and sublation. It is the answer of the will to live to that which it has suffered at the hands of theories and ideologies-partly a spiritual art of survival, partly intellectual resistance, partly satire, partly "critique. "
"Critical theory" tries to protect life from the false abstractness and violence of "positive" theories. In this sense, the Frankfurt Critical Theory too inherited the kynical portions of those grand theories the nineteenth century handed down to the twentieth --of left Hegelianism with its existentialist and anthropological as well as its historical and sociological aspects, and of Marxism, as well as of Criti- cal Psychology, which became well known especially in the form of psychoanaly- sis. These are all, if properly understood, "theories" that contain within them the kynical form of treating theory (namely, the sublation of theory) and that can be made into "fixed systems" only at the cost of an intellectual regression. Such regressions have happened on a grand scale, and how much stupefaction has been
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perpetrated in the late nineteenth century and the whole of the twentieth by vulgar Hegelianism, vulgar Marxism, vulgar psychology, vulgar existentialism, and vulgar Nietzscheanism is all too crassly shown in recent social history. All these systems of stupefaction have dispatched the reflective agility of "Critical The- ories," established rigid dogmas as "knowledge," and left nothing of kynical sub- lation except arrogant presumption. In fact, the kynical sublation of theory stems from a conscious not-knowing, not from a knowing-better. It releases us to a new and fresh not-knowing, instead of letting us become rigid in certainties. For with "convictions" only the desert grows. Against this, Frankfurt Critical Theory achieved a great deal by attempting again and again to "destupefy" the theoretical inheritance of the nineteenth century and, above all, by trying to save the elements of truth in Marxism from its degeneration in Leninist and, still more, in Stalinist dogmatics.
In its good times, Marxism was really a vehicle of an active intelligence, and it knew how to fertilize all the human sciences with its historical-critical con- sciousness. The materialist conception of history [Kautsky; --Trans. ] has always contained hundreds of possibilities for "another history" and for a history of the Other. A real history of the Other, however, can be written only by those who are the Other and the Others and have decided to let this Otherness live and to fight for the freedom to be allowed to be so. The most significant examples today are the history of "femaleness" and the history of homosexuality. With the relating of their suppression and formation, both come simultaneously to the conscious- ness of a freedom that is now becoming real. By talking about themselves --in his- tory and in the present-- women and homosexuals also celebrate the beginning of a new era that they will be "a part of in a different way than they were previously. History must be like this. It must proceed from something and lead to something that lives now and that lays claim to more and more life and rights to life for the Now and Later. What is passe on a vital level cannot be considered passable on the level of living knowledge. The historical is reduced to what has been finished and what has only passed but is not yet over--the unfinished, the imperfect, the inherited evil, the historical hangover. Whenever people and groups set about to finish for themselves such an inherited chapter of the unfinished, then memory and history will become useful forces for them, whether in the individual realm, as in psychotherapy, or in the collective realm, as in struggles for liberation.
This distinguishes an existential historiography from the kind Nietzsche justifiably called "museal" history-a history that serves as distraction and decora- tion rather than as concentration and vitalization. We can call existential histori- ography kynical and museal-decorative historiography cynical. The former tells of all we have come through, battered but not broken--just as the Jewish view of history grew out of the insight into the transitoriness of foreign empires and into its own persistent continuance. In this same way Marxism--in its good times-created a possibility of systematically narrating the history of oppres-
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sions, whether this is called slavery, as in antiquity, serfdom as in the Middle Ages (which, e. g. , in Russia lasted until 1861), or proletarian existence as in the present. But the language in which the history of oppression in the name of Marx- ist ideology will be told one day remains open--in any case, certainly no longer in the language of Marxism;
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perhaps in that of a critique of cynical reason; per- haps in a feminist language; perhaps in a metaeconomic, ecological language. Cynical historiography, by contrast, sees "in all worldly things" only a hopeless cycle; in the life of the peoples, as in the life of individuals, in human life as in organic life in general, it sees a growing, flourishing, withering, and dying: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. "There is nothing new under the sun! " is
36
its motto, and even this is nothing new.
which we have marched and will continue to march, over the bodies of those who were silly enough to believe they could stand in the way of our will to power, our thousand-year Reich, our historical "mission. "
Besides "critical" history, "critical" psychology is the second of the human sciences with a kynically effective barb. Today, with the progressive psy- chologizing of society, that is no longer so readily understandable because for us, the kynical shock of psychological enlightenment already lies in the dim past. At best, we became somewhat aware of the offensive side of psychoanalysis in the Freudo-Marxist spectacles of May 1968 --insofar as we were willing to see any- thing in psychoanalysis other than a great self-mystification of bourgeois society that oppresses, distorts, and manipulates individuals and finally says to them, when, as a result, they don't feel well: Your unconscious is to blame. Only the Freudian Left has transmitted something of the original kynical bit of psychoana- lytic enlightenment in that-- from Wilhelm Reich to Alice Miller --it knew at the same time how to avoid the pitfalls of analytic orthodoxy.
In chapter 6 (the final section), we indicated how the explosive power of psy- choanalysis is initially connected with the fact that Freud equates the unconscious with the domain of sexual secrets. Psychological curiosity was thereby channeled in an extremely successful way toward what has always interested people most of all anyway. As the "unconscious" it was on the whole neutralized and excused, and as sexuality it was, on top of everything else, the most fascinating thing around. Under this banner, the cognitive kynicism of psychoanalysis could breach social consciousness --at first through a small opening, but later there was scarcely anything left of the wall. Then it came out: "Everything you always wanted to know about sex. " Kynics could not possibly fulfill their task more ele- gantly than Freud did. In immaculate prose and dressed in the best English tweed, the Old Master of analysis managed, while maintaining the highest respect, to talk about almost everything that one does not talk about. That in itself is already an Eulenspiegel action without parallel in the history of culture, and it could proba- bly succeed only because Freud personally did not underline the subversive, satir- ical, and rebellious side of his undertaking but on the contrary did his utmost to
Or it sees in history a victory route on
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give his work the appearance of science. The miracle of psychoanalysis is how it so respectably conjures all its objects-- the oral, anal, and genital. It is as if in refined society someone burped at the dinner table and nobody found anything exceptional in it. Freud managed what would leave even Diogenes green with envy: He erected a theory that makes us all, whether we like it or not, into kynics (if not even into cynics).
It happens this way: In the beginning, everyone is a pure, natural being, born from the mother's body into a well-bred society, not knowing what is proper. We grow up as sexually polyvalent, "polymorphously perverse" subjects, and kyni- cism is universally disseminated in our nurseries which at first, in everything lives, thinks, wishes, and acts completely out of our own bodies. Freud imported a kynical phase into the life history of everyone and also found rudimentary expla- nations for why adults still tell cynical jokes or are even inclined to make cynicism their attitude toward life. In every one of us, there was once a primitive dog and a primitive swine, beside which Diogenes is a pale imitation--but we, as well- behaved people, cannot for the life of us remember anything about it. It is not enough that this human primitive animal, as the educators say, "defecates" and performs in front of everybody what we adults do there where only our con- science looks on. Not only does it piss in its diapers and against the wall; this be- ing at times even develops an interest unworthy of a human being in its own excre- ment and does not even shrink from smearing the wall with it. That Diogenes did such things not even his enemies claimed. In all superfluity, this being likes to frequently hold those parts of the body for which adults only know the Latin names and shows in everything a reckless self- conceit, as if it personally and no one else were the center of its world.
That this kynical primitive animal in the end even wants to kill its father and marry its mother--or conversely --that, after all that has happened, is registered somewhat with resignation. Indeed, even when analysts maintain that the Oedipus complex is the universal law of psychic development in human beings, this is accepted like one more piece of bad news among many others. (Later it is noticed that Freud is interested only in the tragic version of the Oedipus myth, not in the kynical dedramatization of the story. ) Af- ter these psychoanalytic revelations, parenthood must unavoidably turn into a bat- tle between philosophical schools. For we have to become a Stoic, when we have the kynic physically right in our own house. If a connection between Freud's ethics and those of Epicure has often been noticed, that is because the Epicurean line was the most successful in finding a compromise between Stoicism and kyni- cism, between moral duty and self-realization, between
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the reality principle and the pleasure principle, between "culture" and those who experience "discontent in it. " Societies in the world era of states send their members continually on those "too long marches" from which the living try to deviate by allowing themselves short cuts.
With respect to our infantile side, we have thus all arisen from kynicism. In
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this point, psychoanalysis does not allow us any evasion. However, it itself be- comes evasive by taking a thoroughly ambivalent stance toward the tension be- tween the infantile and the adult. For it always knows how to arrange things so that the analyst remains respectable while the patient-child remains bestial. He makes a protege, so to speak, out of the kynical-animal side in us, to the extent that we all possess such an analyzable underground. Analysts are those "citizens" who interpret and counsel the still-effective infantile, animal, neurotic, etc. , un- citizenness of others. However, here it seems to be their greatest fear that they themselves will get caught in the undertow of their themes and be seen as just as disreputable as the oral, anal, genital phenomena of life with which they concern themselves. Perhaps, at least in part, the excessive interest in culture that is noticeable in many psychologists comes from this circumstance. They seem pres- sured to constantly prove anew their ability to be cultured --after having already compromised themselves enough through their professional occupation with the infantile and animal aspects of human beings. "Psychological literature" has be- come in the meantime a phenomenon of such dimensions that it can only be dealt with sociologically and statistically. Its primary concern is the self-assurance of modern semicynics in their cultural role. With "cultivation," with books, diplomas, titles, supplementary training and degrees, they try to preserve their rights of citizenship in "official culture" (which, by the way, in any case does not exist). At the same time, this serves the pedantic demarcation of "sicknesses. " There are more than a few psychologists in whose voices a lot of fear, contempt, superciliousness, and aggression can be heard when they use words like narcis- sism, schizophrenia, paranoia, ambivalence, neurosis, psychosis. They are words of demarcation, words for others, words on the high horse of normality. It may, however, be a good sign that today some--I want to say insightful- therapists have decided to let the mask of respectability drop and to give up the role of the respectable portrayer of reality. They have, to their own advantage and that of their patients, come over to the side of the living. For those who have been made ill by reality, the path to being able to get through life well certainly does not lead by way of an accommodation to the Freudian "medium misery" of the average adult.
In the domain of knowledge and the sciences, a number of cynical phenomena have appeared that constitute a counterpart to what, in the preceding section on religious cynicism, I have designated, after Sartre, "bad faith"
(mauvaise foi). These phenomena are the "crooked attitudes" toward truth and knowledge that make these "highest goods" into mere useful items, or even into instruments for lying. Despite all apparent lack of respect, the kynic assumes a basically serious and upright attitude toward truth and maintains a thoroughly solemn relation, sa- tirically disguised, to it. With the cynic, this relation has given way to a thorough flabbiness and agnosticism (denial of knowledge). "What is truth? " asked Pontius Pilate when he sensed that he was just about to commit a crime against it. The
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most harmless among the cynicisms of knowledge is that of the examinees, who build up the most external and contemptuous relation to that which they have to learn, a relation of mere cramming, of rote learning, with the firm intention of forgetting it again after the examination. After that, already less harmless, fol- lows the cynicism of the pragmatists and politicians who, admittedly, like to see that the next generation has acquired its academic foundations, but for the rest proceed from the attitude that theory is theory and that in practice everything looks quite different. Here, all the learning and studying that precede function like pure detour and selection mechanisms, roughly according to the assumption that whoever gets through them successfully can also succeed with the other--even though, as is generally known, study and subsequent occupation often are totally unconnected. Learning is separated cynically and instrumentally from its aims and treated as a mere abstract certificate of qualifications. In some cases, the only thing that links study and occupation is salary, which is set according to the type of highest educational qualification achieved. The "substance" is degraded with cynical realism to a mere prelude, to academic chitchat. How much ethos- decimation and demoralization continually take place here is scarcely measurable --one has only to think of courses that have to do with "values": educa- tion, teacher training, the legal professions, publishing, social work, medicine, and so on. If Mephistopheles could say to Faust that all theory is gray, and green is the golden tree of life, this evidences an optimism that can be developed only by someone who has never passed from study into professional life. For here it becomes clear that theory was probably too rosy and that reality first teaches us what gray really is. But here we are not completely without hope. Course reforms work toward ensuring that the studies too will be just as gray as the prospects to be had after them.
The actual and innermost connection between the sciences and cynicism, how- ever, concerns the structure and the procedure of modern empirical sciences per se. For just as there is a form of cynical correctness in the relations between
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hos- tile individuals, there is also a form of cynical objectivity and methodological strictness in some sciences' and some scientists' way of treating the "facts. " I be- lieve this constitutes the core of what, since the late nineteenth century, we call "positivism. " If this word sounds critical, it is surely not because it designates a scientific mentality that stresses being logically exact and true to the facts and refraining from any sort of speculation. In this sense, positivism would have to be a title of honor rather than a dubious label. But in fact, the point of contention in the positivism debate is not scientific principles but the unprincipledness of science. For there are areas of research - and they are usually those in which the positivists do all the talking-where it does not suffice merely to behave scienti- fically "objectively" with the "facts," but where more is demanded of the scientist than merely the capacity to collect data, produce statistics, and formulate the- orems. There are "objects," in relation to which there is no scientific neutrality
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but only partial and interest-directed forms of investigation --most clearly of all in the entire domain of the human and social sciences (this way of seeing things can be made plausible even with respect to the natural sciences; see chapter 11 "Transcendental Polemic," which indicates the connection between objectifica- tion and the process of making enemies). The dispute around positivism ignited not over its indisputable achievement in clarifying the logical form and the empir- ical basis of strict sciences but over the naive assumption of the positivists that they could open up every "arbitrary" field of research with these means and thus subject every reality to the arbitrariness of a callous researching. The positivist, however, can be suspected not so much of naivete but of cynicism, especially since the days of early, and perhaps really naive, positivism are gone and we have long since been confronted with a positivism in its third generation, which, we can safely say, has been washed in the seven seas. The short formula for the his- tory of science in this century would have to read: The path of scientism leads from positivism to theoretical cynicism (functionalism). When Critical Theory pilloried the "affirmative character" of traditional and positivistic theories, it meant by this that such theories, in their artificial objectivity, betray a cynical as- sent to social relations that, to those who suffer, who sympathize, are concerned, stink to high heaven. In the methodological doctrines of positivism and the new social functionalism, those theoreticians find their organon who, with detached brutality, indirectly and coolly defends existing systems against the individuals who come to grief in them.
Notes
1. If Hegel's Phenomenology is described as a "journey of the weltgeist through history to itself," in this formulation, none of the crucial concepts is acceptable. First, it is no journey because such a thing would have to have a beginning and a goal, which does not hold; "path" metaphors do not adequately grasp history. Second, there is no weltgeist that, simultaneously as combatant and battle follower, has been present through the turnings and struggles of history. Third, there is no world his- tory as narrative of the vicissitudes of a subject that suffered them. Fourth, there is no self that, after some kinds of journeys, histories, or struggles, could arrive at "itself; that would be a pretty ghostly being, a megalomaniac reflexive pronoun that rampages over our natural being-as-self.
2. Wilhelm Stieber, Spion des Kanzlers (The chancellor's spy) (Munich, 1981), p. 135; see also chapter 10, "Black Empiricism. " The quotation suggests a psychoanalytic theory of cynicism that in- terprets cynicism as the expression of an unconscious desire to be punished.
3. Only more recent narrative also includes the civil hero, the hero as rogue (picaro), and even the negative, passive hero.
4. The Arthurian legends discuss the problem of how a hero must constantly earn his status: Erec. His error was to become soft and to fail to expose himself to continual testing.
5. As soon as the soldiers became aware of this, they became suspicious of their leaders. The modern large armies stood and fell with the group of lower commanders and officers who "advanced with the rest. " There supposedly are even statistics from the World Wars that prove that the officers are "sufficiently well" represented among the fallen.
6. This motif will be pursued in chapter 10, ("Black Empiricism"), the final section.
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7. Officially sanctioned in part: As late as the war of 1870-71, there were many paid "substitute soldiers" serving in the place of conscripts.
8. Elsewhere I have tried to work out the particular emotional toning of German Fascist cynicism in an interpretation of the Beelitz anecdote from Hitler's Mein Kampf: Der Gefreite Hitler als Anti- Schweijk--Zur Psychodynamik moderner Zersetzungsangst. See Peter Sloterdijk, "Die Krise des Individuums --studiert im Medium der Literatur," in J. Schulte- Sasse (ed. ), Political Tendencies in the Literature of the Weimar Republic (Minneapolis, Minn. , 1982).
9. See chapter 22, "Bright Hour. "
10. [Translation of the French testament: I have nothing, / I have many debts, / I give the rest
to the poor. ]
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11. See also Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, (2nd ed.
New York, 1978), pp. 133ff.
12. See Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs (Paris, 1975), p. 44: "Tout le monde sent le tragique
de cete information: 'L'ordre est retabli. ' " To maintain order is synonymous with mounted charges, opening fire on unarmed people, and killing women and children.
13. It is no accident that Michel Foucault, who stimulated the most penetrating analyses of power, force, and "micropolitics" in our time, at the same time began with the phenomenon of disciplinary force, of punishment, execution, surveillance, and incarceration.
14. Schlegel's sentence also contains the germ of a theory not only of political but also of economic and religious cynicism and the cynicism of knowledge (see the remaining cardinal cynicisms as well as the secondary cynicisms). The unabridged quotation reads: "If the essence of cynicism consists in giving nature priority over art and virtue over beauty and science; without paying regard to the letter, to which the Stoic strictly sticks, but to pay heed only to the spirit, to unconditionally show contempt for all economic value and political glamour, and to bravely maintain the rights of autonomous ca- price: then Christianism would be nothing other than universal cynicism. " Athenaeum. Eine Zeit- schrift von A. W. und Fr. Schlegel I, selected and edited by Curt Griitzmacher (Hamburg, 1969), p. 102.
15. In detailed studies, these coarse classifications prove problematic; e. g. , up until 1918, the Ger- man state, because of its feudal components, etc. , cannot be designated as wholly bourgeois.
16. Aside: I began writing down these notes on cynicism--that a critique of cynical reason would come of it, I did not know at the time--shortly after seeing an interview with the Jewish philosopher and political scientist, Hannah Arendt, which Giinther Gaus had made with her many years before and which was broadcast again on the fifth anniversary of her death in 1980. This conversation, a prime example of relaxed chatting and philosophizing in front of an audience and one of the few exam- ples of intelligence in television, reached its climax when Arendt told of her activity at the Jerusalem trial of the mass murderer Eichmann. One must have heard with one's own ears how this woman aver- red that in studying the many thousands of pages of the transcript of the proceedings, she repeatedly broke out into loud laughter about the peculiar stupidity that had exercised control over innumerable lives. In Arendt's self-aware confession there was something frivolous and kynical in the most precise sense of the word that, after an initial consternation, proved itself to be a liberating and sovereign expression of truth. When Arendt then, as an encore, even made the remark that she often had fun in exile, for she was young and improvising in uncertainty has its own attractions, then I also had to laugh, and with that, this book began to "write itself. "
17. In the People's Democracies, incidentally, we encounter a complementary swindle.
18. I have decided to place money cynicism under the secondary cynicisms. Exchange cynicism, which is treated in chapter 9, appears to me to be an excrescence of the coercions of power.
19. Mature-immature: These are not value judgments but scales of measurement for objective conditions for socialism. If socialism is defined as the liberation of social productivity from capitalist fetters, then late-capitalist relations must first be created that can then be superseded.
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20. See chapter 11. There I attempt to establish a rational dialectics under the concept of universal polemic. At the same time, I provide a critique of the Marxist use of dialectics.
21. This is not a plea for a "productivistic" ideology. Productivity is a multidimensional concept. Incidentally, the newer consciousness of political ecology presupposes the culmination of produc- tivism.
22. Dialectic--as dialectic of obstruction. That is the realistic basis of Adorno's Negative Di- alectics.
23. Kurt Keiler drew my attention to the story of the mouse's indirect suicide. It is contained in the final chapter of Boris Vian's novel, L'Ecume des jours (1946). Here I have changed it around some- what to fit Goliath's tale.
24. Dialectic of perfection: In what is perfect, there is still a flaw; the perfection of the beginning must therefore be excelled by that of the end --by passing through a disorder. This constitutes a basic figure of dialectical fantasies of movement: A first, "lost" summit is regained in the ascent to a second, higher summit.
25. The motif appears not only in the European tradition but also in Hindu and Buddhist legends.
26. Epiphanius is conspicuous as one of the first priests with an obsession about Mary. See The- odor Reik's interpretation, "Der heilige Epiphanius verschreibt sich. (Eine Fehlleistung vor sechzehn Jahrhunderten. )," in Reik, Der eigene und der fremde Gott. Zur Psychoanalyse der religiosen Ent- wicklung (Frankfurt, 1975), pp. 37-56.
27. It is disturbing to only hint at this theme, which would be a book in itself. I hope to be able to write more comprehensively and convincingly on this topic in a later work.
28. This will displease many a dyed-in-the-wool structuralist who is intent on joining in the dance around the golden calf of "language, discourse, and signifier. " The structuralist fetishism of the sig- nifier (signifiant) is no more clever
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than the "logocentric" fetishism of the signified (signifie).
29. See Sartre, L'Etre et le neant (1943), p. 84: "Through the lie, consciousness affirms that it exists by its nature as something hidden to the other, it exploits the ontological duality of ego and alien ego for its own advantage. It is different with mauvaise foi, if, as we have said, it is a lie to one- self. . . . That is, the duality of deceiver and deceived does not exist here. " The God of Cain would accordingly appear as the partner of a self-consciousness that can still deceive itself. Hence only God in genesis.
30. Nietzsche's neokynical "revaluing of all values" extends also to science by taking its objects more cheerfully "than they deserve. "
31. Is not critical rationalism a la Popper an offshoot of satirical fallibilism, mistakenly taken to be respectable?
32. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel remarks with regard to the "Kynical School": "There is nothing much to say about it. The kynics have little philosophical training and they did not manage to construct a system, a science. " As in most cases, here Hegel hits the nail deftly on the head, so that we only have to put it on its feet.
33. Accordingly, "respectable critique," critique that is an instrument and a methodology of the "dominant" theories, is from the start a contradiction in terms. Critique serves subversion, not con- struction. For this reason, fun in using one's intelligence can be generally destroyed in a surefire way. as happens today, by educating students "critically" by force. Then, what could have been their chance appears to them as their enemy.
34. It seems that Marx found his kynical-existential critic in H. Heine --hence the frictions be- tween them; hence also the curse "dog," which plays a striking role in their quarrels.
35. See Heine, Vorrede zu Salon / (1833), in Heine, Sdmtliche Schriften, vol. 3 (Munich, 1971), p. 10.
36. Heine, Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung (1833), in Sdmtliche Schriften, vol. 3 (Munich, 1971), p. 21.
