The ego stands before the monstrous demand: to
recognize
that it is also what it absolutely believes itself not to be.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
The official church, however, develops more and more into a parody of the state and into a coercive apparatus of wondrous proportions.
This schizophrenia was rationalized for millennia to come by the church's teacher, Saint Augustine, in his doctrine of the "two kingdoms," the divine and the tem- poral-which the Augustinian monk, Luther, continued to maintain.
That in this doctrine, Augustine applies the concept civitas to the religious community signals its political corruption.
It may seem curious but understandable that only with the modern movements toward democracy has a fundamental Christian thought again come into political play.
Western democracies are basically permanent parodies oi religious anarchism, peculiar mixtures of coercive apparatuses, and orders of freedom.
In them the rule applies: an illusory ego for everyone.
Herein lies at the same time the Catholic irony in the modern world. For Catholicism, with its dogma and its absolutist organization, protrudes into a liber- alized social order like an archaic hulk. It is still against the temporal order only
nthe sense that it maintains its perverse alliance with the centralized power of states, just as it had done with the western Roman Empire, northern European eudalism, and with the absolutism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. at is why today's central powers, which have at least learned to play the liberal S me a little, are somewhat embarrassed in their relations to the openly
42 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
authoritarian Vatican. Only with Mussolini's fascism could Catholicism be brought back into the loathsome modernity of the concordats.
This preamble is perhaps useful for understanding the point of departure for the later critique of morality. In the course of its history, Christianity repudiates its own moral structure, a structure of self-reflection superior to conventions. In a word, it itself becomes a conventional coercive organization. It thus degenerates from the free standpoint of metaethics, which, with a clear view of reality and with a love full of reason, says what one should do, to the trite standpoint of "Thou shalt. " Originally directed against Pharisaism, it has become through its political success the most hypocritical ideology the world has ever known.
This has been generally well known in Europe since the late Middle Ages. Since that time, the wolves in Christian sheep's clothing have been distinguished from the sheep and from those exceptional people who, in spite of Christianity, made something of the opportunities it offered. Since the end of the Middle Ages, that is, ever since written documents have recorded the voice of the people and their realism, a good proportion of the people have not let themselves be deceived about this split in morality. The lustful monk, the bellicose prelate, the cynical cardinal, and the corrupt pope are standard figures in popular realism. No "theo- retical" critique has been able to add anything essential to this satirical approach. The unmasking of the clergy belongs to Catholicism like laughter to satire. In laughter, all theory is anticipated.
The critique of morality, however, has not advanced as laughter, and this is connected with the role of Protestantism in the renovation of moralism. Catholi- cism can be content in the last analysis with satire on the clergy. Protestantism, by contrast, must push the critique of morality forward to the exposure of the lay- person, of the fake Christian, and consequently, of everyone. The French En- lightenment directs its moral satire against the personnel in the Catholic specta- cle, the nuns, priests, the all too pious virgins and all too holy prelates. Heinrich Heine's attacks too are directed against Catholicism and can remain satirical. All this is innocuous compared with the critique of the morality internalized by Prot- estant laypeople. How good-natured Diderot's cutting jokes are compared with the critique of Christianity exercised by the son of a Lutheran pastor, Friedrich Nietzsche! There is a clear difference of degree and also a healthy distance be- tween the Roman Catholic and the Protestant Germanic Enlightenment. For the special complications of religious existence are ultimately reserved in Catholi- cism for the clergy. In Protestant countries, the critique of morality necessarily leads to the self-exposure of whole societies and classes. In such countries, partic- ularly in northern Germany and North America, moral enlightenment is therefore unthinkable without sociomasochist components. A second fertile ground is emancipated Judaism--Marx, Heine, Freud, Adorno, among others--which, as Hannah Arendt has shown convincingly, retains a certain outsider viewpoint
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES D 43
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
? Simplicitas (genuine Simplicity) conquers Fraus (Fraud). Strasbourg Cathedral, window 45, inset 7.
predisposed toward critique even though it is strongly assimilated into bourgeois society.
The critique of morality pursues essentially three strategies: uncovering a sec- ond set of rules (double standard); inversion of being and illusion; and reduction to a realistic original motive.
The uncovering of the second set of rules is the simplest procedure, since those roles are immediately apparent through mere observation. Jesus said, "You will recognize them by their fruits. " The test of life is decisive. Enlightenment does nothing more than eavesdrop on likely wolves in their dressing rooms, where they put on and take off their sheep's clothing. One has only to hide behind a curtain or under the bed and watch what happens when the suspected wolves are alone together. In this, sexual unmasking has a special value: The abbot who has to hide
44 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
in the bedroom closet from the husband returning home; the upright family man who is seen in the dark street disappearing into the house with the red light; the prime minister who forgets his glasses in the brothel. "Can one also sort out grapes from the thorns, or figs from the thistles? " This "flagrant literature" could bear the title of one of the most well known "pornographic" books of eighteenth- century Enlightenment: Mirabeau's The Aired Curtain. In all these works, cri- tique did not yet deviate from a sensual, satirical approach.
In this tradition, moral duplicity itself was long regarded as a moral fact, as scandal. Only a cynical man-of-the-world attitude could go so far as to shrug its shoulders about it and soberly accept it as a mere fact. Worldly knowledge recog- nizes the moral world as a compositum of two worlds: There probably has to be a worldview for practical men who must be strong enough to get their hands dirty in political practice without getting dirty themselves, and even if they do, who cares? And a second worldview for youths, simpletons, women, and sensitive souls, for whom "purity" is just the right thing. One could call it a division of labor among temperaments, or the ugliness of the world; worldly knowledge knows how to calculate with both.
In the inversion of being and illusion, critique first separates the facade from the core, in order then to attack the latter as the actual exterior. The most impor- tant points of attack are provided by the nerve centers of Christian morality, in goodness as well as in evil: the ethics of compassion and altruism (the command- ment to love one's neighbor). Here again, enlightenment tries to outflank decep- tion with suspicion; indeed, it even denies, not unrealistically, the possibility of a perfect deception of a mentally alert enlightener: "One lies with the mouth, but with the grimace that one makes in doing so, one says the truth after all" (Nietzsche, Werke in zwei Banden, 4th ed. Munich, 1978, vol. II, p. 73). The "core" does not remain hidden. The "psychologist" (in Nietzsche's sense) sees the self-pity and resentment shining through the compassion that is shown. A form of egoism shines through every act of altruism. The psychology of the courtly age had an edge on bourgeois thinking with these observations. La Rochefoucauld had already skillfully uncovered the game of self-love (amour-propre) in all its masks of fellowship and morality. Following La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche's cri- tique of Christianity could achieve the stage of maturity, that is, the stage of utter nakedness. The more hollow the lie of altruism revealed itself to be in capitalist society, in which striving for profit and utilitariansm imposed themselves more and more brutally, the easier it was for critical, naturalistic thought to suggest that everyone is his own closest neighbor. But Schiller says: The upright man thinks of himself last (Wilhelm Tell). Nietzsche hears the nonsense ringing through Schiller's idealism; he speaks mercilessly of the "moral trumpeter from Sackingen. " The naturalist claims to know that everyone, whether upright or not, thinks of himself first and last. Indeed, every attempt to think of others "first" is bound to fail because thinking cannot leave its domicile in the ego. To deny the EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 45
Ferdinand Dietz, Falsitas, model of a garden figure for Seehof Castle near Bamberg.
primacy of self-love would mean to invert all relations; Nietzsche accuses Chris- tianity of this original falsification, this fundamental distortion, with disquieting sharpness. Bourgeois morality tries to maintain an illusion of altruism, whereas in all other areas bourgeois thinking has long since assumed a theoretical as well as an economic egocentrism. Nietzsche's critique --apart from the religious "poisoning" by his family --is a
reaction against the morally stifling atmosphere of the late nineteenth century
when international imperialisms, in the disguise of idealism and a worn out Chris-
tian bearing, were setting out to subjugate the rest of the world. The First World
War was secretly hoped for by countless contemporaries who expected a "moral
cleansing" from it. The edifying lies of Christianized imperialism had become too
5suffocating. The resonance Nietzsche enjoyed among imperialists had its moral
foundation in the cynicism of self-disinhibition; this cynicism makes a continuum between a subtle philosophy and a brutal politics possible for the first time. The night into confession is one of the characteristic movements of modern
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
conscious- ness, which tries to shake off the existential ambiguities of all morality. It is this flight that opens moral consciousness for cynicism on a broad front.
? The third strategy concludes the process of unmasking with the discovery of
46 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
an original motive. The French moralists called it self-love (amour-propre); Nietzsche called it the will to power. If Marxism spoke in psychological terms (which, according to its logic, it cannot do), it would call the original motive the striving for profit. But it argues in nonpsychological terms; the striving for profit falls in the last instance behind the character mask, so that the capitalist as an in- dividual may be as miserly or as selfless as he likes. For its part, psychoanalysis, having developed in the climate of Nietzsche and the neoromantics, encounters final motives that have nothing to do with altruism and idealism. Important in psy- choanalysis is the dialectical moment in the theory of drives, which assumes a two-pronged drive-nature: ego drives and sexual drives - i n the later version, life drive and death drive.
The exposure of morality becomes explosive when it is not exercised by pri- vate persons on private persons (or as admission in the context of a confessional relation). Since the eighteenth century, enlighteners have concerned themselves--as defenders of "true morality," whatever that may be--with the morality of those who rule. Here, for the first time, the critique of morality shows its political barbs. From this line of critique comes a whole literature about the gluttony of tyrants and the unmasking of the aristocracy's corruption. Schiller's Robbers and Lessing's Emilia Galotti are the best known examples of this genre.
The moralism in the bourgeois sense of decency put aristocratically refined im- moralism into the position of the politically accused. In substance, bourgeois moral literature already exercises a critique of cynicism. It describes states of consciousness in which unethical life (Unsittlichkeit) is self-reflective. But bour- geois thinking all too naively assumes it is possible to subordinate political power to moral concepts. It does not anticipate that one day, when it has itself come to power, it will end up in the same ambivalence. It has not yet realized that it is only a small step from taking moral offense to respectable hypocrisy. Heinrich Heine fought in vain against the narrow-minded moralism of bourgeois Enlight- enment. The German public could not follow his kynical-satirical protest.
One of the characteristics of German Enlightenment is that under the influence of petit-bourgeois Protestantism, it seldom mustered the power to be cheeky. Where the public itself did not resist, there were courts to exercise censorship. Only in the twentieth century has impudent cheekiness--the sociopsyetiological foundation of an enlightenment on the offensive that does not first ask the authori- ties whether it is welcome--created subcultural niches for itself in cabaret and in Bohemianism. It failed lamentably to ally itself with the main force of social op- position, the workers' movement. For in the latter, the political moral critique of the ruling strata was transformed into something that could easily be taken for petit-bourgeois morality.
The workers' movement rarely examined itself from the perspective of moral critique. Also, at first, its demands were so persuasive that only the political reac- tion could have an interest in suspecting something "behind" them. The complex EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 47
moral area of envy and social resentment was in fact treated instead from the per- soective of an antisocialistically inspired thinking, from Nietzsche to Schoeck. However, since the relative historical success of the worker's movement, its original ingenuousness has evaporated. It too has long since been infected by am- bivalences. But whether as "social partner" in the West, or as state power in the East, it does not want to acknowledge anything other than a purely political "will to power" in its own ranks. This is the reason for its moral weakness. Indeed, Marxism has denounced the impulses of Nietzsche and the depth psychologies with all its might, and every personal encounter with people from the Eastern sphere of influence proves how astoundingly prepsychological the mentality is in which they are kept, as if two of the greatest psychologists of modernity, Dostoy- evsky and Tolstoy, had not been Russians. The state based on force presupposes blind subjects. It does everything it can to keep powers of reflection that have long been available from becoming effective.
Critique of Transparency
Under this heading we discuss the discovery of the unconscious, which, as will be shown, represents a necessary consequence of the modern process of enlight- enment. One of the virtually reactionary myths of the twentieth century is that
6Sigmund Freud is the "discoverer of the unconscious. "
only falsifies historical truth but also burdens the history of enlightenment with an absurd and inexplicable asymmetry and retardation in the investigation of the unconscious. How could enlightenment have investigated consciousness criti- cally and empirically without encountering its "other side"?
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
More about real discovery of the unconsciousness: The beginnings of a sys- tematic treatment of the unconscious are to be found--self-evidently, I am tempted to say-in the classical Age of Enlightenment. As Henry F. Ellenberger has shown, the history of methodically controlled encounters with the uncon- scious began in the last third of the eighteenth century. At that time, in the middle of an obscurantist atmosphere (Cagliostro and others), a systematic experimenta- tion with healing through suggestion started and made its first practical break- through with Franz Anton Mesmer's alleged "animal magnetism," even if Mes-
ma failure. Enlightenment depth psychology was born in 1784, three years after ants Critique of Pure Reason, when a French aristocrat discovered so-called magnetic sleep, which came to be called hypnosis in the nineteenth century. The marquis of Puysegur, artillery officer of Strasburg, pupil of Mesmer, and lord
0eanifestation that seemed similar to sleepwalking and therefore was dubbed "arti- C1
al somnambulism. " This was a state of deep trance in which, paradoxically,
er s "fluidical" theory was regarded by his contemporaries and by posterity as
a large country estate in the village of Buzancy near Soisson, observed, during Philanthropic medical treatment of one of his peasants, a previously unknown The legend of Freud not
48 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
"1
? Les effets du magnetisme . . . animal. The blunderer Mesmer puts Parisian soci- ety along with its dogs into convulsive shock. Caricature of "Mesmermania" around 1780-85.
a peculiar clairvoyance and power of expression could be observed in the patient, which far exceeded what they were capable of when awake. What was particu- larly important in all this was the discovery that hypnotized persons proved to be "doctors of themselves" in that they could purposefully and clearly name the causes of their sicknesses about which they normally would not have been able to say anything at all. They uncovered "pathogenic secrets" in themselves, re- vealed hidden roots of their suffering, made suggestions about their own treat- ment, and, moreover, they not infrequently showed excellent character traits that the "surface personality" did not have.
The procedure had a grave disadvantage, for which reason, later enlighten- ment tried to repress this more than a century old "episode": After the procedure, the patients had forgotten everything they had experienced. Through the "posthypnotic amnesia," as it was later called, they were at the mercy of the mag- netizer, who could profit from their excursions into the unconscious. Still in a trance, they had to submit themselves to the healing commands of the magnetizer, who transposed the knowledge he had gained in the session about the patient's problematic into hypnotic instructions. These were supposed to remain effective in the unconscious for the patient's own good. Understandably, later enlighten- ment did not want to be involved with such procedures based entirely on authority and trust. After all, psychologically speaking, enlightenment always meant an ad- vance in the training of mistrust--in the construction of an ego concerned about self-assertion and control of reality. Freud's methodology can be summarized, in a way, as the attempt to keep the path to the unconscious open without using hyp-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 49
osis. One may consider whether, in Freud's procedure, a finesse born of mistrust ? not at work: Naive and reflected at the same time, it has recourse to the "offspring" and "representatives" of an unconsciousness otherwise thought of as closed. Whether this closedness is not also an effect of the mistrustful method is a question not posed here.
Like Mesmer, Puysegur knew that in the hypnotic treatments his personality was the actual agent, or more precisely, it was the intimate relation established between himself and the patient. This "rapport"--in more recent terminology, transference-served as the medium of a methodical and successful depth- psychological praxis. This procedure was continually developed and practiced in credible forms at least until the middle of the nineteenth century. Schopenhauer could still state that this discovery was possibly the most important in the entire history of the human mind, even if it at first posed more puzzles for reason than it resolved. Here was the real breakthrough to a secularized depth psychology that could free its knowledge from the conventional religious and pastoral study of souls (whose psychological competence was, in fact, confirmed by a nonsacral approach to the unconscious). The uncovering of the unconscious
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
touches on that area in which the counterintuitions of ancient esoterics meet with the structure of specifically modern knowledge, which in its own way is, in principle, con- structed counterintuitively. Of course, in the last instance, both must still seek the connection with "direct experience. "
All this says that at least since the late eighteenth century, the illusion of a transparent human self-consciousness has been systematically destroyed. Som- nambulant phenomena provide provocative proofs that consciousness does not know everything about itself. In the state of magnetic lucidity, a zone of knowl- edge speaks that remains inaccessible to surface consciousness. The old "rational psychology" with its theory of memoria, of the capacity to remember, is no longer compatible with this view of consciousness. In the process of enlightenment, hu- man beings become more and more deeply involved in the self-evidence of the enigma that "there is still something else there. " Like an internal gremlin, it manifests itself in such a way that it cannot be directly grasped. If one looks closely, it has already disappeared. It follows consciousness like a shadow or like its double, who never agrees to an encounter with the first ego. But it constantly follows the first ego without ever revealing its name. Its emotional mode of ap- pearance is the uncanny and the fear of going mad-two themes that are not the exclusive property of romanticism.
Hypnosis served the first depth psychology as the royal road to the uncon- scious. It was with regard to these phenomena that nineteenth-century enlighten- ment committed one of its worst mistakes. It misinterpreted the lively interest of reactionary, aristocratic, and religious circles in unconscious phenomena as evi- dence that all this was merely antienlightenment hocus-pocus. Indeed, Mes- merism and hypnosis soon sank into the spiritul underground and landed finally
50 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
in annual fairs and variety shows, where trickery prevails. Enlightenment was for a long time not clearheaded enough to comprehend that when antienlightenment shows such a strong interest in something it must be important. The later religious spiritualism and the carnival occultism were in fact antienlightenment in practice, but only because they obscured the realistic core of the matter: the breakthrough from memoria to the unconsciousness structure, from conscious experience to the unconscious "grammar of feelings. "
From the start, the bourgeois-positivistic fraction of enlightenment was un- comfortable about the unpredictable, subversive dimensions of the new category, the unconscious. With it, the motif of critical self-reflection was introduced into civilization in a way that could not please those who held themselves to be the representatives of civilization. If every ego is underlaid by an unconscious, then that is the end of the self-satisfaction of a consciousness that thinks it knows itself, and thus knows how to value itself. The "unconscious" touched on the cultural narcissism of all social classes. At the same time, its discovery dissolves the basis of all previous philosophies of consciousness. From now on, the word "naivete" gains a new, more unfathomable meaning, because the abyss above which it hovers is more clearly seen.
Something of this sort must have been in Freud's mind when he composed his oft-quoted aphorism about the "three mortifications" that human self-esteem has had to suffer in the process of modern research: the Copernican revolution, which denied the earth's place in the center of the universe; the Darwinian theory of evo- lution, which included human beings in the chain of animal species and claimed for them precarious kinship with the great apes; and finally, psychoanalysis, which shattered the naive opinion that every ego knows itself best because of its immediate proximity. From now on, everyone is furthest from himself. Under all rationality and all consciousness there extends a vast space of irrationality and unconscious programming that everywhere interferes deceptively with conscious speech and action. The Freudian concept of "rationalization" contains an enor- mous irony: with the title ratio, those explanations and pseudojustifications are now designated with which consciousness covers up its self-delusions. The ratio- nal appears as the lid on private and collective irrationality.
Today, the further course, particularly the reorientation of depth- psychological research from its beginnings in hypnosis to the interpretation of dreams and the later branching out of various schools of depth psychology can be assumed to be largely known. Freud designated the dream as his via regia to the unconscious. Through it he developed a "technique of reading" that later proved useful in many other manifestations such as neurotic symptoms, sexual disturbances, and artistic creations. Even manifestations such as humor and jokes, accidents, and the choice of partners are now ordered in a relational system structured by the unconscious. The extension of these dynamic interpretations from psychopathology to everyday cultural phenomena demonstrates the full im-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES Q 51
plications of the critique. Besieged transparency must now accept that behind ev- ery possible fact of consciousness, dynamic causal rules of the unconscious are uncovered that influence its form. Bourgeois (and also proletarian) idealism ob- served bitterly that psychoanalysis wanted to "encroach" on the artist's soul and the work of art, that somehow the psychodynamics of a convoluted mother com- plex was allegedly at work in Goethe's lyrics: For idealism that was
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
worse than bolshevism. The Bolshevists themselves saw in everything that was about to shake their facade of consciousness nothing other than the last scream of bour- geois decadence.
Behind these attitudes toward psychoanalysis there is the desperate defense of the transparency of consciousness, that is, of the claim that the ego knows itself better than anyone else does and is master of the rules of its own exercise of rea- son. For once one accepts through existential self-reflection the reality of one's own unconscious, then, after this change of viewpoint, not only do sexual repres- sions and traumatic scars break open, but also, in the course of self-experience, the inner "shadows" collectively become longer and longer. The entire existential relation to "negativity" must be revised, and, with logical, political, and emo- tional pain, the negative self can emerge, with its sores, its destructiveness, and its ugliness.
The ego stands before the monstrous demand: to recognize that it is also what it absolutely believes itself not to be. The more conventional conscious- ness is, the more embittered will be its refusal to look into this mirror. Thus the resistance against dynamic psychology comes especially from those who believe they have something to lose through "analysis. " They shout loudest of all that they "don't need all that stuff. "
The psychoanalytic technique of reading has become very widespread in West- ern civilization. Especially in the United States over the past decades it has be- come dreadfully trivialized and turned into a social game in which the winner is the one who detects the most ulterior motives and neurotic hidden meanings be- hind everyday appearances in one's own life, as well as in the lives of others. This chronic analysis of oneself and others, which has become something of a sport, leads to at least two false attitudes. It leads, first, to hopeless intellectualization of psychoanalysis, which has thereby become a refuge for emotional coldness and symptomatic rationalism that has found in it the right means to remain entirely unchanged while giving the impression of being something else. Second it leads to an overemphasis of the infantile, which can be subtly reinforced by being con- tinually linked with the present. There is no guarantee that the "dialectic" works positively and that every regression will be canceled out by a corresponding progression. Woody Allen's urban neurotic seems to have gotten off relatively lightly. Psychoanalysis is certainly not a priori, as Karl Kraus has sarcastically remarked, the illness that pretends to be its own cure; but it can easily become so since it continually tends to underrestimate the power of the neurosis that would rather gaze into the mirror than resolutely face the here and now.
52 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
By no means does psychoanalysis encounter everywhere suffering individuals who want to be healed at any cost. Their sufferings fit into a dynamics of self- maintenance in a very complicated way. This dynamics cooperates with the am- bivalence of the healing hand that, for its part, can often only be effective when it stands with one foot on the side of the suffering against which it seems to strug- gle. Here begins a drawn-out game of artfulness - on both sides of the therapeutic relationship. One often does not know whether it is not actually the fish who catches the angler.
The category of the unconscious (better, of the "unconscious structure") is probably the most successful figure of thought in the human sciences of our cen- tury. With this self-reflective concept, the most significant advances in basic re- search into the human being and human civilization have been made. Without this concept, modern anthropology would be just as unthinkable as structural mythol- ogy, modern theory of grammar just as unthinkable as behavioral physiology and the theory of human biograms. With regard to unconscious regulating mechan- isms of human culture and social as well as individual behavior, the human sciences open up an unparalleled reflective attack on everything that, in the hu- man sphere, is "hidden programming" and not conscious behavior.
Here, the most powerful dawning of reflection in the history of human con- sciousness is taking place despite the inclination of some researchers to empha- size the invariance and unchangeability of unconscious structures. Every transpo- sition into consciousness, every reflection, strikes, no matter how gently, on the "rock of the unconscious. " And only in the light of consciousness can it be clarified where enlightenment can be a school of change, and where it can demon- strate its insightfulness by letting happen what cannot be changed.
The psychology of early enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the later schools of dynamic psychology, and all other systems concerned with uncon- scious structures in the area of human orders have made available such a powerful potential for reflection that it will be a long time before we will be able to see how human societies change when they begin to live continually with such reflecting forces. All these disciplines have built up a methodical network of self- experience that even the world religions have been scarcely able to create, with the exception of those great, meditative schools of metareligiosity whose aim has been to pro- mote consciousness-raising and that, today, significantly, are approaching the reflective psychologies: Zen Buddhism, Sufism, Tantra, Yoga, and others. The only question is whether the political central powers and the energies of repres- sion and divisiveness will succeed, on the macro- as well as the microlevel, in chaining the powers of conscious life that already have been half-awakened from slumber. Neoconservatism has long since seen the gathering danger for the repressive capacities of states and capitals; it senses that the time of conscious- nesses has come. Its strength lies in the fact that people have, in addition to a realistic fear of
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
war and crisis, a "fear of freedom" (Erich Fromm) -- fear of them-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES U 53
elves and their own possibilities. It is this fear that makes them listen to the in- idious denunciation of the "dear ego" (Hans Maier) and of "self-realization" as ism (j0hn Paul II during his visit to Germany, particularly in his sermon in Altotting).
Critique of Natural Illusion
Every unmasking critique knows itself to be in an intimate relation with what is "really the case" below the surface. On all sides, human consciousness is invited to deceive itself and to be content with mere illusion. For enlightenment, there- fore, it is always the second look that is decisive because it overcomes the first impression. If things were generally as they immediately seem, investigation and science would be superfluous. There would be nothing to look for, look through, or look into. But science and enlightenment have a detective-like relation to real- ity. The tension between the search and what is given is particularly radicalized in the case of human and social phenomena. For here, everything that is "given" (gegeberi) is simultaneously in a certain way only "ostensible" (vorgeblich) and artificial. Human life moves a priori in a natural artificiality and an artificial natu- ralness (Plessner). This realization is part of the great achievement of enlighten- ment's reflection on culture. It shows that human beings, as they are, live "unnatu- rally. " What was natural in them was "lost" and became "distorted" and "misshapen" through civilization. Human individuals are never in the "center of their beings," but rather stand beside themselves as persons other than who they "really" are or could be. These insights are today common knowledge in philo- sophical anthropology. In the meantime, they have been morally neutralized and have become detached structural viewpoints. At the beginning of this discovery, however, the thought of unnaturalness possessed enormous value for moral at- tacks. Its explosive power was great as long as the belief in a "good Nature" seemed to be unshaken. One of the battle cries of bourgeois society during its up- rising against the aristocratic world order was: "Nature! Nature! "
One can see the consequences of this discovery of unnaturalness in Rousseau's critique of human beings in society. It possesses both a critical-negative and a utopian-positive side; one could also say: a destructive politics and a constructive pedagogy. Rousseau diagnosed a total degeneration, a complete fall of humanity
rom "Nature" in the society of the eighteenth century. All spontaneity had been
tnrou
^naturalized
gh convention, all naivete had been replaced by finesse, all d been glossed over by facades of social intercourse, etc. Rousseau's ye tor these things was excessively sharp in a way that only an offended bour- geois perception, wanting to register its rights to life, could be in an aristocrati- y fabricated social order. The social theater of the ancien regime was becom-
g more transparent and absurd every day. Whereas the aristocracy treated its
"cerity
na
or
m of life with irony, bourgeois cultural values (Gemutskultur) treated the
54 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
artificial convolutions in that form of life with disgust. Consequently, Rousseau's critique met with tremendous approval from his contemporaries. In his depiction of social denaturalization, not only did the up and coming bourgeoisie feel confirmed in its most elementary social feeling, but also the more sensitive part of the aristocratic intelligentsia knew itself in the main to be correctly portrayed in this critique. Here the universal law of "sensitive critique" applies: The critique is accepted by those who in any case are less touched by it, but its main targets seem to be looking into a blind mirror that says absolutely nothing to them. The agreement of intelligent aristocrats with Rousseau's critique was an important cat- alyst for their philanthropic activity, with which they tried to buy off their guilty consciences about benefiting from the status quo. The first rational depth psychol- ogy, as mentioned earlier, was indeed an offshoot of aristocratic Rousseauianism. What came to light in its healing procedure could be taken without further ado as proof of the inner "healing powers of nature. " The possible destructiveness of the unconscious and the "dark side of nature" first came to the notice of the follow- ing generation of romantics and were interpreted in an increasingly conservative- pessimistic way (see E. T. A. Hoffmann, Joseph von Eichendorff, and many others).
A political stance follows directly from this analysis: in the name of the natural against the system of compulsions, on the side of the bourgeois-honest heart against aristocratic-artful deceptiveness, on the side of the free social contract against the old feudal relations based on coercion. The new society wanted to be an order in which all agreed, to their mutual advantage, on a peaceful and diligent life together according to a model based on nature and mutual sympathy.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
As har- monious and affable as that sounded, some representatives of the ancien regime were still sensitive enough to hear the insurrection of hell in this program. With horrified satisfaction, conservatives saw the French Revolution degenerate into terror and war. Nothing since then has nourished the conservative image of hu- manity more strongly. It thinks it knows that human nature, set loose here and now, deserves no optimism or glowing phrases. Conservative thinking in this in- stance behaves positivistically. Without first asking about contexts, it notes that, all too often, human beings behave egoistically, destructively, greedily, un- wisely, and asocially. Indeed, for this reason, criminality was and is so extremely important for all kinds of conservatism, because "short-circuited thinking" finds in it the final proof for a pessimistic view of humanity that, in turn, provides the basis for an authoritarian, strictly disciplining politics. From this viewpoint, there "exist" in nature criminals, idiots, malcontents, egoists, and rebels, just as there exist trees, cows, kings, laws, and heavenly bodies. The Christian doctrine of original sin here joins forces with the conservative, pessimistic understanding of nature. According to this doctrine, human beings, simply because they are born of woman, live in the world as defective creatures.
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 55
Rousseau's philosophy sees all this in advance. It knows that one has to get around pessimism by demonstrating how human beings become what they are so- cially. That there are human beings who behave nastily, greedily, unwisely, de- structively, etc. , proves nothing about their essential being. Here, in Rousseau, we find perhaps the most important figure of thought in moral-political enlighten- ment: the theory of the innocent victim.
The evidence introduced for political pessimism; the criminal, the lunatic, and the asocial individual, in a word, the second-rate citizen --these are not by nature as one finds them now but have been made so by society. It is said that they have never had a chance to be as they would be according to their nature, but were forced into the situation in which they find themselves through poverty, coercion, and ignorance. They are victims of society.
This defense against political pessimism regarding human nature is at first con- vincing. It possesses the superiority of dialectical thinking over positivistic think- ing. It transforms moral states and qualities into processes. Brutal people do not "exist," only their brutalization; criminality does not "exist," only criminalization; stupidity does not "exist," only stupefaction; self-seeking does not "exist," only training in egoism; there are no second-rate citizens, only victims of patroniza- tion. What political positivism takes to be nature is in reality falsified nature: the suppression of opportunity for human beings.
Rousseau knew of two aids who could illustrate his point of view, two classes of human beings who lived before civilization and, consequently, before perver- sion: the noble savage and the child. Enlightenment literature develops two of its most intimate passions around these two figures: ethnology and pedagogy. To the present day nothing has essentially changed in this approach. Literarily, this dou- ble passion precipitates two extensive genres: exotic travel literature and later ethnology on the one hand, and the educational novel and the literature on peda- gogy and child development on the other. The primitive peoples, about whom the European explorers from Columbus to Bougainville and Captain Cook reported, provide an enlightenment, which was gradually becoming more political, the ur- gently needed evidence for its view that, roughly stated, things can "proceed differently" --peacefully, reasonably, humanely, sensuously, without aristoc- racy, without war, without exploitation, without wigs, without lettres de cachet. The noble savages in the South Seas are like an Archimedean point through which one can playfully dislodge the claim of European social orders to be ordained by God and therefore unexcellable. Something different does exist; at the same time, it is better. What is reasonable can thus also become real. That is all enlighten- ment is trying to say.
From this moment on, the child becomes a political object--to a certain extent, the living security deposit of enlightenment. The child is the "noble savage" in one's own house. Through appropriate education care must be taken in the future
56 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
that innocent children are not made into the same artificial social cripples the previous system produced. Children are already what the new bourgeois humans believe they want to become. Enlightenment was not the first to politicize peda- gogy; it has discovered, however, that children always, and everywhere, are the future security of existing relations. But now children are something more: They carry bourgeois hopes for "another world," for a more humane society. It almost appears as if for the first time a new, politically tinged form of parental love has been developing, concentrated in the wish that one's own children should finally have a better life. Only in a society that felt the shake-up and that committed itself totally to the dynamics of world change and progress can such a form of parental love prosper. A new amalgam of love and "ambition for the child" is thus formed, something that would be meaningless in a stable, stagnant society "without prospects. " Peasant societies do not envision "careers" for their children; they see no prospects other than that of life as a peasant. Ambition in the aristocracy is directed not for the benefit of the child but for that of the aristocratic lineage itself, the family. Bourgeois children are the first to have an anthropological and politi- cal mission.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
How the traditional directing of ambitions in the bourgeois parent- child relationship is currently changing could be the topic of a special investi-
gation.
Of course, Rousseau's optimistic naturalism has a very vulnerable point. The beneficence of nature is something that can be doubted even when one does not hold conservative views. In the beginning things were not all that idyllic; genesis (Ursprung) is downright severe and difficult. It soon becomes clear that the image of origin cannot be understood historically because, on closer investigation, one finds that war, inequality, and harsh conditions of life are widespread in an unyielding nature; there are exceptions but they can scarcely be interpreted as ori- gin and rule. Since then, the question about "good origins" becomes the crux for enlightenment. It becomes more and more clear that this idea of origin has not a temporal but a Utopian reference. The Good is still nowhere to be found, except in the wishful human spirit and in daydreams, which unerringly aim at something even though it does not yet exist. Thus, critical naturalism can survive only when it withers away and reawakes as the "spirit of Utopia"; the origin then serves as an end-vision (Bloch).
Naturalistic thinking, in fact, fundamentally changed its function in the nine- teenth century. The natural sciences provided a concept of nature that was any- thing but idyllic. Especially since Darwin, the bourgeois order, having become imperialistic, used the beast of prey as its political emblem. Nature was used as justification by those who needed to legitimate acts of violence, not by those who spoke for peace. The heraldry of the old aristocracy had also shown a striking sympathy for predatory animals: the eagle, falcon, lion, bear. Long before Rous- seauianism, and in substance opposed to it, there was an aristocratic naturalism
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 57
that was renewed in the bourgeois order when it became powerful as political "bi- ologism. " Nothing can show more clearly that Rousseauian naturalism had been only a momentary stylization of the conception of nature on which a general the- ory of liberation could not support itself securely. Hesitatingly, therefore, en- lightenment began to take leave of the noble savage and the innocent child, a part- ing that, of course, can never lead to a complete break (Bruch) with these "allies. " The child and the savage are beings who have a claim on the sympathy of those who remain true to the idea of enlightenment.
Impulses for self-reflection in the great civilizations come from ethnology even today. Thus, behind the conspicuous present-day cult around the American Indian, there is a good deal of pondering about ideas of nature and the maximal size of societies that want to maintain a reasonable relation to themselves as well as to their environment. And from child psychology, there is still today a steady stream of valuable impulses for reflection on the behavioral patterns in societies that suffer from their unresolved childhoods.
What has remained undamaged in Rousseau's critique is the indispensable ex- posure of a supposedly evil "Nature" as a social fiction. This remains important in the purportedly natural inferiorities concerning race, intelligence, and sex and sexual behavior. When conservatives and reactionaries refer to "Nature" to justify their assertions about the inferiority of woman, the lesser capacities of dark races, the innate intelligence of children from the upper social strata, and the sickness of homosexuality, they have usurped naturalism. It remains the task of critique to refute this. Ultimately critique must at least be able to show that what "Nature" gives us has to be recognized as neutral and nontendentious so that every value judgment and every tendency can without doubt be understood as a cultural phenomenon. Even if Rousseau's "good Nature" has been discredited, he has at least taught us not to accept "bad Nature" as an excuse for social oppression.
However, when one speaks of the "victims of society," the "artful dimension"
quickly comes into the picture again. In the concept of the "victim of society,"
there is a reflective contradiction that can be misused in many ways. Already in
Rousseau, a dubious artfulness is observed that is supposed to conceal a double
standard. That he combined nature and childhood in a new idea of education and,
at
? ng been understood as a discrepancy between theory and practice. Rousseau
was a master of an artful reflexivity that skillfully found fault with others on every
Point but in itself always discovered only the purest of intentions. On the white
Page of this feeling of innocence, the famous confessions were written. In this
osturing there was something that other determined enlighteners, above all
einrich Heine, could not and did not want to follow-even though they do not
the same time, denied his own children and stuck them in an orphanage, has
a v e an terenlightenment.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ything to do with the notorious defamation of Rousseau by the entire coun-
58 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
The vulnerable point in the victim theory is, again, the self-reification of con- sciousness, the establishment of a new naively artful position. This can serve or be felt, depending on the circumstances, as a diversionary trick, as a technique of extortion, or as indirect aggression. Psychology is familiar with the "eternal victim," who exploits this position for disguised aggressions. Also belonging to this category, in a broader sense, are those permanent losers as well as medical and political hypochondriacs who lament that conditions are so terrible that it is a great sacrifice on their part not to kill themselves or emigrate. On the German Left, not least of all under the influence of the sociologized schema of the victim, a certain type of renegade has emerged who feels that it is a dirty trick to have to live in this land without summer and without oppositional forces. Nobody can say that such a viewpoint does not know what it is talking about. Its mistake is that it remains blind to itself. For the accusation becomes bound to misery and magnifies it under the subterfuge of unsuspecting critical observations. With the
obstinacy of a Sophist, in aggressive self-reification, many a "critical" conscious- ness refuses to become healthier than the sick whole.
A second possibility of misusing the victim schema has been experienced by dedicated helpers and social workers when, guided by the best intentions, they try to make prisoners, the homeless, alcoholics, marginal youth, and others aware that they are the "victims of society" who have simply failed to offer enough resistance. The helpers often encounter sensitive resistance to their attempts and have to make it clear to themselves just how much discrimination is present in their own "good will. " The self-esteem and need for esteem in the disadvantaged often forcefully defends itself against the demand for self-reification made on them by every political kind of assistance that argues in this way. Precisely those who are worst off feel a spark of self-assertion, whose extinction would be
justifiably feared if those concerned began to think of themselves as victims, as non-egos. To preserve the dignity of "poor bastards," they alone and on their own accord can say that they are poor bastards. Those who try to put such words into their mouths insult them, no matter how good their intentions may be. It is in the nature of liberating reflection that it cannot be forced. It answers only to indirect assistance.
From this vantage point, the perspective on a life spent in total, unavoidable benightedness becomes possible. Theodor Adorno sketched this when he spoke of an unhappy consciousness in which the down-and-outers inflict on themselves a second time that wrong that circumstances perpetrated against them in order to be able to bear it. Here, an inner reflection takes place that looks like a parody of freedom. From the outside, the phenomenon resembles satisfaction and would, if addressed, probably also refer to itself that way. In memory of his mother, Pe- ter Handke has found a tender formulation in which the sadness of a loving and helpless knowledge lays down arms before reality: "self-contented unhappiness. '
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 59
Enlightenment has neither a chance nor a right to disturb the world's slumber if it looks like this.
Critique of the Illusion of Privacy
Where is this ego then, if it is neither in the body nor in the soul?
Blaise Pascal
The last great attack of critique against illusion aims at the position of the ego be- tween nature and society. We know from the line of thought in the preceding cri- tiques that knowledge (Erkenntnis) does not have to do with human nature pure and simple, but with nature as conception, nature as fabrication, with unnatural nature. In that which is "given in nature" there is always something "given in addi- tion" by human beings. The "labor" of reflection is summarized in this insight. Modernity establishes itself in our minds in the shape of counterintuitive ex- periences that break through naivete and exercise a peculiar compulsion on us to increase our intelligence.
Ideologically, the reference to "Nature" is always significant because it
produces an artificial naivete and ends up as voluntary naivete. It covers up the
human contribution and avers that things are by nature, and from their origins,
in that "order" in which our representations, which are always influenced by "in-
terests," depict them. The rudiments for ideologies of order are hidden in all
naturalisms. Every naturalism begins as involuntary naivete. Initially, we cannot
help thinking that the "order of things" is an objective order. For the first glance
falls on the things and not on the "eyeglasses. " In the work of enlightenment, this
first innocence becomes irretrievably lost. Enlightenment leads to the loss of nai-
vete and it furthers the collapse of objectivism through a gain in self-experience.
It effects an irreversible awakening and, expressed pictorially, executes the turn
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
to the eyeglasses, i. e. , to one's own rational apparatus. Once this consciousness
of the eyeglasses has been awakened in a culture, the old naivete loses its charm,
becomes defensive, and is transformed into narrow-mindedness, which is intent
on remaining as it is. The mythology of the Greeks is still enchanting; that of fas-
cism is only stale and shameless. In the first myth, a step toward an interpretation
of the world was taken; in simulated naivete, an artful stupefaction (Verdum-
mung) is at work--the predominant method of self-integration in advanced social 7
orders. Such an observation touches only superficially on the role of mythology in modernity.
Herein lies at the same time the Catholic irony in the modern world. For Catholicism, with its dogma and its absolutist organization, protrudes into a liber- alized social order like an archaic hulk. It is still against the temporal order only
nthe sense that it maintains its perverse alliance with the centralized power of states, just as it had done with the western Roman Empire, northern European eudalism, and with the absolutism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. at is why today's central powers, which have at least learned to play the liberal S me a little, are somewhat embarrassed in their relations to the openly
42 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
authoritarian Vatican. Only with Mussolini's fascism could Catholicism be brought back into the loathsome modernity of the concordats.
This preamble is perhaps useful for understanding the point of departure for the later critique of morality. In the course of its history, Christianity repudiates its own moral structure, a structure of self-reflection superior to conventions. In a word, it itself becomes a conventional coercive organization. It thus degenerates from the free standpoint of metaethics, which, with a clear view of reality and with a love full of reason, says what one should do, to the trite standpoint of "Thou shalt. " Originally directed against Pharisaism, it has become through its political success the most hypocritical ideology the world has ever known.
This has been generally well known in Europe since the late Middle Ages. Since that time, the wolves in Christian sheep's clothing have been distinguished from the sheep and from those exceptional people who, in spite of Christianity, made something of the opportunities it offered. Since the end of the Middle Ages, that is, ever since written documents have recorded the voice of the people and their realism, a good proportion of the people have not let themselves be deceived about this split in morality. The lustful monk, the bellicose prelate, the cynical cardinal, and the corrupt pope are standard figures in popular realism. No "theo- retical" critique has been able to add anything essential to this satirical approach. The unmasking of the clergy belongs to Catholicism like laughter to satire. In laughter, all theory is anticipated.
The critique of morality, however, has not advanced as laughter, and this is connected with the role of Protestantism in the renovation of moralism. Catholi- cism can be content in the last analysis with satire on the clergy. Protestantism, by contrast, must push the critique of morality forward to the exposure of the lay- person, of the fake Christian, and consequently, of everyone. The French En- lightenment directs its moral satire against the personnel in the Catholic specta- cle, the nuns, priests, the all too pious virgins and all too holy prelates. Heinrich Heine's attacks too are directed against Catholicism and can remain satirical. All this is innocuous compared with the critique of the morality internalized by Prot- estant laypeople. How good-natured Diderot's cutting jokes are compared with the critique of Christianity exercised by the son of a Lutheran pastor, Friedrich Nietzsche! There is a clear difference of degree and also a healthy distance be- tween the Roman Catholic and the Protestant Germanic Enlightenment. For the special complications of religious existence are ultimately reserved in Catholi- cism for the clergy. In Protestant countries, the critique of morality necessarily leads to the self-exposure of whole societies and classes. In such countries, partic- ularly in northern Germany and North America, moral enlightenment is therefore unthinkable without sociomasochist components. A second fertile ground is emancipated Judaism--Marx, Heine, Freud, Adorno, among others--which, as Hannah Arendt has shown convincingly, retains a certain outsider viewpoint
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES D 43
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
? Simplicitas (genuine Simplicity) conquers Fraus (Fraud). Strasbourg Cathedral, window 45, inset 7.
predisposed toward critique even though it is strongly assimilated into bourgeois society.
The critique of morality pursues essentially three strategies: uncovering a sec- ond set of rules (double standard); inversion of being and illusion; and reduction to a realistic original motive.
The uncovering of the second set of rules is the simplest procedure, since those roles are immediately apparent through mere observation. Jesus said, "You will recognize them by their fruits. " The test of life is decisive. Enlightenment does nothing more than eavesdrop on likely wolves in their dressing rooms, where they put on and take off their sheep's clothing. One has only to hide behind a curtain or under the bed and watch what happens when the suspected wolves are alone together. In this, sexual unmasking has a special value: The abbot who has to hide
44 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
in the bedroom closet from the husband returning home; the upright family man who is seen in the dark street disappearing into the house with the red light; the prime minister who forgets his glasses in the brothel. "Can one also sort out grapes from the thorns, or figs from the thistles? " This "flagrant literature" could bear the title of one of the most well known "pornographic" books of eighteenth- century Enlightenment: Mirabeau's The Aired Curtain. In all these works, cri- tique did not yet deviate from a sensual, satirical approach.
In this tradition, moral duplicity itself was long regarded as a moral fact, as scandal. Only a cynical man-of-the-world attitude could go so far as to shrug its shoulders about it and soberly accept it as a mere fact. Worldly knowledge recog- nizes the moral world as a compositum of two worlds: There probably has to be a worldview for practical men who must be strong enough to get their hands dirty in political practice without getting dirty themselves, and even if they do, who cares? And a second worldview for youths, simpletons, women, and sensitive souls, for whom "purity" is just the right thing. One could call it a division of labor among temperaments, or the ugliness of the world; worldly knowledge knows how to calculate with both.
In the inversion of being and illusion, critique first separates the facade from the core, in order then to attack the latter as the actual exterior. The most impor- tant points of attack are provided by the nerve centers of Christian morality, in goodness as well as in evil: the ethics of compassion and altruism (the command- ment to love one's neighbor). Here again, enlightenment tries to outflank decep- tion with suspicion; indeed, it even denies, not unrealistically, the possibility of a perfect deception of a mentally alert enlightener: "One lies with the mouth, but with the grimace that one makes in doing so, one says the truth after all" (Nietzsche, Werke in zwei Banden, 4th ed. Munich, 1978, vol. II, p. 73). The "core" does not remain hidden. The "psychologist" (in Nietzsche's sense) sees the self-pity and resentment shining through the compassion that is shown. A form of egoism shines through every act of altruism. The psychology of the courtly age had an edge on bourgeois thinking with these observations. La Rochefoucauld had already skillfully uncovered the game of self-love (amour-propre) in all its masks of fellowship and morality. Following La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche's cri- tique of Christianity could achieve the stage of maturity, that is, the stage of utter nakedness. The more hollow the lie of altruism revealed itself to be in capitalist society, in which striving for profit and utilitariansm imposed themselves more and more brutally, the easier it was for critical, naturalistic thought to suggest that everyone is his own closest neighbor. But Schiller says: The upright man thinks of himself last (Wilhelm Tell). Nietzsche hears the nonsense ringing through Schiller's idealism; he speaks mercilessly of the "moral trumpeter from Sackingen. " The naturalist claims to know that everyone, whether upright or not, thinks of himself first and last. Indeed, every attempt to think of others "first" is bound to fail because thinking cannot leave its domicile in the ego. To deny the EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 45
Ferdinand Dietz, Falsitas, model of a garden figure for Seehof Castle near Bamberg.
primacy of self-love would mean to invert all relations; Nietzsche accuses Chris- tianity of this original falsification, this fundamental distortion, with disquieting sharpness. Bourgeois morality tries to maintain an illusion of altruism, whereas in all other areas bourgeois thinking has long since assumed a theoretical as well as an economic egocentrism. Nietzsche's critique --apart from the religious "poisoning" by his family --is a
reaction against the morally stifling atmosphere of the late nineteenth century
when international imperialisms, in the disguise of idealism and a worn out Chris-
tian bearing, were setting out to subjugate the rest of the world. The First World
War was secretly hoped for by countless contemporaries who expected a "moral
cleansing" from it. The edifying lies of Christianized imperialism had become too
5suffocating. The resonance Nietzsche enjoyed among imperialists had its moral
foundation in the cynicism of self-disinhibition; this cynicism makes a continuum between a subtle philosophy and a brutal politics possible for the first time. The night into confession is one of the characteristic movements of modern
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
conscious- ness, which tries to shake off the existential ambiguities of all morality. It is this flight that opens moral consciousness for cynicism on a broad front.
? The third strategy concludes the process of unmasking with the discovery of
46 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
an original motive. The French moralists called it self-love (amour-propre); Nietzsche called it the will to power. If Marxism spoke in psychological terms (which, according to its logic, it cannot do), it would call the original motive the striving for profit. But it argues in nonpsychological terms; the striving for profit falls in the last instance behind the character mask, so that the capitalist as an in- dividual may be as miserly or as selfless as he likes. For its part, psychoanalysis, having developed in the climate of Nietzsche and the neoromantics, encounters final motives that have nothing to do with altruism and idealism. Important in psy- choanalysis is the dialectical moment in the theory of drives, which assumes a two-pronged drive-nature: ego drives and sexual drives - i n the later version, life drive and death drive.
The exposure of morality becomes explosive when it is not exercised by pri- vate persons on private persons (or as admission in the context of a confessional relation). Since the eighteenth century, enlighteners have concerned themselves--as defenders of "true morality," whatever that may be--with the morality of those who rule. Here, for the first time, the critique of morality shows its political barbs. From this line of critique comes a whole literature about the gluttony of tyrants and the unmasking of the aristocracy's corruption. Schiller's Robbers and Lessing's Emilia Galotti are the best known examples of this genre.
The moralism in the bourgeois sense of decency put aristocratically refined im- moralism into the position of the politically accused. In substance, bourgeois moral literature already exercises a critique of cynicism. It describes states of consciousness in which unethical life (Unsittlichkeit) is self-reflective. But bour- geois thinking all too naively assumes it is possible to subordinate political power to moral concepts. It does not anticipate that one day, when it has itself come to power, it will end up in the same ambivalence. It has not yet realized that it is only a small step from taking moral offense to respectable hypocrisy. Heinrich Heine fought in vain against the narrow-minded moralism of bourgeois Enlight- enment. The German public could not follow his kynical-satirical protest.
One of the characteristics of German Enlightenment is that under the influence of petit-bourgeois Protestantism, it seldom mustered the power to be cheeky. Where the public itself did not resist, there were courts to exercise censorship. Only in the twentieth century has impudent cheekiness--the sociopsyetiological foundation of an enlightenment on the offensive that does not first ask the authori- ties whether it is welcome--created subcultural niches for itself in cabaret and in Bohemianism. It failed lamentably to ally itself with the main force of social op- position, the workers' movement. For in the latter, the political moral critique of the ruling strata was transformed into something that could easily be taken for petit-bourgeois morality.
The workers' movement rarely examined itself from the perspective of moral critique. Also, at first, its demands were so persuasive that only the political reac- tion could have an interest in suspecting something "behind" them. The complex EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 47
moral area of envy and social resentment was in fact treated instead from the per- soective of an antisocialistically inspired thinking, from Nietzsche to Schoeck. However, since the relative historical success of the worker's movement, its original ingenuousness has evaporated. It too has long since been infected by am- bivalences. But whether as "social partner" in the West, or as state power in the East, it does not want to acknowledge anything other than a purely political "will to power" in its own ranks. This is the reason for its moral weakness. Indeed, Marxism has denounced the impulses of Nietzsche and the depth psychologies with all its might, and every personal encounter with people from the Eastern sphere of influence proves how astoundingly prepsychological the mentality is in which they are kept, as if two of the greatest psychologists of modernity, Dostoy- evsky and Tolstoy, had not been Russians. The state based on force presupposes blind subjects. It does everything it can to keep powers of reflection that have long been available from becoming effective.
Critique of Transparency
Under this heading we discuss the discovery of the unconscious, which, as will be shown, represents a necessary consequence of the modern process of enlight- enment. One of the virtually reactionary myths of the twentieth century is that
6Sigmund Freud is the "discoverer of the unconscious. "
only falsifies historical truth but also burdens the history of enlightenment with an absurd and inexplicable asymmetry and retardation in the investigation of the unconscious. How could enlightenment have investigated consciousness criti- cally and empirically without encountering its "other side"?
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
More about real discovery of the unconsciousness: The beginnings of a sys- tematic treatment of the unconscious are to be found--self-evidently, I am tempted to say-in the classical Age of Enlightenment. As Henry F. Ellenberger has shown, the history of methodically controlled encounters with the uncon- scious began in the last third of the eighteenth century. At that time, in the middle of an obscurantist atmosphere (Cagliostro and others), a systematic experimenta- tion with healing through suggestion started and made its first practical break- through with Franz Anton Mesmer's alleged "animal magnetism," even if Mes-
ma failure. Enlightenment depth psychology was born in 1784, three years after ants Critique of Pure Reason, when a French aristocrat discovered so-called magnetic sleep, which came to be called hypnosis in the nineteenth century. The marquis of Puysegur, artillery officer of Strasburg, pupil of Mesmer, and lord
0eanifestation that seemed similar to sleepwalking and therefore was dubbed "arti- C1
al somnambulism. " This was a state of deep trance in which, paradoxically,
er s "fluidical" theory was regarded by his contemporaries and by posterity as
a large country estate in the village of Buzancy near Soisson, observed, during Philanthropic medical treatment of one of his peasants, a previously unknown The legend of Freud not
48 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
"1
? Les effets du magnetisme . . . animal. The blunderer Mesmer puts Parisian soci- ety along with its dogs into convulsive shock. Caricature of "Mesmermania" around 1780-85.
a peculiar clairvoyance and power of expression could be observed in the patient, which far exceeded what they were capable of when awake. What was particu- larly important in all this was the discovery that hypnotized persons proved to be "doctors of themselves" in that they could purposefully and clearly name the causes of their sicknesses about which they normally would not have been able to say anything at all. They uncovered "pathogenic secrets" in themselves, re- vealed hidden roots of their suffering, made suggestions about their own treat- ment, and, moreover, they not infrequently showed excellent character traits that the "surface personality" did not have.
The procedure had a grave disadvantage, for which reason, later enlighten- ment tried to repress this more than a century old "episode": After the procedure, the patients had forgotten everything they had experienced. Through the "posthypnotic amnesia," as it was later called, they were at the mercy of the mag- netizer, who could profit from their excursions into the unconscious. Still in a trance, they had to submit themselves to the healing commands of the magnetizer, who transposed the knowledge he had gained in the session about the patient's problematic into hypnotic instructions. These were supposed to remain effective in the unconscious for the patient's own good. Understandably, later enlighten- ment did not want to be involved with such procedures based entirely on authority and trust. After all, psychologically speaking, enlightenment always meant an ad- vance in the training of mistrust--in the construction of an ego concerned about self-assertion and control of reality. Freud's methodology can be summarized, in a way, as the attempt to keep the path to the unconscious open without using hyp-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 49
osis. One may consider whether, in Freud's procedure, a finesse born of mistrust ? not at work: Naive and reflected at the same time, it has recourse to the "offspring" and "representatives" of an unconsciousness otherwise thought of as closed. Whether this closedness is not also an effect of the mistrustful method is a question not posed here.
Like Mesmer, Puysegur knew that in the hypnotic treatments his personality was the actual agent, or more precisely, it was the intimate relation established between himself and the patient. This "rapport"--in more recent terminology, transference-served as the medium of a methodical and successful depth- psychological praxis. This procedure was continually developed and practiced in credible forms at least until the middle of the nineteenth century. Schopenhauer could still state that this discovery was possibly the most important in the entire history of the human mind, even if it at first posed more puzzles for reason than it resolved. Here was the real breakthrough to a secularized depth psychology that could free its knowledge from the conventional religious and pastoral study of souls (whose psychological competence was, in fact, confirmed by a nonsacral approach to the unconscious). The uncovering of the unconscious
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
touches on that area in which the counterintuitions of ancient esoterics meet with the structure of specifically modern knowledge, which in its own way is, in principle, con- structed counterintuitively. Of course, in the last instance, both must still seek the connection with "direct experience. "
All this says that at least since the late eighteenth century, the illusion of a transparent human self-consciousness has been systematically destroyed. Som- nambulant phenomena provide provocative proofs that consciousness does not know everything about itself. In the state of magnetic lucidity, a zone of knowl- edge speaks that remains inaccessible to surface consciousness. The old "rational psychology" with its theory of memoria, of the capacity to remember, is no longer compatible with this view of consciousness. In the process of enlightenment, hu- man beings become more and more deeply involved in the self-evidence of the enigma that "there is still something else there. " Like an internal gremlin, it manifests itself in such a way that it cannot be directly grasped. If one looks closely, it has already disappeared. It follows consciousness like a shadow or like its double, who never agrees to an encounter with the first ego. But it constantly follows the first ego without ever revealing its name. Its emotional mode of ap- pearance is the uncanny and the fear of going mad-two themes that are not the exclusive property of romanticism.
Hypnosis served the first depth psychology as the royal road to the uncon- scious. It was with regard to these phenomena that nineteenth-century enlighten- ment committed one of its worst mistakes. It misinterpreted the lively interest of reactionary, aristocratic, and religious circles in unconscious phenomena as evi- dence that all this was merely antienlightenment hocus-pocus. Indeed, Mes- merism and hypnosis soon sank into the spiritul underground and landed finally
50 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
in annual fairs and variety shows, where trickery prevails. Enlightenment was for a long time not clearheaded enough to comprehend that when antienlightenment shows such a strong interest in something it must be important. The later religious spiritualism and the carnival occultism were in fact antienlightenment in practice, but only because they obscured the realistic core of the matter: the breakthrough from memoria to the unconsciousness structure, from conscious experience to the unconscious "grammar of feelings. "
From the start, the bourgeois-positivistic fraction of enlightenment was un- comfortable about the unpredictable, subversive dimensions of the new category, the unconscious. With it, the motif of critical self-reflection was introduced into civilization in a way that could not please those who held themselves to be the representatives of civilization. If every ego is underlaid by an unconscious, then that is the end of the self-satisfaction of a consciousness that thinks it knows itself, and thus knows how to value itself. The "unconscious" touched on the cultural narcissism of all social classes. At the same time, its discovery dissolves the basis of all previous philosophies of consciousness. From now on, the word "naivete" gains a new, more unfathomable meaning, because the abyss above which it hovers is more clearly seen.
Something of this sort must have been in Freud's mind when he composed his oft-quoted aphorism about the "three mortifications" that human self-esteem has had to suffer in the process of modern research: the Copernican revolution, which denied the earth's place in the center of the universe; the Darwinian theory of evo- lution, which included human beings in the chain of animal species and claimed for them precarious kinship with the great apes; and finally, psychoanalysis, which shattered the naive opinion that every ego knows itself best because of its immediate proximity. From now on, everyone is furthest from himself. Under all rationality and all consciousness there extends a vast space of irrationality and unconscious programming that everywhere interferes deceptively with conscious speech and action. The Freudian concept of "rationalization" contains an enor- mous irony: with the title ratio, those explanations and pseudojustifications are now designated with which consciousness covers up its self-delusions. The ratio- nal appears as the lid on private and collective irrationality.
Today, the further course, particularly the reorientation of depth- psychological research from its beginnings in hypnosis to the interpretation of dreams and the later branching out of various schools of depth psychology can be assumed to be largely known. Freud designated the dream as his via regia to the unconscious. Through it he developed a "technique of reading" that later proved useful in many other manifestations such as neurotic symptoms, sexual disturbances, and artistic creations. Even manifestations such as humor and jokes, accidents, and the choice of partners are now ordered in a relational system structured by the unconscious. The extension of these dynamic interpretations from psychopathology to everyday cultural phenomena demonstrates the full im-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES Q 51
plications of the critique. Besieged transparency must now accept that behind ev- ery possible fact of consciousness, dynamic causal rules of the unconscious are uncovered that influence its form. Bourgeois (and also proletarian) idealism ob- served bitterly that psychoanalysis wanted to "encroach" on the artist's soul and the work of art, that somehow the psychodynamics of a convoluted mother com- plex was allegedly at work in Goethe's lyrics: For idealism that was
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
worse than bolshevism. The Bolshevists themselves saw in everything that was about to shake their facade of consciousness nothing other than the last scream of bour- geois decadence.
Behind these attitudes toward psychoanalysis there is the desperate defense of the transparency of consciousness, that is, of the claim that the ego knows itself better than anyone else does and is master of the rules of its own exercise of rea- son. For once one accepts through existential self-reflection the reality of one's own unconscious, then, after this change of viewpoint, not only do sexual repres- sions and traumatic scars break open, but also, in the course of self-experience, the inner "shadows" collectively become longer and longer. The entire existential relation to "negativity" must be revised, and, with logical, political, and emo- tional pain, the negative self can emerge, with its sores, its destructiveness, and its ugliness.
The ego stands before the monstrous demand: to recognize that it is also what it absolutely believes itself not to be. The more conventional conscious- ness is, the more embittered will be its refusal to look into this mirror. Thus the resistance against dynamic psychology comes especially from those who believe they have something to lose through "analysis. " They shout loudest of all that they "don't need all that stuff. "
The psychoanalytic technique of reading has become very widespread in West- ern civilization. Especially in the United States over the past decades it has be- come dreadfully trivialized and turned into a social game in which the winner is the one who detects the most ulterior motives and neurotic hidden meanings be- hind everyday appearances in one's own life, as well as in the lives of others. This chronic analysis of oneself and others, which has become something of a sport, leads to at least two false attitudes. It leads, first, to hopeless intellectualization of psychoanalysis, which has thereby become a refuge for emotional coldness and symptomatic rationalism that has found in it the right means to remain entirely unchanged while giving the impression of being something else. Second it leads to an overemphasis of the infantile, which can be subtly reinforced by being con- tinually linked with the present. There is no guarantee that the "dialectic" works positively and that every regression will be canceled out by a corresponding progression. Woody Allen's urban neurotic seems to have gotten off relatively lightly. Psychoanalysis is certainly not a priori, as Karl Kraus has sarcastically remarked, the illness that pretends to be its own cure; but it can easily become so since it continually tends to underrestimate the power of the neurosis that would rather gaze into the mirror than resolutely face the here and now.
52 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
By no means does psychoanalysis encounter everywhere suffering individuals who want to be healed at any cost. Their sufferings fit into a dynamics of self- maintenance in a very complicated way. This dynamics cooperates with the am- bivalence of the healing hand that, for its part, can often only be effective when it stands with one foot on the side of the suffering against which it seems to strug- gle. Here begins a drawn-out game of artfulness - on both sides of the therapeutic relationship. One often does not know whether it is not actually the fish who catches the angler.
The category of the unconscious (better, of the "unconscious structure") is probably the most successful figure of thought in the human sciences of our cen- tury. With this self-reflective concept, the most significant advances in basic re- search into the human being and human civilization have been made. Without this concept, modern anthropology would be just as unthinkable as structural mythol- ogy, modern theory of grammar just as unthinkable as behavioral physiology and the theory of human biograms. With regard to unconscious regulating mechan- isms of human culture and social as well as individual behavior, the human sciences open up an unparalleled reflective attack on everything that, in the hu- man sphere, is "hidden programming" and not conscious behavior.
Here, the most powerful dawning of reflection in the history of human con- sciousness is taking place despite the inclination of some researchers to empha- size the invariance and unchangeability of unconscious structures. Every transpo- sition into consciousness, every reflection, strikes, no matter how gently, on the "rock of the unconscious. " And only in the light of consciousness can it be clarified where enlightenment can be a school of change, and where it can demon- strate its insightfulness by letting happen what cannot be changed.
The psychology of early enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the later schools of dynamic psychology, and all other systems concerned with uncon- scious structures in the area of human orders have made available such a powerful potential for reflection that it will be a long time before we will be able to see how human societies change when they begin to live continually with such reflecting forces. All these disciplines have built up a methodical network of self- experience that even the world religions have been scarcely able to create, with the exception of those great, meditative schools of metareligiosity whose aim has been to pro- mote consciousness-raising and that, today, significantly, are approaching the reflective psychologies: Zen Buddhism, Sufism, Tantra, Yoga, and others. The only question is whether the political central powers and the energies of repres- sion and divisiveness will succeed, on the macro- as well as the microlevel, in chaining the powers of conscious life that already have been half-awakened from slumber. Neoconservatism has long since seen the gathering danger for the repressive capacities of states and capitals; it senses that the time of conscious- nesses has come. Its strength lies in the fact that people have, in addition to a realistic fear of
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
war and crisis, a "fear of freedom" (Erich Fromm) -- fear of them-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES U 53
elves and their own possibilities. It is this fear that makes them listen to the in- idious denunciation of the "dear ego" (Hans Maier) and of "self-realization" as ism (j0hn Paul II during his visit to Germany, particularly in his sermon in Altotting).
Critique of Natural Illusion
Every unmasking critique knows itself to be in an intimate relation with what is "really the case" below the surface. On all sides, human consciousness is invited to deceive itself and to be content with mere illusion. For enlightenment, there- fore, it is always the second look that is decisive because it overcomes the first impression. If things were generally as they immediately seem, investigation and science would be superfluous. There would be nothing to look for, look through, or look into. But science and enlightenment have a detective-like relation to real- ity. The tension between the search and what is given is particularly radicalized in the case of human and social phenomena. For here, everything that is "given" (gegeberi) is simultaneously in a certain way only "ostensible" (vorgeblich) and artificial. Human life moves a priori in a natural artificiality and an artificial natu- ralness (Plessner). This realization is part of the great achievement of enlighten- ment's reflection on culture. It shows that human beings, as they are, live "unnatu- rally. " What was natural in them was "lost" and became "distorted" and "misshapen" through civilization. Human individuals are never in the "center of their beings," but rather stand beside themselves as persons other than who they "really" are or could be. These insights are today common knowledge in philo- sophical anthropology. In the meantime, they have been morally neutralized and have become detached structural viewpoints. At the beginning of this discovery, however, the thought of unnaturalness possessed enormous value for moral at- tacks. Its explosive power was great as long as the belief in a "good Nature" seemed to be unshaken. One of the battle cries of bourgeois society during its up- rising against the aristocratic world order was: "Nature! Nature! "
One can see the consequences of this discovery of unnaturalness in Rousseau's critique of human beings in society. It possesses both a critical-negative and a utopian-positive side; one could also say: a destructive politics and a constructive pedagogy. Rousseau diagnosed a total degeneration, a complete fall of humanity
rom "Nature" in the society of the eighteenth century. All spontaneity had been
tnrou
^naturalized
gh convention, all naivete had been replaced by finesse, all d been glossed over by facades of social intercourse, etc. Rousseau's ye tor these things was excessively sharp in a way that only an offended bour- geois perception, wanting to register its rights to life, could be in an aristocrati- y fabricated social order. The social theater of the ancien regime was becom-
g more transparent and absurd every day. Whereas the aristocracy treated its
"cerity
na
or
m of life with irony, bourgeois cultural values (Gemutskultur) treated the
54 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
artificial convolutions in that form of life with disgust. Consequently, Rousseau's critique met with tremendous approval from his contemporaries. In his depiction of social denaturalization, not only did the up and coming bourgeoisie feel confirmed in its most elementary social feeling, but also the more sensitive part of the aristocratic intelligentsia knew itself in the main to be correctly portrayed in this critique. Here the universal law of "sensitive critique" applies: The critique is accepted by those who in any case are less touched by it, but its main targets seem to be looking into a blind mirror that says absolutely nothing to them. The agreement of intelligent aristocrats with Rousseau's critique was an important cat- alyst for their philanthropic activity, with which they tried to buy off their guilty consciences about benefiting from the status quo. The first rational depth psychol- ogy, as mentioned earlier, was indeed an offshoot of aristocratic Rousseauianism. What came to light in its healing procedure could be taken without further ado as proof of the inner "healing powers of nature. " The possible destructiveness of the unconscious and the "dark side of nature" first came to the notice of the follow- ing generation of romantics and were interpreted in an increasingly conservative- pessimistic way (see E. T. A. Hoffmann, Joseph von Eichendorff, and many others).
A political stance follows directly from this analysis: in the name of the natural against the system of compulsions, on the side of the bourgeois-honest heart against aristocratic-artful deceptiveness, on the side of the free social contract against the old feudal relations based on coercion. The new society wanted to be an order in which all agreed, to their mutual advantage, on a peaceful and diligent life together according to a model based on nature and mutual sympathy.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
As har- monious and affable as that sounded, some representatives of the ancien regime were still sensitive enough to hear the insurrection of hell in this program. With horrified satisfaction, conservatives saw the French Revolution degenerate into terror and war. Nothing since then has nourished the conservative image of hu- manity more strongly. It thinks it knows that human nature, set loose here and now, deserves no optimism or glowing phrases. Conservative thinking in this in- stance behaves positivistically. Without first asking about contexts, it notes that, all too often, human beings behave egoistically, destructively, greedily, un- wisely, and asocially. Indeed, for this reason, criminality was and is so extremely important for all kinds of conservatism, because "short-circuited thinking" finds in it the final proof for a pessimistic view of humanity that, in turn, provides the basis for an authoritarian, strictly disciplining politics. From this viewpoint, there "exist" in nature criminals, idiots, malcontents, egoists, and rebels, just as there exist trees, cows, kings, laws, and heavenly bodies. The Christian doctrine of original sin here joins forces with the conservative, pessimistic understanding of nature. According to this doctrine, human beings, simply because they are born of woman, live in the world as defective creatures.
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 55
Rousseau's philosophy sees all this in advance. It knows that one has to get around pessimism by demonstrating how human beings become what they are so- cially. That there are human beings who behave nastily, greedily, unwisely, de- structively, etc. , proves nothing about their essential being. Here, in Rousseau, we find perhaps the most important figure of thought in moral-political enlighten- ment: the theory of the innocent victim.
The evidence introduced for political pessimism; the criminal, the lunatic, and the asocial individual, in a word, the second-rate citizen --these are not by nature as one finds them now but have been made so by society. It is said that they have never had a chance to be as they would be according to their nature, but were forced into the situation in which they find themselves through poverty, coercion, and ignorance. They are victims of society.
This defense against political pessimism regarding human nature is at first con- vincing. It possesses the superiority of dialectical thinking over positivistic think- ing. It transforms moral states and qualities into processes. Brutal people do not "exist," only their brutalization; criminality does not "exist," only criminalization; stupidity does not "exist," only stupefaction; self-seeking does not "exist," only training in egoism; there are no second-rate citizens, only victims of patroniza- tion. What political positivism takes to be nature is in reality falsified nature: the suppression of opportunity for human beings.
Rousseau knew of two aids who could illustrate his point of view, two classes of human beings who lived before civilization and, consequently, before perver- sion: the noble savage and the child. Enlightenment literature develops two of its most intimate passions around these two figures: ethnology and pedagogy. To the present day nothing has essentially changed in this approach. Literarily, this dou- ble passion precipitates two extensive genres: exotic travel literature and later ethnology on the one hand, and the educational novel and the literature on peda- gogy and child development on the other. The primitive peoples, about whom the European explorers from Columbus to Bougainville and Captain Cook reported, provide an enlightenment, which was gradually becoming more political, the ur- gently needed evidence for its view that, roughly stated, things can "proceed differently" --peacefully, reasonably, humanely, sensuously, without aristoc- racy, without war, without exploitation, without wigs, without lettres de cachet. The noble savages in the South Seas are like an Archimedean point through which one can playfully dislodge the claim of European social orders to be ordained by God and therefore unexcellable. Something different does exist; at the same time, it is better. What is reasonable can thus also become real. That is all enlighten- ment is trying to say.
From this moment on, the child becomes a political object--to a certain extent, the living security deposit of enlightenment. The child is the "noble savage" in one's own house. Through appropriate education care must be taken in the future
56 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
that innocent children are not made into the same artificial social cripples the previous system produced. Children are already what the new bourgeois humans believe they want to become. Enlightenment was not the first to politicize peda- gogy; it has discovered, however, that children always, and everywhere, are the future security of existing relations. But now children are something more: They carry bourgeois hopes for "another world," for a more humane society. It almost appears as if for the first time a new, politically tinged form of parental love has been developing, concentrated in the wish that one's own children should finally have a better life. Only in a society that felt the shake-up and that committed itself totally to the dynamics of world change and progress can such a form of parental love prosper. A new amalgam of love and "ambition for the child" is thus formed, something that would be meaningless in a stable, stagnant society "without prospects. " Peasant societies do not envision "careers" for their children; they see no prospects other than that of life as a peasant. Ambition in the aristocracy is directed not for the benefit of the child but for that of the aristocratic lineage itself, the family. Bourgeois children are the first to have an anthropological and politi- cal mission.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
How the traditional directing of ambitions in the bourgeois parent- child relationship is currently changing could be the topic of a special investi-
gation.
Of course, Rousseau's optimistic naturalism has a very vulnerable point. The beneficence of nature is something that can be doubted even when one does not hold conservative views. In the beginning things were not all that idyllic; genesis (Ursprung) is downright severe and difficult. It soon becomes clear that the image of origin cannot be understood historically because, on closer investigation, one finds that war, inequality, and harsh conditions of life are widespread in an unyielding nature; there are exceptions but they can scarcely be interpreted as ori- gin and rule. Since then, the question about "good origins" becomes the crux for enlightenment. It becomes more and more clear that this idea of origin has not a temporal but a Utopian reference. The Good is still nowhere to be found, except in the wishful human spirit and in daydreams, which unerringly aim at something even though it does not yet exist. Thus, critical naturalism can survive only when it withers away and reawakes as the "spirit of Utopia"; the origin then serves as an end-vision (Bloch).
Naturalistic thinking, in fact, fundamentally changed its function in the nine- teenth century. The natural sciences provided a concept of nature that was any- thing but idyllic. Especially since Darwin, the bourgeois order, having become imperialistic, used the beast of prey as its political emblem. Nature was used as justification by those who needed to legitimate acts of violence, not by those who spoke for peace. The heraldry of the old aristocracy had also shown a striking sympathy for predatory animals: the eagle, falcon, lion, bear. Long before Rous- seauianism, and in substance opposed to it, there was an aristocratic naturalism
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 57
that was renewed in the bourgeois order when it became powerful as political "bi- ologism. " Nothing can show more clearly that Rousseauian naturalism had been only a momentary stylization of the conception of nature on which a general the- ory of liberation could not support itself securely. Hesitatingly, therefore, en- lightenment began to take leave of the noble savage and the innocent child, a part- ing that, of course, can never lead to a complete break (Bruch) with these "allies. " The child and the savage are beings who have a claim on the sympathy of those who remain true to the idea of enlightenment.
Impulses for self-reflection in the great civilizations come from ethnology even today. Thus, behind the conspicuous present-day cult around the American Indian, there is a good deal of pondering about ideas of nature and the maximal size of societies that want to maintain a reasonable relation to themselves as well as to their environment. And from child psychology, there is still today a steady stream of valuable impulses for reflection on the behavioral patterns in societies that suffer from their unresolved childhoods.
What has remained undamaged in Rousseau's critique is the indispensable ex- posure of a supposedly evil "Nature" as a social fiction. This remains important in the purportedly natural inferiorities concerning race, intelligence, and sex and sexual behavior. When conservatives and reactionaries refer to "Nature" to justify their assertions about the inferiority of woman, the lesser capacities of dark races, the innate intelligence of children from the upper social strata, and the sickness of homosexuality, they have usurped naturalism. It remains the task of critique to refute this. Ultimately critique must at least be able to show that what "Nature" gives us has to be recognized as neutral and nontendentious so that every value judgment and every tendency can without doubt be understood as a cultural phenomenon. Even if Rousseau's "good Nature" has been discredited, he has at least taught us not to accept "bad Nature" as an excuse for social oppression.
However, when one speaks of the "victims of society," the "artful dimension"
quickly comes into the picture again. In the concept of the "victim of society,"
there is a reflective contradiction that can be misused in many ways. Already in
Rousseau, a dubious artfulness is observed that is supposed to conceal a double
standard. That he combined nature and childhood in a new idea of education and,
at
? ng been understood as a discrepancy between theory and practice. Rousseau
was a master of an artful reflexivity that skillfully found fault with others on every
Point but in itself always discovered only the purest of intentions. On the white
Page of this feeling of innocence, the famous confessions were written. In this
osturing there was something that other determined enlighteners, above all
einrich Heine, could not and did not want to follow-even though they do not
the same time, denied his own children and stuck them in an orphanage, has
a v e an terenlightenment.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ything to do with the notorious defamation of Rousseau by the entire coun-
58 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
The vulnerable point in the victim theory is, again, the self-reification of con- sciousness, the establishment of a new naively artful position. This can serve or be felt, depending on the circumstances, as a diversionary trick, as a technique of extortion, or as indirect aggression. Psychology is familiar with the "eternal victim," who exploits this position for disguised aggressions. Also belonging to this category, in a broader sense, are those permanent losers as well as medical and political hypochondriacs who lament that conditions are so terrible that it is a great sacrifice on their part not to kill themselves or emigrate. On the German Left, not least of all under the influence of the sociologized schema of the victim, a certain type of renegade has emerged who feels that it is a dirty trick to have to live in this land without summer and without oppositional forces. Nobody can say that such a viewpoint does not know what it is talking about. Its mistake is that it remains blind to itself. For the accusation becomes bound to misery and magnifies it under the subterfuge of unsuspecting critical observations. With the
obstinacy of a Sophist, in aggressive self-reification, many a "critical" conscious- ness refuses to become healthier than the sick whole.
A second possibility of misusing the victim schema has been experienced by dedicated helpers and social workers when, guided by the best intentions, they try to make prisoners, the homeless, alcoholics, marginal youth, and others aware that they are the "victims of society" who have simply failed to offer enough resistance. The helpers often encounter sensitive resistance to their attempts and have to make it clear to themselves just how much discrimination is present in their own "good will. " The self-esteem and need for esteem in the disadvantaged often forcefully defends itself against the demand for self-reification made on them by every political kind of assistance that argues in this way. Precisely those who are worst off feel a spark of self-assertion, whose extinction would be
justifiably feared if those concerned began to think of themselves as victims, as non-egos. To preserve the dignity of "poor bastards," they alone and on their own accord can say that they are poor bastards. Those who try to put such words into their mouths insult them, no matter how good their intentions may be. It is in the nature of liberating reflection that it cannot be forced. It answers only to indirect assistance.
From this vantage point, the perspective on a life spent in total, unavoidable benightedness becomes possible. Theodor Adorno sketched this when he spoke of an unhappy consciousness in which the down-and-outers inflict on themselves a second time that wrong that circumstances perpetrated against them in order to be able to bear it. Here, an inner reflection takes place that looks like a parody of freedom. From the outside, the phenomenon resembles satisfaction and would, if addressed, probably also refer to itself that way. In memory of his mother, Pe- ter Handke has found a tender formulation in which the sadness of a loving and helpless knowledge lays down arms before reality: "self-contented unhappiness. '
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 59
Enlightenment has neither a chance nor a right to disturb the world's slumber if it looks like this.
Critique of the Illusion of Privacy
Where is this ego then, if it is neither in the body nor in the soul?
Blaise Pascal
The last great attack of critique against illusion aims at the position of the ego be- tween nature and society. We know from the line of thought in the preceding cri- tiques that knowledge (Erkenntnis) does not have to do with human nature pure and simple, but with nature as conception, nature as fabrication, with unnatural nature. In that which is "given in nature" there is always something "given in addi- tion" by human beings. The "labor" of reflection is summarized in this insight. Modernity establishes itself in our minds in the shape of counterintuitive ex- periences that break through naivete and exercise a peculiar compulsion on us to increase our intelligence.
Ideologically, the reference to "Nature" is always significant because it
produces an artificial naivete and ends up as voluntary naivete. It covers up the
human contribution and avers that things are by nature, and from their origins,
in that "order" in which our representations, which are always influenced by "in-
terests," depict them. The rudiments for ideologies of order are hidden in all
naturalisms. Every naturalism begins as involuntary naivete. Initially, we cannot
help thinking that the "order of things" is an objective order. For the first glance
falls on the things and not on the "eyeglasses. " In the work of enlightenment, this
first innocence becomes irretrievably lost. Enlightenment leads to the loss of nai-
vete and it furthers the collapse of objectivism through a gain in self-experience.
It effects an irreversible awakening and, expressed pictorially, executes the turn
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
to the eyeglasses, i. e. , to one's own rational apparatus. Once this consciousness
of the eyeglasses has been awakened in a culture, the old naivete loses its charm,
becomes defensive, and is transformed into narrow-mindedness, which is intent
on remaining as it is. The mythology of the Greeks is still enchanting; that of fas-
cism is only stale and shameless. In the first myth, a step toward an interpretation
of the world was taken; in simulated naivete, an artful stupefaction (Verdum-
mung) is at work--the predominant method of self-integration in advanced social 7
orders. Such an observation touches only superficially on the role of mythology in modernity.
