Die Strassen Adolf Hitlers--ein Dombau
unsererZeit
(Granite and heart.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
) fights on with the left hand.
That such a sense of heroism is still alive today in our armies is shown by a small newspaper report from the beginning of June 1915.
In the first attack of the Austrian fleet on the Italian coast, torpedo boat 80 had been hit by a shell in the officers' mess, and the right forearm of a reservist, a fisherman by profession, was completely torn off.
He bound the stump with a strap and, with the left hand, worked the pump in order to stem the flood of water, without letting out a single cry.
There are innumerable such brave men among our military gray and blue boys.
.
.
.
Whoever has done his share(!
) with ARTIFICIAL LIMBS.
FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ?
447
two sound arms in the field against the enemy will be able to master his fate and himself with one arm. . . .
The present booklet . . . wants to show him . . . that one- armedness is not the worst thing by a long shot.
. . . How favorably the war-wounded is situated! The honorary pay protects him once and for all from real need. But what a joyless existence would await him if he could not find his way back to work. Idleness is the source of all vices. . .
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
. Work is the duty of a citizen, a contribution to the Fatherland. . . . Even the single working hand cannot be done with- out. . . . (pp. 1-2)
. . . After a diligent stay at a school, some get on better than they did before the injury, (p. 3)
. . . You have nothing to hide. We no longer live in times when one could suspect a perjurer or thief behind a handless man. You have lost your hand, not under the hatchet of a henchman, but in a holy struggle. You are allowed to be always and everywhere proud, look everyone straight in the eyes and thereby cause wretches and the tactless(! ) to blush. Most people view the war-injured person as a living monument(! ) of our hard times to whom they give thanks silently(l).
To gain independence in every respect is the first commandment, the highest aim of the one-armed man. Never allow yourself to be helped}. There must not be any activity from which he shrinks back; . . . through . . . continual practice he will master it. One-armedness will become a matter of course; it loses the horror of a loss that cannot be overcome. Some ex- perienced one-armers say that they would not know what to do with a sec- ond arm if suddenly, through a miracle, they were given back the lost arm.
. . . Look around you to see if there is someone in your circle of ac- quaintanceswhohasbeenmissinganarmforatime. . . . Thereareprob- ably some in every town. You just have not noticed them yet. (p. 5)
In one of von Kunzberg's footnotes there is also this:
You observe also the bagpipe player at the annual fair who simultane- ously beats the drum with an elbow, works another instrument with his foot, or a mounted kettledrummer who controls the reins with his feet, etc. You can also learn something by observing animals.
The joyful cynicism of patriot medicine does not touch solely on "hardship cases. " Its way of thinking is not related solely to exceptional existential circum- stances. Medical artificial limbs and the mentality of the robust robot, which is offered along with them only, bring a widespread way of thinking to light. War loosens the tongue of the latent cynicism of domination, medicine, and the mili- tary. Under its influence, the military and production apparatuses admit their
448 D ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? The title page of Kiinzberg's primer.
claim to use up the lives of individuals in their service. The human body in the society of labor and war had already long been an artificial limb even before one had to replace damaged parts with functioning parts.
In the Weimar years, technology presses in on the old humanism in a provoca- tive way. In this period, the conceptual association of "the human being and tech- nology" becomes a compulsive connection, from the heights of bourgeois philos- ophy down to school essays. The schema for thinking is this: Technology takes the "upper hand"; it "threatens" to degrade human beings; it "wants" to make us into robots. But if we pay attention and keep our souls in shape, nothing will hap- pen to us. For technology is, after all, there for people and not people for technol- ogy. The image is approximately that of a seesaw. On one end sits the threatening,
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 449
the alien, technology; on the other, the humane spreads out and, according to whether oneself or the alien presses harder, the seesaw falls to one side or the other. The more immature the thinking, the heavier the humane end. With this phraseology, the bourgeois philosophy of technology erected an almost all- encompassing cartel of brains. Minds are nimbly provided with mental artificial "limbs" about technology. With elegant, easy-care, light metal legs ("pure Ger- man model"), thinking hobbles along behind reality, and thus personality as well as soul are kept in operation as usual. The bourgeois philosophy of technology thoroughly breathes in the spirit of the one-armed primer. Personality amputated? No problem --we have another one for you in stock.
You see, ladies and gentlemen, doctors and first-aid helpers, engineers and manufacturers, military posts and the officers of our emergency ser- vices, all strive in the same way to place their experience at the service of our cause and to replace the loss of hand and arm . . . for those who have fought and suffered for the continued existence and greatness of the Fatherland. . . . And for the injured, the poet's words are apt:
Whoever always strives to make an effort, Can be redeemed by us.
(Beitrdge zur Frage der Ausrustung armverletzter Kriegsbeschddigter fiir das Erwerbsleben [1915], p. 127)
Reduced to a formula, the topic of the bourgeois philosophy of technology in the twenties and thirties is "Goethe with Machines," or at least: "Zarathustra and Industry. " Even the privileged now come across the problem of "alienation" or, as Hans Freyer says drastically, "the uprising of the slave-means against the ends. " More reflective authors no longer want to leave it at a mere conservative No to technology. In departing from the erstwhile sensitive repugnance, bour- geois thinking about technology converts to a downright masochistic enthusiasm. The philosophy of the new matter-of- factness, insofar as it is engineers' philoso- phy, tries out a hectic embracing of the new discomfort.
Hans Freyer, for example, suspects deeper connections between technology and the "human being. " Not only the old
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
town, the traditional village, the devel- oped, preindustrial cultural landscape of Europe are subjected to destructive at- tacks by the new technology; an even older image of the human being or model of the soul now collapses. Freyer was by no means the only one who called the master-human relation of the European technologist to the earth the "spiritual" foundation of "our" technology. However, only in the present, where the enor- mous "system of means" penetrates every activity of life, can Europeans no longer escape the experience of themselves as "rulers":
Violent questioning of nature in order to learn how to direct its forces, pondering over the earth in order to conquer and shape it-this will
450 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
stirs itself early in the European spirit. And it is this that guaranteed the continuity in the successes of the technology that, since the beginning of the 18th century, had finally come to be based on science. (H. Freyer, Zur Philosophic der Technik, in Blatter fur Deutsche Philosophic, vol. 3 [Berlin, 1929-30], p. 200)
What Freyer expresses sounds reflective in tone, affirmative in substance: Thus, we are dominant subjects, and, as Europeans, we have always been so. Where the conservative denial stops, the neo-matter-of-fact flight forward into a programmatic confession begins.
What Freyer still holds intelligently in suspense steps onto hard ground with the philosopher of brutality, Theodor Liiddecke. He turns fresh cynicism into the procedure of his talk. In 1931 he published his book on technology: Meisterung der Maschinenwelt. Menschentum und Moglichkeit (The mastering of the world of machines. Humankind and possibility). Liiddecke's ideal is "organic cultivation" --and in the word "organic" he intends a whole range of undertones, from the Goethean original forms up to the organs of power and the organization of the militarized community of the people.
The first condition of an organic cultivation is the employment of the "apprentice principle" in education, as Henry Ford called it. The young person must grow up, from youth onward, in a scuffle with realities, (p. 240)
The most damaging factor in the existing system of education is that the young person is made "too sensitive"; sport offers only an insufficient balance against this.
Urban pupils in particular lack the organic concepts of life and labor. We must educate strong-nerved, adaptable people who are really at
home in their times.
In this way, we will come to a new aristocracy composed of honest,
heroic fighters. . . . This idea of discipline should also stand at the fore of the duty to work. (p. 242)
Hence, send students of economics for four weeks into the mines so that they "develop on the spot the capacities of a respectable miner" (p. 248); bring pupils into the banks before the theory of money is explained to them; make intellectual workers familiar with the hard facts on the "production front. " One has to read some passages by Liiddecke several times to make sure that he really argues from the "Right. " His clammy, joyful antiacademicism could easily be confused with Joyful Science, theory fatigue, and the hunger for concreteness of today's Left intelligentsia, if it were not for the fact that the author takes care to set a clear order with appropriate signal words:
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 451
The intellectual knows too little about the people who fight as soldiers on the battlefront of production. The intellectual battlefield on which he moves is a bourgeois camp. We want to give the socialists credit for one thing: they have made the concept "bourgeois" unsavory for us. For the young generation, bourgeois means the same as unheroic, feeble, anxious. A thoroughly sportsmanly, hard kind of man is no longer bourgeois, (p. 248)
. . . With the help of the typically academic way of thinking, a "grain battle" will never be fought, as Mussolini was able to do. The thinking of the great activists is always straightforward and sim-
ple. . . . (p. 249)
On the sports field and in the imagination of youth, the aggressive man who is master of the situation lives as inspiring character type. In the daily shopkeeper-existence of this civilization, however, the artfully calculating, soft-stepping bourgeois, who denies everything directly heroical, reigns, (pp. 215-16)
That is socialism! Socialism is a new vital force, a philosophy of la- bor, a transferring of principles in sport to occupational activity, a new tone of solid comradeship, (p. 215)
The "Marxist revolution": It is, above all, a question of having or not-having. Our revolution, however, is a question of being and want- ing to be better! (p. 217)
Our gospel is precisely the quick thought and the quick realization of every thought, (p. 217)
Liiddecke develops a philosophy of the enthusiastic artificial limb that ex- periences its "being" in the intoxication of movement. Because it steals from "progressive" discourse, the text is subversive --a reading must be all the more so. In its language, existential motifs of the Left can be found, staged by a right- wing ego: Homo prostheticus as a "storm
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
trooper" itching for action, as an ex- ploiter of himself. From this viewpoint, a diagnostic potential flits through Lud- decke's theory that programs anticapitalist motifs into a capitalist-military ego. As far as an ethics of labor is concerned, its prescribed optimism blends in with the morals of management in the West today as well as with the "ought" attitude of "real existing socialism. " Nothing of content remains of specifically Fascist ele- ments. The ideology of fitness today, denazified, is as rampant as it was then, while the ethics of being is counterposed as always to those of having. The com- position and the dynamic gesture remain Fascist, in which everything, mixed to- gether incoherently, is rasped down by a "resourceful" subject in the fresh cynical tone of the likable Nazi. The Nazi philosopher is the nimble, frivolous mixer of language, the drummer of functionalism who employs everything that "works" and who cheers up the people who are following him. One of the secrets of fas- cism's success is to be found in this tone. It employs truth as a decoy and amiabil-
452 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
ity as bait. At the volatile center of its agitation lies the intimate complicity with the instincts for self-preservation in the confused masses. Its revolution promises complete "superiority" to the sportsmanlike prosthetic subject. Fascism appears here as the uprising of the prosthesis egos against "liberal" civilization, in whose "disorder" they at least still had a small chance of being "themselves. " In a violent flight to the fore, they outdo the system from which they arise. The secret of their self-preservation is hidden in the total abolition of everything that ever reminded one of a self. National socialism established itself as national functionalism.
The brisk prosthesis of the new state needed nursing and the relaxation of ten- sion. It was supposed to find both on the Fascist holiday. The sea was always good for uplifting thoughts, even for Nazi eminences seeking recuperation. On the beach, one can reflect even better on the Goethe of the machines. I quote some lines from Kurt Schuder's book of 1940: Granit und Herz.
Die Strassen Adolf Hitlers--ein Dombau unsererZeit (Granite and heart. Adolf Hitler's roads --a ca- thedral construction of our times; Braunschweig).
In the summer of 1938 I was in Westerland. You have to imagine Westerland as a place where you can find almost everything you are looking for: recuperation, rest, the spicy North Sea air . . . and just as spicy and benevolently stern the North Sea waves . . . which de- velop . . . that famous surf that is such a welcome gift to every guest on the North Sea.
Among them, important and intellectually influential men(! ) from throughout Germany can be found. They know that what little time they have for recuperation can best be spent at the seaside, which, as far as health is concerned, always proves itself to be more than a timesaver. (P-7)
There, Schuder met an "influential man" with whom he was able to speak about "two great cultural manifestations in the people": "technology and industry" and "spiritual life. " The "influential man" had "creative views" on these topics that the author attempts to summarize.
The deed is first and last. The deed is the sole true content of human life. The deed is, of course, also the most difficult thing, for it demands courage. . . . (p. 8)
We technicians, who begin with the substances, have to wed our
spirits to the substances. . . . By the way, Goethe was one of the
2greatest technicians of all time (Grotaz) if one proceeds from this
spiritual foundation of technology. . . . He even foresaw the electrical television. . . . (p. 9)
. . . Instead of sounding battle together as Goethe did, we have marched divided and the remarkable figures of spirit- only and technology-only resulted, to put it briefly, (p. 10)
. . . And without this comradeship with the machine no person
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II D 453
could live today, to say nothing of a people. . . . It serves and serves again. --In it we have to honor the thought of serving as such. This serving, however, is the highest ethical idea and deed, and so, the ma- chine converts this idea into deed. . . . ( ! )
Of course, iron is hard and the machine is not made out of sugar. But the law of life is steel and not sugar, not porridge and puree. And only the heart and the soul made of steel achieve life. . . . (p. 12)
The machine is thus thoroughly in accord with the human being, a thing that corresponds to the human essence; only when we create this inner connection have we overcome the curse of the world, material- ism. And this is indeed one of the great achievements of the new Ger- many: the introduction of technology into the soul. . . so that it no longer has to stand outside freezing. . . .
The technician spoke at length and penetratingly. . . .
And refreshed as if by a chalybeate bath, I go to the beach, breathe the sea air in blissfully that likewise refreshes the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
lungs like steel, (p.
14)
With unheard-of explicitness, the reshaping of human self-experience under the guiding star of the functional relation of the machine is recommended here as the Fascist way into modernity. This self-"reflection" of the living in steel and of "feeling" in hardness at the same time forms the basis for the cynical readiness of these philosophers of hardness to confess. They say everything now, but not so as to correct themselves, not to become "soft" and to think things over again. They seem not to notice that with every word, they give themselves away. They talk as if they were confessing, but without a single spark of insight. They admit everything so as not to compromise in anything. They want to become what their comrade, the machine, already is: men of steel. If images can convey something of the attitude toward life and political style, then the expressions Hitler's stirrup- holder, Alfred Hugenberg, chose in 1928 betray everything about what is to come.
What we need is not a mush but a solid block. In a mush we will per- ish; with the block, victory and reconstruction is a trifle. . . . We will be a block when the iron clamp of Weltanschauung binds us together and, in its embrace, causes everything soft and fluid to solidify and coa- lesce into rock. Those who could hinder us on the way to this goal
must step aside or allow themselves to be melted down. {Berliner Lokalanzeiger, 26-28 August 1928)
Excursus 4. The Fourth Reich-before the Third
In 1927, a Frankfurt philosophy professor, Friedrich Dessauer, presented a book entitled Philosophic der Technik. Das Problem der Realisierung (Philosophy of
454 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? tScncralinfpcFror fiir bag beutfdpe Strajjennjcfen "Concrete and stone are material things.
Man gives them form and spirit.
National Socialist technology possesses in all material achievement ideal content.
Berlin, February 1940 General Inspector for the German Road System. "
technology. The problem of realization) in which he promised a "critical metaphysics" of technology. He turned against the technology Luddites who, in a merely superficial defense, regard technology as a "parvenu" of our civilization. Dessauer pursued the transition that runs through the epoch like a main theme, from resistance to affirmation, from resentment to "positive understanding. "
Affirmation itself constitutes the core of technical knowledge:
Humankind can fly but not because it, say, denies or suspends gravita- tion but by penetrating it in an intellectual process and, expressed pic- torially, coming to the other side of the matter. On the first side, it is its servant, on the other its master. . . .
Thus, gravitation is overcome, not denied. . . . Complete affirma- tion of everything that corresponds to the laws of nature and an un- swerving persistence in the framework of what is given by the laws of nature characterize the means, (pp. 40-41)
The affirmation of the so-called laws of nature serves the interest of controlling them; if they are controlled, they can serve human goals. When Dessauer calls for an affirmation of technology, this means the affirmation of affirmation- ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 455
domination of the means of domination. In the double Yes, the steel subject of the future stirs; it is inseparable from an increased domination by this subject of itself: for this reason, the masters' theory of that period talks incessantly of hero- ism. This mean nothing other than increased self-coercion; the rhetorics of cour- age here means to risk a higher degree of self-mashing.
The machine, for its part, emits a Yes to its inventor as soon as the latter sees that "it works. " As soon as it has "stepped into existence," it possesses a particular ontic quality: It embodies something that did not occur in nature but now exists because the spirit of invention has made it--like a new shape in creation. "We are in the middle of a day of creation" (p. 52).
What does the Fourth Reich mean?
Kant, with a consciousness of an all-encompassing view of the world, distinguished three realms (Reiche) from one another. The first is that of natural science; he called the work, "Critique of Pure Reason. " . . . How is natural science possible? is the key question that opens the way. He gives the answer: through the forms of contemplation, time and space . . . and through the equally a priori forms of understand-
ing . . . the categories through which it works up experience (p. 54). On the basis of this mental equipment, natural science, as knowledge of appearances, is possible. . . .
He discovers the second realm in the experience of ethical law, that omnipotent, unconditional (categorical) imperative that gives the will direction. . . . Theoretical reason of the first realm cannot enter this realm; here, the higher, practical
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
reason reigns that opens up the super- sensuous to the life of the will. . . .
In Kant's ordering, the borders separate the first realm completely from the second. But is such a separation bearable? Kant himself forced an opening through. In the third realm it is a matter of "feeling," of the subjugation of the objects of experience to the goal by means of the power of judgment. This is the aesthetic and functional realm, (pp. 55-56)
But one would try in vain to find in Kant enlightenment about the dimension that cuts most deeply into the life of the present. "In the fourth realm (Reich), we enter a new land that opens up technology to us. " The Fourth Reich is that of in- ventions, those things that have been brought into existence only by human be- ings, the immeasurable potential of what can still be invented and realized. Ac- cording to Dessauer, technology means nothing other than to call the slumbering shapes of the Fourth Reich into reality through invention. It is as if technology reached over into the sphere of the Ding an sich (thing in itself), which according to Kant is inaccessible to us, in order to create out of this sphere previously nonex- isting objects of experience, machines. The machine, however, is no Ding an sich, no creature "out there" whose possibility of existence cannot be reached by
456 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? Heinrich Hoerle, Monument to the Unknown Prostheses, 1930. (Reproduced by permission of the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal. )
any understanding, but rather is there through us. At the same time, what "func- tions" in it is not only from us; there is in it a "power that does not come from me" (Dessauer, p. 60). World-revolutionizing power can be immanent in inven- tions. Dessauer refers, for example, to the ontological puzzle of X rays, which, although a material natural phenomenon, can be produced only by human inter- vention. They constitute a new form of energy that did not previously exist. In- ventions of this quality are ontological enrichments in the inventory of existence--whereby humanity is allotted the role of coauthor of the existing. Through humanity, creation augments itself. Nature provides only the material for the human elevation of the pregiven into a technical supernature.
Everything invented and built by human beings, however, encounters human- ity from the outside like a power of nature-
like mountains, the gulf stream. . . . People have to react. Whoever lives in the mountains lives in accord with the mountains. . . . The power of technology is thus. . . .
. . . The power of newly created forms of technology possesses ba- sically the same autonomy as the creation of a mountain, a river, an ice age or a planet. This fact intensifies the already deeply disturbing extent of a continuing creation, to which we are witnesses and, even more, in which we participate. It is a monstrous fate to be an active participant in creation in such a way that things that have been created by us re- main in the visible world having an effect with an unimaginable autono-
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 457
? Favorable news from the Fourth Reich: "The rota-arm (from Engineer Meyer of the Rotaworks in Aachen) is somewhat lighter and more agreeable than the Jagen- berg arm.
two sound arms in the field against the enemy will be able to master his fate and himself with one arm. . . .
The present booklet . . . wants to show him . . . that one- armedness is not the worst thing by a long shot.
. . . How favorably the war-wounded is situated! The honorary pay protects him once and for all from real need. But what a joyless existence would await him if he could not find his way back to work. Idleness is the source of all vices. . .
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
. Work is the duty of a citizen, a contribution to the Fatherland. . . . Even the single working hand cannot be done with- out. . . . (pp. 1-2)
. . . After a diligent stay at a school, some get on better than they did before the injury, (p. 3)
. . . You have nothing to hide. We no longer live in times when one could suspect a perjurer or thief behind a handless man. You have lost your hand, not under the hatchet of a henchman, but in a holy struggle. You are allowed to be always and everywhere proud, look everyone straight in the eyes and thereby cause wretches and the tactless(! ) to blush. Most people view the war-injured person as a living monument(! ) of our hard times to whom they give thanks silently(l).
To gain independence in every respect is the first commandment, the highest aim of the one-armed man. Never allow yourself to be helped}. There must not be any activity from which he shrinks back; . . . through . . . continual practice he will master it. One-armedness will become a matter of course; it loses the horror of a loss that cannot be overcome. Some ex- perienced one-armers say that they would not know what to do with a sec- ond arm if suddenly, through a miracle, they were given back the lost arm.
. . . Look around you to see if there is someone in your circle of ac- quaintanceswhohasbeenmissinganarmforatime. . . . Thereareprob- ably some in every town. You just have not noticed them yet. (p. 5)
In one of von Kunzberg's footnotes there is also this:
You observe also the bagpipe player at the annual fair who simultane- ously beats the drum with an elbow, works another instrument with his foot, or a mounted kettledrummer who controls the reins with his feet, etc. You can also learn something by observing animals.
The joyful cynicism of patriot medicine does not touch solely on "hardship cases. " Its way of thinking is not related solely to exceptional existential circum- stances. Medical artificial limbs and the mentality of the robust robot, which is offered along with them only, bring a widespread way of thinking to light. War loosens the tongue of the latent cynicism of domination, medicine, and the mili- tary. Under its influence, the military and production apparatuses admit their
448 D ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? The title page of Kiinzberg's primer.
claim to use up the lives of individuals in their service. The human body in the society of labor and war had already long been an artificial limb even before one had to replace damaged parts with functioning parts.
In the Weimar years, technology presses in on the old humanism in a provoca- tive way. In this period, the conceptual association of "the human being and tech- nology" becomes a compulsive connection, from the heights of bourgeois philos- ophy down to school essays. The schema for thinking is this: Technology takes the "upper hand"; it "threatens" to degrade human beings; it "wants" to make us into robots. But if we pay attention and keep our souls in shape, nothing will hap- pen to us. For technology is, after all, there for people and not people for technol- ogy. The image is approximately that of a seesaw. On one end sits the threatening,
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 449
the alien, technology; on the other, the humane spreads out and, according to whether oneself or the alien presses harder, the seesaw falls to one side or the other. The more immature the thinking, the heavier the humane end. With this phraseology, the bourgeois philosophy of technology erected an almost all- encompassing cartel of brains. Minds are nimbly provided with mental artificial "limbs" about technology. With elegant, easy-care, light metal legs ("pure Ger- man model"), thinking hobbles along behind reality, and thus personality as well as soul are kept in operation as usual. The bourgeois philosophy of technology thoroughly breathes in the spirit of the one-armed primer. Personality amputated? No problem --we have another one for you in stock.
You see, ladies and gentlemen, doctors and first-aid helpers, engineers and manufacturers, military posts and the officers of our emergency ser- vices, all strive in the same way to place their experience at the service of our cause and to replace the loss of hand and arm . . . for those who have fought and suffered for the continued existence and greatness of the Fatherland. . . . And for the injured, the poet's words are apt:
Whoever always strives to make an effort, Can be redeemed by us.
(Beitrdge zur Frage der Ausrustung armverletzter Kriegsbeschddigter fiir das Erwerbsleben [1915], p. 127)
Reduced to a formula, the topic of the bourgeois philosophy of technology in the twenties and thirties is "Goethe with Machines," or at least: "Zarathustra and Industry. " Even the privileged now come across the problem of "alienation" or, as Hans Freyer says drastically, "the uprising of the slave-means against the ends. " More reflective authors no longer want to leave it at a mere conservative No to technology. In departing from the erstwhile sensitive repugnance, bour- geois thinking about technology converts to a downright masochistic enthusiasm. The philosophy of the new matter-of- factness, insofar as it is engineers' philoso- phy, tries out a hectic embracing of the new discomfort.
Hans Freyer, for example, suspects deeper connections between technology and the "human being. " Not only the old
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
town, the traditional village, the devel- oped, preindustrial cultural landscape of Europe are subjected to destructive at- tacks by the new technology; an even older image of the human being or model of the soul now collapses. Freyer was by no means the only one who called the master-human relation of the European technologist to the earth the "spiritual" foundation of "our" technology. However, only in the present, where the enor- mous "system of means" penetrates every activity of life, can Europeans no longer escape the experience of themselves as "rulers":
Violent questioning of nature in order to learn how to direct its forces, pondering over the earth in order to conquer and shape it-this will
450 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
stirs itself early in the European spirit. And it is this that guaranteed the continuity in the successes of the technology that, since the beginning of the 18th century, had finally come to be based on science. (H. Freyer, Zur Philosophic der Technik, in Blatter fur Deutsche Philosophic, vol. 3 [Berlin, 1929-30], p. 200)
What Freyer expresses sounds reflective in tone, affirmative in substance: Thus, we are dominant subjects, and, as Europeans, we have always been so. Where the conservative denial stops, the neo-matter-of-fact flight forward into a programmatic confession begins.
What Freyer still holds intelligently in suspense steps onto hard ground with the philosopher of brutality, Theodor Liiddecke. He turns fresh cynicism into the procedure of his talk. In 1931 he published his book on technology: Meisterung der Maschinenwelt. Menschentum und Moglichkeit (The mastering of the world of machines. Humankind and possibility). Liiddecke's ideal is "organic cultivation" --and in the word "organic" he intends a whole range of undertones, from the Goethean original forms up to the organs of power and the organization of the militarized community of the people.
The first condition of an organic cultivation is the employment of the "apprentice principle" in education, as Henry Ford called it. The young person must grow up, from youth onward, in a scuffle with realities, (p. 240)
The most damaging factor in the existing system of education is that the young person is made "too sensitive"; sport offers only an insufficient balance against this.
Urban pupils in particular lack the organic concepts of life and labor. We must educate strong-nerved, adaptable people who are really at
home in their times.
In this way, we will come to a new aristocracy composed of honest,
heroic fighters. . . . This idea of discipline should also stand at the fore of the duty to work. (p. 242)
Hence, send students of economics for four weeks into the mines so that they "develop on the spot the capacities of a respectable miner" (p. 248); bring pupils into the banks before the theory of money is explained to them; make intellectual workers familiar with the hard facts on the "production front. " One has to read some passages by Liiddecke several times to make sure that he really argues from the "Right. " His clammy, joyful antiacademicism could easily be confused with Joyful Science, theory fatigue, and the hunger for concreteness of today's Left intelligentsia, if it were not for the fact that the author takes care to set a clear order with appropriate signal words:
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 451
The intellectual knows too little about the people who fight as soldiers on the battlefront of production. The intellectual battlefield on which he moves is a bourgeois camp. We want to give the socialists credit for one thing: they have made the concept "bourgeois" unsavory for us. For the young generation, bourgeois means the same as unheroic, feeble, anxious. A thoroughly sportsmanly, hard kind of man is no longer bourgeois, (p. 248)
. . . With the help of the typically academic way of thinking, a "grain battle" will never be fought, as Mussolini was able to do. The thinking of the great activists is always straightforward and sim-
ple. . . . (p. 249)
On the sports field and in the imagination of youth, the aggressive man who is master of the situation lives as inspiring character type. In the daily shopkeeper-existence of this civilization, however, the artfully calculating, soft-stepping bourgeois, who denies everything directly heroical, reigns, (pp. 215-16)
That is socialism! Socialism is a new vital force, a philosophy of la- bor, a transferring of principles in sport to occupational activity, a new tone of solid comradeship, (p. 215)
The "Marxist revolution": It is, above all, a question of having or not-having. Our revolution, however, is a question of being and want- ing to be better! (p. 217)
Our gospel is precisely the quick thought and the quick realization of every thought, (p. 217)
Liiddecke develops a philosophy of the enthusiastic artificial limb that ex- periences its "being" in the intoxication of movement. Because it steals from "progressive" discourse, the text is subversive --a reading must be all the more so. In its language, existential motifs of the Left can be found, staged by a right- wing ego: Homo prostheticus as a "storm
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
trooper" itching for action, as an ex- ploiter of himself. From this viewpoint, a diagnostic potential flits through Lud- decke's theory that programs anticapitalist motifs into a capitalist-military ego. As far as an ethics of labor is concerned, its prescribed optimism blends in with the morals of management in the West today as well as with the "ought" attitude of "real existing socialism. " Nothing of content remains of specifically Fascist ele- ments. The ideology of fitness today, denazified, is as rampant as it was then, while the ethics of being is counterposed as always to those of having. The com- position and the dynamic gesture remain Fascist, in which everything, mixed to- gether incoherently, is rasped down by a "resourceful" subject in the fresh cynical tone of the likable Nazi. The Nazi philosopher is the nimble, frivolous mixer of language, the drummer of functionalism who employs everything that "works" and who cheers up the people who are following him. One of the secrets of fas- cism's success is to be found in this tone. It employs truth as a decoy and amiabil-
452 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
ity as bait. At the volatile center of its agitation lies the intimate complicity with the instincts for self-preservation in the confused masses. Its revolution promises complete "superiority" to the sportsmanlike prosthetic subject. Fascism appears here as the uprising of the prosthesis egos against "liberal" civilization, in whose "disorder" they at least still had a small chance of being "themselves. " In a violent flight to the fore, they outdo the system from which they arise. The secret of their self-preservation is hidden in the total abolition of everything that ever reminded one of a self. National socialism established itself as national functionalism.
The brisk prosthesis of the new state needed nursing and the relaxation of ten- sion. It was supposed to find both on the Fascist holiday. The sea was always good for uplifting thoughts, even for Nazi eminences seeking recuperation. On the beach, one can reflect even better on the Goethe of the machines. I quote some lines from Kurt Schuder's book of 1940: Granit und Herz.
Die Strassen Adolf Hitlers--ein Dombau unsererZeit (Granite and heart. Adolf Hitler's roads --a ca- thedral construction of our times; Braunschweig).
In the summer of 1938 I was in Westerland. You have to imagine Westerland as a place where you can find almost everything you are looking for: recuperation, rest, the spicy North Sea air . . . and just as spicy and benevolently stern the North Sea waves . . . which de- velop . . . that famous surf that is such a welcome gift to every guest on the North Sea.
Among them, important and intellectually influential men(! ) from throughout Germany can be found. They know that what little time they have for recuperation can best be spent at the seaside, which, as far as health is concerned, always proves itself to be more than a timesaver. (P-7)
There, Schuder met an "influential man" with whom he was able to speak about "two great cultural manifestations in the people": "technology and industry" and "spiritual life. " The "influential man" had "creative views" on these topics that the author attempts to summarize.
The deed is first and last. The deed is the sole true content of human life. The deed is, of course, also the most difficult thing, for it demands courage. . . . (p. 8)
We technicians, who begin with the substances, have to wed our
spirits to the substances. . . . By the way, Goethe was one of the
2greatest technicians of all time (Grotaz) if one proceeds from this
spiritual foundation of technology. . . . He even foresaw the electrical television. . . . (p. 9)
. . . Instead of sounding battle together as Goethe did, we have marched divided and the remarkable figures of spirit- only and technology-only resulted, to put it briefly, (p. 10)
. . . And without this comradeship with the machine no person
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II D 453
could live today, to say nothing of a people. . . . It serves and serves again. --In it we have to honor the thought of serving as such. This serving, however, is the highest ethical idea and deed, and so, the ma- chine converts this idea into deed. . . . ( ! )
Of course, iron is hard and the machine is not made out of sugar. But the law of life is steel and not sugar, not porridge and puree. And only the heart and the soul made of steel achieve life. . . . (p. 12)
The machine is thus thoroughly in accord with the human being, a thing that corresponds to the human essence; only when we create this inner connection have we overcome the curse of the world, material- ism. And this is indeed one of the great achievements of the new Ger- many: the introduction of technology into the soul. . . so that it no longer has to stand outside freezing. . . .
The technician spoke at length and penetratingly. . . .
And refreshed as if by a chalybeate bath, I go to the beach, breathe the sea air in blissfully that likewise refreshes the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
lungs like steel, (p.
14)
With unheard-of explicitness, the reshaping of human self-experience under the guiding star of the functional relation of the machine is recommended here as the Fascist way into modernity. This self-"reflection" of the living in steel and of "feeling" in hardness at the same time forms the basis for the cynical readiness of these philosophers of hardness to confess. They say everything now, but not so as to correct themselves, not to become "soft" and to think things over again. They seem not to notice that with every word, they give themselves away. They talk as if they were confessing, but without a single spark of insight. They admit everything so as not to compromise in anything. They want to become what their comrade, the machine, already is: men of steel. If images can convey something of the attitude toward life and political style, then the expressions Hitler's stirrup- holder, Alfred Hugenberg, chose in 1928 betray everything about what is to come.
What we need is not a mush but a solid block. In a mush we will per- ish; with the block, victory and reconstruction is a trifle. . . . We will be a block when the iron clamp of Weltanschauung binds us together and, in its embrace, causes everything soft and fluid to solidify and coa- lesce into rock. Those who could hinder us on the way to this goal
must step aside or allow themselves to be melted down. {Berliner Lokalanzeiger, 26-28 August 1928)
Excursus 4. The Fourth Reich-before the Third
In 1927, a Frankfurt philosophy professor, Friedrich Dessauer, presented a book entitled Philosophic der Technik. Das Problem der Realisierung (Philosophy of
454 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? tScncralinfpcFror fiir bag beutfdpe Strajjennjcfen "Concrete and stone are material things.
Man gives them form and spirit.
National Socialist technology possesses in all material achievement ideal content.
Berlin, February 1940 General Inspector for the German Road System. "
technology. The problem of realization) in which he promised a "critical metaphysics" of technology. He turned against the technology Luddites who, in a merely superficial defense, regard technology as a "parvenu" of our civilization. Dessauer pursued the transition that runs through the epoch like a main theme, from resistance to affirmation, from resentment to "positive understanding. "
Affirmation itself constitutes the core of technical knowledge:
Humankind can fly but not because it, say, denies or suspends gravita- tion but by penetrating it in an intellectual process and, expressed pic- torially, coming to the other side of the matter. On the first side, it is its servant, on the other its master. . . .
Thus, gravitation is overcome, not denied. . . . Complete affirma- tion of everything that corresponds to the laws of nature and an un- swerving persistence in the framework of what is given by the laws of nature characterize the means, (pp. 40-41)
The affirmation of the so-called laws of nature serves the interest of controlling them; if they are controlled, they can serve human goals. When Dessauer calls for an affirmation of technology, this means the affirmation of affirmation- ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 455
domination of the means of domination. In the double Yes, the steel subject of the future stirs; it is inseparable from an increased domination by this subject of itself: for this reason, the masters' theory of that period talks incessantly of hero- ism. This mean nothing other than increased self-coercion; the rhetorics of cour- age here means to risk a higher degree of self-mashing.
The machine, for its part, emits a Yes to its inventor as soon as the latter sees that "it works. " As soon as it has "stepped into existence," it possesses a particular ontic quality: It embodies something that did not occur in nature but now exists because the spirit of invention has made it--like a new shape in creation. "We are in the middle of a day of creation" (p. 52).
What does the Fourth Reich mean?
Kant, with a consciousness of an all-encompassing view of the world, distinguished three realms (Reiche) from one another. The first is that of natural science; he called the work, "Critique of Pure Reason. " . . . How is natural science possible? is the key question that opens the way. He gives the answer: through the forms of contemplation, time and space . . . and through the equally a priori forms of understand-
ing . . . the categories through which it works up experience (p. 54). On the basis of this mental equipment, natural science, as knowledge of appearances, is possible. . . .
He discovers the second realm in the experience of ethical law, that omnipotent, unconditional (categorical) imperative that gives the will direction. . . . Theoretical reason of the first realm cannot enter this realm; here, the higher, practical
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
reason reigns that opens up the super- sensuous to the life of the will. . . .
In Kant's ordering, the borders separate the first realm completely from the second. But is such a separation bearable? Kant himself forced an opening through. In the third realm it is a matter of "feeling," of the subjugation of the objects of experience to the goal by means of the power of judgment. This is the aesthetic and functional realm, (pp. 55-56)
But one would try in vain to find in Kant enlightenment about the dimension that cuts most deeply into the life of the present. "In the fourth realm (Reich), we enter a new land that opens up technology to us. " The Fourth Reich is that of in- ventions, those things that have been brought into existence only by human be- ings, the immeasurable potential of what can still be invented and realized. Ac- cording to Dessauer, technology means nothing other than to call the slumbering shapes of the Fourth Reich into reality through invention. It is as if technology reached over into the sphere of the Ding an sich (thing in itself), which according to Kant is inaccessible to us, in order to create out of this sphere previously nonex- isting objects of experience, machines. The machine, however, is no Ding an sich, no creature "out there" whose possibility of existence cannot be reached by
456 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? Heinrich Hoerle, Monument to the Unknown Prostheses, 1930. (Reproduced by permission of the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal. )
any understanding, but rather is there through us. At the same time, what "func- tions" in it is not only from us; there is in it a "power that does not come from me" (Dessauer, p. 60). World-revolutionizing power can be immanent in inven- tions. Dessauer refers, for example, to the ontological puzzle of X rays, which, although a material natural phenomenon, can be produced only by human inter- vention. They constitute a new form of energy that did not previously exist. In- ventions of this quality are ontological enrichments in the inventory of existence--whereby humanity is allotted the role of coauthor of the existing. Through humanity, creation augments itself. Nature provides only the material for the human elevation of the pregiven into a technical supernature.
Everything invented and built by human beings, however, encounters human- ity from the outside like a power of nature-
like mountains, the gulf stream. . . . People have to react. Whoever lives in the mountains lives in accord with the mountains. . . . The power of technology is thus. . . .
. . . The power of newly created forms of technology possesses ba- sically the same autonomy as the creation of a mountain, a river, an ice age or a planet. This fact intensifies the already deeply disturbing extent of a continuing creation, to which we are witnesses and, even more, in which we participate. It is a monstrous fate to be an active participant in creation in such a way that things that have been created by us re- main in the visible world having an effect with an unimaginable autono-
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 457
? Favorable news from the Fourth Reich: "The rota-arm (from Engineer Meyer of the Rotaworks in Aachen) is somewhat lighter and more agreeable than the Jagen- berg arm.
