The Age of the Enlightenment pushed the dialectic of
understanding
and sensuousness to the breaking point.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
The whole spectrum of what the Germans call Beziehungsprobleme (the politics of the per- sonal), which has occupied so much space in the psychopolitics of the 1970s, seems strangely blocked out.
What about cynicism and ways of overcoming it in the relations between lovers and friends, husbands and wives, children and par- ents?
What about relations at the workplace, in institutions, in leisure activities?
Instead of a plausible focus on intersubjective relations, the ultimate testing ground of any new subjectivity, we get Sloterdijk's odd suggestion that we should take the bomb as the Buddha of the West, the source of negative illuminations, of enlightening Selbsterfahrung.
What the Cyclops was for Odysseus, so it seems, the bomb is for us: the moment of danger in which we find our own nobodiness, in which we understand what it would be like "to explode into the cosmos with a complete dissolution of the self (chapter 5).
Here Sloterdijk's con- structive project to transform the reality principle itself by abandoning the "armed subjectivity of our callousness ratio (chapter 9) and by creating a new subjec- tivity, a new reason, veers off into a well-known male fascination with the ma- chinery of technological destruction.
Sloterdijk's meditations on the bomb, which to him are pivotal to achieving the desired breakthrough to the new horizon of another enlightenment, turn the movement of his own thought back into the cold current of cynicism he had set out to escape, and he comes dangerously close to rewriting the romantic death wish in its postmodern form.
When Sloterdijk ap- proximates Diogenes' satirical laughter to the mocking smile of the bomb and talks about the "pandemonium and laughter .
.
.
at the core of the igniting ex- plosive mass" (chapter 5), the kynic can no longer be distinguished from the cynic.
Is Sloterdijk displaying kynical strategies or cynical attitudes?
It is any- body's guess.
If indeed the cosmic laughter of the nuclear holocaust were the ultimate chance for realizing the kynical nobody, then one might want to rely after all and against better insight on the precarious rationality of overkill and madness as a strategy of survival. Perhaps there was always already too much rather than too little nobodiness in the dominant Western forms of rationality and subjectivity. Per- haps Adorno was right after all when his terrified gaze saw nothing
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but destructive self-denial in Odysseus's tricksterism.
Ill
However, the Critique of Cynical Reason does not simply invalidate itself here as an effective critique of contemporary culture. Its analysis of postenlightened cynicism penetrates to the core of the contemporary malaise, and the new "gay science" Sloterdijk proposes is never so gay as to make us forget the wounds and
xxii ? FOREWORD
vulnerabilities from which it springs. Certainly, the critique of postmodern cyni- cism as enlightened false consciousness can stand apart from the somatic strate- gies of Diogenes' new gay science. It is striking though to see how Sloterdijk's text oscillates strangely between an apocalyptic sensibility and a metaphysics of disaster on the one hand and the hope for self-realization in a new enlightenment, a philosophy of survival, on the other. In that oscillation Sloterdijk's text yields to the pressures of the German culture of the missile crisis, the Aussteiger (dropouts), and the antinuke movement of the early 1980s, a culture of an apocalyptic consciousness which is quite reminiscent of certain apocalyptic trends in Weimar culture and which, in typically German ways, takes Baudrillard
5at his word when he claims that the real nuclear event has already taken place. Although the Diogenes in Sloterdijk ultimately keeps him from embracing a
6postmodern aesthetics of collective suicide as the last chance of self-realization, his views on history come problematically close to the German prophecy of apoc- alypse. This is true not only for his meditations on the bomb and the speculations about the promises of the nobody, but more importantly for the ways in which he interprets Weimar as the Grunderzeit of modern cynicism and strategically places this "Historical Main Text", which comprises almost one- fourth of the total work, at the very end of his book.
Ostensibly, Sloterdijk returns to Weimar because it was in those fourteen years between the humiliations of a lost war resulting in Versailles and Hitler's ascent to power that the cynical structure first emerged as culturally dominant. While today's cynicism is bureaucratic and apathetic, anesthetized, as it were, to its own pains, the culture of Weimar is still fully conscious of the losses and sufferings that come with modernization. Nevertheless Sloterdijk speaks emphatically of a "reconstructed proximity of experience" (chapter 12) between Weimar and the present, and he argues that it needed the cynicism of our own time to read Weimar culture as representing a "summit of cynical structures" (chapter 12). Sloterdijk rejects both the nostalgic-archaeological approach to Weimar culture, which played such a large role in the cultural constitution of the New Left in Germany, and the apologetic political approach, which sees Weimar only as a temporal prefascism, an "augury of political ethics" (chapter 12), only good to teach FRG and GDR "Democrats" how to avoid the mistakes of the past. While Sloterdijk sees those views of Weimar as projections, "images in a historical gallery of mir- rors" (chapter 12), he claims to offer a historically more adequate account of Wei- mar culture. I agree by and large with his critique of accounts of Weimar as nostalgia and apologia, and I find his focus on Weimar cynicism fascinating, novel in its insistence on the centrality of the phenomenon, and often brilliant. It is hard to forget Sloterdijk's analyses of Heidegger's "Man" (Anyone) or of the ambivalences of Dada and its semantic cynicism, his descriptions of the historical and physical contingencies of Weimar subjectivities, the trauma of the trenches and the reality of prostheses, the "cubist mentality" and the "cosmetic realism" of
FOREWORD ? xxiii
the emerging Angestelltenkultur (white-collar culture) as Kracauer has called it. Weimar cynicism appears here as the result of a fundamental crisis of male iden- tity after defeat, and Sloterdijk is certainly right in presenting (not unlike Klaus Theweleit) the major front formations on the Right and on the Left as attempts to restore masculinity, to shore up a sense of identity and boundaries, both psy- chologically and politically. He never discusses how Weimar women figure in this struggle, but for once the masculine inscriptions in cynicism and kynicism (e. g. , the section on Brecht and sexual cynicism) are made quite explicit in the Weimar sections of the book.
And yet, one may want to ask whether there is not a hidden agenda to Sloter- dijk's account of Weimar as well, whether we have not just entered another room in the same historical gallery of mirrors from which Sloterdijk wants us to escape. That in itself would not be a criticism so much as an acknowledgment that no historical narrative will ever be entirely free from the interests and pressures of the present. But it is die nature of the pressures that makes me skeptical about Sloterdijk's account. If indeed there is a tension in his writing between catas- trophism and hope, which many of us would probably share in our own percep- tions of the contemporary world, then this crucial chapter on Weimar cynicism would actually tend to obliterate that tension and lock us into the catastrophic mentality, abolishing all ambivalence and ultimately closing down the space for kynical resistance. Sloterdijk analyzes Weimar cynicism cogently as a symptom of cultural pathology, representative of times of declining class domination, of the "decadence
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and indiscriminate disinhibition of the ruling strata. " Even if one does not espouse a teleological view of history, it is difficult to forget that Weimar cynicism did end in fascism and the holocaust. Sloterdijk himself is the first to admit that the cynical disposition of a whole culture is typically found in prewar periods in which neither intelligence nor good intentions may be enough to stop the race toward disaster. What good, then, can Diogenes do today? How would his satirical laughter differ from that hellish laughter of the apocalypse the chilling effects of which Thomas Mann invoked in Doktor Faustus ? Is Sloterdijk not again flirting with catastrophe? If Weimar were indeed the model for the present, would that not make our fate just as inescapable as today's prophets of nuclear disaster in Germany like to proclaim? After all, the holocaust already took place.
It seems to me that Sloterdijk's fascination with Weimar cynicism, to which we owe some of the best writing about Weimar in recent years, locks him into a teleological view of contemporary developments despite himself. Since he never elaborates in any detail on the implied historical comparison between Wei- mar and contemporary culture, it is difficult for the reader to escape the conclu- sion that our fate has already been sealed, with or without Diogenes. Only such a comparison could dispel the temptation of cultural despair and give us some in- dication whether Sloterdijk's critique of identity pathology and his project of de- veloping a new reality principle is more than wishful thinking. But it is precisely
xxiv ? FOREWORD
this project that poses a significant challenge to contemporary thought and politics
in which the very real deconstructions of multinational capitalism and French the-
ory face off with conservative attempts to reconstruct the basics in education, so-
cial life, and international politics. Unless critical intellectuals understand the
new appeal of old values as new, rather than simply as a continuation of "bour-
geois" identity formation and ideology, the genuine insights of poststructuralist
theory will come to naught. The challenge posed by the Critique of Cynical Rea-
son to deconstructionists and reconstructionists alike has been well put by Leslie
Adelson in a very perceptive review of Sloterdijk's book. The central question
is "how to relinquish the obsession with a fixed identity opposed to all Others with-
out abandoning whatever identity is needed, first to perceive and then to end very 7
real and institutionalized forms of oppression. " Sloterdijk hopes to achieve this with the help of Diogenes and a regeneration of the kynical impulse, a solution that may fall short of the forbidding complexities of the task. But however limited one may hold the Diogenes strategy to be in a broader political sense, Sloterdijk is not a renegade of the Enlightenment, and he does not simply advocate carnival on the volcano. In his concluding pages, he finally does reject the temptation of apocalypse, and he denounces the boom in disaster prophecies itself as an outflow of cynicism. It is here that he returns unabashedly to the Kant of "Was ist Auf- klarung? " of 1784: "Sapere aude! remains the motto of an enlightenment that, even in the twilight of the most recent dangers, resists intimidation by catas- trophe. Only out of its courage can a future still unfold that would be more than the expanded reproduction of the worst in the past" (Conclusion). This minimal- ism of hope in the face of maximal possible catastrophe renders an aspect of our postmodernity that it is as important to recognize and to nurture as it is to criticize that enlightened false consciousness that Sloterdijk impels us to acknowledge as one of the most dangerous symptoms of our culture. The historical truth content of Sloterdijk's book lies precisely in the tensions and oscillations between apoca- lypse and hope that the text refuses to reconcile.
Notes
1. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1983), p. 216. It should be said that Foucault speaks only to a minor, if well- known text in Kant's oeuvre. The fact that Kant's subject is ultimately as unhistorical and universal as that of Descartes and partakes in the same problematic trajectory of the construction of Western rationality was already well worked out by Adorno and has recently been substantiated in new ways by Hartmut and Gemot Bohme in Das Andere der Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main, 1983). Nevertheless, Foucault's brief observations here point to his own com- mitment to a form of enlightenment that has not severed all its ties to the by now notorious siecle des lumieres.
2. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146(July/August 1984):53-92.
3. Ibid. , p. 65.
FOREWORD D xxv
4. Ibid.
5. In: Der Tod der Moderne. Eine Diskussion (Tubingen, 1983), p. 104.
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6. For a critique of Baudrillard and Lyotard and their reception in West Germany, see Klaus R.
Scherpe, "Dramatisierung und Entdramatisierung des Untergangs: Zum asthetischen Bewusstsein von Moderne und Postmoderne," in Andreas Huyssen and Klaus R. Scherpe, eds. , Postmoderne: Zeichen eines kulturellen Wandels (Rowohlt, 1986), pp. 270-301. American translation in Cultural Critique 5 (Winter 1986-87).
7. Leslie A. Adelson, "Against the Enlightenment: A Theory with Teeth for the 1980s," German Quarterly 57(Fall 1984):631.
Preface
Beat the drum and have no fear And kiss the camp follower!
That is the whole of science,
That is the deepest of books' meaning. Heinrich Heine, Doktrin
The great defect of German thinkers
is that they have no sense
for irony, cynicism, the grotesque,
contempt, and mockery.
Otto Flake, Deutsch-Franzosisches
(1912)
For a century now philosophy has been lying on its deathbed, but it cannot die because it has not fulfilled its task. Its farewell thus has been tortuously drawn out. Where it has not foundered in the mere administration of thoughts, it plods on in glittering agony, realizing what it forgot to say during its lifetime. Faced with its demise, it would like now to be honest and reveal its last secret. It con- fesses: The great themes, they were evasions and half-truths. Those futile, beauti- ful, soaring flights--God, Universe, Theory, Praxis, Subject, Object, Body, Spirit, Meaning, Nothingness -- all that is nothing. They are nouns for young peo- ple, for outsiders, clerics, sociologists. "Words, words --nouns. They need only to open their wings, and millennia fall out of their flight. " (Gottfried Benn, Epilog und lyrisches Ich).
The last philosophy, willing to confess, treats such things under a historical rubric--together with the sins of youth. Their time has come. In our thinking there is no longer any spark of the uplifting flight of concepts or of the ecstasies of understanding. We are enlightened, we are apathetic. No one talks anymore of a love of wisdom. There is no longer any knowledge whose friend (philos) one could be. It does not occur to us to love the kind of knowledge we have; rather we ask ourselves how we might contrive to live with it without becoming ossified.
What is presented here under a title that alludes to the great traditions is a medi- tation on the sentence "Knowledge is power. " This is the sentence that dug the grave of philosophy in the nineteenth century. It sums up philosophy and is at the same time its first confession, with which the century-long agony begins. This sentence brings to an end the tradition of a knowledge that, as its name indicates,
XXVI
PREFACE ? xxvii
was an erotic theory --the love of truth and the truth through love (Lie- beswahrheii). From the corpse of philosophy arose the modern sciences and the- ories of power in the nineteenth century in the form of political science, theory of class struggle, technocracy, vitalism, and in every form armed to the teeth. "Knowledge is power (Wissen ist Macht). " This sentence fixed the course for the unavoidable politicization of thinking. Those who utter the sentence reveal the truth. However, with the utterance they want to achieve more than truth: They want to intervene in the game of power. At the same time as Nietzsche began to expose a will to power behind every will to know, the old German social democracy exhorted its members to partici- pate in the race for knowledge that is power. Where Nietzsche's insights were in- tended to be "dangerously" cold and without illusions, social democracy behaved pragmatically --and exhibited a middle-class joy in cultivation. Both spoke of power: Nietzsche by undermining bourgeois idealism with vitalism; the Social Democrats by seeking to gain access to the middle classes' opportunities for power through "cultivation. " Nietzsche taught a realism that was supposed to make it easy for the upcoming generations of bourgeois and petit- bourgeois to take their farewell from idealistic absurdities, which curbed the will to power. Social democracy strove for participation in an idealism that to that point had car- ried the promise of power within itself. In Nietzsche the middle classes could study the subtleties and clever crassness of a will to power that had lost its ideals, while the workers' movement looked furtively at an idealism that better suited its still naive will to power.
Around 1900 the radical left wing had caught up with the right-wing cynicism of the masters. The race between the cynical-defensive consciousness of the old bearers of power and the Utopian-offensive consciousness of the new bearers created the political-moral drama of the twentieth century. In the race for the hardest awareness of hard facts, the Devil and Beelzebub trained one another. Out of the competition of consciousnesses arose that twilight characteristic of the present: the mutual spying out of ideologies, the assimilation of antagonisms, the modernization of fraud-in short, that
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situation that forces the philosopher into the void where liars call liars liars.
We detect a second aspect in Nietzsche that is relevant to contemporary times, after the first, Fascist, Nietzsche wave has ebbed. Once more it becomes clear how Western civilization has worn out its Christian costume. After the decades of reconstruction and the decade of Utopias and "alternatives," it is as if a naive elan had suddenly been lost. Catastrophies are conjured up, new values find ready markets, like all analgesics. However, the times are cynical and know: New values have short lives. Being concerned, caring about people, securing peace, feeling responsible, caring about the quality of life and about the environment- none of that really works. Just bide your time. Cynicism stands ready in the back-
xxviii ? PREFACE
? Neo-"Cyniker. " Nietzsche, the thinker of ambivalence.
ground, until the palaver has stopped and things take their course. Our lethargic modernity certainly knows how to "think historically," but it has long doubted that it lives in a meaningful history. "No need for world history. "
The eternal recurrence of the Same, Nietzsche's most subversive thought -- cosmologically untenable, but culturally and morphologically fruitful --is an apt
1description of a resurgence of "kynical" ("kynisch") motives that had developed
to conscious life especially during the time of the Roman emperors, but also to some extent in the Renaissance. The Same: Those are the rappings of a sober, pleasure-oriented life that has learned to live with circumstances. To be ready for
PREFACE ? xxix
anything, that makes one invulnerably clever. Live in spite of history; existential reduction; socialization "as if; irony about politics; mistrust toward "plans. " A new heathen culture that does not believe in life after death and so must seek life before death.
Nietzsche's decisive self-characterization, often overlooked, is that of a "cynic" (Cyniker); with this he became, next to Marx, the most momentous thinker of the century. Nietzsche's "cynicism" (Cynismus) offers a modified ap- proach to "saying the truth": It is one of strategy and tactics, suspicion and disinhi- bition, pragmatics and instrumentalism--all this in the hands of a political ego that minks first and foremost about itself, an ego that is inwardly adroit and outwardly armored.
The violent, antirationalistic impulse in Western countries is reacting to an in- tellectual state of affairs in which all thinking has become strategy; this impulse shows a disgust for a certain form of self-preservation. It is a sensitive shivering from the cold breath of a reality where knowledge is power and power is knowl- edge. In writing, I have thought of readers, have wished for readers, who feel this way; this book, I think, could have something to say to them. The old social democracy had announced the slogan Knowledge is Power as a practical and reasonable prescription. It did not think too much about it. The message was simply that one has to learn something real so that life will be better later. A petit-bourgeois belief in schooling had dictated the slogan. This belief is disintegrating today. Only for our cynical young medicos is there still a clear link between study and standard of living. Almost everyone else lives with the risk of learning without prospects. Those who do not seek power will also not want its knowledge, its knowledge- armaments, and those who reject both are secretly no longer citizens of this civilization. Countless numbers of people are no longer prepared to believe that one first has to "learn something" so that things will be better later. In these people, I believe, a suspicion is growing that was a certainty in ancient cynicism (Kynismus): that things must first be better before you can learn anything sensible. Socialization through schooling, as it takes place here, and in Western societies, in general, is a priori stupefaction, after which scarcely any learning offers a prospect that things sometime or other will im- prove. The inversion of the relation between life and learning is in the air: the end of the belief in education, the end of European Scholasticism. That is what conservatives as well as pragmatists, voyeurs of the decline as well as well- meaning individuals alike find so eerie. Basically, no one believes anymore that today's learning solves tomorrow's "problems"; it is almost certain rather that it causes them.
Why a "Critique of Cynical Reason"? How can I defend myself against the charge of having written a thick book at a time when even thinner books are con- sidered impudent? As is proper, we should distinguish the occasion from the rea- son and the motive.
xxx ? PREFACE
The Occasion
This year (1981) is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason--a date in world history. Seldom has there been a jubilee as dull as this one. It is a sober celebration; the scholars keep to themselves. Six hundred Kant experts gathered in Mainz--that does not produce a carnival at- mosphere, at most endless
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paper streamers. An imagination would be useful: to picture what would happen if the celebrated figure were to appear among the con- temporaries . . . Is it not a sad festival where the invited guests secretly hope that the person being celebrated is prevented from appearing because those who constantly invoke him would have to be ashamed on his arrival? How would we look to the penetratingly human eye of the philosopher?
Who could bring himself to give Kant a summary of history since 1795, the year in which the philosopher published his essay On Perpetual Peace? Who would have the nerve to inform him about the state of the Enlightenment--the emancipation of humanity from "self-imposed dependency"? Who would be so frivolous as to explain to him Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach"? I imagine that Kant's splendid humor would help us out of our stunned state. He was, after all, an individual of the late eighteenth century, when even the rationalists were not yet as rigid as some today who pretend to be so free and easy.
Scarcely anyone has occupied himself with Kant without touching on the enigma of his physiognomy. Applying the Roman rule of thumb mens sana in cor-
2poresano doesnothelpusgrasphisappearanceatall. Ifitistruethatthe"Spirit"
seeks the appropriate body, in Kant's case it must have been a spirit who found pleasure in physiognomic ironies and psychosomatic paradoxes; a spirit who hid a great soul in a small, gaunt body, an upright stride under a bent back, and a gregarious, delicately cordial humor in a hypochondriacal, compulsive tempera- ment, as if to play a joke on the later devotees of the vital and the athletic.
The physiognomic enigma of Kant is scarcely solved through his personality but rather through his position in the history of ideas and of sensuousness.
The Age of the Enlightenment pushed the dialectic of understanding and sensuousness to the breaking point. The traces of such tensions run through the whole of Kant's work. The language of his main works reveals the violence that the process of thinking--especially in a German mind--inflicts on the sensuous. The fact that a poet like Gottfried Benn, himself stamped by the spirit of the century of natural science, could strike back against such violence by rebuking the philosopher for being a "violator of the intellect" shows how modern cynicism can become the sounding board for cogent insights against the erstwhile greatness of Knowing (Erkenntnis) that aims at the notoriously broken relation between intellect and sensuousness. Robert Musil, surely a guarantor of rationality even beyond the limits in which it feels secure, has captured the experience of a reading of Kant in a memorable passage of his Confusions of the Pupil Torless.
PREFACE ? xxxi
In fact, Torless that very morning had bought the Reclam edition of that volume that he had seen at his professor's and used the first recess to begin reading it. However, because of the profusion of brackets and footnotes he didn't understand a single word, and, when he conscien- tiously followed the sentences with his eyes, it was as if an old bony hand were slowly screwing his brain out of his head.
When he stopped in exhaustion after about half an hour, he had only reached the second page, and sweat stood on his brow.
But then he gritted his teeth and read again one page further, until the recess was over.
By evening, however, he did not even want to touch the book. Fear? Repulsion? He didn't quite know. Only one thing tortured him with burning clarity, that the professor, this person, who didn't look like much, had the book lying around openly in his room, as if it were for him a daily conversation, (pp. 84-85)
The delicate empiricism of this sketch awakens understanding of two things: the fascination of the book and the pain it inflicts on sensitive young readers. Does not an ingenuous contact with Kantian thinking, with philosophical thinking in general, contain the risk of exposing a young consciousness to a violent and sud- den aging? What of a youthful will to know is preserved in a philosophy that makes one dizzy with its bony spiraling turns of the screw? Is what we want to know found at the top end of the screw? Are we ourselves not perhaps so twisted at the head of the screw that we will be satisfied with what we now think we know? And what does it mean that people for whom Kantian thinking is "daily conversa- tion" don't "look like much"? Does it mean that philosophy no longer leaves any trace in life and that reality is one thing and philosophy is something hopelessly different?
From die style of philosophers physiognomic forms look out at us, forms in which reason has hidden aspects of its essential character. To be "reasonable" means to put oneself into a special, rarely happy relation to the sensuous. "Be reasonable" means, practically speaking, do not trust your impulses, do not listen to your body, learn control, starting with your own sensuousness. But intellect and sensuousness are inseparable. Torless's outbreak of sweating after two pages of the Critique of Pure Reason contains as much truth as the whole of Kantianism. The understood mutual interaction of physis and logos is philosophy, not what is spoken. In the future, only a physiognomist can be a philosopher who does not lie. Physiognomic thinking offers a chance to escape from the regime of disem- bodied and
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tiierefore evil minds. To announce a new critique of reason also means to have a philosophical physiognomy in mind; that is not, as with Adorno, "aes- thetic theory," but a theory of consciousness with flesh and blood (and teeth).
As things are, there are grounds not for a celebratory writing (Festschrift) but rather for a writing celebration (Schriftfest) that makes a long detour around the
xxxii D PREFACE
celebrated person out of a liking for the author. "I don't want to say how things lie. /I want to show you how the matter stands" (Erich Kastner).
The Reason
If it is discontent in our culture that provokes criticism, there would be no age quite so disposed to criticism as ours. Yet the critical impulse has never been more strongly inclined to let itself be overpowered by a sour temperament. The tension between what wants to "criticize" and what should be "criticized" is so taut that our thinking is becoming much more morose than precise. No capacity of thought keeps pace with what is problematic. Hence the self-abdication of cri- tique. In the utter indifference toward all problems lies the ultimate premonition of how it would be to be their equal. Because everything has become problematic, everything is also somehow a matter of indifference. This thread should be fol- lowed. It leads to a place where one can speak of cynicism and "cynical reason. "
To speak of cynicism means to expose a spiritual, a moral scandal to critique; following that, the conditions for the possibility of the scandalous are unraveled. "Critique" undergoes a movement that at first fully lives out its positive and nega- tive interest in the object, only in the end to run up against elementary structures of moral consciousness that are brought to expression "beyond good and evil. " The times are cynical everywhere you turn, and it is time to develop the connec- tion between cynicism and realism from first principles. What did Oscar Wilde mean by his blase statement: "I am not at all cynical, I am only experienced-- that's pretty much the same thing"? Or Anton Chekov, who gloomily remarked: "No cynicism can outdo life"?
In the course of reflection, the well-known ambiguity in the concept of critique breaks down; at first it means to make and substantiate judgments, to judge, to condemn; then to investigate the foundations for the formation of judgments. However, if one is talking about cynical "reason," then initially this formula com- pletely takes cover behind irony. What can critique achieve today? What can it still hope for in a time that is so sick of theory? Let us first hear Walter Benjamin's answer:
Fools, who complain about the demise of critique. For its time has long since run out. Critique is a matter of proper distance. It is at home in a world where perspectives and prospects are important and where it was still possible to assume a point of view. In the meantime, things have become much too close for comfort for human society. "Disinterested- ness," the "unbiased perspective," have become lies, if not the com- pletely naive expression of plain incompetence. {Einbahnstrasse [1928] 1969, p. 95)
PREFACE ? xxxiii
In a system that feels like a cross between prison and chaos, there is no stand- point for a description, no central perspective for a compelling critique.
In the shattered world of multiple perspectives, the "grand views" of the whole, in fact, belong more to simple souls than to those who are enlightened and edu- cated by the given order of things. No enlightenment can occur without destroy- ing the effect, thinking-from-a-point-of-view, and without dissolving conven- tional morals. Psychologically this goes hand in hand with a scattering of the ego, literarily and philosophically, with the demise of critique.
But how is the contradiction to be explained that the most important renais- sance of critique in the twentieth century is connected with the name of Walter Benjamin, who, on the one hand, convincingly demonstrated that critique's hour had come, and, on the other hand, participated with such far-reaching impact in the school of Critical Theory? It is impossible, so he says, to assume a "stand- point" because things have become much too close for comfort for us. But from a standpoint of having no standpoint, which has still to be more closely defined, critique has made impressive progress. From where, then, does critique speak? From what perspectives? In whose name?
I believe that Critical Theory has found a provisional ego for critique and a "standpoint" that provides it with perspectives for a truly incisive critique-a standpoint that conventional epistemology does not consider. I am inclined to call it a priori pain. It is not the basis of elevated, distanced critique that achieves grand overviews but a stance of extreme closeness --micrology.
If things have become too close for comfort for us, a critique must arise that expresses this discomfort. It is not a matter of proper distance but of proper prox- imity. The success of the word "concernedness" (Betroffenheit) grows from this soil; it is the seed of Critical Theory that germinates in new forms today, even among those who have scarcely heard of it. Regarding the "concerned," would it not be fascinating to find out where they get their critical model? Anyway, in the manner of their "being concerned," the defects of the forgotten source reappear.
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Because the sovereignty of minds (Kopfe) is always false, the new critique pre- pares to slip from the mind into the whole body. Enlightenment tries to move from top to bottom --politico-culturally as well as psychosomatically. To discover the living body as a sensor of the world is to secure a realistic foundation for phil- osophical knowledge of the world. This is what Critical Theory had begun to do, hesitatingly, often aesthetically encoded, hidden in all kinds of squeamishness.
Critical Theory was based on the presupposition that we know this world a pri- ori, through Weltschmerz. What we perceive of the world can be ordered in psy- chosomatic coordinates of pain and pleasure. Critique is possible inasmuch as pain tells us what is "true" and what is "false. " In holding this view, Critical The- ory makes the usual "elitist" assumption of an intact sensibility. This characterizes its strength and its weakness; it establishes its truth and restricts the scope of its
xxxiv ? PREFACE
validity. One must, in fact, be able to muster so much elitist sensibility. It is nourished by an aversion to the deadly poison of normality in a country of hard heads and armored souls. One should not even try to convince certain opponents; there is a generality of "truth" that is an alibi for lack of understanding. Where the capacity for reason is not based on sensitive self-reflection, no argumentation, not even one based on the most solid theory of communication, will be able to bring it about.
On this "sensitive" point, Critical Theory was never able to get along well with the logicians among its opponents. To be sure, there are thinkers whose minds (Kopfe) are so energetic, whose nervous structures are so hardened, that to them, the entire approach of Critical Theory must seem lachrymose. "Sensitive" theory is suspect. In fact, its founders, especially Adorno, had an exclusively narrow concept of the Sensitive --a presupposition of the highest spiritual irascibility and aesthetic schooling that could never be rationalized; its aesthetics ran just along the threshold of nausea toward everything and anything. There was scarcely any- thing that took place in the "practical" world that did not inflict pain on it or was spared being suspected of brutality. For it, everything was somehow chained like an accomplice to "false living" in which there is "no true living. " Above all, it sus- pected everything that seemed to be pleasure and consent as being swindle, re- lapse, and "false" relief. It was inevitable that Critical Theory, particularly in the person of Adorno, came to feel the backlash of its exaggerations. The embodying of reason for which it had prepared the ground with the highest sensibility could not stop at the limits within which it was constrained by its initiators. What is hap- pening today shows how many faces critique issuing from bodily vitality can assume.
Adorno belonged to the pioneers of a renewed critique of cognition that as- sumes an emotional a priori. In his theory the motifs of a crypto-Buddhist spirit are at work. Those who suffer without becoming hardened will understand; those who can hear music in moments of clarity see across to the other side of the world. The conviction that the real is written in the hand of suffering, coldness, and hardness determines the way this philosophy approaches the world. Although it scarcely believed in a change for the better, it did not give in to the temptation to desensitize itself or to get used to the given order of things. To remain sensitive was, as it were, a Utopian stance --to keep the senses sharpened for a happiness that will not come, a stance that nevertheless, by being prepared for happiness, protects us from the worst kind of brutalizations.
Politically, and in its nerve endings, this aesthetic, this "sensitive" theory, is based on a reproachful attitude, composed of suffering, contempt, and rage against everything that has power. It makes itself into a mirror of the evil in the world, of bourgeois coldness, of the principle of domination, of dirty business and its profit motive. It is the masculine world that it categorically rejects. It is inspired by an archaic No to the world of the fathers, legislators, and profiteers. PREFACE D xxxv
Its basic prejudice is that only evil power against the living can come from this world. That is the reason for the stagnation of Critical Theory. The offensive maneuver of refusing to collaborate has long been ineffective. The masochistic element has outdone the creative element. The impulse of Critical Theory is be- coming mature enough to burst open the strictures of negativism. In its heyday, Critical Theory found its adherents among those who could instinctively share their a priori pain with it. Still, in a generation that began to discover what its parents had done or approved, there were many such people. And because they were many, there was once again in the mid-sixties in Germany a thin thread of political culture --public dispute about true living.
The revival of the great impulse depends on a self-reflection by the intelligent- sia that was once inspired by it. In this sensitive critique, there is a paralyzing resentment. The refusal nourishes itself on an archaic rage against "masculinity," that cynical sense for facts exhibited by political as well as scientific positivists. Adorno's theory revolted against the collaborative traits embedded in the "practi- cal attitude. " His theory tried, by means of a conceptual balancing act, to construe a knowledge that would not be power. It took refuge in the realm of the mother, in the arts, and encoded longings. "Pictures prohibited"--do not tread with the whole foot. Defensive thinking characterizes its style-the attempt
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to defend a re- serve where memories of happiness are bound exclusively with a Utopia of the feminine. In an early work, Adorno once disclosed his emotional-epistemological secret almost without camouflage. In a few heartrending lines he wrote about cry- ing in response to Schubert's music, about how tears and knowing (Erkenntnis) are connected. This music makes us cry because we are not like it, not something complete, which turns toward the lost sweetness of life like a distant quotation.
Happiness can only be thought of as something lost, as a beautiful alien. It can- not be anything more than a premonition that we approach with tears in our eyes without ever reaching it. Everything else belongs to "false living" anyway. What dominates is the world of the fathers, who are always appallingly in agreement with the granite of abstractions, now solidified into a system. With Adorno, the denial of the masculine went so far that he retained only one letter from his
3father's name, W. The path to the meadow (Wiesengrund), however, does not
exactly have to be the wrong one (Holzweg).
Since the dissolution of the student movement we have been experiencing a lull in theory. There is, it is true, more erudition and sophistication than ever be- fore, but the inspirations are sterile. The optimism of "those days," that vital in- terests could be combined with efforts in social theory, has pretty much died out. Without this optimism it becomes quickly apparent how boring sociology can be. For those in the enlightenment camp, after the debacle of leftist actionism, terror, and its intensification in antiterror, the world turned topsy-turvy. The enlighten-
xxxvi D PREFACE
ment camp wanted to make it possible for everyone to mourn German history but ended in its own melancholy. Critique seems to have become even more impossi- ble than Benjamin thought. The critical "attitude" turns nostalgically inward to a kind of philological gardening where Benjaminian irises, Pasolinian flowers of evil, and Freudian deadly nightshade are cultivated.
Critique, in any sense of the word, is experiencing gloomy days. Once again, a period of pseudocritique has begun, in which critical stances are subordinated to professional roles. Criticism with limited liability, petty enlightenment as a factor in success --a stance at the junction of new conformisms and old ambitions. Already in Kurt Tucholsky's work, "in those days," the hollowness of a critique that tried to drown out its own disillusionment could be felt. Such a critique real- izes that having success is a long way from having an effect. It writes brilliantly but in vain, and that can be heard through everything. From these almost univer- sal experiences, the latent cynicisms of present-day enlighteners are nourished.
Pasolini spiced up the dull pseudocritique a bit in that he at least designed a convincing costume: that of the buccaneer-- pirate writings. The intellectual as buccaneer--not a bad dream. We have scarcely ever seen ourselves that way. A homosexual gave the warning signal against the effeminization of critique. Like Douglas Fairbanks leaping around in the cultural rigging, with drawn sword, sometimes the conqueror and sometimes the conquered, knocked about unpre- dictably on the seas of social alienation. The blows fall on all sides. Because the costume is amoral, it fits morally like a second skin. The buccaneer cannot as- sume fixed standpoints because he is constantly moving between changing fronts. Perhaps Pasolini's image of the pirate intellect can reflect light on Brecht, I mean on the young, bad Brecht, not the Brecht who believed he had to conduct classes on the Communist galley.
The offensive posture in the myth of the buccaneer is inviting. One reservation might be the illusion that the intelligentsia is based on brawling as such. In fact, Pasolini is a beaten person, like Adorno. It is the a priori pain --it makes even the simplest things in life difficult for a person--that opens his eyes critically. There is no significant critique without significant defects. It is the critically wounded in a culture who, with great effort, find something healing, who con- tinue to turn the wheel of critique. Adorno dedicated a well-known essay to Hein- rich Heine, Die Wunde Heine {The sore, Heine). This sore is nothing other than the one that bores away in any significant critique. Among the great critical achievements in modern times, sores open up everywhere: the sore, Rousseau; the sore, Schelling; the sore, Heine; the sore, Marx; the sore, Kierkegaard; the sore, Nietzsche; the sore, Spengler; the sore, Heidegger; the sore, Theodor Less- ing; the sore, Freud; the sore, Adorno: Out of the self-healing of deep sores come critiques that serve epochs as rallying points for self-knowledge. Every critique is pioneering work on the pain of the times (Zeitschmerz) and a piece of exem- plary healing.
PREFACE ? xxxvii
It is not my ambition to enlarge this honorable infirmary of critical theories. It is time for a new critique of temperaments. Where enlightenment appears as a "melancholy science" (Adorno-Trans), it unintentionally furthers melancholic stagnation. Thus, the critique of cynical reason hopes to achieve more from a work that cheers us up,
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whereby it is understood from the beginning that it is not so much a matter of work but rather of relaxation.
The Motive
It will already have been noticed that the justification is a bit too deliberate to be quite true. I realize that I might be giving the impression that I am trying to save "enlightenment" and Critical Theory. The paradoxes of the rescue method will ensure that this first impression does not last.
It might seem at first that enlightenment necessarily ends in cynical disillusion- ment, but the page is soon turned and the investigation of cynicism becomes the foundation for a healthy freedom from illusions. Enlightenment was always disil- lusionment in the positive sense, and the more it advances, the closer the moment approaches when reason tells us to attempt an affirmation. A philosophy in the spirit of Yes also includes the Yes to the No. This is neither a cynical positivism nor an "affirmative" attitude. The Yes I mean is not the Yes of the defeated. If there is a trace of obedience in this Yes, it is of the only kind of obedience that can be expected from enlightened people, namely, the obedience to their own ex- perience.
European neurosis sees happiness as its goal and an effort of reason as a way to achieve it. This compulsion has to be overcome. The critical addiction to mak- ing things better has to be given up --for the sake of the good, from which one so easily distances oneself on long marches. Ironically, the aim of the most criti- cal effort is the most ingenuous release. Shortly before Adorno died there was a scene in a lecture hall at Frankfurt University that fits like a key into the analysis of cynicism begun here. The philos- opher was just about to begin his lecture when a group of demonstrators prevented him from mounting the podium. Such scenes were not unusual in 1969. On this occasion something happened that required a closer look. Among the disrupters were some female students who, in protest, attracted attention to themselves by exposing their breasts to the thinker. Here, on one side, stood naked flesh, exer- cising "critique"; there, on the other side, stood the bitterly disappointed man without whom scarcely any of those present would have known what critique meant-cynicism in action. It was not naked force that reduced the philosopher
4inextricably mixed in this scene in a way that is quite typical for cynicisms. Cyni- to muteness, but the force of the naked.
If indeed the cosmic laughter of the nuclear holocaust were the ultimate chance for realizing the kynical nobody, then one might want to rely after all and against better insight on the precarious rationality of overkill and madness as a strategy of survival. Perhaps there was always already too much rather than too little nobodiness in the dominant Western forms of rationality and subjectivity. Per- haps Adorno was right after all when his terrified gaze saw nothing
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but destructive self-denial in Odysseus's tricksterism.
Ill
However, the Critique of Cynical Reason does not simply invalidate itself here as an effective critique of contemporary culture. Its analysis of postenlightened cynicism penetrates to the core of the contemporary malaise, and the new "gay science" Sloterdijk proposes is never so gay as to make us forget the wounds and
xxii ? FOREWORD
vulnerabilities from which it springs. Certainly, the critique of postmodern cyni- cism as enlightened false consciousness can stand apart from the somatic strate- gies of Diogenes' new gay science. It is striking though to see how Sloterdijk's text oscillates strangely between an apocalyptic sensibility and a metaphysics of disaster on the one hand and the hope for self-realization in a new enlightenment, a philosophy of survival, on the other. In that oscillation Sloterdijk's text yields to the pressures of the German culture of the missile crisis, the Aussteiger (dropouts), and the antinuke movement of the early 1980s, a culture of an apocalyptic consciousness which is quite reminiscent of certain apocalyptic trends in Weimar culture and which, in typically German ways, takes Baudrillard
5at his word when he claims that the real nuclear event has already taken place. Although the Diogenes in Sloterdijk ultimately keeps him from embracing a
6postmodern aesthetics of collective suicide as the last chance of self-realization, his views on history come problematically close to the German prophecy of apoc- alypse. This is true not only for his meditations on the bomb and the speculations about the promises of the nobody, but more importantly for the ways in which he interprets Weimar as the Grunderzeit of modern cynicism and strategically places this "Historical Main Text", which comprises almost one- fourth of the total work, at the very end of his book.
Ostensibly, Sloterdijk returns to Weimar because it was in those fourteen years between the humiliations of a lost war resulting in Versailles and Hitler's ascent to power that the cynical structure first emerged as culturally dominant. While today's cynicism is bureaucratic and apathetic, anesthetized, as it were, to its own pains, the culture of Weimar is still fully conscious of the losses and sufferings that come with modernization. Nevertheless Sloterdijk speaks emphatically of a "reconstructed proximity of experience" (chapter 12) between Weimar and the present, and he argues that it needed the cynicism of our own time to read Weimar culture as representing a "summit of cynical structures" (chapter 12). Sloterdijk rejects both the nostalgic-archaeological approach to Weimar culture, which played such a large role in the cultural constitution of the New Left in Germany, and the apologetic political approach, which sees Weimar only as a temporal prefascism, an "augury of political ethics" (chapter 12), only good to teach FRG and GDR "Democrats" how to avoid the mistakes of the past. While Sloterdijk sees those views of Weimar as projections, "images in a historical gallery of mir- rors" (chapter 12), he claims to offer a historically more adequate account of Wei- mar culture. I agree by and large with his critique of accounts of Weimar as nostalgia and apologia, and I find his focus on Weimar cynicism fascinating, novel in its insistence on the centrality of the phenomenon, and often brilliant. It is hard to forget Sloterdijk's analyses of Heidegger's "Man" (Anyone) or of the ambivalences of Dada and its semantic cynicism, his descriptions of the historical and physical contingencies of Weimar subjectivities, the trauma of the trenches and the reality of prostheses, the "cubist mentality" and the "cosmetic realism" of
FOREWORD ? xxiii
the emerging Angestelltenkultur (white-collar culture) as Kracauer has called it. Weimar cynicism appears here as the result of a fundamental crisis of male iden- tity after defeat, and Sloterdijk is certainly right in presenting (not unlike Klaus Theweleit) the major front formations on the Right and on the Left as attempts to restore masculinity, to shore up a sense of identity and boundaries, both psy- chologically and politically. He never discusses how Weimar women figure in this struggle, but for once the masculine inscriptions in cynicism and kynicism (e. g. , the section on Brecht and sexual cynicism) are made quite explicit in the Weimar sections of the book.
And yet, one may want to ask whether there is not a hidden agenda to Sloter- dijk's account of Weimar as well, whether we have not just entered another room in the same historical gallery of mirrors from which Sloterdijk wants us to escape. That in itself would not be a criticism so much as an acknowledgment that no historical narrative will ever be entirely free from the interests and pressures of the present. But it is die nature of the pressures that makes me skeptical about Sloterdijk's account. If indeed there is a tension in his writing between catas- trophism and hope, which many of us would probably share in our own percep- tions of the contemporary world, then this crucial chapter on Weimar cynicism would actually tend to obliterate that tension and lock us into the catastrophic mentality, abolishing all ambivalence and ultimately closing down the space for kynical resistance. Sloterdijk analyzes Weimar cynicism cogently as a symptom of cultural pathology, representative of times of declining class domination, of the "decadence
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and indiscriminate disinhibition of the ruling strata. " Even if one does not espouse a teleological view of history, it is difficult to forget that Weimar cynicism did end in fascism and the holocaust. Sloterdijk himself is the first to admit that the cynical disposition of a whole culture is typically found in prewar periods in which neither intelligence nor good intentions may be enough to stop the race toward disaster. What good, then, can Diogenes do today? How would his satirical laughter differ from that hellish laughter of the apocalypse the chilling effects of which Thomas Mann invoked in Doktor Faustus ? Is Sloterdijk not again flirting with catastrophe? If Weimar were indeed the model for the present, would that not make our fate just as inescapable as today's prophets of nuclear disaster in Germany like to proclaim? After all, the holocaust already took place.
It seems to me that Sloterdijk's fascination with Weimar cynicism, to which we owe some of the best writing about Weimar in recent years, locks him into a teleological view of contemporary developments despite himself. Since he never elaborates in any detail on the implied historical comparison between Wei- mar and contemporary culture, it is difficult for the reader to escape the conclu- sion that our fate has already been sealed, with or without Diogenes. Only such a comparison could dispel the temptation of cultural despair and give us some in- dication whether Sloterdijk's critique of identity pathology and his project of de- veloping a new reality principle is more than wishful thinking. But it is precisely
xxiv ? FOREWORD
this project that poses a significant challenge to contemporary thought and politics
in which the very real deconstructions of multinational capitalism and French the-
ory face off with conservative attempts to reconstruct the basics in education, so-
cial life, and international politics. Unless critical intellectuals understand the
new appeal of old values as new, rather than simply as a continuation of "bour-
geois" identity formation and ideology, the genuine insights of poststructuralist
theory will come to naught. The challenge posed by the Critique of Cynical Rea-
son to deconstructionists and reconstructionists alike has been well put by Leslie
Adelson in a very perceptive review of Sloterdijk's book. The central question
is "how to relinquish the obsession with a fixed identity opposed to all Others with-
out abandoning whatever identity is needed, first to perceive and then to end very 7
real and institutionalized forms of oppression. " Sloterdijk hopes to achieve this with the help of Diogenes and a regeneration of the kynical impulse, a solution that may fall short of the forbidding complexities of the task. But however limited one may hold the Diogenes strategy to be in a broader political sense, Sloterdijk is not a renegade of the Enlightenment, and he does not simply advocate carnival on the volcano. In his concluding pages, he finally does reject the temptation of apocalypse, and he denounces the boom in disaster prophecies itself as an outflow of cynicism. It is here that he returns unabashedly to the Kant of "Was ist Auf- klarung? " of 1784: "Sapere aude! remains the motto of an enlightenment that, even in the twilight of the most recent dangers, resists intimidation by catas- trophe. Only out of its courage can a future still unfold that would be more than the expanded reproduction of the worst in the past" (Conclusion). This minimal- ism of hope in the face of maximal possible catastrophe renders an aspect of our postmodernity that it is as important to recognize and to nurture as it is to criticize that enlightened false consciousness that Sloterdijk impels us to acknowledge as one of the most dangerous symptoms of our culture. The historical truth content of Sloterdijk's book lies precisely in the tensions and oscillations between apoca- lypse and hope that the text refuses to reconcile.
Notes
1. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1983), p. 216. It should be said that Foucault speaks only to a minor, if well- known text in Kant's oeuvre. The fact that Kant's subject is ultimately as unhistorical and universal as that of Descartes and partakes in the same problematic trajectory of the construction of Western rationality was already well worked out by Adorno and has recently been substantiated in new ways by Hartmut and Gemot Bohme in Das Andere der Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main, 1983). Nevertheless, Foucault's brief observations here point to his own com- mitment to a form of enlightenment that has not severed all its ties to the by now notorious siecle des lumieres.
2. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146(July/August 1984):53-92.
3. Ibid. , p. 65.
FOREWORD D xxv
4. Ibid.
5. In: Der Tod der Moderne. Eine Diskussion (Tubingen, 1983), p. 104.
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6. For a critique of Baudrillard and Lyotard and their reception in West Germany, see Klaus R.
Scherpe, "Dramatisierung und Entdramatisierung des Untergangs: Zum asthetischen Bewusstsein von Moderne und Postmoderne," in Andreas Huyssen and Klaus R. Scherpe, eds. , Postmoderne: Zeichen eines kulturellen Wandels (Rowohlt, 1986), pp. 270-301. American translation in Cultural Critique 5 (Winter 1986-87).
7. Leslie A. Adelson, "Against the Enlightenment: A Theory with Teeth for the 1980s," German Quarterly 57(Fall 1984):631.
Preface
Beat the drum and have no fear And kiss the camp follower!
That is the whole of science,
That is the deepest of books' meaning. Heinrich Heine, Doktrin
The great defect of German thinkers
is that they have no sense
for irony, cynicism, the grotesque,
contempt, and mockery.
Otto Flake, Deutsch-Franzosisches
(1912)
For a century now philosophy has been lying on its deathbed, but it cannot die because it has not fulfilled its task. Its farewell thus has been tortuously drawn out. Where it has not foundered in the mere administration of thoughts, it plods on in glittering agony, realizing what it forgot to say during its lifetime. Faced with its demise, it would like now to be honest and reveal its last secret. It con- fesses: The great themes, they were evasions and half-truths. Those futile, beauti- ful, soaring flights--God, Universe, Theory, Praxis, Subject, Object, Body, Spirit, Meaning, Nothingness -- all that is nothing. They are nouns for young peo- ple, for outsiders, clerics, sociologists. "Words, words --nouns. They need only to open their wings, and millennia fall out of their flight. " (Gottfried Benn, Epilog und lyrisches Ich).
The last philosophy, willing to confess, treats such things under a historical rubric--together with the sins of youth. Their time has come. In our thinking there is no longer any spark of the uplifting flight of concepts or of the ecstasies of understanding. We are enlightened, we are apathetic. No one talks anymore of a love of wisdom. There is no longer any knowledge whose friend (philos) one could be. It does not occur to us to love the kind of knowledge we have; rather we ask ourselves how we might contrive to live with it without becoming ossified.
What is presented here under a title that alludes to the great traditions is a medi- tation on the sentence "Knowledge is power. " This is the sentence that dug the grave of philosophy in the nineteenth century. It sums up philosophy and is at the same time its first confession, with which the century-long agony begins. This sentence brings to an end the tradition of a knowledge that, as its name indicates,
XXVI
PREFACE ? xxvii
was an erotic theory --the love of truth and the truth through love (Lie- beswahrheii). From the corpse of philosophy arose the modern sciences and the- ories of power in the nineteenth century in the form of political science, theory of class struggle, technocracy, vitalism, and in every form armed to the teeth. "Knowledge is power (Wissen ist Macht). " This sentence fixed the course for the unavoidable politicization of thinking. Those who utter the sentence reveal the truth. However, with the utterance they want to achieve more than truth: They want to intervene in the game of power. At the same time as Nietzsche began to expose a will to power behind every will to know, the old German social democracy exhorted its members to partici- pate in the race for knowledge that is power. Where Nietzsche's insights were in- tended to be "dangerously" cold and without illusions, social democracy behaved pragmatically --and exhibited a middle-class joy in cultivation. Both spoke of power: Nietzsche by undermining bourgeois idealism with vitalism; the Social Democrats by seeking to gain access to the middle classes' opportunities for power through "cultivation. " Nietzsche taught a realism that was supposed to make it easy for the upcoming generations of bourgeois and petit- bourgeois to take their farewell from idealistic absurdities, which curbed the will to power. Social democracy strove for participation in an idealism that to that point had car- ried the promise of power within itself. In Nietzsche the middle classes could study the subtleties and clever crassness of a will to power that had lost its ideals, while the workers' movement looked furtively at an idealism that better suited its still naive will to power.
Around 1900 the radical left wing had caught up with the right-wing cynicism of the masters. The race between the cynical-defensive consciousness of the old bearers of power and the Utopian-offensive consciousness of the new bearers created the political-moral drama of the twentieth century. In the race for the hardest awareness of hard facts, the Devil and Beelzebub trained one another. Out of the competition of consciousnesses arose that twilight characteristic of the present: the mutual spying out of ideologies, the assimilation of antagonisms, the modernization of fraud-in short, that
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situation that forces the philosopher into the void where liars call liars liars.
We detect a second aspect in Nietzsche that is relevant to contemporary times, after the first, Fascist, Nietzsche wave has ebbed. Once more it becomes clear how Western civilization has worn out its Christian costume. After the decades of reconstruction and the decade of Utopias and "alternatives," it is as if a naive elan had suddenly been lost. Catastrophies are conjured up, new values find ready markets, like all analgesics. However, the times are cynical and know: New values have short lives. Being concerned, caring about people, securing peace, feeling responsible, caring about the quality of life and about the environment- none of that really works. Just bide your time. Cynicism stands ready in the back-
xxviii ? PREFACE
? Neo-"Cyniker. " Nietzsche, the thinker of ambivalence.
ground, until the palaver has stopped and things take their course. Our lethargic modernity certainly knows how to "think historically," but it has long doubted that it lives in a meaningful history. "No need for world history. "
The eternal recurrence of the Same, Nietzsche's most subversive thought -- cosmologically untenable, but culturally and morphologically fruitful --is an apt
1description of a resurgence of "kynical" ("kynisch") motives that had developed
to conscious life especially during the time of the Roman emperors, but also to some extent in the Renaissance. The Same: Those are the rappings of a sober, pleasure-oriented life that has learned to live with circumstances. To be ready for
PREFACE ? xxix
anything, that makes one invulnerably clever. Live in spite of history; existential reduction; socialization "as if; irony about politics; mistrust toward "plans. " A new heathen culture that does not believe in life after death and so must seek life before death.
Nietzsche's decisive self-characterization, often overlooked, is that of a "cynic" (Cyniker); with this he became, next to Marx, the most momentous thinker of the century. Nietzsche's "cynicism" (Cynismus) offers a modified ap- proach to "saying the truth": It is one of strategy and tactics, suspicion and disinhi- bition, pragmatics and instrumentalism--all this in the hands of a political ego that minks first and foremost about itself, an ego that is inwardly adroit and outwardly armored.
The violent, antirationalistic impulse in Western countries is reacting to an in- tellectual state of affairs in which all thinking has become strategy; this impulse shows a disgust for a certain form of self-preservation. It is a sensitive shivering from the cold breath of a reality where knowledge is power and power is knowl- edge. In writing, I have thought of readers, have wished for readers, who feel this way; this book, I think, could have something to say to them. The old social democracy had announced the slogan Knowledge is Power as a practical and reasonable prescription. It did not think too much about it. The message was simply that one has to learn something real so that life will be better later. A petit-bourgeois belief in schooling had dictated the slogan. This belief is disintegrating today. Only for our cynical young medicos is there still a clear link between study and standard of living. Almost everyone else lives with the risk of learning without prospects. Those who do not seek power will also not want its knowledge, its knowledge- armaments, and those who reject both are secretly no longer citizens of this civilization. Countless numbers of people are no longer prepared to believe that one first has to "learn something" so that things will be better later. In these people, I believe, a suspicion is growing that was a certainty in ancient cynicism (Kynismus): that things must first be better before you can learn anything sensible. Socialization through schooling, as it takes place here, and in Western societies, in general, is a priori stupefaction, after which scarcely any learning offers a prospect that things sometime or other will im- prove. The inversion of the relation between life and learning is in the air: the end of the belief in education, the end of European Scholasticism. That is what conservatives as well as pragmatists, voyeurs of the decline as well as well- meaning individuals alike find so eerie. Basically, no one believes anymore that today's learning solves tomorrow's "problems"; it is almost certain rather that it causes them.
Why a "Critique of Cynical Reason"? How can I defend myself against the charge of having written a thick book at a time when even thinner books are con- sidered impudent? As is proper, we should distinguish the occasion from the rea- son and the motive.
xxx ? PREFACE
The Occasion
This year (1981) is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason--a date in world history. Seldom has there been a jubilee as dull as this one. It is a sober celebration; the scholars keep to themselves. Six hundred Kant experts gathered in Mainz--that does not produce a carnival at- mosphere, at most endless
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paper streamers. An imagination would be useful: to picture what would happen if the celebrated figure were to appear among the con- temporaries . . . Is it not a sad festival where the invited guests secretly hope that the person being celebrated is prevented from appearing because those who constantly invoke him would have to be ashamed on his arrival? How would we look to the penetratingly human eye of the philosopher?
Who could bring himself to give Kant a summary of history since 1795, the year in which the philosopher published his essay On Perpetual Peace? Who would have the nerve to inform him about the state of the Enlightenment--the emancipation of humanity from "self-imposed dependency"? Who would be so frivolous as to explain to him Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach"? I imagine that Kant's splendid humor would help us out of our stunned state. He was, after all, an individual of the late eighteenth century, when even the rationalists were not yet as rigid as some today who pretend to be so free and easy.
Scarcely anyone has occupied himself with Kant without touching on the enigma of his physiognomy. Applying the Roman rule of thumb mens sana in cor-
2poresano doesnothelpusgrasphisappearanceatall. Ifitistruethatthe"Spirit"
seeks the appropriate body, in Kant's case it must have been a spirit who found pleasure in physiognomic ironies and psychosomatic paradoxes; a spirit who hid a great soul in a small, gaunt body, an upright stride under a bent back, and a gregarious, delicately cordial humor in a hypochondriacal, compulsive tempera- ment, as if to play a joke on the later devotees of the vital and the athletic.
The physiognomic enigma of Kant is scarcely solved through his personality but rather through his position in the history of ideas and of sensuousness.
The Age of the Enlightenment pushed the dialectic of understanding and sensuousness to the breaking point. The traces of such tensions run through the whole of Kant's work. The language of his main works reveals the violence that the process of thinking--especially in a German mind--inflicts on the sensuous. The fact that a poet like Gottfried Benn, himself stamped by the spirit of the century of natural science, could strike back against such violence by rebuking the philosopher for being a "violator of the intellect" shows how modern cynicism can become the sounding board for cogent insights against the erstwhile greatness of Knowing (Erkenntnis) that aims at the notoriously broken relation between intellect and sensuousness. Robert Musil, surely a guarantor of rationality even beyond the limits in which it feels secure, has captured the experience of a reading of Kant in a memorable passage of his Confusions of the Pupil Torless.
PREFACE ? xxxi
In fact, Torless that very morning had bought the Reclam edition of that volume that he had seen at his professor's and used the first recess to begin reading it. However, because of the profusion of brackets and footnotes he didn't understand a single word, and, when he conscien- tiously followed the sentences with his eyes, it was as if an old bony hand were slowly screwing his brain out of his head.
When he stopped in exhaustion after about half an hour, he had only reached the second page, and sweat stood on his brow.
But then he gritted his teeth and read again one page further, until the recess was over.
By evening, however, he did not even want to touch the book. Fear? Repulsion? He didn't quite know. Only one thing tortured him with burning clarity, that the professor, this person, who didn't look like much, had the book lying around openly in his room, as if it were for him a daily conversation, (pp. 84-85)
The delicate empiricism of this sketch awakens understanding of two things: the fascination of the book and the pain it inflicts on sensitive young readers. Does not an ingenuous contact with Kantian thinking, with philosophical thinking in general, contain the risk of exposing a young consciousness to a violent and sud- den aging? What of a youthful will to know is preserved in a philosophy that makes one dizzy with its bony spiraling turns of the screw? Is what we want to know found at the top end of the screw? Are we ourselves not perhaps so twisted at the head of the screw that we will be satisfied with what we now think we know? And what does it mean that people for whom Kantian thinking is "daily conversa- tion" don't "look like much"? Does it mean that philosophy no longer leaves any trace in life and that reality is one thing and philosophy is something hopelessly different?
From die style of philosophers physiognomic forms look out at us, forms in which reason has hidden aspects of its essential character. To be "reasonable" means to put oneself into a special, rarely happy relation to the sensuous. "Be reasonable" means, practically speaking, do not trust your impulses, do not listen to your body, learn control, starting with your own sensuousness. But intellect and sensuousness are inseparable. Torless's outbreak of sweating after two pages of the Critique of Pure Reason contains as much truth as the whole of Kantianism. The understood mutual interaction of physis and logos is philosophy, not what is spoken. In the future, only a physiognomist can be a philosopher who does not lie. Physiognomic thinking offers a chance to escape from the regime of disem- bodied and
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tiierefore evil minds. To announce a new critique of reason also means to have a philosophical physiognomy in mind; that is not, as with Adorno, "aes- thetic theory," but a theory of consciousness with flesh and blood (and teeth).
As things are, there are grounds not for a celebratory writing (Festschrift) but rather for a writing celebration (Schriftfest) that makes a long detour around the
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celebrated person out of a liking for the author. "I don't want to say how things lie. /I want to show you how the matter stands" (Erich Kastner).
The Reason
If it is discontent in our culture that provokes criticism, there would be no age quite so disposed to criticism as ours. Yet the critical impulse has never been more strongly inclined to let itself be overpowered by a sour temperament. The tension between what wants to "criticize" and what should be "criticized" is so taut that our thinking is becoming much more morose than precise. No capacity of thought keeps pace with what is problematic. Hence the self-abdication of cri- tique. In the utter indifference toward all problems lies the ultimate premonition of how it would be to be their equal. Because everything has become problematic, everything is also somehow a matter of indifference. This thread should be fol- lowed. It leads to a place where one can speak of cynicism and "cynical reason. "
To speak of cynicism means to expose a spiritual, a moral scandal to critique; following that, the conditions for the possibility of the scandalous are unraveled. "Critique" undergoes a movement that at first fully lives out its positive and nega- tive interest in the object, only in the end to run up against elementary structures of moral consciousness that are brought to expression "beyond good and evil. " The times are cynical everywhere you turn, and it is time to develop the connec- tion between cynicism and realism from first principles. What did Oscar Wilde mean by his blase statement: "I am not at all cynical, I am only experienced-- that's pretty much the same thing"? Or Anton Chekov, who gloomily remarked: "No cynicism can outdo life"?
In the course of reflection, the well-known ambiguity in the concept of critique breaks down; at first it means to make and substantiate judgments, to judge, to condemn; then to investigate the foundations for the formation of judgments. However, if one is talking about cynical "reason," then initially this formula com- pletely takes cover behind irony. What can critique achieve today? What can it still hope for in a time that is so sick of theory? Let us first hear Walter Benjamin's answer:
Fools, who complain about the demise of critique. For its time has long since run out. Critique is a matter of proper distance. It is at home in a world where perspectives and prospects are important and where it was still possible to assume a point of view. In the meantime, things have become much too close for comfort for human society. "Disinterested- ness," the "unbiased perspective," have become lies, if not the com- pletely naive expression of plain incompetence. {Einbahnstrasse [1928] 1969, p. 95)
PREFACE ? xxxiii
In a system that feels like a cross between prison and chaos, there is no stand- point for a description, no central perspective for a compelling critique.
In the shattered world of multiple perspectives, the "grand views" of the whole, in fact, belong more to simple souls than to those who are enlightened and edu- cated by the given order of things. No enlightenment can occur without destroy- ing the effect, thinking-from-a-point-of-view, and without dissolving conven- tional morals. Psychologically this goes hand in hand with a scattering of the ego, literarily and philosophically, with the demise of critique.
But how is the contradiction to be explained that the most important renais- sance of critique in the twentieth century is connected with the name of Walter Benjamin, who, on the one hand, convincingly demonstrated that critique's hour had come, and, on the other hand, participated with such far-reaching impact in the school of Critical Theory? It is impossible, so he says, to assume a "stand- point" because things have become much too close for comfort for us. But from a standpoint of having no standpoint, which has still to be more closely defined, critique has made impressive progress. From where, then, does critique speak? From what perspectives? In whose name?
I believe that Critical Theory has found a provisional ego for critique and a "standpoint" that provides it with perspectives for a truly incisive critique-a standpoint that conventional epistemology does not consider. I am inclined to call it a priori pain. It is not the basis of elevated, distanced critique that achieves grand overviews but a stance of extreme closeness --micrology.
If things have become too close for comfort for us, a critique must arise that expresses this discomfort. It is not a matter of proper distance but of proper prox- imity. The success of the word "concernedness" (Betroffenheit) grows from this soil; it is the seed of Critical Theory that germinates in new forms today, even among those who have scarcely heard of it. Regarding the "concerned," would it not be fascinating to find out where they get their critical model? Anyway, in the manner of their "being concerned," the defects of the forgotten source reappear.
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Because the sovereignty of minds (Kopfe) is always false, the new critique pre- pares to slip from the mind into the whole body. Enlightenment tries to move from top to bottom --politico-culturally as well as psychosomatically. To discover the living body as a sensor of the world is to secure a realistic foundation for phil- osophical knowledge of the world. This is what Critical Theory had begun to do, hesitatingly, often aesthetically encoded, hidden in all kinds of squeamishness.
Critical Theory was based on the presupposition that we know this world a pri- ori, through Weltschmerz. What we perceive of the world can be ordered in psy- chosomatic coordinates of pain and pleasure. Critique is possible inasmuch as pain tells us what is "true" and what is "false. " In holding this view, Critical The- ory makes the usual "elitist" assumption of an intact sensibility. This characterizes its strength and its weakness; it establishes its truth and restricts the scope of its
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validity. One must, in fact, be able to muster so much elitist sensibility. It is nourished by an aversion to the deadly poison of normality in a country of hard heads and armored souls. One should not even try to convince certain opponents; there is a generality of "truth" that is an alibi for lack of understanding. Where the capacity for reason is not based on sensitive self-reflection, no argumentation, not even one based on the most solid theory of communication, will be able to bring it about.
On this "sensitive" point, Critical Theory was never able to get along well with the logicians among its opponents. To be sure, there are thinkers whose minds (Kopfe) are so energetic, whose nervous structures are so hardened, that to them, the entire approach of Critical Theory must seem lachrymose. "Sensitive" theory is suspect. In fact, its founders, especially Adorno, had an exclusively narrow concept of the Sensitive --a presupposition of the highest spiritual irascibility and aesthetic schooling that could never be rationalized; its aesthetics ran just along the threshold of nausea toward everything and anything. There was scarcely any- thing that took place in the "practical" world that did not inflict pain on it or was spared being suspected of brutality. For it, everything was somehow chained like an accomplice to "false living" in which there is "no true living. " Above all, it sus- pected everything that seemed to be pleasure and consent as being swindle, re- lapse, and "false" relief. It was inevitable that Critical Theory, particularly in the person of Adorno, came to feel the backlash of its exaggerations. The embodying of reason for which it had prepared the ground with the highest sensibility could not stop at the limits within which it was constrained by its initiators. What is hap- pening today shows how many faces critique issuing from bodily vitality can assume.
Adorno belonged to the pioneers of a renewed critique of cognition that as- sumes an emotional a priori. In his theory the motifs of a crypto-Buddhist spirit are at work. Those who suffer without becoming hardened will understand; those who can hear music in moments of clarity see across to the other side of the world. The conviction that the real is written in the hand of suffering, coldness, and hardness determines the way this philosophy approaches the world. Although it scarcely believed in a change for the better, it did not give in to the temptation to desensitize itself or to get used to the given order of things. To remain sensitive was, as it were, a Utopian stance --to keep the senses sharpened for a happiness that will not come, a stance that nevertheless, by being prepared for happiness, protects us from the worst kind of brutalizations.
Politically, and in its nerve endings, this aesthetic, this "sensitive" theory, is based on a reproachful attitude, composed of suffering, contempt, and rage against everything that has power. It makes itself into a mirror of the evil in the world, of bourgeois coldness, of the principle of domination, of dirty business and its profit motive. It is the masculine world that it categorically rejects. It is inspired by an archaic No to the world of the fathers, legislators, and profiteers. PREFACE D xxxv
Its basic prejudice is that only evil power against the living can come from this world. That is the reason for the stagnation of Critical Theory. The offensive maneuver of refusing to collaborate has long been ineffective. The masochistic element has outdone the creative element. The impulse of Critical Theory is be- coming mature enough to burst open the strictures of negativism. In its heyday, Critical Theory found its adherents among those who could instinctively share their a priori pain with it. Still, in a generation that began to discover what its parents had done or approved, there were many such people. And because they were many, there was once again in the mid-sixties in Germany a thin thread of political culture --public dispute about true living.
The revival of the great impulse depends on a self-reflection by the intelligent- sia that was once inspired by it. In this sensitive critique, there is a paralyzing resentment. The refusal nourishes itself on an archaic rage against "masculinity," that cynical sense for facts exhibited by political as well as scientific positivists. Adorno's theory revolted against the collaborative traits embedded in the "practi- cal attitude. " His theory tried, by means of a conceptual balancing act, to construe a knowledge that would not be power. It took refuge in the realm of the mother, in the arts, and encoded longings. "Pictures prohibited"--do not tread with the whole foot. Defensive thinking characterizes its style-the attempt
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to defend a re- serve where memories of happiness are bound exclusively with a Utopia of the feminine. In an early work, Adorno once disclosed his emotional-epistemological secret almost without camouflage. In a few heartrending lines he wrote about cry- ing in response to Schubert's music, about how tears and knowing (Erkenntnis) are connected. This music makes us cry because we are not like it, not something complete, which turns toward the lost sweetness of life like a distant quotation.
Happiness can only be thought of as something lost, as a beautiful alien. It can- not be anything more than a premonition that we approach with tears in our eyes without ever reaching it. Everything else belongs to "false living" anyway. What dominates is the world of the fathers, who are always appallingly in agreement with the granite of abstractions, now solidified into a system. With Adorno, the denial of the masculine went so far that he retained only one letter from his
3father's name, W. The path to the meadow (Wiesengrund), however, does not
exactly have to be the wrong one (Holzweg).
Since the dissolution of the student movement we have been experiencing a lull in theory. There is, it is true, more erudition and sophistication than ever be- fore, but the inspirations are sterile. The optimism of "those days," that vital in- terests could be combined with efforts in social theory, has pretty much died out. Without this optimism it becomes quickly apparent how boring sociology can be. For those in the enlightenment camp, after the debacle of leftist actionism, terror, and its intensification in antiterror, the world turned topsy-turvy. The enlighten-
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ment camp wanted to make it possible for everyone to mourn German history but ended in its own melancholy. Critique seems to have become even more impossi- ble than Benjamin thought. The critical "attitude" turns nostalgically inward to a kind of philological gardening where Benjaminian irises, Pasolinian flowers of evil, and Freudian deadly nightshade are cultivated.
Critique, in any sense of the word, is experiencing gloomy days. Once again, a period of pseudocritique has begun, in which critical stances are subordinated to professional roles. Criticism with limited liability, petty enlightenment as a factor in success --a stance at the junction of new conformisms and old ambitions. Already in Kurt Tucholsky's work, "in those days," the hollowness of a critique that tried to drown out its own disillusionment could be felt. Such a critique real- izes that having success is a long way from having an effect. It writes brilliantly but in vain, and that can be heard through everything. From these almost univer- sal experiences, the latent cynicisms of present-day enlighteners are nourished.
Pasolini spiced up the dull pseudocritique a bit in that he at least designed a convincing costume: that of the buccaneer-- pirate writings. The intellectual as buccaneer--not a bad dream. We have scarcely ever seen ourselves that way. A homosexual gave the warning signal against the effeminization of critique. Like Douglas Fairbanks leaping around in the cultural rigging, with drawn sword, sometimes the conqueror and sometimes the conquered, knocked about unpre- dictably on the seas of social alienation. The blows fall on all sides. Because the costume is amoral, it fits morally like a second skin. The buccaneer cannot as- sume fixed standpoints because he is constantly moving between changing fronts. Perhaps Pasolini's image of the pirate intellect can reflect light on Brecht, I mean on the young, bad Brecht, not the Brecht who believed he had to conduct classes on the Communist galley.
The offensive posture in the myth of the buccaneer is inviting. One reservation might be the illusion that the intelligentsia is based on brawling as such. In fact, Pasolini is a beaten person, like Adorno. It is the a priori pain --it makes even the simplest things in life difficult for a person--that opens his eyes critically. There is no significant critique without significant defects. It is the critically wounded in a culture who, with great effort, find something healing, who con- tinue to turn the wheel of critique. Adorno dedicated a well-known essay to Hein- rich Heine, Die Wunde Heine {The sore, Heine). This sore is nothing other than the one that bores away in any significant critique. Among the great critical achievements in modern times, sores open up everywhere: the sore, Rousseau; the sore, Schelling; the sore, Heine; the sore, Marx; the sore, Kierkegaard; the sore, Nietzsche; the sore, Spengler; the sore, Heidegger; the sore, Theodor Less- ing; the sore, Freud; the sore, Adorno: Out of the self-healing of deep sores come critiques that serve epochs as rallying points for self-knowledge. Every critique is pioneering work on the pain of the times (Zeitschmerz) and a piece of exem- plary healing.
PREFACE ? xxxvii
It is not my ambition to enlarge this honorable infirmary of critical theories. It is time for a new critique of temperaments. Where enlightenment appears as a "melancholy science" (Adorno-Trans), it unintentionally furthers melancholic stagnation. Thus, the critique of cynical reason hopes to achieve more from a work that cheers us up,
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whereby it is understood from the beginning that it is not so much a matter of work but rather of relaxation.
The Motive
It will already have been noticed that the justification is a bit too deliberate to be quite true. I realize that I might be giving the impression that I am trying to save "enlightenment" and Critical Theory. The paradoxes of the rescue method will ensure that this first impression does not last.
It might seem at first that enlightenment necessarily ends in cynical disillusion- ment, but the page is soon turned and the investigation of cynicism becomes the foundation for a healthy freedom from illusions. Enlightenment was always disil- lusionment in the positive sense, and the more it advances, the closer the moment approaches when reason tells us to attempt an affirmation. A philosophy in the spirit of Yes also includes the Yes to the No. This is neither a cynical positivism nor an "affirmative" attitude. The Yes I mean is not the Yes of the defeated. If there is a trace of obedience in this Yes, it is of the only kind of obedience that can be expected from enlightened people, namely, the obedience to their own ex- perience.
European neurosis sees happiness as its goal and an effort of reason as a way to achieve it. This compulsion has to be overcome. The critical addiction to mak- ing things better has to be given up --for the sake of the good, from which one so easily distances oneself on long marches. Ironically, the aim of the most criti- cal effort is the most ingenuous release. Shortly before Adorno died there was a scene in a lecture hall at Frankfurt University that fits like a key into the analysis of cynicism begun here. The philos- opher was just about to begin his lecture when a group of demonstrators prevented him from mounting the podium. Such scenes were not unusual in 1969. On this occasion something happened that required a closer look. Among the disrupters were some female students who, in protest, attracted attention to themselves by exposing their breasts to the thinker. Here, on one side, stood naked flesh, exer- cising "critique"; there, on the other side, stood the bitterly disappointed man without whom scarcely any of those present would have known what critique meant-cynicism in action. It was not naked force that reduced the philosopher
4inextricably mixed in this scene in a way that is quite typical for cynicisms. Cyni- to muteness, but the force of the naked.
