No More Learning

He probably sees himself as someone who fulfills and obeys the morality of the
hero but who does not enjoy the glamor of success. To be sure, the ideal rules
him, but it does not make him into an exemplary case. He fights and dies when
there is no way out of it, and he can console himself with the certainty that he
is prepared to do what is necessary. He does not feel the continual need to prove
himself as does the topnotch hero, who must even seek out danger simply to keep
4
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
up his self-image. The hesitater, however, pays for this with a certain medi-
ocrity; he is neither right at the top nor right at the bottom, and when he dies his name is summarily listed among the dead heroes. Perhaps it is a good sign that modern armies cultivate, right up to the top ranks, the soldier of the hesitater type (obedience plus thinking for oneself, the "citizen in uniform"), one who does not have an inner urge to fight. Only in certain military and political leaders is there still a tendency toward the characteristic offensive mentality --"falcons," heroes of armament, those hooked on hegemony.
The third stance toward the heroic ideal is adopted by the coward. Of course, under the unavoidable pressure of the heroic image, he must seek refuge in the hesitatingly brave masses. He must hide the fact that he is really the anti-hero; he must camouflage himself and make himself as unobtrusive as possible. As muddler, improvisor, and man of few words, he cannot even afford to internalize the image of the hero in any rigid way because otherwise self-contempt would crush him. In him, a slight decomposition of the "superego" is already under way. In the coward's consciousness lie simultaneously the germs of military kynicism and of a higher critical realism! For through his experience and self- experience,
222 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
the coward is forced to reflect and look twice. He can confess his cowardice aloud just as little--otherwise he would be even more despised --as he can simply give it up. In him, to be sure often poisoned by a drop of self-contempt, a critical potential against the ethics of heroes begins to grow. Because he himself has to dissemble, he will be more sensitive to the pretense of others. When heroes and hesitaters succumb to a superior power, the coward, who allows himself to flee, is the sole survivor. Hence the sarcastic saying: Horses are the survivors of heroes.
We now drop the fiction that we are speaking of a socially homogeneous army. It becomes volatile for soldiers' cynicism when consideration is given to military hierarchies, which correspond roughly to the class structure of society. In feudal military structures we find, besides the troop of knightly heroes, mostly an ac- quired troop of paid knights or mercenaries and below them the troop of orderlies and aides. Each of these groups also has its own combat morality that corresponds approximately to the three military temperaments. For the knight, combat, even if it is about tangible material interests, belongs to his social status and to the aristocratic self-image. In his combat morality, therefore, "honor" must be given special consideration. Where honor is at stake, there is an excess of motivation over and above the small and concrete causes--up to fighting for the sake of fighting. This is not the case with mercenaries, who have made war their profes- sion: the motley mob of the times of the mercenaries, paid knights, but mainly infantry, foot troops, peasants' sons from Switzerland bought to engage in wars, etc. Their motive to fight cannot be heroic because the paid soldier (Italian soldi, money) conceives of war as a workplace, not as a heroes' stage, which does not exclude collaborating with the military spectacle of heroes or even a certain hero- ism lowered to the level of a craft. Mercenaries are professional hesitaters. They wage war because war feeds them, and they intend to survive the skirmishes. The metier as such is already dangerous enough; one does not have to, in addition, challenge death with heroic frills. At the lower end of the hierarchy, finally, the orderly fights, above all because an accident of birth made him the serf of a knight who, without him, could neither mount nor dismount a horse and could not even get out of his armor without help. The aides act as a kind of a military proletariat whose invisible and unappreciated labor is sublated in the victories of their
masters like swallowed surplus value. Entanglements in masculine ideals aside, the servant has no "intrinsic" motivation to fight except, as far as possible, to keep himself alive during the fighting. For him it would be realistic to be cowardly from the bottom of his heart.
The military cynical process can now be set into motion, and as always it be- gins at the lower kynical-realistic position. Sancho Panza is its first "great" representative. Without much reflection, this clever little peasant knows that he has a right to cowardice, just as his poor noble master, Don Quixote, has a duty
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 223
? Gustave Dore, Don Quixote.
toward heroism. But those who view the heroism of the master with Sancho Panza's eyes inevitably see the craziness and blindness of heroic consciousness. This cheeky military enlightenment, which Cervantes unrelentingly lays out, re- veals that the old desire for a hero's fight is an anachronism and that all purport- edly noble occasions to fight are nothing more than pure projections of the knight's imagination. Thus windmills stand for giants, prostitutes for ladies to be heroically loved, and so forth. To be able to see this, the narrator himself requires the realistic, foot soldier's, plebeian perspective --and beyond this social permis- sion to speak a language befitting this perspective. This could not have happened before the late Middle Ages, when the knights lost their technical superiority in weaponry to the plebeian infantry and when armed mobs of peasants more and more frequently served troops of knightly heroes annihilating defeats. Since the fourteenth century, the heroic star of armored horse combat was in any case in descent. With this, the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
moment had arrived when anti-heroism found its language and when the cowardly view of heroism became publicly possible. Once the
224 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
? Thomas Rowlandson, The Two Kings of Terror. English caricature of Napoleon's defeat at Leipzig, 1813.
masters had to swallow their first defeats, the servants sensed their real power. Now, one can laugh realistically.
The constitutions of armies after the Middle Ages up to Napoleonic times, in- deed even up to contemporary times, reveal a paradoxical distortion of the origi- nal connections between combat morality and the type of weaponry. The ancient hero was a lone fighter just as the knight was in feudalism. He sought to prove himself in the duel, but best of all in the constellation of one against many. Mod- ern warfare, however, tendentially depreciates the individual fight. Wars are decided by formations and mass movements. Using the Roman legion as its model, the modern organization of armies pushes the genuinely heroic functions--combined assault, standing firm, man-to-man combat, etc. -toward the bottom. This means that the demands made of heroes fall more and more on those, who, according to their nature and motivation, tend to be hesitaters or cowards. In modern infantries, then, a schizoid drill in heroism --the instilling of an anonymous and unacknowledged courage to die --must be carried out. The top officers, who by virtue of their strategic position, are not as endangered, shove the risk of heroism, death in the front line, more and more onto those who actually have nothing at stake in the war and who often were only acquired as troops ac- cidentally or by force (compulsory conscription, extortion of the poor, entice-
5As soon as some space had been made in modern soldiery for the well-founded realism of the cowards (kynicism), the military cynical process is stepped up to a higher level: the answer to it now comes from the modern cynical realism of ment with alcohol, a way out for superfluous peasants' sons, etc. ).
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 225
royalty. Of course, this realism also knows that not one of the poor devils in uni- form can have heroic motives. But they should be heroes nevertheless and look the so-called hero's death in the face, as normally only aristocrats do. For this reason, armies after the Middle Ages are the first social organs that methodically cultivate schizophrenia as a collective condition. In them, the soldier is not "him- self but another, a piece of the heroic machinery. From time to time it also hap- pens that a leader lets his mask fall and reveals that he indeed sympathizes with the poor devils' wish to live, but he cannot acknowledge this wish. "Dogs, do you want to live forever! " The cynic has thoroughly understood his kynical dogs, but nevertheless people have to die. When Frederick II of Prussia speaks thus, in a patriarchal, humorous tone of voice, we are listening to an enlightened master's consciousness in the second round. It has understood the hero humbug but needs the hero's death for the time being as a political tool --here, for the sake of Prus- sia's glory. On this note, have fun being blown to smithereens! From now on, all battles, no matter how nobly advertised, are overshadowed by this cynical self- denial.
The modern development of types of weaponry contributes a good deal, directly and indirectly, to the tension between the consciousness of heroes and that of cowards. In the dispute between cavalry, infantry, and artillery over precedence, this tension has a subliminal effect. For it generally holds that the more horrifyingly a weapon works even from a distance, the more cowardly, in principle, its user can be. Since the late Middle Ages, we have witnessed the as- cent of long-range weapons to systems that decide wars. With a rifle, the infantry soldier, without great risk, can bring down the most noble knight; thus, world history has voted for the technology of gun powder and against the type of weapons used by cavaliers. With a field cannon, in turn, a whole pile of infantry soldiers can be blown to bits. From this has resulted the strategic primacy of ar- tillery, that is, of the "scientific" type of weapon that in the best schizoid manner
6 producesthemostterribleeffectsfromahiddenpositionandgreatdistance. To-
day's air force and missile systems are, for their part, only extrapolated artilleries, the latest consequences of the technical principle: shooting. Napoleon was not a representative of this type of "thinking" for nothing, and it is no accident that, since the First World War, war is waged under the sign of artillery battles of materials. Contemporary literature after the First World War puzzles about the schizophrenia of the "unknown hero," who bore the horrors of war but was essen- tially more technician than fighter, more civil servant than hero.
What we have now described as the "first round" between the kynicism of sol- diers and the cynicism of the generals has been continually repeated since the "bourgeois age" on a higher level and on a greatly extended scale. The bourgeoisie inherited a bit of the heroic tradition from the feudal era, carrying it on into the broad patriotic masses. "The citizen as hero"-a standard problem of the last two hundred years. Is a bourgeois heroism possible? We find the answers in the mili-
226 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
tary traditions of the last centuries: Naturally the militarized bourgeoisie put everything into developing its own heroic
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
tradition, and equally naturally, the neokynical, bourgeois-proletarian strand tried to make its case against it. On the one hand, therefore, we find much "genuine idealism," "Prussianism," boasting, and lies; on the other, a lot of critical realism, laughter, irony, satire, bitterness, and resistance.
How did this come about? In the Napoleonic era, a previously unimaginable
militarization of the masses began in Europe: Bourgeois society arose not only through the expansion of capitalist forms of trade and production but, at the same time, politically through a broad, "patriotically" motivated self-recruiting of soci- ety into the army. The nation became the armed fatherland, a type of super weapon that welded political egos together. It is said that in the revolutionary wars of the 1790s, there was for the first time something like a national volunteer army, that is, practically a mass heroism that mobilized the type of weapon called souls, patriotic hearts. The "nationalization of the masses" (Mosse) implies not only an ideological event but above all the greatest event of modern military his- tory. With it, collective schizophrenia reached a new historical level. Whole na- tions mobilized themselves in external wars. From then on the tendency to total war increased, in which the entire life of society could become, implicitly or ex- plicitly, a means for war-from the universities to the hospitals, from the
churches to the factories, from art to kindergartens. On this level, however, the kynicism of the coward and the cynicism of the citizen-hero became entangled in far more complicated tensions with each other than before. The "cowardly" wish to stay alive sought new forms of expression in the nation-state: explicitly as pacifism or internationalism (e. g. , of the socialist or anarchist type); implicitly as the Schweik principle, muddling through; the ethos of "malingerers" (systeme
7D). In Europe between, say, 1914 and 1945, whoever wanted to represent the
"party of one's own survival," inevitably had to take something from the socialist, the pacifist, or from Schweik.
The sort of entanglements the kynical and the cynical attitude to soldiery can lead to in the twentieth century is shown by the German example. In the autumn of 1918, the German Empire collapsed in an anarchic spectacle. All types screamed out their views and self-representations all at once: the militaristic na- tionalists as heroes who did not even quite want to see that the war had really been lost; the Weimar parties as civil mediating forces and procrastinators who wanted to prevent the worst and try a new beginning; and finally the Spartacists, Com- munists, expressionists, pacifists, Dadaists, etc. , as the "cowardly" fraction, now on the offensive, who damned war without qualification and demanded a new so- ciety based on new principles. One has to be familiar with these collisions in order to understand how German fascism of the type shown in the Hitler movement received its unmistakable quality that can be precisely localized in history. Hitler was one of those fanatical champions of a petit-bourgeois heroism that, in the fric-
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 227
tion with the absolutely unheroic, "cowardly," life-affirming currents and mental- ities during the time of the collapse between 1917 and 1919, culminated in the most advanced position of military cynicism for that time, namely, fascism, as reaction of the German soldiers returned from the world war against the collective "destructive" realisms of the contemporary Schweiks, pacifists, civilians, so-
8cialists, "Bolshevists," and so on. Fascist military cynicism is a late chapter in
the problem of the "citizen as hero. " It presupposes a high level of schizoid distor- tions, until finally even a declassed petit-bourgeois like Hitler could cling to the image of the hero--especially to an image that was nihilistically ravaged by the war. They wanted to lose their egos in this image (Ich an es).
These interconnections are as complicated as they are saddening. They are so because they reflect a systematic confusion of the will to live. This will to live, with its hopes and identifications, clings on to the militarized nation- states, from which the greatest threat to life expectancy emanates. In the schizoid society, in- dividuals can, in fact, hardly still know how they can pursue their own authentic vital interests and when they are making themselves into a component of a defensive-destructive machinery of the state and military. Driven by the desire to obtain protection and security for themselves, they tie themselves almost ir- revocably to the political-military apparatuses that sooner or later will bring about, or at least slide into, conflict with rivals.
But even militarized fascism lies far below the convoluted windings of military cynicism in the age of nuclear strategy. With the emergence of global weapons of annihilation, weapons that make any question concerning heroism illusory,
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
the tension between heroes, hesitaters, and cowards enters into a completely chaotic phase. Defensive motives apparently gain the upper hand everywhere. Each of the nuclear superpowers openly includes the heroic, hesitating, and cowardly mo- tives of the other in its strategic calculations. Each has to accept that the opponent, in the last analysis, builds up its strategy on the other's cowardice, which is, of course, an armed cowardice having at its disposal a battle- ready hero apparatus. The world situation today has brought about a permanent military eye-contact be- tween two cowardly-heroic hesitaters who both arm themselves unrestrainedly to show the other side that being cowardly will remain the only sensible stance --and that it will never be able to be anything more than a hesitater. The position of the hero remains unoccupied. The world will not see any more victors. This implies a revolutionarily new kind of duel because duelers in the past regarded each other as potential heroes. Today, everyone knows about the opponent's realistic and even indispensable cowardice. The world still lives on because East and West think of each other as cowardly, highly armed Schweiks who, after all the loud- mouthed boasting has been vented, have only one thing in mind, namely, to live on this planet a little longer. But since the military process on the global level has arrived at this nadir of an heroic-cowardly hesitation, the previous system of values has been completely unhinged. The tension, at least theoretically, has dis-
228 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
solved into an open equivalence of all temperaments. Heroism may be quite good, but hesitation is at least as good, and cowardice is perhaps even better. The old negative has become as positive as the old positive has become negative. On the summit of military escalation, then, has the real fight become superfluous? The military alone cannot answer this question, especially not in an age that every- where has proclaimed the (illusory) primacy of politics over the military. The danger will continue to grow as long as political systems produce the means, ends, and ideas to come into a military, hegemonic, and annihilating con- test with one another. The dynamics of armament in the strategic and scientific area, as mad then as it is now, proves that this is still, undiminished, the case. Now as then, each side fantasizes that the ability to survive can only mean being able to defend oneself; that defensiveness as such has become the greatest threat to survival is perceived--not head-on, clearly, in a way demanding conse- quences, but only secondarily, obliquely, unclearly. Each side assumes that only a balance of progressive terror can secure so-called peace. This conviction is simultaneously realistic and absolutely paranoid; realistic because it is adapted to the interaction of paranoid systems; paranoid because in the long run and essen- tially, it is completely unrealistic. In this system of games it is thus realistic to be mistrustful to the point of a constant state of alert; at the same time, mistrust sustains the pressure to permanently continue the buildup of arms, more weapons could obviate mistrust. Modern politics has accustomed us to looking on a mas- sive folie a deux as the quintessence of realistic consciousness. The way in which two or more powers, in intricately thought-out interaction, drive each other crazy provides contemporary human beings with their model of reality. Those who ac- commodate themselves to this modern-day society, as it is, accommodate them- selves in the last instance to this paranoid realism. And because there is probably
9no one who, at least subliminally and in "clear moments," does not understand
this, everyone is caught up in modern military cynicism --if they do not expressly and consciously resist it. Those who resist have to, today and probably for a good while longer, put up with being defamed as dreamers, as people who, although perhaps led by good intentions ("The Sermon on the Mount"), have nonetheless begun to flee from reality. But this is not true. The concept of "reality," like no other concept, is used falsely. We must first flee into reality out of the systema- tized paranoia of our everyday world.
Here, in the middle of military-political considerations, a therapeutic problem clearly emerges that possesses both political and spiritual dimensions. How can subjects of power, sick with mistrust but nonetheless realistic, break down their destructiveness and their projections of hostility as long as the interaction of these systems until now has proved that weakness in the face of the opponent has always been exploited as an opportunity to strike again? Each thinks of itself as an essen- tially defensive power and projects aggressive potentials onto the other. In such a structure, relaxation of tension is a priori impossible. Under the conditions of
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 229
the mania for making enemies it remains "realistic" to stay tense and ready for battle. Neither power can show any weakness without provoking the other's strength. With never-ending exertion the opponents must work for a small terrain on which something like self-limitation becomes possible, that is, a weakening of the consciousness of being strong, a relaxing of the feeling of being inflexible. This tiny terrain of self-limitation is, to date, the only bridgehead of reason in the military-cynical process. Everything will depend on its growth. For human be- ings it was difficult enough to learn how to fight, and everything they so far have achieved they have done so as fighters who have accepted challenges and through them developed into themselves (see Toynbee's concept of "challenge"). But to learn how not to
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
fight would be even more difficult because it would be something completely new. Future military history will be written on a completely new front-there, where the struggle to desist struggling will be carried out. The deci- sive blows will be those that are not struck. Under them our strategic subjectivi- ties and our defensive identities will collapse.
The Cynicism of State and Hegemonic Power
Je n'ai rien, je dois beaucoup,
10
je donne le reste aux pauvres.
Testament of an aristocrat
Does an emperor go to the toilet? I think about the question a lot and run to mother. "You'll end up in prison," says mother. So, he doesn't go to the toilet.
Ernst Toller, Eine Jugend in Deutschland (1933)
War and preparation for war go together with: tricks of diplomacy, the suspension of moral concepts, holidays for truth and a field-day for cynicism.
Stanley Baldwin, British prime minister (1936)
The subjects of political reality, states and monarchical powers, can be com- pared with what the heroes were in military reality. The further back we go in history, the more similar the images of heroes and kings become--until they merge in the idea of heroic monarchy. In ancient times, many monarchical houses and emperors traced their lines of descent directly to the gods. In old traditions, the ascent through heroic achievements to monarchy had to be complemented by a divine descent, as descendancy from the divine. One became king, on the one hand, through heroic power and on the other, through "God's grace"; earned from below through triumphs, illuminated from above by a cosmic legitimation. One cannot say of the early monarchies that they were meek in their public
230 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
self-portrayal. Everywhere noble rule, monarchy, and state were established, an intensive training in arrogance began in the ruling families. Only in this way could the consciousness of standing at the summit be consolidated in the psyches of the powerful.
Grandiosity thus became a political-psychic style. The leap from power to grandeur, from the naked superiority of force to sovereign glory, was made. The primeval kings, pharaohs, despots, caesars, and princes secured their self- confidence by means of a charismatic symbolism. A functionally useful megalomania was at work in the monarchies, i. e. , grandiosity as a structural fac- tor in domination. Through their renown, princes staked out their symbolic do- mains, and only through this renown --the medium of media--do we today know of the existence of many a realm and of the names of their rulers. To this extent the luminescence of ancient kingly arrogance has not quite died out, even to the present day. Not only did Alexander the Great carry his name as far as India; he expanded it through the medium of traditions into the depths of time. Around many a power and ruler a radiant crown forms, emanating energy for millennia.
With the emergence of such lofty political-symbolic positions, however, the scene was also set for the process of the cynicism of power to be put into motion-of course, here too from below, through the provocation of the splendid hegemonic power from the cheeky position of a slave.
The subjects of the first political kynicism were therefore people who were led into or threatened with slavery, people who were oppressed but whose self-consciousness was not com- pletely destroyed. For them it was natural to view the arrogant poses of superior power without awe and in doing so to recall the devastation and massacres the victor inflicted before he could strut around so. In the slave's eyes, the reduction of the king's right to pure force and of majesty to brutality was already begun.
The inventors of the original political kynicism were the Jewish people. In "our" civilization, they have provided the most powerful model to date of resis- tance against violent superior powers. "Cheeky," resolute, militant, and capable of suffering at the same time, they are, or were, the Eulenspiegel and the Schweik among peoples. To the present day in Jewish wit, something of the original kyni- cal twist of oppressed-sovereign consciousness lives on--a reflective flash of mel- ancholy knowledge that slyly, insolently, and alertly positions itself against powers and presumptions. Whenever the Israelite dwarf has once again beaten the modern Goliath, an irony of three thousand years lights up in the victor's eyes: How unfair, David! (Kishon). As a people, the descendants of Adam were the first to have eaten of the tree of political knowledge--and it appears to have been a curse. For with the secret of self-preservation in one's head, one risks being sen- tenced, like Ahasver, to not being able to live or die. During the greater part of their history, the Jews were forced to lead a life that was survival on the defensive.
The political kynicism of the Jews is borne by the knowledge, both ironic and
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 231
Rudolf Schlicher, Blind Power, 1937.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
melancholy, that everything passes, even tyrannies, even oppressors, and that the ? nly immutable thing is the pact between the chosen people and their God. There- fore, in a certain respect, the Jews can be held to be the inventors of "political ? dentity"; it is a faith that, inwardly invincible and unshakable, has known how to defend its continued existence through the millennia with kynical renunciation and an ability to suffer. The Jewish people were the first to discover the power of weakness, patience, and sighing. Their survival, in a millenium of military
? 232 Q THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
conflicts and always in the weaker position, depended on this power. The signi-
ficant break in Jewish history, the dispersion after 134 A. D. , with which the age
of the Diaspora began, led to a change in the model figure for the small, valiant
people. The first half of Jewish history stood under the sign of David, who defied
Goliath and passed into history as the first representative of a "realistic" kingdom
without exaggerated glory. In threatening times the people could lean their politi-
cal ego on this majestic Eulenspiegel and hero figure. From him stemmed an al-
ternative image of the hero--the humanized heroism of the weaker who stands
his ground when resisting a superior power. From Judaism, the world inherited
the idea of resistance. This idea lived on in the Jewish people as the messianic
tradition, which, full of hope, anticipated the promised holy king from the house
of David who would lead the unhappy people out of all turmoil to themselves once
again, to their home, their dignity, their freedom. According to Flavius
11
Josephus's account {The Jewish War), Jesus was nothing more than one of
numerous messianic critics of the authorities and religious guerrillas who had proclaimed their resistance to Roman domination. From the Roman conquest of Palestine until the collapse of the Bar Kokhba uprising in 135 A. D. , messianism must have been truly epidemic on Jewish soil. The charismatic rebel, Simeon bar Kozibe (Bar Kokhba, son of the stars), like Jesus, had claimed that he was a descendant of David.
With Jesus and the consolidation of the Christ religion, the David tradition was continued in new dimensions. While the Jewish people were being beaten and driven from their homeland and were entering the bitter second half of their history--in which Ahasver might be their model figure rather than David- Christianity continued the Jewish resistance against the Roman Empire on an- other level. At first, Christianity became a significant school of resistance, cour- age, and embodied faith. If it had been then what it is today in Europe, it would not have lasted fifty years. During the period of the Roman emperors, Christians formed the nucleus of inner resistance. To be a Christian once meant not allowing oneself to be impressed by earthly power, and especially not by the arrogant, vio- lent, and amoral Roman god- emperors, whose religious-political maneuvers were all too transparent. Early Christianity may have been helped in this by hav- ing inherited from the Jews that historicizing kynicism that knew how to say to all bearers of power and fame and imperial pretension: We have already seen a dozen of your sort perish: hyenas and almighty time, which obeys only our God, have been gnawing for a long time on the bones of earlier despots. The same fate awaits you. The Jewish view of history thus contains political dynamite: It dis- covers the transitoriness of others' empires. The primary "theoretical" kynical- cynical consciousness (cynical too because in alliance with the more powerful principle, i. e. , here, historical truth and "God") is the historical consciousness: that so many powerful and grandiose empires have decayed into dust and ashes.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 233
In Jewish consciousness, historical knowledge becomes the narration of the downfall of others and of its own miraculous survival. From the Jews, the early Christians inherited a knowledge of what it was like in the hearts of the oppres- sors, a knowledge of the hubris of naked power. In the tenth Psalm, Jewish con- sciousness puts itself in the interior of evil power and eavesdrops on its haughty conversation with itself:
2 Because the wicked in his pride doth persecute the poor, let them be taken in the devices that they have imagined.
3 For the wicked boasteth of his heart's desire . . .
6 He hath said in his heart, "I shall not be moved, for I shall never be
in adversity. "
The Jewish kynic follows the invulnerability fantasies of military despots into their innermost marrow. There, he then speaks his denial. He will not be among those who praise the powerful rulers. Since that time, despots have to live with this torment. There will always be a group that takes no part in deifying the powerful. This is how the psychopolitical dynamics of the "Jewish question" func- tion. Jewish-kynical consciousness feels on its own beaten and burned skin the violent nature (Gewaltwesen) of glory and splendor. The back that has counted the lashes will, it is true, bow down
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
because that is the smarter thing to do, but there will be an irony in its bowing that drives those hungry for greatness into a rage.
In the tension between hegemonic powers and the oppressed, two positions thus initially present themselves: here, the "splendid" power with its pompous fa- cade; there, the immediate experience slaves have of the violent core of power and of the facade of pomp. A midpoint between the two is established through the political-legal achievements of the hegemonic power, from which it draws its legitimation. At this midpoint--the achievement of law and state--the conscious- ness of the master and the slave can meet. To the extent hegemonic power legiti- mates itself through a good exercise of power, it overcomes its initially violent character and can find its way back into a relative innocence, namely, to exercise the art of the possible in a world of necessities. Where hegemonic power really legitimates itself, it subjects itself to a higher and more universal interest, to the support and continuance of life. For this reason, peace, justice, and protection of the weak are the holy words of politics. Where a hegemonic power can justifia- bly say of itself that it has furthered peace, brought forth justice, and made the protection of the most fragile life its noblest cause, there it begins to overcome its own core of violence and to earn a higher legitimacy. But here more than any- where else, the words must be measured against reality. As a rule, the language
of power changes the meaning of expressions: It calls the postponement of war peace; it says "creation of order" when it suppresses unrest;
12
it boasts about its
234 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
social-mindedness when it has handed out alms that are mere window dressing; and it says "justice" when it administers laws. The dubious justice of power is reflected in Anatole France's great sarcastic remark: "The law, in its elevated equality, forbids beggars and millionaires alike to sleep under bridges. "
The political original sin, the bloody, violent, and extortionary beginnings of
domination, can only be overcome through legitimation in the sense just de-
scribed and purified through broad assent. If this fails, the violent core of
hegemonic powers resurfaces; unveiled. This occurs continually in legalized
form through the exercise of the punitive force that intervenes whenever the law
of hegemonic powers is broken. Punishment is thus the Achilles' heel of the legal-
13
ity of violence.
at the same time something of their essence and his or her own; their core of vio- lence and his or her attitude toward it. Just as cowards have to hide themselves in the mass of hesitaters, the subver- sive consciousness of slaves keeps itself alive by learning the language of slaves (of acknowledgment, of the illusion of legality and of glorification) so well that the ironic tone is not immediately perceived. The Roman Petronius, if tradition portrays him accurately, is supposed to have been a genius at servile irony. In his encounter with the arrogance of a Nero, he carried the art of scathingly ironic flattery to an extreme. He knew how to serve his poisoned veneration to his maj- esty in such sweet compliments that power could not restrain itself from swallow- ing them. Of course, for the ironic, self-aware patrician in the age of the em- perors, there remained in the end no other way out than to consciously die. This savoir mourir, which knowingly calculates its own death as the possible final price for freedom, links the disempowered but proud Roman patriciate with Christianity, which over the centuries had grown into the greatest provocation to the caesars. With it emerged a consciousness of existential sovereignty that, even more than Stoic ethics, neutralized the question whether one stood at the top, in the middle, or at the bottom of society. Under its sign, slaves could become more fearless of death than the masters. The power of embodiment in early Christianity was so strong that in the end, it won the greatest power structure in the ancient world over to its side. It had its roots in the consciousness of freedom that emerges when the naive veneration of power ceases. To never again be forced to respect a mere worldly, external, violent power--this became the kynical core in the Christian attitude toward hegemonic power. Friedrich Schlegel was one of the first modern thinkers to again achieve a clear picture of the kynical-cynical quality of radically embodied Christianity. In his Athenaeumsfragmente of 1798 he noted: "If the essence of cynicism consists in . . . having an absolute con- tempt . . . for all political splendor . . . , then Christianism is probably noth-
14
ing other than universal cynicism. "
The truth of this thesis is shown in the way the splendid Roman state met and
reflected the kynical-Christian challenge. At first, the Roman state had no alterna-
Anyone who observes hegemonic powers as they punish learns
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 235
tive than to suffocate with brutal force the self-aware light that irritated it, as demonstrated by the waves of persecution of Christians over the centuries. When these were unsuccessful, and the power of embodiment in the new faith grew with repression, there occurred, after three centuries of friction, a turn in world his- tory: Imperial power submitted to Christian kynicism in order to tame it. This is the significance of the Constantinian turning point. With it, the Christianization of power began--and herewith, viewed structurally, the refraction of the kynical impulse into cynicism. Since Constantine, the history of nation-states in Europe is essentially the history of Christianized state-cynicism that, after this epoch- making change of positions did not cease to dominate and afflict political reflec- tion in the form of a schizoid masters' ideology. This, by the way, is (initally! ) not a theme that would require a psychology of the unconscious. The divisions discussed here run through consciousnesses on the surface. That power cannot become pious appears to those ruling, not in nocturnal bad dreams but rather in their daily calculations. There is no unconscious conflict between the ideals of faith here and the morality of power there, but, from the beginning, a limited faith. With this, the cynicism of hegemonic power counterposes itself to the kyni- cal impulse of oppositional power. The former already begins as doublethink.
Christian doublethink reached its first peak in the Augustinian philosophy of history that, despairingly realistic and confronted with the decayed monster of the Christianized Roman Empire, saw no other way out than to make a comprehen- sive program out of the splitting of reality (and implicitly of morality). Thus arises the fatally realistic doctrine of the two realms (de duabus civitatibus), the divine realm (civitasf! ] dei) and the temporal realm (civitas terrena), which are conspicuously embodied in the Catholic church and the Roman Empire. The tem- poral organization of the church, as an appendage of the divine spheres, reaches down to earth. With this, dualisms are described from which there has been no definitive break either in the history of European nation-states or in philosophical thought concerning the state. Even in the twentieth century, state and church stand in a conflict-laden relationship--as accomplices and contracting parties. The thousand-year-old wrangle between state and church provides the picture book of pugilism illustrating all positions, holds, throws, hugs, and scissors that are possible between two wrestlers whom fate has wound inseparably together. Not even on the surface can the Christianized state organize itself as a unified en- tity (aside from Byzantinian Christianity). According to its inner and outer struc- ture, it has long since been condemned to being two-faced and to splitting truth. Thus a double system of law (church law, state law), a double culture (spiritual, worldly) and even a double politics (church politics, state politics) develop. In these doublings is hidden something of the secret of the rhythm of Western Euro- pean history, which produced the bloodiest, most disruptive, most conflict- laden, but at the same time, the most creative and "fastest" history that has ever taken place in such a relatively short time on such a small continent. The kynical-
236 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
cynical logic of conflict is one of the forces or "laws" that drive the tumultuous process of the history of European states, classes, and cultures to its unequaled brilliance. Almost from the beginning, everything is "doubled" here-a mighty potential for antitheses ripe for execution, for embodied powers of reflection, and for armed convictions.
Here, we do not want to get into historiography. A few catchwords may illus- trate the tensions just described as they developed. As is well known, the bishopric of Rome, with its provincial dependencies, was the only parastate struc- ture that survived the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire. Around 500 AD. , Christianity conquered the new Northern European group of powers when Regimus of Reims succeeded in christening the Frankish Merovingian chief, Chlodwig (Clovis). For this reason, even today, the French church proudly calls itselffille ainee de I'eglise (the eldest daughter of the church). That Chlodwig him- self was incidentally also one of the wiliest and most bestial and power- hungry figures of early European history -- surely of the same stuff as a Genghis Khan or a Tamerlane, only with lesser means --may be taken as a hint of what could be expected from Christianized monarchical powers. To live with a schism in one's head became the fundamental problem of Christian domination. Moreover, as a last consequence, the doctrine of Christianity had to split itself, namely, into a doctrine for "half and "whole" Christians, for split and intact Christians. This tendency, of course, had already begun in the times of persecution, when Chris- tian communities started to polarize into religious elites--saints, martyrs, priests --and "ordinary" Christians.
The schizoid development of Christianity can be explained essentially through three great movements: first through the transformation of religion from a way of life for communities to the metaphysical dress rehearsal of ruling powers, that is, through the structuring of religious politics; second, through the establishment of spiritual governments in the form of papal, episcopal, and monastical (abbies, priories) landed dominions; and third, through the forced and superficial Chris- tianization of the broad population. The kynical core of Christianity also presents itself in a threefold way, when, still under the sign of Christian domination, it resists mere domination and tries to live against the splits: first, in the great orders of Western monasticism, which, since Benedict of Nursia, carried on the synthe- sis of prayer and labor, and later
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
too in the contemplative and ascetic movements of the high Middle Ages: second, in the heretics who unrelentingly filed suit for the embodiment of the Christian commandment to love and frequently became martyrs in the "Christian" persecution of Christians; third, in the attempts of some Christian monarchs to bridge the tensions between the worldly "office" and Chris- tian doctrine through a princely humanitarianism (we will leave aside the question of the extent to which this could succeed). Charlemagne cynically and brutally pursued his Frankish-imperialist politics in the name of Christianity, for which reason he is rightly called the Father of the Occident. The Ottonians and Salians
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 237
eveloped the business of political rule by means of churchmen so thoroughly that under them the bishoprics became the supporting struts of German imperial poli- tics (cf. the imperial program of the high Middle Ages, the Christian and German- ically transformed idea of empire and emperor, and the political duels between the monarchy and the papacy). The eight great European crusades can probably be understood only against this background. What happened between 1096 and 1270 under the concept of croisade constituted an attempt of the Christianized feudal dominions to act out the masters' cynicism of their own consciousness, which had become unbearable. After centuries of Christianization, the religious commandments had created a matrix of internalizations in the ruling military-aristocratic strata that then inten- sified the contradiction between the Christian commandment to love and the feu- dal ethics of war to the point of bursting. The unbearable pressure of the contradiction --which had become internalized--explains the violence with which, for centuries, Europeans could pour their energies into the pathological idea of the crusade. The Crusades-- proclaimed to be holy wars --were sociopsy- chological explosions of a proto-Fascist quality. They channeled the energies that had been blocked in the conflict between two mutually negating ethics in the in- dividual and collective soul. In the holy war, the opposition of a religion of love and an ethics of heroism that could not be lived out turned into a call that could be lived out: God wills it. In this fiction, enormous tensions were discharged --to the astonishment of a posterity that can discover neither military nor economic nor religious reason in the unspeakable torments and shows of bravado in the Cru- sades. The idea of the crusade offers (besides the persecution of witches, anti- Semitism and fascism) one of the strongest examples of how an officially proclaimed, collective mania saved countless individuals, in whom the conflict between religious love and militarism churned, from going privately mad. Since 1096, the holy war functions in Western civilizations as a safety valve. Under the pressure of their own inner contradictions and madnesses, people have since then sought external, diabolical enemies and have waged the holiest of wars against them. The psychogram of Christian civilizations carries this--proto-Fascist--risk within it: In times of crisis, when the unlivability of opposed ethical program- mings comes to be felt more acutely, a moment regularly arrives when the pres- sure explodes. That the persecution of the Jews in the Rhineland began simultane- ously with the Crusades underlines the interconnections between the various cultural-pathological phenomena. Jews, heretics, witches, Antichrists, and Reds are all victims of a primarily inner formation of fronts that emerge during highly schizoid periods of pressure, when the irrationality of the whole society seeks an outlet for contradictory ethics.
In addition to channeling Christian masters' cynicism into the Crusades, the Middle Ages showed a second way out of the tension: A semisecularized courtly sphere was set up in which the ethos of the aristocracy and the military could be 238 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
indulged in with a free conscience. The early Arthurian legend was nourished by the momentum released by this discovery; chivalrous romances like the chansons de geste pretty clearly gave the heroic ethos priority over the Christian ethos. Here, chivalry removed itself a couple of steps from the "chains" of the Christian commandment to be loving and peaceful by indulging in an autonomous, worldly celebration of skill in the use of weapons, courtly festivity, and a refined erotics, not caring what the priests had to say about it: the culture of tournaments, feasts, hunting, gluttonous banquets, chivalrous love. Aristocratic hedonism played a significant role into the nineteenth century by protecting the worldly joy in living from the masochistic aura of Christian monasteries. He who slew the most oppo- nents and conquered the most beautiful woman was considered the grandest fel- low. Even Nietzsche, in his anti-Christian song of praise for the "blond beast" and powerful figures, had in mind such secularized, rowdy aristocrats, later condottieri-the type of men who act, take what they desire, and can be "splen- didly" ruthless. The courtly neoheroism, however, achieved only an illusory emancipation from Christian ethics. In a more sublime way, Arthur's knights were also, of course, Christian knights; this is obvious in the case of Percival. With the myth of the knight in search of the Holy Grail, the Christianization of the military is extended into metaphorical and allegorical spheres and ultimately stripped of reality in a pure mysticism of chivalry that absorbs combat into spiritual dimensions. During the late Burgundian period, chivalrous culture resembled a literature living itself out.
In the symbolic haze of Christianized ideologies of the empire, the knight and the state during the late Middle Ages, which hovered over the incessant feudal, city, church, and state wars of Europe, Machiavelli's ideas must have had the cleansing effect of a storm. Machiavelli's Prince has always been read, especially in bourgeois times, as the greatest
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
testament of the cynical technique of power. As an insurpassable declaratory oath of political unscrupulousness, it was in- dicted on moral grounds. What religion fundamentally and unconditionally condemns --murder--is here openly recommended as political means. Of course, over the centuries, many have employed this means. This is not what is innovative in Machiavelli's doctrine. But that someone now comes forth and advocates it openly-that creates a new moral standard that can be sensibly treated only under the concept of cynicism. Masters' consciousness arms itself for a new round and in doing so checks the supplies. Someone was almost bound to come along and express the new standard unmistakably, cheekily, unrestrainedly, clearly, etc. The act of expressing, even to the present day, is considered more scandalous than what is expressed.
Machiavelli's political "amoralism" presupposes the unending tradition of war and the feudal and political chaos of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centu- ries. As a historian, Machiavelli saw that the last remnants of legitimation had been torn from the splendid gown of the Christian state, since no ruler was any
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 239
longer in a position to fulfill, even illusorily, the most primitive tasks of state -- securing peace, upholding the law, protecting life--in the never-ending confusion of warring minor powers. Here, the thought of a central power presses to the fore since it would be in a position to end the chaos of individual powers and to again make civil and state life possible. The ideal prince of such an imaginary, still nonexistent central power would, without regard for the constraints and intrica- cies of Christian morality, have to learn to exercise power radically as an effective force of law, peace, and protection within a homogenized state territory. Politi- cally, Machiavelli, with his cynicism, saw decidedly more clearly than the authorities of the land, empire, and town in the late Middle Ages who simply went on running things with a brutality cloaked in Christianity. The Florentine's prince theory posits for the statesman a duty to unconditional hegemonic power whereby the disposal over every means is automatically implied. Such a cynical technology of power can be valid only in situations in which the state, the political vessel for survival, has been smashed and the central power, if it still exists at all, has fallen into the role of a whipped dog with which a pack of brutal, greedy, and chaotically quarreling minor powers play their game. In such a situation, Machiavelli's cyni- cism can speak the truth. For a minute in world history, this is how a cheeky, sovereign spirit sounds who expresses precisely the right point in amoral tones and can speak for more general vital interests. To be sure, this cynical conscious- ness of power is already so reflexively convoluted and precariously unrestrained that this voice cannot be readily understood, neither from above nor below, nei- ther by those who wield power nor by the general population. A residue of uneasi- ness remains when a princely sovereignty is described here that does something "good" for itself and for the nation's people as a whole by risking, beyond good and evil, the most infamous crimes against individuals.
One might think that the politics of the absolutist states and territories in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe fulfilled Machiavelli's ideas with a grain of salt. The absolutist state indeed set itself above the quarreling minor powers, above regional sovereigns, and especially above the religious parties that were bloodily entangled in one another. (The "politicians" were initially those who tried to maneuver tactfully and to remain relatively neutral vis-a-vis the war- ring religious camps. ) But scarcely established as new, relatively stable hegemonic powers, the absolutist states began to present themselves in a cloud of self-adulation. They too did their utmost to veil their core of violence in a gran- diose rhetoric of legality and God's grace. However, no amount of boastful claims on God's grace can make critical subjects completely forget that in reality it is also a domination by the grace of murder and manslaughter as well as oppression. No modern state has completely succeeded in masking its core of violence, as the Uto- pia of legality dreams of doing. The first great resistance against the modern (ab- solutist) state was borne, sensibly enough, by the former free high nobility and the landed aristocracy that feared the court's sovereignty-that is, a group of peo-
240 ?