Schlegel I, selected and edited by Curt
Griitzmacher
(Hamburg, 1969), p.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason
e.
, as a philo- sophical history of art).
Such a history has not been written and would not be necessary if the principles could be made comprehendible without the historical crutch.
In any form of erudition, intelligence risks its life.
Those who deal with the past risk fading into the past themselves without having understood what they have lost in it.
Those who heed these cautions will find sufficient material for a history of the Gay Science hidden in the archives or dispersed in the research liter- ature.
Rich traditions offer themselves for rediscovery: a great European silen- tium tradition that was at home not only in the churches, monasteries, and schools but also in the unresearched popular intelligence that is concealed in the eternal silence of the majorities --a silence in which there is also freedom and not merely speechlessness; insight and simplicity, not merely dullness and oppression.
There is an even greater European tradition of satire in which the freedoms of art, the carnival, and criticism combined into a many-tongued culture of laughter.
Here the main strand of a militant intelligence is probably revealed that bites like the kynical dogs without becoming doggedly pugnacious and that strikes more into its opponent's consciousness with its mockery, irony, inversions, and jokes than
at the opponent himself. Finally, there is an impressive tradition of action in which can be studied the ways in which people have taken their own insights "seri- ously" for the sake of a life whose chances they did not want to waste. That it was frequently an act of resistance is in the nature of things here. The "art of the possible" is not only what statesmen are supposed to master, but always comes
In the presence of so much rage to "change," Diogenes would ex-
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 291
? POLITIQUE. MORALE ET LITT^RAJRE.
J. Grandville, Models of satirical consciousness: the fool with bow and arrow; the Naked Truth. Advertisement for the periodical La Caricature (detail).
into play where people try, with awareness and intelligence, to protect the chance of their life. My favorite examples of such action --apart from some pieces of bravado of the type found in Eulenspiegel, Schweik, and some manifestations of revolutionary praxis --are provided by those emigrants who (especially) in the nineteenth century, set out from a hopelessly hidebound Europe to try their luck in the New World as freer people. In setting out this way there is something of the kynical force of vital intelligence and of the exodus of consciousness into the open world, where life still has a chance to be stronger than the suffocating powers of tradition, society, and conventions. If I were to say which individual action I hold to characterize an intelligence that not only "knows" but also "acts," I would probably choose Heinrich Heine's emigration to Paris in 1831 --this apex of conscious praxis in which a poet subjected his biography to the necessities and chances of the historical moment and left his homeland in order to be able to do what he believed he had to do for his own sake and that of his homeland. "I went because I had to"-and behind this "had to" there were not yet the police (as in the case of Marx and other refugees) but rather the insight that in a conscious life there are moments when we first have to do what we want in order then also to
35
The satirical-polemical-aesthetic dimension in the history of knowledge be- comes important because, in fact, it is the dialectic en marche. With it, the princi- ples of embodiment and resistance penetrate the course of socially organized thinking: the inexpressible individual element; single persons intuitively in touch with their existence; the "nonidentical" conjured up by Adorno; the thing-there
want to do what we have to do.
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that is already mistreated by any mere conceptual designation because it stimu- lates understanding (and only makes a "case of X" out of the singular). Where should this individual reality assure itself better of its existence -- apart from the arts --than in satire, in the ironic dissolution of imposed "orders," in playing with what pretends to be "law," in brief, in the embodiment of this highly nonserious matter that, after all, the living being is? Dialectical thinkers --whether philoso- phers, poets, or musicians --are those in whom polemics and the fierce and uncon- scionable animosity between thoughts and motives already form the inner work- ings of their "thinking" process. Their presence of mind suffices, if one can put it this way, for more than one thought. All great dialectical thinkers and artists thus carry within themselves a disputatious, forward-driving, and creative kynic or cynic that, from within, prescribes movement and provocation for their think- ing. Dialecticians are the movers of thoughts who cannot do otherwise than to give the antithesis to every thesis its due. We observe in them a partly comba- tively unsettled, partly epically measured form of discourse that stems from a feeling for the figural, melodic, and thematic in the composition of thought-in the disguised poet Plato no differently than in the philosophizing musician Adorno, in the grotesque and pompous dialectic of Rabelais as in the uninhibited streaming rhetoric of Ernst Bloch. It would be worth the effort sometime to por-
tray the inner kynical-cynical "partner" of the important masters --whether it be with Diderot or Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard, or Marx, with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, or Foucault. And what really happens when Sartre, the master dialectician of the twentieth century, confronts Flaubert, the grand cynic of the nineteenth century, on the thousands of pages of the Idiot of the Family (a con- frontation so full of philosophical and psychodynamic morsels that it is obviously impossible to talk about it in an incidental manner).
As we have said, kynicism cannot be a theory and cannot have its "own" the- ory. Cognitive kynicism is aform of dealing with knowledge, a form of relativiza- tion, ironic treatment, application, and sublation. It is the answer of the will to live to that which it has suffered at the hands of theories and ideologies-partly a spiritual art of survival, partly intellectual resistance, partly satire, partly "critique. "
"Critical theory" tries to protect life from the false abstractness and violence of "positive" theories. In this sense, the Frankfurt Critical Theory too inherited the kynical portions of those grand theories the nineteenth century handed down to the twentieth --of left Hegelianism with its existentialist and anthropological as well as its historical and sociological aspects, and of Marxism, as well as of Criti- cal Psychology, which became well known especially in the form of psychoanaly- sis. These are all, if properly understood, "theories" that contain within them the kynical form of treating theory (namely, the sublation of theory) and that can be made into "fixed systems" only at the cost of an intellectual regression. Such regressions have happened on a grand scale, and how much stupefaction has been
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perpetrated in the late nineteenth century and the whole of the twentieth by vulgar Hegelianism, vulgar Marxism, vulgar psychology, vulgar existentialism, and vulgar Nietzscheanism is all too crassly shown in recent social history. All these systems of stupefaction have dispatched the reflective agility of "Critical The- ories," established rigid dogmas as "knowledge," and left nothing of kynical sub- lation except arrogant presumption. In fact, the kynical sublation of theory stems from a conscious not-knowing, not from a knowing-better. It releases us to a new and fresh not-knowing, instead of letting us become rigid in certainties. For with "convictions" only the desert grows. Against this, Frankfurt Critical Theory achieved a great deal by attempting again and again to "destupefy" the theoretical inheritance of the nineteenth century and, above all, by trying to save the elements of truth in Marxism from its degeneration in Leninist and, still more, in Stalinist dogmatics.
In its good times, Marxism was really a vehicle of an active intelligence, and it knew how to fertilize all the human sciences with its historical-critical con- sciousness. The materialist conception of history [Kautsky; --Trans. ] has always contained hundreds of possibilities for "another history" and for a history of the Other. A real history of the Other, however, can be written only by those who are the Other and the Others and have decided to let this Otherness live and to fight for the freedom to be allowed to be so. The most significant examples today are the history of "femaleness" and the history of homosexuality. With the relating of their suppression and formation, both come simultaneously to the conscious- ness of a freedom that is now becoming real. By talking about themselves --in his- tory and in the present--women and homosexuals also celebrate the beginning of a new era that they will be "a part of in a different way than they were previously. History must be like this. It must proceed from something and lead to something that lives now and that lays claim to more and more life and rights to life for the Now and Later. What is passe on a vital level cannot be considered passable on the level of living knowledge. The historical is reduced to what has been finished and what has only passed but is not yet over--the unfinished, the imperfect, the inherited evil, the historical hangover. Whenever people and groups set about to finish for themselves such an inherited chapter of the unfinished, then memory and history will become useful forces for them, whether in the individual realm, as in psychotherapy, or in the collective realm, as in struggles for liberation.
This distinguishes an existential historiography from the kind Nietzsche justifiably called "museal" history-a history that serves as distraction and decora- tion rather than as concentration and vitalization. We can call existential histori- ography kynical and museal-decorative historiography cynical. The former tells of all we have come through, battered but not broken--just as the Jewish view of history grew out of the insight into the transitoriness of foreign empires and into its own persistent continuance. In this same way Marxism--in its good times-created a possibility of systematically narrating the history of oppres-
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sions, whether this is called slavery, as in antiquity, serfdom as in the Middle Ages (which, e. g. , in Russia lasted until 1861), or proletarian existence as in the present. But the language in which the history of oppression in the name of Marx- ist ideology will be told one day remains open--in any case, certainly no longer in the language of Marxism; perhaps in that of a critique of cynical reason; per- haps in a feminist language; perhaps in a metaeconomic, ecological language. Cynical historiography, by contrast, sees "in all worldly things" only a hopeless cycle; in the life of the peoples, as in the life of individuals, in human life as in organic life in general, it sees a growing, flourishing, withering, and dying: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. "There is nothing new under the sun! " is
36
its motto, and even this is nothing new.
which we have marched and will continue to march, over the bodies of those who were silly enough to believe they could stand in the way of our will to power, our thousand-year Reich, our historical "mission. "
Besides "critical" history, "critical" psychology is the second of the human sciences with a kynically effective barb. Today, with the progressive psy- chologizing of society, that is no longer so readily understandable because for us, the kynical shock of psychological enlightenment already lies in the dim past. At best, we became somewhat aware of the offensive side of psychoanalysis in the Freudo-Marxist spectacles of May 1968 --insofar as we were willing to see any- thing in psychoanalysis other than a great self-mystification of bourgeois society that oppresses, distorts, and manipulates individuals and finally says to them, when, as a result, they don't feel well: Your unconscious is to blame. Only the Freudian Left has transmitted something of the original kynical bit of psychoana- lytic enlightenment in that--from Wilhelm Reich to Alice Miller --it knew at the same time how to avoid the pitfalls of analytic orthodoxy.
In chapter 6 (the final section), we indicated how the explosive power of psy- choanalysis is initially connected with the fact that Freud equates the unconscious with the domain of sexual secrets. Psychological curiosity was thereby channeled in an extremely successful way toward what has always interested people most of all anyway. As the "unconscious" it was on the whole neutralized and excused, and as sexuality it was, on top of everything else, the most fascinating thing around. Under this banner, the cognitive kynicism of psychoanalysis could breach social consciousness --at first through a small opening, but later there was scarcely anything left of the wall. Then it came out: "Everything you always wanted to know about sex. " Kynics could not possibly fulfill their task more ele- gantly than Freud did. In immaculate prose and dressed in the best English tweed, the Old Master of analysis managed, while maintaining the highest respect, to talk about almost everything that one does not talk about. That in itself is already an Eulenspiegel action without parallel in the history of culture, and it could proba- bly succeed only because Freud personally did not underline the subversive, satir- ical, and rebellious side of his undertaking but on the contrary did his utmost to
Or it sees in history a victory route on
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 295
give his work the appearance of science. The miracle of psychoanalysis is how it so respectably conjures all its objects--the oral, anal, and genital. It is as if in refined society someone burped at the dinner table and nobody found anything exceptional in it. Freud managed what would leave even Diogenes green with envy: He erected a theory that makes us all, whether we like it or not, into kynics (if not even into cynics).
It happens this way: In the beginning, everyone is a pure, natural being, born from the mother's body into a well-bred society, not knowing what is proper. We grow up as sexually polyvalent, "polymorphously perverse" subjects, and kyni- cism is universally disseminated in our nurseries which at first, in everything lives, thinks, wishes, and acts completely out of our own bodies. Freud imported a kynical phase into the life history of everyone and also found rudimentary expla- nations for why adults still tell cynical jokes or are even inclined to make cynicism their attitude toward life. In every one of us, there was once a primitive dog and a primitive swine, beside which Diogenes is a pale imitation--but we, as well- behaved people, cannot for the life of us remember anything about it. It is not enough that this human primitive animal, as the educators say, "defecates" and performs in front of everybody what we adults do there where only our con- science looks on. Not only does it piss in its diapers and against the wall; this be- ing at times even develops an interest unworthy of a human being in its own excre- ment and does not even shrink from smearing the wall with it. That Diogenes did such things not even his enemies claimed. In all superfluity, this being likes to frequently hold those parts of the body for which adults only know the Latin names and shows in everything a reckless self-conceit, as if it personally and no one else were the center of its world. That this kynical primitive animal in the end even wants to kill its father and marry its mother--or conversely --that, after all that has happened, is registered somewhat with resignation. Indeed, even when analysts maintain that the Oedipus complex is the universal law of psychic development in human beings, this is accepted like one more piece of bad news among many others. (Later it is noticed that Freud is interested only in the tragic version of the Oedipus myth, not in the kynical dedramatization of the story. ) Af- ter these psychoanalytic revelations, parenthood must unavoidably turn into a bat- tle between philosophical schools. For we have to become a Stoic, when we have the kynic physically right in our own house. If a connection between Freud's ethics and those of Epicure has often been noticed, that is because the Epicurean line was the most successful in finding a compromise between Stoicism and kyni- cism, between moral duty and self-realization, between the reality principle and the pleasure principle, between "culture" and those who experience "discontent in it. " Societies in the world era of states send their members continually on those "too long marches" from which the living try to deviate by allowing themselves short cuts.
With respect to our infantile side, we have thus all arisen from kynicism. In
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this point, psychoanalysis does not allow us any evasion. However, it itself be- comes evasive by taking a thoroughly ambivalent stance toward the tension be- tween the infantile and the adult. For it always knows how to arrange things so that the analyst remains respectable while the patient-child remains bestial. He makes a protege, so to speak, out of the kynical-animal side in us, to the extent that we all possess such an analyzable underground. Analysts are those "citizens" who interpret and counsel the still-effective infantile, animal, neurotic, etc. , un- citizenness of others. However, here it seems to be their greatest fear that they themselves will get caught in the undertow of their themes and be seen as just as disreputable as the oral, anal, genital phenomena of life with which they concern themselves. Perhaps, at least in part, the excessive interest in culture that is noticeable in many psychologists comes from this circumstance. They seem pres- sured to constantly prove anew their ability to be cultured --after having already compromised themselves enough through their professional occupation with the infantile and animal aspects of human beings. "Psychological literature" has be- come in the meantime a phenomenon of such dimensions that it can only be dealt with sociologically and statistically. Its primary concern is the self-assurance of modern semicynics in their cultural role. With "cultivation," with books, diplomas, titles, supplementary training and degrees, they try to preserve their rights of citizenship in "official culture" (which, by the way, in any case does not exist). At the same time, this serves the pedantic demarcation of "sicknesses. " There are more than a few psychologists in whose voices a lot of fear, contempt, superciliousness, and aggression can be heard when they use words like narcis- sism, schizophrenia, paranoia, ambivalence, neurosis, psychosis. They are words of demarcation, words for others, words on the high horse of normality. It may, however, be a good sign that today some--I want to say insightful- therapists have decided to let the mask of respectability drop and to give up the role of the respectable portrayer of reality. They have, to their own advantage and that of their patients, come over to the side of the living. For those who have been made ill by reality, the path to being able to get through life well certainly does not lead by way of an accommodation to the Freudian "medium misery" of the average adult.
In the domain of knowledge and the sciences, a number of cynical phenomena have appeared that constitute a counterpart to what, in the preceding section on religious cynicism, I have designated, after Sartre, "bad faith" (mauvaise foi). These phenomena are the "crooked attitudes" toward truth and knowledge that make these "highest goods" into mere useful items, or even into instruments for lying. Despite all apparent lack of respect, the kynic assumes a basically serious and upright attitude toward truth and maintains a thoroughly solemn relation, sa- tirically disguised, to it. With the cynic, this relation has given way to a thorough flabbiness and agnosticism (denial of knowledge). "What is truth? " asked Pontius Pilate when he sensed that he was just about to commit a crime against it. The
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most harmless among the cynicisms of knowledge is that of the examinees, who build up the most external and contemptuous relation to that which they have to learn, a relation of mere cramming, of rote learning, with the firm intention of forgetting it again after the examination. After that, already less harmless, fol- lows the cynicism of the pragmatists and politicians who, admittedly, like to see that the next generation has acquired its academic foundations, but for the rest proceed from the attitude that theory is theory and that in practice everything looks quite different. Here, all the learning and studying that precede function like pure detour and selection mechanisms, roughly according to the assumption that whoever gets through them successfully can also succeed with the other--even though, as is generally known, study and subsequent occupation often are totally unconnected. Learning is separated cynically and instrumentally from its aims and treated as a mere abstract certificate of qualifications. In some cases, the only thing that links study and occupation is salary, which is set according to the type of highest educational qualification achieved. The "substance" is degraded with cynical realism to a mere prelude, to academic chitchat. How much ethos- decimation and demoralization continually take place here is scarcely measurable --one has only to think of courses that have to do with "values": educa- tion, teacher training, the legal professions, publishing, social work, medicine, and so on. If Mephistopheles could say to Faust that all theory is gray, and green is the golden tree of life, this evidences an optimism that can be developed only by someone who has never passed from study into professional life. For here it becomes clear that theory was probably too rosy and that reality first teaches us what gray really is. But here we are not completely without hope. Course reforms work toward ensuring that the studies too will be just as gray as the prospects to be had after them.
The actual and innermost connection between the sciences and cynicism, how- ever, concerns the structure and the procedure of modern empirical sciences per se. For just as there is a form of cynical correctness in the relations between hos- tile individuals, there is also a form of cynical objectivity and methodological strictness in some sciences' and some scientists' way of treating the "facts. " I be- lieve this constitutes the core of what, since the late nineteenth century, we call "positivism. " If this word sounds critical, it is surely not because it designates a scientific mentality that stresses being logically exact and true to the facts and refraining from any sort of speculation. In this sense, positivism would have to be a title of honor rather than a dubious label. But in fact, the point of contention in the positivism debate is not scientific principles but the unprincipledness of science. For there are areas of research - and they are usually those in which the positivists do all the talking-where it does not suffice merely to behave scienti- fically "objectively" with the "facts," but where more is demanded of the scientist than merely the capacity to collect data, produce statistics, and formulate the- orems. There are "objects," in relation to which there is no scientific neutrality
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but only partial and interest-directed forms of investigation --most clearly of all in the entire domain of the human and social sciences (this way of seeing things can be made plausible even with respect to the natural sciences; see chapter 11 "Transcendental Polemic," which indicates the connection between objectifica- tion and the process of making enemies). The dispute around positivism ignited not over its indisputable achievement in clarifying the logical form and the empir- ical basis of strict sciences but over the naive assumption of the positivists that they could open up every "arbitrary" field of research with these means and thus subject every reality to the arbitrariness of a callous researching. The positivist, however, can be suspected not so much of naivete but of cynicism, especially since the days of early, and perhaps really naive, positivism are gone and we have long since been confronted with a positivism in its third generation, which, we can safely say, has been washed in the seven seas. The short formula for the his- tory of science in this century would have to read: The path of scientism leads from positivism to theoretical cynicism (functionalism). When Critical Theory pilloried the "affirmative character" of traditional and positivistic theories, it meant by this that such theories, in their artificial objectivity, betray a cynical as- sent to social relations that, to those who suffer, who sympathize, are concerned, stink to high heaven. In the methodological doctrines of positivism and the new social functionalism, those theoreticians find their organon who, with detached brutality, indirectly and coolly defends existing systems against the individuals who come to grief in them.
Notes
1. If Hegel's Phenomenology is described as a "journey of the weltgeist through history to itself," in this formulation, none of the crucial concepts is acceptable. First, it is no journey because such a thing would have to have a beginning and a goal, which does not hold; "path" metaphors do not adequately grasp history. Second, there is no weltgeist that, simultaneously as combatant and battle follower, has been present through the turnings and struggles of history. Third, there is no world his- tory as narrative of the vicissitudes of a subject that suffered them. Fourth, there is no self that, after some kinds of journeys, histories, or struggles, could arrive at "itself; that would be a pretty ghostly being, a megalomaniac reflexive pronoun that rampages over our natural being-as-self.
2. Wilhelm Stieber, Spion des Kanzlers (The chancellor's spy) (Munich, 1981), p. 135; see also chapter 10, "Black Empiricism. " The quotation suggests a psychoanalytic theory of cynicism that in- terprets cynicism as the expression of an unconscious desire to be punished.
3. Only more recent narrative also includes the civil hero, the hero as rogue (picaro), and even the negative, passive hero.
4. The Arthurian legends discuss the problem of how a hero must constantly earn his status: Erec. His error was to become soft and to fail to expose himself to continual testing.
5. As soon as the soldiers became aware of this, they became suspicious of their leaders. The modern large armies stood and fell with the group of lower commanders and officers who "advanced with the rest. " There supposedly are even statistics from the World Wars that prove that the officers are "sufficiently well" represented among the fallen.
6. This motif will be pursued in chapter 10, ("Black Empiricism"), the final section.
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7. Officially sanctioned in part: As late as the war of 1870-71, there were many paid "substitute soldiers" serving in the place of conscripts.
8. Elsewhere I have tried to work out the particular emotional toning of German Fascist cynicism in an interpretation of the Beelitz anecdote from Hitler's Mein Kampf: Der Gefreite Hitler als Anti- Schweijk--Zur Psychodynamik moderner Zersetzungsangst. See Peter Sloterdijk, "Die Krise des Individuums --studiert im Medium der Literatur," in J. Schulte-Sasse (ed. ), Political Tendencies in the Literature of the Weimar Republic (Minneapolis, Minn. , 1982).
9. See chapter 22, "Bright Hour. "
10. [Translation of the French testament: I have nothing, / I have many debts, / I give the rest
to the poor. ]
11. See also Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, (2nd ed.
New York, 1978), pp. 133ff.
12. See Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs (Paris, 1975), p. 44: "Tout le monde sent le tragique
de cete information: 'L'ordre est retabli. ' " To maintain order is synonymous with mounted charges, opening fire on unarmed people, and killing women and children.
13. It is no accident that Michel Foucault, who stimulated the most penetrating analyses of power, force, and "micropolitics" in our time, at the same time began with the phenomenon of disciplinary force, of punishment, execution, surveillance, and incarceration.
14. Schlegel's sentence also contains the germ of a theory not only of political but also of economic and religious cynicism and the cynicism of knowledge (see the remaining cardinal cynicisms as well as the secondary cynicisms). The unabridged quotation reads: "If the essence of cynicism consists in giving nature priority over art and virtue over beauty and science; without paying regard to the letter, to which the Stoic strictly sticks, but to pay heed only to the spirit, to unconditionally show contempt for all economic value and political glamour, and to bravely maintain the rights of autonomous ca- price: then Christianism would be nothing other than universal cynicism. " Athenaeum. Eine Zeit- schrift von A. W. und Fr.
Schlegel I, selected and edited by Curt Griitzmacher (Hamburg, 1969), p. 102.
15. In detailed studies, these coarse classifications prove problematic; e. g. , up until 1918, the Ger- man state, because of its feudal components, etc. , cannot be designated as wholly bourgeois.
16. Aside: I began writing down these notes on cynicism--that a critique of cynical reason would come of it, I did not know at the time--shortly after seeing an interview with the Jewish philosopher and political scientist, Hannah Arendt, which Giinther Gaus had made with her many years before and which was broadcast again on the fifth anniversary of her death in 1980. This conversation, a prime example of relaxed chatting and philosophizing in front of an audience and one of the few exam- ples of intelligence in television, reached its climax when Arendt told of her activity at the Jerusalem trial of the mass murderer Eichmann. One must have heard with one's own ears how this woman aver- red that in studying the many thousands of pages of the transcript of the proceedings, she repeatedly broke out into loud laughter about the peculiar stupidity that had exercised control over innumerable lives. In Arendt's self-aware confession there was something frivolous and kynical in the most precise sense of the word that, after an initial consternation, proved itself to be a liberating and sovereign expression of truth. When Arendt then, as an encore, even made the remark that she often had fun in exile, for she was young and improvising in uncertainty has its own attractions, then I also had to laugh, and with that, this book began to "write itself. "
17. In the People's Democracies, incidentally, we encounter a complementary swindle.
18. I have decided to place money cynicism under the secondary cynicisms. Exchange cynicism, which is treated in chapter 9, appears to me to be an excrescence of the coercions of power.
19. Mature-immature: These are not value judgments but scales of measurement for objective conditions for socialism. If socialism is defined as the liberation of social productivity from capitalist fetters, then late-capitalist relations must first be created that can then be superseded.
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20. See chapter 11. There I attempt to establish a rational dialectics under the concept of universal polemic. At the same time, I provide a critique of the Marxist use of dialectics.
21. This is not a plea for a "productivistic" ideology. Productivity is a multidimensional concept. Incidentally, the newer consciousness of political ecology presupposes the culmination of produc- tivism.
22. Dialectic--as dialectic of obstruction. That is the realistic basis of Adorno's Negative Di- alectics.
23. Kurt Keiler drew my attention to the story of the mouse's indirect suicide. It is contained in the final chapter of Boris Vian's novel, L'Ecume des jours (1946). Here I have changed it around some- what to fit Goliath's tale.
24. Dialectic of perfection: In what is perfect, there is still a flaw; the perfection of the beginning must therefore be excelled by that of the end --by passing through a disorder. This constitutes a basic figure of dialectical fantasies of movement: A first, "lost" summit is regained in the ascent to a second, higher summit.
25. The motif appears not only in the European tradition but also in Hindu and Buddhist legends.
26. Epiphanius is conspicuous as one of the first priests with an obsession about Mary. See The- odor Reik's interpretation, "Der heilige Epiphanius verschreibt sich. (Eine Fehlleistung vor sechzehn Jahrhunderten. )," in Reik, Der eigene und der fremde Gott. Zur Psychoanalyse der religiosen Ent- wicklung (Frankfurt, 1975), pp. 37-56.
27. It is disturbing to only hint at this theme, which would be a book in itself. I hope to be able to write more comprehensively and convincingly on this topic in a later work.
28. This will displease many a dyed-in-the-wool structuralist who is intent on joining in the dance around the golden calf of "language, discourse, and signifier. " The structuralist fetishism of the sig- nifier (signifiant) is no more clever than the "logocentric" fetishism of the signified (signifie).
29. See Sartre, L'Etre et le neant (1943), p. 84: "Through the lie, consciousness affirms that it exists by its nature as something hidden to the other, it exploits the ontological duality of ego and alien ego for its own advantage. It is different with mauvaise foi, if, as we have said, it is a lie to one- self. . . . That is, the duality of deceiver and deceived does not exist here. " The God of Cain would accordingly appear as the partner of a self-consciousness that can still deceive itself. Hence only God in genesis.
30. Nietzsche's neokynical "revaluing of all values" extends also to science by taking its objects more cheerfully "than they deserve. "
31. Is not critical rationalism a la Popper an offshoot of satirical fallibilism, mistakenly taken to be respectable?
32. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel remarks with regard to the "Kynical School": "There is nothing much to say about it. The kynics have little philosophical training and they did not manage to construct a system, a science. " As in most cases, here Hegel hits the nail deftly on the head, so that we only have to put it on its feet.
33. Accordingly, "respectable critique," critique that is an instrument and a methodology of the "dominant" theories, is from the start a contradiction in terms. Critique serves subversion, not con- struction. For this reason, fun in using one's intelligence can be generally destroyed in a surefire way. as happens today, by educating students "critically" by force. Then, what could have been their chance appears to them as their enemy.
34. It seems that Marx found his kynical-existential critic in H. Heine --hence the frictions be- tween them; hence also the curse "dog," which plays a striking role in their quarrels.
35. See Heine, Vorrede zu Salon / (1833), in Heine, Sdmtliche Schriften, vol. 3 (Munich, 1971), p. 10.
36. Heine, Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung (1833), in Sdmtliche Schriften, vol. 3 (Munich, 1971), p. 21.
Chapter 9
The Secondary Cynicisms
Minima Amoralia: Confession, Joke, Crime
/ am equipped with an armor that has been welded together entirely out of mistakes.
Pierre Reverdy
If the six cardinal cynicisms also set up the stages on which idealisms and realisms as well as powers and oppositional powers wrestle with one another, the task is not completed by a first description of them. In reality, what we have separated for the sake of clarity is inextricably entangled. A precise consciousness of reality can only be one that does not fail to note how war and power exist with sexuality and medicine as well as with religion and knowledge in deep reciprocal inter- penetrations and amalgams. But this is only another way of saying that life cannot be grasped through morals and cannot be rationalized with moral explanations. We therefore call someone a moralist who has doubts about the human ability to act "morally. " The main fields described here, on which the kynical-cynical ten- sions inherent in the things themselves develop, mesh and, at the same time, repel one another--in such a way that the values, norms, and views of each individual area are caught up in increasingly entangled relations to those of the other areas. Even the norms of the military and the state often become tangled and contradict one another although these two realities, relatively speaking, understand one an- other best of all. But what will happen when the norms of the military and the state get mixed up and ensnared with those of science and religion, of sexuality and medicine? Due to the complexity and contradictoriness of value systems, a critical measure of cynicism must already become an accompanying shadow of any morality.
Just as war brings about a great inversion of moral consciousness by substitut- ing for Thou shalt not kill, the commandment Thou shalt kill as many as possible. It also turns the other "regional" and sectoral ethics systematically on their heads
301
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? Olaf Gulbransson, Child-like Question. "Grandmother, tell me, after the war, will the Ten Commandments hold again? ", 1918.
and makes the senseless sensible and the reasonable absurd. In order to save a lot of words, I want to refer the reader to Robert Altman's film on the Korean War, M. A. S. H. (1969), a masterpiece of contemporary cynical-satirical con- sciousness. The way in which, with a well thought out and hard-hitting joke tech- nique, military, medical, religious, and sexual cynicism are played into each other raises this film to the status of a document on the history of ideas. In Hegel's words, it achieves what philosophy for a long time has not been able to achieve: It is "its time, grasped in (scenic) thoughts," a satirical meditation on the struc- tures and procedures of the cynical joke, offensive and reflective, pointed and true. Indescribable, this blasphemous "Last Supper" satire, where the field doc- tors take leave (like the Apostles) of a colleague who is weary of life because, after experiencing an erection disorder, he fixes on the idea that he must be gay and cannot imagine how he can admit this to his three girlfriends. Also indescrib- able are the horrifying and horridly funny operation scenes, where the surgeons tell their brutal jokes over soldiers who have half bled to death, think of the nurses' tits, and imagine they are at a baseball game or even on the way home. In the ethos-confusion of the field hospital, something of the latent moral chaos in our so-called everyday reality becomes visible. Because here the various do- mains overlap in a brutally clear way, the one domain knocks the morality of the other out of its hands. It becomes almost a principle of survival there to hack up one's own moral substance so as not to be tempted to believe in some sort of "one's own cause. " Survival as cynical understatement.
The plurality of pronounced, quasi-autonomous domains of reality and the
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corresponding multitude of morals and moral roots are the reason moral everyday life lives on essentially in a moderate amorality and is normally satisfied when things remain by this moderation. This is simultaneously the reason why people with a fairly solid and just feeling for reality are against harshness in matters of punishment. They know that the punishment, in its strict moralism, can be more immoral than the actions of those who are to be punished. (Hence, even with Cic- ero: summum ius, summa iniuria. ) Moral feeling, which self-critically mediates itself with life, means the art of moving through the twilight worlds and contradic- tions of autonomous and counterposed domains of values with the least amount of real evil and human damage. As Karl Markus Michel has shown in his praise of casuistry (i. e. , the normative exegesis of individual "cases"), a halfway living morality tells us which sins we should commit in order to avoid graver ones; the moralist who does not judge as the fool of a superego is someone who, in distin- guishing good and evil, also knows how to appreciate the "virtue of sin" (see Kurs- buch No. 60 [1980]). Morality functions as the capacity to orient oneself toward the relatively better alternative within the universal motliness of given relations.
Only in this sense is the need for a "new" ethics and New Values, which today haunts the decaying superstructure, justified. No one should believe in New Values. Those who do can only become neoconservative shopkeepers. If we have already in large measure overstrained ourselves with the old high-cultural ethics, the "new" ethics can only make us look completely ridiculous. A new conscious- ness of values can only come out of a progressive making-conscious of the fact that (and why) for us there can be no "innocence" except when we suspend every kind of judgment. Wherever it is a matter of values, cynicism is always also in the picture. Anyone who radically defends one scale of values automatically be- comes a cynic, expressly or not, on other scales of values. Whoever you happen to be, you always trample on some norms, and if you live in times that make it impossible to be naive about such trampling, then it can happen at any time that you also say it aloud.
The confession is for us, therefore, besides "theory," the most important form in which the truth is said. From Augustine to Francois Villon, from Rousseau to Freud, from Heine to current autobiographical literature, we hear decisive truths in the form of admission and confession. Moreover, those narrative communities that ultimately develop out of all depth-psychological practices constitute, in es- sence, confessional communities that have been morally neutralized through ther- apy. In motley reality, all talking about oneself necessarily ends up in the vicinity of a blackguard's confession or a criminal's testament, a sick report or a story of suffering, a witness's statement or a confession. That is the condition of authentic- ity in a situation of the unavoidable ethical overtaxing of oneself. Only bastards always have one more excuse, one more white vest to change into, one more spine, and one more good conscience. Those who really say what they are and
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what they have done always and unavoidably, nolens volens, provide a rogue's novel, a certification of poverty, a story of a young scamp, an image of a fool a book of twists and turns.
What Erich Fromm calls his "ethics of being," if one views it properly, aims ultimately at such an upright bearing regarding one's own life, thinking, planning and failure. Without doubt, all that also belongs to "being," of which, according to certain value systems, we would have to be ashamed. An "ethics of being," therefore, if it (and because it) should be a conscious bearing, must lead to a point at which, for the sake of uprightness, all shame also has an end and at which we confess to everything we "are," right or wrong. The ethics of being seeks the truth in authenticity. It therefore demands and encourages confession and honest talking-about-oneself as the cardinal virtue per se. Before this ethics all other morals are suspended, even if the various sectoral ethics do not already contradict each other. Those who want the truth cannot simply build "theories" and see through masks; they must also create relations among people in which every con- fession becomes possible. Only when we have understanding for everything, give everything its due, place everything beyond good and evil, and, in the end, view everything in such a way that nothing human is foreign to us-only then will this ethics of being become possible because it puts an end to the hostility toward other
ways of being. Being as such knows nothing and is nothing of which it would have to be ashamed, apart from conscious crookedness, dishonesty, and self- deceptions. Everything can be "forgiven," not merely what tradition calls "sins against the Holy Spirit" and what we today call a lack of authenticity (genuine- ness, honesty). That consciousness is inauthentic that consciously does not go "into itself because it still banks strategically on the advantage gained through lying.
An ethics of being would be the ethics of a society in which people help each other with love and criticism so that in every ego the will to truth can become stronger than the will to power and to come out on top. The ethics of being passes over the sphere of polemical pretense. Only pathological cynics and vengeful negativists admit their mistakes with the intention of committing them again. They even abuse the form of confession in order to struggle and to lie. And not always is seen in this the coquetry with which Zarah Leander, as the notorious Miss Jane, once sang, "I am so and I'll stay so /1 am so in my whole body / Yes sir! "
One will have noticed that the series of cardinal cynicisms represents simul- taneously a list of the elementary satirical themes and most important genres ot jokes. They represent the main battlefields of elevations and humiliations, ideali- zations and realistic disillusionments. Here, vices and insults, ironies and mock-
n eries have their largest playing fields. Here, the most frivolous sideswipes of h "
guistic liberalism still have a morally regulative sense. The military with its
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tensions between hero ethics and cowards' realism, between officers and subor- dinates, front and rear echelons, war and peace, command and obedience, is just as much an inexhaustible generator of soldiers'jokes as politics, with its ideolo- gies, state actions, its great words and small deeds, which provides an infinite source of pranks and parodies. It is no different with sexuality, which, with the juxtaposition of the covered and the naked, the forbidden and the permitted, con- stitutes a vast field for jokes, obscenities, and comedies, regardless of whether it is flirtation, marriage, coitus, or bedroom battles. Likewise, the medical do- main, with all its possibilities for sarcasm about health and sickness, madness and normality, the living and the dead. And all the more so with the entire domain of religion, which is more serviceable for swearing and joke telling than almost any other theme. For, wherever there is so much sacredness, a large profane shadow arises, and the more saints are honored, the more comical saints can be found among them. Finally, there is also the area of knowledge, which is criss- crossed by tensions between intelligence and stupidity, joke and citizens' duty, reason and madness, science and absurdity. All these "cardinal jokes" function in collective consciousness like a drainage system--regulating, balancing, equilibrating --as a universally accepted regulative mini-amoralism that cleverly assumes that it is healthy to poke fun at what exceeds our capacities to become outraged. For this reason, those who still struggle reject coarse jokes about their own cause. Only when the joke goes inward and one's own consciousness, admit- tedly from on high but not too ungraciously, inspects itself, does there arise a serenity that reveals not a kynical laughter, nor a cynical smile, but a humor that has ceased to struggle.
The most astounding profile of our cultural-moral situation is probably the in- satiable craving of modern consciousness for detective stories. They belong like- wise, I think, to the institutions of moral airing and ventilation in a culture that is doomed to live with an excessively high degree of mixing of norms, ambigui- ties, and contrary ethics. The genre as a whole, in relation to collective ethics, appears as an institutionalized medium for confession. Every detective story is a new opportunity for experimental amoralism. Through fiction it makes "happi- ness in crime" (d'Aurevilly) accessible to everybody. In the movements of thought in modern detective stories, from Poe to the present, those movements or thought in an analysis of cynicism are already anticipated in concentrated form, ? jood crime stories, every one of them, work to reduce the gravity of the in-
ividual crime. If the detective were the representative of enlightenment, the
r
'rninal would be the representative of immorality and the victim would be the
re
presentative of morality. However, this constellation regularly becomes shaky
hen the investigation into guilt reaches the point where the victims --from a dra-
at
'c point of view, initally the "innocent" victims --themselves lose their inno- nce, are cast in a twilight, and are separated from the culprit who assaults them y only a microscopically thin juridical line. This line distinguishes between cyni-
e
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cal, nonpunishable immoralisms and truly punishable offenses. In the most ex- treme case, it is the culprit who, almost like a provoked enlightener, merely exe- cutes on the victim the latter's own amorality. "The victim, not the murderer, is guilty. " (Franz Werfel). These are the films at the end of which the inspector walks down the street, deep in thought, and makes a face as if he were sorry to have solved the case.
Already in the nineteenth century, Herman Melville, in his novel Billy Budd (published posthumously in 1924), relates such an inversion --in a tragic setting, of course. The hero, an upright, naive-sympathetic figure of light, is systemati- cally provoked by a devilish magazine officer until he knocks the latter down in a speechless fit. The officer unfortunately falls on his head and dies with a sneer on his lips because he knows that the boy, who had to hit him because he had no other way of expressing himself, must now in turn, according to maritime law, be sentenced to death by the ship's command. The law appears here as an authority that can be used as an instrument of an absolutely evil will, as a weapon of the victim against the, in reality, "innocent" perpetrator.
The great crime novel constructions remain for a long time in an analogously critical moral schema. They draw their vividness from the moral structure of cap- italist society. In them, individual crimes often appear either as rather naive, rela- tively harmless splinters of a universal social cynicism or as reflective exaggera- tions and magnifications of behaviors that, on a scale of averages, are not yet pursued as crimes. (Hence the two types of perpetrators: here, the relatively harmless perpetrators who have "stumbled into it"; there, the cynical tricksters, grand criminals, and monsters of crime. ) The triumphant success of Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera is based on its ability to set a blackguards' cynicism into a transparent but not moralistic relation to the social whole. As in a Punch and Judy show for adults, the figures flaunt their amorality and their evil artful- ness, sing songs about their own wickedness and about the still greater evil of the world, and use cynical sayings and ways of speaking to educate the public to a mode of expression in which it, too, not completely without pleasure, could speak the truth about itself.
at the opponent himself. Finally, there is an impressive tradition of action in which can be studied the ways in which people have taken their own insights "seri- ously" for the sake of a life whose chances they did not want to waste. That it was frequently an act of resistance is in the nature of things here. The "art of the possible" is not only what statesmen are supposed to master, but always comes
In the presence of so much rage to "change," Diogenes would ex-
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 291
? POLITIQUE. MORALE ET LITT^RAJRE.
J. Grandville, Models of satirical consciousness: the fool with bow and arrow; the Naked Truth. Advertisement for the periodical La Caricature (detail).
into play where people try, with awareness and intelligence, to protect the chance of their life. My favorite examples of such action --apart from some pieces of bravado of the type found in Eulenspiegel, Schweik, and some manifestations of revolutionary praxis --are provided by those emigrants who (especially) in the nineteenth century, set out from a hopelessly hidebound Europe to try their luck in the New World as freer people. In setting out this way there is something of the kynical force of vital intelligence and of the exodus of consciousness into the open world, where life still has a chance to be stronger than the suffocating powers of tradition, society, and conventions. If I were to say which individual action I hold to characterize an intelligence that not only "knows" but also "acts," I would probably choose Heinrich Heine's emigration to Paris in 1831 --this apex of conscious praxis in which a poet subjected his biography to the necessities and chances of the historical moment and left his homeland in order to be able to do what he believed he had to do for his own sake and that of his homeland. "I went because I had to"-and behind this "had to" there were not yet the police (as in the case of Marx and other refugees) but rather the insight that in a conscious life there are moments when we first have to do what we want in order then also to
35
The satirical-polemical-aesthetic dimension in the history of knowledge be- comes important because, in fact, it is the dialectic en marche. With it, the princi- ples of embodiment and resistance penetrate the course of socially organized thinking: the inexpressible individual element; single persons intuitively in touch with their existence; the "nonidentical" conjured up by Adorno; the thing-there
want to do what we have to do.
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that is already mistreated by any mere conceptual designation because it stimu- lates understanding (and only makes a "case of X" out of the singular). Where should this individual reality assure itself better of its existence -- apart from the arts --than in satire, in the ironic dissolution of imposed "orders," in playing with what pretends to be "law," in brief, in the embodiment of this highly nonserious matter that, after all, the living being is? Dialectical thinkers --whether philoso- phers, poets, or musicians --are those in whom polemics and the fierce and uncon- scionable animosity between thoughts and motives already form the inner work- ings of their "thinking" process. Their presence of mind suffices, if one can put it this way, for more than one thought. All great dialectical thinkers and artists thus carry within themselves a disputatious, forward-driving, and creative kynic or cynic that, from within, prescribes movement and provocation for their think- ing. Dialecticians are the movers of thoughts who cannot do otherwise than to give the antithesis to every thesis its due. We observe in them a partly comba- tively unsettled, partly epically measured form of discourse that stems from a feeling for the figural, melodic, and thematic in the composition of thought-in the disguised poet Plato no differently than in the philosophizing musician Adorno, in the grotesque and pompous dialectic of Rabelais as in the uninhibited streaming rhetoric of Ernst Bloch. It would be worth the effort sometime to por-
tray the inner kynical-cynical "partner" of the important masters --whether it be with Diderot or Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard, or Marx, with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, or Foucault. And what really happens when Sartre, the master dialectician of the twentieth century, confronts Flaubert, the grand cynic of the nineteenth century, on the thousands of pages of the Idiot of the Family (a con- frontation so full of philosophical and psychodynamic morsels that it is obviously impossible to talk about it in an incidental manner).
As we have said, kynicism cannot be a theory and cannot have its "own" the- ory. Cognitive kynicism is aform of dealing with knowledge, a form of relativiza- tion, ironic treatment, application, and sublation. It is the answer of the will to live to that which it has suffered at the hands of theories and ideologies-partly a spiritual art of survival, partly intellectual resistance, partly satire, partly "critique. "
"Critical theory" tries to protect life from the false abstractness and violence of "positive" theories. In this sense, the Frankfurt Critical Theory too inherited the kynical portions of those grand theories the nineteenth century handed down to the twentieth --of left Hegelianism with its existentialist and anthropological as well as its historical and sociological aspects, and of Marxism, as well as of Criti- cal Psychology, which became well known especially in the form of psychoanaly- sis. These are all, if properly understood, "theories" that contain within them the kynical form of treating theory (namely, the sublation of theory) and that can be made into "fixed systems" only at the cost of an intellectual regression. Such regressions have happened on a grand scale, and how much stupefaction has been
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 293
perpetrated in the late nineteenth century and the whole of the twentieth by vulgar Hegelianism, vulgar Marxism, vulgar psychology, vulgar existentialism, and vulgar Nietzscheanism is all too crassly shown in recent social history. All these systems of stupefaction have dispatched the reflective agility of "Critical The- ories," established rigid dogmas as "knowledge," and left nothing of kynical sub- lation except arrogant presumption. In fact, the kynical sublation of theory stems from a conscious not-knowing, not from a knowing-better. It releases us to a new and fresh not-knowing, instead of letting us become rigid in certainties. For with "convictions" only the desert grows. Against this, Frankfurt Critical Theory achieved a great deal by attempting again and again to "destupefy" the theoretical inheritance of the nineteenth century and, above all, by trying to save the elements of truth in Marxism from its degeneration in Leninist and, still more, in Stalinist dogmatics.
In its good times, Marxism was really a vehicle of an active intelligence, and it knew how to fertilize all the human sciences with its historical-critical con- sciousness. The materialist conception of history [Kautsky; --Trans. ] has always contained hundreds of possibilities for "another history" and for a history of the Other. A real history of the Other, however, can be written only by those who are the Other and the Others and have decided to let this Otherness live and to fight for the freedom to be allowed to be so. The most significant examples today are the history of "femaleness" and the history of homosexuality. With the relating of their suppression and formation, both come simultaneously to the conscious- ness of a freedom that is now becoming real. By talking about themselves --in his- tory and in the present--women and homosexuals also celebrate the beginning of a new era that they will be "a part of in a different way than they were previously. History must be like this. It must proceed from something and lead to something that lives now and that lays claim to more and more life and rights to life for the Now and Later. What is passe on a vital level cannot be considered passable on the level of living knowledge. The historical is reduced to what has been finished and what has only passed but is not yet over--the unfinished, the imperfect, the inherited evil, the historical hangover. Whenever people and groups set about to finish for themselves such an inherited chapter of the unfinished, then memory and history will become useful forces for them, whether in the individual realm, as in psychotherapy, or in the collective realm, as in struggles for liberation.
This distinguishes an existential historiography from the kind Nietzsche justifiably called "museal" history-a history that serves as distraction and decora- tion rather than as concentration and vitalization. We can call existential histori- ography kynical and museal-decorative historiography cynical. The former tells of all we have come through, battered but not broken--just as the Jewish view of history grew out of the insight into the transitoriness of foreign empires and into its own persistent continuance. In this same way Marxism--in its good times-created a possibility of systematically narrating the history of oppres-
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sions, whether this is called slavery, as in antiquity, serfdom as in the Middle Ages (which, e. g. , in Russia lasted until 1861), or proletarian existence as in the present. But the language in which the history of oppression in the name of Marx- ist ideology will be told one day remains open--in any case, certainly no longer in the language of Marxism; perhaps in that of a critique of cynical reason; per- haps in a feminist language; perhaps in a metaeconomic, ecological language. Cynical historiography, by contrast, sees "in all worldly things" only a hopeless cycle; in the life of the peoples, as in the life of individuals, in human life as in organic life in general, it sees a growing, flourishing, withering, and dying: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. "There is nothing new under the sun! " is
36
its motto, and even this is nothing new.
which we have marched and will continue to march, over the bodies of those who were silly enough to believe they could stand in the way of our will to power, our thousand-year Reich, our historical "mission. "
Besides "critical" history, "critical" psychology is the second of the human sciences with a kynically effective barb. Today, with the progressive psy- chologizing of society, that is no longer so readily understandable because for us, the kynical shock of psychological enlightenment already lies in the dim past. At best, we became somewhat aware of the offensive side of psychoanalysis in the Freudo-Marxist spectacles of May 1968 --insofar as we were willing to see any- thing in psychoanalysis other than a great self-mystification of bourgeois society that oppresses, distorts, and manipulates individuals and finally says to them, when, as a result, they don't feel well: Your unconscious is to blame. Only the Freudian Left has transmitted something of the original kynical bit of psychoana- lytic enlightenment in that--from Wilhelm Reich to Alice Miller --it knew at the same time how to avoid the pitfalls of analytic orthodoxy.
In chapter 6 (the final section), we indicated how the explosive power of psy- choanalysis is initially connected with the fact that Freud equates the unconscious with the domain of sexual secrets. Psychological curiosity was thereby channeled in an extremely successful way toward what has always interested people most of all anyway. As the "unconscious" it was on the whole neutralized and excused, and as sexuality it was, on top of everything else, the most fascinating thing around. Under this banner, the cognitive kynicism of psychoanalysis could breach social consciousness --at first through a small opening, but later there was scarcely anything left of the wall. Then it came out: "Everything you always wanted to know about sex. " Kynics could not possibly fulfill their task more ele- gantly than Freud did. In immaculate prose and dressed in the best English tweed, the Old Master of analysis managed, while maintaining the highest respect, to talk about almost everything that one does not talk about. That in itself is already an Eulenspiegel action without parallel in the history of culture, and it could proba- bly succeed only because Freud personally did not underline the subversive, satir- ical, and rebellious side of his undertaking but on the contrary did his utmost to
Or it sees in history a victory route on
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 295
give his work the appearance of science. The miracle of psychoanalysis is how it so respectably conjures all its objects--the oral, anal, and genital. It is as if in refined society someone burped at the dinner table and nobody found anything exceptional in it. Freud managed what would leave even Diogenes green with envy: He erected a theory that makes us all, whether we like it or not, into kynics (if not even into cynics).
It happens this way: In the beginning, everyone is a pure, natural being, born from the mother's body into a well-bred society, not knowing what is proper. We grow up as sexually polyvalent, "polymorphously perverse" subjects, and kyni- cism is universally disseminated in our nurseries which at first, in everything lives, thinks, wishes, and acts completely out of our own bodies. Freud imported a kynical phase into the life history of everyone and also found rudimentary expla- nations for why adults still tell cynical jokes or are even inclined to make cynicism their attitude toward life. In every one of us, there was once a primitive dog and a primitive swine, beside which Diogenes is a pale imitation--but we, as well- behaved people, cannot for the life of us remember anything about it. It is not enough that this human primitive animal, as the educators say, "defecates" and performs in front of everybody what we adults do there where only our con- science looks on. Not only does it piss in its diapers and against the wall; this be- ing at times even develops an interest unworthy of a human being in its own excre- ment and does not even shrink from smearing the wall with it. That Diogenes did such things not even his enemies claimed. In all superfluity, this being likes to frequently hold those parts of the body for which adults only know the Latin names and shows in everything a reckless self-conceit, as if it personally and no one else were the center of its world. That this kynical primitive animal in the end even wants to kill its father and marry its mother--or conversely --that, after all that has happened, is registered somewhat with resignation. Indeed, even when analysts maintain that the Oedipus complex is the universal law of psychic development in human beings, this is accepted like one more piece of bad news among many others. (Later it is noticed that Freud is interested only in the tragic version of the Oedipus myth, not in the kynical dedramatization of the story. ) Af- ter these psychoanalytic revelations, parenthood must unavoidably turn into a bat- tle between philosophical schools. For we have to become a Stoic, when we have the kynic physically right in our own house. If a connection between Freud's ethics and those of Epicure has often been noticed, that is because the Epicurean line was the most successful in finding a compromise between Stoicism and kyni- cism, between moral duty and self-realization, between the reality principle and the pleasure principle, between "culture" and those who experience "discontent in it. " Societies in the world era of states send their members continually on those "too long marches" from which the living try to deviate by allowing themselves short cuts.
With respect to our infantile side, we have thus all arisen from kynicism. In
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this point, psychoanalysis does not allow us any evasion. However, it itself be- comes evasive by taking a thoroughly ambivalent stance toward the tension be- tween the infantile and the adult. For it always knows how to arrange things so that the analyst remains respectable while the patient-child remains bestial. He makes a protege, so to speak, out of the kynical-animal side in us, to the extent that we all possess such an analyzable underground. Analysts are those "citizens" who interpret and counsel the still-effective infantile, animal, neurotic, etc. , un- citizenness of others. However, here it seems to be their greatest fear that they themselves will get caught in the undertow of their themes and be seen as just as disreputable as the oral, anal, genital phenomena of life with which they concern themselves. Perhaps, at least in part, the excessive interest in culture that is noticeable in many psychologists comes from this circumstance. They seem pres- sured to constantly prove anew their ability to be cultured --after having already compromised themselves enough through their professional occupation with the infantile and animal aspects of human beings. "Psychological literature" has be- come in the meantime a phenomenon of such dimensions that it can only be dealt with sociologically and statistically. Its primary concern is the self-assurance of modern semicynics in their cultural role. With "cultivation," with books, diplomas, titles, supplementary training and degrees, they try to preserve their rights of citizenship in "official culture" (which, by the way, in any case does not exist). At the same time, this serves the pedantic demarcation of "sicknesses. " There are more than a few psychologists in whose voices a lot of fear, contempt, superciliousness, and aggression can be heard when they use words like narcis- sism, schizophrenia, paranoia, ambivalence, neurosis, psychosis. They are words of demarcation, words for others, words on the high horse of normality. It may, however, be a good sign that today some--I want to say insightful- therapists have decided to let the mask of respectability drop and to give up the role of the respectable portrayer of reality. They have, to their own advantage and that of their patients, come over to the side of the living. For those who have been made ill by reality, the path to being able to get through life well certainly does not lead by way of an accommodation to the Freudian "medium misery" of the average adult.
In the domain of knowledge and the sciences, a number of cynical phenomena have appeared that constitute a counterpart to what, in the preceding section on religious cynicism, I have designated, after Sartre, "bad faith" (mauvaise foi). These phenomena are the "crooked attitudes" toward truth and knowledge that make these "highest goods" into mere useful items, or even into instruments for lying. Despite all apparent lack of respect, the kynic assumes a basically serious and upright attitude toward truth and maintains a thoroughly solemn relation, sa- tirically disguised, to it. With the cynic, this relation has given way to a thorough flabbiness and agnosticism (denial of knowledge). "What is truth? " asked Pontius Pilate when he sensed that he was just about to commit a crime against it. The
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 297
most harmless among the cynicisms of knowledge is that of the examinees, who build up the most external and contemptuous relation to that which they have to learn, a relation of mere cramming, of rote learning, with the firm intention of forgetting it again after the examination. After that, already less harmless, fol- lows the cynicism of the pragmatists and politicians who, admittedly, like to see that the next generation has acquired its academic foundations, but for the rest proceed from the attitude that theory is theory and that in practice everything looks quite different. Here, all the learning and studying that precede function like pure detour and selection mechanisms, roughly according to the assumption that whoever gets through them successfully can also succeed with the other--even though, as is generally known, study and subsequent occupation often are totally unconnected. Learning is separated cynically and instrumentally from its aims and treated as a mere abstract certificate of qualifications. In some cases, the only thing that links study and occupation is salary, which is set according to the type of highest educational qualification achieved. The "substance" is degraded with cynical realism to a mere prelude, to academic chitchat. How much ethos- decimation and demoralization continually take place here is scarcely measurable --one has only to think of courses that have to do with "values": educa- tion, teacher training, the legal professions, publishing, social work, medicine, and so on. If Mephistopheles could say to Faust that all theory is gray, and green is the golden tree of life, this evidences an optimism that can be developed only by someone who has never passed from study into professional life. For here it becomes clear that theory was probably too rosy and that reality first teaches us what gray really is. But here we are not completely without hope. Course reforms work toward ensuring that the studies too will be just as gray as the prospects to be had after them.
The actual and innermost connection between the sciences and cynicism, how- ever, concerns the structure and the procedure of modern empirical sciences per se. For just as there is a form of cynical correctness in the relations between hos- tile individuals, there is also a form of cynical objectivity and methodological strictness in some sciences' and some scientists' way of treating the "facts. " I be- lieve this constitutes the core of what, since the late nineteenth century, we call "positivism. " If this word sounds critical, it is surely not because it designates a scientific mentality that stresses being logically exact and true to the facts and refraining from any sort of speculation. In this sense, positivism would have to be a title of honor rather than a dubious label. But in fact, the point of contention in the positivism debate is not scientific principles but the unprincipledness of science. For there are areas of research - and they are usually those in which the positivists do all the talking-where it does not suffice merely to behave scienti- fically "objectively" with the "facts," but where more is demanded of the scientist than merely the capacity to collect data, produce statistics, and formulate the- orems. There are "objects," in relation to which there is no scientific neutrality
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but only partial and interest-directed forms of investigation --most clearly of all in the entire domain of the human and social sciences (this way of seeing things can be made plausible even with respect to the natural sciences; see chapter 11 "Transcendental Polemic," which indicates the connection between objectifica- tion and the process of making enemies). The dispute around positivism ignited not over its indisputable achievement in clarifying the logical form and the empir- ical basis of strict sciences but over the naive assumption of the positivists that they could open up every "arbitrary" field of research with these means and thus subject every reality to the arbitrariness of a callous researching. The positivist, however, can be suspected not so much of naivete but of cynicism, especially since the days of early, and perhaps really naive, positivism are gone and we have long since been confronted with a positivism in its third generation, which, we can safely say, has been washed in the seven seas. The short formula for the his- tory of science in this century would have to read: The path of scientism leads from positivism to theoretical cynicism (functionalism). When Critical Theory pilloried the "affirmative character" of traditional and positivistic theories, it meant by this that such theories, in their artificial objectivity, betray a cynical as- sent to social relations that, to those who suffer, who sympathize, are concerned, stink to high heaven. In the methodological doctrines of positivism and the new social functionalism, those theoreticians find their organon who, with detached brutality, indirectly and coolly defends existing systems against the individuals who come to grief in them.
Notes
1. If Hegel's Phenomenology is described as a "journey of the weltgeist through history to itself," in this formulation, none of the crucial concepts is acceptable. First, it is no journey because such a thing would have to have a beginning and a goal, which does not hold; "path" metaphors do not adequately grasp history. Second, there is no weltgeist that, simultaneously as combatant and battle follower, has been present through the turnings and struggles of history. Third, there is no world his- tory as narrative of the vicissitudes of a subject that suffered them. Fourth, there is no self that, after some kinds of journeys, histories, or struggles, could arrive at "itself; that would be a pretty ghostly being, a megalomaniac reflexive pronoun that rampages over our natural being-as-self.
2. Wilhelm Stieber, Spion des Kanzlers (The chancellor's spy) (Munich, 1981), p. 135; see also chapter 10, "Black Empiricism. " The quotation suggests a psychoanalytic theory of cynicism that in- terprets cynicism as the expression of an unconscious desire to be punished.
3. Only more recent narrative also includes the civil hero, the hero as rogue (picaro), and even the negative, passive hero.
4. The Arthurian legends discuss the problem of how a hero must constantly earn his status: Erec. His error was to become soft and to fail to expose himself to continual testing.
5. As soon as the soldiers became aware of this, they became suspicious of their leaders. The modern large armies stood and fell with the group of lower commanders and officers who "advanced with the rest. " There supposedly are even statistics from the World Wars that prove that the officers are "sufficiently well" represented among the fallen.
6. This motif will be pursued in chapter 10, ("Black Empiricism"), the final section.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 299
7. Officially sanctioned in part: As late as the war of 1870-71, there were many paid "substitute soldiers" serving in the place of conscripts.
8. Elsewhere I have tried to work out the particular emotional toning of German Fascist cynicism in an interpretation of the Beelitz anecdote from Hitler's Mein Kampf: Der Gefreite Hitler als Anti- Schweijk--Zur Psychodynamik moderner Zersetzungsangst. See Peter Sloterdijk, "Die Krise des Individuums --studiert im Medium der Literatur," in J. Schulte-Sasse (ed. ), Political Tendencies in the Literature of the Weimar Republic (Minneapolis, Minn. , 1982).
9. See chapter 22, "Bright Hour. "
10. [Translation of the French testament: I have nothing, / I have many debts, / I give the rest
to the poor. ]
11. See also Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, (2nd ed.
New York, 1978), pp. 133ff.
12. See Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs (Paris, 1975), p. 44: "Tout le monde sent le tragique
de cete information: 'L'ordre est retabli. ' " To maintain order is synonymous with mounted charges, opening fire on unarmed people, and killing women and children.
13. It is no accident that Michel Foucault, who stimulated the most penetrating analyses of power, force, and "micropolitics" in our time, at the same time began with the phenomenon of disciplinary force, of punishment, execution, surveillance, and incarceration.
14. Schlegel's sentence also contains the germ of a theory not only of political but also of economic and religious cynicism and the cynicism of knowledge (see the remaining cardinal cynicisms as well as the secondary cynicisms). The unabridged quotation reads: "If the essence of cynicism consists in giving nature priority over art and virtue over beauty and science; without paying regard to the letter, to which the Stoic strictly sticks, but to pay heed only to the spirit, to unconditionally show contempt for all economic value and political glamour, and to bravely maintain the rights of autonomous ca- price: then Christianism would be nothing other than universal cynicism. " Athenaeum. Eine Zeit- schrift von A. W. und Fr.
Schlegel I, selected and edited by Curt Griitzmacher (Hamburg, 1969), p. 102.
15. In detailed studies, these coarse classifications prove problematic; e. g. , up until 1918, the Ger- man state, because of its feudal components, etc. , cannot be designated as wholly bourgeois.
16. Aside: I began writing down these notes on cynicism--that a critique of cynical reason would come of it, I did not know at the time--shortly after seeing an interview with the Jewish philosopher and political scientist, Hannah Arendt, which Giinther Gaus had made with her many years before and which was broadcast again on the fifth anniversary of her death in 1980. This conversation, a prime example of relaxed chatting and philosophizing in front of an audience and one of the few exam- ples of intelligence in television, reached its climax when Arendt told of her activity at the Jerusalem trial of the mass murderer Eichmann. One must have heard with one's own ears how this woman aver- red that in studying the many thousands of pages of the transcript of the proceedings, she repeatedly broke out into loud laughter about the peculiar stupidity that had exercised control over innumerable lives. In Arendt's self-aware confession there was something frivolous and kynical in the most precise sense of the word that, after an initial consternation, proved itself to be a liberating and sovereign expression of truth. When Arendt then, as an encore, even made the remark that she often had fun in exile, for she was young and improvising in uncertainty has its own attractions, then I also had to laugh, and with that, this book began to "write itself. "
17. In the People's Democracies, incidentally, we encounter a complementary swindle.
18. I have decided to place money cynicism under the secondary cynicisms. Exchange cynicism, which is treated in chapter 9, appears to me to be an excrescence of the coercions of power.
19. Mature-immature: These are not value judgments but scales of measurement for objective conditions for socialism. If socialism is defined as the liberation of social productivity from capitalist fetters, then late-capitalist relations must first be created that can then be superseded.
300 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
20. See chapter 11. There I attempt to establish a rational dialectics under the concept of universal polemic. At the same time, I provide a critique of the Marxist use of dialectics.
21. This is not a plea for a "productivistic" ideology. Productivity is a multidimensional concept. Incidentally, the newer consciousness of political ecology presupposes the culmination of produc- tivism.
22. Dialectic--as dialectic of obstruction. That is the realistic basis of Adorno's Negative Di- alectics.
23. Kurt Keiler drew my attention to the story of the mouse's indirect suicide. It is contained in the final chapter of Boris Vian's novel, L'Ecume des jours (1946). Here I have changed it around some- what to fit Goliath's tale.
24. Dialectic of perfection: In what is perfect, there is still a flaw; the perfection of the beginning must therefore be excelled by that of the end --by passing through a disorder. This constitutes a basic figure of dialectical fantasies of movement: A first, "lost" summit is regained in the ascent to a second, higher summit.
25. The motif appears not only in the European tradition but also in Hindu and Buddhist legends.
26. Epiphanius is conspicuous as one of the first priests with an obsession about Mary. See The- odor Reik's interpretation, "Der heilige Epiphanius verschreibt sich. (Eine Fehlleistung vor sechzehn Jahrhunderten. )," in Reik, Der eigene und der fremde Gott. Zur Psychoanalyse der religiosen Ent- wicklung (Frankfurt, 1975), pp. 37-56.
27. It is disturbing to only hint at this theme, which would be a book in itself. I hope to be able to write more comprehensively and convincingly on this topic in a later work.
28. This will displease many a dyed-in-the-wool structuralist who is intent on joining in the dance around the golden calf of "language, discourse, and signifier. " The structuralist fetishism of the sig- nifier (signifiant) is no more clever than the "logocentric" fetishism of the signified (signifie).
29. See Sartre, L'Etre et le neant (1943), p. 84: "Through the lie, consciousness affirms that it exists by its nature as something hidden to the other, it exploits the ontological duality of ego and alien ego for its own advantage. It is different with mauvaise foi, if, as we have said, it is a lie to one- self. . . . That is, the duality of deceiver and deceived does not exist here. " The God of Cain would accordingly appear as the partner of a self-consciousness that can still deceive itself. Hence only God in genesis.
30. Nietzsche's neokynical "revaluing of all values" extends also to science by taking its objects more cheerfully "than they deserve. "
31. Is not critical rationalism a la Popper an offshoot of satirical fallibilism, mistakenly taken to be respectable?
32. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel remarks with regard to the "Kynical School": "There is nothing much to say about it. The kynics have little philosophical training and they did not manage to construct a system, a science. " As in most cases, here Hegel hits the nail deftly on the head, so that we only have to put it on its feet.
33. Accordingly, "respectable critique," critique that is an instrument and a methodology of the "dominant" theories, is from the start a contradiction in terms. Critique serves subversion, not con- struction. For this reason, fun in using one's intelligence can be generally destroyed in a surefire way. as happens today, by educating students "critically" by force. Then, what could have been their chance appears to them as their enemy.
34. It seems that Marx found his kynical-existential critic in H. Heine --hence the frictions be- tween them; hence also the curse "dog," which plays a striking role in their quarrels.
35. See Heine, Vorrede zu Salon / (1833), in Heine, Sdmtliche Schriften, vol. 3 (Munich, 1971), p. 10.
36. Heine, Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung (1833), in Sdmtliche Schriften, vol. 3 (Munich, 1971), p. 21.
Chapter 9
The Secondary Cynicisms
Minima Amoralia: Confession, Joke, Crime
/ am equipped with an armor that has been welded together entirely out of mistakes.
Pierre Reverdy
If the six cardinal cynicisms also set up the stages on which idealisms and realisms as well as powers and oppositional powers wrestle with one another, the task is not completed by a first description of them. In reality, what we have separated for the sake of clarity is inextricably entangled. A precise consciousness of reality can only be one that does not fail to note how war and power exist with sexuality and medicine as well as with religion and knowledge in deep reciprocal inter- penetrations and amalgams. But this is only another way of saying that life cannot be grasped through morals and cannot be rationalized with moral explanations. We therefore call someone a moralist who has doubts about the human ability to act "morally. " The main fields described here, on which the kynical-cynical ten- sions inherent in the things themselves develop, mesh and, at the same time, repel one another--in such a way that the values, norms, and views of each individual area are caught up in increasingly entangled relations to those of the other areas. Even the norms of the military and the state often become tangled and contradict one another although these two realities, relatively speaking, understand one an- other best of all. But what will happen when the norms of the military and the state get mixed up and ensnared with those of science and religion, of sexuality and medicine? Due to the complexity and contradictoriness of value systems, a critical measure of cynicism must already become an accompanying shadow of any morality.
Just as war brings about a great inversion of moral consciousness by substitut- ing for Thou shalt not kill, the commandment Thou shalt kill as many as possible. It also turns the other "regional" and sectoral ethics systematically on their heads
301
302 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
? Olaf Gulbransson, Child-like Question. "Grandmother, tell me, after the war, will the Ten Commandments hold again? ", 1918.
and makes the senseless sensible and the reasonable absurd. In order to save a lot of words, I want to refer the reader to Robert Altman's film on the Korean War, M. A. S. H. (1969), a masterpiece of contemporary cynical-satirical con- sciousness. The way in which, with a well thought out and hard-hitting joke tech- nique, military, medical, religious, and sexual cynicism are played into each other raises this film to the status of a document on the history of ideas. In Hegel's words, it achieves what philosophy for a long time has not been able to achieve: It is "its time, grasped in (scenic) thoughts," a satirical meditation on the struc- tures and procedures of the cynical joke, offensive and reflective, pointed and true. Indescribable, this blasphemous "Last Supper" satire, where the field doc- tors take leave (like the Apostles) of a colleague who is weary of life because, after experiencing an erection disorder, he fixes on the idea that he must be gay and cannot imagine how he can admit this to his three girlfriends. Also indescrib- able are the horrifying and horridly funny operation scenes, where the surgeons tell their brutal jokes over soldiers who have half bled to death, think of the nurses' tits, and imagine they are at a baseball game or even on the way home. In the ethos-confusion of the field hospital, something of the latent moral chaos in our so-called everyday reality becomes visible. Because here the various do- mains overlap in a brutally clear way, the one domain knocks the morality of the other out of its hands. It becomes almost a principle of survival there to hack up one's own moral substance so as not to be tempted to believe in some sort of "one's own cause. " Survival as cynical understatement.
The plurality of pronounced, quasi-autonomous domains of reality and the
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corresponding multitude of morals and moral roots are the reason moral everyday life lives on essentially in a moderate amorality and is normally satisfied when things remain by this moderation. This is simultaneously the reason why people with a fairly solid and just feeling for reality are against harshness in matters of punishment. They know that the punishment, in its strict moralism, can be more immoral than the actions of those who are to be punished. (Hence, even with Cic- ero: summum ius, summa iniuria. ) Moral feeling, which self-critically mediates itself with life, means the art of moving through the twilight worlds and contradic- tions of autonomous and counterposed domains of values with the least amount of real evil and human damage. As Karl Markus Michel has shown in his praise of casuistry (i. e. , the normative exegesis of individual "cases"), a halfway living morality tells us which sins we should commit in order to avoid graver ones; the moralist who does not judge as the fool of a superego is someone who, in distin- guishing good and evil, also knows how to appreciate the "virtue of sin" (see Kurs- buch No. 60 [1980]). Morality functions as the capacity to orient oneself toward the relatively better alternative within the universal motliness of given relations.
Only in this sense is the need for a "new" ethics and New Values, which today haunts the decaying superstructure, justified. No one should believe in New Values. Those who do can only become neoconservative shopkeepers. If we have already in large measure overstrained ourselves with the old high-cultural ethics, the "new" ethics can only make us look completely ridiculous. A new conscious- ness of values can only come out of a progressive making-conscious of the fact that (and why) for us there can be no "innocence" except when we suspend every kind of judgment. Wherever it is a matter of values, cynicism is always also in the picture. Anyone who radically defends one scale of values automatically be- comes a cynic, expressly or not, on other scales of values. Whoever you happen to be, you always trample on some norms, and if you live in times that make it impossible to be naive about such trampling, then it can happen at any time that you also say it aloud.
The confession is for us, therefore, besides "theory," the most important form in which the truth is said. From Augustine to Francois Villon, from Rousseau to Freud, from Heine to current autobiographical literature, we hear decisive truths in the form of admission and confession. Moreover, those narrative communities that ultimately develop out of all depth-psychological practices constitute, in es- sence, confessional communities that have been morally neutralized through ther- apy. In motley reality, all talking about oneself necessarily ends up in the vicinity of a blackguard's confession or a criminal's testament, a sick report or a story of suffering, a witness's statement or a confession. That is the condition of authentic- ity in a situation of the unavoidable ethical overtaxing of oneself. Only bastards always have one more excuse, one more white vest to change into, one more spine, and one more good conscience. Those who really say what they are and
304 D THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
what they have done always and unavoidably, nolens volens, provide a rogue's novel, a certification of poverty, a story of a young scamp, an image of a fool a book of twists and turns.
What Erich Fromm calls his "ethics of being," if one views it properly, aims ultimately at such an upright bearing regarding one's own life, thinking, planning and failure. Without doubt, all that also belongs to "being," of which, according to certain value systems, we would have to be ashamed. An "ethics of being," therefore, if it (and because it) should be a conscious bearing, must lead to a point at which, for the sake of uprightness, all shame also has an end and at which we confess to everything we "are," right or wrong. The ethics of being seeks the truth in authenticity. It therefore demands and encourages confession and honest talking-about-oneself as the cardinal virtue per se. Before this ethics all other morals are suspended, even if the various sectoral ethics do not already contradict each other. Those who want the truth cannot simply build "theories" and see through masks; they must also create relations among people in which every con- fession becomes possible. Only when we have understanding for everything, give everything its due, place everything beyond good and evil, and, in the end, view everything in such a way that nothing human is foreign to us-only then will this ethics of being become possible because it puts an end to the hostility toward other
ways of being. Being as such knows nothing and is nothing of which it would have to be ashamed, apart from conscious crookedness, dishonesty, and self- deceptions. Everything can be "forgiven," not merely what tradition calls "sins against the Holy Spirit" and what we today call a lack of authenticity (genuine- ness, honesty). That consciousness is inauthentic that consciously does not go "into itself because it still banks strategically on the advantage gained through lying.
An ethics of being would be the ethics of a society in which people help each other with love and criticism so that in every ego the will to truth can become stronger than the will to power and to come out on top. The ethics of being passes over the sphere of polemical pretense. Only pathological cynics and vengeful negativists admit their mistakes with the intention of committing them again. They even abuse the form of confession in order to struggle and to lie. And not always is seen in this the coquetry with which Zarah Leander, as the notorious Miss Jane, once sang, "I am so and I'll stay so /1 am so in my whole body / Yes sir! "
One will have noticed that the series of cardinal cynicisms represents simul- taneously a list of the elementary satirical themes and most important genres ot jokes. They represent the main battlefields of elevations and humiliations, ideali- zations and realistic disillusionments. Here, vices and insults, ironies and mock-
n eries have their largest playing fields. Here, the most frivolous sideswipes of h "
guistic liberalism still have a morally regulative sense. The military with its
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tensions between hero ethics and cowards' realism, between officers and subor- dinates, front and rear echelons, war and peace, command and obedience, is just as much an inexhaustible generator of soldiers'jokes as politics, with its ideolo- gies, state actions, its great words and small deeds, which provides an infinite source of pranks and parodies. It is no different with sexuality, which, with the juxtaposition of the covered and the naked, the forbidden and the permitted, con- stitutes a vast field for jokes, obscenities, and comedies, regardless of whether it is flirtation, marriage, coitus, or bedroom battles. Likewise, the medical do- main, with all its possibilities for sarcasm about health and sickness, madness and normality, the living and the dead. And all the more so with the entire domain of religion, which is more serviceable for swearing and joke telling than almost any other theme. For, wherever there is so much sacredness, a large profane shadow arises, and the more saints are honored, the more comical saints can be found among them. Finally, there is also the area of knowledge, which is criss- crossed by tensions between intelligence and stupidity, joke and citizens' duty, reason and madness, science and absurdity. All these "cardinal jokes" function in collective consciousness like a drainage system--regulating, balancing, equilibrating --as a universally accepted regulative mini-amoralism that cleverly assumes that it is healthy to poke fun at what exceeds our capacities to become outraged. For this reason, those who still struggle reject coarse jokes about their own cause. Only when the joke goes inward and one's own consciousness, admit- tedly from on high but not too ungraciously, inspects itself, does there arise a serenity that reveals not a kynical laughter, nor a cynical smile, but a humor that has ceased to struggle.
The most astounding profile of our cultural-moral situation is probably the in- satiable craving of modern consciousness for detective stories. They belong like- wise, I think, to the institutions of moral airing and ventilation in a culture that is doomed to live with an excessively high degree of mixing of norms, ambigui- ties, and contrary ethics. The genre as a whole, in relation to collective ethics, appears as an institutionalized medium for confession. Every detective story is a new opportunity for experimental amoralism. Through fiction it makes "happi- ness in crime" (d'Aurevilly) accessible to everybody. In the movements of thought in modern detective stories, from Poe to the present, those movements or thought in an analysis of cynicism are already anticipated in concentrated form, ? jood crime stories, every one of them, work to reduce the gravity of the in-
ividual crime. If the detective were the representative of enlightenment, the
r
'rninal would be the representative of immorality and the victim would be the
re
presentative of morality. However, this constellation regularly becomes shaky
hen the investigation into guilt reaches the point where the victims --from a dra-
at
'c point of view, initally the "innocent" victims --themselves lose their inno- nce, are cast in a twilight, and are separated from the culprit who assaults them y only a microscopically thin juridical line. This line distinguishes between cyni-
e
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cal, nonpunishable immoralisms and truly punishable offenses. In the most ex- treme case, it is the culprit who, almost like a provoked enlightener, merely exe- cutes on the victim the latter's own amorality. "The victim, not the murderer, is guilty. " (Franz Werfel). These are the films at the end of which the inspector walks down the street, deep in thought, and makes a face as if he were sorry to have solved the case.
Already in the nineteenth century, Herman Melville, in his novel Billy Budd (published posthumously in 1924), relates such an inversion --in a tragic setting, of course. The hero, an upright, naive-sympathetic figure of light, is systemati- cally provoked by a devilish magazine officer until he knocks the latter down in a speechless fit. The officer unfortunately falls on his head and dies with a sneer on his lips because he knows that the boy, who had to hit him because he had no other way of expressing himself, must now in turn, according to maritime law, be sentenced to death by the ship's command. The law appears here as an authority that can be used as an instrument of an absolutely evil will, as a weapon of the victim against the, in reality, "innocent" perpetrator.
The great crime novel constructions remain for a long time in an analogously critical moral schema. They draw their vividness from the moral structure of cap- italist society. In them, individual crimes often appear either as rather naive, rela- tively harmless splinters of a universal social cynicism or as reflective exaggera- tions and magnifications of behaviors that, on a scale of averages, are not yet pursued as crimes. (Hence the two types of perpetrators: here, the relatively harmless perpetrators who have "stumbled into it"; there, the cynical tricksters, grand criminals, and monsters of crime. ) The triumphant success of Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera is based on its ability to set a blackguards' cynicism into a transparent but not moralistic relation to the social whole. As in a Punch and Judy show for adults, the figures flaunt their amorality and their evil artful- ness, sing songs about their own wickedness and about the still greater evil of the world, and use cynical sayings and ways of speaking to educate the public to a mode of expression in which it, too, not completely without pleasure, could speak the truth about itself.
