No More Learning

Precisely in the years of the most desolate modernization--the so-called Golden Twenties --the city, once the site of Utopia, begins to lose its magic. Berlin especially, the principal city of the early twentieth century, played its part in plunging the euphoria of the metropolis into a disenchanted light. As the focal point of industry, production, consumption, and mass misery, it is at the same time the most exposed to alienation: Nowhere is modernity paid for so dearly as in the mass cities. The vocabulary of Heidegger's Anyone analysis seems espe- cially well suited to express the discontent of developed cities in their own form of life. Culture of distraction, talk, curiosity, unhousedness, habituatedness (one can think here of all sorts of vices), homelessness, fear, being-unto-death: All that sounds like the misery of the city, captured in a mirror that is somewhat cloudy and somewhat too subtle. Heidegger's provincial kynicism has a marked cultural- critical tendency. But it not only attests to a hopeless provincialism when a philos- opher of his stature takes leave of the bourgeois urban and socialist Utopias, but points to a kynical turn in the sense that it abrogates the great goals and projec- tions of urban social space. The turn to the province can also be a turn to real macrohistory that more closely attends to the regulation of life in the framework of nature, agriculture, and ecology than all previous industrial world images could. History written by an industrial historian would necessarily become microhistory. The history of the country knows the pulse of a much greater tem- porality. Reduced to short formulas, the city is not the fulfillment of existence; nor are the goals of industrial capitalism; nor scientific progress; nor more civili- zation, more cinema, more home beautiful, longer vacations, better eating: None of these things is the fulfillment of existence. What is "authentic" will always be something else. You must know who you are. You must consciously experience being-unto-death as the highest instance of your potentiality: it attacks you when you are afraid, and your moment has come when you are courageous enough to hold your ground in the face of the great fear.
Authentic fear is . . . rare under the hegemony of habituatedness and the
Public sphere" (Sein und Zeit, p. 190). Those who choose what is rare make an e
htist choice. Authenticity is thus, according to Heidegger, a matter for the few.
w tln
? "eedom, and the many who want to live as rebellious slaves and are not prepared
to
ended elitism, which assumes an elite of those who really exist, had to slide al-
m
ost inevitably into the social and guide political options. In this, the Grand In-
"at is that reminiscent of? Do we not hear again the Grand Inquisitor as he dis-
guishes between the few and the many--the few who bear the burden of great
encounter real freedom, real fear, real being? This completely apolitically in-
206 D THE CABINET OF CYNICS
quisitor possessed the advantage of an undeceived and cynical political conscious- ness. Heidegger, by contrast, remained naive, without a clear awareness that the traditional mixture of academic apoliticism, elitist consciousness, and heroic atti- tude leads, almost with blind necessity to, unforeseen political decisions. For a time he-one would like to say, therefore -fell into the cynicism of the populist Grand Inquisitor. His analysis proved to be true inadvertently about him himself. Everything looks as if. It sounds as if it has been "really understood, grasped and spoken, but basically it is not. " National socialism--"movement," "uprising," "decision"--seemed to resemble Heidegger's vision of authenticity, decisiveness, and heroic being unto death, as if fascism were the rebirth of authenticity out of habituatedness, as if this modern revolt against modernity were the real proof of an existence that had resolutely decided for itself. One has to think of Heidegger when one cites Hannah Arendt's sublime remark about those intellectuals in the Third Reich who, to be sure, were not Fascists, but "let something occur" to them on the theme of national socialism. In fact, Heidegger let many things occur to him until he noticed what the case "authentically" was with this political move- ment. The delusion could not last long. The Nazi movement was supposed to clar- ify what the populist Anyone has up its sleeve--Anyone as Master Human, Any- one as simultaneously narcissistic and authoritarian mass, Anyone as murderer for pleasure and official responsible for killing. The "authenticity" of fascism-its sole authenticity --consisted in transforming latent destructiveness into manifest destructiveness, thereby participating in a highly contemporary way in the cyni- cism of open "expressedness" that no longer conceals anything. Fascism, espe-
cially in its German version, is the unconcealment of political destructiveness reduced to its most naked form and encouraged by the formula of the "will to power. " It happened as if Nietzsche, in the manner of a psychotherapist, had said to capitalist society: "Basically, you are all consumed by a will to power, so let
52
it out openly for once and confess to being what you are in any case! "
upon, the Nazis, in fact, proceeded to let "it" (es = id) out, not under therapeutic conditions, however, but in the middle of political reality. It was perhaps Nietzsche's theoretical recklessness that allowed him to believe that philosophy can exhaust itself in provocative diagnoses, without at the same time thinking seriously about therapy. The Devil can be called by his real name only by those who know of an antidote to him. To name him (whether as will to power, as ag- gression, etc. ) is to acknowledge his reality, and to acknowledge this reality is to "unleash" it.
Since Heidegger, there is another offspring of the ancient kynical impulse, strongly encoded but nevertheless legible, on the point of intervening in social happenings with a critique of civilization. It leads modern consciousness of tech- nology and domination ultimately ad absurdum. Perhaps existential ontology can be robbed of much of its pretentious gloominess when it is understood as a philo- sophical Eulenspiegel game. It pretends all kinds of things to people in order to
Where-
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 207
get them into a position where they no longer allow themselves to be deceived. It pretends to be frightfully unyielding in order to communicate the simplest things. I call it the kynicism of ends. Inspired by the kynicism of ends, life that has learned the coldness of producing, ruling, and destroying through the cyni- cism of means could become warm again for us. The critique of instrumental rea- son presses for its completion as a critique of cynical reason. Its chief task is to loosen Heidegger's pathos and break its tight hold on the mere consciousness of death. "Authenticity," if the expression is to have any meaning at all, is ex- perienced by us rather in love and sexual intoxication, in irony and laughter, creativity and responsibility, meditation and ecstasy. In this release, that existen- tial individual (Einzige) who believes its most intimately genuine (eigenst) posses- sion is its own death disappears. At the summit of potentiality we experience not only the end of the world in lonely death, but even more the demise of the ego in its surrender to the most communal world.
Admittedly, death overshadowed philosophical fantasy between the world wars and claimed the right to the first night with the kynicism of ends for itself, at least in philosophy. However, it does not shed a good light on the relationship of existential philosophy to real existence when only "one's own death" occurs to it when it is asked what it has to say about real life. Actually, it says that it has nothing to say-and to this end it must write nothing with a capital N. This para- dox characterizes the enormous movement of thought in Sein und Zeit: Such a great wealth of concepts was hardly ever employed before to convey a content so "poor" in the mystical sense. The work beseeches the reader with a lofty call to authentic existence but veils itself in silence when one wants to ask, How then? The only, and to be sure, fundamental answer that can be drawn out of it must read, deciphered (in the foregoing sense): consciously. That is no longer a con- crete morality that instructs us as to what to do and what not to do. But if the phi- losopher is no longer able to give directives, he can still give an urgent suggestion to be authentic. Thus: You can do what vou like, you can do what you must, but do it in a way that you can remain intensely conscious of what you are doing. Moral amoralism--the last possible word of existential ontology to ethics? It seems that the ethos of conscious life would be the only ethos that can maintain itself in the nihilistic currents of modernity because it is basically not an ethos. It does not even fulfill the function of a substitute morality (of the kind in Utopias that posit the good in the future and help to relativize the evil on the way there). Those who really think from beyond good and evil find only one single opposition that is relevant to life; it is at the same time the only one over which we have Power stemming from our own existence without idealistic overexertions, namely, that between conscious and unconscious deed. If Sigmund Freud in a fa- mous challenge put forward the sentence: Where it (Es) was, ego (Ich) should be- come, Heidegger would say: Where Anyone was, authenticity should become. Authenticity --freely interpreted--would be the state we achieve when we pro-
208 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
duce a continuum of being conscious in our existence.
of being-unconscious under which human life, especially as socialized human life, lives. The distracted consciousness of Anyone is condemned to remaining discontinuous, impulsively reactive, automatic, and unfree. Anyone is the must. As opposed to this, conscious authenticity --we provisionally accept this expression --works out a higher quality of awareness. Authenticity puts into its deeds the entire force of its decisiveness and energy. Buddhism speaks about the same thing in comparable phrases. While the Anyone ego sleeps, the existence of the authentic self awakes to itself. Those who examine themselves in a state of continual awakeness discover what is to be done for them in their situation, beyond morals.
54
How deep Heidegger's systematic amoralism
terpretation of the concept of conscience (Gewissen): Heidegger construes, care- fully and revolutionarily at the same time, a "conscienceless conscience. " If, through the millennia of European moral history, conscience was held to be an inner authority that tells us what good and evil are, then Heidegger understands it now as an empty conscience that makes no statements. "The conscience speaks solely and continually in the modus of keeping silent" (Sein und Zeit, p. 273). Again, Heidegger's characteristic figure of thought appears: intensity that says nothing. Beyond good and evil there is only the "loud" silence, the intensive non-
judgmental consciousness that restricts itself to alertly seeing what the case is. Conscience--once understood as a substantial moral authority-- now approaches pure conscious being (Bewusst-Sein). Morality, as participation in social conven- tions and principles, only concerns Anyone's behavior. As the domain of the authentic self there remains only pure, decisive consciousness: vibrating presence.
In a sublime line of thought, Heidegger discovers that this "conscienceless con- science" contains a call to us --a "call to be guilty. " Guilty of what? No answer. Is "authentic" living in some way a priori guilty? Is the Christian doctrine of origi- nal sin secretly returning here? In that case we would have only apparently taken leave of moralism. If, however, authentic self-being is described as being unto death, then the thought suggests itself that this "call to be guilty" produces an ex- istential connection between one's own still-being-alive and the death of others. Life as causing-to-die. Authentically living persons are those who understand themselves as survivors, as those whom death has just passed over and who con- ceive of the time it will take for a renewed, definitive encounter with death as a
postponement. Heidegger's analysis, in essence, penetrates into this most extreme boundary zone of amoral reflection. That he is conscious of standing on explosive ground is revealed by his question: "Calling on others to be guilty, is that not an incitement to do evil? " Could there be an "authenticity" in which we show our- selves as the decisive doers of evil? Just as the Fascists cited Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil in order to do evil emphatically in this world? Heidegger recoils
53
Only that breaks the spell
reaches is shown in its rein-
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 209
from this consequence. The amoralism of "conscienceless conscience" is not meant as a call to do evil, he assures us. At least the Heidegger of 1927 is worried by this vague premonition, but in 1933 he misses the moment of truth--and in this way he let himself be deluded by the activistic, decisionistic {dezisionistisch), and heroic husks of slogans of the Hitler movement. The politically naive Heideg- ger believed he had found in fascism a "politics of authenticity"--and permitted, unsuspecting as only a German university professor could be, a projection of his philosophy onto the national movement.
However, it should be noted that Heidegger, with respect to his central philo-
sophical achievement, would still not be a man of the Right even if he had said
still more politically muddled things than he actually did. For, with his, as I call
it, kynicism of ends, he is the first to burst through the Utopian-moralistic grand
theories of the nineteenth century. With this achievement he remains one of the
first in the geneaology of a new and alternative Left: of a Left that no longer clings
to the hybrid constructions in the philosophy of history of the past century; a Left
that does not, in the style of the dogmatic Marxist grand theory (I prefer this ex-
pression to the word "Weltanschauung"), see itself as the accomplice of the world
spirit; a Left that has not sworn allegiance to the dogmatics of industrial develop-
ment without ifs and buts; a Left that revises the narrow-minded materialist tradi-
tion that burdens it; a Left that not only assumes that the others must die for one's
"own cause" but lives with the insight that the living can only rely on themselves;
a Left that in no way still clings to the naive belief that socialization (Vergesell-
schaftung) would be the wonder cure for the maladies of modernity. Without
knowing it and, for the most part, even without wanting to know it (in this country
even with an outraged resoluteness not to recognize it), the New Left is an ex-
istential Left, a neokynical Left--I risk the expression: a Heideggerian Left. This
is, particularly in the land of Critical Theory, which has hung an almost im-
penetrable taboo on the "fascist" ontologist, a rather piquant discovery. But who
has exhaustively and rigorously investigated the processes of repulsion between
the existential tendencies and Left-Hegelian critical social research? Is there not
a wealth of hidden similarities and analogies between Adorno and Heidegger?
What grounds are there for their striking refusal to communicate with one an-
s
other? science"?
And Diogenes? Did his existential-ontological adventure pay off for him? Has his lantern found people? Has he succeeded in instilling the unspeakably simple m our heads? I think he himself doubts it. He will consider whether he should not give up the enterprise of philosophy altogether. It makes no headway against the sad complicatedness of circumstances. The strategy of collaborating in order to change entangles the changer in the collective melancholy. In the end, those who were the more fully alive are only sadder, and it could hardly be otherwise.
Who could say which of the two had formulated the more "melancholy
210 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
Diogenes probably will resign one day from his professorship; soon after, we will find a notice on the bulletin board saying that Professor X's lectures are canceled until further notice. Rumor has it that he was seen in an army surplus store where he bought himself a sleeping bag. He was last reported seen sitting on a garbage bin, pretty drunk and giggling to himself like someone whose head is not quite in order.
Notes
1. The enormous interest shown by intellectuals in de Sade betrays a progressive dawning in which bourgeois cynicism begins to recognize itself again in late-aristocratic cynicism. It could be that in the future, Flaubert will take the place of de Sade.
2. "Those who give me a gift, I wag my tail at, those who give me nothing, I bark at, and scoun- drels I bite" (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 60).
3. [The metropolitan Indians (also mentioned in chapter 5) were a movement in the second half of the seventies in Western Europe of fringe dwellers who emulated American Indian culture and wanted to subvert the capitalist urban culture from within with (unarmed) cultural guerrilla tactics. As such, they are the politicized forerunners of the punks. --Trans. ]
4. Shaving was a custom of the Macedonia military, taken over by Hellenic and Roman society. From then on the beard becomes a philosophical status symbol, a sign of nonconformism.
5. A modern counterexample: "No one should let himself be infected by the scientists of the Club of Rome, who have told us that we should turn back to a simple life. For this we have not come into office and we also do not work towards this. Diogenes could live in a tub and was satisfied with that. But he was a philosopher, and most of the time we are not. " Here we have Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in 1976, who is speaking as a cynic warning us about the kynics.
6. See Hegel, Vorlesungen tiber die Geschichte der Philosophie. Collected Works, vol. 18 (Frankfurt, 1971), pp. 551ff.
7. Another version shifts this story to Corinth. The sources are few and fragmentary. For this reason one wants to lay every tiny particle recovered on the philologist's assaying scales and carefully weigh every letter. However, the ultimate wisdom often lies in not taking what has been handed down too literally. In this there is also a great hermeneutical chance, and we make unrestrained use of it.
8. See Regis Debray, who recognizes that a cultural history of scientific claims, to be properly founded, must be built on the basis of a sociology of ambitions. Le pouvoir intellectuel en France (Paris, 1979).
9. ". . . which neither sought a place to rest nor avoided the dark, nor showed any desire for so-called delicacies. That gave him a helpful tip for his needy situation. " (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 22).
10. [A famous German clown of the twentieth century--Trans. ]
11. There is one derivation of kynicism from kyon, the Greek for "dog," and another from the gymnasion Kynosarges in which Diogenes' purported teacher, Antisthenes, is said to have taught. 12. Words like drop-out, Aussteiger [escapist; literally, one who climbs out, "alighter"; --Trans. ]
and others hint in the same direction.
13. Kynicism even begins historically with an apparent enmity toward pleasure, if it is true that
Antisthenes "would rather have gone mad than feel pleasure. " Self-control, however, is not self- torture.
14. Laertius maintains that there was a writing by Diogenes on the state (Politeia). Like every- thing else, it has been lost. Its possible content can easily be surmised, however. The idea of a world- state, in which the later Stoic political philosophy culminates, is of kynical origin.
15. [This phrase comes from Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Part 3, section 2. -Trans. ]
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 211
16. Here an enticing comparison with the doctrine of long life in Chinese Taoism could be filled out. Meiner's edition of Laertius gives Diogenes' life span as 404-323 B. C. , i. e. , eighty-one years. 17.
With Diogenes, under the slogan Remint the Coins, there begins what will be called by the neokynic Nietzsche "the revaluing of all values," the cultural revolution of the "naked truth. " Nietzsche, of course, ruins the point. His revaluation turns the kynical rejection of power into a will to power; with this he changes sides and provides the powerful with a philosophy of disinhibition. 18. Feminism thus has an originally kynical side; indeed, it is perhaps the present-day core of neokynicism. For example, it encourages women to discover masturbation so as to detach themselves
from the compulsions of marriage.
19. Helmut Schmidt still cites his ethics.
20. This image prevails from about the time of Nero. In Cicero's time, the sects, which dominated
the ideological scene for a hundred years, are scarcely mentioned.
21. The interpretation of the late-ancient existential anxiety-among other things, a premise of
Christianity--is still a challenge to psychohistory.
22. Modern analogy: rival depth-psychological sects (Freudians, Jungians, Reichians, Adlerians,
Janovians, Perlsians, Lacanians, etc. ).
23. Christoph Martin Wieland, too, the best scholar of kynicism in eighteenth-century Germany
and the translator of Lucian, probably sensed that there was something inauthentic in Lucian's con- tempt for Peregrinus. In his novel, Die geheime Geschichte des Peregrinus Proteus (The secret story of Peregrinus Proteus) (1788-89), he thus draws a kinder picture of the philosopher.
24. See chapter 23, "On the German Republic of Impostors," as well as the section in chapter 10 entitled "Knowledge of War and Espionage. "
25. Recall the theses on art as the form of expression of bourgeois neokynicism in chapter 5. The arts possessed an exceptional capacity to process negativity. The concept "realism" refers to this in- vestigatory power of art.
26. Since Marx we know that the moving force that plunges modernity into its apparent progres- sive historicity is based on the alliance between capital and science. At the same time we are forced to distinguish more sharply between continuance (Fortgang) and progress (Fortschritt).
27. ". . . you call. . . evil": The Devil is not only an evolutionist but also a nominalist. "Evil" understands itself in another way: as a "power," as a phenomenon of energy, as a position in a natural polarity. Konrad Lorenz, still arguing in the schema of evolution, nowadays treats the phenomenon of aggression consistently from this standpoint: "so-called evil. "
28. Not actionism but "contemplative praxis," to act in order to become conscious.
29. Nietzsche, who initially again consciously called himelf a Cyniker, also coined the phrase "live dangerously. " It is the motto of kynical empiricism toward which Faust orients himself.
30. In its sharpest formulations, Adorno's Minima Moralia, the main work of moral critique in postwar German philosophy, speaks without reserve of the disgrace of surviving; it would be short- sighted to understand this merely as the reaction to Jewish experiences in those years (1943 on). On the morality of survival see also Elias Canetti, Masse undMacht (Munich, 1976) (Crowds and power; 1962).
31. In chapter 10, the way of seeing that leads to the "black empiricism" of the enlightenment sciences will be described.
32. "Boogie-woogie of the hormones" (Arthur Miller).
33. We are reading it here without regard to its context in the novel.
34. One hundred years after Dostoyevsky wrote this, the full implications of this reflection seem
to be coming to light, since, in Western leftist traditions, a departure from the "spirit of the (Christian) Utopia" is being carried out with a previously unknown profundity and since the intelligentsia ex- periences, directly and on its own responsibility, the ineluctability of the principle of power and of the reason of state. The Left in political power: With this, moral-political and psychic complications with a new degree of complexity begin.
212 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
35. "The world is everything that is the case," positivism will say later. If one takes the expression "the case is" somewhat more generously, the great realists of the nineteenth century are thoroughly positivistic--or at least "on the way" to positivism. For Marx, class struggles (although a universal concept) are the case; for Nietzsche, the will to power; for Freud, drives.
36. That is certainly no longer the biblical Jesus but a Jesus from the perspective of Judas, a Judas who seeks disburdening. His tragic cynicism evades an unbearable guilt; psychoanalytically, this probably belongs to the psychodynamic of the patricidal son, who can continue to live without suffocating on his guilt only by finding reasons for why he had to kill.
37. Here we approach the third level of the development of the concept of cynicism which will be presented in Part III.
38. Historicism contributes something decisive to this by educating us to see all phenomena of consciousness as a "product of their time"; it can easily be combined with psychologism as well as sociologism.
39. For this reason, conservatives often have a clear consciousness of "semantics. "
40. See "Minima Amoralia," in chapter 9.
41. Applied to the area of (church) politics, this dualism is expressed as power and spirit.
42. Overcoming of nihilism? "The results of the overcoming . . . are always worse than what
is overcome"; Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt, 1966), p. 371.
43. Christian substitute: One does it for the good of others.
44. Only once has Diogenes been seen in this way in modernity. Nietzsche's metaphysical happen-
ing in which the "crazy person" with the lantern announces: "God is dead" was the signal of neo- kynicism.
45. In Part IV, I pursue this "translation" further and investigate what subjugation and being sub- jugated mean for epistemology.
46. Mephistopheles: "If I had not reserved fire for myself/1 would have nothing apart for myself. "
47. [Heidegger's term has many connotations. Verfallen can mean "degenerated," "lapsed," "decayed," "addicted," "fallen. " The sense of having fallen ("fallenness") into the habit of everyday- ness seems to predominate. --Trans. ]
48. Nihilism? For a long time, the Marxist critique of Heidegger wanted to see in him nothing other than the swan song of the decadent bourgeoisie that had been left stranded even by the will to a future. Heidegger as speaker for a fascistoid nihilism and cult of death? Hardly. Rather, he con- tributed an impulse against the socialisms of the "great tomorrow," against Utopias of endless sacrifice.
49. Here I take up a motif of Michel Foucault's.
50. Concreteness does not exclude vagueness.
51. [Unbehaustheit recalls, among other things, Diogenes and his tub and suggests the original-
fundamental insecurity of all existence, naked ejection into the world. --Trans. ]
52. An assessment of Nietzsche will always depend strongly on how one conceives of the "will to power. " Encouragement to imperial cynicism? Cathartic confession? Aesthetic motto? Self- correction of an inhibited person? Vitalistic slogan? Metaphysics of narcissism? Propaganda of disin-
hibition?
53. This is a modern equivalent for the Delphic "Know thyself. " The Freudian ego is attributable
rather to Anyone. Is the psychoanalyzed person an accommodated person, someone cut down to size? 54. This reflected amoralism, which, paradoxically, carries the mute promise of an authentic ethi- cal life within it, has found its opponent in socialist moralism. The more recent Critical Theory has also renounced the sensitivistic quasi-amoralism of Adorno's "aesthetic theory" and steers with direct argumentation toward a positive ethics. That may signify an advance in a certain respect--if it avoids falling behind the radical modernity of existential and aesthetic amoralism. The latter already works on modern experiences with every morality and all categorical imperatives: Because these forms of "Ought" result in idealistic overexertions, imperative ethics comes with its own gravedigger-
skepticism, resignation, cynicism. Moralism, with its "you should" inevitably drives us into an "I
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can't. " Amoralism, by contrast, which proceeds from the "you can," realistically banks on the chance that what "I can" in the end will also be the right thing. The turn to practical philosophy that happily characterizes every present-day fundamental thinking that is world-wise should not tempt us to again let loose at being with a categorical imperative. Kynical reason, therefore, develops a nonimperative ethics that encourages the Can, instead of entangling us in the depressive complications of the Ought.
55. Recently, Hermann Morchen's extended study of Heidegger and Adorno has taken on these questions.
II. Phenomenological Main Text
Chapter 8
The Cardinal Cynicisms
In hasty ill humor, I have ripped the fig leaves from some naked thoughts.
Heinrich Heine, preface to Germany, a Winter's Tale
From what we have seen then, the concept of cynicism contains more than a first glance would lead us to expect. It is one of those things that, if given an inch, will take a mile. Our curiosity aroused, we wanted at first to "see what's really in it," and thereby --we noticed it too late--we experienced something that bog- gles our minds. We wanted to learn something about cynicism and discovered in doing so that it has long since brought us under its domination.
To this point, we have presented the concept of cynicism in two versions, and a third clearly emerges after chapter 7, "The Cabinet of Cynics. " The first says: Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness--unhappy consciousness in modern- ized form. Our approach here is intuitive, starting with a paradox; it articulates an uneasiness that sees the modern world steeped in cultural insanities, false hopes and their disappointment, in the progress of madness and the suspension of reason, in the deep schism that runs through modern consciousnesses and that seems to separate the rational and the real, what we know and what we do, from each other for all time. In the description we achieved a pathography that probed schizoid phenomena. It tried to find words for the perversely complicated struc- tures of a consciousness that has become reflective and is almost more melancholy than false; it is a consciousness that, under the compulsions of self-preservation, continues to run itself, though run down, in a permanent moral self-denial.
In the second version, the concept of cynicism assumes a historical dimension. A tension becomes apparent that, in the ancient critique of civilization, had first found expression under the name of kynicism: the urge of individuals to maintain
217
218 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
themselves as fully rational living beings against the distortions and semirationali- ties of their societies. Existence in resistance, in laughter, in refusal, in the appeal to the whole of nature and a full life. It begins as plebeian "individualism," panto- mimic, wily, and quick-witted. Some of this trickles through to the more serious Stoa; iridescent transitions to Christianity are effected but die out to the extent that Christian theology negates and even damns the ancient-heathen inheritance. We reserved the concept of cynicism for the reply of the rulers and the ruling cul- ture to the kynical provocation. They definitely see that there is an element of truth in it, but proceed with oppression. From now on, they know what they do.
The concept here undergoes a split into the dichotomy: kynicism-cynicism that, in substance, corresponds to resistance and repression, or more precisely, self-embodiment in resistance and self-splitting in repression. The phenomenon of kynicism is thereby separated from its historical origin and becomes a type that crops up again and again historically whenever, in crisis civilizations and civiliza- tion crises, consciousnesses clash with each other. Kynicism and cynicism are, accordingly, constants in our history, typical forms of a polemical consciousness "from below" and "from above. " In them, the opposition of high culture and peo- ple's culture is lived out as the exposure of paradoxes within high-cultural ethics.
Here, the third version of the concept of cynicism continues on to a phenome- nology of polemical forms of consciousness. The polemic always revolves around the correct conception of the truth as "naked" truth. Cynical thinking, namely, can arise only when two views of things have become possible, an official and an unofficial view, a veiled and a naked view, one from the viewpoint of heroes and one from the viewpoint of valets. In a culture in which one is regularly told lies, one wants to know not merely the truth but the naked truth. Where that cannot be that is not allowed to be, one has to draw out what the "naked" facts look like, no matter what morality has to say about it. In a certain way, "ruling" and "lying" are synonyms. The truth of rulers and that of servants are different.
In this phenomenological sighting of contestable forms of consciousness, we must "sublate" (aufheben) the bias in favor of the kynical standpoint. At first, we will have to patiently and somewhat dryly look at how, in six great arenas of values-the military, politics, sexuality, medicine, religion, and knowledge (the- ory)--kynical and cynical consciousnesses confront, attack, retaliate against each other, qualify each other, provoke each other, and finally get to know and neutral- ize each other. In the cardinal cynicisms, the contours of a combative history of ideas emerge. Such a history describes that "labor on the ideal" that stands at the heart of high-cultural ethics. That this is not a "phenomenology of spirit" in the
1
Hegelian sense will become clear.
phenomenology apart from the irrepressible philosophical battle cry: "Let's get down to things! "
Likewise, it has little to do with Husserlian
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 219
? Heinrich Zille, Riesenprogramm (Gigantic program). Variety tent on a Berlin fair- ground around 1900.
Military Cynicism
Five minutes' cowardice is better than a life long dead.
Soldier's saying
Even the Prussian prime minister, von Bismarck, was horrified by the atrocities. "War is hell, and whoever lets it loose with the stroke of a quill is a devil! " he exclaimed, without consider- ing how tirelessly he himself had contributed to it!
2 W. Stieber
Anthropological research says that flight is older than attack. Accordingly, the
human being would be, admittedly, partly predator (hunter), but not a priori a
warring animal. Nevertheless the discovery of weapons --for beating, throwing,
shooting (development of distance, neocortical development)--plays a key role
in anthropogenesis. If one can assume anything at all about the original tendency
of the human psyche regarding struggle and war, one can assume at least this
much: It prefers avoidance to striking. "Cowardly but happy" (G. Kleemann, sub-
title: Why the contemporary primitive human being does not want to fight;
Frankfurt-Berlin-Vienna, 1981). Those who avoid can initially better secure their
chances for survival than those who confront. If cowardice is neutrally under-
stood as the primary inclination to avoid confrontation, in the economy of human
dr
than to hold one's ground. "The smarter person yields. "
'ves it must have priority over the desire to fight. Initially it is smarter to flee
220 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
But at some point in the process of civilization it becomes smarter to stand firm than to flee. How this came to be is not our topic here --a couple of historical con- ceptual lumps may mark out the problem: ecological competition, increase in population density, neolithic revolution, the division between mobile herding cul- tures and sedentary agricultural cultures, and so on. The path to "history," to higher cultures, leads through the militarization of tribes and beyond to the state.
Military cynicism can emerge when three male martial character types have assumed clear contours in a society: the hero, the hesitater, and the coward. (This can even be seen in a rudimentary form in animal species with high intraspecies aggression, e. g. , in deer populations. ) An unambiguous hierarchy of values is es- tablished at whose summit the hero stands; everyone should be basically like him. Heroism is internalized as a model by the males in a combative civilization. But hereby, a new sociopsychological training of human beings also becomes neces- sary, with the aim of acquiring a distribution of martial temperaments not found in nature. Cowardice, present in large quantities as raw material and in everyone, must be reworked into battle-hungry heroism, or at least into brave, battle-ready hesitancy. All training of soldiers in the history of combative civilizations works to produce this unnatural alchemy. The noble family contributes to it just as much as the armed peasant family, as do, later, royal courts, military schools, barracks, and public morals. Heroism became and remained, in part to the present day, a dominant cultural factor. The cult of the aggressive, triumphant warrior runs through all of recorded history.