And you also
maintain
that it's true?
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
)
Since the eighteenth century, the political atmosphere in Central Europe has been rife with "open secrets. " Partly discreetly, in a private or secret setting, partly in the form of an open publicistic aggression, the secrets of power are now given away. Power is once again supposed to answer to morality. The origin of absolutism and its political wisdom, which was based on the prince's capability to suppress minor war and religious massacre, has here long since sunk into the dim past. Convinced that it would handle power in a morally unobjectionable way, if it only had power, the political- moral critique of the eighteenth century resisted absolute "despotism. " A new social class, the bourgeoisie, now made it- self, under the name of the people, a candidate for the assumption of power ("commoners," the "Third Estate," etc. ). The French Revolution, in its regicidal phase, carried a government of the "people" to the summit of the political system. However, what had made the revolution in the name of the "people" established itself in the following era as the bourgeois aristocracy, as an aristocracy of finance, culture, and entrepreneurship; moreover, through marriage, it was inter- woven a hundredfold with the older hereditary nobility. It could not be long be- fore this new stratum of masters, which called itself the people and cited the sov- ereignty of the people as its legitimating principle, experienced the contradictions of ruling for itself. For those who use the people for legitimation call forth the people and invite them to take an active interest in the machinations that are em- ployed in their name and against them.
The contradictory nature of the Christianized state now repeats itself, on a higher historical level, in the contradictions of the bourgeois state, which bases itself on the sovereignty of the people and makes the authorities dependent on universal elections (or makes it appear so). For, just as little as the Christian "state" in the Middle Ages realized the Christian ethics of love, reconciliation, and free fraternity could the modern "bourgeois" states convincingly represent their maxims ("freedom, equality, fraternity, solidarity") or even the vital in- terests of the broad masses. Those who study the situation of the peasant popula- tions in the nineteenth century, or even more, that of the growing industrial proletariat and the development of pauperism in the age of bourgeois rule (and in addition, the situation of women, servants, minorities, etc. ) -- those who do this must notice that a garbled and truncated concept of the people underlies the legitimating appeal to the people.
At this point, socialist movements become possible and necessary. They de- mand that whatever happens in the name of the people should also happen through and for the people. Those who base their authority on the people must also "serve the people," to start with by not involving them in those murderous "people's wars" that were typical of that age when bourgeois or feudal-bourgeois classes
242 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
ruled "in the name of the people"; and ending by allotting them a just proportion of the wealth they produce through their own labor.
In the secular conflict of the socialist movements with, let us say, the "bour-
15
geois" nation-state,
political consciousness were perpetrated that to a large extent govern the twen- tieth century. Both are late, complex forms of cynical consciousness. The first is what we call fascism. It goes so far as to confess in a relatively unabashed way its allegiance to a politics of pure violence. In a cynical manner, it simply dis- penses with the effort of legitimation by openly proclaiming brutality and "holy egoism" to be political necessities and historical-biological laws. Hitler's contem- poraries found him to be a "great orator," because, among other reasons, he began to articulate with a clear tone of naked realism that which had displeased the Ger- man temperament for a long time and that which it had wanted to do away with in accordance with its narcissistic and brutal ideas of order, namely, the hopeless Weimar parliamentarianism, the infamous Treaty of Versailles, etc. , and in par- ticular the "guilty" ones and the troublemakers-- socialists, Communists, trade unionists, anarchists, modern artists, gypsies, homosexuals, but above all the Jews, who had to bear the brunt of it all for being the intimate enemy and univer- sal projection figure. Why precisely them? What is the meaning of this uniquely malicious animosity? Through the mass murder of the Jews, the Fascists sought to smash the mirror that the Jewish people, by their mere existence, held up to Fascist arrogance. For the Fascist, the heroically arrogant Nobody, must have felt that no one saw through him more than did the Jews, who by virtue of their
tradition of suffering, almost as if by nature stand in ironic juxtaposition to every superior power. The central figures of German Fascism must have sensed that their arrogant thousand-year Reich would never be able to believe in itself as long as there remained in a corner of their own consciousness the memory that this pretention to power was a mere
pose. It was the Jews who reminded the Fascists of this. Anti-Semitism betrayed the kink in the Fascists' will to power.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
This power could never become so great that it would overcome the kynical-Jewish denial of it. "The impudent Jew" became the catchword for beating, stabbing, and murder- ing (Schlag-, Stick-, und Mordwort) under fascism. Out of its legacy of resigned resistance, covered over by apparent accommodation, modern Judaism radiated such an intense negation of the arrogance of power into the center of Fascist con- sciousness that the German Fascists, bent on their own grandiosity, built extermi- nation camps in order to eliminate what stood in the way of their presumptuous- ness. Did not these people live with the melancholy knowledge that all messiahs, since time immemorial, had been false? How could the German messiah out of the Austrian night-asylum, who let himself be celebrated as the returned Bar-
barossa from Kyffhauserberge, believe in his own mission as long as he himself looked over his shoulder with the eyes of the "evil Jew," who "undermines every-
two new turnings and polemical-reflexive convolutions of
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 243
thing"? No will to power can endure the irony of the will to survive this power
16
too.
To be sure, it is inadmissible simply to characterize the Fascist state of the
twentieth century as the typical representative of the modern, "bourgeois" state based on the sovereignty of the people. Nevertheless, fascism develops one of the latent possibilities of the "bourgeois" people's state. Its rampant antisocialism makes it clear that there is in fascism a political phenomenon of disinhibition, namely, a master-cynical defensive reaction against the impudent socialist de- mand to let the people have what they were promised, what is due to them. Fas- cism, it is true, also wants "everything for the people," but first it swindles through its false concept of the people: the people as monolith, as a homogeneous
17
mass that obeys a single will ("One people, one Reich, one Fuhrer").
With this,
liberal ideology is given a good, swift lesson. Individual freedoms, individual will? Individual opinion (Eigensinn)? Nonsense! And this nonsense is all the more annoying the further "down" it appears. Fascism realizes the tendency of the "bourgeois" state to push through, with the "necessary force," the particular "in- terests of the whole" rather than individual interests. In doing this it distinguishes itself through its unrestrained brutality. For this reason, it could occur to some substantial non-Fascist interest groups with political influence (in the economy and parliament) to support the Fascists when they seized state power and to think of them perhaps as the new broom with which disruptive "individual" interests (down below) could be thoroughly swept away. Were there really people who were cynical enough to believe that they could buy off Hitler and his cynical party of brutality? (One of them -- Thy ssen--in fact wrote memoirs under the title / Paid
nHitler. ) The Fascist state, with its stifling confusion of capital and folk ideology,
idealisms and brutalities deserves a unique philosophical predicate: the cynicism of cynicism.
The second complicated convolution of modern political consciousness oc- curred in recent Russian history. There seems to be a tendency for the militance and radicalness of socialist movements to develop proportionally to the level of oppression in a country. The more powerful a workers' movement was able to become in Europe, especially in Germany --corresponding to the real growth of the proletariat in the process of industrialization --the more established ("bour- geois") it presented itself in its average political behavior, the more it trusted in a gradual victory over its opponents, the forces of the late-feudal and bourgeois state. Conversely, the more powerful and unconquerable a despotic-feudal state power really was, the more fanatically it was confronted by the "socialist" opposi- tion. One might try to express it in the following way: The riper a country was for the insertion of socialist elements into its social order (high development of the productive forces, high degree of employment of wage labor, high degree of organization of "proletarian" interests, etc. ), the more calmly the leaders of the workers' movements waited for their chance. The strength and weakness of the
244 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
social democratic principle was always its pragmatic patience. Conversely, the
19
less ripe
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
unrelentingly and successfully radical socialism knew how to place itself at the head of subversive movements.
If there is a law governing the logic of struggle that says that in long conflicts opponents assimilate each other, then this law has been substantiated in the conflict between the Russian Communists and the czarist despots. What was played out between 1917 and the XXth Party Congress must be understood as the cynical and ironical testament of czarism. Lenin became the testamentary execu- tor of a despotism whose representatives had possibly been extinguished, but not its procedures and inner structures. Stalin raised the traditional despotism to the technological level of the twentieth century, in a way that would have made any Romanov blanch. If, under the czars, the Russian state was already a much too tightly fitting shirt for its society, under the Communist party it became a real straitjacket. If under czarism a tiny group of the privileged had held an enormous empire terroristically under control through their apparatus of power, after 1917, it was a tiny group of professional revolutionaries who, riding the wave of disgust with the war and the hatred the peasants and proletariat had for "those at the top," overthrew Goliath.
But was Leon Trotsky not, as a Jew, the inheritor of an ancient tradition of resistance and self-assertion against arrogant power? Trotsky had to let himself be banished and murdered by his colleague, who had become the Goliath. Is not in Stalin's murder of Trotsky the same cynical reply of presumptuous hegemonic power at work as in Fascist genocide? In both cases it is a matter of the revenge of presumptuous force on those whom it knows will never respect it, but rather for all time will cry out to the bugaboo: Legitimate yourself or you will be over- powered! In Trotsky's idea of permanent revolution was hidden something of the knowledge that political force must justify itself every time it is used in order to differentiate itself from criminality. Power must prove that it is a force for peace, law, and protection within its territory in order to make possible a new abundance of autonomous life. The idea of a permanent revolution is not an appeal for con- tinual chaos but stands rather as a code for the Jewish consciousness that every mere arrogance of state will be humbled--even if that means by being reminded of its crimes for as long as it exists. If Russian resistance even today expresses itself in the language of Christian and human rights, it does so because the process of . ^//-liberation in Russia came to a halt at that point where it had arrived be- tween February and the Red October of 1917: the demand for human rights as the universal formula of bourgeois freedoms. A country that wants to leap over the "liberal phase" will, when it jumps from despotism to socialism, land back in despotism again. The Russian people let themselves be made into the tools of a future that never wanted to arrive and that, after all that has happened, can no longer come in the way it was promised. It has sacrificed its rights to life and its
a society was for socialism (thought of as postcapitalism), the more
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 245
demands of reason for the present --in an act of orthodox masochism and scared confessional torment--on the altars of consumption of distant generations. It has exhausted its vital energies in the race to catch up to the madness of consumption and Western weapons technology.
As far as the real socialist apparatus of state is concerned, most observers as- sure us that ideologically it has been in the meantime totally drained. Everyone feels the gulf between the phraseology of the Leninist tradition and everyday ex- periences, particularly those who are forced to speak this phraseology because of their position. The world falls into two separate dimensions. One reckons everywhere with a split reality. Reality begins where the state and its terminology end. The conventional concept of "lie" does not adequately describe the situation in the East with its floating, schizoid diffusions of reality. For everyone knows that the relation between the "words" and the "things" is disrupted, but without control through public discussion, the disruption establishes itself as a new nor- mality. People therefore no longer define themselves in terms of socialist values and ideals; rather their definitions proceed from the lack of any alternative or es- cape from what is really given, that is, from a "socialism" that one endures like an evil, together with its radiantly true, but unfortunately only rhetorical, side. If cynicism--according to the prototype of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor-- can turn into tragedy, then it does so here, where the word "socialism," which every- where else in the world delineates a hope for people to become the masters of their own lives, has frozen into a symbol of futility. This represents a cynical speech disturbance of epochal proportions. Even from the outside it is obvious that the politics of the socialist powers no longer holds any hope of socialism whatsoever. In Marxist-Leninist terminology, the East exemplifies naked hegemonic politics, and one hesitates to laugh or hiss only because one cannot know what would hap- pen when the emperor notices that he has been walking naked across the street for a long time now. The other also has long been this way, but what will happen when it becomes known? Why has the greatest military power in the world been built up in order to protect a Active otherness?
If we try to imagine what a Machiavelli at the end of the twentieth century would say after a careful study of the political situation, it would probably be a cynical piece of advice to the super powers to declare with unscrupulous openness the bankruptcy of the systems on both sides, first, to motivate each to aid the other, second, to move their politically tired subjects to a great offensive of inven- tive self-help, and third, because the bankruptcy has probably in
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
fact come about. As a good positivist, Machiavelli would observe that a majority of the so-called political problems around the year 2000 are "illusory problems," stemming from the antagonism between two power blocs that confront each other because one of them tried to organize a social system that bypasses capitalism without having ever really known it; the other is a brittle, old, "overripe" capitalism that cannot go beyond itself because the house named "socialism" into which it could move
246 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
is already occupied. Accordingly, the competition between East and West is- Machiavelli would recite this with his well-known dry malice--neither a produc- tive competition between powers in the usual sense nor a classic hegemonic rivalry, but rather an aborted conflict of a complicated type. "Socialism" has be- come the chief hindrance to capitalism's transition to it; at the same time, the capitalism of the West, "nailed down" in this way, is its own chief hindrance to an open joining with systems in the East. Thus, while the East systematically lives beyond its means by pretending to be socialism, the West systematically does not live up to its potential because it has to formulate its ideas of the future defen- sively; namely, under no circumstances does it want this socialism--which is un- derstandable because no system can take what it has long since surpassed as its goal. For capitalism, a disguised and crippled state capitalism of the Eastern type cannot be an idea for the future.
If we want to resolve the conflict, we first must have a precise understanding of this uniquely paradoxical type of conflict. On this point Machiavelli would con- cur with the views of his colleague Marx, who provided the initial steps for a
20
Universal (historical-political) Polemic.
lows us to differentiate between conflicts based on rivalry between similar sys- tems and conflicts based on evolutionarily dissimilar systems, differing from each other in the degree of their development. In the latter case, the conflict is between the less developed and the more developed system whereby the latter necessarily grows out of the former. Ideally, the conflict between capitalism and socialism is of the latter kind. Seen logically, it can only be a conflict of overcoming in which the old resists the new, even though the latter undeniably emerges out of the former. The new becomes necessary when the old has become a fetter. This is precisely what Marx assures us of concerning the essence of fully developed capitalism: Once it has first become completely developed, it becomes itself a bar- rier to the human productivity that it had previously impelled. This barrier must thus be lifted: socialism. Socialism, on all levels, releases human productivity from its restrictive capitalist conditions, i. e. , above all from capitalist property relations. If we now observe what presents itself today as the conflict between capitalism and socialism, it can be seen at once that this is in no way the conflict between the old and the new studied by Marx but is instead a conflict based on the rivalry between two empires. Thus nothing new under the sun? What is new arises through the turning of this rivalry about its own sociological and historical axis. The Marxist attempt to guide history through socioeconomic insight has led to a complete distortion of historical perspectives on the future as a whole. The claims to control the history of the system, instead of letting it take its (known) course, has brought it drastically out of step. For indeed the future of capitalism is not an eternally new capitalism, but rather something grows out of it and out of its achievements that comes after it, overcomes it, inherits it, and will make it into prehistory. In a word, it makes possible its own ascent into a postcapital- This Marxian Universal Polemic al-
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 247
ism, and if we call this socialism, then what this means should now be clearly enough defined from all points of view: after-capitalism, grown out of an overripe capitalism.
Now one must not dream that one could "force" the development simply be- cause one has recognized these interconnections. What gave Lenin the right to believe or want to believe that Russia offered a case for the application of this Marxist theory of development and revolution will remain a puzzle. The puzzle lies not in Lenin's authentic revolutionary motivations but in the way in which he forced the application of a Western political-economic theory on a semi-Asiatic, scarcely industrialized, agrarian empire. I believe there can be no other answer: Here was an absolute will to revolution in search of a halfway suitable theory, and when it became evident that the theory was not really appropriate due to the lack of the real preconditions for its application, a compulsion to falsify, reinter- pret, and distort arose out of the determination to apply it. In Lenin's hands, Marxism became a theory of legitimation for an attempt to violently force reality to a point at which, later, the preconditions for the application of Marxian theory would be given, namely, in late-capitalist relations that would thus be ripe for revolution. How? Through forced industrialization. To the present day, the So- viet Union is in search of the causes of the Second Revolution of 1917. It would like, in a sense, to provide "after the fact" the necessity for a socialist revolution and, if all signs do not deceive us, it is on the best road for doing just that. For it is there, as in scarcely any other country, that, in Marx's formulation, the rela- tions of production
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
have become a fetter to the productive forces. If this incon- gruity provides the general formula for a revolutionary tension, then it is given here in an exemplarily crass form.
What in the current world situation is a conflict within the system presents it- self in an absurd way as a conflict between two systems. At the same time, this externalized conflict between the systems has become the main fetter to the libera-
21
tion of human productivity.
two mystified mystifiers. By means of a paranoid politics of armament, two real illusory opponents force themselves to maintain an imaginary system difference solidified through self-mystification. In this way, a socialism that does not want to be capitalism and a capitalism that does not want to be socialism paralyze each other. Moreover, the conflict confronts a socialism that practices more exploita- tion than capitalism (in order to hinder the latter) with a capitalism that is more
22
socialist than socialism (in order to hinder the latter).
Universal Polemic, Machiavelli would conclude that the developmental conflict has been neutralized by an externalized, distorted hegemonic conflict. Two giants of production expend enormous amounts of their socially produced wealth to so- lidify militarily a demarcation of systems that is basically untenable.
Thus, as was said, at the end of the twentieth century, Machiavelli would prob- ably recommend a general declaration that the systems are bankrupt. This decla-
The so-called system conflict takes place between
In the spirit of the Marxian
248 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
ration must precede so-called disarmament. For what causes the systems to arm is the idea that they are fundamentally opposed and that they each want something quite different that must be defended at all costs. Relaxation of tension through disarmament--that is yet again one of those fatally dangerous mystifications that see everything in inverted order. Relaxation of tension can only happen as an un- cramping from within, that is, as insight into the fact that the only thing we have to lose is the unbearable, armed illusion of a difference between systems.
Perhaps Machiavelli would again write a small pamphlet on the art of govern- ing, this time not under the title The Prince but under the heading On the Weak State. Posterity would doubtless again agree that this brochure is a scandal. Machiavelli perhaps would not have entirely stripped off his Florentine human- ism and thus would write his treatise in the form of a dialogue between two partners --David and Goliath. A passage from it might read as follows:
David: Well, Goliath, always fit, always ready for a fight? I hope you're in shape for another duel.
Goliath: How unfair, David! You can see I'm somewhat indisposed today. David: How come?
Goliath: It's a long story.
David: I love stories! How would it be if, for today, we tell stories instead of duel-
ing? The winner would be the one who can tell the crazier story, on the condi-
tion that it's true. Do you want to begin?
Goliath: Hmm, if you like. Stories as a substitute for fighting . . . what a funny
idea. Okay. Let me think . . . Well, some time ago, something happened that unsettled me so much that I can still scarcely relax.
You know, after the Great War, I defeated the giant Caput and wiped out his entire following. That was quite an achievement, for there were a lot of them and it wasn't easy for me to track them all down. They had artfully hidden themselves in my own ranks. In the end, I had created calm and order, and everything seemed to run smoothly again. One day I met a giant who, upon seeing me, at once cried: "You are Caput, I will conquer you! " And thereupon, he began a horrifying arms buildup. In vain I tried to make clear it to him that I was not Caput, because / had killed him with my own hands. But he would have none of it. Incessantly, he piled up the most frightening tools of war so as to be armed against me --whom he held to be the murderous Caput. He armed without letup, so that I myself had no choice but to arm without stop- ping. Nothing I said could convince him that I was not Caput. He nailed me down to it. Both of us were convinced that Caput was terrible and had to be subdued at all costs, but I could not make him see that I was not Caput. Indeed, in time I myself became uncertain whether I had killed the real Caput. Perhaps the one I slew was not Caput at all; perhaps this guy, the one who is attacking me
23
David: Almighty God!
street.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 249
and trying to drive me mad by insisting that /am Caput--perhaps he is Caput. But I won't let him get the better of me. I'm on my guard. We spy on each other day and night. Our fleets are always on the seas, and our planes are constantly in the air so as to be able to strike the instant the other makes a move. I don't know who he is, and I still maintain that he's confusing me with someone else, perhaps even intentionally. In any case, the one thing that is certain is that we are arming against each other, and keep on arming and arming.
David: That really is a nasty story. I'll have to exert myself to find a crazier one.
And you also maintain that it's true? Goliath: Absolutely. I wish it were made up. I'm sure things would then be only half as bad for me. Because of all this armament, I'm on the point of throwing up. I can't even move around freely anymore because of all the armor and the electronic contacts that would set off the bombs if they were touched.
David: Damn! Then you can't even really fight anymore. You'd only blow your- self to smithereens. Why didn't you tell me that in the first place? I almost tan- gled with you just now, just like back then, when you were still a real op- ponent. Goliath: Before, I would have punched you in the mouth for such cheeky talk. But somehow you're right. As an opponent, I'm useless now. To tell you the truth, I'm already so miserable that I don't know how to go on. Every night brings nightmares that take their toll on my nerves, nothing but bombs, craters, corpses --I feel like I'm suffocating. David: And I wanted to brawl with someone like that? You're no giant, you're a basket case. Are you finished?
Goliath: Not quite. Since we're on the subject, you may as well hear everything.
Recently I've been having the same nightmare: I dream that I'm a mouse who
wants to die because life has simply become too much for it. I look for a cat
who will do me the favor. I sit down in front of the cat and try to get it in-
terested in me, but it remains lethargic. "That is not fair of you," I say to the
cat, "for I'm still young and must taste pretty good, especially since I've been
well fed. " But the cat, the blase beast, merely answers: "I'm well nourished
too, so why should I bother? That wouldn't be normal. " Finally, with great
difficulty, I talk the cat into it. "I'll help you out this way," it says. "Put your
head in my mouth and wait. " I do what it says. Then I ask: "Will it take long? "
The cat replies: "Just as long as it takes for someone to step on my tail. It must
be a reflex action. But don't worry, I'll stretch my tail out. " So, that is death,
I think to myself, my head in the cat's mouth. The cat stretches out its bushy
tail across the sidewalk. I hear steps. I squint sideways. What do I see? Twelve
little blind girls from the Pope Julius Orphanage come singing down the
250 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
Goliath: At this moment I usually wake up, bathed in sweat, as you can imagine. David (reflecting): Well, that's it! Goliath: What do you mean?
David: You've won. I can't top your story. It makes me shudder, the state you're
in.
Goliath: Really? Well now, a victory in storytelling, that is something after all. David: Perhaps it will be your last. Goliath: Anyone as big as I am will still often win.
David: Big, what's that?
Sexual Cynicism
Love is a way to pass the time,
To do it you go 'neath the belly line. Erich Kastner, Fabian (1931)
/ do it with my hand, Madam . . . Popular parody
Woman is a being that dresses, babbles, and undresses.
V oltaire
The stage for the appearance and grimaces of sexual cynicism is set by an idealis- tic ideology of love that attributes to the body a lesser role in relation to "higher feelings. " How this separation of body and soul and the construction of a hierar- chy came about in detail would be a complicated chapter in the history of customs and the psyche. We must begin with the result of this history, with the doubleness and dualism of body and soul, heart and genitals, love and sexuality, above and below --even if we want to admit that these dualisms do not necessarily imply universally hostile antagonisms.
Even Platonism -- which continues to be influential (together with Christianity) as the most powerful Western theory of love--takes up the question of the origin of the split between body and soul and the separation of the sexes. Because Plato does not want to or cannot dwell on this chapter, he takes a shortcut. Whenever one does not want to tell long-
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
winded stories, one resorts to small myths that use images to string together the essential points. Let us listen to the fairy tale from Plato's banquet about the hermaphrodite.
In the beginning, so it goes in the mythical poem told by Aristophanes as one of the company, the human being was sexually self-sufficient and complete, a her- maphrodite with all the attributes of both the female and the male. The original human being had four legs and four arms, two faces and a rounded shape, as well
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 251
as the genitals of both sexes. Who would be surprised then that this androgynous wonder-animal was extraordinarily enraptured in itself? The envious gods, how- ever, began to consider how they could punish the hubris of this creature. With a saw, the original human being was simply cut in two. Each half was called, respectively, man and woman and condemned, with bleeding soul, to run after the other half, now separate, so as to comprehend that the part is not the whole and that the human being is not god. Since that time, both halves seek help from Eros, who can unite those who belong together and return human beings to them- selves.
This sarcastic account can be misunderstood only in one way, namely, when it is understood as an expression of naivete. The fairy tale of the hermaphrodite, in its series of speeches about Eros, constitutes the ironical-poetical station, that is, a mere moment or a phase of the truth. This truth must, of course, necessarily be expressed in this way also, but by no means only in this way. In the Platonic dialogue, a reciprocal and ironic deciphering of poetry and philosophical lan- guage takes place --the translation of the enthused into the sober and of the sober into the enthused (which holds for many synthetic mythologies, i. e. , mythologies that reflect on themselves in a rational alternative language). Only if one recalls the extent to which Greek culture idealized and venerated the human body does one understand completely the poetical cynicism of this story. The narrator serves up to his friends at the banquet a Hindu monster with eight extremities and two faces as the original image of the complete human figure (and on top of that, round as a ball, incapable of walking upright) on which the Greek ethics of the body put so much weight. It's hard to imagine what a figure it would make at the Olym- pic Games.
The point of the story is revealed as soon as one sees that here completeness again appears as deficiency --namely, as a lack of beauty. The gods' cruelty, which cuts the original narcissistic monster apart, thus has, on the one hand, a punitive aspect, but on the other, a creative perspective. For with the separation of man and woman arises at the same time, with divine irony, the beauty of the human body. Only this beauty can point the direction for a yearning love. Un- divided, the spherical creature cannot yet experience love because there is as yet no beauty in it that is worth yearning for in love. For this reason, only in the sec- ond unity, which arises out of the unification of the separated, is a real complete- ness possible that in the first unity, due to a lack of beauty, was still missing. From now on, Eros, the god of the desire to unite and of infatuation with beauty, must
24
also be part of the game if unification is to occur.
human bodies embrace and straddle (umarmen und umbeinen) each other with desire.
One then imagines a curious scene: a circle of clever Greeks who rave about Eros's ability to draw a man and a woman to each other, and who, at the same time, do not allow any women to be present among them. At the banquet, in pub- Only after the separation can
252 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
lie life, in the academy, everywhere, the men and their erotic theories are among themselves. Are they really? Do they suspect that the female aspect is not repre- sented in their circle? Do they sense a lack of oppositions, stimuli, love objects, and targets for yearning when they are among themselves? It does not appear so. They obviously feel themselves to be complete, intellectually as well as sexually. As a closed company of men, they enjoy the consciousness of a complete and mutually complementary group in which the masculine and the feminine, the hard and the soft, the giving and the taking, etc. , are present. In the circle of friends of the same sex, indeed, all countersexual forces are at hand, and what appears to be a homosexual community contains within itself a broad spectrum of bisexual experiences. Only in this way can one visualize the vibrancy of original Platonism. A vibrating atmosphere of wanting to understand fills the academy, this temple of clever male friendships. The longing for insight among them takes on the same tonal color as the longing for a loved one, and understanding itself can be experienced in the same way as the ecstasy of love in which the usual ego vanishes because something larger, higher, more comprehensive has replaced it--enthusiasm, the inner moment with God. One must have seen Mediterranean men dancing together--those auspicious moments of a naive and clear bisexual- ity, when strength and gentleness combine. Between master and pupil, this glim- mer must have been present, with which the younger soul, in perceiving the spiritual glow and mental alertness of the master, and anticipating its own unfold- ing and future, spreads its wings and experiences, beyond itself, itself in an approaching- present magnificence that the master, as someone who is fulfilled, guarantees. The erotic aura gives the school its
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
unmistakable style. It constitutes the spirit of the dialogues through which, throughout all argument and counter- argument, an erotic-dialectical affirmation of all positions and turns of conscious- ness pulses. With its comical movement of opinions, the dialogue becomes a river
that, through an energetic and perplexing dephlegmatizing of minds, frees con- sciousness for the experience of experiences, that ecstatic intensification that lights up in the soul simultaneously as truth, beauty, and goodness.
The dangers inherent in such a rapturous theory of love are clear. As a philosophizing among friends, the theory remains bound to the atmosphere of a rather narrow circle, and each time it is transposed to the universal, it must have a partly incomprehensible, partly irrational, and partly repressive effect. As an idealistic erotics, the theory must seem to all those who do not belong to the circle of friends like perverted effusiveness. Set loose from the erotic force field of the school, Platonism seems like the teachings of an insipid spiritualism. The love of wisdom becomes from then on increasingly sexless; it loses the region below the belly line and its energetic core. From the degeneration of Platonism to a mere idealistic literalism onward, philosophy suffers disturbances in potency, and in the age of Christianization, under the protective umbrella of theology, it becomes nothing more than an organized realm of eunuchs. Materialist counterstrikes are
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 253
inevitable. Because of their pugnacious tendency, they possess a kynical quality. But because men and women experience the presumptions of masculine idealism in different ways, we must take account of two different kynical replies to the idealistic disdain for the body. In fact, for both there are illuminating examples: Sexual kynicism is just as much at play when Diogenes jerks off in front of every- body as when housewives or courtesans give the all-too-clever philosophers a taste of womanly powers.
1. With Diogenes' masturbating in public another chapter of sexual history be- gins. In this first Happening of our civilization, ancient kynicism shows its sharp- est claws. They are partly responsible for the fact that in Christian- idealist usage, the word "cynical" describes a person to whom nothing more is sacred, who declares himself to be no longer ashamed of anything, and who embodies "evil" with a scornful smile. Those who want to make a plea for sublime love, for the partnership of souls, etc. , come up against a radical counterposition here. This position teaches sexual self-sufficiency as the original possibility for the in- dividual. The officially sanctioned married couple is not the first to have a chance to satisfy sexual urges; the individual human being, the laughing masturbator in the marketplace of Athens, is already in a position to do so. Plebeian onanism is an affront to the aristocratic soul-to-soul game, as well as to love relationships in which individuals, for the sake of sexuality, subjugate themselves to the yoke of a relationship. The sexual kynic, from the start, counters this with a self- satisfaction unburdened by scruples.
As soon as the kynic meets someone who wants to impress upon him that he is not an animal, Diogenes pulls out his organ from underneath his toga: Now, is that animalistic or not? And anyway, what do you have against animals? When someone comes who wants to dissuade human beings from their animal founda- tions, the kynic must demonstrate to his opponent how short the way is from the hand to the organ. Did human beings not initally through their upright stature find themselves in the position where their hands were precisely level with their geni- tals? Is the human being --seen anthropologically -- not the masturbating animal? Is it not possible that human consciousness of autarky --more than is generally surmised -- comes from the consequence of the upright stature just mentioned? The quadrupeds, in any case, have been spared this anatomical-philosophical complication. Indeed, masturbation accompanies our civilization like an inti- mately philosophical as well as moral "problem. " Masturbation is to the libidinous region what self-reflection is to the intellectual region. It constitutes at the same time a bridge from male kynicism to female kynicism, especially to the kynicism that can be observed in the present-day women's movement. Here, too, onanism is considered an aid to emancipation. Here, too, it is praised and practiced as a right that one claims for oneself just as much as a joy for which one is not indebted to anyone else.
2. To speak of a female kynicism is methodologically risky because the history
254 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
of "female consciousness" for the whole of ancient times is documented only in- directly, in the medium of male traditions. Nevertheless, some traditional anec- dotes can be examined from a female-kynical perspective. They are, of course, stories told primarily from a male perspective that from the beginning view fe- male images from a master- cynical angle--stories about women as whores and as evil matrimonial dragons. Nevertheless, in some cases a slight displacement of the viewing angle suffices for the same anecdotes to show a pro feminine mean- ing. As a rule, they mirror typical scenes out of the "battle between the sexes," where it happens that the man slips into the weaker position. This happens to him especially in two areas: sexual dependence and household management.
The first example treats Aristotle in the role of a fool in love. One anecdote says that one day he fell so passionately in love with the Athenian courtesan Phyllis that he completely lost his own will and surrendered himself blindly to her
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
whims. The famous whore thus commanded the thinker to crawl on all fours in front of her and he, willingly without will, obeyed and let himself be made a fool of. Humbly he crawled on the ground and served his mistress as a mount. 25
This anecdotal motif was captured by Hans Baldung Grien in 1513-the time
of Eulenspiegel--after the Lai d'Aristote of a French poet of the Middle Ages. The white-bearded philosopher crawls on all fours in a walled garden, while Phyllis, with a broad behind and obtruding belly, sits on his back. In her left hand she holds the reins, which run through the mouth of the thinker with the receding hair- line; in the right hand, with a delicately extended little finger, she holds a dainty riding crop. Unlike the humbled philosopher, who looks urgently toward the viewer, Phyllis looks at the ground, an Old-German bonnet on her tilted head. Her shoulders are rounded, her body corpulent and melancholy. The kynical meaning of the story is clear: Beauty swings its whip over wisdom, the body con- quers reason; passion makes the spirit pliable; the naked woman triumphs over masculine intellect; against the persuasive power of breasts and hips, understand- ing has nothing to offer. Naturally, here the usual cliches about femininity crop up, but the point lies not in them but rather in the fact that an opportunity for fe- male power is depicted. In Grien's picture, the element of reflectiveness has passed from the philosopher to the courtesan. Admittedly she is "only a whore" but nonetheless it is not a "shame that she is a whore. " She seizes thereby a possi- bility for her own sovereignty. Whoever rides on Aristotle may perhaps be a dan- gerous woman, but certainly one who remains above contempt. That a Phyllis wants to ride on the clever man is supposed, on the one hand, to serve him as a warning, but on the other hand, it should also show him where that can lead. She, with her head tilted thoughtfully to one side, sees coming what he, down under, still seems to fear. To her it is clear that this is only the beginning and that Aristotle will probably not be so stupid in the long run. Admittedly, for him it begins on all fours, but if he is as clever as people say, it will end up with him on his back.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 255
? Hans Baldung Grien, Beauty Swings Her Whip over Wisdom, woodcut, 1513.
The cleverer a man is in his occupation, the greater an idiot he is at home. The more respected he is in society, the more contemptible he appears within his own four walls. This could be the moral of the story of Socrates and Xantippe, if it is tentatively read from a female-kynical perspective. This philosopher has been included in history not only because of his talent for posing questions and leading penetrating dialogues, but also because of his notoriously horrible marriage. Be- cause she is said to have made a domestic hell on earth for her husband, Xantippe is no longer merely a name but has become a generic term for a tyrannical, quar- relsome wife. But a small alteration in point of view suffices to see the relationship between Socrates and Xantippe in another light. Xantippe, the evildoer, then ap- pears rather as the victim of her apparent victim, and the latter becomes recogniz- able in a significant way as the "true" culprit. From today's perspective, every-
256 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
thing speaks for defending Xantippe against her bad reputation. One really has to ask oneself how Socrates managed to maneuver himself into such conjugal mis- ery, and this question can be posed in several variations. If Xantippe really was from the start the kind of woman the legend says she was, we would show very little understanding for our great philosopher because then it was his own care- lessness that led him to choose precisely her and no other woman. Or is he sup- posed to have thought, ironic as he was, that a surly woman is just what a thinker needs? If, from the beginning, he recognized her "true nature" and put up with it, then this indicates deplorable marital behavior on his part because he thus un- reasonably expected a women to spend her whole life with a man who obviously at best endured her but did not appreciate her. Conversely, if Xantippe had be- come as she is described only during her marriage to Socrates, then the philoso- pher would really come into a questionable light because then indisputably he himself must have caused his wife's vexation without having interested himself in it. No matter how the story is turned, Xantippe's moods fall back on Socrates. This is a genuine philosophical problem: How did the thinker and questioner manage not to solve the puzzle of Xantippe's bad temper? This great midwife of truth was obviously unable to let his wife's rage express itself or to help her find a language in which she would have been able to express the grounds and justifica- tions for her behavior. The failure of a philosopher often consists not in false an- swers but in neglecting to pose the right questions --and in denying some ex-
periences the right to become "problems. " His experiences with Xantippe must have been of this kind--a misery that is not given the dignity of obtruding into the male problem-monopoly. Philosphers fail when they endure as a naturally given evil that for which they are to blame; indeed, their capacity for "wisely" enduring it is itself an intellectual scandal, a misuse of wisdom in favor of blind- ness. With Socrates, it seems, this misuse immediately avenged itself. When a thinker cannot refrain from equating humanity with masculinity, reality will strike back in the philosopher's marital hell. The stories about this thus have, I think, also a kynical meaning. They reveal the real reason for
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
philosophical- clerical celibacy in our civilization. A definite dominating kind of idealism, phi- losophy, and grand theory becomes possible only when a certain "other kind" of experience is systematically avoided.
Just as it is impossible to speak of European state-cynicism without dealing with Christian ethics, it is also impossible in our culture to speak of sexual cyni- cism without talking about the Christian way of treating sexuality. The really crass "cynical" gestures can arise only on a foundation of idealism and oppression--the idealism of oppression.
Since the eighteenth century, the political atmosphere in Central Europe has been rife with "open secrets. " Partly discreetly, in a private or secret setting, partly in the form of an open publicistic aggression, the secrets of power are now given away. Power is once again supposed to answer to morality. The origin of absolutism and its political wisdom, which was based on the prince's capability to suppress minor war and religious massacre, has here long since sunk into the dim past. Convinced that it would handle power in a morally unobjectionable way, if it only had power, the political- moral critique of the eighteenth century resisted absolute "despotism. " A new social class, the bourgeoisie, now made it- self, under the name of the people, a candidate for the assumption of power ("commoners," the "Third Estate," etc. ). The French Revolution, in its regicidal phase, carried a government of the "people" to the summit of the political system. However, what had made the revolution in the name of the "people" established itself in the following era as the bourgeois aristocracy, as an aristocracy of finance, culture, and entrepreneurship; moreover, through marriage, it was inter- woven a hundredfold with the older hereditary nobility. It could not be long be- fore this new stratum of masters, which called itself the people and cited the sov- ereignty of the people as its legitimating principle, experienced the contradictions of ruling for itself. For those who use the people for legitimation call forth the people and invite them to take an active interest in the machinations that are em- ployed in their name and against them.
The contradictory nature of the Christianized state now repeats itself, on a higher historical level, in the contradictions of the bourgeois state, which bases itself on the sovereignty of the people and makes the authorities dependent on universal elections (or makes it appear so). For, just as little as the Christian "state" in the Middle Ages realized the Christian ethics of love, reconciliation, and free fraternity could the modern "bourgeois" states convincingly represent their maxims ("freedom, equality, fraternity, solidarity") or even the vital in- terests of the broad masses. Those who study the situation of the peasant popula- tions in the nineteenth century, or even more, that of the growing industrial proletariat and the development of pauperism in the age of bourgeois rule (and in addition, the situation of women, servants, minorities, etc. ) -- those who do this must notice that a garbled and truncated concept of the people underlies the legitimating appeal to the people.
At this point, socialist movements become possible and necessary. They de- mand that whatever happens in the name of the people should also happen through and for the people. Those who base their authority on the people must also "serve the people," to start with by not involving them in those murderous "people's wars" that were typical of that age when bourgeois or feudal-bourgeois classes
242 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
ruled "in the name of the people"; and ending by allotting them a just proportion of the wealth they produce through their own labor.
In the secular conflict of the socialist movements with, let us say, the "bour-
15
geois" nation-state,
political consciousness were perpetrated that to a large extent govern the twen- tieth century. Both are late, complex forms of cynical consciousness. The first is what we call fascism. It goes so far as to confess in a relatively unabashed way its allegiance to a politics of pure violence. In a cynical manner, it simply dis- penses with the effort of legitimation by openly proclaiming brutality and "holy egoism" to be political necessities and historical-biological laws. Hitler's contem- poraries found him to be a "great orator," because, among other reasons, he began to articulate with a clear tone of naked realism that which had displeased the Ger- man temperament for a long time and that which it had wanted to do away with in accordance with its narcissistic and brutal ideas of order, namely, the hopeless Weimar parliamentarianism, the infamous Treaty of Versailles, etc. , and in par- ticular the "guilty" ones and the troublemakers-- socialists, Communists, trade unionists, anarchists, modern artists, gypsies, homosexuals, but above all the Jews, who had to bear the brunt of it all for being the intimate enemy and univer- sal projection figure. Why precisely them? What is the meaning of this uniquely malicious animosity? Through the mass murder of the Jews, the Fascists sought to smash the mirror that the Jewish people, by their mere existence, held up to Fascist arrogance. For the Fascist, the heroically arrogant Nobody, must have felt that no one saw through him more than did the Jews, who by virtue of their
tradition of suffering, almost as if by nature stand in ironic juxtaposition to every superior power. The central figures of German Fascism must have sensed that their arrogant thousand-year Reich would never be able to believe in itself as long as there remained in a corner of their own consciousness the memory that this pretention to power was a mere
pose. It was the Jews who reminded the Fascists of this. Anti-Semitism betrayed the kink in the Fascists' will to power.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
This power could never become so great that it would overcome the kynical-Jewish denial of it. "The impudent Jew" became the catchword for beating, stabbing, and murder- ing (Schlag-, Stick-, und Mordwort) under fascism. Out of its legacy of resigned resistance, covered over by apparent accommodation, modern Judaism radiated such an intense negation of the arrogance of power into the center of Fascist con- sciousness that the German Fascists, bent on their own grandiosity, built extermi- nation camps in order to eliminate what stood in the way of their presumptuous- ness. Did not these people live with the melancholy knowledge that all messiahs, since time immemorial, had been false? How could the German messiah out of the Austrian night-asylum, who let himself be celebrated as the returned Bar-
barossa from Kyffhauserberge, believe in his own mission as long as he himself looked over his shoulder with the eyes of the "evil Jew," who "undermines every-
two new turnings and polemical-reflexive convolutions of
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 243
thing"? No will to power can endure the irony of the will to survive this power
16
too.
To be sure, it is inadmissible simply to characterize the Fascist state of the
twentieth century as the typical representative of the modern, "bourgeois" state based on the sovereignty of the people. Nevertheless, fascism develops one of the latent possibilities of the "bourgeois" people's state. Its rampant antisocialism makes it clear that there is in fascism a political phenomenon of disinhibition, namely, a master-cynical defensive reaction against the impudent socialist de- mand to let the people have what they were promised, what is due to them. Fas- cism, it is true, also wants "everything for the people," but first it swindles through its false concept of the people: the people as monolith, as a homogeneous
17
mass that obeys a single will ("One people, one Reich, one Fuhrer").
With this,
liberal ideology is given a good, swift lesson. Individual freedoms, individual will? Individual opinion (Eigensinn)? Nonsense! And this nonsense is all the more annoying the further "down" it appears. Fascism realizes the tendency of the "bourgeois" state to push through, with the "necessary force," the particular "in- terests of the whole" rather than individual interests. In doing this it distinguishes itself through its unrestrained brutality. For this reason, it could occur to some substantial non-Fascist interest groups with political influence (in the economy and parliament) to support the Fascists when they seized state power and to think of them perhaps as the new broom with which disruptive "individual" interests (down below) could be thoroughly swept away. Were there really people who were cynical enough to believe that they could buy off Hitler and his cynical party of brutality? (One of them -- Thy ssen--in fact wrote memoirs under the title / Paid
nHitler. ) The Fascist state, with its stifling confusion of capital and folk ideology,
idealisms and brutalities deserves a unique philosophical predicate: the cynicism of cynicism.
The second complicated convolution of modern political consciousness oc- curred in recent Russian history. There seems to be a tendency for the militance and radicalness of socialist movements to develop proportionally to the level of oppression in a country. The more powerful a workers' movement was able to become in Europe, especially in Germany --corresponding to the real growth of the proletariat in the process of industrialization --the more established ("bour- geois") it presented itself in its average political behavior, the more it trusted in a gradual victory over its opponents, the forces of the late-feudal and bourgeois state. Conversely, the more powerful and unconquerable a despotic-feudal state power really was, the more fanatically it was confronted by the "socialist" opposi- tion. One might try to express it in the following way: The riper a country was for the insertion of socialist elements into its social order (high development of the productive forces, high degree of employment of wage labor, high degree of organization of "proletarian" interests, etc. ), the more calmly the leaders of the workers' movements waited for their chance. The strength and weakness of the
244 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
social democratic principle was always its pragmatic patience. Conversely, the
19
less ripe
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
unrelentingly and successfully radical socialism knew how to place itself at the head of subversive movements.
If there is a law governing the logic of struggle that says that in long conflicts opponents assimilate each other, then this law has been substantiated in the conflict between the Russian Communists and the czarist despots. What was played out between 1917 and the XXth Party Congress must be understood as the cynical and ironical testament of czarism. Lenin became the testamentary execu- tor of a despotism whose representatives had possibly been extinguished, but not its procedures and inner structures. Stalin raised the traditional despotism to the technological level of the twentieth century, in a way that would have made any Romanov blanch. If, under the czars, the Russian state was already a much too tightly fitting shirt for its society, under the Communist party it became a real straitjacket. If under czarism a tiny group of the privileged had held an enormous empire terroristically under control through their apparatus of power, after 1917, it was a tiny group of professional revolutionaries who, riding the wave of disgust with the war and the hatred the peasants and proletariat had for "those at the top," overthrew Goliath.
But was Leon Trotsky not, as a Jew, the inheritor of an ancient tradition of resistance and self-assertion against arrogant power? Trotsky had to let himself be banished and murdered by his colleague, who had become the Goliath. Is not in Stalin's murder of Trotsky the same cynical reply of presumptuous hegemonic power at work as in Fascist genocide? In both cases it is a matter of the revenge of presumptuous force on those whom it knows will never respect it, but rather for all time will cry out to the bugaboo: Legitimate yourself or you will be over- powered! In Trotsky's idea of permanent revolution was hidden something of the knowledge that political force must justify itself every time it is used in order to differentiate itself from criminality. Power must prove that it is a force for peace, law, and protection within its territory in order to make possible a new abundance of autonomous life. The idea of a permanent revolution is not an appeal for con- tinual chaos but stands rather as a code for the Jewish consciousness that every mere arrogance of state will be humbled--even if that means by being reminded of its crimes for as long as it exists. If Russian resistance even today expresses itself in the language of Christian and human rights, it does so because the process of . ^//-liberation in Russia came to a halt at that point where it had arrived be- tween February and the Red October of 1917: the demand for human rights as the universal formula of bourgeois freedoms. A country that wants to leap over the "liberal phase" will, when it jumps from despotism to socialism, land back in despotism again. The Russian people let themselves be made into the tools of a future that never wanted to arrive and that, after all that has happened, can no longer come in the way it was promised. It has sacrificed its rights to life and its
a society was for socialism (thought of as postcapitalism), the more
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 245
demands of reason for the present --in an act of orthodox masochism and scared confessional torment--on the altars of consumption of distant generations. It has exhausted its vital energies in the race to catch up to the madness of consumption and Western weapons technology.
As far as the real socialist apparatus of state is concerned, most observers as- sure us that ideologically it has been in the meantime totally drained. Everyone feels the gulf between the phraseology of the Leninist tradition and everyday ex- periences, particularly those who are forced to speak this phraseology because of their position. The world falls into two separate dimensions. One reckons everywhere with a split reality. Reality begins where the state and its terminology end. The conventional concept of "lie" does not adequately describe the situation in the East with its floating, schizoid diffusions of reality. For everyone knows that the relation between the "words" and the "things" is disrupted, but without control through public discussion, the disruption establishes itself as a new nor- mality. People therefore no longer define themselves in terms of socialist values and ideals; rather their definitions proceed from the lack of any alternative or es- cape from what is really given, that is, from a "socialism" that one endures like an evil, together with its radiantly true, but unfortunately only rhetorical, side. If cynicism--according to the prototype of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor-- can turn into tragedy, then it does so here, where the word "socialism," which every- where else in the world delineates a hope for people to become the masters of their own lives, has frozen into a symbol of futility. This represents a cynical speech disturbance of epochal proportions. Even from the outside it is obvious that the politics of the socialist powers no longer holds any hope of socialism whatsoever. In Marxist-Leninist terminology, the East exemplifies naked hegemonic politics, and one hesitates to laugh or hiss only because one cannot know what would hap- pen when the emperor notices that he has been walking naked across the street for a long time now. The other also has long been this way, but what will happen when it becomes known? Why has the greatest military power in the world been built up in order to protect a Active otherness?
If we try to imagine what a Machiavelli at the end of the twentieth century would say after a careful study of the political situation, it would probably be a cynical piece of advice to the super powers to declare with unscrupulous openness the bankruptcy of the systems on both sides, first, to motivate each to aid the other, second, to move their politically tired subjects to a great offensive of inven- tive self-help, and third, because the bankruptcy has probably in
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
fact come about. As a good positivist, Machiavelli would observe that a majority of the so-called political problems around the year 2000 are "illusory problems," stemming from the antagonism between two power blocs that confront each other because one of them tried to organize a social system that bypasses capitalism without having ever really known it; the other is a brittle, old, "overripe" capitalism that cannot go beyond itself because the house named "socialism" into which it could move
246 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
is already occupied. Accordingly, the competition between East and West is- Machiavelli would recite this with his well-known dry malice--neither a produc- tive competition between powers in the usual sense nor a classic hegemonic rivalry, but rather an aborted conflict of a complicated type. "Socialism" has be- come the chief hindrance to capitalism's transition to it; at the same time, the capitalism of the West, "nailed down" in this way, is its own chief hindrance to an open joining with systems in the East. Thus, while the East systematically lives beyond its means by pretending to be socialism, the West systematically does not live up to its potential because it has to formulate its ideas of the future defen- sively; namely, under no circumstances does it want this socialism--which is un- derstandable because no system can take what it has long since surpassed as its goal. For capitalism, a disguised and crippled state capitalism of the Eastern type cannot be an idea for the future.
If we want to resolve the conflict, we first must have a precise understanding of this uniquely paradoxical type of conflict. On this point Machiavelli would con- cur with the views of his colleague Marx, who provided the initial steps for a
20
Universal (historical-political) Polemic.
lows us to differentiate between conflicts based on rivalry between similar sys- tems and conflicts based on evolutionarily dissimilar systems, differing from each other in the degree of their development. In the latter case, the conflict is between the less developed and the more developed system whereby the latter necessarily grows out of the former. Ideally, the conflict between capitalism and socialism is of the latter kind. Seen logically, it can only be a conflict of overcoming in which the old resists the new, even though the latter undeniably emerges out of the former. The new becomes necessary when the old has become a fetter. This is precisely what Marx assures us of concerning the essence of fully developed capitalism: Once it has first become completely developed, it becomes itself a bar- rier to the human productivity that it had previously impelled. This barrier must thus be lifted: socialism. Socialism, on all levels, releases human productivity from its restrictive capitalist conditions, i. e. , above all from capitalist property relations. If we now observe what presents itself today as the conflict between capitalism and socialism, it can be seen at once that this is in no way the conflict between the old and the new studied by Marx but is instead a conflict based on the rivalry between two empires. Thus nothing new under the sun? What is new arises through the turning of this rivalry about its own sociological and historical axis. The Marxist attempt to guide history through socioeconomic insight has led to a complete distortion of historical perspectives on the future as a whole. The claims to control the history of the system, instead of letting it take its (known) course, has brought it drastically out of step. For indeed the future of capitalism is not an eternally new capitalism, but rather something grows out of it and out of its achievements that comes after it, overcomes it, inherits it, and will make it into prehistory. In a word, it makes possible its own ascent into a postcapital- This Marxian Universal Polemic al-
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 247
ism, and if we call this socialism, then what this means should now be clearly enough defined from all points of view: after-capitalism, grown out of an overripe capitalism.
Now one must not dream that one could "force" the development simply be- cause one has recognized these interconnections. What gave Lenin the right to believe or want to believe that Russia offered a case for the application of this Marxist theory of development and revolution will remain a puzzle. The puzzle lies not in Lenin's authentic revolutionary motivations but in the way in which he forced the application of a Western political-economic theory on a semi-Asiatic, scarcely industrialized, agrarian empire. I believe there can be no other answer: Here was an absolute will to revolution in search of a halfway suitable theory, and when it became evident that the theory was not really appropriate due to the lack of the real preconditions for its application, a compulsion to falsify, reinter- pret, and distort arose out of the determination to apply it. In Lenin's hands, Marxism became a theory of legitimation for an attempt to violently force reality to a point at which, later, the preconditions for the application of Marxian theory would be given, namely, in late-capitalist relations that would thus be ripe for revolution. How? Through forced industrialization. To the present day, the So- viet Union is in search of the causes of the Second Revolution of 1917. It would like, in a sense, to provide "after the fact" the necessity for a socialist revolution and, if all signs do not deceive us, it is on the best road for doing just that. For it is there, as in scarcely any other country, that, in Marx's formulation, the rela- tions of production
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
have become a fetter to the productive forces. If this incon- gruity provides the general formula for a revolutionary tension, then it is given here in an exemplarily crass form.
What in the current world situation is a conflict within the system presents it- self in an absurd way as a conflict between two systems. At the same time, this externalized conflict between the systems has become the main fetter to the libera-
21
tion of human productivity.
two mystified mystifiers. By means of a paranoid politics of armament, two real illusory opponents force themselves to maintain an imaginary system difference solidified through self-mystification. In this way, a socialism that does not want to be capitalism and a capitalism that does not want to be socialism paralyze each other. Moreover, the conflict confronts a socialism that practices more exploita- tion than capitalism (in order to hinder the latter) with a capitalism that is more
22
socialist than socialism (in order to hinder the latter).
Universal Polemic, Machiavelli would conclude that the developmental conflict has been neutralized by an externalized, distorted hegemonic conflict. Two giants of production expend enormous amounts of their socially produced wealth to so- lidify militarily a demarcation of systems that is basically untenable.
Thus, as was said, at the end of the twentieth century, Machiavelli would prob- ably recommend a general declaration that the systems are bankrupt. This decla-
The so-called system conflict takes place between
In the spirit of the Marxian
248 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
ration must precede so-called disarmament. For what causes the systems to arm is the idea that they are fundamentally opposed and that they each want something quite different that must be defended at all costs. Relaxation of tension through disarmament--that is yet again one of those fatally dangerous mystifications that see everything in inverted order. Relaxation of tension can only happen as an un- cramping from within, that is, as insight into the fact that the only thing we have to lose is the unbearable, armed illusion of a difference between systems.
Perhaps Machiavelli would again write a small pamphlet on the art of govern- ing, this time not under the title The Prince but under the heading On the Weak State. Posterity would doubtless again agree that this brochure is a scandal. Machiavelli perhaps would not have entirely stripped off his Florentine human- ism and thus would write his treatise in the form of a dialogue between two partners --David and Goliath. A passage from it might read as follows:
David: Well, Goliath, always fit, always ready for a fight? I hope you're in shape for another duel.
Goliath: How unfair, David! You can see I'm somewhat indisposed today. David: How come?
Goliath: It's a long story.
David: I love stories! How would it be if, for today, we tell stories instead of duel-
ing? The winner would be the one who can tell the crazier story, on the condi-
tion that it's true. Do you want to begin?
Goliath: Hmm, if you like. Stories as a substitute for fighting . . . what a funny
idea. Okay. Let me think . . . Well, some time ago, something happened that unsettled me so much that I can still scarcely relax.
You know, after the Great War, I defeated the giant Caput and wiped out his entire following. That was quite an achievement, for there were a lot of them and it wasn't easy for me to track them all down. They had artfully hidden themselves in my own ranks. In the end, I had created calm and order, and everything seemed to run smoothly again. One day I met a giant who, upon seeing me, at once cried: "You are Caput, I will conquer you! " And thereupon, he began a horrifying arms buildup. In vain I tried to make clear it to him that I was not Caput, because / had killed him with my own hands. But he would have none of it. Incessantly, he piled up the most frightening tools of war so as to be armed against me --whom he held to be the murderous Caput. He armed without letup, so that I myself had no choice but to arm without stop- ping. Nothing I said could convince him that I was not Caput. He nailed me down to it. Both of us were convinced that Caput was terrible and had to be subdued at all costs, but I could not make him see that I was not Caput. Indeed, in time I myself became uncertain whether I had killed the real Caput. Perhaps the one I slew was not Caput at all; perhaps this guy, the one who is attacking me
23
David: Almighty God!
street.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 249
and trying to drive me mad by insisting that /am Caput--perhaps he is Caput. But I won't let him get the better of me. I'm on my guard. We spy on each other day and night. Our fleets are always on the seas, and our planes are constantly in the air so as to be able to strike the instant the other makes a move. I don't know who he is, and I still maintain that he's confusing me with someone else, perhaps even intentionally. In any case, the one thing that is certain is that we are arming against each other, and keep on arming and arming.
David: That really is a nasty story. I'll have to exert myself to find a crazier one.
And you also maintain that it's true? Goliath: Absolutely. I wish it were made up. I'm sure things would then be only half as bad for me. Because of all this armament, I'm on the point of throwing up. I can't even move around freely anymore because of all the armor and the electronic contacts that would set off the bombs if they were touched.
David: Damn! Then you can't even really fight anymore. You'd only blow your- self to smithereens. Why didn't you tell me that in the first place? I almost tan- gled with you just now, just like back then, when you were still a real op- ponent. Goliath: Before, I would have punched you in the mouth for such cheeky talk. But somehow you're right. As an opponent, I'm useless now. To tell you the truth, I'm already so miserable that I don't know how to go on. Every night brings nightmares that take their toll on my nerves, nothing but bombs, craters, corpses --I feel like I'm suffocating. David: And I wanted to brawl with someone like that? You're no giant, you're a basket case. Are you finished?
Goliath: Not quite. Since we're on the subject, you may as well hear everything.
Recently I've been having the same nightmare: I dream that I'm a mouse who
wants to die because life has simply become too much for it. I look for a cat
who will do me the favor. I sit down in front of the cat and try to get it in-
terested in me, but it remains lethargic. "That is not fair of you," I say to the
cat, "for I'm still young and must taste pretty good, especially since I've been
well fed. " But the cat, the blase beast, merely answers: "I'm well nourished
too, so why should I bother? That wouldn't be normal. " Finally, with great
difficulty, I talk the cat into it. "I'll help you out this way," it says. "Put your
head in my mouth and wait. " I do what it says. Then I ask: "Will it take long? "
The cat replies: "Just as long as it takes for someone to step on my tail. It must
be a reflex action. But don't worry, I'll stretch my tail out. " So, that is death,
I think to myself, my head in the cat's mouth. The cat stretches out its bushy
tail across the sidewalk. I hear steps. I squint sideways. What do I see? Twelve
little blind girls from the Pope Julius Orphanage come singing down the
250 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
Goliath: At this moment I usually wake up, bathed in sweat, as you can imagine. David (reflecting): Well, that's it! Goliath: What do you mean?
David: You've won. I can't top your story. It makes me shudder, the state you're
in.
Goliath: Really? Well now, a victory in storytelling, that is something after all. David: Perhaps it will be your last. Goliath: Anyone as big as I am will still often win.
David: Big, what's that?
Sexual Cynicism
Love is a way to pass the time,
To do it you go 'neath the belly line. Erich Kastner, Fabian (1931)
/ do it with my hand, Madam . . . Popular parody
Woman is a being that dresses, babbles, and undresses.
V oltaire
The stage for the appearance and grimaces of sexual cynicism is set by an idealis- tic ideology of love that attributes to the body a lesser role in relation to "higher feelings. " How this separation of body and soul and the construction of a hierar- chy came about in detail would be a complicated chapter in the history of customs and the psyche. We must begin with the result of this history, with the doubleness and dualism of body and soul, heart and genitals, love and sexuality, above and below --even if we want to admit that these dualisms do not necessarily imply universally hostile antagonisms.
Even Platonism -- which continues to be influential (together with Christianity) as the most powerful Western theory of love--takes up the question of the origin of the split between body and soul and the separation of the sexes. Because Plato does not want to or cannot dwell on this chapter, he takes a shortcut. Whenever one does not want to tell long-
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
winded stories, one resorts to small myths that use images to string together the essential points. Let us listen to the fairy tale from Plato's banquet about the hermaphrodite.
In the beginning, so it goes in the mythical poem told by Aristophanes as one of the company, the human being was sexually self-sufficient and complete, a her- maphrodite with all the attributes of both the female and the male. The original human being had four legs and four arms, two faces and a rounded shape, as well
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 251
as the genitals of both sexes. Who would be surprised then that this androgynous wonder-animal was extraordinarily enraptured in itself? The envious gods, how- ever, began to consider how they could punish the hubris of this creature. With a saw, the original human being was simply cut in two. Each half was called, respectively, man and woman and condemned, with bleeding soul, to run after the other half, now separate, so as to comprehend that the part is not the whole and that the human being is not god. Since that time, both halves seek help from Eros, who can unite those who belong together and return human beings to them- selves.
This sarcastic account can be misunderstood only in one way, namely, when it is understood as an expression of naivete. The fairy tale of the hermaphrodite, in its series of speeches about Eros, constitutes the ironical-poetical station, that is, a mere moment or a phase of the truth. This truth must, of course, necessarily be expressed in this way also, but by no means only in this way. In the Platonic dialogue, a reciprocal and ironic deciphering of poetry and philosophical lan- guage takes place --the translation of the enthused into the sober and of the sober into the enthused (which holds for many synthetic mythologies, i. e. , mythologies that reflect on themselves in a rational alternative language). Only if one recalls the extent to which Greek culture idealized and venerated the human body does one understand completely the poetical cynicism of this story. The narrator serves up to his friends at the banquet a Hindu monster with eight extremities and two faces as the original image of the complete human figure (and on top of that, round as a ball, incapable of walking upright) on which the Greek ethics of the body put so much weight. It's hard to imagine what a figure it would make at the Olym- pic Games.
The point of the story is revealed as soon as one sees that here completeness again appears as deficiency --namely, as a lack of beauty. The gods' cruelty, which cuts the original narcissistic monster apart, thus has, on the one hand, a punitive aspect, but on the other, a creative perspective. For with the separation of man and woman arises at the same time, with divine irony, the beauty of the human body. Only this beauty can point the direction for a yearning love. Un- divided, the spherical creature cannot yet experience love because there is as yet no beauty in it that is worth yearning for in love. For this reason, only in the sec- ond unity, which arises out of the unification of the separated, is a real complete- ness possible that in the first unity, due to a lack of beauty, was still missing. From now on, Eros, the god of the desire to unite and of infatuation with beauty, must
24
also be part of the game if unification is to occur.
human bodies embrace and straddle (umarmen und umbeinen) each other with desire.
One then imagines a curious scene: a circle of clever Greeks who rave about Eros's ability to draw a man and a woman to each other, and who, at the same time, do not allow any women to be present among them. At the banquet, in pub- Only after the separation can
252 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
lie life, in the academy, everywhere, the men and their erotic theories are among themselves. Are they really? Do they suspect that the female aspect is not repre- sented in their circle? Do they sense a lack of oppositions, stimuli, love objects, and targets for yearning when they are among themselves? It does not appear so. They obviously feel themselves to be complete, intellectually as well as sexually. As a closed company of men, they enjoy the consciousness of a complete and mutually complementary group in which the masculine and the feminine, the hard and the soft, the giving and the taking, etc. , are present. In the circle of friends of the same sex, indeed, all countersexual forces are at hand, and what appears to be a homosexual community contains within itself a broad spectrum of bisexual experiences. Only in this way can one visualize the vibrancy of original Platonism. A vibrating atmosphere of wanting to understand fills the academy, this temple of clever male friendships. The longing for insight among them takes on the same tonal color as the longing for a loved one, and understanding itself can be experienced in the same way as the ecstasy of love in which the usual ego vanishes because something larger, higher, more comprehensive has replaced it--enthusiasm, the inner moment with God. One must have seen Mediterranean men dancing together--those auspicious moments of a naive and clear bisexual- ity, when strength and gentleness combine. Between master and pupil, this glim- mer must have been present, with which the younger soul, in perceiving the spiritual glow and mental alertness of the master, and anticipating its own unfold- ing and future, spreads its wings and experiences, beyond itself, itself in an approaching- present magnificence that the master, as someone who is fulfilled, guarantees. The erotic aura gives the school its
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
unmistakable style. It constitutes the spirit of the dialogues through which, throughout all argument and counter- argument, an erotic-dialectical affirmation of all positions and turns of conscious- ness pulses. With its comical movement of opinions, the dialogue becomes a river
that, through an energetic and perplexing dephlegmatizing of minds, frees con- sciousness for the experience of experiences, that ecstatic intensification that lights up in the soul simultaneously as truth, beauty, and goodness.
The dangers inherent in such a rapturous theory of love are clear. As a philosophizing among friends, the theory remains bound to the atmosphere of a rather narrow circle, and each time it is transposed to the universal, it must have a partly incomprehensible, partly irrational, and partly repressive effect. As an idealistic erotics, the theory must seem to all those who do not belong to the circle of friends like perverted effusiveness. Set loose from the erotic force field of the school, Platonism seems like the teachings of an insipid spiritualism. The love of wisdom becomes from then on increasingly sexless; it loses the region below the belly line and its energetic core. From the degeneration of Platonism to a mere idealistic literalism onward, philosophy suffers disturbances in potency, and in the age of Christianization, under the protective umbrella of theology, it becomes nothing more than an organized realm of eunuchs. Materialist counterstrikes are
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 253
inevitable. Because of their pugnacious tendency, they possess a kynical quality. But because men and women experience the presumptions of masculine idealism in different ways, we must take account of two different kynical replies to the idealistic disdain for the body. In fact, for both there are illuminating examples: Sexual kynicism is just as much at play when Diogenes jerks off in front of every- body as when housewives or courtesans give the all-too-clever philosophers a taste of womanly powers.
1. With Diogenes' masturbating in public another chapter of sexual history be- gins. In this first Happening of our civilization, ancient kynicism shows its sharp- est claws. They are partly responsible for the fact that in Christian- idealist usage, the word "cynical" describes a person to whom nothing more is sacred, who declares himself to be no longer ashamed of anything, and who embodies "evil" with a scornful smile. Those who want to make a plea for sublime love, for the partnership of souls, etc. , come up against a radical counterposition here. This position teaches sexual self-sufficiency as the original possibility for the in- dividual. The officially sanctioned married couple is not the first to have a chance to satisfy sexual urges; the individual human being, the laughing masturbator in the marketplace of Athens, is already in a position to do so. Plebeian onanism is an affront to the aristocratic soul-to-soul game, as well as to love relationships in which individuals, for the sake of sexuality, subjugate themselves to the yoke of a relationship. The sexual kynic, from the start, counters this with a self- satisfaction unburdened by scruples.
As soon as the kynic meets someone who wants to impress upon him that he is not an animal, Diogenes pulls out his organ from underneath his toga: Now, is that animalistic or not? And anyway, what do you have against animals? When someone comes who wants to dissuade human beings from their animal founda- tions, the kynic must demonstrate to his opponent how short the way is from the hand to the organ. Did human beings not initally through their upright stature find themselves in the position where their hands were precisely level with their geni- tals? Is the human being --seen anthropologically -- not the masturbating animal? Is it not possible that human consciousness of autarky --more than is generally surmised -- comes from the consequence of the upright stature just mentioned? The quadrupeds, in any case, have been spared this anatomical-philosophical complication. Indeed, masturbation accompanies our civilization like an inti- mately philosophical as well as moral "problem. " Masturbation is to the libidinous region what self-reflection is to the intellectual region. It constitutes at the same time a bridge from male kynicism to female kynicism, especially to the kynicism that can be observed in the present-day women's movement. Here, too, onanism is considered an aid to emancipation. Here, too, it is praised and practiced as a right that one claims for oneself just as much as a joy for which one is not indebted to anyone else.
2. To speak of a female kynicism is methodologically risky because the history
254 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
of "female consciousness" for the whole of ancient times is documented only in- directly, in the medium of male traditions. Nevertheless, some traditional anec- dotes can be examined from a female-kynical perspective. They are, of course, stories told primarily from a male perspective that from the beginning view fe- male images from a master- cynical angle--stories about women as whores and as evil matrimonial dragons. Nevertheless, in some cases a slight displacement of the viewing angle suffices for the same anecdotes to show a pro feminine mean- ing. As a rule, they mirror typical scenes out of the "battle between the sexes," where it happens that the man slips into the weaker position. This happens to him especially in two areas: sexual dependence and household management.
The first example treats Aristotle in the role of a fool in love. One anecdote says that one day he fell so passionately in love with the Athenian courtesan Phyllis that he completely lost his own will and surrendered himself blindly to her
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
whims. The famous whore thus commanded the thinker to crawl on all fours in front of her and he, willingly without will, obeyed and let himself be made a fool of. Humbly he crawled on the ground and served his mistress as a mount. 25
This anecdotal motif was captured by Hans Baldung Grien in 1513-the time
of Eulenspiegel--after the Lai d'Aristote of a French poet of the Middle Ages. The white-bearded philosopher crawls on all fours in a walled garden, while Phyllis, with a broad behind and obtruding belly, sits on his back. In her left hand she holds the reins, which run through the mouth of the thinker with the receding hair- line; in the right hand, with a delicately extended little finger, she holds a dainty riding crop. Unlike the humbled philosopher, who looks urgently toward the viewer, Phyllis looks at the ground, an Old-German bonnet on her tilted head. Her shoulders are rounded, her body corpulent and melancholy. The kynical meaning of the story is clear: Beauty swings its whip over wisdom, the body con- quers reason; passion makes the spirit pliable; the naked woman triumphs over masculine intellect; against the persuasive power of breasts and hips, understand- ing has nothing to offer. Naturally, here the usual cliches about femininity crop up, but the point lies not in them but rather in the fact that an opportunity for fe- male power is depicted. In Grien's picture, the element of reflectiveness has passed from the philosopher to the courtesan. Admittedly she is "only a whore" but nonetheless it is not a "shame that she is a whore. " She seizes thereby a possi- bility for her own sovereignty. Whoever rides on Aristotle may perhaps be a dan- gerous woman, but certainly one who remains above contempt. That a Phyllis wants to ride on the clever man is supposed, on the one hand, to serve him as a warning, but on the other hand, it should also show him where that can lead. She, with her head tilted thoughtfully to one side, sees coming what he, down under, still seems to fear. To her it is clear that this is only the beginning and that Aristotle will probably not be so stupid in the long run. Admittedly, for him it begins on all fours, but if he is as clever as people say, it will end up with him on his back.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 255
? Hans Baldung Grien, Beauty Swings Her Whip over Wisdom, woodcut, 1513.
The cleverer a man is in his occupation, the greater an idiot he is at home. The more respected he is in society, the more contemptible he appears within his own four walls. This could be the moral of the story of Socrates and Xantippe, if it is tentatively read from a female-kynical perspective. This philosopher has been included in history not only because of his talent for posing questions and leading penetrating dialogues, but also because of his notoriously horrible marriage. Be- cause she is said to have made a domestic hell on earth for her husband, Xantippe is no longer merely a name but has become a generic term for a tyrannical, quar- relsome wife. But a small alteration in point of view suffices to see the relationship between Socrates and Xantippe in another light. Xantippe, the evildoer, then ap- pears rather as the victim of her apparent victim, and the latter becomes recogniz- able in a significant way as the "true" culprit. From today's perspective, every-
256 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
thing speaks for defending Xantippe against her bad reputation. One really has to ask oneself how Socrates managed to maneuver himself into such conjugal mis- ery, and this question can be posed in several variations. If Xantippe really was from the start the kind of woman the legend says she was, we would show very little understanding for our great philosopher because then it was his own care- lessness that led him to choose precisely her and no other woman. Or is he sup- posed to have thought, ironic as he was, that a surly woman is just what a thinker needs? If, from the beginning, he recognized her "true nature" and put up with it, then this indicates deplorable marital behavior on his part because he thus un- reasonably expected a women to spend her whole life with a man who obviously at best endured her but did not appreciate her. Conversely, if Xantippe had be- come as she is described only during her marriage to Socrates, then the philoso- pher would really come into a questionable light because then indisputably he himself must have caused his wife's vexation without having interested himself in it. No matter how the story is turned, Xantippe's moods fall back on Socrates. This is a genuine philosophical problem: How did the thinker and questioner manage not to solve the puzzle of Xantippe's bad temper? This great midwife of truth was obviously unable to let his wife's rage express itself or to help her find a language in which she would have been able to express the grounds and justifica- tions for her behavior. The failure of a philosopher often consists not in false an- swers but in neglecting to pose the right questions --and in denying some ex-
periences the right to become "problems. " His experiences with Xantippe must have been of this kind--a misery that is not given the dignity of obtruding into the male problem-monopoly. Philosphers fail when they endure as a naturally given evil that for which they are to blame; indeed, their capacity for "wisely" enduring it is itself an intellectual scandal, a misuse of wisdom in favor of blind- ness. With Socrates, it seems, this misuse immediately avenged itself. When a thinker cannot refrain from equating humanity with masculinity, reality will strike back in the philosopher's marital hell. The stories about this thus have, I think, also a kynical meaning. They reveal the real reason for
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
philosophical- clerical celibacy in our civilization. A definite dominating kind of idealism, phi- losophy, and grand theory becomes possible only when a certain "other kind" of experience is systematically avoided.
Just as it is impossible to speak of European state-cynicism without dealing with Christian ethics, it is also impossible in our culture to speak of sexual cyni- cism without talking about the Christian way of treating sexuality. The really crass "cynical" gestures can arise only on a foundation of idealism and oppression--the idealism of oppression.
