Is the
Christian
doctrine of origi- nal sin secretly returning here?
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
)
it cannot be ascertained in any way. As long as ambivalence is at least still as- serted as a fundamental feature of existence, the possibility of the "other dimen- sion" remains formally salvaged. With this, Heidegger's movement of thought (Denkbewegung) seems to already exhaust itself: in a formal salvaging of the authentic, which of course, can look exactly like the "inauthentic. " But mere as- sertions are not enough; ultimately, the much-entreated authentic existence re-
46
quires something "special for itself
in order to be somehow distinguished. How
we are to find it remains the question for the time being. In order to make things
really exciting, Heidegger emphasizes on top of it all that the "habituatedness
1(Verfallenheiif of existence as Anyone in the world is not a fall from some kino
of higher or "original state," but rather that existence is all along "already-always habituated. With dry irony, Heidegger remarks that Anyone lulls itself into think- ing that it leads a genuine, full life when it throws itself unreservedly into worldly goings-on. On the contrary, it is precisely in that that he recognizes habituated-
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 201
must
ness. It
the reader who impatiently awaits the "authentic" and --let us be frank--it is a tor- ture by means of a "pronounced" "deep platitude. " He leads us, fantastically, ex- plicitly, through the labyrinthine gardens of a positive negativity; he speaks about Anyone and its talk, its curiosity, its degeneratedness into the goings-on, in brief, of "alienation," but he assures us in the same breath that all this is established with- out a trace of "moral critique. " Rather, all this is supposed to be an analysis "with ontological intent," and whoever speaks of Anyone is by no means describing a downtrodden self but a quality of existence that originates simultaneously with authentic being-as-self. That is how it is from the beginning, and the expression "alienation," oddly enough, does not refer back to an earlier, higher, essential authentic being without estrangement! Alienation, we learn, does not mean that existence had been wrenched from if'self," but rather that the inauthenticity of this alienation is from the start the most powerful and the most primitive mode of being of existence. In existence there is nothing that, in an evaluative sense, could be called bad, negative, or false. Alienation is simply the mode of being of Anyone.
Let us try to make the unique choreography of these leaps in thought clear: Heidegger pushes the labor of thinking, which strives toward realistic sobriety, beyond the most advanced positions of the nineteenth century. If the previous grand theories only had the power for realism when they possessed a Utopian or moral counterweight for balance, Heidegger now extends "nihilism" to include the utopian-moral area. If the typical pairings of the nineteenth century were liai- sons between theoretical science and practical idealism, realism and utopianism, objectivism and mythology, Heidegger now sets about a second liquidation of metaphysics. He proceeds to a radical secularization of ends. Without much ado, he notes the unquestionable freedom from ends characteristic of life in its authen- ticity. We do not at all move toward radiant goals, and we are not commissioned
48
be admitted that the author of Sein und Zeit knows how to torture
by any authority to suffer today for a great tomorrow. ends, one needs to think beyond good and evil.
Also with regard to the
The distinction between authentic and inauthentic seems more puzzling than it really is. So much is clear from the beginning: It cannot be the difference in a "thing" (beautiful-ugly, true-false, good-evil, great-small, important-
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
unimportant), because the existential analysis operates prior to these differences. Thus, the last conceivable difference remains that between decided and undecided existence--I would like to say, between conscious and unconscious existence. However, the opposition between conscious and unconscious should not be un- derstood in the sense of psychological enlightenment (the undertone of decided- undecided points more in the direction intended). Conscious and unconscious here are not cognitive oppositions, or oppositions in information, knowledge, or science, but existential qualities. If it were otherwise, the Heideggerian pathos ? f "authenticity" would not be possible.
202 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
The construction of the authentic --finally --results in the theorem of "being-
unto-death," for Heidegger's critics an excuse for the cheapest kind of outrage:
Bourgeois philosophy can no longer work itself up to anything more than morbid
thoughts on death! Ash Wednesday fantasies in parasitic heads! There is an ele-
ment of truth in such critique when it says that Heidegger's work, contrary to its
intention, reflects the historical-social moment in which it was written; even
though it claims to be ontological analysis, it provides an unintended theory of
the present. To the extent that it is involuntarily such a theory, the critics are prob-
ably justified in pointing out an unfree, indeed, deluded side in it, but that does
not mean that they should not also properly assess its inspired side. No thought
is so intimately embedded in its time as that of being-unto-death; it is the philo-
sophical key word in the age of imperialist and Fascist world wars. Heidegger's
theory falls in the breathing space between the First and the Second World Wars,
the first and the second modernization of mass death. It stands midway between
the first triumvirate of the destruction industry: Flanders, Tannenberg, Verdun,
and the second: Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Hiroshima. Without death industry, no
distraction industry. If Sein undZeit is read not "merely" as existential ontology
but also as an encoded social psychology of modernity, insights into structural
relations open up, offering a tremendous perspective. Heidegger has captured the
connection between modern "inauthenticity" of existence and modern fabrication
of death in a way that is accessible only to a contemporary of industrial world
wars. If we break the spell cast by the suspicion of fascism on Heidegger's work,
explosive critical potentials are disclosed in the formula "being-unto-death. " It
then becomes understandable that Heidegger's theory of death harbors the
greatest critique by this century of the last. Namely, the best theoretical energies
of the nineteenth century went into the attempt to make the deaths of others un-
49
thinkable by means of realistic Grand Theories.
lifted the evil in the world, insofar as it affected others, into the higher state of later, fulfilled times: Here there are formal equivalences between the idea of evo- lution, the concept of revolution, the concept of selection, the struggle for exis- tence and the survival of the fittest, the idea of progress and the myth of race. In all these concepts, an optics is tested out that objectifies the downfall of others. With Heidegger's theory of death, twentieth-century thinking turns its back on these hybrid, theoretically neutralized cynicisms of the past century. Viewed su- perficially, only the personal pronoun is altered: "One dies" becomes "I die. " In conscious being unto death, Heideggerian existence revolts against the "constant reassurance about death" on which an excessively destructive society inevitably relies. The total militarism of industrial war forces in everyday circumstances a narcotic repression of death that has as few loopholes as possible-- or the deflec- tion of death onto others: That is the law of modern distraction. The world situa- tion is such that it whispers to people, if they are attentive. Your annihilation is merely a question of time, and the time that it takes to reach you is simultaneously
The great evolutionist designs
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 203
the time of your distraction. The coming annihilation indeed presupposes your distraction, your undecidedness to live. The distracted Anyone is the mode of our existing, through which we ourselves are stuck in the universal contexts of death and cooperate with the death industry. I want to maintain that Heidegger holds the beginning of the thread to a philosophy of armament in his hands, for arma- ment means to subjugate oneself to the law of Anyone. One of the most impres- sive sentences in Sein und Zeit reads: "Anyone does not allow the courage to fear death to rise up" (p. 254). Those who arm themselves substitute the "courage to fear one's own death" by military activity. The military is the best
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
guarantor that I do not have to die my "own death"; it promises me help in the attempt to repress the "I die" so that I can put in its place an Anyone-death, a death in absentia, a death in political inauthenticity and anesthesia. One arms, one distracts oneself, one dies.
In Heidegger's "I die," I find the crystallization point around which a Real- philosophie of a rejuvenated kynicism can develop. No end in the world may ever remove itself so far from this kynical a priori, "I die," that our deaths become the means to an end. The meaninglessness of life--about which so much stupid ni- hilistic prattle winds itself--in fact provides the foundation for its full precious- ness. Not only despair and the nightmare of an oppressive existence are attributed to what is meaningless, but also a celebration of life that endows meaning, ener- getic consciousness in the here and now, and oceanic festival.
That with Heidegger himself things proceed more gloomily and that his ex- istential scenery unfolds between the nuances in gray of everydayness and the glaring flashes of fear and the colors of death is well known and explains the mel- ancholy nimbus of his work. But even in the pathos of being unto death, a grain of kynical substance can be discovered, for it is a pathos of asceticism, and in this pathos the kynicism of ends can make itself heard in a language of the twen- tieth century. What society prescribes for us as ends in its process already binds us to inauthentic existence. The world process does everything to repress death -- whereas "authentic" existence is ignited only when I alertly recognize how I stand in the world, eye to eye with the fear of death that makes itself felt when, in ad- vance, I radically carry through the thought that I am the one whom, at the end ? f my time, my death awaits. Heidegger concludes from this an original eerie un- nomeliness (Un-heimlichkeit) of existence. The world can never become the se- cure and security-endowing home of human beings. Because existence from the start is unhomely, the "unhoused human being" (who, above all in philosophy af-
ter the Second World War, wandered through the devastated country) feels an
ur
ge to flee into artificial dwelling places and homes and to withdraw out of fear into habits and habitats.
Of course, such statements, although intended to have universal validity, have
a 50
concrete connection to the phenomena of their historical moment. Not for
nothing is Heidegger a contemporary of the Bauhaus, of New Living, of early
204 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
? George Grosz, Republican Automatons, 1920. ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/ V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
urbanism, state housing, the theory of settlement and the first rural communes.
His philosophical discourse surreptitiously draws on the modern problematics of
feelings toward one's domicile, of the myths of the house and the city. When he
51
talks of the unhousedness (Unbehaustheit) of human beings, this idea is
nourished not only by the horror that the incorrigible provincial feels toward modern forms of urban life. It amounts to a rejection if the house-building, city- building Utopia of our civilization. Socialism really means, insofar as it must affirm industry, an extension of the urban "spirit of Utopia. " It promises to lead us out of the "inhospitableness of the cities," however, it proposes to use urban means and envisages a new city, the ultimate humane city and home. Thus, in socialism of this type, there is always a dream partially nourished by urban mis- ery. Heidegger's provincialism has no understanding for this. He views the city with the eyes of an "eternal provincial" who cannot be convinced that there could
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 205
ever be something better to take the place of the country. Heidegger, as the well- meaning interpreter may say, breaks through modern fantasies about space in which the city dreams of the country, and the country of the city. Both fantasies are equally restricted and equally distorted. Heidegger carries out, in part liter- ally, in part metaphorically, a "posthistorical" return to the country.
Precisely in the years of the most desolate modernization--the so-called Golden Twenties --the city, once the site of Utopia, begins to lose its magic. Berlin especially, the principal city of the early twentieth century, played its part in plunging the euphoria of the metropolis into a disenchanted light. As the focal point of industry, production, consumption, and mass misery, it is at the same time the most exposed to alienation: Nowhere is modernity paid for so dearly as in the mass cities. The vocabulary of Heidegger's Anyone analysis seems espe- cially well suited to express the discontent of developed cities in their own form of life. Culture of distraction, talk, curiosity, unhousedness, habituatedness (one can think here of all sorts of vices), homelessness, fear, being-unto-death: All that sounds like the misery of the city, captured in a mirror that is somewhat cloudy and somewhat too subtle. Heidegger's provincial
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
kynicism has a marked cultural- critical tendency. But it not only attests to a hopeless provincialism when a philos- opher of his stature takes leave of the bourgeois urban and socialist Utopias, but points to a kynical turn in the sense that it abrogates the great goals and projec- tions of urban social space. The turn to the province can also be a turn to real macrohistory that more closely attends to the regulation of life in the framework of nature, agriculture, and ecology than all previous industrial world images could. History written by an industrial historian would necessarily become microhistory. The history of the country knows the pulse of a much greater tem- porality. Reduced to short formulas, the city is not the fulfillment of existence; nor are the goals of industrial capitalism; nor scientific progress; nor more civili- zation, more cinema, more home beautiful, longer vacations, better eating: None of these things is the fulfillment of existence. What is "authentic" will always be something else. You must know who you are. You must consciously experience being-unto-death as the highest instance of your potentiality: it attacks you when you are afraid, and your moment has come when you are courageous enough to hold your ground in the face of the great fear.
Authentic fear is . . . rare under the hegemony of habituatedness and the
Public sphere" (Sein und Zeit, p. 190). Those who choose what is rare make an e
htist choice. Authenticity is thus, according to Heidegger, a matter for the few.
w tln
? "eedom, and the many who want to live as rebellious slaves and are not prepared
to
ended elitism, which assumes an elite of those who really exist, had to slide al-
most inevitably into the social and guide political options. In this, the Grand In- "at is that reminiscent of? Do we not hear again the Grand Inquisitor as he dis- guishes between the few and the many--the few who bear the burden of great encounter real freedom, real fear, real being? This completely apolitically in- 206 D THE CABINET OF CYNICS
quisitor possessed the advantage of an undeceived and cynical political conscious- ness. Heidegger, by contrast, remained naive, without a clear awareness that the traditional mixture of academic apoliticism, elitist consciousness, and heroic atti- tude leads, almost with blind necessity to, unforeseen political decisions. For a time he-one would like to say, therefore -fell into the cynicism of the populist Grand Inquisitor. His analysis proved to be true inadvertently about him himself. Everything looks as if. It sounds as if it has been "really understood, grasped and spoken, but basically it is not. " National socialism--"movement," "uprising," "decision"--seemed to resemble Heidegger's vision of authenticity, decisiveness, and heroic being unto death, as if fascism were the rebirth of authenticity out of habituatedness, as if this modern revolt against modernity were the real proof of an existence that had resolutely decided for itself. One has to think of Heidegger when one cites Hannah Arendt's sublime remark about those intellectuals in the Third Reich who, to be sure, were not Fascists, but "let something occur" to them on the theme of national socialism. In fact, Heidegger let many things occur to him until he noticed what the case "authentically" was with this political move- ment. The delusion could not last long. The Nazi movement was supposed to clar- ify what the populist Anyone has up its sleeve-- Anyone as Master Human, Any- one as simultaneously narcissistic and authoritarian mass, Anyone as murderer for pleasure and official responsible for killing. The "authenticity" of fascism-its sole authenticity --consisted in transforming latent destructiveness into manifest destructiveness, thereby participating in a highly contemporary way in the cyni- cism of open "expressedness" that no longer conceals anything. Fascism, espe-
cially in its German version, is the unconcealment of political destructiveness reduced to its most naked form and encouraged by the formula of the "will to power. " It happened as if Nietzsche, in the manner of a psychotherapist, had said to capitalist society: "Basically, you are all consumed by a will to power, so let
52
it out openly for once and confess to being what you are in any case! "
upon, the Nazis, in fact, proceeded to let "it" (es = id) out, not under therapeutic conditions, however, but in the middle of political reality. It was perhaps Nietzsche's theoretical recklessness that allowed him to believe that philosophy can exhaust itself in provocative diagnoses, without at the same time thinking seriously about therapy. The Devil can be called by his real name only by those who know of an antidote to him. To name him (whether as will to power, as ag- gression, etc. ) is to acknowledge his reality, and to acknowledge this reality is to "unleash" it.
Since Heidegger, there is another offspring of the ancient kynical impulse, strongly encoded but nevertheless legible, on the point of intervening in social happenings with a critique of civilization. It leads modern consciousness of tech- nology and domination ultimately ad absurdum. Perhaps existential ontology can be robbed of much of its pretentious gloominess when it is understood as a philo- sophical Eulenspiegel game. It pretends all kinds of things to people in
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
order to
Where-
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 207
get them into a position where they no longer allow themselves to be deceived. It pretends to be frightfully unyielding in order to communicate the simplest things. I call it the kynicism of ends. Inspired by the kynicism of ends, life that has learned the coldness of producing, ruling, and destroying through the cyni- cism of means could become warm again for us. The critique of instrumental rea- son presses for its completion as a critique of cynical reason. Its chief task is to loosen Heidegger's pathos and break its tight hold on the mere consciousness of death. "Authenticity," if the expression is to have any meaning at all, is ex- perienced by us rather in love and sexual intoxication, in irony and laughter, creativity and responsibility, meditation and ecstasy. In this release, that existen- tial individual (Einzige) who believes its most intimately genuine (eigenst) posses- sion is its own death disappears. At the summit of potentiality we experience not only the end of the world in lonely death, but even more the demise of the ego in its surrender to the most communal world.
Admittedly, death overshadowed philosophical fantasy between the world wars and claimed the right to the first night with the kynicism of ends for itself, at least in philosophy. However, it does not shed a good light on the relationship of existential philosophy to real existence when only "one's own death" occurs to it when it is asked what it has to say about real life. Actually, it says that it has nothing to say-and to this end it must write nothing with a capital N. This para- dox characterizes the enormous movement of thought in Sein und Zeit: Such a great wealth of concepts was hardly ever employed before to convey a content so "poor" in the mystical sense. The work beseeches the reader with a lofty call to authentic existence but veils itself in silence when one wants to ask, How then? The only, and to be sure, fundamental answer that can be drawn out of it must read, deciphered (in the foregoing sense): consciously. That is no longer a con- crete morality that instructs us as to what to do and what not to do. But if the phi- losopher is no longer able to give directives, he can still give an urgent suggestion to be authentic. Thus: You can do what vou like, you can do what you must, but do it in a way that you can remain intensely conscious of what you are doing. Moral amoralism-- the last possible word of existential ontology to ethics? It seems that the ethos of conscious life would be the only ethos that can maintain itself in the nihilistic currents of modernity because it is basically not an ethos. It does not even fulfill the function of a substitute morality (of the kind in Utopias that posit the good in the future and help to relativize the evil on the way there). Those who really think from beyond good and evil find only one single opposition that is relevant to life; it is at the same time the only one over which we have Power stemming from our own existence without idealistic overexertions, namely, that between conscious and unconscious deed. If Sigmund Freud in a fa- mous challenge put forward the sentence: Where it (Es) was, ego (Ich) should be- come, Heidegger would say: Where Anyone was, authenticity should become. Authenticity --freely interpreted--would be the state we achieve when we pro-
208 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
duce a continuum of being conscious in our existence.
of being-unconscious under which human life, especially as socialized human life, lives. The distracted consciousness of Anyone is condemned to remaining discontinuous, impulsively reactive, automatic, and unfree. Anyone is the must. As opposed to this, conscious authenticity --we provisionally accept this expression --works out a higher quality of awareness. Authenticity puts into its deeds the entire force of its decisiveness and energy. Buddhism speaks about the same thing in comparable phrases. While the Anyone ego sleeps, the existence of the authentic self awakes to itself. Those who examine themselves in a state of continual awakeness discover what is to be done for them in their situation, beyond morals.
54
How deep Heidegger's systematic amoralism
terpretation of the concept of conscience (Gewissen): Heidegger construes, care- fully and revolutionarily at the same time, a "conscienceless conscience. " If, through the millennia of European moral history, conscience was held to be an inner authority that tells us what good and evil are, then Heidegger understands it now as an empty conscience that makes no statements. "The conscience speaks solely and continually in the modus of keeping silent" (Sein und Zeit, p. 273). Again, Heidegger's characteristic figure of thought appears: intensity that says nothing. Beyond good and evil there is only the "loud" silence, the intensive non-
judgmental consciousness that restricts itself to alertly seeing what the case is. Conscience--once understood as a substantial moral authority-- now approaches pure conscious being (Bewusst-Sein). Morality, as participation in social conven- tions and principles, only concerns Anyone's behavior. As the domain of the authentic self there remains only pure, decisive consciousness: vibrating presence.
In a sublime line of thought, Heidegger discovers that this "conscienceless con- science" contains a call to us --a "call to
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
be guilty. " Guilty of what? No answer. Is "authentic" living in some way a priori guilty?
Is the Christian doctrine of origi- nal sin secretly returning here? In that case we would have only apparently taken leave of moralism. If, however, authentic self-being is described as being unto death, then the thought suggests itself that this "call to be guilty" produces an ex- istential connection between one's own still-being-alive and the death of others. Life as causing-to-die. Authentically living persons are those who understand themselves as survivors, as those whom death has just passed over and who con- ceive of the time it will take for a renewed, definitive encounter with death as a
postponement. Heidegger's analysis, in essence, penetrates into this most extreme boundary zone of amoral reflection. That he is conscious of standing on explosive ground is revealed by his question: "Calling on others to be guilty, is that not an incitement to do evil? " Could there be an "authenticity" in which we show our- selves as the decisive doers of evil? Just as the Fascists cited Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil in order to do evil emphatically in this world? Heidegger recoils
53
Only that breaks the spell
reaches is shown in its rein-
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 209
from this consequence. The amoralism of "conscienceless conscience" is not meant as a call to do evil, he assures us. At least the Heidegger of 1927 is worried by this vague premonition, but in 1933 he misses the moment of truth--and in this way he let himself be deluded by the activistic, decisionistic {dezisionistisch), and heroic husks of slogans of the Hitler movement. The politically naive Heideg- ger believed he had found in fascism a "politics of authenticity"--and permitted, unsuspecting as only a German university professor could be, a projection of his philosophy onto the national movement.
However, it should be noted that Heidegger, with respect to his central philo-
sophical achievement, would still not be a man of the Right even if he had said
still more politically muddled things than he actually did. For, with his, as I call
it, kynicism of ends, he is the first to burst through the Utopian-moralistic grand
theories of the nineteenth century. With this achievement he remains one of the
first in the geneaology of a new and alternative Left: of a Left that no longer clings
to the hybrid constructions in the philosophy of history of the past century; a Left
that does not, in the style of the dogmatic Marxist grand theory (I prefer this ex-
pression to the word "Weltanschauung"), see itself as the accomplice of the world
spirit; a Left that has not sworn allegiance to the dogmatics of industrial develop-
ment without ifs and buts; a Left that revises the narrow-minded materialist tradi-
tion that burdens it; a Left that not only assumes that the others must die for one's
"own cause" but lives with the insight that the living can only rely on themselves;
a Left that in no way still clings to the naive belief that socialization (Vergesell-
schaftung) would be the wonder cure for the maladies of modernity. Without
knowing it and, for the most part, even without wanting to know it (in this country
even with an outraged resoluteness not to recognize it), the New Left is an ex-
istential Left, a neokynical Left--I risk the expression: a Heideggerian Left. This
is, particularly in the land of Critical Theory, which has hung an almost im-
penetrable taboo on the "fascist" ontologist, a rather piquant discovery. But who
has exhaustively and rigorously investigated the processes of repulsion between
the existential tendencies and Left-Hegelian critical social research? Is there not
a wealth of hidden similarities and analogies between Adorno and Heidegger?
What grounds are there for their striking refusal to communicate with one an-
sother? science"?
And Diogenes? Did his existential-ontological adventure pay off for him? Has his lantern found people? Has he succeeded in instilling the unspeakably simple m our heads? I think he himself doubts it. He will consider whether he should not give up the enterprise of philosophy altogether. It makes no headway against the sad complicatedness of circumstances. The strategy of collaborating in order to change entangles the changer in the collective melancholy. In the end, those who were the more fully alive are only sadder, and it could hardly be otherwise.
Who could say which of the two had formulated the more "melancholy
210 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Diogenes probably will resign one day from his professorship; soon after, we will find a notice on the bulletin board saying that Professor X's lectures are canceled until further notice. Rumor has it that he was seen in an army surplus store where he bought himself a sleeping bag. He was last reported seen sitting on a garbage bin, pretty drunk and giggling to himself like someone whose head is not quite in order.
Notes
1. The enormous interest shown by intellectuals in de Sade betrays a progressive dawning in which bourgeois cynicism begins to recognize itself again in late-aristocratic cynicism. It could be that in the future, Flaubert will take the place of de Sade.
2. "Those who give me a gift, I wag my tail at, those who give me nothing, I bark at, and scoun- drels I bite" (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 60).
3. [The metropolitan Indians (also mentioned in chapter 5) were a movement in the second half of the seventies in Western Europe of fringe dwellers who emulated American Indian culture and wanted to subvert the capitalist urban culture from within with (unarmed) cultural guerrilla tactics. As such, they are the politicized forerunners of the punks. -- Trans. ]
4. Shaving was a custom of the Macedonia military, taken over by Hellenic and Roman society. From then on the beard becomes a philosophical status symbol, a sign of nonconformism.
5. A modern counterexample: "No one should let himself be infected by the scientists of the Club of Rome, who have told us that we should turn back to a simple life. For this we have not come into office and we also do not work towards this. Diogenes could live in a tub and was satisfied with that. But he was a philosopher, and most of the time we are not. " Here we have Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in 1976, who is speaking as a cynic warning us about the kynics.
6. See Hegel, Vorlesungen tiber die Geschichte der Philosophie. Collected Works, vol. 18 (Frankfurt, 1971), pp. 551ff. 7. Another version shifts this story to Corinth. The sources are few and fragmentary. For this reason one wants to lay every tiny particle recovered on the philologist's assaying scales and carefully weigh every letter. However, the ultimate wisdom often lies in not taking what has been handed down too literally. In this there is also a great hermeneutical chance, and we make unrestrained use of it.
8. See Regis Debray, who recognizes that a cultural history of scientific claims, to be properly founded, must be built on the basis of a sociology of ambitions. Le pouvoir intellectuel en France (Paris, 1979).
9. ". . . which neither sought a place to rest nor avoided the dark, nor showed any desire for so-called delicacies. That gave him a helpful tip for his needy situation. " (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 22).
10. [A famous German clown of the twentieth century--Trans. ]
11. There is one derivation of kynicism from kyon, the Greek for "dog," and another from the gymnasion Kynosarges in which Diogenes' purported teacher, Antisthenes, is said to have taught. 12. Words like drop-out, Aussteiger [escapist; literally, one who climbs out, "alighter"; --Trans. ]
and others hint in the same direction.
13. Kynicism even begins historically with an apparent enmity toward pleasure, if it is true that
Antisthenes "would rather have gone mad than feel pleasure. " Self-control, however, is not self- torture.
14. Laertius maintains that there was a writing by Diogenes on the state (Politeia). Like every- thing else, it has been lost. Its possible content can easily be surmised, however. The idea of a world- state, in which the later Stoic political philosophy culminates, is of kynical origin.
15. [This phrase comes from Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Part 3, section 2. -Trans. ]
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 211
16. Here an enticing comparison with the doctrine of long life in Chinese Taoism could be filled out. Meiner's edition of Laertius gives Diogenes' life span as 404-323 B. C. , i. e. , eighty-one years. 17. With Diogenes, under the slogan Remint the Coins, there begins what will be called by the neokynic Nietzsche "the revaluing of all values," the cultural revolution of the "naked truth. " Nietzsche, of course, ruins the point. His revaluation turns the kynical rejection of power into a will to power; with this he changes sides and provides the powerful with a philosophy of disinhibition. 18. Feminism thus has an originally kynical side; indeed, it is perhaps the present-day core of neokynicism. For example, it encourages women to discover masturbation so as to detach themselves
from the compulsions of marriage.
19. Helmut Schmidt still cites his ethics.
20. This image prevails from about the time of Nero. In Cicero's time, the sects, which dominated
the ideological scene for a hundred years, are scarcely mentioned.
21. The interpretation of the late-ancient existential anxiety-among other things, a premise of
Christianity--is still a challenge to psychohistory.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
22. Modern analogy: rival depth-psychological sects (Freudians, Jungians, Reichians, Adlerians,
Janovians, Perlsians, Lacanians, etc. ).
23. Christoph Martin Wieland, too, the best scholar of kynicism in eighteenth-century Germany
and the translator of Lucian, probably sensed that there was something inauthentic in Lucian's con- tempt for Peregrinus. In his novel, Die geheime Geschichte des Peregrinus Proteus (The secret story of Peregrinus Proteus) (1788-89), he thus draws a kinder picture of the philosopher.
24. See chapter 23, "On the German Republic of Impostors," as well as the section in chapter 10 entitled "Knowledge of War and Espionage. "
25. Recall the theses on art as the form of expression of bourgeois neokynicism in chapter 5. The arts possessed an exceptional capacity to process negativity. The concept "realism" refers to this in- vestigatory power of art.
26. Since Marx we know that the moving force that plunges modernity into its apparent progres- sive historicity is based on the alliance between capital and science. At the same time we are forced to distinguish more sharply between continuance (Fortgang) and progress (Fortschritt).
27. ". . . you call. . . evil": The Devil is not only an evolutionist but also a nominalist. "Evil" understands itself in another way: as a "power," as a phenomenon of energy, as a position in a natural polarity. Konrad Lorenz, still arguing in the schema of evolution, nowadays treats the phenomenon of aggression consistently from this standpoint: "so-called evil. " 28. Not actionism but "contemplative praxis," to act in order to become conscious.
29. Nietzsche, who initially again consciously called himelf a Cyniker, also coined the phrase "live dangerously. " It is the motto of kynical empiricism toward which Faust orients himself.
30. In its sharpest formulations, Adorno's Minima Moralia, the main work of moral critique in postwar German philosophy, speaks without reserve of the disgrace of surviving; it would be short- sighted to understand this merely as the reaction to Jewish experiences in those years (1943 on). On the morality of survival see also Elias Canetti, Masse undMacht (Munich, 1976) (Crowds and power; 1962).
31. In chapter 10, the way of seeing that leads to the "black empiricism" of the enlightenment sciences will be described. 32. "Boogie-woogie of the hormones" (Arthur Miller).
33. We are reading it here without regard to its context in the novel.
34. One hundred years after Dostoyevsky wrote this, the full implications of this reflection seem
to be coming to light, since, in Western leftist traditions, a departure from the "spirit of the (Christian) Utopia" is being carried out with a previously unknown profundity and since the intelligentsia ex- periences, directly and on its own responsibility, the ineluctability of the principle of power and of the reason of state. The Left in political power: With this, moral-political and psychic complications with a new degree of complexity begin.
212 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
35. "The world is everything that is the case," positivism will say later. If one takes the expression "the case is" somewhat more generously, the great realists of the nineteenth century are thoroughly positivistic--or at least "on the way" to positivism. For Marx, class struggles (although a universal concept) are the case; for Nietzsche, the will to power; for Freud, drives.
36. That is certainly no longer the biblical Jesus but a Jesus from the perspective of Judas, a Judas who seeks disburdening. His tragic cynicism evades an unbearable guilt; psychoanalytically, this probably belongs to the psychodynamic of the patricidal son, who can continue to live without suffocating on his guilt only by finding reasons for why he had to kill.
37. Here we approach the third level of the development of the concept of cynicism which will be presented in Part III. 38. Historicism contributes something decisive to this by educating us to see all phenomena of consciousness as a "product of their time"; it can easily be combined with psychologism as well as sociologism.
39. For this reason, conservatives often have a clear consciousness of "semantics. "
40. See "Minima Amoralia," in chapter 9.
41. Applied to the area of (church) politics, this dualism is expressed as power and spirit.
42. Overcoming of nihilism? "The results of the overcoming . . . are always worse than what
is overcome"; Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt, 1966), p. 371.
43. Christian substitute: One does it for the good of others.
44. Only once has Diogenes been seen in this way in modernity. Nietzsche's metaphysical happen-
ing in which the "crazy person" with the lantern announces: "God is dead" was the signal of neo- kynicism.
45. In Part IV, I pursue this "translation" further and investigate what subjugation and being sub- jugated mean for epistemology.
46. Mephistopheles: "If I had not reserved fire for myself/1 would have nothing apart for myself. "
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
47. [Heidegger's term has many connotations. Verfallen can mean "degenerated," "lapsed," "decayed," "addicted," "fallen.
it cannot be ascertained in any way. As long as ambivalence is at least still as- serted as a fundamental feature of existence, the possibility of the "other dimen- sion" remains formally salvaged. With this, Heidegger's movement of thought (Denkbewegung) seems to already exhaust itself: in a formal salvaging of the authentic, which of course, can look exactly like the "inauthentic. " But mere as- sertions are not enough; ultimately, the much-entreated authentic existence re-
46
quires something "special for itself
in order to be somehow distinguished. How
we are to find it remains the question for the time being. In order to make things
really exciting, Heidegger emphasizes on top of it all that the "habituatedness
1(Verfallenheiif of existence as Anyone in the world is not a fall from some kino
of higher or "original state," but rather that existence is all along "already-always habituated. With dry irony, Heidegger remarks that Anyone lulls itself into think- ing that it leads a genuine, full life when it throws itself unreservedly into worldly goings-on. On the contrary, it is precisely in that that he recognizes habituated-
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 201
must
ness. It
the reader who impatiently awaits the "authentic" and --let us be frank--it is a tor- ture by means of a "pronounced" "deep platitude. " He leads us, fantastically, ex- plicitly, through the labyrinthine gardens of a positive negativity; he speaks about Anyone and its talk, its curiosity, its degeneratedness into the goings-on, in brief, of "alienation," but he assures us in the same breath that all this is established with- out a trace of "moral critique. " Rather, all this is supposed to be an analysis "with ontological intent," and whoever speaks of Anyone is by no means describing a downtrodden self but a quality of existence that originates simultaneously with authentic being-as-self. That is how it is from the beginning, and the expression "alienation," oddly enough, does not refer back to an earlier, higher, essential authentic being without estrangement! Alienation, we learn, does not mean that existence had been wrenched from if'self," but rather that the inauthenticity of this alienation is from the start the most powerful and the most primitive mode of being of existence. In existence there is nothing that, in an evaluative sense, could be called bad, negative, or false. Alienation is simply the mode of being of Anyone.
Let us try to make the unique choreography of these leaps in thought clear: Heidegger pushes the labor of thinking, which strives toward realistic sobriety, beyond the most advanced positions of the nineteenth century. If the previous grand theories only had the power for realism when they possessed a Utopian or moral counterweight for balance, Heidegger now extends "nihilism" to include the utopian-moral area. If the typical pairings of the nineteenth century were liai- sons between theoretical science and practical idealism, realism and utopianism, objectivism and mythology, Heidegger now sets about a second liquidation of metaphysics. He proceeds to a radical secularization of ends. Without much ado, he notes the unquestionable freedom from ends characteristic of life in its authen- ticity. We do not at all move toward radiant goals, and we are not commissioned
48
be admitted that the author of Sein und Zeit knows how to torture
by any authority to suffer today for a great tomorrow. ends, one needs to think beyond good and evil.
Also with regard to the
The distinction between authentic and inauthentic seems more puzzling than it really is. So much is clear from the beginning: It cannot be the difference in a "thing" (beautiful-ugly, true-false, good-evil, great-small, important-
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
unimportant), because the existential analysis operates prior to these differences. Thus, the last conceivable difference remains that between decided and undecided existence--I would like to say, between conscious and unconscious existence. However, the opposition between conscious and unconscious should not be un- derstood in the sense of psychological enlightenment (the undertone of decided- undecided points more in the direction intended). Conscious and unconscious here are not cognitive oppositions, or oppositions in information, knowledge, or science, but existential qualities. If it were otherwise, the Heideggerian pathos ? f "authenticity" would not be possible.
202 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
The construction of the authentic --finally --results in the theorem of "being-
unto-death," for Heidegger's critics an excuse for the cheapest kind of outrage:
Bourgeois philosophy can no longer work itself up to anything more than morbid
thoughts on death! Ash Wednesday fantasies in parasitic heads! There is an ele-
ment of truth in such critique when it says that Heidegger's work, contrary to its
intention, reflects the historical-social moment in which it was written; even
though it claims to be ontological analysis, it provides an unintended theory of
the present. To the extent that it is involuntarily such a theory, the critics are prob-
ably justified in pointing out an unfree, indeed, deluded side in it, but that does
not mean that they should not also properly assess its inspired side. No thought
is so intimately embedded in its time as that of being-unto-death; it is the philo-
sophical key word in the age of imperialist and Fascist world wars. Heidegger's
theory falls in the breathing space between the First and the Second World Wars,
the first and the second modernization of mass death. It stands midway between
the first triumvirate of the destruction industry: Flanders, Tannenberg, Verdun,
and the second: Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Hiroshima. Without death industry, no
distraction industry. If Sein undZeit is read not "merely" as existential ontology
but also as an encoded social psychology of modernity, insights into structural
relations open up, offering a tremendous perspective. Heidegger has captured the
connection between modern "inauthenticity" of existence and modern fabrication
of death in a way that is accessible only to a contemporary of industrial world
wars. If we break the spell cast by the suspicion of fascism on Heidegger's work,
explosive critical potentials are disclosed in the formula "being-unto-death. " It
then becomes understandable that Heidegger's theory of death harbors the
greatest critique by this century of the last. Namely, the best theoretical energies
of the nineteenth century went into the attempt to make the deaths of others un-
49
thinkable by means of realistic Grand Theories.
lifted the evil in the world, insofar as it affected others, into the higher state of later, fulfilled times: Here there are formal equivalences between the idea of evo- lution, the concept of revolution, the concept of selection, the struggle for exis- tence and the survival of the fittest, the idea of progress and the myth of race. In all these concepts, an optics is tested out that objectifies the downfall of others. With Heidegger's theory of death, twentieth-century thinking turns its back on these hybrid, theoretically neutralized cynicisms of the past century. Viewed su- perficially, only the personal pronoun is altered: "One dies" becomes "I die. " In conscious being unto death, Heideggerian existence revolts against the "constant reassurance about death" on which an excessively destructive society inevitably relies. The total militarism of industrial war forces in everyday circumstances a narcotic repression of death that has as few loopholes as possible-- or the deflec- tion of death onto others: That is the law of modern distraction. The world situa- tion is such that it whispers to people, if they are attentive. Your annihilation is merely a question of time, and the time that it takes to reach you is simultaneously
The great evolutionist designs
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 203
the time of your distraction. The coming annihilation indeed presupposes your distraction, your undecidedness to live. The distracted Anyone is the mode of our existing, through which we ourselves are stuck in the universal contexts of death and cooperate with the death industry. I want to maintain that Heidegger holds the beginning of the thread to a philosophy of armament in his hands, for arma- ment means to subjugate oneself to the law of Anyone. One of the most impres- sive sentences in Sein und Zeit reads: "Anyone does not allow the courage to fear death to rise up" (p. 254). Those who arm themselves substitute the "courage to fear one's own death" by military activity. The military is the best
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
guarantor that I do not have to die my "own death"; it promises me help in the attempt to repress the "I die" so that I can put in its place an Anyone-death, a death in absentia, a death in political inauthenticity and anesthesia. One arms, one distracts oneself, one dies.
In Heidegger's "I die," I find the crystallization point around which a Real- philosophie of a rejuvenated kynicism can develop. No end in the world may ever remove itself so far from this kynical a priori, "I die," that our deaths become the means to an end. The meaninglessness of life--about which so much stupid ni- hilistic prattle winds itself--in fact provides the foundation for its full precious- ness. Not only despair and the nightmare of an oppressive existence are attributed to what is meaningless, but also a celebration of life that endows meaning, ener- getic consciousness in the here and now, and oceanic festival.
That with Heidegger himself things proceed more gloomily and that his ex- istential scenery unfolds between the nuances in gray of everydayness and the glaring flashes of fear and the colors of death is well known and explains the mel- ancholy nimbus of his work. But even in the pathos of being unto death, a grain of kynical substance can be discovered, for it is a pathos of asceticism, and in this pathos the kynicism of ends can make itself heard in a language of the twen- tieth century. What society prescribes for us as ends in its process already binds us to inauthentic existence. The world process does everything to repress death -- whereas "authentic" existence is ignited only when I alertly recognize how I stand in the world, eye to eye with the fear of death that makes itself felt when, in ad- vance, I radically carry through the thought that I am the one whom, at the end ? f my time, my death awaits. Heidegger concludes from this an original eerie un- nomeliness (Un-heimlichkeit) of existence. The world can never become the se- cure and security-endowing home of human beings. Because existence from the start is unhomely, the "unhoused human being" (who, above all in philosophy af-
ter the Second World War, wandered through the devastated country) feels an
ur
ge to flee into artificial dwelling places and homes and to withdraw out of fear into habits and habitats.
Of course, such statements, although intended to have universal validity, have
a 50
concrete connection to the phenomena of their historical moment. Not for
nothing is Heidegger a contemporary of the Bauhaus, of New Living, of early
204 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
? George Grosz, Republican Automatons, 1920. ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/ V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
urbanism, state housing, the theory of settlement and the first rural communes.
His philosophical discourse surreptitiously draws on the modern problematics of
feelings toward one's domicile, of the myths of the house and the city. When he
51
talks of the unhousedness (Unbehaustheit) of human beings, this idea is
nourished not only by the horror that the incorrigible provincial feels toward modern forms of urban life. It amounts to a rejection if the house-building, city- building Utopia of our civilization. Socialism really means, insofar as it must affirm industry, an extension of the urban "spirit of Utopia. " It promises to lead us out of the "inhospitableness of the cities," however, it proposes to use urban means and envisages a new city, the ultimate humane city and home. Thus, in socialism of this type, there is always a dream partially nourished by urban mis- ery. Heidegger's provincialism has no understanding for this. He views the city with the eyes of an "eternal provincial" who cannot be convinced that there could
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 205
ever be something better to take the place of the country. Heidegger, as the well- meaning interpreter may say, breaks through modern fantasies about space in which the city dreams of the country, and the country of the city. Both fantasies are equally restricted and equally distorted. Heidegger carries out, in part liter- ally, in part metaphorically, a "posthistorical" return to the country.
Precisely in the years of the most desolate modernization--the so-called Golden Twenties --the city, once the site of Utopia, begins to lose its magic. Berlin especially, the principal city of the early twentieth century, played its part in plunging the euphoria of the metropolis into a disenchanted light. As the focal point of industry, production, consumption, and mass misery, it is at the same time the most exposed to alienation: Nowhere is modernity paid for so dearly as in the mass cities. The vocabulary of Heidegger's Anyone analysis seems espe- cially well suited to express the discontent of developed cities in their own form of life. Culture of distraction, talk, curiosity, unhousedness, habituatedness (one can think here of all sorts of vices), homelessness, fear, being-unto-death: All that sounds like the misery of the city, captured in a mirror that is somewhat cloudy and somewhat too subtle. Heidegger's provincial
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
kynicism has a marked cultural- critical tendency. But it not only attests to a hopeless provincialism when a philos- opher of his stature takes leave of the bourgeois urban and socialist Utopias, but points to a kynical turn in the sense that it abrogates the great goals and projec- tions of urban social space. The turn to the province can also be a turn to real macrohistory that more closely attends to the regulation of life in the framework of nature, agriculture, and ecology than all previous industrial world images could. History written by an industrial historian would necessarily become microhistory. The history of the country knows the pulse of a much greater tem- porality. Reduced to short formulas, the city is not the fulfillment of existence; nor are the goals of industrial capitalism; nor scientific progress; nor more civili- zation, more cinema, more home beautiful, longer vacations, better eating: None of these things is the fulfillment of existence. What is "authentic" will always be something else. You must know who you are. You must consciously experience being-unto-death as the highest instance of your potentiality: it attacks you when you are afraid, and your moment has come when you are courageous enough to hold your ground in the face of the great fear.
Authentic fear is . . . rare under the hegemony of habituatedness and the
Public sphere" (Sein und Zeit, p. 190). Those who choose what is rare make an e
htist choice. Authenticity is thus, according to Heidegger, a matter for the few.
w tln
? "eedom, and the many who want to live as rebellious slaves and are not prepared
to
ended elitism, which assumes an elite of those who really exist, had to slide al-
most inevitably into the social and guide political options. In this, the Grand In- "at is that reminiscent of? Do we not hear again the Grand Inquisitor as he dis- guishes between the few and the many--the few who bear the burden of great encounter real freedom, real fear, real being? This completely apolitically in- 206 D THE CABINET OF CYNICS
quisitor possessed the advantage of an undeceived and cynical political conscious- ness. Heidegger, by contrast, remained naive, without a clear awareness that the traditional mixture of academic apoliticism, elitist consciousness, and heroic atti- tude leads, almost with blind necessity to, unforeseen political decisions. For a time he-one would like to say, therefore -fell into the cynicism of the populist Grand Inquisitor. His analysis proved to be true inadvertently about him himself. Everything looks as if. It sounds as if it has been "really understood, grasped and spoken, but basically it is not. " National socialism--"movement," "uprising," "decision"--seemed to resemble Heidegger's vision of authenticity, decisiveness, and heroic being unto death, as if fascism were the rebirth of authenticity out of habituatedness, as if this modern revolt against modernity were the real proof of an existence that had resolutely decided for itself. One has to think of Heidegger when one cites Hannah Arendt's sublime remark about those intellectuals in the Third Reich who, to be sure, were not Fascists, but "let something occur" to them on the theme of national socialism. In fact, Heidegger let many things occur to him until he noticed what the case "authentically" was with this political move- ment. The delusion could not last long. The Nazi movement was supposed to clar- ify what the populist Anyone has up its sleeve-- Anyone as Master Human, Any- one as simultaneously narcissistic and authoritarian mass, Anyone as murderer for pleasure and official responsible for killing. The "authenticity" of fascism-its sole authenticity --consisted in transforming latent destructiveness into manifest destructiveness, thereby participating in a highly contemporary way in the cyni- cism of open "expressedness" that no longer conceals anything. Fascism, espe-
cially in its German version, is the unconcealment of political destructiveness reduced to its most naked form and encouraged by the formula of the "will to power. " It happened as if Nietzsche, in the manner of a psychotherapist, had said to capitalist society: "Basically, you are all consumed by a will to power, so let
52
it out openly for once and confess to being what you are in any case! "
upon, the Nazis, in fact, proceeded to let "it" (es = id) out, not under therapeutic conditions, however, but in the middle of political reality. It was perhaps Nietzsche's theoretical recklessness that allowed him to believe that philosophy can exhaust itself in provocative diagnoses, without at the same time thinking seriously about therapy. The Devil can be called by his real name only by those who know of an antidote to him. To name him (whether as will to power, as ag- gression, etc. ) is to acknowledge his reality, and to acknowledge this reality is to "unleash" it.
Since Heidegger, there is another offspring of the ancient kynical impulse, strongly encoded but nevertheless legible, on the point of intervening in social happenings with a critique of civilization. It leads modern consciousness of tech- nology and domination ultimately ad absurdum. Perhaps existential ontology can be robbed of much of its pretentious gloominess when it is understood as a philo- sophical Eulenspiegel game. It pretends all kinds of things to people in
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
order to
Where-
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 207
get them into a position where they no longer allow themselves to be deceived. It pretends to be frightfully unyielding in order to communicate the simplest things. I call it the kynicism of ends. Inspired by the kynicism of ends, life that has learned the coldness of producing, ruling, and destroying through the cyni- cism of means could become warm again for us. The critique of instrumental rea- son presses for its completion as a critique of cynical reason. Its chief task is to loosen Heidegger's pathos and break its tight hold on the mere consciousness of death. "Authenticity," if the expression is to have any meaning at all, is ex- perienced by us rather in love and sexual intoxication, in irony and laughter, creativity and responsibility, meditation and ecstasy. In this release, that existen- tial individual (Einzige) who believes its most intimately genuine (eigenst) posses- sion is its own death disappears. At the summit of potentiality we experience not only the end of the world in lonely death, but even more the demise of the ego in its surrender to the most communal world.
Admittedly, death overshadowed philosophical fantasy between the world wars and claimed the right to the first night with the kynicism of ends for itself, at least in philosophy. However, it does not shed a good light on the relationship of existential philosophy to real existence when only "one's own death" occurs to it when it is asked what it has to say about real life. Actually, it says that it has nothing to say-and to this end it must write nothing with a capital N. This para- dox characterizes the enormous movement of thought in Sein und Zeit: Such a great wealth of concepts was hardly ever employed before to convey a content so "poor" in the mystical sense. The work beseeches the reader with a lofty call to authentic existence but veils itself in silence when one wants to ask, How then? The only, and to be sure, fundamental answer that can be drawn out of it must read, deciphered (in the foregoing sense): consciously. That is no longer a con- crete morality that instructs us as to what to do and what not to do. But if the phi- losopher is no longer able to give directives, he can still give an urgent suggestion to be authentic. Thus: You can do what vou like, you can do what you must, but do it in a way that you can remain intensely conscious of what you are doing. Moral amoralism-- the last possible word of existential ontology to ethics? It seems that the ethos of conscious life would be the only ethos that can maintain itself in the nihilistic currents of modernity because it is basically not an ethos. It does not even fulfill the function of a substitute morality (of the kind in Utopias that posit the good in the future and help to relativize the evil on the way there). Those who really think from beyond good and evil find only one single opposition that is relevant to life; it is at the same time the only one over which we have Power stemming from our own existence without idealistic overexertions, namely, that between conscious and unconscious deed. If Sigmund Freud in a fa- mous challenge put forward the sentence: Where it (Es) was, ego (Ich) should be- come, Heidegger would say: Where Anyone was, authenticity should become. Authenticity --freely interpreted--would be the state we achieve when we pro-
208 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
duce a continuum of being conscious in our existence.
of being-unconscious under which human life, especially as socialized human life, lives. The distracted consciousness of Anyone is condemned to remaining discontinuous, impulsively reactive, automatic, and unfree. Anyone is the must. As opposed to this, conscious authenticity --we provisionally accept this expression --works out a higher quality of awareness. Authenticity puts into its deeds the entire force of its decisiveness and energy. Buddhism speaks about the same thing in comparable phrases. While the Anyone ego sleeps, the existence of the authentic self awakes to itself. Those who examine themselves in a state of continual awakeness discover what is to be done for them in their situation, beyond morals.
54
How deep Heidegger's systematic amoralism
terpretation of the concept of conscience (Gewissen): Heidegger construes, care- fully and revolutionarily at the same time, a "conscienceless conscience. " If, through the millennia of European moral history, conscience was held to be an inner authority that tells us what good and evil are, then Heidegger understands it now as an empty conscience that makes no statements. "The conscience speaks solely and continually in the modus of keeping silent" (Sein und Zeit, p. 273). Again, Heidegger's characteristic figure of thought appears: intensity that says nothing. Beyond good and evil there is only the "loud" silence, the intensive non-
judgmental consciousness that restricts itself to alertly seeing what the case is. Conscience--once understood as a substantial moral authority-- now approaches pure conscious being (Bewusst-Sein). Morality, as participation in social conven- tions and principles, only concerns Anyone's behavior. As the domain of the authentic self there remains only pure, decisive consciousness: vibrating presence.
In a sublime line of thought, Heidegger discovers that this "conscienceless con- science" contains a call to us --a "call to
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
be guilty. " Guilty of what? No answer. Is "authentic" living in some way a priori guilty?
Is the Christian doctrine of origi- nal sin secretly returning here? In that case we would have only apparently taken leave of moralism. If, however, authentic self-being is described as being unto death, then the thought suggests itself that this "call to be guilty" produces an ex- istential connection between one's own still-being-alive and the death of others. Life as causing-to-die. Authentically living persons are those who understand themselves as survivors, as those whom death has just passed over and who con- ceive of the time it will take for a renewed, definitive encounter with death as a
postponement. Heidegger's analysis, in essence, penetrates into this most extreme boundary zone of amoral reflection. That he is conscious of standing on explosive ground is revealed by his question: "Calling on others to be guilty, is that not an incitement to do evil? " Could there be an "authenticity" in which we show our- selves as the decisive doers of evil? Just as the Fascists cited Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil in order to do evil emphatically in this world? Heidegger recoils
53
Only that breaks the spell
reaches is shown in its rein-
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 209
from this consequence. The amoralism of "conscienceless conscience" is not meant as a call to do evil, he assures us. At least the Heidegger of 1927 is worried by this vague premonition, but in 1933 he misses the moment of truth--and in this way he let himself be deluded by the activistic, decisionistic {dezisionistisch), and heroic husks of slogans of the Hitler movement. The politically naive Heideg- ger believed he had found in fascism a "politics of authenticity"--and permitted, unsuspecting as only a German university professor could be, a projection of his philosophy onto the national movement.
However, it should be noted that Heidegger, with respect to his central philo-
sophical achievement, would still not be a man of the Right even if he had said
still more politically muddled things than he actually did. For, with his, as I call
it, kynicism of ends, he is the first to burst through the Utopian-moralistic grand
theories of the nineteenth century. With this achievement he remains one of the
first in the geneaology of a new and alternative Left: of a Left that no longer clings
to the hybrid constructions in the philosophy of history of the past century; a Left
that does not, in the style of the dogmatic Marxist grand theory (I prefer this ex-
pression to the word "Weltanschauung"), see itself as the accomplice of the world
spirit; a Left that has not sworn allegiance to the dogmatics of industrial develop-
ment without ifs and buts; a Left that revises the narrow-minded materialist tradi-
tion that burdens it; a Left that not only assumes that the others must die for one's
"own cause" but lives with the insight that the living can only rely on themselves;
a Left that in no way still clings to the naive belief that socialization (Vergesell-
schaftung) would be the wonder cure for the maladies of modernity. Without
knowing it and, for the most part, even without wanting to know it (in this country
even with an outraged resoluteness not to recognize it), the New Left is an ex-
istential Left, a neokynical Left--I risk the expression: a Heideggerian Left. This
is, particularly in the land of Critical Theory, which has hung an almost im-
penetrable taboo on the "fascist" ontologist, a rather piquant discovery. But who
has exhaustively and rigorously investigated the processes of repulsion between
the existential tendencies and Left-Hegelian critical social research? Is there not
a wealth of hidden similarities and analogies between Adorno and Heidegger?
What grounds are there for their striking refusal to communicate with one an-
sother? science"?
And Diogenes? Did his existential-ontological adventure pay off for him? Has his lantern found people? Has he succeeded in instilling the unspeakably simple m our heads? I think he himself doubts it. He will consider whether he should not give up the enterprise of philosophy altogether. It makes no headway against the sad complicatedness of circumstances. The strategy of collaborating in order to change entangles the changer in the collective melancholy. In the end, those who were the more fully alive are only sadder, and it could hardly be otherwise.
Who could say which of the two had formulated the more "melancholy
210 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Diogenes probably will resign one day from his professorship; soon after, we will find a notice on the bulletin board saying that Professor X's lectures are canceled until further notice. Rumor has it that he was seen in an army surplus store where he bought himself a sleeping bag. He was last reported seen sitting on a garbage bin, pretty drunk and giggling to himself like someone whose head is not quite in order.
Notes
1. The enormous interest shown by intellectuals in de Sade betrays a progressive dawning in which bourgeois cynicism begins to recognize itself again in late-aristocratic cynicism. It could be that in the future, Flaubert will take the place of de Sade.
2. "Those who give me a gift, I wag my tail at, those who give me nothing, I bark at, and scoun- drels I bite" (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 60).
3. [The metropolitan Indians (also mentioned in chapter 5) were a movement in the second half of the seventies in Western Europe of fringe dwellers who emulated American Indian culture and wanted to subvert the capitalist urban culture from within with (unarmed) cultural guerrilla tactics. As such, they are the politicized forerunners of the punks. -- Trans. ]
4. Shaving was a custom of the Macedonia military, taken over by Hellenic and Roman society. From then on the beard becomes a philosophical status symbol, a sign of nonconformism.
5. A modern counterexample: "No one should let himself be infected by the scientists of the Club of Rome, who have told us that we should turn back to a simple life. For this we have not come into office and we also do not work towards this. Diogenes could live in a tub and was satisfied with that. But he was a philosopher, and most of the time we are not. " Here we have Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in 1976, who is speaking as a cynic warning us about the kynics.
6. See Hegel, Vorlesungen tiber die Geschichte der Philosophie. Collected Works, vol. 18 (Frankfurt, 1971), pp. 551ff. 7. Another version shifts this story to Corinth. The sources are few and fragmentary. For this reason one wants to lay every tiny particle recovered on the philologist's assaying scales and carefully weigh every letter. However, the ultimate wisdom often lies in not taking what has been handed down too literally. In this there is also a great hermeneutical chance, and we make unrestrained use of it.
8. See Regis Debray, who recognizes that a cultural history of scientific claims, to be properly founded, must be built on the basis of a sociology of ambitions. Le pouvoir intellectuel en France (Paris, 1979).
9. ". . . which neither sought a place to rest nor avoided the dark, nor showed any desire for so-called delicacies. That gave him a helpful tip for his needy situation. " (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 22).
10. [A famous German clown of the twentieth century--Trans. ]
11. There is one derivation of kynicism from kyon, the Greek for "dog," and another from the gymnasion Kynosarges in which Diogenes' purported teacher, Antisthenes, is said to have taught. 12. Words like drop-out, Aussteiger [escapist; literally, one who climbs out, "alighter"; --Trans. ]
and others hint in the same direction.
13. Kynicism even begins historically with an apparent enmity toward pleasure, if it is true that
Antisthenes "would rather have gone mad than feel pleasure. " Self-control, however, is not self- torture.
14. Laertius maintains that there was a writing by Diogenes on the state (Politeia). Like every- thing else, it has been lost. Its possible content can easily be surmised, however. The idea of a world- state, in which the later Stoic political philosophy culminates, is of kynical origin.
15. [This phrase comes from Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Part 3, section 2. -Trans. ]
THE CABINET OF CYNICS ? 211
16. Here an enticing comparison with the doctrine of long life in Chinese Taoism could be filled out. Meiner's edition of Laertius gives Diogenes' life span as 404-323 B. C. , i. e. , eighty-one years. 17. With Diogenes, under the slogan Remint the Coins, there begins what will be called by the neokynic Nietzsche "the revaluing of all values," the cultural revolution of the "naked truth. " Nietzsche, of course, ruins the point. His revaluation turns the kynical rejection of power into a will to power; with this he changes sides and provides the powerful with a philosophy of disinhibition. 18. Feminism thus has an originally kynical side; indeed, it is perhaps the present-day core of neokynicism. For example, it encourages women to discover masturbation so as to detach themselves
from the compulsions of marriage.
19. Helmut Schmidt still cites his ethics.
20. This image prevails from about the time of Nero. In Cicero's time, the sects, which dominated
the ideological scene for a hundred years, are scarcely mentioned.
21. The interpretation of the late-ancient existential anxiety-among other things, a premise of
Christianity--is still a challenge to psychohistory.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
22. Modern analogy: rival depth-psychological sects (Freudians, Jungians, Reichians, Adlerians,
Janovians, Perlsians, Lacanians, etc. ).
23. Christoph Martin Wieland, too, the best scholar of kynicism in eighteenth-century Germany
and the translator of Lucian, probably sensed that there was something inauthentic in Lucian's con- tempt for Peregrinus. In his novel, Die geheime Geschichte des Peregrinus Proteus (The secret story of Peregrinus Proteus) (1788-89), he thus draws a kinder picture of the philosopher.
24. See chapter 23, "On the German Republic of Impostors," as well as the section in chapter 10 entitled "Knowledge of War and Espionage. "
25. Recall the theses on art as the form of expression of bourgeois neokynicism in chapter 5. The arts possessed an exceptional capacity to process negativity. The concept "realism" refers to this in- vestigatory power of art.
26. Since Marx we know that the moving force that plunges modernity into its apparent progres- sive historicity is based on the alliance between capital and science. At the same time we are forced to distinguish more sharply between continuance (Fortgang) and progress (Fortschritt).
27. ". . . you call. . . evil": The Devil is not only an evolutionist but also a nominalist. "Evil" understands itself in another way: as a "power," as a phenomenon of energy, as a position in a natural polarity. Konrad Lorenz, still arguing in the schema of evolution, nowadays treats the phenomenon of aggression consistently from this standpoint: "so-called evil. " 28. Not actionism but "contemplative praxis," to act in order to become conscious.
29. Nietzsche, who initially again consciously called himelf a Cyniker, also coined the phrase "live dangerously. " It is the motto of kynical empiricism toward which Faust orients himself.
30. In its sharpest formulations, Adorno's Minima Moralia, the main work of moral critique in postwar German philosophy, speaks without reserve of the disgrace of surviving; it would be short- sighted to understand this merely as the reaction to Jewish experiences in those years (1943 on). On the morality of survival see also Elias Canetti, Masse undMacht (Munich, 1976) (Crowds and power; 1962).
31. In chapter 10, the way of seeing that leads to the "black empiricism" of the enlightenment sciences will be described. 32. "Boogie-woogie of the hormones" (Arthur Miller).
33. We are reading it here without regard to its context in the novel.
34. One hundred years after Dostoyevsky wrote this, the full implications of this reflection seem
to be coming to light, since, in Western leftist traditions, a departure from the "spirit of the (Christian) Utopia" is being carried out with a previously unknown profundity and since the intelligentsia ex- periences, directly and on its own responsibility, the ineluctability of the principle of power and of the reason of state. The Left in political power: With this, moral-political and psychic complications with a new degree of complexity begin.
212 ? THE CABINET OF CYNICS
35. "The world is everything that is the case," positivism will say later. If one takes the expression "the case is" somewhat more generously, the great realists of the nineteenth century are thoroughly positivistic--or at least "on the way" to positivism. For Marx, class struggles (although a universal concept) are the case; for Nietzsche, the will to power; for Freud, drives.
36. That is certainly no longer the biblical Jesus but a Jesus from the perspective of Judas, a Judas who seeks disburdening. His tragic cynicism evades an unbearable guilt; psychoanalytically, this probably belongs to the psychodynamic of the patricidal son, who can continue to live without suffocating on his guilt only by finding reasons for why he had to kill.
37. Here we approach the third level of the development of the concept of cynicism which will be presented in Part III. 38. Historicism contributes something decisive to this by educating us to see all phenomena of consciousness as a "product of their time"; it can easily be combined with psychologism as well as sociologism.
39. For this reason, conservatives often have a clear consciousness of "semantics. "
40. See "Minima Amoralia," in chapter 9.
41. Applied to the area of (church) politics, this dualism is expressed as power and spirit.
42. Overcoming of nihilism? "The results of the overcoming . . . are always worse than what
is overcome"; Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt, 1966), p. 371.
43. Christian substitute: One does it for the good of others.
44. Only once has Diogenes been seen in this way in modernity. Nietzsche's metaphysical happen-
ing in which the "crazy person" with the lantern announces: "God is dead" was the signal of neo- kynicism.
45. In Part IV, I pursue this "translation" further and investigate what subjugation and being sub- jugated mean for epistemology.
46. Mephistopheles: "If I had not reserved fire for myself/1 would have nothing apart for myself. "
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
47. [Heidegger's term has many connotations. Verfallen can mean "degenerated," "lapsed," "decayed," "addicted," "fallen.
