FUNCTIONALIST
CYNICISMS II
?
?
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason
On one end sits the threatening,
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 449
the alien, technology; on the other, the humane spreads out and, according to whether oneself or the alien presses harder, the seesaw falls to one side or the other. The more immature the thinking, the heavier the humane end. With this phraseology, the bourgeois philosophy of technology erected an almost all- encompassing cartel of brains. Minds are nimbly provided with mental artificial "limbs" about technology. With elegant, easy-care, light metal legs ("pure Ger- man model"), thinking hobbles along behind reality, and thus personality as well as soul are kept in operation as usual. The bourgeois philosophy of technology thoroughly breathes in the spirit of the one-armed primer. Personality amputated? No problem --we have another one for you in stock.
You see, ladies and gentlemen, doctors and first-aid helpers, engineers and manufacturers, military posts and the officers of our emergency ser- vices, all strive in the same way to place their experience at the service of our cause and to replace the loss of hand and arm . . . for those who have fought and suffered for the continued existence and greatness of the Fatherland. . . . And for the injured, the poet's words are apt:
Whoever always strives to make an effort, Can be redeemed by us.
(Beitrdge zur Frage der Ausrustung armverletzter Kriegsbeschddigter fiir das Erwerbsleben [1915], p. 127)
Reduced to a formula, the topic of the bourgeois philosophy of technology in the twenties and thirties is "Goethe with Machines," or at least: "Zarathustra and Industry. " Even the privileged now come across the problem of "alienation" or, as Hans Freyer says drastically, "the uprising of the slave-means against the ends. " More reflective authors no longer want to leave it at a mere conservative No to technology. In departing from the erstwhile sensitive repugnance, bour- geois thinking about technology converts to a downright masochistic enthusiasm. The philosophy of the new matter-of-factness, insofar as it is engineers' philoso- phy, tries out a hectic embracing of the new discomfort.
Hans Freyer, for example, suspects deeper connections between technology and the "human being. " Not only the old town, the traditional village, the devel- oped, preindustrial cultural landscape of Europe are subjected to destructive at- tacks by the new technology; an even older image of the human being or model of the soul now collapses. Freyer was by no means the only one who called the master-human relation of the European technologist to the earth the "spiritual" foundation of "our" technology. However, only in the present, where the enor- mous "system of means" penetrates every activity of life, can Europeans no longer escape the experience of themselves as "rulers":
Violent questioning of nature in order to learn how to direct its forces, pondering over the earth in order to conquer and shape it-this will
450 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
stirs itself early in the European spirit. And it is this that guaranteed the continuity in the successes of the technology that, since the beginning of the 18th century, had finally come to be based on science. (H. Freyer, Zur Philosophic der Technik, in Blatter fur Deutsche Philosophic, vol. 3 [Berlin, 1929-30], p. 200)
What Freyer expresses sounds reflective in tone, affirmative in substance: Thus, we are dominant subjects, and, as Europeans, we have always been so. Where the conservative denial stops, the neo-matter-of-fact flight forward into a programmatic confession begins.
What Freyer still holds intelligently in suspense steps onto hard ground with the philosopher of brutality, Theodor Liiddecke. He turns fresh cynicism into the procedure of his talk. In 1931 he published his book on technology: Meisterung der Maschinenwelt. Menschentum und Moglichkeit (The mastering of the world of machines. Humankind and possibility). Liiddecke's ideal is "organic cultivation" --and in the word "organic" he intends a whole range of undertones, from the Goethean original forms up to the organs of power and the organization of the militarized community of the people.
The first condition of an organic cultivation is the employment of the "apprentice principle" in education, as Henry Ford called it. The young person must grow up, from youth onward, in a scuffle with realities, (p. 240)
The most damaging factor in the existing system of education is that the young person is made "too sensitive"; sport offers only an insufficient balance against this.
Urban pupils in particular lack the organic concepts of life and labor. We must educate strong-nerved, adaptable people who are really at
home in their times.
In this way, we will come to a new aristocracy composed of honest,
heroic fighters. . . . This idea of discipline should also stand at the fore of the duty to work. (p. 242)
Hence, send students of economics for four weeks into the mines so that they "develop on the spot the capacities of a respectable miner" (p. 248); bring pupils into the banks before the theory of money is explained to them; make intellectual workers familiar with the hard facts on the "production front. " One has to read some passages by Liiddecke several times to make sure that he really argues from the "Right. " His clammy, joyful antiacademicism could easily be confused with Joyful Science, theory fatigue, and the hunger for concreteness of today's Left intelligentsia, if it were not for the fact that the author takes care to set a clear order with appropriate signal words:
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 451
The intellectual knows too little about the people who fight as soldiers on the battlefront of production. The intellectual battlefield on which he moves is a bourgeois camp. We want to give the socialists credit for one thing: they have made the concept "bourgeois" unsavory for us. For the young generation, bourgeois means the same as unheroic, feeble, anxious. A thoroughly sportsmanly, hard kind of man is no longer bourgeois, (p. 248)
. . . With the help of the typically academic way of thinking, a "grain battle" will never be fought, as Mussolini was able to do. The thinking of the great activists is always straightforward and sim-
ple. . . . (p. 249)
On the sports field and in the imagination of youth, the aggressive man who is master of the situation lives as inspiring character type. In the daily shopkeeper-existence of this civilization, however, the artfully calculating, soft-stepping bourgeois, who denies everything directly heroical, reigns, (pp. 215-16)
That is socialism! Socialism is a new vital force, a philosophy of la- bor, a transferring of principles in sport to occupational activity, a new tone of solid comradeship, (p. 215)
The "Marxist revolution": It is, above all, a question of having or not-having. Our revolution, however, is a question of being and want- ing to be better! (p. 217)
Our gospel is precisely the quick thought and the quick realization of every thought, (p. 217)
Liiddecke develops a philosophy of the enthusiastic artificial limb that ex- periences its "being" in the intoxication of movement. Because it steals from "progressive" discourse, the text is subversive --a reading must be all the more so. In its language, existential motifs of the Left can be found, staged by a right- wing ego: Homo prostheticus as a "storm trooper" itching for action, as an ex- ploiter of himself. From this viewpoint, a diagnostic potential flits through Lud- decke's theory that programs anticapitalist motifs into a capitalist-military ego. As far as an ethics of labor is concerned, its prescribed optimism blends in with the morals of management in the West today as well as with the "ought" attitude of "real existing socialism. " Nothing of content remains of specifically Fascist ele- ments. The ideology of fitness today, denazified, is as rampant as it was then, while the ethics of being is counterposed as always to those of having. The com- position and the dynamic gesture remain Fascist, in which everything, mixed to- gether incoherently, is rasped down by a "resourceful" subject in the fresh cynical tone of the likable Nazi. The Nazi philosopher is the nimble, frivolous mixer of language, the drummer of functionalism who employs everything that "works" and who cheers up the people who are following him. One of the secrets of fas- cism's success is to be found in this tone. It employs truth as a decoy and amiabil-
452 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
ity as bait. At the volatile center of its agitation lies the intimate complicity with the instincts for self-preservation in the confused masses. Its revolution promises complete "superiority" to the sportsmanlike prosthetic subject. Fascism appears here as the uprising of the prosthesis egos against "liberal" civilization, in whose "disorder" they at least still had a small chance of being "themselves. " In a violent flight to the fore, they outdo the system from which they arise. The secret of their self-preservation is hidden in the total abolition of everything that ever reminded one of a self. National socialism established itself as national functionalism.
The brisk prosthesis of the new state needed nursing and the relaxation of ten- sion. It was supposed to find both on the Fascist holiday. The sea was always good for uplifting thoughts, even for Nazi eminences seeking recuperation. On the beach, one can reflect even better on the Goethe of the machines. I quote some lines from Kurt Schuder's book of 1940: Granit und Herz. Die Strassen Adolf Hitlers--ein Dombau unsererZeit (Granite and heart. Adolf Hitler's roads --a ca- thedral construction of our times; Braunschweig).
In the summer of 1938 I was in Westerland. You have to imagine Westerland as a place where you can find almost everything you are looking for: recuperation, rest, the spicy North Sea air . . . and just as spicy and benevolently stern the North Sea waves . . . which de- velop . . . that famous surf that is such a welcome gift to every guest on the North Sea.
Among them, important and intellectually influential men(! ) from throughout Germany can be found. They know that what little time they have for recuperation can best be spent at the seaside, which, as far as health is concerned, always proves itself to be more than a timesaver. (P-7)
There, Schuder met an "influential man" with whom he was able to speak about "two great cultural manifestations in the people": "technology and industry" and "spiritual life. " The "influential man" had "creative views" on these topics that the author attempts to summarize.
The deed is first and last. The deed is the sole true content of human life. The deed is, of course, also the most difficult thing, for it demands courage. . . . (p. 8)
We technicians, who begin with the substances, have to wed our
spirits to the substances. . . . By the way, Goethe was one of the
2
greatest technicians of all time (Grotaz) if one proceeds from this
spiritual foundation of technology. . . . He even foresaw the electrical television. . . . (p. 9)
. . . Instead of sounding battle together as Goethe did, we have marched divided and the remarkable figures of spirit-only and technology-only resulted, to put it briefly, (p. 10)
. . . And without this comradeship with the machine no person
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II D 453
could live today, to say nothing of a people. . . . It serves and serves again. --In it we have to honor the thought of serving as such. This serving, however, is the highest ethical idea and deed, and so, the ma- chine converts this idea into deed. . . . ( ! )
Of course, iron is hard and the machine is not made out of sugar. But the law of life is steel and not sugar, not porridge and puree. And only the heart and the soul made of steel achieve life. . . . (p. 12)
The machine is thus thoroughly in accord with the human being, a thing that corresponds to the human essence; only when we create this inner connection have we overcome the curse of the world, material- ism. And this is indeed one of the great achievements of the new Ger- many: the introduction of technology into the soul. . . so that it no longer has to stand outside freezing. . . .
The technician spoke at length and penetratingly. . . .
And refreshed as if by a chalybeate bath, I go to the beach, breathe the sea air in blissfully that likewise refreshes the lungs like steel, (p.
14)
With unheard-of explicitness, the reshaping of human self-experience under the guiding star of the functional relation of the machine is recommended here as the Fascist way into modernity. This self-"reflection" of the living in steel and of "feeling" in hardness at the same time forms the basis for the cynical readiness of these philosophers of hardness to confess. They say everything now, but not so as to correct themselves, not to become "soft" and to think things over again. They seem not to notice that with every word, they give themselves away. They talk as if they were confessing, but without a single spark of insight. They admit everything so as not to compromise in anything. They want to become what their comrade, the machine, already is: men of steel. If images can convey something of the attitude toward life and political style, then the expressions Hitler's stirrup- holder, Alfred Hugenberg, chose in 1928 betray everything about what is to come.
What we need is not a mush but a solid block. In a mush we will per- ish; with the block, victory and reconstruction is a trifle. . . . We will be a block when the iron clamp of Weltanschauung binds us together and, in its embrace, causes everything soft and fluid to solidify and coa- lesce into rock. Those who could hinder us on the way to this goal
must step aside or allow themselves to be melted down. {Berliner Lokalanzeiger, 26-28 August 1928)
Excursus 4. The Fourth Reich-before the Third
In 1927, a Frankfurt philosophy professor, Friedrich Dessauer, presented a book entitled Philosophic der Technik. Das Problem der Realisierung (Philosophy of
454 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS.
FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? tScncralinfpcFror fiir bag beutfdpe Strajjennjcfen "Concrete and stone are material things.
Man gives them form and spirit.
National Socialist technology possesses in all material achievement ideal content.
Berlin, February 1940 General Inspector for the German Road System. "
technology. The problem of realization) in which he promised a "critical metaphysics" of technology. He turned against the technology Luddites who, in a merely superficial defense, regard technology as a "parvenu" of our civilization. Dessauer pursued the transition that runs through the epoch like a main theme, from resistance to affirmation, from resentment to "positive understanding. "
Affirmation itself constitutes the core of technical knowledge:
Humankind can fly but not because it, say, denies or suspends gravita- tion but by penetrating it in an intellectual process and, expressed pic- torially, coming to the other side of the matter. On the first side, it is its servant, on the other its master. . . .
Thus, gravitation is overcome, not denied. . . . Complete affirma- tion of everything that corresponds to the laws of nature and an un- swerving persistence in the framework of what is given by the laws of nature characterize the means, (pp. 40-41)
The affirmation of the so-called laws of nature serves the interest of controlling them; if they are controlled, they can serve human goals. When Dessauer calls for an affirmation of technology, this means the affirmation of affirmation-
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 455
domination of the means of domination. In the double Yes, the steel subject of the future stirs; it is inseparable from an increased domination by this subject of itself: for this reason, the masters' theory of that period talks incessantly of hero- ism. This mean nothing other than increased self-coercion; the rhetorics of cour- age here means to risk a higher degree of self-mashing.
The machine, for its part, emits a Yes to its inventor as soon as the latter sees that "it works. " As soon as it has "stepped into existence," it possesses a particular ontic quality: It embodies something that did not occur in nature but now exists because the spirit of invention has made it--like a new shape in creation. "We are in the middle of a day of creation" (p. 52).
What does the Fourth Reich mean?
Kant, with a consciousness of an all-encompassing view of the world, distinguished three realms (Reiche) from one another. The first is that of natural science; he called the work, "Critique of Pure Reason. " . . . How is natural science possible? is the key question that opens the way. He gives the answer: through the forms of contemplation, time and space . . . and through the equally a priori forms of understand-
ing . . . the categories through which it works up experience (p. 54). On the basis of this mental equipment, natural science, as knowledge of appearances, is possible. . . .
He discovers the second realm in the experience of ethical law, that omnipotent, unconditional (categorical) imperative that gives the will direction. . . . Theoretical reason of the first realm cannot enter this realm; here, the higher, practical reason reigns that opens up the super- sensuous to the life of the will. . . .
In Kant's ordering, the borders separate the first realm completely from the second. But is such a separation bearable? Kant himself forced an opening through. In the third realm it is a matter of "feeling," of the subjugation of the objects of experience to the goal by means of the power of judgment. This is the aesthetic and functional realm, (pp. 55-56)
But one would try in vain to find in Kant enlightenment about the dimension that cuts most deeply into the life of the present. "In the fourth realm (Reich), we enter a new land that opens up technology to us. " The Fourth Reich is that of in- ventions, those things that have been brought into existence only by human be- ings, the immeasurable potential of what can still be invented and realized. Ac- cording to Dessauer, technology means nothing other than to call the slumbering shapes of the Fourth Reich into reality through invention. It is as if technology reached over into the sphere of the Ding an sich (thing in itself), which according to Kant is inaccessible to us, in order to create out of this sphere previously nonex- isting objects of experience, machines. The machine, however, is no Ding an sich, no creature "out there" whose possibility of existence cannot be reached by
456 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? Heinrich Hoerle, Monument to the Unknown Prostheses, 1930. (Reproduced by permission of the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal. )
any understanding, but rather is there through us. At the same time, what "func- tions" in it is not only from us; there is in it a "power that does not come from me" (Dessauer, p. 60). World-revolutionizing power can be immanent in inven- tions. Dessauer refers, for example, to the ontological puzzle of X rays, which, although a material natural phenomenon, can be produced only by human inter- vention. They constitute a new form of energy that did not previously exist. In- ventions of this quality are ontological enrichments in the inventory of existence--whereby humanity is allotted the role of coauthor of the existing. Through humanity, creation augments itself. Nature provides only the material for the human elevation of the pregiven into a technical supernature.
Everything invented and built by human beings, however, encounters human- ity from the outside like a power of nature-
like mountains, the gulf stream. . . . People have to react. Whoever lives in the mountains lives in accord with the mountains. . . . The power of technology is thus. . . .
. . . The power of newly created forms of technology possesses ba- sically the same autonomy as the creation of a mountain, a river, an ice age or a planet. This fact intensifies the already deeply disturbing extent of a continuing creation, to which we are witnesses and, even more, in which we participate. It is a monstrous fate to be an active participant in creation in such a way that things that have been created by us re- main in the visible world having an effect with an unimaginable autono-
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 457
? Favorable news from the Fourth Reich: "The rota-arm (from Engineer Meyer of the Rotaworks in Aachen) is somewhat lighter and more agreeable than the Jagen- berg arm. In its flexibility, it far exceeds that of the human arm. " Here, the worka- day arm with the adjustable working claw is juxtaposed with the Sunday arm with its attractive imitation hand.
mous power: The greatest earthly experience of mortal beings, (pp. 65-66)
This philosophy of technology pretends to be heroically optimistic because it conceives of humanity as the ongoing creator of the cosmos. It is never allowed to resign before the overpowering misery, but must bring over more and more new shapes out of that Fourth Reich in which the solutions to all urgent problems already stand ready, slumbering, and only "await" their discovery. Thus, beside nature there grows a "dynamically pulsating metacosmos," "created" by human beings.
Do we have to point out the absurd aspects of this philosophy? Its deception- once again --lies in the concept of the subject. The subject's heroism is nothing other than the refusal to conceive any distress or suffering as its "own. " The ego becomes heroic because it is too cowardly to be weak. It "sacrifices" because it hopes to gain something. Technology thus appears as the promise of a total solu- tion to problems. One day, the philosopher implies, technology will have worked off all misery. In an astoundingly shortsighted way, he overlooks the destructive aspect of "invention. " The fighting subject made of heroism and steel has to be blind to its own destructiveness. The more it threatens to break under the massive suffering of the technical, dominated world, the more optimistically it simulates the heroic pose. At the heart of this theory stands a subject who can no longer suffer because it has become wholly prosthesis.
Excursus 5: Total Prosthesis and Technical Surrealism
A diagnostic history of ideas owes a great deal to that cynical garrulousness of historical persons from whom an inner urge and the external compulsion of crisis force out statements that better controlled individuals would never let pass their
458 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
lips. Often they are screwballs who prefer to speak when so-called normal people think it cleverer to be silent. One of these compulsive talkers who supercleverly reveal something that otherwise nobody would be able to uncover so easily is the "expressionist philosopher" (Scholem) Adrien Turel. In 1934 he published, under the sign of the new German spirit, a ludicrous book: Technokratie, Autarkie, Genetokratie (Technocracy, autarky, genetocracy), in which curious detailed knowledge combines with megalomaniac, expansive perspectives to form a mys- terious, idiosyncratic speculation.
No conventional categorization can be applied to this text; it is neither mono-
graph nor essay nor theorem nor manifesto. As a singular document of a theoreti-
cal surrealism, it eludes all classification. Its tone is serious and pompous, at the
same time, noncommital in its apparently playful inclination to combine the most
disparate things. Statements about nomadic and agrarian existence slide over as
in a game into thoughts on industrialism, metallurgy, and quantum theory, clima-
tology and the philosophy of time, subzero physics and astronomy --from the
Aurignac cave dwellers to mathematical description of geopolitical power struc-
tures. At this market fair of a confused intellect, in which Turel, like an
3
Achternbusch for the philosophy of history, calls out his insights, rare "gems"
are to be found--combinations of prosthesis theory and philosophy of technology that cause one to prick up one's ears.
Technology is only a prosthesis; the labor we employ in technology is never anything else than a great offloading of compulsions to surrender our authentic essence in order to grasp the zones and concerns of other kinds of essences without thereby also having to give up our human- ness, our Germanness. (p. 34)
Turel dreams, insanely realistically, of a new level of Western technocracy that secures for itself "as a class of generals and leaders," a total domination over the strivings of the rest of the world to catch up --he is referring in particular to Japan, which, according to Turel, has already stolen European models of thinking, prostheses, technologies. Only that would be the "social psychology of the com- ing age. " Philosophy itself, in processing thought models, elevates itself
to a bold system of prostheses that will be indispensable in the future and that is to be placed beside the prosthetic system of the airplane, the submarine, the automobile, etc. , as at least their equal, (p. 34)
If it is a fact that we will no longer be able to protect the great blan- ket patent of our technical and scientific prosthetic system from the clutches of the second zone, and in the foreseeable future, also the third zone [today, we would say Second and Third Worlds;-Author], quite independently of whether we ourselves betray the methods of fabrica- tion to these zones . . . then, on the other hand, it is not to be forgot- ten that we, out of ourselves, produce, create at least an enormous new
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II D 459
increase in the style of prosthesis produced by machine to date, which can be called globally the total prosthesis of a technical kind. . . .
This technical prosthetic system, which is a typically masculine achievement, can only be compared with the prenatal, complete en- closure in the body of the mother.
All people, no matter of what sex(! ), were initially, in their prenatal period, caught in the great prototype of every nourishing landscape, ev- ery protective sphere, every prison, too, i. e. , they have experienced the enclosure in the body of a mother. The masculine counterpart to this is the development of technocratic prostheses, of power, of financial power and of the technical apparatuses for a complete capsule system in which individual people seem to be enclosed for better or worse. . . .
When the British fly over the Himalayas in the total prostheses of their fighter planes, and do so completely systematically with entire squadrons, that is no crazy record setting, nor is it money out the win- dow, but rather, it is for all India a symbol of the superior prosthetic power of Britain and Europe, (pp. 59-60)
How confused does a thinker have to be to see so clearly? Madness sees through the method completely. For the rest, those who cannot follow Turel can console themselves with Gershom Scholem's analysis; he knew the author per- sonally and, as early as the twenties, "understood literally not one word" of his utterances (Von Berlin nach Jerusalem, pp. 157-58).
Notes
1. H. Goetz, Erwin Piscator in Selbstzeugnissen undBilddokumenten (Hamburg, 1974), pp. 18f. 2. [Grotaz is an acronym from "grosster Techniker aller Zeiten" and a play on Goring's
megalomaniac, insulting nickname "Grofaz". --Trans. ]
3. [Achternbusch is a German film director. --Trans. ]
Chapter 20
Political Algodicy:
Cynical Cosmologies and the Logic of Pain
What is all this racket from constructions, ships, mines, battles and books seen from outer space: in comparison with the earth's crust, nothing!
Oswald Spengler, Urfragen (Munich, 1965)
Even if the hard Nazi sport subjects proclaimed their sympathies with prosthetic life under the mask of vitalism and in this way sought to counter pain through denial, in the end they, too, could not evade the question of the meaning of pain. Like nothing else, pain, which can announce death, challenges metaphysical meaning. The latter wants to know what the immeasurable suffering of this cen- tury means, who is responsible for it, and to what whole it could contribute.
Everyday understanding, made safe through routine from thoughts that are too deep, does not let itself get caught in such discussions. It thus remains protected from explicit cynicism. Mostly it does not say anything more than "that's life. " But those who take on the question and risk having an "opinion" about suffering are drawn into a region where one has to very sure of one's metaphysical views, or else become cynical.
Algodicy means a metaphyscial interpretation of pain that gives it meaning. In modernity it takes the place of theodicy, as its converse. In the latter, it was asked, How are evil, pain, suffering, and injustice to be reconciled with the exis- tence of God? Now the question is, If there is no God and no higher meaning, how can we still bear the pain? The function of politics as substitute theology im- mediately becomes clear. The nationalists as a rule did not hesitate for a moment to claim that the immeasurable suffering of the war had been meaningful as sac- rifice for the Fatherland. The momentum of such claims was hindered solely by the fact that the lost war and the victors' dictatorship in peacetime, as well as the disappointed revolution, put this nationalist offer of meaning into question. One might consider whether the much-quoted legend of the dagger thrust was a
460
a biological "grand
view" for himself.
Heroes fall
and sons leave their mothers. They are all
simple laws.
The breathing and batting of an eyelid in a colossal happening. (Wailing)
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 461
desperate rescue attempt for the political algodicy of the Right. For to realize that Germany would lose the war could be expected from even the densest nationalist. But to admit that "everything had been for nothing" and that the untold torments had no political meaning at all --for many contemporaries that was unbearable. The legend of the dagger thrust was no naive myth but a willed self-delusion of the Right. Their effort is also witnessed by Hitler's "bitter fortune. "
Those who ask for the meaning of the suffering in the First World War were drawn by the question into a region where politics, natural philosophy, and medi- cal cynicism met. Scarcely any speaker in those years refrained from medical metaphors: sickness, cancerous growths, operations, and healing through crisis. In Mein Kampf, Hitler spoke of the violent catastrophe that was to be preferred to a creeping political tuberculosis. The medical metaphors of the Right were in- tended to eliminate the sickness as well as the enemy within with "steel and radia- tion. " The Left at least registered the double danger of the sickness.
If, however, the revolutionary proletariat wants to be the doctor who has to take on the operation that is recognized as being unavoidable, then it is not allowed to continually soil its hands in the open festering sores of the sickness. For then, during the operation, the surgeon him- self would carry the poisonous substances into the body of the patient again, so vitiating his task of ridding the patient of them.
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 449
the alien, technology; on the other, the humane spreads out and, according to whether oneself or the alien presses harder, the seesaw falls to one side or the other. The more immature the thinking, the heavier the humane end. With this phraseology, the bourgeois philosophy of technology erected an almost all- encompassing cartel of brains. Minds are nimbly provided with mental artificial "limbs" about technology. With elegant, easy-care, light metal legs ("pure Ger- man model"), thinking hobbles along behind reality, and thus personality as well as soul are kept in operation as usual. The bourgeois philosophy of technology thoroughly breathes in the spirit of the one-armed primer. Personality amputated? No problem --we have another one for you in stock.
You see, ladies and gentlemen, doctors and first-aid helpers, engineers and manufacturers, military posts and the officers of our emergency ser- vices, all strive in the same way to place their experience at the service of our cause and to replace the loss of hand and arm . . . for those who have fought and suffered for the continued existence and greatness of the Fatherland. . . . And for the injured, the poet's words are apt:
Whoever always strives to make an effort, Can be redeemed by us.
(Beitrdge zur Frage der Ausrustung armverletzter Kriegsbeschddigter fiir das Erwerbsleben [1915], p. 127)
Reduced to a formula, the topic of the bourgeois philosophy of technology in the twenties and thirties is "Goethe with Machines," or at least: "Zarathustra and Industry. " Even the privileged now come across the problem of "alienation" or, as Hans Freyer says drastically, "the uprising of the slave-means against the ends. " More reflective authors no longer want to leave it at a mere conservative No to technology. In departing from the erstwhile sensitive repugnance, bour- geois thinking about technology converts to a downright masochistic enthusiasm. The philosophy of the new matter-of-factness, insofar as it is engineers' philoso- phy, tries out a hectic embracing of the new discomfort.
Hans Freyer, for example, suspects deeper connections between technology and the "human being. " Not only the old town, the traditional village, the devel- oped, preindustrial cultural landscape of Europe are subjected to destructive at- tacks by the new technology; an even older image of the human being or model of the soul now collapses. Freyer was by no means the only one who called the master-human relation of the European technologist to the earth the "spiritual" foundation of "our" technology. However, only in the present, where the enor- mous "system of means" penetrates every activity of life, can Europeans no longer escape the experience of themselves as "rulers":
Violent questioning of nature in order to learn how to direct its forces, pondering over the earth in order to conquer and shape it-this will
450 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
stirs itself early in the European spirit. And it is this that guaranteed the continuity in the successes of the technology that, since the beginning of the 18th century, had finally come to be based on science. (H. Freyer, Zur Philosophic der Technik, in Blatter fur Deutsche Philosophic, vol. 3 [Berlin, 1929-30], p. 200)
What Freyer expresses sounds reflective in tone, affirmative in substance: Thus, we are dominant subjects, and, as Europeans, we have always been so. Where the conservative denial stops, the neo-matter-of-fact flight forward into a programmatic confession begins.
What Freyer still holds intelligently in suspense steps onto hard ground with the philosopher of brutality, Theodor Liiddecke. He turns fresh cynicism into the procedure of his talk. In 1931 he published his book on technology: Meisterung der Maschinenwelt. Menschentum und Moglichkeit (The mastering of the world of machines. Humankind and possibility). Liiddecke's ideal is "organic cultivation" --and in the word "organic" he intends a whole range of undertones, from the Goethean original forms up to the organs of power and the organization of the militarized community of the people.
The first condition of an organic cultivation is the employment of the "apprentice principle" in education, as Henry Ford called it. The young person must grow up, from youth onward, in a scuffle with realities, (p. 240)
The most damaging factor in the existing system of education is that the young person is made "too sensitive"; sport offers only an insufficient balance against this.
Urban pupils in particular lack the organic concepts of life and labor. We must educate strong-nerved, adaptable people who are really at
home in their times.
In this way, we will come to a new aristocracy composed of honest,
heroic fighters. . . . This idea of discipline should also stand at the fore of the duty to work. (p. 242)
Hence, send students of economics for four weeks into the mines so that they "develop on the spot the capacities of a respectable miner" (p. 248); bring pupils into the banks before the theory of money is explained to them; make intellectual workers familiar with the hard facts on the "production front. " One has to read some passages by Liiddecke several times to make sure that he really argues from the "Right. " His clammy, joyful antiacademicism could easily be confused with Joyful Science, theory fatigue, and the hunger for concreteness of today's Left intelligentsia, if it were not for the fact that the author takes care to set a clear order with appropriate signal words:
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 451
The intellectual knows too little about the people who fight as soldiers on the battlefront of production. The intellectual battlefield on which he moves is a bourgeois camp. We want to give the socialists credit for one thing: they have made the concept "bourgeois" unsavory for us. For the young generation, bourgeois means the same as unheroic, feeble, anxious. A thoroughly sportsmanly, hard kind of man is no longer bourgeois, (p. 248)
. . . With the help of the typically academic way of thinking, a "grain battle" will never be fought, as Mussolini was able to do. The thinking of the great activists is always straightforward and sim-
ple. . . . (p. 249)
On the sports field and in the imagination of youth, the aggressive man who is master of the situation lives as inspiring character type. In the daily shopkeeper-existence of this civilization, however, the artfully calculating, soft-stepping bourgeois, who denies everything directly heroical, reigns, (pp. 215-16)
That is socialism! Socialism is a new vital force, a philosophy of la- bor, a transferring of principles in sport to occupational activity, a new tone of solid comradeship, (p. 215)
The "Marxist revolution": It is, above all, a question of having or not-having. Our revolution, however, is a question of being and want- ing to be better! (p. 217)
Our gospel is precisely the quick thought and the quick realization of every thought, (p. 217)
Liiddecke develops a philosophy of the enthusiastic artificial limb that ex- periences its "being" in the intoxication of movement. Because it steals from "progressive" discourse, the text is subversive --a reading must be all the more so. In its language, existential motifs of the Left can be found, staged by a right- wing ego: Homo prostheticus as a "storm trooper" itching for action, as an ex- ploiter of himself. From this viewpoint, a diagnostic potential flits through Lud- decke's theory that programs anticapitalist motifs into a capitalist-military ego. As far as an ethics of labor is concerned, its prescribed optimism blends in with the morals of management in the West today as well as with the "ought" attitude of "real existing socialism. " Nothing of content remains of specifically Fascist ele- ments. The ideology of fitness today, denazified, is as rampant as it was then, while the ethics of being is counterposed as always to those of having. The com- position and the dynamic gesture remain Fascist, in which everything, mixed to- gether incoherently, is rasped down by a "resourceful" subject in the fresh cynical tone of the likable Nazi. The Nazi philosopher is the nimble, frivolous mixer of language, the drummer of functionalism who employs everything that "works" and who cheers up the people who are following him. One of the secrets of fas- cism's success is to be found in this tone. It employs truth as a decoy and amiabil-
452 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
ity as bait. At the volatile center of its agitation lies the intimate complicity with the instincts for self-preservation in the confused masses. Its revolution promises complete "superiority" to the sportsmanlike prosthetic subject. Fascism appears here as the uprising of the prosthesis egos against "liberal" civilization, in whose "disorder" they at least still had a small chance of being "themselves. " In a violent flight to the fore, they outdo the system from which they arise. The secret of their self-preservation is hidden in the total abolition of everything that ever reminded one of a self. National socialism established itself as national functionalism.
The brisk prosthesis of the new state needed nursing and the relaxation of ten- sion. It was supposed to find both on the Fascist holiday. The sea was always good for uplifting thoughts, even for Nazi eminences seeking recuperation. On the beach, one can reflect even better on the Goethe of the machines. I quote some lines from Kurt Schuder's book of 1940: Granit und Herz. Die Strassen Adolf Hitlers--ein Dombau unsererZeit (Granite and heart. Adolf Hitler's roads --a ca- thedral construction of our times; Braunschweig).
In the summer of 1938 I was in Westerland. You have to imagine Westerland as a place where you can find almost everything you are looking for: recuperation, rest, the spicy North Sea air . . . and just as spicy and benevolently stern the North Sea waves . . . which de- velop . . . that famous surf that is such a welcome gift to every guest on the North Sea.
Among them, important and intellectually influential men(! ) from throughout Germany can be found. They know that what little time they have for recuperation can best be spent at the seaside, which, as far as health is concerned, always proves itself to be more than a timesaver. (P-7)
There, Schuder met an "influential man" with whom he was able to speak about "two great cultural manifestations in the people": "technology and industry" and "spiritual life. " The "influential man" had "creative views" on these topics that the author attempts to summarize.
The deed is first and last. The deed is the sole true content of human life. The deed is, of course, also the most difficult thing, for it demands courage. . . . (p. 8)
We technicians, who begin with the substances, have to wed our
spirits to the substances. . . . By the way, Goethe was one of the
2
greatest technicians of all time (Grotaz) if one proceeds from this
spiritual foundation of technology. . . . He even foresaw the electrical television. . . . (p. 9)
. . . Instead of sounding battle together as Goethe did, we have marched divided and the remarkable figures of spirit-only and technology-only resulted, to put it briefly, (p. 10)
. . . And without this comradeship with the machine no person
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II D 453
could live today, to say nothing of a people. . . . It serves and serves again. --In it we have to honor the thought of serving as such. This serving, however, is the highest ethical idea and deed, and so, the ma- chine converts this idea into deed. . . . ( ! )
Of course, iron is hard and the machine is not made out of sugar. But the law of life is steel and not sugar, not porridge and puree. And only the heart and the soul made of steel achieve life. . . . (p. 12)
The machine is thus thoroughly in accord with the human being, a thing that corresponds to the human essence; only when we create this inner connection have we overcome the curse of the world, material- ism. And this is indeed one of the great achievements of the new Ger- many: the introduction of technology into the soul. . . so that it no longer has to stand outside freezing. . . .
The technician spoke at length and penetratingly. . . .
And refreshed as if by a chalybeate bath, I go to the beach, breathe the sea air in blissfully that likewise refreshes the lungs like steel, (p.
14)
With unheard-of explicitness, the reshaping of human self-experience under the guiding star of the functional relation of the machine is recommended here as the Fascist way into modernity. This self-"reflection" of the living in steel and of "feeling" in hardness at the same time forms the basis for the cynical readiness of these philosophers of hardness to confess. They say everything now, but not so as to correct themselves, not to become "soft" and to think things over again. They seem not to notice that with every word, they give themselves away. They talk as if they were confessing, but without a single spark of insight. They admit everything so as not to compromise in anything. They want to become what their comrade, the machine, already is: men of steel. If images can convey something of the attitude toward life and political style, then the expressions Hitler's stirrup- holder, Alfred Hugenberg, chose in 1928 betray everything about what is to come.
What we need is not a mush but a solid block. In a mush we will per- ish; with the block, victory and reconstruction is a trifle. . . . We will be a block when the iron clamp of Weltanschauung binds us together and, in its embrace, causes everything soft and fluid to solidify and coa- lesce into rock. Those who could hinder us on the way to this goal
must step aside or allow themselves to be melted down. {Berliner Lokalanzeiger, 26-28 August 1928)
Excursus 4. The Fourth Reich-before the Third
In 1927, a Frankfurt philosophy professor, Friedrich Dessauer, presented a book entitled Philosophic der Technik. Das Problem der Realisierung (Philosophy of
454 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS.
FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? tScncralinfpcFror fiir bag beutfdpe Strajjennjcfen "Concrete and stone are material things.
Man gives them form and spirit.
National Socialist technology possesses in all material achievement ideal content.
Berlin, February 1940 General Inspector for the German Road System. "
technology. The problem of realization) in which he promised a "critical metaphysics" of technology. He turned against the technology Luddites who, in a merely superficial defense, regard technology as a "parvenu" of our civilization. Dessauer pursued the transition that runs through the epoch like a main theme, from resistance to affirmation, from resentment to "positive understanding. "
Affirmation itself constitutes the core of technical knowledge:
Humankind can fly but not because it, say, denies or suspends gravita- tion but by penetrating it in an intellectual process and, expressed pic- torially, coming to the other side of the matter. On the first side, it is its servant, on the other its master. . . .
Thus, gravitation is overcome, not denied. . . . Complete affirma- tion of everything that corresponds to the laws of nature and an un- swerving persistence in the framework of what is given by the laws of nature characterize the means, (pp. 40-41)
The affirmation of the so-called laws of nature serves the interest of controlling them; if they are controlled, they can serve human goals. When Dessauer calls for an affirmation of technology, this means the affirmation of affirmation-
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 455
domination of the means of domination. In the double Yes, the steel subject of the future stirs; it is inseparable from an increased domination by this subject of itself: for this reason, the masters' theory of that period talks incessantly of hero- ism. This mean nothing other than increased self-coercion; the rhetorics of cour- age here means to risk a higher degree of self-mashing.
The machine, for its part, emits a Yes to its inventor as soon as the latter sees that "it works. " As soon as it has "stepped into existence," it possesses a particular ontic quality: It embodies something that did not occur in nature but now exists because the spirit of invention has made it--like a new shape in creation. "We are in the middle of a day of creation" (p. 52).
What does the Fourth Reich mean?
Kant, with a consciousness of an all-encompassing view of the world, distinguished three realms (Reiche) from one another. The first is that of natural science; he called the work, "Critique of Pure Reason. " . . . How is natural science possible? is the key question that opens the way. He gives the answer: through the forms of contemplation, time and space . . . and through the equally a priori forms of understand-
ing . . . the categories through which it works up experience (p. 54). On the basis of this mental equipment, natural science, as knowledge of appearances, is possible. . . .
He discovers the second realm in the experience of ethical law, that omnipotent, unconditional (categorical) imperative that gives the will direction. . . . Theoretical reason of the first realm cannot enter this realm; here, the higher, practical reason reigns that opens up the super- sensuous to the life of the will. . . .
In Kant's ordering, the borders separate the first realm completely from the second. But is such a separation bearable? Kant himself forced an opening through. In the third realm it is a matter of "feeling," of the subjugation of the objects of experience to the goal by means of the power of judgment. This is the aesthetic and functional realm, (pp. 55-56)
But one would try in vain to find in Kant enlightenment about the dimension that cuts most deeply into the life of the present. "In the fourth realm (Reich), we enter a new land that opens up technology to us. " The Fourth Reich is that of in- ventions, those things that have been brought into existence only by human be- ings, the immeasurable potential of what can still be invented and realized. Ac- cording to Dessauer, technology means nothing other than to call the slumbering shapes of the Fourth Reich into reality through invention. It is as if technology reached over into the sphere of the Ding an sich (thing in itself), which according to Kant is inaccessible to us, in order to create out of this sphere previously nonex- isting objects of experience, machines. The machine, however, is no Ding an sich, no creature "out there" whose possibility of existence cannot be reached by
456 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
? Heinrich Hoerle, Monument to the Unknown Prostheses, 1930. (Reproduced by permission of the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal. )
any understanding, but rather is there through us. At the same time, what "func- tions" in it is not only from us; there is in it a "power that does not come from me" (Dessauer, p. 60). World-revolutionizing power can be immanent in inven- tions. Dessauer refers, for example, to the ontological puzzle of X rays, which, although a material natural phenomenon, can be produced only by human inter- vention. They constitute a new form of energy that did not previously exist. In- ventions of this quality are ontological enrichments in the inventory of existence--whereby humanity is allotted the role of coauthor of the existing. Through humanity, creation augments itself. Nature provides only the material for the human elevation of the pregiven into a technical supernature.
Everything invented and built by human beings, however, encounters human- ity from the outside like a power of nature-
like mountains, the gulf stream. . . . People have to react. Whoever lives in the mountains lives in accord with the mountains. . . . The power of technology is thus. . . .
. . . The power of newly created forms of technology possesses ba- sically the same autonomy as the creation of a mountain, a river, an ice age or a planet. This fact intensifies the already deeply disturbing extent of a continuing creation, to which we are witnesses and, even more, in which we participate. It is a monstrous fate to be an active participant in creation in such a way that things that have been created by us re- main in the visible world having an effect with an unimaginable autono-
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II ? 457
? Favorable news from the Fourth Reich: "The rota-arm (from Engineer Meyer of the Rotaworks in Aachen) is somewhat lighter and more agreeable than the Jagen- berg arm. In its flexibility, it far exceeds that of the human arm. " Here, the worka- day arm with the adjustable working claw is juxtaposed with the Sunday arm with its attractive imitation hand.
mous power: The greatest earthly experience of mortal beings, (pp. 65-66)
This philosophy of technology pretends to be heroically optimistic because it conceives of humanity as the ongoing creator of the cosmos. It is never allowed to resign before the overpowering misery, but must bring over more and more new shapes out of that Fourth Reich in which the solutions to all urgent problems already stand ready, slumbering, and only "await" their discovery. Thus, beside nature there grows a "dynamically pulsating metacosmos," "created" by human beings.
Do we have to point out the absurd aspects of this philosophy? Its deception- once again --lies in the concept of the subject. The subject's heroism is nothing other than the refusal to conceive any distress or suffering as its "own. " The ego becomes heroic because it is too cowardly to be weak. It "sacrifices" because it hopes to gain something. Technology thus appears as the promise of a total solu- tion to problems. One day, the philosopher implies, technology will have worked off all misery. In an astoundingly shortsighted way, he overlooks the destructive aspect of "invention. " The fighting subject made of heroism and steel has to be blind to its own destructiveness. The more it threatens to break under the massive suffering of the technical, dominated world, the more optimistically it simulates the heroic pose. At the heart of this theory stands a subject who can no longer suffer because it has become wholly prosthesis.
Excursus 5: Total Prosthesis and Technical Surrealism
A diagnostic history of ideas owes a great deal to that cynical garrulousness of historical persons from whom an inner urge and the external compulsion of crisis force out statements that better controlled individuals would never let pass their
458 ? ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II
lips. Often they are screwballs who prefer to speak when so-called normal people think it cleverer to be silent. One of these compulsive talkers who supercleverly reveal something that otherwise nobody would be able to uncover so easily is the "expressionist philosopher" (Scholem) Adrien Turel. In 1934 he published, under the sign of the new German spirit, a ludicrous book: Technokratie, Autarkie, Genetokratie (Technocracy, autarky, genetocracy), in which curious detailed knowledge combines with megalomaniac, expansive perspectives to form a mys- terious, idiosyncratic speculation.
No conventional categorization can be applied to this text; it is neither mono-
graph nor essay nor theorem nor manifesto. As a singular document of a theoreti-
cal surrealism, it eludes all classification. Its tone is serious and pompous, at the
same time, noncommital in its apparently playful inclination to combine the most
disparate things. Statements about nomadic and agrarian existence slide over as
in a game into thoughts on industrialism, metallurgy, and quantum theory, clima-
tology and the philosophy of time, subzero physics and astronomy --from the
Aurignac cave dwellers to mathematical description of geopolitical power struc-
tures. At this market fair of a confused intellect, in which Turel, like an
3
Achternbusch for the philosophy of history, calls out his insights, rare "gems"
are to be found--combinations of prosthesis theory and philosophy of technology that cause one to prick up one's ears.
Technology is only a prosthesis; the labor we employ in technology is never anything else than a great offloading of compulsions to surrender our authentic essence in order to grasp the zones and concerns of other kinds of essences without thereby also having to give up our human- ness, our Germanness. (p. 34)
Turel dreams, insanely realistically, of a new level of Western technocracy that secures for itself "as a class of generals and leaders," a total domination over the strivings of the rest of the world to catch up --he is referring in particular to Japan, which, according to Turel, has already stolen European models of thinking, prostheses, technologies. Only that would be the "social psychology of the com- ing age. " Philosophy itself, in processing thought models, elevates itself
to a bold system of prostheses that will be indispensable in the future and that is to be placed beside the prosthetic system of the airplane, the submarine, the automobile, etc. , as at least their equal, (p. 34)
If it is a fact that we will no longer be able to protect the great blan- ket patent of our technical and scientific prosthetic system from the clutches of the second zone, and in the foreseeable future, also the third zone [today, we would say Second and Third Worlds;-Author], quite independently of whether we ourselves betray the methods of fabrica- tion to these zones . . . then, on the other hand, it is not to be forgot- ten that we, out of ourselves, produce, create at least an enormous new
ARTIFICIAL LIMBS. FUNCTIONALIST CYNICISMS II D 459
increase in the style of prosthesis produced by machine to date, which can be called globally the total prosthesis of a technical kind. . . .
This technical prosthetic system, which is a typically masculine achievement, can only be compared with the prenatal, complete en- closure in the body of the mother.
All people, no matter of what sex(! ), were initially, in their prenatal period, caught in the great prototype of every nourishing landscape, ev- ery protective sphere, every prison, too, i. e. , they have experienced the enclosure in the body of a mother. The masculine counterpart to this is the development of technocratic prostheses, of power, of financial power and of the technical apparatuses for a complete capsule system in which individual people seem to be enclosed for better or worse. . . .
When the British fly over the Himalayas in the total prostheses of their fighter planes, and do so completely systematically with entire squadrons, that is no crazy record setting, nor is it money out the win- dow, but rather, it is for all India a symbol of the superior prosthetic power of Britain and Europe, (pp. 59-60)
How confused does a thinker have to be to see so clearly? Madness sees through the method completely. For the rest, those who cannot follow Turel can console themselves with Gershom Scholem's analysis; he knew the author per- sonally and, as early as the twenties, "understood literally not one word" of his utterances (Von Berlin nach Jerusalem, pp. 157-58).
Notes
1. H. Goetz, Erwin Piscator in Selbstzeugnissen undBilddokumenten (Hamburg, 1974), pp. 18f. 2. [Grotaz is an acronym from "grosster Techniker aller Zeiten" and a play on Goring's
megalomaniac, insulting nickname "Grofaz". --Trans. ]
3. [Achternbusch is a German film director. --Trans. ]
Chapter 20
Political Algodicy:
Cynical Cosmologies and the Logic of Pain
What is all this racket from constructions, ships, mines, battles and books seen from outer space: in comparison with the earth's crust, nothing!
Oswald Spengler, Urfragen (Munich, 1965)
Even if the hard Nazi sport subjects proclaimed their sympathies with prosthetic life under the mask of vitalism and in this way sought to counter pain through denial, in the end they, too, could not evade the question of the meaning of pain. Like nothing else, pain, which can announce death, challenges metaphysical meaning. The latter wants to know what the immeasurable suffering of this cen- tury means, who is responsible for it, and to what whole it could contribute.
Everyday understanding, made safe through routine from thoughts that are too deep, does not let itself get caught in such discussions. It thus remains protected from explicit cynicism. Mostly it does not say anything more than "that's life. " But those who take on the question and risk having an "opinion" about suffering are drawn into a region where one has to very sure of one's metaphysical views, or else become cynical.
Algodicy means a metaphyscial interpretation of pain that gives it meaning. In modernity it takes the place of theodicy, as its converse. In the latter, it was asked, How are evil, pain, suffering, and injustice to be reconciled with the exis- tence of God? Now the question is, If there is no God and no higher meaning, how can we still bear the pain? The function of politics as substitute theology im- mediately becomes clear. The nationalists as a rule did not hesitate for a moment to claim that the immeasurable suffering of the war had been meaningful as sac- rifice for the Fatherland. The momentum of such claims was hindered solely by the fact that the lost war and the victors' dictatorship in peacetime, as well as the disappointed revolution, put this nationalist offer of meaning into question. One might consider whether the much-quoted legend of the dagger thrust was a
460
a biological "grand
view" for himself.
Heroes fall
and sons leave their mothers. They are all
simple laws.
The breathing and batting of an eyelid in a colossal happening. (Wailing)
POLITICAL ALGODICY ? 461
desperate rescue attempt for the political algodicy of the Right. For to realize that Germany would lose the war could be expected from even the densest nationalist. But to admit that "everything had been for nothing" and that the untold torments had no political meaning at all --for many contemporaries that was unbearable. The legend of the dagger thrust was no naive myth but a willed self-delusion of the Right. Their effort is also witnessed by Hitler's "bitter fortune. "
Those who ask for the meaning of the suffering in the First World War were drawn by the question into a region where politics, natural philosophy, and medi- cal cynicism met. Scarcely any speaker in those years refrained from medical metaphors: sickness, cancerous growths, operations, and healing through crisis. In Mein Kampf, Hitler spoke of the violent catastrophe that was to be preferred to a creeping political tuberculosis. The medical metaphors of the Right were in- tended to eliminate the sickness as well as the enemy within with "steel and radia- tion. " The Left at least registered the double danger of the sickness.
If, however, the revolutionary proletariat wants to be the doctor who has to take on the operation that is recognized as being unavoidable, then it is not allowed to continually soil its hands in the open festering sores of the sickness. For then, during the operation, the surgeon him- self would carry the poisonous substances into the body of the patient again, so vitiating his task of ridding the patient of them.
