No More Learning

The god of the ancient Hebrews has many traits of a bad- tempered, embittered, old man who no longer completely understands the
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world and who, with a jealous and mistrustful countenance, observes everything that goes on down below. Nevertheless, the reprisal for Cain's original crime is post- poned until the Day of Judgment. God grants himself and humankind a respite, and the myths about the Day of Judgment emphasize that a considerable amount of time will elapse before it arrives--the time of a great opportunity. It is the time God needs to become just and the time we need to understand what proper living is. Both mean basically the same thing.
How the Christianization of power in the end phase of the Roman Empire, and even more during the European Middle Ages, led to cynical effects, was indicated earlier in this chapter ("The Cynicism of State and Hegemonic Power"). Catholic masters' cynicism reached its peak at the time of the Crusades, in which the ori-
What can Cain answer? Whatever he
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gins of the Inquisition are to be found. If we express this concisely with the phrase "the persecution of Christians by Christians," this outlines the reflexive-cynical practice of lying by the master church, whose gloomiest representatives -- in the style of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor--do not shrink from incinerating the returned Jesus just as they did those heretics who strove to revive his teachings. They knew precisely what they were doing, and it is probably a romantic simpli- fication to label these gentlemen of the Inquisition Catholic "fanatics," as histori- ography so creepily puts it. Would that not mean to underestimate them and to declare them to be blind agents of a purported "faith" and a rigid "conviction"? Can we seriously attribute such naivetes to powerful and educated representatives of the Christ-religion? Do they not themselves appeal to God incarnate as their idol who had become conspicuous as a rebel and, for his part, stood in the tradi- tion of the founder of a religion who, in a holy rage, had shattered God's own inscribed commandments on the ground? Don't they know? Don't they have to know? And, as inquisitors, don't they have daily impressed on their minds that this religion is based on a call to "imitate Christ"--so that the imitators, precisely when they behave "heretically," are possibly closer to the source than the learned and cynical administrators of the letter?
It has already been shown how Friedrich Schlegel conceived of the kynical dimension of the Christ religion; as religious resistance against the power state, in fact, against every form of raw, unreflective, and egoistically insensitive worldliness. As soon as a power state in the robes of Christianity-whether it be as papacy or as the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation --was established and the brutal world of the masters began to become too impudent, kynical ascetics appeared in the Middle Ages who, with the death skull and the Great Reaper tried to cut the haughty men of the world down to size. They tried to pro- voke power-hungry conquerors of lands to critical self-reflection by pointing out that after they died, they would possess just as much ground as was necessary for burial (a motif in the critique of power that has been kept alive up to Brecht's lyri- cal cynicisms of the 1920s and beyond). The kynical Christianity of the Middle Ages, resolutely committed to reflection and resistance, with its memento mori fought in ever-recurring waves against the tendencies of luxuria and superbia, of bodily lust and unreflecting worldly greed for life. The great reform movements, whose first wave emanated from the Cluniac monasteries and whose influence stretched well into the raw and chaotic warring feudal systems of the tenth and eleventh centuries, appear to me to be indeed kynically inspired in the religious sense. The second great wave, which in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries spread ascetic and mystical experiences into broader circles, also contained kyni- cal elements. It was no different with the beginnings of reform in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the kynical element was even stronger in the great era of the reformations and reformers, among whom Luther ("the Pope is the Devil's
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sow"), who combined in his person kynical prototypes from Moses and David up to Eulenspiegel (his literary contemporary), advanced with a primitive polemical intensity the idea of a self-renewal of religion from the "spirit" and against the idols of tradition.
The late Middle Ages provides examples of the overturning of ascetic motifs --as shown by the following novella:
A beautiful young woman had been wooed by an admirer for a long time, but, for fear of harming her soul and her chastity, she rejected him again and again. Her resistance against the man's wooing was sup- ported by a priest of the town, who continually admonished her to pre- serve her virtue. One day when the priest was forced to leave the town to travel to Venice, he made the woman solemnly pledge not to weaken in his absence. She promised, but on the condition that the priest bring her one of the famous mirrors from Venice. During the priest's ab- sence, she in fact withstood all temptations. After his return, however, she asked for the promised Venetian mirror. Thereupon the priest pulled a skull out from under his robe and thrust it cynically into the young woman's face: "Vain woman, here you see your true face! Con- sider that you must die and that you are nothing before God. " The woman was horrified to the marrow. That same night, she surrendered herself to her suitor and from then on enjoyed with him the joys of love. (Unfortunately, I had to relate this story from memory, since I could not relocate the source; therefore, I can vouchsafe only the gist, but not the wording or detail of the novella. )
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As soon as Christians recognize themselves in the death skull as in a mirror, they can come to the point where the fear of death recedes before the fear of not having lived. They then understand that it is precisely the climbing into bed with the "whore world" that represents the chance of this irretrievable life.
From the beginning, Christian religion is haunted by a characteristic problem: that of not being able to believe. As organized religion, it is, in its innermost core, already a religion of bad faith, of insincerity, namely, to the extent that it is based not on the imitation of Christ but on the imitation of the imitation, on the legend of Christ, the myth of Christ, the dogma and idealization of Christ. The process of dogmatization is marked by bad faith, for there are two dimensions of unavoid- able uncertainty that, through dogmatization, are deceivingly turned into cer- tainty. First, what was left behind by Jesus was extraordinarily fragmentary and not comprehensible in its authenticity with final certainty, so that it is all too un- derstandable that in the centuries following Jesus' death, the most diverse in- terpretations of Christianness could be developed. The mere fact that they devel- oped demonstrate a certain "tradition of inspiration," that is, a handing down of the original experience the first Christians had shared with Jesus --the experience
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 283
of an unconditional affirmation that, as love and fearlessness, must have made an indelible impression on all those who encountered the early Christians. The dog- matization arises, according to one point of view, in the competitive struggle of various Christian "organizations" and mythologies, none of which can be sure whether, after all, "the spirit" is not also present in the rival Christian organization and mythology. In the obvious and undeniable plurality of "Christendoms," only a primary bad faith can want to establish itself as the sole true faith. This marks the second dimension of bad faith: In the repudiation of alternative Christendoms and in the corresponding "theologicaF- intellectual elaboration of the Christ reli- gion, the antagonism between myth and understanding, between faith and knowl- edge, had to break out--and the more starkly it broke out, the stronger became the tendency to bridge it with disingenuous self-manipulative acts of conscious- ness. In the theological dogmatization of the Christ religion, innumerable lies were told in this dimension of the objectively problematic --as if one believed "one's own faith. " But the history of Christian theology and dogmatics is at least just as much a history of doubting-but-wanting-to-believe as a history of "believ- ing. " Christian theology is the equally immense and spectral attempt to seek cer- tainty precisely where the nature of things does not permit certainty. This theol- ogy has a demonstrable autohypnotic dimension; it begins working on what we today call "ideology," that is, the instrumental use of understanding to paralogi- cally legitimate pregiven aims, interests, and identifications. Even in its first mo- ment, theology is a hybrid construction of faith and doubt that wants to lie its way back into the simplicity of "mere faith. " It formulates "confessions" in a dogmati- cally fixed form, whereas a confession by nature can relate only to what is an im- mediate certainty for confessors, that is, their self-experiences and inwardness: In these they do not find primarily the formulated faith as such; they find doubt, not certainty. What we today call "confession" probably circumscribes the sum of things we doubt rather than the things of which we can be sure. This legacy of bad faith has been passed on from the Christian structure of mentality to practi- cally everything that has arisen as ideology and Weltanschauung on Western soil in the time since Christ. There is, on our cultural soil, a tradition that teaches how to present what is uncertain per se in the raiment of "conviction," what is believed as something that is known: the confession as a strategic lie.
This inner problematic of bad faith experienced a dramatic escalation in the wrangle of the Catholic Counter- Reformation with the Protestant movements. These movements, if we observe only their intrareligious historical emergence, had become necessary precisely because of the phenomena connected with bad faith, which, in Catholicism, had resulted in an insufferable amount of corruption and deceitfulness. The reforms were concerned with the miserable credibility of "faith," the hollowness, coarseness, and cynicism in the spectacle of the Catholic church. When the Counter-Reformation then armed itself theologically against the Protestant challenge, it inevitably felt a compulsion to reform because it could
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? Honore Daumier, Christian Love--As Practiced in Spain.
not overcome the opponent without studying its "armament" and its critique of Catholicism. From then on, a mute cynical reflexivity increased within Catholic theology, which practiced thinking the opponent's thoughts without letting its own "confessions" show that it had long since known more than it said and "believed. " Talk like the rearguard, think like the vanguard-that became the psychological- strategic secret for the functioning of the Jesuit order, which, like a spiritual mili- tia, constituted the intellectual elite in the struggle against Protestantism. In some areas, this technique is still employed today: The conservative style of ideology --to work with a high degree of consciousness toward an instrumental diminution of one's own intelligence and a self-censorship through artful conventionality--has to the present day something of the former Jesuit manner. In the modern world, being a Catholic really has to be learned for it presupposes the capacity to develop a bad faith of the second degree. Poor Hans Kiing. After such brilliant studies he
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should have known that the Catholic way of being intelli-
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gent pays off only when one also knows how to decently conceal that one knows too much.
The history of modern "secularization" also touches on cynical phenomena in religion. In this process of "secularization," the partly kynically admonishing, partly cynically intimidating propaganda of skulls and skeletons comes to an end. In a fully militarized, consumption-oriented society of the capitalist (or "so- cialist") type, the memento mori no longer has a chance. In the death's head, no one any longer sees his "true face. " Since the nineteenth century, such death mo- tifs have been forced into a "black romanticism" and have been treated only aes- thetically. The tension between religion and worldly society over what constitutes "real living" has (deceptively) dissolved without residue in favor of the "worldly," political, social, cultural forces. Those who demand "more life," a more "inten- sive life," a "higher life," or a "real life" see themselves, at least since the eigh- teenth century, presented with a series of nonreligious revitalizations that have assumed something from the positive legacy of religion: art, science, erotics, traveling, consciousness of the body, politics, psychotherapy, and the like. All of them can contribute something to the reconstruction of that "full life" that was the dream and memory core of religion. In this sense, it is justifiable to speak of religion as "becoming superfluous. " The living being from whom not so much is taken anymore does not want to get everything back later. Human life that no longer remains so far below its own potentialities has, in fact, less reason to seek a compensatory religiosity. For those for whom "life on earth" is no longer so miserable, heaven itself no longer promises something "completely different. " The principal powers of devitalization--family, state, the military --have, since the nineteenth century, created their own ideologies of revitalization (con- sumerism, sexism, sports, tourism, the cult of violence, mass culture) that the conservative clerical groups cannot match with anything similarly attractive. Modern mass vitalisms contribute a great deal to the circumstance that today's so- cieties, at least on the level of the more robust vital functions, no longer thirst for religion. On the whole, they have become religiously dreamless. When today too little of something is felt, it is expressed in a language of worldly concerns: too little money, too little time, too little sex, too little fun, too little security, and so on. Only recently has a new phrase surfaced: There is too little meaning --and with this neoconservative sob, a "demand for religion" is again heard, a demand that has led to a flourishing trade in meaning, without much feel for the fact that it is the addiction to meaning that gives all sorts of nonsense the opportunity to sell itself as the way to salvation. Only so much is certain: The coarser (so-called material) possibilities of revitalization in our culture, precisely when we avail ourselves of them to some extent, expose deeper levels of our being dead that are not really touched by the vitalism of consumption, sport, disco fever, and free sexuality. This inner level of death is what was earlier called "nihilism," a mixture
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? Standard-bearing trumpeter of the SS Death Head Units.
of disillusionment and violent despair stemming from the feeling of emptiness and arbitrary craving. Without doubt, experiences of this type played a subliminal role in national socialism, that, in some respects, resembles a nihilistic religion. It was, by the way, the only political force in the twentieth century that, in a petu- lant masters' cynical pose, again dared to appropriate for itself the old symbols of the Christian admonition of death: Its ideological vanguard, the SS, chose, not without a good feel for self-representation, the skull and crossbones as its symbol. In matters concerning disinhibition, absolutely nothing can outdo German fas- cism. Fascism is the vitalism of the dead; as political "movement," they want to have their dance. This vitalism of death, which characterizes Western cultural in- stitutions to the present day, is embodied, literarily as well as in reality, in vam- pire figures that, for lack of their own life force, emerge as the living dead among the not yet extinguished to suck their energies into themselves. Once the latter are sucked dry, then they too become vampires. Once they have become devital- ized at their core, they crave the vitality of others.
In Christian times, the appeal to reflect on authentic living runs media vita in morte sumus -- in the midst of life, we are nevertheless already surrounded by death. Today, do we not have to say, conversely, media morte in vita sumus--in the midst of all-pervading death, there is nevertheless something in us that is more alive than is lived by our lifeless life? What do the anxious person, the security person, the wage-labor person, the defense person, the care-laden person, the history person, the planning person know of life? When we add up the contents of our life, we find that there is a lot that is left out and little fulfillment, a lot of dull dreaming and little presence.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 287
Here, life means being not yet dead. To learn to live again leads via a great labor of recollection, but not a labor that only stirs up old stories. The innermost recollection leads not to a story but to a force. To touch this force means to ex- perience a flood of ecstasy. This experience ends up not in a past but in a rapturous now.
The Cynicism of Knowledge
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What is truth ?
Pontius Pilate
You can trust a statistic only when you have manipulated it yourself.
Winston Churchill
Cleopatra's nose: had it been shorter, then the entire face of the earth would have been changed.
Blaise Pascal
The main thing in life is simply to go freely, lightly, pleasantly, frequently, every evening to the commode. O stercus pretio-
sum! that is the great result of life in all classes.
Denis Diderot, Rameau's Nephew
All culture after Auschwitz, including the penetrating critique of it, is garbage.
T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics
30
Diogenes is the real founder of the Gay Science.
sify. Should he be counted among the philosophers? Is he similar to a "researcher"? Does he remind us of what we call a scientist? Or is he "only" a "popularizer" of knowledges that have been gained elsewhere? None of these labels quite fit. Diogenes' intelligence is nothing like that of professors, and whether it could be compared with that of artists, dramatists, and writers remains uncertain because, as with the kynics in general, nothing of his own work has been handed down. Kynical intelligence did not assert itself in writing, even if, in the good old days of Athenian kynicism, there were supposed to be all sorts of cheeky pamphlets and parodies from the quills of kynics (as suggested by Laer- tius). To make use of intelligence in a kynical way, therefore, probably means to parody rather than propose a theory; it means to be able to find ready answers rather than to brood over insoluble, deep questions. The first Gay Science is satir- ical intelligence. In this it resembles literature more than systematized knowl-
As such, he is not easy to clas-
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edge. Its insights disclose the questionable and ridiculous aspects of the grand, serious systems. Its intelligence is floating, playful, essayistic, not laid out on se- cure foundations and final principles. Diogenes inaugurates the Gay Science by treating serious sciences in a tongue-in-cheek manner. How much truth is con- tained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter
31
that can stand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot stand satire is false. To parody a theory and its proponents is to carry out the experiment of experiments with it. If, as Lenin says, the truth is concrete, then saying the truth must also assume concrete forms, which means, on the one hand, embodiment, and on the other, radical dismantling; what was "concrete" will become even clearer once it has been put through the wringer. Thus, if we are looking for a label for the father of the Gay Science, the first pantomimic materialist, it could be: the satyr capable of thinking. His main theo- retical achievement consists in defending reality against the theorists' delusion 32
that they have conceptualized it.
side of the satyr and satire, of the mobile and mentally alert sense for reality, which is able to restore to the "spirit" its freedom in relation to its own product and to "sublate" (aufheben) the known and the acquired -- in true Hegelian fashion.
Satire as procedure? To the extent that it is an art of intellectual opposition, it can be learned to a certain degree, when its fundamental gestures and turns of expression are investigated. In any case, it takes up a position against whatever might loosely be called "high thinking": idealism, dogmatics, grand theory, Wel- tanschauung, sublimity, ultimate foundations, and the show of order. All these forms of a masters', sovereign, subjugating theory magically attract kynical taunt- ing. Here, the Gay Science finds its playing field. The kynic possesses an unerring instinct for those facts that do not fit into grand theories (systems). (All the worse for the fact? All the worse for the theory? ) Mentally alert, it finds the reply and the counterexample to everything that has been too well thought out to be true. Whenever the ruling and master thinkers present their great visions, the kynical moles set to work--indeed, perhaps what we in our scientific tradition call "cri- tique" is nothing other than a satirical function that no longer understands itself, namely, the realistic undermining from "below" of grand theoretical systems that
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are experienced as fortresses or prisons
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(i. e. , the actual methodological core of energy in "critique," as Marx so aptly put it with regard to Hegel) consists in "inverting" things. In the realistic sense that means: from the head onto the feet; but inversion in the other direction can some- times also prove useful: yoga for flatheaded realists.
Inversion --how is it done? In ancient kynical satire, we discover the most im- portant techniques that, incidentally, are related to the conceptual tools of the First Enlightenment (the Sophists). As soon as high theory says order, satire op- poses it with the concept of arbitrariness (and gives examples). If grand theory
Every truth requires a contribution from the
(see chapter 2). The satirical procedure
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 289
tries to speak of laws (nomoi), critique answers by appealing to nature (physis). If the former say cosmos, then the satirists reply, Cosmos may be there where we are not, in the universe, but wherever we human beings turn up, it would be better to speak of chaos. The proponent of order sees the great whole; the kynic sees also the little dismembered pieces. Grand theory looks toward the sublime; satire sees also what is absurd. Elevated Weltanschauung wants to notice only what has been achieved; in kynicism, it is also possible to speak of what has been botched. Idealism sees only the true, the beautiful, and the good, whereas satire takes the liberty of considering what is bent, crooked, or lousy also to be worth talking about. Where dogmatics postulates an unconditional duty toward truth, the Gay Science assumes from the start the right to lie. And where theory de- mands that the truth be presented in discursive forms (argumentatively self- contained texts, chains of sentences), the original critique knows of the possibili- ties of expressing the truth pantomimically and spontaneously. The latter also of- ten recognizes the best in "grand insights" through the jokes that can be made about them. When the guardians of morality perform a great tragedy because Oedipus has slept with his mother, and then believe that therefore the world is no longer in order and the great law of the gods and humankind is in danger, then kynical satire first admonishes us to stay calm. Let us see whether that is really so bad! Who is really harmed by this copulation that goes against the regulations? Only the naive illusion of law. How would it be, however, if human beings did not have to serve the law, but the law had to serve human beings? Did Isocrates not teach that human beings are the measure of all things? Poor Oedipus, don't make such a long face; remember that for the Persians and for dogs, too, mount- ing members of the family is also very much in fashion! Chin up, you old mother- fucker! Here, in Greek antiquity, an epochal threshold in the cultural history of irony has been crossed. The Sophist sages are so sure of being borne by universal principles that they can raise themselves above any mere conventionality. Only an unconditionally "culture-resistant" individual can become free enough for such apparently vice-ridden liberties. Only where the social nomos has already done its work can the deeply civilized person appeal to physis and think of the relaxa- tion of tension.
The master-thinkers let the theater of the world --the display of order, the great "law"--pass review before their mind's eye and cast visions that probably also in- clude pain and the negative but that cause them no pain. An overview is achieved only by those who overlook a lot (A. Gehlen). It is always the pain of others that the theoretical grand views of the "cosmos" call for in payment. According to kynical custom, by contrast, those who suffer by themselves must also scream by themselves. We do not have to see our life from a bird's-eye view or with the eyes of disinterested gods from another planet. Diogenes' anti-philosophy always talks in such a way that we realize that here we see a person in his own skin and he has no intention of leaving it. Whenever he is beaten up, Diogenes hangs a sign
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around his neck with the names of the culprits and walks through the city with it. That is enough theory, enough praxis, enough struggle, and enough satire.
In addition to its quick-witted, mentally alert way of dealing with the official
and linguistically coded cultural wares (theories, systems), kynical anti-
philosophy possesses three essential media by which intelligence can free itself
from "theory" and discourse: action, laughter, and silence. Nothing is achieved
by a mere juxtaposition of theory and praxis. When Marx claims in his famous
eleventh thesis on Feuerbach that philosophers had previously only interpreted
the world in different ways but that the point is to change it (through the world's
becoming philosophical, philosophy's becoming worldly), then, although borne
by a partially kynical impulse, he remains far below the level of an existential di-
alectical materialism. Diogenes, the existentialist, would not be able to stop
laughing about the way in which Marx again throws himself into the business of
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grand theory.
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txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
hibit a demonstrative silence and, with anarchistic laughter, he would rebuff the impudent demand to make the whole of one's life into a tool of a (good old idealistically) planned "praxis. "
If we wanted to write a history of the kynical impulse in the field of knowledge, it would have to take the form of a philosophical history of satire, or better still, a phenomenology of the satirical mind, as a phenomenology of combative con- sciousness and as a history of what has been thought in the arts (i. e. , as a philo- sophical history of art). Such a history has not been written and would not be necessary if the principles could be made comprehendible without the historical crutch. In any form of erudition, intelligence risks its life. Those who deal with the past risk fading into the past themselves without having understood what they have lost in it. Those who heed these cautions will find sufficient material for a history of the Gay Science hidden in the archives or dispersed in the research liter- ature. Rich traditions offer themselves for rediscovery: a great European silen- tium tradition that was at home not only in the churches, monasteries, and schools but also in the unresearched popular intelligence that is concealed in the eternal silence of the majorities --a silence in which there is also freedom and not merely speechlessness; insight and simplicity, not merely dullness and oppression. There is an even greater European tradition of satire in which the freedoms of art, the carnival, and criticism combined into a many-tongued culture of laughter. Here the main strand of a militant intelligence is probably revealed that bites like the kynical dogs without becoming doggedly pugnacious and that strikes more into its opponent's consciousness with its mockery, irony, inversions, and jokes than
at the opponent himself. Finally, there is an impressive tradition of action in which can be studied the ways in which people have taken their own insights "seri- ously" for the sake of a life whose chances they did not want to waste. That it was frequently an act of resistance is in the nature of things here. The "art of the possible" is not only what statesmen are supposed to master, but always comes
In the presence of so much rage to "change," Diogenes would ex-
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 291
? POLITIQUE. MORALE ET LITT^RAJRE.
J. Grandville, Models of satirical consciousness: the fool with bow and arrow; the Naked Truth. Advertisement for the periodical La Caricature (detail).
into play where people try, with awareness and intelligence, to protect the chance of their life. My favorite examples of such action --apart from some pieces of bravado of the type found in Eulenspiegel, Schweik, and some manifestations of revolutionary praxis --are provided by those emigrants who (especially) in the nineteenth century, set out from a hopelessly hidebound Europe to try their luck in the New World as freer people. In setting out this way there is something of the kynical force of vital intelligence and of the exodus of consciousness into the open world, where life still has a chance to be stronger than the suffocating powers of tradition, society, and conventions. If I were to say which individual action I hold to characterize an intelligence that not only "knows" but also "acts," I would probably choose Heinrich Heine's emigration to Paris in 1831 --this apex of conscious praxis in which a poet subjected his biography to the necessities and chances of the historical moment and left his homeland in order to be able to do what he believed he had to do for his own sake and that of his homeland. "I went because I had to"-and behind this "had to" there were not yet the police (as in the case of Marx and other refugees) but rather the insight that in a conscious life there are moments when we first have to do what we want in order then also to
35
The satirical-polemical-aesthetic dimension in the history of knowledge be- comes important because, in fact, it is the dialectic en marche. With it, the princi- ples of embodiment and resistance penetrate the course of socially organized thinking: the inexpressible individual element; single persons intuitively in touch with their existence; the "nonidentical" conjured up by Adorno; the thing-there
want to do what we have to do.
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that is already mistreated by any mere conceptual designation because it stimu- lates understanding (and only makes a "case of X" out of the singular). Where should this individual reality assure itself better of its existence -- apart from the arts --than in satire, in the ironic dissolution of imposed "orders," in playing with what pretends to be "law," in brief, in the embodiment of this highly nonserious matter that, after all, the living being is? Dialectical thinkers --whether philoso- phers, poets, or musicians --are those in whom polemics and the fierce and uncon- scionable animosity between thoughts and motives already form the inner work- ings of their "thinking" process. Their presence of mind suffices, if one can put it this way, for more than one thought. All great dialectical thinkers and artists thus carry within themselves a disputatious, forward-driving, and creative kynic or cynic that, from within, prescribes movement and provocation for their think- ing. Dialecticians are the movers of thoughts who cannot do otherwise than to give the antithesis to every thesis its due. We observe in them a partly comba- tively unsettled, partly epically measured form of discourse that
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stems from a feeling for the figural, melodic, and thematic in the composition of thought-in the disguised poet Plato no differently than in the philosophizing musician Adorno, in the grotesque and pompous dialectic of Rabelais as in the uninhibited streaming rhetoric of Ernst Bloch. It would be worth the effort sometime to por-
tray the inner kynical-cynical "partner" of the important masters --whether it be with Diderot or Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard, or Marx, with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, or Foucault. And what really happens when Sartre, the master dialectician of the twentieth century, confronts Flaubert, the grand cynic of the nineteenth century, on the thousands of pages of the Idiot of the Family (a con- frontation so full of philosophical and psychodynamic morsels that it is obviously impossible to talk about it in an incidental manner).
As we have said, kynicism cannot be a theory and cannot have its "own" the- ory. Cognitive kynicism is aform of dealing with knowledge, a form of relativiza- tion, ironic treatment, application, and sublation. It is the answer of the will to live to that which it has suffered at the hands of theories and ideologies-partly a spiritual art of survival, partly intellectual resistance, partly satire, partly "critique. "
"Critical theory" tries to protect life from the false abstractness and violence of "positive" theories. In this sense, the Frankfurt Critical Theory too inherited the kynical portions of those grand theories the nineteenth century handed down to the twentieth --of left Hegelianism with its existentialist and anthropological as well as its historical and sociological aspects, and of Marxism, as well as of Criti- cal Psychology, which became well known especially in the form of psychoanaly- sis. These are all, if properly understood, "theories" that contain within them the kynical form of treating theory (namely, the sublation of theory) and that can be made into "fixed systems" only at the cost of an intellectual regression. Such regressions have happened on a grand scale, and how much stupefaction has been
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perpetrated in the late nineteenth century and the whole of the twentieth by vulgar Hegelianism, vulgar Marxism, vulgar psychology, vulgar existentialism, and vulgar Nietzscheanism is all too crassly shown in recent social history. All these systems of stupefaction have dispatched the reflective agility of "Critical The- ories," established rigid dogmas as "knowledge," and left nothing of kynical sub- lation except arrogant presumption. In fact, the kynical sublation of theory stems from a conscious not-knowing, not from a knowing-better. It releases us to a new and fresh not-knowing, instead of letting us become rigid in certainties. For with "convictions" only the desert grows. Against this, Frankfurt Critical Theory achieved a great deal by attempting again and again to "destupefy" the theoretical inheritance of the nineteenth century and, above all, by trying to save the elements of truth in Marxism from its degeneration in Leninist and, still more, in Stalinist dogmatics.
In its good times, Marxism was really a vehicle of an active intelligence, and it knew how to fertilize all the human sciences with its historical-critical con- sciousness. The materialist conception of history [Kautsky; --Trans. ] has always contained hundreds of possibilities for "another history" and for a history of the Other. A real history of the Other, however, can be written only by those who are the Other and the Others and have decided to let this Otherness live and to fight for the freedom to be allowed to be so. The most significant examples today are the history of "femaleness" and the history of homosexuality. With the relating of their suppression and formation, both come simultaneously to the conscious- ness of a freedom that is now becoming real. By talking about themselves --in his- tory and in the present-- women and homosexuals also celebrate the beginning of a new era that they will be "a part of in a different way than they were previously. History must be like this. It must proceed from something and lead to something that lives now and that lays claim to more and more life and rights to life for the Now and Later. What is passe on a vital level cannot be considered passable on the level of living knowledge. The historical is reduced to what has been finished and what has only passed but is not yet over--the unfinished, the imperfect, the inherited evil, the historical hangover. Whenever people and groups set about to finish for themselves such an inherited chapter of the unfinished, then memory and history will become useful forces for them, whether in the individual realm, as in psychotherapy, or in the collective realm, as in struggles for liberation.
This distinguishes an existential historiography from the kind Nietzsche justifiably called "museal" history-a history that serves as distraction and decora- tion rather than as concentration and vitalization. We can call existential histori- ography kynical and museal-decorative historiography cynical. The former tells of all we have come through, battered but not broken--just as the Jewish view of history grew out of the insight into the transitoriness of foreign empires and into its own persistent continuance. In this same way Marxism--in its good times-created a possibility of systematically narrating the history of oppres-
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sions, whether this is called slavery, as in antiquity, serfdom as in the Middle Ages (which, e. g. , in Russia lasted until 1861), or proletarian existence as in the present. But the language in which the history of oppression in the name of Marx- ist ideology will be told one day remains open--in any case, certainly no longer in the language of Marxism;
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perhaps in that of a critique of cynical reason; per- haps in a feminist language; perhaps in a metaeconomic, ecological language. Cynical historiography, by contrast, sees "in all worldly things" only a hopeless cycle; in the life of the peoples, as in the life of individuals, in human life as in organic life in general, it sees a growing, flourishing, withering, and dying: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. "There is nothing new under the sun! " is
36
its motto, and even this is nothing new.
which we have marched and will continue to march, over the bodies of those who were silly enough to believe they could stand in the way of our will to power, our thousand-year Reich, our historical "mission. "
Besides "critical" history, "critical" psychology is the second of the human sciences with a kynically effective barb. Today, with the progressive psy- chologizing of society, that is no longer so readily understandable because for us, the kynical shock of psychological enlightenment already lies in the dim past. At best, we became somewhat aware of the offensive side of psychoanalysis in the Freudo-Marxist spectacles of May 1968 --insofar as we were willing to see any- thing in psychoanalysis other than a great self-mystification of bourgeois society that oppresses, distorts, and manipulates individuals and finally says to them, when, as a result, they don't feel well: Your unconscious is to blame. Only the Freudian Left has transmitted something of the original kynical bit of psychoana- lytic enlightenment in that-- from Wilhelm Reich to Alice Miller --it knew at the same time how to avoid the pitfalls of analytic orthodoxy.
In chapter 6 (the final section), we indicated how the explosive power of psy- choanalysis is initially connected with the fact that Freud equates the unconscious with the domain of sexual secrets. Psychological curiosity was thereby channeled in an extremely successful way toward what has always interested people most of all anyway. As the "unconscious" it was on the whole neutralized and excused, and as sexuality it was, on top of everything else, the most fascinating thing around. Under this banner, the cognitive kynicism of psychoanalysis could breach social consciousness --at first through a small opening, but later there was scarcely anything left of the wall. Then it came out: "Everything you always wanted to know about sex. " Kynics could not possibly fulfill their task more ele- gantly than Freud did. In immaculate prose and dressed in the best English tweed, the Old Master of analysis managed, while maintaining the highest respect, to talk about almost everything that one does not talk about. That in itself is already an Eulenspiegel action without parallel in the history of culture, and it could proba- bly succeed only because Freud personally did not underline the subversive, satir- ical, and rebellious side of his undertaking but on the contrary did his utmost to
Or it sees in history a victory route on
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give his work the appearance of science. The miracle of psychoanalysis is how it so respectably conjures all its objects-- the oral, anal, and genital. It is as if in refined society someone burped at the dinner table and nobody found anything exceptional in it. Freud managed what would leave even Diogenes green with envy: He erected a theory that makes us all, whether we like it or not, into kynics (if not even into cynics).
It happens this way: In the beginning, everyone is a pure, natural being, born from the mother's body into a well-bred society, not knowing what is proper. We grow up as sexually polyvalent, "polymorphously perverse" subjects, and kyni- cism is universally disseminated in our nurseries which at first, in everything lives, thinks, wishes, and acts completely out of our own bodies. Freud imported a kynical phase into the life history of everyone and also found rudimentary expla- nations for why adults still tell cynical jokes or are even inclined to make cynicism their attitude toward life. In every one of us, there was once a primitive dog and a primitive swine, beside which Diogenes is a pale imitation--but we, as well- behaved people, cannot for the life of us remember anything about it. It is not enough that this human primitive animal, as the educators say, "defecates" and performs in front of everybody what we adults do there where only our con- science looks on. Not only does it piss in its diapers and against the wall; this be- ing at times even develops an interest unworthy of a human being in its own excre- ment and does not even shrink from smearing the wall with it. That Diogenes did such things not even his enemies claimed. In all superfluity, this being likes to frequently hold those parts of the body for which adults only know the Latin names and shows in everything a reckless self- conceit, as if it personally and no one else were the center of its world. That this kynical primitive animal in the end even wants to kill its father and marry its mother--or conversely --that, after all that has happened, is registered somewhat with resignation. Indeed, even when analysts maintain that the Oedipus complex is the universal law of psychic development in human beings, this is accepted like one more piece of bad news among many others. (Later it is noticed that Freud is interested only in the tragic version of the Oedipus myth, not in the kynical dedramatization of the story. ) Af- ter these psychoanalytic revelations, parenthood must unavoidably turn into a bat- tle between philosophical schools. For we have to become a Stoic, when we have the kynic physically right in our own house. If a connection between Freud's ethics and those of Epicure has often been noticed, that is because the Epicurean line was the most successful in finding a compromise between Stoicism and kyni- cism, between moral duty and self-realization, between
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the reality principle and the pleasure principle, between "culture" and those who experience "discontent in it. " Societies in the world era of states send their members continually on those "too long marches" from which the living try to deviate by allowing themselves short cuts.
With respect to our infantile side, we have thus all arisen from kynicism. In
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this point, psychoanalysis does not allow us any evasion. However, it itself be- comes evasive by taking a thoroughly ambivalent stance toward the tension be- tween the infantile and the adult. For it always knows how to arrange things so that the analyst remains respectable while the patient-child remains bestial. He makes a protege, so to speak, out of the kynical-animal side in us, to the extent that we all possess such an analyzable underground. Analysts are those "citizens" who interpret and counsel the still-effective infantile, animal, neurotic, etc. , un- citizenness of others. However, here it seems to be their greatest fear that they themselves will get caught in the undertow of their themes and be seen as just as disreputable as the oral, anal, genital phenomena of life with which they concern themselves. Perhaps, at least in part, the excessive interest in culture that is noticeable in many psychologists comes from this circumstance. They seem pres- sured to constantly prove anew their ability to be cultured --after having already compromised themselves enough through their professional occupation with the infantile and animal aspects of human beings. "Psychological literature" has be- come in the meantime a phenomenon of such dimensions that it can only be dealt with sociologically and statistically. Its primary concern is the self-assurance of modern semicynics in their cultural role. With "cultivation," with books, diplomas, titles, supplementary training and degrees, they try to preserve their rights of citizenship in "official culture" (which, by the way, in any case does not exist). At the same time, this serves the pedantic demarcation of "sicknesses. " There are more than a few psychologists in whose voices a lot of fear, contempt, superciliousness, and aggression can be heard when they use words like narcis- sism, schizophrenia, paranoia, ambivalence, neurosis, psychosis. They are words of demarcation, words for others, words on the high horse of normality. It may, however, be a good sign that today some--I want to say insightful- therapists have decided to let the mask of respectability drop and to give up the role of the respectable portrayer of reality. They have, to their own advantage and that of their patients, come over to the side of the living. For those who have been made ill by reality, the path to being able to get through life well certainly does not lead by way of an accommodation to the Freudian "medium misery" of the average adult.
In the domain of knowledge and the sciences, a number of cynical phenomena have appeared that constitute a counterpart to what, in the preceding section on religious cynicism, I have designated, after Sartre, "bad faith"
(mauvaise foi). These phenomena are the "crooked attitudes" toward truth and knowledge that make these "highest goods" into mere useful items, or even into instruments for lying. Despite all apparent lack of respect, the kynic assumes a basically serious and upright attitude toward truth and maintains a thoroughly solemn relation, sa- tirically disguised, to it. With the cynic, this relation has given way to a thorough flabbiness and agnosticism (denial of knowledge). "What is truth? " asked Pontius Pilate when he sensed that he was just about to commit a crime against it. The
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most harmless among the cynicisms of knowledge is that of the examinees, who build up the most external and contemptuous relation to that which they have to learn, a relation of mere cramming, of rote learning, with the firm intention of forgetting it again after the examination. After that, already less harmless, fol- lows the cynicism of the pragmatists and politicians who, admittedly, like to see that the next generation has acquired its academic foundations, but for the rest proceed from the attitude that theory is theory and that in practice everything looks quite different. Here, all the learning and studying that precede function like pure detour and selection mechanisms, roughly according to the assumption that whoever gets through them successfully can also succeed with the other--even though, as is generally known, study and subsequent occupation often are totally unconnected. Learning is separated cynically and instrumentally from its aims and treated as a mere abstract certificate of qualifications. In some cases, the only thing that links study and occupation is salary, which is set according to the type of highest educational qualification achieved. The "substance" is degraded with cynical realism to a mere prelude, to academic chitchat. How much ethos- decimation and demoralization continually take place here is scarcely measurable --one has only to think of courses that have to do with "values": educa- tion, teacher training, the legal professions, publishing, social work, medicine, and so on. If Mephistopheles could say to Faust that all theory is gray, and green is the golden tree of life, this evidences an optimism that can be developed only by someone who has never passed from study into professional life. For here it becomes clear that theory was probably too rosy and that reality first teaches us what gray really is. But here we are not completely without hope. Course reforms work toward ensuring that the studies too will be just as gray as the prospects to be had after them.
The actual and innermost connection between the sciences and cynicism, how- ever, concerns the structure and the procedure of modern empirical sciences per se. For just as there is a form of cynical correctness in the relations between
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hos- tile individuals, there is also a form of cynical objectivity and methodological strictness in some sciences' and some scientists' way of treating the "facts. " I be- lieve this constitutes the core of what, since the late nineteenth century, we call "positivism. " If this word sounds critical, it is surely not because it designates a scientific mentality that stresses being logically exact and true to the facts and refraining from any sort of speculation. In this sense, positivism would have to be a title of honor rather than a dubious label. But in fact, the point of contention in the positivism debate is not scientific principles but the unprincipledness of science. For there are areas of research - and they are usually those in which the positivists do all the talking-where it does not suffice merely to behave scienti- fically "objectively" with the "facts," but where more is demanded of the scientist than merely the capacity to collect data, produce statistics, and formulate the- orems. There are "objects," in relation to which there is no scientific neutrality
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but only partial and interest-directed forms of investigation --most clearly of all in the entire domain of the human and social sciences (this way of seeing things can be made plausible even with respect to the natural sciences; see chapter 11 "Transcendental Polemic," which indicates the connection between objectifica- tion and the process of making enemies). The dispute around positivism ignited not over its indisputable achievement in clarifying the logical form and the empir- ical basis of strict sciences but over the naive assumption of the positivists that they could open up every "arbitrary" field of research with these means and thus subject every reality to the arbitrariness of a callous researching. The positivist, however, can be suspected not so much of naivete but of cynicism, especially since the days of early, and perhaps really naive, positivism are gone and we have long since been confronted with a positivism in its third generation, which, we can safely say, has been washed in the seven seas. The short formula for the his- tory of science in this century would have to read: The path of scientism leads from positivism to theoretical cynicism (functionalism). When Critical Theory pilloried the "affirmative character" of traditional and positivistic theories, it meant by this that such theories, in their artificial objectivity, betray a cynical as- sent to social relations that, to those who suffer, who sympathize, are concerned, stink to high heaven. In the methodological doctrines of positivism and the new social functionalism, those theoreticians find their organon who, with detached brutality, indirectly and coolly defends existing systems against the individuals who come to grief in them.
Notes
1. If Hegel's Phenomenology is described as a "journey of the weltgeist through history to itself," in this formulation, none of the crucial concepts is acceptable. First, it is no journey because such a thing would have to have a beginning and a goal, which does not hold; "path" metaphors do not adequately grasp history. Second, there is no weltgeist that, simultaneously as combatant and battle follower, has been present through the turnings and struggles of history. Third, there is no world his- tory as narrative of the vicissitudes of a subject that suffered them. Fourth, there is no self that, after some kinds of journeys, histories, or struggles, could arrive at "itself; that would be a pretty ghostly being, a megalomaniac reflexive pronoun that rampages over our natural being-as-self.
2. Wilhelm Stieber, Spion des Kanzlers (The chancellor's spy) (Munich, 1981), p. 135; see also chapter 10, "Black Empiricism. " The quotation suggests a psychoanalytic theory of cynicism that in- terprets cynicism as the expression of an unconscious desire to be punished.
3. Only more recent narrative also includes the civil hero, the hero as rogue (picaro), and even the negative, passive hero.
4. The Arthurian legends discuss the problem of how a hero must constantly earn his status: Erec. His error was to become soft and to fail to expose himself to continual testing.
5. As soon as the soldiers became aware of this, they became suspicious of their leaders. The modern large armies stood and fell with the group of lower commanders and officers who "advanced with the rest. " There supposedly are even statistics from the World Wars that prove that the officers are "sufficiently well" represented among the fallen.
6. This motif will be pursued in chapter 10, ("Black Empiricism"), the final section.
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7. Officially sanctioned in part: As late as the war of 1870-71, there were many paid "substitute soldiers" serving in the place of conscripts.
8. Elsewhere I have tried to work out the particular emotional toning of German Fascist cynicism in an interpretation of the Beelitz anecdote from Hitler's Mein Kampf: Der Gefreite Hitler als Anti- Schweijk--Zur Psychodynamik moderner Zersetzungsangst. See Peter Sloterdijk, "Die Krise des Individuums --studiert im Medium der Literatur," in J. Schulte- Sasse (ed. ), Political Tendencies in the Literature of the Weimar Republic (Minneapolis, Minn. , 1982).
9. See chapter 22, "Bright Hour. "
10. [Translation of the French testament: I have nothing, / I have many debts, / I give the rest
to the poor. ]
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11. See also Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, (2nd ed.
New York, 1978), pp. 133ff.
12. See Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs (Paris, 1975), p. 44: "Tout le monde sent le tragique
de cete information: 'L'ordre est retabli. ' " To maintain order is synonymous with mounted charges, opening fire on unarmed people, and killing women and children.
13. It is no accident that Michel Foucault, who stimulated the most penetrating analyses of power, force, and "micropolitics" in our time, at the same time began with the phenomenon of disciplinary force, of punishment, execution, surveillance, and incarceration.
14.