Nobody can say that such a
viewpoint
does not know what it is talking about.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
"
All this says that at least since the late eighteenth century, the illusion of a transparent human self-consciousness has been systematically destroyed. Som- nambulant phenomena provide provocative proofs that consciousness does not know everything about itself. In the state of magnetic lucidity, a zone of knowl- edge speaks that remains inaccessible to surface consciousness. The old "rational psychology" with its theory of memoria, of the capacity to remember, is no longer compatible with this view of consciousness. In the process of enlightenment, hu- man beings become more and more deeply involved in the self-evidence of the enigma that "there is still something else there. " Like an internal gremlin, it manifests itself in such a way that it cannot be directly grasped. If one looks closely, it has already disappeared. It follows consciousness like a shadow or like its double, who never agrees to an encounter with the first ego. But it constantly follows the first ego without ever revealing its name. Its emotional mode of ap- pearance is the uncanny and the fear of going mad-two themes that are not the exclusive property of romanticism.
Hypnosis served the first depth psychology as the royal road to the uncon- scious. It was with regard to these phenomena that nineteenth-century enlighten- ment committed one of its worst mistakes. It misinterpreted the lively interest of reactionary, aristocratic, and religious circles in unconscious phenomena as evi- dence that all this was merely antienlightenment hocus-pocus. Indeed, Mes- merism and hypnosis soon sank into the spiritul underground and landed finally
50 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
in annual fairs and variety shows, where trickery prevails. Enlightenment was for a long time not clearheaded enough to comprehend that when antienlightenment shows such a strong interest in something it must be important. The later religious spiritualism and the carnival occultism were in fact antienlightenment in practice, but only because they obscured the realistic core of the matter: the breakthrough from memoria to the unconsciousness structure, from conscious experience to the unconscious "grammar of feelings. "
From the start, the bourgeois-positivistic fraction of enlightenment was un- comfortable about the unpredictable, subversive dimensions of the new category, the unconscious. With it, the motif of critical self-reflection was introduced into civilization in a way that could not please those who held themselves to be the representatives of civilization. If every ego is underlaid by an unconscious, then that is the end of the self-satisfaction of a consciousness that thinks it knows itself, and thus knows how to value itself. The "unconscious" touched on the cultural narcissism of all social classes. At the same time, its discovery dissolves the basis of all previous philosophies of consciousness. From now on, the word "naivete" gains a new, more unfathomable meaning, because the abyss above which it hovers is more clearly seen.
Something of this sort must have been in Freud's mind when he composed his oft-quoted aphorism about the "three mortifications" that human self-esteem has had to suffer in the process of modern research: the Copernican revolution, which denied the earth's place in the center of the universe; the Darwinian theory of evo- lution, which included human beings in the chain of animal species and claimed for them precarious kinship with the great apes; and finally, psychoanalysis, which shattered the naive opinion that every ego knows itself best because of its immediate proximity. From now on, everyone is furthest from himself. Under all rationality and all consciousness there extends a vast space of irrationality and unconscious programming that everywhere interferes deceptively with conscious speech and action. The Freudian concept of "rationalization" contains an enor- mous irony: with the title ratio, those explanations and pseudojustifications are now designated with which consciousness covers up its self-delusions. The ratio- nal appears as the lid on private and collective irrationality.
Today, the further course, particularly the reorientation of depth- psychological research from its beginnings in hypnosis to the interpretation of dreams and the later branching out of various schools of depth psychology can be assumed to be largely known. Freud designated the dream as his via regia to the unconscious. Through it he developed a "technique of reading" that later proved useful in many other manifestations such as neurotic symptoms, sexual disturbances, and artistic creations. Even manifestations such as humor and jokes, accidents, and the choice of partners are now ordered in a relational system structured by the unconscious. The extension of these dynamic interpretations from psychopathology to everyday cultural phenomena demonstrates the full im-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES Q 51
plications of the critique. Besieged transparency must now accept that behind ev- ery possible fact of consciousness, dynamic causal rules of the unconscious are uncovered that influence its form. Bourgeois (and also proletarian) idealism ob- served bitterly that psychoanalysis wanted to "encroach" on the artist's soul and the work of art, that somehow the psychodynamics of a convoluted mother com- plex was allegedly at work in Goethe's lyrics: For idealism that was
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
worse than bolshevism. The Bolshevists themselves saw in everything that was about to shake their facade of consciousness nothing other than the last scream of bour- geois decadence.
Behind these attitudes toward psychoanalysis there is the desperate defense of the transparency of consciousness, that is, of the claim that the ego knows itself better than anyone else does and is master of the rules of its own exercise of rea- son. For once one accepts through existential self-reflection the reality of one's own unconscious, then, after this change of viewpoint, not only do sexual repres- sions and traumatic scars break open, but also, in the course of self-experience, the inner "shadows" collectively become longer and longer. The entire existential relation to "negativity" must be revised, and, with logical, political, and emo- tional pain, the negative self can emerge, with its sores, its destructiveness, and its ugliness. The ego stands before the monstrous demand: to recognize that it is also what it absolutely believes itself not to be. The more conventional conscious- ness is, the more embittered will be its refusal to look into this mirror. Thus the resistance against dynamic psychology comes especially from those who believe they have something to lose through "analysis. " They shout loudest of all that they "don't need all that stuff. "
The psychoanalytic technique of reading has become very widespread in West- ern civilization. Especially in the United States over the past decades it has be- come dreadfully trivialized and turned into a social game in which the winner is the one who detects the most ulterior motives and neurotic hidden meanings be- hind everyday appearances in one's own life, as well as in the lives of others. This chronic analysis of oneself and others, which has become something of a sport, leads to at least two false attitudes. It leads, first, to hopeless intellectualization of psychoanalysis, which has thereby become a refuge for emotional coldness and symptomatic rationalism that has found in it the right means to remain entirely unchanged while giving the impression of being something else. Second it leads to an overemphasis of the infantile, which can be subtly reinforced by being con- tinually linked with the present. There is no guarantee that the "dialectic" works positively and that every regression will be canceled out by a corresponding progression. Woody Allen's urban neurotic seems to have gotten off relatively lightly. Psychoanalysis is certainly not a priori, as Karl Kraus has sarcastically remarked, the illness that pretends to be its own cure; but it can easily become so since it continually tends to underrestimate the power of the neurosis that would rather gaze into the mirror than resolutely face the here and now.
52 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
By no means does psychoanalysis encounter everywhere suffering individuals who want to be healed at any cost. Their sufferings fit into a dynamics of self- maintenance in a very complicated way. This dynamics cooperates with the am- bivalence of the healing hand that, for its part, can often only be effective when it stands with one foot on the side of the suffering against which it seems to strug- gle. Here begins a drawn-out game of artfulness - on both sides of the therapeutic relationship. One often does not know whether it is not actually the fish who catches the angler.
The category of the unconscious (better, of the "unconscious structure") is probably the most successful figure of thought in the human sciences of our cen- tury. With this self-reflective concept, the most significant advances in basic re- search into the human being and human civilization have been made. Without this concept, modern anthropology would be just as unthinkable as structural mythol- ogy, modern theory of grammar just as unthinkable as behavioral physiology and the theory of human biograms. With regard to unconscious regulating mechan- isms of human culture and social as well as individual behavior, the human sciences open up an unparalleled reflective attack on everything that, in the hu- man sphere, is "hidden programming" and not conscious behavior.
Here, the most powerful dawning of reflection in the history of human con- sciousness is taking place despite the inclination of some researchers to empha- size the invariance and unchangeability of unconscious structures. Every transpo- sition into consciousness, every reflection, strikes, no matter how gently, on the "rock of the unconscious. " And only in the light of consciousness can it be clarified where enlightenment can be a school of change, and where it can demon- strate its insightfulness by letting happen what cannot be changed.
The psychology of early enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the later schools of dynamic psychology, and all other systems concerned with uncon- scious structures in the area of human orders have made available such a powerful potential for reflection that it will be a long time before we will be able to see how human societies change when they begin to live continually with such reflecting forces. All these disciplines have built up a methodical network of self- experience that even the world religions have been scarcely able to create, with the exception of those great, meditative schools of metareligiosity whose aim has been to pro- mote consciousness-raising and that, today, significantly, are approaching the reflective psychologies: Zen Buddhism, Sufism, Tantra, Yoga, and others. The only question is whether the political central powers and the energies of repres- sion and divisiveness will succeed, on the macro- as well as the microlevel, in chaining the powers of conscious life that already have been half-awakened from slumber. Neoconservatism has long since seen the gathering danger for the repressive capacities of states and capitals; it senses that the time of conscious- nesses has come. Its strength lies in the fact that people have, in addition to a realistic fear of
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
war and crisis, a "fear of freedom" (Erich Fromm) -- fear of them-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES U 53
elves and their own possibilities. It is this fear that makes them listen to the in- idious denunciation of the "dear ego" (Hans Maier) and of "self-realization" as ism (j0hn Paul II during his visit to Germany, particularly in his sermon in Altotting).
Critique of Natural Illusion
Every unmasking critique knows itself to be in an intimate relation with what is "really the case" below the surface. On all sides, human consciousness is invited to deceive itself and to be content with mere illusion. For enlightenment, there- fore, it is always the second look that is decisive because it overcomes the first impression. If things were generally as they immediately seem, investigation and science would be superfluous. There would be nothing to look for, look through, or look into. But science and enlightenment have a detective-like relation to real- ity. The tension between the search and what is given is particularly radicalized in the case of human and social phenomena. For here, everything that is "given" (gegeberi) is simultaneously in a certain way only "ostensible" (vorgeblich) and artificial. Human life moves a priori in a natural artificiality and an artificial natu- ralness (Plessner). This realization is part of the great achievement of enlighten- ment's reflection on culture. It shows that human beings, as they are, live "unnatu- rally. " What was natural in them was "lost" and became "distorted" and "misshapen" through civilization. Human individuals are never in the "center of their beings," but rather stand beside themselves as persons other than who they "really" are or could be. These insights are today common knowledge in philo- sophical anthropology. In the meantime, they have been morally neutralized and have become detached structural viewpoints. At the beginning of this discovery, however, the thought of unnaturalness possessed enormous value for moral at- tacks. Its explosive power was great as long as the belief in a "good Nature" seemed to be unshaken. One of the battle cries of bourgeois society during its up- rising against the aristocratic world order was: "Nature! Nature! "
One can see the consequences of this discovery of unnaturalness in Rousseau's critique of human beings in society. It possesses both a critical-negative and a utopian-positive side; one could also say: a destructive politics and a constructive pedagogy. Rousseau diagnosed a total degeneration, a complete fall of humanity
rom "Nature" in the society of the eighteenth century. All spontaneity had been
tnrou
^naturalized
gh convention, all naivete had been replaced by finesse, all d been glossed over by facades of social intercourse, etc. Rousseau's ye tor these things was excessively sharp in a way that only an offended bour- geois perception, wanting to register its rights to life, could be in an aristocrati- y fabricated social order. The social theater of the ancien regime was becom-
g more transparent and absurd every day. Whereas the aristocracy treated its
"cerity
na
or
m of life with irony, bourgeois cultural values (Gemutskultur) treated the
54 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
artificial convolutions in that form of life with disgust. Consequently, Rousseau's critique met with tremendous approval from his contemporaries. In his depiction of social denaturalization, not only did the up and coming bourgeoisie feel confirmed in its most elementary social feeling, but also the more sensitive part of the aristocratic intelligentsia knew itself in the main to be correctly portrayed in this critique. Here the universal law of "sensitive critique" applies: The critique is accepted by those who in any case are less touched by it, but its main targets seem to be looking into a blind mirror that says absolutely nothing to them. The agreement of intelligent aristocrats with Rousseau's critique was an important cat- alyst for their philanthropic activity, with which they tried to buy off their guilty consciences about benefiting from the status quo. The first rational depth psychol- ogy, as mentioned earlier, was indeed an offshoot of aristocratic Rousseauianism. What came to light in its healing procedure could be taken without further ado as proof of the inner "healing powers of nature. " The possible destructiveness of the unconscious and the "dark side of nature" first came to the notice of the follow- ing generation of romantics and were interpreted in an increasingly conservative- pessimistic way (see E. T. A. Hoffmann, Joseph von Eichendorff, and many others).
A political stance follows directly from this analysis: in the name of the natural against the system of compulsions, on the side of the bourgeois-honest heart against aristocratic-artful deceptiveness, on the side of the free social contract against the old feudal relations based on coercion. The new society wanted to be an order in which all agreed, to their mutual advantage, on a peaceful and diligent life together according to a model based on nature and mutual sympathy.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
As har- monious and affable as that sounded, some representatives of the ancien regime were still sensitive enough to hear the insurrection of hell in this program. With horrified satisfaction, conservatives saw the French Revolution degenerate into terror and war. Nothing since then has nourished the conservative image of hu- manity more strongly. It thinks it knows that human nature, set loose here and now, deserves no optimism or glowing phrases. Conservative thinking in this in- stance behaves positivistically. Without first asking about contexts, it notes that, all too often, human beings behave egoistically, destructively, greedily, un- wisely, and asocially. Indeed, for this reason, criminality was and is so extremely important for all kinds of conservatism, because "short-circuited thinking" finds in it the final proof for a pessimistic view of humanity that, in turn, provides the basis for an authoritarian, strictly disciplining politics. From this viewpoint, there "exist" in nature criminals, idiots, malcontents, egoists, and rebels, just as there exist trees, cows, kings, laws, and heavenly bodies. The Christian doctrine of original sin here joins forces with the conservative, pessimistic understanding of nature. According to this doctrine, human beings, simply because they are born of woman, live in the world as defective creatures.
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 55
Rousseau's philosophy sees all this in advance. It knows that one has to get around pessimism by demonstrating how human beings become what they are so- cially. That there are human beings who behave nastily, greedily, unwisely, de- structively, etc. , proves nothing about their essential being. Here, in Rousseau, we find perhaps the most important figure of thought in moral-political enlighten- ment: the theory of the innocent victim.
The evidence introduced for political pessimism; the criminal, the lunatic, and the asocial individual, in a word, the second-rate citizen --these are not by nature as one finds them now but have been made so by society. It is said that they have never had a chance to be as they would be according to their nature, but were forced into the situation in which they find themselves through poverty, coercion, and ignorance. They are victims of society.
This defense against political pessimism regarding human nature is at first con- vincing. It possesses the superiority of dialectical thinking over positivistic think- ing. It transforms moral states and qualities into processes. Brutal people do not "exist," only their brutalization; criminality does not "exist," only criminalization; stupidity does not "exist," only stupefaction; self-seeking does not "exist," only training in egoism; there are no second-rate citizens, only victims of patroniza- tion. What political positivism takes to be nature is in reality falsified nature: the suppression of opportunity for human beings.
Rousseau knew of two aids who could illustrate his point of view, two classes of human beings who lived before civilization and, consequently, before perver- sion: the noble savage and the child. Enlightenment literature develops two of its most intimate passions around these two figures: ethnology and pedagogy. To the present day nothing has essentially changed in this approach. Literarily, this dou- ble passion precipitates two extensive genres: exotic travel literature and later ethnology on the one hand, and the educational novel and the literature on peda- gogy and child development on the other. The primitive peoples, about whom the European explorers from Columbus to Bougainville and Captain Cook reported, provide an enlightenment, which was gradually becoming more political, the ur- gently needed evidence for its view that, roughly stated, things can "proceed differently" --peacefully, reasonably, humanely, sensuously, without aristoc- racy, without war, without exploitation, without wigs, without lettres de cachet. The noble savages in the South Seas are like an Archimedean point through which one can playfully dislodge the claim of European social orders to be ordained by God and therefore unexcellable. Something different does exist; at the same time, it is better. What is reasonable can thus also become real. That is all enlighten- ment is trying to say.
From this moment on, the child becomes a political object--to a certain extent, the living security deposit of enlightenment. The child is the "noble savage" in one's own house. Through appropriate education care must be taken in the future
56 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
that innocent children are not made into the same artificial social cripples the previous system produced. Children are already what the new bourgeois humans believe they want to become. Enlightenment was not the first to politicize peda- gogy; it has discovered, however, that children always, and everywhere, are the future security of existing relations. But now children are something more: They carry bourgeois hopes for "another world," for a more humane society. It almost appears as if for the first time a new, politically tinged form of parental love has been developing, concentrated in the wish that one's own children should finally have a better life. Only in a society that felt the shake-up and that committed itself totally to the dynamics of world change and progress can such a form of parental love prosper. A new amalgam of love and "ambition for the child" is thus formed, something that would be meaningless in a stable, stagnant society "without prospects. " Peasant societies do not envision "careers" for their children; they see no prospects other than that of life as a peasant. Ambition in the aristocracy is directed not for the benefit of the child but for that of the aristocratic lineage itself, the family. Bourgeois children are the first to have an anthropological and politi- cal mission.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
How the traditional directing of ambitions in the bourgeois parent- child relationship is currently changing could be the topic of a special investi-
gation.
Of course, Rousseau's optimistic naturalism has a very vulnerable point. The beneficence of nature is something that can be doubted even when one does not hold conservative views. In the beginning things were not all that idyllic; genesis (Ursprung) is downright severe and difficult. It soon becomes clear that the image of origin cannot be understood historically because, on closer investigation, one finds that war, inequality, and harsh conditions of life are widespread in an unyielding nature; there are exceptions but they can scarcely be interpreted as ori- gin and rule. Since then, the question about "good origins" becomes the crux for enlightenment. It becomes more and more clear that this idea of origin has not a temporal but a Utopian reference. The Good is still nowhere to be found, except in the wishful human spirit and in daydreams, which unerringly aim at something even though it does not yet exist. Thus, critical naturalism can survive only when it withers away and reawakes as the "spirit of Utopia"; the origin then serves as an end-vision (Bloch).
Naturalistic thinking, in fact, fundamentally changed its function in the nine- teenth century. The natural sciences provided a concept of nature that was any- thing but idyllic. Especially since Darwin, the bourgeois order, having become imperialistic, used the beast of prey as its political emblem. Nature was used as justification by those who needed to legitimate acts of violence, not by those who spoke for peace. The heraldry of the old aristocracy had also shown a striking sympathy for predatory animals: the eagle, falcon, lion, bear. Long before Rous- seauianism, and in substance opposed to it, there was an aristocratic naturalism
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 57
that was renewed in the bourgeois order when it became powerful as political "bi- ologism. " Nothing can show more clearly that Rousseauian naturalism had been only a momentary stylization of the conception of nature on which a general the- ory of liberation could not support itself securely. Hesitatingly, therefore, en- lightenment began to take leave of the noble savage and the innocent child, a part- ing that, of course, can never lead to a complete break (Bruch) with these "allies. " The child and the savage are beings who have a claim on the sympathy of those who remain true to the idea of enlightenment.
Impulses for self-reflection in the great civilizations come from ethnology even today. Thus, behind the conspicuous present-day cult around the American Indian, there is a good deal of pondering about ideas of nature and the maximal size of societies that want to maintain a reasonable relation to themselves as well as to their environment. And from child psychology, there is still today a steady stream of valuable impulses for reflection on the behavioral patterns in societies that suffer from their unresolved childhoods.
What has remained undamaged in Rousseau's critique is the indispensable ex- posure of a supposedly evil "Nature" as a social fiction. This remains important in the purportedly natural inferiorities concerning race, intelligence, and sex and sexual behavior. When conservatives and reactionaries refer to "Nature" to justify their assertions about the inferiority of woman, the lesser capacities of dark races, the innate intelligence of children from the upper social strata, and the sickness of homosexuality, they have usurped naturalism. It remains the task of critique to refute this. Ultimately critique must at least be able to show that what "Nature" gives us has to be recognized as neutral and nontendentious so that every value judgment and every tendency can without doubt be understood as a cultural phenomenon. Even if Rousseau's "good Nature" has been discredited, he has at least taught us not to accept "bad Nature" as an excuse for social oppression.
However, when one speaks of the "victims of society," the "artful dimension"
quickly comes into the picture again. In the concept of the "victim of society,"
there is a reflective contradiction that can be misused in many ways. Already in
Rousseau, a dubious artfulness is observed that is supposed to conceal a double
standard. That he combined nature and childhood in a new idea of education and,
at
? ng been understood as a discrepancy between theory and practice. Rousseau
was a master of an artful reflexivity that skillfully found fault with others on every
Point but in itself always discovered only the purest of intentions. On the white
Page of this feeling of innocence, the famous confessions were written. In this
osturing there was something that other determined enlighteners, above all
einrich Heine, could not and did not want to follow-even though they do not
the same time, denied his own children and stuck them in an orphanage, has
a v e an terenlightenment.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ything to do with the notorious defamation of Rousseau by the entire coun-
58 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
The vulnerable point in the victim theory is, again, the self-reification of con- sciousness, the establishment of a new naively artful position. This can serve or be felt, depending on the circumstances, as a diversionary trick, as a technique of extortion, or as indirect aggression. Psychology is familiar with the "eternal victim," who exploits this position for disguised aggressions. Also belonging to this category, in a broader sense, are those permanent losers as well as medical and political hypochondriacs who lament that conditions are so terrible that it is a great sacrifice on their part not to kill themselves or emigrate. On the German Left, not least of all under the influence of the sociologized schema of the victim, a certain type of renegade has emerged who feels that it is a dirty trick to have to live in this land without summer and without oppositional forces.
Nobody can say that such a viewpoint does not know what it is talking about. Its mistake is that it remains blind to itself. For the accusation becomes bound to misery and magnifies it under the subterfuge of unsuspecting critical observations. With the
obstinacy of a Sophist, in aggressive self-reification, many a "critical" conscious- ness refuses to become healthier than the sick whole.
A second possibility of misusing the victim schema has been experienced by dedicated helpers and social workers when, guided by the best intentions, they try to make prisoners, the homeless, alcoholics, marginal youth, and others aware that they are the "victims of society" who have simply failed to offer enough resistance. The helpers often encounter sensitive resistance to their attempts and have to make it clear to themselves just how much discrimination is present in their own "good will. " The self-esteem and need for esteem in the disadvantaged often forcefully defends itself against the demand for self-reification made on them by every political kind of assistance that argues in this way. Precisely those who are worst off feel a spark of self-assertion, whose extinction would be
justifiably feared if those concerned began to think of themselves as victims, as non-egos. To preserve the dignity of "poor bastards," they alone and on their own accord can say that they are poor bastards. Those who try to put such words into their mouths insult them, no matter how good their intentions may be. It is in the nature of liberating reflection that it cannot be forced. It answers only to indirect assistance.
From this vantage point, the perspective on a life spent in total, unavoidable benightedness becomes possible. Theodor Adorno sketched this when he spoke of an unhappy consciousness in which the down-and-outers inflict on themselves a second time that wrong that circumstances perpetrated against them in order to be able to bear it. Here, an inner reflection takes place that looks like a parody of freedom. From the outside, the phenomenon resembles satisfaction and would, if addressed, probably also refer to itself that way. In memory of his mother, Pe- ter Handke has found a tender formulation in which the sadness of a loving and helpless knowledge lays down arms before reality: "self-contented unhappiness. '
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 59
Enlightenment has neither a chance nor a right to disturb the world's slumber if it looks like this.
Critique of the Illusion of Privacy
Where is this ego then, if it is neither in the body nor in the soul?
Blaise Pascal
The last great attack of critique against illusion aims at the position of the ego be- tween nature and society. We know from the line of thought in the preceding cri- tiques that knowledge (Erkenntnis) does not have to do with human nature pure and simple, but with nature as conception, nature as fabrication, with unnatural nature. In that which is "given in nature" there is always something "given in addi- tion" by human beings. The "labor" of reflection is summarized in this insight. Modernity establishes itself in our minds in the shape of counterintuitive ex- periences that break through naivete and exercise a peculiar compulsion on us to increase our intelligence.
Ideologically, the reference to "Nature" is always significant because it
produces an artificial naivete and ends up as voluntary naivete. It covers up the
human contribution and avers that things are by nature, and from their origins,
in that "order" in which our representations, which are always influenced by "in-
terests," depict them. The rudiments for ideologies of order are hidden in all
naturalisms. Every naturalism begins as involuntary naivete. Initially, we cannot
help thinking that the "order of things" is an objective order. For the first glance
falls on the things and not on the "eyeglasses. " In the work of enlightenment, this
first innocence becomes irretrievably lost. Enlightenment leads to the loss of nai-
vete and it furthers the collapse of objectivism through a gain in self-experience.
It effects an irreversible awakening and, expressed pictorially, executes the turn
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
to the eyeglasses, i. e. , to one's own rational apparatus. Once this consciousness
of the eyeglasses has been awakened in a culture, the old naivete loses its charm,
becomes defensive, and is transformed into narrow-mindedness, which is intent
on remaining as it is. The mythology of the Greeks is still enchanting; that of fas-
cism is only stale and shameless. In the first myth, a step toward an interpretation
of the world was taken; in simulated naivete, an artful stupefaction (Verdum-
mung) is at work--the predominant method of self-integration in advanced social 7
orders. Such an observation touches only superficially on the role of mythology in modernity. For the moment this will suffice. Artful self-stupefaction manifests itself in a whole range of modern naturalisms: racism, sexism, fascism, vulgar biologism, and -- egoism.
To put egoism into this series may, at first glance, seem strange, indeed, even dangerous. Actually, there is in egoism a "natural givenness" of a special kind.
60 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
The critique of egoism (better, the critique of the illusion of privacy) constitutes, I think, the core of all enlightenment in which the self-experience of civilized egos comes to maturity. After it, there can be logically no other uncovering critique, but only "praxis," conscious life.
How does the ego come to its determinations? What constitutes its "character? " What creates the material of its self- experience? The answer runs as follows: The ego is a result of programming. It is formed in emotional, practical, moral, and political drill. "In the beginning was education" (Alice Miller).
Self-experience proceeds in two stages: naive perception and reflection. In the naive stage, no consciousness can do otherwise than to conceive of its character traits, programming, and training as its own. Whether in the case of impressions, feelings, or opinions, at first it must always say: I am so! My feeling is thus, my attitude is thus. I am as / am. In the reflective stage, self-consciousness becomes clear about itself: My programming, my traits, my training are thus; I have been brought up in this way and have become so; my "mechanisms" function thus; what I am and what I am not are both at work in me in this way.
The establishment of inwardness and the creation of the illusion of privacy are the most subversive themes of enlightenment. It is still not really clear today who the social conveyor of this impulse of enlightenment may be. One of the ambiva- lences of enlightenment is that although intelligence can be explained sociologi- cally, educationally, and politically, "wisdom," self-reflection cannot. The sub-
ject of a radical ego enlightenment cannot be socially identified with certainty --even though the procedures of this enlightenment are anchored in reality.
In this point, the majority of societies seem to strive for a conscious nonen-
lightenment. Did not Nietzsche too warn of that "life-destroying enlightenment"
8 thattouchesonourlife-supportingself-delusions? Canweaffordtoshakeupthe
"basic fictions" of privacy, personality, and identity? Be that as it may, in this question both old and new conservatives have come to the hard decision to take the "stance" of defending, against all the demands of reflection, their "unavoidable lies for living," without which self-preservation would not be possible. That they are aided in this by the general fear of self-experience, which competes with curi- osity about self-experience, does not have to be expressly emphasized. Thus the theater of respectable, closed egos goes on everywhere, even where the means have long been available to secure better knowledge. Crosswise to all political fronts, it is the "ego" in society that offers the most resolute resistance against the decisive enlightenment. Scarcely anyone will put up with radical self-reflection on this point, not even many of those who regard themselves as enlighteners. The dance around the golden calf of identity is the last and greatest orgy of counteren- lightenment. Identity is the magic word of a partially hidden, partially open con- servatism that has inscribed personal identity, occupational identity, national identity, political identity, female identity, male identity, class identity, party
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 61
identity, etc. , on its banner. The listing of these essential demands for identity would already suffice to illustrate the pluralistic and mobile character of that which is called identity. But one would not be speaking of identity if it were not basically a question of the fixed form of the ego.
The establishment of inwardness comprises the ego as the bearer of ethics, the erotic, aesthetics, and politics. In these four dimensions, everything that I ex- perience as mine is given to me, though at first "I" was not asked: my norms of behavior, my professional ethics, my sexual patterns, my sensual-emotional modes of experience, my class "identity," my political interests.
Here I want to begin with the last mentioned. By briefly describing the "politi- cal narcissisms" of the aristocracy, the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
bourgeoisie, and the proletariat, I will show how, even in the most "inner" region, where we suppose ourselves to be in the closest "narcissistic" proximity to ourselves, we encounter at the same time the most "external" and most universal. Here, the game of "one's own self with what is "alien" becomes visible in the public heart of personalities. Precisely the analysis of narcissism can show how the other has already got the better of the ego. I look in the mirror and see a stranger who swears that it is me. It is one of the irresistible ironies of enlightenment that it shatters our consciousness with such radical counterintuitions. In concluding this line of thought, I want to simply suggest for consideration the question whether the last level of integration in en- lightenment does not have to be a kind of "rational mysticism. "
The ego enters the political world never as a private individual but as the mem- ber of a group, an estate, or a class. From time immemorial, the members of the aristocracy have known themselves to be "the best. " Their social and political po- sition is based on an open, demonstrative, and self-satisfied relation between power and self-esteem. The political narcissism of the aristocracy is nourished
by this plain, power-conscious presumption. The aristocracy has been allowed to believe that it is favored in every existentially essential respect and is called on
to excel--to be militarily stronger, aesthetically superior, culturally refined, un- broken in vitality (which only with regard to the courtly aristocracy is no longer quite true). Thus in the function of the aristocracy there is initially nothing that would allow one to suggest that political status destroys vitality. In fact, the nobil- ity often tried to base its cultural self-portrait directly on narcissistic pleasure. Its political-aesthetic culture is based on the motif of self-celebration, of the union
of self-consciousness and festival. The everyday form of this narcissistic class consciousness appears in the concept of the noble's honor and in the idea of a no- D 'e life-sry/e. With the smallest affronts to their highly trained sense of honor, aristocrats must demand satisfaction --which precipitates the history of the duel
and symbolic combat in Europe as well as in Asia. Honor was the bond between Motion and public life, between the innermost life of the "best" and the reality 31
? ' greeting, obsequious forms of behavior, and even grammatical structures, life among the "best" as well as in public view of the common people. Rules 62 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
which are unknown in prefeudal languages (the most striking being the honorific forms in Japanese), can be traced back to these claims to domination, honor, and personal pleasure.
The aristocratic programming of a heightened self-consciousness, however, comprises more than just what is too hastily called vanity or arrogance. It pro- vides at the same time a high level of character formation and education that works to form opinions, etiquette, emotionality, and cultural taste. All these mo- ments are still encompassed in the old concept of courtliness (Hoftichkeit, polite- ness). The courtly person (cortegiano, gentilhomme, gentleman, Hofmann) has gone through a training in self-esteem that expresses itself in many ways: in aristocratically pretentious opinions, in polished or majestic manners, in gallant or heroic patterns of feeling as well as in a selective, aesthetic sensitivity for that which is said to be courtly or pretty. The noble, far removed from any self-doubt, should achieve all this with a complete matter-of-factness. Any uncertainty, any doubt in these things signifies a slackening in the nobility's cultural "identity. " This class narcissism, which has petrified into a form of life, tolerates no irony, no exception, no slips, because such disturbances would give rise to unwelcome reflections. The French nobles did not turn up their noses at Shakespeare's "bar- barism" without reason. In his plays one already "smells" the human ordinariness of those who want to stand before society as the best.
With the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, the place of the "best" is awarded anew. The bourgeois ego, in an unprecedented, creative storming to the heights of a new class consciousness won for itself an autonomous narcissism, in whose period of degeneration we are living today; it is for this reason that we have to suffer so much political and cultural depressiveness. The bourgeoisie found its own way of being better than the others, better than the corrupt nobility and the uncultivated mob. At first its class ego raised itself on the feeling of having the better, purer, more rational, and more useful morality in all areas of life, from sexuality to management. For a whole century, the new bourgeoisie wallowed in moralizing literature. In it, a new political collective learns to say "I" in a special way; whether psychologically and aesthetically as in that "sensitivity" that schools itself in natural beauty, intimate sociability, and empathy with heartrending fates; whether politically and scientifically as in that bourgeois public sphere that starts as a
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
republic of the learned in order to end up as a republic of citizens. Literature, the diary, gregariousness, critique, science, and republicanism are all training grounds for a new bourgeois high ego, for a new will to subjectivity. Only here do citizens learn how to have good taste, proper demeanor, opinions, and will- Here, the class-specific, novel high feelings of bourgeois culture are drilled--the
pleasure of being a citizen: the awareness of progress; the pride in having worked up from the bottom and in having come a long way; the pride in being the moral and historical torchbearer; the joy in one's own moral sensibility; the demonstra- tive pleasure in one's own cultivation; the pleasure in having a simultaneously cul-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 63
tivated and naive feeling about nature; the self-admiration of the class for its musi- cal, poetic, and scientific genius; the joy in the feeling of enterprise, invention, and historical movement; finally, the triumph of gaining a political say. Looking back at the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one now gets an idea of the extent to which creative and coquettish narcissism permeates bourgeois cul- ture. At the same time, however, the bourgeoisie also followed the nobility in es- sential respects, not least of all in its concept of honor, through which the duel came into bourgeois life and even into the realm of student life. Without doubt, honor became for the bourgeoisie, too, an essential socionarcissistic factor, with which the national militarization of bourgeois society is connected. That this type of bourgeois is dying out today is felt in every nook and cranny of civilization. Those who still know such a latecomer should regard themselves as ethnologists; with wonder they may hear how the last specimens even today cannot walk through the forest without speaking of God.
The neobourgeois generations have modernized their social narcissism. Since at least the Weimar years, the collective ego tone of the bourgeoisie has been loosening up. A lazier style of ego-being as bourgeois is becoming prevalent everywhere. Today we find the mode of expression of the last surviving cultivated bourgeois horribly artificial, and everyone has had the urge to tell them to their faces that they should not ramble on the way they do, so full of themselves. In the twentieth century we observe a sociopsychological front between two bour- geois ego styles, an older and a newer type, which are extremely allergic to each other. The threshold between the two types runs roughly through the time of the First World War and the following phase of modernization. In the mutual dislike of, say, Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, this front becomes concretely visible.
From a historical perspective, the bourgeoisie is the first class that has learned to say /and that at the same time has the experience of labor. All older class nar- cissisms can base themselves "only" on struggle, military heroism, and the gran- diosity of rulers. When the bourgeois says "I" the idea of the pride of labor, of productive accomplishment can also be heard for the first time. This ego of a "laboring class" introduces a previously unheard of turn toward realism into higher social feelings. Of course, that cannot be seen clearly from the beginning because bourgeois culture was forced to distinguish between poetry and prose, art and life, the ideal and reality. The consciousness of labor in the bourgeois ego ? s still thoroughly split-into an idealistic and a pragmatic fraction. The one ver- sion of the bourgeois comprises the artisan, the trader, the official, the financier, and the entrepreneur, all of whom, in their own way, can claim to know what
abor is. Juxtaposed to them from the beginning, stands a type of bourgeois who oes research, writes poetry, composes and makes music, and philosophizes and
who believes that these activities develop a world that is self-sufficient. It is obvi- ous that these two fractions of the bourgeois ego get on only superficially and come together only in the hollow connection of property and cultivation. They
64 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
? Inscription above the entrance to the concentration camp at Auschwitz: "Labor is liberating. "
create the century-long tension between the good and the evil bourgeois, the ide- alist and the exploiter, the visionary and the pragmatist, the ideally liberated bour- geois and the laboring bourgeois. This tension remains as inexhaustible as that between the world of work and "freedom" in general: Even a large part of social- ism to date has been only the renewal of the inner-bourgeois conflict between the idealistic citoyen and the detestable bourgeois.
But even the bourgeois experience of labor is not so straightforward as the bourgeoisie would like to have it. The bourgeois, who, as subjects of power, say I because they also labor and are creative, express only formally and illusorily the truth for everybody. They want others to forget that their way of laboring is arranged in a questionable way. This holds specially for the genuine bourgeois in the sphere of labor, the entrepreneurs, the capitalists, and financiers. Their consciousness of labor is so inconsistent that, since the late nineteenth century, it is difficult not to speak of lying. For if labor were really what creates a right to a political ego, what about those who labor for bourgeois "laborers"? The situa- tion of the proletariat, which, during a great part of the nineteenth century and in segments of the twentieth, was
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
deprived of its rights, prevented bourgeois soci- ety from coming to rest. Precisely the principle of achievement--success and privileges for the more diligent--became undermined in the course of the de- velopment. "Labor is liberating" was a slogan that sounded more and more cyni- cal with the passing of each decade, until finally it was written above the entrance to Auschwitz.
The pleasure in being a citizen combined in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies with the compulsion to politics in a new kind of political complex of feel- ings that for the past 200 years has seemed to countless individuals to be the inner-
iEIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 65
most and most spontaneous impulse of their ego: the love of the Fatherland. What began as patriotic spontaneity was methodically organized in the nineteenth cen- tury as a political ideology, which in the twentieth century heated up into a politi- cal system of madness. The European nationalisms were indeed complexes of convictions and passions that individuals found in themselves as though given by nature, complexes to which they could say in a primary naivete and honesty: That is me, that is how my innermost self feels, that is how my most intimate political reason stirs itself. For Germans, empathy with such naively wonderful patri- otisms is actually only still possible when we meet people from foreign countries who live in the first dawning of patriotic self-reflection and who can still claim for themselves a primal innocence. How many German left-wingers did not stand bv with a pensive and uneasy smile when Chilean socialist emigres sang songs that ended with the refrain: fatherland or death. It has been a long time since Ger- mans could hear a mutual resonance of progressive and patriotic motives; the reaction has incorporated national feeling for too long.
Two hundred years ago things looked a little different. The first patriotic generations --the French, who after the Revolution felt their national existence threatened by the offensives of European monarchies; the Germans, who offered resistance against the Napoleonic occupation; the Greeks, who engaged in a struggle of liberation against Turkish domination; the disunited and scattered Poles; the Italians in the time of Garibaldi, who felt themselves to be "un- redeemed" under multiple foreign domination--all these could, in their national
9narcissisms, still enjoy, so to speak, a primal innocence. What later with each
decade could be seen more clearly probably still remained hidden to them: That patriotism and nationalism were the conscious self-programming of bourgeois ego pride that, taken seriously, immediately lead to worrisome, indeed calami- tous, developments. It was precisely in Germany that this innocence was lost early on. Already in Napoleonic times, Jean Paul perceived that artful, self- reflectively mandacious element in Fichte's Speeches to the German Nation (1808) that, seen in the light of day, are nothing other than a deliberate program- ming of a consciousness that is not one bit naive but is supposed to be so. That it was Fichte, one of the greatest logicians of self-reflection in modern philoso- phy, who preached the love of fatherland to the Germans, reveals the vile, self- deceptive aspects of the earliest stages in German national feeling. Heinrich Heine also saw what was repulsive and affected in German patriotism from its first moment. National spontaneity was generated through pedagogy, indoctrina- tion, and propaganda until finally loud- mouthed national narcissism exploded militarily out of the ideological test tube in the early twentieth century. It celebrated its greatest triumph in the European storm of emotion and war eupho- ria in August 1914.
Because of its synthetic nature, nationalistic mentality bears up badly when its narcissistic self-programming is disturbed. This is the reason for the rage of the
66 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, which had constricted itself in a chauvinistic and elitist way, against the self- reflective intelligentsia, which purportedly had such "decomposing" effects. In defending against the "decomposition" (Zerset- zung) of its artificial naivete, bourgeois ideology maneuvered itself into a position where it came into conflict with its own previous enlightenment. The cosmopoli- tan composure and universalistic nobleness of enlightenment must have become a thorn in the side of the political narcissism of the patriots. The oft-cited "destruc- tion of reason" (Lukacs) in later bourgeois thinking was deeply rooted in the nar- cissistic self-assertion of the bourgeois class ego against the forces of disillusion- ment that reflection inevitably exercises on it. Thus an alliance had to come about between enlightenment and socialist currents that initially knew how to avoid the willful self-delusion of a mentality of domination.
The principal disturbance of nationalism arose, as could not be otherwise, from the political movement of the old Fourth Estate, the workers'movement. In it, a new political ego took the floor once more. It was no longer a bourgeois ego, but initially and for a long time, it spoke a bourgeois language. Ideologically, so- cialism did not at first require its "own" weapon. It was enough simply to take the bourgeoisie at its word: freedom, equality, solidarity. Only when it became evident that all this was not meant so literally did socialism have to forge its own critical weapon against bourgeois
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ideology, whereby initially it was forced to ad- vance bourgeois ideals against a bourgeois double standard. Only with the theory of class consciousnesses did socialist doctrine elevate itself to a metamoral standpoint.
Ethically, the early workers' movement had every argument on its side, hence its erstwhile moral superiority. It pushed the process that began with bourgeois realism of labor a significant step further. For there is a proletarian consciousness of labor that clearly differs from that of the bourgeois. In it, an archrealistic ex- perience "from the very bottom" wants to gain political expression: One sweats for a whole lifetime and gets nowhere; often there is not even enough to eat, while aggregate social wealth continually grows. One sees it in architecture, in the resi- dences of those who rule, in the construction of cities, in the standard of the mili- tary forces, in the luxury consumption of others. Laborers do not participate in the growth of wealth although they spend their whole lives in producing it. As soon as the laborer says I, things must change.
The political egoformation of the proletariat thus begins and proceeds differ- ently from that of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. The laborer ego intrudes into the public world with neither grandiosity of domination nor moral-cultural hegemony. It possesses no primary narcissistic will to power. All previous work- ers' movements and socialisms failed because they disregarded this condition. In the aristocracy, the will to power is in politics and in life almost identical; it is anchored in the social structure as status narcissism -- whatever is on top automati- cally experiences itself as the best, as political and existential excellence. In the
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES a 67
h ureeoisie, class narcissism already becomes more ambivalent.
All this says that at least since the late eighteenth century, the illusion of a transparent human self-consciousness has been systematically destroyed. Som- nambulant phenomena provide provocative proofs that consciousness does not know everything about itself. In the state of magnetic lucidity, a zone of knowl- edge speaks that remains inaccessible to surface consciousness. The old "rational psychology" with its theory of memoria, of the capacity to remember, is no longer compatible with this view of consciousness. In the process of enlightenment, hu- man beings become more and more deeply involved in the self-evidence of the enigma that "there is still something else there. " Like an internal gremlin, it manifests itself in such a way that it cannot be directly grasped. If one looks closely, it has already disappeared. It follows consciousness like a shadow or like its double, who never agrees to an encounter with the first ego. But it constantly follows the first ego without ever revealing its name. Its emotional mode of ap- pearance is the uncanny and the fear of going mad-two themes that are not the exclusive property of romanticism.
Hypnosis served the first depth psychology as the royal road to the uncon- scious. It was with regard to these phenomena that nineteenth-century enlighten- ment committed one of its worst mistakes. It misinterpreted the lively interest of reactionary, aristocratic, and religious circles in unconscious phenomena as evi- dence that all this was merely antienlightenment hocus-pocus. Indeed, Mes- merism and hypnosis soon sank into the spiritul underground and landed finally
50 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
in annual fairs and variety shows, where trickery prevails. Enlightenment was for a long time not clearheaded enough to comprehend that when antienlightenment shows such a strong interest in something it must be important. The later religious spiritualism and the carnival occultism were in fact antienlightenment in practice, but only because they obscured the realistic core of the matter: the breakthrough from memoria to the unconsciousness structure, from conscious experience to the unconscious "grammar of feelings. "
From the start, the bourgeois-positivistic fraction of enlightenment was un- comfortable about the unpredictable, subversive dimensions of the new category, the unconscious. With it, the motif of critical self-reflection was introduced into civilization in a way that could not please those who held themselves to be the representatives of civilization. If every ego is underlaid by an unconscious, then that is the end of the self-satisfaction of a consciousness that thinks it knows itself, and thus knows how to value itself. The "unconscious" touched on the cultural narcissism of all social classes. At the same time, its discovery dissolves the basis of all previous philosophies of consciousness. From now on, the word "naivete" gains a new, more unfathomable meaning, because the abyss above which it hovers is more clearly seen.
Something of this sort must have been in Freud's mind when he composed his oft-quoted aphorism about the "three mortifications" that human self-esteem has had to suffer in the process of modern research: the Copernican revolution, which denied the earth's place in the center of the universe; the Darwinian theory of evo- lution, which included human beings in the chain of animal species and claimed for them precarious kinship with the great apes; and finally, psychoanalysis, which shattered the naive opinion that every ego knows itself best because of its immediate proximity. From now on, everyone is furthest from himself. Under all rationality and all consciousness there extends a vast space of irrationality and unconscious programming that everywhere interferes deceptively with conscious speech and action. The Freudian concept of "rationalization" contains an enor- mous irony: with the title ratio, those explanations and pseudojustifications are now designated with which consciousness covers up its self-delusions. The ratio- nal appears as the lid on private and collective irrationality.
Today, the further course, particularly the reorientation of depth- psychological research from its beginnings in hypnosis to the interpretation of dreams and the later branching out of various schools of depth psychology can be assumed to be largely known. Freud designated the dream as his via regia to the unconscious. Through it he developed a "technique of reading" that later proved useful in many other manifestations such as neurotic symptoms, sexual disturbances, and artistic creations. Even manifestations such as humor and jokes, accidents, and the choice of partners are now ordered in a relational system structured by the unconscious. The extension of these dynamic interpretations from psychopathology to everyday cultural phenomena demonstrates the full im-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES Q 51
plications of the critique. Besieged transparency must now accept that behind ev- ery possible fact of consciousness, dynamic causal rules of the unconscious are uncovered that influence its form. Bourgeois (and also proletarian) idealism ob- served bitterly that psychoanalysis wanted to "encroach" on the artist's soul and the work of art, that somehow the psychodynamics of a convoluted mother com- plex was allegedly at work in Goethe's lyrics: For idealism that was
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
worse than bolshevism. The Bolshevists themselves saw in everything that was about to shake their facade of consciousness nothing other than the last scream of bour- geois decadence.
Behind these attitudes toward psychoanalysis there is the desperate defense of the transparency of consciousness, that is, of the claim that the ego knows itself better than anyone else does and is master of the rules of its own exercise of rea- son. For once one accepts through existential self-reflection the reality of one's own unconscious, then, after this change of viewpoint, not only do sexual repres- sions and traumatic scars break open, but also, in the course of self-experience, the inner "shadows" collectively become longer and longer. The entire existential relation to "negativity" must be revised, and, with logical, political, and emo- tional pain, the negative self can emerge, with its sores, its destructiveness, and its ugliness. The ego stands before the monstrous demand: to recognize that it is also what it absolutely believes itself not to be. The more conventional conscious- ness is, the more embittered will be its refusal to look into this mirror. Thus the resistance against dynamic psychology comes especially from those who believe they have something to lose through "analysis. " They shout loudest of all that they "don't need all that stuff. "
The psychoanalytic technique of reading has become very widespread in West- ern civilization. Especially in the United States over the past decades it has be- come dreadfully trivialized and turned into a social game in which the winner is the one who detects the most ulterior motives and neurotic hidden meanings be- hind everyday appearances in one's own life, as well as in the lives of others. This chronic analysis of oneself and others, which has become something of a sport, leads to at least two false attitudes. It leads, first, to hopeless intellectualization of psychoanalysis, which has thereby become a refuge for emotional coldness and symptomatic rationalism that has found in it the right means to remain entirely unchanged while giving the impression of being something else. Second it leads to an overemphasis of the infantile, which can be subtly reinforced by being con- tinually linked with the present. There is no guarantee that the "dialectic" works positively and that every regression will be canceled out by a corresponding progression. Woody Allen's urban neurotic seems to have gotten off relatively lightly. Psychoanalysis is certainly not a priori, as Karl Kraus has sarcastically remarked, the illness that pretends to be its own cure; but it can easily become so since it continually tends to underrestimate the power of the neurosis that would rather gaze into the mirror than resolutely face the here and now.
52 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
By no means does psychoanalysis encounter everywhere suffering individuals who want to be healed at any cost. Their sufferings fit into a dynamics of self- maintenance in a very complicated way. This dynamics cooperates with the am- bivalence of the healing hand that, for its part, can often only be effective when it stands with one foot on the side of the suffering against which it seems to strug- gle. Here begins a drawn-out game of artfulness - on both sides of the therapeutic relationship. One often does not know whether it is not actually the fish who catches the angler.
The category of the unconscious (better, of the "unconscious structure") is probably the most successful figure of thought in the human sciences of our cen- tury. With this self-reflective concept, the most significant advances in basic re- search into the human being and human civilization have been made. Without this concept, modern anthropology would be just as unthinkable as structural mythol- ogy, modern theory of grammar just as unthinkable as behavioral physiology and the theory of human biograms. With regard to unconscious regulating mechan- isms of human culture and social as well as individual behavior, the human sciences open up an unparalleled reflective attack on everything that, in the hu- man sphere, is "hidden programming" and not conscious behavior.
Here, the most powerful dawning of reflection in the history of human con- sciousness is taking place despite the inclination of some researchers to empha- size the invariance and unchangeability of unconscious structures. Every transpo- sition into consciousness, every reflection, strikes, no matter how gently, on the "rock of the unconscious. " And only in the light of consciousness can it be clarified where enlightenment can be a school of change, and where it can demon- strate its insightfulness by letting happen what cannot be changed.
The psychology of early enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the later schools of dynamic psychology, and all other systems concerned with uncon- scious structures in the area of human orders have made available such a powerful potential for reflection that it will be a long time before we will be able to see how human societies change when they begin to live continually with such reflecting forces. All these disciplines have built up a methodical network of self- experience that even the world religions have been scarcely able to create, with the exception of those great, meditative schools of metareligiosity whose aim has been to pro- mote consciousness-raising and that, today, significantly, are approaching the reflective psychologies: Zen Buddhism, Sufism, Tantra, Yoga, and others. The only question is whether the political central powers and the energies of repres- sion and divisiveness will succeed, on the macro- as well as the microlevel, in chaining the powers of conscious life that already have been half-awakened from slumber. Neoconservatism has long since seen the gathering danger for the repressive capacities of states and capitals; it senses that the time of conscious- nesses has come. Its strength lies in the fact that people have, in addition to a realistic fear of
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
war and crisis, a "fear of freedom" (Erich Fromm) -- fear of them-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES U 53
elves and their own possibilities. It is this fear that makes them listen to the in- idious denunciation of the "dear ego" (Hans Maier) and of "self-realization" as ism (j0hn Paul II during his visit to Germany, particularly in his sermon in Altotting).
Critique of Natural Illusion
Every unmasking critique knows itself to be in an intimate relation with what is "really the case" below the surface. On all sides, human consciousness is invited to deceive itself and to be content with mere illusion. For enlightenment, there- fore, it is always the second look that is decisive because it overcomes the first impression. If things were generally as they immediately seem, investigation and science would be superfluous. There would be nothing to look for, look through, or look into. But science and enlightenment have a detective-like relation to real- ity. The tension between the search and what is given is particularly radicalized in the case of human and social phenomena. For here, everything that is "given" (gegeberi) is simultaneously in a certain way only "ostensible" (vorgeblich) and artificial. Human life moves a priori in a natural artificiality and an artificial natu- ralness (Plessner). This realization is part of the great achievement of enlighten- ment's reflection on culture. It shows that human beings, as they are, live "unnatu- rally. " What was natural in them was "lost" and became "distorted" and "misshapen" through civilization. Human individuals are never in the "center of their beings," but rather stand beside themselves as persons other than who they "really" are or could be. These insights are today common knowledge in philo- sophical anthropology. In the meantime, they have been morally neutralized and have become detached structural viewpoints. At the beginning of this discovery, however, the thought of unnaturalness possessed enormous value for moral at- tacks. Its explosive power was great as long as the belief in a "good Nature" seemed to be unshaken. One of the battle cries of bourgeois society during its up- rising against the aristocratic world order was: "Nature! Nature! "
One can see the consequences of this discovery of unnaturalness in Rousseau's critique of human beings in society. It possesses both a critical-negative and a utopian-positive side; one could also say: a destructive politics and a constructive pedagogy. Rousseau diagnosed a total degeneration, a complete fall of humanity
rom "Nature" in the society of the eighteenth century. All spontaneity had been
tnrou
^naturalized
gh convention, all naivete had been replaced by finesse, all d been glossed over by facades of social intercourse, etc. Rousseau's ye tor these things was excessively sharp in a way that only an offended bour- geois perception, wanting to register its rights to life, could be in an aristocrati- y fabricated social order. The social theater of the ancien regime was becom-
g more transparent and absurd every day. Whereas the aristocracy treated its
"cerity
na
or
m of life with irony, bourgeois cultural values (Gemutskultur) treated the
54 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
artificial convolutions in that form of life with disgust. Consequently, Rousseau's critique met with tremendous approval from his contemporaries. In his depiction of social denaturalization, not only did the up and coming bourgeoisie feel confirmed in its most elementary social feeling, but also the more sensitive part of the aristocratic intelligentsia knew itself in the main to be correctly portrayed in this critique. Here the universal law of "sensitive critique" applies: The critique is accepted by those who in any case are less touched by it, but its main targets seem to be looking into a blind mirror that says absolutely nothing to them. The agreement of intelligent aristocrats with Rousseau's critique was an important cat- alyst for their philanthropic activity, with which they tried to buy off their guilty consciences about benefiting from the status quo. The first rational depth psychol- ogy, as mentioned earlier, was indeed an offshoot of aristocratic Rousseauianism. What came to light in its healing procedure could be taken without further ado as proof of the inner "healing powers of nature. " The possible destructiveness of the unconscious and the "dark side of nature" first came to the notice of the follow- ing generation of romantics and were interpreted in an increasingly conservative- pessimistic way (see E. T. A. Hoffmann, Joseph von Eichendorff, and many others).
A political stance follows directly from this analysis: in the name of the natural against the system of compulsions, on the side of the bourgeois-honest heart against aristocratic-artful deceptiveness, on the side of the free social contract against the old feudal relations based on coercion. The new society wanted to be an order in which all agreed, to their mutual advantage, on a peaceful and diligent life together according to a model based on nature and mutual sympathy.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
As har- monious and affable as that sounded, some representatives of the ancien regime were still sensitive enough to hear the insurrection of hell in this program. With horrified satisfaction, conservatives saw the French Revolution degenerate into terror and war. Nothing since then has nourished the conservative image of hu- manity more strongly. It thinks it knows that human nature, set loose here and now, deserves no optimism or glowing phrases. Conservative thinking in this in- stance behaves positivistically. Without first asking about contexts, it notes that, all too often, human beings behave egoistically, destructively, greedily, un- wisely, and asocially. Indeed, for this reason, criminality was and is so extremely important for all kinds of conservatism, because "short-circuited thinking" finds in it the final proof for a pessimistic view of humanity that, in turn, provides the basis for an authoritarian, strictly disciplining politics. From this viewpoint, there "exist" in nature criminals, idiots, malcontents, egoists, and rebels, just as there exist trees, cows, kings, laws, and heavenly bodies. The Christian doctrine of original sin here joins forces with the conservative, pessimistic understanding of nature. According to this doctrine, human beings, simply because they are born of woman, live in the world as defective creatures.
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 55
Rousseau's philosophy sees all this in advance. It knows that one has to get around pessimism by demonstrating how human beings become what they are so- cially. That there are human beings who behave nastily, greedily, unwisely, de- structively, etc. , proves nothing about their essential being. Here, in Rousseau, we find perhaps the most important figure of thought in moral-political enlighten- ment: the theory of the innocent victim.
The evidence introduced for political pessimism; the criminal, the lunatic, and the asocial individual, in a word, the second-rate citizen --these are not by nature as one finds them now but have been made so by society. It is said that they have never had a chance to be as they would be according to their nature, but were forced into the situation in which they find themselves through poverty, coercion, and ignorance. They are victims of society.
This defense against political pessimism regarding human nature is at first con- vincing. It possesses the superiority of dialectical thinking over positivistic think- ing. It transforms moral states and qualities into processes. Brutal people do not "exist," only their brutalization; criminality does not "exist," only criminalization; stupidity does not "exist," only stupefaction; self-seeking does not "exist," only training in egoism; there are no second-rate citizens, only victims of patroniza- tion. What political positivism takes to be nature is in reality falsified nature: the suppression of opportunity for human beings.
Rousseau knew of two aids who could illustrate his point of view, two classes of human beings who lived before civilization and, consequently, before perver- sion: the noble savage and the child. Enlightenment literature develops two of its most intimate passions around these two figures: ethnology and pedagogy. To the present day nothing has essentially changed in this approach. Literarily, this dou- ble passion precipitates two extensive genres: exotic travel literature and later ethnology on the one hand, and the educational novel and the literature on peda- gogy and child development on the other. The primitive peoples, about whom the European explorers from Columbus to Bougainville and Captain Cook reported, provide an enlightenment, which was gradually becoming more political, the ur- gently needed evidence for its view that, roughly stated, things can "proceed differently" --peacefully, reasonably, humanely, sensuously, without aristoc- racy, without war, without exploitation, without wigs, without lettres de cachet. The noble savages in the South Seas are like an Archimedean point through which one can playfully dislodge the claim of European social orders to be ordained by God and therefore unexcellable. Something different does exist; at the same time, it is better. What is reasonable can thus also become real. That is all enlighten- ment is trying to say.
From this moment on, the child becomes a political object--to a certain extent, the living security deposit of enlightenment. The child is the "noble savage" in one's own house. Through appropriate education care must be taken in the future
56 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
that innocent children are not made into the same artificial social cripples the previous system produced. Children are already what the new bourgeois humans believe they want to become. Enlightenment was not the first to politicize peda- gogy; it has discovered, however, that children always, and everywhere, are the future security of existing relations. But now children are something more: They carry bourgeois hopes for "another world," for a more humane society. It almost appears as if for the first time a new, politically tinged form of parental love has been developing, concentrated in the wish that one's own children should finally have a better life. Only in a society that felt the shake-up and that committed itself totally to the dynamics of world change and progress can such a form of parental love prosper. A new amalgam of love and "ambition for the child" is thus formed, something that would be meaningless in a stable, stagnant society "without prospects. " Peasant societies do not envision "careers" for their children; they see no prospects other than that of life as a peasant. Ambition in the aristocracy is directed not for the benefit of the child but for that of the aristocratic lineage itself, the family. Bourgeois children are the first to have an anthropological and politi- cal mission.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
How the traditional directing of ambitions in the bourgeois parent- child relationship is currently changing could be the topic of a special investi-
gation.
Of course, Rousseau's optimistic naturalism has a very vulnerable point. The beneficence of nature is something that can be doubted even when one does not hold conservative views. In the beginning things were not all that idyllic; genesis (Ursprung) is downright severe and difficult. It soon becomes clear that the image of origin cannot be understood historically because, on closer investigation, one finds that war, inequality, and harsh conditions of life are widespread in an unyielding nature; there are exceptions but they can scarcely be interpreted as ori- gin and rule. Since then, the question about "good origins" becomes the crux for enlightenment. It becomes more and more clear that this idea of origin has not a temporal but a Utopian reference. The Good is still nowhere to be found, except in the wishful human spirit and in daydreams, which unerringly aim at something even though it does not yet exist. Thus, critical naturalism can survive only when it withers away and reawakes as the "spirit of Utopia"; the origin then serves as an end-vision (Bloch).
Naturalistic thinking, in fact, fundamentally changed its function in the nine- teenth century. The natural sciences provided a concept of nature that was any- thing but idyllic. Especially since Darwin, the bourgeois order, having become imperialistic, used the beast of prey as its political emblem. Nature was used as justification by those who needed to legitimate acts of violence, not by those who spoke for peace. The heraldry of the old aristocracy had also shown a striking sympathy for predatory animals: the eagle, falcon, lion, bear. Long before Rous- seauianism, and in substance opposed to it, there was an aristocratic naturalism
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 57
that was renewed in the bourgeois order when it became powerful as political "bi- ologism. " Nothing can show more clearly that Rousseauian naturalism had been only a momentary stylization of the conception of nature on which a general the- ory of liberation could not support itself securely. Hesitatingly, therefore, en- lightenment began to take leave of the noble savage and the innocent child, a part- ing that, of course, can never lead to a complete break (Bruch) with these "allies. " The child and the savage are beings who have a claim on the sympathy of those who remain true to the idea of enlightenment.
Impulses for self-reflection in the great civilizations come from ethnology even today. Thus, behind the conspicuous present-day cult around the American Indian, there is a good deal of pondering about ideas of nature and the maximal size of societies that want to maintain a reasonable relation to themselves as well as to their environment. And from child psychology, there is still today a steady stream of valuable impulses for reflection on the behavioral patterns in societies that suffer from their unresolved childhoods.
What has remained undamaged in Rousseau's critique is the indispensable ex- posure of a supposedly evil "Nature" as a social fiction. This remains important in the purportedly natural inferiorities concerning race, intelligence, and sex and sexual behavior. When conservatives and reactionaries refer to "Nature" to justify their assertions about the inferiority of woman, the lesser capacities of dark races, the innate intelligence of children from the upper social strata, and the sickness of homosexuality, they have usurped naturalism. It remains the task of critique to refute this. Ultimately critique must at least be able to show that what "Nature" gives us has to be recognized as neutral and nontendentious so that every value judgment and every tendency can without doubt be understood as a cultural phenomenon. Even if Rousseau's "good Nature" has been discredited, he has at least taught us not to accept "bad Nature" as an excuse for social oppression.
However, when one speaks of the "victims of society," the "artful dimension"
quickly comes into the picture again. In the concept of the "victim of society,"
there is a reflective contradiction that can be misused in many ways. Already in
Rousseau, a dubious artfulness is observed that is supposed to conceal a double
standard. That he combined nature and childhood in a new idea of education and,
at
? ng been understood as a discrepancy between theory and practice. Rousseau
was a master of an artful reflexivity that skillfully found fault with others on every
Point but in itself always discovered only the purest of intentions. On the white
Page of this feeling of innocence, the famous confessions were written. In this
osturing there was something that other determined enlighteners, above all
einrich Heine, could not and did not want to follow-even though they do not
the same time, denied his own children and stuck them in an orphanage, has
a v e an terenlightenment.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ything to do with the notorious defamation of Rousseau by the entire coun-
58 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
The vulnerable point in the victim theory is, again, the self-reification of con- sciousness, the establishment of a new naively artful position. This can serve or be felt, depending on the circumstances, as a diversionary trick, as a technique of extortion, or as indirect aggression. Psychology is familiar with the "eternal victim," who exploits this position for disguised aggressions. Also belonging to this category, in a broader sense, are those permanent losers as well as medical and political hypochondriacs who lament that conditions are so terrible that it is a great sacrifice on their part not to kill themselves or emigrate. On the German Left, not least of all under the influence of the sociologized schema of the victim, a certain type of renegade has emerged who feels that it is a dirty trick to have to live in this land without summer and without oppositional forces.
Nobody can say that such a viewpoint does not know what it is talking about. Its mistake is that it remains blind to itself. For the accusation becomes bound to misery and magnifies it under the subterfuge of unsuspecting critical observations. With the
obstinacy of a Sophist, in aggressive self-reification, many a "critical" conscious- ness refuses to become healthier than the sick whole.
A second possibility of misusing the victim schema has been experienced by dedicated helpers and social workers when, guided by the best intentions, they try to make prisoners, the homeless, alcoholics, marginal youth, and others aware that they are the "victims of society" who have simply failed to offer enough resistance. The helpers often encounter sensitive resistance to their attempts and have to make it clear to themselves just how much discrimination is present in their own "good will. " The self-esteem and need for esteem in the disadvantaged often forcefully defends itself against the demand for self-reification made on them by every political kind of assistance that argues in this way. Precisely those who are worst off feel a spark of self-assertion, whose extinction would be
justifiably feared if those concerned began to think of themselves as victims, as non-egos. To preserve the dignity of "poor bastards," they alone and on their own accord can say that they are poor bastards. Those who try to put such words into their mouths insult them, no matter how good their intentions may be. It is in the nature of liberating reflection that it cannot be forced. It answers only to indirect assistance.
From this vantage point, the perspective on a life spent in total, unavoidable benightedness becomes possible. Theodor Adorno sketched this when he spoke of an unhappy consciousness in which the down-and-outers inflict on themselves a second time that wrong that circumstances perpetrated against them in order to be able to bear it. Here, an inner reflection takes place that looks like a parody of freedom. From the outside, the phenomenon resembles satisfaction and would, if addressed, probably also refer to itself that way. In memory of his mother, Pe- ter Handke has found a tender formulation in which the sadness of a loving and helpless knowledge lays down arms before reality: "self-contented unhappiness. '
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 59
Enlightenment has neither a chance nor a right to disturb the world's slumber if it looks like this.
Critique of the Illusion of Privacy
Where is this ego then, if it is neither in the body nor in the soul?
Blaise Pascal
The last great attack of critique against illusion aims at the position of the ego be- tween nature and society. We know from the line of thought in the preceding cri- tiques that knowledge (Erkenntnis) does not have to do with human nature pure and simple, but with nature as conception, nature as fabrication, with unnatural nature. In that which is "given in nature" there is always something "given in addi- tion" by human beings. The "labor" of reflection is summarized in this insight. Modernity establishes itself in our minds in the shape of counterintuitive ex- periences that break through naivete and exercise a peculiar compulsion on us to increase our intelligence.
Ideologically, the reference to "Nature" is always significant because it
produces an artificial naivete and ends up as voluntary naivete. It covers up the
human contribution and avers that things are by nature, and from their origins,
in that "order" in which our representations, which are always influenced by "in-
terests," depict them. The rudiments for ideologies of order are hidden in all
naturalisms. Every naturalism begins as involuntary naivete. Initially, we cannot
help thinking that the "order of things" is an objective order. For the first glance
falls on the things and not on the "eyeglasses. " In the work of enlightenment, this
first innocence becomes irretrievably lost. Enlightenment leads to the loss of nai-
vete and it furthers the collapse of objectivism through a gain in self-experience.
It effects an irreversible awakening and, expressed pictorially, executes the turn
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
to the eyeglasses, i. e. , to one's own rational apparatus. Once this consciousness
of the eyeglasses has been awakened in a culture, the old naivete loses its charm,
becomes defensive, and is transformed into narrow-mindedness, which is intent
on remaining as it is. The mythology of the Greeks is still enchanting; that of fas-
cism is only stale and shameless. In the first myth, a step toward an interpretation
of the world was taken; in simulated naivete, an artful stupefaction (Verdum-
mung) is at work--the predominant method of self-integration in advanced social 7
orders. Such an observation touches only superficially on the role of mythology in modernity. For the moment this will suffice. Artful self-stupefaction manifests itself in a whole range of modern naturalisms: racism, sexism, fascism, vulgar biologism, and -- egoism.
To put egoism into this series may, at first glance, seem strange, indeed, even dangerous. Actually, there is in egoism a "natural givenness" of a special kind.
60 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
The critique of egoism (better, the critique of the illusion of privacy) constitutes, I think, the core of all enlightenment in which the self-experience of civilized egos comes to maturity. After it, there can be logically no other uncovering critique, but only "praxis," conscious life.
How does the ego come to its determinations? What constitutes its "character? " What creates the material of its self- experience? The answer runs as follows: The ego is a result of programming. It is formed in emotional, practical, moral, and political drill. "In the beginning was education" (Alice Miller).
Self-experience proceeds in two stages: naive perception and reflection. In the naive stage, no consciousness can do otherwise than to conceive of its character traits, programming, and training as its own. Whether in the case of impressions, feelings, or opinions, at first it must always say: I am so! My feeling is thus, my attitude is thus. I am as / am. In the reflective stage, self-consciousness becomes clear about itself: My programming, my traits, my training are thus; I have been brought up in this way and have become so; my "mechanisms" function thus; what I am and what I am not are both at work in me in this way.
The establishment of inwardness and the creation of the illusion of privacy are the most subversive themes of enlightenment. It is still not really clear today who the social conveyor of this impulse of enlightenment may be. One of the ambiva- lences of enlightenment is that although intelligence can be explained sociologi- cally, educationally, and politically, "wisdom," self-reflection cannot. The sub-
ject of a radical ego enlightenment cannot be socially identified with certainty --even though the procedures of this enlightenment are anchored in reality.
In this point, the majority of societies seem to strive for a conscious nonen-
lightenment. Did not Nietzsche too warn of that "life-destroying enlightenment"
8 thattouchesonourlife-supportingself-delusions? Canweaffordtoshakeupthe
"basic fictions" of privacy, personality, and identity? Be that as it may, in this question both old and new conservatives have come to the hard decision to take the "stance" of defending, against all the demands of reflection, their "unavoidable lies for living," without which self-preservation would not be possible. That they are aided in this by the general fear of self-experience, which competes with curi- osity about self-experience, does not have to be expressly emphasized. Thus the theater of respectable, closed egos goes on everywhere, even where the means have long been available to secure better knowledge. Crosswise to all political fronts, it is the "ego" in society that offers the most resolute resistance against the decisive enlightenment. Scarcely anyone will put up with radical self-reflection on this point, not even many of those who regard themselves as enlighteners. The dance around the golden calf of identity is the last and greatest orgy of counteren- lightenment. Identity is the magic word of a partially hidden, partially open con- servatism that has inscribed personal identity, occupational identity, national identity, political identity, female identity, male identity, class identity, party
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 61
identity, etc. , on its banner. The listing of these essential demands for identity would already suffice to illustrate the pluralistic and mobile character of that which is called identity. But one would not be speaking of identity if it were not basically a question of the fixed form of the ego.
The establishment of inwardness comprises the ego as the bearer of ethics, the erotic, aesthetics, and politics. In these four dimensions, everything that I ex- perience as mine is given to me, though at first "I" was not asked: my norms of behavior, my professional ethics, my sexual patterns, my sensual-emotional modes of experience, my class "identity," my political interests.
Here I want to begin with the last mentioned. By briefly describing the "politi- cal narcissisms" of the aristocracy, the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
bourgeoisie, and the proletariat, I will show how, even in the most "inner" region, where we suppose ourselves to be in the closest "narcissistic" proximity to ourselves, we encounter at the same time the most "external" and most universal. Here, the game of "one's own self with what is "alien" becomes visible in the public heart of personalities. Precisely the analysis of narcissism can show how the other has already got the better of the ego. I look in the mirror and see a stranger who swears that it is me. It is one of the irresistible ironies of enlightenment that it shatters our consciousness with such radical counterintuitions. In concluding this line of thought, I want to simply suggest for consideration the question whether the last level of integration in en- lightenment does not have to be a kind of "rational mysticism. "
The ego enters the political world never as a private individual but as the mem- ber of a group, an estate, or a class. From time immemorial, the members of the aristocracy have known themselves to be "the best. " Their social and political po- sition is based on an open, demonstrative, and self-satisfied relation between power and self-esteem. The political narcissism of the aristocracy is nourished
by this plain, power-conscious presumption. The aristocracy has been allowed to believe that it is favored in every existentially essential respect and is called on
to excel--to be militarily stronger, aesthetically superior, culturally refined, un- broken in vitality (which only with regard to the courtly aristocracy is no longer quite true). Thus in the function of the aristocracy there is initially nothing that would allow one to suggest that political status destroys vitality. In fact, the nobil- ity often tried to base its cultural self-portrait directly on narcissistic pleasure. Its political-aesthetic culture is based on the motif of self-celebration, of the union
of self-consciousness and festival. The everyday form of this narcissistic class consciousness appears in the concept of the noble's honor and in the idea of a no- D 'e life-sry/e. With the smallest affronts to their highly trained sense of honor, aristocrats must demand satisfaction --which precipitates the history of the duel
and symbolic combat in Europe as well as in Asia. Honor was the bond between Motion and public life, between the innermost life of the "best" and the reality 31
? ' greeting, obsequious forms of behavior, and even grammatical structures, life among the "best" as well as in public view of the common people. Rules 62 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
which are unknown in prefeudal languages (the most striking being the honorific forms in Japanese), can be traced back to these claims to domination, honor, and personal pleasure.
The aristocratic programming of a heightened self-consciousness, however, comprises more than just what is too hastily called vanity or arrogance. It pro- vides at the same time a high level of character formation and education that works to form opinions, etiquette, emotionality, and cultural taste. All these mo- ments are still encompassed in the old concept of courtliness (Hoftichkeit, polite- ness). The courtly person (cortegiano, gentilhomme, gentleman, Hofmann) has gone through a training in self-esteem that expresses itself in many ways: in aristocratically pretentious opinions, in polished or majestic manners, in gallant or heroic patterns of feeling as well as in a selective, aesthetic sensitivity for that which is said to be courtly or pretty. The noble, far removed from any self-doubt, should achieve all this with a complete matter-of-factness. Any uncertainty, any doubt in these things signifies a slackening in the nobility's cultural "identity. " This class narcissism, which has petrified into a form of life, tolerates no irony, no exception, no slips, because such disturbances would give rise to unwelcome reflections. The French nobles did not turn up their noses at Shakespeare's "bar- barism" without reason. In his plays one already "smells" the human ordinariness of those who want to stand before society as the best.
With the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, the place of the "best" is awarded anew. The bourgeois ego, in an unprecedented, creative storming to the heights of a new class consciousness won for itself an autonomous narcissism, in whose period of degeneration we are living today; it is for this reason that we have to suffer so much political and cultural depressiveness. The bourgeoisie found its own way of being better than the others, better than the corrupt nobility and the uncultivated mob. At first its class ego raised itself on the feeling of having the better, purer, more rational, and more useful morality in all areas of life, from sexuality to management. For a whole century, the new bourgeoisie wallowed in moralizing literature. In it, a new political collective learns to say "I" in a special way; whether psychologically and aesthetically as in that "sensitivity" that schools itself in natural beauty, intimate sociability, and empathy with heartrending fates; whether politically and scientifically as in that bourgeois public sphere that starts as a
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
republic of the learned in order to end up as a republic of citizens. Literature, the diary, gregariousness, critique, science, and republicanism are all training grounds for a new bourgeois high ego, for a new will to subjectivity. Only here do citizens learn how to have good taste, proper demeanor, opinions, and will- Here, the class-specific, novel high feelings of bourgeois culture are drilled--the
pleasure of being a citizen: the awareness of progress; the pride in having worked up from the bottom and in having come a long way; the pride in being the moral and historical torchbearer; the joy in one's own moral sensibility; the demonstra- tive pleasure in one's own cultivation; the pleasure in having a simultaneously cul-
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 63
tivated and naive feeling about nature; the self-admiration of the class for its musi- cal, poetic, and scientific genius; the joy in the feeling of enterprise, invention, and historical movement; finally, the triumph of gaining a political say. Looking back at the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one now gets an idea of the extent to which creative and coquettish narcissism permeates bourgeois cul- ture. At the same time, however, the bourgeoisie also followed the nobility in es- sential respects, not least of all in its concept of honor, through which the duel came into bourgeois life and even into the realm of student life. Without doubt, honor became for the bourgeoisie, too, an essential socionarcissistic factor, with which the national militarization of bourgeois society is connected. That this type of bourgeois is dying out today is felt in every nook and cranny of civilization. Those who still know such a latecomer should regard themselves as ethnologists; with wonder they may hear how the last specimens even today cannot walk through the forest without speaking of God.
The neobourgeois generations have modernized their social narcissism. Since at least the Weimar years, the collective ego tone of the bourgeoisie has been loosening up. A lazier style of ego-being as bourgeois is becoming prevalent everywhere. Today we find the mode of expression of the last surviving cultivated bourgeois horribly artificial, and everyone has had the urge to tell them to their faces that they should not ramble on the way they do, so full of themselves. In the twentieth century we observe a sociopsychological front between two bour- geois ego styles, an older and a newer type, which are extremely allergic to each other. The threshold between the two types runs roughly through the time of the First World War and the following phase of modernization. In the mutual dislike of, say, Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, this front becomes concretely visible.
From a historical perspective, the bourgeoisie is the first class that has learned to say /and that at the same time has the experience of labor. All older class nar- cissisms can base themselves "only" on struggle, military heroism, and the gran- diosity of rulers. When the bourgeois says "I" the idea of the pride of labor, of productive accomplishment can also be heard for the first time. This ego of a "laboring class" introduces a previously unheard of turn toward realism into higher social feelings. Of course, that cannot be seen clearly from the beginning because bourgeois culture was forced to distinguish between poetry and prose, art and life, the ideal and reality. The consciousness of labor in the bourgeois ego ? s still thoroughly split-into an idealistic and a pragmatic fraction. The one ver- sion of the bourgeois comprises the artisan, the trader, the official, the financier, and the entrepreneur, all of whom, in their own way, can claim to know what
abor is. Juxtaposed to them from the beginning, stands a type of bourgeois who oes research, writes poetry, composes and makes music, and philosophizes and
who believes that these activities develop a world that is self-sufficient. It is obvi- ous that these two fractions of the bourgeois ego get on only superficially and come together only in the hollow connection of property and cultivation. They
64 D EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
? Inscription above the entrance to the concentration camp at Auschwitz: "Labor is liberating. "
create the century-long tension between the good and the evil bourgeois, the ide- alist and the exploiter, the visionary and the pragmatist, the ideally liberated bour- geois and the laboring bourgeois. This tension remains as inexhaustible as that between the world of work and "freedom" in general: Even a large part of social- ism to date has been only the renewal of the inner-bourgeois conflict between the idealistic citoyen and the detestable bourgeois.
But even the bourgeois experience of labor is not so straightforward as the bourgeoisie would like to have it. The bourgeois, who, as subjects of power, say I because they also labor and are creative, express only formally and illusorily the truth for everybody. They want others to forget that their way of laboring is arranged in a questionable way. This holds specially for the genuine bourgeois in the sphere of labor, the entrepreneurs, the capitalists, and financiers. Their consciousness of labor is so inconsistent that, since the late nineteenth century, it is difficult not to speak of lying. For if labor were really what creates a right to a political ego, what about those who labor for bourgeois "laborers"? The situa- tion of the proletariat, which, during a great part of the nineteenth century and in segments of the twentieth, was
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
deprived of its rights, prevented bourgeois soci- ety from coming to rest. Precisely the principle of achievement--success and privileges for the more diligent--became undermined in the course of the de- velopment. "Labor is liberating" was a slogan that sounded more and more cyni- cal with the passing of each decade, until finally it was written above the entrance to Auschwitz.
The pleasure in being a citizen combined in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies with the compulsion to politics in a new kind of political complex of feel- ings that for the past 200 years has seemed to countless individuals to be the inner-
iEIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES ? 65
most and most spontaneous impulse of their ego: the love of the Fatherland. What began as patriotic spontaneity was methodically organized in the nineteenth cen- tury as a political ideology, which in the twentieth century heated up into a politi- cal system of madness. The European nationalisms were indeed complexes of convictions and passions that individuals found in themselves as though given by nature, complexes to which they could say in a primary naivete and honesty: That is me, that is how my innermost self feels, that is how my most intimate political reason stirs itself. For Germans, empathy with such naively wonderful patri- otisms is actually only still possible when we meet people from foreign countries who live in the first dawning of patriotic self-reflection and who can still claim for themselves a primal innocence. How many German left-wingers did not stand bv with a pensive and uneasy smile when Chilean socialist emigres sang songs that ended with the refrain: fatherland or death. It has been a long time since Ger- mans could hear a mutual resonance of progressive and patriotic motives; the reaction has incorporated national feeling for too long.
Two hundred years ago things looked a little different. The first patriotic generations --the French, who after the Revolution felt their national existence threatened by the offensives of European monarchies; the Germans, who offered resistance against the Napoleonic occupation; the Greeks, who engaged in a struggle of liberation against Turkish domination; the disunited and scattered Poles; the Italians in the time of Garibaldi, who felt themselves to be "un- redeemed" under multiple foreign domination--all these could, in their national
9narcissisms, still enjoy, so to speak, a primal innocence. What later with each
decade could be seen more clearly probably still remained hidden to them: That patriotism and nationalism were the conscious self-programming of bourgeois ego pride that, taken seriously, immediately lead to worrisome, indeed calami- tous, developments. It was precisely in Germany that this innocence was lost early on. Already in Napoleonic times, Jean Paul perceived that artful, self- reflectively mandacious element in Fichte's Speeches to the German Nation (1808) that, seen in the light of day, are nothing other than a deliberate program- ming of a consciousness that is not one bit naive but is supposed to be so. That it was Fichte, one of the greatest logicians of self-reflection in modern philoso- phy, who preached the love of fatherland to the Germans, reveals the vile, self- deceptive aspects of the earliest stages in German national feeling. Heinrich Heine also saw what was repulsive and affected in German patriotism from its first moment. National spontaneity was generated through pedagogy, indoctrina- tion, and propaganda until finally loud- mouthed national narcissism exploded militarily out of the ideological test tube in the early twentieth century. It celebrated its greatest triumph in the European storm of emotion and war eupho- ria in August 1914.
Because of its synthetic nature, nationalistic mentality bears up badly when its narcissistic self-programming is disturbed. This is the reason for the rage of the
66 ? EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES
bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, which had constricted itself in a chauvinistic and elitist way, against the self- reflective intelligentsia, which purportedly had such "decomposing" effects. In defending against the "decomposition" (Zerset- zung) of its artificial naivete, bourgeois ideology maneuvered itself into a position where it came into conflict with its own previous enlightenment. The cosmopoli- tan composure and universalistic nobleness of enlightenment must have become a thorn in the side of the political narcissism of the patriots. The oft-cited "destruc- tion of reason" (Lukacs) in later bourgeois thinking was deeply rooted in the nar- cissistic self-assertion of the bourgeois class ego against the forces of disillusion- ment that reflection inevitably exercises on it. Thus an alliance had to come about between enlightenment and socialist currents that initially knew how to avoid the willful self-delusion of a mentality of domination.
The principal disturbance of nationalism arose, as could not be otherwise, from the political movement of the old Fourth Estate, the workers'movement. In it, a new political ego took the floor once more. It was no longer a bourgeois ego, but initially and for a long time, it spoke a bourgeois language. Ideologically, so- cialism did not at first require its "own" weapon. It was enough simply to take the bourgeoisie at its word: freedom, equality, solidarity. Only when it became evident that all this was not meant so literally did socialism have to forge its own critical weapon against bourgeois
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ideology, whereby initially it was forced to ad- vance bourgeois ideals against a bourgeois double standard. Only with the theory of class consciousnesses did socialist doctrine elevate itself to a metamoral standpoint.
Ethically, the early workers' movement had every argument on its side, hence its erstwhile moral superiority. It pushed the process that began with bourgeois realism of labor a significant step further. For there is a proletarian consciousness of labor that clearly differs from that of the bourgeois. In it, an archrealistic ex- perience "from the very bottom" wants to gain political expression: One sweats for a whole lifetime and gets nowhere; often there is not even enough to eat, while aggregate social wealth continually grows. One sees it in architecture, in the resi- dences of those who rule, in the construction of cities, in the standard of the mili- tary forces, in the luxury consumption of others. Laborers do not participate in the growth of wealth although they spend their whole lives in producing it. As soon as the laborer says I, things must change.
The political egoformation of the proletariat thus begins and proceeds differ- ently from that of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. The laborer ego intrudes into the public world with neither grandiosity of domination nor moral-cultural hegemony. It possesses no primary narcissistic will to power. All previous work- ers' movements and socialisms failed because they disregarded this condition. In the aristocracy, the will to power is in politics and in life almost identical; it is anchored in the social structure as status narcissism -- whatever is on top automati- cally experiences itself as the best, as political and existential excellence. In the
EIGHT UNMASKINGS: A REVIEW OF CRITIQUES a 67
h ureeoisie, class narcissism already becomes more ambivalent.
