But it can be asked for which
existential
disposition Utopia and hope stand.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
Following them came the "skeptical Generation" of the fifties, which stands today at the helm, and following them, the generations of the seventies and
118 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
eighties, among whom the early developers in cynicism are already making them- selves noticed as New Wave.
The Bohemians, a relatively recent phenomenon, played a prominent role in the regulation of the tensions between art and bourgeois society. Bohemianism was the space in which the transition from art into the art of living was tried out. For a century, Bohemianism gave the neokynical impulse a social shelter. As a regulator for bourgeois careers, it was above all important because, similarly to the universities, it served as a "psychosocial moratorium" (Erikson) in which young bourgeois could live out their crises of adjustment in the transition from the world of school and home to the world of serious occupations. Research has established that there were only a few long-term Bohemians; for the great majority of Bohemians, the milieu remained a transit station, a space for testing out life and departing from the norms. There they used their freedom to work out their rejection of bourgeois society until a (perhaps) more grown-up "yes, but" took its place.
If we look today at these nurturing soils and living spaces in which deviation and critique, satire and cheekiness, kynicism and willfulness thrive, it becomes immediately clear why we must fear the worst for embodied cheeky enlighten- ment. Before our very eyes, cities have been transformed into amorphous clumps where alienated streams of traffic transport people to the various scenes of their attempts and failures in life. For a long time now carnival has meant not "inverted world" but flight into safe world, of anesthesia from a permanently inverted world full of daily
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
absurdities. We know that, at least since Hitler, Bohemianism is dead, and in its offshoots in the subcultures cheeky moods are to be found less than the cheerless attitudes of withdrawal. And as far as the universities are concerned--oh, let's not talk about that!
These mutilations of cheeky impulses indicate that society has entered a stage of organized seriousness in which the playgrounds of lived enlightenment are be- coming increasingly clogged. This is what dampens the climate of this country so much. We live on in a morose realism, not wanting to be noticed, and play the respectable games. Cynicism prickles beneath the monotony. A clear-sighted coquetting with its own schizophrenia betrays the unhappy consciousness, in academia and elsewhere. The provocations seem to be exhausted, all bizarre twists of modern existence seem to be already tried out. A state of public, respect- able torpor has been entered. A tired, schizoidly demoralized intelligentsia plays at realism by contemplatively walling itself up in harsh circumstances.
Embodiment or Splitting
The embodied is that which wants to live. But life is fundamentally different from the postponement of suicide. Those who live in societies armed with atomic weapons become, whether they want to or not, at least semiagents of a cynical "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 119
community of suicides, that is, unless they were to decide to resolutely turn their backs on it. That is precisely what a continually growing number of people are doing, people who have emigrated since the fifties--to Provence, Italy, the Ae- gean, California, Goa, the Caribbean, Auroville, Poona, Nepal, and, last but not least, to Tibetan highlands in the interior of Germany and France.
Two questions arise in connection with these phenomena, the first cynical, the second concerned. First, when it comes to the crunch, will that be far enough? And second, who is helped when the morally most sensitive people abandon the sinking ship of cynical society? We have "good" reasons to ask these questions, for the growing expectation of war nourishes both the cynical and the concerned view on what is coming. Emigration could be useful for both sides if we under- stand it correctly: for the emigrants, who will find out whether the greener pastures they seek exist; for those who remain behind, to whom the departure of the others says: There where you are, life is not possible--for us. Is it for you? Emigration could be taken somewhat less seriously if it were really only a fringe phenomenon. However, nothing permits this innocuous view of things. What is happening on the fringe today comes from the middle. Emigration has become a fact of mass psychology. Entire strata of the population have been living for a considerable period in an inner somewhere-else, just not in this country. They do not feel bound to what are called the fundamental values of society. One hears "fundamental values" and involuntarily sees mushroom clouds rise up. One hears those who are responsible proclaim their readiness to negotiate and feels, looking into their faces, the ice of the end of the world in their eyes. The main body of society has long since chosen to emigrate into leisure time, and for them the word "life" gets its bright color from memories of certain moments on happy vacations --when the horizon opened up . . .
What is to be done? Get out or collaborate? "Flee or stand firm? " Both alterna- tives seem inadequate. Their expressions are all overused and ambivalent. Are the "escapists" really comprehended with this word? Is there not infrequently a lot of cowardliness and melancholy, collaboration and opportunism in what is called "standing firm"? Is escapism without exception a conscious act--and don't a lot of so-called escapists (Aussteiger) already find themselves on the outside be- fore they are asked about their own attitude? Is collaboration really cynically tinged everywhere? Is it not also motivated by the need for something "positive" and the need to belong?
But it is also worthwhile to see the elements of truth in the expressions on both sides. Escapists are justified, because they do not want to be entangled with open
eyes in the intolerable cynicisms of a society in which the distinction between producing and destroying is becoming blurred. Collaboration is justified because individuals are also permitted to orient themselves toward survival in the short run. To flee is justified because it rejects a stupid courage and because only fools let themselves be consumed by hopeless struggles -- when there are spaces that are
120 D "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
more amenable to life. Standing firm is justified because experience shows that every conflict that is merely avoided will catch up with us at every point of our flight.
For this reason, the alternative that corresponds to our view of life must be grasped in a different way-- it is that between embodiment or splitting. It is an al- ternative that addresses itself first to consciousness, and only afterward to be- havior. It demands a radical priority of self-experience over morality. It is a mat- ter of either consciously letting what is already torn apart grow together again or unconsciously surrendering what is split off to the schizoid process. Integration or schizophrenia. Choose life or celebrate at the party of suicides. That may sound like a spiritual diet for individuals, and those who take it this way have heard right. Initially enlightenment has no other addressees than those
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
individuals who elude blind socialness (Gesellschaftlichkeit) without thereby being able to cease playing a role in society. One must therefore keep the idea of enlightenment alive-through embodied enlightenment, of course. Enlightenment means to affirm all antischizophrenic movements. The universities are scarcely the place where this happens. The universitas vitae is taught in other places, there, where people oppose the cynicism of split official consciousness, where they try out forms of living that open up a chance for conscious life in minds, bodies, and souls. It unfolds in a broad field of individuals and groups who carry on the kyni- cal impulse and who attempt what no politics and no mere art can take from them: to tackle, with their alertness, the splits and unconscious elements that seep into individual existence; to grow into one's own possibilities; and to participate in en- lightenment's labor of cheering up, a part of which is to pay attention to the wishes
that are the premonition of the possible.
Psychopolitics of Schizoid Society
What are the signs of a prewar period? How do the psychopolitical constitutions of capitalist societies before world wars reveal themselves? German history offers an exemplary lesson in how world wars ferment in the psychic (seelisch) tensions of a nation. On the basis of two --viewed pessimistically, three --cases we can study what it means to live in the prelude to great military explosions. The main psychopolitical symptom is an increasing heaviness in the social atmosphere, which becomes charged with schizoid tensions and ambivalences to the point where it is no longer tolerable. In such a climate, an eerie readiness for catas- trophes flourishes; I call it, alluding to Erich Fromm, the catastrophile complex. It attests to a collective disturbance of vitality through which the energies of the living are displaced into a sympathy with the catastrophic, the apocalyptic, and the violently spectacular.
The historian knows that political history cannot be the site of human happi- ness. Nevertheless, if we want to ask when in our century Europeans experienced
IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 121
? their happiest hour, we will be embarrassed by the answer. But the signs and the documents speak for themselves. We stand at first perplexed before the phenome- non of August 1914: What the peoples of Europe, on entering the war, ex- perienced at that time is designated by historiographers ashamedly as "war psy- chosis. " If we look closer, we see it was a matter of indescribable storms of affect that took hold of the masses, of outbreaks of jubilation and of national emotion, of pleasure in fear and the ecstasy of fate. There were moments of pathos and a presentiment of life beyond comparison. The slogan of the times was an ecstatic one: Finally things have gone so far. The masses probably also experienced fear, but above all a feeling of basic change into something that promised "life. " The slogans were rejuvenation, putting to the test, cleansing bath, purgative cure. In the first year, the war was waged by purely volunteer armies; no one had to be forced to go to the front. The catastrophe enticed the Wilhelminian youth. When the catastrophe occurred, the people recognized themselves in it and understood that they had waited for it.
There is not the slightest reason to believe that the people of that time were so very different from people of today. Only arrogance could allow us to deceive ourselves that we would be smarter in existentially decisive matters than those volunteers from Langemarck who, by the thousands, pathetically ran into the fire ? r the machine guns. The only difference is that the psychic mechanisms of later generations operate more subtly. That is why we are initially astounded that the Processes then ran so naively and unrestrained on the surface. The war enthusiasts
nought they were experiencing the qualitative difference between provisional ar-
ra
between inauthentic and supposedly authentic life. Even after the war, the talk
ngements and decision, a sultriness and clarification --in a word, the difference
of as
>> was felt by the men of August 1914, there would finally be something at stake wat made living worthwhile.
"battle as inner experience" wafted through pre-Fascist literature. In the war,
122 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
The First World War signals the turning point in modern cynicism. With it the up-tempo phase of the decomposition of old naivetes begins-such as those about the nature of war, the nature of social order, of progress, of bourgeois values, indeed, of bourgeois civilization itself. Since this war, the diffuse schizoid climate around the major European powers has not become any less intense. Since then, those who have spoken of cultural crisis, etc. , have had that mental disposition of postwar shock unquestionably in mind that knows that the naivete of yesterday will never exist again. Irrevocably, mistrust, disillusion, doubt, and distanced stances have infiltrated into the sociopsychological "hereditary substance. " Everything positive will be from then on an "In-spite-of," laced with latent desper- ation. Since that time, the broken modes of consciousness visibly reign: irony, cynicism, stoicism, melancholy, sarcasm, nostalgia, voluntarism, resignation to the lesser evil, depression and anesthesia as a conscious choice of uncon- sciousness.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
In the few years of the Weimar Republic the catastrophile complex built up again until finally the economic crisis ignited the kindling. The joyless republic granted an end to itself. In the myth of revolution and in the myth of the people, catastrophile tendencies found their "respectable" underpinnings. Whoever secretly accepted the catastrophe loudly claimed to know where the course of events was heading and which drastic cure was the proper one. Those who saw the catastrophe approaching tried, before it broke, to get the most out of life. In 1931, Erich Kastner captured the voice of a man who was beyond the cliffs of naive morality and who, with his private lust for life, swam with the current as it flowed toward the next cataract.
"Serious conversations, how? Is there a life after death? Confidentially, there isn't. Everything must be settled before death. There's a heap of things to do, day and night. . . . Better to amuse yourselves than to redeem humanity. As I said, life has to be settled before death. More
8That is a contemporary voice that in fifty years has not become outmoded. This is how a person speaks who knows that he does not change history. In spite of everything he wants to live--before the end, which is disguised as an uprising. Today, the latent will to catastrophe on all sides has taken cover under the official respectability of the politics of peace. The mechanisms whose relatively brutal openness characterized the Fascist style have sunk into the subliminal and the atmospheric under the masks of accommodation, good will, and sincere senti- ments. Naive stimuli have disappeared from the surface of consciousness. The increasing socialization of reactions represses open gestures; what is called democracy means, psychologically, an increase in self-control, which is probably necessary in dense populations. However, we should not be deceived by the calmed surface. The catastrophile complex lives on, and if not all signs are mis-
information glady given. Don't be so serious, my boy. "
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" D 123
leading, its mass is caught up in incessant accumulation. Perhaps it is the "accom- plishment of terrorism"--to speak frivolously--to have made the catastrophile currents, at least here and there, tangible and recognizable. One can refer to what is clearly there.
Recall the kidnapping and murder of the president of the Employers' Associa- tion, Hans-Martin Schleyer--the feverish climate of those months when terrorism approached its peak in Germany. At that time, the psychopolitical scenario that belongs to the catastrophile complex again came crassly to light, perhaps for the first time since the Second World War. The media and the voices of state were spontaneously and completely united in their respectable tone of indignation and dismay. Among millions of published sentences, there was hardly a passage in which the truth of the masses in the atmosphere forced its way through. This truth consisted, as every whispered conversation, every scene at a kiosk, dialogues in canteens and bars, chats in lobbies, etc. , proved, in a flickering ambivalence of feelings in which existential fears and desire for catastrophe were indistinguisha- bly entwined. The avidness of the reporting, the measureless breadth of the dis- cussion, and the excess of state and private reactions, even viewed in retrospect, speak an unmistakable language. Here something had happened that touched the feeling toward life. A nameless hunger for drama in history and a desperate long- ing for conflict on the right front had so confused hearts and minds that for months on end, an event was gnawed away at that in its criminal and political content did not justify such agitation. Through the political staging of the crime and the spec- tacular interaction of state and terror group, it took on the significance of an epoch-making event. It nourished itself on powerful catastrophile currents and swelled up, becoming the dominant emotional theme of endless days. Sociopsy- chologically, it brought an hour of truth. It was the substitute for a history in which something moves, the caricature of a "liberation struggle," an idiotic- criminal parody of that which social democracy under Wilhelm II, Hindenberg, and Hitler had neglected--battle on the wrong front, at the wrong time, by the wrong attackers against the wrong opponents, and yet, in spite of the sum of all these distortions, it was greedily lapped up by society as a substitute for struggle, conflict drug, and political catastrophe film.
At one point, the universal consensus in the cynically mute delirium around
9the "event" was torn open. I here refer to the paper by "Mescalero," who had
been naive enough to believe that, without being punished, one could break through conspiracies of silence of this magnitude with honesty and throw open the ambivalences for debate. He thus spoke in a formulation that has become fa- mous and that was repeated incessantly by the media to millions and millions of ears, of his "deep, secret joy" {klammheimlichen Freude) he discovered in himself in the first moment on hearing of the Buback murder, in order then, in the next moment of reflection, to distance himself from it. Mescalero was shocked at him- self and wanted to speak reasonably about this shock. With the Mescalero explo-
124 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
sion, the collective ambivalence discharged itself in a grand parade of lies. That was a historical moment of learning- from then on it could no longer be sup- pressed that society again lived in a prewar period in which all conflicts that had to do with life feelings were decisively postponed to that moment when the exter- nal war would make the encounter with inner reality superfluous. In the ballet of rectifications, shieldings, repudiations, and protestations, the attitude of respecta- bility celebrated a paper victory over the honesty that had said the other part of the truth, if not for everybody, then at least for many. Since that time, we can imagine how the papers will rustle in which, at the outbreak of war, those with responsibility will read of their dismay, shock, and resolution--if there is enough time for this before the atomic burial of the Federal Republic (Atom-BRDigung).
Unashamed Happiness
Does cheekiness, which recalls the rights to happiness, still have a chance? Is the kynical impulse really dead, and is it only cynicism that has a grand, deadly fu- ture? Can enlightenment --the idea that it would be reasonable to be happy -- be reincarnated in our gloomy modernity? Are we defeated once and for all, and will the cynical twilight of harsh reality and moral dream never again grow lighter?
These questions touch on the feeling toward life in the atomically armed civili- zations. These civilizations are going through a crisis of their innermost vitality that is probably without historical parallel. The tip of this uneasiness can perhaps be felt most keenly in Germany, the country that has lost two world wars and in which the atmospheric conditions register most sensitively how it feels to live be- tween catastrophes.
Modernity is losing, in addition to its feeling of vitality, the distinction be- tween crisis and stability. No longer do any positive experiences of our situation take place, no feeling that existence can extend into an immeasurably wide and firm horizon without exhausting itself. A feeling of the provisional, the specula- tive, at best medium-term, lies at the bottom of all public and private strategies. Even those who are optimists by constitution are beginning to quote Luther, who said he would plant an apple tree today anyway, even if he knew that tomorrow the world would come to an end. Periods of chronic crisis demand of the human will to live that it accept perma- nent uncertainty as the unchangeable background of its striving for happiness. Then the hour of kynicism arrives; it is the life philosophy of crisis. Only under its sign is happiness in uncertainty possible. It teaches moderation of expecta- tions, adaptability, presence of mind, attention to what the moment offers. It knows that the expectation of long-term careers and the defense of social assets must entangle one in an existence "as care" (Sorge). It was no accident that Heidegger, in the days of the precarious Weimar Republic, revealed the "struc- ture of cares" in existence. (Sein undZeit, 1927). Care absorbs the motif of happi- "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 125
? We're alive, we're alive, 1945.
ness. Those who want to hold on to the latter must learn, following the kynical model, to break the hegemonic power of cares. But socialized consciousness sees itself at the mercy of an incessant agitation by themes of care. These themes create the subjective lighting of the crisis in which even the well-to-do have already ac- quired the mentality of the shipwrecked. Never were such well-heeled people so much in a mood of termination.
This widespread disturbance of vitality and this bleakening of the life feeling provide the general background to the demoralization of enlightenment. "Care" clouds existence so persistently that the idea of happiness cannot be made socially plausible any more. The atmospheric presupposition for enlightenment- cheering up--is not present. Those who, like Ernst Bloch, spoke of the "principle of hope" would have to be able to find this climatic a priori of enlightenment, the view of a clear sky, at least in themselves; and that Bloch found it makes him different from the mainstream of intellectuals. Even when everything became gloomy, he knew the private secret of cheering up, trusting in life, letting expres- sion flow, believing in development. It was his power to rediscover the "current of warmth"--which he carried in himself--everywhere in human history. That made his view of things more optimistic than they deserve. The current of warmth is what separates him so much from the Zeitgeist. The intelligentsia is exposed to the cold currents of universal demoralization almost without protection; in- deed, it can almost seem as if, as far as defeatism and disorientation are con- cerned, it is still out in front. Now, no one can be talked into believing in the
spirit of utopia" or a "principle of hope" who can discover no experiences in him- self that give these expressions meaning.
But it can be asked for which existential disposition Utopia and hope stand. Is it a "dissatisfaction in principle," as some
126 D "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
say? Is the Blochian hope ? as is claimed--a creation of resentment? I believe, if it is taken that way, the report from the current of warmth was not listened to care- fully enough. Its message is not the principle of denial. Principled hope stands for "biophilia" (Fromm); it is a code word for creative friendliness toward life. With it, that which lives follows an unquestioned permission to be and to become. That establishes its opposition to the predominant mentality of care and self- inhibition (Selbsthemmung).
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Self-inhibition is the symptom that perhaps best characterizes the rest of the "critical" intelligentsia in the tired column of enlightenment. It knows it is in a two-front situation: On the one side, it is at pains to resist the cynicism of "late capitalism," which has coagulated into a system; on the other side, it is anxious about the radicalness of the emigrants and escapists who seek other ways and who break off cooperation. In such an in-between position, the temptation to defend
10
its "identity" through forced moralism is great.
renders oneself more than ever to the overserious and depressive mood. The scen- ery of the critical intelligentsia is therefore populated by aggressive and depres- sive moralists, problematists, "problemoholics," and soft rigorists whose predominant existential stimulus is No. From this group there is not much hope for the correction of the vitally false course.
From Walter Benjamin comes the aphorism: "To be happy means to be able
11
to look into oneself without being frightened. "
frightened come from? Fright is, I think, the shadow of moralism and of denial, which together cripple the capacity for happiness. Where moralism is, fright necessarily dominates -- as the spirit of self-denial, and fright excludes happiness. Morality always knows, with its thousand and one fixed ideas, how we and the world are supposed to be but are not. From moralism, even a leftist moralism, in the long run unrealistic and cramped effects emanate. Perhaps an age-old tradi- tion of Christian joylessness again makes itself felt in enlightenment, a tradition whose perception of things is attracted by whatever can be taken as proof of the negativity of existence. There is so much of that that the material will not be ex- hausted for the whole of the moralist's life.
12
The fronts between moralism and amoralism are thus curiously inverted. The former, although it has good intentions, encourages the climate of negativity; the latter, although it acts so foolishly or sinisterly, elevates morale considerably. And this amoral good humor is what must attract us as enlighteners onto the pre- Christian, the kynical terrain. We have gone so far that happiness seems politi- cally indecent to us. A short time ago, Fritz J. Raddatz gave his enthusiastic com- mentary on Gunther Kunert's morbid Abtotungsverfahren (Procedures for killing, 1980) the title "Happiness--The Ultimate Crime? " Perhaps better: "Happiness- The Ultimate Impudence! " Herein lies the cardinal point of all principled cheeki- ness. Those who still want to claim to be enlighteners must be able to be so
But with moralism one sur-
Where does our readiness to be
'IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 127
cheeky, so impudent. It is no longer so much our heads on which enlightenment has to perform its labor, it is the gloomy egoisms, the frozen identities.
It may be telling for the demoralized state of critical intelligence that for the entire spectrum of biophilia and self- affirmation, it knows scarcely any word other than "narcissism. " If this concept already in itself is a dubious construction, in the hands of conservatives it becomes a cudgel for a psychologizing counteren- lightenment with which social tendencies toward critical self-reflection are sup- posed to be quelled. Just as the phenomenon of narcissism as sickness and uncon- scious tic is interesting and welcome, it is equally suspect as a healthy condition. As a general sickness it functions like a psychological dynamo for society, which requires people who are full of self-doubt, affirmation-seeking, ambitious, greedy for consumption, selfish, and moralistically zealous in their intent on being better than others. As a healthy condition, "narcissistic" self-affirmation would laugh in the face of the impudent demands of such morose societies.
Gray is the basic color of an age that, for a long time, has again been dreaming secretly about the colorful big bang. What necessitates and inspires such dreams is a sum of vital incapacities. The well-behaved sociopsychological enlighten- ment thought the problem lay in the "incapacity to mourn. " But this is not the sole factor. It is even more the incapacity to have the right rage at the right time, the incapacity to express, the incapacity to explode the climate of care, the incapacity to celebrate, the incapacity to let go. Among all these atrophies, one capacity has remained that unerringly sets its sights on what a life grants to itself in the end, a life that no longer sees a way out of such relations: the capacity, under respecta- ble pretenses, to work toward circumstances in which, unavoidably, everything will be blown to smithereens with the greatest possible spectacle without anyone feeling to blame. The catastrophe warms people up and in it, the barren ego comes to its last feast that melts long-lost passions and impulses together in the final burn-up.
A short time ago, the leader of the English punk group, The Stranglers, celebrated the neutron bomb in a frivolous interview because it is what can set a nuclear war into motion. "Miss Neutron, I love you. " Here he had found the point
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
where the kynicism of protesters coincides with the brazen-faced master cynicism of the strategists. What did he want to say? Look how wicked I can be? His smile was coquettish, nauseated, and ironically egoistic; he could not look the reporter in the face. As in a dream, he spoke past the camera for those who will understand him, the little, beautifully wicked punk devil who causes the world to rattle with unthinkable words. That is the language of a consciousness that earlier perhaps did not mean to be so wicked. But now, since the show de- mands it, not only is it unhappy, it also wants to be unhappy. In this way misery can be outdone. The last act of freedom is used to will what is terrifying. In this act is a grand gesture, a pathos of ugliness-desperate cheekiness that gives off a spark of independence. In the last instance they can pretend to be innocent, and
128 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
the war, the great big shitty mess, is caused by the others anyway. They, the beau- tiful self-mutilators, know enough to scream out against the conspiracy of silence of the respectable. Everything is shit, "Miss Neutron, I love you. " There is still something of one's own in willed self-destruction, a symbolic shock. That is what can be enjoyed in them. In intellectual trash, in the cynical show, in the hysterical uprising, and in the crazy parade, the suffocating armor around the well-behaved wild ego loosens up: Rocky Horror Picture Show, the hot-cold hissing death drive of the hunger for oneself.
Meditation on the Bomb
Here we have to think ahead--assuming further that fringe and middle correspond more deeply to one another than seems obvious at first glance. On the surface, the life-style of the punks and that of the establishment seem to be irreconcilable. But at bottom they are very close. Cynical eruptions are catapulted out of the catastrophile masses of civilization. For that reason the philosophical, the com- prehending approach to phenomena must not limit itself to subjective excesses, but must begin with the objective excesses.
Objective excess is nothing other than the excess of structural unrest that characterizes our form of life, even in its saturated phases and in the intervals be- tween wars. At the end of the Second World War, the earth's weapon potential sufficed for a multiple extinction of every citizen on earth. As we approach the Third, the extermination factor has been multiplied by hundreds, even thousands. The overkill atmosphere becomes denser by the minute. The factor grows monthly and its growth is, in the final analysis, the determining agent of our his- tory. The overkill structures have become the actual subject of current develop- ments. In the First as well as in the Second World, an enormous proportion of social labor flows into these structures. At the moment preparations are being made for a renewed escalation, but this is not our theme here.
In view of these "hard facts," the task of philosophy is to pose child's questions like the following: Why don't people get along with each other? What compels them to prepare for their mutual atomization? Philosophers are those who can put aside the hardened, habituated, and cynically versed contemporary in themselves --who, without further ado, can make clear to that contemporary in two or three sentences why everything is the way it is and why it cannot be changed with good intentions. The philosopher must give a chance to that inner child who "does not yet understand" all this. Those who "do not yet understand it" can perhaps pose the right questions.
All wars are, at root, the consequence of the principle of self-preservation. In the competition among political groups, war has been an age-old means of estab- lishing and defending the existence, identity, and form of life of a given society against the pressure of a rival. Since time immemorial, realists assume a natural
'IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 129
right to self-preservation of the individual group and to military self-defense of the group attacked. The morality that legitimates the suspension of morality in war is that of self-preservation. Those who fight for their own life and its social forms stand, according to the conviction of all previous realistic mentalities, be- yond the ethics of peace.
When one's own identity is threatened; the prohibition of killing is suspended. That which constitutes the basic taboo in times of peace becomes a duty in times of war; indeed, a maximum of killing is even honored as a particularly worthy achievement.
All modern military ethics, however, have abolished the image of the aggres- sive hero because it would interfere with the defensive justification for war. Mod- ern heroes all want to be mere defenders, heroes of self-defense. One's own primarily aggressive component is uniformly denied: All professional soldiers see themselves as protectors of peace, and attack is solely a strategic alternative to defense. The latter remains the first priority over all military modes of be- havior. Defense is nothing more than the military counterpart of what is called self-preservation in philosophy. This cynical self-denial of every morality is guided by the principle of self-preservation, which anticipates the "moment of truth" and arms itself with a free-style ethics without illusions.
If we look at today's world from this perspective, boundless proliferation of the principle of defense strikes us. East and West, both armed to the teeth, con- front one another as giants of self-defense. In order to be able to "defend" itself, each
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
party has produced instruments of destruction that suffice for the absolute annihilation of human, animal, and even plant life. In the shadow of atomic weapons, even the deadly specialties of war biologists and chemists are usually overlooked. In the name of self-preservation a reckless sadism disguised as de- fense has flourished in the minds of the researchers of destruction; an old oriental master of torture would have an inferiority complex by comparison.
However, we do not want to impute unusually evil motives to any party or any of those in charge. Everyone probably does what he can within the realm of the possible. However, this realm itself has its malicious peculiarities. It seems that a certain form of realism has come close to its immanent limits, namely, that real- ism that adopted war as ultima ratio of political self-preservation in its mode of reckoning. This realism should not be retrospectively condemned; it has had its time and done its work, for the good perhaps, for evil certainly. It must be ob- served, however, that this ultima ratio realism is bankrupt.
Today's "politics of disarmament" has only apparently grasped this. That be- hind it there is no real insight is revealed by the fact that the negotiating nations are playing a double game. While they talk, they frantically build up stockpiles; the question, as mad as it seems, is basically whether "only" armament should be
13
solution will never be found. Following this way, the arms race can only end in
pursued or whether armament plus talking is better.
In this way, I maintain, a
130 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS
war. The wild proliferation of the principle of defense precludes all other possi- bilities.
The ultimate war has truly become an "internal matter" of armed humanity. In it, it is a matter of breaking through the principle of harsh self-preservation with its archaic and modern ultima ratio of war. For this unforeseen struggle on the inner front against the deadly realism of political self-defense, the strongest allies are truly needed. On this front, overpowering weapons, fear-inducing strategies, and cunning maneuvers are required. In this respect we are not without hope, the arsenals are full. Among the weapons now being made ready for use are collected all imaginable monstrosities: nerve gases, microbe armies, gas clouds, bacteria squadrons, psychedelic grenades, astrocannons, and death rays. We do not want to undervalue the accomplishments of these means. But the phi- losopher is drawn again and again by an old dependency back to the H-bomb be- cause its nuclear mode of operation challenges contemplation most of all. Nuclear fission is in any case a phenomenon that invites meditation, and even the nuclear bomb gives the philosopher the feeling of here also really touching on the nucleus of what is human. Thus, the bomb basically embodies the last, most energetic en- lightener. It teaches an understanding of the essence of splitting; it makes com- pletely clear what it means to set up a Me against a You, an Us against a Them to the point of a readiness to kill. At the summit of the principle of self- preservation it teaches how to end and conquer dualisms. The bomb carries the last hope and task of Western philosophy, but its pedagogical procedure still seems unusual to us. It is so cynically crass and so suprapersonally hard that one is reminded of Eastern Zen masters who do not hesitate to punch their pupils in the face if that helps their progress toward enlightenment.
The atomic bomb is the real Buddha of the West, a perfect, sovereign appara- tus without bonds. It rests unmoving in its silos, purest reality and purest possibil- ity. It is the epitome of cosmic energies and human participation in these, the highest achievement of human beings and their destroyer, the triumph of techni- cal rationality and its sublation (Aufhebung) into the para-gnostical. With it we leave the realm of practical reason where ends are pursued through appropriate means. The bomb has long since ceased to be a means to an end, for it is the
14
boundless means that exceeds every possible end.
longer be a means to an end, it must become a medium of self-experience. It is an anthropological event, an extreme objedification of the spirit of power that works behind the drive to self-preservation. Although we built it to "defend" our- selves it has, in fact, yielded for us a defenselessness without parallel. It is a con- summation of the human in its "evil" aspect. We cannot get any more evil, intelli- gent, or defensive.
The bomb is really the only Buddha that Western reason could understand. Its calm and its irony are infinite. It makes no difference to it how it fulfills its mis- sion, whether in mute waiting or as firecloud; for it, the change of aggregate cir-
:However, since it can no
'IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEK1NESS" ? 131
? John Heartfield. The arms industry's choir. "A Mighty Fortress Is Our Geneva. " Photomontage, 1934. cumstances has no relevance. As with Buddha, everything that could be said is
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
said through its mere existence. The bomb is not one bit more evil than reality and not one bit more destructive than we are. It is merely our unfolding, a mate- rial representation of our essence. It is already embodied as something whole, whereas we, in relation to it, are still split. Confronted by such a machine, strate- gic considerations are not appropriate but a heightened attentiveness is. The bomb demands of us neither struggle nor resignation, but self-experience. We are it.
In
it, the Western "subject" is consummated. Our most extreme armament makes s defenseless to the point of weakness, weak to the point of reason, reasonable to the point of fear. The only question that remains is whether we choose the ex-
u132 D "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
ternal path or the inner path --whether insight will come from critical reflection or from the fireballs over the earth.
All external paths, no matter how "well intended" they may be, come together, as our experience shows, again and again in the irresistible flow toward arma- ment. All "inner paths," even when they appear awfully unrealistic, flow together in the single tendency that furthers real pacification. The modern world process led to a point beyond which the most external path, politics, and the most inner path, meditation, speak the same language; both revolve around the principle that only a ''relaxation of tensions" can help us along. All secrets lie in the art of con- ceding, of not resisting. Meditation and disarmament discover a strategic com- mon interest. If that's not an ironic result of modernity! Grand politics today is, in the final analysis, meditation on the bomb and deep meditation seeks the urge to build bombs in us. Meditation works gently on everything that has solidified internally as the crust of a so-called identity. It dissolves the armor behind which an ego sits that feels itself to be the defender of its "basic values. " (The strategists of armament say: "We have the better values! ") The bomb is a damned ironic ma- chine that is "good" for nothing and yet produces the most powerful effects. Even though it may be our Buddha, it nevertheless has the sarcastic devil within itself. One must have put oneself in its interior in order to feel what it means to explode into the cosmos with a complete dissolution of the self. It can do this at any time. A similar pandemonium and laughter reigns at the core of the igniting explosive mass as in the interior of suns. To know that one has such a possibility at one's disposal gives a unique superiority. Deep down, the human spirit knows itself to be in solidarity with its eerie and ironic sun machine.
Those who look very carefully can observe every now and then how the bombs seem to smile mockingly to themselves. If we were only alert enough to perceive this smile something would have to happen that the world has never experienced: It could become fearless and feel how relaxation loosens the archaic cramps of defense. "Good morning, Miss Neutron, how are you? " The bombs become the night watchmen of our destructiveness. If we awake, then, like the entreating voices at the end of Hermann Broch's Schlafwandler (Sleepwalkers), the thousand bombs will talk to us, for "it is the voice of humanity and of the people, the voice of solace and of hope and of the immediate good: "Don't do yourself any harm, for we are all still here! "
Notes
1, I treat Diogenes, as well as the other kynical and cynical figures, in the present tense, not historically, from a distance. The present tense creates the possibility of a general typification of kyni- cal and cynical themes.
2. See the portrait of Diogenes in chapter 7. I show there also the sociocritical, political side of the kynical impulse. This side explains why kynicism fits present-day potentials for social resis- tance "to a T. "
'IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 133
3. Willy Hochkeppel, Mit zynischem Lacheln. Uber die Hippies der Antike, in gehort gelesen (Dec. 1980):89ff.
4. Especially subdued and diverted through the Stoa.
5. See the chapter entitled "Zur Logik der Representation. Selbstdarstellung als Tateinheit von Publizieren und Verallgemeinern," pp. 305ff (On the Logic of Representation.
118 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
eighties, among whom the early developers in cynicism are already making them- selves noticed as New Wave.
The Bohemians, a relatively recent phenomenon, played a prominent role in the regulation of the tensions between art and bourgeois society. Bohemianism was the space in which the transition from art into the art of living was tried out. For a century, Bohemianism gave the neokynical impulse a social shelter. As a regulator for bourgeois careers, it was above all important because, similarly to the universities, it served as a "psychosocial moratorium" (Erikson) in which young bourgeois could live out their crises of adjustment in the transition from the world of school and home to the world of serious occupations. Research has established that there were only a few long-term Bohemians; for the great majority of Bohemians, the milieu remained a transit station, a space for testing out life and departing from the norms. There they used their freedom to work out their rejection of bourgeois society until a (perhaps) more grown-up "yes, but" took its place.
If we look today at these nurturing soils and living spaces in which deviation and critique, satire and cheekiness, kynicism and willfulness thrive, it becomes immediately clear why we must fear the worst for embodied cheeky enlighten- ment. Before our very eyes, cities have been transformed into amorphous clumps where alienated streams of traffic transport people to the various scenes of their attempts and failures in life. For a long time now carnival has meant not "inverted world" but flight into safe world, of anesthesia from a permanently inverted world full of daily
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
absurdities. We know that, at least since Hitler, Bohemianism is dead, and in its offshoots in the subcultures cheeky moods are to be found less than the cheerless attitudes of withdrawal. And as far as the universities are concerned--oh, let's not talk about that!
These mutilations of cheeky impulses indicate that society has entered a stage of organized seriousness in which the playgrounds of lived enlightenment are be- coming increasingly clogged. This is what dampens the climate of this country so much. We live on in a morose realism, not wanting to be noticed, and play the respectable games. Cynicism prickles beneath the monotony. A clear-sighted coquetting with its own schizophrenia betrays the unhappy consciousness, in academia and elsewhere. The provocations seem to be exhausted, all bizarre twists of modern existence seem to be already tried out. A state of public, respect- able torpor has been entered. A tired, schizoidly demoralized intelligentsia plays at realism by contemplatively walling itself up in harsh circumstances.
Embodiment or Splitting
The embodied is that which wants to live. But life is fundamentally different from the postponement of suicide. Those who live in societies armed with atomic weapons become, whether they want to or not, at least semiagents of a cynical "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 119
community of suicides, that is, unless they were to decide to resolutely turn their backs on it. That is precisely what a continually growing number of people are doing, people who have emigrated since the fifties--to Provence, Italy, the Ae- gean, California, Goa, the Caribbean, Auroville, Poona, Nepal, and, last but not least, to Tibetan highlands in the interior of Germany and France.
Two questions arise in connection with these phenomena, the first cynical, the second concerned. First, when it comes to the crunch, will that be far enough? And second, who is helped when the morally most sensitive people abandon the sinking ship of cynical society? We have "good" reasons to ask these questions, for the growing expectation of war nourishes both the cynical and the concerned view on what is coming. Emigration could be useful for both sides if we under- stand it correctly: for the emigrants, who will find out whether the greener pastures they seek exist; for those who remain behind, to whom the departure of the others says: There where you are, life is not possible--for us. Is it for you? Emigration could be taken somewhat less seriously if it were really only a fringe phenomenon. However, nothing permits this innocuous view of things. What is happening on the fringe today comes from the middle. Emigration has become a fact of mass psychology. Entire strata of the population have been living for a considerable period in an inner somewhere-else, just not in this country. They do not feel bound to what are called the fundamental values of society. One hears "fundamental values" and involuntarily sees mushroom clouds rise up. One hears those who are responsible proclaim their readiness to negotiate and feels, looking into their faces, the ice of the end of the world in their eyes. The main body of society has long since chosen to emigrate into leisure time, and for them the word "life" gets its bright color from memories of certain moments on happy vacations --when the horizon opened up . . .
What is to be done? Get out or collaborate? "Flee or stand firm? " Both alterna- tives seem inadequate. Their expressions are all overused and ambivalent. Are the "escapists" really comprehended with this word? Is there not infrequently a lot of cowardliness and melancholy, collaboration and opportunism in what is called "standing firm"? Is escapism without exception a conscious act--and don't a lot of so-called escapists (Aussteiger) already find themselves on the outside be- fore they are asked about their own attitude? Is collaboration really cynically tinged everywhere? Is it not also motivated by the need for something "positive" and the need to belong?
But it is also worthwhile to see the elements of truth in the expressions on both sides. Escapists are justified, because they do not want to be entangled with open
eyes in the intolerable cynicisms of a society in which the distinction between producing and destroying is becoming blurred. Collaboration is justified because individuals are also permitted to orient themselves toward survival in the short run. To flee is justified because it rejects a stupid courage and because only fools let themselves be consumed by hopeless struggles -- when there are spaces that are
120 D "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
more amenable to life. Standing firm is justified because experience shows that every conflict that is merely avoided will catch up with us at every point of our flight.
For this reason, the alternative that corresponds to our view of life must be grasped in a different way-- it is that between embodiment or splitting. It is an al- ternative that addresses itself first to consciousness, and only afterward to be- havior. It demands a radical priority of self-experience over morality. It is a mat- ter of either consciously letting what is already torn apart grow together again or unconsciously surrendering what is split off to the schizoid process. Integration or schizophrenia. Choose life or celebrate at the party of suicides. That may sound like a spiritual diet for individuals, and those who take it this way have heard right. Initially enlightenment has no other addressees than those
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
individuals who elude blind socialness (Gesellschaftlichkeit) without thereby being able to cease playing a role in society. One must therefore keep the idea of enlightenment alive-through embodied enlightenment, of course. Enlightenment means to affirm all antischizophrenic movements. The universities are scarcely the place where this happens. The universitas vitae is taught in other places, there, where people oppose the cynicism of split official consciousness, where they try out forms of living that open up a chance for conscious life in minds, bodies, and souls. It unfolds in a broad field of individuals and groups who carry on the kyni- cal impulse and who attempt what no politics and no mere art can take from them: to tackle, with their alertness, the splits and unconscious elements that seep into individual existence; to grow into one's own possibilities; and to participate in en- lightenment's labor of cheering up, a part of which is to pay attention to the wishes
that are the premonition of the possible.
Psychopolitics of Schizoid Society
What are the signs of a prewar period? How do the psychopolitical constitutions of capitalist societies before world wars reveal themselves? German history offers an exemplary lesson in how world wars ferment in the psychic (seelisch) tensions of a nation. On the basis of two --viewed pessimistically, three --cases we can study what it means to live in the prelude to great military explosions. The main psychopolitical symptom is an increasing heaviness in the social atmosphere, which becomes charged with schizoid tensions and ambivalences to the point where it is no longer tolerable. In such a climate, an eerie readiness for catas- trophes flourishes; I call it, alluding to Erich Fromm, the catastrophile complex. It attests to a collective disturbance of vitality through which the energies of the living are displaced into a sympathy with the catastrophic, the apocalyptic, and the violently spectacular.
The historian knows that political history cannot be the site of human happi- ness. Nevertheless, if we want to ask when in our century Europeans experienced
IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 121
? their happiest hour, we will be embarrassed by the answer. But the signs and the documents speak for themselves. We stand at first perplexed before the phenome- non of August 1914: What the peoples of Europe, on entering the war, ex- perienced at that time is designated by historiographers ashamedly as "war psy- chosis. " If we look closer, we see it was a matter of indescribable storms of affect that took hold of the masses, of outbreaks of jubilation and of national emotion, of pleasure in fear and the ecstasy of fate. There were moments of pathos and a presentiment of life beyond comparison. The slogan of the times was an ecstatic one: Finally things have gone so far. The masses probably also experienced fear, but above all a feeling of basic change into something that promised "life. " The slogans were rejuvenation, putting to the test, cleansing bath, purgative cure. In the first year, the war was waged by purely volunteer armies; no one had to be forced to go to the front. The catastrophe enticed the Wilhelminian youth. When the catastrophe occurred, the people recognized themselves in it and understood that they had waited for it.
There is not the slightest reason to believe that the people of that time were so very different from people of today. Only arrogance could allow us to deceive ourselves that we would be smarter in existentially decisive matters than those volunteers from Langemarck who, by the thousands, pathetically ran into the fire ? r the machine guns. The only difference is that the psychic mechanisms of later generations operate more subtly. That is why we are initially astounded that the Processes then ran so naively and unrestrained on the surface. The war enthusiasts
nought they were experiencing the qualitative difference between provisional ar-
ra
between inauthentic and supposedly authentic life. Even after the war, the talk
ngements and decision, a sultriness and clarification --in a word, the difference
of as
>> was felt by the men of August 1914, there would finally be something at stake wat made living worthwhile.
"battle as inner experience" wafted through pre-Fascist literature. In the war,
122 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
The First World War signals the turning point in modern cynicism. With it the up-tempo phase of the decomposition of old naivetes begins-such as those about the nature of war, the nature of social order, of progress, of bourgeois values, indeed, of bourgeois civilization itself. Since this war, the diffuse schizoid climate around the major European powers has not become any less intense. Since then, those who have spoken of cultural crisis, etc. , have had that mental disposition of postwar shock unquestionably in mind that knows that the naivete of yesterday will never exist again. Irrevocably, mistrust, disillusion, doubt, and distanced stances have infiltrated into the sociopsychological "hereditary substance. " Everything positive will be from then on an "In-spite-of," laced with latent desper- ation. Since that time, the broken modes of consciousness visibly reign: irony, cynicism, stoicism, melancholy, sarcasm, nostalgia, voluntarism, resignation to the lesser evil, depression and anesthesia as a conscious choice of uncon- sciousness.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
In the few years of the Weimar Republic the catastrophile complex built up again until finally the economic crisis ignited the kindling. The joyless republic granted an end to itself. In the myth of revolution and in the myth of the people, catastrophile tendencies found their "respectable" underpinnings. Whoever secretly accepted the catastrophe loudly claimed to know where the course of events was heading and which drastic cure was the proper one. Those who saw the catastrophe approaching tried, before it broke, to get the most out of life. In 1931, Erich Kastner captured the voice of a man who was beyond the cliffs of naive morality and who, with his private lust for life, swam with the current as it flowed toward the next cataract.
"Serious conversations, how? Is there a life after death? Confidentially, there isn't. Everything must be settled before death. There's a heap of things to do, day and night. . . . Better to amuse yourselves than to redeem humanity. As I said, life has to be settled before death. More
8That is a contemporary voice that in fifty years has not become outmoded. This is how a person speaks who knows that he does not change history. In spite of everything he wants to live--before the end, which is disguised as an uprising. Today, the latent will to catastrophe on all sides has taken cover under the official respectability of the politics of peace. The mechanisms whose relatively brutal openness characterized the Fascist style have sunk into the subliminal and the atmospheric under the masks of accommodation, good will, and sincere senti- ments. Naive stimuli have disappeared from the surface of consciousness. The increasing socialization of reactions represses open gestures; what is called democracy means, psychologically, an increase in self-control, which is probably necessary in dense populations. However, we should not be deceived by the calmed surface. The catastrophile complex lives on, and if not all signs are mis-
information glady given. Don't be so serious, my boy. "
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" D 123
leading, its mass is caught up in incessant accumulation. Perhaps it is the "accom- plishment of terrorism"--to speak frivolously--to have made the catastrophile currents, at least here and there, tangible and recognizable. One can refer to what is clearly there.
Recall the kidnapping and murder of the president of the Employers' Associa- tion, Hans-Martin Schleyer--the feverish climate of those months when terrorism approached its peak in Germany. At that time, the psychopolitical scenario that belongs to the catastrophile complex again came crassly to light, perhaps for the first time since the Second World War. The media and the voices of state were spontaneously and completely united in their respectable tone of indignation and dismay. Among millions of published sentences, there was hardly a passage in which the truth of the masses in the atmosphere forced its way through. This truth consisted, as every whispered conversation, every scene at a kiosk, dialogues in canteens and bars, chats in lobbies, etc. , proved, in a flickering ambivalence of feelings in which existential fears and desire for catastrophe were indistinguisha- bly entwined. The avidness of the reporting, the measureless breadth of the dis- cussion, and the excess of state and private reactions, even viewed in retrospect, speak an unmistakable language. Here something had happened that touched the feeling toward life. A nameless hunger for drama in history and a desperate long- ing for conflict on the right front had so confused hearts and minds that for months on end, an event was gnawed away at that in its criminal and political content did not justify such agitation. Through the political staging of the crime and the spec- tacular interaction of state and terror group, it took on the significance of an epoch-making event. It nourished itself on powerful catastrophile currents and swelled up, becoming the dominant emotional theme of endless days. Sociopsy- chologically, it brought an hour of truth. It was the substitute for a history in which something moves, the caricature of a "liberation struggle," an idiotic- criminal parody of that which social democracy under Wilhelm II, Hindenberg, and Hitler had neglected--battle on the wrong front, at the wrong time, by the wrong attackers against the wrong opponents, and yet, in spite of the sum of all these distortions, it was greedily lapped up by society as a substitute for struggle, conflict drug, and political catastrophe film.
At one point, the universal consensus in the cynically mute delirium around
9the "event" was torn open. I here refer to the paper by "Mescalero," who had
been naive enough to believe that, without being punished, one could break through conspiracies of silence of this magnitude with honesty and throw open the ambivalences for debate. He thus spoke in a formulation that has become fa- mous and that was repeated incessantly by the media to millions and millions of ears, of his "deep, secret joy" {klammheimlichen Freude) he discovered in himself in the first moment on hearing of the Buback murder, in order then, in the next moment of reflection, to distance himself from it. Mescalero was shocked at him- self and wanted to speak reasonably about this shock. With the Mescalero explo-
124 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
sion, the collective ambivalence discharged itself in a grand parade of lies. That was a historical moment of learning- from then on it could no longer be sup- pressed that society again lived in a prewar period in which all conflicts that had to do with life feelings were decisively postponed to that moment when the exter- nal war would make the encounter with inner reality superfluous. In the ballet of rectifications, shieldings, repudiations, and protestations, the attitude of respecta- bility celebrated a paper victory over the honesty that had said the other part of the truth, if not for everybody, then at least for many. Since that time, we can imagine how the papers will rustle in which, at the outbreak of war, those with responsibility will read of their dismay, shock, and resolution--if there is enough time for this before the atomic burial of the Federal Republic (Atom-BRDigung).
Unashamed Happiness
Does cheekiness, which recalls the rights to happiness, still have a chance? Is the kynical impulse really dead, and is it only cynicism that has a grand, deadly fu- ture? Can enlightenment --the idea that it would be reasonable to be happy -- be reincarnated in our gloomy modernity? Are we defeated once and for all, and will the cynical twilight of harsh reality and moral dream never again grow lighter?
These questions touch on the feeling toward life in the atomically armed civili- zations. These civilizations are going through a crisis of their innermost vitality that is probably without historical parallel. The tip of this uneasiness can perhaps be felt most keenly in Germany, the country that has lost two world wars and in which the atmospheric conditions register most sensitively how it feels to live be- tween catastrophes.
Modernity is losing, in addition to its feeling of vitality, the distinction be- tween crisis and stability. No longer do any positive experiences of our situation take place, no feeling that existence can extend into an immeasurably wide and firm horizon without exhausting itself. A feeling of the provisional, the specula- tive, at best medium-term, lies at the bottom of all public and private strategies. Even those who are optimists by constitution are beginning to quote Luther, who said he would plant an apple tree today anyway, even if he knew that tomorrow the world would come to an end. Periods of chronic crisis demand of the human will to live that it accept perma- nent uncertainty as the unchangeable background of its striving for happiness. Then the hour of kynicism arrives; it is the life philosophy of crisis. Only under its sign is happiness in uncertainty possible. It teaches moderation of expecta- tions, adaptability, presence of mind, attention to what the moment offers. It knows that the expectation of long-term careers and the defense of social assets must entangle one in an existence "as care" (Sorge). It was no accident that Heidegger, in the days of the precarious Weimar Republic, revealed the "struc- ture of cares" in existence. (Sein undZeit, 1927). Care absorbs the motif of happi- "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 125
? We're alive, we're alive, 1945.
ness. Those who want to hold on to the latter must learn, following the kynical model, to break the hegemonic power of cares. But socialized consciousness sees itself at the mercy of an incessant agitation by themes of care. These themes create the subjective lighting of the crisis in which even the well-to-do have already ac- quired the mentality of the shipwrecked. Never were such well-heeled people so much in a mood of termination.
This widespread disturbance of vitality and this bleakening of the life feeling provide the general background to the demoralization of enlightenment. "Care" clouds existence so persistently that the idea of happiness cannot be made socially plausible any more. The atmospheric presupposition for enlightenment- cheering up--is not present. Those who, like Ernst Bloch, spoke of the "principle of hope" would have to be able to find this climatic a priori of enlightenment, the view of a clear sky, at least in themselves; and that Bloch found it makes him different from the mainstream of intellectuals. Even when everything became gloomy, he knew the private secret of cheering up, trusting in life, letting expres- sion flow, believing in development. It was his power to rediscover the "current of warmth"--which he carried in himself--everywhere in human history. That made his view of things more optimistic than they deserve. The current of warmth is what separates him so much from the Zeitgeist. The intelligentsia is exposed to the cold currents of universal demoralization almost without protection; in- deed, it can almost seem as if, as far as defeatism and disorientation are con- cerned, it is still out in front. Now, no one can be talked into believing in the
spirit of utopia" or a "principle of hope" who can discover no experiences in him- self that give these expressions meaning.
But it can be asked for which existential disposition Utopia and hope stand. Is it a "dissatisfaction in principle," as some
126 D "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
say? Is the Blochian hope ? as is claimed--a creation of resentment? I believe, if it is taken that way, the report from the current of warmth was not listened to care- fully enough. Its message is not the principle of denial. Principled hope stands for "biophilia" (Fromm); it is a code word for creative friendliness toward life. With it, that which lives follows an unquestioned permission to be and to become. That establishes its opposition to the predominant mentality of care and self- inhibition (Selbsthemmung).
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Self-inhibition is the symptom that perhaps best characterizes the rest of the "critical" intelligentsia in the tired column of enlightenment. It knows it is in a two-front situation: On the one side, it is at pains to resist the cynicism of "late capitalism," which has coagulated into a system; on the other side, it is anxious about the radicalness of the emigrants and escapists who seek other ways and who break off cooperation. In such an in-between position, the temptation to defend
10
its "identity" through forced moralism is great.
renders oneself more than ever to the overserious and depressive mood. The scen- ery of the critical intelligentsia is therefore populated by aggressive and depres- sive moralists, problematists, "problemoholics," and soft rigorists whose predominant existential stimulus is No. From this group there is not much hope for the correction of the vitally false course.
From Walter Benjamin comes the aphorism: "To be happy means to be able
11
to look into oneself without being frightened. "
frightened come from? Fright is, I think, the shadow of moralism and of denial, which together cripple the capacity for happiness. Where moralism is, fright necessarily dominates -- as the spirit of self-denial, and fright excludes happiness. Morality always knows, with its thousand and one fixed ideas, how we and the world are supposed to be but are not. From moralism, even a leftist moralism, in the long run unrealistic and cramped effects emanate. Perhaps an age-old tradi- tion of Christian joylessness again makes itself felt in enlightenment, a tradition whose perception of things is attracted by whatever can be taken as proof of the negativity of existence. There is so much of that that the material will not be ex- hausted for the whole of the moralist's life.
12
The fronts between moralism and amoralism are thus curiously inverted. The former, although it has good intentions, encourages the climate of negativity; the latter, although it acts so foolishly or sinisterly, elevates morale considerably. And this amoral good humor is what must attract us as enlighteners onto the pre- Christian, the kynical terrain. We have gone so far that happiness seems politi- cally indecent to us. A short time ago, Fritz J. Raddatz gave his enthusiastic com- mentary on Gunther Kunert's morbid Abtotungsverfahren (Procedures for killing, 1980) the title "Happiness--The Ultimate Crime? " Perhaps better: "Happiness- The Ultimate Impudence! " Herein lies the cardinal point of all principled cheeki- ness. Those who still want to claim to be enlighteners must be able to be so
But with moralism one sur-
Where does our readiness to be
'IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 127
cheeky, so impudent. It is no longer so much our heads on which enlightenment has to perform its labor, it is the gloomy egoisms, the frozen identities.
It may be telling for the demoralized state of critical intelligence that for the entire spectrum of biophilia and self- affirmation, it knows scarcely any word other than "narcissism. " If this concept already in itself is a dubious construction, in the hands of conservatives it becomes a cudgel for a psychologizing counteren- lightenment with which social tendencies toward critical self-reflection are sup- posed to be quelled. Just as the phenomenon of narcissism as sickness and uncon- scious tic is interesting and welcome, it is equally suspect as a healthy condition. As a general sickness it functions like a psychological dynamo for society, which requires people who are full of self-doubt, affirmation-seeking, ambitious, greedy for consumption, selfish, and moralistically zealous in their intent on being better than others. As a healthy condition, "narcissistic" self-affirmation would laugh in the face of the impudent demands of such morose societies.
Gray is the basic color of an age that, for a long time, has again been dreaming secretly about the colorful big bang. What necessitates and inspires such dreams is a sum of vital incapacities. The well-behaved sociopsychological enlighten- ment thought the problem lay in the "incapacity to mourn. " But this is not the sole factor. It is even more the incapacity to have the right rage at the right time, the incapacity to express, the incapacity to explode the climate of care, the incapacity to celebrate, the incapacity to let go. Among all these atrophies, one capacity has remained that unerringly sets its sights on what a life grants to itself in the end, a life that no longer sees a way out of such relations: the capacity, under respecta- ble pretenses, to work toward circumstances in which, unavoidably, everything will be blown to smithereens with the greatest possible spectacle without anyone feeling to blame. The catastrophe warms people up and in it, the barren ego comes to its last feast that melts long-lost passions and impulses together in the final burn-up.
A short time ago, the leader of the English punk group, The Stranglers, celebrated the neutron bomb in a frivolous interview because it is what can set a nuclear war into motion. "Miss Neutron, I love you. " Here he had found the point
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
where the kynicism of protesters coincides with the brazen-faced master cynicism of the strategists. What did he want to say? Look how wicked I can be? His smile was coquettish, nauseated, and ironically egoistic; he could not look the reporter in the face. As in a dream, he spoke past the camera for those who will understand him, the little, beautifully wicked punk devil who causes the world to rattle with unthinkable words. That is the language of a consciousness that earlier perhaps did not mean to be so wicked. But now, since the show de- mands it, not only is it unhappy, it also wants to be unhappy. In this way misery can be outdone. The last act of freedom is used to will what is terrifying. In this act is a grand gesture, a pathos of ugliness-desperate cheekiness that gives off a spark of independence. In the last instance they can pretend to be innocent, and
128 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
the war, the great big shitty mess, is caused by the others anyway. They, the beau- tiful self-mutilators, know enough to scream out against the conspiracy of silence of the respectable. Everything is shit, "Miss Neutron, I love you. " There is still something of one's own in willed self-destruction, a symbolic shock. That is what can be enjoyed in them. In intellectual trash, in the cynical show, in the hysterical uprising, and in the crazy parade, the suffocating armor around the well-behaved wild ego loosens up: Rocky Horror Picture Show, the hot-cold hissing death drive of the hunger for oneself.
Meditation on the Bomb
Here we have to think ahead--assuming further that fringe and middle correspond more deeply to one another than seems obvious at first glance. On the surface, the life-style of the punks and that of the establishment seem to be irreconcilable. But at bottom they are very close. Cynical eruptions are catapulted out of the catastrophile masses of civilization. For that reason the philosophical, the com- prehending approach to phenomena must not limit itself to subjective excesses, but must begin with the objective excesses.
Objective excess is nothing other than the excess of structural unrest that characterizes our form of life, even in its saturated phases and in the intervals be- tween wars. At the end of the Second World War, the earth's weapon potential sufficed for a multiple extinction of every citizen on earth. As we approach the Third, the extermination factor has been multiplied by hundreds, even thousands. The overkill atmosphere becomes denser by the minute. The factor grows monthly and its growth is, in the final analysis, the determining agent of our his- tory. The overkill structures have become the actual subject of current develop- ments. In the First as well as in the Second World, an enormous proportion of social labor flows into these structures. At the moment preparations are being made for a renewed escalation, but this is not our theme here.
In view of these "hard facts," the task of philosophy is to pose child's questions like the following: Why don't people get along with each other? What compels them to prepare for their mutual atomization? Philosophers are those who can put aside the hardened, habituated, and cynically versed contemporary in themselves --who, without further ado, can make clear to that contemporary in two or three sentences why everything is the way it is and why it cannot be changed with good intentions. The philosopher must give a chance to that inner child who "does not yet understand" all this. Those who "do not yet understand it" can perhaps pose the right questions.
All wars are, at root, the consequence of the principle of self-preservation. In the competition among political groups, war has been an age-old means of estab- lishing and defending the existence, identity, and form of life of a given society against the pressure of a rival. Since time immemorial, realists assume a natural
'IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 129
right to self-preservation of the individual group and to military self-defense of the group attacked. The morality that legitimates the suspension of morality in war is that of self-preservation. Those who fight for their own life and its social forms stand, according to the conviction of all previous realistic mentalities, be- yond the ethics of peace.
When one's own identity is threatened; the prohibition of killing is suspended. That which constitutes the basic taboo in times of peace becomes a duty in times of war; indeed, a maximum of killing is even honored as a particularly worthy achievement.
All modern military ethics, however, have abolished the image of the aggres- sive hero because it would interfere with the defensive justification for war. Mod- ern heroes all want to be mere defenders, heroes of self-defense. One's own primarily aggressive component is uniformly denied: All professional soldiers see themselves as protectors of peace, and attack is solely a strategic alternative to defense. The latter remains the first priority over all military modes of be- havior. Defense is nothing more than the military counterpart of what is called self-preservation in philosophy. This cynical self-denial of every morality is guided by the principle of self-preservation, which anticipates the "moment of truth" and arms itself with a free-style ethics without illusions.
If we look at today's world from this perspective, boundless proliferation of the principle of defense strikes us. East and West, both armed to the teeth, con- front one another as giants of self-defense. In order to be able to "defend" itself, each
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
party has produced instruments of destruction that suffice for the absolute annihilation of human, animal, and even plant life. In the shadow of atomic weapons, even the deadly specialties of war biologists and chemists are usually overlooked. In the name of self-preservation a reckless sadism disguised as de- fense has flourished in the minds of the researchers of destruction; an old oriental master of torture would have an inferiority complex by comparison.
However, we do not want to impute unusually evil motives to any party or any of those in charge. Everyone probably does what he can within the realm of the possible. However, this realm itself has its malicious peculiarities. It seems that a certain form of realism has come close to its immanent limits, namely, that real- ism that adopted war as ultima ratio of political self-preservation in its mode of reckoning. This realism should not be retrospectively condemned; it has had its time and done its work, for the good perhaps, for evil certainly. It must be ob- served, however, that this ultima ratio realism is bankrupt.
Today's "politics of disarmament" has only apparently grasped this. That be- hind it there is no real insight is revealed by the fact that the negotiating nations are playing a double game. While they talk, they frantically build up stockpiles; the question, as mad as it seems, is basically whether "only" armament should be
13
solution will never be found. Following this way, the arms race can only end in
pursued or whether armament plus talking is better.
In this way, I maintain, a
130 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS
war. The wild proliferation of the principle of defense precludes all other possi- bilities.
The ultimate war has truly become an "internal matter" of armed humanity. In it, it is a matter of breaking through the principle of harsh self-preservation with its archaic and modern ultima ratio of war. For this unforeseen struggle on the inner front against the deadly realism of political self-defense, the strongest allies are truly needed. On this front, overpowering weapons, fear-inducing strategies, and cunning maneuvers are required. In this respect we are not without hope, the arsenals are full. Among the weapons now being made ready for use are collected all imaginable monstrosities: nerve gases, microbe armies, gas clouds, bacteria squadrons, psychedelic grenades, astrocannons, and death rays. We do not want to undervalue the accomplishments of these means. But the phi- losopher is drawn again and again by an old dependency back to the H-bomb be- cause its nuclear mode of operation challenges contemplation most of all. Nuclear fission is in any case a phenomenon that invites meditation, and even the nuclear bomb gives the philosopher the feeling of here also really touching on the nucleus of what is human. Thus, the bomb basically embodies the last, most energetic en- lightener. It teaches an understanding of the essence of splitting; it makes com- pletely clear what it means to set up a Me against a You, an Us against a Them to the point of a readiness to kill. At the summit of the principle of self- preservation it teaches how to end and conquer dualisms. The bomb carries the last hope and task of Western philosophy, but its pedagogical procedure still seems unusual to us. It is so cynically crass and so suprapersonally hard that one is reminded of Eastern Zen masters who do not hesitate to punch their pupils in the face if that helps their progress toward enlightenment.
The atomic bomb is the real Buddha of the West, a perfect, sovereign appara- tus without bonds. It rests unmoving in its silos, purest reality and purest possibil- ity. It is the epitome of cosmic energies and human participation in these, the highest achievement of human beings and their destroyer, the triumph of techni- cal rationality and its sublation (Aufhebung) into the para-gnostical. With it we leave the realm of practical reason where ends are pursued through appropriate means. The bomb has long since ceased to be a means to an end, for it is the
14
boundless means that exceeds every possible end.
longer be a means to an end, it must become a medium of self-experience. It is an anthropological event, an extreme objedification of the spirit of power that works behind the drive to self-preservation. Although we built it to "defend" our- selves it has, in fact, yielded for us a defenselessness without parallel. It is a con- summation of the human in its "evil" aspect. We cannot get any more evil, intelli- gent, or defensive.
The bomb is really the only Buddha that Western reason could understand. Its calm and its irony are infinite. It makes no difference to it how it fulfills its mis- sion, whether in mute waiting or as firecloud; for it, the change of aggregate cir-
:However, since it can no
'IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEK1NESS" ? 131
? John Heartfield. The arms industry's choir. "A Mighty Fortress Is Our Geneva. " Photomontage, 1934. cumstances has no relevance. As with Buddha, everything that could be said is
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
said through its mere existence. The bomb is not one bit more evil than reality and not one bit more destructive than we are. It is merely our unfolding, a mate- rial representation of our essence. It is already embodied as something whole, whereas we, in relation to it, are still split. Confronted by such a machine, strate- gic considerations are not appropriate but a heightened attentiveness is. The bomb demands of us neither struggle nor resignation, but self-experience. We are it.
In
it, the Western "subject" is consummated. Our most extreme armament makes s defenseless to the point of weakness, weak to the point of reason, reasonable to the point of fear. The only question that remains is whether we choose the ex-
u132 D "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
ternal path or the inner path --whether insight will come from critical reflection or from the fireballs over the earth.
All external paths, no matter how "well intended" they may be, come together, as our experience shows, again and again in the irresistible flow toward arma- ment. All "inner paths," even when they appear awfully unrealistic, flow together in the single tendency that furthers real pacification. The modern world process led to a point beyond which the most external path, politics, and the most inner path, meditation, speak the same language; both revolve around the principle that only a ''relaxation of tensions" can help us along. All secrets lie in the art of con- ceding, of not resisting. Meditation and disarmament discover a strategic com- mon interest. If that's not an ironic result of modernity! Grand politics today is, in the final analysis, meditation on the bomb and deep meditation seeks the urge to build bombs in us. Meditation works gently on everything that has solidified internally as the crust of a so-called identity. It dissolves the armor behind which an ego sits that feels itself to be the defender of its "basic values. " (The strategists of armament say: "We have the better values! ") The bomb is a damned ironic ma- chine that is "good" for nothing and yet produces the most powerful effects. Even though it may be our Buddha, it nevertheless has the sarcastic devil within itself. One must have put oneself in its interior in order to feel what it means to explode into the cosmos with a complete dissolution of the self. It can do this at any time. A similar pandemonium and laughter reigns at the core of the igniting explosive mass as in the interior of suns. To know that one has such a possibility at one's disposal gives a unique superiority. Deep down, the human spirit knows itself to be in solidarity with its eerie and ironic sun machine.
Those who look very carefully can observe every now and then how the bombs seem to smile mockingly to themselves. If we were only alert enough to perceive this smile something would have to happen that the world has never experienced: It could become fearless and feel how relaxation loosens the archaic cramps of defense. "Good morning, Miss Neutron, how are you? " The bombs become the night watchmen of our destructiveness. If we awake, then, like the entreating voices at the end of Hermann Broch's Schlafwandler (Sleepwalkers), the thousand bombs will talk to us, for "it is the voice of humanity and of the people, the voice of solace and of hope and of the immediate good: "Don't do yourself any harm, for we are all still here! "
Notes
1, I treat Diogenes, as well as the other kynical and cynical figures, in the present tense, not historically, from a distance. The present tense creates the possibility of a general typification of kyni- cal and cynical themes.
2. See the portrait of Diogenes in chapter 7. I show there also the sociocritical, political side of the kynical impulse. This side explains why kynicism fits present-day potentials for social resis- tance "to a T. "
'IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 133
3. Willy Hochkeppel, Mit zynischem Lacheln. Uber die Hippies der Antike, in gehort gelesen (Dec. 1980):89ff.
4. Especially subdued and diverted through the Stoa.
5. See the chapter entitled "Zur Logik der Representation. Selbstdarstellung als Tateinheit von Publizieren und Verallgemeinern," pp. 305ff (On the Logic of Representation.
