Summary of Peter Sloterdijk's "Critique of Cynical Reason"

 

Except from the above video on Peter Sloterdijk's "Critique of Cynical Reason"

The goal of the book, he says, is to lay bare the structure of this cynicism that he thinks today is the dominant attitude or mood of the West. He's writing this in the early '80s, but it's obviously also true today. This analysis is, I think, deeply relevant today, maybe even more relevant. And by "cynicism" he doesn't just mean "skeptical about people and their intentions", he doesn't just mean "pessimistic". It's deeper than that. He defines it as "enlightened false consciousness", that it's "a form of Reason which is a priori reflexively rebuffed against falsification. It already always includes the critique of it". And so, it both disempowers the critique, and also undermines our confidence in joy in living, and in our beliefs, and our conduct. In this way, he says, that the cynical consciousness is both, have it, well-off and miserable. It's immune to attack, but it's you know, our views become immune to attack, basically. Our conduct is immune to attack, but empty. And we don't believe in them and we think that they're wrong. Basically, we're all living in bad faith because of this. He says, "new values have short lives, grand narratives are impossible. We've given up on the idea of truth capital 'T'. And, in a kind of enlightened way, consistent with the Enlightenment project, we just see all of this stuff as a strategy, or a mask of power. We see and think everything cynically, including ourselves and our conduct, and our beliefs. Everyone, including us, has base motives. Everyone's faking it to get ahead.

So, he thinks that this phenomenon of cynicism as reflectively buffered false consciousness, that in order to be understood, it has to be localized in a kind of "dialectic of enlightenment". Specifically, as a polemical dialectic that is oriented to illuminating via unmasking and exposing our political opponents motives. Basically, about exposing their false consciousness their prejudices, their desires, their hidden class interests, whatever, as a way of attacking their political or social position. So, I say something, you say something else, you know, how do we achieve synthesis here? Where do we go from from there? And the way that it works is not, you know, we come to X Y or whatever, but "I have this bias, you have that bias, this is a class interest, etc.", right? So he sees the process of enlightenment as a kind of progressive development of this sort of discourse. These techniques of unmasking, they become increasingly sophisticated and widespread, and then we wind up, not with a win-win discourse, as proponents of the Enlightenment project would like to say, that truth capital 'T', but an interminable clashing of different identities, class interest, desires, passions, hegemonic positions, psychological resistances; we get a war of consciousnesses rather than a dialogue of peace. And this discursive war consists in the reification of the other's consciousness, for analysis and inquiry. The others consciousness is the target of the argument, rather than the validity or the invalidity of their ideas. It involves endless reciprocal reification of subjects, leading to a condition where our interactions no longer are really intersubjective, but inter-objective, and there's universal suspicion.

With Freud, false consciousness looks like a kind of sickness, we trace it to unconscious drives. For Marx, we trace it to non-subjective economic historical laws and see individual people as just sort of epiphenomenon in the process of Capital. And all this stuff is operating behind people's backs, and becomes the real subject of enlightenment discourse. That's what enlightenment discourse is, illuminating. He actually thinks that Marxism is a kind of particularly important jump in cynicism, since we get not just false consciousness, but necessarily false consciousness. False consciousness that is false in precisely the correct way, because stemming from your social class you know the false consciousness appropriate to your social class. He thinks any functional understanding of truth actually inclines one to cynicism. Sociologists, even if of the non-Marxist variety, tend to have a functional view where they think, basically, that false consciousness isn't necessary for society to function.

But, so then, Sloterdijk goes through a kind of step-by-step historical development that he calls "8 unmaskings", and it's a kind of genealogy or tracking of the development of enlightenment critique that proceeds from target to target. First, and-Latin? begins with the critique of Revelation. These guys argue that there's no trans-historical non-philological objective way to verify the sacred texts. So that's, as you said, at the top. At the top of the macro-sphere, at this sort of outermost limits of our metaphysics, the furthest away from man. That's where the enlightenment critique starts, and then it goes down.

So, (2) we move down a step and we get a critique of religious illusion. This critique notices how God is being anthropomorphised, how he is portrayed in a culturally relative way. This turns also into the idea of religion as instrumental or functional, existing to legitimate the social order or to ease our existential angst.

Then (3), we go down in metaphysics in metaphysical illusion, and this is Kant basically, where human reason is limited and functions reliably only under conditions of experiential knowledge. So the power of pure reason is delimited. He says that after Kant, truthful propositions concerning objects beyond the empirical are no longer possible. So that what first looked like knowledge, metaphysical knowledge, comes to be seen as deception.

Then (4), we get the critique of the idealistic superstructure. Which he says is a giant leap for a critique. This is Marx claiming, that what happens in our head is determined by social functions and the economy of labour. He says that people are masks of social functions, and that religion, aesthetics, justice, welfare, morality, philosophy, science; Marx thinks all of this is ideological mystification. So false consciousness, false being, this is a function of the process of Capital and Marx. So we can have necessarily false consciousness, which means Universal mystification.

Then (5) comes the critique of moral illusion. And this has, he says, three strategies, remember, as of polemics, right? The first is, uncover a double standard. The second is, invert being and illusion. And the third is a reduction to what are thought to be realistic motives. So basically, you catch your opponent in hypocrisy, you invert interior and exterior in order to attack the true core of their views or their beliefs, and this is always power, egoism, selfishness, horniness, greed, whatever.

Then (6) we get the critique of transparency. And this is like Freud as the main figure, but he's not the only one, or the first one. The idea of the rational, self-transparent mind has been systematically dismantled. Since the 18th century, rationality starts to look like self-delusion, Post-hoc, pseudo-justifications of our behaviors and ideas, and attempt to evade the deeper reality of the irrational forces and motivations that actually guide us. Freud was actually viewed as a reactionary for a long time, because his idea of the unconscious undermines not just this or that class, but every class, even the victim. Psychoanalysis is familiar with the idea of the eternal victim, who exploits their apparent position of weakness for aggression, right? So this undermines everybody. And then finally, just in case you thought, "Okay, well maybe all this stuff is BS, at least these irrational, unconscious forces, and motives are mine, at least they're my desires", wrong!

The final one (7) is, we get "the critique of illusion of privacy". Your own ego doesn't even really belong to you. Even your selfishness isn't yours. You're basically just an object to be sliced and diced by it and make critique, until there's nothing left at all. Your self is molded. your subjectivated, as Foucault would say, by all this discourse and these forces of social control, and of power. You don't know what, or who you are. And even if you did, it wouldn't matter. Because, to switch over and point out as Lacan does, even your desire is always the desire of the other.

So Enlightenment begins with critique aimed at the top, at the church, officials, monarchy, whatever, exposing them as frauds. But the end result of this kind of dialectical polemics is that we even expose ourselves as frauds. That truth is a fraud, that even our fraud is fraudulent, because it isn't even our fraud, it doesn't actually belong to us. There is no "us" to own it.

And I mean, so Nietzsche warned about Enlightenment's destruction of life, destroying illusions, and boy did it. How do you believe anything, or do anything, or live your life, or find joy or peace in a situation characterized by this mode of reason? Well, you do it cynically. You know very well what you're doing is BS, or saying it is, but you do it anyway.

This is actually where Zizek takes over this idea of cynicism from Sloterdijk. He refers to him frequently in his talks. You know he says, "my friend Peter Sloterdijk". But this is how Zizek talks about how ideology functions today, that they know very well what they're doing, but they're doing it anyway. That's how this works. And you know that everybody else is doing and saying BS, and our institutions and our values are BS. And the idea of any escape or systemic transformation is BS. He actually anticipates our current identity politics fixation by saying that this creates a kind of manic drive to recover some sort of solidity. Something that's ours, and stable.

But, you know, ultimately there's, we just get back to this. And it ensures even more, the primacy of the alien over ourselves. We just find this sort of bedrock layer of unconscious programming, we hope! And all this has just totally annihilated the possibility of ideological seriousness, of intellectual seriousness. Everyone's in bad faith. They know they're in bad faith, but there's no alternative. So strike up this defensive identity, live in bad faith. You know, it's false consciousness, but we're enlightened about our false consciousness. We know that we're falsely conscious, and what else is there to do? So just live in bad faith, and do it to get by, or win, or whatever. What else is there?

So and then he talks about how it functions in in relation to different disciplines and stuff. But, this is part of what I'm cutting out, but I do want to point out the way he relates it to Weimar. Because I think this gets at the deep relevance of this topic in the book to our present moment. He examines the psycho-politics of Weimar as being sort of pre-war, predisposed to Nazism. Due precisely to the heavy atmosphere of sentient cynicism. And he says, "you know we can't live this way". So when the pressure builds up, violence erupts. People become catastrophilic. Like they're hoping, they're just waiting for something to happen, some catastrophe, some eruption of the real into the world so that there can be some meaning and substance again.

You can't have a society where there's a universal distrust and suspicion. When nobody believes in politics, everything's too complex to grasp, the serious and the playful can't be distinguished from one another. There's a kind of, so what you end up getting is, there's a kind of desublimation. You're all consumed by will the power, and so just go ahead and let it out, live honestly at least. Because, otherwise there's just this deep ambivalence about everything. And yeah, it's precisely in this sort of social-psychological, psycho-political stew that something like Nazism can develop. And its success has a lot to do with the need to simplify this tremendous complexity, this sort of schizoid tension, where all of us are living these double lives, pretending to be this or that, to be content, whatever. But deep down, we suspect all of it's a lie, and wrong, and a malicious delusion, and it's unbearable. And so it demands some kind of event so that we can be disburdened of it. That's obviously not the path that he wants to go down, Nazism.

So, what can we do? Well, he doesn't think that we can have a return to the simplicity of a mono-perspective, a world that we can know something definite about, or master through the use of objective reason. We've lost the macrocosm, retreated back to subjectivianism. But we get all the way to the bottom it doesn't do any better, because subjective and objective reason are both caught in a in a kind of mutual liquefaction. He says," philosophy used to be about trying to find some kind of foundation that we can learn about, know about, that gives us information about the world and ourselves. Because they link up with one another. Modernity splits these two things apart, and then Bridge that connects them is obliterated too, so that neither the world, nor the self is intelligible, even on their own. The self pole is exposed as empty, the world pole is a stranger.

So, as he says, how an emptiness is supposed to be able to recognize itself in a stranger cannot be imagined by our reason. No matter how hard we try, we can't do this. So, from our perspective, knowledge about either pole, about both, or about their having a shared foundation at all anymore, just looks naive to us. Critical reason necessarily rejects both of these propositions. And yet, he says, "only with the anticipation of universal understanding can Enlightenment refrain from just the war of individual strategies, and save itself in the universal". He goes on, "the subjectivity that cannot mirror itself in any whole, nevertheless encounters itself in countless analogous subjectivities that, similarly world listen encapsulated, pursue only their own goals. And that where they interact with each other, then they're bound together only precariously, and subject to revocation in antagonistic cooperation".

So again, this anticipates what I think is a much better framework for arriving at a solution that he articulates later in 'Spheres'. Stuff, about encapsulation. Other stuff he says about Auto-hypnosis, about the privileges of the kind of binding media of individuals over individuals themselves at least. All this gets at a much more extensive treatment in 'Spheres'. But for now, the main recommendation that he gives is what's called Kynicism, cynicism, but with a 'k'. And this is an allusion to the original Greek cynics. This tradition that he wants to return to, Diogenes in particular. And he thinks it's a much better way of fighting against cynicism today, in a sort of way of developing a serious movement that could actually challenge the status quo. And that's because basically, it opposes idealism in this kind of cynical reason not with, further unmasking, not with more critique, not with a call to return to some kind of naivete that is unavailable to us now, but because it offers a material embodied rebuttal to the critical cynical reason.

Diogenes is famous for things like urinating and masturbating in public, to demonstrate rather than to argue, something about our norms, about the nature of desire, and how easy it is to satisfy, etc. He's famous for plucking the feathers of a bird, taking it into the Academy, and saying, "Here's Aristotle's man", because the latter had defined man as a featherless bird. So Diogenes didn't argue with him, he didn't try to make a rational case for a different conception, or to try to dismantle Aristotle's position via argumentation or "whatever" him. He just has a kind of cheeky light-hearted jovial way of embodying the counter critique, as a jokester, and Sloterdijk thinks this is the way we ought to be today if we are to stand a chance at all against any of this stuff. And he really does, himself, also embody this kind of attitude. In this book, and today still, throughout his works, the idea that one becomes a kind of living, vital refutation of idealism. Living with the irreverence and joviality, rather than cynical suspicion and disappointment, and disbelief in everything.

This goes back, I think, to like the kind of Nietzschean idea: loving life, loving the body, opposing the despisers of life and the despisers of the body. But I think it also relates to the hippie experience that Sloterdijk has, his experience with Osho. And I think it's the weaker part of the book, but I do think there's something to it, this kind of affirmation of life as a rejection of the despotism of negativity that stifles all of us in this kind of heavy, cynical atmosphere. It's an escape from the confines of critique and it's endless undermining of every possibility, in every value. He says, "we ought to oppose critique not with more critique, which is just turning the cynical screw even more, but with this kynical attitude, just this sort of like Monty Python "I fart in your general direction" sort of idea.

So anyway, yeah, I skipped a lot. This is kind of a bare-bones summary of the book in terms of the way that, in terms of the stuff that I think is important in it. Basically, thanks for sticking with me...