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Critique of Cynical Reason

By Peter Sloterdijk (1983 DE, 1988 EN)

Foreword by Andreas Huyssen

I

The book was popular and praised for its crituque of the Enlightenment and despised as a capitalist message. Both are discussions that Sloterdijk proposed to avoid.

The success of Critique of Cynical Reason is mainly rooted in the fact that old explanations & enemies (left vs right, progress vs. reaction - dichotomies) do not seem to suffice anymore. It can be seen as a theoretic approach of a central aspect of postmodern culture. An intervention in the current state to open up discourse. Sloterdijk is, despite the name of the book, anti-Kantian in that he rejects all master narratives of reason.

Critique of Cynical Reason shoul be read as a contemporary investigation and theorization of cynicism - which is often rooted in political disappointment in the promisses of the 60's. It proposes kynicism as a counterstrategy. The growth of cynicism during the 70's sparked the revival of ideologial conservatism of the 80's.

One could question wether Sloterdijks premisse - that a diffuse cynicism is the predominant mindset - is that widespreak, but more directed at a selective group of intellectuals.

Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and unsuccessfully. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered,

His notion of cynicism is an enlightened false conscious that has rejection of ideological critique reflexively build in. It's a state of unhappy sensibility. Sloterdijk critiques the subjective side of ideology critique, which often rests on reificaton or depersonalization. He follows a Marxists tradition: critique of reification.

Sloterdijk focusses on cynical reason on a "subjective, existential level" to avoid abstract language games without subjects. A new interpretation is given to postmodernity, on that is concrete and about the here and now, this precise moment in history. (Aufklarung as explained by Foucault)

he asks how a historical memory can hep resist "the spread of cynical amnesia" And how to avoid the feeling of history at a stand still SLoterdijk proposes an enlightenment that is enlightened about istself: he rejects both fundamentalism of conservatives and the universality of the Enlightenment. He is troubled with both the absolute truth (Critical Theory) and the dissolution of truth (poststructuralism).

He proposes to steer away from disillusionment with its cynicism and melancholy. Towards the rational that is gone from scientific enlightenment: kynicism.

II

He rejects the worldview in which reason "has become the strategic tool for the domination of inner and outer nature." - He rejects an instrumental reason.

Sloterdijk sees a oming and going of enlightened reason, without beginning and without telos: an eternal return of the oposing consciousnesses. An eternal struggle between cynicism of power and institutions and "the kynical revolt from below".

making the fear of total closure suddenly appear to be as delusive and irrelevant as the hope for total emancipation, the first actually being nothing so much as a binary reversal of the latter.

He argues that one of the Enlightenments biggest flaws was the rejection of "body and senses in its project of emancipation." According to Sloterdijk it should be more about experience (Selbsterfahrung)

As the cynic is as far from idealism, values and emancipation as the kynic, Sloterdijk suggests the distinction between both to be in the phenomenon itself. He shows that the "masochism of refusal or the melancholy about an irrevocable loss of happiness, [...] reinforces the enlightened false consciousness it should help to dismantle."

Sloterdijk's kynic Diogenes "undercuts the modern notion of a stable identity" and in that sense attempts to create a "counterpublic sphere".

He "emphasises the positive aspect of physical survival" and the experience of a "preindividual emptiness". In the body is an oscillation between cynicism and kynicism.

In an age in which traditional rationality has revealed itself as the "principle of selfpreservation gone wild" and the political pathology of overkill presents itself as realism, Sloterdijk sees the only chance for survival in a reversal of the civilizing process itself, which has created the dominant Western mindset of "hard subjects, hard facts, hard politics, and hard business".

His critique of Western rationality and patriarchy shares common ground with ie. ecological or feminist discourse. But these similarities expose the problem of Sloterdijks male appraoch to kynicism.

Another problem might be the non-binary distinction between cynic and kynic: "the kynic may himself be simply a cynic in disguise." Sometimes the difference between kynical strategies or cynical attitudes is hard to point out.

III

In the book there is an interesting tension between an apocalyptic sense and hope for philosophy of survival.

Sloterdijk's cases of Weimar shows an interesting approach to cynicism being a crisis of the male identity after defeat. Its extreme choices between ie. Left and Right can then be seen as an attempt to restore its masculinity.

If his assumption - that cynicism is mainly present in a prewar period, a race towards disaster - what would that say about our chances today? Has our fate already been sealed?

Sloterdijk asks: how to avoid a subversive identity "without abandoning whatever identity is needed." He hopes to resolve this using Diogenes kynical attitude.

This minimalism of hope in the face of maximal possible catastrophe renders an aspect of our postmodernity that is as important to recognize and to nurture as it is to criticize that enlightened false consciousness that Sloterdijk impels us to acknowledge as one of the most dangerous symptoms of our culture. The historical truth content of Sloterdijk's book lies precisely in the tensions and oscillations between apocalypse and hope that the text refuses to reconcile.

Definitions & clarifications

Reflexifely buffered

reflexively: without concious thought. Buffered: damped

false consciousness

noun (especially in Marxist theory) a way of thinking that prevents a person from perceiving the true nature of their social or economic situation.

Reïficatie/Reification

Het begrip reïficatie slaat op het toekennen van menselijke eigenschappen aan dingen en op het versluieren van de betrekkingen tussen de mensen achter de beweging van de dingen. Het is een verzelfstandigen van sociale verhoudingen, een tot-ding-maken. Verdinglijken.

Reïficatie is een soort van ‘illusie’ uit de beelden die onze hersenen maken. Het heeft een vormgelijkenis met optische illusies.

Reïficatie betekent dus het veranderen, in het onderbewustzijn, van verhoudingen tussen mensen in verhoudingen tussen dingen.

Poststructuralism

Emerging in French intellectual life in the late 1960s and early 1970s, poststructuralism departed from the claims to objectivity and comprehensiveness made by structuralism and emphasized instead plurality and deferral of meaning, rejecting the fixed binary oppositions of structuralism and the validity of authorial authority.

critical theory

a philosophical approach to culture, and especially to literature, that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures that produce and constrain it. The term is applied particularly to the work of the Frankfurt School.