The previous post entails, then, that Sloterdijk must be taken as rather more nuanced than the “Heidegger? Can’t be a good philosopher. Wasn’t a good man”* school of philosophical valuation.
Indeed, Sloterdijk’s reflections, at least in his Critique of Cynical Reason, appear to continue, even when it comes to Heidegger, the contextual hermeneutic and historical spirit of Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting’s surprisingly straightforward highlighting of Hegel’s polemical and thus Aristotelian approach to the history of philosophy.*This is Gilbert Ryle’s apothegm as Robert Bernasconi cites it from The Times Higher Educational Supplement, No 850, February 17, 1989, p. 12 in Bernasconi, “Habermas and Arendt on the Philosopher’s ‘Error’: Tracking the Diabolical in Heidegger,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 14:2/15:1 (1991): 1-23, here, p. 4. See also Babich, “The Ethical Alpha and Heidegger’s Linguistic Omega” in Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), pp. 243-264.
Note by contrast that Jaspers in his essay on Anaximander highlights the achievement that it is to conceive a cosmological conception of theory without tacking it against an opponent: “And he effected all these innovations of human consciousness quietly, without polemics against anyone.” Jaspers, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plotinus, Laotzu, Nagarjuna (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 3.
If it has to be noted that the Ryle-Blackburn approach continues apace in the ongoing fisticuffs that characterize the so-called analytic-continental divide, Sloterdijk’s thinking in his Critique of Cynical Reason ironizes our extraordinary ignorance of the history of philosophy, a history that is not only the story of Plato and not only the story of Aristotle but also the story of the cynics, about whom today, and increasingly so, we barely know anything at all. Indeed, although some will argue that this is changing, it may be countered that the seeming change is only by contrast with an otherwise fairly continuous oblivion.
The analytic-continental divide (and everyone disputes the idea that there is any such thing as either analytic philosophy, per se, or continental philosophy. per se, which has nothing to do with issue or the stakes at hand) refers to a conceptual display of aggression that seems only to have escalated with the triumph of analytic philosophy in terms of jobs and the professional of philosophy as a trade. To discuss this we need the psychoanalytic exigence of a Lacan or in his incarnation as a one-time Lacanian theorist of Žižek or else Badiou, though not, perhaps for reasons that have a great deal to do with Comte, Irigaray or else Kristeva. I discuss this in political terms with reference to academia itself (and not many scholars do) in Babich, “On the Analytic-Continental Divide in Philosophy: Nietzsche’s Lying Truth, Heidegger’s Speaking Language, and Philosophy” in C. G. Prado, ed., A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books. 2003), pp. 63-103 but see also Babich, “Early Continental Philosophy of Science” in: Alan Schrift and Keith Ansell-Pearson, eds., The New Century Volume Three: History of Continental Philosophy [Link is to Michael Kelly's review] (Chesham, UK: Acumen Press, 2010), pp. 263-286 as well as Babich, “Continental Beginnings and Bugbears, Whigs and Waterbears: Towards a Critical Philosophy of Science,” International Journal of the Philosophy of Science, 25 (2011).
I note already that it will not do to say in the context of the current review that there were no women cynics — there were, which is among other things, the most disconcerting aspect of the doctrine, as women do indeed tend to profit and to suffer, but these are the same things, most from convention. Thus Hipparchia of Maroneia had to put up with rather more of the course of a lifetime than Kierkegaard’s child-bride intended, Regina, but the difference between Hipparchia and Regina was one of practical askesis, which at least for some readers would make Regina the feminist hero. Kierkegaard did not simply break with Regina but presented impossible terms which, as Kierkegaard ironically presented these to her, would have had her living in a cupboard, another kind of nordic dollhouse.
The same difference makes Hipparchia a cynic philosopher, or kynic philosopher, just to use Sloterdijk’s distinction. It is in meaning and doing as you say that distinguishes the cynic from the kynic, male or female. And it is for the same reason that, like the Cathar Perfecti, the ancients held cynic philosophy in high regard as beyond reproach (and Diogenes’ manifestation as sober-minded rather than as foil for mockery in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead would attest to this as well).
As we saw at the start, Sloterdijk not only knows a lot about the cynics he also knows a good deal about many others, some of whom have gone to the heights of fashionable discourse and some for whom fortune has gone quite the other way.
But with Sloterdijk — as was also the case with Marcuse and especially Adorno — there is something more at work than merely the matter of having done one’s homework. Indeed the great majority of scholars who work on the cynics can be (or least have traditionally been) all too conventional. And if this covers over, as in the case of classics traditionally, a certain prurient fascination with topics that are traditionally regarded as taboo — and this is neither a great revelation for us today and nothing like a rarity after the enormous success of Foucault’s History of Sexuality — it is still the case that such motivations, as Nietzsche would uncover them, make a difference, and sometimes even all the difference.
Thus we have noted that Sloterdijk shocks us and he shocks us, often enough, in the most conventionally sexist of ways. Hence it seemingly does not occur to Sloterdijk to wonder about the woman who might be reading the text or the desires that she might (or might not) have for her own part. Women are present in Sloterdijk’s text but only as objects of fairly conventional, if rather Groszian desire.
Thus even as restrained a scholar as Andreas Huyssen — and one as friendly to Sloterdijk, Huyssen writes, after all, the introduction to the English edition of The Critique of Cynical Reason — is moved (no matter how mildly he is moved), to observe that Sloterdijk
But with Sloterdijk — as was also the case with Marcuse and especially Adorno — there is something more at work than merely the matter of having done one’s homework. Indeed the great majority of scholars who work on the cynics can be (or least have traditionally been) all too conventional. And if this covers over, as in the case of classics traditionally, a certain prurient fascination with topics that are traditionally regarded as taboo — and this is neither a great revelation for us today and nothing like a rarity after the enormous success of Foucault’s History of Sexuality — it is still the case that such motivations, as Nietzsche would uncover them, make a difference, and sometimes even all the difference.
Thus we have noted that Sloterdijk shocks us and he shocks us, often enough, in the most conventionally sexist of ways. Hence it seemingly does not occur to Sloterdijk to wonder about the woman who might be reading the text or the desires that she might (or might not) have for her own part. Women are present in Sloterdijk’s text but only as objects of fairly conventional, if rather Groszian desire.
Thus even as restrained a scholar as Andreas Huyssen — and one as friendly to Sloterdijk, Huyssen writes, after all, the introduction to the English edition of The Critique of Cynical Reason — is moved (no matter how mildly he is moved), to observe that Sloterdijk
clearly has the rational, reified, male subject in mind. The question of women’s subjectivity and its relationship to the cynicism-kynicism constellation is never really explored and the presentation of Phyllis and Xanthippe as female kynics is (just to put it mildly) disappointing. What are women to do while Diogenes “pisses against the idealist wind,” and how do they participate in or counteract the cynicism of domination?*
*Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 169. See more generally, Derek Krueger, “The Bawdy and Society The Shamelessness of Diogenes in Roman Imperial Culture,” in R. Bracht Branham, Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, eds., The Cynics.
Yet where Huyssen suggests that Sloterdijk might well have strengthened his own case “by focusing more thoroughly on the problem of gender and by asking himself to what extent his critique of male identity pathology might be indebted to feminist perspectives”(ibid.), Huyssen raises an important ideological point, intriguingly one that Sloterdijk seems not quite to wish to avail himself of. The reason may simply be that Sloterdijk’s sexism is fairly good-natured or ordinary. The question of how his views on women may come across to others is not his concern. And this too is fairly common among male academics.
We have noted that Sloterdijk begins by characterizing Nietzsche as a cynic, and one can do this, provided one ignores Nietzsche’s other self-characterizing tropes and Sloterdijk — as it can be supposed — has no problem with such a device. After all, Sloterdijk borrows Foucault’s thunder, without naming him, as he also sets him along with Marx as a “modified approach to ‘saying the truth.’” (Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. xxix) Along the way, Sloterdijk does not spare himself his own cyncism (somewhat, somewhat).
Sloterdijk reflects on Musil’s description of the existential frustration that can be an encounter with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (provided one is affected at all, and as we recall Nietzsche was fairly persuaded that there were scarcely any such).
And Sloterdijk goes on to add a reflection on the dullness of the professors (referring to the 1981 Kant Congress in Mainz he had already conceded a certain underwhelming aura but and to be fair, who has not been to a conference and taken stock of the sort of “luminaries” presented by one’s peers or higher-ups --- or one’s younger-ups, noting the accelerated professionalization of the student) esteemed as the “very best” and who has not experienced something of the same feeling? Here Sloterdijk intends to go beyond not merely Kant but Adorno, which already tells us that he knows what he is doing, but to offer “a theory of consciousness with flesh and blood (and teeth).” (CCR, xxxi)
Sloterdijk’s inspiration is without doubt the impotence of the Frankfurt School, by which we should not think of Adorno or Horkheimer or Marcuse but just and only the Frankfurt School-as-it-has-been-standing without advance or perturbation under the aegis of Habermas (and those who stand in his place today). Even in 1981. Perhaps most of all in 1981 where one might have expected something more (and the Frankfurt School was given every possible break to fulfill this expectation, of that there is no doubt).
See for a extended discussion in the context of Jacobi, Fichte, and Kleist, Babich, “Ex aliquo nihil: Nietzsche on Science and Modern Nihilism,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. Special Issue on Nietzsche. 84-2. (Spring 2010): 231-256.
And Sloterdijk goes on to add a reflection on the dullness of the professors (referring to the 1981 Kant Congress in Mainz he had already conceded a certain underwhelming aura but and to be fair, who has not been to a conference and taken stock of the sort of “luminaries” presented by one’s peers or higher-ups --- or one’s younger-ups, noting the accelerated professionalization of the student) esteemed as the “very best” and who has not experienced something of the same feeling? Here Sloterdijk intends to go beyond not merely Kant but Adorno, which already tells us that he knows what he is doing, but to offer “a theory of consciousness with flesh and blood (and teeth).” (CCR, xxxi)
Sloterdijk’s inspiration is without doubt the impotence of the Frankfurt School, by which we should not think of Adorno or Horkheimer or Marcuse but just and only the Frankfurt School-as-it-has-been-standing without advance or perturbation under the aegis of Habermas (and those who stand in his place today). Even in 1981. Perhaps most of all in 1981 where one might have expected something more (and the Frankfurt School was given every possible break to fulfill this expectation, of that there is no doubt).
But it is with Adorno (not Habermas) that Sloterdijk’s sympathies are free to find expression, out the open. “Critical Theory,” so we read, categorically rejects “the masculine world.” (xxxiv) Exceeding Lacan, it “is inspired by an archaic No to the world of the fathers, legislators, and profiteers.” (Ibid.)
And Sloterdijk is not done: “The masochistic element has outdone the creative element,” (xxxv) adds the condemnation of the “sensitive,” expressed as “paralyzing resentment” nourished upon “an archaic rage against ‘masculinity,’ that cynical sense for facts exhibited by political as well as scientific ‘positivists’.” (Ibid.) And we are then hardly surprised to read that it “took refuge in the realm of the mother, in the arts, and encoded longings.” (Ibid.) Oh, can we add deconstruction too? Why ever not?
“With Adorno, the denial of the masculine went so far that he retained only one letter from his father’s name, W.” (Ibid.)
Of course we get to hear about Adorno’s sex life but not in detail just the gossip. The year is 1981 and we have already been there and done that. Adorno we are told is reduced, done to ground by nakedness, not just nakedness, naked breasts. (xxxvii) And Sloterdijk recalls these words in the body of the text (nothing like self-reference):
Does the reader remember the episode in the lecture hall described in the Preface? The disturbance of the lecture and the female student’s naked breasts? Now their baring was no run-of-the-mill erotic-cheeky argument with female skin. They were, almost in the ancient sense, cynically bared bodies, bodies as arguments, bodies as weapons. (109)
Fascinating: so that is where the women were and are.
The author has spent some time for her own part in German university lecture halls, both as student and visiting professor, and recalls wondering how the female students in the room were able to take notes especially as they were (and this was 1984, decades after Sloterdijk’s “cynical” moment of encounter with Adorno) assiduously knitting.
And yet, it is hard to protest too much, for that would be to pretend that one knows nothing of American style academic feminism. Even more that, it would be to ignore the circumstances of today’s media connectedness, male and female. Thus I too have students like these today, male and female, although in place of knitting they use computers or just text, using the like Thumbelina-sized zither that is their cell-phones.NB: See however for what might be accounted a kind of cynicism of the sort that might not appeal Sloterdijk and likely not at all to the majority of feminists, who have also and to be sure their problems with Simone de Beauvoir and any woman who practices a kind of truth telling against the conventionality that argues that women choose traditional roles in a kind of magically liberating way, see per contra, Christina Thürmer-Rohr, Vagabundinnen: Feministische Essays (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1987) and Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: A Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston 1978: Beacon Press).
Kynic or cynic?
Sloterdijk who moves between analyzing the claims of objectivity and analysis and claiming the same for himself concludes his introduction: “A mixture of cynicism, sexism, ‘matter-of-factness,” and psychologism constitutes the mood of the superstructure in the West, a twilight mood, good for owls and philosophy.” (xxxviii)
The self-styledly masculine Sloterdijk quotes his grandmother (no mamma’s boy he) (or maybe not: he’s not writing Dutch after all, this we know) “a teacher’s daughter, from an idealistic home,” who “often recounted proudly and respectfully that it was Kant who wrote the Critique of Pure Reason and Schopenhauer The World as Will and Representation.” (Ibid.)
Sloterdijk seems to know that these were for his grandmother “magical books which we cannot read because they are too difficult, but which we must admire from the outside like something from someone very great.” (Ibid.) That would be anyone who knows the true disenchanted magic of such books at all, that is, again, as Nietzsche once spoke of it “those who really know how to use such valuable books, probably those who themselves write or could write such books, as Nietzsche once put it speaking “in usum delphinorum.”*
What does one mean when one speaks of those books one can have read?
What is reading?
Proof, a metaphor borrowed from a certain tradition of geometrical demonstration or construction and further from the security of a test against injury, is similarly in need of question.
Sloterdijk’s initial discussion of what fascinates philosophers who remain captivated by Marxist-Hegelian-Freudian language with a certain resentment of Adorno and Marcuse but an odd fondness for Lühmann, Marquard, and Habermas (note the pigeon-holing here), of unhappy false conciousness — the comparison to Marcuse requires that one pay attention to repressive desublimation precisely in its desublimation as indulgent liberation, and think of the more or less happily unabated consumption of porn and the trafficking in prostitutes which makes a weary appearance either in the tabloids with politicians (as if that were the essence of scandal, and indeed in order to distract from what might otherwise occupy our concern) or else with the trade in children for sex, whereby one engages in the dissociative moralization that allows one to condemn men who flock to Thailand (or to Hamburg or San Francisco) for child prostitutes while at the same time celebrating the prowess (mostly monetary of course and this is why we praise them) of men who date younger women or presidents who marry supermodels, of the kind that another generation called starlets in order to emphasize precisely what counts as charm: and that is their youth. But as a date for the evening, one person’s 17 or 16 year old starlet (13 years old, if one is Roman Polanski) is another person’s “child.” Sloterdijk seems to know that these were for his grandmother “magical books which we cannot read because they are too difficult, but which we must admire from the outside like something from someone very great.” (Ibid.) That would be anyone who knows the true disenchanted magic of such books at all, that is, again, as Nietzsche once spoke of it “those who really know how to use such valuable books, probably those who themselves write or could write such books, as Nietzsche once put it speaking “in usum delphinorum.”*
These special readers, very like Sloterdijk’s good grandmother, correspond to the majority of today’s scholars. It is a necessary corollary to add that this kind of ranking (grandmothers and dauphins), whereby we take ourselves to know whose references are impotent, de-virilized, and whose not, extends fairly broadly. Thus we continue to read commentaries by those who inform us that there is no evidence, no “proof” that Nietzsche ever read Kant’s first critique (though fond as many are of the third critique, one sometimes makes an exception for this one critique out of a possible three). It does not occur to these commentators that there is, apart from their own convictions, to use Nietzsche’s word for prejudice, no proof, not a shred of “evidence” (of the kind they themselves would identify as such) that they themselves have read the text they speak of (and with today’s search engine the need to have read anything at all is an optimism of a kinder, perhaps more rigorous, but certainly foregone era).*Nietzsche, GS §102. See for a discussion in the context of philology and today’s scholarship, Babich, “Nietzsche’s Philology and Nietzsche’s Science: On The ‘Problem of Science’ and ‘fröhliche Wissenschaft’ in: Pascale Hummel, ed., Metaphilology: Histories and Languages of Philology (Paris: Philologicum, 2009), pp. 155-201. Here it is worth noting that Swift, noted in a previous post, expressly characterized his own Tale of Tub in a similar fashion as for the "use" of the dauphin.
What is reading?
Proof, a metaphor borrowed from a certain tradition of geometrical demonstration or construction and further from the security of a test against injury, is similarly in need of question.
Think of the scandal of the by-now nearly forgotten New York governor Eliot Spitzer whose fall from grace had mostly to do with the legal embarrassment less of procurement than transporting across state lines (this is still with a rakish charm called “white slavery” but it is all about sex for money and this is the desublimation that comes with power (it matters indeed that Spitzer’s replacement after his fall from grace, his lieutenant governor and associates would accede to the same proximity to libertarian indulgence assured by political power with an instantaneity that so far from outraging simply bored the press.
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