(5:47 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

An excerpt from Critique of Cynical Reason

For a century now philosophy has been lying on its deathbed, but it cannot die because it has not fulfilled its task. Its farewell thus has been tortuously drawn out. Where it has not foundered in the mere administration of thoughts, it plods on in glittering agony, realizing what it forgot to say during its lifetime. Faced with its demise, it would now like to be honest and reveal its last secret. It confesses: The great themes, they were evasions and half-truths. Those futile, beautiful, soaring flights--God, Universe, Theory, Praxis, Subject, Object, Body, Spirit, Meaning, Nothingness--all that is nothing. They are nouns for young people, for outsiders, clerics, sociologists. "Words, words--nouns. They need only to open their wings, and millennia fall out of their flight." (Gottfried Benn, Epilog und lyrisches Ich)

The last philosophy, willing to confess, treats such things under a historical rubric--together with the sins of youth. Their time has come. In our thinking there is no longer any spark of the uplifting flight of concepts or of the ecstasies of understanding. We are enlightened, we are apathetic. No one talks anymore of a love of wisdom. There is no longer any knowledge whose friend (philos) one could be. It does not occur to us to love the kind of knowledge we have; rather we ask ourselves how we might contrive to live with it without becoming ossified.

What is presented here under a title that alludes to the great traditions is a meditation on the sentence "Knowledge is power." This is the sentence that dug the grave of philosophy in the nineteenth century. It sums up philosophy and is at the same time its first confession, with which the century-long agony begins. This sentence brings to an end the tradition of a knowledge that, as its name indicates, was an erotic theory--the love of truth and the truth through love... From the corpse of philosophy arose the modern sciences and theories of power in the nineteenth century in the form of political science, theory of class struggle, technocracy, vitalism, and in every form armed to the teeth. "Knowledge is power..." This sentence fixed the course for the unavoidable politicization of thinking. Those who utter the sentence reveal the truth. However, with the utterance they want to achieve more than truth: They want to intervene in the game of power.

[...]

The eternal recurrence of the Same, Nietzsche's most subversive thought -- cosmologically untenable, but culturally and morphologically fruitful -- is an apt description of a resurgence of "kynical" [the author spells it with a "K" when he means the "good" kind of cynicism, and with a "c" when he means the "bad" -- with all appropriate nuances, etc.] motives that had developed to conscious life especially during the time of the Roman emperors, but also to some extent in the Renaissance. The Same: Those are the rappings of a sober, pleasure-oriented life that has learned to live with circumstances. To be ready for anything, that makes one invulnerably clever. Live in spite of history; existential reduction; socialization "as if"; irony about politics; mistrust toward "plans." A new heathen culture that does not believe in life after death and so must seek life before death.

Nietzsche's decisive self-characterization, often overlooked, is that of a "cynic"; with this he became, next to Marx, the most momentous thinker of the century. Nietzsche's "cynicism" offers a modified approach to "saying the truth": It is one of strategy and tactics, suspicion and disinhibition, pragmatics and instrumentalism--all this in the hands of a political ego that thinks first and foremost about itself, an ego that is inwardly adroit and outwardly armored.

The violent, antirationalistic impulse in Western countries is reacting to an intellectual state of affairs in which all thinking has become strategy; this impulse shows a disgust for a certain form of self-preservation. It is a sensitive shivering from the cold breath of a reality where knowledge is power and power is knowledge. In writing, I have thought of readers, have wished for readers, who feel this way; this book, I think, could have something to say to them.

The old social democracy had announced the slogan Knowledge is Power as a practical and reasonable prescription. It did not think too much about it. The message was simply that one has to learn something real so that life will be better later. A petit-bourgeois belief in schooling had dictated the slogan. This belief is disintegrating today. Only for our cynical young medicos is there still a clear link between study and standard of living. Almost everyone else lives with the risk of learning without prospects. Those who do not seek power will also not want its knowledge, its knowledge armaments, and those who reject both are secretly no longer citizens of this civilization. Countless numbers of people are no longer prepared to believe that one first has to "learn something" so that things will be better later. In these people, I believe, a suspicion is growing that was a certainty in ancient Kynicism: that things must first be better before you can learn anything sensible. Socialization through schooling, as it takes place here, and in Western societies, in general, is a priori stupefaction, after which scarcely any learning offers a prospect that things sometime or other will improve. The inversion of the relation between life and learning is in the air: the end of the belief in education, the end of European Scholasticism. That is what conservatives as well as pragmatists, voyeurs of the decline as well as well-meaning individuals alike find so eerie. Basically, no one believes anymore that today's learning solves tomorrow's "problems"; it is almost certain rather that it causes them.

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