‘Intellectus quaerens iram’: Sloterdijk on Cynicism, God, and the (Im)possibility of Revolution – Nick Dion

This paper is interested in theorising the role of religion in revolutionary political action in the modern West, specifically with respect to the philosophy of Peter Sloterdijk. If you have never heard of Sloterdijk, you are not alone. Having built his reputation in Germany as a philosopher and cultural critic after the publication of his best-selling Critique of Cynical Reason in the early 80s, Sloterdijk is a veritable phenomenon on the German philosophical scene, having published over a dozen books since the Critique, hosting his own late-night philosophical debate television show, and having had very public and lasting arguments with Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and other members of the Frankfurt school. His works have long since been translated into French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian and other ‘European’ languages but, with the exception of the Critique, were not available in English until 2009. Sloterdijk’s Zorn und Zeit, or ‘Rage and Time’, the work most important for my argument today, is slated for English release next month.

Following Nietzsche, Sloterdijk’s brand of philosophy is interested in questioning the fundamental values of Western society – capitalism, humanism, the Enlightenment legacy – and in making out of his inquiries a ‘gay science’, proposing alternatives to current social trends. In short, the philosopher, while remaining rigourous, must not take himself too seriously, nor must he revel in despair or fatalism. It is on this point of method that he differs most considerably from the approach of the Frankfurt school.

Sloterdijk’s Rage and Time is, I think, central to his critique of political revolution. In an age where analysis of the emotions seems to be ‘in’, as much in phenomenology as in the cognitive sciences, Sloterdijk’s is one of the first real treatments of anger. Following his usual genealogical method of argumentation, Sloterdijk presents what he calls a ‘psychohistory of rage’, examining the way in which humanity has managed and expressed its social anger from archaic Greece onwards. He reads in the history of the West a series of institutional attempts to balance anger and care in social interactions, to channel anger, an inevitable human emotion, into something socially productive. Revolutionary political movements, from the Jacobins to Marxism to national socialism, all fit into the category of such attempts.

But first: what do we mean by revolution? A worthy question indeed, and you’ll forgive me if I skirt around the complexities of the issue, for Sloterdijk at least is clear on his definition. Since France 1789, ‘revolution’ involves a reversal of social power relations, accompanied by the ascent of a neglected working middle class. Not the most creative definition granted, nor perhaps the most suitable for, say, an analysis of the ancient world, but insofar as Sloterdijk is concerned specifically with the potential for revolution in the modern West, one that should prove apt enough. We might question, however, the ways in which his adoption this definition colours his later analysis.

Sloterdijk’s understanding of revolutionary potential grows out of his diagnosis of the modern West, which, he argues, is dominated by a kind of political and epistemological cynicism resulting from the Enlightenment’s destruction of master narratives. On the one hand, metaphysical and teleologically oriented understandings of human purpose needed to be examined closely, for a variety of reasons: to include the excluded, to break with anthropocentrism and fatalism, and so on. On the other hand, though, master narratives, including religious narratives, gave human life a sense of meaning that many individuals have now lost. Instead, they are left living life day-to-day, not quite certain what they want or where they are heading. Despite this, and contrary to some, Sloterdijk does not want to argue that the Enlightenment was a bad thing, quite the opposite. Insofar as it sought to liberate humanity from illusion, it is worth salvaging. But we have not learned to live with its legacy. We need a way, Sloterdijk suggests, of ‘being enlightened about our enlightenment’, of making sense of our lives despite our deconstruction of metaphysics.

The Enlightenment also brought about a revolution in epistemology. Knowledge, in the wake of Ricoeur’s ‘masters of suspicion’, has become a question of unmasking hidden power games and political strategies. Today, philosophy as philos sophia, as the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, is impossible; it has been replaced with Nietzsche’s ‘knowledge is power’. We strive to know so that we might control. Yet even Nietzsche fails us today; how many of us know, for example, that we will have jobs waiting for us when we graduate? That our years of accumulating knowledge will translate into some kind of ‘power’, broadly construed? As Sloterdijk puts it, “No one believes anymore that today’s learning will solve tomorrow’s problems; it is much more likely to cause them” (1987; xxix).The legacy of the Enlightenment has affected political systems as well. Politics has become a power game with rules to which we are not privy, leaving us disillusioned with the way society is run. Yet if discontent spawns critique, then ours should be the age of critique. Instead, cynicism has replaced the critical impulse. As the title of Sloterdijk’s first book suggests, the Critique of Cynical Reason labours at some length to refine and characterise this prevailing cynical mode. Sloterdijk describes it, somewhat paradoxically, as ‘enlightened false consciousness’; the cynic has learned the lessons of the Enlightenment but cannot put them into practice. Immune to critique, the cynic acts against his own better knowledge. Why, for example, do many continue to make the weekly pilgrimage to Wal-Mart when we all know of the company’s anti-union sentiment, its exploitation of the Third World, and its destruction of small-town businesses? The cynic knows better, but cannot be brought to act on this knowledge.

In a sense, Sloterdijk has learned the lessons of his generation. As a child of the 1968 student revolts, he is most concerned with theorising the political disillusionment that he sees in these former revolutionaries and the perceived lack of political and social alternatives in the West. In this mission, Sloterdijk differs little from other prominent European political thinkers. Slavoj Zizek, for example, who lauds Sloterdijk as “definitely not on our side, but also not a complete idiot” (2009; 131), also asks if the Left is destined to play the part of those who convince but still lose and describes modern notions like democracy and justice as institutions in which one participates without actually believing in them anymore. The major difference between the two lies in their prescribed solutions. For Zizek, critique should be revitalized by way of a transformed communism. For Sloterdijk, this is a naïve and indeed even dangerous option. Socialism and communism have lost their innocence, Sloterdijk argues, in light of the tragedies of the twentieth century. He writes:

The degeneration of Marxism into the legitimating ideology of hidden nationalist and open hegemonic and despotic powers has ruined the much-celebrated principle of hope and spoiled any pleasure in history… The Left too is learning that one can no longer speak of communism as if none existed and as if one could ingenuously begin anew. (1987; 90)

Sloterdijk does not deny the insights of Marxist theory – its critique of capitalism, for instance, or of religion – but he does deny the possibility of Marxism as a basis for revolution in light of the historical events of the last century. Much as Freud wrote of religion in Civilization and its Discontents, Marxism, Sloterdijk argues, has had its shot, and now it is time to move on. So if Marxism, the banner under which the word ‘revolution’ is most often spoken, is not a suitable remedy to political cynicism, what is? Sloterdijk broaches this question in Rage and Time by analysing the history of anger in the Western tradition. Of course, Sloterdijk’s anger is not our anger. He is interested in thymos, that Platonic concept which denotes a combination of dignity and pride, indignation and anger all rolled into one. In the Republic, thymos is the virtue of the guardian class, the form of courage that allows them to defend the state. Perhaps best translated by the equally nebulous Latin term ‘animus’, thymos is the form of conviction and self-assertion that motivates one to stand up for one’s ideals and speak one’s voice, as well as the brand of anger resulting from the lack of public recognition. Sloterdijk’s thymos is closely related to pride and ambition and could almost be described as a psychoanalytic brand of narcissism, a desire to prove one’s worth to others. On a religious level, it runs completely counter to the traditional Augustinian prescription of humility over pride. On a political level, as the assertion of one’s self-worth and as a demand for recognition, thymos is that which motivates the lower classes to revolt against the upper.

Thymos, then, can be either a positive or a negative force. For Plato, at least, thymos tended to be positive until it got carried away with itself, an eventuality which society quickly developed institutions to prevent. These institutions have failed in the twentieth century, according to Sloterdijk. We have let our thymos carry us away, resulting in widespread violence and political cynicism. For if the political Left is nearing death today and revolution seems impossible, it is specifically because those political ideologies designed to focus individual thymotic energies into a mass movement for change are no longer able to capture the imaginations of the people in the way that they once could.

Religion is another one of those institutions that used to be able to channel thymos. The Abrahamic religions, for Sloterdijk, should have the ability to transform history into a courtroom, as believers give up their right to vengeance in this lifetime in return for a belief that the divine will take vengeance upon their enemies in the afterlife. This exchange acts as a form of religious psychotherapy, allowing believers to cope with various forms of trauma through the belief that things will eventually be made right. Sloterdijk reads Nietzsche’s ‘god is dead’ not as an empirical fact or as a prescription, but as an indication that religion’s ability to manage thymos in this way is failing and, one might suspect by looking at human history, has indeed been failing for quite some time. The Christian message of love, Jesus’ kindness to his enemies, all of that fluffy ‘love thy neighbour’ stuff works at best to create an ambiguity in Christian ethics, but an ambiguity that is nonetheless based on faith in divine wrath, in retribution after death. Tertullian’s “Let us weep while the pagans rejoice, that we might rejoice when they weep” is the central thymotic message of Christianity, and the political Left uses a secular version of this same logic when prescribing revolution. After the death of god, the avenging god has become the political revolutionary, who now tries to fight social injustice under the name of ‘class warfare’ and focus individual anger in the pursuit of a collective goal. But in today’s world, both religion and Marxism have lost their influence, leaving no institution with a globalised scope that can unite the people in a common goal.

The political revolutionary, then, is left with the task of arousing the thymos of a large number of people and directing it at a common goal in an age where Leftist narratives have lost their influence on many. Sloterdijk seems to be working toward a non-Marxist theory of revolution, remaining convinced, in the tradition of ’68, that the theorising of revolution is one of the proper tasks of philosophy. Religion emerges as a limited option as well when it comes to inspiring revolution, for a variety of reasons. First of all, without buying into the secularisation thesis wholesale, Sloterdijk does not see religion as the unifying force that it may once have been, partly but not entirely because of the plurality of religions. There is also a Nietzschean critique of institutional religion latent in many of Sloterdijk’s texts, though not one that I have focused on here; if revolution requires that we ‘change our ways’, a spiritual metanoia of sorts, while Christianity can provide historical models for this its institutions ultimately belong to the part of the world that we need to change.

It might not appear obvious from his dismissal of religion and the political Left, but Sloterdijk remains convinced that the West can be shaken from its cynical stupor, and the originality of his analyses aim to provide only one angle through which revolutionary potential might be stirred up again. Sloterdijk’s ‘theory in action’ is perhaps best observed in his latest presentation, an analysis of the recent financial crisis. Sloterdijk sees here another failure of thymotic management, as greed, eros, desire found no counterweight in personal pride. Capitalism, he suggests, is antithetic to thymos, as the basic idea is to exactly cheat the system; success is measured by getting more from the market than you put in. Personal ambition and hard work give way to what is essentially a legalised pyramid scheme. Yet Sloterdijk is interested not only in this economic critique but also in the popular anger that the crisis provoked; for a brief moment, just over a year ago, it seemed possible that this anger at the failure of the capitalist system might unite people around the world. One year later, however, this only appears as a missed opportunity; everything is back to the status quo. So where, then, can we go from here?Bibliography

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