Читать книгу After God - Peter Sloterdijk - Страница 12

“The rays of the sun drive out the night, / The surreptitious power of hypocrites annihilate.” This celebratory, incontestable declaration by the priest-king Zarastro, with which Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute (first performed in September 1791) ends, condenses the two primary motifs of the theological and political Enlightenment into a compact threat. Whenever the Enlightenment takes the stage, whether it is inspired in a rational–religious fashion or filled with the pathos of a movement of liberation, it undertakes to expel the despotism that is allied with “the night” and to unmask the systems of established hypocrisy. The protagonist in this drama can be none other than the sun itself.

Schikaneder’s childish, folksy Enlightenment did not do a bad job of striking the critical nerve in the psycho-political construction of the ancien régime. Since time immemorial, a problem of constitutional hypocrisy has indeed accompanied the alliance between throne and altar in the monarchies of old Europe, supported as they were by clerical power. Its reflections entered into the popular image of the medieval church; they are just as inseparable from it as is the old, tacit conviction of humbler people that hardly one of the greats of the world can be trusted. From the late Middle Ages on, the hypocritical priest and the dissolute monk functioned as standard figures of popular realism. Starting in the sixteenth century, the consultant to the prince, the trickster who teaches deception in order to prevent his listeners from falling prey to it themselves, was added to their number. In the literature of the baroque period, worldly wisdom and masked existence closed ranks to the point where they could no longer be distinguished. Indeed, wasn’t it a time-honored necessity to view the entirety of the world as the epitome of falsehood, guile, and dissimulation? Wasn’t Lady World considered to be the hypocrite par excellence – at the front, the voluptuous harlot who promises happiness, but at the back the gruesome skeleton? Since the advent of the bourgeoisie, the hypocrite, alongside the bastard and the actor, was portrayed as a key figure in the emerging sciences of humankind. As long as you failed to take the omnipresence of Tartuffe into account, you did not know enough about how the human being was among her own kind. Whenever you encounter idealists making pleas, plaster saints won’t be far away. The French moralists had set the tone: as soon as altruism dolls itself up, the petticoat of egoism peeks through.

The roles of criminal and secret agent have often been depicted since the late nineteenth century. This attests to the typically modern interest in phenomena of disguised behavior, far beyond the motif, widespread since the eighteenth century, of unmasking the deception of priests. The basic mood of “bourgeois society” resounds in the motif of “lost illusions.” It betrays how much the battle lines between hypocrisy and enlightenment had shifted. From the nineteenth century on, the critique of hypocrisy receded into the background. Yet this was only in order to make room for its expanded edition as critique of ideology. The great power of concealment was thereby transposed one octave lower, as it were, into class-conditioned systems of illusion and half-automatic self-deceptions.

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One year after the first performance of The Magic Flute, the theatrical skepticism against the hypocrisy of the powerful came to a head on the streets of Paris. There was now an armed fervor against the new masks of hypocrisy. During la Terreur, which raged from 1792 to 1794, it was the “annihilation” of the “surreptitious power” that took the helm. Its protagonists, Jacobins above all, were steeped in the conviction that they alone, plenipotentiaries of the light, were in a position to see through hypocrisies, both new and old. They dedicated themselves to the self-appointed mission of preserving the purity of the revolution and of tearing off the masks of both the feigned patriots and the secret partisans of earlier conditions – or of tearing off their faces from their torsos.

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The course of events after 1789 revealed that the activists had conceived of the practice of “driving out” and “annihilating” in a crudely simplistic fashion. What was supposedly snuffed and driven out, namely hypocrisy and nightshades of older times, asserted itself as a recurrent phenomenon. Hardly had the militancy taken up its work of driving out the night when an irony came to the fore: the expelled reappeared at the very heart of the expellers. The traditional subreption of power irrepressibly reemerged in the following generations of public characters. The delegates of good newness were mustered as politicians of light, only to fall into the old twilight themselves, shortly afterwards.

In more recent times, people have attempted to tell the story of the Enlightenment as a story of inevitable inversion into its opposite. People have also wanted to understand its trajectory as an increasingly manifest realization of its cleverly masked totalitarian impulses. Meanwhile such generalizing interpretations can be considered over and done with; a charitable reading may put them to rest, as discarded exercises in exaggeration.

It could be more in line with the facts of the history of ideas and more fruitful for the self-understanding of human and social sciences to count the course of the Enlightenment from the time of Spinoza and Voltaire to postmodernism, as a history of resigning to hypocrisy – more generally as a growing insight into the commandments of dissimulation that adhere to culture as such. Nietzsche’s words about the “reverence for the mask” indicate the direction of movement.¹

From a moral perspective, what is called resignation in psychology refers to the neutralization of disputes. This makes mediating options available. In front of a steep choice between all-reprehensible dissimulation and completely praiseworthy true confession, it may be advisable for the present to shrink back into the realm of overtones.

Philosophical anthropology, as it has taken shape since the third decade of the twentieth century, has played a towering role in the neutralization of hypocrisy. It was above all Helmuth Plessner who constructed a platform for the relaxing and leveling of the critique of hypocrisy. He did so through his doctrine of the “eccentric positionality” of the human being which he first presented in 1928 and then subsequently developed.² It was on this platform that overtones could first be heard as explicit compositions.

Plessner capitalized on the discourse about the difference between human and animal, as was common in his time. While Nietzsche had defined the human being as the “unestablished [nicht festgestellte] animal,” Plessner took the step of positing that the human being is the animal “placed” [gestellte] beside himself. Animals live without exception in a “concentricity” proper to their nature, and are thus sheltered in a permanent state of being at home with themselves in the midst of their environments (although even tortured animals can be “put out of sorts”). “The human being,” by contrast, is characterized by an existential eccentricity. This does not indicate any tendency to odd demeanor or mannered comportment, except in the sense that humankind qua humankind occupies an eccentric pole of the universe: ever since “human beings” buried their dead, negotiated with the beyond, attended balls, and contemplated the series of prime numbers, they have been ontologically derailed, off-track creatures.

Eccentricity, as a positional value in the Plessnerian sense, marks “man” through the structure of his consciousness. It is as though, by virtue of his reflexive constitution, he – and here the naive masculine predominates – were a priori transposed from the middle of existence into the surroundings. For him, to exist means as much as falling outside the borders of an environment. No matter what his environment presents, the human being goes beyond the enclosing effect of the horizon, even when he stays put. He is not here without being there. Having always already run away from the borders of the immediate environment, he must, in the attempt to come to himself, discover himself as a being that is essentially moved beside itself. As if wounded by an inevitable beyond, he is alienated from himself from close range. Nevertheless, he is capable of being “himself,” insofar as he succeeds at coming back to himself from standing beside himself. Being a human takes, accordingly, the form of a task never to be entirely accomplished: in order for existence to succeed, it requires that the individual shape the tension between eccentric and concentric tendencies.

One may, with all due respect, object that Plessner’s artfully elaborated doctrine of the positionally redoubled existence of “man” put a half-price version of German idealism on the market. His doctrine was original insofar as it presented a spatialized interpretation of “self-reflection.” It struck a surprising chord by revealing a hitherto unnoticed depth to the horizontal realm. Up until then, “men” had negotiated with an upwardly transcendent world; now and in the future they were to clinch the deal by dispensing with it altogether, as creatures of a displaced proximity to themselves. If we wished to characterize Plessner’s impulse in a word, we could say that he transposed Feuerbach’s anthropology from the vertical into the horizontal. Eccentricity is offered as a successor figure of transcendence. “Man” is the animal that not only places a heaven above itself, but also bears within itself a remoteness from which it returns to itself.

With his theorem of “eccentric positionality,” Plessner took the conception of the human being as an actor on the stage of the world, which had been in circulation since the Renaissance, and brought it to bear once more, in a terminology of the twentieth century. All men and women are merely players,³ and all have their entrances and exits. Shakespeare’s maxim inaugurated the age of theater anthropology. According to it, the human being is the animal that acts as if. Hypocrisy and hysteria should not be missing from the portrait of the being that is endowed with dissimulation; they furnish the traits of an existence that is histrionic and thoroughly cued in on the gazes of others. What is called “identity” is the self-illusion of the actor, who would like to be, even in the wings, what he portrays on the stage. There is no outside the stage. Resting in the image of what is proper to one can ever emerge only from the antagonism between the perception of the foreign and the positing of the self. At best, it’s a resting in the restless. Phantoms nest in the space of this antagonism. These phantoms lead “man” astray by leading him on. They make him believe that he is himself so long as he looks into the fun-house mirror that others put before him. Today it is, above all, respect and recognition – as well as their negative counterparts – that serve as mirrors. When these cast their reflections, we will inevitably become frustrated with our attempts to find anchorage in what is proper to us. No search for lost naivety can help combat the expectations of shipwreck as we work on mediating between our own perspective and another’s.

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What Nietzsche wanted to elucidate with the example of Richard Wagner, in order to reject it as a mistaken development, was the “advent of the actor type” in the arts. In reality, this was an event of much older provenance. Its trajectory could not be gleaned from the perspective of the polemics that surrounded art in the nineteenth century. Even Shakespeare – who flourished barely two generations after Martin Luther and eight generations before Nietzsche – only touched in passing on the real origins of the pull toward an eccentric positionality, even if his dictum was destined to be remembered. The entire world is a stage and men and women together mere players: with this thesis he proclaims what will be interpreted philosophically three centuries later – that being and being seen converge. The element of discontent in civilization cannot be attributed solely to the compulsory renunciation of the drives; it stems even more from the feeling of being burdened by the gaze of the unfriendly other. The human being cannot become what and who she is so long as she does not produce herself before the eyes of observers. Existence implies a permanent test of whether one can let oneself be seen.

Regardless of whether this thesis was presented around 1600 or after 1900, we must derive the excentering of the human being, his removal from the center, from much more remote events. Shakespeare and Plessner make some essential points, but both come millennia too late to bear witness to the real beginnings. In a nutshell, the impetus to establish and solidify the “eccentric positionality” that Plessner would have wanted to interpret as a supratemporal constant was due to the emergence of higher powers, typically called gods, which had already driven the human being out of his animal centering early on. The gods of the first hour are entities that are interested in the existence of human beings in an uncanny, ambivalent, and for the most part interventionist fashion. In the beginning, gods appeared to be beings that had to settle an outstanding balance with humans. Even Dante still speaks of God’s vendetta (Inferno 16, 16–18; Inferno 24, 119). The resentment of those who no longer exist against those who do is condensed in these beings. At the same time, they hold all the power, because their chapters have been closed, while the living still flounder about in incompleteness.

Accordingly, Nietzsche’s sentence “God is dead” contains an element of perspectival deception: whatever truth it may express, that truth pertains less to the end of the history of the human being’s relation to what lies beyond the world (for this has largely faded today)⁴ than to its beginning. Dead is the god who looked over the shoulders of the living with an eye of ontological envy – but also the one who looked through the lenses of compassion for those who still had to exist. From the fact of his own deadness, the early god staked out claims against the living. Debt wove the cord that connected the here and the beyond.⁵ Indifferent gods formed a very late chapter in the history of transcendence: with an everlasting smile, they prefigure the mysteries of a releasing being, which does not insist on getting revenge in the present or in the future. Not without reason does Aristotle emphasize God’s lack of envy; he is not jealous of the human being’s knowledge. The loving god was a later addition, although, admittedly, his love was often a sort of compulsory contract filled with threats. For the time being, we must continue to wait for gods who are loving beyond ambivalence, and until they arrive human beings would do well to look after the shape of their own relationships.

The morning twilight of the gods takes place in a half-archaic period, when the heavenly ones don’t yet know the virtues of indifference and equanimity. Human beings of the twilight period had to grapple with such invisible and not indifferent gods, who hovered over the collective like embittered ancestors in a vengeful mood. Human beings learned from these gods to fall outside themselves. Already in very remote times, human beings hit on the idea that their fates depended on powers that were incomprehensible for sacred reasons, terrifying, and occasionally benevolent. They did so independently of one another, in the most diverse cultures, owing to the similarity of their situation.⁶ These powers, whether they bore names that could be appealed to or not, allowed themselves not only to be moved by petitions, but to be bound by means of cleverly negotiated contracts. The most radical form of a binding petition is blood sacrifice on the altar of a beyond that is not too remote. Les dieux ont soif [The gods are thirsty]. In a universe pervaded by the law of reciprocity, fascination-generating sacrifice, whether in the form of human or animal life, compels the otherworldly addressee to answer with a rich return gift of existential goods. The first macroeconomy develops in the system of sacrifice.

What we call today the “pressure to succeed” formed the first article in the system of terms of trade⁷ between the executors and the recipients of sacrifice. Ever since these terms have been established, the gods have shared the business risks with the cultures that worship them. They represent transcendence in the state of manipulability. The gods are dependent on human beings who believe that they are dependent on gods. The Latin term religio points to this schema of reciprocal neediness: initially it signifies nothing less than the anxious care to safeguard the protocol when dealing with the higher powers.

We have thus introduced a first phase of excentering. It implies the tendency to take on a certain role; here the human partner puts herself in the position of surrendering to the expectations of a strong superworld. Entrance into the eccentric position came about for the first time only when ethnic groups became willing to respond to adversity by jointly taking the path that leads from anxiety to ecstasy. At the beginning of cultural evolution, it is of course not the individual who ends up in a position beside himself. It is rather the collective that consolidates itself: as a group sacrificing together in the common experience of horror, it takes responsibility for the death of a living being – whose equality as a bearer of life is deeply felt.⁸

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We give the name “high cultures” to what was at first a very small number of civilizations. These civilizations sublimate archaic transcendence by keeping the burden of blood sacrifice at bay. Indeed, they elevate the superworld into higher spheres by removing it entirely from the effective domain of human manipulations. “High culture” is a code name for three inseparable movements. First it designates the hypostatization of an unmanipulable superworld, whose incorruptibility is condensed into pathos concepts such as “truth,” kosmos, universum, brahman, and tao. Second it signifies the civil war that selected individuals launched against all-too-humanness – and eo ipso against every form of trivial religiosity, which now gets called “superstition.” Lastly it refers to the liberation of death and the progressive easing of the burdens of threats, debt collection, and revenge.

Karl Jaspers used the phrase “cultures of the axial age” to refer to the groups that instigated these campaigns against the rest of the world.⁹ The campaigns were begun by enlightened individuals; but, once begun, they could not be stopped. Among these cultures Jaspers counted the Chinese of the Confucian and Taoist age, the Indians from the time of the Upanishads, the Persians of the Avesta, the Jews of the high period of the prophets, and the Greeks of the tragic theater and the first philosophy. At that time – around 2,500 years ago, give or take a few centuries – a “breakthrough” occurred worldwide; note the military metaphor, which this time has been employed correctly. Worldviews that were more abstract and tended toward universality came into being, as did ethical doctrines that pertained to everything. All of a sudden, the gateway to the age of excessive demands was pushed open. Here begins the world history of an exclusivity that paints universal inclusions on the wall. The superworld began to code itself in concepts of truth that one could no longer live up to through externalized rituals. From then on, communication with higher powers and with the Highest was much more likely to take place in thinking souls and in literacy-demanding schools than on sacrificial stones and in sacral slaughterhouses. What later gets called “culture” designated, already at this time, work toward devulgarizing the superpowerful.

Among rare and circumspect individual human beings, as they were to begin with, the sublimating tendency led to the (premature) insight that the absolute owes them not even the slightest of things; rather they owe everything to it. The emergent spiritual elite launched a subtle, unattainable, and thus unending civil war against the uncircumspect, as they arise everywhere from everyday life. This was a civil war that could be fixed as a permanent mission.

Right from the beginning, four almost invincible groups stand against the few who have knowledge: the haughty, whose pride prevents them from gaining insight (given that insight cannot be gained without humiliation); those with entitlement, who want to persist in their received religio (given that knowledge is not possible without change); the miserable multitudes, whom everyday life has numbed into resignation to their shackles (given that they have not yet been awoken by the counter-resignation power of wonder); and the reserve army of the jealous, who lie in wait for their cue to bring everything down to their level.

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From the perspective of the present day, we can hardly avoid noting that Jaspers’s doctrine of the axial age represents one of the last among the outsized confabulations that western historians of ideas and of religion have concocted to make sense of humanity’s past. The boldness of this epochal fairytale, as it comes from the pen of the newly appointed Basel professor, consists in the fact that he backdates the Enlightenment – which has advanced since the eighteenth century, along with the cockade of contemporary reason – to 2,500 years ago.

One can get an idea of the space-making effects of this maneuver once one realizes that it is now no longer necessary to be modern at all costs in order to take part in the Enlightenment. Not only did this maneuver create a freedom of movement for ecumenical exchanges, as they manifested themselves since then, in the dialogue between cultures. Above all, it lessened the fanatical tensions between the avant-garde of the European Enlightenment – whose voice has been raised ever since the seventeenth century – and the heritage conservationists, who reject any progress of questioning and testing that takes place beyond the preserved holdings. If the trial conducted by the light against the night already began two and a half millennia ago, then we should be able to recognize the bearers of the extended enlightenment above all by their evolutionary patience. The distinction between esotericism and exotericism, which, significantly, is as old as the high cultures,¹⁰ helps us be patient – or, in modern parlance, tolerant.

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Doctor Martin Luther, who is often labeled a rebel, indeed a religious precursor of the Enlightenment, would in no way have been able to comprehend this wide-ranging construct of the philosopher Karl Jaspers; Luther would have indignantly put it to the side. Indeed, he would have rejected it as a dubious bow to the reason of unbelief. For it only examines cultures whose age indisputably precedes Christianity. So long as truth is to be allied with seniority, any attempt to assign a pre-Christian date to ways of approaching the highest insight – alias revelation – will remain suspect. Luther would have sensed in Jaspers’s theorem a fabrication from the spirit of humanist paganism, calculated to dissuade the person of the “now” time from worrying about the salvation of her soul. What is more, he would have rejected the concept of “culture” as a heretical suggestion. It expects Christianity to subordinate itself to the comparative study of worldviews and robs it of its character as the absolute “religion.”

Luther would have shuddered at the widespread and well-argued fact that, obviously, the “whore of reason” did not speak only through the immeasurably overrated Aristotle – that retrovirus of paganism inside corpus Christi, and the advocate of the unbearable thesis that human beings are able to display the virtue of magnanimity, megalopsuchia, through their own efforts. She also expressed herself through previously unknown figures with exotic names such as Confucius, Shankara, and Zarathustra. Even a familiar name such as Isaiah, who we believed was the first to prophesy the coming of the savior, would all of a sudden look like a colorful piece of cloth in the globalized whorehouse of reason.

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Jaspers’s doctrine of the axial age rests on the offensive universalization of the supposition that “the human being” exists under permanent transcendent supervision. Like no philosophizing psychologist before him – Nietzsche excepted – this philosopher perceived the shift in mood that took place in the first millennium before Christ and continued to resonate throughout the religious actualities of the next two millennia. We can characterize the “axial age” not only by the more or less synchronous emergence of all-encompassing cosmologies and precursors of post-conventional ethics. There is more: the axial age distanced itself in the first place from everything that came before it. It did so by means of an unparalleled overshadowing of the existential moods of the time – to the point of a complete negation of world and life. We need not discuss here whether this incursion of a disgruntled mood was a reverberation of cosmic catastrophes like the Flood or an undesired aftereffect of the emergence of holy texts and promissory notes. In terms of the atmosphere of belief, it does not seem to be unproblematic when a god that allows himself to be paraphrased with the cipher JHWE threatens his “own” people more than eighty times, in writing, with obliteration. Alongside the risky predicate of “omnipotence,” the potential for total negations is also gathered in the Highest. In 1946, Jaspers noted: “We are guilty of being alive.”¹¹ The tremor of the National Socialist catastrophe and the era of mass murders reverberate in this sentence. Yet it still belongs, undoubtedly, in the global resonance chamber of the disgruntled mood of the axial age.

At any rate, “high culture” refers to the epoch of growing anxiety about being touched. Whoever turns toward the One or to agathon [the Good], whoever strives for moksha [release from incarnations] and desires sanctification, must be in a position to rescind his membership in profane spheres. As long as the rays of the sun have not driven out the night, the adepts of purity do well to avoid entering impure precincts. The “world” is everything that the soul courting true knowledge keeps at a distance. In the future, wisdom and world contempt are to be unified by more than alliteration.

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In order to trace the beginnings of the compulsion toward dissimulation, it is then necessary to trace the eccentrification of the human being back to the revolutions in the world picture that took place during the “axial age.” Hypocrisy is not merely vice’s bow to virtue, as La Rochefoucauld once remarked. Rather it marks the human being’s embarrassment about the omnipresence of a transcendent observer. It corresponds to the need not to be always seen. From this need emerge various strategies for circumventing unbearable scrutiny. Even the invention of the “unconscious” in the late eighteenth century belongs with the maneuvers of escaping an all too invasive scrutiny. The excessively observed human being is driven to hypocrisy the more she is held to the belief that the observer misses no detail, no matter how small. God, who is all eyes, surrounds me from without and vets me from within – all according to the Augustinian spatial schema of double transcendence: interior intimo meo, superior summo meo, “more inward to me than my most inward part, higher than my highest part.”¹²

Accordingly, the establishment of the eccentric position of the human being on the stage of existence results from an internally fixated reaction to high cultures’ impositions of always being watched by an observer who can see through everything. The excesses of the Genevan city of God revealed just how far the attack of rigorous scrutiny on daily modes of life can go. The church of Calvin employed its own watchmen, spies, and executioners, in order to transform the city into a concentration camp of the elect.

The majorities, which remain in their world childishness, count on the fact that God for the most part does not see them. Like Tartuffe, they think that anything that is not seen is not a sin. The god of the people is to be exempted from the burden of having to register everything in his logbook. Since time immemorial, the people has therefore voted for the oblivion of being – that is, for the obfuscation of the presence of constant scrutiny from both within and without. Nor has the people ever warmed up to the clerical elites’ attempt to enforce permanent self-control through universal confession. By contrast, those spiritual minorities that have been seized by the revolution in the world picture [Weltbild] feel overwhelmed by the lofty suggestion that they produce themselves relentlessly in the face of a super-clairvoyant observer.¹³