cynicism and enlightenment

I read the The Critique of Cynical Reason by Peter Sloterdijk (translated by Michael Eldred, University of Minnesota Press, 1987) about three years ago. It’s one of those books that didn’t make a huge impression on me at the time but haunts me as events in the world and in my life stir the memory of this or that passage. The book is actually many projects-in-one: a detailed analysis of the Weimar Republic as the birthplace of modern cynicism, and a more philosophical analysis of modern cynicism as “enlightened false consciousness [ . . .] that modernized, unhappy consciousness [ . . .] which has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but [ . . .] has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice.” (p. 5) In these passages, he explores the metaphor of the world-historical process of enlightenment as a flame whose most fearsome and foolishly unacknowledged enemy is the cynicism of the ruling elite, which “consciously tries preserve the naivete of the others”. (p. 83). (Of course I’m mapping this onto the left’s failure to remove Karl Rove -- I mean, Bush -- from office).

Analogous to the image of the flame, [Enlightenment’s] energy is most intense at the center and dies down at the periphery. Starting with the pioneers and masters of reflective intelligence in philosophy and the arts, its impulse is refracted initially in the milieu of the intelligentsia with its inertia, then in the world of social labor and politics, futher in the countless private spheres split off from the universal, and is finally reflected back by pure misery that can no longer be enlightened. (p.83)

Enlightenment, no matter how impotent the mere means of reason seem, is subtly irresitble, like the light, after which, in sound mystical tradition, it is named: les lumieres, illumination. Light is unable to reach only those places where obstacles block its rays. [ . . .] In the language of the eighteenth-century Freemasons, the obstacles that disturbed or blocked the light of knowledge had a threefold name: superstition, error, and ignorance. Enthusiastically and naively, the early enlighteners presented themselves to the powers-that-be in the name of their struggle for light and demanded free passage.

However, they never really got a clear view of the “fourth monster,” the actual and most difficult opponent [ . . .] [This was] the knowledge of domination in the hegemonic powers. This knowledge always has the structure of a double knowledge: one for the rules of conduct of power and one for the norms of general consciousness.

[ . . .] Those who rule, if they are not “merely” arrogant, must place themselves studiously between enlightenment and its addressees [ . . .] The state must know the truth before it can censor it. (p. 78)