“How Well Disposed Would You Have to Become to Yourself and to Life”
Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy That Will Be Able to Present Itself as an Enlightenment — Part I
"How Well Disposed Would You Have to Become to Yourself and to Life"
Prolegomena to any future philosophy that may arise as an Enlightenment — Part I
The following text explores the hypothesis that every philosophy of the zeitgeist finds its onset at something that bothers it: in the beginning, there was disgruntlement. This something is interpreted here as an illiberally disgruntled enlightenment, which is embodied in the current “polarization.” With Francis Fukuyama's help, this trail is explored and the drama of the recognition of modern Enlightenment is described.
The philosopher Fukuyama, born in Chicago in 1952, is primarily known for his essay The End of History? from 19891. There, he held that the “end of history” assumed by Hegel had finally arrived with the looming collapse of the Soviet Union. He saw the triumphant liberal Western democracies as the final stage of the process of historical progress. In 1992, Fukuyama published his main work based on this essay: The End of History and the Last Man, in which he combines Hegel's thesis with Nietzsche's diagnosis of the “last man.” Our author is also referring to this book. It caused controversial debates worldwide and continues to provoke today. — Do we really live after the “end of history”? Our author agrees with Fukuyama: While with the form of liberal democracy a final embodiment of the course of history has been achieved, history has been continuing as a conflict within this embodiment. World history has become history of liberalism.
"We do not easily negate; we make it a point of honor to be affirmers.”
Nietzsche, Twllight of the Idols, Morality as Anti-Nature, 6 (source of translation)
"Proctophantasmist: You still are here?
Nay, ’tis a thing unheard!
Vanish, at once! We’ve said the enlightening word.
The pack of devils by no rules is daunted:
We are so wise, and yet is Tegel haunted.
To clear the folly out, how have I swept and stirred!
Twill ne’er be clean: why, ’tis a thing unheard!! ”
Goethe, Faust (source of translation)
1. Basic Disgruntlement
A ghost is haunting the West — the specter of anti-liberal disgruntlement. It stems from a culture of Enlightenment that pushes its promise of a better life through intelligence into the background through a habit of criticism. Because spirit and freedom do not seem to complement each other, spirit begins to suspect freedom. The skeptical spirit thus itself becomes a reason why trust in the spirit's vital promise of ascension has given way to intelligent suspicion. The cunning cleverness, with which Odysseus escaped from Polyphemus' cave and with which Boccaccio in his Decameron made sympathy for this world against dogmatic Christianity plausible, becomes an abstract discourse of hypercritical consciousness, which develops its inventive power in ever new suspicions against itself. Being becomes being-against as being-against-oneself. As “Enlightenment about the Enlightenment,” Enlightenment turns from exhilarating logos into the myth of a tribunalization that, in ever more advanced narratives, casts a gloomy light on its own existence — to the delight of the autocratic Internationale, which looks grudgingly at Western culture. Adorno, the siren-like grandmaster of the apodictic hypersensitivities of a cultural criticism industry against everything that exists, explained together with his co-author Horkheimer: “Enlightenment is totalitarian.”2 Thinking must be correct when it repeatedly rejoins into the chorus that there can be no right life in the wrong one. Through this type of diagnoses, which in a totalitarian manner adjudge Enlightenment to be totalitarian and whose heirs today determine the subject matter of the humanities almost hegemonically, a point is reached at which Enlightenment must ask itself whether it has not fallen into an extremism of criticism, which shows masochistic traits and, in this state, contributes to exacerbating the problem of dysfunctional liberalism. An Enlightenment that no longer follows the fury of criticism must reinterpret the disgruntling interpretations so that there could be a change of mood. It finds its yardstick in experiencing freedom as a fragile opportunity to recognize an unlikely abundance to which, surprisingly enough, we belong.3
2. Toxic Elective Affinities
In a kind of Enlightenment about the Enlightenment of Enlightenment, it would first be possible to differentiate phenomenologically two main types of extremist criticism. The first litany, which often belongs more to the left-wing camp, is directed against the own as an aggressiveness against the foreign. The West is stigmatized as a capitalist-colonialist plot by white men against the rest of the world. In an expression that leaves nothing to be desired, the young Susan Sontag writes in this sense: “The white race is the cancer of humanity.”4 This kind of big interpretation leads to the plausibility of social chemotherapy that pays homage to the utopia of a radically different future: “in solidarity,” “empathetic,” “consensual.” Today, this critique of the own often shows itself under the value of “justice.”
Criticism in the opposite tendency is directed against one's own as a force pervaded by strangers. It takes place under the guiding principle of “decadence.” Perceiving one's own culture as “alienated” is usually practiced by right-wing critics. The decline of values is stylized as the notorious “fall of the West” (Oswald Spengler, 19185). He is summoned in the mode of the dark romance of an end-time Götterdämmerung. Cultural criticism becomes eulogy. Salvation lies in the nostalgia of the good old days, garnished with the authority of God. Currently, this criticism of one's own, which is interpreted as “alienated,” is mostly seen as a defense of “freedom.”
Both critiques could be interpreted as justified to a certain extent. A modern liberal-democratic society needs the conflict that stems from its internal tension of freedom and justice. A proportionate and recongestant immune response against lack of freedom and against injustice indicates social fitness. However, this vital and vitalizing response has currently reached the state of emergency of a permanent stress response, which is taking on the outlines of a double autoimmune disease. The tricky thing is that both overreactions are not reduced because they represent a milieu for each other that makes their respective state of alarm appear appropriate. These cultural critiques, formed from contrasting angles but related emotional states, thus create mutual stability. They form a successful toxic relationship as intertwined cultural autoimmune diseases. In doing so, each other's exaggerations become welcome reasons to be able to glorify one's own exaggerations as objective and realistic. While you stand out clearly in your distortions alone, you look good in the light of the contrasting distortions. Your own contradictions and radicalisms can thus easily be reinterpreted as “fake facts” and appropriate proportionality. The agenda of one side determines the agenda of the other. This is how “Woke” and “MAGA” complement each other in the USA.
The longer this double autoimmune reaction lasts, the more it stabilizes. The sentiments of Occidental “no” against themselves are concentrated and organized in diametrically arranged industries of cultural criticism. This is reflected, for example, in a homophobic friendliness that is otherwise not interested in the foreign and a xenophobic love of home that has understood little of its own culture. Being for something is fed by being in opposition to being in opposition to the other being. You like something because the other side doesn't like it. In this interprovocation, certain shibboleths, codes of belonging, are formed, which mark one's own horde membership. They each provide the philosophical service of a warming horde of communal ill-finding and ill-doing in times of a functionally “differentiated society” (Luhmann). Hassen unites and creates the magic of community. The slogan in these racquets is: The fight must go on and on. Together in hate, they become analogous conspiracy theories against the West. In this way, a bipolar cultural struggle against the West is being formed, which maintains its integrity from the struggle of the two main poles of cultural criticism in a self-image as a rational immune response.
Public discourse is increasingly being consumed by the phenomenon of “polarization,” because the spaces of neutral confrontation are themselves under the suspicion of being partisan. This situation is escalated by the utopia of a radical new start promoted by both sides. The concept of world revolution is available on the left and the concept of rebirth is available on the right. In slogans: “Smash the system! ““Make America great again! ”
Under the stress of two self-stabilizing autoimmune diseases, the social body increasingly lacks the capacity for sustainable cultural work, in which the foreign and the own become more deeply recognizable, become friends with each other on this basis or can at least remain cooperative in a conscious sense of otherness while civilizing each other. In the spirit of Odo Marquard, it could be said that what avoids declarations of a state of emergency would be healthy.6
3. And Yet It Continues
In order to better understand the phenomenon of radical Enlightenment versus one's own Enlightenment, one could refer to ideas that Francis Fukuyama wrote in the last chapter of his great book The End of History and the Last Man from 1992. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, Fukuyama does not triumphantly argue that the has ended with the victory of the West against the East in the Cold War. Instead, he adopts a view that gathers “weakly deterministic”7 arguments as to why historical development has a tendency to lead to liberal democracies. Fukuyama justifies this interpretation by saying that liberal democracy is the political form for the possibility of a rational civilizing of a basic psychological energy, which he understands as “thymos” with reference to Plato's teaching of the three parts of the soul. Unlike “sophia,” which embodies wise reflection, and “eros,” which means greedy desire, thymos stands for a psychological figure that has received little attention in modern times. It covers the spectrum of feelings associated, for example, with pride, recognition, self-esteem, envy, jealousy, and ambition. Thymos, translatable roughly as “courage,” is portrayed by Fukuyama in the manner of a drive for heroism:
“Thymos” is the side of man that deliberately seeks out struggle and sacrifice, that tries to prove that self is something better and higher than a fearful, needy, instinctual, physically determined animal.8
In his diagnosis, Fukuyama distinguishes between two types of thymos. “Isothymia” is stimulated by the defamation suffered and urges equal treatment. “Megalothymia,” on the other hand, describes the urge to show off one's own abilities ambitiously and “show it to everyone else.”9 In a fight for recognition, both forms of thymos prove themselves in the quality of honorable sacrifice for something higher than one's own life.
Political thought has traditionally considered the negativity of the megalothymic. In an instructive overview, Fukuyama lists the previous ways of dealing with it. While Plato attached great importance to the education of Thymos, Machiavelli votes for a Balance of Thymos, Power should be kept in check by force.10 Modern liberalism in Hobbes and Locke thinks of Thymos as a vain quest for recognition,”Vainglory“To completely neutralize (Hobbes). A rational quest for self-preservation and material prosperity should replace the barbaric desire for fame. After all, the founding fathers of the USA did not seek to “rationalize away” thymotic energies, but rather to implement them in a politically wise manner Checks and Balances to channel.11 Fukuyama joins this model. He makes it clear that the liberal attempt to domesticate Thymos through reason and consumption alone falls short. Peace does not produce peace and prosperity does not produce prosperity. In a liberal democracy, the extremes of Thymos must not only be tamed, but they must also be transformed in such a way that they become essential productive elements of social life as civil courage and as a desire to do one's best.12 However, this only ever happens in a balance of freedom and justice, which is always considered trade off is to be watched. Emphasis on freedom comes at the expense of justice and vice versa. As examples, Fukuyama cites the USA, where the primacy of freedom and Europe, where the primacy of justice is decisive, and he also explicitly mentions Germany as the country in which the”European Dream“was most clearly realized as the successful end of history in peace and prosperity.13
Fukuyama sees the core problem of Western culture in not being able to moderate the irrevocable tensions and excesses of isothymia and megalothymia effectively enough. The reason for this is a lack of understanding of the power of recognition. In addition, isothymia as a plausible factor in postal history is culturally interpreted as good and megolathymia as an apparent relic from non-civil times as evil. So the story doesn't end for Fukuyama. It goes on. But now as an internal tension of liberal democracies that have successfully left the history of imperial history.14
The good life in prosperity has its specific difficulty in the absence of the magic of recognition struggles. This creates the type of “last person,” which Fukuyama, unlike Nietzsche, does not portray as squinting comfort in small day and night lusts. There is aggressive dissatisfaction in the thymos oblivion of prosperity. Peace becomes unpeaceful because it is bored with itself. You are no longer in demand as a top performer. Everyday life can be tackled by just giving 40%. The battles have been fought, and efforts are still being made to do so. Little enemy, little honor. Normality is an underchallenge. “The inadequate/Here is the event” (Goethe). As a result, there is a greed for symbolic sham battles that distract attention from the fact that the true struggles for recognition in the West have largely been successfully ended and are largely successfully institutionalized in the West.
The best of all political worlds has the problem that it disposes of radicalization to radicalization through its too brief understanding of de-radicalization. Therefore, the lack of challenge must be balanced in such a way that life continues to be thymotically stimulated but does not tip into uninhibited thymotic excesses (see “Cancel Culture” and “MAGA” and the anger attention industry, for which in English the terms Angertainment, Doomporn or Ragebait circulate).
Fukuyama sees the future task of liberal democracies as resolving the lack of awareness of the negative consequences of recognition. Politically, recognition has been latently recognized, but in theory they have not yet understood deeply enough what it means. This is how confusion ensues. It remains unclear what a thymotically comprehensive dignified human condition is and how exactly human rights are to be defined, and so it remains unclear how thymotic energies are to be treated within the framework of a liberal democracy.15 This ambiguity leads to a consensual way of life that is thymotically underwhelmed and is attracted by thymotic exaggerations. This opens the way for two radical extremes — on the one hand, the hyper-intensified demand for the recognition of ever more specific identity rights (isothymia) and, on the other hand, the unleashed return of megalothymia, which manifests itself in the ruthless drive for imperialist superiority. This creates a mental situation that Fukuyama foresaw in 1992: “This opens the way to hyperintensified demand for the recognition of equal rights, on the one hand, and the re-liberation of megalothymia on the other.”16 History continues: As a battle of citizens, the descendants are of citizens who successfully ended the story.
The article image was created by Linus Rupp based on the painting Diogenes by Jules Bastien-Lepage (1873; link).
Footnotes
1: A German translation of this important text by Alexander Görlitz and Paul Stephan, published by the Halcyon Association for Radical Philosophy, was published in 2020 as the first volume of the series of publications Edition Halkyon (link). (Editor's note: You can also acquire this brochure as a reward at our recent crowdfunding campaign.)
2: Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, p. 12.
3: The following thoughts can be seen as additions to the aphorisms with which the small notebook Die Freiheit zu sein (“The freedom to be”) from the year 2022 (link), which was intended as a kind of attempt at a cautiously affirming philosophy, fade out. (Editor's note: You can also acquire this brochure as a reward at our recent crowdfunding campaign.)
4: Susan Sontag, What's Happening to America, p. 57 f. (Our translation.)
5: Editor's note: On Spengler's right-Nietzscheanism, see also Christian Saehrendt's article Nietzsche’s Monkey, Nietzsche’s Varlet on this blog.
6: Editor's note: Cf. the article Abyss and Enablement? The Suspense of Contingency Johannes Hansmann Discusses Odo Marquard and Richard Rorty by Natalie Schulte and Paul Stephan on this blog (link).
7: Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man p. 354.
8: Ibid., p. 304.
9: Ibid., p. 180.
10: Consider the European Pentarchy from 1763 to 1914, which could currently be repeated on a larger scale globally if a post-transatlantic West was created. It would consist of the USA, China, Russia, Europe, and the Gulf region.
11: See ibid., p. 184 ff.
12: In addition, there must be rooms, arenas, in which the megalothymic can exist. Fukuyama, for example, speaks of “free solo rock climbers”, “skydiving”, “ironman”: “TheAlpinist has, in short, re-created for him or herself all the conditions ofhistorical struggle: danger, disease, hard work, and finally the risk of violent death” (ibid., p. 319).
13: Ibid., pp. 293 f. & 346 f. The thymotic epochal change in Germany could perhaps be described as an outbreak from an all-out war for all to prosperity for all, which could currently be known as the slogan “Care for all.” The welfare state becomes the care state. The self-image as a victim becomes opium for the people and the defense of this self-image becomes the cocaine of the people's representatives. Both sides instrumentalize isothymia as an “affect medication” (Nietzsche). Some do not want to despise and change and others do not want to feel important and therefore do not want to upset the sovereign. Mediocracy instead of meritocracy. Perhaps it is the unfamiliarity in dealing with thymotic energies that has led to the growth of a custom of slight insult in Germany, the special student of modern times and the model student of posthistory, so that even current heads of state are not afraid to apply the strict sanctions of paragraph 188 of the Criminal Code against harmless satire.
14: Ibid., p. 292 ff. — Realpolitik remains acute insofar as there is an inequality with regard to the historical development of post-history (see ibid., p. 276 ff.) Tensions may continue to arise at the collision zones of modern and ancient history, in which the language of realpolitik Lingua franca is. This phenomenon can currently be observed — March 2026 — in the conflict between the Shiite theocracy in Iran and its Western opponents. But Fukuyama also admonishes that the paradigm of realpolitik has considerable weaknesses in looking at everything through the filter of strength. It should be added: It is part of the pattern of real politics that criticism of this scheme is already interpreted as a form of weakness. This leads to solutions that become problems: “Treating a disease that no longer exists, realist now find themselves proposing costly and dangerous cures to healthy patients” (ibid., p. 253).
15: Ibid., p. 296 f. & 337 f. — The so-called strengthening of right-wing politics should be interpreted as cultural backlash megalothymic energies in a hegemony of isothymic dramas. There is a lack of forms of rational thymotics that would not have to repeat the old idiocies in order to be able to embody themselves.
16: Ibid., p. 337 f.
