In fact, Törless that very morning had bought the Reclam edition of that volume that he had seen at his professor’s and used the first recess to begin reading it. However, because of the profusion of brackets and footnotes he didn’t understand a single word, and, when he conscientiously followed the sentences with his eyes, it was as if an old bony hand were slowly screwing his brain out of his head.

When he stopped in exhaustion after about half an hour, he had only reached the second page, and sweat stood on his brow.

But then he gritted his teeth and read again one page further, until the recess was over.

By evening, however, he did not even want to touch the book. Fear? Repulsion? He didn’t quite know. Only one thing tortured him with burning clarity, that the professor, this person, who didn’t look like much, had the book lying around openly in his room, as if it were for him a daily conversation.

The ancient world knows the cynic (better: kynic) as a lone owl and as a provocative, stubborn moralist. Diogenes in the tub is the archetype of this figure. In the picture book of social characters he has always appeared as a distance-creating mocker, as a biting and malicious individualist who acts as though he needs nobody and who is loved by nobody because nobody escapes his crude unmasking gaze uninjured. Socially he is an urban figure who maintains his cutting edge in the goings-on of the ancient metropolises. He could be characterized as the earliest example of declassed or plebeian intelligence. His “cynical” turn against the arrogance and the moral trade secrets of higher civilization presupposes the city, together with its successes and shadows. Only in the city, as its negative profile, can the figure of the cynic crystallize in its full sharpness, under the pressure of public gossip and universal love-hate. And only the city can assimilate the cynic, who ostentatiously turns his back on it, into the group of its outstanding individuals, on whom its liking for unique, urbane personalities depends.

The fertile ground for cynicism in modern times is to be found not only in urban culture but also in the courtly sphere. Both are dies of pernicious realism through which human beings learn the crooked smile of open immorality. Here, as there, a sophisticated knowledge accumulates in informed, intelligent minds, a knowledge that moves elegantly back and forth between naked facts and conventional facades. From the very bottom, from the declassed, urban intelligensia, and from the very top, from the summits of statesmanly consciousness, signals penetrate serious thinking, signals that provide evidence of a radical, ironic treatment (Ironisierung) of ethics and of social conventions, as if universal laws only existed for the stupid, while that fatally clever smile plays on the lips of those in the know. More precisely, it is the powerful who smile this way, while the kynical plebeians let out a satirical laugh. In the great hall of cynical knowledge the extremes meet: Eulenspiegel meets Richilieu; Machiavelli meets Rameau’s nephew; the loud Condottieri of the Renaissance meet the elegant cynics of the rococo; unscrupulous entrepreneurs meet disillusioned outsiders; and jaded systems strategists meet conscientious objectors without ideals.

Since bourgeois society began to build a bridge between the knowledge of those at the very top and those at the very bottom and announced its ambition to ground its worldview completely on realism, the extremes have dissolved into each other. Today the cynic appears as a mass figure: an average social character in the upper echelons of the elevated superstructure. It is a mass figure not only because advanced industrial civilization produces the bitter loner is a mass phenomenon. Rather, the cities themselves and become diffuse clubs whose power to create generally accepted public characters has been lost. The pressure toward individualization has lessened the modern urban and media climate. Thus modern cynics— and there have been mass numbers of them in Germany, especially since the First World War— are no longer outsiders. But less than ever do they appear as tangibly developed type. Modern mass cynics lose their individual sting and refrain from the risk of letting themselves be put on display. They have long since ceased to expose themselves as eccentrics to the attention and mockery of others. The person with the clear, "evil gaze" has disappeared into the crowd; anonymity now becomes the domain for cynical deviation. Modern cynics are integrated, asocial characters who, on the score of subliminal illusionlessness, are a match for any hippie. They do not see their clear, evil gaze as a personal defect or an amoral quirk that needs to be privately justified. Instinctively, they no longer understand their way of existing as something that has to do with being evil, but as participation in a collective, realistically attend way of seeing things. It is the universally widespread way in which enlightened people see to it that they are not taken for suckers. There even seems to be something healthy in this attitude, which, after all, the will to self-preservation generally supports. It is the stance of people who realize that at times of naïveté are gone.

Psychologically, present-day cynics can be understood as borderline melancholics, who can keep their symptoms of depression under control and can remain more or less able to work. Indeed, this is the essential point in modern cynicism: the ability of its bearers to work— in spite of anything that might happen, and especially, after anything that might happen. The key social compositions in boards, parliaments, commissions, executive councils, publishing companies, practices, faculties, and lawyers' and editors' offices have long since become a part of this diffuse cynicism. A certain chic bitterness provides an undertone to its activity. For cynics are not dumb, and every now and then they certainly see the nothingness to which everything leads. Their psychic (seelisch) apparatus has become elastic enough to incorporate a survival factor of permanent doubts about their own activities. They know what they are doing, but they do it because, in the short run, the force of circumstances and the instinct for self-preservation are speaking the same language, and they are telling them that it has to be so. Others would do it anyway, perhaps worse. Thus, the new, integrated cynicism even has the understandable feeling about itself of being a victim and making sacrifices. Behind the capable, collaborative, hard façade, it covers up a massive offensive unhappiness and the need to cry. In this, there is something of the mourning for a "lost innocence," of the mourning for better knowledge, against which all action and labor are directed.

Thus, we come to our first definition: cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; it's falseness is already reflexively buffered.

"Enlightened false consciousness": To choose such a formulation seems to be a blow against the tradition of enlightenment. The sentence itself is cynicism in a crystalline state. Nonetheless, it claims an objective validity (sachlich); its content and its necessity are developed in the present essay. Logically it is a paradox, for how could enlightened consciousness still be false? This is precisely the issue here.

To act against better knowledge is today the global situation in the superstructure; it knows itself to be without illusions and yet to have been dragged down by the “power of things.” Thus what is regarded in logic as a paradox and in literature as a joke appears in reality as the actual state of affairs. Thus emerges a new attitude of consciousness toward “objectivity.”

The characteristic odor of modern cynicism is a more fundamental nature—a constitution of consciousness afflicted with enlightenment that, having learned from historical experience, refuses cheap optimism. New values? No thanks! With the passing of defiant hopes, the listlessness of egoisms pervades. In the new cynicism, a detached negativity comes through that scarcely allows itself any hope, at most a little irony and pity.

In order to survive, one must be schooled in reality. Of course. Those who mean well call it growing up, and there is a grain of truth to that. But that is not all. Always a bit unsettled and irritable, collaborating consciousness looks around for its lost naïveté, to which there is no way back, because consciousness-raising is irreversible.

Gottfried Benn, himself one of the prominent speakers on the structure of modern cynicism, has probably provided the formulation of the century for cynicism, lucid and unabashed: “To be dumb and have a job, that’s happiness.” But it is the converse of the sentence that really reveals its full content: “To be intelligent and still perform one’s work, that is unhappy consciousness in its modernized form, afflicted with enlightenment. Such consciousness cannot become dumb and trust again; innocence cannot be regained. It persists in its belief in the gravitational pull of the relations to which it is bound by its instinct for self-preservation. In for a penny, in for a pound. At two thousand marks net a month, counterenlightenment quietly begins; it banks on the fact that all those who have something to lose come to terms privately with their unhappy consciousness or cover it over with “engagements.”

The new cynicism, precisely because it is lived as a private disposition that absorbs the world situation, does not glaringly draw attention to itself in a way that would correspond to the concept itself. It envelops itself in discretion—as we will soon see, this is a key word for charmingly mediated alienation. The self-cognizant accommodation, which has sacrificed its better judgement to “compulsions,” no longer sees any reason to expose itself aggressively and spectacularly. There is a nakedness that no longer has an unmasking effect and in which no “naked fact” appears on whose grounds one could position oneself with serene realism. there is something lamentable about the neocynical accommodation to given circumstances; it is no longer self-confidently naked. For this reason it is also methodologically quite difficult to bring this diffuse, murky cynicism to expression. It has withdrawn into a mournful detachment that internalizes its knowledge as though it were something to be ashamed of, and as a consequence, it is rendered useless for taking the offensive. The great offensive parades of cynical impudence have become a rarity; ill-humor has taken its place, and there is no energy left for sarcasm. Gehlen even thought that today not even the English can be cutting any more because their reserves of dissatisfaction have been consumed and the rationing of stocks has begun. The discontent that follows offensives does not open its mouth wide enough for enlightenment to gain anything.

A critique of cynical reason would remain an academic glass bead game if it did not pursue the connection between the problem of survival and the danger of fascism. In fact, the question of “survival,” of self-preservation and self-assertion, to which all cynicisms provide answers, touches on the central problem of holding the fort and planning for the future in modern nation-states.

Perhaps these considerations about cynicism, as the fourth configuration of false consciousness, will help to overcome the characteristic speechlessness of genuinely philosophical critique regarding so-called Fascist ideology. Philosophy as a “discipline” has no real thesis about “theoretical fascism” because it basically considers the latter to be beneath all critique. The explanations of fascism as nihilism (Rauschning et al.) or as the product of “totalitarian thinking” remain diffuse and imprecise. The “inauthentic,” patchwork character of Fascist ideology has already been sufficiently emphasized, and everything it wanted to represent as substantial statements has long since been radically criticized by the individual sciences: psychology, political science, sociology, historiography. For philosophy, the programmatic statements of fascism do not even rate as a serious, substantial ideology over which a reflective critique would really have to toil. But herein lies the weak point—of critique. It remains fixated on “serious opponents,” and with this attitude it neglects the task of comprehending the ideological template of “unserious,” shallow “systems.” To this day, critique has thus not been a match for this modern blend of opinion and cynicism. But since questions of social and individual self-preservation are discussed precisely in such blends, there are good reasons for concerning oneself with their composition. Questions of self-preservation must be approached in the same language as those of self-destruction (Selbstvernichtung). The same logic in the repudiation of morality seems to operate in them. I call it the logic of the “cynical structure,” that is, of the self-repudiation of refined ethics. Elucidating this structure will clarify what it would mean to opt for life.

From the style of philosophers physiognomic forms look out at us, forms in which reason has hidden aspects of its essential character. To be “reasonable” means to put oneself into a special, rarely happy relation to the sensuous. “Be reasonable” means, practically speaking, do not trust your impulses, do not listen to your body, learn control, starting with your own sensuousness. But intellect and sensuousness are inseparable. Törless’s outbreak of sweating after two pages of the Critique of Pure Reason contains as much truth as the whole of Kantianism. The understood mutual interaction of physis and logos is philosophy, not what is spoken. In the future, only a physiognomist can be a philosopher who does not lie. Physiognomic thinking offers a chance to escape from the regime of disembodied and therefore evil minds. To announce a new critique of reason also means to have a philosophical physiognomy in mind; that is not, as with Adorno, “aesthetic theory,” but a theory of consciousness with flesh and blood (and teeth).

“I don’t want to say how things lie. / I want to show you how the matter stands”

It has often been shown how and why the early champions of republican enlightenment at that time could not have been anything else but a desperately well intentioned minority of representatives of reason against almost insurmountable odds: massive currents of antienlightenment and hatred for the intelligentsia; an array of antidemocratic and authoritarian ideologies that knew how to effectively organize the public sphere; an aggressive nationalism with a desire for revenge; an unenlightenable confusion of stubborn conservatisms, displaced petty bourgeois, messianic religious sects, apocalyptic political views, and equally realistic and psychopathological rejections of the demands of a disagreeable modernity. The wounds of the war kept getting infected in the smoldering crisis; Nietzscheanism continued to be rampant—as the most prominent style of thinking for the German-narcissistic sulkiness and for the moody, arrogant, “protestant” relationship to a “bad reality.” The climate of crisislike agitation produced a penetrating psychopolitical oscillation between fear of the future and resentment, unstable pseudorealisms and psychic makeshifts. If ever an epoch called for a historical psychopathology, it is the decade and a half between the fall of the empire and the establishment of national socialism.

The first impression turns out to be right here: Those who sought to promote enlightenment in such a society fought a losing battle. The powers of enlightenment were too weak for a precise number of reasons. Enlightenment was never able to ally itself effectively with the mass media, and individual self-determination was never an ideal for industrial monopolies and their organizations. How could it have been?

Obviously enlightenment is fragmented through the resistance of powers opposed to it. It would be wrong, however, to regard this only as a question of power arithmetic. For enlightenment is fragmented equally by a qualitative resistance in the opponent’s consciousness. The latter fiercely resists the invitation to discussion and the undermining talk about truth; even talking itself is resented because through it conventional views, values, and forms of self-assertion are brought into question. The interpretation of this resistance as a basic principle of ideology has become one of the main motifs of enlightenment.

It is not only in modern times that enlightenment has had to deal with an opposed consciousness that has increasingly entrenched itself in impregnable positions. In principle, the front can be traced back to the days fo the Inquisition. If it is true that knowledge is power, as taught by the workers’ movement, it is also true that not all knowledge is welcomed with open arms. Because there are no truths that can be taken possession of without a struggle, and because all knowledge must choose a place in the configuration of hegemonic and oppositional forces, the means of establishing knowledge seem to be almost more important than the knowledge itself. In modern times, enlightenment shows itself to be a tactical complex. The demand to universalize the rational draws it into the vortex of politics, pedagogy, and propaganda. With this, enlightenment consciously represses the harsh realism of older precepts of wisdom, for which there was no question that the masses are foolish and that reason is to be found only among the few. Modern elitism has to encode itself democratically.

It is a matter of a sublimely peaceful event, where, under the impact of plausible reasons, old, now untenable opinions are given up. Enlightenment thus contains within itself, so to speak, a utopian archaic scene—an epistemological idyll of peace, a beautiful and academic vision: that of the free dialogue of those who, under no external compulsion, are interested in knowledge. Here, dispassionate individuals, not enslaved to their own consciousness and not repressed by social ties, come together for a dialogue directed at truth under the laws of reason. The truth enlighteners want to disseminate arises through a noncoerced, but compelling, acceptance of stronger arguments. The protagonist or discoverer of an enlightened thought has taken this step only a short time earlier, usually by surrendering an earlier opinion.

The procedure of enlightenment accordingly has two aspects; the acceptance of the better position and the discarding of the previous opinion. This gives rise to an ambivalence of feelings: a gain and a pain. The utopia of a gentle, critical dialogue foresees this difficulty. The pain becomes bearable in consciousness so that it can be voluntarily accepted among colleagues as the price of commonality. The “losers” can view themselves as the real winners. Thus, the dialogue of enlightenment is essentially nothing other than a laborious wrestling with opinions and an exploratory dialogue among person who submit a priori to rules of peace because they emerge from the confrontation only as winners, winners in knowledge and solidarity. For this reason, it is assumed that parting from previous opinions can be overcome.

An academic idyll, as I have said—at the same time the regulative idea of any enlightenment that does not want to give up its hope for reconciliation. That things proceed differently in reality will surprise no one. In the confrontations of enlightenment with preceding stances of consciousness, everything but truth is at stake: hegemonic positions, class interests, established doctrines, desires, passions, and the defense of “identities.” These impediments so strongly remold the dialogue of enlightenment that it would be more appropriate to talk of a war of consciousness than a dialogue of peace. The opponents do not submit themselves to a previously agreed upon peace treaty; rather they confront each other in a competition directed at banishment and annihilation; and they are not free in relation to the powers that force their consciousness to speak just so, and in no other way.

Faced with these sober facts, the discourse model reacts in a consciously unrealistic way. It allows the archpragmatic statement primum vivere, deinde philosophari to hold only conditionally; for it knows at least this much: Situations will recur repeatedly where “philosophizing” is the only thing that can help life along.

It is tempting to poke fun at the “methodological antirealism” of the dialogue idea, and part of this book indeed tries to help the derisive laughter about every form of foolish idealism get its due. However, when all contradictions have been taken into account, one will return here to the beginning, of course with a consciousness that has gone through all the hells of realism. To preserve the healing fiction of a free dialogue is one of the last tasks of philosophy.

Of course, enlightenment itself is the first to notice that it will not “pull through” with rational and verbal dialogue alone. No one can feel the faltering, the distorted assumptions about life, the ruptures, the miscarriage of the dialogue more keenly than it. At the beginning of ideology critique there is also astonishment because the opponent is so hard of hearing—an astonishment that quickly gives way to a realistic awakening. Whoever does not want to hear, lets others come to feel. Enlightenment is reminded how easily speaking openly can lead to camps and prisons. Hegemonic powers cannot be addressed so easily; they do not come voluntarily to the negotiating table with their opponents, who they would prefer to have behind bars. But even tradition, if one is allowed to speak allegorically about it, initially has no interest in granting equal rights of speech to enlighteners. From the dawn of time, human sentiment has regarded the old as the tre, the new always as something questionable. This “archaic” feeling for the truth has to be subdued by enlightenment, before we could see the new as the true. Earlier, one took for granted that political and spiritual hegemonic powers were allied in a conservative front, disinclined to all innovations. Wherever spiritual reforms took place (I have in mind, above all, the monastic movements of the Middle Ages and the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century), they saw themselves as “conervative revolutions” obeying a call for a return to the roots. Finally, in addition to hegemonic powers and traditions, people’s minds, already too full, constitute a third authority that does not really care to listen to the spirit of enlightened innovation. They counter enlightenment with the resistance of ingrained habits and established attitudes that firmly occupy the space of consciousness and that can be brought to listen to a reason other than conventional wisdom only in exceptional circumstances. However, the vessel of knowledge cannot be filled twice. Enlightenment as critique recognizes in everything that it is “already there” in people’s minds in its inner archenemy; it gives the enemy a contemptuous name: prejudices.

The threefold polemic in a critique of power, in the struggle against tradition, and in a war against prejudices is part of the traditional image of enlightenment. All three imply a struggle with opponents disinclined to dialogue. Enlightenment wants to talk to them about things that hegemonic powers and traditions prefer to keep quiet about: reason, justice, equality, freedom, truth, research. Through silence, the status quo is more likely to remain secure. Through talk, one is pursuing an uncertain future. Enlightenment enters this dialogue virtually empty-handed; it has only the fragile offer of free consent to the better argument. If it could gain acceptance by force, it would be not enlightenment but a variation of a free consciousness. Thus, it is true: As a rule, people stick to their positions for anything but “rational” reasons.

Enlightenment has tried to make the best of this situation. Since nothing was freely given to it, it developed almost form the beginning—besides the friendly invitation to a conversation—a second, combative stance. It receives blows, so it returns them. Some exchanges are so old that it would be senseless to ask who started them. The history of ideology critique compromises to a large extent the history of this second, polemical gesture, the history of a great counteroffensive. Such critique, as theory of struggle, serves enlightenment in a twofold way: as a weapon against a hardened, conservative-complacent consciousness, and as an instrument for practice and gaining inner strength. The refusal of the opponents to engage in dialogue for enlightenment is of such enormous significance that it becomes a theoretical issue. Those who do not want to participate in enlightenment must have their reasons, and they are probably not the alleged reasons. Resistance itself becomes a topic in enlightenment. The opponents thus necessarily become “cases,” their consciousness an object. Because they do not want to talk with us, we have to talk about them. But as in every combative attitude, the opponents are from then on thought of not as egos but as apparatuses in which, partly openly, partly secretly, a mechanism of resistance is at work that renders them unfree and leads them to errors and illusions.

Arguing behind the back and through the head of the opponent has become common practice in modern critique. The gesture of exposure characterizes the style of argumentation of ideology critique, from the critique of religion in the eighteenth century to the critique of fascism in the twentieth. Everywhere, one discovers extrarational mechanisms of opinion: interests, passions, fixations, illusions. That helps a bit to mitigate the scandalous contradiction between the postulated unity of truth and the factual plurality of opinions—since it cannot be eliminated. Under these assumptions, a true theory would be one that not only grounds its own theses best, but also knows how to defuse all significant and persistent counterpositions through ideology critique. In this point, as one can easily see, official Marxism has the greatest ambition, since the major part of its theoretical energy is dedicated to outdoing all non-Marxist theories and exposing them as “bourgeois ideologies.” Only by continually outdoing the others, can ideologists succeed in “living” with plurality of ideologies. De facto, the critique of ideology implies the attempt to construct a hierarchy between unmasking and unmasked theory. In the war of consciousness, getting on top, that is, achieving a synthesis of claims to power and better insights, is crucial.

Since, in the business of critique, contrary to academic custom, ad hominem arguments are used unhesitatingly, universities have, probably deliberately, moved cautiously toward the procedures of ideology critique. For the attack from the flank, the argumentum ad personam, is strongly disapproved of in the “academic community.” Respectable critique meets its opponent in its best form; critique honors itself when it overwhelms its rival in the full armor of its rationality. For as long as possible, the learned collegium has tried to defend its integrity against the close combat of ideologico-critical exposures. Do not unmask, lest you yourself be unmasked could be the unspoken rule. It is no accident that the great representatives of critique—the French moralists, the Encyclopedists, the socialists, and especially Heine, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—remain outsiders to the scholarly domain. In all of them there is a satirical, polemical component that can scarcely be hidden under the mask of scholarly respectability. These signals of a holy nonseriousness, which remains one of the sure indexes of truth, can be employed as signposts to the critique of cynical reason. We will find a reliably unreliable traveling companion in Heinrich Heine, who displayed a knack, unsurpassed to the present day, for combining theory and satire, cognition and entertainment. Here, following in his tracks, we want to try to reunite the capacities for truth in literature, satire, and art with those of “scholarly discourse.”

The right of ideology critique to use ad hominem arguments was indirectly acknowledged even by the strictest absolutist of reason, J. G. Fichte, whom Heine aptly compared to Napoleon when he said that the kind of philosophy one chooses depends on the kind of person one is. This critique intrudes into the conditions under which human beings form opinions with either compassionate serenity or cruel seriousness. It seizes error from behind and tears at its roots in practical life. This procedure is not exactly modest, but its immodesty is excused with a reference to the principle of the unity of truth. What is brought to light by the vivisecting approach is the everlasting embarrassment of ideas confronted by the interests underlying them: human, all too human; egoisms, class privileges, resentments, steadfastness of hegemonic powers. Under such illumination, the opposing subject appears not only psychologically but also sociologically and politically undermined. Accordingly, its standpoint can be understood only if one adds to its self-portrayals what is, in fact, hidden behind and below them. In this way, ideology critique raises a claim that it shares with hermeneutics, namely, the claim to understand an “author” better than he understands himself. What at first sounds arrogant about this claim can be methodologically justified. Others often really do perceive things about me that escape my attention—and conversely. They possess the advantage of distance, which I can profit from only retrospectively through dialogic mirroring. This, of course, would presuppose a functioning dialogue, which is precisely what does not take place in the process of ideology critique.

An ideology critique that does not clearly accept its identity as satire can, however, easily be transformed from an instrument in the search for truth into one of dogmatism. All too often, it interferes with the capacity for dialogue instead of opening up new paths for it. This explains, leaving general antischolastic and antiintellectual feelings aside, a part of the current dissatisfaction with the critique of ideology.

Thus it happens that an ideology critique that presents itself as science, because it is not allowed to be satire, gets more and more entangled in serious radical solutions. One of these is its striking tendency to seek refuge in psychopathology. False consciousness appears first of all as sick consciousness. Almost all important works of the twentieth century on the phenomenon of ideology do the same thing—from Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich to R. D. Laing and David Cooper, not to mention Joseph Gabel, who has pushed the analogy between ideology and schizophrenia furthest. Those stances are suspected of being sick that loudly proclaim themselves to the be the healthiest, most normal, and natural. The reliance of critique on psychopathology, although probably well justified, risks alienating the opponent more and more deeply; it reifies and diminishes the other’s reality. In the end, the critic of ideology stands before the opposing consciousness like one of those modern, highly specialized pathologists who can, of course, say precisely what kind of pathological disturbance the patient is suffering from but knows nothing about appropriate therapies because that is not his speciality. Such critics, like some medicos corrupted by their profession, are interest in the diseases, not in the patients.

Any sociological system theory that treats “truth” functionalistically—I say this in advance—carries an immense potential for cynicism. And since every contemporary intellect is caught up in the process of such sociological theories, it inevitably is implicated in the latent or overt master cynicism of these forms of thinking. Marxism, in its origins, at least maintained an ambivalence between reifying and emancipative perspective. Non-Marxist system theories of society drop even the last trace of sensitivity. In alliance with neoconservative currents, they proclaim that useful members of human society have to internalize certain “correct illusions” once and for all, because without them nothing functions properly. The naïveté of the others should be planned, “capital fix being man himself.” It is always a good investment to mobilize the naive will to work, for whatever reason. System theoreticians and maintenance strategists are from the start beyond naive belief. But for those who should believe in it, the aphorism holds: Stop reflecting and maintain values.

Those who make the means of liberating reflection available and invite others to use them appear to conservatives as unscrupulous and power-hungry good-for-nothings who are reproached with “Others do the work.” Very well, but for whom?