Peter Sloterdijk
Pronoia, Paranoia, Metanoia
Minor remarks on the critique of bad reason
1 Providential foresight
Homo sapiens belongs in terms of evolutionary design to the creatures that enjoy the privilege of a horizon. Its position in the surroundings that shape it gifted him with a view far and wide. By virtue of walking erect in Africa’s flat Savannahs it acquired the ability to see dangers from afar by day and opts for greater watchfulness during the night. He who sleeps too deeply will possibly not wake to the new day. Under normal conditions, the human inhabitants of the Savannah is subject to a mood cycle of cheer by day and being ready for nocturnal alarms by night, because it is thus that he makes life bearable for himself in the world. He benefits here from the favorable overall security balance, for if it had not been so advantageous the species would have long since disappeared from the surface of the earth.
The first eco-system of human intelligence arises through the interaction of farsightedness during the day and enhanced vigilance during the night. It was thanks to this that the naked ape first earned the distinction of being a sapiens. The Savannah is a space where man is immersed in looking round, where farsightedness into distant locations is connected with foresight into the immediate future. Whoever lives here learns to act in real time/space. One sees potential attackers approaching from far off and has time to prepare for emerging presences. Although here there are also phenomena of suddenness, above all in connection with darkness and opaqueness, most of what happens, in particular the predator, the potential perpetrator of injury, the agent of death, can be identified at an early point as it approaches from the horizon. It is only a step from farsightedness to seeking salvation by fleeing.
This ability to see things coming is the first evidence of what in higher cultures then comes to be termed foresight (Greek: pronoia, prognosis, Latin: providentia). At some point, “providence” was then ascribed to God and mystified as fate. Where people have immediately practiced this kind of “seeing what is coming” (Heidegger termed it an Er-Äugnis) the group tone oscillates between alarm and leisure. The human ability to handle stress is trained by at certain intervals humans being put through the entire cycle of states, from play with no stress factors, to the stress of a real emergency, and post-stressed relaxation[1]. Such cycles generate adult mental fitness. Primary adulthood means being fit to cope with a real emergency. Today people still comment on an avoidable difficulties by saying: I saw it coming. In may well be that even in very ancient times the stressors were already subject to initial hypostatization: Dangers converge in types of threats and coagulate as spirits, gods and minor coalitions of the ominous. Providence in its old form was able to effortlessly view these variables, which float in the field of the semi-visible – a swarm of vultures moving left across the horizon, a blackish-green low-hanging cloud, a lion’s footprint in the wet sand and the scornful laughter of an ancestor from the other side of the river. This does not impair the cheerfulness of existence, as it suffices to know that there is a threat and what it means. Early man is sparing with his fears, he is wary of allowing his constant and advisable watchfulness to turn into chronic mistrust.
2 Evil Eye
As soon as the duo that has evolved together of caution and foresight is severed, which usually occurs with the entry into forms of life associated with a high culture, a surfeit tends to accumulate on both sides that culminates in rampant special developments. From now on the floor is taken by the specialists in exaggeration. Rampant caution gives birth to paranoia, rampant foresight engenders the culture of wisdom that later morphs into philosophy. While wisdom always purports there is more cause for equanimity than can be given in this world, paranoia enjoys pretending there are more reasons to be alarmed than circumstances would warrant. Paranoia and wisdom form a duo that wander through time at a conscious distance from each other, whereby each is indispensable for the other. While the first develops the talent of the evil eye, the second nurtures the art of perceiving more order than there is.
One could initially consider paranoia to be a kind of second sight: It habitually sees more harm coming than actually arrives, whereby we can never exclude things then happening the way the paranoid predicted. When a paranoid’s fears are confirmed, this gives man cause to establish prophesies and oracles, while the unsubstantiated fears evidently get lost in everyday life.
In truth, the paranoid overgrowth of caution never disappears completely, but becomes lodged in marginal niche worlds, where the individual fixated on permanent mistrust wallows in the most ebullient suggestions of impending harm. He constantly allows himself that extra shot of personally being under threat, of seeing the entire horizon filled with camouflaged attackers; he lauds his own intelligence by discerning deception where others simply see harmless transactions; he celebrates a high mass of sensitivity by noting animosity toward himself that everyone else has not even noticed; he achieves miracles of lucidity by accusing a partner of infidelity of which the latter is not even aware; he reads a fatal illness into side-stitch which in their ignorance is stubbornly regarded by the doctors as a trifle; he believes the world as a whole is inexorably heading for ruin, where others merely detect the usual course of events; he reads the signs of the times as spelling a pending apocalypse, while others find being able to read the papers a “realistic blessing each morning” [2].
For the paranoid, being-in-the-world means enjoying the unique opportunity to be unjustly treated. The world consists of everything that could make things worse or even worse. The paranoid Ego makes himself available as the focus of all insights into harmful trends, on both his own and everyone else’s behalf. Where caution, alarm and distrust are rampant they form a subculture that eagerly ensures their reproduction. It blossoms at the point where the rhetorical figure of exaggeration (Quintilian recommends that in uncertain matters it is better for the speaker to go too far than not far enough) interfaces with the logical figure of revealing reduction (as Democritus presented it with his assertion that behind the colorful world of sensory phenomena “in truth” there are only two things, atoms and the void). From the psychological perspective, paranoia seems to be a form of excess emotional labor owing to a hidden oath. The paranoid lives in a state of chronic over-exertion because he dedicates himself to maintaining the imaginary claim to importance. Instead of being satisfied with average living conditions, he resides in a palace of threats and disadvantages. He wishes to rule over a realm of pre-announced calamities. Since every mishap far and wide confirms his opinion, he sees his stocks forever rising. As the oligarch of the calamities he prays: My Kingdom come!
Essentially, the paranoid person remains lonely, even if he is incessantly on the search for like-minded fellows. After all, he only seeks such comrades in order one day to be able to be disappointed by them, too. Then paranoid finds his true place only among Modernist artists, of whom there are none who are not in some way or other concerned with building a palace in an impossible realm. Which of today’s artists does not know what it means to be surrounded by disregard, scorn, from maliciousness disguised as a lack of knowledge? Where the will to art and paranoia join arms, the resolution is taken to sound the counter-attack. Now what counts is the battle-cry of the Surrealist Pierre Reverdy: “I am armed with a tank forged entirely of mistakes.”
In its most extreme form, paranoia leads to the conviction that the meaning of all calamity to befall me and only me. This opinion tends to convince the paranoid to collaborate with the worst that will ostensibly happen any way. He is forever occupied with collecting compelling evidence that proves that everything is turning out as badly as assumed, if not worse. Franz Kafka once portrayed the luxury of insisting to the bitter end on being right in a note jotted in his third octavo exercise books: “The suicide is then prisoner who sees a gallows being erected in the prison yard, wrongly believes it is destined for him, and that night breaks out of his cell, goes down and hangs himself.”[3] Kafka could have added: The person hanging from the gallows feels the greatest and most perfect satisfaction in his life. It stems from the correspondence finally made possible between the fear experienced with heels kicking and the suspicion he has always had that everything will invariably come to this. The suspicious mind comes alight in a triumphant final thought: It is actually just the way I always thought it was. Is it not worth taking things partly into one’s own hands somewhat if the finale is going to be so great?
3 Idyll and reflection
One thing is certain: The way the world is made it cannot but greet me with animosity. I am persecuted therefore I am. Indeed, what you call your world is nothing other then the surplus in animosity that refers to me – and over and above me to everything else that is good and not mistrustful. And yet I am unlike everything else that you could persecute. You think you have managed to squeeze me into a corner? You think that your persecutors will find me wherever I my flee? You are evil, dream on! Your evilness is powerless against my innocence. Enveloped in a ring of disparagements I will withdraw into a sphere that cannot be reached by your animosity. The heartfelt circle, the friendly plants, the green peace, the sweet isle of rabbits, the rowing boat that bears me out onto the lake. There I will lie on my back and gaze through half-closed eyes at the skies. During such hours I am untouchable. I have forgiven the world, indeed, I have forgotten it. On such days, dreaming on the water, I am new and good. It is as if I had never met anyone of you. Should there ever have been an object of your hatred than it most certainly could not have been me. You mistook me for someone else, you invented a rascal with my name who in no way at all resembles me. I shall show the entire world who the real Jean Jacques is.
In the eye of the paranoid cyclone: the idyll, that immaculate conception of the self, salvation through the origins in natural benevolence. As long as that center defends itself, the storm rages only on the periphery. Should it blow out, then its natural salvational center, the over-good ego, must be disarmed. This can only be accomplished by contemplation, metánoia, that discerns the inmates of its own garrison in the evil that ostensibly always penetrates from the outside. Thinking outside the box is turned against itself by rethinking, until the well-head of the persecutional surpluses dries up. The superstitious belief in evil then loses its support in phantasms.
This does not cause evil to disappear from the world, but its inflationary expansion is stopped. The arms race between mistrust and deception comes to an end. Now there is nothing to search for behind the bad phenomena, there is no background world of evil. Kafka writes in his Betrachtungen über Sünde, Leid, Hoffnung und den wahren Weg [Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope and the True Way]: “Sin always approaches openly and can immediately be grasped by the senses. It moves on its roots and does not need to be torn out. There can be a knowledge of the devilish, but not a belief in it, as there cannot be more devilish things than already exist.”[4] The devilish that exists … is termed elsewhere the fatal, the tragic, the tragicomic. After the reduction in exaggerations, bad reason has enough on its plate. With the projections all that disappears is the surfeit while the rest of world remains bad enough. What should we think about a world that is sever enough to permit there to be jealous persons who do in fact get deceived, unknown artists who really deserve to be unknown, hypochondriacs who do one day succumb to incurable illnesses, paranoids who really are persecuted? And what should one say about world wars that really do break out, and about apocalypses that really do reveal what no one wanted to know, other than those who always saw it coming?
[1] It have borrowed this expression from Heiner Mühlmann; see: his, Die Natur der Kulturen, Springer, Berlin/New York, 1996.
[2] See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Aphorismen aus Hegels Wastebook,” in: his, Werke, Band 2, Suhrkamp, Frankfurth/M., 1990.
[3] Franz Kafka, “Wedding Preparations on the Country” (org.: Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande), in: The Blue Octavo Notebooks, Exact Change, New York, 1991.
[4] Franz Kafka, “Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope and the True Way” (org.: Betrachtungen über Sünde, Leid, Hoffnung und den wahren Weg), in: his, The Great Wall of China. Stories and Reflections, Schocken, Berlin, 1946.