Karl Kraus: In praise of a perverse way of life

From the German by CS and MM:

In praise of a perverse way of life

I had come all too soon to feel the unhappy effect on body and soul of the “normal” way of life I had been trying for a time. So I resolved before it was too late to begin living unreasonably again. Once more I see the world with a special rosy gaze that not only helps me deal with the reality of earthly misery, but grants me so many exaggerated notions of life’s joys as well. I am a living demonstration of the healthy principle of a perverse way of life within a perverse world-order.

I too was once a master of the art of rising with the sun and going to bed not long after it went down. But the unbearable objectivity with which it shines indiscriminately on all my fellow citizens, on all deformity and ugliness, is not everyone's cup of tea; whoever can spare himself in timely fashion from the peril of seeing the world clearly by day acts wisely, he has the good fortune of being avoided by the very people he flees. For when the day was still divided into morning and evening, it was a pleasure to awaken at cockcrow and go to bed when one heard the night watchman call. But then it all got divided up differently – into the time for the morning paper and the time for the evening paper, and the world began to lie in wait for Events. If one has observed for a while how shamefully the latter debase themselves before human curiosity, how cravenly the course of the world adapts itself to the spiraling lust for information and how time and space finally become nothing more than the modes of experience of journalistic souls, then one turns over in bed and goes on sleeping. “Oh tired eyes, seize this opportunity to close yourselves again to the sight of this shameful earthly abode.”

And so I sleep well into the day. And when I wake, I spread the whole papery disgrace of humanity out in front of me to find out what I’ve missed, and I am happy. Stupidity rises early, and so events are in the habit of happening in the morning. Much can indeed take place before evening, but in general the afternoon lacks the raucous bustle with which human progress wishes to show itself worthy of its good name up till its lunchtime feeding hour. A true miller awakes only when his mill comes to a halt; whoever wishes to have nothing to do with people whose idea of existence is being in on the act - rises late.

I cross the Ringstrasse and watch them prepare for a parade. The racket goes on for four weeks, like an enormous symphonic poem on the theme of money-grubbing. Mankind rigs itself up for a holiday, the carpenters knock up the stands and the price-boards and when I consider I’m never going to see the splendiferous end result, my heart too begins to beat more gladly. If I led a normal way of life, I would have to leave town because of these festivities; now I can stay put and still miss the whole thing. An old king of Shakespeare’s waves his followers away: “Make no noise, make no noise; draw the curtains. So, so, so. We’ll go to supper i’th’morning.” His fool confirms the perversity of this world and adds: “And I’ll go to bed at noon.” But if I have my breakfast in the evening, everything will already be over and I can find out the day’s total number of sunbeams at my leisure in the papers at a later date. 

All important accidents occur in the morning. I know of them only from hearsay and by always arriving too late I maintain my faith in the excellence of human affairs. In the evening papers, it is not only events that are reported, but the names of those involved too, so that one feels one is at a safe distance from the scene of the fire, but still has the opportunity to count the heads of one’s loved ones, of whom not a single one is absent. One turns to one’s advantage the transformation of the cosmos into a local fragment as best one can; one avails oneself of that new technique which turns time into jam and calls the jam jar a newspaper. The world has grown uglier since it began taking a look at itself twice daily in the mirror. So let’s make do with the reflection, and avert our eyes from the original completely. It is uplifting to lose one’s belief in a reality that matches the descriptions in the papers. He who has slept through half the day has gained half of life.

All exceptional stupidities occur in the morning; a good citizen should only wake after the Close of Business. After his evening breakfast, he will step out into life’s stream when it is free of politics. Admittedly he won’t be able to learn from the evening papers that all assassinations occur in the morning; for most of them are missed by the dozy-eyed correspondents too. There was once a newspaper that sent one correspondent after another to Paris to report presidential assassinations as they happened; would you believe it - one president after another met his end and each time the death of the president had its mirror image in the sleep of the correspondent. When the German princes sojourned in our city, I knew nothing of it. But this occurrence had no adverse effects either - the worst was that I didn’t get my regular beefsteak for breakfast and so had to renounce a cherished habit with which I had given demonstration up till then of my affiliation with the city I live in. The waiter apologised and told me in a consoling tone of the consolidation of the Triple Entente – the true step forward taken that day and one that put local interests in the shade.

When a theologian fights his way through to disbelief in the immaculate conception, it occurs in the morning; when a nuncio disgraces himself, it occurs in the morning; and it is surely better still that the noise of farmers storming universities or the cries of “Away with universal suffrage!” disturb our morning sleep rather than the peace of afternoon. I can only remember one minister ever resigning after lunch. By chance I was on my way past. How very messy the afternoon version of the resignation-business was. At 3 the police were handing out fines to the crowd that had been calling for the honourable minister Badeni to walk. By 3.15 they were already telling them to pack it in “’cause Badeni packed it in a while back himself!”

And what of justice? She is blind only in the morning, and if by exception a judicial murder ever occurs at a more advanced hour, it's bound to be someone exceptional who’s being executed. What sometimes happens in Germany is that the details of some sexual escapade are on the march, sometimes for 25 years in fact, and then, to be sure, truth needs the aid of the afternoon hours. To let an event like that escape one’s notice it’s no use withdrawing to your bedroom – it being a well-known fact that the bedroom has proved the least secure of refuges from the lust for truth.

Though sleeping through the operations of government bureaucracy is indeed one of the pleasures of life, I'm sorry to have to say that there is one area of my policy where I've no luck at all, and this is the realm of art. For it has been established that most opening-night flops occur precisely in the evening. One’s compensation is that at night there’s complete calm across all general fields of public activity. Nothing stirs. There is nothing new. The rubbish van alone makes its way through the streets, like the symbol of a perverse world-order, and spreads the dust that the day has left behind, and when it rains the hosing truck moves along behind it. Otherwise, all is quiet. Stupidity is asleep, and so I go to work. In the distance, I think I hear the noise of printing presses: stupidity is snoring. And I steal up to all that stupidity and take pleasure in harbouring murderous intentions. And when the first morning paper appears on the eastern horizon of the cultural world, I go to sleep . . . Those roughly are the advantages of a perverse way of life.

Vienna, 19 June, 1908

Gernot Böhme: The End of the Baconian Age

For anyone looking for a little more in explanation of one of the claims in my recent Böhme translation, a rough English version of the opening page and half of B's The End of the Baconian Age (Am Ende des Baconschen Zeitalters, 1993):

The Baconian Faith, The Baconian Programme

We are in the habit of giving names to eras only once we are bidding them farewell. It is only then that a particular characteristic of the age becomes noticeable as a fully-fledged characteristic mark - in the past we hardly noticed it at all because we took it as an unquestionable given of our existence in the world. If today we have reason to call the age of modern science the Baconian era, this is because a given of our existence has vanished - the basic conviction that scientific and technological progress amount to the same thing as human progress. In its time this basic conviction came into the world through Francis Bacon. We might call it the opening of the age of modern science.

The belief that techno-scientific progress was the same thing as human progress was not a given of the age that preceded Bacon: the notion of progress was quite foreign to antiquity, while in the Christian Middle Ages human progress was to be found on the path of religious salvation; it was certainly not what men and women looked to worldly sciences to provide. Bacon himself was highly conscious of the fact that his conviction was by no means something he could assume ordinary people shared. His entire output as a writer was a single propaganda campaign in support of this his guiding idea. In particular his object was to convince political authority - England's reigning queen and then its king - of the "dignity and progress of the sciences" - to persuade them, in short, to give science their financial and institutional backing. His programme of large-scale renewal (instauratio magna) was shaped by a notion that had been voiced by many - the call for the religious reformation that had been set in motion to be expanded into a general reformation of the entire world. What distinguished Bacon from the other reformers - those whose names are writ large in the figures of Cromwell and Comenius - was that he set his hopes for human progress on the development of science and technology rather than on political revolution or educational reforms. As he put it in the justly famous Aphorism 129 of the first volume of his Novum Organon:

"For the benefits of discoveries may extend to the whole race of man, civil benefits only to particular places; the latter last not beyond a few ages, the former through all time. Moreover, the reformation of a state in civil matters is seldom brought in without violence and confusion; but discoveries carry blessings with them, and confer benefits without causing harm or sorrow to any."

Here we find the consisest answer to the question what the Baconian programme consisted in - in short, in organising science into an enterprise devoted specifically to new inventions and in forming science into a social institution capable of transforming its discoveries for the benefit of humanity at large. . .