Two hundred years after the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, any critique that aims to fulfill the Enlightenment in the present is confronted with a new form of false consciousness. This false consciousness is neither based on lies nor on errors; it cannot be resolved through an ideology critique grounded in a critique of political economy. Cynicism is the enlightened false consciousness. It is the modernized unhappy consciousness that the Enlightenment has simultaneously worked on successfully and in vain. It has learned its enlightenment but has not enacted it, and likely could not enact it. This consciousness, feeling both well-off and miserable, is no longer affected by any ideology critique, as its falsehood is already reflexively cushioned. The present essay seeks to develop the content of this self-cynical statement in a form that is...