No More Learning

SCHMIDT: How far has that influenced your work? SLOTERDIJK: My entire work so far has been a kind of
52 Tackling the Unspoken Things in Culture
history writing like underground mining, in which I tried to weave the history of riddles, the history of injuries and the history of the unconscious quest into the official version of philosophy. This means my concept of philosophy is always starkly defined together with psychology, which has led to some misunderstand- ings. Philosophy is supposed to philosophize instead of being occupied with psychoanalysis. Generally speaking, philosophy is either a form of happy ontological mathematics without any ulte- rior motive, and that is quite reasonable, or it is a form of defence, a very rare form of stupidity that has managed to assume a socially respectable front. Only in very rare cases is it salutary work on the things culture leaves unsaid.
From 1975 on, my life was totally devoted to self-awareness. My Indian excursion was part of that. I think my life story is typical of our times – a kind of biography of the age. I know a fair amount about the radicalism, the extremism, the madness and the traumas of the twentieth century. All of that belongs to a single system of communicating vessels circulating the message that something is wrong with life. That’s why I am so fascinated by the present, because I am observing something not only in my own feeling of life, but also in society as a whole, that makes me extraordinarily curious, perhaps even joyful. I mean that the social climate has been changing for a while now, and we are emerging from the shadows of madness that hung over us since 1914. More and more people are no longer directly affected by those old communicating vessels of madness.
SCHMIDT: Do you mean society is doing therapy on itself?
SLOTERDIJK: I would rather say it is normalizing itself. But this normalization is a fascinating process, and in the case of Germans, an almost uncanny one. The question of what constitutes German normality is not normal in itself, because none of us will live long enough to meet a normal German. The German forms of life and prevailing moods are changing now – and occasionally I try to play something of an active role in that. Perhaps this is the only excep- tion I have to make to my negative answer to your question as to whether I sometimes feel tempted to become a kind of philosophical National Moderator. I would like very much to link my name with a comprehensive normalization story for this country, which has been sick in some sense up until now. I am optimistic enough to believe the recuperation process can work.
SCHMIDT: We will have to get used to your performance as a philosopher with an optimistic outlook. Have you finally given up being the herald of catastrophe sarcasm?
SLOTERDIJK: I want to confirm that my basic attitude has
Tackling the Unspoken Things in Culture 53
changed. The crucial factor in this process was something which had not played a dominant role in my life previously, and which can be described by the conventional concept of responsibility. The catas- trophe sarcasm was a contradictory attitude, a kind of sly black humour. I felt instinctively that Marx must have meant something similar when he said we must force the relations to dance by singing their own tune to them. This is a bitter form of revolutionary pow- erlessness. It gave rise to the catastrophe sarcasm. I was trapped in a pattern of thought that is known from the therapy world but actually depends on a false calculation in human and psychological terms, namely, the view that one can handle doubt as a means to an end, based on the motto: ‘I will begin by doubting so that I can be properly reborn later on. ’ I wouldn’t accept that frivolous attitude today. It was an instance of malpractice I wouldn’t want to repeat.
SCHMIDT: In some ways you were picking up on your pre- Adorno phase again.
SLOTERDIJK: Anyway, I got rid of the exaggerated critical attitude and remembered a very early phase of my work in which I was influenced by authors from the Protestant tradition, such as Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer.
SCHMIDT: In the first volume of your Spheres trilogy you outed yourself as a kind of birthing assistant, a midwife. You seem deeply impressed by the theme of birth.
SLOTERDIJK: I am one of those unfortunate people whose remembrance of their birth has never been erased from their bodily memory. I know there is a specific form of birth stress that is repro- duced throughout one’s life.
SCHMIDT: Your daughter is seven years old now, and I’m sure she is a curious child. How do you explain to her what holds the world together in its innermost depths?
SLOTERDIJK: I’m impressed by the natural poetry of her ques- tions. Her way of asking doesn’t put pressure on me because it has its own poetic mechanism. I don’t know where that comes from. Sometimes it seems to me she has a special aptitude for calming down at the right moment to stop her thoughts from going in cryptic directions. It is fascinating how she plays with mythological imagi- nation and constantly restructures her picture of the world without her very knowledgeable father and omniscient mother setting the agenda.
SCHMIDT: When did you first ask the question as to how the universe, Planet Earth and life arose?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t know if I ever asked myself that question because the answers came much earlier than the questions.
SCHMIDT: How did that happen?
54 Tackling the Unspoken Things in Culture
SLOTERDIJK: Like so many other people, I’m a typical victim of the school that permanently answers questions that haven’t been asked yet. But it’s still possible to recover from that at an advanced age. Last summer I had a moment of deep emotion on the plane of natural philosophy when I saw the wonderful total eclipse of the sun. Suddenly a physical feeling of reality appeared in the tone of natural philosophy. Up until then my concept of reality was defined very closely in relation to humanism, the social sciences, linguistics and culture. I was convinced only oddballs could be interested in physics. Today I think our exaggerated culturalism has probably made us blind to physics. However, I would like to describe the wondrous moment of eclipse of the sun that I enjoyed as an excep- tional state, from which point on something changed for me.
SCHMIDT: In any case, philosophy begins in wonder.
SLOTERDIJK: At least, that was the original thesis of Aristotle and Plato. Looking at this thesis more closely, it is very cleverly constructed and actually says something quite different from what is usually associated with it. People probably marvelled for tens of thousands of years without ever beginning to philosophize in the formal sense like the Greeks. Plato developed wonder and questioning to a special form of competition. He made philosophy attractive as a contest in astonishment. Just as we act stupid, we can act astonished – which for many, incidentally, is the same thing. We play at wondering, and can then develop the unnatural questions that philosophers ask.
SCHMIDT: Have you ever vacillated in your life between phi- losophy and literature?
SLOTERDIJK: No. Never. But for a long time now I have felt the need to change emphasis and cross over to the narrative genre. That is the form I need today as a free phrasemaker in order to realize what is in my imagination.
SCHMIDT: So you keep on crossing between philosophy and literature, between the arts and scholarship.
SLOTERDIJK: I’m sure it will go on like that. But I would be pleased if there were more people who could acknowledge things done well, not only serious functional things but also things achieved in the sense of philosophy as a profession. I think my work has reached the point where it doesn’t get further without a degree of collaborative assistance from competent people.
SCHMIDT: That could happen soon if, as planned, you start moderating your own talk show in ZDF, a kind of ‘Philosophical Quartet’. Will that mean a TV commission offering guidance, some- thing to give disoriented humankind stability and comfort?
SLOTERDIJK: I would put it a shade more cautiously, although
Tackling the Unspoken Things in Culture 55
I think the desire for orientation is absolutely legitimate. For now, we can be content with Nietzsche’s definition of philosophy as a project ‘for harming stupidity’. My mission in this venture is to situate philosophy in a medium that begins by being completely unsuitable, or practically in an opposite world. It is important to create a really informative and exhilarating context, a fruitful atmosphere for the intelligence. This is created merely by it happen- ing at all.
SCHMIDT: By placing philosophy in the mass medium of televi- sion, aren’t you worried about making your own contribution to the mediatizing of society that you have compared to public degrada- tion in the arenas of ancient Rome?
SLOTERDIJK: I certainly won’t contribute to closing off the arena of the totalitarian mass media even more. I would like to promote a form of public culture that never bothers with dis- tinguishing between winners and losers but, on the contrary, consistently defers this distinction. The point is to remix victor’s truth with loser’s truth and, by doing so, to force a real widening of perspective. Not knowing who has won and who has lost is a good way to foster open discussion.
SCHMIDT: What do you want to achieve by this?
SLOTERDIJK: My plans are very far from the usual talk-show chitchat and are not intended to add to the trend towards gathering an audience that is sentimental, excitable, cruel, forgetful, and curi- ously good-natured and nasty at the same time – just as if we were back in the days of the manhunts in the Circus Maximus in Rome.
SCHMIDT: Are you proposing a kind of anti-television?
SLOTERDIJK: Philosophy on television is the anti-circus in the circus. Let’s see if it works.
9
ON WEALTH AND SELF-RESPECT
Interview with Klaus Methfessel and Christian Ramthun*1
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Professor Sloterdijk, let’s talk about Menschenpark [Rules for the Human Zoo]. Two years ago you sparked off a debate on genetic engineering that took place mainly in the features pages of newspapers. Are you pleased that politicians are taking up this topic now?
SLOTERDIJK: In tackling this, politics is simply fulfilling its role as provider of a system of norms in a deregulation process that is confusing society at the moment.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: What do you mean by deregula- tion? The issue here actually concerns new technical possibilities.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s right. We have become familiar with the concept of deregulation mostly in relation to retrospective aboli- tion of state control of services. But deregulation has a much wider meaning. Deregulation through innovation is basically our motive force of history per se. The whole modern age is a gigantic experi- ment in the cultural introduction of technologies that have not been tested before in human history.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: What is your position on this?
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk, Klaus Methfessel and Christian Ramthun appeared under the title ‘Reichtum muß Selbstachtung erzeugen’ [Wealth Must Create Self-Respect], in the weekly magazine Wirtschaftswoche (19 July 2001): 22–6
Klaus Methfessel is director of the Georg von Holtzbrinck-Schule für Wirtschaftsjournalisten. Christian Ramthun has worked for Wirtschaftswoche since 1997 and is deputy chief of the magazine’s Berlin office.
On Wealth and Self-Respect 57
Two years ago some critics saw you as an advocate of genetic eugenics.
SLOTERDIJK: That was a misunderstanding, to put it mildly. A philosopher never sees things in terms of being for or against a technology. It is all about trying to understand the technology at a deeper level. In my talk, Regeln für den Menschenpark [Rules for the Human Zoo], I advocated channelling the mega-trend of genetic engineering in a responsible way. We must be guided by the princi- ple of caution.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Morality dominates in the genetic debate. The German President is worried about human dignity, while the Chancellor sees opportunities for gainful employment.
SLOTERDIJK: There is not just one single morality. We always behave as if morality were the last word, and only exists in the sin- gular. But morality is just as pluralist as society.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: That sounds almost as if morality is arbitrary.
SLOTERDIJK: No, but it has several roots or sources that give rise to our system of norms. One is the area of domestic life forms, the ethics of the vicinity, so to speak, that regulates communication between people in neighbourly categories. The loftiest generaliza- tion of this source of morals is humanism, which is currently trying to establish itself as a world ethos – without admitting that it only interprets one segment of the moral space. Another source is the state’s aesthetics. The state has a remit sui generis. Its regulatory obligations are not reducible to the general family ethos. Moreover, the moralities of ascetic religions have an independent source that can’t be traced back to humanism or the logic of the state.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: And the sources of morality creation are clashing with each other in the genetic engineering debate?
SLOTERDIJK: That happens at the moment when society is forced to discuss the unsupervised introduction of major new tech- nologies that cause social upheaval. From a theoretical viewpoint, we are living in the middle of a fantasy world in which we are follow- ing a running experiment on how the stuff of reality is woven and how a society makes new rules for itself in a continuing process of justice and self-discovery.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Could this discovery process also lead to a renaissance of morality?
SLOTERDIJK: Not to a renaissance of morality as the great mystical singular concept I mentioned earlier – as if humans would be good again because times are bad.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: The Chancellor [Gerhard
58 On Wealth and Self-Respect
Schröder]1 has set up a national ethical council. Is this the right approach, or does it also fall into the category of hyper-consensus?
SLOTERDIJK: The ethical council probably won’t work because it was set up by a putsch-type procedure, bypassing Parliament in a way that is far too transparent. The committee seems like a case of blatant manipulation. It gives the impression that the govern- ment is buying in expert opinions. Those who participate must ask themselves whether they have reflected closely enough on their own corruptibility.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: All the same, the ethical council hasn’t stopped citizens and politicians from conducting excellent debates on genetic engineering . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Which I am very pleased about. For a while it seemed we might have seen the end of a society that engages in debate. But now, on the verge of introducing an important new technology, we are being treated once again to the spectacle of society discussing issues in depth.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: The dispute about genetic engi- neering seen as a fountain of youth?
SLOTERDIJK: Modern society is being brought back to its origins. It is a birth of society out of the battle of consciousness or the battle of genuine parties.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Don’t we have any proper parties any more?
SLOTERDIJK: Genuine parties only exist where real conflicts of interest occur. At the moment we are seeing parties reforming in a relatively passionate way again, and not along parliamentary lines. We are witnessing the formation of morality parties, an informal party landscape with a technophobic and a technophile party. Right now the technophobic party is in power, although the Chancellor belongs to the technophile tendency.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Schröder is trying to bridge the gap for the Social Democratic Party with the slogan ‘Security in a changing world’.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s very smart because it involves balanc- ing out the atmospheric extremes to prevent society plunging into a patently semantic civil war about the intolerable fundamental trends.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: In relation to genetic engineer- ing, this civil war seems to have had more impact on the CDU
1 Gerhard Schröder, Social Democratic politician and Federal Chancellor of Germany, 1998–2005.
On Wealth and Self-Respect 59
[Christliche Demokratische Union – the conservative Christian Democratic Party].
SLOTERDIJK: There is also a serious conflict within the Green Party, although the great majority of Greens are naturally techno- phobic. But in the course of the conversion to realpolitik that has been going on in the party for the past ten to fifteen years, some Greens have converted to a rather moderate technophile attitude.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: The SPD [Sozaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands – German Social Democratic Party] is also going through that process.
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, because the SPD, the traditional party of redistribution of wealth, is reconsidering its fateful alliance with a prospering market and has to follow the Chancellor for pragmatic reasons.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Does the informal evolution of moralist parties as part of the genetics debate have an effect on the traditional party landscape?
SLOTERDIJK: The results show, first of all, that we have four Social Democratic parties and one party of liberal economics in Parliament. The PDS [Partei für Demokratische Sozialismus – Democratic Socialist Party] contains a left-wing fascist opposition bloc that is unpredictable because it gathers resentful anti-capitalist feelings that are difficult to identify as right or left. Basically, all politics that stems from resentment corresponds to what we wrongly describe as right-wing radicalism. In fact, it is an emotional radical- ism or a rejectionist radicalism that could just as well be left wing as right wing. But the PDS as a whole is on the path to becoming Social Democratic.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: What will happen now? Is it pos- sible for the genetic engineering debate to create a climate that would result in a social-liberal coalition?
SLOTERDIJK: That wouldn’t surprise me. After all, social democracy, since its conversion to the ideology of the third way, has become Blairite, and Blairism is the product of the marriage of Labour and Thatcherism. That, in turn, means the long overdue re- enactment of the working formula that was valid for the twentieth century: the market economy moderated by the welfare state. This turn by social democracy means it has admitted that it is depend- ent on industry prospering in an infinite economic game, an endless lottery of the markets. Liberalism and social democracy are two sides of the same coin – because both are infinitists.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Do you mean they don’t recog- nize any limits?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, they both pursue a policy of exceeding
60 On Wealth and Self-Respect
limits – growth policy. Growth is merely a neutralizing term for crossing boundaries, shifting boundaries. In modern society the upward processes are open because there are no income limits, no limits to satisfaction and no limits to personal fulfilment. In contrast to the ancient hypothesis that humans can be satisfied – which is, of course, the anthropological principle of the ancient world – humans in the modern age are pursuing goals insatiably.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: And the Social Democrats want to continue this insatiable policy of dissolving boundaries?
SLOTERDIJK: It is naturally harder to do that in coalition with the Greens than with the Liberals.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Aren’t Social Democrats very resolute about redistribution?
SLOTERDIJK: They support redistribution; they realize that it depends on endlessly creating value. It is not surprising that Social Democratic prime ministers spearhead advances towards new tech- nologies. It may be rather distasteful that this is occurring in such a sensitive area as human biotechnology, but in the end it is com- pletely consistent.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: In the age of globalization it is probably impossible to avoid the temptations of new technologies.
SLOTERDIJK: Globalization is based on the very successful export of European methods of improving living standards. For the past 200 years Europeans have been developing a range of products that dramatically changes the way of life of people nearly everywhere as soon as the utility value of these new products is recognized. There is a regular jealousy competition about access to these resources.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: What do you mean by ‘jealousy competition’?
SLOTERDIJK: All competitions are processes driven by jealousy. The great competition is not about goods but about non-material gratification. Hegel talks about the struggle for recognition as the actual motive force of history.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: And why isn’t envy the motive force of competition?
SLOTERDIJK: Both variants exist, of course. ‘Jealousy’ is the more positive term because jealous people believe in the opportunity of being ahead of their rivals in the race for a particular commodity, even if they first learned from their rivals to covet what the latter already have. In the case of envy, jealousy is deprived of its creative edge, and disparagement of others becomes important: if I don’t have something, they shouldn’t have it either.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Do you mean jealousy is linked
On Wealth and Self-Respect 61
more closely with opportunity and freedom, and envy more with equality?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes. It is easier to make a general case for the unreasonable demand that people should do without something.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: It follows that envious societies are typified by more redistribution, but a larger state share. Does this make Germany an envious society and the United States a jealous society?
SLOTERDIJK: That’s certainly true.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Nowadays globalization neces- sitates the retreat of the state, indirectly fostering the creation of a civil society.
SLOTERDIJK: On condition we can trust traditional state ser- vices, that is, provided new management can be found for these large communitarian systems. In other words, the enterprises would become the workers’ new fatherlands. The only problem is, there is hardly any evidence to show it works here in Germany.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Why doesn’t it work?
SLOTERDIJK: Because the state is, and continues to be, an enormous service provider for which there is no substitute. Here in Germany, Homo oeconomicus is not created by the economy but is born in state-run hospitals, grows up in families, is educated in state schools, trained in state universities, and then emerges at age twenty-five or thirty and is returned to the wild, let loose in the market arena and given a second chance to qualify, as it were – the opportunity to begin a second life to learn the criteria and moral judgements that are part of making the person roadworthy in this other scene.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Is our society structured in such a way that it can’t emancipate itself from state tutelage?
SLOTERDIJK: At any rate, it won’t happen soon. Our regula- tory state services are so comprehensive and detailed that trying to do it alone would overburden market forces in the long run. It would make sense, however, to reduce state control of schools to some extent, and the same applies to universities and the sciences. It would not a priori be a cultural disaster if the university became more like a privately run company and if academics were somewhat less dependent on the bureaucracy.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Why do we Germans in par- ticular believe so strongly in the state, in contrast to Anglo-Saxon countries?
SLOTERDIJK: This is related to the fact that, in common with all continental peoples, our notion of the state is strongly influenced by territorialism. That is a very tragic notion of the state. It means
62 On Wealth and Self-Respect
the state exists for us to be able to die for it. In the end, the nation is a sacrificial entity, and that is something countries based more on maritime cultures, those neo-nomadic collectives of Britons and Americans, are reluctant to understand. But meanwhile we conti- nentals are also increasingly abandoning the lofty state that gives death and demands sacrifice.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: If we look at the growth of tax evasion and illegal labour, Germans are becoming increasingly unwilling to make financial sacrifices for the state.
SLOTERDIJK: From a historical perspective, the tax rate is extremely high. People in the so-called higher-income bracket have realized they have the comparative in terms of earnings, but the superlative in terms of taxation. We are punished for success, and that is sending out the wrong signal – it emanates from the lofty state that still exists with a lofty idea of community and a lofty ideology of redistribution, and that justifies the harm done to middle-class households and the interference in citizens’ property. But the population is becoming less tolerant of these interventions because people always feel that taxation is just a matter of suffer- ance and nothing else.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: How do we achieve the situation of citizens suffering less and giving gladly?
SLOTERDIJK: It depends on seeing the levies, the taxes subjec- tively, so that we don’t just mindlessly hand over part of what we have earned, but we can dedicate it to a goal. Sponsoring is an ideal example of what could be possible here.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: That would be a systemic breach: taxes are not supposed to serve a specific end but to finance state activity as a whole.
SLOTERDIJK: Of course. But if the state merely acts as the imaginary pimp of the whole society and extracts everything it can, but doesn’t explain convincingly what it is doing with it, that results in taxation passivity and citizens end up fleeing as tax exiles. Anybody who understands anything about the economy and intel- ligent allocation can’t agree with the way those mass redistributions take place. If governments here in Germany don’t handle it more cleverly, we will observe the strange socio-psychological outcome that people who are getting richer all the time are getting more dis- contented all the time.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: In that case, would the state be threatening its own existence by destroying the trust society is based on?
SLOTERDIJK: Precisely. There are countless areas of redistribu- tion that could be organized much more intelligently and efficiently
On Wealth and Self-Respect 63
by alternative means. I am thinking of unemployment benefits, of the whole welfare state that should be organized more in terms of incentives, much more in terms of entrepreneurship and less in terms of the consumer state.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Are you saying that entrepre- neurial thinking is supposed to save the welfare state?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, entrepreneurs will raise the banners of hope again. Without a movement of entrepreneurs, as there was once a workers’ movement, the economy can no longer explain itself adequately to society.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: And what will be written on the banners?
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Entrepreneurs of the world, unite’ – what else? At the moment only entrepreneurs can convincingly represent the interests of the industries and services that produce the hardware, that is, the real value of productive industry, against the phantom superstructure of speculative finance economy. Only an entrepre- neurs’ movement can act in the anti-capitalist way that is needed now. It is time for entrepreneurial anti-capitalism.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: The entrepreneur as alternative to the distorted picture of globalization, of the anonymous flow of money around the globe?
SLOTERDIJK: Entrepreneurs must show that an operative economy, not the dictatorship of the lottery bosses, is the founda- tion of the market economy. Entrepreneurs are the social democracy of tomorrow.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Are you serious?
SLOTERDIJK: Of course. At the moment entrepreneurs may describe themselves in neoliberal terms, but this is becoming increas- ingly false as the years go by, because in the end they can only justify themselves as producers of the net value that serves the other side of redistribution.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: And this results in the economy itself stabilizing society?
SLOTERDIJK: Exactly. We have three mechanisms of redistri- bution: taxation, the stock market and foundations. Redistribution must take place because statehood and civil laws will suffer if they are not sufficiently well grounded. The first platform for redistribu- tion, social democracy, is no longer convincing in the long run, and alongside it the economy has developed another platform for redis- tribution – the shareholder system.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: In other words, shareholder capi- talism alongside state redistribution. And what is the third platform? SLOTERDIJK: I call that ‘subjective tax’. There are beautiful
64 On Wealth and Self-Respect
examples from the Anglo-Saxon world, where gentlemanly capi- talism has a certain tradition. Calvinism’s strength was that it produced a type of person who was willing to earn 5 million pounds as a capitalist and then spend 4 million pounds in foundations as a member of Christian society. We have to remould our rich people from a cultural perspective and explain to them that just being rich is not good enough.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Are you advocating a new Calvinism?
SLOTERDIJK: A new Calvin? No, he was a weird, unpleas- ant fellow. I would rather have a mixture of an opera director and Albert Schweitzer – I mean somebody who adds charisma and gives hope to millionaires again.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: So that giving can be fun?
SLOTERDIJK: Wealth must be fun – in such a way that the fun turns serious of its own accord. Wealth is too serious to leave to envy and fear. Unfortunately, people here in Germany don’t know that the only feeling that makes life worthwhile is generosity. Too many people in this country haven’t been rich for long enough to attain this wisdom and make the move towards generosity.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: That could explain why the Germans have never been as affluent as they are today, but are still not happier.
SLOTERDIJK: Indeed, people in this country are caught in a socio-psychological dilemma. The only possibility of getting out of it would be to reclaim the public arena lustfully, turning it into a culture of public generosity. Then wealth would be justified again . . .
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: . . . and people would be in a better mood?
SLOTERDIJK: I won’t claim that their bad mood will vanish; it is too deeply entrenched in the system. After all, we are dealing with a jealousy and envy machine of huge dimensions. That basic tension can’t be eliminated. But we can make the whole issue less acute if people feel more freedom at the point where money is spent, if they experience more generosity and get back the euphoria of a celebra- tory donation. We should break through the spiritual isolation of the rich.
10
LEARNING IS JOYFUL ANTICIPATION OF ONESELF
Interview with Reinhard Kahl*2
KAHL: A new education debate is in the air. What’s brewing?
SLOTERDIJK: Potential disturbance is in the air for the whole society. You can compare it to how individuals feel physical pain. Debates and scandals form a nervous system of topics by which society perceives itself.
KAHL: Education debates could be a way for society to explore itself. But the promising debate often breaks off at the last moment. Why?
SLOTERDIJK: We usually try to suppress questions about education. They are some of the most uncomfortable questions. Compared to that, the hospital system is almost pleasant and fasci- nating, as we can clearly see from the mass media. We have endless film series about hospitals and consultant surgeons. The gentlemen in green who snip around on bodies have become heroes. Intuitively we could say it doesn’t make sense – we don’t actually want to see anything unpleasant like an operating theatre in our living room in the evening. But in fact, that’s just what people want. The really unpleasant thing is school.
KAHL: There are some school soaps on television nowadays. But their equivalent of the operating theatre in hospital series would be lessons and exams, and you don’t see them in school series.
SLOTERDIJK: School exams are so unpleasant because they
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Reinhard Kahl appeared under the title ‘Lernen ist Vorfreude auf sich selbst’, in Pädagogik 53 (2001): 40–5 (Beltz, Weinheim).
Reinhard Kahl is a journalist and film-maker.
66 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
remind many people of birth. In schools, people are not interned for nine months but incubated for at least nine years. Then they have to fight their way out in written exams, in other words, closed situa- tions. Modern people don’t want to be reminded that they were ever incarcerated.
KAHL: School isn’t seen as a prenatal paradise – that would be asking too much – but it isn’t seen as the joyful event of com- ing-into-the-world either. Can we think of school as pressure in the birth canal?
SLOTERDIJK: School is what people always want to leave behind them. People rarely look back at school with affection.
KAHL: It wasn’t always as clear-cut as that.
SLOTERDIJK: Romanticism about school, as expressed in the famous film Die Feuerzangenbowle [The Punch Bowl],1 evokes mem- ories of situations that were not yet emergencies. Today the school has become a necessity of its own.
KAHL: A curious necessity, like a military exercise that uses live ammunition. On the other hand, there is a lack of resonance for taking any action that might have a serious effect. The school wryly adopts an attitude of necessity and claims, ‘all this is required later in life’.
SLOTERDIJK: The famous saying that we don’t learn for school, but for life, was an attempt at justification from the very beginning. The original school allowed pupils to learn for school because the Graeco-Roman view was that there was no need to learn for life. Life is its own teacher; it is self-explanatory. School, however, meant leisure for the Greeks, and leisure was regarded as the quintessence of life. Funnily enough, the Greeks formed their word for ‘to work’ or ‘to do business’ from the negation of the word ‘to be idle’. Anybody learning for leisure was engaging in free activity.
KAHL: How did the intrinsic value of a leisure education become a means to other ends?
SLOTERDIJK: When the modern nation-state took over the school service, the necessity principle was transferred to learning in school. It became pre-professional: school is preparation for employ- ment. The German concept of education was shaped by Prussian neo-humanism around 1800 and still tries to find a balance between
1 Die Feuerzangenbowle [The Punch Bowl] was a popular German film released in 1944. Set in a school in Germany, it was famous for its praise of schooldays as the best days of life, and for its light-hearted escapism during the grim last year of the Second World War.
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the classical and the modern concept: we learn for school and for life. The society of work is already at the door, but the school still holds its own as an autonomous life form. Die Feuerzangenbowle symbolizes this compromise. Meanwhile the migration of necessity into the classroom has advanced considerably. We’re not going to see any new punch bowls.
KAHL: School means something traumatic for most people. What is it? You mentioned the birth analogy. Does school make people feel unwelcome?
SLOTERDIJK: Perhaps. For most children today, school is the initiation into a situation that they feel is not about them person- ally. It’s an inoculation programme that administers grievances until they have passed through every kind of grievance – and then they get their narcissistic school-leaving certificate. The message is: ‘Whatever you may think of yourself, you’re not that important. ’ People don’t like being reminded of such exams.
KAHL: In the old school where people supposedly learned for life, they experienced being a small cog in a big machine. The oppo- sitional movement, ‘do whatever you want’, didn’t get far either. Today we have school students who end up without any idea of what they want.
SLOTERDIJK: That is undoubtedly related to the fact that today’s educationists don’t know themselves what they are educat- ing children for. Modern society’s confusion about its own goals is more clearly reflected in the confusing school system than anywhere else – except, perhaps, the area of visual arts, which is also a great world stage for mental disturbance. The school and the art business are nervous systems of sensitive issues in society in which the con- fusion about what will happen next is very clearly articulated. On average, teachers can’t be different from the society they come from.
KAHL: Twenty or thirty years ago many people said they wanted to affect things by playing a key part in social change, and they became teachers. By now there are many other options for people with ideas. The teaching profession has become a second choice. How are refugees from life supposed to represent the world to the next generation?
SLOTERDIJK: Teachers are people who often believe it is better to explain something than do something. The cowardly and the the- oretical decisions about life don’t necessarily converge, but often do. The result is schools as socio-psychological biotopes with an atypi- cal concentration of timid, under-motivated people concerned with private issues. The only answer is to de-professionalize schools. We have to enhance their social skills and leave them free on the factual side. It is increasingly clear that you don’t get to the core of learning
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with classic schooling methods. All the people who turned out to be special in school didn’t do it because of the school but because the school left them alone. When things went well it offered protection under which intensive learning processes, which have always been intrinsically autodidactic, could flourish. Sometimes the autodi- dactic element was able to evolve under cover of didactics. But I think this particular constellation has passed its optimal point. New optimal situations have to be created for autodidactics. The school is probably no longer part of these optimal conditions.
KAHL: Aren’t didactic teachers – there are other kinds as well, of course – representatives of an ailing priestly class nowadays? Who else still believes knowledge can be passed down from above?
SLOTERDIJK: Priesthood: that’s a convincing analogy. Today, armies of world clerics appear before their flock and appeal to the good in human beings. Meanwhile they have discovered that their appeals result in evil developing all the more. Then people pretend to naivety and ask what’s going wrong.
KAHL: Teachers don’t encourage new knowledge ‘from below’. They lack the combination of action and experience.
SLOTERDIJK: Teachers live with false descriptions – more so, in fact, than any other group in society, aside from nihilists, who know what they’re doing and still keep on doing it. Nihilists are always on target with any possible enlightenment. They are already on the baseline of total lack of illusions about themselves and others. They think and act on the damaging assumption that entropy always wins. This is precisely what we people on the creative side have been fighting against with the methods of art and philosophy since way back when. The point is to inspire people to enthusiasm and get them involved.
KAHL: So let’s give school one more chance! How could it become a venue, or even a hothouse, for autodidactic experiments? After all, people learning of their own accord are not autistic. They need other people to inspire them, people who are curious but don’t lecture them or ‘mediate’ the lessons in a boring way.
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, we need schools that emphasize young people’s pertinacity and don’t colonize them for the sake of ‘neces- sity’. We must shut the school doors to business, fashion and other such terrifying menaces, and reconstruct a living space for people to engage in a libidinous relationship with their own intelligence. What is clear to see in a small child usually gets lost in the school pupil. The rescue of the cognitive libido must become the school’s core project.
KAHL: School as a space of dense atmospheres swelling with possibilities? You have been occupied for years with understanding
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what spheres are and not getting stuck with congealed substances like knowledge.
SLOTERDIJK: My theory of enthusiasms, that is, of public spirits, tries to reduce overblown romantic-nationalist concepts to the level of specific groups. Schools must become boarding schools! Not literally, of course, but rather in the sense of emphasizing the intrinsic character of school life. I’m seeing that with my daughter, who is lucky to be in an excellent schooling situation. In her case, you can see clearly what it means to spend time in an environment for encouraging enthusiasm.
KAHL: What grade is she in?
SLOTERDIJK: She is in the second year at the Montessori branch of an ordinary elementary school. You can see how a dif- ferent climatic policy in the school encourages a different way of speaking to the pupils and a different language among the pupils themselves. This school begins by assuming that the learning libido is the real capital. The children bring their curiosity, their enthusi- asm, that priceless medium of happy anticipation of their own self, into the learning process. What matters is expectation of the next state to be reached. A form of didactics that respects this operates quite differently and with better results than a school where teachers have the attitude: you’re going to be astonished, and I’m the one who is going to show you how things are.