No More Learning

STEINGART/RIECKE: Does she get too little support from economics as an academic discipline?
SLOTERDIJK: Economic science seems to me to be a discipline that has lost its basic principles. The whole faculty is in a dreadful state. One increasingly gets the feeling that the theories as such are fiction that is trying to become reality and can’t be linked to any
9 Sloterdijk is referring to Adorno’s famous dictum, reproduced in Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (New York: Verso Books), 1978.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 255
external standard. This is not a new observation for a theorist of cognition. Niklas Luhmann10 had already stated twenty years ago that good theory is like a panel flight above closed cloud cover. Visual flight is only for amateurs; the clear view down to the ground is always harmful for social scientists because they let their subjec- tivity and sentimentality influence them.
STEINGART/RIECKE: We live in a period of permanent stress tests for our citizens. Right now, we are waiting for some parting words of comfort from the philosopher.
SLOTERDIJK: I have discovered a first-class comforter. STEINGART/RIECKE: A whisky?
SLOTERDIJK: One of the most beautiful proverbs I have come
across in a long time. It comes from Piet Klocke. Do you know him? STEINGART/RIECKE: Yes, of course.
SLOTERDIJK: He’s the fantastic cabaret artist . . . STEINGART/RIECKE: The one who sounds like Mr Rürup? 11 SLOTERDIJK: He has discovered that most sentences don’t
have to be spoken right to the end. He just runs on immediately into the next sentence. Well, I think we can pass on a proverb from Piet Klocke to people in need of comfort. It goes like this: ‘However big the chaos, there’s always a tiny spark of hopelessness in it somewhere. ’
STEINGART/RIECKE: Mr Sloterdijk, thank you for this interview.
10 Niklas Luhmann (1927–98) was an influential German sociologist and social theorist.
11 Bert Rürup is a German economist and former chairman of the German Council of Economic Experts. He was a leading consultant on the reform of the German pension and social welfare system from 2002 to 2009.
30
IS THERE A WAY OUT OF THE CRISIS OF WESTERN CULTURE?
Interview with Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Žižek*12
LE MONDE: For the first time in the history of the Western world, the future has run into a crisis. And the new generations don’t think they’ll have better lives than their predecessors. Lack of interest in politics, the economic crisis and retreat into the identity of our origins: how can we describe the moment in time we are pres- ently living through? Can we call it a crisis of culture?
SLOTERDIJK: What do we mean by using the term ‘Western culture’ for the culture we have lived in since the seventeenth century? In my opinion we are talking about a form of world based on the idea that the age of the cult of the past is over. The pre- eminence of the past has been destroyed. Western people invented an unprecedented life form founded on anticipating the future. This means we live in a world that is more and more strongly ‘futurized’. Consequently, I believe that at a deep level the meaning of our ‘being-in-the-world’ embraces futurism, and this is the fundamental feature of the way we exist. The pre-eminence of the future dates back to the epoch at the beginning of the Renaissance in which the West invented the new art of making promises. I mean the time at which credit intruded into the life of Europeans. In antiquity and the Middle Ages credit hardly played a role because it was managed
* This conversation between Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Žižek appeared under the title ‘Comment sortir de la crise de la civilisation occidentale? ’, in Le Monde (28 May 2011). Available at: <http://colblog. blog. lemonde. fr/2011/05/28/peter-sloterdijk-slavoj-zizek-comment-sortir-de-la-crise-de-la- civilisation-occidentale/>.
Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher, cultural critic and performer. The interviewer for Le Monde was Nicolas Truong.
Is There a Way Out of the Crisis of Western Culture? 257
by usurers who were condemned by the Church. The usurer directly blocked the future of anybody who had to repay credit. Modern loans, by contrast, loans with moderate interest, opened up a future. For the first time, promises of repayment could be fulfilled or honoured. The crisis of culture involves this: we have reached an epoch in which credit is increasingly blocked from offering a sustainable future because nowadays people take out loans to repay other loans. In other words, ‘creditism’ has entered its final crisis. People have amassed so many debts that the promise of repayment that underpins the credibility of our construction of the world is no longer viable. The seriousness of the promise vanishes in the mists. If you ask Americans how they imagine the debts amassed by the US federal government will be repaid, their response will undoubt- edly be: ‘Nobody knows. ’ And I think this not-knowing is the hard core of our crisis. Nobody on earth knows how the collective debt should be repaid. The future of our culture has run up against a wall of debt.
ŽIŽEK: I completely agree with the idea of a crisis of ‘futurism’ and of the logic of loans. Let’s take the so-called ‘sub-prime’ eco- nomic crisis of 2008: everybody knew it was impossible to repay those mortgage loans but everybody behaved as if they were able to do so. In my psychoanalytic jargon I call this fetishist denial: ‘I know it’s impossible but I’m going to try anyway. . . . ’ People are well aware they can’t do it but in practice they act as if they actu- ally could. All the same, I would rather use the term ‘future’ to describe what Peter Sloterdijk calls ‘creditism’. The word ‘future’ seems more open to me, incidentally. The expression, ‘no future’ is pessimistic, but the word ‘future’ is more optimistic. I’m not trying to revive Marxist communism, which actually resembles immense creditism. To describe our economic and political, ideological and intellectual situation, I can only quote what is probably an apocry- phal story. It’s about a telegram exchange between the German and the Austrian general staff in the First World War. The Germans sent the Austrians a telegram with the words, ‘The situation here on the front is serious but not disastrous. ’ To which the Austrians replied, ‘Our situation here is disastrous but not serious’! And that’s exactly what is disastrous: people can’t pay their debts but in a sense they don’t take it seriously. Beyond that wall of debts the present epoch is approaching a kind of zero point. First, the massive economic crisis forces us not to stay on the same politico-economic track any longer. Second, as we can see in China, capitalism will not be naturally tied to parliamentary democracy in the future. Third, the bio-genetic revolution is forcing us to find a different kind of bio- politics. As for the social divisions in the world as a whole, they
258 Is There a Way Out of the Crisis of Western Culture?
create the conditions for unparalleled explosions and popular upris- ings . . .
LE MONDE: Multicultural capitalism or social individualism, global nationalism or global nomadism – the failure of Europe, the retreat into identities based on origins – the collective is also immersed in a crisis. How can the idea of communality be given new meaning today?
ŽIŽEK: Even if we must reject the naïve communitarianism, the homogenization of cultures and the kind of multiculturalism that has become the ideology of the new spirit of capitalism, we must still make the different cultures and the individual persons enter into dia- logue with each other. On the level of the individual we need a new logic of discretion, of distance or even of not-knowing. Coexistence in a tight space has become a total reality, which means we are dealing with a need that is vital for life, a crucial point.
On the collective level we must really find a different way to articulate communality. Multiculturalism is completely wrong as a response to the problem, on the one hand because it is a kind of unprofessed racism that respects the identity of the other but impris- ons him or her in terms of their particular characteristics. It’s a kind of neo-colonialism that reverses classical colonialism by ‘respecting’ communities, but from the perspective of its universal stance. On the other hand, multicultural tolerance is a decoy that de-politicizes public debate and diverts social questions towards race issues and economic questions towards ethnic issues. This attitude of the postmodern left wing is intrinsically estranged from the world in many respects. Buddhism, for example, can serve and legitimate an extreme form of militarism. In the period between 1930 and 1940, the entire institution of Zen Buddhism not only supported but also legitimated the hegemony of Japanese imperialism. I like using the word ‘communism’, particularly to provoke upper-class types, but the questions I am asking actually relate to ‘communal’ properties such as biogenetics and ecology.
SLOTERDIJK: We have to rediscover the real problems of our times. The memory of communism and of the great tragic experience of twentieth-century politics warns us that there are no dogmatic and automatic ideological solutions. The problem of the twenty-first century is that of coexistence in a ‘humankind’ that has become a physical reality. It is no longer a matter of the ‘abstract universalism’ of the Enlightenment but of the real universality of an enormous collective that is starting to become a real-life community of circulation with greater opportunities for continual encounters and clashes.
We have become like particles of a gas under pressure. The
Is There a Way Out of the Crisis of Western Culture? 259
question nowadays concerns social ties within an oversized society, and I think the legacy of the so-called religions is important because they represent the first attempts at meta-national or meta-ethnic syntheses. The Buddhist sangha was a spaceship in which desert- ers from all ethnic backgrounds could take refuge. We could use a similar description for Christianity, which is a kind of social synthesis that transcends the dynamic of closed ethnicities and the subdivisions of class societies. The dialogue of religion in our times is nothing but reformatting of the problem of ‘communism’. The assembly held in Chicago in 1893, the World’s Parliament of Religions, was a particular way to pose questions for our times with the aid of these fragments, these representatives of unknown origin of the human family members who had lost touch with each other after they left Africa . . . In the age of assembly, human beings have to restructure and reformat everything they previously thought about the bond of coexistence of a humankind without boundaries. That is why I use the term ‘co-immunism’.
All the social federations of history, from primal hordes to world empires are, in fact, structures of co-immunity. The choice of this concept recalls the communist legacy. In my analysis, communism goes back to Rousseau and his idea of the ‘religion of man’. This is a constitutive term, a sort of communitarianism on a global scale. This exaggerated homogenization inevitably had terrible consequences – but they were probably unavoidable errors. Although we know more today, the problem still oppresses us. We can’t escape this situ- ation. The goddess, or divine being, that appears on the last pages of my book is the crisis: it is the only instance that has enough author- ity to make us change our lives. 1 Our starting point is a shattering, evident truth: we can’t go on like this.
ŽIŽEK: I’m less interested in looking for ‘co-immunism’ than in reviving the idea of true communism. But I assure you, it is more about Kafka’s than Stalin’s communism, more about the com- munism of Erik Satie than that of Lenin. In his last short story, ‘Josephine the Singer or The Mouse Folk’, Kafka sketched the utopia of an egalitarian society, a world in which artists like the singer Josephine, whose singing draws big crowds and fascinates and astonishes them, are celebrated and showered with compli- ments but without gaining any material benefits from this. It is a picture of a society of recognition that maintains ritual and revives community festivities but without hierarchy or herd behaviour.
1 Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity), 2013, p. 444.
260 Is There a Way Out of the Crisis of Western Culture?
The same applies to Erik Satie. Everything about Satie, the famous composer of the Gymnopédies who declared he was composing ‘wallpaper music’, music for an environment or background, seems removed from politics. Yet Satie was a member of the Communist Party. Far from writing propaganda songs, he gave auditory expres- sion to a kind of collective intimacy, the exact opposite of elevator music. That is what my idea of communism consists of.
LE MONDE: Peter Sloterdijk, your solution for getting out of this crisis is to reactivate the practice of individual spiritual exercises – whereas you, Slavoj Žižek, insist on political, collective mobilization and on reactivating the emancipatory power of Christianity. Why is there such a divergence?
SLOTERDIJK: My proposal simply calls for introducing pragma- tism into the study of so-called religions. This pragmatic dimension forces you to look more closely at what religious people do, namely, internal and external practices that we can describe as exercises that build a personality structure. What I describe as the chief subject of philosophy and psychology is the system of a series of exercises that form the personality. And some of these exercise series that make up the personality can be described as religious. But what does that mean? We make spiritual movements to communicate with an invisible partner. These are absolutely concrete things that can be described. There is nothing mysterious in this. I think that so far the concept of a ‘system of exercises’ is a thousand times more effective and useful than the term ‘religion’, which relates back to the state bigotry of the Romans. We shouldn’t forget that the Romans reserved use of the terms ‘religion’, ‘piety’ or ‘loyalty to the faith’ for the Roman legions stationed in the Rhine Valley and lots of other places. The greatest privilege for a legion was to be awarded the designation pia fidelis because it expressed special loyalty to the Emperor in Rome. I think Europeans have simply forgotten what religio means. The literal meaning of the word is ‘care’. Cicero provided its correct etymology: ‘to read’ – legere, religere, which means, to make a careful study of the protocol that regulates communication with higher beings. In other words, it concerns a specific kind of care or, in my terminology, a training code. This is why I believe the ‘religious return’ can only be effective when it leads to the practice of intensive exercises. By con- trast, our ‘new religious people’ are mostly lazy dreamers. But in the twentieth century, sport gained precedence in Western culture. It is not religion that has returned, but sport, after being nearly forgotten for 1,500 years. Not fideism, but athleticism came to the fore. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Pierre de Coubertin wanted to create a religion of muscles. Although he failed to found a religion, he tri- umphed as the creator of a new system of exercises.
Is There a Way Out of the Crisis of Western Culture? 261
ŽIŽEK: Early on, the Russian avant-garde artists saw sport as a totality of physical practices. The Soviet director Sergey Eisenstein (1898–1948) wrote a very fine text about the Jesuit Ignatius von Loyola (1491–1556), who was concerned with forgetting God, or at least was somebody who established specific spiritual exercises. My thesis of the return of Christianity is very paradoxical: I believe one can only really feel like an atheist via Christianity. If you look at the great atheist movements of the twentieth century, in reality we are dealing with quite a different logic, namely that of theologi- cal ‘creditism’. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885–1962), one of the founders of quantum mechanics, had a visit from a friend at his weekend cottage. The friend hesitated to go through the door of the house because of a horseshoe nailed there – in Central Europe this is a superstitious custom to stop evil spirits from entering. Niels Bohr’s friend said to him: ‘You’re a leading scientist. How can you obey that kind of popular superstition? ’ To which Bohr replied, ‘I don’t believe in it at all! ’ ‘So why do you leave the horseshoe there? ’ his friend insisted. And Niels Bohr gave the following beautiful answer: ‘Somebody told me it works even if you don’t believe in it! ’ That would be a very good picture of our present ideology. I think the death of Christ on the cross means the death of God and that he is no longer the Great Other who holds the strings. The only possibility of being a believer after the death of Christ is to be part of collective egalitarian relationships. Christianity can be seen as a religion that accompanies the ruling order, or as a religion that says ‘No’ and helps people to oppose that order. I think Christianity and Marxism have to combat jointly the surge of new kinds of spiritu- ality and capitalist herd behaviour. I represent a religion without God, a communism without masters.
SLOTERDIJK: Let’s suppose we landed at the closing session of the Council of Nicaea and during the assembly one of the archbish- ops asked: should we put our brother Slavoj Žižek on the Index? I think the great majority would vote for an anathema because he is committing what the elders called a ‘heresy’. Slavoj Žižek takes a selective position with regard to the whole truth: heresy means selection. And in this particular case, selection involves omitting the sequel to the Bible story that tells of the resurrection after the death of Christ. If you leave out the resurrection you forget the main issue, because the message of Christianity is that death is no threat to us any more. The worldwide success of Christianity is based not only on the message of universal love but, above all, on the neutraliza- tion of the threats with which death weighs on every conscience. Without ignoring pagan phobocracy: all empires are founded on the power of fear. We can tell the story as Slavoj Žižek has done, but we
262 Is There a Way Out of the Crisis of Western Culture?
have to add a second, liberating dimension: without a rupture with phobocracy, the rule of fear, there is no freedom, either Christian or atheist. Otherwise we are only exchanging masters: Jupiter or Christ, there’s no difference at all as long as the two divine beings remain phobocratic powers. Regrettably, Christianity has become the most terrible phobocracy in the whole history of religion, espe- cially through Augustine, who created a veritable fear reactor with his theory of predestination. Fortunately, the philosophy of the Enlightenment deactivated it. Christian phobocracy even persisted in the communist adventure, in the form of state terrorism. And the story isn’t over yet. Muslim phobocracy is not willing to stop. We have to reconstruct the emancipatory dimensions of an enlightened Christianity for everyone looking for a way out of the concentra- tion camp world of classical phobocrats. And I will gladly accept an atheist reconstruction on condition that the emphasis is on eliminat- ing the phobocratic elements of ancient paganism.
LE MONDE: The historical moment we are presently living through seems to be characterized by rage. The sense of outrage peaked in the slogan of the Arab revolutions, ‘Get out! ’, or the democratic protests in Spain. If we can believe Slavoj Žižek, then you, Peter Sloterdijk, are too severe towards the social movements you regard as originating from resentment.
SLOTERDIJK: You have to distinguish between rage and resent- ment. In my opinion there is a whole spectrum of emotions that belong to the realm of thymos, that is, to the realm of pride. There is a kind of fundamental, irreducible pride that resides in the very depths of our being. Joviality, a benevolent view of everything that exists, can be expressed on this thymotic spectrum. Here, the psy- chological field is never clouded over. If we descend a few steps on the ladder of values we come to self-pride. If we go down further we come to humiliation of this pride, which provokes rage. If the rage cannot be expressed and is condemned to waiting to be expressed later and elsewhere, this leads to resentment, and so the process goes on, ending up with destructive hate that really wants to annihilate the object that caused the humiliation. Let’s not forget that, accord- ing to Aristotle, good rage is the feeling that accompanies the desire for justice. Justice that knows no rage remains a helpless movement. The socialist tendencies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created collection points of collective rage. That was doubtless something very right and very important. Tragically, however, too many people and too many organizations of the traditional left slid into resentment. This creates the urgent need to think about and imagine a new left beyond resentments.
ŽIŽEK: What satisfies the conscious mind in resentment is related
Is There a Way Out of the Crisis of Western Culture? 263
more to the fact that we harm other people and destroy the obstacle than with benefiting ourselves. We Slovenians are like that by nature. You know the legend in which an angel appears to a farmer and asks him, ‘Do you want me to give you a cow? But watch out, I’ll also give your neighbour two cows! ’ And the Slovenian farmer says, ‘Of course not! ’ Yet for me, resentment is never really the attitude of the poor. It is rather the attitude of poor lords – Nietzsche analysed that very well. It is the morality of ‘slaves’. Only he was wrong in relation to the social standpoint: it is not about real slaves but about the slaves that Beaumarchais’ Figaro wants to substitute for the masters. I think capitalism contains a very specific combination of the thymotic aspect and the erotic aspect. Capitalist eroticism, in comparison with bad thymotics, which creates resentment, is totally mediated: ‘I want to have that, not for myself but so that somebody else doesn’t get it. ’ I agree with Peter Sloterdijk: basically the biggest difficulty lies in the question of how to conceive and describe the act of giving beyond exchange and beyond resentment. I’m rather pessimistic about that. People are corrupt; they can’t be changed. Sometimes it’s possible, depending on the circumstances. You know the totalitarian formula: ‘You love mankind in the abstract but you hate real people. ’ Well, in this respect I’m totalitarian – I love humankind but I often find real people weak, wicked and cowardly. I deeply and utterly deplore all that human stupidity.
I don’t actually believe in the reality of the spiritual exercises Peter Sloterdijk proposes. I’m too pessimistic for that. I would like to add a social heterotopia to those sporting-type practices of self- discipline. That’s why I wrote the final chapter of Living in the End Times2 in which I sketch out a utopian space of communism by referring to works that make what we could call collective intimacy visible and audible. I’m also inspired by certain science-fiction films in which chaotic heroes and neurotic types form real collectives. Individual life stories can guide us as well. It is often forgotten that Victor Kravchenko (1905–66), the Soviet sport medallist who criti- cized Stalinist terror very early on in his book, I Chose Freedom, and who was shamefully attacked by pro-Soviet intellectuals, wrote a sequel with the title, I Chose Justice, during the struggle to construct a more equitable agricultural production system in Bolivia. We should follow and encourage the new Kravchenkos who are now appearing everywhere, from South America to the Mediterranean coast.
SLOTERDIJK: I think you are a victim of the psycho-political 2 Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso Books), 2010.
264 Is There a Way Out of the Crisis of Western Culture?
evolution of the East European states. Everyone in Russia, for example, is carrying the load of a whole century of political and per- sonal catastrophes on their shoulders. The tragedy of communism still affects the peoples of Eastern Europe and they can’t get away from it. All of that creates a spiral of autogenous despair. Although I’m a pessimist by nature, life has refuted my original pessimism. You could call me an optimist who achieved optimism at the second attempt. In this respect, I think, we are quite close because we began from radically different starting points and have had parallel biogra- phies in some senses, reading the same books along the way.
LE MONDE: To sum up, a word about the affair of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. 3 Is this a case of a simple moral lapse or a symptom of a more important malaise?
SLOTERDIJK: We can’t dismiss the possibility that it is about a matter of global importance that goes beyond an ordinary every- day event. Maybe Dominique Strauss-Kahn is innocent. But the story shows that over-exaggerating the power of an individual can create a kind of religion of the powerful that I describe as sexual pantheism. We thought the age of the Sun King was finally over. But strangely enough, the twenty-first century is multiplying these power people in thousands. They imagine all the objects of their desire can be penetrated by their aura.
ŽIŽEK: The only interesting aspect of the DSK affair is the rumour that his friends are said to have approached members of the family of the victim, Nafissatou Diallo, in Guinea, and offered an exorbitant sum of money if she withdrew her accusation. If this is true, what a dilemma! Should one choose dignity, or the money that can rescue a family by giving it the possibility of living in prosperity? That would perfectly sum up the real moral perversion of our times.
3 Dominique Strauss-Kahn (known as DSK), a leading French politician and former head of the International Monetary Fund, was charged with rape of a hotel employee in New York in 2011. He was later acquitted but remained permanently disgraced by sex scandals.
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
31
QUESTIONS OF FATE A Novel About Thought
Conversation with Ulrich Raulff*
I. Karlsruhe Conversation
RAULFF: Mr Sloterdijk, some time ago I read a report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about the public discussion you had with Heiner Geißler1 at the beginning of March 2010 on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. According to the report, you brought the term ‘fate’ into the discussion twice. That struck me as interesting. First, you are quoted as saying that Luhmann’s concept of ‘differentiation’ of subsystems is the coolest possible reference to the power of fate: complex social systems unavoidably follow the legitimacy of self-referential functioning. Second, you put forward the argument that the West’s involvement in Afghanistan proves that the modern world doesn’t escape the tragic. The word ‘fate’ appeared in this context as well. What does it mean? To what extent are you talking about something else apart from military failure or lack of political strategy?
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Ulrich Raulff appeared under the title ‘Schicksalsfragen: Ein Roman vom Denken’, in Marbacher Magazin, Ausstellungskatalog Schicksal: Sieben mal sieben unhintergehbare Dinge (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, No. 135), 2011, pp. 14–72.
Ulrich Raulff has been director of the German Academy for Language and Literature in Marbach am Neckar since 2004.
1 Heiner Geißler is a German politician and member of the Christian Democratic Party (CDU). He was a government minister for youth, health and the family in the 1980s and was later involved in critical movements on social policy and globalization.
266 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
SLOTERDIJK: I used Afghanistan in my argument as a topical example of all the situations in which people are doomed to make mistakes whatever they do. Even modern people are forced to experience that sometimes we can only choose between mistakes, mishaps and great misfortunes because there is no right and simple behaviour at that particular moment. As regards the situation in Afghanistan, I explained in the discussion with Heiner Geißler that Western politicians currently have the choice of two evils: if the Western troops stay in the country, the authorities that are respon- sible alienate their own populations because they still don’t really understand what their soldiers are doing there after all these years. Dead soldiers are continually being repatriated, yet there is no rec- ognizable military success. As a result this policy is very unpopular. But if we withdraw from Afghanistan we will be abandoning the country to forces that are likely to do the worst for their own people and the world in general. In short, we can only choose between two evils. In this context I think we should use the concept of the tragic once again, beyond its everyday meaning. Interestingly, ordinary speech today defines more or less everything that used to be called fatal as tragic, particularly the deadly accident. For us, the accident is the authority that governs the tragic or the fatal – both terms express that people today are occasionally overwhelmed, as they have always been, by the feeling that they are ruled by the force of horror. Accidents and catastrophes are opportunist factors that confirm their mastery now and then by hitting out blindly. People are helplessly confused then, because as modern subjects they like to think they have protected themselves technically and politically against bad luck. Suddenly all the trappings of competence we have built up against the blows of fate seem useless, and from one moment to the next people sink back into a state of almost archaic helpless- ness. The word ‘helpless’ touches on the ancient starting point of the Enlightenment: for enlightenment, as it took shape for the first time in ancient Sophism, is primarily a prophylactic of helpless- ness. There is a concept in Greek Sophism that is hardly discussed in contemporary philosophy, although it expresses one of the most important ideas of ancient ethics: the concept of amechanía, which is usually translated as ‘helplessness’. It literally describes the lack of mechané, which means the cunning or the device or the machine we can use to get out of a situation of existential difficulties . . .
RAULFF: To thwart the procedure, so to speak . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Exactly, because amechanía describes the situa- tion in which human beings are denied just what the Greeks believed made them wholly human, that is, the ability to retaliate against attacks, being equipped with options for action or, as we would say
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 267
today, being in full control of their agency. As soon as people sink into amechanía, they land in a situation that just doesn’t seem appro- priate for human beings. Ancient Sophism thought more profoundly on this point than the academy. According to Sophism, the meaning of all training, both spiritual and physical, is that people react against the extreme situation of amechanía so that they can become real experts – experts of existence in general and beings that find the right words in particular. Whenever people talked about paideia, and later, education, they had to remember that these concepts had their starting point in a very elementary concept of existential competence. The legacy of Sophism became part of Stoical ethics that wanted to develop human beings as creatures that would never be helpless. This ethics is based on the postulate that humans should always be able to do something, even in situations in which the only possible thing they can do is to remain calm and composed.
RAULFF: That describes a level that goes deeper than the inability to use our own understanding without someone else’s guid- ance, the condition our famous Enlightenment sought to change. Helplessness describes a level below that, complete incapacity to act . . .
SLOTERDIJK: True, helplessness is one dimension beyond normal legal immaturity. Our understanding of legal immaturity involves the idea, of course, that the ward needs a legal guardian who is equipped with the means to avoid helplessness. The ideal of the relationship between the ward and the guardian would natu- rally be to encourage the former to reach the state of independence. A bond like that is already prefigured in the ancient rejection of amechanía. It is also the basis of the initial relationship between teacher and pupil. The Greeks already had a concept of humans as beings that should know how to help themselves. The old Sophists were not at a loss when it came to answering the question about the character of human beings: for them, humans were the creatures directed by an indestructible ‘I-can’ whatever the circumstances. A living being of that kind, which had Aristotle, and therefore language, and Sophism, and therefore the art of retaliation and improvisation, pitted his competence against external powers in the same way as the helmsman defies the storm with his experi- ence. It is no coincidence that Plato, who was very close to Sophist thought despite being polemically opposed to Sophism, liked choos- ing examples that presented people as experts. For instance, the architect who knows how to build a house so that people aren’t compelled to spend their lives in the terrible condition of homeless- ness, or the helmsman, kybernetes, who ensures that we reach our destination even in heavy seas.
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In short, the anti-mechanía attitude runs through the entire Greek enlightenment and culminates in the teachings of the Stoic stance. If you read the relevant letters of Seneca, you can see he had a highly developed sense for philosophizing in the face of emergencies. Emergencies are situations in which regression into helplessness seems nearly inevitable. In the age of Emperor Nero, the Roman Stoics’ awareness of emergencies was attuned to the most extreme situation that could happen to people of that time, the situation of the gladiator in the arena waiting for the final blow from his victori- ous opponent. In Seneca’s letters, the battle of life and death in the arena replaced sea voyages as the model for emergencies. In the arena the losing fighter directly faces the agent of death who will kill him. There is only one way he can prove his ability to stand up to that: by showing he has learned to fall with dignity. It is right and fitting for a player on the stage of Being to cut a good figure until the last moment. This savoir mourir is no longer Socratic. Seneca derived a new picture of human existence from the gladiator role: Sine missione nascimur, he wrote in one of his letters, as if he wanted to introduce a kind of arena fatalism. In the Coliseum of life, the fight always has to be to the death. We should be aware that the missio meant the sign of remission, the upturned thumb with which the audience in the arena could grant life to a brave loser. In sine missione fights the rules disallowed this option and the gladiators had to strike the deadly blow. When Seneca says we are born sine missione, it means that as mortals we are always compelled to go to the final end. From his perspective, it follows that we only have one way left to prove our worth, to prove the strength we have gained from wisdom, and that is still to be standing when everybody else has fallen to the ground, literally and metaphorically. The act of standing upright becomes the final evidence for the lack of helpless- ness that we, the brave gladiators of the cosmos, should aim for. We could go as far as to link the concept of substance to the upright position of the stoical finalist. If Heidegger had not despised Latin philosophy he would have gained something from it for his enfram- ing theory.
RAULFF: But what does fate mean in this situation? Is it the general situation in life of constantly being in a fight sine missione, or does the term only apply to the final constellation?
SLOTERDIJK: Fate is both things: the series of tests and the endgame. The power of fate is already evident in the arena complex. People standing below in the sand track have a clear view of their situation because of the architecture: complete immanence, the closed scene with no exit, and the lascivious crowd in the rows that wants its spectacle. The situation is the message. The building
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expresses fatality with spectators. If I am a gladiator, I feel how my existence down there is absolutely exposed. The others in the rows enjoy the privilege of being in the audience. They can hide among the masses and keep their backs covered. The fighter is visible all the time from all around; he is held out into the final risk – there is no place he can retreat to, nowhere to lean on, nowhere to rest. At most he achieves a postponement if he wins out this time, but if he doesn’t fall in today’s games, then he will fall in the next or the one after. If he leaves the arena standing, he is excused from the next fight – that is what it means to live on reprieve. The second volume of my Spheres trilogy contains a digression with the title ‘Dying Later in the Amphitheater: On Postponement, the Roman Way’, in which I relate Derrida’s concept of différance, which means both difference and postponement, to the arena idea of Stoic fatalism.
For the Romans, the games were a didactic medium for present- ing people with the fundamental truth of existence in the empire. Life in a tight time situation like that means nothing but the attempt to die later – later than your antagonist of today, as late as pos- sible. Most of all it means being unable to hide when dying. In the arena, imperial fatalism comes into its own, affecting the mob as well as Caesar, the gladiator as well as the pupil of philosophy. The universe itself is the arena, and nobody is granted the missio, the reprieve. Given these conditions, the Stoic tries all his life to memo- rize the mnemonic phrase that he doesn’t need to be discharged from the lost skirmish anyway because basically all fates are good. After all, as humans we are merely local functions of the cosmos; every death happens at the right time and place. If this sounds rather exaggerated, you should consider that ancient philosophy is nothing more and nothing less than the attempt to overwrite the tremendous improbability of this cosmic-harmonic doctrine. As in all great teachings of faith, the point is to profess the incredible as if it were the surest thing of all. Ancient philosophy and Christianity are very close on this point. For our ancestors, clear fatalism in the sense of faith in the things that are securely anchored in every destiny served to hold back the annihilating darkness in the life of the few and the many.
RAULFF: You began by saying that the accident has replaced the tragic event for us. Seen from the aesthetic perspective of the tragic, accidents acquire a degree of worthiness. They represent the lofty in the scenes of everyday life. The situations you have described now with reference to ancient philosophy always display an aesthetic component. In each case – and I am struck by this gen- erally in relation to the concept of fate – there is somebody looking on, whether in Greek theatre or the Roman arena. An observer
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always appears who watches the others trying to cope with their lot, whether they triumph over it, stand there and accept it, or fall quickly. How does this observer belong to the function field of the concept of fate? Does fate really need an observer who watches from the safety of the shore, as suggested in the existential metaphor of the ‘shipwreck with spectator’?
SLOTERDIJK: The Lucretian spectator on the safe shore takes part in the general theorizing about life that occurs in classical antiquity. Phenomenology began as observation of fatal events. Since the time that theory has existed in the world, there is, in fact, always somebody who watches from a relatively secure posi- tion as fate overtakes others. This applies first of all to the gods of the ancients who permanently enjoyed the world play, watching without suffering, and equally to the Greek theatregoer – not to mention the audiences at the Roman circus. In fact, theory begins with tragedy, which is quite a lot older than philosophy. The Greeks learned the act of watching everything in the form of tragedy. The dramatists seldom used the explicit concept of fate in their plays, but they didn’t need the general term because the tragic form per se pro- vided a vehicle for observing fates. The ‘goats’ songs’, or tragedies, presented the heroes’ dilemmas by showing the audience the con- flicts, traps and complications that can lead to human life coming to an end. They used observation of fate as a cathartic mechanism – indeed, in line with Aristotelian theory, they wanted to chasten the spectators through phobos and eleos, that is, through awe and lamentation or, as it used to be translated with less pathos, through ‘fear’ and ‘empathy’. This presupposes that the observers are not primarily reflective but begin as empathetic spectators who put themselves in the shoes of the unfortunate hero without completely identifying with him. The origin of tragedy is a ritual of empathy. In the theatre the collective soul is affectively synchronized; this is how the individual is made fit for the polis. Cultural theorists would say that Dionysian theatre with its annual productions was an appa- ratus for strengthening the memo-active fitness of Athens. At that time one could only be a good Athenian by starting to wail with the other spectators at the same point in the play – we can detect a faint echo of this humanizing parallel occurrence of affects in Goethe’s ‘awe is the best of man’. By the same token, reliable members of the polis were recognizable because they laughed together with the others at the right moment.
RAULFF: We have now considered various situations in our investigations into the concept of fate. Afghanistan provides an example of the dilemma of acting in a situation in which we have to choose between evils of equal or different dimensions, evils of
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unequal speed, different effects and different temporalities. You briefly mentioned amechanía, the situation of helplessness when action is no longer possible at all. Finally, you referred to the mishap or accident that occurs suddenly and destroys the normal pattern of life. It seems there is a regular repertoire of situations that constitute our knowledge of the fateful or tragic.
SLOTERDIJK: Such basic situations and the latent or mani- fest consciousness of them are part of the field kit of the drama of humankind. This equipment for dealing with fate was first assem- bled by the ancient poets and philosophers in the form of theatrical performances, or as myths and collections of proverbs, and finally also in the first manifestations of philosophy. These were the pro- visions the people of the emergent high cultures had available for dealing with their journey through life. The diverse types of wisdom always come together at one point: all the versions of ancient con- sultation about fate converge in the warning that humans should never succumb to hubris. Anyone who allows himself to be tempted by arrogance, who feels much too secure in his thick skin, in his high-handedness, in his phallic cockiness, calls down disaster. This brings us back to the spectator problem again, because if the gods generally behave like unaffected, eternally laughing spectators of the world theatre, there is still a scene they don’t watch without intervening in the game, and that is the spectacle of human hubris. If this appears the gods don’t keep calm; they intervene and destroy the cocky people. The gods invented the pathos of distance and they don’t appreciate it when people want to be too similar to them. On the other hand, modesty doesn’t offer adequate security against the inauspicious.