No More Learning

DAUK: Isn’t the dark side of man only half the truth?
SLOTERDIJK: It is the forgotten half of the truth. What matters now is to continue thinking about the cognitive insights of anthro- pology in such a way that we remain within the continuum of Western learning processes and can still discuss and debate on an equal footing with a Taoist sage, an Indian sadhu and an ecstatic Hasid.
2
WHY ARE PEOPLE MEDIA? Interview with Jürgen Werner*1
WERNER: We usually think of media as apparatuses that trans- mit pictures and sound – but you argue that people are media. Why? SLOTERDIJK: To be a medium means to occupy the middle in a field of at least three elements. That is a phenomenon people are aware of nowadays particularly in relation to technical media. We have radio receivers. We have television receivers. If Mr A. wants to send Mr B. a quick message he uses what we call a new medium, a telephone or a fax machine. Now, cultural anthropology has shown that media are not originally apparatuses, but people. It is modern- ism that first led us to shift the role of transmitter from people to apparatuses. This displacement drama hides the business secrets of
modernity.
WERNER: When people act as transmitters, what are they
transmitting between?
SLOTERDIJK: Firstly, as with the apparatuses, they are trans-
mitting between two communicating sides. This is easy to explain if you think of travelling salesmen, who played an enormous role in antiquity because they fulfilled the function of international com- muters. They were people who commuted between self-contained cultures. It would be wrong to imagine the world of that time as it is today, a world of tourists. Reconstructing the age of settled life
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Jürgen Werner appeared under the title ‘Warum sind Menschen Medien, Herr Sloterdijk? ’ [Why are People Media, Mr Sloterdijk? ], in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Magazin (9 September 1994): 54f.
Jürgen Werner was an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung until 1998, first in the Sports section, then at FAZ-Magazin.
8 Why Are People Media?
requires people of our times to envisage a bygone form of life that was largely shaped by what Benedictine monks called stabilitas loci, being settled in one place. This makes the people in settled cultures who saw more than one village or town extraordinarily important. They seemed like a prefiguration of messengers from the world beyond. In antiquity there was a social class of itinerant preach- ers, philosophers, educators and rhetoricians who travelled from village to village and from town to town and tried to communicate their worldly wisdom, their tricks and their doctrines to different audiences. They are the actual ancestors of those we call ‘experts’ or ‘consultants’ today. At the same time they are representatives of what I call ‘personal mediumism’. Incidentally, the phenomena of personal mediumism are totally rational. That is a very important point for me. Since the nineteenth century, the concept of the per- sonal medium has been consigned to the occult sphere, the idiot’s corner. Nowadays people who hear voices quickly receive gener- ous doses of psychiatric treatment. This makes it very difficult for anybody to use the term ‘medium’ in ordinary speech today. I am interested in developing mediumism as an anthropological term with such broad scope that it will be impossible to make a statement about a person without saying in which medial system he or she lives.
WERNER: Being a medium means being able not to oppose something but to be open towards something different. Can you also oppose things you are enthusiastic about? Musil once said a man can’t be angry at his own time without suffering some damage. Are we damaged if we don’t let ourselves be affected by the flow of our times?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, seriously damaged, in fact. ‘Going against the flow’ is merely a metaphor for withdrawing from the flow – drying out. It is a way of describing the fundamental schizophrenic disturbance that applies to the whole situation of modern people, to the extent that they typically represent the results of a centuries- long history of de-spiritualization. The de-spiritualized individual stands at the edge of everything like an absolute onlooker, a final consumer. The sum of de-spiritualized persons amounts to the con- temporary population of last people. That is something that justifies the phrase, ‘to forfeit his soul’. 1
WERNER: Do we have to give up the ideal of independence if we see man as a medium?
1 ‘For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? ’ (Mark 8:36, ESV).
Why Are People Media? 9
SLOTERDIJK: We have to conceive independence very differ- ently. Independence only happens by stepping up our participation, not by continuing to invest in the ideal of coolness. Coolness is the meta-symptom of a post-religious situation. It is the major symptom of a generation that doesn’t even bother to dip its feet into the stream it emerged from to test how the temperature was. This investment in not letting the intellect flow, sitting coolly on the riverbank as the last man or woman, influences the conditions under which we as teachers find our students today, but also under which we meet with adults in our role as consultants. De-spiritualization is the lowest common denominator of contemporary ‘spiritual’ life.
WERNER: Couldn’t we see it as a reaction to being overchal- lenged, related to the present generation seeing and hearing so much through electronic media that it raises the sensation threshold?
SLOTERDIJK: I’m very sensitive to any discussion about being overchallenged, because the term has become a universal excuse for people, and actually misses the point. The idea nowadays is that people shouldn’t be spurred on any more; instead, they should be reassured they shouldn’t feel guilty for not being the way they are supposed to be. But in fact people need challenges, they can’t stand being unchallenged any longer, and they rebel against being expected to reduce their existence to a state of stupidity and lack of achievement. Basically the whole society, with very few exceptions, is in a kind of psychological strike against the world. We don’t want to use our intelligence. Even our brains carry the message: work to rule. That is the real disaster of this period, the 1990s.
WERNER: Can electronic media help people to stop this strike or do they hamper this?
SLOTERDIJK: The electronic media are actually very counter- productive. They foster the cool, half-moronic, smiling person who is on strike. But that is not their ultimate definition. They are not defined by their use. I don’t know what is in the technological nature of television that condemns it to broadcast programmes of the quality it does. If we gave humans another hundred years, I think we would reach a new state of balance between our personal media and electronic media. The latter are obviously profoundly necessary for evolution. They synchronize people in large political spaces. We have been able to observe this principle at work since the begin- ning of the written word, which should be interpreted as a form of rational telepathy. If an imperial decree was written in Rome and a courier took it out of the palace, it was intended to be decipher- able in Carthage and capable of being translated into some kind of action or ideas. This rational telepathy organized communication of power in large areas. The social synthesis through writing is, of
10 Why Are People Media?
course, preceded by another synthesis, namely that arising through imperial power, military power. And if we pursue this and place the need for synthesis at the basis of modern society, then we also understand why the media are like they are.
WERNER: If the media develop as we are told, in a few years we will have more than a hundred TV channels. In other words, instead of global synthesizing, people will be completely separated from each other. Does that mean nobody will look at what anybody else has watched, and each person will only be aware of his or her own programme?
SLOTERDIJK: I think all these scenarios are wrong. Even with multiple channels, an interesting niche will emerge here and there. We shouldn’t worry too much about how this is developing. It is more likely that society will revert to the experience of de-spiritu- alization in an even harsher form than is already the case. But the tendency towards the electronic kiosk will also open up a field of additional gadgets. This is where the big opportunity lies. Many people in our culture have nothing to do any longer; there is high unemployment, even more inside people themselves than in the outside world, and this creates an immense need for micro-dramas.
WERNER: What would a society look like in which basic forms of sensitivity, openness and the right kind of independence could be strengthened? And what role would electronic media play in this?
SLOTERDIJK: I think electronic media will simply replace schools. I have high hopes of this.
WERNER: But wouldn’t that be alienation from personal encounters again?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, but it would be alienation from personal teaching that is already alienated anyway. For today’s generation, their teachers’ outlook is an initiation into stupidity as a normal state. The average teacher represents the result of an education process that fosters parroting. Those thirteen years of classes are such an obscene spectacle that it’s actually a miracle anybody gets through that kind of teaching by example. It would be a good thing if everything in school teaching that relies on spreading the word, on the syllabus and on academic subjects, were to disappear. All of that is a major assault on human intelligence. The electronic media are an excellent barrier against that. In ten years all subjects could be computerized in a fantastic, lively, entertaining way. Teachers will not be able to keep up. The coolness system is also related to the institutionalization of stupidity through state schools. The chil- dren sit around in those compulsory classes becoming increasingly defeatist, increasingly defeated and increasingly listless. Of course, as a new father, I must worry about things that never bothered me
Why Are People Media? 11
before. I’m already horrified at the thought of teachers I know. If I imagined having to hand my child over to people like that for five hours a day I would become a crazed killer – or somebody who wants to change the world for the better. And as long as my rela- tionship to violence remains as tenuous as it is now I will probably opt for the ludicrous task of improving the world.
WERNER: What has to happen for modern people to rediscover themselves as a medium?
SLOTERDIJK: Cultural criticism always attacks the mass media. I don’t think that makes sense. We should look more closely at the work of deformation that starts deeper down, especially because it involves so much demoralization. Something gets destroyed there that should not be destroyed under any circumstances – the aware- ness that knowledge is born out of euphoria and that intelligence is a relationship of the happy consciousness with itself. And that intelligence partly consists in the ability to find our own ways of overcoming the boredom that develops in an under-used brain. Across society as a whole, the most disturbing symptom is that people are no longer ambitious enough to plumb the limits of under- standing within themselves. Intelligence is the last utopian potential. The only terra incognita humankind still owns are the galaxies of the brain, the Milky Ways of intelligence. And there is hardly any con- vincing space travel in them. Incidentally, this internal astronautics is the only alternative to a consumerist perspective. It is the only thing that could explain to people in the future that their intelligence space is so immense that they can experiment with themselves for millennia without becoming exhausted. The really good news is that there is something breathtakingly great that is called intelligence and is uncharted. Who is willing to volunteer? The volunteers of intelligence are eo ipso its media.
3
WORLD ESTRANGEMENT AND DIAGNOSIS OF OUR TIMES
Interview with Andreas Geyer*
2
GEYER: Professor Sloterdijk, looking at your publications, for some time now two opposite extremes have been discernible. On the one hand, there is your intense focus on Gnosis or mysticism. Three years ago you compiled a practical reader with commentaries on Gnosis. Last year you published a comprehensive book with the title Weltfremdheit [World Estrangement], in which you attempt to rede- velop forgotten Gnostic themes. Yet we can hardly assume you have become an unworldly mystic. In fact, we could say you seem to be trying harder than ever to keep your finger on the pulse of the time. In the past year alone you have published three volumes of essays in which you take positions on concrete political and social questions. This polarity, of introspection on the one hand and contemporary diagnosis on the other – is it coincidental, or is there something behind it, perhaps even a major new theme of your philosophy?
SLOTERDIJK: To begin with, I agree with how you describe the alternating movement of my work in recent years, a rhythmic alternation in which an introversion is followed by an extroversion and an extroversion by an introversion. The internal structure of the book about world estrangement contains something of this alterna- tion and reflects on it.
It is the slumbering, or forgotten, topic of European philoso- phy, which is, of course, essentially a philosophy of verification
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Andreas Geyer was origi- nally broadcast on Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bavarian Radio) on 2 December 1994.
Andreas Geyer heads the Medical Affairs section at Bayerischer Rundfunk in Munich.
World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times 13
or philosophy of situations, with no understanding of events and rhythms. The fact that humans are beings in the process of coming into the world and departing from it, that humans are beings who awaken and whose attention breaks down, creatures able to with- stand stress but only up to a certain limit: these topics are largely overlooked in philosophy in favour of visions of structure.
I think the kind of philosophy that has a certain anthropological realism in proposing a new language for mankind has no choice but to address this elementary rhythm in which humans are described as really coming-into-the-world and departing-from-the-world. Indeed, this holds not only for the greatest metaphysical pulsation, for expressions of birth and death, but also for the micro-rhythm that characterizes every single hour of every day. In this respect I would say it is merely a continuation of a feature that philosophy has generally exhibited since the nineteenth century, namely getting down off the high horse of absolute reflection and orienting towards the low ground of precise self-observation and merging of logical motifs with anthropological motifs. The place where the intersec- tion of these currents occurs is where, for me, the wave movement develops with a certain inevitability: once outward, once inward, once with one’s back to the world, monologues of the soul, attempts to turn off the world’s main switch. It is an old saying that the last one out turns off the light. The same applies to thinking: the last one turns off the light of existence. And what remains after turning off the light is a voice, a world remainder that is still capable of self- examination – while it is true, of course, that there will never be a self that does not contain deposits of world remainders.
GEYER: You have written that your latest book, Weltfremdheit [World Estrangement], is ‘a phenomenology of the worldless intel- lect, or the intellect turned away from the world’. Could we start by clarifying what you understand by the term ‘world estrangement’ in this context?
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Weltfremdheit’ [World estrangement] is one of those marvellous words that make the German language appear to be philosophizing of its own accord. My ambition – rather like that of Ernst Bloch in relation to the word ‘utopia’ – was to skim off the negative element of this formulation and take the expression seri- ously for long enough for it to be finally accepted as a positive term, actually as a basic concept of philosophy. ‘World’ is not something we live in with no alternative; rather, ‘world’ designates that which we continually turn towards, under the precondition that we have turned away from it previously.
In other words, this involves a rhythmological world concept: ‘world’ is everything that rises and that falls, and in between are
14 World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times
phases of balance and the present and duration. But these phases are all momentary and, of course, the original moment of abstrac- tion of classical philosophy – or of any theory at all – consists in it attempting to create durable propositions and durable discourses. This means that in a particular way it starts off by missing the elementary truth about humans as beings that are sometimes here and sometimes not – and mostly not. Theory is also a form of world estrangement, namely, it is the sleep of reason that believes it is always here. Philosophy and ascesis were two closely related quantities, and philosophy has always been a sort of discipline of permanent wakefulness. Like ancient asceticism, it toyed with the illusion that there was a possibility of imitating God, insofar as this is a God that is ever-wakeful, never sleeping, all-knowing, all-accompanying, a God facing every event. I think it is entirely necessary for philosophy, and for people in general, to develop a language and to propose a form of theory which would make it clear that humans are beings standing by and large with their back to reality. Turning towards reality is the exception, and turning away from everything that is a part of that reality is the rule. That is why I am now using the term ‘world estrangement’ with the assumption it is a basic concept.
GEYER: In other words, you mean that until now in Western philosophy it is exclusively the world-oriented mind that has been socially acceptable, and this has resulted in an important com- ponent of the human mind getting lost – or at least, being barely acknowledged.
SLOTERDIJK: Mind has always been world spirit in a way. This is not just a terminological speciality of Hegel’s – he merely uses it to define the latent trend of all theories of mind. The mind has always been world-oriented and has always been the light spread over things of the world. Knowledge has always been a knowledge of the positive. But it is a non-wakeful knowledge. That is my point. Knowledge and consciousness or, more precisely, knowledge and wakefulness, are two different quantities, and European philosophy was passionate about confusing them. This leads to philosophy being increasingly incompetent in some way to deal with questions of wakefulness and, incidentally, also questions of topicality. A philosopher who touches on topicality is still regarded very much as an unserious member of the discipline. It is a late consequence of the preliminary decision made in very early times that privileged the unambiguous correlation of knowledge and world. But the fact there is a waking that has no world as yet, and that consequently only ‘eavesdrops’ on the world, a waking that somehow derives from the night the idea of the morning – to describe things with
World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times 15
metaphors that meant a lot to Martin Heidegger – those are cir- cumstances that we can see much better by looking at them from this kind of rhythmic viewpoint, and that we can also convey much better in language after having decided on the positive concept of world estrangement.
GEYER: The point of your argument is that the mind turned away from the world as an essential component of human beings has not simply vanished, but is forging ahead today on new paths. Which paths?
SLOTERDIJK: To start with, we should mention the classical paths to what I would call an officially created world estrangement, or turning away from the world. After all, we live in a culture, in a cultural moment, when we can look back on 3,000 years – perhaps even 4,000 years in India – of organized escape or distance from the world. We shouldn’t forget that, until quite recently, intellectual history was essentially the narrative of life forms and thinking of people who lived in retreat. It is a relatively novel idea that intel- lectual history should be the history of a mind oriented towards the world. What we call intellect – and that is why most people turn up their noses when such things are mentioned – is located on a terrain where we are usually confronted with world escapism, ascesis, retreat to the wilderness, and with monasteries, monastic forms of life, etc. . . .
GEYER: But surely those were also the classical paths, weren’t they?
SLOTERDIJK: Those were the main routes, the paths created by an official and noble – this is very important – a noble escape from the world. The world is everything, in a way, that encour- ages humans to turn their back on it. This has been concealed up to now in the traditions of our mental philosophy. One could get the impression that the deconstruction, or the dismantling, of the great systems of mental philosophy has brought human beings into a more wretched situation than ever before, because they were for- cibly incorporated with no alternative into a world that was always presented as positive. We must object to that from the modernist position too: humans remain estranged from the world or turned away from the world to a large extent – even at a time when people no longer interpret themselves as intellectual beings and where the opposition of world children and intellectual humans seems to have ultimately collapsed. Today, even intellectual persons sign a cer- tificate attesting their reality fitness. We have run out of ontological excuses for world escape in the classical sense. We cannot retreat to God during our lives like the saints in the wilderness in Syria in the third and fourth centuries. Some rather vain poets and writers,
16 World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times
in particular, put themselves up on pillars; usually they place their pillars in densely populated areas, as Bertolt Brecht once joked in relation to Stefan George.
GEYER: But where are these ‘pillars’ today? Where do they stand?
SLOTERDIJK: Everybody has his or her private pillar in the bedroom. Now, this may not be a lofty philosophical topic, but the human being as the sleeper is the unknown quantity per se in the history of thought. Not that there hasn’t been a great deal of meaningful and valuable empirical research on sleep in recent years – but that is a matter for psychologists. Philosophy itself seldom crosses the threshold to this perception of the human constitution.
Philosophers do not want to know that they sleep. At most, phi- losophers admit that they know that they do not know. But they hardly admit that they are only rarely awake. They don’t realize that, because they usually express themselves, speak and think when they are here. But they seldom think at twilight. And this temporal shift of the philosophical moment: not thinking at noon, not think- ing in the harsh light of the morning, but at twilight, very early in the morning or very early in the evening, this gives rise to other tones and other perceptions. Nowadays, a kind of Janus position is pos- sible: we can look forward and backward at the same time and know that we are a disappearing person or an arriving person, depending on the direction. If we think on entering or leaving, if we think at those moments and not in the overcrowded middle, and not on this positivist bright day, then we have the view on either side and know that thinking is also a coming and a going. This makes twilight the authentic time of day for a philosophy that has got wise to itself or can look over its own shoulder.
GEYER: We can also artificially induce this sleeping state by using drugs. What can be said about drugs in this context?
SLOTERDIJK: A chapter is devoted to this question in the book Weltfremdheit that you mentioned earlier. I answer the question why humans, from the earliest times of cultures that we know, have been drug users, even if under quite different terms. The term ‘drug’ is a pharmacist’s term and a police term . . .
GEYER: A term we associate today with addiction!
SLOTERDIJK: A term linked to addiction, and the associa- tions seem to hold. They are associations for a phenomenon that first arose in relation to this description. I think the so-called drugs didn’t make people addicted in the past – because they were not drugs, but psychedelic, psychotropic substances, we could almost say ‘theotropic’ substances. In other words, they opened the door to the Sacred, the door to the gods, chemicals that . . .
World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times 17
GEYER: Were used as part of rituals . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Bound up with rituals, rooted in a cult, in which the plant and the god and the person were mutually correlated in a holy triad. The more elaborate the use of drugs in a ritual culture, the more impossible it is to abuse them in the sense of private intoxication. People who took drugs in ancient times did it to give their lives existential and metaphysical input, as some people still do nowadays, whereas today’s drug addicts are people who have fallen into the hands of a dealer who exploits their weakness. They no longer have a metaphysical informer, but a thoroughly empirical trader instead.
GEYER: Does this mean modern drug consumers have nothing more in common with the mystic?
SLOTERDIJK: Well, they still do in a certain way, because everything perverted has something in common with things that are the right way round. I think modern drug addicts are also in search of God to some extent, or in search of fulfilment, to put it more cau- tiously. Drug addicts also have ideas – we don’t know where they come from, but they have these ideas – of what would satisfy them, what would lighten the load of their existence, and particularly what would release them from their hatred of the situation their existence condemns them to. And to the extent they are absolute seekers, that is, people with a manic drive or a manic desire, we might say they probably do have something in common with traditional seekers of God. I think it wouldn’t be totally wrong to say that successful drug therapy occurs mainly where people are not sobered up or dried out in a trivial way and sentenced to a dry reality, but where they can be offered alternative feelings of being high, where they are shown a different kind of vitality and different stimulation, and the ecstasies of withdrawal successfully outweigh the ecstasies of addiction. If that works, then such therapies will work as well. If not, it is difficult to break the vicious circle of repetition compulsion in addiction.
GEYER: I was surprised that in your progress through the dif- ferent forms of flight from the world and quest for God there is one mass phenomenon you did not mention at all. I am thinking of the ‘esoteric wave’ that has been around for some time now. It has lasted too long to be just a passing phenomenon . . .
SLOTERDIJK: You are right. But I must say I do touch on it – indirectly. The tone and choice of subject in my book are at a certain level. It may be arrogant or not, but I overfly the stomping grounds of vulgar esoteric people. That is absolutely right. Anyway, I never wanted – how shall I phrase it? – to produce an encyclope- dia of flight from the world and forms of world escape. I was more interested in the classical forms of flight from the world. I thought
18 World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times
that if I could include a good chapter on Indian spirituality in the book, and if I could find a place for a good chapter on the Freudian theory of the death drive and, above all, if I could give a reasonably adequate account of Platonism and the Socratic art of dying in the book, then I would have dealt in advance, in exemplary form, with everything esotericism talks about, usually as vulgar rehashing. Most of esotericism is nothing but bad philosophy. It is usually an overgrowth of late Platonism that has slunk back into modern pub- lications on a digression via Islam, on a detour via Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox religiosity and on the path via theosophy. Let’s consider the corpus hermeticum, the much-quoted construct that speaks of Hermes Trismegistos, with its legends and sagas. You just have to glance at the texts to see it is degraded stuff from trivial Platonism that simply can’t be compared with the magnificent con- structs of Christian Gnostics or the theology of Origenes, not to mention Plotin. If you know the originals, the highest forms, this spoils you for the type of esotericism sold in bookshops, because the authors of those works are all merely propounding degraded forms of Platonic monotheism, sometimes mixed with Indian-polytheist religiosity.
GEYER: I would go even further in my verdict on ‘esotericism’. It is true that it attracts the most absurd combinations of astrology, tarot cards, the study of German runes, etc. , and usually with a bit of pop psychology as well. But what always makes me wonder, is: how can so many people fall so easily for the most bizarre rituals on the modern esoteric market, but when it comes to the rituals of the Catholic Church the same people suddenly come to their senses and find them absolutely ridiculous? How does that fit together?
SLOTERDIJK: That’s because Christianity is not a religion of being able to let yourself go. This is the whole problem! The only Christians who can let go are the enthusiastic theologians them- selves, the very small number of inspired priests and pastors who experience similar medial ecstasies in the pulpit to the esoteric types. But this is a very, very small minority. Christianity is a religion of dryness. As I describe in a passage in my book, it is based on a sac- rament of withdrawal. In fact, the Eucharistic Communion wafers are not psychedelic substances, and do not have – or, if they ever did, no longer have – the power to cause a reaction like rapture in those who eat them. The sacrament of withdrawal basically aims to make a sober person out of the Christian, a person who shoulders the cross of reality and postpones the ecstasy problem for later, as a post-mortal matter. That is the big difference between esoteric people and mainstream Christians.
In the United States, incidentally, there are a whole lot of
World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times 19
Protestant sub-sects of Christianity that would not fit the descrip- tion you just gave. They are even more esoteric than esoteric people here in Germany, in one respect particularly: they communicate much more to people, attribute more medium-type powers to them and address them even more clearly as possessed by the Holy Spirit. That is what the whole of esotericism ultimately leads to. People want to be possessed again, and they claim something like a natural right to being possessed, or obsession. They don’t tolerate the de- spiritualizing effect of enlightened, scholarly education forever. This explains the mass exodus to the various branches of esotericism. People reach for the first best obsession. They are far from choosy in this respect.
GEYER: It’s a fast-food obsession, of course! Yet it can’t really be an alternative in the long run.
SLOTERDIJK: You’re right, it’s a fast-food obsession. But in the first place it’s not about quality but about the basic experience of being swept away by something or other. People who are not fired by enthusiasm can’t bear themselves for long, and only a very few people achieve the self-admiration that appears in philoso- phy as a borderline possibility. Consequently, people have to buy cheap enthusiasm off the rack. By now these racks are the crammed shelves in any random bookshop, even in the smallest towns in Germany. I don’t know if you have ever been to the United States and had the opportunity to look at the bookstores over there. The situation there is much more extreme. There are big bookstores in which nothing is sold except that type of literature and you get the impression that those are the most prosperous ones. The conclusion I draw is that people are no longer prepared to put up with being disenchanted by the reality definition of mainstream culture. There are a very large number of ‘pirate routes’ into the new obsessiveness, and people practically claim a birthright to being overpowered by something they hope will be stronger at wrestling the devil than they are themselves.
GEYER: Sometimes I suspect that the tendency towards turning away from the world as you define it occurs where we least expect it, namely in modern theoretical physics. If extrapolated, these new cosmological attempts at explanation certainly have mystical and mythical qualities . . .
SLOTERDIJK: I prefer the term ‘mythical’ here . . .
GEYER: But I think ‘mystical’ also applies!
SLOTERDIJK: You are right that natural scientists also infer
a sort of mystical dimension as a marginal value. Why? – Because their investigations lead into an area where the possibility of giving positive answers comes to a complete halt. This is the operation that
20 World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times
the mystics of monotheist religions utilized to focus on the abyss. We know about that from positive theology, which attempted to focus thinking on God by means of the via eminentiae, the way of eminence: think of the biggest thing you can imagine and then think of something even bigger. Conceive God as that which tran- scends your power of explanation. By analogy, physicists who seek the most powerful explanation for the world and then say, ‘That’s not enough, either’, are doing the same thing. Basically, the sheer madness of reasoning has brought you to dissolution, and that is the procedure of mystical thought. As long as it is not an emotional mysticism but a logical mysticism, you arrive in the abyss by way of a pathos of reasoning that has reached a conclusion. We can study that in the case of Meister Eckhart, we can already see it for Plotin, and for Dionysius Areopagita – in fact, for everybody for whom mysticism was not about intoxication and feelings, but a question of taking matters to their logical conclusion. These people exhibit phenomena comparable to the limiting states in natural science in which thought tapers off.
You are absolutely right. This is a neo-mystical trend, even in the strictest form of theory. We should add, however, that the people who propound these theories today are not the strictest characters – they tend to be crossover types. Outstanding physicists are nearly always people who can’t bear working in an office. They share this trait with other eccentrics, not least certain kinds of philosophers. Incidentally, the well-known modern philosophers happily put up with working in offices – that’s exactly what they can be reproached for. In negotiations for job appointments they talk mostly about their office and hardly say anything about their mission.
GEYER: Well, you certainly take swipes at established philoso- phy. For instance, you have written, ‘Anybody who wants to learn to talk over people’s heads in a complex way can’t do better than become a player in the contemporary philosophy business. ’ What do you think is going wrong? What must philosophy do to reach people again?
SLOTERDIJK: Let’s take modern medical recruitment as an example. We have a grading system that results in Grade A students and children from families that aspire to high living standards being favoured for the healing professions because they can expect special advantages. Unsuitable people are being systematically selected on the wrong basis. I think every discipline today in the whole spectrum of sciences is going similarly in the wrong direction. It would be a miracle if philosophy were an exception to this. Of course, academic philosophy is hugely misdirected because the academy as it exists today no longer has any academic spirit but a spirit of competition
World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times 21
for qualifications. We’re talking about big contests for avoiding mistakes. It creates neurotic-compulsive careers, and people who get through that only remain philosophers in exceptional cases. Philosophy is dying as a result of its academic representatives, just as religion – hasn’t yet died, I would say, but has wasted away because of its theologians. We are entitled to claim this rather broad generalization if we are prepared to accept the exceptions. And God knows, in this century there has been a whole series of splendid exceptions – particularly in German philosophy – that still confirm the rule. Heidegger was also an important figure as a university teacher. After the war there were lively figures who breathed new life into the subject. Thank God that happens over and again. In fact, it would be dishonest to scold philosophy in general if we were not prepared to begin with the exceptions. But it’s your fault, you started me off on this topic! Personally I only make such comments in brackets and as asides. I’m not a polemical author at all. My kind of polemics is indirect.
GEYER: Well then, let’s drop this tiresome topic. It seems to me you essentially want to achieve two kinds of synthesis – in your latest book and, I think, in your thought as a whole. In the first stage you tried to reunite widely different faculties such as philosophy, religion, mysticism and psychoanalysis. In the second stage you also crossed cultural borders and tried, for example, to integrate Eastern mysticism and philosophy into your thought. Are you ultimately interested in showing that this Eastern way of looking at the world and people, which is usually more mystical, is not only compatible with the Western way, but possibly even complementary to it?
SLOTERDIJK: My idea is rather different, namely, that the people on earth who now discover they belong to the same species all share a common difficulty. They are gradually working out the ‘disadvantage of being born’ at this point of the planet in different ways and means. Carrying the weight of the world is an art that can be practised in many different ways. I think it is right to say that it is fundamentally the same art. It consists of answers to the burden- some nature of life . . .
GEYER: But you are trying to translate these answers into the same language, to synchronize them . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Not into the same language. All I’m saying is that there is an ecumene, a concentrated area of high culture in rela- tion to problems, but not an ecumene of answers. It’s not so much that the big differences between people are national and cultural; it’s rather that they are very, very deeply idiosyncratic. You have to be more of a novelist than a cultural morphologist to discover these differences. An idiot has different strategies for mastering life than
22 World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times
the cleverest person in the same culture. I’m convinced we should look for the great gap that yawns between people on the level of individual strategies.
One thing is true, however: in every human culture there are people who have an easy life and people who have a hard life. And in every culture those who have an easy life and those who have a hard life have to create a lowest common denominator. The person with the easiest life lives in a group and the person with the hardest life lives in a group and they have to meet somewhere in a shared symbolic continuum. The moment that happens is the moment when something that we call culture today starts to emerge: a total- ity is created that is self-centred and potentially independent from the outside world, a pandemonium of life arts and life forms. The Indians developed such an incredibly rich culture that they spelled out nearly everything humans could be in their own forms. That would be true even if they had not been flanked in the East by the Chinese, to whom exactly the same statement applies, and in the West by the Europeans, to whom the same also applies to the very highest degree. The pandemonic character of culture actually relies on the fact that cultures are precisely these continua: that the hardest life and the easiest life contribute to the symbolic system of their respective cultures, and that we find a common symbolic shell for the easiest and for the most difficult life, for the most casual fri- volity and for the deepest passion. People can live in this shell; these are the famous ‘houses of Being’ that Heidegger spoke of, unfortu- nately in the singular, not the plural – houses of Being that are the containers in which people make their own sense of the enormous size and expanse of the world.
GEYER: Your book on world estrangement ends with something I would almost call pathos, a conciliatory pathos unusual for phi- losophy today. You write: ‘The duty to be happy applies more than ever in times like ours. The true realism of the species consists in not expecting less than is demanded of its intelligence. ’
In other words, you have obviously not lost your faith in human beings. We could even get the impression that you have become more optimistic since the Critique of Cynical Reason . . .
4
UTERUS ON WHEELS Interview with Walter Saller from Der Spiegel*3
SPIEGEL: Why is modern man so obsessed with cars?
SLOTERDIJK: It is an obsessive relationship. The person and the vehicle form a unity in which the vehicle can assume the role of the better ego. It is the faster and more kinetically powerful self that imagines itself in the automobile. I see the unity of person and vehicle as already prefigured in Plato. In general, in every culture that invented the wheel, the wagon and riding, and developed the centaur motif, man with his small strength rides on a bigger animal energy, transformed into a hybrid creature with a human front and the lower body of a horse.
SPIEGEL: Do you mean that traffic planners who only see the car in terms of transportation haven’t understood its real nature?
SLOTERDIJK: Any theory that characterizes cars as a means of transport leaves out a whole dimension: the car is a means both of intoxication and regression. It is a uterus on wheels that has the advantage over its biological model of being linked to independent movement and a feeling of autonomy. And this goes even further: a car is a Platonic cave built around the individual driver, but we don’t sit welded into it. Instead, this private travelling cave offers us the view of a world passing by. The car also has phallic and anal components – the primitive-aggressive competitive behaviour, and the revving up and overtaking which turns the other, slower person, into an expelled turd, almost like in defecation.
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Walter Saller appeared under the title ‘Rollender Uterus’, in Der Spiegel magazine 8 (1995): 130.
Walter Saller is a German journalist.
24 Uterus on Wheels
SPIEGEL: Does that make the catalyser the nappy of anal pleasure?
SLOTERDIJK: The catalyser represents a form of hygiene edu- cation of the automobile self. Civilized people suddenly erupt with all kinds of sinister things when they are sitting at the wheel. In fact, in the car people pass through stages of gradual regression of the adult ego going right back to the intra-uterine mollusc. And at every level of psychological development the car reproduces tensions and aggressions in the process of individuation.
SPIEGEL: To put it more simply: why are so many people aggressive behind the wheel?
SLOTERDIJK: In traffic, regressed egos that often feel attracted by ‘king of the road’ myths and childish projections of royal power clash with each other. Weak people in particular tend to act out such myths aggressively and use the car to express themselves.
SPIEGEL: In other words, the myth of the car must be shattered. How can this be done?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t see any chance at the moment.