No More Learning

SLOTERDIJK: The philosophical punchline is obvious: exist- ence means returning from eternity. To really live, a person must have death behind him or her. As long as we regard death as exter- mination that lies ahead of everybody, pessimism will engulf us sooner or later. Then the Tiamat, the exterminating chaos that is on our trail, will win out in the end.
OSTEN: That reminds me of Goethe’s classic saying: ‘Death is the stratagem nature employs for having as much life as possible. ’2
2 The quotation is from Goethe’s fragment, ‘Die Natur’ (1780).
With the Babble of Babylon in the Background 317
SLOTERDIJK: That saying can be accentuated even more – I attempted it in the seventh scene of the opera, where I made the soul, the child and the rainbow septet declare the consequences of the mythological process of Babylon. Human existence can only be understood when the individual has liquidated his or her credit at the bank of illusions about eternity. To really live we must have returned from eternity.
OSTEN: Nonetheless, in your Babylonian story, the path through Hell comes before this existentially affirmative return.
SLOTERDIJK: That happens in the sixth scene, in which Inanna embarks on her journey to the Underworld. The Babylonian myth of Inanna’s descent into Hell is probably the oldest example of an Underworld journey in an early high culture. It may give a special thrill to opera lovers because the story of that art form began in the seventeenth century, thanks to the Orpheus legend with the liaison between music and the descent into Hell.
OSTEN: There is one important difference that you introduce into the Babylon libretto: to bring Tammu back to the light of day, Inanna must constantly ‘keep an eye’ on the returnee during his ascent – unlike in the Orpheus story where he wasn’t allowed to turn back towards Eurydice.
SLOTERDIJK: In fact, we had to amend something there: at the beginning it is not the singing man who brings his deceased beloved back from the Underworld, but the staunch, loving woman who reclaims her lover. In principle the conventional narrative of the story of Orpheus and his beloved includes a disastrous message. It reveals why the poet ultimately prefers his mourning for Eurydice to the real return of his beloved. The artist clings to his state of melancholy. If Eurydice really rose from the dead, he would have to relinquish it. That is why he must turn round, so that she falls back into the realm of shadows. Poets’ love is impossible without poets’ lies. We have created an alternative primal scene: it is the eye of the woman that carries the dead man back into the light. Inanna does not need the loss of her lover to be creative. We have to beware of the old web of deceit that binds art to loss and culture to depriva- tion. Of course, Romanticism cast suspicion on the topos of the redemption of man through woman – Gottfried Benn said every- thing that has to be said about the notorious need that men have for redemption, in the case of neurotics in general and Richard Wagner in particular, when he commented that first they behave like pigs and then they want to be redeemed.
OSTEN: But do things look different in Babylon?
SLOTERDIJK: The whole piece is arranged like an appeals procedure against traditional misunderstandings of the myth. We
318 With the Babble of Babylon in the Background
establish the fact that the Babylonian gods had nothing to do with the Flood at all. In the old accounts we read that they fled shivering to the mountaintops to await the end of the catastrophe. First and foremost, the God of Israel had no connection with the Flood – he was only associated with this Mesopotamian story later, in the post- exile period. It follows that he didn’t send the Flood and that he had no powers to promise it would never return. In fact, he is completely outside this story – even though people might have perpetuated the false version of it for the past 2,500 years. The real point is that neither the gods of the Babylonians nor the God of Judaism were involved in causing the Flood. The Flood, with all its awe-inspiring astral drama, was an external cosmological event that was later internalized by means of religion and translated into the language of guilt and sacrificial duty. As regards the feeling of guilt, human beings seem to have been sensitive to it already in the Mesopotamia of pre-antiquity.
OSTEN: This means there was already a connection between guilt, sacrifice and willingness to suffer persecution. That disposed the Babylonians to sacrificial acts, even to human sacrifice.
SLOTERDIJK: If we are not wholly mistaken, those people had an unprecedented talent for feeling guilty – even for things they couldn’t help. If establishing this fact about a people is a compli- ment, we can pass it on to the Babylonians, and if it is a reproach, the Babylonians have to accept that as well. We can observe a dis- position to exaggerated liability even in those early times. Because Babylon anticipated so much of what later made ‘religious’ history, I have taken the liberty of dating the father–son relationship familiar to us from the Christian Trinity back to Babylon. I have portrayed the priest-king in such a way that, just like the Father of the Trinity, he sacrifices his best beloved, in this case his young friend from the Jewish guest population, to ward off repetition of the worst case.
OSTEN: You also deal with the abolition of human sacrifice, which was an immense cultural step in the development of human- ity. You derive that from a simple cosmological interpretation of the events.
SLOTERDIJK: If the gods weren’t involved in the great disaster at all they couldn’t have any interest in sacrifices being made to avoid a repetition. The heavens – as understood in cosmological and meteorological terms – constitute a factor beyond divine power. Because God and gods didn’t cause the Flood, we don’t need to beg them to protect us from another flood. The gods have nothing to do with the cosmic disaster. Consequently, after the end of the Flood there was no need for a new covenant between God and human beings. Whatever could the people on Earth be guilty of? After all,
With the Babble of Babylon in the Background 319
they were at the mercy of a reality in which an ultimate terror like the Flood could happen. The rainbow in the sky after the Flood does not mean that God, after venting his wrath on the sinful mob, returned to calm reflection, as the biblical narrative suggests. If we want to make a symbol out of the rainbow, it stands for people finding the courage to carry on after the worst has happened. It inspires them to unite with each other against blind fate.
OSTEN: Your libretto also says that a Flood can always recur. And – that the old rainbow is obsolete. This corresponds to Nietzsche’s insight in The Gay Science, telling us we have to learn ‘to live dangerously’. Only heightened awareness of finiteness keeps people wakeful.
SLOTERDIJK: Tammu says this expressis verbis: the Flood is never over. We have to get used to the idea that life is always in danger. The possibility of being cut short is part of things. It is always about defining the post-Flood situation. Is there a happy, successful life after the catastrophe?
OSTEN: ‘Maximal terror’ is a key concept, not only of your opera project but also of the general theory of religion. In the end, don’t the historical religions base their power on their insistence on fear? I read your libretto as if you wanted to express formal rejection of religious phobocracy, one more time. In your piece, love finally triumphs over fear in operatic style – and at the same time this indi- cates the end of religion as the hegemony of fear.
SLOTERDIJK: As you rightly say, in operatic style. Modern opera history begins, as we know, with the Orpheus myth – many composers have been fascinated by the story, from Monteverdi to Gluck. In Gluck’s version the plot ends with the triumph of love – contrary to the text of the myth, which has Orpheus losing Eurydice again. We reconstruct the Orphic setting by playing it through once more with a changed cast.
OSTEN: In other words, the victory of love gives your opera an affirmative-positive ending?
SLOTERDIJK: One realizes why the happy end is justified if we pursue the question of why love should triumph in European music. We should remember that modern music since the seven- teenth century has staged a kind of parallel action to religion and philosophy. From that time on, traditional religion became increas- ingly self-enlightened: it went through a major historical process of ‘undarkening’ – becoming less and less dark. It couldn’t bear its own darkness any more, shook off its phobocratic mission and became transformed from an object of enlightenment into its vehicle – at least in its best aspects. Its latent theme is lightening up the world. Its mission is to extend the friendship zone. It may be that God is
320 With the Babble of Babylon in the Background
at the beginning of ultimate terror because he not only unleashed Hell on Earth but followed that up by demanding supreme sacrifice. Nevertheless, reformed religion finally got to the point where it could say ‘God is love’ again.
OSTEN: Does it follow that the development of Christianity after Constantine and Augustus, which was marked by fear, was based on a monstrous distortion of the earlier realization that occurred at some points, particularly in the works of some Jewish prophets, that ‘God is love’?
SLOTERDIJK: Enlightenment is actually nothing but the process of critique of myths that results in overcoming the terror of sacrifice. This work on myth began early on in the ancient world. We tune into this work. That’s why I have used the key phrase of the Old Testament twice in this piece, in the intermezzo and in the final scene: ‘For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowl- edge of God rather than burnt offerings. ’3 Widmann thought a text like this demanded an invisible choir, male voices in octaves, a bass part and a tenor part, lofty, mysterious and magically benign. In Mesopotamia, a world dominated by fear, this message bursts in like a gospel. That is the Enlightenment in the tone of the first mil- lennium before Christ.
OSTEN: In your book The Aesthetic Imperative, you wrote that the art of the modern era emerged at the end of the Middle Ages when the wondrous was emancipated from wonder. Isn’t that exactly what you have presented once again in your libretto? Why do you describe your opera as a fairy tale?
SLOTERDIJK: As regards categorization, Jörg Widmann and I have disagreed almost from the beginning, and we are very likely to end up with a Solomonic solution by which we are both right. He wants to call the Babylon enterprise purely and simply ‘An opera in seven scenes’. And he is right, because if you are looking for a kind of operatic musical work that belongs to the improbable category that opera has become in recent years, we can say that Babylon is an opera from the first to the last note. As far as I am concerned, if we have to give it a label I would like to point more clearly to the fantastical stage machinery. Widmann’s position is clear. What he has composed is grand opera. What I have written is a libretto for an operatic-type marvel, a story that shows how things that are won- derful can achieve miracles on a big stage with technical know-how. Schikaneder, for instance, unashamedly described his Magic Flute as a ‘mechanical fairy tale’. The generic name shows that people
3 Hosea 6:6, ESV.
With the Babble of Babylon in the Background 321
in the eighteenth century had no inhibitions about imagining the machine as the servant of the wondrous. The Magic Flute already belonged to the age of special effects.
OSTEN: There are plenty of those effects at the end of your libretto in the sixth and seventh scene. The wondrous really succeeds there. It succeeds because Death makes an exception. And it suc- ceeds because the soul, which seemed to be the great loser to begin with, manages to move beyond the position of loss, finally leaves the melancholic position and is transformed into a sun.
SLOTERDIJK: The wondrous ushers in an exceptional situation. At the decisive moment, Death says, ‘You shall have the exception! ’ OSTEN: Suddenly a kind of productive madness erupts in Death’s mood, a fluctuation which gives rise to the astonishing event. Nonetheless, in the prologue to the story, and in an epilogue, you bring in the disturbing figure of the Scorpion Man who proph- esies disaster against the backdrop of a devastated city. What is the
meaning of this mysterious figure?
SLOTERDIJK: I go back to this figure from the Epic of
Gilgamesh to describe the intervention of the sceptical position into the mythical world, a world in which initially only positive forces and affirmations exist, but where there is no doubt, no distance from ritual and tradition, and no problematic interior world. The Scorpion Man’s appearance actualizes the possibilities of the exam- ined life.
OSTEN: In your essay, ‘La Musique retrouvée’,4 you suggest that music is the real religion of modernity. It is the medium of a positive relationship to the world, yet at the same time it acknowledges the call of the deep.
SLOTERDIJK: Important music is always related to the redis- covery of lost music – that is the psycho-acoustic thesis I developed many years ago in a different context. Great music of the kind that flourished in Europe from the seventeenth century onward implies friction between what we have already heard and what we have not heard yet. Curious listeners are open to hearing something new, but are searching for a lost sound at the same time. Knowing this imme- diately gives you a simple guideline for what a modern libretto has to achieve. It should offer the composer the opportunity to explore, in his or her own way, the argument between what we have already heard and what we have not heard yet, between familiar music and new music. I think the cooperation between Jörg Widmann and
4 Peter Sloterdijk, ‘La musique retrouvée’, in Der aesthetische Imperativ (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag), 2014, pp. 8–28.
322 With the Babble of Babylon in the Background
myself has confirmed this assumption. If I were to characterize our collaboration, I would say it was rather like conceptual chamber music. I think we both know more than we did before about the utopia of listening to one another.
Bernhard Klein: Editorial Note
BERNHARD KLEIN Editorial Note
Michel de Montaigne: The most fruitful and natural exercise of the mind, in my opinion, is conversation. 1*
Friedrich Nietzsche: In a dialogue, there is only one single refraction of thought: this is produced by the partner
in conversation, the mirror in which we want to see our thoughts reflected as beautifully as possible. 2*
Peter Sloterdijk: As paradoxical as all this may sound, these duplications of the ego onto the seeker and what is sought, the questioner and he who answers, the present self and the self that is yet to belong inexorably to the structure of an impassioned existential search for truth. 3*2*
Peter Sloterdijk engages in dialogue on many different public platforms. He has given hundreds of interviews in the German and international press, including in Austria, Switzerland, France, Holland, Italy, England, Poland and the USA. His interviews are an important part of his work both as a public intellectual and as a philosopher. He is not shy of attention and is open to, and uses,
1* Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Ch. VIII – Of The Art of Conference, at: <https://www. gutenberg. org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h. htm>.
2* Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human – A Book for Free Spirits, Section 374, Dialogue, 1879, at: <http://www. lexido. com/EBOOK_ TEXTS/HUMAN_ALL_TOO_HUMAN_BOOK_ONE_. aspx? S=374>. 3* Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1989, p. 22.
324 Bernhard Klein: Editorial Note
all kinds of channels for disseminating his ideas: radio, television, internet, (specialist) periodicals, newspapers, conference paper col- lections, exhibition catalogues, advertising brochures and newsprint supplements.
Sometimes the present editor had to go to unusual lengths to excavate some of the sources. One memorable occasion was a visit to the underground air raid shelter of the Evangelical Press Archive of Munich University Library.
Sloterdijk has described the interview as a highly artificial form of rhetoric that first has to be refined and polished before it reaches the public:
I think the interview is a special form that has evolved out of the construct of the rhetorical question. Since the days of oratory in ancient times, the rhetorical question has been a question the speaker asks himself and then usually answers as well. This has only changed in modern times in the sense that the rhetorical question and the rhetorical answer are divided between two people.
(. . . ) It usually succeeds when both sides have reworked it enough, in other words, when the last traces of the original situation, which merely creates the raw material for the end product, have been eliminated. 4*
This kind of reworking for publication fits with Sloterdijk’s tendency towards hyperbolical (exaggerated) philosophizing and assertion. He takes a stand against the people who play on understatement in our culture, and he emphasizes that
by definition, a being with a neocortex can never be over- challenged – because we use fully at most seven to eight per cent of what we have, and even geniuses use only a tiny amount of their potential. In other words the question is how to put an end to the lack of mental challenge of human beings by human beings. For several hundred years, ‘enlightenment’ was the catchword for saying that the systematic underselling of human beings by human beings is a scandal that can’t be maintained any longer if we humans succeed in identifying with the most intelligent members of our species. 5*3
4* Peter Sloterdijk, interview with Christian Thiele in Karlsruhe on 15 January 2010, available at: <https://www. youtube. com/watch? v=_ZK ziG1xMw4>.
5* Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Baden-Badener Disput’, German TV broadcast, November 1992.
Bernhard Klein: Editorial Note 325
Sloterdijk is an exaggerator in the best sense of the term: a person who overstates and surprises, a man with an overview. He is a diagnostician of our times, constantly busy but apparently never over-challenged.
As a protagonist on the existential stage of thought and truth, Sloterdijk often exposes himself to criticism and the risk of failure. His path of development, from his beginnings as a powerfully elo- quent writer to an award-winning rhetorician, is admirable.
His book Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason], originally published in German by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1983, is one of the best-selling philosophical works of the twentieth century. This book marked Sloterdijk’s entry into a media discourse that has lasted more than thirty years. He is not afraid to engage openly in public discussion about theses that are sometimes tucked away in ornate language and metaphors in his books.
The number of interviews he has given has risen exponentially since the 1980s. While his media presence was relatively easy to track in the 1980s and 1990s, in the 2000s he gave an overwhelming number of interviews.
Looking at the present volume, in formal terms we can distinguish between Sloterdijk’s short interviews (e. g. , ‘Uterus on Wheels’), medium-length interviews (e. g. , with Felix Schmidt) and long ones (e. g. , with Macho, Raulff). Two of the longer type were previ- ously published separately in German as Selbstversuch with Carlos Oliveira (Conversation with Carlos Oliveira) 1994, and Die Sonne und der Tod with Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs (The Sun and Death) 2001.
Sloterdijk’s interviews are often linked to publication of his books or related reading tours. They are intended to back up and explain his socio-political position. (At the time of writing he is planning to set up an institute for psycho-political research. )
The interview subjects range from (international) politics, eco- nomics and history to topics such as sport, cinema, culture and philosophy.
Below is a short general outline of the interviews, listed as random key topics: global economic crisis, banlieu, Tour de France, foot- ball world championship, Daniel Goldhagen, spheres, bubbles, globes, world estrangement, cynicism, Crystal Palace, greenhouse, rage, globalization, capital, television, interview, asceticism, design, half-moon men, automobile men, Beethoven, [Helmut] Kohl, the post-war period in Germany, architecture.
When the media start sensationalizing his ideas, Sloterdijk has his own way of analysing how the ensuing debate proceeds.
Players and opponents are often identified as competitors in these debates. Many contemporary German philosophers don’t consider
326 Bernhard Klein: Editorial Note
it important to intervene in such discussions. They would rather continue as ‘thinkers in ivory towers’ than be ‘thinkers on stage’.
Sloterdijk has initiated the following debates in the German media:
●● – the debate on the ‘wasted Enlightenment’ (Critique of Cynical Reason, originally published in German in 1983)
●● – the controversy about ‘high’ versus ‘low culture’ (Blick zurück auf Dorn, [Look Back at Dorn], Munich Kammerspiele, Peter Sloterdijk–Julian Nida-Rümelin, 1999)
●● – the debate about the lecture ‘Rules for the Human Zoo’, and subsequently about genetic engineering (Peter Sloterdijk–Jürgen Habermas, started 1999)
●● – the ‘taxation debate’ (Peter Sloterdijk–Axel Honneth, started 2009).
Peter Sloterdijk isn’t afraid of getting involved in topical issues by using his gift for formulation to make public statements. He frequently indulges in digressions, inventing new terms or using analogies to illuminate the topic in question. His accurate, captivat- ing power of judgement often enables him to see general events and situations from a totally new perspective (the technique of reversal).
The author’s elaborate language and his artistry in changing his position and perspective provide unusual and convinc- ing insights and revelations. (. . . ) Under Sloterdijk’s gaze, familiar aesthetic phenomena are transformed into sources of surprise. 6*
Sloterdijk’s books and his interviews contain subtle neologisms and formulations that journalists and columnists gladly adopt and adapt as catchwords and headlines. This is reflected in many of the titles of the interviews.
Collecting interviews in a book offers the chance to make scattered, ephemeral pieces accessible.
The present volume can contribute to rediscovering Sloterdijk as a communicator and provocative thinker. It contradicts the idea that nothing is more boring than yesterday’s newspapers or websites. The interviews are entertaining and inspir- ing to read, and clearly illustrate Sloterdijk’s way of thinking. They preserve something that was spoken for the moment – and reveal him as a lively, inventive conversationalist. These ‘retrieved media pieces’ are gems, fragmentary ideas or surprises waiting to be discovered.
Appendix
The following is a list of works by Peter Sloterdijk referred to in this book. The works are listed in order of appearance in the original German, with the English edition below.
Kritik der zynischen Vernunft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983. Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Der Denker auf der Bühne: Nietzsches Materialismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986.
Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Der Zauberbaum: Die Entstehung der Psychoanalyse im Jahr 1785. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987. No English translation.
Eurotaoismus: Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989.
Eurotaoism: Sketch for the Project of a Critique of Political Kinetics. Cluj-Napoca, Romania: IDEA, 2004. Weltfremdheit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993. No English translation.
Falls Europa erwacht: Gedanken zum Programm einer Weltmacht am Ende des Zeitalters ihrer politischen Absence. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994. No English translation.
Sphären I – Blasen, Mikrosphärologie, 1998; Sphären II – Globen, Makrosphärologie, 1999; Sphären III – Schäume, Plurale Sphärologie, 2004. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag.
328 Appendix
English editions: Spheres I: Bubbles, trans. Wieland Hoban, 2011; Spheres II: Globes, trans. Wieland Hoban, 2014; Spheres III: Foam, forthcoming. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)/ Foreign Agents.
Regeln für den Menschenpark: Ein Antwortschreiben zu Heideggers Brief über den Humanismus, 1999.
‘The Elmauer Rede: Rules for the Human Zoo. A Response to the Letter on Humanism’, trans. Mary Varney Rorty. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27/1 (2009): 12–28. Available at: <http://web. stanford. edu/~mvr2j/sloterdijk. html>.
Nicht gerettet. Versuche nach Heidegger, 2001.
Not Saved: Essays After Heidegger. Cambridge: Polity, forthcoming.
Luftbeben. An den Quellen des Terrors. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002. Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e),
2009.
Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005. In the World Interior of Capital: Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalization, trans. Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.
Derrida. Ein Ägypter. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007.
Derrida, an Egyptian: On the Problem of the Jewish Pyramid, trans.
Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity, 2009.
Zorn und Zeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007.
Rage and Time, trans. Mario Wenning. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2010.
Gottes Eifer: Vom Kampf der drei Monotheismen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007.
God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms, trans. Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity, 2009.
Scheintod im Denken – Von Philosophie und Wissenschaft als Übung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010.
The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice, trans. Karen Margolis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Du mußt dein Leben ändern. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009.
You Must Change Your Life, trans. Wieland Hoban. Cambridge:
Polity, 2013.
Die nehmende Hand und die gebende Seite. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010. No English translation.
Der ästhetische Imperativ. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014. The Aesthetic Imperative. Cambridge: Polity, forthcoming.