To limit risk using probability
calculations?
Sloterdijk - Selected Exaggerations
The effect is very touching.
In this case the house becomes a living-tool – and if living and thinking belong together, the house there is a thinking-tool and a world-tool in one.
By staying in Heidegger’s region I have gained access to some ideas of his that you can’t get simply by reading them.
Incidentally, you don’t find any traces of this at Heidegger’s notorious hut, which is only a humble lean-to, a green-painted shack.
RAULFF: I am pleased that this digression on the sensitivities of the later Heidegger has helped us towards a more positive defini- tion of the concept we are discussing. So far, we have described the topic mostly in negative modes such as compensation, exoneration, excuses, pre-emptive confrontation, etc. I have been meaning to ask you the whole time: can’t you also envisage a legitimate, positive way of using this concept? Do you think it still has a halfway mean- ingful field of application in the present day?
SLOTERDIJK: Are you still talking about fate?
RAULFF: Yes, indeed; I’m sticking to it quite obsessively . . . SLOTERDIJK: Well, the concept remains meaningful, although
today it is used in a narrower sense than in ancient times. The Fates have laid down their shears – they probably had to hand them in at hand-luggage control. The Moirai, the ananke, fate, kismet – we can’t revive all that. It is time for a reformatted, weaker, more modest concept of fate. It’s no secret how we will get it: it will appear for us in the third act of the drama of the history of ideas that began in Europe in the seventeenth century. We have already referred to this. In the first act, fate is swallowed up by the rational version of Being. In Spinoza’s work the world appears as a gesamtkunstwerk composed of causalities. That suspended fate in natural laws, after which fate could retire peacefully because everything happens through good
286 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
imperatives anyway. The necessary and sufficient conditions arrange things between themselves. Fatalism vanishes in universal causality and can then dissolve temporarily into the optimism of the phi- losophy of praxis. To quote a classical warning against superstitious belief in astrology, ‘In your breast are the stars of your fate. ’8 The age of the pathos of self-determination has come, and we just don’t need heteronomous powers of fate any more. But it won’t stay like that for long. After the first naïve wave of practice has crashed, the second phase will start. We are being overwhelmed by the evidence of old and new kinds of heteronomy currently overtaking the anti- fatalism of the Enlightenment. Neo-fatalist concepts have taken over since it became clear that things are going to turn out differently than we imagined. Counter-enlightenment tendencies are celebrating a return match. Oswald Spengler almost believed that deeper minds would always feel attracted to the concept of fate. Even the largest growing organisms on earth, the high cultures, are subject to fate in the form of morphological necessity. The cultures are winding down like plant life or thousand-year-old musical boxes, and our life is synchronized with them. A good part of our latter-day literature on fate is written in this tone. It processes the darkness in our conditions of existence affirmatively – from Goethe’s Primal Words, Orphic to Nietzsche’s amor fati to the retour du tragique. The last motif has been a topic for French authors such as Jean-Marie Domenach, from a Catholic perspective, and Michel Maffesoli, from the stand- point of postmodern pluralism. 9 A while ago we entered the third phase, in which we are just as remote from the Promethean rational- ism of the Enlightenment as we are from the coy irrationalism of the counter-Enlightenment. This is the basic position from which to get a clear overall view of the field. We are at the end of the parable of fate: the Enlightenment neutralization of the concept and its irrationalist revival are followed by post-Enlightenment clarification.
RAULFF: There were occasional objections to this, of course. You have already mentioned Marquard, who used the term ‘fate’ to protest against the technocratic enlightenment’s crazy notion that anything is feasible, and Koselleck does something similar as well. 10
8 ‘In thy breast are the stars of thy fate. ’ (Friedrich Schiller, The Piccolomini, Act II, Scene VI. )
9 Jean-Marie Domenach (1922–97) was a French journalist and writer with a Catholic perspective whose influential book, Le retour de la tragique, appeared in 1963. Michel Maffesoli is a French sociologist specializing in postmodernity and the presence of the imaginary in everyday life.
10 Reinhard Koselleck (1923–2006) was a leading twentieth-century German historian.
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 287
SLOTERDIJK: In my opinion, both of them belong to the cat- egory of Abklärung, ‘clarification’. The great master in this field was, of course, Niklas Luhmann. I was referring to him when I claimed, in the discussion with Heiner Geißler we mentioned at the beginning of this interview, that the most profound incognito of the idea of fate or destiny in the modern age is the concept of ‘differentiation of sub- systems’ that Luhmann used. Maybe he would object, but it seems to me it was a meaningful statement. When Luhmann speaks of dif- ferentiation it sounds almost as if he were telling us ex officio: ‘Not only books, but also systems, have their destinies. ’ The destiny of social systems is that, from a specific degree of complexity onwards, they differentiate functionally of their own accord. We notice this partly from the fact that they become obscure in terms of common sense. As soon as a system has become differentiated you can’t apply everyday reasoning to it any longer because it has become autono- mous and self-referential. Expert reason and everyday reason are estranged from each other. The expert has the task of explaining to the layperson that things in differentiated subsystems function as they function and it can’t be any different even when, and precisely when, it seems absurd to common sense. We can also describe this as follows: when they are differentiated, social systems reach the level at which the people who are the targets of sociological enlighten- ment are required to understand that society has no logical centre and doesn’t produce any true self. Society has no God spots, as it were, where it can look into its own interior. Sociology, too, is only useful to the extent that it understands that it doesn’t really under- stand its subject . . .
RAULFF: Does this mean Luhmann is also on the side of the post-Enlightenment?
SLOTERDIJK: I would call Luhmann the third member of the group of clarifiers next to Koselleck and Marquard. What they all share is the objective irony with which they view the results of his- torical activism. Clarification is always post-optimistic.
RAULFF: In his day Marquard, in particular, represented the position of objection to the social-technological ideology that was still in its original happy state in the 1970s. In other words, he opposed the belief in the feasibility and predictability of everything.
SLOTERDIJK: The concept of fate has needed modernizing from the time we could no longer bring on the kind of crude heavy weaponry of history and ontology that was typical in the nineteenth century. The semantic content of the recycled concept of fate can be dispersed rather more finely now. To give one example of a nuance in meaning that has become detached from the complex of discourses on fatality, let me mention the concept of the irreversible
288 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
as it has developed in thermodynamics and process theory. Whereas human history represents the realm of second chances and of things happening ‘once again’, the sphere of physical processes is defined by unrepeatability and irreversibility. Another example is the concept of inviolability: this expression has had a notable career in theological circles in recent decades. In using it, we are repeating a gesture we have known since the Romantic period: omnipotence of the subject – no thanks! Anyone who says ‘inviolable’ nowa- days is thinking of the ‘mortal coil’ in the theological sense that can’t be shuffled off by any clarification, or by any technological relief.
RAULFF: Theologians are not the only people who talk like that. There are similar cases among aestheticians and phenomenologists: Gumbrecht with his repeated emphasis on the epiphanic presence, Karl Heinz Bohrer with his focus on the aesthetic moment – those are also expressions of inviolability. 11 They relate to instances that can’t be planned and produced, moments of an emotional presence that either appear on their own or withdraw without our being able to protest about it.
SLOTERDIJK: By the way, both Gumbrecht and Bohrer refer to the strongest instance of ‘fate’ in modern German poetry. In Rilke’s eighth Duino Elegy, we hear the sigh: ‘This is what fate means: to be opposite / and to be that and nothing else, opposite, forever. ’ Towards the end of the poem comes the question: ‘Who has turned us round like this, so that / whatever we do, we always have the aspect / of one who leaves? ’ The poet’s lament relates to the fact that for us, as humans in general and individuals of the modern age in particular, unlike for dumb animals, the world no longer represents pure openness. We have stacked up the space before us with projects. Fate is decided here through human beings’ existential orthopaedics. It has failed so fundamentally that we will always be those who turned round, who go away, who are incapable of being present. It seems to me we encounter the concept of fate here in a soft, almost innocent version, because it designates a tragic dowry of civilization, not triumphal and not masochistic, but tinged with melancholy. Heidegger described something vaguely compa- rable when he spoke of the insanity that is inseparable from human beings’ period of residence in the world. Going astray is ensconced in normal existence itself, which has always been in a kind of flight.
11 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is a German-born American literary scholar and professor at Stanford University. Karl Heinz Bohrer is a German essayist and literary scholar.
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 289
Heidegger is almost saying: ‘Being human is being away’ – like the expression ‘Let’s get out of here! ’
RAULFF: May I return to the other point again: is there a pos- sibility for you to integrate the concept of fate into your own work? It seems to me you touched almost directly on the concept a couple of times in the development of your work, from the Critique of Cynical Reason to Eurotaoism and You Must Change Your Life, but you haven’t adopted it personally, if I can put it like that; in a sense you have narrowly squeezed past it. All the same, I would like to ask whether fate might be a positive, interesting concept for you.
SLOTERDIJK: I would say the most interesting concepts are retired concepts.
RAULFF: Concepts in the retirement home for the history of concepts?
SLOTERDIJK: Their retirement is part of their charm. When their service is over, old concepts find a small part-time job now and then. This is how a new use of the concept of fate would appear to me. It has to be brought into play far more casually than in its heyday; it has to become almost feather-light. This reminds me of a passage in Nietzsche’s work I often return to – the song ‘Before Sunrise’ from the third part of Zarathustra. The scenery is imposing: as we can expect from the prophet of the new world age, Zarathustra is already up at dawn, running across the mountains and engaging in dialogue with the heavens before the sun appears. This is where the decisive phrases come – wait, I have to find the place (Sloterdijk leafs through the book): ‘Truly it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach: “Above all things stands the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of accident, the heaven of wanton- ness. ” “Von Ohngefähr” [Lord Chance] – that is the world’s oldest nobility. ’12
RAULFF: That is very beautiful.
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Which I have given back to all things, I have released them from servitude under purpose. ’ At this point we have to interrupt and add a commentary on the metaphysical content of the formula ‘servitude under purpose’. In its strongest form, the idea of fate was not an improvised home remedy for hypochondriacs on cloudy days – it was a world principle placed on a high onto- logical throne; it was the work of the good reason of all things. The philosophical concept of fate appeared at its most splendid in late antiquity in the form of the stoical Heimarmene, who represented
12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books), 1961, pp. 186; 4,209ff.
290 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
something like the sweeping reason of the government of the uni- verse – incidentally, in mythology, Heimarmene was known as the daughter of Ananke. Nietzsche rejected such fictitious ideas of a lofty premeditated necessity in the course of all things by letting chance off the leash:
I have released them from servitude under purpose. I set this freedom and celestial cheerfulness over all things like an azure bell when I taught that no ‘eternal will’ acts over them and through them. I set this wantonness and this foolishness in place of that will when I taught: ‘With all things one thing is impossible – rationality! ’ A little reason, to be sure, a seed of wisdom scattered from star to star – this leaven is mingled with all things: for the sake of foolishness is wisdom mingled with all things. A little wisdom is no doubt possible; but I have found this happy certainty in all things: that they prefer – to dance on the feet of chance.
These lines were written on the Independence Day of modern thought – and inevitably they deal with the emancipation of the coincidental. Nietzsche still employs the metaphysical language of thunder and lightning in some places, but on this subject he has already changed to contingency thought. This much remains today from good old fate: Luhmann’s theorem of double contingency. A system in which everything could be different relates to an environ- ment in which everything could also be different. But the fact it is actually the way it is involves a touch of fatefulness.
RAULFF: And would that be your answer as well?
SLOTERDIJK: In principle, yes, as long as it means the eman- cipation of the coincidental. I really like terms that are out of commission. Antiquated concepts contain riches you can discover by chance as if you were clearing out the attic. A word like ‘fate’ is an archive in itself. That reminds me of Gottfried Benn’s remark: ‘Words, words – nouns! They only need to open their wings and millennia drop off from their flight. ’13
RAULFF: I think that’s wonderful.
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Fate’ is the kind of word from whose flight the millennia drop off.
RAULFF: The concept in itself is a gigantic theory novel, a novel of thought. So far we have only unpacked a couple of expressions
13 Gottfried Benn, ‘Epilog und lyrisches ich’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, ed. Dieter Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes), 1968, p. 8.
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 291
and metaphors from the crate, but it is quite astonishing what that revealed.
SLOTERDIJK: We have indicated a few examples of mythi- cal and terminological conceptions of the fateful in the Western tradition. Aside from this, we shouldn’t forget that there is an inde- pendent oriental world of theory, namely the Indian, which has had a concept such as karma for 2,500 years. This covers much of what Eastern philosophers have experienced or devised on moral causal- ity, long-term relations of culpability, coincidences of incarnation, and existential inequalities and their future compensations. India belongs to a world sphere that, seen as a whole, had a far lower level of technological and political freedom than the Western sphere. As soon as you open up to its culture you feel something of the domi- nant need there to react to prevailing conditions with far more soul, many more gods and much more asceticism.
RAULFF: Doesn’t that also mean, with far more poetry?
SLOTERDIJK: It is true that the people of the Indian hemisphere were condemned to produce an interior world from very early times, just like the people of the bygone days when Europe was still called the Occident. In this state of the world, the way outward was largely blocked and the external facts were not very inspiring. Only enor- mous achievements of practice and recasting make the world and life bearable. To explain with an analogy, I am fond of recalling the ancient European tradition of constellations that modern people hardly know about any more – at most they know Ursa Major or Orion’s Belt. In antiquity every halfway-educated person knew the forty-eight constellations like the back of their hand, and each of the constellations was associated with innumerable stories. The constellation-studded sky was evidence of how earlier people had vested the external world with excess matter from their inner world. In this state of the world the concept of fate assumes enormous importance because it simulates a kind of grammar for recasting good and bad fortune. A single star starts off being nothing but a meaningless point of light, part of a constellation, a cipher. This is how apparently meaningless coincidences are woven together in an ad hoc fabric of meaning. The concept of fate indicates the psycho- logical work that will be necessary if people want to recast chance into something meaningful and liveable. Only well-insured people like us in the modern age have been able to emancipate themselves from chance. Only in technological culture can one travel with such light psychological baggage as we have grown accustomed to carrying. Most of the generations before us didn’t have that kind of relief from burdens. They had to try to understand the world like a big carpet with a pattern that is too big to be recognizable, but they
292 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
still wanted to believe absolutely in its existence. In its most human form, the idea of fate was the core element of the belief that we our- selves are threads and figures in a divine carpet-weaving workshop.
II. Marbach Conversation
RAULFF: Mr Sloterdijk, to follow up and round off our first meeting of several months ago, today we should talk about some topics that we didn’t mention last time. I am thinking mainly about the symbolism of fate in early modernism, especially Fortuna with all her attributes, each of which is extremely interesting in its own right . . .
SLOTERDIJK: And each of which would merit a large exhibi- tion. Fortuna’s classical attributes are the helm, the sail, the wheel that rises and falls, the cosmos sphere on which the goddess bal- ances, the globe and its miniature versions, the ball and the lottery ball. Today, unfortunately, nobody gives a thought any more to the symbolic sources of the countless balls that we play with in present mass culture.
RAULFF: Except for Horst Bredekamp, who is interested in the ball games of the Medici . . . 14
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, he is one of the few contemporary scholars of visual imagery to have examined these topics. But the whole theme of balls, globes and spheres has a miserable existence in the margin of the official attention system.
RAULFF: What is the reason for this? Is it perhaps because, despite Huizinga,15 people haven’t taken the game seriously in terms of its function for cultural creativity? Or is it that playing games has always been associated with a kind of vagueness? With an inherent shakiness?
SLOTERDIJK: I think you’re right. For a very long period vagueness and shakiness were unpopular with theorists – they disliked them. One exception is Paul Valéry’s work, where we can still see the morose, classical-rationalist type of character with a visceral abhorrence of anything approximate. On the other hand, we can only understand something about the twentieth-century
14 Horst Bredekamp is a German art historian. Raulff is referring to his book: Horst Bredekamp, Florentiner Fußball. Die Renaissance der Spiele. Calcio als Fest der Medici (first published 1993; revised edition, Berlin: Wagenbach, 2001).
15 Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) was a Dutch historian and cultural theorist who played a major role in developing modern cultural theory.
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 293
culture of rationality if we view it as constantly extending the zone of calculability. It is an enterprise to bring labile factors, all kinds of vagueness, enthusiasms and turbulences into the realm of exact thought. In the Europe of old, these unstable entities were treated as mythological forms; uncertainties were attributed to divine moods or predestination. But probability calculations began to appear in the seventeenth century, and since the twentieth century we have been able to apply chaos theory, fractals and algorithms to every- thing crooked, twisted and tattered.
We don’t talk about Fortune nowadays, of course, but about risk. That presupposes a leap into a different discursive order. For an author like Petrarch it was still right and proper to survey the whole field of existential instability with a collection of exemplary stories or novellas about good and bad luck. Research tells us that his gigantic book De remediis utriusque fortunae16 was one of the most frequently copied secular manuscripts of the pre-Gutenberg age. This shows, incidentally, that we can discern the beginning of modernity from the rise of the advice manual. Petrarch’s work shows him as the first great master of literary life training. He was completely abreast of his times because in the dawning modern age he understood that he could particularly arouse interest in the role of a fortune therapist. His approach was still completely Stoical- Christian. He appealed to his readers with the message: if you have to live in this world in which moody Fortuna throws her balls – the bewildering goddess Fortuna, who sometimes pampers you and sometimes lets you drop – you should start by learning to respond with indifference to the balls she throws. The best way is to practise keeping an equal distance from her so as not to cling to good luck too much and not to lament bad luck too much.
RAULFF: What do latter-day advisers who have started talking about risk have in mind? What is their goal?
To limit risk using probability calculations? Do they want to win the game themselves? Or do they want to act as insurers and limit other people’s risk of damage?
SLOTERDIJK: This field of play involves various different types and positions: some people play for the sake of the game, and others to win, while a third group wants to play to win profit from others winning. A fourth group doesn’t play at all for fear of losing – they are the ones who don’t realize they have lost from the beginning. Anyone who hasn’t played loses without having had the chance to
16 Francesco, Petrarch, Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, trans. C. H. Rawski (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 1991.
294 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
win. The fourth position is that of the eternal conservatives who are still around today, who think they can save their skin in the general competition by staying away from the current games of chance.
RAULFF: Moving upward historically from the medieval emblem of Fortuna – namely, the globe on which the goddess bal- ances – we get to modern techniques of controlling coincidence, from risk minimization to risk elimination. If we go backward from that, we get to the ancient pictures of the distribution of lots.
SLOTERDIJK: On this reading, the Fortune theology of the late Middle Ages and the early modern era would be something like the midpoint between the dark fatalism of the Greeks before the beginning of the first enlightenment, and the apparently complete elimination of risks in modern banking mathematics – although we know by now this can only function as massive deception of oneself and others. That middle position couldn’t be held without compli- cations: it was related to the almost insoluble problem of balancing up the fundamental anti-fatalist teachings of Christianity – which assert that after the resurrection of the Lord, Fate has no more dominion – with the persistence of the ancient, popular formulas for neutralizing chance and fate, which were almost indispensable. This is the only reason why Fortuna haunted the Christian Middle Ages, for which she actually had no residence permit. The strongest symptom of this insoluble tension was the Augustine teaching of predestination in which we can retrospectively recognize the matrix of Western neurosis. On the one hand, Augustine understood better than anyone else that faith in Fate is irreconcilable with the triune nature of God. That is why he wanted to sink any idea of Fate in the underworld of vanquished superstition. This, however, didn’t elimi- nate the problem that ancient belief in fate was developed to solve; the unfathomable inequality of human living conditions preoccu- pied the thoughts of Christians just as much as those of the people of pre-Christian antiquity. The riddle consisted of absorbing the real existing absurdity that yawns at us as we watch human beings wrestling with incredibly blatant inequalities from birth onward. To deal with this, Augustine hit upon a solution that turned out to be even more sinister than ancient fatalism had ever been – the theory of human beings’ divine predestination to salvation and perdition. To fend off pagan fatalism, the Church Father plunged into the murkiest adventure in the history of ideas: he invented a monothe- ist hyper-fatalism called predestination, which literally means the anticipatory determination of fate.
At the same time Augustine firmly adhered to the thesis of human freedom, because otherwise it would have been impossible to defend the penal character of being predestined to damnation. In his
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 295
philosophy, predestination becomes a medium of divine selectivity that remains incomprehensible. Augustine’s finicky God was not a laughing matter. In real terms, the great majority of people have to anticipate belonging to the damned souls from the very begin- ning. This exactly reflects the ideological situation of late antiquity in which the Church, although it was formally the religion of state from the year 395 onward, barely had any influence on the lives of people in the Empire: the few convinced Christians who existed were well aware that they belonged to a tiny elite and that the gates of heaven would probably remain shut to the great majority. It is true that the Christian God is called the Merciful, and the word ‘mercy’ describes the exceptional right of the sovereign, but mercy for the many or, indeed, mercy for all, would not be plausible, even for a God that makes exceptions.
The ominous nature of Augustine’s version didn’t consist in its manifest elitism – Christianity is elitist, or it is not Christian. It was rather a matter of its depressive logic, because it eliminated the pos- sibility of contributing to one’s own redemption by making pious efforts. Piety itself is a result of mercy, not its cause. Augustine is formal on this point. Humans cannot obtain merits. Full stop. It took almost a thousand years until Anselm of Canterbury corrected Augustine’s erroneous thinking. In Augustine’s work, humans remain metaphysically in debit even after the redemption of Christ, because even after their baptism they continue being guilty of original sin, as their debt to God is infinite. This seems to make sense immediately: finite merit can’t redeem infinite guilt, because adding a finite plus to an infinite minus yields an infinite minus. The relevant scholastic theorem is: Inter finitum et infinitum non est proportio. In other words, one can’t bargain with the infinite, and Augustine knew that better than anybody. Yet a false conclusion crept into his calculation, and it was Anselm who first drew atten- tion to it indirectly with his theory of satisfaction in Cur deus homo. Anselm presented a discrete kind of theological mathematics that showed the way out of the depressive logic of the Middle Ages. Since then, theologians have been able to calculate differently, as follows – A: the children of Adam brought infinite guilt on themselves; B: the infinite guilt was redeemed by the infinitely satisfying sacrifice of Christ. Consequently, C holds: infinite guilt plus infinite satisfaction equals zero. The revised calculation had an enormous impact: from that time on, human merits have made a difference. They could be chalked up positively because they were no longer directly counter- posed to an infinite minus, for the latter is definitively balanced up by the deed of the God-man – and this balance marks the starting position of the believer. The horizon is now free for the active life;
296 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
positive deeds count. All at once it is meaningful when Christian people want to make something out of their lives and are not always panting for infinite guilt. From this perspective, the road to the modern world began in an obscure theological tract shortly before the year 1100. Since that time, Augustine’s flight from ancient fate into the Christian Super-Fate called predestination has been brought to a standstill, at least wherever possible. That it persisted in Calvinism, and still persists, is a different matter.
RAULFF: What is modern about all this is probably the math- ematization or arithmetization of fate, the quantification of guilt and the idea that it is possible to do calculations on the terrain of morality. The ability to add and subtract such factors is typical of the modern age. Fate in antiquity was simply irreparable, and addi- tion, subtraction, etc. , were unthinkable.
SLOTERDIJK: These calculations became established at the dawn of the modern age. Each life was linked to an evaluation. The Last Judgement changed its structure. We can see this above all in the emergence of Purgatory in the description of after-death landscapes in the High Middle Ages. The harsh alternative between Heaven and Hell was relativized by the very popular creation of an intermediate region where people would be retrospectively purified, cleansed and upgraded to enable them to share in salvation even if they had accumulated big overdrafts on their moral account which made them strong candidates for Hell. Purgatory marked the begin- ning of the age of rational repayment procedures.
RAULFF: And the idea of reparability as well.
SLOTERDIJK: We could almost say that the modern therapy society made its debut with the invention of Purgatory. The idea of debt repayment, which had its natural prototype in the begin- ning of the credit transactions of the High Middle Ages, even pervades human relationships with the heavenly authorities. This offered scope for human initiative and merits. Only then did it really make a difference whether people had behaved well or badly – a difference that would have been impossible otherwise in the Augustinian world, which was deeply paradoxical and impenetra- ble. In that world, sinners could inexplicably be redeemed at the last minute and the purported saint could remain accursed if, and because, divine predestination had determined that in advance. In contrast, spaces for human achievements were created at the beginning of the modern age and the first approaches to merito- cratic thought could take root. One day, towards the end of the eighteenth century, a temple of enlightenment would be erected on Kaisersgracht in Amsterdam with a beautiful Greek facade; on the roof gable were the words Felix meritis, ‘Happy through
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 297
merit’. The Dutch were the firstborn members of a world without Hell.
RAULFF: But how does Fortune fit into the picture? Doesn’t it stand for the fact that there is still fluctuation in this new arith- metized world, things still see-saw uncontrollably and can be overturned at any time for unknown reasons?
SLOTERDIJK: That is why the message until well into the late Middle Ages was: don’t be impressed by Fortune, and be aware that good fortune poses the greater danger. Fortune may seem to favour you, only to let you fall even further later on. Therefore, beware of good luck, but don’t be impressed by bad luck either. Petrarch expounded this approach in an immensely diverse manner in his work on medicine: he narrated around 125 stories with admonitory examples on both sides. We can well understand why life training in humanism and literature was so important for people of the fourteenth century. They felt that the message of the Gospels was completely under-determined in terms of modern conditions of life. People became increasingly interested in the supra-temporal or, rather, in the anachronistic elements of the statements of the Gospels. The characters of the New Testament were no longer contemporary, and even Renaissance painting, which persisted in behaving as if the Gospels could be visually actualized whereas they were becoming increasingly remote in moral terms, couldn’t change that. The Gospels were hardly relevant in the new world of labour, in emergent politics, in the arts, in the sciences, and at the beginning of global traffic and communications. An intermediary text had to be inserted to develop and express what remained undefined in the Gospels. This became the field of activity for humanist writers at the dawn of the modern age. Think back to the ancient story about Fortuna and Tyche. From the fourteenth century onwards, the near- empty reservoir of knowledge about luck and ideas about risk was refilled. A kind of Stoical-Christian people’s press concerned with the specific destiny of famous men and women emerged. Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus of 1374 is a model text of the new casuist tendency, as is his most successful collection, De casibus virorum illustrium, in which he showed how the unlucky star – disastro – is capable of throwing the lives of the great and greatest off track. The whole world was suddenly crazy for case histories, as if people were fed up with the eternal legends of the saints. Perhaps, from a literary perspective, this typifies the whole secret of the modern age: what is interesting outdoes what is edifying. Then Machiavelli arrived on the scene and suddenly the tone changed. His advice to people was no longer to be stoical and show evangelical indifference to good and bad luck. Instead, he openly concluded that the point is to seize
298 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
luck with both hands. If luck is a woman one shouldn’t hesitate for too long. His contemporaries, starting with merchants and adroit princes, understood that immediately. The affairs of Fortune took a great leap forward in the hundred years between Petrarch and Machiavelli. Machiavelli already talked like a trainer who wanted to make contemporary people fit for the really big match, the game of power and luck and success in the world . . .
RAULFF: We have to grab the right moment . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Machiavelli thought that everything depended on the moment, on opportunità, and it depended on the hand that grasps the opportunity – which raises the question of ball technique. Only somebody who is prepared to catch the ball of chance can be in the game at all. From that time on, it didn’t help to surrender to the tendency to flee from the world. Let’s not forget, people in late antiquity and the Middle Ages were always aware of the option of turning their back on the world. There was still the possibility of settling down in a remote, if uncomfortable, counter-world, in the school of philosophers or the community of saints, whether in the sense of a definitive separation from worldly things or whether one acted to improve the world from the counter-world. These options are not available in the same way to people of the modern age, because they can no longer wholly believe in an existence in the counter-world, but at best they can believe in holidays and emigration. On this point, even Luther who, God knows, was more medieval than the Middle Ages in many ways, scored the modernity goal and cast off his monk’s habit. From a philosophical viewpoint, modern philosophy begins with the thesis that human beings are innately a microcosm, an abbreviation of the world as a whole. If human beings themselves are the world in miniature, the idea of flight from the world becomes meaningless because the world is always with me. Where I am, I am completely and utterly the world. The consequence is that the philosophical mentors of modern indi- viduals, the literary life coaches we have mentioned, increasingly convinced their clients to join in the game of the world. This created a new kind of discourse about Fortune. It led to re-evaluation of humankind’s being-in-the-world from the perspective of being able to join in the game.
RAULFF: That would mean the advisers are spectators to some extent, giving their clients advance commentaries on their possible fate.
SLOTERDIJK: Literary advisers cast their vote in advance, whereas operative advisers offer counselling on the spot. Of course, it is no coincidence that in the fifteenth century, at the very time when the twilight of Fortune occurred, the career profile of the
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 299
secretario emerged. It was the right name for him, as he was indeed party to the secrets of enterprising modern individuals. We have largely forgotten this because we think of secretaries as people who carry out menial tasks in the boss’s office. The job’s original high status survives only in titles such as ‘secretary of state’ or ‘general secretary’. The secretario of the Renaissance – Machiavelli was the prime example – is, if you like, the temporal version of the grand aumônier, the prince’s chaplain whom every powerful man had to have at his side, according to the psychogogues of the early modern era. In those days people had already realized that the powerful man simply can’t be powerful on his own – Schiller’s famous saying ‘The strong man is strongest when alone,’ is totally wrong. The strong man is strong, and only looks strong, as long as he is surrounded by realistic advisers and efficient ministers, and by his secretario, of course. The latter’s first task is to keep the prince’s conscience intact because it represents the commonwealth’s centre of moral strength. A prince who doesn’t believe he will be pardoned is lost from the start. As far as I know, the first person to state these ideas explicitly was Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. 17 According to him, the real state secret is the intact character of the prince’s conscience. A prince who saw himself as a criminal would drag the whole state system into dis- repute if he doubted himself – and this would particularly apply to a guilty prince who couldn’t and wouldn’t confess even in his deepest self. Machiavelli understood that being a prince is a profession that cannot be pursued without wrongdoing. This is why the ruler needs a spiritually competent person at his side who is familiar with the sacraments of power. This person must act as a guard to keep the prince’s conscience intact in precarious situations – these are the situations we already mentioned, in which people can only choose between different evils. The office was usually performed by clerics – we involuntarily associate this with the archetype of the grey emi- nence, the notorious Père Joseph who was the spiritual watchdog at the side of Cardinal Richelieu, the most powerful man of the seventeenth century. Père Joseph was a paradigm case of the highest exercise of power from the religious wing. It was he who made the grey of the Capuchin monks’ habits the leading political colour in Europe. A glance at the Italian scene shows that this function can also be performed by a secular person who is capable of sharing the prince’s secret . . .
17 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888–1973) was a German-born American social philosopher and historian of law. He is particularly known for his contribution to Jewish–Christian dialogue.
300 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
RAULFF: . . . sharing and guarding.
SLOTERDIJK: Indeed, ‘share and guard’ is the secretary’s oath. It is both his motto and the basis of his profession. He knows two things that the nation and the court should not know on penalty of losing their power: the first is that exercise of power includes willing- ness to contravene morality and the law, if necessary . . .
RAULFF: The willingness to be a criminal . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Perhaps it must be expressed in such a dramatic way. The second, maybe even more embarrassing secret, is that having power usually means not knowing what to do.
RAULFF: Helplessness increases as power increases?
SLOTERDIJK: That is precisely the secret that has to be shared and guarded. The secretario is the person who best understands the difficult position of the mighty. This is the origin of the second source of the modern consultation: it stops giving advice on life from a general literary standpoint and starts providing concrete consultation on power instead. The core idea is the insight that there is no continuity between a plan of action and its execution. When the powerful want to move into action, they are not standing at the beginning of a paved road but in front of a precipice or a wide gap. The break in continuity means we can’t walk into action; we can only leap into it. The secretario is the person who helps the mighty to find the jumping-off point. There are almost always ditches of indecision, of hesitation, of risk awareness to overcome if we want to act practically, and nobody knows this better than the man in the exposed position. His intimate confidant knows it as well. Having power means always being conscious of how far things can go wrong.
RAULFF: This means we should look up the old literature on the secretary if we want to know what happened to fate once consult- ants and risk managers became involved in shaping it.
SLOTERDIJK: Recently I happened to look at one of the funda- mental books of the dawn of the modern era: Leon Battista Alberti’s Della famiglia – On the Family – written around 1460. It seems to be a simple text by the father of a family for use by his own offspring. In reality, this book reveals nothing less than the face of the eco- nomic modern age that is about to begin, reflected in the language games of classical philosophy. The author was one of the actors who had long since understood that people have to enter the playing field themselves if they expect Fortune’s favours – especially if they want to secure its favours on a long-term basis. The fourth part of the book is about friendship, which might make us think that the author is offering nothing but typical contemporaneous variations on the Aristotelian theme of philía. At first glance it merely seems to be a
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 301
free restatement of the subject of friendship, using topical examples. In reality, we are looking at the first theory of networking. Alberti’s considerations have a clear starting point: to successfully conclude business in the widening world, the entrepreneur must have friends everywhere in faraway places. What is interesting here is that Alberti didn’t envisage the entrepreneur as the Faustian individual but as the active family, the power-conscious clan. At that time, the only method of ensuring the loyalty of employees in nearby and distant places of work consisted of situating one’s own family members at key points where possible. We should remember that, as had been common since Greek and Roman antiquity, the family and friendship circles at that time were still closely intertwined, linguistically and in real terms. Loyalty was the greatest asset for people at the centre of entrepreneurial clans. It was the mercantile variant of the classical philía. The loyalty and esteem of a house or a firm could only be preserved if the merchants knew that alongside monetary capital and monetary credit there was another, subtle capital, a second kind of credit that was probably more important than the first – a good reputation. The reputation capital ultimately determined the good or bad luck of a firm, that is, a solid, firmly established and viable entrepreneurial unit in the modern markets. In fact, economic relationships between distant partners can’t be established and can’t flourish in the long term without that good reputation and its carefully nurtured growth. The type of successful long-distance relationships that traders engage in are only possible in the long run if the partners have more reason to trust than to mistrust. Securing trust by making friends is one of the processes for domesticating Fortune. The other successful procedures are in the field of risk management, which was already taking shape at that time. That is what the merchants are talking about on the Rialto in Venice in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. This much is clear: a merchant couldn’t go far with the Gospels alone. Reflections on Christian teaching couldn’t make the new market predictable. That is why, around 1500, a perfectly functioning clandestine system of double theology was established in many places in Europe. For the critical moments in life there was Christianity, and for the business and private spheres there was the cult of Fortune.
RAULFF: In other words, people learned to be Christians and fatalists at the same time.
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, fatalist in the clear sense of the word. RAULFF: In the entrepreneurial sense?
SLOTERDIJK: In a very practical sense, in which both the busi-
nessman and the courtier always did what was necessary to gain and keep Fortune’s favours. But, as we have shown, at the beginning of
302 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
the Enlightenment the suppression of such intellectual constructs had become unavoidable. The eighteenth century tried to break with feudal categories on a broad front, including the favouritism of Fortune. The ideology of equality had as little use for Fortune and its royal court as early Christianity had for Fate.
RAULFF: The early Enlightenment neutralized amor fati, while the democracy of the twentieth century doesn’t have a clue what to do with it.
SLOTERDIJK: All in all, we can rightly say that the modern age initially had to abolish fate because it brought the dawn of the period in which people decided to direct their own fate. We have discussed how this led to neo-fatalist movements and that it was equally inevitable that they would be clarified in the Enlightenment via enlightenment and counter-enlightenment. Yet the pattern of abolition, return and clarification of the idea of fate is ultimately unsatisfying. I think that the most important thing is missing in this smooth narrative.
RAULFF: I am pleased that this digression on the sensitivities of the later Heidegger has helped us towards a more positive defini- tion of the concept we are discussing. So far, we have described the topic mostly in negative modes such as compensation, exoneration, excuses, pre-emptive confrontation, etc. I have been meaning to ask you the whole time: can’t you also envisage a legitimate, positive way of using this concept? Do you think it still has a halfway mean- ingful field of application in the present day?
SLOTERDIJK: Are you still talking about fate?
RAULFF: Yes, indeed; I’m sticking to it quite obsessively . . . SLOTERDIJK: Well, the concept remains meaningful, although
today it is used in a narrower sense than in ancient times. The Fates have laid down their shears – they probably had to hand them in at hand-luggage control. The Moirai, the ananke, fate, kismet – we can’t revive all that. It is time for a reformatted, weaker, more modest concept of fate. It’s no secret how we will get it: it will appear for us in the third act of the drama of the history of ideas that began in Europe in the seventeenth century. We have already referred to this. In the first act, fate is swallowed up by the rational version of Being. In Spinoza’s work the world appears as a gesamtkunstwerk composed of causalities. That suspended fate in natural laws, after which fate could retire peacefully because everything happens through good
286 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
imperatives anyway. The necessary and sufficient conditions arrange things between themselves. Fatalism vanishes in universal causality and can then dissolve temporarily into the optimism of the phi- losophy of praxis. To quote a classical warning against superstitious belief in astrology, ‘In your breast are the stars of your fate. ’8 The age of the pathos of self-determination has come, and we just don’t need heteronomous powers of fate any more. But it won’t stay like that for long. After the first naïve wave of practice has crashed, the second phase will start. We are being overwhelmed by the evidence of old and new kinds of heteronomy currently overtaking the anti- fatalism of the Enlightenment. Neo-fatalist concepts have taken over since it became clear that things are going to turn out differently than we imagined. Counter-enlightenment tendencies are celebrating a return match. Oswald Spengler almost believed that deeper minds would always feel attracted to the concept of fate. Even the largest growing organisms on earth, the high cultures, are subject to fate in the form of morphological necessity. The cultures are winding down like plant life or thousand-year-old musical boxes, and our life is synchronized with them. A good part of our latter-day literature on fate is written in this tone. It processes the darkness in our conditions of existence affirmatively – from Goethe’s Primal Words, Orphic to Nietzsche’s amor fati to the retour du tragique. The last motif has been a topic for French authors such as Jean-Marie Domenach, from a Catholic perspective, and Michel Maffesoli, from the stand- point of postmodern pluralism. 9 A while ago we entered the third phase, in which we are just as remote from the Promethean rational- ism of the Enlightenment as we are from the coy irrationalism of the counter-Enlightenment. This is the basic position from which to get a clear overall view of the field. We are at the end of the parable of fate: the Enlightenment neutralization of the concept and its irrationalist revival are followed by post-Enlightenment clarification.
RAULFF: There were occasional objections to this, of course. You have already mentioned Marquard, who used the term ‘fate’ to protest against the technocratic enlightenment’s crazy notion that anything is feasible, and Koselleck does something similar as well. 10
8 ‘In thy breast are the stars of thy fate. ’ (Friedrich Schiller, The Piccolomini, Act II, Scene VI. )
9 Jean-Marie Domenach (1922–97) was a French journalist and writer with a Catholic perspective whose influential book, Le retour de la tragique, appeared in 1963. Michel Maffesoli is a French sociologist specializing in postmodernity and the presence of the imaginary in everyday life.
10 Reinhard Koselleck (1923–2006) was a leading twentieth-century German historian.
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 287
SLOTERDIJK: In my opinion, both of them belong to the cat- egory of Abklärung, ‘clarification’. The great master in this field was, of course, Niklas Luhmann. I was referring to him when I claimed, in the discussion with Heiner Geißler we mentioned at the beginning of this interview, that the most profound incognito of the idea of fate or destiny in the modern age is the concept of ‘differentiation of sub- systems’ that Luhmann used. Maybe he would object, but it seems to me it was a meaningful statement. When Luhmann speaks of dif- ferentiation it sounds almost as if he were telling us ex officio: ‘Not only books, but also systems, have their destinies. ’ The destiny of social systems is that, from a specific degree of complexity onwards, they differentiate functionally of their own accord. We notice this partly from the fact that they become obscure in terms of common sense. As soon as a system has become differentiated you can’t apply everyday reasoning to it any longer because it has become autono- mous and self-referential. Expert reason and everyday reason are estranged from each other. The expert has the task of explaining to the layperson that things in differentiated subsystems function as they function and it can’t be any different even when, and precisely when, it seems absurd to common sense. We can also describe this as follows: when they are differentiated, social systems reach the level at which the people who are the targets of sociological enlighten- ment are required to understand that society has no logical centre and doesn’t produce any true self. Society has no God spots, as it were, where it can look into its own interior. Sociology, too, is only useful to the extent that it understands that it doesn’t really under- stand its subject . . .
RAULFF: Does this mean Luhmann is also on the side of the post-Enlightenment?
SLOTERDIJK: I would call Luhmann the third member of the group of clarifiers next to Koselleck and Marquard. What they all share is the objective irony with which they view the results of his- torical activism. Clarification is always post-optimistic.
RAULFF: In his day Marquard, in particular, represented the position of objection to the social-technological ideology that was still in its original happy state in the 1970s. In other words, he opposed the belief in the feasibility and predictability of everything.
SLOTERDIJK: The concept of fate has needed modernizing from the time we could no longer bring on the kind of crude heavy weaponry of history and ontology that was typical in the nineteenth century. The semantic content of the recycled concept of fate can be dispersed rather more finely now. To give one example of a nuance in meaning that has become detached from the complex of discourses on fatality, let me mention the concept of the irreversible
288 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
as it has developed in thermodynamics and process theory. Whereas human history represents the realm of second chances and of things happening ‘once again’, the sphere of physical processes is defined by unrepeatability and irreversibility. Another example is the concept of inviolability: this expression has had a notable career in theological circles in recent decades. In using it, we are repeating a gesture we have known since the Romantic period: omnipotence of the subject – no thanks! Anyone who says ‘inviolable’ nowa- days is thinking of the ‘mortal coil’ in the theological sense that can’t be shuffled off by any clarification, or by any technological relief.
RAULFF: Theologians are not the only people who talk like that. There are similar cases among aestheticians and phenomenologists: Gumbrecht with his repeated emphasis on the epiphanic presence, Karl Heinz Bohrer with his focus on the aesthetic moment – those are also expressions of inviolability. 11 They relate to instances that can’t be planned and produced, moments of an emotional presence that either appear on their own or withdraw without our being able to protest about it.
SLOTERDIJK: By the way, both Gumbrecht and Bohrer refer to the strongest instance of ‘fate’ in modern German poetry. In Rilke’s eighth Duino Elegy, we hear the sigh: ‘This is what fate means: to be opposite / and to be that and nothing else, opposite, forever. ’ Towards the end of the poem comes the question: ‘Who has turned us round like this, so that / whatever we do, we always have the aspect / of one who leaves? ’ The poet’s lament relates to the fact that for us, as humans in general and individuals of the modern age in particular, unlike for dumb animals, the world no longer represents pure openness. We have stacked up the space before us with projects. Fate is decided here through human beings’ existential orthopaedics. It has failed so fundamentally that we will always be those who turned round, who go away, who are incapable of being present. It seems to me we encounter the concept of fate here in a soft, almost innocent version, because it designates a tragic dowry of civilization, not triumphal and not masochistic, but tinged with melancholy. Heidegger described something vaguely compa- rable when he spoke of the insanity that is inseparable from human beings’ period of residence in the world. Going astray is ensconced in normal existence itself, which has always been in a kind of flight.
11 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is a German-born American literary scholar and professor at Stanford University. Karl Heinz Bohrer is a German essayist and literary scholar.
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 289
Heidegger is almost saying: ‘Being human is being away’ – like the expression ‘Let’s get out of here! ’
RAULFF: May I return to the other point again: is there a pos- sibility for you to integrate the concept of fate into your own work? It seems to me you touched almost directly on the concept a couple of times in the development of your work, from the Critique of Cynical Reason to Eurotaoism and You Must Change Your Life, but you haven’t adopted it personally, if I can put it like that; in a sense you have narrowly squeezed past it. All the same, I would like to ask whether fate might be a positive, interesting concept for you.
SLOTERDIJK: I would say the most interesting concepts are retired concepts.
RAULFF: Concepts in the retirement home for the history of concepts?
SLOTERDIJK: Their retirement is part of their charm. When their service is over, old concepts find a small part-time job now and then. This is how a new use of the concept of fate would appear to me. It has to be brought into play far more casually than in its heyday; it has to become almost feather-light. This reminds me of a passage in Nietzsche’s work I often return to – the song ‘Before Sunrise’ from the third part of Zarathustra. The scenery is imposing: as we can expect from the prophet of the new world age, Zarathustra is already up at dawn, running across the mountains and engaging in dialogue with the heavens before the sun appears. This is where the decisive phrases come – wait, I have to find the place (Sloterdijk leafs through the book): ‘Truly it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach: “Above all things stands the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of accident, the heaven of wanton- ness. ” “Von Ohngefähr” [Lord Chance] – that is the world’s oldest nobility. ’12
RAULFF: That is very beautiful.
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Which I have given back to all things, I have released them from servitude under purpose. ’ At this point we have to interrupt and add a commentary on the metaphysical content of the formula ‘servitude under purpose’. In its strongest form, the idea of fate was not an improvised home remedy for hypochondriacs on cloudy days – it was a world principle placed on a high onto- logical throne; it was the work of the good reason of all things. The philosophical concept of fate appeared at its most splendid in late antiquity in the form of the stoical Heimarmene, who represented
12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books), 1961, pp. 186; 4,209ff.
290 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
something like the sweeping reason of the government of the uni- verse – incidentally, in mythology, Heimarmene was known as the daughter of Ananke. Nietzsche rejected such fictitious ideas of a lofty premeditated necessity in the course of all things by letting chance off the leash:
I have released them from servitude under purpose. I set this freedom and celestial cheerfulness over all things like an azure bell when I taught that no ‘eternal will’ acts over them and through them. I set this wantonness and this foolishness in place of that will when I taught: ‘With all things one thing is impossible – rationality! ’ A little reason, to be sure, a seed of wisdom scattered from star to star – this leaven is mingled with all things: for the sake of foolishness is wisdom mingled with all things. A little wisdom is no doubt possible; but I have found this happy certainty in all things: that they prefer – to dance on the feet of chance.
These lines were written on the Independence Day of modern thought – and inevitably they deal with the emancipation of the coincidental. Nietzsche still employs the metaphysical language of thunder and lightning in some places, but on this subject he has already changed to contingency thought. This much remains today from good old fate: Luhmann’s theorem of double contingency. A system in which everything could be different relates to an environ- ment in which everything could also be different. But the fact it is actually the way it is involves a touch of fatefulness.
RAULFF: And would that be your answer as well?
SLOTERDIJK: In principle, yes, as long as it means the eman- cipation of the coincidental. I really like terms that are out of commission. Antiquated concepts contain riches you can discover by chance as if you were clearing out the attic. A word like ‘fate’ is an archive in itself. That reminds me of Gottfried Benn’s remark: ‘Words, words – nouns! They only need to open their wings and millennia drop off from their flight. ’13
RAULFF: I think that’s wonderful.
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Fate’ is the kind of word from whose flight the millennia drop off.
RAULFF: The concept in itself is a gigantic theory novel, a novel of thought. So far we have only unpacked a couple of expressions
13 Gottfried Benn, ‘Epilog und lyrisches ich’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, ed. Dieter Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes), 1968, p. 8.
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 291
and metaphors from the crate, but it is quite astonishing what that revealed.
SLOTERDIJK: We have indicated a few examples of mythi- cal and terminological conceptions of the fateful in the Western tradition. Aside from this, we shouldn’t forget that there is an inde- pendent oriental world of theory, namely the Indian, which has had a concept such as karma for 2,500 years. This covers much of what Eastern philosophers have experienced or devised on moral causal- ity, long-term relations of culpability, coincidences of incarnation, and existential inequalities and their future compensations. India belongs to a world sphere that, seen as a whole, had a far lower level of technological and political freedom than the Western sphere. As soon as you open up to its culture you feel something of the domi- nant need there to react to prevailing conditions with far more soul, many more gods and much more asceticism.
RAULFF: Doesn’t that also mean, with far more poetry?
SLOTERDIJK: It is true that the people of the Indian hemisphere were condemned to produce an interior world from very early times, just like the people of the bygone days when Europe was still called the Occident. In this state of the world, the way outward was largely blocked and the external facts were not very inspiring. Only enor- mous achievements of practice and recasting make the world and life bearable. To explain with an analogy, I am fond of recalling the ancient European tradition of constellations that modern people hardly know about any more – at most they know Ursa Major or Orion’s Belt. In antiquity every halfway-educated person knew the forty-eight constellations like the back of their hand, and each of the constellations was associated with innumerable stories. The constellation-studded sky was evidence of how earlier people had vested the external world with excess matter from their inner world. In this state of the world the concept of fate assumes enormous importance because it simulates a kind of grammar for recasting good and bad fortune. A single star starts off being nothing but a meaningless point of light, part of a constellation, a cipher. This is how apparently meaningless coincidences are woven together in an ad hoc fabric of meaning. The concept of fate indicates the psycho- logical work that will be necessary if people want to recast chance into something meaningful and liveable. Only well-insured people like us in the modern age have been able to emancipate themselves from chance. Only in technological culture can one travel with such light psychological baggage as we have grown accustomed to carrying. Most of the generations before us didn’t have that kind of relief from burdens. They had to try to understand the world like a big carpet with a pattern that is too big to be recognizable, but they
292 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
still wanted to believe absolutely in its existence. In its most human form, the idea of fate was the core element of the belief that we our- selves are threads and figures in a divine carpet-weaving workshop.
II. Marbach Conversation
RAULFF: Mr Sloterdijk, to follow up and round off our first meeting of several months ago, today we should talk about some topics that we didn’t mention last time. I am thinking mainly about the symbolism of fate in early modernism, especially Fortuna with all her attributes, each of which is extremely interesting in its own right . . .
SLOTERDIJK: And each of which would merit a large exhibi- tion. Fortuna’s classical attributes are the helm, the sail, the wheel that rises and falls, the cosmos sphere on which the goddess bal- ances, the globe and its miniature versions, the ball and the lottery ball. Today, unfortunately, nobody gives a thought any more to the symbolic sources of the countless balls that we play with in present mass culture.
RAULFF: Except for Horst Bredekamp, who is interested in the ball games of the Medici . . . 14
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, he is one of the few contemporary scholars of visual imagery to have examined these topics. But the whole theme of balls, globes and spheres has a miserable existence in the margin of the official attention system.
RAULFF: What is the reason for this? Is it perhaps because, despite Huizinga,15 people haven’t taken the game seriously in terms of its function for cultural creativity? Or is it that playing games has always been associated with a kind of vagueness? With an inherent shakiness?
SLOTERDIJK: I think you’re right. For a very long period vagueness and shakiness were unpopular with theorists – they disliked them. One exception is Paul Valéry’s work, where we can still see the morose, classical-rationalist type of character with a visceral abhorrence of anything approximate. On the other hand, we can only understand something about the twentieth-century
14 Horst Bredekamp is a German art historian. Raulff is referring to his book: Horst Bredekamp, Florentiner Fußball. Die Renaissance der Spiele. Calcio als Fest der Medici (first published 1993; revised edition, Berlin: Wagenbach, 2001).
15 Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) was a Dutch historian and cultural theorist who played a major role in developing modern cultural theory.
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 293
culture of rationality if we view it as constantly extending the zone of calculability. It is an enterprise to bring labile factors, all kinds of vagueness, enthusiasms and turbulences into the realm of exact thought. In the Europe of old, these unstable entities were treated as mythological forms; uncertainties were attributed to divine moods or predestination. But probability calculations began to appear in the seventeenth century, and since the twentieth century we have been able to apply chaos theory, fractals and algorithms to every- thing crooked, twisted and tattered.
We don’t talk about Fortune nowadays, of course, but about risk. That presupposes a leap into a different discursive order. For an author like Petrarch it was still right and proper to survey the whole field of existential instability with a collection of exemplary stories or novellas about good and bad luck. Research tells us that his gigantic book De remediis utriusque fortunae16 was one of the most frequently copied secular manuscripts of the pre-Gutenberg age. This shows, incidentally, that we can discern the beginning of modernity from the rise of the advice manual. Petrarch’s work shows him as the first great master of literary life training. He was completely abreast of his times because in the dawning modern age he understood that he could particularly arouse interest in the role of a fortune therapist. His approach was still completely Stoical- Christian. He appealed to his readers with the message: if you have to live in this world in which moody Fortuna throws her balls – the bewildering goddess Fortuna, who sometimes pampers you and sometimes lets you drop – you should start by learning to respond with indifference to the balls she throws. The best way is to practise keeping an equal distance from her so as not to cling to good luck too much and not to lament bad luck too much.
RAULFF: What do latter-day advisers who have started talking about risk have in mind? What is their goal?
To limit risk using probability calculations? Do they want to win the game themselves? Or do they want to act as insurers and limit other people’s risk of damage?
SLOTERDIJK: This field of play involves various different types and positions: some people play for the sake of the game, and others to win, while a third group wants to play to win profit from others winning. A fourth group doesn’t play at all for fear of losing – they are the ones who don’t realize they have lost from the beginning. Anyone who hasn’t played loses without having had the chance to
16 Francesco, Petrarch, Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, trans. C. H. Rawski (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 1991.
294 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
win. The fourth position is that of the eternal conservatives who are still around today, who think they can save their skin in the general competition by staying away from the current games of chance.
RAULFF: Moving upward historically from the medieval emblem of Fortuna – namely, the globe on which the goddess bal- ances – we get to modern techniques of controlling coincidence, from risk minimization to risk elimination. If we go backward from that, we get to the ancient pictures of the distribution of lots.
SLOTERDIJK: On this reading, the Fortune theology of the late Middle Ages and the early modern era would be something like the midpoint between the dark fatalism of the Greeks before the beginning of the first enlightenment, and the apparently complete elimination of risks in modern banking mathematics – although we know by now this can only function as massive deception of oneself and others. That middle position couldn’t be held without compli- cations: it was related to the almost insoluble problem of balancing up the fundamental anti-fatalist teachings of Christianity – which assert that after the resurrection of the Lord, Fate has no more dominion – with the persistence of the ancient, popular formulas for neutralizing chance and fate, which were almost indispensable. This is the only reason why Fortuna haunted the Christian Middle Ages, for which she actually had no residence permit. The strongest symptom of this insoluble tension was the Augustine teaching of predestination in which we can retrospectively recognize the matrix of Western neurosis. On the one hand, Augustine understood better than anyone else that faith in Fate is irreconcilable with the triune nature of God. That is why he wanted to sink any idea of Fate in the underworld of vanquished superstition. This, however, didn’t elimi- nate the problem that ancient belief in fate was developed to solve; the unfathomable inequality of human living conditions preoccu- pied the thoughts of Christians just as much as those of the people of pre-Christian antiquity. The riddle consisted of absorbing the real existing absurdity that yawns at us as we watch human beings wrestling with incredibly blatant inequalities from birth onward. To deal with this, Augustine hit upon a solution that turned out to be even more sinister than ancient fatalism had ever been – the theory of human beings’ divine predestination to salvation and perdition. To fend off pagan fatalism, the Church Father plunged into the murkiest adventure in the history of ideas: he invented a monothe- ist hyper-fatalism called predestination, which literally means the anticipatory determination of fate.
At the same time Augustine firmly adhered to the thesis of human freedom, because otherwise it would have been impossible to defend the penal character of being predestined to damnation. In his
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 295
philosophy, predestination becomes a medium of divine selectivity that remains incomprehensible. Augustine’s finicky God was not a laughing matter. In real terms, the great majority of people have to anticipate belonging to the damned souls from the very begin- ning. This exactly reflects the ideological situation of late antiquity in which the Church, although it was formally the religion of state from the year 395 onward, barely had any influence on the lives of people in the Empire: the few convinced Christians who existed were well aware that they belonged to a tiny elite and that the gates of heaven would probably remain shut to the great majority. It is true that the Christian God is called the Merciful, and the word ‘mercy’ describes the exceptional right of the sovereign, but mercy for the many or, indeed, mercy for all, would not be plausible, even for a God that makes exceptions.
The ominous nature of Augustine’s version didn’t consist in its manifest elitism – Christianity is elitist, or it is not Christian. It was rather a matter of its depressive logic, because it eliminated the pos- sibility of contributing to one’s own redemption by making pious efforts. Piety itself is a result of mercy, not its cause. Augustine is formal on this point. Humans cannot obtain merits. Full stop. It took almost a thousand years until Anselm of Canterbury corrected Augustine’s erroneous thinking. In Augustine’s work, humans remain metaphysically in debit even after the redemption of Christ, because even after their baptism they continue being guilty of original sin, as their debt to God is infinite. This seems to make sense immediately: finite merit can’t redeem infinite guilt, because adding a finite plus to an infinite minus yields an infinite minus. The relevant scholastic theorem is: Inter finitum et infinitum non est proportio. In other words, one can’t bargain with the infinite, and Augustine knew that better than anybody. Yet a false conclusion crept into his calculation, and it was Anselm who first drew atten- tion to it indirectly with his theory of satisfaction in Cur deus homo. Anselm presented a discrete kind of theological mathematics that showed the way out of the depressive logic of the Middle Ages. Since then, theologians have been able to calculate differently, as follows – A: the children of Adam brought infinite guilt on themselves; B: the infinite guilt was redeemed by the infinitely satisfying sacrifice of Christ. Consequently, C holds: infinite guilt plus infinite satisfaction equals zero. The revised calculation had an enormous impact: from that time on, human merits have made a difference. They could be chalked up positively because they were no longer directly counter- posed to an infinite minus, for the latter is definitively balanced up by the deed of the God-man – and this balance marks the starting position of the believer. The horizon is now free for the active life;
296 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
positive deeds count. All at once it is meaningful when Christian people want to make something out of their lives and are not always panting for infinite guilt. From this perspective, the road to the modern world began in an obscure theological tract shortly before the year 1100. Since that time, Augustine’s flight from ancient fate into the Christian Super-Fate called predestination has been brought to a standstill, at least wherever possible. That it persisted in Calvinism, and still persists, is a different matter.
RAULFF: What is modern about all this is probably the math- ematization or arithmetization of fate, the quantification of guilt and the idea that it is possible to do calculations on the terrain of morality. The ability to add and subtract such factors is typical of the modern age. Fate in antiquity was simply irreparable, and addi- tion, subtraction, etc. , were unthinkable.
SLOTERDIJK: These calculations became established at the dawn of the modern age. Each life was linked to an evaluation. The Last Judgement changed its structure. We can see this above all in the emergence of Purgatory in the description of after-death landscapes in the High Middle Ages. The harsh alternative between Heaven and Hell was relativized by the very popular creation of an intermediate region where people would be retrospectively purified, cleansed and upgraded to enable them to share in salvation even if they had accumulated big overdrafts on their moral account which made them strong candidates for Hell. Purgatory marked the begin- ning of the age of rational repayment procedures.
RAULFF: And the idea of reparability as well.
SLOTERDIJK: We could almost say that the modern therapy society made its debut with the invention of Purgatory. The idea of debt repayment, which had its natural prototype in the begin- ning of the credit transactions of the High Middle Ages, even pervades human relationships with the heavenly authorities. This offered scope for human initiative and merits. Only then did it really make a difference whether people had behaved well or badly – a difference that would have been impossible otherwise in the Augustinian world, which was deeply paradoxical and impenetra- ble. In that world, sinners could inexplicably be redeemed at the last minute and the purported saint could remain accursed if, and because, divine predestination had determined that in advance. In contrast, spaces for human achievements were created at the beginning of the modern age and the first approaches to merito- cratic thought could take root. One day, towards the end of the eighteenth century, a temple of enlightenment would be erected on Kaisersgracht in Amsterdam with a beautiful Greek facade; on the roof gable were the words Felix meritis, ‘Happy through
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 297
merit’. The Dutch were the firstborn members of a world without Hell.
RAULFF: But how does Fortune fit into the picture? Doesn’t it stand for the fact that there is still fluctuation in this new arith- metized world, things still see-saw uncontrollably and can be overturned at any time for unknown reasons?
SLOTERDIJK: That is why the message until well into the late Middle Ages was: don’t be impressed by Fortune, and be aware that good fortune poses the greater danger. Fortune may seem to favour you, only to let you fall even further later on. Therefore, beware of good luck, but don’t be impressed by bad luck either. Petrarch expounded this approach in an immensely diverse manner in his work on medicine: he narrated around 125 stories with admonitory examples on both sides. We can well understand why life training in humanism and literature was so important for people of the fourteenth century. They felt that the message of the Gospels was completely under-determined in terms of modern conditions of life. People became increasingly interested in the supra-temporal or, rather, in the anachronistic elements of the statements of the Gospels. The characters of the New Testament were no longer contemporary, and even Renaissance painting, which persisted in behaving as if the Gospels could be visually actualized whereas they were becoming increasingly remote in moral terms, couldn’t change that. The Gospels were hardly relevant in the new world of labour, in emergent politics, in the arts, in the sciences, and at the beginning of global traffic and communications. An intermediary text had to be inserted to develop and express what remained undefined in the Gospels. This became the field of activity for humanist writers at the dawn of the modern age. Think back to the ancient story about Fortuna and Tyche. From the fourteenth century onwards, the near- empty reservoir of knowledge about luck and ideas about risk was refilled. A kind of Stoical-Christian people’s press concerned with the specific destiny of famous men and women emerged. Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus of 1374 is a model text of the new casuist tendency, as is his most successful collection, De casibus virorum illustrium, in which he showed how the unlucky star – disastro – is capable of throwing the lives of the great and greatest off track. The whole world was suddenly crazy for case histories, as if people were fed up with the eternal legends of the saints. Perhaps, from a literary perspective, this typifies the whole secret of the modern age: what is interesting outdoes what is edifying. Then Machiavelli arrived on the scene and suddenly the tone changed. His advice to people was no longer to be stoical and show evangelical indifference to good and bad luck. Instead, he openly concluded that the point is to seize
298 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
luck with both hands. If luck is a woman one shouldn’t hesitate for too long. His contemporaries, starting with merchants and adroit princes, understood that immediately. The affairs of Fortune took a great leap forward in the hundred years between Petrarch and Machiavelli. Machiavelli already talked like a trainer who wanted to make contemporary people fit for the really big match, the game of power and luck and success in the world . . .
RAULFF: We have to grab the right moment . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Machiavelli thought that everything depended on the moment, on opportunità, and it depended on the hand that grasps the opportunity – which raises the question of ball technique. Only somebody who is prepared to catch the ball of chance can be in the game at all. From that time on, it didn’t help to surrender to the tendency to flee from the world. Let’s not forget, people in late antiquity and the Middle Ages were always aware of the option of turning their back on the world. There was still the possibility of settling down in a remote, if uncomfortable, counter-world, in the school of philosophers or the community of saints, whether in the sense of a definitive separation from worldly things or whether one acted to improve the world from the counter-world. These options are not available in the same way to people of the modern age, because they can no longer wholly believe in an existence in the counter-world, but at best they can believe in holidays and emigration. On this point, even Luther who, God knows, was more medieval than the Middle Ages in many ways, scored the modernity goal and cast off his monk’s habit. From a philosophical viewpoint, modern philosophy begins with the thesis that human beings are innately a microcosm, an abbreviation of the world as a whole. If human beings themselves are the world in miniature, the idea of flight from the world becomes meaningless because the world is always with me. Where I am, I am completely and utterly the world. The consequence is that the philosophical mentors of modern indi- viduals, the literary life coaches we have mentioned, increasingly convinced their clients to join in the game of the world. This created a new kind of discourse about Fortune. It led to re-evaluation of humankind’s being-in-the-world from the perspective of being able to join in the game.
RAULFF: That would mean the advisers are spectators to some extent, giving their clients advance commentaries on their possible fate.
SLOTERDIJK: Literary advisers cast their vote in advance, whereas operative advisers offer counselling on the spot. Of course, it is no coincidence that in the fifteenth century, at the very time when the twilight of Fortune occurred, the career profile of the
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 299
secretario emerged. It was the right name for him, as he was indeed party to the secrets of enterprising modern individuals. We have largely forgotten this because we think of secretaries as people who carry out menial tasks in the boss’s office. The job’s original high status survives only in titles such as ‘secretary of state’ or ‘general secretary’. The secretario of the Renaissance – Machiavelli was the prime example – is, if you like, the temporal version of the grand aumônier, the prince’s chaplain whom every powerful man had to have at his side, according to the psychogogues of the early modern era. In those days people had already realized that the powerful man simply can’t be powerful on his own – Schiller’s famous saying ‘The strong man is strongest when alone,’ is totally wrong. The strong man is strong, and only looks strong, as long as he is surrounded by realistic advisers and efficient ministers, and by his secretario, of course. The latter’s first task is to keep the prince’s conscience intact because it represents the commonwealth’s centre of moral strength. A prince who doesn’t believe he will be pardoned is lost from the start. As far as I know, the first person to state these ideas explicitly was Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. 17 According to him, the real state secret is the intact character of the prince’s conscience. A prince who saw himself as a criminal would drag the whole state system into dis- repute if he doubted himself – and this would particularly apply to a guilty prince who couldn’t and wouldn’t confess even in his deepest self. Machiavelli understood that being a prince is a profession that cannot be pursued without wrongdoing. This is why the ruler needs a spiritually competent person at his side who is familiar with the sacraments of power. This person must act as a guard to keep the prince’s conscience intact in precarious situations – these are the situations we already mentioned, in which people can only choose between different evils. The office was usually performed by clerics – we involuntarily associate this with the archetype of the grey emi- nence, the notorious Père Joseph who was the spiritual watchdog at the side of Cardinal Richelieu, the most powerful man of the seventeenth century. Père Joseph was a paradigm case of the highest exercise of power from the religious wing. It was he who made the grey of the Capuchin monks’ habits the leading political colour in Europe. A glance at the Italian scene shows that this function can also be performed by a secular person who is capable of sharing the prince’s secret . . .
17 Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888–1973) was a German-born American social philosopher and historian of law. He is particularly known for his contribution to Jewish–Christian dialogue.
300 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
RAULFF: . . . sharing and guarding.
SLOTERDIJK: Indeed, ‘share and guard’ is the secretary’s oath. It is both his motto and the basis of his profession. He knows two things that the nation and the court should not know on penalty of losing their power: the first is that exercise of power includes willing- ness to contravene morality and the law, if necessary . . .
RAULFF: The willingness to be a criminal . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Perhaps it must be expressed in such a dramatic way. The second, maybe even more embarrassing secret, is that having power usually means not knowing what to do.
RAULFF: Helplessness increases as power increases?
SLOTERDIJK: That is precisely the secret that has to be shared and guarded. The secretario is the person who best understands the difficult position of the mighty. This is the origin of the second source of the modern consultation: it stops giving advice on life from a general literary standpoint and starts providing concrete consultation on power instead. The core idea is the insight that there is no continuity between a plan of action and its execution. When the powerful want to move into action, they are not standing at the beginning of a paved road but in front of a precipice or a wide gap. The break in continuity means we can’t walk into action; we can only leap into it. The secretario is the person who helps the mighty to find the jumping-off point. There are almost always ditches of indecision, of hesitation, of risk awareness to overcome if we want to act practically, and nobody knows this better than the man in the exposed position. His intimate confidant knows it as well. Having power means always being conscious of how far things can go wrong.
RAULFF: This means we should look up the old literature on the secretary if we want to know what happened to fate once consult- ants and risk managers became involved in shaping it.
SLOTERDIJK: Recently I happened to look at one of the funda- mental books of the dawn of the modern era: Leon Battista Alberti’s Della famiglia – On the Family – written around 1460. It seems to be a simple text by the father of a family for use by his own offspring. In reality, this book reveals nothing less than the face of the eco- nomic modern age that is about to begin, reflected in the language games of classical philosophy. The author was one of the actors who had long since understood that people have to enter the playing field themselves if they expect Fortune’s favours – especially if they want to secure its favours on a long-term basis. The fourth part of the book is about friendship, which might make us think that the author is offering nothing but typical contemporaneous variations on the Aristotelian theme of philía. At first glance it merely seems to be a
Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought 301
free restatement of the subject of friendship, using topical examples. In reality, we are looking at the first theory of networking. Alberti’s considerations have a clear starting point: to successfully conclude business in the widening world, the entrepreneur must have friends everywhere in faraway places. What is interesting here is that Alberti didn’t envisage the entrepreneur as the Faustian individual but as the active family, the power-conscious clan. At that time, the only method of ensuring the loyalty of employees in nearby and distant places of work consisted of situating one’s own family members at key points where possible. We should remember that, as had been common since Greek and Roman antiquity, the family and friendship circles at that time were still closely intertwined, linguistically and in real terms. Loyalty was the greatest asset for people at the centre of entrepreneurial clans. It was the mercantile variant of the classical philía. The loyalty and esteem of a house or a firm could only be preserved if the merchants knew that alongside monetary capital and monetary credit there was another, subtle capital, a second kind of credit that was probably more important than the first – a good reputation. The reputation capital ultimately determined the good or bad luck of a firm, that is, a solid, firmly established and viable entrepreneurial unit in the modern markets. In fact, economic relationships between distant partners can’t be established and can’t flourish in the long term without that good reputation and its carefully nurtured growth. The type of successful long-distance relationships that traders engage in are only possible in the long run if the partners have more reason to trust than to mistrust. Securing trust by making friends is one of the processes for domesticating Fortune. The other successful procedures are in the field of risk management, which was already taking shape at that time. That is what the merchants are talking about on the Rialto in Venice in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. This much is clear: a merchant couldn’t go far with the Gospels alone. Reflections on Christian teaching couldn’t make the new market predictable. That is why, around 1500, a perfectly functioning clandestine system of double theology was established in many places in Europe. For the critical moments in life there was Christianity, and for the business and private spheres there was the cult of Fortune.
RAULFF: In other words, people learned to be Christians and fatalists at the same time.
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, fatalist in the clear sense of the word. RAULFF: In the entrepreneurial sense?
SLOTERDIJK: In a very practical sense, in which both the busi-
nessman and the courtier always did what was necessary to gain and keep Fortune’s favours. But, as we have shown, at the beginning of
302 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
the Enlightenment the suppression of such intellectual constructs had become unavoidable. The eighteenth century tried to break with feudal categories on a broad front, including the favouritism of Fortune. The ideology of equality had as little use for Fortune and its royal court as early Christianity had for Fate.
RAULFF: The early Enlightenment neutralized amor fati, while the democracy of the twentieth century doesn’t have a clue what to do with it.
SLOTERDIJK: All in all, we can rightly say that the modern age initially had to abolish fate because it brought the dawn of the period in which people decided to direct their own fate. We have discussed how this led to neo-fatalist movements and that it was equally inevitable that they would be clarified in the Enlightenment via enlightenment and counter-enlightenment. Yet the pattern of abolition, return and clarification of the idea of fate is ultimately unsatisfying. I think that the most important thing is missing in this smooth narrative.
