That is one of the unforgettable lessons of the
twentieth
century.
Sloterdijk - Selected Exaggerations
My rage is transformed into enhanced self-esteem.
Unfortunately, the left-wing parties have often failed to achieve this.
Then the clients withdraw their deposits.
They either become apolitical or take their savings to a right-wing bank, which then practises direct revenge politics and chooses the uncensored form of expressing rage.
The right-wing bank directors appear relatively uncensored as rowdies, populists, provocateurs and rabble-rousers, drawing in the frustrated voters and rabble sympathizers.
At any rate, a person who identifies with the party boss’s rabble-rousing gets gratification very directly.
My rage will no longer be idealisti- cally ennobled but at least I will be able to express it openly as part of my life.
It’s obvious that such scenarios must end in disappoint- ment.
For every slap in the face the populist gives he gets one and a half slaps back – a classic loss-making business.
Generally speaking, the problem of political parties seen as rage banks is the mismanage- ment of affects.
That can go as far as open investment fraud.
BOPP: Could you give an example?
SLOTERDIJK: From the perspective of the philosophy of history, the biggest emotional fraud in twentieth-century history occurred in August 1914. This triggered the implosion of left-wing interna- tionalism, following which the parliamentary left in Germany and elsewhere granted the war credits, falling into step with the policy of waging nationalist warfare. This meant that the left wing’s transna- tional and progressively invested emotional credit was misused for a nationalist-imperialist war. The left-wing system has basically never recovered from that disaster. It also partly explains the pathological radicalization that occurred in Russia after 1917 and the daydream- ing on the extreme flanks of politics.
BOPP: The thymotic impulses seem to have died down to some extent in Western Europe today. We have accepted that the capital- ist system satisfies our needs adequately and we can safely leave it to shape the future. There are still conflicts now and then, but they are ritualized and occur periodically between labour unions and the state. Labour-union bosses have to be credible and convince their clientele that they have fought and haven’t let themselves be cheated.
SLOTERDIJK: But these negotiating rituals are much more important than people generally think because they are about a thy- motic yield. Conflicts between social partners are never just about percentages. Wrangling for recognition and satisfying frustrated expectations is always important as well.
224 Do Your Duty To Enjoy!
BOPP: We really have it so good. After all, we’ve got everything. Everything is always available. Consumerism instead of commu- nism. . . . (A woman’s voice over the loudspeaker says, ‘Would you like breakfast? We’re happy to serve you. ’)
SLOTERDIJK: There’s the answer to your question! A voice from above tells you your needs. That’s consumerism personified. For sure you would like breakfast? Yes? Then it’s your damned duty to enjoy it. And if you can’t enjoy it, our job is to show you ways and possibilities to enjoy things anyway. This is the new categorical imperative: do your duty to enjoy!
BOPP: Can this imperative be generalized?
SLOTERDIJK: Absolutely. All it needs is for us to recognize that we are being called on to metabolize. There’s not much to object to in that. People used to see it as a mortal curse that human beings – as metabolic beings – are bound to the material sphere. The spirit, however, knows no hunger and is driven at most by a longing to see the higher things. Today, things are shown in reverse. Now you are supposed to forget everything that could release you from needs. Avoid the temptation of not needing anything at all costs. Don’t get the idea you can cheat your way out of the permanent cycle of consumption. Your body has to do its consumer duty.
BOPP: Only the body?
SLOTERDIJK: No, the senses were also recruited for duty a long time ago. The eye is on image duty day and night. The ear is on music and sound duty and, since the wellness wave started rolling, the skin is permanently on feeling duty as well. The modern angel of prosperity floats above everything. It no longer says, ‘Fear not! ’ as it did to the shepherds way back then, but instead, ‘Enjoy it! ’
BOPP: Is it a monotheistic angel?
[Peter Sloterdijk’s latest book has the title Gottes Eifer: Vom Kampf der drei Monotheismen. 2]
SLOTERDIJK: Consumerism is a kind of behaviour with a high capacity for anthropological connectivity. I suspect that all cul- tures that have involved a high degree of superego formation can veer towards consumerism relatively easily. People who are used to thinking in terms of service and performance can extend these principles to consumption as well. First you achieve something, and then you can afford something.
BOPP: But isn’t the capitalist the ascetic and the aristocrat the epicure?
2 English edition: Peter Sloterdijk, God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms (Cambridge: Polity), 2009.
Do Your Duty To Enjoy! 225
SLOTERDIJK: That was Max Weber’s opinion, but his view was one-sided. At the very least, capitalism was driven just as much by the luxury of the epicurean classes. We still get instructive illus- trations of this today: a psycho-historical phenomenon has spread in Africa and the Arabian oil states – an overabundance of epicu- rean uselessness. Overnight, the pride of Arabian manhood was swamped with unexpected wealth, and this created the oil sheikhs, the newcomers to extreme consumerism who can be compared with the Russian nouveau riche that emerged recently. These people have never had work experience. This shows how easily consumer- ism penetrates into the psyche: people are evidently beings attuned to luxury by nature. Accession to wealth is possible from all sides. Whether Shintoist, Calvinist, Catholic or animist – people react very similarly once they get rich: they finally feel understood and accepted!
BOPP: Is luxury capable of globalization? Could it bring eternal peace?
SLOTERDIJK: That is psychologically and economically impos- sible. Part of the nature of luxury is that it creates strong paradoxes. Satisfaction with life can never be derived from net luxury. It lives chiefly from comparison: most people would gladly do without absolute advantages as long as they are relatively better off than others. Not everybody can take first place. This paradox is insur- mountable, and no kind of egalitarianism can get around it. There will always be a group of people that are more ‘equal’ than all the others.
27
EVEN A GOD CAN’T SAVE US Interview with Julia Encke*
ENCKE: Mr Sloterdijk, why must we change our life?
SLOTERDIJK: The global crisis dictates change. We must change our life decisively because otherwise we are participating in an economic and ecological programme of self-annihilation. In the ancient history of humankind there also were stern authori- ties, gods, gurus and teachers who troubled their followers with enormous demands. Nowadays, we have to deal with an ungodly goddess called ‘crisis’ who demands that we evolve new forms of life. Human groups usually have a long-term project, a will to continued existence. But that project of permanence is completely incompat- ible with the present modus vivendi. Incredible things are happening in this context.
ENCKE: What exactly do you mean?
SLOTERDIJK: For example, the state has reached such a peak of helplessness that it is openly considering whether to give its citi- zens money to go shopping. Unbelievable! We have to be publicly reminded to maintain at all costs the level of extravagance we once achieved. I can still remember how Edmund Stoiber1 told the people of Munich during an earlier crisis, ‘Go on, give your wife a fur coat
* This conversation between Peter Sloterdijk and Julia Encke appeared under the title ‘Uns hilft kein Gott’ [‘No God will Help Us’], in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (22 March 2009): 21.
At the time of the interview Julia Encke was a member of the FAZ news- paper’s editorial team in Berlin.
1 The southern German politician Edmund Stoiber was Minister President of the Federal State of Bavaria from 1993 to 2007 and head of the German Christian Democratic Party from 1999 to 2007.
Even a God Can’t Save Us 227
now! ’ The reason was that Rieger Pelze, a leading fur goods store in Munich, had a financial crisis, and Minister President Stoiber, who was a stalwart supporter of the Bavarian system of nepotism and a personal friend of the firm, thought almost like an old comrade from 1968 that ‘the personal is political’. The present procedures for rescuing the extravagant society aren’t any less incredible. Overnight we have been catapulted into a giant seminar on econom- ics and anthropology where people reflect on how global and real expenditure can continue.
ENCKE: Who is supposed to change their life? Do you really mean everybody? Or do you mean a specific ‘elite’?
SLOTERDIJK: My book makes the first ever attempt at a literal interpretation of the generic subtitle of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: ‘A Book for Everyone and No One’. It is ‘for no one’ because the elites to whom the book could be addressed do not exist yet. At the same time, it is ‘for everyone’ because a new selection process has begun which will determine who lets the crisis speak to them. Humankind will divide, and is already dividing as we watch, into those who carry on as always and those who are prepared to make changes.
ENCKE: Let’s take an example: Peer Steinbrück. 2 What should he change?
SLOTERDIJK: The first thing he has to understand is that his mission can’t be to secure jobs on board the Titanic. He should study icebergs a little more carefully. Jobs on board the Titanic only existed as long as the ship was afloat. Incidentally, nobody would gladly step into Steinbrück’s shoes. He is in a position whose occupants are bound to become unhappy. He knows better than anybody else that the right things can’t be financed.
ENCKE: What is your advice to him?
SLOTERDIJK: To reflect that, from now on, everything that lacks a sufficient vision for the future will be seen one day as a contribution to the collision with the ultimate iceberg. He has to persuade himself and his colleagues all over the world to create joint advisory boards that make politics capable of pursuing clear long-term projects again. Politics has to be emancipated from election-period panic.
ENCKE: What can I do personally as a journalist?
SLOTERDIJK: You can react against the pressure to talk about irrelevant things. Journalists are called up to the distraction front
2 The politician Peer Steinbrück was Federal German Minister of Finance from 2005 to 2009 and deputy head of the German Social Democratic Party in the same period.
228 Even a God Can’t Save Us
every day. Austria has just gone through an astonishingly short ‘Fritzl week’ and we can’t thank the Austrian justice system enough for succeeding in closing the trial in three and a half days with a suc- cinct judgement. 3
ENCKE: You mean you’re actually not complaining about Austria!
SLOTERDIJK: That’s unusual for me. But the Austrian authori- ties have spared the rest of the world endless debates, and not least themselves. You can imagine what our press in Germany would have done in tandem with our justice system – we would have been treated to a festival of unnecessary news for months. The story would have been exploited to a much greater extent as legal drama and scandal journalism, with a full demonstration of the parasitic function of the press: to distract from the important issues, which has long since become its major function.
ENCKE: How do you see yourself? As a coach for improving the world, or as a postmodern guru?
SLOTERDIJK: Well, philosophers are persons with a strong monologue. On the one hand, there is somebody inside them who shares the common human confusion about the state of the world today. On the other hand, a part of their personality claims they have learned something and can give advice. The latter figure, who sits with me in the consultant’s seat, may have become a little more imposing at the moment. I have listened in to the world situation and related my present perceptions to the general knowledge about the evolution of high cultures in the past 3,000 years. This produces some urgent messages.
ENCKE: Not everybody wants to hear those urgent messages. In your book you accuse intellectuals of summarily dismissing people who give serious warnings as pompous idiots. You say that hardly anybody wants to face up to the extent of the threat. Do you think these people are cynics or are they simply too naïve?
SLOTERDIJK: In the present case there isn’t a complete alterna- tive between cynical and naïve. Twenty-five years ago, when I wrote Critique of Cynical Reason, I tried to squeeze the whole typology of the intellectual field into these two alternatives: either people are naïve, in which case they are too close to the problems, or they are cynical, which means they are too indifferent to the problems.
3 Sloterdijk is referring to the case of Josef Fritzl, a man from Amstetten in Austria who imprisoned one of his daughters for twenty-four years and repeatedly raped her. She bore seven children by him. The crime was dis- covered in 2008.
Even a God Can’t Save Us 229
Today we need a third position. I’m talking about people who are neither cynical nor naïve.
ENCKE: You mean people who deconstruct everything to keep the world at bay?
SLOTERDIJK: Deconstructivism has become plausible partly because modernism has produced too many embarrassingly naïve forms of world salvation. The social catastrophes of the twentieth century stemmed from ideologies formulated by certain semi-vision- ary people who solved the mystery of the world with grand prophetic gestures. Whether private property or subversive Judaism was blamed for all evils – the deconstructive attitude was always justified in opposition to seductive, primitive formulas.
ENCKE: But that isn’t enough any more?
SLOTERDIJK: Richard Rorty4 once described his colleagues in the philosophical and humanities departments somewhat bitterly as ‘detached cosmopolitan spectators’. What he meant is: you talk about the crisis as if it were an opera production. At most we stand on the periphery looking at the catastrophes through opera glasses, without understanding that many disasters that occur today not only contain their own inherent harmful aspect, but also have a sig- nifying quality for our future.
ENCKE: What do you mean by a ‘signifying quality’?
SLOTERDIJK: Hans Jonas and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker had already raised the issue of ‘warning catastrophes’ back in the 1980s. 5 They meant that humankind receives warnings from the real world that have to be decoded and translated into the behaviour of individuals and institutions. That’s exactly what people who are satisfied with the role of detached cosmopolitan theatregoers can’t do.
ENCKE: Don’t we also use an opera glass for protection? If people are really confronted with that degree of real threat, it can make them incapable of acting, and can drive them to suicide in extreme cases. People are creatures that need protection.
SLOTERDIJK: For 3,000 years the avant-garde of humankind has lived in this situation: that they see something overpowering and the intelligentsia shivers. It seems to me the concept of ‘God’ was one of the strongest protective shields. For an aeon, humans
4 Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was an American philosopher and comparatist.
5 Hans Jonas (1903–93) was a German-born American philosopher who was a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912–2007) was a German physicist, philosopher and expert on peace studies.
230 Even a God Can’t Save Us
retreated behind it to defend themselves from the monster. Anyone who saw the outer side of the shield would be frozen to a pillar of salt. Remember the shield of Perseus with the terrifying head of the gorgon as its centrepiece. But the hero is on the inner side of the shield and turns the terror outwards. This image is a very good description of the situation of the intelligentsia when it tries to protect itself in close combat with reality.
ENCKE: Do you mean we must shake off false security and live more dangerously?
SLOTERDIJK: Above all, we should think more consciously about danger. What lies ahead is a kind of gorgon-like enlighten- ment. We must decide to build a global immune system that opens up a common survival perspective. We have to work now on a pro- tective shield for the earth, for humankind and for its technological environment. That will require global ecological management. I call this co-immunism.
ENCKE: As at other points in your book, this is a word- play on communism. Is You Must Change Your Life a left-wing manifesto?
SLOTERDIJK: I am not envisaging a neo-communist project. Communism, as we know, tried to be a religion of conquest, like an atheist Islam, and to pull all industrialized nations into its orbit in an aggressive expansionist movement. What did the communists really want? To seize political power so as to institute extreme edu- cational dictatorships for immature populations. You have been warned against repetition. The movement postulated in my book doesn’t aim at forced conversion. We have to achieve everything voluntarily on the basis of good advice – or ‘assisted willingness’, if you like. That’s why I talk throughout the book about the life of practice and about shaping oneself by self-improvement.
ENCKE: You have a fairly positive image of human beings.
SLOTERDIJK: I start from a strong ontological thesis: intel- ligence exists. This leads to a strong ethical thesis: there is a positive correlation between intelligence and the will to self-preservation. Since Adorno, we have known that this correlation can be ques- tioned – that was the most promising idea of older Critical Theory. It started from the observation that intelligence can go in the wrong direction and confuse self-destruction with self-preservation.
That is one of the unforgettable lessons of the twentieth century. What is on the agenda now is an affirmative theory of global co-immunity. It is the foundation of, and orientation for, the many and varied practices of shared survival.
ENCKE: Have you designed a utopia?
SLOTERDIJK: If you called this utopian it would make my hair
Even a God Can’t Save Us 231
stand on end! If you were right, I would belong to the tradition of mad men who wanted to make the world better. On the contrary, I thought I had demonstrated pragmatism, though admittedly with a dash of prophetic agitation.
28
A PLUG FOR HIGHER ENERGIES
Interview with Mateo Kries*6
KRIES: Mr Sloterdijk, the title of your book, Du mußt Dein Leben ändern [You Must Change Your Life] refers to Rainer Maria Rilke, a contemporary of Steiner. You preface the book with a quo- tation from Nietzsche that also made a great impact on Steiner, in which Nietzsche advocated the practising existence. Is your interest in Steiner connected with the life-reform movements at the begin- ning of the twentieth century?
SLOTERDIJK: Life reform was the major topic in the period around 1900. It was the alternative to the concept of revolution that had structured people’s consciousness of the possibility of trans- forming the world since 1789. It put the idea of non-political or supra-political transformation on the agenda. Life reformers such as Nietzsche and Steiner held the common view that it was pointless to carry on repeating political phrases and founding a new party in the back room of a pub. They thought it was much more important to rebuild one’s whole life from the smallest elements, as it were. They posed the question: how can we maintain human existence in a vertical tension that still does justice to the human being as a meta- physical animal? How can we create a pull from above, although the ladder on which people climb up can’t be leaned against anything up there any more, because the other side no longer exists? The
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Mateo Kries appeared under the title ‘Ein Stecker für höhere Energien’, in Die Welt newspaper (25 October 2011); available at: <http://www. welt. de/print/die_welt/kultur/ article13679318/Ein-Stecker- fuer-die-hoeheren-Energien. html>.
At the time of the interview Mateo Kries was chief curator at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein.
A Plug for Higher Energies 233
twentieth century ended with the recognition that the revolutionar- ies were wrong and the life reformers right. Meanwhile, fear of the gurutocracy, rule by gurus, has receded to some extent and today people are more willing to see Steiner as a quite normal genius rather than a guru.
KRIES: Still, we have to realize that Steiner vanished off the map from his death in 1925 to the end of the twentieth century, and was dismissed as a spiritual crank. Anthroposophy became fossilized, and that led to the whole movement being isolated. Steiner was associated with Kandinsky and Jawlensky, but in the succeeding decades his students only developed his radical aesthetics in minor ways. Wasn’t there some justification for the criticism of Steiner and anthroposophy?
SLOTERDIJK: The few followers of anthroposophy I knew in the 1960s to 1970s made an unpleasant impression. They went around as if they were imitating an angel who was practising how to stride like a human. Moreover, pop culture had long since made its mark on us, and the anthroposophists were still talking about their eurhythmics. In those days anthroposophy followers were out of pace with their surrounding culture, but they are catching up now. We have new grounds for asking what makes the movement relevant to the present day. One possible answer is that on a broad level we were no longer able to agree with the answers given by classical and contemporary philosophy to the question of the character of sub- jectivity. To some extent, Steiner made it possible to access human subjectivity in an upward direction. He found the plug for accessing higher energies that were normally banned from the conversations of middle-class society. That can’t fail to have consequences because it creates intellectual dissonance. Think of Gottfried Benn’s dictum: ‘In Germany philosophers who aren’t linguistically capable of expressing their world view tend to be called seers. ’
KRIES: The concept of the seer is appropriate because Steiner actually demanded that people should try to imagine seeing abstract- philosophical associations in pictures ‘before their eyes’. He made the famous blackboard drawings during his lectures.
SLOTERDIJK: In a sense, those blackboard drawings are the precursors of PowerPoint presentations. When he was speaking Steiner relied on the idea embracing him at the right moment – a theme that can be traced back to the heights of German idealism. Fichte, for example, made it unmistakably clear in his instructions to his students that the lecturer has to be open to the flash of illu- mination that may come while he is speaking. The concept of the medium is central for understanding the Steiner phenomenon. It partly explains the fascination that still emanates from his work and
234 A Plug for Higher Energies
personality today. People are increasingly realizing that a defini- tion of mediality based solely on machines and apparatuses is not enough. We have to return to the concept of the medium established in the nineteenth century, which is intricately interwoven with ghost sightings.
KRIES: How does that relate to Steiner in a modern-day context?
SLOTERDIJK: Personal mediums are people with antennae. Hugo Ball, a co-founder of Dadaism who experienced a spiritual change after 1918, wrote in an important essay at the time that the whole world had become a medium. Steiner had already realized that two decades earlier. His life curve ended at the moment when the process of the masses becoming the medium with the aid of popular broadcasting began. The first radio test broadcasts took place in 1923. Steiner died in 1925. By 1930, probably one in five of all German households owned a radio receiver. A new form of social synthesis via the ear emerged. Steiner had put out his antennae much more sensitively than everybody else who had been engaging in what has been called ‘discourse’ since Michel Foucault founded discourse theory. ‘Discourse’ literally means running to and fro, but not receiving live at the moment.
KRIES: Looking at Steiner in those major historical contexts, his death also coincided with the end of the earlier phase of modernism, the phase that was charged with expressionism. This was followed by the triumph of rationalism from the second half of the twenti- eth century on, and in the post-war period there was a pervasive longing for a middle-class mainstream in which there was no place for Steiner anyway. Artists like Sigmar Polke, who said, ‘Higher beings commanded: paint the top right-hand corner black! ’ were loners. It is only today that the social constellations seem to offer the conditions again for Polke’s oeuvre, with all its ramifications, to be located within the intellectual history of the modern age, and not as the work of a weird outsider. 1 Why do you think it took so long?
SLOTERDIJK: It may be due to another factor that co-determined the cycles of readability of Steiner’s work. I’m thinking of a theme that Helmut Lethen2 had already put on the agenda of the humani- ties twenty-five years ago: the ‘Birth of the Cool’ in the 1920s from the perspective of the history of ideas. In the 1920s, there was a cold snap in the intellectual sphere with quite a different impact from
1 Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) was a German painter and photographer known for his work in postmodernist realism.
2 Helmut Lethen is a Germanist and cultural scholar. He is director of the International Research Centre for Cultural Studies in Vienna.
A Plug for Higher Energies 235
that which Paul Valéry meant, for example, when he remarked with rather paternalistic Cartesian overtones that good intellect is ‘dry’. From the 1920s on, the motto was ‘Good intellect is cold’. If we extrapolate this position as a constant factor at work in the background character of twentieth-century culture, it is clear why a system like Steiner’s has always risked being marginalized. After all, in many ways it is the epitome of uncoolness. Coolness will have nothing to do with improving life and the world. As soon as a do- gooder enters the room, the coolness enthusiasts leave.
KRIES: Has that changed today?
SLOTERDIJK: Today’s zeitgeist allows more scope to specific forms of uncoolness again. Many years ago I read Nietzsche’s Zarathustra with my American students. I was afraid it would be too full of pathos for them. But they simply read the whole thing right through like a rap. They didn’t find it at all bombastic and overblown. They had no trouble reading Nietzsche’s extreme flights of rhapsodic style, which are difficult for people educated in old Europe, straight off the page.
KRIES: Your view may be confirmed if we look at particular tendencies in fashion today. In periods of almost overwhelming progress, the things that are really fashionable are those that look rather uncool and contradict the accelerated tempo – at the moment, heavy horn-rimmed glasses and knitted ties. But there are also other parallels to the present. Think of the many objects and build- ings with a polygonal and crystalline form, like certain designs by Steiner’s circle. At first these designs even seem to draw aesthetic inspiration from the molecular world, yet their heaviness and occa- sional clumsiness are reminiscent of the yearning for stability and solidity in an increasingly fast-moving age. Paul Virilio interpreted Steiner’s Goetheanum in the sense of his own bunker thesis as a space for protection against the temptations and risks of acceler- ated modernism. As decelerated architecture, so to speak. Do you agree?
SLOTERDIJK: In the first place I understand houses as immune systems in spatial form. On this definition we can ask what happens if the form really follows the function. What is the way to build when the immunitary imperative is at the beginning of a spatial creation? A house would then be envisaged beginning with its most intimate rooms and not with the splendid entrance hall. Good architects conceive the house starting from the bedrooms, whereas the modernists, who have brought the cold trend of the modern age into the home, have come up with weird proposals such as folding the bed up against the wall in the daytime.
KRIES: Steiner, on the other hand, designed a bed for his Haus
236 A Plug for Higher Energies
Duldeck that looks like a gigantic ocean steamer. It almost seems to swallow you with its curves and bumps . . .
SLOTERDIJK: One of the key words for understanding some of the more recent architectural tendencies is a word borrowed from English sociology, ‘embedding’. Given the ubiquitous, rampant tendency towards being mobile and dis-embedding, people are getting interested in foundational or embedding situations again. Embedding means that humans, as beings sensitive to spheres, want to understand space as space for immersion.
KRIES: The immersion always includes immersion in an endless intellectual cosmos. Steiner once said that if we could pull a human heart inside out we would get a universe. This can be applied to Steiner’s architecture and design. His interiors are the reverse of his intellectual cosmos. And to refer back to your image, he wanted to listen in to that cosmos. Is that, perhaps, one of the intersection points for Steiner’s artistic creations and his philosophical works?
SLOTERDIJK: In his case the two things are inextricably inter- woven. Steiner created a kind of antenna anthropology that we can’t simply do without any more, even if we have to rewrite every phrase of this doctrine. Since the dawn of the modern age, people actually have been listening in to the ether and want to know what is to be done. Martin Buber wrote in his book Mystische Zeugnisse aller Zeiten und Völker, published in 1906/07 – and this is very typical for the reception situation of early modernism – ‘We listen to our innermost selves – and do not know which sea we hear murmuring. ’3 Steiner had begun with a much more precise reception at that time. He spoke as if being dictated to, and apparently heard in the ether a mandate to attempt life reform that put people of our era on a new track. Now, 100 years later, after the twentieth century – a lost century from a spiritual perspective – we are standing on the same spot again.
Today, the phrase ‘You must change your life’ is no longer inter- preted only in terms of Buddhism, Christianity or Stoicism, or in Nietzsche’s sense, but as a mission to develop a form of life that makes human coexistence on this endangered planet possible. If you tune your antennae more finely you can hear this on all sides. Large numbers of people feel this very clearly, and Steiner is an ideal transmitter for this unavoidable message. He was important, and remains so, because he was one of the people who put out antennae even before the birth of radio.
3 Martin Buber, Mystical Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism, ed. Paul Mendes-Flor (New York: Syracuse University Press), 1996.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
29
MORTGAGING THE AIR The Financial Crisis
Conversation with Gabor Steingart and Torsten Riecke*4
STEINGART/RIECKE: Let’s start with the biggest question of all, the debt question: who is mainly responsible for the present mess in Europe? Is it the finance market systems impelled by greed, as you once put it, or the politicians dependent on their own promises? Or is it the citizens themselves, who always want more than they are prepared to pay for?
SLOTERDIJK: It may sound odd – and your question expresses it wonderfully – but today we are coming back from modern debts to classical ones. The question is: who is to blame for the debts? This implies there are obviously two ways people can be tied to a guilty past. The modern way is through debts. Financial debts are rather like sins we can be forgiven for by redeeming them ourselves – whereas moral debt has to be forgiven by others.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But it seems we can’t redeem our debts any more; we can only hope for forgiveness.
SLOTERDIJK: The old cloven hoof of religion has reappeared in the concept of debt in modern finance – from the moment, in fact, that the debts grew so big that the idea of redeeming them lost all credibility. The debt mechanism can work as long as there are
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk, Gabor Steingart and Torsten Riecke appeared under the title ‘Die Staaten verpfänden die Luft und Banken atmen tief durch’ [‘The Countries Pledge Air and Banks Take Deep Breaths’], in Handelsblatt magazine (17 December 2011).
Gabor Steingart is a German journalist and author. He was editor-in- chief of Handelsblatt from 2010 to 2012.
Torsten Riecke is a journalist and was head of the Opinion and Analysis section of Handelsblatt at the time of this interview.
238 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
people who seriously believe that a debtor is in a position (a) to pay off the whole loan amount, and (b) to pay the extra charge in the form of interest. Anybody who can credit something like that can become a creditor.
STEINGART/RIECKE: What you describe was the basis of eco- nomic behaviour in transactions in the past 200 years.
SLOTERDIJK: Much longer! A good example occurred in the sixteenth century: the wealthy tradesman Jakob Fugger had the Tyrolean prince give him the country’s silver mines as security, whereas a bungling relative from another branch of the family, Fugger vom Reh, accepted the city of Lüttich [Liège] as a deposit – but realized one morning that a city can’t be a deposit because it can’t be seized in foreclosure. To have trust you need to be smart about security.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But hasn’t the connection between guilt and debts been lost because in modern economic theory debts can’t be considered as guilt any more? Aren’t they regarded as invest- ments, and isn’t it therefore seen as a kind of basic right for present generations to help themselves to the putative treasures of future generations? The Americans call that a stimulus package. Nobody in modern credit capitalism thinks about redeeming debts any more.
SLOTERDIJK: Basically it’s a matter of cultivating a pathologi- cal relationship to the past. Crimes or sins are pathological – they bind perpetrators to what has happened by foreshadowing the suf- fering that will ensue later. Their crimes will catch up with them. The long arm of guilt that stretches out from the past to grab people in the present is represented mainly by credit in modern society. Credit, in turn, has to be tied to two stabilizing factors: first, the deposit, and, second, a state that guarantees foreclosure.
STEINGART/RIECKE: On that argument the cuckoo, not the German eagle, should represent the state.
SLOTERDIJK: It would generally be helpful if we talked less about a federal chancellor and more about a federal bailiff. The real semantic or juridical-moral centre of the body politic is located where legal enforcement is guaranteed. For a community that relies mainly on a credit-driven economy, the mechanism that assures credit by enforcement is the ultimate moral criterion. In other words, before we expect justice from the state we should be clear that the state, as guarantor of legal enforcement, has long since been at the heart of specifically modern transactions.
STEINGART/RIECKE: In Greece the creditors have realized that they have lent more than they can impound. Evidently they are not very smart about collateral either. For them it is like a replay of the Hans Fugger situation.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 239
SLOTERDIJK: We are reaching the point again where states are going to experience what happened to Fugger vom Reh. As we know, he dropped out of economic history, whereas the family line represented by Jakob the Wealthy prospered – due to collateral smartness. And that’s exactly what is missing today. Governments mortgage the air over their national territory and banks take deep breaths. This may lead to a European-wide disorientation of historical dimensions, possibly comparable with the massive moral- economic meltdown of 1922/23, the period of hyperinflation.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Since that period the Germans have been more traumatized than other nations, and even more deeply after the second hyperinflation after the end of the Second World War. Is this moral way of reflecting on the crisis typically German?
SLOTERDIJK: I would say that the German language is delight- fully German in this respect – it delivers these ideas to our doorstep. We shouldn’t criticize it for one of its merits, that of making it easy to understand connections that might otherwise remain obscure. Saying the words ‘debt’ and ‘guilt’ in English doesn’t clarify any- thing, and that particular play on words doesn’t work at all in the Romance languages. But if we consider the issue, we come to the same conclusions all round because it is always the knots that were tied in the past that bind the present to the past.
STEINGART/RIECKE: What you are saying is a curious way to provoke the people who coined the slogan ‘Occupy Wall Street’. They say, ‘Occupy’ or, even better, ‘Expropriate the creditors! ’ You argue back: ‘Creditors have a right to demand repayment of the debts on their books. ’ Is the protest against the banks simply a big mistake?
SLOTERDIJK: First of all, the debtor is always the guilty party, the party that owes something. Given this, it would be good to set up a lawyer’s office that specializes in reclaiming debts opposite every bank branch, to make the connection clear to people coming out of the bank with loans. The probability that a borrower will get into debt in the sense of owing both interest and the capital sum is constantly increasing. This makes us suspect the seriousness of the borrower’s intentions. Our confidence erodes fastest when the really big players turn out to be the most unscrupulous because they never seriously considered repaying the loans.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you mean the United States?
SLOTERDIJK: The Americans illustrate this very well: they have long since stopped thinking how to repay the national debt. Of course they talk about saving, but in today’s parlance that means reducing new borrowing. My grandmother interpreted the concept of saving very differently in her day.
240 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you mean the concept has become distorted?
SLOTERDIJK: Saving used to mean putting something aside. Today’s finance ministers use the word to applaud themselves when they make fewer new debts.
STEINGART/RIECKE: In other words, the banks stand acquitted?
SLOTERDIJK: Be careful! The banks as banks aren’t respon- sible for every mistake. First of all, for a society driven by money, honest belief in repayment is indispensable.
STEINGART/RIECKE: We could say that just an illusion of repayment would be worth a great deal. But even that is unreal in the case of Greece, as well as Japan and the USA.
SLOTERDIJK: Repayment illusion is a lovely name for a moral construct protected by the state – provided the state itself remains credible as a debtor. That is hardly the case today.
STEINGART/RIECKE: The illusion is fed by the fact that the debts are continually recycled. All the debtor nations pay their debts every few months with new debts.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s an idea Dante himself couldn’t have come up with. We should add a fourth part to his Divine Comedy. As we know, Dante conceived Purgatory as the purification system for venial – let’s say, redeemable – sins. They would be marked on the sinners’ brows with seven ‘P’s – even in the hell of purification everything important must be in writing. After every stage, one ‘P’ (for peccatum) would be erased, until the former sinner would stand there with a clear brow. No one in medieval times could imagine that charges from the past could be restructured.
BOPP: Could you give an example?
SLOTERDIJK: From the perspective of the philosophy of history, the biggest emotional fraud in twentieth-century history occurred in August 1914. This triggered the implosion of left-wing interna- tionalism, following which the parliamentary left in Germany and elsewhere granted the war credits, falling into step with the policy of waging nationalist warfare. This meant that the left wing’s transna- tional and progressively invested emotional credit was misused for a nationalist-imperialist war. The left-wing system has basically never recovered from that disaster. It also partly explains the pathological radicalization that occurred in Russia after 1917 and the daydream- ing on the extreme flanks of politics.
BOPP: The thymotic impulses seem to have died down to some extent in Western Europe today. We have accepted that the capital- ist system satisfies our needs adequately and we can safely leave it to shape the future. There are still conflicts now and then, but they are ritualized and occur periodically between labour unions and the state. Labour-union bosses have to be credible and convince their clientele that they have fought and haven’t let themselves be cheated.
SLOTERDIJK: But these negotiating rituals are much more important than people generally think because they are about a thy- motic yield. Conflicts between social partners are never just about percentages. Wrangling for recognition and satisfying frustrated expectations is always important as well.
224 Do Your Duty To Enjoy!
BOPP: We really have it so good. After all, we’ve got everything. Everything is always available. Consumerism instead of commu- nism. . . . (A woman’s voice over the loudspeaker says, ‘Would you like breakfast? We’re happy to serve you. ’)
SLOTERDIJK: There’s the answer to your question! A voice from above tells you your needs. That’s consumerism personified. For sure you would like breakfast? Yes? Then it’s your damned duty to enjoy it. And if you can’t enjoy it, our job is to show you ways and possibilities to enjoy things anyway. This is the new categorical imperative: do your duty to enjoy!
BOPP: Can this imperative be generalized?
SLOTERDIJK: Absolutely. All it needs is for us to recognize that we are being called on to metabolize. There’s not much to object to in that. People used to see it as a mortal curse that human beings – as metabolic beings – are bound to the material sphere. The spirit, however, knows no hunger and is driven at most by a longing to see the higher things. Today, things are shown in reverse. Now you are supposed to forget everything that could release you from needs. Avoid the temptation of not needing anything at all costs. Don’t get the idea you can cheat your way out of the permanent cycle of consumption. Your body has to do its consumer duty.
BOPP: Only the body?
SLOTERDIJK: No, the senses were also recruited for duty a long time ago. The eye is on image duty day and night. The ear is on music and sound duty and, since the wellness wave started rolling, the skin is permanently on feeling duty as well. The modern angel of prosperity floats above everything. It no longer says, ‘Fear not! ’ as it did to the shepherds way back then, but instead, ‘Enjoy it! ’
BOPP: Is it a monotheistic angel?
[Peter Sloterdijk’s latest book has the title Gottes Eifer: Vom Kampf der drei Monotheismen. 2]
SLOTERDIJK: Consumerism is a kind of behaviour with a high capacity for anthropological connectivity. I suspect that all cul- tures that have involved a high degree of superego formation can veer towards consumerism relatively easily. People who are used to thinking in terms of service and performance can extend these principles to consumption as well. First you achieve something, and then you can afford something.
BOPP: But isn’t the capitalist the ascetic and the aristocrat the epicure?
2 English edition: Peter Sloterdijk, God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms (Cambridge: Polity), 2009.
Do Your Duty To Enjoy! 225
SLOTERDIJK: That was Max Weber’s opinion, but his view was one-sided. At the very least, capitalism was driven just as much by the luxury of the epicurean classes. We still get instructive illus- trations of this today: a psycho-historical phenomenon has spread in Africa and the Arabian oil states – an overabundance of epicu- rean uselessness. Overnight, the pride of Arabian manhood was swamped with unexpected wealth, and this created the oil sheikhs, the newcomers to extreme consumerism who can be compared with the Russian nouveau riche that emerged recently. These people have never had work experience. This shows how easily consumer- ism penetrates into the psyche: people are evidently beings attuned to luxury by nature. Accession to wealth is possible from all sides. Whether Shintoist, Calvinist, Catholic or animist – people react very similarly once they get rich: they finally feel understood and accepted!
BOPP: Is luxury capable of globalization? Could it bring eternal peace?
SLOTERDIJK: That is psychologically and economically impos- sible. Part of the nature of luxury is that it creates strong paradoxes. Satisfaction with life can never be derived from net luxury. It lives chiefly from comparison: most people would gladly do without absolute advantages as long as they are relatively better off than others. Not everybody can take first place. This paradox is insur- mountable, and no kind of egalitarianism can get around it. There will always be a group of people that are more ‘equal’ than all the others.
27
EVEN A GOD CAN’T SAVE US Interview with Julia Encke*
ENCKE: Mr Sloterdijk, why must we change our life?
SLOTERDIJK: The global crisis dictates change. We must change our life decisively because otherwise we are participating in an economic and ecological programme of self-annihilation. In the ancient history of humankind there also were stern authori- ties, gods, gurus and teachers who troubled their followers with enormous demands. Nowadays, we have to deal with an ungodly goddess called ‘crisis’ who demands that we evolve new forms of life. Human groups usually have a long-term project, a will to continued existence. But that project of permanence is completely incompat- ible with the present modus vivendi. Incredible things are happening in this context.
ENCKE: What exactly do you mean?
SLOTERDIJK: For example, the state has reached such a peak of helplessness that it is openly considering whether to give its citi- zens money to go shopping. Unbelievable! We have to be publicly reminded to maintain at all costs the level of extravagance we once achieved. I can still remember how Edmund Stoiber1 told the people of Munich during an earlier crisis, ‘Go on, give your wife a fur coat
* This conversation between Peter Sloterdijk and Julia Encke appeared under the title ‘Uns hilft kein Gott’ [‘No God will Help Us’], in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (22 March 2009): 21.
At the time of the interview Julia Encke was a member of the FAZ news- paper’s editorial team in Berlin.
1 The southern German politician Edmund Stoiber was Minister President of the Federal State of Bavaria from 1993 to 2007 and head of the German Christian Democratic Party from 1999 to 2007.
Even a God Can’t Save Us 227
now! ’ The reason was that Rieger Pelze, a leading fur goods store in Munich, had a financial crisis, and Minister President Stoiber, who was a stalwart supporter of the Bavarian system of nepotism and a personal friend of the firm, thought almost like an old comrade from 1968 that ‘the personal is political’. The present procedures for rescuing the extravagant society aren’t any less incredible. Overnight we have been catapulted into a giant seminar on econom- ics and anthropology where people reflect on how global and real expenditure can continue.
ENCKE: Who is supposed to change their life? Do you really mean everybody? Or do you mean a specific ‘elite’?
SLOTERDIJK: My book makes the first ever attempt at a literal interpretation of the generic subtitle of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: ‘A Book for Everyone and No One’. It is ‘for no one’ because the elites to whom the book could be addressed do not exist yet. At the same time, it is ‘for everyone’ because a new selection process has begun which will determine who lets the crisis speak to them. Humankind will divide, and is already dividing as we watch, into those who carry on as always and those who are prepared to make changes.
ENCKE: Let’s take an example: Peer Steinbrück. 2 What should he change?
SLOTERDIJK: The first thing he has to understand is that his mission can’t be to secure jobs on board the Titanic. He should study icebergs a little more carefully. Jobs on board the Titanic only existed as long as the ship was afloat. Incidentally, nobody would gladly step into Steinbrück’s shoes. He is in a position whose occupants are bound to become unhappy. He knows better than anybody else that the right things can’t be financed.
ENCKE: What is your advice to him?
SLOTERDIJK: To reflect that, from now on, everything that lacks a sufficient vision for the future will be seen one day as a contribution to the collision with the ultimate iceberg. He has to persuade himself and his colleagues all over the world to create joint advisory boards that make politics capable of pursuing clear long-term projects again. Politics has to be emancipated from election-period panic.
ENCKE: What can I do personally as a journalist?
SLOTERDIJK: You can react against the pressure to talk about irrelevant things. Journalists are called up to the distraction front
2 The politician Peer Steinbrück was Federal German Minister of Finance from 2005 to 2009 and deputy head of the German Social Democratic Party in the same period.
228 Even a God Can’t Save Us
every day. Austria has just gone through an astonishingly short ‘Fritzl week’ and we can’t thank the Austrian justice system enough for succeeding in closing the trial in three and a half days with a suc- cinct judgement. 3
ENCKE: You mean you’re actually not complaining about Austria!
SLOTERDIJK: That’s unusual for me. But the Austrian authori- ties have spared the rest of the world endless debates, and not least themselves. You can imagine what our press in Germany would have done in tandem with our justice system – we would have been treated to a festival of unnecessary news for months. The story would have been exploited to a much greater extent as legal drama and scandal journalism, with a full demonstration of the parasitic function of the press: to distract from the important issues, which has long since become its major function.
ENCKE: How do you see yourself? As a coach for improving the world, or as a postmodern guru?
SLOTERDIJK: Well, philosophers are persons with a strong monologue. On the one hand, there is somebody inside them who shares the common human confusion about the state of the world today. On the other hand, a part of their personality claims they have learned something and can give advice. The latter figure, who sits with me in the consultant’s seat, may have become a little more imposing at the moment. I have listened in to the world situation and related my present perceptions to the general knowledge about the evolution of high cultures in the past 3,000 years. This produces some urgent messages.
ENCKE: Not everybody wants to hear those urgent messages. In your book you accuse intellectuals of summarily dismissing people who give serious warnings as pompous idiots. You say that hardly anybody wants to face up to the extent of the threat. Do you think these people are cynics or are they simply too naïve?
SLOTERDIJK: In the present case there isn’t a complete alterna- tive between cynical and naïve. Twenty-five years ago, when I wrote Critique of Cynical Reason, I tried to squeeze the whole typology of the intellectual field into these two alternatives: either people are naïve, in which case they are too close to the problems, or they are cynical, which means they are too indifferent to the problems.
3 Sloterdijk is referring to the case of Josef Fritzl, a man from Amstetten in Austria who imprisoned one of his daughters for twenty-four years and repeatedly raped her. She bore seven children by him. The crime was dis- covered in 2008.
Even a God Can’t Save Us 229
Today we need a third position. I’m talking about people who are neither cynical nor naïve.
ENCKE: You mean people who deconstruct everything to keep the world at bay?
SLOTERDIJK: Deconstructivism has become plausible partly because modernism has produced too many embarrassingly naïve forms of world salvation. The social catastrophes of the twentieth century stemmed from ideologies formulated by certain semi-vision- ary people who solved the mystery of the world with grand prophetic gestures. Whether private property or subversive Judaism was blamed for all evils – the deconstructive attitude was always justified in opposition to seductive, primitive formulas.
ENCKE: But that isn’t enough any more?
SLOTERDIJK: Richard Rorty4 once described his colleagues in the philosophical and humanities departments somewhat bitterly as ‘detached cosmopolitan spectators’. What he meant is: you talk about the crisis as if it were an opera production. At most we stand on the periphery looking at the catastrophes through opera glasses, without understanding that many disasters that occur today not only contain their own inherent harmful aspect, but also have a sig- nifying quality for our future.
ENCKE: What do you mean by a ‘signifying quality’?
SLOTERDIJK: Hans Jonas and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker had already raised the issue of ‘warning catastrophes’ back in the 1980s. 5 They meant that humankind receives warnings from the real world that have to be decoded and translated into the behaviour of individuals and institutions. That’s exactly what people who are satisfied with the role of detached cosmopolitan theatregoers can’t do.
ENCKE: Don’t we also use an opera glass for protection? If people are really confronted with that degree of real threat, it can make them incapable of acting, and can drive them to suicide in extreme cases. People are creatures that need protection.
SLOTERDIJK: For 3,000 years the avant-garde of humankind has lived in this situation: that they see something overpowering and the intelligentsia shivers. It seems to me the concept of ‘God’ was one of the strongest protective shields. For an aeon, humans
4 Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was an American philosopher and comparatist.
5 Hans Jonas (1903–93) was a German-born American philosopher who was a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912–2007) was a German physicist, philosopher and expert on peace studies.
230 Even a God Can’t Save Us
retreated behind it to defend themselves from the monster. Anyone who saw the outer side of the shield would be frozen to a pillar of salt. Remember the shield of Perseus with the terrifying head of the gorgon as its centrepiece. But the hero is on the inner side of the shield and turns the terror outwards. This image is a very good description of the situation of the intelligentsia when it tries to protect itself in close combat with reality.
ENCKE: Do you mean we must shake off false security and live more dangerously?
SLOTERDIJK: Above all, we should think more consciously about danger. What lies ahead is a kind of gorgon-like enlighten- ment. We must decide to build a global immune system that opens up a common survival perspective. We have to work now on a pro- tective shield for the earth, for humankind and for its technological environment. That will require global ecological management. I call this co-immunism.
ENCKE: As at other points in your book, this is a word- play on communism. Is You Must Change Your Life a left-wing manifesto?
SLOTERDIJK: I am not envisaging a neo-communist project. Communism, as we know, tried to be a religion of conquest, like an atheist Islam, and to pull all industrialized nations into its orbit in an aggressive expansionist movement. What did the communists really want? To seize political power so as to institute extreme edu- cational dictatorships for immature populations. You have been warned against repetition. The movement postulated in my book doesn’t aim at forced conversion. We have to achieve everything voluntarily on the basis of good advice – or ‘assisted willingness’, if you like. That’s why I talk throughout the book about the life of practice and about shaping oneself by self-improvement.
ENCKE: You have a fairly positive image of human beings.
SLOTERDIJK: I start from a strong ontological thesis: intel- ligence exists. This leads to a strong ethical thesis: there is a positive correlation between intelligence and the will to self-preservation. Since Adorno, we have known that this correlation can be ques- tioned – that was the most promising idea of older Critical Theory. It started from the observation that intelligence can go in the wrong direction and confuse self-destruction with self-preservation.
That is one of the unforgettable lessons of the twentieth century. What is on the agenda now is an affirmative theory of global co-immunity. It is the foundation of, and orientation for, the many and varied practices of shared survival.
ENCKE: Have you designed a utopia?
SLOTERDIJK: If you called this utopian it would make my hair
Even a God Can’t Save Us 231
stand on end! If you were right, I would belong to the tradition of mad men who wanted to make the world better. On the contrary, I thought I had demonstrated pragmatism, though admittedly with a dash of prophetic agitation.
28
A PLUG FOR HIGHER ENERGIES
Interview with Mateo Kries*6
KRIES: Mr Sloterdijk, the title of your book, Du mußt Dein Leben ändern [You Must Change Your Life] refers to Rainer Maria Rilke, a contemporary of Steiner. You preface the book with a quo- tation from Nietzsche that also made a great impact on Steiner, in which Nietzsche advocated the practising existence. Is your interest in Steiner connected with the life-reform movements at the begin- ning of the twentieth century?
SLOTERDIJK: Life reform was the major topic in the period around 1900. It was the alternative to the concept of revolution that had structured people’s consciousness of the possibility of trans- forming the world since 1789. It put the idea of non-political or supra-political transformation on the agenda. Life reformers such as Nietzsche and Steiner held the common view that it was pointless to carry on repeating political phrases and founding a new party in the back room of a pub. They thought it was much more important to rebuild one’s whole life from the smallest elements, as it were. They posed the question: how can we maintain human existence in a vertical tension that still does justice to the human being as a meta- physical animal? How can we create a pull from above, although the ladder on which people climb up can’t be leaned against anything up there any more, because the other side no longer exists? The
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Mateo Kries appeared under the title ‘Ein Stecker für höhere Energien’, in Die Welt newspaper (25 October 2011); available at: <http://www. welt. de/print/die_welt/kultur/ article13679318/Ein-Stecker- fuer-die-hoeheren-Energien. html>.
At the time of the interview Mateo Kries was chief curator at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein.
A Plug for Higher Energies 233
twentieth century ended with the recognition that the revolutionar- ies were wrong and the life reformers right. Meanwhile, fear of the gurutocracy, rule by gurus, has receded to some extent and today people are more willing to see Steiner as a quite normal genius rather than a guru.
KRIES: Still, we have to realize that Steiner vanished off the map from his death in 1925 to the end of the twentieth century, and was dismissed as a spiritual crank. Anthroposophy became fossilized, and that led to the whole movement being isolated. Steiner was associated with Kandinsky and Jawlensky, but in the succeeding decades his students only developed his radical aesthetics in minor ways. Wasn’t there some justification for the criticism of Steiner and anthroposophy?
SLOTERDIJK: The few followers of anthroposophy I knew in the 1960s to 1970s made an unpleasant impression. They went around as if they were imitating an angel who was practising how to stride like a human. Moreover, pop culture had long since made its mark on us, and the anthroposophists were still talking about their eurhythmics. In those days anthroposophy followers were out of pace with their surrounding culture, but they are catching up now. We have new grounds for asking what makes the movement relevant to the present day. One possible answer is that on a broad level we were no longer able to agree with the answers given by classical and contemporary philosophy to the question of the character of sub- jectivity. To some extent, Steiner made it possible to access human subjectivity in an upward direction. He found the plug for accessing higher energies that were normally banned from the conversations of middle-class society. That can’t fail to have consequences because it creates intellectual dissonance. Think of Gottfried Benn’s dictum: ‘In Germany philosophers who aren’t linguistically capable of expressing their world view tend to be called seers. ’
KRIES: The concept of the seer is appropriate because Steiner actually demanded that people should try to imagine seeing abstract- philosophical associations in pictures ‘before their eyes’. He made the famous blackboard drawings during his lectures.
SLOTERDIJK: In a sense, those blackboard drawings are the precursors of PowerPoint presentations. When he was speaking Steiner relied on the idea embracing him at the right moment – a theme that can be traced back to the heights of German idealism. Fichte, for example, made it unmistakably clear in his instructions to his students that the lecturer has to be open to the flash of illu- mination that may come while he is speaking. The concept of the medium is central for understanding the Steiner phenomenon. It partly explains the fascination that still emanates from his work and
234 A Plug for Higher Energies
personality today. People are increasingly realizing that a defini- tion of mediality based solely on machines and apparatuses is not enough. We have to return to the concept of the medium established in the nineteenth century, which is intricately interwoven with ghost sightings.
KRIES: How does that relate to Steiner in a modern-day context?
SLOTERDIJK: Personal mediums are people with antennae. Hugo Ball, a co-founder of Dadaism who experienced a spiritual change after 1918, wrote in an important essay at the time that the whole world had become a medium. Steiner had already realized that two decades earlier. His life curve ended at the moment when the process of the masses becoming the medium with the aid of popular broadcasting began. The first radio test broadcasts took place in 1923. Steiner died in 1925. By 1930, probably one in five of all German households owned a radio receiver. A new form of social synthesis via the ear emerged. Steiner had put out his antennae much more sensitively than everybody else who had been engaging in what has been called ‘discourse’ since Michel Foucault founded discourse theory. ‘Discourse’ literally means running to and fro, but not receiving live at the moment.
KRIES: Looking at Steiner in those major historical contexts, his death also coincided with the end of the earlier phase of modernism, the phase that was charged with expressionism. This was followed by the triumph of rationalism from the second half of the twenti- eth century on, and in the post-war period there was a pervasive longing for a middle-class mainstream in which there was no place for Steiner anyway. Artists like Sigmar Polke, who said, ‘Higher beings commanded: paint the top right-hand corner black! ’ were loners. It is only today that the social constellations seem to offer the conditions again for Polke’s oeuvre, with all its ramifications, to be located within the intellectual history of the modern age, and not as the work of a weird outsider. 1 Why do you think it took so long?
SLOTERDIJK: It may be due to another factor that co-determined the cycles of readability of Steiner’s work. I’m thinking of a theme that Helmut Lethen2 had already put on the agenda of the humani- ties twenty-five years ago: the ‘Birth of the Cool’ in the 1920s from the perspective of the history of ideas. In the 1920s, there was a cold snap in the intellectual sphere with quite a different impact from
1 Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) was a German painter and photographer known for his work in postmodernist realism.
2 Helmut Lethen is a Germanist and cultural scholar. He is director of the International Research Centre for Cultural Studies in Vienna.
A Plug for Higher Energies 235
that which Paul Valéry meant, for example, when he remarked with rather paternalistic Cartesian overtones that good intellect is ‘dry’. From the 1920s on, the motto was ‘Good intellect is cold’. If we extrapolate this position as a constant factor at work in the background character of twentieth-century culture, it is clear why a system like Steiner’s has always risked being marginalized. After all, in many ways it is the epitome of uncoolness. Coolness will have nothing to do with improving life and the world. As soon as a do- gooder enters the room, the coolness enthusiasts leave.
KRIES: Has that changed today?
SLOTERDIJK: Today’s zeitgeist allows more scope to specific forms of uncoolness again. Many years ago I read Nietzsche’s Zarathustra with my American students. I was afraid it would be too full of pathos for them. But they simply read the whole thing right through like a rap. They didn’t find it at all bombastic and overblown. They had no trouble reading Nietzsche’s extreme flights of rhapsodic style, which are difficult for people educated in old Europe, straight off the page.
KRIES: Your view may be confirmed if we look at particular tendencies in fashion today. In periods of almost overwhelming progress, the things that are really fashionable are those that look rather uncool and contradict the accelerated tempo – at the moment, heavy horn-rimmed glasses and knitted ties. But there are also other parallels to the present. Think of the many objects and build- ings with a polygonal and crystalline form, like certain designs by Steiner’s circle. At first these designs even seem to draw aesthetic inspiration from the molecular world, yet their heaviness and occa- sional clumsiness are reminiscent of the yearning for stability and solidity in an increasingly fast-moving age. Paul Virilio interpreted Steiner’s Goetheanum in the sense of his own bunker thesis as a space for protection against the temptations and risks of acceler- ated modernism. As decelerated architecture, so to speak. Do you agree?
SLOTERDIJK: In the first place I understand houses as immune systems in spatial form. On this definition we can ask what happens if the form really follows the function. What is the way to build when the immunitary imperative is at the beginning of a spatial creation? A house would then be envisaged beginning with its most intimate rooms and not with the splendid entrance hall. Good architects conceive the house starting from the bedrooms, whereas the modernists, who have brought the cold trend of the modern age into the home, have come up with weird proposals such as folding the bed up against the wall in the daytime.
KRIES: Steiner, on the other hand, designed a bed for his Haus
236 A Plug for Higher Energies
Duldeck that looks like a gigantic ocean steamer. It almost seems to swallow you with its curves and bumps . . .
SLOTERDIJK: One of the key words for understanding some of the more recent architectural tendencies is a word borrowed from English sociology, ‘embedding’. Given the ubiquitous, rampant tendency towards being mobile and dis-embedding, people are getting interested in foundational or embedding situations again. Embedding means that humans, as beings sensitive to spheres, want to understand space as space for immersion.
KRIES: The immersion always includes immersion in an endless intellectual cosmos. Steiner once said that if we could pull a human heart inside out we would get a universe. This can be applied to Steiner’s architecture and design. His interiors are the reverse of his intellectual cosmos. And to refer back to your image, he wanted to listen in to that cosmos. Is that, perhaps, one of the intersection points for Steiner’s artistic creations and his philosophical works?
SLOTERDIJK: In his case the two things are inextricably inter- woven. Steiner created a kind of antenna anthropology that we can’t simply do without any more, even if we have to rewrite every phrase of this doctrine. Since the dawn of the modern age, people actually have been listening in to the ether and want to know what is to be done. Martin Buber wrote in his book Mystische Zeugnisse aller Zeiten und Völker, published in 1906/07 – and this is very typical for the reception situation of early modernism – ‘We listen to our innermost selves – and do not know which sea we hear murmuring. ’3 Steiner had begun with a much more precise reception at that time. He spoke as if being dictated to, and apparently heard in the ether a mandate to attempt life reform that put people of our era on a new track. Now, 100 years later, after the twentieth century – a lost century from a spiritual perspective – we are standing on the same spot again.
Today, the phrase ‘You must change your life’ is no longer inter- preted only in terms of Buddhism, Christianity or Stoicism, or in Nietzsche’s sense, but as a mission to develop a form of life that makes human coexistence on this endangered planet possible. If you tune your antennae more finely you can hear this on all sides. Large numbers of people feel this very clearly, and Steiner is an ideal transmitter for this unavoidable message. He was important, and remains so, because he was one of the people who put out antennae even before the birth of radio.
3 Martin Buber, Mystical Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism, ed. Paul Mendes-Flor (New York: Syracuse University Press), 1996.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
29
MORTGAGING THE AIR The Financial Crisis
Conversation with Gabor Steingart and Torsten Riecke*4
STEINGART/RIECKE: Let’s start with the biggest question of all, the debt question: who is mainly responsible for the present mess in Europe? Is it the finance market systems impelled by greed, as you once put it, or the politicians dependent on their own promises? Or is it the citizens themselves, who always want more than they are prepared to pay for?
SLOTERDIJK: It may sound odd – and your question expresses it wonderfully – but today we are coming back from modern debts to classical ones. The question is: who is to blame for the debts? This implies there are obviously two ways people can be tied to a guilty past. The modern way is through debts. Financial debts are rather like sins we can be forgiven for by redeeming them ourselves – whereas moral debt has to be forgiven by others.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But it seems we can’t redeem our debts any more; we can only hope for forgiveness.
SLOTERDIJK: The old cloven hoof of religion has reappeared in the concept of debt in modern finance – from the moment, in fact, that the debts grew so big that the idea of redeeming them lost all credibility. The debt mechanism can work as long as there are
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk, Gabor Steingart and Torsten Riecke appeared under the title ‘Die Staaten verpfänden die Luft und Banken atmen tief durch’ [‘The Countries Pledge Air and Banks Take Deep Breaths’], in Handelsblatt magazine (17 December 2011).
Gabor Steingart is a German journalist and author. He was editor-in- chief of Handelsblatt from 2010 to 2012.
Torsten Riecke is a journalist and was head of the Opinion and Analysis section of Handelsblatt at the time of this interview.
238 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
people who seriously believe that a debtor is in a position (a) to pay off the whole loan amount, and (b) to pay the extra charge in the form of interest. Anybody who can credit something like that can become a creditor.
STEINGART/RIECKE: What you describe was the basis of eco- nomic behaviour in transactions in the past 200 years.
SLOTERDIJK: Much longer! A good example occurred in the sixteenth century: the wealthy tradesman Jakob Fugger had the Tyrolean prince give him the country’s silver mines as security, whereas a bungling relative from another branch of the family, Fugger vom Reh, accepted the city of Lüttich [Liège] as a deposit – but realized one morning that a city can’t be a deposit because it can’t be seized in foreclosure. To have trust you need to be smart about security.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But hasn’t the connection between guilt and debts been lost because in modern economic theory debts can’t be considered as guilt any more? Aren’t they regarded as invest- ments, and isn’t it therefore seen as a kind of basic right for present generations to help themselves to the putative treasures of future generations? The Americans call that a stimulus package. Nobody in modern credit capitalism thinks about redeeming debts any more.
SLOTERDIJK: Basically it’s a matter of cultivating a pathologi- cal relationship to the past. Crimes or sins are pathological – they bind perpetrators to what has happened by foreshadowing the suf- fering that will ensue later. Their crimes will catch up with them. The long arm of guilt that stretches out from the past to grab people in the present is represented mainly by credit in modern society. Credit, in turn, has to be tied to two stabilizing factors: first, the deposit, and, second, a state that guarantees foreclosure.
STEINGART/RIECKE: On that argument the cuckoo, not the German eagle, should represent the state.
SLOTERDIJK: It would generally be helpful if we talked less about a federal chancellor and more about a federal bailiff. The real semantic or juridical-moral centre of the body politic is located where legal enforcement is guaranteed. For a community that relies mainly on a credit-driven economy, the mechanism that assures credit by enforcement is the ultimate moral criterion. In other words, before we expect justice from the state we should be clear that the state, as guarantor of legal enforcement, has long since been at the heart of specifically modern transactions.
STEINGART/RIECKE: In Greece the creditors have realized that they have lent more than they can impound. Evidently they are not very smart about collateral either. For them it is like a replay of the Hans Fugger situation.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 239
SLOTERDIJK: We are reaching the point again where states are going to experience what happened to Fugger vom Reh. As we know, he dropped out of economic history, whereas the family line represented by Jakob the Wealthy prospered – due to collateral smartness. And that’s exactly what is missing today. Governments mortgage the air over their national territory and banks take deep breaths. This may lead to a European-wide disorientation of historical dimensions, possibly comparable with the massive moral- economic meltdown of 1922/23, the period of hyperinflation.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Since that period the Germans have been more traumatized than other nations, and even more deeply after the second hyperinflation after the end of the Second World War. Is this moral way of reflecting on the crisis typically German?
SLOTERDIJK: I would say that the German language is delight- fully German in this respect – it delivers these ideas to our doorstep. We shouldn’t criticize it for one of its merits, that of making it easy to understand connections that might otherwise remain obscure. Saying the words ‘debt’ and ‘guilt’ in English doesn’t clarify any- thing, and that particular play on words doesn’t work at all in the Romance languages. But if we consider the issue, we come to the same conclusions all round because it is always the knots that were tied in the past that bind the present to the past.
STEINGART/RIECKE: What you are saying is a curious way to provoke the people who coined the slogan ‘Occupy Wall Street’. They say, ‘Occupy’ or, even better, ‘Expropriate the creditors! ’ You argue back: ‘Creditors have a right to demand repayment of the debts on their books. ’ Is the protest against the banks simply a big mistake?
SLOTERDIJK: First of all, the debtor is always the guilty party, the party that owes something. Given this, it would be good to set up a lawyer’s office that specializes in reclaiming debts opposite every bank branch, to make the connection clear to people coming out of the bank with loans. The probability that a borrower will get into debt in the sense of owing both interest and the capital sum is constantly increasing. This makes us suspect the seriousness of the borrower’s intentions. Our confidence erodes fastest when the really big players turn out to be the most unscrupulous because they never seriously considered repaying the loans.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you mean the United States?
SLOTERDIJK: The Americans illustrate this very well: they have long since stopped thinking how to repay the national debt. Of course they talk about saving, but in today’s parlance that means reducing new borrowing. My grandmother interpreted the concept of saving very differently in her day.
240 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you mean the concept has become distorted?
SLOTERDIJK: Saving used to mean putting something aside. Today’s finance ministers use the word to applaud themselves when they make fewer new debts.
STEINGART/RIECKE: In other words, the banks stand acquitted?
SLOTERDIJK: Be careful! The banks as banks aren’t respon- sible for every mistake. First of all, for a society driven by money, honest belief in repayment is indispensable.
STEINGART/RIECKE: We could say that just an illusion of repayment would be worth a great deal. But even that is unreal in the case of Greece, as well as Japan and the USA.
SLOTERDIJK: Repayment illusion is a lovely name for a moral construct protected by the state – provided the state itself remains credible as a debtor. That is hardly the case today.
STEINGART/RIECKE: The illusion is fed by the fact that the debts are continually recycled. All the debtor nations pay their debts every few months with new debts.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s an idea Dante himself couldn’t have come up with. We should add a fourth part to his Divine Comedy. As we know, Dante conceived Purgatory as the purification system for venial – let’s say, redeemable – sins. They would be marked on the sinners’ brows with seven ‘P’s – even in the hell of purification everything important must be in writing. After every stage, one ‘P’ (for peccatum) would be erased, until the former sinner would stand there with a clear brow. No one in medieval times could imagine that charges from the past could be restructured.
