No More Learning

SLOTERDIJK: In my opinion, decisionism and the philosophy of the deed are subversive products of classical Enlightenment historicism. For decisionists, there is a sharp remainder of human history-making in the form of disastrous epoch-making. This happens through sudden decisions with which the great agent pre- pares to ride the wave of the world as it moves onward. This is the moment for the distinction Nietzsche introduced between active and passive nihilism. Without this, it is nearly impossible to understand the path of ideas in the twentieth century. In both forms nihilism is the inevitable reverse side of historicism. It has to take the upper hand as soon as we abandon the classical assumption that all epochs are equally close to God. Then comes the idea that history is what ultimately leads to nothing. In principle there are only the two posi- tions Nietzsche described with his distinction between passive and active nihilism. First, people let themselves drift along . . .
RAULFF: Nirvana . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Nirvana, fun, drugs. The drug world is sig- nificant in this context because it not only expresses disinterest in history, but also disinterest in being-in-the-world as such. In La condition humaine, the French novelist André Malraux described an old Chinese man – I think it was the father of one of the young revolutionaries at the centre of the novel – who chose to let the world drown in unreality. Malraux used extreme irony in his depic- tion of the opium dealer, who had once been a sociologist at Peking University, because from this person’s perspective even the most
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serious thing people could achieve at that time on the world stage – revolution – became blurred in the meaninglessness of the world as a whole. What a terrible world that was, the China of the late 1920s as seen through the eyes of this French novelist: the fathers dreaming away their lives in an opium haze while their sons imagine they will achieve self-fulfilment in murders for the future. Clearly, Malraux could only have presented the figure of the man on the opium couch on the basis of Nietzsche’s theory of passive nihilism. At the same time he highlighted the instability of revolutionary struggle because it could only mean nihilism in action. Just as weigh- ing out opium implies fleeing from reality, the revolutionary actions of the Shanghai activists in 1927 imply fleeing beyond reality. This is best illustrated in the two most powerful scenes from La Condition humaine: right at the beginning, when the young fighter Chen commits his first murder in a kind of active trance and discovers the surrealism of killing, and then again towards the end of the novel with the self-sacrifice of Comrade Katov, who gives away his only cyanide capsule, which is supposed to guarantee him quick death in an emergency, to two young Chinese comrades to allow them to end their own lives in the last night before the execution. He himself accepts being burned alive by Kuomintang soldiers the following morning in the boiler of the locomotive. This shows active nihilist ethics at the most extreme end. Malraux was one of the key wit- nesses of the twentieth century because he understood early on that communist commitment was identical with active nihilism.
Incidentally, we could ask ourselves whether Carl Schmitt4 wasn’t also arguing the line of active nihilism, and whether his superim- posed Catholicism wasn’t just a mask for nihilism, with decisionist trimmings in this case. Precisely because everything leads to nothing, he pictured the great designers of society being called upon to make decisions with fatal consequences. The horrible jurist Schmitt thought that people who postponed the inevitable end of the world should have a free hand. Schmitt granted licence to major perpetra- tors to take superhuman risks – such as Hitler when he launched the Second World War. In retrospect we would be right to say that, all in all, active nihilism with its posture of a fresh start emerging out of abrupt decision, and its faith at rock bottom, and the great rupture, was a disappointment, a self-hypnotic swindle. The truth is that nothing old ended and nothing new began. Anyone who wants to
4 Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) was a conservative German theorist who specialized in legal, constitutional and political theory. His support for the Nazi regime made him a controversial figure.
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keep on living always has to connect to the previous state and carry on from there in some direction or other.
RAULFF: Isn’t it more that historical thought always hovers between an attitude of loving breaches and hating them? By all appearances we are currently in a phase that is afraid of breaches, although as you rightly say we always need both and should take both into account. Passive nihilism spreads until active nihilism intervenes. Then it destroys the passive and devours it with a strong project. Commentators have observed, incidentally, how nihilism as a figure of thought was used in the courtroom in Nuremberg to explain and excuse criminal actions, for example, in relation to the trials of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile SS killing squads. To exonerate the accused, European nihilism was presented as a global chain of guilt with the catastrophic German deeds as only part of that, and the guilty actions of individuals in turn only as a micro- scopic fragment of the fateful whole. Just imagine, such arguments even extended to the defence strategies of the lawyers at Nuremberg.
SLOTERDIJK: Regrettably, Heidegger made a special contribu- tion to this field. His works represent a dubious peak in the indirect apologetics for lapses of the twentieth century and their exaltation to decrees of fate.
RAULFF: Prepared in terms of the structure of care . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Heidegger’s early work had already presaged the turn to thinking in concepts of ‘fate’, using the basic existen- tial structure of care. To begin with, we should note the method of thinking: it is not that I care, but that care is sent to me and takes me into service. In the works of his middle and later periods, Heidegger attached the concept of fate generally to the occurrences of civilization that we know as technology. In this context, we hear disastrous statements such as that the industrialized landscape and mass production of dead people in concentration camps stem from the same. . . .
RAULFF: . . . ‘process logic’ . . .
SLOTERDIJK: . . . and arise from the same fateful objectification and misuse of everything by production and presentation, that is, the unstoppable rush of self-empowering framing subjectivity. We still don’t know what to make of these statements. They abrogate the possibility of being guilty of anything at all. We can see some- thing slightly comparable in the neurological hype that nothing and nobody can resist at the present time. In fact, it opens the way for a renewed attempt to popularize fatalism as naturalism, in this case as neuro-fatalism. The art of not having been the guilty person remains as topical as it was in the period of the first setbacks in the Enlightenment project. From this perspective, Marquard actually
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provided the key to the moral ecological system of the modern age: as soon as the human capacity to act explosively increases, a demand for irresponsibility begins. Everybody talks about responsibility, but in reality most people have a stake in effacing the possibility of making perpetrators responsible for their actions.
RAULFF: This is what Marquard described as ‘refatalization’. In this respect a concept like fate, or whatever is offered as an alter- native, always has an exonerating function, not only individually but also on the level of the species.
SLOTERDIJK: Nietzsche invented the most powerful image of the global dilemma for which one needs and seeks relief when he described man as a being hanging on the back of a tiger in dreams. In that situation we think twice about whether to wake up the pas- senger. Nobody has practised getting off the tiger’s back. Some progressive moralists today are coming round to the idea that the tiger doesn’t exist at all. According to them, we have been stand- ing on firm ground all the time, responsible for ourselves from top to toe. For them, there is no dark underbelly that empowers and sometimes devours us. By contrast, authors such as Heidegger or Friedrich Georg Jünger5 focused on the monstrous in their consid- erations on the modern world, the former with his theory of frames that concerns a super-tiger called technology, and the latter in the form of a meditation about the titanic quality of modern civiliza- tions. Since then, there has been an almost never-ending discussion about the weirdness that lies at the roots of the enterprises of moder- nity. Thinking like that makes us imagine ourselves as insects in the scaly skin of a dragon. Dreamers on a tiger’s back or gnats on the scales of a monster – those are the images that have shaped being- in-the-world after the collapse of the perpetrator illusion following the French Revolution, and after the implosion of the Napoleon bubble.
RAULFF: In this case refatalization seems to be not only giving relief but also oppressive.
SLOTERDIJK: First, the key word ‘relief’ is the best word for this situation. To understand that we have to go back to the era fol- lowing the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. After the heroic period, losers stood around everywhere looking for excuses. Fate was just the right thing. Napoleon was exiled to a remote Atlantic island, the heroes were pensioned off, history stagnated and a strong demand for non-responsibility hung in the air. People
5 Friedrich Georg Jünger (1898–1977) was a German poet, author and essayist in cultural criticism.
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had meant well but things turned out differently. In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo portrayed a sad figure who created a paltry business out of the memories of great days – the sergeant from Waterloo, a veteran who earned a living from saying he had been there. That was the beginning of the memorial industry, which is now an inte- gral part of the exonerated life of the modern age: somebody once called it ‘mobility on a stationary basis’ and this is still the most profound statement about our way of being. Kierkegaard memo- rably described the experience of the calm after the storm that was history in his little-known essay, A Literary Review. It is here, inci- dentally, that we find the first instance of insulting the audience in modern philosophy, which seems to have inspired the Man chapter of Heidegger’s Being and Time. In this essay Kierkegaard discovered a new kind of monster, gigantic in its lack of character – the modern public, in fact, whose formation brought the art of not having been there to its present stage. Heidegger would later describe this public as follows: ‘Everyone is the other and no one is himself. ’ Its fate was to have arrived too late for the real history.
RAULFF: The epigones . . . Immermann6 . . . All the deeds that would have been worth doing are already written down in the history books, and all the works it would have been worth writing are already in the libraries.
SLOTERDIJK: To pursue the point even further, it means that history had already come to a standstill at Waterloo. The first concise post-historic era occurred in the years 1815 to 1818, during the occupation by the Belle Alliance victors when France slumped into political catatonia – an episode that has been erased from or, more precisely, never entered French memory. The country regained its status as a sovereign nation with the Bourbon restoration of 1818 to 1830, but the cost was standstill, political and ideological regres- sion, and bitterly warring rival parties splintering into chaos. The post-historical mood became chronic under the rigid Bourbons. You just have to look at the pompous, overblown portraits of Louis XVIII in French heraldic ermine to realize that post-history and simulation belong together. The French were the first to learn that people can fake entire epochs. At that period the best one could do was to write medieval novels or memoirs beyond the grave. This is just what Walter Scott and Chateaubriand, the great masters of ersatz history and ersatz life, did. Given this constellation, we can understand the hunger for fate. Along with post-historical paralysis
6 Karl Leberecht Immermann (1796–1840) was a German novelist, dra- matist and poet famous for his contemporary criticism.
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comes nostalgia for turbulent times with all their blood and pomp. Incidentally, one topic of recent literature on Heidegger and Co. is ‘yearning for harshness and severity’, which is a rather good charac- terization of the heroic disposition of the young conservative spirits of the early twentieth century. The formulation aptly fits the post- Napoleonic age. It describes the nostalgia for the days when the French lived on victory reports. This nostalgia is still alive today. Among current politicians, Dominique de Villepin is the one who most clearly embodies the epic-heroic view of history.
RAULFF: This resembles the Bainville tradition that brought royalism into the twentieth century via the digression of the Action française.
SLOTERDIJK: De Villepin, who is a Gaullist and a lyrical Bonapartist, wrote quite an interesting book about Napoleon’s hundred days. The book reveals an intensely nostalgic picture of the author’s view of France in its best period – heroic and grand, although unfortunate in the end. It gives an idea of the role the author would like to play in his lofty nation.
RAULFF: Typical historical-mythological French thinking, astonishing for a modern-day politician.
SLOTERDIJK: It has something of the drama of the gifted child from the right wing who concocts a story with plumed helmets and clinking swords. Anyway, we’re familiar with similar exercises on German soil as well. Here, as in France, the point of such exercises is to postulate an inspired new start after a significant military defeat, or after it feels as if history has come to an end. We can also trace this pattern of the end and a new beginning of the world drama in post-war periods in detail, by looking at the case of the young Heidegger. His lecture in the winter semester of 1929–30 on the fundamental concepts of metaphysics included the magnificent treatment of boredom, in which Heidegger described the world of 1929 as if it were conclusively over. He asked: ‘What is our actual condition? ’ and answered: ‘Our condition is such that nothing moves us deeply any more. ’ Our own epoch leaves us empty. That is the Freiburg variation of the theorem of the end of history. Its end is shown in our emptiness that proves the absence of the essen- tial in our existence. Of course, Heidegger only followed this train of thought with a strategic intention because he believed being immersed in extreme boredom would lead to a dialectical reversal into its opposite, the greatest state of tension. He wanted to compel the rebirth of history out of the spirit of being left in a state of emptiness. According to Heidegger, profound boredom is the most philosophical of moods: in it, we experience the difficulty of an exist- ence in which being is abandoned. In the state of ultimate boredom
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of having-nothing-else-to-do, Being will experience even when it is in absent mode. Only once we have penetrated into it totally can we feel, first remotely, then increasingly clearly, the returning call of temporalized Being that commissions a new chapter of history: ‘The event needs you! ’ That sounds like a tempting call to join the first loud political movement that comes along . . .
RAULFF: Which naturally promises the direct way out of the absence of fate.
SLOTERDIJK: Naturally, because it bursts on to the scene with brute force to kick-start history, which is at a standstill. From this perspective, in Heidegger’s work it could also have been the com- munists whose revolutionary historicism would have suited his onto historical approach well. But its options did not correspond to Heidegger’s profile, which was closer to the national Bolshevik revolt, Niekisch and his consorts. In the days of national revolu- tion, the concept of fate in its most massive form became important again. Great history, in Heidegger’s opinion, is sent. Indeed, it is sent by the noblest sender, Being. But as the sending Being trans- mits itself via existence, it needs people who are sent: they will be the rare people who are simultaneously moved and resolute. The only other example we have of this concerns the Christian Apostles, who promulgate an unconditional message. When being moved and being resolute occur together, it creates an action through a medium, an acted action, so to speak, that makes history by follow- ing the call of Being and reinforcing it with its own calls. In terms of form, it is like the model of the eternal love story between human beings and God. Such stories regularly start with the subject that has been left empty wanting to be emotionally moved. The unbe- lievers who want to believe think that once really moved, we would rush ahead with good reason and would finally know what had to be done. My deed should move me in such a way that I can do it. For most people, the reality is precisely the other way round: anyone who follows the tendency to rush ahead thinks up the emotion to match.
RAULFF: The person in the grip of emotion thus stands on both sides of the passivity–activity relationship. This causes an enormous reinforcement, a dramatization of existence. Being emotionally moved involves immersion or submissiveness. As the former female bishop would say, we lie even deeper in God’s hands. On the other hand, the resoluteness creates an ascension . . .
SLOTERDIJK: I have been thinking about such figures of mediatory subjectivity for decades. I always come back to a short, lucid essay titled The Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle, that Kierkegaard wrote in 1848 as part of his polemic against the
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Danish pastor Adler. 7 This short essay with its strong inner dimen- sion is something like the Magna Carta of a spiritual media theory. We should read it every two or three years to hone our analytical tools. In an extremely compact style, Kierkegaard described two diametrically opposite modes of communication, that of the genius and that of the apostle. Genius-type communication is based on self-expression; it corresponds to the aesthetic mode of being- in-the-world. As Kierkegaard says, it stems from the humorous self-sufficiency of the genius. The genius has done enough if he or she manifests the interior world in highly artistic work without caring whether the world around is following him or her. Genius needs no authority. The public’s admiration is ample compensation for what it is missing at the level of communicating the truth. The apostle is an entirely different story: this is a person with an absolute teleology because he or she is motivated by an unconditional in-order-to, an unavoidable task. Apostles submit to a call from above and gain authority insofar as they invoke that call. This creates a performative loop: St Paul can only invoke the fact that God called him, but he can’t provide external evidence of this, of course. He can only affirm it in the act of speaking himself: ‘Paul, a servant of Christ’ – he has to repeat it endlessly, and by repeating it he is putting his existence at the service of the mission that mobilizes and makes use of him. In submitting to the absolute goal he lays claim to a mandate. This is the key concept here. It seems to me the question of mandate was Heidegger’s major problem until the very end. He knew that author- ity and destiny belong together somehow. He cherished the hope of authority for his message but he sought it outside the Christian succession in a philosophical line of succession, as if the vocation and authorization for his profession were also based on a kind of apostolic chain that was inaugurated and actualized by Being itself. If that were not the case, Being would not be Time, and the temporal succession of ideas would not be a true event but a mere sequence of self-dissolving paradigms. The Greek beginning is enormously important for Heidegger because it was there that the transmission chain began – although jamming transmitters have dominated since Plato. Being as Time also sends out its followers as if they should go out to the whole world and baptize people in the name of the basic concepts of metaphysics: world – finiteness – solitude. People sent out like that live in the ecstasy of being ambassadors set march- ing by Being itself. And Heidegger wanted to be regarded as an
7 Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, and Of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle (New York: Harper & Row), 1962.
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absolute person set marching by the grace of the shrouded absolute sender.
RAULFF: He wanted to be a homme fatal himself.
SLOTERDIJK: In fact, he realized that he would only gain authority if he reinsured himself with the supreme sender. That is the reason why he was religious as well, and this distinguishes him from the nihilists. Resolute nihilists leave the sender behind them and declare themselves as the force majeure. A Gnosticizing spirit like Heidegger, who took a Protestant stance in his early works and a Catholic stance in his later works, always knew he must have Being backing him because Being shared the function of absolute sender authority with the God of the New Testament. Heidegger’s work has undertones of the Gnostic view in the sense that he sees the function of God not in creating but in being the sender. His God was not the one that created the Sun, Moon and Earth, but the one who sent indications to the dark world on how salvation could be conceived.
The only knowledge that counts in this approach is knowledge of salvation – and here salvation means collecting from the dispersal. Incidentally, an arrangement like this corresponds to the dream of absolute authorship: it reflects the will to move on from the phase of experimenting with talent to the level of commu- nicating truth. That is the author fantasy par excellence, and it can’t be fulfilled simply by being a genius. A depressed genius can have endless fun but still commit suicide in the end. The simple genius doesn’t achieve transformation into a messenger. Messengers do not belong to themselves and should never desert the flag.
RAULFF: Are you thinking of David Foster Wallace?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, of course. In his case, the Kierkegaard-type humorous self-sufficiency of the genius was not enough; his depres- sive constitution got in the way. As far as Heidegger is concerned, he was light years away from such complications because he . . .
RAULFF: . . . always felt he was in good hands.
SLOTERDIJK: He seems to have been constantly surrounded by a supportive environment.
RAULFF: He felt structurally protected in something or other, maybe in language, or the destiny of being, or the landscape. He always gives the impression of being sure that there is a sustaining power.
SLOTERDIJK: I think I know better now where he derived that from. For several years I have visited the Black Forest regularly, in the region between Sankt Blasien and Todtnauberg. It is a strange area. If you spend time there peacefully looking at the farmhouses and you start responding to their charming effect, something stirs inside you. Those Black Forest houses have an archetypal aura of
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security. We must imagine what it means for the people living in such a house that the roof takes up three-quarters of the house’s volume. It stands out so far that it seems to enclose the whole of the rest of the building. Like henhouses that seem to cluck contentedly . . .
RAULFF: The epitome of being protected . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Protected to the highest degree, as safe and secure as on the seventh day of creation. Some houses are so beauti- ful that you just want to stand there and say, ‘Perfect. ’
RAULFF: The hat – to shelter something with your hat – to protect, or to shepherd – Shepherd of Being . . . these motifs play a pre-eminent role in the late Heidegger.
SLOTERDIJK: The same goes for the mountain range, hiding, seclusion. All this is directly there in those cocooning houses. Even if you don’t go up to the loft the whole year round, you live with its presence. It is the prototype of the mountain range under which a protected existence evolves. 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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.