No More Learning

SCHMIDT: Could Habermas’s verdict be connected with the fact that you abandoned the Frankfurt sickbed? You come from the left-wing movement of 1968, the camp of the Frankfurt School. In which range of thought do you position yourself today?
SLOTERDIJK: I would dearly like to find a good answer to that question. Most of all, I would like to have a good topography or a political map on which I could plot where I stand now. I still see myself as a product of the critical movement of 1968, but I seriously believe that I understand the left better today than they understand themselves. If it were still possible to be a leftist, I would be happiest describing myself as such. But it wouldn’t exactly be true.
SCHMIDT: Are you hurt by the accusation that you have drifted very far to the right?
SLOTERDIJK: No. I think there are maturing processes that don’t fit into that conventional pattern. The more experience I gain, the less time I have for the eternally badly behaved, hyper-moralistic lefties to whom I once belonged. The stage of maturity – and that concept means more to me today than a definition of political position – doesn’t allow space for that any more. Generally, I think people today are wrong in debating about values at the expense of a debate about maturity and processes of maturing. If you say ‘values’, you should always make maturity a condition or admit openly: ‘I stand for values that I don’t turn into reality. ’ If the debate were held like that, I would join in. But I can’t stand the whole annoying present trend towards thinking in terms of norms and values that comes mainly from crazy jurists and philosophers who believe jurists are the men of the moment. This is a new form of correct hypocrisy nowadays and it already shows signs of tomor- row’s excess. Philosophy has the right to make this a topic.
SCHMIDT: How did you discover philosophy as your elixir of life?
SLOTERDIJK: To be honest, I don’t really know. I can only describe it psychologically. The job is there and you invent the motive for it. In other words, it is a particular kind of thoughtful- ness, a particular talent for absorbing books very easily and talking about them just after reading them as if they were part of your
Philosophical Retuning 37
native language. In my case this was evident relatively early on. It may sound odd, but at the age of fourteen I was already using the vocabulary of Kantian philosophy when talking to myself. At fourteen I read Kant’s first Critique and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra for the first time, and at the same age I wrote a summary of philo- sophical proofs of the existence of God for my school homework. All that gave me the rather unusual qualification of having learned to speak the standard language of philosophy like ordinary speech. Growing up without a father, I didn’t waste any time on false anti- authoritarian dialectics. I didn’t have to submit to any paternal authority trying to force me to do something I didn’t want. And I was enormously greedy in devouring anything that seemed best to me at that time: the philosophy and language of Max Bense, Foucault, Adorno, Benn and Gotthard Günther, whose philosophy of cybernetics is still underrated today.
SCHMIDT: The part of you that loves word games never tires of experimenting with new forms of description to extend the borders of possible expression. In your latest work, Spheres,2 you use lan- guage that sounds rather strange to describe immaterial objects.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s right. Spheres I and Spheres II are both written in a non-existent language – a language I invented specially for that book.
SCHMIDT: How do you invent a language?
SLOTERDIJK: In the course of developing an individual philo- sophical position it is quite natural to end up creating one’s own language as a precision instrument for a problem you have just dis- covered. It is, indeed, a foreign language within my native language, and it characterizes me as long as I speak it. A person who conducts cross-border operations, as I do, can’t achieve anything with news- reader’s German.
SCHMIDT: You expressed that in Der Zauberbaum [The Magic Tree] your only published novel to date. 3
SLOTERDIJK: Der Zauberbaum is the book I had to work hardest on because I first had to capture a freedom I would never have imagined possible before I experienced it myself.
SCHMIDT: Der Zauberbaum is about the discovery of the
2 Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären I, 1998; Sphären II, 1999; Sphären III, 2004 (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag).
English editions: Spheres I: Bubbles, 2011; Spheres II: Globes, 2014; Spheres III: Foam, forthcoming (Los Angeles: Semiotexte/ MIT).
3 Peter Sloterdijk, Der Zauberbaum (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag), 1987. (No English translation. )
38 Philosophical Retuning
unconscious. Did you ever do psychoanalysis yourself to help you dig so deeply?
SLOTERDIJK: I didn’t invent anything in the book. Everything in it is self-analysis distilled in a literary fashion. It is an interpreted autobiography. In the period between 1975 and 1985 my life was strongly motivated by self-awareness. My Indian trip was part of this.
SCHMIDT: Do you mean the months you spent in a guru community?
SLOTERDIJK: It was inspired less specifically by cultural criti- cism than one might say in retrospect. I didn’t go to India as a romantic. It was a very specific fascination I wanted to explore in depth. It emanated from a guru who gave me the impression I would benefit by letting him beguile me. This spiritual impulse and my experience in America directly afterwards prevented the shy, intro- verted parts of me from defining my life – otherwise things would have worked out differently. I would probably have failed early on.
SCHMIDT: Was it the crucial experiences of the psychoanalytic experiments and the Indian adventure that finally silenced your sar- castic approach attuned to catastrophes?
SLOTERDIJK: I think at least two things were responsible. Firstly, I started defining myself professionally as a writer and philosopher. That wasn’t the case to begin with, when I saw philoso- phizing as an expressive act, and only published my excesses or my arrogance, as it were.
SCHMIDT: And secondly?
SLOTERDIJK: When I was young I was not exactly a loner, but I was certainly not somebody who felt my emotional partnerships should lead to starting a family. That has changed fundamentally. Parallel to affirming philosophy as a profession I made what you could call an affirmation of the family as a way of life. You can trace that in my books from the 1990s. The texts suddenly show aware- ness of children, and you can hear fatherly tones – I was forced to learn a lesson I had previously rejected. The experience that children define reality and that you have to experience the possibility of reality from that point was related to the fact that I became a father.
SCHMIDT: In Spheres you actually revealed yourself as a kind of midwife. Birth, or to put it another way, coming-into-the-world, seems to have assumed a central place in your thought.
SLOTERDIJK: I had already made the hero in Der Zauberbaum dream of his own birth. The book was published in 1985, and quite correctly understood as my agenda. The basic features haven’t changed at all. I have just understood better that birth as a type of event and coming-into-the-world as another type of event are not
Philosophical Retuning 39
the same thing, because for creatures of our kind, being born is not enough to come into the world. The fact that a birth is a com- ing-into-the-world at all is the key to the whole mystery, and that is what my work is about.
SCHMIDT: Isn’t a person like you, a highly motivated athlete in the fields of thought and writing, so absorbed physically and psy- chologically by a work like the three volumes of Spheres that he has no time for anything else?
SLOTERDIJK: Although I occasionally call myself a failed Bohemian, working boosts my energy. When you are writing and you realize that the text is going to be successful, you get back more energy than you put into producing it. Of course, the precondition for a successful text is that you don’t torture yourself. And the readers can feel that the texts have been written without torture, that they flow and are carried along by a happy feeling all the way through. Even if one or two texts are wrong, it doesn’t affect the whole thing.
SCHMIDT: Concerning that happy feeling: I’ve heard that you also get it from enjoying a fine Bordeaux wine. You’re quite a con- noisseur, are you?
SLOTERDIJK: That’s all self-taught! In the field of philosophy I never had a proper teacher, at least not in the complete sense of the word, and to some extent I learned things auto-didactically. It’s just the same with Bordeaux. But by the time we reach the point of understanding something about Bordeaux we can’t afford to pay for it any more. Now we have to make do as best we can with Australian and Italian wines. It’s really awful. The only aspect of globalism I seriously deplore is that ignorant Japanese and Americans sour the enjoyment of the few Europeans who really understand something about their own wine because they buy up everything we have come to cherish.
7
WE’RE ALWAYS RIDING DOWN MATERNITY DRIVE
Interview with Mateo Kries*4
KRIES: Is mobility a fundamental human constant?
SLOTERDIJK: From a philosophical viewpoint, we can think of the characteristic mobility of humans as coming-into-the-world. The formula of coming-into-the-world says that more happens at the birth of a human being than the biological exit from the mother. The meaning of birth in general is probably that beings which come from inside achieve a change of place from an absolutely intimate protected space to an outer, less protected space that, regardless of its openness, still has to retain some characteristics of a protected space if it is to remain habitable. In other words, the particular attribute of the human birth is the exodus from the interior world into the real world, an experience of openness, freedom and danger. On my basic analysis, human mobility, as far as it interests phi- losophers, depends on this movement. Of course there are also extra-philosophical aspects of mobility that develop completely in the physical, sociological or economic dimensions. But as soon as we examine human mobility using instruments of philosophical and depth psychology, we arrive directly at the field where this natal discrepancy comes into play.
KRIES: Is the urge to keep moving inborn, or is it like a primal element, something unstoppable?
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Mateo Kries appeared under the title ‘Wir fahren immer auf dem Maternity Drive . . . ’, in the exhibition catalogue Automobility – Was uns bewegt (Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum), 1999, pp. 102–13.
Mateo Kries is chief curator at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein.
We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive 41
SLOTERDIJK: We should always be very careful with anthro- pological generalizations. All the same, it is a fact that the great majority of human beings invested too much in the past 10,000 years in an experiment hostile to mobility – the all-embracing attempt to halt the initial nomadic flow of human movement. This, the greatest attack ever made on mobility, has the lovely name ‘settledness’, and occurred in the same timespans as the agrarian and the agrosophical or agraro-ontological periods of human cultural history. The soil on which the farmer sits tight, the clod of earth that transforms humans themselves into a second plant, is an incredibly intense and durable force, and we are far from having freed ourselves of it completely.
Yet the soil has not remained the epitome of superior power; it has not defined humans everywhere for all time. As we can see, the age of settledness and of fixed ties to the soil ended in Europe with the beginning of the modern age, and a neo-nomadic epoch staked its claim. The underlying trend of the twentieth century consists of ending the era of settledness and liberating the kinetic potential in humans that has been tied down for over 10,000 years.
KRIES: At the same time the urge for mobility repeatedly occurs in the mythologies of almost all peoples, even during settled periods . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Because the old settledness contained an element of excess by which humans were expected to accept being bound in a way that belied their kinetic truth. Consequently, this had to emerge elsewhere, and particularly in the psychological evasions and flights of imagination typical of those times – leaving aside discussion of war and pilgrimage, the two formalized compensations for settled- ness, for the moment.
We could certainly claim that humans, in terms of metaphysi- cal and imaginary mobility, were more mobile in the 10,000 years of great pacification than we are today with our trains, planes and cars. The reason is that people of that bygone era had internal maps charting movements over a very wide area. Their most important means of transport was the soul, which, as we know, travels faster and more appreciatively than the modern car user.
KRIES: Can you give concrete examples of myths or soul jour- neys? How did they occur?
SLOTERDIJK: The culture of soul journeys begins with the observation that individuals can lose their souls. In depression some people become separated from the principle that animates them. They become stiff and weary, they seem to be soulless and don’t move to the group’s rhythm any more. This makes the little society of the group realize that one of its members is having a crisis and losing their soul, or – to use an anachronistic modern expression – is
42 We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive
suffering from depression. This suggests that the soul must have lost its way. Shamans become important here because they know the art of looking for the depressed person’s lost free soul somewhere at the edge of the world, and bringing it back to its owner. The early movement experiments and shamanic soul journeys were meant to revive the alliance between humans and their animators, that is, their companion spirits, the forces that help to arouse enthusiasm. This involves a truth that was in force long before all philosophies, and before the major religions: that humans can only move properly when their moving principle, their true motor, their soul, is with them. No good movement exists without enthusiasm.
KRIES: Does this imply that the invention of the automobile or of mobile devices and their use is a kind of anti-depressant?
SLOTERDIJK: Definitely, for the car is a machine for increas- ing self-confidence. The difference is that an external engine causes the movement. The car gives its driver additional power and reach. Today, regrettably, we have a predominance of naïve theories of sociology of traffic that see cars mainly as a means of transport. But as long as people stick to simple transport studies we won’t get to the essential layers of modern automobility. I think we have to see the vehicles of humans in the first place as a means of idealization and intensification, and consequently as a kinetic anti-depressant. The big demand for automobility certainly comes from people who want the vehicle for increasing their radius of action and capability. The sta- tistics tell us clearly that only one in three car trips is connected with work and with what we call transportation in the economic sense. Two out of three movements are escapes: people drive to their lovers, they take trips to the countryside and on holiday, they go visiting, or they use the car for letting off steam. We could almost think people use the car as revenge on the heavy demands of settledness.
KRIES: Does this explain the desire for locomotion?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, in a way. But if we want to talk like that, we have to derive the meaning of desire correctly. We have to be able to say how people came to feel desire, or how desire found us. Desire is the material the movements are made of; it builds the bridge to goals we have not reached. But I think we shouldn’t talk of desire if we don’t talk beforehand and at the same time about settledness, and about how the wishes of people who have been made static are organized, and therefore about the system of frustrations that shapes the desires that are typical of our form of life.
KRIES: Today the car actually has its own mythology.
SLOTERDIJK: This is revealing because, according to my working hypothesis on the theory of religion, myths only evolve where people try to speak about what complements them. Humans
We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive 43
are beings that understand themselves in terms of their complemen- tary principle – we could say, in terms of their invisible partner. In the mythical period of consciousness those partners were seen pri- marily as gods and spirits, whereas today they are seen as technical adjuncts to the human body, that is, as machines and media. All cultures work at spinning themselves into their symbolic husks and these husks are first woven by the companion spirits. The car seems capable of a mythological development precisely because it is a kind of materialized companion spirit. We can baptize cars, we can talk to cars, and they have something common to all religious spheres – we can go inside them, immerse ourselves in them. As we noted at the start of this discussion, at least indirectly, people are beings that can’t help constantly asking about the difference between inside and outside. They can’t suppress the question about the difference between being born and not being born. Because this difference will never be completely clear, and because the ideal interior cannot be totally cast off or totally reproduced, people face the persistent ques- tion: how do we succeed in being as good outside as we are inside? The car is a suggestive answer to this. It is the most perfect solu- tion to the following riddle: how can I move with masterful control although I don’t venture out?
Modern humans are customers who voice a demand for methods of demonstrating supreme control. That is the basic cultural market. People who offer means of representing or simulating supreme control can always count on enormous demand. That is just what car manufacturers do. They offer one of the most convincing means of demonstrating supreme control in today’s world, and we are inca- pable of not demanding that. Personally, I sometimes ask myself how so many friends in my circle happen not to have a driving licence. I’m like a magnet that pulls nails out of a rotten old ship – I have the curious ability to attract people from the intellectual scene who function completely as non-drivers. I think not one of my close friends, or maybe only one or two, has a driving licence. We obvi- ously play different kinds of mastery games, which don’t involve driving around the neighbourhood. I’m the only tacky automobilist in this select clique. We have constructed a congenial system that makes driving our own car unimportant. I think all of us are people who belong more to the old shamanic culture where people still achieved their exalted feelings with soul journeys, and no driving licence exists for that.
KRIES: Many people feel they don’t exist at all without a car. The physical experience of having these machines available is totally fundamental to their identity.
SLOTERDIJK: Those people have their antecedents in the horse
44 We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive
cultures of the past 3–4,000 years. The symbiosis between an animal as a means of transport and the rider already existed once in the case of the centaur. The horse as a complement to humans has also produced its own mythology. The typical human rider has faded into the background today, although he or she still exists, usually embodied by young women, with the girl in front and the horse behind. Those are the animal centaurs of today, whereas the techni- cal centaurs are represented by the people at the wheel inside with the car outside surrounding them. Incidentally, there are almost as many horses today as there were in the eighteenth or nineteenth cen- turies, but they have all been reassigned. They are almost all leisure horses, hardly any workhorses nowadays. Isn’t it an odd comment on today’s society that only horses have achieved emancipation? Humans are still work animals just as they always were, even if they are miserable jobless people, but the horses standing in German paddocks today are all horses of pleasure, post-historic horses. Children stroke them and adults admire them, and we feel very sorry for the last workhorses we see now and then at the circus and at racecourses. Some are used in psychotherapy for children with behavioural problems, but they are treated well and respectfully. All the other European horses have managed to do what humans still dream of – horses are the only ones for whom historical phi- losophy’s dream of a good end to history has become reality. They are the happy unemployed that evolution seemed to be moving towards. For them, the realm of freedom has been reached, they stand in their paddock, are fed, have completely forgotten the old drudgery and live out their natural mobility.
KRIES: What does the car mean for our mobility?
SLOTERDIJK: From the philosophical perspective we have to pose the question of the ‘real’ meaning of the automobile as follows: do we make new movements with the car – that is, trips to places where we have never been before? Or do we use the new vehicle for old movements, that is, for journeys that we always repeat on the oldest patterns and for which the vehicle only provides a new setting? In the latter case I am speaking of Platonic movements, in the former of exodus-type movements.
In terms of Platonic explanation we believe we have understood a movement when we recognize its old pattern, when we can say, for example: the natal breakthrough is repeated here by other means. In Platonic traffic analysis, the trip always goes backward to the origins, and all vehicles are aids for retrospective yearning. On this view all vehicles ultimately serve only the journey home. The return journey has priority everywhere. All the wheels are set in motion to seek the mother, and the word ‘maternity’ is on every street sign.
We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive 45
We’re always riding down Maternity Drive.
If we adopt this level of analysis, the vehicle is understood as a means to carry out an old movement with a new medium. If we choose this romantic, psycho- analytic theory of travelling, the answer to the question, ‘Where are we going? ’ is: ‘Always home’. But I would be interested in working out the difference between old and new movements. New move- ments require non-Platonic kinetics, that is, a theory of exodus. The primacy of the journey out applies here. I think we should also develop an argument for the outward journey that can match the power of Platonic and psychoanalytic regressions. We have to make room in theory for trips to new terrain, and award the vehicle an appropriate function in such exodus-type movements. The automo- bile can also take us to places we have never visited before. It is not just the means of regression we suspect it to be in our most interest- ing theories – it can also give us access to new, open places, it can also be a medium of coming-into-the-world.
We have to grant the car the two potentials that belong to basic human mobility – exodus and regression. Philosophically speak- ing, whenever people make an outward movement, it brings into play a movement of coming-into-the-world. When people are born they discover not only their mother, who was the first vehicle and will remain so for some time to come; they also discover the world in which they move on without the mother. For us, perhaps learn- ing means, above all, understanding the difference between mother and world on a deeper level. It is from this starting point that vehi- cles acquire their meaning. If they were only a means to re-create a womblike situation and to return to an inner world, then they would merely be ‘homecoming vehicles’. But I want to emphasize the other direction of movement: what about an ‘outward-bound vehicle’? Where are the means of transportation that bring us into the open? To be able to give a convincing answer, it seems impor- tant to me to point to a profound lack of contemporary debate on automobility. Everybody suffers from being much too ‘car-centric’ and restricted to movements on land. This results in not thinking through the difference between the ship and the car thoroughly enough. The reason is trivial: most people who talk about the car today are incorrigible landlubbers, and consequently use inland terms to explain mobility as a whole, and this leads to one-sided concepts.
Anybody looking for the truth about the vehicle for which the outward journey has primacy simply has to consider the ship – from the Argo of Theseus to Columbus’s Santa Maria. We do the car too much honour if we make it the exclusive focus of the mobility ques- tion. In a comprehensive theory of mobility we have to appreciate
46 We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive
ships, particularly the ocean-going ships of the age of discovery, much more than we usually do. Even today, the ship is much more magical than the car in many respects, and the actors and specta- tors of the great age of ocean travel felt this magic very strongly. As a whole, the mythology about ships is more powerful than the mythology of automobiles, which has barely existed for a hundred years. The poetry of shipping space is much more extensive than the poetry of the automobile – in its first century the automobile failed to find its Herman Melville. It is no coincidence that the setting for the greatest novel of world literature is a whaling ship. We are still waiting for the book that raises the automobile to the status of a world metaphor as Melville’s peerless book has done for ship’s navi- gation. The twentieth century, especially the second half, liquidated the primacy of ships, leaving a hazy memory of the most powerful of all vehicles so far. The result is that our thoughts about traffic are dominated by the paradigm of road travel, and we understand almost nothing any longer about movements related to outward journeys, exodus and the ocean.
KRIES: The conquest of the world by the ship is fascinating in a different way from the conquest by the car. One reason is prob- ably that the automobile has become a mass phenomenon and the aspects of adventure that are still associated with ocean voyages, or are associated in our imagination, obviously can’t be transferred to four-wheeled vehicles.
SLOTERDIJK: But automobility has democratized the privilege of movement. Today we forget too easily that mobility was an aris- tocratic privilege until the beginning of the twentieth century. Rulers were those who advanced faster and more successfully. The lord was reflected in his vehicle. Nowadays we have produced kinetic democ- racy through the mass distribution of means of mobility. That is the real reason why people today feel equal – not because they are equally talented or educated, or have the same voting rights, but because they are equally fast and because the little person can over- take the rich lord at any time. Kinetic emancipation has happened on the streets, and therefore the truth is on the highway. The United States shows us that mass culture is largely automobile culture. Harking back to sailing vessels, on the other hand, would return the focus to a more aristocratic and maritime-nomadic type of mobility. Incidentally, you have to admit that a port has a different kind of magic than a parking lot. What is more, the means of propulsion, the wind, has a deeper relationship to imaginative power, to the processes of ensoulment that stimulate the imagination, than the jet engine of a modern aircraft.
KRIES: Convertible drivers or motorcyclists argue the same way.
We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive 47
SLOTERDIJK: Motorcyclists are returning sailors who can’t forget the storm and don’t want to miss the ecstasy of the open sea. But since we are dependent today on replaying maritime ecstasies in a different medium, we are left with the full-throttle experience.
KRIES: The current discussion about mobility is also defined by the question as to which means of transportation is right for which purpose . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Respectable transport scholars and the gentle- men from urban transportation companies usually get their ideal of mobility from railway vehicles. The dream of safe movement is only realized on the tracks. Only rail traffic allows implementation of the ideal of completely reversible movement – outward journey minus return journey equals zero. From the underlying structural perspective, we can see a battle in today’s transport system between mad and rational transporters, in which the rational ones opt for the railways and the mad ones for the roads, because only the roads can serve as a substitute for air, ocean and primordial waters. On the roads all the intoxicating, excessive potential of the urge for mobil- ity can be acted out in the progressive as well as the regressive mode. The railways, on the other hand, put an end to the kinetic delirium.
KRIES: All the same, sensible transport scholars cite a very con- crete and palpable risk involved in our mobility today. You have talked about the kinetic utopia yourself . . .
SLOTERDIJK: We can reformulate this kinetic utopia in a lan- guage of critique of religion and of victim theory. Then the question is: ‘How many victims is such a high level of mobility worth to us? ’ In fact, everything that costs human life is usually prohibited today because we have abolished human sacrifice. Still, eight or ten thou- sand road deaths annually are not sufficient reason to demand a ban on road traffic. In this case we make an offset calculation, and because mobility is actually the occult kinetic religion of moder- nity, there is not the slightest chance of restricting or suppressing the demands for mobility. Quite the opposite: we have to consider how we approach the demands for even greater increases. Anybody trying to impose restrictions on mobility today would unleash a civil war.
KRIES: Are automobiles female or male?
SLOTERDIJK: Automobiles are male outside and female inside, as befits amphibian or hermaphrodite constructs. Femininity plays a role here in terms of the characteristic ‘accessibility’ – we can go inside. Masculinity is expressed in the characteristic ‘good for moving forward’. As automobiles have ideally synthesized these two attributes, they are also the perfect realization of the desire for the hermaphrodite. Since the beginning of this century, mass culture has
48 We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive
tended towards dissolving gender difference and producing unisex subjects. Cars are ahead of people in this respect. While convinc- ing bisexuals have yet to be created, cars have already reached this goal.
8
TACKLING THE UNSPOKEN THINGS IN CULTURE
Interview with Felix Schmidt*1
SCHMIDT: Mr Sloterdijk, people see you as one of the nation’s intellectual heroes. They even call you a star and award you the vacant seat next to Schopenhauer. Do you feel right and comfort- able sitting there?
SLOTERDIJK: Sitting next to great dead men is always very uncomfortable. A living person should try to avoid such compari- sons because the price is too high. Basically, as an author one wants to resemble the dead rather than the living. One of the paradoxes of an author’s existence is that very often – and in philosophy, without exception – one looks for idols in the ranks of the great and glorious. But I can accept being identified in the sense of a family resem- blance, because there is a direct line between my work and my kind of philosophizing and that of certain nineteenth-century authors. I mean Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and particularly Nietzsche.
SCHMIDT: Your unusual popularity as a scholar of the humani- ties owes a great deal to the scandal caused by your lecture, ‘Rules for the Human Zoo’. What is the situation after that scandal?
SLOTERDIJK: Your question has a paramilitary undertone. I will try to respond in a similarly serious tone. My personal situation has changed in that the so-called ‘human zoo’ affair has given me
* This interview appeared under the title, ‘Ich weiß viel vom Wahnsinn’ [‘I know a lot about madness’], in Frankfurter Rundschau Magazin (30 June 2001): 18f.
Felix Schmidt was chief editor for culture at Der Spiegel, editor-in-chief of Welt am Sonntag, Stern and Hörzu, and was director of television at Südwestfunk Baden-Baden before becoming managing director of the TV production company AVE.
50 Tackling the Unspoken Things in Culture
a new social position. I have become more of a classical political intellectual again. I had previously created an aura of marginal phi- losophy, an atmosphere of artistic philosophy around myself, and in general there were many advantages to staying that way. Meanwhile I have come to terms with the new definition of myself as a public intellectual.
SCHMIDT: Doesn’t the public intellectual sometimes feel he has to influence the nation’s image of itself?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes. In such crises of meaningfulness it is advis- able either to retreat into rational work or go to a conference, where you realize that the fantasy idea of intellectuals representing the interests of the state has absolutely no connection with reality, and is at best a nice delusion.
SCHMIDT: Have you had your mental state examined recently? SLOTERDIJK: Should I?
SCHMIDT: I read an allegation somewhere that disappointment
sent you on a flight into madness.
SLOTERDIJK: I am always amazed by the diagnoses people
dream up for free. German journalism sees itself as a sort of con- tinuation of the Spanish bullfight by other means, and believes it has to present the slaughter of an intellectual at regular intervals. People who talk like that evidently perceive their role in the arena as banderilleros, the little gadflies that are intended to annoy the bull if he doesn’t want to fight as required. That kind of amateur psychol- ogy merely amuses me. It is blatantly obvious what these people are up to.
SCHMIDT: Those attacks still bear the after-effects of the big ‘human zoo’ debate, which is only gradually calming down. People somehow got the fixed idea that you were advocating a joint venture between philosophy and genetic engineering and, as part of this, a new elite to be formed by selection.
SLOTERDIJK: The accusation that I wanted to replace educa- tion by breeding is absolutely stupid. However, it shows up those who enjoy denouncing me as even more stupid. As we well know, the cultural field begins where the biological ends. In the debates around the ‘human zoo’ I never hid the fact that I stand for culture. It follows that the idea of the elite comes from the educational field, not from biology.
SCHMIDT: Is the debate that has been shifted to the biological sphere a substitute for the complete lack of discussion about deficits in education and training?
SLOTERDIJK: We must underscore this even more: It is a sub- stitute for the dreaded debate that probably can’t be postponed any longer – the debate about a socio-psychological disaster in the most
Tackling the Unspoken Things in Culture 51
real sense of the word, a debate that has forced its way into modern society from the school system. The deliberate silence about the edu- cational disaster is the reason people believe that somebody could abolish school in favour of some kinds of biological mechanisms. But this imaginary scenario is interesting because it demonstrates there is really a need to abolish school.
SCHMIDT: Is there an alternative to school?
SLOTERDIJK: There is no convincing answer to society’s ques- tion about what could replace the failing education system. One thing is certain: we can’t find alternative answers in biotechnology. We urgently need an educational alternative this side of biology.
SCHMIDT: What explains our reluctance to engage in a substan- tial debate on this?
SLOTERDIJK: There are three or four themes that humans a priori don’t like talking about: death, school and their mothers. And school is probably the most unpleasant in this triad.
SCHMIDT: As you have already talked about school, let’s talk about your mother.
SLOTERDIJK: Talking about that topic means talking about a strange tragedy I have never publicly revealed anything about before. It still troubles me today.
SCHMIDT: A mother complex?
SLOTERDIJK: My mother was a very gifted woman. She was born in the middle of the First World War, and her father was one of the first soldiers to fall on the Western Front. She had to grow up with the question, ‘Where is my real father? ’ To some extent this question drove her destiny because all her life she never got along well with people, especially not with men.
SCHMIDT: Not with her son either?
SLOTERDIJK: It’s not easy to be the son of a woman like her. It created a series of complications that were built into my life tra- jectory from the very beginning. It took decades of brooding and experimenting with life for me to understand and process those interrelationships. The resurrection of the dead in the child and the grandchild is an uncanny thing, and I have only worked through that phantom history in the past few years. I have, so to speak, laid out my own personal hero’s graveyard for my grandfather, and I am in the process of burying him there on behalf of my whole family. Those experiences have taught me how heavy psychological legacies are, and how powerful histories of the soul are. I know that beneath the official history, the daytime history, there is also a nocturnal side, a dark side to history.
SCHMIDT: How far has that influenced your work? SLOTERDIJK: My entire work so far has been a kind of
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history writing like underground mining, in which I tried to weave the history of riddles, the history of injuries and the history of the unconscious quest into the official version of philosophy. This means my concept of philosophy is always starkly defined together with psychology, which has led to some misunderstand- ings. Philosophy is supposed to philosophize instead of being occupied with psychoanalysis. Generally speaking, philosophy is either a form of happy ontological mathematics without any ulte- rior motive, and that is quite reasonable, or it is a form of defence, a very rare form of stupidity that has managed to assume a socially respectable front. Only in very rare cases is it salutary work on the things culture leaves unsaid.
From 1975 on, my life was totally devoted to self-awareness. My Indian excursion was part of that. I think my life story is typical of our times – a kind of biography of the age. I know a fair amount about the radicalism, the extremism, the madness and the traumas of the twentieth century. All of that belongs to a single system of communicating vessels circulating the message that something is wrong with life. That’s why I am so fascinated by the present, because I am observing something not only in my own feeling of life, but also in society as a whole, that makes me extraordinarily curious, perhaps even joyful. I mean that the social climate has been changing for a while now, and we are emerging from the shadows of madness that hung over us since 1914. More and more people are no longer directly affected by those old communicating vessels of madness.
SCHMIDT: Do you mean society is doing therapy on itself?
SLOTERDIJK: I would rather say it is normalizing itself. But this normalization is a fascinating process, and in the case of Germans, an almost uncanny one. The question of what constitutes German normality is not normal in itself, because none of us will live long enough to meet a normal German. The German forms of life and prevailing moods are changing now – and occasionally I try to play something of an active role in that. Perhaps this is the only excep- tion I have to make to my negative answer to your question as to whether I sometimes feel tempted to become a kind of philosophical National Moderator. I would like very much to link my name with a comprehensive normalization story for this country, which has been sick in some sense up until now. I am optimistic enough to believe the recuperation process can work.
SCHMIDT: We will have to get used to your performance as a philosopher with an optimistic outlook. Have you finally given up being the herald of catastrophe sarcasm?
SLOTERDIJK: I want to confirm that my basic attitude has
Tackling the Unspoken Things in Culture 53
changed. The crucial factor in this process was something which had not played a dominant role in my life previously, and which can be described by the conventional concept of responsibility. The catas- trophe sarcasm was a contradictory attitude, a kind of sly black humour. I felt instinctively that Marx must have meant something similar when he said we must force the relations to dance by singing their own tune to them. This is a bitter form of revolutionary pow- erlessness. It gave rise to the catastrophe sarcasm. I was trapped in a pattern of thought that is known from the therapy world but actually depends on a false calculation in human and psychological terms, namely, the view that one can handle doubt as a means to an end, based on the motto: ‘I will begin by doubting so that I can be properly reborn later on. ’ I wouldn’t accept that frivolous attitude today. It was an instance of malpractice I wouldn’t want to repeat.
SCHMIDT: In some ways you were picking up on your pre- Adorno phase again.
SLOTERDIJK: Anyway, I got rid of the exaggerated critical attitude and remembered a very early phase of my work in which I was influenced by authors from the Protestant tradition, such as Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer.
SCHMIDT: In the first volume of your Spheres trilogy you outed yourself as a kind of birthing assistant, a midwife. You seem deeply impressed by the theme of birth.
SLOTERDIJK: I am one of those unfortunate people whose remembrance of their birth has never been erased from their bodily memory. I know there is a specific form of birth stress that is repro- duced throughout one’s life.
SCHMIDT: Your daughter is seven years old now, and I’m sure she is a curious child. How do you explain to her what holds the world together in its innermost depths?
SLOTERDIJK: I’m impressed by the natural poetry of her ques- tions. Her way of asking doesn’t put pressure on me because it has its own poetic mechanism. I don’t know where that comes from. Sometimes it seems to me she has a special aptitude for calming down at the right moment to stop her thoughts from going in cryptic directions. It is fascinating how she plays with mythological imagi- nation and constantly restructures her picture of the world without her very knowledgeable father and omniscient mother setting the agenda.
SCHMIDT: When did you first ask the question as to how the universe, Planet Earth and life arose?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t know if I ever asked myself that question because the answers came much earlier than the questions.
SCHMIDT: How did that happen?
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SLOTERDIJK: Like so many other people, I’m a typical victim of the school that permanently answers questions that haven’t been asked yet. But it’s still possible to recover from that at an advanced age. Last summer I had a moment of deep emotion on the plane of natural philosophy when I saw the wonderful total eclipse of the sun. Suddenly a physical feeling of reality appeared in the tone of natural philosophy. Up until then my concept of reality was defined very closely in relation to humanism, the social sciences, linguistics and culture. I was convinced only oddballs could be interested in physics. Today I think our exaggerated culturalism has probably made us blind to physics. However, I would like to describe the wondrous moment of eclipse of the sun that I enjoyed as an excep- tional state, from which point on something changed for me.
SCHMIDT: In any case, philosophy begins in wonder.
SLOTERDIJK: At least, that was the original thesis of Aristotle and Plato. Looking at this thesis more closely, it is very cleverly constructed and actually says something quite different from what is usually associated with it. People probably marvelled for tens of thousands of years without ever beginning to philosophize in the formal sense like the Greeks.