No More Learning

Politics, economics
* This conversation between Peter Sloterdijk and Thomas Macho appeared under the title ‘Den Kopf heben: Über Räume der Verwöhnung und das Driften in der Zeit’, in Petra Lutz, Thomas Macho and Gisela Staupe (eds), Der (im)perfekte Mensch: Metamorphosen von Normalität und Abweichung (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag), 2003, pp. 379–405.
Thomas Macho is a cultural scholar and philosopher. He has been a pro- fessor of cultural history at the Humboldt University of Berlin since 1993.
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and new technologies whose impact it may only be possible to evalu- ate after thousands of years impose a kind of thinking in the future without any historical models to rely on. Since the twentieth century we have known in more detail what it means to project the educa- tion or improvement of the human race.
SLOTERDIJK: This approach to consciousness of time raises a controversial point right away. In working on the third volume of my Spheres project I have developed a new approach in philosophi- cal anthropology with a stronger spatial emphasis. It was surprising, even for me, to see how much this theory of the contemporary age – for that is essentially what Spheres III is intended to be – had to delve into anthropology. I would actually go as far as to say that the forms of philosophical anthropology until then had been defined too hastily. At least, as I see it, the shotgun wedding between the concepts ‘philosophy’ and ‘anthropology’ didn’t result in a lasting alliance, either in the Heideggerian form or in the form of Plessner’s or Gehlen’s philosophy. I am aware, of course, that Heidegger would be appalled at anybody making such associations with his works – he saw himself as a resolute anti-anthropologist – but at the same time he wouldn’t really be able to deny the connections to what Plessner did on the one hand and Gehlen on the other. Spheres III has evolved into a book that proposes reshaping philosophical anthropology as topology. My aim was mainly to explain to people by starting from the place where human beings are formed – the surreal place that determines anthropogenesis. I am thinking of Homo sapiens’ characteristic tendency to premature births, and the permanent incubator situation in which the young grow up. I am also thinking of the extraordinary bonding between mothers and their young that flows into the human condition from the ancient primate legacy. All that gives us the right to speak of an exceptional neurological situation in relation to sapiens. Added to that is the exceptional phonotopic situation, life in ‘the house of language’, to cite Heidegger’s great phrase. We realize all too rarely that the house of language is firstly, and usually, a house of nonsense. It is the refuge of redundancy and self-arousal. Its residents live eo ipso in the house of self-referentiality, perhaps even in the house of proto- music. In other words, it is the home of a kind of tonality or sound closer to music than to communication. In this case, Dasein means something like being heard.
MACHO: The ‘house of language’ is a mysterious place. Neither linguists nor palaeo-anthropologists know when and how lan- guage developed in the first place, and the possible preconditions under which it had to develop. The word ‘house’ suggests that people first developed grammatically differentiated languages, with
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subject-predicate relations for example, during the ‘Neolithic revo- lution’ when houses and cities were built. We have examples of many different kinds of symbol formation from the period 40,000 to 30,000 BC (in the Spanish and French cave paintings, for example); but if we think about the anatomy of the vocal apparatus among Neanderthals it is still completely unclear whether these images and symbols indicate a sort of language (and it is probably unlikely). Nonetheless, and despite all his criticism of anthropology, Heidegger insisted on the house of language: he argued that humans only became conclusively and unmistakably distinguished from animals through entry into the house of language. On the contrary, I think humans and animals entered the house of language together, and the first things they probably heard – according to Julian Jaynes’s thesis – were commands and imperatives.
SLOTERDIJK: According to the latest information from geneti- cists, Homo sapiens shares 99. 4 per cent of his genetic make-up with chimpanzees. This is horrifying for anthropocentric people. It follows that the whole anthropological difference induced by the break with animality resides in this tiny remainder – provided it can be biologi- cally located. This fact makes it immediately clear that genetics is not adequate as a basis for the human phenomenon. Rather, we have to take account of a topological difference to explain what actually happened when great apes became human beings. ‘Topological dif- ference’ means we are dealing with an essential displacement, and that is what leads to culture. As I see it, humanization is a side effect of exceptional pampering. The ‘pampering’ of humans enables them to move into the house of language. Of course I am aware that the term ‘pampering’ sounds outrageous to most people – especially those who are generally regarded as poor wretches anyway. Since the eighteenth century, if not before, ‘pampering’ has been seen as one of the worst statements people can make about other people. Nothing has struck fear into educators and moralists as much as the phenomenon of pampering – and sometimes for good reason, because this fear conceals an insight of great significance. I am actu- ally saying that pampering is the conditio humana as such, and those who don’t want to talk about pampering should keep silent about human beings. In fact, the anthropologists of the eighteenth century spoke of pampering, although not from a theoretical perspective but in a moralizing, admonitory tone: do anything you want, as long as you never admit to the tendency to pamper! That was almost the categorical imperative of bourgeois educational theory. I am arguing that anthropologists have seen humans as being so seri- ously at risk from pampering that they can’t talk about the human constitution except in terms of admonitions. Once again, in this case
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the alarm was quicker than the theory. After 200 years of aversive discourse about pampering we have reached the moment when we can neutralize the concept and transform it into a descriptive term. What happens when the block behind which the phenomenology of pampering was hidden up to now collapses? What happens when the scene is no longer dominated by educationalists who want to turn people into diligent citizens, soldiers and subjects? When the tradi- tions of education for toughening people up don’t work any more, and militarist alchemy no longer sets the tone? For the first time, we can calmly survey the immense mass of facts about pampering – and we have reached the moment when philosophy really meets anthro- pology. This is where the encounter between the two happens first, and all the previous attempts of so-called philosophical anthropol- ogy were over-hasty and based on false concepts because the core concept, pampering, was either missing or only effective in a dis- torted way. Gehlen’s reference to human abandonment of instincts is still too vague and too negatively formulated. The trend may be right but there is still too much of the teacher calling for the heavy hand of institutions to take charge of this mollycoddled, biologically impossible being and give it support. Plessner’s case is very similar, although seen through the lens of liberalism and just as inadequate. It is not enough to say that Homo sapiens is his own spectator – however deeply meaningful such a diagnosis may be. Basically, this statement is about transcendental philosophy distilled into anthropology: if humans are their own spectators it means they are always simultaneously agents of their lives and observers of those same lives. They live their life and stand beside themselves. This is all that the formula of eccentric positioning that Plessner propounded means. Because, we are told, life in human form is something that cannot simply be lived, but must be led, one can say of Homo sapiens that he represents the union between the leaders and the led. So far, so good. But that’s not enough because it doesn’t tackle the basic problem – the dynamic of pampering that catapults humans out of nature. Occasionally I use an image of Homo sapiens as a space trav- eller, sitting in a pampering rocket and being catapulted into outer space. We have always lived in a space station of pampering, but usually we don’t notice because part of the character of pampering is that it naturalizes itself at every stage and declares itself to be self- evident. Pampering is relegated to the background as self-evident and becomes irrelevant. As a theoretician, you have to be very cold- blooded and try to think in a way that is methodically asocial before you are able to articulate such theses at all.
Incidentally, there is another reason why this is the only way things can be: ancient European influences have accustomed us to
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describing humans in terms of their misery – we usually see them as animals that lack something. The tradition of the conditio humana focuses unequivocally on human beings as broken creatures. We could rename the species Homo patiens. This reminds me of the basic text of European miserabilism with the telling title de humanae conditionis miseria, written by Lotario de Segni, later Pope Innocent III, around the year 1200. It is quite a remarkable and illuminating text, a veritable litany of misery based on the decision to weigh up human existence completely on the negative side and to fuel argu- ments about the weariness of life – presumably to eulogize taking refuge with God as the sole alternative to normal existence.
MACHO: Raising the spectre of the misery of human existence is, of course, an essential element of talking about death and mor- tality that was important for the old cultures – before the advent of humanism – because people believed that ‘memento mori’ was a mark of the specific human condition. Notwithstanding all the idealization of perfection and beauty of human beings, often with reference to Greek art, we should never forget the fleeting nature of humans, the transience of their existence. The cruellest discussion on the miserable condition of humans that I know of – aside from the text by Innocent III you have just mentioned – is in the medieval dialogue between Death and the Bohemian ploughman, where man is described as a mass of refuse, a churn of filth, a dish for worms, a stink house, a repulsive washtub, a rancid carcass and a reeking flagon of urine, whose cavities exude ‘disgusting filth’. This dialogue about death allows us to locate humans in a kind of middle position: on the one hand they are distinguished from animals, on the other from God and the angels. Humans stand in the middle between animals and God: we can also glean that from the Porphyrian tree, the scale of being that gave rise to Neoplatonism, a philosophy full of overflows and emanations. Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind – even though it argues in terms of uni- versal history – is quite obsessed by the idea that humans are the beings in the middle, not just the ‘deficient beings’ but the ‘beings liberated in the creation’ that can develop downwards (towards the animals) or upwards (towards spiritual beings). The principles of ‘domestication’ are unified in this middle. These principles lit- erally mean the connections between living in the house of being, habituation and pampering. 1 Habituation – along with pampering
1 Sloterdijk is playing with the German nouns das Gewöhnen [habituation] and das Verwöhnen [pampering], both of which have their roots in the verb wohnen [to live in, or to inhabit].
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– is probably an equally interesting process of early human history. Constructing houses, learning to speak, and commanding and obeying, presupposes habituation; without habituation we would be totally incapable of perceiving our pampering – including where it is thwarted by death, hunger and illness. The ‘first liberated being in the creation’ can habituate himself or herself beyond destiny and coercion. Habituation and pampering, those beginnings of living, can, as you suggest, only be conceived adequately as themes of topology. Actually, time is always presented topologically – even as a miserabilist epitome of an experience of vanitas, of the transi- ence of life. Until recently, we never imagined time in any other way except topologically, in concepts of distance or measurable stretches. From the start, time was an epiphenomenon of space, just like memory. Somebody who remembers (or plans) builds spaces, interior palaces we know from the ars memoriae. But to get back to pampering: in your view it precedes inhabiting, or even habituation. When and where was the ‘pampering rocket’ you refer to actually launched?
SLOTERDIJK: The special human variation of pampering arises from the fusion of a favourable situation, in which the early hominoid type of savannah walker emerged, with an old animalist advantage of warmth, already fully developed in hominoids, which is evident in the mother–child relationship among great apes. The formula says: Savannah security effect plus hominoid cosy room. The moment these two factors coincide the special incubator effect occurs, resulting in the emergence of Homo sapiens. There is a natural history of pampering that goes back far beyond the human field. Since the time it was defined by Julius Kollmann, a biologist of the late nineteenth century, the phenomenon of retaining juvenile morphologies has been described as neoteny. The neo-characteristics of children and young adults are projected through neoteny, or juve- nilization, into the morphology of adults. In other words, a general protraction of juvenile forms occurs – a phenomenon that biologists have noted in numerous animal species. As we know, it is heavily topologically conditioned because, as far as I can see, it can be observed exclusively in nest-building, cave-dwelling or other animal species that have particular technical skills for creating niches. We can see immediately that nest-building animals start a process of enormous security transfer for the benefit of their own brood that will show up sooner or later in the biological appearance of their offspring. This transfer is unknown to flight animals living out in the open, which means they cannot afford such extensive juvenilization of their offspring. Nest-builders, however, generate a spontaneous incubation effect for the benefit of their young. I can see it in cats,
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I can see it in dogs, I can see it in countless other mammals, not to mention the famous axolotl. Where the nest security effect occurs, the offspring can be born in a shockingly immature state. The same thing can be observed in marsupials, which have the most interest- ing life form in terms of developmental history because they seem to embody the compromise solution between live birth and laying eggs. This touches on the topological puzzle of neoteny. As soon as the work of the uterus can be transferred from the maternal body to a nest, nature treats itself to an additional pampering luxury: the children are born much less matured than those in more exposed life forms, without nests. This is where it gets interesting philosophi- cally, because to be born prematurely generally means exposing the nervous system to the venture of postnatal maturing. If the wiring of the nerves occurs largely a priori or prenatally, the result is an animal that learns relatively little because it doesn’t need to learn much – a relatively ready animal in a relatively ready environment. Premature babies, however, start with the adventure of not being ready and leave room for a great deal a posteriori. The result is something like a natural history of the a posteriori principle. It could be written as the natural history of openness to experience, of open-mindedness. This is connected with the luxury of pampering, or with the level of unreadiness at which a nervous system becomes fit for the world or open-minded.
But all that is still animal history. It must be narrated in the context of biology – it is not yet human history. The biological extension of the juvenile phase creates animals that play and experiment more, that are essayists by nature and have a prolonged phase of mental maturation. In any case, the relationship between a priori and a posteriori can be described neurologically. This sums up the outline of the first half of my topological argument. In the second half, the anthropological space question is refined using the following idea: as we know, we are descendants of a species of tree-dwelling apes that developed into savannah apes. But how did the tree-dwelling ape arrive in the savannah? And how does a climber become a walker? How did walking upright evolve? How were all these exodus phenomena possible? There are plenty of fairly controversial topics – and, at the same time, something like the thema probandum for anthropologists, because somebody who has nothing to say about walking upright hasn’t really grasped the issue of human beings. But for the moment we are less interested in the vertical apes problem than in characteristics of the place at which apes can become men. Once again we establish the primacy of topology and we also offer an explanation for why, in the beginning, time could actually appear as integrated into space.
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Savannah apes live in a world with a wide horizon – a huge dif- ference to the world of the treetop, which consists of a world of leaf caverns. This cannot be emphasized enough. Before human beings came the apes, and they had a horizon. This situation creates a cognitive pattern that belongs to our a priori equipment as human beings. I am thinking of an inborn schema of alertness that antici- pates something like the transcendental unity of mental perception. In Kantian terms, we humans have a red alert that must be able to keep up with everything we imagine. We note first that the savan- nah ape is comparatively untroubled to begin with, and for most of the time. He sees possible danger coming from afar, so he can relax much more than the tree ape that can’t see the danger coming from so far away. His long-sightedness gives him a safety buffer that affects his whole behaviour. Equanimity is a biological attain- ment from the savannahs. Like some other savannah inhabitants, Homo sapiens is a sleepy creature dependent on alerts. His natural behaviour is to hang around and do nothing most of the time. This automatically brings to mind male lions that spend twenty-three hours of the day dozing. These types of idleness and relaxation are typical of the savannah. The safety buffer provided by the wide view enables this. But then time and the event come into play. Homo sapiens is not only a sleepy creature ready for alert but also a curious creature driven by appetite. Let’s imagine the basic situation of life modified into a wide horizon: what has to happen to raise the level of alertness in a pampered ape? Evidently it is triggered when a stress factor appears on the horizon. Whether aggressor or prey, something has to interrupt the situation – and, in fact, the inter- ruption appears on the horizon. Then the ape raises its head and is immediately ‘right there’ with its eyes. Raising the head, inciden- tally, is a metaphor Heidegger used to describe the way a person stands in a clearing. The new event comes in the form of a break in the line of the horizon. The event that fixes the time appears in the space as a disturbance on the horizon. In my view, this provides a further argument to confirm that the time problem could be largely neutralized in the earliest periods of prehistory. The animal with this observational advantage sees things approaching – as eventful interruptions on the horizon. When the alarm is over, peace returns to the horizon. To sum up the two arguments: adding together these two functions, the nest privilege of the neotenized animal and the horizon privilege of the savannah apes, brings into view what I have just described as the launching pad for the pampering process.
MACHO: Savannah apes learned to deal flexibly with the point on the horizon, the disruption on the horizon, the feared or desired appearance on the horizon. It did not always signal danger – more
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often it meant food. The latest studies show that prehistoric people in the East African savannah lived in blissful harmony with the animals, because they fulfilled their protein needs exclusively with dead animals. They were not ‘killer apes’ but carrion eaters. Yet how could they find dead animals quickly before they were inedible or devoured by beasts of prey? Only through specific ‘signs from heaven’ – namely, the circular plummeting of vultures that appeared on the horizon.
SLOTERDIJK: There is a neurobiological argument that illus- trates the connection you mention quite well. It recalls the familiar station effect: we are sitting in a train and the train beside us departs. We usually have the impression we are the ones who are moving. Maybe this can be seen as a sign of an inborn expectation that makes us think the horizon is fixed, whereas movement can only be movement within a horizon. On the other hand, if the horizon as a whole moves, our nervous system interprets this as if we ourselves are moving. Given our basic biological make-up, it is inconceivable that the horizon is moving. That is why the station illusion occurs so persistently and makes such an impression. Even if you are aware of the effect, it doesn’t change anything in the way you perceive it. Your mind invariably tells you: we are on the move. There is a strong argument for seeing this as a relic of the situation of being in the savannah. From this we can develop a psychology of feeling dizzy: dizziness is the monstrous neurological sensation that the horizon is moving.
MACHO: That’s exciting. But I’d really like to go back to the topics of horizon opening, neoteny and pampering. It seems to me that the theory of pampering you suggest denotes a sharp differ- ence to anthropology as it has been practised since the eighteenth century. In fact, this theory of pampering dissolves a fundamental ambivalence that was presumed from Herder to Gehlen or Plessner: the idea that the imperfection of human beings – their openness and deficient nature – is the condition for their perfectibility, their freedom or liberated character. From the pampering perspective, humans are not seen as imperfect beings, either in the negative aspect (as ‘deficient beings’) or the positive aspect (as ‘the beings liberated from the creation’). If we describe people in terms of pam- pering we don’t have to accept the diametrical opposition between imperfection and perfection that troubled Herder when he described humans, on the one hand, as ‘middle creatures’, and, on the other hand, as ‘engines’ of an imposing universal history that was sup- posed to stretch from the star systems to future spiritual beings. A historical philosophy that results in education and perfecting can only develop if pampering – regardless of whether it takes the form
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of risk or opportunity – is characterized as a primary imperfec- tion. This is the only way for narratives to evolve that portray the wretched life of human beings and lead to a perspective of comple- tion: religious and spiritual, military, educational, political or even, more recently, genetic perfection. In his book on Sedna, a wide- ranging speculation about early history, Hans Peter Duerr traced how the abandonment of the prehistoric paradise, the ‘Fall’, actu- ally happened. 2 Why did the pampered prehistoric humans want to move into houses anyway? Why did they often worsen their living conditions, and then describe them as misery, needing improve- ment? The question has still not been resolved today. One possible answer points to language, to the possibility not only of inhabiting a space but also of naming and expressing it metaphorically: a space in which a person’s own beginning and ending could become an elementary question, a space in which – between the dead and the stars – the desire emerged to change, influence, educate, habituate and improve a ‘middle creature’ that started somewhere and would end somewhere. If I understand you correctly, you assert that in the beginning there was pampering. How did it come about that this pampering was seen as the origin of misery? Or as the root of the imperfection that virtually provoked an educative, missionary response? I don’t quite understand that.
SLOTERDIJK: You already suggested the answer earlier your- self. As long as human beings described themselves as ‘middle creatures’ they lived in images of the world that let them come to terms with their heritage of imperfection – but from the moment humans couldn’t position themselves in a middle place between above and below, they rapidly lost the ability to accept their defi- ciencies. In a middle creature’s picture of the world, humans are topologically saturated, as it were. They see themselves in the right place ontologically because, in a cosmology of essences, Dasein means that every thing and every living creature stands only at its designated place and nowhere else. If we are really located in the middle between God and the animals, then any situation assigned to us can be seen as a part of human attributes. The revolt against the middle position is perceived as a transgression against moderation. The Greek idea of hubris means exactly that. The famous phrase ‘Know yourself’ should really also be understood in this sense: keep to the middle as much as you can; don’t mistake yourself for the
2 Hans Peter Duerr is a German anthropologist. Macho is referring to the book by Hans Peter Duerr, Sedna oder Die Liebe zum Leben (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag), 1984.
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animals and certainly not for the gods. The Greeks developed an art of speaking to beings who evidently risked hubris, beings who tended to leap out of their rank, their class and their genus.
MACHO: I think this is very important. If humans are the beings in the middle, only very limited scope exists for trying to improve them.
Incidentally, I have noticed that even the humanist texts that first explicitly discussed the educational capability of human beings, such as the work of Pico della Mirandola, do not really openly con- ceive the perfecting of humans; they focused more on the risk that spawns hubris, a transgression of the lower boundary of the middle position (towards bestiality) or of the upper boundary (towards presumptuous divinity).
SLOTERDIJK: Pico’s work, however, clearly includes the recom- mendation to improvement in an upward direction. In addressing humans as plastes et fictor he is appealing to their talent for repair- ing their own deficiencies and creating out of their own resources. It follows that Homo sapiens should make something as divine as possible out of himself – there is a clear pressure to move upward in this early humanist-alchemist discourse. If we speak of the middle position here, it means the starting point of a self-selection process that, it is hoped, will reach for the stars. But this is the exception. Generally the strict classification theories, that really mean middle when they say middle, dominate. For them, the idea of the con- ditio humana, properly understood, is a warning about humilitas: truly humble people tend to rank themselves in the lower middle. Incidentally, in the current debate on genetic engineering there is a very vocal humilitas party that insists that, firstly, we can’t do what we want, and, secondly, we’re not allowed to do what we can. The modern superbia or hubris party, however, openly champions genetic optimization. But what is optimization, and how can we think about it? The term as such is only meaningful if Homo sapiens no longer has a fixed position between above and below. In that case, reminders of the conditio humana and sermons about humilitas become conservative, if not reactionary gestures – because people liberated from the metaphysical middle position, if they understand their position correctly, are condemned to self-improvement. In this case ‘liberated’ means having to accept the immanent life as the last chance. This causes a kind of metaphysical panic, because anybody who fails in their mortal life fails completely in everything. This is precisely what makes the enormous difference between the age of classical metaphysics based on personalism and the modern age. The inhabitants of a world complemented by a world above may think and believe that ultimately, before God, the difference between the most successful and the most unsuccessful human life
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on earth hardly matters. On earth the most blatant differences are between winners and losers, but in God’s realm there is a return match played with obscure rules – which means the winners from here can be the losers there, and vice versa. The edifying impact of that idea simply can’t be overestimated.
Recently, in Seville, I saw a picture by the painter Valdéz de Leal from the late seventeenth century, hanging in the Church of the Sisters of Mercy. It shows, in the harshest possible terms, the con- sequences of metaphysical egalitarianism and the equal humiliation of all before God and death. The viewer sees a mortuary containing three coffins; a heap of skulls is visible in the dark background. In the foremost coffin lies a cardinal in the most hideous state of decay. In the second coffin is a high-ranking noble. The first man’s head is turned to the left, the other man’s head to the right. A little further on, almost in darkness, is the coffin of a bourgeois man without any insignia. A scroll with writing in the foreground gives the picture its telling title: Finis gloriae mundi. The painter Murillo is supposed to have commented that you have to hold your nose to look at this picture. Yet it is more than an example of Catholic romanticism about cadavers. In our context I would like to read the painting mainly as a reference to the symbolic economy of metaphysics. If you want to classify people between above and below, sometimes you also have to show the border that divides them from the sphere above in the most drastic fashion. You can’t have the image of the great Chain of Being without the rhetoric of death.
MACHO: As you describe it, the picture probably belongs to the magnificent tradition of dances of death in which we are shown, picture by picture, as if they were comics of the early modern age, how all humans, regardless of their origin or status, are dragged off by death, or better still, by the dead. The dance of death directly expresses the egalitarianism of mortality, for example, in the proverb: ‘Death strangles all people equally / as he finds them, poor and rich. ’ Such egalitarianism blocks the upward boundary and at the same time keeps the people in the middle firmly in place. This fixing of the upward boundary may also reduce the fear of transgressing the lower boundary towards the animals. The risks of animalization, of bestialization, can only be revived at the moment the upward boundary is opened (one example of this is Herder, who dreamed, more than 150 years before Teilhard de Chardin, of an evolution of the ‘noosphere’, the transformation of humans into pure ‘spiritual beings’). As soon as the upper boundary is declared open for development and mutation, this brings the fear of reversion and regression. It is often the same philosophers who talk about an upward development and simultaneously express concern about
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animalization: think of the ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’. I suspect that this is the moment when the humanist programme of fear first gains its importance by always associating miserabilism with reversion to bestiality; it is the same moment in which education is organized as dressage, as animal training, as taming – as you wrote in your response to Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’. As long as human beings are considered as middle creatures they can only deviate in two possible directions, in the direction of bestialization or in the direction of hubris – in other words, usurping a super- man position. That was the centre of the ethical programme of the Greeks: one reason hubris must be avoided is because in principle it always fails.
SLOTERDIJK: The dance of death and related iconographic forms comment on this failure in macabre ways. Death is the great hubris therapist; it reproduces the original relationships by ensur- ing that human trees do not grow into heaven. Lotario de Segni portrays death and its herald, miseria, as levellers, so to speak. Both ensure that summa summarum lord and servant are equally wretched, however different their types of wretchedness may be. In the end, both have the same amount on their misery account.
MACHO: That’s a beautiful way of expressing it.
SLOTERDIJK: This traditional topic is at its most interesting when the upper classes bemoan the human condition as miserabilism. I have just finished reading a collection of letters of the Marquise de Pompadour, Louis XV’s mistress and confidante. I came across a wistful exchange with one of her lady friends where she repeats the old aristocratic lament that the stable boy is happier than the lord, and the recipient of the letter replies that it can’t really be true. What Mme Pompadour meant was a kind of courtly vanitas theory: in one of her finest letters, addressed to the philosopher Montesquieu, a text that deserves a place in world literature, she reproaches him with an exquisitely phrased complaint that she only has automatons around her at the court. We always thought the critique of aliena- tion was a by-product of German idealism, but obviously there is a French strand to the critique of alienation, in fact, as early as around 1750, in the form of criticism of court automatons. German criticism laments the loss of the soul, whereas the French realize that automatons don’t have a soul and don’t need one.
To return to the earlier problem: we were asking under which conditions Homo patiens leaves the stage to make room for Homo compensator. To answer this adequately, we would have to tell a very complex story – one chapter of which would deal with meta- physical topology and the crisis of finding one’s place in an ordered context. Another chapter would cover the psychological and moral
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side effects of modernization. Since the nineteenth century we have been aiming at a social order in which individuals have stopped identifying with their social situation. Feelings about rank have largely disappeared. Nobody still believes that our personal stand- ing in the outside world is an essential statement about our self or our existential mission. The classical amor fati is not a modern idea, despite Nietzsche’s attempt to reactivate it. Today, people who believe everything that happens to them is always exactly the right thing for them are either followers of esotericism or radical right- wingers. In other words, we are talking about individualist forms of life and subjectivity. We should preface this by saying that the term ‘individualism’ is very unfortunate because it unfairly labels the so- called ‘individuals’ practising this way of life. In fact, they are not indivisible or ‘undividable’ at all, but highly divisible creatures, in other words, ‘dividuals’, if you like, who live in permanent distinc- tion from themselves. To be an individual today means occupying the spot where the systematic distinction occurs between the life lived previously and the life to be lived in the future. The individual is the point of experience between our own personal past and our own future. In other words, we become an individual/dividual in the moment we transfer transcendence into ourselves. From then on the person relates to himself or herself as his or her interior, greater other. My life until now has created me as an individuum revelatum, an uncovered, known, manifest self – and it is exactly in this capac- ity that I can relate to myself as an individuum absconditum. I am already here and simultaneously I embody my own not-yet. I see myself as an individuum absconditum to the extent that I engage with my lack of self-knowledge. I have myself constantly in my mind’s eye; I define myself in relation to time as a surprise for myself.
MACHO: Accordingly, modern individuals would be possible only under the precondition that they were ready to break with their own history of pampering, in the sense of taking their own position in relation to the future, in fact. In contrast to the positioning in the middle we discussed earlier, they familiarize the theme of perma- nent escape from the nest. Modern individuals group themselves in forward movement, in the intersection of many different kinds of pampering situations. They pursue careers that can only advance by continual demolition of houses and ‘nests’. In this respect they resemble people of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries who sold all their possessions before embarking on a big journey.
SLOTERDIJK: That means their own domesticity is absolutely the forbidden option for them.
MACHO: This brings us back to the topic that particularly fas- cinates me. Where and when does one start conceiving of humans
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from the perspective of the future, of their potential improvement and perfecting? As we have said, in past centuries or even millennia, metaphysics was a discipline of topology: below, above, middle. If time played any role at all, it was related to this spatial planning. The relationship to the past was influenced by holy texts that people believed could even tell them the date of the world’s creation, the absolute beginning. The future, however, remained a matter for God, as St Augustine noted in his Confessions. Anyone who tried to take control of that future would always risk degenerating into a particular eschatological form of hubris, which we have already mentioned. Sub specie mortis the future is not a topic, either for the individual or for humankind. And, even in eschatology, the issue concerns spatial planning again: the sky is above, hell is below, and in between – since the twelfth century – is purgatory. This reflects the consciousness of an agrarian culture that has no extended plan- ning horizon because it remains dependent on many unforeseeable, contingent factors (symbolized in the famous Horsemen of the Apocalypse). As we have said, with a vision stretching fourteen years into the future one could become the Pharaoh’s chief adviser.
SLOTERDIJK: Saving food for seven lean years was an enter- prise people still talked about thousands of years later. In that respect Joseph was more successful than Lenin.
MACHO: And now we have been individual for nearly 200 years, but also collective, in a remarkable situation that can only be under- stood if we see it as the result of a warp of metaphysical topology. The boundaries between above, below and the middle were literally blurred, and that was done in the name of time. Doing evolution theory means being able to agree on experiences that apes in the forest and the savannah had millions of years ago, and means that we can reflect on the origin of language or domestication just as we are doing in this conversation. It’s like a game we are playing to manage enormous time periods, retrospectively but also ahead of us. Metaphysical topology has been temporalized. Since then, ‘below’ is the place of the animals behind us, and ‘above’ is the place of angels, gods and supermen ahead of us.
The first attempts at universal history have already shown what could lie ahead of us (although Herder and Hegel thought human- kind had almost arrived at its goal). Since Marxism, if not before, it has become evident how long it can take until the species has passed right through its predicted stages of development. I suspect we have only just arrived at the point when metaphysical topology was tem- poralized, following the questioning associated with issues of the education, improvement and domestication of humans, all the types of questions that often plague us today.
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SLOTERDIJK: That means constructing contemporary arts of living on the basis of giving patience a positive value. The people who are naturally more open and flexible and easier to recruit for fundamental optimization thinking and, even more, for getting fun- damentally impatient with their own situation, are those who have learned to stop identifying with their social status. I mean people who are no longer status persons in the sense of the old forms of rank, and who have stopped having faith in the essential cosmos where every creature has its rightful place. As soon as people’s trust in the divine taxonomies has been weakened, every individual will become structurally appropriative. True, we can still observe an astonishing amount of modesty, persistence and conservative seri- ousness, but one of the general features of the present is a rather aggressive and grabbing attitude towards fate. Today it is very easy to convince people to believe they deserve better than they actually get. A strong onwards and upwards thrust is starting to dominate, including, and above all, in relation to fate. Ulrich Sonnemann’s famous dictum: ‘Enlightenment, an enterprise for sabotaging fate’,3 relates to many more areas than we once believed possible – including manipulation of birth and death. What used to be seen as the worst kind of hubris has become normal behaviour today, and for easily understandable reasons. In fact, if objective ranks still existed we should recommend everybody to stay where they are – except for people with hubris who we would have to try to persuade to return to the middle ground. But if nobody has hubris – and that is the fundamental conviction of modern times – the recom- mendation will look different. Now people can only look towards better things. To some extent meliorism is the latent metaphysics of the present age. It is impossible to establish an objective good; a relative better is easier. We could almost say that people today are obliged to practise hubris unless they give up altogether. They have to maintain a particular orientation onwards and upwards to keep fit existentially. This leads to a remarkable kind of lurching and sliding, because the evolutionist offence of collecting species in the nineteenth century is also relevant for individuals nowadays. We can’t really imagine today how shocking the idea once was that God did not conceive the species, and that neither the archetypal content of a species nor its physical appearance are fixed once and for all. That is the real shock of the nineteenth century: the genetic drift,
3 Ulrich Sonnemann (1912–93) was a German social philosopher, psy- chologist and political writer who taught at the universities of Munich and Kassel.
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the idea that the original images of humans and beasts, of plants and everything that grows and blossoms, are not permanently fixed but drift in evolution, as we say today. That is worse than the worst seasickness because it affects the ontological forms, as it were. When the species drift we become ontologically seasick – suddenly we have to watch fish becoming amphibians and the latter becoming terres- trial animals; we witness a mammoth transforming into an elephant, and wolves turning into dogs – and all sorts of other monstrosities.
MACHO: Evolution as a freak show . . .
SLOTERDIJK: And as a vaudeville of forms. If God is dead, one reason is because he is no longer any good as a guarantor of the species. No Catholic defence front can change that, and human- ism can only offer a weak alternative in this respect. We can see this quite clearly in the current genetics debate, with Catholics and old-fashioned humanists very heavily over-represented. They think it is a good idea to erect a corral round the human gene and shoot at everybody who tries to change it in some way. The unfortunate thing about this issue is that normal reproduction has long since been exposed for contributing to species drift, and every normal sexual act among humans infinitesimally advances this drifting. We must finally realize that the potential of the genus per se is mon- strous. In fact, anthropology is only possible now as a branch of general monstrology.
MACHO: Species slide like cultures. Mammoths become ele- phants, Egyptians become Greeks, and Greeks become Romans. Such ‘slipping processes’ were only conceivable at a late stage, perhaps only since Hegel’s universal history that presented the first model of an evolutionary history. And when everything starts sliding, individuals also slide, always hoping (with hope that is articulated for me in the appropriative figments of some geneticists’ imagination) at least to be able to influence the direction of this slippage.
SLOTERDIJK: The concept of peoples was initially conceived in analogy to the species. Peoples were the animal species of the spirit world, so to speak, and as such they could be seen as ideas from God. The discovery of evolutionary drift put an end to this onto- logical comfort.
MACHO: That is already clear from Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. He tried to localize and register cultures in climatic terms. He argued that Africans fit to Africa, Chinese to China, and Lapps to Lapland. All cultures were directly equal to God and history, provided they remained where they originated. But Herder had already noted that cultures move, they slide and drift. The Romans colonized Gaul; the Europeans
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colonized America. And because cultures slide and drift, and don’t keep to the borders of closed republics of the mind and of habits, the individuals in them also slide and drift. The status of individuals is no longer determined by origin; and the openness of their future motivates them to permanent flight from the nest. It is no coinci- dence that in the nineteenth century, in the wake of evolutionism, this slippage was discussed totally empirically, theatrically, in fact. This happened in the circus where audiences watched poodles doing arithmetic and apes that could stand upright to become men, like in Kafka’s short story ‘A Report to an Academy’, and in freak shows and side shows that presented elephant men, lion men and snake men, often with the label ‘What is it? ’ or ‘Nondescripts’. And, of course, slippage was also the subject and goal of research that seems extremely dubious today but was regarded as self-evident at the beginning of the twentieth century. Eugenics was seen as the great progressive science, by no means only among the right wing or ‘pre- fascists’. Eugenic ideals were already proclaimed avant la lettre in the great social utopias of Plato, Morus, Bacon and Campanella. In 1910, for example, Otto Neurath, a philosopher of the Vienna Circle and pictorial statistician who was later minister of culture in the Munich Soviet Republic, enthusiastically translated Sir Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius and added a euphoric foreword. It included the statement, ‘Anyone trying to foresee the development of the future with open eyes can see that the major problems that will affect people increasingly strongly will be the improvement of social order and the improvement of our race, two goals that are very closely interlinked. ’ And Max Weber formulated it as follows in his inaugural lecture as a professor in 1895: ‘We do not want to breed wellbeing in people, but rather those characteristics which we think of as constituting the human greatness and nobility of our nature. ’
In 1905, a young Dutch evolutionary biologist first had the idea – which seems crazy to us now – of inseminating female primates with the semen of African men to create the missing link artificially. Ernst Haeckel wrote him a letter confirming that he regarded the ‘physiological experiments, especially the crossbreeding of lower human races (negroes) and great apes’ by ‘artificial insemination’ as ‘very interesting’ and believed that ‘these experiments could pos- sibly succeed’. In short, the drift, the slippage, became universal, and perhaps this has a practical implication that our current debate has not focused on enough. Philosophy and metaphysics – in the sense of the topology of the middle or of the nest, the localization of the pampering situation you mentioned earlier – always presup- pose that their central concepts, the concept of truth, the concept
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of goodness, everything, in fact, that Plato called ideas and that scholastics calls transcendentals, are basically timeless and seen as supra-temporal. Truth is subject to time just as little as goodness is, and if anything should not drift, it is these key concepts. For millennia, it was unimaginable that the truth drifted, or the law, or the idea of the good. I think the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were marked by a kind of shock wave following the realization that these concepts also drift. Perhaps people could still bear the fact that human beings suddenly had to be fitted into an evolutionary history and could no longer be traced back to a divine act of creation. Maybe it was also possible to accept constantly expanding notions of future horizons, utopias and dystopias. But that truths drift and are not supra-temporally valid, and that goodness is not a settled thing, but, as utilitarians claim, will probably come to light at some time, is deeply shocking. The true, the good and the beautiful will be established a posteriori, historicized and relativized – that is an incredible, terrifying realization. Suddenly we must ask, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to John Wayles Eppes on 24 June 1813, whether the laws we passed today have to be voted on again in twenty years’ time because half the people who just voted for them will be dead by then. And what gives us the right to enact laws for people who are not yet alive? Can the process of slippage be better expressed than in Jefferson’s words, which I shall quote here: ‘We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the suc- ceeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country’?
SLOTERDIJK: That would certainly result in parents having to treat their children as members of a foreign culture, and all educa- tion policy becoming foreign policy. It raises really weird questions. Can basic values be improvisations? Can eternal values be modi- fied over time? Incidentally, there is a famous letter from Jefferson in which he tries to remember the mood in which he edited the wording of the American Declaration of Independence. He speaks totally in the language of an occasionalist, saying he did not want to imitate any other document, but to express exactly what that unique historical occasion demanded. This probably sounds strange to anybody looking for a fundamentum inconcussum in morality. But what if there is no such thing? What if even the noblest state- ments of the Constitution were dictated by the ‘occasion’ or, as we would say, by the cultural context? The most widespread reaction to this worry is a kind of escape to intrinsic values. We can see a general anti-relativist reaction. What is right for values is reason- able for genetics. Many worried, insecure people want to isolate the human gene like a sanctuary and erect a new temple: you can touch
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everything, but not that. You shall eat of all the fruits of the tree of Knowledge and Ability, but just not of the Tree of Life. You shall change everything and deem it capable of revision, but as for the gene – leave the gene sweetly in peace for me. Anti-relativist feeling is not squeamish when it comes to denouncing relativists. It starts with the terminology: as soon as the new optimization processes of genetic engineering are linked to the traditional concepts of eugen- ics, it brings up the permanent contamination attached to this expression as a result of Nazi racism. This probably makes eugenics an irredeemable concept, and the people who sarcastically talk of ‘liberal eugenics’ today are deliberately calculating on the deterrent effect. The friendly adjective can’t redeem the sullied noun, which means people exploit the latter’s criminal connotations to make the whole thing seem shady. Because of this we never really get to the problem as it exists. The fact is, firstly, that the general drift involves the genetic premises of the conditio humana, but, secondly, that this drifting is increasingly moving from the passive to the active form. Just because of this, through the transition from suffering to doing, the Enlightenment has always moved gradually forward up to now, and anybody who wishes it to keep on advancing has to look very carefully at this sensitive spot. The old paradigm of Baconian schol- arship comes into play here: natura non vincitur nisi parendo, we can’t command nature except by obeying it. By obeying, and obedi- ently understanding, we broaden the scope for active modification. This agenda is, I think, still productive, although meanwhile we are also realizing more and more, not least by reading the ecologists, that we can’t use the word ‘obey’ so lightly. The public debate about ostensible eugenics still largely occurs in a region of hysteria. (I use the word ‘ostensible’ because genetic engineering is totally different from eugenic breeding in the procedural sense, which involves the hopeless problem of merely ‘exploited’ intermediate generations. ) People still project a completely conventional criticism of the ‘seizure of power’ on to the sphere of biotechnology. Only a few people have understood that the Baconian nisi parendo is becom- ing an urgent issue, because obeying the nature of the genus is an art, and we are gradually beginning to understand its implications.