One could (vis-a-vis his book on tragedy) compare them to what was initially said about Nietzsche's construction of the tragic stage: they would be like these Apollonian support mechanisms, through whose efficiency a cul- turally endurable arrival of the
Dionysian
would become possible for the first time.
Sloterdijk - Thinker on Stage
DIONYSUS MEETS DIOGENES ?
73
good for something, as a form of being, and the naked existence of a god would not have been as trying and ? He would have had no more cul- tural gold in his body, which would have had to be exchanged for acknowledg- ment as a royal ? and given away because of the collapse of the ? He would have done something that was his own ? could have given culture its due, taken a fragment of unavoidable logos upon himself, and at the same time fulfilled his task of incarnation honestly and artfully. Only then would he have been able to release himself to what he was: not a word become flesh, which irritated the dry masculine body with hopeless ? not a hysterical idea that dragged the body behind it as a melancholy ? but a silent, spiritually rich, playful physis, a concrete individuality beyond missions and resignations.
A ? moment awaits an individual such as this who has returned from the battlefields of the drama of individuation to that which can be endured. If the partiality of circumstances opposes it, it may experience being as a suc- cessful and unsurpassable recognizability. It encounters the great moments in which existence, corporeality, and knowledge are conceived of as a unified whole. From this point forward, everything is comedy ? war is over, research has come to an ? In every second of its existence the world would be acknowl- edged as being enough. Now a thought that leaves no shadow blossoms forth without need for transcendent worlds, without reduction, without imputation, supported only by
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
a perception that is free from the weight ? of the researching ego, without interference and without the necessity of indulgence, immaculately looking the obvious in the eye. It is the midday of being, the calm lull of obligation (Solleri). The weight of the world has been lifted; there is in- corrigibility wherever we look. Dionysus is philosophizing. ? Chapter 5
Pain and Justice
There are many good ? on earth, some useful, some pleasing: for their sake, the earth is to be loved.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
"On Old and New Tablets"
So, would a raving individualism be Nietzsche's last word? Did he leave behind for us nothing but the incentive for the production of ecstatic freethinkers in their reckless physicality, their amoral intensity, and their suspicious second inno- cence?
We might ask: Where is the ? ? Nietzsche? Are your ecstasies still grounded on the constitution? Doesn't your commonplace conceal the landmines of anarchy? What do you have to say about the problems of the ? will you limit yourself to a reference to the discrepancy between isolated knowledge and collective banter? Is all that we can expect of you a subjectivity without a subject, which, if thought out further as a general principle, cannot produce any- thing more than a postmodern colloquium, entitled: "The Autumn Salon of Van- ities, upon Which Intensities Collapse into Each Other, in a Manner That is Guar- anteed to Be Meaning-Free and Polylogical"? Only bodies remaining, without worlds? Only actors remaining, with no engagement? Only adventurers, with no retirement insurance? Only projects of antiquity without the realism of late italism? Only the new vehemence without diplomacy and the social state? Do you intend to invite us into chaos with your young conservative romanticism of conflict and your Dionysian prowess in the art of breaking ? Don't your cult of the moment and your worship of the exception bring the sociopolitical premises of democracy to ruin, that is, the capacities to engage oneself
nicably, to engage in long-term thinking, and to feel within the context of the institution? Isn't there inherent within every individualistic agitation a playing with fire, an impulse toward the relaxation of restraint, which encourages bru- ? ? 74
? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 75
tality and intimidates caution, which defends a loss of control and robs the breath of responsibility? Isn't any emphasis of the singular at the same time a pillaging of the general, which thus contributes to an increase in tension between narcis- sism and the ? You will become a danger to political culture, Herr
if you don't cease seducing those who are most sensitive into political resignation -- not to mention those hardened types who borrow risque doctrines from your writings so that they can carry out their brutality with a clear con- science. Which brand of politics was it, then, that thought it had found in your energetic romanticism a permit to start swinging? Do we have to make it any clearer?
What these questions allude to, assuming a minimal recall of political ideas, is clear enough. Their bluntness, however, stems from perceptions that are them- selves imprecise: it stems from a definition of the world that is fundamentally false and that disintegrates into radical ambiguities as soon as this definition has been discredited. It presumes that, in a normal society, it is simply a matter of bringing together individuals who have grown up exhibiting an average sense of good will for the purpose of solving their common problems cooperatively. Who- ever withdraws from this kind of cooperation because he wants something differ- ent falls under suspicion of being someone who is running away from some other type of irresponsible ? conceals his blindness for the social behind therapeutic and private ideologies of retreat, and who, in the worst cases, makes excuses for himself with Nietzsche's formulation of the aesthetic exoneration of life.
This opinion, which probably considers itself the healthy one, disintegrates under the first alert gaze into fragments, each of which is
with the pseudo-ontological concept of normality, moving on to the trivially mor- alistic postulate of goodwill, and continuing all the way to the
inflated, block that, in the form of the bipartite illusion of the individual here and society stands in the way of any deeper understanding, and ultimately is summarized in the vulgar-political compulsive idea of the "common ? Only "common values" are lacking here as ontological catchalls. One cannot, of course, permit the use of the term "deeper understand- ing" with its educated-bourgeois ? he who moves on from the word to the matter itself ? is pulled into a dramatic phenomenon in whose wake the vulgar-ontological block to a Dionysian understanding melts away. It is little wonder, ? that critical identities rebel against an understanding of this kind as they would against something that mortally endangered the ? Because "truth" indicates something terrible for the subjects of the status quo, it is only natural that they would defend themselves from behind their block against the enlightening ? the drama; they react
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
critically because they really do not want to find what they purport to be seeking.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? 76 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
This much can be made plausible without any great effort: for the person who experiences existence as a drama that takes place above the Dionysian foundation of pain and pleasure (and who is the alert individual who would not approach such an experience ? moral and social facts must appear as subor- dinate quantities, however much they try to force themselves into the discourses of the institution as realities of the first order. Nietzsche's theory of truth explains to us in the most impressive terms that what calls itself reality within the context of institutional discourse can be nothing other than a reality in place of a reality, an Apollonian explanation, and institutionalization of the founda- tion of the world in accordance with the criteria of endurability and predictability. But in the alert ? this ? can never become exclusive: the individual is always standing at the crossroads; he is always alive only to the extent that he is a meeting point between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, ? that he occupies the position wherein reality, in its in- capacity to be represented, encounters the institutional "reality in the place of.
that can be
It could therefore be that individuals who are alert to Dionysus are most cidedly not trying to dodge reality, but are rather the only ones who are able to survive in the vicinity of pain and pleasure all the ramifications of this survival for a metabolic exchange between the individual and nature, life and society, while, conversely, the completely politicized, completely socialized, and thoroughly moralized subjects would be the very ones who were most successful in their organized flight from the terrible truth. It is conceivable that no one is more translucent, authentic, more incorporated, or more life-en- hancing in their involvement in what is real than these Dionysian
these types who are ? oversensitive, apolitical, or parapolitical. Per- haps it is they who engage themselves in an ecology of pain and pleasure that precedes any of the usual politics. Perhaps they are the real ? as opposed to those who have specialized in "politics" with a capital P and those who, in the style of traditional activists, endlessly force their game as the admin- istrators of abuses and as the agents of a shifting of suffering onto others.
Here a crack blatantly forms in the concept of the political itself. It will be necessary to supplement an everyday concept of the political ? the plane of combative and discursive interests along with their discourses, weapons, and in-
a darker, nighttime concept of the political that casts its gaze on the hidden ecology of universal pain. While politics, according to its everyday conceptualization, belongs to the Apollonian world of visibility and unfolds before our eyes as a reality in place of a reality, the dark side of the political falls on the side of the ? nonconcrete energetic of a prototypical foun- dation of pain and pleasure, which is a prerequisite to all everyday political action and reaction. Within this dark conceptualization, the most sensitive prob- lematic of modernity is announced; we are inquiring into the relationship be-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 77
modern-day constructions of what is socially endurable, on the one hand, and the unendurable proliferation of suffering brought about by precisely such constructions of what can be endured, on the other. With this sort of dark inquiry, only one thing is obvious: wherever thought of this kind takes place, the logic of politology ? from Machiavelli to Marx and from Hobbes to Ho Chi Minh has already been superseded by a Dionysian politology of passions.
This is dangerous ? else could it be defined? Is it the usual an- archic-romantic flirtation with the abyss, the well-known playing with fire, which leads to the potential for conflict within the masses, a literary sharpening of an asocial explosive that every socialized subject carries within him? These are imputations with which any thinking in this area will have to reckon. I do believe, however, that one of the fundamental impulses of modernity is continued through such questions. In its best moments, enlightenment was always a phe- nomenon in the spirit of a Dionysian politology. Authentic modernity accom- plished an immeasurable departure from the feudal ontology of misere, which was grounded in the fact that the very fewest had permitted the greatest number to ? departure in which liberalism, Marxism, anarchism, social democ- racy, and political Catholicism by and large have come to terms with each other. The modern pain-ecological the great majority will not allow themselves to be made to suffer by the minority the smallest common denominator for all the positions available within the fissured landscapes of mo- dernity. Modernization has been accomplished for the most part as a mass en- trance on the part of suffering subjects into what has been rendered newly en-
alleviations, authorizations, and enrichments that, when measured against traditional standards, were so overpowering that one was for a long time at a loss even to pose the question as to the ecology of their unburdening
This inability to pose the question has been coming to an end within the con- text of a dramatic awakening that has taken place over the last several decades. With spectacular speed, the feeling has spread that modernity cannot be satisfied with an exoneration of life from the ethos of technical improvement, political par- ticipation, and economic enrichment, but that it also longs for a Dionysian ex- oneration of life in the sense of an ? ? feeling is the epochal basis
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
for Nietzsche's new currency. As we see, the religious question has survived the end of religions. It now appears, insofar as it is articulated at the heights of moder- nity, as the question of the possibility of an aesthetic exoneration of life.
Of course, this question ultimately ties in with doubts as to the value and lon- gevity of any improvements and the possibility of realizing general participation, doubts that have taken on epidemic proportions; in addition to this, these ques- tions have their foundation in a skepticism vis-a-vis the ? of sociopoli- tical modernity that is rapidly becoming radicalized. This skepticism allows us to ask whether, in the moralism of the Enlightenment, the legitimate voice of wounded life that is demanding its restitution can really be heard, or whether the
? ? ? ? ? ? 78 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
syndrome of moralizing social activism has not long since unwillingly become part and parcel of the tendencies that, from behind the pretext of further improve- ment and humanitarian ? lead to an unprecedented proliferation of suf-
In a situation such as this, what could be more suggestive than Nietzsche's doctrine of the aesthetic exoneration of life? Whoever takes the aesthetic into consideration as an exonerating force has broken through the spell of the moral- istic concept of exculpation that clings to the Protestant wing of modernity in particular and has burdened us with libraries full of dyspeptic moral discourses. W ith its assertions in this respect, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy has won a philo- sophical breadth that exceeds everything debated prior to it. For, with a reckless- ness that is still astonishing today, Nietzsche cut through the moral knots of mo- dernity. He naturalistically reversed the relationship between morality and life: instead of finding fault with life from the perspective of an eternally dissatisfied morality, he began by observing morality from the perspective of an eternally unimprovable life. This reversal provides the "suggestive statement" that "the existence of the world can be justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon" with its penetrating ? explains why it is unacceptable for those who even today maintain the primacy of the moral.
On the question of ? the intellectuals are divided. Actually, we are dealing with two diametrically opposed definitions of what constitutes the pain of life. The moral-political definition, which -- unjustly and for too ? wanted to be perceived as the only legitimate voice of enlightenment, recognizes in almost all pain a variation of injustice and derives from it a program for its redress that expands into
Moralistic-theoretical modernity wants to respond to the question of algodicy with a progressive universal analgesic in which pain can only find acknowledg- ment of its own potential abolition as an ontological motif. That this is an un- contemptible view that becomes apparent as reasonable within an intermediate area does not require confirmation: a great majority of therapeutic action has been grounded on its plausibility. He who has suffered and found release knows how to evaluate its truth content. Was it not also Nietzsche who most clearly ex- pressed what grief had to say about itself?
Accordingly, Nietzsche's algodicy stands in direct opposition to a program of moral abrogation. In a manner that is completely antiquated, it pits our memory of the ethos of the affirmative resistance against the modern idea of an abolishing negation. Because it conceives of life, in a radically immanent fashion, as the play acted out upon the foundation of pleasure and pain that cannot be overcome, it negates any metaphysics of redemption ? its modern manifestations in programs for the elimination of pain and therapy. Would this imply that Nietz- sche was a stoic in the wrong century? Or does an irredeemable Christ want to
? ? ? ? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 79
throw the promises of the Christian age, with neoclassical gestures, onto the wreckage?
Dionysus versus "the ? you have the opposition. It is not a difference with respect to martyrdom ? has a different meaning. Life itself, its eternal fertility and return, requires agony, destruction, the will to ? ? On the other hand, suffering, "the crucified one as the innocent," functions as an objection to this life, as a formula for condemning it. One guesses: the problem is that of the meaning of suffering, whether this be a Christian meaning, or a tragic meaning. ? In the former case, it is meant to be the path to a divine being; in the latter, being is considered divine enough to vindicate a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic human being still affirms the harshest suffering. ? ? ? The Christian will negate even the happiest destiny on earth; the god on the cross is a curse upon ? a cue to redeem oneself from it; the Dionysus who has been cut to pieces is a promise of life: it is eternally reborn and brought back from destruction.
15, p. 490)
Nietzsche's doctrine of the aesthetic exoneration of life reveals itself as the opposite of a cynical aestheticism: it is grounded in an algodicy that attempts to draw pain into the immanence of a life that no longer requires redemption as an element of the Dionysian passion. Within the Dionysian passion, which forms the basis for every alert life, there occurs, paradoxically, that which we have characterized as the endurance of the unendurable. But this endurance is not without its digressions; rather, it has two indispensable assistants in the form of intoxication and the ? oldest of drugs for elevating the psyche. They contribute to the formation of those intermediate worlds and realms of endura- bility that we need to keep ourselves from perishing of immediacy.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
Here the thesis that The Birth of Tragedy must be read as Apollonian in its dramaturgical effect again becomes important. The book had shown how Diony- sian passion has been instructed by means of an Apollonian translation into something that can be looked at, imagined, and endured. In this book, Nietzsche professes culture, the compulsion to symbolize, representation. That this profes- sion has a double base was made just as ? if culture then wanted to belong in general to the world of illusion, it would be a matter of an illusion that does not permit anyone to look through it because it is the true lie of life itself. Accordingly, culture would be the fiction that we ourselves are; we exist as self- inventions of the living being that has been brought forth from the unendurability of the immediate Dionysian passion into a state of endurability and mediation. Life itself owes its spontaneous elevation to culture to a dialectic of what can be endured and what is unendurable, a dialectic from which the process of self-rep- resentation has sprung. From this,
an ethics can be conceptualized from Nietz- sche's basic assertions that is commensurate with the universal experience of mo-
? ? 80 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
dernity ? ethics of necessary illusion, of what is endurable, of intermediate worlds; an ethics of the ecology of pleasure and pain; an ethics of ingenuous life. The concept of illusion in Nietzsche possesses a power that bridges the contra- diction between the ethical and the ? indeed, between the thera- peutic and the
Under Nietzsche's gaze, the world of moral and political institutions is pre- sented as a sphere of essential illusion, as a form of ? of collec- tive life, ? order to endure ? symbolize itself, ritualize itself, and subordinate itself to ? These suppositions form the Apollonian back- bone of ?
One could (vis-a-vis his book on tragedy) compare them to what was initially said about Nietzsche's construction of the tragic stage: they would be like these Apollonian support mechanisms, through whose efficiency a cul- turally endurable arrival of the Dionysian would become possible for the first time. But the normative sphere of law, mores, conventions, and institutions re- ceives its legitimation from life's compulsion toward art, not from the autonomy of a universal law of morals ? However, in order to remain valid, moral law must appear in the guise of autonomy and universality. There will be no Apollonian ethics without Dionysian ? but there can also be no Diony- sian ethics without Apollonian fictions of autonomy. This means that, after
there can no longer be a theory of culture that is not informed by fun- damental Nietzsche did indeed shift moral and cultural-critical thought onto the track of naturalism, but he also broke open naturalism aesthetically and illusionistically; he localized this ? inventive, lying phenomenon within the phenomenon of life itself. Thus we see through everything that has been culturally imposed to its natural basis; this basis is at the same ? how- ever, what ascends to the cultural and is composed into value systems. Thus human consciousness is placed ontologically in an ironic site; one from which the pretending animal is condemned to see through his own fictions. His awakening to this irony is at the same time an awakening to philosophy ? is not an irony that could lead to detachment nor an understanding that would provide distance. At this site, the mechanism for maintaining distance from life through knowledge breaks down. But one must play with that from which one is unable to distance oneself.
Nietzsche's algodicy therefore conceals the beginnings of a philosophical ethics ? ethics that clearly rests on a foundation of tragic irony. Because the moral illusion belongs to the ? of ? a naturalistic
ness is also not permitted to want to return to moral compositions. They belong irrevocably to the cybernetics of social beings. The Apollonian, conceived of bernetically, signifies nothing other than the necessity of imprinting upon the amorphous compulsion of Dionysian forces and the chaotic multiplicity of the individual a controlling form, which is ruled by the law of ? indi-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
viduality, ? and rationality. The concept of "justice" is a true dream of humanity, born out of the unendurability of unjust conditions: it belongs to the ? of life in the "intermediate worlds" of endurable ho- meostases. It is a component of the comprehensive compositions of self that we refer to as "cultures. " But because everything just and all morality are to be understood as controlling forces in the cybernetics of the unendurable, the ironic shadow cast by the postulate of the autonomy and universality of justice will never again be skipped over. Where values are, there ironies shall ? The slick Apollonian belief in values and their autonomy cannot be reproduced in moder- nity.
If ethics is cybernetics, we can understand why it pursues no objectives but, rather, processes ? It is a typically modern error to believe that ethics might change the world, to guarantee the Apollonian natural right to an endurable life. Nietzsche has classically formulated the regulative character of the ethical- Apollonian in that he advances the claim that only as much of the Dionysian foundation of pleasure and pain should be permitted to surface in an individual as "can be again subdued by the Apollonian force of Is it possible to conceive of a more sublime acknowledgment of culture?
Here the concept of righteousness appears with an unusual significance. For Nietzsche states further on in the same discussion:
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
Thus these two art drives must unfold their powers in a strict proportion, according to the law of eternal justice. (BT, p. 143)
Justice now becomes the heading for a homeostatic the necessity of which is based on the ? of living Nietzsche formulates this par- adoxically enough: " A l l that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both" (BT, p. 72). He who expresses himself in this way does not sit at his desk and draw up the plans for better worlds; he does not analytically pull to pieces the moral vocabulary of his nation and, on the basis of this accomplishment, take himself for a philosopher. He who speaks in this way has, through experimenta- tion on his own body, thrust forward into the tissue of reality and cast his gaze into the ecology of suffering life.
Of course, this has for some time not been a matter of what is dealt with in formal ethics or doctrines of material value. Behind the altercations between good and evil and the contest of values for cultural or political priority there arises ? and ? central philosophical massif of modernity: the question of understanding subjectivity as ? W ith the introduction of a cy- bernetic concept of justice, something decisive has clearly taken place
thing that is heavy with implications and that must remain plainly incomprehen- sible and unacceptable to those who have inscribed upon their flags the illusion of the moral autonomy of the subject and the superstition of free ? The moral ? ? ? ? ? 82 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
it is called "individual," "citizen," "entity with legal rights," "human being," or ? with this turn of events already been released from its fictional central position in the moral cosmos. It has become "decentered" into a great force within the play of subjective forces. Here the question of whether a surrender or release of the subject has taken place must remain unanswered; a decision on this could not be made readily in any case. It is not unthinkable that only a ? of the subject, which bids a respectful adieu to the fiction of autonomy, could lead to a legitimate constitution of sub-
ego and will. What seems at first a bitter expulsion from the center could be viewed on second glance as an adventurous ? it is correct that, in becoming conscious of having been decentered, the subject is anyway only giving up what it never possessed ? autonomy ? is gaining what it would have to lose to the illusion of autonomy: the play of its body and its dialogic-ecstatic status. Whereas the centered subject is the effect of a grammat- ical system that harasses to death the living consciousness between "Thou
and "I want," the decentered subject would perhaps be the first to have the right to say in reference to itself: I am.
What is to be gained from these speculations? Assuming that they pointed in the direction of fruitful insights, who would gain by learning to accept a cybernetic version of justice and seeing in it a radical, constructive, selective force that be- longs to the constructive nature of vital self-composition? The significance of these speculations lies presumably only in their ramifications for the self-defini- tion of the phenomenon of enlightenment. Because enlightenment represents a historic wager on the realization of a reasoning subjectivity, the subject of en- lightenment is radically moved by a transformation of the concept of the subject from a moral-legal center of will to a cybernetic and medial phenomenon. This is no small matter. It is presumably an all-or-nothing situation being put into play within the context of philosophical thought. The subject of enlightenment could from this point forward no longer constitute itself as it had wanted to in accor- dance with the rules of Apollonian as an autonomous source of mean- ing, ethos, logic, and instead, as something medial, cybernetic, ec- centric, and Dionysian, as a site of sensibility within the ruling cycles of forces, as a point of alertness for the modulation of impersonal ? as a process of self-healing for primordial pain, and an instance of the self-composition of primordial ? speak poetically, as an eye through which Dionysus serves
Measured against such conceptions of medial subjectivity, the moral construc- tivism of the Enlightenment must appear naive. If, indeed, the vision of a uni- versal dominion of morality is derived from this, this ? becomes a hyste- procreation of demons in the air, an impotent ? of Apollonian illusion. In his critique of morality, Nietzsche presents us with a minimum of a
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 83
second reflection, without which the Enlightenment for its part would remain only a natural illusion. A morality without morals is unthinkable, however, with- out an aesthetic relationship to the necessary illusion:
If we could imagine dissonance become what else is
this dissonance, to be able to live, would need a splendid illusion that would cover dissonance with a veil of beauty. (BT, p. 143)
The Apollonian veil is just as moral as it is aesthetic in nature and is woven in particular from the most magnificent of all ? which the En- lightenment had characterized as the moral autonomy of the subject. Thus man, according to his moral ecology, is a fragment of suffering, dreaming, building, and valuing nature ? order to endure ? the illusion of freedom from merely suffering naturalness.
These thoughts are anything but pleasant. They indicate that Nietzsche's doc- trine of the aesthetic exoneration of life does not represent a program of frivolity. To a much greater it is one of the most serious attempts -- perhaps the only
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
promising think through the moral situation of modernity without being duped into the more complex swindle of a New Morality. The seriousness of this attempt is connected with the audacity of the attack against recent abstract sub- jectivism. There shines forth from Nietzsche's project the beginnings of a return to the physical foundation of ? to the return to the physical foundation of thought discussed in Chapter 4. In both cases, the truth is speaking as a truth from below, not as an idea in search of a body, but as an intelligent body that, out of respect, accelerates itself in the course of its composition of self toward language, toward the intellect, and toward justice in a manner that is strin- gently perspectival, "constructive," and How- ever, the notion that knowledge does not fall from ? but instead opens itself to us through the dramatic revelation of previously concealed worldly ? is the fundamental concept of authentic of whether it speaks a Marxist labor-oriented, anthropological, or fundamentally ontological idiom. In the ciphers of physicality, a Dionysian ma- terialism is announced, of which "dialectical" materialism is only a brutal car-
With these observations, we leave the realm within which we had been able to read The Birth of Tragedy as an aesthetic theory with cultural-philosophical side- lights. In my concluding remarks I will attempt to advance Nietzsche's model to level at which his book on tragedy will take on a profile.
It actually seems to us as if Nietzsche, along with the major portion of his work, belonged within a history of the "enlanguaging" and self-mobilization of ? that is incalculable but global in its implications
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 84 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
phenomenon, therefore, for which the expression "Dionysian materialism" was used, an expression whose plausibility goes hand in hand with its unapproacha- bility. And talk of materialism within modernity runs the risk of being complicit with the most brutal subjectivisms and the most cynical forms of objectifying thought. And yet, the materialist confession wanted, in accordance with its spirit, to reconcile with matter as the not-other of spirit; it strove to mediate the physics that was unhappily hovering above the physical basis with it, and to call home the logical ghosts. Modern materialism, outlined in a ? le- gitimate withdrawal of idealism, established itself almost universally as the form of thought for ultimate violation and the final seizure of power, and it seems to me that there belongs with it a belief that is more despairing than naive toward the historical potential and the power of self-control of modernity, in order to once again conjure up from beneath the unity of modernity in the spirit of a Dionysian materialism and a medial process of becoming universal.
Be that as it may, this thought always has the greater power, the more conse- quential structure, and the deeper universal capacity for containment vis-a-vis numerous retrogressive ? enclosures, and ? It is a thought that conceives of itself as materialist and Dionysian because it is permit- ted to believe in itself as a medium for a singularly phenomenal,
dramatic uni- versality. It knows that it has been incorporated into a planetary magnetism of physical universal candor (Weltqffenheit) that shows us that every delimitation of subjectivity that does not become superegotistical raving flows into trips around the world that parade before our eyes where our effective limits ? Within these trips around the world on the part of a cosmonautical and a psychonautical reason that are both limitless and final at ? the freedoms of the modern era find their first fragile meaning. Cosmonautical reason concerns itself with the planets as the source and basis of a worldwide communion, world trade, world communi- cation, and world ecology ? when in crisis, world ? Psychonautical reason, on the other hand, queries the individual as to his capacity to endure the universal citizenship into which he was born. For this reason, I believe, the psy- chologies that have been developing continuously on European terrain for the last two hundred years are the essential component of authentic enlightenment; they are the symbolic vehicle of psychonautical reason, that is, any form of self-re- flection that gives voice to our condition of being condemned to universality, even into the very depths of the subject. Within the phenomenon of Dionysian materialism, the individual psyche must be confronted with the advent of an in- creasingly violent and subtle contextualization of what constitutes the "world"; it must learn to liberate the unceasing unveiling of a world of worlds from its initial unendurability and recast it into something that can be endured. It must learn to accept into itself the impact of the ? which "arrives" from without, in order to correspond to the external opening of worlds through an increase in inner openness to the ? is the deity who also protects
? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 85
the ecstasies of ? The fundamental question for modern psychologies, which the Dionysians of an active materialism must render animate from the out- side in, is the following: how can individuals who are imprinted by regionality,
and fear of death in any way endure being affiliated with a planetary fact? To formulate this in the language of Heidegger: how can finite being (Dasein) endure being thrown into an irrepressible universality?
Nothing is more complicated than an answer to this question. But what does this help? The arrival of the God to come is accomplished today in Dionysians of complexity. He who concerns himself with modernity as the period in which he exists will more than ever have to find his way back in complicated stories.
I recently made an attempt to untangle one of the complicated threads of mo- dernity in a philosophical story. I wanted
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
to show how the depth-psychological mediation of body and world had been made obligatory for modern individuals before the models of Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung existed. One has to reach back into the period of the French Revolution to observe the decisive moment at which the unconscious began to ? The unconscious is the name for the sources at which the modern ? ? retrogressive metamorphoses of subjec- tivity lead back to that which preceded it. The body and the drama are the ma- terial foundations of this modern consciousness of retrogressive metamorphoses; we experience in them the way in which the narrowness of the subject breaks open when it resigns itself nolens volens to the universal context, of which it has long since unconsciously been a part and from which it will never be permitted to
Any inwardness is interwoven deeply and somatically into the magnetism of the universal.
It has been said that the three decisive revolutions of the nineteenth century were the politicization of the proletariat, the cultural seizing of language by women, and the discovery of the unconscious. Could it not be that the same phenomenon was at work in all these movements, which would only now be apostrophied as Dionysian or dramatic materialism? Is it not in each case a matter of the surfacing of amorous and plural truths that, thanks to the revolutionary exonerations of technical civilization, are able to develop a modern ecology of expression?
It is probably impossible properly to understand Nietzsche's idea of justice if one views his work and his person as separate from these movements of emer- gence. It would above all else be an unjust abbreviation to explain Nietzsche's impulse as representing only an oscillating balancing with the immoralistic de- restraining tendencies of advanced capitalism that are produced in advance, whether this might also exhibit what belonged to the image of an active nihilism together with its ? "excluding," "exterminating" determinations of ? One would be much more likely to do justice to Nietzsche if one could conceive of his work as a play in the ? twilight of the idols of meta- physics and the collapse of idealisms. This would be appropriate to the emergent
? ? ? 86 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
movement of the excluded physical and dramatic forces. After having been wounded, banished into the darkness, and forgotten, the bodies that have all too long been abused as incarnation machines press toward the light; they make use of modern exonerations, authorizations, and symbolic constructs to prepare ? a new intervention by the lower elements ? a new presence of the
which cunningly and as a rule behaves as if it wanted something in particular
as if it were fighting for a place in the sun of subjectivities, while at bottom it is always only looking for a chance to once again become aesthetic and appear in the arena of absolute
But whereas, among these basis movements, the proletarian and feminist movements are more easily caught by the traps of subjectivity of abstract indi- vidualism, the emergent movement of the ? in its ego-psycho- logical reversal and its therapeutic ? the most promising man- ifestation of the three. The depth psychologies, which for two hundred years have increasingly left their mark on the physiognomy of intellectual Europe, are the characteristic impulse in the history here described as
They conceal the most important reasoning potential of an enlightenment that is not only instrumental and strategic: only they are prepared to consider properly the reality of the drama under the conditions of modernity. Wherever they remain true to their authentic impulse, they reject the deliberate indolence of rationalism and decline to cooperate with the abstract individualism that is only the psychic- legal form in which the universal domination of a nature-exploiting theoretical- moralistic subject wants to prevail. The depth psychologies are, as it were, the thinking heart of the ? which must beat during the epochal history of re- fusing light to the physis if all bodies are not to atrophy into intersubjectivized fighting machines and self-consciously cold legal entities. This heart thinks in the center of Dionysian passion ? the memory of the ecology of suffering, among which are included even the reason of exonerations and the construction of what is ? It is the living memorial that the history of the wounding of civilization has accumulated within itself, along with all of what must be consol- idated of induration and obscuration in order to bring forth the dominant degree of intellectual armament and the armoring of the body.
Admittedly, this all sounds a trace too dark to satisfy the need for understand- ing, in case one anyway and of one's own accord does not know what could be meant. Is the author here making a game, following the example of the more recent French authors, of cultivating darkness as a genre of the beaux arts? Or is it plausible that the veil over these references to a depth-psychological drama of knowledge should not be understood as a malicious component of a literary nature but instead illuminated as a ways and means by which the "thing itself" is there for us? How could our thinking, if it questions the limitations of its per- formance, circumvent the insight that it cannot render everything transparent? With the acknowledgment that the rational world is situated before an
? ? ?
good for something, as a form of being, and the naked existence of a god would not have been as trying and ? He would have had no more cul- tural gold in his body, which would have had to be exchanged for acknowledg- ment as a royal ? and given away because of the collapse of the ? He would have done something that was his own ? could have given culture its due, taken a fragment of unavoidable logos upon himself, and at the same time fulfilled his task of incarnation honestly and artfully. Only then would he have been able to release himself to what he was: not a word become flesh, which irritated the dry masculine body with hopeless ? not a hysterical idea that dragged the body behind it as a melancholy ? but a silent, spiritually rich, playful physis, a concrete individuality beyond missions and resignations.
A ? moment awaits an individual such as this who has returned from the battlefields of the drama of individuation to that which can be endured. If the partiality of circumstances opposes it, it may experience being as a suc- cessful and unsurpassable recognizability. It encounters the great moments in which existence, corporeality, and knowledge are conceived of as a unified whole. From this point forward, everything is comedy ? war is over, research has come to an ? In every second of its existence the world would be acknowl- edged as being enough. Now a thought that leaves no shadow blossoms forth without need for transcendent worlds, without reduction, without imputation, supported only by
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
a perception that is free from the weight ? of the researching ego, without interference and without the necessity of indulgence, immaculately looking the obvious in the eye. It is the midday of being, the calm lull of obligation (Solleri). The weight of the world has been lifted; there is in- corrigibility wherever we look. Dionysus is philosophizing. ? Chapter 5
Pain and Justice
There are many good ? on earth, some useful, some pleasing: for their sake, the earth is to be loved.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
"On Old and New Tablets"
So, would a raving individualism be Nietzsche's last word? Did he leave behind for us nothing but the incentive for the production of ecstatic freethinkers in their reckless physicality, their amoral intensity, and their suspicious second inno- cence?
We might ask: Where is the ? ? Nietzsche? Are your ecstasies still grounded on the constitution? Doesn't your commonplace conceal the landmines of anarchy? What do you have to say about the problems of the ? will you limit yourself to a reference to the discrepancy between isolated knowledge and collective banter? Is all that we can expect of you a subjectivity without a subject, which, if thought out further as a general principle, cannot produce any- thing more than a postmodern colloquium, entitled: "The Autumn Salon of Van- ities, upon Which Intensities Collapse into Each Other, in a Manner That is Guar- anteed to Be Meaning-Free and Polylogical"? Only bodies remaining, without worlds? Only actors remaining, with no engagement? Only adventurers, with no retirement insurance? Only projects of antiquity without the realism of late italism? Only the new vehemence without diplomacy and the social state? Do you intend to invite us into chaos with your young conservative romanticism of conflict and your Dionysian prowess in the art of breaking ? Don't your cult of the moment and your worship of the exception bring the sociopolitical premises of democracy to ruin, that is, the capacities to engage oneself
nicably, to engage in long-term thinking, and to feel within the context of the institution? Isn't there inherent within every individualistic agitation a playing with fire, an impulse toward the relaxation of restraint, which encourages bru- ? ? 74
? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 75
tality and intimidates caution, which defends a loss of control and robs the breath of responsibility? Isn't any emphasis of the singular at the same time a pillaging of the general, which thus contributes to an increase in tension between narcis- sism and the ? You will become a danger to political culture, Herr
if you don't cease seducing those who are most sensitive into political resignation -- not to mention those hardened types who borrow risque doctrines from your writings so that they can carry out their brutality with a clear con- science. Which brand of politics was it, then, that thought it had found in your energetic romanticism a permit to start swinging? Do we have to make it any clearer?
What these questions allude to, assuming a minimal recall of political ideas, is clear enough. Their bluntness, however, stems from perceptions that are them- selves imprecise: it stems from a definition of the world that is fundamentally false and that disintegrates into radical ambiguities as soon as this definition has been discredited. It presumes that, in a normal society, it is simply a matter of bringing together individuals who have grown up exhibiting an average sense of good will for the purpose of solving their common problems cooperatively. Who- ever withdraws from this kind of cooperation because he wants something differ- ent falls under suspicion of being someone who is running away from some other type of irresponsible ? conceals his blindness for the social behind therapeutic and private ideologies of retreat, and who, in the worst cases, makes excuses for himself with Nietzsche's formulation of the aesthetic exoneration of life.
This opinion, which probably considers itself the healthy one, disintegrates under the first alert gaze into fragments, each of which is
with the pseudo-ontological concept of normality, moving on to the trivially mor- alistic postulate of goodwill, and continuing all the way to the
inflated, block that, in the form of the bipartite illusion of the individual here and society stands in the way of any deeper understanding, and ultimately is summarized in the vulgar-political compulsive idea of the "common ? Only "common values" are lacking here as ontological catchalls. One cannot, of course, permit the use of the term "deeper understand- ing" with its educated-bourgeois ? he who moves on from the word to the matter itself ? is pulled into a dramatic phenomenon in whose wake the vulgar-ontological block to a Dionysian understanding melts away. It is little wonder, ? that critical identities rebel against an understanding of this kind as they would against something that mortally endangered the ? Because "truth" indicates something terrible for the subjects of the status quo, it is only natural that they would defend themselves from behind their block against the enlightening ? the drama; they react
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
critically because they really do not want to find what they purport to be seeking.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? 76 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
This much can be made plausible without any great effort: for the person who experiences existence as a drama that takes place above the Dionysian foundation of pain and pleasure (and who is the alert individual who would not approach such an experience ? moral and social facts must appear as subor- dinate quantities, however much they try to force themselves into the discourses of the institution as realities of the first order. Nietzsche's theory of truth explains to us in the most impressive terms that what calls itself reality within the context of institutional discourse can be nothing other than a reality in place of a reality, an Apollonian explanation, and institutionalization of the founda- tion of the world in accordance with the criteria of endurability and predictability. But in the alert ? this ? can never become exclusive: the individual is always standing at the crossroads; he is always alive only to the extent that he is a meeting point between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, ? that he occupies the position wherein reality, in its in- capacity to be represented, encounters the institutional "reality in the place of.
that can be
It could therefore be that individuals who are alert to Dionysus are most cidedly not trying to dodge reality, but are rather the only ones who are able to survive in the vicinity of pain and pleasure all the ramifications of this survival for a metabolic exchange between the individual and nature, life and society, while, conversely, the completely politicized, completely socialized, and thoroughly moralized subjects would be the very ones who were most successful in their organized flight from the terrible truth. It is conceivable that no one is more translucent, authentic, more incorporated, or more life-en- hancing in their involvement in what is real than these Dionysian
these types who are ? oversensitive, apolitical, or parapolitical. Per- haps it is they who engage themselves in an ecology of pain and pleasure that precedes any of the usual politics. Perhaps they are the real ? as opposed to those who have specialized in "politics" with a capital P and those who, in the style of traditional activists, endlessly force their game as the admin- istrators of abuses and as the agents of a shifting of suffering onto others.
Here a crack blatantly forms in the concept of the political itself. It will be necessary to supplement an everyday concept of the political ? the plane of combative and discursive interests along with their discourses, weapons, and in-
a darker, nighttime concept of the political that casts its gaze on the hidden ecology of universal pain. While politics, according to its everyday conceptualization, belongs to the Apollonian world of visibility and unfolds before our eyes as a reality in place of a reality, the dark side of the political falls on the side of the ? nonconcrete energetic of a prototypical foun- dation of pain and pleasure, which is a prerequisite to all everyday political action and reaction. Within this dark conceptualization, the most sensitive prob- lematic of modernity is announced; we are inquiring into the relationship be-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 77
modern-day constructions of what is socially endurable, on the one hand, and the unendurable proliferation of suffering brought about by precisely such constructions of what can be endured, on the other. With this sort of dark inquiry, only one thing is obvious: wherever thought of this kind takes place, the logic of politology ? from Machiavelli to Marx and from Hobbes to Ho Chi Minh has already been superseded by a Dionysian politology of passions.
This is dangerous ? else could it be defined? Is it the usual an- archic-romantic flirtation with the abyss, the well-known playing with fire, which leads to the potential for conflict within the masses, a literary sharpening of an asocial explosive that every socialized subject carries within him? These are imputations with which any thinking in this area will have to reckon. I do believe, however, that one of the fundamental impulses of modernity is continued through such questions. In its best moments, enlightenment was always a phe- nomenon in the spirit of a Dionysian politology. Authentic modernity accom- plished an immeasurable departure from the feudal ontology of misere, which was grounded in the fact that the very fewest had permitted the greatest number to ? departure in which liberalism, Marxism, anarchism, social democ- racy, and political Catholicism by and large have come to terms with each other. The modern pain-ecological the great majority will not allow themselves to be made to suffer by the minority the smallest common denominator for all the positions available within the fissured landscapes of mo- dernity. Modernization has been accomplished for the most part as a mass en- trance on the part of suffering subjects into what has been rendered newly en-
alleviations, authorizations, and enrichments that, when measured against traditional standards, were so overpowering that one was for a long time at a loss even to pose the question as to the ecology of their unburdening
This inability to pose the question has been coming to an end within the con- text of a dramatic awakening that has taken place over the last several decades. With spectacular speed, the feeling has spread that modernity cannot be satisfied with an exoneration of life from the ethos of technical improvement, political par- ticipation, and economic enrichment, but that it also longs for a Dionysian ex- oneration of life in the sense of an ? ? feeling is the epochal basis
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
for Nietzsche's new currency. As we see, the religious question has survived the end of religions. It now appears, insofar as it is articulated at the heights of moder- nity, as the question of the possibility of an aesthetic exoneration of life.
Of course, this question ultimately ties in with doubts as to the value and lon- gevity of any improvements and the possibility of realizing general participation, doubts that have taken on epidemic proportions; in addition to this, these ques- tions have their foundation in a skepticism vis-a-vis the ? of sociopoli- tical modernity that is rapidly becoming radicalized. This skepticism allows us to ask whether, in the moralism of the Enlightenment, the legitimate voice of wounded life that is demanding its restitution can really be heard, or whether the
? ? ? ? ? ? 78 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
syndrome of moralizing social activism has not long since unwillingly become part and parcel of the tendencies that, from behind the pretext of further improve- ment and humanitarian ? lead to an unprecedented proliferation of suf-
In a situation such as this, what could be more suggestive than Nietzsche's doctrine of the aesthetic exoneration of life? Whoever takes the aesthetic into consideration as an exonerating force has broken through the spell of the moral- istic concept of exculpation that clings to the Protestant wing of modernity in particular and has burdened us with libraries full of dyspeptic moral discourses. W ith its assertions in this respect, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy has won a philo- sophical breadth that exceeds everything debated prior to it. For, with a reckless- ness that is still astonishing today, Nietzsche cut through the moral knots of mo- dernity. He naturalistically reversed the relationship between morality and life: instead of finding fault with life from the perspective of an eternally dissatisfied morality, he began by observing morality from the perspective of an eternally unimprovable life. This reversal provides the "suggestive statement" that "the existence of the world can be justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon" with its penetrating ? explains why it is unacceptable for those who even today maintain the primacy of the moral.
On the question of ? the intellectuals are divided. Actually, we are dealing with two diametrically opposed definitions of what constitutes the pain of life. The moral-political definition, which -- unjustly and for too ? wanted to be perceived as the only legitimate voice of enlightenment, recognizes in almost all pain a variation of injustice and derives from it a program for its redress that expands into
Moralistic-theoretical modernity wants to respond to the question of algodicy with a progressive universal analgesic in which pain can only find acknowledg- ment of its own potential abolition as an ontological motif. That this is an un- contemptible view that becomes apparent as reasonable within an intermediate area does not require confirmation: a great majority of therapeutic action has been grounded on its plausibility. He who has suffered and found release knows how to evaluate its truth content. Was it not also Nietzsche who most clearly ex- pressed what grief had to say about itself?
Accordingly, Nietzsche's algodicy stands in direct opposition to a program of moral abrogation. In a manner that is completely antiquated, it pits our memory of the ethos of the affirmative resistance against the modern idea of an abolishing negation. Because it conceives of life, in a radically immanent fashion, as the play acted out upon the foundation of pleasure and pain that cannot be overcome, it negates any metaphysics of redemption ? its modern manifestations in programs for the elimination of pain and therapy. Would this imply that Nietz- sche was a stoic in the wrong century? Or does an irredeemable Christ want to
? ? ? ? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 79
throw the promises of the Christian age, with neoclassical gestures, onto the wreckage?
Dionysus versus "the ? you have the opposition. It is not a difference with respect to martyrdom ? has a different meaning. Life itself, its eternal fertility and return, requires agony, destruction, the will to ? ? On the other hand, suffering, "the crucified one as the innocent," functions as an objection to this life, as a formula for condemning it. One guesses: the problem is that of the meaning of suffering, whether this be a Christian meaning, or a tragic meaning. ? In the former case, it is meant to be the path to a divine being; in the latter, being is considered divine enough to vindicate a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic human being still affirms the harshest suffering. ? ? ? The Christian will negate even the happiest destiny on earth; the god on the cross is a curse upon ? a cue to redeem oneself from it; the Dionysus who has been cut to pieces is a promise of life: it is eternally reborn and brought back from destruction.
15, p. 490)
Nietzsche's doctrine of the aesthetic exoneration of life reveals itself as the opposite of a cynical aestheticism: it is grounded in an algodicy that attempts to draw pain into the immanence of a life that no longer requires redemption as an element of the Dionysian passion. Within the Dionysian passion, which forms the basis for every alert life, there occurs, paradoxically, that which we have characterized as the endurance of the unendurable. But this endurance is not without its digressions; rather, it has two indispensable assistants in the form of intoxication and the ? oldest of drugs for elevating the psyche. They contribute to the formation of those intermediate worlds and realms of endura- bility that we need to keep ourselves from perishing of immediacy.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
Here the thesis that The Birth of Tragedy must be read as Apollonian in its dramaturgical effect again becomes important. The book had shown how Diony- sian passion has been instructed by means of an Apollonian translation into something that can be looked at, imagined, and endured. In this book, Nietzsche professes culture, the compulsion to symbolize, representation. That this profes- sion has a double base was made just as ? if culture then wanted to belong in general to the world of illusion, it would be a matter of an illusion that does not permit anyone to look through it because it is the true lie of life itself. Accordingly, culture would be the fiction that we ourselves are; we exist as self- inventions of the living being that has been brought forth from the unendurability of the immediate Dionysian passion into a state of endurability and mediation. Life itself owes its spontaneous elevation to culture to a dialectic of what can be endured and what is unendurable, a dialectic from which the process of self-rep- resentation has sprung. From this,
an ethics can be conceptualized from Nietz- sche's basic assertions that is commensurate with the universal experience of mo-
? ? 80 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
dernity ? ethics of necessary illusion, of what is endurable, of intermediate worlds; an ethics of the ecology of pleasure and pain; an ethics of ingenuous life. The concept of illusion in Nietzsche possesses a power that bridges the contra- diction between the ethical and the ? indeed, between the thera- peutic and the
Under Nietzsche's gaze, the world of moral and political institutions is pre- sented as a sphere of essential illusion, as a form of ? of collec- tive life, ? order to endure ? symbolize itself, ritualize itself, and subordinate itself to ? These suppositions form the Apollonian back- bone of ?
One could (vis-a-vis his book on tragedy) compare them to what was initially said about Nietzsche's construction of the tragic stage: they would be like these Apollonian support mechanisms, through whose efficiency a cul- turally endurable arrival of the Dionysian would become possible for the first time. But the normative sphere of law, mores, conventions, and institutions re- ceives its legitimation from life's compulsion toward art, not from the autonomy of a universal law of morals ? However, in order to remain valid, moral law must appear in the guise of autonomy and universality. There will be no Apollonian ethics without Dionysian ? but there can also be no Diony- sian ethics without Apollonian fictions of autonomy. This means that, after
there can no longer be a theory of culture that is not informed by fun- damental Nietzsche did indeed shift moral and cultural-critical thought onto the track of naturalism, but he also broke open naturalism aesthetically and illusionistically; he localized this ? inventive, lying phenomenon within the phenomenon of life itself. Thus we see through everything that has been culturally imposed to its natural basis; this basis is at the same ? how- ever, what ascends to the cultural and is composed into value systems. Thus human consciousness is placed ontologically in an ironic site; one from which the pretending animal is condemned to see through his own fictions. His awakening to this irony is at the same time an awakening to philosophy ? is not an irony that could lead to detachment nor an understanding that would provide distance. At this site, the mechanism for maintaining distance from life through knowledge breaks down. But one must play with that from which one is unable to distance oneself.
Nietzsche's algodicy therefore conceals the beginnings of a philosophical ethics ? ethics that clearly rests on a foundation of tragic irony. Because the moral illusion belongs to the ? of ? a naturalistic
ness is also not permitted to want to return to moral compositions. They belong irrevocably to the cybernetics of social beings. The Apollonian, conceived of bernetically, signifies nothing other than the necessity of imprinting upon the amorphous compulsion of Dionysian forces and the chaotic multiplicity of the individual a controlling form, which is ruled by the law of ? indi-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
viduality, ? and rationality. The concept of "justice" is a true dream of humanity, born out of the unendurability of unjust conditions: it belongs to the ? of life in the "intermediate worlds" of endurable ho- meostases. It is a component of the comprehensive compositions of self that we refer to as "cultures. " But because everything just and all morality are to be understood as controlling forces in the cybernetics of the unendurable, the ironic shadow cast by the postulate of the autonomy and universality of justice will never again be skipped over. Where values are, there ironies shall ? The slick Apollonian belief in values and their autonomy cannot be reproduced in moder- nity.
If ethics is cybernetics, we can understand why it pursues no objectives but, rather, processes ? It is a typically modern error to believe that ethics might change the world, to guarantee the Apollonian natural right to an endurable life. Nietzsche has classically formulated the regulative character of the ethical- Apollonian in that he advances the claim that only as much of the Dionysian foundation of pleasure and pain should be permitted to surface in an individual as "can be again subdued by the Apollonian force of Is it possible to conceive of a more sublime acknowledgment of culture?
Here the concept of righteousness appears with an unusual significance. For Nietzsche states further on in the same discussion:
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
Thus these two art drives must unfold their powers in a strict proportion, according to the law of eternal justice. (BT, p. 143)
Justice now becomes the heading for a homeostatic the necessity of which is based on the ? of living Nietzsche formulates this par- adoxically enough: " A l l that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both" (BT, p. 72). He who expresses himself in this way does not sit at his desk and draw up the plans for better worlds; he does not analytically pull to pieces the moral vocabulary of his nation and, on the basis of this accomplishment, take himself for a philosopher. He who speaks in this way has, through experimenta- tion on his own body, thrust forward into the tissue of reality and cast his gaze into the ecology of suffering life.
Of course, this has for some time not been a matter of what is dealt with in formal ethics or doctrines of material value. Behind the altercations between good and evil and the contest of values for cultural or political priority there arises ? and ? central philosophical massif of modernity: the question of understanding subjectivity as ? W ith the introduction of a cy- bernetic concept of justice, something decisive has clearly taken place
thing that is heavy with implications and that must remain plainly incomprehen- sible and unacceptable to those who have inscribed upon their flags the illusion of the moral autonomy of the subject and the superstition of free ? The moral ? ? ? ? ? 82 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
it is called "individual," "citizen," "entity with legal rights," "human being," or ? with this turn of events already been released from its fictional central position in the moral cosmos. It has become "decentered" into a great force within the play of subjective forces. Here the question of whether a surrender or release of the subject has taken place must remain unanswered; a decision on this could not be made readily in any case. It is not unthinkable that only a ? of the subject, which bids a respectful adieu to the fiction of autonomy, could lead to a legitimate constitution of sub-
ego and will. What seems at first a bitter expulsion from the center could be viewed on second glance as an adventurous ? it is correct that, in becoming conscious of having been decentered, the subject is anyway only giving up what it never possessed ? autonomy ? is gaining what it would have to lose to the illusion of autonomy: the play of its body and its dialogic-ecstatic status. Whereas the centered subject is the effect of a grammat- ical system that harasses to death the living consciousness between "Thou
and "I want," the decentered subject would perhaps be the first to have the right to say in reference to itself: I am.
What is to be gained from these speculations? Assuming that they pointed in the direction of fruitful insights, who would gain by learning to accept a cybernetic version of justice and seeing in it a radical, constructive, selective force that be- longs to the constructive nature of vital self-composition? The significance of these speculations lies presumably only in their ramifications for the self-defini- tion of the phenomenon of enlightenment. Because enlightenment represents a historic wager on the realization of a reasoning subjectivity, the subject of en- lightenment is radically moved by a transformation of the concept of the subject from a moral-legal center of will to a cybernetic and medial phenomenon. This is no small matter. It is presumably an all-or-nothing situation being put into play within the context of philosophical thought. The subject of enlightenment could from this point forward no longer constitute itself as it had wanted to in accor- dance with the rules of Apollonian as an autonomous source of mean- ing, ethos, logic, and instead, as something medial, cybernetic, ec- centric, and Dionysian, as a site of sensibility within the ruling cycles of forces, as a point of alertness for the modulation of impersonal ? as a process of self-healing for primordial pain, and an instance of the self-composition of primordial ? speak poetically, as an eye through which Dionysus serves
Measured against such conceptions of medial subjectivity, the moral construc- tivism of the Enlightenment must appear naive. If, indeed, the vision of a uni- versal dominion of morality is derived from this, this ? becomes a hyste- procreation of demons in the air, an impotent ? of Apollonian illusion. In his critique of morality, Nietzsche presents us with a minimum of a
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 83
second reflection, without which the Enlightenment for its part would remain only a natural illusion. A morality without morals is unthinkable, however, with- out an aesthetic relationship to the necessary illusion:
If we could imagine dissonance become what else is
this dissonance, to be able to live, would need a splendid illusion that would cover dissonance with a veil of beauty. (BT, p. 143)
The Apollonian veil is just as moral as it is aesthetic in nature and is woven in particular from the most magnificent of all ? which the En- lightenment had characterized as the moral autonomy of the subject. Thus man, according to his moral ecology, is a fragment of suffering, dreaming, building, and valuing nature ? order to endure ? the illusion of freedom from merely suffering naturalness.
These thoughts are anything but pleasant. They indicate that Nietzsche's doc- trine of the aesthetic exoneration of life does not represent a program of frivolity. To a much greater it is one of the most serious attempts -- perhaps the only
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
promising think through the moral situation of modernity without being duped into the more complex swindle of a New Morality. The seriousness of this attempt is connected with the audacity of the attack against recent abstract sub- jectivism. There shines forth from Nietzsche's project the beginnings of a return to the physical foundation of ? to the return to the physical foundation of thought discussed in Chapter 4. In both cases, the truth is speaking as a truth from below, not as an idea in search of a body, but as an intelligent body that, out of respect, accelerates itself in the course of its composition of self toward language, toward the intellect, and toward justice in a manner that is strin- gently perspectival, "constructive," and How- ever, the notion that knowledge does not fall from ? but instead opens itself to us through the dramatic revelation of previously concealed worldly ? is the fundamental concept of authentic of whether it speaks a Marxist labor-oriented, anthropological, or fundamentally ontological idiom. In the ciphers of physicality, a Dionysian ma- terialism is announced, of which "dialectical" materialism is only a brutal car-
With these observations, we leave the realm within which we had been able to read The Birth of Tragedy as an aesthetic theory with cultural-philosophical side- lights. In my concluding remarks I will attempt to advance Nietzsche's model to level at which his book on tragedy will take on a profile.
It actually seems to us as if Nietzsche, along with the major portion of his work, belonged within a history of the "enlanguaging" and self-mobilization of ? that is incalculable but global in its implications
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 84 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
phenomenon, therefore, for which the expression "Dionysian materialism" was used, an expression whose plausibility goes hand in hand with its unapproacha- bility. And talk of materialism within modernity runs the risk of being complicit with the most brutal subjectivisms and the most cynical forms of objectifying thought. And yet, the materialist confession wanted, in accordance with its spirit, to reconcile with matter as the not-other of spirit; it strove to mediate the physics that was unhappily hovering above the physical basis with it, and to call home the logical ghosts. Modern materialism, outlined in a ? le- gitimate withdrawal of idealism, established itself almost universally as the form of thought for ultimate violation and the final seizure of power, and it seems to me that there belongs with it a belief that is more despairing than naive toward the historical potential and the power of self-control of modernity, in order to once again conjure up from beneath the unity of modernity in the spirit of a Dionysian materialism and a medial process of becoming universal.
Be that as it may, this thought always has the greater power, the more conse- quential structure, and the deeper universal capacity for containment vis-a-vis numerous retrogressive ? enclosures, and ? It is a thought that conceives of itself as materialist and Dionysian because it is permit- ted to believe in itself as a medium for a singularly phenomenal,
dramatic uni- versality. It knows that it has been incorporated into a planetary magnetism of physical universal candor (Weltqffenheit) that shows us that every delimitation of subjectivity that does not become superegotistical raving flows into trips around the world that parade before our eyes where our effective limits ? Within these trips around the world on the part of a cosmonautical and a psychonautical reason that are both limitless and final at ? the freedoms of the modern era find their first fragile meaning. Cosmonautical reason concerns itself with the planets as the source and basis of a worldwide communion, world trade, world communi- cation, and world ecology ? when in crisis, world ? Psychonautical reason, on the other hand, queries the individual as to his capacity to endure the universal citizenship into which he was born. For this reason, I believe, the psy- chologies that have been developing continuously on European terrain for the last two hundred years are the essential component of authentic enlightenment; they are the symbolic vehicle of psychonautical reason, that is, any form of self-re- flection that gives voice to our condition of being condemned to universality, even into the very depths of the subject. Within the phenomenon of Dionysian materialism, the individual psyche must be confronted with the advent of an in- creasingly violent and subtle contextualization of what constitutes the "world"; it must learn to liberate the unceasing unveiling of a world of worlds from its initial unendurability and recast it into something that can be endured. It must learn to accept into itself the impact of the ? which "arrives" from without, in order to correspond to the external opening of worlds through an increase in inner openness to the ? is the deity who also protects
? ? PAIN AND JUSTICE ? 85
the ecstasies of ? The fundamental question for modern psychologies, which the Dionysians of an active materialism must render animate from the out- side in, is the following: how can individuals who are imprinted by regionality,
and fear of death in any way endure being affiliated with a planetary fact? To formulate this in the language of Heidegger: how can finite being (Dasein) endure being thrown into an irrepressible universality?
Nothing is more complicated than an answer to this question. But what does this help? The arrival of the God to come is accomplished today in Dionysians of complexity. He who concerns himself with modernity as the period in which he exists will more than ever have to find his way back in complicated stories.
I recently made an attempt to untangle one of the complicated threads of mo- dernity in a philosophical story. I wanted
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
to show how the depth-psychological mediation of body and world had been made obligatory for modern individuals before the models of Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung existed. One has to reach back into the period of the French Revolution to observe the decisive moment at which the unconscious began to ? The unconscious is the name for the sources at which the modern ? ? retrogressive metamorphoses of subjec- tivity lead back to that which preceded it. The body and the drama are the ma- terial foundations of this modern consciousness of retrogressive metamorphoses; we experience in them the way in which the narrowness of the subject breaks open when it resigns itself nolens volens to the universal context, of which it has long since unconsciously been a part and from which it will never be permitted to
Any inwardness is interwoven deeply and somatically into the magnetism of the universal.
It has been said that the three decisive revolutions of the nineteenth century were the politicization of the proletariat, the cultural seizing of language by women, and the discovery of the unconscious. Could it not be that the same phenomenon was at work in all these movements, which would only now be apostrophied as Dionysian or dramatic materialism? Is it not in each case a matter of the surfacing of amorous and plural truths that, thanks to the revolutionary exonerations of technical civilization, are able to develop a modern ecology of expression?
It is probably impossible properly to understand Nietzsche's idea of justice if one views his work and his person as separate from these movements of emer- gence. It would above all else be an unjust abbreviation to explain Nietzsche's impulse as representing only an oscillating balancing with the immoralistic de- restraining tendencies of advanced capitalism that are produced in advance, whether this might also exhibit what belonged to the image of an active nihilism together with its ? "excluding," "exterminating" determinations of ? One would be much more likely to do justice to Nietzsche if one could conceive of his work as a play in the ? twilight of the idols of meta- physics and the collapse of idealisms. This would be appropriate to the emergent
? ? ? 86 ? PAIN AND JUSTICE
movement of the excluded physical and dramatic forces. After having been wounded, banished into the darkness, and forgotten, the bodies that have all too long been abused as incarnation machines press toward the light; they make use of modern exonerations, authorizations, and symbolic constructs to prepare ? a new intervention by the lower elements ? a new presence of the
which cunningly and as a rule behaves as if it wanted something in particular
as if it were fighting for a place in the sun of subjectivities, while at bottom it is always only looking for a chance to once again become aesthetic and appear in the arena of absolute
But whereas, among these basis movements, the proletarian and feminist movements are more easily caught by the traps of subjectivity of abstract indi- vidualism, the emergent movement of the ? in its ego-psycho- logical reversal and its therapeutic ? the most promising man- ifestation of the three. The depth psychologies, which for two hundred years have increasingly left their mark on the physiognomy of intellectual Europe, are the characteristic impulse in the history here described as
They conceal the most important reasoning potential of an enlightenment that is not only instrumental and strategic: only they are prepared to consider properly the reality of the drama under the conditions of modernity. Wherever they remain true to their authentic impulse, they reject the deliberate indolence of rationalism and decline to cooperate with the abstract individualism that is only the psychic- legal form in which the universal domination of a nature-exploiting theoretical- moralistic subject wants to prevail. The depth psychologies are, as it were, the thinking heart of the ? which must beat during the epochal history of re- fusing light to the physis if all bodies are not to atrophy into intersubjectivized fighting machines and self-consciously cold legal entities. This heart thinks in the center of Dionysian passion ? the memory of the ecology of suffering, among which are included even the reason of exonerations and the construction of what is ? It is the living memorial that the history of the wounding of civilization has accumulated within itself, along with all of what must be consol- idated of induration and obscuration in order to bring forth the dominant degree of intellectual armament and the armoring of the body.
Admittedly, this all sounds a trace too dark to satisfy the need for understand- ing, in case one anyway and of one's own accord does not know what could be meant. Is the author here making a game, following the example of the more recent French authors, of cultivating darkness as a genre of the beaux arts? Or is it plausible that the veil over these references to a depth-psychological drama of knowledge should not be understood as a malicious component of a literary nature but instead illuminated as a ways and means by which the "thing itself" is there for us? How could our thinking, if it questions the limitations of its per- formance, circumvent the insight that it cannot render everything transparent? With the acknowledgment that the rational world is situated before an
? ? ?
