No More Learning

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. To obey life and understand its plans is an immensely ambitious agenda. Perhaps we will give up one day because understanding the almost insoluble inherent complexity of the phenomena will show the limits to energetic activism.
MACHO: It is only by seeing the eugenics debate as a ‘symptom carrier’ that we come to the real problem of drift: the temporalizing of a topological metaphysics and ethics that has been practised and preached for thousands of years. I mean what actually happens at
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the moment somebody says, ‘maybe we will only find out what is good and what is true in the future; the bonum et verum is not fixed from the start but will only be visible much later’. Such assertions have tremendous disruptive potential. That brings us to a critical reading of Heidegger. Heidegger introduced time as the basic ques- tion of philosophy but he simultaneously twisted the question to rescue the topology – the Sein – in the aletheia concept of truth, in the concepts of framework (Gestell) or of clearing (Lichtung). He tried to stop the incredible drift Nietzsche described so impressively in section 125 of Fröhlichen Wissenschaft [The Gay Science]: ‘Where are we moving now? Away from all suns? Aren’t we perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? ’ Heidegger remained an agrarian thinker who subsumed the drift under the history of existence (and, incidentally, also had a thoroughly positive relationship to fate). To him, time became merely the ‘horizon of existence’, unlike Ernst Jünger in his later years, who believed he could foresee a ‘metamorphosis of the gods’ and future ‘battles of the Titans’.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s just how I see it. It’s very important to understand that Heidegger remained an ontologist of the vegetable essence. His philosophy is situated in the system frame of the plant world, which is why emerging or opening (Aufgehen) meant so much to him. This could lead us to ask whether there is any convincing metaphysics of animal being. My impression is that the philosophy of animality is in its very earliest stage. This tallies with the impres- sion that the contemporary debate is being conducted in a hysterical tone. Beginnings provide ample scope for hysteria – it is part of the rebellion of the old and shows that some things have become unstoppable. The representatives of the old get hot flashes from the new. Personally, I believe the bio-philosophical age is just dawning. Our first glimpse into the human genome gave us the impression that only part of the genetic text ‘makes sense’, to use the common, if problematic, metaphor of textual theory. Our genetic make-up evidently involves many things whose purpose we don’t understand. Why is there all that redundancy; what are those empty fields for; what is the purpose of the high morbidity potential? These questions are troubling for medicine and theoretically interesting at the same time. Answering them would probably take us back to the begin- ning of our discussion because we can also articulate the topic of pampering in genetic terminology. In fact, the genome seems to be anything but an economical text that records only what is absolutely necessary. On the contrary, we get the impression it is travelling in a huge genetic omnibus with a whole array of baggage containing genetic information, and enjoying itself. What are we supposed to
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think about the pile of mob genes that are apparently being dragged in tow in the context of a luxuriant evolution? Our model biologists are rather puzzled and don’t know what they are supposed to do with this junk. What are things like that doing in the genetic mate- rial of the crown of creation? How, for example, does the genetic programme for Down’s syndrome get into our make-up? Questions like that sound blasphemous, I know – but it’s a fairly serious issue. We can see one important aspect of the pampering story in the fact that we have a huge morbidity potential accompanying us. One feature of the pampering dynamic of the conditio humana is that selection is largely deactivated in it. Countless genetic characteris- tics, including morbid or pathological ones, are selectively neutral to a great extent. They simply flow with the genetic current, beyond good and evil. The beautiful, the not-beautiful, the beneficial, the detrimental, everything is passed on, it travels along, meandering through the generations – with the restriction that, all in all, we can observe a certain tendency towards beauty in the sapiens species, that we can see, for instance, in the hybrid vigour of female forms. We still know regrettably little about bio-aesthetics. In any case, people must take a position themselves on their potential for pam- pering – and they know that, because they were aware early on of the risk of getting out of condition. We could combine the main ideas of Sartre and Plessner here: we are condemned to pampering; and we can make something ourselves out of what has been made out of us; we can take charge of our own pampering. This will make the future horizon recognizable, because I am sure the twenty-first century will be a mediocre era. The new ruling class will consist not of the military but of doctors and bio-engineers. To borrow a term from the US author James L. Nolan, the state only has a future as the ‘therapeutic state’. In the coming mediocracy there will doubt- less be doctors who will cheerfully concur with the basic direction of technological civilization as a whole, and propose extending specific health definitions to the genome. These doctors will suggest that we renounce part of the morbidity potential that many members of the Homo sapiens species have. They will suggest we could well do with a rather less luxurious morbidity rate. And if there is a safe method available for eliminating clearly identifiable genetic diseases such as Down’s syndrome, there is a lot to be said for implement- ing this technology some day. Whatever the Catholic and humanist guardians of the genetic reservation may say to the contrary, there is no human right to the risk of suffering from Down’s syndrome. I am also convinced that precisely defined prevention is legitimate, just as, conversely, I have no time for the arguments of people who want to ensure today that future generations face the same genetic
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risks as all the previous generations. This is almost outrageous, as if we wanted to explain that humans as such have an obligation to be ill just because the human condition involves a certain risk of deformity.
The more I look at the conservative scene’s arguments, the more I am amazed by their lack of generosity in the guise of caring for humankind and its so-called freedom. Those people have a strik- ing lack of anthropological faith – as if they knew for sure that the present state of Homo sapiens represented the terminal station of evolution. This brings me back again to our comments about evo- lutionary drift: apparently it affects not only the biological forms, the species boundaries and cultural codes, but in future it will also increasingly involve technological life forms and therapeutic possi- bilities. If the border between the curable and incurable is sliding, it is the task of the actors who cause this drift to react by shifting the borders of what can be done and what is permissible, and to improve the professional ethics of doctors from a historical viewpoint. The sabotage of fate goes on. If somebody can cure and doesn’t do so, he or she is guilty of the crime of omission, even if it is covered up by the hypocritical claim to protection of the human species. The whole issue concerns affirmation of modern thinking about therapy, not genetic deregulation, as some alarmists claim.
MACHO: Anyway, the new, much-discussed genetic therapy pro- cedures are proving to be very difficult – more difficult than people thought when the research began.
SLOTERDIJK: The result is once again that therapy isn’t achiev- ing miracles. It is clear that the alarmists with their overblown arguments haven’t given enough thought to the intransigence of the genetic field. In this situation, Bacon’s nisi parendo argument has immensely far-reaching implications. We can’t have fun controlling the gene – that’s a story for regressive science fiction. Future society will be defined in therapeutocratic terms, in relation to the rule of therapy, even more than at present, which is yet another reason to reveal the philosophical conditions of ideas of healing and to spell out the psychosomatics of the ‘good life’. I think we’ll remain meliorists in this respect. We won’t stop improving what there is to improve. Anyone who doesn’t accept that is dropping out of the Enlightenment. Anybody who argues polemically today against so-called liberal eugenics must ask themselves whether they are not knowingly saying farewell to the Enlightenment because of human- ist hysteria.
MACHO: I agree that the area of truly controversial borderline cases is considerably smaller than often assumed in the public dis- cussion. Many things can’t be done anyway, and there are some
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things absolutely nobody wants to do. In the case of cloning, it became clear only recently that reproduction of genetic identity doesn’t really work. People who had been offered cloning of their deceased pets suddenly got animals that looked totally different – instead of a beloved plump tabby cat, the ‘copy’ they got was an elegant monochrome cat resembling the goddess Bastet. Some inter- ventions, however, have been in practice for a long time already. As far as I know, Down’s syndrome can be established by a standard amniotic fluid analysis without embryo screening; admittedly, in cases of doubt, therapy simply means killing, even beyond the established limits for an abortion. And, finally, there are quite dif- ferent cases in which the assessment more clearly shows the effect of the drift, the slippage of terms as well as operations. What do we think, for example, about ‘triage’, the spontaneous selection of disaster victims according to how seriously they are injured? What do we think of techniques of prenatal optimization that include the selective killing of weaker or apparently biologically disadvantaged foetuses in multiple pregnancies? What do we think about trans- plant medicine? Turning life into an experimental field evidently also implies decisions for death that can only be legitimated in terms of ethics of responsibility. But what does an ethics of responsibil- ity actually consist of, if it does not argue in terms of ‘goodwill’ or the ‘right attitude’, but uses the idea of a future good, a futurized bonum? Weren’t older cultures lucky to be able to assume that the good was fixed – not just for subsequent generations but also for myself in twenty years from now?
SLOTERDIJK: That raises a new dilemma. Knowing so much in terms of diagnosis and prognosis, we are doomed to construct an incredible bogey out of the ethics of responsibility. Everyone watching current events will admit we are living in the middle of this wave. The reaction is predictable: a new wave of ethicists will inevitably emerge and advocate the virtue of indifference. You can see it coming – a neo-differentialist school advocating laissez-faire. It will demonstrate that an ethics of irresponsibility is necessary after the ethics of responsibility has gone too far. That, I think, will close the circle. The pampering dynamic in humans is so enormous that it even creates luxury forms of responsibility. Today’s ethics professors have long since stopped living in the proverbial ivory tower. (Given the present species protection laws, where is all that ivory supposed to come from? ) They tend to live in a hothouse of moral overexcitement. It is difficult to stay in such hyper-moral hot- houses for long without getting breathless. If you’re interested in a cultured style of living, you should protect the house of being from overheating.
13
GOOD THEORY DOESN’T COMPLAIN
Interview with Frank Hartmann and Klaus Taschwer*4
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: Mr Sloterdijk, you have just com- pleted your trilogy on spheres with the publication of your new book, Schaum [Foam]. The work is 2,500 pages long. Will it be your magnum opus?
SLOTERDIJK: The trilogy will definitely be a major event in my oeuvre, but the weight of emphasis is very likely to change again. I operate like a writer who conceives a philosopher who keeps getting different thoughts. In my case, the philosopher is an artificial figure who was invented in the writer’s workshop.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: Doesn’t that undermine the authority of the philosopher?
SLOTERDIJK: I would find it more difficult if a philosopher confused himself with the author of his writings. As soon as phi- losophers try to be authorities they turn into what they would dearly like to have been in the twentieth century: literary figures with a worldview. If they act as ideologues and leaders in the crisis, they release harmful emissions into society and produce illusory certain- ties with which people have identified, often in a naive and violent way. If there has been a learning process in philosophy in the past
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk, Frank Hartmann and Klaus Taschwer appeared under the title ‘Gute Theorie lamentiert nicht’ [‘Good Theory Doesn’t Complain’], in Telepolis (8 June 2004). Available at: <http://www. heise. de/tp/artikel/17/17554/1. html>.
Frank Hartmann has been a professor at the Bauhaus University in Weimar since 2009. Klaus Taschwer is a freelance social scientist and schol- arly journalist. He lives and works in Vienna.
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fifty years, it is probably that we have to stop this kind of ideological emission, if possible.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: You use particularly soft concepts for your theory, such as bubbles and foam. Aren’t you making it too easy for your critics?
SLOTERDIJK: Critics want to have it easy, and a kind author respects that. Unfortunately, I don’t always succeed in being kind, which means I sometimes tie the choice of concepts to a character test for the reader. If we talk about foaming, for example, the verbal association of ‘whipping up foam’ is awfully close. I’m watching the critics to see if they can resist being tempted by the cheapest way to use ideas. Good readers understand it’s a matter of letting the images and concepts do their work.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: Sociologists have recently used the concept of the network to describe contemporary society. Does that make sense to you?
SLOTERDIJK: A great deal, in fact. I am fond of quoting Bruno Latour, who has proposed replacing the concept of society with that of agent networks. The term stands for a post-sociological form of reflection that has much to offer. It allows us to respect the rela- tive autonomy of the individual nodes in relation to the rest of the network far more than if we start with a concept of society defined from above.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: Why do you use the metaphor of foam?
SLOTERDIJK: I want to correct the reduced character of network metaphors. When talking about nets we are using starkly reductive geometry, that is, simply the one- or two-dimensional forms of the point and the line. The term ‘foam’, on the other hand, brings a three-dimensional construct into play from the very beginning. Whereas in network models the individual points have no volume, and therefore do not live, the image of foam offers the perspective on a theory of household diversity. A household is a successful structure of life. What I am searching for is a theory of humans as beings living in homes, and a theory of agglomera- tion of those beings in their diverse forms of living and gathering together.
HARTMANN/TASCHWER: What is your own judgement on your book?
SLOTERDIJK: It is worth something on a scale that doesn’t exist yet. Because this type of book is new, we can’t judge its value. It would already have to be canonical to have a value, but if it were canonical it would not have any innovative power. You can’t have value and novelty at the same time.