No More Learning

The discussion as it runs today says more about the whole ideo- logical field than about individual groups. Of course there are quite disgusting groupings whose members one has to feel sorry for from any angle. But focusing on those groups hardly helps to explain the problem of sects for society as a whole.
Some organizations are certainly criminal and show nasty ten- dencies to psychological slavery. But that doesn’t alter the fact that whenever people get together, whenever they form an association or, let’s say, if they form a couple, they do things other people don’t like. First, because they don’t invite us to join them and, second, because outsiders imagine that it’s hot and exciting inside those groups and people outside are missing something. We get the feeling that sect members indulge in a life in the psychological tropics while we decent folk living on the edges of the Alps are resigned to perma- frost with short summers. This represents a provocation that leads to constant trouble. Moreover, sect leaders give their followers such brazen answers to the question of meaning that non-members of the sect can’t even laugh about it.
I interpret sects as substitute forms of the extended family. As such, first and foremost they have very good functions of the kind church congregations have always had. And because sects are psychological incubators they run the risk of overheating. If that happens, they are no longer beneficial to their members but make them dependent on the benefits.
28 Fire Your Shrink!
Such dependence falls under a wider definition of drugs. The typical sect leader behaves like a dealer – he takes more from people than he gives them. Incidentally, that is also the definition of an average businessman, and actually of anybody who thinks in terms of capital, for whom taking more than they give is self-evident. Particularly in psychic exploitation this rule is immediately clear in an ugly way.
FRISCHKNECHT: I am trying to avoid the word ‘sect’, if pos- sible, because it is generally used in a derogatory fashion. The term covers a wide variety of groups, from Seventh Day Adventists to Hare Krishna disciples and drinking clubs. They are all lumped together and ostracized by methods that increasingly resemble inquisitions. You have spoken of latent totalitarianism in this context.
SLOTERDIJK: I use the term ‘sect’ to mean the relationship of an inclusive majority towards an exclusive minority, which is what a sect is. Our society is trying, at least at points where liberal think- ing occurs, to move from totalitarian inclusiveness to a pluralism of exclusive groups. That is, society is dissolving into a patchwork of exclusive minorities that are not easy to enter.
I am talking of groups that are formed on the basis of specific characteristics and shut themselves off from the outside world. In many respects religious groups act similarly. Mostly they settle into a victim cliché, and they end up fairly often as something approach- ing a structure of self-sacrifice, clearly because they realize the best way to get a voice in society today is as a group of victims and targets of discrimination.
FRISCHKNECHT: We can see how groups suddenly start gaining members just because they are despised and persecuted.
SLOTERDIJK: The Scientologists are a particularly good example. They pursue a totally schizophrenic programme. On the one hand, Scientology is a religion of winners, while, on the other, Scientologists are also persecuted, and to some extent defeated winners. The American leaders of this sect (note they are American) realized that their biggest social success lay in being obstructed, dis- criminated against and misunderstood. This combination is the non plus ultra: a religion that is utterly shameless and rejects any kind of solidarity, in which people have recognized that the status of loser is actually more profitable.
FRISCHKNECHT: In fact, the first Christians had great success with that particular mixture.
SLOTERDIJK: That was a different constellation. The first Christians triumphed over the competing systems of religion because they founded an authentic form of building congregations
Fire Your Shrink! 29
and a culture of friendship unprecedented in antiquity. Early Christian theology was partly the attempt to combine the experi- ences of people at that time into a common language. This brought a current of basic democracy into the story that has still not totally disappeared today. You could almost say that the Europeans have Greek urban culture to thank for pretty much everything, as do the Christian sects that later became the official Church. That is the European mix: Greek urban culture plus good Christian sectari- anism. By that I mean communication forms used by people who found a new reason to talk to each other because they belonged to the same system of religious delusion – and that is actually a good kind of delusion. The system of Christian delusion made them humanly and morally superior to the manic system and increasingly naked nihilism of the Romans, who had manoeuvred themselves into an ideological tunnel with their barbaric games and entertain- ments, and couldn’t get out again.
FRISCHKNECHT: But where does such a strong reaction come from? Why does a society feel so deeply challenged by a few groups? SLOTERDIJK: It comes from the fact that the Europeans established a culture built on the distinction between civil society and religious congregation. In principle this means our states are religiously neutral. Since the end of the Thirty Years War, Europe has moved a step further from each generation to the next. Religion was increasingly forced out of the state sector and consigned to the private sector. It was the opposite in earlier times, when the state was religious and citizens had to seek their freedoms elsewhere. Today the state is liberal and reacts hysterically towards a society that is more religious at certain points than it would like. Part of this
hysteria is dealt with under the heading of ‘fundamentalism’. FRISCHKNECHT: It just takes a few Muslim girls to wear headscarves in school to plunge Europe into a debate about the basic values of its society. And alongside this is a semi-private area where people are subjected to inquisitorial examination about their membership of a religious group to determine, for instance, if they
are suitable for public office.
SLOTERDIJK: This is the point where the state realizes it can no
longer blindly depend on its members’ loyalty as it could in a homo- geneous, neutral mass culture where religion was restricted to a private issue. Today we can no longer rely on society not becoming a battlefield of religious partisan fighting. Some religious groupings are suspected of latent hegemonic ambitions, and are believed to be subversive. But this has been a basic element of European paranoia for a couple of hundred years: that there could be people among us of different faith, who watch us and pay lip service to things that
30 Fire Your Shrink!
sound just like what we believe in. In fact, such people are following the orders of the Pope, an Indian guru or American mafia bosses. They have secretly conspired with a gang leader for souls and have entered a pact with the devil, which means that although those people are still here, they are already somewhere else. It is such images of fear that give society a glimpse of its own disintegration.
FRISCHKNECHT: You allot sects an important role in the lives of many people as incubators and boilers. What happens to people who get caught in those containers? What decides whether some- body passes through a sect phase or becomes imprisoned by it?
SLOTERDIJK: It depends on the membership rules. If sects are primarily what they have every right to be in our times, that is, helpers for psychological transition, places where people can do emotional and spiritual apprenticeships, then they are very beneficial institutions. That is because we are increasingly heading towards a form of society in which becoming an adult is portrayed as a difficult process. Looking at the clock or a birth certificate tells us little about when a person has reached adulthood. In this situa- tion a society needs spaces that offer scope for episodes of extended maturing.
This is something one must almost suggest. Whether you think sects are appropriate for carrying out these functions or not, it is a fact that people with delayed or fragmented development towards adulthood would be well advised to attend such schools of emotion. Not everybody leaves high school or its equivalent as a well-rounded personality, and not everybody has developed the functioning of the essential, inner other to such a level of maturity in their twenties that we can say society has no need of something like that. The opposite is the case. Many people only start the process of maturing at that age. Many have had enough of the zombies they have met until then and finally want to see real people. That is exactly what can happen in a psychological and spiritual subculture: one finally sees real people. It is a fantastic and essential demand. It is understandable that people may be rather indiscriminate in that situation.
FRISCHKNECHT: Indiscriminate! This begs the question as to how we are supposed to have learned to be choosy!
SLOTERDIJK: Absolutely. Where are we supposed to have met those kinds of people before, and how could we have trained the ability to choose between them? From this perspective there is a human right to fall for charlatans, and that right has to be respected within certain limits.
FRISCHKNECHT: And what about the people who get hooked?
SLOTERDIJK: That’s a different issue. Of course, in many cases a milieu is created and what should have been a useful expedient
Fire Your Shrink! 31
becomes a subculture and assumes a life of its own. But which cri- teria do we want to apply to criticize people who get caught? There are people who are still Christians even 2,000 years after Christ. We are just more careful about using the idea of ‘getting hooked’ in rela- tion to them. There are people who are still trying, 2,500 years after Buddha, to get closer to enlightenment with Buddhist techniques and teachings. Are they hooked? Maybe.
Every organized form of psychological needs inevitably suffers the fate of creating a milieu. The phenomenon of getting hooked arises as soon as a need takes on an organizational form. But I think we should look at this in a wider context. Nations are full of people who got caught. A newborn baby is not yet a Swiss, or a German, or a Chinese citizen. Because they are where they are, they are social- ized as locals. In sects and religious communities something like a second generation emerges, and the institutionalized religion then develops from its midst. It is a phenomenon we can observe else- where, for example, in psychotherapy. There are people who are still in therapy and have their own children meanwhile. Until the parents announce: ‘We’re not hooked any more! ’ should the children be taken into state care?
FRISCHKNECHT: You can talk. You became a father a few years ago and you turned fifty a few days ago.
SLOTERDIJK: I have chosen to get caught on hooks that are less tricky than the nails of sects. The philosophy hook was ham- mered into the wall 2,400 years ago by a magnificent madman, and hanging from it today is regarded as fairly honourable.
FRISCHKNECHT: If that hook were called ‘Scientology’ you would be ruined and your reputation would be down the drain.
SLOTERDIJK: True. It’s not good that people are discriminated against for being members of a supportive group. It is a paradox that people looking for help in particular should not have to deal with. They go to a helper because they want to reach greater psy- chological maturity and find themselves, a process they haven’t achieved properly yet. This drags them into a whirlpool of discrimi- nation, which means they now have two problems instead of just one: at the same time as the guru helps them, he takes them into social isolation, which means they can only have rewarding contact with him and people like him, and a doubly hostile world begins right outside the door of the therapeutic space.
In this respect I admire societies like the United States, where the sect is a constituent part of society itself, so to speak. Unlike in Europe, sects can’t be ostracized in the USA, because the people who wanted to exclude them would expose themselves as sectarians the moment they tried to do it. Under those conditions I don’t even
32 Fire Your Shrink!
need to have an opinion about sects I don’t like. That’s a genuine expression of freedom. We don’t have that freedom in Europe right now. We must have an opinion about Scientology. In my opinion they are a gang of criminals, but it would be much better to live in a world in which we weren’t obliged to have such opinions. I wouldn’t say they are nice people. But I would like to say their crimes are unimportant compared with other things that go on. Ideally, I would prefer to be able to say that I really don’t care what they do.
FRISCHKNECHT: Meanwhile there are groups that are so literal about following the agenda of not being part of this world that they collectively take their own lives. How do you interpret this phenomenon?
SLOTERDIJK: They are not people who practise meditation or who live in a state of awareness. They live in a comic. They were never there; they always dropped out. For them, departure would be structured as arrival to show there are places where people can arrive. The people in San Diego who killed themselves were typically bright intellectuals, New Celibates, well-dressed, high-income chil- dren of the middle class who were only apparently integrated into their society, but were actually always on board the space station. 1
1 Sloterdijk is referring to Heaven’s Gate, a millenarian group devoted to UFO religion in San Diego, USA. Thirty-nine members of the group committed mass suicide on 26 March 1997, apparently to reach what they believed was an alien spacecraft.
6 PHILOSOPHICAL RETUNING Interview with Felix Schmidt*
SCHMIDT: Mr Sloterdijk, only a few months ago you were complaining that philosophy had abdicated and the discourse on philosophical topics was dead. The reaction to your book Regeln für den Menschenpark [Rules for the Human Zoo]1 must have made you think again.
SLOTERDIJK: I am impressed at the scale of public discussion and the great improvement in the level of argument. What began with sheer rabble-rousing in the Süddeutscher Zeitung newspaper and in Der Spiegel magazine has turned into an authentic debate overnight. After a long period when the German public seemed paralysed by rhetoric about beliefs and the inevitable counterpart, the flight into stupidity, it is suddenly clear that one can still talk to people on an intellectual level, perhaps more than ever. People are fed up with organized hypocrisy and boring speeches, and want to
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Felix Schmidt appeared under the title ‘Meine Arbeit dreht sich um das Zur-Welt-Kommen’ [My work revolves around coming-into-the-world], in Die Welt newspaper (6 October 1999): 35.
Felix Schmidt was cultural editor of Der Spiegel magazine, and editor- in-chief of the Welt am Sonntag newspaper and of the magazines Stern and Hörzu. He was also director of television for the broadcasting author- ity Südwestfunk Baden-Baden and managing director of AVE television production companies.
1 Peter Sloterdijk. ‘The Elmauer Rede: Rules for the Human Zoo. A Response to the Letter on Humanism’, trans. Mary Varney Rorty, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27/1 (2009): 12–28. Available at: <http://web. stanford. edu/~mvr2j/sloterdijk. html>.
34 Philosophical Retuning
use their intelligence freely again without perpetual intimidation by discourse police.
SCHMIDT: Your critics, particularly Jürgen Habermas’s jour- nalistic disciples, accused you of ‘fascist rhetoric’ and ‘selection fantasies’ in this debate because your Human Zoo lecture apparently advocated a new stylistic breed of the human species.
SLOTERDIJK: The word ‘apparently’ should be underlined. If you read my text carefully line by line alongside the so-called interpretations, you can only talk of hallucinations and a deliber- ate attempt to ruin my reputation. Every author dreams of people reading his writings like mind-enhancing drugs, but in this case the side effects have got out of control. As usual in Germany, some of those involved have projected their own National Socialist night- mares into the text and want to be lauded as good citizens for that. My letter to Jürgen Habermas, published in Die Zeit, said what was necessary about the background to this deliberate misreading. Journalists had already followed this up and found confirmatory evidence by the time Habermas himself indirectly admitted in his placatory letter to Die Zeit that I had been justified in accusing him. In the meantime, Habermas’s incriminating letter instructing his faithful pupils what to write has turned up in the media.
SCHMIDT: Not everybody can tolerate it when the universal thinker cuts a swathe through the obscurity of the epoch with one great blow, and actually has success doing it.
SLOTERDIJK: If you wanted to be mean, you could say I have a megalomaniac streak that has defied therapy so far and allows me to jump lots of hurdles. In the long run, I can’t do my work if I’m expected to apologize constantly for my best options.
SCHMIDT: Isn’t the main reason for your success that the phi- losophy you practise and describe is a kind of life aid?
SLOTERDIJK: I would answer the question positively if I were sure we could agree that this description is partly ironical.
SCHMIDT: We can do that.
SLOTERDIJK: My viewpoint is not edification, but what we call the fundamental problems in relation to existentialist philosophy: the problems we do not have to create artificially in order to have them, as is done in every academic research discipline, for example. By definition, researchers are people who solve problems that only exist because they have created them – with the exception of doctors. By the way, I have been involved in debates with doctors more and more often recently. One of my forthcoming books will be a collection of medico-philosophical essays in which I discuss the relationship between catharsis, healing, suggestion and immunity. The term ‘immunity’ has become a key focus of my work over the
Philosophical Retuning 35
past few years. From this aspect, which is a kind of immune-anthro- pology, I have actually developed a style of thinking that no longer accepts the dominant role of non-edifying philosophy as criticism.
SCHMIDT: You have always been a therapist of our times, a diagnostician of our times. Your first major work, the Critique of Cynical Reason, was greeted as ‘the summing-up of our age’.
SLOTERDIJK: The concept, ‘diagnosis of our times’, brings us close to a cultural-medical approach, because where a diagnosis is made, the therapy shouldn’t be far away. But this is difficult for us because, seen as a whole, time and life represent incurable rela- tionships, or at least they create an overall situation in which the incurable has the edge over the curable.
SCHMIDT: Should the Critique of Cynical Reason be understood as a cheerful riposte against the Enlightenment that has been frozen stiff in sad, miserable scholarship?
SLOTERDIJK: It is more of an attempt at retuning – including in the sense of changing the strings on the instrument we used for playing the song of the bad world. I come from the circle around the Frankfurt School in which we learned a special kind of virtuous lamentation. You were allowed to be wrong in an argument but not in the tone of it. If you broke the consensus of lamentation you were a bigger traitor than if you disagreed with the masters’ opinion in judging a philosophical issue. In concrete terms, you were a traitor if you dared have a different opinion of jazz than Adorno’s. My book really did precipitate the major breach.
SCHMIDT: How did it happen?
SLOTERDIJK: It brought a change of key in two respects. First, it was tuned to a more cheerful and playful key, and, second, it broke up the alliance between critical philosophy and academicism. The result was that my work started to reach a general audience, as you can see from the book’s enormous success in terms of reviews and sales. We are already into the fourteenth edition, with 120,000 copies sold so far.
SCHMIDT: Do you think you ushered in the demise of critical theory, whose death you certify in the present debate?
SLOTERDIJK: That is doubtless the case, even if we weren’t clearly aware of it yet in 1983. Back then, it seemed briefly as if Habermas wanted to accept my approach as the first declaration of an independent third generation of the Frankfurt School, and I didn’t see any reason to correct that mistake myself. Quite the oppo- site: I had achieved something that looked like the fulfilment of a plan that the young Habermas had charted for himself and then for- gotten or repressed. ‘Thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger’ was the motto of a 1953 essay of his. And hadn’t I done just that?
36 Philosophical Retuning
But in time it became clear that not all roads lead to Frankfurt, and, what is more, it became evident that the Frankfurt Road wasn’t leading anywhere itself. Finally, I got the chance to test in a con- flict what Habermas understands by ‘communicative action’ and what he means when he talks about the ‘ideal speech situation’ and ‘including the Other’. I pronounced Critical Theory dead when all that was left of the critique was hypocrisy. The autopsy will show it was ailing for longer than people had believed.
SCHMIDT: Could Habermas’s verdict be connected with the fact that you abandoned the Frankfurt sickbed?
You come from the left-wing movement of 1968, the camp of the Frankfurt School. In which range of thought do you position yourself today?
SLOTERDIJK: I would dearly like to find a good answer to that question. Most of all, I would like to have a good topography or a political map on which I could plot where I stand now. I still see myself as a product of the critical movement of 1968, but I seriously believe that I understand the left better today than they understand themselves. If it were still possible to be a leftist, I would be happiest describing myself as such. But it wouldn’t exactly be true.
SCHMIDT: Are you hurt by the accusation that you have drifted very far to the right?
SLOTERDIJK: No. I think there are maturing processes that don’t fit into that conventional pattern. The more experience I gain, the less time I have for the eternally badly behaved, hyper-moralistic lefties to whom I once belonged. The stage of maturity – and that concept means more to me today than a definition of political position – doesn’t allow space for that any more. Generally, I think people today are wrong in debating about values at the expense of a debate about maturity and processes of maturing. If you say ‘values’, you should always make maturity a condition or admit openly: ‘I stand for values that I don’t turn into reality. ’ If the debate were held like that, I would join in. But I can’t stand the whole annoying present trend towards thinking in terms of norms and values that comes mainly from crazy jurists and philosophers who believe jurists are the men of the moment. This is a new form of correct hypocrisy nowadays and it already shows signs of tomor- row’s excess. Philosophy has the right to make this a topic.
SCHMIDT: How did you discover philosophy as your elixir of life?
SLOTERDIJK: To be honest, I don’t really know. I can only describe it psychologically. The job is there and you invent the motive for it. In other words, it is a particular kind of thoughtful- ness, a particular talent for absorbing books very easily and talking about them just after reading them as if they were part of your
Philosophical Retuning 37
native language. In my case this was evident relatively early on. It may sound odd, but at the age of fourteen I was already using the vocabulary of Kantian philosophy when talking to myself. At fourteen I read Kant’s first Critique and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra for the first time, and at the same age I wrote a summary of philo- sophical proofs of the existence of God for my school homework. All that gave me the rather unusual qualification of having learned to speak the standard language of philosophy like ordinary speech. Growing up without a father, I didn’t waste any time on false anti- authoritarian dialectics. I didn’t have to submit to any paternal authority trying to force me to do something I didn’t want. And I was enormously greedy in devouring anything that seemed best to me at that time: the philosophy and language of Max Bense, Foucault, Adorno, Benn and Gotthard Günther, whose philosophy of cybernetics is still underrated today.
SCHMIDT: The part of you that loves word games never tires of experimenting with new forms of description to extend the borders of possible expression. In your latest work, Spheres,2 you use lan- guage that sounds rather strange to describe immaterial objects.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s right. Spheres I and Spheres II are both written in a non-existent language – a language I invented specially for that book.
SCHMIDT: How do you invent a language?
SLOTERDIJK: In the course of developing an individual philo- sophical position it is quite natural to end up creating one’s own language as a precision instrument for a problem you have just dis- covered. It is, indeed, a foreign language within my native language, and it characterizes me as long as I speak it. A person who conducts cross-border operations, as I do, can’t achieve anything with news- reader’s German.
SCHMIDT: You expressed that in Der Zauberbaum [The Magic Tree] your only published novel to date. 3
SLOTERDIJK: Der Zauberbaum is the book I had to work hardest on because I first had to capture a freedom I would never have imagined possible before I experienced it myself.
SCHMIDT: Der Zauberbaum is about the discovery of the
2 Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären I, 1998; Sphären II, 1999; Sphären III, 2004 (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag).
English editions: Spheres I: Bubbles, 2011; Spheres II: Globes, 2014; Spheres III: Foam, forthcoming (Los Angeles: Semiotexte/ MIT).
3 Peter Sloterdijk, Der Zauberbaum (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag), 1987. (No English translation. )
38 Philosophical Retuning
unconscious. Did you ever do psychoanalysis yourself to help you dig so deeply?
SLOTERDIJK: I didn’t invent anything in the book. Everything in it is self-analysis distilled in a literary fashion. It is an interpreted autobiography. In the period between 1975 and 1985 my life was strongly motivated by self-awareness. My Indian trip was part of this.
SCHMIDT: Do you mean the months you spent in a guru community?
SLOTERDIJK: It was inspired less specifically by cultural criti- cism than one might say in retrospect. I didn’t go to India as a romantic. It was a very specific fascination I wanted to explore in depth. It emanated from a guru who gave me the impression I would benefit by letting him beguile me. This spiritual impulse and my experience in America directly afterwards prevented the shy, intro- verted parts of me from defining my life – otherwise things would have worked out differently. I would probably have failed early on.
SCHMIDT: Was it the crucial experiences of the psychoanalytic experiments and the Indian adventure that finally silenced your sar- castic approach attuned to catastrophes?
SLOTERDIJK: I think at least two things were responsible. Firstly, I started defining myself professionally as a writer and philosopher. That wasn’t the case to begin with, when I saw philoso- phizing as an expressive act, and only published my excesses or my arrogance, as it were.
SCHMIDT: And secondly?
SLOTERDIJK: When I was young I was not exactly a loner, but I was certainly not somebody who felt my emotional partnerships should lead to starting a family. That has changed fundamentally. Parallel to affirming philosophy as a profession I made what you could call an affirmation of the family as a way of life. You can trace that in my books from the 1990s. The texts suddenly show aware- ness of children, and you can hear fatherly tones – I was forced to learn a lesson I had previously rejected. The experience that children define reality and that you have to experience the possibility of reality from that point was related to the fact that I became a father.
SCHMIDT: In Spheres you actually revealed yourself as a kind of midwife. Birth, or to put it another way, coming-into-the-world, seems to have assumed a central place in your thought.
SLOTERDIJK: I had already made the hero in Der Zauberbaum dream of his own birth. The book was published in 1985, and quite correctly understood as my agenda. The basic features haven’t changed at all. I have just understood better that birth as a type of event and coming-into-the-world as another type of event are not
Philosophical Retuning 39
the same thing, because for creatures of our kind, being born is not enough to come into the world. The fact that a birth is a com- ing-into-the-world at all is the key to the whole mystery, and that is what my work is about.
SCHMIDT: Isn’t a person like you, a highly motivated athlete in the fields of thought and writing, so absorbed physically and psy- chologically by a work like the three volumes of Spheres that he has no time for anything else?
SLOTERDIJK: Although I occasionally call myself a failed Bohemian, working boosts my energy. When you are writing and you realize that the text is going to be successful, you get back more energy than you put into producing it. Of course, the precondition for a successful text is that you don’t torture yourself. And the readers can feel that the texts have been written without torture, that they flow and are carried along by a happy feeling all the way through. Even if one or two texts are wrong, it doesn’t affect the whole thing.
SCHMIDT: Concerning that happy feeling: I’ve heard that you also get it from enjoying a fine Bordeaux wine. You’re quite a con- noisseur, are you?
SLOTERDIJK: That’s all self-taught! In the field of philosophy I never had a proper teacher, at least not in the complete sense of the word, and to some extent I learned things auto-didactically. It’s just the same with Bordeaux. But by the time we reach the point of understanding something about Bordeaux we can’t afford to pay for it any more. Now we have to make do as best we can with Australian and Italian wines. It’s really awful. The only aspect of globalism I seriously deplore is that ignorant Japanese and Americans sour the enjoyment of the few Europeans who really understand something about their own wine because they buy up everything we have come to cherish.
7
WE’RE ALWAYS RIDING DOWN MATERNITY DRIVE
Interview with Mateo Kries*4
KRIES: Is mobility a fundamental human constant?
SLOTERDIJK: From a philosophical viewpoint, we can think of the characteristic mobility of humans as coming-into-the-world. The formula of coming-into-the-world says that more happens at the birth of a human being than the biological exit from the mother. The meaning of birth in general is probably that beings which come from inside achieve a change of place from an absolutely intimate protected space to an outer, less protected space that, regardless of its openness, still has to retain some characteristics of a protected space if it is to remain habitable. In other words, the particular attribute of the human birth is the exodus from the interior world into the real world, an experience of openness, freedom and danger. On my basic analysis, human mobility, as far as it interests phi- losophers, depends on this movement. Of course there are also extra-philosophical aspects of mobility that develop completely in the physical, sociological or economic dimensions. But as soon as we examine human mobility using instruments of philosophical and depth psychology, we arrive directly at the field where this natal discrepancy comes into play.
KRIES: Is the urge to keep moving inborn, or is it like a primal element, something unstoppable?
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Mateo Kries appeared under the title ‘Wir fahren immer auf dem Maternity Drive . . . ’, in the exhibition catalogue Automobility – Was uns bewegt (Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum), 1999, pp. 102–13.
Mateo Kries is chief curator at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein.
We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive 41
SLOTERDIJK: We should always be very careful with anthro- pological generalizations. All the same, it is a fact that the great majority of human beings invested too much in the past 10,000 years in an experiment hostile to mobility – the all-embracing attempt to halt the initial nomadic flow of human movement. This, the greatest attack ever made on mobility, has the lovely name ‘settledness’, and occurred in the same timespans as the agrarian and the agrosophical or agraro-ontological periods of human cultural history. The soil on which the farmer sits tight, the clod of earth that transforms humans themselves into a second plant, is an incredibly intense and durable force, and we are far from having freed ourselves of it completely.
Yet the soil has not remained the epitome of superior power; it has not defined humans everywhere for all time. As we can see, the age of settledness and of fixed ties to the soil ended in Europe with the beginning of the modern age, and a neo-nomadic epoch staked its claim. The underlying trend of the twentieth century consists of ending the era of settledness and liberating the kinetic potential in humans that has been tied down for over 10,000 years.
KRIES: At the same time the urge for mobility repeatedly occurs in the mythologies of almost all peoples, even during settled periods . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Because the old settledness contained an element of excess by which humans were expected to accept being bound in a way that belied their kinetic truth. Consequently, this had to emerge elsewhere, and particularly in the psychological evasions and flights of imagination typical of those times – leaving aside discussion of war and pilgrimage, the two formalized compensations for settled- ness, for the moment.
We could certainly claim that humans, in terms of metaphysi- cal and imaginary mobility, were more mobile in the 10,000 years of great pacification than we are today with our trains, planes and cars. The reason is that people of that bygone era had internal maps charting movements over a very wide area. Their most important means of transport was the soul, which, as we know, travels faster and more appreciatively than the modern car user.
KRIES: Can you give concrete examples of myths or soul jour- neys? How did they occur?
SLOTERDIJK: The culture of soul journeys begins with the observation that individuals can lose their souls. In depression some people become separated from the principle that animates them. They become stiff and weary, they seem to be soulless and don’t move to the group’s rhythm any more. This makes the little society of the group realize that one of its members is having a crisis and losing their soul, or – to use an anachronistic modern expression – is
42 We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive
suffering from depression. This suggests that the soul must have lost its way. Shamans become important here because they know the art of looking for the depressed person’s lost free soul somewhere at the edge of the world, and bringing it back to its owner. The early movement experiments and shamanic soul journeys were meant to revive the alliance between humans and their animators, that is, their companion spirits, the forces that help to arouse enthusiasm. This involves a truth that was in force long before all philosophies, and before the major religions: that humans can only move properly when their moving principle, their true motor, their soul, is with them. No good movement exists without enthusiasm.
KRIES: Does this imply that the invention of the automobile or of mobile devices and their use is a kind of anti-depressant?
SLOTERDIJK: Definitely, for the car is a machine for increas- ing self-confidence. The difference is that an external engine causes the movement. The car gives its driver additional power and reach. Today, regrettably, we have a predominance of naïve theories of sociology of traffic that see cars mainly as a means of transport. But as long as people stick to simple transport studies we won’t get to the essential layers of modern automobility. I think we have to see the vehicles of humans in the first place as a means of idealization and intensification, and consequently as a kinetic anti-depressant. The big demand for automobility certainly comes from people who want the vehicle for increasing their radius of action and capability. The sta- tistics tell us clearly that only one in three car trips is connected with work and with what we call transportation in the economic sense. Two out of three movements are escapes: people drive to their lovers, they take trips to the countryside and on holiday, they go visiting, or they use the car for letting off steam. We could almost think people use the car as revenge on the heavy demands of settledness.
KRIES: Does this explain the desire for locomotion?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, in a way. But if we want to talk like that, we have to derive the meaning of desire correctly. We have to be able to say how people came to feel desire, or how desire found us. Desire is the material the movements are made of; it builds the bridge to goals we have not reached. But I think we shouldn’t talk of desire if we don’t talk beforehand and at the same time about settledness, and about how the wishes of people who have been made static are organized, and therefore about the system of frustrations that shapes the desires that are typical of our form of life.
KRIES: Today the car actually has its own mythology.
SLOTERDIJK: This is revealing because, according to my working hypothesis on the theory of religion, myths only evolve where people try to speak about what complements them. Humans
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are beings that understand themselves in terms of their complemen- tary principle – we could say, in terms of their invisible partner. In the mythical period of consciousness those partners were seen pri- marily as gods and spirits, whereas today they are seen as technical adjuncts to the human body, that is, as machines and media. All cultures work at spinning themselves into their symbolic husks and these husks are first woven by the companion spirits. The car seems capable of a mythological development precisely because it is a kind of materialized companion spirit. We can baptize cars, we can talk to cars, and they have something common to all religious spheres – we can go inside them, immerse ourselves in them. As we noted at the start of this discussion, at least indirectly, people are beings that can’t help constantly asking about the difference between inside and outside. They can’t suppress the question about the difference between being born and not being born. Because this difference will never be completely clear, and because the ideal interior cannot be totally cast off or totally reproduced, people face the persistent ques- tion: how do we succeed in being as good outside as we are inside? The car is a suggestive answer to this. It is the most perfect solu- tion to the following riddle: how can I move with masterful control although I don’t venture out?
Modern humans are customers who voice a demand for methods of demonstrating supreme control. That is the basic cultural market. People who offer means of representing or simulating supreme control can always count on enormous demand. That is just what car manufacturers do. They offer one of the most convincing means of demonstrating supreme control in today’s world, and we are inca- pable of not demanding that. Personally, I sometimes ask myself how so many friends in my circle happen not to have a driving licence. I’m like a magnet that pulls nails out of a rotten old ship – I have the curious ability to attract people from the intellectual scene who function completely as non-drivers. I think not one of my close friends, or maybe only one or two, has a driving licence. We obvi- ously play different kinds of mastery games, which don’t involve driving around the neighbourhood. I’m the only tacky automobilist in this select clique. We have constructed a congenial system that makes driving our own car unimportant. I think all of us are people who belong more to the old shamanic culture where people still achieved their exalted feelings with soul journeys, and no driving licence exists for that.
KRIES: Many people feel they don’t exist at all without a car. The physical experience of having these machines available is totally fundamental to their identity.
SLOTERDIJK: Those people have their antecedents in the horse
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cultures of the past 3–4,000 years. The symbiosis between an animal as a means of transport and the rider already existed once in the case of the centaur. The horse as a complement to humans has also produced its own mythology. The typical human rider has faded into the background today, although he or she still exists, usually embodied by young women, with the girl in front and the horse behind. Those are the animal centaurs of today, whereas the techni- cal centaurs are represented by the people at the wheel inside with the car outside surrounding them. Incidentally, there are almost as many horses today as there were in the eighteenth or nineteenth cen- turies, but they have all been reassigned. They are almost all leisure horses, hardly any workhorses nowadays. Isn’t it an odd comment on today’s society that only horses have achieved emancipation? Humans are still work animals just as they always were, even if they are miserable jobless people, but the horses standing in German paddocks today are all horses of pleasure, post-historic horses. Children stroke them and adults admire them, and we feel very sorry for the last workhorses we see now and then at the circus and at racecourses. Some are used in psychotherapy for children with behavioural problems, but they are treated well and respectfully. All the other European horses have managed to do what humans still dream of – horses are the only ones for whom historical phi- losophy’s dream of a good end to history has become reality. They are the happy unemployed that evolution seemed to be moving towards. For them, the realm of freedom has been reached, they stand in their paddock, are fed, have completely forgotten the old drudgery and live out their natural mobility.
KRIES: What does the car mean for our mobility?
SLOTERDIJK: From the philosophical perspective we have to pose the question of the ‘real’ meaning of the automobile as follows: do we make new movements with the car – that is, trips to places where we have never been before? Or do we use the new vehicle for old movements, that is, for journeys that we always repeat on the oldest patterns and for which the vehicle only provides a new setting? In the latter case I am speaking of Platonic movements, in the former of exodus-type movements.
In terms of Platonic explanation we believe we have understood a movement when we recognize its old pattern, when we can say, for example: the natal breakthrough is repeated here by other means. In Platonic traffic analysis, the trip always goes backward to the origins, and all vehicles are aids for retrospective yearning. On this view all vehicles ultimately serve only the journey home. The return journey has priority everywhere. All the wheels are set in motion to seek the mother, and the word ‘maternity’ is on every street sign.
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We’re always riding down Maternity Drive. If we adopt this level of analysis, the vehicle is understood as a means to carry out an old movement with a new medium. If we choose this romantic, psycho- analytic theory of travelling, the answer to the question, ‘Where are we going?