No More Learning

SPIEGEL: To put it more simply: why are so many people aggressive behind the wheel?
SLOTERDIJK: In traffic, regressed egos that often feel attracted by ‘king of the road’ myths and childish projections of royal power clash with each other. Weak people in particular tend to act out such myths aggressively and use the car to express themselves.
SPIEGEL: In other words, the myth of the car must be shattered. How can this be done?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t see any chance at the moment. We have been conducting an ecological debate for the past twenty years, and the car is still here in all its glory. Its aesthetic and technological development has been explosive. This suggests that cars are con- nected with a kind of archetypal violence that is completely immune to enlightenment.
SPIEGEL: And where is the enlightenment-resistant car heading for?
SLOTERDIJK: It is on the ride to nowhere, on the ride to the ride. In a sense cars are circus vehicles, vehicles of futility – but an enthusiastic kind of futility. We enjoy the ride as a ride and this over- rides the issue of destinations. Car driving is a religion. Modernism as a whole resembles an arena, a self-contained circuit. That’s why Formula One races are so important. They are the modern proof of what St Paul the Apostle wrote: the godless go round in circles. The circular rides in the circus contradict the elementary hope, the key theme of the modern age: the primacy of the journey out, opening up new spheres. If technology is the perfect control of sequences of movement, this leaves us with only one progressive function: braking.
5
FIRE YOUR SHRINK! Interview with Martin Frischknecht*4
FRISCHKNECHT: ‘Fire your shrink; hire a philosopher’ is the latest trend in the United States, where more and more people looking for cures seem to be dropping out of psychotherapy and turning to philosophy. Therapy is generally defined as a healing art, whereas philosophy is seen as love of wisdom. Why should philoso- phers suddenly be able to heal?
SLOTERDIJK: Philosophers can’t heal anything, not even them- selves. They aren’t competent to heal, unless the ability to heal is somehow equivalent to the claim to heal. A suspicion has haunted all therapy systems for a long time now: that the most important thing about any method is a therapist who believes in him- or herself and his or her method. In other words, that people can be convincingly tricked into health. Many people get healthy or describe themselves as healthy simply because they would be ashamed to upset a persua- sive therapist like theirs by not getting better. The therapist appears before the client and commands the illnesses to leave the body. They should turn round and go, and in general they do just that.
FRISCHKNECHT: How does the philosopher react to these demands?
SLOTERDIJK: No differently. He or she falls in line with a tradi- tion that began with Mesmer’s magnetic healing 200 years ago, and has been continually revived since then without people knowing
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Martin Frischknecht was originally published under the title ‘Interview mit dem Philosophen Peter Sloterdijk’, in Spuren – Magazin für Neues Bewußtsein 45 (1997).
Martin Frischknecht is the publisher of the magazine Spuren – Das Leben neu entdecken, Winterthur (Switzerland).
26 Fire Your Shrink!
how the therapeutic success actually works. If philosophers start being active in this field as well now, it is merely one brief incident in the long history of the riddle of why a particular kind of closeness in encounters between people benefits the person on the receiving end. For 200 years there has been a very diverse history of experi- menting with such relationships of closeness – organized encounters with people who listen to each other, lay hands, hug each other, cry their eyes out, etc. These are arrangements that inherently release a specific therapeutic potential and we don’t really know who to attribute this to.
It doesn’t matter, for however this arrangement is set up it evi- dently works – unless the so-called helpers are obviously vampires or sadists who can only get what they want by leading people in that direction. But if a halfway clear standard for the code of encounters in such fields of intimacy is observed, we almost always see some kind of therapeutic productivity.
FRISCHKNECHT: In that case, everything else would be super- structure. It doesn’t really matter whether the healing person involved is oriented to Rogers, Jung or Heidegger.
SLOTERDIJK: The important thing is for people to enter a kind of healing retreat together, to create a little conspiracy, to get together as two persons who say, ‘As long as our relationship lasts, we are the craziest people ever. We are living as conspirators for a time, extra-territorials in relation to the rest of the world, in the land of “us”, and we’re regenerating ourselves there. That’s all. ’ And it works. People are animals that need a complementary other. They can’t survive in the way they are supposed to be according to the modern world’s basic individualist ideology. People can’t really become what individualist ideology demands of them. There is no such thing as autonomy, and it is even doubtful whether adulthood in the true sense of the word really exists. There is no genuine inde- pendence and, even if there were, it wouldn’t be desirable. People are always twins but they usually do not know the other comple- mentary individual, yet during their lives they fill the role or place of the other in various guises, and they are happier and healthier if they cast the role right. In allocating the twin role, the role of the essential inner other, they decide what they are going to become. Constant miscasting at this point, constantly under-filling this position, leads to human atrophy. You can give the role to a dachshund, of course, or even a whisky bottle; you can fill this position with almost any- thing, from a lifeless object to the God of St Augustine. Depending on whom you choose as your counterpart, your own self forms in resonance with it. I see this resonance between an individual and his or her twin, or double, as a fundamental secret of psychology. The
Fire Your Shrink! 27
way this resonance occurs determines whether the person’s existence is a success or a failure. This account seems to me a good way to reconstruct the whole field of therapy. The therapist is an optional casting choice for the vacant twin position. If he or she does it well, if he or she behaves adequately like a good twin for a while, and is sufficiently discreet and encouraging, the subject of the therapy will flourish.
FRISCHKNECHT: You recently advocated tackling the so- called sect question again and discussing the topic under different auspices. At the moment there is scaremongering about how easy it is to seduce the masses, and about the coming millennium. What perspectives do you think are missing from that?
SLOTERDIJK: The most important thing people forget is that all good human groups are sects. Regrettably, the term ‘sect’ cur- rently has a bad reputation. This is related to the fact that we don’t have any ideological opponents at the moment. Our society can’t hunt down socialists, communists and anarchists any more. All those groups have either become well-behaved or silent. Who is left to hunt down? Only terrorists and sect members, that is, people who throw physical or mental bombs.
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.