No More Learning

KLEIN: Naturally, we’d like you to explain that in more detail.
xiv In Place of a Preface
SLOTERDIJK: Let me try. I was born in 1947 and as a young man I grew up almost without any paternal influence. At the right moment I realized I should decide to be a sort of father to myself. I already had a good idea of what mothering is, whether pre-existing or chosen, and how one gradually leaves it behind. I had no idea what fathering meant. I had to find my fathers and mentors, which meant I had to look in the world around me. Fathers are models we seek to have something to conquer later on, aren’t they? So I set off, with admiration as my guideline. Nobody who had something to say was safe from my admiration – or from my disappointment either. The breakthrough came when I understood that I had to explain the world to myself. In my case it could only happen by taking myself in hand – as teacher and student in one. Somehow I managed to duplicate myself into a bigger and a smaller part. So I took myself by the hand and explained the world and life to myself. Evidently this made sense to many observers who enjoyed reading what I said to myself. They probably laughed at how I slipped into the role of the wise old man for the sake of the junior. I still think this method wasn’t the worst way to approach the philosophical sphere. It was particularly useful in my case because it fitted the situ- ation of a young person who, like many of his generation, grew up with a strong sense of cultural insecurity.
KLEIN: What made you go East after you finished your disser- tation under the professors in Hamburg? What did you learn from the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, or Osho, as he was also known? Why did you go to India at that time instead of staying at the university?
SLOTERDIJK: That is a long story I can only sketch briefly here. In 1974 I was offered a post as a temporary assistant professor at Hamburg University. I accepted, and moved to Hamburg. The fol- lowing year in Hamburg was a very fruitful time for me, a watershed in my life. I was very lucky to become a close associate of Klaus Briegleb, the tenured professor for modern German literature. I knew him from Munich and in my opinion, and not only mine, he was the foremost literary scholar in the country and at the peak of his art in his years in Hamburg. The constellation with my older colleagues was equally auspicious, an intellectual spiral nebula with enormous energy. It was also interesting in terms of group eroti- cism. As regards the university, from then on I knew it was not my kind of patch. I went back to Munich when my contract expired. Then the wild years of groups began: communes, psychotherapy, meditation groups, the New Left, the New Man. Topics like that were constantly bandied about. Back then, we believed in theory as if it had messianic power. The period between 1974 and 1980 was the experimental phase of my life. I had written my doctoral
In Place of a Preface xv
dissertation, I had many options open to me, and the only thing I knew clearly was that I wouldn’t go back to the university. If there is such a thing as suffering from doubt, I wasn’t aware of it then. I felt inspired by having the freedom of several years ahead to find my feet without having to commit myself.
KLEIN: But that still doesn’t explain why you decided to go to India.
SLOTERDIJK: The Indian trip had been a preordained choice in the spiritual curriculum of the West since the days of the blessed Hermann Hesse. You might have read Marx, Lenin and Marcuse, but the Orient was still missing. One day the time was ripe. It embod- ied everything that mattered back then, the therapeutic awakening, the spiritual awakening and the countercultural awakening. What is more, the whole enterprise was headlined by the topic of the day, ‘free love’, like a neon sign on Times Square. You would have had to be an idiot not to give it a try. Anyway, in India you met half of Frankfurt and half of Munich. I experienced my best Adorno col- loquia on the fringes of the ashram in Poona. This was the start of an incredibly intensive period, because in India you just met people who were brave in their own fashion, aggressive, confrontational, and generous with feelings, observations and touching. The mood there today is largely defined by the need for safeguards, which was unknown back then. Of course, everybody was crazy at that time; you realize it when you look back soberly, but you have to admit they were brave to the point of excess. To go to India under the con- ditions at that time was really a big leap, a breach with the culture we came from.
KLEIN: Replaying old videos in which the eyes of Osho are looking at us, we can still feel the pulse of a dimension beyond European academia. How did this guru come to play such a major role at that time?
SLOTERDIJK: Nowadays he doesn’t mean anything to me any more, aside from a rather remote feeling of gratitude. Remember, I was one of the people who returned from the East intending to stay here. I had changed, for sure, but I hadn’t become Indianized. On the contrary, it was only since then that I consciously became a European. I have built the impulses from there discreetly into my life. They are only present now in an altered form, as elements of gentle vibrations.
KLEIN: Have you lived ‘under a brighter sky’ since then?
SLOTERDIJK: That’s how I once expressed it. After I came back from India I developed my own private meteorology. I no longer felt personally affected by the weather forecast for Central Europe.
KLEIN: Can you explain how we get to the brighter sky in our
xvi In Place of a Preface
region? Are there directions for people beset by crises and looking for inner strength?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t want to embark on a discursive essay about the interconnection of individual and society, but it should be clear that the brightening up of feeling for the world is linked to a change in the mode of socialization. At the end of the Second World War, Arthur Koestler wrote a lucid essay, ‘The Yogi and the Commissar’, in which he typologically contrasted the two fundamental responses of the twentieth century to the misery of the world, the response of the yogi, who chooses the path inwards without asking about external conditions, and the response of the commissar who never tires of repeating the thesis that the social structures first have to be completely changed before we can think about emancipation of individuals. Towards the end of the 1970s the social revolutionary illusions of the decade collapsed, leaving a gap that offered fresh scope for the yogi option.
Most people don’t remember that today. At the moment we are going through an era of commissars again, even if they are no longer the type of communist Koestler had in mind. Today’s protagonists of social democracy are convinced that expanding the authority of the state is the cure for all of life’s evils. The absolutism of the social sphere is seeping into the smallest cracks once again. The commissar’s approach is not compatible with the classical Indian conception of the world. People in India tend to think that while each individual carries the potential for a revolution within himself or herself, it is a revolution in the first person. I returned from India to Europe with this lesson in my baggage without paying duty on it, and I have never completely renounced it. The ensuing conflict with the commissars was predictable. Overall, this happened in a rather weird way, perhaps partly because I didn’t take the floor as a phenotypic yogi, turned away from the world, idealistic and eso- teric, but as a person very much of this world yet with a different concept of the world. This contradiction has hung in the air, more or less unexplained, for around thirty years. Now and then, new com- missars ganged up against some of my interventions – think of the strange failed debate two years ago about democratically redefining taxation in the spirit of giving. One way or another, that was an odd scene. A grand coalition of commissars bludgeoned an idea that obviously came from the yogi region. People still don’t understand that there is more than one kind of progress, more than one revolu- tion, more than one anthropology.
KLEIN: How does it affect you as a person when, aside from criticism, you also get a great deal of admiration? How do you cope with all the projections of your readers and fans?
In Place of a Preface xvii
SLOTERDIJK: Now I’m going to say something very odd: I often don’t feel appreciation from outside. When it comes to applause, I’m afraid I am mentally blind. It hasn’t escaped me that some readers value my work, just as it hasn’t escaped me that attempts have been made to devalue it. I haven’t been deaf to the applause but it doesn’t distract me, and individual readers’ opinions have only rarely touched me deeply.
KLEIN: That sounds very paradoxical. After all, at the same time you claim to react very sensitively to external stimuli.
SLOTERDIJK: Maybe I should explain that in more detail. I am talking about the public impact of books. You see, before a new work leaves my workshop I first have to accept it myself. At that moment I am my own audience, and I want to be convinced as such. My approval is not given for nothing. At the moment I hand over a piece of work I must have an idea of its place on the scale of values. If the author doesn’t know that, who should? I don’t believe in the cliché of the writer who produces work automatically or while sleepwalking, who creates works at his desk like a pure fool and only knows they are worth something when others react excitedly. Many artists nowadays adopt the camouflage of ‘I don’t know’ games, acting as if the sophisticated public alone can pass judgement on a work of art. I think the self-evaluation of any author worthy of the name is usually just as accurate as the readers’ verdict, and often better. Maybe a certain percentage should be deducted for the usual self-overestimation and then we would get a realistic value.
KLEIN: In other words, in cases where the inner power of judge- ment is sufficiently well developed, excessive self-overestimation wouldn’t occur at all. Then one would not be overly surprised by other people’s common judgement. But the ability to see beyond the narrow confines of one’s own work seems to be an art not everybody is endowed with.
SLOTERDIJK: Let’s say that publication means deciding whether something you have written passes the test. It presup- poses an internal verdict about whether a construction has made the grade. You don’t make a decision like that because you are so blindly narcissistic as to think everything of yours is magnificent. On the contrary, you are more likely to feel intense self-doubt. Only a little is allowed to pass through the barrier. If you conclude the work can remain as it is, the pre-censorship is complete. That doesn’t exclude other people with other standards making other judge- ments. The author is only the person who says ‘finished’. Anything else can be done by other people as well, but the author is the one who breaks off the work on a thing. An intimate sense of evident- ness decides when the time is right.
xviii In Place of a Preface
KLEIN: Your fans and critics agree that your style is baroque and not infrequently brilliant. How far does clarity play a role in your conception of philosophical prose?
SLOTERDIJK: My judgement on this is biased. I believe my own writings are completely clear. I often work with abbreviations and exaggerations or, technically speaking, ellipses and hyperbole, two stylistic methods that are indisputably useful for working out ideas. Some colleagues accuse me of sprinkling metaphors too lib- erally, but I always respond that concepts and metaphors are not necessarily opposed, and metaphors often represent a higher state of concepts. There are, of course, theoreticians who were socialized in a different culture of rationality and have difficulty understanding associative language. They are accustomed to discussing whether a statement such as ‘All bachelors are unmarried men’ should be regarded as an analytical judgement. They are suspicious of my hopping and jumping and are inclined to cry ‘thought poetry! ’ or ‘metaphor-spouting! ’
KLEIN: Do you mean ‘live’ thinking should rate higher than edited thinking because it is more difficult?
SLOTERDIJK: It is not necessarily more difficult, but rarer. ‘Live’ is a term from broadcasting technology that allows us to participate in events elsewhere. In general, we are not present when thinking is happening somewhere. And it is usually a long time since thought took place. With luck, it is recorded in writing and we can read it later.
KLEIN: The idea of reading something later raises an impor- tant question for me. I have the impression that some time ago you began the phase of reappraisal of your work as a whole, still hesitatingly, but we can recognize the beginnings. The section of your oeuvre published in book form so far represents less than half of your works. The present interview collection provides an initial, extremely selective indication of what you have produced along the way in the everyday business of Zeitkritik, critique of our times. In relation to the lectures and essays you have produced in the past twenty-five years, as far as I know there is no plan for a collected edition, which would involve a series of big volumes. From what I can see, the majority of your unknown works consists of your aca- demic lectures, and only those who attended have an idea of them. Great treasures of live thinking are probably buried among them. What are you going to do with them?
SLOTERDIJK: For twenty years I gave lectures at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna on many topics without repeating them. The audiotapes of those lectures must be lying around in various private and university archives. Most of the public lectures in
In Place of a Preface xix
Karlsruhe, and the seminars there, are also documented but not catalogued. Only one complete lecture, the final lecture of the cycle on classical Greek theatre in the auditorium of the state library in Karlsruhe, was published in 1999 by supposé. It is an interpretation of Sophoclean drama with the title Ödipus oder Das zweite Orakel [Oedipus or the Second Oracle]. That piece shows roughly what it was like when I could act freely in a live situation. Some time ago Auer Verlag issued an audio cassette with six recordings of lectures, but as far as I remember they were based on written scripts. There are probably around 1,500 hours of speech tapes in the archives. Regrettably, Suhrkamp Verlag couldn’t decide to take on manage- ment of the documents. Meanwhile the Centre for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe has taken the first steps towards collect- ing and archiving the material. A considerable proportion of the documents has been digitized and listened to for indexing purposes with the aim of deciding, using selected key words, which pieces are suitable for transcription. I suspect most of them can simply be forgotten with no loss, but perhaps some things are worth produc- ing. It seems this project could move forward in the next few years. Incidentally, in the period when I lectured in Vienna and Karlsruhe there was a loyal audience composed of people from the university and local residents in the city whose presence gave me the illusion of not talking entirely to the wind. Sadly, I have never been in the position of Meister Eckart when he claimed he was so full of God that he would have preached to the offertory box if there had been nobody to hear him. I was happy to have an audience and let their presence inspire me.
KLEIN: Let’s not forget that the Philosophische Quartett is still available in the ZDF archives. 3
SLOTERDIJK: According to my calculations, we produced sixty-three programmes in ten and a half years. My appearances in my own TV programme constitute a special category that has practically nothing to do with the rest of my work. In the Quartets I was always very reserved, aside from a few exceptions when I indulged in spinning yarns a little more freely. Usually I played the discreet moderator whose main concern is to offer the guests the
3 Das Philosophische Quartett (The Philosophical Quartet) was a cultural talk show on German television hosted by philosophers Peter Sloterdijk and Rüdiger Safranski, who were joined for every edition by two differ- ent guests, usually prominent German intellectuals. Broadcast every two months on ZDF, the second German public TV channel, the show ran for ten years from 2002 to 2012.
xx In Place of a Preface
best possible frame. You could call it the achievement of being lack- lustre, which has its own attraction.
KLEIN: Let me briefly quote from Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals:
This descending to popular concepts is certainly very com- mendable, provided the ascent to the principles of pure reason has first taken place and has been carried through to complete satisfaction. That would mean that the doctrine of morals is first grounded on metaphysics and afterwards, when it has been firmly established, is provided with access by means of popularity. 4
Could you identify with this statement in your work as a public intellectual?
SLOTERDIJK: I can’t shake off the impression that Kant is expressing himself much more simply here than he really thought. He is pretending to believe philosophy is a result-based science that stops short of the last insights. They can naturally be popularized without difficulty. But that’s not how things are. I assume that if philosophers knew something relevant with absolute certainty it would have seeped through by now. Since Kant, philosophers have had 200 years to reach agreement. But they disagree more than ever. The model of ex-cathedra popularization of metaphysically certified doctrines can’t be applied to today’s intellectual situation. Nobody knows any more what generally compelling ‘fundamental metaphys- ical principles’ might be. Theoreticians can’t even agree whether the word ‘fundamental’ is a meaningful term. The whole business of ‘making something fundamental’ has become problematic. One gets the impression all the fundamental rule-makers are going round in circles. Incidentally, the symptomatic metaphorical mistake in the comment by Kant you just quoted shows that he couldn’t decide himself in which area to look for the so-called principles. He says, first we should ‘ascend’ to them, and then, two lines later, we find the same principles have descended again to become the secure ground on which popular teaching should be ‘firmly grounded’. The debate over ‘grounding’ ran dry some time ago. I think it was best summed up in the maxim attributed to Le Corbusier that the ground is the foundation of the basis.
4 Quoted from Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1999, p. 63.
In Place of a Preface xxi
KLEIN: But then, what can a philosopher still share with the wider public?
SLOTERDIJK: I tend to regard philosophy not as a special- ized subject but as the mode of working on a topic. Anybody who thinks more philosophico locates positive knowledge against the background of unknowing and in the context of general con- cerns. This creates an oscillation between affirmations and sceptical moments. If this is done over a lengthy period, when we share thoughts and ideas we can see for ourselves that we have much more unknowing in common than effective knowledge. Over time, the non-professional participants in such exercises can adopt this mode of thinking. In the process one learns how to be sure-footed on shaky ground. This kind of modal philosophical behaviour can go in many directions. In the future it can even touch a larger public, whereas it would be unrealistic to expect philosophy as an academic subject to emerge from its conclave again. Fortunately, there is a series of well-established disciplines such as anthropology, linguistics, ethnology, psychology, systemics and, more recently, neurology and particularly cultural theory that, in terms of the logic of their objects, operate more or less close to philosophy, or could do so. Their actors know quite precisely what they can do and where the borders of their art lie. We can pick up on these findings. In the disciplines I have mentioned the archives are full of knowledge suit- able for post-sceptical representation to the public. That is all I have been doing for a long time now.
1
THE HALF-MOON MAN Interview with Elke Dauk*1
DAUK: Mr Sloterdijk, ten years ago the Critique of Cynical Reason seemed like a tremendously bold call.
How do you explain that extraordinary impact?
SLOTERDIJK: The book was not a call – it was a performance. It celebrated what it discussed in its own pages. It was, and still is, a very cheerful book, unusually provocative in a context where one doesn’t expect it. The critique lies in the tone. Considering its subject, it is astonishingly funny; it contains a kind of phenomenol- ogy of all the jokes that can ever be made about humans in the nine major fields of humour, which are spelled out in detail in the second volume.
Above all, it contributed to blasting open the conspiracy of disen- chantment, the left-wing mawkishness in the year 1983. The Critique of Cynical Reason was the attempt to reconstruct the super-ego disaster of European culture in a phenomenologically broad study – a super-ego disaster that began with people having to live up to unattainably high ideals. Today we are living through the break-up of a process of constructing the super-ego that had already begun in antiquity. What Europeans experience today as a universal feeling of demoralization, right down to the tiny ramifications of political incorrectness that have such a deep influence on the zeitgeist, are
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Elke Dauk appeared under the title ‘Der Halbmondmensch’, in the Frankfurter Rundschau (29 September 1993, supplement): 2.
Elke Dauk’s book about life forms in the Western world, Der Griff nach den Sternen. Suche nach Lebensformen im Abendland, was published in 1998 by Insel Verlag, a division of Suhrkamp Verlag.
2 The Half-Moon Man
remote effects of a process of idealization that took root with Greek philosophy and the later Christian doctrine of virtue and inexorably led to an unparalleled history of destruction.
DAUK: To what extent was the Critique of Cynical Reason a critique of the Enlightenment?
SLOTERDIJK: It is not a critique of the Enlightenment, but rather a continuation of the Enlightenment in a self-reflective stage. It is enlightenment about the Enlightenment. Reflections across borders that necessarily emerge in a first attempt are recognized at the second attempt and are already part of the picture by the third attempt. The third attempt is social education after the bad experiences society had made with its own naivety. We have still not learned the art of convincing humans to live together in large communities. It has become so questionable whether it can succeed at all, via the paths of classical idealism and conceptions of sacrifice first developed in antiquity, that we have to expect new attempts.
DAUK: Wasn’t it also the attempt to create an opposing model to sublate the destructive reason represented by kynicism and Diogenes?
SLOTERDIJK: It is not about sublating destructive elements. I focused on kynicism as a sort of existential revolt that had already become formulated in antiquity against the city and the state, that is, against the two major repressive forms, against the ‘political monsters’ of ancient times. Even today, people can use this model for guidance if they understand that humans must first be brought into life before the state can use them. Modern education, the modern Enlightenment and the modern state system have always assumed humans as given and don’t consider how humans are born, how they engender themselves. In my opinion, ancient kynicism was an attempt, perhaps with inappropriate means, to defend a sphere in which humans are not delivered to the state too quickly, and don’t become agents of big structures too quickly. The aim of kynicism was to recall a life form that was linked to the concept of self-assertion at that time, a life form in which human beings emerge first of all, and are not already exploited and given missions.
DAUK: Did you want to go beyond social theory towards an art of living or, more precisely, eroticism?
SLOTERDIJK: What I do is not only social theory; it is a philo- sophical-existential approach that per se observes the social world as a fragmented landscape of obsessions. The book is a manifesto of liberation; it is the continuation of a strand of German philosophy insofar as it was a philosophy of emancipation. It was probably most successful in Germany because it played language games in a new way on a sophisticated level of possibilities.
The Half-Moon Man 3
DAUK: Back then, using the example of the atom bomb, you characterized the subject as the pure will to annihilate himself and the world. Does this analysis still hold today?
SLOTERDIJK: In principle, yes. But the social parameters have shifted very considerably. Nowadays we no longer face the paranoid duel that pitted two exemplary political mega-centres against each other in the Cold War era. Today the issue is not so much to disarm two such subjects or to give information about them, although this is still relevant, but to reform them and inform them in such a way that they can live with their own magnitude, with their own potential for violence, and their own paranoia. This might sound paradoxical, but it is not about smashing up these great subjects but about helping them to function successfully. By ‘successfully’, I mean beyond self-destruction.
DAUK: Is the kynical-cynical impulse still the motive force of your thought?
SLOTERDIJK: Kynical-cynical impulses do not lead to thought; they lead to formal rejection of unreasonable demands. Forces that drive thought are not found on the level of kynical and cynical impulses because these impulses have something to do with defensive movements, defensive feelings. The cynical impulse is the feeling of rejection that powerful persons have when people demand that they humbly submit to morality or a norm. They feel too strong for that and become cynical. And the kynical impulse is the resistance produced by the vitality of ‘poor suckers’ when they are required to keep to norms that were created for others. In their own way, they are also too strong to let themselves be castrated by a sort of normativism that tries to co-opt them for a social game that nobody ever asked if they wanted to play. In both cases it is a sort of individualist résistance that operates on the borders of moralism, in the one case from above, in the other from below. There are records of this from various world cultures since the beginning of cities and empires. One can see that this kind of résistance, this rejection of the imperial ethos, from above as from below, has been known for around 2,500 years, and par- ticularly in the West where there has always been special licence for speaking out defiantly, that is, where the truth oracle has func- tioned better, and even in a cheeky, immoral tone, than in China or other places, where the political pressure to gloss over and say the required things operates much more tightly. Returning to your question, for me, and I think for most philosophers, what drives thought lies at a deeper level. It is not resistance, but riddles, that make one think. Having a big ‘No’ inside you leads to therapy, at best. But if you have a riddle inside you, you arrive either at art
4 The Half-Moon Man
or philosophy. I see my work being located at the intersection of these fields.
DAUK: You have been interested in Gnosis in recent years. Whereas the kynic insists on a fulfilled life, the disciple of Gnosticism seeks flight from the world. Isn’t this a path from ‘life as risk’ to ‘life as mourning’?
SLOTERDIJK: Quite the contrary. I am much more optimistic now than I was in my book Critique of Cynical Reason, because that book only spoke the language of cheerful protest. You can declare war and you can declare a holiday, and that book declared a holiday. It did so intentionally and polemically against a society that had declared war and troubles. Today my eyes see other hori- zons and my thinking stems from a different centre that is more thoroughly worked out and differently informed about its reasons for cheerfulness. My reasons for cheerfulness go much deeper than those of the Critique of Cynical Reason. The result is that I no longer work on a theory of protest but on a fundamental theory of the absent person. That means I use anthropological arguments to develop the thesis that humans have turned away from the world to a large degree, and they always exist also in the mode of absence, in the mode of unknowing, in a nocturnal relation to the world. Consequently I see no reason, at least not in terms of anthropology, to continue the forcible co-option of individuals for the sake of a totality called ‘reality’. That’s what contemporary media do when they keep on agitating about troubles, showering people constantly with unpleasant news, inspired by a degree of informative sadism, as if to say, ‘We have recorded this awful stuff to pass on and you are the right recipients. ’ Everybody tries to be the medium, not the filter. The filters and the end buyers are always the others. I think it’s pos- sible to show that people never have to be end buyers of misfortune. Their inherent nature makes them like half-moons, only half turned towards the world, and their other half belongs to a different princi- ple that can’t be reached by that agitation about troubles.
DAUK: Is the relationship between the ego and the world the basic theme of your work?
SLOTERDIJK: The relationship between humans and the world has been the theme of philosophy for 2,500 years, but classical metaphysics included a third element that gets a bad press today. However, the metaphysical triangle in which thought was practised via the major questions – the triangle consisting of God, man and the soul – still exists as a rump. Elsewhere it is replaced by a monist view of the world, that is, by positing the world as absolute, and treating human beings only as a function of the world, as a local function of the cosmos or a local function of society. This makes us slip back
The Half-Moon Man 5
into the bad old conditions because we urge each individual to live his or her life in a way that is symptomatic of a society that doubts its own existence. There are good reasons to reject this imposition. I am beginning to present a very different kind of anthropology, one that eliminates the automatic relation of man and the world. Humans don’t belong to the world like your thumb to your hand. They also stand with their backs to the world – as children of the night or of vacant nothingness.
DAUK: Were you interested in Gnosticism because the Gnostics practised opposition to the agents of the material world?
SLOTERDIJK: I saw Gnosis as an exercise ground on which one can study the a-cosmic dimension, the components of the human psyche that are turned away from the world. It was an interdiscipli- nary project between the philosophy of religion and anthropology. The results are now available, first of all in a big collection of documents titled World Revolution of the Soul, a documentation of nearly a thousand pages that proves how people in the Western tradition have recorded their deregistration – if I can put it like that – at the residency registration office of the cosmos. Another result of the project is my forthcoming book, Weltfremdheit [World Estrangement]. This is not documentation – it is a discursively written account that develops the above-mentioned thesis in rela- tion to music, sleep, drugs, religions, the death drive, self-awareness, meditative phenomena and many other things. The whole point is to show that we can’t get any further with a primitive face-to-face relationship between ‘man and the world’. It shows that we only describe a human being properly when we show that he or she lives at a sharp angle to reality and is sometimes here and sometimes not, and usually not.
DAUK: How is Weltfremdheit related to your thesis that homini- zation, humanization itself, is the disaster per se?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t say that on my own account; rather, I adopt a thesis that emerged around 2,000 years ago in the context of a dissident branch of Judaism during a self-critical phase of Jewish Genesis theology, and that people in our cultural sphere have never forgotten since then. The secret rumour says that there was a clumsy Creator and that this earth is not the best achievement of the world beyond, and certainly not optimal, and that the fundamen- tal Catholic decision to save God by burdening man isn’t the only meaningful possibility for distributing the burden in this context. We could also burden God and thus save the truth by regarding the Creation as second-best, maybe even as a botched effort, or one with a built-in tendency to fail. That is quite a different philosophi- cal approach and it has created a breakthrough in anthropology
6 The Half-Moon Man
and made negative anthropology possible, that is, teachings about a person’s absence from the world as a kind of theory of the night and of sleep, of absence. As soon as that is formulated in enough detail we shall see that it generally offers a better way to describe humans than positivist anthropologies do.
DAUK: Isn’t the dark side of man only half the truth?
SLOTERDIJK: It is the forgotten half of the truth. What matters now is to continue thinking about the cognitive insights of anthro- pology in such a way that we remain within the continuum of Western learning processes and can still discuss and debate on an equal footing with a Taoist sage, an Indian sadhu and an ecstatic Hasid.
2
WHY ARE PEOPLE MEDIA? Interview with Jürgen Werner*1
WERNER: We usually think of media as apparatuses that trans- mit pictures and sound – but you argue that people are media. Why? SLOTERDIJK: To be a medium means to occupy the middle in a field of at least three elements. That is a phenomenon people are aware of nowadays particularly in relation to technical media. We have radio receivers. We have television receivers. If Mr A. wants to send Mr B. a quick message he uses what we call a new medium, a telephone or a fax machine. Now, cultural anthropology has shown that media are not originally apparatuses, but people. It is modern- ism that first led us to shift the role of transmitter from people to apparatuses. This displacement drama hides the business secrets of
modernity.
WERNER: When people act as transmitters, what are they
transmitting between?
SLOTERDIJK: Firstly, as with the apparatuses, they are trans-
mitting between two communicating sides. This is easy to explain if you think of travelling salesmen, who played an enormous role in antiquity because they fulfilled the function of international com- muters. They were people who commuted between self-contained cultures. It would be wrong to imagine the world of that time as it is today, a world of tourists. Reconstructing the age of settled life
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Jürgen Werner appeared under the title ‘Warum sind Menschen Medien, Herr Sloterdijk? ’ [Why are People Media, Mr Sloterdijk? ], in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Magazin (9 September 1994): 54f.
Jürgen Werner was an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung until 1998, first in the Sports section, then at FAZ-Magazin.
8 Why Are People Media?
requires people of our times to envisage a bygone form of life that was largely shaped by what Benedictine monks called stabilitas loci, being settled in one place. This makes the people in settled cultures who saw more than one village or town extraordinarily important. They seemed like a prefiguration of messengers from the world beyond. In antiquity there was a social class of itinerant preach- ers, philosophers, educators and rhetoricians who travelled from village to village and from town to town and tried to communicate their worldly wisdom, their tricks and their doctrines to different audiences. They are the actual ancestors of those we call ‘experts’ or ‘consultants’ today. At the same time they are representatives of what I call ‘personal mediumism’. Incidentally, the phenomena of personal mediumism are totally rational. That is a very important point for me. Since the nineteenth century, the concept of the per- sonal medium has been consigned to the occult sphere, the idiot’s corner. Nowadays people who hear voices quickly receive gener- ous doses of psychiatric treatment. This makes it very difficult for anybody to use the term ‘medium’ in ordinary speech today. I am interested in developing mediumism as an anthropological term with such broad scope that it will be impossible to make a statement about a person without saying in which medial system he or she lives.
WERNER: Being a medium means being able not to oppose something but to be open towards something different. Can you also oppose things you are enthusiastic about? Musil once said a man can’t be angry at his own time without suffering some damage. Are we damaged if we don’t let ourselves be affected by the flow of our times?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, seriously damaged, in fact. ‘Going against the flow’ is merely a metaphor for withdrawing from the flow – drying out. It is a way of describing the fundamental schizophrenic disturbance that applies to the whole situation of modern people, to the extent that they typically represent the results of a centuries- long history of de-spiritualization. The de-spiritualized individual stands at the edge of everything like an absolute onlooker, a final consumer. The sum of de-spiritualized persons amounts to the con- temporary population of last people. That is something that justifies the phrase, ‘to forfeit his soul’. 1
WERNER: Do we have to give up the ideal of independence if we see man as a medium?
1 ‘For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? ’ (Mark 8:36, ESV).
Why Are People Media? 9
SLOTERDIJK: We have to conceive independence very differ- ently. Independence only happens by stepping up our participation, not by continuing to invest in the ideal of coolness. Coolness is the meta-symptom of a post-religious situation. It is the major symptom of a generation that doesn’t even bother to dip its feet into the stream it emerged from to test how the temperature was. This investment in not letting the intellect flow, sitting coolly on the riverbank as the last man or woman, influences the conditions under which we as teachers find our students today, but also under which we meet with adults in our role as consultants. De-spiritualization is the lowest common denominator of contemporary ‘spiritual’ life.
WERNER: Couldn’t we see it as a reaction to being overchal- lenged, related to the present generation seeing and hearing so much through electronic media that it raises the sensation threshold?
SLOTERDIJK: I’m very sensitive to any discussion about being overchallenged, because the term has become a universal excuse for people, and actually misses the point. The idea nowadays is that people shouldn’t be spurred on any more; instead, they should be reassured they shouldn’t feel guilty for not being the way they are supposed to be. But in fact people need challenges, they can’t stand being unchallenged any longer, and they rebel against being expected to reduce their existence to a state of stupidity and lack of achievement. Basically the whole society, with very few exceptions, is in a kind of psychological strike against the world. We don’t want to use our intelligence. Even our brains carry the message: work to rule. That is the real disaster of this period, the 1990s.
WERNER: Can electronic media help people to stop this strike or do they hamper this?
SLOTERDIJK: The electronic media are actually very counter- productive. They foster the cool, half-moronic, smiling person who is on strike. But that is not their ultimate definition. They are not defined by their use. I don’t know what is in the technological nature of television that condemns it to broadcast programmes of the quality it does. If we gave humans another hundred years, I think we would reach a new state of balance between our personal media and electronic media. The latter are obviously profoundly necessary for evolution. They synchronize people in large political spaces. We have been able to observe this principle at work since the begin- ning of the written word, which should be interpreted as a form of rational telepathy. If an imperial decree was written in Rome and a courier took it out of the palace, it was intended to be decipher- able in Carthage and capable of being translated into some kind of action or ideas. This rational telepathy organized communication of power in large areas. The social synthesis through writing is, of
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course, preceded by another synthesis, namely that arising through imperial power, military power. And if we pursue this and place the need for synthesis at the basis of modern society, then we also understand why the media are like they are.
WERNER: If the media develop as we are told, in a few years we will have more than a hundred TV channels. In other words, instead of global synthesizing, people will be completely separated from each other. Does that mean nobody will look at what anybody else has watched, and each person will only be aware of his or her own programme?
SLOTERDIJK: I think all these scenarios are wrong. Even with multiple channels, an interesting niche will emerge here and there. We shouldn’t worry too much about how this is developing. It is more likely that society will revert to the experience of de-spiritu- alization in an even harsher form than is already the case. But the tendency towards the electronic kiosk will also open up a field of additional gadgets. This is where the big opportunity lies. Many people in our culture have nothing to do any longer; there is high unemployment, even more inside people themselves than in the outside world, and this creates an immense need for micro-dramas.
WERNER: What would a society look like in which basic forms of sensitivity, openness and the right kind of independence could be strengthened? And what role would electronic media play in this?
SLOTERDIJK: I think electronic media will simply replace schools. I have high hopes of this.
WERNER: But wouldn’t that be alienation from personal encounters again?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, but it would be alienation from personal teaching that is already alienated anyway. For today’s generation, their teachers’ outlook is an initiation into stupidity as a normal state. The average teacher represents the result of an education process that fosters parroting. Those thirteen years of classes are such an obscene spectacle that it’s actually a miracle anybody gets through that kind of teaching by example. It would be a good thing if everything in school teaching that relies on spreading the word, on the syllabus and on academic subjects, were to disappear. All of that is a major assault on human intelligence. The electronic media are an excellent barrier against that. In ten years all subjects could be computerized in a fantastic, lively, entertaining way. Teachers will not be able to keep up. The coolness system is also related to the institutionalization of stupidity through state schools. The chil- dren sit around in those compulsory classes becoming increasingly defeatist, increasingly defeated and increasingly listless.