No More Learning

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
10 Why Are People Media?
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.
Of course, as a new father, I must worry about things that never bothered me
Why Are People Media? 11
before. I’m already horrified at the thought of teachers I know. If I imagined having to hand my child over to people like that for five hours a day I would become a crazed killer – or somebody who wants to change the world for the better. And as long as my rela- tionship to violence remains as tenuous as it is now I will probably opt for the ludicrous task of improving the world.
WERNER: What has to happen for modern people to rediscover themselves as a medium?
SLOTERDIJK: Cultural criticism always attacks the mass media. I don’t think that makes sense. We should look more closely at the work of deformation that starts deeper down, especially because it involves so much demoralization. Something gets destroyed there that should not be destroyed under any circumstances – the aware- ness that knowledge is born out of euphoria and that intelligence is a relationship of the happy consciousness with itself. And that intelligence partly consists in the ability to find our own ways of overcoming the boredom that develops in an under-used brain. Across society as a whole, the most disturbing symptom is that people are no longer ambitious enough to plumb the limits of under- standing within themselves. Intelligence is the last utopian potential. The only terra incognita humankind still owns are the galaxies of the brain, the Milky Ways of intelligence. And there is hardly any con- vincing space travel in them. Incidentally, this internal astronautics is the only alternative to a consumerist perspective. It is the only thing that could explain to people in the future that their intelligence space is so immense that they can experiment with themselves for millennia without becoming exhausted. The really good news is that there is something breathtakingly great that is called intelligence and is uncharted. Who is willing to volunteer? The volunteers of intelligence are eo ipso its media.
3
WORLD ESTRANGEMENT AND DIAGNOSIS OF OUR TIMES
Interview with Andreas Geyer*
2
GEYER: Professor Sloterdijk, looking at your publications, for some time now two opposite extremes have been discernible. On the one hand, there is your intense focus on Gnosis or mysticism. Three years ago you compiled a practical reader with commentaries on Gnosis. Last year you published a comprehensive book with the title Weltfremdheit [World Estrangement], in which you attempt to rede- velop forgotten Gnostic themes. Yet we can hardly assume you have become an unworldly mystic. In fact, we could say you seem to be trying harder than ever to keep your finger on the pulse of the time. In the past year alone you have published three volumes of essays in which you take positions on concrete political and social questions. This polarity, of introspection on the one hand and contemporary diagnosis on the other – is it coincidental, or is there something behind it, perhaps even a major new theme of your philosophy?
SLOTERDIJK: To begin with, I agree with how you describe the alternating movement of my work in recent years, a rhythmic alternation in which an introversion is followed by an extroversion and an extroversion by an introversion. The internal structure of the book about world estrangement contains something of this alterna- tion and reflects on it.
It is the slumbering, or forgotten, topic of European philoso- phy, which is, of course, essentially a philosophy of verification
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Andreas Geyer was origi- nally broadcast on Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bavarian Radio) on 2 December 1994.
Andreas Geyer heads the Medical Affairs section at Bayerischer Rundfunk in Munich.
World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times 13
or philosophy of situations, with no understanding of events and rhythms. The fact that humans are beings in the process of coming into the world and departing from it, that humans are beings who awaken and whose attention breaks down, creatures able to with- stand stress but only up to a certain limit: these topics are largely overlooked in philosophy in favour of visions of structure.
I think the kind of philosophy that has a certain anthropological realism in proposing a new language for mankind has no choice but to address this elementary rhythm in which humans are described as really coming-into-the-world and departing-from-the-world. Indeed, this holds not only for the greatest metaphysical pulsation, for expressions of birth and death, but also for the micro-rhythm that characterizes every single hour of every day. In this respect I would say it is merely a continuation of a feature that philosophy has generally exhibited since the nineteenth century, namely getting down off the high horse of absolute reflection and orienting towards the low ground of precise self-observation and merging of logical motifs with anthropological motifs. The place where the intersec- tion of these currents occurs is where, for me, the wave movement develops with a certain inevitability: once outward, once inward, once with one’s back to the world, monologues of the soul, attempts to turn off the world’s main switch. It is an old saying that the last one out turns off the light. The same applies to thinking: the last one turns off the light of existence. And what remains after turning off the light is a voice, a world remainder that is still capable of self- examination – while it is true, of course, that there will never be a self that does not contain deposits of world remainders.
GEYER: You have written that your latest book, Weltfremdheit [World Estrangement], is ‘a phenomenology of the worldless intel- lect, or the intellect turned away from the world’. Could we start by clarifying what you understand by the term ‘world estrangement’ in this context?
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Weltfremdheit’ [World estrangement] is one of those marvellous words that make the German language appear to be philosophizing of its own accord. My ambition – rather like that of Ernst Bloch in relation to the word ‘utopia’ – was to skim off the negative element of this formulation and take the expression seri- ously for long enough for it to be finally accepted as a positive term, actually as a basic concept of philosophy. ‘World’ is not something we live in with no alternative; rather, ‘world’ designates that which we continually turn towards, under the precondition that we have turned away from it previously.
In other words, this involves a rhythmological world concept: ‘world’ is everything that rises and that falls, and in between are
14 World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times
phases of balance and the present and duration. But these phases are all momentary and, of course, the original moment of abstrac- tion of classical philosophy – or of any theory at all – consists in it attempting to create durable propositions and durable discourses. This means that in a particular way it starts off by missing the elementary truth about humans as beings that are sometimes here and sometimes not – and mostly not. Theory is also a form of world estrangement, namely, it is the sleep of reason that believes it is always here. Philosophy and ascesis were two closely related quantities, and philosophy has always been a sort of discipline of permanent wakefulness. Like ancient asceticism, it toyed with the illusion that there was a possibility of imitating God, insofar as this is a God that is ever-wakeful, never sleeping, all-knowing, all-accompanying, a God facing every event. I think it is entirely necessary for philosophy, and for people in general, to develop a language and to propose a form of theory which would make it clear that humans are beings standing by and large with their back to reality. Turning towards reality is the exception, and turning away from everything that is a part of that reality is the rule. That is why I am now using the term ‘world estrangement’ with the assumption it is a basic concept.
GEYER: In other words, you mean that until now in Western philosophy it is exclusively the world-oriented mind that has been socially acceptable, and this has resulted in an important com- ponent of the human mind getting lost – or at least, being barely acknowledged.
SLOTERDIJK: Mind has always been world spirit in a way. This is not just a terminological speciality of Hegel’s – he merely uses it to define the latent trend of all theories of mind. The mind has always been world-oriented and has always been the light spread over things of the world. Knowledge has always been a knowledge of the positive. But it is a non-wakeful knowledge. That is my point. Knowledge and consciousness or, more precisely, knowledge and wakefulness, are two different quantities, and European philosophy was passionate about confusing them. This leads to philosophy being increasingly incompetent in some way to deal with questions of wakefulness and, incidentally, also questions of topicality. A philosopher who touches on topicality is still regarded very much as an unserious member of the discipline. It is a late consequence of the preliminary decision made in very early times that privileged the unambiguous correlation of knowledge and world. But the fact there is a waking that has no world as yet, and that consequently only ‘eavesdrops’ on the world, a waking that somehow derives from the night the idea of the morning – to describe things with
World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times 15
metaphors that meant a lot to Martin Heidegger – those are cir- cumstances that we can see much better by looking at them from this kind of rhythmic viewpoint, and that we can also convey much better in language after having decided on the positive concept of world estrangement.
GEYER: The point of your argument is that the mind turned away from the world as an essential component of human beings has not simply vanished, but is forging ahead today on new paths. Which paths?
SLOTERDIJK: To start with, we should mention the classical paths to what I would call an officially created world estrangement, or turning away from the world. After all, we live in a culture, in a cultural moment, when we can look back on 3,000 years – perhaps even 4,000 years in India – of organized escape or distance from the world. We shouldn’t forget that, until quite recently, intellectual history was essentially the narrative of life forms and thinking of people who lived in retreat. It is a relatively novel idea that intel- lectual history should be the history of a mind oriented towards the world. What we call intellect – and that is why most people turn up their noses when such things are mentioned – is located on a terrain where we are usually confronted with world escapism, ascesis, retreat to the wilderness, and with monasteries, monastic forms of life, etc. . . .
GEYER: But surely those were also the classical paths, weren’t they?
SLOTERDIJK: Those were the main routes, the paths created by an official and noble – this is very important – a noble escape from the world. The world is everything, in a way, that encour- ages humans to turn their back on it. This has been concealed up to now in the traditions of our mental philosophy. One could get the impression that the deconstruction, or the dismantling, of the great systems of mental philosophy has brought human beings into a more wretched situation than ever before, because they were for- cibly incorporated with no alternative into a world that was always presented as positive. We must object to that from the modernist position too: humans remain estranged from the world or turned away from the world to a large extent – even at a time when people no longer interpret themselves as intellectual beings and where the opposition of world children and intellectual humans seems to have ultimately collapsed. Today, even intellectual persons sign a cer- tificate attesting their reality fitness. We have run out of ontological excuses for world escape in the classical sense. We cannot retreat to God during our lives like the saints in the wilderness in Syria in the third and fourth centuries. Some rather vain poets and writers,
16 World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times
in particular, put themselves up on pillars; usually they place their pillars in densely populated areas, as Bertolt Brecht once joked in relation to Stefan George.
GEYER: But where are these ‘pillars’ today? Where do they stand?
SLOTERDIJK: Everybody has his or her private pillar in the bedroom. Now, this may not be a lofty philosophical topic, but the human being as the sleeper is the unknown quantity per se in the history of thought. Not that there hasn’t been a great deal of meaningful and valuable empirical research on sleep in recent years – but that is a matter for psychologists. Philosophy itself seldom crosses the threshold to this perception of the human constitution. Philosophers do not want to know that they sleep. At most, phi- losophers admit that they know that they do not know. But they hardly admit that they are only rarely awake. They don’t realize that, because they usually express themselves, speak and think when they are here. But they seldom think at twilight. And this temporal shift of the philosophical moment: not thinking at noon, not think- ing in the harsh light of the morning, but at twilight, very early in the morning or very early in the evening, this gives rise to other tones and other perceptions. Nowadays, a kind of Janus position is pos- sible: we can look forward and backward at the same time and know that we are a disappearing person or an arriving person, depending on the direction. If we think on entering or leaving, if we think at those moments and not in the overcrowded middle, and not on this positivist bright day, then we have the view on either side and know that thinking is also a coming and a going. This makes twilight the authentic time of day for a philosophy that has got wise to itself or can look over its own shoulder.
GEYER: We can also artificially induce this sleeping state by using drugs. What can be said about drugs in this context?
SLOTERDIJK: A chapter is devoted to this question in the book Weltfremdheit that you mentioned earlier. I answer the question why humans, from the earliest times of cultures that we know, have been drug users, even if under quite different terms. The term ‘drug’ is a pharmacist’s term and a police term . . .
GEYER: A term we associate today with addiction!
SLOTERDIJK: A term linked to addiction, and the associa- tions seem to hold. They are associations for a phenomenon that first arose in relation to this description. I think the so-called drugs didn’t make people addicted in the past – because they were not drugs, but psychedelic, psychotropic substances, we could almost say ‘theotropic’ substances. In other words, they opened the door to the Sacred, the door to the gods, chemicals that . . .
World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times 17
GEYER: Were used as part of rituals . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Bound up with rituals, rooted in a cult, in which the plant and the god and the person were mutually correlated in a holy triad. The more elaborate the use of drugs in a ritual culture, the more impossible it is to abuse them in the sense of private intoxication. People who took drugs in ancient times did it to give their lives existential and metaphysical input, as some people still do nowadays, whereas today’s drug addicts are people who have fallen into the hands of a dealer who exploits their weakness. They no longer have a metaphysical informer, but a thoroughly empirical trader instead.
GEYER: Does this mean modern drug consumers have nothing more in common with the mystic?
SLOTERDIJK: Well, they still do in a certain way, because everything perverted has something in common with things that are the right way round. I think modern drug addicts are also in search of God to some extent, or in search of fulfilment, to put it more cau- tiously. Drug addicts also have ideas – we don’t know where they come from, but they have these ideas – of what would satisfy them, what would lighten the load of their existence, and particularly what would release them from their hatred of the situation their existence condemns them to. And to the extent they are absolute seekers, that is, people with a manic drive or a manic desire, we might say they probably do have something in common with traditional seekers of God. I think it wouldn’t be totally wrong to say that successful drug therapy occurs mainly where people are not sobered up or dried out in a trivial way and sentenced to a dry reality, but where they can be offered alternative feelings of being high, where they are shown a different kind of vitality and different stimulation, and the ecstasies of withdrawal successfully outweigh the ecstasies of addiction. If that works, then such therapies will work as well. If not, it is difficult to break the vicious circle of repetition compulsion in addiction.
GEYER: I was surprised that in your progress through the dif- ferent forms of flight from the world and quest for God there is one mass phenomenon you did not mention at all. I am thinking of the ‘esoteric wave’ that has been around for some time now. It has lasted too long to be just a passing phenomenon . . .
SLOTERDIJK: You are right. But I must say I do touch on it – indirectly. The tone and choice of subject in my book are at a certain level. It may be arrogant or not, but I overfly the stomping grounds of vulgar esoteric people. That is absolutely right. Anyway, I never wanted – how shall I phrase it? – to produce an encyclope- dia of flight from the world and forms of world escape. I was more interested in the classical forms of flight from the world. I thought
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that if I could include a good chapter on Indian spirituality in the book, and if I could find a place for a good chapter on the Freudian theory of the death drive and, above all, if I could give a reasonably adequate account of Platonism and the Socratic art of dying in the book, then I would have dealt in advance, in exemplary form, with everything esotericism talks about, usually as vulgar rehashing. Most of esotericism is nothing but bad philosophy. It is usually an overgrowth of late Platonism that has slunk back into modern pub- lications on a digression via Islam, on a detour via Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox religiosity and on the path via theosophy. Let’s consider the corpus hermeticum, the much-quoted construct that speaks of Hermes Trismegistos, with its legends and sagas. You just have to glance at the texts to see it is degraded stuff from trivial Platonism that simply can’t be compared with the magnificent con- structs of Christian Gnostics or the theology of Origenes, not to mention Plotin. If you know the originals, the highest forms, this spoils you for the type of esotericism sold in bookshops, because the authors of those works are all merely propounding degraded forms of Platonic monotheism, sometimes mixed with Indian-polytheist religiosity.
GEYER: I would go even further in my verdict on ‘esotericism’. It is true that it attracts the most absurd combinations of astrology, tarot cards, the study of German runes, etc. , and usually with a bit of pop psychology as well. But what always makes me wonder, is: how can so many people fall so easily for the most bizarre rituals on the modern esoteric market, but when it comes to the rituals of the Catholic Church the same people suddenly come to their senses and find them absolutely ridiculous? How does that fit together?
SLOTERDIJK: That’s because Christianity is not a religion of being able to let yourself go. This is the whole problem! The only Christians who can let go are the enthusiastic theologians them- selves, the very small number of inspired priests and pastors who experience similar medial ecstasies in the pulpit to the esoteric types. But this is a very, very small minority. Christianity is a religion of dryness. As I describe in a passage in my book, it is based on a sac- rament of withdrawal. In fact, the Eucharistic Communion wafers are not psychedelic substances, and do not have – or, if they ever did, no longer have – the power to cause a reaction like rapture in those who eat them. The sacrament of withdrawal basically aims to make a sober person out of the Christian, a person who shoulders the cross of reality and postpones the ecstasy problem for later, as a post-mortal matter. That is the big difference between esoteric people and mainstream Christians.
In the United States, incidentally, there are a whole lot of
World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times 19
Protestant sub-sects of Christianity that would not fit the descrip- tion you just gave. They are even more esoteric than esoteric people here in Germany, in one respect particularly: they communicate much more to people, attribute more medium-type powers to them and address them even more clearly as possessed by the Holy Spirit. That is what the whole of esotericism ultimately leads to. People want to be possessed again, and they claim something like a natural right to being possessed, or obsession. They don’t tolerate the de- spiritualizing effect of enlightened, scholarly education forever. This explains the mass exodus to the various branches of esotericism. People reach for the first best obsession. They are far from choosy in this respect.
GEYER: It’s a fast-food obsession, of course! Yet it can’t really be an alternative in the long run.
SLOTERDIJK: You’re right, it’s a fast-food obsession. But in the first place it’s not about quality but about the basic experience of being swept away by something or other. People who are not fired by enthusiasm can’t bear themselves for long, and only a very few people achieve the self-admiration that appears in philoso- phy as a borderline possibility. Consequently, people have to buy cheap enthusiasm off the rack. By now these racks are the crammed shelves in any random bookshop, even in the smallest towns in Germany. I don’t know if you have ever been to the United States and had the opportunity to look at the bookstores over there. The situation there is much more extreme. There are big bookstores in which nothing is sold except that type of literature and you get the impression that those are the most prosperous ones. The conclusion I draw is that people are no longer prepared to put up with being disenchanted by the reality definition of mainstream culture. There are a very large number of ‘pirate routes’ into the new obsessiveness, and people practically claim a birthright to being overpowered by something they hope will be stronger at wrestling the devil than they are themselves.
GEYER: Sometimes I suspect that the tendency towards turning away from the world as you define it occurs where we least expect it, namely in modern theoretical physics. If extrapolated, these new cosmological attempts at explanation certainly have mystical and mythical qualities . . .
SLOTERDIJK: I prefer the term ‘mythical’ here . . .
GEYER: But I think ‘mystical’ also applies!
SLOTERDIJK: You are right that natural scientists also infer
a sort of mystical dimension as a marginal value. Why? – Because their investigations lead into an area where the possibility of giving positive answers comes to a complete halt. This is the operation that
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the mystics of monotheist religions utilized to focus on the abyss. We know about that from positive theology, which attempted to focus thinking on God by means of the via eminentiae, the way of eminence: think of the biggest thing you can imagine and then think of something even bigger. Conceive God as that which tran- scends your power of explanation. By analogy, physicists who seek the most powerful explanation for the world and then say, ‘That’s not enough, either’, are doing the same thing. Basically, the sheer madness of reasoning has brought you to dissolution, and that is the procedure of mystical thought. As long as it is not an emotional mysticism but a logical mysticism, you arrive in the abyss by way of a pathos of reasoning that has reached a conclusion.