SLOTERDIJK:
Basically
it’s a matter of cultivating a pathologi- cal relationship to the past.
Sloterdijk - Selected Exaggerations
Do you think these people are cynics or are they simply too naïve?
SLOTERDIJK: In the present case there isn’t a complete alterna- tive between cynical and naïve. Twenty-five years ago, when I wrote Critique of Cynical Reason, I tried to squeeze the whole typology of the intellectual field into these two alternatives: either people are naïve, in which case they are too close to the problems, or they are cynical, which means they are too indifferent to the problems.
3 Sloterdijk is referring to the case of Josef Fritzl, a man from Amstetten in Austria who imprisoned one of his daughters for twenty-four years and repeatedly raped her. She bore seven children by him. The crime was dis- covered in 2008.
Even a God Can’t Save Us 229
Today we need a third position. I’m talking about people who are neither cynical nor naïve.
ENCKE: You mean people who deconstruct everything to keep the world at bay?
SLOTERDIJK: Deconstructivism has become plausible partly because modernism has produced too many embarrassingly naïve forms of world salvation. The social catastrophes of the twentieth century stemmed from ideologies formulated by certain semi-vision- ary people who solved the mystery of the world with grand prophetic gestures. Whether private property or subversive Judaism was blamed for all evils – the deconstructive attitude was always justified in opposition to seductive, primitive formulas.
ENCKE: But that isn’t enough any more?
SLOTERDIJK: Richard Rorty4 once described his colleagues in the philosophical and humanities departments somewhat bitterly as ‘detached cosmopolitan spectators’. What he meant is: you talk about the crisis as if it were an opera production. At most we stand on the periphery looking at the catastrophes through opera glasses, without understanding that many disasters that occur today not only contain their own inherent harmful aspect, but also have a sig- nifying quality for our future.
ENCKE: What do you mean by a ‘signifying quality’?
SLOTERDIJK: Hans Jonas and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker had already raised the issue of ‘warning catastrophes’ back in the 1980s. 5 They meant that humankind receives warnings from the real world that have to be decoded and translated into the behaviour of individuals and institutions. That’s exactly what people who are satisfied with the role of detached cosmopolitan theatregoers can’t do.
ENCKE: Don’t we also use an opera glass for protection? If people are really confronted with that degree of real threat, it can make them incapable of acting, and can drive them to suicide in extreme cases. People are creatures that need protection.
SLOTERDIJK: For 3,000 years the avant-garde of humankind has lived in this situation: that they see something overpowering and the intelligentsia shivers. It seems to me the concept of ‘God’ was one of the strongest protective shields. For an aeon, humans
4 Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was an American philosopher and comparatist.
5 Hans Jonas (1903–93) was a German-born American philosopher who was a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912–2007) was a German physicist, philosopher and expert on peace studies.
230 Even a God Can’t Save Us
retreated behind it to defend themselves from the monster. Anyone who saw the outer side of the shield would be frozen to a pillar of salt. Remember the shield of Perseus with the terrifying head of the gorgon as its centrepiece. But the hero is on the inner side of the shield and turns the terror outwards. This image is a very good description of the situation of the intelligentsia when it tries to protect itself in close combat with reality.
ENCKE: Do you mean we must shake off false security and live more dangerously?
SLOTERDIJK: Above all, we should think more consciously about danger. What lies ahead is a kind of gorgon-like enlighten- ment. We must decide to build a global immune system that opens up a common survival perspective. We have to work now on a pro- tective shield for the earth, for humankind and for its technological environment. That will require global ecological management. I call this co-immunism.
ENCKE: As at other points in your book, this is a word- play on communism. Is You Must Change Your Life a left-wing manifesto?
SLOTERDIJK: I am not envisaging a neo-communist project. Communism, as we know, tried to be a religion of conquest, like an atheist Islam, and to pull all industrialized nations into its orbit in an aggressive expansionist movement. What did the communists really want? To seize political power so as to institute extreme edu- cational dictatorships for immature populations. You have been warned against repetition. The movement postulated in my book doesn’t aim at forced conversion. We have to achieve everything voluntarily on the basis of good advice – or ‘assisted willingness’, if you like. That’s why I talk throughout the book about the life of practice and about shaping oneself by self-improvement.
ENCKE: You have a fairly positive image of human beings.
SLOTERDIJK: I start from a strong ontological thesis: intel- ligence exists. This leads to a strong ethical thesis: there is a positive correlation between intelligence and the will to self-preservation. Since Adorno, we have known that this correlation can be ques- tioned – that was the most promising idea of older Critical Theory. It started from the observation that intelligence can go in the wrong direction and confuse self-destruction with self-preservation. That is one of the unforgettable lessons of the twentieth century. What is on the agenda now is an affirmative theory of global co-immunity. It is the foundation of, and orientation for, the many and varied practices of shared survival.
ENCKE: Have you designed a utopia?
SLOTERDIJK: If you called this utopian it would make my hair
Even a God Can’t Save Us 231
stand on end! If you were right, I would belong to the tradition of mad men who wanted to make the world better. On the contrary, I thought I had demonstrated pragmatism, though admittedly with a dash of prophetic agitation.
28
A PLUG FOR HIGHER ENERGIES
Interview with Mateo Kries*6
KRIES: Mr Sloterdijk, the title of your book, Du mußt Dein Leben ändern [You Must Change Your Life] refers to Rainer Maria Rilke, a contemporary of Steiner. You preface the book with a quo- tation from Nietzsche that also made a great impact on Steiner, in which Nietzsche advocated the practising existence. Is your interest in Steiner connected with the life-reform movements at the begin- ning of the twentieth century?
SLOTERDIJK: Life reform was the major topic in the period around 1900. It was the alternative to the concept of revolution that had structured people’s consciousness of the possibility of trans- forming the world since 1789. It put the idea of non-political or supra-political transformation on the agenda. Life reformers such as Nietzsche and Steiner held the common view that it was pointless to carry on repeating political phrases and founding a new party in the back room of a pub. They thought it was much more important to rebuild one’s whole life from the smallest elements, as it were. They posed the question: how can we maintain human existence in a vertical tension that still does justice to the human being as a meta- physical animal? How can we create a pull from above, although the ladder on which people climb up can’t be leaned against anything up there any more, because the other side no longer exists? The
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Mateo Kries appeared under the title ‘Ein Stecker für höhere Energien’, in Die Welt newspaper (25 October 2011); available at: <http://www. welt. de/print/die_welt/kultur/ article13679318/Ein-Stecker- fuer-die-hoeheren-Energien. html>.
At the time of the interview Mateo Kries was chief curator at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein.
A Plug for Higher Energies 233
twentieth century ended with the recognition that the revolutionar- ies were wrong and the life reformers right. Meanwhile, fear of the gurutocracy, rule by gurus, has receded to some extent and today people are more willing to see Steiner as a quite normal genius rather than a guru.
KRIES: Still, we have to realize that Steiner vanished off the map from his death in 1925 to the end of the twentieth century, and was dismissed as a spiritual crank. Anthroposophy became fossilized, and that led to the whole movement being isolated. Steiner was associated with Kandinsky and Jawlensky, but in the succeeding decades his students only developed his radical aesthetics in minor ways. Wasn’t there some justification for the criticism of Steiner and anthroposophy?
SLOTERDIJK: The few followers of anthroposophy I knew in the 1960s to 1970s made an unpleasant impression. They went around as if they were imitating an angel who was practising how to stride like a human. Moreover, pop culture had long since made its mark on us, and the anthroposophists were still talking about their eurhythmics. In those days anthroposophy followers were out of pace with their surrounding culture, but they are catching up now. We have new grounds for asking what makes the movement relevant to the present day. One possible answer is that on a broad level we were no longer able to agree with the answers given by classical and contemporary philosophy to the question of the character of sub- jectivity. To some extent, Steiner made it possible to access human subjectivity in an upward direction. He found the plug for accessing higher energies that were normally banned from the conversations of middle-class society. That can’t fail to have consequences because it creates intellectual dissonance. Think of Gottfried Benn’s dictum: ‘In Germany philosophers who aren’t linguistically capable of expressing their world view tend to be called seers. ’
KRIES: The concept of the seer is appropriate because Steiner actually demanded that people should try to imagine seeing abstract- philosophical associations in pictures ‘before their eyes’. He made the famous blackboard drawings during his lectures.
SLOTERDIJK: In a sense, those blackboard drawings are the precursors of PowerPoint presentations. When he was speaking Steiner relied on the idea embracing him at the right moment – a theme that can be traced back to the heights of German idealism. Fichte, for example, made it unmistakably clear in his instructions to his students that the lecturer has to be open to the flash of illu- mination that may come while he is speaking. The concept of the medium is central for understanding the Steiner phenomenon. It partly explains the fascination that still emanates from his work and
234 A Plug for Higher Energies
personality today. People are increasingly realizing that a defini- tion of mediality based solely on machines and apparatuses is not enough. We have to return to the concept of the medium established in the nineteenth century, which is intricately interwoven with ghost sightings.
KRIES: How does that relate to Steiner in a modern-day context?
SLOTERDIJK: Personal mediums are people with antennae. Hugo Ball, a co-founder of Dadaism who experienced a spiritual change after 1918, wrote in an important essay at the time that the whole world had become a medium. Steiner had already realized that two decades earlier. His life curve ended at the moment when the process of the masses becoming the medium with the aid of popular broadcasting began. The first radio test broadcasts took place in 1923. Steiner died in 1925. By 1930, probably one in five of all German households owned a radio receiver. A new form of social synthesis via the ear emerged. Steiner had put out his antennae much more sensitively than everybody else who had been engaging in what has been called ‘discourse’ since Michel Foucault founded discourse theory. ‘Discourse’ literally means running to and fro, but not receiving live at the moment.
KRIES: Looking at Steiner in those major historical contexts, his death also coincided with the end of the earlier phase of modernism, the phase that was charged with expressionism. This was followed by the triumph of rationalism from the second half of the twenti- eth century on, and in the post-war period there was a pervasive longing for a middle-class mainstream in which there was no place for Steiner anyway. Artists like Sigmar Polke, who said, ‘Higher beings commanded: paint the top right-hand corner black! ’ were loners. It is only today that the social constellations seem to offer the conditions again for Polke’s oeuvre, with all its ramifications, to be located within the intellectual history of the modern age, and not as the work of a weird outsider. 1 Why do you think it took so long?
SLOTERDIJK: It may be due to another factor that co-determined the cycles of readability of Steiner’s work. I’m thinking of a theme that Helmut Lethen2 had already put on the agenda of the humani- ties twenty-five years ago: the ‘Birth of the Cool’ in the 1920s from the perspective of the history of ideas. In the 1920s, there was a cold snap in the intellectual sphere with quite a different impact from
1 Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) was a German painter and photographer known for his work in postmodernist realism.
2 Helmut Lethen is a Germanist and cultural scholar. He is director of the International Research Centre for Cultural Studies in Vienna.
A Plug for Higher Energies 235
that which Paul Valéry meant, for example, when he remarked with rather paternalistic Cartesian overtones that good intellect is ‘dry’. From the 1920s on, the motto was ‘Good intellect is cold’. If we extrapolate this position as a constant factor at work in the background character of twentieth-century culture, it is clear why a system like Steiner’s has always risked being marginalized. After all, in many ways it is the epitome of uncoolness. Coolness will have nothing to do with improving life and the world. As soon as a do- gooder enters the room, the coolness enthusiasts leave.
KRIES: Has that changed today?
SLOTERDIJK: Today’s zeitgeist allows more scope to specific forms of uncoolness again. Many years ago I read Nietzsche’s Zarathustra with my American students. I was afraid it would be too full of pathos for them. But they simply read the whole thing right through like a rap. They didn’t find it at all bombastic and overblown. They had no trouble reading Nietzsche’s extreme flights of rhapsodic style, which are difficult for people educated in old Europe, straight off the page.
KRIES: Your view may be confirmed if we look at particular tendencies in fashion today. In periods of almost overwhelming progress, the things that are really fashionable are those that look rather uncool and contradict the accelerated tempo – at the moment, heavy horn-rimmed glasses and knitted ties. But there are also other parallels to the present. Think of the many objects and build- ings with a polygonal and crystalline form, like certain designs by Steiner’s circle. At first these designs even seem to draw aesthetic inspiration from the molecular world, yet their heaviness and occa- sional clumsiness are reminiscent of the yearning for stability and solidity in an increasingly fast-moving age. Paul Virilio interpreted Steiner’s Goetheanum in the sense of his own bunker thesis as a space for protection against the temptations and risks of acceler- ated modernism. As decelerated architecture, so to speak. Do you agree?
SLOTERDIJK: In the first place I understand houses as immune systems in spatial form. On this definition we can ask what happens if the form really follows the function. What is the way to build when the immunitary imperative is at the beginning of a spatial creation? A house would then be envisaged beginning with its most intimate rooms and not with the splendid entrance hall. Good architects conceive the house starting from the bedrooms, whereas the modernists, who have brought the cold trend of the modern age into the home, have come up with weird proposals such as folding the bed up against the wall in the daytime.
KRIES: Steiner, on the other hand, designed a bed for his Haus
236 A Plug for Higher Energies
Duldeck that looks like a gigantic ocean steamer. It almost seems to swallow you with its curves and bumps . . .
SLOTERDIJK: One of the key words for understanding some of the more recent architectural tendencies is a word borrowed from English sociology, ‘embedding’. Given the ubiquitous, rampant tendency towards being mobile and dis-embedding, people are getting interested in foundational or embedding situations again. Embedding means that humans, as beings sensitive to spheres, want to understand space as space for immersion.
KRIES: The immersion always includes immersion in an endless intellectual cosmos. Steiner once said that if we could pull a human heart inside out we would get a universe. This can be applied to Steiner’s architecture and design. His interiors are the reverse of his intellectual cosmos. And to refer back to your image, he wanted to listen in to that cosmos. Is that, perhaps, one of the intersection points for Steiner’s artistic creations and his philosophical works?
SLOTERDIJK: In his case the two things are inextricably inter- woven. Steiner created a kind of antenna anthropology that we can’t simply do without any more, even if we have to rewrite every phrase of this doctrine. Since the dawn of the modern age, people actually have been listening in to the ether and want to know what is to be done. Martin Buber wrote in his book Mystische Zeugnisse aller Zeiten und Völker, published in 1906/07 – and this is very typical for the reception situation of early modernism – ‘We listen to our innermost selves – and do not know which sea we hear murmuring. ’3 Steiner had begun with a much more precise reception at that time. He spoke as if being dictated to, and apparently heard in the ether a mandate to attempt life reform that put people of our era on a new track. Now, 100 years later, after the twentieth century – a lost century from a spiritual perspective – we are standing on the same spot again.
Today, the phrase ‘You must change your life’ is no longer inter- preted only in terms of Buddhism, Christianity or Stoicism, or in Nietzsche’s sense, but as a mission to develop a form of life that makes human coexistence on this endangered planet possible. If you tune your antennae more finely you can hear this on all sides. Large numbers of people feel this very clearly, and Steiner is an ideal transmitter for this unavoidable message. He was important, and remains so, because he was one of the people who put out antennae even before the birth of radio.
3 Martin Buber, Mystical Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism, ed. Paul Mendes-Flor (New York: Syracuse University Press), 1996.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
29
MORTGAGING THE AIR The Financial Crisis
Conversation with Gabor Steingart and Torsten Riecke*4
STEINGART/RIECKE: Let’s start with the biggest question of all, the debt question: who is mainly responsible for the present mess in Europe? Is it the finance market systems impelled by greed, as you once put it, or the politicians dependent on their own promises? Or is it the citizens themselves, who always want more than they are prepared to pay for?
SLOTERDIJK: It may sound odd – and your question expresses it wonderfully – but today we are coming back from modern debts to classical ones. The question is: who is to blame for the debts? This implies there are obviously two ways people can be tied to a guilty past. The modern way is through debts. Financial debts are rather like sins we can be forgiven for by redeeming them ourselves – whereas moral debt has to be forgiven by others.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But it seems we can’t redeem our debts any more; we can only hope for forgiveness.
SLOTERDIJK: The old cloven hoof of religion has reappeared in the concept of debt in modern finance – from the moment, in fact, that the debts grew so big that the idea of redeeming them lost all credibility. The debt mechanism can work as long as there are
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk, Gabor Steingart and Torsten Riecke appeared under the title ‘Die Staaten verpfänden die Luft und Banken atmen tief durch’ [‘The Countries Pledge Air and Banks Take Deep Breaths’], in Handelsblatt magazine (17 December 2011).
Gabor Steingart is a German journalist and author. He was editor-in- chief of Handelsblatt from 2010 to 2012.
Torsten Riecke is a journalist and was head of the Opinion and Analysis section of Handelsblatt at the time of this interview.
238 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
people who seriously believe that a debtor is in a position (a) to pay off the whole loan amount, and (b) to pay the extra charge in the form of interest. Anybody who can credit something like that can become a creditor.
STEINGART/RIECKE: What you describe was the basis of eco- nomic behaviour in transactions in the past 200 years.
SLOTERDIJK: Much longer! A good example occurred in the sixteenth century: the wealthy tradesman Jakob Fugger had the Tyrolean prince give him the country’s silver mines as security, whereas a bungling relative from another branch of the family, Fugger vom Reh, accepted the city of Lüttich [Liège] as a deposit – but realized one morning that a city can’t be a deposit because it can’t be seized in foreclosure. To have trust you need to be smart about security.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But hasn’t the connection between guilt and debts been lost because in modern economic theory debts can’t be considered as guilt any more? Aren’t they regarded as invest- ments, and isn’t it therefore seen as a kind of basic right for present generations to help themselves to the putative treasures of future generations? The Americans call that a stimulus package. Nobody in modern credit capitalism thinks about redeeming debts any more.
SLOTERDIJK: Basically it’s a matter of cultivating a pathologi- cal relationship to the past. Crimes or sins are pathological – they bind perpetrators to what has happened by foreshadowing the suf- fering that will ensue later. Their crimes will catch up with them. The long arm of guilt that stretches out from the past to grab people in the present is represented mainly by credit in modern society. Credit, in turn, has to be tied to two stabilizing factors: first, the deposit, and, second, a state that guarantees foreclosure.
STEINGART/RIECKE: On that argument the cuckoo, not the German eagle, should represent the state.
SLOTERDIJK: It would generally be helpful if we talked less about a federal chancellor and more about a federal bailiff. The real semantic or juridical-moral centre of the body politic is located where legal enforcement is guaranteed. For a community that relies mainly on a credit-driven economy, the mechanism that assures credit by enforcement is the ultimate moral criterion. In other words, before we expect justice from the state we should be clear that the state, as guarantor of legal enforcement, has long since been at the heart of specifically modern transactions.
STEINGART/RIECKE: In Greece the creditors have realized that they have lent more than they can impound. Evidently they are not very smart about collateral either. For them it is like a replay of the Hans Fugger situation.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 239
SLOTERDIJK: We are reaching the point again where states are going to experience what happened to Fugger vom Reh. As we know, he dropped out of economic history, whereas the family line represented by Jakob the Wealthy prospered – due to collateral smartness. And that’s exactly what is missing today. Governments mortgage the air over their national territory and banks take deep breaths. This may lead to a European-wide disorientation of historical dimensions, possibly comparable with the massive moral- economic meltdown of 1922/23, the period of hyperinflation.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Since that period the Germans have been more traumatized than other nations, and even more deeply after the second hyperinflation after the end of the Second World War. Is this moral way of reflecting on the crisis typically German?
SLOTERDIJK: I would say that the German language is delight- fully German in this respect – it delivers these ideas to our doorstep. We shouldn’t criticize it for one of its merits, that of making it easy to understand connections that might otherwise remain obscure. Saying the words ‘debt’ and ‘guilt’ in English doesn’t clarify any- thing, and that particular play on words doesn’t work at all in the Romance languages. But if we consider the issue, we come to the same conclusions all round because it is always the knots that were tied in the past that bind the present to the past.
STEINGART/RIECKE: What you are saying is a curious way to provoke the people who coined the slogan ‘Occupy Wall Street’. They say, ‘Occupy’ or, even better, ‘Expropriate the creditors! ’ You argue back: ‘Creditors have a right to demand repayment of the debts on their books. ’ Is the protest against the banks simply a big mistake?
SLOTERDIJK: First of all, the debtor is always the guilty party, the party that owes something. Given this, it would be good to set up a lawyer’s office that specializes in reclaiming debts opposite every bank branch, to make the connection clear to people coming out of the bank with loans. The probability that a borrower will get into debt in the sense of owing both interest and the capital sum is constantly increasing. This makes us suspect the seriousness of the borrower’s intentions. Our confidence erodes fastest when the really big players turn out to be the most unscrupulous because they never seriously considered repaying the loans.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you mean the United States?
SLOTERDIJK: The Americans illustrate this very well: they have long since stopped thinking how to repay the national debt. Of course they talk about saving, but in today’s parlance that means reducing new borrowing. My grandmother interpreted the concept of saving very differently in her day.
240 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you mean the concept has become distorted?
SLOTERDIJK: Saving used to mean putting something aside. Today’s finance ministers use the word to applaud themselves when they make fewer new debts.
STEINGART/RIECKE: In other words, the banks stand acquitted?
SLOTERDIJK: Be careful! The banks as banks aren’t respon- sible for every mistake. First of all, for a society driven by money, honest belief in repayment is indispensable.
STEINGART/RIECKE: We could say that just an illusion of repayment would be worth a great deal. But even that is unreal in the case of Greece, as well as Japan and the USA.
SLOTERDIJK: Repayment illusion is a lovely name for a moral construct protected by the state – provided the state itself remains credible as a debtor. That is hardly the case today.
STEINGART/RIECKE: The illusion is fed by the fact that the debts are continually recycled. All the debtor nations pay their debts every few months with new debts.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s an idea Dante himself couldn’t have come up with. We should add a fourth part to his Divine Comedy. As we know, Dante conceived Purgatory as the purification system for venial – let’s say, redeemable – sins. They would be marked on the sinners’ brows with seven ‘P’s – even in the hell of purification everything important must be in writing. After every stage, one ‘P’ (for peccatum) would be erased, until the former sinner would stand there with a clear brow. No one in medieval times could imagine that charges from the past could be restructured. But that is exactly what would happen in the annexe to Purgatory. The drawback is that one would never get away completely from the past again and there would be no chance of being accepted into the sphere of heavenly joys.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Ludwig Erhard1 said that moderation was an integral part of the social market economy. Have we forgot- ten that?
SLOTERDIJK: Most people let their income determine their level of moderation. True, you can artificially boost your income with private credit, but income is the determining factor, and for the majority of people it is modest enough to ensure they don’t build castles in the air.
1 Ludwig Erhard (1897–1977) was a conservative German politician, Minister of Economics and architect of the 1960s ‘economic miracle’ in West Germany. He was Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1963 to 1966.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 241
STEINGART/RIECKE: The citizen, the ego, stays within limits. But the state, the ‘we’, isn’t able to?
SLOTERDIJK: One thing we should not forget in this situa- tion: the first half of the twentieth century was marked by so-called ‘system competition’. We had real existing socialism on the doorstep, that is, the communist command economy. The situation created enormous psycho-political pressure, especially here in Germany. It inspired the general social democratization of the West. In other words, comrade Stalin gave us the gift of the welfare state. But that competition had definitively ended even before the implosion of the Soviet Union. Margaret Thatcher knew what she was doing when she held out for over a year in the battle with the British miners.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But communism was still alive in her time.
SLOTERDIJK: It still existed as a system but no longer as a source of inspiration or a pervasive threat. By 1975, if not before, people had recognized that communism was a paper tiger, an empty threat. Back then, there were authors who seriously said: ‘Now is the moment to try out real existing capitalism for the first time. ’ Until then, there had never been pure capitalism. Instead there had been a mixed system, let’s say a worldwide relatively successful semi-socialism that had developed out of the systemic alternatives of social democracy versus Leninism. The removal of pressure from the Soviet Bloc engendered the neoliberal phase that is coming to an end today.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Going back to your concept of semi- socialism: have we possibly gone too far with system convergence? Socialism, as we know, was completely run down. The machines were worn out; the people, intellectual and spiritual life, and the buildings as well. But we in the West – contrary to what the left wing often claims – didn’t take from the rich and give to the poor; we took from creditors. Semi-socialism allied with the banks and got loans in the night to impress voters the following day. Haven’t we simply relocated the wear and tear in the future?
SLOTERDIJK: To a great extent, national debt is an indica- tor of a structural deficit of socialism in the community coffers. What can’t be obtained in the form of taxation is borrowed from irresponsible creditors. The social deficit expresses that precisely in the scale of national debt. In the era of flourishing Rhine capi- talism in Germany,2 the level of national debt was low because
2 ‘Rhine capitalism’ (sometimes called ‘social capitalism’) denotes the eco- nomic policies in Germany and other European countries in the 1980s at
242 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
semi-socialism functioned better under conservative governments. Ludwig Erhard’s social market economy rewrote this concept so resonantly that even conservatives liked it. In reality we have long been living in a fiscally organized semi-socialism integrated by the mass media and based on an interest-driven economy that many people call capitalism.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you mean it was not the ‘invisible hand of the market’ but the invisible hand of Stalin that gave us the social market economy?
SLOTERDIJK: Stalin’s hand certainly played a major role, and trade-union positions were much stronger at that time as well. Most of all, we had a completely different basic psycho-political situation back then: Almost everybody believed in ceaseless improvement. The real historical breach came at the moment when people in our part of the world found themselves looking not at a clear horizon but at a horizon that was cloudy, even menacing. In psycho-political terms that is the primary fact in the present-day West. In the past we could cultivate luxury pessimism: just remember the dying forests. In tune with that luxury pessimism we also had a hysterical, over-exaggerated attitude to the atomic threat. Nowadays realistic pessimism has the upper hand.
STEINGART/RIECKE: How do we get out of this mess of debt again? The neoliberal approach is politically discredited, and people are starting to believe in the strong state again. Are the left-wingers correct after all, as Frank Schirrmacher, editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has said?
SLOTERDIJK: Unfortunately, the left can’t be right because they haven’t introduced any new ideas into the debate. They only repeat washed-out slogans: ‘You must take it by violence from those who have. ’
STEINGART/RIECKE: The left responds to the debt ques- tion unambiguously by saying the banks are to blame – they have pumped us full of the debt drug like a dealer.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s like the cigarette smoker who gets a tumour and claims damages from Marlboro.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But who is supposed to liberate the state from the misery it created itself? In the end, doesn’t the money have to come from the rich?
SLOTERDIJK: That is the obvious conclusion. The money is there. The wealth is enormous. Nonetheless, from a psycho-political
the time of the ‘neo-American’ economics advocated by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 243
perspective, we have been cheering on the wrong side for centuries. We have seen redistribution as something that can be achieved either by murderous violence, as in Leninism, or by moderately gentle fiscal force as in the Western system. But that was done without reckoning with the citizens.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Will the rich give their money voluntarily?
SLOTERDIJK: You know, taxes are a wonderful instrument for testing the donor capability of different population strata. We have 40 million working people in employment in Germany. Around 16 million are exempt from direct taxes because of their low incomes. They are also not heavily involved in the VAT system because they spend a large part of their income on food, which has a VAT rate of only 7 per cent. It is nonsense to say, as we hear so often in the tax debate, that everybody pays the same amount of VAT. If we look at this pseudo-truth in detail we can see, of course, that the same people who top the list for paying VAT pay the lion’s share of income tax.
STEINGART/RIECKE: That is because some people can’t dis- tinguish between absolute and relative, and judge things on the basis of relative tax rates. The rates are relatively high for small incomes and the yield from them is low in absolute terms.
SLOTERDIJK: The so-called taxation experts don’t use their brains, which would tell them that the people who are more involved in the income-tax sphere because of their higher degree of consumption naturally also account for the greater part of the VAT returns, even if it’s true that VAT affects everybody. But the new idea is self-evident: on one hand we have a society with a very high level of private wealth and, on the other hand, massive public debt. The rich city of Bremen is a good example, because it is the German city with the biggest public debt. What are the results? A child could work it out.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you want to hit the wallets of left- wing professors in Bremen?
SLOTERDIJK: We must call on the strong with their strength, that’s right. But it shouldn’t be done any longer by using the method of confiscatory taxation. We finally have to restructure the whole sphere of public finance to become a matter of honour. In psycho- political terms this is a very ambitious manoeuvre, something that can easily take a hundred years. But we have to be clear about the historical dimensions of the problem. We believed that the problem of nobility was resolved from the time a large number of aristocrats had their heads chopped off in the French Revolution. But it is not resolved. The result of the French Revolution shouldn’t be that the
244 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
national population gets the right to behave like the mob. On the contrary, the common people should be raised to the rank of the aristocracy. I think we haven’t fully realized the superior kind of psycho-political tendencies of the French Revolution – whereas the liberation of the mob has been largely successful.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do we have the aristocratic idea innately as human beings?
SLOTERDIJK: The only people who have shown that public spirit can support the state in a casual way are the Swiss. To para- phrase O. W. Fischer in the film Helden:3 ‘No aristocratic title is more beautiful than the simple Swiss address, “Herr”. ’
STEINGART/RIECKE: Haven’t the modern Greeks taught us that the rich don’t pay voluntarily? In a way, Greece is living out the model of an abstinent country that demands taxes but doesn’t collect them.
SLOTERDIJK: The idea of the state hasn’t caught on at all in Greece. I get annoyed whenever people say Greece is the cradle of democracy. The real Greece is a psycho-political ruin in which 400 years of Turkish occupation left a residue of resignation, priva- tism, wisecrack attitudes and remoteness from the state. It reminds me of what Joseph de Maistre said about the Turks in Greece. (Incidentally, they had enough time to become Europeans while they remained on European soil for 400 years. But what happened? The Greeks became orientalized; they failed to Westernize the Turks – if they ever tried to. In those times, however, they didn’t know about the fairy story of the cradle of democracy. ) Remember De Maistre’s verdict on the Turks of that time: they remained Tartars camping on European soil.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Where is the cradle of democracy? In Paris?
SLOTERDIJK: More likely in Rome. Initially it wasn’t a ques- tion of democracy as a form of popular rule, it was more about the res publica, which is about having an open space in which people feel that the noblest thing anyone can do is to participate in shaping the body politic. And that was more to do with Roman philosophy of the state than the Greek heritage.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But how do we achieve the psycho- political change you are discussing and demanding, in which citizens give voluntarily, without the state collapsing?
3 Helden was the German version of the film Arms and the Man, starring O. W. Fischer (1958). The film was adapted from the play of the same name by George Bernard Shaw.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 245
SLOTERDIJK: There are two main possibilities: first, that human beings are asocial creatures by nature – as representatives of black anthropology from Thomas Hobbes to Adorno have told us – and only fear can force them into coexistence. Think of Schopenhauer: bourgeois society resembles a group of freezing porcupines that huddle together for warmth and can only hurt each other. These images are enough to substantiate the pessimism of black anthro- pology. But there is another track. If we consult the works of the ‘moral sense’ philosophers that gave rise to political economy, the works of the Scots, of Adam Smith and of Lord Shaftesbury, one of the most wonderful figures in European intellectual history, we get a completely different picture. Shaftesbury taught and practised an enthusiastic attitude to sociability.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Wilhelm Röpke, the author of Jenseits von Angebot und Nachfrage,4 also had a view of humankind that regarded capitalists as more than just monsters and the state as more than merely an auxiliary machine.
SLOTERDIJK: Convivial philosophers assume that human beings are creatures that feel well in company. Human beings like seeing their reflection in the eyes of others and are full of empathetic virtues. The main thesis here is that concern is first nature to us and bourgeois coldness is only acquired with additional educa- tion through whole epochs of negative dressage. Philosophers then plump up the results into dark anthropological theories.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Because we have redacted empathy away.
SLOTERDIJK: Still, empathy is the basic given factor. Everything else is more of an acquired vice. I want briefly to point out one thing: people in a fiscal democracy in which there are still elements left over from absolutism are accustomed to being called on as donors anyway. They wouldn’t suffer any more than they do now if we introduced a new official term for channelling public emo- tions, stating that from today, everything we pay into the communal coffers is not called ‘taxes’ but ‘donations’ from citizens. That they are now called donations doesn’t alter their obligatory character. That was, by the way, the starting point taken for the almost totally ignorant debates on my theses that shocked the German cultural press two years ago. Many of the people who voiced their opin- ions had not read Marcel Mauss; it was he who pointed out that
4 Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market (Chicago: Henry Regner), 1960.
246 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
donations involve a curious unity of duty and voluntariness. 5 His theory about the dual nature of donations contains everything one needs to know to see the plausibility of switching from confiscation to donation as the way to fill the communal coffers. Incidentally, Mauss was a socialist and he knew what he was talking about. The spontaneity of donations doesn’t eliminate their obligatory character – that doesn’t occur to a convinced étatist and fiscalist. An alternative interpretation of social relations can only emerge from the idea that the whole society functions in donor streams and will no longer be animated by the tax burden.
STEINGART/RIECKE: So far your ideas haven’t found many supporters. Taking seems more blessed to us than giving.
SLOTERDIJK: The German Social Democrats have just dis- cussed increasing taxation again at their party conference. What they didn’t want to understand is that in recent years in America the initiative called ‘The Giving Pledge’ has begun turning billion- aires into social democrats. Social democracy lives from the simple formula: ‘half for the communal budget’. Warren Buffet’s words rang in my ears because he and his fellow campaigners seem to be aware of precisely that figure. Apparently, the 50 per cent logic has found its place in the minds of American billionaires. Meanwhile, here in Germany all those flatfooted psychologists are lumbering around and still using the language of threats when tax increases are up for discussion.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Is Warren Buffett your hero rather than Sigmar Gabriel? 6
SLOTERDIJK: I think Sigmar Gabriel is able to learn.
SLOTERDIJK: In the present case there isn’t a complete alterna- tive between cynical and naïve. Twenty-five years ago, when I wrote Critique of Cynical Reason, I tried to squeeze the whole typology of the intellectual field into these two alternatives: either people are naïve, in which case they are too close to the problems, or they are cynical, which means they are too indifferent to the problems.
3 Sloterdijk is referring to the case of Josef Fritzl, a man from Amstetten in Austria who imprisoned one of his daughters for twenty-four years and repeatedly raped her. She bore seven children by him. The crime was dis- covered in 2008.
Even a God Can’t Save Us 229
Today we need a third position. I’m talking about people who are neither cynical nor naïve.
ENCKE: You mean people who deconstruct everything to keep the world at bay?
SLOTERDIJK: Deconstructivism has become plausible partly because modernism has produced too many embarrassingly naïve forms of world salvation. The social catastrophes of the twentieth century stemmed from ideologies formulated by certain semi-vision- ary people who solved the mystery of the world with grand prophetic gestures. Whether private property or subversive Judaism was blamed for all evils – the deconstructive attitude was always justified in opposition to seductive, primitive formulas.
ENCKE: But that isn’t enough any more?
SLOTERDIJK: Richard Rorty4 once described his colleagues in the philosophical and humanities departments somewhat bitterly as ‘detached cosmopolitan spectators’. What he meant is: you talk about the crisis as if it were an opera production. At most we stand on the periphery looking at the catastrophes through opera glasses, without understanding that many disasters that occur today not only contain their own inherent harmful aspect, but also have a sig- nifying quality for our future.
ENCKE: What do you mean by a ‘signifying quality’?
SLOTERDIJK: Hans Jonas and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker had already raised the issue of ‘warning catastrophes’ back in the 1980s. 5 They meant that humankind receives warnings from the real world that have to be decoded and translated into the behaviour of individuals and institutions. That’s exactly what people who are satisfied with the role of detached cosmopolitan theatregoers can’t do.
ENCKE: Don’t we also use an opera glass for protection? If people are really confronted with that degree of real threat, it can make them incapable of acting, and can drive them to suicide in extreme cases. People are creatures that need protection.
SLOTERDIJK: For 3,000 years the avant-garde of humankind has lived in this situation: that they see something overpowering and the intelligentsia shivers. It seems to me the concept of ‘God’ was one of the strongest protective shields. For an aeon, humans
4 Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was an American philosopher and comparatist.
5 Hans Jonas (1903–93) was a German-born American philosopher who was a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912–2007) was a German physicist, philosopher and expert on peace studies.
230 Even a God Can’t Save Us
retreated behind it to defend themselves from the monster. Anyone who saw the outer side of the shield would be frozen to a pillar of salt. Remember the shield of Perseus with the terrifying head of the gorgon as its centrepiece. But the hero is on the inner side of the shield and turns the terror outwards. This image is a very good description of the situation of the intelligentsia when it tries to protect itself in close combat with reality.
ENCKE: Do you mean we must shake off false security and live more dangerously?
SLOTERDIJK: Above all, we should think more consciously about danger. What lies ahead is a kind of gorgon-like enlighten- ment. We must decide to build a global immune system that opens up a common survival perspective. We have to work now on a pro- tective shield for the earth, for humankind and for its technological environment. That will require global ecological management. I call this co-immunism.
ENCKE: As at other points in your book, this is a word- play on communism. Is You Must Change Your Life a left-wing manifesto?
SLOTERDIJK: I am not envisaging a neo-communist project. Communism, as we know, tried to be a religion of conquest, like an atheist Islam, and to pull all industrialized nations into its orbit in an aggressive expansionist movement. What did the communists really want? To seize political power so as to institute extreme edu- cational dictatorships for immature populations. You have been warned against repetition. The movement postulated in my book doesn’t aim at forced conversion. We have to achieve everything voluntarily on the basis of good advice – or ‘assisted willingness’, if you like. That’s why I talk throughout the book about the life of practice and about shaping oneself by self-improvement.
ENCKE: You have a fairly positive image of human beings.
SLOTERDIJK: I start from a strong ontological thesis: intel- ligence exists. This leads to a strong ethical thesis: there is a positive correlation between intelligence and the will to self-preservation. Since Adorno, we have known that this correlation can be ques- tioned – that was the most promising idea of older Critical Theory. It started from the observation that intelligence can go in the wrong direction and confuse self-destruction with self-preservation. That is one of the unforgettable lessons of the twentieth century. What is on the agenda now is an affirmative theory of global co-immunity. It is the foundation of, and orientation for, the many and varied practices of shared survival.
ENCKE: Have you designed a utopia?
SLOTERDIJK: If you called this utopian it would make my hair
Even a God Can’t Save Us 231
stand on end! If you were right, I would belong to the tradition of mad men who wanted to make the world better. On the contrary, I thought I had demonstrated pragmatism, though admittedly with a dash of prophetic agitation.
28
A PLUG FOR HIGHER ENERGIES
Interview with Mateo Kries*6
KRIES: Mr Sloterdijk, the title of your book, Du mußt Dein Leben ändern [You Must Change Your Life] refers to Rainer Maria Rilke, a contemporary of Steiner. You preface the book with a quo- tation from Nietzsche that also made a great impact on Steiner, in which Nietzsche advocated the practising existence. Is your interest in Steiner connected with the life-reform movements at the begin- ning of the twentieth century?
SLOTERDIJK: Life reform was the major topic in the period around 1900. It was the alternative to the concept of revolution that had structured people’s consciousness of the possibility of trans- forming the world since 1789. It put the idea of non-political or supra-political transformation on the agenda. Life reformers such as Nietzsche and Steiner held the common view that it was pointless to carry on repeating political phrases and founding a new party in the back room of a pub. They thought it was much more important to rebuild one’s whole life from the smallest elements, as it were. They posed the question: how can we maintain human existence in a vertical tension that still does justice to the human being as a meta- physical animal? How can we create a pull from above, although the ladder on which people climb up can’t be leaned against anything up there any more, because the other side no longer exists? The
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Mateo Kries appeared under the title ‘Ein Stecker für höhere Energien’, in Die Welt newspaper (25 October 2011); available at: <http://www. welt. de/print/die_welt/kultur/ article13679318/Ein-Stecker- fuer-die-hoeheren-Energien. html>.
At the time of the interview Mateo Kries was chief curator at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein.
A Plug for Higher Energies 233
twentieth century ended with the recognition that the revolutionar- ies were wrong and the life reformers right. Meanwhile, fear of the gurutocracy, rule by gurus, has receded to some extent and today people are more willing to see Steiner as a quite normal genius rather than a guru.
KRIES: Still, we have to realize that Steiner vanished off the map from his death in 1925 to the end of the twentieth century, and was dismissed as a spiritual crank. Anthroposophy became fossilized, and that led to the whole movement being isolated. Steiner was associated with Kandinsky and Jawlensky, but in the succeeding decades his students only developed his radical aesthetics in minor ways. Wasn’t there some justification for the criticism of Steiner and anthroposophy?
SLOTERDIJK: The few followers of anthroposophy I knew in the 1960s to 1970s made an unpleasant impression. They went around as if they were imitating an angel who was practising how to stride like a human. Moreover, pop culture had long since made its mark on us, and the anthroposophists were still talking about their eurhythmics. In those days anthroposophy followers were out of pace with their surrounding culture, but they are catching up now. We have new grounds for asking what makes the movement relevant to the present day. One possible answer is that on a broad level we were no longer able to agree with the answers given by classical and contemporary philosophy to the question of the character of sub- jectivity. To some extent, Steiner made it possible to access human subjectivity in an upward direction. He found the plug for accessing higher energies that were normally banned from the conversations of middle-class society. That can’t fail to have consequences because it creates intellectual dissonance. Think of Gottfried Benn’s dictum: ‘In Germany philosophers who aren’t linguistically capable of expressing their world view tend to be called seers. ’
KRIES: The concept of the seer is appropriate because Steiner actually demanded that people should try to imagine seeing abstract- philosophical associations in pictures ‘before their eyes’. He made the famous blackboard drawings during his lectures.
SLOTERDIJK: In a sense, those blackboard drawings are the precursors of PowerPoint presentations. When he was speaking Steiner relied on the idea embracing him at the right moment – a theme that can be traced back to the heights of German idealism. Fichte, for example, made it unmistakably clear in his instructions to his students that the lecturer has to be open to the flash of illu- mination that may come while he is speaking. The concept of the medium is central for understanding the Steiner phenomenon. It partly explains the fascination that still emanates from his work and
234 A Plug for Higher Energies
personality today. People are increasingly realizing that a defini- tion of mediality based solely on machines and apparatuses is not enough. We have to return to the concept of the medium established in the nineteenth century, which is intricately interwoven with ghost sightings.
KRIES: How does that relate to Steiner in a modern-day context?
SLOTERDIJK: Personal mediums are people with antennae. Hugo Ball, a co-founder of Dadaism who experienced a spiritual change after 1918, wrote in an important essay at the time that the whole world had become a medium. Steiner had already realized that two decades earlier. His life curve ended at the moment when the process of the masses becoming the medium with the aid of popular broadcasting began. The first radio test broadcasts took place in 1923. Steiner died in 1925. By 1930, probably one in five of all German households owned a radio receiver. A new form of social synthesis via the ear emerged. Steiner had put out his antennae much more sensitively than everybody else who had been engaging in what has been called ‘discourse’ since Michel Foucault founded discourse theory. ‘Discourse’ literally means running to and fro, but not receiving live at the moment.
KRIES: Looking at Steiner in those major historical contexts, his death also coincided with the end of the earlier phase of modernism, the phase that was charged with expressionism. This was followed by the triumph of rationalism from the second half of the twenti- eth century on, and in the post-war period there was a pervasive longing for a middle-class mainstream in which there was no place for Steiner anyway. Artists like Sigmar Polke, who said, ‘Higher beings commanded: paint the top right-hand corner black! ’ were loners. It is only today that the social constellations seem to offer the conditions again for Polke’s oeuvre, with all its ramifications, to be located within the intellectual history of the modern age, and not as the work of a weird outsider. 1 Why do you think it took so long?
SLOTERDIJK: It may be due to another factor that co-determined the cycles of readability of Steiner’s work. I’m thinking of a theme that Helmut Lethen2 had already put on the agenda of the humani- ties twenty-five years ago: the ‘Birth of the Cool’ in the 1920s from the perspective of the history of ideas. In the 1920s, there was a cold snap in the intellectual sphere with quite a different impact from
1 Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) was a German painter and photographer known for his work in postmodernist realism.
2 Helmut Lethen is a Germanist and cultural scholar. He is director of the International Research Centre for Cultural Studies in Vienna.
A Plug for Higher Energies 235
that which Paul Valéry meant, for example, when he remarked with rather paternalistic Cartesian overtones that good intellect is ‘dry’. From the 1920s on, the motto was ‘Good intellect is cold’. If we extrapolate this position as a constant factor at work in the background character of twentieth-century culture, it is clear why a system like Steiner’s has always risked being marginalized. After all, in many ways it is the epitome of uncoolness. Coolness will have nothing to do with improving life and the world. As soon as a do- gooder enters the room, the coolness enthusiasts leave.
KRIES: Has that changed today?
SLOTERDIJK: Today’s zeitgeist allows more scope to specific forms of uncoolness again. Many years ago I read Nietzsche’s Zarathustra with my American students. I was afraid it would be too full of pathos for them. But they simply read the whole thing right through like a rap. They didn’t find it at all bombastic and overblown. They had no trouble reading Nietzsche’s extreme flights of rhapsodic style, which are difficult for people educated in old Europe, straight off the page.
KRIES: Your view may be confirmed if we look at particular tendencies in fashion today. In periods of almost overwhelming progress, the things that are really fashionable are those that look rather uncool and contradict the accelerated tempo – at the moment, heavy horn-rimmed glasses and knitted ties. But there are also other parallels to the present. Think of the many objects and build- ings with a polygonal and crystalline form, like certain designs by Steiner’s circle. At first these designs even seem to draw aesthetic inspiration from the molecular world, yet their heaviness and occa- sional clumsiness are reminiscent of the yearning for stability and solidity in an increasingly fast-moving age. Paul Virilio interpreted Steiner’s Goetheanum in the sense of his own bunker thesis as a space for protection against the temptations and risks of acceler- ated modernism. As decelerated architecture, so to speak. Do you agree?
SLOTERDIJK: In the first place I understand houses as immune systems in spatial form. On this definition we can ask what happens if the form really follows the function. What is the way to build when the immunitary imperative is at the beginning of a spatial creation? A house would then be envisaged beginning with its most intimate rooms and not with the splendid entrance hall. Good architects conceive the house starting from the bedrooms, whereas the modernists, who have brought the cold trend of the modern age into the home, have come up with weird proposals such as folding the bed up against the wall in the daytime.
KRIES: Steiner, on the other hand, designed a bed for his Haus
236 A Plug for Higher Energies
Duldeck that looks like a gigantic ocean steamer. It almost seems to swallow you with its curves and bumps . . .
SLOTERDIJK: One of the key words for understanding some of the more recent architectural tendencies is a word borrowed from English sociology, ‘embedding’. Given the ubiquitous, rampant tendency towards being mobile and dis-embedding, people are getting interested in foundational or embedding situations again. Embedding means that humans, as beings sensitive to spheres, want to understand space as space for immersion.
KRIES: The immersion always includes immersion in an endless intellectual cosmos. Steiner once said that if we could pull a human heart inside out we would get a universe. This can be applied to Steiner’s architecture and design. His interiors are the reverse of his intellectual cosmos. And to refer back to your image, he wanted to listen in to that cosmos. Is that, perhaps, one of the intersection points for Steiner’s artistic creations and his philosophical works?
SLOTERDIJK: In his case the two things are inextricably inter- woven. Steiner created a kind of antenna anthropology that we can’t simply do without any more, even if we have to rewrite every phrase of this doctrine. Since the dawn of the modern age, people actually have been listening in to the ether and want to know what is to be done. Martin Buber wrote in his book Mystische Zeugnisse aller Zeiten und Völker, published in 1906/07 – and this is very typical for the reception situation of early modernism – ‘We listen to our innermost selves – and do not know which sea we hear murmuring. ’3 Steiner had begun with a much more precise reception at that time. He spoke as if being dictated to, and apparently heard in the ether a mandate to attempt life reform that put people of our era on a new track. Now, 100 years later, after the twentieth century – a lost century from a spiritual perspective – we are standing on the same spot again.
Today, the phrase ‘You must change your life’ is no longer inter- preted only in terms of Buddhism, Christianity or Stoicism, or in Nietzsche’s sense, but as a mission to develop a form of life that makes human coexistence on this endangered planet possible. If you tune your antennae more finely you can hear this on all sides. Large numbers of people feel this very clearly, and Steiner is an ideal transmitter for this unavoidable message. He was important, and remains so, because he was one of the people who put out antennae even before the birth of radio.
3 Martin Buber, Mystical Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism, ed. Paul Mendes-Flor (New York: Syracuse University Press), 1996.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
29
MORTGAGING THE AIR The Financial Crisis
Conversation with Gabor Steingart and Torsten Riecke*4
STEINGART/RIECKE: Let’s start with the biggest question of all, the debt question: who is mainly responsible for the present mess in Europe? Is it the finance market systems impelled by greed, as you once put it, or the politicians dependent on their own promises? Or is it the citizens themselves, who always want more than they are prepared to pay for?
SLOTERDIJK: It may sound odd – and your question expresses it wonderfully – but today we are coming back from modern debts to classical ones. The question is: who is to blame for the debts? This implies there are obviously two ways people can be tied to a guilty past. The modern way is through debts. Financial debts are rather like sins we can be forgiven for by redeeming them ourselves – whereas moral debt has to be forgiven by others.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But it seems we can’t redeem our debts any more; we can only hope for forgiveness.
SLOTERDIJK: The old cloven hoof of religion has reappeared in the concept of debt in modern finance – from the moment, in fact, that the debts grew so big that the idea of redeeming them lost all credibility. The debt mechanism can work as long as there are
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk, Gabor Steingart and Torsten Riecke appeared under the title ‘Die Staaten verpfänden die Luft und Banken atmen tief durch’ [‘The Countries Pledge Air and Banks Take Deep Breaths’], in Handelsblatt magazine (17 December 2011).
Gabor Steingart is a German journalist and author. He was editor-in- chief of Handelsblatt from 2010 to 2012.
Torsten Riecke is a journalist and was head of the Opinion and Analysis section of Handelsblatt at the time of this interview.
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people who seriously believe that a debtor is in a position (a) to pay off the whole loan amount, and (b) to pay the extra charge in the form of interest. Anybody who can credit something like that can become a creditor.
STEINGART/RIECKE: What you describe was the basis of eco- nomic behaviour in transactions in the past 200 years.
SLOTERDIJK: Much longer! A good example occurred in the sixteenth century: the wealthy tradesman Jakob Fugger had the Tyrolean prince give him the country’s silver mines as security, whereas a bungling relative from another branch of the family, Fugger vom Reh, accepted the city of Lüttich [Liège] as a deposit – but realized one morning that a city can’t be a deposit because it can’t be seized in foreclosure. To have trust you need to be smart about security.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But hasn’t the connection between guilt and debts been lost because in modern economic theory debts can’t be considered as guilt any more? Aren’t they regarded as invest- ments, and isn’t it therefore seen as a kind of basic right for present generations to help themselves to the putative treasures of future generations? The Americans call that a stimulus package. Nobody in modern credit capitalism thinks about redeeming debts any more.
SLOTERDIJK: Basically it’s a matter of cultivating a pathologi- cal relationship to the past. Crimes or sins are pathological – they bind perpetrators to what has happened by foreshadowing the suf- fering that will ensue later. Their crimes will catch up with them. The long arm of guilt that stretches out from the past to grab people in the present is represented mainly by credit in modern society. Credit, in turn, has to be tied to two stabilizing factors: first, the deposit, and, second, a state that guarantees foreclosure.
STEINGART/RIECKE: On that argument the cuckoo, not the German eagle, should represent the state.
SLOTERDIJK: It would generally be helpful if we talked less about a federal chancellor and more about a federal bailiff. The real semantic or juridical-moral centre of the body politic is located where legal enforcement is guaranteed. For a community that relies mainly on a credit-driven economy, the mechanism that assures credit by enforcement is the ultimate moral criterion. In other words, before we expect justice from the state we should be clear that the state, as guarantor of legal enforcement, has long since been at the heart of specifically modern transactions.
STEINGART/RIECKE: In Greece the creditors have realized that they have lent more than they can impound. Evidently they are not very smart about collateral either. For them it is like a replay of the Hans Fugger situation.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 239
SLOTERDIJK: We are reaching the point again where states are going to experience what happened to Fugger vom Reh. As we know, he dropped out of economic history, whereas the family line represented by Jakob the Wealthy prospered – due to collateral smartness. And that’s exactly what is missing today. Governments mortgage the air over their national territory and banks take deep breaths. This may lead to a European-wide disorientation of historical dimensions, possibly comparable with the massive moral- economic meltdown of 1922/23, the period of hyperinflation.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Since that period the Germans have been more traumatized than other nations, and even more deeply after the second hyperinflation after the end of the Second World War. Is this moral way of reflecting on the crisis typically German?
SLOTERDIJK: I would say that the German language is delight- fully German in this respect – it delivers these ideas to our doorstep. We shouldn’t criticize it for one of its merits, that of making it easy to understand connections that might otherwise remain obscure. Saying the words ‘debt’ and ‘guilt’ in English doesn’t clarify any- thing, and that particular play on words doesn’t work at all in the Romance languages. But if we consider the issue, we come to the same conclusions all round because it is always the knots that were tied in the past that bind the present to the past.
STEINGART/RIECKE: What you are saying is a curious way to provoke the people who coined the slogan ‘Occupy Wall Street’. They say, ‘Occupy’ or, even better, ‘Expropriate the creditors! ’ You argue back: ‘Creditors have a right to demand repayment of the debts on their books. ’ Is the protest against the banks simply a big mistake?
SLOTERDIJK: First of all, the debtor is always the guilty party, the party that owes something. Given this, it would be good to set up a lawyer’s office that specializes in reclaiming debts opposite every bank branch, to make the connection clear to people coming out of the bank with loans. The probability that a borrower will get into debt in the sense of owing both interest and the capital sum is constantly increasing. This makes us suspect the seriousness of the borrower’s intentions. Our confidence erodes fastest when the really big players turn out to be the most unscrupulous because they never seriously considered repaying the loans.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you mean the United States?
SLOTERDIJK: The Americans illustrate this very well: they have long since stopped thinking how to repay the national debt. Of course they talk about saving, but in today’s parlance that means reducing new borrowing. My grandmother interpreted the concept of saving very differently in her day.
240 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you mean the concept has become distorted?
SLOTERDIJK: Saving used to mean putting something aside. Today’s finance ministers use the word to applaud themselves when they make fewer new debts.
STEINGART/RIECKE: In other words, the banks stand acquitted?
SLOTERDIJK: Be careful! The banks as banks aren’t respon- sible for every mistake. First of all, for a society driven by money, honest belief in repayment is indispensable.
STEINGART/RIECKE: We could say that just an illusion of repayment would be worth a great deal. But even that is unreal in the case of Greece, as well as Japan and the USA.
SLOTERDIJK: Repayment illusion is a lovely name for a moral construct protected by the state – provided the state itself remains credible as a debtor. That is hardly the case today.
STEINGART/RIECKE: The illusion is fed by the fact that the debts are continually recycled. All the debtor nations pay their debts every few months with new debts.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s an idea Dante himself couldn’t have come up with. We should add a fourth part to his Divine Comedy. As we know, Dante conceived Purgatory as the purification system for venial – let’s say, redeemable – sins. They would be marked on the sinners’ brows with seven ‘P’s – even in the hell of purification everything important must be in writing. After every stage, one ‘P’ (for peccatum) would be erased, until the former sinner would stand there with a clear brow. No one in medieval times could imagine that charges from the past could be restructured. But that is exactly what would happen in the annexe to Purgatory. The drawback is that one would never get away completely from the past again and there would be no chance of being accepted into the sphere of heavenly joys.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Ludwig Erhard1 said that moderation was an integral part of the social market economy. Have we forgot- ten that?
SLOTERDIJK: Most people let their income determine their level of moderation. True, you can artificially boost your income with private credit, but income is the determining factor, and for the majority of people it is modest enough to ensure they don’t build castles in the air.
1 Ludwig Erhard (1897–1977) was a conservative German politician, Minister of Economics and architect of the 1960s ‘economic miracle’ in West Germany. He was Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1963 to 1966.
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STEINGART/RIECKE: The citizen, the ego, stays within limits. But the state, the ‘we’, isn’t able to?
SLOTERDIJK: One thing we should not forget in this situa- tion: the first half of the twentieth century was marked by so-called ‘system competition’. We had real existing socialism on the doorstep, that is, the communist command economy. The situation created enormous psycho-political pressure, especially here in Germany. It inspired the general social democratization of the West. In other words, comrade Stalin gave us the gift of the welfare state. But that competition had definitively ended even before the implosion of the Soviet Union. Margaret Thatcher knew what she was doing when she held out for over a year in the battle with the British miners.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But communism was still alive in her time.
SLOTERDIJK: It still existed as a system but no longer as a source of inspiration or a pervasive threat. By 1975, if not before, people had recognized that communism was a paper tiger, an empty threat. Back then, there were authors who seriously said: ‘Now is the moment to try out real existing capitalism for the first time. ’ Until then, there had never been pure capitalism. Instead there had been a mixed system, let’s say a worldwide relatively successful semi-socialism that had developed out of the systemic alternatives of social democracy versus Leninism. The removal of pressure from the Soviet Bloc engendered the neoliberal phase that is coming to an end today.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Going back to your concept of semi- socialism: have we possibly gone too far with system convergence? Socialism, as we know, was completely run down. The machines were worn out; the people, intellectual and spiritual life, and the buildings as well. But we in the West – contrary to what the left wing often claims – didn’t take from the rich and give to the poor; we took from creditors. Semi-socialism allied with the banks and got loans in the night to impress voters the following day. Haven’t we simply relocated the wear and tear in the future?
SLOTERDIJK: To a great extent, national debt is an indica- tor of a structural deficit of socialism in the community coffers. What can’t be obtained in the form of taxation is borrowed from irresponsible creditors. The social deficit expresses that precisely in the scale of national debt. In the era of flourishing Rhine capi- talism in Germany,2 the level of national debt was low because
2 ‘Rhine capitalism’ (sometimes called ‘social capitalism’) denotes the eco- nomic policies in Germany and other European countries in the 1980s at
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semi-socialism functioned better under conservative governments. Ludwig Erhard’s social market economy rewrote this concept so resonantly that even conservatives liked it. In reality we have long been living in a fiscally organized semi-socialism integrated by the mass media and based on an interest-driven economy that many people call capitalism.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you mean it was not the ‘invisible hand of the market’ but the invisible hand of Stalin that gave us the social market economy?
SLOTERDIJK: Stalin’s hand certainly played a major role, and trade-union positions were much stronger at that time as well. Most of all, we had a completely different basic psycho-political situation back then: Almost everybody believed in ceaseless improvement. The real historical breach came at the moment when people in our part of the world found themselves looking not at a clear horizon but at a horizon that was cloudy, even menacing. In psycho-political terms that is the primary fact in the present-day West. In the past we could cultivate luxury pessimism: just remember the dying forests. In tune with that luxury pessimism we also had a hysterical, over-exaggerated attitude to the atomic threat. Nowadays realistic pessimism has the upper hand.
STEINGART/RIECKE: How do we get out of this mess of debt again? The neoliberal approach is politically discredited, and people are starting to believe in the strong state again. Are the left-wingers correct after all, as Frank Schirrmacher, editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has said?
SLOTERDIJK: Unfortunately, the left can’t be right because they haven’t introduced any new ideas into the debate. They only repeat washed-out slogans: ‘You must take it by violence from those who have. ’
STEINGART/RIECKE: The left responds to the debt ques- tion unambiguously by saying the banks are to blame – they have pumped us full of the debt drug like a dealer.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s like the cigarette smoker who gets a tumour and claims damages from Marlboro.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But who is supposed to liberate the state from the misery it created itself? In the end, doesn’t the money have to come from the rich?
SLOTERDIJK: That is the obvious conclusion. The money is there. The wealth is enormous. Nonetheless, from a psycho-political
the time of the ‘neo-American’ economics advocated by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
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perspective, we have been cheering on the wrong side for centuries. We have seen redistribution as something that can be achieved either by murderous violence, as in Leninism, or by moderately gentle fiscal force as in the Western system. But that was done without reckoning with the citizens.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Will the rich give their money voluntarily?
SLOTERDIJK: You know, taxes are a wonderful instrument for testing the donor capability of different population strata. We have 40 million working people in employment in Germany. Around 16 million are exempt from direct taxes because of their low incomes. They are also not heavily involved in the VAT system because they spend a large part of their income on food, which has a VAT rate of only 7 per cent. It is nonsense to say, as we hear so often in the tax debate, that everybody pays the same amount of VAT. If we look at this pseudo-truth in detail we can see, of course, that the same people who top the list for paying VAT pay the lion’s share of income tax.
STEINGART/RIECKE: That is because some people can’t dis- tinguish between absolute and relative, and judge things on the basis of relative tax rates. The rates are relatively high for small incomes and the yield from them is low in absolute terms.
SLOTERDIJK: The so-called taxation experts don’t use their brains, which would tell them that the people who are more involved in the income-tax sphere because of their higher degree of consumption naturally also account for the greater part of the VAT returns, even if it’s true that VAT affects everybody. But the new idea is self-evident: on one hand we have a society with a very high level of private wealth and, on the other hand, massive public debt. The rich city of Bremen is a good example, because it is the German city with the biggest public debt. What are the results? A child could work it out.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you want to hit the wallets of left- wing professors in Bremen?
SLOTERDIJK: We must call on the strong with their strength, that’s right. But it shouldn’t be done any longer by using the method of confiscatory taxation. We finally have to restructure the whole sphere of public finance to become a matter of honour. In psycho- political terms this is a very ambitious manoeuvre, something that can easily take a hundred years. But we have to be clear about the historical dimensions of the problem. We believed that the problem of nobility was resolved from the time a large number of aristocrats had their heads chopped off in the French Revolution. But it is not resolved. The result of the French Revolution shouldn’t be that the
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national population gets the right to behave like the mob. On the contrary, the common people should be raised to the rank of the aristocracy. I think we haven’t fully realized the superior kind of psycho-political tendencies of the French Revolution – whereas the liberation of the mob has been largely successful.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do we have the aristocratic idea innately as human beings?
SLOTERDIJK: The only people who have shown that public spirit can support the state in a casual way are the Swiss. To para- phrase O. W. Fischer in the film Helden:3 ‘No aristocratic title is more beautiful than the simple Swiss address, “Herr”. ’
STEINGART/RIECKE: Haven’t the modern Greeks taught us that the rich don’t pay voluntarily? In a way, Greece is living out the model of an abstinent country that demands taxes but doesn’t collect them.
SLOTERDIJK: The idea of the state hasn’t caught on at all in Greece. I get annoyed whenever people say Greece is the cradle of democracy. The real Greece is a psycho-political ruin in which 400 years of Turkish occupation left a residue of resignation, priva- tism, wisecrack attitudes and remoteness from the state. It reminds me of what Joseph de Maistre said about the Turks in Greece. (Incidentally, they had enough time to become Europeans while they remained on European soil for 400 years. But what happened? The Greeks became orientalized; they failed to Westernize the Turks – if they ever tried to. In those times, however, they didn’t know about the fairy story of the cradle of democracy. ) Remember De Maistre’s verdict on the Turks of that time: they remained Tartars camping on European soil.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Where is the cradle of democracy? In Paris?
SLOTERDIJK: More likely in Rome. Initially it wasn’t a ques- tion of democracy as a form of popular rule, it was more about the res publica, which is about having an open space in which people feel that the noblest thing anyone can do is to participate in shaping the body politic. And that was more to do with Roman philosophy of the state than the Greek heritage.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But how do we achieve the psycho- political change you are discussing and demanding, in which citizens give voluntarily, without the state collapsing?
3 Helden was the German version of the film Arms and the Man, starring O. W. Fischer (1958). The film was adapted from the play of the same name by George Bernard Shaw.
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SLOTERDIJK: There are two main possibilities: first, that human beings are asocial creatures by nature – as representatives of black anthropology from Thomas Hobbes to Adorno have told us – and only fear can force them into coexistence. Think of Schopenhauer: bourgeois society resembles a group of freezing porcupines that huddle together for warmth and can only hurt each other. These images are enough to substantiate the pessimism of black anthro- pology. But there is another track. If we consult the works of the ‘moral sense’ philosophers that gave rise to political economy, the works of the Scots, of Adam Smith and of Lord Shaftesbury, one of the most wonderful figures in European intellectual history, we get a completely different picture. Shaftesbury taught and practised an enthusiastic attitude to sociability.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Wilhelm Röpke, the author of Jenseits von Angebot und Nachfrage,4 also had a view of humankind that regarded capitalists as more than just monsters and the state as more than merely an auxiliary machine.
SLOTERDIJK: Convivial philosophers assume that human beings are creatures that feel well in company. Human beings like seeing their reflection in the eyes of others and are full of empathetic virtues. The main thesis here is that concern is first nature to us and bourgeois coldness is only acquired with additional educa- tion through whole epochs of negative dressage. Philosophers then plump up the results into dark anthropological theories.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Because we have redacted empathy away.
SLOTERDIJK: Still, empathy is the basic given factor. Everything else is more of an acquired vice. I want briefly to point out one thing: people in a fiscal democracy in which there are still elements left over from absolutism are accustomed to being called on as donors anyway. They wouldn’t suffer any more than they do now if we introduced a new official term for channelling public emo- tions, stating that from today, everything we pay into the communal coffers is not called ‘taxes’ but ‘donations’ from citizens. That they are now called donations doesn’t alter their obligatory character. That was, by the way, the starting point taken for the almost totally ignorant debates on my theses that shocked the German cultural press two years ago. Many of the people who voiced their opin- ions had not read Marcel Mauss; it was he who pointed out that
4 Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market (Chicago: Henry Regner), 1960.
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donations involve a curious unity of duty and voluntariness. 5 His theory about the dual nature of donations contains everything one needs to know to see the plausibility of switching from confiscation to donation as the way to fill the communal coffers. Incidentally, Mauss was a socialist and he knew what he was talking about. The spontaneity of donations doesn’t eliminate their obligatory character – that doesn’t occur to a convinced étatist and fiscalist. An alternative interpretation of social relations can only emerge from the idea that the whole society functions in donor streams and will no longer be animated by the tax burden.
STEINGART/RIECKE: So far your ideas haven’t found many supporters. Taking seems more blessed to us than giving.
SLOTERDIJK: The German Social Democrats have just dis- cussed increasing taxation again at their party conference. What they didn’t want to understand is that in recent years in America the initiative called ‘The Giving Pledge’ has begun turning billion- aires into social democrats. Social democracy lives from the simple formula: ‘half for the communal budget’. Warren Buffet’s words rang in my ears because he and his fellow campaigners seem to be aware of precisely that figure. Apparently, the 50 per cent logic has found its place in the minds of American billionaires. Meanwhile, here in Germany all those flatfooted psychologists are lumbering around and still using the language of threats when tax increases are up for discussion.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Is Warren Buffett your hero rather than Sigmar Gabriel? 6
SLOTERDIJK: I think Sigmar Gabriel is able to learn.
