No More Learning

KRIES: Does this explain the desire for locomotion?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, in a way. But if we want to talk like that, we have to derive the meaning of desire correctly. We have to be able to say how people came to feel desire, or how desire found us. Desire is the material the movements are made of; it builds the bridge to goals we have not reached. But I think we shouldn’t talk of desire if we don’t talk beforehand and at the same time about settledness, and about how the wishes of people who have been made static are organized, and therefore about the system of frustrations that shapes the desires that are typical of our form of life.
KRIES: Today the car actually has its own mythology.
SLOTERDIJK: This is revealing because, according to my working hypothesis on the theory of religion, myths only evolve where people try to speak about what complements them. Humans
We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive 43
are beings that understand themselves in terms of their complemen- tary principle – we could say, in terms of their invisible partner. In the mythical period of consciousness those partners were seen pri- marily as gods and spirits, whereas today they are seen as technical adjuncts to the human body, that is, as machines and media. All cultures work at spinning themselves into their symbolic husks and these husks are first woven by the companion spirits. The car seems capable of a mythological development precisely because it is a kind of materialized companion spirit. We can baptize cars, we can talk to cars, and they have something common to all religious spheres – we can go inside them, immerse ourselves in them. As we noted at the start of this discussion, at least indirectly, people are beings that can’t help constantly asking about the difference between inside and outside. They can’t suppress the question about the difference between being born and not being born. Because this difference will never be completely clear, and because the ideal interior cannot be totally cast off or totally reproduced, people face the persistent ques- tion: how do we succeed in being as good outside as we are inside? The car is a suggestive answer to this. It is the most perfect solu- tion to the following riddle: how can I move with masterful control although I don’t venture out?
Modern humans are customers who voice a demand for methods of demonstrating supreme control. That is the basic cultural market. People who offer means of representing or simulating supreme control can always count on enormous demand. That is just what car manufacturers do. They offer one of the most convincing means of demonstrating supreme control in today’s world, and we are inca- pable of not demanding that. Personally, I sometimes ask myself how so many friends in my circle happen not to have a driving licence. I’m like a magnet that pulls nails out of a rotten old ship – I have the curious ability to attract people from the intellectual scene who function completely as non-drivers. I think not one of my close friends, or maybe only one or two, has a driving licence. We obvi- ously play different kinds of mastery games, which don’t involve driving around the neighbourhood. I’m the only tacky automobilist in this select clique. We have constructed a congenial system that makes driving our own car unimportant. I think all of us are people who belong more to the old shamanic culture where people still achieved their exalted feelings with soul journeys, and no driving licence exists for that.
KRIES: Many people feel they don’t exist at all without a car. The physical experience of having these machines available is totally fundamental to their identity.
SLOTERDIJK: Those people have their antecedents in the horse
44 We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive
cultures of the past 3–4,000 years. The symbiosis between an animal as a means of transport and the rider already existed once in the case of the centaur. The horse as a complement to humans has also produced its own mythology. The typical human rider has faded into the background today, although he or she still exists, usually embodied by young women, with the girl in front and the horse behind. Those are the animal centaurs of today, whereas the techni- cal centaurs are represented by the people at the wheel inside with the car outside surrounding them. Incidentally, there are almost as many horses today as there were in the eighteenth or nineteenth cen- turies, but they have all been reassigned. They are almost all leisure horses, hardly any workhorses nowadays. Isn’t it an odd comment on today’s society that only horses have achieved emancipation? Humans are still work animals just as they always were, even if they are miserable jobless people, but the horses standing in German paddocks today are all horses of pleasure, post-historic horses. Children stroke them and adults admire them, and we feel very sorry for the last workhorses we see now and then at the circus and at racecourses. Some are used in psychotherapy for children with behavioural problems, but they are treated well and respectfully. All the other European horses have managed to do what humans still dream of – horses are the only ones for whom historical phi- losophy’s dream of a good end to history has become reality. They are the happy unemployed that evolution seemed to be moving towards. For them, the realm of freedom has been reached, they stand in their paddock, are fed, have completely forgotten the old drudgery and live out their natural mobility.
KRIES: What does the car mean for our mobility?
SLOTERDIJK: From the philosophical perspective we have to pose the question of the ‘real’ meaning of the automobile as follows: do we make new movements with the car – that is, trips to places where we have never been before? Or do we use the new vehicle for old movements, that is, for journeys that we always repeat on the oldest patterns and for which the vehicle only provides a new setting? In the latter case I am speaking of Platonic movements, in the former of exodus-type movements.
In terms of Platonic explanation we believe we have understood a movement when we recognize its old pattern, when we can say, for example: the natal breakthrough is repeated here by other means. In Platonic traffic analysis, the trip always goes backward to the origins, and all vehicles are aids for retrospective yearning. On this view all vehicles ultimately serve only the journey home. The return journey has priority everywhere. All the wheels are set in motion to seek the mother, and the word ‘maternity’ is on every street sign.
We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive 45
We’re always riding down Maternity Drive. If we adopt this level of analysis, the vehicle is understood as a means to carry out an old movement with a new medium. If we choose this romantic, psycho- analytic theory of travelling, the answer to the question, ‘Where are we going? ’ is: ‘Always home’. But I would be interested in working out the difference between old and new movements. New move- ments require non-Platonic kinetics, that is, a theory of exodus. The primacy of the journey out applies here. I think we should also develop an argument for the outward journey that can match the power of Platonic and psychoanalytic regressions. We have to make room in theory for trips to new terrain, and award the vehicle an appropriate function in such exodus-type movements. The automo- bile can also take us to places we have never visited before. It is not just the means of regression we suspect it to be in our most interest- ing theories – it can also give us access to new, open places, it can also be a medium of coming-into-the-world.
We have to grant the car the two potentials that belong to basic human mobility – exodus and regression. Philosophically speak- ing, whenever people make an outward movement, it brings into play a movement of coming-into-the-world. When people are born they discover not only their mother, who was the first vehicle and will remain so for some time to come; they also discover the world in which they move on without the mother. For us, perhaps learn- ing means, above all, understanding the difference between mother and world on a deeper level. It is from this starting point that vehi- cles acquire their meaning. If they were only a means to re-create a womblike situation and to return to an inner world, then they would merely be ‘homecoming vehicles’. But I want to emphasize the other direction of movement: what about an ‘outward-bound vehicle’? Where are the means of transportation that bring us into the open? To be able to give a convincing answer, it seems impor- tant to me to point to a profound lack of contemporary debate on automobility. Everybody suffers from being much too ‘car-centric’ and restricted to movements on land. This results in not thinking through the difference between the ship and the car thoroughly enough. The reason is trivial: most people who talk about the car today are incorrigible landlubbers, and consequently use inland terms to explain mobility as a whole, and this leads to one-sided concepts.
Anybody looking for the truth about the vehicle for which the outward journey has primacy simply has to consider the ship – from the Argo of Theseus to Columbus’s Santa Maria. We do the car too much honour if we make it the exclusive focus of the mobility ques- tion. In a comprehensive theory of mobility we have to appreciate
46 We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive
ships, particularly the ocean-going ships of the age of discovery, much more than we usually do. Even today, the ship is much more magical than the car in many respects, and the actors and specta- tors of the great age of ocean travel felt this magic very strongly. As a whole, the mythology about ships is more powerful than the mythology of automobiles, which has barely existed for a hundred years. The poetry of shipping space is much more extensive than the poetry of the automobile – in its first century the automobile failed to find its Herman Melville. It is no coincidence that the setting for the greatest novel of world literature is a whaling ship. We are still waiting for the book that raises the automobile to the status of a world metaphor as Melville’s peerless book has done for ship’s navi- gation. The twentieth century, especially the second half, liquidated the primacy of ships, leaving a hazy memory of the most powerful of all vehicles so far. The result is that our thoughts about traffic are dominated by the paradigm of road travel, and we understand almost nothing any longer about movements related to outward journeys, exodus and the ocean.
KRIES: The conquest of the world by the ship is fascinating in a different way from the conquest by the car. One reason is prob- ably that the automobile has become a mass phenomenon and the aspects of adventure that are still associated with ocean voyages, or are associated in our imagination, obviously can’t be transferred to four-wheeled vehicles.
SLOTERDIJK: But automobility has democratized the privilege of movement. Today we forget too easily that mobility was an aris- tocratic privilege until the beginning of the twentieth century. Rulers were those who advanced faster and more successfully. The lord was reflected in his vehicle. Nowadays we have produced kinetic democ- racy through the mass distribution of means of mobility. That is the real reason why people today feel equal – not because they are equally talented or educated, or have the same voting rights, but because they are equally fast and because the little person can over- take the rich lord at any time. Kinetic emancipation has happened on the streets, and therefore the truth is on the highway. The United States shows us that mass culture is largely automobile culture. Harking back to sailing vessels, on the other hand, would return the focus to a more aristocratic and maritime-nomadic type of mobility. Incidentally, you have to admit that a port has a different kind of magic than a parking lot. What is more, the means of propulsion, the wind, has a deeper relationship to imaginative power, to the processes of ensoulment that stimulate the imagination, than the jet engine of a modern aircraft.
KRIES: Convertible drivers or motorcyclists argue the same way.
We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive 47
SLOTERDIJK: Motorcyclists are returning sailors who can’t forget the storm and don’t want to miss the ecstasy of the open sea. But since we are dependent today on replaying maritime ecstasies in a different medium, we are left with the full-throttle experience.
KRIES: The current discussion about mobility is also defined by the question as to which means of transportation is right for which purpose . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Respectable transport scholars and the gentle- men from urban transportation companies usually get their ideal of mobility from railway vehicles. The dream of safe movement is only realized on the tracks. Only rail traffic allows implementation of the ideal of completely reversible movement – outward journey minus return journey equals zero. From the underlying structural perspective, we can see a battle in today’s transport system between mad and rational transporters, in which the rational ones opt for the railways and the mad ones for the roads, because only the roads can serve as a substitute for air, ocean and primordial waters. On the roads all the intoxicating, excessive potential of the urge for mobil- ity can be acted out in the progressive as well as the regressive mode. The railways, on the other hand, put an end to the kinetic delirium.
KRIES: All the same, sensible transport scholars cite a very con- crete and palpable risk involved in our mobility today. You have talked about the kinetic utopia yourself . . .
SLOTERDIJK: We can reformulate this kinetic utopia in a lan- guage of critique of religion and of victim theory. Then the question is: ‘How many victims is such a high level of mobility worth to us? ’ In fact, everything that costs human life is usually prohibited today because we have abolished human sacrifice. Still, eight or ten thou- sand road deaths annually are not sufficient reason to demand a ban on road traffic. In this case we make an offset calculation, and because mobility is actually the occult kinetic religion of moder- nity, there is not the slightest chance of restricting or suppressing the demands for mobility. Quite the opposite: we have to consider how we approach the demands for even greater increases. Anybody trying to impose restrictions on mobility today would unleash a civil war.
KRIES: Are automobiles female or male?
SLOTERDIJK: Automobiles are male outside and female inside, as befits amphibian or hermaphrodite constructs. Femininity plays a role here in terms of the characteristic ‘accessibility’ – we can go inside. Masculinity is expressed in the characteristic ‘good for moving forward’. As automobiles have ideally synthesized these two attributes, they are also the perfect realization of the desire for the hermaphrodite. Since the beginning of this century, mass culture has
48 We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive
tended towards dissolving gender difference and producing unisex subjects. Cars are ahead of people in this respect. While convinc- ing bisexuals have yet to be created, cars have already reached this goal.
8
TACKLING THE UNSPOKEN THINGS IN CULTURE
Interview with Felix Schmidt*1
SCHMIDT: Mr Sloterdijk, people see you as one of the nation’s intellectual heroes. They even call you a star and award you the vacant seat next to Schopenhauer. Do you feel right and comfort- able sitting there?
SLOTERDIJK: Sitting next to great dead men is always very uncomfortable. A living person should try to avoid such compari- sons because the price is too high. Basically, as an author one wants to resemble the dead rather than the living. One of the paradoxes of an author’s existence is that very often – and in philosophy, without exception – one looks for idols in the ranks of the great and glorious. But I can accept being identified in the sense of a family resem- blance, because there is a direct line between my work and my kind of philosophizing and that of certain nineteenth-century authors. I mean Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and particularly Nietzsche.
SCHMIDT: Your unusual popularity as a scholar of the humani- ties owes a great deal to the scandal caused by your lecture, ‘Rules for the Human Zoo’. What is the situation after that scandal?
SLOTERDIJK: Your question has a paramilitary undertone. I will try to respond in a similarly serious tone. My personal situation has changed in that the so-called ‘human zoo’ affair has given me
* This interview appeared under the title, ‘Ich weiß viel vom Wahnsinn’ [‘I know a lot about madness’], in Frankfurter Rundschau Magazin (30 June 2001): 18f.
Felix Schmidt was chief editor for culture at Der Spiegel, editor-in-chief of Welt am Sonntag, Stern and Hörzu, and was director of television at Südwestfunk Baden-Baden before becoming managing director of the TV production company AVE.
50 Tackling the Unspoken Things in Culture
a new social position. I have become more of a classical political intellectual again. I had previously created an aura of marginal phi- losophy, an atmosphere of artistic philosophy around myself, and in general there were many advantages to staying that way. Meanwhile I have come to terms with the new definition of myself as a public intellectual.
SCHMIDT: Doesn’t the public intellectual sometimes feel he has to influence the nation’s image of itself?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes. In such crises of meaningfulness it is advis- able either to retreat into rational work or go to a conference, where you realize that the fantasy idea of intellectuals representing the interests of the state has absolutely no connection with reality, and is at best a nice delusion.
SCHMIDT: Have you had your mental state examined recently? SLOTERDIJK: Should I?
SCHMIDT: I read an allegation somewhere that disappointment
sent you on a flight into madness.
SLOTERDIJK: I am always amazed by the diagnoses people
dream up for free. German journalism sees itself as a sort of con- tinuation of the Spanish bullfight by other means, and believes it has to present the slaughter of an intellectual at regular intervals. People who talk like that evidently perceive their role in the arena as banderilleros, the little gadflies that are intended to annoy the bull if he doesn’t want to fight as required. That kind of amateur psychol- ogy merely amuses me. It is blatantly obvious what these people are up to.
SCHMIDT: Those attacks still bear the after-effects of the big ‘human zoo’ debate, which is only gradually calming down. People somehow got the fixed idea that you were advocating a joint venture between philosophy and genetic engineering and, as part of this, a new elite to be formed by selection.
SLOTERDIJK: The accusation that I wanted to replace educa- tion by breeding is absolutely stupid. However, it shows up those who enjoy denouncing me as even more stupid. As we well know, the cultural field begins where the biological ends. In the debates around the ‘human zoo’ I never hid the fact that I stand for culture. It follows that the idea of the elite comes from the educational field, not from biology.
SCHMIDT: Is the debate that has been shifted to the biological sphere a substitute for the complete lack of discussion about deficits in education and training?
SLOTERDIJK: We must underscore this even more: It is a sub- stitute for the dreaded debate that probably can’t be postponed any longer – the debate about a socio-psychological disaster in the most
Tackling the Unspoken Things in Culture 51
real sense of the word, a debate that has forced its way into modern society from the school system. The deliberate silence about the edu- cational disaster is the reason people believe that somebody could abolish school in favour of some kinds of biological mechanisms. But this imaginary scenario is interesting because it demonstrates there is really a need to abolish school.
SCHMIDT: Is there an alternative to school?
SLOTERDIJK: There is no convincing answer to society’s ques- tion about what could replace the failing education system. One thing is certain: we can’t find alternative answers in biotechnology. We urgently need an educational alternative this side of biology.
SCHMIDT: What explains our reluctance to engage in a substan- tial debate on this?
SLOTERDIJK: There are three or four themes that humans a priori don’t like talking about: death, school and their mothers. And school is probably the most unpleasant in this triad.
SCHMIDT: As you have already talked about school, let’s talk about your mother.
SLOTERDIJK: Talking about that topic means talking about a strange tragedy I have never publicly revealed anything about before. It still troubles me today.
SCHMIDT: A mother complex?
SLOTERDIJK: My mother was a very gifted woman. She was born in the middle of the First World War, and her father was one of the first soldiers to fall on the Western Front. She had to grow up with the question, ‘Where is my real father? ’ To some extent this question drove her destiny because all her life she never got along well with people, especially not with men.
SCHMIDT: Not with her son either?
SLOTERDIJK: It’s not easy to be the son of a woman like her. It created a series of complications that were built into my life tra- jectory from the very beginning. It took decades of brooding and experimenting with life for me to understand and process those interrelationships. The resurrection of the dead in the child and the grandchild is an uncanny thing, and I have only worked through that phantom history in the past few years. I have, so to speak, laid out my own personal hero’s graveyard for my grandfather, and I am in the process of burying him there on behalf of my whole family. Those experiences have taught me how heavy psychological legacies are, and how powerful histories of the soul are. I know that beneath the official history, the daytime history, there is also a nocturnal side, a dark side to history.
SCHMIDT: How far has that influenced your work? SLOTERDIJK: My entire work so far has been a kind of
52 Tackling the Unspoken Things in Culture
history writing like underground mining, in which I tried to weave the history of riddles, the history of injuries and the history of the unconscious quest into the official version of philosophy. This means my concept of philosophy is always starkly defined together with psychology, which has led to some misunderstand- ings. Philosophy is supposed to philosophize instead of being occupied with psychoanalysis.
Generally speaking, philosophy is either a form of happy ontological mathematics without any ulte- rior motive, and that is quite reasonable, or it is a form of defence, a very rare form of stupidity that has managed to assume a socially respectable front. Only in very rare cases is it salutary work on the things culture leaves unsaid.
From 1975 on, my life was totally devoted to self-awareness. My Indian excursion was part of that. I think my life story is typical of our times – a kind of biography of the age. I know a fair amount about the radicalism, the extremism, the madness and the traumas of the twentieth century. All of that belongs to a single system of communicating vessels circulating the message that something is wrong with life. That’s why I am so fascinated by the present, because I am observing something not only in my own feeling of life, but also in society as a whole, that makes me extraordinarily curious, perhaps even joyful. I mean that the social climate has been changing for a while now, and we are emerging from the shadows of madness that hung over us since 1914. More and more people are no longer directly affected by those old communicating vessels of madness.
SCHMIDT: Do you mean society is doing therapy on itself?
SLOTERDIJK: I would rather say it is normalizing itself. But this normalization is a fascinating process, and in the case of Germans, an almost uncanny one. The question of what constitutes German normality is not normal in itself, because none of us will live long enough to meet a normal German. The German forms of life and prevailing moods are changing now – and occasionally I try to play something of an active role in that. Perhaps this is the only excep- tion I have to make to my negative answer to your question as to whether I sometimes feel tempted to become a kind of philosophical National Moderator. I would like very much to link my name with a comprehensive normalization story for this country, which has been sick in some sense up until now. I am optimistic enough to believe the recuperation process can work.
SCHMIDT: We will have to get used to your performance as a philosopher with an optimistic outlook. Have you finally given up being the herald of catastrophe sarcasm?
SLOTERDIJK: I want to confirm that my basic attitude has
Tackling the Unspoken Things in Culture 53
changed. The crucial factor in this process was something which had not played a dominant role in my life previously, and which can be described by the conventional concept of responsibility. The catas- trophe sarcasm was a contradictory attitude, a kind of sly black humour. I felt instinctively that Marx must have meant something similar when he said we must force the relations to dance by singing their own tune to them. This is a bitter form of revolutionary pow- erlessness. It gave rise to the catastrophe sarcasm. I was trapped in a pattern of thought that is known from the therapy world but actually depends on a false calculation in human and psychological terms, namely, the view that one can handle doubt as a means to an end, based on the motto: ‘I will begin by doubting so that I can be properly reborn later on. ’ I wouldn’t accept that frivolous attitude today. It was an instance of malpractice I wouldn’t want to repeat.
SCHMIDT: In some ways you were picking up on your pre- Adorno phase again.
SLOTERDIJK: Anyway, I got rid of the exaggerated critical attitude and remembered a very early phase of my work in which I was influenced by authors from the Protestant tradition, such as Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer.
SCHMIDT: In the first volume of your Spheres trilogy you outed yourself as a kind of birthing assistant, a midwife. You seem deeply impressed by the theme of birth.
SLOTERDIJK: I am one of those unfortunate people whose remembrance of their birth has never been erased from their bodily memory. I know there is a specific form of birth stress that is repro- duced throughout one’s life.
SCHMIDT: Your daughter is seven years old now, and I’m sure she is a curious child. How do you explain to her what holds the world together in its innermost depths?
SLOTERDIJK: I’m impressed by the natural poetry of her ques- tions. Her way of asking doesn’t put pressure on me because it has its own poetic mechanism. I don’t know where that comes from. Sometimes it seems to me she has a special aptitude for calming down at the right moment to stop her thoughts from going in cryptic directions. It is fascinating how she plays with mythological imagi- nation and constantly restructures her picture of the world without her very knowledgeable father and omniscient mother setting the agenda.
SCHMIDT: When did you first ask the question as to how the universe, Planet Earth and life arose?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t know if I ever asked myself that question because the answers came much earlier than the questions.
SCHMIDT: How did that happen?
54 Tackling the Unspoken Things in Culture
SLOTERDIJK: Like so many other people, I’m a typical victim of the school that permanently answers questions that haven’t been asked yet. But it’s still possible to recover from that at an advanced age. Last summer I had a moment of deep emotion on the plane of natural philosophy when I saw the wonderful total eclipse of the sun. Suddenly a physical feeling of reality appeared in the tone of natural philosophy. Up until then my concept of reality was defined very closely in relation to humanism, the social sciences, linguistics and culture. I was convinced only oddballs could be interested in physics. Today I think our exaggerated culturalism has probably made us blind to physics. However, I would like to describe the wondrous moment of eclipse of the sun that I enjoyed as an excep- tional state, from which point on something changed for me.
SCHMIDT: In any case, philosophy begins in wonder.
SLOTERDIJK: At least, that was the original thesis of Aristotle and Plato. Looking at this thesis more closely, it is very cleverly constructed and actually says something quite different from what is usually associated with it. People probably marvelled for tens of thousands of years without ever beginning to philosophize in the formal sense like the Greeks. Plato developed wonder and questioning to a special form of competition. He made philosophy attractive as a contest in astonishment. Just as we act stupid, we can act astonished – which for many, incidentally, is the same thing. We play at wondering, and can then develop the unnatural questions that philosophers ask.
SCHMIDT: Have you ever vacillated in your life between phi- losophy and literature?
SLOTERDIJK: No. Never. But for a long time now I have felt the need to change emphasis and cross over to the narrative genre. That is the form I need today as a free phrasemaker in order to realize what is in my imagination.
SCHMIDT: So you keep on crossing between philosophy and literature, between the arts and scholarship.
SLOTERDIJK: I’m sure it will go on like that. But I would be pleased if there were more people who could acknowledge things done well, not only serious functional things but also things achieved in the sense of philosophy as a profession. I think my work has reached the point where it doesn’t get further without a degree of collaborative assistance from competent people.
SCHMIDT: That could happen soon if, as planned, you start moderating your own talk show in ZDF, a kind of ‘Philosophical Quartet’. Will that mean a TV commission offering guidance, some- thing to give disoriented humankind stability and comfort?
SLOTERDIJK: I would put it a shade more cautiously, although
Tackling the Unspoken Things in Culture 55
I think the desire for orientation is absolutely legitimate. For now, we can be content with Nietzsche’s definition of philosophy as a project ‘for harming stupidity’. My mission in this venture is to situate philosophy in a medium that begins by being completely unsuitable, or practically in an opposite world. It is important to create a really informative and exhilarating context, a fruitful atmosphere for the intelligence. This is created merely by it happen- ing at all.
SCHMIDT: By placing philosophy in the mass medium of televi- sion, aren’t you worried about making your own contribution to the mediatizing of society that you have compared to public degrada- tion in the arenas of ancient Rome?
SLOTERDIJK: I certainly won’t contribute to closing off the arena of the totalitarian mass media even more. I would like to promote a form of public culture that never bothers with dis- tinguishing between winners and losers but, on the contrary, consistently defers this distinction. The point is to remix victor’s truth with loser’s truth and, by doing so, to force a real widening of perspective. Not knowing who has won and who has lost is a good way to foster open discussion.
SCHMIDT: What do you want to achieve by this?
SLOTERDIJK: My plans are very far from the usual talk-show chitchat and are not intended to add to the trend towards gathering an audience that is sentimental, excitable, cruel, forgetful, and curi- ously good-natured and nasty at the same time – just as if we were back in the days of the manhunts in the Circus Maximus in Rome.
SCHMIDT: Are you proposing a kind of anti-television?
SLOTERDIJK: Philosophy on television is the anti-circus in the circus. Let’s see if it works.
9
ON WEALTH AND SELF-RESPECT
Interview with Klaus Methfessel and Christian Ramthun*1
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Professor Sloterdijk, let’s talk about Menschenpark [Rules for the Human Zoo]. Two years ago you sparked off a debate on genetic engineering that took place mainly in the features pages of newspapers. Are you pleased that politicians are taking up this topic now?
SLOTERDIJK: In tackling this, politics is simply fulfilling its role as provider of a system of norms in a deregulation process that is confusing society at the moment.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: What do you mean by deregula- tion? The issue here actually concerns new technical possibilities.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s right. We have become familiar with the concept of deregulation mostly in relation to retrospective aboli- tion of state control of services. But deregulation has a much wider meaning. Deregulation through innovation is basically our motive force of history per se. The whole modern age is a gigantic experi- ment in the cultural introduction of technologies that have not been tested before in human history.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: What is your position on this?
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk, Klaus Methfessel and Christian Ramthun appeared under the title ‘Reichtum muß Selbstachtung erzeugen’ [Wealth Must Create Self-Respect], in the weekly magazine Wirtschaftswoche (19 July 2001): 22–6
Klaus Methfessel is director of the Georg von Holtzbrinck-Schule für Wirtschaftsjournalisten. Christian Ramthun has worked for Wirtschaftswoche since 1997 and is deputy chief of the magazine’s Berlin office.
On Wealth and Self-Respect 57
Two years ago some critics saw you as an advocate of genetic eugenics.
SLOTERDIJK: That was a misunderstanding, to put it mildly. A philosopher never sees things in terms of being for or against a technology. It is all about trying to understand the technology at a deeper level. In my talk, Regeln für den Menschenpark [Rules for the Human Zoo], I advocated channelling the mega-trend of genetic engineering in a responsible way. We must be guided by the princi- ple of caution.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Morality dominates in the genetic debate. The German President is worried about human dignity, while the Chancellor sees opportunities for gainful employment.
SLOTERDIJK: There is not just one single morality. We always behave as if morality were the last word, and only exists in the sin- gular. But morality is just as pluralist as society.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: That sounds almost as if morality is arbitrary.
SLOTERDIJK: No, but it has several roots or sources that give rise to our system of norms. One is the area of domestic life forms, the ethics of the vicinity, so to speak, that regulates communication between people in neighbourly categories. The loftiest generaliza- tion of this source of morals is humanism, which is currently trying to establish itself as a world ethos – without admitting that it only interprets one segment of the moral space. Another source is the state’s aesthetics. The state has a remit sui generis. Its regulatory obligations are not reducible to the general family ethos. Moreover, the moralities of ascetic religions have an independent source that can’t be traced back to humanism or the logic of the state.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: And the sources of morality creation are clashing with each other in the genetic engineering debate?
SLOTERDIJK: That happens at the moment when society is forced to discuss the unsupervised introduction of major new tech- nologies that cause social upheaval. From a theoretical viewpoint, we are living in the middle of a fantasy world in which we are follow- ing a running experiment on how the stuff of reality is woven and how a society makes new rules for itself in a continuing process of justice and self-discovery.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Could this discovery process also lead to a renaissance of morality?
SLOTERDIJK: Not to a renaissance of morality as the great mystical singular concept I mentioned earlier – as if humans would be good again because times are bad.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: The Chancellor [Gerhard
58 On Wealth and Self-Respect
Schröder]1 has set up a national ethical council. Is this the right approach, or does it also fall into the category of hyper-consensus?
SLOTERDIJK: The ethical council probably won’t work because it was set up by a putsch-type procedure, bypassing Parliament in a way that is far too transparent. The committee seems like a case of blatant manipulation. It gives the impression that the govern- ment is buying in expert opinions. Those who participate must ask themselves whether they have reflected closely enough on their own corruptibility.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: All the same, the ethical council hasn’t stopped citizens and politicians from conducting excellent debates on genetic engineering . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Which I am very pleased about. For a while it seemed we might have seen the end of a society that engages in debate. But now, on the verge of introducing an important new technology, we are being treated once again to the spectacle of society discussing issues in depth.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: The dispute about genetic engi- neering seen as a fountain of youth?
SLOTERDIJK: Modern society is being brought back to its origins. It is a birth of society out of the battle of consciousness or the battle of genuine parties.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Don’t we have any proper parties any more?
SLOTERDIJK: Genuine parties only exist where real conflicts of interest occur. At the moment we are seeing parties reforming in a relatively passionate way again, and not along parliamentary lines. We are witnessing the formation of morality parties, an informal party landscape with a technophobic and a technophile party. Right now the technophobic party is in power, although the Chancellor belongs to the technophile tendency.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Schröder is trying to bridge the gap for the Social Democratic Party with the slogan ‘Security in a changing world’.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s very smart because it involves balanc- ing out the atmospheric extremes to prevent society plunging into a patently semantic civil war about the intolerable fundamental trends.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: In relation to genetic engineer- ing, this civil war seems to have had more impact on the CDU
1 Gerhard Schröder, Social Democratic politician and Federal Chancellor of Germany, 1998–2005.
On Wealth and Self-Respect 59
[Christliche Demokratische Union – the conservative Christian Democratic Party].
SLOTERDIJK: There is also a serious conflict within the Green Party, although the great majority of Greens are naturally techno- phobic. But in the course of the conversion to realpolitik that has been going on in the party for the past ten to fifteen years, some Greens have converted to a rather moderate technophile attitude.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: The SPD [Sozaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands – German Social Democratic Party] is also going through that process.
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, because the SPD, the traditional party of redistribution of wealth, is reconsidering its fateful alliance with a prospering market and has to follow the Chancellor for pragmatic reasons.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Does the informal evolution of moralist parties as part of the genetics debate have an effect on the traditional party landscape?
SLOTERDIJK: The results show, first of all, that we have four Social Democratic parties and one party of liberal economics in Parliament. The PDS [Partei für Demokratische Sozialismus – Democratic Socialist Party] contains a left-wing fascist opposition bloc that is unpredictable because it gathers resentful anti-capitalist feelings that are difficult to identify as right or left. Basically, all politics that stems from resentment corresponds to what we wrongly describe as right-wing radicalism. In fact, it is an emotional radical- ism or a rejectionist radicalism that could just as well be left wing as right wing. But the PDS as a whole is on the path to becoming Social Democratic.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: What will happen now? Is it pos- sible for the genetic engineering debate to create a climate that would result in a social-liberal coalition?
SLOTERDIJK: That wouldn’t surprise me. After all, social democracy, since its conversion to the ideology of the third way, has become Blairite, and Blairism is the product of the marriage of Labour and Thatcherism. That, in turn, means the long overdue re- enactment of the working formula that was valid for the twentieth century: the market economy moderated by the welfare state. This turn by social democracy means it has admitted that it is depend- ent on industry prospering in an infinite economic game, an endless lottery of the markets. Liberalism and social democracy are two sides of the same coin – because both are infinitists.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Do you mean they don’t recog- nize any limits?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, they both pursue a policy of exceeding
60 On Wealth and Self-Respect
limits – growth policy. Growth is merely a neutralizing term for crossing boundaries, shifting boundaries. In modern society the upward processes are open because there are no income limits, no limits to satisfaction and no limits to personal fulfilment. In contrast to the ancient hypothesis that humans can be satisfied – which is, of course, the anthropological principle of the ancient world – humans in the modern age are pursuing goals insatiably.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: And the Social Democrats want to continue this insatiable policy of dissolving boundaries?
SLOTERDIJK: It is naturally harder to do that in coalition with the Greens than with the Liberals.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Aren’t Social Democrats very resolute about redistribution?
SLOTERDIJK: They support redistribution; they realize that it depends on endlessly creating value. It is not surprising that Social Democratic prime ministers spearhead advances towards new tech- nologies. It may be rather distasteful that this is occurring in such a sensitive area as human biotechnology, but in the end it is com- pletely consistent.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: In the age of globalization it is probably impossible to avoid the temptations of new technologies.
SLOTERDIJK: Globalization is based on the very successful export of European methods of improving living standards. For the past 200 years Europeans have been developing a range of products that dramatically changes the way of life of people nearly everywhere as soon as the utility value of these new products is recognized. There is a regular jealousy competition about access to these resources.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: What do you mean by ‘jealousy competition’?
SLOTERDIJK: All competitions are processes driven by jealousy. The great competition is not about goods but about non-material gratification. Hegel talks about the struggle for recognition as the actual motive force of history.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: And why isn’t envy the motive force of competition?
SLOTERDIJK: Both variants exist, of course. ‘Jealousy’ is the more positive term because jealous people believe in the opportunity of being ahead of their rivals in the race for a particular commodity, even if they first learned from their rivals to covet what the latter already have. In the case of envy, jealousy is deprived of its creative edge, and disparagement of others becomes important: if I don’t have something, they shouldn’t have it either.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Do you mean jealousy is linked
On Wealth and Self-Respect 61
more closely with opportunity and freedom, and envy more with equality?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes. It is easier to make a general case for the unreasonable demand that people should do without something.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: It follows that envious societies are typified by more redistribution, but a larger state share. Does this make Germany an envious society and the United States a jealous society?
SLOTERDIJK: That’s certainly true.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Nowadays globalization neces- sitates the retreat of the state, indirectly fostering the creation of a civil society.
SLOTERDIJK: On condition we can trust traditional state ser- vices, that is, provided new management can be found for these large communitarian systems. In other words, the enterprises would become the workers’ new fatherlands. The only problem is, there is hardly any evidence to show it works here in Germany.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Why doesn’t it work?
SLOTERDIJK: Because the state is, and continues to be, an enormous service provider for which there is no substitute.