No More Learning

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had meant well but things turned out differently. In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo portrayed a sad figure who created a paltry business out of the memories of great days – the sergeant from Waterloo, a veteran who earned a living from saying he had been there. That was the beginning of the memorial industry, which is now an inte- gral part of the exonerated life of the modern age: somebody once called it ‘mobility on a stationary basis’ and this is still the most profound statement about our way of being. Kierkegaard memo- rably described the experience of the calm after the storm that was history in his little-known essay, A Literary Review. It is here, inci- dentally, that we find the first instance of insulting the audience in modern philosophy, which seems to have inspired the Man chapter of Heidegger’s Being and Time. In this essay Kierkegaard discovered a new kind of monster, gigantic in its lack of character – the modern public, in fact, whose formation brought the art of not having been there to its present stage. Heidegger would later describe this public as follows: ‘Everyone is the other and no one is himself. ’ Its fate was to have arrived too late for the real history.
RAULFF: The epigones . . . Immermann6 . . . All the deeds that would have been worth doing are already written down in the history books, and all the works it would have been worth writing are already in the libraries.
SLOTERDIJK: To pursue the point even further, it means that history had already come to a standstill at Waterloo. The first concise post-historic era occurred in the years 1815 to 1818, during the occupation by the Belle Alliance victors when France slumped into political catatonia – an episode that has been erased from or, more precisely, never entered French memory. The country regained its status as a sovereign nation with the Bourbon restoration of 1818 to 1830, but the cost was standstill, political and ideological regres- sion, and bitterly warring rival parties splintering into chaos. The post-historical mood became chronic under the rigid Bourbons. You just have to look at the pompous, overblown portraits of Louis XVIII in French heraldic ermine to realize that post-history and simulation belong together. The French were the first to learn that people can fake entire epochs. At that period the best one could do was to write medieval novels or memoirs beyond the grave. This is just what Walter Scott and Chateaubriand, the great masters of ersatz history and ersatz life, did. Given this constellation, we can understand the hunger for fate. Along with post-historical paralysis
6 Karl Leberecht Immermann (1796–1840) was a German novelist, dra- matist and poet famous for his contemporary criticism.
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comes nostalgia for turbulent times with all their blood and pomp. Incidentally, one topic of recent literature on Heidegger and Co. is ‘yearning for harshness and severity’, which is a rather good charac- terization of the heroic disposition of the young conservative spirits of the early twentieth century. The formulation aptly fits the post- Napoleonic age. It describes the nostalgia for the days when the French lived on victory reports. This nostalgia is still alive today. Among current politicians, Dominique de Villepin is the one who most clearly embodies the epic-heroic view of history.
RAULFF: This resembles the Bainville tradition that brought royalism into the twentieth century via the digression of the Action française.
SLOTERDIJK: De Villepin, who is a Gaullist and a lyrical Bonapartist, wrote quite an interesting book about Napoleon’s hundred days. The book reveals an intensely nostalgic picture of the author’s view of France in its best period – heroic and grand, although unfortunate in the end. It gives an idea of the role the author would like to play in his lofty nation.
RAULFF: Typical historical-mythological French thinking, astonishing for a modern-day politician.
SLOTERDIJK: It has something of the drama of the gifted child from the right wing who concocts a story with plumed helmets and clinking swords. Anyway, we’re familiar with similar exercises on German soil as well. Here, as in France, the point of such exercises is to postulate an inspired new start after a significant military defeat, or after it feels as if history has come to an end. We can also trace this pattern of the end and a new beginning of the world drama in post-war periods in detail, by looking at the case of the young Heidegger. His lecture in the winter semester of 1929–30 on the fundamental concepts of metaphysics included the magnificent treatment of boredom, in which Heidegger described the world of 1929 as if it were conclusively over. He asked: ‘What is our actual condition? ’ and answered: ‘Our condition is such that nothing moves us deeply any more. ’ Our own epoch leaves us empty. That is the Freiburg variation of the theorem of the end of history. Its end is shown in our emptiness that proves the absence of the essen- tial in our existence. Of course, Heidegger only followed this train of thought with a strategic intention because he believed being immersed in extreme boredom would lead to a dialectical reversal into its opposite, the greatest state of tension. He wanted to compel the rebirth of history out of the spirit of being left in a state of emptiness. According to Heidegger, profound boredom is the most philosophical of moods: in it, we experience the difficulty of an exist- ence in which being is abandoned. In the state of ultimate boredom
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of having-nothing-else-to-do, Being will experience even when it is in absent mode. Only once we have penetrated into it totally can we feel, first remotely, then increasingly clearly, the returning call of temporalized Being that commissions a new chapter of history: ‘The event needs you! ’ That sounds like a tempting call to join the first loud political movement that comes along . . .
RAULFF: Which naturally promises the direct way out of the absence of fate.
SLOTERDIJK: Naturally, because it bursts on to the scene with brute force to kick-start history, which is at a standstill. From this perspective, in Heidegger’s work it could also have been the com- munists whose revolutionary historicism would have suited his onto historical approach well. But its options did not correspond to Heidegger’s profile, which was closer to the national Bolshevik revolt, Niekisch and his consorts. In the days of national revolu- tion, the concept of fate in its most massive form became important again. Great history, in Heidegger’s opinion, is sent. Indeed, it is sent by the noblest sender, Being. But as the sending Being trans- mits itself via existence, it needs people who are sent: they will be the rare people who are simultaneously moved and resolute. The only other example we have of this concerns the Christian Apostles, who promulgate an unconditional message. When being moved and being resolute occur together, it creates an action through a medium, an acted action, so to speak, that makes history by follow- ing the call of Being and reinforcing it with its own calls. In terms of form, it is like the model of the eternal love story between human beings and God. Such stories regularly start with the subject that has been left empty wanting to be emotionally moved. The unbe- lievers who want to believe think that once really moved, we would rush ahead with good reason and would finally know what had to be done. My deed should move me in such a way that I can do it. For most people, the reality is precisely the other way round: anyone who follows the tendency to rush ahead thinks up the emotion to match.
RAULFF: The person in the grip of emotion thus stands on both sides of the passivity–activity relationship. This causes an enormous reinforcement, a dramatization of existence. Being emotionally moved involves immersion or submissiveness. As the former female bishop would say, we lie even deeper in God’s hands. On the other hand, the resoluteness creates an ascension . . .
SLOTERDIJK: I have been thinking about such figures of mediatory subjectivity for decades. I always come back to a short, lucid essay titled The Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle, that Kierkegaard wrote in 1848 as part of his polemic against the
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Danish pastor Adler. 7 This short essay with its strong inner dimen- sion is something like the Magna Carta of a spiritual media theory. We should read it every two or three years to hone our analytical tools. In an extremely compact style, Kierkegaard described two diametrically opposite modes of communication, that of the genius and that of the apostle. Genius-type communication is based on self-expression; it corresponds to the aesthetic mode of being- in-the-world. As Kierkegaard says, it stems from the humorous self-sufficiency of the genius. The genius has done enough if he or she manifests the interior world in highly artistic work without caring whether the world around is following him or her. Genius needs no authority. The public’s admiration is ample compensation for what it is missing at the level of communicating the truth. The apostle is an entirely different story: this is a person with an absolute teleology because he or she is motivated by an unconditional in-order-to, an unavoidable task. Apostles submit to a call from above and gain authority insofar as they invoke that call. This creates a performative loop: St Paul can only invoke the fact that God called him, but he can’t provide external evidence of this, of course. He can only affirm it in the act of speaking himself: ‘Paul, a servant of Christ’ – he has to repeat it endlessly, and by repeating it he is putting his existence at the service of the mission that mobilizes and makes use of him. In submitting to the absolute goal he lays claim to a mandate. This is the key concept here. It seems to me the question of mandate was Heidegger’s major problem until the very end. He knew that author- ity and destiny belong together somehow. He cherished the hope of authority for his message but he sought it outside the Christian succession in a philosophical line of succession, as if the vocation and authorization for his profession were also based on a kind of apostolic chain that was inaugurated and actualized by Being itself. If that were not the case, Being would not be Time, and the temporal succession of ideas would not be a true event but a mere sequence of self-dissolving paradigms. The Greek beginning is enormously important for Heidegger because it was there that the transmission chain began – although jamming transmitters have dominated since Plato. Being as Time also sends out its followers as if they should go out to the whole world and baptize people in the name of the basic concepts of metaphysics: world – finiteness – solitude. People sent out like that live in the ecstasy of being ambassadors set march- ing by Being itself. And Heidegger wanted to be regarded as an
7 Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, and Of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle (New York: Harper & Row), 1962.
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absolute person set marching by the grace of the shrouded absolute sender.
RAULFF: He wanted to be a homme fatal himself.
SLOTERDIJK: In fact, he realized that he would only gain authority if he reinsured himself with the supreme sender. That is the reason why he was religious as well, and this distinguishes him from the nihilists. Resolute nihilists leave the sender behind them and declare themselves as the force majeure. A Gnosticizing spirit like Heidegger, who took a Protestant stance in his early works and a Catholic stance in his later works, always knew he must have Being backing him because Being shared the function of absolute sender authority with the God of the New Testament. Heidegger’s work has undertones of the Gnostic view in the sense that he sees the function of God not in creating but in being the sender. His God was not the one that created the Sun, Moon and Earth, but the one who sent indications to the dark world on how salvation could be conceived. The only knowledge that counts in this approach is knowledge of salvation – and here salvation means collecting from the dispersal. Incidentally, an arrangement like this corresponds to the dream of absolute authorship: it reflects the will to move on from the phase of experimenting with talent to the level of commu- nicating truth. That is the author fantasy par excellence, and it can’t be fulfilled simply by being a genius. A depressed genius can have endless fun but still commit suicide in the end. The simple genius doesn’t achieve transformation into a messenger. Messengers do not belong to themselves and should never desert the flag.
RAULFF: Are you thinking of David Foster Wallace?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, of course. In his case, the Kierkegaard-type humorous self-sufficiency of the genius was not enough; his depres- sive constitution got in the way. As far as Heidegger is concerned, he was light years away from such complications because he . . .
RAULFF: . . . always felt he was in good hands.
SLOTERDIJK: He seems to have been constantly surrounded by a supportive environment.
RAULFF: He felt structurally protected in something or other, maybe in language, or the destiny of being, or the landscape. He always gives the impression of being sure that there is a sustaining power.
SLOTERDIJK: I think I know better now where he derived that from. For several years I have visited the Black Forest regularly, in the region between Sankt Blasien and Todtnauberg. It is a strange area. If you spend time there peacefully looking at the farmhouses and you start responding to their charming effect, something stirs inside you. Those Black Forest houses have an archetypal aura of
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security. We must imagine what it means for the people living in such a house that the roof takes up three-quarters of the house’s volume. It stands out so far that it seems to enclose the whole of the rest of the building. Like henhouses that seem to cluck contentedly . . .
RAULFF: The epitome of being protected . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Protected to the highest degree, as safe and secure as on the seventh day of creation. Some houses are so beauti- ful that you just want to stand there and say, ‘Perfect. ’
RAULFF: The hat – to shelter something with your hat – to protect, or to shepherd – Shepherd of Being . . . these motifs play a pre-eminent role in the late Heidegger.
SLOTERDIJK: The same goes for the mountain range, hiding, seclusion. All this is directly there in those cocooning houses. Even if you don’t go up to the loft the whole year round, you live with its presence. It is the prototype of the mountain range under which a protected existence evolves. The effect is very touching. In this case the house becomes a living-tool – and if living and thinking belong together, the house there is a thinking-tool and a world-tool in one. By staying in Heidegger’s region I have gained access to some ideas of his that you can’t get simply by reading them. Incidentally, you don’t find any traces of this at Heidegger’s notorious hut, which is only a humble lean-to, a green-painted shack.
RAULFF: I am pleased that this digression on the sensitivities of the later Heidegger has helped us towards a more positive defini- tion of the concept we are discussing. So far, we have described the topic mostly in negative modes such as compensation, exoneration, excuses, pre-emptive confrontation, etc. I have been meaning to ask you the whole time: can’t you also envisage a legitimate, positive way of using this concept? Do you think it still has a halfway mean- ingful field of application in the present day?
SLOTERDIJK: Are you still talking about fate?
RAULFF: Yes, indeed; I’m sticking to it quite obsessively . . . SLOTERDIJK: Well, the concept remains meaningful, although
today it is used in a narrower sense than in ancient times. The Fates have laid down their shears – they probably had to hand them in at hand-luggage control. The Moirai, the ananke, fate, kismet – we can’t revive all that. It is time for a reformatted, weaker, more modest concept of fate. It’s no secret how we will get it: it will appear for us in the third act of the drama of the history of ideas that began in Europe in the seventeenth century. We have already referred to this. In the first act, fate is swallowed up by the rational version of Being. In Spinoza’s work the world appears as a gesamtkunstwerk composed of causalities. That suspended fate in natural laws, after which fate could retire peacefully because everything happens through good
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imperatives anyway. The necessary and sufficient conditions arrange things between themselves. Fatalism vanishes in universal causality and can then dissolve temporarily into the optimism of the phi- losophy of praxis. To quote a classical warning against superstitious belief in astrology, ‘In your breast are the stars of your fate. ’8 The age of the pathos of self-determination has come, and we just don’t need heteronomous powers of fate any more. But it won’t stay like that for long. After the first naïve wave of practice has crashed, the second phase will start. We are being overwhelmed by the evidence of old and new kinds of heteronomy currently overtaking the anti- fatalism of the Enlightenment. Neo-fatalist concepts have taken over since it became clear that things are going to turn out differently than we imagined. Counter-enlightenment tendencies are celebrating a return match. Oswald Spengler almost believed that deeper minds would always feel attracted to the concept of fate. Even the largest growing organisms on earth, the high cultures, are subject to fate in the form of morphological necessity. The cultures are winding down like plant life or thousand-year-old musical boxes, and our life is synchronized with them. A good part of our latter-day literature on fate is written in this tone. It processes the darkness in our conditions of existence affirmatively – from Goethe’s Primal Words, Orphic to Nietzsche’s amor fati to the retour du tragique. The last motif has been a topic for French authors such as Jean-Marie Domenach, from a Catholic perspective, and Michel Maffesoli, from the stand- point of postmodern pluralism. 9 A while ago we entered the third phase, in which we are just as remote from the Promethean rational- ism of the Enlightenment as we are from the coy irrationalism of the counter-Enlightenment. This is the basic position from which to get a clear overall view of the field. We are at the end of the parable of fate: the Enlightenment neutralization of the concept and its irrationalist revival are followed by post-Enlightenment clarification.
RAULFF: There were occasional objections to this, of course. You have already mentioned Marquard, who used the term ‘fate’ to protest against the technocratic enlightenment’s crazy notion that anything is feasible, and Koselleck does something similar as well. 10
8 ‘In thy breast are the stars of thy fate. ’ (Friedrich Schiller, The Piccolomini, Act II, Scene VI. )
9 Jean-Marie Domenach (1922–97) was a French journalist and writer with a Catholic perspective whose influential book, Le retour de la tragique, appeared in 1963. Michel Maffesoli is a French sociologist specializing in postmodernity and the presence of the imaginary in everyday life.
10 Reinhard Koselleck (1923–2006) was a leading twentieth-century German historian.
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SLOTERDIJK: In my opinion, both of them belong to the cat- egory of Abklärung, ‘clarification’. The great master in this field was, of course, Niklas Luhmann. I was referring to him when I claimed, in the discussion with Heiner Geißler we mentioned at the beginning of this interview, that the most profound incognito of the idea of fate or destiny in the modern age is the concept of ‘differentiation of sub- systems’ that Luhmann used.
Maybe he would object, but it seems to me it was a meaningful statement. When Luhmann speaks of dif- ferentiation it sounds almost as if he were telling us ex officio: ‘Not only books, but also systems, have their destinies. ’ The destiny of social systems is that, from a specific degree of complexity onwards, they differentiate functionally of their own accord. We notice this partly from the fact that they become obscure in terms of common sense. As soon as a system has become differentiated you can’t apply everyday reasoning to it any longer because it has become autono- mous and self-referential. Expert reason and everyday reason are estranged from each other. The expert has the task of explaining to the layperson that things in differentiated subsystems function as they function and it can’t be any different even when, and precisely when, it seems absurd to common sense. We can also describe this as follows: when they are differentiated, social systems reach the level at which the people who are the targets of sociological enlighten- ment are required to understand that society has no logical centre and doesn’t produce any true self. Society has no God spots, as it were, where it can look into its own interior. Sociology, too, is only useful to the extent that it understands that it doesn’t really under- stand its subject . . .
RAULFF: Does this mean Luhmann is also on the side of the post-Enlightenment?
SLOTERDIJK: I would call Luhmann the third member of the group of clarifiers next to Koselleck and Marquard. What they all share is the objective irony with which they view the results of his- torical activism. Clarification is always post-optimistic.
RAULFF: In his day Marquard, in particular, represented the position of objection to the social-technological ideology that was still in its original happy state in the 1970s. In other words, he opposed the belief in the feasibility and predictability of everything.
SLOTERDIJK: The concept of fate has needed modernizing from the time we could no longer bring on the kind of crude heavy weaponry of history and ontology that was typical in the nineteenth century. The semantic content of the recycled concept of fate can be dispersed rather more finely now. To give one example of a nuance in meaning that has become detached from the complex of discourses on fatality, let me mention the concept of the irreversible
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as it has developed in thermodynamics and process theory. Whereas human history represents the realm of second chances and of things happening ‘once again’, the sphere of physical processes is defined by unrepeatability and irreversibility. Another example is the concept of inviolability: this expression has had a notable career in theological circles in recent decades. In using it, we are repeating a gesture we have known since the Romantic period: omnipotence of the subject – no thanks! Anyone who says ‘inviolable’ nowa- days is thinking of the ‘mortal coil’ in the theological sense that can’t be shuffled off by any clarification, or by any technological relief.
RAULFF: Theologians are not the only people who talk like that. There are similar cases among aestheticians and phenomenologists: Gumbrecht with his repeated emphasis on the epiphanic presence, Karl Heinz Bohrer with his focus on the aesthetic moment – those are also expressions of inviolability. 11 They relate to instances that can’t be planned and produced, moments of an emotional presence that either appear on their own or withdraw without our being able to protest about it.
SLOTERDIJK: By the way, both Gumbrecht and Bohrer refer to the strongest instance of ‘fate’ in modern German poetry. In Rilke’s eighth Duino Elegy, we hear the sigh: ‘This is what fate means: to be opposite / and to be that and nothing else, opposite, forever. ’ Towards the end of the poem comes the question: ‘Who has turned us round like this, so that / whatever we do, we always have the aspect / of one who leaves? ’ The poet’s lament relates to the fact that for us, as humans in general and individuals of the modern age in particular, unlike for dumb animals, the world no longer represents pure openness. We have stacked up the space before us with projects. Fate is decided here through human beings’ existential orthopaedics. It has failed so fundamentally that we will always be those who turned round, who go away, who are incapable of being present. It seems to me we encounter the concept of fate here in a soft, almost innocent version, because it designates a tragic dowry of civilization, not triumphal and not masochistic, but tinged with melancholy. Heidegger described something vaguely compa- rable when he spoke of the insanity that is inseparable from human beings’ period of residence in the world. Going astray is ensconced in normal existence itself, which has always been in a kind of flight.
11 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is a German-born American literary scholar and professor at Stanford University. Karl Heinz Bohrer is a German essayist and literary scholar.
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Heidegger is almost saying: ‘Being human is being away’ – like the expression ‘Let’s get out of here! ’
RAULFF: May I return to the other point again: is there a pos- sibility for you to integrate the concept of fate into your own work? It seems to me you touched almost directly on the concept a couple of times in the development of your work, from the Critique of Cynical Reason to Eurotaoism and You Must Change Your Life, but you haven’t adopted it personally, if I can put it like that; in a sense you have narrowly squeezed past it. All the same, I would like to ask whether fate might be a positive, interesting concept for you.
SLOTERDIJK: I would say the most interesting concepts are retired concepts.
RAULFF: Concepts in the retirement home for the history of concepts?
SLOTERDIJK: Their retirement is part of their charm. When their service is over, old concepts find a small part-time job now and then. This is how a new use of the concept of fate would appear to me. It has to be brought into play far more casually than in its heyday; it has to become almost feather-light. This reminds me of a passage in Nietzsche’s work I often return to – the song ‘Before Sunrise’ from the third part of Zarathustra. The scenery is imposing: as we can expect from the prophet of the new world age, Zarathustra is already up at dawn, running across the mountains and engaging in dialogue with the heavens before the sun appears. This is where the decisive phrases come – wait, I have to find the place (Sloterdijk leafs through the book): ‘Truly it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach: “Above all things stands the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of accident, the heaven of wanton- ness. ” “Von Ohngefähr” [Lord Chance] – that is the world’s oldest nobility. ’12
RAULFF: That is very beautiful.
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Which I have given back to all things, I have released them from servitude under purpose. ’ At this point we have to interrupt and add a commentary on the metaphysical content of the formula ‘servitude under purpose’. In its strongest form, the idea of fate was not an improvised home remedy for hypochondriacs on cloudy days – it was a world principle placed on a high onto- logical throne; it was the work of the good reason of all things. The philosophical concept of fate appeared at its most splendid in late antiquity in the form of the stoical Heimarmene, who represented
12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books), 1961, pp. 186; 4,209ff.
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something like the sweeping reason of the government of the uni- verse – incidentally, in mythology, Heimarmene was known as the daughter of Ananke. Nietzsche rejected such fictitious ideas of a lofty premeditated necessity in the course of all things by letting chance off the leash:
I have released them from servitude under purpose. I set this freedom and celestial cheerfulness over all things like an azure bell when I taught that no ‘eternal will’ acts over them and through them. I set this wantonness and this foolishness in place of that will when I taught: ‘With all things one thing is impossible – rationality! ’ A little reason, to be sure, a seed of wisdom scattered from star to star – this leaven is mingled with all things: for the sake of foolishness is wisdom mingled with all things. A little wisdom is no doubt possible; but I have found this happy certainty in all things: that they prefer – to dance on the feet of chance.
These lines were written on the Independence Day of modern thought – and inevitably they deal with the emancipation of the coincidental. Nietzsche still employs the metaphysical language of thunder and lightning in some places, but on this subject he has already changed to contingency thought. This much remains today from good old fate: Luhmann’s theorem of double contingency. A system in which everything could be different relates to an environ- ment in which everything could also be different. But the fact it is actually the way it is involves a touch of fatefulness.
RAULFF: And would that be your answer as well?
SLOTERDIJK: In principle, yes, as long as it means the eman- cipation of the coincidental. I really like terms that are out of commission. Antiquated concepts contain riches you can discover by chance as if you were clearing out the attic. A word like ‘fate’ is an archive in itself. That reminds me of Gottfried Benn’s remark: ‘Words, words – nouns! They only need to open their wings and millennia drop off from their flight. ’13
RAULFF: I think that’s wonderful.
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Fate’ is the kind of word from whose flight the millennia drop off.
RAULFF: The concept in itself is a gigantic theory novel, a novel of thought. So far we have only unpacked a couple of expressions
13 Gottfried Benn, ‘Epilog und lyrisches ich’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, ed. Dieter Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes), 1968, p. 8.
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and metaphors from the crate, but it is quite astonishing what that revealed.
SLOTERDIJK: We have indicated a few examples of mythi- cal and terminological conceptions of the fateful in the Western tradition. Aside from this, we shouldn’t forget that there is an inde- pendent oriental world of theory, namely the Indian, which has had a concept such as karma for 2,500 years. This covers much of what Eastern philosophers have experienced or devised on moral causal- ity, long-term relations of culpability, coincidences of incarnation, and existential inequalities and their future compensations. India belongs to a world sphere that, seen as a whole, had a far lower level of technological and political freedom than the Western sphere. As soon as you open up to its culture you feel something of the domi- nant need there to react to prevailing conditions with far more soul, many more gods and much more asceticism.
RAULFF: Doesn’t that also mean, with far more poetry?
SLOTERDIJK: It is true that the people of the Indian hemisphere were condemned to produce an interior world from very early times, just like the people of the bygone days when Europe was still called the Occident. In this state of the world, the way outward was largely blocked and the external facts were not very inspiring. Only enor- mous achievements of practice and recasting make the world and life bearable. To explain with an analogy, I am fond of recalling the ancient European tradition of constellations that modern people hardly know about any more – at most they know Ursa Major or Orion’s Belt. In antiquity every halfway-educated person knew the forty-eight constellations like the back of their hand, and each of the constellations was associated with innumerable stories. The constellation-studded sky was evidence of how earlier people had vested the external world with excess matter from their inner world. In this state of the world the concept of fate assumes enormous importance because it simulates a kind of grammar for recasting good and bad fortune. A single star starts off being nothing but a meaningless point of light, part of a constellation, a cipher. This is how apparently meaningless coincidences are woven together in an ad hoc fabric of meaning. The concept of fate indicates the psycho- logical work that will be necessary if people want to recast chance into something meaningful and liveable. Only well-insured people like us in the modern age have been able to emancipate themselves from chance. Only in technological culture can one travel with such light psychological baggage as we have grown accustomed to carrying. Most of the generations before us didn’t have that kind of relief from burdens. They had to try to understand the world like a big carpet with a pattern that is too big to be recognizable, but they
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still wanted to believe absolutely in its existence. In its most human form, the idea of fate was the core element of the belief that we our- selves are threads and figures in a divine carpet-weaving workshop.
II. Marbach Conversation
RAULFF: Mr Sloterdijk, to follow up and round off our first meeting of several months ago, today we should talk about some topics that we didn’t mention last time. I am thinking mainly about the symbolism of fate in early modernism, especially Fortuna with all her attributes, each of which is extremely interesting in its own right . . .
SLOTERDIJK: And each of which would merit a large exhibi- tion. Fortuna’s classical attributes are the helm, the sail, the wheel that rises and falls, the cosmos sphere on which the goddess bal- ances, the globe and its miniature versions, the ball and the lottery ball. Today, unfortunately, nobody gives a thought any more to the symbolic sources of the countless balls that we play with in present mass culture.
RAULFF: Except for Horst Bredekamp, who is interested in the ball games of the Medici . . . 14
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, he is one of the few contemporary scholars of visual imagery to have examined these topics. But the whole theme of balls, globes and spheres has a miserable existence in the margin of the official attention system.
RAULFF: What is the reason for this? Is it perhaps because, despite Huizinga,15 people haven’t taken the game seriously in terms of its function for cultural creativity? Or is it that playing games has always been associated with a kind of vagueness? With an inherent shakiness?
SLOTERDIJK: I think you’re right. For a very long period vagueness and shakiness were unpopular with theorists – they disliked them. One exception is Paul Valéry’s work, where we can still see the morose, classical-rationalist type of character with a visceral abhorrence of anything approximate. On the other hand, we can only understand something about the twentieth-century
14 Horst Bredekamp is a German art historian. Raulff is referring to his book: Horst Bredekamp, Florentiner Fußball. Die Renaissance der Spiele. Calcio als Fest der Medici (first published 1993; revised edition, Berlin: Wagenbach, 2001).
15 Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) was a Dutch historian and cultural theorist who played a major role in developing modern cultural theory.
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culture of rationality if we view it as constantly extending the zone of calculability. It is an enterprise to bring labile factors, all kinds of vagueness, enthusiasms and turbulences into the realm of exact thought. In the Europe of old, these unstable entities were treated as mythological forms; uncertainties were attributed to divine moods or predestination. But probability calculations began to appear in the seventeenth century, and since the twentieth century we have been able to apply chaos theory, fractals and algorithms to every- thing crooked, twisted and tattered.
We don’t talk about Fortune nowadays, of course, but about risk. That presupposes a leap into a different discursive order. For an author like Petrarch it was still right and proper to survey the whole field of existential instability with a collection of exemplary stories or novellas about good and bad luck. Research tells us that his gigantic book De remediis utriusque fortunae16 was one of the most frequently copied secular manuscripts of the pre-Gutenberg age. This shows, incidentally, that we can discern the beginning of modernity from the rise of the advice manual. Petrarch’s work shows him as the first great master of literary life training. He was completely abreast of his times because in the dawning modern age he understood that he could particularly arouse interest in the role of a fortune therapist. His approach was still completely Stoical- Christian. He appealed to his readers with the message: if you have to live in this world in which moody Fortuna throws her balls – the bewildering goddess Fortuna, who sometimes pampers you and sometimes lets you drop – you should start by learning to respond with indifference to the balls she throws. The best way is to practise keeping an equal distance from her so as not to cling to good luck too much and not to lament bad luck too much.
RAULFF: What do latter-day advisers who have started talking about risk have in mind? What is their goal? To limit risk using probability calculations? Do they want to win the game themselves? Or do they want to act as insurers and limit other people’s risk of damage?
SLOTERDIJK: This field of play involves various different types and positions: some people play for the sake of the game, and others to win, while a third group wants to play to win profit from others winning. A fourth group doesn’t play at all for fear of losing – they are the ones who don’t realize they have lost from the beginning. Anyone who hasn’t played loses without having had the chance to
16 Francesco, Petrarch, Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, trans. C. H. Rawski (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 1991.
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win. The fourth position is that of the eternal conservatives who are still around today, who think they can save their skin in the general competition by staying away from the current games of chance.
RAULFF: Moving upward historically from the medieval emblem of Fortuna – namely, the globe on which the goddess bal- ances – we get to modern techniques of controlling coincidence, from risk minimization to risk elimination. If we go backward from that, we get to the ancient pictures of the distribution of lots.
SLOTERDIJK: On this reading, the Fortune theology of the late Middle Ages and the early modern era would be something like the midpoint between the dark fatalism of the Greeks before the beginning of the first enlightenment, and the apparently complete elimination of risks in modern banking mathematics – although we know by now this can only function as massive deception of oneself and others. That middle position couldn’t be held without compli- cations: it was related to the almost insoluble problem of balancing up the fundamental anti-fatalist teachings of Christianity – which assert that after the resurrection of the Lord, Fate has no more dominion – with the persistence of the ancient, popular formulas for neutralizing chance and fate, which were almost indispensable. This is the only reason why Fortuna haunted the Christian Middle Ages, for which she actually had no residence permit. The strongest symptom of this insoluble tension was the Augustine teaching of predestination in which we can retrospectively recognize the matrix of Western neurosis. On the one hand, Augustine understood better than anyone else that faith in Fate is irreconcilable with the triune nature of God. That is why he wanted to sink any idea of Fate in the underworld of vanquished superstition. This, however, didn’t elimi- nate the problem that ancient belief in fate was developed to solve; the unfathomable inequality of human living conditions preoccu- pied the thoughts of Christians just as much as those of the people of pre-Christian antiquity. The riddle consisted of absorbing the real existing absurdity that yawns at us as we watch human beings wrestling with incredibly blatant inequalities from birth onward. To deal with this, Augustine hit upon a solution that turned out to be even more sinister than ancient fatalism had ever been – the theory of human beings’ divine predestination to salvation and perdition. To fend off pagan fatalism, the Church Father plunged into the murkiest adventure in the history of ideas: he invented a monothe- ist hyper-fatalism called predestination, which literally means the anticipatory determination of fate.
At the same time Augustine firmly adhered to the thesis of human freedom, because otherwise it would have been impossible to defend the penal character of being predestined to damnation. In his
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philosophy, predestination becomes a medium of divine selectivity that remains incomprehensible. Augustine’s finicky God was not a laughing matter. In real terms, the great majority of people have to anticipate belonging to the damned souls from the very begin- ning. This exactly reflects the ideological situation of late antiquity in which the Church, although it was formally the religion of state from the year 395 onward, barely had any influence on the lives of people in the Empire: the few convinced Christians who existed were well aware that they belonged to a tiny elite and that the gates of heaven would probably remain shut to the great majority. It is true that the Christian God is called the Merciful, and the word ‘mercy’ describes the exceptional right of the sovereign, but mercy for the many or, indeed, mercy for all, would not be plausible, even for a God that makes exceptions.
The ominous nature of Augustine’s version didn’t consist in its manifest elitism – Christianity is elitist, or it is not Christian. It was rather a matter of its depressive logic, because it eliminated the pos- sibility of contributing to one’s own redemption by making pious efforts. Piety itself is a result of mercy, not its cause. Augustine is formal on this point. Humans cannot obtain merits. Full stop. It took almost a thousand years until Anselm of Canterbury corrected Augustine’s erroneous thinking. In Augustine’s work, humans remain metaphysically in debit even after the redemption of Christ, because even after their baptism they continue being guilty of original sin, as their debt to God is infinite. This seems to make sense immediately: finite merit can’t redeem infinite guilt, because adding a finite plus to an infinite minus yields an infinite minus. The relevant scholastic theorem is: Inter finitum et infinitum non est proportio. In other words, one can’t bargain with the infinite, and Augustine knew that better than anybody. Yet a false conclusion crept into his calculation, and it was Anselm who first drew atten- tion to it indirectly with his theory of satisfaction in Cur deus homo. Anselm presented a discrete kind of theological mathematics that showed the way out of the depressive logic of the Middle Ages. Since then, theologians have been able to calculate differently, as follows – A: the children of Adam brought infinite guilt on themselves; B: the infinite guilt was redeemed by the infinitely satisfying sacrifice of Christ. Consequently, C holds: infinite guilt plus infinite satisfaction equals zero. The revised calculation had an enormous impact: from that time on, human merits have made a difference. They could be chalked up positively because they were no longer directly counter- posed to an infinite minus, for the latter is definitively balanced up by the deed of the God-man – and this balance marks the starting position of the believer. The horizon is now free for the active life;
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positive deeds count. All at once it is meaningful when Christian people want to make something out of their lives and are not always panting for infinite guilt. From this perspective, the road to the modern world began in an obscure theological tract shortly before the year 1100. Since that time, Augustine’s flight from ancient fate into the Christian Super-Fate called predestination has been brought to a standstill, at least wherever possible.