It’s an inoculation programme that
administers
grievances until they have passed through every kind of grievance – and then they get their narcissistic school-leaving certificate.
Sloterdijk - Selected Exaggerations
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. Here in Germany, Homo oeconomicus is not created by the economy but is born in state-run hospitals, grows up in families, is educated in state schools, trained in state universities, and then emerges at age twenty-five or thirty and is returned to the wild, let loose in the market arena and given a second chance to qualify, as it were – the opportunity to begin a second life to learn the criteria and moral judgements that are part of making the person roadworthy in this other scene.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Is our society structured in such a way that it can’t emancipate itself from state tutelage?
SLOTERDIJK: At any rate, it won’t happen soon. Our regula- tory state services are so comprehensive and detailed that trying to do it alone would overburden market forces in the long run. It would make sense, however, to reduce state control of schools to some extent, and the same applies to universities and the sciences. It would not a priori be a cultural disaster if the university became more like a privately run company and if academics were somewhat less dependent on the bureaucracy.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Why do we Germans in par- ticular believe so strongly in the state, in contrast to Anglo-Saxon countries?
SLOTERDIJK: This is related to the fact that, in common with all continental peoples, our notion of the state is strongly influenced by territorialism. That is a very tragic notion of the state. It means
62 On Wealth and Self-Respect
the state exists for us to be able to die for it. In the end, the nation is a sacrificial entity, and that is something countries based more on maritime cultures, those neo-nomadic collectives of Britons and Americans, are reluctant to understand. But meanwhile we conti- nentals are also increasingly abandoning the lofty state that gives death and demands sacrifice.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: If we look at the growth of tax evasion and illegal labour, Germans are becoming increasingly unwilling to make financial sacrifices for the state.
SLOTERDIJK: From a historical perspective, the tax rate is extremely high. People in the so-called higher-income bracket have realized they have the comparative in terms of earnings, but the superlative in terms of taxation. We are punished for success, and that is sending out the wrong signal – it emanates from the lofty state that still exists with a lofty idea of community and a lofty ideology of redistribution, and that justifies the harm done to middle-class households and the interference in citizens’ property. But the population is becoming less tolerant of these interventions because people always feel that taxation is just a matter of suffer- ance and nothing else.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: How do we achieve the situation of citizens suffering less and giving gladly?
SLOTERDIJK: It depends on seeing the levies, the taxes subjec- tively, so that we don’t just mindlessly hand over part of what we have earned, but we can dedicate it to a goal. Sponsoring is an ideal example of what could be possible here.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: That would be a systemic breach: taxes are not supposed to serve a specific end but to finance state activity as a whole.
SLOTERDIJK: Of course. But if the state merely acts as the imaginary pimp of the whole society and extracts everything it can, but doesn’t explain convincingly what it is doing with it, that results in taxation passivity and citizens end up fleeing as tax exiles. Anybody who understands anything about the economy and intel- ligent allocation can’t agree with the way those mass redistributions take place. If governments here in Germany don’t handle it more cleverly, we will observe the strange socio-psychological outcome that people who are getting richer all the time are getting more dis- contented all the time.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: In that case, would the state be threatening its own existence by destroying the trust society is based on?
SLOTERDIJK: Precisely. There are countless areas of redistribu- tion that could be organized much more intelligently and efficiently
On Wealth and Self-Respect 63
by alternative means. I am thinking of unemployment benefits, of the whole welfare state that should be organized more in terms of incentives, much more in terms of entrepreneurship and less in terms of the consumer state.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Are you saying that entrepre- neurial thinking is supposed to save the welfare state?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, entrepreneurs will raise the banners of hope again. Without a movement of entrepreneurs, as there was once a workers’ movement, the economy can no longer explain itself adequately to society.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: And what will be written on the banners?
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Entrepreneurs of the world, unite’ – what else? At the moment only entrepreneurs can convincingly represent the interests of the industries and services that produce the hardware, that is, the real value of productive industry, against the phantom superstructure of speculative finance economy. Only an entrepre- neurs’ movement can act in the anti-capitalist way that is needed now. It is time for entrepreneurial anti-capitalism.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: The entrepreneur as alternative to the distorted picture of globalization, of the anonymous flow of money around the globe?
SLOTERDIJK: Entrepreneurs must show that an operative economy, not the dictatorship of the lottery bosses, is the founda- tion of the market economy. Entrepreneurs are the social democracy of tomorrow.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Are you serious?
SLOTERDIJK: Of course. At the moment entrepreneurs may describe themselves in neoliberal terms, but this is becoming increas- ingly false as the years go by, because in the end they can only justify themselves as producers of the net value that serves the other side of redistribution.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: And this results in the economy itself stabilizing society?
SLOTERDIJK: Exactly. We have three mechanisms of redistri- bution: taxation, the stock market and foundations. Redistribution must take place because statehood and civil laws will suffer if they are not sufficiently well grounded. The first platform for redistribu- tion, social democracy, is no longer convincing in the long run, and alongside it the economy has developed another platform for redis- tribution – the shareholder system.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: In other words, shareholder capi- talism alongside state redistribution. And what is the third platform? SLOTERDIJK: I call that ‘subjective tax’. There are beautiful
64 On Wealth and Self-Respect
examples from the Anglo-Saxon world, where gentlemanly capi- talism has a certain tradition. Calvinism’s strength was that it produced a type of person who was willing to earn 5 million pounds as a capitalist and then spend 4 million pounds in foundations as a member of Christian society. We have to remould our rich people from a cultural perspective and explain to them that just being rich is not good enough.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Are you advocating a new Calvinism?
SLOTERDIJK: A new Calvin? No, he was a weird, unpleas- ant fellow. I would rather have a mixture of an opera director and Albert Schweitzer – I mean somebody who adds charisma and gives hope to millionaires again.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: So that giving can be fun?
SLOTERDIJK: Wealth must be fun – in such a way that the fun turns serious of its own accord. Wealth is too serious to leave to envy and fear. Unfortunately, people here in Germany don’t know that the only feeling that makes life worthwhile is generosity. Too many people in this country haven’t been rich for long enough to attain this wisdom and make the move towards generosity.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: That could explain why the Germans have never been as affluent as they are today, but are still not happier.
SLOTERDIJK: Indeed, people in this country are caught in a socio-psychological dilemma. The only possibility of getting out of it would be to reclaim the public arena lustfully, turning it into a culture of public generosity. Then wealth would be justified again . . .
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: . . . and people would be in a better mood?
SLOTERDIJK: I won’t claim that their bad mood will vanish; it is too deeply entrenched in the system. After all, we are dealing with a jealousy and envy machine of huge dimensions. That basic tension can’t be eliminated. But we can make the whole issue less acute if people feel more freedom at the point where money is spent, if they experience more generosity and get back the euphoria of a celebra- tory donation. We should break through the spiritual isolation of the rich.
10
LEARNING IS JOYFUL ANTICIPATION OF ONESELF
Interview with Reinhard Kahl*2
KAHL: A new education debate is in the air. What’s brewing?
SLOTERDIJK: Potential disturbance is in the air for the whole society. You can compare it to how individuals feel physical pain. Debates and scandals form a nervous system of topics by which society perceives itself.
KAHL: Education debates could be a way for society to explore itself. But the promising debate often breaks off at the last moment. Why?
SLOTERDIJK: We usually try to suppress questions about education. They are some of the most uncomfortable questions. Compared to that, the hospital system is almost pleasant and fasci- nating, as we can clearly see from the mass media. We have endless film series about hospitals and consultant surgeons. The gentlemen in green who snip around on bodies have become heroes. Intuitively we could say it doesn’t make sense – we don’t actually want to see anything unpleasant like an operating theatre in our living room in the evening. But in fact, that’s just what people want. The really unpleasant thing is school.
KAHL: There are some school soaps on television nowadays. But their equivalent of the operating theatre in hospital series would be lessons and exams, and you don’t see them in school series.
SLOTERDIJK: School exams are so unpleasant because they
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Reinhard Kahl appeared under the title ‘Lernen ist Vorfreude auf sich selbst’, in Pädagogik 53 (2001): 40–5 (Beltz, Weinheim).
Reinhard Kahl is a journalist and film-maker.
66 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
remind many people of birth. In schools, people are not interned for nine months but incubated for at least nine years. Then they have to fight their way out in written exams, in other words, closed situa- tions. Modern people don’t want to be reminded that they were ever incarcerated.
KAHL: School isn’t seen as a prenatal paradise – that would be asking too much – but it isn’t seen as the joyful event of com- ing-into-the-world either. Can we think of school as pressure in the birth canal?
SLOTERDIJK: School is what people always want to leave behind them. People rarely look back at school with affection.
KAHL: It wasn’t always as clear-cut as that.
SLOTERDIJK: Romanticism about school, as expressed in the famous film Die Feuerzangenbowle [The Punch Bowl],1 evokes mem- ories of situations that were not yet emergencies. Today the school has become a necessity of its own.
KAHL: A curious necessity, like a military exercise that uses live ammunition. On the other hand, there is a lack of resonance for taking any action that might have a serious effect. The school wryly adopts an attitude of necessity and claims, ‘all this is required later in life’.
SLOTERDIJK: The famous saying that we don’t learn for school, but for life, was an attempt at justification from the very beginning. The original school allowed pupils to learn for school because the Graeco-Roman view was that there was no need to learn for life. Life is its own teacher; it is self-explanatory. School, however, meant leisure for the Greeks, and leisure was regarded as the quintessence of life. Funnily enough, the Greeks formed their word for ‘to work’ or ‘to do business’ from the negation of the word ‘to be idle’. Anybody learning for leisure was engaging in free activity.
KAHL: How did the intrinsic value of a leisure education become a means to other ends?
SLOTERDIJK: When the modern nation-state took over the school service, the necessity principle was transferred to learning in school. It became pre-professional: school is preparation for employ- ment. The German concept of education was shaped by Prussian neo-humanism around 1800 and still tries to find a balance between
1 Die Feuerzangenbowle [The Punch Bowl] was a popular German film released in 1944. Set in a school in Germany, it was famous for its praise of schooldays as the best days of life, and for its light-hearted escapism during the grim last year of the Second World War.
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 67
the classical and the modern concept: we learn for school and for life. The society of work is already at the door, but the school still holds its own as an autonomous life form. Die Feuerzangenbowle symbolizes this compromise. Meanwhile the migration of necessity into the classroom has advanced considerably. We’re not going to see any new punch bowls.
KAHL: School means something traumatic for most people. What is it? You mentioned the birth analogy. Does school make people feel unwelcome?
SLOTERDIJK: Perhaps. For most children today, school is the initiation into a situation that they feel is not about them person- ally.
It’s an inoculation programme that administers grievances until they have passed through every kind of grievance – and then they get their narcissistic school-leaving certificate. The message is: ‘Whatever you may think of yourself, you’re not that important. ’ People don’t like being reminded of such exams.
KAHL: In the old school where people supposedly learned for life, they experienced being a small cog in a big machine. The oppo- sitional movement, ‘do whatever you want’, didn’t get far either. Today we have school students who end up without any idea of what they want.
SLOTERDIJK: That is undoubtedly related to the fact that today’s educationists don’t know themselves what they are educat- ing children for. Modern society’s confusion about its own goals is more clearly reflected in the confusing school system than anywhere else – except, perhaps, the area of visual arts, which is also a great world stage for mental disturbance. The school and the art business are nervous systems of sensitive issues in society in which the con- fusion about what will happen next is very clearly articulated. On average, teachers can’t be different from the society they come from.
KAHL: Twenty or thirty years ago many people said they wanted to affect things by playing a key part in social change, and they became teachers. By now there are many other options for people with ideas. The teaching profession has become a second choice. How are refugees from life supposed to represent the world to the next generation?
SLOTERDIJK: Teachers are people who often believe it is better to explain something than do something. The cowardly and the the- oretical decisions about life don’t necessarily converge, but often do. The result is schools as socio-psychological biotopes with an atypi- cal concentration of timid, under-motivated people concerned with private issues. The only answer is to de-professionalize schools. We have to enhance their social skills and leave them free on the factual side. It is increasingly clear that you don’t get to the core of learning
68 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
with classic schooling methods. All the people who turned out to be special in school didn’t do it because of the school but because the school left them alone. When things went well it offered protection under which intensive learning processes, which have always been intrinsically autodidactic, could flourish. Sometimes the autodi- dactic element was able to evolve under cover of didactics. But I think this particular constellation has passed its optimal point. New optimal situations have to be created for autodidactics. The school is probably no longer part of these optimal conditions.
KAHL: Aren’t didactic teachers – there are other kinds as well, of course – representatives of an ailing priestly class nowadays? Who else still believes knowledge can be passed down from above?
SLOTERDIJK: Priesthood: that’s a convincing analogy. Today, armies of world clerics appear before their flock and appeal to the good in human beings. Meanwhile they have discovered that their appeals result in evil developing all the more. Then people pretend to naivety and ask what’s going wrong.
KAHL: Teachers don’t encourage new knowledge ‘from below’. They lack the combination of action and experience.
SLOTERDIJK: Teachers live with false descriptions – more so, in fact, than any other group in society, aside from nihilists, who know what they’re doing and still keep on doing it. Nihilists are always on target with any possible enlightenment. They are already on the baseline of total lack of illusions about themselves and others. They think and act on the damaging assumption that entropy always wins. This is precisely what we people on the creative side have been fighting against with the methods of art and philosophy since way back when. The point is to inspire people to enthusiasm and get them involved.
KAHL: So let’s give school one more chance! How could it become a venue, or even a hothouse, for autodidactic experiments? After all, people learning of their own accord are not autistic. They need other people to inspire them, people who are curious but don’t lecture them or ‘mediate’ the lessons in a boring way.
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, we need schools that emphasize young people’s pertinacity and don’t colonize them for the sake of ‘neces- sity’. We must shut the school doors to business, fashion and other such terrifying menaces, and reconstruct a living space for people to engage in a libidinous relationship with their own intelligence. What is clear to see in a small child usually gets lost in the school pupil. The rescue of the cognitive libido must become the school’s core project.
KAHL: School as a space of dense atmospheres swelling with possibilities? You have been occupied for years with understanding
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 69
what spheres are and not getting stuck with congealed substances like knowledge.
SLOTERDIJK: My theory of enthusiasms, that is, of public spirits, tries to reduce overblown romantic-nationalist concepts to the level of specific groups. Schools must become boarding schools! Not literally, of course, but rather in the sense of emphasizing the intrinsic character of school life. I’m seeing that with my daughter, who is lucky to be in an excellent schooling situation. In her case, you can see clearly what it means to spend time in an environment for encouraging enthusiasm.
KAHL: What grade is she in?
SLOTERDIJK: She is in the second year at the Montessori branch of an ordinary elementary school. You can see how a dif- ferent climatic policy in the school encourages a different way of speaking to the pupils and a different language among the pupils themselves. This school begins by assuming that the learning libido is the real capital. The children bring their curiosity, their enthusi- asm, that priceless medium of happy anticipation of their own self, into the learning process. What matters is expectation of the next state to be reached. A form of didactics that respects this operates quite differently and with better results than a school where teachers have the attitude: you’re going to be astonished, and I’m the one who is going to show you how things are.
KAHL: That’s what nourishes the evil eye, which is probably related to the frustration of teaching staff. They basically remain like school pupils from the ages of six to sixty-five, and that’s really mortifying.
SLOTERDIJK: I think it’s time for teachers to carry on the work Nietzsche did for priests. Teachers are an authority that is under-criticized and deserves to be given liberating and destructive criticism. In fact, people mostly accuse teachers of the wrong things.
KAHL: The accusation of laziness, for example.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s lazy itself.
KAHL: It may apply to some people who are already practically
retired from the job, usually due to mental overload. But isn’t the teaching profession a case of overload in structural terms?
SLOTERDIJK: That’s why teachers should be helped with adequate criticism. The analysis of job-specific mortification and experiences of failure is needed just as much as the analysis of resentment against the profession. That would be the most valu- able kind of enlightenment. We must link up with teachers to revitalize the school starting from its strongest position. Where is its renewable, enthusiastic source point? Schools must come forward energetically and say: we offer opportunities, here is our knowledge,
70 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
here is our art of living – we are inviting you to all that. The gesture of invitation is perhaps the most important thing. It turns schools into guesthouses of knowledge and places for the intelligence to go on outings, so to speak.
KAHL: You mean the end of compulsory school, which insists, like a surreal restaurant, on forced feeding and pupils being com- pelled to eat everything on their plate?
SLOTERDIJK: We have to break with the most harmful of all ancient European concepts: the idea of knowledge transfer. This idea of instilling is wrong in terms of system theory, it is morally wrong . . .
KAHL: Unsustainable in terms of cognitive psychology . . .
SLOTERDIJK: And despite that, the school is built around that idea, around the truly accursed and harmful idea of transfer.
KAHL: They are still distributing Communion wafers.
SLOTERDIJK: The institution of school is based on the perverse communion that says: ‘We have and we share out. ’ But learning just doesn’t function that way. We have to respect that we’re always dealing with people who are accomplished in their own personal way. Up until now they have been complete and without any real deficiency. The next state or condition can only be constructed on the basis of the work the person has already done. Teachers can only disturb the process, unless they become something like a host, a coach or – in a good sense – a seducer who is already at the place the child’s next step leads to. In such ‘guesthouses’ the principle of happy anticipation could seal the pedagogical pact. Watching my daughter, I am fascinated by this. At the age of two, she already strikes me as a person who has something I have never seen properly described, either in psychoanalysis or any other kind of psychologi- cal description. I discovered from her that the libido of wakefulness is shown by the fact she is excited about her next state. She is happy about her own becoming. It is as if she were wearing a safety lamp on her head that lights up the next chapter of life for her discreetly and always auspiciously. She always sees light at the end of the tunnel. It is the light from her own inbuilt projector.
KAHL: What a drama it would be if the safety lamp were blown out and only the gaffer on set switched the lights on and off! Maybe blowing out one’s own light was a systemic compulsion of old industrial capitalism, against which it was futile to rebel. Enterprises today are also increasingly unable to cope with burned-out cases. They can deal with them as consumers, but not in the role of ‘staff members’.
SLOTERDIJK: Professional teaching must forge the link again with the dynamic libido that illuminates one’s own ability to
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 71
become. Instead of that, I have heard that teachers of German- language classes invited staff from the Employment Office in Karlsruhe to visit schools to teach school students how to fill in unemployment benefit forms. I know it’s an extreme example, but it illustrates where the problem lies. Many teachers, when they operate as creators of the bad climate, practise the didactics of discourage- ment. They often do it, even without wanting to, when they secretly project their own failure or their self-pity on to their young clients.
KAHL: That provokes running battles and power struggles.
SLOTERDIJK: Most of all, the latent message comes through: ‘You’ll be astonished. I myself stopped being astonished a long time ago. ’ These two pieces of lethal information turn people into first- class climate polluters. Children should be protected against adult pessimism with their own special anti-pollution law. To refer to my daughter again, she has the advantage of an exceptional situation: she has a teacher with an amazing way of tapping the source that generates happiness. Like a good demon, he links into the children’s love of learning. He lights up when he sees the children’s faces light- ing up. This is awesome, and sets a standard. But along come the parents with their concept of realism, their pessimism and their fearful projections, and try to curtail this space of didactic miracles and to colonize it from outside.
KAHL: What do the parents say?
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Aren’t you giving the children the wrong picture of life? ’ ‘Can’t you make things more structured? ’ ‘Can’t you be a bit stricter? ’ Statements like that show how ‘realists’ try to impose their climatic monopoly. We have to create a counter-climate to oppose this. Basically, in my work as a university teacher and as a writer, I see myself mainly as a creator of spheres and a didactic proponent of atmospheres. What people learn is not all that important in the first place; far more important is for them to enter a climate that makes them aware that being able to learn is, in itself, the best opportunity of their life. In my opinion, this work of climate creation that some people attack as unjustified shamanism is indispensable for the moral regeneration of our community.
KAHL: If using productive atmospheres works, something could develop that we never experience when only standard results are presented and the special atmospheres are sacrificed to the require- ments of rigid purity rules.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s when the poison of boredom starts to spread. The school is an epicentre of boredom and is run by profes- sional bores who daub, gum up and insult children’s intelligence. Many people never recover. That is the real educational disaster. In the end, atmospheres must be seen as the most real things of all.
72 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
Today, we create situations for young people in which they have everything to hand and no desire for anything. We lose more than ten years in the elementary education process, and the best students need another ten years after the first educational experience to find their own second chance. By then, if all goes well, we have an original thirty-year-old who, after the process of school and regen- eration, can start his or her own career as a creative person attuned to atmospheres.
KAHL: Most people in Germany would think it is a strange idea that everything else depends on atmospheres in institutions and around people.
SLOTERDIJK: The problem is more acute in Germany. The catastrophe of National Socialism with its monstrous perversion of collective enthusiasm has resulted in a super-abstinence of com- munal energy in this country. In French and Anglo-Saxon culture, and in the USA, the school system is governed by different climatic factors. There is much more emphasis on the relation between the institution and the public spirit that animates people. In Germany, we have a very bureaucratic school atmosphere, always combined with resignation and dogmatic scepticism.
KAHL: The German preference for being victims – or any- thing rather than active players because that could make them perpetrators – is particularly widespread in teachers’ staff rooms.
SLOTERDIJK: It’s not only victim passion that exists, but also victim didactics and victim simulation. At our university we recently experienced the problem of individual students having to put up with restrictions and inconveniences because of reorganization in some subjects.
KAHL: You are referring to the School of Design in Karlsruhe, to which you were appointed rector this year.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s right. And what happened? We had 120 students applying for credits for two semesters of their course because they feel they are victims of the move to the new centre, which offers them access to one of Europe’s most impressive uni- versity buildings, not to mention one of the best teaching bodies and fabulous teacher–student ratios. The temptation to describe our own life in the light of discrimination has become so strong that even young people have now developed this resigned, senior- citizen-type attitude, combined with an aggressive kind of moralist demanding, as if it were perfectly natural. To counter this, we must try to interest them in the idea of entrepreneurial life so that they don’t already behave like social security clients at the age of twelve. In any case, victim hysteria relates back to childish patterns – to over-dramatization of minor injuries.
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 73
KAHL: The foundling, exposed, all alone in the world.
SLOTERDIJK: Betrayed by all – and besides, my parents are not my real parents. My teachers are not my real teachers. Everyone abandoned me. I’m only looking for the mailbox where I can post my complaints letter . . .
KAHL: The agony column . . .
SLOTERDIJK: . . . the world’s agony column. This attitude can only be corrected by activating a conspiracy of knowing better. Philosophy, literature and art must be the starting point for putting an end to the era we have lived in for fifty, sixty years now, handing in our homework as a model nation with collective depression. We are at the beginning of a generational change. It should be inter- preted openly and energetically.
KAHL: Couldn’t a new education debate be a medium for that? We must transpose to society as a whole the image of ‘joyful antici- pation of oneself’ as the heart and soul of the learning process.
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, we should have this debate, because soci- eties have no centre and no ego, they only have the public as a medium for giving wake-up calls and creating disturbances. We must finally abandon the dangerous spectres that have driven the twentieth century into disasters, the idea that society is totally itself at some point. After all, the crazy illusion of a Führer is nothing but the political interpretation of a fallacy that our culture has blithely fostered for centuries, namely, that there is a place where it could be completely itself. This realization is the entrance charge we have to pay if we want to attain the second wave of sociological enlighten- ment. We must understand that societies use atmospheres to control and climatize themselves. The topics we are talking about form a semantic air-conditioning system. Right now, all the signs are that we are programming it wrongly.
KAHL: Humans are, so to speak, the subtenants of the world, responsible for small precincts, but not for the atmosphere, not for the intermediate parts. We hold ‘the state’ and ‘society’ responsible for that.
SLOTERDIJK: And that leads to running away, disablement or avoidance panic. We feel trapped in the ‘system’. This is the basis for the psychology of employees and public servants today. Instead, we must start with a good understanding of the perspec- tive of an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of life, and use this kind of thinking to reanimate the public service as well. Perhaps this will lead to the emergence of a new generation of teachers. I think the impulse for this has to come from artists and from independent media. Philosophy and art set the tone – they retune the general atmosphere.
74 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
KAHL: Maybe we should begin by imagining a school with dif- ferent architecture. Looking at classrooms where everybody sits in rows leaves me speechless.
SLOTERDIJK: The nineteenth century built schools, museums and barracks – three atmospheric conditioning systems that pre- form social synthesis with the aid of state techniques for influencing people. Schools must be liberated from this tradition. Hopefully, the idea of a new kind of school will become enough of a political issue in the coming years that a new phase of experimentation can begin. With luck, we could have a really good, productive row about education quite soon . . .
KAHL: It could happen .
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. Here in Germany, Homo oeconomicus is not created by the economy but is born in state-run hospitals, grows up in families, is educated in state schools, trained in state universities, and then emerges at age twenty-five or thirty and is returned to the wild, let loose in the market arena and given a second chance to qualify, as it were – the opportunity to begin a second life to learn the criteria and moral judgements that are part of making the person roadworthy in this other scene.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Is our society structured in such a way that it can’t emancipate itself from state tutelage?
SLOTERDIJK: At any rate, it won’t happen soon. Our regula- tory state services are so comprehensive and detailed that trying to do it alone would overburden market forces in the long run. It would make sense, however, to reduce state control of schools to some extent, and the same applies to universities and the sciences. It would not a priori be a cultural disaster if the university became more like a privately run company and if academics were somewhat less dependent on the bureaucracy.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Why do we Germans in par- ticular believe so strongly in the state, in contrast to Anglo-Saxon countries?
SLOTERDIJK: This is related to the fact that, in common with all continental peoples, our notion of the state is strongly influenced by territorialism. That is a very tragic notion of the state. It means
62 On Wealth and Self-Respect
the state exists for us to be able to die for it. In the end, the nation is a sacrificial entity, and that is something countries based more on maritime cultures, those neo-nomadic collectives of Britons and Americans, are reluctant to understand. But meanwhile we conti- nentals are also increasingly abandoning the lofty state that gives death and demands sacrifice.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: If we look at the growth of tax evasion and illegal labour, Germans are becoming increasingly unwilling to make financial sacrifices for the state.
SLOTERDIJK: From a historical perspective, the tax rate is extremely high. People in the so-called higher-income bracket have realized they have the comparative in terms of earnings, but the superlative in terms of taxation. We are punished for success, and that is sending out the wrong signal – it emanates from the lofty state that still exists with a lofty idea of community and a lofty ideology of redistribution, and that justifies the harm done to middle-class households and the interference in citizens’ property. But the population is becoming less tolerant of these interventions because people always feel that taxation is just a matter of suffer- ance and nothing else.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: How do we achieve the situation of citizens suffering less and giving gladly?
SLOTERDIJK: It depends on seeing the levies, the taxes subjec- tively, so that we don’t just mindlessly hand over part of what we have earned, but we can dedicate it to a goal. Sponsoring is an ideal example of what could be possible here.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: That would be a systemic breach: taxes are not supposed to serve a specific end but to finance state activity as a whole.
SLOTERDIJK: Of course. But if the state merely acts as the imaginary pimp of the whole society and extracts everything it can, but doesn’t explain convincingly what it is doing with it, that results in taxation passivity and citizens end up fleeing as tax exiles. Anybody who understands anything about the economy and intel- ligent allocation can’t agree with the way those mass redistributions take place. If governments here in Germany don’t handle it more cleverly, we will observe the strange socio-psychological outcome that people who are getting richer all the time are getting more dis- contented all the time.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: In that case, would the state be threatening its own existence by destroying the trust society is based on?
SLOTERDIJK: Precisely. There are countless areas of redistribu- tion that could be organized much more intelligently and efficiently
On Wealth and Self-Respect 63
by alternative means. I am thinking of unemployment benefits, of the whole welfare state that should be organized more in terms of incentives, much more in terms of entrepreneurship and less in terms of the consumer state.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Are you saying that entrepre- neurial thinking is supposed to save the welfare state?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, entrepreneurs will raise the banners of hope again. Without a movement of entrepreneurs, as there was once a workers’ movement, the economy can no longer explain itself adequately to society.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: And what will be written on the banners?
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Entrepreneurs of the world, unite’ – what else? At the moment only entrepreneurs can convincingly represent the interests of the industries and services that produce the hardware, that is, the real value of productive industry, against the phantom superstructure of speculative finance economy. Only an entrepre- neurs’ movement can act in the anti-capitalist way that is needed now. It is time for entrepreneurial anti-capitalism.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: The entrepreneur as alternative to the distorted picture of globalization, of the anonymous flow of money around the globe?
SLOTERDIJK: Entrepreneurs must show that an operative economy, not the dictatorship of the lottery bosses, is the founda- tion of the market economy. Entrepreneurs are the social democracy of tomorrow.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Are you serious?
SLOTERDIJK: Of course. At the moment entrepreneurs may describe themselves in neoliberal terms, but this is becoming increas- ingly false as the years go by, because in the end they can only justify themselves as producers of the net value that serves the other side of redistribution.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: And this results in the economy itself stabilizing society?
SLOTERDIJK: Exactly. We have three mechanisms of redistri- bution: taxation, the stock market and foundations. Redistribution must take place because statehood and civil laws will suffer if they are not sufficiently well grounded. The first platform for redistribu- tion, social democracy, is no longer convincing in the long run, and alongside it the economy has developed another platform for redis- tribution – the shareholder system.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: In other words, shareholder capi- talism alongside state redistribution. And what is the third platform? SLOTERDIJK: I call that ‘subjective tax’. There are beautiful
64 On Wealth and Self-Respect
examples from the Anglo-Saxon world, where gentlemanly capi- talism has a certain tradition. Calvinism’s strength was that it produced a type of person who was willing to earn 5 million pounds as a capitalist and then spend 4 million pounds in foundations as a member of Christian society. We have to remould our rich people from a cultural perspective and explain to them that just being rich is not good enough.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: Are you advocating a new Calvinism?
SLOTERDIJK: A new Calvin? No, he was a weird, unpleas- ant fellow. I would rather have a mixture of an opera director and Albert Schweitzer – I mean somebody who adds charisma and gives hope to millionaires again.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: So that giving can be fun?
SLOTERDIJK: Wealth must be fun – in such a way that the fun turns serious of its own accord. Wealth is too serious to leave to envy and fear. Unfortunately, people here in Germany don’t know that the only feeling that makes life worthwhile is generosity. Too many people in this country haven’t been rich for long enough to attain this wisdom and make the move towards generosity.
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: That could explain why the Germans have never been as affluent as they are today, but are still not happier.
SLOTERDIJK: Indeed, people in this country are caught in a socio-psychological dilemma. The only possibility of getting out of it would be to reclaim the public arena lustfully, turning it into a culture of public generosity. Then wealth would be justified again . . .
METHFESSEL/RAMTHUN: . . . and people would be in a better mood?
SLOTERDIJK: I won’t claim that their bad mood will vanish; it is too deeply entrenched in the system. After all, we are dealing with a jealousy and envy machine of huge dimensions. That basic tension can’t be eliminated. But we can make the whole issue less acute if people feel more freedom at the point where money is spent, if they experience more generosity and get back the euphoria of a celebra- tory donation. We should break through the spiritual isolation of the rich.
10
LEARNING IS JOYFUL ANTICIPATION OF ONESELF
Interview with Reinhard Kahl*2
KAHL: A new education debate is in the air. What’s brewing?
SLOTERDIJK: Potential disturbance is in the air for the whole society. You can compare it to how individuals feel physical pain. Debates and scandals form a nervous system of topics by which society perceives itself.
KAHL: Education debates could be a way for society to explore itself. But the promising debate often breaks off at the last moment. Why?
SLOTERDIJK: We usually try to suppress questions about education. They are some of the most uncomfortable questions. Compared to that, the hospital system is almost pleasant and fasci- nating, as we can clearly see from the mass media. We have endless film series about hospitals and consultant surgeons. The gentlemen in green who snip around on bodies have become heroes. Intuitively we could say it doesn’t make sense – we don’t actually want to see anything unpleasant like an operating theatre in our living room in the evening. But in fact, that’s just what people want. The really unpleasant thing is school.
KAHL: There are some school soaps on television nowadays. But their equivalent of the operating theatre in hospital series would be lessons and exams, and you don’t see them in school series.
SLOTERDIJK: School exams are so unpleasant because they
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Reinhard Kahl appeared under the title ‘Lernen ist Vorfreude auf sich selbst’, in Pädagogik 53 (2001): 40–5 (Beltz, Weinheim).
Reinhard Kahl is a journalist and film-maker.
66 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
remind many people of birth. In schools, people are not interned for nine months but incubated for at least nine years. Then they have to fight their way out in written exams, in other words, closed situa- tions. Modern people don’t want to be reminded that they were ever incarcerated.
KAHL: School isn’t seen as a prenatal paradise – that would be asking too much – but it isn’t seen as the joyful event of com- ing-into-the-world either. Can we think of school as pressure in the birth canal?
SLOTERDIJK: School is what people always want to leave behind them. People rarely look back at school with affection.
KAHL: It wasn’t always as clear-cut as that.
SLOTERDIJK: Romanticism about school, as expressed in the famous film Die Feuerzangenbowle [The Punch Bowl],1 evokes mem- ories of situations that were not yet emergencies. Today the school has become a necessity of its own.
KAHL: A curious necessity, like a military exercise that uses live ammunition. On the other hand, there is a lack of resonance for taking any action that might have a serious effect. The school wryly adopts an attitude of necessity and claims, ‘all this is required later in life’.
SLOTERDIJK: The famous saying that we don’t learn for school, but for life, was an attempt at justification from the very beginning. The original school allowed pupils to learn for school because the Graeco-Roman view was that there was no need to learn for life. Life is its own teacher; it is self-explanatory. School, however, meant leisure for the Greeks, and leisure was regarded as the quintessence of life. Funnily enough, the Greeks formed their word for ‘to work’ or ‘to do business’ from the negation of the word ‘to be idle’. Anybody learning for leisure was engaging in free activity.
KAHL: How did the intrinsic value of a leisure education become a means to other ends?
SLOTERDIJK: When the modern nation-state took over the school service, the necessity principle was transferred to learning in school. It became pre-professional: school is preparation for employ- ment. The German concept of education was shaped by Prussian neo-humanism around 1800 and still tries to find a balance between
1 Die Feuerzangenbowle [The Punch Bowl] was a popular German film released in 1944. Set in a school in Germany, it was famous for its praise of schooldays as the best days of life, and for its light-hearted escapism during the grim last year of the Second World War.
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 67
the classical and the modern concept: we learn for school and for life. The society of work is already at the door, but the school still holds its own as an autonomous life form. Die Feuerzangenbowle symbolizes this compromise. Meanwhile the migration of necessity into the classroom has advanced considerably. We’re not going to see any new punch bowls.
KAHL: School means something traumatic for most people. What is it? You mentioned the birth analogy. Does school make people feel unwelcome?
SLOTERDIJK: Perhaps. For most children today, school is the initiation into a situation that they feel is not about them person- ally.
It’s an inoculation programme that administers grievances until they have passed through every kind of grievance – and then they get their narcissistic school-leaving certificate. The message is: ‘Whatever you may think of yourself, you’re not that important. ’ People don’t like being reminded of such exams.
KAHL: In the old school where people supposedly learned for life, they experienced being a small cog in a big machine. The oppo- sitional movement, ‘do whatever you want’, didn’t get far either. Today we have school students who end up without any idea of what they want.
SLOTERDIJK: That is undoubtedly related to the fact that today’s educationists don’t know themselves what they are educat- ing children for. Modern society’s confusion about its own goals is more clearly reflected in the confusing school system than anywhere else – except, perhaps, the area of visual arts, which is also a great world stage for mental disturbance. The school and the art business are nervous systems of sensitive issues in society in which the con- fusion about what will happen next is very clearly articulated. On average, teachers can’t be different from the society they come from.
KAHL: Twenty or thirty years ago many people said they wanted to affect things by playing a key part in social change, and they became teachers. By now there are many other options for people with ideas. The teaching profession has become a second choice. How are refugees from life supposed to represent the world to the next generation?
SLOTERDIJK: Teachers are people who often believe it is better to explain something than do something. The cowardly and the the- oretical decisions about life don’t necessarily converge, but often do. The result is schools as socio-psychological biotopes with an atypi- cal concentration of timid, under-motivated people concerned with private issues. The only answer is to de-professionalize schools. We have to enhance their social skills and leave them free on the factual side. It is increasingly clear that you don’t get to the core of learning
68 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
with classic schooling methods. All the people who turned out to be special in school didn’t do it because of the school but because the school left them alone. When things went well it offered protection under which intensive learning processes, which have always been intrinsically autodidactic, could flourish. Sometimes the autodi- dactic element was able to evolve under cover of didactics. But I think this particular constellation has passed its optimal point. New optimal situations have to be created for autodidactics. The school is probably no longer part of these optimal conditions.
KAHL: Aren’t didactic teachers – there are other kinds as well, of course – representatives of an ailing priestly class nowadays? Who else still believes knowledge can be passed down from above?
SLOTERDIJK: Priesthood: that’s a convincing analogy. Today, armies of world clerics appear before their flock and appeal to the good in human beings. Meanwhile they have discovered that their appeals result in evil developing all the more. Then people pretend to naivety and ask what’s going wrong.
KAHL: Teachers don’t encourage new knowledge ‘from below’. They lack the combination of action and experience.
SLOTERDIJK: Teachers live with false descriptions – more so, in fact, than any other group in society, aside from nihilists, who know what they’re doing and still keep on doing it. Nihilists are always on target with any possible enlightenment. They are already on the baseline of total lack of illusions about themselves and others. They think and act on the damaging assumption that entropy always wins. This is precisely what we people on the creative side have been fighting against with the methods of art and philosophy since way back when. The point is to inspire people to enthusiasm and get them involved.
KAHL: So let’s give school one more chance! How could it become a venue, or even a hothouse, for autodidactic experiments? After all, people learning of their own accord are not autistic. They need other people to inspire them, people who are curious but don’t lecture them or ‘mediate’ the lessons in a boring way.
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, we need schools that emphasize young people’s pertinacity and don’t colonize them for the sake of ‘neces- sity’. We must shut the school doors to business, fashion and other such terrifying menaces, and reconstruct a living space for people to engage in a libidinous relationship with their own intelligence. What is clear to see in a small child usually gets lost in the school pupil. The rescue of the cognitive libido must become the school’s core project.
KAHL: School as a space of dense atmospheres swelling with possibilities? You have been occupied for years with understanding
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 69
what spheres are and not getting stuck with congealed substances like knowledge.
SLOTERDIJK: My theory of enthusiasms, that is, of public spirits, tries to reduce overblown romantic-nationalist concepts to the level of specific groups. Schools must become boarding schools! Not literally, of course, but rather in the sense of emphasizing the intrinsic character of school life. I’m seeing that with my daughter, who is lucky to be in an excellent schooling situation. In her case, you can see clearly what it means to spend time in an environment for encouraging enthusiasm.
KAHL: What grade is she in?
SLOTERDIJK: She is in the second year at the Montessori branch of an ordinary elementary school. You can see how a dif- ferent climatic policy in the school encourages a different way of speaking to the pupils and a different language among the pupils themselves. This school begins by assuming that the learning libido is the real capital. The children bring their curiosity, their enthusi- asm, that priceless medium of happy anticipation of their own self, into the learning process. What matters is expectation of the next state to be reached. A form of didactics that respects this operates quite differently and with better results than a school where teachers have the attitude: you’re going to be astonished, and I’m the one who is going to show you how things are.
KAHL: That’s what nourishes the evil eye, which is probably related to the frustration of teaching staff. They basically remain like school pupils from the ages of six to sixty-five, and that’s really mortifying.
SLOTERDIJK: I think it’s time for teachers to carry on the work Nietzsche did for priests. Teachers are an authority that is under-criticized and deserves to be given liberating and destructive criticism. In fact, people mostly accuse teachers of the wrong things.
KAHL: The accusation of laziness, for example.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s lazy itself.
KAHL: It may apply to some people who are already practically
retired from the job, usually due to mental overload. But isn’t the teaching profession a case of overload in structural terms?
SLOTERDIJK: That’s why teachers should be helped with adequate criticism. The analysis of job-specific mortification and experiences of failure is needed just as much as the analysis of resentment against the profession. That would be the most valu- able kind of enlightenment. We must link up with teachers to revitalize the school starting from its strongest position. Where is its renewable, enthusiastic source point? Schools must come forward energetically and say: we offer opportunities, here is our knowledge,
70 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
here is our art of living – we are inviting you to all that. The gesture of invitation is perhaps the most important thing. It turns schools into guesthouses of knowledge and places for the intelligence to go on outings, so to speak.
KAHL: You mean the end of compulsory school, which insists, like a surreal restaurant, on forced feeding and pupils being com- pelled to eat everything on their plate?
SLOTERDIJK: We have to break with the most harmful of all ancient European concepts: the idea of knowledge transfer. This idea of instilling is wrong in terms of system theory, it is morally wrong . . .
KAHL: Unsustainable in terms of cognitive psychology . . .
SLOTERDIJK: And despite that, the school is built around that idea, around the truly accursed and harmful idea of transfer.
KAHL: They are still distributing Communion wafers.
SLOTERDIJK: The institution of school is based on the perverse communion that says: ‘We have and we share out. ’ But learning just doesn’t function that way. We have to respect that we’re always dealing with people who are accomplished in their own personal way. Up until now they have been complete and without any real deficiency. The next state or condition can only be constructed on the basis of the work the person has already done. Teachers can only disturb the process, unless they become something like a host, a coach or – in a good sense – a seducer who is already at the place the child’s next step leads to. In such ‘guesthouses’ the principle of happy anticipation could seal the pedagogical pact. Watching my daughter, I am fascinated by this. At the age of two, she already strikes me as a person who has something I have never seen properly described, either in psychoanalysis or any other kind of psychologi- cal description. I discovered from her that the libido of wakefulness is shown by the fact she is excited about her next state. She is happy about her own becoming. It is as if she were wearing a safety lamp on her head that lights up the next chapter of life for her discreetly and always auspiciously. She always sees light at the end of the tunnel. It is the light from her own inbuilt projector.
KAHL: What a drama it would be if the safety lamp were blown out and only the gaffer on set switched the lights on and off! Maybe blowing out one’s own light was a systemic compulsion of old industrial capitalism, against which it was futile to rebel. Enterprises today are also increasingly unable to cope with burned-out cases. They can deal with them as consumers, but not in the role of ‘staff members’.
SLOTERDIJK: Professional teaching must forge the link again with the dynamic libido that illuminates one’s own ability to
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 71
become. Instead of that, I have heard that teachers of German- language classes invited staff from the Employment Office in Karlsruhe to visit schools to teach school students how to fill in unemployment benefit forms. I know it’s an extreme example, but it illustrates where the problem lies. Many teachers, when they operate as creators of the bad climate, practise the didactics of discourage- ment. They often do it, even without wanting to, when they secretly project their own failure or their self-pity on to their young clients.
KAHL: That provokes running battles and power struggles.
SLOTERDIJK: Most of all, the latent message comes through: ‘You’ll be astonished. I myself stopped being astonished a long time ago. ’ These two pieces of lethal information turn people into first- class climate polluters. Children should be protected against adult pessimism with their own special anti-pollution law. To refer to my daughter again, she has the advantage of an exceptional situation: she has a teacher with an amazing way of tapping the source that generates happiness. Like a good demon, he links into the children’s love of learning. He lights up when he sees the children’s faces light- ing up. This is awesome, and sets a standard. But along come the parents with their concept of realism, their pessimism and their fearful projections, and try to curtail this space of didactic miracles and to colonize it from outside.
KAHL: What do the parents say?
SLOTERDIJK: ‘Aren’t you giving the children the wrong picture of life? ’ ‘Can’t you make things more structured? ’ ‘Can’t you be a bit stricter? ’ Statements like that show how ‘realists’ try to impose their climatic monopoly. We have to create a counter-climate to oppose this. Basically, in my work as a university teacher and as a writer, I see myself mainly as a creator of spheres and a didactic proponent of atmospheres. What people learn is not all that important in the first place; far more important is for them to enter a climate that makes them aware that being able to learn is, in itself, the best opportunity of their life. In my opinion, this work of climate creation that some people attack as unjustified shamanism is indispensable for the moral regeneration of our community.
KAHL: If using productive atmospheres works, something could develop that we never experience when only standard results are presented and the special atmospheres are sacrificed to the require- ments of rigid purity rules.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s when the poison of boredom starts to spread. The school is an epicentre of boredom and is run by profes- sional bores who daub, gum up and insult children’s intelligence. Many people never recover. That is the real educational disaster. In the end, atmospheres must be seen as the most real things of all.
72 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
Today, we create situations for young people in which they have everything to hand and no desire for anything. We lose more than ten years in the elementary education process, and the best students need another ten years after the first educational experience to find their own second chance. By then, if all goes well, we have an original thirty-year-old who, after the process of school and regen- eration, can start his or her own career as a creative person attuned to atmospheres.
KAHL: Most people in Germany would think it is a strange idea that everything else depends on atmospheres in institutions and around people.
SLOTERDIJK: The problem is more acute in Germany. The catastrophe of National Socialism with its monstrous perversion of collective enthusiasm has resulted in a super-abstinence of com- munal energy in this country. In French and Anglo-Saxon culture, and in the USA, the school system is governed by different climatic factors. There is much more emphasis on the relation between the institution and the public spirit that animates people. In Germany, we have a very bureaucratic school atmosphere, always combined with resignation and dogmatic scepticism.
KAHL: The German preference for being victims – or any- thing rather than active players because that could make them perpetrators – is particularly widespread in teachers’ staff rooms.
SLOTERDIJK: It’s not only victim passion that exists, but also victim didactics and victim simulation. At our university we recently experienced the problem of individual students having to put up with restrictions and inconveniences because of reorganization in some subjects.
KAHL: You are referring to the School of Design in Karlsruhe, to which you were appointed rector this year.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s right. And what happened? We had 120 students applying for credits for two semesters of their course because they feel they are victims of the move to the new centre, which offers them access to one of Europe’s most impressive uni- versity buildings, not to mention one of the best teaching bodies and fabulous teacher–student ratios. The temptation to describe our own life in the light of discrimination has become so strong that even young people have now developed this resigned, senior- citizen-type attitude, combined with an aggressive kind of moralist demanding, as if it were perfectly natural. To counter this, we must try to interest them in the idea of entrepreneurial life so that they don’t already behave like social security clients at the age of twelve. In any case, victim hysteria relates back to childish patterns – to over-dramatization of minor injuries.
Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself 73
KAHL: The foundling, exposed, all alone in the world.
SLOTERDIJK: Betrayed by all – and besides, my parents are not my real parents. My teachers are not my real teachers. Everyone abandoned me. I’m only looking for the mailbox where I can post my complaints letter . . .
KAHL: The agony column . . .
SLOTERDIJK: . . . the world’s agony column. This attitude can only be corrected by activating a conspiracy of knowing better. Philosophy, literature and art must be the starting point for putting an end to the era we have lived in for fifty, sixty years now, handing in our homework as a model nation with collective depression. We are at the beginning of a generational change. It should be inter- preted openly and energetically.
KAHL: Couldn’t a new education debate be a medium for that? We must transpose to society as a whole the image of ‘joyful antici- pation of oneself’ as the heart and soul of the learning process.
SLOTERDIJK: Yes, we should have this debate, because soci- eties have no centre and no ego, they only have the public as a medium for giving wake-up calls and creating disturbances. We must finally abandon the dangerous spectres that have driven the twentieth century into disasters, the idea that society is totally itself at some point. After all, the crazy illusion of a Führer is nothing but the political interpretation of a fallacy that our culture has blithely fostered for centuries, namely, that there is a place where it could be completely itself. This realization is the entrance charge we have to pay if we want to attain the second wave of sociological enlighten- ment. We must understand that societies use atmospheres to control and climatize themselves. The topics we are talking about form a semantic air-conditioning system. Right now, all the signs are that we are programming it wrongly.
KAHL: Humans are, so to speak, the subtenants of the world, responsible for small precincts, but not for the atmosphere, not for the intermediate parts. We hold ‘the state’ and ‘society’ responsible for that.
SLOTERDIJK: And that leads to running away, disablement or avoidance panic. We feel trapped in the ‘system’. This is the basis for the psychology of employees and public servants today. Instead, we must start with a good understanding of the perspec- tive of an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of life, and use this kind of thinking to reanimate the public service as well. Perhaps this will lead to the emergence of a new generation of teachers. I think the impulse for this has to come from artists and from independent media. Philosophy and art set the tone – they retune the general atmosphere.
74 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
KAHL: Maybe we should begin by imagining a school with dif- ferent architecture. Looking at classrooms where everybody sits in rows leaves me speechless.
SLOTERDIJK: The nineteenth century built schools, museums and barracks – three atmospheric conditioning systems that pre- form social synthesis with the aid of state techniques for influencing people. Schools must be liberated from this tradition. Hopefully, the idea of a new kind of school will become enough of a political issue in the coming years that a new phase of experimentation can begin. With luck, we could have a really good, productive row about education quite soon . . .
KAHL: It could happen .
