The key point here is how nature cooperated with human
interests
as an artist and a healer, as a source of wealth and as Schelling’s striving towards the light.
Sloterdijk - Selected Exaggerations
The word ‘fate’ appeared in this context as well.
What does it mean?
To what extent are you talking about something else apart from military failure or lack of political strategy?
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Ulrich Raulff appeared under the title ‘Schicksalsfragen: Ein Roman vom Denken’, in Marbacher Magazin, Ausstellungskatalog Schicksal: Sieben mal sieben unhintergehbare Dinge (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, No. 135), 2011, pp. 14–72.
Ulrich Raulff has been director of the German Academy for Language and Literature in Marbach am Neckar since 2004.
1 Heiner Geißler is a German politician and member of the Christian Democratic Party (CDU). He was a government minister for youth, health and the family in the 1980s and was later involved in critical movements on social policy and globalization.
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SLOTERDIJK: I used Afghanistan in my argument as a topical example of all the situations in which people are doomed to make mistakes whatever they do. Even modern people are forced to experience that sometimes we can only choose between mistakes, mishaps and great misfortunes because there is no right and simple behaviour at that particular moment. As regards the situation in Afghanistan, I explained in the discussion with Heiner Geißler that Western politicians currently have the choice of two evils: if the Western troops stay in the country, the authorities that are respon- sible alienate their own populations because they still don’t really understand what their soldiers are doing there after all these years. Dead soldiers are continually being repatriated, yet there is no rec- ognizable military success. As a result this policy is very unpopular. But if we withdraw from Afghanistan we will be abandoning the country to forces that are likely to do the worst for their own people and the world in general. In short, we can only choose between two evils. In this context I think we should use the concept of the tragic once again, beyond its everyday meaning. Interestingly, ordinary speech today defines more or less everything that used to be called fatal as tragic, particularly the deadly accident. For us, the accident is the authority that governs the tragic or the fatal – both terms express that people today are occasionally overwhelmed, as they have always been, by the feeling that they are ruled by the force of horror. Accidents and catastrophes are opportunist factors that confirm their mastery now and then by hitting out blindly. People are helplessly confused then, because as modern subjects they like to think they have protected themselves technically and politically against bad luck. Suddenly all the trappings of competence we have built up against the blows of fate seem useless, and from one moment to the next people sink back into a state of almost archaic helpless- ness. The word ‘helpless’ touches on the ancient starting point of the Enlightenment: for enlightenment, as it took shape for the first time in ancient Sophism, is primarily a prophylactic of helpless- ness. There is a concept in Greek Sophism that is hardly discussed in contemporary philosophy, although it expresses one of the most important ideas of ancient ethics: the concept of amechanía, which is usually translated as ‘helplessness’. It literally describes the lack of mechané, which means the cunning or the device or the machine we can use to get out of a situation of existential difficulties . . .
RAULFF: To thwart the procedure, so to speak . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Exactly, because amechanía describes the situa- tion in which human beings are denied just what the Greeks believed made them wholly human, that is, the ability to retaliate against attacks, being equipped with options for action or, as we would say
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today, being in full control of their agency. As soon as people sink into amechanía, they land in a situation that just doesn’t seem appro- priate for human beings. Ancient Sophism thought more profoundly on this point than the academy. According to Sophism, the meaning of all training, both spiritual and physical, is that people react against the extreme situation of amechanía so that they can become real experts – experts of existence in general and beings that find the right words in particular. Whenever people talked about paideia, and later, education, they had to remember that these concepts had their starting point in a very elementary concept of existential competence. The legacy of Sophism became part of Stoical ethics that wanted to develop human beings as creatures that would never be helpless. This ethics is based on the postulate that humans should always be able to do something, even in situations in which the only possible thing they can do is to remain calm and composed.
RAULFF: That describes a level that goes deeper than the inability to use our own understanding without someone else’s guid- ance, the condition our famous Enlightenment sought to change. Helplessness describes a level below that, complete incapacity to act . . .
SLOTERDIJK: True, helplessness is one dimension beyond normal legal immaturity. Our understanding of legal immaturity involves the idea, of course, that the ward needs a legal guardian who is equipped with the means to avoid helplessness. The ideal of the relationship between the ward and the guardian would natu- rally be to encourage the former to reach the state of independence. A bond like that is already prefigured in the ancient rejection of amechanía. It is also the basis of the initial relationship between teacher and pupil. The Greeks already had a concept of humans as beings that should know how to help themselves. The old Sophists were not at a loss when it came to answering the question about the character of human beings: for them, humans were the creatures directed by an indestructible ‘I-can’ whatever the circumstances. A living being of that kind, which had Aristotle, and therefore language, and Sophism, and therefore the art of retaliation and improvisation, pitted his competence against external powers in the same way as the helmsman defies the storm with his experi- ence. It is no coincidence that Plato, who was very close to Sophist thought despite being polemically opposed to Sophism, liked choos- ing examples that presented people as experts. For instance, the architect who knows how to build a house so that people aren’t compelled to spend their lives in the terrible condition of homeless- ness, or the helmsman, kybernetes, who ensures that we reach our destination even in heavy seas.
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In short, the anti-mechanía attitude runs through the entire Greek enlightenment and culminates in the teachings of the Stoic stance. If you read the relevant letters of Seneca, you can see he had a highly developed sense for philosophizing in the face of emergencies. Emergencies are situations in which regression into helplessness seems nearly inevitable. In the age of Emperor Nero, the Roman Stoics’ awareness of emergencies was attuned to the most extreme situation that could happen to people of that time, the situation of the gladiator in the arena waiting for the final blow from his victori- ous opponent. In Seneca’s letters, the battle of life and death in the arena replaced sea voyages as the model for emergencies. In the arena the losing fighter directly faces the agent of death who will kill him. There is only one way he can prove his ability to stand up to that: by showing he has learned to fall with dignity. It is right and fitting for a player on the stage of Being to cut a good figure until the last moment. This savoir mourir is no longer Socratic. Seneca derived a new picture of human existence from the gladiator role: Sine missione nascimur, he wrote in one of his letters, as if he wanted to introduce a kind of arena fatalism. In the Coliseum of life, the fight always has to be to the death. We should be aware that the missio meant the sign of remission, the upturned thumb with which the audience in the arena could grant life to a brave loser. In sine missione fights the rules disallowed this option and the gladiators had to strike the deadly blow. When Seneca says we are born sine missione, it means that as mortals we are always compelled to go to the final end. From his perspective, it follows that we only have one way left to prove our worth, to prove the strength we have gained from wisdom, and that is still to be standing when everybody else has fallen to the ground, literally and metaphorically. The act of standing upright becomes the final evidence for the lack of helpless- ness that we, the brave gladiators of the cosmos, should aim for. We could go as far as to link the concept of substance to the upright position of the stoical finalist. If Heidegger had not despised Latin philosophy he would have gained something from it for his enfram- ing theory.
RAULFF: But what does fate mean in this situation? Is it the general situation in life of constantly being in a fight sine missione, or does the term only apply to the final constellation?
SLOTERDIJK: Fate is both things: the series of tests and the endgame. The power of fate is already evident in the arena complex. People standing below in the sand track have a clear view of their situation because of the architecture: complete immanence, the closed scene with no exit, and the lascivious crowd in the rows that wants its spectacle. The situation is the message. The building
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expresses fatality with spectators. If I am a gladiator, I feel how my existence down there is absolutely exposed. The others in the rows enjoy the privilege of being in the audience. They can hide among the masses and keep their backs covered. The fighter is visible all the time from all around; he is held out into the final risk – there is no place he can retreat to, nowhere to lean on, nowhere to rest. At most he achieves a postponement if he wins out this time, but if he doesn’t fall in today’s games, then he will fall in the next or the one after. If he leaves the arena standing, he is excused from the next fight – that is what it means to live on reprieve. The second volume of my Spheres trilogy contains a digression with the title ‘Dying Later in the Amphitheater: On Postponement, the Roman Way’, in which I relate Derrida’s concept of différance, which means both difference and postponement, to the arena idea of Stoic fatalism.
For the Romans, the games were a didactic medium for present- ing people with the fundamental truth of existence in the empire. Life in a tight time situation like that means nothing but the attempt to die later – later than your antagonist of today, as late as pos- sible. Most of all it means being unable to hide when dying. In the arena, imperial fatalism comes into its own, affecting the mob as well as Caesar, the gladiator as well as the pupil of philosophy. The universe itself is the arena, and nobody is granted the missio, the reprieve. Given these conditions, the Stoic tries all his life to memo- rize the mnemonic phrase that he doesn’t need to be discharged from the lost skirmish anyway because basically all fates are good. After all, as humans we are merely local functions of the cosmos; every death happens at the right time and place. If this sounds rather exaggerated, you should consider that ancient philosophy is nothing more and nothing less than the attempt to overwrite the tremendous improbability of this cosmic-harmonic doctrine. As in all great teachings of faith, the point is to profess the incredible as if it were the surest thing of all. Ancient philosophy and Christianity are very close on this point. For our ancestors, clear fatalism in the sense of faith in the things that are securely anchored in every destiny served to hold back the annihilating darkness in the life of the few and the many.
RAULFF: You began by saying that the accident has replaced the tragic event for us. Seen from the aesthetic perspective of the tragic, accidents acquire a degree of worthiness. They represent the lofty in the scenes of everyday life. The situations you have described now with reference to ancient philosophy always display an aesthetic component. In each case – and I am struck by this gen- erally in relation to the concept of fate – there is somebody looking on, whether in Greek theatre or the Roman arena. An observer
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always appears who watches the others trying to cope with their lot, whether they triumph over it, stand there and accept it, or fall quickly. How does this observer belong to the function field of the concept of fate? Does fate really need an observer who watches from the safety of the shore, as suggested in the existential metaphor of the ‘shipwreck with spectator’?
SLOTERDIJK: The Lucretian spectator on the safe shore takes part in the general theorizing about life that occurs in classical antiquity. Phenomenology began as observation of fatal events. Since the time that theory has existed in the world, there is, in fact, always somebody who watches from a relatively secure posi- tion as fate overtakes others. This applies first of all to the gods of the ancients who permanently enjoyed the world play, watching without suffering, and equally to the Greek theatregoer – not to mention the audiences at the Roman circus. In fact, theory begins with tragedy, which is quite a lot older than philosophy. The Greeks learned the act of watching everything in the form of tragedy. The dramatists seldom used the explicit concept of fate in their plays, but they didn’t need the general term because the tragic form per se pro- vided a vehicle for observing fates. The ‘goats’ songs’, or tragedies, presented the heroes’ dilemmas by showing the audience the con- flicts, traps and complications that can lead to human life coming to an end. They used observation of fate as a cathartic mechanism – indeed, in line with Aristotelian theory, they wanted to chasten the spectators through phobos and eleos, that is, through awe and lamentation or, as it used to be translated with less pathos, through ‘fear’ and ‘empathy’. This presupposes that the observers are not primarily reflective but begin as empathetic spectators who put themselves in the shoes of the unfortunate hero without completely identifying with him. The origin of tragedy is a ritual of empathy. In the theatre the collective soul is affectively synchronized; this is how the individual is made fit for the polis. Cultural theorists would say that Dionysian theatre with its annual productions was an appa- ratus for strengthening the memo-active fitness of Athens. At that time one could only be a good Athenian by starting to wail with the other spectators at the same point in the play – we can detect a faint echo of this humanizing parallel occurrence of affects in Goethe’s ‘awe is the best of man’. By the same token, reliable members of the polis were recognizable because they laughed together with the others at the right moment.
RAULFF: We have now considered various situations in our investigations into the concept of fate. Afghanistan provides an example of the dilemma of acting in a situation in which we have to choose between evils of equal or different dimensions, evils of
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unequal speed, different effects and different temporalities. You briefly mentioned amechanía, the situation of helplessness when action is no longer possible at all. Finally, you referred to the mishap or accident that occurs suddenly and destroys the normal pattern of life. It seems there is a regular repertoire of situations that constitute our knowledge of the fateful or tragic.
SLOTERDIJK: Such basic situations and the latent or mani- fest consciousness of them are part of the field kit of the drama of humankind. This equipment for dealing with fate was first assem- bled by the ancient poets and philosophers in the form of theatrical performances, or as myths and collections of proverbs, and finally also in the first manifestations of philosophy. These were the pro- visions the people of the emergent high cultures had available for dealing with their journey through life. The diverse types of wisdom always come together at one point: all the versions of ancient con- sultation about fate converge in the warning that humans should never succumb to hubris. Anyone who allows himself to be tempted by arrogance, who feels much too secure in his thick skin, in his high-handedness, in his phallic cockiness, calls down disaster. This brings us back to the spectator problem again, because if the gods generally behave like unaffected, eternally laughing spectators of the world theatre, there is still a scene they don’t watch without intervening in the game, and that is the spectacle of human hubris. If this appears the gods don’t keep calm; they intervene and destroy the cocky people. The gods invented the pathos of distance and they don’t appreciate it when people want to be too similar to them. On the other hand, modesty doesn’t offer adequate security against the inauspicious. To quote Epicurus’ famous proverb: ‘People can insure against most things but when it comes to death we all live in a city without walls. ’ The ancients’ awareness of mortality assumed that lack of walls signified the last word on the conditio humana. Death means the end of capability, and compulsion gets its chance. And the word ‘must’, the idea of compulsion, includes the incredible gravitational force of invincible natural laws as the ancients experi- enced them.
Death and necessity – an inseparable couple in the ontology of the ancients. Given this, we can understand the enormity of the philosophical turning point represented by Socrates’ death scene. It was the beginning of the triumphal progress of the extraordinary idea that even death was something that should be translated from ‘compulsion’ into ‘capability’ – Greek on the example of Socrates, and Roman on the model of the gladiators who took the death-blow without a grimace. This idea had already begun seeping into the lives of private individuals in middle antiquity and became epidemic
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in late antiquity. The last thing someone struck down by the final blow should do is fall off the sofa quietly, without a whimper; instead he should be able to elect to face death like an athlete faces his opponent.
The philosophical idea of death as an athletic event soon made its entry into the early Christian martyr scene and flourished later in the monastic culture of the Middle Ages. Thomas von Celano’s biogra- phy of St Francis contains a passage describing how Francis, when he felt his end nearing, performed a wrestling ritual: he undressed completely – a daring gesture, because his brother monks had not yet had an opportunity to verify whether he bore the gaping wound of Christ in his side – and lay down on the ground in the position of an ancient fighter in the palaestra to fight the last wrestling match with his opponent. At this juncture the author of the vita used the formulaic expression nudus cum nudo, a naked man with a naked man, well aware that for the monks’ ancient predecessors the Latin word nudus, the Greek gymnos, meaning the naked man, was simply the wrestler anointed with oil. In his death pantomime Francis men- tioned the Greek comportment of the gymnasts, the naked fighters who prepared for the agon. We should read this as an indication that the Greek and Roman translation of animalist compulsion into human skill in relation to the last things had conquered the inner core of Christian monasticism. Even in extremis, those perfect practitioners of faith were expected to retain an element of skill and endurance – the monks in the early monasteries of Byzantine Christianity who described themselves as the athletes of Christ had reason for doing so. The resistance to amechanía is also clearly noticeable here. This may have been partly due to the fact that, if we follow St John’s account of the events of Golgotha, the crucified Christ created an athletic topos for himself. In the story of Jesus, the hanging on the cross was to be understood not only as a simple execution but more as the fulfilment of a mission.
RAULFF: And as withstanding a test.
SLOTERDIJK: A test in the sense of the Roman theatre of cruelty. St John, the Greek, goes so far with his depiction of the athleticization of Christ that he attributes to him the last word tetélestai, an Agonist word that Luther translated as ‘It is finished. ’ It should actually be, ‘It is achieved. ’ In English it would be ‘Mission accomplished. ’ The word unites the fulfilment of the prophecy and the fulfilment of the supreme stint of heroic passivity. It makes Christ into a Hercules who adds a new deed, the greatest of all, to his heroic ponoi. It would be impossible to imagine Christianity, especially in its medieval version, without the additional bolstering given by the art of suffering the death agony.
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Being compelled to die is occasionally transformed into having the ability to die, even to the point of willingness to die, specifically in the mysticism of the late Middle Ages that tried to stretch the extreme form of ability to be passive to the point where it became willingness-to-be-nothing. The mystic is the person who keeps calm when God takes the place of the ego. He is an athlete of being- extinguished. In his case the abolition of fate has achieved its goal long before any enlightenment.
RAULFF: Do you find traces of this in modern philosophy? Let’s say, in the philosophy of the last 100 or 150 years?
SLOTERDIJK: They are definitely there, even if only marginally. Think of Schopenhauer and what came after.
RAULFF: Yet it is characteristic of the modern age that the concept of fate returned in it and should actually play an important role again. Recently I came upon a remark by Lucian Hölscher that around the mid-nineteenth century a big cold current of religious thought affected Western philosophy, and this was the beginning of the revival of the concept of fate.
SLOTERDIJK: That is probably the right perspective. The eight- eenth century apparently issued the final condemnation of fate. At that time the process of enlightenment entered its decisive phase, and thinking in terms of fate seemed to be finished forever. The Enlightenment held the opinion that people have no destinies, they make history. Leibniz, for instance, turned up his nose at what he called ‘destin à la turque’.
RAULFF: Turkish fatalism . . .
SLOTERDIJK: That scornful epithet stayed in circulation until Schopenhauer. It describes people in ontological slavery who don’t stand on their own two feet because they submit to the powers of fate. People who think like that don’t learn the upright gait that was so important to the protagonists of the Enlightenment. Fatalists remain incapable of discovering the forces released by one’s own enterprises. The European Enlightenment is firmly based on the idea that human emancipation only gets moving through anti-fatalism. To quote Ulrich Sonnemann’s neat phrase, all enlightenment is an enterprise for ‘sabotaging fate’. 2 This formulation has poten- tial because it talks of sabotage as if fate in the twentieth century resembled a power station run by reactionaries that the revolution- ary had attacked with a bomb. For anti-fatalists from Voltaire
2 Ulrich Sonnemann (1912–93) was a German philosopher, psychologist and political writer on the fringes of the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory.
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to Kant, the concept of fate was not philosophical and should no longer be part of the vocabulary of world wisdom. The strong ego of the Enlightenment intended to get along in future without fate. It wanted to break the hegemony of chains of events and ultimately dissolve fate in self-made history. That was the beginning of the long process of overstrained subjectivity, which is approximately identi- cal with the history of more recent philosophy. We are grateful to Odo Marquard3 for the classical representation of the complications in which the new, apparently unauthorized history-making subject of the Enlightenment inevitably got entangled when venturing into major politics. The protagonists of enlightenment involuntarily saw their optimism about progress, their exuberant project-making and their energetic historical planning culminating in the human ego being immensely overloaded. They had to recognize that history is the field where things turn out differently than we imagine. From that time on, people have needed apologies – Marquard called this the art of not having been there.
Along with the apologies, excuses also became fashionable, usually in the form of explanations of one’s own failure because of what was described from that time on as ‘the forces of reac- tion’. In the first place, all of this was not a reason for despair, but a theme for reflection. The discovery that progress was non-linear led to reflection on the relationship of human energy to non-human drives that have an impact on the world. This much was clear: the post-Titanic ego, due to its relative weakness, which had become obvious, had to tackle the question of finding superhuman allies to support its exuberant plans. From the start, there were only two potential partners with whom it would be possible to form an alli- ance to realize the opus magnum – nature and history. As a result, late- and post-Enlightenment philosophy indulged in alliance fanta- sies in both directions. It waxed delirious about unions with nature on the one hand and history on the other. Those who sought an alliance with nature became romantics: what the human subject failed to achieve of its own accord could be promoted instead in the same spirit by a benevolent allied nature. This motif has pro- foundly influenced European thought for 200 years.
The key point here is how nature cooperated with human interests as an artist and a healer, as a source of wealth and as Schelling’s striving towards the light. In the twentieth century it was Ernst Bloch who went fur- thest in exploring the pathetic implications of this position. From
3 Odo Marquard (1928–2015) was a German philosopher who specialized in contemporary Western philosophy and philosophical anthropology.
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this perspective, nature has a priori a sort of two-thirds majority in all our goodwill enterprises, and if we let its progressive aspects become truly effective it would be dreadfully bad luck if the project of the Enlightenment didn’t achieve its goal. My point is that, from the mid-nineteenth century on, this serene concept of nature as an alliance clouded over. After that, the triumph of darker elements and unpleasant themes such as nature as a competitive struggle, as unfathomable cruelty, as deliberate fermenting of blind force and suchlike came to the fore.
The inspiring discoveries of Schopenhauer and Darwin worked in the same direction. Finally, to a great extent nature no longer played the role of the major alliance partner of the Enlightenment. We looked into the heart of darkness and murmured, ‘the horror, the horror’. This created the impression that only anti-naturalist think- ing could take us further. Then the slogan changed from ‘forward to culture’ to ‘back to nature’. On the other hand, after the relative failure of revolutions, weak human beings had their eye on ‘History’ as their strong partner, History with a capital ‘H’ and in the lofty singular. History is the goddess who knows what is going to happen to the world. If she joined in the Enlightenment we could trust- ingly follow her progress through times and spaces. This concept of history carried traces of older meanings, from the Stoics’ pronoia to the providentia of the Christian doctrine of salvation and the philo- sophical process myths of the Neoplatonists whose echo we can still hear in the works of Comenius, Hegel and Schelling. In this alliance, too, the weak humane person could link up with a strong basis of support with the power of Being on its side. This achieved by itself what mere planning and fiddling around by human beings couldn’t manage. From our perspective this aspect is naturally more interest- ing because the hypostatization, the attribution of real identity to history, was accompanied by the general cultural picture in which fate could re-enter the scene. In fact, the moment that history and fate amalgamate – initially with moderately enlightening intentions – is the moment for second-order fatalism. For the individual, this means he or she can be sure of doing the right thing as soon as they think of their mortal life as occurring within the endless flow of history. Then they see themselves as tools of historical movement and as junior partners in a superior, meaningful event. This meta- physics of cooperation with the global coming-into-being provided a pattern of thought and feeling in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that released enormous creative (as well as criminal) forces among revolutionaries, reformists, therapists and artists. But just as the concept of nature clouded over with time, the concept of history became much darker as time went on. Although everybody
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who lived in the twentieth century involuntarily felt that the world would somehow go on, they began to doubt the meaningfulness of movement. In the end, many people only felt the great movement going on and on like a maelstrom, a whirlpool pulling them into the depths. That is the moment when the concept of fate could return with overtones of early antiquity – similarly to the Greek moira or ananke, the goddess of fate who was surrounded in earlier times by dark and mysterious hints that she was older and more powerful than the Olympic gods.
RAULFF: But the concept of fate often reappears in the modern age as the name for a remarkable deed by which a great figure wrests free of blind forces. Fate, or destiny, comes to mean the sudden blow that tears the fateful fabric, the act with major consequences . . . The key word here is ‘sudden’. All at once the old fabric is torn. Nietzsche: ‘I am a destiny . . . ’
SLOTERDIJK: When I lecture about the eternal return, I have to explain ‘why I am a destiny’ . . .
RAULFF: This also applies to the theoreticians of decision: for them fate is the abrupt act that tears the fabric of the past.
SLOTERDIJK: In my opinion, decisionism and the philosophy of the deed are subversive products of classical Enlightenment historicism. For decisionists, there is a sharp remainder of human history-making in the form of disastrous epoch-making. This happens through sudden decisions with which the great agent pre- pares to ride the wave of the world as it moves onward. This is the moment for the distinction Nietzsche introduced between active and passive nihilism. Without this, it is nearly impossible to understand the path of ideas in the twentieth century. In both forms nihilism is the inevitable reverse side of historicism. It has to take the upper hand as soon as we abandon the classical assumption that all epochs are equally close to God. Then comes the idea that history is what ultimately leads to nothing. In principle there are only the two posi- tions Nietzsche described with his distinction between passive and active nihilism. First, people let themselves drift along . . .
RAULFF: Nirvana . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Nirvana, fun, drugs. The drug world is sig- nificant in this context because it not only expresses disinterest in history, but also disinterest in being-in-the-world as such. In La condition humaine, the French novelist André Malraux described an old Chinese man – I think it was the father of one of the young revolutionaries at the centre of the novel – who chose to let the world drown in unreality. Malraux used extreme irony in his depic- tion of the opium dealer, who had once been a sociologist at Peking University, because from this person’s perspective even the most
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serious thing people could achieve at that time on the world stage – revolution – became blurred in the meaninglessness of the world as a whole. What a terrible world that was, the China of the late 1920s as seen through the eyes of this French novelist: the fathers dreaming away their lives in an opium haze while their sons imagine they will achieve self-fulfilment in murders for the future. Clearly, Malraux could only have presented the figure of the man on the opium couch on the basis of Nietzsche’s theory of passive nihilism. At the same time he highlighted the instability of revolutionary struggle because it could only mean nihilism in action. Just as weigh- ing out opium implies fleeing from reality, the revolutionary actions of the Shanghai activists in 1927 imply fleeing beyond reality. This is best illustrated in the two most powerful scenes from La Condition humaine: right at the beginning, when the young fighter Chen commits his first murder in a kind of active trance and discovers the surrealism of killing, and then again towards the end of the novel with the self-sacrifice of Comrade Katov, who gives away his only cyanide capsule, which is supposed to guarantee him quick death in an emergency, to two young Chinese comrades to allow them to end their own lives in the last night before the execution. He himself accepts being burned alive by Kuomintang soldiers the following morning in the boiler of the locomotive. This shows active nihilist ethics at the most extreme end. Malraux was one of the key wit- nesses of the twentieth century because he understood early on that communist commitment was identical with active nihilism.
Incidentally, we could ask ourselves whether Carl Schmitt4 wasn’t also arguing the line of active nihilism, and whether his superim- posed Catholicism wasn’t just a mask for nihilism, with decisionist trimmings in this case. Precisely because everything leads to nothing, he pictured the great designers of society being called upon to make decisions with fatal consequences. The horrible jurist Schmitt thought that people who postponed the inevitable end of the world should have a free hand. Schmitt granted licence to major perpetra- tors to take superhuman risks – such as Hitler when he launched the Second World War. In retrospect we would be right to say that, all in all, active nihilism with its posture of a fresh start emerging out of abrupt decision, and its faith at rock bottom, and the great rupture, was a disappointment, a self-hypnotic swindle. The truth is that nothing old ended and nothing new began. Anyone who wants to
4 Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) was a conservative German theorist who specialized in legal, constitutional and political theory. His support for the Nazi regime made him a controversial figure.
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keep on living always has to connect to the previous state and carry on from there in some direction or other.
RAULFF: Isn’t it more that historical thought always hovers between an attitude of loving breaches and hating them? By all appearances we are currently in a phase that is afraid of breaches, although as you rightly say we always need both and should take both into account. Passive nihilism spreads until active nihilism intervenes. Then it destroys the passive and devours it with a strong project. Commentators have observed, incidentally, how nihilism as a figure of thought was used in the courtroom in Nuremberg to explain and excuse criminal actions, for example, in relation to the trials of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile SS killing squads. To exonerate the accused, European nihilism was presented as a global chain of guilt with the catastrophic German deeds as only part of that, and the guilty actions of individuals in turn only as a micro- scopic fragment of the fateful whole. Just imagine, such arguments even extended to the defence strategies of the lawyers at Nuremberg.
SLOTERDIJK: Regrettably, Heidegger made a special contribu- tion to this field. His works represent a dubious peak in the indirect apologetics for lapses of the twentieth century and their exaltation to decrees of fate.
RAULFF: Prepared in terms of the structure of care . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Heidegger’s early work had already presaged the turn to thinking in concepts of ‘fate’, using the basic existen- tial structure of care. To begin with, we should note the method of thinking: it is not that I care, but that care is sent to me and takes me into service. In the works of his middle and later periods, Heidegger attached the concept of fate generally to the occurrences of civilization that we know as technology. In this context, we hear disastrous statements such as that the industrialized landscape and mass production of dead people in concentration camps stem from the same. . . .
RAULFF: . . . ‘process logic’ . . .
SLOTERDIJK: . . . and arise from the same fateful objectification and misuse of everything by production and presentation, that is, the unstoppable rush of self-empowering framing subjectivity. We still don’t know what to make of these statements. They abrogate the possibility of being guilty of anything at all. We can see some- thing slightly comparable in the neurological hype that nothing and nobody can resist at the present time. In fact, it opens the way for a renewed attempt to popularize fatalism as naturalism, in this case as neuro-fatalism. The art of not having been the guilty person remains as topical as it was in the period of the first setbacks in the Enlightenment project. From this perspective, Marquard actually
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provided the key to the moral ecological system of the modern age: as soon as the human capacity to act explosively increases, a demand for irresponsibility begins. Everybody talks about responsibility, but in reality most people have a stake in effacing the possibility of making perpetrators responsible for their actions.
RAULFF: This is what Marquard described as ‘refatalization’. In this respect a concept like fate, or whatever is offered as an alter- native, always has an exonerating function, not only individually but also on the level of the species.
SLOTERDIJK: Nietzsche invented the most powerful image of the global dilemma for which one needs and seeks relief when he described man as a being hanging on the back of a tiger in dreams. In that situation we think twice about whether to wake up the pas- senger. Nobody has practised getting off the tiger’s back. Some progressive moralists today are coming round to the idea that the tiger doesn’t exist at all. According to them, we have been stand- ing on firm ground all the time, responsible for ourselves from top to toe. For them, there is no dark underbelly that empowers and sometimes devours us. By contrast, authors such as Heidegger or Friedrich Georg Jünger5 focused on the monstrous in their consid- erations on the modern world, the former with his theory of frames that concerns a super-tiger called technology, and the latter in the form of a meditation about the titanic quality of modern civiliza- tions. Since then, there has been an almost never-ending discussion about the weirdness that lies at the roots of the enterprises of moder- nity. Thinking like that makes us imagine ourselves as insects in the scaly skin of a dragon. Dreamers on a tiger’s back or gnats on the scales of a monster – those are the images that have shaped being- in-the-world after the collapse of the perpetrator illusion following the French Revolution, and after the implosion of the Napoleon bubble.
RAULFF: In this case refatalization seems to be not only giving relief but also oppressive.
SLOTERDIJK: First, the key word ‘relief’ is the best word for this situation. To understand that we have to go back to the era fol- lowing the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. After the heroic period, losers stood around everywhere looking for excuses. Fate was just the right thing. Napoleon was exiled to a remote Atlantic island, the heroes were pensioned off, history stagnated and a strong demand for non-responsibility hung in the air. People
5 Friedrich Georg Jünger (1898–1977) was a German poet, author and essayist in cultural criticism.
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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 interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Ulrich Raulff appeared under the title ‘Schicksalsfragen: Ein Roman vom Denken’, in Marbacher Magazin, Ausstellungskatalog Schicksal: Sieben mal sieben unhintergehbare Dinge (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, No. 135), 2011, pp. 14–72.
Ulrich Raulff has been director of the German Academy for Language and Literature in Marbach am Neckar since 2004.
1 Heiner Geißler is a German politician and member of the Christian Democratic Party (CDU). He was a government minister for youth, health and the family in the 1980s and was later involved in critical movements on social policy and globalization.
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SLOTERDIJK: I used Afghanistan in my argument as a topical example of all the situations in which people are doomed to make mistakes whatever they do. Even modern people are forced to experience that sometimes we can only choose between mistakes, mishaps and great misfortunes because there is no right and simple behaviour at that particular moment. As regards the situation in Afghanistan, I explained in the discussion with Heiner Geißler that Western politicians currently have the choice of two evils: if the Western troops stay in the country, the authorities that are respon- sible alienate their own populations because they still don’t really understand what their soldiers are doing there after all these years. Dead soldiers are continually being repatriated, yet there is no rec- ognizable military success. As a result this policy is very unpopular. But if we withdraw from Afghanistan we will be abandoning the country to forces that are likely to do the worst for their own people and the world in general. In short, we can only choose between two evils. In this context I think we should use the concept of the tragic once again, beyond its everyday meaning. Interestingly, ordinary speech today defines more or less everything that used to be called fatal as tragic, particularly the deadly accident. For us, the accident is the authority that governs the tragic or the fatal – both terms express that people today are occasionally overwhelmed, as they have always been, by the feeling that they are ruled by the force of horror. Accidents and catastrophes are opportunist factors that confirm their mastery now and then by hitting out blindly. People are helplessly confused then, because as modern subjects they like to think they have protected themselves technically and politically against bad luck. Suddenly all the trappings of competence we have built up against the blows of fate seem useless, and from one moment to the next people sink back into a state of almost archaic helpless- ness. The word ‘helpless’ touches on the ancient starting point of the Enlightenment: for enlightenment, as it took shape for the first time in ancient Sophism, is primarily a prophylactic of helpless- ness. There is a concept in Greek Sophism that is hardly discussed in contemporary philosophy, although it expresses one of the most important ideas of ancient ethics: the concept of amechanía, which is usually translated as ‘helplessness’. It literally describes the lack of mechané, which means the cunning or the device or the machine we can use to get out of a situation of existential difficulties . . .
RAULFF: To thwart the procedure, so to speak . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Exactly, because amechanía describes the situa- tion in which human beings are denied just what the Greeks believed made them wholly human, that is, the ability to retaliate against attacks, being equipped with options for action or, as we would say
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today, being in full control of their agency. As soon as people sink into amechanía, they land in a situation that just doesn’t seem appro- priate for human beings. Ancient Sophism thought more profoundly on this point than the academy. According to Sophism, the meaning of all training, both spiritual and physical, is that people react against the extreme situation of amechanía so that they can become real experts – experts of existence in general and beings that find the right words in particular. Whenever people talked about paideia, and later, education, they had to remember that these concepts had their starting point in a very elementary concept of existential competence. The legacy of Sophism became part of Stoical ethics that wanted to develop human beings as creatures that would never be helpless. This ethics is based on the postulate that humans should always be able to do something, even in situations in which the only possible thing they can do is to remain calm and composed.
RAULFF: That describes a level that goes deeper than the inability to use our own understanding without someone else’s guid- ance, the condition our famous Enlightenment sought to change. Helplessness describes a level below that, complete incapacity to act . . .
SLOTERDIJK: True, helplessness is one dimension beyond normal legal immaturity. Our understanding of legal immaturity involves the idea, of course, that the ward needs a legal guardian who is equipped with the means to avoid helplessness. The ideal of the relationship between the ward and the guardian would natu- rally be to encourage the former to reach the state of independence. A bond like that is already prefigured in the ancient rejection of amechanía. It is also the basis of the initial relationship between teacher and pupil. The Greeks already had a concept of humans as beings that should know how to help themselves. The old Sophists were not at a loss when it came to answering the question about the character of human beings: for them, humans were the creatures directed by an indestructible ‘I-can’ whatever the circumstances. A living being of that kind, which had Aristotle, and therefore language, and Sophism, and therefore the art of retaliation and improvisation, pitted his competence against external powers in the same way as the helmsman defies the storm with his experi- ence. It is no coincidence that Plato, who was very close to Sophist thought despite being polemically opposed to Sophism, liked choos- ing examples that presented people as experts. For instance, the architect who knows how to build a house so that people aren’t compelled to spend their lives in the terrible condition of homeless- ness, or the helmsman, kybernetes, who ensures that we reach our destination even in heavy seas.
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In short, the anti-mechanía attitude runs through the entire Greek enlightenment and culminates in the teachings of the Stoic stance. If you read the relevant letters of Seneca, you can see he had a highly developed sense for philosophizing in the face of emergencies. Emergencies are situations in which regression into helplessness seems nearly inevitable. In the age of Emperor Nero, the Roman Stoics’ awareness of emergencies was attuned to the most extreme situation that could happen to people of that time, the situation of the gladiator in the arena waiting for the final blow from his victori- ous opponent. In Seneca’s letters, the battle of life and death in the arena replaced sea voyages as the model for emergencies. In the arena the losing fighter directly faces the agent of death who will kill him. There is only one way he can prove his ability to stand up to that: by showing he has learned to fall with dignity. It is right and fitting for a player on the stage of Being to cut a good figure until the last moment. This savoir mourir is no longer Socratic. Seneca derived a new picture of human existence from the gladiator role: Sine missione nascimur, he wrote in one of his letters, as if he wanted to introduce a kind of arena fatalism. In the Coliseum of life, the fight always has to be to the death. We should be aware that the missio meant the sign of remission, the upturned thumb with which the audience in the arena could grant life to a brave loser. In sine missione fights the rules disallowed this option and the gladiators had to strike the deadly blow. When Seneca says we are born sine missione, it means that as mortals we are always compelled to go to the final end. From his perspective, it follows that we only have one way left to prove our worth, to prove the strength we have gained from wisdom, and that is still to be standing when everybody else has fallen to the ground, literally and metaphorically. The act of standing upright becomes the final evidence for the lack of helpless- ness that we, the brave gladiators of the cosmos, should aim for. We could go as far as to link the concept of substance to the upright position of the stoical finalist. If Heidegger had not despised Latin philosophy he would have gained something from it for his enfram- ing theory.
RAULFF: But what does fate mean in this situation? Is it the general situation in life of constantly being in a fight sine missione, or does the term only apply to the final constellation?
SLOTERDIJK: Fate is both things: the series of tests and the endgame. The power of fate is already evident in the arena complex. People standing below in the sand track have a clear view of their situation because of the architecture: complete immanence, the closed scene with no exit, and the lascivious crowd in the rows that wants its spectacle. The situation is the message. The building
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expresses fatality with spectators. If I am a gladiator, I feel how my existence down there is absolutely exposed. The others in the rows enjoy the privilege of being in the audience. They can hide among the masses and keep their backs covered. The fighter is visible all the time from all around; he is held out into the final risk – there is no place he can retreat to, nowhere to lean on, nowhere to rest. At most he achieves a postponement if he wins out this time, but if he doesn’t fall in today’s games, then he will fall in the next or the one after. If he leaves the arena standing, he is excused from the next fight – that is what it means to live on reprieve. The second volume of my Spheres trilogy contains a digression with the title ‘Dying Later in the Amphitheater: On Postponement, the Roman Way’, in which I relate Derrida’s concept of différance, which means both difference and postponement, to the arena idea of Stoic fatalism.
For the Romans, the games were a didactic medium for present- ing people with the fundamental truth of existence in the empire. Life in a tight time situation like that means nothing but the attempt to die later – later than your antagonist of today, as late as pos- sible. Most of all it means being unable to hide when dying. In the arena, imperial fatalism comes into its own, affecting the mob as well as Caesar, the gladiator as well as the pupil of philosophy. The universe itself is the arena, and nobody is granted the missio, the reprieve. Given these conditions, the Stoic tries all his life to memo- rize the mnemonic phrase that he doesn’t need to be discharged from the lost skirmish anyway because basically all fates are good. After all, as humans we are merely local functions of the cosmos; every death happens at the right time and place. If this sounds rather exaggerated, you should consider that ancient philosophy is nothing more and nothing less than the attempt to overwrite the tremendous improbability of this cosmic-harmonic doctrine. As in all great teachings of faith, the point is to profess the incredible as if it were the surest thing of all. Ancient philosophy and Christianity are very close on this point. For our ancestors, clear fatalism in the sense of faith in the things that are securely anchored in every destiny served to hold back the annihilating darkness in the life of the few and the many.
RAULFF: You began by saying that the accident has replaced the tragic event for us. Seen from the aesthetic perspective of the tragic, accidents acquire a degree of worthiness. They represent the lofty in the scenes of everyday life. The situations you have described now with reference to ancient philosophy always display an aesthetic component. In each case – and I am struck by this gen- erally in relation to the concept of fate – there is somebody looking on, whether in Greek theatre or the Roman arena. An observer
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always appears who watches the others trying to cope with their lot, whether they triumph over it, stand there and accept it, or fall quickly. How does this observer belong to the function field of the concept of fate? Does fate really need an observer who watches from the safety of the shore, as suggested in the existential metaphor of the ‘shipwreck with spectator’?
SLOTERDIJK: The Lucretian spectator on the safe shore takes part in the general theorizing about life that occurs in classical antiquity. Phenomenology began as observation of fatal events. Since the time that theory has existed in the world, there is, in fact, always somebody who watches from a relatively secure posi- tion as fate overtakes others. This applies first of all to the gods of the ancients who permanently enjoyed the world play, watching without suffering, and equally to the Greek theatregoer – not to mention the audiences at the Roman circus. In fact, theory begins with tragedy, which is quite a lot older than philosophy. The Greeks learned the act of watching everything in the form of tragedy. The dramatists seldom used the explicit concept of fate in their plays, but they didn’t need the general term because the tragic form per se pro- vided a vehicle for observing fates. The ‘goats’ songs’, or tragedies, presented the heroes’ dilemmas by showing the audience the con- flicts, traps and complications that can lead to human life coming to an end. They used observation of fate as a cathartic mechanism – indeed, in line with Aristotelian theory, they wanted to chasten the spectators through phobos and eleos, that is, through awe and lamentation or, as it used to be translated with less pathos, through ‘fear’ and ‘empathy’. This presupposes that the observers are not primarily reflective but begin as empathetic spectators who put themselves in the shoes of the unfortunate hero without completely identifying with him. The origin of tragedy is a ritual of empathy. In the theatre the collective soul is affectively synchronized; this is how the individual is made fit for the polis. Cultural theorists would say that Dionysian theatre with its annual productions was an appa- ratus for strengthening the memo-active fitness of Athens. At that time one could only be a good Athenian by starting to wail with the other spectators at the same point in the play – we can detect a faint echo of this humanizing parallel occurrence of affects in Goethe’s ‘awe is the best of man’. By the same token, reliable members of the polis were recognizable because they laughed together with the others at the right moment.
RAULFF: We have now considered various situations in our investigations into the concept of fate. Afghanistan provides an example of the dilemma of acting in a situation in which we have to choose between evils of equal or different dimensions, evils of
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unequal speed, different effects and different temporalities. You briefly mentioned amechanía, the situation of helplessness when action is no longer possible at all. Finally, you referred to the mishap or accident that occurs suddenly and destroys the normal pattern of life. It seems there is a regular repertoire of situations that constitute our knowledge of the fateful or tragic.
SLOTERDIJK: Such basic situations and the latent or mani- fest consciousness of them are part of the field kit of the drama of humankind. This equipment for dealing with fate was first assem- bled by the ancient poets and philosophers in the form of theatrical performances, or as myths and collections of proverbs, and finally also in the first manifestations of philosophy. These were the pro- visions the people of the emergent high cultures had available for dealing with their journey through life. The diverse types of wisdom always come together at one point: all the versions of ancient con- sultation about fate converge in the warning that humans should never succumb to hubris. Anyone who allows himself to be tempted by arrogance, who feels much too secure in his thick skin, in his high-handedness, in his phallic cockiness, calls down disaster. This brings us back to the spectator problem again, because if the gods generally behave like unaffected, eternally laughing spectators of the world theatre, there is still a scene they don’t watch without intervening in the game, and that is the spectacle of human hubris. If this appears the gods don’t keep calm; they intervene and destroy the cocky people. The gods invented the pathos of distance and they don’t appreciate it when people want to be too similar to them. On the other hand, modesty doesn’t offer adequate security against the inauspicious. To quote Epicurus’ famous proverb: ‘People can insure against most things but when it comes to death we all live in a city without walls. ’ The ancients’ awareness of mortality assumed that lack of walls signified the last word on the conditio humana. Death means the end of capability, and compulsion gets its chance. And the word ‘must’, the idea of compulsion, includes the incredible gravitational force of invincible natural laws as the ancients experi- enced them.
Death and necessity – an inseparable couple in the ontology of the ancients. Given this, we can understand the enormity of the philosophical turning point represented by Socrates’ death scene. It was the beginning of the triumphal progress of the extraordinary idea that even death was something that should be translated from ‘compulsion’ into ‘capability’ – Greek on the example of Socrates, and Roman on the model of the gladiators who took the death-blow without a grimace. This idea had already begun seeping into the lives of private individuals in middle antiquity and became epidemic
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in late antiquity. The last thing someone struck down by the final blow should do is fall off the sofa quietly, without a whimper; instead he should be able to elect to face death like an athlete faces his opponent.
The philosophical idea of death as an athletic event soon made its entry into the early Christian martyr scene and flourished later in the monastic culture of the Middle Ages. Thomas von Celano’s biogra- phy of St Francis contains a passage describing how Francis, when he felt his end nearing, performed a wrestling ritual: he undressed completely – a daring gesture, because his brother monks had not yet had an opportunity to verify whether he bore the gaping wound of Christ in his side – and lay down on the ground in the position of an ancient fighter in the palaestra to fight the last wrestling match with his opponent. At this juncture the author of the vita used the formulaic expression nudus cum nudo, a naked man with a naked man, well aware that for the monks’ ancient predecessors the Latin word nudus, the Greek gymnos, meaning the naked man, was simply the wrestler anointed with oil. In his death pantomime Francis men- tioned the Greek comportment of the gymnasts, the naked fighters who prepared for the agon. We should read this as an indication that the Greek and Roman translation of animalist compulsion into human skill in relation to the last things had conquered the inner core of Christian monasticism. Even in extremis, those perfect practitioners of faith were expected to retain an element of skill and endurance – the monks in the early monasteries of Byzantine Christianity who described themselves as the athletes of Christ had reason for doing so. The resistance to amechanía is also clearly noticeable here. This may have been partly due to the fact that, if we follow St John’s account of the events of Golgotha, the crucified Christ created an athletic topos for himself. In the story of Jesus, the hanging on the cross was to be understood not only as a simple execution but more as the fulfilment of a mission.
RAULFF: And as withstanding a test.
SLOTERDIJK: A test in the sense of the Roman theatre of cruelty. St John, the Greek, goes so far with his depiction of the athleticization of Christ that he attributes to him the last word tetélestai, an Agonist word that Luther translated as ‘It is finished. ’ It should actually be, ‘It is achieved. ’ In English it would be ‘Mission accomplished. ’ The word unites the fulfilment of the prophecy and the fulfilment of the supreme stint of heroic passivity. It makes Christ into a Hercules who adds a new deed, the greatest of all, to his heroic ponoi. It would be impossible to imagine Christianity, especially in its medieval version, without the additional bolstering given by the art of suffering the death agony.
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Being compelled to die is occasionally transformed into having the ability to die, even to the point of willingness to die, specifically in the mysticism of the late Middle Ages that tried to stretch the extreme form of ability to be passive to the point where it became willingness-to-be-nothing. The mystic is the person who keeps calm when God takes the place of the ego. He is an athlete of being- extinguished. In his case the abolition of fate has achieved its goal long before any enlightenment.
RAULFF: Do you find traces of this in modern philosophy? Let’s say, in the philosophy of the last 100 or 150 years?
SLOTERDIJK: They are definitely there, even if only marginally. Think of Schopenhauer and what came after.
RAULFF: Yet it is characteristic of the modern age that the concept of fate returned in it and should actually play an important role again. Recently I came upon a remark by Lucian Hölscher that around the mid-nineteenth century a big cold current of religious thought affected Western philosophy, and this was the beginning of the revival of the concept of fate.
SLOTERDIJK: That is probably the right perspective. The eight- eenth century apparently issued the final condemnation of fate. At that time the process of enlightenment entered its decisive phase, and thinking in terms of fate seemed to be finished forever. The Enlightenment held the opinion that people have no destinies, they make history. Leibniz, for instance, turned up his nose at what he called ‘destin à la turque’.
RAULFF: Turkish fatalism . . .
SLOTERDIJK: That scornful epithet stayed in circulation until Schopenhauer. It describes people in ontological slavery who don’t stand on their own two feet because they submit to the powers of fate. People who think like that don’t learn the upright gait that was so important to the protagonists of the Enlightenment. Fatalists remain incapable of discovering the forces released by one’s own enterprises. The European Enlightenment is firmly based on the idea that human emancipation only gets moving through anti-fatalism. To quote Ulrich Sonnemann’s neat phrase, all enlightenment is an enterprise for ‘sabotaging fate’. 2 This formulation has poten- tial because it talks of sabotage as if fate in the twentieth century resembled a power station run by reactionaries that the revolution- ary had attacked with a bomb. For anti-fatalists from Voltaire
2 Ulrich Sonnemann (1912–93) was a German philosopher, psychologist and political writer on the fringes of the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory.
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to Kant, the concept of fate was not philosophical and should no longer be part of the vocabulary of world wisdom. The strong ego of the Enlightenment intended to get along in future without fate. It wanted to break the hegemony of chains of events and ultimately dissolve fate in self-made history. That was the beginning of the long process of overstrained subjectivity, which is approximately identi- cal with the history of more recent philosophy. We are grateful to Odo Marquard3 for the classical representation of the complications in which the new, apparently unauthorized history-making subject of the Enlightenment inevitably got entangled when venturing into major politics. The protagonists of enlightenment involuntarily saw their optimism about progress, their exuberant project-making and their energetic historical planning culminating in the human ego being immensely overloaded. They had to recognize that history is the field where things turn out differently than we imagine. From that time on, people have needed apologies – Marquard called this the art of not having been there.
Along with the apologies, excuses also became fashionable, usually in the form of explanations of one’s own failure because of what was described from that time on as ‘the forces of reac- tion’. In the first place, all of this was not a reason for despair, but a theme for reflection. The discovery that progress was non-linear led to reflection on the relationship of human energy to non-human drives that have an impact on the world. This much was clear: the post-Titanic ego, due to its relative weakness, which had become obvious, had to tackle the question of finding superhuman allies to support its exuberant plans. From the start, there were only two potential partners with whom it would be possible to form an alli- ance to realize the opus magnum – nature and history. As a result, late- and post-Enlightenment philosophy indulged in alliance fanta- sies in both directions. It waxed delirious about unions with nature on the one hand and history on the other. Those who sought an alliance with nature became romantics: what the human subject failed to achieve of its own accord could be promoted instead in the same spirit by a benevolent allied nature. This motif has pro- foundly influenced European thought for 200 years.
The key point here is how nature cooperated with human interests as an artist and a healer, as a source of wealth and as Schelling’s striving towards the light. In the twentieth century it was Ernst Bloch who went fur- thest in exploring the pathetic implications of this position. From
3 Odo Marquard (1928–2015) was a German philosopher who specialized in contemporary Western philosophy and philosophical anthropology.
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this perspective, nature has a priori a sort of two-thirds majority in all our goodwill enterprises, and if we let its progressive aspects become truly effective it would be dreadfully bad luck if the project of the Enlightenment didn’t achieve its goal. My point is that, from the mid-nineteenth century on, this serene concept of nature as an alliance clouded over. After that, the triumph of darker elements and unpleasant themes such as nature as a competitive struggle, as unfathomable cruelty, as deliberate fermenting of blind force and suchlike came to the fore.
The inspiring discoveries of Schopenhauer and Darwin worked in the same direction. Finally, to a great extent nature no longer played the role of the major alliance partner of the Enlightenment. We looked into the heart of darkness and murmured, ‘the horror, the horror’. This created the impression that only anti-naturalist think- ing could take us further. Then the slogan changed from ‘forward to culture’ to ‘back to nature’. On the other hand, after the relative failure of revolutions, weak human beings had their eye on ‘History’ as their strong partner, History with a capital ‘H’ and in the lofty singular. History is the goddess who knows what is going to happen to the world. If she joined in the Enlightenment we could trust- ingly follow her progress through times and spaces. This concept of history carried traces of older meanings, from the Stoics’ pronoia to the providentia of the Christian doctrine of salvation and the philo- sophical process myths of the Neoplatonists whose echo we can still hear in the works of Comenius, Hegel and Schelling. In this alliance, too, the weak humane person could link up with a strong basis of support with the power of Being on its side. This achieved by itself what mere planning and fiddling around by human beings couldn’t manage. From our perspective this aspect is naturally more interest- ing because the hypostatization, the attribution of real identity to history, was accompanied by the general cultural picture in which fate could re-enter the scene. In fact, the moment that history and fate amalgamate – initially with moderately enlightening intentions – is the moment for second-order fatalism. For the individual, this means he or she can be sure of doing the right thing as soon as they think of their mortal life as occurring within the endless flow of history. Then they see themselves as tools of historical movement and as junior partners in a superior, meaningful event. This meta- physics of cooperation with the global coming-into-being provided a pattern of thought and feeling in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that released enormous creative (as well as criminal) forces among revolutionaries, reformists, therapists and artists. But just as the concept of nature clouded over with time, the concept of history became much darker as time went on. Although everybody
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who lived in the twentieth century involuntarily felt that the world would somehow go on, they began to doubt the meaningfulness of movement. In the end, many people only felt the great movement going on and on like a maelstrom, a whirlpool pulling them into the depths. That is the moment when the concept of fate could return with overtones of early antiquity – similarly to the Greek moira or ananke, the goddess of fate who was surrounded in earlier times by dark and mysterious hints that she was older and more powerful than the Olympic gods.
RAULFF: But the concept of fate often reappears in the modern age as the name for a remarkable deed by which a great figure wrests free of blind forces. Fate, or destiny, comes to mean the sudden blow that tears the fateful fabric, the act with major consequences . . . The key word here is ‘sudden’. All at once the old fabric is torn. Nietzsche: ‘I am a destiny . . . ’
SLOTERDIJK: When I lecture about the eternal return, I have to explain ‘why I am a destiny’ . . .
RAULFF: This also applies to the theoreticians of decision: for them fate is the abrupt act that tears the fabric of the past.
SLOTERDIJK: In my opinion, decisionism and the philosophy of the deed are subversive products of classical Enlightenment historicism. For decisionists, there is a sharp remainder of human history-making in the form of disastrous epoch-making. This happens through sudden decisions with which the great agent pre- pares to ride the wave of the world as it moves onward. This is the moment for the distinction Nietzsche introduced between active and passive nihilism. Without this, it is nearly impossible to understand the path of ideas in the twentieth century. In both forms nihilism is the inevitable reverse side of historicism. It has to take the upper hand as soon as we abandon the classical assumption that all epochs are equally close to God. Then comes the idea that history is what ultimately leads to nothing. In principle there are only the two posi- tions Nietzsche described with his distinction between passive and active nihilism. First, people let themselves drift along . . .
RAULFF: Nirvana . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Nirvana, fun, drugs. The drug world is sig- nificant in this context because it not only expresses disinterest in history, but also disinterest in being-in-the-world as such. In La condition humaine, the French novelist André Malraux described an old Chinese man – I think it was the father of one of the young revolutionaries at the centre of the novel – who chose to let the world drown in unreality. Malraux used extreme irony in his depic- tion of the opium dealer, who had once been a sociologist at Peking University, because from this person’s perspective even the most
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serious thing people could achieve at that time on the world stage – revolution – became blurred in the meaninglessness of the world as a whole. What a terrible world that was, the China of the late 1920s as seen through the eyes of this French novelist: the fathers dreaming away their lives in an opium haze while their sons imagine they will achieve self-fulfilment in murders for the future. Clearly, Malraux could only have presented the figure of the man on the opium couch on the basis of Nietzsche’s theory of passive nihilism. At the same time he highlighted the instability of revolutionary struggle because it could only mean nihilism in action. Just as weigh- ing out opium implies fleeing from reality, the revolutionary actions of the Shanghai activists in 1927 imply fleeing beyond reality. This is best illustrated in the two most powerful scenes from La Condition humaine: right at the beginning, when the young fighter Chen commits his first murder in a kind of active trance and discovers the surrealism of killing, and then again towards the end of the novel with the self-sacrifice of Comrade Katov, who gives away his only cyanide capsule, which is supposed to guarantee him quick death in an emergency, to two young Chinese comrades to allow them to end their own lives in the last night before the execution. He himself accepts being burned alive by Kuomintang soldiers the following morning in the boiler of the locomotive. This shows active nihilist ethics at the most extreme end. Malraux was one of the key wit- nesses of the twentieth century because he understood early on that communist commitment was identical with active nihilism.
Incidentally, we could ask ourselves whether Carl Schmitt4 wasn’t also arguing the line of active nihilism, and whether his superim- posed Catholicism wasn’t just a mask for nihilism, with decisionist trimmings in this case. Precisely because everything leads to nothing, he pictured the great designers of society being called upon to make decisions with fatal consequences. The horrible jurist Schmitt thought that people who postponed the inevitable end of the world should have a free hand. Schmitt granted licence to major perpetra- tors to take superhuman risks – such as Hitler when he launched the Second World War. In retrospect we would be right to say that, all in all, active nihilism with its posture of a fresh start emerging out of abrupt decision, and its faith at rock bottom, and the great rupture, was a disappointment, a self-hypnotic swindle. The truth is that nothing old ended and nothing new began. Anyone who wants to
4 Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) was a conservative German theorist who specialized in legal, constitutional and political theory. His support for the Nazi regime made him a controversial figure.
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keep on living always has to connect to the previous state and carry on from there in some direction or other.
RAULFF: Isn’t it more that historical thought always hovers between an attitude of loving breaches and hating them? By all appearances we are currently in a phase that is afraid of breaches, although as you rightly say we always need both and should take both into account. Passive nihilism spreads until active nihilism intervenes. Then it destroys the passive and devours it with a strong project. Commentators have observed, incidentally, how nihilism as a figure of thought was used in the courtroom in Nuremberg to explain and excuse criminal actions, for example, in relation to the trials of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile SS killing squads. To exonerate the accused, European nihilism was presented as a global chain of guilt with the catastrophic German deeds as only part of that, and the guilty actions of individuals in turn only as a micro- scopic fragment of the fateful whole. Just imagine, such arguments even extended to the defence strategies of the lawyers at Nuremberg.
SLOTERDIJK: Regrettably, Heidegger made a special contribu- tion to this field. His works represent a dubious peak in the indirect apologetics for lapses of the twentieth century and their exaltation to decrees of fate.
RAULFF: Prepared in terms of the structure of care . . .
SLOTERDIJK: Heidegger’s early work had already presaged the turn to thinking in concepts of ‘fate’, using the basic existen- tial structure of care. To begin with, we should note the method of thinking: it is not that I care, but that care is sent to me and takes me into service. In the works of his middle and later periods, Heidegger attached the concept of fate generally to the occurrences of civilization that we know as technology. In this context, we hear disastrous statements such as that the industrialized landscape and mass production of dead people in concentration camps stem from the same. . . .
RAULFF: . . . ‘process logic’ . . .
SLOTERDIJK: . . . and arise from the same fateful objectification and misuse of everything by production and presentation, that is, the unstoppable rush of self-empowering framing subjectivity. We still don’t know what to make of these statements. They abrogate the possibility of being guilty of anything at all. We can see some- thing slightly comparable in the neurological hype that nothing and nobody can resist at the present time. In fact, it opens the way for a renewed attempt to popularize fatalism as naturalism, in this case as neuro-fatalism. The art of not having been the guilty person remains as topical as it was in the period of the first setbacks in the Enlightenment project. From this perspective, Marquard actually
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provided the key to the moral ecological system of the modern age: as soon as the human capacity to act explosively increases, a demand for irresponsibility begins. Everybody talks about responsibility, but in reality most people have a stake in effacing the possibility of making perpetrators responsible for their actions.
RAULFF: This is what Marquard described as ‘refatalization’. In this respect a concept like fate, or whatever is offered as an alter- native, always has an exonerating function, not only individually but also on the level of the species.
SLOTERDIJK: Nietzsche invented the most powerful image of the global dilemma for which one needs and seeks relief when he described man as a being hanging on the back of a tiger in dreams. In that situation we think twice about whether to wake up the pas- senger. Nobody has practised getting off the tiger’s back. Some progressive moralists today are coming round to the idea that the tiger doesn’t exist at all. According to them, we have been stand- ing on firm ground all the time, responsible for ourselves from top to toe. For them, there is no dark underbelly that empowers and sometimes devours us. By contrast, authors such as Heidegger or Friedrich Georg Jünger5 focused on the monstrous in their consid- erations on the modern world, the former with his theory of frames that concerns a super-tiger called technology, and the latter in the form of a meditation about the titanic quality of modern civiliza- tions. Since then, there has been an almost never-ending discussion about the weirdness that lies at the roots of the enterprises of moder- nity. Thinking like that makes us imagine ourselves as insects in the scaly skin of a dragon. Dreamers on a tiger’s back or gnats on the scales of a monster – those are the images that have shaped being- in-the-world after the collapse of the perpetrator illusion following the French Revolution, and after the implosion of the Napoleon bubble.
RAULFF: In this case refatalization seems to be not only giving relief but also oppressive.
SLOTERDIJK: First, the key word ‘relief’ is the best word for this situation. To understand that we have to go back to the era fol- lowing the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. After the heroic period, losers stood around everywhere looking for excuses. Fate was just the right thing. Napoleon was exiled to a remote Atlantic island, the heroes were pensioned off, history stagnated and a strong demand for non-responsibility hung in the air. People
5 Friedrich Georg Jünger (1898–1977) was a German poet, author and essayist in cultural criticism.
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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.
