Selected Exaggerations

Conversations and Interviews 1993 - 2012

Peter Sloterdijk

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745691664, 9780745691657
• eBook ISBN: 9780745691695
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Peter Sloterdijk's reputation as one of the most original thinkers of our time has grown steadily since the early 1980s. This volume of over thirty conversations and interviews spanning two decades illuminates the multiple interconnections of his life and work.

In these wide-ranging dialogues Sloterdijk gives his views on a variety of topics, from doping to doxa, design to dogma, media to mobility and the financial crisis to football. Here we encounter Sloterdijk from every angle: as he expounds his ideas on the philosophical tradition and the latest strands of contemporary thought, as he analyses the problems of our age and as he provides a new and startling perspective on everyday events. Through exaggeration, Sloterdijk draws our attention to crucial issues and controversies and makes us aware of their implications for society and the individual. Always eager to share his knowledge and erudition, he reveals himself equally at home in ancient Babylon, in the channels of the mass media and on the ethical and moral terrain of religion, education or genetic engineering.

Appealing both to the seasoned reader of Sloterdijk and to the curious newcomer, these dialogues offer fresh insight into the intellectual and political events of recent decades. They also give us glimpses of Sloterdijk's own life story, from his early passionate love of reading and writing to his journeys in East and West, his commitment to Europe and his acceptance and enjoyment of the role of a public intellectual and philosopher in the twenty-first century. 

1
THE HALF-MOON MAN

Interview with Elke Dauk^*

DAUK: Mr Sloterdijk, ten years ago the Critique of Cynical Reason seemed like a tremendously bold call. How do you explain that extraordinary impact?

SLOTERDIJK: The book was not a call – it was a performance. It celebrated what it discussed in its own pages. It was, and still is, a very cheerful book, unusually provocative in a context where one doesn’t expect it. The critique lies in the tone. Considering its subject, it is astonishingly funny; it contains a kind of phenomenology of all the jokes that can ever be made about humans in the nine major fields of humour, which are spelled out in detail in the second volume.

Above all, it contributed to blasting open the conspiracy of disenchantment, the left-wing mawkishness in the year 1983. The Critique of Cynical Reason was the attempt to reconstruct the super-ego disaster of European culture in a phenomenologically broad study – a super-ego disaster that began with people having to live up to unattainably high ideals. Today we are living through the break-up of a process of constructing the super-ego that had already begun in antiquity. What Europeans experience today as a universal feeling of demoralization, right down to the tiny ramifications of political incorrectness that have such a deep influence on the zeitgeist, are remote effects of a process of idealization that took root with Greek philosophy and the later Christian doctrine of virtue and inexorably led to an unparalleled history of destruction.

DAUK: To what extent was the Critique of Cynical Reason a critique of the Enlightenment?

SLOTERDIJK: It is not a critique of the Enlightenment, but rather a continuation of the Enlightenment in a self-reflective stage. It is enlightenment about the Enlightenment. Reflections across borders that necessarily emerge in a first attempt are recognized at the second attempt and are already part of the picture by the third attempt. The third attempt is social education after the bad experiences society had made with its own naivety. We have still not learned the art of convincing humans to live together in large communities. It has become so questionable whether it can succeed at all, via the paths of classical idealism and conceptions of sacrifice first developed in antiquity, that we have to expect new attempts.

DAUK: Wasn’t it also the attempt to create an opposing model to sublate the destructive reason represented by kynicism and Diogenes?

SLOTERDIJK: It is not about sublating destructive elements. I focused on kynicism as a sort of existential revolt that had already become formulated in antiquity against the city and the state, that is, against the two major repressive forms, against the ‘political monsters’ of ancient times. Even today, people can use this model for guidance if they understand that humans must first be brought into life before the state can use them. Modern education, the modern Enlightenment and the modern state system have always assumed humans as given and don’t consider how humans are born, how they engender themselves. In my opinion, ancient kynicism was an attempt, perhaps with inappropriate means, to defend a sphere in which humans are not delivered to the state too quickly, and don’t become agents of big structures too quickly. The aim of kynicism was to recall a life form that was linked to the concept of self-assertion at that time, a life form in which human beings emerge first of all, and are not already exploited and given missions.

DAUK: Did you want to go beyond social theory towards an art of living or, more precisely, eroticism?

SLOTERDIJK: What I do is not only social theory; it is a philosophical-existential approach that per se observes the social world as a fragmented landscape of obsessions. The book is a manifesto of liberation; it is the continuation of a strand of German philosophy insofar as it was a philosophy of emancipation. It was probably most successful in Germany because it played language games in a new way on a sophisticated level of possibilities.

DAUK: Back then, using the example of the atom bomb, you characterized the subject as the pure will to annihilate himself and the world. Does this analysis still hold today?

SLOTERDIJK: In principle, yes. But the social parameters have shifted very considerably. Nowadays we no longer face the paranoid duel that pitted two exemplary political mega-centres against each other in the Cold War era. Today the issue is not so much to disarm two such subjects or to give information about them, although this is still relevant, but to reform them and inform them in such a way that they can live with their own magnitude, with their own potential for violence, and their own paranoia. This might sound paradoxical, but it is not about smashing up these great subjects but about helping them to function successfully. By ‘successfully’, I mean beyond self-destruction.

DAUK: Is the kynical-cynical impulse still the motive force of your thought?

SLOTERDIJK: Kynical-cynical impulses do not lead to thought; they lead to formal rejection of unreasonable demands. Forces that drive thought are not found on the level of kynical and cynical impulses because these impulses have something to do with defensive movements, defensive feelings. The cynical impulse is the feeling of rejection that powerful persons have when people demand that they humbly submit to morality or a norm. They feel too strong for that and become cynical. And the kynical impulse is the resistance produced by the vitality of ‘poor suckers’ when they are required to keep to norms that were created for others. In their own way, they are also too strong to let themselves be castrated by a sort of normativism that tries to co-opt them for a social game that nobody ever asked if they wanted to play. In both cases it is a sort of individualist résistance that operates on the borders of moralism, in the one case from above, in the other from below. There are records of this from various world cultures since the beginning of cities and empires. One can see that this kind of résistance, this rejection of the imperial ethos, from above as from below, has been known for around 2,500 years, and particularly in the West where there has always been special licence for speaking out defiantly, that is, where the truth oracle has functioned better, and even in a cheeky, immoral tone, than in China or other places, where the political pressure to gloss over and say the required things operates much more tightly. Returning to your question, for me, and I think for most philosophers, what drives thought lies at a deeper level. It is not resistance, but riddles, that make one think. Having a big ‘No’ inside you leads to therapy, at best. But if you have a riddle inside you, you arrive either at art or philosophy. I see my work being located at the intersection of these fields.

DAUK: You have been interested in Gnosis in recent years. Whereas the kynic insists on a fulfilled life, the disciple of Gnosticism seeks flight from the world. Isn’t this a path from ‘life as risk’ to ‘life as mourning’?

SLOTERDIJK: Quite the contrary. I am much more optimistic now than I was in my book Critique of Cynical Reason, because that book only spoke the language of cheerful protest. You can declare war and you can declare a holiday, and that book declared a holiday. It did so intentionally and polemically against a society that had declared war and troubles. Today my eyes see other horizons and my thinking stems from a different centre that is more thoroughly worked out and differently informed about its reasons for cheerfulness. My reasons for cheerfulness go much deeper than those of the Critique of Cynical Reason. The result is that I no longer work on a theory of protest but on a fundamental theory of the absent person. That means I use anthropological arguments to develop the thesis that humans have turned away from the world to a large degree, and they always exist also in the mode of absence, in the mode of unknowing, in a nocturnal relation to the world. Consequently I see no reason, at least not in terms of anthropology, to continue the forcible co-option of individuals for the sake of a totality called ‘reality’. That’s what contemporary media do when they keep on agitating about troubles, showering people constantly with unpleasant news, inspired by a degree of informative sadism, as if to say, ‘We have recorded this awful stuff to pass on and you are the right recipients.’ Everybody tries to be the medium, not the filter. The filters and the end buyers are always the others. I think it’s possible to show that people never have to be end buyers of misfortune. Their inherent nature makes them like half-moons, only half turned towards the world, and their other half belongs to a different principle that can’t be reached by that agitation about troubles.

DAUK: Is the relationship between the ego and the world the basic theme of your work?

SLOTERDIJK: The relationship between humans and the world has been the theme of philosophy for 2,500 years, but classical metaphysics included a third element that gets a bad press today. However, the metaphysical triangle in which thought was practised via the major questions – the triangle consisting of God, man and the soul – still exists as a rump. Elsewhere it is replaced by a monist view of the world, that is, by positing the world as absolute, and treating human beings only as a function of the world, as a local function of the cosmos or a local function of society. This makes us slip back into the bad old conditions because we urge each individual to live his or her life in a way that is symptomatic of a society that doubts its own existence. There are good reasons to reject this imposition. I am beginning to present a very different kind of anthropology, one that eliminates the automatic relation of man and the world. Humans don’t belong to the world like your thumb to your hand. They also stand with their backs to the world – as children of the night or of vacant nothingness.

DAUK: Were you interested in Gnosticism because the Gnostics practised opposition to the agents of the material world?

SLOTERDIJK: I saw Gnosis as an exercise ground on which one can study the a-cosmic dimension, the components of the human psyche that are turned away from the world. It was an interdisciplinary project between the philosophy of religion and anthropology. The results are now available, first of all in a big collection of documents titled World Revolution of the Soul, a documentation of nearly a thousand pages that proves how people in the Western tradition have recorded their deregistration – if I can put it like that – at the residency registration office of the cosmos. Another result of the project is my forthcoming book, Weltfremdheit [World Estrangement]. This is not documentation – it is a discursively written account that develops the above-mentioned thesis in relation to music, sleep, drugs, religions, the death drive, self-awareness, meditative phenomena and many other things. The whole point is to show that we can’t get any further with a primitive face-to-face relationship between ‘man and the world’. It shows that we only describe a human being properly when we show that he or she lives at a sharp angle to reality and is sometimes here and sometimes not, and usually not.

DAUK: How is Weltfremdheit related to your thesis that hominization, humanization itself, is the disaster per se?

SLOTERDIJK: I don’t say that on my own account; rather, I adopt a thesis that emerged around 2,000 years ago in the context of a dissident branch of Judaism during a self-critical phase of Jewish Genesis theology, and that people in our cultural sphere have never forgotten since then. The secret rumour says that there was a clumsy Creator and that this earth is not the best achievement of the world beyond, and certainly not optimal, and that the fundamental Catholic decision to save God by burdening man isn’t the only meaningful possibility for distributing the burden in this context. We could also burden God and thus save the truth by regarding the Creation as second-best, maybe even as a botched effort, or one with a built-in tendency to fail. That is quite a different philosophical approach and it has created a breakthrough in anthropology and made negative anthropology possible, that is, teachings about a person’s absence from the world as a kind of theory of the night and of sleep, of absence. As soon as that is formulated in enough detail we shall see that it generally offers a better way to describe humans than positivist anthropologies do.

DAUK: Isn’t the dark side of man only half the truth?

SLOTERDIJK: It is the forgotten half of the truth. What matters now is to continue thinking about the cognitive insights of anthropology in such a way that we remain within the continuum of Western learning processes and can still discuss and debate on an equal footing with a Taoist sage, an Indian sadhu and an ecstatic Hasid.

^* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk and Elke Dauk appeared under the title ‘Der Halbmondmensch’, in the Frankfurter Rundschau (29 September 1993, supplement): 2.
Elke Dauk’s book about life forms in the Western world, Der Griff nach den Sternen. Suche nach Lebensformen im Abendland, was published in 1998 by Insel Verl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• In Place of a Preface
• 1 The Half-Moon Man
• 2 Why Are People Media?
• 3 World Estrangement and Diagnosis of Our Times
• 4 Uterus on Wheels
• 5 Fire Your Shrink!
• 6 Philosophical Retuning
• 7 We’re Always Riding Down Maternity Drive
• 8 Tackling the Unspoken Things in Culture
• 9 On Wealth and Self-Respect
• 10 Learning Is Joyful Anticipation of Oneself
• 11 Postmen and Fallen Towers
• 12 Raising Our Heads: Pampering Spaces and Time Drifts
• 13 Good Theory Doesn’t Complain
• 14 There Are No Individuals
• 15 Confused People Spread Confusion
• 16 Germans Want To Be Compelled: Theory for the Year’s End
• 17 Comparatists of Happiness
• 18 Image and Perspective: An Experiment in Atmospheric Seeing
• 19 On Progress: The Holy Fire of Dissatisfaction
• 20 A Team of Hermaphrodites
• 21 Under a Brighter Sky
• 22 Making the Effort: The Reader
• 23 Thus Spoke Sloterdijk
• 24 Fathers Should Be Kept Out of Brothels and Pubs
• 25 The Athletics of Dying
• 26 Do Your Duty To Enjoy!
• 27 Even a God Can’t Save Us
• 28 A Plug for Higher Energies
• 29 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
• 30 Is There a Way Out of the Crisis of Western Culture?
• 31 Questions of Fate: A Novel About Thought
• 32 Humans in Repetition: The Twenty-first Century Will Be Acrobatic
• 33 With the Babble of Babylon in the Background
• Bernhard Klein: Editorial Note
• Appendix
• End User License Agreement