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Essays After Heidegger

Peter Sloterdijk

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745696997, 9780745696980
• eBook ISBN: 9780745697024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

One can rightly say of Peter Sloterdijk that each of his essays and lectures is also an unwritten book. That is why the texts presented here, which sketch a philosophical physiognomy of Martin Heidegger, should also be characterized as a collected renunciation of exhaustiveness.

In order to situate Heidegger's thought in the history of ideas and problems, Peter Sloterdijk approaches Heidegger's work with questions such as: If Western philosophy emerged from the spirit of the polis, what are we to make of the philosophical suitability of a man who never made a secret of his stubborn attachment to rural life? Is there a provincial truth of which the cosmopolitan city knows nothing? Is there a truth in country roads and cabins that would be able to undermine the universities with their standardized languages and globally influential discourses? From where does this odd professor speak, when from his professorial chair in Freiburg he claims to inquire into what lies beyond the history of Western metaphysics?

Sloterdijk also considers several other crucial twentieth-century thinkers who provide some needed contrast for the philosophical physiognomy of Martin Heidegger. A consideration of Niklas Luhmann as a kind of contemporary version of the Devil's Advocate, a provocative critical interpretation of Theodor Adorno's philosophy that focuses on its theological underpinnings and which also includes reflections on the philosophical significance of hyperbole, and a short sketch of the pessimistic thought of Emil Cioran all round out and deepen Sloterdijk's attempts to think with, against, and beyond Heidegger. Finally, in essays such as "Domestication of Being" and the "Rules for the Human Park," which incited an international controversy around the time of its publication and has been translated afresh for this volume, Sloterdijk develops some of his most intriguing and important ideas on anthropogenesis, humanism, technology, and genetic engineering.

1
THE PLUNGE AND THE TURN
Speech on Heidegger’s Thinking in Motion

1. Prelude in the Theater

Ladies and gentlemen, a few years ago, while walking around the campus of Bard College, one of the academic institutions in the state of New York favored by students from the upper-middle classes, which is situated a hundred miles north of New York City on the eastern bank of the Hudson River, I discovered—almost accidentally—the resting place of Hannah Arendt, that admirable and provocative philosopher, whose early love for Martin Heidegger is today not only a secret that has been disclosed, but was also able to be portrayed as a chapter of recent intellectual history—lately in Rüdiger Safranski’s rightly much-praised biography of Heidegger. Hannah Arendt’s grave is distinguished by its unusual simplicity—if one may speak in such contradictory terms: a stone slab on the flat earth with her name and the dates of her birth and death. One step to the side is the gravestone of her husband, the philosopher Heinrich Blücher, just as simple, taken back to the trinity: name, dates, stone. What touched me about Hannah Arendt’s gravesite was the extraordinariness of its location. I do not mean the inconspicuousness of the place, nor the dignified lack of fuss that these two stones on the earth evinced. What astonished me was the fact that I found myself obviously at a campus cemetery at which the earlier presidents of the college and a number of professors, who no doubt had felt especially connected to the college, were laid to rest. A small island of the dead in the midst of the college grounds, a locus amoenus, planted with conifers and evergreen bushes, a meditative enclave, hardly a hundred steps from the library.

Apart from that, the small cemetery was an almost unmarked space, without surrounding walls, as if, for the inhabitants of this region, there were no reason to distinguish the living and the dead in such a way as to necessitate a wall that would divide them. Thus a cemetery of professors—I must admit that a certain amazement overcame me at this sight, an amazement that in retrospect I would like to call Old European and that was perhaps equally both disconcerting and exhilarating. At the time I was in the process of beginning to contemplate whether I should take up the expected call for a professorship in Germany. Here in America it was now discreetly shown to me how far one can go as a professor. Up to that point it had not been clear that a session of the faculty senate could last an eternity—assuming that one had been a member of American academia during one’s life. What European professor would today be laid to rest at a university’s own cemetery? What university in the Old World possesses so much esprit de corps and community spirit that it would be embodied as a virtual community of dead and living teachers, as was so clearly revealed by the small campus cemetery on the Hudson River? In today’s Europe, who would be so identified with his teaching position that he would take up the call beyond the end and wish to be interred among only colleagues and schoolmasters?

In light of Hannah Arendt’s grave, a few aspects of American spatial planning have become somewhat more understandable to me. I have learned to observe at least three boundaries more attentively than before, boundaries that in the United States were sometimes drawn differently than in the Old World: the boundary between the city and the countryside; the boundary between the university and the city; finally, the boundary between the cemetery and the world of the living. It became clear to me that the philosopher, in allowing herself to be laid to rest next to her husband, a charismatic teacher who had belonged to the college for decades, had not chosen to be buried in a village, as did her former teacher and lover in Marburg, Martin Heidegger, when he decided on the cemetery in Messkirch as his last resting place. According to statistical criteria, there is no more remote province than Annandale-on-Hudson; one can scarcely imagine a place where the village, the first thesis, as it were, of humanity vis-à-vis nature, contrasts with the countryside so tentatively and almost helplessly as it does here. And yet the campus cemetery is not a village cemetery. The campus is the university abstracted from the urban body; the university, for its part, embodies in an ideal form the place where cities are most of all urban.

Campus, academy, university, college: these are the names of institutions or spaces that testify to the irruption of the world that has been extended by theory into cities. They indicate where plain human settlements were used for great purposes. Where universities and academies are established, provincial towns change into cosmopolitan cities. The United States of America, the hyperbolic European colony, has even managed to disconnect the logical heart of the city from the urban body and to isolate it under the name ‘campus,’ field of studies—not seldom like a backdrop in a countryside in which professors emerge as the first human beings.

I would thus like to say that Hannah Arendt’s grave, in a manner different from that of Martin Heidegger’s, in spatio-logical terms, lies in the midst of the cosmopolitan city, in the center of that academic space in which Western cities could become cosmopolitan cities and native sons could become world citizens, so long as they did not misuse universities as extensions of provincial life. Viewed in this light, the emigrant Hannah Arendt never left European soil behind; when in the 1930s she immigrated first to France and then to the United States, she simply relocated from a tainted province to a more open zone—from a Europe in the hands of the Nazisto a metropolis that was manifestly called New York but whose latent name could be nothing other than Athens. Athens was the real country to which Hannah Arendt immigrated, on the one hand because the first academic city symbolizes the reformatting of thought in the transition from the village to the city, on the other hand because the Greek right to hospitality kept the necessary resources available for Jewish and other exiles. Thus it comes about that the philosopher lies interred in one of the noblest cemeteries on earth, on the fringes of the campus that signifies the world, in a corner that we may not even call a village, in a hamlet that, because it is a part of Athens, nevertheless bears in itself the universitas.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would not have permitted myself to reminisce on Hannah Arendt’s transatlantic last resting place in this typifying manner if I had not intended to characterize Martin Heidegger’s place in the history of ideas and problems in the century that is now coming to a close by way of contrast to this choice of place. I would not have ventured this suggestion were I not of the opinion that Heidegger’s position becomes immediately and vividly discernable when we think of the imaginary line that leads from the grave on the American campus to the grave at the Messkirch cemetery. I do not hesitate to claim that Heidegger’s burial arrangements also testify to something that is philosophically significant. If the master from Germany did not choose any other site for his last resting place than the rural town’s church cemetery, whose native he wished to remain—under a gravestone adorned not by a cross, but rather by a small star—then there is a piece of information here that is ignored only by one who preemptively refuses to believe the lessons that lie in that decision. One must explicitly note, as though it were a proposition, that Professor Heidegger’s grave is not found on a campus but rather in a rural cemetery, not in a university town but rather tucked away in a little town with a pious name, not in the vicinity of lecture halls and libraries where the philosopher had been at work but rather not far from the houses and fields of his childhood, as though the tenured professor at the illustrious Albert-Ludwigs-Universität refused moving to the urban world even in extremis.

In what follows, I sketch a philosophical physiognomy of Heidegger, the thinker of motion, which takes its point of departure from this discovery: the thinker, whom many, without doubt rightly, consider to be one of the movers of philosophy at the end of this twentieth century, is someone who in terms of his personal dynamic refuses to move, who can only be at home in the vicinity of his original landscapes, and who even as a professor never actually relocated to the city where he held his chair.

It is not hard to see the contradiction to which this diagnosis would like to call attention. For if Western philosophy, as was sometimes claimed, actually emerged from the urban spirit, if it was an eruption of the city into a world-function and an irruption of great world-dimensions into the local soul, then what are we to make of the theoretical temperament of a man who never concealed his aversion for the city and his stubborn attachment to the spirits of the rural world? From where does this odd professor speak when from his chair in Freiburg he claims to inquire beyond the history and fate of Western metaphysics? What province does Heidegger mean when he takes it to be a relevant philosophical act that he of all people remains there instead of following the call to the big city? Is there a provincial truth of which the cosmopolitan city knows nothing? Is there a truth of the field path and the cabin that would be able to undermine the university, together with its refined language and globally influential discourses?

I will not attempt to answer these questions here. Only this seems certain to me: Heidegger was not a thinker on the stage, at least not if one proceeds from the everyday understanding of this formulation.¹ He is not a thinker on the stage in a twofold sense: on the one hand, because the theater and the stage are at home in the religion of the city and in urban culture, thus in the political formation that, although a professor, Heidegger obstinately opposed like a visitor from the country—at best like an ambassador from a region without cities or from a community of shared problems that is grounded not in space but rather in time; on the other hand, because every stage, metaphorical and real, implies a central position, an exposure to the front-and-center of visibility. However, that is a position that Heidegger, even at the height of his fame, could never have seriously sought, according to his whole mental disposition, because his place, inside and outwardly, remained that of someone on the margins and a collaborator. He does not think on the stage but rather in the background, at best on the side stage, or in a Catholic context, not before the high altar but rather in the sacristy. Because of influences that are older than his thought, he came to the conviction that what is visible and prominent, what is right in the middle, lives from the inconspicuous preparation of assistants backstage and in the wings. He too is such an assistant, and that is what he wants to be: a pioneer, a second, someone who blends into a greater event—in no case, or at least only momentarily and awkwardly, is he the hero standing center stage. Heidegger is never actually a protagonist who exposes himself in exemplary battles to the heroic risk of being seen on all sides. Moments of apparent deep emotion cannot change anything in this regard. A hidden power was at work in him, which was neither exhibited nor explained, let alone admitted or apologized for. When distressed or embarrassed, he tended to fall silent, and no god gave him the words to say how he suffered.

It seems important to me, in everything having to do with Heidegger’s spiritual physiognomy, to take into consideration his father’s occupation as a sexton. If, in his biographical studies, Hugo Ott has plausibly argued that much in Heidegger’s thought is only understandable as a metastasis of southwestern German Old Catholicism circa 1900, then we should add that it was not so much a priestly Catholicism, thus a Catholicism of the high altar and the nave, that formed Heidegger’s disposition; it was rather a Catholicism of the side aisle, a Catholicism of the sexton and altar boy, a religiosity of the quiet assistant on the periphery, desperate for acceptance.

One could only in a very precarious sense characterize Heidegger as a thinker on the stage, by imputing to him the dream of an impending state of exception that would convey him to his destiny. One might perhaps do that if one lends credence to the suspicion that the sexton’s son was incapable of doing anything other than day-dreaming that, one day—through a wondrous, deeply grounded reversal—his diligent father would be transformed into an acting priest, so that, on a fateful day not far off, all power would issue from the sacristy. One would have to further assume that the fantasy must have arisen in the son that he himself had been called to take up the heritage of an official sexton. Only in this sense can Heidegger’s hazy political philosophy—above all his gauche agitation in the eleventh month of his rectorship from 1933 to 1934 and his ministrations for the fateful chancellor in far-off Berlin—be interpreted as thinking in the form of a High Mass on a phantasmal stage. Here, as sexton in charge, he would have thus become a liturgical revolutionary, who administers to an unredeemed people an astoundingly ancient sacrament—non-Catholic hosts and Presocratic wine. In this heterodox rite, that which was previously inconspicuous would be brought forward triumphantly, what was an accessory would become the main thing, the courtyard would be transformed into the central structure, the sacristy would bec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Translators’ Introduction
• Preface
• 1. The Plunge and the Turn: Speech on Heidegger’s Thinking in Motion
• 2. Luhmann, Devil’s Advocate: Of Original Sin, the Egotism of Systems, and the New Ironies
• 3. The Domestication of Being: The Clarification of the Clearing
• 4. What Is Solidarity with Metaphysics at the Moment of Its Fall?: Note on Critical and Exaggerated Theory
• 5. Alētheia or the Fuse of Truth: Toward the Concept of a History of Unconcealment
• 6. Rules for the Human Park: A Response to Heidegger’s “Letter on ‘Humanism’”
• 7. Wounded by Machines: Toward the Epochal Significance of the Most Recent: Medical Technology
• 8. The Time of the Crime of the Monstrous: On the Philosophical Justification of the Artificial
• 9. The Selfless Revanchist: A Note on Cioran
• 10. “An Essential Tendency toward Nearness Lies in Dasein”: Marginalia to Heidegger’s Doctrine of Existential Place
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