In 1983 a book is published by a previously unknown author, Peter Sloterdijk, called “Critique of Cynical Reason”. After a year more than 100.000 copies have been sold, and it has become one of the best sold modern philosophical books in Germany. Moreover, it provides a new tool for the disappointed left-wing movement to act in the cynical but apparently inescapable reality of the later days of the cold war. At one stroke Sloterdijk becomes the new-born star of the Critical School in philosophy.

Sixteen years later the following message appears in a leading German newspaper [10] (the numbers refer to the references below):

“ Konstanz, 5 October 1999- Yesterday the 18th German congress of philosophy was opened in Konstanz with an attack on the statements by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk about the breeding of men. Sloterdijk has naively and unsteadily trespassed “all scientifically and philosophically justifiable limits”, the chairman of the general society for philosophy in Germany, Jürgen Mittelstraß, remarked. In the name of the “majority of colleagues” he demanded an end to the provocative but superficial debate.
Until Friday about 700 philosophers gather in Konstanz to discuss the topic of “the future of knowing”. Particularly interesting is the forum on bio- and medical ethics, which has as topics “the moral problems of genetic engineering” and “the selection at the beginning of life”. Peter Sloterdijk had provoked a public debate on eugenics and the breeding of men with his lecture in the Elmauer Mansion in July. According to many critics the 52-years old philosopher from Karlsruhe had used several provocative concepts from the Nazi vocabulary."

To understand these disparate facts better, I will now delve deeper into Sloterdijk’s thinking. In contrast to systematic philosophers like Levinas or Derrida, Peter Sloterdijk has not one uniform idea or one clear method. Books by these former authors can be compared to castles; hard to conquer, but, once you have reached the castle tower, easy to understand in their blueprint and architecture. Sloterdijk’s works are more like the stations of the London Underground; easy to enter, to find your way through, and to exit again, but hard to conceive in groundwork or overall idea.

However, some continuities can be discerned in Sloterdijk’s works. I will arrange these connections under three main lines. The most solid, oldest line is the red -critical- line, which stands for Sloterdijk’s wondering about the question: “How can we recognise and resist the powers that prevent us from happiness and truth?” The green -esoteric- line runs deeper and connects the most faraway places and times. It involves the question: “Since we are here, what does this ‘here’ actually mean, and who is this ‘we’?” Finally there is the black line, which stands for Sloterdijk’s capacity to articulate the themes of his time, and to illuminate these from a new tempting perspective.

Red Line

Sloterdijk has been educated in the world view of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurter Schule, and studied History, Philosophy and German Studies in Hamburg and München. Today he holds a chair in philosophy and media theory in Karlsruhe. In 1978 his dissertation was published [1], in which he examined in German autobiographies from the 1920s how people organise and justify their life. Sloterdijk considers “dialectical learning” as central to a sincere life. Contradictions and struggles between self conception and ruling ideology of capitalist society are unavoidable. One can learn from these struggles and disturbing experiences, but in most instances people fall in ideological traps, especially when they are bourgeois. Bourgeois life, as described in the autobiographies, is characterised by psychological trauma’s, rationalisations and objectifications of one’s own life. Instead, proletarian experience remains closer to concrete life. Sloterdijk thinks that, even when not being ‘proletarian’ oneself, one can learn from these autobiographies [1, p.317]:

“ Proletarian life description is a world view ‘from below’. Where we as intellectuals incline to distancing, abstraction, and overview, the proletarian way of experience reminds of what is concrete, sensory and not related to presupposed categories.”

Sloterdijk’s dissertation was written in the grim language of those who know it all, but to whom nobody listens. After this first book Sloterdijk visits Rajneesh, the oriental sect leader in India also known as Baghwan, - about whom he says later [6, p.105]:

“ Rajneesh has deconstructed and repeated everything under the right supposition that religion is only researchable by active religion games. The West is stuck in a critique of complete rejection by alienation, oblivion and denial. Rajneesh went the other way: he went further than the positive religions by means of experimental religion games and he destroyed and elevated them at the same time. His main method was the parody, that is, the analysis through affirmation”.

After his return from India Sloterdijk writes his most famous work, Critique of Cynical Reason, [2], in which the reflection has deepened, his language has freed itself from the neo- marxist dogmas, and his style has become sharp and joyful. In [2] Sloterdijk wants to find out why the promises of the Enlightenment have failed. In the 18th and 19th century, rationalism and criticism promised a liberation of mankind from false idolatry, oppression and ignorance through the slogan “Knowledge is Power”. In the 20th century, however, this great project got stuck in mass destruction, disillusion, and cynicism, which especially prevailed among those who were optimists in the 1960s. Sloterdijk’s masterpiece unravels the psychological history that led to the climate of cynicism in the late 20th century. The paradox which Sloterdijk tries to solve is that cynics are already rational and enlightened -in a way-, though that does not seem to help. After discussing the older forms of cynicism, Sloterdijk says about modern cynics [2, p.37]:

“ Cynics are not silly and they are certainly aware, now and then, that their acts lead to nothing. Their psychic resignation, however, is elastic enough to subsume the continuous doubts about their activities into their character as a factor of survival. They know what they do, but they still do it, because the urgency of things and the will to self-preservation speak, in the short run, the same language and tell them that it is necessary. ‘Otherwise others would do it, and perhaps they would act even worse.’ That is why the new integrated cynics consider themselves, understandably, as victims, and they think they also have to bring ‘offers’. Behind the hard disguise cynicism hides a large quantity of vulnerable feelings of misery and a need for tears. It envelops the mourning of the lost innocence - the mourning about a better knowledge against which all activity and plodding is directed.”

Alternatives for the cynical attitude cannot lay in providing more enlightenment or rationality. Instead, Sloterdijk examines the original cynicism during the Greeks, which he calls ‘kynicism’, and opposes this concept against modern cynicism. The wisdom of the original founder of the Kynical School, Diogenes, was not comprised in abstract systems, but in a unity of living, thinking and acting. While later mainstream philosophy could separate morality, ideas and material reality, a kynical under-current in history remained faithful to the body and to immanency instead of transcendency. In periods of hypocrisy the only possible position for kynics was that of the clown or the idiot. When those in power started to act like kynics, but remained in power, modern cynicism emerged.

With help of this opposition Sloterdijk analyses thinkers like Marx and Heidegger; social fields like religion, science, and journalism; literary figures like Dostojevski’s Grand-Inquisitor; the rise of fascism in recent German history, and many other issues. With this highly readable book Sloterdijk answers the question of the red line “How can we recognise and resist the powers that prevent us from happiness and truth?” He provides a kynical language and propagates an embodied attitude of a sort of engaged dadaism in combination with a clear but sensitive mind, which remains faithful to itself and which does not give in to the rhetoric of those who are ‘beyond naiveté’.

Green line

After [2] Sloterdijk drifts away from the Frankfurter critical perspective. Under influence of studies of Heidegger, his attention shifts from ideology criticism to a more profound criticism of Western existential and societal structures that shape the more fundamental categories of experience and thought. In Eurotaoism [4, p.24] he says:

“ ..both versions of critical theory, marxist theory and Frankfurter Schule theory, have remained abstract: they get either no grip on their object, that is, the kinetic reality of modern times as mobil-isation, or they can not keep distance, since they are themselves mobilisators.”

In [4] Sloterdijk attempts to build a new critical theory in which he conceives movement, mobility, motion, and mobilisation as metaphors that have shaped experience since the rise of science. From that perspective he considers the dogma of economic progress, the development of technology, and the hardening individuation of men as factors that speed up the world towards a catastrophe. In [4] he is quite fatalistic and sees the apocalypse approaching. To deal with this doom, he looks for an appropriate attitude that does not evoke more accelerated activities. Deactivation would be necessary, and instead of treating the earth as the stage where glorified human history unfolds its destiny, he calls for the absorption of the earth as a historical factor.

So Sloterdijk criticises man as an expansive activist, and he looks for the moment and reason where everything went wrong. Therefore he examines the primary awakenings and formations of the human subject, before he was seduced and colonised by -false- ideologies. For instance, in World Strangeness, [5], he develops a ‘paleopsychology’, i.e., a speculative psychology of early Homo Sapiens, and he discusses, for example, what it must have meant psychologically to become a settler instead of a nomad, [5, p.51]:

“After mankind had settled in the neolithic revolution, there has been no event with a comparable effect. In neo-lithical times the auto-encirclement by man started; man got under the terror of a new logic; the obsession by concepts of genealogy, kinship, and property started to prevail. From here on the intellectual history has been like an inventory of systems of obsession. Here began the chaining of Man to the galleys of origin. On this basis principles of genealogical thinking took over, which are connected to causality and revenge, gradations of similarity and karmical chains, impossibility to leave the past and the dead ancestors behind, and, finally, dominance of kinship and territoriality over sympathy and freedom of movement.”

Such wide-ranging speculative comparisons are often made by Sloterdijk; like an archaeologist he tries to discern the psychological correlates of man as the animal that got consciousness, or as the animal that does no longer need to be in constant fear for predators, or as the farmer and herdsman that went to live in cities and invented new tools. For instance, in a recent interview, in the context of a conversation on genetic engineering, Sloterdijk said [11]:

“…equally, whether we talk about agriculture or husbandry, a proto- technique of acting on life processes is in both forms given. Breeding always implies an unequal distribution of chances of reproduction, that is, favouring according to criteria, which are determined by human benefits. The dilemma of modern man is, that we think like vegetarians but live like carnivores. That is why ethics and technology do not run parallel. We want to be like the good herds, but we live like the bad herds…”

By dissecting such various layers of sediments that were added to images of man in world history, Sloterdijk tries to clarify what the human condition is today, and what it could be. Thereby he does not search for a universal genetic code, or a universal humanity that would underlie man through all times. On the contrary, Sloterdijk examines the interactions between man and different social and cultural environments, whereby he distances himself from the deceptive idea of modern man as crown on social evolution.

In this historical relativism, and underdeterminacy of what it means to be human, Sloterdijk resembles French post-humanists like Foucault and Deleuze. Sloterdijk says himself [12]:

“ It was the meeting with "The Order of Things" by Foucault, which threw me into a reflective space which was larger than my original philosophical education, imbued as I was by young- Hegelian and marxist thinking, especially in Adorno's version. I was immediately staggered by the atmosphere of clarity and rigor which came out of Foucault's work, and still, I felt an undescribable pain when reading Foucault. Now I know that that confusion was a reflex, or better said, an alarm signal, which indicated that I had been permanently and irreversibly carried away by a non-Hegelian and non-Kantian manner of thinking. I made my first steps into a spiritual space where the logic of reconciliation by a final synthesis did not function anymore.“

Sloterdijk stands out among the post-humanists in his sensitivity to the Zeitgeist; he often calls himself a ‘diagnostician of time’ instead of a ‘philosopher’. Furthermore, Sloterdijk examines more often religious phenomena, and is interested more in experience than in discourse or structures. Finally, Heidegger has specifically influenced Sloterdijk in his thinking about authentic and non-authentic being, and in his examination of terms appropriate for (post)- modern conditions like world, being-thrown, and being-there. However, different from Heidegger, Sloterdijk uses such notions in a more concrete sense. When examining the coming-into-the-world, for Sloterdijk this does not mean an abstract arrival, but the concrete anthropological genesis of homo sapiens in prehistoric times, or the concrete birth of a child. The topic of ‘birth’ is elaborated by Sloterdijk in [3] and in [7], which is the first part of the Spheres trilogy. In [3] he is concerned with the interaction between the first awakenings of a child, and the way the world forces itself onto the child. Sloterdijk concludes that it is language which confronts a child with a pre-given world order, but that it is also language which hands him the tool to create his own world, [3, p.165]:

“ Words are resurrected everywhere. They fix us by their meanings. They keep their shields high and allow no-one to leave the ring. Aren’t we just war prisoners of contingency, both linguistic and material? Prisoners of examination, against whom a life-long investigation is executed in the place of punishment called existence? Have we not recently been informed that we have to remain in postmodern de-concentration camps, sentenced to amusement? Where can the Other be found? Or at least the trace of the Other which leads us into freedom? Ladies and gentlemen, the trace to freedom cuts through language itself.”

In [7] he elaborates on a micro-level what kind of languages and other enclosing, protective spheres we encounter, when coming into the world. By illustrations and ideas from medieval paintings, psychoanalysis and existential philosophy he adduces the idea that after birth we are cut off, not from our mothers, but from a more essential entity, that is, in fact, the first entity that we experience, the placenta. After the first stage in life, in the uterus, the next stage, outside the uterus, would be characterised by searching for an equivalent of this first companion. In [9, p.34] he says:

“This exodus [from birth, WK] would only render psychotic animals, unless the emergence into the world parallels the entrance into what Heidegger called the House of Being. The traditional languages of mankind have made viable the ecstasy of being-in-the-world, when they showed man how his being-on-the-world can also be experienced as a being-with- oneself. In that way, elevation [Lichtung] is an event on the border of the history of nature and culture, and the human coming-into-the world implies a coming-to-speech.”

In the second book of the Spheres trilogy, [8], Sloterdijk develops the same idea of man’s need for a sphere, or, as he often calls it, a symbolic immune system to protect him from the outer meaningless cold. In [8] macro-spheres are visited, and Sloterdijk dwells on various issues through man’s history, like early civilisations, the diaspora, the discovery of the globe, the invention of gods to embrace us in a warm sphere, and, the explosion of this divine sphere in the Middle Ages, e.g., at [8, p.552]:

“ This [christian infinite] god, whose centre is everywhere and whose boundaries are nowhere can not be used anymore as a wall against the Outside. Thanks to his speculative self- inflation he has become himself an ex-centric power; his empire is not of the inner world; his sphere is not habitable as an intimate sphere. He who tries to meditate on this god, gets into the measureless extra-human, which is reminiscent of the coldest thoughts on emptiness and the most bitter detachments from what is near and valuable. Who would like to relate to such a theo-mathematical creature?”

For the time being this is the final station of ‘the green line’, because the third part of the Spheres trilogy, which is announced to deal with the disappearance of all global spheres, has not appeared yet. The question of the green line, “Since we are here, what does this ‘here’ actually mean, and who is this ‘we’?” can now be summarised as follows. ‘We’ are animals who have waken up from the unconscious succession of cause and effect, and who find a whole world out there. Our coming into this world is like being wounded; we often hasten to find a medicine, but we seldom realise that the medicine we use may have turned unnoticed into a drug, no longer fitted to changed circumstances. The craving for the drug then leads us back to a new state of unconsciousness. For instance, about humanism as a no longer effective medicine, Sloterdijk remarks [13]:

“ Man, who is confronted with a library, becomes a humanist. Man, who is confronted with a computer however, becomes someone for whom we have no name yet. Here a post-literary, post-humanist type of man is developed.”

Black line

Under the black line I will discuss the way Sloterdijk articulates his ideas, and the reception of these ideas.

His main success is still “Critique of Cynical Reason” with its analysis of the psychological state of cynicism. The opposing pair, kynicism versus cynicism, has found entrance especially in German intellectual circles but is also known in the Anglo-Saxon world. Since [2] the bodily motivated refusal to co-operate in rationally proof, but intuitively wrong practices has found a new basis. The putting out of the tongue at those in power has found new self-confidence.

His later work seems not to have reached an equally wide audience yet, perhaps because of its more remote historical themes. For a considerable group, however, the demonstration of the possibility of a cross-over between daily experience, critical thought, and philosophy of culture, history and religion has given support to the hope that not all experiences can be colonised by Western capitalism, and that what is left over, after the breaking up of the intrusive market-place, is more than flies and rotten fruits of wrong-proven histories. Apart from the themes Sloterdijk examines, he is also known for his style. As some of the quotes above show, Sloterdijk uses many metaphors, etymological associations, and overstatements. Because of his sometimes suggestive style, his texts remain open for several interpretations. And that is how we come to the context of the newspaper quote I mentioned in the introduction.

Last year Sloterdijk gave a lecture at a congress on Heidegger’s “Letter about Humanism”. He discussed several philosophical perspectives, notably by Plato, Nietzsche and Heidegger, on issues like ‘who should control human societies’, ‘under what justification’, and, ‘to what purpose’. He also deliberate upon the end of humanism, as the end of a tradition of letter- writing, and he alluded to the beginning of an era of new writing, directly into DNA. For the unsuspecting reader outside Germany this was just a lecture, perhaps a little grandiloquent, on the problems of modern times, like the rise of mass media, biotechnology and the loss of shared value systems. However, thanks to a scandal-ready journalist, some passages were raised from their context, especially the following, [9, p.44]:

“ It is the signature of the technical and anthropotechnical age, that men increasinly ends up at the active or subjective side of the selection ….in the future it will be important to play the game [of selection] actively and to formulate a codex of anthropotechnics.”

This still may look pretty harmless. However, in Germany the word ‘selection’, in the context of ‘selecting who is allowed to live’ was only used during the Nazi regime, where it was used for the ‘selection’ in the camps. After this association had been made, it was only a small step to accuse Sloterdijk of propagating nazi eugenics. Instead, Sloterdijk had only tried to put the dilemma’s of genetic engineering onto the philosophical agenda, instead of avoiding this issue. In [9, p.47] he says:

“ It belongs to the signature of humanity, that man is confronted with problems, which are too difficult for man. Man can however not resolve to avoid them because of their difficulty.”

When Habermas, the godfather of modern left-wing philosophy in Germany, also interfered, the ‘scandal’ became even larger, and turned into a generational clash, and into a clash between humanists and post-humanists. I will not further discuss this ‘scandal’, because that discussion has already been far too prominent in the past two years. It should be clear by now that Sloterdijk’s field of interest is indeed no longer restricted to ‘critical theory’, as it was in the beginning of his career. However, to suppose that Sloterdijk’s interest in possible forms of existence would basically be ‘fascist’, would testify of a malicious urge for sensation.

Conclusion

Sloterdijk is undoubtedly an original thinker, with a sharp tongue and a joyful style. His position in Germany is, especially since the so-called ‘scandal’ in 1999, controversial, but his ideas and style are of great influence in philosophical circles, and perhaps even more outside academic philosophy.

However, some criticisms must be made. First of all, Sloterdijk’s writings give hardly opportunity for critical discussion and open debate. The wealth of metaphors and associations between several fields of knowledge provide plenty of new perspectives and ideas, but, in fact, these are not subject to rational criticism anymore. On the one hand, detailed criticisms on Sloterdijk’s treatment of specific details make no sense, since the over-all picture and applicability counts more than historic and factual accuracy. On the other hand the bigger picture itself is not claimed to be true, but at most to be inspiring. Sloterdijk is aware of this fact when he says, [14]:

“ The only promising way in philosophy is to engage in a constellation of art, writing and philosophy. That form is not exhausted yet. It does not lend itself for refutation. At most it can be tiring.”

This problem is, however, not specific for Sloterdijk, but characteristic of all philosophies which have a literary, instead of an argumentative persuasiveness.

Another possible criticism on Sloterdijk’s works is that the topics are too wide-ranging, from mass media to psychoanalysis, early christianity, prenatal life, religious sects, globalisation and the rise of fascism. One might object that Sloterdijk’s ideas therefore must be too unfocussed and superficial. However, one could also praise the diagonal view, and the defragmentation of knowledge. Moreover, as I hope to have shown, beneath the diverging themes a common core and motivation is visible from his dissertation onwards; that is, a wondering about the contingencies of actual existence, and the possibilities of the non-actual. These can be argued to be constitutive properties for any philosopher. In many cases, however, this initial wonder is overlooked by narrow-mindedness.



Literature

After mentioning the German title, my translation of the title into English, and the year of publication, I notify whether translations of the work in question exist, and possibly, in what languages it has been translated. Not wholly surprising, most translations have been into French. The English language area has been rather sparingly endowed with translations. Even the number of books translated into Dutch is higher.

[1] Literatur und Lebenserfahrung. Literature and Life Experience. (1978).
[2] Kritik der zynischen Vernunft. Critique of Cynical Reason. (1983). English, French, Dutch.
[3] Zur Welt kommen-Zur Sprache kommen. Coming-to-World; Coming-to-Language. (1988).
[4] Eurotaoismus. Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik. Eurotaoism; to a Critique of Political Kinetics (1989). French, Dutch.
[5] Weltfremdheit. World Strangeness. (1993).
[6] Selbstversuch. Self-Attempt. (1996). French.
[7] Sphären 1; Blasen. Spheres; Bubbles. (1998).
[8] Sphären 2; Globen. Spheres; Globes. (1999).
[9] Regeln für den Menschenpark. Rules for the Human Zoo. (1999). French, Dutch.
[10] -article in Berliner Morgenpost, 5-10-1999.
[11] -interview with Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs
[12] -interview with Eric Alliez in “Multitudes 1”, 2000
[13] -interview with K. Matter in “Bund”, 10-1-2001,
[14] -interview with R. van den Boogaard in NRC-Handelsblad, 28-4-2000.

Other works by Peter Sloterdijk, which I have not used in the text, are:

Der Zauberbaum. Die Entstehung der Psychoanalyse im Jahr 1785, The Magical Tree, the Emergence of Psychoanalysis in 1785. (1985). French, Dutch.
Der Denker auf der Bühne. Nietzsches Materialismus, Thinker on Stage; Nietzsche’s Materialism. (1986). English, French.
Kopernikanische Mobilmachung und ptolemäische Abrüstung. Copernican Mobilisation and Ptolemean Disarmament. (1987).
Versprechen auf Deutsch; Rede auf das eigene Land. German Promises. Lecture on the own Country. (1990).
Vor der Jahrtausendwende. Before the Y2K. (1990).
Weltrevolution der Seele. Ein Lese- und Arbeitsbuch zur Gnosis von der Spätantike bis zur Gegenwart. World Revolution of the Soul; an History of the Gnosis. (1991 ).
Medien-Zeit. Media Times. (1993). Dutch.
Im selben Boot. In the same boat. (1995). French.
Der starke Grund zusammen zu sein. The strong Ground of Being-together. (1998).
Die Verachtung der Massen. The Contempt of the Masses. (2000).
Über die Verbesserung der guten Nachricht. Nietzsches fünftes “Evangelium”. About the Improvement of the Good Message; Nietzsche’s fifth “Gospel”. (2000).