Sloterdijk, Peter

The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk is as famous as he is controversial. Since 1980, he has published numerous works on questions of cultural criticism, the philosophy of culture and religion, the theory of art, psychology and the philosophy of economics, and has spoken up again and again to comment on current events with a sharp tongue.

There appears to be scarcely a subject on which Peter Sloterdijk has not publicly expressed himself. His talkativeness and eloquence have made the Karlruhe Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics a popular interlocutor in the pages of German features sections. Sloterdijk is a frequent guest on television programmes and himself moderator of the ZDF's (i.e., the Second German Television Programme) "Philosophical Quartet".

In the eyes of the academic guild, which esteems the modest specialist, such a jack-of-all-trades is naturally more than suspect. Sloterdijk's first work, Die Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (i.e., The Critique of Cynical Reason), which at once gained the 35 year-old author a reputation when it was published in 1983, already split its many readers into followers and critics. The former celebrated Sloterdijk as the successor of Arthur Schopenhauer and Oswald Spengler (FAZ); the latter pigeonholed him as a Zeitgeist philosopher and spoke deprecatingly of a "cult book" (Spiegel). Die Kritik der zynischen Vernunft is in fact one of the best-selling German philosophical books of the 20th century.

Critic of cynicism and spatial thinker

In his early main work, the cultural critic Sloterdijk takes aim at the "laughing tradition of satirical knowledge" and describes cynicism as the "false consciousness of the Enlightenment". In opposition to cynicism, he develops the idea of a "saving kynicism" (1): against the supremacy of the cynic, the kynic pits an anarchic counter-power, introduces a "being in resistance, in laughter, in refusal, in appeal to the whole of nature and the fullness of life". In this Sloterdijk links himself above all with what he calls the "neo-kynical" (neo-kynische) works of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and calls for the re-discovery of a lost boldness in the treatment of violent and disfiguring cynical maxims (Zynismen).

And in his latest work, too, the three-volume Sphären (i.e., Spheres, 1998-2004), Heidegger serves Sloterdijk as the point of reference when he formulates "the fundamental question of philosophy, the question of being". Sloterdijk, however, poses this question with a view not to time, as did Heidegger, but to space, so that the question of being emerges as a "question about being-together". "In Sphären, an answer is attempted to the question how human beings manage to master their being-together with an overwhelming abundance of non-human and co-human facts. One is never alone only with oneself, but also with other people, with things and circumstances; thus beyond oneself and in an environment" (Sloterdijk). Space is thus no longer an empty abstraction, but a form of human life in the sense of a space-shaping, space-creating activity.

The essayist

Many of Sloterdijk's publications appear as "attempts": Im selben Boot. Versuch über die Hyperpolitik (i.e., In the Same Boat. Attempt at a Hyperpolitics, 1993), Medienzeit. Drei gegenwartsdiagnostische Versuche (i.e., Media Time. Three Attempts at a Diagnosis of the Present, 1993), Selbstversuch. Gespräch mit Carlos Oliveira (i.e., Self-Attempt [or Self-Experiment] with Oneself. Conversation with Carlos Oliveira, 1996), Die Verachtung der Massen. Versuch über Kulturkämpfe in der modernen Gesellschaft (i.e., The Contempt for the Masses. An Attempt about Culture Wars in Modern Society, 2000), and Nicht gerettet. Versuch über Heidegger (i.e., Not Saved. An Attempt about Heidegger, 2001). Sloterdijk therefore finds his proper literary genre in the essay, of which he writes (in connection with his highly esteemed Friedrich Nietzsche): "The word ‘essay' has a suspicious sound; it sounds almost like a plea for forbearance in regard to insufficient powers. Open form, loose argumentation, rhetorical freedom, holiday from proofs" – in short, a reserve "where one appears not to take things so precisely". Sloterdijk does occasionally take a "holiday from proofs" in his texts. Many of his writings therefore, including long passages in his more or less systematic main works, read like a string of brilliantly formulated opinions and suggestive metaphors. Some readers prize this, praise his style, his unusual language, his vagabund thought. "Who today", rhetorically asked, for example, the Frankfurter Rundschau in July 2004, "matches Sloterdijk as a writer of reflective prose?" Others in turn reproach the philosopher for the same reasons with "intellectual negligence" (Spiegel). What systematic method, they ask, does Sloterdijk follow, where does he fit on the broad map of values or at least of positions? P

The scandaliser

That one cannot take a "holiday from proofs" unscathed, at least not in the area of philosophy, was shown by the debate over Sloterdijk's controversial speech Regeln für den Menschenpark (i.e., Rules for the Human Park, 1999), which developed into a regular scandal. In this speech, referring to the progress of gene technology, Sloterdijk more suggested than actually argued for the discovery of rules according to which human beings could be bred in the future. The speech met with a critical echo and the demand for clarification, especially with respect to casual formulations like "the unexampled dark years after [!] 1945" and several provocative expressions from Nazi phraseology, which earned the philosopher the reproach of having drifted far to the Right.

This debate harmed Sloterdijk, less for what he said – even his sharpest critics do not finally suspect him of being an advocate of eugenic ambitions – as for what he did not say. Little of substance remained of the controversy. His speech contributed hardly anything to answering the question how we should treat the results of gene technology in the future. The objection, which the Tübingen Philosophy professor Manfred Frank summed up as "stuff and nonsense", is rather that of argumentative disingenuousness. Sloterdijk, he maintained, deliberately provoked a scandal by his playing with incoherent opinions and the strangely one-sided quotation of his intellectual ancestors Nietzsche and Heidegger. The media, of course, ate it up.

TV philosopher

Since the beginning of 2002, Sloterdijk has moderated a talk-show for the Second German Television Porgramme with the title Im Glashaus. Das philosophische Quartett (i.e., In the Glass House. The Philosophical Quartet). Once a month, together with the philosophical writer Rüdiger Safranski and invited guests, he discusses religion, populism, Adolf Hitler, the question where Europe ends. "This engagement is important", he explains, "because the entire current of contemporary culture is inimical to high culture and promotes non-verbal forms of communication". Sloterdijk, the media juggler, is also a master in this field.

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Note (1) Sloterdijk distinguishes Zynismus, the ordinary German word for cynicism, from Kynismus, a word deriving from the ancient Greek spelling for the philosophical school of Cynicism (translator's note).