#sloterdijk

We live in a time profoundly characterised by noise—auditory, visual, intellectual, emotional, and existential. Photo by Gaetan THURIN on Pexels.com From the moment we awaken to the digital sirens of notifications, traffic, alerts, broadcasts, opinions, arguments, advertisements, algorithms, and artificially induced anxieties, to the final hours of wakeful unrest where silence is neither…

It is one of the rules of the game of literate culture that the senders cannot know in advance their eventual recipients. Nonetheless the authors committed themselves to the adventure of sending off their letters to unidentified friends.

…

In fact, it was from 1789 to 1945 that reading-friendly national humanism had its greatest period of influence. At its center, powerful and self-satisfied, resided the caste of classical and modern philologians, who were entrusted with the task of initiating each new generation into the circle of recipients of the authorized standard thick letters. The power of the professor in this period, and the key role of the philologians, had its root in their privileged knowledge of the authors who were considered senders of the letters that undergirded solidarity. As far as its content went, national humanism was nothing other than the power to incline the young toward the classics and to reaffirm / confirm the universal validity of the national canon. [--fn: as well as the national validity of the universal canon...] Thus the nation-state itself was to some extent a literary and postal product: the fiction of a fateful friendship with distant peoples and sympathetically united readers of bewitching /enchanting common (or individual) authors.

If this period seems today to be irredeemably vanished, it is not because people have through decadence become unwilling to follow their national literary curriculum. The epoch of nationalistic humanism has come to an end because the art of writing love-inspiring letters to a nation of friends , however professionally it is practiced, is no longer sufficient to form a telecommunicative bond between members of a modern mass society. Because of the formation of a mass culture through the media--radio in the First World War and television after 1945--and even more through the contemporary web-revolution, the co-existence of people in the present societies has been established on new foundations. These are, as it can uncontrovertably be shown, clearly post-literary, post-epistolary, and thus post-humanistic. Anyone who thinks the prefix "post" in this formulation is too dramatic can replace it with the adverb "marginal." Thus our thesis: modern societies can produce their political and cultural synthesis only marginally through literary, letter-writing, humanistic media.

Of course that does not mean that literature has come to an end, but it has split itself off and become a sui generis subculture, and the days of its value as bearer of the national spirit have passed. The social synthesis is no longer – and is no longer seen to be -- primarily a matter of books and letters. New means of political-cultural telecommunication have come into prominence, which have restricted the pattern of script-born friendship to a limited number of people. The period when modern humanism was the model for schooling and education has passed, because it is no longer possible to retain the illusion that political and economic structures could be organized on the amiable model of literary societies.

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Two thousand years after Plato wrote it seems as if not only the Gods but the wise have abandoned us, and left us alone with our partial knowledge and our ignorance. What is left to us in the place of the wise is their writings, in their glinting brilliance and their increasing obscurity. They still lay in more or less accessible editions; they can still be read, if only one knew why one should bother. It’s their fate—to stand in silent bookshelves, like posted letters no longer collected, sent to us by authors, of whom we no longer know whether or not they could be our friends.

Letters that are not mailed cease to be sendings for possible friends; they turn into archived things. Thus this—that the important books of the past have more and more ceased to be letters to friends, and that they do not lie any longer on the tables and nightstands of their readers—this has deprived the humanistic movement of its previous power. Less and less often do archivists climb up to the ancient texts in order to reference earlier statements of modern commonplaces. Perhaps it occasionally happens that in such researches in the dead cellars of culture the long-ignored texts begin to glimmer, as if a distant light flickers over them. Can the archives also come into the Clearing? Everything suggests that archivists have become the successors of the humanists. For the few who still peer around in those archives, the realization is dawning that our lives are the confused answer to questions which were asked in places we have forgotten.

«Ahora resulta fácil entender por qué la relación de seres humanos con un Supremo de tipo personal cae bajo leyes completamente distintas que la establecida con un Supremo impersonal. La forma del suprematismo personal conlleva que los pensantes y creyentes en relación con Dios sólo puedan ocupar el puesto de vasallos o colaboradores; si no, sólo les queda el descabellado papel de incrédulos y objetores de conciencia. Lo quieran o no, la suprematización del Dios personal asigna de modo totalmente inevitable a los seres humanos un nivel inferior. La asimetría más importante entre señor y servidor se expresa en el hecho de que Dios, incluso como revelado, permanece inescrutable para los seres humanos, mientras que los seres humanos no pueden tener ningún secreto ante Dios. Las asimetrías cosmológicas y morales son abrumadores en igual medida: las competencias de Dios se extienden al universo entero, mientras que el ser humano a menudo ni siquiera consigue mantener en orden su propia vida.»

Peter Sloterdijk: El celo de Dios: Sobre la lucha de los tres monoteísmos. Ediciones Siruela, págs. 91-92. Madrid, 2011

TGO

@bocadosdefilosofia

The conviction that the real is written in the hand of suffering, coldness, and hardness determines the way this philosophy approaches the world.

Although it scarcely believed in a change for the better, it did not give in to the temptation to desensitize itself or to get used to the given order of things. To remain sensitive was, as it were, a Utopian stance —to keep the senses sharpened for a happiness that will not come, a stance that nevertheless, by being prepared for happiness, protects us from the worst kind of brutalizations.

Politically, and in its nerve endings, this aesthetic, this "sensitive" theory, is based on a reproachful attitude, composed of suffering, contempt, and rage against everything that has power. It makes itself into a mirror of the evil in the world, of bourgeois coldness, of the principle of domination, of dirty business and its profit motive.

It is the masculine world that it categorically rejects. It is inspired by an archaic No to the world of the fathers, legislators, and profiteers. Its basic prejudice is that only evil power against the living can come from this world.

That is the reason for the stagnation of Critical Theory. The offensive maneuver of refusing to collaborate has long been ineffective.

The masochistic element has outdone the creative element. The impulse of Critical Theory is becoming mature enough to burst open the strictures of negativism.

In its heyday, Critical Theory found its adherents among those who could instinctively share their a priori pain with it. Still, in a generation that began to discover what its parents had done or approved, there were many such people. And because they were many, there was once again in the mid-sixties in Germany a thin thread of political culture —public dispute about true living.

Sunday, September 18, 2022

Peter Sloterdijk

Der Zauberbaum (1985)