Our moral-ethical objections to Heidegger (for most readers, if not all) and the parallel Sloterdijk Affair (for some readers) confirms the rule that the classicist, Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting makes with his allusion to our fealty to Hegel just when it comes to telling the history of philosophy, counting some as philosophers and excluding others and thereby gaining the right to speak of good and bad (we are all so many footnotes not to Plato but to Aristotle or indeed Heraclitus as we do this) and, in Heidegger’s case, of the pernicious or dangerous. For some, to be sure, Heidegger can be an objection to Sloterdijk who undertakes to read Heidegger somewhat more generously than Adorno (which latter edginess may have endeared him to Habermas) — nevertheless and at the same time our instruction in classical philosophy continues to repeat Hegel’s expression vis-à-vis the ancients in terms of what is and what is not philosophy. For some the same objection can be applied to Sloterdijk himself.
Still Sloterdijk later shifts some of the blame even here as he locates it on the side of a certain lack of not of philology but manliness:
I wasn’t unaware, either, that this “materialist” terminology was going to create definite unease among Heideggerians of a neo-pietist persuasion. Having proposed an iconoclastic — and “Left-wing” — reading of Heidegger’s work in Critique of Cynical Reason, I didn’t at any cost wish to be confused with that de-virilized, conservative Heideggerianism.” (Sloterdijk with lliez, “Living Hot,Thinking Coldly,” 320)
Sloterdijk here recommends Gotthard Günther --- already noted in connection with the cybernetician Warren McCulloch --- as “the author of an amazing book and more than the title of it, The Consciousness of Machines. A Metaphysics of Cybernetics (1963), ought to be translated.” (Ibid, 319)
NB: Sloterdijk may be correct to urge this but it is perhaps more significant to note that Günther’s Das Bewusstsein der Maschinen (Krefeld-Baden Baden: Agis Verlag, 1957) work is well known and influential in English. Günther was employed by several US government agencies, e.g. and do note the science fiction locus, “Can Mechanical Consciousness Exist,” Startling Stories, Vol. 29, No.1 (1953): 110-116) it will be more because of a hoped for resonance with Simondon than anything else) or, and this would be more apropos, an interest in Ray Kurzweil’s mystical vision of technology in his The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Hassocks: Penguin, 2006), than because of a genuine interest in a man who by all accounts would have escaped most classifications, but exemplified Nietzsche’s valuation of perspectives and point of view. A product in a consummate fashion of the last century, born in the same year’s but dying in the Orwellian year of 1984 (Günther, an enthusiastically pro-American German could not have been less Orwellian) but worth considering as a useful guide to what might have been hoped for as a result of possible logics in the wake of Gödel’s challenge to the same and Gödel was interested in Günther’s Idee und Grundriss einer nicht-Aristotelischen Logik (Hamburg: Meiner, 1959). But see already in a French context, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Günther a certain German-American systems thinker on cybernetics to the French, as a translation opportunity, echoes an audaciously technical optimism. As Sloterdijk here explains
in Günther’s work the concept of a “formless matter” embodies, in my view, all that’s been thought between Hegel and Turing on the relation of “things” to “mind.” It tests out a trivalent — or multivalent — logic that’s so potent it could rid us of the impotent, brutal binarism of the mind/thing, subject/object, idea/matter type… (Ibid., 318)
NB: Sloterdijk also discusses thinking on the philosophy of technology in Rathaus, Freyer, Turel, Jünger, Dessauer, etc., in the latter pages of Critique of Cynical Reason.
There is nothing like cybernetics and systems theory and its allure has animated the military industrial world, especially but not only in the US for quite some now.
With such references, formulaically placing himself on the other side of any kind of Heideggerianism and making it plain that he reads his Nietzsche with the right thinkers and in the right tonality, not analytic but not gelded either.
This Nietzsche, which he also names a “hard Nietzsche” will be the systems Nietzsche or the rhizomatic or the biopower Nietzsche (Sloterdijk means to keep the ecologist’s word, bioculture, for himself), this is the Nietzsche of “Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Luhmann.” (ibid.) Thus Sloterdijk rewrites the materialism of his earlier title, Thinker on Stage, here restaged alongside what some perhaps captivated by the language of gravitational singularity in cosmological physics (think of black holes) have called the technological singularity.
Reading Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason it is clear throughout, but especially at the end, that futurists like Vinge but also Toffler and McLuhan, and the name buzzing about today, Ray Kurzweil, are all of them only late comers, following not only Friedrich Dessauer and Adrien Turel but others in a decidedly uncanny context that turns out to be nothing less than the crucible for the particular fascism that grew out of the Weimar Republic as Sloterdijk discuses it. Thus it is not too surprising that some will find it hard not to think of Kurzweil’s (or should one say Vinge’s) technological singularity or machine-human mind-meld, when Sloterdijk highlights his Regeln für den Menschenpark (link to English translation here) in his interview with Erik Alliez andThe term as applied to technology was arguably used for the first time by the computer scientist and science fiction author, Vernor Vinge who himself attributes it to John von Neumann. But by far the greatest attention has been drawn by Kurzweil.
its strong epistemological linkage between concepts like ‘Dionysian materialism’ and ‘vitalism, a linkage made even more interesting by the fact that the life sciences and life technics have just passed into a new phase of their development. (Ibid)
Thus here Sloterdijk, who understands Habermas’ role in the “Sloterdijk Affair” as an opponent appreciates a judo master, and that is to say and no matter who wins (and if Sloterdijk wins on one level, he chooses to know better on another)[1] because the judo play in question took place by means of a resentment already given over, in two senses as Nietzsche reminds us that resentment is always a sentiment of perpetual return, to a substitute provided by Habermas himself (that would be Thomas Assheuer),[2] describing Sloterdijk’s own Elmau lecture as articulating “an integral” and so indispensable “part of a reflection on the foundations of a biocultural discourse of the clearing,”[3] this would be Heidegger improved via Sloterdijk but not only Sloterdijk, “Nietzsche and Plato have invited themselves to the ‘symposium’ to comment on the ideas of Heidegger, to put forward their opinions on the drama played out in the clearing. The title of this drama? Anthropotechnics or: How human beings produce themselves. And suddenly everyone wants to be invited, everyone — dramatically — wants to be part of the debate, to take part in it.”[4]
Anthropotechnics.
This is of course the message of Kurzweil’s singularity as it has been embraced by popular cutlure, when it is not the message of the genome project or stem cells. And it may be because the biological business of genetic engineering has not been going as well as anticipated (owing to pesky technical details like the organism and the small fact that cloning adult organisms seems to produce young organisms that senesce and die markedly faster than young organisms usually do, whether they are sheep or Korean saluki-like dogs or mice, seemingly to catch up with their origins) that the new enthusiasm for the coming technological rapture is as fascinating as it is. Here we note the very specific (and very Nietzschean) “faith” in science and especially industrial, corporate, capitalist technology that has, if we read Sloterdijk aright, been with us since the interregnum between the two wars which is also to say that such a vision is fascist through and through. Yet another reason to prepare for the coming singularity: as with other raptures, one does not expect to have a choice.
But along with the idealized expectation of technological rapture goes a vision of technological oversimplification that Sloterdijk suggests is not quite a result of our being closer and closer to a future we once imagined. Hence talk of 2045 was once unimaginably distant, like talk of 2012. Or like 1998, the supposed time period of the 1968 American television series Lost in Space.
To see this it is worth thinking (just briefly) of Aubrey de Grey, a software developer or programmer who, having learnt sufficient biology for the purpose (as he supposes enough),[5] argues that we can resist aging if we avoid its causes, namely the oxidation of cells and the build-up of waste-products in those same cells. Having determined that it is the mitochondria that develop problems, getting gunked up or losing efficiency, de Gray proposes that we send in little nanobots to clean them out or as replacements.
Nanobots are a better way to express what de Grey has in mind for what he is thinking of is rather closer to the miniaturized spaceships of Fantastic Voyage, the 1966 film not for fans of Gulliver’s travels on a microscopic level but of Raquel Welch and those who might have been watching Star Trek which also began as a television series in the same year, or who had otherwise been reading Fantastic Stories and watching the science fiction films of the 1950s. Du Brey is a hero of the tech-singularity movement and just because he straddles both sides of the biotech and computer tech industry. For it is all about the tech aspect, precisely in the way we relate to technology as those who have, as fully vested heirs of a cargo cult, grown up with devices we know very well how to use, electric appliances, toilets (to be Illichian here), televisions and computers, cell-phones and coffee-makers, automobiles and airplane travel, but could not ourselves for a minute fabricate if our lives depended on it (this is the ominous subtext of the future-as-desert film genre, like Road Warrior or Mad Max). But assuming that someone else makes the tool or the technology, the gadgets are what it is all about. Critics object that like Kurzweil, de Grey does not seem to mind too much that the technology supposed by the theorizing (this would be de Grey’s theorizing) or futuristic speculation (this would be Kurzweil picking up after Walt Disney left off and telling us what life will be like in 2025 or 2045) does not in fact exist as yet. But that will come, both assume. As Iphone commercials insist on proclaiming, without needing to ask what we might have in mind: there’s an app for that (or will be).
But there is little or nothing new under the sun, and Sloterdijk reminds us that this was already an issue, and already imagined as resolved for the crippled military victims after the first world war. Thus he cites Brecht’s Interjection (from which we take only the line relevant for de Grey and Kurzweil “Here this evening, a man will be reassembled like a car / Without losing anything in the process”).[6] That Sloterdijk already anticipates the flaws of the current technological program of imagining that one’s soul can be “uploaded” via past or current or future technology is clear as he repeats Brecht’s uncanny line
To accommodate himself to the course of the world
And to let his private fish swim away
And no matter what he is remodeled into,
In doing so no mistake is made.[7]
Like Brecht, Nietzsche emphasized the usually unsung dangers of large-scale or grand “politics” as he reviews these on the terms of ordinary political or everyday social life. For Nietzsche, the most extensive consequence of war is in terms of everyday life (and this is no surprise) an economic one,[8] but what Nietzsche does not emphasize is the crass affair of sheer destruction nor indeed the subtle stimulus such a negative impulse notoriously engenders for a depleted social system of jaded productivity and stale surplus but and the “capital” of the mind and the heart [Kopf- und Herz-Capitale] — such a legacy would correspond to Brecht’s “private fish,” — as the “cost involved in the extraction, year in, year out, of an extraordinary number of its efficient and industrious men from their proper professions and occupations so that they become soldiers.”[9]
For his part, Sloterdijk invokes Brecht’s “remodeling of the civilian as a soldier”[10] as prelude to his chapter on “Artificial Limbs” now with a view to the reassembling (today we say rehabilitation or, even better, physical therapy) of the victims of war, in this case the first war, citing Erich Kästner’s 1931 Fabian, to remind the reader that “fifteen years after the war, its victims still lay in endless agonies.”[11] Sloterdijk’s reading is important for what he asks us to consider is the conceptual disconnect in the recommendations to the handicapped just as this same recommendation could serve both political and spiritual deployment without missing a beat. “Two things were recommended to the mutilated survivors by the standard psychotechnical textbooks; a will to live as hard as steel and the training of the body to handle artificial limbs.”[12] And we know all about Post war physical therapy in America, or actually we know nothing of it although it all around us, as an array of statistics are there for the searching — which is to say that these same facts and their implications are only occasionally an open or overt theme for public discourse — to tell us that more grievously wounded soldiers have survived the still-ongoing wars in Afghanistan (and still Iraq).
In the textbooks on the maimed and the writings of the medical-technical industry, a highly apposite image of the human being emerges: Homo prostheticus, who is supposed to say a wildy joyful Yes to everthing that says No to the “individuality” of “individuals.”[13]
This is the prosthesis that is still associated with fascism — we recognize Dr. Strangelove as German not by his Kissinger-like accent but by his obviously prosthetic hand (and seemingly programmed or automatic Hitler salute). For Sloterdijk the move is immediately and already made in the direction of the Kurzweilian singularity “Personality amputated? No problem — we have another for you in stock.”[14] Essential here is the quiescence of any phobias as we might call them, an assurance that any talk of technological autonomy is just philosophical blather and Sloterdijk explains this as a logical consequence of its already consummate autonomy in the society of the machine, that is “the society of labor and war.”[15] In a patent alliance with humanism, the thought scheme works like this:
Technology takes the ‘upper hand’; it threatens to degrade human beings; it wants to make us into robots. But if we pay attention and keep our souls in shape, nothing will happen to us. For technology is, after all, there for people and not people for technology.[16]
Thus Sloterdijk goes on to cite Dessauer, “In the fourth realm (Reich), we enter a new land that opens up technology to us,”[17] explaining that the Fourth Reich is that of inventions those things that have been brought into existence only human beings, the immeasurable potential of what can still be invented and realized.”[18] We are back to the world of Kurzweil’s anticipated techno-singularity. But for Sloterdijk this world is already fully fleshed out in Dessauer: it is “as if technology reached over into the sphere of the Ding an sich … which according to Kant is inaccessible to us, in order to create out of this sphere previously nonexisting objects of experience, machines.”[19] It is this ontico-ontological consummation that intrigues Sloterdijk: “Inventions of this quality are ontological enrichments in the inventory of existence — whereby humanity is allotted the role of coauthor of the existing.”[20]
Thus if we would just include Dessauer’s philosophy of technology it truly need never occur to Kurzweil that the technology requisite for the machine-consciousness and machine-human-mind-meld transformation or rapture of which he speaks is not really close to existing. It hardly matters. More pedestrianly regarded (and it is pedestrian) it turns out that Kurzweil is talking about Google and having a cell-phone and being able to text and thus we already are the singularity. It’s like finding out that you are a cyborg because you wear … contact lenses. How exciting. And for the rest of what does not exist or for predictions that have not panned out — these do not matter. Like the drugstore magazine that tells us what event about to happen will confirm what Nostradamus prediction, suitably qualified and rightly interpreted, the passage of time and the failure of that event to transpire according to plan is irrelevant. One shrugs and updates the date. So, I was off by a year, says Kurzweil. Like jam tomorrow, the future is always like a course that hasn’t yet been set or a lecture venue that hasn’t been located: to be arranged. The point is, rather like manifesting wealth or a life-partner, to believe. But the implications are not exactly as harmless as most new-age self-creation. For technology thus “appears as the promise of a total solution to problems” and will, “one day” according to our man de Grey, Kurzweil and indeed Dessauer “have worked out all misery.” The sophisticated move of Kurzweil (be the machines) is not one that would have been wasted on Dessauer or, in a different sense, Sloterdijk, who goes on to observe of Dessauer as might also be observed of Kurzweil: “In an astoundingly shortsighted way he overlooks the destructive aspect of ‘invention.’ … At the heart of this theory stands a subject who can no longer suffer because it has become wholly prosthesis.”[21]
It is Heidegger, if it also Ellul with his reflections on technological autonomy, who remains to be read here just because for Sloterdijk Heidegger’s early so-called existential theory, his account of Das Man — the translator’s rendering Anyone is truly lamentable because truly misleading, despite the imagined resonance or matching up with Odysseus’ pun (a pun may work between one language and another, the third is not the charm). Thus the French has on, we speakers of English have One, and the translators of Being and Time opted for “the They,” and Anyone does not quite do. Heidegger also has fallenness (not quite ‘habituatedness’) and being unto death. Sloterdijk notes that “for Heidegger’s critics” this was “an excuse for the cheapest kind of outrage.”[22] And while Sloterdijk will not fault them completely he thinks that it is assessing the inspiration for what it can tell us just where we need it, here and now. Thus it will do to read this theory historio-critically for if we do so what we find is that
No thought is so intimately embedded in its time as that of being-unto-death: it is the philosophical key word in the age of imperialist and Fascist world wars. Heidegger’s theory falls in the breathing space between the First and the Second World Wars, the first and the second modernization of mass death.[23]
But, and this point is the key for Sloterdijk’s media reflections: “It stands midway between the first triumvirate of the destruction industry Flanders, Tannenberg, Verdun, and the second Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Hiroshima.”[24] Note as we pass that the second array illuminates Heidegger’s irritating identification of Germany as caught in the “pincers” between America and its capitalism and Russia and its Bolsheviks which Heidegger expresses in the political exaggeration of the Germany of the times: “Europe lies in a pincers between Russia and America, which are metaphysically the same, namely in regard to their world character and their relation to the spirit.”[25] The cynic point here is that it will do to add that we also know where that center leaves Germany as Sloterdijk cites Gustav Regler’s awful ditty: “There was once a Communist / who didn’t know what a Nazi is, / he went into a brown house, / and without any bones, he came out! Hahahaha!”[26]
At this earlier juncture, reading Heidegger historio-critically, what is significant is that “without death industry, no distraction industry.”[27] Thus for Sloterdijk, “Heidegger’s theory of death harbors the greatest critique by this century of the last.” And Sloterdijk goes on to note that precisely in the conceptual accomplishments of the 19th Century depends upon very
formal equivalences between the idea of evolution, the concept of revolution, the concept of selection, the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, the idea of progress and the myth of race. In all these concepts, an optics is tested out that objectifies the downfall of others. … Viewed superficially only the personal pronoun is altered: “One dies” becomes “I die.”[28]
Therefore Sloterdijk can remind us that in “conscious being-unto-death Heideggerian existence revolts against the ‘constant reassurance about death’ on which an excessively destructive society necessarily depends.”[29] It should go without saying that the technological singularity is only one of the latest and hardly the best instantiation of this kind of thinking, a kind of thinking we are far from having abandoned despite the popularity of our ongoing anxiety about nihilism and our denunciation of thinkers like Heidegger and Nietzsche as nihilistic. Space does not permit here, but it is well worth looking at the program of incorporating Heidegger into what Sloterdijk calls a new and alternative left: “an existential left, a neokynical Left.”[30] That this will not endear him to the inhabitants of “the land of Critical Theory,” Sloterdijk is well aware. But neither is he to be ranged with the Heideggerians, not of the usual stripe however we may paint them. And we remember that Sloterdijk means indeed what he says and goes on in this direction in his Regeln für den Menschenpark, which he anticipates as inevitably offputting to Heideggerians while still claiming a certain genesis in Heidegger’s spirit, as he tells us that his effort rendered “Heideggerian onto-anthropology in a paraphrase whose benevolence is anything but ironic.”[31]
See the entire collection -- for the sake of Stuart Elden's -- as ever -- magisterial introduction and for the sake of the other contributions.
Notes
This post is from a longer, illustrated version of a book chapter by Babette Babich, “Sloterdijk’s Cynicism: Diogenes in the Marketplace” published in: Stuart Elden, ed., Sloterdijk Now (Oxford: Polity, 2011), pp. 17-36; 186-189.
See the entire collection -- for the sake of Stuart Elden's -- as ever -- magisterial introduction and for the sake of the other contributions.
Notes
[1] The mechanism is well-known to Sloterdijk, who crystallizes it as the well-known opposition between the philosopher and the sophist, whereby the favored one is written into one corner of the constellation in question, with the nice coincidence of leaving only the space for the other on the other side, in a square of dupes, in his interview with Alliez with regard to the newspaper scandal that grew up in the wake of his Regeln für den Menschenpark lecture at Elmau: “To arrive at the effective exclusion of the sophist, the true philosopher of our age resorted to a clandestine stratagem that would doubtless have effected that delicate operation for him if it could have remained secret, but which was inevitably to produce a lethal effect if the public became aware of it.” Alliez, Alliez, “Living Hot, Thinking Coldly,” p. 309. The point of course is about crossing the opposed other, a procedure which cannot spare the dupe, in either sense of the word: “Habermas — who hasn’t neglected to read Carl Schmitt — never had the foolish idea of descending into the arena in person. Does one really need to fight a duel to make the distinction between friend and enemy? Can’t the true philosopher have himself represented by a true substitute? Now, at this point, this latter becomes aware of his master’s cunning: the philosopher will not come in to back his cause and the disciple will not be invited to sit on the right hand of truth.” Ibid., 310.
[2] Thus Sloterdijk, who is well aware of his journalistic past, gives his own analysis of Habermas as “philosopher of truth” as having charged another sophist, a journalist associated with the confraternity of true discourse, a contributor to the Hamburg-based weekly, Die Zeit — that is to say, his faithful disciple Thomas Assheuer — with denouncing the sophist Sloterdijk. The charge sheet was to be read out loud and clear, the offenses being precisely those the philosopher did not dare to pronounce publicly.” Sloterdijk, interview with Alliez, “Living Hot, Thinking Coldly,” 309. The problem is the bead game: Habermas remains in control. “But at that point the young sophist Assheuer, who no doubt aspired to be received and recognized among the true philosophers, had to face up to the cruel truth: Habermas — who hasn’t neglected to read Carl Schmitt — never had the foolish idea of descending into the arena in person. Does one really need to fight a duel to make the distinction between friend and enemy? Can’t the true philosopher have himself represented by a true substitute? Now, at this point, this latter becomes aware of his master’s cunning: the philosopher will not come in to back his cause and the disciple will not be invited to sit on the right hand of truth.” Ibid. And all would have been well, but sophists will be sophists, and if Assheuer took his revenge, as anyone not part of the guild can do, remember the dog’s teeth, and Habermas had to faced the facts, which did not quite mean that he lost any face or prestige. And not even for Sloterdijk who reflects: “We touch here on the political heart of the affair: for Habermas did not lie when he lied. He simply — one too many times perhaps — defended, by means that seemed justified to him, given the dictates of militant democracy, what he sees as the space of consensual truth against what he perceives as the irruption of the word of the sophist, of a discourse that’s polyvalent, essayistic, seductive, harmful, French, and irresponsible.” Ibid., 310. Sloterdijk, don’t you know where he is inscribed in the play of forces? has his own rhetoric down cold and he knows exactly who he is talking to.
[3] Sloterdijk, with Alliez, “Living Hot, Thinking Coldly,” 324.
[4] Sloterdijk, with Alliez, “Living Hot, Thinking Coldly,” 324.
[5] Cambridge University apparently concurs as they awarded him a doctorate for his The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (Austin: Landes Publishing, 1999). See also Denham Harman, “Aging: A Theory Based on Free Radical and Radiation Chemistry,” Journal of Gerontology, 11 (3) (1956): 298–300.
[6] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 441.
[7] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 442.
[8] The section to be cited below is entitled Grosse Politik und Ihre Einbussen, and gives an important context to Nietzsche’s often misunderstood terminus: grand politics. Nietzsche also speaks of „Politik und Geldgier,“ KSA , Volume 9, 213).
[9] KSA 2, p. 315; HH I: §481. See for a further discussion and with reference to Habermas, Babich, ““Nietzsche’s Will to Power: Politics and Destiny,” in: Tracy B. Strong, ed., Friedrich Nietzsche (London: Ashgate, 2009), 282-296.
[10] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 442.
[11] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 443.
[12] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 444.
[13] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 446.
[14] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 449.
[15] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 448.
[16] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 448.
[17] Friedrich Dessauer, Philosophie der Technik. Das Problem der Realisierung, cited in Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 455.
[18] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 455.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 456.
[21] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 457.
[22] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 202.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University press, 1979), 45. Heidegger’s lectures date from 1935.
[26] Regler, Das Ohr des Malchus, 1933, cited in Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 530.
[27] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 202.
[28] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 202.
[29] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 202.
[30] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 209.
[31] Sloterdijk, with Alliez, “Living Hot, Thinking Coldly,” 324.
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