Rules for the human park

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Rules for the human park is a speech that the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk gave for the first time on June 15, 1997 in Basel and, in a slightly different form, again on July 17, 1999 at Elmau Castle ( Upper Bavaria ) and which was published in the same year as a book. From the end of August 1999 the text sparked an intense public debate about the application of biotechnology to humans.

introduction

Preliminary remarks

About Peter Sloterdijk: Sloterdijk is a philosopher and stands in the tradition of Nietzsche and phenomenology .

Regarding the content of the text: In the Elmau speech, several topics come into play.

  • First of all, the so-called media choice: book or stadium : Sloterdijk calls for a renunciation of brutalizing media. With this topic he places himself in the tradition of criticizing the culture industry (cf. the corresponding chapter in the Dialectic of Enlightenment ).
  • Then the Enlightenment criticism in the tradition of Horkheimer and Adorno : In myth are enlightened elements and regressive in the Enlightenment elements present. Habermas called this, in reference to the Odysseus chapter of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the "intertwining of myth and enlightenment". In Sloterdijk, this is expressed in the note that there is a reactionary modern element in Plato's philosophy , the Weber parable .
  • Then the subject of slave language : This was originally about the trick of operating Marxian theory without Marxian terms, to hide it in neutral idioms. Sloterdijk does this by reinterpreting Heidegger materialistically. In Heidegger's metaphysics, he hides a more modern variant of thinking than Heidegger tried to convey from the wording of his work.
  • Finally, there is another thought in Nietzsche's tradition: people have always pursued a breeding project and hidden it under the guise of humanity.

Regarding the form of the text: In the speech itself there is an element of continuous radicalization.

Reception: These content-related details were perceived as a point against the critical theory . Sloterdijk - in the guise of critical theory - raised issues that can easily be understood as reactionary political theses: as a plea for positive eugenics (in the sense of Francis Galton ).

humanism

The humanism founded on the book culture of the Greco-Roman period . The Romans convey the ancient message in a bottle . The literate, as an intellectual elite, set a pattern for bourgeois society. Only the written culture knows demiurgic human creation myths like the golem . The fiction of the national identity of an armed and well-read bourgeois society generated by compulsory military service and compulsory schooling has come to an end today with the replacement of book culture by new media. In Rome, the dualism of book culture and the wilderness of the masses in the stadiums was proverbial. This is where the concept of humanism was invented: taming man through the right reading. The choice of media - book or stadium - determines the nature of the human being.

Heidegger

The concept of humanism cannot be saved because it has always been an accomplice of human atrocities. Martin Heidegger poses the epoch question anew and answers: Man is the guardian of being. Language is the house of being. The clearing is the place where being rises. Sloterdijk historicizes the concept of the clearing: During the hominization of humans, the boundary between natural and cultural history marks the place of the clearing, its premature birth ( neoteny ) triggers this process. The first human cultural achievement is building a house. House, people and animals are now part of a biopolitical complex.

Nietzsche

Zarathustra explains what that means: people are selected for houses. Just as man raises animals, so man has raised people for the houses he builds. Behind the cheerful prospect of the school and literary taming of man lies the dark horizon of human discipline . After Nietzsche's unveiling of human history as a breeding project, rules have to be drawn up for a future human park.

Plato

In the Weber parable, Plato gives the archetype of a social utopia of human breeders. Plato's ideal breeder is a god or a shepherd-king close to the god.

The argumentative development in detail

Definition: humanism

At the beginning there is a definition of Humanitas: it is a friendship-creating telecommunication in the medium of writing . Implicitly, humanitas is inserted into philosophy. The fact that it is still relevant to this day is thanks to its medium, the book , which, like a chain letter, has created a friendship function for its readers over the generations.

First historicization

The concept is immediately historized . The Romans as transmitters of the Greek letters on philosophy are of paramount importance. You deliver the message in a bottle. (First allusion to critical theory ). The writing functions as a message in a bottle like a magical actio in distans (influence on distant things). Through its medium book, humanism finds the form of a literary society that provides the model of a bourgeois society. (In the broadest sense, there is an analogy here to Marcuse's essay on the “Affirmative Character of Culture”). It should be discussed at this point to what extent this is not a mere play on words. Historically, the literate is initially nothing more than a sect . The first digression on human breeding takes place here: The exaggerated culture of writing creates the myth of the golem : God creates the world through the word, man creates a golem through writing.

First sociological escalation

The sociological maximal thesis reads: Conscription and compulsory schooling create the fiction of a nation as an armed and well-read public . Today this epoch has come to an end, since making books is no longer enough to create a communicative link between the members of a modern mass society . We live in an era of transition from reading to listening and seeing to surfing: books, radio, television, the Internet. However, the abdication of humanism did not take place consistently after the insight into its inadequacy: after 1945 we experience neo-humanism with recourse to Cicero and Christ . He turns against his traditional enemy: the savage of humans. Rome gave an example of this with the juvenal duality of bread and games. Nowhere was the tendency to bestialize people more unrestrained than in the ancient amphitheatres . Roman humanism therefore had the following theme: the taming of man through correct reading.

First conclusion: education for the right choice of media

The Roman culture with its first ancient mass media network of amphitheatres, which promoted the bestialization of man, is instructive here too . At the same time, for the first time in the history of mankind, it is given the choice of which medium should shape people: the book or the stadium. And humanism is more than mere education : here the question is posed about the destiny of man.

Definition: the failure of humanism

Heidegger's letter about "humanism" and its " seat in life " are briefly presented: In autumn 1946, in extreme poverty, Heidegger wrote a letter to a French admirer. Sloterdijk does not accept the accusations made by Heidegger's opponents that he was looking for an exculpation in mysticism for his involvement in National Socialism . They fail to recognize the meaning and literary form: a letter that, based on the ancient model, is supposed to win friends. But what is the content of this ancientizing missive ? "How do you give meaning back to the word humanism?"

In parenthesis : to Auschwitz ? Heidegger claims: The word humanism must be given up. The catastrophe of the present shows that humans with their metaphysical self-exaggeration are the problem. The common answers to the question about humanitas: Christianity , Marxism and existentialism are just varieties of humanism. All of these are characterized by an “immeasurable omission”: the non-asking of the question about the essence of man. Heidegger's answer: Firstly, humans are not a sensible animal. “The essence of the divine is closer to us than the alienation of the living being.” Reason: Man has a world, the animal is tense in the environment. Instead: Man is ordered to be the guardian of being: "Language is the house of being, in which man resides in ek-sisting by listening to the truth of being, guarding it." The place where this position applies, is the clearing , the place where being rises. By designating people as shepherds and neighbors of being, Heidegger binds them to radical behavior. Those who live in the House of Language are destined to wait and see. One can assume that Heidegger hopes that in this ascetic seclusion there is no longer any room for bestiality. The more the ideal of the strong person is said goodbye, the stronger the taming, one can assume. However, humanism is simply nothing more than an accomplice to all the atrocities that are committed in the name of human good. During World War II, Bolshevism , fascism and Americanism fought for world domination in the name of ideals of humanity. Fascism, however, is a special form, a metaphysics of disinhibition, perhaps the disinhibition figure of metaphysics. With the letter of humanism, Heidegger decided to re-pose the epochal question of what man is. What can still tame man after the failure of humanism?

Second historicization

Sloterdijk argues as follows: Just as a historicization of the abstract concept of humanity first brought to light how philosophy fails, Heidegger's concept of being must now be historicized . There is a real story of man stepping out into the clearing. This has two lines: a natural history of serenity and a social history of taming (of man). The natural history of serenity is none other than hominization. The chronic animal immaturity of man, his premature birth are the basis for his hominization. The clearing is an event on the border of natural and cultural history. The social history of taming shows the following: What happens at the boundary between nature and culture: settling down. The houses rise in the clearing, in reality. But with the settling down, the relationship between humans and animals changes: the era of domestic animals begins . House, people and animals are a biopolitical complex. Theory is housework. But where there is a house there is also a battleground. Houses are not made for people, people are selected for houses, says Nietzsche (quote from Also sprach Zarathustra ). Behind the serene horizon of the school taming of man is the dark horizon of human breeding. Nietzsche claims that there is a well-hidden history of selection (“Houses are made for little people”). He wants to name the previous owners of the breeding monopoly by name and their secret function and predicts a dispute between "small and large breeders" in the future.

Second sociological escalation

After the failure of the humanist project in the 20th century and Heidegger's disenchantment of humanism as an accomplice of the atrocities, Nietzsche's unveiling of human history as a story of taming and breeding must lead to the insight that the philosophical task of the future will be through the dawning anthropotechnics thinking about making rules for the human park. This task is not new, but today we see that lesson and selection have always been intertwined. The writing culture itself has drawn hard boundaries between people. Sloterdijk says clearly: It is important to formulate a code of anthropotechnics.

Second conclusion: measure the distance

In order to understand how far Nietzsche is from the future that awaits us, we want to measure how far we are from the breeding phantasy in Plato's Dialog Politikos . There Plato gives rules for the operation of a people park, Heidegger's example comes from there. In the age after the abdication of the gods, humans are self-guarding beings. For Plato this is indubitable. The only question is who should be the shepherd.

The first thing you notice is the form of the dialogue: Socrates the Younger and a stranger discuss. A definition of man is given from the point of view of breeding impulses. It follows a kind of botany of humans: not winged, not horned, unmixed mated bipedes. Now we know the flock to be guarded. It's a professional's point of view. But the true art of herding excludes tyrannical forms. It is “voluntary herd maintenance over voluntary living beings.” The true king has a special expert knowledge, which is explained in the famous Weber parable: the brave and level-headed human disposition must be ideally interwoven. The unsatisfactory have to be combed out.

graduation

The topicality of the Weber parable becomes clear when you review the contents of the essay: the humanistic high school , fascist eugenics , the coming biotechnological age: a humanistic society that embodies itself in a “full humanist”, the ideal shepherd. The ideal shepherd has always been the god, but in the age of Zeus, after the twilight of the gods, the gods withdrew. Now people are forced to take care of themselves. The true shepherd can only be a wise man who is close to God. Today the wise have also withdrawn, only their writings remain.

interpretation

The imagery of the message in a bottle is borrowed from critical theory. A philosophical topic is transformed into a sociological phenomenon: humanism and mass culture. Here, too, Sloterdijk leans on critical theory , explicitly on the chapter on the culture industry in the dialectic of the Enlightenment . A punch line is the statement that taming people is a question of choosing the right entertainment medium: book or stadium.

Heidegger's critique of humanism is materialistically criticized by Sloterdijk by integrating its central concept of clearing into a genre-historical context. What the concept of the guardian of being and the context of man, house and animal, coined by Heidegger, means is explained by referring to Nietzsche: Man has always been tamed by his masters, either real or supposed.

Sloterdijk uses the example of Plato's Politics to illustrate the theme of the intertwining of myth and Enlightenment : the archetype of future anthropotechnics appears here, as does Heidegger's fundamental criticism of humanism.

Sloterdijk's message in the message in a bottle is: take up the dangerous themes of philosophy in the tradition of Nietzsche. Who dares to make rules for the human park?

criticism

Ernst Tugendhat criticized in an article in the period of 22 December 1999 Sloterdijk's thesis, morality is the "Taming of the Wild" and now had the result of genetic "taming" are. Sloterdijk ignores the fact that morality does not belong to the realm of nature but to culture and therefore cannot be the result of genetic breeding . Most likely there are no genes for certain moral concepts. However, this criticism does not coincide with what Sloterdijk writes in "Rules for the human park". In the whole text there is only one sentence on the subject of genetic manipulation (pp. 46/47) and this sentence contains no thesis, only questions: “But whether the long-term development will also lead to a genetic reform of the genus characteristics ... this are questions on which, however vague and uneasy, the evolutionary horizon begins to clear in front of us. ”Tugendhat also criticizes Sloterdijk for his conceptual proximity to the concepts of Nietzsche and the Nazis , which also carry out a program of“ selection ” Represented power. Here, too, the following applies: Sloterdijk's text contains no reference to selection through power. Sloterdijk mentions and quotes Nietzsche and specifically points out that the Nazis abused Nietzsche. "... - as the booty, bad Nietzsche readers of the 30s thought." (P. 41) Tugendhat ends: "I have to admit that I did not understand what the author is about. What does he actually want? And is there anything in this essay that we should understand better now? Anything he'd have cleared up? I have found nothing."

The controversy over the topic of eugenics triggered by Sloterdijk's speech prompted Jürgen Habermas to publish the future of human nature in 2001 . On the way to a liberal eugenics? .

Manfred Frank criticized Sloterdijk in an open letter at Die Zeit for the linguistic form of his contributions to eugenics , which was often unclear and represented “whispers”. In addition, Frank Sloterdijk accuses him of being inconsistent because, on the one hand, he ontologizes the problem of human breeding and claims that people cannot solve this problem by acting according to moral standards, but are subject to it, but on the other hand, they themselves demand moral criteria with which to decide on breeding should.

expenditure

  • Peter Sloterdijk: Rules for the human park. A reply to Heidegger's letter on humanism. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-06582-2 (reprint of the first edition from 1999)

literature

Books
  • Heinz-Ulrich Nennen : Philosophy in real time: the Sloterdijk debate. Chronicle of a production. About metaphor assessment, the art of the spectator and the pathology of discourse. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2003, ISBN 3-8260-2642-X .
Newspaper article 1999
  • Rainer Stephan : Who tames the philosophers? A conference at Elmau Castle looked for new ways of ethical thinking. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . July 29, 1999.
  • Enno Rudolph : Breeder in the human park. Peter Sloterdijk's Dawn of Anti-Human Reason. In: Frankfurter Rundschau . August 20, 1999.
  • Th. Meier: Dual rule of philosophy and genetic engineering. On the debate about Peter Sloterdijk's lecture at Schloss Elmau. In: Berliner Zeitung . September 6, 1999.
  • N. N. (not specified): Sloterdijk: Don't be afraid of three zeros. In: Frankfurter Rundschau. September 8, 1999.
  • R. Pohl: Sloterdijk's "Scandal". In: The Standard . September 10, 1999.
  • N. N. (not specified): Obituary. In: Frankfurter Rundschau. September 10, 1999 (meaning: for critical theory).
  • R. Stephan: Lovely lies. On the latest developments in the Sloterdijk affair. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. September 10, 1999.
  • F. Olbert: Life in the Age of Biotechnology. Sloterdijk's controversial Elmau speech. In: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger . September 10, 1999.
  • Gregor Dotzauer : Peter Sloterdijk - Does the philosopher advocate the breeding of supermen? The philosopher answers his critics. In: Der Tagesspiegel . September 10, 1999.
  • H. Holzbach: Humanism in a test tube? Intellectual dispute over the misleading breeding theses of the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. In: Kölnische Rundschau . September 11, 1999.
  • B. Spörri: Out of tune piano of the zeitgeist. Peter Sloterdijk advocates bred superman. Or not? In: Sunday newspaper . September 12, 1999.
  • Harald Jähner: Sloterdijk's human park. Once again a fascist is exposed who is not one: excitement about a philosopher. In: Berliner Zeitung . September 12, 1999.
  • Reinhard Kahl : Killer satellites. Professional Deformations: Peter Sloterdijk, Critical Theory and War in the Features Section. In: the daily newspaper . September 13, 1999.
  • M. Kluger: Alarm system. In: Frankfurter Neue Presse . September 15, 1999 (Commentary on the Sloterdijk debate).
  • Jens Frederiksen: Taming, Breeding or Chastisement? Sloterdijk, the "people park" and the excitement in the national German feature pages. In: Main-Rhein Zeitung. September 16, 1999.
  • Rudolf Mitlöhner : Peter Sloterdijk, Martin Walser and the Berlin Republic. The discussion about Peter Sloterdijk's Elmauer lecture is also a new edition of the debate about Germany's “normality”. In: The press . September 16, 1999.
  • R. Schneider: The hat is in the ring. Peter Sloterdijk's “Rules for the Human Park” spark the next cultural debate. In: Berliner Morgenpost . September 17, 1999.
  • Micha Brumlik : The avenger of the disinherited. On the Sloterdijk affair: observations at the beginning of a debate. In: Frankfurter Rundschau. September 18, 1999.
  • Thomas E. Schmidt : Deer in the clearing of thought: Peter Sloterdijk and Jürgen Habermas . In: The world . September 20, 1999.
  • Martin Meyer : The Sloterdijk Effect. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . September 20, 1999.
  • Hans-Peter Schreiber: The phantom of the construction of the perfect human. Sloterdijk and the Consequences: About the Discomfort with Gene Culture. In: Basler Zeitung . September 23, 1999.
  • Ludwig Hasler : Why not? Peter Sloterdijk wants to dictate the law of human optimization to genetic engineers. A desperate form of surrender. A very typical zeitgeist. In: Weltwoche . No. 38, September 23, 1999.
  • Manfred Frank : Curls and sulfur. In: The time . dated September 23, 1999.
  • J. Wetzel: Sloterdijk in France. The debate is presented in an anti-German climate of opinion. In: Berliner Zeitung. September 30, 1999.
  • H. Jähner: Who is afraid of the black man ?. In: Berliner Zeitung. October 4, 1999 (Commentary on the Sloterdijk debate).
  • Silvio Vietta : What philosophy in Germany missed. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . October 9, 1999 (letter to the editor on the Sloterdijk debate).
  • Karsten Zipp: When humans breed humans. On the controversial theses of the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. In: Gießener Anzeiger . October 11, 1999.
  • Alexander Schuller : Man creates himself. The Sloterdijk debate discussed what is reality: the new man. In: The world. October 15, 1999.

Web links

  • Collection of articles: Sloterdijk Debate. FEWD - Research Center for Ethics and Science, University of Vienna, 1999, archived from the original on February 12, 2010 ; Retrieved July 17, 2014 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ernst Tugendhat : There are no genes for morality In: Die Zeit . dated September 23, 1999
  2. ^ Manfred Frank : Geschweife and Geschwefel. In: The time . dated September 23, 1999.