Adding a philosopher to such an intense menu this season can be as risky as seasoning the star dish of a great chef.
But in the case of Peter Sloterdijk, a popular, controversial, brilliant thinker, habitually revulsive against commonplaces, it is a sure ingredient.
The dish will deserve it.
The German born in Karlsruhe in 1947, author of works that have moved thought such as
Critique of Cynical Reason or the
Spheres
trilogy
, has passed this week through Madrid and Valladolid invited by the Forum of Culture, in which 60 speakers have participated from all over the world and has gathered thousands of attendees despite the pandemic difficulties.
Siruela has published most of his books in Spanish.
Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy at the Karlsruhe Higher School of Design for many years, Sloterdijk is probably the most important living European philosopher next to Jürgen Habermas. He is a thinker of enormous imagination, versatile, mediatic, capable of touching on all topics and getting into all kinds of puddles. His controversies with Habermas himself and other contemporaries on issues such as taxation, feminism or the welfare state are already legendary. An enemy of political correctness, he is a great heir to Nietzsche and Heidegger and, in his flight from academicism and the unequivocal and simplistic view, he has also drawn from the guru Rajneesh Osho after his research in India. Sloterdijk speaks slowly, seems tired and doubtful in an English that supports French, German and even Spanish words,but each sentence is pure essence worthy of entering this great dish that our time serves us.
QUESTION.
In
Anger and Time,
you describe anger as a motor that drives the story.
What role is anger playing today?
ANSWER.
Anger arises where disappointment prevails.
And disappointment increases when promises are not kept.
As long as we live in a world of promises and disappointments and there are no political societies that do not generate disappointments, the anger will always be there.
And the alternative to disappointment is resignation, which is what there is in the East, in Russia.
Russia is populated by people who have undergone such processes of promises and disappointments that they no longer believe in anything.
They are more cynical, they have chosen to live their private lives and are content not to be too much in the way of politics.
It is an attitude that is not compatible with life in a democracy.
It needs hope, an expectation that things will get better.
And if there is no improvement in sight, resignation will prevail.
Q. So democracy needs anger, anger?
R.
_
Yes. Democracy needs a minimum element of hope that things will improve in the future or at least that the losses will not be too great.
Anger and anger will always be within reach and can lead to disappointment.
Q. How would you define this era?
An era of hate?
Of cynicism?
R.
_
What German philosophers have called the
zeitgeist
since the eighteenth century, the spirit of our time, is something that escapes all definition.
But even so, there is something in the air, and that is that today's Europeans feel a certain discomfort due to their political weakness.
Although many continue to believe in political commitment, a large part of our western population has already chosen resignation, they no longer believe in politics.
An important sector of the population in Europe has chosen
privatism,
the priority of private life.
Q. And does it grow?
Is it a trend?
R.
_
The important thing is that this helps politicians, because facing a resigned population makes their job easier.
Look at Boris Johnson.
Everyone has understood that he is a clown, that he does whatever he wants and that it would be a mistake to take him too seriously.
He is the ironic version of resignation, which fits very well with the British mentality: he has always had a certain amount of derision in the political sphere.
And the same with the French, who have always been leaders in revolts and now they are tired.
“European decadence is still the most attractive thing in the world”
P. You who have explained the world from a spherical and global point of view, how do you assess
what is happening with Russia?
Is Putin returning us to a bipolar world?
R.
_ No, definitely not. Because Putin cannot believe that Russia is more important than China. That illusion is not realistic even for him. It will continue to be a tri- or penta-polar world: the United States, China, Russia, Europe… After the breakdown of the bipolar order in 1990 there is no longer any room for great simplifications, the multipolar structure grows and there is no way to escape this complicated pattern. Putin claims leadership of what used to be called the second world, but he knows that the Russian way of life is not attractive. It has no charm, no
soft power
absolutely.
While the United States, even though it has been disgraced by so many mistakes, it still has that charming side, the enormous power of that way of life.
Nothing is attractive in Russian and Chinese ways of life.
Even European decadence is still the most attractive thing in the world as a way of life, followed by what remains of the American dream.
That has destroyed and disappointed much, but there is still something.
Putin knows well that he will never be able to compete with the elements of the Western way of life.
The only weapons he has are subversion, corruption, disinformation and the usual discourse against Western decadence.
About the increase in homosexual subcultures or the unwillingness of Western women to have children, which also happens there and that worries him, in 20 years they may lose 10 million inhabitants.
How to claim to be such a great power?
The EU alone has more than 400 million inhabitants, it is weak, it is intensive in consumption and not very good in combat, it does not have any military splendor, but it is a queen in lifestyle.
Peter Sloterdijk, philosopher, photographed at Espacio Telefónica, in Madrid, this Thursday, January 27.
bald elm
Q. Should we be scared?
Are you scared by
Putin's moves around Ukraine
?
R.
_
Not really.
I have been watching him for 20 years and I know that he is capable of committing any crime if it is useful to him, but he has already achieved his goal: to destabilize the West, create concern and show that Russia still deserves attention from the rest of humanity, which probably It was his main goal.
He will surely leave as soon as his thirst for power and his ambitions are satisfied, after some symbolic blow.
Q. Europe is attractive, as you say, and it attracts an immigration that, however, we reject.
People escaping climate change, droughts.
How do we solve this?
R.
We are in a great contradiction.
According to our system of symbolic values, we are obliged to show a hospitality and generosity that we could assume, but we do not want to.
Especially in Eastern countries.
Their attitude is: we have suffered for more than half a century under Russian repression, we have been exploited for decades, and now we are asked to share what little we have achieved?
P. Nor does the extreme right in Germany, Spain, France want.
R.
_
Yes, the atmosphere is comparable everywhere.
There is an idealistic urge on the part of priests, activists or citizens who want to integrate the foreigner, feminists for example who welcome victims of sexual violence, but it is a contradiction because we do not want what we should and we will never achieve that the majority of the population wants what what should
Because Kantianism is not made for ordinary people [laughs].
Q. And what can philosophy do for this world?
R.
_ When they ask me that, I try to hide behind the back of Nietzsche, who said that our mission is to harm stupidity. If we succeed, we will have completed at least one chapter. We share the other with artists and nuns: to develop a look at the meaning or nonsense of life and make it somewhat more comprehensive. But this is not necessarily an analytical work, but a lyrical mission, and these kinds of questions can be answered by poetry and any other form of consolation. We are creatures in need of comfort. Or at least anesthesia. I wrote 10 years ago
you have to change your life
(Pre-Texts, 2012) with the chapter 'October Revolution', which does not refer to 1917 but to something that happened at the Massachusetts General Hospital, in October 1847, the first intervention under total anesthesia, which made possible the modern world of medicine.
Now we are patients in a different way, we are operable to incredible lengths.
I had surgery myself a week ago and here I am!
"Distrust has grown, anyone can be a carrier of evil or toxic influences"
P. Speaking of diseases, have we learned from the pandemic?
Has anything changed?
A.
I think so.
The general level of paranoia has increased.
Q. And that is good?
A. No, no. Absolutely. The atmosphere of mistrust has grown because everyone can be a transmitter or carrier of evil, of toxic influences. It was already in the air long before covid-19. From the US we had been receiving a new type of social discourse, a language game created by American feminism on toxic masculinity. That was born 10 years ago or more. They call each complicated person a sociopath and are willing to define others with pathological characteristics. Covid-19 has only exacerbated that trend. And on the other hand, we understand the importance of friendship, trust, reflection as thoughtful qualities of life, the whole society has been transformed into a kind of monastery during confinement. We saw something incredibly precious: rediscovering the beauty of empty moments,the meditative quality of life.
P. At the same time there is a paradox: we thought we lived in an interconnected world in which we had New Zealand kiwis for breakfast and suddenly we realized that there were no masks.
And the problem of supplies continues.
What is your reflection on that interconnectivity that makes us so dependent?
R.
_
Some time ago, a group of intellectuals based in Paris published what we call the Declaration of Dependency, addressed to the whole world, so that people no longer believe in the illusion of independence in a world where everything is connected.
This is the time for that declaration to be signed by all the governments of the world.
Supply chain failures have been around for a long time.
P. But it tells us about our vulnerability and our limits.
R.
_
Yes. We live in a kind of high performance bubble and once you get out of it you see that it is an illusion for a happy minority.
You just have to take a step, get out of the greenhouse of capitalism and realize that there is not so much interconnectedness.
She told it in
In the inner world of capital.
Q. Do you think capitalism is in decline?
R.
_
No, I do not think so.
It can lead to decadent situations, but decadence is only the result of relaxation.
If people relax deeply, there will be decay, they become unaccustomed to the effort that makes you go further.
P. You have been a teacher and are in contact with young people.
How do you see the new generations?
R.
_
There are many hungry for success, eager to earn money as soon as possible, studying business, engineering and pragmatic careers, but those with whom I was in contact as a teacher were dreamers and romantics or cynics who take everything as a joke from very early on.
Some are worried about the seriousness, about climate change.
The only way to escape resentment is to commit to a real cause.
“Putin has already achieved his goal: to show that Russia still deserves attention”
Q. Can we save the planet?
R.
_
No. No one can save the planet because the planet does not need a savior.
It is human civilization that needs new policies that will make human life sustainable in the next 20 or 100 years.
We do not know if this is possible, there is a great contradiction between the imperatives of our way of life and the imperatives of climate management.
We should prepare ourselves for hard times and especially those who live this modern way of life, consumption, mobility, travel, luxury, tourism, clothes, and do not want to give it up.
Q. Are you pessimistic then about our ability to change?
R.
_
I am not pessimistic.
But you have to take people for what they are and from there build solutions.
It is that with the crooked wood of humanity you cannot build something straight, a very realistic anthropological concept.
Only realism will help.
P. You have written
What happened in the 20th century?
In 80 years, what would you say in a book called
What Happened in the 21st Century?
R.
_
The 21st century is still an extension of the 20th.
And the main thing about the 20th century was the rise and fall of communism, it was a lost century, one of bloodshed and immense sacrifice of lives.
“With the pandemic we saw something incredibly precious: the beauty of empty moments”
Q. And this one?
Can you see the end of the consumerism we practice?
R.
_
In the best of all possible worlds, it could be the century when those beasts we call empires tame each other.
P. Do you speak of mutual destruction?
R
. Not just destruction, but taming. The nation state has within itself a civilizing power for its population, but in foreign relations it continues to behave like a predator, like a wild beast. Earth is an entity that supports five or seven powerful imperial-type constructs that compete with each other strongly. And, in the future, since welfare in the generous long-term sense is no longer an option, they must learn the art of coexistence and mutual taming. A wild beast must learn to tame itself and others. And that can only happen in intensive tension with the other powers. From the time the great war is excluded, the 21st century could become an age of advancement of civilization,since civilization hasn't gone all the way because there's still a savage out there. Maybe in 100 years you will interview an intellectual who tells you that the 21st century was even worse than the 20th. I hope not!
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