An English translation of Peter Sloterdijk's "Revolution of the Open Hand" ("Die Revolution der gebenden Hand" - FAZ, June 13, 2009) is yet to appear and to go by Axel Honneth's response to the piece (below), it might be better if an English version never saw the light of day. For those readers who feel they need something to go by in English from the object of Honneth's attack, a translation of a similar argument by Sloterdijk can be found here.
Honneth's views appear here in translation, not because they are sanctioned by The Great Stage, but because they are expressed with a flair that our local journalism, our local "public philosophy" radically excludes. Honneth's are impassioned arguments of intellectual substance. From the point of view of Australia's degraded media landscape, it must surely seem remarkable that they appeared in a broadsheet newspaper at all; however Honneth himself might recoil from the "childishness, superficiality and useless blather" that thrive as part of the democratic culture of today, reducing the idea of democracy to a nonsense, it nonetheless says something about the possibility of expression and argument in current-day Europe that his own antinomian views became available in a mainstream print medium (Die Zeit, September 24, 2009).
Honneth's attack appears here, in short, as an implicit - and no doubt ineffectual - rebuke to the print media of mainstream Australia - to the self-infatuated schizoid ramblings of Catherine Deveney, the brainless navel-gazing of Kate Holden, the interviews and monster pictures that make up The Age's former book pages, and to the small fleet of "stream-lined, slickly got-up semi-intellectual magazines that give the reader the feeling of being 'advanced' without actually forcing him/her to think."
CS
"Fatal Profundity" - by Axel HonnethHonneth's views appear here in translation, not because they are sanctioned by The Great Stage, but because they are expressed with a flair that our local journalism, our local "public philosophy" radically excludes. Honneth's are impassioned arguments of intellectual substance. From the point of view of Australia's degraded media landscape, it must surely seem remarkable that they appeared in a broadsheet newspaper at all; however Honneth himself might recoil from the "childishness, superficiality and useless blather" that thrive as part of the democratic culture of today, reducing the idea of democracy to a nonsense, it nonetheless says something about the possibility of expression and argument in current-day Europe that his own antinomian views became available in a mainstream print medium (Die Zeit, September 24, 2009).
Honneth's attack appears here, in short, as an implicit - and no doubt ineffectual - rebuke to the print media of mainstream Australia - to the self-infatuated schizoid ramblings of Catherine Deveney, the brainless navel-gazing of Kate Holden, the interviews and monster pictures that make up The Age's former book pages, and to the small fleet of "stream-lined, slickly got-up semi-intellectual magazines that give the reader the feeling of being 'advanced' without actually forcing him/her to think."
CS
Nothing of what Peter Sloterdijk has written over the past couple of decades has seemed compatible either with the dominant spirit of the times or with the adversaries of that spirit. A principled scepticism about all the achievements of social modernity separated him from the advocates of extending the economy into all corners of life; a proud refusal to take the side of the weak and disadvantaged distinguished him from the hesitant objections of the critics of capitalism. A tone of militant anti-conformism meant however that he was met from many sides with reverence and admiration. As The Critique of Cynical Reason (1983) seemed to signal, a true free spirit had here stepped on to the intellectual stage again at last, someone who, with the lonely resolve and radicalism of a Nietzsche, took issue with all the habits of thought that had long ago given our era an almost unbearable sloppiness.
Where Sloterdijk’s intellectual calculations fell flat because he had done violence to morally well-founded principles, he was quick to shoot off further argumentative smoke grenades; their effect was that the atrocity ended up shrouded in further darkness, taking on the grandiose status of previously unthinkable thoughts. It was tough to get a handle on Sloterdijk’s thought over the years from any real moral or political angle.
However, Sloterdijk has himself recently put an end to the game of cat-and-mouse that the arts pages of our newspapers have ingloriously taken part in. In an article for the FAZ [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung], he has let slip what historical developments actually capture his interest as a philosopher of history. Readers may have always suspected that his own resentment was at the bottom of that Nietzschean critique of ressentiment he has successfully mimicked. That his own resentment now shows its face in so petty-minded a way must simply have dumbfounded them though.
From the start, Sloterdijk’s preference for essayistic philosophy was connected with the rise of a social group that had nothing but contempt for the capitalist welfare state’s forms of cultural expression, though without having any workable idea of its own how to shape the future politically. In their academic youth, which fell in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the representatives of this new elite had read the words of Michel Foucault; because of their unfixed, elastic intellectual attitude, their readiness for bold intuitive leaps, they had quickly ascended all the conceivable heights of power, where they now found themselves awaiting inspiration – a transcendent word of clarity that could provide our epoch with an intellectual signature. In this milieu, which included the editorial desks of broadsheet newspapers, the cafeterias of banks, architecture offices and advertising agencies, there was agreement on one thing alone – that the welfare mentality of the social democratic age should be brought to a decisive end. The majority of Germans seemed too dependent; the culture was too attached to the open hand of the state for it possibly to give birth to any sort of powerful idea or way of life.
Admittedly their contempt was directed less towards the needy classes themselves and much more towards the latter’s intellectual representatives, who, in the “old” West German republic, had been presumptuous enough to put themselves forward as political spokesmen for a general redistribution. They enthusiastically read every article demonising the politics of 1968, they noted with deep satisfaction that the leading disciplines of the declining post ’68 era, sociology and psychoanalysis, were finally getting their comeuppance. The word of redemption was to be different from the jeremiads that the ideologues of old had delivered in the name of the weak and socially disenfranchised. It had to have something of the courage of intellectual grandeur and keep well away from the jargon of social impoverishment.
The representatives of this new class didn’t have too long to wait – soon a writer came out to meet them who had the right prescription for all their anxieties and hopes in his hand. At the very outset of his intellectual development, Peter Sloterdijk may still have been undecided whether he should set off down the path of philosophically inspired social criticism, or that of a mystical or speculative interpretation of history and the world. It may only have been the rapid success of his first books in the milieu just mentioned that finally led him to serve its disciples as a seer in impoverished times. He didn’t lack the power to create concepts and metaphors that seemed to throw open the world; he was also gifted with a certain capacity for diagnostic condensation; now all the intellectual preconditions had been fulfilled for Sloterdijk to take on that much-eyed prophetic mantle. Since then a string of essays, books and speeches have issued form his fertile mind year by year; if they aren’t all read by that stratum of his devotees, nonetheless they’re surely leafed through.
