Peter Sloterdijk offers a talk about today’s magical will, the Kremlin in the soul, and the path to peace, under the intriguing title: “Garden or engine room of humanity? The future of education in a digital culture.” Wolfgang Held listens in.
This summer, Peter Sloterdijk was invited to speak at the Udo Keller Foundation’s Festival of Philosophy in Cologne. Udo Keller was a Hamburg businessman who was closely associated with Far Eastern spirituality and established a foundation to promote dialogue between the natural sciences and the humanities. The foundation expects its partners to have the “courage to transcend disciplinary, denominational, and cultural boundaries.” With Peter Sloterdijk as a guest speaker, this is tenable.
In Sloterdijk’s title, “Garden or Engine Room of Humanity?”, there’s a clue. Der Garten des Menschlichen [The garden of humanity] is a collection of essays on historical anthropology published 50 years ago by the great philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. The book is probably one of the most spiritual and profound forays into the “science of humans”—a phrase Weizsäcker sets straight: the science of humans is the science of humanity. Looking back through history, we find this is not a “system” but a “garden”—there are paths in a garden, and from every vantage point you see a different meaningful picture. What an image! Science as gardening!
The first and last steps in this garden are interesting. Weizsäcker begins with an essay on peace. In it, he writes: “Peace is the body of truth.” Peace is triune, he writes. It encompasses peace with oneself, peace between the individual and society, and peace between societies. This is Weizsäcker’s first step in his garden; the last step in his 600-page book is about meditation—finding peace with oneself. The book is a dialogue, in the Platonic tradition.
When radio editor Udo Reiter interviewed the philosopher and asked about his meditative experience, Weizsäcker answered: “When you tell someone about meditation who has experience with it themselves, they’ll understand without words. If the listener has no experience, they’ll find your description strange.” Reiter probed further, and Weizsäcker responded: “Meditation does not change you into someone else, it makes you the person you have always been.” Reiter kept pushing, inquiring about the substance of meditation. Weizsäcker’s reply: “The fact that I don’t answer immediately is the most important part of the answer.” And then: “Meditation is the ‘Oh …. I see.’” Rarely has such a distinguished academic thinker revealed himself so openly about personal meditative experience as in this conversation.
We Are All Sorcerer’s Apprentices
Sloterdijk probably has all this in mind, including the fact that Weizsäcker headed the Institut für die Erforschung der Lebensbedingungen der wissenschaftlich-technischen Welt [the Max Planck Institute for the research of living conditions in the scientific-technical world] when he discusses the digital revolution with Cai Werntgen on stage at the Festival. According to Sloterdijk, to understand our times, we need to uncover the archaeological breadth that lies behind technology. There is nothing in technology that didn’t previously exist in metaphysics, and there is nothing in metaphysics that wasn’t already found in magic. And what does magic do? “Magic revolves around the question of how I can provoke an effect at a distance beyond simple causality through contact. The actual magic is that a tiny act of will can have a huge impact,” says Sloterdijk. He brings up Rudyard Kipling’s children’s story “The Butterfly That Stamped,” wherein the delicate little “hero” boasted that he could make the whole world disappear with his tiny legs.
According to Sloterdijk, we’ve all been thrown back into the position of sorcerer’s apprentices. Today’s technology can only be understood as a response to the archaic desire for power: conjuring up, spiriting away, wanting to have, wanting to get rid of, translocation, television, telephones, and telescopes. All of these are magical operations. Sloterdijk describes how this long-distance effect began with the invention of the lever (Greek: mechanae). With it, we see how magical effects can be transformed into physical effects: with less force, we can move greater weight. As a Waldorf teacher, I once took the principle of the lever to the extreme with a grade 10 class. We placed a metal profile sheet over an oak plank. A student pushed down on the long end of the plank and lifted a small car into the air. Magic! Sloterdijk adds, “All technology is leverage.” Fire, as “pyrotechnical leverage,” is the lever of all levers. When the pyrotechnical and the mechanical meet, we truly “lift the world off its hinges.”
From the Will to Power to the Will to Obstinance
Sloterdijk then moves on to the question of peace. He recalls an incident that took place at a gas station in Ida-Oberstein during the coronavirus pandemic. A cashier admonished a customer to put on a mask. The customer was so enraged that he went home, returned with a firearm, and shot the employee in the head, killing him. According to Sloterdijk, the “crucial moment” manifests in the will to be obstinate and unchangeable. A minor blunder is blown up into demonic dimensions. It is the absolute unwillingness to be told anything that might catapult us out of our ego-spherical autocracy. Then Sloterdijk ignites his gift for language. “We are all becoming more or less Putinized. The model of autocracy is not only found in the Kremlin.” Sloterdijk probably means this geographically: there isn’t just one “Kremlin.” And he means it in terms of scale: “An autocratic character is one who rejects any intervention in his sphere of ego perfection.” According to Sloterdijk, one positions oneself in the impossible and thus becomes infinitely vulnerable. Once one has created such a powerful illusion, one crashes into every edge one encounters.
Formulate Declarations of Dependency!
Autocracy begins when the individual becomes a Kremlin, the Russian word for “fortress.” When a fortress becomes synonymous with the individual, then we must communicate from Kremlin to Kremlin—from private tank to private tank. “The Kremlinization of our way of life is extremely advanced.” Then he offers his answer to the question of peace: “We must first relearn life beyond our walls.” According to Sloterdijk, the desire to make ourselves independent is at the root of our misfortunes. Instead of sending declarations of independence out into the world, we should spend day and night formulating declarations of dependence that would, in a positive sense, enable life outside the fortress. With this, Sloterdijk, probably unnoticed by most of his audience, has arrived at meditation, just as Friedrich von Weizsäcker did in The Garden of Humanity. Meditation is the place of declarations of dependence; meditation is the place where we discover, suffer, and recognize that everything is interrelated—just like in the garden.
Info “Garden or engine room of humanity? The future of education in the digital age.” A talk with Peter Sloterdijk and Cai Werntgen held on June 27, 2025, in Cologne at phil.COLOGNE.
Photo Screenshot from the YouTube video.
Translation Laura Liska
