{"id":67753,"date":"2025-09-17T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-17T06:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/?p=67753"},"modified":"2025-09-15T20:49:05","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T18:49:05","slug":"garden-or-engine-room-of-humanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/garden-or-engine-room-of-humanity\/","title":{"rendered":"Garden or Engine Room of Humanity?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Peter Sloterdijk offers a talk about today’s magical will, the Kremlin in the soul, and the path to peace, under the intriguing title: \u201cGarden or engine room of humanity? The future of education in a digital culture.\u201d Wolfgang Held listens in.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

This summer, Peter Sloterdijk was invited to speak at the Udo Keller Foundation\u2019s 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 \u201ccourage to transcend disciplinary, denominational, and cultural boundaries.\u201d With Peter Sloterdijk as a guest speaker, this is tenable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Sloterdijk\u2019s title, \u201cGarden or Engine Room of Humanity?\u201d, there\u2019s a clue. Der Garten des Menschlichen<\/em> [The garden of humanity] is a collection of essays on historical anthropology published 50 years ago by the great philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizs\u00e4cker. The book is probably one of the most spiritual and profound forays into the \u201cscience of humans\u201d\u2014a phrase Weizs\u00e4cker sets straight: the science of humans is the science of humanity. Looking back through history, we find this is not a \u201csystem\u201d but a \u201cgarden\u201d\u2014there are paths in a garden, and from every vantage point you see a different meaningful picture. What an image! Science as gardening!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first and last steps in this garden are interesting. Weizs\u00e4cker begins with an essay on peace. In it, he writes: \u201cPeace is the body of truth.\u201d Peace is triune, he writes. It encompasses peace with oneself, peace between the individual and society, and peace between societies. This is Weizs\u00e4cker’s first step in his garden; the last step in his 600-page book is about meditation\u2014finding peace with oneself. The book is a dialogue, in the Platonic tradition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When radio editor Udo Reiter interviewed the philosopher and asked about his meditative experience, Weizs\u00e4cker answered: \u201cWhen you tell someone about meditation who has experience with it themselves, they\u2019ll understand without words. If the listener has no experience, they\u2019ll find your description strange.\u201d Reiter probed further, and Weizs\u00e4cker responded: \u201cMeditation does not change you into someone else, it makes you the person you have always been.\u201d Reiter kept pushing, inquiring about the substance of meditation. Weizs\u00e4cker\u2019s reply: \u201cThe fact that I don’t answer immediately is the most important part of the answer.\u201d And then: \u201cMeditation is the \u2018Oh \u2026. I see.\u2019\u201d Rarely has such a distinguished academic thinker revealed himself so openly about personal meditative experience as in this conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We Are All Sorcerer’s Apprentices<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Sloterdijk probably has all this in mind, including the fact that Weizs\u00e4cker headed the Institut f\u00fcr 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\u2019t previously exist in metaphysics, and there is nothing in metaphysics that wasn\u2019t already found in magic. And what does magic do? \u201cMagic 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,\u201d says Sloterdijk. He brings up Rudyard Kipling’s children’s story \u201cThe Butterfly That Stamped,\u201d wherein the delicate little \u201chero\u201d boasted that he could make the whole world disappear with his tiny legs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Sloterdijk, we\u2019ve 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<\/em>). 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, \u201cAll technology is leverage.\u201d Fire, as \u201cpyrotechnical leverage,\u201d is the lever of all levers. When the pyrotechnical and the mechanical meet, we truly \u201clift the world off its hinges.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the Will to Power to the Will to Obstinance<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201ccrucial moment\u201d 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. \u201cWe are all becoming more or less Putinized. The model of autocracy is not only found in the Kremlin.\u201d Sloterdijk probably means this geographically: there isn\u2019t just one \u201cKremlin.\u201d And he means it in terms of scale: \u201cAn autocratic character is one who rejects any intervention in his sphere of ego perfection.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Formulate Declarations of Dependency!<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Autocracy begins when the individual becomes a Kremlin, the Russian word for \u201cfortress.\u201d When a fortress becomes synonymous with the individual, then we must communicate from Kremlin to Kremlin\u2014from private tank to private tank. \u201cThe Kremlinization of our way of life is extremely advanced.\u201d Then he offers his answer to the question of peace: \u201cWe must first relearn life beyond our walls.\u201d 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 Weizs\u00e4cker did in The Garden of Humanity<\/em>. Meditation is the place of declarations of dependence; meditation is the place where we discover, suffer, and recognize that everything is interrelated\u2014just like in the garden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Info <\/strong>\u201cGarden or engine room of humanity? The future of education in the digital age.\u201d A talk with Peter Sloterdijk and Cai Werntgen held on June 27, 2025, in Cologne at phil.COLOGNE.
Photo <\/strong>Screenshot from the YouTube video.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translation <\/strong>Laura Liska<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Sloterdijk offers a talk about today’s magical will, the Kremlin in the soul, and the path to peace, under the intriguing title: \u201cGarden or engine room of humanity? The future of education in a digital culture.\u201d Wolfgang Held listens in. This summer, Peter Sloterdijk was invited to speak at the Udo Keller Foundation\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9159,"featured_media":67576,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11696,8823],"tags":[11695,11697,8824],"class_list":["post-67753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai-challenges-en","category-reflection","tag-ausgabe-36-2025-en","tag-english-issue-38-2025","tag-spotlights"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9159"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}