Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and Interviews 1993 - 2012 by Peter Sloterdijk

Author:Peter Sloterdijk [Sloterdijk, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780745691688
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-06-06T22:00:00+00:00

19

ON PROGRESS

The Holy Fire of Dissatisfaction

Interview with M. Walid Nakschbandi*

NAKSCHBANDI: Mr Sloterdijk, the proverb says: ‘Progress sits in the saddle and rides humankind.’ Has progress got human beings under control now?

SLOTERDIJK: People who are crazy about horses may like that proverb, but we should beware of skewed images. Progress is about moving forward, not about control. Still, it’s good to start in an offbeat way. It is true that the disastrous concept of progress has become rather like a modern form of holiness. We find references to progressive things all over the place, including the decorations on banknotes and the logos of major companies. It’s almost as if the curious word ‘progress’ represented a universal concept of movement, and without it the world’s modernists would lose their sense of direction. Not many expressions of that type exist. The only concept that would be equally powerful in terms of generality and importance is, perhaps, circulation, the cycle. The traditional awe of cyclical processes – beginning with the self-reflection of God and going right up to recycling of ecological waste – relates to the metaphysical thesis that the good and the cyclic are ultimately the same thing.

NAKSCHBANDI: So it was a nicely rounded issue to begin with. But then something got in the way?

SLOTERDIJK: You could say that. From the nineteenth century on, the bourgeois world began trying to find the good in the line. That is a remarkable process because the line didn’t have a high reputation in traditional geometry. In the past, people had always seen linear processes as final movements, movements that could wear down and basically lead nowhere except to decay. Circular processes, however, lead back to themselves, and that qualifies them for the good infinity. The greatest break made by the modern era is that human beings conceived an absolute movement of a new type that constantly moved upwards from a less valuable to a more valuable state. That means something like upgrading of being as a whole. It is a rather heretical idea because if we assume God created the world, such a process is pure sacrilege. After all, God can’t have created anything except the best.

But why is it that we don’t all feel we are under the curse of heresy? The answer is that since around the sixteenth century our society has been experiencing a mental shift that contemporary people still can’t evaluate completely: the shift from a metaphysics of the complete world to a metaphysics of the incomplete world. This means we have shifted from the concept of creation, that is, of the finished work, to the concept of gradual development – from completed being to relative becoming. And that made us capable of participating in movements that go from the less good to the better without being suspected of blasphemy.

NAKSCHBANDI: How should we imagine that transformation?

SLOTERDIJK: Moving directly from God to the world, we seem to go from the very best to second best. This is how Plato classically articulated it in Timaios, his dialogue on natural philosophy.

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