I. Summer evening philosophy

Idleness is the beginning of all philosophy. No effort of arguments and no analytical headache characterizes relevant thinking. At the beginning of one of the classic texts of philosophy, a rest in the shade under a plane tree is therefore advertised in order to be able to adequately address the major topics:

PHAEDROS: Well, do you see that tallest plane tree there?

SOCRATES: How should I not?

PHAEDROS: There is both shade and a moderate draft, also grass to sit down or, if we'd rather, lie down!

SOCRATES: You just want to go about it like that!¹

This motif of philosophy as an art of pause has also been preserved in modern times. In joking verses, Nietzsche votes for an outdoor philosophy that is based on mutual sympathy:

It is nice to be silent with each other

Better to laugh with each other —

Under silk sky cloth

Leaning towards moss and beech

Laugh sweetly out loud with friends

And white teeth show up.²

Philosophizing in the protective gray of shadow as the place where time can be thought of contradicts the attitude of philosophy as a work of concept as a work of concept as circulated by Hegel. Nevertheless, there could also be found a passage from the master thinker of the 19th century that suggests an objection to brooding reflection. This is how the famous preface to his ends Principles of the Philosophy of Law from 1821 with the words: “When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then a figure of life has grown old, and with gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized; the Minerva owl only begins its flight at dusk. ”³

It is with these thoughts that a philosophical serenade in Gütchenpark zu Halle between Peter Sloterdijk and Stefano Vastano — organized by Literaturhaus Halle — began in July 2024. They allude to a theme that Sloterdijk, who repeatedly pointed out in his work that he was significantly influenced by Nietzsche's thinking, in his book published two years ago Who hasn't thought gray yet. A theory of colors developed extensively. While the swallows performed their seasonal capers in the alarmingly gray summer evening sky and from time to time a dull murmur was heard from the city, which came from the European Football Championships taking place at the same time, the approximately 80 participants, who were greying reindeer, listened to the conversation lasting approximately 90 minutes. The interplay between Vastano and Sloterdijk was interesting to watch. In a strong Italian accent, the former presented sentences such as melody suggestions to the philosopher, who turned 77 years old on June 26, bent over like a self-playing piano, and visualized wide contexts at heavenly lengths as the day was running out.

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II. Grey theory

Sloterdijk explained that gray was actually the basal color of Western philosophy. Right at the beginning of Plato's philosophy, in fact, there is an influential distinction between real essence and superficial appearance in the allegory of the cave, which is described by a kind of cinematic theory of fraud. In the seventh book of Politeia lets Plato Socrates philosophically construct reality as a kind of involuntary cinema event. According to this, the mass of people is bound within a dark cave, in which they are biased by a play of shadows that are projected onto the cave wall in front of them by candlelight behind them, in front of the undetectable wearer. In this sense, what most people think is the actual reality and what therefore sets them in suspense are just illusions. For Plato, the truth consists of climbing out of the cave and seeing the light of reality. The difference between Plato and Sloterdijk now lies in the fact that Sloterdijk draws attention to the distinctions created by the grey shadows on the grey cave wall. There would be differences in gray in gray. This is how the world of apparitions emerges from the shades of gray between shadow and wall. There is no need to break out for this truth.

In this respect, one could speculate, Sloterdijk is following Nietzsche's project to reverse Platonism. Instead of promoting an exodus from the cave to light and campaigning for the black and white difference, post-Platonic philosophy addresses twilight. This is the reversal of the most powerful western prejudice. Not everything that doesn't glitter is gold. Wouldn't reality be presented in a completely different light if the essence of ontology was that the essence of being was its appearance? Not so much reflection and the idea as attention to the objects and the atmospheres in which they appeared would become so central. The light of the Enlightenment, which gave up the idea of making ideas and no longer defames the caves as illusory worlds, no longer provides a clear and clear definition of the crystal-clear facts. What it can do at best is a better description of the horror, the ambiguity, the ambivalent, the complex mixtures of the possible. No “pressure to light” (Celan) requires shadowless illumination of everything and everyone as a massive object. Explication is becoming more careful. Post-Platonic theory stands as a good awakening of the Enlightenment to itself in the twilight of utopia: Between light and dark, the diversity of horror opens up as the true colorfulness of life. There are still plenty of worlds to discover in grey. Plato and Hegel's ideas thus become imaginable as conceptual caves from which thought must free itself: When philosophy paints its gray in gray, life can sometimes be recognized and understood again in a new form that can rejuvenate it.

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III. Exciting boredom

When the completely enlightened world is no longer, as was the case with the critical, all-too self-critical theory at the beginning of Dialectic of Enlightenment Presented against the rational culture of modernity, must shine in the sign of triumphant disaster, the opportunity opens up to analyse the structural change of modern lifestyles in more detail. As a result, Sloterdijk then showed Heidegger's meditations on boredom from his winter semester lecture The basic concepts of metaphysics — perhaps the best lecture by, as Emmanuel Levinas once said, “unfortunately the greatest thinker of the 20th century” — from 1929/30 exactly the basic mood of horror. Only humans can be an animal that is bored because they are open to a world that can affect you. The stone is “worldless”, the animal is “world-poor.” It is only through perception and participation in the wealth of the world that, with an astonishingly activist connotation for Heidegger, can be “world-building.” If this world-building fails, the self that is open to it fails and you notice yourself as a penetrating absence. Boredom is the sobering self-knowledge as an emotion: I am fog, therefore I am. But here too, Sloterdijk, again following Nietzsche's project, is trying to revalue the gravity. Where Heidegger suggests that “deep boredom in the abysses of existence like a silent fog goes back and forth”⁴ And showing the arch-conservative's clear will to philosophize a new state of emergency out of this phenomenon, Sloterdijk strives to recognize a sparkling freedom in the absence of intrinsic initiative. Whoever is none of their business, who loses themselves in boredom, is radically disposable of everything possible. In gray leisure, the ability to “unalarmed alert” (Sloterdijk) to let the world get close to you grows. And it increases the ability to roll off the appeals of urgency. Sloterdijk referred to Melville's character Bartleby, who infuriated his environment by evading the impositions with which he was confronted with a notorious “I would prefer not to” — Sloterdijk translated ad hoc as “I would rather not”. (However, the author can only conditionally recommend the use of this saying, in view of the immediate and lasting negative effect it had on the course of the evening when his companion at the event expressed the wish whether he would be so kind as to fetch her another glass of wine.)

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IV. The politics of gray

Through an allusion to the figure of the “gray eminence,” Sloterdijk recently drew attention to the political implications that affect his thoughts. He writes about this in his book: “[T] he liberality of modernity that invites mixing cannot force the desired rainbow society. At the same time, it is too late for segregation and pure colored identities. ”⁵  Sloterdijk concludes from this that grey is the most politically rational color of the time. The gray is fate. The toxic dualisms of true and false, good and evil dissolve in their unconditionality. From the epochal, utopian departure into better worlds through the reddish brown or brown-red mobilizations, the horizon emerges, which offers the prospect of better living in the now more interesting gray of everyday life. Grey is the communication of extremes, the twilight of consensus, the wonderfully unobtrusive boredom of the middle, whose life dramas no longer need the fight to live and die in order to feel something. Through his chromatic speculation, Sloterdijk thus supports Francis Fukuyama's thesis that the story of making history has come to an end. According to the story, that is, after archaic heroism, which always needed the strong contrast of black and white thinking in order to legitimize its intensities. Lots of enemies, lots of honor, lots of unnecessary bloodshed.

Nevertheless, according to Sloterdijk, the dimension of thymos — the “courage” — remains significant as the part of the soul that, according to Plato, is central to the impulses of insult, recognition and pride. In the gray story, it was no longer the heroic epics of the warriors and the missionary projects of the priests that colored the era. In the modern age, post-heroic heroism emanates from entrepreneurs, artists and athletes. It is they who invent the sacred games after the death of God, which on the one hand can provide new comfort, but which on the other hand also re-ritualize the thymotic energies. It is less the invisible hand of the market than the invisible hands of a new thymotic morality that governs such as extended Checks and Balances the community. The prestige struggles for a more profitable business, the more successful work, the new record mark domesticate the surplus of the aspiring part of the soul, which wants to exceed what is, without having to destroy what is or prevents it from having to destroy it. Enemies don't have to become friends. It is enough if they face each other as opponents, competitors, opponents. The ever-increasing diffuse cheers from the city, which burned on during the conversation and were played at the same time by the German national team, impressively pointed to the established structural change of the heroic in the modern world.

If civil integration of the thymotic does not succeed, for example by equating the thymotic too sub-complex with the belligerent and being canceled as toxic masculinity, the phenomenon of cynicism acquires a new charisma. Sloterdijk quotes a quip from Rochefoucauld, according to which hypocrisy is a bow of vice to virtue. Cynicism no longer makes this effort. He impresses by openly displaying his amoral disinhibition. Napoleon, who crowned himself emperor in 1804, provided the paradigmatic scene for this. This relapse into the monarchy has happened in France, the second home of Sloterdijk, four times since 1789. The alarming developments in the USA currently point to the virulent dimension of wild Thymos as Trumpism, which celebrates itself in its cynicism and brazenly exploits the legal grey areas in its favor.

Sloterdijk ended the evening with a mixture of joy and concern with the words that they hope they had completed their workload. The swallows were silent, the day grew grey and the last master thinker, after quickly signing a few more books, took the car to the train to Berlin.

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sources

Adorno, Theodor W. & Max Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical fragments. Frankfurt am Main 2022.

Hegel, George Frederick William: Principles of a Philosophy of Law. Frankfurt am Main 2002.

Heidegger, Martin: Basic concepts of metaphysics. Frankfurt am Main 2001.

Plato: Phaedrus. Hamburg 2005.

Sloterdijk, Peter: Who hasn't thought of gray yet. A theory of colors. Frankfurt am Main 2022.

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Item image template

https://www.wikiwand.com/de/Peter_Sloterdijk#Media/Datei:Peter_Sloterdijk,_Karlsruhe_07-2009,_IMGP3019.jpg

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footnotes

1: Plato, Phaedrus, 229 3a.

2: Human, all-too-human I, sequel 1.

3: Hegel, Principles of the Philosophy of Law, P. 28.

4: Heidegger, Basic concepts of metaphysics, P. 119.

5: Sloterdijk, Who hasn't thought gray yet, P. 18.

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