Rules for the Human Park

Books, as the poet Jean Paul once observed, are thicker letters to friends. With this sentence, he gracefully and succinctly named the essence and function of Humanism: it is a friendship-forging telecommunication in the medium of writing. What has been called humanitas since the days of Cicero belongs, in the narrowest and broadest sense, to the consequences of literacy. Since philosophy has existed as a literary genre, it has recruited its followers by writing about love and friendship in an infectious manner. It is not only a discourse on the love of wisdom—it also seeks to inspire others to this love. The fact that written philosophy has remained virulent from its beginnings over 2,500 years ago until today is due to its success in making friends through text. It has continued like a chain letter through the generations, and despite all the copying errors—perhaps even thanks to such errors—it has drawn copyists and interpreters into its friendly spell.

The most important link in this chain of letters was undoubtedly the reception of the Greek message by the Romans, for it was only the Roman appropriation that made the Greek text accessible to the Empire and, at least indirectly, accessible to later European cultures beyond the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Certainly, the Greek authors would have been surprised at what kind of friends would one day respond to their letters. It is part of the rules of the writing culture that the senders cannot foresee their real recipients. Nevertheless, authors embark on the adventure of sending their letters to unidentified friends. Without the codification of Greek philosophy on transportable scrolls, the postal matters we call tradition could never have been dispatched; but without the Greek readers who made themselves available to the Romans as helpers in deciphering the letters from Greece, these Romans would not have been able to befriend the senders of these writings. Friendship that reaches into the distance thus requires both—the letters themselves and their deliverers or interpreters. Without the willingness of Roman readers to befriend the distant messages of the Greeks, there would have been a lack of recipients, and if the Romans had not entered the game with their excellent receptivity, the Greek messages would never have reached the Western European space that today's humanism enthusiasts still inhabit. There would be neither the phenomenon of Humanism nor any serious form of Latin philosophical discourse, nor later national philosophical cultures. If we speak today of humane matters in the German language, this possibility owes much to the willingness of the Romans to read the writings of the Greek teachers as if they were letters to friends in Italy.

Considering the epochal consequences of the Greek-Roman postal exchange, it becomes evident that there is something special about the writing, sending, and receiving of philosophical documents. Obviously, the sender of this type of friendship letter sends his writings into the world without knowing the recipients—or, if he knows them, he is aware that the letter extends beyond them and can provoke an indefinite number of friendship opportunities with nameless, often unborn readers. From an erotic perspective, the hypothetical friendship of the book and letter writer with the recipients of his messages represents a case of love at the greatest distance—in Nietzsche's sense, who knew that writing is the power that transforms love of the neighbor and the nearest into love for the unknown, distant, future life; writing not only bridges the gap between proven friends who, at the time of sending the letter, live in spatial distance from each other, but it also initiates an operation in the unproven, it launches a seduction into the distance, an actio in distans in the language of ancient European magic, with the goal of revealing the unknown friend as such and moving him to join the circle of friends. Indeed, the reader who exposes himself to the thicker letter can understand the book as an invitation card, and if he allows himself to be warmed by the reading, he joins the circle of those addressed, to confess there to the reception of the message.

Thus, one could trace the communitarian fantasy underlying all Humanisms back to the model of a literary society in which the participants discover their shared love for inspiring senders through canonical readings. At the heart of this understanding of Humanism, we discover a sect or club fantasy—the dream of fateful solidarity among those chosen to be able to read. For the Ancient World, indeed until the eve of the modern nation-state, literacy meant something akin to membership in a mysterious elite—grammatical knowledge was once considered the epitome of magic: in fact, in medieval English, the word grammar developed into glamour [1]. Whoever could read and write would easily master other impossibilities. The humanized are initially nothing more than the sect of the literate, and as in many other sects, expansionist and universalist projects come to the fore. Where alphabetism became fantastic and presumptuous, grammatical or literal mysticism arose, the Kabbalah, which dreamed of gaining insight into the writing style of the Creator of the world [2]. Where, on the other hand, Humanism became pragmatic and programmatic, as in the gymnasial ideologies of bourgeois nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries, the pattern of the literary society expanded into the norm of political society. From then on, nations organized themselves as fully literate compulsory friendship associations, sworn to a nationally binding reading canon. In addition to the common European ancient authors, national and modern classics were now also mobilized—their letters to the public were elevated through the book market and higher schools to effective motives for nation-building. What are modern nations other than the powerful fictions of reading publics, which through the same writings would become a like-minded union of friends? The general conscription for male youth and the general reading requirement for youths of both sexes characterize the classical bourgeois era, that is, the era of armed and literate Humanism, which today's new and old conservatives nostalgically and helplessly look back on, completely unable to account for the meaning of a reading canon from a media theory perspective—if one wants a current impression of this, one can read about how miserably the results of a recent national debate in Germany about the supposed necessity of a new literary canon have turned out.

Indeed, from 1789 to 1945, the reading-friendly national Humanisms had their heyday; in their midst resided, power-conscious and self-satisfied, the caste of old and new philologists, who saw themselves entrusted with the task of initiating the descendants into the circle of recipients of the authoritative thicker letters. The power of teachers at that time and the key role of philologists were grounded in their privileged knowledge of the authors who were eligible as senders of community-building writings. In substance, bourgeois Humanism was nothing other than the authority to impose the classics on youth and assert the universal validity of national readings [3]. Thus, bourgeois nations themselves were to some extent literary and postal products—fictions of a fateful friendship with distant compatriots and sympathetically connected readers of utterly inspiring shared authors.

If this era now seems irrevocably over, it is not because people, out of decadent whim, are no longer willing to fulfill their national literary quota; the era of national-bourgeois Humanism has come to an end because the art of writing letters of love to a nation of friends, no matter how professionally practiced, could no longer suffice to knit the tele-communicative bond between the inhabitants of a modern mass society. Through the media establishment of mass culture in the First World in 1918 (radio) and after 1945 (television), and even more so through the current networking revolutions, the coexistence of people in contemporary societies has been placed on new foundations. These are, as can easily be shown, decisively post-literary, post-epistolary, and consequently post-humanistic. Those who consider the prefix post in these formulations too dramatic could replace it with the adverb marginal—so our thesis is: modern large societies can only marginally produce their political and cultural synthesis through literary, epistolary, humanistic media. Literature is by no means at its end because of this, but it has differentiated itself into a subculture sui generis, and the days of its overestimation as the bearer of national spirits are over. Social synthesis is no longer—nor even seemingly—primarily a matter of books and letters. New media of political-cultural telecommunication have come to the fore, which have pushed the schema of writing-born friendships to a modest level. The era of modern Humanism as a school and education model has ended because the illusion can no longer be sustained that political and economic large structures could be organized according to the amiable model of the literary society.

This disillusionment, which has been awaiting acknowledgment by the still humanistically educated since at least the First World War, has a peculiarly protracted, marked history of reversals and distortions. For precisely at the glaring end of the national-humanistic era, in the unprecedentedly darkened years after 1945, the humanistic model was to experience a late bloom once again; it was an organized and reflexive Renaissance that provides the pattern for all subsequent small reanimations of Humanism. If the background were not so dark, one would have to speak of a competition in enthusiasm and self-deception. In the fundamentalist moods of the years after 1945, it was not enough for many people, for understandable reasons, to return from the horrors of war to a society that once again presented itself as a pacified audience of reading friends—as if a Goethe youth could erase the memory of the Hitler Youth. At that time, many found it congenial to reopen not only the newly reissued Roman readings but also the second, biblical basic readings of Europeans and to invoke the foundations of what was now again called the West in Christian Humanism. This desperate Neo-Humanism, looking longingly from Weimar to Rome, was a dream of saving the European soul through radicalized bibliophilia, a melancholy-hopeful enthusiasm for the civilizing, humanizing power of classical literature—if we may, for a moment, take the liberty of regarding Cicero and Christ side by side as classics.

In these post-war Humanisms, however illusion-born they may have been, a motive is revealed that alone can make the humanistic tendency comprehensible in its entirety—neither in the days of the Romans nor in the era of modern bourgeois nation-states: Humanism as a word and a matter always has an antagonist, for it is the commitment to reclaiming humanity from barbarism. It is easy to understand that precisely those ages that have had their particular experiences with the barbaric potential unleashed in violent interactions between humans are also the times when the call for Humanism tends to become louder and more demanding. Whoever asks today about the future of humanity and humanizing media fundamentally wants to know whether there is hope of mastering the current tendencies toward dehumanization. It is alarming to note that dehumanization, today as always, tends to break out precisely where power is exercised at its greatest intensity, whether as immediate martial and imperial brutality or as the everyday bestialization of people in the media of unrestrained entertainment. For both, the Romans provided the European-defining models—on the one hand with their all-pervasive militarism, on the other with their forward-looking entertainment industry of bloody games. The latent theme of Humanism is thus the taming of humanity, and its latent thesis is: proper reading makes one tame.

The phenomenon of Humanism deserves attention today, above all because it—however veiled and awkward—reminds us that in high culture, humans are constantly subject to two formative forces at once—we shall simply call them the inhibiting and the uninhibiting influences for the sake of simplification. The creed of Humanism includes the conviction that humans are "animals under influence" and that it is therefore essential to expose them to the right kind of influences. The label Humanism reminds us—in falsely harmless terms—of the ongoing battle over humanity, which unfolds as a struggle between bestializing and taming tendencies.

For the era of Cicero, the two formative forces are still easy to identify, for each possesses its characteristic medium. As for the bestializing influences, the Romans, with their amphitheaters, their animal hunts, their gladiatorial games to the death, and their execution spectacles, had installed the most successful mass media network of the Ancient World. In the roaring stadiums around the Mediterranean, the unrestrained homo inhumanus found his pleasure as rarely before or since [4]. During the Imperial era, the provision of the Roman masses with bestializing fascinations became an indispensable, routinely developed technique of governance, which has remained memorable thanks to the Juvenalian formula of bread and circuses. One can only understand ancient Humanism if one also grasps it as taking sides in a media conflict—that is, as the resistance of the book against the amphitheater and as the opposition of humanizing, patience-inducing, and reflective philosophical reading against the dehumanizing, impatient, and riotous sensationalism in the stadiums. What the educated Romans called humanitas would be unthinkable without the demand for abstinence from mass culture in the theaters of cruelty. Should the Humanist himself ever stray into the roaring crowd, it would only be to realize that he too is human and therefore can be infected by bestialization. He returns home from the theater, ashamed of his involuntary participation in the infectious sensations, and is now inclined to admit that nothing human is alien to him. But in doing so, he acknowledges that humanity consists in choosing taming media for the development of one's nature and in refraining from uninhibiting ones. The purpose of this choice of media is to wean oneself from possible bestiality and to place a distance between oneself and the dehumanizing escalations of the theatrical mob.

These hints make it clear: the question of Humanism is about much more than the bucolic assumption that reading is educational. It is about nothing less than an anthropodicy—that is, a determination of humanity in light of its biological openness and moral ambivalence. Above all, the question of how a human being can become a true or real human being must inevitably be posed as a media question from here on out, if we understand media as the communal and communicative means by which humans shape themselves into what they can and will become.

In the autumn of 1946, in the miserable valley of the European post-war crisis, the philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote his now-famous essay on Humanism—a text that, at first glance, could also be understood as a thicker letter to friends. But the befriending process that this letter sought to use to its advantage was no longer simply that of bourgeois aesthetic communication, and the concept of friendship invoked by this memorable philosophical epistle was by no means the communion between a national audience and its classic author. Heidegger knew, when he formulated this letter, that he would have to speak with a faltering voice or write with a hesitant hand and that the pre-established harmony between the author and his readers could no longer be assumed in any way. It was not even clear to him at that time whether he still had any friends at all, and if friends could still be found, the basis of these friendships would have to be redefined, beyond everything that had hitherto been considered the foundation of friendship among the educated in Europe and in the nations. One thing, at least, is obvious: what the philosopher put on paper in that autumn of 1946 was not a speech to his own nation and not a speech to a future Europe; it was a more ambiguous, simultaneously cautious and bold attempt by the author to imagine whether he could still conceive of a sympathetic recipient of his message at all—and it resulted, strangely enough for a man of Heidegger's regionalist nature, in a letter to a foreigner—a potential friend in the distance, a young thinker who had taken the liberty during the German occupation of France to be inspired by a German philosopher.

So, a new befriending technique? A new postal system? A different way of gathering like-minded and fellow thinkers around a piece of writing sent out into the distance? Another attempt at Humanization? A different social contract between bearers of a homeless, no longer national-humanistic reflection? Heidegger's opponents, of course, did not fail to point out that the cunning little man from Meßkirch instinctively seized the first opportunity after the war to work on his rehabilitation: he had cleverly exploited the goodwill of one of his French admirers to retreat from political ambiguity into the highland of mystical reflection. These suspicions may sound suggestive and compelling, but they miss the intellectual and communicative strategic event that the initially Paris-addressed, later independently published, and translated essay on Humanism represents. For by exposing and questioning the conditions of European Humanism in this writing, which was formally intended to be a letter, Heidegger opened up a trans-humanistic or post-humanistic [5] space of thought, in which a significant part of the philosophical reflection on humanity has since moved.

Heidegger takes up a formulation from a letter by Jean Beaufret: Comment redonner un sens au mot, Humanisme? (How can we restore meaning to the word, Humanism?) The letter to the young Frenchman contains a gentle rebuke to the questioner, most clearly revealed in two direct replies:

“This question arises from the intent to hold on to the word ‘Humanism’. I wonder if that is necessary. Or is the mischief that all titles of this kind cause not already evident enough?” “Your question not only assumes that you want to hold on to the word ‘Humanism’, but it also concedes that this word has lost its meaning.”

("On Humanism"; 1949, 1981, pages 7 and 35)

Thus, a part of Heidegger’s strategy is already manifest: the word Humanism must be abandoned if the true philosophical task, which the humanistic or metaphysical tradition already wanted to present as solved, is to be re-experienced in its original simplicity and inevitability. Put more pointedly: why promote the human being and his significant philosophical self-representation in Humanism as the solution when the catastrophe of the present has shown that the human being himself, along with his systems of metaphysical self-exaltation and self-explanation, is the problem? This adjustment of Beaufret's question is not without masterful malice, for it, in Socratic fashion, presents the student with the false answer contained in the question. At the same time, it is done with intellectual seriousness, as the three prevalent remedies in the European crisis of 1945—Christianity, Marxism, and Existentialism—are characterized side by side as variations of Humanism that differ only in surface structure—more sharply put: as three ways of evading the radical question of the essence of humanity.

Heidegger offers to bring an end to the immeasurable omission of European thought—namely, the failure to pose the question of the essence of humanity in the only appropriate, he means, existential-ontological way; at least, the author indicates his willingness to serve the arrival of the properly posed question in whatever preliminary terms. With these seemingly modest turns, Heidegger reveals disturbing consequences: Humanism—in its ancient, Christian, and Enlightenment forms—is certified as the agent of a two-thousand-year-long non-thinking; it is reproached for having blocked the emergence of the true question of the essence of humanity with its quickly given, seemingly self-evident, and irrefutable interpretations of human nature. Heidegger declares that his work from Being and Time onward is directed against Humanism, not because it overestimated humanitas, but because it did not set it high enough ("On Humanism," page 21). But what does it mean to set the essence of humanity high enough? It means, first of all, to renounce a habitual false devaluation. The question of the essence of humanity will not get on the right track until one distances oneself from the oldest, most persistent, and most pernicious practice of European metaphysics: defining humanity as animal rationale. In this interpretation of human nature, humanity remains understood from an animalitas expanded by intellectual additions. Heidegger’s existential-ontological analysis revolts against this, for he believes that the essence of humanity can never be stated from a zoological or biological perspective, even if a spiritual or transcendent factor is regularly added to it.

In this regard, Heidegger is relentless; indeed, he steps between the animal and the human like an angry angel with crossed swords, denying any ontological community between the two. In his anti-vitalist and anti-biologistic affect, he is driven to near-hysterical expressions, such as when he declares that it seems “as though the essence of the divine is closer to us than the strangeness of living beings” ("On Humanism," page 17). At the core of this anti-vitalist pathos lies the realization that humanity stands in ontological, not specific or generic, difference to animals, which is why it can under no circumstances be understood as an animal with a cultural or metaphysical surplus. Rather, the mode of being of the human is essentially and ontologically different from that of all other vegetative and animal beings; for humanity has a world and is in the world, while plants and animals are merely bound to their respective environments.

If there is a philosophical basis for speaking of human dignity, it is because humanity is addressed by Being itself and, as Heidegger liked to say as a pastoral philosopher, is appointed to its stewardship. That is why humans have language—but according to Heidegger, they do not possess it primarily to communicate with each other and tame each other through such communication.

“Rather, language is the house of Being, in which humanity dwells, by existing in the truth of Being, and belongs to it by guarding it. Thus, in determining the humanity of humanity as existence, the essential is not humanity, but Being as the dimension of the ecstatic in existence.” ("On Humanism," page 24)

Listening to these initially hermetic formulations, one begins to sense why Heidegger's critique of Humanism is so confident that it will not lead to Inhumanism. For by rejecting the claims of Humanism to have already adequately interpreted the essence of humanity and by opposing his own onto-anthropology, he nevertheless adheres to the most important function of classical Humanism, namely the befriending of humanity with the word of the Other, in an indirect way—indeed, he radicalizes this befriending motive and shifts it from the pedagogical field to the center of ontological reflection.

This is the meaning of the often-quoted and much-ridiculed phrase of humanity as the shepherd of Being. Using images from the motif circle of pastoral and idyll, Heidegger speaks of the task of humanity, which is its essence, and of the essence of humanity, from which its task arises: namely, to guard Being and correspond to Being. Certainly, humanity does not guard Being like a sick person guards a bed, more like a shepherd guards his flock in a clearing, with the significant difference that here, instead of a flock of cattle, the world as an open circumstance is to be serenely observed—and further, that this guarding is not a freely chosen surveillance task in one's own interest, but that humans are employed as guardians by Being itself. The place where this employment is valid is the clearing or the site where Being arises as what is.

What gives Heidegger the certainty that he has reflected upon and surpassed Humanism with these turns is the fact that he includes humanity, as the clearing of Being, in a taming and befriending process that goes deeper than any humanistic de-bestialization and any educated love for the text that speaks of love could ever reach. By determining humanity as the shepherd and neighbor of Being and designating language as the house of Being, he binds humanity into a correspondence with Being that imposes a radical self-restraint and confines him—the shepherd—to the proximity or embrace of the house; he exposes him to a reflection that demands more stillness and silent obedience than the most comprehensive education could ever achieve. Humanity is subjected to an ecstatic self-restraint that goes further than the civilized pause of the text-pious reader before the classical word. Heidegger's dwelling in the house of language, holding back, is defined as a waiting, listening for what will be given to say by Being itself. It invokes a listening into the proximity in which humanity must become quieter and tamer than the Humanist in reading the classics. Heidegger wants a humanity that is more obedient than a mere good reader. He wishes to initiate a befriending process in which he himself would no longer be received merely as a classic or as an author among others; it would be best, for now, if the audience, which naturally consists only of a few with a presentiment, would take note that Being itself has begun to speak anew through him, the mentor of the question of Being.

Thus, Heidegger elevates Being to the sole author of all essential letters and appoints himself as its current scribe. Those who speak from such a position may also record stammering and publish silence. So, Being sends the decisive letters; more precisely, it gives hints to spiritually alert friends, to receptive neighbors, to collectedly quiet shepherds. Yet, as far as we can see, no nations, nor even alternative schools, can be formed from the circle of these co-shepherds and friends of Being—not least because there can be no public canon of the hints of Being—unless Heidegger's opera omnia were to be considered, for the time being, as the standard and voice of the nameless super-author.

Given these dark communions, it remains entirely unclear how a society of neighbors of Being could be constituted—it must, before anything clearer emerges, be understood as an invisible church of scattered individuals, each of whom listens in their own way to the immense and awaits the words in which what the speaker is given to say by language itself becomes audible. It is idle to go into the cryptic-Catholic character of Heidegger's meditation figures here. What matters now is that Heidegger's critique of Humanism propagates a change in attitude that points humanity toward a meditative asceticism far beyond all humanistic educational goals. Only through this asceticism could a society of the meditative form beyond the humanistic literary society; it would be a society of people who have moved humanity from the center because they have understood that they exist only as "neighbors of Being"—and not as willful homeowners or as furnished gentlemen with unbreakable main leases. To this asceticism, Humanism can contribute nothing as long as it remains oriented toward the ideal of the strong human.

The humanistic friends of human authors miss the blessed weakness in which Being reveals itself to the touched, the addressed. For Heidegger, there is no way from Humanism to this heightened ontological exercise in humility; he sees in it, rather, a contribution to the history of the armament of subjectivity. Indeed, Heidegger interprets the historical world of Europe as the theater of militant Humanisms; it is the field in which human subjectivity enacts its fateful seizure of power over all that exists. From this perspective, Humanism must offer itself as the natural accomplice of all conceivable atrocities that can be committed in the name of human welfare. Even in the tragic Titanomachia of the mid-century between Bolshevism, Fascism, and Americanism, only three variants of the same anthropocentric violence [7] and three candidacies for humanitarian world domination faced each other—from Heidegger's perspective—while Fascism stepped out of line by displaying its contempt for inhibiting peace and educational values more openly than its competitors. Indeed, Fascism is the metaphysics of disinhibition—perhaps also a form of disinhibited metaphysics. From Heidegger's perspective, Fascism was the synthesis of Humanism and Bestialism—that is, the paradoxical coincidence of inhibition and disinhibition.

In light of such monstrous distortions and perversions, it was only natural to reexamine the basis for human taming and human education, and if Heidegger's ontological shepherd games—which already sounded strange and offensive in their time—seem completely anachronistic today, they still retain the merit of having articulated the epochal question despite their awkwardness and clumsiness: What still tames humanity if Humanism as a school of human taming fails? What tames humanity if its previous efforts at self-taming have largely led to its seizure of power over all that exists? What tames humanity if, after all the previous experiments with the education of the human race, it remains unclear who or what educates the educators and for what purpose? Or is it perhaps no longer possible to competently pose the question of the taming and shaping of humanity within the framework of mere taming and educational theories?

We will deviate from Heidegger's instructions to remain in the final figures of meditative thought by attempting to historically characterize the ecstatic clearing in which humanity allows itself to be addressed by Being. It will become apparent that the human residence in the clearing—Heidegger would say the standing or being held in the clearing of Being—is by no means an ontological primordial relationship inaccessible to further questioning. There is a history of humanity stepping into the clearing—a social history of humanity's susceptibility to the question of Being and a historical movement in the opening of the ontological difference—that Heidegger resolutely ignored.

On the one hand, we must speak here of a natural history of serenity, through which humanity became the world-open, world-capable animal; on the other hand, we must speak of a social history of taming, through which humans originally experienced themselves as the beings who gather [8] to correspond to the whole. Thus, the real history of the clearing—from which a reflection on humanity that goes beyond Humanism must begin—consists of two larger narratives that converge in a common perspective, namely, in the account of how the sapiens-animal became the sapiens-human. The first of these two narratives accounts for the adventure of hominization. It tells how, in the long periods of pre-human-human prehistory, the live-bearing mammal became a species of prematurely born beings that—if one may speak so paradoxically—emerged into their environments with an increasing excess of animal incompleteness. Here, the anthropogenetic revolution occurs—the explosion of biological birth into the act of coming into the world. Heidegger, in his stubborn reserve against all anthropology and in his eagerness to preserve the ontological purity of the starting point in humanity's existence and being-in-the-world, has taken far too little notice of this explosion. For the fact that humanity could become the being that is in the world has phylogenetic roots that can be hinted at by the profound concepts of prematurity, neoteny, and humanity's chronic animal immaturity. One could go so far as to define humanity as the being that has failed in its animality and remaining an animal. By failing as an animal, the indefinite being is ejected from the environment and thus acquires the world in the ontological sense. This ecstatic coming-into-the-world and this "surrender" to Being is bequeathed to humanity by phylogenetic heritage. If humanity is in the world, it is because it belongs to a movement that brings it into the world and exposes it to the world. It is the product of a hyper-birth that turns the infant into a world-ling.

This exodus would only produce psychotic animals if, along with the emergence into the world, there were not also an entry into what Heidegger called the house of Being. The traditional languages of humankind have made the ecstasy of being-in-the-world livable by showing humanity how its being with the world can simultaneously be experienced as being with itself. In this respect, the clearing is an event at the boundary between natural and cultural history, and the human coming-into-the-world early on takes on the features of coming-into-language [9].

But the history of the clearing cannot be developed solely as a narrative of humanity's entry into the houses of language. For as soon as speaking humans live together in larger groups and bind themselves not only to language houses but also to built houses, they come into the force field of sedentary modes of existence. They are now no longer only sheltered by their languages but also tamed by their dwellings. In the clearing, the houses of humans rise—as its most conspicuous markers—along with the temples of their gods and the palaces of their rulers. Cultural historians have made it clear that with the sedentarization, the relationship between humanity and animals as a whole came under new signs. With the taming of humanity through the house, the epic of domesticated animals begins at the same time. However, the binding of these to the houses of humans is not merely a matter of taming but also of training and breeding.

Humanity and domesticated animals—the history of this monstrous cohabitation has yet to be adequately portrayed, and philosophers have certainly not wanted to acknowledge what they themselves have to do in the midst of this history [10]. Only in a few places has the veil of philosophical silence been torn over the house, the human, and the animal as a biopolitical complex, and what was then heard were dizzying hints at problems that are still too heavy for humans. The least of these is the intimate connection between domesticity and theorizing—since one could certainly go so far as to define theory as a form of housework, or rather as a kind of domestic leisure; for what theory was according to its ancient definitions resembles a serene gaze out of the window—it is primarily a matter of contemplation, while in modern times—since knowledge is supposed to be power—it has clearly taken on the character of work. In this sense, windows are the clearings in the walls behind which humans became beings capable of theorizing. Even walks, where movement and reflection merge, are derivatives of domesticity. Heidegger's notorious meditative walks along field and woodland paths are typical movements of one who has a house at his back.

But this derivation of the clearing from secure domesticity only captures the more harmless aspect of becoming human in houses. The clearing is also a battlefield, a place of decision and selection. In this regard, nothing can be clarified with the phrases of philosophical pastoral. Where houses stand, decisions must be made about what will become of the humans who inhabit them; it is indeed decided, through action, what kinds of house builders will come to dominate. The seriousness of what is at stake here was described in distressing hints by the master of dangerous thinking, Nietzsche, in the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra under the heading: "Of the Diminishing Virtue":

“For he (Zarathustra) wanted to learn what had happened to humanity in the meantime: whether it had become greater or smaller. And once he saw a row of new houses; then he wondered and said: What do these houses mean? Truly, no great soul built them as its image! … these rooms and chambers: can men go in and out of them?

And Zarathustra stopped and pondered. Finally, he said sorrowfully: 'Everything has become smaller!' Everywhere I see lower gates: whoever is of my kind can still pass through, but— he must stoop! … I walk through this people and keep my eyes open: they have become smaller and are getting smaller: - but that is their teaching of happiness and virtue.

… Some of them want, but most of them are only wanted ... … Round, righteous, and kind they are with one another, as grains of sand are round, righteous, and kind with grains of sand. To modestly embrace a small happiness—that is what they call resignation! ... They truly want just one thing most of all: that no one hurts them … Virtue to them is what makes one modest and tame: that is how they turned the wolf into a dog and humanity itself into humanity's best domestic animal.”

(KSA 4, pages 211-214)

Without a doubt, a theoretical discourse on humanity as a taming and breeding force is hidden in this rhapsodic sequence of sayings. From Zarathustra's perspective, the humans of the present are primarily one thing: successful breeders who have managed to turn the wild human into the last human. It goes without saying that such a thing could not have happened solely with humanistic, taming, training, and educational means. With the thesis of humanity as the breeder of humanity, the horizon of Humanism is shattered, insofar as Humanism can never and must never think beyond the question of taming and education: the Humanist accepts the given human and then applies his taming, training, and educational means to him—convinced, as he is, of the necessary connection between reading, sitting, and soothing.

Nietzsche, on the other hand—who read Darwin and Paul equally attentively—believes he perceives a second, darker horizon behind the cheerful horizon of school taming of humans. He senses a space where inevitable struggles over the directions of human breeding will begin—and it is in this space that the other, hidden face of the clearing is revealed. When Zarathustra walks through the city where everything has become smaller, he perceives the result of a hitherto successful and undisputed breeding policy: humanity has—so it seems to him—through a skillful combination of ethics and genetics managed to breed itself small. They have subjected themselves to domestication and have set in motion a selection process toward domestic amiability within themselves. From this insight springs Zarathustra's peculiar critique of Humanism as a rejection of the false harmlessness with which the modern good human surrounds himself. Indeed, it would not be harmless if humans bred humans toward harmlessness. Nietzsche's suspicion of all humanistic culture insists on uncovering the domestication secret of humanity. He wants to name the previous holders of breeding monopolies—the priests and teachers who presented themselves as friends of humanity—and to launch a world-historically novel conflict between different breeders and different breeding programs.

This is the fundamental conflict of all future postulated by Nietzsche: the struggle between the small breeders and the great breeders of humanity—one could also say between Humanists and Super-Humanists, friends of humanity and friends of the Overhuman. The emblem Overhuman in Nietzsche's reflections does not stand for the dream of rapid disinhibition or an evasion into the bestial—as the booted bad Nietzsche readers of the 1930s thought. The expression also does not stand for the idea of a re-breeding of humanity to the status before the time of domestication and church animality. When Nietzsche speaks of the Overhuman, he is thinking of an age far beyond the present [11]. He takes measure of the millennial processes in which human production has been carried out so far—thanks to intimate interconnections of breeding, taming, and education—in a process that, however, largely managed to make itself invisible and that, under the mask of the school, had domestication as its object.

With these hints—and more than hints is neither possible nor permissible in this field—Nietzsche stakes out a gigantic terrain on which the determination of humanity in the future will have to take place, whether or not the concept of the Overhuman plays a role. It may well be that Zarathustra was the speaking mask of a philosophizing hysteria, whose infectious effects have perhaps already disappeared forever. But the discourse on the difference and interweaving of taming and breeding, indeed the very hint of the dawn of a consciousness of human production and, more generally, of anthropotechnics—these are guidelines that contemporary thought cannot turn away from unless it wants to devote itself anew to harmlessness. Nietzsche probably overreached when he spread the suggestion that the domestication of humanity was the deliberate work of a pastoral breeding association, that is, a project of the clerical, Pauline instinct, which senses everything that could go independently and self-confidently in humanity and immediately applies its extermination and mutilation means against such things. This was certainly a hybrid thought, partly because it conceived the potential breeding process much too short-term—as if a few generations of priestly rule would suffice to turn wolves into dogs and prehistoric humans into Basel professors [12]; it is hybrid, but more because it presupposes a planning perpetrator where one would rather expect breeding without breeders, that is, a subjectless biocultural drift. Yet even after deducting the overreaching and suspiciously anti-clerical elements, there remains a sufficiently hard core of Nietzsche's idea to provoke later thought about humanity beyond the harmlessness of Humanism.

The realization that the domestication of humanity is the great unthought that Humanism from antiquity to the present has turned a blind eye to—that is enough to get into deep water. Where we can no longer stand, there the evidence rises over our heads that mere educational taming and befriending of humanity with letters alone could never suffice. Certainly, reading was a great human-forming power—and it still is, in more modest dimensions; however, selection—however it may have been carried out—was always in play as the power behind the power. Lessons and selections have more to do with each other than any cultural historian has been willing or able to consider, and even if it seems impossible for us, for the time being, to sufficiently precisely reconstruct the connection between reading and selection, it is more than a vague notion that this connection exists in reality.

The writing culture itself, until the recently enforced universal literacy, has had sharply selective effects; it has deeply divided its host societies and thrown a chasm between literate and illiterate humans, whose unbridgeability reached almost the severity of a species difference. If one wanted to speak anthropologically again, contrary to Heidegger's warnings, historical humans could be defined as animals, of whom some can read and write, while others cannot. From here, it is only a step, though a challenging one, to the thesis that humans are animals of whom some breed their kind, while others are the bred—a thought that has been part of the pastoral folklore of Europeans since Plato's reflections on education and the state. Something of this resonates in Nietzsche's above-quoted sentence that among the humans in the small houses, few want, but most are only wanted. To be merely wanted means to exist only as the object, not as the subject of selection.

It is the signature of the technical and anthropotechnical age that more and more humans are moving onto the active or subjective side of selection, even without necessarily having voluntarily pushed themselves into the role of selectors. It may also be stated: there is an unease in the power of choice, and it will soon be an option for innocence when humans explicitly refuse to exercise the selection power they have factually won. But as soon as powers of knowledge are positively developed in any field, humans cut a poor figure if, as in times of earlier incapacity, they want to let a higher power, be it God, chance, or others, act in their place. Since mere refusals or resignations usually fail due to their sterility, the future will likely depend on actively taking up the game and formulating a codex of anthropotechnics. Such a codex would retroactively change the meaning of classical Humanism—because with it, it would be revealed and written down that humanitas not only includes the friendship of humanity with humanity; it always also implies—and with growing explicitness—that humanity represents the higher power over humanity.

Something of this was present to Nietzsche when he dared to refer to himself in anticipation of his distant effects as a force majeure. One can let the scandal set off by this statement rest, as it is many centuries, if not millennia, too early to judge such pretensions. Who has the breath to imagine a world age in which Nietzsche will be as historical as Plato was for Nietzsche? It suffices to realize that the next long periods for humanity will be periods of species-political decision. In them, it will be revealed whether humanity or its main cultural factions will succeed in at least initiating effective self-taming procedures. Even in contemporary culture, the Titanomachia between taming and bestializing impulses and their respective media is taking place. Even greater taming successes would be surprising given a civilizational process in which an unprecedented wave of disinhibition seems unstoppable [14]. But whether long-term development will also lead to a genetic reform of species traits—whether future anthropotechnology will advance to explicit trait planning; whether humanity will move globally from birth fatalism to optional birth and prenatal selection—these are questions in which, however blurred and uncanny, the evolutionary horizon before us begins to clear.

It belongs to the signature of humanitas that humans are confronted with problems by humans that are too heavy for humans without them being able to resolve to leave them untouched due to their severity. This provocation of human nature by the inescapable, which is also the unmanageable, has left an indelible mark on the very beginning of European philosophy—indeed, perhaps philosophy itself is this mark in the broadest sense. After what has been said, it is no longer all too surprising that this mark, in particular, turns out to be a discourse on human care and human breeding. Plato, in his dialogue Politikos—often translated as The Statesman—has presented the Magna Charta of a European pastoral politology. This writing is significant not only because it shows more clearly than anywhere else what antiquity truly understood by thinking—the acquisition of truth through careful division or cutting of concepts and matters; its incomparable position in the history of thinking about humanity lies primarily in the fact that it is conducted almost like a working conversation among breeders—not coincidentally with the participation of an atypical cast for Plato—a foreigner and a younger Socrates, as if ordinary Athenians were not yet allowed to partake in such conversations—how could they be if the discussion concerns selecting a statesman who does not exist in Athens and breeding a populace not yet found in any empirical city? This foreigner, therefore, and his interlocutor, Socrates junior, devote themselves to the risky attempt to subject future politics or city-shepherding to transparent rational rules.

With this project, Plato bears witness to an intellectual unrest in the human park that could never be completely appeased again. Since the Politikos and the Politeia, discourses have been in the world that speak of the human community as if it were a zoological park, which is simultaneously a theme park; the human condition in parks or cities now appears as a zoopolitical task. What presents itself as a reflection on politics is, in truth, a foundational reflection on the rules for operating human parks. If there is a dignity of humanity that deserves to be brought to speech in philosophical reflection, it is primarily because humans are not only held in political theme parks but also hold themselves there. Humans are self-caring, self-guarding beings who—wherever they live—generate a park space around themselves. In city parks, national parks, cantonal parks, eco-parks—everywhere, humans must form an opinion on how their self-holding should be regulated.

As for Plato's zoo and its reestablishment, it is about nothing less than determining whether there is only a gradual or a specific difference between the population and the direction. Under the first assumption, the distance between the human keepers and their wards would be merely incidental and pragmatic—one could, in this case, grant the herd the ability to elect their shepherds periodically. But if there is a specific difference between zoo directors and zoo inhabitants, then they would be fundamentally different, so much so that an electoral direction would not be advisable but only a direction based on insight. Only the false zoo directors, the pseudo-statesmen, and political sophists would then campaign for themselves with the argument that they were of the same kind as the herd, while the true breeder would emphasize difference and discreetly imply that he, acting from insight, is closer to the gods than to the confused creatures he supervises.

Plato's dangerous sense of dangerous topics touches the blind spot of all high-cultural pedagogies and politics—the current inequality of humans before the knowledge that gives power. In the logical form of a grotesque exercise in definition, the dialogue on the statesman develops the preambles of a political anthropotechnics; in this, it is not only about the taming guidance of the already tame herds but about a systematic re-breeding of human specimens closer to the ideal. The exercise begins so comically that even the not entirely comical end could easily be drowned in laughter. What is more grotesque than defining statesmanship as a discipline dealing with the foot-walkers among herd-living beings?—for human leaders do not practice the breeding of swimming creatures but of land-walkers. Among the land-walkers, one must separate the winged from the unwinged, if one aims at the human populations, who are known to lack feathers and wings. The stranger in Plato's dialogue now adds that this very foot-folk among the tame is again divided into two distinct subgroups—namely, “that some are hornless by nature, while others are horn-bearing”. A willing interlocutor does not need to be told this twice. The two groups correspond to two types of shepherding, namely shepherds for horned herds and shepherds for the hornless—it should be obvious that one finds the true leaders of the human group only by excluding the shepherds for the horned. For if one were to let horn-shepherds shepherd humans, what else could one expect but encroachments by the unsuitable and seemingly suitable? The good kings or basileioi, so the stranger says, thus tend a truncated herd without horns (265d). But that is not all; they also have the task of tending unmixed-breeding beings—that is, creatures that do not cross-breed, as horses and donkeys tend to do—they must therefore guard endogamy and prevent bastardization. When the characteristic of two-footedness—modernly spoken: upright gait—is finally added to these unwinged, hornless, only with their kind breeding bipeds, then the shepherding skill, which refers to unwinged, hornless, unmixed-breeding bipeds, is already quite well selected as the true art and distinguished from all sham competencies. This provident shepherding skill must now, in turn, be divided into tyrannical or voluntary. If the tyrannical form is again excluded as false, illusory, then the true statesmanship remains: it is determined as the “voluntary herding… over voluntary living beings” (276e).

Up to this point, Plato has managed to place his teaching on statesmanship entirely within shepherding and herding images—and he has selected from dozens of false images of this skill the only true image, the valid idea of the matter in question. But now, as the definition seems complete, the dialogue suddenly shifts to a different metaphor—but this happens, as we shall see, not to give up what has been achieved but to take up the most difficult piece of human shepherding, the breeding control of reproduction, from a shifted perspective even more vigorously. Here, the famous weaver metaphor of the statesman has its place. The real and true basis of royal art, according to Plato, cannot be found in the citizens' vote, which can be given or withdrawn from the politician at will; it is also not found in inherited privileges or new presumptions. The Platonic ruler finds the reason for his rule only in a breeding kingly knowledge, that is, an expert knowledge of the rarest and most considerate kind. Here emerges the phantom of an expert kingship whose legal basis is the insight into how humans—without ever harming their voluntariness—can best be sorted and combined. The royal anthropotechnics require the statesman to understand how to most effectively interweave the qualities most favorable to the commonwealth in voluntarily governable humans so that, under his hand, the human park reaches optimal homeostasis. This occurs when the two relative optimas of human breeding, martial bravery on the one hand, and philosophical-humanistic prudence on the other, are equally woven into the fabric of the commonwealth.

But because both virtues, in their one-sidedness, can produce specific degenerations—the first, the militaristic lust for war with its devastating consequences for the fatherlands, the second, the privatism of the intellectually quiet in the land, who can become so lukewarm and state-remote that they would fall into servitude without noticing it—the statesman must comb out the unsuitable natures before proceeding to weave the state with the suitable ones. With the remaining noble and voluntary natures alone, the good state is created—where the brave serve as the coarser warp threads and the prudent as the “fatter, softer, weft-like threads”—as Schleiermacher puts it; one might say somewhat anachronistically that the prudent are assigned to the cultural sector.

“This, then, we would say, is the completion of the fabric of practical statesmanship, that the temperaments of brave and prudent humans, woven and intertwined with each other, when the royal art, uniting both through agreement and friendship, forms the most splendid and excellent of all fabrics, encompassing all other free and enslaved people in the states under this web...” (311 b, c)

For the modern reader—who looks back at the humanistic gymnasia of the bourgeois era and the fascist eugenics, and at the same time already looks ahead into the biotechnological age—the explosiveness of these considerations is impossible to overlook. What Plato has the stranger present is the program of a humanistic society embodied in a single full Humanist, the master of royal shepherding. The task of this Over-Humanist would be none other than the planning of qualities in an elite that must be specially bred for the sake of the whole.

One complication remains to be considered: the Platonic shepherd is a true shepherd only because he embodies the earthly image of the only and original true shepherd—the god who, in the primeval times under the rule of Kronos, had directly shepherded humans. One must not forget that even for Plato, only the god comes into question as the original shepherd and breeder of humans. But now, after the great upheaval (metabole), as under the rule of Zeus, the gods have withdrawn and left humans the care of shepherding themselves, the wisest remains as the most worthy shepherd and breeder, in whom the memory of the heavenly visions of the best is most vividly preserved. Without the guiding image of the wise, human care of humanity remains a futile passion.

Two and a half thousand years after Plato's work, it now seems as if not only the gods but also the wise have withdrawn, leaving us with our unwisdom and half-knowledge in everything. What remains to us in place of the wise are their writings in their rough brilliance and growing darkness; they still lie in more or less accessible editions, and they could still be read if one only knew why one should still read them. It is their fate to stand silently on shelves like letters held at the post office, no longer to be collected—images or false images of a wisdom that contemporaries no longer believe in—sent by authors of whom we no longer know whether they can still be our friends.

Documents that are no longer delivered cease to be messages to possible friends—they turn into archived objects. This too, that the authoritative books of yesteryear have increasingly ceased to be letters to friends, and that they no longer lie on the day- and night tables of their readers but have sunk into the timelessness of archives—this too has taken much of the momentum from the humanistic movement. Ever more rarely do archivists descend to the textual antiquities to look up earlier statements on modern keywords. Perhaps it happens occasionally that in such research in the dead cellars of culture, the long unread papers begin to flicker, as distant lightning flashes over them. Can even the archive cellar become a clearing? Everything suggests that archivists and archive attendants have taken over the succession of the Humanists. For the few who still look around in the archives, the view emerges that our life is the confused answer to questions whose origin we have forgotten.

[1] The word for magic derives from the word for grammar.
[2] That the secret of life is closely connected with the phenomenon of writing is the great intuition of the Golem legend. Cf. Moshe Idel: "Le Golem", Paris 1992; in the preface to this book, Henri Atlan refers to the report of a commission appointed by the US President under the title: "Splicing Life. The Social and Ethical issue of Genetic Engineering with Human Beings"; 1982, whose authors refer to the Golem legend.
[3] Naturally also the national validity of universal readings.
[4] Only with the genre of Chain Saw Massacre movies has modern mass culture fully reconnected to the level of ancient bestiality consumption. Cf. Marc Edmundson, "Nightmare on Mainstreet. Angels, Sadomasochism and the Culture of the American Gothic"; Cambridge, MA, 1997.
[5] This gesture is missed by those who want to see something like an "anti-humanism" in Heidegger's onto-anthropology, a foolish formulation that suggests a metaphysical form of misanthropy.
[6] Moreover, it is equally unclear how a society of deconstructivists or a society of Levinas students could look, each giving priority to the suffering other.
[7] Cf. Silvio Vietta: "Heidegger's Critique of National Socialism and Technology"; Tübingen 1989.
[8] On the motif of "collection" cf. Manfred Schneider: "Collections of the Spirit", Neue Rundschau 1999, issue 2, pages 44 ff.
[9] Elsewhere I will explain how much more we must reckon with a coming into the image of humanity: P. Sl.: "Spheres I, Bubbles; Spheres II, Globes", Frankfurt 1998/1999.
[10] One of the few exceptions is the philosopher Elisabeth de Fontenay with her book "Le silence des bêtes, La philosophie face à l'épreuve de l'animalité", as well as the philosopher and civilizational historian Thomas Macho with "Animal", in: Christoph Wulf (ed.): "Handbook of Historical Anthropology", Weinheim and Basel 1997, pages 62-85.
[11] The fascist Nietzsche readers stubbornly misread that in relation to them and the present in general, it was only about the difference between the all-too-human and the human.
[12] On the genesis of the dog, neoteny, etc., cf. Dany-Robert Dufour: "Lettres sur la nature humaine à l'usage des survivants", Paris 1999.
[13] Cf. P. Sloterdijk: "Eurotaoismus. Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik", Frankfurt 1989 (discussions on ethics of omission and "braking" as a progressive function).
[14] I refer here to the wave of violence currently breaking into schools across the Western world, particularly in the USA, where teachers are beginning to build protection systems against students. Just as in antiquity, the book lost the battle against the theater, so today the school could lose the battle against the indirect educational powers, television, violent cinema, and other disinhibition media, if a new violence-damping cultivation structure does not emerge.
[15] Plato interpreters like Popper tend to overlook this twice-repeated "voluntary".