Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, Myself and Other Superstars

Hemingwaywrote "d--n" instead of "damn." In some of his works, at least. In The Naked and the Dead,Norman Mailer may have spelled out all of the other dirty words, but instead of "fuck" he wrote "fug."

And it was published and it was a huge success, and the reason, Mailer said, that in all of his later works he spelled out all of the naughty words is that when he was first introduced to Dorothy Parker, she said, "Ah, you're the young man who doesn't know how to spell 'fuck.'"

This would have been the late 40's. Hemmingway was still alive then, he lived until after 1960. I don't know whether he and Mailer ever met. It seems strange to me that I don't know that. I also don't know whether by the late 40's Hemmingway had begun to spell out the naughty words.

Clive Owen plays Hemmingway in a new HBO movie. He wears spectacles and a big moustache and a goofy expression, but still it's very flattering physically to Hemmingway.

Okay, okay. I'm not complaining about how much better-looking Cate Blanchett is than Elizabeth I was, or that Owen played Walter Raleigh opposite Blanchett.

And if we get right down to it (Mailer was a shrimp!), it's possible that if I had had more success as a writer, and as a young writer like Hemmingway and Mailer, I might have spent less of my life sneering at Hemmingway and Mailer.

That's either all the way right down to it, or painfully close.

Sloterdijk and His Opponents, Part II

Sloterdijk's footnotes refer to authors from ancient Greece, to medieval, renaissance and modern authors, mostly philosophers, but also psychologists, historians, theologians, natural scientists -- a vast array. Besides Plato and Nietzsche and Heidegger there are frequent references to Nicholas of Cues and to Augustine of Hippo, and to Indian and Chinese philosophers. Sloterdijk's reading list seems infinitely more interesting than Kallscheuer's half-vast repertoire. But then, Sloterdijk is interested in presenting new perspectives on the whole of human history. I can't imagine Kallscheuer ever attempting something like that. I can, however, imagine him proferring reasons why such an attempt is decadant, or passe, or otherwise outside the lines or against the rules of the club.

Of course it is possible that Sloterdijk was not involved at all in the publication of the volume with Kallscheuer's article, and has never been aware of Kallscheuer at all. Certainly, the attacks on Sloterdijk from various German academics and critics have been so numerous that no-one could give serious attention to them all, and clearly, Sloterdijk has had his mind on more interesting things. Regrettably, he has been caught up in a bitter feud with Juergen Habermas. Either Habermas or Sloterdijk is the leading philosopher in Germany today, or perhaps more accurately, Habermas leads one branch of philosophy and Sloterdijk another, and there are probably very few people who admire them both. I have not yet noticed any calls for reconciliation between the two, among the numerous articles praising one at the other's expense. I'm no exception here, I can't think of anything nice to say about Habermas.

The outward, obvious, immediate source of the feud was, depending upon which camp you're in, either Sloterdijk's lecture "Regeln fuer den Menschenpark" ("Rules For the Human Park"), first read in 1999; or a gross mis-representation of said lecture, leading to accusations against Sloterdijk of neo-fascist thought. A journalist, an intellectual lightweight, apparently, in any case he hasn't become a household name, heard Sloterdijk give his lecture, and reported that Sloterdijk was propogating right-wing extremism. Within days headlines were flying, and Habermas had weighed in. This is where I came in: I had heard Sloterdijk's name before, but "Regeln fuer den Menschenpark" was the first of his works which I read. Sloterdijk made the entire text of the essay available free of charge on the Internet -- which again was interpreted in two very different ways: Sloterdijk's opponents accused him of capitalizing on a scandal in order to further his fame; to others, such as myself, it seemed that Sloterdijk felt, quite rightly, that he was being grossly misunderstood, and slandered, and wanted the public to read the text in question and decide for themselves whether he was a fascist.

In "Regeln fuer den Menschenpark," Sloterdijk mentions that genetic technology is creating new possibilities for human life, which will create new choices, and that philosophy has yet to develop the new parameters which will be necessary to to deal intelligently with these new conditions and new choices. That's it, that's the entire bone of contention right there, the basis for accusations that Sloterdijk was calling for a return to eugenics as practiced under the Third Reich. It is apparently taboo among the philosophical mainstream in Germany, or what used to be the mainstream, embodied by Habermas and the traditional Left, to mention genetic technology without condemning the entire field out of hand. This traditional left goes back to Adorno, who in postwar Germany was the leader of the Institut fuer Sozialforschung in Frankfurt-on-the-Main, more commonly known as the Frankfurter Schule, the Frankfurt School. More than just the actual Institute in Frankfurt, the term "Frankfurt School" came to mean the entire dominant school of philosophy in Germany, and kritische Theorie, critical theory, was another name used to describe the whole movement: left-leaning, Marxist or otherwise post-Hegelian, including Adorno, Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and others, and definitely NOT including such independent thinkers as , Wittgensteinor Canetti. Adorno and Horkheimer were especially close, and collaborated at times as authors. Juergen Habermas definitely belonged to the Frankfurt School: in the literal sense, Adorno having personally appointed Habermas to a post at the Institut fuer Sozialforschung; and in the figurative sense as well, with Habermas, the last living prominent colleague of Adornos's, embodying in the public mind the continuation of Adorno's tradition.

The problem is that Sloterdijk came from the same tradition, and studied for a time at the Institut in Frankfurt, although he has proceeded in a very different direction. Sloterdijk, as well as Habermas, has a very great reverence and admiration for Adorno. However, Sloterdijk also admires Heidegger, and Oswald Spengler, and Michel Foucault, and Nietzsche, and other philosophers, all of whom the Frankfurter Schule tended either to disparage or to ignore. To the Habermas camp, to the traditional Left, to the Frankfurt School or at least to one narrow-minded stream of that movement, Sloterdijk's preoccupation with such thinkers is at best frivolous, at worst reactionary. They seem to forget that long passages of Adorno, for example in the Negative Dialektik, are devoted to Heidegger, certainly not in a positive way, but by no means dismissive either; and that Walter Benjamin, killed by the Gestapo before there was a Frankfurt School, but none the less one of its intellectual fathers, was a very enthusiastic reader of Nietzsche; and in general they seem to be connecting the dots in an ever-narrower philosophical system, ever more self-referential, ever less relevant to anything outside of itself. Sloterdijk may have begun as one of them, but at an early age he found that he could no longer dismiss all those others: Heidegger, Foucault, Nietzsche and the other bogeymen of the Frankfurt School. All the much worse that he praised Adorno along with all those others, lumped Adorno together with the movement's betes noirs. By the time of the Kritik der zynischen Vernunft Sloterdijk was coloring way outside the lines. Kallscheuer's attack upon Sloterdijk -- again, allowing for the possibility that I have completely misinterpreted it. Some may find this hard to believe, but I hope I'm wrong about Kallscheuer. I hope that there is a brilliance there which I do not see. There is no surplus of human brilliance in the world, any more than there are philosophers who are too popular -- is the attack of a priest against a heretic, and therefore much more bitter, more PERSONAL than it would have been if the transgressor had never been a member of the flock.

I too have serious reservations about Heidegger and Spengler and Foucault and Nietzsche. I feel the closest personal identification with Walter Benjamin, who was both a Leftist and a Nietzschean, but aside from Benjamin and myself there are very, very few Leftist Nietzscheans. Throw in my great enthusiasm for Sloterdijk, and I may very well be a movement of one. I have some reservations about Sloterdijk, but these are far outweighed by my admiration for the way he broke out of the mold of the Frankfurt School. In the course of his feud with Habermas, Sloterdijk has pronounced that the Frankfurt School is dead -- an exaggeration, perhaps, but even if not dead it surely has become deadly dull. We can no longer ask Adorno to choose between Sloterdijk and Habermas. But it seems to me that a truly profound reading of Adorno must lead to an image of him as a stubbornly INDIVIDUAL thinker, who followed no pre-determined path. In this Sloterdijk resembles him, while Habermas, along with hordes, now receding, of other adepts of the Frankfurt School, betrays the example and lesson of Adorno by trying too much to imitate the inimitable, and by repeating the dictums of one who very seldom repeated himself.

Sloterdijk and His Opponents, Part I

Peter Sloterdijk, who at least in his native Germany has become a celebrity, hosting, for example, along with fellow-philosopher Ruediger Safranski, the television series "Im Glashaus: das philosophische Quartett," seems often to take a positive pleasure in the opposition he arouses. He is without a doubt the most widely-disliked intellectual in contemporary Germany. It's not entirely unreasonable for a German to be proud of such a distinction: Adornowas probably the most widely-disliked German philosopher of his time, Schopenhauerand Nietzschewere practically unknown in their own lifetimes, Heine and Marx and Wittgenstein and Canetti were exiles, Walter Benjamin emigrated to France in 1933, when the Germans invaded France in 1940 Benjamin tried to flee to Spain, was pursued all the way by the Gestapo, and killed himself in the Pyranees rather than let himself be captured... Well, one could extend the list for quite a while. Germany's intellectual life is different than ours in the US. A very large part of the animosity against Sloterdijk, it seems quite clear to me, has to do with his popularity. A philosopher, many or most German intellectuals seem to believe, cannot be simultaneously profound and popular. Sloterdijk comes along and embodies a glorious refutation of this preconception, is at once brilliant and popular, not as popular as J.K. Rowling or, to name another anomalous conflux of depth and success, Cormac McCarthy, but just popular enough to stand out from the other intellectuals, just enough to make it clear that the readership for contemporary philosophy has widened a bit. The intellectual mainstream in Germany, rather than re-examining their belief in the incompatibility of of intellectual seriousness and publishing success, reject Sloterdijk out of hand. One very striking example is Otto Kallscheuer'sarticle "Spiritus Lector. Die Zerstreuung des Zeitgeists," the first and longest piece in the volume, published in 1987, of reactions to Sloterdijk's book Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, which appeared in 1983, sold over 70,000 copies in the first year alone, to give you a more exact idea of the size of the teapot in which this particular tempest has been brewing for over a quarter-century now, and made Sloterdijk famous and extremely controversial. Kallscheuer's essay is extremely difficult. I have nothing against difficult writing. Above, I speculated that Adorno, Theodor W. Adorno, was probably the most widely-disliked German thinker of his time. The scorn which was heaped upon him probably had to do above all, even more than with the fact that he was, from the end of World War II to his death in 1969, by far the most influential philosopher in Germany, and a Jew, with his absolutely unique and extraordinarily difficult prose style. But once I could see past the noise and hysteria surrounding Adorno, I began to appreciate his thinking, and began to eagerly labor through those uniquely difficult sentences of his. Now that he's been dead for four decades, one notices that the negative remarks have largely faded away, and that Adorno has largely been accorded his rightful place in the Pantheon of philosophy, although he's probably actually read as seldom as the other immortals. I love Gaddis' JR and Joyce's Finnegans Wake, too. But difficult is not always the same as good. It is not a praiseworthy end in itself if it does not offer rewards equal to the effort it demands. It can proceed from hopeless confusion as well as from genius. After a long study of the 54 pages of text of Kallsceuer's essay, followed by 85 footnotes over 12 pages, I'm fairly sure that it consists of a deeply confused and neurotic negative reaction to Sloterdijk, based first, last and in between on the sales figures of the Kritik der zynischen Vernunft. It's just possible that I have it all wrong, and that what Kallscheuer has produced here is a persiflage, a merciless satire of those who would refuse to consider a book to be serious because too many people had bought it -- but I have gone to the trouble of reading other of Kallscheuer's writings, and I'm afraid he's just not that funny. Excuse me, I should say: not intentionally. If I must sum up my reaction to Kallscheuer and to others like him in one line, I cannot think of an improvement on Mark Vonnegut's statement to his father Kurt, quoted in one of the latter's prefaces: "You've disappeared up your own asshole and died." (I gather that the Vonneguts, father and son, eventually reconciled.) There are many others like Kallscheuer, see his footnotes. The main reason I'm singling him out is that I don't want to dig through any more attacks against Sloterdijk, I find them deadly dull and dumb, the dozen or so negative articles I've read by as many different authors in a half-dozen popular, mainstream German publications and smaller, leftist intellectual ones, will last me for a long time to come.

Yes, most of the books on the bestsellers lists are crap. All the more reason to be happy when there's an anomaly, when Cormac McCarthy sticks out like a sore thumb between Kevin Trudeau and Dan Brown. If the stench of the masses horrifies you, just tell yourself that all those other people only bought No Country for Old Men to look smart and won't actually read it -- that is, if you're actually going to read it yourself. If not, telling yourself such things might just upset you further, but then again, pain can lead to greater wisdom.

Most people cannot live freely, cannot think for themselves, it's terrifying. Instead, they conform, to religions, for example, to political parties and movements, to academic trends. They obey, they believe, they connect the dots in the same way as others before them, all to distract themselves from an all-too-clear perception of their own existence. Philosophers are no exception, they slog along their dreary academic paths and repeat their mantras: those other authors are hugely successful, but they write trash. We are the keepers of the flame, we are the enlightened ones. Then someone like Sloterdijk comes along, who is truly free and obviously brilliant, and therefore fits into neither this slot nor that. His very existence calls certain assumptions into question. The honest reaction to him would be gratitude for throwing more light onto life. But such honesty is also brave, much more brave than most people can be. Free and brave thinkers must expect more venom than gratitude.

The book about Sloterdijk's Kritik der zynischen Vernunft -- it's entitled quite simply Peter Sloterdijks "Kritik der zynischen Vernunft", and I obtained it quite by accident, wishing to purchase Sloterdijk's famous work itself rather than a book about it, shopping online from across the Atlantic, rather than in a German bookstore -- is published by Suhrkamp, who also publish Sloterdijk himself. Although they have almost a monopoly of the more ambitious German authors, as far as I can determine they have not published any volumes by Kallscheuer alone. I have to wonder, therefore, since it seems not to have been a case of Suhrkamp calling on a writer from its own stable, whether Kallsceuer's vicious, ridiculous attack appeared in the Suhrkamp volume on Sloterdijk's insistence. I would like to think that that is how it happened, that it was Sloterdijk's way of saying, Look, you calf-biters, ("Wadenbeisser" is a beautiful German term of contempt for puny, insignificant critics, who nip at one's ankles and calves like tiny toy poodles.) take a long, 54-page-plus-85-footnotes look at one of your leaders. That it was Sloterdijk's way of saying how little such nonsense bothered him. Or perhaps, as I did, so too Sloterdijk found that Kallscheuer can be very funny, unintentionally. Sloterdijk often seems verschmitzt, an untranslatable German word meaning at once sly, quietly observing, amused, calm.

I've mentioned the 54 pages and 85 footnotes twice now, I should perhaps clarify that there's nothing wrong, in my opinion, with a lot of footnotes in philosophical writing. Almost all philosophers include a lot of footnotes in their works, Sloterdijk is no exception. The only exception I can think of, in the couple of centuries in which footnotes have been commonly written, is Nietzsche, and he may have had no other reason for leaving them out than that he wanted to emphasize how different he was from other philosophers. (As if he needed to.) But Kallscheuer's footnotes are no more inspiring than his main text; they're heavy on obscure contemporary philosophers and critics who toe the same line as Kallscheuer. Obscurantists. Nerdy club members who all know the secret handshake.

PS, 6. June 2015: I've finally figured out that Kallscheuer was mocking Wadenbeisser who have attacked Sloterdijk for ridiculous reasons, not committing such an attack. I'm disappointed. Wadenbeisser don't deserve that much commentary. Like I said in 2009: Kallscheuer isn't very funny. Brevity is the soul of wit. Besides exposing Kallscheuer's lack of it, having someone go on at such length about how ridiculous the Wadenbeisser are mkaes Sloterdijk seem insecure. An actual Wadenbeisser leading off the volume would've been much funnier.