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FEBRUARY 1ST, 2012

Bubbles: Spheres, Volume I:

Microspherology
by John Ganz

Peter Sloterdijk
Bubbles: Spheres, Volume I: Microspherology
(Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents, 2011)
It could almost be a proverb: The difference between the United States and Europe is
that in Europe a philosopher can have a television show. The German philosopher Peter
Sloterdijk hosts just such a weekly talk show. Its also sadly hard to imagine that in this
countrydespite many virtues over that cultural rival of ourswe could have a real,
heavyweight public intellectual, let alone one whose provocations would lead to a
national debate on the meaning of the state and democracy. In Germany and France,
Sloterdijks 1999 lecture Rules for the Human Zoowith its brilliant, biologicallytinged take on humanismon the framing of philosophy and literature since Plato as a
technique for taming the human beast, and on the production of pacific citizens,
caused a major controversy that was extensively covered in the media. The lecture
which was also published in the newspaper Die Zeitbrought a cry from the critical
theory establishment that Sloterdijk had betrayed his leftist roots and become a radical
neoconservative, with the inevitable insinuations that his apparent hatred for
democracy was really treading on more sinister, fascist grounds.
But Slotderdijks point was that humanity has been abandoned by the wise, that today
there remain no humanists who serve to transmit the civilizing literatures of the past. It
is a profound point and it should have special resonance in the United States, where
Sloterdijks work has been relegated to relative obscurity. Only hisCritique of Cynical
Reason, which diagnoses contemporary culture as being sickly obsessed with the notion
of all-pervading self-interest, was something of a 1980s academic cause
clbre stateside. With Semiotext(e)s recent translation of the first volume of his
magnum opus Spheres trilogy, Bubbles: Spheres I (it was first published in Germany in
1998), Sloterdijks name in this country ought to become better known.
Sloterdijks concern in Spheres is the same as every German philosopher since Kant:
What is humanity in the condition of modernity? That is to say: What is humanity
without the all-encompassing presence of religion, whose persistence in the modern

world is either ineffectually subcultural or violently retrograde, and, in any case, is

clearly incapable of offering a satisfying universal? What is humanity without the
predictable cycles of the quasi-natural, communal lifeworld, and without the
unquestioned legitimacy of the social, spiritual, and aesthetic hierarchies that once
regulated that lifeworld? And how should we best offer solace to the lonely, confused,
and rootless subject that emerges with the triumph of mass society, capitalism,
scientism, technology, the destruction of traditional life, and the disenchantment of the
world? (Just to make it sunnier, we can now also add to the list impending ecological
crisis.) Sloterdijk describes humanity at the end of this process: [d]isappointed, cold,
and abandoned, they wrap themselves in surrogates of older conceptions of the world,
as long as these still hold a trace of the warmth of old human illusions of
encompassedness.
For Sloterdijk, this crisis of modernity and post-enlightenment sketched above is
aspherological crisis: it concerns the gradual destruction of those protectiveor
immunlogical, to use Sloterdijks terminologymembranes that mankind dwelled in for
millenia, the bursting of the shared spaces that human beings had cultivated to provide
meaning, metaphysical comfort, and shelter from the inhuman exterior. This metaphor
of the spherethe preservation, growth, and development of which can be thought of as
the sole preoccupation of what we call cultureshares with Sloterdijks style in general
the quality of being astonishing, strange, and novel, as well as being, at the same time,
familiar, intuitive, and even self-evident.
Philosophers are often harsh judges of human nature, and the concept of Spheresis
unusually generous, kind, and good-natured: it construes human life through an effort
to create conditions of warmth, closeness, and security. Sloterdijks patience and his
lack of a concern for purity allows him a great deal of freedom and variety in terms of
his source material. As learned as he is philosophical, Sloterdijk seems equally
comfortable drawing on medieval theology, media theory, sociology, theoretical biology,
antique numismatics, psychoanalysis, Roman superstitions and domestic cults, and
Buddhist sculpture. And that is only a partial catalogue. The result is that
reading Bubbles: Spheres I can at first feel a little like being locked inside a cabinet of
curiosities, or like reading a book from the Renaissance, when knowledge wasnt yet
splintered into hundreds of specialist fields, when the universe was a vast system of
analogies, and when books on medicine would not be considered complete if they didnt
include extended meditations on alchemy, astrology, demonology, the nature of the

soul, and the meaning of the holy trinity. Hannah Arendt once wrote something to the
effect of, Schopenhauer was a charlatan who wrote like a philosopher, and Nietzsche
was a philosopher who wrote like a charlatan. The latter description could equally be
applied to Sloterdijk.
Once the dazzling effect of Sloterdijks erudition wears off and the arguments of the
book come into clearer focus, Bubbless place in the entire spherological system
emerges. The first volume spells out the most intimate type of spherethe microsphere
or bubblethe original form of being-in-spheres. As Sloterdijk somewhat opaquely puts
it, bubbles constitute the intimate forms of the rounded being-in form and the basic
molecule of the strong relationship. Put in terms of what one might call ordinary
philosophical vocabulary, Bubbles comprises Sloterdijks theory of human subjectivity
and the anthropological ground that his theoretical edifice will rest upon. In an attempt
to move past the legacy of Heideggerperhaps Sloterdijks main foil and point of
referenceSloterdijk thinks that the traditional philosophical account of the subject
the self-contained, rational, alternately contemplative, and emotional I that can either
observe or decide to act upon an exterior Natureis a woefully inadequate description
of the human condition that reflects the self-image of where humanity has arrived
historically rather than the eternal essence that it purports itself to be. Sloterdijk
believes that the modern, existentialist heroic myth of the isolated individual, fighting
for its own place and suspended in nothingness, obscures more than it reveals about
human existence, and cannot offer a radical interpretation of the meaning of human
life.
For Sloterdijk, the human subject is always inat the very leasta dyadic microsphere,
with another being that animates it: Only the ideologia perennisspeaks of the
mainstream of individualistic abstraction speaks of the unaccompanied single person.
[H]uman existing is thus no longer to be understood as the solitary individual standing
out into the indeterminate openness. Instead, existence includes the presence of a
pre-objective something floating around me; its purpose is to let me be and support
me. According to Sloterdijk, people are ecstatic, as Heidegger says, but not because
they are contained in nothingness, but rather in the souls of others, or in the field of the
soul of others, and vice versa.
Probably the most fundamental microsphere that underlies the investigation
inBubbles is the fetus in the mothers womb. The centrality of this theme allows

Sloterdijk to posit a fundamental state for the formation of the human soul that
predates any kind of conscious self in an animating and immunizing sphere. To this
end, Sloterdijk crafts absolutely beautiful passages about sound coming through the
medium of the womb that extends to the songs of the nursery to form an original
musicality of the human soul. Sloterdijk presents the womb-state as an original type of
human ecstasy that is at the root of subsequent religious, erotic, communal, and
political sphere formations.
The centrality of the womb for Sloterdijk also hints at a genetic principle of everexpanding sphere formation: All amniotic sacs, organic models of autogenuous vessels,
live towards their bursting; with the turbulent waters of birth, every life is washed up on
the coast of harder facts. Those who reach it can use those facts to explain what drives
the intimate, all too intimate bubbles to failure and forces their inhabitant into
transformations. In other words, bubbles burst, we are bornbiologically and
ontologicallythrown out of our intimate spheres, and we are ever set about forming
new ones.
But what does the theory of the microsphere provide other than an intellectual high? It
would be supposing a bit much that something that is frankly so odd could quickly
enter into mainstream discourse. But I believe Sloterdijk successfully puts to rest the
notion that we are essentially isolated beings in a field of meaningless objects, and puts
in its place a way to conceive of human existence as incumbent upon highly convoluted
and delicate systems of augmentation, nurturing, and growth. In the process, Sloterdijk
is able to find new meaning in the cast aside achievements of past culture. This is
particularly true in the case of archaic mysticism and theology, which Sloterdijk does
not treat as the ideological relics of backward societies, but rather as containing subtle
lessons on the nature of human solidarity and intimacy. And he does this without
calling for the uncritical readoption of a pre-modern religiosity or by succumbing to
tasteless, New Age pseudo-spirituality (some puzzling words of admiration for the
deplorable mountebank Osho in one interview notwithstanding), but by permitting the
spirit of the past to breathe into and reanimate the present.
The language-game of spheres leads to an ecological understanding of culture; a term
whose etymology in Latin denotes the care of plants and the tilling of the earth. In that
light, those involved in humanistic endeavors should concern themselves with the
preservation and cultivation of the atmospheres that permit human beings to flourish.

Its easy to see how this could lead quickly into a belief in the necessity of mindless,
cloying communal life, or reactionary conservative politics, its ugly political correlate.
The other risk with all these horticultural metaphorsone of Sloterdijks terms is
anthropogenic hothouseis that they could also lead to a philosophical outlook that
might tend to replace the inquiry into the being of the human animal with the being of
the human vegetable. But there are two volumes yet to be translated, so it remains to be
seen for the non-German-speaking English reader how Sloterdijk deals with these
problems.
One might wonder also if the sphere as a figure of thought is not a little too good.
Sloterdijk writes that its characteristic of the old philosophical systemsas the
metaphysical correlates of states and empiresto attempt to pull everything into their
purview and round off the world. Although he expresses doubt about the ability of
philosophy to provide such all-encompassing universals in the contemporary period,
the relentless certainty with which Sloterdijk deploys his thought might be accused of
sharing the same megalomaniac delusions of grandeur. The sphere starts to become
claustrophobic at times, and it can become exhausting to think along with Sloterdijk as
ones imagination turns either into an ever-expanding amoeba inexorably sucking
everything inside, or a foaming sea of bubbles.
But trying to keep pace with Sloterdijks intellectual athleticism ison the whole
invigorating. This touches on a theme thats been dealt with in his recent work: the idea
of philosophy as a spiritual exercise, an idea, which he has taken up from the French
historian of ancient philosophy Pierre Hadot. (Hadot was also a major influence on
Michel Foucaults late work about the care of the self.) Rather than taking philosophy as
a purely theoretical enterprise concerned with developing a disinterested, complete
picture of the world, this conception treats it as a therapeutic method, a way in which to
affect change in oneself. As a very ancient technique for the support of human life, its
unclear whether philosophy can compete with the rapid proliferation of new
technologies of human augmentation. If philosophy has a place in this world, it looks
like this.
CONTRIBUTOR
John Ganz