The Absolute Imperative

See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand!

Galatians 6:11

Who Is Allowed to Say It?

‘You must change your life!’ The voice Rilke heard speaking to him at the Louvre has meanwhile left its point of origin. Within a century, it has become part of the general zeitgeist – in fact, it has become the last content of all the communications whirring around the globe. At present, there is no information in the world ether that cannot be connected to this absolute imperative in its deep structure. It is the call that can never be neutralized into a mere statement of fact; it is the imperative whose effects are unhindered by any indicatives. It articulates the motto that arranges the innumerable chaotic particles of information into a concise moral form. It expresses concern for the whole. It cannot be denied: the only fact of universal ethical significance in the current world is the diffusely and ubiquitously growing realization that things cannot continue in this way.

Once again, we have reason to recall Nietzsche. It was he who first understood in which mode the ethical imperative must be conveyed in modern times: it speaks to us in the form of a command that sets up an unconditional overtaxing. In so doing, he opposed the pragmatic consensus that one can only demand of people what they are capable of achieving in the status quo. Nietzsche set the original axiom of the practising life against it in the form established since the irruption of ethical difference into conventional life forms: humans can only advance as long as they follow the impossible. The moderate decrees, the reasonable prescriptions, the daily requirements – in all cases, their fulfilment presupposes a hyperbolic tension that stems from an unrealizable and inescapable demand. What is the human being if not an animal of which too much is demanded? Only those who set up the first commandment can subsequently present Ten Commandments In the first, the impossible itself speaks to me: thou shalt have no other standards next to me. Whoever has not been seized by the oversized does not belong to the species of Homo sapiens. The first hunter in the savannah was already a member; he raised his head and understood that the horizon is not a protective boundary, but rather the gate for the gods and the dangers to enter.

In order to articulate the current overtaxing in keeping with the state of the world, Nietzsche took the risk of presenting the public with ‘a book for everyone and nobody’ – a prophetic eruption, six thousand feet beyond mankind and time, spoken with no consideration for any listeners, and yet allied in an invasive fashion with each individual’s knowledge of his intimate design for the not-yet. One cannot simply let the Übermensch programme rest if one knows that it stands for vertical tension in general. Its proclamation became necessary once there was no longer sufficient faith in the hypothesis of God to guarantee the anchoring of upwards-pulling tension in a transcendent pole. But even without God or the Übermensch, it is sufficient to note that every individual, even the most successful, the most creative and the most generous, must, if they examine themselves in earnest, admit that they have become less than their potentiality of being would have required – except for those moments in which they could say that they fulfilled their duty to be a good animal. As average Über-animals, tickled by ambitions and haunted by excessive symbols, humans fall short of what is demanded of them, even when they wear the winner’s jersey or the cardinal’s robe. 

The statement ‘You must change your life!’ provides the basic form for the call to everyone and nobody. Although it is unmistakably directed at a particular addressee, it speaks to all others too. Whoever hears the call without defences will experience the sublime in a personally addressed form. The sublime is that which, by calling to mind the overwhelming, shows the observer the possibility of their engulfment by the oversized – which, however, is suspended until further notice. The sublime whose tip points to me is as personal as death and as unfathomable as the world. For Rilke, it was the Dionysian dimension of art that spoke to him from the disfigured statue of Apollo and gave him the feeling of encountering something infinitely superior. Today, on the other hand, the authoritative voice can scarcely be heard in works of art. Nor do the established ‘religions’ or church councils possess any commanding authority, let alone the councils of wise men, assuming one can still use this phrase without irony.

The only authority that is still in a position to say ‘You must change your life!’ is the global crisis, which, as everyone has been noticing for some time, has begun to send out its apostles. Its authority is real because it is based on something unimaginable of which it is the harbinger: the global catastrophe. One need not be religiously musical to understand why the Great Catastrophe had to become the goddess of the century. As it possesses the aura of the monstrous, it bears the primary traits that were previously ascribed to the transcendent powers: it remains concealed, but makes itself known in signs; it is on the way, yet already authentically present in its portents; it reveals itself to individual intelligences in penetrating visions, yet also surpasses human understanding; it takes certain individuals into its service and makes prophets of them; its delegates turn to the people around them in its name, but are fended off as nuisances by most. On the whole, its fate is much like that of the God of monotheism when He entered the stage scarcely three thousand years ago: His mere message was already too great for the world, and only the few were prepared to begin a different life for His sake. In both cases, however, the refusal of the many increases the tension affecting the human collective. Since the global catastrophe began its partial unveiling, a new manifestation of the absolute imperative has come into the world, one that directs itself at everyone and nobody in the form of a sharp admonition: ‘Change your life! Otherwise its complete disclosure will demonstrate to you, sooner or later, what you failed to do during the time of portents!’ 

Against this background, we can explain the origin of the unease in today’s ethical debate, both in its academic and in its publicistic varieties. It stems from the discrepancy between the monstrosities that have been in the air since the Cold War era after 1945 and the paralysing harmlessness of all current discourses, whether their arguments draw on the ethics of attitude, responsibility, discourse or situations – to say nothing of the helpless reanimation of doctrines of value and virtue. Nor is the oft-cited return of ‘religion’ much more than the symptom of an unease that awaits its resolution in a lucid formulation. In reality, ethics can only be based on the experience of the sublime, today as much as since the beginning of the developments that led to the first ethical secessions. Driven by its call, the human race of two speeds began its campaign through the ages. Only the sublime is capable of setting up the overtaxing that enables humans to head for the impossible. What people called ‘religion’ was only ever significant as a vehicle of the absolute imperative in its different place-and time-based versions. The rest is the chatter of which Wittgenstein rightly said that it should be brought to an end.

For the theologically interested, this means that the one God and the catastrophe have more in common than was previously registered – not least their trouble with humans, who cannot rouse themselves to believe in either. There is not only what Coleridge called the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in the fiction whose absence would render aesthetic behaviour impossible. An even more effective approach is the willing suspension of belief in the real whose absence would prevent any practical accommodation with the given situation. Individuals barely ever cope with reality without an additional element of de-realization. Incredulous de-realization, furthermore, makes little distinction between the past and the future: whether the catastrophe is a past one from which one should have learned or an imminent one that could be averted by the right measures, the reluctance to believe always knows how to arrange things in such a way as to achieve the desired degree of de-realization.

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

On Anthropotechnics

PETER SLOTERDIJK