Co-Immunism In The Age Of Pandemics

And Climate Change

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk speaks with Noema’s editor-in-
chief, Nathan Gardels.
JUNE 12, 2020

Gardels: The German philosopher Martin Heidegger famously remarked back in the

1960s that the advent of cybernetics1 meant the end of Western metaphysics2. What
do you think he meant by this comment? And to what extent do you agree?

Sloterdijk: It wasn’t only reading Norbert Wiener, the American philosopher and
mathematician known as the father of cybernetics, that brought Heidegger to this
assumption. He was familiar with all the debates among theologians and engineers
going back to the 17  century about the erosion of the divide between God-given
th

nature and man-made tools and inventions. They understood that once patterns of
repetition were discovered in nature, they could be systematically replicated by
machines designed to fulfill a particular purpose through instrumental reason. When
the first automats3 came into being, they stimulated countless fantasies about
artificial humans.

Cybernetics, in Heidegger’s time, was only the latest development of this evolution
of spirit being put into matter and transforming it. The classical differentiation of
soul and thing, spirit and matter, subject and object, freedom and technique, cannot
cope with entities that are by their very constitution hybrids with both a spiritual and
a material component. Cybernetics, as the theory and practice of intelligent
machines and modern biology, as the study of system-environment units, has forced
the questions of the old metaphysical divisions to be posed anew.

Here, [the German philosopher Georg W.F.] Hegel’s concept of objective spirit
turns into the principle of information. Information enters between thoughts and
things as a third value, between the pole of reflection and the pole of the thing,
between spirit and matter. Intelligent machines — like all artifices that are culturally
created — eventually also compel the recognition of spirit. Reflection or thought is
1
Cybernetics is the study of automatic control systems, such as the nervous system and brain and mechanical-electrical
communication systems.
2
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that uses broad, abstract concepts — such as being, knowing, space and time — to help
define reality.
3
Automats, first introduced in Berlin in 1895, were fast-food restaurants where food and drink were served by vending machines.

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infused into matter and remains there ready to be re-found and further cultivated.
Machines and artifices are thus memories or reflections turned objective.

Gardels: In a famous interview with the German news magazine “Der Spiegel” in

1966, where he was asked about this end of metaphysics, Heidegger said “only a
god can save us.” What did this mean?

Sloterdijk: Heidegger believed that modern technology uprooted and dislodged

man from his time and place and thus his spiritual grounding. When he said “only a
god can save us,” he feared that something the pre-Socratic Greeks grasped was
being lost or forgotten through the general triumph of technology. He called this
“Seinsvergessenheit,” or the obliviousness of being.

It is not easy to tell what he meant by “Sein.”4 Maybe it should hint at the idea that
there is grace in the universe, the gift of spontaneous truth quality or inner light,
sparked by the unexpected experience of a given event. In their programmed
purpose, machines could neither produce nor capture something original, not rooted
in either time or place and emerging outside any systemized pattern. The reason why
only a god can save us is to be found in our obsession with power, with control over
nature, with a reification of everything by which all of nature becomes just raw
material. Only a god could bring relief from this ontological cannibalism.

Gardels: Yuval Noah Harari, the author of “Homo Deus,” has suggested that a new
god has arrived: data. The idea is organisms as algorithms, which has given birth to
AI and synthetic biology. As Harari said to me in an interview: Human history “will
end when men become gods” through these creations.

Has the technological advance that abolished Western metaphysics produced its own
god?

Sloterdijk: Despite the godlike omniscience suggested by Harari, I wouldn’t call

data the new god but the basis of a new philosophical outlook beyond the old
explanations of metaphysics. It means man has domesticated himself as well as
nature through his tools and thus become a co-creator of being, even his own being.

“Climate change and the imperative of immunizing all civilizations

from its effects will likely be the impetus for the coming axial
breakthrough.”

4
The German verb “sein,” or “to be,” when capitalized is a noun that translates to “being” or “existence.”

2
Gardels: The Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui, author of “The Question Concerning
Technology in China,” argues that AI and synthetic biology — which erase the
metaphysical divide between objective and subjective and between culture and
nature — only lead back to Eastern philosophy, which never embraced the
metaphysical divide the West did. Daoism has always seen the inseparable unity of
“dao” and “qi,” the spiritual and material, the cosmos and Earthly existence.

Does West meet East when cybernetics, AI and genomics end metaphysics? Though
Heidegger believed the answer must lie in the roots of the culture from which the
question arose, isn’t this Daoist perspective essentially the new philosophy
Heidegger was looking for?

Sloterdijk: In the abstract, yes, we can say that the spirit of Daoism approximates
this new consciousness. But in reality, the Eastern mind has been colonized by the
instrumental reason of Western Enlightenment, which became globally dominant in
recent centuries. Paradoxically, at the very moment the truth of the old Asian
worldview shows its plausibility anew, it has been lost where it originated.

Gardels: The German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote about the Axial Age,
when all the main religions and ethical systems — Confucianism in China, the
Upanishads and Buddhism in India, the early Greek philosophers, the Hebrew
prophets, Zoroastrianism in Persia — emerged simultaneously in a pre-synchronized
world in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E.

Thinking in 1949 mostly of nuclear weapons, he had a premonition that advances on

the frontiers of science and technology were laying the ground for a new Axial Age
that would give birth to entirely new systems of belief and codes of behavior. That
seems more likely now than ever with the advent of artificial intelligence, synthetic
biology and the awareness of climate change.

Do you see a new pivotal moment ahead — this time in a synchronized and
connected world? Will a common global ethos emerge?

Thomas Pullin for Noema Magazine

Sloterdijk: Jaspers may have been mistaken to leave out Mesopotamia and Egypt
from his Axial Age construct in order to fit it within the timeframe of simultaneity
he sought to establish. But what is clear is that the “axial” breakthrough in all these
civilizations was the shift from an oral culture to a written one, enabling both the
interiority of reflection and transcendence — the self-distancing from one’s
immediate circumstances to share common meanings with others.

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Certainly, today, the ground is prepared for a new Axial Age because the main
problem facing humanity is a planet synchronized by technology but not united by a
common narrative. We are not yet a super-organism, as some suggest, but rather a
loose agglomeration of higher-order organisms. Climate change and the imperative
of immunizing all civilizations from its effects will likely be the impetus for the
coming axial breakthrough.

As I wrote in my book, “You Must Change Your Life,” history so far has been a
battle of immune systems between protectionism of one’s own and externalization
of any damage to an anonymous environment in which no one takes responsibility.
The victory of one’s own, of the holy egoisms of cities, nations and faiths, could
always be purchased with the defeat of the external other. With the deterioration of
Earth’s fragile atmospheric and biospheric systems, externalization has reached its
absolute limit.

From now on, protectionism of the whole is the directive of what I call “immunitary
reason.” The operational imperative of the future calls for a new consciousness, new
habits of the heart, of cooperation and solidarity with others and nature in order to
survive and thrive. I call this “co-immunism.”

I am in agreement with the British historian Arnold Toynbee that the history of the
rise and fall of civilizations is a process of challenge and response. If challenges
elicit a new spiritual vigor and shared inner confidence, then civilization will
advance. If not, it will fail.

Most people have only very vague ideas about what the term “immune system”
really means. On the biological level, it designs the inner defense and protection
structures of an organism. That is why one could go as far as to say: “Life itself is
the success phase of an immune system.”

Immunity, however, is not limited to an individual organism — and this is exactly

what one has to learn with all its radical consequences. The security of groups
depends on the faculty of its members to provide each other with the advantages of
individual and collective immunity combined. So what we call “herd immunity” —
a term occurring quite often these days — is a form of deep mutualism that means a
state of protection that can only be reached collectively. That is why I have coined
the term co-immunism. It is part of a moral-political reflection leading to a new
definition of togetherness.

The coronavirus pandemic is an emergency strongly hinting that the co-immunism

imperative has arrived. In this crisis, one can already see that there is no real private
property of immunity advantages. The virus ignores national borders, fences and
walls. Now, the moment has come to share the means of protection even with the

4
most distant members of the family of man/woman. There is something sublime in
the worldwide colloquium that has been going on among physicians sharing their
best ideas to confront the new menace.

Global immunitary reason would create such a response; it is a step higher than the
philosophical idealism or religious monotheism of the past. In this sense, what I call
“general immunology” is the organic successor of metaphysics and of religion. All
previous divisions between one’s own and the other, between humans and nature,
collapse.

“History has been a battle of immune systems between

protectionism of one’s own and externalization of any damage to an
anonymous environment in which no one takes responsibility.”

Gardels: “Everything essential and of great magnitude,” Heidegger told his “Der

Spiegel” interviewer, “has arisen only out of the fact that man had a home and was
rooted in a tradition.” In the 21st century, then, the planet itself is that home. It is a
return to the earthly virtue of place on a planetary scale, a kind of return to
wholeness and the unity of origins.

Sloterdijk: Yes, I think so. Heidegger was right that humans are essentially
residential beings. To be a resident and to acquire higher degrees of mobility are no
longer necessarily oppositions. Now, thanks to observation from space combined
with the lived experience of climate change and of pandemic, we are finally seeing
that the Earth is our home.

Gardels: As you have noted, the shift from oral to written culture was key to the
advent of the Axial Age. The interiority of reflection and the critical self-distancing
from one’s immediate circumstances introduced the quality of transcendence into
human consciousness. This “great disembedding” of the person from nature and
community, as the philosopher Charles Taylor has called it, in turn gave rise to the
theoretic culture of monotheistic religions and ethical systems across the boundaries
of individual experience, ultimately leading to the Enlightenment, science and
modern autonomy of the individual.

With the new global awareness of the climate crisis you mention, with our ability
now to intervene in evolution with synthetic biology and with the hyper-intelligent
potential of AI, we seem to be “re-embedding” transcendence in nature and the
confines of technological systems in a way that will once again diminish human
centrality, perhaps even extinguishing individual autonomy.

5
What moral and ethical codes would undergird this new ecology of being as
humanity commits to its mutation? Will we be able to salvage the human autonomy
that emerged from the Axial Age in the coming epoch?

Sloterdijk: We must not forget that the concepts of human freedom and individual
autonomy are not only grounded in metaphysical and religious assumptions like the
presence of a divine spark or an inalienable birthright in every human person. They
are also grounded in cultural and technical habits and skills, such as making fire,
burning clay pots, shaping statues, melting metals, producing knives and weapons,
domesticating animals, erecting buildings, riding horses, sailing ships — and
mastering all the respective language-games5. The strength of a person depends on
his or her active participation in these abilities.

What we see emerge in all of them is autonomy in cooperation with others and
creativity as the will to transform the found into the made. Both of these human
features that culminated in modern times will survive in many ways, even if not
always in authentic forms. Already, the world is full of empty pretensions to
autonomy and endless displays of pseudo-creativity.

“With the deterioration of Earth’s fragile atmospheric and

biospheric systems, externalization has reached its absolute limit.”

Gardels: Because the corporeal and mundane from which humans forge their tools
are materially grounded in diverse realities — contingency — their fusing with the
learned-shared meanings of transcendent understanding results in a hybrid being
composed of both archetype and unique individuation, just as every musician creates
a different sound from the same score. 

As Hui sees it, the planetary synchronization by Western modernity will ultimately
fragment precisely because it has completed its course, opening the space once again
for an incommensurate diversity of cultures within a connected unity. Do you see
this dialectic at work?

Sloterdijk: That is the distinct hope.

The concept of anthropotechnics refers to the entire autopoiesis, or self-creation, of

mankind in its many thousands of cultural specializations. It is empirical, pluralistic
and egalitarian from the ground up — in the sense that all individuals, as heirs to the
memory of mankind, are free to surpass themselves. This implies the almost
5
A language-game is a concept developed by the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, referring to examples of
language use and actions that involve the use of specific forms of language.

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classical idea that humans are “mikrokosmoi” — today we would say small factories
— embedded in the super-factory of the grand universe. The idea of
the singularity6, promoted by the likes of [the American inventor and futurist] Ray
Kurzweil, by contrast, contains futuristic, monistic and elitist elements. Although the
singularity, according to its logical and rhetorical design, is meant to integrate
mankind as a whole, it is evident that it could only encompass a tiny group of
exceptional transhuman individuals. In speaking of the cloud and singularity,
Kurzweil positions himself in a field that is preformatted by traditional philosophy,
which has become obsolete.

6
The singularity is the point at which artificially intelligent machines and/or cognitively enhanced biological intelligence surpass
human intelligence.