Holding myself together in a lounge at Chengdu’s airport yesterday, whilst a typhoon roared through Hong Kong, I immersed myself in writing a piece about the dollar system.
Fascinating Adam - and here's an interesting tit-bit for you. I was doing some work on Agnes Smedley and had also used the Chinese A1 tool DeepSeek to good effect. However, on entering Edgar Snow in the same app, after thinking (semi aloud) for a few moments, it returns with a 'this is beyond my current scope' message. What might be going on here? I have always had ES down to be 'a great friend' of China?
Not to be a spoil-sport, but Sloterdijk gets the Odyssey exactly wrong, on a basic level of plot.
While trapped in the cave, Odysseus claims to be called Nobody. But after he's freed himself, from the safety of his ship, he does proudly reveal his real name to the cyclops.
Hence the son of Poseidon knows exactly whom to report to his father and our hero is not safe from the God's rage, far from it. (Sloterdijk confuses the Gods with Polyphem's fellow cyclopes: those fall for the trick.)
"`Cyclops, if any one of mortal men shall ask thee about the shameful blinding of thine eye, say that Odysseus, the sacker of cities, blinded it, even the son of Laertes, whose home is in Ithaca.’" (Od., Book 9.500f, Murray translation).
Don't worry about cramping the creativity of AI. The frog just jumped on one lily pad rather than another. Monkeys typing Hamlet could come up with some entertaining typos. AI is the ultimate Niemand and it is also the ultimate Allemand.
I am no Sloterdijk fan (for several reasons) as I have uttered here but the passage you mentioned is indeed interesting and speaks to my awkwardness with all things "online" (tell us who you are and what you want) and offline (all closed circles, from schools to workplaces to neighbourly barbecues) which serve to "pin us down". Good thought - thanks for the post (and also for reappraising AI in a positive way for the second time now; after all, we need to get a "grip" on AI to be able to "fence it in" and to make it useful. How else could we live and deal with the new circumstances?!)
Great post from AT. I’m not a Sloterdijk fan either so I want to note that this reading of Odysseus is in Horkeimer and Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment. A book well worth revisiting. I did during Covid.
I read it at uni and, reading Adam Tooze’s post here (as always: a delight to receive this newsletter, in my case mainly for inspiration besides the information - nobody at a normal working age with an average income can venture out to university again and Adam can’t also invite us all to a giant regular get-together to share his thoughts - unless he soon opts to found his own cult 😉 which wouldn’t sound like him, methinks - so I praise the modern world’s agora which is substack), I thought I should check out if my hunch (which you just confirmed) was right but I hadn’t got the time to do so yet 😊
So, reading your comment I had to smile big and I would like to say: thanks for your thoughtful and informed comment 😃👍 - I will dig out my copy.
And nevertheless, I will try to find out what Adam loves so much about this particular philosopher, simply, because I am always curious and besides, because I know all too well that most of my own beloved “house deities” are and have never been blameless to a fault as well.
I still don’t know, with regards to this particular title, if there is more than “great language” to discover…
I once wrote here in a commentary, that I think Sloterdijk has “lost it” with regards to the Frankfurter Schule (loving Christian Lindner and sounding right-wing-propaganda is probably as far as one can get away from the Dialektik der Aufklärung” 😉).
Maybe I will still loathe his recent actions and words but find some planks in the wreckage of this (at least in my opinion) loss at sea in the vast philosophical ocean which I can use for my own boat?
I feel this translation is indeed falling short of the original meaning and style in many ways and details. I am quite surprised by your approval of it.
My apologies. Let me try to elaborate on this small excerpt:
"Der lebendige Niemand ist es, der, trotz der Greuel der Sozialisation, sich an die energetischen Paradiese unter den Persönlichkeiten erinnert. Sein Lebensgrund ist der geistesgegenwärtige Körper, den wir nicht nobody, sondern yesbody nennen sollen, und der sich im Gang der Individuation vom areflexiven »Narzißmus« zur reflektierten »Selbstentdeckung im Weltganzen« zu entfalten vermag. Bei ihm findet die letzte Aufklärung als Kritik des privaten, egoistischen Scheins ihr Ende."
I have edited the translation in some parts below, to follow the original more closely and capture more of it's meaning and style.
It is this lively nobody who, despite the horrors of socialisation, realises the *energetic paradises* beneath all personalities. His raison d'être is the *body that is aware of the mind*, which we should call not *nobody* but *yesbody*, and which is able to unfold in the course of individuation from non-reflexive "narcissism" to self-reflected "self-discovery within the world in its entirety."
Perhaps you can follow my perception, despite the imperfection of my adaption, just by the examples of words and expressions I have altered, which I found to be misinterpreted in the orginal translation. I am not claiming my version is much better, but the delta can hopefully demonstrate what I was hinting at.
This living nobody remembers, despite the horrors of socialization, the *energetic paradises* beneath personalities. Its foundation is the *present-minded body*, which we should call not *nobody* but *yesbody*, and which can unfold in the course of individuation from unreflective "narcissism" to reflected "self-discovery within the cosmic whole." In it the ultimate enlightenment as a critique of private, egoistic illusion finds its conclusion. While mystical advances into such "innermost" zones of pre-individual emptiness were previously the exclusive domain of meditative minorities, there are now good reasons to hope that in our world—torn apart by clashing identifications—majorities can be found for such enlightenment.
But where's the Chinese version? I thought this was going to be like a project a Chinese friend from my church and I cooked up some years back--one we never carried through on--when she commented that most Chinese translations of the Bible aren't very good (in her opinion). We discussed that, since she doesn't know Greek and I don't know Chinese, I could do Greek to English, and she would do English to Chinese. Forget the AI part, I'm curious how such a mediated translation would turn out.
“Letting our no ones live” brings to mind not only the Odysseus and Polyphemus story, but also the ee cummings poem that includes the lines: “one day anyone died i guess
“New blind identifications emerge to confront new destabilizations. Life, which even through upheavals and moments of wakefulness, seeks new stabilities, obeys an inclination toward inertia. Thus, the impression can arise that intellectual history forms a mere carousel of ideologies—not a systematically wrought emergence of human cultures from immaturity and delusion. In the twilight of "post-enlightenment," the idiocy of the I’s (Iche, i.e. plural Ich’s) screws itself into ever more refined and contorted positions: into a *conscious unconsciousness*, into defensive identities."
Honey, this teacher says go back and try writing this in simple sentences that communicate something of value to the reader.
1) Yes this is in the English translation (page 73 and onwards), the AI translation above is different but does not lack anything other than the elegance of the human translation.
2) What more can ever be said on this than has already been said? Who in high theory is more ambivalent than Adam, the theoretical bi-sexual if there ever was one (if we take that in the analytic sense that someone who is bi sexual simply has not chosen yet).
==
Every single thing that Sloterdijk says in this section is an excellent rendition of this position, I could never put it clearer, and I disagree vehemently with EVERY. SINGLE. POINT.
Why? Simple: Its the antithesis to what I *believe* in.
End this promiscuity Adam, as no one will ever tell you to: too interesting is the technocrat that has this love affair with 'High Theory'. In your interview on "C&C" that's the yes/no question Ruda should of posed to you: Freud or Jung? Heidegger or Hegel? Foucault or Zizek?
Otherwise at some point we will have to start looking for a symptom, this obsessive postponing, of why you refuse to be baptised one way or another.
PS: You know well Plato would not approve of this 'interest' in philosophy, this smorgasbord approach, this wistfully quoting passages on stormy nights. This isn't for fun, its just work. Life would be better if one did not have to grapple with Lacan, but cest la vie. You would consider it treasonous if someone took this position in the harder sciences that are you forte, im not sure why you think such a loose affair is appropriate here.
Fascinating Adam - and here's an interesting tit-bit for you. I was doing some work on Agnes Smedley and had also used the Chinese A1 tool DeepSeek to good effect. However, on entering Edgar Snow in the same app, after thinking (semi aloud) for a few moments, it returns with a 'this is beyond my current scope' message. What might be going on here? I have always had ES down to be 'a great friend' of China?
sometimes the most random things get screened by deepseeks 'beyond my current scope' filter. it can be quite telling.
Not to be a spoil-sport, but Sloterdijk gets the Odyssey exactly wrong, on a basic level of plot.
While trapped in the cave, Odysseus claims to be called Nobody. But after he's freed himself, from the safety of his ship, he does proudly reveal his real name to the cyclops.
Hence the son of Poseidon knows exactly whom to report to his father and our hero is not safe from the God's rage, far from it. (Sloterdijk confuses the Gods with Polyphem's fellow cyclopes: those fall for the trick.)
"`Cyclops, if any one of mortal men shall ask thee about the shameful blinding of thine eye, say that Odysseus, the sacker of cities, blinded it, even the son of Laertes, whose home is in Ithaca.’" (Od., Book 9.500f, Murray translation).
Don't worry about cramping the creativity of AI. The frog just jumped on one lily pad rather than another. Monkeys typing Hamlet could come up with some entertaining typos. AI is the ultimate Niemand and it is also the ultimate Allemand.
Wow „Niemand/Allemand“ Haha, Nice! So, he found the antidote.
I am no Sloterdijk fan (for several reasons) as I have uttered here but the passage you mentioned is indeed interesting and speaks to my awkwardness with all things "online" (tell us who you are and what you want) and offline (all closed circles, from schools to workplaces to neighbourly barbecues) which serve to "pin us down". Good thought - thanks for the post (and also for reappraising AI in a positive way for the second time now; after all, we need to get a "grip" on AI to be able to "fence it in" and to make it useful. How else could we live and deal with the new circumstances?!)
Great post from AT. I’m not a Sloterdijk fan either so I want to note that this reading of Odysseus is in Horkeimer and Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment. A book well worth revisiting. I did during Covid.
I read it at uni and, reading Adam Tooze’s post here (as always: a delight to receive this newsletter, in my case mainly for inspiration besides the information - nobody at a normal working age with an average income can venture out to university again and Adam can’t also invite us all to a giant regular get-together to share his thoughts - unless he soon opts to found his own cult 😉 which wouldn’t sound like him, methinks - so I praise the modern world’s agora which is substack), I thought I should check out if my hunch (which you just confirmed) was right but I hadn’t got the time to do so yet 😊
So, reading your comment I had to smile big and I would like to say: thanks for your thoughtful and informed comment 😃👍 - I will dig out my copy.
And nevertheless, I will try to find out what Adam loves so much about this particular philosopher, simply, because I am always curious and besides, because I know all too well that most of my own beloved “house deities” are and have never been blameless to a fault as well.
I still don’t know, with regards to this particular title, if there is more than “great language” to discover…
I once wrote here in a commentary, that I think Sloterdijk has “lost it” with regards to the Frankfurter Schule (loving Christian Lindner and sounding right-wing-propaganda is probably as far as one can get away from the Dialektik der Aufklärung” 😉).
Maybe I will still loathe his recent actions and words but find some planks in the wreckage of this (at least in my opinion) loss at sea in the vast philosophical ocean which I can use for my own boat?
Who knows 🤓
Anyways, thanks again!
I feel this translation is indeed falling short of the original meaning and style in many ways and details. I am quite surprised by your approval of it.
Simply writing 'I don't like it' would have done the same job, as you don't bother to elaborate on the reasons for your surprise.
My apologies. Let me try to elaborate on this small excerpt:
"Der lebendige Niemand ist es, der, trotz der Greuel der Sozialisation, sich an die energetischen Paradiese unter den Persönlichkeiten erinnert. Sein Lebensgrund ist der geistesgegenwärtige Körper, den wir nicht nobody, sondern yesbody nennen sollen, und der sich im Gang der Individuation vom areflexiven »Narzißmus« zur reflektierten »Selbstentdeckung im Weltganzen« zu entfalten vermag. Bei ihm findet die letzte Aufklärung als Kritik des privaten, egoistischen Scheins ihr Ende."
I have edited the translation in some parts below, to follow the original more closely and capture more of it's meaning and style.
It is this lively nobody who, despite the horrors of socialisation, realises the *energetic paradises* beneath all personalities. His raison d'être is the *body that is aware of the mind*, which we should call not *nobody* but *yesbody*, and which is able to unfold in the course of individuation from non-reflexive "narcissism" to self-reflected "self-discovery within the world in its entirety."
Perhaps you can follow my perception, despite the imperfection of my adaption, just by the examples of words and expressions I have altered, which I found to be misinterpreted in the orginal translation. I am not claiming my version is much better, but the delta can hopefully demonstrate what I was hinting at.
The "original" translation:
This living nobody remembers, despite the horrors of socialization, the *energetic paradises* beneath personalities. Its foundation is the *present-minded body*, which we should call not *nobody* but *yesbody*, and which can unfold in the course of individuation from unreflective "narcissism" to reflected "self-discovery within the cosmic whole." In it the ultimate enlightenment as a critique of private, egoistic illusion finds its conclusion. While mystical advances into such "innermost" zones of pre-individual emptiness were previously the exclusive domain of meditative minorities, there are now good reasons to hope that in our world—torn apart by clashing identifications—majorities can be found for such enlightenment.
"playful German prose"? This I've got to see.
But where's the Chinese version? I thought this was going to be like a project a Chinese friend from my church and I cooked up some years back--one we never carried through on--when she commented that most Chinese translations of the Bible aren't very good (in her opinion). We discussed that, since she doesn't know Greek and I don't know Chinese, I could do Greek to English, and she would do English to Chinese. Forget the AI part, I'm curious how such a mediated translation would turn out.
“Letting our no ones live” brings to mind not only the Odysseus and Polyphemus story, but also the ee cummings poem that includes the lines: “one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face).”
Wonderful interesting quick, taking me along on your chat with DeepSeek in the airport. Fun and informative. Thanks.
“New blind identifications emerge to confront new destabilizations. Life, which even through upheavals and moments of wakefulness, seeks new stabilities, obeys an inclination toward inertia. Thus, the impression can arise that intellectual history forms a mere carousel of ideologies—not a systematically wrought emergence of human cultures from immaturity and delusion. In the twilight of "post-enlightenment," the idiocy of the I’s (Iche, i.e. plural Ich’s) screws itself into ever more refined and contorted positions: into a *conscious unconsciousness*, into defensive identities."
Honey, this teacher says go back and try writing this in simple sentences that communicate something of value to the reader.
Thank you also for this William Gibson-esque scenario and story!
“to be able to become *No-one*.”
I am reminded here of Keats’ “negative capability” …
Fascinating.
Thanks for this.
make him translate hegel instead of heideggerian mashups.see how far that gets you
This post very much reminds me of part of a Jesse Singal post that I read recently:
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/a-chatbot-coined-a-phrase-i-really
So:
1) Yes this is in the English translation (page 73 and onwards), the AI translation above is different but does not lack anything other than the elegance of the human translation.
2) What more can ever be said on this than has already been said? Who in high theory is more ambivalent than Adam, the theoretical bi-sexual if there ever was one (if we take that in the analytic sense that someone who is bi sexual simply has not chosen yet).
==
Every single thing that Sloterdijk says in this section is an excellent rendition of this position, I could never put it clearer, and I disagree vehemently with EVERY. SINGLE. POINT.
Why? Simple: Its the antithesis to what I *believe* in.
End this promiscuity Adam, as no one will ever tell you to: too interesting is the technocrat that has this love affair with 'High Theory'. In your interview on "C&C" that's the yes/no question Ruda should of posed to you: Freud or Jung? Heidegger or Hegel? Foucault or Zizek?
Otherwise at some point we will have to start looking for a symptom, this obsessive postponing, of why you refuse to be baptised one way or another.
PS: You know well Plato would not approve of this 'interest' in philosophy, this smorgasbord approach, this wistfully quoting passages on stormy nights. This isn't for fun, its just work. Life would be better if one did not have to grapple with Lacan, but cest la vie. You would consider it treasonous if someone took this position in the harder sciences that are you forte, im not sure why you think such a loose affair is appropriate here.