Transhuman education: Sloterdijk's reading of Heidegger's Letter on Humanism

Peter Sloterdijk presented a reading of Heidegger's Letter on Humanism at a conference held at Elmau in 1999. Reinterpreting the meaning of humanism in the light of Heidegger's Letter, Sloterdijk focused his presentation on the need to redefine education as a form of genetic ‘taming’ and proposed what seemed to be support for positive eugenics. Although Sloterdijk claimed that he only wanted to open a debate on the issue, he could not have been surprised at the level of opposition this suggestion aroused. In the weeks following, he blamed Habermas for raising this opposition and for refusing to engage with him openly. Although Luis Arenas has chronicled the aftermath of Sloterdijk's paper, it may be of interest to educators to examine how Heidegger's text is presented. What is this new humanism? If Heidegger's new humanism was based on a mystical attitude towards Being, so Sloterdijk's new humanism was to be based on the materialist principles of a biotechnological age. Unlike Heidegger who rejected technology as yet one further example of the forgetfulness of Being, Sloterdijk seems to embrace technology and the enhancement of the human body and mind as the next great step forward in educational theory. Could he possibly be right? Is education in these times a partner or an opponent of the technological enhancement of the human being? This article tries to identify Sloterdijk's disagreements with Heidegger on the question of the human.

Max Stirner's relevance to contemporary philosophy: a critical analysis

The aim of this dissertation is to revive the 19th-century thinker Max Stirner’s thought through a critical reexamination of his mistaken legacy as a ‘political’ thinker. The reading of Stirner that I present is one of an ontological thinker, spurred on as much—if not more—by the contents of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as it is the radical roots that Hegel unintentionally planted. In the first chapter, the role of language in Stirner’s thought is examined, and the problems to which his conception of language seem to give rise are addressed. The second chapter looks at Stirner’s purportedly ‘anarchistic’ politics and finds the ‘anarchist’ reading of Stirner misguided. Rather than being a ‘political’ anarchist, it is argued that we ought to understand Stirner as advocating a sort of ‘ontological’ anarchism in which the very existence of authority is questioned. In the third chapter, I look at the political ramifications of Stirner’s ontology as well as the critique of liberalism contained within it, and argue that the politics implicit in his philosophy shares more in common with the tradition of political realism than it does anarchism. The fourth chapter is dedicated to an examination of Stirner’s anti-humanism, which is concluded to be much different than the ‘anti-humanisms’ associated with other, more famous thinkers, such as Foucault and Heidegger. In the fifth and final chapter, I provide an answer to the question(s) of how, if, and to what extent Friedrich Nietzsche was influenced by Stirner. It is concluded that the complete lack of evidence that Nietzsche ever read Stirner is proof enough to dismiss accusations of plagiarism on Nietzsche’s part, thus emphasizing the originality and singularity of both thinkers.