To Stir the Sleep of the World: Conjectures on Awakening

What is it about?

This essay by Peter Sloterdijk (translated by Robert Hughes, 2021) is taken from his book Weltfremdheit (1993). It opens with a phenomenological rumination on awakening: the dawning of thought and perception pulls the resisting subject out of its morass of sleep, “bringing me back to me.” Sloterdijk posits a communal wakeful watchfulness as the founding condition of civilization’s support for thinking beyond mere survival. When culture metaphysicalized this sentinel function in a new conception of divine surveillance, the entirety of the world became conceivable as thoroughly penetrable by vision and subject to knowledge. Sloterdijk discusses three civilizations that posited the world as thoroughgoingly susceptible to vision and requiring wakeful watchfulness for its defense: Heraclitus’s Greek polis called upon a coalition of human perception and judgment to defend against the idiocy of night and dream; Zoroaster’s Iranian empire posited the world as cosmic struggle requiring bright, sober thinkers to join their lord against furious confusion; and Isaiah’s Hebrew civilization raised the stakes of theological surveillance in the precarious context of God’s election of the saved. Metaphysics and modernity have come to functionalize the dark within a positivist frame, refusing the rhythm of coming and going, asserting an everlasting assembly of the whole, positing an absence of absence. In truth, the world itself and we ourselves come forth through rhythms of waking and sleeping. The appearance of the world is conditioned upon these hiatuses and we impoverish it when we foreclose the discrete nothings of its nocturnal aspect. The age of planetary co-existence calls for a new evolution in the wakeful watchfulness of a world undergoing inexorable devastation.

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Photo by Zach Searcy on Unsplash

Photo by Zach Searcy on Unsplash