This seems like such a great image of the metacrisis. It’s useful to understand the philosophical roots of the metacrisis framing in Nietzsche, Heidegger and others, and for me Sloterdijk is one of the most important living thinkers to address this theme.
Nietzsche invented the most powerful image of the global dilemma for which one needs and seeks relief when he described man as a being hanging on the back of a tiger in dreams.
In that situation we think twice about whether to wake up the passenger.
Nobody has practised getting off the tiger’s back.
Some progressive moralists today are coming round to the idea that the tiger doesn’t exist at all.
According to them, we have been standing on firm ground all the time, responsible for ourselves from top to toe.
For them, there is no dark underbelly that empowers and sometimes devours us.
By contrast, Heidegger or Friedrich Georg Jünger focused on the monstrous in their considerations on the modern world, the former with his theory of frames that concerns a super-tiger called technology, and the latter in the form of a meditation about the titanic quality of modern civilizations.
Since then, there has been an almost never-ending discussion about the weirdness that lies at the roots of the enterprises of modernity.
Thinking like that makes us imagine ourselves as insects in the scaly skin of a dragon.
(Sloterdijk: Selected Exaggerations. Conversations and Interviews 1993–2012. German edition 2013, English 2016, edited by Bernhard Klein, translated by Karen Margolis, Polity Press, p. 279f. edited)
A basic Jungian perspective on the tiger is that the tiger is the part of ourselves we fear and dread. A part that Nietzsche elsewhere warns us may be the devil we ought not be too keen about casting out, lest we lose also the best part of ourselves. Perhaps the tiger likewise symbolizes the void peering back at us. In any case, what we mostly have to fear is fear itself. Try letting the tiger in. Try feeling what it’s hungry for. Go ahead and be it. It’s not like denying our animal natures makes as any less predatory. Just less honest about it.
My favorite thing about UTOK is how “minded animal” is the foundation of all human psychology. Important parts of us are mostly about eating and being eaten. The “culture-person” layer is a gloss on that. AI would just be a new gloss on the prior gloss. In developmentalist terms, we never really outgrow the limbic system. Maturity is not transcending our primal natures, it’s more like reintegrating our primal natures. Every day on the walking trail I see others with their dogs. My barely-domesticated wolf-creature walks the same trail, but within my own sneakers. Animals need out in the open air. They need running room.
Currently my reading stack features both Iain McGilchrist and Charles Taylor, each of whom clearly underlines the self-imposed limits of the modern “rational”. Heidegger, the later Wittgenstien, and the whole phenomenological tradition are in there too. All that more or less defines what I now might call “common sense”. It’s not “common” in the statistical definition that most people think that way (they don’t). More like it’s the common core of what the best thinkers appear to be converging upon. The transrational attractor calling culture to itself.
No one - repeat no one - is going to transcend western instrumental rationality by being afraid of the dark. All the maths in the world can’t bar the devil from the doorstep. The devil is already well in.
I love the use of dream imagery in philosophy. It reminds of the Zen story of The Ox and his Herdsman. It describes the story of enlightenment through 10 frames. The story flows from no noticing of the ox, to hearing it, seeing, taming, herding, and riding, until the ox disappears. The frames that follow are an empty circle and a nature scene. Finally, the boy meets the Buddha on the road.
Nietzsche’s tiger reminds me of the 4th frame, the taming. Yet, here we a presented with a more viscous creature than the ox. One that is not typically tamed. I’m left with the feeling that this a similar but formidable task, at least at the personal level. The world has become more complex and dangerous to the individual. Still, the process is the same. Learn to live with it and eventually see that it is both empty and full of beauty and you will find the others along the way.
