Peter Sloterdijk (Not Saved) – human being stems from the stone (!)

SLOTERDIJK  , Peter. Not saved : essays after Heidegger  . Malden: Polity, 2016.

Consequently, the long formative phase of the human is a stone age in the non-museological sense of the word, or an age of hard resources. Here, one may underline Heidegger’s observation that language is neither the utterance of an organism nor the expression of a living being. This is already the case a fortiori with the stone and every other hard material that is ready to hand for the earliest and simplest applications, particularly bones and branches. The stone does not express the human being; it gives him a chance to step into the clearing. The first resources already bring primitive truth-values in their train, namely successes and failures in their deployment. Hence they have a character that primordially makes space for the world and is eo ipso formative for the human being. In the stone the fundamental feature of the readiness-to-hand of equipment [Zuhandenheit von Zeug] in the lifeworld gains contour for the first time. But hard resources are more than equipment in the normal sense of the word. The pre-human being produces the first gaps and tears in the environmental ring by becoming the author of a distancing technique by means of striking outward and throwing projectiles, which has repercussions for his very self. The human being neither stems from the ape (singe) as overhasty vulgar Darwinians believe, nor from the sign (signe), as one finds in the language games of French surrealists, but rather comes from the stone or, in more general terms, from hard resources, provided we are in agreement with the view that it was the use of stones that opened up the horizon of prototechnics. As a primitive stone technologist, as a thrower, and as an operator of equipment with which to strike, the pre-sapiens becomes an apprentice of hard resources. Becoming human happens under the protection of lithotechnics. For the principle of technology comes into play for the first time with the use of stones for throwing, striking, and cutting: relieving the body of contact with presences in the environment. That allows the nascent human being to deactivate bodily contact and replace it with stone contact. While flight is a negative evasion in the face of unwelcome instances of bodily contact, stone technology effects a positive evasion that transitions into a capability. It preserves the dense relation to the object and provides the path to its mastery. Thing-mastery thus becomes advisable as an evolutionary alternative to the distance engendered by flight. Technology transforms stress into sovereignty. That holds for the proximate range that can be manipulated by blows and cuts, as it also does to an even higher degree for the relations of distance to objects that one can throw. The limits of my throws are the limits of my world. The gaze that follows a stone that has been thrown is the first form of theory. If the human being is the animal that has a project then this is because he is disposed to anticipate the results of throws by means of a competence that is acquired early on and that is organismically anchored. The feeling of consentaneity that comes with a successful throw, hitting a target, or an effective blow is the first stage of a post-animal truth-function. One must not allow the primitive nature of the first use of tools to seduce one into the opinion that their range would not yet have been great enough to burst the pre-human being out of his environment. It was sufficient to trigger the primary event of anthropogenesis: the first ontologically relevant production in the sense of manufacturing an effect in an observable space. In order to produce, and thus to be able to bring forth and effectuate, an agent must see in front of himself an opening—some kind of space of leeway or window—in which a transformation in the environment can be perceived as a successful work of his own doing. Precisely this opening is engendered by the technology of stone throwing and hitting, technologies that were soon complemented by those of stone splitting and cutting, which is based on striking stone against stone. The stone, as equipment discovered to throw and strike with, thus becomes equipment for cutting and thereby the first produced means of production. Some paleontologists would like to view the employment of the second stone as the genuine criterion for distinguishing what is essential in the human tool department from animal usage.37 There is also the evidence for early preparations of wooden objects by means of stone. Other researchers see the criterion in the tending of fire, which for perhaps one and a half or two million but certainly for a million years, as the findings in the Escale Cave show, was in use by pre-human groups. Its power for forming niches and spheres and thus the means of emancipation for human groups from climatic and biogeographical backgrounds should never be underestimated.

Through the triad of throwing, striking, and cutting (supplemented by manual operations such as tying knots, scraping, polishing, piercing, etc.), a window is opened in which productions happen and products can appear: in this opening that which ‘comes forth’ steps into appearance [tritt . . . in Erscheinung] in an entirely new way. This coming forth from the results of one’s own actions is of a fundamentally different quality than the becoming visible of beings in the plant’s budding or in animal births. It is also fundamentally distinct from the ‘occurrence’ [Eintreten] of meteorological phenomena and from the ‘appearance’ [Auftreten] of wild animals or sicknesses. We are already dealing with an authentic bringing about of something by ‘labor’: in the case of success as in the case of failure the action (factum) and the observed and evaluated situation after the deed (verum) converge for the first time. The pre-human being as a thrower, striker, and one who cuts apart thus represents, if not the sole producer of, then at least someone who cooperates with the clearing. Only in the clearing—the realm of the observation of success—can truths and activities refer to each other and be on a par with each other. The activity intends success; the success refers to the activity that effected it. The clearing is a work of stones that become suitable for other stones, for nascent hands, and for things that are able to be worked on or struck. The successful blow is the prototype of the proposition. The throw that hits the mark is thefirst synthesis of subject (stone), copula (action), and object (animal or enemy). Cutting all the way through something prefigures the analytical judgment [Urteil].38 Propositions are a mimesis of the throw, blow, and cut in the space of signification, where affirmations reenact successful throws, blows, and cuts, while negations are born of the observation of missed throws, unsuccessful blows, and failed cuts. The oldest stone artifacts are equipment for work and equipment for signification in one. From the beginning they speak of the power that follows from being-able-to-be-vis-àvis. Therefore: whoever does not wish to speak of stones should say nothing of the human being.

The ontological result of these first instances of bringing forth is thus much more than an isolated product—it is the opening up of the space in which there can first be results: in this window onto the success of one’s deeds, labor processes are carried out, throws are assessed, and results understood. The effects of blows, throws, and cuts establish the bond between success and truth, which in elevated cultural situations is, admittedly, stretched taught, though it can never be torn asunder. (For which reason the late Heidegger, in my opinion, no longer does justice to the clearing when he tends to align being a reflective human being entirely with the renunciation of the will and with a neo-humble insertion into the play of the ‘fourfold.’ The clearing is thereby thought too much from the perspective of a freewheeling Being-attentive that is elevated to the status of releasement [Gelassenheit]. The inceptual clearing, however, is already in itself the space of success in which technological approaches to things become observable: as a window onto observations of success it is initially thrust open solely by active interventions and an offensive creation of distance—before it invites aesthetic and meditative perspectives.) In this space the character of hitting the mark belonging to ‘truths’ and the character of fit belonging to operative syntheses coincide. In it the possibility of readiness-to-hand is achieved—the clearing in the hand, as it were. At the same time, the horizon emerges for the eye that accompanies the throw—the clearing is the expanding of the space of circumspection. In this sense one may say that the result of the Stone Age consisted in the conquest of that natural distance with which the environmental ring bursts in the direction of world-openness.