The Standardized Social Animal—Recreating Man by Hypertexting Antiquity: A Critical View on German Philosophical Discourse of the Early 1800s

In 1999 German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk provoked a scandal with his speech Regeln für den Menschenpark in which he referred to Plato’s Republic to define rules for the “zoo for humans” (instead of the commonly used German term Tierpark (animal park) Sloterdijk used Menschenpark)—a phrase supposed to ironically rename civilization and modern society. The provocation had its intended effect, and German critics—especially Jürgen Habermas—accused Sloterdijk of advocating fascism. The critics were especially appalled by Sloterdijk’s terminology that employed terms such as Züchtung (breeding). If one digs deeper, though, this category leads straight back to the Enlightenment and the new social class of the Bürger. Prominent thinkers of that era proclaimed that it was necessaryto produce a “new man” by establishing a unique social system within which classical education and new philosophical thought were seen as tools to create a new “modern” (German) man. The aim of this paper is to examine the mechanisms employed to create the framework of a system intended to produce the “new (German) man” through hypertexting classical Greek thought and aestheticism for the “new” pedagogy. By showing up the way the German Enlightenment—and here especially writers and theoreticians like Schiller, Schleiermacher, Fichte, Wilhelm von Humboldt, etc.—promoted this “new human” and forced a new bourgeois identity on people by re-accentuating ancient Greek thought, the question arises whether the “breeding” criticized by Habermas and others has been a basic principle of social systems that can be traced back to Plato’s writings. Eventually, the question: in what way a social system uses a certain standard with regard to how the persons of a particular Lebenswelt are shaped, will be examined. The way the creation of a certain identity occurs through a process of bricolage shall furthermore more be discussed.