Kurt Röttgers
Pandemic Politics without Alternatives?
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Pandemic Politics without Alternatives?
Kurt Röttgers, Dept. of Philosophy,
Fernuniversität in Hagen, Hagen, Germany
kurt.roettgers@fernuni-hagen.de Abstract:
Starting from the current situation of a global pandemic policy, the paper investigates the questions of, firstly, what postmodernism had offered in terms of freedoms before this policy took over, and secondly, what might be expected as a change in policy after the pandemic. Postmodernism is regarded as characterized by the following items: The renunciation of the idea of an autonomous subject, of a general order of values, of substances as the man or the people, of the thinking in hierarchies and of one-dimensional method from one beginning to one end. What does the one- dimensional pandemic politics offer instead of the freedom of postmodernism? It is the execution of hygiene, of distancing, of masking, of securities, of healthy aging, of home office and of cultural poverty. The paper then discusses the foundations on which a post-pandemic social philosophy could be built to enable a truly democratic society without the one-dimensional, authoritarian politics of executing a presumed factual constraint. It would stress the social relations, the Between of men and women, the independent creation of sense without a prescribed origin and prescribed aim of societies. That means an emphasis on the
pluralities of culture instead of an imposition of a supposed factual constraint
Keywords: pandemic, postmodernism, pluralism, social philosophy, communicative text
Pandemic Politics without Alternatives?
1. DIAGNOSTICAL PRELUDE
Since we live in pandemic times, we are no longer confronted with or treated by a politics we were used to in the old fashioned democracy: the will of the people is no longer decisive, but instead the insight of experts who seemingly know better what is the best for the individual selves, i.e. for the hygiene of the interiors of bodies. It is pretended that the knowledge of the bodies is best done by external experts, not by the conscience of a self, called immune system. The experts execute what they call factual constraints: it is, they say, not by the arbitrary power of virologists and epidemiologists what is prescribed, but the irrefutable constraint of the matter. The constraint is oppressive and follows the structure of top-down without personal responsibility of anyone. On top we see virologist-politicians, and below we find the masked sub-jects. This oppressive structure produces depressions for the whole of contemporary societies. The oppression is a kind of one- dimensionality. Only the matter, namely the virus, which is above all other matters, dictates what has to be done on men and women.
No advice of what possibly could be done by politics other than the oppressive constraint of the matter is accepted any more. Of course, there could have been auxiliary advice from social philosophers taking into account the consequences of destroying the cohesion of the social, e.g. by the prohibition of nearness of humans less than 150 cm und the obligation of hiding emotional allocation by masks and rigid postulation of manipulation of the immune system by
vaccination. There could also be auxiliary advice by psychologists warning against destroying the mental health, by the priority of the corporal health before mental health of the isolated bodies in lockdowns. There could also be the auxiliary advice of pedagogues regarding what is done to the children by hindering the social learning in groups of equal age by the exclusive offering of home schooling instead of classes, and the auxiliary advice of sociologists and legal officers and their potential warning before increasing violence of families imprisoned in their flats.
The new politics is a politics of the State of control, as we used to have it in Europe in the 17th century (in Germany named
“Obrigkeitsstaat”, where the king knew best what is good for the subjects, what they even did not anticipate, and he took care for their welfare, limiting their lives on that amount, what he believed to be beneficial for them. This changed with the invention of the autonomous subject; now the caring for the subjects was imposed on themselves in the movement of the bourgeois revolution in France and America. Now the sovereignty of the autonomous subject was discovered and proclaimed as a new political subjectivity. It was denied that the society has a hierarchical structure by its nature, in which all orders originate above and are transmitted to those below. This order of society, inherited from the Middle Ages, did not allow egoism, the basis of modern capitalism.
Nowadays the health of the virologist-politician conforms to this pattern: they exclusively care for the health and the welfare of the human bodies from the outclassing standpoint– not the (suffering?) clients. How could that happen?
The classical modernity of the autonomous subject relied on an essence of man as a power of/on himself which could be combined in a common power of society or of a state. The virological/epidemiological politics do not discover autonomy in an essence of man, but only suspicious potentiality of a virus of his organism, by which the body (without an essence of a soul) may already be infected or the suspicion of an inclination to be infected in future. This generalization of a suspicion has become now the general affect between men and women and their caretakers and between men/women and men/women replacing autonomous self- care. But this general suspicion against everyone was already
prepared by the structure of monitoring and control in late modern societies, in which profiles replace individuals in order to recognize terrorists, future terrorists and potentially future terrorists as well as early recognition of possible clients, future clients and potentially future clients of any product.
In this late modernity the liberation of the subject from authoritarian hierarchical structures did not lead to such a freedom, which could be a freedom-to, to an “être-en-commun”, as Jean-Luc Nancy calls this aim of a really democratic society, i.e. to a
“communism of spirits”, as Hölderlin had called it. Not a community of nearness was proclaimed nowadays but social distancing, not open-mindedness for a social community, but the duty of mummery by masks, and no longer a dialectic of nearness and distance in friendly touching and kissing, but the distance of 150cm between men and women. This new freedom should not be anything else but the freedom from viruses, not the freedom of individuals encountering each other. The new order consists in ordering the subjects in those infected, diseased, died, convalesced, and in the vaccinated and the non-vaccinated. The social values that oriented social activities in the direction to improve the living together in a better world is decayed to arbitrariness in the fixing the criteria of values of incidence. Ironically this arbitrariness contradicts the pretended factual constraints by viruses and virologists. The factual constraint regresses politics which always has been juggling, balancing of alternatives and experimenting with options, to a simple and one-dimensional execution of imposed constraints.
The diagnostic of these changes of the structure and the sense of the social is not intended to be a critique and proposal of improvements; the intention is only a description without passion.
Therefore what remains is the question, what could have and should have been the chances of real freedom released by postmodernity.
2. MAIN QUESTION:WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN THE FREEDOM IN POSTMODERNITY?
It is not the aim of the considerations to be carried out here to open up a new variant of the discussions of what postmodernism is.
Nevertheless, as a certain understanding – regardless of criticism or
apology – the following may perhaps be assumed. Postmodernism dismisses:
• The adoption of the idea of an autonomous subject [1] by which the social is constituted; Michel Foucault, one of the main keyword givers of postmodernism, had shown that the concept of subject owes itself to a historical constitution [2];
• Farewell to a generally valid order of values, whatever the justifications may be, an order which guides or should guide all actions of individuals[3];
• End of thinking in individual or supra-individual substances such as "the" human being, "the" people etc.[4];
• Dissolution of hierarchical thinking [5];
1 For the critique of this idea in Butler, Foucault und Marx: Hanna Meißner, Jenseits des autonomen Subjekts, Bielefeld 2010; Käte Meyer-Drawe, Illusionen von Autonomie, München 1990; cf. also Slavoj Žiżek, Living in the End Times, London, New York 2010, 229: “… the subject is not its own origin, it is secondary, dependent on its substantial presuppositions; but these
presuppositions do not have a substantial consistency of their own and are always retroactively posited. The only ‘absolute’ is thus the process itself.”
2 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 2nd ed., London 2001.
3 About an accidental pluralism of values Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, Varieties of Pluralism in an Polyphonic Society, The Review of Metaphysics 44 (1990), 3- 20; cf. Kurt Röttgers, Wertepolitik, Zeitschrift. für Kulturphilosophie 3 (2009), 135-150. Also Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values („Umwertung aller Werte“) presupposes, that there in fact is no pre-established given order of values.
4 The desubstantialization: Sybille Krämer, Transmission. An Approach to Media Philosophy, Amsterdam 2015, for a politics without a substantial band, without any other target than the pure connectivity, without any other structure than interconnectivity see Jean-Luc Nancy, The sense of the World,
Minneapolis, London 1998. The pure relational medium („between“) without a substantial filling is at the same time a medium full of possibilities. Robert D.
Cottrell, Sexuality / Textuality, Columbus/Ohio1981, 81-93.
5 For the resistance against hierarchy in Gilles Deleuze see Wolfgang Langer, Gilles Deleuze. Kritik und Immanenz, Berlin 2003, 81; cf. with regard to Bataille: Andreas Hetzel, Denken der Kontinuität, Georges Bataille. Vorreden zur Überschreitung, ed. Andreas Hetzel and Peter Wiechens, Würzburg 1999, 78.
• Detachment of a way of thinking and a methodology of a progress from a (single) origin to a (single) goal of all social orientation[6].
These dismissals cannot be seen as justified in actions by actors, in in their so called critical actions; for this would have been the mode of criticism typical of modernity and late modernity[7], but it is not that of postmodern theoretical practices. These farewells of modernity are more comparable to waving after the departure of a train with the beloved: this waving does not stop the train. Even if they are sad or even melancholic, such dissolutions of (late) modernity are corrosions and not recoverable. If postmodernism determines the downfall of modernity, this history of loss, these corrosions, there is no reason for jubilation, criticism or even due moralizations because it is purely diagnostic. But in purely diagnostic terms, costs, side effects and risks can very well be accounted for, as well as relief and opportunities, of course.
Modernity and even late modernity were founded in the idea of unity of the social coherence, either as a necessary assumption, e.g.
eth transcendental unity of the One reason which is one in all subjects, or as a real substantiated unification: “ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”, as the Nazis said. Postmodernity gave up this tendency to unity and stake out on the plurality of possible social connections and of open futures. By this stressing on plurality the postmoderns did not want a negation of unity in every respect but they were replacing the 1 by an 1+n: the one and then another one and so on.
The perversion of postmodernity by the pandemic politics gives up both, the unity and the plurality and replaces it by the pure Zero, of autonomous subjectivity as well as that of the plurality of intersubjectivities. All social connections and combinations are broken down into a universal egoism of numbers of infected and non-yet infected. They replace the humanity of fellowmen, be it the
6 Robert D. Cottrell, Sexuality / Textuality, 140-145; the finiteness of man reveals a world without origin and aim, so the diagnosis of Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Nude. The Skin of Images New York 2014, and in relation to Heidegger:Jean-Luc Nancy, Banalité de Heidegger, Paris 2015, 65.
7 I call late modernity in difference to modernity the theories of communicative acting à la Habermas, the analytical philosophy of Anglo-Saxon provenience and most parts of phenomenology.
duty solidarity or the loving touching, by the mummery of speaking, which is in Greek the logos, and of hearing, which in German connotes the “Vernehmen” (hearing) with “Vernunft”
(reason) and the masking of all connecting attractions and seductions. The trust in the unity of reason (so modernity) or of the plurality of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls in an untranslatable word
“être-en-commun” (so postmodernity) is now replaced by the duty of distancing and the distrust that the man/woman that formerly was a fellow must suspected as a bearer of the virus, so everyone is dangerous for everyone. Love and confidence become dysfunctional.
3. WHAT DOES THE PANDEMIC-POLITICAL PERVERSE FUTURE HAVE TO OFFER US?
I would like to explain these expectations in seven points:
• Hygiene instead of immunity
• Distance/distance instead of attention/closeness
• Disguise instead of openness
• "Security" instead of risk and risk
• Healthy aging instead of a livable, "debauched" life
• Digitalization instead of experience
• Poverty instead of carelessness 3.1 Hygiene instead of immunity
In its evolution, the human body has built up a defense system against threats: the immune system. This works with two methods.
Dangerous foreign bodies are either integrated or combated. Just as certain bacteria have developed multi-resistant variations in order to overcome the pharmacological barrier, viruses – as if it were had knowledge of the immune system – also seem to be able to form particularly resistant variations. But the fighting defense has always been a learning opportunity for the organism, an adaptation of the immune system. And there are certain parasites, biological and economic, that know how to take advantage of the organism's need for help. But just as the offer of help from the mafia or the state is always a double-edged sword, so it is also in this double respect the medical-immunological and the political-economic offer of help
through vaccinations. The paradox of fighting parasites through protective super-parasites such as mafia or state is shown very clearly by Michel Serres in his book "The Parasite". And this could be transferred to the vaccine parasites of pharmaco-politics[8, 9].
The fight is also carried out – socially mediated – by hygiene regulations. In their origins, these have always been religiously or ideologically based before they become a custom and a normality.
Holiness commands purity (cleanliness). The Prophet forbade the consumption of (unclean) pork, the epidemologist ideologues today forbid the visit of food in the restaurant. Sometimes people died after eating pork (today we know: by trichinae) or after visiting restaurants (by viruses). So such things had to be banned.
Gradually, however, the imposed compulsion will become a custom and habit. While the prophetic or virological-ideological speech originally imposed itself as a compulsion from the outside, the necessity gradually turns into a morally formed should, especially if the original practical purpose will have been forgotten.
Today, this can already be observed in the aggressive hostility towards people who did not keep enough distance, by their moralizing fellow human beings. In the future we will probably also avoid restaurants – you never know... The commandments on fasting or monogamy were also originally imposed religiously before they became a matter of course [10].
However, we must keep the question of induced losses of hygiene as an open question. Hygiene, as we know, leads to a weakening of the immune system, especially blatant in the panicked hygiene of pop singer Michael Jackson. Also renunciation of restaurant visits and monogamy freely reduce lust-oriented pleasures. In the pandemic policy, virological-epidemiological- political imposed, we can observe all these reductions in human pleasures, from the closure of playgrounds for children up to the closure of gyms and the closure of theaters. And the prognosis to be derived is that without an abyss of other possibilities, people will
8 Fremdkörper, ed. F. Peschke, A. Schulz-Buchta, M. Nagenborg, Chr. F. Hoffstett. Bochum, Freiburg.
9 Michel Serres, The parasite, The University of Minnesota Press 2007.
10 R. Caillois: Man and the Sacred, University of Illinois Press 2001.
have to accept these restrictions of a livable life as a self-evident custom in the future. They learn to forget what that was, a life worth living in the fullest sense. At some point they will have accepted the disguises of human interaction and one will disapprove of meeting a person in public without a mask. Hygiene rules instead of strengthened immunity will determine the morality of human bodies.
3.2 Distance instead of human attention and closeness
Touch is not only indispensable for the children of humans (and all animals related to us) to survive and thrive, it is also essential for happiness in human life as a whole. The handshake, the hug, even the bellows of the children, and the kiss and the sexuality – all these gestures and affections make up the culture of the social.
Where they are missing or denied or even forbidden, i.e. where people are supposed to see and experience each other as untouchable, enmity thrives. In this respect, the duty of distancing the pandemic policy is the core of asociality. And the prevention of proximity and the habituation to its absence is the hallmark of a decaying society. However, the removal of fellow human beings from close relationships and the prevention of closeness began even before the pandemic policy, but it is gladly received by it, strengthened and remains not only an informal moment of capitalist egoism, but is now expressly prescribed. Because of the anchoring in capitalism, it is not to be expected that this exit from sociality will disappear after the pandemic policy: the cold from lack of touch will have become a habit and a normal state, especially since all children have been socialized in this way during the years 2020ff.: online schooling instead of learning together with classmates, "sports" in front of the screen instead of together with others in the sports hall; however, how you can learn to swim without going into the water is still beyond my imagination [11].
This imposed renunciation of closeness converges with an increasing formalization and abstractness. In abstractly defined
11 Ashley Montagu, Touching. 2. ed. New York 1977; cf. also Madalina Diaconu, Tasten, Riechen, Schmecken 2nd ed., 2020; as well as with regard to Covid-19 Gesa Lindemann, Die Ordnung der Berührung, Weilerswist 2020.
relations, in numbers and profiles, the concrete diversity of reality disappears into arbitrarily configurable ("manipulable") images of reality. For them, human proximity (already made suspicious as
"human" anyway) is increasingly made impossible, because the namelessness of the numbers cannot reflect the diversity of human reality.
The situation was quite different for the empiricist moral philosophy of David Hume and Adam Smith, for whom the concept of sympathy, of feeling together, was central. Even Kant's ethics of the generalizability of maxims of action renounced this concept of sympathy, because too little was calculable and therefore too little reliable in the colorfulness of human destiny. Sympathy actually meant nothing more than the sharing of sensitivities. Sympathy unfolds in the “between” (the medium, i.d. the middle) of human relationships, always determined at the same time by closeness and distance. But when closeness is removed from this in-between, the social crumbles into individualistic egoisms. The obligation to distance oneself dissolves the être-en-commun into a mass of the isolated bodies.
Deeply rooted behind this lies the atavistic fear of the untouchable. This age-old taboo of mythical societies is being reactivated in the fear of infections, and their continued existence after the pandemic policy is already being prepared with the argument that these measures, to which one will have become accustomed, also protect against all sorts of other infections in the vicinity.
If, however, contagion as a process of approximation unites people, then the restrictive prevention and avoidance of infection at all costs is itself a contagious disease, the convulsive avoidance of closeness itself a pathological feature, whereby, as I said, in every touch it is a mode of between people, a combination of closeness and distance. So not the proximity à tout prix is desirable, but the prohibition of proximity below 150 cm is a typical feature of madness. No longer knowing the interplay of proximity and distance makes foreign space and intrinsic space indistinguishable:
nothing can be experienced and communicated anymore because everything is arranged "objectively". The expression of this pathology has been expressed by one patient as follows: "I no
longer see myself in a real world: it is rather as if I am already dead and watching myself. I can't do anything and I'm nothing!" This is also the expected structure of the comprehensively regulated social world after the pandemic policy: incidences or other arbitrarily set numerical values lead the lives of people: they can no longer do anything and are nothing as if they were already dead.
It is to be expected that the once destroyed human closeness can never again be restored in its integrity, especially since it lies exactly on the line of the capitalism-friendly egoism of all against all, just as playful trust cannot simply be restored. I have to stay away from the former fellow human beings; because they are competitors of my health (and of my wealth) as potential virus carriers. When they are vaccinated, they will have selfishly reserved for themselves a milder course of a possible disease, but they may continue to be contagious to others. Therefore, as a precaution, a renunciation of an être-en-commun is indicated. This is the expected future of the social after the pandemic policy of fueled mistrust nearby.
3.3 Disguise instead of openness
There is no denying that we all always play theater, wear masks, and not only on the real stage in the theater or in the carnival. But this game of masks offers an infinite variety of masks. Of the mummeries, officially called "masks", there are only two approved ones: OP and FFP2. Behind these “masks”, the human masks have become invisible. Identity, which had become an event in postmodernism, is limited to standardized and fixed phenomenality. In these circumstances the mask resembles the death mask. Behind it there is nothing essential, in any case no more rebellion. The masked person becomes one with the disguise for himself and for the others in the encounter. The masked people no longer recognize each other. The principle of recognition, formerly proclaimed by late modernism the angel of morality, is now obsolete. In the perverse-postmodern pandemic-political re- education of the subjects, this moral principle is no longer functional for the coherence of society, because people will have understood that the constraints imposed on them have been established only for their own best and that observing the
limitations of their possibilities of successful existence is their own duty.
It is not only paradoxical that only masked people are allowed to protest and demonstrate against the mask requirement, i.e. only masked people are entitled to this fundamental right, just as probably in the future only vaccinated people will be allowed to claim the fundamental right to freedom of movement. This is not only paradoxical at the level of politics, but it also leads to existential paradoxes for the subjects of these decisions: they either have to contradict themselves and stand up against masks, masked as commanded, or they are criminalized by the authorities, whose policies they wanted to change by protest. This self-paradoxization is the breeding ground for mental disorders such as schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia of the masses is becoming the "new normal".
Just as only masked people are allowed to protest against the mask requirement, so only vaccinated people will be allowed to speak out against vaccinations in the future, which is already practiced in the selection of interlocutors on the talk shows of German television.
Back to the masks. A successful human existence would be an open one. Openness as a condition of co-existence, the être-en- commun, with fellow human beings has several positive aspects.
On the one hand, it is a condition for new experiences, and this presupposes the ability to move in open real and intellectual spaces.
Something new encounters in the rhythm of the movements in such open spaces: openness is directed towards the unpredictable and unexpected. The surprising and unexpected is of a different quality than the spectrum of intended feasibility, channeled by existing findings and limited by constraints.
Only a life in the openness of the self is a successful life, both morally and epistemic. Morally, openness is openness to the abyssal otherness of the other, i.e. to be surprised by him or her, and it is openness to moral experiments. It is the mysterious perspective of becoming. Epistemically it was e.g. that Heidegger interpreted truth (alétheia) as openness. Thinking must be open to what is encountered. Taken together, openness is understood as a condition of the co-existence of things and people. But it is then very much the question whether this openness after the restrictions
of the pandemic policy will still be able to flourish in the future, since all criticism and every different thinking had been defamed and ostracized as conspiracy thinking.
3.4 "Security" instead of risk
Since February 2020, the pandemic policy has relied on uncertainty and on the constriction of fear in order to accept the measures to be ordered in order to be able to pass off the orders as a factual constraint. The narrowness of fear had its model in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes had recommended the all- powerful state of Leviathan as the only antidote to everyone's fear of being killed by anyone else. The argument was not that all other people were potential murderers, but the uncertainty of whether one of the many would be my murderer and which one of them. The same structure underpinned the pandemic administrators' scaremongering: not the thesis that everyone else would actually carry the virus and infect and kill me, but the concern that there might be at least one of them who could infect and kill me.
The subjects, fundamentally insecure, followed the orders of the authorities, however drastic they may have been. In fact, however, obedience in the adoption of the perspective of "factual constraint" as an objective commandment did not provide any security, as the numbers of infections that were often spread showed, but obedience to the law was nothing less than the willing submission of one's own powerlessness in the face of state- epidemiological superiority and followed the everyday maxim 'It is not pleasant, but it must be'.
Security is always questionable and promises of security, as can be observed on all sides in pandemic policy, are fundamentally deceptive, that is why the "imperative" measures have been changed from week to week. The greed for security that politics generated and fought at the same time was basically nothing more than the fear of a possible death. Solidarity with the very elderly was proclaimed, who were to be assured of a long further life. But since ancient times, learning to die has been part of the philosophical learning load. In contrast, it should now be learned that the very elderly should not die (at least not from or with this virus). In order not to let the fear fall asleep, the published death
numbers added together those who died from the virus with those who died of something else, but also carried the virus. In this way, the numbers of the other types of death also decreased conspicuously, because the deceased were now attributed to the Corona dead., The fear of dying will no longer leave us and a life- friendly serenity will no longer be possible after the pandemic policy, although the advances in palliative medicine will always enable a low-pain death.
A culture without the risk of failure, even the risk of dying unexpectedly, is not possible. Without these risks, neither a knowledge of the true nor a successful life beyond the illusion of the monotonous ever-same is possible. Failure is also an opportunity to learn and as such an enrichment of life.
Uncertainties, if they are accepted as a condition of a successful existence, are called risks. This also includes the risk associated with every social encounter, be it infectious encounters, be it those of contagious enthusiasm or of spontaneous falling in love. Those who are not willing to take the risk of encountering the other, including the risk of failure in social relationships, including the life plans and existential orientations associated with them, ultimately fail all social relationships. His advice is autism. There is no sure advice in the “between” of the social relations (in the communicative text that connects us). Contrary to all the striving for security (propagated in pandemic policy through vaccination and testing), it is necessary to accept, even advocate, the risk of existence in the tangle of uncertainties. The risk of existence always implies wrong paths. Those who cannot accept this – after the fear of the viruses caused by the pandemic policy – ignore finiteness and mortality; because as an everyday wisdom knows to report, life is life-threatening, otherwise it would not be a living life at all, but only a supposedly endless survival. But maybe that's what we're left with after the pandemic policy: mere survival instead existential living one’s life.
3.5 Healthy aging instead of a livable, extravagant life
There is nothing wrong with being and staying old and healthy at the same time. Medicine, pharmacology and cosmetics are working to keep the aging body healthy, to repair its health or at
least to maintain the appearance of healthy and perhaps non-aging body. Life wants its preservation, and these life-sustaining techniques support the aging body in it. There is absolutely nothing to argue against that. But what if the only remaining purpose of life is left as life support, purpose of reparation medicine and the dying body is prevented from dying? In order to postpone death – which awaits everyone due to finiteness as a conditio humana – considerable efforts are made to minimize risks: to live only as the postponed death, i.e. to spend one's life instead of living it. The pandemic policy has repeatedly designed the horror scenario that people die and that it would be necessary to prevent this, possibly also by deleting them a life worth living, e.g. by the assistance of dear people, in order to ensure the mere survival of this organism.
Another perspective is completely out of sight, namely what it means beyond mere survival to be a human being, to exist.
Anthropological medicine is changing its perspective to this; their center of efforts now is what it means to exist humanly, whether sick or (relatively) healthy. Beyond pure survival with a mask and at an inhuman distance, what would be a life worth living? A first answer must be: A life worth living is a debauched life, insofar as it transcends survival in the direction of an over-life. Georg Simmel believed to have observed that people who enjoy life, who enjoy being alive, age earlier. They are more likely to age, according to Simmel, because they live more, more intensely, more extravagantly; so the question is: is a long-lived life more desirable than a life-driven one? The pandemic policy with its lockdown bans of all pleasures and all sensuality of shared enjoyment guarantees a long-lived survival. But the prolongation of life concerned and prescribed for the subjects willing to survive is a paradox; because such a spending life is detrimental even to the health, since the joylessness causes a weakening of the immune system and an increase in psychologically and psychosomatically caused, often depressive diseases. In the meantime, we have heard of hospitals that have not fully occupied the intensive care units for the Corona patients, but have to expand the psychiatric departments.
Earlier times took old age as an opportunity to think more about the salvation of the soul, often in the form of a commemoration of a life after death. In survival politics, this is a perspective without
sense. The question now is, will the way of life from this revaluation of the relationship between life extension and enjoyment of life find its way back to a full concept of human existence, to which medicine, especially since virology has nothing to contribute, because it is purely scientifically oriented, must fail to provide a true human existence. The pessimistic expectation is that we will hardly find our way back there, because we have learned through the pandemic policy to understand ourselves as scientific objects. And the increased egoism hardly allows a choice between the alternatives.
3.6 Digitalization instead of social experiences
Although pandemic policy has not invented "home schooling"
to contain sources of infection, it has increasingly propagated it. It was invented by the behaviorist psychologist Skinner, who expected programmed learning to increase effectiveness. This self- learning autism has serious social consequences.
Digital learning was all about the acquisition of available knowledge content to the children and young people. The students no longer had to make their own experiences, because these had long since been made by knowers, were available in textbooks and handouts and could now be passed on and appropriated in an easily consumable form. In the course of digitization and knowledge databases, this behaviorist, autistic tendency intensified: one no longer had to experience, i.e. move to explorations, but one could sit at the desk or kitchen table (depending on the social situation) and receive experiences of others. In this respect, digitization is always also discipline: sitting still in front of the screen. It must be admitted that not every young earthly person has to reinvent the wheel, as they say, and many findings of today's natural sciences are only available by means of highly artificial apparatuses and highly mathematized models. No one has ever personally seen a neutrino or currently the Corona virus with their own eyes: we are dependent on taking this knowledge from the relevant experts in confidence in the self-regulation of scientific knowledge processes.
In this way, more and more of our knowledge bases are second- hand knowledge. Nothing can be done about that, and that's a good thing. Of course, this also has the negative effect that many critics
of pandemic policy take refuge in hostility to science and deny the available scientific findings. One cannot deny the sciences, but one has to doubt that politics can derive a compulsion to act from it.
However, the mathematized and digitized knowledge is only one part of our civilization. And the danger of sub-disciplines of medicine guiding social and political processes unidirectionally has become evident in pandemic policy. The concerns of educators, psychiatrists, pediatricians and, most recently, social philosophers could be blown to the wind with the simple reference to incidence figures.
In phenomenology, it has been pointed out on several occasions that the other has no access to the black box of my experiences and therefore remains dependent on the testimony qua communication (susceptible to deception, of course). This can be changed through digitization – digital learning from the known experiences of others. The knower will then know what the other knows, and we will share our knowledge of our ignorance. This eliminates the possibility of correcting deceptions through one's own experiences.
This is exactly what happens in the so-called "social" media, and an American president was a (amateurish) virtuoso of these practices.
It could be important to regain a non-methodical, non- programmable learning through movements after the pandemic policy, even by seductions and loves. But exactly the opposite has happened, possible experiential learning has been replaced by mere knowledge transfer. The slogan of "lifelong learning" can therefore have two meanings: either lifelong programming and digitization or lifelong wandering and trying out unknown paths in social touches, i.e. in the living environment and not on the screen.
Learning also means learning to live and die, outgrowing the independent digital world in the model of free speech in the communicative text, i.e. listening well, observing and responding.
3.7And finally: poverty instead of carelessness
The fact that rich people are getting richer and richer and the poor are getting poorer and poorer is certainly not a consequence of the pandemic policy, but quite normal under capitalism. The fact that start-ups from the pharmaceutical industry are now among the
new rich is also not a remarkable peculiarity. These trivialities are quite uninteresting from the point of view of diagnosing pandemic policy. More remarkable, however, are the impoverishments caused and their justifications. Food, it is undisputed, must remain generally accessible. But the fact that culture was generally regarded as dispensable for a society and that many cultural workers were driven to ruin, both emotionally-existentially and financially, is already a special feature of this policy; for this
"factual constraint" does not result from the structural logic of capitalism. In capitalism, especially of the American variety, it was true in a banal way that culture had to "pay off", quantifiable in sums of money. Now, however, beyond capitalist banality, culture, this glue of social cohesion, has been completely banned.
This will be imprinted, and after the end of the pandemic policy, the dispensability of culture and the people who work for it will remain a lasting feature of our society. Specifically, the poverty of these population groups will survive, or those who have worked there will have to look for jobs as taxi drivers, police officers or the like. This is the new poverty in the double sense: the poverty of the cultural workers and the cultural poverty of our societies. On the other hand, symptomatic of cultural impoverishment is the educational poverty of an entire generation of pupils. And, of course, many have become economically poorer to the point of impossibility of survival.
Carelessness as a medium for the flourishing of culture disappeared completely. Carelessness and serenity are the fluid of morality, a morality that is understood by itself. Will we ever be able to return from the mental illnesses caused by pandemic politics and moral deformations of the incited egoism of infection- avoidance worries to the carelessness of a calmly led lifestyle?
Probably not.
*
This section, with its seven points of what to expect after the end of the pandemic policy, has turned out quite bleak with its prospects. And indeed, it can be assumed that there will be no change from this one-dimensional policy of material domination, but only a further stabilization for the purpose of prophylaxis with
the destruction of the social between people. The "relaxations"
prescribed by the pandemic policy in May 2021 for the vaccinated do not owe themselves to a new democratic realization of freedom through liberation, but are nothing more than a new triumph of the prescribing authorities: this "relaxation" is at the same time accompanied by a new tightening of the masking obligation Is there really no way out? In the next sections, I would like to highlight some alternatives based on the self-organization of the social dimension beyond politics. The grief caused does not have to end in melancholy and depression, but can perhaps be overcome by grief work – but how?
4. THE FOUNDING OF THE FOUNDAT ION
The guiding question of this chapter, which we will continue to follow, has been: What is to come after the pandemic policy:
Continue in the structuring as they were predetermined by this policy, or start anew. Do we need a new policy (or even something other than politics?) or was this policy – also called crisis management – not so bad. In the following, I will develop the idea raised by Jean-Luc Nancy that we do not need a different policy, but something other than politics in order to regenerate the social.
Philosophy cannot provide practical assistance without failing due to the persistence of the machinations or surrendering itself to it.
Their an-archic practice always lies on the sidelines of everyday machinations. Only mediated, in her peculiar oblique way, she works [12].
The breaking up of the self-evident in questioning is the event;
it breaks the continuities of "business as before". Abyss and event belong together. Just as the transition to the open is not a generation of novelties ("news"), so the “Ereignis” in the sense of Heidegger is not an "event".
The chasm of this abyss is an in-between. In it, it follows the social philosophy of the communicative text; because the communicative text is that between the self and others as a social process. With Heidegger it is possible to think of this between the
12 For the an-archic structure of this thinking s. Reiner Schürmann, Le principe d’anarchie et la question de l’agir, Bienne, Paris 2013.
être-en-commun not only and not primarily as a continuous process, but as an abysmal gap in the intermediate, i.e. not only as proximity, but also as distance, admittedly not as a hierarchically dictated distance from above ("distance" in pandemic politics), but as a connecting distance [13].
So when we talk about abysses, we should be talking about an absolutely new one that does not correspond to any of the designs, the immemorable new, that takes a radical break into the continuity of experience. Since modern times, a radical break in favor of a new has means: the farewell of the past, but also of the supposedly timelessly valid such as e.g. eternal values. This upheaval also includes past future plans and projects.
If philosophy can and must be something other than the solemn affirmation and fortification of commonly regarded nonsense or the opportune of public opinion ("political correctness"), be it in terms of content loyalty to the homeland, “völkisch” attitude, human rights, gendering, the neoliberal and democratic capitalist mainstream or the pandemic fear, then philosophy must also look the (respectively) "evil", the "villains" unreservedly in the face , because ethical, philosophical reflection is something completely different from morality and moralization. Then it is philosophically imperative not to prematurely join a prevailing opinion that rejects this, tomorrow that as "evil" and demands a general accession to this rejection – contingent moralizing. So it will follow the out-of- home with interest – mind you in the context of philosophical thinking, not necessarily as a political statement in public. It is particularly interested in moral experiments, vehemently rejected,
13 An expression coined by Jean-Luc Nancy when he reformulated Heidegger's philosophy as a socio-ontology. Jean-Luc Nancy, Blanchot. Passion politique, Paris 2011, 31; cf. Jean- Luc Nancy, L'expérience de la liberté, Paris1988; Jean.-Luc Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie, Paris 2008; Jean-LLuc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, Stanford 2000, see also Kurt Röttgers: Das Soziale denken, 535-564.
suspected, monitored and persecuted by the mainstream public [14, 15, 16].
One could already expand the political, i.e. bipolarly structured thinking by a tripolar one. A tripartite scheme makes it easier to avoid clear attributions of the kind of us, the clever, the good and well-behaved vaccinated, and those there, the stupid and the bad, i.e. also to subvert the political through the social. Therefore, socio- philosophical thinking is structured differently than political thought and the sentence "everything is political" is a sad sentence;
for it would not leave room for philosophical thinking that knows the third and is open to encounters with the foreign and the new.
5. DESPERAT E PLEADING FOR A POST PANDEMIC-
POLITICAL SOCIETY IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF A NEW POSTMODERN SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY
The following pleading seems desperate, because one cannot realistically believe in the possibility of a realization of the vision as long as we think that the factual constraint, formulated by the pandemic politics, reigns our ideas, i.e. so long as real democratic processes of the articulation of the will of the people is not possible, so long as we are subdued by the arbitrary decisions of an ill informed authority. Nevertheless it is not the mission of philosophy to formulate advices for practical problems, but to depict outlines of what could be and happen under an an-archaistic perspective.
The question is: what could have been the perspective , if we were not banned by the pandemic politics. To answer this crucial
14 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, Stanford 2005.
15 An example of this is George Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay On General Economy. Volume I: Consumption, Robert Hurley, 1988, Zone Books. See: Georges Bataille. Vorreden zur Überschreitung, ed. A. Hetzel u. P. Wiechens, Würzburg 1999; as well as the confrontation with Bataille in Kurt Röttgers, Um Kopf und Kragen. Das Schreiben der Verausgabung bei Bataille und de Sade, https://www.fernuni- hagen.de/philosophie/docs/sade_bataille.pdf . Kurt Röttgers, Kopflos im Labyrinth, Essen 2013, 17-21.
16 On the term, starting from the early Romanticism, see Kurt Röttgers, Erfahrungsverluste durch Moral – alles halb so schlimm, Ethik und wissenschaftliche Objektivität, ed.
Fellsches / W. L. Hohmann Essen 2001, 10-38.
question I refer to the social philosophy of the communicative text, as developed in my studies.
6.IS LOVE THE SOLUTION, IS IT A POSSIBLE CORNERSTONE OF A NEW SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY?
With the disintegration of the self-evident things that were socially binding in modernity and late modernity, questions about the "social bond" are now appearing everywhere in postmodernism, especially since the plural and liberal postmodernism has been shortened to a one-dimensional pandemic policy, i.e. the question of what binds "us". The corrosion of life-world values in the societies of the present has meanwhile become unmistakable, now observable in the hateful split in between masked and unmasked und between and the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, as a counter- reaction, makes the call for the previously unifying values resound.
This reputation permeates not only the new populisms, which are sometimes openly fascist, but always reactionary in the sense of reaction that has characterized the reactionaries since the French Revolution: the rejection of the political and social state that has occurred and the propagation of the restoration of old conditions.
But this call can also be heard in the incantations of the threatened values of democracy, human rights and the like.
In the background of this management of uncertainty, on the one hand, there is the basic conviction of liberalism, according to which if everyone thought only of themselves and only cared for themselves, it would logical that everyone would then be thought of. On the other hand, if everyone thought of the others and of the neighbors and farthest, i.e. under the universalization of selflessness, no one would be helped. To use an image: if everyone followed the example of St. Martin and cut up their coat to give away the half of it, then everyone would only have half a coat and both would have to freeze. A thriving selfish economy, on the other hand, would ensure that everyone could afford a whole coat. That such individualism from Hobbes to Rawls is nonsense could have been known since Marx, but in pandemic politics this extreme egoism has been revived. On the other hand, there is also the opposite position in the background, namely that there is a
something that would be more consecrated than this in front of all individuality and all economic liberal egoism and that would give the individuals value and dignity in the first place. If this something was formerly the church or the community, later the ideas of brotherhood, community or people, even the national community, moved into the vacant position. Most blatantly, the totalitarianisms have expressed the primacy of the one, the big whole, and demanded the sacrifice of all individuality from people: "You are nothing, your people is everything." Despite all the other contrasts, both background ideologies are united by the fact that they think substantialistically. Since Cassirer's "Substance and Function "
[17], since Heidegger's structural ontology, since structuralism and functionalism, since Luhmann's system theory and since the social philosophy of the communicative text (Röttgers) as well as the plural socio-ontology of "être-en-commun" of Nancy, in short, since all variants of postmodern thought, such substantialism has become obsolete.
In addition, both individualism and rather cryptic collectivism do not know the actually social, constituted by the position of the third beyond intersubjectivity and the unity of the collective [18].
Some propagate a new large or a small substantialism, as if one had decided, and wonder whether love is not suitable for "community"
or not, as if it were a matter of having a "community" that unites us by a "bond"; be it love or another something. Ferdinand Tönnies distinguished society and community not substantially, but functionally as two forms of will articulation, which he described as the will of nature and the will to choose [19]. However, it would no longer be a substantialist social division through a social contract of individuals or a unifying large whole, a constituted or a constituent community, but a mediality-centered, the middle and the intermediate [20]. And this center, this medium, this in-between is not a certain something, but the purely relational process of "être-
17 Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function, Chicago 1923.
18 Theorie des Dritten, ed. Th. Bedorf, J. Fischer, G. Lindemann, Munich 2010, esp. 33-71:
"Transzendentaler Voyeurismus".
19 Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft 3. ed., Darmstadt 1991.
20 Medium, Handbuch Kulturphilosophie, ed. R. Konersmann, Stuttgart, Weimar 2012, 347- 355.
en-commun", of being together, an ontology not of things or of man, but of pure existential co-existence, as Heidegger described it. This between does not gain its contour as a being, but purely relational, just as the words "between" and "with" are prepositions and not "thing" words.
Love belongs to the sphere of authenticity. Precisely because of this, as an extreme of authentic intersubjectivity, love is unsuitable for establishing or consolidating the social [21]; for the social, as is well known, needs the third, but love tends to exclude him as if he or she were not there. If love allows the third party, it is no longer real love. In other words, the lovers stray, their love threatens the social bond, and love tends to be amoral [22]. It is, as Derrida says, the "principle of absolute disorder." Niklas Luhmann also emphasizes that love is irresponsible [23]. Love can therefore neither be moralized nor socialized. It eludes the mode of communication of postmodern societies, which provides for the type of connection. The bourgeois age had envisaged a different type of communication for love, namely the lovingly understanding intervention in the other soul, which ultimately eludes the communicative text and penetrates the other soul in a deep look into the other eyes – without mediality, love as a cult of the purest immediacy. It is clear that such a company must fail, and romantic love is above all unfulfilled longing, unhappy love. To compensate for this failure, society has the everyday life ready: marriage, with parents, in-laws and descendants as well as various auxiliary institutions and programs in the protective background.
But the variously presented thesis that love is an antisocial feeling suffers first of all from the fact that it may not be a privately had and then expressed "feeling". In erotic social processes, it is not the truth of a feeling that can be suspected in the psychic depths that counts, but the effectiveness of e.g. a compliment. 'I love you' is not a truthful statement about the reality of a feeling, but a performative act that invites you into the simulation space of seductions. So even
21 Ingeborg Bachmann, Der Gute Gott von Manhattan, Gedichte, Erzählungen, Hörspiel, Essays, München 1964, 196-242.
22 Jacques Derrida, Politics of friendship, London1997.
23 Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, Cambridge 1986.
founding words like "I love you" actually do not found anything, not something that would correspond to something of duration or a place outside the communicative text. In the event of so-talking, the self plays its role without any doubt having to arise about the seriousness of the role-playing game. But there is neither a meaning behind the self in the text who would express his existential, extra- textual truth in this way, nor does this text create a lasting identity, a quasi-person, in between self and other [24].
However, if we start medially centered on the in-between us, the communicative text, then a completely different view of love arises, namely what the early Romantics called
"symphilosophy"[25]. In both cases, this is not an (intersubjective) relationship of two, but rather a common philosophizing from the middle between us and designed for inclusion. The "reader"-in-the text does not remain a pure reader in erotic communication or in symphilosophy. This love is not a subjective feeling (answered by the lover or unhappily loving), but this inclusive eroticism has its place in the middle of the communicative text.
The Social is not about a bond that binds/bandages, and subjective love is certainly not suitable for creating it; rather, it is about the text that unfolds between us and binds (integrates) us – in the sense of Hölderlin's "…seit ein Gespräch wir sind…“
(... since a conversation we are...")
Conclusion
Pandemic politics destroys the postmodern society with its achievements of freedom and plurality. The structure of this politics is that of a one-dimensional execution of a presumed factual constraint. If there is any hope in a post-pandemic truly democratic
24 More precisely and with further differentiations of Kurt Röttgers, Das Soziale als kommunikativer Text. Eine postanthropologische Sozialphilosophie, Bielefeld 2012 (=The social as a communicative text), as well as the continuation: Das Soziale denken. Leitlinien einer Philosophie des kommunikativen Textes Weilerswist 2021.
25 Kurt Röttgers, Symphilosophieren, Philosophisches Jahrbuch. 88 (1981), 90-119; also in:
Texte und Menschen, Würzburg 1983, 84-118, as well as the still classical work by Alfred Schlagdenhauffen, Frédéric Schlegel et son groupe. La doctrine de l'Athenaeum (1798- 1800), Diss. Paris 1934.
renewal of society it must be based in a new social philosophy of communication, in a communicative text between men and women.
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