SLOTERDIJK, Peter
Midwife of the Intellect

How could a Rhineland mystic of the 13th century help us better navigate the 21st? In a provocative reading of the work of Meister Eckhart, Peter Sloterdijk offers a compelling answer: What medieval mysticism teaches us is that all there is doesn’t exist per se—everything only exists in relation.

For Eckhart, living on Earth is the same as the Holy Trinity: in a symbiosis, a form of co-relationship forgotten for too long. The triumph of individualism led to the shared illusion that humans, like everything else on the planet, had an essence, an identity, a being. But nothing could be more false. What everything is, is the others. What everything is, is a shared relationality. We are not alone—we are also all others; we depend on them. In the Anthropocene, when planetary symbiosis has never been more jeopardized, shifting our metaphysics and recalling lessons such as those of Meister Eckhart has become vital. [publishers' note]

Published by Berggruen Press, 2025
Philosophy / Essays