Peter Sloterdijk is a morphological thinker. He thinks morphologies and his thinking continually morphs. He is interested in life forms, in the forms of collectivity, and in the collective forms of individuality. He just as soon analyzes the intra-uteral life of the unborn child as he does the space of the apartment-dweller. He finds in Ficino's rendition of the visual field just as many indications of a being-in-spheres as in the 15th and 16th century discovery of the sea as the primary medium of modern being. Sloterdijk's work can be said to have a certain cosmogonic character. After the Fall, man stands naked and in need of inventing life forms that cover him, in which he can be immersed. The great metaphysical buildings of antiquity and Christianity were life forms providing existential shelter in the form of spheres of socio-spatial co-existence. But they have lost credibility, and we are back out in the open, naked. According to Sloterdijk, the topological message of modernity is: “that people are living beings, living at the edge of an uneven round body – a body which, as a whole, is neither a mother's body nor a container, and which has no protection to offer”. In Sloterdijk's diagnosis, if one could call it that, something of the existential despair of Pascal shines through: we realise we are afloat in a meaningless universe, crawling a tiny globe that has been dethroned, cast from centre to periphery. But there is also Voltaire's scepticism and humour: the same situation can be described in terms of the Micromégas, arrogantly roaming the globe. Then again, there is in Sloterdijk a Nietzschean energy, a positive affirmation of this situation, and a continuous call to invent new ways of forming life. For like in Hannah Arendt's conception of ‘natality’, being is a continuous coming-into-the-world (zur Welt kommen). In his recent work, that is accompanied by a constructive call: Sloterdijk turns Rilke's ‘du mußt dein Leben ändern’ into the positive challenge of an existential acrobatics. The art of life is a morphological art, an acrobatic act of constituting collective spheres whilst balancing over a crevice on Nietzsche's rope between animal and overman. And it is in such intermediary zones that new life forms come to be constituted through practice and training.

Q Professor Sloterdijk, you say that philosophy is its own place, raized to the level of thought. Can you tell us what you mean by spatiality in philosophy?

PS I believe that space, in a philosophical sense, is actually the great unknown of the modern world, since all speak of space but no-one was there. That has to do with the fact that we know and use at least two or three deeply differing concepts of space. One is the concept of space used by physicists, mathematicians or topologists. It is the homogeneous space, the completely neutralized space in which the equipotentiality of points is presupposed as a mathematical axiom, perhaps even as an ontological axiom. Between equipotential points one can draw an arbitrary number of lines, as many times as one would like. This concept of space is mostly used by neo-liberals and also by common commentators when they speak of globalization. They usually mistake this geometrical space of points in topology for the space of geographers. The geographer's space is a space that already comes closer to reality, to the living space of natural subjects, which understand space to be something like environment (Umwelt). For us that is usually connected to the sense of dwelling, of the space of living. So inasmuch as people are living creatures that dwell, they create a wholly different and living, vital space, a space of meaning, in which all objects around are charged with a variety of semantic values. And then there is a third concept of space, which is in a sense the most mysterious, and which my work actually deals with most – that is, the first part of my trilogy (Sphären) – and that is, how shall I put it, in a sense you put it right in your question, this ‘psychodynamic space’, which is the space in which existence takes place. Existence for me doesn't quite mean, as it does for Heidegger, that man is extended in the world. Heidegger of course translates the Latin verb existere by the Greek word extasis by association. And this ecstatis (standing-out) in Heidegger leads to the openness of the world, but also to the loneliness of the cosmic night in which man can lose him- or herself.