Mobilization of the Planet from the Spirit of Self-Intensification

In this essay, the interpretation of the present is based on a philosophical kinetics originating from three axioms. First, that we are moving in a world that is moving itself; second, that the self-movements of the world include our own self-movements and affect them; and third, that in modernity, the self-movements of the world originate from our self-movements, which are cumulatively added to world-movement. From these axioms, it is possible to more or less entirely develop a relationship between an old world, a modern world, and a postmodern world.

If we want to show the world in its motion as pregnant with catastrophies, we have to assume that today's world process has received its dynamics from the initiatives accumulated over the past centuries. Thus, a perception of the present that claims to be at the level of real events presupposes something that has hitherto been successfully rejected by intellectual conscience: a physics of freedom, a kinetics of moral initiatives. Let's say it openly: This is the end of aestheticism in cultural theory. The seemingly most empty, the most external, the most mechanical—movement (which had been left to the physicists and sports medicine doctors to research)—penetrates the humanities and at once turns out to be the cardinal category, even of the moral and social sphere.

As an expression of movement, the ethical-political adventures of the human mind become a branch of physics. While all over the West ethics commissions gather for seminars, while everywhere people with good intentions sacrifice their weekends to discuss the principles of new morals in idyllic sites of evangelical academies and political study centers, the best-guarded secret of modernity seeps from the hermetic studios of fundamental philosophical research into the world. What nobody wanted to know became unambiguously evident. What nobody wanted to understand, angrily and stridently forced its way into our thought. Once it has been spoken out loud, the revealed secret evokes the question: Why hasn't this most obvious thing been given attention long ago? Some urbanists and a few military theorists who were willing to speculate knew it first; dubious philosophers who distrusted modernity thought about it; Schizos in intellectual circles in big cities followed the urbanists' example and got really into it; swanky Art and Literature sections in newspapers started talking about the matter—soon there will be many of them who say that they always knew it. Knew what? Well, the trivial fact that kinetics is the ethics of modernity.

What is worrisome or even obscene about this can only be diminished by referring to the old doctrines of progress that we are very familiar with. There, the relationship of morals and kinetics seemed still to be controlled morally. As a matter of fact, modernity has also defined itself from the beginning in kinetic terms because it determined its mode of realization and existence as advancing and progressive. Progress is the expression of movement in which the ethical-kinetic self-awareness of modern times expresses itself most powerfully and at the same time is heavily disguised. If we mention progress we mean the kinetic and kinetic-aesthetic fundamental motive of modernity, which has as its only goal the elimination of the limits of human self-movement. At the beginning of progress there was the presumption, whether right or wrong, of a "moral" initiative that cannot rest until the better has become the real. It belongs to the experience of real progress that a valuable human initiative comes "out of itself," that it tears apart the old limits of mobility, that it broadens its work spectrum, and that it asserts itself with a good conscience against inner inhibitions and outer resistance.

In the political, technological, and historical-philosophical doctrines of progress, the ongoing epoch declared its kinetic self-evidence. However, what it did not admit loudly was its secret inclination to take the moral motives seriously only to the extent that they serve as engines of outer movements. It is part of the essence of a progressive process to begin...