About Peter Sloterdijk's Rules for the Human Park

Abstract

Seldom does a philosophical text raise such a controversy as the book Regeln für den Menschenpark by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. This paper examines Sloterdijk's book and tries to identify the reasons for the explosive reaction it produced. I suggest that the controversy owes more to an intellectual weakening of the stringent guidelines that have dictated the interpretation of postwar German history than to fears of the ethical consequences of the application of genetics to select and determine the characteristics of the human species.