On Domestication
Dec 26, 2025
Human Condition
In this post, I explore Peter Sloterdijk's controversial "Rules for the Human Park" (Regeln für den Menschenpark, 1999), a lecture that ignited one of the most heated intellectual debates in postwar Germany. Sloterdijk's provocative meditation on humanism, domestication, and genetic selection raises unsettling questions: What technologies have shaped humanity? And who decides the 'rules' for human improvement? A foundational text for understanding contemporary biopolitics.
Context and scandal
In September 1999, Peter Sloterdijk delivered a lecture at Elmau Castle that would ignite one of the most explosive intellectual controversies in postwar Germany. Entitled Regeln für den Menschenpark ("Rules for the Human Park"), the talk was ostensibly a response to Heidegger's Letter on Humanism (1946). But Sloterdijk ventured further, suggesting that humanism itself had always been a project of selection and "taming" (Zähmung), and that biotechnology now forced us to confront this hidden history (Sloterdijk 1999). The reaction was immediate: Jürgen Habermas accused Sloterdijk of rehabilitating eugenic thinking, and German feuilletons erupted in what became known as the Sloterdijk-Debatte.
Why it matters for biolaw
Twenty-five years later, the questions Sloterdijk raised remain unresolved and increasingly urgent. If humanist education was always a "technique" for producing certain kinds of humans, what distinguishes it from genetic enhancement? Who decides which traits are desirable, and through what legal frameworks? The controversy revealed how deeply our regulatory assumptions about biotechnology rest on unstated philosophical commitments. For scholars working at the intersection of law and the life sciences, Regeln für den Menschenpark remains essential reading, not for its answers, but for the discomfort it provokes.