Sloterdijk: You Must Change Your Life - The Planet of the Practising - The Command From the Above - Rilke's Experience

Sloterdijk, Peter (2013) You Must Change Your Life - The Planet of the Practising - The Command From the Above - Rilke's Experience

1 Introduction to Art and Rilke's Poems
- Starting with art because art is no authoritarian command:

"La poesie ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose." (Sloterdijk 2013:19),

Art does not foster reactions against the Lord above

2
Rilke's 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' (New Poems: The Other Part, 1908), the thing is the source of authority (a thing-poem), result from his work with Rodin as a secretary from 1905 to 1906

3 Things that are speaking as a turn towards religion
Thing-Poems eliminate randomness, a reaction to the emptiness of the Linguistic Turn.

4
Not everything is a thing, however. They require a messenger who translates the energy of things into meaning

5
A breakthrough to the concept of an object that states itself - Torso - only a mutilated body

6 The Poem and its interpretation

7
First interpretation of the poem: It deals with perfection

8
Perfection is not in a morphologically complete thing: "The sense for perfection withdraws from the forms of nature - probably because nature itself is in the process of losing its ontological authority." (Sloterdijk 2013:22) Perfection is not expressed by complete forms anymore.

9
Sloterdijk's reflections on the museum: "[E]ven a God can find himself among the pretty figures that no longer mean anything to us [...]" (Sloterdijk 2013:23)

10 What does "You must change your life!" mean?
Why did the last lines enter our modernity as such famous lines?

11
The recipient completes the Torso, but why does the torso see him?

12
It is a training in religiosity: We need to come to the point of a subject-object-reversal. Suddenly the stone starts seeing me. Suddenly we accept a "surplus of soul" in the stone.

13
"[R]eligiosity is a form of hermeneutical flexibility and can be trained." (Sloterdijk 2013:25) Rilke described Rodin's work that everywhere in his statues we can find places, and in each place something happens. The second necessity of religion is that something stands for something else and this holds for the stone. It is more than its structure.

14
Why does Being suddenly speak in the imperative form (the command from above)? The stone speaks, it is the torso of religion.

15
All teachings in one workshop are summarized in this torso

16
"It is the authority of a different life in this life." (Sloterdijk 2013:25) The "innermost not-yet" tells me that "my change is the one thing that is necessary" (Sloterdijk 2013:26)

17
In Greece there was always an identity between the sportsman and God. "Hence the athlete's body, which unifies beauty and discipline into a calm readiness for action, offers itself as one of the most understandable and convincing manifestations of authority." (Sloterdijk 2013:26)

18
"the so called ideas had already established themselves in the statue", the eros works in both directions

19
Sport is the "resurrection of the flesh in this life" (Sloterdijk 2013:27). Sport is a de-spirtiualization of asceticism and it comes up in our modernity again.

20
It is the change of the "crippling tradition of Christian 'renunciation of instincts'

21
The imperative has another meaning now, it became a coach

22
"Give up your attachment to comfortable ways of living - show yourself in the gymnasium (gymnos = 'naked'), prove that you are not indifferent to the difference between perfect and imperfect [...] Seize the chance to train with God." (Sloterdijk 2013:28)

Sloterdijk - You Must Change Your Life - Outline Introductory Chapter

Introduction - On the Anthropotechnic Turn

The Return of Religion?

§1 "A spectre is haunting the Western world - the spectre of religion." (Sloterdijk 2009:1)

A spectre is something that is real and unreal at the same time. Religion, in this sense, is not fully grasped, and its decaying body is haunting several discourses.

§2 Humanism was "reclaiming the powers wasted on the world above".

Humanism was a radical tendency to wipe out certain belief-systems. The "humanist aggression", however, revealed soon its own flaws. The battle with the subtle enemy lead to a hidden return.

§3 "European Enlightenment - a crisis of form? An experiment on a slippery slope, at any rate, and from a global perspective an anomaly. Sociologists of religion put it quite bluntly: people keep believing everywhere else, but in our society we have glorified disillusionment. Indeed, why should Europeans be the only ones on a metaphysical diet when the rest of the world continues to dine unperturbed at the richly decked tables of illusion?" (Sloterdijk 2009:1)

An Alternative Interpretation to the Return: Practice

§4 Main Thesis: This book presents an alternative form of religion against the spectre of religion.

§5 The ritual immune cells of religion remained. Practitioners of anthropotechnics are another kind of religion.

§6 Man produces man through practice and not religion anymore: "Practice is defined here as any operation that provides or improves the actor's qualification for the next performance of the same operation, whether it is declared as practice or not." (Sloterdijk 2009:4)

§7 Human beings result from repetition.

§8 Methodological Note: We are introducing a new, transforming language for former religious concepts

§9 Repeated Thesis: There was never a religion. In fact, there were only different spiritual systems of practice.

§10 Only Nietzsche has understood the forms of a new ascetology. Before the topic was not sufficiently understood, and thus enabled its constant return of only repressed parts.

§11 Structural Note: We perceive learning as the self-defining element of Enlightenment, and follow all of its tendencies

§12 Elaboration what 'making explicit' means. It is not the Hegelian idea of introducing a "sunday of life" by interpreting all problems. It is not the rough imperative of Enlightenment to make everything explicit, but also not meaningless research.

§13 Cherry-Wood-Table-Example (Sloterdijk 2009:7): The end consumer of Enlightenment must accept that his surrounding is dissolved into subatomic nothings under the light of research. But even though the Cherry-Wood-Table remains to be a part of a practical sphere that is untouched by research.

Immune Systems as the Guiding Principle of our Practice and Religion

§14 The relevance of immune systems, "Consequently, immune systems [...] can be defined [...] as embodied expectations of injury and the corresponding programmes of protection and repair." (Sloterdijk 2009:8) Immune systems are grasped as a precondition of systems of unity at all.

§15 Immune systems search for a "modus vivendi" to live with their environment. The more abstract the danger the higher the level of abstraction. Sloterdijk applies this to religion.

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§16 For humans the world becomes an integral of latent elements. Every element stands for something higher transcending. First they transcend into world, but then we transcend into heavens.

§17 Three Immune Systems in Mankind

• 1. "[T]he socio-immunological methods, especially legal and solidaric ones, but also military [...]"
• 2. Symbolic or psycho-immunological practices", the building of a "mental armour"
• 3. Anthropotechnics

§18 Anthropotechnics are "methods of mental and physical practising by which humans from the most diverse cultures have attempted to optimize their cosmic and immunological status in the face of vague risks of living and acute certainties of death." (Sloterdijk 2009:10)

Analysis of the Homo Repetitivus and his Tendency to the Above

§19 central point of analysis: The "Homo repetitivus" (Sloterdijk 2009:10)

§20 No dualism between body and soul in this concept.

§21 Garden-metaphor: They are a cross-over of nature and culture. Human societies are gardens

§22 The civil sciences want to change human development at all. 

§23 Humans are always in vertical tensions (statuses, hierarchies, degrees)

§24 'Barbarian' is an entry concept for understanding our status-structuring societes

§25 "man is a being potentially 'superior to himself'" 

§26 "Whoever goes in search of humans will find acrobats." forces from above, upward tendencies

§27 Disciplines pass into each other, for example, we have non-athletic definitions of achievement nowadays

Self-Reflection: What Does the Book Do to his Reader and Author?

§28 The book has only partial character, because the writer is involved in this project itself "Alas! The magic of these struggles is such, that he who sees them must also take part in them!"

This means that also the reader will be involved

§29 "[T]he deep plays are those which are moved by the heights." (Sloterdijk 2009:14)

Additional Comments:

§30 Some thoughts on the defenses against a naturalism: It is done in the spirit of faith, but it is an inner castle against external explanation.

§31 Sloterdijk, however, does not touch these castles of the first-person-perspective. His intent is only to make explicit inner languages of religions to have a higher level of understanding.

Source: Sloterdijk, P. You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics. Translated by Wieland Hoban, First Published in 2009, Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt, English Edition, Polity Press 2013