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