Sloterdijk: You Must Change Your Life - The Planet of the Practising - Only Cripples Will Survive - Unthan's Lesson

§1

"That life can involve the need to move forwards in spite of obstacles is one of the basic experiences shared by the group of people whom, with a carefree clarity, one formerly called 'cripples', before younger and supposedly more humane, understanding and respectful spirits of the age renamed them the handicapped, those with special needs, the problem children, and finally simply 'human beings'"

Uses the term Cripples, because a "oversensitive" discourse would cover and hide the source of its meaning.

Humans "must move forward because they are obstructed by something" (Sloterdijk 2013:40)

§2

Carl Hermann Unthan, born without arms in East Prussia in 1848 -1929 discovers that he can play violin with his feet

§3

"element of acrobatic improbability" leads him to a tour around Europe. Even Liszt congratulates him, but was his congratulation sincere?

§4 (evaluation of Unthan's writing), §5 (A list of events) §6 "life-philosophical performance" - all life is embedded in an overall virtuosity

Allowing the cripple 'enough light and air in his development' rather means giving him a chance to participate in normality

"He interprets his disability as a school for the will." (Sloterdijk 2013:44)

"I do not feel lacking in any way compared to a fully able person [ ... J I have never found anyone with whom, taking all conditions into account, I would have wanted to exchange places. I have certainly struggled, even more with myself than with my surroundings, but I would not give up those exquisite pleasures of the soul, which came about precisely through the struggles caused by my armlessness, for anything in the world. 2"
to participate in the normal is what frees

§10 Freedom as a misinterpretation.

1. The subject makes something from what it was made of
2. The "gaze of the other" (Sloterdijk 2013:45) "produces the impulse of freedom", "assert oneself against the confining power coming from the foreign eye" (Sloterdijk 2013:45)
3. "the temptation of insincerity [...] to play the role of a thing among things" (Sloterdijk 2013:45)

§11
The original existentialism is a reaction to the limits of the body. French Existentialism is an existentialism of the political oppression and thus an existentialism of resistance

§12
His life-challenge is normality

§13
Thus the difference between life and art disappears

§14
The truer people in circus

§15

Grant them freedom to become normal
"For him, normality is to become the reward for abnormality. In order to be at peace with himself, he must therefore develop a form of life in which his pathological oddity is transformed into the precondition for a successful assimilation. Hence the 'armless fiddler', as Unthan was known on American stages, could under no circumstances perform as a mere cripple, as was the custom in the European circus and even more in the freakshows across the Atlantic. He had to present himself as the victor over his disability and beat the gawking industry at its own game"

This brings us to a new development in our account of the phenomenon of practising. By investigating the forms of life among the disabled, a class of practising persons comes into view among the inhabitants of the ascetic star where more particular motives gain the upper hand. They do not follow their asceticisms for God's sake - or if they do, like Ignatius of Loyola, who was crippled by cannon fire, it is because Christ impresses them as a model for the neutralization of their defect. (47)

For them, leading a practising life is a response to the stimulus that lies in the concrete disability; it provides the incentive of inhibition that sometimes provokes an artiste's answer. As Unthan notes, one must grant the handicapped 'freedom' in the form of 'light and air' in their development, until the blow suffered has been overridden by self-will and integrated into a life project. Thus, through the phenomenon of inhibited and handicapped life, General Ascetology now faces its trial by fire. (48)



§16

1930's Hans Würtz "Zerbrecht die Krücken"

§17
How does it fit into the Nazi-time?

§18

§19

Anarchism: The religion of the people without: without the state, without the church, etc., a religion against auxilary constructions. Against the crutches of the state.

§20

Moments of overcompensation

§21

§22

It is all the reemergence of the problem of practice

§23

reactions exceed the stimulus" (Sloterdijk 2013:52)

§24

so overcompensation makes success, are people not "sufficiently disabled" (Sloterdijk 2013:52)

§25

§26

under the Nazi regime all copies were banned

§27

Würtz was accused and convicted.

§28

But also Würtz had spokesman-syndrom (the Priest of Nietzsche)

§29

My trainer is the one who wants me to want - he embodies the voice that can say to me: "You must change your life!"

§30

§31

§32

"While Stiner's uniqueness remained trapped within neurosis, as Würtz regretfully points out, constructive work with the handicapped should aim 'to free the problematic cripple to become a person of character" (Sloterdijk 2013:56)

§33

The first emergence of the trainer, directing the will to survive [in a sense the Nazi were an undirected energy]

§34

Also a counterpart: The athlet is raised as the spiritually empty counterpart of the saint [Ronaldo]

§35

female inborn crippled penislessness, are we, according to Freud, the Gods of Protheses? An inborn disadvantage? Do we have to lose more than our chains, are we relying on crutches?

§36

Older generations try to maintain old structures. Other systems have to prove their repeatibility first.

§37

§38

"if humans are cripples, without exception and in different ways, then each one of them, in their own particular way, has good reason to understand their existence as an incentive for corrective exercises." (Sloterdijk 2013:59)

§39

"diabled in terms of growth"
different abilities in terms of their format
vertically challenged people"

§40

What is the inner axis that makes us upright

Wherever humans appear, their crippledom has preceded them: this insight was the chorus of philosophical discussions on the human being in the previous century, regardless of whether, as in psychoanalysis, one speaks of humans as cripples of helplessness who can only hobble towards their goals;45 or, like Bolk and Gehlen, views them as neotenic cripples whose chronic immaturity can only be balanced out by rigid cultural capsules; or, like Plessner, as eccentric cripples chronically standing beside themselves and observing their lives; or, like Sartre and Blumenberg, as visibility cripples who must spend their lives coming to terms with the disadvantage of being seen.

The implications of these observations are as diverse as the diagnoses themselves. They have one thing in common, however: if humans are cripples, without exception and in different ways, then each one of them, in their own particular way, has good reason to understand their existence as an incentive for corrective exercises.

In short, people had to speak about the handicapped, the differently constituted, to stumble on a phrase that expresses the general constitution of beings under vertical tension. 'You must change your life!' means, as we saw in Rilke's torso poem: you must pay attention 59 PLANET OF THE PRACTISING mner yOU! It is not walking upright that it is rather the incipient awareness of the inner gradient that causes humans to do so. (59, 60)