Tag: Ascesis

• April 16, 2014

  The main theses of Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life

  This is the fourth set of reflections on Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). The first set of reflections can be read here. * Let us review what we know about Stoterdijk’s basic philosophical orientation. 1.) Human beings are first and foremost practicing animals. Most practice what they do implicitly: even an ignoramus, Stoterdijk contends,…
• March 21, 2014

  Kissing a ‘thing which is human’

  1 At bedtime, I lie on my side, facing her. Her hand is so warm, rough from climbing. 2 After I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I lie back down and listen. There: her breath. 3 Epicetus says, ‘If you kiss your wife, say you only kiss a thing which is human.…
• February 8, 2014

  Plotinus on sculpting the self

  In Enneads I 6, 9, Plotinus writes, Go back inside yourself and look: if you do not yet see yourself as beautiful [i.e., as participating in the Idea of Beauty], then do as the sculptor does with a statue he wants to make beautiful; he chisels away one part, and levels off another, makes one…
• October 22, 2013

  Sweetness and gravity

  ’15. From MAXIMUS, self-mastery and stability of purpose; and cheeriness in sickness as well as in all other circumstances; and a character justly proportioned of sweetness and gravity; and to perform without grumbling the task that lies to one’s hand.’ –Marcus, Meditations, Book I
• July 29, 2013

  A right discipline: Daily practice

  A right discipline is not a regime that one imposes upon oneself from without. A right discipline begins with lived experiences of what is best, of intimations of the elongation and prolongation of what is best. Taking the idea of prolongation seriously, a right discipline makes explicit to one how it is possible to maintain oneself in…