Elitism – Andrew James Taggart, Practical Philosopher, Ph.D.

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, has to ‘work hard’ to continue to be ignorant. (Imagine him continuing to get a math problem wrong and continuing to work on it in this wrongheaded fashion.) Meanwhile, the few and the rare are immersed in explicit training programs aimed at radically changing their lives.

2.) Stoterdijk’s most elementary question is, ‘How does one become extraordinary?’ The other way of articulating the question is, ‘How is it possible for a human being to uproot himself from his poor habits?’

3.) Stoterdijk is an elitist in the sense that he insists that some human beings dare to be extraordinary while most do not. He is not so much concerned with what impediments stand in the way of virtuosity as he is to analyze the project of extraordinary human beings.

Continue reading “The main theses of Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life” →

This is the third set of reflections on Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). In the post below, I am tacking back, by way of Charles Taylor’s work, in order to understand how Stoterdijk arrived at his version of neo-Nietzschean elitism.

The first set of reflections can be read here.

Before one comes to the question, ‘How is conversion possible?’ one must confront the genuine challenge that modernity has a truck with the very idea of conversion. One place where the refusal of conversion is in great evidence is in the realm of the therapeutic. In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor discusses the triumph of the therapeutic in terms of two basic claims. I cite him at length:

The modern therapeutic perspective develops partly out of the Enlightenment (in inspiration, Lockean) idea that the human agent is malleable; on the basis of certain fundamental motivations (e.g., seeking pleasure, avoiding pain), the agent can be trained to identify his ends in a variety of different ways. To redefine these ends through re-education thus does not force him to abandon an intrinsic direction of his being; and if it ends up making him better able to adjust to everyone else, it can lead to greater harmony, greater general desire-fulfillment, and thus a gain all around.

The other source of the triumph of the therapeutic is the desire to do away with the category of sin, which attributes at some level an ill will to the sinner. The deviant is a victim of bad training or illness; he is not there as an agent endorsing his lamentable, destructive behaviour, someone we should therefore condemn; rather he is caught in a cycle of compulsion, from which we can liberate him through therapy. (633, my emphasis)

Taylor’s argument against the therapeutic dispensation turns on the assumption that there is a loss of transcendence. Under this regime of thought, there are only ordinary goods to be pursued and secured, with greater or lesser a degree of success. If transcendence is impossible, then one might subscribe to a materialist view according to which human beings are malleable (what changes is only the already-existing) and exculpable (since one’s conduct, already reduced considerably to behavior, is not up to one). It seems that the patient or client is, at bottom, merely a being who suffers and so is in need of help or amelioration of his condition.

Continue reading “Conversion and elitism: A propaedeutic to reading Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life” →