Tag: Peter Sloterdijk

A training program in transformation: Implications of Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life

Andrew Taggart

This is the tenth and final 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. A summary of Sloterdijk’s principal theses is available here. An overview of my posts (what I term ‘the thrust of his argument’) can be found here. 

*

Let us recall that Sloterdijk has investigated whether human beings qua practicing animals can overcome their bad habits. His conclusion is that in the past some extraordinary persons and groups of practitioners have. Let us remind ourselves further of the conceptual muddle shining forth in the modern period:

Modernity is the time in which those humans who hear the call to change no longer know where they should start: with the world or with themselves–or with both at once. (323)

I believe Sloterdijk’s answer clearly resounds that I am called to change my life, a project of self-cultivation that can occur alongside those who have also heard such a call addressed to each of them. This untimely time Sloterdijk designates ‘antique.’

Continue reading “A training program in transformation: Implications of Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life” →

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

Andrew Taggart

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” →

‘You must change your life’ or ‘You must change life’?

Andrew Taggart

This is the first set of reflections on Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).

*

‘You must change your life,’ writes Peter Sloterdijk in his eponymous book of philosophy. His provocative project is to redescribe human beings in terms of forms of practice or training programs. Some programs are explicit (such as those formulated by yogis or by virtuosos), others inexplicit and inarticulate (such as daily routines), yet all human beings, he claims, are at the same time producers and products, dancers and danced, lovers and loved. The guiding thread of the book, then, is an investigation into the various ways in which the call to change your life have been articulated from antiquity to the present.

On my reading, there are two seminal moments. The first is ahistorical, basic, logically prior: ‘Can humans be uprooted from bad habits?’ (411). The second is historical, contingent, prescient:

Modernity is the time in which those humans who hear the call to change no longer know where they should start: with the world or with themselves–or with both at once. (323)

Continue reading “‘You must change your life’ or ‘You must change life’?” →