You Must Change Your Life (Peter Sloterdijk, 2009)

“Peter Sloterdijk ist plötzlich erkrankt…”

Once, when I was in Hamburg, I was set to hear a talk by Peter Sloterdijk at the Literaturhaus (by the Alster). This was a few years ago, so it must have been around the time he published Die schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit. Unfortunately, upon arrival I was met by a notice that the evening had been cancelled.

I consider this reading a late compensation for this lost evening. And what a reading! Full of crazy ideas, new angles, strange juxtapositions. In fact, there is another autobiographical hook story to this book, poetry-related. It has to do with the title of the book, lifted from a poem by Rilke. Ever since I heard that poem in an American movie in my teens, it has stuck in my personal inventory of meaningful ephemera. I took it to mean those moments in life when one realises that life needs to change. I understand now that my interpretation seems to differ from Rilke’s original intent.

It was, serendipitously, one of those moments that led me back to this book (which sparked my interest upon publication, but got lost in the stream, as most things do).

The theme of the book is quite monumental: the history of what Sloterdijk terms anthropotechnics. That is, human efforts to change life. I’m not sure it is an entirely felicitous coinage, but it has a certain cachet.

Divided into four parts, with essaylike chapters on various aspects of these “human techniques” the first part treats Kafka, Unthan, Rilke, Baron de Coubertin and L. Ron Hubbard. The second part goes into Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. It goes into a lot of how religious practices changes human practices – and likens asceticism to the advent of literacy. Just as humanity made a “leap of literacy”, it made a “leap of asceticism”. Part three is about world-relinquishment, and reminds me of Ahmad Sadri on Weber‘s typology of intellectuals and Harry T. Hunt on western mysticism. Part four is dedicated (in a rambling style) to education and how it connects to anthropotechnics, based on Czech “father of pedagogy” Jan Comenius.

This, my first real encounter with a Sloterdijk text, is an exposure to his style and thinking. It feels liberating to read his subtle smashing of contemporary cultural idols, even though his writing style is quite abstruse and rambling.

I tried boiling down my thoughts and impressions of this book, and my notes are very scattered and multiform. Amorphous? This is, at least in part, because the book is so heterogeneous with unending new topics introduced. It is hard to pin it all into the overall theme of human techniques (which is a very wide theme, by the way). Anyway, I will list a few standout thoughts, in fashionable bullet points:

* The metaphor of the mountain. This is an old, old analogy, but somehow Sloterdijk breathes new air into it. He speaks of life as climbing a mountain, and most people stay at the base camp.

* Metanoetics. This word appears almost every other page. I always took noesis to mean thinking (after a half-hearted appropriation of the vernadskian/chardinian term nöosphere) and took metanoetics to mean thinking of thinking. But, it seems this particular phrase originates with Japanese philosopher Hajime Tanabe.

* The text contains extended discussions of certain undisputed assumptions of current social theory, like the concept of habitus (Bourdieu) and a exegesis on Foucault and his work on “le souci de soi”. Also long-ranging connections between demography, statecraft and religion and how they influenced ideas in social thought.

* There is an exposé of how the “holy” or magical or saintly transforms into the secular categories like artists, geniuses, virtuosos and wunderkinder during the renaissance.

* Towards the end of the book, a long discussion on education based on educational philosopher Comenius, and the pithy quote “all education is conversion” (supposedly from Pierre Hadot).

In closing, a few quotes:

““Man” comes about from the small minority of ascetic extremists who step out from the crowd and claim that they are actually everyone.”

“The modern effect known as “religion” perhaps ensues only when an ethical practice programme is turned to the purpose of collective identity formation.”

“It was only with Luther’s reformation that the Orient was driven out of newer Christianity.”

“Petrarch was the first modern to wear a poet’s crown (april 6, 1341)”

“…from that point on, being human means running oneself as a workshop of self-realization”

Another Time (W.H. Auden, 1939)

I have been vaguely aware of Wystan Hugh Auden since I was in my late teens, when I read a passing note on his poetry in Erica Jong‘s Fear of Flying. I was also made aware of a personal family connection to Auden by way of my grandmother’s good friend who knew Auden at Oxford. It was shortly after reading Jong that I was given a signed copy of Auden’s poetry collection “Another Time” from 1939 that had been in said friend’s possession. I treated this tome with the requisite reverence, even maybe too much reverence – because I never dared read it. Until now.

At this point, I should state that although I have much respect for the form, I’m not sure I am a poetry person, because a lot (most) poetry passes me by, or leaves me untouched. A few poets have gotten through to me, like Michaux and Ekelund maybe, but generally it is tough going for me.

Several poems in this collection are about famous people, like A E Housman, Voltaire and Sigmund Freud. Some are about places (Musée des beaux-arts, Dover) and some about points in time, like the well-known “September 1, 1939” – about the start of world war two.

I know quite little of Auden’s biography – I know he was a religious man off and on, that he was in love with Christopher Isherwood, lived in Berlin, Iceland and then the US. He has apparently been described as the best poet of the 20th century by Joseph Brodsky. He must have been very big at one point. He also wrote the words to the short film Night Mail. I have always felt a connection to his name, without real reason. Now that I’ve finally read some of his work I feel better equipped to make an assessment.

The Tennis Players (Lars Gustafsson, 1977)

This is a special case, as I listened to this book, read by the author in a series of TV broadcasts produced in connection with its publication. I was inspired to approach Gustafsson’s writing when I heard of the death of one of his collaborators, Jan Myrdal. The Tennis Players is about a Swedish professor of literature guest lecturing at the University of Texas and his incessant tennis playing. It is a short book, dealing a lot with differences between the US and Europe, and ideas the one has about the other. Me, having lived on both sides, figured it would be an interesting topic. It turned out to be mostly about American ideas of Europe, rather than the other way around. The main character is a lecturer on Strindberg, and one of the story lines is that an American student of his has found evidence that would revolutionize the world of Strindberg research. Our lecturer ends up withholding this evidence to the community of Strindberg researchers, much to his student’s chagrin.
Another line in the book is the constant tennis playing, both in rich country clubs and in humbler areas, where he meets different people and learn of their philosophy of playing. It seems that Gustafsson uses the game of tennis as a metaphor for life in general (much like the management book “The Inner Game of Tennis” by Timothy Gallwey, incidentally published 1972). Myrdal was married to literary critic Madeleine Gustafsson, but divorced her to marry a woman he met in Texas, with whom he had two children. Later he married a third woman, before he passed away in 2016.