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”
Kinship of all Species 