Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology

Sphären #3

by Peter Sloterdijk, Wieland Hoban (Translator)

The final volume in Peter Sloterdijk's celebrated Spheres trilogy, on the phenomenology of community and its spatial peripheries.

“So the One Orb has imploded—now the foams are alive."—from Foams

Foams completes Peter Sloterdijk's celebrated Spheres trilogy: his 2,500-page “grand narrative” retelling of the history of humanity, as related through the anthropological concept of the "Sphere." For Sloterdijk, life is a matter of form and, in life, sphere formation and thought are two different labels for the same thing. The trilogy also offers his corrective answer to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, reformulating it into a lengthy meditation on Being and Space—a shifting of the question of who we are to a more fundamental question of where we are.

In this final volume, Sloterdijk's “plural spherology” moves from the historical perspective on humanity of the preceding two volumes to a philosophical theory of our contemporary era, offering a view of life through a multifocal lens. If Bubbles was Sloterdijk's phenomenology of intimacy, and Globes his phenomenology of globalization, Foams could be described as his phenomenology of spatial plurality: how the bubbles that we form in our duality bind together to form what sociological tradition calls "society." Foams is an exploration of capsules, islands, and hothouses that leads to the discovery of the foam city.

The Spheres trilogy ultimately presents a theology without a God—a spatial theology that requires no God, whose death therefore need not be of concern.

As with the two preceding volumes, Foams can be read on its own or in relation to the rest of the trilogy.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, History, Sociology, Psychology

912 pages, Hardcover

Published August 19, 2016

About the author

Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher, cultural theorist, television host and columnist. He is a professor of philosophy and media theory at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe.

Peter Sloterdijk studied philosophy, Germanistics and history at the University of Munich. In 1975 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg. Since 1980 he has published many philosophical works, including the Critique of Cynical Reason. In 2001 he was named president of the State Academy of Design, part of the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. In 2002 he began to co-host Das Philosophische Quartett, a show on the German ZDF television channel devoted to discussing key issues affecting present-day society.

The Kritik der Zynischen Vernunft (Critique of Cynical Reason), published by Suhrkamp in 1983, became the best-selling philosophical book in the German language since the Second World War and launched Sloterdijk's career as an author.

The trilogy Spheres is the philosopher's magnum opus. The first volume was published in 1998, the second in 1999, and the last in 2004.

Reviews

[Benji · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only very rarely do we succeed in producing a sentence that already belongs to the present; no one is ready for the world culture of the future.

[Alex Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the tail end trilogical finale to his Spheres series. In some sense, one doesn't need the first two books to consider this one. Here Sloterdijk gets much more relevant in his examination, bringing us to the modern era whereby we create our environmental spaces actively, to "territorialize" our lifeworld in the manner we like.

Spheres is another way of talking about materialized cultural contextualization though, and to a large degree this is a fairly surface level survey of how applicable his insight is. He doesn't talk in a metalanguage instead, like the previous two volumes, he throws a bunch of stuff together under a topic and wanders aimlessly throughout the cultural material to illuminate the extent of his concept.

This is interesting but works like poetry, to get you to consider things differently but without giving you much of a meta-narrative framework for considering how or why, only to describe what is. In this sense, Sloterdijk is still working as a kind of structuralist in a semiotic space of his own making.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This guy gets it. Sloterdijk has given us the most comprehensive and plausible explanation of who we are and how we got here that I've read.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truly a spectacle, maybe even an Event.

"Like stupidity, evil is autohypnotic" (p.118).

[Dana Campos Schwarze · Rating 5 out of 5]

Confieso que me costó un poco seguirle el paso, muy entretenido

[Mindfulnessmyttymuhveli · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aloitin Peter Sloterdijkin magnum opuksena pidetyn trilogian vuonna 2019. 2023 joulukuussa sain vihdoin ja viimein luettua viimeisen osan ja jopa paksuinta filosofista soopaa sietävän lukijan täytyy myöntää, että en tiedä mistä ihme risukasasta sitä juuri rönyttiin ulos, mutta olen enemmän kuin tyytyväinen, ettei minun tarvitse enää koskaan astua kyseisen trilogian sisään uudestaan. En halua edes säilyttää kyseisiä kirjoja asunnossani!

Siinä missä Sloterdijk onnistuu olemaan yksi harvoista filosofeista, joita on usein miellyttävä lukea -toisin sanoin herra osaa kirjoittaa- ja jonka oivallukset elämästä ja yhteiskunnasta tuntuvat usein tuoreilta tai aidon oivaltavilta, on tämän trilogian osalta tarina toinen. Trilogia on Sloterdijkin oma seikkailu jossain herran oman suuroivalluksen taikamaailmassa, jonne ei saa pääsylippua tiketti.fi:stä tai R-kioskilta. Aihealueeseen joko intoutuu tai hypnotisoituu mukaan tai ei -välimaastoa ei tunnu olevan ja kaikki, jotka eivät vaivu syvään tilallisuuden dynamiikan hypnoosin, saavat kantaa mukanaan pensasleikkuria ja suojalaseja (kenties myös viiltohansikkaita), jotta olisi mitään toivoa päästä elävien kirjoissa kyseisen saagan loppuun.

Sanalla sanoen, tämä trilogia kokonaisuudessaan on yksi niitä filosofian kirjallisuuden teoksia, jotka ovat joko totaalisen nerokkaita (ja nerokkuudessaan vain harvojen nautittavissa) tai totaalisen nerokkaina ja syvällisinä esiintyvää soopaa. Nerokasta tai ei, en tiedä, onko kukaan muu kuin Sloterdijk käsitellyt koskaan tilallisuutta -oli se sitten ihmisten välisen vuorovaikutuksen tilan, yhteisöjen tai rakennettujen tilojen tilallisuutta- yhtä laajasti ja pikkutarkasti. Trilogian jokainen osa sisältää yksittäisiä täsmäoivalluksia ja huomioita, mutta kun ottaa teosten sivumäärän huomioon ja sen, miten harvakseltaan yhteenkokoavia huomioita löytyy, ei niiden etsintä ole sen arvoista. Ainakaan omasta mielestäni.

En suosittele kuin tietynlaisille hulluille.

[Volbet · Rating 4 out of 5]

If Bubbles: Spheres I and Globes: Spheres Volume II: Macrospherology were about defining the sphere(s), Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology is about setting the parameter of the sphere. And in his endeavor to uncover the surfacetension of our rounded being-with, Peter Sloterdijk draws on an analysis of the technological development from about the 18th century to the end of the 20th century.

Specifically, this is a look on how developments from the hot air ballon to chlorine gas has influenced how we humans think about, and limit the scope of, our possible environment, and how this has affected the way we relate to one another.

Yet again, Sloterdijk paints his analysis like a true impressionistic painter, and he has written his way through the analysis like a poet. Creating a big, sweeping aesthetic argument about the conditions that define the modern and post-modern world.

[Carlos David Montoya V · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un gran libro que reflexiona, desde una mirada filosófica e histórica, el ¿dónde estamos? Cambiando un poco la pregunta clásica de ¿quienes somos? Esto le permite proponer una mirada filosófica del ser en el espacio, la cual incluye la biología de nuestra especie, la evolución en procesos de cazador-recolector, los agro-imperios y la técnica moderna. Surge y conecta en este proceso nociones de islas, islas absolutas, atmosféricas, antropógenas, invernaderos, instalaciones, estadios-colectores, viviendas-células, para culminar con cómo este proceso de construcción de espacio busca la levitación, la ligereza, el mimo, los invernaderos del confort. Todo como una historia de la creación y organización del espacio como espumas, que incluyen burbujas y globos, bajo el concepto general de esferas.

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps the most intelligent expression of current conservative talking points ever written, but did he really have to go on about it for 800- plus pages?

[Ryan Fellhauer · Rating 1 out of 5]

garbage philosophy from a garbage philosopher

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Foams, Sloterdijk impressively diagnoses the spatial relationships between the human and its technological world through an analysis of architecture, urban planning, and environment. His claim is that, due to the increasing level of global interconnectivity, and the rapidly rising population, we have shifted into an epoch in which all human actions are determined, and potentially limited, by their proximity to other humans. In order to exemplify this point, Sloterdijk uses the metaphor of a ‘foam’ as it signifies a structure comprised of a number of chambers or cells (bubbles) that are separated from each other by thin, fragile and easily collapsible walls. What this implies is that our individual ‘micro-spheres’ are in a constant state of co-dependence and co-fragility with one another. Each individual sphere of existence is inherently related to, and defined by, it’s relation to others. As he states: “The foam metaphor has the merit of capturing the topological allocation of creative and self-securing creations of living space in an image. It not only reminds us of the tight proximity between fragile units, but also of the necessary self-enclosure of each foam cell, even though they can only exist as users of shared separation installations” (Sloterdijk, 2016, 236).