Du mußt dein Leben ändern

by Peter Sloterdijk

Über Religion, Artistik und Anthropotechnik

Sind wir heute Zeugen des Abwrackens abendländischer Aufklärung und der machtvollen Wiederkehr der Religion? Oder haben wir uns endgültig im Technikpark des Konsums eingerichtet, in dem Transzendenz nur noch in Slogans von Esoterikanbietern auftaucht? Wenn es nach Peter Sloterdijk geht, lautet die Antwort zwei Mal eindeutig: Nein! In Du musst dein Leben ändern begründet er eindrucksvoll, warum der Gegensatz zwischen Glauben und Unglauben eine Unterscheidung aus der Vergangenheit ist und es heute nur noch eine „einzige Tatsache von universaler ethischer Bedeutung“ gibt: die „allgegenwärtig wachsende Einsicht, dass es so nicht weitergehen kann.“

Dies ist die Kurzformel für den „absoluten Imperativ“, der an Anfang und Ende dieses ehrgeizigen philosophischen Projekts steht und ihm zugleich seinen Titel gibt: Du musst dein Leben ändern. Der Befehl, der im Idealfall zugleich Erkenntnis ist, lautet, im eigenen Leben ernst zu machen mit dem Konzept „Menschheit“, ein „Fakir der Koexistenz“ zu werden und so mitzuarbeiten am „Projekt eines globalen Immundesigns“, dessen Ziel nicht mehr und nicht weniger ist als: Leben.

Wie alle Propheten weiß auch Sloterdijk, dass die Zeit drängt. Bei der unausweichlichen, weil für jede Erkenntnis notwendigen Begegnung mit der Fratze der Apokalypse sind wir auf „Anthropotechniken“ angewiesen, auf die „mentalen und physischen Übungsverfahren, mit denen die Menschen verschiedenster Kulturen versucht haben, ihren kosmischen und sozialen Immunstatus angesichts von vagen Lebensrisiken und akuten Todesgewissheiten zu optimieren.“ Und so bekennt sich Sloterdijk nicht nur „zu dem Kontinuum kumulativen Lernens, das wir Aufklärung nennen“, sondern nimmt auch „die zum Teil jahrtausendealten Fäden auf, die uns an frühe Manifestationen menschlichen Übungs- und Beseelungswissens binden“. Sloterdijk ordnet und sichtet das Arsenal der Anthropotechnik: von der indischen Teleologie bis zu Kafka, von den Aposteln bis zu Nietzsche.

Das Ideal für die Gegenwart, das sich aus diesem zum Teil atemberaubendem Gang durch Kultur- und Menschheitsgeschichte ergibt, ist „ein Leben in Übungen“, das sich der unausweichlichen Überforderung des Menschen durch Tod und Schicksal erkennend und handelnd stellt. Diese Haltung ist für Sloterdijk die einzige Alternative zur „lähmenden Harmlosigkeit sämtlicher gängigen Diskurse“, die sich zu fragen scheinen, wie man Arbeitsplätze auf der Titanic sichert, anstatt ihrem Untergang entgegenzuwirken.

Der Philosoph Sloterdijk geht also zum pragmatisch-prophetischen Angriff über. Auch wenn er sich sprachlich und insbesondere metaphorisch („Schlaflos in Ephesos“) manchmal irgendwo zwischen Nietzsche und Luhmann verirrt, ist ihm unbedingt zu wünschen, dass sein Exerzitium lebensbejahenden Stänkerns erstens Gehör findet und er es zweitens noch weiter verfeinert, um noch dunkler und eindringlicher formulieren zu können, was einzugestehen jeden Tag leichter werden dürfte: die Katastrophe hat bereits begonnen. -- Roland Große Holtforth, Literaturtest

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychology, Religion, Self Help, Theory, Sociology

723 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

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

[Lukáš · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sloterdijk is a nagger. Well, not really, but I can hardly think of any other contemporary figure being able to achieve something as grandiose as this book in such a biting style. Reading almost every bit of this book forces one to silently keep saying 'you must be joking!' ('You must joke your life'?) but also to acknowledge that the author, as Keith Ansell-Pearson wrote, must be the most erudite person currently dwelling on Earth, in his ability to mobilize such a vast amount of arguments, bibliographical, archival and obscure material to pursue his theses.
So, for the start, the book takes up an 'insignificant' claim: that the concept of 'religion' is entirely misleading, in fact, that there is no thing as 'religion'. To this, Sloterdijk picks up a line from Rilke's poem that reads "You must change your life" as the ever-returning imperative posited on human beings - that we find ourselves in the midst of a practice of self-cultivation, described by Sloterdijk with the term askesis or ascetism. There are no religions, just ascetisms, and the intellectual and praxeological history that came out of Sloterdijk's typewriter is a provocative re-reading of all kinds of episodes of this planet's history including encounters with thinkers such as Foucault, Wittgenstein, St. Paul, Nietzsche, Buddhism, Hinduism, Plato (in the background) etc., etc. as an ever-recurring dealing with the ascetic predicament.
I can not pretend that some parts of this book are just hard to digest, because of the recurrence of petty details mentioned only in passing here and there, but out of Sloterdijk's books I've seen, this one is both the most controversial, the most challenging (in the sense of a glove slap), and a one that probably won't satisfy itself with nothing less than changing your life. From the ancients to the moderns, as Sloterdijk addresses the current era, "the re-secularization of the withdran subject did not fulfil the expectation of abstained bliss directly contributes to physical or actual happiness." After all, in a non-Hegelian fashion, we are presented with a story of how the local practices of self-formation have underwent a global mobilization that simultaneously achieved an amount of positive changes, but has lost the connection with the self. Sloterdijk closes with a challenging vision of metaphysics reconceived as immunology and a thought-provoking suggestion to craft what we might call a co-immunism. Isn't that already a politically daring move?
Given it is such a monster of a book full of intellectual provocations, counter-imaginations, erudite scholarship that can be hardly called anything else, but a slab of top-notch philosophical work, nothing less than provoking one to thinking, arguing and imagining, even disagreeing can't come out of it. And this might be precisely a way for 21st century political and social thought.

[j ac · Rating 5 out of 5]

A self-help book in the strictest meaning of the expression. Sloterdijk is a genius at reinterpreting the human condition and its drive to overcome. "You Must Change Your Life" explores the drive to transcend personal existence through greatness, whether it be greatness in humility and self-denial as seen in the different religious traditions or greatness through achievement as seen in sports and in the Communist social experiments of the twentieth century. It sets to fulfill this task by designating a common denominator to all human greatness: explicit practice of that which one wants most. An inspiring and relevant book. One to be kept at arm's length for repeated reading.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good friend gave me this deep, dense, heady book to read and I found it fascinating. Unfortunately, I've just finished off the first QUARTER of this massive philosophical text, three years after starting. Partially because I was reading it in gaps between other reading, partially because (as I am, in this area at least, essentially unschooled and an autodidact) nearly every line needs to be mulled and considered, while I am also forced to extrapolate backwards the framework of Nietzschean thought from which Sloterdijk is constructing his argument (although having that friend, Nietzsche scholar Peter Groff as a resource to tap, certainly helps - modern philosophical writing and critique gets a bad rap for an abuse of inscrutable jargon, but here there is not "jargon" so much as just a deep immersion in the terminology and thought of one of history's greatest thinkers). But it is a fascinating book and well worth anyone's time - it will NOT be easy reading (I took 13 pages of notes from just this first quarter, just so that I could continue to grasp the concepts as I moved along) but it will be worth the time you put into it and you may find that it will, in fact, make you re-consider many things, including how you live your own life.

I'm also a bit wary of even reviewing it, for fear of misstating or dumbing-down arguments far more complicated than I can articulate. I fear being reductive, essentially, but it seems inescapable so I'll just have to hit some highlights and beg the gentle reader to access the text itself for clarity. What follows next is just a quick tour through dense brambles of thought, to give one a sense of the vast range and flavor of the work.

Sloterdijk's main argument is framed, at the start, as a response to a currently in-vogue claim that the end of the 20th Century and the start of a new millennium will see a "return of religion" to Western life and thought (as if the Enlightenment had all been merely a spiritual “recession” from which we have now finally recovered). Which, Sloterdijk says, is impossible - because religion doesn't exist, and never has existed...and then he goes on to painstakingly explain what he means. As noted above, his argument is made in a framework of Nietzschean thought, and he does an amazing job unmooring the reader's preconceptions and definitions provided by our culture, and causes us to re-frame how we look at the idea of "religion" and what being alive means.

This theory is a commitment to the Enlightenment and picking up much older threads of earlier manifestations of human knowledge about “practice and animation”. It is based around ideas of "practice" (any operation that provides or improves the actor's qualification for the next performance of the same operation, self-forming, self-enhancing. Man is a being who results from repetition) and a symbolic embrace of the concept of "immune systems" (the concept derived from Biology but applied here as the unifying “cognitive novelty” of the modern – all systems [forms of life, cultures, etc.] become systems, self-organizing entities, by constantly reacting/referring to a potentially and actually invasive/irritating environment. The ever recurrent drive for the spiritual/metaphysical in Man is seen as consciousness' way of “warning” us of the dangers of itself and a way to immunize ourselves against these dangers). The “practicing life”, education, etiquette, custom, habit formation, training & exercise (“the garden of the human”) is the bridge between nature and culture.

Practicing is directed by responding to "vertical tensions" (all cultures / subcultures / scenes are based on distinctions wherein human behaviors are subdivided into polarized classes – an attractor and a repellor, yardsticks for vertical tensions that provide orientation in mental systems - the dichotomy of any field – excellence/mediocrity, wealth/lack, etc.) and by examining the practicing life we automatically enter the world of human vertical tensions.

From there, Sloterdijk examines various historical figures in thought and art to define the parameters of his argument. You get some astounding analysis of Rilke's poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" (from which the book's title derives) which leads to discussion of "perfection asserted by a fragment", sport-culture, Training & Trainer Authority, Nietzsche's concepts of Antiquity (a "constant present," not just a "past that we overcame"), "Healthy" and "Sick" asceticisms, Anthropotechnics and Nietzsche's revolutionary "Remote View of an Ascetic Planet." An examination of "Cripple asceticism" (by discussing those who overcome physical disability to function in the world) leads into how so much of 20th Century thought redefined mankind as "crippled" in some way.

Nietzsche's Acrobatic Existentialism (as displayed in THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA - previously, religious mankind were trained to be “acrobats of the world above” - practiced in the Art of crossing the Abyss of the “sensual world” with the balancing pole of asceticism, and the rope they walked was the transition from immanence to transcendence) is used to interrogate Kafka's work. Kafka and Nietzsche share the intuition that even though “heaven” disappeared, the rope was still here – so it must serve some other purpose than merely being a bridge to the world above. Acrobatism was always the point, not “crossing over.” What supplies the tension on the metaphorical rope now that heaven no longer pulls? What is the alternative generator for existential tension? (“Man is a rope stretched between the beast and the Ubermensch”/ man is an animal that has made “danger its profession”). This concept is applied to Kafka's "First Sorrow" and "The Hunger Artist". “First Sorrow” illustrates Kafka's discovery – there are no artistic training duties that do not lead to a second training: first come toughening exercises, second come un-toughenings that mold the artist into a virtuoso of the “inability to live”. In “First Sorrow”, the acrobat eventually needs a second bar to move further from life. "The Hunger Artist" is examined as a commentary on the ascetic practices of medieval Saints, and what the action means when brought forward to modern/non-religious times (it isn't WHAT he's doing, it's THAT he's doing it) and the story's last line (“I always wanted you to admire my fasting, but you shouldn't admire it, I can't help it, I couldn't find the food I liked”) has Solterdijk comment that “But you shouldn't admire it” is “the most spiritual European pronouncement of the last Century” - thus the Hunger Artist, in Nietzschean terms, never “overcomes himself” but “hunger art”, in the story, shows what remains of metaphysical desire when its transcendental goal is eliminated (the heaven pole is removed when “God is Dead”) - a beheaded asceticism where supposed tensile strength from above is actually aversive tension from within (“couldn't find what food he liked”).

An examination of the pessimist philosophy of E.M. Cioran is equally fascinating. Cioran "never overcomes himself" either (“How to continue when one lacks everything and everything is too much?”), but makes an art of that action - an “existentialism of refusal”, the central paradox is the “role of a protagonist with no role, the position of a man with no position”. So, Cioran adopts “acrobatic contrarianism”. Cioran practices by rejecting every goal-directed way of practicing. Methodical exercises are only possible if there is a fixed practice goal in sight, but it is precisely the authority of this goal that Cioran contests – accepting a practice goal would mean believing, and “believing” refers here to the mental act whereby the beginner anticipates the goal. In doing so, Cioran becomes the first master of “not getting anywhere” who discovered “the healthiest way of being incurable.”

Next is a regrouping/restatement of the basic argument incorporating what has been touched on. I got a bit lost following the discussion of Supply Religions and Demand Religions, but the summing up, in which Sloterdijk chooses two individuals who attempted to create modern religions (de Coubertin, the founder of the Modern Olympics, who originally intended it as a return of a physicality/sport and competition religion and L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology) as two poles defining his points is extremely fascinating (De Sade and Crowley are briefly touched on as well), with his deconstruction of Scientology's roots in mid-2oth Century fears of Atomic War especially perceptive.

And that's as far as I got. I'd really like to take on the second quarter in one sitting but (much like my plans to read Alan Moore's massive Jerusalem) I'm not exactly sure when I can make the time. Time will tell!

[Maru Kun]

The title of this book in German is Du mußt dein Leben ändern, which I suspect, not coincidentally, is the also list line of the sonnet Archaischer Torso Apollos, by Rainer Maria Rilke. And because this is a very good sonnet I have reproduced it below as a reminder to read the book and, if the book lives up to the title, think hard about what it has to say as well.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Nice article on the poem here, and a link to the original German together with other translations.

[… · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just some sacramental polemics, an interdict against spiritual obesity, a catechism for the verticality of man, an altar call to consummate oneself with the invisible church where the yoke of the real is the bread of life.

You probably wouldn’t like it…

[Amir matin Ghariblu]

اطمینان یافتم اسلوتردیک نویسنده جالبی می‌تواند باشد؛ پیچیده، هذیانی و مالیخولیایی، کمدی البته منظور از نوع دانته‌ای‌اش، با ایده‌های جالب شاید جزئی خوشمزگی و پوپولیسم ژیژک را از او بگیریم اسلوتردیک را می‌شود شبیهش دانست. خواندن چند اثر دیگرش هم در دستور کار هست. وقتی همه را در یک فهم کلی یافتم احتمالا هم یک ریویو مفصل روی آثار می‌نویسم هم چند بخش از آثار و مقالاتش را شامل چند بخش از فصول همین کتاب و سه مقاله دیگر را که تا الان نصفه و نیمه ترجمه کردم، یک ویراستار آشنا با اندیشه اسلوتردیک بیابم که زحمت بکشد که خطاهای احتمالی را پوشش دهد احتمالا تحت وب رایگان منتشر کنم، البته بعد از اضافه کردن و ساماندهی بخش‌های دیگری از سایر آثارش و البته ویراستاری دوباره!

[Theo Austin-Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only word I can truly summon for this work that would do it any kind of justice is simply this — magisterial.

Sloterdijk has firmly established himself, in my mind at the very least (which really counts for nil), as the preeminent philosopher of our times. As much as I hate brown nosing I can’t see any other way of describing this book, it seriously is that good. His conception of anthropotechnics, usurped from a rather curt usage circulating around the time of the Russian Revolution, is the summation of all prior technical/practical processes and arduous tasks carried out by the ascetics of history. Ascetics broach a far greater range than just religious mystics or hermits, instead including every individual who attempts to bring about the impossible and somehow make it look easy (athletes, musicians, generals and military leaders, actors, writers, teachers, priests and religious authorities - the list is truly endless). They maintain a vertical tension on ‘Mount Improbable’, paradoxically moving both forwards and upwards simultaneously. Ever since the re-secularisation of the subject from the Enlightenment onwards we have faced an easing and slackening of this vertical tension that is causing mankind to become mere cannon fodder, numerically ordained into various programmes (the forced remoulding dreamed of by Trotsky, the Biocosmists, capitalist globalisation etc.) The question is how we can reappropriate the resources of the past, with their edifices on which they stand effectively laid waste to by now, and be able to go forth without succumbing to ecological disaster and a complete disintegration of the symbolic order.

There’s way too much to discuss in a review here, Sloterdijk practically comes out of the gate like a carnivorous, malignant cancer eschewing ever figure there ever was. His intellectual eye is all-encompassing and intensely scrutinising, picking up on subtle sociological, pedagogical, aesthetic, commercial, religious etc. trends that have shaped the disarray we have to contend with today. This book begs for multiple re-reads and I am more than happy to oblige, a quick summation is simply impossible. Read it, and then re-read it, my review really doesn’t stand up to the colossal project Sloterdijk has only just begun to explicate in outline. I agree, his anthropotechnics stands at the base of a new discourse that will take decades of research before it even begins to cover any considerable ground. But my god, what a start!

[Brian Hoffstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

You Must Change Your Life! This is the “sublime imperative” German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk explicates, elucidates, and contextualizes in his tour-de-force, titled as the maxim itself, which we learn is a pursuit as old as humanity itself. Beginning with the first monkey voyaging the savannah, hammering his hand axe into a tool for survival, the tale continues today in unprecedented acceleration through our technological age. Starting with Rilke’s poem, The Archaic Torso of Apollo (inspired by Rodin’s statue in the Louvre), in which the imperative is therein proclaimed, Sloterdijk begins a narrative of humanity through the concept of self-improvement as a metaphor that encompasses both the Self and the Other.

Sloterdijk outlines the many ways the imperative has manifested itself throughout history. He describes many forms that have been created to service this same function of ascent and mastery. In a word, we discover, it’s all about (capital-p) Progress. To describe progress in evolutionary terms, Sloterdijk borrows Richard Dawkins metaphor as “the climbing of Mount Improbable,” and in philosophical terms, Sloterdijk harps on Nietzsche endlessly through his notion of the Übermensch. You Must Change Your Life reads like rich, intellectual treasure trove, archiving a conversation that’s been taking place over the millennia. We hear from Buddha, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Foucault, to name only a few.

Sloterdijk introduces us to many terms and phrases that become thematic tools for his thesis. Anthropotechnics, metanoia, auto-operative curvature, praxis, élan — just embrace it, he’s an intellect on that level where extraordinary vocabulary is requisite (additionally, his prose was most likely not helped by the translation). Nevertheless, he breaks everything down for the reader in digestible bites. Man, he proclaims, is defined by his habits. Irregardless the flavor of the ends, life is born and bred in the means. We are what we practice. This recognition sparks a need to separate from the status quo, creating what he refers to as a General Immunology for living as the higher Self within the mindless zeitgeist du jour. It becomes a call to action: whether it’s the awakened Atman within the cosmic Brahman, a devotion to Christ, or the compulsion to create art or cultivate an athletic prowess, knowingly or unknowingly man is what he makes of himself.

Eventually the discourse shifts from the individual to the collective. He paints a picture of the planet’s societal complexification through this thematic vantage of improvement, and brings us to the present day — where the call to change your life has become the call to change the world. The looming climate crisis of the anthropocene becomes Sloterdijk’s anthropotechnic raison d’être; the subject of and for modernity’s metanoia. It feels like a stark finale after such a thorough discourse on the preceding topics, but nonetheless serves as an apt conclusion. It’s the ultimate, collective call to action. And having gone through the entirety of this dense volume, one is all the more moved to get off his/her ass and insure the story doesn’t end here.

[Marcel Côté · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like penetrating an incredibly dense thicket to find a hidden treasure. Unfortunately, the thicket is far denser than need be due to the author's almost deliberately obscure style. For example, why must he rely so much on technical terms in Greek and Latin when everyday-language translations would do? Besides, the treasure itself is more like a single diamond than like the riches of King Tut. In fact, I can sum it up in a simple phrase: we are creatures of habit, so it is incumbent on us in life to replace bad habits with good ones (or bad social adaptations with good ones) through long and deliberate practice until they become second nature.

Yet there is a lot to be said for this book, which, by its very density, provides an incredible wealth of material to chew on while traveling from Point A to Point B. The author takes us on a tour of "practice systems" (regimens designed to achieve excellence in some field or another) from the earliest Greek philosophers and Hindu mystics through the Christian desert hermits to the schools of the Renaissance, to the utopian projects of the Enlightenment and Romantic artistes, all the way to the attempts at mass social engineering (whether Communist or Fascist) in modern times. Along the way, there are so many fascinating (to me) tangents that besides constantly running to Wikipedia for background info (which vastly multiplied my reading time), I downloaded maybe 20 books to read later: on Pythagoras and Heraclitus, the Desert Fathers and St. Francis, Nietzche's Geneology of Morals, and a study of the Russian Cosmists who believed in the resurrection of the dead through science, to name a few. If it's the sign of a good book that it leads you to other books (as I've often thought), then this is one of the best I've read in years!

Beyond this, the author's thesis that the entire history of human culture can be summed up as an evolving series of "practice systems" is a concept at least worth thinking about, and it leads to his final conclusion (warning: spoilers!) that if we are to survive much longer as a species in a globally linked world, we must once again make a leap forward in our "practice systems" to develop habits adapted (for the first time) to sustainable, cooperative life on this planet. Rather than dividing ourselves into "in groups" and "out groups" as we have in the past, we must learn to see the entirety of the human race as the "in group" and inoculate ourselves not against each other, but against the very idea of us-vs.-them.

[Esteban · Rating 1 out of 5]

Has de cambiar tu vida se deja leer como la contraparte afirmativa de El extrañamiento del mundo, pero es en muchos sentidos un libro más pobre y ostentoso. Sloterdijk es más conciso e iluminador hablando de métodos de autoaniquilación que haciéndolo sobre como participar en el mundo. Concretamente, habla sobre las prácticas, actividades muy distintas al trabajo (alienado), organizadas por una abnegación, y que permiten alcanzar alguna forma de excelencia. Sloterdijk incluye a los ejercicios espirituales de los yogis y los anacoretas, con lo que borronea la distinción de Weber entre misticismo (una retirada debilitante del mundo) y ascetismo propiamente dicho (una abnegación interesada que sirve para introducir un cambio en el mundo). A sus ojos, la religión vendría a ser una especie de perversión política de un sistema de prácticas. No es raro que reniegue de la noción de acontecimiento, que es, entre otras cosas, la forma en la que la filosofía contemporánea llama a la inevitabilidad de posicionarse frente a algo ajeno al self y sus proyecciones. Más allá de su enorme y ostentosa erudición, tiene el problema de todos los libros de autoayuda; sólo pueden hacer referencia al sí mismo. Con todos los vicios que pueda tener la posición filomarxista de encumbrar a la historia, es cierto que abre puertas y ventanas en el taller del self.

Sloterdijk denosta acertadamente el culto a la identidad como apología de la mediocridad, pero su horizonte no va más allá de la fantasía de autoperfeccionamiento que ofrece el mercado y la cultura popular: reinvención de sí, formas débiles del ideal atlético, primacía de lo performativo, normalización de la búsqueda del aplauso. Escuchándolo no hay ángel de la historia ni horizonte apocalíptico, y la salvación es sólo un eufemismo para la ausencia de adicciones y compulsiones. Admiremos a los ascetas y sus automortificaciones, nos dice, pero neguémos la existencia de lo sagrado que justifica sus vidas; veámos como destruyen sus vidas, pero no dejemos que introduzcan doctrinas perniciosas.

Una interpretación posible: Sloterdijk es el último hombre. Su obra sirve para amplificar y proyectar en el pensamiento la miseria de una cómoda ausencia de horizonte. Has de cambiar tu vida es una expresión ilustrada del sentido común de la época, lo que en filosofía es muy poca cosa.

[Nicklas Karlsson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This opus of a book is quite something to digest. I have yet to understand it all and the very intricacies and implications of what Sloterdijk is saying.
As a novice or willing amateur in philosophy I fear this book was a but beyond my skills. Having little trouble in general to grasp academic texts of higher theoretical nature, this however was very hard to extend the requisite attention.

The core concept is simple enough, yet Sloterdijk swings out to a foray of diverse anecdotes in an almost positivist maner. I feel like he doesn’t quite manage to tie it all together for the uninitiated like myself. Nor should he have to. The work is truly a life-time of accumulated knowledge, no one could weave such tapestry without years upon years of subtle absorption.

Another point is the seeming lack of why in the grander sense of the concept. Perhaps I am not, again, smart enough or attentive enough to grasp it. But I do miss an explanation of why you must change your life. A great emphasis is put on how and how through ages these anthrotechnics have been applied, and in an analogical way they could probably have correspondence with reality. But why. Why do we do this, why have we created a meta-culture with the objective of ”you must change your life”?

Thus I cannot give this book a higher rating. Not in any quasi-objective way, because the book truly is wondrous and I sense that there is a deeper meaning which I just quite can’t grasp. But in my subjective opinion as a recommendation for others I feel like giving it a higher rating would be misleading as I believe that clarity and simplicity really are marks of genius as well.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peter Sloterdijk is undeniably brilliant. He is undeniably well-read and a critical thinker.
His diagnosis of the practicing human and his prescription for the type of practice that will create a global community and global immunity for the impending disaster that threatens humanity are considered and deeply thought through.

But for me, incomplete.

I feel that when he conflates technological, athletic, and artistic mastery/progress with the "upward" transformation of humankind, the creation of a new human, he is severely mistaken. No amount of "progress" alters what is fundamental in our humanity, a wiring created by evolution that has us be self-serving, rapacious, and unable to see life clearly. Humans can "practice" till forever and not lose what is fundamental. With all the progress we have achieved, has anything really altered in what makes us human? His hope for a new humanity permeates his book, has him interpret artists and philosophers through this skewed vision, and made reading this book, in my view, tedious. I reject that the salvation of humankind is inherently a worthy project and this book did little to convince me that humanity has the necessary courage or wherewithal, to achieve the salvation Sloterdiijk says is imperative.

Having said that, I tip my hat to the depth of his thinking. Even if I feel that he falters when he ascribes to some hopeful illusion of what mankind could be.

[Uxküll · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review forthcoming...

[David Bjelland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well this was certainly... a journey.

Infuriating and tedious for long stretches, and then, like a scenic clearing opening up after miles of joyless, meandering bush-whacking, it just bowls you over with a section of distilled poetic beauty and insight.

YMCYL is self-consciously difficult and slippery and arrogant in the way I associate with Theory's worst crimes against language, but there's this undercurrent of earnestness and playfulness too in Sloterdijk that kept me coming back no matter how many times it felt like he was trying to throw the reader off his trail.

Do I recommend it? Uhh...

I guess not anymore than I'd recommend going days without showering on a backpacking trip, or training for an Ironman until you puke?

Depends on how readily you can acclimate to hostile, novel environments, and how much you feel like proving your potential redeems the suffering required to get there – it's fitting that in YMCYL, Sloterdijk is both writing about and demanding from the reader that kind of stubborn, punishing drive for self-overcoming.

[Hans-Peter Merz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Geschenk einer guten Freundin. Nach einer Lesung Sloterdijks in Bochum war ich bereits laenger um das Buch herumgeschlichen. Da mir Sloterdijks heftig- philosophische Sprache doch sehr absichtsvoll uebertrieben vorkommt, habe ich von der Lektuere aber bislang Abstand genommen. Nun hat das Buch aber doch den Weg auf meinen Tisch gefunden. Auch wenn ich den Sprachduktus nach wie vor nicht mag so muss ich doch gestehen, dass der Autor mich mehr und mehr in seinen Bann zieht.

Vertikalspannung: der draengend empfundene Unterschied zwischen wo(wie) ich bin und wie(wo) ich sein koennte.

[Jimena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una obra densa, completa e intensa que, a través de más de 570 páginas, nos descubre el pensamiento de Peter Sloterdijk. Solo compensaría cambiar tu vida si al hacerlo tienes en cuenta tu propio ser como integrante y partícipe de lo que significa humanidad en el mundo globalizado hodierno. El ser humano ante la encrucijada de tener que salvar el mundo y no posponer el auxilio que nos pide la ecología, ha de ponerse manos a la obra antes de su extinción.

[Timothy Lavenz · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Time is of the essence" —in two senses:

(1) It is imperative that you start now, and it is your "innermost not-yet" which calls you, tells you this. It induces you to feel unsettled with your status quo by pulling you in the opposite direction. It attracts you vertically with a potentiality that you do not currently know— and will never exactly know. You are seduced to the exact thing you doubted was possible— and precisely for that reason.

This initial imperative— "Change your life!"— is applicable at all times and to all humans, no matter their level, and forms the essential reflecting pool of this book. It begins by rethinking "religiosity" itself in terms of one's ability to hear this call coming from "elsewhere" (e.g., from the words you are reading right now). Quite apart from so-called "religions" (which Sloterdijk argues do not exist), religiosity has to do with one's ability to experience an object as a subject, one's ability to experience things or situations as "saying something to you," something that pulls you to the more "mysterious" aspects of yourself and things— the strange, difficult, surprising, and Improbable. Examples include koans, chance encounters, statues of gods, relics, weathered stones, theological summa, mediation handbooks, warrior manuals, snowstorms, and so on. In each case, it is a matter of hearing an obscure mandate, an "unconditional instruction" seemingly tailored just for you in that very moment. This call thrusts you into a previously unknown understanding of yourself, and more importantly, catapults you into a new application. This implies minding your dissatisfaction with the current "givens" and doing something about it, which in turn implies "seceding" or "receding" from your conventional totalities and re-orienting your life-practice along the vertical, singular-to-you axis, which is demanding your devotion. There is no upper limit to this axis: it is your Impossible (you'll never know how high you can go unless you go there); and therefore, the call is Infinite (so long you keep listening). "Religiosity" made explicit means listening in to the call that concerns you: paying attention, "listening up."

In tracing out the modern scene— which everyone will note is rather vertically challenged—, Nietzsche becomes a key player. First, he realized that every man is product of what he does, of how he spends his time. To that extent, he tried to salvage "ascetic" practices from their life-denying and life-diminishing for the sake of life-affirmation and life-empowerment instead. Second, we owe him the figure of the Übermensch, who ensures, "the possibility of fastening new ropes overhead that are worth looking up to" (that is, after the so-called death of God). Now, the overman does not point to any specific concept or type of man, but rather to the fundamental fact that to be "human" is to be charged, defined, and structured by the "over-" itself. To be human is to understand that, no matter what our present maximum is, there is always room for increase, and that no goal in heaven or on earth ought to, nor can, stop our upward march. Combining these two insights, what is required here is an "athleticism of the incredible," which has no limit except an infinite "over-," an endless "more-than-."

(2) What opens up in response to such high callings is what Sloterdijk calls the "time of inner exertion," which is, "meant to overtake the sluggish time of the world. Where more advanced civilization begins, people come forward who want to hear that they can do something besides waiting. They look for proof that they are moving themselves, not simply being carried along by the course of things..." In this time, one raises questions: what shall I expose myself to? who shall I admire? what is worthy and unworthy, in general, of being repeated? what practices should I take up and leave behind? and how will I keep in tune with my driving force? what alienates me from it? and why have I not taken up more rigorous assignments— acted wiser? Such questions, often ignored, have to do of course with habits and inertias, laziness and wakefulness, and above all with what, on the one hand, binds us to the streams of information that impinge on our drive and what, on the contrary, keeps us in contact with it, in conversation with ourselves. To repeat, such a conversation MUST be cultivated, nurtured, practiced at countless levels (for it would be foolish to say it comes naturally). To nurture this infinite conversation indeed requires the "time of inner exertion"!

Taken more broadly, the above questions become: which praxes throughout human history have kept us in conversation with ourselves and with our own longing to advance (singularly and as a civilization)? How do we become, and best become, technicians of ourselves, conservationists of our world? With such questions in mind— at the personal, social, and symbolic levels— Sloterdijk outlines a "General Ascetology", cataloging, studying, and pursuing the practices that make humans human. His goal is to "make explicit what was implicit" in them, whether they be religious, philosophical, vocational, social, or artistic: culture in all its forms and facets because every culture "cultivates" somehow. But by unlinking these practices from ultimate-truth-procedures— that is, unlinking them from the ground they seemed to be chained to—, they are set free for our own pragmatic applications as practicing beings. "The main thing is to carry out the exercise, not to reason over it." If this book drives home one point it is that, "one can neither not practice nor not learn to live." One is always already caught up in huge programs of practicing behaviors, most of which go unnoticed. What matters is to become aware of this.

"Being human means existing in an operatively curved space in which actions return to affect the actor, works the worker, communications the communicator, thoughts the thinker and feelings the feeler." That means: every second counts, every fact factors in. There's little room for sideshow antics when what happens to us shapes and trains us constantly. "Even being a poor student must first be learned." Practices transform, first, last, and always, their agents, absolutely. One's usage-of-time "is" one's being-in-time (the being that is made out of one's expenditures). The "subject" is simply a carrier for multiple practices that selects out of many those to develop and those to avoid, conscious of the fact that each practice affects (constitutes) the "practitioner" instantaneously. This means that before you are "you" (self, presence, origin), you are an operation, a function, a TECHNIQUE. "From that point on, being human mean[s] running oneself as a workshop of self-realization."

Becoming aware of ourselves as the "products" of our own techniques and technologies leads us in the direction of what Sloterdijk calls a "General Immunology": how do we preserve ourselves in our own singularity? how do we do difficult things efficiently— so that we can do more difficult things? how do we last longest, doing the hardest, most "effortlessly," at the least cost (materially, energetically, and temporally)? Overall, it is an attempt to approach human HEALTH in every sense, from biological metabolism to international law to artistic-symbolic confrontations with death. Sloterdijk of course focuses only on the latter in this book, as it constitutes the highest sphere of immunology (formerly known as metaphysics). It gives the axis and aim of our anthropotechnics: to pivot upwards in ways unimaginable and to hold each step gained, because in point of fact, we are really only "ourselves" when we assume our destiny as "acrobats of the impossible" and find our place in the truths we have yet to acquire and undergo. A question of our "form of life" above all: our countless acts of tweaking ourselves, our time, and our world. We're forced to remind ourselves of that ever-unpopular truth: "nothing happens unless you do it yourself."

A simple injunction, a challenge and a question rolled into one, posed not generally but to you singularly, internally, eternally, from way out there: "You must change your life, sooner than you think. Time is of the essence."

[Martin Riexinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

(5+1)/2=3

Wie alles von Sloterdijk ein Werk, das sich gängigen Kategorien entzieht, keine akademische Philosophie oder Kulturwissenschaft, aber auch kein bloßer Feuilletonismus. Originell, aber oft unzusammenhängend, und am besten dort, wo die Abhängigkeit von anderen am deutlichsten ist.

Der Grundgedanke des Buches lässt sich mit den beiden Begriffen "Übung" und "Vertikalität" benennen. Sloterdijk zufolge prägt seit den achsenzeitlichen Asketen der Versuch durch Übung (Lernen, Wiederholung) Höheres zu erreichen. Das, nicht etwa Glauben, sei das Grundprinzip der Religion, es lasse sich aber in neuerer Zeit in vielen andern Zusammenhängen beobachten. Die auf Fachliteratur gestützten Abschnitte über die Achsenzeit im antiken Griechenland, in Indien und im frühen Christentum sind auch die besten Teile dieses Werks.
Ansonsten wird in dem Werk viel analogisiert, metaphorisiert, etymologisiert und essentialisiert, eine stichhaltige Beweisführung für Zusammenhaånge sucht man meist vergeblich, und Sloterdijks Versuch, Randphänomene (Scientology, Krüppeldiskurse der Zwischenkriegszeit) als zentrale Elemente der modernen Zivilisation zu verkaufen, überzeugt mich zumindest nicht. Und bei aller Belesenheit stutzt man zuweilen über grobe Schnitzer. So behauptet Sloterdijk, das Wesen des Kapitalismus habe, anders als Max Weber behaupte, seinen Ursprung nicht im Protestantismus, sondern in von Laien übernommenen Übungspraktiken mittelalterlicher Mönche. Ähem, exakt das behauptet Weber in die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus.

Wenngleich die meisten Ausführung Sloterdijks zu keinem anderen Zwecke zitierfähig sind, als dessen Position zu belegen, erkenne ich jedoch an, dass die Vielzahl seiner Assoziationen sehr stimulierend wirkt, und dazu motiviert, bestimmte Gedankengänge weiterzuverfolgen.
Daüberhinaus macht Sloterdijks Sprachgewalt und sprachschöpferische Begabung die Lektüre des Werks zu einem Vergnügen. Nicht nur, aber speziell für die Freunde der Polemik und des gepflegten Seitenhiebs ("das parakatholische Eleganzphänomen Martin Mosebach").

[Simon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pseudotiefe Wortpampe - pseudointellectual bullshit.

Leider konnte ich nur die Einleitung lesen, da ich eine Allergie gegen Bullshit habe. Das reicht allerdings aus, die Ideen des Buchs (fragwürdig) und den Schreibstil zu erkennen. Dieser besteht in der Sammlung möglichst vieler vager, überladener Wörter wie Schicksal und Integrationsdynamik in möglichst langen Sätzen, um durch Unverständlichkeit tiefgründig zu scheinen.

Das Buch fängt mit der These an, die Religion sei als neue Präsenz zurückgekehrt. Anscheinend hat Sloterdijk keine Statistiken über Religiosität gelesen, natürlich auch nicht zitiert, denn dann hätte man gesehen, dass Religiosität, vor allem bis zum Erscheinen des Buchs 2007, eher stark abnimmt. In Amerika und Deutschland sinkt die Zahl der Christen, die der Konfessionslosen steigt. Was soll man von einem Buch erwarten, dessen erster Satz Quatsch ist?

Statt meine Zeit mit dem Rest des Buchs und einer ausführlicheren Rezension zu verschwenden, präsentiere ich noch einen der genüsslich sinnlosen, überparfümierten Sätze der Einleitung:

"Wenn Aufklärung in technischer Hinsicht das Programmwort für den Fortschritt im Bewußtsein der Expliziertheit darstellt, darf man ohne Scheu vor großen Formeln sagen, daß die Explizitmachung des Impliziten die kognitive Form des Schicksals ist."

Und um zumindest eine echte Weisheit beizutragen, bekommt Nietzsche das Schlusswort:

"Tief sein und tief scheinen. — Wer sich tief weiß, bemüht sich um Klarheit; wer der Menge tief scheinen möchte, bemüht sich um Dunkelheit. Denn die Menge hält Alles für tief, dessen Grund sie nicht sehen kann: sie ist so furchtsam und geht so ungern in's Wasser."
- Nietzsche, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, Nr. 173.

[Bart · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've got the guts and perseverance, read this book. Sloterdijk can write really beautiful, although his sentences are hard to follow. This might seem like a contradiction, but in my opinion it isn't: although reading the sentences is challenging, they're still beautiful and meaningful too.
My complaint with this book is that it tries to be many things at once, and that Sloterdijk should've set a clearer message and purpose. Here's a list of the things this book is (or at least tries to be):
- a rewriting of the history of philosophy
- an analysis of history
- an analysis of contemporary society
- a sociopolitical text
In some places, this book tries to be these at once; at others, the focus lies more on one purpose than on the other.
Still, Sloterdijk really impressed me, and the book deserves 5 stars. You must read this book ;)

[Ert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has helped me to understand the philosophy of modern performance society a bit better. I was impressed by the richness of his speech. However sometimes I got the funny feeling, that there were also some empty words, which conveyed commonplaces in an overintellcualised way.
Eventual it has been a personal gain and was entertaining to read.

[Patrick]

Most excellent. The author attempts to reintroduce the experience/rapture of living into the understandings of the Western philosophical tradition(s)
.

[Ippolit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crypto

[isaac · Rating 3 out of 5]

The brief portraits of Hubbard, Wittegenstein, and Foucault toward the start were fun. Sloterdijk's casual off-hand uses and twists of phrases from Nietzsche and Heidegger are also fun. Otherwise, I had a lot of difficulty with Sloterdijk's use of neologisms and jargon. Otherwise a lot of analytical riffing on anthropotechnics, ascesis, vertical tension, and towards the end, habitus. Religion and Greek athletics gave self change through practice and training that has only survived less and less in artists, scientists, and philosophers. Would like to reread once I get a better grip of Sloterdijk's style.

[Danijel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Str. 11- Pošast hodi po zahodnem svetu - pošast religije. O njej nam prav povsod zatrjujejo, da se je po daljši odsotnosti vrnila med ljudi sodobnega sveta in da storimo, če njeno novo pristnost jemljemo karseda resno.

Str. 14- pokazal bom, da vračanje k religiji prav tako malo mogoče kot tudi sam povratek religije - namreč iz povsem preprostega razloga, saj ne obstaja niti "religija" niti "religije", temveč zgolj napačno razumljeni sistemi duhovnih vsaj, pa naj se ti uporabljajo oz. prakticirajo znotraj kolektivov - običajno so to cerkve, ordo, sangha - ali pa personaliziranih izvedbah - v interakciji z " lastnim bogom", pri katerem se zasebno zavarujejo državljani moderne.

Str. 50- Prisluhni glasu iz kamna, ne upiraj se pozivu k formi. Izkoristi priložnost treniranje z bogom.

Str. 71- "Ste najsrečnejši človek, kar jih poznam," je rekel nekdo, ki so mu pravili John D. "In Vi s svojim denarjem, g. Rockerfeller?" sem ga vprašal. "Z vsem svojim denarjem si ne morem kupiti Vašega veselja do življenja ..."

Str. 72/73- Uthan zaključi svoje zapiske ....:
V primerjavi s popolnim človekom se ne počutim prav nič prikrajšanega… Še nikoli nisem naletel na človeka, s katerim bi, če upoštevam prav vse okoliščine, rad zamenjal. BORIL SEM SE POŠTENO, SAM S SABO ŠE BOLJ KOT S SVETOM OKOLI MENE, vendar pa se s tem najbolj pretanjenim duševnim užitkom, ki se mu rojevajo ravno iz bojev kot posledica tega, da sem brez rok, ne bi odrekel za nič na svetu.

Str. 99- Resnična pot gre čez vrv, ki ni napeta visoko, temveč tik nad tlemi. Ta se zdi bolj namenjena temu, da človeka spotakne, kot da bi hodil po njej.

Str. 100- Bivanje kot tako je akrobatska dejavnost, in nihče ne more z gotovostjo reči, katera izobrazba nam bo dala predpostavke, da se bomo lahko dokazali v tej disciplini.

Str. 167- Ne trdim, da nekdo, ki vidi himere, ne vidi sploh ničesar. Vendar pa pri tem spoznava le to. Kar mu dovoljuje zaznavati njegova metoda – strokovne interese v človeški podobi..

Str. 177- Nietzsche s svojo histeriedno propagando nadčloveka ne nazadnje zagotovi le možnost za napenjanje novih vrvi nad glavami, h katerim se izplača gledati

Str. 178- Mar v tem, ko Nietzsche v že citiranem uvodnem govoru svojega dela Tako je govoril Zarasutra preroku v njegovem prvem nagovoru meščanov polaga v usta besede »Človek je vrv, napeta med živaljo in nadčlovekom – vrv nad prepadom …«, ne slišimo poleg marsičesa drugega […], ki vztrajno zatrjuje, da evolucija, kar se tiče homo sapiensa, še ni izrekla svoje zadnje besede?

Str. 180- […] na vprašanje kdo opazuje naravo pri njenih umetninah, s človeškega vidika ni mogoče odgovoriti – edini opazovalec, na katerega lahko pokažemo s prstom, je biolog, ki vstopa v gledališče evolucije z zamudo več sto milijon let.

Str. 189- »Človek« je monstrum nemira, ki išče nevarnost in sramoti status qou, ki ničesar ne pusti tako, kot je bilo..

Str. 204- Wittegensteinovo najznačilnojšo izjavo o religioznih stvareh najdemo v notici iz leta 1948:
Pošteni religiozni mislec je kakor vrvohodec. Zdi se, kot da bi hodil po zraku. Njegova pot je najožja, kar si jih je sploh mogoče misliti. Pa kljub temu po svoji vrvi nekam pride.

Str. 205- »O sebi pišeš ne glede na to, kako velik si. Tedaj ne stojiš na hoduljah ali visoko na kaki lestvi, temveč na golih nogah«(Wittgenstein, 1937)

Str. 231- »Ne hodi ven, ampak se vrni v samega sebe. Resnica prebiva v notranjem človeku. In če boš odkril, da je tvoja narava spremenljiva, presezi samega sebe (transcende et te ipsum). Vendar pomni, da s tem, ko greš čez samega sebe, presežeš svojo razumno dušo (Avrelij Avguštin: Izbrani spisi, Nova revija, Ljubljana 2011, str. 143).

Str. 289- Jaspers:
Kar doseže posameznik, se nikakor ne prenaša na vse. Razdalja med vrhovi človeških možnosti in množico postane tedaj izredno velika. Vendar pa to, kar doseže posameznik, posredno spremeni prav vse.

Str. 686 (Spremna beseda Tine Hribar)- Hegel zato o vzgoji govori tudi kot o »drugem rojstvu«, se pravi, o rojstvu v novo, drugačno življenje. Vzgoja, skupaj z omiko in izobraževanjem, ki vodi od naravne prek nenaravne k resnični, duhovni volji vzpostavi človeka kot naravno bitje, oblikuje »drugo naravno individua«: Svoboda, ki je izvor zla, duhovne bolezni, se na ravni duha prek vzgoje, drugega rojstva in druge narave pretvori v izvir dobrega, duhovne ozdravitve.
Toda ali s tem človek kot novi človek, človek novega življenja ne živi navsezadnje tistega, čemur pravimo dvojno življenje? Je moč staro življenje povsem izbrisati?

Str. 695- Vračajoča religija je religija globalne oblasti. Verske resnice so postale sredstvo za merjenje moči, delitev oblasti. Prav zato tudi »Cerkev« kot Centri moči nepopustljivo branijo svojo versko ideologijo, saj bi sicer izgubile svojo identiteto; […]

Str. 706- V času, ko je spreminjajoče se spreminjanje edina stalnica, kritika vsega obstoječega/bivajočega, pa naj bo še tako brezobzirna, ne zadošča več, vstanite, toda prej se prebudite; in malo PREMISLITE. […] Tako eksploatatorski kapitalizem z enoodstotnim klubom miljarderjev na čelu kot diktatorski komunizem z enoodstotnim politbirojem partijskih privilegirancev vzpostavljata enakost (99% izkoriščanih oz. depriviligiranih) v neenakosti […].

Str. 707- Četudi zahodna civilizacija ne bo preživela, ne bo zmožna preživeti trka z drugimi civilizacijami in je bo konec, to ne bo konec sveta. […] Da, spremeniti moraš svoje življenje; a sledeč svoji lastni vesti, izvirajoči iz klica biti: bodi , to, kar si.

[Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Você precisa mudar a sua vida: a frase de Rilke inspirado no torso de Apólo é o imperativo da ascese, a voz da tensão vertical que nos impele a fazer mais de nós mesmos. Nesse sentido, o homem se autoproduz - antropotécnica. Como pode o humano fazer mais de si no mundo contemporâneo? O livro oferece um final brilhante: o imperativo atual é uma esferologia global, uma co-imunidade que nos proteja da cada vez mais próxima autodestruição. Você precisa mudar a sua vida. Aja como um indivíduo do globo.

[Thomas Bravender-Coyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book of philosophy. As usual, Sloterdijk lacks hard data, but his anecdotals and theory-building remain lucid, impressive and persuasive.

[Liedzeit Liedzeit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wer wollte widersprechen? Worum es genau geht, kann ich leider nicht sagen. Um die Kritik an der These, dass die Religionen zurückkehren? Jedenfalls springt er hübsch von H̦ölzken auf Stöckchen und klingt fabelhaft nach Selbstparodie.
Ganz sch̦ön da, wo er wirklich Informationen gibt, über den armlosen Wundergeiger und über Krüppelgeschichte in den 30ern von Würtz. Auch die Auflistung der Lehrertypen z.B. ist ganz nett. Aber hauptsächlich Schwafel... Der Teil über Wittgenstein ist ganz witzig. Ich glaube sogar, dass er etwas zu sagen hätte, aber der Ton ist anmaßend, seine Kenntnis marginal, er zitiert aus einem Werk, den Vermischten Bemerkungen, und es steht zu vermuten, dass er meint, in der Nachfolge Wittgensteins unter all dem Unsinn, Tiefschürfendes beitragen zu k̦önnen.

[Samuel Ronsin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly fascinating book, that explores the art of elevating oneself in the modern days. It deals with the individualistic side of the program sketched in Sloterdijk's controversial conference / book on "rules for the human zoo".

I simply regret the almost comical use of neologisms and the narrow adoption a somewhat solipsistic / Nietzschean point of view. Its leaves very little room for what would be the social graph of elevation (hopefully in a sequel) and forces Sloterdijk to make pretty ridiculous claims, especially on religions.

[André Bernhardt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took me ages to finish bc very difficult to understand and honestly I didn´t understand everything but what I understood was quite insightful. Recommended. Need to read it again. Title is a Rilke quote btw.