What Sloterdijk's amusing analysis of our present times has to do with my Christmas cookies
In most cases, eating too many cookies on Christmas leads to tightened pants on New Year's Eve. But thank God I am a "Selbstfindling", a self-discoverer, how Peter Sloterdijk puts the human experience in his book 'Weltfremdheit', 'Unworldliness', 1993. As such I "encounter and cannot utilize myself".
Probably Sloterdijk didn't think of the moment I get on my feet to go for a jog in favour of my trousers. But he puts a masterful eloquent philosopher's finger on the original relationship between "the self of the heroes and prophets and the migraine and hypochondriac subjects". Which means, if I go jogging with the cookies in my stomach, I have chosen, and will be a hero?
It might not be that easy. His book 'You must change your life' from 2009 revolves around the question, who it even is to states this imperative. When there is more at stake than my Christmas cookies, my "embarrassment to be a human", my conditio humana, then this question implies a historical-critical approach to ideologies.
'Change', Regensburg, 2009 © Dr. Christine Lehr
Who particularly functions as a provider of bahavioral directions for those beings, who "must behave towards their own vertical tension, who therefore are beings that cannot be relieved from the stress of the you-can-make-more-or-less-of-yourself"? In his 2017 book 'After God' Sloterdijk distinguishes familiarly amusing between vertical and horizontal tensions, and investigates the role which gets assigned to something like God through the times.
With intellectual lightness those tension structures get declined through societal eras and their respective organs. Terminological heavyweights like state, religion, and the humans/citizens in these relations are juggled into an extraordinary cultural analysis that bemuses the wake reader (it soothes his feeling of being alone with those assessments), and befuddles the disenchanted reader with the desired rapture. Cookies without regret so to speak.
The surprising fact that Mister Sloterdijk has been living in the Indian ashram of Osho from 1978 until 1980, might have determined the titles of a great portion of his work. Especially to his current monograph 'Den Himmel zum sprechen bringen' (in English the title might be something like 'Get the heavens to talk') from 2020 I am very much looking forward, and hope to have instigated the reading of his work, and will report from my own!
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