Peter Sloterdijk Knows it All
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The PC gave us computing power at home, the internet connected us, and mobile let us do it pretty much anywhere. Now generative AI lets us communicate with technology in our own language, using our own senses. But figuring it all out when you're living through it is a totally different story. Welcome to Leading the Shift.

a new podcast for Microsoft Azure. I'm your host, Susan Etlinger. In each episode, leaders will share what they're learning to help you navigate all this change with confidence. Please join us. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the New Books Network. This is the Imperfect Buddha Podcast, sponsored by O'Connell Coaching. Find out more at imperfectbuddha.com.

Today's guest is Dr. Thomas Sutherland, author of the Bloomsbury title, Speaking Philosophically, Communication at the Limits of Discursive Reason. He's a lecturer in digital media at the University of Southampton and a researcher into digital culture and the humanities, as well as the history of philosophy, contemporary continental philosophy and technologies of the self.

He is also highly knowledgeable on matters non-philosophical and our expert today on Peter Sloterdijk, the main subject of today's conversation. For those who don't know, Peter Sloterdijk or Peter is a philosopher and cultural critic from Germany. He is a prolific author and well-known public figure in Germany and Italy and in much of Europe.

He hosted a popular TV program on philosophy and culture for over 10 years, making him a household name there. He is also controversial, has an intense dislike of Marxism and critical theory, and is a big fan of Hyperbole.

He is a fascinating and original thinker, and when he is not producing unexpected takes on all things philosophical, he is encouraging people to take up the practicing life and treat philosophy as practice. Hence our interest in him on this podcast. There are three main areas we discuss regarding Sloterdijk's work.

They concern cynicism, spheres and the practicing life and the rehabilitation of philosophy as wisdom. Now, before we begin, a little more context. There are certain figures from the world of philosophy and related fields who are simultaneously inspirational and frustrating.

For me, Sloterdijk is one such figure. Yet, I am very much attracted to his ideas and his way of articulating in particular interdependence or coexistence, as well as his take on the notion of practice. We could argue that he is a post-traditional practitioner par excellence.

Now, his ideas resonate strongly with my own intuitions and proclivities, like other figures I have come across. Some of them he is also inspired by: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Meleuponti. For me, this expands though beyond philosophy to anthropologists like Tim Ingold or the sociologist Anthony Giddens.

Sloterdijk, despite the difficulties, provides a language for articulating intuitions and desires outside of Buddhism or spiritual traditions more broadly. He articulates a way of understanding the human condition in its complexity beyond religion and spirituality and also, thank God, one that is not enclosed in academia or subdued by the need to be economically productive or scientifically affirmed.

Now why is he difficult to read? Well, partly because he writes with an assumption that the reader is already familiar with many of the references he uses and his own interpretation of those thinkers and events.

He draws from as far and wide as the Buddha to Dionysus to Christian saints to modern-day athletes. He'll draw on any cultural product to make a point and a connection. And he does so playfully and often with humorous detours and, yes, more hyperbole. It is as if his writing were in fact long streams of consciousness in which he is talking to himself and we are mere spectators.

fine if he's your average person, not if he's one of the most widely read people you'll ever come across. Now, since I have struggled with his prose despite my attraction to it, I sought help from Thomas today. It has actually not been at all easy. I've been looking around for someone for over a year. Sloterdijk in the English language world is not so well known or popular and therefore it can be difficult to find people well versed in his ideas

and able to unpack them in a critical manner. Thomas has written papers on Peter Sloterdijk such as "Petter Sloterdijk and the Security Architecture of Existence", "Immunity, Autochtony and Ontological Nativism". Hmm, tricky. And "Ontological Co-Belonging in Peter Sloterdijk's Spherological Philosophy of Mediation".

Now those titles are complex. Thomas is certainly rich in what he shares with us, but I think you'll find it accessible. You Must Change Your Life is perhaps his most well-known text in the English language world. If you haven't heard of it, you might go and take a look. Enjoy. Welcome to the podcast, Thomas Sutherland.

Let's begin with you, Thomas. Why did you find yourself writing about Peter Sloterdijk, of all people, and what was it that drew you to his work initially? So quite a while ago now, when I was doing my PhD, like a lot of people at the early 2010s, I became very interested in these sorts of currents of philosophy that were appearing, speculative realism and new materialism and things like that.

I very quickly determined that this was a dead end, at least from my perspective. I became very interested in sort of, I guess, the opposite, in very anti-metaphysical lines of thought. People like Wittgenstein and Derrida and later Laruelle

thinkers like Sarah Kaufman and Michelle Lederf and so on. And I also became interested in attempts to sort of think philosophy or critical theory in, I guess, a more quote-unquote materialist fashion. People like Foucault and Pierre Hadot and Régis Debray and Friedrich Hitler and so on, as

As part of all of this, I was drawn toward Sloterdijk's work, which I think cuts across both of these things, both in being very much a sort of anti-metaphysical approach to philosophy and to the history of philosophy, but also one who is trying to

like many other thinkers have tried to do, tried to sort of wrest the history of philosophy away from inveterate idealism, basically. And also, from a very sort of personal perspective, Sloterdijk engages directly with media theory, which is my own nominal discipline, although I often interpret media theory in rather kind of unusual ways.

Particularly what interested me about Sloterdijk is for him this notion that ideas and theorems and discourses and concepts and so on have to be understood as sort of sustained by these ongoing processes of what he describes as repetitive life.

ideas for him don't just exist out there in the ether. They have to be practiced. They have to be preserved and transmitted. And so I think that really kind of drew me to his work and has, to some degree, sustained my interest in his work. I guess I'd also add to that that

So, I guess on the one hand, I'd say my interest in Sloterdijk's work is in large part a result of this kind of concern with his conception of philosophy as practice and his attempt to reframe the history of philosophy and history of thought as practices. At the same time, I think it's probably important to note that I'm not a proponent, I guess, of his work. I think he's a very significant thinker, but I'm not perhaps a defender of his work.

I think it's interesting, but I think it's often, for me, quite frustrating when one discusses continental philosophy or critical theory. Obviously, the relationship between those two things is kind of a conversation in itself. I think there's often a tendency for people to go into bat for a particular thinker and to mount a defense of them.

Or, conversely, you get this sort of eclectic approach where you have thinkers who are described as theorists, and there is just this assumption that they all kind of fit into a conceptual toolbox, which is a term Deleuze once used. So these concepts get abstracted from their context and just sort of mixed together. I think that Sloterdijk is often applied in both of these ways. He has ardent defenders.

But you also see his ideas treated as sort of just more critical theory. I'm not so interested, I guess, in either of these ways of approaching his work. I'm very interested in Sloterdijk, but I think I'm also deeply skeptical of much of his work and of the positions he espouses. Sometimes positions that he espouses overtly, sometimes ones that are a bit more kind of covert and tacit.

So as I was saying, I sort of come to his work with interest, but also with, I guess, like frustration and sometimes distaste, I would say, sometimes perhaps a kind of morbid curiosity. I have mixed feelings, I guess you could say, on Sloterdijk as a thinker.

What's wrong with a bit of healthy suspicion towards these thinkers, especially when they're living? I mean, that must be part of the excitement, in a sense, right? Excitement in its broadest meaning of engaging with the work of somebody who is alive. They can speak for themselves, they can defend themselves, and they can obviously produce new kind of thought which may cement a position or head off in new directions. And Sloterdijk certainly seems to be

prolific in the directions he's willing to explore, which I guess also leaves him open to quite a bit of interpretation, right? Because when there are so many sources of thought coming into his own work, it's hard to kind of find an essential truth within the positions he's taking. But yeah, all interesting. Now, I feel like we should spend a few moments on where Schlotterdijk began. I'm familiar with some of his work, not all of his work.

Some of what I know feels like it's the beginning of the process of opening a door, entering the room. So I'm going to need you to help me out with some of these matters. One of them being the critique of cynicism, which is a major theme, certainly in his earlier work. Would you say that his books are, in many ways, all of them, in a sense, a kind of ongoing revolt against cynicism and

also an attempt to articulate a way of being in the world that moves on from the limitations of cynicism and the kind of culture, politics and thought that it's given rise to, especially in the last century. Yes, I mean, very much so. I think it would be fair to say, in a qualified manner, and I think pretty much everything one says about Sloterdijk sort of needs a qualifier. As you say, interpretations of Sloterdijk are sort of myriad and

He's very difficult to summarize, I guess you would say. But I would say that in a qualified manner, yes, I think it is true to say that this kind of revolt against cynicism is very much a theme that runs throughout his work. The term cynicism itself kind of disappears after that initial book, but the themes that he establishes in that book very much resonate throughout.

That book you're referring to, The Critique of Cynical Reason, which came out in 1983, it is a strange book in many ways. When it was first published in Germany, it was a sort of genuine bestseller, and it was seen as very provocative. It was a provocative rejoinder to the German philosophical landscape at that time.

As you say as well, in this book, it's very much an attempt to get beyond what he thinks are the limitations of basically academic philosophy at the time that he's writing. The crucial thing to note about the Critique of Cynical Reason is it is denouncing cynicism, but it is also kind of advocating for a different kind of cynicism. In the same way that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, that the title is sort of a parody of,

The critique of pure reason is not a denunciation of pure reason as such. It is an attempt to draw the boundaries of the sort of acceptable or possible use of pure reason, legitimate use, I guess, of pure reason. So it's not a wholesale denunciation. It's an attempt to sort of discipline it. And I would say

In a sort of a very loosely analogous way, Sloterdijk in this book is very castigatory of a particular kind of what he thinks is this sort of predominant cynicism, whilst also trying to resuscitate or revive an older and what he thinks is a more valuable form of cynicism.

The cynicism that he is sort of denouncing is what he describes as an enlightened false consciousness, which is a concept that was then later popularized further, certainly in English by Slavoj Žižek in his book Sublime Objective Ideology that discusses this concept at length. But basically, this idea of enlightened false consciousness, what he means by this term

It's a kind of postmodern cynicism. It's a way people separate words from deeds.

It is this self-reflexivity that he considers so characteristic of postmodernity. It's a self-reflexivity that is defeated from the outset. It's like we've all learned the lessons of the Enlightenment, but we're unable to actually put them into effect in our own lives. So again, it's separating word from deed. We know certain things, but in our own lives, we find ourselves powerless to actually enact them.

He says it's a cynicism that knows itself to be without illusions, or maybe that would be better phrased as it believes it can see past the illusions, and yet it's been dragged down by the power of things. For him, he's particularly...

targeting ideology critique within the academy. This notion that we're able to expose ideology and therefore defeat it, that we can kind of see behind the curtain and that we can demystify all these aspects of our everyday lives. And he thinks that ideology critique just totally sort of falls down in the face of this enlightened false consciousness because

Sloterdijk argues, well, people sort of know the principles of ideology critique. People know that everything's a lie. They're aware of the ideology, but they just keep doing the same things. They just go through the motions anyway. Being able to see behind the curtain doesn't change anything about their behaviour.

And so for him, this is the cynicism that sort of dominates today. It is a peculiarly modern or postmodern cynicism that views itself as realist, as pragmatic. The postmodern cynic has adapted themselves to society.

they're able to keep living, to keep working, to keep going on in spite of whatever happens. And particularly in spite of what they know about the world and how the world works, right? They're just trying to get through life however one can. And so...

It's melancholic, this enlightened false consciousness. It's based on this sort of resignation where you go, well, if I'm not doing this, whether that's I'm not doing this job or I'm not engaging in these things, then someone else will. So what difference does it make? Sloterdijk argues enlightened false consciousness, it's an unhappy consciousness. It's sort of a well-adapted miserablism, basically. And particularly, he thinks this is what critical theory and

and philosophy more broadly has become.

It's resigned. It's acting against one's better judgment. It is espousing all these ideas that are completely distanced from one's life and particularly distanced from the lives of the people who are espousing them, right? So he thinks there's kind of no greater distance than between the ideology critic and the critique that they're espousing, between their actual life and the ideas that they're trying to convey. For him, there's a sort of...

professional interest in this in a way, or there's a professional cynicism here. This enlightened false consciousness enables the critical theorists to keep on doing what they're doing, and they never have to change anything about how they live. They can just continue pursuing the same old sort of tired goals, you know. So Sloterdijk's critique, as I say, of cynical reason, it can very much be read as a critique of critical theory.

and of what he describes as critical theory's self-abdication and its stagnation in the sort of twilight of late enlightenment.

To go back to your initial question, it's particularly here that we see the themes that kind of echo throughout Sloterdijk's later work. In the introduction to this book, he's scathing of post-war German critical theory, so particularly Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School and Habermas as well. For him, Adorno's philosophy is sort of the exemplar of this cynicism. It involves a kind of cultivated...

aesthetic and melancholic sensitivity. It's attuned to pain. It sees pain everywhere. For someone like Adorno, Sloterdijk argues, reality is kind of inscribed in suffering. Reality is the real is suffering. And the task of the critical theorist then, it's utopian. It's to remain attuned to sort of point toward a happiness, a pleasure, an absence of pain and suffering that will never come.

And such critical theory, he says, and this is crucial, I think, for understanding Sloterdijk's basic worldview. He argues this kind of critical theory is reproachful. It's resentful. It hates everything that has power. He describes it as an impotent rage against masculinity.

And so you can already see this sort of, this kind of Nietzschean, I guess, worldview or sort of mindset that people often find somewhat off-putting in Sloterdijk. These sort of declarations about resentment and about who has power and who doesn't. And he argues that critical attitude in his day, so this is the early 80s, he argues it's become more and more inward looking, it's half-hearted, it's apathetic.

He thinks that the critical stance has really just become a professional role. And so that means critique, it's quite easy. Everything is problematic. Everything is there, ready to be critiqued. Of course, anything aside from what might say, you know, threaten one's cushy academic job. Critical theory has become boring. It's become serious and it's become work. It's stone-faced.

It's humorless, but it's also totally impotent, right? Totally sort of powerless because it is totally divorced from the ways people live, including the very people who are advocating for it.

The other side of Sloterdijk's argument is that against this melancholy and against this cynicism and against the sort of ossified principles of academic philosophy, Sloterdijk hopes to cheer us up. He says this cheering up, it's not about making us hope that things might get better. It's not about offering us something new. There are no promissory gestures here whatsoever.

what he wants to do through this critique of cynical reason. He wants to put forward a sort of a mindset, an approach to the world that is about acceptance. It's about taking the world as it is. It's not about doing, but it is about letting things be.

And the term that he uses for letting things be is glassenheit, which typically means composure or calmness, but it also has a very specific meaning in Martin Heidegger's work, which I won't get into, but he's sort of gesturing toward that. So this idea of a passive rather than an active conception of the self, not a doing, but a letting things be.

To some extent, this is a kind of post-Nietzschean affirmationism. It's a gay science to use the Nietzschean phrase. And Sloterdijk's work is deeply, deeply Nietzschean. He advocates for an embodied physiognomic thinking. He describes this as a theory of consciousness with flesh and blood and teeth. But he also, in doing this...

He gestures back to the origins of the term cynicism, which he calls kynicism with a K, which is going back to the original Attic Greek spelling of the word. And he particularly looks back to Diogenes of Sinope, who was one of the earliest cynics and one of Socrates' students.

Sloterdijk, he advocates for a kind of return to or a revival of this ancient kinesism, which is, as he describes it, it's cheeky or it's impertinent. It involves a kind of argumentation that more respectable thought can't deal with. If Plato offers a high theory, a theory which sort of hates the body, which denigrates life, which denigrates

erases the connection between the body and perception and movement and understanding and thought. Instead, he argues, Diogenes proposes a low theory, one that is anti-elitist, anti-dogmatic, anti-metaphysical, you could say even anti-theoretical.

And this is one where the true cynic doesn't chase after ideals that he'll never be able to capture. Rather, the true cynic says what they live. For the true cynic or kynic, saying and doing, word and deed sort of coincide. For Sloterdijk, kynicism, it's about provoking. It's joyful. It's satirical. It's antagonistic. It's animalistic. It's mocking. It's often offensive.

And it is as well, and this is the last point I'll make, it's also ascetic. Sloterdijk at this point in this book, he says he doesn't like this term ascetic or asceticism because of its Christian resonances. In his later work, he becomes much more comfortable with the term.

It is specifically kinesism as he describes it. It's specifically ascetic in the sense that it is uncivil. It's about withdrawing from the political sphere. It's about abstention and self-restraint and choosing not to act. And in doing so, sort of throwing off the yokes and the burdens basically that restrict one's freedom. In this book, you have this kinesism, this kind of to

to put it very bluntly, this sort of good ancient form of cynicism contrasted against this sort of bad melancholic postmodern form of cynicism. And as I was saying, whilst these terms are kind of mostly confined to this one book, this contrast that he makes becomes in different terms and in different ways one of the absolutely central motifs that recurs throughout his work.

Yeah, thank you. That's a rich explanation. And I love the fact that you linked it so successfully and clearly to where he's gone since with his writings. Because it's so rich, I mean, we could just keep our conversation here, right? Yes, very much so, yeah. But I need to be disciplined and I need to keep us disciplined. Otherwise, this will end up being a five-hour podcast episode. So...

There's a lot I like and there's a lot I find interesting, and even your own discomfort almost with parts of his work make me think further about some of the points you've just shared now. I kind of like this playfulness of his and I think it is also clearly a kind of anti-elitist approach to discourse more broadly. I do wonder though to what degree we should take him seriously

with some of his more provocative claims. I mean, he clearly likes to antagonise, and that's part of the game he plays. I would find myself in strong resonance with Sloterdijk in his anti-cynicism. And I think it's interesting that he has this friendship with Slavoj Žižek as well. He has that famous phrase, you know, enjoy your symptom, which seems to resonate with this discourse on cynicism as well. Yes.

So in your description of this theme of cynicism, you mentioned the date of the book, which was what, the late 80s?

And you mentioned that it was certainly in its conception a critique of the current academic concerns of the time, and in particular in Germany. You also mentioned postmodernism. Postmodernism, again, is a contested term, of course. It has different usages. It's also a pop philosophy term these days, of course.

that gets used and abused by all manner of folks, being the most recent bogeyman on the right in America and Britain. But beyond that, postmodernism is fascinating because, well, its death has been announced, right? Its end has also been announced by various intellectuals over the decades.

And yet it still persists. And even if we may have people who claim that we're moving into some sort of post-modern phase, it seems to me that we are actually not on the other side of post-modernism, that

that it sort of coexists. We live in a kind of age of plenty, and perhaps that is due to the persistent presence of some form of cynicism. Certainly critical theory hasn't gone anywhere, right? So I wonder if you were to think about the current landscape we're in, to what degree do you think his critique is still relevant? And how do you see the kind of cynicism he was identifying and picking up on with that book back in the 80s?

How do you see that having changed or evolved or warped, if at all, to today? I will note that in Critique of Cynical Reason, he doesn't use the term postmodern, to be fair. He uses the term modern. Right, okay. In later books, he does use the term postmodern. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To the extent that I think his critique is reasonable, it is very much applicable to today.

I think the two key things to take from it, to put it very briefly, one is this sense of the seeming powerlessness of critique. That is to say, the fact that you can critique as much as you want, but the material effects of that critique often don't seem to arise. Whether that's true or not, I think it depends a lot on the circumstances, but I think that it is a difficulty that...

particularly sort of quote unquote critical theory very much faces and continues to face at the moment. The circumstances are different, particularly because he is aiming this critique particularly at academic philosophy and academia more generally. And the circumstances from the time that he wrote this book are now very different. The cynicism that has evolved within the academy is a very different type of cynicism.

than what he describes, or it is precisely based on the circumstances. The other thing to take from his work, and I think this is quite a useful point, is the distance often between one's ideas and one's life, and the way in which particularly the kind of processes and the

Training and the discipline that is involved in academia and academic philosophy means precisely that one is able to work at these ideas without these ideas having any kind of measurable connection to one's life.

Whether one considers this to be a problem or not, I think, is kind of a matter of discussion. These are problems that certainly resonate in discussions over the future of philosophy, the future of academia, the future of humanities, and so on. They are useful prompts for debate, I guess, if nothing else.

So let's move on to another very important theme in the history of his work. This brings us up to, relatively recently, a three-part book series under the title of Spheres. I've found this to be particularly interesting. I think it's also interesting as a kind of alternative to thinking about

collective consciousness, you know, collective subjectivity as an alternative to ideology. The two are quite interesting when they're juxtaposed. Spheres could come across as something quite abstract, but it seems that it is his attempt to elaborate a spatial ontology or an ontology of being together with others, kind of

analysis of coexistence, almost a phenomenology of, well, we might call it collective consciousness. Perhaps you could tell us something about it. What is going on with this three-part series, and what kind of vision is he enacting across these three texts?

As you say, I think the central concern of the Spheres trilogy, which I think personally is his most impressive work, is the notion of being with others. The notion that human existence is an inevitably and invariably kind of shared common experience. There is a strong influence of Heidegger, I would argue, on this project specifically,

It's not that Sloterdijk is kind of deriving concepts from Heidegger. He's not really a conceptual thinker, but he's sort of transforming these Heideggerian concepts into these evocative images that he then uses to illustrate in all these different contexts and all these different forms. In Spheres, you have these Heideggerian images of dwelling, of ecstatic being, that is sort of always existing outside of ourselves, of language as the house of

being, as Heidegger describes it in the Letter on Humanism. Particularly more than anything else, I would argue the Spheres trilogy is an extension of this Heideggerian idea of being in the world, which essentially means that our existence can't be abstracted from the world in which it exists, as, say, Descartes tried to do. Like,

There isn't a world and a self and a state of being in. Rather, these are all sort of fundamentally inseparable. To exist as human beings is to be in the world. There are a lot of ramifications of this that, for brevity's sake, I won't get into. Particularly crucial

for the Spheres trilogy is Heidegger's idea that we are thrown into the world, which is to say that we find ourselves within a sort of determinate, concrete situation that determines in advance what possibilities are open to us. And Heidegger argues that this thrownness, this facticity, the result of which is we are spatial beings. And this spatiality

It's not just there, it's something that we partly make for ourselves. But also, and to come back to your question, Heidegger argues that our being in the world is a being with others. We're never isolated, we're always tending toward a sort of closeness with others. Sloterdijk, he takes up this idea, but he homes in on the spatial component to which Heidegger doesn't dedicate much attention.

And so Sloterdijk says that whilst Heidegger's most famous book is Being and Time, Spheres could be subtitled Being and Space.

As you're saying, the purpose of the Spheres trilogy, it is a denunciation of modern individualism. It's a denunciation of the way in which Sloterdijk believes we are sort of treated now, we are assumed to be solitary beings, that we are treated as beings in ourselves, but not beings with others in our essence. The Spheres trilogy, it's not just a denunciation. If it was

that would just make him a sort of cynic in the manner he rejects. Rather, it's a kind of an attempt at a re-spatialization. It is trying to provide a novel and positive conception of the human being. This concept of spheres that he develops is, I would argue, about emphasizing our sort of ineradicable, our essential, fundamental, original sociality.

He posits human beings as space-creating beings. We always live in spheres with others. We are always enveloped within these sort of common symbolic spaces. And Sloterdijk argues our existence is an existence in spheres, and to exist in spheres is to exist with others.

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as a concept itself, is something I think we do continue to struggle with. Going back to this idea of ideology, how would you differentiate spheres from an ideological analysis? Because there's kind of resonance between these ideas, any conceptual material that we're using to think about what it means to coexist, and that challenges the role of the individual.

and challenges the idea that the individual is somehow self-made, right? That they exist autonomously apart from the world, which I think as soon as you investigate it to any serious degree, it's an absurd notion, right? Of course we are co-created with the world, but we don't have to deny individuality or, you know, determine that there's no agency to be had. But any kind of even cursory analysis of what it means to be a human being in the world is to recognize that we are with others.

So if we were to take Althusser's notion of ideology, which I think goes quite deep and it's quite different from some of the, let's say, more analytic renderings of ideology, which tend to see it more as a kind of set of political propositions which unite a group of people behind a set of beliefs, etc., etc.,

Yes.

How would you say spheres are distinct from this kind of analysis of ideology, and what do you think it adds possibly to the way we might think about it and also use it as a means for challenging this notion of absolute individuality or autonomy? Sure. So if we're talking about ideology, there's a couple of things to say. The first is that Sloterdijk fundamentally doesn't believe in the idea of ideology.

This stems from what he would describe as his basically Nietzschean politics. He thinks it's a good thing. And so the idea of ideology for him is sort of a resentful vision of the world. It's one that resents the fact that certain people have power. In one sense, there is a basic normative distinction, right? Sloterdijk is a sort of profoundly anti-Marxist thinker who just fundamentally disagrees with

certain principles that animate Marxist thinkers. In another sense, though, you're right that Althusser, in describing ideology, is describing a kind of way of life. But

For him, this way of life is produced by these kind of abstract structures, right? These ideological state apparatuses and so on. Whereas what Sloterdijk emphasizes is that we as human beings, we all take part in the construction of the world around us. For him, being in the world is being in spheres. We're always enveloped by spheres, symbolic spheres. These are

worlds that human beings build for themselves. And they're built from languages and meanings and beliefs and superstitions. They're things that we share in common with others. Whereas, say, ideology is this thing that's imposed upon us. And it's this thing that in some way

hides or masks from us the real working of things. For Sloterdijk, these spheres are protective, they shelter us. He describes them as symbolic immune systems. So they're these kind of protective symbolic shelters in which we dwell with others.

I would say that the notion of spheres, it's not the same as, but it's probably more similar to the work of certain media scholars, so Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, and so on, or to followers of general semantics, all of whom describe us as living in symbolic environments or sort of symbolic ecologies. And I would say that is what it's closer to.

It's not about something that is imposed upon us. For Sloterdijk, this idea of spheres, it's about living and it's about thinking and building and dwelling and sharing and having something in common. And it's also, and I think this is really crucial for understanding this trilogy, it's also about the ways in which we as human beings sort of take control of our situations.

He describes spheres as being about immunising and protecting and securing and bordering. They're about keeping things out, about maintaining a boundary or a sort of inside and an outside. They sort of express this tension between, on the one hand, community, right, having something in common, belonging, and on the other hand, immunity, having differences with others, keeping others out in some way.

But fundamentally, these are things that we all build and we all contribute to in certain respects, some more than others and in different ways and so on. It's not at all something that is imposed upon us. We're thrown into a situation that is outside of our control.

Precisely because we are thrown into that situation, we are forced to construct these shelters, these symbolic shelters for ourselves with others. That's very clear. And it also makes me think just how picking up again on this theme of him being opposed to critical theory more broadly,

They're anti-utopian, whereas ideology can be a utopian force. I mean, if you think about spheres, they're clearly not. They're much more down-to-earth, media, and ubiquitous. To what degree are you convinced by this take? Do you think there's a good argument to suggest that thinking spherologically rather than ideologically may be a more useful philosophical exercise? Thoughts? I think it is useful to some degree. And I think in particular,

It's a very useful metaphorical tool for understanding the ways in which senses of identity and community and belonging are developed. And the complex interactions between, as I say, things like, on the one hand, community, on the other hand, say, exclusion. It's a very useful way of thinking about the tensions between people

our own roles in sort of making the world that we live in and the conditions that are sort of handed down to us or that are sort of forced upon us in some way. As well as that, Sloterdijk provides a quite compelling account of the ways in which these sorts of symbolic immune systems or protective shelters interact with technology in the sort of modern or postmodern world.

I think there is a great deal of utility in what he's describing here. And as I say, it chimes a lot with certain currents of media theory. In a lot of ways, although they're not arguing the same thing, I often compare Sloterdijk to Régis Debray, who is a French scholar whose work isn't especially well known in English. And like Sloterdijk, it's quite hard to pin down politically and in various ways

They both have this quite ambitious understanding of the ways in which ideas and technologies and modes of communication and modes of interaction and things like that are fundamentally entwined with the way that we live. I would say as well, though, I think, you know, by the same token,

I've already said there's much in Sloterdijk's work that I don't really agree with. I think that whilst he is very, very critical of this melancholy sort of resigned approach of critical theory, I think that his depiction of human existence, I would describe it as quite paranoid. Whilst he rhetorically has this emphasis on this sort of joyful approach to philosophy, I'm not convinced that

that this always kind of plays out in the way that he describes the world and the way that he describes human existence. The way that he describes human existence constantly throughout this trilogy is that human existence is characterized by a fear and a very justified fear of invasion from the outside.

He describes spheres as sort of necessary psychosocial protection against the external and the foreign and the fortuitous, those sort of chance happenings. And his idea of spheres is that as we build these spheres, we...

either incorporate and assimilate external threats and disturbances within our own sort of spheric interiority. We neutralize these external elements by assimilating them or by sort of taking a stand against them. He describes human history as, and I quote here, a history of immune system battles. This idea of human history as fundamentally premised upon immunization,

against this sort of repelling or assimilating outside of which we're fearful.

I think that this kind of re-inscribes a whole bunch of normative assumptions into a basically sort of psycho-ontological register. He declares very explicitly that he wants to bridge the gap between biological and cultural phenomena of immunity, and I'm always surprised how often this aspect of his project is just taken for granted, because I'm not at all convinced that

that this move between biological modes of immunity and cultural modes of immunity, I'm not at all convinced that this is legitimate, that this transposition can occur. Whilst he is quite effective and quite appealing in the way that he attempts to counter this sort of hyper-individualism, at the same time, at some points, not at all points, I should say, but at some points,

he produces a sort of unnecessarily narrow and as I say kind of paranoid conception of sociality that doesn't necessarily chime with me. Yeah, that's fair.

Thomas, we've been talking about spheres here on the Imperfect Buddha podcast. As folks will have noticed, we didn't really present it as a warning, but it was made explicit at the beginning. Sloterdijk has a hell of a lot to say, and therefore talking about him and his work means an infinite amount of work that we might touch on and explore and discuss and critique.

Infinity, indeed. We need to spend some time talking about perhaps his most famous book, at least in the Anglosphere. You Must Change Your Life is the text I'm referring to.

And what I'd like to do, so that we make sure we do actually speak about both of them before our time runs out, I'd like to couple that straight away to another book, The Art of Philosophy, Wisdom as a Practice, because there is a link between the two. So, You Must Change Your Life, I've read it, and I even know people that have read it, which is quite remarkable, I think, for such a large, dense, and challenging book.

Thomas, I actually bought it in English and then gave up because I just found his prose frustrating. And I bought it in Italian and found it far more legible. Perhaps the translator was slightly better. I've no idea. But it read better in Italian.

Here's the question though. This is a podcast which bridges the gap between academic life, intellectual culture and the practicing life and therefore Sloterdijk had to at least find some place on the podcast sooner or later. 'You Must Change Your Life' is fascinating. It picks up on so many different themes and figures.

it does, in a sense, articulate a kind of argument for why we must all change our lives, or why we must all become practicing creatures. The art of philosophy, wisdom as a practice, as the title seems to suggest, takes that further. So we can just take a broad approach to begin with, and we'll see where we end up. I'd like to actually start by asking you what your thoughts are on the text. What would you say were...

its strengths and weaknesses. And also, did you find it interesting personally? I mean, do you feel like you must change your life since reading it? And then the art of philosophy, what does it do? Why is it important? What does it add to You Must Change Your Life? I'll answer the second question first. So the art of philosophy is basically a series of lectures that Sloterdijk gave after You Must Change Your Life was published. And

It follows very similar themes, and I would say that if one is struggling with You Must Change Your Life, specifically the introduction to The Art of Philosophy describes that book much more clearly than at any moment in the book, the main book itself. So there's a nice path in basically there. The rest of The Art of Philosophy is more difficult, particularly if you're not familiar with Husserl, who's one of the main focuses. But

But you must change your life. I think that, as you say, it has gained a prominence that I think his other books haven't, which is funny because I would say it's very difficult. I would argue it's more difficult than the Spheres books. It's, I think, very dense and very sort of intricate in its ideas. I think that what Sloterdijk is doing in this book, and it's an idea that goes back to some degree right back to the Critique of Cynical Reason, which was written decades earlier, he

He's trying to reconceptualize the history of philosophy and the history of thought in terms of practice, as you say. He's trying to think about this history rather than being just a history of ideas that sort of float in the ether. He's trying to anchor these ideas to practices. And I think that this is a very important thing. It's a very important part of my own work.

He wants to restore the status of practice. He thinks that this notion of practice has been neglected by modern thought.

I think that there is something very interesting in this idea, you must change your life, which he argues, he argues this is sort of the key overriding ethical imperative. What defines the human for Sloterdijk is the capacity to sort of demand more from themselves, to reshape themselves, to go outside of themselves or exceed themselves. He argues that humans always outgrow themselves.

In order to sort of become an ethical being, one must submit to a transformation or one must open oneself up to the prospect of transformation. One must change one's life.

What Sloterdijk is arguing here is very much based upon the idea of assesis, of ascetic withdrawal, or what he calls secession. The idea that in order to change oneself and change one's life, one must distance oneself from the world and from the ordinary, from that which is taken for granted or readily accepted.

you must change your habits, your routines, you must sort of free yourself from cynicism in the way that was described earlier and go inward to become sort of disinterested in some way. So for him,

There's something very monastic about human culture, right? He argues that we as humans are ceaselessly training ourselves, we're working on ourselves, we're fashioning ourselves. These can be physical exercises, they can be mental exercises, they can be spiritual exercises. Again, I think one of the notable things about this book, and again, this goes back to ideas that were first proposed in the Critique of Cynical Reason,

He is not making distinctions between physical exercises and mental exercises and spiritual exercises. He's talking about monks, he's talking about artists, but he's also talking about athletes who he thinks are all aiming in quite diverse ways at self-improvement, of sort of getting themselves into shape and achieving a sort of virtuosity.

At the same time, I think that if I'm talking about the strengths of the book, I think that there are also certain, if not weaknesses, then I think there is a particular perspective that Sloterdijk takes here that, again, I'm not sure that I agree with, or for me, provides a somewhat limited application.

account of this history. I think there are perhaps two things that limit this history. One is that he's overly narrowly focused on this sort of monastic or almost monastic idea of ascesis as being the sort of the good form of practice.

He's attracted a lot of critique for this, basically because he attempts to essentially understand, to interpret human history through this lens of a particular type of practice or a particular type of facetious. And I think

I think one has to be quite skeptical of the idea that this is in fact a useful rubric for sort of judging history as a whole. And I think that there are other thinkers who've dealt with the history of practices and philosophy that perhaps are more useful precisely because they are more limited and less ambitious in their scope.

The other thing that I would say, which might not be a weakness, but I think I find less appealing to his work, is the sort of Nietzschean valuation that runs throughout this work, which is to say there is this normative component throughout, premised particularly upon what Sloterdijk calls vertical tensions. So basically, Sloterdijk argues that life is a slope. We're all on this slope. And the impetus for all sort of

purposeful practice is the sense that one is not yet enough, that one's status quo is never enough, right? That one must change one's life, which I think is quite a reasonable thing to say. But he also focuses on the idea that we're always caught between these hierarchies or distinctions, between high or low, between aristocratic and herd-like,

between common and base or excellent and mediocre and so on and so forth. And that these distinctions sort of command us to climb upward because he argues it's the very nature of practice that things can be done better or worse, that they can be ranked in some fashion. And he describes us as acrobats. We're sort of vertical tightrope walkers, always on this precarious slope, trying to make our way up, but always

we can never be fully successful. None of this I entirely disagree with, but I think that Sloterdijk's history is limited by the fact that it has this very strong normative component in which essentially there are good types of practices and bad types of practices. He doesn't quite put it in these terms, but this is the gist of it. Good practices are

are those that raise one upward, that aim for the high or the aristocratic or the excellent or the superior and so on. These are the practices that he valorizes. From my perspective, both in terms of how I think about the world and also in terms of how I conduct my research, that normative imposition actually kind of occludes the more interesting part of thinking about practices for me, which is to emphasize that

that practices are ordinary, that practices are very much a standard part of life, rather than trying to valorize certain types of practices over others, trying to precisely use the idea of practice as a way of avoiding those valuations. And obviously that's impossible. I'm not claiming that one can avoid these sorts of normative impositions, but I basically think that

Sloterdijk's Nietzscheanism in this case actually sort of hinders what I think is personally the most interesting component of thinking about the history of thought as a history of practice. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I think there's also something in there to do with that tension point as well between transcendence and imminence and the role and purpose of practice. I like the fact that

a living philosopher actually cares enough to write about these topics. It's not so common that somebody actually tackles questions which have long remained in the realm of religion or, increasingly in this day and age, the sort of self-help, self-development. Absolutely, yes. Right, yeah? Spirituality. What I like about Sloterdijk, or what I think Sloterdijk brings, which has certainly came across as a breath of

of Frechère is, despite the fact he's talking about the individual striving to become more, right, in this Nietzschean sense,

he also has this entire project of spheres, which challenges that at the same time, right? Yes, absolutely. It challenges the Superman or the super individual or the elite athlete. So it's interesting that these two projects have come out of the same person in a way, yeah? Yes, very much so. I also felt that in a kind of perhaps unspoken way, that the book was in a sense a project to justify his own

curiosity and appreciation for Indian spirituality of the sort that I'm sure some listeners know he was involved in for a period when he hung out with Osho. In the period that he did, I guess it was when Osho was at the height of his career. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if this tension can be resolved in the project, You Must Change Your Life, between the idea of a sort of Laruelian sense of imminence

as being, you know, wed to the earth. Actually, if there being no kind of hierarchical trajectory of escape.

Even if you're going to talk about people trudging up a hill, the hill is still earthbound, right? Yes. And it's not that you get anywhere at the end, you just go up. Personally, I actually struggled with that point, so I'm quite pleased you critiqued it. I wonder if there's a way of kind of making peace with it and whether you've tried to. So I'll formulate that into a question which is probably going to bring us towards the end of our conversation today.

How might it look if we took a more imminent approach to the ideal of practice whilst not losing the potential of change, of radical transformation? What might it look like, do you think, if we were to keep

the kinds of outcomes of practice, including things like elite practitioners, which, of course, you know, we don't want to lose them. We don't want to lose the master craftsman. We don't want to lose the Usain Bolts or the incredibly naturally skilled meditators. I kind of feel that there is a possibility, though, in which excellence is not lost.

But we could somehow humanise the whole thing a bit further by not putting it on a hierarchical structure or creating this distinction between the elite, the refined, the special and the superior and everyone else. Absolutely. And I think that what you're describing is a project that is fundamentally different from what Sloterdijk is trying to do in as much as this

This kind of imminence is to, you know, to gesture toward this imminence is to gesture toward, is to make claim to a disinterestedness that Sloterdijk finds offensive, right? That Sloterdijk's entire project is aimed against disinterestedness. He thinks that we should be interested in the world, that we should be passionate about the world, and that this disinterestedness is, you know, one of the causes of dissent.

the sort of cynical, enlightened false consciousness and so on. But what you're describing is very much a plausible project in its own right. At least for me, it's one in which

you sort of attempt, you attempt to suspend these sorts of value judgments. It's not to say that value judgments don't exist or that we don't all make them. It is an attempt to suspend them in terms of thinking about practice in order to foreground all of the different

practices that become part of life. Because I think that philosophy has, for the most part, tended to deride things that are routine or things that are habitual, and has tended to valorize these sorts of often, particularly from the sort of 19th century onward,

to valorize moments of action and moments, these sorts of heroic moments or moments of contingency, moments of fortuitousness. I think that there is another way of looking at, or I guess thinking about thought and thinking about

our lives as sort of thinking beings and as intellectual beings that understands this in terms of, as I say, routines and habits and things that are not in the sense necessarily of unthinking routines and habits, but things that we do habitually or things that we do repetitively. And the way in which that repetition is a fundamental aspect of

thought. And Sloterdijk very much talks about repetition and the importance of repetition, and he would agree with the comments about this sort of, you know, these kind of heroic moments. But nevertheless, I think that kind of butts up against, as I say, this sort of normative component of his work. Fascinating stuff.

We will be, I hope we can say this, Thomas, at this point, having another conversation in the future in which we will be focusing specifically on your own work on a text entitled Speaking Philosophically, Communication at the Limits of Discursive Reason.

You've proven yourself a fine communicator and articulate expert on Sloterdijk, and it will be interesting to hear you speaking about your own work too. Thomas, thanks for giving up your time and helping us all get to grips with Sloterdijk and some of these quite abstract and often complex themes.

Would you like to just finish up by letting us know if you're working on any new texts or projects at the moment? I'm working on several things. It all feels quite distant in the sort of future, but I will say this discussion of practice and practice in the history of thought, the question of sort of self-fashioning and the ways in which the sort of the intellectual persona comes to be fashioned is something that's very central in my work at the moment.

Ladies and gentlemen, you've been listening to the Imperfect Buddha podcast, and we'll catch you next time on the New Books Network.