Tagged: Self-Discipline & Responsibility
Sloterdijk: We must replace the romanticism of brotherliness with the logic of cooperation
There is, of course, a dark side to the story Sloterdijk is telling us in You Must Change Your Life. This centers on programs for social engineering and the re-engineering of humans that has been a hallmark of social modernity since 1789. Sloterdijk thus speaks of “the moral-historical caesura of the Modern Age” as an era in which there is a change from “individual metanoia” to a mass reconstruction of the human condition from the roots, as it were. Modernity is in part, therefore, to be understood as the process that radically secularizes and collectivizes the life of practice by removing asceticisms from their spiritual contexts and dissolving them “in the fluid of modern societies of training, education, and work.” Now, the disciplinary measures and imperatives of modernity establish themselves on all fronts of human self-intensification. In the modern period, we have witnessed the conversion of Europe into a training camp for human improvements on a multitude of fronts, such as the school, the military context, as well as the arts and sciences.
For Sloterdijk, we misunderstand the Russian Revolution if we understand it simply as a political event. It’s better comprehended as an anthropotechnic movement in a socio-political guise. Bolshevism was an experiment in biopolitics, a politics of absolute means, a “culture of camps” that invoked the French Revolution and took over the sanctification of terror of the Jacobins. Sloterdijk thus contends that the birth of modern extremism as an entrepreneurial form can be dated precisely to September 5, 1918, when Lenin decreed on Red Terror, stating that enemies needed to be incarcerated in camps and eliminated step by step. Sloterdijk is unforgiving in his criticism: “While the denial of Nazi crimes is rightly treated as a punishable crime in some countries, the atrocities of the Marxist archipelago are still considered peccadilloes of history in some circles.” Sloterdijk judiciously alerts us to the dangers of moralism, indeed, of the inclination towards “moral-demonic excess.” He astutely notes that the 20th century was the most instructive period in world history for understanding man-made catastrophes. What was demonstrated in the century was the fact that the greatest “disaster complexes” came about in the form of projects designed to assume control of the course of history from a single center of action.
Sloterdijk appeals to the inevitability of a normative component in the activity of theory. He argues that a study of this kind, which is basically an exercise in “practice-anthropology,” cannot be simply carried out in a detached and unbiased fashion. He contends that every discourse on man goes beyond the limits of description and pursues a normative agenda (whether this is made explicit or not). He maintains that this was in fact clearly visible in the early Enlightenment of Europe and at a time when anthropology was established as the original civil science.
…
Sloterdijk appeals also to the sublime in his concluding reflections, claiming that if you hear the call without defenses, then you will experience the sublime in a personally addressed form. Here the sublime refers to the “overwhelming” and is as personal as death and as unfathomable as the world… Sloterdijk is on firmer footing when he notes that today the only authority that is still in a position to exhort us to change our lives is the global crisis. “Humanity” needs to become a political concept, he argues, in which a romanticism of brotherliness is replaced by a logic of co-operation and in which the members of this humanity are not naïve travellers on some ship of fools, such as Enlightenment ideas of abstract universalism, but “workers on the consistently concrete and discrete project of a global immune design.”
For Sloterdijk, there remains an important lesson to be learned from the example of Communism: …its recognition that the shared interests of life require for their realization a horizon of universal co-operative asceticisms. It’s this communism of the future that, for Sloterdijk, will have to assert itself sooner or later, pressing the need for a “macrostructure of global immunization” or “co-immunism.” In short, we need to make the decision to take on the good habits of “shared survival in daily exercises.” Sloterdijk leaves it to us, his readers, to work out the ethical and political details of this ecological conception of a new future humanity.
SOURCE: Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Philosophy of the Acrobat: On Peter Sloterdijk”, 7/8/2013
DFW: Your freedom is the freedom-from. But what of the freedom-to?
‘There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It’s not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us–these are just the hazards of being free.’
‘But what does this U.S.A. expression want to mean, this Buckeroo?’
Steeply turned to face away into the space they were above. ‘And now here we go. Now you will say how free are we if you dangle fatal fruit before us and we cannot help ourselves from temptation. And we say “human” to you. We say that one cannot be human without freedom.’
Marathe’s chair squeaked slightly as his weight shifted. ‘Always with you this freedom! For your walled-up country, always to shout “Freedom! Freedom!” as if it were obvious to all people what it wants to mean, this word. But look: it is not so simple as that. Your freedom is the freedom-from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what they must do. It is this meaning only, this freedom from constraint and forced duress.’ Marathe over Steeply’s shoulder suddenly could realize why the skies above the coruscating city were themselves erased of stars: it was the fumes from the exhaust’s wastes of the moving autos’ pretty lights that rose and hid stars from the city and made the city Tucson’s lume nacreous in the dome’s blankness of it. ‘But what of the freedom-to? Not just free-from. Not all compulsion comes from without. You pretend you do not see this. What of freedom-to? How for the person to freely choose? How to choose any but a child’s greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?’
Steeply threw away a cigarette and faced partly Marathe, from the edge: ‘Now the story of the rich man.’
Marathe said ‘The rich father who can afford the cost of candy as well as food for his children: but if he cries out “Freedom!” and allows his child to choose only what is sweet, eating only candy, not pea soup and bread and eggs, so his child becomes weak and sick: is the rich man who cries “Freedom!” the good father?’
Steeply made four small noises… Marathe could believe he could hear some young U.S.A. voices shouting and laughing in a young gathering somewhere out on the desert floor below, but saw no headlights or young persons. Steeply stamped a high heel in frustration. Steeply said:
‘But U.S. citizens aren’t presumed by us to be children, to paternalistically do their thinking and choosing for them. Human beings are not children.’
Marathe pretended again to sniff.
‘Ah, yes, but then you say: No?’ Steeply said. ‘No? you say, not children? You say: What is the difference, please, if you make a recorded pleasure so entertaining and diverting it is lethal to persons, you find a Copy-Capable copy and copy it and disseminate it for us to choose to see or turn off, and if we cannot choose to resist it, the pleasure, and cannot choose instead to live? You say what your Fortier believes, that we are children, not human adults like the noble Québecers, we are children, bullies but still children inside, and will kill ourselves for you if you put the candy within the arms’ reach.’
Marathe tried to make his face expressive of anger, which was difficult for him. ‘This is what happens: you imagine the things I will say and then say them for me and then become angry with them. Without my mouth; it never opens. You speak to yourself, inventing sides. This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self. I am not even here, possibly, for listening to.’
SOURCE: David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 1996, pp. 320-321
Sloterdijk: New construction on the foundation of favorable repetition
The radical separation of ascetics, saints, sages, practising philosophers, and later also artists and virtuosos from the mode of existence of those who continue in the average, approximate and unqualified, shows that the human being is a creature damned to distinguish between repetitions. What later philosophers called freedom first manifests itself in the act with which dissidents rebel against the domination by inner and outer mechanisms. By distancing themselves from the entire realm of deep-seated passions, acquired habits and adopted or sedimented opinions, they make space for a comprehensive transformation. No part of the human can stay as it was: the feelings are reformed, the habitus remodeled, the world of thoughts restructured from the bottom up, and the spoken word overhauled. The whole of life rises up as a new construction on the foundation of favorable repetition.
…The transformation occurs thorugh mental deautomatization and mental decontamination. Hence the use of silence in many spiritual schools… Nietzsche was still acting in this tradition: “Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus–you have to react, you follow every impulse.” The spiritual exercise is the one that disables such compulsion.
This de-automatization, this liberation from infection by the blindly reproducing unexamined, must be accompanied by the methodical erection of a new spiritual structure. Nothing could be more alien to the pioneers of the ethical distinction than modern spontaneism, which cultivates shock, confusion and the interruption of the habitual as aesthetic values per se, without asking what should replace the interrupted. The original ethical life is reformatory. It always seeks to exchange harmful for favourable repetition. It wants to replace corrupt life forms with upright ones. It strives to avoid the impure and immerse itself in the pure. That these binary oppositions entail costly simplifications if, for now, beside the point. All that matters is that in this framework, individualized freedom emerges in its oldest and most intense form.
SOURCE: Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, originally published in German in 2009, English translation published in 2013
Ellul: Fragmented work and the evasion of responsibility
In a society such as ours, it is almost impossible for a person to be responsible. A simple example: a dam has been built somewhere, and it bursts. Who is responsible for that? Geologists worked it out. They examined the terrain. Engineers drew up the construction plans. Workmen constructed it. And the politicians decided that the dam had to be in that spot. Who is responsible? No one. There is never anyone responsible. Anywhere. In the whole of our technological society the work is so fragmented and broken up into small pieces that no one is responsible. But no one is free either. Everyone has his own, specific task. And that’s all he has to do.
Just consider, for example, that atrocious excuse… It was one of the most horrible things I have ever heard. The person in charge of the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen was asked, during the Auschwitz trial… the Nuremburg trials regarding Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen: “But didn’t find you it horrible? All those corpses?” He replied: “What could I do? The capacity of the ovens was too small. I couldn’t process all those corpses. It caused me many problems. I had no time to think about those people. I was too busy with that technical problem of my ovens.” That was the classic example of an irresponsible person. He carries out his technical task. He’s not interested in anything else.
SOURCE: Jacques Ellul, 1992 interview (included in The Betrayal by Technology: A Portrait of Jacques Ellul)
Natsios: The dissident analyst as cyborg gone rogue
I think it’s interesting looked at in terms of large technosystem theory, the NSA taken as a large technosystem, this operative being something of a prosthetic extension of hardware. Snowden being understood as a kind of cyborgian creature without any political intuition. There’s a kind of shock now in the system, now that this piece of hardware has suddenly, you know, gone rogue. And a person of his status, his age, his youth, there seems to be an incredible bias about their having any political voice.
It’s a key threshold for him to have broken out of his little enclosure and committed the act of conscience. Presumably the cyborg has no conscience, they’re just kind of artificially intelligenced. And that’s why if he’s to be a hero in the literary sense, it’s based on this act of conscience argument that he’s deploying.
SOURCE: Deborah Natsios, interview with Adrian Chen from Gawker, 6/19/2013
Rollo May: The dilated eyes of Apollo
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves based on this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness.
We are concerned here with how the oracle at Delphi furthers this process of self-creation. Clearly self-creating is actualized by our hopes, our ideals, our images, and all sorts of imagined constructs that we may hold from time to time in the forefront of our attention. These “models” function consciously as well as unconsciously; they are shown in fantasy as well as in overt behavior…
We can see in the superb statues of Apollo carved at this time—the archaic figure with his strong, straight form, his calm beauty of head, his ordered features which are eloquent with controlled passion, even down to the slight “knowing” smile on the almost straight mouth—how this god could be the symbol in which the Greek artists as well as other citizens of that period perceived their longed-for order. There is a curious feature in these statues that I have seen: the eyes are dilated, made more open than is normal in the head of a living man or in classical Greek statues. If you walk through the archaic Greek room of the National Museum in Athens, you will be struck by the fact that the dilated eyes of the marble figures of Apollo give an expression of great alertness. What a contrast to the relaxed, almost sleepy eyes of the familiar fourth-century head of Hermes by Praxiteles.
These dilated eyes of the archaic Apollo are characteristic of apprehension. They express the anxiety—the excessive awareness, the “looking about” on all sides lest something unknown might happen—that goes with living in a fomenting age. There is a remarkable parallel between these eyes and the eyes in the figures Michelangelo painted in another formative period, the Renaissance. Almost all of Michelangelo’s human beings, powerful and triumphant as they appear at first glance, have, on closer inspection, the dilated eyes which are a telltale sign of anxiety. And, as if to demonstrate that he is expressing the inner tensions not only of his age but of himself as a member of his age, Michelangelo in his self-portraits paints eyes that are again markedly distended in the way that is typical of apprehension.
The poet Rilke also was struck by Apollo’s prominent eyes with their quality of seeing deeply. In his “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” he speaks of “…his legendary head in which the eyeballs ripened,” and then continues,
…But
his torso still glows like a candelabrum
in which his gaze, only turned low,
holds and gleams. Else could not the curve
of the breast blind you nor in the slight turn
of the loins could a smile be running
to that middle, which carried procreation.
Else would this stone be standing maimed and short
under the shoulders’ translucent plunge
nor glimmering like the fell of beasts of prey
nor breaking out of all its contours
like a star: for there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
In this vivid picture we note how well Rilke catches the essence of controlled passion—not inhibited or repressed passion, as was to be the goal during the laster Hellenistic age of the Greek teachers who had become afraid of vital drives. What a far cry is Rilke’s interpretation from Victorian inhibition and repression of drives. These early Greeks, who wept and made love and killed with zest, gloried in passion and Eros and the daimonic… But the Greeks knew also that these drives had to be directed and controlled. It was the essence, they believed, of a man of virtue (arete) that he choose his passions rather than be chosen by them. In this lies the explanation of why they did not need to go through the self-castrating practice of denying Eros and the daimonic, as modern Western man does.
SOURCE: Rollo May, The Courage to Create, chapter 5: “The Delphic Oracle as Therapist”, pp. 100-102
Nietzsche: Passion uses and uses up convictions, it does not succumb to them
One should not be deceived: great spirits are skeptics. Zarathustra is a skeptic. Strength, freedom which is born of the strength and overstrength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons. Such men do not look far enough, they do not look beneath themselves: but to be permitted to join in the discussion of value and disvalue, one must see five hundred convictions beneath oneself—behind oneself.
A spirit who wants great things, who also wants the means to them, is necessarily a skeptic. Freedom from all kinds of convictions, to be able to see freely, is part of strength. Great passion, the ground and the power of his existence, even more enlightened, even more despotic than he is himself, employs his whole intellect; it makes him unhesitating; it gives him courage even for unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not begrudge him convictions. Conviction as a means: many things are attained only by means of a conviction. Great passion uses and uses up convictions, it does not succumb to them—it knows itself sovereign.
Conversely: the need for faith, for some kind of unconditional Yes and No, this Carlylism, if one will forgive me this word, is a need born of weakness. The man of faith, the “believer” of every kind, is necessarily a dependent man—one who cannot posit himself as an end, one who cannot posit any end at all by himself. The “believer” does not belong to himself, he can only be a means, he must be used up, he requires somebody to use him up. His instinct gives the highest honor to a morality of self-abnegation; everything persuades him in this direction: his prudence, his experience, his vanity. Every kind of faith is itself an expression of self-abnegation, of self-alienation.
If one considers how necessary most people find something regulatory, which will bind them from without and tie them down; how compulsion, slavery in a higher sense, is the sole and ultimate condition under which the more weak-willed human being, woman in particular, can prosper—then one will also understand conviction, “faith.” The man of conviction has his backbone in it. Not to see many things, to be impartial at no point, to be party through and through, to have a strict and necessary perspective in all questions of value—this alone makes it possible for this kind of human being to exist at all. But with this they are the opposite, the antagonists, of what is truthful—of truth.
The believer is not free to have any conscience at all for questions of “true” and “untrue”: to have integrity on this point would at once destroy him. The pathological condition of his perspective turns the convinced into fanatics—Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon: the opposition-type of the strong spirit who has become free. Yet the grand pose of these sick spirits, these epileptics of the concept, makes an impression on the great mass: the fanatics are picturesque; mankind prefers to see gestures rather than to hear reasons.
SOURCE: Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
“It is for us to finish the work that they have begun”
We don’t often in a human lifetime see a moment of heroism like this, and we forget what we have to do when we’ve run into it.
Mr. Snowden has nobly advanced our effort to save democracy and in doing so he has stood on the shoulders of others: of Mr. Assange, Ms. Machon, Mr. Binney, Mr. Drake. The honor will be theirs, but the responsibility is ours. We must see to it that these sacrifices have not been in vain. We have to learn from them.
They have sought a struggle and a hard way. They have endangered themselves. They have assured us nothing, but they have offered us the chance to assure the generations that come after us that we have given them a world as free as those who came before us gave to us
And so it is for us… to finish the work that they have begun.
We must see to it that their sacrifices have meaning. That this nation, and all the nations, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
SOURCE: Eben Moglen, talk given at Columbia Law School, December 4th, 2013
Emerson: Why all this deference?
An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man…
Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common day’s work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue?
…Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.
SOURCE: R.W. Emerson, “Self-Reliance”, 1841
Sortes Mechanomica 