You Must Change Your Life

Peter Sloterdijk

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780745649221, 9780745649214
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In his major investigation into the nature of humans, Peter Sloterdijk presents a critique of myth - the myth of the return of religion. For it is not religion that is returning; rather, there is something else quite profound that is taking on increasing significance in the present: the human as a practising, training being, one that creates itself through exercises and thereby transcends itself. Rainer Maria Rilke formulated the drive towards such self-training in the early twentieth century in the imperative 'You must change your life'.

In making his case for the expansion of the practice zone for individuals and for society as a whole, Sloterdijk develops a fundamental and fundamentally new anthropology. The core of his science of the human being is an insight into the self-formation of all things human. The activity of both individuals and collectives constantly comes back to affect them: work affects the worker, communication the communicator, feelings the feeler.

It is those humans who engage expressly in practice that embody this mode of existence most clearly: farmers, workers, warriors, writers, yogis, rhetoricians, musicians or models. By examining their training plans and peak performances, this book offers a panorama of exercises that are necessary to be, and remain, a human being.

THE COMMAND FROM THE STONE

Rilke’s Experience

I will first of all present an aesthetic example to explain the phenomenon of vertical tensions and their meaning for the reorientation of the confused existence of modern humans: the well-known sonnet ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, which opens the cycle New Poems: The Other Part from 1908. Beginning with a poetic text seems apposite because – aside from the fact that the title of this book is taken from it – its assignment to the artistic field makes it less likely to provoke those anti-authoritarian reflexes which follow almost compulsively from any encounter with statements made dogmatically or from above – ‘what does “above” mean anyway!’ The aesthetic construct, and nothing else, has taught us to expose ourselves to a non-enslaving experience of rank differences. The work of art is even allowed to ‘tell’ us, those who have run away from form, something, because it quite obviously does not embody the intention to confine us. ‘La poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose.’¹ Something that exposes itself and proves itself in this test gains unpresumed authority. In the space of aesthetic simulation, which is at once the emergency space for the success and failure of the artistic construct, the powerless superiority of the works can affect observers who otherwise take pains to ensure that they have no lord, old or new, above them.

Rilke’s ‘Torso’ is particularly suited to posing the question of the source of authority, as it constitutes an experiment about allowing oneself to be told something. As we know, Rilke, under the influence of Auguste Rodin, whom he had assisted between 1905 and 1906 in Meudon as a private secretary, turned away from the art nouveau-like, sensitized-atmospheric poetic approach of his early years to pursue a view of art determined more strongly by the ‘priority of the object’. The proto-modern pathos of making way for the object without depicting it in a manner ‘true to nature’, like that of the old masters, led in Rilke’s case to the concept of the thing-poem – and thus to a temporarily convincing new answer to the question of the source of aesthetic and ethical authority. From that point, it would be the things themselves from which all authority would come – or rather: from this respectively current singular thing that turns to me by demanding my full gaze. This is only possible because thing-being would now no longer mean anything but this: having something to say.

In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the ‘transformation of being into message’ (more commonly, ‘linguistic turn’). ‘Being that can be understood is language’, Heidegger would later state – which conversely implies that language abandoned by being becomes mere chatter. When, and only when, being contracts in privileged things and turns to us via these things can we hope to escape the increasing randomness, both aesthetically and philosophically. In the face of the galloping inflation of chatter, it was inevitable that such a hope would draw in numerous artists and people of ‘spirit’ around 1900. In the midst of the ubiquitous dealings with prostituted signs, the thing-poem was capable of opening up the prospect of returning to credible experiences of meaning. It did this by tying language to the gold standard of what things themselves communicate. Where randomness is disabled, authority should shine forth.

It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing – otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to things. Rilke privileges two categories of ‘entities’ [Seienden], to express it in the papery diction of philosophy, that are eligible for the lofty task of acting as message-things – artifices and living creatures – with the latter gaining their particular quality from the former, as if animals were being’s highest works of art before humans. Inherent to both is a message energy that does not activate itself, but requires the poet as a decoder and messenger. This underlies the complicity between the speaking thing and Rilke’s poetry – just as, only a few years later, Heidegger’s things would conspire with the ‘legend’ of a contemplative philosophy that no longer wants to be a mere scholastic discipline.

These somewhat accelerated remarks outline a framework in which we can attempt a brief reading of the ‘Torso’ poem. I am assuming that the torso mentioned in the sonnet is meant to embody a ‘thing’ in the eminent sense of the word, precisely because it is merely the leftover of a complete sculpture. We know from accounts of Rilke’s life that his stay in Rodin’s workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso.² The poet’s view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century’s Romanticism of fragments and ruins; it is part of the breakthrough in modern art to the concept of the object that states itself with authority and the body that publicizes itself with authorization.

ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

We never knew his head and all the light
that ripened in his fabled eyes. But
his torso still glows like a gas lamp dimmed
in which his gaze, lit long ago,

holds fast and shines. Otherwise the surge
of the breast could not blind you, nor a smile
run through the slight twist of the loins
toward that centre where procreation thrived.

Otherwise this stone would stand deformed and curt
under the shoulders’ transparent plunge
and not glisten just like wild beasts’ fur

and not burst forth from all its contours
like a star: for there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.³

Whoever absorbs anything vaguely concrete upon first reading has understood this much: the poem is dealing with perfection – a perfection that seems all the more binding and mysterious because it is the perfection of a fragment. It is reasonable to suppose that this work was also an expression of thanks to Rodin, his master in his Paris days, for the concept of the autonomous torso, which he had encountered in his workshop. The reason for the existence of the perfection conjured up in these fourteen lines is that it possesses – independently of its material carrier’s mutilation – the authorization to form a message that appeals from within itself. This power of appeal is exquisitely evident in the object evoked here. The perfect thing is that which articulates an entire principle of being. The poem has to perform no more and no less than to perceive the principle of being in the thing and adapt it to its own existence – with the aim of becoming a construct with an equal power to convey a message.

Rilke’s torso can be experienced as the bearer of the attribute ‘perfect’ because it brings along something that permits it to snub the usual expectation of a morphological whole. This gesture is one of the motifs of modernity’s turn against the principle of imitating nature, that is to say, imitating predefined morphological expectations. It is still capable of perceiving message-totalities and autonomous thing-signals when no morphologically intact figures are left – indeed, precisely then. The sense for perfection withdraws from the forms of nature – probably because nature itself is in the process of losing its ontological authority. The popularization of photography also increasingly devalues the standard views of things. As the first edition of the visible, nature comes into discredit. It can no longer assert its authority as the sender of binding messages – for reasons that ultimately come from its disenchantment through being scientifically explored and technically outdone. After this shift, ‘being perfect’ takes on an altered meaning: it means having something to say that is more meaningful than the chatter of conventional totalities. Now the torsos and their ilk have their turn: the hour of those forms that do not remind us of anything has come. Fragments, cripples and hybrids formulate something that cannot be conveyed by the common whole forms and happy integrities; intensity beats standard perfection. A hundred years after Rilke pointed to this, we probably understand it better even than his own contemporaries, as our perceptual capacity has been numbed and plundered by the chatter of flawless bodies more than in any preceding generation.

These observations will have made it clear how the phenomenon of being spoken to from above embodies itself in an aesthetic construct. To understand an appeal experience of this kind, it is not necessary to address the assumption, accepted by Rilke, that the torso he describes was once the statue of a god – of Apollo, the curators of the day believed. One cannot entirely rule out an element of art nouveau-esque reverence for education in the poet’s experience of the sculpture; it is said that Rilke encountered the poem’s real-life model during a visit to the Louvre, and as far as we know, it would have been a piece from the classical period of Greek sculpture rather than an archaic work of art. What the poet has to say to the torso of the supposed Apollo, however, is more than a note on an excursion to the antiques collection. The author’s point is not that the thing depicts an extinct god who might be of interest to the humanistically educated, but that the god in the stone constitutes a thing-construct that is still on air. We are dealing with a document of how newer message ontology outgrew traditional theologies. Here, being itself is understood as having more power to speak and transmit, and more potent authority, than God, the ruling idol of religions. In modern times, even a God can find himself among the pretty figures that no longer mean anything to us – assuming they do not become openly irksome. The thing filled with being, however, does not cease to speak to us when its moment has come.

We are approaching the critical point: the final two lines have always captivated readers. They awaken feelings of significance that virtually unhinge the entire lyric construct – as if it were merely the path towards a climax for which the rest is laid out. And indeed, the two closing sentences – ‘for there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.’ – almost began an independent career, imprinting themselves on the memories of the educated in general, not only Rilke admirers and poetry fanatics. I admit: on this particular occasion, I am inclined to agree with the need to take lines out of their context, not least because the popular taste for the beautiful places sometimes contains a valid judgement on authentic moments of climax. One does not need to be an enthusiast to understand why those closing lines have developed a life of their own. In their dignified brevity and mystical simplicity, they radiate an art-evangelical energy that can scarcely be found in any other passage from recent language art.

At first glance, the initial statement seems the more enigmatic one. Whoever understands or accepts it, or allows it to apply in the lyric context – which amounts to the same in this case – is immediately affected by an almost hypnotic suggestion. By seeking to ‘understand’, one gives credit to a turn of phrase that reverses the everyday relationship between the seer and the seen. That I see the torso with its stout shoulders and stumps is one aspect; that I dreamily add the missing parts – the head, the arms, the legs and the genitals – in my mind and associatively animate them is a further aspect. If need be, I can even follow Rilke’s suggestion and imagine a smile extending from an invisible mouth to vanished genitals. A completely different aspect, however, the thoroughly incommensurable one, lies in the imposition of accepting that the torso sees me while I observe it – indeed, that it eyes me more sharply than I can look at it.

The ability to perform the inner gesture with which one makes space for this improbability inside oneself most probably consists precisely in the talent that Max Weber denied having. This talent is ‘religiosity’, understood as an innate disposition and a talent that can be developed, making it comparable to musicality. One can practise it, just as one practises melodic passages or syntactic patterns. In this sense, religiosity is congruent with a certain grammatical promiscuity. Where it operates, objects elastically exchange places with subjects. Therefore, if I accept that there are – on the shimmering surface of the mutilated stone – numerous ‘places’ that amount to eyes and see me, I am performing an operation with a micro-religious quality – and which, once understood, one will recognize at all levels of macro-religiously developed systems as the primary module of a ‘pious’ inner action. In the position where the object usually appears, never looking back because it is an object, I now ‘recognize’ a subject with the ability to look and return gazes. Thus, as a hypothetical believer, I accept the insinuation of a subject that dwells inside the respective place, and wait to see what this pliable development will make of me. (We note: even the ‘deepest’ or most virtuosic piety cannot achieve more than habitualized insinuations.) I receive the reward for my willingness to participate in the object–subject reversal in the form of a private illumination – in the present case, as an aesthetic movedness. The torso, which has no place that does not see me, likewise does not impose itself – it exposes itself. It exposes itself by testing whether I will recognize it as a seer. Acknowledging it as a seer essentially means ‘believing’ in it, where believing, as noted above, refers to the inner operations that are necessary to conceive of the vital principle in the stone as a sender of discrete addressed energies. If I somehow succeed in this, I am also able to take the glow of subjectivity away from the stone. I tentatively accept the way it stands there in exemplary radiance, and receive the starlike eruption of its surplus of authority and soul.

It is only in this context that the name of the depicted has any significance. What appears in the former statue of Apollo, however, cannot simply be equated with the Olympian of the same name, who had to ensure light, contours, foreknowledge and security of form in his days of completeness. Rather, as the poem’s title implies, he stands for something much older, something rising from prehistoric sources. He symbolizes a divine magma in which something of the first ordering force, as old as the world itself, becomes manifest. There is no doubt that memories of Rodin and his cyclopian work ethic had an effect on Rilke here. During his work with the great artist, he experienced what it means to work on the surfaces of bodies until they are nothing but a fabric of carefully shaped, luminous, almost seeing ‘places’.⁴ A few years earlier, he had written of Rodin’s sculptures that ‘there were endless places, and none of them did not have something happening in them’.⁵ Each place is a point at which Apollo, the god of forms and surfaces, makes a visually intense and haptically palpable compromise with his older opponent Dionysus, the god of urges and currents. That this energized Apollo embodies a manifestation of Dionysus is indicated by the statement that the stone glistens ‘like wild beasts’ fur’: Rilke had read his Nietzsche. Here we encounter the second micro-religious or proto-musical module: the notorious ‘this stands for that’, ‘the one appears in the other’ or ‘the deep layer is present in the surface’ – figures without which no religious discourse would ever have come about. They tell us that religiosity is a form of hermeneutical flexibility and can be trained.

‘For there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.’ It remains to be shown why the second sentence, which seemingly requires no interpretation, is actually far more enigmatic than the first. It is not only its lack of preparation, its suddenness that is mysterious. ‘You must change your life’ – these words seem to come from a sphere in which no objections can be raised. Nor can we establish from where they are spoken; only their verticality is beyond doubt. It is unclear whether this dictum shoots straight up from the ground to stand in my way like a pillar, or falls from the sky to transform the road before me into an abyss, such that my next step should already belong to the changed life that has been demanded. It is not enough to say that Rilke retranslated ethics in an aestheticizing fashion into a succinct, cyclopian, archaic-brutal form. He discovered a stone that embodies the torso of ‘religion’, ethics and asceticism as such: a construct that exudes a call from above, reduced to the pure command, the unconditional instruction, the illuminated utterance of being that can be understood – and which only speaks in the imperative.

If one wished to transfer all the teachings of the papyrus religions, the parchment religions, the stylus and quill religions, the calligraphic and typographical, all order rules and sect programmes, all instructions for meditation and doctrines of stages, and all training programmes and dietologies into a single workshop where they would be summarized in a final act of editing: their utmost concentrate would express nothing other than what the poet sees emanating from the archaic torso of Apollo in a moment of translucidity.

‘You must change your life!’ – this is the imperative that exceeds the options of hypothetical and categorical. It is the absolute imperative – the quintessential metanoetic command. It provides the keyword for revolution in the second person singular. It defines life as a slope from its higher to its lower forms. I am already living, but something is telling me with unchallengeable authority: you are not living properly. The numinous authority of form enjoys the prerogative of being able to tell me ‘You must’. It is the authority of a different life in this life. This authority touches on a subtle insufficiency within me that is older and freer than sin; it is my innermost not-yet. In my most conscious moment, I am affected by the absolute objection to my status quo: my change is the one thing that is necessary. If you do indeed subsequently change your life, what you are doing is no different from what you desire with your whole will as soon as you feel how a vertical tension that is valid for you unhinges your life.

As well as this ethical-revolutionary reading, there are also somewhat more concrete and psychologically accessible interpretations of the torso poem. There is no need to limit our commentary to lofty art-philosophical and being-philosophical positions; the experience of authority that binds the poet for a moment to the ancient statue can perhaps be reconstructed more plausibly on a more sensual, aesthetically comprehensible level. This raises the somatic, or, more precisely, the auto-erotic and masculine-athletic, impressions of the sculpture, which must have provoked in the poet (who, in the language of his time, was a neurasthenic and a weak-bodied introvert) an empathetic experience of the antipodal mode of being that is native to strong ‘body people’. This is in keeping with a fact that did not escape Rilke, namely that, in the immeasurably rich statue culture of the ancient Greeks, there was a dominant system of physical and mental kinship between gods and athletes in which resemblance could reach the level of identity. A god was alw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: On the Anthropotechnic Turn
• The Planet of the Practising
• 1 The Command from the Stone
• 2 Remote View of the Ascetic Planet
• 3 Only Cripples Will Survive
• 4 Last Hunger Art
• 5 Parisian Buddhism
• Transition: Religions Do Not Exist
• I The Conquest of the Improbable: For an Acrobatic Ethics
• 1 Height Psychology
• 2 ‘Culture Is a Monastic Rule’
• 3 Sleepless in Ephesus
• 4 Habitus and Inertia
• 5 Cur Homo Artista
• II Exaggeration Procedures
• 6 First Eccentricity
• 7 The Complete and the Incomplete
• 8 Master Games
• 9 Change of Trainer and Revolution
• III The Exercises of the Moderns
• 10 Art with Humans
• 11 In the Auto-Operatively Curved Space
• 12 Exercises and Misexercises
• Retrospective
• Outlook: The Absolute Imperative
• Notes
• Index