Sloterdijk's Anthropotechnics

Patrick Roney, Andrea Rossi, Patrick Roney, Andrea Rossi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000547948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Esthétique en philosophie

Peter Sloterdijk is an internationally renowned philosopher and thinker whose work is now seen as increasingly relevant to our contemporary world situation and the multiple crises that punctuate it, including those within ethical, political, economic, technological, and ecological realms.

This volume focuses upon one of his central ideas, anthropotechnics. Broadly speaking, anthropotechnics refers to the technological constitution of the human as its fundamental mode of existence, which is characterized by the ability to create dwelling places that 'immunize' human beings from exterior threats while at the same time instituting practices and exercises that call on humanity to transcend itself 'ascetically'. The essays included in this volume enter a critical dialogue with Sloterdijk and his many philosophical interlocutors in order to interrogate the many implications of anthropotechnics in relation to some of the most pressing issues of our time, including and especially the question of the future of humanity in relation to globalism and modernization, climate change, the post-secular, neoliberalism, and artificial intelligence.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

ALONE WITH ONESELF solitude as cultural technique

thomas macho translated by sascha rashof

1

In scholarly as well as literary texts, solitude is often described as a state, as a suffering and passion, as more or less tragic fate (cf., exemplarily, Rakusa or Dreitzel). In the following considerations, I want to try to examine solitude from a contrary perspective. “Solitude” shall (firstly) figure as a title for processes that are actively initiated and not suffered; it shall (secondly) be thematised as an indeed ambivalent, yet not just painful, but also sensuous experience; and it shall (thirdly) be perceived as both context and cause of the practice of cultural techniques – and precisely not as pathos formula for contingent events or fatal circumstances. By the way, I use the expression “cultural techniques” by following Marcel Mauss and his notion of “techniques of the body,” and of course with regard to Foucault’s analyses of “technologies of the self” (“Technologies”; cf. Foucault, The Care of the Self; Foucault and Sennett).

What do techniques of solitude consist in? They can very generally be characterised as “doubling-up techniques,” as self-perception strategies. The one who is not merely abandoned by everyone (what ordinarily leads to death), but survives, conquers and designs his “abandonment,” performs some kind [Art] of relation to himself. By perceiving his solitude, without becoming mad, he splits into two figures at least: as a being that is alone with itself – and thus is actually “two.” In this regard, the most famous mayor of Bordeaux postulates, “We have a soul that can be turned upon itself; it can keep itself company; it has the means to attack and the means to defend, the means to receive and the means to give” (de Montaigne 177). The soul turns upon itself, it becomes the sun (sol) of its solitudo, a medium in the process of meditatio. Solitude as a “doubling-up” strategy indeed has to be learned and practised – like all cultural techniques. For

there are ways to fail in solitude as well as in company. Until you have made yourself such that you dare trip up in your own presence, and until you feel both shame and respect for yourself, let true ideals be kept before your mind, keep ever in your mind Cato, Phocion, and Aristides, in whose presence even fools would hide their faults; make them controllers of all your intentions; if these intentions get off the track, your reverence for those men will set them right again. (182f.)

– Montaigne cites Seneca (as so often), who he prefers to the philosophy of Pliny and Cicero, which is “ostentatious and talky.” In his XXVth letter to Lucilius, Seneca namely wrote,

There is no real doubt that it is good for one to have appointed a guardian over oneself, and to have someone whom you may look up to, someone whom you may regard as a witness of your thoughts. It is, indeed, nobler by far to live as you would live under the eyes of some good man, always at your side; but nevertheless I am content if you only act, in whatever you do, as you would act if anyone at all were looking on; because solitude prompts us to all kinds of evil. And when you have progressed so far that you have also respect for yourself, you may send away your attendant; but until then, set as a guard over yourself the authority of some man, whether your choice be the great Cato, or Scipio, or Laelius – or any man in whose presence even abandoned wretches would check their bad impulses. (185)

This sounds like contemporary psychology, as the translation of “dignatio tui” with “respect for yourself,” suggests. While Montaigne speaks about “examples” though, which the soul shall “dwell on,” it remains doubtful whether Seneca, plagiarised by him, really wanted to give advice for the formation of a well-functioning “conscience,” of a “super-ego,” which – named after a prominent idol – should have diminished the dangers and risks of solitude. The cited text passage from the XXVth letter in no way compels such associations. It talks of a “guard” (“custos”), an appointment of a teacher (“paedagogus”) or spectator (“tamquam spectet aliquis”); it talks of protection and intervention. The exercise advocates the imagination of a personal guardian spirit, of a “third man,” which at the same time monitors the solitary excesses of the “cogitationes”; it is reminiscent of the Roman cult of “geniuses,” who used to be worshipped as some sort of personal “doubles” – on each birthday, for example (Censorinus; cf. Schmidt; Macho, “Himmel”). In addition, Seneca’s letter recapitulates as a maxim what it at once performatively puts into effect: namely, the representation of the interlocutor Lucilius, who creates and constitutes the “auctoritas custodi” of Seneca the author in the first place. But what should the imagined personality save its “creators” from – Cato/Lucilius, Lucilius/Seneca? What did the “omnia mala” of “solitudo” consist in? What was the solitude person seduced to? To despair, insanity, suicide? The dietetics of the invention of a mental “witness” or “guard” hardly served the resistance against melancholy (which was only demonised in the middle ages – as acedia) or even the resistance against autoerotic desires (which would only be cast out in the nineteenth century), but rather the order and discipline of soliloquy, of inner dialogues. Not for nothing it says: “omnia nobis mala solitude persuadet.” Solitude “speaks,” it cajoles and persuades, which is what its potential harmfulness consists in. The solitary person runs the danger to get, literally, “talked to death” – and indeed by oneself. In solitude, even a “good man,” so Plato already argued in the tenth book of The Republic, would be “doing many things which he would be ashamed of any one hearing or seeing him do.”

For the one who is alone exposes himself to too many voices: regardless of whether he perceives them as his own or as foreign voices. Through the “Ta eis heauton,” the “self-admonitions” of the emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius, composed in the Greek language, Pierre Hadot demonstrates how the building work of a “citadelle intérieure” was erected against inadequate forms of phantasia and dianoia. Following Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius differentiated between “objective” and “subjective” representations: whilst the objective representation (phantasia kataléptiké) correlated with reality, the subjective representation issued comments and evaluations, as elaborate as unnecessary. In the sense of the recommended “self-limitation” exercises, it now depends on limiting every inner speech to the objective, realistic phantasia; merely physicalistic “protocol sentences” should be pronounced in the mind. In the Meditations, Marcus Aurelius wrote,

Don’t tell yourself anything more than what your primary representations tell you. If you’ve been told, “So-and-so has been talking behind your back,” then this is what you’ve been told. You have not, however, been told that “Somebody has done a wrong to you.” (Hadot, The Inner Citadel 103)

Pierre Hadot comments on these sentences as stages of a process:

In the first place, we have the exterior event: someone announces to Marcus that so-and-so has been saying negative things about him. Next, we have the representation produced within him, which is called “primary” because as yet, nothing has been added to it. In the third place, there is the discourse which enunciates the contents of this primary representation: “So-and-so has been saying negative things about you”; this is what is announced by the primary representation. Finally, there is yet another enunciation, which is no longer content merely to describe the situation, but emits a value-judgement: “I have been wronged” […] Thus, both Marcus and Epictetus draw a clear distinction between “objective” inner discourse, which is merely a pure description of reality, and “subjective” inner discourse, which includes conventional or passionate considerations, which have nothing to do with reality. (The Inner Citadel 103f.)

The ideal of the Stoic – the hoped-for effect of long-term exercising – consequently consists in the freedom from the overwhelming power of things and relations that intrude consciousness by provoking inner images, voices and conversations. For “what troubles people is not things, but their judgements about things,” Epictetus writes in the fifth paragraph of his “Enchiridion” (cited in Hadot, The Inner Citadel 107).

From these examples, it could be concluded: solitude techniques are strategies for the initiation and cultivation of self-perceptions (including the imagination of examples and “guiding voices”); they intend to achieve an incitation and disciplining – not the haphazard unleashing – of inner dialogues. Montaigne cites Tibullus, “In solitude be to thyself a throng” (“in solis tu mihi turba locis”).² This “turba” had to be conquered; the techniques of its conquering had to be learned and practised. What was striven for was no “self-restraint” in the sense of modern civilisation theories, but the control of representations that – particularly as voices, but also as images and phantasies – populate the space of consciousness. The experience of freedom, which may have emanated from such disciplining exercises, culminated in the evidence that the “turba” of inner images and voices cannot storm the “ego core,” the “citadelle intérieure.”³ This certainty (and the fortune of unaccountability associated with it) can only be understood if the contrasting experience is called into memory: the experience of being overwhelmed by events and affects that provoke an unwanted uproar of inner representations and dialogues. Such experiences were less alien to antiquity than to contemporary consciousness; “becoming possessed” by other powers, images or voices was plausible in multiple regards – and befell in no way only social outsiders, but also heroes and mythical idols: from the Delphic Pythia to Sybille von Cumae, from Ajax raving mad, who massacres a herd of sheep, to Heracles slaying wife and child, from the Homeric rhapsodist Ion to the Corinthian Bellerophon (Starobinski 9–80). Notoriously, Plato’s Socrates still praised the “manic art,” which was distorted by the more recent interpretation as the “mantic art” (“Phaedrus” 244b–d): for the poets are “the interpreters of the Gods by whom they are severally possessed” (Ion 534e).

2

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself,” remarks Montaigne (178); but even in his sixteenth century, this “thing” was a bit strange. The modern ideal of exclusive self-ownership – the enlightened insight that humans are able to determine and be in command of themselves because they can, and must, be regarded as sole owners of themselves – presumes, for example, that the definition of slavery prevalent since Aristotle is given up: namely, the notion that slaves function like bodily organs of their master, i.e., like their arms, legs or tongues (Aristotle 1254a–b). However, slavery was only forbidden in England in 1834 and – after the end of the civil war – the United States. The feudal principle of serfdom was also only abolished in the wake of the bourgeois revolutions in Europe – in 1861 in Russia; and the suicide attempt (for instance in England) was classified as a criminal act until 1961: which only makes sense as long as one can assume that the suicide wanted to damage “foreign property.” To this day, a potential claim to the body and life of at least the male population is conceded to every state government: during “general mobilisation,” the ideal of “self-ownership” is also retracted, and “desertion” is not uncommonly punished with death. To this day, many parents need to be taught that they do not “own” their children – and therefore must also not abuse them or prevent them from attending school; and since the implementation of new organ transplantation laws, the right of disposal of one’s own body can be drastically limited. In a nutshell: humans only belong to “themselves” in exceptional cases. Most humans are never, and have never been, able to learn or practise the art of “belonging to themselves.” The one who does not belong to oneself however belongs to another master, is their property and eo ipso a possessed person, a literally foreign-determined subject, which obeys the orders, rhythms and maxims of its leaders (cf. first section of Macho, “Zeichen” 225–29; cf. Macho, “Auferstehung” 34–36).

Solitude techniques were often practised to suspend a specific logic of “becoming possessed.” Because of his hermitage in the forest lasting several months, Henry David Thoreau authorised the proposal of a “civil disobedience” against the state. Most solitude techniques did not intend any narcissistic “self-doubling,” so to say as a permanent staging of autoerotic “mirror stages of self possession,” but rather the defence against menacing obsessions and external claims of ownership. The one who was able to get used to talking to himself was able to neutralise the chain of commands of foreign voices by hearing his own voice – regardless of whether they came from priests, spirits, parents, teachers or leaders; he obeyed the internalised compulsions to submit of everyday “obedience” – a not just socially agreeable, but almost constitutive “possession” – through a state of alternative “possession.” Marcus Aurelius wanted to erect the “citadelle intérieure” in order to protect his ego from all passions and to commit to the indomitable guiding principle (hégemonikon) of the good daimôn: though he was in no way convinced to “own” this ego, and even Pierre Hadot is not sure whether the agados daimôn as inner voice has to be interpreted as a kind of divinity (in the tradition of ancestor and genius worship) or merely as an allegorisation of the ability to reason (The Inner Citadel 112–27). Lucilius was supposed to be “possessed” by Cato or Scipio in order to be able to practise (dangerous) solitude as art “to belong to oneself”; as it were, the ego, besieged by images and voices, was given a “higher self” as compa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Sloterdijk’s Anthropotechnics
• 1 Alone with Oneself: Solitude as Cultural Technique
• 2 Anthropotechnics and the Absolute Imperative
• 3 Of an Enlightenment-conservative Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy
• 4 Specters of Religion: Sloterdijk, Immunology, and the Crisis of Immanence
• 5 Sartre and Sloterdijk: The Ethical Imperative. You Must Change Your Life
• 6 Ascetic Worlds: Notes on Politics and Technologies of the Self after Peter Sloterdijk
• 7 The Limits of the Spheres: Otherness and Solipsism in Peter Sloterdijk’s Philosophy
• 8 Anthropotechnical Practising in the Foam-world
• 9 Staying with the Darkness: Peter Sloterdijk’s Anthropotechnics for the Digital Age
• 10 The Unknown Quantity: Sleep as a Trope in Sloterdijk’s Anthropotechnics
• Untitled (Negative Exercises)
• Index