ANTHROPOTECHNICS AND THE ABSOLUTE IMPERATIVE

Abstract

This essay attempts to interrogate the distinct character of Peter Sloterdijk’s declaration of the absolute imperative that concludes his work, You Must Change Your Life, by contextualizing it within the development of his notion of anthropotechnics. In particular, the essays examine the claim that his is a new and unprecedented form of the absolute imperative that is alone able to address, in an effective way, the contemporary global crises that are confronting us now. The first sections trace out the ways in which this new imperative differs from previous forms of the imperative, including the categorical, the aesthetic, and the existential-ontological. The latter sections then discuss how the new form of the imperative is connected to Sloterdijk’s radical attempt at a rethinking of the essence of the human as always already technological, which is the very project of anthropotechnics. This leads finally to a discussion of Sloterdijk’s polemical engagement with Heidegger’s question concerning technology, in which I trace out his attempt at a sweeping translation of Heidegger’s notion of enframing [Gestell] into enhousing [Gehäuse] and the consequences thereof.

Keywords:

• anthropotechnics
• absolute imperative
• enframing
• enhousing
• Heidegger
• Sloterdijk

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 There are three senses in which one can say that we are of time. In each case, it is the sense of a future that has already arrived and will keep arriving.

The senses I have in mind are: (1) the urgency of our situation in light of the growing ecological disaster; (2) being out of time also relates to Sloterdijk’s spherology: insofar as being in the world consists of living in spheres that domesticate relations between an inside and an outside, the breakdown of immunological structures that have housed human beings has left us exposed to the de-territorializing tendencies of globalism without recourse. On this see Jean-Pierre Couture’s discussion of the geographical question in Sloterdijk, especially pages 58ff.; (3) more distantly, being out of time also indicates the emptying of time because of its reduction by means of contemporary communications technology to simultaneity and latency.

2 “Erhaben ist, was durch Vergegenwärtigung des Überwältigenden dem Beobachter die Möglichkeit seines Untergangs im Übergroßen vor Augen stellt […]” (Sloterdijk, Du Mußt 701). The emphasis on the position of the spectator before the overwhelming bears an unmistakable reference to Kant’s dynamic sublime, where it is Nature as might (Macht) and as dominion (Gewalt) before which the spectator stands and feels his impotence. Whether Sloterdijk actually follows Kant down the path from an aesthetics of beauty to that of the sublime is unclear, since Sloterdijk never addresses Kant’s aesthetics to my knowledge.

3 Cf. Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia and The New Climatic Regime. Sloterdijk shares much in common with Latour, although one must not minimize the differences. Latour’s is more of a political objective: to outline the new “climatic regime” as a new political formation. Sloterdijk does not refer to the political in terms of specific regimes very often, much preferring the philosophical-anthropological idea of Anthropotechnics. Sloterdijk remains more committed to the philosophical and particularly to a continuous Auseindandersetzung with Heidegger that certainly has its political implications, but is, as I intend to show, more dedicated to the condition of dwelling.

4 Cf. Sloterdijk, Foams 59.

5 Cf. The Prologue to Foams, where metaphysics is described as macrospherology, that is, as an all-encompassing circle, an absolute orb that represented nothing less than a total immune structure that housed all microspheres within itself, organized around its center (17).

6 “We shall be questioning concerning technology,” Heidegger writes, “and in so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence (Dasein) to the essence (Wesen) of technology” (Technology 17).

7 Unless otherwise noted, I follow Sloterdijk’s particular use of the term “modernity” that emphasizes three characteristics: first, that in contradistinction to the ancient, the modern era is distinguished by the mobilization of human powers for the sake of work and production (You Must Change 211–12); second, modernity makes room for two tracks of ascetic practice, namely, adapting oneself to the labor of creating a better world (323) and self-realization (326); and finally, “progress” does not mean a process of secularization but rather the de-verticalization of existence (371).

8 “In a Kantian or Marxist world one knows in principle always exactly what to do […] The right thing is only temporarily delayed but can never become irrelevant” (translation mine).

9 Although I cannot trace the extent of Heidegger’s reading of Kant here, his point is that according to the usual way for beings to become manifest as objects that are subject to the law of causality, “objectness” is a mode of comportment (Verhalten) that has the character of a “letting something stand-over-against as given.” This mode of comportment is only possible if an originary self-binding exists in the form of the giving of a law to oneself (Heidegger, Essence of Human Freedom 205).

10 This is Sloterdijk’s rendition of Jonas’ imperative. In his own text, Jonas reformulates the imperative several times. See, for instance, Jonas 11 and 43–44.

11 Cf. Jonas 157–58.

12 Cf. Jonas 1 and 117ff.

13 Sloterdijk, The Aesthetic Imperative 249–52.

14 Cf., for example, Sloterdijk, You Must Change 27–28, 337, and 417–18.

15 It is a pity that Sloterdijk chose not to address Kant’s Critique of Judgment here or anywhere else that I am aware of. Doing so could have led to a much more fruitful discussion of how and in what way art might command, whether by means of a moral imperative or otherwise. Kant attributes to judgments of beauty a “free liking” (freie Wohlfgefallen) that is demanded of everyone not in the form of an imperative, but as a sensus communis, a common sense that consists solely in the expectation that each and every one of us will agree that the free liking that accompanies the aesthetic presentation of an object is universally communicable and thus potentially shared or shareable by all. Far from mimicking the moral imperative, the aesthetic contains no imperative save for the demand that everyone consent to judgments of beauty which are in turn based on the pleasure of free-play of the faculties before pure appearances. The discussion of the relation of aesthetics and ethics in Kant is vast and long-standing. Cf. the works of Paul Guyer, Henry Allison, Frederick Beiser, Hannah Arendt, Dieter Henrich, and many, many others.

16 “The concept (or the model) of grace returns in Heidegger – transformed into the kinetic schema of releasement [Gelassenheit]” (Sloterdijk, Not Saved 39).

17 Cf. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy 23ff.

18 These are in fact Sloterdijk’s own terms. The latter relates directly to his project in Spheres, Vol. I: Bubbles which identifies the pairing of mother and infant as archetype of all forms of existential spatiality.

19 See Sheehan 75ff.