OF AN ENLIGHTENMENT-CONSERVATIVE TONE RECENTLY ADOPTED IN PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

How can an enterprise, such as Sloterdijk defines in his You Must Change Your Life and its satellite The Art of Philosophy, be “Enlightenment-conservative”? That is the question leading these reflections on the key terms that contain both works in nuce – practice of course, but also perspective and retrospective, transition, extension, explicitation, turn, return, and quarter turn –, reflections that shed light on Sloterdijk’s non-revolutionary conception of Enlightenment as a continuing modernity, without postmodernity, but in need of a curator, a conservateur, and that expose the ontologico-ethical question of the authoritative or sublime imperative (you must) in its Heideggerian, Nietzschean, and finally pseudo-Kantian, even apocalyptic tones, and in its attempt to preserve not only the Enlightenment, but the Renaissance and Antiquity at the same time.

Keywords:

• Peter Sloterdijk
• postmodern philosophy
• Enlightenment
• imperative
• conservative

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This essay is based on a reading of two books by Peter Sloterdijk: You Must Change Your Life, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2013) and its extension The Art of Philosophy. Wisdom as a Practice, trans. Karen Margolis (New York: Columbia UP, 2012). It was first presented at the International Philosophical Seminar on July 3, 2017 in Castelrotto, Italy.

2 The French ed. is: Peter Sloterdijk, Tu dois changer ta vie: de l’anthropotechnique, trans. Olivier Mannoni (Paris: Libella-Maren Sell, 2011). Hereafter referenced as FE.

3 In the English translation word appears as world: cf. Sloterdijk, You Must Change 6 (FE 18).

4 Not une entreprise de conservation éclairée, as in FE 18.

5 Cf. FE 18: l’éducation, which unfortunately erases all direct reference to Aufklärung.

6 Sloterdijk, You Must Change 6 (German ed.: Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern: über Anthropotechnik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009) 17. Hereafter referenced as GE).

7 Sloterdijk, You Must Change 1. Thus, begins the book.

8 Cf. Sloterdijk, You Must Change 451, even though the imperative has ultimately become a mere directive: “protectionism of the whole becomes the directive of immunity reason […] General Immunology is the legitimate successor of metaphysics and the real theory of ‘religions.’”

9 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 677 (A805/B833).

10 Cf. Kant, Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie; Derrida; and Trottein.