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Du mußt dein Leben ändern Quotes
Via the mediation of the Enlightenment, this movement had changed from a hobby among a tiny literate elite and their secretaries, an ostentatious amusement among princely and mercantile art patrons and their masterly suppliers (who established a first ‘art system’), into a national, a European, indeed a planetary matter. In order to spread from the few to the many, the renaissance had to discard its humanistic exterior and reveal itself as the return of ancient mass culture. The true renaissance question, reformulated in the terminology of practical philosophy – namely, whether other forms of life are possible and permissible for us alongside and after Christianity, especially ones whose patterns are derived from Greek and Roman (perhaps even Egyptian or Indian) antiquity – was no longer a secret discourse or an academic exercise in the nineteenth century, but rather an epochal passion, an inescapable pro nobis.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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 be understood is language’, Heidegger would later state – which conversely implies that language abandoned by being becomes mere chatter.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
The stakes in this game are not low. Our enterprise is no less than the introduction of an alternative language, and with the language an altered perspective, for a group of phenomena that tradition tended to refer to with such words as ‘spirituality’, ‘piety’, ‘morality’, ‘ethics’ and ‘asceticism’. If the manoeuvre succeeds, the conventional concept of religion, that ill-fated bugbear from the prop studios of modern Europe, will emerge from these investigations as the great loser. Certainly intellectual history has always resembled a refuge for malformed concepts – and after the following journey through the various stations, one will not only see through the concept of ‘religion’ in its failed design, a concept whose crookedness is second only to the hyper-bugbear that is ‘culture’.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
Give up your attachment to comfortable ways of living – show yourself in the gymnasium (gymnos = ‘naked’), prove that you are not indifferent to the difference between perfect and imperfect, demonstrate to us that achievement – excellence, arete, virtu – has not remained a foreign word to you, admit that you have motives for new endeavours! Above all: only grant the suspicion that sport is a pastime for the most stupid as much space as it deserves, do not misuse it as a pretext to drift further in your customary state of self-neglect, distrust the philistine in yourself who thinks you are just fine as you are! Hear the voice from the stone, do not resist the call to get in shape! Seize the chance to train with a god!
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
As in the days of the first Merovingian, who pledged allegiance to the cross because of a victorious battle, today’s children of the banalized Enlightenment are likewise meant to burn what they worshipped and worship what they burned.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
…only very few – only humans, as far as we know – achieve the second level of transcendent movement. Through this, the environment is de-restricted to become the world as an integral whole of manifest and latent elements. The second step is the work of language. This not only builds the ‘house of being’ – Heidegger took this phrase from Zarathustra’s animals, which inform the convalescent: ‘the house of being rebuilds itself eternally’; it is also the vehicle for the tendencies to run away from that house with which, by means of its inner surpluses, humans move towards the open. It need hardly be explained why the oldest parasite in the world, the world above, only appears with the second transcendence.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
[Nietzsche’s] questions – transcend, but where to; ascend, but to what height? – would have answered themselves if he had calmly kept both feet on the ascetic ground. He was too sick to follow his most important insight: that the main thing in life is to take the minor things seriously. When minor things grow stronger, the danger posed by the main thing is contained; then climbing higher in the minor things means advancing in the main thing.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
The reason for the existence of the perfection conjured up in these fourteen lines is that it possesses … 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.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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 poesie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose’ 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.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
What the poet has to say to the torso of the supposed Apollo, however, is more than a note on an excursion to the antiquities 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.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
Wherever one encounters members of the human race, they always show the traits of a being that is condemned to surrealistic effort. Whoever goes in search of humans will find acrobats.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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