YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

I doubt that many readers will have heard of Peter Sloterdijk (b. 1947), who is professor of philosophy and aesthetics at Karlsruhe's School of Design. He was active in the student movement of the 1960s, and in 1983 published his Critique of Cynical Reason, where he analyses the dissolution of the student movement as a 'complex metamorphosis of hope into realism, of revolt into a clever melancholy. He continues: 'Because everything has become problematic, everything is also somehow a matter of indifference. The result is cynicism, defined as 'enlightened false consciousness': 'It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. With this reference to practice, we come to a central theme of the current book, which is challenging, complex and dense in its analysis.

The title comes from the last line of a poem by Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo. Despite its incompleteness, the perfection of the statue represents the ethical imperative that we must change our life. Christians will recognise this as the fallen state requiring conversion, transformation or a new birth. Broadly speaking, this requires askesis, exercise or training, striving to become better. The brooding presence in the book is that of Friedrich Nietzsche with his representation of human life as a rope with Ubermensch at one end and the beast at the other. Nietzsche helped to define the plight of modernity after the proclaimed death of God, favouring self-mastery over submission even if discipline is required in both instances. For Sloterdijk, the dichotomy between believers and unbelievers is obsolete and has been replaced by the distinction between the practising and the untrained, and those who train differently. (p. 3)

This distinction raises interesting issues since practice, whether athletic, musical or spiritual, requires commitment and discipline, especially to maintain it in the long term. Discipline can also be contrasted with indulgence encouraged by our consumerist culture and built on the kinds of habit and inertia that we all recognise. At a certain point, we may feel compelled to overcome our inner obstacles in the form of passions, habits and unclear ideas, (p. 195), which, for Nietzsche, metaphorically represents a form of acrobatics designed produce strength and resilience. This also introduces the image of verticality and the de-verticalisation of our culture. Height psychology is maintained in our discourse of ladders and levels, as well as the traditional idea that heaven is above and hell below. One example of de-verticalisation given by the author is the Olympic philosophy of Pierre de Coubertin where the ascetic practice is primarily physical, although the mental component is also important. Interestingly, he does not mention the Olympic motto of citius, altius, fortius (faster, higher, stronger) as an example of self-overcoming, or becoming superior to oneself - the breaking of Olympic records testifies to this. This process of self-formation is similar to biological concept of autopoeisis, which is not mentioned in this context. We also live in the time of de-contextualisation, where practices like mindfulness are removed from their original cultural context. However, this makes the point that for us contemporary people, the practice and its pragmatic results are what matters. An interesting example (not given by the author) of self-overcoming since the 19th century is the rise of mountaineering - an obvious image of verticality - where courage, perseverance and discipline are required in equal measure, and humans have consistently climbed new faces; then we have it complement in downhill skiing. The horizontal equivalent would be polar expeditions, if anything even more gruelling.

Human life consists both of self-formation, mainly in the first part of life, and self-transcendence in the second. This corresponds to a process of creation and dissolution, anabolic and catabolic processes, the creation and transcendence of the ego. In this respect, the author gives examples from various spiritual traditions, including the ladder of humility by St Benedict and the exercises of St Ignatius. All these forms of training come under the heading of 'anthropotechnics', requiring individual effort and persistence. The result is often overtaxing, and the imitation of Christ (theomimesis) may represent a form of 'authoritative perfection'. In every case, however, there is a self-referential or autoplastic relationship where we are artistically forming ourselves – 'actions return to affect the actor, works the worker, communications the communicator, thoughts the thinker and feelings the feeler.' (p. 110) It is important to note that this represents a conscious striving for self-improvement rather than a technological or engineering enhancement from the outside. Augustine has a different take when, against Arius, he devalues works and by implication practice in favour of the overwhelming power of grace. He may have a point in the sense that there is both a time to act and a time to surrender.

Although the author uses the phrase 'work on oneself', he does not delve into the long American tradition of self-improvement, going back to Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century and also manifest in Britain the 19th century with Samuel Smiles. This was given a new impulse by Andrew Carnegie in persuading Napoleon Hill to undertake a 20-year project, resulting in his Laws of Success in Sixteen Lessons, which forms the starting point of subsequent work on self-improvement and success principles developed by Earl Nightingale, which one also finds transpersonal psychology and the work of Ken Wilber. The spiritual impulse in 19th-century also came from Emerson and the New Thought movement with Ralph Waldo Trine, Thomas Troward, Charles Haanel and Walter Russell. All these men were convinced that we co-create our lives from the inside out and can transform ourselves in the process.

The final chapter analyses the human outlook in relation to Rilke's imperative that you must change your life. It was Nietzsche who suggested that humans can only advance as long as they follow the impossible, challenging the pragmatic consensus that one can only demand of people what they seem capable of achieving. In our current predicament, this is manifestly inadequate and we all fall short of who we might become. It is now the spectre of global catastrophe that urges us to change our lives, but most of us continue to prevaricate with business as usual - threatening pronouncements can be seen as a form of entertainment in the documentary horror genre. As a signpost, the author quotes Hans Jonas' version of the categorical imperative: 'act in such a way that the effects of your actions can be reconciled with the permanence of true human life on earth.' (p. 448) The trouble is that we are in a long emergency, 'heading for a crash whose time is uncertain, but which cannot be delayed indefinitely' – we can see a parallel uncertainty in the timing of our own deaths. However, our short-term imperatives trump these concerns and we spend our time 'preserving jobs on the Titanic.' This does leave the reader asking for further guidance on the kinds of practice the author thinks are required beyond his generality of 'taking on the good habits of shared survival in daily exercises.' He is stronger on diagnosis than practical applications, even with his overall emphasis on the importance of practice – perhaps this will be the subject of a further volume.