This very long article is at once both thought-provoking and rather confused, like reading the beginning of a hundred interesting conversations, each interrupting the last before they get anywhere. I'm not really sure what to take away from it, other than "if you want to finish the conversation, buy the books."
The title here gives a clue as to what someone else got out of it. "Against Cynicism: A philosopher's brilliant reasons for living." We might infer that this was about reasons for living, that they are brilliant, and that cynicism isn't part of those reasons. And yet, I'm not entirely sure that "reasons for living" are what Sloterdijk is even addressing. It seems more like he's addressing the concern of minimizing suffering in a culture that's largely given up God. He's an atheist who admits that religion in general and the belief in God in particular has utility, and he's exploring replacement therapies. An eminently reasonable thing to do. But this isn't a reason for living: for the vast majority of people, the "reason for living" is simply that the alternative, death, is petrifying.
"for the vast majority of people, the "reason for living" is simply that the alternative, death, is petrifying."
Perhaps I'm unusually happy, but my reason is to have the most fun, which pretty strongly implies helping those around me have fun, while being focused on long term. Some sociocultural rules from the other side of the planet three thousand years ago are interesting and all that, but don't float my boat or fit my needs.
Let's say rather that the least common denominator reason for living is that, well, death sucks. Yes, of course are positive reasons to live, and while those are nice to have, they aren't as universal a motivator, I think, as simple fear of death.
Shakespeare: "For in that sleep of death what dreams may come...?" Or as brilliantly stated by XKCD, you end up going back into the "Lego box" http://xkcd.com/659/
To define what sucks about death is the concept of complete non-existence and the the total erasure of everything you ever were and consequently destined to never exist again.
Your atoms may change into different forms but you will never experience it. That to me makes even the worst of life experiences better than death sentence known as "...we owe god one death."
Ernest Becker's 1974 Pulitzer Prize winner would agree with you [1]; in fact, the theory goes so far as to state that all of human culture is designed around avoidance of death, and even avoidance of the acceptance of the reality of true, complete death.
Thanks for sharing this. I'm glad to see a secular author who
has a real appreciation of religion--he doesn't treat it as something that makes dimwitted people happy, but as a training regimen designed for self-improvement, a struggle to develop good mental hygiene and psychologically safe communities, etc. If I read the article right, he is saying we need to develop these practices in a nonreligious context.
I agree, but how can secular people and communities practice spirituality in a way that will cause these changes without sharing a common set of beliefs, practices and language?
It doesn't need to be called 'spirituality' - you hit it on the head before with 'self-improvement'
It's possible for secular people to practice self-improvement, but why would we not share a common set of beliefs/practices/language? I think many self-improvement groups do just that - obvious ones like churches, but also non-obvious ones (book clubs, running clubs, etc).
You can practice self improvement, but there is not really anything to tie people together in ordinary living in the absence of religion. Self improvement groups do not create the kind of bonds in a community that will cause people to make real sacrifices for their neighbors. As an atheist married to a practicing Christian I am acutely aware of the fact that my wife's church offers a level of community, tied together by common beliefs and practices, that I've never found outside a religious context. Book clubs don't give you a shared way of life, and political organizations are linked by a common fight not a common way of living ordinary life. I can't think of anything in my secular urban world that is quite like the barn raisings my wife tells me about from the small, Christian, town in Iowa where she grew up. The closest thing I guess would be some sort of Habitat for Humanity project, but that's very different: focused outward rather than inward; charity rather than reciprocity.
> there is not really anything to tie people together in ordinary living [emphasis added] in the absence of religion. Self improvement groups do not create the kind of bonds in a community that will cause people to make real sacrifices for their neighbors.
1. A sense that we share an on-going narrative can give rise to a shared sense of purpose or mission. That in turn can be a significant motivator of communal behavior, even in ordinary life.
(EXAMPLES: + The founding of the modern state of Israel [many founders were secular or even atheistic]. + American exceptionalism and "manifest destiny." + Tradition in, e.g., military units and sports teams. + Scientific teams in pursuit of a discovery.)
2. QUESTION: Do we share any non-religious on-going narrative that can scalably and sustainably generate a sense of shared purpose or mission? Certainly different individuals are motivated by different things. Here's what sort of does it for me: It's plausible that we're all participating in a cosmic construction project that's been in progress for at least the past 13.8 billion years. In the words of an old story, we aren't just cutting stone to pay the bills, we're building a cathedral [0]. We can't know what the final outcome of the construction project will be, but if past trends are any indication, it'll be amazing. To me, that's pretty exciting.
Re: (1), it seems to me that, at least in my circle of friends (yuppies, basically), there is precious little narrative that gives rise to a shared sense of purpose. There are bonds of friendship, but between people of comparable social class and experience. There is nothing that binds me to the people in my neighborhoods, etc, at least nothing that compares to the depth of the ties my wife experiences in her religious community.
Re: (2), it is an interesting open question to me. I don't yearn for the spiritual aspect of religion. I don't fear death, I don't lack any sense of purpose, etc. I do lament not being able to participate in the communal aspect of religion. I haven't encountered any secular alternative. I'll give an example: my wife had our daughter dedicated in her church. I have encountered nothing like that in the secular realm. Maybe you can offer a baby shower as an example, but our baby shower would involve other upper middle class people, not a broad cross-section of the people who live near us.
It's worthwhile to note that it's unclear if religion is so decidedly behind a shared sense of purpose among the people. E.g. Pakistan, an Islamic nation with 97% of its populace being Muslim, is littered with social problems, there is very much a lack of shared sense of purpose. I think culture and history are better candidates for what unites people together.
My apologies for getting off-topic, but if I may inquire: how is it, being atheistic and being married to a religious person? Isn't it difficult to work things out, when the other believes that you're destined to hell? To believe that there's nothing after death, and that there's a whole afterlife of heaven (or hell) is quite a gap. How do you reconcile with this, do you often try to convert her, or make her see things differently?
> I do lament not being able to participate in the communal aspect of religion. I haven't encountered any secular alternative.
There isn't really much to work out. She does believe in heaven and hell, but she also believes that God has a plan for everyone. We can't prove each other wrong so we don't find much point in arguing or debating the issue. The only potential sticking point is how we raise our daughter, which we've solved the way most couples solve things: doing what she wants. I think a child has a lot to gain, socially, being raised in a church, as long as we pick one that isn't preaching certain messages (anti-homosexuality or anti-feminism being the two important ones for me).
> how is it, being atheistic and being married to a religious person?
You didn't direct the question to me, but I was an agnostic married (then and now) to a fairly-serious Christian. These days I'm sort of in the believer camp, for reasons that I think are intellectually defensible [0]. I still don't subscribe to many of the official tenets of Christianity [1].
The key to that aspect of our marriage seems to be mutual love and -admiration --- which dictate respectful behavior --- while agreeing to disagree about certain matters theological. We each recognize that for all we know, both of us could be wrong.
We see the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin's approach: Concerning the divinity of Jesus, Franklin wrote, a few weeks before his death at age 84, that, "it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, ... and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble." [2].
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> Isn't it difficult to work things out, when the other believes that you're destined to hell?
Your premise won't always be true. I can't speak to what Muslims, Jews, etc., would believe, but most traditional Christians claim that even a deathbed conversion will be rewarded with eternal salvation. Such a Christian, married to an atheist, can thus hope that the loved one will still make it to heaven.
While some Calvinist-style Christians believe in pre-destination [3], they're in the minority. As I understand it, Calvinists don't claim to know who will go to heaven or to hell.
In liberal Christianity, there's a strain of universalist thought that says God would not punish finite sin with eternal damnation; therefore, everyone will make it to heaven eventually.
Finally, not all religious people believe in heaven or hell; some (like me) simply don't know what happens after death.
> why would we not share a common set of beliefs/practices/language?
Religions are big things with many purposes. One of those purposes is self-improvement, and it would be useful for religious people and secular people to be able to communicate about the same set of routines using the same set of vocabulary and so on. However, this seems to introduce one of two strange situations.
A religious person adopting purely secular sets of beliefs and practices may find some of this to conflict with their religion. They're moving from one intellectual/psychological/social context to another. While a secular person might be able to point at how rather non-optimal a set of mental machinery might be, it is also quite likely that a religious person and a secular one have decidedly different understandings of the utility function for 'optimal' (and at very deep psychological levels).
On the other side of that coin, and probably more obviously, a secular person begin asked to acquire religious contexts and practices so as to communicate about this mental machinery would probably find these new shared beliefs/practices/language a bit "crufty". This would be totally understandable because all a secular person here would be after is 'self-improvement' whereas from above 'Religions are big things'. All of these mechanics are suddenly attempting to function outside of the context in which they developed.
2) banal observations once you finally figure out WTF they are talking about. check.
3) lauded for being the smartest, greatest, most brilliant intellectual of their age. check.
4) books with inscrutable titles like Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology and Rage and Time. check. (LOL! How big do your balls have to be to give a book a title like that?)
5) constant name-dropping of fashionable intellectuals. check.
Must be European philosophy!
UPDATE: quote from Amazon description of Bubbles. Behold the enormity of Peter Sloterdijk's balls:
"reinterprets the history of Western metaphysics as an
inherently spatial and immunological project, from the
discovery of self (bubble) to the exploration of world
(globe) to the poetics of plurality (foam)."
There is a saying I really like: "I may not have hope, but I do have determination". I'm not sure who said it, but it's true (for some things).
People have faced many hopeless tasks and triumphed. They only seem inevitable after the fact. I'm sure it was difficult to expect the end of racism in South Africa, but it happened. It's not hard to think of many other examples.
It's worth it to start working on a cause you believe in, and other people will join.
I should have written "institutionalized racism" or maybe "overt state sponsored racism". I wasn't trying to imply that racism no longer exists in South Africa.
Reminds me of watching the series "Lost", where the expectation was set from the beginning that there was a logical, rational explanation for the whole thing. In the end they producers basically lied, and it ended up being a big shaggy dog story.
If anyone can extract the "brilliant reasons for living" from that article, please post them here. I don't expect much of a list.
"[...] it is just one of the many provocative ideas that he develops and then drops in the course of the book, which reads less like a structured argument than a long prose poem. Sloterdijk’s strength and appeal come from the intuitive and metaphorical quality of his thought, his unconventional approaches to familiar problems, his willingness to scandalize."
This sums up Sloterdijk pretty well. I highly recommend reading him.
While I wasn't previously familiar with Sloterdijk, I find it interesting that he takes exactly the opposite value from Christianity as Slavoj Zizek, the other great popular atheist apologist for Christianity (cf. Zizek's The Fragile Absolute: Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting for).
"Sloterdijk’s ideal is not Pauline conversion but Trinitarian 'perichoresis,'"
Unfortunately, I don't think Sloterdijk has understood the theological context of perichoresis which he goes on to define:
"'Perichoresis means that the milieu of the persons is entirely the relationship itself,' he writes, envisioning love as a total mutual absorption."
Perichoresis is literally "mutual interpenetration" and refers to the greek choros and their dances around (peri) each other in interlocking rings in the theatre. In the theological appropriation of this imagery, this has more to do with the depth and interdependence of the relationship than with the "milieu" - though it's not clear what he means by that.
Call me cynical, but this exudes the intellectual aroma of Fuller's "Synergetics". In the words of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (and remembering everything to which it referred): "Mostly harmless."
I understood it reasonably well. The article wasn't very good, randomly quoting from several books and the writer of the article added onto the already complex language with his own even more complex descriptions.
Anyway Sloterdijk is apparently a borderline new-age post-existentialist, who hopes that (new, updated) religions can provide solace for the masses, in these books at least hasn't bothered to keep up with the technological changes of the last 20 years or so (although there is some mention of genetics, but that's old news by now).
Though I heard the name so often I never read the man, I think have to rectify that.
We need to recover, and give to one another, the trust that we once gave our placentas.
Wow! It's so refreshing to hear something like that put so strongly. When discussing politics, people often say competition and struggle is normal and lets us have all the nice things, but I like this radically different outlook much more, man should not be predator to man. After all, we can also invent things because it makes ourselves and others happy, just as an expression of our creativity or intelligence... I would even say we can't avoid it. Competition is nice, sportsmanship and/or cooperation are nicer.
It's a lot less poetic if you consider that it wasn't "trust" that brought our placentas into being but a mutated retrovirus.
More power to this guy if he helps people feel better about themselves and the world but he should refrain from entering public debates about "genetic engineering and economics" while presenting himself as somebody enlightened, knowledgeable or even adequately informed.
It is unfair to judge him solely from this article without having read his books but what can be gathered from it and a cursory search suggests that his interest in modern science consists exclusively of surfing the current zeitgeist without actually being interested in science, or even the philosophy of science.
If he indeed is "at the forefront of European intellectual life" it would be a pretty sad testament to the dismal state of contemporary philosophy.
The title here gives a clue as to what someone else got out of it. "Against Cynicism: A philosopher's brilliant reasons for living." We might infer that this was about reasons for living, that they are brilliant, and that cynicism isn't part of those reasons. And yet, I'm not entirely sure that "reasons for living" are what Sloterdijk is even addressing. It seems more like he's addressing the concern of minimizing suffering in a culture that's largely given up God. He's an atheist who admits that religion in general and the belief in God in particular has utility, and he's exploring replacement therapies. An eminently reasonable thing to do. But this isn't a reason for living: for the vast majority of people, the "reason for living" is simply that the alternative, death, is petrifying.