/lit/ - Literature

As someone who has read pretty much all of Sloterdijks bigger works I wouldn't rate it as his best work.
It was his first widely successful work that gave him a big name and made him Germany's top philosopher alive next to Habermas which why the book gets talked about more frequently than his other works.
In it's core the book does something Sloterdijk will continue to do for the rest of his career.
Take a Konzept that he sees present throughout European history (mostly starting with the greeks) and build around it throughout the ages until the present to exemplify why this and that is a thing.

In this case it Cynism.
In his main trilogy it's spheres, in Zorn und Zeit it's the Thymos, in YMCYL/Weltfremdheit it is the idea of asceticism/monastic thought.
He does this approach several times in different books and not always do they build on top of each other which in my case lead to some confusions in the beginning when going though his whole bibliography. Also, not always does this land on a point where conclusions can be made(Zorn und Zeit was one of those cases in my opinion) but it is always a very educating experience since P. SL. always explains his points while providing interesting historical points.

To get back to the book in question:
The last third of this critique is one big bit on the Weimarer Republik and for everone not really into that time (i.E. everyone who hasn't heard this shit as part of basic German history lessons again again) it's not too engaging. But of course if you are interested in history and find his writing style engaging, then it is a very good book.
It is not short though and if you want I could give you a few pointers to certain parts where things are more "relevant" in todays climate. I should have a few notes in my copy.

>>20271687
>how do you think his philosophy could be realised?
In my opinion his framework that is being laid out in his spheres trilogy is quite easy to adapt for the average reader and whoever wants to delve deeper into the underlying ontology can do so by studying Heidegger further provided by the sources P. SL. usually gives in his footnotes. (One of the points I really like in his writing. The easy to follow and extensive footnotes that make the text more digestible)
I think his theories do give a lot of very well devised tools to navigate and explore all kinds of different events, philosophies and general circumstances.
> image his concepts becoming widespread and understood here on /lit/
There is already quite some overlap with /lit/ related topics. Throughout his writing SL has some bigger dives into Gnosticism, strong emphasis on the Greeks as starting points for ideas in european philosophy and even connecting points with the Bhagavad Gita from his time in India. All things /lit/ tends to be interested in too and more. I'd like to see him discussed more.

>>20062739
There are two main works I would always recommed, are translated into English and are available as pdf on the regular sites. Spheres Trilogy and "you must change your life"
Spheres are three pretty massive books but they start at the very beginning and are a very complete body of work that could be used as a framework for all kinds of thoughts, ethics and metaphysics. For me personally it was an absolute joy to read.
The second is basically a book on Nietzsche and Sloterdjiks life-long engagement with spirituality, asceticism etc.
I think it is a good idea to engage with "You must change your life" first to see if you like the way Sloterdjijk writes. He has a the habit of going on broad historical tangents to explain why something is relevant which I found rather interesting and educating but others kinda dislike.
If you fall in the later category then spheres wont be much fun either and you probably wont finish it.

If you can speak German then there are other books which I found pretty good and substantial (Nach Gott and Nicht Gerettet in particular) in understanding P. SL. especially his use of Heideggerian ontology which really comes to life in Spheres. But they are optional and the two books I mentioned before are very standalone and don't particularly need secondary literature because his usage of footnotes is very excessive and clear.
He also has a few stinkers imo but you wont name them now since it's probably not relevant.

If been thinking about making a Sloterdijk /chart/ since quite some while now if people are interested.

Very based. My favourite philosopher and pretty much every other book is a joy to read.
There is always something to learn in terms of historical context and other facts.
His ontology is very much influenced Heidegger but the way he writes is actually very easy to follow which makes reading his work rather unique.
Once I've read pretty much the entire bibliography I'll finally make a /lit/ chart that isn't just a listing of the main works plus some wikipedia tier influences.

>>19850380
>as for sloterdijk i've been interested in You Must Change Your Life, would you say this is a good introduction or not really?
I'd say it's a good place to start yes. It is rather standalone, doesn't rely on previous works and gives an interesting read on Nietzsche.

>>19762061
Very based.
Been reading him for two years now and already on my 10th+ book by him. Coincidentally it's "nicht gerettet" on Heidegger.
Sloterdijks ontology especially in Spheres is decidedly Heiddeggerian and it goes through all his work.

I can talk about Sloterdijk and his works quite extensively.

Yes
Personally I really enjoyed it a lot. For some the expanding way of writing about this and that and the constant deviation towards historical facts is annoying but for me it was always as if I'm learning something new at every page.
It's big it it's scope and three book are certainly a lot but it reads really easy compared to most philosophy books out there.

After getting through Spheres I pretty much read most of Sloterdijks bibliography and while in some cases his writing goes nowhere it certainly hits the mark in Spheres. Big fan.

Sloterdijks "you must change your life" to some extent I would say.
He talks a lot about gnosticism across his whole body of work. Especially in his works "weltfremdheit" and his gnosis workbook "weltrevolution der seele" and as of recently in "den Himmel zum sprechen bringen".
Usually he just does it with the observing neutrality of a philosopher without giving it too much of a positive or negative spin but in one of his works ,which I consider his second best after spheres, "you must change your life" he makes a very strong interpretation of Nietzsches "ascetic star" which is played as this driving force towards new heights.
Dissatisfaction with the material world and the many attempts to escape it by monks, hermits, ascetic practitioners have lead to an religious athleticism as he calls it. These practices.

The book doesn't explicitly work with too many gnostic sources but when you read it with the background of the rest of his bibliography then the connection is pretty obvious.

Spheres 1-3
Absolute delight to read.

Serious question to some anons who have made charts themselves:
Did you really read all the books on the chart you made?
Curating a list on something would usually imply that some books made the cut and others didn't so it wouldn't but just the books on the list but several more who didn't make it.

I'm thinking about making a Sloterdijk chart but I'm still only halfway done with his bibliography after reading him for over a year now.

I only need to count to one to make the following assesement:
based

Personally my favorite philosopher to read.
I've read and enjoyed most of his bigger publications and it's almost always a very entertaining and enlightening experience.
Spheres is A+

I guess as one of the few resident Sloterdijk shills I have to mention him in this since it fits the bill.
When exploring a topic he always as early as possible in human history and every work takes a look at a range of anthropological theories.
Spengler and Arendt are also frequently quoted too so that way it may already build on top of stuff you already know about.

I would recommend Spheres 1-3 since that is also one big anthropological exercise about how humans lived and continue to live.

>Sloterdijk - Spheres
Extremely based and probably my favourite philosophical work.
The the way SL constructs this rather simple idea of spheres from bubbles to foams throughout the 3 books is very engaging and I very much enjoyed all the historical interjections about art, architecture and culture. After reading a SL book you always get the feeling that you learned something even if you don't accept the philosophy.

>>18175349
>>18178959
>Is that the book where he says everybody wishes to be back in the comfort of the womb?
Yes. It's either 1 or 2 where he makes the direct statement of that.

>>18175561
>does it have actual praxis?
I would say so yes. He mentions several examples of people in todays world who apply the the principle of Nietzsches ascetic star, which is pretty much the basis of that book.

Ok so here's the thing....

SPHERES!!!!!

>>17246410
Sloterdijk writes in Globes [Sloterdijk, P. (2004) "Globes: Spheres 2", Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. CH 3 'Uplift and Pampering, On the Critique of Pure Whim' p 650]:

"But what if the philosophically relevant event of the twentieth century had consisted in all gravity-seeking fictions of reality being invalidated by a single moment of uplift?"

By which he means all pre-WW2 political philosophy has been deprecated by a change in the human condition so drastic that the ancients have nothing to say to us and we couldn't understand them even if they managed to convey a message to us.

I regard that as a comprehensive critique of political philosophy.

>and my spheres

>>17001466

here's one of them anyways

>>13034898
waking up is a beautiful thing. i have had one and exactly one only genuine no-bullshit epiphany in my life, but it really was like being struck with lightning. and basically it was just that awareness that i had been living most of my life on a complete auto-pilot. i was terrified to think of what it might have been like to not do that, but it was all super-weird. i really had no idea how much i was basically just stone-blind. happily afterwards i started to have slightly more awareness that the things that were happening to me actually were, in fact, a product of my own choices and decisions. and i have really just been kind of reflecting on this shit ever since. and i guess that kind of informs my worldview also: i'm way more on the side of people who decide to rebel against their own masters internally, rather than Smashing The System externally, because the fact is that
a) you may not know what the fuck you are Smashing externally, and
b) you may not have any idea of what life might be like without the Smash Protocol making all of your decisions for you, like a brainless drone.

this much to say, Consider The Many Deaths of Super Mario, because his karma is also one's own, in a way. and also because Git Gud is also a pretty fundamentally sane idea also, and that pic rel knows what he's talking about. and because failure is everything. failure, shame, depression, rage, misery, disgust, self-loathing, being pathetic, coping, being more pathetic, still more pathetic even than that, holy shit incredibly vistas of patheticness...you get the idea.

i like your idea of Mario refusing to take part in the game, i guess i am just attached for various reasons to realizing the sources and natures of our own anxiety and grief. call it The Will to Suck. we love failing, failing is often pleasureable. we hate it too. so wat do? partly it feels like we need some kind of firm hand urging us to do better, but we also need the soft touch also so that we don't go out of our minds with the rage and frustration that comes with failing, because it seems like life is mostly that. it's why those good games tend to kind of incentivize you to keep going and not frustrate you too much.

tldr the cruel demiurge is probably you, or mostly you.

Is Spheres the most based work of philosophy of the 2000s?

>>11204375
this is never lost on me. it entirely makes sense w/r/t deleuze and inhumanism and the rest: that capital itself is the social critique. anthropocentrism is what leads to ideology.

this is not to say that there aren't problems with throwing the baby out with the bathwater. pic rel is all about anthropotechnics for this reason, and will argue that capital is only an accelerator of cultural desire. the ubermensch and immunology is an appealing alternative to Skynet also.

it's being in the formless depths of the middle that is what capital preys on. if you don't know what you want, *that's fine,* just lie down in the floatation tank and relax and the sexbot nurses will be with you shortly.

so, capital itself is indeed powerfully an-anthropomorphic. this is what is great is about it. it's also what is terrifying (though oddly refreshing).

as girardfag i tend to inevitably grativate towards believing that unreconciled fantasies ultimately culminate in orgies of destruction as disappointing and confusing as they are frightening. but also cyclical and repetitive. existentialism is deader than dead to me at this point and this includes postmodernity as well. that, basically, is why i like land so much: infinite haggling over language games is exactly what greases the wheels of big capital. the current madness you can see in universities is all a product of the schizophrenic demand for workers to be capitalists while retaining the inner moral purity that comes with being oppressed. it is a sad rejoinder to baudrillard's statement: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are. so, why not just assume that you will never be liberated? that way you never have to confront the alternative to being a slave to your own thirst for recognition, which would include the capacity for disarmanent and forgiveness (there are some things hegel was not wrong about in this sense).

it is because capital *cannot* be anthropomorphosized that we can either get with the general cybernetic condition, return to nietzsche and anthropotechnics, or just drop all the mimetic bullshit and be kind to each other. generally speaking a culture of irony declines all of these options. a contagious rage virus is the result.

but, at the risk of colonizing this thread with my own tendency to rampantly shitpost until the sun seems to disappear as if behind a cloud: double yes to all readings of sloterdijk.

you must change your life is good
philosophical temperaments is good
bubbles and globes are both good
in the world interior of capital is good
whatever else i am forgetting atm is good

sloterdijk rules. here's also a cool interview with him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPGUiFDFrwk