Peter Sloterdijk's You Must Change Your Life.

I’m absolutely loving it—his writing is beautifully poetic and deeply engaging. It feels like exactly what I needed to unwind and take it easy after wrestling with dense theory books, of which I probably understood about twenty percent, leaving me more overwhelmed than enlightened. That said, I can’t help but feel this veers close to the literary equivalent of the market’s self-improvement fantasy—just dressed up a bit better. But really, as they say, the common sense of our time prevails. What else can one do but this?

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 understood is language’, Heidegger would later state – which conversely implies that language abandoned by being becomes mere chatter. When, and only when, being contracts in privileged things and turns to us via these things can we hope to escape the increasing randomness, both aesthetically and philosophically. In the face of the galloping inflation of chatter, it was inevitable that such a hope would draw in numerous artists and people of ‘spirit’ around 1900. 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.

For there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.’ It remains to be shown why the second sentence, which seemingly requires no interpretation, is actually far more enigmatic than the first. It is not only its lack of preparation, its suddenness that is mysterious. ‘You must change your life’ – these words seem to come from a sphere in which no objections can be raised. Nor can we establish from where they are spoken; only their verticality is beyond doubt. It is unclear whether this dictum shoots straight up from the ground to stand in my way like a pillar, or falls from the sky to transform the road before me into an abyss, such that my next step should already belong to the changed life that has been demanded. It is not enough to say that Rilke retranslated ethics in an aestheticizing fashion into a succinct, cyclopian, archaic-brutal form. He discovered a stone that embodies the torso of ‘religion’, ethics and asceticism as such: a construct that exudes a call from above, reduced to the pure command, the unconditional instruction, the illuminated utterance of being that can be understood – and which only speaks in the imperative.

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, areté, virtù – has not remained a foreign word to you, admit that you have motives for new endeavours!