homo artista: training, asceticism, and the design of the human

peter sloterdijk begins his book " you must change your life " with the statement, in his characteristically knowing and contrarian manner: "a specter is haunting the western world; the specter of religion." all over the country, we hear that after a long absence, it has now returned, is among the people of the modern world, and that it would be good to take its new presence seriously. however, this return does not simply mean the return of religion after the failure of the enlightenment; for the return to religion is just as impossible as the return of religion. the simple reason for this is that, in an objective sense, there is no such thing as "religion" or "religions" and never has been. there are only misunderstood spiritual regimens, practical and exercise systems that people use to shape themselves mentally and physically. the history of humanity should not be divided into believers and non-believers, but into those who practice, that is, those who train, and those who do not. human beings are, by nature, beings who try to transcend themselves, who produce and shape themselves through repetitions and exercises; they are not merely tool-making homo faber or believing homo religiosus , but constantly training homo repetitivus or homo artista . the systems that people have called religion, morality, or spirituality throughout history are actually symbolic or psycho-immunological immune systems they invented to cope with the risks, uncertainties of life, and the reality of death. beyond the biological and socio-immunological immune systems, this third layer of immunity is a mental armor through which people try to optimize their cosmic status. the command from the stone and vertical tensions to comprehend this truth, it is necessary to examine the phenomenon of "vertical tensions" from a philosophical and anthropological perspective. this phenomenon is a force that extends from ordinariness to perfection and compels humans to transcend themselves. to understand how vertical tensions can issue an absolute ethical command purely through an aesthetic structure, without the pressure of a dogmatic religion or external domination, it is appropriate to look at rainer maria rilke's sonnet "archaic torso of apollo". as we know from rilke's biography, the poet, under the strong influence of his master auguste rodin, for whom he worked as a private secretary in meudon, pursued a new view of art based on the priority of the object. this proto-modernist enthusiasm leads to the concept of the thing-poem and the idea that authority comes directly from the concrete object itself. the state of "thing-being" no longer means anything other than "having something to say". the torso mentioned in rilke's poem literally embodies an autonomous thing, precisely because it is merely a remnant or leftover of a complete sculpture. the perfection phenomenon becomes much more binding and mysterious because it is the perfection of a fragment. the staggering closing sentence of the poem, the command "you must change your life!" , carries a mystery that seemingly requires no interpretation. this mystery comes from a vertical space where no objections can be raised. rilke discovered a stone that embodies the torso of religion, ethics, and asceticism itself, a call reduced to an absolute command. if all the religions and training programs in the world were passed through a single filter, the purest concentrate that would emerge would be this. this is an absolute imperative that defines life as a slope from its higher forms to its lower forms. this absolute objection to the status quo calls individuals to give up their comfort and show themselves in the gymnasium, that is, literally in the realm of nakedness. this call comes not from a god, but from a trainer authority, much like a coach's speech motivating an athlete. this leads us to the somatic and athletic renaissance that peaked in europe in the early twentieth century. remote view of the ascetic planet and acrobatic ethics to understand that this desire in humans to elevate and transcend themselves has nothing to do with traditional religion, one must look at nietzsche's description of the world as an "ascetic planet". while tracing the genealogy of morals, nietzsche discovered that asceticism is not religious people hating the world and taking refuge in god, but a training technique humans apply to themselves to create their own form. he divided forms of asceticism into the asceticism of the healthy and that of the sick; arguing that the sick, namely the priests, produced a malignant asceticism by hating the world and life and tormenting themselves with resentment. healthy asceticism, on the other hand, is a training discipline that humans apply to transcend themselves, maximize their potential, and affirm life. nietzsche is practically the schliemann of asceticisms; amidst this metaphysical wreckage, he revealed the greatest secret of human history, namely that humans are by nature acrobats trying to achieve the impossible. when asceticism is de-spiritualized, what remains is modern sport, personal development, and athleticism. the resurrection of the flesh in this world, which is the most obvious realization of modern sport, is a secularized continuation of past monastic disciplines. only cripples will survive: defiance existentialism one of the most striking examples of this acrobatic ethics is the story of carl hermann unthan, who was born without arms but played the violin with his feet. the defiance existentialism he displayed in his memoir titled das pediskript proves how weakness transforms into virtuosity through will and endless training. unthan viewed his disability not as a deficiency, but as a boundary to be crossed, a training opportunity. this is a manifestation of the central european defiance existentialism, which is much more deeply rooted than french resistance existentialism; here, the disabled individual ceases to be a pitiful victim and transforms into a vaudeville artist who constructs normality like a work of art. hans wurtz's work break the crutches , written in the early twentieth century, is also a manifesto of how disability can be transformed into a school of the will. adapting nietzsche's philosophy of will to special education, wurtz claims that every overcome obstacle is actually the mother of a higher movement and virtuosity. the fact that the name of joseph goebbels, who transformed his disability into a radical political power, is also mentioned among the famous disabled people in wurtz's list shows how dangerous and bidirectional these compensatory vertical tensions can be. the disabled individual is a being who constantly works on themselves to appear normal, turns their disability into an acrobatics, and is the trainer of their own life. last hunger art and parisian buddhism similarly, kafka's story "a hunger artist" demystifies old religious acts of asceticism. pious fasting is not a path to reach god, but an extreme performance art done simply to achieve the impossible. at the end of the hunger artist story, the artist's confession that the reason he fasted was actually because he could not find any food he liked shows that when the goals of transcendence of metaphysical desire disappear, all that remains is an exercise in disgust, a rejection. the rope that old saints thought they were pulled up to heaven on is actually nothing but the rope a tightrope walker walks on. the fact that simone weil starved to death in france in the twentieth century is tragic proof of how old monastic asceticism transformed into a modern hunger art. we see a similar de-spiritualized ascetic practice in the secluded life of romanian aphorism master emil cioran in paris. cioran, who did not believe in any religion or salvation goal, applied a profound practice of spiritual retreat against the weight and fullness of existence through negative exercises and endo-rhetoric, that is, self-talk techniques. this…