Practice

When an observer doesn't immediately turn what his senses convey to him into language, into the vocabulary and syntactical framework we all employ when trying to define our experiences, there's a much greater opportunity for minor details, which might at first seem unimportant, to remain alive in the foreground of an impression, where, later, they might deepen the meaning of an experience...

The first lesson in learning how to see more deeply into a landscape was to be continuously attentive, and to stifle the urge to stand outside the event, to instead stay within the event, leaving its significance to be resolved later; the second lesson, for me, was to notice how often I asked my body to defer to the dictates of my mind, how my body's extraordinary ability to discern textures and perfumes, to discriminate among tones and colours in the world outside itself, was dismissed by the rational mind.

The Invitation, Barry Lopez, Granta 133, Autumn 2015

The crossing from nature to culture and vice versa has always stood wide open. It leads across an easily accessible bridge: the practising life.

Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, 2013

Photo by author

A philosophy of pure ressentiment

Cioran accepts his aggressive-depressive disposition as the atmospheric fact of his existence. He accepts that he is fated to experience the world primarily in dystonic timbres; weariness, boredom, meaninglessness, tastelessness, and rebellious anger towards everything that is the case. He frankly affirms Nietzsche’s diagnosis that the ideals of metaphysics should be viewed as the intellectual products of physical and psychosocial illness…Thinking does not mean thanking, as Heidegger suggests; it means taking revenge.

You Must Change Your Life by Peter Sloterdijk (2012)

Image via TuttoCioran

As personal as death, as unfathomable as the world

The sublime is that which, by calling to mind the overwhelming, shows the observer the possibility of their engulfment by the oversized — which, however, is suspended until further notice. The sublime whose tip points to me is as personal as death and as unfathomable as the world.

You Must Change Your Life by Peter Sloterdijk (2009)