Anthropotechnique
Anthropotechnik
Peter Sloterdijk’s concept: anthropotechniques are the methods of practice—mental and physical—through which humans work on themselves and shape their own form. Here, man emerges as a being of *Übung* (exercise), bound to an imperative that Sloterdijk reads in Rilke’s bust of Apollo: *“You must change your life.”* Religions, ethics, asceticism, sports—all systems of practice that, under various names, belong to this same self-made fabrication of the self.
By this I mean the methods of mental and physical practising by which humans from the most diverse cultures have attempted to optimize their cosmic and immunological status in the face of vague risks of living and acute certainties of death.
Sloterdijk begins with an observation: humans do not exist merely within “material conditions,” but within “symbolic immune systems” and “ritual envelopes.” He calls the loom of these envelopes by a “coldly rational” term: anthropotechnics. The word had been hijacked—since 1997—by debates over genetic engineering, the biological reshaping of humans by others. Sloterdijk reclaims it to mean something entirely different: “work on oneself,” the vast repertoire of practices through which humans have, at all times, trained themselves to transform.
From this comes his provocative thesis: “religions do not exist.” What we call religion is, upon analysis, nothing more than a “system of anthropotechnical practices” misunderstood—protocols for regulating inner and outer behavior, graduated exercises, disciplines of the self. Humans are animals capable of elevating themselves, Homo immunologicus, beings of asceticism in the broadest sense: not the suffering ascetic, but the practitioner, the one who responds to a vertical imperative. The book’s title is that imperative itself: You Must Change Your Life.
The concept in turn illuminates related entries: the Stoics’ care of attention and attention, the meditation on death—all exercises Sloterdijk rereads as explicit anthropotechnics. It also offers a counterpoint to Han’s society of fatigue: where Han describes a subject exhausted by self-performance, Sloterdijk rehabilitates formative exercise—provided one distinguishes between the two.
Anthropotechnics ≠ training / eugenics: not the shaping of humans by an other (selection, genetic engineering), a reduction against which Sloterdijk precisely reclaims the term, but an exercise of the self upon the self.
Anthropotechnics ≠ external technical enhancement: it is not about augmenting humans through external devices, but a “work on one’s own vital form,” a self-formation through practice and habit (the bona consuetudo, the good fold taken).