Episode #251 ... You Must Change Your Life, Pt. 2 - The Worlds That Make Us

Philosophize This! - Stephen West

In this episode of Philosophize This!, Stephen West explores Peter Sloterdijk's philosophy in 'You Must Change Your Life, Pt. 2', focusing on how our identities are co-constituted by the environments we inhabit—from prenatal life to social spaces like casinos. Drawing from Martin Heidegger's concept of

Key takeaways

• Our identity is not formed in isolation but through continuous co-constitution with our environments from before birth onward.
• Heidegger's 'Being-in-the-world' reveals that meaning arises pre-theoretically through practical involvement, not abstract judgment.

Main topics

• Co-constitution of identity and environment
• Heidegger's 'Being-in-the-world' and pre-theoretical experience

Notable quotes

"We need to think of human beings as in part the effects of the environments we create."

"The casino is not a room full of neutral objects—it's a network of practical relations that already carry meaning."

Conclusion

Sloterdijk's philosophy challenges the notion of a self-contained, rational subject and instead presents humans as products of deeply embedded,

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com slash Philosophize This. By the way, thanks to all the fine people on Patreon that have tested the Philosophize This app this last month. Just want to get it right before, you know, before we release it to everybody in the world for free all at once, all the time. It's kind of a big thing, so thanks for the feedback. In addition, there's philosophical writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there if that's something you're interested in. Hope you love the show today. So I made a joke last episode where I said that for Peter Slaughterdike, in a sense, you're a person that's been trained from the moment you were born. From the moment your doctor rescued you from that spelunking accident on the day of your birth, you have been trained in various ways that shape what you even see as possible in the world. It was a hilarious joke. I won the Comedy Congressional Medal of Honor over here for making such a fine comparison. But the really funny thing is that it actually wasn't entirely true of Slaughterdike. And clarifying this here, it's going to be an important thing for starting this episode, because it's going to give us some insight into how his whole project's linked to the work of Martin Heidegger and that famous dismantling he does of the whole subject-object view of the universe and being in time. Technical details of what I think is so cool about this whole book, honestly. It's a book that's essentially approaching the problem of how to change your life, but it's starting from a Heideggerian picture of subjectivity rather than a traditional subject-object one. Let's get started on it, though. So... The fact that you're training in every single moment of your life. And I guess even deeper than that, the fact that you're always living inside a world of internal relations between things that form important parts of you, that doesn't just begin at your birth for Slaughter Dyke. No, this actually starts long before that, prenatally, in the very first environment that you ever existed in alongside your mother. And as you sat there in that little pouch of yours, in this beautiful world the two of you had together. Well, look, each of your respective existences certainly co-affected one another during this time. And we know that even the physical environment you two were living in, as you grew, it was already forming important things about the kind of creature you'd eventually become once you got on the outside. And not surprisingly, this is something that didn't magically stop the moment you were born. This co-constitution of you and the interior world you always exist in. When you're actually born, you can think of it as just expanding outward for you a bit. where now it extends to things about your immediate environment, from climate to the neighborhood that you live in that teaches you what's possible to do, to even your family, even your Uncle Murray and all those genius takes he's always got on everything. He'd have won the Nobel Prize by now if he just didn't get injured in college. But what are we really talking about here? All this discussion about environments and co-constitution. Well, it's building on a point that we started making last episode about the common ways people usually think about what kind of being they are. What exactly is it to be me as a human? How do you even answer that kind of question if you wanted to? And we talked about how in the modern world, because of ideas that we inherit from the history of thought, ideas that we often don't even realize we're inheriting at the time, it becomes very easy to think of ourselves as detached subjects navigating a realm of neutral objects. Subject versus object kind of thinking. That I'm me, a being standing right here, and the world is something that is over there. that's simply having effects on me standing here. Where what I am is something that looks out at that world, decides what's good or bad about it, and then tries to choose what the right thing to do next is. In other words, it's very easy to think that the most primordial way that you ever experience the world is separate from it at the level of making abstractions about it. And it should be said, we certainly do think about the world through abstractions all the time. It's a very important part of what we do. But the idea is that this comes slightly later. This is actually a secondary activity to something that comes ontologically prior to it. And the point for Sloterdijk here, when he brings up the womb, is to destabilize this whole set of assumptions that you're fundamentally this fully formed subject on the inside, judging a realm of objects out there. Because where is the moment at any point in your past where you and the environment you're in are not literally forming each other? To Sloterdijk, then, one simple way to put it is that what you are is part of the world and the world's a part of you. You're not something looking out at the world. Again, it's co-constitutive, a unified condition. He has this great line where he says that we need to think of human beings as in part the effects of the environments we create. And so with all this in mind, the first important thing we got to recognize here for Sloterdijk is that these environments we're talking about, you know, these interior worlds that we're supposedly always in, he said that we need to always be very clear. that these are not neutral worlds that we're moving around in. This can be a common assumption, but if you look around you wherever you're at right now, you are not in a neutral spot wherever you are. Again, you are in a spot that is always already training you in important ways, whether you think about it that way or not. And how about a really simple example of an environment here? Just to get us started thinking about this whole point. Imagine yourself inside of a casino. I think this will help illustrate what can be some pretty technical distinctions going on. So it's possible to experience what a casino is in terms of these abstractions we've been talking about. Where what it is, is it's this physical space full of a lot of stuff that is ultimately neutral. There's slot machines, flashing lights, scantily clad people handing out all the free drinks. Whereas you stroll across the vomit-colored carpet and smell the cigarette smoke, the complete lack of windows in the place makes you practically forget about the fact there's even an outside world. In other words, it's a way to look at this whole situation where you're a subject in a room and you got all this stuff in the room with you where it's not good, it's not bad necessarily. It just comes down to how people use it. If a person starts misusing the slot machines, maybe using them a bit too much, getting rowdy, acting immorally, well, that's the point when the casino turns into something where problematic stuff may be going on. But the casino itself as an environment has no real moral content. But there's a whole nother way of viewing this same exact casino. where it's describing it in what you could call a more raw, primordial level of the way we experience things. A pre-theoretical version of the casino, the picture of which Martin Heidegger lays out in his work Being in Time. And by the way, this will be the foundation for Slaughterdike 2. Now, this other way of viewing it would say that the person that goes into this casino we're talking about never actually encounters a room full of these neutral objects that they only then reflect on and decide the value of. Whenever we step foot into an environment like this, We always already encounter all the different parts of the casino as different parts of a network of practical relations that they are in. Relationships between these things that already carry meaning to us when we enter the casino. For example, the slot machine appears to us not as some, you know, a neutral box sitting on the floor there, but we encounter it as a chance to win, maybe. The free drink appears to us as maybe hospitality. The money appears to us as the stakes of this whole activity. Even the vomit-colored carpet has its own kind of invitation to it, you know, to just let loose that night. See, to Heidegger, the way that our experience even becomes intelligible to us as beings in the first place is through an already existing network of practical involvements that we find ourselves as a part of. And importantly, this is a version of our experience that's going on prior to any abstraction that's being made about it. And you may notice that at this more pre-theoretical level of our experience, the casino starts to look more like something that's actually loaded with meaning, all throughout it. Certainly not a neutral environment is the point. But Sloterdijk's going to take this picture of the casino one step further than even this. Now, it should be said, he certainly thought Heidegger got this whole part of it correct. This is a more primordial form of how we experience reality that many philosophers don't account for, where in most of their work, they usually just begin at the level of abstraction. But Heidegger's whole move there is still massively incomplete for Sordidig in terms of an explanation. For example, how exactly do we become the kind of creatures in these sorts of relational networks? What is it about the most fundamental relationships we have with the actual world that produces a creature that's even capable of inhabiting something like this in the first place? So for some context, one way to understand what Sordidig's doing here is that he's adding more of a spatial dimension to Heidegger's work. that he thinks probably focused a bit too much on time as a structure of Dasein. He apparently said at one point that his whole three-book project he does in the middle of his career called Spheres, where he lays out this whole thesis, that you could think of all three of those books as titled Being in Space instead of Being in Time. Just a memorable way to think about what he's going for here. Anyway, there's again a third way of looking at this exact same casino that builds off of the second one, where in this case... We're, of course, beginning from a place where the casino is a meaningful environment. It's certainly producing a very specific world for the people living inside it. So the real question for Slaughterdeck now becomes, and this will be the case when it comes to any space we're in, what exactly is it about this whole spatial arrangement of everything that helps to progressively form the kind of person that continues to operate in this environment? And so when you take that question and you look at something like a casino, there is a borderline... predatory level of cultural forces that