Philosophy as Practice

Wisdom, Rage and the Responsibility to Think

I first encountered Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophy through Jean Carlos Luz, a friend I met during one of my journeys to Brazil. Luz also became a philosophical guide. He introduced me to a thinker I had never read before, but one who would soon challenge my understanding of what philosophy can be.

This is one way philosophy can begin: not necessarily in a lecture hall or through a systematic study of the history of philosophy, but in an encounter between people. One friend places a book in another’s hands and says: You should read this. My journeys to Brazil were connected with research, teaching and social work, but they also opened doors to new ways of thinking. Meeting Luz opened one of those doors.

The first book I read was Peter Sloterdijk’s The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice. The English title points towards philosophy as an art and wisdom as something that can be cultivated. The original German title, Scheintod im Denken, is more unsettling. It can be translated as something like “suspended animation in thought.” Philosophical thinking is associated here with a state in which we withdraw from our ordinary involvement in the world in order to observe it—and ourselves—from a distance.

Sloterdijk’s central idea is that philosophy is not merely theory. Philosophy is also practice. Just as athletes must train to develop their abilities, philosophers must practise thinking. Wisdom is not something we simply acquire by reading enough books. It must be practised. Thinking must become an exercise that touches the way we live.

This brings Sloterdijk into conversation with Edmund Husserl and phenomenology. Husserl wanted to establish philosophy as a rigorous science. One of his central concepts was epoché: we place our habitual assumptions about the world in brackets so that we can examine how the world appears to consciousness. It can be compared to walking through a shop without buying anything. We look, examine and consider, but for the moment refrain from intervening.

Such restraint may be necessary for the researcher. Without a certain distance, it is difficult to examine anything carefully. But Sloterdijk raises an unsettling question: What happens if this distance also becomes a distance from our own lives? Can we understand human existence without being personally involved in it?

This question matters far beyond philosophy. It also concerns research, teaching and social work. Professional knowledge requires us to step back, examine our assumptions and try to see more clearly. But if this withdrawal becomes complete, the person we are trying to understand may disappear behind our concepts. The researcher may disappear as well—as though knowledge could emerge from a place without a body, a history or a responsibility.

Sloterdijk therefore turns to Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, there is no thinking from a neutral position outside life. All knowledge is perspectival. We always see the world from a particular standpoint, shaped by our bodies, histories and experiences. No human observer can entirely transcend their own position.

This does not mean that truth is irrelevant, or that every viewpoint is equally valid. It means that those who seek knowledge must also examine the position from which they are looking. Philosophical practice therefore becomes more than training in argument. It becomes an exercise in self-awareness and responsibility.

But self-awareness is not enough. Philosophy must also turn its attention towards the forces that move people and societies. What happens when people are humiliated, when their dignity is violated, or when their anger is ignored and allowed to grow? These questions led me from The Art of Philosophy to Sloterdijk’s Rage and Time.

The first book asks how we can practise thinking. The second tests this thinking against the political and emotional forces of history.

Rage in History

In Rage and Time, Sloterdijk examines rage as a psychopolitical force. Beginning with Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, he traces the significance of rage through Western history. Anger is not treated merely as an individual emotion. It can be accumulated, organised and directed towards a particular purpose. Political and religious movements may gather the anger of individuals and groups, preserve it over time and transform it into collective action.

This perspective is especially relevant to the relationship between shame, humiliation, anger and violence. Acts of violence do not arise in an emotional vacuum. Individuals and groups may carry long histories of degradation, exclusion and powerlessness. When such experiences are neither acknowledged nor addressed, humiliation may develop into a desire for revenge. Those who have been humiliated may try to reverse the relationship of power by humiliating others.

This creates a dangerous movement from humiliation to counter-humiliation. Powerful nations, institutions and groups may believe they have created order, while in reality they have contributed to filling new reservoirs of anger. Violence creates humiliation, humiliation creates rage, and rage prepares the ground for further violence. Political, military and economic power can therefore produce the very hostility it later claims merely to be defending itself against.

Dialogue and negotiation can often prevent disagreement from developing into conflict. But negotiation becomes far more difficult when the parties carry a long history of humiliation and a corresponding desire for revenge. The political and the emotional cannot be separated. Public conflicts also have an inner history.

Here Sloterdijk makes an important contribution. He encourages us to examine the emotional forces beneath political ideas and historical events. His broad cultural and historical perspective may provide a foundation for further theoretical and empirical research into shame, rage, humiliation and violence. For me, with my interest in the social significance of shame, this was one of the book’s greatest strengths.

Reading Critically

Yet I also found Rage and Time troubling. Sloterdijk’s account is deeply pessimistic and sometimes gives the impression that our societies are trapped in their own accumulated rage. He offers few practical ways out. His analysis is powerful, but it does not tell us how cycles of humiliation and revenge might be broken.

I was also disappointed by the disrespectful language he occasionally uses about other thinkers. Philosophers should dare to think dangerously, as Nietzsche did. They should challenge established ideas about society, justice and the self. But dangerous thinking is not the same as disrespectful thinking. Sharp criticism does not require ridicule.

His treatment of Islam and religion is particularly problematic. Religion cannot be reduced to an instrument for collecting and directing rage. Nor can God simply be described as “the king of rage,” or religions understood solely as “metaphysical rage banks.” Religious traditions contain many voices: rage and reconciliation, judgement and mercy, exclusion and hospitality. To reduce religion to a single political or emotional function is not only inaccurate. It may also reinforce the divisions the analysis was intended to explain.

These objections do not make Sloterdijk unimportant. On the contrary, engaging critically with him is part of what it means to read philosophy as a practice. A philosophical text should not merely be admired or rejected. It should be worked with, questioned and sometimes resisted. The reader, too, has a responsibility to think.

The Responsibility of Wisdom

This brings us back to the ancient Socratic idea that practising philosophy is also a way of practising death. This need not be understood as a longing for death. It may instead mean that we must dare to let go of some of what we cling to: our certainties, our ready-made answers and perhaps even the image we have created of ourselves. Something must be allowed to step aside before the world can appear differently.

In a sense, we must lose ourselves in order to find ourselves. But the self we find is not necessarily the same self we left behind.

Philosophy then becomes more than an academic discipline. It becomes a way of life. Reading, writing and thinking are not merely ways of gathering knowledge. They are exercises in living more attentively. Philosophy does not necessarily teach us what to believe. It can, however, teach us to pause, examine our own standpoint and ask whether the lives we lead are consistent with what we claim to know.

But wisdom as practice also requires us to return to the world. We must try to recognise anger before it becomes hatred, humiliation before it becomes revenge, and power before it becomes the degradation of another human being. Philosophical distance may help us to see more clearly, but it does not release us from the responsibility to act.

Philosophy as practice is therefore not only an exercise in observing the world. It is also an exercise in confronting the world’s rage without contributing to new cycles of humiliation and revenge.

I think back to Brazil and to my friend Luz, who showed me the way into Sloterdijk’s philosophy. It reminds me that wisdom rarely develops in solitude. It often emerges through conversation, friendship and encounters with people who open doors we did not know were there.

Luz did more than introduce me to the name of a new philosopher. He invited me into a continuing practice of thought—a practice in which reading leads to questions, questions lead to further reading, and disagreement becomes part of the search for understanding.

Perhaps wisdom begins precisely there: when one person shares a thought with another, and both are changed, if only slightly, by the encounter.

References

Helmick, R. G. (2004). Negotiating outside the law: Why Camp David failed. Pluto Press.

Jones, J. W. (2008). Blood that cries out from the earth: The psychology of religious terrorism. Oxford University Press.

Scheff, T. J. (1994). Bloody revenge: Emotions, nationalism, and war. Westview Press.

Sloterdijk, P. (2010). Rage and time: A psychopolitical investigation (M. Wenning, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 2006)

Sloterdijk, P. (2012). The art of philosophy: Wisdom as a practice (K. Margolis, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 2010)

Smelser, N. J. (2007). The faces of terrorism: Social and psychological dimensions. Princeton University Press.

Smith, D. (2006). Globalization: The hidden agenda. Polity Press.

Stern, J. (2003). Terror in the name of God: Why religious militants kill. Ecco.

Strozier, C. B., Terman, D. M., Jones, J. W., & Boyd, K. A. (Eds.). (2010). The fundamentalist mindset: Psychological perspectives on religion, violence, and history. Oxford University Press.

Based on the original blog posts “The Art of Philosophy—Wisdom as a Practice” and “Peter Sloterdijk 2010, Rage and Time”, published in Praktisk Filosofi in 2012 and 2013.