Today, the Deep End brings you an in-depth review of a major new work of near-impenetrable German philosophy. What better way to lift the spirits as summer gives way to autumn?
Our reviewer is Joshua Mostafa writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books and our German philosopher is Peter Sloterdijk, whose 1998 book Blasen has finally been published in English translation. The English title is ‘Bubbles’, which makes its sounds like the biography of some frivolous socialite – but there’s nothing lightweight about this 600 page volume (itself just the first part of Sloterdijk’s monumental ‘Spheres’ trilogy).
The author is a leading public intellectual in Germany and a controversial one too, as Mostafa explains:
From the above, you might conclude that Sloterdijk is an advocate of “rugged individualism”, a sort of Teutonic Ayn Rand. Not a bit of it:
Sloterdijk is not, one presumes, a conservative. Many of his musings are decidedly un-conservative – as one might expect from someone so steeped in contemporary academic philosophy. And yet, his “rejection of the idea of essential loneliness… [as] an inherent characteristic of the human condition” must surely lead one in a conservative direction.
While the concept of personhood is central to philosophical conservatism, so is the connectedness of each person to other people within the organic institutions of family, community and nation, each of which of which stretch out beyond ourselves not only in space, but also in time through the traditions that sustain a living culture.
It is fascinating to see what had happens when philosophy slips the constraints of modernism and post-modernism and drifts, however erratically, back towards eternal truth.