Abstract
Abstract. With his three-volume magnum opus on spheres, Peter Sloterdijk introduces a critical philosophical and cultural view of the spatiality of current society. His spatial metaphors serve as an intriguing source for inspiration for geographers. He describes the topological conditions of society by means of three different forms of spherical conditions of life: bubbles, globes, and foams. To understand, assess, and critique our current society we, according to Sloterdijk, need to replace the arrogant and cynical academic view of Plato and his followers with the more serene composure of the kinetic view of Diogenes. In this contribution, on the one hand we shall elaborate the spatial metaphor Sloterdijk uses. On the other hand we want to scrutinise Sloterdijk's ideas by drawing some parallels between his ideas and those of other philosophical anthropological thinkers. Finally, we very briefly want to point to a suitable conceptual framework for empirically investigating the spherology of human being in the world.
Highlights
Even if his work seems to be rather eclectic and fuzzy, there is a basic line of spatial argumentation in his work, which makes him, especially for geographers, a very interesting and inspiring thinker
Peter Sloterdijk claims that his theory of spheres is an elaboration of the spatiality of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927)
Sloterdijk’s philosophical starting point is Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), in which Heidegger dealt with the temporality of human existence (Dasein), which Sloterdijk tries to reformulate in a philosophy of Being and Space (Noordegraaf-Eelens and Schinkel, 2005)
Summary
Peter Sloterdijk has written almost about everything, and in doing so has developed a great number of inspiring as well as provocative new ideas and new critical perspectives on old ideas. He is sometimes accused of being a philosophical knock, knock, ginger prankster – a thinker who yells something and quickly hides away He loves to throw out some grand ideas, out of the blue, in a language which is bombastic, swollen and full of neologisms and with which he amuses and confuses his audience. Even if his work seems to be rather eclectic and fuzzy, there is a basic line of spatial argumentation in his work, which makes him, especially for geographers, a very interesting and inspiring thinker In his magnum opus, the trilogy Spheres, the first volume of which was titled Bubbles (2011), the second Globes (2014) and the concluding one Foams (2016b), he develops his main ideas about the spatiality of the human being.
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