You Must Change Your Life
‘You must change you life!’ - these words seem to come from a sphere in which no objections can be raised. Nor can we establish from where they are spoken; only their verticality is beyond doubt.
...It is not enough to say that Rilke retranslated ethics in an aestheticizing fashion into a succinct, cyclopian, archaic-brutal form. He discovered a stone that embodies the torso of 'religion’, ethics and asceticism as such: a construct that exudes a call from above, reduced to the pure command, the unconditional instruction, the illuminated utterance of being that can be understood - and which only speaks in the imperative...
'You must change your life!’ - this is the imperative that exceeds the options of hypothetical and categorical. It is the absolute imperative–the quintessential metanoetic command. It provides the keyword for revolution in the second person singular. It defines life as a slope from its higher to its lower forms. I am already living, but something is telling me with unchallengable authority: you are not living properly. The numinous authority of form enjoys the prerogative of being able to tell me 'You must’. It is the authority of a different life in this life. This authority touches on a subtle insufficiency within me that is older and freer than sin; it is my innermost not-yet. In my most conscious moment, I am affected by the absolute objection to my status quo: my change is the one thing that is necessary.
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
