Abstract

In the third volume of his Spheres trilogy, Foams, Peter Sloterdijk develops a topology of the human, namely a theory concerning the fundamental dimensions of the anthropogenesis. These dimensions represent the criteria, provided which the phenomenon of human being is possible. Each of them expresses an aspect of the event of the anthropogenesis and an essential constant of the human condition. The aim of this paper is, firstly, to analyze one of these dimensions, namely the thermotop. This dimension represents the complex of the dynamics, which produce the space of the spoiling, in which the human being can appear. In this context, spoiling means the consequence of the suspension of the environmental selective pressure, in favor of the institution of endogenous criteria of surviving. This circumstance allows highlighting the technical nature of the human being, whose genesis deeply depends on the production of inorganic prosthesis, which shape its psychophysical and behavioral constitution. Secondly, this paper aims to show how this fundamental situation of the human being entails, according to Sloterdijk, the coincidence of its existence and conception conditions. This means, that the human environment represents at the same time the place, in which the human being can exist as such and through which one can properly conceptualize it. This is due to the fact, that the reconstruction of the process of anthropogenesis includes in itself the reconstruction of its own conditions of possibility.