Abstract

How can an enterprise, such as Sloterdijk defines in his You Must Change Your Life and its satellite The Art of Philosophy, be “Enlightenment-conservative”? That is the question leading these reflections on the key terms that contain both works in nuce – practice of course, but also perspective and retrospective, transition, extension, explicitation, turn, return, and quarter turn –, reflections that shed light on Sloterdijk’s non-revolutionary conception of Enlightenment as a continuing modernity, without postmodernity, but in need of a curator, a conservateur, and that expose the ontologico-ethical question of the authoritative or sublime imperative (you must) in its Heideggerian, Nietzschean, and finally pseudo-Kantian, even apocalyptic tones, and in its attempt to preserve not only the Enlightenment, but the Renaissance and Antiquity at the same time.