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The Quest for Verticality: an Inquiry into the Infinite Nature of Self-Perfection

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Abstract

If there is one question that has perplexed the best minds in every society, it is how to raise the individuals from their present state to a higher state of existence and perfection? The answers have been tried using different formulations in history: religious, scientific and political. The common factor in all these historical formulations was that they were designed in opposition to each other and therefore left many things unaccounted. The aim of this paper is to explore the idea of self-perfection as a continuous streak of infinite vertical ascension. The paper has elaborated the idea of ‘Verticality’, propounded by Peter Sloterdijk for looking in to the domains of self-perfection and the stages of vertical ascension. For our purpose, we have relied on the example of discipline of Management that has progressively theorized about different aspects and stages of existence.

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Notes

  1. For the detailed description of the idea of society developed in 19th and twentieth century, See Anthony Giddens (1971) Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

  2. According to Bruno Latour, much of the so called postmodernist discontent stems from the failure of the promised project of modernity of universalism, emancipation and rationality. See his works, We Have Never Been Modern (1993) & An Inquiry into the Mode of Existence (2013) for postmodernist confusion between facts and artifacts and the larger question of truth associated with it. Similarly, Sloterdijk’s (2001) elaboration of idea of Cynicism in the post-war period captures the ambivalence towards actions and their larger utility.

  3. Akeel Bilgrami, while studying the history of western moral philosophy, finds universalization to be its recurrent theme, which he calls by the name of universalizability: to extend the scope of one’s moral values to everybody else as a necessity.

  4. See Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation (2004) to see the interconnectedness between personal transformation and the mythologies that accumulate stories about great people’s transformation.

  5. See the works of Gerda Lerner, Marija Gimbutas, Sarah Pomeroy and Miriam Robbins Dexter who have shown the relation between the political power paradigm of one ruler and the rise of monotheism.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, 500046, India

    Prashant Kumar Singh

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Verticality is an idea propounded by Peter Sloterdijk to explain the process of raising oneself to newer heights, to higher stages of self-perfection. Therefore infinite self-perfection refers to boundless possibilities for human growth and development.

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Singh, P.K. The Quest for Verticality: an Inquiry into the Infinite Nature of Self-Perfection. Philosophy of Management 19, 387–408 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-020-00137-x

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