[MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]. Hello. The German Peter Sloterdijk is one of the most creative, original and erudite contemporary philosopher. In his work, you must change your life, he explains how a new self improvement spirit has pervaded our society. And this lesson we will deepen into Sloterdijk thought related with sport and Olympic games. According to the German philosopher, Sloterdijk, human beings are moved by two impulses drives: The thymotic drives. from the Greek, Thymós, which means courage, and the erotic ones. The thymothic impulse refers to the pride, the courage, the feeling of dignity. This drive can be found in sport, in the impulse of self-improvement that sport entails. The combination of both explains the human condition in its complexity. The psychoanalysis approach explained all the human behavior highlighting the decisive influence of the sexual drives. However, this would be a simple way of explaining the human nature. The prevalence of the sexual impulse would not explain the self-improvement impulse of an athlete, for example. The sport phenomenon is one of the most important trends in the current societies, for its social presence, as a practice but as a spectacle too. However, in this section we will focus on the aspects which link sport to its practice dimension. According to Peter Sloterdijk, we can describe the human being as a being that does exercise. In this sense, Sloterdijk understands exercise as those practices we do in order to improve our performance, for learning to live, and which are not focused on the physical exercise. They are oriented to improve our performance in future occasions, in learning a foreign language, in driving a car or in managing new computer software, for instance. According to the aforementioned philosopher, the point is that the effort and the self-improvement capacity that is present in the practice of sport can and must be transferred to other activities on a daily basis different from sport, which required from a self- improvement capacity. For the first time, in the 21st century the culture of the effort and self-improvement became separated from the religious practise. The asceticism, which means exercise in Greek, is a way of life that has been traditionally linked to religious practices: hermits, eremites or yogis devoted to life of prays and privacy with the aspiration of being closer to the divinity of finding the divinity in their inner world. On the other hand, with the renaissance of sport, the figure of the coach has resurged. In the sense, a couch is somebody who wants that we can. According to Sloterdijk, since the renaissance of somatic and the athletics, which was produced in the final years of the 19th century thanks to the modern Olympic games, and during the 20th century, the sport has had a great influence in the society. With the revival of the Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin established a new religion, a cultural religion, emancipated from its religious design, the religion of sport. This new cultural religion became into the most holistic, and integrated organizational model based on the effort and the exercise, apart from the army world, the world of the war. In the modern times, we have lived a process of de-spiritualization of the asceticism of exercise. In other words, currently that attitude of effort, sacrifice, and self-improvement is not exclusively linked to the religious practice, but to the sport practice mainly. In this sense, from the sport practices this culture of improvement would be transferred to other aspects of our every day life. Sloterdijk considers a key moment in the way of de-spiritualisation of the asceticism the first Marathon, during the first modern Olympic Games in Athens, which was held on April 10, 1896. The champion was a 23 year old Greek shepherd, called Spiridon Louis. He lasted two hours, 58 minutes and 50 seconds to run the distance between Marathon and the Olympic Stadium in Athens, constructed when Athens was a Roman province and which had been restored on the occasion on the first modern Olympic Games. During the entrance of Spyridon Louis in the stadium, a new way of energy had been discovered, a kind of emotional electricity, which, would be present along the 20th century coinciding with the sport as a center of mass spectacles. Sloterdijk points out that that afternoon was presented for the first time to the modern public a new category of the so-called Gods of the moment, which until that moment had not been known. As Sloterdijk highlight, these Gods did not need any demonstration, because they only existed while its manifestation lasted, Gods in which you don't believe but you experience them. At five in the afternoon on 10th of April 1896 it was inaugurated a new chapter in the history of enthusiasm, he said. When Spyiridon Louis entered the stadium, the Greek princes accompanied him to go over the last meters. Then, it was taken to the King's presence. According to Sloterdijk, that moment started an epoch of hierarchical inversions. For a moment an athlete who was a shepherd was turned into the kind of the king. It was seen how the majesty and the power of the monarch was transferred to the shepherd. This was the starting point of this new time in which sport turned into a way of transforming people's lives. The sport became a path of self-improvement in the benefit not only to the individual, but also to the society as a whole. To sum up, for Sloterdijk, the Olympics took us a new religion, a religion without Gods, the religion of self-improvement throughout the asceticism, the exercise. The human being is not only motivated for the impulses of pleasure and the sex, but the thymotic ones, the courage, the pride and the feeling of dignity. These are the drivers not only for the self-improvement in the sport, but also for the self-improvement in our daily life. [BLANK_AUDIO]
