Lecture 3: Religion as Verticality

If reduction to the political is an inadequate account of the sacred, then perhaps we need to understand religion in terms of verticality, that there is a vertical attraction that orientates human beings towards transcendence. The German philosopher Peter Sloterdjik has reflected on this and presented a philosophy of the human that takes verticality into account. Following the pattern of the previous lectures, this lecture will present a description of verticality and offer a critical reflection that takes up themes from the last lecture of the need to understand the human by drawing on social neuroscience and evolutionary anthropology.