AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
I'm not sure "aspiration" is the best name for this, because to me it connotes a kind of social climbing. There is aspiration to higher things (verticality, like anthropotechnics) and to higher status. Often confused, and perhaps in fact so intertwined that they are aspects of the same thing.
Huh, Sloterdijk is not mentioned in the book...I guess analytic and continental philosophy really are different worlds and only weird amateurs like me try and connect the two. But it really sounds like they are attacking the same problem from two wildly different perspectives.
A central term in in Sloterdijk's You Must Change Your Life, referring literally to the ways in which mankind creates or improves itself, at a very pragmatic sort of cultural engineering sense. So referring to all sorts of training programs, including spiritual disciplines, physical and martial training, and more.
Sloterdijk's definition is "an activity done for the sake of its own self-improvement" (I think, that's from memory).