Peter Sloterdijk quotes - page 2

Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher, cultural theorist, and author, recognized for his innovative works on philosophy, society, and media. His writings blend philosophical analysis with contemporary social commentary and have influenced modern European thought. He is considered one of the most original and provocative thinkers of the 21st century. Here are 44 of his quotes:

Since the eighteenth century, enlighteners have concerned themselves-as defenders of "true morality,” whatever that may be-with the morality of those who rule. ... The moralism in the bourgeois sense of decency put aristocratically refined immoralism into the position of the politically accused. ... But bourgeois thinking all too naively assumes it is possible to subordinate political power to moral concepts. It does not anticipate that one day, when it has itself come to power, it will end up in the same ambivalence. It has not yet realized that it is only a small step from taking moral offense to respectable hypocrisy.

Peter Sloterdijk

To be "reasonable” means to put oneself into a special, rarely happy relation to the sensuous. "Be reasonable” means, practically speaking, do not trust your impulses, do not listen to your body, learn control, starting with your own sensuousness. But intellect and sensuousness are inseparable. Torless's outbreak of sweating after two pages of the Critique of Pure Reason contains as much truth as the whole of Kantianism. The understood mutual interaction of physis and logos is philosophy, not what is spoken.

Peter Sloterdijk

For as long as possible, the learned collegium has tried to defend its integrity against the close combat of ideologico-critical exposures. Do not unmask, lest you yourself be unmasked could be the unspoken rule. It is no accident that the great representatives of critique-the French moralists, the Encyclopedists, the socialists, and especially Heine, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud-remain outsiders to the scholarly domain. In all of them there is a satirical, polemical component that can scarcely be hidden under the mask of scholarly respectability. These signals of a holy nonseriousness, which remains one of the sure indexes of truth, can be employed as signposts to the critique of cynical reason.

Peter Sloterdijk

Psychology is familiar with the "eternal victim,” who exploits this position for disguised aggressions. Also belonging to this category, in a broader sense, are those permanent losers as well as medical and political hypochondriacs who lament that conditions are so terrible that it is a great sacrifice on their part not to kill themselves or emigrate. On the German Left, not least of all under the influence of the sociologized schema of the victim, a certain type of renegade has emerged who feels that it is a dirty trick to have to live in this land without summer and without oppositional forces. Nobody can say that such a viewpoint does not know what it is talking about. Its mistake is that it remains blind to itself. For the accusation becomes bound to misery and magnifies it under the subterfuge of unsuspecting critical observations. With the obstinacy of a Sophist, in aggressive self-reification, many a "critical” consciousness refuses to become healthier than the sick whole.

Peter Sloterdijk

"Knowledge is power.” This is the sentence that dug the grave of philosophy in the nineteenth century. ... This sentence brings to an end the tradition of a knowledge that, as its name indicates, was an erotic theory-the love of truth and the truth through love (Liebeswahrheit). ... Those who utter the sentence reveal the truth. However, with the utterance they want to achieve more than truth: They want to intervene in the game of power.

Peter Sloterdijk

Philosophy ... lost its prestige to the extent that it lost its evident advantage in cleverness to "normal life." In the transition from archaic teachings of wisdom to philosophy based on argument, it itself was engulfed in the twilight of alienation from life. It had to accept that the independent cleverness theories of pragmatics, economics, strategy, and politics proved themselves to be its better, until, with its logical niceties, it became infantile and academic, and stood there as the Utopian idiot with its reminiscences about great ideals. Today philosophy is surrounded on all sides by maliciously clever empiricisms and realistic disciplines that "know better."

Peter Sloterdijk

In the kynicism of Diogenes of Sinope, the laughter about philosophy itself became philosophical. ... In the pantomimes and wordplays of the philosopher from the tub, the Gay Science was born, which saw the earnestness of the false life recur in the false earnestness of philosophy.

Peter Sloterdijk

... undermined by the need for seriousness ...

Peter Sloterdijk

Our lethargic modernity certainly knows how to "think historically,” but it has long doubted that it lives in a meaningful history.

Peter Sloterdijk

The establishment of inwardness and the creation of the illusion of privacy are the most subversive themes of enlightenment. It is still not really clear today who the social conveyor of this impulse of enlightenment may be. One of the ambivalences of enlightenment is that although intelligence can be explained sociologically, educationally, and politically, "wisdom,” self-reflection cannot. The subject of a radical ego enlightenment cannot be socially identified with certainty-even though the procedures of this enlightenment are anchored in reality. In this point, the majority of societies seem to strive for a conscious nonenlightenment.

Peter Sloterdijk

Philosophical thinking peddles its wares today at a fair of self-sublations and falls head over heels in its eagerness to find favor with ironic, pragmatic, and strategic realisms. The risk of such realistic metamorphoses is obvious: It can easily end up by substituting the bad with something worse. It is a short step from the kynical "sublation" of philosophy to the cynical self-denial of what great philosophy had embodied in its best aspects.

Peter Sloterdijk

There probably has to be a worldview for practical men who must be strong enough to get their hands dirty in political practice without getting dirty themselves, and even if they do, who cares? And a second worldview for youths, simpletons, women, and sensitive souls, for whom "purity” is just the right thing. One could call it a division of labor among temperaments.

Peter Sloterdijk

From the start, the bourgeois-positivistic fraction of enlightenment was uncomfortable about the unpredictable, subversive dimensions of the new category, the unconscious. With it, the motif of critical self-reflection was introduced into civilization in a way that could not please those who held themselves to be the representatives of civilization. If every ego is underlaid by an unconscious, then that is the end of the self-satisfaction of a consciousness that thinks it knows itself, and thus knows how to value itself. The "unconscious” touched on the cultural narcissism of all social classes.

Peter Sloterdijk

Diogenes of Sinope ... was also the first to recognize the danger embodied in Plato, that the school will subjugate life, that the artificial psychosis of "absolute knowledge" wants to destroy the vital connection between perception, movement, and understanding.

Peter Sloterdijk

Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered.

Peter Sloterdijk

Psychologically, present-day cynics can be understood as borderline melancholics, who can keep their symptoms of depression under control and can remain more or less able to work. ... Their psychic (seelisch) apparatus has become elastic enough to incorporate as a survival factor a permanent doubt about their own activities. They know what they are doing, but they do it because, in the short run, the force of circumstances and the instinct for self-preservation are speaking the same language, and they are telling them that it has to be so.

Peter Sloterdijk

In our thinking there is no longer any spark of the uplifting flight of concepts or of the ecstasies of understanding. We are enlightened, we are apathetic. No one talks anymore of a love of wisdom. There is no longer any knowledge whose friend (philos) one could be. It does not occur to us to love the kind of knowledge we have; rather we ask ourselves how we might contrive to live with it without becoming ossified.

Peter Sloterdijk