Peter Sloterdijk Quotes
Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher and cultural theorist, long associated with the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, whose three-volume Spheres trilogy offered a sweeping spatial anthropology of human existence as a being-in-spheres, from the prenatal microsphere of the womb to the planetary macrosphere of globalization. His earlier Critique of Cynical Reason brought psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School into contact with the classical Cynicism of Diogenes, while his recent You Must Change Your Life developed an immunological theory of practice in which the human is the animal that lives by exercises and self-formation. The quotes below are attributed to Peter Sloterdijk, organized by topic.
Peter Sloterdijk on Death
-
“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.”
p. xxvii
Peter Sloterdijk on Knowledge
-
“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.”
p. xxvi -
“Socialization through schooling, as it takes place here, and in Western societies, in general, is a priori stupefaction”
p. xxix -
“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.”
p. 5 -
“Zynismus ist das aufgeklärte falsche Bewußtsein, an dem Aufklärung zugleich erfolgreich und vergeblich gearbeitet hat. Es hat seine Aufklärungselektion gelernt, aber nicht vollzogen und wohl nicht vollziehen können. Gutsituiert und miserabel zugleich fühlt sich dieses Bewußtsein von keiner Ideologiekritik mehr betroffen; seine Falschheit ist bereits reflexiv gefedert.”
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
Peter Sloterdijk on Mind
-
Attributed to Peter Sloterdijk:
“The human being is the animal that has to make of itself something.”
-
“Does not an ingenuous contact with Kantian thinking, with philosophical thinking in general, contain the risk of exposing a young consciousness to a violent and sudden aging? What of a youthful will to know is preserved in a philosophy that makes one dizzy with its bony spiraling turns of the screw?”
p. xxxi -
“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.”
p. xxxi -
“Our thinking is becoming much more morose than precise. … Capacity of thought does not keep pace with what is problematic. Hence the self-abdication of critique. … Because everything has become problematic, everything is also somehow a matter of indifference.”
p. xxxii
Peter Sloterdijk on Nature
-
Attributed to Peter Sloterdijk:
“We live not in the world but in spheres of our own making.”
Peter Sloterdijk on Politics
-
Attributed to Peter Sloterdijk:
“Globalization is the late history of the sphere.”
-
“The violent, antirationalistic impulse in Western countries is reacting to an intellectual state of affairs in which all thinking has become strategy; this impulse shows a disgust for a certain form of self-preservation. It is a sensitive shivering from the cold breath of a reality where knowledge is power and power is knowledge.”
p. xxix
Peter Sloterdijk on Time
-
“Our lethargic modernity certainly knows how to “think historically,” but it has long doubted that it lives in a meaningful history.”
p. xxviii
Peter Sloterdijk on Truth
-
“Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness.”
Zynismus ist das aufgeklärte falsche Bewußtsein, an dem Aufklärung zugleich erfolgreich und vergeblich gearbeitet hat. Es hat seine Aufklärungselektion gelernt, aber nicht vollzogen und wohl nicht vollziehen können. Gutsituiert und miserabel zugleich fühlt sich dieses Bewußtsein von keiner Ideologiekritik mehr betroffen; seine Falschheit ist bereits reflexiv gefedert.
Peter Sloterdijk on Virtue
-
Attributed to Peter Sloterdijk:
“You must change your life.”