Peter Sloterdijk Quotes on Mind
Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason (1983) and the three-volume Spheres trilogy (1998–2004) give contemporary German philosophy one of its most distinctive engagements with the philosophical anthropology of the modern mind. The central thesis of the Spheres trilogy is that human beings are creatures who inhabit air-conditioned spheres of meaning — bubbles, globes, and foams — whose successive historical configurations supply the immunological conditions for human mental and political life, with the modern atmospheric collapse of the great enclosing sphere of Christian-cosmological order producing the distinctive ressentiment-saturated psychology Sloterdijk diagnoses. The framework, drawing on Heidegger, Nietzsche, the German philosophical-anthropological tradition through Plessner and Gehlen, and a wide-ranging engagement with the history of art, religion, and technology, has shaped contemporary continental reflection on the post-metaphysical conditions of mental life.
Quotes
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Attributed to Peter Sloterdijk:
“The human being is the animal that has to make of itself something.”
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Attributed to Peter Sloterdijk:
“We live not in the world but in spheres of our own making.”
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“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 -
“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 -
“Bourgeois morality tries to maintain an illusion of altruism, whereas in all other areas bourgeois thinking has long since assumed a theoretical as well as an economic egocentrism.”
Critique of Cynical Reason(1987) | p. 45 -
“In the twilight of late enlightenment, the insight gains shape that our "praxis," which we always held to be the most legitimate child of reason, in fact, represents the central myth of modernity.”
Critique of Cynical Reason(1987) | p. 539 -
“The question about “good origins” becomes the crux for enlightenment. It becomes more and more clear that this idea of origin has not a temporal but a Utopian reference. The Good is still nowhere to be found, except in the wishful human spirit.”
Critique of Cynical Reason(1987) | p. 56