Peter Sloterdijk Quotes on Mind
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. This page collects quotes attributed to Peter Sloterdijk on the topic of mind, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
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