Peter Sloterdijk: Modernity

“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.”

Peter Sloterdijk

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 539

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

Peter Sloterdijk

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. xxviii

History , Thinking

“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

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.
Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), pp. 5-6

Feeling , Learning , Time , Falseness

“Because there are no truths that can be taken possession of without a struggle, and because all knowledge must choose a place in the configuration of hegemonic and oppositional forces, the means of establishing knowledge seem to be almost more important than the knowledge itself. … The demand to universalize the rational draws it into the vortex of politics, pedagogy, and propaganda. With this, enlightenment consciously represses the harsh realism of older precepts of wisdom, for which there was no question that the masses are foolish and that reason is to be found only among the few. Modern elitism has to encode itself democratically.”

Peter Sloterdijk

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 11

Wisdom , Truth , Question , Knowledge

“Since modern thinking no longer entrusts itself with the translation of self-knowledge into worldly knowledge, and of world experience into self-experience, philosophy has had to withdraw from theories of "objective reason" into those of "subjective reason." The ground is thus taken from under the feet of the ancient holistic pathos, and philosophy sinks into the apparent truncatedness and groundlessness of the subjective.”

Peter Sloterdijk

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 538

World , Knowledge , Thinking

“In an earlier day, the rich lived at the expense of the poor, directly and unequivocally; in a modern economy, unproductive citizens increasingly live at the expense of productive ones—though in an equivocal way, since they are told, and believe, that they are disadvantaged and deserve more still. Today, in fact, a good half of the population of every modern nation is made up of people with little or no income, who are exempt from taxes and live, to a large extent, off the other half of the population, which pays taxes. If such a situation were to be radicalized, it could give rise to massive social conflict. The eminently plausible free-market thesis of exploitation by the unproductive would then have prevailed over the much less promising socialist thesis of the exploitation of labor by capital.”

Peter Sloterdijk

The Grasping Hand (2010)

People , Way

“If the movements of reflection in classical philosophy could be depicted in the structure of Homer's Odysseus, in which a wandering hero returns home via a thousand false paths across the whole world, in order there to be recognized by his woman, that is, by his "soul," then the reflections of modern thinking in no way still find their way back "home." They either move on the spot in essenceless flurries, drained of experience, or they drift on, like the eternal Jew or the Flying Dutchman, without hope of arriving, through the perpetually alien. … For the modern subject, a "vagabond in existence," there is no longer any return home.”

Peter Sloterdijk

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 538

World , Hope , Way , Home

““Philosophical” ideology critique is truly the heir of a great satirical tradition, in which the motif of unmasking, exposing, baring has served for aeons now as a weapon. But modern ideology critique—according to our thesis has ominously cut itself off from the powerful traditions of laughter in satirical knowledge.”

Peter Sloterdijk

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 16

Knowledge , Laughter