Peter Sloterdijk: Politics

“The dance around the golden calf of identity is the last and greatest orgy of counterenlightenment. Identity is the magic word of a partially hidden, partially open conservatism that has inscribed personal identity, occupational identity, national identity, political identity, female identity, male identity, class identity, party identity, etc., on its banner.”

Peter Sloterdijk

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), pp. 60-61

Dance , Personality

“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

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 46

Thinking , Sense

“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

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 58

Feeling , Sense , Summer , Parting

“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

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 536

Life , Wisdom

“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

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 60

Wisdom , Intelligence , Reality

“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

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 44

Women , Men , Youth , Soul

“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

“The evidence introduced for political pessimism; the criminal, the lunatic, and the asocial individual, in a word, the second-rate citizen —these are not by nature as one finds them now but have been made so by society. It is said that they have never had a chance to be as they would be according to their nature, but were forced into the situation in which they find themselves through poverty, coercion, and ignorance. They are victims of society.
This defense against political pessimism regarding human nature is at first convincing. It possesses the superiority of dialectical thinking over positivistic thinking. It transforms moral states and qualities into processes. Brutal people do not “exist,” only their brutalization; criminality does not “exist,” only criminalization; stupidity does not “exist,” only stupefaction; self-seeking does not “exist,” only training in egoism; there are no second-rate citizens, only victims of patronization. What political positivism takes to be nature is in reality falsified nature: the suppression of opportunity for human beings. Rousseau knew of two aids who could illustrate his point of view, two classes of human beings who lived before civilization and, consequently, before perversion: the noble savage and the child. Enlightenment literature develops two of its most intimate passions around these two figures: ethnology and pedagogy.”

Peter Sloterdijk

(describing Rousseau’s philosophy) p. 55
Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983)

People , Stupidity , Literature , Nature

“From this moment on, the child becomes a political object—to a certain extent, the living security deposit of enlightenment. The child is the “noble savage” in one’s own house. Through appropriate education care must be taken in the future that innocent children are not made into the same artificial social cripples the previous system produced. Children are already what the new bourgeois humans believe they want to become.”

Peter Sloterdijk

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), pp. 55-56

Children , Education , Future , Housing

“Did not Nietzsche too warn of that “life-destroying enlightenment” that touches on our life-supporting self-delusions? Can we afford to shake up the “basic fictions” of privacy, personality, and identity? Be that as it may, in this question both old and new conservatives have come to the hard decision to take the “stance” of defending, against all the demands of reflection, their “unavoidable lies for living,” without which self-preservation would not be possible. That they are aided in this by the general fear of self-experience, which competes with curiosity about self-experience, does not have to be expressly emphasized. Thus the theater of respectable, closed egos goes on everywhere, even where the means have long been available to secure better knowledge. Crosswise to all political fronts, it is the “ego” in society that offers the most resolute resistance against the decisive enlightenment. Scarcely anyone will put up with radical self-reflection on this point, not even many of those who regard themselves as enlighteners.”

Peter Sloterdijk

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 60

Life , Fear , Question , Support