Peter Sloterdijk: Self

“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

“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

“Philosophical thinking peddles its wares today at a fair of self-sublations and falls head over heels in its eagerness to find favor with ironic, pragmatic, and strategic realisms. The risk of such realistic metamorphoses is obvious: It can easily end up by substituting the bad with something worse. It is a short step from the kynical "sublation" of philosophy to the cynical self-denial of what great philosophy had embodied in its best aspects.”

Peter Sloterdijk

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

Thinking

“From the start, the bourgeois-positivistic fraction of enlightenment was uncomfortable about the unpredictable, subversive dimensions of the new category, the unconscious. With it, the motif of critical self-reflection was introduced into civilization in a way that could not please those who held themselves to be the representatives of civilization. If every ego is underlaid by an unconscious, then that is the end of the self-satisfaction of a consciousness that thinks it knows itself, and thus knows how to value itself. The “unconscious” touched on the cultural narcissism of all social classes.”

Peter Sloterdijk

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 50

Way , Thinking

“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.”

Peter Sloterdijk

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

“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

“The courtly person (cortegiano, gentilhomme, gentleman, Hofmann) has gone through a training in self-esteem that expresses itself in many ways: in aristocratically pretentious opinions, in polished or majestic manners, in gallant or heroic patterns of feeling as well as in a selective, aesthetic sensitivity for that which is said to be courtly or pretty. The noble, far removed from any self-doubt, should achieve all this with a complete matter-of-factness. Any uncertainty, any doubt in these things signifies a slackening in the nobility’s cultural “identity.” This class narcissism, which has petrified into a form of life, tolerates no irony, no exception, no slips, because such disturbances would give rise to unwelcome reflections. The French nobles did not turn up their noses at Shakespeare’s “barbarism” without reason. In his plays one already “smells” the human ordinariness of those who want to stand before society as the best.
With the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, the place of the “best” is awarded anew. The bourgeois ego, in an unprecedented, creative storming to the heights of a new class consciousness won for itself an autonomous narcissism.”

Peter Sloterdijk

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 62

Life , Way , Feeling , Personality

“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

“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.”

Peter Sloterdijk

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

Thinking , Indifference

“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.”

Peter Sloterdijk

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

Knowledge , Thinking , Reality , Country

“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

“The one version of the bourgeois comprises the artisan, the trader, the official, the financier, and the entrepreneur, all of whom, in their own way, can claim to know what labor is. Juxtaposed to them from the beginning, stands a type of bourgeois who does research, writes poetry, composes and makes music, and philosophizes and who believes that these activities develop a world that is self-sufficient. It is obvious that these two fractions of the bourgeois ego get on only superficially and come together only in the hollow connection of property and cultivation. They create the century-long tension between the good and the evil bourgeois, the idealist and the exploiter, the visionary and the pragmatist, the ideally liberated bourgeois and the laboring bourgeois. This tension remains as inexhaustible as that between the world of work and “freedom” in general.”

Peter Sloterdijk

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), pp. 63-64

World , Music , Way , Freedom

“Every naturalism begins as involuntary naïveté. Initially, we cannot help thinking that the “order of things” is an objective order. For the first glance falls on the things and not on the “eyeglasses.” In the work of enlightenment, this first innocence becomes irretrievably lost. Enlightenment leads to the loss of naïveté and it furthers the collapse of objectivism through a gain in self-experience. It effects an irreversible awakening and, expressed pictorially, executes the turn to the eyeglasses, i. e., to one’s own rational apparatus. Once this consciousness of the eyeglasses has been awakened in a culture, the old naïveté loses its charm, becomes defensive, and is transformed into narrow-mindedness, which is intent on remaining as it is. The mythology of the Greeks is still enchanting; that of fascism is only stale and shameless. In the first myth, a step toward an interpretation of the world was taken; in simulated naïveté, an artful stupefaction (Verdummung) is at work—the predominant method of self-integration in advanced social orders.”

Peter Sloterdijk

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 59

World , Art , Nature , Thinking