{"author":"Peter Sloterdijk","author_id":"Peter+Sloterdijk","total_quotes":28,"quotes":[{"text":"The aesthetic construct, and nothing else, has taught us to expose ourselves to a non-enslaving experience of rank differences. The work of art is even allowed to 'tell' us, those who have run away from form, something, because it quite obviously does not embody the intention to confine us. 'La poesie ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose' Something that exposes itself and proves itself in this test gains unpresumed authority. In the space of aesthetic simulation, which is at once the emergency space for the success and failure of the artistic construct, the powerless superiority of the works can affect observers who otherwise take pains to ensure that they have no lord, old or new, above them.","author":"Peter Sloterdijk","tags":["art","ity","creativity","poetry","rilke"],"id":20219,"author_id":"Peter+Sloterdijk"},{"text":"Fatally, the term 'barbarian' is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century. It refers to the despiser of achievement, the vandal, the status denier, the iconoclast, who refuses to acknowledge any ranking rules or hierarchy. Whoever wishes to understand the twentieth century must always keep the barbaric factor in view. Precisely in more recent modernity, it was and still is typical to allow an alliance between barbarism and success before a large audience, initially more in the form of insensitive imperialism, and today in the costumes of that invasive vulgarity which advances into virtually all areas through the vehicle of popular culture. That the barbaric position in twentieth-century Europe was even considered the way forward among the purveyors of high culture for a time, extending to a messianism of uneducatedness, indeed the utopia of a new beginning on the clean slate of ignorance, illustrates the extent of the civilizatory crisis this continent has gone through in the last century and a half - including the cultural revolution downwards, which runs through the twentieth century in our climes and casts its shadow ahead onto the twenty-first.","author":"Peter Sloterdijk","tags":["20th-century","21st-century","barbarian","barbaric","barbarism","civilization","iconoclast","ignorance","twentieth-century","vandal","vulgar","vulgarity"],"id":27025,"author_id":"Peter+Sloterdijk"},{"text":"We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world—indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states—the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities.","author":"Peter Sloterdijk","tags":["books","grammar","humanism","language","reading"],"id":43639,"author_id":"Peter+Sloterdijk"},{"text":"Give up your attachment to comfortable ways of living - show yourself in the gymnasium (gymnos = 'naked'), prove that you are not indifferent to the difference between perfect and imperfect, demonstrate to us that achievement - excellence, arete, virtu - has not remained a foreign word to you, admit that you have motives for new endeavours! Above all: only grant the suspicion that sport is a pastime for the most stupid as much space as it deserves, do not misuse it as a pretext to drift further in your customary state of self-neglect, distrust the philistine in yourself who thinks you are just fine as you are! Hear the voice from the stone, do not resist the call to get in shape! Seize the chance to train with a god!","author":"Peter Sloterdijk","tags":["athleticism","change-your-life","sport","training"],"id":61054,"author_id":"Peter+Sloterdijk"},{"text":"Wherever one encounters members of the human race, they always show the traits of a being that is condemned to surrealistic effort. Whoever goes in search of humans will find acrobats.","author":"Peter Sloterdijk","tags":["human-race","humanity","humans"],"id":83930,"author_id":"Peter+Sloterdijk"},{"text":"In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the 'transformation of being into message' (more commonly, 'linguistic turn'). 'Being that can be be understood is language', Heidegger would later state - which conversely implies that language abandoned by being becomes mere chatter.","author":"Peter Sloterdijk","tags":["being","chatter","heidegger","language","linguistic-turn","rilke","thing-poem"],"id":143951,"author_id":"Peter+Sloterdijk"},{"text":"I am already living, but something is telling me with unchallengeable authority: you are not living properly. The numinous authority of form enjoys the prerogative of being able to tell me 'You must'. It is the authority of a different life in this life. This authority touches on a subtle insufficiency within me that is older and freer than sin; it is my innermost not-yet. In my most conscious moment, I am affected by the absolute objection to my status quo: my change is the one thing that is necessary. If you do indeed subsequently change your life, what you are doing is no different from what you desire with your whole will as soon as you feel how a vertical tension that is valid for you unhinges your life.","author":"Peter Sloterdijk","tags":["change","life","not-yet","status-quo","will"],"id":169255,"author_id":"Peter+Sloterdijk"},{"text":"The Enlightenment, finally, invented progressive 'history' as an inner-worldly purgatory in order to develop the conditions of possibility of a perfected 'society'. This provided the required setting for the aggressive social theology of the Modern Age to drive out the political theology of the imperial eras. What was the Enlightenment in its deep structure if not an attempt to translate the ancient rhyme on learning and suffering - mathein pathein - into a collective and species-wide phenomenon? Was its aim not to persuade the many to expose themselves to transitional ordeals that would precede the great optimization of all things?","author":"Peter Sloterdijk","tags":["ancient","enlightenment","enlightenment","optimization","philosophy","political-theology","purgatory","theology"],"id":186911,"author_id":"Peter+Sloterdijk"},{"text":"What early Christianity meant by 'faith' (pistis) was initially nothing other than running ahead and clinging to a model or idea whose attainability was still uncertain. Faith is purely anticipatory, in the sense that it already has an effect when it mobilizes the existence of the anticipatory towards the goal through anticipation. In analogy for the placebo effect, one would have to call this the movebo effect.","author":"Peter Sloterdijk","tags":["anthropology","anticipation","faith","philosophy","theology"],"id":233790,"author_id":"Peter+Sloterdijk"},{"text":"How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false.","author":"Peter Sloterdijk","tags":["irony","parody","reasoning"],"id":244856,"author_id":"Peter+Sloterdijk"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":28,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}