Peter Sloterdijk - Enlightenment Quotes

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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
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
The question about good origins becomes the crux for enlightenment. It becomes more and more clear that this idea of origin has not a temporal but a Utopian reference. The Good is still nowhere to be found, except in the wishful human spirit.

Peter Sloterdijk
Enlightenment does nothing more than eavesdrop on likely wolves in their dressing rooms, where they put on and take off their sheep's clothing.

Peter Sloterdijk
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
The only loyalty to enlightenment consists in disloyalty. This can be partly understood from the position of its heirs, who look back on the heroic times and are necessarily more skeptical of the results. To be an heir always carries a certain status cynicism with it, as is well known from stories about the inheritance of family capital.

Peter Sloterdijk
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
Ideology critique, having become respectable, imitates surgical procedure: … The opponent is cut open in front of everyone, until the mechanism of his error is laid bare. … Ideology critique is now interested not in winning over the vivisected opponent but in focusing on the corpse, the critical extract of its ideas. … Those who previously did not want to engage in enlightenment will want to do so even less now that they have been dissected and exposed by the opponent.

Peter Sloterdijk
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