The Art of Philosophy Quotes

“Ancient tradition had already ascribed this tendency to a specific type of thinker, Heraclitus of Ephesus, for example, who represented the cliché of the weeping philosopher from time immemorial. In fact, the old adage Democritus ridens, Heraclitus flens (Democritus laughs, Heraclitus cries) proves how early people had begun to link the distinctions between schools of thought and philosophical schemes with the contrasts between characteristic humors (in modern parlance, between undertones).”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet: The nocturnal glory of being great without being anything! The somber majesty of unknown splendour … and all at once I experience the sublime state of the monk in the wilderness or of the hermit in his retreat, acquainted with the substance of Christ in the stones and in the caves of withdrawal from the world. And at this table in my room I’m less of a petty, anonymous employee. I write words as if they were the soul’s salvation and I gild myself with the impossible sunset of high and vast hills in the distance, and with the statue I received in exchange for life’s pleasures and with the ring of renunciation on my evangelical finger, stagnant jewel of my ecstatic disdain.8”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“the same time, they tell us to what extent the contemporary theory scene, and especially the French one, of which Bourdieu has a good overview, resembles a bonfire of vanities. They show how deeply the human, the all too human, especially the struggle for prestige and privileged status, influenced the behavior of the class that does theory.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“In tenth and last place comes the conquest of the myth of the rapture of the cognitive person in recent academic research. Bruno Latour is the most important name here. He has also raised subversive demands in political theory for the reinclusion of experts. From”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“This has recently led to the proof that the links between logic and emotionality in the human brain structure go deeper than any self-observation, however acute, is capable of comprehending. This discipline’s results culminate in the demand to shelve the dream of purely apathetic-noetic theory. The main figure to mention here is António R. Damásio, whose studies on human and animal consciousness exposed the “Cartesian” dualism of reason and emotion as untenable and demonstrated the key role of emotions for all cognitive processes.3”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“In eighth place, we note the attempts by feminism to reveal all the orders of discourse until now as fabrications of masculine domination.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“Aside from this, we should mention two concepts and two names that are still talking points for academics: the paradigm theory developed by Thomas S. Kuhn and the theory of discourse evolved by Michel Foucault. For the moment, it is unclear whether we should read these explorations as value-free ethnologies in the theoretical field or as critical exposure of discursive conformity.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“He distinguished three basic types of knowledge: educational knowledge, knowledge of salvation, and knowledge of domination, corresponding to the three main anthropologically deducible complexes of interest in education, salvation, and domination.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“My sixth point concerns the effect of existentialism in blasting open philosophical systems thinking and natural science ideology. This process also dates back to the first half of the nineteenth century. Its opening scene played when Kierkegaard objected that Hegel had forgotten the real existing individual when he constructed his system. This approach reached its culmination in the mid-twentieth century when Jean-Paul Sartre, inspired by the phenomenologists Husserl and Heidegger, presented his widely influential theory of committed existence.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“The fifth point I would like to mention is how faith in disinterested perception in the modern sciences has been shaken, particularly by the events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Physics, the previously unchallenged ruling discipline of the natural sciences, lost its innocence at the latest because of”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“The fourth place on my list goes to the subversion of the Western culture of rationality by phenomenological analysis, which placed all theory on the pretheoretical ground of “atmosphere.” The key figure to remember here is Martin Heidegger, a philosopher who quite unmistakably belongs to the movement that started with the three already-mentioned attacks on pure theory.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“he tried to elevate the principle of “class consciousness” to the a priori of all morally defensible intellectual activities. In this respect, he not only made his contribution to bombarding the ancient European academe with the campaign category of “bourgeois science,” which was to help in defaming every non-Marxist form of theory formation as the accomplice of the “existing order”; in addition, as an apologist of Lenin’s and Stalin’s exterminatory politics,”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“Nietzsche accomplished nothing less than the proof that all cognition is local in character and that, in imitating the divine eye, no human observer is able to go as far as really transcending his own location. The advice of the new critique of cognition was to stop jumping out of one’s skin for the sake of the phantom of a transpersonal wisdom and, instead, to slip completely into one’s skin in order to exploit to the limit the cognitive opportunity offered by the untenable perspective of a singular existence. There is no need to explain how this leads to science converging with belles lettres and theory being transformed into creed, without a decision being made in advance on the precedence of one or the other.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“with the basic tenet of Marxism: where there was contemplation, there should now be mobilization. The abiding catastrophe of now-impure theory began with the introduction of militancy before the March 1848 revolution and its presupposition of civil war in philosophy.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“Here, I shall take the name of Karl Marx to represent many philosophers from this tendency. Although he may only be a dubious witness for concern with democracy, there can be no doubt of his pioneering role in subordinating the theoretical to the practical life. His work is associated with the fateful incursion of the real into the sphere of theory.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“right man to prepare the citizens of his country, who were facing disempowerment, for the benefits of the vita contemplativa. The transition to reflective existence was worth an error in reasoning: Cicero unhesitatingly created a lofty nimbus for the future Roman spectator by portraying Pythagoras making the many in the stadium into the few in study.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“earth. It took another five hundred years for the metaphysical dogma of living once and dying once to become definitively established in the Western hemisphere, with the result that all morally important decisions had to be squeezed into a single life. The consequence was that the dramatic fear of hell replaced the epic concern about reincarnation (the fear of hell is, incidentally, a basic factor of what is called “political theology,” but which should more accurately be described as the imperial management of the fear of death).”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“We cannot agree with Aristotle’s claim that “by nature” all of mankind aspires to knowledge (because the philosopher votes unilaterally for recognition as a reason for joy in the transcendental faculty of sight and willfully ignores the facts demonstrating the enormous neophobia of the human species). Nevertheless, there are enough motives for those who aspire to knowledge for local or cultural reasons to consider their modus vivendi as sufficiently respectable. * 2 Corinthians 3:6–8 (“For the letter kills but the spirit quickens.”)—Translator’s note.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“Fourth, the theoretical person educates himself as a reader in every sense of the word. He does training in the grammatical humanism of the ancient European type; he becomes the person in the collection; he teaches himself daily by practicing what the Greeks called legein and antilegein, speaking and contradicting, reading and collecting, learning and testing. Nulla dies sine linea (No day without a line) may seem to be a motto for draughtsmen, but it holds equally for readers and writers. To borrow a title from Ivan Illich: homo theoreticus is a harvest laborer “in the vineyard of the text.” He knows the intellect is breathing in the collection. He enters its service as an assistant for collecting perceptions.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“Gabriel Tardes’s remark that “life is a search for the impossible via the useless.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“portrait of the theoretician as a young man. His first distinguishing feature is the serenity of indirect defeatism. Although he belongs to a collective of losers,”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“A humanist is a person who can say: I am human, nothing written down is strange to me.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“the spirit of Heidegger’s dictum that thinking and thanking belong together, so do reading and collecting. The professional reader, the scholar, or the pandit becomes the agent of a novel form of concentration: indeed, he not only collects, he turns himself into a collection, a person filled up with knowledge that moves to and fro between internal and external memories.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“contrast, ancient European access to the experiential world was preformed by grammatical dressage; in fact, in this literacy zone the actual intellectual material offered by the world was formatted according to letter, syllable, line, page, paragraph, and chapter.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“In our context, this means that the practicing complex of the early bios theoretikós constantly has to be examined together with the formation of mental attitudes through the new conquest of reality by the written word. The primary mode of “looking” is unmistakably co-conditioned by the European mode of reading. For Europeans, the world and the book began to be mutually analogous early on. This configuration held fast over a period of more than two thousand years and first changed with Renaissance painting, when the world and panel painting revealed a new equivalence. The cartography of the modern age also played its part in abolishing the book-world analogy by elevating globes and maps to being the main media of the pragmatic worldview.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“The phenomenon of withdrawal is explained by ancient humoral pathology as the dominance of black bile over the three other bodily fluids (blood, mucus, and choler), which is why this type of person was described as melancholic. Bile is manifested in a diffuse lack of will to participate and a generally pervasive low-level alienation. Homo theoreticus seems to suffer from sadness without object: he is not sad about something specific, but marked by feelings of loss without any identifiable reason. For him, it is as if something important were missing in the world. As a result, he will never feel at home—a condition Lamartine invoked in his elegy “Isolement” (Isolation): “Upon the earth in exile why do I remain / As there is nothing more to share between the earth and me.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“the joys of a liberality that still appreciates the living plural and the inviolable legitimacy of doxa (meaning “common belief,” from dokei moi: “it seems to me”); articulating the human right of each person to his or her own point of view.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“fact, almost everything that was philosophically articulated in the nineteenth century and the twentieth, from the Young Hegelians to French Existentialism, from the early Socialists to Critical Theory, grew in the conservatories of a second romantic loser atmosphere.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“short, as soon as the polis had lost the power to persuade people to commit to it fully with their highest ambitions and willingness to serve, a cosmopolitan market of theory and ethics arose in which a postpolitical intelligentsia reoriented itself to the ideological needs of the defeated, or one could also say, of private persons. The trend toward empire and monarchy was part of the times.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

“Philosophy, as Plato endowed it to posterity, is a child of defeat that simultaneously compensates for this defeat by ingeniously attacking it as the best form of defense.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice