Bubbles Quotes

“If I were merely a basalt black, how could it be that a vague sense of being-in is taking root within me? What is the meaning of this feeling, this floating bulge? If my black were seamlessly joined to the mountain's eternally dead interior of the same black, why would I feel a hasty beating stirring within me, and above it the slower distant drum? If I were indistinguishably merged with the black substance, how could I already be something that senses a space and makes first stretching movements within it? Can there be a substance that is simultaneously sensation?”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I

“The black of the eye has to expand for the sight to be maintained in the dark. If the dark grows as deep as in the exquisite night, it would be helpful if the eye could become as large as the eye itself. Perhaps such a spheric eye would be ready for what lies before us: the journey through a black monochrome. If the subject in the dark had become wholly a pupil, the pupil wholly a tactile organ, and the tactile organ wholly a sounding body, the homogeneous massif of that orb of blackness could unfold into landscapes already sensed. Suddenly a world before the world would begin to transpire; a vague, ethereal universe would take shape, as delicate as breath and pre-discrete. The salty night would remain safe in its unspeakable density, and its circle would still be sealed with no possible exit; and yet an organic something would begin to stand out, like a sculpture of black mercury against a black background.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I

“The notion of private ideas had no ground in [prehistoric] emotional experience.... The notion of a private interior in which the subject can close the door behind it, reflect upon and express itself was unknown before the early individualistic turn in antiquity; its propagandists were the men known as sages or philosophers.... who first gave the motif that true thought was only possible as independent thought, as thinking differently from the stupid masses....”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I

“The spaces that humans allow to contain them have their own history - albeit a history that has never been told, and whose heroes are eo ipso not humans themselves, but rather the topoi and spheres as whose function humans flourish, and from which they fall if their unfolding fails.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I

“As a system of hybrid communicating vessels, the human interior consists of paradoxical or autogenous hollow bodies that are at once tight and leaky, that must alternate between the roles of container and content, and which simultaneously have properties of inner and outer walls.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I

“In the foam worlds, however, no bubble can be expanded into an absolutely centered, all-encompassing, amphiscopic org; no central light penetrates the entire foam in its dynamic murkiness. Hence the ethics of the decentered, small and middle-sized bubbles in the world foam includes the effort to move about in an unprecedentedly spacious world with an unprecedentedly modest circumspection; in the foam, discrete and polyvalent games of reason must develop that learn to live with a shimmering diversity of perspectives , and dispense with the illusion of the one lordly point of view. Most roads do not lead to Rome-that is the situation, European: recognize it.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I

“When everything has become the center, there is no longer any valid center; when everything is transmitting, the allegedly central transmitter is lost in the tangle of messages.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I

“In this distinctive world, elusive quantities flash at the edge of conventional logic.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I

“For many intelligences,the thought of homely intimacies is associated with a spontaneous disgust at too much sweetness-which is why there is neither a philosophy of sweetness nor an elaborated ontology of the intimate. One must assess the nature of this resistance if one is to get past typical initial aversions. From a distance,the subject appears so unattractive and inconsequential that for the time being,only suckers for harmony or theophilic eunuchs would get stuck on it. An intellect that spends its energy on worthy objects usually prefers the sharp to the sweet; one does not offer candy to heroes”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I