Peter Sloterdijk Quotes

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...

His concept of allochrony - initially introduced shyly as 'untimeliness', then later radicalized to an exit from modernity - is based on the idea, as suggestive as it is fantastic, that antiquity has...

About Author

Peter Sloterdijk (; German: [ˈsloːtɐˌdaɪk]; born 26 June 1947) is a German philosopher and cultural theorist. He was a professor of philosophy and media theory at and Rector from 2001-2015 of the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe. He co-hosted the German television show Das Philosophische Quartett from 2002 until 2012.

What appears in the former statue of Apollo, however, cannot simply be equated with the Olympian of the same name, who had to ensure light, contours, foreknowledge and security of form in his days of...

The ascetic planet he sights is the planet of the practising as a whole, the planet of advanced-civilized humans, the planet of those who have begun to give their existence forms and contents under ve...

The de-spiritualization of asceticisms is probably the event in the current intellectual history of mankind that is the most comprehensive and, because of its large scale, the hardest to perceive, yet...

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 truth, the crossing from nature to culture and vice versa has always stood wide open. It leads across an easily accessible bridge: the practising life. People have committed themselves to its const...

In the monotheistic age, God was viewed as the one who causes and does everything, and hence humans were not entitled to make something, let alone a great deal, of themselves. In humanistic epochs, by...

The extension of the moral-historical perspective makes the meaning of the thesis of the athletic and somatic renaissance apparent. At the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the...

In his differentiation between asceticisms, Nietzsche posited a clear divide between the priestly varieties on the one side, illuminated by his vicious gaze, and the disciplinary rules of intellectual...

Nietzsche is no more or less than the Schliemann of asceticisms. In the midst of the excavation sites, surrounded by the psychopathic rubble of millennia and the ruins of morbid palaces, he was comple...

In Nietzsche's usage, the word 'Christianity' does not even refer primarily to the religion; using it like a code word, he is thinking more of a particular religio-metaphysically influenced dispositio...

[Nietzsche's] questions - transcend, but where to; ascend, but to what height? - would have answered themselves if he had calmly kept both feet on the ascetic ground. He was too sick to follow his mos...

Here we should quote especially those sections from Nietzsche's central morality-critical work The Genealogy of Morals that deal with their subject in a diction of Olympian clarity. In the decisive pa...

Cultele memoriei de orice natură, indiferent dacă se prezintă ȋn veșminte religioase, civilizatoare sau politice, trebuie privite... cu neȋncredere și asta fără excepție: sub pretextul unei comemorări...

We know from accounts of Rilke's life that his stay in Rodin's workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet's view of the mutilated body thus h...

It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing - otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to things....

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 c...

La primera forma de falta de libertad la experimentamos como opresión política, la segunda como una opresión impuesta por aquella realidad que, con razón o sin, llamamos externa. [...] un tercer frent...

El secreto de la modernidad se esconde en su capacidad de reclutar personas de cualquier origen y cualquier confesión para que formen parte de la más grande de las campañas militares, la campaña por e...