Peter Sloterdijk Quote

It is not an overstatement if one characterizes this revision of the false metaphysical classification of beings as the contemporary gigantomachy that reaches deeply into ingrained human self-relations. Very many view this revision suspiciously as an expropriation of the self and condemn it as technological devilry. The uncanniness of the process is not to be denied, precisely because it impresses by means of its results. The humanistically minded observer cannot withdraw his fascination because everything that happens on the technological front leads to consequences for human self-understanding. In the progress of technological evolution the citadel of subjectivity, that is to say, the thinking and experiencing ego, is impinged on, and to be sure not only by symbolic deconstructions that were, incidentally, anticipated in various ways in regional high cultures—one might think here of the mystical and yogic systems, of negative theology and Romantic irony—but also by material modifications, for instance, the alteration of mental states with the help of psychotropic substances (a procedure that for millennia has been common in drug cultures, and for decades in Western psychiatry). In addition, a time is foreseeable when the contents of ideas and experience will be induced by means of nootropic substances.