102
" Such immune systems could equally be described as organismic early forms of a feeling for transcendence: thanks to the efficiency of these devices, which are constantly at the ready, the organism actively confronts the potential bringers of its death, opposing them with its endogenous capacity to overcome the lethal. Such functions have earned immune systems of this type comparisons to a ‘body police’ or border patrol. But as the concern, already at this level, is to work out a modus vivendi with foreign and invisible powers – and, in so far as these can bring death, ‘higher’ and ‘supernatural’ ones – this is a preliminary stage to the behaviour one is accustomed to terming religious or spiritual in human contexts. For every organism, its environment is its transcendence, and the more abstract and unknown the danger from that environment, the more transcendent it appears. "
― Peter Sloterdijk , You Must Change Your Life
105
" 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 passage he discusses the practice forms of that life-denial or world-weariness which, according to Nietzsche, exemplifies the morphological circle of sick asceticisms in general:
'The ascetic [of the priestly-sick type] treats life as a wrong path on which one must walk backwards till one comes to the place where it starts; or he treats it as an error which one may, nay must, refute by action: for he demands that he should be followed; he enforces, where he can, his valuation of existence. What does this mean? Such a monstrous valuation is not an exceptional care, or a curiosity recorded in human history: it is one of the broadest and longest facts that exist. Reading from the vantage point of a distant star the capital letters of our earthly life would perchance lead to the conclusion that the earth was the truly ascetic planet, a den of discontented, arrogant and repulsive creature creatures, who never got rid of a deep disgust of themselves, of the
world, of all life, and did themselves as much hurt as possible out of pleasure in hurting - presumably their one and only pleasure. "
― Peter Sloterdijk , You Must Change Your Life
106
" A completely different aspect, however, the thoroughly incommensurable one, lies in the imposition of accepting that the torso sees me while I observe it - indeed, that it eyes me more sharply than I can look at it.
The ability to perform the inner gesture with which one makes space for this improbability inside oneself most probably consists precisely in the talent that Max Weber denied having. This talent is 'religiosity', understood as an innate disposition and a talent that can be developed, making it comparable to musicality. One can practise it, just as one practises melodic passages or syntactic patterns. In this sense, religiosity is congruent with a certain grammatical promiscuity. Where it operates, objects elastically exchange places with subjects. "
― Peter Sloterdijk , You Must Change Your Life
109
" The biggest and, outwardly, most trustful banker in history is God, the administrator delegated to eternity. And his credit institute is Paradise. Billions of faithfuls, for centuries, have invested in the hope of God, expecting redemption in eternal life. And since the celestial agency is going bankrupt, nothing is left of its capital, on which the hopes of six billion faithful consumers rely. Capitalism is a project of universal anthropology. Humans primarily are beings who desire. Not in an hedonistic, but in a materialistic sense: in the modern period, Westerners have looked for felicity through the possession of objects and the consumption of commodities. "
― Peter Sloterdijk
112
" We see today, as if scales were falling from our eyes, that even nature, that great conferrer of talent and ally of bourgeois ascent, was itself conceived of rather like a court in which there were still protégés and favorites. Thus, when exposed to the light, nature is as unjust and capricious as the absolute ruler, nay, even more: it is the absolutism of chance in its purest form. With this insight, talent and genius become offensive to all those who, as Niklas Luhmann so finely (and maliciously) put it once, must also live off their looks. First there is discontent, then comes hatred, and hatred, as always, is followed by a codicil of good reasons. "
― Peter Sloterdijk , After God
117
" Hannah Arendt indicated a partial answer in her book The Life of the Mind, in a chapter titled “Where Are We When We Think?”12 The title has a distinctly provocative slant, and outside the context mentioned here, it could seem like a parody. Yet, without ceremony, Arendt stressed the observation that it is impossible to define the place of thinking with information from everyday topology. She also refers to the Socratic absences: if Socrates is immersed in his thoughts and we “see him thinking,” obviously we cannot locate this at the place where we perceive him physically. But where else? It may seem natural to some of our contemporaries to claim that the philosopher’s thoughts are in his brain, the philosopher himself is in the lecture room, the lecture room is in the university, the university is in the city, and so on, right up to the biggest container of all, the universe. "
― Peter Sloterdijk , The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice