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161 " 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
162 " 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, "
163 " 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. "
164 " 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 "
165 " mundo quiere ser engañado”. "
― Peter Sloterdijk , Las epidemias políticas
166 " 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. "
167 " 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. "
168 " 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. "
169 " In eighth place, we note the attempts by feminism to reveal all the orders of discourse until now as fabrications of masculine domination. "
170 " 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 "
171 " 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 "
172 " 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. "
173 " 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 "
174 " 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. "
175 " 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. "
176 " Desde hace unas cuantas décadas es una moda intelectual llamar construcciones a todas las entidades posibles de este mundo en que vivimos para desproveérlos de la apariencia de entidades naturales y evidentes en sí mismas. Y siempre se presenta "la sociedad" como el constructor general. [...] En la cultura moderna de la reflexión se quería ver el sujeto activo implicado de repente en todos los asuntos que antes se dejaban al buen criterio de la "naturaleza" o del "ser objetivo". [...] las referencias a la construcción social de la realidad tienen un sentido bien diferente del que pretenden los que se sirven del argot constructivista. En la edad moderna, la realidad es efectivamente una construcción, pero no precisamente una construcción del sujeto, sino una construcción de los defensores de la objetividad que no sirve para otro fin que evitar que el sujeto se evada de la realidad estresante común. "
― Peter Sloterdijk
177 " En el presente ensayo parto de la suposición de que no es el singular o plural de las concepciones de Dios de los colectivos o de los individuos lo que juega un papel decisivo en la liberación de los actos de violencia. Más bien lo que determina la disposición hacia el uso de la violencia es la forma e intensidad de la absorción de los practicantes de la fe a través del sistema de normas, al que subordinan su existencia. Entonces, si ocasionalmente aparece el término “monoteísmo” en las siguientes reflexiones, no se refiere tanto a un grupo de concepciones teológicas o metafísicas. "
― Peter Sloterdijk , Fobocracia: Reflexiones sobre religión
178 " 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. "
179 " 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. "
180 " The end of history is a metaphor for the disablement of the dominant reality principle of the Iron Age following non-heroic measures against the five needs. These include the industrial-political switch from scarcity to oversupply; the division of labour between the topic achievers and the moderately working in business and sport; the general deregulation of sexuality; the transition to a mass culture without masters and a politics of co-operation without enemies; and attempts toward a post-heroic thanatology. "