Peter Sloterdijk Quotes

The reason for the existence of the perfection conjured up in these fourteen lines is that it possesses ... the authorization to form a message that appeals from within itself. This power of appeal is exquisitely evident in the object evoked here. The perfect thing is that which articulates an entire principle of being. The poem has to perform no more and no less than to perceive the principle of being in the thing and adapt it to its own existence - with the aim of becoming a construct with an equal power to convey a message.

...only very few - only humans, as far as we know - achieve the second level of transcendent movement. Through this, the environment is de-restricted to become the world as an integral whole of manifest and latent elements. The second step is the work of language. This not only builds the 'house of being' - Heidegger took this phrase from Zarathustra's animals, which inform the convalescent: 'the house of being rebuilds itself eternally'; it is also the vehicle for the tendencies to run away from that house with which, by means of its inner surpluses, humans move towards the open. It need hardly be explained why the oldest parasite in the world, the world above, only appears with the second transcendence.

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. Rilke privileges two categories of 'entities' [Seienden), to express it in the papery diction of philosophy, that are eligible for the lofty task of acting as message-things - artifices and living creatures - with the latter gaining their particular quality from the former, as if animals were being's highest works of art before humans. Inherent to both is a message energy that does not activate itself, but requires the poet as a decoder and messenger.

How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false.

[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 most important insight: that the main thing in life is to take the minor things seriously. When minor things grow stronger, the danger posed by the main thing is contained; then climbing higher in the minor things means advancing in the main thing.