# Quote — Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason

> From the start, the bourgeois-positivistic fraction of enlightenment was uncomfortable about the unpredictable, subversive dimensions of the new category, the unconscious. With it, the motif of critical self-reflection was introduced into civilization in a way that could not please those who held themselves to be the representatives of civilization. If every ego is underlaid by an unconscious, then that is the end of the self-satisfaction of a consciousness that thinks it knows itself, and thus knows how to value itself. The “unconscious” touched on the cultural narcissism of all social classes.

- Author: [Peter Sloterdijk](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-sloterdijk.md)
- Book: [Critique of Cynical Reason](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-sloterdijk/critique-of-cynical-reason.md)
- Page: 50
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Sloterdijk#Critique_of_Cynical_Reason_(1987)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-sloterdijk/critique-of-cynical-reason/from-the-start

## More from this book

> Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered.

p. 5 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-sloterdijk/critique-of-cynical-reason/cynicism-is-enlightened.md)

> Every active deed is etched in the matrix of passivity.

p. 540 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-sloterdijk/critique-of-cynical-reason/every-active-deed.md)

> Since modern thinking no longer entrusts itself with the translation of self-knowledge into worldly knowledge, and of world experience into self-experience, philosophy has had to withdraw from theories of "objective reason" into those of "subjective reason." The ground is thus taken from under the feet of the ancient holistic pathos, and philosophy sinks into the apparent truncatedness and groundlessness of the subjective.

p. 538 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-sloterdijk/critique-of-cynical-reason/since-modern-thinking.md)