"Enlightenment … asks, innocently and subversively, for proofs, sources, and evidence. At the beginning it solemnly avers that it would willingly believe everything, if only it could find someone to convince it. Here it becomes clear that the biblical texts, taken philologically, remain themselves their only witness. Their revelatory character is their own claim, and it can be believed or not; the church, which elevates this revelatory character to the status of a grand dogma, itself plays only the role of an interpreter. With his radical biblicism, Luther rejected the church’s claim to authority. This repudiation then repeats itself on the higher level through biblicism itself. For text remains text, and every assertion that it is divinely inspired can, in turn, be only a human, fallible assertion. With every attempt to grasp the absolute source, critique comes up against relative, historical sources that only ever assert the Absolute. The miracles spoken about in the Bible to legitimate God’s power are only reports of miracles for which there are no longer any means of verification. The revelatory claim is stuck in a philological circle."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
p. 24
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Sloterdijk
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Peter Sloterdijk
deutscher Kulturphilosoph
57 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Peter Sloterdijk →
Related Quotes
"Our thinking is becoming much more morose than precise. … Capacity of thought does not keep pace with what is problem…"
"To be “reasonable” means to put oneself into a special, rarely happy relation to the sensuous. “Be reasonable” means,…"
"Socialization through schooling, as it takes place here, and in Western societies, in general, is a priori stupefaction"
"The violent, antirationalistic impulse in Western countries is reacting to an intellectual state of affairs in which …"
"Our lethargic modernity certainly knows how to “think historically,” but it has long doubted that it lives in a meani…"
"Does not an ingenuous contact with Kantian thinking, with philosophical thinking in general, contain the risk of expo…"
"“Knowledge is power.” This is the sentence that dug the grave of philosophy in the nineteenth century. … This sentenc…"
"The question about “good origins” becomes the crux for enlightenment. It becomes more and more clear that this idea o…"
"In our thinking there is no longer any spark of the uplifting flight of concepts or of the ecstasies of understanding…"
"Psychologically, present-day cynics can be understood as borderline melancholics, who can keep their symptoms of depr…"