Sep 12, 2026 09:43 PM
(This post was last modified: Sep 13, 2026 06:22 PM by Magical Realist.)
What I like to call "doing philosophy in real time."
“The great rush of philosophy towards everyday life is the opposite of bending the knee before bon sens, which was once claimed to be the most fairly distributed thing in the world.
Here, the essential thing is not the populist gesture.
What matters is a downward movement of thought, dressed in metropolitan-populist clothes. (It also existed in the ethnic costumes that have long since seemed silly to us.)
The way down – this motif is completely inseparable from the impulses of post-metaphysical philosophy in modernity.
By lifting the banal philosophically to a higher level, it proves to common sense that it does it no good to be so well distributed.
For common sense, everyday life remains a prison from which every life that has not resigned itself to it nevertheless dreams itself free.
Philosophy, on the other hand, wants to break out of its empty rooms and into the post-metaphysical fullness of human life, and the mundane is thus the promised land of the tangible.
There, people can be found as they are – you surprise them in the middle of work, during sexual activity, while with children and in kitchens, and even in the application of rules of linguistic understanding and in convivial self-indulgence – weird and wonderful creatures who make full use of their provisions with sets of everyday knowledge.
Intoxicated by these discoveries, metaphysics-weary thinking plunges into the depths, which compensate it abundantly for its loss of idealized height.
A hermeneutic of the banal blossoms out of these newly discovered depths, explaining to us what an amazing mystery it is if we make the effort to be there.”
(Peter Sloterdijk: ”Infinite Mobilization. Towards A Critique of Political Kinetics”, German edition “Eurotaoismus” 1989. English 2020, translated by Sandra Berjan, Polity Press, p. 113f. edited)
“The great rush of philosophy towards everyday life is the opposite of bending the knee before bon sens, which was once claimed to be the most fairly distributed thing in the world.
Here, the essential thing is not the populist gesture.
What matters is a downward movement of thought, dressed in metropolitan-populist clothes. (It also existed in the ethnic costumes that have long since seemed silly to us.)
The way down – this motif is completely inseparable from the impulses of post-metaphysical philosophy in modernity.
By lifting the banal philosophically to a higher level, it proves to common sense that it does it no good to be so well distributed.
For common sense, everyday life remains a prison from which every life that has not resigned itself to it nevertheless dreams itself free.
Philosophy, on the other hand, wants to break out of its empty rooms and into the post-metaphysical fullness of human life, and the mundane is thus the promised land of the tangible.
There, people can be found as they are – you surprise them in the middle of work, during sexual activity, while with children and in kitchens, and even in the application of rules of linguistic understanding and in convivial self-indulgence – weird and wonderful creatures who make full use of their provisions with sets of everyday knowledge.
Intoxicated by these discoveries, metaphysics-weary thinking plunges into the depths, which compensate it abundantly for its loss of idealized height.
A hermeneutic of the banal blossoms out of these newly discovered depths, explaining to us what an amazing mystery it is if we make the effort to be there.”
(Peter Sloterdijk: ”Infinite Mobilization. Towards A Critique of Political Kinetics”, German edition “Eurotaoismus” 1989. English 2020, translated by Sandra Berjan, Polity Press, p. 113f. edited)
