Since the eighteenth century, enlighteners have concerned themselves—as defenders of “true morality,” whatever that may be—with the morality of those… - Peter Sloterdijk

Every naturalism begins as involuntary naïveté. Initially, we cannot help thinking that the “order of things” is an objective order. For the first glance falls on the things and not on the “eyeglasses.” In the work of enlightenment, this first innocence becomes irretrievably lost. Enlightenment leads to the loss of naïveté and it furthers the collapse of objectivism through a gain in self-experience. It effects an irreversible awakening and, expressed pictorially, executes the turn to the eyeglasses, i.e., to one’s own rational apparatus. Once this consciousness of the eyeglasses has been awakened in a culture, the old naïveté loses its charm, becomes defensive, and is transformed into narrow-mindedness, which is intent on remaining as it is. The mythology of the Greeks is still enchanting; that of fascism is only stale and shameless. In the first myth, a step toward an interpretation of the world was taken; in simulated naïveté, an artful stupefaction (Verdummung) is at work—the predominant method of self-integration in advanced social orders.

For as long as possible, the learned collegium has tried to defend its integrity against the close combat of ideologico-critical exposures. Do not unmask, lest you yourself be unmasked could be the unspoken rule. It is no accident that the great representatives of critique—the French moralists, the Encyclopedists, the socialists, and especially Heine, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—remain outsiders to the scholarly domain. In all of them there is a satirical, polemical component that can scarcely be hidden under the mask of scholarly respectability. These signals of a holy nonseriousness, which remains one of the sure indexes of truth, can be employed as signposts to the critique of cynical reason.

Does not an ingenuous contact with Kantian thinking, with philosophical thinking in general, contain the risk of exposing a young consciousness to a violent and sudden aging? What of a youthful will to know is preserved in a philosophy that makes one dizzy with its bony spiraling turns of the screw?