The question about “good origins” becomes the crux for enlightenment. It becomes more and more clear that this idea of origin has not a temporal but … - Peter Sloterdijk

Our thinking is becoming much more morose than precise. … Capacity of thought does not keep pace with what is problematic. Hence the self-abdication of critique. … Because everything has become problematic, everything is also somehow a matter of indifference.

Ideology critique, having become respectable, imitates surgical procedure: … The opponent is cut open in front of everyone, until the mechanism of his error is laid bare. … Ideology critique is now interested not in winning over the vivisected opponent but in focusing on the “corpse,” the critical extract of its ideas. … Those who previously did not want to engage in enlightenment will want to do so even less now that they have been dissected and exposed by the opponent.

Since the eighteenth century, enlighteners have concerned themselves—as defenders of “true morality,” whatever that may be—with the morality of those who rule. … The moralism in the bourgeois sense of decency put aristocratically refined immoralism into the position of the politically accused. … But bourgeois thinking all too naively assumes it is possible to subordinate political power to moral concepts. It does not anticipate that one day, when it has itself come to power, it will end up in the same ambivalence. It has not yet realized that it is only a small step from taking moral offense to respectable hypocrisy.