The dance around the golden calf of identity is the last and greatest orgy of counterenlightenment. Identity is the magic word of a partially hidden,… - Peter Sloterdijk

Ideologically, the reference to “Nature” is always significant because it produces an artificial naïveté and ends up as voluntary naïveté. It covers up the human contribution and avers that things are by nature, and from their origins, in that “order” in which our representations, which are always influenced by “interests,” depict them. The rudiments for ideologies of order are hidden in all naturalisms.

Diogenes of Sinope … was also the first to recognize the danger embodied in Plato, that the school will subjugate life, that the artificial psychosis of "absolute knowledge" wants to destroy the vital connection between perception, movement, and understanding.

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.