God’s Zeal

Together with Jürgen Habermas (81) Peter Sloterdijk (63), professor in Karlsruhe, represents contemporary German philosophy. He is the more exotic of the two, having spent three years in an Ashram in Puna and authored the startling concept of “Eurotaoism”. After focusing on Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger’s ontotheology, and Jacques Derrida, Sloterdijk irreverently even dared to echo Immanuel Kant with a two volume Critique of Cynical Reason (1983).

Luckily his language while exuberant and torrential, is less abstract than Kant’s dicta, less innovative than Heidegger’s poetics, and less hermetic than Wittgenstein’s tracti. Typical are disrespectful formulations of his like “religio- neurotic”, “clerico-pathic”, “ménage à trois” (for the Trinity) or portraying religion as a “crypto-suicidal urge”“.

In 2007, with Gottes Eifer (God’s Zeal) the author, impressed by brain research, launched this supercritical deconstruction of religious sentiments, treating them as a mere wishes to cope with stress, depression, and death; perceived magic; or transcendental unresponsiveness (: “God does not react, therefore He is.”).