A book that ends with the question "Where does the good come from?" in the "heart of the question of being" after having practiced "grey area studies", i.e. the meaning of the mixed, middle and compromised for human self-knowledge and world knowledge worked out and with Aplomb in the art has captured - such a book by Peter Sloterdijk may perhaps be regarded as the keystone for an opulent life's work that ultimately revolves around the question of being.
But Sloterdijk never answers with deductions, but with intellectual overwhelming, underpinned by stupendous erudition.
If there is one thing that this thinking in spheres and bubbles is not, it is gray theory.
Rather, it is about spectrally colorful adventure philosophy.
Deception is the stubborn accusation of the critics.
So it's quite clever to now let a dimming follow,
It was Cézanne who gave the author the idea of extending this conditional to philosophy with the sentence "As long as you have not painted a gray color, you are not a painter".
Through all the rhetorical bombast, Sloterdijk reveals a cultural-historical macro perspective.
Accordingly, up to the nineteenth century, radiant white had a special status, a last refuge of the ancient metaphysics of light.
Then the great de-hierarchization and secularization also began in the area of colors.
Instead of a liturgical-allegorical order of colors, the “United Colors of Everything” now prevailed, a polychrome idyll of total tolerance.
For Sloterdijk, the appropriate symbol is not the rainbow, but a dirty gray of the mixed.
color of thought
A “grey ethics” accompanied this freedom movement, which was once led by art.
In addition, an expected tip: Angela Merkel, "at the same time lukewarm and obsessed with power", Sloterdijk is regarded as the preliminary culmination of the movement towards the center that is shirking all decisions, which will probably end in a grey-green "eco-bureaucratic regulation policy": "Dirty colors are the inevitable result of the postmodern mixophilia.” Gray would thus be “the colorless universal color of alienated freedom”.
But this unoriginal narrative of decay, the modern state as “the great gray one” that “surpasses the 'absolute' monarchy many times over in terms of the extent of its responsibilities and the depth of its measures” is only one thing.
Sloterdijk seems to stick with Goethe's color theory, in which he sees a distinction between "two types of grey": next to the "dull" mixed color gray there is a pure grey, i.e. black tinted by white light.
And so the “grey-on-grey” of philosophers or that of artists “that touches you” is by no means discredited here.
On the contrary: For Sloterdijk, gray in its purest form is the color of thought.
The book is strongest in the chapters that associatively cross motif history and metaphorology.