Peter Sloterdijk wird im deutschsprachigen Raum ja gerne für einen Philosophen gehalten, weil viele Menschen eine unverständliche Sprache mit intellektueller Tiefe verwechseln, obwohl in Wahrheit das Gegenteil der Fall ist. Sehr schön also, dass John Gray [Notiz] in der New York Review of Books unter dem treffenden Titel Blowing Bubbles diesen Philosophendarsteller geistig entblättert.

Gutes Denken und guter Stil geht bis auf wenige Ausnahmen in der Geistesgeschichte Hand in Hand:

Sloterdijk has done the opposite, adopting a tortuously complicated style that obscures any clear ideas his writings may contain.

Nach einem Zitat entlarvt Gray die rhetorischen Tricks Sloterdijks:

What is entertaining in this passage is not the suggestion that national cultures are constructed from “smells or gases,” an assertion that relies chiefly on a “kinship” between two Latin words, or neologisms such as “latrinocentrism” and “merdocratic.” Instead the droll effect comes from the use of the words “therefore” and “thus,” which inject an appearance of logic into what is, at bottom, an exercise in wordplay.

Sein Fazit am Ende:

Sloterdijk belongs in a European professorial tradition in his confident assertion of intellectual authority. But this is not some latter-day Max Weber, struggling to diagnose the disorder of the age in writings born from prolonged intellectual suffering. Throughout his career Sloterdijk has been a reactive thinker, voicing the passing moods of the time. Everything suggests he will continue running after the zeitgeist, blowing bubbles along the way.