And we find ourselves at the end, just after the rocky-horror like force of the “pleural shock,” quoting Thomas Mann, 

I know death .. I can tell you it’s almost nothing … We come out of the dark and go into the dark….   

Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 529. Simon Critchley took this to title one of his books. 

Mann’s reflection on life and death is also made by Nietzsche who speaks of the human being as a rope suspended over an abyss, between animal and Übermensch (Nietzsche, ZI, Prologue §4).  — Elsewhere I emphasize that it has already been noted that it it is important to note that the term corresponds to Lucian’s hyperanthropos. 

Hence Zarathustra’s Lucianic Übermensch refers to the Afterworld and to the human who is dispossessed not only in this world, as Sloterdjk rightly read Heidegger as saying, but is similarly ill at ease and not at home in the world to come, Nietzsche also calls the human being, using two dashes or Gedankenstriche as punctuation “— a hiatus between two nothingness [zwei Nichtsen] —“ (KSA 12, 473)

Thus we might undertake to read philosophy in a sense that engages what “Philosophy demands as life,” conceived as Sloterdijk conceives it via Thales, “’as what is difficult’, to know thyself.” (CCR, 536) 
Now Sloterdijk is able to see not only the popular joke with Thales and the Milesian maid (but we have already noted such proclivities as par for the philosophical course) but and indeed that for Thales both theoretical and practical regards can coexist.
Rather than being dissonant as today’s renaissance of re-reading of Anaximander seem to insist, this goes hand in glove with readings of Empedocles that would strip his Katharmoi of any cathartic or purifying force.   
All in service of the preludes of science they say. 

But ‘know thyself” works dialectically in an extraordinary way to make such sundering readings redundant: “for Thales, knowledge of the heavens and self-investigation could proceed directly parallel to each other.” (537) 

Sloterdijk ends here in a fashion both Heideggerian and kynical, precisely in Diogenes’ spirit.  For Sloterdijk in its self-incurred tutelage or blinding,

practical reason could not see that the highest concept of behaviour is not “doing” but “letting things be,” and that it achieves its utmost not by reconstructing the structures of our doing but by penetrating the relations between doing and desisting.  Every active deed is etched in the matrix of passivity; every act of disposing over something remains dependent on the stable massiveness of what is not at our disposal; every change is borne also by the reliable perseverance of what is unchanged; and everything that is calculated rests on the indispensable base of what is predictable. (540) 

    
This is the problem of lying even for moral reasons. For Kant as for Sloterdijk, “those who can let things be are not pursued from behind by projects that have taken on a life of their own.” (531) 

And in that sense “the great thinking of antiquity is rooted in the experience of enthusiastic tranquility when, on the summit of having-thought, the thinker steps aside and lets himself be permeated by the self-revelation of the truth.” (Ibid.) And Sloterdijk quotes Heidegger to say this, as the logos that “lets itself ‘be given to think’ what is thinkable by being itself.” (Ibid.) At the end, it becomes earnest for Sloterdijk, with his allusion to the golden, Goethian “present” that we have earlier already referred to, here not heavy or deadly earnest, rather of a “courage” born of the experience of a well-spent life, the courage of Kant’s daring in his Sapere aude, a courage that 

“can suddenly make itself felt as a euphoric clarity or a seriousness that is wonderfully tranquil within itself. It awakens the present within us. In the present, awareness  climbs all at once to the heights of being. Cool and bright, every moment enters its space: you are no difference from its brightness, its coolness, its jubilation.”  (547)   

This feeling which Nietzsche for his part called “the happiness of a god, full of power and love, full of laughter and full of tears,” is also a benediction.

Postmodernism and the Nouvelle Cynic

I have  suggested that the cynicism of which Sloterdijk writes could also be called as both Lyotard and Eco spoke of it, “postmodern” — “Discontent in our culture appears today as a universal, diffuse cynicism.” (88)  

Lyotard

And Sloterdijk calls on Benjamin, where he always could also invoke Adorno or Horkheimer, but even Adorno knew that Benjamin would be a safer bet, just as today we could also invoke Foucault, more popularly, or more esoterically even today, the late Jean Baudrillard: thus for Benjamin, here for Sloterdijk, critics

have long since blended together with what is to be criticized, and that distance that would be created by morality has been lost through a general muddling along in immorality, semimorality, and the morality of lesser evils. Cultivated and informed people of today have become aware of the essential model of critique and the procedure of unmasking without having been shaken. (Ibid.) 

And in the two decades that have come and gone between the time of this reflection, even before the world changed and references to the GDR cease to make any sense, and the shock of invoking Marx becomes something else again, Sloterdijk asks in a Nietzschean voice, 

Who today is still an enlightener? The question is almost too direct to be decent. (Ibid.) 

And he answers with his own directness, letting the reader know that we do not have to do with an ordinary critical text, or indeed, any kind of merely academic context.
When I am hit up for cash in a New York sidewalk I pay up, but at the same time, I know that I am using the best expedient to assure my imperturbability. 

The same goes for an email asking me to add my voice to stopping the logger’s saw, to preventing the death of polar bears, wolves, seals, coyotes, and sometimes just horses and kittens.  I always hit a key to respond and I do so although I know that in a world where industry has for nearly 60 years taken each and every new formulation (not merely every new invention) of hand-soap, hand-cream, sun-lotion, dish-washing liquid, etc. and rammed it down the throats of captive animals not until they sicken but until they die and not until some die but until enough of them, at least half have died (and it is nearly always a complete achievement by the time one gets that far), that in a civilization that takes it for granted that animals should be bled to death and hence merely stunned before being literally de-assembled, skinned, sometimes alive, legs removed, beheaded, cut in half and in pieces, etc., in a civilization that poisons prairie dogs so that cows grazing (corporately owned cattle on public lands meant for public use) should not, grazing as they are without supervision (today’s cowboys drive pick-up trucks and not ponies, and do not stay with their herd but round them up mechanically as needs be to take them to the feed lots and then to slaughter), so that as these animals scrabble for food on a range no one has planted for them, these cows do not break their legs by accident or in the stress of being herded together before going off to their deaths.  

Thus the prairie dogs have to die and the black footed ferret likewise and so too anything that eats the poison meant for them or anything that eats prairie dogs, this will include coyotes and pumas, foxes, hawks and eagles, even the cowboy’s dog dies.  

And I have not begun talking about Obama's use of wildlife and parks funding in order to fund the high tech slaughter of America's wolves, shot by morons.

Our civilization shrugs, wolves are 'dangerous.' 

And if we take to the ocean, the shrug intensifies:  so what about the fish, so what about the dolphins, the turtles, the whales, so what about the sharks? So what about squid (harvested at a massive rate, starving whales in the process, just because we can take it all and so we do.

Nor does it end there, America continues its longest war(s). It is hard to think of anyone who is not a European who is not disappointed in Obama, first generation, now into the Obama second term, just after the phantasm of the inauguration but already graced immediately following his election with headlines wondering, warning, that and of course, he will -- because he cannot but -- "blow" his mandate, again. 

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And part of the reason for this predictably ambidextrous answer can be seen in Sloterdijk’s choice of George Schulz’s cynical oil painting, Industrial Farmers, a painting that for some would combine Grant Wood and Georg Grosz.

 Georg Schulz, Industrial Farmers, 1920 (Von der Heydt Museum Wuppertal)

What is of interest in the painting is its cavalier depiction of perversity, of cupidity in the case of the father and exploitative intimacy in the case of the mother and the piglet on her lap (and what one knows of its destiny -- the stainless steel mesh on the mother’s hand seems to show the threat that awaits the thus poised suckling pig). And the famer’s progeny, head tilted to show a literal mindlessness, torturing a frog. In the small window on the opposite side of the twisted flystrip handing from the ceiling, a figure with a strangely convex hollow core sporting what seems to be star in the lower part of the round barrel of his coat stands next to a mechanical harvesting truck in a field harvested clean.

The vision of the farmer exemplifies what Heidegger will later, infamously and inexcusably and precisely accurately name “industrial agriculture.” 

 And for Sloterdijk,

A new provincial consciousness emphasizes that enlightenment cannot pledge itself for all time to a blind alliance with the scientific-technical-industrial complex, even if the latter has been its inseparable companion for centuries.  
The social forefront of enlightenment today aims at a qualification of that technical enlightenment with whose unleashing the hot phases of our history began. In it can be discovered traces of myth, dreams of a rational-magical mastery of nature, omnipotence fantasies of political engineers. (CCR, 95)
 

We can also call this as we increasingly do, globalization and the imperative of “urban imperialism” or sustainable development.   

But what is in a name?

What Sloterdijk says of censorship one can also read in Horkheimer but also Marcuse and at greater length in an another author Sloterdijk does not name at all: Jacques Ellul who wrote insightfully, if rarely cited on this complex and all-too-present topic, on propaganda.

See among his other books, Ellul’s Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Knopf, 1965).

These are not cricitisms and Sloterdijk to be sure can answer any criticism raised against him.  His books are designed to do this. 

Add to this the sheer size of Sloterdijk’s intellectual output and it is plain that this abundance, too, shields against critique. 

So, is there anything unshielded? 

No, and yes.