On Sloterdijk - John Gray in NYRB (in 2017):

‘At present Sloterdijk is Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the Karlsruhe School of Design. Unlike Heidegger he has avoided committing overtly to any political party. Yet throughout most of his career he has been a prominent and controversial public figure, engaging forcefully in debates about the welfare state (he has advocated the abolition of taxes), genetic engineering (he seems to support human genetic alteration), immigration (he was a strident critic of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy), and other issues. In 1999 he clashed with Jürgen Habermas, who attacked him for echoing aspects of Nazi discourse when in “Rules for the Human Park” he used terms such as “selection” and “breeding” to suggest that future generations might be shaped by some version of eugenics. More recently Sloterdijk has been criticized for appearing to give intellectual legitimacy to a rising current of German nationalism. Nonetheless his political thinking—like his philosophy as a whole—has always been unsystematic, diffuse, and hard to define.’ (…)

‘In the late 1970s he spent some years in India as a disciple of the Indian guru Osho, otherwise known as the Baghwan Shree Rajneesh. In 1983, having returned to Germany to become an independent scholar, Sloterdijk published his first major philosophical work, the one-thousand-page Critique of Cynical Reason, a best-seller that sold more copies than any other philosophy book in Germany since World War II.’

(…)

‘For ten years, between 2002 and 2012, Sloterdijk hosted a popular television show, Im Glashaus: Das Philosophische Quartett (In the Glass House: The Philosophical Quartet). Alongside these public interventions, he has maintained a prodigious rate of intellectual production. His Spheres trilogy runs to over 2,500 pages, and he has written numerous shorter works, only a few of which—Stress and Freedom, Philosophical Temperaments, and In the Shadow of Mount Sinai, for example—have been translated into English. Overall he has produced some fifty books.’

(…)

‘Instead the problem lies in his mode of writing, in which argument takes second place to a rhetoric deploying abstruse terminology and self-invented neologisms.’

(…)

‘In this regard Sloterdijk has something in common with the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, another prolific writer in the shadow of Heidegger. In both writers a provocative style is used to project an image of original thought, when what is being presented is a succession of variations on familiar Heideggerian themes.’

(…)

‘However, it would seem that Sloterdijk has not found it necessary to alter his view of Heidegger in light of these discoveries. In a conference on “Heidegger and the Jews” held in Paris in January 2015, he addressed the issue only toward the end of his presentation with the observation—reported and paraphrased by a student who was there—that “anything Heidegger wrote after Sein und Zeit need not concern us much.”’

(…)

‘We are not separate individuals trundling along a solitary trajectory to death, as Heidegger seemed to suggest in Being and Time (1927). From our months in the womb to the moment of our death, we inhabit spaces formed by and shared with other people.’

(…)

‘Much of the trilogy reads like a monstrously extended version of a digressive literary meditation of the kind W.G. Sebald produced in The Rings of Saturn. But Sloterdijk’s foamy verbosity has nothing of Sebald’s exquisite restraint and delicacy, and he displays none of Sebald’s modesty.’

(…)

‘For Sloterdijk technology included many cultural practices, including religions, which in our time have revealed themselves as “anthropotechnics,” tools devised by humans to enable them to manipulate themselves and one another. He pursued this theme in You Must Change Your Life, a five-hundred-page conspectus of “anthropotechnic tricks,” encompassing Greco-Roman Stoicism, yoga, icon painting, the “Parisian Buddhism” of the French-Romanian essayist E.M. Cioran, “neo-athleticism,” advertising, and much else.
Sloterdijk comes closest to an extended diagnosis of contemporary politics in Rage and Time (first published in German in 2006). Arguing that “Europe’s first word” is “rage,” which appears in the opening lines of Homer’s Iliad, the book develops an interpretation of modern politics in which the central moving force is “thymos.” The word, he writes, “signifies the impulsive center of the proud self, yet at the same time it also delineates the receptive ‘sense.’” He goes on to discuss “the piling-up of Jewish rage” in the biblical conception of a wrathful God, Lenin’s project of harnessing thymosin the service of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the “depression of rage” in post–cold war capitalism. The book closes with a discussion of the rise of what he calls “political Islam,” which he describes as a totalitarian movement of “hopeless male adolescents” from “an agitated subproletariat,” which Sloterdijk believes could nonetheless transform itself and become “a religious readymade excellent for mobilizing purposes.” He concludes: “It would be absurd to claim that rage’s best days are behind it.”’

(…)

‘Despite the scornful attitude to professors expressed in his thoughts on the campus cemetery, 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.’

Read the review here.

Gray on Sloterdijk is Popper on Hegel, to give just an example of Popper’s rants on Hegel: ‘In order to discourage the reader beforehand from taking Hegel’s bombastic and mystifying cant too seriously, I shall quote some of the amazing details which he discovered about sound, and especially about the relations between sound and heat.’

I could not bear ‘Spheres’.

But ‘Critique of Cynical Reason’ made a big impression on me, and so did ‘Rage and Time’ and ‘You Must Change Your Life’, that is filled with precious anecdotes and histories. A far cry from the Heideggerian-style that can be unbearable, but according to some people I respect even Heidegger opens up to you when you are willing to make an effort to understand his neologisms.

It's very well possible that Sloterdijk’s defense of Heidegger’s antisemitism was sloppy, but perhaps we should turn to Arendt if we want to know more about this issue.

Quite a few of Sloterdijk’s ideas are offensive to the liberal bourgeois, since open-mindedness is a quality that the progressives officially claim to appreciate you could make an effort to not be immediately be offended by Sloterdijk, even when he wants to abolish taxes for gifts and other sorts of beneficence.

Sloterdijk is at his best moments a comedian-philosopher or a philosopher-comedian. His style is uneven but the examples Gray gives don’t do justice to Sloterdijk.
Even in Kafka’s work you can find sloppy sentences.

The comedian-philosopher can be annoying for those who are attracted by saints.