Peter Sloterdijk distinguishes in his Critique of Cynical Reason (139-40) between the objectifying and distancing aims of Enlightenment thought and the inescapable “physiognomic sense” of life among fleshly humans:

“Whereas the process of civilization, whose core is constituted by the sciences, teaches us to distance ourselves from people and things so that we experience them as objects, physiognomic sense provides a key to all that which reveals our proximity to the environment. Its secret is intimacy, not distance; it dispenses not a matter-of-fact but a convivial knowledge of things.1 It knows that everything has form and that every form talks to us in multiple ways. The skin can hear, the ears have the capacity to see, and the eyes can distinguish warm from cold, Physiognomic sense pays attention to the tensions in the forms and, as the neighbor of things, eavesdrops on their expressive whispering” (140).

Enlightenment attempts to silence physiognomic sense, stressing objectivity at the cost of closeness. As a result, “Scientists lose the capacity to behave as neighbors of the world; they think in concepts of distance, not of friendship; they seek overviews, not neighborly involvement. Over the centuries, modern science excluded everything that was incompatible with the a priori of objectifying distance and intellectual domination over the object: intuition, empathy, esprit de finesse, aesthetics, erotics” (140).

It won’t work: “What is repressed cannot . . . fail to return, and the irony of enlightenment tries to make such a return look like irrationalism, against which sworn enlighteners struggle with a vengeance. In the century-long dispute between rationalism and irrationalism, two complementary but one-sided views are putting each other on trial” (140).