Historians From Germany

"[...] let the end come, even if it is hard, then at least we’ll know whether we will win out in the end or go under."

"En begint er nog tijdens dat gevecht al tweedracht te komen, is toch de Jood weer minder dan de ander? O het is treurig, heel erg treurig, dat weer voor de zoveelste maal de oude wijsheid bevestigd is: "Wat één Christen doet, moet hijzelf verantwoorden, wat één Jood doet, valt op alle Joden terug.""

"“Which books are ruined?” I asked Margot, who was going through my library of treasures. “Algebra,” Margot said. I hurried over for a look, but unfortunately the algebra book had not been destroyed completely too."

"[Ik vind], dat er nog altijd iets moois overblijft, aan de natuur, de zonneschijn, de vrijheid, aan jezelf, daar heb je wat aan. Kijk daarnaar, dan vind je jezelf weer en God, dan word je evenwichtig. En wie gelukkig is, zal ook anderen gelukkig maken, wie moed en vertrouwen heeft, zal nooit in de ellende ondergaan!"

"Ik ben vaak neerslachtig geweest, maar nooit wanhopig, ik beschouw dit onderduiken als een gevaarlijk avontuur, dat romantisch en interessant is. Ik beschouw elke ontbering als een amusement in mijn dagboek. Ik heb me nu eenmaal voorgenomen, dat ik een ander leven zal leiden dan andere meisjes en later een ander leven dan gewone huisvrouwen. Dit is het goede begin van het interessante en daarom, daarom alleen moet ik in de meest gevaarlijke ogenblikken lachen om het humoristische van de situatie."

"Ik geloof nooit dat de oorlog de schuld is alleen van de grote mannen, van de regeerders en kapitalisten. O neen, de kleine man doet het net zo goed graag, anders zouden de volkeren er toch al lang tegen in opstand zijn gekomen! Er is nu eenmaal in de mensen een drang tot vernieling, een drang tot doodslaan, tot vermoorden en razen en zolang de gehele mensheid, zonder uitzondering, geen grote metamorphose heeft ondergaan, zal de oorlog woeden, zal alles wat opgebouwd, aangekweekt en gegroeid is, weer geschonden en vernietigd worden, waarna de mensheid opnieuw moet beginnen."

"Wees moedig! Laten we ons van onze taak bewust blijven en niet mopperen, er zal een uitkomst komen, God heeft ons volk nooit in de steek gelaten. Door alle eeuwen heen zijn er Joden blijven leven, door alle eeuwen heen moesten Joden lijden, maar door alle eeuwen heen zijn ze ook sterk geworden; de zwakken vallen, maar de sterken zullen overblijven en nooit ondergaan!"

"Ik wil nog voortleven ook na mijn dood! En daarom ben ik God zo dankbaar, dat hij me bij mijn geboorte al een mogelijkheid heeft meegegeven om me te ontwikkelen en om te schrijven, dus om uit te drukken alles wat in me is."

"Ik moet iets hebben naast man en kinderen waar ik me aan wijden kan! O ja, ik wil niet zoals de meeste mensen voor niets geleefd hebben. Ik wil van nut of plezier zijn voor de mensen, die om mij heen leven en die mij toch niet kennen."

"Onder "eet-periodes" versta ik periodes waarin men niets anders te eten krijgt dan een bepaald gerecht of een bepaalde groente. Een tijdlang hadden we niets anders te eten dan elke dag andijvie met zand, zonder zand, stamppot, los en in de vuurvaste schotel, toen was het spinazie, daarna volgden koolrabie, schorseneren, komkommers, tomaten, zuurkool enzovoort enzovoort."

"Dan denk ik niet aan al de ellende, maar aan het mooie dat nog overblijft. Hierin ligt voor een groot deel het verschil tussen moeder en mij. Haar raad voor zwaarmoedigheid is: "Denk aan al de ellende in de wereld en wees blij, dat jij die niet beleeft!" Mijn raad is: "Ga naar buiten, naar de velden, de natuur en de zon, ga naar buiten en probeer het geluk in jezelf te hervinden en in God. Denk aan al het mooie dat er in en om jezelf nog overblijft en wees gelukkig!""

"Men kan zeggen, je moet je mond houden, maar geen oordeel hebben bestaat niet. Niemand kan een ander zijn oordeel verbieden, al is die ander nog zo jong."

"Voor ieder die bang, eenzaam of ongelukkig is, is stellig het beste middel naar buiten te gaan, ergens waar hij helemaal alleen is, alleen met de hemel, de natuur en God. Want dan pas, dan alleen voelt men, dat alles is, zoals het zijn moet en dat God de mensen in de eenvoudige, maar mooie natuur gelukkig wil zien. Zolang dit bestaat en dat zal wel altijd zo zijn, weet ik, dat er in welke omstandigheden ook, een troost voor elk verdriet is. En ik geloof stellig, dat bij elke ellende de natuur veel ergs kan wegnemen."

"Ik laat het er op aankomen en doe niets anders dan leren en op een goed einde hopen."

"I’ve now reached the point where it doesn’t matter that much more to me anymore whether I die or whether I live on, the world will go on spinning without me and I can’t do anything to fight against these events anyway."

"Wie zou weten, hoeveel er in een bakvisziel omgaat?"

"Ik sus mijn geweten nu maar met de gedachte, dat scheldwoorden beter op papier kunnen staan dan dat moeder ze moet meedragen in haar hart."

"Een mens kan eenzaam zijn ondanks de liefde van velen, want voor niemand is hij toch "de liefste"."

"Als ik een boek lees, dat indruk op me maakt, moet ik in mezelf grondig orde scheppen, alvorens me onder de mensen te begeven, anders zou men van mij denken dat ik een wat rare geest had."

"Fraai volk, de Duitsers. En daar behoorde ik ook eens toe!"

"Maar één ding weet ik nu en dat is dit: je leert de mensen pas goed kennen, als je een keer echte ruzie met ze gemaakt hebt. Pas dan kan je hun karakter beoordelen!"

"In de derde les werd het hem echter weer te bont. "Anne, als strafwerk voor praten, een opstel over het onderwerp 'Kwek, kwek, kwek, zei juffrouw Snaterbek'.""

"Het is voor iemand als ik een heel eigenaardige gewaarwording om in een dagboek te schrijven. Niet alleen dat ik nog nooit geschreven heb, maar het komt me zo voor, dat later noch ik, noch iemand anders in de ontboezemingen van een dertienjarig schoolmeisje belang zal stellen."

"Change, according to Hegel, was the rule of life. Every idea irrepressibly bred its opposite and the two merged into a synthesis which in turn produced its own contradiction."

"When Shaw is read in the light of the existentialist thinkers, a new philosophical position arises from his works as a whole, a position of he himself was probably unconscious. It is this: that although the ultimate reality may be irrational, yet man's relation to it is not. Existentialism means the recognition that life is a tiny corner of casual order in a universe of chaos. All men are aware of that chaos; but some insulate themselves from it and refuse to face it. These are the Insiders, and they make up the overwhelming majority of the human race. The Outsider is the man who has faced chaos. If he is an abstract philosopher — like Hegel — he will try to demonstrate that chaos is not really chaos, but that underlying it is an order of which we are unaware. If he is an existentialist, he acknowledges that chaos is chaos, a denial of life — or rather, of the conditions under which life are possible. If there is nothing but life and chaos, then life is permanently helpless — as Sartre and Camus think it is. But if a rational relation can somehow exist between them, ultimate pessimism is avoided, as it must be avoided if the Outsider is to live at all. It is this contribution which makes Shaw the key figure of existentialist thought."

"Hegel expressed his formulation that the purpose of Phenomenology is to find the magic words with which you can conjure up the shape of the future. He was, consummately, a sorcerer. [...] it is quite consciously a magic act by which reality is transmogrified into the perfect reality."

"Hegel is explicit on the point that through his conceptual speculation one achieves a salvation that has not been delivered through Christ, or has been delivered only in an imperfect form and now will be delivered in perfect form by Hegel. When you go through his meditative exercise you are in the state of salvation and beyond being mere man."

"Hegel experiences his state of alienation as an acute loss of reality, and even as death. But he cannot, or will not, initiate the movement of return; the epistrophe, the periagoge, is impossible. The despair or lostness, then, turns into the mood of revolt. Hegel closes his existence in on himself; he develops a false self; and lets his false self engage in an act of self-salvation that is meant to substitute for the periagoge of which his true self proves incapable. The alienation which, as long as it remains a state of lostness in open existence, can be healed through the return [to God], now hardens into the acheronta movebo of the sorcerer who, through magic operations, forces salvation from the non-reality of his lostness. Since, however, nonreality has no power of salvation, and Hegel's true self knows this quite well, the false self must take the next step and, by ‘the energy of thinking,’ transform the reality of God into the dialectics of his consciousness: the divine power accrues to the Subjeckt that is engaged in self-salvation through reaching the state of reflective self-consciousness. If the soul cannot return to God, God must be alienated from himself and drawn into the human state of alienation. And finally, since none of these operations in Second Reality would change anything in the surrounding First Reality, but result only in the isolation of the sorcerer from the rest of society, the whole world must be drawn into the imaginary Second Reality. The sorcerer becomes the savior of the ‘age’ by imposing his System of Science as the new revelation on mankind at large. All mankind must join the sorcerer in the hell of his damnation."

"Let us state that the term "philosophy of history" may be applied to Hegel's speculation only with reservations. For Hegel's history is not to be found in reality, and the reality of history is not in Hegel. The harmony between construct and history could be achieved [by Hegel] only though the omission of an essential factor of reality. The factor Hegel excludes is the mystery of a history that wends its way into the future without our knowing its end. History as a whole is not necessarily an object of cognition; the meaning of the whole is not discernible. Hegel can construct, then, a meaningfully self-contained project of history only by assuming that the revelation of God in history is fully comprehensible. The appearance of Christ for him [for Hegel] the crux of world history; in this decisive epoch God had revealed the Logos -- reason -- in history. But the revalation was incomplete, and Hegel considered it man's duty to complete the incomplete revalation by raising the Logos to complete clarity in consciousness. This elevation to consciousness is in fact possible through the mind of the philosopher -- concretely, through the mind of Hegel: in the medium of the Hegelian dialectic the revelation of God in history reaches its fulfillment. The validity of the construct depends on the assumption that the mystery of revelation and of the course of history can be solved and made fully transparent through the dialectical unfolding of the Logos. We have here a construct closely related to that of Joachim of Flora. Joachim, too, was dissatisfied with the Augustinian waiting for the end; he, too, wanted to have an intelligible meaning in history here and now; and in order to make the meaning intelligible, he had to set himself up as the prophet to whom this meaning was clear. In the same manner, Hegel identifies his human logos with the Logos that is Christ, in order make the meaningful process of history fully comprehensible."

"(According to Glenn Alexander Magee) Hegel is a hermetic thinker: he replaced the philosopher with the sage and philosophy with theosophy, drawing on the Kabala, Alchemy, Rosicrucians, Gnosis and the Hermetic tradition, from Hermes Trismegistus onwards, in a broad line that goes from Meister Eckhart to Böhme, from Agrippa to Lullo and Paracelsus, from Pico della Mirandola to Giordano Bruno, to occultism and spiritism, astrology and the esotericism of Freemasonry. Hegel refers to an Invisible Church in his correspondence with Schelling and Hölderlin... But Hegel remains a Christian and a professor, not a magician or esotericist. He is inspired more by Luther than by Paracelsus."

"The absolute moment may be the absolute moment simply or the absolute moment of all previous history. That it is the absolute moment simply had been the contention of Hegel. His system of philosophy, the final philosophy, the perfect solution of all philosophic problems belongs to the moment when mankind has solved in principle its political problem by establishing the post-revolutionary state, the first state to recognize the equal dignity of every human being as such. This absolute peak of history, being the end of history, is at the same time the beginning of the final decline. In this respect Spengler has merely brought out the ultimate conclusion of Hegel's thought."

"To be a Hegelian was considered a sine qua non, not only among philosophers, but quite as much among theologians, men of science, lawyers, artists, in fact, in every branch of human knowledge, at least in Prussia. If Christianity in its Protestant form was the state-religion of the kingdom, Hegelianism was its state philosophy."

"The legacy of Hegel is that he blinded the West to the parochialism of its supposed 'universals' and hence consolidated the discourse on what was wrong about India. Hegel captures all cultures in his boxed-in categories of past/present, high/low, great/small. This is Reason's march forward to the realization of the Absolute in the temporal state. The degree to which Western scholarship has been influenced by his linear theory of history (including many Marxist and humanist accounts of history and the various philosophies built on such accounts) is truly amazing. His views found wide acceptance across the West and reshaped attitudes towards India. Hegel's theory of history has led to liberal Western supremacy, which hides behind the notion of providing the 'universals'. These European Enlightenment presuppositions became incorporated in the confluence of academic philosophy, philology, social theories and 'scientific' methodologies – all of which were driven by various imperial and colonial values alongside Christian theology. These influences, then, informed Indology, and they haunt South Asian Studies today."

"But it was Hegel, among all German thinkers, who had the deepest and most enduring impact on Western thought and identity. It is often forgotten that his work was a reaction against the Romantics' passion for India's past. He borrowed Indian ideas (such as monism) while debating Indologists to argue against the value of Indian civilization. He posited that the West, and only the West, was the agent of history and teleology. India was the 'frozen other', which he used as a foil to define the West.... Hegel has a peculiarly phobic and blind reaction to Asia in general and India in particular. He laboriously criticizes Sanskrit and Indian civilization, arguing with European Indologists with the aim of assimilating some ideas (such as absolute idealism) into his own philosophy while postulating India as the inferior other in order to construct his theory of the West. Asia's place in history is as an infant, whereas the West is mature and everyone's eventual destination."

"Among Noah's sons was one who covered the shame of his father, but the Hegelians are still tearing away the cloak which time and oblivion had sympathetically thrown over the shame of their Master."

"Of the nineteenth-century philosophers, Hegel put me off by his language, as arrogant as it was laborious; I regarded him with downright mistrust. He seemed to me like a man who was caged in the edifice of his own words and was pompously gesticulating in his prison."

"If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right."

"My reason for rejecting Hegel and monism in general is my belief that the dialectical argument against relations is wholly unsound. I think such a statement as 'A is west of B' can be exactly true. You will find that Bradley's arguments on this subject pre-suppose that every proposition must be of the subject-predicate form. I think this the fundamental error of monism."

"Hegel published his proof that there must be exactly seven planets just a week before the discovery of the eighth. The matter was hushed up, and a new, revised edition was hastily prepared; nevertheless, there were some who scoffed."

"When I was young, most teachers of philosophy in British and American universities were Hegelians, so that, until I read Hegel, I supposed there must be some truth to his system; I was cured, however, by discovering that everything he said on the philosophy of mathematics was plain nonsense."

"Hegel's philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound. It can quite easily be expounded lucidly in words of one syllable, but then its absurdity becomes obvious."

"While scientists were performing astounding feats of disciplined reason [during the Enlightenment], breaking down the barriers of the “unknowable” in every field of knowledge, charting the course of light rays in space or the course of blood in the capillaries of man's body -- what philosophy was offering them, as interpretation of and guidance for their achievements was the plain Witchdoctory of Hegel, who proclaimed that matter does not exist at all, that everything is Idea (not somebody's idea, just Idea), and that this Idea operates by the dialectical process of a new “super-logic” which proves that contradictions are the law of reality, that A is non-A, and that omniscience about the physical universe (including electricity, gravitation, the solar system, etc.) is to be derived, not from the observation of facts, but from the contemplation of that Idea's triple somersaults inside his, Hegel's, mind. This was offered as a philosophy of reason."

"[W]hen Hitler says that “the State dominates the nation because it alone represents it,” he is only putting into loose popular language the formula of Hegel, that “the State is the general substance, whereof individuals are but accidents.”"

"The principle of organic unities, like that of combined analysis and synthesis, is mainly used to defend the practice of holding both of two contradictory propositions, wherever this may seem convenient. In this, as in other matters, Hegel's main service to philosophy has consisted in giving a name to and erecting into a principle, a type of fallacy to which experience had shown philosophers, along with the rest of mankind, to be addicted. No wonder that he has followers and admirers."

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."

"My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Epigonoi [Epigones – Büchner, Dühring and others] who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing's time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell."

"Goethe made German literature into world literature, and Hegel made German philosophy into world philosophy."

"Hegel's philosophy was taught in the German universities, and had the approval of the Prussian throne. Frederick William III regarded it as a very excellent philosophy — in fact, an intellectual bulwark of the crown. He reached that complacent conclusion in a very simple way. Hegel said: "All that is real is reasonable, and all that is reasonable is real." The Emperor interpreted this as follows: All that exists is real, therefore reasonable, therefore right. As Alexander Pope, the English poet, put it, "Whatever is, is right." As this seemed to be a philosophical justification of police-government, the censorship, and the star-chamber, the Hegelian philosophy flourished under royal patronage."

"Hegel... scornfully characterizes Empiricism as seeking truth in Experience instead of in Thought. It is on such principles that the modern German Philosophy has reproduced the ambitious but inane attempts of Scholasticism."

"The second important characteristic of this utopia [as posited by Marxists] was the belief that the glorious future is not simply predetermined by the course of history hitherto, but that the future was already there, not empirically noticeable and yet more real than the empirical present about to crumble. This belief in a “higher” reality which, albeit invisible, was already embedded in the actual world could be traced back, to be sure, to its Hegelian sources; more exactly, it was an extension into the future-illegitimate in strictly Hegelian terms-of the Hegelian way of investigating the past. This enviable ability to detect in what appears to be something that appears not to be but that in fact is in a more eminent sense than what is “merely” empirical was itself in Hegel a secularized version of the Christian concept of salvation which, though not perceptible directly, is not just inscribed in God's plan but has already occurred, since in the divine timelessness whatever is going to happen did happen. It justifies the illimited self-righteousness of those who not only are capable of predicting the future but in fact are already its blessed owners, and it gives them the right to treat the actual world as essentially non-existent."