Philosophers From Germany

"It was the function of poetry, not of himself as the poet, that he thought highly. That function was sacred, for the poet was the priest of the divine. Mr. Peacock – we think rightly – compares him with Blake both for his isolation among his contemporaries and for the purity of his utterance, which seems to carry with it so little base or neutral matter. He can be compared with Blake also for his sense of inspiration; but whereas the divine for Blake was gradually concentrated in a power which he identified with the god of Christianity, Hölderlin sought for it in the gods. These gods of his – of whose imaginative reality his poetry convinces us – appear to have been created by a singular combination of German philosophical pantheism and a profound insight into the religious sources of Greek poetry."

"Friedrich Hölderlin saw his times – like Wordsworth, Beethoven and Hegel, he was born in 1770 – as in fermentation, as a messy process that may lead to clarity. Most of his poems are concerned with the nature and possibility of transition. Through the complexity of their syntax, the intricate jointing of their rhythms, and their abrupt shifts between images, we are trained in the dynamics of moving through uncertainty, and given experiences of how it can resolve itself into coherence. But almost at once comes the correction, the recognition that reality does not yet match the hopes that it is nevertheless capable of nourishing. If we are taken back to ancient Greece, the chief sustainer of Hölderlin's belief that a better world was possible, to witness, as in his poem “The Archipelago”, a vision of the growth of Athens so powerful it seems to be happening before our eyes, it is only to have the illusion wrecked by the reminder that Athens now lies in ruins. “The Archipelago” ends with the sober desire to understand the “changing and becoming” (“das Wechseln / Und das Werden”) it has so successfully embodied in its lines, so at a kind of remove; and most of Hölderlin's completed poems end quietly."

"When you read Hölderlin, you see feints and variations that put him with Celan; it was reading Hölderlin that gave Rilke the impetus for his Duino Elegies (his "Gods" are like Rilke's "Angels", tutelary presences that don't quite convince us that they exist: "Celebrate – yes, but what?" Hölderlin writes somewhere, but it sounds eerily like Rilke). Sometimes reading him can feel as bitterly sacramental as Trakl, the great Austrian poet who took his life following the battle of Grodek in the first world war. All that doesn't really "translate". If you really want to read Hölderlin – or any one of the other great "national" poets – you should learn German (or Russian or French or Spanish)."

"Before either of us knew it, we belonged to each other."

"It was not delight, not wonder that arose among us, it was the peace of heaven. A thousand times have I said it to her and to myself: the most beautiful is also the most sacred. And such was everything in her. Like her singing, even so was her life."

"I call on Fate to give me back my soul."

"What is the wisdom of a book compared with the wisdom of an angel?"

"What is all that men have done and thought over thousands of years, compared with one moment of love. But in all Nature, too, it is what is nearest to perfection, what is most divinely beautiful! There all stairs lead from the threshold of life. From there we come, to there we go."

"Now we were standing close to the summit's rim, gazing out into the endless East."

"Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste."

"The earth with yellow pears And overgrown with roses wild Upon the pond is bent, And swans divine, With kisses drunk You drop your heads In the sublimely sobering water. But where, with winter come, am I To find, alas, the floweres, and where The sunshine And the shadow of the world? Cold the walls stand And the wordless, in the wind The weathercocks are rattling."

"You seek life, and a godly fire Gushes and gleams for you out of the earth, As, with shuddering long, you Hurl yourself down to the flames of the Etna. So by a queen's wanton whim Pearls were dissolved in wine- heed her not! What folly, poet, to cast your riches Into that bright and bubbling cup! Yet still are you holy to me, as the might of the earth That bore you away, audaciously perishing! And I would follow the hero into the depths Did love not hold me."

"Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the mania Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth, and one way."

"Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst // das Rettende auch. - Patmos, 1803, Vers 3f. in: Gedichte von Friedrich Hölderlin, Druck und Verlag von Philipp Reclam jun., Leipzig 1873, S. 133"

"Wir sind nichts; was wir suchen, ist alles. - Fragment von Hyperion, aus: Neue Thalia, Vierter Band, Hrsg. Friedrich Schiller, Georg Joachim Göschen, Leipzig 1793, S. 220"

"The science of religion is one science within philosophy; indeed it is the final one. In that respect it presupposes the other philosophical disciplines and is therefore a result."

"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."

"Situation: that Hegel in punishment for his attack upon the religious would have to deliver an upbuilding discourse."

"The question would then turn on the significance of Hegel's Phaenomenologie for the System: whether it is an Introduction, whether it remains outside the System, and if it is an Introduction, whether it is again incorporated within the System; furthermore, whether Hegel does not have to his credit the astonishing achievement of not only having written the System, but of having written two, eye, three Systems, which must always require a matchless systematic talent, but which nevertheless seems be the case, since the System is finished more than once."

"Frau Edouard Devrient: "Do tell me, who is the stupid fellow sitting next to me?" Felix Mendelssohn (behind his napkin): "The stupid fellow next to you is the philosopher Hegel.""

"As in the Phenomenology and elsewhere in his system, therefore, Hegel is concerned above all in the philosophy of nature not to reduce phenomena to mere expressions of a single, universal principle, but to understand the unique specificity of each phenomenon in turn, as well as the distinctive logic immanent in that specificity that makes further specificities necessary. In other words (and pace critics, such as Deleuze), Hegel endeavours throughout his mature work on nature and on the human spirit to develop a fully articulated philosophy of difference."

"Hegel's logic requires our ordinary understanding to transform itself into dialectical thinking, but it sets out that process of transformation in a way that ordinary understanding can clearly understand. Hegel's logic is thus not some esoteric exercise in mystical thinking that can only be grasped by specially gifted initiates. It is the presuppositionless study of thought which is assessable and understandable by anyone who is prepared to be fully self-critical. Ordinary consciousness can understand the need for a presupposition - less logic and, as long as it is prepared to see its categories redefined, and see itself transformed in the process, it can understand the development of such a logic as well."

"There is reason in being, nature and history for Hegel. Such reason, or, as Hegel calls it, the 'Idea', is a reality, not a fiction. It is not, however, a transcendent power that dominates from on high the world in which we live. In that sense, it is not the infamous 'Absolute' attacked so frequently by Hegel's critics. The Idea is, rather, the rationality that is immanent in the world itself: the world's own inherent logic. In nature the Idea is the logic that is immanent in and generated by space as such and that leads to the emergence of freely moving matter and eventually to life. In history the Idea is nothing other than the logic that is immanent within and generated by human action and that leads human beings to become more social and more self-conscious as they seek to satisfy their interests."

"Historically, when philosophy runs up against science, philosophy loses. Think of the bishops who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. Or Hegel's proving by logic that there can be no more than seven planets."

"Theories of politics or of conduct that live long and retain influence have something more than theory behind them. They appeal to powerful instincts and interests, and the Hegelian philosophy is no exception. It appeals to the instincts and interests of counsellors and kings, of privileged classes, of Property and Order. It plays on the fear of fundamental criticism, of the razor-edge of thought, of the claim of conscience to scrutinize institutions and ordinances. It appeals to the slavishness which accepts a master if he will give the slave a share of tyranny over others more deeply enslaved. It satisfies national egotism and class ascendancy."