Academics From Germany

"I am excluded from the possession of a determined object, not through the will of the other, but only through my own free-will. If I had not excluded myself, I should not be excluded. But I must exclude myself from something in virtue of the Conception of Rights. ** P. 182"

"Each individual imagines that he can exist, live, think, and act for himself, and believes that he himself is the thinking principle of his thoughts; whereas in truth he is but a single ray of the ONE universal and necessary Thought."

"The true Christian knows no Covenant or Mediation with God, but only the Old, Eternal, and Unchangeable Relation, that in Him we live, and move, and have our being; and he asks not who has said this, but only what has been said;—even the book wherein this may be written is nothing to him as a proof, but only as a means of culture; he bears the proof in his own breast. This is my view of the matter…"

"The Life according to Reason consists herein, -that the Individual forget himself in the Race, place his own life in the life of the Race, and dedicate it thereto;-the Life opposed to Reason, on the contrary, consists in this, that the Individual think of nothing but himself, love nothing but himself and in relation to himself, and set his whole existence in his own personal well-being alone: —and since we may briefly call that which is according to Reason good, and that which is opposed to Reason evil, so there is but One Virtue, to forget one's own personality;-and but One Vice,—to make self the object of our thoughts."

"The Doctrine of a Perfect God; in whose nature nothing arbitrary or changeable can have a place; in whose Highest Being we all live, and in this Life may, and ought at all times to be, blessed;—this Doctrine, which ignorant men think they have sufficiently demolished when they have proclaimed it to be Mysticism, is by no means Mysticism, for it has an immediate reference to human action, and in deed to the inmost spirit which ought to inspire and guide all our actions. It can only become Mysticism when it is associated with the pretext that the insight into this truth proceeds from a certain inward and mysterious light, which is not accessible to all men, but is only bestowed upon a few favourites chosen from among the rest:—in which pretext the Mysticism consists, for it betrays a presumptuous contemplation of personal merit, and a pride in mere sensuous Individuality."

"The greatest of the champions was, of course, Emanuel Lasker."

"My chess hero."

"He hated chess as much as he loved it, using it chielfy as a means of livelihood while he devoted himself to problems of philosophy and mathematics."

"As I pored over the games of the great masters, two styles appealed to me above all others: Lasker and Steinitz. In Lasker I saw, above all, the supreme tactical genius. Whether a game was won or lost mattered little to him; he fought on to get the most out of every position."

"Lasker also remarked with his detached, penetratingly ironic insight that Dawid Janowski took so much pleasure in a won position that he could not bear to part with it and wind it up to a victorious conclusion."

"That Lasker was a great fighter is an observation which is common to all studies of his play. Nobody can estimate what enormous will-power went into Lasker's fighting ability; and yet at the core of this quality was his belief that each position is unique, that it has some hidden aspect which the skeptic, the man of resource, will finally unearth."

"Tarrasch teaches knowledge, Lasker teaches wisdom."

"Steinitz always looked for the objectively right move. Tarrasch always claimed to have found the objectively right move. Lasker did nothing of the kind. He never bothered about what might or might not be the objectively right move; all he cared for was to find whatever move was likely to be most embarrassing for the specific person sitting on the other side of the board."

"It is no easy matter to reply correctly to Lasker's bad moves."

"Although the adage "If you find a good move, look for a better one" is often attributed to Lasker, it actually dates earlier."

"Emanuel Lasker was undoubtedly one of the most interesting people I came to know in my later life."

"Without error there can be no brilliancy."

"Put two players against each other who both have perfect technique, who both avoid weaknesses, and what is left?—a sorry caricature of chess.{{cite book"

"I rather liked Lasker's stubborn intellectual independence, a most rare quality in a generation whose intellectuals are almost invariably mere camp-followers."

"You should keep in mind no names, nor numbers, nor isolated incidents, not even results, but only methods. The method is plastic. It is applicable in every situation."

"Education in Chess has to be an education in independent thinking and judgement. Chess must not be memorized, simply because it is not important enough. If you load your memory you should know why. Memory is too valuable to be stocked with trifles. Of my fifty-seven years I have applied at least thirty to forgetting most of what I had learned or read, and since I succeeded in this I have acquired a certain ease and cheer which I should never again like to be without. If need be, I can increase my skill in Chess, if need be I can do that of which I have no idea at present. I have stored little in my memory, but I can apply that little, and it is of good use in many and varied emergencies. I keep it in order, but resist every attempt to increase its dead weight."

"He who wants to educate himself in Chess must evade what is dead in Chess — artificial theories, supported by few instances and upheld by an excess of human wit; the habit of playing with inferior opponents; the custom of avoiding difficult tasks; the weakness of uncritically taking over variations or rules discovered by others; the vanity which is self-sufficient; the incapacity for admitting mistakes; in brief, everything that leads to a standstill or to anarchy."

"On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in the checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite."

"Dr. Tarrasch is a thinker, fond of deep and complex speculation. He will accept the efficacy and usefulness of a move if at the same time he considers it beautiful and theoretically right. But I accept that sort of beauty only if and when it happens to be useful. He admires an idea for its depth, I admire it for its efficacy. My opponent believes in beauty, I believe in strength. I think that by being strong, a move is beautiful too."

"What he really yearned for was some scientific understanding and that beauty peculiar to the process of logical creation, a beauty from whose magic spell no one can escape who has ever felt even its slightest influence."

"What is immobile must suffer violence. The light-winged bird will easily escape the huge dragon, but the firmly rooted big tree must remain where it is and may have to give up its leaves, fruit, perhaps even its life."

"Spinoza's material life and economic independence were based on the grinding of lenses; in Lasker’s life chess played a similar part. But Spinoza was luckier, for his business was such as to leave his mind free and independent; whereas master-chess grips its exponent, shackling the mind and brain, so that the inner freedom and independence of even the strongest character cannot remain unaffected."

"What makes The Present Age and The Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle important is not so much that the former essay anticipates Heidegger and the latter, Barth: it would be more accurate to say that Heidegger’s originality is widely overestimated, and that many things he says at great length in his highly obscure German were said earlier by various writers who had made the same points much more elegantly, and that some of these writers, including Kierkegaard, were known to Heidegger. Why should Kierkegaard’s significance depend on someone else’s, quite especially when many points that others copied from him may be wrong?"

"Kaufmann’s Nietzsche is important for other reasons as well. It is a book that everyone seems to be familiar with but few have actually read, as if, having succeeded in upending the traditional picture of Nietzsche, it can now be safely ignored. But reading it (or rereading it) repays the effort. Kaufmann’s own views are considerably more nuanced than I have been able to suggest, and his accounts of Nietzsche’s dependence of Goethe, of his naturalism—the view that human beings are continuous with the rest of the animal world, in the spirit of Darwin—the mechanisms of sublimation, and his affinities with American pragmatism are genuine and lasting contributions to our understanding of this still seductive and enigmatic philosopher who is now, thanks to this book, part and parcel of our intellectual heritage. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche is still very much alive, and for that reason his Nietzsche deserves to come alive once again."

"The great artist liberates the emotions and recreates the sheer wonder of childhood without surrendering the development of the intellect."

"If Nietzsche’s image reached its nadir during the Second World War, when Hitler presented Mussolini with a bound edition of his works and the historian Crane Brinton wrote a book asserting he would have been “a good Nazi,” a resurrection was soon to come. The German émigré and Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann almost single-handedly revived his standing with his many translations and forceful reminder that Nietzsche hated anti-Semites and German nationalists as well as woolly-headed romantics. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche was a late flower of the Enlightenment, a tough-minded rationalist with the courage to face the Darwinian revelation that there is no purpose to nature or to our existence. The true task of the overman was to overcome himself, not others, and to do so by sculpturing his impulses and thoughts and inheritances into a willed unity that could be called “style.”"

"The most obvious failure of organized religions is surely that almost all of them have made a mockery of what their founders taught."

"I agree with Paul that love is more important than faith and hope; but so are honesty, integrity, and moral courage. The world needs less faith and more love and nobility."

"If it does not upset, it is not philosophy."

"Of course, not everything old is beautiful, any more than everything black, or everything white, or everything young. But the notion that old means ugly is every bit as harmful as the prejudice that black is ugly. In one way it is even more pernicious. The notion that only what is new and young is beautiful poisons our relationship to the past and to our own future. It keeps us from understanding our roots and the greatest works of our culture and other cultures. It also makes us dread what lies ahead of us and leads many to shirk reality."

"There is thus a certain plausibility to Nietzsche's doctrine, though it is dynamite. He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee."

"Of faith and morals, one cannot speak honestly for long without hurting feelings. Therefore, most people speak dishonestly of the most important subjects. Many recent philosophers prefer not to speak of them at all. But in some situations honesty is incompatible with silence."

"Heresy is a set of opinions "at variance with established or generally received principles." In this sense, heresy is the price of all originality and innovation."

"This period is characterized by a diversity of textual transmissions undreamed of two decades ago."

"Certain conclusions have forced themselves upon me while studying the sources, and I have not felt constrained to conceal them on account of that over-scrupulousness which is afraid to influence the future users of the edition."

"This identity is neither coincidental nor self-evident."

"It may be said, without exaggeration, that there is no other text which is documented by such varied types of sources."

"To be sure, these witnesses provide an excellent illustration of textual dynamics, and they deepen our knowledge of the development of the Bible text in the technical sense."

"The name of Rothschild means more than the firm. It means ALL JEWDOM SO FAR AS THE STOCK EXCHANGE is concerned; for only with the help of compatriots could the Rothschilds have reached their position of power — which dominates all others and obtain ENTIRE MASTERY OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE. In order to obtain command of the stock exchange and the money market all possible means were utilized. The Rothschilds practiced stock jobbing in the narrower sense which the French attach to the word. They employed the expedient of artificially influencing the market by creating a favorable atmosphere. The capitalist movement reached its highest point in the speculation banks. By means of loaning speculative securities, banks are placed in a position, by acquiring other securities at a cheap price, to create the impression that money is plentiful and is accompanied by a desire to buy. Thus power of creating an upward movement in prices is easily acquired — and this power can be reversed just as easily to depress prices by depreciating the store of available securities. The great banks, accordingly, hold the handle which controls the machine called the stock exchange. And the heads of the banks tend more and more TO BECOME ENTIRE MASTERS OF ECONOMIC LIFE."

"Capitalism was born from the money loan. Money lending contains the root idea of capitalism. Turn to the pages of the Talmud and you will find that the Jews made an art of lending money. They were taught early to look for their chief happiness in the possession of money. They fathomed all the secrets that lay hid in money. They became Lords of Money and Lords of the World."

"In the face of this fact, is there not some justification for the opinion that the United States owe their very existence to the Jews? And if this be so, how much more can it be asserted that Jewish influence made the United States just what they are—that is, American? For what we call Americanism is nothing else, if we may say so, than the Jewish spirit distilled."

"The rejection of concern for practical goals expressed in the German Society for Sociology's founding charter represented the culmination of a debate in the Social Policy Association, the so-called Werturteilsstreit, in which a group of young political economists, including , Werner Sombart, and Max Weber, attacked the older generation of political economists for mixing facts and values, science and politics."

"Humanity without Nationality is empty, nationality without humanity is blind."

"He [Einstein] calls my way of describing the physical world 'incomplete'; in his eyes this is a flaw which he hopes to see removed, while I am prepared to put up with it. I have in fact always regarded it as a step forward, because an exact description of the state of a physical system presupposes that one can make statements of infinite precision about it, and this seems absurd to me. It seems to me that I have followed Einstein's own way of thinking in accordance with his theory of relativity, which recognizes the impossibility of locating any point in time and space absolutely, and therefore concludes that the concept of absolute place and time determination does not make sense. This is at the base of the whole of his mighty edifice. But he did not want to acknowledge the analogy of the situation in the quantum theory."

"The world of Man's experience is infinitely rich and manifold, but chaotic and involved with the experiencing being. This being strives to arrange his impressions and to agree with others concerning them. Language and art, with their numerous modes of expression, are such ways of transmission from mind to mind, complete in their way where objects of the sense-world are concerned, but not well suited to the communication of exact ideas concerning the outer world. This marks the beginning of the task of science. From the multitude of experiences it selects a few simple forms, and constructs from them, by thought, an objective world of things. In physics, all 'experience' consists of the activity of constructing apparatus and of reading pointer instruments. Yet the results thereby obtained suffice to re-create the cosmos by thought. At first images are formed which are much influenced by observation; gradually, the conceptions become more and more abstract, old ideas are rejected and replaced by new ones. But, however far the constructed world of things departs from observation, nevertheless it is indissolubly linked at its boundaries to the perceptions of the sense, and there is no statement of the most abstract theory that does not express, ultimately, a relation between observations. That is why each new observation shakes up the entire structure, so that theories seem to rise and fall. This, however, is precisely what charms and attracts the scientist. The creation of his mind would be a melancholy thing, did it not die and come to life once more."