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Hegel Quotes

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Hegel Quotes

“customs must be introduced that require, if one is to be aware of their necessity and utility, either trusting belief or habituation from childhood on. Thus it is evident that a Volksreligion, if as the concept of religion implies its teaching is to be efficacious in active life, cannot possibly be constructed out of sheer reason. Positive religion necessarily rests on faith in the tradition by which it is handed down to us.”

ReligionTrustHabitHegelCustom
Book:The Philosophy of Art: An Introduction to the Scientific Study of Aesthetics
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“In a state which is really articulated rationally all the laws and organizations are nothing but a realization of freedom in its essential characteristics. When this is the case, the individual’s reason finds in these institutions, only the actuality of his own essence, and if he obeys these laws, he coincides, not with something alien to himself, but simply with what is his own. Freedom of choice, of course, is often equally called ‘freedom’; but freedom of choice is only non-rational freedom, choice and self-determination issuing not from the rationality of the will but from fortuitous impulses and their dependence on sense and the external world.”

FreedomInstitutionsIndividualityRationalityModernityLawsHegelThe State
Book:Lecciones de Estetica
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“The only way to survive such shitty times, if you ask me, is to write and read big, fat books, you know? And I’m writing now another book on Hegelian dialectics, subjectivity, ontology, quantum physics and so on. That’s the only way to survive. Like Lenin. I will use his example. You know what Lenin did, in 1915, when World War I exploded? He went to Switzerland and started to read Hegel.”

Inspirational QuotesTrumpHegelLeninShitty Times
Author:Slavoj Žižek
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“I'd be willing to bet that the notion of the end of time is more common today in the secular world than in the Christian. The Christian world makes it the object of meditation, but acts as if it may be projected into a dimension not measured by calendars. The secular world pretends to ignore the end of time, but is fundamentally obsessed by it. This is not a paradox, but a repetition of what transpired in the first thousand years of history. ... I will remind readers that the idea of the end of time comes out of one of the most ambiguous passages of John's text, chapter 20... This approach, which isn't only Augustine's but also the Church Fathers' as a whole, casts History as a journey forward—a notion alien to the pagan world. Even Hegel and Marx are indebted to this fundamental idea, which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pursued. Christianity invented History, and it is in fact a modern incarnation of the Antichrist that denounces History as a disease. It's possible that secular historicism has understood history as infinitely perfectible—so that tomorrow we improve upon today, always and without reservation... But the entire secular world is not of the ideological view that through history we understand how to look at the regression and folly of history itself. There is, nonetheless, an originally Christian view of history whenever the signpost of Hope on this road is followed. The simple knowledge of how to judge history and its horrors is fundamentally Christian, whether the speaker is Emmanuel Mounier on tragic optimism or Gramsci on pessimism of reason and optimism of will.”

ChristianTimeReligionHopeChristianityHistoryBibleCatholicScriptureCatholicismSecularApocalypseEnd Of The WorldSecularismRevelationHegelAugustineMarxChurch FathersHistoricismEnd Of The Time
Book:Belief or Nonbelief?
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“God is simply all souls together, while 'the Devil' is all souls apart (leading to conflict, hate and evil). Creation is what all souls together construct to explore their deepest nature and come to self-awareness. Souls start off united, and then create maximum disunity: the Big Bang. Then they dialectically work to come back into unity. They alienate themselves from themselves in order to understand themselves, to come to consciousness of themselves and their purpose and meaning, and then they return to themselves, but at a much higher level, a divine level. They have found themselves. They have come home. The broken mirror of God has reassembled and God can once again see its own reflection and know exactly what and why it is.”

SoulGodDevilDivinityMirrorHegelDialectic
Book:Soul Science: Know Your Soul
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“Em sua interpretação do budismo, Hegel opera, de maneira problemática, com conceitos onto-teo-lógicos como substância, essência, Deus, poder, soberania e criação, que são todos inadequados para o budismo. O nada budista é tudo, menos uma “substância”. Ele não é nem “em si essente” nem [algo que] “repousa e permanece em si mesmo”. Antes, ele é, por assim dizer, em si vazio. Ele não foge à determinação para se recolher em seu interior infinito. O nada budista não se deixa determinar como aquela “força substancial” que “rege o mundo e permite que tudo se origine e venha a ser segundo uma ordenação [Zusammenhang] racional”. O nada significa, antes, que nada domina. Ele não se exterioriza como um senhor. Dele não parte nenhuma “soberania”, nenhum “poder”. Buda não representa nada. Ele não encarna a substância infinita em uma singularização individual. Hegel emaranha de maneira inadmissível o nada budista em uma relação representacional e causal. O seu pensamento, que se dirige à “substância” e ao “sujeito”, não concebe apreender o nada budista.”

ZenHegelBudismo
Book:Filosofía del budismo Zen
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“When we say of things that they are finite, we understand thereby that they not only have a determinateness, that their quality is not only a reality and an intrinsic determination, that finite things are not merely limited . . . but that on the contrary, non-being constitutes their nature and being. Finite things are, but their relation to themselves is that they are negatively self-related and this very relation drives them beyond their being. They are, but the truth of this being is their destruction. The finite not only alters, as anything does, but it ceases to be, and it is not merely a possibility that it ceases to be, as though it could be that it might not cease. No, the nature of the being of finite things is that they have within them the seeds of their own destruction; the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.”

PhilosophyBecomingLogicBeingOntologyHegelDialecticsDialectic
Book:Science of Logic
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“Spinoza formulated the profoundly important principle that *all determination is negation*. To determine a thing is to cut it off from some sphere of being and so to limit it. To define is to set boundaries. To say that a thing is green limits it by cutting it from the sphere of pink, blue, or other-coloured things. To say that it is good cuts it off from the sphere of evil. This limitation is the same as negation. To *affirm* that a thing is within certain limits is to *deny* that it is outside those limits. To say that it is green is to say that it is not pink. Affirmation involves negation. Whatever is said of a thing denies something else of it. All determination is negation. This principle is fundamental for Hegel also, but with him it takes rather the converse form that *all negation is determination*. Formal logicians will remind us that we cannot simply convert Spinoza's proposition. But it is sufficient to point out in reply that not only does affirmation involve negation; negation likewise involves affirmation. To say that a thing belongs to one class is to affirm that it belongs to some other class,—though we may not know what that class is. Positive and negative are correlatives which mutually involve each other. To posit is to negate: this is Spinoza's principle. To negate is to posit: this is Hegel's. When, therefore, we meet Hegel talking about "the portentous power of the negative," we have to consider that for him negation is the very process of creation. For the *positive* nature of an object consists in its determinations. The nature of a stone is to be white, heavy, hard, etc. And since all determinations are negations, it follows that the positive nature of a thing consists in its negations. Negation, therefore, is of the very essence of positive being. And for the world to come into being what is above all necessary is the force of negation, "the portentous power of the negative." The genus only becomes the species by means of the differentia, and the differentia is precisely that which carves out a particular class from the general class by excluding, i.e., negating, the other species. And the species again only becomes the individual in the same way, by negating other individuals. These thoughts are no causal reflections of Hegel. They underlie his entire system. We must get to understand that these three ideas, determination, limitation, and negation, all involve each other." —from_The Philosophy of Hegel_”

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Author:W.T. Stace
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“Both Zizek and early Hegelians hint at some sort of state that is both beyond and within reality, both an escape and a hyper-examination that allows for some sort of becoming that does not escape ideology, but at least to some degree has a self that knows the game which the mind is playing and is not fooling itself.”

MindRealityIdeologyHegelZizekPsychoterapy
Book:Žižek in the Clinic: A Revolutionary Proposal for a New Endgame in Psychotherapy
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“Writers who see the existential loneliness of man as I see it – as a longing to be dissolved in the subjectivity of God – have written in ways so obscure that I have real doubts whether I can do any better. I am thinking of Kierkegaard, Levinas and Berdyaev, and also of Hegel, in whose shadow they wrote, and whose vision they confirmed by the very vehemence of their attacks on it. Hegel argued that we self-conscious beings become what we essentially are, through a process of conflict and resolution. Self-consciousness is implanted in us as a condition to be realized, and we acquire it through Entäusserung – through building the public arena in which the dialogue between self and other can occur. The self becomes real through the recognition of the other. Language, institutions, laws are the vehicles through which we achieve Selbstbestimmung, the certainty of self, which is also a limiting of self and a recognition of the boundary between self and other. The process that leads me to see myself as other to others also makes me other to myself, and this is the ‘moment’, to use Hegel’s language, of self-alienation, in which subjects become strangers to themselves, bound by external laws, hampered in their freedom and in rebellion against the constraints that press on them from outside. It is in this way that the fatal fracture splits our world – the fracture between subject and object that runs through me. Healing that fracture means reconciling my own view from somewhere with the competing views by which I am surrounded, so that how I am in the eyes of others matches how I am for myself. For Hegel this is achieved objectively through law and institutions, subjectively through art and religion. These are ways in which we re-connect with the world from which our own struggle for freedom and self-knowledge had separated us. Hölderlin expressed some of this in his great invocations of home and homecoming – the journey outwards, which is also a journey back. And Hölderlin’s spiritual journey has been traced in our time, and through a changed emotional geography, by T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets.”

SelfHegelActualization
Book:Face of God: The Gifford Lectures
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“I felt that the metal of my spirit, like a bar of iron that is softened and bent by a persistent flame, was being gradually softened and bent by the troubles that oppressed it. In spite of myself, I was conscious of a feeling of envy for those who did not suffer from such troubles, for the wealthy and the privileged; and this envy, I observed, was accompanied—still against my will—by a feeling of bitterness towards them, which, in turn, did not limit its aim to particular persons or situations, but, as if by an uncontrollable bias, tended to assume the general, abstract character of a whole conception of life. In fact, during those difficult days, I came very gradually to feel that my irritation and my intolerance of poverty were turning into a revolt against injustice, and not only against the injustice which struck at me personally but the injustice from which so many others like me suffered. I was quite aware of this almost imperceptible transformation of my subjective resentments into objective reflections and states of mind, owing to the bent of my thoughts which led always and irresistibly in the same direction: owing also to my conversation, which, without my intending it, alway harped upon the same subject. I also noticed in myself a growing sympathy for those political parties which proclaimed their struggle against the evils and infamies of the society to which, in the end I had attributed the troubles that beset me—a society which, as I thought, in reference to myself, allowed its best sons to languish and protected its worst ones. Usually, and in the simpler, less cultivated people, this process occurs without their knowing it, in the dark depths of consciousness where, by a kind of mysterious alchemy, egoism is transmuted into altruism, hatred into love, fear into courage; but to me, accustomed as I was to observing and studying myself, the whole thing was clear and visible, as though I were watching it happen in someone else; and yet I was aware the whole time that I was being swayed by material subjective factors, that I was transforming purely personal motives into universal reasons.”

CharacterFree WillAlienationItalyObjectivitySubjectivityHegelCategorical ImperativeEssentialismPolitical AnimalUniversal Reasons
Book:Contempt
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“Hegel’s claim that genuine agency is the collective historical product of earlier, only partially realized attempts at the actualization of such agency (attempts at an unavoidable normative self-regulation) goes well beyond Kant’s self-legislation model but is not fully intelligible without remembering that origin, and without working through what he (and Fichte) adopted from Kant and transformed. Kant’s view that being an agent involves not acting “according to laws” but “according to conceptions of law” still holds great, decisive force in his successors, as does his claim that a law’s authority and so its genuineness as law, can be explained only by some non arbitrary act of self-legislation or self authorization. This will turn out to be a thoroughly “socially mediated” account of human autonomy (as collective autonomy), but the reliance on the German idealist theme of Reason’s self-authorization will be quite prominent.”

AutonomyHegelKantFichteConceptions Of LawLaws Self Legislation
Book:Hegel's Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life
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“A free will not subject to immutable laws would be "ein Unding", a non-thing. If being autonomous were being under laws imposed in what would have to be arbitrary, lawless acts, then autonomy would be a non-reality. If this is right, then there is no need for a concept of autonomy - anyway paradoxical and therefore empty - according to which being autonomous is being under laws one has freely chosen. For then there is no apparent conflict of being free and being under laws, which autonomy so conceived would resolve.”

AutonomyLawsHegelKantPippinRödlPinkardBrandom
Book:Self-Consciousness
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“It is certainly possible that an individual can, qua individual, suffer some failure of meaning, as in pathological boredom or depression. But any given social world is also a nexus of common significances, saliences, taboos, and a general shared orientation that can also either be sustained or can fail. Indeed one of the most interesting aspects of such a social condition, shared meaningfulness, or intelligibility, is that it can fail, go dead, lose its grip, and a very great deal of what interests Hegel is simply what such shared practical meaningfulness must be that it could fail, and how we should integrate our account of action into a fuller theory of the realization of such a condition and its failure. (His general name for the achievement and maintenance of such a form of intelligible life is “Sittlichkeit” and his case for this sort of priority of Sittlichkeit over strictly individualist accounts of mindedness in-action has not, I want to argue, been properly appreciated.)”

MeaningAgencyHegelPippinIndividualistSocialitySittlichkeit
Book:Hegel's Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life
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“Hegel is well aware of the fact - personally experienced in his youth - that a "deviation" (Abweichung) in thought from what is "publicly recognized" can be the expression of a genuine, albeit unhappy, consciousness, one which is justifiably "severed" (entzweit) from actuality. In certain periods criticism is the only possible form of philosophy. Nothing can be said a priori about the time at which a situation arises in which a philosopher can only be true by dissenting. Ontological principles, a universal belief in providence or the conviction that reason is strong enough to be victorious do not answer the question of whether our current factual situation is in agreement with reason. Even if one believes or knows for certain that the universe and history as a whole are rational, one still does not know a priori the degree to which the present situation realizes what history as a whole (if this word means anything) and the entire actuality make actual.”

ReasonHistoryCritiqueActualityHegelUnhappy Consciousness
Book:Philosophy and Politics: A Commentary on the Preface to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
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“No matter how deeply it [a faith based on mere authority] entrenches itself behind authority, no matter how artfully it seeks to ward off all counter-hypotheses and alternative possibilities by assembling a system that covers every conceivable circumstance . . . , reason will still venture to subject it to critical scrutiny. And it will do so spontaneously [aus sich selbst], generating from within itself principles of possibility and plausibility irrespective of any such artificial historical structure predisposed to neglect reason and to claim primacy on historical grounds over the persuasiveness of rational truths.”

ReasonHegel
Author:Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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“If sharing meant receiving, well and good, but if it was a question of giving, then to hell with it, the Clochemerlins would cry out in chorus. Sad to relate, these bumpkins knew nothing about Hegel or Marx. They each had their little patch of ground inherited from previous generations, their trade secrets handed down from father to son, and they could see no farther.”

SharingHegelMarxClochemerle
Book:Clochemerle-les-Bains [English language]
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“Epic art is founded on action, and the model of a society in which action could play out in greatest freedom was that of the heroic Greek period; so said Hegel, and he demonstrated it with The Iliad: even though Agamemnon was the prime king, other kings and princes chose freely to join him and, like Achilles, they were free to withdraw from the battle. Similarly the people joined with their princes of their own free will; there was no law that could force them; behavior was determined only by personal motives, the sense of honor, respect, humility before a more powerful figure, fascination with a hero's courage, and so on. The freedom to participate in the struggle and the freedom to desert it guaranteed every man his independence. In this way did action retain a personal quality and thus its poetic form. Against this archaic world, the cradle of the epic, Hegel contrasts the society of his own period: organized into the state, equipped with a constitution, laws, a justice system, an omnipotent administration, ministries, a police force, and so on. The society imposes its moral principles on the individual, whose behavior is thus determined by far more anonymous wishes coming from the outside than by his own personality. And it is in such a world that the novel was born.”

ActionAncientBureaucracyGreeceStatismDoingHegelIliadHomerClassical
Book:The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
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“[O]ne has to have endured a few decades before wanting, let alone needing, to embark on the project of recovering lost life. And I think it may be possible to review 'the chronicles of wasted time.' William Morris wrote in The Dream of John Ball that men fight for things and then lose the battle, only to win it again in a shape and form that they had not expected, and then be compelled again to defend it under another name. We are all of us very good at self-persuasion and I strive to be alert to its traps, but a version of what Hegel called 'the cunning of history' is a parallel commentary that I fight to keep alive in my mind.”

LifeAgeHistoryBattlesHegelSelf DelusionReminiscenceWilliam MorrisSelf Persuasion
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“The sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as "substance" and "essence of man," and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as "self-consciousness" and the "Unique.”

CommunismMaterialismCapitalSelf ConsciousnessHegelIdealMeans Of ProductionRelations Of Production
Book:The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy
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“Man's nature, he postulated, was to be a "free conscious producer," but so far he had not been able to express himself freely in productive activity. He had been driven to produce by need and greed, by a passion for accumulation which in the modern bourgeois age becomes accumulation of capital. His productive activity had always, therefore, been involuntary; it had been "labour.”

CapitalismLaborCommunismBourgeoisCapitalHegelEstrangementMarxAlienated LaborEntfremdungsgeschichteFree Conscious Producer
Book:The Marx-Engels reader
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“Hegel was an advocate of panlogism: reason is literally everywhere. Existence is made of reason, hence existence is entirely knowable. Reality is constituted by the mind and is its construction. Given that mind can know everything it made, there is no unknowable, noumenal world. If mind creates everything, there is nothing outside mind, no noumenal objects existing independently of mind.”

PhilosophyRationalismHegelKantNoumenaPanlogos
Book:Magic, Matter and Qualia
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“The ground of the spacetime domain is the frequency domain. What exists beyond spacetime isn’t anything mysterious and unknowable, it’s just frequency, i.e. the domain of pure mind, of pure light, the photonic domain: immaterial, massless, maximally length contracted (it does not experience space) and time dilated (it does not experience time), unextended and dimensionless; everything that matter is not. The photonic domain of mind is simply Leibniz’s world of pure monads, Descartes’ world of thinking substance, and Hegel’s world of the Absolute Idea. It is the inside of reality.”

MatterScienceIdealismRationalismHegelMindsDescartesPhotonFourier MathematicsFourier Frequency
Book:Inside Reality: The Inner View of Existence
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“Noi non partiamo dal presupposto di combattere e vincere una guerra, ma dal presupposto di autoemancipazione di tutta la specie. È un presupposto molto diverso che comporta - è vero su scala storica anche se è molto difficile declinarlo - che non ci siano più guerre, superare il concetto della guerra, che filosoficamente significa superare la dialettica come fatto fondamentalmente negativo, come fatto di affermazione seriale della deperibilità, come fatto del «non» che prevale costantemente - che significa, come atteggiamento diffusamente hegeliano, prevalenza assoluta della critica. La nostra impostazione tende ad essere apertamente in rottura con tutto ciò. Non è casuale neanche una differenza di linguaggio, di utilizzo delle parole molto grande rispetto al passato: è voluta, scelta, meditata. Significa partire dal concetto di unità, cercare di arrivare al concetto di armonia, cercare di riabilitare metodologicamente e complessivamente il concetto di specie. Questo non vuol dire negare quelle che chiameremo differenze, o opposizioni, o contrarietà, o anche contraddizioni o persino contrapposizioni. La questione è da dove si parte nell'affermazione, nella qualifica di questi termini di opposizione, di contrarietà, di contraddizione, di contrapposizione: da chi opprime la specie o dalla specie tutta? [...] Qui sta la questione decisiva, nel punto di partenza: dal punto di partenza si riconosce tutto, è un problema di codice genetico della nostra ricerca.”

GuerraFilosofiaHegelCriticaArmoniaLogicaSpecie UmanaAuto EmancipazioneAutoemancipazioneGnoseologiaAffermazioneContraddizioniDialetticaDialettica NegativaEmancipazioneRicerca FilosoficaUnità
Book:Per una logica affermativa della specie. Corso introduttivo alla logica
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“La dialettica hegeliana si fondava sul coraggio fisico: colui che non ha paura sarà il padrone, colui che ha paura sarà lo schiavo. La dialettica romanzesca si fonda sull'ipocrisia: la violenza, lungi dal servire gli interessi di colui che la esercita, rivela l'intensità del suo desiderio; è dunque un segno di schiavitù.”

HegelDesiderioViolenzaGirardDesiderio TriangolarePadroneSchiavo
Book:Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure
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“Si tratta di pensare in maniera diversa l'esistenza concreta della specie. Non che il tempo passa e noi invecchiamo: noi siamo protagonisti del nostro tempo e costruiamo la nostra vita, giorno per giorno, settimana per settimana, mese per mese, anno per anno, idea per idea, sentimento per sentimento, apprendimento per apprendimento, riflessione per riflessione, espressione per espressione. Allora abbiamo una visione più chiara: quando parliamo di interrelazione universale (lo ha detto anche Engels cercando di realizzare Hegel) non ci riferiamo a una interrelazione universale fatidica e fatale, tutta negativa, che quindi potrà realizzarsi solo attraverso bagni di sangue. Di vittoria in vittoria nascerà una nuova sconfitta, o di sconfitta in sconfitta cerchiamo la vittoria? Questo è il punto, il punto di partenza. Ecco perché non partiamo dal conflitto, non partiamo dalla negazione e non partiamo dalla negazione della negazione. Può sembrare una sfida eccessiva all'obbrobrio, all'oppressione, alla devastazione del sistema, ma è obbligatorio domandarsi: tutti coloro che sono partiti dal conflitto e lo hanno assolutizzato dove sono arrivati, a che conclusioni sono giunti, che strade ci hanno fornito, che chance ci hanno dato? Ci hanno insegnato molto, ma che obiettivo ci propongono? È possibile vincere continuando a partire dal conflitto? E il conflitto non è forse il terreno a cui l'avversario vuole costringerci, non è forse quello che dobbiamo rifiutare, che dobbiamo cercare di superare da tutti i punti di vista? Per esempio: il conflitto di genere c'è, addirittura abbiamo parlato di uno scontro necessario con il marxismo. Tuttavia questo è il punto di partenza o una conseguenza? Il vero punto di partenza è cercare di ricostruire a un livello più alto, nella logica dell'autosuperamento - che contiene profondamente opposizione, contrarietà, contrapposizione, conflitto, ma tende già a superarli -, l'unità della specie, la sua possibilità di sviluppo a un livello superiore. Su questo si gioca tutto. Cominciamo da un sì o cominciamo sui no? E dove andiamo a finire? Da che punto di vista partiamo e dove arriviamo, dove vogliamo arrivare? Questo è un problema filosoficamente molto profondo. Purtroppo Hegel ha fornito le ragioni maggiori di questa dialettica della negatività che dobbiamo cercare di superare d'entrata. Non è soltanto un desiderio (e se già lo fosse sarebbe una cosa molto grande), ha a che fare con tutto il modo in cui pensiamo alla nostra impresa, alla nostra causa, alla nostra vita.”

FilosofiaHegelEngelsSentimentoMarxismoSistemaRiflessioneOppressioneSpecie UmanaOntologiaGnoseologiaOnticaAffermazioneApprendimentoContraddizioniDialetticaDialettica NegativaEspressioneAuto SuperamentoAutosuperamentoConflittoConflitto Di GenereDialettica Della NegativitàInterrelazioneInterrelazione UniversaleNegazione Della NegazionePunto Di PartenzaUnità Della Specie
Book:Per una logica affermativa della specie. Corso introduttivo alla logica
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“[Jürgen Habermas' obituary to friend and philosopher, Richard Rorty] One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.”

LoveInspirationalPhilosophyEarthLawDeathHopeJusticeAtheismHolySacredAtheistAutobiographyDescendantsHegelObituaryOrchidsStalinTrotskyJoseph StalinLeon TrotskyIronistRichard RortyGlobal CivilizationRichard Rorty ObituaryStrict Atheist
Author:Jürgen Habermas
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“It is all very well to have some internal sense of oneself as an individual, but that sense must correspond to an external reality. Part of that external reality is property. The fact that something belongs to me and not to everyone increases my sense of myself as someone in particular. For Hegel that sense of individual particularity is intrinsic to the modern moral order. Indeed "the right of the subject's particularity to find satisfaction, or--to put it differently--the right of subjective freedom, is the pivotal and focal point in the difference between antiquity and the modern age." The fact that others do not take my property--that they regard it as mine--is also a way in which they recognize me as an individual. It is precisely this recognition that the slave, the bondsman, and the serf lack. That the right to own private property, to control some corner of the world, is universal in the modern state is for Hegel part of its glory. (p. 155)”

Private PropertyHegelSubjective Freedom
Book:The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought
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“The violence of Hegel’s writing style consists in not allowing the reader to translate the conflicts of a proposition into the higher synthesis of a stable meaning. It interferes with the reader’s wish to be done with the text…. Hegel frustrates the reader’s desire to withdraw as quickly as possible from the contact with the other into the aloof identity and superior authority of the I. Speculative science asks us to “be with [zusammensein]” being (apprehended and articulated as subject) to sympathize with its self-disruption without losing our own beat, to join hands with it and dance.”

PhilosophyHegelHegelianismAffect Theory
Book:Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion
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“The claim that Hegel represents the culmination of metaphysics has had disastrous consequences, not because Hegel is a disaster, but because the reiteration of this claim has stood in the way of rethinking metaphysics. It is like a mesmerizing fetish whose bewitching spell we cannot break. Why are we in its spell? Precisely because of Hegel's greatness, and the great difficulty of thinking philosophically at a level comparable to Hegel's. We cannot surpass Hegel because Hegel surpasses us, and the seeming comprehensive system freezes us, or exhausts us, instead of freeing us. It does not have to be so.”

MetaphysicsHegelHegelianism
Author:William Desmond
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“Hegel represents history as the self-realization of spirit (Geist) or God. The fundamental scheme of his theory is as follows. Spirit is self-creative energy imbued with a drive to become fully conscious of itself as spirit. Nature is spirit in its self-objectification in space; history is spirit in its self-objectification as culture—the succession of world-dominant civilizations from the ancient Orient to modern Europe. Spirit actualizes its nature as self-conscious being by the process of knowing. Through the mind of man, philosophical man in particular, the world achieves consciousness of itself as spirit. This process involves the repeated overcoming of spirit's alienation (Entfremdung) from itself, which takes place when spirit as the knowing mind confronts a world that appears, albeit falsely, as objective, i.e. as other than spirit. Knowing is recognition, whereby spirit destroys the illusory otherness of the objective world and recognizes it as actually subjective or selbstisch. The process terminates at the stage of "absolute knowledge," when spirit is finally and fully "at home with itself in its otherness," having recognized the whole of creation as spirit—Hegelianism itself being the scientific form of this ultimate self-knowledge on spirit's part.”

GodSpiritMaterialismAlienationObjectivitySubjectivityOntologyHegelMarxDialectical MaterialismGerman PhilosophyGeistAbsolute KnowledgeEntfremdungSelbstischWorld Spirit
Book:The Marx-Engels reader
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“Since we are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable, tool-making creatures who arose from other evolutionary paths and see not beasts but brothers, not rivals by fellow pilgrims journeying to the shrine of intelligence. Yet that is what I see, or yearn to see. The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged but in the creature judging, and when we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.”

Science FictionAlienHegelThe Other
Author:Orson Scott Card
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“The view that Hegel represents a kind of summation of major strands in the Western tradition is not without some truth. This being so, if we wish to follow in his footsteps, we must strive for as comprehensive and nuanced an understanding of the possibilities of the philosophical tradition as he had. Obviously, this is extraordinarily difficult; it is Hegel's greatness that has made things more difficult for metaphysics rather than easier. To be a great metaphysician is not only to release essential possibilities of thinking, it is to cast a shadow over descendent thinkers under which they must struggle for light. Excess of light blinds eyes unused to the surplus of greatness.”

MetaphysicsHegelWestern Philosophy
Author:William Desmond
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“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep," Jess intoned as they took the path down from the parking lot. She had imagined finding a spot to read and meditate, leaving Emily to walk alone for half an hour, but the trees were so tall, and the light filtering down so green that she forgot her stratagem, and her troubles as well. The saplings here were three hundred years old, their bark still purple, their branches supple, foliage feathery in the gloaming. They rose up together with their ancestors, millennia-old redwoods outlasting storms, regenerating after lightning, sending forth new spires from blasted crowns. What did Hegel matter when it came to old-growth? Who cared about world-historical individuals? Not the salamanders or the moss. Not the redwoods, which were prehistoric. Potentially post-historic too.”

WoodsTreesHegelJess BachMuirRedwood Forest
Book:The Cookbook Collector
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“Hegel’s account avoids falling into a careless historicism by virtue of its appeal to the infinite ends at work in subjectivity, but it maintains its strong historicist commitment by virtue of the way in which Hegel takes himself to have shown that the universal has to particularize itself— a thesis we could formulate rather abstractly as the notion that for speculative (philosophical) concepts, meaning is determined by use but not exhausted by use, such that within a certain historical development, such concepts can be developed into better actualizations. Hegel’s type of philosophical history is not an a priori theory about how those historical particulars were necessitated to line up with each other, nor is it some happy talk Whig account of progress, nor is it a self-congratulatory tale of progressive enlightenment and error-correction, nor is it the explication of any laws of history or any claims about how various regimes inevitably converge at some final point or inevitably lead to a certain result. It is rather an examination of the metaphysical contours of subjectivity and how the self interpreting, self-developing collective human enterprise has moved from one such shape to another in terms of deeper logic of sense-making and how that meant that subjectivity itself had reshaped itself over the course of history. It is not a thesis about what constitutes true causality in history, nor is it even a thesis that unintelligibility causes such breakdowns. Hegel’s philosophy of history is concerned with what various things mean to subjects, individually and collectively, in the historical configurations into which they are thrown.”

HistoryMeaningSubjectivityHegelPinkardMaking Sense Of Making SenseMeaning As Use
Book:Does History Make Sense?: Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice
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“Kant ist über dieses äußerliche Verhältnis des Verstandes als des Vermögens der Begriffe und des Begriffes selbst zum Ich hinausgegangen. Es gehört zu den tiefsten und richtigsten Einsichten, die sich in der Kritik der Vernunft finden, daß die Einheit, die das Wesen des Begriffs ausmacht, als die ursprünglich-synthetische Einheit der Apperzeption, als Einheit des »Ich denke« oder des Selbstbewußtseins erkannt wird”

HegelKantSelbstbewusstseinVerstandBegriffEinheit Der Apperzeption
Book:Wissenschaft der Logik. Zwieter Theil
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