philosopher, university teacher, philosophy historian, writer, philosopher of law, logician
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Among the Romans in Christian times Mithras-worship as very widely spread, and so late as the Middle Ages we meet with a secret Mithras-worship ostensibly connected with the order of the Knights-Templars. Mithras thrusting the knife into the neck of the ox is a figurative representation belonging essentially to the cult of Mithras, of which examples have been frequently found in Europe.
What experience and history teach is this β that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help.
To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.
It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in providence, than to see their real import or value.
Life has a value only when it has something valuable as its object.
History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.
Serious occupation is labor that has reference to some want.
The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.
Education is the art of making man ethical.
In history, we are concerned with what has been and what is; in philosophy, however, we are concerned not with what belongs exclusively to the past or to the future, but with that which is, both now and eternally β in short, with reason.
On the stage on which we are observing it, β Universal History β Spirit displays itself in its most concrete reality.
The destiny of the spiritual World, and, β since this is the substantial World, while the physical remains subordinate to it, or, in the language of speculation, has no truth as against the spiritual, β the final cause of the World at large, we allege to be the consciousness of its own freedom on the part of Spirit, and ipso facto, the reality of that freedom.
The first remark we have to make, and which β though already presented more than once β cannot be too often repeated when the occasion seems to call for it, β is that what we call principle, aim, destiny, or the nature and idea of Spirit, is something merely general and abstract. Principle β Plan of Existence β Law β is a hidden, undeveloped essence, which as such β however true in itself β is not completely real.
Aims, principles, &c., have a place in our thoughts, in our subjective design only; but not yet in the sphere of reality. That which exists for itself only, is a possibility, a potentiality; but has not yet emerged into Existence. A second element must be introduced in order to produce actuality β viz. actuation, realization; and whose motive power is the Will β the activity of man in the widest sense.
We assert then that nothing has been accomplished without interest on the part of the actors; and β if interest be called passion, inasmuch as the whole individuality, to the neglect of all other actual or possible interests and claims, is devoted to an object with every fibre of volition, concentrating all its desires and powers upon it β we may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion.
This final aim is God's purpose with the world; but God is the absolutely perfect Being, and can, therefore, will nothing but himself.
Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.
Education is the art of making man ethical.
We do not need to be shoemakers to know if our shoes fit, and just as little have we any need to be professionals to acquire knowledge of matters of universal interest.
Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.
Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself.
To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them.
In Mohammedanism the narrow principle of the Jews is expanded into universality and thereby overcome. Here, God is no longer, as in the Far East, regarded as existent in an immediately sensory way but is conceived as the one infinite power elevated above all the multiplicity of the world. Mohammedanism is, therefore, in the strictest sense of the word, the religion of sublimity.
Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.
There are Plebes in all classes.
Between the Shaman of the Tungus, the European prelate who rules church and state, the Voguls, and the Puritans, on the one hand, and the man who listens to his own command of duty, on the other, the difference is not that the former make themselves slaves, while the latter is free, but that the former have their lord outside themselves, while the latter carries his lord in himself, yet at the same time is his own slave.
What Jesus reveals is not that laws disappear but that they must be kept through righteousness of a new kind, β¦ which is more complete because it supplements the deficiency in the laws. β¦ This expanded content we may call an inclination so to act as the laws may command, i.e., a unification of inclination with the law whereby the latter loses its form as law. This correspondence with inclination is the ΟληΟΟΞΌΞ± [fulfillment] of the law.
The inclination to act as the laws command, a virtue, is a synthesis in which the law β¦ loses its universality and the subject its particularity; both lose their opposition, while in the Kantian conception of virtue this opposition remains, and the universal becomes the master and the particular the mastered.
In the βfulfillmentβ of both the laws and duty, β¦ the moral disposition ceases to be the universal, opposed to inclination, and inclination ceases to be particular, opposed to the law.
A command can express no more than an ought or a shall, because it is a universal, but it does not express an βisβ; and this at once makes plain its deficiency. Against such commands Jesus sets virtue, i.e., a loving disposition, which makes the content of the command superfluous and destroys its form as a command, because that form implies an opposition between a commander and something resisting the command.
Opinion considers the opposition of what is true and false quite rigid, and, confronted with a philosophical system, it expects agreement or contradiction. And in an explanation of such a system, opinion still expects to find one or the other.
The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself.
The life of God β the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things β may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things.
The goal to be reached is the mindβs insight into what knowing is. Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary, ... because by nothing less could that all-pervading mind ever manage to become conscious of what itself is β for that reason, the individual mind, in the nature of the case, cannot expect by less toil to grasp what its own substance contains.
Discord which appears at first to be a lamentable breach and dissolution of the unity of a party, is really the crowning proof of its success.
The significance of that 'absolute commandment', know thyself β whether we look at it in itself or under the historical circumstances of its first utterance β is not to promote mere self-knowledge in respect of the particular capacities, character, propensities, and foibles of the single self. The knowledge it commands means that of man's genuine reality β of what is essentially and ultimately true and real β of spirit as the true and essential being.
A philosophy without heart and a faith without intellect are abstractions from the true life of knowledge and faith. The man whom philosophy leaves cold, and the man whom real faith does not illuminate, may be assured that the fault lies in them, not in knowledge and faith. The former is still an alien to philosophy, the latter an alien to faith.
The Philosophy of Nature takes up the material, prepared for it by physics out of experience, at the point to which physics has brought it, and again transforms it, without basing it ultimately on the authority of experience. Physics therefore must work into the hands of philosophy, so that the latter may translate into a true comprehension (Begriff) the abstract universal transmitted to it, showing how it issues from that comprehension as an intrinsically necessary whole.
It is because the method of physics does not satisfy the comprehension that we have to go on further.
Not only must philosophy be in agreement with our empirical knowledge of Nature, but the origin and formation of the Philosophy of Nature presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics. However, the course of a science's origin and the preliminaries of its construction are one thing, while the science itself is another. In the latter, the former can no longer appear as the foundation of the science; here, the foundation must be the necessity of the Concept.
The heart is everywhere, and each part of the organism is only the specialized force of the heart itself.
The owl of Minerva first begins her flight with the onset of dusk.
The essence of the modern state is the union of the universal with the full freedom of the particular, and with the welfare of individuals.
To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational whether in life or in science. Great achievement is assured, however, of subsequent recognition and grateful acceptance by public opinion, which in due course will make it one of its own prejudices
I'm not ugly, but my beauty is a total creation.
What the English call βcomfortableβ is something endless and inexhaustible. Every condition of comfort reveals in turn its discomfort, and these discoveries go on for ever. Hence the new want is not so much a want of those who have it directly, but is created by those who hope to make profit from it.
Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.
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.
The beginning of religion, more precisely its content, is the concept of religion itself, that God is the absolute truth, the truth of all things, and subjectively that religion alone is the absolutely true knowledge.
That man should think of God as nothingness must at first sight seem astonishing, must appear to us a most peculiar idea. But, considered more closely, this determination means that God is absolutely nothing determined. He is the Undetermined; no determinateness of any kind pertains to God; He is the Infinite. This is equivalent to saying that God is the negation of all particularity.