Hegel Quotes

Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one.

Most “process” philosophy is historicist (e.g., Hegel) and not concerned with “deep time.” Maybe Whitehead is an exception. He may be a really important philosopher for all I know. I’ve never been able to read him.

At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.

The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it.

That Hegel is a metaphysician, and that he thinks metaphysics is fundamental to philosophy, is plain enough from his definition of philosophy.

To a society that inarticulately and thoughtlessly takes itself to be divine, Hegel says, Yes, we are indeed divine, and philosophy can show how this is both possible and necessary.

To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs — but a tribute nevertheless.

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.

Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don’t see any way of getting beyond those prophecies.

Hegel said that `truth` is subjective, thus rejecting the existence of any `truth` above or beyond human reason. All knowledge is human knowledge.

Fichte is a necessary step to both Hegel and Marx.

When Hegel later became a man of influence’ he insisted that the Jews should be granted equal rights because civic rights belong to man because he is a man and not on account of his ethnic origins or his religion.

Thinking is the subtlest form of self-polemics, the art of a certain finesse in psychological self-vivisection and self-crucifixion (Hegel of course called the path of self-disillusion the via dolorosa or “highway of despair,” in Baillie’s fine and florid rendering, like Jesus’ route to Golgotha).

Hegel’s theory of recognition is basically derived from Fichte, who is its real author.

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that men never learn anything from history.

Unlike Hegel’s progress model of history, which moves by stages, each containing its own logic of growth and decline, the economic model develops as the simple function of one money-variable over time, with a long-term trend which increases monotonically.

It was also Hegel who established the view that the different philosophic systems that we find in history are to be comprehended in terms of development and that they are generally one-sided because they owe their origins to a reaction against what has gone before.

As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.

Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I knew people who can’t even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.

Well, I don’t know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I’m no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.

As Hegel well knew, the ascent of reason has never followed a straight line.

Berkeley , Hume, Kant , Fichte , Hegel , James , Bergson all are united in one earnest attempt, the attempt to reinstate man with his high spiritual claims in a place of importance in the cosmic scheme.

Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.

As Karl Marx once noted: ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’ William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

For my own part, I abandon the ethics of duty to the Hegelian critique with no regrets; it would appear to me, indeed, to have been correctly characterized by Hegel as an abstract thought, as a thought of understanding.

The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.

I’m so smart, I read and understand Hegel

There is more to be learnt from every page of David Hume than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart, and Schleiermacher are taken together.

That Hegel’s theory is derivative from Fichte’s does not prevent it from being strikingly original and of independent value.

Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.

Contemporary philosophy illustrates Hegel’s dictum that philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, for in our age philosophy yields to the objectifying technical impulse and loses its ancient task of pursuing the Socratic ideal of the wisdom of the examined life.

An abiding and central concern of philosophy and religion alike is the fear that the world is alien to human beings, that nature is, in Hegel’s words, ‘out and out other’ to ‘spirit’. It’s easy enough to see how ‘constructivist’ or ‘humanist’ conceptions are efforts to dispel this fear.

Hegel remains of great importance to understand ourselves, but essentially because we have all grown out of a reaction against Hegel.

Think of me as an impetuous Hegel, drunk with power, and also, regular drunk.

Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity.