Quotes from Robert C. Solomon

J'ai lu les postmodernistes avec un certain intérêt avec même admiration. Mais quand je les lis, j'ai toujours cet horrible sentiment lancinant que quelque chose d'absolument essentiel est oublié. Plus on dit qu'une personne est un produit social, ou un confluent de forces ou fragmentée, ou marginalisée et plus on ouvre tout un nouveau monde d'excuses.

If Hegel could not be taught to ordinary intelligent people, then I for one would not find reason to read him at all.

Hegel calls the truth of his Phenomenology a "bacchanalian revel"; it is, in other words, an orgy of ideas, a conceptual debauch.

To say that Hegel is an idealist is to say that, at every turn, he argues that the world is thoroughly knowable, and it is nothing "beyond" the realm of conscious experience.

Hegel rejects the very idea of a single world-view, and though he does indeed give us what he considers to be the "best" world-view, it is rather a meta-view, a view about the correctness of views, rather than a view as such.

I want to emphasize the second Hegel, the Heraclitan Hegel, the Hegel of endless change, and what he calls "the bad infinity," running on without end. This is the Hegel who said, in effect, that there is no unity except through differences and there is no end to philosophy.

What is discontinuous in Hegel's text is not just the text itself, but the whole of human history, for it is Hegel who sees, or begins to see, that it is the process of thought that is everything; its results are only part of the process, and the final result—"the Absolute"—is an illusion.

Freedom, for Hegel, has to do with identification—how one sees oneself (as citizen, as rebel, as stoic, as master, as slave), it is not the political question of societal restraints and duties.

Trust opens up new and unimagined possibilities.

In a world that has come to see ideas and collective enthusiasm with horror, Hegel becomes a gateway to a new world, where ideas are the key to conciousness, where the philosopher becomes the spokesman for the times and the prophet of a united humanity. It is a world in which archaic terms like "harmony" and "humanity" still make sense—indeed, still give us something to hope for. It is a world worth, at least, considering.

Teaching philosophy isn't what I do. Teaching philosophy is, sort of, what I am.

Philosophy is all about our beliefs and attitudes about ourselves and the world. Doing philosophy, therefore, is first of all the activity of stating, as clearly and as convincingly as possible, what we believe and what we believe in.

The prices of all imports would rise if the dollar depreciates.

Thus when I have to summarize naturalized spirituality in a single phrase, it is this: the thoughtful love of life.

Another question has been raised rather widely in Europe, in Japan as well as in the United States is what, to what extent will the euro become a reserve currency.

The dollar went up some eighty percent in real terms as I recall now or something like that - from '80 to '85.

Chances are the movements of the euro as against the dollar will be relatively moderate.

Love can be understood only "from the inside," as a language can be understood only by someone who speaks it, as a world can be understood only by someone who lives in it.

Trust opens up new and unimagined possibilities.

Building trust means thinking about trust in a positive way.

Trust is not bound up with knowledge so much as it is with freedom, the openness to the unknown.

Trust is almost always conditional, focused, qualified, and therefore limited.

Trust is a skill learned over time so that, like a well-trained athlete, one makes the right moves, usually without much reflection.

Trust is built step by step, commitment by commitment, on every level.