Quotes About Hegel

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.

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.

Paradoxical logic was predominant in Chinese and Indian thinking, in the philosophy of Heraclitus, and then again, under the name of dialectics, it became the philosophy of Hegel, and of Marx.

Power for man, as the genius of Hegel saw, is the ability to support contradictions, nothing less.

Hegel would not have been possible but for Kant, who would not have been possible but for Plato. These three, more than any others, are the intellectual builders of Auschwitz.

Every central doctrine of the Nazi politics, racism included, is an expression or variant of the theory of collectivism. Such doctrines cannot rise to the ascendancy, neither among the intellectuals nor in the mind of the public, except in a culture already saturated with a mystical-collectivist philosophy. In the case of Germany, this means: saturated with the ideas of Hegel.

three major philosophers who, above all others, are responsible for generating the disease of collectivism and transmitting it to the dictators of our century. The three are: Plato—Kant—Hegel. (The antidote to them is: Aristotle.)

Reality, declares Hegel, is inherently contradictory;

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.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Hegel on sacrifice. The animal dies. The man becomes alert.

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.

If Hegel had written the whole of his logic and then said, in the preface or some other place, that it was merely an experiment in thought in which he had even begged the question in many places, then he would certainly have been the greatest thinker who had ever lived. As it is, he is merely comic.

To go beyond Hegel is a miracle, but to get beyond Abraham is the easiest thing of all. I for my part have devoted a good deal of time to the understanding of the Hegelian philosophy, I believe also that I understand it tolerably well, but when in spite of the trouble I have taken there are certain passages I cannot understand, I am foolhardy enough to think that he himself has not been quite clear. All

Reason governs the world. World history "is therefore a rational process" (Hegel, Lectures). The German word for reason is Vernunft.

watching the original thousand-year Reich collapse before his eyes, the 36-year-old Hegel felt compelled to come up with an explanation and this led him to formulate a philosophy of history.

Kant's articulation of the synthetic a priori put an end to Hume's skepticism and set the stage for the full flowering of German thought in Hegel, who reintroduced Logos to the post-Enlightenment West and simultaneously set the stage for the emergence of the German nation in 1871.

Unified by the horrible wars, instructed in our brutal stupidity by revolutions, by engineered famines directed by "ideologists" (heirs of Marx and Hegel and trained in the cunning of reason), perhaps we, modern humankind (can it be!), have done the nearly impossible, namely, learned something.

Schopenhauer on Hegel: A flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan.

In the struggle with the English mechanistic dumbing down of the world, Hegel and Schopenhauer (along with Goethe) were unanimous—both of these hostile fraternal geniuses in philosophy, who moved away from each other towards opposite poles of the German spirit and, in the process, wronged each other, as only brothers do.

Our ideas do not make the world, the world makes our ideas. Marx is therefore a materialist; Hegel, an idealist.

Hegel claimed that reality was essentially reason and logic – "whatever is rational is real, and whatever is real is rational".