Quotes About Hegel

I once had a friend at Oxford who drifted into the study of Hegel, that famously impenetrable German philosopher, and was never seen again. There are intellectual black holes, vortexes of endless regression, that mortals out to stay clear of.

The Prussian state is, for Hegel, the model most akin to the rational state because it represents, thanks both to the Protestant religion and the authority of the monarchy, a synthesis between the revolutionary exigencies of principles and the traditional exigencies of organization.

Despite the salience of Marx's critique of capitalism, this was the worst event to occur within the internal history of the project of emancipation. The theoretical turn from Hegel to Marx paved the way for a practical catastrophe.

Taking [Hegel's] philosophy as the point of reference, we could say that emancipation involves making explicit and embracing contradiction, whereas conservatism aims at repressing or eliminating it.

For Hegel, philosophy intervenes politically by making clear the relations that already exist.

By giving priority to the state, Hegel claims that we are public individuals before we are private ones. Our investment in the public sphere is not an option - like the decision to vote or not - but the basis for our private existence. The priority of the state indicates that one must go through the detour of the public in order to be a private individual.

According to Hegel, philosophy should not try to change the world because it cannot. It always arrives too late on the scene to offer concrete political proposals.

Though Hegel constructs a totalizing system, its airtight structure does not produce a perfectly harmonious whole in which nothing is out of place. Instead, the totality renders visible the ontological necessity of contradiction. This is the reason that Hegel insists on thinking the absolute idea... on their own, particulars create the illusion of the possibility of avoiding contradiction. This is, for Hegel, the great danger of the failure to think absolutely.

Hegel] sees that no principles is sustainable as a first principle since it implicitly relies on other principles in order to distinguish itself.

In place of the Absolute as determining history through the Zeitgeist, Marx offered mass movements and economic forces as the basic causes of every fundamental change, whether in the world of things or in the life of thought. Hegel, the imperial professor, had hatched the socialistic eggs.

But the height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most bare-faced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument to German stupidity.

As one reads Hegel one realizes how much inspiration Hitler, like Marx, drew from him, even if it was at second hand. Above all else, Hegel in his theory of "heroes," those great agents who are

To Hegel the State is all, or almost all. Among other things, he says, it is the highest revelation of the "world spirit"; it is the "moral universe"; it is "the actuality of the ethical idea… ethical mind… knowing and thinking itself"; the State "has the supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the State… for the right of the world spirit is above all special privileges…

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.

German philosopher Hegel, whose philosophy insisted on the coherence and meaning of history. The

Hegel argued that death is used as a threat to keep citizens in line. The minute you stop feating death you are no longer controlled by governments and councils. In a sense you are no longer accountable to life.

Derrida maintains that through three millenia of Western philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Rousseau, Hegel, Husserl and others, philosophers have indeed privileged speech. What have they claimed?

Marx inverted Hegel's dialectics and stood it right side up, on its feet.

One senses that Hegel was possible only in German, and finds it natural that Locke in a language where large and red precede apple should have arrived at the thing after sorting out its sensory qualities, whereas Descartes in a language where grosse et rouge follows pomme should have come to the attributes after the distinct idea.

Marx's simultaneous critique of the categories of political economy, of utopian socialism and of Hegel does not aim to replace them with an improved set. He grasps them as expressions of the way that humanity is concealed within inhumanity. By tracing their logical interconnections, he finds the way to break their stranglehold on our consciousness and on our lives.

The danger is that Hegel's logic could be twisted to justify anything that happens in history.

As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right , a dilemma none of us who wanted participate in history could escape.

As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape. The major had the right to live, but I was right

As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape.