Kojeve Hegel Quotes

always remember that we are in Germany where we have been able to do what would have been possible nowhere else: namely to proclaim as a great mind and profound thinker a mindless, ignorant, nonsense-spreading philosophaster who, through unprecedented, hollow verbiage, thoroughly and permanently disorganizes their brains. I mean our dear Hegel. And ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

The only way to survive such shitty times, if you ask me, is to write and read big, fat books, you know? And I'm writing now another book on Hegelian dialectics, subjectivity, ontology, quantum physics and so on. That's the only way to survive. Like Lenin. I will use his example. You know what Lenin did, in 1915, when World War I exploded? He went to Switzerland and started to read Hegel. ~ Slavoj Zizek

The ignorant man is not free, because what confronts him is an alien world, something outside him and in the offing, on which he depends, without his having made this foreign world for himself and therefore without being at home in it by himself as in something his own. The impulse of curiosity, the pressure for knowledge, from the lowest level up to the highest rung of philosophical insight arises only from the struggle to cancel this situation of unfreedom and to make the world one's own in one's ideas and thought. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In a state which is really articulated rationally all the laws and organizations are nothing but a realization of freedom in its essential characteristics. When this is the case, the individual's reason finds in these institutions, only the actuality of his own essence, and if he obeys these laws, he coincides, not with something alien to himself, but simply with what is his own. Freedom of choice, of course, is often equally called 'freedom'; but freedom of choice is only non-rational freedom, choice and self-determination issuing not from the rationality of the will but from fortuitous impulses and their dependence on sense and the external world. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. ~ David Hume

Ever since Hegel, world history, in contrast to historia, seems to be precisely what one has not seen and experienced, inquired after and investigated for himself. ~ Karl Löwith

I asked him what advice he could give me as I began my research on Hegel. He said that most research tries to establish a conclusion or reach verification that no one can successfully criticize or undermine. Everyone attempts that; there is nothing new in it. I should take a different approach. He said that if I try to discover a few questions in this area that no one has thought of asking, then I will have discovered something truly original and important. ~ John O'Donohue

On the stage on which we are observing it, - Universal History - Spirit displays itself in its most concrete reality. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. ~ Michael Shermer

Too fair to worship, too divine to love. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Each consciousness seeks the death of the other. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In a true tragedy, both parties must be right. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state. It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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. ~ Hugh Kenner

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. ~ Frederick C. Beiser

It is all very well to have some internal sense of oneself as an individual, but that sense must correspond to an external reality. Part of that external reality is property. The fact that something belongs to me and not to everyone increases my sense of myself as someone in particular. For Hegel that sense of individual particularity is intrinsic to the modern moral order. Indeed "the right of the subject's particularity to find satisfaction, or
to put it differently
the right of subjective freedom, is the pivotal and focal point in the difference between antiquity and the modern age." The fact that others do not take my property
that they regard it as mine
is also a way in which they recognize me as an individual. It is precisely this recognition that the slave, the bondsman, and the serf lack. That the right to own private property, to control some corner of the world, is universal in the modern state is for Hegel part of its glory. (p. 155) ~ Jerry Z. Muller

Alienation is the inability to bring together these two aspects of Bildung: that self-conscious individuals acknowledging the norms as binding in their practice is what makes those selves what they are, and that self-conscious individuals acknowledging the norms as binding is what makes the norms what they are. These are the authority of the community and its norms over individuals (their dependence on it), and the authority of individuals over the community and its norms (its dependence on them), respectively. ~ Robert Brandom

The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Apparently the world today can no longer be anything other than a world of masters and
slaves because contemporary ideologies, those that are changing the face of the earth, have learned from
Hegel to conceive of history in terms of the dialectic of master and slave. If, on the first morning of the
world, under the empty sky, there is only a master and a slave; even if there is only the bond of master
and slave between a transcendent god and mankind, then there can be no other law in this world than the
law of force. Only a god, or a principle above the master and the slave, could intervene and make men's
history something more than a mere chronicle of their victories and defeats. ~ Albert Camus

The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth. ~ Herbert Marcuse

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

When I was young, most teachers of philosophy in British and American universities were Hegelians, so that, until I read Hegel, I supposed there must be some truth to his system; I was cured, however, by discovering that everything he said on the philosophy of mathematics was plain nonsense. ~ Bertrand Russell

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

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The link established by Christian theology between oikonomia and history is crucial to an understanding of Western philosophy of history. In particular, it is possible to say that the concept of history in German idealism, from Hegel to Schelling and even up to Feuerbach, is nothing besides an attempt to think the "economic" link between the process of divine revelation and history (adopting Schelling's terms, which we have quoted earlier, the "co-belonging" of theology and oikonomia). It is curious that when the Hegelian Left breaks with this theological concept, it can do so only on condition that the economy in a modern sense, which is to say, the historical self-production of man, is placed at the center of the historical process. In this sense, the Hegelian Left replaces divine economy with a purely human economy. ~ Giorgio Agamben

With Napoleon and the Napoleonic philosopher
Hegel, the period of efficacy begins. Before Napoleon, men had discovered space and the universe; with
Napoleon, they discovered time and the future in terms of this world; and by this discovery the spirit of
rebellion is going to be profoundly transformed. ~ Albert Camus

The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

If Hegel had written the whole of his Logic and in the Preface disclosed the fact that it was only a thought-experiment (in which however at many points he had steered clear of many things), he would have been the greatest thinker who ever lived. As it is, he is merely comic. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

The anti-human, the merely animal, consists in staying within the sphere of feeling, and being able to communicate only at that level". (1807, § 69). ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Beauty and art, no doubt, pervade all business of life like a kindly genius, and form the bright adornment of all our surroundings, both mental and material, soothing the sadness of our condition and the embarrassments of real life, killing time in entertaining fashion, and where there's nothing to be achieved, occupying the place of what is vicious, better, at any rate, than vice. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed ...
When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

No man is a hero to his valet de chamber ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

But as Hegel teaches us, beginnings are necessarily problematic. (As are endings.) How can I describe my first encounter with Ana fairly, when my understanding of her essence has passed through infinite iterations over the past four and a half years? My ~ Alena Graedon

If it were Hegel, I might suspect it means nothing. But Goethe means something, always. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain
that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Perhaps Mahalia, like Paul Celan, has already lived all our lives for us. Perhaps that is the definition of genius. Hegel says, "Each man hopes and believes he is better than the world which is his, but the man who is better merely expresses this same world better than the others. ~ Claudia Rankine

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

The significance of that 'absolute commandment', know thyself - whether we look at it in itself or under the historical circumstances of its first utterance - 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 - of what is essentially and ultimately true and real - of spirit as the true and essential bein ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised - the question involuntarily arises - to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

It is specially characteristic of the German that the more servile he on the one hand is, the more uncontrolled is he on the other; restraint and want of restraint - originality, is the angel of darkness that buffets us. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The spirit is never at rest, but always engaged in progressive motion, giving itself new form. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Education is the art of making man ethical ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

This meaning-argument is of a very different kind from the arguments I have been speaking about so far. The premise entails the conclusion all right, but it is so astoundingly false that it defies criticism, at first, by the simple method of taking the reader's breath away. This was a method which the neo-Hegelian idealists later perfected: reasoning from a sudden and violent solecism. Say or imply, for example, that in English "value" means the same as "individuality." You can be miles down the track of your argument before they get their breath back.
This method is not only physiologically but ethologically sound. Of course it should never be used first. You need first to earn the respect of your readers, by some good reasoning, penetrating observations, or the like: then apply the violent solecism. Tell them, for example, that when we say of something that it is a prime number, we mean that it was born out of wedlock. You cannot go wrong this way. Decent philosophers will be so disconcerted by this, that they will never do the one thing they should do: simply say, "That is NOT what 'prime number' means!" Instead, they will always begin … [by] casting about for an excuse for someone's saying what you said, or a half-excuse, or a one-eighth excuse; nor is there any danger that they will search in vain. ~ David Stove