Frederick C. Beiser Quotes

The struggle against subjectivism was the attempt to avoid the charge of what was then called "idealism" or "nihilism", i.e., that we know nothing more than our own representations.

There is no comfortable middle path where we get to provide a rational justification for our basic moral, religious and common sense beliefs.

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

All the spookiness comes from giving a contemporary anachronistic sense to terms whose historical meaning is lost to us.

The idea of romanticising the world goes back to the idea of creating a harmonious whole where the individual will feel at one with himself, others and nature.

To live well is to live in harmony with ourselves, others and nature, and that idea of harmony is, of course, an aesthetic one.

The absolute as the idea is neither subjective nor objective; it is the intellectual structure under which they are subsumed.

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.

You only have to talk to artists to see that they work according to rules, and that they know all too well that they can employ only certain means to achieve the ends they want.

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

There was no Prussian bastion to stop the Scotsman's swift conquest of the territory once claimed by reason.

The connection between romantic politics and aesthetics is plain in Schiller's and Novalis's concept of the aesthetic or poetic state.

The aesthetic dimension of the ideal state comes out in the idea of harmony, which is the classical idea of beauty as "concinnitas" or "unity-in-variety".

Schiller is an important philosopher because he shows just how integral the idea of beauty is in normal life.

The romantics really did want to romanticise the world itself, and that meant re-creating the state, society and even nature so that it became a work of art.