#frederick beiser

"Why read Hegel? It is a good question, one no Hegel scholar should shirk. After all, the burden of proof lies heavily on his or her shoulders. For Hegel's texts are not exactly exciting or enticing. Notoriously, they are written in some of the worst prose in the history of philosophy. Their language is dense, obscure and impenetrable. Reading Hegel is often a trying and exhausting experience, the intellectual equivalent of chewing gravel. 'And for what?' a prospective student might well ask. To avoid such an ordeal, he or she will be tempted to invoke the maxim of one of Hegel's old enemies whenever he lost patience with a tiresome book: 'Life is short!' [Footnote revealing that the enemy is Schopenhauer]"

"The drama of cosmic death and decay in nature Mainlander also finds in history. Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel misunderstood history, he argues, when they saw it as a progression toward the creation of a moral world order. If we examine the development of human civilization from ancient Asia, Greece and Rome, we have to admit that it is a long history of steady decline and decay."

“The most intense suffering, even insanity, arises because the self is divided within itself [Julius Bahnsen:] ‘willing what it does not will and not willing what it wills.'"

"One step forward in one respect often is a step backward in another respect. The wounds civilization cures it also inflicts. The real motor of historical 'evolution', as Julius Bahnsen says, is the striving for greater comfort and prosperity in life. People are not satisfied with their lot, with what their parents had in the past, and they want to make things better for themselves. But this very striving creates new needs, so that we are no longer satisfied with the simple life of the past; and with the growth of needs there comes more sources of dissatisfaction. There is indeed an interplay, a direct proportion, between development and the receptivity and sensitivity to pain, so that the more we 'progress' the more we suffer."

"Tanto la iglesia católica como la protestante se han aferrado al teísmo, puesto que la han visto como la única forma adecuada de creencia religiosa. Sin embargo, esta creencia religiosa es insostenible, porque es incompatible con dos principios básicos del mundo moderno: la autonomía moral, es decir, el derecho de cada individuo de llevar su vida de acuerdo con su propia voluntad y valores; y la libre investigación o crítica, es decir, el derecho de cada individuo a investigar la verdad de acuerdo con la sola razón. La autonomía moral ha socavado el teísmo porque su ética es esencialmente heterónoma, ya que está basada en la creencia de que deberíamos seguir los preceptos éticos simplemente porque son mandatos de Dios."

Reasons Has Its Reason

Nietzsche studies have become a virtual industry, an obsession that has taken attention away from other thinkers who were just as interesting philosophically and just as important historically. The enormous amount of emphasis on Nietzsche, compared to the virtual complete neglect of these other thinkers, reveals an astonishing lack of historical sense and philosophical sophistication. It is the task of future scholars to rectify such injustice.

Love is at once both the most generous and most selfish feeling: generous, because it gives everything; and selfish, because it only sees itself in everything.