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.

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Struggle, Nihilism, Subjectivism

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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• Since substance is infinite, the universe as a whole, i.e., god, Hegel is telling us that philosophy is knowledge of the infinite, of the universe as a whole, i.e, god. You cannot get more metaphysical than that. I think that Hegel scholars have to admit this basic fact rather than burying their heads in the sand and trying to pretend that Hegel is concerned with conceptual analysis, category theory, normativity or some such contemporary fad.

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Philosophy, Thinking, Trying

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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• The romantics were reacting against a modern culture that divided individuals from themselves (through specialisation in the division of labor), from others (the competitive market place) and from nature, which had been reduced down to a machine through technology. The antidote to such division is unity and wholeness, which means feeling at home again in the world.

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Mean, Home, Technology

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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• 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.

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Ideas, Creating, World

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Hegel, Reactions, Importance

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Giving, Historical, Lost

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Ideas, Harmony, Live Well

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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• Royce is the father of the thesis that German idealism is a story about the discovery and development of the Kantian transcendental ego - the "I" that accompanies all my representations - as an absolute cosmic supersubject who, god-like, creates the entire universe.

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Father, Discovery, Ego

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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• There is a sinister anachronistic interpretation of the aesthetic state as some kind of totalitarian regime that puts aesthetic over moral standards; one associates it with national-socialism. But this has nothing to do with the romantics, whose ideal of the aesthetic state has much more to do with the republican tradition.

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Moral, Kind, Republican

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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• 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

  Philosophy, Mean, Nihilism

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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• The years 1781 to 1793 are crucial for many reasons, but chiefly because they pose in an especially clear way the main problem of German philosophy for the next century. This is the old conflict between reason and faith which recurred during the pantheism controversy between Jacobi and Mendelssohn.

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Philosophy, Years, Way

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Ideas, Intellectual, Structure

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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• No one nowadays talks about the absolute, not even people with firm and deep religious convictions. The whole Hegelian project has no resonance for us, as it once had for the Germans in the 1820s and the British and Americans around the 1880s.

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Religious, People, Conviction

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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• 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.

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Mean, Artist, Want

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Philosophy, Thinking, Fundamentals

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Religious, Common Sense, Middle Path

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Territory, Reason, Scotsmen

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Connections, Poetic, States

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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• 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".

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Ideas, Unity, Dimensions

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Ideas, Important, Normal

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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• Schiller never wanted to replace the moral with the aesthetic but he did want the moral to be one part of the aesthetic. He rightly notes the aesthetic dimension of morality, that we use concepts like grace to characterise people who do their duty with ease and pleasure.

  Frederick C. Beiser

  People, Grace, Use

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Art, Creating, World

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• Liberals and leftists are not wrong in describing romanticism as reactionary, because it did indeed become that after 1810. The problem is that they make that description true of the movement as a whole, as if romanticism were essentially reactionary.

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Movement, Problem, Description

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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• When Hume insists that taste is a matter of delicacy, that it is a matter of having a sensitivity to features of an object itself, he is very close to the rationalist doctrine. Hume was really a covert objectivist (or partial one) about aesthetic pleasure because that pleasure had to be based on the sensitivity to features in the object.

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Doctrine, Delicacy, Matter

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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