{"quotes":[{"text":"I felt that the metal of my spirit, like a bar of iron that is softened and bent by a persistent flame, was being gradually softened and bent by the troubles that oppressed it. In spite of myself, I was conscious of a feeling of envy for those who did not suffer from such troubles, for the wealthy and the privileged; and this envy, I observed, was accompanied—still against my will—by a feeling of bitterness towards them, which, in turn, did not limit its aim to particular persons or situations, but, as if by an uncontrollable bias, tended to assume the general, abstract character of a whole conception of life. In fact, during those difficult days, I came very gradually to feel that my irritation and my intolerance of poverty were turning into a revolt against injustice, and not only against the injustice which struck at me personally but the injustice from which so many others like me suffered. I was quite aware of this almost imperceptible transformation of my subjective resentments into objective reflections and states of mind, owing to the bent of my thoughts which led always and irresistibly in the same direction: owing also to my conversation, which, without my intending it, alway harped upon the same subject. I also noticed in myself a growing sympathy for those political parties which proclaimed their struggle against the evils and infamies of the society to which, in the end I had attributed the troubles that beset me—a society which, as I thought, in reference to myself, allowed its best sons to languish and protected its worst ones. Usually, and in the simpler, less cultivated people, this process occurs without their knowing it, in the dark depths of consciousness where, by a kind of mysterious alchemy, egoism is transmuted into altruism, hatred into love, fear into courage; but to me, accustomed as I was to observing and studying myself, the whole thing was clear and visible, as though I were watching it happen in someone else; and yet I was aware the whole time that I was being swayed by material subjective factors, that I was transforming purely personal motives into universal reasons.","author":"Alberto Moravia","tags":["alienation","categorical-imperative","character","essentialism","free-will","hegel","italy","objectivity","political-animal","subjectivity","universal-reasons"],"id":64198,"author_id":"Alberto+Moravia"},{"text":"Spinoza formulated the profoundly important principle that *all determination is negation*. To determine a thing is to cut it off from some sphere of being and so to limit it. To define is to set boundaries. To say that a thing is green limits it by cutting it from the sphere of pink, blue, or other-coloured things. To say that it is good cuts it off from the sphere of evil. This limitation is the same as negation. To *affirm* that a thing is within certain limits is to *deny* that it is outside those limits. To say that it is green is to say that it is not pink. Affirmation involves negation. Whatever is said of a thing denies something else of it. All determination is negation.This principle is fundamental for Hegel also, but with him it takes rather the converse form that *all negation is determination*. Formal logicians will remind us that we cannot simply convert Spinoza's proposition. But it is sufficient to point out in reply that not only does affirmation involve negation; negation likewise involves affirmation. To say that a thing belongs to one class is to affirm that it belongs to some other class,—though we may not know what that class is. Positive and negative are correlatives which mutually involve each other. To posit is to negate: this is Spinoza's principle. To negate is to posit: this is Hegel's.When, therefore, we meet Hegel talking about 'the portentous power of the negative,' we have to consider that for him negation is the very process of creation. For the *positive* nature of an object consists in its determinations. The nature of a stone is to be white, heavy, hard, etc. And since all determinations are negations, it follows that the positive nature of a thing consists in its negations. Negation, therefore, is of the very essence of positive being. And for the world to come into being what is above all necessary is the force of negation, 'the portentous power of the negative.' The genus only becomes the species by means of the differentia, and the differentia is precisely that which carves out a particular class from the general class by excluding, I.E., negating, the other species. And the species again only becomes the individual in the same way, by negating other individuals. These thoughts are no causal reflections of Hegel. They underlie his entire system. We must get to understand that these three ideas, determination, limitation, and negation, all involve each other.'—from_The Philosophy of Hegel_.","author":"W.T. Stace","tags":["hegel","logic","philosophy"],"id":109511,"author_id":"W.T.+Stace"},{"text":"Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.","author":"Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel","tags":["economics","economics-philosophy","hegel","innovative","interesting","philosophy"],"id":132985,"author_id":"Georg+Wilhelm+Friedrich+Hegel"},{"text":"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.","author":"Slavoj Žižek","tags":["hegel","inspirational","lenin","shitty-times","trump"],"id":156276,"author_id":"Slavoj+%C5%BDi%C5%BEek"},{"text":"War is progress, peace is stagnation.","author":"Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel","tags":["hegel","peace","progress","stagnation","war"],"id":202490,"author_id":"Georg+Wilhelm+Friedrich+Hegel"},{"text":"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.","author":"Michael Shermer","tags":["biology","creationists","evolution","facts","farce","g-w-hegel","hegel","history","intelligent-design","john-scopes","john-t-scopes","karl-marx","marx","philosophy","pseudoscience","religion-and-science","science","scopes-monkey-trial","scopes-trial","superstition","theory","tragedy"],"id":224132,"author_id":"Michael+Shermer"},{"text":"Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.","author":"Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel","tags":["conscientiousness","curiosity","duty","hegel","truth","vanity"],"id":242341,"author_id":"Georg+Wilhelm+Friedrich+Hegel"},{"text":"The sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as 'substance' and 'essence of man,' and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as 'self-consciousness' and the 'Unique.","author":"Karl Marx","tags":["capital","communism","hegel","ideal","materialism","means-of-production","relations-of-production","self-consciousness"],"id":293288,"author_id":"Karl+Marx"},{"text":"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.","author":"David Stove","tags":["hegel","hegelian-dialectic","hegelianism","logic","refuge-in-audacity"],"id":325943,"author_id":"David+Stove"},{"text":"Logic is the science not of external forms of thought, but of the laws of development 'of all material, natural and spiritual things', I.E., of the development of the entire concrete content of the world and of its cognition, I.E., the sum-total, the conclusion of the History of knowledge of the world.","author":"Vladimir Lenin","tags":["epistemology","hegel","hegelian-dialectic","lenin","revolution"],"id":333054,"author_id":"Vladimir+Lenin"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":17,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}