Great Throughts Treasury

"Architecture is music in space as it were a frozen music."

"There is in every man a certain feeling that he has been what he is from all eternity, and by no means become such in time."

"All knowledge is founded upon the coincidence of an objective with a subjective. - For we know only what is true; but truth is generally taken to consist in the coincidence of presentations with their objects."

"The human brain is the highest bloom of the whole organic metamorphosis of the earth."

"According to the representation of space that currently prevails, it is a void that indifferently spilled out from all sides into the indefinite and into which individual things are merely placed. But the true being of space, or expressed more exactly, the force that really posits space, is that universal, primordial force that contracts the whole. Were there no such force, or were it able to cease, then there would be neither place nor space. Hence, space cannot be indifferent but rather is organically in the whole and in the particulars."

"After it is plunged into finitude, the soul can no longer behold the originary images in their true form, only in a form clouded by matter. Nonetheless, it still sees in them their original nature and recognizes them as universals, and while it sees them differentiated and apart from each other, it does not see them merely as independent from each other but also as self-dependent."

"All merely finite imagination by nature only ideal; however, the representations of the Absolute are by nature real for it is that in view of which the ideal is real-perse. Thus the Absolute does not become objectified through form in a merely ideal image of itself but rather in a counter-image that is itself a truly other absolute. It transfers its entire essentiality [Wesenheit] into the form by which it becomes an object."

"Although the concept cannot be the sole content of thought, what Hegel asserts might at least remain true: that the Logic in the metaphysical sense which he gives it must be the real basis of all philosophy. What Hegel so often emphasises might for this reason be true after all: that everything that is is in the Idea or in the logical concept, and that as a consequence the Idea is the truth of everything, into which at the same time everything goes as into its beginning and into its end."

"Architecture in general is frozen music."

"All rules for study are summed up in this one: learn only in order to create."

"Every single system acknowledges that the force of contraction is the real and actual beginning of everything. The greatest glory of development is not expected from what easily unfolds. It is expected from what has been excluded and which only decides to unfold with opposition. Yet many do not want to acknowledge that ancient and holy force of Being and they would like to banish it straightaway from the beginning, before it, overcome in itself, gives way to Love."

"Concepts as such do in fact exist nowhere but in consciousness; they are, therefore, taken objectively, after nature, not before it."

"But now even for the common use of reason, nothing is immediately certain save the proposition I exist; which, since it actually loses its meaning outside immediate consciousness, is the most individual of all truths, and the absolute preconception, which must first be accepted, if anything else is to be certain."

"Certainly one who could write completely the history of their own life would also have, in a small epitome, concurrently grasped the history of the cosmos. Most people turn away from what is concealed within themselves just as they turn away from the depths of the great life and shy away from the glance into the abysses of that past which are still in one just as much as the present."

"Everyone unanimously agrees that God, in accordance with its highest self, is pure spirit. But whether everyone has thought the full purity and ferocity of this thought can be doubted."

"Everyone recognizes that God would not be able to create beings outside of itself from a blind necessity in God's nature, but rather with the highest voluntarism. To speak even more exactly, if it were left to the mere capacity of God's necessity, then there would be no creatures because necessity refers only to God's existence as God's own existence. Therefore, in creation, God overcomes the necessity of its nature through freedom and it is freedom that comes above necessity not necessity that comes above freedom."

"Everything can be communicated to the creature except for one thing. The creature cannot have the immortal ground of life in itself. The creature cannot be of and through itself."

"First task of philosophy: to explain how our presentations can absolutely coincide with objects existing wholly independent of them."

"God, in accordance with its highest self, is not a necessarily actual essence, but the eternal freedom to be."

"For being, actual, real being is precisely self-disclosure/revelation (Selbstoffenbarung). If it is to be as One then it must disclose/reveal itself in itself; but it does not disclose/reveal itself in itself if it is not another in itself, and is in this other the One for itself, thus if it is not absolutely the living link of itself and another."

"From ordinary reality there are only two ways out – poetry, which transports us into an ideal world, and philosophy, which makes the real world vanish before our eyes."

"How both the objective world accommodates to presentations in us, and presentations in us to the objective world, is unintelligible unless between the two worlds, the ideal and the real, there exists a pre-determined harmony. But this latter is itself unthinkable unless the activity, whereby the objective world, is produced, is at bottom identical with that which expresses itself in volition, and vice versa."

"If, then, there is a transcendental philosophy, there remains to it only the opposite direction, that of proceeding from the subjective, as primary and absolute! and having the objective arise from this. Thus nature-philosophy and transcendental philosophy have divided into the two directions possible to philosophy, and if all philosophy must go about either to make an intelligence out of nature, or a nature out of intelligence, then transcendental philosophy, which has the latter task, is thus the other necessary basic science of philosophy."

"How charitable it is to know a principle amid the motility and slackness of thinking that is neither to be dissolved by the “menstruum” of the sharpest concept nor to go up in smoke in the fire of spiritual thinking! Without this principle which resists thinking, the world would actually already be dissolved into nothing. Only this insuperable center preserves the world against the storms of the never-resting spirit. In fact, this principle is the eternal force of God."

"If there is to be any philosophy at all, this contradiction must be resolved – and the solution of this problem, or answer to the question: how can we think both of Presentations as conforming to objects, and objects as conforming to presentations? is, not the first, but the highest task of transcendental philosophy."

"In a word, there is no continuous transition from the Absolute to the actual; the origin of the phenomenal world is conceivable only as a complete falling-away from absoluteness by means of a leap."

"In the absolute world, there are no confines anywhere, and just as God can only bring forth the real-per-se and absolute, so any ensuing effulgence is again absolute and can itself only bring forth something akin to it."

"It is clear that in every explanation of the truth as a correspondence (Übereinstimmung) of subjectivity and objectivity in knowledge, both, subject and object, are already presupposed as separate, for only what is different can agree, what is not different is in itself one."

"It seems universal that every creature which cannot contain itself or draw itself together in its own fullness, draws itself together outside itself, whence e.g. the elevated miracle of the formation of the word in the mouth belongs, which is a true creation of the full inside when it can no longer remain in itself."

"It is easy to see that this problem can be solved neither in theoretical nor in practical philosophy, but only in a higher discipline, which is the link that combines them, and neither theoretical nor practical, but both at once."

"It would be entirely in accordance with the objective of maintaining an empty space outside of philosophy — one that the soul can fill up through faith and devotion — to place God above the Absolute and eternal as the infinitely higher potency of the latter"

"Matter belongs altogether to the category of nonbeing insofar as it is nothing other than the negation of evidence, of the complete absorption of reality in ideality. Viewed in itself and independent from the soul, of which it is a mere idol (simulacrum), matter is complete nothingness."

"Nature is the image of God's beatitude, and the ideal world that of God's holiness, albeit an incomplete image disrupted by difference."

"One usually says that the human will is for the Kingdom of Heaven and this is true if by this will the pure, naked, simple will is understood. Then the person who would be transposed into their pure conation would alone be free of all nature."

"One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form."

"One can push as many transitory materials as one wants, which become finer and finer, between mind and matter, but sometime the point must come where mind and matter are One, or where the great leap that we so long wished to avoid becomes inevitable."

"Ordinary thinking is a mechanism governed by concepts, though they are not distinguished as concepts; whereas transcendental thinking suspends this mechanism, and in becoming aware of the concept as an act, attains to the concept of a concept."

"Reflection… only knows the universal and the particular as two relative negations, the universal as relative negation of the particular, which is, as such, without reality, the particular, on the other hand, as a relative negation of the universal… something independent of the concept must be added to posit the substance as such."

"Our self-consciousness is not at all the consciousness of that nature which has passed through everything, it is precisely just our consciousness… for the consciousness of man is not the consciousness of nature… Far from man and his activity making the world comprehensible, man himself is that which is most incomprehensible."

"Only the contradiction is absolutely not allowed not to act and is alone what drives, nay, what coerces, action. Therefore, without the contradiction, there would be no movement, no life, and no progress. There would only be eternal stoppage, a deathly slumber of all of the forces."

"That the absolutely first thought is pure being is proven, though, by the fact that nothing could exclude itself from this concept if it is thought in its purity and complete abstraction - it is supposed to be the purest and most immediate certainty, or pure certainty itself without further content, that which is presupposed along with all certainty; it is not supposed to be an arbitrary action, but rather the most complete necessity, first that being in general, then that all being in being (in dem Seyn alles Seyn) should be thought."

"Space subsumes time; this occurs in the first dimension just as time also subsumes space and, albeit subordinated to its dominant dimension (the first), subsumes all the others. The dominant dimension of space is the second dimension, the image of ideal oneness; it is in time as the past, which like space, is for the soul a completed image wherein it intuits differences as having receded, having been re-absorbed into identity."

"The fear of speculation, the ostensible rush from the theoretical to the practical, brings about the same shallowness in action that it does in knowledge. It is by studying a strictly theoretical philosophy that we become most acquainted with Ideas, and only Ideas provide action with energy and ethical significance."

"The concept of the subjective is not contained in that of the objective; on the contrary, they exclude one another. The subjective must therefore be annexed to the objective. – The concept of nature does not entail that there should also be an intelligence that is aware of it. Nature, it seems, would exist, even if there were nothing that was aware of it. Hence the problem can also be formulated thus: how does intelligence come to be added to nature, or how does nature come to be presented?"

"The first form of positing absoluteness is the categoric' al; it can be expressed through reflective cognition negatively by a neither-nor; it is clear that no positive cognition by any means lies herein and that only the eventual productive intuition will fill this void and grant positivity in said neither-nor."

"The ideal world of art and the real world of objects are therefore products of one and the same activity; the concurrence of the two (the conscious and the non-conscious) without consciousness yields the real, and with consciousness the aesthetic world."

"The identity philosophy was with its first steps in nature, thus in the sphere of the empirical and thereby also of intuition (Anschauung). Hegel wanted to erect his abstract Logic above the Naturphilosophie. But he took the method of the Naturphilosophie there with him; it is easy to see how forced the result had to be of wishing to elevate into the merely logical the method which definitely had nature as its content and the intuition of nature as its companion; it was forced because he had to deny these forms of intuition and yet continually tacitly assumed them, whence it is also quite correct to remark, and not difficult to discover that Hegel already presupposed intuition with the first steps of his Logic and could not take a single step without assuming it."

"The objective world is simply the original, as yet unconscious, poetry of the spirit the universal organon of philosophy – and the keystone of its entire arch – is the philosophy of art."

"The intrinsic notion of everything merely objective in our knowledge, we may speak of as nature. The notion of everything subjective is called, on the contrary, the self, or the intelligence. The two concepts are mutually opposed. The intelligence is initially conceived of as the purely presentative, nature purely as what can be presented; the one as the conscious, the other as the non-conscious. But now in every knowing a reciprocal concurrence of the two (the conscious and the intrinsically non-conscious) is necessary; the problem is to explain this concurrence."

"The nature of the transcendental mode of apprehension must therefore consist essentially in this, that even that which in all other thinking, knowing, or acting escapes consciousness and is absolutely non-objective, is therein brought to consciousness and becomes objective – it consists, in short, of a constant objectifyinq-to-itself of the subjective."