This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Will without freedom is an empty word, while freedom is actual only as will, as subject... Mind is in principle thinking, and man is distinguished from beast in virtue of thinking. But it must not be imagined that man is half thought and half will, and that he keeps thought in one pocket and will in another, for this would be a foolish idea. The distinction between thought and will is only that between the theoretical attitude and the practical. These, however, are surely not two faculties; the will is rather a special way of thinking, thinking translating itself into existence, thinking as the urge to give itself existence.
Distinction | Existence | Freedom | Man | Mind | Thinking | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Theoretical | Thought |
Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
Fear | Government | Opposition | Terror | Government |
Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.
A great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle (patriotism) alone. It must be aided by a prospect of interest, or some reward.
Patriotism | Reward | War |
I wondered over again from the hundredth time what could be the principle which, in the wildest, most lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious work of nature, always kept it beautiful.
I know [patriotism] exists, and I know it has done much in the present contest. But a great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle alone. It must be aided by a prospect of interest, or some reward.
Patriotism | Present | Reward | War |
There is a principle that is guaranteed to keep man in everlasting ignorance. That principle is contempt prior to investigation.
In reference to our moral conduct, there is not a single principle now known to the most cultivated Europeans which was not likewise known to the ancients.
Conduct |
With the sharpest self-examination we can find nothing beside the moral principle of duty which could have been powerful enough to move us to this or that action and to so great a sacrifice; yet we cannot from this infer with certainty; that it was not really some secret impulse of self-love, under the false appearance of duty, that was the actual determining cause of the will. We like them to flatter ourselves by falsely taking credit for a more noble motive; whereas in fact we can never, even with the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action.
Action | Appearance | Cause | Credit | Duty | Enough | Impulse | Love | Nothing | Sacrifice | Self | Self-love | Will |
An action done from duty derives its moral worth, not from the purpose which is to be attained by it, but from the maxim by which it is to be determined, and therefore does not depend on the realization of the object of the actions, but merely on the principle of volition by which the action has taken place, without regard to any object of desire.
Action | Desire | Duty | Object | Purpose | Purpose | Regard | Worth |
The moral worth of an action does not lie in the effect expected from it, nor in any principle of action which requires to borrow its motive from this expected effect. For all these effects - agreeableness of one’s condition and even the promotion of the happiness of others - could have been also brought about by other causes, so that for this there would have been no need of the will of a rational being; whereas it is in this alone that the supreme and unconditional good can be found. The pre-eminent good which we call moral can therefore consist in nothing else than the conception of law in itself, which certainly is only possible in a rational being, in so far as this conception, and not the expected effect, determines the will. This is a good which is already present in the person who acts accordingly, and we have not to wait for it to appear first in the result.
Action | Good | Law | Need | Nothing | Present | Will | Worth | Happiness |
An imperative which commands a certain conduct immediately, without having as its condition any other purpose to be attained by it...is categorical. It concerns not the matter of the action, or its intended result, but its form and the principle of which it is itself a result; and what is essentially good in it consists in the mental disposition, let the consequence be what it may. The imperative may be called that of Morality.
Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conniption of it. Man simply is... Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.
Existentialism | God | Human nature | Man | Nature | Nothing | God |
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign asters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and law. Systems which attempt to question it deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light.
Darkness | Effort | Law | Light | Man | Mankind | Nature | Object | Pain | Pleasure | Question | Reality | Reason | Right | Sense | System | Will | Words | Wrong | Govern |
Man simply is. Not that he simply is what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives of himself after already existing - as he will to be... Man is nothing else but that which is makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.
Existentialism | Man | Nothing | Will | Wills |