Philosophy and the Art of Living

Osher Life-Long Learning Institute (UC Irvine) 2010

The Masters of Reason and the Masters of Suspicion:

Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel

Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre

When: Mondays for six weeks: November 1 ,8, 15, 22, 29, and Dec. 6. Where: Woodbridge Center, 4628 Barranca Pkwy. Irvine CA 92604

NOTES AND QUOTES:

Aristotle: 384 BCE- 322 BCE (62 years): Reference: http://www.jcu.edu/philosophy/gensler/ms/arist-00.htm

Theoretical Reason contemplates the nature of Reality. Practical Reason arranges the best means to accomplish one's ends in life, of which the final end is happiness. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/#IntVir Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of virtue (1103a1-10): those that pertain to the part of the soul that engages in reasoning (virtues of mind or intellect), and those that pertain to the part of the soul that cannot itself reason but is nonetheless capable of following reason (ethical virtues, virtues of character). Intellectual virtues are in turn divided into two sorts: those that pertain to theoretical reasoning, and those that pertain to practical thinking 1139a3-8). He organizes his material by first studying ethical virtue in general, then moving to a discussion of particular ethical virtues (temperance, courage, and so on), and finally completing his survey by considering the intellectual virtues (practical wisdom, theoretical wisdom, etc.). Life : Aristotle was born in northern Greece in 384 B.C. He was raised by a guardian after the death of his father, Nicomachus, who had been court physician to the king of Macedonia. Aristotle entered Plato's Academy at age 17. After Plato's death, he supervised the education of the young Alexander the Great. He started his own school, the Lyceum, at age 49. He fled Athens after the death of Alexander the Great, fearing an attack from the anti-Macedonians. He died in 322 B.C., at age 62.

1 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_virtue Aristotle analyzed virtues into moral and intellectual virtues (or dianoetic virtues, from the Greek aretai dianoetikai ). He... identified five intellectual virtues as the five ways the soul arrives at truth. He grouped them into three classes: • Theoretical • Sophia - wisdom. • Episteme - scientific knowledge, empirical knowledge. • Nous - mind. • Practical • Phronesis- practical wisdom/prudence. • • Productive • Techne-craft knowledge, art, skill.

Intellectual virtues are displayed in • Euboulia-deliberating well, deliberative excellence; thinking properly about the right end. • Sunesis- understanding, sagacity, astuteness, consciousness of why something is as it is. • Gnome-judgment and consideration; allowing us to make equitable or fair decisions. • Deinotes-cleverness; the ability to carry out actions so as to achieve a goal. plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/#IntVir Happiness The Greek "eudaimonia," which we translate as "happiness," more precisely means "excellence" or "living well." Happiness is our highest good.

Happiness is virtuous activity that fulfills our proper function. Such activity is satisfying and brings pleasure. But our ultimate end isn't pleasure; if it were, we'd be no better than the beasts. Physical pleasures, indeed, can tempt us with excesses and lead us away from virtue and happiness.

Reason The distinct human function that separates us from other beings is reason. Thus our highest good (happiness) must involve reason.

The harpist's function is to play the harp and to play it well, and the heart's function is to pump blood and to pump it well. So also our function is to use reason and to use it well. As we do this, we fulfill the natural end to which we are oriented.

Our happiness consists in the excellent use of reason -- in virtue.

2

Virtue The virtue of a thing is its proper excellence. Our virtue consists in excellent rational activity. Virtue is a habitual way of acting -- not an emotion or a capacity. There are intellectual virtues (about thinking) and moral virtues (about character).

Virtue is a mean between excess and deficiency. For example, courage is a mean between recklessness and cowardice. We judge the mean by perception -- not by mathematical calculation.

A virtuous act requires that we do the right thing knowingly and willingly, that we act in character, and that we do the act for its own sake (and not from an ulterior motive or reward).

Moral Development Virtue doesn't arise naturally; it requires training and habitual action -- that we keep doing the right thing with the right motivation. We become what we do; we form our moral character through our choices and actions. For example, your marriage commitment (a virtue) can be formed and nourished by daily actions that express your commitment and love.

A virtue is a habit -- but not one that is mechanical or automatic; rather, it is voluntary and purposeful. We are responsible for what we do and who we are. We cannot excuse ourselves from ignorance, weakness, or even addiction.

Practical Wisdom A person of practical wisdom deliberates well about the proper means to the goal of happiness. This presumes a good upbringing in virtue, a wide experience of life, and an intelligent calculation of how to achieve the highest good in the concrete situation.

Socrates thought that virtue consisted in knowledge; once we know virtue, we will be virtuous. But virtue isn't knowledge, it's an habitual activity. We become virtuous by doing virtuous acts.

Contemplation The highest form of happiness is contemplation (philosophical wisdom). This involves scientific understanding -- the intuitive grasp of eternal first principles combined with demonstration.

Of all the pleasures in life, contemplation is the most continuous and self-sufficient. It aims at nothing outside of itself. It realizes a divine element in us. It directs our highest activity toward the highest objects. Philosophical wisdom combined with a virtuous character is complete happiness.

3 Virtue Ethics: www/drury.edu/ess/reason/Aristotle. Dr. Charles Ess, Druty U Aristotle observes that each "science" such as mathematics, ethics, politics, psychology, biology, physics, etc. admits of different degrees of certainty and demonstration. The same degree of certainty and demonstration is not possible in ethics that is possible in mathematics. Moral excellence is to become moderate in one's habits, hitting the mean between extremes in feeling, action and emotion. Aristotle notes that “...to experience fear, courage, desire, anger, pity, and pleasure at the right times and on the right occasions and toward the right persons and for the right causes and in the right manner is the mean or the supreme good, which is characteristic of virtue.” And in another passage: “By the mean considered relatively to ourselves I understand that which is neither too much nor too little; but this is not one thing, nor is it the same for everybody. Thus if 10 be too much and 2 too little we take 6 as a mean in respect of the thing itself; for 6 is as much greater than 2 as it is less than 10, and this is a mean in arithemtical proportion. But the mean considered relatively to ourselves must not be ascertained in this way. It does not follow that if 10 pounds of meat be too much and 2 be too little for a man to eat, a trainer will order him 6 pounds, as this may itself be too much or too little for the person who is to take it....the right amount will vary with the individual. This being so, everybody who understands his business avoids alike excess and deficiency; he seeks and chooses the mean, not the absolute mean, but the mean considered relatively to ourselves.”

"the good of man is activity of soul [psyche] in accordance with virtue [excellence], or, if there are more virtues than one, in accordance with the best and most complete virtue."

[A "happy" man is] one who is active in accord with perfect virtue and adequately furnished with external goods, not for some chance period of time, but for his whole lifetime. ( - because achieving virtue requires a moderate amount of material foundation)

Our present study is not, like other studies, purely theoretical in intention; for the object of our inquiry is not to know what virtue is but how to become good , and that is the sole benefit of it. We must, therefore, consider the right way of performing actions, for it is acts that determine the character of the resulting moral states.

The virtue or excellence of man will be such a moral state as makes a man good and able to perform his proper function well.

Finally, consider the following from the last book in the Nichomachean Ethics: In fact, however, arguments seem to have enough influence to stimulate and encourage the civilized ones among the young people, and perhaps to make virtue [excellence] take possession of a well-born character that truly loves what is fine; but they seem unable to stimulate the many towards being fine and good.

For the many naturally obey fear, not shame; they avoid what is base because of the penalties, not because it is disgraceful. For since they live by their feelings, they pursue

4 their proper pleasures and the sources of them, and avoid the opposed pains, and have not even a notion of what is fine and truly pleasant, since they have had no taste of it.

What argument could reform people like these? For it is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit [_ethos_]....

Arguments and teaching surely do not influence everyone, but the soul of the student needs to have been prepared by habits for enjoying and hating finely, like ground that is to nourish seed. For someone whose life follows his feelings would not even listen to an argument turning him away, or comprehend it; and in that state how could he be persuaded to change?

From: http://tab.faculty.asu.edu/chapter102.html

Aristotle: "Well suppose that the gods are alive and in work, since surely they are not asleep like Endymion. And if someone is alive, and action is excluded, and production even more, nothing is left but contemplation. Hence the actuality of the gods that is superior in blessedness is contemplation. The human actuality most akin to this is the nature of happiness. An indication is that other animals have no happiness, being completely deprived of contemplation. The whole life of the gods is blessed, and human life is blessed to the extent that it resembles this sort of actuality, but none of the other animals is happy because none shares in contemplation at all. Happiness extends just so far as contemplation, and those to whom contemplation more fully belongs are more truly happy, not accidentally, but according to contemplation. Contemplation is valuable according to itself. Happiness, therefore, must be some form of contemplation." (Nichomachean Ethics X.8.1178b18-32.)

5 Spinoza: 1632-1677 (44 years) www.philosophypages.com/ph/spin.htm Life: Baruch Spinoza was born to Portuguese Jews living in exile in Holland. Despite an early rabbinical education, he was expelled from the synagogue at Amsterdam for defending heretical opinions in 1656. While engaging privately in serious study of medieval Jewish thought, Cartesian philosophy, and the new science at Rijnburg and the Hague, Spinoza supported himself by grinding optical lenses, an occupation that probably contributed to the consumption that killed him. Private circulation of his philosophical treatises soon earned him a significant reputation throughout Europe, but Spinoza so treasured his intellectual independence that in 1673 he declined the opportunity to teach at Heidelberg, preferring to continue his endeavors alone. Spinoza begins by describing what can be known about God. God is infinite substance, consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses God’s eternal and infinite essence (I, Prop. XI). 1 God necessarily exists, argues Spinoza, because God’s essence is existence. God’s essence and existence are the same (I, Prop. XX). Infinite substance is indivisible (I, Prop. XIII). If infinite substance were divisible, it could either be divided into two finite parts, which is impossible, or it could be divided into two equally infinite parts, which is also impossible. Thus, there is only one infinite substance. Every being has its being in God. Nothing can come into being or exist without God. In God, intellect is fully actualized. This means that things must necessarily occur in the manner in which they occur. Thought and extension are attributes of God. Spinoza argues that the human mind is a part of the infinite intellect of God (II, Prop. XI, Corollary). Ideas are true and adequate insofar as they refer to God. Ideas that logically follow from adequate ideas are also adequate. Ideas are false and inadequate insofar as they do not express the essence of God. An idea is adequate and perfect insofar as it represents knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God. For Spinoza, the will cannot be separated from the intellect. There is no such thing as free will. The human mind may have both adequate and inadequate ideas. The mind is active insofar as it has adequate ideas, and is passive insofar as it has inadequate ideas. The mind may have more or less adequate ideas, according to whether it is more or less subject to reason. The mind may have more or less inadequate ideas, according to whether it is more or less subject to emotion. Desire may arise from either pleasure or pain. Pleasure is produced by a transition from a lesser to a greater state of perfection. Pain is produced by a transition from a greater to a lesser state of perfection. Spinoza claims that the more perfect a thing is, the more active and less passive it is. Spinoza argues that knowledge of good and evil arises from the awareness of what causes pleasure and pain. The greatest good of the mind, and its greatest virtue, is to know God (IV, Prop. XXVIII).

6 To act with virtue is to act according to reason (IV, Prop. XXXVI). If we act according to reason, then we desire only what is good. If we act according to reason, then we try to promote what is good not only for ourselves but for others. Freedom is the ability to act according to reason. Freedom is not the ability to make free, undetermined choices but the ability to act rationally and to control the emotions. Servitude is the inability to act rationally or to control the emotions. Emotions which agree with reason cause pleasure, while emotions which do not agree with reason cause pain. Inability to control the emotions causes pain. Pain arises from inadequate ideas, i.e. ideas which do not adequately express the essence of God. Knowledge of evil is thus inadequate knowledge (IV, Prop. XIV). Pleasure arises from adequate ideas, i.e. ideas which adequately express the essence of God. Spinoza argues that to live according to reason is to live freely, and is not to live in servitude to the emotions. If we act according to reason, then we are guided by love and good-will and not by fear or hatred. www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/opinion/30iht-edgoldstein.2335157.html Spinoza's life and thought have the power to illuminate the kind of events that at the moment seem so intractable. Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly claim infallible knowledge of the creator's partiality to its beliefs and ways. He spent the rest of his life studying the varieties of religious intolerance. The conclusions he drew are still of dismaying relevance. Spinoza's reaction to the religious intolerance he saw around him was to try to think his way out of all sectarian thinking. He understood the powerful tendency in each of us toward developing a view of the truth that favors the circumstances into which we happened to have been born. Self-aggrandizement can be the invisible scaffolding of religion, politics or ideology. Against this tendency we have no defense but the relentless application of reason. Reason must stand guard against the self-serving false conclusions that creep into our thinking, inducing us to believe that we are more cosmically important than we truly are, that we have had bestowed upon us - whether Jew or Christian or Muslim - a privileged position in the narrative of the world's unfolding. Spinoza's system is a long argument for a conclusion as radical in our day as it was in his: that to the extent that we are rational, we each partake in exactly the same identity. Spinoza's faith in reason as our only hope and redemption is the core of his system, and its consequences reach out in many directions, including the political. Each of us has been endowed with reason, and it is our right, as well as our responsibility, to exercise it. Ceding this faculty to others, to the authorities of either the church or the state, is neither a rational nor an ethical option. He argued that a government that impedes the development of the sciences subverts the grounds for state legitimacy, which is to provide us physical safety so that we can realize our full potential. And this, too, is why he argued against the influence of clerics in government. Statecraft infused with religion is intrinsically unstable, since it must insist on its version of the truth against all others. Spinoza's universalist religion, which makes no reference to revelation, but rather to ethical truths that can be discovered through human reason.

7 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza Spinoza's philosophy has much in common with Stoicism inasmuch as both philosophies sought to fulfill a therapeutic role by instructing people how to attain happiness. However, Spinoza differed sharply from the Stoics in one important respect: he utterly rejected their contention that reason could defeat emotion. On the contrary, he contended, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion. For him, the crucial distinction was between active and passive emotions, the former being those that are rationally understood and the latter those that are not. He also held that knowledge of true causes of passive emotion can transform it to an active emotion, thus anticipating one of the key ideas of psychoanalysis. That humans presume themselves to have free will, he argues, is a result of their awareness of appetites while being unable to understand the reasons why they want and act as they do.

Spinoza quotes:

We shall bear with equal mind all that happens to us contrary to our private advantage so long as we are conscious that we have done our duty and lack the power to protect ourselves.

Remember that we are all part of universal nature and follow her order. If we have a clear and distinct understanding of this, we will more readily acquiesce in what befalls us.

The mind feels pleasure when it reflects on its own power and activity.

When the mind conceives things that make it unhappy, it endeavors to remember things that excludes those things.

The wise man will shrink from talking of men's faults, and will speak sparingly about human infirmity. He will dwell on human virtue and how it may be perfected.

The intellectual love of God is that very love of God whereby God loves Himself, explained through the essence of the human mind regarded sub species aeternitatis. The love that God shows man is identical with the intellectual love of God in man.

Desire is appetite with consciousness thereof.

Everyone desires his fellow-men to live after his own fashion.

Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or deformed, ordered or confused.

Blessedness consists in our knowledge of God as the One Substance. It teach us to value the gifts of fortune. We should await and endure fortunes' smiles or frowns with an equal mind, seeing that all things follow from the eternal decree of God by the same necessity that a triangle has three angles that are equal to two right angles.

8 This wisdom teaches us to hate no man, neither despise, to deride, to envy, or to be angry with any. It tells us to be content with our own and to be helpful to our neighbors, through the guidance of reason.

Bondage is caused by our inability to moderate or check our emotions. For when a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.

Churches: I have often wondered, that people who make boast of their Christian piety, love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men, should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues they claim, is the readiest criterion of their faith.

Faith: As to what God may be, whether fire, or spirit, or light, or what not, this, I say, has nothing to do with faith. The best faith is possessed by him who displays the best fruits of justice and charity.

Anyone who seeks for the true causes of natural phenomena as an intelligent being, and not to gaze at them like a fool, is set down and denounced as an impious heretic by those, whom the masses adore as the interpreters of nature and the gods. Such persons know that, with the removal of ignorance, the wonder which forms their only available means for proving and preserving their authority would vanish also.

God: In the language of philosophy, it cannot be said that God desires anything of any man, or that anything is displeasing to Him: all these human qualities have no place in God.

God has no right hand nor left. He is not moved or at rest, nor in a particular place, but that He is absolutely infinite and contains in Himself all perfections.

He who loves God, cannot endeavor that God should love him in return. Death: A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.

The love of God is man's highest happiness and good.

Philosophy: Scripture does not teach philosophy, but merely obedience. Therefore, those who wish to adapt religion to philosophy must ascribe to the prophets many ideas which they never dreamed of, and give an extremely force interpretation to their world.

We fear death less in proportion as the mind's clear and distinct knowledge is greater, and, consequently, in proportion as the mind loves God more.

Desire that springs from reason cannot be excessive.

One man may love what another hates, and does not fear what another man fears. Also, the same person can be differently affected by the same object at different times.

An emotion can only be controlled or destroyed by another emotion contrary thereto, and with more power for controlling emotion.

9

The primary emotions are pleasure, pain and desire. All emotions arise from these three.

Enjoyment: To make use of what comes our way, and to enjoy it as much as possible (not to the point of satiety, for that would not be enjoyment) is the part of a wise man.

He who is led by fear and does good in order to escape evil, is not led by reason.

The free man has ever first in his thoughts, that all things follow from the necessity of the Divine naure, wherefore he strives to remove hatred, anger, derision, pride and similar emotions. Thus he endeavors to do good and to go on his way rejoicing.

Men are mistaken in thinking they have free will. What they have is consciousness of their own actions and ignorance of the causes by which they are conditioned.

Good: We do not desire a thing because we deem it good, but deem it good because we desire it. Everyone judges things according to his particular emotions. Thus a miser thinks that money is best, and poverty the worst thing, while the ambitious man desires glory and fears nothing so much as public shame.

Good and Bad have no positive quality in themselves, but are merely modes of thinking, or notions which we form from the comparison of things one with another. Thus one and the same thing can be good, bad and indifferent. For instance, music is good for him that is melancholy, bad for him that mourns; for him that is deaf, it is neither good nor bad.

Harmony: It is impossible that man should not be part of nature. Human Nature: I have labored carefully, not to mock,lament, or execrate but to understand human actions. I have looked at passions such as love, hatred, anger, envy, ambition, pity, and other perturbations of the mind as properties of the mind, as are heat, cold, storm, thunder, etc. are perturbations of the weather.

Intellectual Perfection is our highest good and happiness, since the intellect is the best part of our being.

If men were so constituted by nature that they desired nothing but what is designated by true reason, society would obviously have no need of laws. But human nature is such that everyone seeks his own interest, and most people in ignorance, out of emotions, desires and irrational passions.

Men who are governed by reason – that is, who seek what is useful to them in accordance with reason, - desire for themselves nothing, which they do not also desire for the rest of mankind, and, consequently, are just, faithful, and honorable in their conduct.

A man's true happiness consists only in wisdom, and the knowledge of the truth, not at all in the fact that he is wiser than others, or that others lack such knowledge: such considerations do not increase his wisdom or true happiness.

10 Mind and body are one and the same thing, conceived first under the attribute of thought, secondly, under the attribute of extension.

The mind has greater power over the emotions and is less subject thereto, in so far as it understands all things as necessary.

New Ideas: Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is very well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by the many.

Obedience to God consists solely in love to our neighbor – for whoever loves his neighbor, as a means of obeying God, has fulfilled the law.

Negative emotions cannot be banished by first subduing them. That would be like insisting that someone who is ignorant must first forsake his ignorance before he can attain to knowledge. Rather it is knowledge that enables us to banish negative emotions.

A negative emotion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it. In this way we gain more control over our emotions, and the mind is less passive in respect to them.

The desire to do well that is engendered by reason is the essence of piety.

Prejudice: I know how deeply rooted are the prejudices embraced under the name of religion. I am aware that in the mind of the masses superstition is no less deeply rooted than fear; I recognize that their constancy is mere obstinacy, and that they are led to praise or blame by impulse rather than reason.

Selfishness: Man in the natural and civil state acts according to the laws of his own nature, and consults his own interest.

Self-Love: He who is guided only by emotions endeavors to cause others to love what he loves himself, and to make the rest of the world live according to his own fancy, acts solely by impulse, and is, therefore, hateful, especially to those who take delight in something different...

Pleasure which springs from contemplating the idea of ourselves is called self-love or self- complacency. This feeling is renewed each time a man contemplates his own virtues. It follows that everyone is fond of narrating his own exploits, and displaying the force both of his body and mind, and also that, for this reason, men are troublesome to one another.

Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being.

The effort for self-preservation is the first and only foundation of virtue.

Sin only exists in a civil state, not in nature.

For my part, I cannot admit that sin and evil have any positive existence.

Only in speaking improperly or 'humanly' can we speak of offending God or sin against God.

11

Soul: The human soul cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but there remains something of it which is eternal. The Soul can be united either with the body of which it is the Idea, or with God, without whom it can neither be, or be known.

We find, when we pursue sensuousness, pleasures, and worldly things, we do not find our happiness in them, but, on the contrary, our ruin. We therefore choose the guidance of our understanding.

There is no connection between philosophy and theology. Philosophy's sole end is truth, while faith aims only for obedience and piety.

Universe: All bodies are surrounded by others, and are mutually determined to exist and operate in a fixed and definite proportion, while the relations between motion and rest in sum total of then remain unchanged.

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but is virtue itself. It is because we rejoice in virtue that we can control our lusts.

Wisdom: The wise man is scarcely disturbed in spirit, but, being conscious or himself, of God, and of things, by a certain eternal necessity, never ceases to be, but always possesses true acquiescence of his spirit.

12

Hegel: August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831 (61 years)

Life: www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/hegelbio.htm Hegel was born in Stuttgart on August 27, 1770, the son of Georg Ludwig Hegel, a revenue officer with the Duchy of Wurttemburg. Eldest of three children (his younger brother, Georg Ludwig, died young as an officer with Napoleon during the Russian campaign), he was brought up in an atmosphere of Protestant pietism. Hegel soon became thoroughly acquainted with the Greek and Roman classics while studying at the Stuttgart Gymnasium (preparatory school) and was familiar with German literature and science. Hegel developed a profound interest in Greek literature and philosophy. Hegel worshipped Goethe and long regarded himself as inferior to his brilliant contemporaries Schelling and Hölderlin. He was an avid reader of Schiller and Rousseau. Hegel was 18 when the Bastille was stormed and the Republic declared in France and Hegel was an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution, and participated in a support group formed in Tübingen. Hegel finished his first great work, The Phenomenology of Mind on the very eve of the decisive Battle of Jena, in which Napoleon broke the Prussian armies and dismembered the kingdom. French soldiers entered Hegel’s house and set it afire just after he stuffed the last pages of the Phenomenology into his pocket and took refuge in the house of a high official of the town. In the Phenomenology he attempts to understand the revolutionary terror of the Jacobins in terms of their interpretation of Freedom. Hegel celebrated Bastille Day throughout his life. Hegel studied, wrote and lectured, although he did not receive a salary until the end of 1806, just before completing the first draft of The Phenomenology of Mind. Almost everything that Hegel was to develop systematically over the rest of his life is prefigured in the Phenomenology, but this book is far from systematic and extremely difficult to read. The Phenomenology attempts to present human history, with all its revolutions, wars and scientific discoveries, as an idealistic self- development of an objective Spirit or Mind .

13 Having exhausted the legacy left him by his father, Hegel became editor of the Catholic daily Bamberger Zeitung. He then moved to Nuremberg, where he served for eight years as headmaster of a Gymnasium.

During the Nuremberg years, Hegel met and married Marie von Tucher (1791-1855). They had three children – a daughter who died soon after birth, and two sons, Karl (1813-1901) and Immanuel (1814-91). Hegel had also fathered an illegitimate son, Ludwig, to the wife of his former landlord in Jena. Ludwig was born soon after Hegel had left Jena but eventually came to live with the Hegels, too.

In 1818, Hegel was invited to teach at the University of Berlin, where he was to remain. He died in Berlin on November 14, 1831, during a cholera epidemic.

Hegel's Absolute Idealism Hegel’s aim was to set forth a philosophical system so comprehensive that it would encompass the ideas of his predecessors and create a conceptual framework in terms of which both the past and future could be philosophically understood. Such an aim would require nothing short of a full account of reality itself. Thus, Hegel conceived the subject matter of philosophy to be reality as a whole. This reality, or the total developmental process of everything that is, he referred to as the Absolute, or Absolute Spirit . According to Hegel, the task of philosophy is to chart the development of Absolute Spirit. This involves (1) making clear the internal rational structure of the Absolute; (2) demonstrating the manner in which the Absolute manifests itself in nature and human history; and (3) explicating the teleological nature of the Absolute, that is, showing the end or purpose toward which the Absolute is directed.

Dialectic

Concerning the rational structure of the Absolute, Hegel, following the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, argued that “what is rational is real and what is real is rational .” This must be understood in terms of Hegel’s further claim that the Absolute must ultimately be regarded as pure Thought, or Spirit , or Mind, in the process of self-development . The logic that governs this developmental process is dialectic. The

14 dialectical method involves the notion that movement, or process, or progress, is the result of the conflict of opposites . Traditionally, this dimension of Hegel’s thought has been analysed in terms of the categories of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Although Hegel tended to avoid these terms, they are helpful in understanding his concept of the dialectic. The thesis, then, might be an idea or a historical movement. Such an idea or movement contains within itself incompleteness that gives rise to opposition, or an antithesis, a conflicting idea or movement. As a result of the conflict a third point of view arises, a synthesis , which overcomes the conflict by reconciling at a higher level the truth contained in both the thesis and antithesis . This synthesis becomes a new thesis that generates another antithesis, giving rise to a new synthesis, and in such a fashion the process of intellectual or historical development is continually generated. Hegel thought that Absolute Spirit itself (which is to say, the sum total of reality) develops in this dialectical fashion toward an ultimate end or goal. For Hegel, therefore, reality is understood as the Absolute unfolding dialectically in a process of self-development . As the Absolute undergoes this development, it manifests itself both in nature and in human history. Nature is Absolute Thought or Being objectifying itself in material form. Finite minds and human history are the process of the Absolute manifesting itself in that which is most kin to itself, namely, spirit or consciousness. In The Phenomenology of Mind Hegel traced the stages of this manifestation from the simplest level of consciousness, through self-consciousness, to the advent of reason.

Self-Knowledge of the Absolute

The goal of the dialectical cosmic process can be most clearly understood at the level of reason. As finite reason progresses in understanding, the Absolute progresses toward full self-knowledge. Indeed, the Absolute comes to know itself through the human mind’s increased understanding of reality, or the Absolute . Hegel analysed this human progression in understanding in terms of three levels: art, religion, and philosophy . Art grasps the Absolute in material forms, interpreting the rational through the sensible forms of beauty. Art is conceptually superseded by religion, which grasps the Absolute by means of images

15 and symbols. The highest religion for Hegel is Christianity, for in Christianity the truth that the Absolute manifests itself in the finite is symbolically reflected in the incarnation. Philosophy , however, is conceptually supreme, because it grasps the Absolute rationally . Once this has been achieved, the Absolute has arrived at full self-consciousness, and the cosmic drama reaches its end and goal. Only at this point did Hegel identify the Absolute with God. “God is God,” Hegel argued, “only in so far as he knows himself.”

Philosophy of History

In the process of analysing the nature of Absolute Spirit, Hegel made significant contributions in the philosophy of history and social ethics. With respect to history, his two key explanatory categories are reason and freedom. “ The only Thought ”, maintained Hegel, “ which Philosophy brings ... to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the world, that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process. “As a rational process, history is a record of the development of human freedom, for human history is a progression from less freedom to greater freedom.”

Ethics and Politics

Hegel’s social and political views emerge most clearly in his discussion of morality and social ethics. At the level of morality, right and wrong is a matter of individual conscience. One must, however, move beyond this to the level of social ethics, for duty, according to Hegel, is not essentially the product of individual judgment. Individuals are complete only in the midst of social relationships ; thus, the only context in which duty can truly exist is a social one. Hegel considered membership in the state one of the individual’s highest duties. Ideally, the state is the manifestation of the general will, which is the highest expression of the ethical spirit . Obedience to this general will is the act of a free and rational individual.

16 Influence

At the time of Hegel’s death, he was the most prominent philosopher in Germany. His views were widely taught, and his students were highly regarded. His followers soon divided into right-wing and left-wing Hegelians. Theologically and politically the right-wing Hegelians offered a conservative interpretation of his work. They emphasised the compatibility between Hegel’s philosophy and Christianity. Politically, they were orthodox. The left-wing Hegelians eventually moved to an atheistic position. In politics, many of them became revolutionaries. This historically important left-wing group included Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx.

QUOTES:

In the tool the subjectivity of labor is raised to something universal. Anyone can make a similar tool and work with it. To this extent the tool is the persistent norm of labor. System of Ethical Life (1803-4) ibid

This ideal and rational middle term is speech , the tool of reason, the child of intelligent beings.

The spoken word unites the objectivity of the corporeal sign with the subjectivity of gesture, the articulation of the latter with the self-awareness of the former.

Great wealth, which is similarly bound up with the deepest poverty, produces on the one side in ideal universality, on the other side in real universality, mechanically. This is the unmitigated extreme of barbarism. The original character of the business class disappears, and the bestiality of contempt for all higher things enters. Jena Lectures of 1805-6

The government has to work as hard as possible against this inequality and the destruction of private and public life wrought by it. It can do this directly in an external way by making high gain more difficult, and if it sacrifices one part of this class to mechanical and factory labor and abandons it to barbarism, it must keep the whole people without question in the life possible for it.

17 The wealthy man is directly compelled to modify his relation of mastery, and even others’ distrust for it, by permitting a more general participation in it.

The universal is a people, a group of individuals in general, an existent whole, the universal force. It is of insurmountable strength against the individual, and is his necessity and the power oppressing him. And the strength that each one has in his being-recognized is that of a people. This strength, however, is effective only insofar as it is united into a unity, only as will. The universal will is the will as that of all and each, but as will it is simply this Self alone. The activity of the universal is a unity. The universal will has to gather itself into this unity. It has first to constitute itself as a universal will, out of the will of individuals, so that this appears as the principle and element. Yet on the other hand the universal will is primary and the essence – and individuals have to make themselves into the universal will through the negation of their own will, [in] externalization and cultivation. The universal will is prior to them, it is absolutely there for them – they are in no way immediately the same.

I saw the Emperor (Napoleon) – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it. Letter to Niethammer , 13 October 1806

The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. The ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes these stages moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and constitutes thereby the life of the whole. Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

Our epoch is a birth-time, and a period of transition. The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things hitherto prevailing, and with the old ways of thinking, and is in the mind to let them all sink into the depths of the past and to set about its own transformation.

A building is not finished when its foundation is laid; and just as little, is the attainment of a general notion of a whole the whole itself. When we want to see an oak, we are not satisfied to be shown an acorn instead. In the same way science, the crowning glory of a spiritual world, is not found complete in its initial stages.

To pit this single assertion, that “in the Absolute all is one,” against the organised whole of determinate and complete knowledge, or of knowledge which at least aims at and demands complete development – to give out its Absolute as the night in which , as we say, all cows are black – that is the very naïveté of emptiness of knowledge.

18

Everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well.

If we say ‘all animals’, that does not pass for zoology; for the same reason we see at once that the words absolute, divine, eternal, and so on do not express what is implied in them.

The particular individual, so far as content is concerned, has also to go through the stages through which the general mind has passed, but as shapes once assumed by mind and now laid aside, as stages of a road which has been worked over and leveled out. Hence it is that, in the case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and even pastimes, for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of the world’s culture delineated in faint outline. This bygone mode of existence has already become an acquired possession of the general mind, which constitutes the substance of the individual, and, by thus appearing externally to him, furnishes his inorganic nature. In this respect culture or development of mind ( Bildung ), regarded from the side of the individual, consists in his acquiring what lies at his hand ready for him, in making its inorganic nature organic to himself, and taking possession of it for himself. Looked at, however, from the side of universal mind qua (as) general spiritual substance, culture means nothing else than that this substance gives itself its own self-consciousness, brings about its own inherent process and its own reflection into self. Reason is negative and dialectical , because it resolves the determinations of the understanding into nothing. Consciousness is spirit as a concrete knowing, a knowing too, in which externality is involved; but the development of this object, like the development of all natural and spiritual life, rests solely on the nature of the pure essentialities which constitute the content of logic. The Science of Logic (1812)

The forms of thought are, in the first instance, displayed and stored as human language .

Dialectic is here understood in the grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative.

Just as little is seen in pure light as in pure darkness.

There is nothing which is not an intermediate state between being and nothing.

We call dialectic the higher movement of reason in which utterly separate terms pass over

19 into each other spontaneously.

The very fact that something is determined as a limitation implies that the limitation is already transcended.

There is nothing, nothing in heaven, or in nature or in mind or anywhere else which does not equally contain both immediacy and mediation.

Pure Being and pure nothing are, therefore, the same.

Even a slight experience in reflective thinking will make it apparent that if something has been defined as positive and one moves forward from this basis, then straightway the positive has secretly turned into a negative. The Science of Logic (1813)

Everything is inherently contradictory.

I adhere to the view that the world spirit has given the age marching orders. These orders are being obeyed. The world spirit, this essential, proceeds irresistibly like a closely drawn armored phalanx advancing with imperceptible movement, much as the sun through thick and thin. Innumerable light troops flank it on all sides, throwing themselves into the balance for or against its progress, though most of them are entirely ignorant of what is at stake and merely take head blows as from an invisible hand. Letter to Niethammer, 5 July 1816

Freedom is the truth of necessity. The Science of Logic (1816) and so on...

Dialectic has often been regarded as an art, as though it rested on a subjective talent and did not belong to the objectivity of the Notion.

The Idea, in positing itself as absolute unity of the pure Notion and its reality and thus contracting itself into the immediacy of being, is the totality in this form – Nature.

This Idea of Spinoza's we must allow to be in the main true and well-grounded; absolute substance is the truth, but it is not the whole truth; in order to be this it must also be thought of as in itself active and living, and by that very means it must determine itself as mind. But substance with Spinoza is only the universal and consequently the abstract determination of mind. History of Philosophy (1817)

20 It may really be said: You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.

Man is free, this is certainly the substantial nature of man; and not only is this liberty not relinquished in the state, but it is actually in the state that it is first realized. The freedom of nature, the gift of freedom, is not anything real; for the state is the first realization of freedom.

There are two kinds of laws, laws of nature and laws of right. Preface to The Philosophy of Right (1821)

What is rational is real and what is real is rational.

Philosophy cannot teach the state what it should be, but only how the ethical universe is to be known .

As for the individual, every one is a son of his time; so philosophy also is its time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as foolish to fancy that any philosophy can transcend its present world, as that an individual could leap out of his time or jump over Rhodes.

When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

Impulses must be freed from the form of direct subjection to nature.

The propulsion by the universality of thought is the absolute worth of civilization.

Personality implies that as this person: I am completely determined on every side and so finite, yet nonetheless I am simply and solely self-relation, and therefore in finitude I know myself as something infinite, – universal, and free.

‘Person’ is essentially different from ‘subject’, since ‘subject’ is only the possibility of personality; every living thing of any sort is a subject. A person, then, is a subject aware of this subjectivity, since in personality it is of myself alone that I am aware.

‘Be a person and respect others as persons.’

21

Personality is that which struggles to lift itself above the restriction of being only subjective and to give itself reality.

From the point of view of others, I am in essence a free entity in my body.

What and how much I possess is a matter of indifference so far as rights are concerned.

Those substantive characteristics which constitute my own private personality are inalienable.

Existence as determinate being is in essence being for another.

The family as a legal entity in relation to others must be represented by the husband as its head.

Once the children have come of age, they become recognized as persons.

The abstraction of one man’s production from another’s makes labor more and more mechanical, until finally man is able to step aside and install machines in his place.

The fact that society has become strong and sure of itself leads to a mitigation of its punishment.

No act of revenge is justified.

The public authority takes the place of the family where the poor are concerned.

Society struggles to make charity less necessary, by discovering the causes of penury and means of its relief.

The inner dialectic of civil society drives it to push beyond its own limits and seek markets in other lands.

22

Colonial independence proves to be of the greatest advantage to the mother country, just as the emancipation of slaves turns out to the greatest advantage of the owners.

The Corporation comes on to the scene like a second family.

The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea.

The march of God in the world, that is what the state is.

The state is the actuality of concrete freedom.

The strength of the state is lies in the unity of its universal end with the particular interest of individual.

Necessity appears to itself in the shape of freedom.

The constitution of any given nation depends in general on the character and development of its self-consciousness.

As for popular suffrage, it may be further remarked that especially in large states it leads inevitably to electoral indifference, since the casting of a single vote is of no significance where there is a multitude of electors. Even if a voting qualification is highly valued and esteemed by those who are entitled to it, they still do not enter the polling booth.

Public opinion has common sense, but is infected by accidents of opinion, ignorance and perversity.

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational.

Free speech is assured by the innocuous character which it acquires as a result of the stability of government.

23 The individual's duty is to maintain the sovereignty of the state, at the risk and sacrifice of property and life.

Sacrifice on behalf of the state is the substantial tie between the state and all its members.

If the state as such is in jeopardy, all its citizens are in duty bound to answer the summons to its defence.

The nation state is Mind in its substantive rationality and immediate actuality — the absolute power on earth.

The fundamental proposition of international law is that treaties ought to be kept.

It follows that if states disagree, the matter can only be settled by war.

The Mind of the world, exercises its right in the ‘history of the world which is the world's court of judgment’.

World history is a court of judgment.

World history is not the verdict of mere might, but actualization of the universal mind.

The history of Mind is its own act.

States, nations, and individuals are all the time the unconscious tools of the world mind at work within them.

Each stage of world-history is a necessary moment in the Idea of the World Mind.

History is mind clothing itself with the form of events.

Civilized nations are justified in regarding as barbarians those who lag behind them in institutions.

24

Spiritual culture, the modern intellect, produces this opposition in man which makes him an amphibious animal, because he now has to live in two worlds which contradict one another. Introduction to the Lectures on Aesthetics (1826)

Art’s vocation is to unveil the truth in the form of sensuous artistic configuration, to set forth the reconciled opposition just mentioned [the common world of earthly temporality, and a realm of thought and freedom], and so to have its end and aim in itself, in this very setting forth and unveiling.

A symbol is a sensuous object. There are two terms to be distinguished: the first is a conception of the mind; the second, a sensuous phenomenon, an image which address itself to the senses.

The sentiment of art like the religious sentiment, like scientific curiosity, is born of wonder; the man who wonders at nothing lives in a state of imbecility and stupidity.

The object of philosophy is an actuality of which social regulations and conditions, are only the superficial outside. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Introduction (1830)

Those sciences, which thus got the name of philosophy, we call empirical sciences, for the reason that they take their departure from experience. In England this is still the usual signification of the term philosophy. Newton continues to be celebrated as the greatest of philosophers: and the name goes down as far as the price-lists of instrument-makers.

Experience is the real author of growth and advance of philosophy.

For these thousands of years the same Architect has directed the work: and that Architect is the one living Mind whose nature is to think.

Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself . In each of these parts, however, the philosophical Idea is found in a particular specificality or medium. The single circle, because it is a real totality, bursts through the limits imposed by its special medium, and gives rise to a wider circle. The whole of philosophy in this way resembles a circle of circles . The Idea appears in each single circle, but, at the same time, the whole Idea is constituted by the system of these peculiar phases, and each is a necessary member of the organization.

25 By the act of reflection something is altered in the way in which the fact was originally presented in sensation, perception, or conception. Thus, as it appears, an alteration must be interposed before the true nature of the object can be discovered.

‘Think for yourself’ is a phrase which people often use as if it had some special significance. The fact is, no man can think for another, any more than he can eat or drink for him. In point of contents, thought is only true in proportion as it sinks itself in the facts; and in point of form it is no private act of the subject, but rather that attitude of consciousness where the abstract self, freed from all the special limitations to which its ordinary states are liable, restricts itself to that universal action in which it is identical with all individuals.

To know what free thought means go to Greek philosophy. Shorter Logic (1830)

Religion and morals, however much they may be faith or immediate knowledge, are still on every side conditioned by the mediating process which is termed development, education, training.

It is the fashion of youth to dash about in abstractions – but the man who has learnt to know life steers clear of the abstract ‘either-or’, and keeps to the concrete.

... the earliest systems are the most abstract, and thus at the same time the poorest.

(The earlier systems of philosophy) ...are preserved in the later: but subordinated and submerged. This is the true meaning of a much misunderstood phenomenon in the history of philosophy – the refutation of one system by another, of an earlier by a later. Most commonly the refutation is taken in a purely negative sense to mean that the system refuted has ceased to count for anything, has been set aside and done for. Were it so, the history of philosophy would be, of all studies, most saddening, displaying, as it does, the refutation of every system which time has brought forth. Now although it may be admitted that every philosophy has been refuted, it must be in an equal degree maintained that no philosophy has been refuted . And that in two ways. For first, every philosophy that deserves the name always embodies the Idea: and secondly, every system represents one particular factor or particular stage in the evolution of the Idea. The refutation of a philosophy, therefore, only means that its barriers are crossed, and its special principle reduced to a factor in the completer principle that follows.

Pure Being, as it is mere abstraction, is just Nothing. In fact this definition is implied in saying that God is only the supreme Being and nothing more. The Nothing which the Buddhists make the universal principle, as well as the final aim and goal of everything, is

26 the same abstraction.

The word ‘reality’ is used to mean that something behaves conformably to its essential characteristic or notion. For example, we use the expression: ‘This is a real man’. Here the term does not merely mean outward and immediate existence: but rather that some existence agrees with its notion. In this sense, reality is not distinct from ideality .

Newton gave physics an express warning to beware of metaphysics, it is true, but to his honor be it said, he did not by any means obey his own warning.

Thus the man, in himself, is the child. And what the child has to do is to rise out of this abstract and undeveloped 'in-himself' and become 'for himself' what he is at first only 'in-himself' – a free and reasonable being.

The problem of science, and especially of philosophy, consists in eliciting the necessity concealed under the semblance of contingency.

The truth of necessity is, therefore, Freedom.

Necessity is blind only so long as it is not understood.

The notion is the principle of all life, and thus possesses at the same time a character of thorough concreteness. The notion is what contains all the earlier categories of thought merged in it, an infinite and creative form which includes, but at the same time releases from itself, the fullness of all content. And so too the notion may, if it be wished, be styled abstract, if the name concrete is restricted to the concrete facts of sense or of immediate perception. For the notion is not palpable to the touch, and when we are engaged with it, hearing and seeing must quite fail us. And yet, the notion is a true concrete.

The universal ... cost thousands of years to enter the consciousness of men.

The theory which regards the Object as Absolute expresses the point of view of superstition and slavish fear.

Logic shows that the subjective which is to be subjective only, the finite which would be

27 finite only, the infinite which would be infinite only, and so on, have no truth, but contradict themselves, and pass over into their opposites

The single members of the body are what they are only by and in relation to their unity. A hand e.g. when hewn off from the body is, as Aristotle has observed, a hand in name only, not in fact.

The chemist places a piece of flesh in his retort, tortures it in many ways, and then informs us that it consists of nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, etc. True: but these abstract matters have ceased to be flesh.

The Idea, as unity of the Subjective and Objective Idea, is the absolute and all truth, the Idea which thinks itself.

The absolute idea may in this respect be compared to the old man who utters the same creed as the child, but for whom it is pregnant with the significance of a lifetime. Even if the child understands the truths of religion, he cannot but imagine them to be something outside of which lies the whole of life and the whole of the world.

The same may be said to be the case with human life as a whole and the occurrences with which it is fraught. All work is directed only to the aim or end; and when it is attained, people are surprised to find nothing else but just the very thing which they had wished for. The interest lies in the whole movement.

The method is not an extraneous form, but the soul and notion of the content.

Life is essentially the concept which realizes itself only through self-division and reunification. Philosophy of Nature (1830)

Only what is living feels a lack.

The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning. Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1831)

The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form

28 therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism , the second Democracy and Aristocracy , the third Monarchy .

The Mohammedan principle – the enlightenment of the Oriental World – is the first to contravene this barbarism and caprice [of the real world]. We find it developing itself later and more rapidly than Christianity; for the latter needed eight centuries to grow up into a political form.

Reason governs the world and has consequently governed its history. In relation to this Reason, which is universal and substantial, in and for itself, all else is subordinate, subservient, and the means for its actualization. Moreover, this Reason is immanent in historical existence and reaches its own perfection in and through this existence. General Introduction to the Philosophy of History (1831)

The morality of the individual, then, consists in his fulfilling the duties of his social position.

Each individual is the child of a people at a definite stage of its development. One cannot skip over the spirit of his people any more than one can skip over the earth. But only through his own effort can he be in harmony with his substance; he must bring the will demanded by his people to his own consciousness, to articulation. The individual does not invent his own content; he is what he is by acting out the universal as his own content. This universal content everyone must activate within himself.

In the course of history two factors are important. One is the preservation of a people, a state, of the well-ordered spheres of life. This is the activity of individuals participating in the common effort and helping to bring about its particular manifestations. The other important factor, however, is the decline of a state. The existence of a national spirit is broken when it has used up and exhausted itself. This development is connected with the degradation, destruction, annihilation of the preceding mode of actuality which the concept of the Spirit had evolved. This is the result, on the one hand, of the inner development of the Idea and, on the other, of the activity of individuals, who are its agents and bring about its actualization. It is at this point that appear those momentous collisions between existing, acknowledged duties, laws, and rights and those possibilities which are adverse to this system, violate it, and even destroy its foundations and existence.

Man is an end in himself only by virtue of the divine in him – that which we designated at the outset as Reason, or, insofar as it has activity and power of self-determination, as Freedom.

It is not the general idea that is implicated in opposition and combat, and that is exposed to

29 danger. It remains in the background, untouched and uninjured. This may be called the cunning of reason , – that it sets the passions to work for itself, while that which develops its existence through such impulsion pays the penalty and suffers loss.

In Nature there happens ‘nothing new under the sun’.

The only Thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process.

America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself – perhaps in a contest between North and South America. It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe.

30 Søren Kierkegaard: 5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855 (42 Years)

Life: plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/ (Kierkegaard)... is known as the “father of existentialism”, but at least as important are his critiques of Hegel and of the German romantics, his contributions to the development of modernism, his literary experimentation, his vivid re-presentation of biblical figures to bring out their modern relevance, his invention of key concepts which have been explored and redeployed by thinkers ever since, his interventions in contemporary Danish church politics, and his fervent attempts to analyse and revitalise Christian faith. Kierkegaard led a somewhat uneventful life. He rarely left his hometown of Copenhagen, and travelled abroad only five times — four times to Berlin and once to Sweden. His prime recreational activities were attending the theatre, walking the streets of Copenhagen to chat with ordinary people, and taking brief carriage jaunts into the surrounding countryside. He was educated at a prestigious boys' school (Borgerdydskolen), then attended Copenhagen University where he studied philosophy and theology. His teachers at the university included F.C. Sibbern, Poul Martin Møller, and H.L. Martensen. Sibbern and Møller were both philosophers who also wrote fiction. The latter in particular had a great influence on Kierkegaard's philosophico-literary development. Martensen also had a profound effect on Kierkegaard, but largely in a negative manner. Martensen was a champion of Hegelianism, and when he became Bishop Primate of the Danish People's Church, Kierkegaard published a vitriolic attack on Martensen's theological views. Kierkegaard's life is more relevant to his work than is the case for many writers. Kierkegaard's biography is important for an understanding of his writing because his life was the source of many of the preoccupations and repetitions within his oeuvre. Because of his existentialist orientation, most of his interventions in contemporary theory do double duty as means of working through events from his own life. In particular Kierkegaard's relations to his mother, his father, and his fiancée Regine Olsen pervade his work. Kierkegaard saw himself as a “singular universal” whose personal preoccupation with himself was transfigured by divine Governance into universal significance. The influence of Kierkegaard's father on his work has been frequently noted. Not only did Kierkegaard inherit his father's melancholy, his sense of guilt and anxiety, and his pietistic emphasis on the dour aspects of Christian faith, but he also inherited his talents for philosophical argument and creative imagination. In addition Kierkegaard inherited enough of his father's wealth to allow him to pursue his life as a freelance writer.The father's sense of guilt was so great (for having cursed God? for having impregnated Kierkegaard's mother out of wedlock?) that he thought God would punish him by taking the lives of all seven of his children before they reached the age of 34 (the age of Jesus Christ at his

31 crucifixion). This was born out for all but two of the children, Søren and his older brother Peter. Søren was astonished that they both survived beyond that age. This may explain the sense of urgency that drove Kierkegaard to write so prolifically in the years leading up to his 34th birthday. Kierkegaard's (broken) engagement to Regine Olsen has also been the focus of much scholarly attention. The theme of a young woman being the occasion for a young man to become “poeticized” recurs in Kierkegaard's writings, as does the theme of the sacrifice of worldly happiness for a higher (religious) purpose. Kierkegaard's infatuation with Regine, and the sublimated libidinal energy it lent to his poetic production, were crucial for setting his life course. The breaking of the engagement allowed Kierkegaard to devote himself monastically to his religious purpose, as well as to establish his outsider status (outside the norm of married bourgeois life). It also freed him from close personal entanglements with women, thereby leading him to objectify them as ideal creatures, and to reproduce the patriarchal values of his church and father.

Kierkegaard and Hegel Much of the thrust of his critique of Hegelianism is that its system of thought is abstracted from the everyday lives of its proponents. This existential critique consists in demonstrating how the life and work of a philosopher contradict one another. Hegelianism promised to make absolute knowledge available by virtue of a science of logic. Anyone with the capacity to follow the dialectical progression of the purportedly transparent concepts of Hegel's logic would have access to the mind of God (which for Hegel was equivalent to the logical structure of the universe). Kierkegaard thought this to be the hubristic attempt to build a new tower of Babel, or a scala paradisi — a dialectical ladder by which humans can climb with ease up to heaven. Kierkegaard's strategy was to invert this dialectic by seeking to make everything more difficult. Instead of seeing scientific knowledge as the means of human redemption, he regarded it as the greatest obstacle to redemption. Instead of seeking to give people more knowledge he sought to take away what passed for knowledge. Instead of seeking to make God and Christian faith perfectly intelligible he sought to emphasize the absolute transcendence by God of all human categories. Instead of setting himself up as a religious authority, Kierkegaard used a vast array of textual devices to undermine his authority as an author and to place responsibility for the existential significance to be derived from his texts squarely on the reader. Kierkegaard's “method of indirect communication” was designed to sever the reliance of the reader on the authority of the author and on the received wisdom of the community. The reader was to be forced to take individual responsibility for knowing who s/he is and for knowing where s/he stands on the existential, ethical and religious issues raised in the texts. A key concept in the Hegelian dialectic, which Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship parodies, is Aufhebung(sublation). In Hegel's dialectic, when contradictory positions are reconciled in a higher

32 unity (synthesis) they are both annulled and preserved (aufgehoben). Similarly with Kierkegaard's pseudo-dialectic: the aesthetic and the ethical are both annulled and preserved in their synthesis in the religious stage. As far as the aesthetic stage of existence is concerned what is preserved in the higher religious stage is the sense of infinite possibility made available through the imagination. But this no longer excludes what is actual. Nor is it employed for egotistic ends. Aesthetic irony is transformed into religious humor, and the aesthetic transfiguration of the actual world into the ideal is transformed into the religious transubstantiation of the finite world into an actual reconciliation with the infinite.

The term “ethics” in Kierkegaard's work has more than one meaning. It is used to denote both: (i) a limited existential sphere, or stage, which is superseded by the higher stage of the religious life; and (ii) an aspect of life which is retained even within the religious life. In the first sense “ethics” is synonymous with the Hegelian notion of Sittlichkeit, or customary mores. In this sense “ethics” represents “the universal”, or more accurately the prevailing social norms. The social norms are seen to be the highest court of appeal for judging human affairs — nothing outranks them for this sort of ethicist. Even human sacrifice is justified in terms of how it serves the community, so that when Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia he is regarded as a tragic hero since the sacrifice is required for the success of the Greek expedition to Troy (Fear and Trembling). In order to maintain itself as a relation which relates itself to itself, the self must constantly renew its faith in “the power which posited it.” There is no mediation between the individual self and God by priest or by logical system (contra Catholicism and Hegelianism respectively). There is only the individual's own repetition of faith. This repetition of faith is the way the self relates itself to itself and to the power which constituted it, i.e. the repetition of faith is the self. One of Kierkegaard's main interventions in cultural politics was his sustained attack on Hegelianism. Hegel's philosophy had been introduced into Denmark with religious zeal by J.L. Heiberg, and was taken up enthusiastically within the theology faculty of Copenhagen University and by Copenhagen's literati. Kierkegaard, too, was induced to make a serious study of Hegel's work. While Kierkegaard greatly admired Hegel, he had grave reservations about Hegelianism and its bombastic promises. Hegel would have been the greatest thinker who ever lived, said Kierkegaard, if only he had regarded his system as a thought-experiment. Instead he took himself seriously to have reached the truth, and so rendered himself comical. Kierkegaard's tactic in undermining Hegelianism was to produce an elaborate parody of Hegel's entire system. The pseudonymous authorship, from “Either-Or” to “Concluding Unscientific Postscript”, presents an inverted Hegelian dialectic which is designed to lead readers away from knowledge rather than towards it.

33 There were two main foci of Kierkegaard's concern in church politics. One was the influence of Hegel, largely through the teachings of H.L. Martensen; the other was the popularity of N.F.S. Grundtvig. Grundtvig's theology was diametrically opposed to Kierkegaard's in tone. Grundtvig emphasized the light, joyous, celebratory and communal aspects of Christianity, whereas Kierkegaard emphasized seriousness, suffering, sin, guilt, and individual isolation. Kierkegaard also provided critical commentary on social change. He was an untiring champion of “the single individual” as opposed to “the crowd”. He feared that the opportunity of achieving geniune selfhood was diminished by the social production of stereotypes. He lived in an age when mass society was emerging from a highly stratified feudal order and was contemptuous of the mediocrity the new social order generated. One symptom of the change was that mass society substitutes detached reflection for engaged passionate commitment. Yet the latter is crucial for Christian faith and for authentic selfhood according to Kierkegaard.

Quotes: www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/soren_kierkegaard.html A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him. Don't forget to love yourself. During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk. Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are. Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further. Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good. I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this. I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations - one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it - you will regret both. If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.

It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.

34 It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.

Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God. Life must be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.

Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment. Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself. Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all.

Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable. Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid. Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.

Once you label me you negate me.

One can advise comfortably from a safe port.

Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts. Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.

People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.

35

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me. Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.

Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.

Purity of heart is to will one thing.

Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.

The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo; the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.

There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.

36

Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.

37

Nietzsche: 1844-1900 (55 years)

Life: plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/ Nietzsche was born near Leipzig on Oct. 15, 1844, son of the town's Luthern minister. Nietzsche's uncle and grandfathers were also Lutheran ministers, and his paternal grandfather was also distinguished as a Protestant scholar. When Nietzsche was nearly 5 years old, his father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche died from a brain ailment and his two-year-old brother, Ludwig Joseph, died six months later. The Nietzsche family moved to nearby Naumburg an der Saale, where Nietzsche (called “Fritz” by his family) lived with his mother, Franziska, his grandmother, Erdmuthe, his father's two sisters, Auguste and Rosalie, and his younger sister, Therese Elisabeth Alexandra (1846–1935). From the ages of 14 to 19, Nietzsche attended a first-rate boarding school, where he prepared for university studies. The school's rigid educational atmosphere was reflected in its long history as a former Cistercian monastery. After graduating from Schulpforta, Nietzsche entered the University of Bonn in 1864 as a theology and philology student. (He then moved) to the University of Leipzig in 1865, where Nietzsche quickly established his own academic reputation through his published essays on two 6th century BCE poets, Theognis and Simonides, as well as on Aristotle. In 1867, as he approached the age of 23, Nietzsche entered his required military service and was assigned to an equestrian field artillery regiment.While attempting to leap-mount into the saddle, he suffered a serious chest injury and was put on sick leave after his chest wound refused to heal. He returned shortly thereafter to the University of Leipzig, and in November of 1868, met the composer Richard Wagner Wagner and Nietzsche shared an enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche admired Wagner for his musical genius, magnetic personality and cultural influence. The Nietzsche-Wagner relationship was quasi-familial and sometimes-stormy. During the months surrounding Nietzsche's initial meeting with Wagner, a friend recommended Nietzsche for a position on the classical philology faculty at the University of Basel. He began teaching there in May, 1869, at the age of 24. At Basel, Nietzsche's satisfaction with his life among his philology colleagues was limited, and he established closer intellectual ties to the historian Franz Overbeck, who became his room mate for five years, and Jacob Burkhardt .Never in outstanding health, further complications arose from Nietzsche's August-October 1870 service as a 25-year-old hospital attendant during the Franco-Prussian War

38 (1870-71), where he participated in the siege of Metz. He witnessed the traumatic effects of battle, took close care of wounded soldiers, and contracted diphtheria and dysentery. Nietzsche's first book was The Birth of Tragedy (1872) published when Nietzsche was 27. From 1880 until his collapse in January 1889, Nietzsche led a wandering, gypsy-like existence as a stateless person, never residing in any place longer than several months at a time. On a visit to Rome in 1882, Nietzsche, now at age thirty-seven, met Lou von Salomé (1861–1937), a 21 year old Russian woman who was studying philosophy and theology in Zurich. He quickly fell in love with her. Eventually declining to develop her relationship with Nietzsche on a romantic level, the future of Nietzsche's friendship with her and Paul Rée took a turn for the worse, as Salomé and Rée left Nietzsche and moved to Berlin. In the years to follow, Salomé would become an associate of Sigmund Freud, and would write with psychological insight of her association with Nietzsche. These nomadic years were the occasion of Nietzsche's main works, among which are Daybreak (1881), The Gay Science (1882/1887), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). Nietzsche's final active year, 1888, saw the completion of The Case of Wagner (May-August 1888), Twilight of the Idols (August-September 1888), The Antichrist (September 1888),Ecce Homo (October-November 1888) and Nietzsche Contra Wagner (December 1888). On the morning of January 3, 1889, while in Turin, Nietzsche experienced a mental breakdown which left him an invalid for the rest of his life. Coincidentally, on virtually the same date, viz., January 4, his little brother, Joseph, had died many years before. Nietzsche, upon witnessing a horse being whipped by a coachman at the Piazza Carlo Alberto — although this episode with the horse could be anecdotal — threw his arms around the horse's neck and collapsed in the plaza, never to return to full sanity. Some argue that Nietzsche was afflicted with a syphilitic infection (this was the original diagnosis of the doctors in Basel and Jena), but the exact cause of Nietzsche's incapacitation remains unclear. To complicate matters of interpretation, Nietzsche states in a letter from April 1888 that he never had any symptoms of a mental disorder. In contrast, we have Paul Rée writing in an 1897 letter that Nietzsche had always been unbalanced. After a brief hospitalization in Basel, he spent 1889 in a sanatorium in Jena at the Binswanger Clinic, and in March 1890 his mother took him back home to Naumburg, where he lived under her care for the next seven years in the house he knew as a youngster. After his mother's death in 1897, his sister Elisabeth assumed responsibility for Nietzsche's welfare. In an effort to promote her brother's philosophy, she rented the “Villa Silberblick,” a large house in Weimar, and moved both Nietzsche and his collected manuscripts to the residence, where Elisabeth received visitors who wanted to observe the now-incapacitated philosopher. On August 25, 1900, Nietzsche died in the villa as he approached his 56th year, apparently of pneumonia in combination with a stroke. His body was then transported to the family gravesite directly

39 beside the church in Röcken bei Lützen, where his mother and sister now also rest. The Villa Silberblick was eventually turned into a museum. Main Themes www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/nietzsche/themes.html While most of his contemporaries looked on the late nineteenth century with unbridled optimism, confident in the progress of science and the rise of the German state, Nietzsche saw his age facing a fundamental crisis in values. With the rise of science, the Christian worldview no longer held a prominent explanatory role in people’s lives, a view Nietzsche captures in the phrase “God is dead.” However, science does not introduce a new set of values to replace the Christian values it displaces. Nietzsche rightly foresaw that people need to identify some source of meaning and value in their lives, and if they could not find it in science, they would turn to aggressive nationalism and other such salves. The last thing Nietzsche would have wanted was a return to traditional Christianity, however. Instead, he sought to find a way out of nihilism through the creative and willful affirmation of life. On one level, the will to power is a psychological insight: our fundamental drive is for power as realized in independence and dominance. This will is stronger than the will to survive, as martyrs willingly die for a cause if they feel that associating themselves with that cause gives them greater power, and it is stronger than the will to sex, as monks willingly renounce sex for the sake of a greater cause. While the will to power can manifest itself through violence and physical dominance, Nietzsche is more interested in the sublimated will to power, where people turn their will to power inward and pursue self-mastery rather than mastery over others. An Indian mystic, for instance, who submits himself to all sorts of physical deprivation gains profound self-control and spiritual depth, representing a more refined form of power than the power gained by the conquering barbarian. On a deeper level, the will to power explains the fundamental, changing aspect of reality. According to Nietzsche, everything is in flux, and there is no such thing as fixed being. Matter is always moving and changing, as are ideas, knowledge, truth, and everything else. The will to power is the fundamental engine of this change. For Nietzsche, the universe is primarily made up of wills. The idea of the human soul or ego is just a grammatical fiction, according to Nietzsche. What we call “I” is really a chaotic jumble of competing wills, constantly struggling to overcome one another. Because change is a fundamental aspect of life, Nietzsche considers any point of view that takes reality to be fixed and objective, be it religious, scientific, or philosophical, as life denying. A truly life-affirming philosophy that recognizes change as the only constant in the world.

The Perspectivist Conception of Truth

Nietzsche is critical of the very idea of objective truth. That we should think there is only one right way of considering a matter is only evidence that we have become inflexible in our thinking. Such

40 intellectual inflexibility is a symptom of saying “no” to life, a condition that Nietzsche abhors. A healthy mind is flexible and recognizes that there are many different ways of considering a matter. There is no single truth but rather many.

Some argue that Nietzsche believes the very idea of “truth” to be a lie. Truth is not an elephant that we must look at from multiple perspectives under this view. Rather, truth is simply the name given to the point of view of the people who have the power to enforce their point of view. The only reality is the will to power, and truth, like morality, is just another fig leaf placed on top of this reality.

Christianity as a Life-Denying Force Throughout his work, particularly in The Antichrist, Nietzsche writes scathingly about Christianity, arguing that it is fundamentally opposed to life. In Christian morality, Nietzsche sees an attempt to deny all those characteristics that he associates with healthy life. The concept of sin makes us ashamed of our instincts and our sexuality, the concept of faith discourages our curiosity and natural skepticism, and the concept of pity encourages us to value and cherish weakness. Furthermore, Christian morality is based on the promise of an afterlife, leading Christians to devalue this life in favor of the beyond. Nietzsche argues that Christianity springs from resentment for life and those who enjoy it, and it seeks to overthrow health and strength with its life-denying ethic. As such, Nietzsche considers Christianity to be the hated enemy of life.

The Revaluation of All Values

As the title of one of his books suggests, Nietzsche seeks to find a place “beyond good and evil.” One of Nietzsche’s fundamental achievements is to expose the psychological underpinnings of morality. He shows that our values are not themselves fixed and objective but rather express a certain attitude toward life. For example, he argues that Christian morality is fundamentally resentful and life denying, devaluing natural human instincts and promoting weakness and the idea of an afterlife, the importance of which supercedes that of our present life. Nietzsche aims to expose the very concept of morality as being a fig leaf placed on top of our fundamental psychological drives to make them seem more staid and respectable. By exposing morality as a fiction, Nietzsche wants to encourage us to be more honest about our drives and our motives and more realistic in the attitude we take toward life. Such honesty and realism, he contends, would cause a fundamental “revaluation of all values.” Without morality, we would become an entirely different species of being, and a healthier species of being at that.

Man as Bridge Between Animal and Overman

Nietzsche contends that humanity is a transition, not a destination. We ceased to be animals when we taught ourselves to control our instincts for the sake of greater gains. By learning to resist some of our natural impulses, we have been able to forge civilizations, develop knowledge, and deepen ourselves spiritually. Rather than directing our will to power outward to dominate those around us, we have directed it inward and gained self-mastery. However, this struggle for self-mastery is arduous, and humanity is constantly tempted to give up. Christian morality and contemporary nihilism are just two examples of worldviews that express the desire to give up on life . We come to see life as blameworthy or meaningless as a way of easing ourselves out of the struggle for self-mastery. Nietzsche’s concept of the overman is the destination toward which we started heading when we first

41 reined in our animal instincts. The overman has the self-mastery that animals lack but also the untrammeled instincts and good conscience that humans lack. The overman is profoundly in love with life, finding nothing in it to complain about, not even the constant suffering and struggle to which he willingly submits himself.

Eternal Recurrence

The Doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence involves a supreme affirmation of life. On one level, it expresses the view that time is cyclical and that we will live every moment of our lives over and over an infinite number of times, each time exactly the same. In other words, each passing moment is not fleeting but rather echoes for all eternity. Nietzsche’s ideal is to be able to embrace the eternal recurrence and live in affirmation of this idea. In other words, we should aim to live conscious of the fact that each moment will be repeated infinitely, and we should feel only supreme joy at the prospect. On another level, the doctrine of the eternal recurrence involves Nietzsche’s contention that there is no such thing as being: everything is always changing, always in a state of becoming. Because nothing is fixed, there are no “things” that we can distinguish and set apart from other “things.” All of reality is intertwined, such that we cannot pass judgment on one aspect of reality without passing judgment on all of reality. In other words, we cannot feel regret for one aspect of our lives and joy for another because these two aspects of our lives cannot properly be distinguished from one another. In recognizing that all of life is one indistinguishable swirl of becoming, we are faced with the simple choice of saying yes to all life or no to all life. Naturally, Nietzsche contends that the yes -saying attitude is preferable.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/

Nietzsche's Influence Upon 20th Century Thought Nietzsche's thought extended a deep influence during the 20th century, especially in Continental Europe. In English-speaking countries, his positive reception has been less resonant. During the last decade of Nietzsche's life and the first decade of the 20th century, his thought was particularly attractive to avant-garde artists who saw themselves on the periphery of established social fashion and practice. Here, Nietzsche's advocacy of new, healthy beginnings, and of creative artistry in general stood forth. His tendency to seek explanations for commonly-accepted values and outlooks in the less-elevated realms of sheer animal instinct was also crucial to Sigmund Freud's development of psychoanalysis . Later, during the 1930's, aspects of Nietzsche's thought were espoused by the Nazis and Italian Fascists, partly due to the encouragement of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche through her associations with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. It was possible for the Nazi interpreters to assemble, quite selectively, various passages from Nietzsche's writings whose juxtaposition appeared to justify war, aggression and domination for the sake of nationalistic and racial self-glorification.

42 Until the 1960s in France, the academic philosophical climate was dominated by the thought of G.W.F. Hegel, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Nietzsche became especially influential in French philosophical circles during the 1960's-1980's, when his “God is dead” declaration, his perspectivism, and his emphasis upon power as the real motivator and explanation for people's actions revealed new ways to challenge established authority and launch effective social critique. In the English-speaking world, Nietzsche's unfortunate association with the Nazis kept him from serious philosophical consideration until the 1950's and 60's.

Specific 20th century figures who were influenced, either quite substantially, or in a significant part, by Nietzsche include painters, dancers, musicians, playwrights, poets, novelists, psychologists, sociologists, literary theorists, historians, and philosophers: Alfred Adler, Georges Bataille, Martin Buber, Albert Camus, E.M. Cioran, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Isadora Duncan, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Stefan George, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Martin Heidegger, Gustav Mahler, André Malraux, Thomas Mann, H.L. Mencken, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Paul Sartre, Max Scheler, Giovanni Segantini, George Bernard Shaw, Lev Shestov, Georg Simmel, Oswald Spengler, Richard Strauss, Paul Tillich, Ferdinand Tönnies, Mary Wigman, William Butler Yeats and Stefan Zweig. That Nietzsche was able to write prolifically for years, while remaining in a condition of ill-health and often intense physical pain, is a testament to his spectacular mental capacities and willpower. Lesser people under the same physical pressures might not have had the inclination to pick up a pen, let alone think and record thoughts which — created in the midst of striving for healthy self-overcoming — would have the power to influence an entire century.

Quotes:

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.

A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

43 All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn't.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Art is the proper task of life.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies. Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.

Every church is a stone on the grave of a god-man: it does not want him to rise up again under any circumstances.

Every church is a stone on the grave of a god-man: it does not want him to rise up again under any circumstances.

44 Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions. Faith: not wanting to know what is true. Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.

Fear is the mother of morality.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.

Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.

Go up close to your friend, but do not go over to him! We should also respect the enemy in our friend.

God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.

He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

45 He who laughs best today, will also laugh last.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer . For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his "divine service." I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him .

Is man one of God's blunders? Or is God one of man's blunders?

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one.

46 Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around. It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

It is the most sensual men who need to flee women and torment their bodies. Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms - in themselves such judgments are stupidities .

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.

Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.

Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.

47

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

Plato was a bore.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend.

Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.

Some are made modest by great praise, others insolent.

Success has always been a great liar.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself. That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

The "kingdom of Heaven" is a condition of the heart - not something that comes "upon the earth" or "after death."

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The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

The doer alone learneth.

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

The lie is a condition of life .

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything. The word "Christianity" is already a misunderstanding - in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.

The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power - and nothing else!

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There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

There are no facts, only interpretations .

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

There are slavish souls who carry their appreciation for favors done them so far that they strangle themselves with the rope of gratitude.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness .

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are - more humane.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

These people abstain, it is true: but the bitch Sensuality glares enviously out of all they do.

Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one's experiences in common.

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

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War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives .

We have art in order not to die of the truth. We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

What doesn't kill us makes us stronger. What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.

What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers? Seek zeros!

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.

Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego' .

Whoever feels predestined to see and not to believe will find all believers too noisy and pushy: he guards against them.

Woman was God's second mistake.

Women are considered deep - why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

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You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Jean-Paul Sartre: 1905- 1980 (75 years) Life: http://www.biography.com/articles/Jean-Paul-Sartre-9472219 French novelist, playwright, and exponent of Existentialism—a philosophy acclaiming the freedom of the individual human being. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, but he declined it. Sartre lost his father at an early age and grew up in the home of his maternal grandfather, Carl Schweitzer, uncle of the medical missionary Albert Schweitzer and himself professor of German at the Sorbonne. The boy, who wandered in the Luxembourg Gardens of Paris in search of playmates, was small in stature and cross-eyed. His brilliant autobiography, Les Mots (1963), narrates the adventures of the mother and child in the park as they went from group to group—in the vain hope of being accepted—then finally retreated to the sixth floor of their apartment “on the heights where (the) dreams dwell.” “The words” saved the child, and his interminable pages of writing were the escape from a world that had rejected him but that he would proceed to rebuild in his own fancy.

Sartre went to the Lycée Henri IV in Paris and, later on, to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, from which he was graduated in 1929. Sartre resisted what he called “bourgeois marriage,” but while still a student he formed a union with Simone de Beauvoir that remained a settled partnership in life.

Twice his career was interrupted, once by a year of study in Berlin and the second time when Sartre was drafted in 1939 to serve in World War II. He was made prisoner in 1940 and released a year later.

During his years of teaching in Le Havre, Sartre published La Nausée (1938), his first claim to fame.

Sartre took over the phenomenological method, which proposes careful, unprejudiced description rather than deduction, from the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and used it with great skill in three successive publications: L'Imagination (1936) , Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, 1939 ), and The Psychology of Imagination . But it was above all in L'Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness, 1956) that Sartre revealed himself as a master of outstanding talent. Sartre places human consciousness, or no-thingness ( néant ), in opposition to being, or thingness ( être ). Consciousness is not-matter and by the same token escapes all determinism. The message, with all the implications it contains, is a hopeful one; yet the incessant reminder that human endeavor is and remains useless makes the book tragic as well.

After World War II, Sartre took an active interest in French political movements, and his leanings to the left became more pronounced. He became an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union, although he did not become a member of the Communist Party.

52 From 1960 until 1971 most of Sartre's attention went into the writing of a four-volume study called Flaubert. Two volumes with a total of some 2,130 pages appeared in the spring of 1971. . As if he himself were saturated by the prodigal abundance of his writings, Sartre moved away from his desk during 1971 and did very little writing. Under the motto that “commitment is an act, not a word,” Sartre often went into the streets to participate in rioting, in the sale of left-wing literature, and in other activities that in his opinion were the way to promote “the revolution.” Paradoxically enough, this same radical Socialist published in 1972 the third volume of the work on Flaubert, L'Idiot de la famille, another book of such density that only the bourgeois intellectual can read it.

Sartre became blind and his health deteriorated. In April 1980 he died of a lung tumor. His very impressive funeral, attended by some 25,000 people, was reminiscent of the burial of Victor Hugo , but without the official recognition that his illustrious predecessor had received. Those who were there were ordinary people, those whose rights his pen had always defended. http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/sartre/themes.html

The Gift and Curse of Freedom

In the early phase of his career, Sartre focused mainly on his belief in the sanctity of every individual consciousness, a consciousness that results from each person’s subjective and individual experience of the world. He was particularly attuned to the ways that people are objectified by the gaze of others. As Sartre became more intimately involved in the concrete political questions of his day, he came to focus more on the various larger social structures that systematically objectify people and fail to recognize or affirm their individual consciousness and innate freedom. These structures include capitalist exploitation, colonialism, racism, and sexism.

Sartre’s focus on individual freedom shaped his view of Marxism. Politically, Sartre was for many years closely allied to the French Communist Party. However, he never actually joined the party, largely because of his ever-present suspicion of authoritarian states and institutions of all kinds, especially after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Sartre always harbored a healthy libertarian or anarchist streak. He wanted the working class to collectively overthrow the capitalist system and believed that any political struggle should affirm and allow for the individual freedom of all human beings. In accordance with this view, Sartre never accepted Marx’s view that economic and social realities define consciousness. Rather, Sartre affirmed that people are essentially free. No matter how objectified they may be, the gifts of freedom and consciousness mean that they always have the possibility of making something out of their circumstance of objectification. In Sartre’s view, individual freedom of consciousness is humanity’s gift—as well as its curse, since with it comes the responsibility to shape our own lives.

The Burden of Responsibility

Sartre believed in the essential freedom of individuals, and he also believed that as free beings, people are responsible for all elements of themselves, their consciousness, and their actions. That is, with total freedom comes total responsibility. He believed that even those people who wish not to be responsible,

53 who declare themselves not responsible for themselves or their actions, are still making a conscious choice and are thus responsible for anything that happens as a consequence of their inaction.

The Difficulty of Knowing the Self For Sartre, for any individual to claim “that’s just the way I am” would be a statement of self- deception. Likewise, whenever people internalize the objectified identity granted to them by other people or by society, such as servile woman or dutiful worker, they are guilty of self-deception. Every individual person is a “being-for-itself” possessed of self-consciousness, but he or she does not possess an essential nature and has only a consciousness and a self-consciousness, which are eternally changeable. Whenever people tell themselves that their nature or views are unchangeable, or that their social position entirely determines their sense of self, they are deceiving themselves. Sartre believed it is always possible to make something out of what one has been made into. This task of self- actualization, however, involves a complex process of recognizing the factual realities outside of one’s self that are acting on the self (what Sartre calls 'facticity') and exactly how those realities are working, as well as knowing fully that one possesses a consciousness independent of those factors.

For Sartre, the only truly authentic outlook recognizes one’s true state as a being possessed of self- consciousness whose future conscious state of being is a matter of choice, even as that conscious state will itself always be in flux. That is, even though we are ultimately responsible for our own consciousness, consciousness of self is never quite identical to consciousness itself. This difficult paradox—that one is responsible for one’s own consciousness, even though that consciousness is never quite graspable, since it is based on nothingness—goes to the heart of Sartre’s existentialism and is crucial to his conceptions of human freedom and moral responsibility.

Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself Sartre defines two types, or ways, of being: en-soi , or being-in-itself, and pour-soi , or being-for-itself. He uses the first of these, en-soi , to describe things that have a definable and complete essence yet are not conscious of themselves or their essential completeness. Trees and rocks, for example,fall into this category. Sartre uses pour-soi to describe human beings, who are defined by their possession of consciousness and, more specifically, by their consciousness of their own existence—and, as Sartre writes, by their consciousness of lacking the complete, definable essence of the en-soi . This state of being-for-itself is not just defined by self-consciousness—it would not exist without that consciousness. In Sartre’s philosophical system, the interplay and difference between these two manners of being is a constant and indispensable point of discussion.

The Importance and Danger of the Other Following Hegel, Sartre writes that an individual person, or being-for-itself, can become cognizant of his own existence only when he sees himself being perceived by another being-for-itself. That is, we can formulate a conscious state of being and an identity only when we are confronted by others who are also possessed of that consciousness and we apprehend ourselves in relation to them. As Sartre explains, however, the encounter with the Other is tricky, at least initially, because we may first believe that in being perceived by another conscious being we are being objectified or essentialized by that being, who may appear to be regarding us only as type, appearance, or imagined essence. In turn, we may seek to regard others as definable, simple objects not possessed of individual consciousness.

54 The notion of the Other plays a central role in Sartre’s thinking and writing about large-scale systems of social objectification, such as colonialism, racism, and sexism. Such systems enable the Other to be falsely seen as an object, a definable being-in-itself, and not as a free individual, a being-for-itself, possessed of his or her own undefinable, conscious state of being.

Quotes and Notes: www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jeanpaul_sartre.html

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Existence precedes and rules essence .

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

Hell is other people .

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.

If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically.

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

It is only in our decisions that we are important.

55 Life begins on the other side of despair.

Life has no meaning the moment you loose the illusion of being eternal.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does .

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than you life.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.

There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

We do not judge the people we love.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

56 When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.

Words are loaded pistols.

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think. http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1466.Jean_Paul_Sartre

It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.

Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.

Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.

Existence is prior to essence. I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together. " (Nausea )

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.

"As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished." (No Exit: A Play in One Act )

There is a universe behind and before him. And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left; he will say to himself, "now what?" (The Wall and Other Stories )

One always dies too soon — or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are — your life, and nothing else.

There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.

An individual chooses and makes himself.

57 In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations. (Existentialism Is a Humanism )

For many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think, “Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote myself it is because I did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains within me a wide range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but perfectly viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions.” But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art.

The consciousness that says 'I am' is not the consciousness that thinks.

The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.

Once freedom lights its beacon in man's heart, the gods are powerless against him.

A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.

To think new thoughts you have to break the bones in your head .

Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.

"I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have followed the source of rivers towards their source or plunged into forests, always making for other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men; and I could never turn back any more than a record can spin in reverse. And all that was leading me where ? To this very moment..." (Nausea )

I must be without remorse or regrets as I am without excuse; for from the instant of my upsurge into being, I carry the weight of the world by myself alone without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.

Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.

Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable?...Ah,I see; it's life without a break." (No Exit and Three Other Plays )

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