HERR DOKTOR'S Rx

Yes, here is another selection of excellent adages, this time from the medicine chest of Herr Doktor Hegel.

“Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.” (Not by reason alone!)

“What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.” (How true!)

“If you want to love, you must serve; if you want freedom, you must die.” (Indeed, freedom lies in death! It means that freedom is rest. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine… And also: Libera me!)

“God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow.” (How shocking! Only a true philosopher can say something like this.)

“Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.” (This is very close to what I call the truth of all fiction: the created world must be without internal conceptual and real contradictions.)

“Poverty in itself does not make men into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government.” (Here is Nietzsche’s “ressentiment” for you. That’s Nietzsche’s “slave mentality,” which surely lives among the rich just as much as among the poor. It is, however, more noticeable and more expected from the poor, which is why the poor are so persistently associated with it. This is by no means to be confused, however, with the noble revolutionary zeal, which has nothing of Nietzsche’s “slave mentality” in it. Hopefully, Hegel can appreciate the difference between “rabble” and a legitimate popular revolt.)

“When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.” (Is freedom-loving modern America’s passion for other nations’ “liberation” precisely of this nature?..)

“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.” (Tocqueville was more clairvoyant when he spoke of America and Russia together.)

“To be free is nothing, to become free is everything.” (A brilliant contribution to the theory of freedom!)

“Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me.” (A clever witticism, as long as there is no whining admixed to it.)

“To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.” (Doesn’t this mean that in such a case the irrational element of existence is hidden from both?)