55 ideas
| 6928 | Only that which can be an object of religion is an object of philosophy [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Only that which can be an object of religion is an object of philosophy. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §35) | |
| A reaction: The temple of Pythagoras at Solon sounds like an embodiment of this idea. The obvious candidate would be truth, to which philosophers must show almost religious respect. Some what motivates the philosophy of a minimalist (Idea 3750)? |
| 21761 | If we start with indeterminate being, we arrive at being and nothing as a united pair [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: Presuppositionless thinking which begins by thinking pure, indeterminate being must therefore come to think being and nothing in terms of one another. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 02 'From indeterminate' | |
| A reaction: In Houlgate's account this seems to be the key Hegelian thought. Simply by confronting nothingness he gets the idea that one concept can lead to an alternative, and that the two can then be grasped together, which is his dialectic. |
| 21764 | Thought about being leads to a string of other concepts, like becoming, quantity, specificity, causality... [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: In the course of (Hegel's) logic, we come to understand that to think being is to think becoming, quality, quantity, specificity, essence and existence, substance and causality, and, ultimately, self-determining reason itself. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 02 'The Method' | |
| A reaction: Extraordinary! Houlgate spells out nicely what some commentators seem to gloss over, the huge a priori ambitions of Hegel's thought. I find his entire programme utterly implausible. |
| 21769 | We must start with absolute abstraction, with no presuppositions, so we start with pure being [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The beginning must be an absolute - an abstract beginning; and so it may not presuppose anything, must not be mediated by anything or have a ground; rather it is itself to be the ground of the entire science. ...The beginning therefore is pure being. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816], p.70), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 03 'Logic' | |
| A reaction: This is the 'presuppositionless' beginning of Hegel's metaphysics, which Houlgate emphasises. Hegel's logic is very obviously a direct descendent of Descartes' Cogito. But it is pure thought, with no mention of a Self. |
| 6918 | Philosophy should not focus on names, but on the determined nature of things [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy need not care about the conceptions that common usage or misuse attaches to a name; philosophy, however, has to bind itself to the determined nature of things, whose signs are names. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §23) | |
| A reaction: I like this attempt to nip ordinary language philosophy in the bud. Indeed I like the notion of philosophy binding itself to the 'determined nature of things' (which sound like essences to me), rather than to their names or descriptions. |
| 6904 | Modern philosophy begins with Descartes' abstraction from sensation and matter [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: The beginning of Descartes' philosophy, namely, the abstraction from sensation and matter, is the beginning of modern speculative philosophy. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §10) | |
| A reaction: In Britain it might be said that modern philosophy begins with a rebellion against Descartes' move. Feuerbach is charting the movement towards idealism. |
| 6931 | Empiricism is right about ideas, but forgets man himself as one of our objects [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Empiricism rightly derives the origin of our ideas from the senses; only it forgets that the most important and essential object of man is man himself. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §41) | |
| A reaction: This seems to nicely pinpoint the objection of most 'continental' philosophy to British empiricism and analytic philosophy. It seems to point towards Husserl's phenomenology as the next step. It is true that empiricists divided person from world. |
| 22037 | Objectivity is not by correspondence, but by the historical determined necessity of Geist [Hegel, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: What gives objectivity to a judgment about an object is not correspondence, but the way in which a judgement is located within a pattern of reasonng that is determined by the way in which Geist is historically determined as necessarily taking the object. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816], Intro) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 | |
| A reaction: I quote this, but I'm blowed if I can make sense of how objectivity could be achieved in such a way. How can a historical process create a necessary judgement? Sorry, I'm fairly new to Hegel. Pinker says it is the practice of giving reasons. |
| 6933 | The laws of reality are also the laws of thought [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: The laws of reality are also the laws of thought. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §45) | |
| A reaction: I like this a lot, though it runs contrary to a lot of conventionalist thinking in the twentieth century. Russell, though, agrees with Feuerbach (Idea 5405). There is not much point to thought if it doesn't plug into reality at the roots. |
| 21983 | Being and nothing are the same and not the same, which is the identity of identity and non-identity [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Pure being and pure nothing are the same, ...but on the contrary they are not the same ...they are absolutely distinct. ...This is the identity of identity and non-identity. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816], I.i.i.1C p.82,74), quoted by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 07.7 | |
| A reaction: Even Moore, who is very patient with Hegel, gets cross at this point, describing such talk as 'shocking'. He's not wrong. Moore later says that the reason in reality tolerates contradictions, but human understanding can't. |
| 21985 | The so-called world is filled with contradiction [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The so-called world is never and nowhere without contradiction. (...but it is unable to endure it) | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816], I.i.ii.2C(b)), quoted by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 07.7 | |
| A reaction: [Second bit in Ency I §11] To clarify this one would need to understand 'so-called'. Note that his claim is not that the world contains occasional contradictions, but that the whole of reality is contradictory. I think this idea is nonsense. |
| 21978 | Hegel's dialectic is not thesis-antithesis-synthesis, but usually negation of negation of the negation [Hegel, by Moore,AW] |
| Full Idea: The dialectic is often described in terms of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis - though this is not a Hegelian way of speaking. Hegel himself sometimes describes it in terms of negation and negation of the negation. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816], I.i.i.C(c) p.150) by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 07.4 | |
| A reaction: A footnote says the first form of description only occurs once in Hegel's work. I am guessing that Marx is responsible for the standard misrepresentation. |
| 21766 | Dialectic is the instability of thoughts generating their opposite, and then new more complex thoughts [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: The dialectical principle, for Hegel, is the principle whereby apparently stable thoughts reveal their inherent instability by turning into their opposites and then into new, more complex thoughts (as being turns to nothing, and then becoming). | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 02 'The Method' | |
| A reaction: Houlgate says this is unique to Hegel, and is NOT the familiar thesis-antithesis-synthesis idea of dialectic, found in Kant and Engels. Hegelian idea shares the Greek idea of insights arising from oppositions. |
| 11211 | If a sound conclusion comes from two errors that cancel out, the path of the argument must matter [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: If a designated conclusion follows from the premisses, but the argument involves two howlers which cancel each other out, then the moral is that the path an argument takes from premisses to conclusion does matter to its logical evaluation. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], II) | |
| A reaction: The drift of this is that our view of logic should be a little closer to the reasoning of ordinary language, and we should rely a little less on purely formal accounts. |
| 11210 | Standardly 'and' and 'but' are held to have the same sense by having the same truth table [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: If 'and' and 'but' really are alike in sense, in what might that likeness consist? Some philosophers of classical logic will reply that they share a sense by virtue of sharing a truth table. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000]) | |
| A reaction: This is the standard view which Rumfitt sets out to challenge. |
| 11212 | The sense of a connective comes from primitively obvious rules of inference [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: A connective will possess the sense that it has by virtue of its competent users' finding certain rules of inference involving it to be primitively obvious. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], III) | |
| A reaction: Rumfitt cites Peacocke as endorsing this view, which characterises the logical connectives by their rules of usage rather than by their pure semantic value. |
| 6919 | Absolute thought remains in another world from being [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Absolute thought never extricates itself from itself to become being. Being remains in another world. …If being is to be added to an object of thought, so must something distinct from thought be added to thought itself. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §24/5) | |
| A reaction: This sounds a bit like a child wishing for the moon. Is he saying he doesn't just want to think about reality - he wants his mental states to BE external reality? The distinction between a thought and its content or intentionality would help here. |
| 19457 | Being is what is undetermined, and hence indistinguishable [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Being in the sense in which it is an object of speculative thought is that which is purely and simply unmediated, that is, undetermined; in other words, there is nothing to distinguish and nothing to think of in being. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], 26) | |
| A reaction: This sounds remarkably like the idea of 'prime matter' used in scholastic Aristotelian philosophy. Matter existing without form is somehow ungraspable, but presented from Hegel onwards as the ultimate mystery. |
| 21762 | To grasp an existence, we must consider its non-existence [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: It is only to the extent that we can say that something is not, that we can say what it actually is. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 02 'From indeterminate' | |
| A reaction: A key idea for Hegel, but it leaves me flat. Thinking about the non-being of something throws no light at all for me on the inexpressible actuality of its existence. |
| 21977 | Nothing exists, as thinkable and expressible [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Nothing can be thought of, imagined, spoken of, and therefore it is. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816], I.i.i.C.1 Rem 3 p.101), quoted by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 07.4 | |
| A reaction: This sounds like Meinong on circular squares. Does this mean that the negation of every truth also somehow exists? I struggle with this idea. Lewis Carroll nailed it. |
| 21760 | Thinking of nothing is not the same as simply not thinking [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: Thinking of nothing is not the same as simply not thinking. Thought that suspends all its presuppositions and so ends up thinking of nothing determinate still remains thought, albeit utterly indeterminate and inchoate thought. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 02 'From indeterminate' | |
| A reaction: This is the very starting point of Hegel's dialectical inferences in his 'Logic'. It is hard to entirely disagree, though I wonder whether the exercise is actually possible. What are you aware of if you have a thought with no content? |
| 6920 | Being posits essence, and my essence is my being [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Being is the positing of essence. That which is my essence is my being. The fish exists in water; you cannot, however, separate its essence from this being. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §27) | |
| A reaction: This throws a different light on later (e.g. Heidegger) discussions of 'being', which may map onto Aristotelian discussions of essences. |
| 6921 | Particularity belongs to being, whereas generality belongs to thought [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Particularity and individuality belong to being, whereas generality belongs to thought. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §29) | |
| A reaction: This agrees with Russell's view that every sentence (and proposition) must contain a universal (i.e a generality). The very notion of thinking 'about' a horse seems to require a move to the universal concept of a horse. |
| 6926 | The only true being is of the senses, perception, feeling and love [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Being as an object of being - and only this being is being and deserves the name of being - is the being of the senses, perception, feeling, and love. …Only passion is the hallmark of existence. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §33) | |
| A reaction: This remark seems to make Feuerbach a romantic and anti-Enlightenment figure. I don't see why there shouldn't be just as much 'being' in doing maths as in admiring a landscape. The mention of love links him to Empedocles (Ideas 459 + 630). |
| 21765 | The ground of a thing is not another thing, but the first thing's substance or rational concept [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: Hegel's logic reveals that the true ground of something is not something other than it is, but the substance of that thing itself, or the rational concept that makes the thing what it is. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 02 'The Method' | |
| A reaction: This seems to be classic Aristotelian essentialism, though Aristotle was also interested in dependence relations. |
| 22059 | Kant's thing-in-itself is just an abstraction from our knowledge; things only exist for us [Hegel, by Bowie] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel there is no thing-in-itself, because the thing only becomes a something by being for us. Kant's thing-in-itself is the result of abstracting from the thing everything we know about it. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by Andrew Bowie - German Philosophy: a very short introduction 3 | |
| A reaction: This seems to pinpoint why Hegel is an idealist philosopher. Frege objected to abstraction for similar reasons. I don't understand how the tree outside my window can only exist 'for me'. I have a much better theory about the tree. |
| 22083 | Hegel believe that the genuine categories reveal things in themselves [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: Hegel believed, unlike Kant, that the categories of the understanding, when properly understood, disclose the nature of things in themselves and not just the character of things as they appear to us. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by Stephen Houlgate - Hegel p.101 | |
| A reaction: 'Properly understood' sounds like 'no true Scotsman'. This is thoroughgoing idealism, because reality is determined by the activity of the mind, and not from outside. The Hegel story makes more sense if you see the categories as evolutionary. |
| 22080 | The nature of each category relates itself to another [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: In the categories, something through its own nature relates itself to the other. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816], p.125), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - Hegel p.99 | |
| A reaction: This is the doctrine of internal relations rejected by Moore and Russell, and also the key idea in Hegel's logic - that ideas give rise to other ideas, without contribution by the thinker. |
| 21772 | In absolute knowing, the gap between object and oneself closes, producing certainty [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: In absolute knowing ...the separation of the object from the certainty of oneself is completely eliminated: truth is now equated with certainty and this certainty with truth. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816], p.49), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 03 'Absolute' | |
| A reaction: I don't understand this, but I note it because Hegel is evidently not a fallibilist about knowledge. I take this idea to be Descartes' 'clear and distinct ideas', wearing a grand rhetorical uniform. |
| 6908 | Consciousness is absolute reality, and everything exists through consciousness [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Consciousness is the absolute reality, the measure of all existence; all that exists, exists only as being for consciousness, as comprehended in consciousness; for consciousness is first and foremost being. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §17) | |
| A reaction: This is Feuerbach declaring himself in favour of idealism even as he was trying to rebel against it, and move towards a more sensuous and human view of the world. I just see idealists as confusing ontology and epistemology. |
| 20954 | The 'absolute idea' is when all the contradictions are exhausted [Hegel, by Bowie] |
| Full Idea: The point in philosophy at which the contradictions are exhausted is what Hegel means by the 'absolute idea'. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by Andrew Bowie - Introduction to German Philosophy 4 'Questions' | |
| A reaction: {Can't think of a response to this one) |
| 21972 | Hegel, unlike Kant, said how things appear is the same as how things are [Hegel, by Moore,AW] |
| Full Idea: Hegel rejected the fundamental Kantian distinction between how things knowably appear and how they unknowably are in themselves. This was anathema to him. For Hegel how things knowably appear is how they manifestly are. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 07.2 | |
| A reaction: We shouldn't assume that Hegel was therefore a realist, because Berkeley would agree with this idea. Hegel rejected transcendental idealism for this reason. Hegel wanted to get rid of the immanent/transcendent distinction |
| 22038 | Hegel's non-subjective idealism is the unity of subjective and objective viewpoints [Hegel, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: The unity of the two points of view (subjective and objective) constitutes Hegel's idealism. ...He kept emphasising that it was not 'subjective' idealism. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 10 | |
| A reaction: Subjective idealism denies the objective point of view. [**20th June 2019, 10:49 am. This is the 20,000th idea in the database. The project was begun in 1997, as organised notes to help with teaching. For the last ten years today has been my target**]. |
| 22044 | Hegel claimed his system was about the world, but it only mapped conceptual interdependence [Pinkard on Hegel] |
| Full Idea: In the view of the later Schelling, although Hegel's system only really laid out the ways in which the senses of various concepts depended on each other, it claimed to be a system about the world itself. | |
| From: comment on Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 | |
| A reaction: I'm no expert, but I'm inclined to agree with Schelling. Since I am suspicious of the idea that each concept generates its own negation, I also doubt the accuracy of Hegel's map. I'm a hopeless case. |
| 21464 | The Absolute is the primitive system of concepts which are actualised [Hegel, by Gardner] |
| Full Idea: In Hegel the Absolute is the exhaustive, unconditioned and self-grounding system of concepts made concrete in actuality, the world of experience. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by Sebastian Gardner - Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason 10 'Absolute' | |
| A reaction: If I collect multiple attempts to explain what the Absolute is, I may one day drift toward a hazy understanding of it. Right now this idea means nothing to me, but I pass it on. His notion of 'concept' seems a long way from the normal modern one. |
| 22084 | Authentic thinking and reality have the same content [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Thinking in its immanent determination and the true nature of things form one and the same content. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816], p.45), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - Hegel p.101 | |
| A reaction: This is not much use unless we have a crystal clear idea of 'immanent determination', because we need to eliminate errors. |
| 21975 | The absolute idea is being, imperishable life, self-knowing truth, and all truth [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The absolute idea alone is being, imperishable life, self-knowing truth, and is all truth. ....All else is error, confusion, opinion, endeavour, caprice, and transitoriness. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816], II.iii.3 p.824), quoted by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 07.4 | |
| A reaction: Hegel sounding a bit too much like an over-excited preacher here. The absolute idea seems to be the unified totality of all truths about reality. For Hegel human self-awareness is a big part of that. The idea is being because there is only one substance. |
| 21976 | The absolute idea is the great unity of the infinite system of concepts [Hegel, by Moore,AW] |
| Full Idea: We can think of the absolute idea roughly as the entire infinite system of interrelated concepts, in their indissoluble unity, as exercised in the self-consciousness towards which the process [of thought] leads. It is the 'telos' of the process. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816], II.iii.3 p.825) by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 07.4 | |
| A reaction: This expounds the quotation in Idea 21975. Moore emphasises concepts, where Hegel emphasises the truth. The connection is in Idea 5644. |
| 6932 | Ideas arise through communication, and reason is reached through community [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Only through communication and conversation between man and man do ideas arise; not alone, but only with others, does one reach notions and reason in general. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §41) | |
| A reaction: This is a strikingly modern view of the solipsism problem, and is close in spirit to Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument (Ideas 4143 +4158). Feuerbach is interested in universals rather than rules. I prefer Feuerbach. |
| 6935 | In man the lowest senses of smell and taste elevate themselves to intellectual acts [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Even the lowest senses, smell and taste, elevate themselves in man to intellectual and scientific acts. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §53) | |
| A reaction: Since Darwin we have, I am glad to say, lost this need to distinguish what is 'low' or 'high', and to try to show that even our 'lowest' functions are on the 'high' side. Personally, though, I still need the low/high distinction in moral thinking. |
| 22058 | Hegel's 'absolute idea' is the interdependence of all truths to justify any of them [Hegel, by Bowie] |
| Full Idea: Hegel's system culminates in the 'absolute idea', the explanation of why all particular truths depend on the relationship to other truths for their justification. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by Andrew Bowie - German Philosophy: a very short introduction 3 | |
| A reaction: The 'hyper-coherence' theory of justification. The normal claim is that there must be considerable local coherence to provide decent support. Hegel's picture sounds like part of the Enlightenment Dream. Is the idea of 'all truths' coherent? |
| 20953 | Every concept depends on the counter-concepts of what it is not [Hegel, by Bowie] |
| Full Idea: Hegel relies on the claim that every concept depends for its determinacy upon its relation to other concepts which it is not (so that even the concept of being depends, for example, upon the concept of nothing). | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by Andrew Bowie - Introduction to German Philosophy 4 'Questions' | |
| A reaction: How does he know this? A question I keep asking about continental philosophers. The negation concepts must be entirely non-conscious. Which negation concepts are relevant to the concept 'tree'? |
| 6925 | The new philosophy thinks of the concrete in a concrete (not a abstract) manner [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: The new philosophy is the philosophy that thinks of the concrete not in an abstract, but in a concrete manner. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §31) | |
| A reaction: This leads to placing a high value on art, and on virtuous action through particulars rather than principles, and on empirical science. The only problem is that what he proposes is impossible. To think 'about' is to abstract from the particulars. |
| 21763 | When we explicate the category of being, we watch a new category emerge [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, by explicating the indeterminate category of being, we do not merely restate in different words what is obviously 'contained' in it; we watch a new category emerge. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Science of Logic [1816]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 02 'The Method' | |
| A reaction: This is obviously a response to Kant's view of analyticity, as merely explicating the contents of the subject of the sentence, without advancing knowledge or conceptual resources. A key idea of Hegel's, which I find unconvincing. |
| 11214 | We learn 'not' along with affirmation, by learning to either affirm or deny a sentence [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: The standard view is that affirming not-A is more complex than affirming the atomic sentence A itself, with the latter determining its sense. But we could learn 'not' directly, by learning at once how to either affirm A or reject A. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], IV) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This seems fairly anti-Fregean in spirit, because it looks at the psychology of how we learn 'not' as a way of clarifying what we mean by it, rather than just looking at its logical behaviour (and thus giving it a secondary role). |
| 6924 | Plotinus was ashamed to have a body [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Plotinus, according to his biographers, was ashamed to have a body. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §29) | |
| A reaction: When Feuerbach draws our attention to this, we see what an astonishing state it is for a human being to have got into. Modern thought is appalled by it, but it also has something heroic about it, like swimming all the time because you want to be a fish. |
| 6927 | If you love nothing, it doesn't matter whether something exists or not [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: To him who loves nothing it is all the same whether something does or does not exist. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §33) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me to be quite a good motto for the aim of education - just get them to love something, no matter what (well, almost!). Loving something, even if it is train-spotting, seems a good route to human happiness. |
| 6934 | Man is not a particular being, like animals, but a universal being [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Man is not a particular being, like the animals, but a universal being. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §53) | |
| A reaction: This sounds a bit extravagent. The capacity of man to use universals in thought seems crucial to Feuerbach (though he doesn't directly address the problem). 'We are particulars with access to universals' sounds better. |
| 6936 | The essence of man is in community, but with distinct individuals [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: The essence of man is contained only in the community and unity of man and man; it is a unity, however, which rests only on the reality of the distinction between I and thou. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §59) | |
| A reaction: In English provincial suburbs (where I live) it is astonishing how little interest in and need for their neighbours people seem to have. People seem to survive without community. Most of us, though, think full human happiness needs community. |
| 6913 | God's existence cannot be separated from essence and concept, which can only be thought as existing [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: God is the being in which existence cannot be separated from essence and concept and which cannot be thought except as existing. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §18) | |
| A reaction: This shows how faith in God endured through the Idealist movement by means of the Ontological Argument, despite the criticisms of Hume and Kant. To me this now appears as an odd abberation in the history of human thought. |
| 6903 | If God is only an object for man, then only the essence of man is revealed in God [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: If God is only an object of man, what is revealed to us in his essence? Nothing but the essence of man. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §07) | |
| A reaction: It is important to distinguish here between what we could know about God, and what we think God might actually be like. We may well only be able to read the essence of man into God, but we might speculate that God is more than that. |
| 6923 | God is what man would like to be [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: God is what man would like to be. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §29) | |
| A reaction: It is hard to see how even the most devout person could deny the truth of this. Perhaps the essential hallmark of humanity is a desire to be different from the way we are. |
| 6911 | God is for us a mere empty idea, which we fill with our own ego and essence [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: God exists, but he is for us a tabula rasa, an empty being, a mere idea; God, as we conceive and think of him, is our ego, our mind, and our essence. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §17) | |
| A reaction: He accepted God's existence because of the Ontological Argument. This is a little stronger than Hume's view (Idea 2185), because Hume seems to be talking about imagining God, but Feuerbach says this is our understanding of God. |
| 6902 | Catholicism concerns God in himself, Protestantism what God is for man [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Protestantism is no longer concerned, as Catholicism is, about what God is in himself, but about what he is for man. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §02) | |
| A reaction: It is certainly true that the major religions in their origins seem to be almost exclusively concerned with God alone, and have little interest in human life (or morality). |
| 6905 | Absolute idealism is the realized divine mind of Leibnizian theism [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Absolute idealism is nothing but the realized divine mind of Leibnizian theism. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §10) | |
| A reaction: In general it seems an accurate commentary that during the eighteenth century philosophers on the continent were designing a religion without God. Kantian duty tries to replace the authority of God with pure reason. |