Egotism in German Philosophy

In their tentative, many-sided, indomitable way, the Germans have been groping for four hundred [Pg 150] years towards a restoration of their primitive heathenism. Germany under...

Consider, too, the romantic demand for a violent chiaroscuro, a demand which blossoms into a whole system of ethics. Good and evil, we are told, enhance one another, like light...

We must not suppose that this prescription of austere and abstract aims implies any aversion on Fichte's part to material progress, compulsory _Kultur_, or military conquest. Ge...

This vortex which things, as apprehension catches them, seem to form round each whirling spectator, is the fascinating theme of lyric poetry, of psychological novels, and of Ger...

Even the absolute requires an enemy to whet its edge upon, and the state, which according to Hegel is morally absolute, requires rival states in order that its separate individu...

The change from "the will to live" to "the will to be powerful" is only a change of metaphors: both are used merely to indicate the general movement of nature. The choice of a p...

The beauty and the torment of Protestantism is that it opens the door so wide to what lies beyond it. This progressive quality it has fully transmitted [Pg 25] to all the system...

The momentum of his transcendental method, however, led to a very different and quite egotistical conclusion. An adept in transcendentalism can hardly suppose that God, free-wil...

This book is one of the many that the present war has brought forth, but it is the fruit of a long gestation. During more than twenty years, while I taught philosophy at Harvard...

The whole transcendental philosophy, if made ultimate, is false, and nothing but a private perspective. The will is absolute neither in the individual nor in humanity. Nature is...