Robert C. Solomon > Quotes

“What gives life meaning is a form of rebellion, rebellion against reason, an insistence on believing passionately what we cannot believe rationally. The meaning of life is to be found in passion—romantic passion, religious passion, passion for work and for play, passionate commitments in the face of what reason knows to be meaningless.”
― Robert C. Solomon, Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life

“Nietzsche says very clearly all the way through his career that if you want to define human nature the first thing you must say is that human beings insist on value--we see the world through value colored eyes. We do not know how to look at things neutrally, value-free. So, it's not a question of giving up all values, it's simply a question of which values.”
― Robert C. Solomon, Will to Power: The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

“[W]hat we also see in sex is a kind of submissiveness. But not a kind of submissiveness which is simply 'do what you like, I'm just here for you', but it...is, or can be, very manipulative. It is a way of getting the other person to exercise all his or her efforts towards pleasing you, and in that way controlling what they're thinking, and in particular what they're thinking of you.”
― Robert C. Solomon, No Excuses: Existentialism And The Meaning Of Life

“ما يعطي الحياة معنى هو شكل من التمرد , التمرد ضد العقل , الاصرار على الايمان بشغف فيما لانستطيع الايمان به عقلياً . معنى الحياة يوجد في الشغف , الشغف الرومانسي والشغف الديني والشغف بالعمل واللعب , التزامات شغوفة في مواجهة ما يعرف العقل انه بلا معنى”
― Robert C. Solomon, Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life

“The thoroughly guilty man has an advantage over all of us; he cannot be found more guilty of anything, since he has already found himself guilty of everything. This may sound like an absurdity - causing oneself extreme pain in order not to feel any number of little pains of lesser guilts and shames, but it has its own logic. A man more easily adapts to what he inflicts upon himself; as to his own judgement, he is already committed to it and willing to live with it.”
― Robert C. Solomon

“We choose our friends on the basis of, among other things, our conception of ourselves. That's not to say that friendship is narcissistic, it doesn't follow that we choose people 'like ourselves'; in fact we might choose people very different than ourselves. For example, if I'm not very intelligent, and I'm concerned about my lack of intelligence, I might take up with an extremely intelligent woman, precisely in order to have her intelligence, in some sense, radiate onto me.

The idea is that in friendship what we do is we pick people who are going to reinforce, in some sense, our own conception of ourselves. So if I think of myself as intelligent, or I want to think of myself as intelligent, whether or not I pick a partner who is also intelligent, what is going to be essential is that it's going to be a partner who somehow expands my notion of my own intelligence, either by telling me all the time, perhaps, how intelligent I am, or maybe by always contradicting me in such a way that I can prove my intelligence with her or him.”
― Robert C. Solomon, No Excuses: Existentialism And The Meaning Of Life

“Ideas give life meaning. Our minds need ideas the way
our bodies need food. We are starved for visions, hungry for understanding. We
are caught up in the routines of life, distracted occasionally by those activities we
call “recreation” and “entertainment.” What we as a nation have lost is the joy of
thinking, the challenge of understanding, the inspirations as well as the consolations
of philosophy.”
― Robert C Solomon, The Big Questions: A Short Introduction to Philosophy

“A woman’s death, through much of the same history, was thought to be a simpler thing, preferably quiet and uncomplaining, or tragically in childbirth. Just as women were denied the right and the capacity to a full life, they were denied the right and the capacity to a full death as well.”
― Robert C. Solomon, Death and Philosophy

“Whether one sees the world as God's creation or as a secular mystery that science is on the way to figuring out, there is no denying the beauty and majesty of everything from mountain ranges, deserts, and rain forests to the exquisite details in the design of an ordinary mosquito.”
― Robert C. Solomon

“J'ai lu les postmodernistes avec un certain intérêt avec même admiration. Mais quand je les lis, j'ai toujours cet horrible sentiment lancinant que quelque chose d'absolument essentiel est oublié. Plus on dit qu'une personne est un produit social, ou un confluent de forces ou fragmentée, ou marginalisée et plus on ouvre tout un nouveau monde d'excuses.”
― Robert C. Solomon

“Nietzsche’s background makes sense of his convictions that the loss of faith in God is a calamitous cultural crisis. Although writing as one who has lost faith and who sees his own religious tradition as having many pernicious effects on its adherents, he experienced the loss of faith as a personal trauma. He was shocked that others seemed to throw off their religious backgrounds so casually, and he eventually concluded that many of his contemporaries had not really shed their religion but instead continued their old habits in disguised forms. Because he was convinced that the Christian worldview had harmful psychological effects, he endeavored to show how much damage continued to affect his contemporaries who maintained habits of the old worldview, even though they no longer endorsed it.

We see Nietzsche not as the ‘atheist by instinct’ he claims to be in his autobiography but as a religious desperado. If one understands by ‘religious’ the effort to integrate one’s life with what is larger than oneself, Nietzsche rejects Christianity for religious reasons. His many complaints about the ideology that the Christian Church has foisted on its members express his conviction that it harms our ability to love and to be responsive to others in the world and to nature.”
― Robert C. Solomon, What Nietzsche Really Said

“Teaching philosophy isn't what I do. Teaching philosophy is, sort of, what I am.”
― Robert C. Solomon

“Hegel calls the truth of his Phenomenology a "bacchanalian revel"; it is, in other words, an orgy of ideas, a conceptual debauch.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“If Hegel could not be taught to ordinary intelligent people, then I for one would not find reason to read him at all.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“To say that Hegel is an idealist is to say that, at every turn, he argues that the world is thoroughly knowable, and it is nothing "beyond" the realm of conscious experience.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“In a world that has come to see ideas and collective enthusiasm with horror, Hegel becomes a gateway to a new world, where ideas are the key to conciousness, where the philosopher becomes the spokesman for the times and the prophet of a united humanity. It is a world in which archaic terms like "harmony" and "humanity" still make sense—indeed, still give us something to hope for. It is a world worth, at least, considering.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“It is by making meanings in life that we free ourselves from the meaninglessness of suffering.”
― Robert C. Solomon, Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life

“Freedom, for Hegel, has to do with identification—how one sees oneself (as citizen, as rebel, as stoic, as master, as slave), it is not the political question of societal restraints and duties.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“Philosophy is all about our beliefs and attitudes about ourselves and the world. Doing philosophy, therefore, is first of all the activity of stating, as clearly and as convincingly as possible, what we believe and what we believe in.”
― Robert C. Solomon, The Big Questions - A Short Introduction to Philosophy By Robert C. Solomon

“Hegel rejects the very idea of a single world-view, and though he does indeed give us what he considers to be the "best" world-view, it is rather a meta-view, a view about the correctness of views, rather than a view as such.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“Similarly, Hegel's dialectic of "the concept" or "forms of consciousness" is an attempt to "think through" our ideas about the world, and about ourselves, developing these ideas—or letting them develop—to the point where we can see their consequences, their inadequacies, their inconsistencies. And by doing so, our comprehension "grows," it becomes more encompassing, letting us see things we did not see, letting us appreciate ideas we could not accept, forcing us to see connections we had not seen before. And the goal of this process, or "Absolute Knowing," is to gain a single all-encompassing conception, which makes sense of everything at once. But though this may be the goal of the Phenomenology, it is not its result; there is no end to the process of understanding life, while we are still living it. Hegel began looking for the Absolute, but what he discovered was the richness of conceptual history.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“I want to emphasize the second Hegel, the Heraclitan Hegel, the Hegel of endless change, and what he calls "the bad infinity," running on without end. This is the Hegel who said, in effect, that there is no unity except through differences and there is no end to philosophy.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“Indeed, I want to argue that no single image has been more detrimental to our understanding of Hegel—or our ability to accept him—than the self-congratulatory idea that his philosophy is the spiral staircase upward to the Absolute, not only because there is no Absolute, but because there is no "upward" either, and no staircase. Whatever else their disagreements, the one view of Hegel's philosophy that seems wholly taken for granted by almost all the commentators is the idea that the dialectic is going somewhere; but to move is not necessarily to move in any particular direction, and increasingly to comprehend the complexity and expanse of the world is not always an improvement or progress. One of the more obnoxious features of philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to such modern stoics as Spinoza and Schopenhauer, is their unabashed tendency to declare their own profession, thinking, as indubitably the "highest" human activity, and "thinking about thinking" (or, as many of these thinkers think,
"thought thinking itself") as the very purpose of the cosmos itself. But once one steps outside of philosophy (and indeed, sometimes inside of it, too), there is no justification whatsoever for this self-
congratulatory view. To think with increasing clarity and comprehension is an undeniable desideratum of thought, and increasingly to appreciate both the unity and differences of what we call "humanity"
may be an important goal in a world which is quickly shrinking, getting more crowded and more violent. But none of this justifies the arrogant pretentiousness of some philosophers, that philosophy alone is the answer to the world's problems, and that thinking itself is what makes us uniquely "human." Hegel may have believed these things, but the Phenomenology presents us with a very different image; the
dialectic is more of a panorama of human experience than a form of cognitive ascension. It has its definite movements, even improvements, but it is the journey, not the final destination, that gives us our
appreciation of humanity, its unity and differences. And if, as in Goethe's Faust, there is a sudden but unanticipated divine act of salvation at the very end of the drama, this is more poetic license than the conceptual climax of all that has gone before it.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“What is discontinuous in Hegel's text is not just the text itself, but the whole of human history, for it is Hegel who sees, or begins to see, that it is the process of thought that is everything; its results are only part of the process, and the final result—"the Absolute"—is an illusion.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“Each person would like to be certain of the approval of the other, but to be certain of the other is already to lose that sense of the other as an independent judge. I want you to say 'I love you', but the last thing I would want to do is to ask you, much less force you, to say it. I want you to say it freely, and not because I want you to or expect you to. But then, you know that I do want you to say it, and I know that you know that I want you to say it. So you say it; I don't really believe you. Did you say it because you mean it? Or in order not to hurt my feelings? And so I get testy, more demanding, to which your response is, quite reasonably, to become angry or defensive, until finally I provoke precisely what I feared all along, - an outburst of abuse. But then, I fell righteously hurt; you get apologetic. You seek forgiveness; I hesitate. You aren't sure whether I will say it or not: I'm not sure whether you mean it or not, but I say, 'I forgive you'. You wonder whether I'm really forgiving you or just trying to keep from hurting your feelings, and so you become anxious, testy, and so on.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“Trust opens up new and unimagined possibilities.”
― Robert C. Solomon, Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life

“Hegel's Phenomenology is not so much about experience as it is about changes in experience, changes in the forms of experience, transformations of the concepts through which we give form to our experience. Total and unified comprehension is the principle behind this series of changes and transformations, but this is not Hegel's principle; it is rather the principle or goal intrinsic to all human experience and, in particular, what defines reason (which Hegel sometimes defines as "the search for unity").”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“Here is the personal source of "the two Hegels." On the one hand, there is Hegel's sense of particular contexts, communities, and cultures; on the other hand, there is his Enlightenment sense of humanity, this all-embracing conception that had become, in Kant for example, the key to morality, rationality, politics, religion, and simply "being human." There is, again, this extreme tension in Hegel's Spirit, in other words,
between his sense of unity and his sense of differences. And I shall argue in the pages that follow that this essential temperamental tension emerges in the writing of the Phenomenology itself, literally splitting the work in two. The incoherence of the Phenomenology, I want to argue, is nothing less than the epic philosophical tension of the age—something far more important than the lack of organization of a single philosopher, and something far more earth-shaking than an academic confusion concerning the proper "systematization" of German Idealism.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel