Status Updates From Philosophical Writings

His argument for the human as opposed to divine origin of language was very nice. His portrait of language's childhood in terms of poetry, song, and painting was less compelling: combine a worship of the artistic "genius" of the Greeks, Home in particular, with extremely suspect anthropology/orientalism: eg. Chinese civilization never changes, so its tone inflections reflect the sing-song quality of early language?!

I wish the editor would stop trying to convince me that phrases like "women are the most volkish of the volk" are proto-feminist.

Let the land be named to which Europeans have come without having sinned against defenseless, trusting humanity, perhaps for all aeons to come, through injurious acts, through unjust wars, greed, deceit, oppression, through diseases and harmful gifts! [...]; it has not cultivated but has destroyed the shoots of peoples' own cultures wherever and however it could.

Free investigation of the truth from all sides is the sole antidote against delusion and error of whatever sort they may be. Let the deluded person defend his delusion, the person who thinks differently his thought; that is their business. Even if both of them fail to be corrected, for the unbiased person there certainly arises out of every criticized error a new reason, a new view of the truth.

Set two observers with the same kind of telescope in one spot and they will see more or less similarly; but judge, infer, conjecture about what they have seen - no longer so completely similarly.

The normal course of our thoughts proceeds so quickly, the waves of our sensations rush so obscurely into each other, there is so much in our soul at once, that in regard to most ideas we are as though asleep by a spring where to be sure we still hear the rush of each wave, but so obscurely that in the end sleep takes away from us all noticeable feeling.

And how interesting the philosophy about the childhood of language becomes when I simultaneously see the human soul develop in it, form language according to itself, and form itself according to language. The greatest work of the human spirit!