Status Updates From The Disinherited Mind: Essa...

'Experience is to the empiricist what the sand is to the ostrich's head...Uncertainty alone is ineluctably real.'

Nicht Gott, nur alles leugn' ich, was ihn leugnet, Und wenn er will, ist alles wunderbar.

The satirist Karl Kraus brought to life a world whose every breath was a denial of God's designs, and was the chaos that decided that His will should not be done.

On Karl Kraus:

'His work is untranslatable....

This rare fusion of spontaneity and subtlety, of ethical integrity and intellectual complexity, he [Karl Kraus] shares...with Kierkegaard and, in modern German literature, only with Franz Kafka.'

I love Karl Kraus.

On Karl Kraus:

'His work is untranslatable....

This rare fusion of spontaneity and subtlety, of ethical integrity and intellectual complexity, he [Karl Kraus] shares...with Kierkegaard and, in modern German literature, only with Franz Kafka.'

'Oswald Spengler believed that he had found the new centre of gravity for history...
The problem was present right at the beginning of modern historical thought. Vico knew it, and, of course, Herder...For the purely empiricist concept of history is hopelessly spoilt as soon as the question of meaning or pattern is raised.'

‘Heidegger...is said to have remarked that his philosophy is merely the unfolding in thought of what Rilke has expressed poetically...’

‘It [writing poetry] is the difficulty of translating spiritual convictions into living convictions.’

'Gesang ist Dasein'
🧡

‘...the denial of pain means the denial of existence. Existence is pain, and joy lies not in non-existence, as Schopenhauer would have it, but in its tragic transfiguration.’

‘We shall come to see Rilke as the St. Francis of the Will to Power.‘

“That something like Spinoza’s amor dei could be experienced again!” This is a note which Nietzsche, during his most radical Anti-Christ period, made about Goethe.’

"As a historian", Burckhardt once wrote, "I am lost where I cannot begin with Anschauung. It is a Goethe word and hardly translatable. '
'...it is not surprising that Burckhardt agrees with Aristotle and Schopenhauer in claiming for poetry and art a higher rank in the hierarchy of understanding and knowledge than history could ever hold.'

'The idea of arriving at any positive certainty by accumulating more and more sources until that point of completeness is reached at which we may, in Bury's words, "grasp the complete development of humanity', is, of course, dismissed by Burckhardt as a chimera. '

“Everything that exists is an analogy of existence itself.”
Goethe

I love Goethe’s concept of the Urphänomen:

‘...the Urphänomen marks for Goethe the point where the observer is still in contact with what he observes, and beyond which the real relationship between a human being and an object of nature ceases, with the object no longer being what it is and the human mind establishing itself as a subjective tyrant...’

I put this down so long ago I decided to just restart it last week. I am super glad I did because I am getting a lot more out of it second time around!

‘We have become so democratic in our habits of thought that we are convinced that Truth is determined through a plebiscite of facts.’

“Wär nicht das Auge das sonnenhaft,
Wie könnten wir das Licht erblicken?
Lebt´nicht in uns des Gotte eigne Kraft,
Wie könnt uns Göttliches entzücken?“

‘...Goethe’s rejection...by critics of the stature of, for instance, Irving Babbit, Ortega y Gasset, George Santayana, T. S. Eliot...[italics mine]

What?! I’m shocked! :/

‘Nature is fundamentally innocent, and Goethe’s genius is in communion with Nature. Hence, there can be, for Goethe, no catharsis, only metamorphosis.’

Quoting Goethe:
‘However fully developed our nomenclature is, we must remember that it is only a nomenclature; that a word is merely a sign of syllables attached to a certain phenomenon. Thus it can never express Nature completely and ought to be regarded as mere equipment for our comfort.’

...Even if one grants that Goethe’s theory is untenable, Helmholtz’s criticism makes no sense either...Goethe himself felt over and over again with naive dismay and painful poignancy how ill-served his science was by the established methods of scientific exposition.’

On Goethe’s concept of the Urpflanze (archetypal plant)...’Everything is leaf’ is Goethe’s final finding, but he is perfectly aware of that verbal embarrassments and misunderstandings that such a theory must needs produce; he himself anticipated the objections which Helmholtz was later to raise to this monistic simplification, showing the tautological character of Goethe’s theory...

‘In a way it is even true to say that the silent centre of this book is Hölderlin...’