r0b’s Reviews > German Philosophy: An Introduction > Status Update

‘In less mystical-sounding terms, Hegel is simply saying that a thoroughgoing philosophical scepticism does not cling obtusely to what it imagines to be first and simplest- namely sense perception and its derivatives- but looks to the source from which such ‘knowledge’ takes its authority.’

It took me about half an hour just to read 6 pages, and this is the freaking commentary...

‘Historically, Hegel’s ‘dialectic’ can be seen as a radicalization of Kant. Kant had introduced two fundamental notions in his account of the subject. One was the transcendental unity of apperception...[which states] that all of our experience relates back to the knowing subject; we are at the centre of our own phenomenal universes...in Hegel’s reading [this principle] becomes the continuity of Being.’

‘... the Phenomenology shows Hegel’s style at its most refractory. It is not that he was a particularly bad writer. He wrote a far more pleasing German than, say, Kant. But his publications were elliptical and allusive.’
...!

‘In its overall project, the Phenomenology undertakes what Schelling had attempted in the Philosophy of Transcendental Idealism: a systematic account of Being against the category of time.’

It’s unfortunate that this book doesn’t have a chapter on Fichte, but only deals with him indirectly in the chapter on Lukács.

‘...the most cultured community is also simultaneously the most ethical and has the highest sense of the aesthetic.’

Oh, and on page 40 (almost forgot!):

‘Human nature, so called, is not actually something we find in ‘nature’; it is not an object of experience. So it cannot be at the root of human conceptuality.’

Re-reading the chapter on Kant (this time with pleasure! :)

‘Kant [says] that existence is not a ‘real predicate’. What does he mean by this? What he does not mean is that existence is not a predicate at all (as Scruton suggests, Kant, 53).’

‘...Kant offered his discussion of the faculty of ‘judgement’ [in the Critique of Judgement] as a means of bridging the ‘great chasm’ between the orders of understanding and reason. It was to be a ‘mediating element’ - the keystone, in fact, of the whole enterprise...it provided the conceptual model for the most important developments of German idealism...’

‘In Kant’s exposition, the only ‘subject’ is the purely formal one of our own subjectivity; there is never any underlying essence that sustains identity, whether in things or in persons.’

Yay Kant!