r0b’s Reviews > The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought > Status Update

'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'
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‘...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.‘