Edward Caird Quotes
Edward Caird was a Scottish Hegelian philosopher, long-time professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, and from 1893 master of Balliol College, Oxford, in succession to Benjamin Jowett. His Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant and Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant offered the most comprehensive nineteenth-century English-language reading of Kant through Hegelian eyes, while his The Evolution of Religion and The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers interpreted religion and Greek thought as the self-development of spirit. The quotes below are attributed to Edward Caird, organized by topic.
Browse Edward Caird by topic
Edward Caird on God
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Attributed to Edward Caird:
“Religion is the consciousness of unity with the absolute.”
Edward Caird on Justice
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“Where cruelty and injustice are concerned, hopelessness is submission, which I believe is immoral.”
quoted in "Internal Exile" by Pankaj Mishra in The New Yorker , 2021
Edward Caird on Knowledge
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“When one learns something one first performs an act of will, because only by willing to learn can one learn.”
Vico: Autodidact and Humanist," The Centennial Review , Vol. 11, No. 3 (Summer 1967), p. 340 -
“The central fact for me is, I think, that the [role of the] intellectual ... cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d'être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.”
Representation of the Intellectual (1994) -
“Representation of the Intellectual (1994)”
The central fact for me is, I think, that the [role of the] intellectual ... cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d'être is to represent all those people and issues that a -
“Interview with Michaël Zeeman for Leven en Werken”
I retain my faith in the humanist tradition, that it’s possible to deal with discrepant experiences truthfully without resolving into simple things like only women should write about women, only Chicanos should write about Chicanos, only Latinos should write about Latinos… I think that’s the most damaging crime, and misapprehension of what I’m saying. That’s why they debate all these things and th -
“An Interview with Edward W. Said" (New York, July–August 1999), The Edward Said Reader (2000) edited by Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, PART IV : Spoken Words, Ch. 17”
I’ve always been interested in what gets left out. That’s why I’m interested in the figure from the “ Ode on a Grecian Urn ,” the “silent form” that “dost tease us out of thought.” That’s why I’m interested in Raymond Williams ’s discussion of the country house poems, where the representation of the country house necessarily excludes the silence of the peasants who have been driven off the land; o
Edward Caird on Politics
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Attributed to Edward Caird:
“Modern individualism must be transcended in a fuller community.”
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“[An elaborated culture has a] density, complexity, and historical-semantic value that is so strong as to make politics possible... Gramsci 's insight is to have recognised that subordination, fracturing, diffusion, reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding, are necessary aspects of elaboration.”
Quoted in Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-335-15275-9 ), p. 248
Edward Caird on Truth
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Attributed to Edward Caird:
“Kant's philosophy completes itself in Hegel.”
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Attributed to Edward Caird:
“The synthesis of opposites is the structure of every living truth.”
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Attributed to Edward Caird:
“Philosophy is the spirit of an age made articulate.”