Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes on Knowledge
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) presents knowledge not as a static relation between a knowing subject and an external object but as the developmental process — at once individual and historical — by which consciousness comes to recognize that what appears as the object is itself an articulation of spirit. The phenomenological ascent through sense-certainty, perception, understanding, self-consciousness, reason, and absolute spirit supplies the introduction to the system of Science whose mature presentation occupies the Science of Logic and the Encyclopaedia. Absolute knowing, the terminus of the path, is the standpoint at which spirit grasps its own activity as the substance and structure of all the categories through which it has hitherto known its world.
Quotes
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“The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”
Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counter -
Attributed to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel:
“What is rational is actual; what is actual is rational.”
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“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it. -
“Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer.”
Miscellaneous writings of G.W.F. Hegel , translation by Jon Bartley Stewart, Northwestern University Press, 2002, page 247. -
“An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking.”
Jede Vorstellung ist eine Verallgemeinerung, und diese gehört dem Denken an. Etwas allgemein machen, heißt, es denken. ("Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse", Berlin, 1833, p. 35) -
“To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them.”
As quoted in Inwardness and Existence (1989) by Walter A. Davis, p. 18 -
“Miscellaneous writings of G.W.F. Hegel , translation by Jon Bartley Stewart, Northwestern University Press, 2002, page 247.”
Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer . One orients one's attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands. -
“Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for ”
Difference of the Fichtean and Schellingean System of Philosophy , cited in W. Kaufmann, Hegel (1966), p. 49