Kindle Notes & Highlights
In the race between reason and superstition he predicted the victory of superstition.
what does it matter whether people prostrate themselves before a piece of unleavened bread, before the ox Apis, before the Ark of the Covenant, or before a statue? The choice is not worth the trouble; the superstition is the same, and reason gains nothing.
The most thorough of skeptics had forgotten for a moment to be skeptical of skepticism.
He saved Prussia from defeat and collapse, and paid by losing the love of his people. He realized this result, and comforted himself with righteousness:
“It is not easy,” wrote Edmund Burke, “to find or to conceive governments more mild and indulgent than these church sovereignties.”
This Aufklärung was no virgin birth. It was the painful product of English deism coupled with French free thought on the ground prepared by the moderate rationalism of Christian von Wolff.
Lessing’s quip that in tragic dramas the protagonists die of nothing but the fifth act.
“painting is silent poetry, and poetry is eloquent painting.”
poetry should narrate events in time, and not try to describe objects in space. Detailed description should be left to the plastic arts;
He was warm in his friendships, hot in his enmities. He was never so happy as in controversy, and then he dealt wounds with a sharp pen.
“Let a critic,” he wrote, “. . . first seek out someone with whom he can quarrel. Thus he will gradually get into a subject, and the rest will follow as a matter of course. I frankly admit that I have selected primarily the French authors for this purpose, and among them particularly M. de Voltaire”
Not the truth of which a man is—or believes himself to be—possessed, but the sincere effort he has made to reach it, makes the worth of a man. For not through the possession, but through the investigation, of truth does he develop those energies in which alone consists his ever-growing perfection. Possession makes the mind stagnant, indolent, proud. If God held enclosed in His right hand all truth, and in His left hand simply the ever-moving impulse toward truth, although with the condition that I should eternally err, and said to me, “Choose!,” I should humbly bow before His left hand, and
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the dramatist had no asset but genius, and owed a thousand thalers.
“Wolfenbüttel Fragments”
All history may be viewed as a divine revelation, as a gradual education of mankind. Every great religion was a stage in that step-by-step illumination;
But supernatural Christianity is only a step in the evolution of the human mind; a higher stage comes when the race learns to reason, and when men grow strong and clear enough to do the right because it is seen to be right and reasonable, rather than for material or heavenly rewards.
To put it Pythagoreanly, each of us is reborn and reborn until his education—his adjustment to reason—is complete.
“There is no other philosophy but Spinoza’s.... If I were to call myself after someone, I know of no other name.”
“When you see me about to die, call a notary; I will declare before him that I die in none of the prevailing religions.”
After taking almost as long to write his epic as Jesus had taken to live it,
Spinoza’s philosophy, he said, is perfectly logical if you accept logic, but it is false because logic never reaches the heart of reality, which is revealed only to feeling and faith. God’s existence cannot be proved by reason, but feeling knows that without belief in God the life of man is a tragic and hopeless futility.
“Mephistopheles Merck,”
“In girls we love what they are, but in young men what they promise to be.”
Crime is not crime, says the hero, if it is brave; the only real crime is weakness; the truest virtues are strength and courage of body and will. Life is the manifestation of elemental instincts, and we miss the mark if we brand these as immoral.
The enthusiasm and exaggerations of Sturm und Drang marked it as an expression of intellectual adolescence, the voice of a minority condemned to grow up and simmer down.
The movement won no popular support, for tradition and the people have always supported each other.
He did not know that time had washed away the color from Greek art, leaving only line; so, like Mengs, he reduced his brush to a pencil, and aimed only at perfect form.
Art, like sex, can be a consuming fire.
Famous was Lord Fordyce’s remark that Germany stood at the head of the nations for two reasons: the Prussian army and the Mannheim orchestra.
“Halle Bach.”
Mozart said of this “Berlin Bach”: “He is the father, we are his boys (Buben); those of us who know anything correctly have learned from him, and any [student! who does not confess this is a rascal [Lump]”
“Milan Bach.”
Der Alte Fritz—
“it is better that the sovereign should break his word than that the people should perish”
“It is in the nature of man that no one learns from experience. The follies of the fathers are lost on their children; each generation has to commit its own.”
“These Memoirs convince me more and more that to write history is to compile the follies of men and the strokes of fortune. Everything turns on these two articles.”
“The first concern of a prince is to maintain himself; the second is to extend his territory.
The way to hide secret ambitions is to profess pacific sentiments till the favorable moment arrives. This has been the method of all great statesmen.”
“If he were alive we should not be here.”
misty with the sea.
It was an education that produced virtue in some of its graduates, hypocrisy in others, and perhaps a somber spirit in most.
“Die Sch öpfung ist niemals vollendet”— creation is never complete; it is ever going on.9
But I constantly made shipwreck of reason, and I have therefore preferred to venture upon the boundless ocean of ideas.”
Kritik der reinen Vernunft.
Clarity takes time, and Kant was not sure that he had the time.
These three stages—dogmatism, skepticism, criticism—were, in Kant’s view, the three ascending phases in the evolution of modern philosophy.
The “laws of nature” are not objective entities but mental constructs useful in handling experience.
All knowledge takes the form of ideas.
Sapere aude— “Dare to know.”
“If we ask whether we live in an enlightened [aufgeklärt] age, the answer is no”; we live only “in an age of enlightening” (Aufklärung)
