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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Will Durant
Read between
November 15 - December 10, 2019
morganatic unions
Everyone wondered how he could last so long, being weak in will and benign in sentiment.
There is a tough kernel in the German character—firmed by centuries of arduous survival between alien and martial peoples—that can bear defeat proudly and bide its time for response.
The double-faced god of war, breeding industries to feed and clothe and kill men, nourished national economies; and after 1806 the Continental Blockade, more or less excluding British goods, helped the mainland industries to grow.
Faith always recovers, and doubt remains.
Faith must have weakened, for toleration grew.
Anti-Semitism remained among the unlettered, but in the literate it lost its religious aura, and had to feed on economic and intellectual rivalries, and on ghetto ways lingering vestigially among the struggling poor.
the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century saw such a flurry of emancipated women as only our time could match in number, and only eighteenth-century France could match in brilliance, and none surpassed in deviltry.
“Kingdoms and empires, as we see here, perish; but a fine poem endures forever.”
He was a burden and blessing to all scientists, who believe that nothing is science until it can be stated in mathematical terms.
Music was Germany’s pride in prosperity and her solace in desolation.
sesquipedalian
The romantics die young, for in twoscore years they live their threescore and ten.
Nearly every German city had a theater, for man, harassed by fact during the day, relaxes into imagination in the evening.
he played with the fancy of buying a farm and letting the discipline of the seasons calm the instability of a mind dizzied with ideas.
“The classic is healthy, the romantic is sickly.”
human nature has changed too little in history to make political revolutions profitable for the poor.
individualism is the snake in every socialist paradise.
By reading Kant, Schopenhauer wrote about 1816, “the public was compelled to see that what is obscure is not always without significance.”
the height of absurdity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant masses of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most beautiful mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument of German stupidity.
“Pure reason, incapable of any limitation, is the Deity itself.”
On February 5, 1807, Christina Burkhardt, wife of Hegel’s landlord, gave birth to a boy whom the absent-minded professor recognized as one of his anonymous works.
Being (Sein)—
Nothing (Nichts).
Becoming (Werden)
But Hegel protests that his categories are not things; they are ways of conceiving things, of making their behavior intelligible, often predictable, sometimes manageable.
All reality, as conceived by Hegel, is in a process of becoming; it is not a static Parmenidean world of Being but a fluid
all things flow.
All reality, in Hegel, all thoughts and things, all history, religion, philosophy, are in constant evolution; not by a natural selection of variations, but by the development and resolution of internal c...
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Hegelian (formerly Fichtean) dialectic (literally the art of conversation) of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis: an idea or situation potentially contains its opposite, develops it, struggles against i...
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Opposition absorbed is the secret of wisdom and the perfection of victory.
Geist as mind is not a separate substance or entity behind psychological activities; it is those activities themselves.
When the object perceived is another individual apparently endowed with mind, consciousness becomes self-consciousness by opposition; then the consciously personal Ego is born, and becomes uncomfortably aware that competition is the trade of life.
There are three ways in which man can approach this summit of understanding and freedom: through art, religion, and philosophy.
Religion troubled and puzzled him in his declining years, for he recognized its historic function in molding character and supporting social order, but he was too fond of reason to care for the gropings of theology, the ecstasies and sufferings of saints, the fear and worship of a personal God.
His ideal was not the saint but the sage.
Recht—right—is a majestic word in Germany, covering both morality and law as kindred supports of the family, the state, and civilization.
The angry professor vented his scorn upon street-corner philosophers who construct perfect states any evening out of the rosy dreams of immaturity.
the principle that “what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.”
Morality must be a common bond, not an individual preference. Freedom under law is a constructive force; freedom from law is impossible in nature and destructive in society,
Nor should we make a fetish of equality. We are equal only in the sense that each of us is a soul, and should not be a tool for another person; but we are obviously unequal in physical or mental ability.
In this sense we may say of the state, as of the universe, that “the rational is real, and the real is rational.” It is not utopic, but utopia is unreal.
Hegel rejected democracy outright: the ordinary citizen is ill-equipped to choose competent rulers, or to determine national policy.
So Hegel recommended a government composed of a bicameral legislature elected by property owners; an executive and administrative cabinet of ministers; and an hereditary monarch having “the will with the power of ultimate decision.”
It is not for age to venture but to preserve.
“The only thought which philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of history is the simple concept of Reason: that Reason [the logic and law of events] is the Sovereign of the World; that therefore the history of the world presents us a rational process.”
These two forces—the time and the genius—are the engineers of history, and when they work together they are irresistible.
This was the very truth for their age, for their world; the species next in order, so to speak, and which was already formed in the womb of time.”
“The history of the world is not the theater of happiness. Periods of happiness are the blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony, when the antithesis is in abeyance,”66 and history sleeps.
The chief obstacle to interpreting history as progress is the fact that civilizations can die, or entirely disappear.
