Status Updates From German Philosophy: An Intro...

Feuerbach is great. Shoutout to all the people that make their unconscious desires divine to attest to their ultimate unknowability except through collective conscious and hopefully someday secularization.

‘In less mystical-sounding terms, Hegel is simply saying that a thoroughgoing philosophical scepticism does not cling obtusely to what it imagines to be first and simplest- namely sense perception and its derivatives- but looks to the source from which such ‘knowledge’ takes its authority.’

It took me about half an hour just to read 6 pages, and this is the freaking commentary...

‘Historically, Hegel’s ‘dialectic’ can be seen as a radicalization of Kant. Kant had introduced two fundamental notions in his account of the subject. One was the transcendental unity of apperception...[which states] that all of our experience relates back to the knowing subject; we are at the centre of our own phenomenal universes...in Hegel’s reading [this principle] becomes the continuity of Being.’

‘... the Phenomenology shows Hegel’s style at its most refractory. It is not that he was a particularly bad writer. He wrote a far more pleasing German than, say, Kant. But his publications were elliptical and allusive.’
...!

‘In its overall project, the Phenomenology undertakes what Schelling had attempted in the Philosophy of Transcendental Idealism: a systematic account of Being against the category of time.’

It’s unfortunate that this book doesn’t have a chapter on Fichte, but only deals with him indirectly in the chapter on Lukács.

‘The culmination of Kant’s aesthetics, and in a certain sense the culmination of his whole critical project, is the theory of genius.’

...Hegel on the horizon... :)

‘...the most cultured community is also simultaneously the most ethical and has the highest sense of the aesthetic.’

Oh, and on page 40 (almost forgot!):

‘Human nature, so called, is not actually something we find in ‘nature’; it is not an object of experience. So it cannot be at the root of human conceptuality.’

Re-reading the chapter on Kant (this time with pleasure! :)

‘Kant [says] that existence is not a ‘real predicate’. What does he mean by this? What he does not mean is that existence is not a predicate at all (as Scruton suggests, Kant, 53).’

‘...Kant offered his discussion of the faculty of ‘judgement’ [in the Critique of Judgement] as a means of bridging the ‘great chasm’ between the orders of understanding and reason. It was to be a ‘mediating element’ - the keystone, in fact, of the whole enterprise...it provided the conceptual model for the most important developments of German idealism...’

‘In Kant’s exposition, the only ‘subject’ is the purely formal one of our own subjectivity; there is never any underlying essence that sustains identity, whether in things or in persons.’

Yay Kant!

The Grundsätze contain the foundations of Kant’s system. They alone make possible the discussion of ‘reason’ itself; for the Grundsätze are the encapsulation of what sense and understanding are able to accomplish between them.
The function of the Grundsätze is to engender the systematically compatible components of experience.’

‘Although it has been used for bizarre purposes by critics like the earlier Heidegger, this section [the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of The Understanding, which stands at the beginning of the ‘Grundsätze chapter] is basically straightforward.’

‘Kant’s ‘transcendental philosophy’ is an attempt to determine what the universal preconditions of human experience are.’

Kant’s ‘critical’ writings...only started to appear when he was already middle-aged...Important sections of Kant’s work are marked by the languor of age...[ouch!]hence the baroque convolutions of the ‘Table of Categories’, which Kant himself believed to be his greatest achievement, but which his philosophical heirs have almost universally ignored.’

Kant’s work not only systematizes much of the preceding philosophical tradition, it also provides the basis for the vastly accelerated development that followed. It is that development with which this book is mainly concerned...

‘Gadamer and Habermas...Ultimately, these thinkers remain metaphysical wolves in the clothes of analytical sheep.’