The Spectre of Hegel Quotes

“To philosophise with open eyes is to philosophise in the dark. Only the blind can look straight at the sun.”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“the end is the beginning and the beginning the end. The content is thus a circle; it is the discovery of the self in the other extreme, now recognized as the self’s very essence.”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“The time has come in which the overriding preoccupation of bourgeois philosophers and littérateurs is the following question: ‘What does the truth have to be for the Communists to be wrong? What does Marx have to be for the Communists to be wrong?’ Thus it is that our bourgeois politicians and philosophers fabricate the truth and the events they need to condemn their adversary the more forcefully.”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“the word seeks a resolution in itself; it seeks the mediation between itself and the world in itself, yet never produces anything more than a demiurge of words”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“the philosopher only rewrites his own alienation in terms of being: because he is alienated from himself in his thought, his thought is the essence of alienation...”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“philosophy, which is the self-consciousness of Spirit in the various moments of its development, and thus in its alienation, is simply the reality of the world's contradictions translated into thought.”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“in the Phenomenology, the truth appears at dusk, since, in this sense, history has ended. But this dusk is only a retrospective image...”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“Hegel adopted the only possible solution, contraband; but he failed to reckon with the customs-officer Marx, who caught him in the act of smuggling in false contents.”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“Hegelian Logic is cavernous: it is Plato stood on his head, the world turned topsy turvy. No longer is the Logos the body of truth, and the world its shadow on the wall; now it is the inner shadow of the true world. Plato proceeds from the shadow to the body, Hegel from the body to the shadow, which is not recognized as a shadow until the end.”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“Today we see that the question of Hegel is, for the bourgeoisie, merely a matter of impugning Marx. This Great Return to Hegel is simply a desperate attempt to combat Marx, cast in the specific form that revisionism takes in imperialism's final crisis: a revisionism of a fascist type.”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“Hegel is the last of the philosophers in that, attaining Absolute Knowledge, he replaces the love of knowledge with knowledge; he is thus the Savant or Sage - the first and last - because those who come after him can only retrace the contents of the System of Knowledge (in 1806, Hegel thought of the Phenomenology as Part I of this System).”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“it can be argued that philosophy has not gone beyond Hegelianism, and that the struggles of our recent history are merely the conflict of Left against Right in Hegel...”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“We were straightfacedly told that, to understand the Phenomenology and the Encyclopædia, we had to go back to Abraham, Isaac, and the desert. Today it is all too obvious this sort of exegesis was merely a manoeuvre.”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings