Frederick C. Beiser Quotes

#1. Schiller is an important philosopher because he shows just how integral the idea of beauty is in normal life.

Frederick C. Beiser

#2. Hegel remains of great importance to understand ourselves, but essentially because we have all grown out of a reaction against Hegel.

Frederick C. Beiser

#3. Royce is the father of the thesis that German idealism is a story about the discovery and development of the Kantian transcendental ego - the "I" that accompanies all my representations - as an absolute cosmic supersubject who, god-like, creates the entire universe.

Frederick C. Beiser

#4. The connection between romantic politics and aesthetics is plain in Schiller's and Novalis's concept of the aesthetic or poetic state.

Frederick C. Beiser

#5. The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it.

Frederick C. Beiser

#6. To live well is to live in harmony with ourselves, others and nature, and that idea of harmony is, of course, an aesthetic one.

Frederick C. Beiser

#7. There was no Prussian bastion to stop the Scotsman's swift conquest of the territory once claimed by reason.

Frederick C. Beiser

#8. Schiller never wanted to replace the moral with the aesthetic but he did want the moral to be one part of the aesthetic. He rightly notes the aesthetic dimension of morality, that we use concepts like grace to characterise people who do their duty with ease and pleasure.

Frederick C. Beiser

#9. The struggle against subjectivism was the attempt to avoid the charge of what was then called "idealism" or "nihilism", i.e., that we know nothing more than our own representations.

Frederick C. Beiser

#10. You only have to talk to artists to see that they work according to rules, and that they know all too well that they can employ only certain means to achieve the ends they want.

Frederick C. Beiser

#11. The aesthetic dimension of the ideal state comes out in the idea of harmony, which is the classical idea of beauty as "concinnitas" or "unity-in-variety".

Frederick C. Beiser

#12. There is no comfortable middle path where we get to provide a rational justification for our basic moral, religious and common sense beliefs.

Frederick C. Beiser

#13. The idea of romanticising the world goes back to the idea of creating a harmonious whole where the individual will feel at one with himself, others and nature.

Frederick C. Beiser

#14. The years 1781 to 1793 are crucial for many reasons, but chiefly because they pose in an especially clear way the main problem of German philosophy for the next century. This is the old conflict between reason and faith which recurred during the pantheism controversy between Jacobi and Mendelssohn.

Frederick C. Beiser

#15. The absolute as the idea is neither subjective nor objective; it is the intellectual structure under which they are subsumed.

Frederick C. Beiser

#16. Liberals and leftists are not wrong in describing romanticism as reactionary, because it did indeed become that after 1810. The problem is that they make that description true of the movement as a whole, as if romanticism were essentially reactionary.

Frederick C. Beiser

#17. All the spookiness comes from giving a contemporary anachronistic sense to terms whose historical meaning is lost to us.

Frederick C. Beiser

#18. That Hegel is a metaphysician, and that he thinks metaphysics is fundamental to philosophy, is plain enough from his definition of philosophy.

Frederick C. Beiser

#19. No one nowadays talks about the absolute, not even people with firm and deep religious convictions. The whole Hegelian project has no resonance for us, as it once had for the Germans in the 1820s and the British and Americans around the 1880s.

Frederick C. Beiser

#20. The romantics really did want to romanticise the world itself, and that meant re-creating the state, society and even nature so that it became a work of art.

Frederick C. Beiser