From Meingast’s notebook circa 1880: “For many a man, the totality of social connexions is at bottom nothing but a grumpily dignified scheme—a dull procession that one joins in, reluctantly and without zest, once in a while. Such a relation between ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ assumes instead of creating and forces into the foreground something entirely […]

All this (I sweep my hands out in front of me) that I ostend, these Prussian meadows with their red poppies, with their pale caducous calyxes, the black firs rumbling from the sea winds, my feet on the gravel of the path (I am always careful not to sunder the lengthened warming worm-bodies scattered here […]

“The fate of all transcendental arguments is abject failure. This is because the world is made possible by the individual himself. When one reflects, one separates oneself from oneself, and can no longer find oneself in the world, through reflection, as the condition for its possibility. Man chases after himself but will never catch up […]

“Gentlemen! We find ourselves in a crucial epoch. We, so called ‘civilized’ men of intellect, are only now emerging from a primitive phase in which one mode of thought has been elevated to the highest degree due to its usefulness in practical matters. Surrendering to purposive intellectuality has helped the primitive man over many hurdles. Building […]

From Insouciance in Deliberation (1899):  To really deliberate, that is, to vividly imagine oneself persisting into one future, adjusting that mysterious stew of antecedent beliefs and evaluative biases (which may, of course, just be two Gestalten of the very same essence) in such a way that the resultant future “self” is one wants to assume is […]

From “Hallowed Hollowness: On Machines and Modernity”: “The modern man of science wonders to himself, “If I were to arrange things thus-and-so, how would y then be?” But what the scientist fails to see is that this is just the manipulation of what is arbitrary [eigenmächtig], rearrangement of labels chosen for their aesthetic charm and not for […]

“Knowledge, for Reason, is but a passing stage. Once, through its effortful striving, it has reached knowledge of the world entire, Reason coagulates into a knowing that knows itself. Knowledge is the being of Reason, and having reached being, Reason can act no more. When nothing escapes its gaze, and every corner of the world […]

“There are hordes of people today who would like us to believe that in their wisest moments they were doing their thinking with the help of some special faculty. Whether one calls it divine illumination or, in the modern fashion, merely intuition, it is a hindrance to real understanding. Nothing is to be gained by […]