1844
1844
I was born in 1813, in that mad year when so many other mad bank-notes were put into circulation,21 and I can be best compared to one of them. There is something about me which points to greatness, but because of the mad state of affairs I am only worth little.
And sometimes bank-notes of that kind are the misfortune of a whole family.
Let no one misunderstand all my talk about passion and pathos to mean that I am proclaiming any and every uncircumcised immediacy, all manner of unshaven passion.
The hardest trial of all is when a man does not know whether the cause of his suffering is madness or guilt. While in other cases freedom is what he fights with, in this case it has become dialectical in its own most terrible contrary.
Where feelings are concerned the same thing happens to me that happened to the Englishman who got into financial difficulties because no one could change his £100 note.
In Aus meinem Leben Goethe is nothing but a talented defender of solecisms. At no single point has he realised the idea; but (whether the subject is girls, love or Christianity) there is one thing he can do, talk himself out of everything.
If Hegel had written the whole of his logic and then said, in the preface, that it was merely an experiment in thought in which he had even begged the question in many places, then he would certainly have been the greatest thinker who had ever lived. As it is he is merely comic.
N.B. God can only show himself to man in miracles, i.e. as soon as he sees God he sees a miracle. But by himself he is incapable of seeing miracles for the miracle is his own annihilation. The Jews expressed that pictorially by saying that to see God was death. It is truer to say that to see God, or see miracles happens by virtue of the absurd, for reason must stand aside.
It seems quite extraordinary to me to read Cap III of Book III of Aristotle’s de anima. It is a year and a half since I began my little essay: de omnibus dubitandum est in which I made my first attempt at a bit of philosophical writing. The motivating concept which I used was : error. Aristotle does so too. At that time I had not read any Aristotle and only part of Plato.
It is however the Greeks who are my consolation, the cursed mendacity which came into philosophy with Hegel, that eternal hinting and deceiving, and blustering and dilution of some point or other in the Greeks.
Trendelenburg be praised; one of the most honest thinking philologists I know.