Order was not made by god or man. It always was and is and shall be an ever-living fire, flaring up in regular measures and dying down in regular measures.
—Heraclitus of Ephesus. (via philosophy-of-praxis)
Scepticism is a resting place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings, but it is no dwelling place for permanent settling. Simply to acquiesce in scepticism can never suffice to overcome the restlessness of reason.
—Immanuel Kant (via ishotthfuckingsheriff)
Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.
—G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (via outofthedarkness)
If someone were to transform Beethoven’s Ode to Joy into a painting and not restrain his imagination when millions of people sink dramatically into the dust, then we could come close to the Dionysian. Now is the slave a free man, now all the stiff, hostile barriers break apart, those things which necessity and arbitrary power or “saucy fashion” have established between men. Now, with the gospel of world harmony, every man feels himself not only united with his neighbour, reconciled and fused together, but also as if the veil of Maja has been ripped apart, with only scraps fluttering around before the mysterious original unity. Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher unity. He has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the verge of flying up into the air as he dances. The enchantment speaks out in his gestures. Just as the animals speak and the earth gives milk and honey, so now something supernatural echoes out of him. He feels himself a god. He now moves in a lofty ecstasy, as he saw the gods move in his dream. The man is no longer an artist. He has become a work of art. The artistic power of all of nature, the rhapsodic satisfaction of the primordial unity, reveals itself here in the intoxicated performance. The finest clay, the most expensive marble—man—is here worked and chiseled, and the cry of the Eleusianian mysteries rings out to the chisel blows of the Dionysian world artist: “Do you fall down, you millions? World, do you have a sense of your creator?
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (via ludimagister)

In Scepticism consciousness gets, in truth, to know itself as a consciousness containing contradiction within itself. From the experience of this proceeds a new attitude which brings together the two thoughts which Scepticism holds apart. The want of intelligence which Scepticism manifests regarding itself is bound to vanish, because it is in fact one consciousness which possesses these two modes within it. This new attitude consequently is one which is aware of being the double consciousness of itself as self-liberating, unalterable, self-identical, and as utterly self-confounding, self-perverting; and this new attitude is the consciousness of this contradiction within itself.

In Stoicism, self-consciousness is the bare and simple freedom of itself. In Scepticism, it realizes itself, negates the other side of determinate existence, but, in so doing, really doubles itself, and is itself now a duality. In this way the duplication, which previously was divided between two individuals, the lord and the bondsman, is concentrated into one. Thus we have here that dualizing of self-consciousness within itself, which lies essentially in the notion of mind; but the unity of the two elements is not yet present.

—

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

Hegel’s take on Skepticism and Stoicism: interesting to consider how he views Skepticism as destroying the other rather than preserving its radical difference, especially considering how the “destruction” of the object is a claim leveraged against Hegelian dialectics often.

(via anthropologeist)

Are the axioms of logic adequate to reality or are they a means and measure for us to create reality, the concept “reality”, for ourselves?
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (via ludimagister)
…with the first thinkers the atomistic principle did not remain in this externality but besides its abstraction had also a speculative determination in the fact that the void was recognized as the source of movement, which is an entirely different relation of the atom and the void from the mere juxtaposition and mutual indifference of these two determinations…The view that the void constitutes the ground of movement contains the profounder thought that in the negative as such there lies the ground of becoming, of the unrest of self-movement—in which sense, however, the negative is to be taken as the veritable negativity of the infinite.
—Hegel, ‘Science of Logic’  (via aidsnegligee)
Self-consciousness has before it another self-consciousness; it has come outside itself. This has a double significance. First it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as an other being; secondly, it has thereby sublated that other, for it does not regard the other as essentially real, but sees its own self in the other
—GWF Hegel, The Phenomenonology of Spirit (via memejacker)
For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter.
—Friedrich Schiller, Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man
The victory of a moral ideal is achieved by the same “immoral” means as every victory: force, lies, slander, injustice.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (via ludimagister)