Merold Westphal

"Hegel’s lack of charity toward the instrument metaphor is not arbitrary. It represents his disenchantment with the assumption that knowledge is power and that method is the means to this end… Descarte…"

"Hegel’s… deepest objections to the view of knowledge as method and power, as “controlling knowledge” or “the logic of domination” , are moral. He agrees with Schiller that “utility is the great idol o…"

"The question concerns the texture of daily life. Does the individual live with the assurance, conscious or unconscious, that We are absolute—or with the challenge of being, both as I and as We, finite…"

"Knowledge conceived as an instrument is a means to the end of power. The goal of philosophy, however, is not to gain power over the Absolute but to know it as it truly is."

"In a revolutionary age talk of equality may well have represented a passion to provide full human dignity to those who had previously been denied it by systems of political and economic domination; bu…"

"For the amoral herd that fears boredom above all else, everything becomes entertainment. Sex and sport, politics and the arts are transformed into entertainment… Nothing is immune from the demand that…"

"To a society that inarticulately and thoughtlessly takes itself to be divine, Hegel says, Yes, we are indeed divine, and philosophy can show how this is both possible and necessary."

"It is the shared bad faith by which individuals help each other sustain the illusion that they can shirk their spiritual destiny by joining the public."