Merold Westphal: Power

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Merold Westphal: 28 quotes0 likes

“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. … Descartes’ conception of method, like Bacon’s, is linked to this idea of knowledge as an instrument of power. … The same could be said of Locke. Hegel can rightly claim that the instrument metaphor pervades the epistemological tradition he is seeking to transcend.”

Merold Westphal

Source: History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology (1979), pp. 3-4

“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.”

Merold Westphal

Source: History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology (1979), p. 4

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

Merold Westphal

Source: History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology (1979), p. 4

“Kierkegaard … likes to quote the church father Lactantius, who said that the virtues of paganism were glittering vices. Nietzsche's response is that the virtues of the Christians are splendid vices. They are splendid because they represent no small spiritual achievement; but they are doubly vices first because they mask a self-centered will to power that by their own criteria is the essence of immorality, and second, because in hiding this fact from themselves and from others, the votaries of the "virtues" engage in systematic self-deception and hypocrisy. Here again Nietzsche invokes his principle: "To become moral is not in itself moral," meaning that the act of adopting certain values need not be an act instantiating those values but can just as easily violate them. "Subjection to morality can be slavish or vain or self-interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or an act of despair, like subjection to a prince: in itself it is nothing moral."”

Merold Westphal

Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism, pp. 246-247