Merold Westphal: Quotes about knowledge

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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