“If Nietzsche and Hegel serve as alibis to the masters of Dachau and Karaganda, that does not condemn their entire philosophy.”

— Albert Camus , book The Rebel

The Rebel (1951)
Context: If Nietzsche and Hegel serve as alibis to the masters of Dachau and Karaganda, that does not condemn their entire philosophy. But it does lead to the suspicion that one aspect of their thought, or of their logic, can lead to these appalling conclusions.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If Nietzsche and Hegel serve as alibis to the masters of Dachau and Karaganda, that does not condemn their entire philo…" by Albert Camus?

Albert Camus photo

Albert Camus 209

French author and journalist 1913–1960

Related quotes

“Nietzsche's problem is how to be a philosopher once he has grasped the finitude of philosophy.”

David Wood (1946) British philosopher, born 1946

Source: Philosophy At The Limit (1990), Chapter 5, Nietzsche's Styles, p. 96

“Excessive jealousy is the alibi of someone who does not give enough value to the one who calls love.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) L'eccessiva gelosia è l'alibi di chi non dà abbastanza valore a colui che chiama amore.
Source: prevale.net

“Contemporary philosophy illustrates Hegel’s dictum that philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, for in our age philosophy yields to the objectifying technical impulse and loses its ancient task of pursuing the Socratic ideal of the wisdom of the examined life.”

Donald Phillip Verene (1937) philosopher

Source: Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (1997), p. 191

“After Hegel, philosophy confronts the possibility of its own death, and in some sense has to do so if it is to remain the most fundamental kind of thinking.”

David Wood (1946) British philosopher, born 1946

Source: Philosophy At The Limit (1990), Chapter 4, Philosophy As Writing: The Case Of Hegel, p. 88

“The dislike of philosophy is perennial, and the seeds of the condemnation of Socrates are present at all times”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

“Western Civ,” p. 19.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)
Context: I am now even more persuaded of the urgent need to study why Socrates was accused. The dislike of philosophy is perennial, and the seeds of the condemnation of Socrates are present at all times, not in the bosoms of pleasure-seekers, who don’t give a damn, but in those of high-minded and idealistic persons who do not want to submit their aspirations to examination.

“Life is more than thought: what a man feels, and what his senses awaken in him, are more indispensable to his life’s fullness than subsequent reflection on their significance. Both Stirner and Nietzsche have elaborated Faust’s opening speech in which he bemoans his wasted years in academia: this speech is Goethe’s own impeachment of Kant and Hegel. Philosophy proceeds always under the risk of making a fetish of thinking.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 105

“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.”

Merold Westphal (1940)

Source: Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (1992), p. 38

“This is precisely what is decisive in Nietzsche’s conception of art, that he sees it in its essential entirety in terms of the artist; this he does consciously and in explicit opposition to that conception of art which represents it in terms of those who “enjoy” and “experience” it.
That is a guiding principle of Nietzsche’s teaching on art: art must be grasped in terms of creators and producers, not recipients. Nietzsche expresses it unequivocally in the following words (WM, 811): “Our aesthetics heretofore has been a woman’s aesthetics, inasmuch as only the recipients of art have formulated their experiences of ‘what is beautiful.’ In all philosophy to date the artist is missing.” Philosophy of art means “aesthetics” for Nietzsche too—but masculine aesthetics, not feminine aesthetics. The question of art is the question of the artist as the productive, creative one; his experiences of what is beautiful must provide the standard.”

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German philosopher

Source: Nietzsche (1961), p. 70

“Hegel … proceeds abstractly from the pre-existence of the intellect. … He does not appeal to the intellect within us.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 68
Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy (1839)

“What is most needed today is a fundamental theological thinking, one centered upon the Godhead itself, and centered upon that which is most challenging or most offensive in the Godhead, one which has truly been veiled in the modern world, except by our most revolutionary thinkers and visionaries. If we allow Blake and Nietzsche to be paradigmatic of those revolutionaries, nowhere else does such a centering upon God or the Godhead occur, although a full parallel to this occurs in Spinoza and Hegel; but the language of Hegel and Spinoza is not actually offensive, or not in its immediate impact, whereas the language of Nietzsche and Blake is the most purely offensive language which has ever been inscribed. Above all this is true of the theological language of Blake and Nietzsche, but here a theological language is a truly universal language, one occurring in every domain, and occurring as that absolute No which is the origin of every repression and every darkness, and a darkness which is finally the darkness of God, or the darkness of that Godhead which is beyond “God.” Only Nietzsche and Blake know a wholly fallen Godhead, a Godhead which is an absolutely alien Nihil, but the full reversal of that Nihil is apocalypse itself, an apocalypse which is an absolute joy, and Blake and Nietzsche are those very writers who have most evoked that joy.”

Thomas J. J. Altizer (1927–2018) American radical theologian

Godhead and the Nothing (2003), Preface

Related topics