
Variant: The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.
Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous), p. 40
Variant: The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.
Subjectively speaking, the essence of philosophy is certitude; for the moderns, on the contrary, the essence of philosophy is doubt: the philosopher is supposed to reason without any premise (voraussetzungsloses Denken), as if this condition were not itself a preconceived idea; this is the classical contradiction of all relativism. Everything is doubted except for doubt. The solution to the problem of knowledge − if there is a problem − could not possibly be this intellectual suicide that is the promotion of doubt; on the contrary, it lies in having recourse to a source of certitude that transcends the mental mechanism, and this source − the only one there is − is the pure Intellect, or Intelligence as such.
[2005, The Transfiguration of Man, World Wisdom, 3, 978-0-94153219-8]
Miscellaneous, Philosophy
“Reason is our soul's left hand, Faith her right,
By these we reach divinity”
“Better to have a big goal and reach half of it than to have no goal and reach all of it.”
Assorted Themes, On Love for the Fellow Man
“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.”
“Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has its own reason, which is not reasonable.”
pg 129
Source: Identity (1998)