Beiser Quotes & Sayings

Schiller is an important philosopher because he shows just how integral the idea of beauty is in normal life. — Frederick C. Beiser

To live well is to live in harmony with ourselves, others and nature, and that idea of harmony is, of course, an aesthetic one. — Frederick C. Beiser

You only have to talk to artists to see that they work according to rules, and that they know all too well that they can employ only certain means to achieve the ends they want. — Frederick C. Beiser

The romantics really did want to romanticise the world itself, and that meant re-creating the state, society and even nature so that it became a work of art. — Frederick C. Beiser

Royce is the father of the thesis that German idealism is a story about the discovery and development of the Kantian transcendental ego - the "I" that accompanies all my representations - as an absolute cosmic supersubject who, god-like, creates the entire universe. — Frederick C. Beiser

Schiller never wanted to replace the moral with the aesthetic but he did want the moral to be one part of the aesthetic. He rightly notes the aesthetic dimension of morality, that we use concepts like grace to characterise people who do their duty with ease and pleasure. — Frederick C. Beiser

A person can do a lot of reading and research as I have done. I went to Spain and spent a whole summer there with my family, immersing myself in the culture. But all that isn't really necessary to experience the music. — Maya Beiser

It's wonderful when music is intellectually stimulating. But ultimately it has to be a visceral experience. — Maya Beiser

All the spookiness comes from giving a contemporary anachronistic sense to terms whose historical meaning is lost to us. — Frederick C. Beiser

The years 1781 to 1793 are crucial for many reasons, but chiefly because they pose in an especially clear way the main problem of German philosophy for the next century. This is the old conflict between reason and faith which recurred during the pantheism controversy between Jacobi and Mendelssohn. — Frederick C. Beiser

The romantics were reacting against a modern culture that divided individuals from themselves (through specialisation in the division of labor), from others (the competitive market place) and from nature, which had been reduced down to a machine through technology. The antidote to such division is unity and wholeness, which means feeling at home again in the world. — Frederick C. Beiser

The connection between romantic politics and aesthetics is plain in Schiller's and Novalis's concept of the aesthetic or poetic state. — Frederick C. Beiser

I grew up in a kibbutz in the Galilee, but we were surrounded by Arabic villages, so I heard all these sounds and all this music. My father was very close friends with one of the Bedouin tribes, so I would always go there, to weddings, and I was always very fascinated by that music. — Maya Beiser

That Hegel is a metaphysician, and that he thinks metaphysics is fundamental to philosophy, is plain enough from his definition of philosophy. — Frederick C. Beiser

Post-minimalism implies music that's genre-less. Minimalism was very important because it came at a time when contemporary music had become so complex, so experimental and detached that people turned away from it. Minimalism broke that trend and brought music back to the people. — Maya Beiser

The absolute as the idea is neither subjective nor objective; it is the intellectual structure under which they are subsumed. — Frederick C. Beiser

The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it. — Frederick C. Beiser

The struggle against subjectivism was the attempt to avoid the charge of what was then called "idealism" or "nihilism", i.e., that we know nothing more than our own representations. — Frederick C. Beiser

I decided that I wanted to explore all kinds of music with my cello, not just the Western classical tradition. I just wanted to try and expand my vocabulary and bring that different kind of music to my audience. — Maya Beiser

I want to create endless possibilities with this cello. I become the medium through which the music is being channeled. — Maya Beiser

No one nowadays talks about the absolute, not even people with firm and deep religious convictions. The whole Hegelian project has no resonance for us, as it once had for the Germans in the 1820s and the British and Americans around the 1880s. — Frederick C. Beiser

Hegel remains of great importance to understand ourselves, but essentially because we have all grown out of a reaction against Hegel. — Frederick C. Beiser

There is a sinister anachronistic interpretation of the aesthetic state as some kind of totalitarian regime that puts aesthetic over moral standards; one associates it with national-socialism. But this has nothing to do with the romantics, whose ideal of the aesthetic state has much more to do with the republican tradition. — Frederick C. Beiser

The aesthetic dimension of the ideal state comes out in the idea of harmony, which is the classical idea of beauty as "concinnitas" or "unity-in-variety". — Frederick C. Beiser

There is no comfortable middle path where we get to provide a rational justification for our basic moral, religious and common sense beliefs. — Frederick C. Beiser

I was a rebel and I wanted to do something that nobody else did, and nobody else played the cello. Also, I was also a small kid and I liked the fact that it was big. — Maya Beiser

Liberals and leftists are not wrong in describing romanticism as reactionary, because it did indeed become that after 1810. The problem is that they make that description true of the movement as a whole, as if romanticism were essentially reactionary. — Frederick C. Beiser

From the 9th to the 15th centuries, the area which is now modern Spain was home to the greatest peaceful agglomeration of cultures ever known in the post-literate worldEven more remarkable than the flowering of art itself was the confluence of cultures that produced it: under the rule of Islam, Muslims, Jews and Christians lived and worked together in relative harmony. — Maya Beiser

I'm interested in music that happens now and that relates to our lives now. — Maya Beiser

'Provenance' is more than a multimedia concert. It's a journey that unifies cultures through music, theater and beautiful visuals. — Maya Beiser

There was no Prussian bastion to stop the Scotsman's swift conquest of the territory once claimed by reason. — Frederick C. Beiser

The idea of romanticising the world goes back to the idea of creating a harmonious whole where the individual will feel at one with himself, others and nature. — Frederick C. Beiser

Since substance is infinite, the universe as a whole, i.e., god, Hegel is telling us that philosophy is knowledge of the infinite, of the universe as a whole, i.e, god. You cannot get more metaphysical than that. I think that Hegel scholars have to admit this basic fact rather than burying their heads in the sand and trying to pretend that Hegel is concerned with conceptual analysis, category theory, normativity or some such contemporary fad. — Frederick C. Beiser

When Hume insists that taste is a matter of delicacy, that it is a matter of having a sensitivity to features of an object itself, he is very close to the rationalist doctrine. Hume was really a covert objectivist (or partial one) about aesthetic pleasure because that pleasure had to be based on the sensitivity to features in the object. — Frederick C. Beiser

I was always a rebel in the sense that I always wanted to go my own road and do something that nobody else has done. — Maya Beiser