2
" There are, then, no easy answers to the questions raised by a thinker who may best be understood in performative terms. Their texts may be trying to provoke the reader to respond by, for example, saying something which the author does not actually believe. In that case, objecting to the argument merely means that one falls into the trap set by the text, in the way one looks silly by taking something seriously that is meant as a joke. One strategy is to accept that much of what is happening in Nietzsche's texts is indeed more performance than argument, but to look very carefully at the moments when performance gives way to assertion of a kind that cannot be construed as ironic or as merely performative. A further strategy is to keep in mind the ideological context of his writing. Although the Nietzsche of after the BT cannot be considered as a German nationalist, his elitism and his tendency to regard social issues as though they were biological issues - for example in relation to the idea that societies and cultures can become 'sick' - are very much part of reactionary thought in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such ideas fed into Nazism and other anti-democratic movements in the twentieth century, and are neither Nietzsche's creation, nor of any serious philosophical interest. "
― , Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas
4
" In Hegel's case the irony ceases at the end of the system, because all the negatives lead eventually to the positive recognition that one has exhausted negativity: negativity is the path to the truth. Romantic irony, on the other hand, does not come to an end. The sense that we can never rest with a final certainty becomes the essential fact about our being. Romantic irony is, then, an attitude of mind which tries to come to terms with the finitude of every individual's existence, rather than trying to transcend that finitude by reaching a positive, philosophical conclusion. The scepticism involved in Romantic irony is not the kind of scepticism which worries about whether all our beliefs might be false, but rather a kind of 'fallibilism', which assumes we may always come up with new and better ways of dealing with things, because being transcends what we know of it. "
― , Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas
5
" On the one hand, a language is a means by which a culture symbolizes its identity, binding the members of a social grouping to each other. On the other, the people who do not speak this language are excluded, both because they cannot speak it and because the language will not express their world anyway. Read positively, in the manner of Hamann, Herder's conception means that people are able to explore other worlds by acquiring other languages. Read negatively, it means that one's language can become a factor in a nationalistic exclusion of 'the Other' who does not share one's language.
[...]
At the same time, there is an essential difference between the linguistic nationalism of an oppressed people attempting to assert themselves, and the linguistic nationalism of the kind that played a role in Nazism's attempts to 'purify' the German language of foreign words. Herder himself was thoroughly liberal and progressive, which suggests how complex an issue the relationship of language to national identity can be. Ideas which in one context are thoroughly progressive can, in a different historical context, be anything but progressive. "
― , Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas
7
" A Hegelian might then argue that this indeterminacy of being is precisely the point: it is only when being becomes something via social interchange that it is conceptually significant. Hegel's conception would seem compatible with an essentially left-wing conception of the centrality of social and political perspectives, rather than merely philosophical ones. Why, then, do Feuerbach and the other Young Hegelians come to oppose Hegel?
For the most significant German thinkers after Hegel, from Feuerbach, to Nietzsche, Heidegger and Habermas himself, the very understanding of the task of philosophy in modernity becomes an issue because of the demise of Hegel's emphatic conception of the status of philosophy. If philosophy no longer can, or should, play a decisive systematizing role in modernity, what are the alternatives for dealing with what had formerly been seen as philosophical issues? One way of considering the perceived dangers of Hegel's approach to philosophy is in sociopolitical terms. The idea is that Hegel's philosophy subordinates real people to abstractions. This is precisely what Marx thinks that modern capitalism also does to them, by giving money, the abstract medium through which value is exchanged in society, precedence over people. "
― , Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas