Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Chronology
- Further reading
- Note on the texts
- Aesthetica in nuce: A Rhapsody in Cabbalistic Prose (1762)
- Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766)
- From ‘On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful’ (1788)
- ‘Kallias or Concerning Beauty : Letters to Gottfried Körner’ (1793)
- ‘Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism’ (1796)
- ‘Letter to Hegel, 26 January 1795’
- ‘Being Judgement Possibility’ (1795)
- ‘The Significance of Tragedy’ (1802)
- ‘Remarks on Oedipus’ (1803)
- From Miscellaneous Remarks (1797)
- ‘Monologue’
- ‘Dialogues’ (1798)
- ‘On Goethe’ (1798)
- ‘Studies in the Visual Arts’ (1799)
- From ‘Critical Fragments’ (1797)
- From ‘Athenaeum Fragments’ (1798)
- From ‘Ideas’ (1800)
- ‘On Goethe's Meister’ (1798)
- ‘Letter About the Novel’ (1799)
- ‘On Incomprehensibility’ (1800)
- Index
- Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy
‘Monologue’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Chronology
- Further reading
- Note on the texts
- Aesthetica in nuce: A Rhapsody in Cabbalistic Prose (1762)
- Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766)
- From ‘On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful’ (1788)
- ‘Kallias or Concerning Beauty : Letters to Gottfried Körner’ (1793)
- ‘Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism’ (1796)
- ‘Letter to Hegel, 26 January 1795’
- ‘Being Judgement Possibility’ (1795)
- ‘The Significance of Tragedy’ (1802)
- ‘Remarks on Oedipus’ (1803)
- From Miscellaneous Remarks (1797)
- ‘Monologue’
- ‘Dialogues’ (1798)
- ‘On Goethe’ (1798)
- ‘Studies in the Visual Arts’ (1799)
- From ‘Critical Fragments’ (1797)
- From ‘Athenaeum Fragments’ (1798)
- From ‘Ideas’ (1800)
- ‘On Goethe's Meister’ (1798)
- ‘Letter About the Novel’ (1799)
- ‘On Incomprehensibility’ (1800)
- Index
- Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy
Summary
Speaking and writing is a crazy state of affairs really; true conversation is just a game with words. It is amazing, the absurd error people make of imagining they are speaking for the sake of things; no one knows the essential thing about language, that it is concerned only with itself. That is why it is such a marvellous and fruitful mystery – for if someone merely speaks for the sake of speaking, he utters the most splendid, original truths. But if he wants to talk about something definite, the whims of language make him say the most ridiculous false stuff. Hence the hatred that so many serious people have for language. They notice its waywardness, but they do not notice that the babbling they scorn is the infinitely serious side of language. If it were only possible to make people understand that it is the same with language as it is with mathematical formulae – they constitute a world in itself – their play is self-sufficient, they express nothing but their own marvellous nature, and this is the very reason why they are so expressive, why they are the mirror to the strange play of relationships among things. Only their freedom makes them members of nature, only in their free movements does the world-soul express itself and make of them a delicate measure and a ground-plan of things.
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- Information
- Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics , pp. 214 - 215Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002