How, indeed, can Philosophy be learned? Every philosophical thinker builds his own work on the ruins, so to speak, of another; but nothing has ever been built that could be permanent in all its parts. It is, therefore, impossible to learn philosophy, even for this reason, that it does not yet exist. But even supposing there were a philosophy actually existing, yet no one who learned it could say of himself that he was a philosopher, for his knowledge of it would still only be subjectively historical. (Introduction to Logic, 1800)
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| Hubert Robert, The Washerwomen (1792) |
The Getty Guide to Imagery:
The Temple of Modern Philosophy [at Ermenonville, pictured above], built in 1775 and copied from the Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli, is unfinished, because "philosophy never attains her goals." (Gardens in Art, 2007)Herman Melville:
They are mostly artists of various sorts; painters, or sculptors, or indigent students, or teachers of languages, or poets, or fugitive French politicians, or German philosophers. Their mental tendencies, however heterodox at times, are still very fine and spiritual upon the whole; since the vacuity of their exchequers leads them to reject the coarse materialism of Hobbes, and incline to the airy exaltations of the Berkelyan philosophy. Often groping in vain in their pockets, they can not but give in to the Descartian vortices; while the abundance of leisure in their attics (physical and figurative), unite with the leisure in their stomachs, to fit them in an eminent degree for that undivided attention indispensable to the proper digesting of the sublimated Categories of Kant; especially as Kant (can't) is the one great palpable fact in their pervadingly impalpable lives. (Pierre, 1852)
