René Magritte, Les Idées Claires, oil on canvas, 1955

‘Kant failed to see…(that) the being of something is found in its appearances, not in the thing considered (artificially) in so far as it does not appear! For Hegel, we are not cut off from the reality of things – appearances give us that reality.’

Glenn Alexander Magee, The Hegel Dictionary, Continuum, London, 2010, 120

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A man that looks on glasse

On it may stay his eye,

Or if he pleaseth, through it passe

And then the heav’n espie¹

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Routeburn Track, New Zealand

Note

1. George Herbert, in W.K.C.Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, 464. Lenin wrote ‘From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice, – such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality. Kant disparages knowledge in order to make way for faith: Hegel exalts knowledge, asserting that knowledge is knowledge of God. The materialist exalts the knowledge of matter, of nature…’ Lenin, Collected Works, Vol., 38 (Philosophical Notebooks), Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976, 171 ↩

René Magritte, Les Idées Claires