Former posting: “Kojčve, a kind of Nabokov of European philosophy, presented Hegel as he had never been known before – a Hegel almost indistinguishable from Heidegger. Everybody knew Hegel’s thesis that “the real is reasonable.” Hegel was regarded as a rationalist. And now Kojčve was demonstrating that Hegel had done nothing other than reveal the unreasonable origin of reason …” Martin Heidegger: “Between Good and Evil” by Rüdger Safranski.
Present posting: Here is a quote from VN’s Lecture on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, mentioning language and philosophy and Hegel… (just for the sake of contrast and for the fun of it…)
“ When a certain clear-thinking but somewhat superficial French philosopher asked the profound but obscure German philosopher Hegel to state his views in a concise form, Hegel answered him harshly, ‘These things can be discussed neither concisely nor in French.’ We shall ignore the question whether Hegel was right or not, and still try to put into a nutshell the difference between the Gogol-Kafka kind of story and Stevenson's kind./ In Gogol and Kafka the absurd central character belongs to the absurd world around him but, pathetically and tragically, attempts to struggle out of it into the world of humans—and dies in despair.” http://www.kafka.org/index.php?id=191,209,0,0,1,0
In a discussion at the Wikipedia “reference desk” we find Nabokov being quoted but without his name being cited: Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Humanities/2006_December_16
German philosopher quotation
"Some things cannot be said simply and some things cannot be said in French"
I think I saw this somewhere, but cannot find the source -- if I remember right, a German philosopher, my guess being Hegel or Schopenhauer. But I could not find the quote under these names, or under simple + French, etc. And, of course, the text is not exact, and I have no idea how it may be in German.
I'm quite sure it was Hegel, but I don't know the source. Skarioffszky 13:55, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
Ah, yes, this is where I first encountered the quote: "When a certain clear-thinking but somewhat superficial French philosopher asked the profound but obscure German philosopher Hegel to state his views in a concise form, Hegel answered him harshly, 'These things can be discussed neither concisely nor in French.'" Skarioffszky 13:58, 16 December 2006 (UTC)