Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0026084, Sat, 21 Mar 2015 17:38:47 -0300

Subject
[Sightings] Safranski and Steiner: philosopher or polyglot?
Date
Body
Former posting: “Kojève, 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 Kojève 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/20
06_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
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegel> , but I don't know the source.
Skarioffszky <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Skarioffszky> 13:55, 16
December 2006 (UTC)
Ah, yes, this
<http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vermeer/287/nabokov_s_metamorphosis.htm>
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 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Skarioffszky>
13:58, 16 December 2006 (UTC)



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