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Rustle in the Bush

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“Those who criticize without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the forces it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy.”

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri-‘What is Philosophy, 1991

Home-brewed joyful affects.

The Philosopher’s Way – Wahl

Jean Wahl was a French philosopher, important to the academic community between World War I and his death in the 1970s. He was a thinker who saw beyond the confines of existentialist movements, strict Marxism, and European thought, with a commitment to the relationships between philosophies, a holistic approach to investigating t philosophy, and a renowned teacher. He taught Deleuze as if a mentor at times, and most likely gave him his appreciation for English and American thought as well as an emphasis on philosophy’s relationship to the history of philosophy.
Pretty sure that he was skeptical of Hegel on consciousness, and tried to remedy this along Kierkegaardian line and tried to secularize Kierkegaard thiough I know people like Wahl becuse he places an important emphasis on religion and mysticism.

Other famous teachers who influenced structuralism were the Hegelian interpreters Kojeve and Hyppolite.

Wahl’s Hegel believes a religious reconciliation is what Hegel’s phenomenology is grounded in, whereas for Kojeve the focus is on “politics and the struggle for recognition were the primary theme for Kojève” from this blog post

This blog also says Wahl gets this interpretation from a guy, Wilhelm Dilthey, who coined in name The Lebensphilosophie. This group is a start of vitalism, they rejected epistemology and are seen in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Husserl, sometimes, maybe Bergson, but it’s mostly German. This tracts in terms of the direction from Wahl -> Deleuze

Apparently, Wahl really hammers in on this idea of man’s progression in “unhappy consciousness” with Christ as the literal symbol of this. The blog suggests that this works better for Wahl’s Kierkegaard.

This will become important, I think because we’ll see a shuffling of cups between Hegel and Kierkegaard in The Philosopher’s Way.



One response to “The Philosopher’s Way – Wahl”

  1. […] There is a great parapgraph here: “If we wish to view in its totality the world as it is conceived by most of the thinkers of the modem period, we shall first see God— who is called by them the infinite— at the summit, then the finitude of quantity and of the clear and distinct ideas, and then at the bottom the indefiniteness of qualities. The qualities of matter, at least the secondary ones, have become indefinite; quantity is now considered as coinciding with the finite; and as for the idea of the infinite, it has become separated into God, on the one hand, who may be called the good infinite, and, on the other hand, the bad infinite, or rather the indefiniteness of qualities.” This summarizes these changes and how they relate to fundamental movements in religion, as I noted Wahl’s emphasis in the first post. […]

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