Jean Wahl Quotes on Knowledge
Jean Wahl (1888–1974), the French philosopher whose The Pluralist Philosophies of England and America (1920), Toward the Concrete (1932), and Human Existence and Transcendence (1944) supplied early-twentieth-century French thought with one of its most influential introductions to both Anglophone pragmatism and Anglo-Hegelian idealism, played a central role in the transmission of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Whitehead into the French philosophical conversation. The framework defends a concrete, experiential epistemology against the abstractions of system-philosophy, and Wahl's long tenure at the Sorbonne and at the Collège Philosophique he co-founded made him one of the principal institutional bridges between the Anglo-American and continental traditions.
Quotes
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Attributed to Jean Wahl:
“Philosophy must remain in contact with the concrete, however far it ventures.”
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Attributed to Jean Wahl:
“Hegel's spirit only lives where it is read against itself.”
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“L'imagination ( Imagination: A Psychological Critique ) (1936)”
Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom . -
“What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?”
Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)" preface, Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Nègre et Malgache (1948) -
“Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)" preface, Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Nègre et Malgache (1948)”
What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes? -
“Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)”
Every age has its own poetry ; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.