Relation To Western Philosophy
Study and contemplation of Seder Hishtalshelus is central to the Intellectual-Hasidism school of Habad. Some speculate that the recent Hasidic explanations of Seder Hishtalshelus may have been influenced by certain principles in Western Philosophy. Various dichotomies mentioned in philosophy are strikingly similar to those mentioned in late Hasidic texts: Form/Matter, Sense/Feeling, Initial Cognition/Semiotic Cognition/Semiotic Transition. Furthermore, the prose of the Rebbe Rashab is almost identical to that of G.W.F. Hegel.
Others counter that the dichotomies meantioned in Hasidic texts originate in sources predating Western Philosophy. Proponents of Hasidic philosophy, counter that since Intellectual-Hasidut is an essential wisdom that is higher than, and includes all other wisdoms it would necessarily make reference to all other forms of wisdom, whether Western or otherwise. They would argue that such similarities are not proof of influence of Western philosophy, but rather are evidence that Hasidic philosophy touches upon, unites, and enlightens every other wisdom, whether it be Torah or secular.
The website and books of Sanford Drob bring the Seder Hishtalshelut theosophical scheme of Lurianic Kabbalah into dialogue with Modern and Postmodern Philosophy and Psychology. In our age when Western Philosophy deconstructs the possibility of metaphysics, he sees the Lurianic scheme as an essence-myth that transcends and incorporates secular disciplines, allowing it to re-open the possibilities of philosophy. This process both enriches the secular disciplines, while giving intellectual insights into the Lurianic myth through revealing its facets in human life. This dialogue includes Hegelian dialectics and its application in Marxism, Freud, Jung and Deconstructionism, as well as ancient systems of thought.
Read more about this topic: Seder Hishtalshelus
Famous quotes containing the words relation to, relation, western and/or philosophy:
“The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious.” One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“There is undoubtedly something religious about it: everyone believes that they are special, that they are chosen, that they have a special relation with fate. Here is the test: you turn over card after card to see in which way that is true. If you can defy the odds, you may be saved. And when you are cleaned out, the last penny gone, you are enlightened at last, free perhaps, exhilarated like an ascetic by the falling away of the material world.”
—Andrei Codrescu (b. 1947)
“In everyone’s youthful dreams, philosophy is still vaguely but inseparably, and with singular truth, associated with the East, nor do after years discover its local habitation in the Western world. In comparison with the philosophers of the East, we may say that modern Europe has yet given birth to none.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.”
—W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875)