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November 13, 2005
In contrast to Deleuze's conception of philosophy as the creation of new concepts stands Hegel's understanding of philosophy as a 'thinking-over' of the content given in pre-philosophical experience--in feeling, intuition, desire and willing--- of say ethical life. For Hegel, all experience involves thinking, and thinking pervades all our activities.
In our pre-philosophical modes of experience thinking is active, but it remains implicit, submerged in an immediate form. It is in philosophy that this thinking becomes explicit: a translaton and interpretation of this implicit thinking into explicit thoughts and concepts.
As it is the comprehension of the present and the actual philosophy avoids fleeing the actual world to seek a beyond. The development that is traced in terms of these concepts is a conceptual one and so it does not acquiesce to the actual world or whatever exists in history. It is concerned with what is substantial (essentialities, or what makes a thing what it is) in things, processes and relations.
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What happens--what is actually experienced--to make pre-philosophical, implicit modes explicit? Philosophy always arrives late, for Hegel, and always responds to the same crisis: What are we supposed to think now that we can't ignore the failure of our concepts to fit our experience? New concepts created ahistorically are, as Hegel would say, shot from a pistol. Dialectical history is anathema for Deleuze.