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Human Existence and Transcendence
William C. Hackett’s English translation of Jean Wahl’s Existence humaine et transcendence (1944) brings back to life an all-but-forgotten book that provocatively explores the philosophical concept of transcendence. Based on what Emmanuel Levinas called “Wahl’s famous lecture” from 1937, Existence humaine et transcendence captured a watershed moment of European philosophy. Included in the book are Wahl's remarkable original lecture and the debate that ensued, with significant contributions by Gabriel Marcel and Nicolai Berdyaev, as well as letters submitted on the occasion by Heidegger, Levinas, Jaspers, and other famous figures from that era. Concerned above all with the ineradicable felt value of human experience by which any philosophical thesis is measured, Wahl makes a daring clarification of the concept of transcendence and explores its repercussions through a masterly appeal to many (often surprising) places within the entire history of Western thought. Apart from its intrinsic philosophical significance as a discussion of the concepts of being, the absolute, and transcendence, Wahl's work is valuable insofar as it became a focal point for a great many other European intellectuals. Hackett has provided an annotated introduction to orient readers to this influential work of twentieth-century French philosophy and to one of its key figures.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
212 pages, Hardcover
Published December 15, 2016
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About the author
Jean Wahl
45 books14 followersFrench philosopher. Wahl was educated at the École Normale Supérieure. He was a professor at the Sorbonne from 1936 to 1967, broken by World War II. He was in the U.S. from 1942 to 1945, having been interned as a Jew at the Drancy internment camp (north-east of Paris) and then escaped.
He began his career as a follower of Henri Bergson and the American pluralist philosophers William James and George Santayana. He is known as one of those introducing Hegelian thought in France in the 1930s (his book on Hegel was published in 1929). He was also a champion in French thought of the Danish proto-existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. These enthusiasms, which became the significant books Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (1929) and Études kierkegaardiennes (1938) were controversial, in the prevailing climate of thought. However, he influenced a number of key thinkers including Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas and [Jean-Paul Sartre]. In the second issue of Acéphale, Georges Bataille's review, Jean Wahl wrote an article titled "Nietzsche and the Death of God", concerning Karl Jaspers' interpretation of this work. He became known as an anti-systematic philosopher, in favour of philosophical innovation and the concrete.
While in the USA, Wahl with Gustave Cohen and backed by the Rockefeller Foundation founded a 'university in exile', the École Libre des Hautes Études, in New York City. Later, at Mount Holyoke where he had a position, he set up the Décades de Mount Holyoke, also known as Pontigny-en-Amérique, modelled on meetings run from 1910-1939 by French philosopher Paul Desjardins (November 22, 1859 - March 13, 1940) at the site of the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy. These successfully gathered together French intellectuals in wartime exile, ostensibly studying the English language, with Americans including Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevenss and Roger Sessions. Wahl, already a published poet, made translations of poems of Stevens into French. He was also an avid reader of the Four Quartets and toyed with the idea of publishing a poetical refutation of the poem. (See, e.g., his "On Reading the Four Quartets." )
In post-war France Wahl was an important figure, as a teacher and editor of learned journals. In 1946 he founded the Collège philosophique, influential center for non-conformist intellectuals, alternative to the Sorbonne. Starting in 1950, he headed the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale.
Wahl translated the second hypothesis of the Parmenides of Plato as "Il y a de l'Un", and Jacques Lacan adopted his translation as a central point in psychoanalysis, as a sort of antecedent in the Parmenides of the analytic discourse. This is the existential sentence of psychoanalytic discourse according to Lacan, and the negative one is "Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel" — there is no such a thing as a sexual relationship.
He began his career as a follower of Henri Bergson and the American pluralist philosophers William James and George Santayana. He is known as one of those introducing Hegelian thought in France in the 1930s (his book on Hegel was published in 1929). He was also a champion in French thought of the Danish proto-existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. These enthusiasms, which became the significant books Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (1929) and Études kierkegaardiennes (1938) were controversial, in the prevailing climate of thought. However, he influenced a number of key thinkers including Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas and [Jean-Paul Sartre]. In the second issue of Acéphale, Georges Bataille's review, Jean Wahl wrote an article titled "Nietzsche and the Death of God", concerning Karl Jaspers' interpretation of this work. He became known as an anti-systematic philosopher, in favour of philosophical innovation and the concrete.
While in the USA, Wahl with Gustave Cohen and backed by the Rockefeller Foundation founded a 'university in exile', the École Libre des Hautes Études, in New York City. Later, at Mount Holyoke where he had a position, he set up the Décades de Mount Holyoke, also known as Pontigny-en-Amérique, modelled on meetings run from 1910-1939 by French philosopher Paul Desjardins (November 22, 1859 - March 13, 1940) at the site of the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy. These successfully gathered together French intellectuals in wartime exile, ostensibly studying the English language, with Americans including Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevenss and Roger Sessions. Wahl, already a published poet, made translations of poems of Stevens into French. He was also an avid reader of the Four Quartets and toyed with the idea of publishing a poetical refutation of the poem. (See, e.g., his "On Reading the Four Quartets." )
In post-war France Wahl was an important figure, as a teacher and editor of learned journals. In 1946 he founded the Collège philosophique, influential center for non-conformist intellectuals, alternative to the Sorbonne. Starting in 1950, he headed the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale.
Wahl translated the second hypothesis of the Parmenides of Plato as "Il y a de l'Un", and Jacques Lacan adopted his translation as a central point in psychoanalysis, as a sort of antecedent in the Parmenides of the analytic discourse. This is the existential sentence of psychoanalytic discourse according to Lacan, and the negative one is "Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel" — there is no such a thing as a sexual relationship.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 14, 2023
I recently read the book French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism and Jean Wahl was probably the most repeatedly mentioned philosopher featured in that book and I wanted to discover more about him. This book is the perfect book for doing that.
This book is wonderfully put together by the editor and is probably the definitive guide for understanding Wahl mostly with his own words and a detailed introduction. After having read this book, it’s easy to understand why Wahl would have been so influential within existential French thought for the middle part of the last century, but it’s not as easy to understand why he is mostly forgotten today. There’s a quote from Deleuze to the effect that most of what he knows went through Wahl, and I can see how.
Wahl says it’s not the quid it is the quis, that is, it is not the something it’s the someone. Wahl will formulate the paradox of existence with subjective versus objective, or the idea versus the real, and moreover, will chastise the existentialists for forgetting that we are alive and do exist and basically noting the existence is not a predicate, and acknowledging the closer we get to the divine the less divine we become; this is partly why Wahl appeals to his transdesendance rather than transcendence.
The being of beings as dasein (Heidegger does take center stage often in this book) is the being that matters most with the transcendence beyond the immanent and as this book mentions Heidegger uses the ecstasies of past, present, and future time and Wahl avoids allowing a God as above nature, and Wahl will say Kierkegaard is a ‘romantic Calvinist’. Wahl doesn’t mince words and meshes poetry with philosophy strives to get beyond the eternal recurrence of the same (Nietzsche also is prominent is this book). (If you read Heidegger’s latter stuff written after this book, you can see that Heidegger sneaks a God in from time-to-time and makes poetry, art, and literature as the ecstatic truth, I guess he got tired of worshipping Hitler).
There is a lot of existential thought within this book while Wahl wants to preserve choices within ourselves but can’t find the spot for our freewill by putting a perhaps onto it. In as much as Wahl leverages his thought around Kierkegaard, there are many echoes of Miguel de Unamuno’s book Tragic Sense of Life, and life’s paradox of existence (“irony is jealous of authenticity”!).
Both writers see the world heavily influenced by Kierkegaard, though for Unamuno he has a persistence of faith for insisting while not accepting the transcendent and Wahl avoids a leap of faith by sneaking in a transdesendence (his word) rather than a transcendence because the mystery is best avoided and the perhaps still could be a nature beyond the immanent but below the divine. (Calling Kierkegaard as ‘romantic Calvinist’ is exactly the right call for Wahl, and I find the phrase somewhat funny, and Wahl is right not to fully trust the existentialists).
Wahl appeals to poetry, literature, and painting (e.g., Rimbaud and Holderlin, Proust, and Rembrandt) as replacements for philosophy and as replacements for the ‘anxiety about nothing’. This book is edifying both for explaining Wahl, and the philosophy he espouses is well worth understanding though he connects a lot of thinkers but is never really straying from the biggest question of all, ‘why is there something rather than nothing’. I would say that one must have familiarity with most of the philosophers he talks about in order to fully appreciate this book.
This book is wonderfully put together by the editor and is probably the definitive guide for understanding Wahl mostly with his own words and a detailed introduction. After having read this book, it’s easy to understand why Wahl would have been so influential within existential French thought for the middle part of the last century, but it’s not as easy to understand why he is mostly forgotten today. There’s a quote from Deleuze to the effect that most of what he knows went through Wahl, and I can see how.
Wahl says it’s not the quid it is the quis, that is, it is not the something it’s the someone. Wahl will formulate the paradox of existence with subjective versus objective, or the idea versus the real, and moreover, will chastise the existentialists for forgetting that we are alive and do exist and basically noting the existence is not a predicate, and acknowledging the closer we get to the divine the less divine we become; this is partly why Wahl appeals to his transdesendance rather than transcendence.
The being of beings as dasein (Heidegger does take center stage often in this book) is the being that matters most with the transcendence beyond the immanent and as this book mentions Heidegger uses the ecstasies of past, present, and future time and Wahl avoids allowing a God as above nature, and Wahl will say Kierkegaard is a ‘romantic Calvinist’. Wahl doesn’t mince words and meshes poetry with philosophy strives to get beyond the eternal recurrence of the same (Nietzsche also is prominent is this book). (If you read Heidegger’s latter stuff written after this book, you can see that Heidegger sneaks a God in from time-to-time and makes poetry, art, and literature as the ecstatic truth, I guess he got tired of worshipping Hitler).
There is a lot of existential thought within this book while Wahl wants to preserve choices within ourselves but can’t find the spot for our freewill by putting a perhaps onto it. In as much as Wahl leverages his thought around Kierkegaard, there are many echoes of Miguel de Unamuno’s book Tragic Sense of Life, and life’s paradox of existence (“irony is jealous of authenticity”!).
Both writers see the world heavily influenced by Kierkegaard, though for Unamuno he has a persistence of faith for insisting while not accepting the transcendent and Wahl avoids a leap of faith by sneaking in a transdesendence (his word) rather than a transcendence because the mystery is best avoided and the perhaps still could be a nature beyond the immanent but below the divine. (Calling Kierkegaard as ‘romantic Calvinist’ is exactly the right call for Wahl, and I find the phrase somewhat funny, and Wahl is right not to fully trust the existentialists).
Wahl appeals to poetry, literature, and painting (e.g., Rimbaud and Holderlin, Proust, and Rembrandt) as replacements for philosophy and as replacements for the ‘anxiety about nothing’. This book is edifying both for explaining Wahl, and the philosophy he espouses is well worth understanding though he connects a lot of thinkers but is never really straying from the biggest question of all, ‘why is there something rather than nothing’. I would say that one must have familiarity with most of the philosophers he talks about in order to fully appreciate this book.
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