Human Existence and Transcendence

HUMAN EXISTENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE

THRESHOLDS IN PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

Jeffrey Bloechl and Kevin Hart, series editors

Philosophy is provoked and enriched by the claims of faith in a revealed God. Theology is stimulated by its contact with the philosophy that proposes to investigate the full range of human experience. At the threshold where they meet, there inevitably arises a discipline of reciprocal interrogation and the promise of mutual enhancement. The works in this series contribute to that discipline and that promise.

HUMAN EXISTENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE

JEAN WAHL

TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY WILLIAM C. HACKETT WITH JEFFREY HANSON

FOREWORD BY KEVIN HART

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

www.undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

English Language Edition Copyright © 2016 by the University of Notre Dame

Translated by William C. Hackett from Jean Wahl, Existence Humaine et Transcendance, published by Éditions de la Baconnière – Neuchâtel,

June 6, 1944. © Éditions de la Baconnière.

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wahl, Jean André, 1888-1974, author.

Title: Human existence and transcendence / Jean Wahl ; translated and edited by William C. Hackett, with Jeffrey Hanson ; foreword by Kevin Hart.

Other titles: Existence humaine et transcendence. English

Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. | Series: Thresholds in philosophy and theology | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016032983 (print) | LCCN 2016034178 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268101060 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 026810106X (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780268101084 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268101091 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Transcendence (Philosophy) | Ontology.

Classification: LCC BD362 .W3313 2016 (print) | LCC BD362 (ebook) | DDC 111—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032983

ISBN 9780268101091

∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected].

Les circonstances ont empêché l’auteur de revoir les épreuves

du présent ouvrage. L’éditeur s’excuse donc des erreurs qui

pourraient ne pas avoir été corrigées et des initiatives qu’il a

dû prendre sans l’agrément de l’auteur.

Circumstances prevented the author from reviewing the proofs

of the present work. The publisher thereby apologizes for

mistakes that may not have been corrected and initiatives that

had to be undertaken without the agreement of the author.

[Editorial apology affixed to the beginning of the original French text, published June 1944]

CONTENTS

Foreword

Kevin Hart

Introduction: Jean Wahl, A Human Existence and Transcendence(s)

William C. Hackett

— HUMAN EXISTENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE —

Preface

On Existence

On the Idea of Transcendence

Subjectivity and Transcendence

On the Idea of Being

On the Absolute

On Space and Time

On Descartes

Poetry and Metaphysics

Magic and Romanticism: Notes on Novalis and Blake

Novalis and the Principle of Contradiction

From Wahl’s Famous Lecture (Meeting of the Société française de philosophie, December 4, 1937)

Introductory Note and Dramatis Personae of December 4, 1937

William C. Hackett

Discussion

Letters

Translated by Jeffrey Hanson

Appendix 1. Selected List of Philosophers, Artists, and Poets in Wahl’s Text

Appendix 2. Books by Jean Wahl in English

FOREWORD

Jean Wahl’s Human Existence and Transcendence is a very important yet almost completely forgotten work in the history of twentieth-century French philosophy. It arose from a lecture given in 1937 and was expanded into a short book in the troubled years that followed. Apart from its intrinsic interest as a discussion of being, the absolute, and transcendence, the work is valuable insofar as it became a focal point for a great many European intellectuals. Their responses to Wahl’s thoughts, especially on transcendence, at once clarify many issues to do with existentialism as well as hint how it was to be transformed by a later thinker such as Emmanuel Levinas (whom we see here as a young man in full flush of enthusiasm for Heidegger).

Is transcendence exclusively a theological notion, or can it be put to philosophical use? This is Wahl’s animating question, and the question that excited or upset those who heard his lecture and the others who responded to it by mail. Wahl answers his own question: transcendence can indeed be lifted from the matrix of theology, reset as a concept, and then used to clarify the human situation. Of course, he was not the first or the only person to move in this direction. Heidegger had already rethought transcendence in Sein und Zeit (1927), having brooded on the concept’s roots in the medieval tradition of the transcendentals: being, beauty, goodness, truth, and unity. Such things do not themselves settle into the Aristotelian categories but are found in all of them; they cross (trans) from one category to another. Centuries later in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787) Kant redirected this tradition, distinguishing between the transcendental and the transcendent. The former give conditions of possibility for knowledge; the latter exceed all possible knowledge. So Kant gives only a negative sense of transcendence. It is Heidegger who gives it a positive sense, which is human Dasein’s openness to pass from beings to being. This is fundamental-ontological transcendence, and it is this radical understanding of the concept that Levinas wishes to impress on Wahl in his letter to him after the lecture had been given.

In his letter Levinas points out that in rethinking transcendence Heidegger breaks decisively with theology. Here theology is regarded as limited by ontic concerns; one desires to pass from this world to another world above or beyond it, though this second world doubtless resembles ours in many ways (hell, purgatory, and heaven as evoked in Dante’s Commedia, for example). Wahl is not entirely at ease with Levinas’s response to his lecture, and he could well point out that his rethinking of transcendence as transascendence also overcomes a naïve theology: one transcends without term; there is no fall back into the immanence of a higher place. He also could remind Levinas of transcendence’s other dimension, transdescendence, in which one is taken without term down into the depths. In later years Levinas will gladly learn from Wahl: Totalité et infini (1961) could not have been conceived without the transascendence of the other person, and much that Levinas fears is perhaps contained in the thought of transdescendence.¹ If transascendence is coordinate with the holy (and hence the ethical), its negative counterpart converges with the sacred.² Wahl himself cites D. H. Lawrence—he may well have The Plumed Serpent (1926) in mind—as a witness to the transdescendent.

Not that Wahl’s rethinking of transcendence is limited to the uses to which Levinas finally put it. His distinction illuminates a whole tendency of modern European thought, the quest to explain phenomena by way of what preconditions them, whether that be by way of preexistent constitution (Fink), the neutral (Blanchot), or la différance (Derrida). Perhaps one could extend the explanatory power of transdescendence further back into the history of philosophy, from the critical philosophy to structuralism, but let us not try to press too hard on it. Already, with Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida, it has done a job of work, as has its correlative idea, transcendence, which also quickens all three in their understanding of ethics. The work of transascendence is not yet over, and ironically it may well be the theologian’s task, rather than the philosopher’s, to continue it. For despite the power of various caricatures, in which Heidegger and Levinas both indulged themselves, Christian theology has never been committed to transcendence in the limited sense of passing from one world to another. The radical rethinking of God as infinite, as proposed by Saint Gregory of Nyssa in his argument with Eunomius, yields a massive elaboration of the Pauline figure in Philippians 3:13 of reaching forward to what is before him (δὲ ἔμπροσθεν ἐπεκτεινόμενος). For Gregory, the Christian life is continual transcendence of self into the abundant life of God. In this life, we do not believe in God so much as believe ourselves into God. And so it will be throughout eternity, though no longer in the mode of belief. One fruit of Wahl’s famous lecture may well be to return the Christian to the most powerful contemporary advocate of Nicene orthodoxy and the boldest of the Cappadocian theologians. For Gregory’s insistence on the metaphysical infinity of the divine shored up not only the divinity of Christ, which Eunomius had called into question, but also allowed for a better theological grasp of God as triune and stressed the importance of the apophatic strain in theology.

Let us return to Wahl. He was a considerable figure in midcentury French intellectual life, and indeed in Franco-American intellectual life. He was fluent in English, and lived for some years in the United States, setting up the discussions among writers and intellectuals known as Pontigny-en-Amérique. In that context he became acquainted with Wallace Stevens. In September 1942 Alfred A. Knopf published the great poet’s Parts of a World, and then, a month later, Cummington Press produced a limited edition of a memorable work in that collection, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction. Wahl wrote to Stevens’s friend Henry Church after reading Notes and told him of the pleasure he had gained from reading it. Stevens later said to Church, "To give pleasure to an intelligent man, by this sort of thing, is as much as one can expect; and certainly I am most content, in the French sense of that word, to have pleased Jean Wahl."³ More, Stevens appreciated Wahl’s insight that in order to articulate a supreme fiction one must first strip away all other fictions.⁴ It is pleasant to imagine Wahl, who was a professor at the Sorbonne (albeit not from 1942 to 1945, when he was mostly at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts), reading some lines that come almost at the end of that magnificent poem:

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.

We shall return at twilight from the lecture

Pleased that the irrational is rational.⁵

Those who went home after Wahl’s famous lecture might not have been convinced that the irrational is rational, which in any case was hardly what the lecturer wanted to show, but they were doubtless moved by the prospect of a style of transcendence that was entirely appropriate to human life as it is lived in the streets of Paris, South Hadley, and Hartford, Connecticut.

Wahl had significant, if subterranean, influences on generations of French and American people. He founded the Collège philosophique in Paris in 1945, notable for many events, not the least of which was a paper given on March 4, 1963, by Jacques Derrida which upset his former teacher Michel Foucault and led to a rift between them, the effects of which are still being felt in some quarters of the academy.⁶ It was Wahl who indirectly taught American professors and their students about French existentialism and, more generally, about the philosophy of existence. Two generations of Americans read Sartre and others through lenses ground by Wahl. If his A Short History of Existentialism (1949) and Philosophies of Existence (1968) have largely served their purposes, a new generation of Americans with different concerns perhaps still needs to read Wahl’s more enduring works, including Études kierkegaardiennes (1938), Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (1929), and of course Existence humaine et transcendance (1944).

We now have that last title available in English. So at last Anglophone readers can see an important text in the history of the vicissitudes of transcendence in the twentieth century, both in relation to philosophy and to theology. The book itself is an unusual one; in some ways, as Chris Hackett says in his introduction, it recalls Pascal’s Pensées. All the more reason, then, for it to have a long historical introduction. The editor nicely leads the reader into Wahl’s world, and indicates, with all due lightness, moments when our world unknowingly intersects with it and other moments when we could profit from knowing it better than we do. He and Jeffrey Hanson have done a fine job of rendering a host of European voices into English. This is an event that allows us to savor a precious moment in French intellectual life and to ponder its many consequences.

Kevin Hart

University of Virginia

NOTES

1. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 35n.

2. See Levinas, Desacralization and Disenchantment, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. and intro. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 136–60.

3. Wallace Stevens to Henry Church, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 430.

4. See Stevens, Letters, 431.

5. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 351.

6. See Jacques Derrida, Cogito and the History of Madness, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 31–63.

Introduction

Jean Wahl, A Human Existence and Transcendence(s)

The philosophy of existence is a philosophy of transcendence.

On the evening of Saturday, December 4, 1937, Jean Wahl (1888–1974), professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, spoke to the Société française de philosophie. His topic: Subjectivité et transcendance.¹ The transcript of the meeting published in the society’s Bulletin shows how historically remarkable this event was: it brought together a virtual who’s who of the Parisian intellectual scene and beyond. Following Wahl’s paper, major contributions to the discussion were offered by Léon Brunschvicg, Gabriel Marcel, René Berthelot, Nicolai Berdyaev (in exile from Russia), Siegfried Marck (in exile from Nazi Germany), and others. Letters of intervention were submitted on behalf of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Karl Jaspers, Karl Löwith, Rachel Bespaloff, Denis de Rougemont, Raymond Aron, and Georges Bastide, and others, with responses from Wahl. This was an event that Emmanuel Levinas would immortalize simply as Wahl’s famous lecture.² Looking back from the vantage afforded by seventy-five years, one is tempted not only to affirm Levinas’s judgment but to add to it by saying that this lecture was, in fact, a watershed. It galvanized and refigured perhaps the key debate of the Parisian intellectual scene of his era, namely the destiny of the notion of transcendence within the ever-broadening and self-purifying conception of immanence developing in the wake of phenomenology, especially that of Heidegger. In the lecture, Wahl expressed this key locus of reflection in the form of a question: Can there be a secular concept of transcendence that allows the thinking of the concrete existence of human being without an extrinsic appeal to an abstract divine, that is, without theology and without even the secularization of theological concepts? Or would such a thinking, if it were possible, shorn of every last bit of the theological, empty of every nostalgia, and deaf to every echo of the religious, leave us merely with a general theory of existence, dehistoricized and dehumanized, a meaningless philosophy? The paper Wahl delivered that evening constitutes the first part of the third chapter of the book that is in your hands, and it doubtlessly serves as a point of orientation for this book in its entirety. The transcript of the rigorous discussion and the letters were likewise included in this book when it originally appeared, and they remain in this edition.

Regardless of the answer anyone would desire to give (or begin to give) to Wahl’s question, what matters is the pause that the question requires of us and the attention it demands. In Wahl’s case it would be seriously misleading to think that he posed this question as part of some program to écraser l’infâme, to escape from or neutralize the hegemony of the religious and theological over the meaning of human existence. That is, he did not pose it (at least in the first, motivating, place) for the sake of answering it in any one particular way. Rather, he posed it precisely because it is a philosophical question, one that gives rise to thought, and one that implicitly was giving rise to the order of thinking that dominated his day. It was a question that—as a question: what does it mean to be human? Does the theological wholly determine myself as one who is capable of posing and in fact does pose this question?—fundamentally shaped Jean Wahl’s own thought. And to that degree, Jean Wahl uniquely embodied—if I can risk an impossible thesis—European intellectual culture of the mid-twentieth century from (and through) the Second World War to (and through) May 1968.

A corollary thesis: Existence humaine et transcendance embodies the thought of Jean Wahl in an exceptional if not irreplaceable way.

What have I asserted so far? (1) To reach the heart of Jean Wahl’s thought one should read the present book. (2) To understand Jean Wahl means reaching a crucial level of understanding of European thought of the last century. I have also strongly suggested: (3) to understand the philosophical thinking of the last century through Jean Wahl opens up a path for us toward understanding ourselves, its heirs.

These assertions are not offered as theses to be proved, as I have already implied. They are, however, governing convictions that shape my understanding of Wahl, and they are meant to serve you as motivations for your own entrance into his thought and world which you have initiated by picking up the present book.

It is virtually a matter of public record that Jean Wahl was one of the earliest interpreters, and doubtlessly the most important, of Kierkegaard in France.³ He was also an original thinker of no small magnitude whose influence on contemporary French philosophy could hardly be overestimated. If the former is known well enough, the latter is still barely recognized. Trained under Henri Bergson, Wahl wrote a thèse complémentaire on the notion of the temporal instant in Descartes.⁴ His thèse principale was an exhaustive study of Anglo-American philosophies of pluralism, particularly the pragmatism of William James.⁵ He likewise developed an important interpretation of Hegel, reading his later, famous works in continuity with his early religious writings and especially from the vantage of Kierkegaard’s criticisms that highlighted the role of the anxiety of the subject in Unhappy Consciousness for Hegel’s system as a whole.⁶

In this latter book the reader can begin to see how much Wahl’s own thinking develops out of an encounter with Kierkegaard. In this encounter that came to define his philosophical legacy, Wahl brought specific concerns that he articulated under the name of la philosophie de l’existence, or la philosophie existentielle: man is a problem to himself, a problem that cannot be answered except by posing the problem as an insoluble one. He poses this problem by posing the question of being, and he poses the question of being only by posing the question of himself. The perceptive reader could perhaps already intuit that it was not Kierkegaard alone, however. One could almost say that (if he is not directly on the page) Kierkegaard was behind every page that Wahl wrote, and further, Heidegger and Hegel stand there with him. Whatever Wahl’s disagreements with these philosophers (and with Hegel in particular disagreement runs deep), each one of these thinkers lived his philosophy; their thought was an example of a deep and singular articulation of metaphysical experience.

There is of course a set of standard views of Wahl’s work: first, there is the one that considers Wahl primarily as an interpreter of Kierkegaard with no lasting philosophical contribution of his own, and, further, sees his philosophy as simply an attempt to secularize Kierkegaard or appropriate him to a general existentialism. Second, there is the complementary view that sees Wahl’s significance primarily in his central, auxiliary role as an educator (in whose debt lies a generation at least of French philosophers). Both of these views are profoundly true.⁷ Wahl was in fact an early and influential mediator of the thought of Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Heidegger in French philosophy. To be fair, American philosophy—pragmatism, in the form of its most eminent representative, William James—would need to be added to this list.⁸ As the present book makes abundantly clear, Wahl ceaselessly wrestled with each one of these figures, seeking not only to understand them more and more adequately, but also—more importantly, at least in his own mind—to understand the significance of their thought, to assess and to respond to their philosophical ideas. The present book also makes plain Wahl’s still important insight regarding abundant parallels between German and French philosophy and Anglo-American philosophy (in the forms of pragmatism and process philosophy especially).

As is perhaps already made patent enough, Wahl was much more than an existentialist, and his importance should not be tied to the fate of that movement of twentieth-century French philosophy. One very well known index of this importance merits being stated at the outset. I