Transcendence and the Concrete

Selected Writings

Jean Wahl, Alan D. Schrift, Ian Alexander Moore, Alan D. Schrift, Ian Alexander Moore

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780823273027, 9780823273010
• eBook ISBN: 9780823273034
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

Jean Wahl (1888–1974), once considered by the likes of Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gabriel Marcel to be among the greatest French philosophers, has today nearly been forgotten outside France. Yet his influence on French philosophical thought can hardly be overestimated. Levinas wrote that "during over a half century of teaching and research, [Wahl] was the life force of the academic, extra-academic, and even, to a degree anti-academic philosophy necessary to a great culture." And Deleuze, for his part, commented that "Apart from Sartre, who remained caught none the less in the trap of the verb to be, the most important philosopher in France was Jean Wahl."Besides engaging with the likes of Bataille, Bergson, Deleuze, Derrida, Levinas, Maritain, and Sartre, Wahl also played a significant role, in some cases almost singlehandedly, in introducing French philosophy to movements like existentialism, and American pragmatism and literature, and thinkers like Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers, and Heidegger. Yet Wahl was also an original philosopher and poet in his own right. This volume of selections from Wahl's philosophical writings makes a selection of his most important work available to the English-speaking philosophical community for the first time.Jean Wahl was Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1936 to 1967, save during World War II, which he spent in the United States, having escaped from the Drancy internment camp. His books to appear in English include The Pluralist Philosophies of England and America (Open Court, 1925), The Philosopher's Way (Oxford UP, 1948), A Short History of Existentialism (Philosophical Library, 1949), and Philosophies of Existence (Schocken, 1969).

1

Existence, Experience, and Transcendence

An Introduction to Jean Wahl

IAN ALEXANDER MOORE AND ALAN D. SCHRIFT

There should be no permanent split between academic philosophy and existentialism. Such a split, if it were possible, would leave existentialism without a content and academic philosophy without real life.

—Jean Wahl

Jean Wahl, once considered by the likes of Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze to be among the greatest philosophers in France, and by Emmanuel Levinas to be “the life force of the academic, extra-academic, and even, to a degree, anti-academic philosophy necessary to a great culture,”1 has today nearly been forgotten outside France. Yet his influence on French thought can hardly be overestimated. As professor at the Sorbonne for over three decades, president of the Société Française de Philosophie (1960–74), editor of the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (1950–74), and founder and director of the Collège Philosophique, Wahl was in dialogue with some of the most prominent and well-known French philosophers and intellectuals of the twentieth century, including Bataille, Henri Bergson, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Butor, Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Édouard Glissant, Jean Hyppolite, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain, Jacques Lacan, Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone Weil, impacting several of them greatly. Wahl, who has been called “the most influential French interpreter of contemporary philosophy,”2 also played a significant role, in some cases almost singlehandedly, in introducing French philosophy to movements such as phenomenology, existentialism, American pragmatism and literature, and British empiricism. And Wahl was an original philosopher and poet in his own right. He was, along with Gabriel Marcel, among the first to make the case that philosophy must look to the real, to the actual rather than the ideal, and attend to the concrete data of human existence. It was his focus on existence that made it possible for him to put forward a novel account of transcendence that avoided the assumption that transcendence must take us out of this world into some otherworldly domain. Instead, Wahl understood transcendence to be itself a fundamental component of what it means to exist as a human being. It was his focus on existence and transcendence that guided his interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel and Søren Kierkegaard as well as his encounters with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, and while a sensitive and insightful reader of the work of others, his own philosophical voice comes through clearly in all of his writings, as the selections we have chosen for this volume will show. After providing a biographical sketch of Jean Wahl (Section I), we will examine his influence on some of the most important French philosophers of the twentieth century (Section II), his introduction of philosophical movements and figures into France, Great Britain, and the United States (Section III), and his own original philosophical and poetic approaches to transcendence and the concrete (Section IV).

I

Jean André Wahl was born on May 25, 1888, into a secular Jewish family in Marseille, France.3 The family relocated to Paris, where Wahl studied at the Lycée Janson de Sailly, where his father, Edmond, was a professor of English, occupying the post once held by Stéphane Mallarmé. Wahl did one year of khâgne at Lycée Louis-le-Grand (1906–07) before entering the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied from 1907 to 1910. In 1910 he passed the agrégation (the competitive examination for recruiting teachers) at the top of his class, followed by his longtime friend Gabriel Marcel. He received a three-year scholarship from the Thiers Foundation and taught at secondary schools in Saint-Quentin, Nantes, Tours, and Le Mans. In 1920, Wahl earned his doctorat ès lettres under the direction of Henri Bergson with the submission of a principal thesis on Les philosophies pluralistes d’Angleterre et d’Amérique (The Pluralist Philosophies of England and America) and a thèse complémentaire on “Le rôle de l’idée de l’instant chez Descartes” (The role of the idea of the moment in the philosophy of Descartes).

Wahl taught in the Faculty of Letters at the Universities of Besançon, Nancy (1927–29) and Lyon (1929–36) before being called to join the faculty in philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he taught the history of philosophy (his initial appointment was in the history of ancient philosophy), assuming a professor’s chair in 1936. During the German invasion of 1940—in fact, one day before the Germans entered Paris on June 14—Wahl “was whisked out of the city by three of his students, all Chinese,” and fled to Bayonne in the south of France, where his parents had already taken refuge.4 When Wahl learned that the Sorbonne would reopen for the school year, he returned to Paris in September, only to be forced to retire in December as a result of the first Vichy Statute on Jews of October 3, 1940, which excluded Jews from many professions, including teaching.5 Nevertheless, from November until May 1941 Wahl met regularly with a group of fifteen students from the École Normale Supérieure in his hotel room on rue des Beaux-Arts. In fact, on the very day the Gestapo seized the area, Wahl was reading Heidegger and Friedrich Hölderlin for a small circle of students,6 and he is reported to have joked with them that “If the Gestapo comes, it will not hurt to say that we are studying Heidegger. The Nazis at one time thought highly of him.”7

In July 1941, perhaps because of his criticism of the collaborationist turn of La Nouvelle Revue Française,8 for which he had formerly written, Wahl was arrested by the Gestapo, interrogated, and tortured at La Santé prison, where he was held for thirty-six days. Although conditions at the prison were difficult, he was allowed to keep the English edition of Shakespeare his brother had given him; he read three plays a day and translated some of the sonnets into French, and although refused access to a pencil, he managed to write several poems by means of scratching on packaging paper with a needle.9 From La Santé, Wahl was transferred to the notorious Drancy internment camp. While treatment of those held at Drancy by their French guards was, in some ways, more brutal than treatment by the Germans at La Santé, Drancy did not prohibit those interned from having pencils, thus allowing Wahl to write just under one hundred poems.10 In addition, there was a certain amount of freedom to move about and congregate, thereby allowing Wahl at one point to deliver a lecture on Bergson to three hundred men.11

How Wahl eventually got out of Drancy and then out of occupied France involved a series of fortuitous events and more than a little good luck. In the United States, the Rockefeller Foundation, which had set up a fund to assist “deposed scholars” in 1933, established an Emergency Program for European Scholars in 1940 that placed Wahl’s name on a list of one hundred important European scholars to be assisted in leaving Europe because their lives were deemed to be threatened by the Nazis.12 A first step in this process was an appointment in the United States, and Wahl learned of his appointment to the faculty of the New School for Social Research while still in Drancy through a French woman who served as a head nurse and happened to be the friend of a friend of one of Wahl’s colleagues at the Sorbonne. During a serious outbreak of dysentery at Drancy, the fear that too many of the guards might succumb to the outbreak led to the decision to release some eight hundred of the most ill prisoners. A French doctor who was aware of Wahl’s offer from the New School managed to get him on the list of those to be released, and Jean Wahl left Drancy sixty-four days after his initial arrival.13

What happened next is recounted by Elizabeth Alden Green:

In spite of the fact that his name appeared on two lists of German enemies to be shot [Basso reports that Theodor Dannecker, a protégé of Eichmann and head of the Department of Jewish Affairs in Paris, had put his name on a list of public enemies to be shot on sight] M. Wahl stayed in Paris [after his release from Drancy] for two weeks before attempting the dash across the border to unoccupied France.14 Only the two last days, he slept outside his ordinary hotel.… He boarded a train in Paris without molestation. Getting off at a small village, he made a succession of trips by car with strangers to remote houses, according to a prearranged plan. The actual crossing entailed risk because the Germans had been tightening up their border supervision. After an anxious night’s delay, a man came with an empty butcher cart. M. Wahl, covered with the same kind of cloth that wrapped the sides of meat, rode a half mile toward the border in the back of the cart. The unexpected presence of Germans at the chosen crossing point forced M. Wahl and his guide to abandon the cart and dash across the open fields for nearly two miles. On the other side another car picked up M. Wahl and took him to safety.15

Safety here was Wahl’s brother Paul’s house in Mâcon, just over the border in the French Free Zone. Eventually, Wahl was able to join his friend Rachel Bespaloff16 and her family in Marseilles, and six months after he had left Paris, in June 1942, Wahl and Bespaloff left for Casablanca, where they spent a week before boarding “a ship from Lisbon which docked in Baltimore July 31 with nearly 600 Jewish refugees.”17 It was the last refugee ship to leave France, and it arriv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Epigraph
• 1. Existence, Experience, and Transcendence: An Introduction to Jean Wahl
• 2. Preface to Toward the Concrete
• 3. Commentary on a Passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
• 4. Hegel and Kierkegaard
• 5. Heidegger and Kierkegaard: An Investigation into the Original Elements of Heidegger’s Philosophy
• 6. The Problem of Choice: Existence and Transcendence in Jaspers’s Philosophy
• 7. Subjectivity and Transcendence
• 8. Nietzsche and the Death of God: A Note on Jaspers’s Nietzsche
• 9. Poetry and Metaphysics
• 10. Order and Disorder in Nietzsche’s Thought
• 11. Experience and Transcendence; or, An Ontological Journey
• Acknowledgments
• A Bibliography of Works by Jean Wahl
• Index of Names
• Series Page