Poetry and Metaphysics

In this foundational article from 1939, Wahl elucidates several fundamental connections between metaphysics and poetry, and demonstrates how various French, German, and English language poets convey profound metaphysical ideas. Wahl shows how poetry is able to join opposites, without fully reconciling them, in such a way that allows for both transcendence and a return to immanence. This is, however, not unlike metaphysics as Wahl understands it. He accordingly concludes with the idea that “the core of poetry will always be metaphysics, and it is quite possible that the core of metaphysics is, equally, always poetry.”

Subjectivity and Transcendence

Featuring replies and letters by Raymond Aron, Nikolai Berdyaev, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, Gabriel Marcel, and many others, Wahl’s 1937 “Subjectivity and Transcendence” should be included among the most important debates in twentieth-century European philosophy. It is essential for understanding the secularization of Kierkegaard, and it provided a crucial forum in which to discuss and shape the future of existentialism. While revealing Jaspers’s and Heidegger’s debt to Kierkegaard, Wahl at the same time worries that any attempt to provide a philosophy of the insights that stem from Kierkegaard’s life would threaten either to fall into abstraction or to harbor implicit theological presuppositions. He also sets the stage for dialogue about the nature of transcendence by developing the concepts of “transascendence” and “transdescendence.” This chapter concludes with a previously unpublished letter Wahl wrote to Heidegger in which he provides a more detailed response to Heidegger’s contribution to the debate than the one given in “Subjectivity and Transcendence.”

The Problem of Choice

First published in 1934 in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale and later republished with minor revisions in Études kierkegaardiennes, this extended discussion of Karl Jaspers’s three-volume Philosophie (1932) was among the first to address Jaspers’s work in France. While ranging widely over Jaspers’s three volumes, this essay is also strangely personal, addressing those topics in Jaspers’s work that most matter to Wahl: the question of choice, being in a situation, the limited, fragmented, and tragic character of existence. Wahl makes a point of drawing a distinction, one not always recognized, between philosophers of existence like Jaspers and Heidegger and existential philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. While not always agreeing with Jaspers, Wahl nevertheless recognizes that Jaspers’s thought is “situated in a place where some of the most eternal and most real philosophical problems are located.”

Heidegger and Kierkegaard

First published in 1932/1933, Wahl’s article laid the groundwork for the anthropological, humanist reading of Heidegger by showing how Heidegger’s philosophy must be seen as an attempt to ontologize and secularize Kierkegaard’s more religiously-tinged thought. At the same time, and thanks precisely to Heidegger’s philosophy, it revealed that Kierkegaard was a serious philosophical thinker in his own right. Wahl’s essay also stands out for being at once a succinct, admirable overview of Heidegger’s early philosophy and a penetrating critique of issues still debated by Heidegger scholars today. Finally, in characteristic style, we see Wahl bringing thinkers into dialogue over the most fundamental issues. In this essay alone, there are more than just passing remarks on Nietzsche, Jaspers, Bergson, and Hegel.

Hegel and Kierkegaard

First presented at the third Hegel Congress in 1933, Wahl here explores the relations between Hegel and Kierkegaard, showing both their opposition and what they share in the midst of the dissimilarities that remain. From here, Wahl moves on to follow the study of the Kierkegaard-Hegel opposition in the existential philosophy of present-day Germany, paying particular attention to Heidegger and Jaspers.

Preface to Toward the Concrete

First published in 1932, Vers le concret(“Toward the Concrete”) served as something of a manifesto for a new approach to philosophy in France, one that turned away from idealism and toward the questions that would engage phenomenology and existentialism. The Preface draws out the themes that Wahl sees uniting the three figures discussed in the book’s three chapters: William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gabriel Marcel, all the while showing the proximity of these three thinkers to the work of Heidegger. About this work, Jean-Paul Sartre would later write: “What interested us, however, was real men with their labors and their troubles. We cried out for a philosophy which would account for everything, and we did not perceive that it existed already and that it was precisely this philosophy which provoked in us this demand. At that time one book enjoyed a great success among us—Jean Wahl’s Toward the Concrete. … the work pleased us, for it embarrassed idealism by discovering in the universe paradoxes, ambiguities, conflicts, still unresolved.”

Existence, Experience, and Transcendence

This chapter offers an overview of Jean Wahl’s life, career, works, and influence on developments in twentieth-century French philosophy. Specific attention is paid to his introduction of Hegel and Kierkegaard into France, as well as his work on Nietzsche and Heidegger. Also discussed is his influence on Levinas and Deleuze, his relations with Bataille and Sartre, and his poetry and discussions of art and literature.

Commentary on a Passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

In this, the third chapter from the work that began the twentieth-century Hegel renaissance in France, Wahl’s 1929 Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, he relates the chapter on “the Unhappy Consciousness” to earlier and later chapters of the Phenomenology (“Master and Slave,” “Stoicism and Scepticism,” “Culture,” “Revealed Religion,” “Absolute Knowing”) as well as Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of history. Wahl’s was the first major French study of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), marking a turn away from Hegel’s Science of Logic to the affective and experiential basis of Hegel’s dialectical method.

Experience and Transcendence; or, An Ontological Journey

In this mature writing, Wahl looks back on his career and offers a succinct account of his philosophical and poetic journey. It not only touches on many of his philosophical, poetic, and artistic influences—Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, James, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Plato, Whitehead, Claudel, Novalis, and Valéry, Cézanne and Van Gogh—but also but brings them together in such a way as to present his own unique concerns with a radical empiricism, with relativity, negativity, and facticity, with the concrete, with surpassing dichotomies, with “the silences of the dialectic,” with transcending transcendence, and especially with the preeminence of poetry. Along the way, Wahl demonstrates how poetry is crucial to his personal philosophical quest by interspersing his wide-ranging discussions with several poems of his own.

Order and Disorder in Nietzsche’s Thought

In July 1964, a major five-day conference on Friedrich Nietzsche took place at the Royaumont Abbey just north of Paris. Organized by Gilles Deleuze, with input from Jean Wahl, Deleuze invited presentations from both younger philosophers like Michel Foucault and Gianni Vattimo, as well as from distinguished senior philosophers, including Jean Wahl, Jean Beaufret, Karl Löwith, and Gabriel Marcel. Wahl’s presentation characteristically focused on Nietzsche as an irreducibly contradictory thinker in whom conflicting states coexist in a tension without resolution, in which order is imposed even as chaos is affirmed. In his talk and in the discussion which follows, one gets a good sense of how Wahl approached Nietzsche’s thought and how Nietzsche’s thought was a fundamental resource for Wahl throughout his career.