WAHL, JEAN (1888–1974). French philosopher and influential professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. Wahl’s books and commentaries were instrumental in the introduction of existential philosophy in France in the 1930s and 1940s and in the propagation of existentialism in France, Europe, and the United States throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Jean-Paul Sartre cites Wahl’s Vers le concret (1932) (see CONCRETE, TOWARDS THE) as an important early work for himself and fellow philosophy students who, in the early 1930s, hungered for a philosophical approach to “concrete,” “lived” experience as an antidote to the complacent academic philosophies of their college professors. Wahl’s Études Kierkegardiennes (1938) was an extremely influential early study of the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and his Le Malheur de la conscience de Hegel (1929) helped introduce G. W. F. Hegel to a generation of French intellectuals, including Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Wahl’s other books include A Short History of Existentialism (1949) and Philosophies of Existence (1969).
WAITING FOR GODOT. See BECKETT, SAMUEL.
WEBER, MAX (1864–1920). Preeminent German sociologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Weber’s analysis of the bureaucratization and “rationalization of society” provided a strong model of the inauthenticity of modern life (see AUTHENTICITY AND INAUTHENTICITY). Weber had wide-ranging influence on intellectual life in Germany in the early decades of the 20th century, including influence on some existentialists.
As the center of an intellectual circle at the University of Heidelberg in the years following World War I, Weber was a formative influence on Karl Jaspers, then a lecturer in psychology. In Psychology of Worldviews (1919), Jaspers transposed Weber’s notion of “ideal types” from the sociology of religion to the field of psychology. Along with Wilhelm Dilthey, Weber was a proponent of the Verstehen (understanding) approach to the social sciences, which defended understanding the past on the basis of one’s own cultural and historical assumptions, which are taken to be necessary guides for, rather than impediments to, historical understanding. Jaspers’s General Psychopathology, which had introduced the Verstehen approach to the field of psychology, was already indebted to Weber. The notion of Verstehen is the foundation for modern hermeneutics; as such it is also of central importance for Martin Heidegger’s analysis of existence in Being and Time.
Weber defended a strict distinction between facts and values. Science and philosophy are, or ought to be, value-neutral, concerned exclusively with factual description, analysis, and explanation. In contrast, religion, art, and culture reflect particular Weltanschauungen or worldviews that express particular cultural and historical evaluations of the world; among these there is no one true view but a diversity of different perspectives across time and cultures. In Psychology of Worldviews, Jaspers endeavored to respect Weber’s fact/value distinction by describing, without evaluating, the structure of various worldviews and the psychological types associated with them.
WEIL, SIMONE (1909–1943). French philosopher, political activist, and mystic. A brilliant philosophy student, Weil was one of the few women to be admitted to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where her classmates included Raymond Aron and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. As a young philosophy teacher, she became obsessed with issues of social justice and worked tirelessly for workers’ causes, becoming an influential figure in the French Anarcho-Syndicalist movement through articles in which she challenged communist orthodoxy. Out of sympathy for workers and the suffering of the poor, she lived a life of material deprivation that was also a form of self-punishment. She served as a cook on the frontlines in the Spanish Civil War and as a Paris factory laborer, where she disguised her upper-class Jewish identity. A series of mystical experiences prompted her conversion to Catholicism around 1938; her subsequent thought combines mysticism with a type of Platonic metaphysics that recognizes goodness as an absolute, nonmaterial value. Weil’s death at age 34 from complications of anorexia has been interpreted by some as a type of martyrdom. Her writings were published posthumously after World War II, many in a series edited by Albert Camus. Weil’s assessment of the moral situation of France in 1940, The Need for Roots (1949; L’Enracinement), helped Camus “to crystallize his own views on non-violence and . . . anti-history” (Lottman, 374), which he published in The Rebel.
WELTANSCHAUUNG. See WORLDVIEW.
WHAT IS LITERATURE? See COMMITTED LITERATURE.
“WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?” (“Was ist Metaphysik?” 1929). Martin Heidegger’s inaugural public lecture on assuming the chair of philosophy at Freiburg University; the lecture was published in German as an essay the same year. Since the publication of Being and Time in 1927, Heidegger had developed a reputation in Germany as a revolutionary philosopher of great promise. “What Is Metaphysics?” helped confirm this reputation and introduced his thinking to a wider readership abroad. Heidegger’s idiosyncratic reference to “the nothing” and “nothingness” (das Nichts) stirred a good deal of controversy at the time. Some found Heidegger’s language intentionally mystifying; harsher critics, like Rudolph Carnap, accused Heidegger of speaking sheer nonsense, confusing a grammatical form of negation with a grammatical substantive. But many found Heidegger’s ideas provocative and stimulating. Jean-Paul Sartre described the 1938 French translation of Heidegger’s lecture by Henri Corbin (published in the collection Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?) as “providential,” providing him with notions of authenticity and historicity just when he needed them (WD, 182).
Heidegger’s general intention in the lecture is to defend the autonomy of philosophy and to establish its foundational role vis-à-vis the sciences, an argument outlined in Being and Time. The intent of Heidegger’s reference to “the nothing” is to recapture the original depth and significance of philosophical thought. In contrast to science, which recognizes only determinate, positive entities, philosophy maintains at least a peripheral interest in the question of “nonbeing” and “nothingness.” “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is the consummate question of metaphysics, for it places the matter of nothingness in relation to being. Yet when nothingness is approached solely through reflective thought, it appears illusory. Thus, Heidegger reasons, it must be approached through a nonreflective experience, the experience of anxiety. Heidegger rehearses his account from Being and Time. In anxiety, Heidegger maintains, the everyday world “withdraws,” and one is left with an indeterminate apprehensiveness and uneasiness, a sense of uncanniness. The source of this uneasiness, however, is no specific thing or state of affairs. Ultimately, it is an apprehension of the groundlessness of one’s own being, that one is essentially a thrown, finite, “being of possibility,” a “being-in-the-world” and not a substantial thing in any traditional sense. Anxiety reveals the “nothingness” of human beings hand in hand with the “nothingness” of the world. It allows us to be moved by the “wonder” and “strangeness” of beings themselves, and ultimately provokes us to ask “why.” In this way, Heidegger’s essay concludes with a remarkable reversal: Far from being illusory and nonexistent, the nothing lies at the root of all human inquiry, for without an apprehension of nothingness we would not be moved to inquire into why things are as they are.
WILL. See CHOICE; ETHICAL VOLUNTARISM; FREEDOM.
WILL TO POWER (Ger. Wille zur Macht). While he accepted the claim of Darwinian science that living things strive to survive and reproduce, Friedrich Nietzsche maintained that desire for self-preservation and reproduction are not ultimate causes of life but rather instances of a more fundamental drive he called the “will to power.” The will to power, Nietzsche speculated, is the drive of all living things not merely to preserve themselves but to “discharge their strength,” to enhance their conditions for existing, to extend beyond their current limits, and to impress themselves on the world in some fashion. The will to power is thus clearly a metaphysical doctrine. Under one interpretation, Nietzsche is asserting by it the general principle of vitalism: that life cannot be reduced to material or mechanical causes. On this basis, Nietzsche may be classified as a philosopher of life. But Nietzsche’s primary concern was how the will to power may be expressed in human life. It was clear to Nietzsche that human beings sometimes act out of a higher purpose than self-preservation. He contended that many apparently benign and selfless behaviors, such as the philosophical pursuit of truth, the defense of religious beliefs, and the enforcement of moral rules, were disguised expressions of power.
In the late 1930s, Martin Heidegger interpreted Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power as the culminating expression of Western metaphysics. By assimilating reality to the human act of will, Heidegger claimed, Nietzsche was simply rendering explicit the tacit anthropocentrism of the philosophical tradition, for which all things exist as objects to be known or manipulated by human beings. Heidegger’s view of philosophy as dominated by a subjective will to mastery is apparent in his Letter on Humanism.
WITTGENSTEIN, LUDWIG (1889–1951). Austrian philosopher, the preeminent analytic philosopher of the 20th century. Wittgenstein’s early work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), provided a foundation for logical positivism. His later work, published posthumously as Philosophical Investigations (1953), was the origin of “ordinary language philosophy.” Both his early and later positions have been immensely influential in Anglo–American philosophy. Wittgenstein’s use of linguistic analysis as a deflationary tool, and his association with the antimetaphysical programs of philosophers like Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, Rudolph Carnap, and Gilbert Ryle, have lent credence to the view that his thought is, or at least ought to be, opposed to existentialism. However, he was not particularly hostile to existentialism, and his viewpoint can be construed as complementary to the existentialist perspective in several respects. On at least one occasion Wittgenstein expressed sympathy with the views of Martin Heidegger and Søren Kierkegaard: “I can readily think what Heidegger means by being and anxiety. Man has the impulse to run up against the limits of language. Think, for example, of the astonishment that anything exists. . . . This running-up against Kierkegaard also recognized and even designated it in a quite similar way (as running-up against paradox). This running-up against the limits of language is ethics” (cited in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, edited by Michael Murray, 80, translation slightly altered). Wittgenstein’s appreciation for Heidegger’s “astonishment that anything exists” is less surprising when one recalls that their concerns grew, in part, out of the same soil of post-Kantian German philosophy. Hence, Wittgenstein’s belief that language represents “the limits” of the world is linked to the possibility of suggesting (or “showing”) by extra-philosophical means (e.g., by poetry or art) an apprehension of what lies beyond the world, for instance, a sense of the world in its totality. “It is not how things are in the world that it mystical, but that it exists,” Wittgenstein wrote (Tractatus, 6.44). Heidegger expressed a similar thought in “What Is Metaphysics?” referring to the feeling of wonder “that there is something rather than nothing.” In each case it should be noted that, while “the mystical” and “the nothing” defy scientific description and explanation, they are certainly not without meaning in their proper (nontheoretical) spheres. In this way, unlike the logical positivists, Wittgenstein was not critical of religious, “ethical,” or “mystical” sentiments per se but rather of philosophers’ attempts to express and justify them theoretically. In a manner not unlike existentialist philosophers, such as Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, he sought to set limits to the theoretical claims of philosophy and science in order to safeguard that which “cannot be put into words.”
WORLD. A central concept in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. Heidegger observes that the world is not the totality of objects present-at-hand occurring in space but is first and foremost a human world, the total network of human purposes and meanings that Dasein understands prereflectively in its involvements with things ready-to-hand. The world thus does not come into view as a particular entity. Rather, it is an a priori whole: It functions as the horizon for understanding particular entities. The human being exists “in” the world, not in the sense that the glass is “in” the cupboard, but in the sense of being actively engaged in it, grasping its meaning through immediate practical concern. The core of Dasein’s being is thus characterized as a being-in-the-world.
WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, THE. See SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR.
WORLDVIEW (Ger. Weltanschauung). The notion of the worldview was a product of historically sensitive 19th-century German philosophy. A worldview is the general cognitive and evaluative framework according to which groups and individuals perceive the world. One may speak, for example, of the “scientific worldview,” the “Christian worldview,” or the “artistic worldview” to designate the basic perspective from which the scientist, Christian, or artist apprehends reality. According to the hermeneutic philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, human experience is necessarily filtered through the lens of a particular worldview, and there is no perspective independent of world-views. Hence there is no absolute, ahistorical truth. Dilthey proposed examining and classifying the worldviews of different cultures and historical periods in order to gain insight into the essential life experiences (Erlebnisse) of people inhabiting these cultures and times. He understood philosophy as the philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie), an examination and appreciation of the richness and diversity of human experience across culture and history. The notion of world-view in existentialism was developed by Karl Jaspers. In Psychology of Worldviews, Jaspers identified such worldviews as nihilism, pessimism, and optimism as necessary means of understanding the world and at the same time as restrictive “shells” used to protect consciousness from experiences it cannot make sense of.
WORLDVIEWS, PSYCHOLOGY OF. See PSYCHOLOGY OF WORLDVIEWS.
WORLD WAR I (1914–1918). In certain respects, the conflict of the First World War, and especially the defeat and subsequent humiliation of Germany under the Treaty of Versailles, set the stage for the crises of the 1920s and the call for cultural renewal, among them the German philosophy of existence. After the war, Germany was in crisis economically and politically; the rise of socialism and threat of communist takeover (evidenced by failed communist uprisings throughout the 1920s), staggering inflation, and continual political instability, not to mention the millions of young men killed in the war itself, occasioned a wave of apocalyptic and messianic literature and prompted a range of radical responses from German intellectuals. “Conservative revolutionaries,” such as Carl Schmitt and Oswald Spengler, reacted to the perceived “decline” of German civilization by advocating the abandonment of democratic government; the ineffectualness of the Weimar Republic should, they believed, be replaced by a “new Germany” built on military and nationalistic values. While most German intellectuals rejected this conservative revolutionary agenda, some, like Martin Heidegger, sympathized with the call for German renewal in an atmosphere of world-historical crisis. For Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, German academic philosophy in the 1920s seemed abstract and inadequate, buried in the past and out of touch with present concerns. The philosophy of existence they developed sought to overcome these inadequacies and to attend directly to concrete problems of human life. Inspired by the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, and, in Heidegger’s case, by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, each man approached philosophy not merely as a positing of true theories but as a manner of awakening his audience to the possibilities of authentic existence. For Jaspers, this entailed exploring “limit situations” such as guilt, death, and suffering, in which the individual is forced to face the contradictory nature of the finite human perspective. Martin Heidegger, in turn, called attention to the role of anxiety and resolute decision. For both, a properly “existentialized” philosophy could itself play a role in the renewal of German culture. See also HEIDEGGER AND NAZISM.
WORLD WAR II (1939–1945). The Second World War was transformative for existentialism, especially in France. For Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the experience of the war shifted philosophical concerns from an individual to a collective register and brought into focus ethical issues such as collective responsibility and guilt, the reality of political violence, the power of history, and the impotence of isolated individual action. The task of assimilating these issues into a philosophical perspective preoccupied most French existentialists throughout the 1950s and in effect coincided with the decline of existentialism in France. For Beauvoir and Sartre as well as, initially, Merleau-Ponty, Marxism provided the only viable framework for accomplishing this task. After 1945, for Camus, Marxism as embodied in Soviet communism represented a collective terror to be combated. In all events, the necessity of confronting issues raised by the war prompted each thinker to reorder his or her philosophical priorities, shifting focus from problems of individual autonomy and authenticity to social, political, and ethical questions.
Life under the German occupation, rather than the experience of combat, bombardment, or deportation, was the most concrete aspect of the war for French existentialists. Beauvoir, Camus, and Sartre each reported that during the four years of the occupation they learned the meaning of “solidarity,” the moral interdependence of individuals within society. This was reflected in postwar writings, such as Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, Camus’s The Rebel, and Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which directly addressed problems of social injustice and political repression. German existentialists responded to World War II in a somewhat different manner. With the exception of Karl Jaspers’s The Question of German Guilt (1946), which addressed the issue of collective responsibility for the war, generally the reaction was more oblique. In his first postwar publication, Letter on Humanism (1947), Martin Heidegger repudiated Sartre’s existentialism as a type of metaphysical subjectivism that misconstrues the human agent as the source of being rather than “the shepherd of being.” He avoided passing judgment on the events of the war; instead, his postwar philosophy focused on a global “forgetting of being” and technological domination of the earth that transcended national boundaries. For both Jaspers and Heidegger, World War II marked the end of their preoccupation with the philosophy of existence. Heidegger explicitly distanced himself from existentialist interpretations of Being and Time and announced the bankruptcy of philosophy, turning instead to poetry and what he called “meditative thinking.” In his postwar writings Jaspers developed more explicitly theological concerns and pursued interests in world philosophy, though he did not repudiate his earlier positions.
WRIGHT, RICHARD (1908–1960). African American novelist, writer, and poet. Having worked for the Communist Party in the 1930s, Wright changed his views about the Soviet Union in 1944 but nonetheless was blacklisted after World War II. To pursue his career and to avoid the racism he continually experienced in the United States, Wright moved to Paris in 1946, where he spent the rest of his life. There he befriended Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. For Sartre, Wright’s novels, such as Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), which addressed issues of social injustice and racism through the prism of Wright’s personal experience, were outstanding examples of committed literature. Wright’s novel The Outsiders (1953) was a self-conscious experiment in existentialist fiction modeled loosely on Camus’s novel The Stranger.