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 am thinking of Wahl’s influence on his friend, Emmanuel Levinas. The central idea of Totality and Infinity (1961) in fact depends on Wahl’s thinking about transcendence, which is found at the heart of the present book.⁹ There Levinas appropriates the first term of Wahl’s distinction between “transascendence” and “transdescendence” (on which more shortly), taking it to name the “metaphysical desire” for the Other that describes the logic of disproportionate alterity and the noncollapsible “distance” that (by contrast to transdescendence) it holds in place. Making explicit reference to the second chapter below (“On the Idea of Transcendence”), Levinas says with noteworthy directness: “We have drawn much inspiration from the themes evoked in that study.”¹⁰ Similarly, it may well be—and there is some indication of this in Levinas—that the second term of Wahl’s account of transcendence, transdescendence, is an important origin of his own account of subjectivity, determined by the interiority of the Other within, that is the theme of his second major philosophical work, Otherwise Than Being (1974).¹¹ If this is the case, then Levinas’s thought, in perhaps its most basic features, might be said to be first, made possible by the thought of Jean Wahl, and second, a particularly fruitful interpretation and development of it.

Existence humaine et transcendance (published in 1944) must have been written sometime between Wahl’s lecture in December 1937 and June 1942, when Wahl fled to the United States in order to preserve his life. The note attached to the front page of the book by the (Swiss) publisher, reproduced above, observes that Wahl was not able to review the proofs of the book due to “les circonstances”—the reader will generally comprehend what circumstances these were given the date of publication: Nazi Germany seized Paris in June 1940. This event and the subsequent story of the Second World War unfolded for Jean Wahl in the following way.¹²

Wahl, who had been made professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1936, was, like all Jewish teachers in Occupied France, dismissed from his post when the Sorbonne reopened in November 1940. He was brutally interrogated by the Gestapo the following year, arrested on the charge of “impertinence” (for denying, during the interrogation, that he was a “dirty Jew”), and sent to the infamous Parisian prison La Santé. He remained at La Santé for thirty-six days and was subsequently sent to the internment camp at Drancy, outside of Paris, where he remained for sixty-four days. During this time Wahl was appointed in absentia to the faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City: plans were afoot to bring him to the United States through the Refugee Scholars Fund, although there seemed to be no real hope of liberating him from his imprisonment. In the meantime dysentery ran rampant through the camp, and the French police decided to release the sickest prisoners. At the last minute, Wahl, who was not sick, was added to the list: the (French) doctor of his barrack added Wahl’s name after hearing through the head nurse (whose husband was an academic) of his appointment to the New School. Wahl walked through the gates the next morning. Three weeks later he had to make a harrowing flight to Vichy France in the South with the help of an underground network. After living and teaching in Mâcon and then Lyon, Wahl decided to move to the United States when it seemed that Germany would come to occupy all of France (which happened in late 1942). After a month in Casablanca waiting for a ship with Rachel Bespaloff, he arrived in Baltimore in July 1942, almost a year to the day that he was first arrested and sent to La Santé.

In the United States,¹³ Wahl participated in the faculties of three institutions, Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, Smith College, and the École libre des hautes études, the French-speaking university-in-exile, founded in 1942 and attached to the New School for Social Research. Wahl taught philosophy at both Mount Holyoke and the École libre, and he lectured on French literature at Smith. His main position was at Mount Holyoke, where he lived. He helped found and lead the famous Décades de Mount Holyoke (also called Pontigny-en-Amérique), a remarkable gathering of French intellectuals in exile (such as Jacques Maritain, Gustave Cohen, and Rachel Bespaloff) and American thinkers (including, famously, poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore). These meetings were modeled on the famous gatherings founded by the intellectual Paul Desjardins, the Décades de Pontigny, an annual meeting of European intellectuals at a famed Cistercian abbey in Burgundy purchased by Desjardins that ran from 1910 to 1914 and 1922 to 1939 (brought to an end by the German invasion of Poland). Wahl, whose father was a professor of English at Marseille (and in fact succeeded Mallarmé at the post), was completely at home in the English language, as is demonstrated by his many letters, English-language publications (poetry and prose), translations (including scholarly editions of English authors John Cowper Powys and Thomas Traherne and American poet Wallace Stevens), and his 1920 doctoral thesis (thèse principale), translated into English five years later as The Pluralist Philosophies of England and America.

Wahl returned to France in 1945, resumed his post at the Sorbonne, married one of his students (with whom he had three daughters, and a son who died at one month’s age), and quickly returned to the center of Parisian intellectual life (e.g., he founded the Collège philosophique, served as the president of the Société française de philosophie, and directed the Revue de métaphysique et de morale) until his death in 1974 at the age of eighty-six.¹⁴

Before proceeding to further remarks about Jean Wahl, his “famous lecture,” and this book, it is worth reminding ourselves about the state of what I have called his “orienting question” today. It hardly needs arguing that the notion of the “secularization” of concepts is a theory that itself has an important place in the history of modern thought: an invocation of the names of Karl Löwith, Carl Schmitt, and Hans Blumenberg is sufficient to show it. Ideas within—even fundamental to and defining of—intellectual domains outside of theology (philosophy, politics, sociology, etc.) have a religious and theological origin. The fact that such a thesis does not demand immediate consent with the force of a historical fact for contemporary Western self-understanding testifies precisely to its profundity and significance—if also to our most important blind spot. Yet its importance and centrality is misunderstood if it is not properly contextualized. We ought first to say that such a place afforded to the theological—as the nourishing womb that gave (gives?) birth to reason—is a defining feature of Western intellectual culture.¹⁵ More acutely and more adequately put: Western philosophy from the beginning to the present day is itself only intelligible as a “genealogy of the theological.” The implications of such a thesis are debatable; its historicity, it seems to me, is not. The embrace and negation of the theological/religious dimension in Western intellectual culture are only two integral points of dialectic within the domain named by this genealogy. Jean Wahl expresses precisely this in his Traité de métaphysique: “Through their proximity to this idea [of God] all these problems [evil, the will, freedom, personality, one and the many, the good] have often taken on a profundity that they would not have been able to have otherwise, for human thought has come to maturity within what could be called a theological context, sometimes on account of this context, sometimes against it.”¹⁶

English theologian John Milbank has recently expressed the logic and implications of his version of a thesis corollary to this broader one: “An entity called ‘philosophy’ has never … really existed in pure independence from religion or theology…. [T]he idea, or rather, the illusion, of a sheerly autonomous philosophy is twice over the historical invention of certain modes of theology itself.”¹⁷ The features of this particular thesis (as “genealogy of modernity”) are not our concern here, but rather the recognition by the thesis of the wholly modern character of a rigid division of philosophy and theology, and even the (typically unrecognized) theological origin of such a division. Regardless of that, Jean Wahl is probably rightly understood to lie somewhere within the continuum of this defining Western dialectic. I should like to say—and I think the present book is a case in point—that he would be most deeply understood, however, to embody the entire dialectic in his philosophy. Extrapolating from this assertion as a general point of orientation, let us recall a few fundamental facts.

Reference to Thales’s “first word” of philosophy is a commonplace: “All things are full of gods.”¹⁸ Aristotle represented the classical view of the philosopher’s critical continuity with mythic-ritual consciousness in his famous sentence in the opening paragraphs of the Metaphysics, “Even the lover of myth is in a sense the lover of wisdom, for myth is composed of wonders.”¹⁹ The critical nature of philosophical response to myth was itself religious, a matter of concern for the adequate representation of the divine by human thought.²⁰ Hence for the ancients philosophy was a mode of religious life, and in fact—and here lies the philosophical revolution in its most potent center in Plato—philosophy was conceived as accomplishing precisely that which the cults of the gods could only tragically emphasize as impossible: knowledge of the ultimately real and human salvation.²¹ Philosophy is itself a “religious” enterprise; not simply a “spiritual exercise,”²² but a religious one, meant to accomplish that which the religions sought. There is more.

The “religiosity” of philosophy, its peculiar piety, involves what I would call the apophatic “transfer of intelligibility” between thought thinking its object and thought thinking about itself (precisely as thinking about its object), an endless, restless dialectic of reason, most profoundly endless and most acutely restless when it turns to its most challenging and most basic task (thinking God).²³ It is well known that philosophy is born out of and continues as a “critique” of the idols generated by mythic religious experience, from antiquity to the modern period (Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, Nancy, Marion … all the same from this vantage). What is not well understood is the evidently permanent dialectic joining logos and mythos: the more primary narrative order of human culture provides the initial orientating framework of intelligibility that makes possible the birth and sustenance of conceptual rationality. The basic narratives communities (and individuals, in fact) tell provide a “pretheoretical” understanding of the total human order offering “extratheoretical” access to our fundamental transhistorical coordinates of origin and end.²⁴ At the classical origin of the Western tradition (and there are analogies with others),²⁵ philosophy is conceived as an intellectual penetration into the divinity, into that logos that gives first and final meaning to all that is, and it is just as fundamentally conceived as a life lived in accord with this logos.²⁶ When reason comes to ask what it itself is, this accomplishment of the ambition of the religious in the bios theoretikos gives an account of reason as such that receives its own intelligibility from the divine realm itself, conceived, minimally, as its origin, constant milieu, and end. Reason is all the more rational as it is all the more divine. A crucial implication of this is that any account of reason is ultimately only as good as its conception of God (and vice versa).

This vantage explains why the early Christian thinkers from the second to fifth centuries understood Christianity as the “true philosophy”: the Incarnation discloses the effulgent mystery of the God known only in a shadowy way through the world of experience reflected on by the philosophers.²⁷ In its early theoretical reflection on itself, Christianity understood itself as accomplishing the philosophical “enlightenment” anticipated by the greatest philosophers.²⁸

From here it is not hard to advance the thesis that this apophatic “transfer of intelligibility” from religious experience to rationality as such is basic to philosophical traditions from antiquity to the present. I mention two representative examples, one ancient and one contemporary. If the so-called Chaldean Oracles were, for the late Platonists from Porphyry to Damascius (and in this they were only repeating Aristotle in a new key), considered to hold the intelligible content of philosophy under mythic form,²⁹ then contemporary philosophy in France has come to realize something similar in its own unique intellectual context: for these thinkers, religious phenomena provide, by their very nature, an absolute qualification of rationality, even to the point of offering the data of revelation as paradigmatic for phenomenological intelligibility as such.³⁰ One influential instantiation of this sensibility is the strange attunement of Jacques Derrida’s “deconstruction” with the “negative theology” at the heart of traditional religious reflection developed by Jean-Luc Nancy’s ongoing Deconstruction of Christianity (2005– ).³¹ Here Nancy holds the wholly classical supposition that revelation, or at least religious rationality, contains within itself the conditions for transfiguring philosophical speculation. But he emphasizes that this comes with a cost: in the passage of transfer demanded and goaded by religion’s intelligible character it sows the seeds of its own undoing since the capturing of revelation in concepts is always only historically conditioned interpretation and therefore irreducibly tainted by all too human categories. With this, Nancy lies in direct continuity with Heidegger and in fact only acutely expresses the latter’s most fundamental presuppositions: if “God” only contaminates the thought of being (the task of human thinking for Heidegger) and vice versa, ³² then any adequately human thought of God can only be negative. God is the abyss into which every idea cast by the human mind disappears. Because every possible thought of God falls short, the most faithful human thought to God is the thought that refuses every thought of God. “To philosophize!” declares Heidegger, “and in so doing to be genuinely religious.”³³ Yet, as philosophy this genuinely religious character is not a matter of “religious ideology and fantasy.” Heidegger continues: “Philosophy in its radical, self-posing questionability, must be a-theistic as a matter of principle. Precisely on account of its basic intention, philosophy must not presume to possess or determine God. The more radical philosophy is, the more determinately is it on a path away from God; yet precisely in the radical actualization of the ‘away,’ it has its own difficult proximity to God.”³⁴ Nancy’s “deconstruction” only pushes this (Heideggerian) “difficult proximity” forward. As he says in the opening lines of Dis-Enclosure: “It is … a question of opening mere reason up to the limitlessness that constitutes its truth.”³⁵

To the side of Nancy’s project is the current phenomenological milieu in France, still fundamentally shaped by its fruitful beginning in the so-called theological turn effected in the latter half of the twentieth century by Husserl’s major French interpreters. For these thinkers, it is the transcendence of the divine appearing to a human rationality always seeking to catch up with it that precisely serves as the first and final condition for an adequate conception of human rationality itself. The “postphenomenological” viewpoint of Nancy is one with that of the theological turn inasmuch as both are self-conscious heirs of Heidegger.³⁶

The latter “phenomenological” position, however (at least under the pen of Jean-Luc Marion), considers Heidegger as a representative of the problem to be overcome, instantiating a major moment of the a priori conscription of the possible (the essence of “metaphysics”), which is based on the individual philosopher’s predilections and not what may and/or in fact does itself appear.³⁷ In a way analogous to Schelling’s critique of Hegel, Nancy likewise falls under this critique of the metaphysical inasmuch as he fails to see his “deconstruction” as a negative praeparatio evangelica, as a gateway to truly religious faith that explicates the intelligibility of the phenomenon par excellence, divine “revelation.”³⁸

This conversation between Nancy and Marion (which extends an earlier one between Derrida and Marion on the concept of the gift) concerns ultimately the equivalence of the truly religious and the truly philosophical.³⁹ It reached a critical moment in a debate held at the Institut Catholique de Paris in 2011.⁴⁰ This debate showed that what is finally at stake for phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion and “postphenomenologist” Jean-Luc Nancy alike is the unity of human rationality itself and a fundamental renewing of the Western philosophical project. In this case, it is precisely the evidential force of revelation that “saves” the unity of reason. The upshot seems to be that, at this point of origin, where revelation provides its own intelligibility and creates the conditions for human reason, these two distinct discourses, theology and philosophy, are fully identified; and that, paradoxically, this formal unity is the condition for their material distinction. This conception of the relation of reason and revelation in the primary transfer of intelligibility from revelation to reason must be conceived, paradoxically, as itself based on an original transfer from reason to revelation in which reason recognizes itself in (an always more original transfer from) revelation and discerns its inscrutable origin and endless completion.⁴¹

Stepping back from phenomenology to European philosophy more generally, countercurrents in twentieth-century political theory had already acknowledged this direction of the transfer of intelligibility as well: Carl Schmitt argued in his famous Politische Theologie (1922) that “all significant concepts of modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,”⁴² while Ernst Kantorowicz in The King’s Two Bodies (1957) extended Henri de Lubac’s “corpus mysticum” thesis (Corpus Mysticum, 1949) to show that the theological structure of the sacred body, originally demarcating the matrix of the sacramental presence of Christ in the church and Eucharist, is progressively transferred to the political domain as a metaphor to underwrite political structures at the foundation of modernity.⁴³ German philosopher Hans Blumenberg, in his massive project of “metaphorology,” observed that the philosophical questions that modern philosophy has sought to answer by conscripting the “paradigms” inherited from medieval theological reflection are themselves perennial and necessary. He argued as a consequence for the “legitimacy” of the transfer of intelligibility from sacred to secular domains at the root of modernity.⁴⁴ These acknowledgments of the paradigmatic influence of the theological and the religious on theoretical reflection outside of their realm is presently the new orthodoxy of critical theory, as summarized and advanced in the work of the literary theorist and philosopher William Franke, whose own position is not far from Nancy’s.⁴⁵

Look at how far we have come. The old orthodoxy of modern liberal theology conceived of the relation of revelation and reason, or their respective discourses, theology and philosophy, as a one-way street. Certainly since Harnack’s History of Dogma (1885–98), the historians thought that heavy traffic runs from the philosophical to theological realms. For Harnack, early Christianity was infected by an alien influence of Greek philosophy on the Jewish teaching of Jesus and the apostles. The task of the historian in his view was to separate the “pure” Gospel from this alien influence. Harnack’s view was grounded in what today has come to be seen as a questionable presupposition regarding the “essence” of Christianity (rooted in the aberrations of nineteenth-century German Protestantism rather than in what the historical texts contain to be thought), and yet Harnack was right to see the all-pervasive influence of Greco-Roman categories on Christian thought. Under the aegis of Origen’s concept of the “spoils of Egypt,” theologians have by right borrowed concepts from outside of the biblical domain in order to aid them in the expression of Christian doctrine (whether the “Neoplatonism” of the church fathers, the Aristotelianism of the late medievals, or the post-Kantian “Idealism” of Balthasar or Barth). Yet at least since H. Austryn Wolfson’s groundbreaking historical study, Philosophy of the Church Fathers (1956), it has become apparent that the influence is profoundly reciprocal.⁴⁶ According to Wolfson, the challenge of new Christian convictions about God, the world, and man refigured reason from within. More recently, David Bentley Hart, in his Atheist Delusions (2009), has argued with force that the pressure chamber of dogmatic debate in the classical era of Christian doctrine transfigured the most basic concepts of Western philosophy (substance, person, relation, etc.).⁴⁷ This fundamental revision is now, arguably, the majority view among historians.⁴⁸

What matters here is that, in either case, the transfer of intelligibility between the theological and philosophical has been seen to be a defining feature of the Western tradition.

Returning, finally, to contemporary phenomenology centered in France: this tradition in some of its main figures has likewise come to realize something strikingly similar in its own unique intellectual context: religious phenomena, in providing the greatest challenge to reason by virtue of their vertigo-inducing transcendence, also expand rationality itself by virtue of their inexhaustible intelligibility.⁴⁹ This dynamism of the deconstruction and reconstruction of rationality by religious phenomenality (and subsequently theological rationality), has led these thinkers to reflect on the relation between philosophy and theology, which are understood no longer as two distinct and self-sufficient domains, but rather as always already deeply implicated and intertwined. What is finally at stake, therefore, with Jean-François Courtine’s conception of effets en retour (countereffects),⁵⁰ Jean-Yves Lacoste’s frontière absente (missing boundary),⁵¹ Emmanuel Falque’s choc en retour (counterblow),⁵² Jean-Luc Marion’s conception of certitudes négatives (negative certainties),⁵³ is the unity of human rationality across the domains of philosophy and theology. As Jean-Luc Marion has argued, it is precisely the evidential force of revelation that saves the unity of reason and offers coherence to the philosophical response to the mystery of existence.⁵⁴ After the “end of metaphysics” (the failure of classical abstract principles to command philosophical and religious attention) that has culminated in the “death of God” (the normatively uncompelling nature of traditional religious belief), contemporary French phenomenologists are inscribed in a program that refigures the traditional “logos doctrine” of Christian faith opened particularly by the letters of Saint Paul and the Gospel of John: that the logos tou theou (Word of God) incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth is the very logos, or principle of intelligibility, studied and sought, if only fragmentarily, by the philosophers.

On the face of it, Jean Wahl stands closer to Nancy, Franke, or Heidegger than to Marion, Milbank, or Kierkegaard. Yet regardless of how we would wish to answer that question (which depends on our personal metaphysical allegiances, as it were), all the evidence suggests that in Wahl’s case the answer is not so straightforward. Wahl’s impassioned discussion with Gabriel Marcel after his paper “Subjectivity and Transcendence” is worth referring to inasmuch as it can give us a point of reference out of the present volume.⁵⁵ Marcel, in taking issue with Wahl on the possibility of an a-theological, nonreligious concept of transcendence, suggests that the true “peril” involved in linking philosophy of existence too directly with theology is not for the reason that the theological tends to inform and hence pollute the “philosophical” description of human existence. Precisely because, he says, theological ideas “did not fall from heaven” but are generated out of human experience, they are, in fact, always of major philosophical significance. Rather, the true peril results when the philosopher is tied (whether implicitly or explicitly, negatively or positively) to an “overly determined theology.” This is where the “act of betrayal” of the philosophical enterprise precisely lies, according to Marcel. In other words, when the philosopher thinks he knows what theology says, and develops his philosophy as a response to that theology, he runs the risk of building a counterfeit philosophy on top of a vapid theology, a theology that he already rejects but to which his philosophy remains invisibly bound. The problem, Marcel continues, occurs therefore when the philosopher stands on “ideological terrain,” not only accepting a predetermined, reductive conception of theology without sufficient interrogation into it, for which (Marcel seems to suggest here) the theological is a mere “idea,” problematically insufficient, not worthy of what believers conceive when they think of and worship God; but also desiring to throw that flat picture to the wind for the sake of another picture that only gratifies one’s own short-sighted agenda.⁵⁶ Hence he says rhetorically in response to Wahl’s proposal of a critical distance from theology for the sake of a possible secular transcendence: “It seems to me that you are using the words ‘God’ and ‘theology’ in a determined hyper-Christian sense…. [But] I do not think that the idea of transcendence stretched to the limit is secularizable.” Perhaps, therefore, a philosophy intrinsic to the religious enterprise could be imagined as more philosophical for that reason; only an (onto-theological) account of “God” set in opposition to the world, as if a mere being within it (a conceptual idolatry in the religious sense; an “overly determined” theology), would require a philosophy at odds with and in “competition” with the theological for the meaning of human being. For Marcel this means at the very least that any possible account of transcendence (which, however multiplied, still always points to an ever-greater unity beyond) is always “religious” inasmuch as our concept of transcendence names the unnameable, the divine mystery that is always a possibility.

On my reading, Marcel and Wahl are not as far removed from one another as would seem first to be the case.⁵⁷

Raising the question of the possibility of an alterity that is without religious appeal, “not necessarily the God of the religions nor even of their heterodoxies,” as Wahl desires to do, is nevertheless wholly distinct from actually carving out a space for a purely “secular” transcendence. Wahl desired to propose a new or renewed groundless ground of transcendence in the “immediacy of feeling” which would redefine the ecstatic structure of human existence in its passage out of itself into the ever-receding Unknown where the differentiation of transascendence and transdescendence is finally erased. This account, which he did intend to precede the religious expression of human existence, is not, however, “secular,” not an attempt to speak the human in its essential finitude apart from the contrast with divine transcendence, as it is in Heidegger.⁵⁸ On the contrary, as Emmanuel Levinas points out, for Wahl “transcendence [is] prior to being”: the ecstatic character of human existence that makes humans the site of “metaphysical experience” is only flattened and made abstract by the “isolating” distinction between “Being” and “subjectivity.”⁵⁹ “Consciousness and thought spring up, then, in an event they neither exhaust nor encompass, and which brings them about …”⁶⁰ As we will see, Wahl calls this intersection of transcendence and subjectivity the “metaphysical reality” in which we “bathe”: it is as much “religious” as “secular,” and in fact to understand the human being we must do away with that distinction in order that we may discern the fact that we are marked by a sudden and permanent alterity that defines us but ever eludes us. Wahl was not averse to the question of God, but he was always concerned to keep it a question, and even a most pressing one.

Elsewhere in his writings Wahl makes it much clearer that he does not avow a simplistic opposition between finite “names” (of religions, philosophies) and the Unknown mystery in which we are immersed (“names” to be shed like husks once the mystical union is achieved), but rather always feels compelled to keep the names and absolute alterity in perpetual play. On the one hand, he says in a (significantly undated) letter:

Yes, I am a bearer of a Jewish tradition—as much as the Hellenic; and Judaism, both by itself and through the New Testament—which is Jewish and Hellenic—influences all Western thought.

A community of suffering unites me to other Jews….

I am a non-unified [non-unifié] Jew; I do not care to be standardized [unifié], except under certain aspects—perhaps the highest ones …⁶¹

This “suffering” is inseparably, and infinitely problematically, both the suffering of the Jews at the hands of others (reaching its unthinkable nadir in Wahl’s own lifetime), and the “suffering” of election, of “bearing” the Name of God. These “highest” aspects that unify Wahl with his Jewish tradition are lived by him in a non-“standardized” way, precisely through the practice of philosophy, in the double-tradition that defines the Western inheritance. Hence, in response to the question “Do you believe in God?” in a late interview on Swiss radio, Wahl answers: “I have to hesitate before responding. I believe that this question cannot be answered without following what I call … the philosopher’s way. I can only answer this question by affirming God, negating him, reaffirming him, and finally by re-negating and always being unable to decide [et en s’interrogeant toujours].”⁶² Wahl here alludes to the threefold “way” of classical “negative theology” that critiques or “negates” the original affirmations of faith out of a fidelity to the transcendence of what is originally given (the data of revelation), thereby returning through critique to a hyperaffirmation beyond negation, a critical appropriation of the original data of faith.⁶³ But he adds a fourth moment, a hyperphilosophical return to the negation by passing through the excess of hyperaffirmation of the classical position. Being en s’interrogeant toujours—“always wondering,” “always questioning oneself,” “always unable to decide”—is the path of the philosopher.

On the other hand, his 1945 poem “Invocation” attests to a lived faith, albeit simultaneously removed from and problematically joined to the faith of the community of believers:

O Jésus, non pas toi

Qu’ils invoquent, mais toi que je ressens ce soir,

Toi brûlure, présent infini, juge et frère.

Travaille en moi et doucement manie mon âme.⁶⁴

O Jesus, not you

Whom they invoke, but you whom I feel tonight,

You burning, immeasurably here, judge and brother.

Work in me and sweetly touch my soul.

Wahl’s resolute determination to inhabit an impossible religious space of indecision between Catholicism and Judaism is an attempt to be faithful to himself and, paradoxically, to God.⁶⁵ In a poem entitled “Atheism,” only recently published, Wahl expresses his position thus:

L’athée est bien plus étroitement uni à Dieu

Par son refus où Dieu s’affirme lui-même

Que le croyant par sa croyance.⁶⁶

The atheist is even more directly united to God

By his refusal in which God affirms himself

Than the believer through his belief.

Similarly he says in a late interview published in the same article: “I am not absolutely sure that I do not believe at all, since I [already] said that we bathe in a metaphysical reality. Consequently I am not … a complete non-believer, as some would think after some things that I have said. There is a tension within me between unbelief and belief.”⁶⁷ This enactment of his own “difficult proximity” to God (so far removed from what may only be called, in its light, the pseudodifficult “proximity” of Heidegger’s easy atheism) Wahl lives philosophically by raising questions, by “wondering” or “always asking/interrogating himself” (s’interrogeant toujours), and by reaching (as it were) the essential existential situation of humanity where the limits of concepts and theses are revealed at the same time as their permanence and necessity. A resolute remaining in the space of indecision is, for Wahl, the only adequate decision for the Ineffable in which he finds himself always already “bathed.”

On my reading Wahl desires simply to express the human “situation” in its radical limitations that press into us at every point but which we always seek to overcome—precisely by undoing the “names” we afford to the Unknown. Wahl, in other words, only ever wanted to give the question its proper due. If that was not philosophy’s task, it was his particular philosophical task. In the case of transcendence, we do not know that we know even if we do actually know … Human beings are not divine; we cannot determine the possible by fiat. This impossibility of closing down the possible is a basic feature of ourselves, the paradoxical intersection of “subjectivity and transcendence.”

The conjunction of these last two words may be the key to Wahl’s thought. For him, they are a crucial conceptual component of any philosophy adequate to the human situation. A few remarks are therefore in order about his famous paper, “Subjectivity and Transcendence,” mentioned above. These remarks will also serve as a first point of orientation to the book.

Wahl begins this paper by explaining that for Kierkegaard, “subjectivity,” or rather, the “tension” that creates subjectivity, is created by the presence of “transcendence.” According to Wahl, the way of thinking that marks the Danish philosopher (as much as Heidegger and Jaspers as well) is explicated precisely in the new conjunction of these two ideas. The traditional conception of the subject as “soul,” that is, as locus of the presence of a divine transcendence, is completely rethought by Kierkegaard: here we do not have an “expansion” or “overflow” of excess in the relation of subjects human and divine, but rather an encounter, a “force of negation,” an “opposition of individualities” that are “irreducible” one to the other. This awareness of subjectivity (and its problematic) is a defining feature of modern thought, and makes Kierkegaard an irreplaceable figure in Wahl’s understanding. Kierkegaardian “anxiety” is completely distinct from any traditional approach to transcendence—marked, classically in Plotinus, by the confluence of the soul and the divine—in that for him the soul is not only self-enclosed as an absolute individuality, but further, is self-enclosed as an individuality with freedom. In the Études kierkegaardiennes, Wahl observes that the disrupting presence of God’s absolute transcendence is the most constitutive element of human subjectivity, the whole tension of which is marked by the problem of how to convert this Other, who menaces and challenges one’s subjectivity to its foundations, into the very condition for one’s own beatitude.⁶⁸ Here the traditional metaphysical problematic of the relation of the infinite and the finite, in their absolute distinction yet necessary relation, is radicalized by Kierkegaard through the insertion of the human will, in all its infinity, into the heart of the problematic. This insertion gives rise to what Wahl calls the “presence of evil,” the fundamental ambiguity of this presence of the Infinite which raises anxiety to the second power, doubling the tension intrinsic to anxiety inherent to the Kierkegaardian account of subjectivity. This ambiguity or uncertainty raises the possibility that Wahl identifies of kinds of transcendence: transcendence is not (necessarily) singular, is not exhaustively identified with the divinity alone. For Kierkegaard at least these modalities of transcendence still remain traditional, being either relation with the divine or with the diabolical (though each—and this is what makes Kierkegaard “modern”—is defined by the movement of the human will in accomplishing itself as good or evil). Here emerges Wahl’s famous distinction between “transascendence” and “transdescendence.” In its light he makes manifest the entire problematic of the modern concept of transcendence: namely, that the erasure of the term or goal or goad of the movement of transcendence calls into question the very tension within the act that defines it.⁶⁹

We reach the heart of Wahl’s remarks in his presentation of what he calls Kierkegaard’s “description” of the “phenomenon of belief” (167) which immediately follows. As Wahl puts it, it is the presence of an unassimilable transcendence that constitutes subjectivity, and further, an absolute other impossibly rendered temporal, or in other words, to risk Heideggerian language, an ontological reality, the ontological reality, become an ontic participant in history, and in the midst of this contingency constituting the ontological structure of human subjectivity as belief. The very conditions of finite experience are crossed, contradicted, and reordered by a (the?) religious event. This relation, marked by the “absolute protest against immanence” (to use the relevant phrase of Kierkegaard’s) is the locus of subjectivity’s break with rationality (as defined by the ontological distinction) inasmuch as in our desire for beatitude or salvation we sense or feel that our relation with the historical (more precisely: the eternal made historical) becomes the condition for our salvation. Here, in the famously termed “crucifixion of reason,” we take leave of rational control of our existence and destiny. This absolute other in its eternity is indefinable and unreachable; it comes into existence, becomes real, through our “subjective” relation with it in history. Now this relation with something external, the absolute in history, is paradoxically revealed in and through the absolutely immanent relation within the individual and defines subjectivity itself: it is only our “absolute passion,” the depth of our subjective interiority, that manifests the reality of this relation with the most objective of all realities, the Absolute, and further, it is the quality of this passion as absolute—that is, the new depth of our subjectivity—that alone “proves” or gives pressing evidence for the truth or objectivity of belief (namely, that we are in a real relation with the Absolute itself). The paradox of such subjective “objectivity” (or objective “subjectivity”) is an explication of the nature of this paradoxical Presence. As Wahl says, “The intensity of this relation is such that, in the same way that we enter into it, it gives to us this other term, which in a sense can never be given” (167). In this way there is an intensification of mutual reciprocity between subjectivity and objectivity, between immanence and transcendence: the deeper, the more absolute subjectivity becomes, the more the objectivity of the relation is manifest. Only the greatest subjectivity, belief, can reveal the Objectivity par excellence, the Absolute.

The “phenomenon of belief” is therefore marked by exit toward the other and passionate interiority at once. In the last pages of Traité de métaphysique (1953), Wahl summarizes his sprawling text by an analysis of the concept of transcendence in the history of philosophy that develops what he already adumbrates here in 1937. There Wahl risks a simple categorization and observes that the tradition of philosophy has discerned three types of transcendence, corresponding to three phases of its history: (1) ancient, (2) modern, and (3) contemporary (let us say “postmodern” or “hypermodern” avant la lettre).

First, there is transcendence conceived as the Absolute, the separated logos of Heraclitus, the Good beyond being of Plato, the One of Plotinus, the nameless one beyond the one of Damascius, and so forth. Second, there is transcendence as transcendental, evacuated of content, rooted in Kant’s separation of transcendence into two kinds: first, the transcendent prohibited to human access; and then, transcendence appropriate to our finite state, understood as conditions for the intelligibility of immanence, otherwise said, that which must be in order to make sense of our experience. Third, for Wahl writing in 1953, there is the intensification of this transcendental turn in “intentional” transcendence, understood as the structural elaboration of immanence itself, as movement toward alterity, as found in Husserl’s elaboration of consciousness correlated to the world and objects in the world, and then expanded to being and beings in the world by Heidegger.

Wahl discerns two dangers revealed by this little history of transcendence, one that negates immanence or concrete existence for the sake of the transcendent—a danger of classical accounts—and one that, on the other hand, negates the term or intentional object of transcendence—a danger of modern/contemporary accounts. The upshot of his discussion there, under primarily Kierkegaardian inspiration (as we have seen), argues that any adequate account of transcendence, understood as a permanent dimension of human existence, must recognize a constitutive tension that cannot be reduced but at the expense of transcendence itself. The concept, he says, contains an essential “ambiguity,” for it must mean at once the “ever unattainable terme of our thought and effort of thought” and also “this very effort itself towards the terme” (645). That is to say, transcendence is indelibly marked by a fundamental duality that is permanent and irresolvable: the duality of, on the one hand, transcendence as transcending, as the ecstatic structure of temporal movement, that is, as finitude; and, on the other hand, transcendence as terme (term, terminus, limit, or end), the ungraspable reality beyond the movement that inspires it, without which the movement collapses into itself and is no longer transcend-ing. Heidegger, after Husserl and more fundamentally after Kant, reduced transcendence to the singular aspect of transcending, full stop: human existence, on this account, is an act of opening, a sheer ecstatic structure of “movement toward” the possible. The all-determining master concept of the “ontological difference,” if I could add an elaboration to Wahl’s thoughts here, makes transcendence as terme a priori impossible; on this account, transcendence is and can only ever be an aspect of immanence conceived as a groundless finitude without a contrast to the infinite or eternal that could underwrite its own meaningfulness. Does this, however, not close down the questioning before it could open itself sufficiently—ruling the question of God or at least its relevance out of play in advance, and making God’s meaningful appearing such as attested to or affirmed in religion a priori impossible, thereby legislating that the distinction it recognizes and spreads univocally over the totality of the given is most fundamental and the only one possible?

Yet the fundamental problem “posed by the idea of transcendence itself,” says Wahl, is “to know whether we can maintain both senses of the term”—which means explicitly in the context of post-Heideggerian thought, “to know if the movement of transcendence implies the idea of a terminus [terme] that is irreducible to us and which transcends us” (646). The question is rephrased by Wahl as an alternative between two options, almost classically articulated: “Is that which is conceived or felt by us as transcendent independent of our minds or is it a property of the human mind itself, projecting beyond itself what we could call its highest point?” (646). Post-Heideggerian thought is marked by the second alternative, in Wahl’s terms, of “transcending transcendence and returning to immanence” (646).⁷⁰ On Wahl’s account, making this decision determinative of our philosophy fails to heed the most important aspect of philosophical inquiry, the permanent insolubility of its most basic problems: “If one chooses too explicitly,” he says, “he risks destroying the value [of transcendence] and that which composes the very root of the problem” (646). In other words, to put it in Kantian language and perhaps too harshly, this is the point where one passes over from philosopher to dogmatician. By contrast to Heidegger, Wahl sought to “retain transcendence” in the return to immanence.

With this critique, Jean Wahl, at least I would argue, anticipates an important dimension of contemporary Continental thought, which has recently been quite daringly called by an Anglo-Saxon observer, “transgressive realism”: that our contact with reality at its most real dissolves our preconceived categories and gives itself on its own terms, that truth as novelty is not only possible, though understood as such only ex post facto, but is in fact the most valuable and even paradigmatic kind of truth, defining our human experience.⁷¹ The fundamental realities determinative of human experience and hence philosophical questioning—the face of the other, the idol, the icon, the flesh, the event, to use Jean-Luc Marion’s well-known conceptual apparatus, and also divine revelation, freedom, life, love, evil, and so forth—exceed the horizon of transcending-immanence and give more than what it, on its own terms, allows, thereby exposing that its own conditions are not found in itself and opening from there onto more essential terrain. The question raised here concerns precisely the terme of the movement of transcending, that which gives it to itself in its movement: can there be two distinct manners of understanding this idea? One, the Heideggerian mode, proposes that the terme cannot be given, can only at best be perpetually delayed (as in Derrida), and its nonappearing, its absence and impossibility the means of the absolute expansion of the movement of immanence itself; the other, a Kierkegaardian mode, says that the terme is given, but given as nongiven, and yet nongiven because excessively given, that is, given paradoxically, given as perpetually escaping the grasp of the movement of transcending within immanence, founding it, and given thereby all the more radically.

Jean Wahl stands, and attempts to remain, at the fork of this path.

Transcendence, in sum, is here marked by two elements: (1) the terme of transcendence, the presence of the other, and the condition for the movement of immanence itself; and (2) the movement of transcendence interior to subjectivity or passion, which is the condition for the manifestation of the “absolute” within the conditions of historical finitude. We could almost say, as a principle: so much transcendence, so much finitude, and vice versa. The transcendent in itself is irresolvably joined to the transcendent in immanence, but this irresolvability requires the noncollapsibility of the difference between them, since, if it collapses, one of the essential elements of transcendence is lost. And it is this irresolvability, finally, that forms one-half of the problematic of human existence named by transcendence. The other half is articulated by the corollary distinction between transascendence and transdescendence.

This paper, “Subjectivity and Transcendence,” shows that for Wahl, the phenomenon of belief proposes itself as an intensification of the concept of transcendence, and, indeed, the locus of the phenomenon of transcendence par excellence, for its terminus or object and its movement are absolute: its kind of transcendence proposes itself as a model or archetype for every phenomenon of transcendence in experience; the phenomenon of belief gives us the most transcendent of transcendences. In this way it is tempting to suggest that Wahl anticipates the basic feature of the so-called theological turn in French phenomenology since for the latter, likewise, religious phenomena give reason a paradigmatic image of itself.⁷² I mentioned at the beginning the fact that Wahl rightly and profoundly understood philosophy engaged in a dialectic interior to the religious context, since, whether we like it or not, the idea of God is the most dramatically intensifying concept for philosophical reflection.⁷³ In the present context of Kierkegaard’s singular significance, Wahl demonstrates how central Kierkegaard’s thought is for this very breakthrough: “The most important aspect of the thought of Kierkegaard … is that the religious consciousness is … our own subjectivity, intensified to its highest point by its relation with the Absolute Other.”⁷⁴ Here Wahl stands with Kierkegaard, on the other side of Heidegger, we could almost say, waiting at the fork in the road for the proponents of the “theological turn” to discover Heidegger’s metaphysical infidelity (through an a priori restriction of the possible) to the basic task of phenomenology: “to let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself,” and nothing else.⁷⁵

According to Wahl it is the Kierkegaardian concept of anxiety, intrinsic to belief, which furthers this essential religio-philosophical antinomy. Kierkegaardian anguish is a product of the presence of the divine other whose “impossible” ontic presence, as an appearance in history in the repetition of faith, is ontologically constitutive of the believer’s subjectivity itself. This much is clear. Yet the anxiety is compounded by the fact that this presence that somehow exceeds the ontico-ontological difference is a tension that is not collapsible within the historical horizon within which faith has its raison d’être. The presence of the Infinite pushes the tension that marks finitude to deeper limits. The further intensification of anxiety arrives from out of this paradoxical presence: the terme or object of transcendence, the condition for the movement of transcending, is through and through ambiguous. Faith is therefore only possible by virtue of doubt, by the absence of the object of faith, an absence that paradoxically registers its presence, precisely within the horizon of faith. Belief subsists therefore in uncertainty, inseparable from unbelief. “Belief,” says Wahl, “is never sure of being in the presence of God” (“Subjectivité et transcendance,” 167). It is the ambiguity of the terme of transcendence—not, by contrast to Heidegger, its mere absence or nothingness—which defines the anxiety of finitude. The anxiety about something that is greater than our distinction between something and nothing, between beings and Being, is greater than one that rests secure in the inviolability of the ontological difference, which is merely an anxiety before nothing.

Levinas’s letter on the occasion of the meeting highlights what is at stake here. Here he accuses Wahl of misunderstanding the radicality of Heidegger’s distinction between Being and beings, and the “overcoming” of religion that it implies: For Heidegger, “every distinction,” he says, “between a [religious] beyond and a here-below is ontic and posterior to the ontological problematic,” and hence, for him “the fundamental transcendence is accomplished … not in the passage from one being to another [even to a divine being], but rather from a being to Being itself.”⁷⁶ In this so-called overcoming of onto-theology, Heidegger circumscribes the religious question as a whole. The question of Being is absolute; our relation to a specific being, even the highest Being, is secondary. Wahl’s comments that follow Levinas’s letter are interesting, inasmuch as they arise from an intuition that Wahl described earlier by articulating the irreducibly complex character of transcendence. Here Wahl makes the observation that Heidegger’s conception of the ontological difference is purely formal, “determined,” he says, “by the problem of the conditions of possibility of existence,” which “does not pose its questions any more authentically or any more satisfyingly than does the criticism of reason.”⁷⁷ If the problem of Being is an existential problem alone, the humanity of existence is drained of all its color.⁷⁸ Heidegger himself, Wahl observes, sees the existentielle, the ontic domain, as the necessary starting point for ontological questions (193–94). This necessary interlacing of the two domains in the phenomenon of belief demands a conception of transcendence that reflects it, which Heidegger fails to give by denying the phenomenological pertinence of the theological data manifest within the horizon of belief: in this case transcendence may or rather must be thought extrametaphysically.

In his response to Levinas, Wahl is cataloguing another false path to our conceptions of transcendence and its implications for subjectivity. There is the typical path to which Heidegger’s proposal is only a response. False transcendence, on this score, is one that negates the reality of immanence and concrete existence, as in some crude Platonism for which the world of experience is only illusory, an epiphenomenon at best of the real world beyond experience. A Neoplatonic absorption of the transcending into the divine stands here as well. Here the terme or goal of transcendence swallows up the movement of transcendence. But the response is just as fundamental a failure. According to the other type of false transcendence, epitomized by Nietzsche or Heidegger (and we could add Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy here), the terme is negated for the sake of the pure intelligibility of the transcending itself, which purports to give us a “purer” conception of finitude. For Heidegger, there can be no object or thing or person toward which our ecstatic self-transcending touches or sees or that the opening of Being discloses. The latter reduction of transcendence to the bare movement of immanence protests the former’s objectification of that toward which transcendence moves. Wahl finds in Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of faith a way both to recognize the ambiguity of the terme of transcendence as ineffable and to acknowledge the self-surpassing character of human existence, and indeed, to intensify both sides by refusing to separate them.⁷⁹

It is this perspective that provokes me to suggest that Wahl anticipates another major feature of late twentieth-century French thought: Derrida’s “quasi-transcendental” concept of “différance” (which would arguably be a mode of transdescendence), since différance could properly be understood as a refusal to allow transcendence as terme to be made absolute—it is an a priori decision, that Derrida (like Wahl) takes as the essence of human experience, to refuse to collapse transcendence as terme and as movement. Here, however, Wahl’s anticipation already harbors implicitly the capacity to step through the hegemonic stricture of Derridean différance that refuses through infinite deferral the possibility of the gift (of the absolute terme), inasmuch as such a quasi transcendental only recasts the ontological difference of Heidegger in another key. Like the latter master-concept of Heidegger, this master-concept of Derrida circumscribes the field of possible experience and knowledge, not out of a fidelity to the intelligibility of what gives itself in experience, but out of a preconception of what is human, a preconception that itself requires justification in the light of experience. Wahl (again, after Kierkegaard) can only say that such an interrogation into the “humanity of man” comes most powerfully in light of the concept of God.⁸⁰ We can see this (proto) “overcoming” of deconstruction most clearly in Wahl’s systematic presentation in the Traité. There Wahl points out in a fuller manner than he does in “Subjectivity and Transcendence” the way in which Kierkegaard’s paradoxical coincidence of subjectivity and objectivity (for which the deepening of subjectivity coincides with the crystallization of the object) in the phenomenology of religious belief expresses and renews the very heart of philosophical experience as it centers on God. Pointing toward the double interpretation of divine Unity in Plato’s Parmenides (on which Wahl wrote an important commentary)⁸¹—the One is both beyond all and ineffable, not even “being” or “one” are finally “proper” names for it, and the One is the totality, and, again, not one, but identical with the multiple—Wahl points out that the entire task of “philosophical effort” is to unite these two hypotheses while retaining their opposition at the same time, that irreducibility of two unities, the first, of transcendence, and the second, of immanence: “to think simultaneously that the One is beyond all things and within all things.”⁸² Here, in other words, at the beating heart of the philosophical tradition is the highest expression of the religious attitude. Russian philosopher Sergius Bulgakov expressed this with the same fundamental force in his early masterpiece, Unfading Light: “That which is immanent cannot be at the same time transcendent and to that extent is not transcendent. That which is transcendent cannot be immanent to consciousness and remains beyond the limits for it. If we take these concepts in static immobility … the fundamental concept of religion, the idea of Divinity, is in general only a patent misunderstanding … burning ice, a round square, bitter honey. But rational impossibility and contradiction are no guarantee of real impossibility.”⁸³ Wahl says, therefore, that “that these two conceptions of unity, one immanent and the other transcendent, are not opposed, for when we think God, we join them together, thinking at the same time that God is beyond everything, and that we live, move and have our being in him.”⁸⁴

Holding together the rationally impossible antinomy of the equal primordiality of the absolute as wholly ineffable and other and as eminently present to all things—more immanent to me than I am to myself, as Saint Augustine once put it—is required for an approach to the living God, the God of gods, the most divine God, the most nonidolatrous concept of God, and hence the most philosophical of philosophical ideas. Higher than possibility, separated from it, stands personality, a reality that, in its freedom, I can never comprehend. Wahl stands before this idea as a signpost at a crossroads, like Kierkegaard—for whom the true believer is always only becoming a believer, for whom doubt is intrinsic to faith—as expressed in the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, the author of the Philosophical Fragments and their Concluding Unscientific Postscript: the philosopher who stands on the threshold of faith and lives faith authentically precisely as one who knows that he cannot find himself explicitly to have or possess it.

Wahl also acknowledges the centrality of these two basic philosophical concepts to other metaphysical ideas, and he again states the deepening crystallization that occurs in the context of the concept of God: “We have already encountered these two ideas [of transcendence and immanence] in our previous studies [that constitute the Traité] pertaining to things, persons, values, and being and existence. Here, in the notion of God, these two ideas simultaneously in conflict and union are met once more, and at their highest point.”⁸⁵

From this vantage we can venture a response to the common critique regarding Wahl’s questionable “secularization” of Kierkegaard, an attempted detachment of the structure of Kierkegaard’s ideas from their concrete instantiation in Kierkegaard’s nonphilosophy and faith, and this, for the sake of an existentialism that prizes the concrete. Wahl points out, as we saw, that it is of the essence of faith to doubt. The ambivalence regarding the object of religious faith, that which makes it faith, and not comprehending knowledge, the absence of the object, or at least, its paradoxical kind of “ambiguous” presence that is manifest as absence, itself gives rise to the possibility, therefore, of the plurality of transcendences. Am I in the presence of an angel or demon, God or only my desire for God, the depths of nature or a transcendent being, and so forth?⁸⁶ The secularization, as it were, of Kierkegaard, for Wahl only arises in this context; it is therefore not meant to rip out of Kierkegaard’s specific context the concrete character of Christian faith for the sake of a general existentialism, suffering then from the danger that Adorno specified, namely, that abstracting Kierkegaard’s existentialism from Christian theology leaves his thought open to abuse for political ends,⁸⁷ or that danger specified by Shestov or Fondane, namely, that separating Kierkegaard from his specific religious domain makes him a “theorist” rather than an “existentialist” concerned with acts of belief.⁸⁸ Rather, it is meant to intensify the problematic inherent within Kierkegaard’s notion of transcendence in the first place, to maximize its contradictions. For Wahl this inhabitation of the contradiction is expressive of the concrete problematic that he lived.⁸⁹ He asked the question, a question, paradoxically as religious and authentic for his own concrete situation as Kierkegaard’s Christian question, without, like Kierkegaard, offering an “answer.”⁹⁰ Recalling his response to Levinas’s letter in the proceedings of the meeting, Wahl first makes what seems to be a hasty distinction between religion and existence. He says, “For me, it is of the nature of religion to be a response. And it is of the nature of existence first to be a question.”⁹¹ This could be read as reifying a secularized concept of existence set over against the religious. But the difference between religion and existence does not have to be absolute—and in metaphysical experience it cannot be. Religion as a response to divine action and existence as the provocation of philosophical questioning can, and perhaps ought to be, put in relation to one another, if we are to escape from Heidegger’s collapse of the tension of transcendence. After demonstrating the possibility of the pluralization of transcendencies, Wahl is not here reducing them back down to the singular.

The words with which he closed on the evening of December 4, 1937, reveal the heart of Wahl’s conception of philosophy and the radical degree of his difference from Heidegger: “I cannot conclude by presenting a solution, because I believe that it is of the essence of existential philosophy to tell us that the problems have a value in themselves. Philosophical problems cannot be fully resolved…. One has to make oneself the question. And this is why I will not answer.” It is the insolubility of the essential questions that philosophy’s basic task is to highlight in all of their gravity, even to increase their insolubility to the point of the transformation of a life that lives from within the tension of this very insolubility. The peculiar transcendence that constitutes subjectivity, and the inherent tension within it, is the greatest philosophical question. “Existential philosophy” is nothing else for Wahl but an encounter with the impossible questions that define existence. It is therefore not the name of a movement or current or style of modern philosophy; rather, it is the nature of philosophy itself. It is this very insolubility that Heidegger himself dissolves by surrounding being with an atheist hermetical seal, thereby reducing the nature of transcendence to a movement of immanence alone. Heidegger, for Wahl, refuses to countenance philosophy’s own other, its foundational manner of calling philosophy into question and thereby constituting it. It is the irresolvable tension in transcendence—that between the terme or end of transcendence, which always stands beyond and constitutes the self-transcending that defines radical finitude, on the one hand, and the movement of self-transcending itself, on the other—that alone does not, as Wahl says elsewhere, “destroy the value [of transcendence] and that which makes it a problem in the first place.”⁹² It is Kierkegaard, for Wahl, who has already eclipsed the ontological difference and established it in the very manner of this eclipse, precisely by his new manner of thinking that, far from resolving the tension inherent to the problem of transcendence “in advance” (as was Heidegger’s castigation), only emphasizes and elaborates it as the crucial problem.

Human Existence and Transcendence is a deceptively simple text. It is a miscellany of compositions, written in different styles, in different states of mind, and, seemingly, at different levels of completion. On the whole, one could read it as a set of notations, brought together and meant to be filled in later; from this vantage an analogy with Pascal’s Pensées would not be misplaced. As in this latter text, the power of Human Existence and Transcendence is often found in what Wahl does not say as much as in what he says, in what he suggests as much as in what he asserts, and, regardless, in what he demands of the reader to think. The text, therefore, is most properly read as a set of meditations, proposals, sketches, and gestures, to be meditated on in a philosophical attitude, with a pencil in hand, by a reader willing to take his or her time, to accept Wahl’s often elliptical and poetic crystallizations as (often provocative) invitations to walk with him on pathways he proposes through the perennial thickets of philosophical inquiry. To read this text, one must be prepared to think, and to think one’s own thoughts after Wahl, and more often than not (as one chooses) against and beyond him.

As Human Existence and Transcendence shows, Wahl was a poet as much as a philosopher. A great portion of this book is given over to examining the relation between these two vocations. As much as Wahl himself was one person in whom poetry and philosophy were thought, expressed, and lived, so also one finds him given over again and again to the task of discovering the point of difference and point of unity between them. For him, the poet lives that which the philosopher always seeks to know; the poet accomplishes what the philosopher teaches. Wahl begins the book with a reference to the “poet-philosophers” Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and he sees in them a recovery of the essence of the philosophical, a rejoining of what was only problematically separated. There is no philosophy without poetry; theory, the formation of concepts, only emerges out of theoria, the contemplation of reality, the experiential awareness of one’s immersion in being, which is most powerfully encountered in the affective dimension of our personality. And poetry lives closer to the experience of this immersion. The logic of this encounter is described by Wahl as an “existential dialectic” (opposed to the Hegelian or Platonic kinds) that moves “from presence to dialectic, and from dialectic to ecstasy through the play of antitheses that destroy each other in order to cede their place to this ecstasy.” Reasoning (“dialectic”) arises out of the original affective encounter of embodied force and the feeling of resistance (“presence”). And the contradictions into which reasoning always comes to be embroiled lead it (ecstatically) to reattain the original presence in an enriched way. “It is yet,” says Wahl in the later chapter “Poetry and Metaphysics,” “by the union of things that contradict one another that the poet will not only be able to lead us to the beyond, but, once we have perceived this beyond, leads us back towards the here below, joining immanence to transcendence.” Here we have a clear statement of Wahl’s task in the present book, one, in fact, that defines his philosophical ambition. He states this concisely in two places in the preface. We can compare each one of these to two similar statements found in the conclusion to Traité de métaphysique in order to gain a first glimpse of the shape of this ambition. First, in the preface of the present book he says, “We are studying [in this book] some ideas: the idea of being, of the absolute, of transcendence, of space. We see that they carry us each time to something that is beyond ideas, or rather below them.” The dialectic of reason reaches a point of failure, and in failing, it accomplishes itself by returning to the embodied world of things where it began. In the conclusion of the Traité, he says, therefore, “At the end of each of our meditations on the principal questions [of philosophy] we only reached out into the ineffable. Perhaps these different ineffables that we discovered each time should not be reduced to a unity, even though we must not exclude this possibility.”⁹³ We ought not overly determine the ineffable, for in doing so we only evacuate its essential richness by papering it over with our abstractions.

The last words of both the preface and the Traité itself express all of this in an even clearer way. First, from the concluding lines of the Traité:

Is it possible for us to return to immanence without losing transcendence? Can an eternal return of the dialect be conceived by which the first term, enriching and deepening itself, reappears in its primitive character? Is it demanded of the philosopher finally to transcend transcendence itself and to fall bravely back into immanence without leaving behind the value of his effort of transcendence?

Questions of this kind are those that constitute philosophy itself, for philosophy is the attitude of questioning rather than the attitude of answers. It is the movement, obscurely perceived rather than seen, which goes from reality, through dialectic and antitheses, to ecstasy.⁹⁴

And finally, the last lines of the preface. Here Wahl gives an express indication of the task to be undertaken in the present book:

By returning to immanence, could we have lost transcendence? Can we preserve in myth that which thought destroys, that is, its essence, which gives it value? Could there be a return of dialectic, an eternal return by which the first term reappears enriched and impoverished? The following studies endeavor to give a response to this question. However, they themselves rather possess more of the character of questions than answers. At the least they place us in the presence of a movement that is glimpsed rather than seen and which strikes off from reality through a dialectic of antitheses and nonbeings in its struggle toward a mystery.⁹⁵

These passages from these two texts are so similar that one might conclude that Wahl intends them as an essential statement of his philosophy. In honor of that, I let them stand in all of their poetic evocativeness and philosophical profundity without further comment.

What is the legacy of Jean Wahl? It is too early to tell. There has appeared to date no book-length study of the philosophical thought of Jean Wahl in its own right. In light of what we have examined above much could be said. Presently, however, I will draw this introduction to a close by attempting merely to express something from the perspective of at least one dimension of the philosophical vocation he so profoundly lived.

Among other things, Jean Wahl reminds us in a unique way, I think, that the history of Western civilization, and of world civilization itself, remains a story without an ending. If the dangers and risks have (already) changed dramatically since Wahl’s time, the questions he was himself asking have only intensified. Wahl’s approach to the questions, the human questions, is presented—almost aphoristically, improvisationally—in this little book. What Wahl thought about was the insoluble mystery of human existence; his thinking is an embrace of this insolubility and he offers a set of rather minimalist proposals about how to navigate this mystery, the miracle of ourselves, without reduction, in a manner faithful to it. Wahl’s minimalism stems, I think, not only from his poetic sensibility, his strong, pressing awareness of the acute limits and partiality of all thought and every conceptualization, but also from the fact that he was in the first place a historian of philosophy.⁹⁶

Wahl’s works from the beginning evince a singular grasp of the history of Occidental thought from the pre-Socratics to Heidegger. With this grasp Wahl approached every philosopher as a contemporary, for they were his contemporaries, asking the basic human questions (in however diverging manners) and attempting to live a response to them that does them justice.⁹⁷ He could often rightly be accused of anachronism. But this was the risk he was willing to take in order to philosophize. This risk is itself an authentically philosophical risk, for only through undertaking it can one understand what philosophy is.

Wahl’s thought is, in other words, an act of hope. As long, in fact, as there are living human beings on this good earth, hope will remain, and hope, as Wahl’s friend Gabriel Marcel said, is itself the original motivating principle behind philosophical reflection—hope that we can in fact come to an understanding regarding what there is, who we are, and what it means to be good. Philosophy is rooted in a desire to know the truth of things and where we humans stand in relation to it. Jean Wahl grasped this task in a singular way, and he realized that the “desire to know” was a defining feature of humanity and the first measure of any philosophy.

The second measure, we could say, is the permanent dissatisfaction that this desire to know generates: all answers we can give are partial answers. They are always insufficient. This permanent insufficiency in every philosophical proposal generated in the history of thought is ultimately understood when it is interpreted as a key to the situation of human being. When this is not recognized to the degree that it ought to be, that is, fundamentally, then the would-be philosopher proposes facile answers to reality. But reality permits of no “facility”; reality can never be mastered, especially by conceptuality and abstraction. And yet every philosophical answer partakes of the facile to a greater or lesser degree; the work of the philosopher is never finished.

The third measure of philosophy is that the desire to know, inflamed by the recognition of its own tragic character as the manifestation of its essential truth, must be lived. Wahl understood this too. The modern recovery of the goal of a bios theoretikos, wherein the insoluble questions of the philosopher are recognized as the human questions, and a life lived in accordance with this recognition, was precisely the importance for Wahl of the thought of Kierkegaard, and, by extension, of “existential philosophy,” with which he at least partially identified himself.

Wahl was of course a man of his time, which might at times make his thought seem a little provincial. But his enduring significance is not found in the way he is wed to his time, but rather in the way he lived out the philosophical vocation itself in his time, to the questions he posed to his time, in other words, in the philosophical authenticity that breathes in every page of his writings, and makes his thought come brilliantly alive every time it meets the same double attitude of philosophical desire and hope in a reader. Human Existence and Transcendence is a means toward the enlivening of the flame of philosophy in us.

I will conclude with an anecdote. It seems right to do so in writing what has become, it appears, the first (more or less) extended introductory account in English of the philosophical significance of a man for whom, first, philosophical inquiry was as complex and singular as the persons who engaged in it; and for whom, second, such an irreducible plurality of philosophical experience joins the most quotidian with the most profound and thereby speaks the ineffable miracle of human existence. The May 12, 1945, issue of The New Yorker referenced above relates the story of how Jean Wahl as a young man discovered philosophy by discovering himself as a philosopher, wondering at the paradox of identity and difference through the experience of temporal change: “Wahl has been occupied with such [philosophical] considerations … ever since, as a boy of fifteen, he heard the call to philosophy while he was in the act of putting on his pants. The details of that occasion are still very clear to him. One moment he was standing in his room half-dressed, without any pants on, and the next moment he was fully clothed. The boy with his pants on, it occurred to him, could not be said to be the same person, in the philosophical sense, as the boy with the pants off.”⁹⁸

If one cannot “step into the same river twice,” in the famous words of Heraclitus, something similar, Wahl teaches us, goes for our pants.

The work in your hands is an annotated translation of Wahl’s 1944 Existence humaine et transcendance in its entirety and a commentary on his lecture to the Société française de philosophie, delivered on December 4, 1937. It is an introduction to the thought of one of the central figures in French philosophy and Parisian intellectual life of the last century. The present edition aims to make (or rather, to allow Wahl to make) a contribution to contemporary reflection by proposing—and enacting—the relevance of his “philosophy of transcendence” today. By its publication I intend to help reopen the dossier on Jean Wahl the philosopher. Any annotation added to the text is clearly set apart from the original, and meant solely to magnify or contextualize a concept or theme. Departures from the original form of the French text are minimal and are explained in text and undertaken for the sake of producing the best English-language edition possible, I hope in fidelity to the spirit of the original. Wahl switches back and forth between the first person singular and plural in this text. It is sometimes odd, and yet not clearly an irregularity the translator should suppress. Perhaps it is a rhetorical strategy to focus the shared reflection of author and reader that he hopes to generate on the existential “I” that must feel the living weight, as it were, of philosophical ideas discussed. I therefore retained this distinctive usage in the translation. Translation from one language to another is a matter of the communication of “spirit,” of which the “letter,” though of course irreplaceable in itself, is still simply a vehicle. There is no “spirit” for material beings like ourselves without its incarnation in the “letter,” but nevertheless these two are not for all that identified, as the very possibility of translation (and of all communication) severely demonstrates. Translator’s notes are enclosed in brackets. The scholarly apparatus, including the introduction and appendices, is included as a means toward better understanding Jean Wahl, his world, and his thought—in the hope that they will serve the happenings of philosophy. Philosophy happens … but not apart from the awareness of how it has already happened. I hope readers will find my annotations of use to that end.

A debt of thanks is owed to my colleague Jeffrey Hanson for his translation of the letters, to Genevieve Fahey for proofreading the whole and for her suggestions for improving the translation, as well as to Margo Shearman, an extremely competent and judicious copy-editor. Thanks also to Barbara Wahl for helping me in an irreplaceable way at the very beginning of this project, especially for putting me in contact with Mme Laurence Gudin of Éditions Baconnière, the Swiss press that originally published Wahl’s book and which continues the same august tradition of philosophical publication today. As the latter told me, often the best projects take the longest to materialize, at least much longer than was originally foreseen. On that note, it was my Doktorvater and colleague, Professor Kevin Hart, who originally suggested to me during those halcyon days of doctoral studies that this project was one worthy of pursuit, and I thank him and Jeffrey Bloechl for receiving this work in their book series, and for always keeping the path open.

W. C. H.

Melbourne, July 2014, and Paris, June 2015

NOTES

  The epigraph is from the original French edition: Jean Wahl, Existence humaine et transcendance (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1944), 29n1.

  1. “Subjectivité et transcendance,” Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 37, no. 5 (1937): 161–211.

  2. See Emmanuel Levinas, “Jean Wahl: Sans avoir ni être,” in the book collecting the keynote papers (by Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, and Xavier Tilliette) for a colloquium in Geneva in 1975 celebrating the legacies of Wahl and Gabriel Marcel, who died in 1974 and 1973, respectively: Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, and Xavier Tilliette, Jean Wahl et Gabriel Marcel (Paris: Beauchesne, 1976), 17. The introduction to this little book was composed by Jeanne Hersch, herself a participant in the meeting.

  3. His massive Études kierkegaardiennes (Paris: F. Aubier, 1938) remains a classic.

  4. Le rôle de l’instant dans la philosophie de Descartes (Paris: F. Alcan, 1920).

  5. Les philosophes pluralistes d’Angleterre et d’Amérique (Paris: F. Alcan, 1920).

  6. Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (Paris: Rieder, 1929). “One of the first signs of serious French interest in Hegel” (Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 109).

  7. See for this view Alan D. Schrift, Twentieth Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006).

  8. See Mathias Girel’s introduction to the recent edition of Wahl’s Vers le concret (1932; Paris: Vrin, 2013), 5–26.

  9. Totality and Infinity, of course, is dedicated to Marcelle and Jean Wahl.

10. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alfonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 35n2.

11. On Wahl’s account of transcendence as a hermeneutic for the two major moments of Levinas’s thought, see Roger Burggraeve, “Affected by the Face of the Other: The Levinasian Movement from the Exteriority to the Interiority of the Infinite,” Dialegesthai. Revistia telematica di filosofia 11 (2009). Online: http://mondodomani.org/dialegesthai/rbu01.

12. For further details of this narrative, see Hamilton Basso’s article “Profiles: Philosopher: Jean Wahl,” in The New Yorker, May 12, 1945, 27–41. Also of importance is Barbara Wahl’s article-memoir “Autour de Jean Wahl: Textes, traces, témoignages,” Rivista di storia della filosofia 3 (2011): 517–38.

13. For a thorough presentation of the significance of this historical moment, see the collection, Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942–1944, ed. Christopher E. G. Benfey and Karen Remmler (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006).

14. One should consult the appendix to Levinas, Ricoeur, and Tilliette, Jean Wahl et Gabriel Marcel, 89–92, for a biographical notice and bibliography of Wahl’s major works compiled by his daughter.

15. If not of the intellectual traditions of all the classical civilizations of the world, Near Eastern, Indian, Chinese … See David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), as well as Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Similarly, Gabriel Marcel speaks of “the spiritual tradition of humanity” in his contribution to the discussion at the meeting, recorded below.

16. Traité de métaphysique (Paris: Payot, 1953), 625. I will recall this remarkable quotation below, when I suggest that Wahl anticipates by several decades the defining moment of contemporary French phenomenology (viz., its “theological turn”).

17. Beyond Secular Order (Oxford: Wiley, 2013), 19–20. These “certain modes of theology,” according to Milbank’s exemplification of a well-known genealogy of modernity, happen to be found in late medieval aberrations from classical Christian orthodoxy of some English Franciscan responses to the rediscovery of Aristotle, and then in even later (misled) interpretations of Thomas Aquinas in the Dominican and Jesuit commentarial tradition.

18. Aristotle quotes this in, e.g., On the Soul 411a 7–8. See also Pseudo-Aristotle, On the Universe 6, 397b 17–18. Wahl himself refers to it in Poésie, pensée, perception (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1948), 26, and Traité de métaphysique, 594–626.

19. Aristotle, Metaphysics A 982b 19; The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1554.

20. As an example see Xenophanes of Colophon’s famous critique of anthropomorphism, B 23, 14 and 15 (Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 10th ed. [Berlin: Weidmann, 1952]); See also Aristotle, On the Universe 6, “on the cause which holds all things together,” 397b 10–401b 30.

21. See the Theaetetus 176a–b.

22. To allude to Pierre Hadot’s breakthrough phrase. See Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1981).

23. It is worth seeing here Wahl’s comments in the conclusion to Traité de métaphysique (718–19) summarizing his late chapters on God (IX.2) and on the multiple types of transcendence (perfection, infinity, unity, the absolute, the transcendent) which tend to be unified and focused on the divinity (IX.3). For Wahl the philosopher discovers the divine as the terminus of the tendency of reason to move toward a reduction of the multiple ineffables to a unity, but does not discover a final justification for that tendency; the dialectic of reason never comes to rest on the final term.

24. See Peter Koslowski’s profound remarks on ancient Gnosticism, which, one must say, is a mode of thinking that applies (at least here) a glass of magnification (if also distortion) on an essential feature of human rationality: Philosophien der Offenbarung (Padderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2001), 143–56.

25. For exploration of the endless evocative and tantalizing analogies across Greek, ancient Near Eastern, and Indian civilizations, see in particular Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (New York: Allworth Press, 2012).

26. From this crucial perspective it is the later Schelling who recovers this attitude with the fullest force. See, for example, his Lectures on the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie (1836; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

27. One can argue that this is the teaching of Saint Paul, for whom the Cross, in revealing the “folly” of human wisdom, also redeems it: see Rom. 12:1–2 and 1 Cor. 1–3; for the fathers of the church see esp. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata I, 18, 90. For a general account of this see Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Philosophy, Christianity, Monasticism,” Explorations in Theology, vol. 2: Spouse of the Word (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 333–71.

28. See Augustine, City of God VIII, 10.

29. See Peter Struck, Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), esp. chaps. 6, 7, and the epilogue, for late Neoplatonism and the enduring significance of this tradition.

30. See Hans-Dieter Gondek and Laszlo Tengelyi, Neue Phänomenologie in Frankreich (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011), for whom a defining feature of the “new phenomenology” is the direct result of a “turn” to religious phenomena, which has fundamentally transformed both the conception of the phenomenon and the phenomenological sensibility itself.

31. Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, vol. 1, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity, vol. 2, trans. John McKeane (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).

32. See for example Heidegger’s famous comment in the Zürich Seminar, Nov. 6, 1951, in GA 15 436-f. “Faith has no need of the ‘thought’ of being,” etc.

33. Phenomenological Interpretation of Aristotle, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 148.

34. Ibid.

35. Dis-Enclosure, 1.

36. See esp. Heidegger et la question de Dieu, ed. Richard Kearney and Joseph O’Leary, 2nd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009).

37. See, for example, Jean-Luc Marion, “The Possible and Revelation,” in The Visible and the Revealed, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

38. See Jean-Luc Marion’s contribution to the debate mentioned immediately below.

39. See God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John Caputo and Michael Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

40. Published in Dieu en tant que Dieu: La question philosophique, ed. Philippe Capelle-Dumont (Paris: Cerf, 2012), 239–82.

41. The conclusion that “philosophy, reduced to what we control of it, is undertaken in the field of the possible and the question of the impossible becomes the central question of the limits of philosophy” (268) leads directly to the recognition that “there is no outside of the Christological question, not even under the regime of deconstruction” (282). With Christ we are “hors-texte,” outside of any a priori determination of what we are doing in thought, even, ultimately the division of labor between discourses. Thinking after Christ, however, the distinction emerges between the two modalities of reason, theology and philosophy—never wholly identifiable but never wholly separable (see “On the Foundations of the Distinction between Theology and Philosophy,” Budhi 13, no. 1–3 [2009], http://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/index.php/budhi/issue/view/34).

42. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

43. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, trans. Gemma Simmonds (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

44. See esp. his 1966 The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).

45. According to Franke (“Cosmopolitan Conviviality and Negative Theology: Europe’s Vocation to Universalism,” Journal of European Studies 44, no. 1 [2014]: 30–49), the present “vocation” of European thought is a “non-predicative universality” that creates a permanently open “space” for inclusive dialogue among religions and cultures which gives the ground of transcendence only by permanently withholding it in a paradoxical incommensurability. See also the introductory essays to his On What Cannot Be Said, 2 vols. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), and his most recent statement of his position, A Philosophy of the Unsayable (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014).

46. Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, vol. 1: Faith, Trinity, Incarnation, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).

47. David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

48. See on this my interview with Jean-François Courtine, in Tarek R. Dika and W. Chris Hackett, Quiet Powers of the Possible: Interviews in Contemporary French Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).

49. See of course Dominique Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000).

50. Jean-François Courtine, “Interview,” in Dika and Hackett, Quiet Powers of the Possible.

51. Jean-Yves Lacoste, La phénoménalité de Dieu: Neuf études (Paris: Cerf, 2008); From Theology to Theological Thinking, trans. W. Chris Hackett (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).

52. Emmanuel Falque, Passer le Rubicon: Philosophie et théologie: Essai sur les frontières (Brussels: Lessius, 2013).

53. Jean-Luc Marion, Certitudes négatives (Paris: Grassette et Fasquelle, 2010).

54. See again Jean-Luc Marion, “On the Foundation of the Distinction between Theology and Philosophy,” in Certitudes.

55. Existence humaine et transcendance, 113–24.

56. Short-sighted because it lacks the breadth and depth opened to the mind by the theological and religious.

57. See similarly Paul Ricoeur’s concluding remarks, “Entre Gabriel Marcel et Jean Wahl,” in Jean Wahl et Gabriel Marcel, 57–87.

58. This “project” is anticipated by the present volume in all of its major dimensions and developed particularly in Traité de métaphysique and especially his last and most original book, Expérience métaphysique (Paris: Flammarion, 1964).

59. See “Jean Wahl: Neither Having nor Being,” 56.

60. Ibid.

61. I translate Barbara Wahl’s transcription of this letter, “Autour de Jean Wahl,” 527.

62. This interview was conducted around 1968 or 1969. He is referring to his book composed in the United States, written in English, The Philosopher’s Way (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948). Barbara Wahl, “Autour de Jean Wahl,” 531.

63. See, for example, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, I 12, 12 resp., and 13, 1 resp.

64. Poems (1945), 164. Quoted in Barbara Wahl, “Autour de Jean Wahl,” 527n21.

65. Wahl was born into an “assimilated” and nonpracticing Jewish family; he married a Catholic, and his children were raised in the Catholic Church. See Barbara Wahl’s irreplaceable article for research into the existential complexity of Wahl’s thought in an intimate and moving presentation in homage to her father.

66. Barbara Wahl, “Autour de Jean Wahl,” 528.

67. Ibid., 536.

68. Études kierkegaardiennes, chap. 7, 210–55. See Samuel Moyn, “Transcendence, Morality and History: Emmanuel Levinas and the Discovery of Kierkegaard in France,” Yale French Studies 104 (2004): 22–54. This passage is discussed on p. 40.

69. See esp. his closing remarks, which introduce, by reference to Nicolai Hartmann, the distinction between transcendence as movement and transcendence as term, which the dynamic character of the first distinction allows us to see more clearly.

70. See also the penultimate paragraph of the conclusion, which conceives of this “return to immanence without losing transcendence” as among the “constitutive questions of philosophy itself” (721–72).

71. Lee Braver, “A Brief History of Continental Realism,” Continental Philosophy Review 45 (2012): 261–89.

72. The classic statement of this in the context of an “overcoming” of the ontological difference, or, in Marion’s words, of the “liberation of being,” can be found in his God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 53–107, which proposes a “difference more essential to being than ontological difference itself” (85).

73. See, again, the quotation from Traité de métaphysique, 625, translated above.

74. Traité de métaphysique, 602.

75. This is the famous definition of phenomenology presented in Being and Time § 7, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 30.

76. “Subjectivité et transcendance,” 195.

77. Ibid.

78. For Heidegger, Kierkegaard “got the farthest” in the theological interpretation of anxiety, but remained within the theological domain for which the ontic and ontological registers were never appropriately distinguished. See Being and Time, n4, to §40, 190 (Stambaugh translation, 178, note on pp. 404–5).

79. This, for Kierkegaard of course, is all accomplished in the concrete figure of Christ.

80. I use this phrase in order to gesture pointedly toward Jean-Yves Lacoste’s small masterpiece, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans. Mark Raftery-Skehan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004).

81. Étude sur le “Parménide” de Platon (Paris: Rieder, 1930): the importance of which, however, has yet to be appropriately manifest …

82. Traité de métaphysique, 619.

83. Unfading Light, trans. Thomas Allan Smith (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 104 (emphasis mine). Or again: “The object of religion, God, is something that on the one hand is completely transcendent, of a different nature, and external to the world and the human being, but on the other hand is revealed to religious consciousness, touches it, enters inside it, becomes its immanent content. Both moments of religious consciousness are given simultaneously, like poles, in their mutual repulsion and attraction. The object of religion is something transcendent-immanent or immanent-transcendent according to its essence” (103).

84. Traité de métaphysique, 619. The last expression comes from the New Testament (Acts 17:28), wherein Luke’s Saint Paul quotes a pagan poet, Epimenides.

85. Ibid.

86. It is interesting, and would prove a fascinating study auxiliary to this one, that the great mystical literature of Christianity is filled with ways of addressing this very question (think of the instructions for “testing the spirits” in Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross).

87. Adorno’s critique is found primarily in two book reviews of Wahl’s Études kierkegaardiennes, the first in Journal of Philosophy 36, no. 1 (1939): 18–19; the second in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 8, no. 1–2 (1939–40): 232–33. See the discussion of Adorno’s critique of Wahl and their correspondence in Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy: German and Scandinavian Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 22–24.

88. See Samuel Moyn’s discussion of this intra-Jewish debate about the interpretation of Kierkegaard in “Transcendence, Morality and History,” 40–42.

89. In the interview discussed above, in response to the question “What do you think of someone who converts?” Wahl says candidly, “But I interrogate myself [je m’interroge]. I tell myself that I will not convert. I tell myself that I am not converted. I often find myself thinking about Bergson who is … who had taken a position so complex that he wrote in his Testament: I believe that Catholicism is true! And yet he was not baptized—in order, he said, not to separate himself from those who would probably be persecuted” (Barbara Wahl, “Autour de Jean Wahl,” 532).

90. This tension is, again, well presented by Barbara Wahl in her article.

91. “Subjectivité et transcendance,” 195.

92. Traité de métaphysique, 646.

93. Ibid., 718–19.

94. Ibid., 721.

95. Existence humaine et transcendance, 24–25.

96. See Emmanuel Levinas’s remarks in “Jean Wahl, Neither Having nor Being,” in Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (London: Continuum, 1993), 51–64, esp. 53–54.

97. This approach is on full display in The Philosopher’s Way and Traité de métaphysique.

98. “Profiles: Philosopher: Jean Wahl,” 27–28.