Subjectivity and Transcendence

I.

A. Subjectivity and transcendence are two ideas that, from the philosophical point of view, characterize the thought of Kierkegaard. Or rather, it is the junction of the two that characterizes his thought. The tension inherent to subjectivity is explained by the presence of transcendence. By becoming more subjective, by closing in on itself, the subject suddenly discovers the transcendent. The soul alone before God alone: here we return to the ideas of Plotinus. But the soul is much more closed in on itself, and God enclosed in God, than in Plotinus and the mystics who followed the Neoplatonists. There is not in Kierkegaard this confluence of souls into God, and this expansion, this overflowing of God in souls. Rather, there is a much more powerful force of negation, an all-the-more irreducible opposition of individualities. And this is one of the causes of Kierkegaardian anguish.

A second cause of this anguish is the presence of evil. A being is in anguish because it does not know what it is facing, whether it stands before a beneficent transcendence or a maleficent transcendence, whether it faces God or a demonic power; it does not know if the movement that it accomplishes is a movement of “transascendence” or “transdescendence.”

B. In Kierkegaard, these ideas are enveloped in an atmosphere of theology and morality. We could ask if transascendence is necessarily good and transdescendence is necessarily evil. On this point, the teachings of Blake, of Gide in his Dostoyevsky, of Lawrence, and of John Cowper Powys would be invaluable. For them it is a matter of returning to something elementary, savage: “angel or demon, it does not matter.”

Additionally, we could ask if we need to retain the theological aspect of subjectivity and transcendence. Transcendence is not necessarily God or the devil. It could simply be nature, which is no less mysterious than the God of orthodoxies and the God of heterodoxies.

II.

A. Observing philosophical developments in Germany, we can see that those most inspired by Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Jaspers, developed his philosophy through the ideas of “being-in-the-world,” “communication” and “historicity” (these last two, first presented in the thought of Kierkegaard, are highlighted by Jaspers).

At the same time, these two thinkers want to remain within the world that is ours; they refuse to follow Kierkegaard when he searches for “repetition” in a beyond, after having tried in vain to find it in this world.

B. Are they, however, completely delivered from the theological elements of Kierkegaardian thought? Both have tried to secularize the idea of sin, such as they found it in Kierkegaard and theology: Heidegger, in making sin the fall into the realm of the anonymous crowd, into the “They”; Jaspers, in an apparently more profound way, through identifying it with limitation. But this latter conception implies the idea that the good would be the totality, which Jaspers’s thought does not seem capable of admitting.

In both thinkers one finds the idea of “repetition.” But is this not, just like the theories of the instant or of the eternal return, an Ersatz of the idea of eternity?

Could a philosophy similar to that of Heidegger and Jaspers be conceived, and of which the attraction would not be partly explained by its inclusion of nostalgia for and an echo of the religious?

And if such a philosophy is conceivable, would it not risk dissolving into a general theory of existence, where all particularity, all historicity, all existence is excluded?

Perhaps that is where the problem faced by “existential philosophy” lies, and which is exposed to a double danger: either of being joined to theology too directly, or of detaching too completely from every concretely given.

This is what can lead us to ask ourselves if some existences like those of Rimbaud or Van Gogh or Nietzsche (or Kierkegaard) are not actually more “existential” and more truly philosophical than the philosophies of existence. But these latter at least have the merit of making us more acutely sense the value of the former.

Kierkegaard places us before the here and now, whereas, on the contrary, for Hegel, the here and now ought to be reabsorbed by a dialectic into generalities, into universalities that are more and more immense.¹ This here and this now is evidently not uniquely the bodily here and now. They both open onto a subjectivity, and it is before subjectivity that Kierkegaard places us. But this subjectivity itself, for him, takes its value, its reality, from the fact that it is found in the presence of another, of the absolute other, of the absolutely different, the transcendent.

Subjectivity should not try, as it does in thinking like Hegel’s, to assimilate this other or even be assimilated to it. No. It is found in the presence of this other in order to collide with it. And this collision is all the more violent as this other, in the thought of Kierkegaard, assumes an essentially paradoxical aspect. This other is in fact the eternal rendered temporal. And it is this that Kierkegaard calls the absolute protestation against immanence, the fact that the eternal became historical.

It is at this moment that we must break with thought, at the moment when we feel that our eternal beatitude depends on our relation with something historical, and that this something historical is nothing other than the eternal.

This relation must be lived. We must live it isolated in our thought, somehow both tightly coiled up within our present and reaching out for our future.

Evidently, we cannot define this other. But at least we are able to say that we are aware of it through the relation that we have with it. And here a new paradox emerges. This other is fundamentally the one of the first hypothesis of the Parmenides, which is absolutely without relation with anything; and yet this one without relation only exists through the relation in which we find ourselves with it.

This is in fact the most internal relation, the relation, for Kierkegaard, with something from the outside; the absolute transcendent is only revealed through this absolutely immanent relation with the individual.

If we are concerned, indeed, with another than ourselves, this other can only be the absolute other, so that the intensity of our passion signifies that we are in relation with something which can only be the eternal and absolute. The intensity of this relation is such that by the very fact that we enter into it, it gives us this other element [terme]—this other limit [terme] which in a sense can never be given. And it is in this way that what is subjective to the highest degree must be considered as relating to what is objective to the highest degree.

But, in spite of the abstract terms in which Kierkegaard presents it, and in which I have presented it after him, this is nothing other (as he says) than a description of belief. Belief is necessarily belief in another. This other, in whose existence we are infinitely interested, can only be God. And this movement, this relation that I am describing, which is both exit toward the other and passionate interiority, is still nothing other than the paradox of belief. We could say then that Kierkegaard entered into the domain of paradox and contradiction in order simply to give a faithful description of the phenomenon of belief.

Once the individual is found in this relation, somehow, by the force of this paradoxical passion within him and which is belief, he will work toward the annihilation of his thought. Here the phenomenon of anguish is produced, because of the co-presence of this subjective thinker and this transcendent object. We see at the same time how Kierkegaard’s conception radically differs, at least most of the time, from mysticism: there is, generally speaking, no fusion with the other. Though Kierkegaard lived certain moments of ecstasy or near-ecstasy, ordinarily the other is a sort of resistant being who is before him and from which he is separated.

Kierkegaardian anguish has a second cause, the presence of evil. This second cause is very profoundly bound up with the first. From the moment that this other than me is distant from me, I will not communicate directly with it and I will have the incessant sense that I may be mistaken about its essence. From here the idea emerges that we are never sure of being in the presence of God. And this element of uncertainty subsists in belief as Kierkegaard defines it. This is a new element which brings his description of belief to completion.

This anguish becomes even greater as we have the idea that God might be tempting us, and at the same time the fear that we might be tempting God in some way, an idea which appears quite often in Kierkegaard. From here emerge certain characteristics of his thought, when he finds himself in the presence of moral problems: on the one hand, either the suspension of the ethical, as in Fear and Trembling, where he shows how Abraham ought to leave behind the rules of morality in order to obey God; or even, on the other hand, the idea that it is necessary to sink into the depths of sin in order to have access to faith, or finally, on the contrary, the conception of religious ethics.

One could without a doubt interpret in a different way the hesitation which is produced in the individual faced with that which exceeds him. The individual can be surpassed in two different directions: he can be surpassed from below as from above, either by mysterious forces that meet back up with the animal dimensions of being (and which are perhaps not bad simply for that), or, secondly, by forces of nature recognized as superior.

And, at the same time, I wonder why there is in Kierkegaard this will to paradox and contradiction. Why? The intensification of the existence of the individual. But Kierkegaard himself knows that the existence of the individual is a paradox in itself. It is not simply God who is paradox in coming to earth, but we ourselves are paradoxes by being, as Kierkegaard put it, a union and contradiction of the finite and infinite.

To have the sense of paradox, is it so necessary to refer to those same beliefs to which Kierkegaard refers? Is not the vision of what surrounds us full of realities that are extremely paradoxical, like knowledge, the person, or even things?

One could say that Heidegger and Jaspers are in a sufficiently similar relation to Kierkegaard and Husserl, and in a contradictory relation to both on certain points.² Husserl separates essences from existences, and Kierkegaard separates the individual and the world, whereas for Heidegger, existence is essence, and this existence is being and being in the world.

Taking account of all the nuances—even more, the profound differences—that should be established between these two philosophers, what Heidegger and Jaspers have somehow added to the thought of Kierkegaard are the ideas of “being in the world,” of communication, and of “Geschichtlichkeit,” historicity. The individual is bound to the world in a fundamental manner. And Heidegger always insists, and in a very beautiful way, on his radical isolation.

The difficulty of speaking of transcendence in Heidegger seems to be because this word has different senses in his thought. First he speaks of the transcendence of being in relation to nothing. Then he employs the word transcendence when he characterizes our relation with being-in-the-world. And in the third place he employs the word transcendence when he describes our life in its way of being always out in front of itself, projecting toward the future. So existence is transcendent starting from nothing, it is transcendent in relation to the world, or the world is transcendent in relation to it, and it is transcendent in relation to itself.

But all of this only makes us more acutely feel what characterizes existence for Heidegger, namely, finitude. The two ideas of transcendence and finitude are tied for Heidegger; and what he places in the foreground is the idea of the abandonment of being, a sort of essential poverty of being. His is not a philosophy of abundance, poros, but on the contrary, one could say, a philosophy of peneia, of essential misery.

I said that in Heidegger “transcendence” has multiple applications; in Jaspers the idea is by definition very difficult to elucidate. Jaspers, by starting from the fact that in myself there are a lot of things which do not depend on me, arrives at the idea that I am in some way given to myself, and thus there are some things which exceed me. The transcendent will also be that which, by opposition to myself, I conceive as essentially one, unconditioned, independent, and as a reality in which possibility cannot be distinguished from reality.

In Heidegger and Jaspers one also finds this same junction between the ideas of subjectivity and transcendence that I have noted in Kierkegaard. For example, in Heidegger, it is above all in transcending toward the world that a subjectivity is realized, or even that transcendence can only be revealed by the ontological interpretation of subjectivity; it is in returning to itself that the individual discovers the other than itself.

We can bring in from here the analyses that Heidegger makes of certain feelings that put us in the presence of the world in its totality, not only the feeling of angst on which he particularly insists, but also, as he took care to say, feelings like boredom or joy. These feelings that bind us to what is most personal within us cause to rise up before our mind a whole—even more than a whole, the totality of the world—at least sometimes, in certain particular joys, in certain anguishes, certain particular moments of boredom; through the personality we come to vast impersonal feelings.

In Jaspers this same connection can be found. For example, in such phrases as these: “The more profoundly I press into myself, the more I feel solidarity with the one who is a stranger to me.” And again: “Transcendence is revealed in my attitude toward it. It is the existence that I can only attain by my more profound subjectivity.”

And both Heidegger and Jaspers, after having thus highlighted this idea of transcendence, enact a movement rather analogous to the movement that Kierkegaard accomplished in returning toward immanence, with the help of the idea that they borrow, it seems to me, from Kierkegaard: “repetition.”

Repetition is the act in which the past is taken up again, somehow, outside of the past, and newly made present, reaffirmed. One could compare it to the way in which Aristotle defined substance: to ti han einai. The individual should be that which it was. It is the act of “remaining what one was” and of thus being reaffirmed.

Along with Kierkegaard, and perhaps more than he, they give this idea of repetition a metaphysical allure, analogous to what Nietzsche gave to the eternal return. By repetition we fashion a unity out of the present, past, and future. We attain a moment where there is an absolute marriage of what Heidegger calls “the three ecstasies of time.”

Regarding these philosophies, we could wonder—it is the first question I asked myself—if some elements of beliefs do not remain in them from which they wanted to be distinguished and by which they are in fact distinguished. The strongest feeling that exists in Heidegger and which colors all of his work is the sense that man is thrown into the world, “entworfen,” and abandoned, the idea of the “Entworfenheit” of man, of finitude, of a deserted finitude, one could almost say an accursed finitude.

Is there not something here that is only explained by the memory, by remembering other ideas, and not explained through itself but by relation with that from which Heidegger has broken?

In the second place, it seems to me that the idea of repetition, in its metaphysically extreme form, could call forth criticisms, some objections, when it takes the form of absolute repetition, when it wants to be the absolute unification of moments of time. What is it that the philosopher wants to accomplish? He wants to find a nunc stans in our temporality, and the task is certainly arduous.

As for transcendence such as they define it, it seems to me that here again some questions come to mind since we have seen the multiplicity of meanings that it has in Heidegger. And in Jaspers, it is definitely difficult to grasp, which is doubtlessly natural, since by definition transcendence cannot be completely grasped, but this is aggravated when he says that I am only able to grasp it by unifying myself, and, at the same time, that he wants, however, to preserve it as transcendence and as other—and this, so that, on the one hand, transcendence ought to be me in my extreme unity and, on the other hand, something both different from me and opposed to me.

But one of the gravest criticisms, I believe, that one could make of Jaspers’s theory is that he tells us that all philosophy consists of a choice, of a radical option, but he himself is content to establish the theory that all philosophy consists in a radical option, that is to say, that he does not decide—and this, so that if we were to delve deeper into this thought, we would come to affirm that existence such as it is here defined is in a sense the least existential of all since it is able, as it were, to see very well; it stands back and justifies every choice, but in itself it only justifies the decision of others and does not choose for itself.

Here the importance of Jaspers’s work is not diminished, but it is no longer necessary perhaps to pigeonhole his philosophy within the same framework as others: it is a general theory of philosophies, a work of an observer of philosophies; it is not the act of a philosopher choosing for himself his symbol, his figure. If it is such an act, it loses its general value and is no longer a theory of philosophies in general.

At the root of these philosophies of Heidegger and Jaspers is a double feeling of regret and hope, which corresponds to the two ecstasies of time—to speak like Heidegger—the past and the future and which, as it were, intones the rhythm of time; it is the double feeling of paradise lost and of this paradise regained: repetition.

In thinking through the efforts of these philosophers I have come to think that perhaps one could find in others outside of philosophy similar attempts that draw closer to existence. And the names that have by chance come to mind—by chance indeed, but selecting from among those that I most admire—are Rimbaud, Van Gogh, and Nietzsche. Yet all three possess in a very strong manner precisely these two attitudes of subjectivity and transcendence. That which captivates us in a work of Van Gogh is precisely the intensity of his feeling and the fact that—to take back up the phrase of Cézanne—he “created the image” [faisait l’image]. And concerning Nietzsche’s thought, there is, on the one hand, the Overman and, on the other hand, the Eternal Return, which symbolize what is most absurd, the immanent symbolizing the pure transcendent by relation to our thought.

Even so, my personal preference of Rimbaud or Van Gogh or Nietzsche over Heidegger and Jaspers does not seem to me to disagree with the main current of their thought. For Heidegger says very well that the metaphysics of human reality is not only a metaphysics about [sur] reality, it is metaphysics coming necessarily to occur as reality. Perhaps this is what we find in Rimbaud or Nietzsche. And when Heidegger, in one of his most recent works, speaks of Hölderlin, it is perhaps not first a very different sentiment that animates him: the idea that art is also grasped by the individual as a relation with the transcendent. And for a stronger reason, one could say, Jaspers could be in agreement with what I am saying here, because he possesses very strongly this sense of the value of art; moreover he also refers to Van Gogh, and it is above all in the individual as existence that he finds the reality of philosophy.³

[The text of this chapter was originally presented to the Société française de philosophie on the evening of Dec. 4, 1937. It is reproduced here with very little change. The first part of this text (I. A–B and II. A–B) was distributed to the participants in advance of the meeting. It was then followed by an oral presentation by Wahl (the text of which follows) and then an extended discussion.]

1. [The following is the text Wahl presented viva voce to the meeting of 1937. There he introduced these remarks with the following words: “I would simply like to pose some questions in relation to Kierkegaard and contemporary philosophy. To introduce this subject one could begin by opposing Kierkegaard to Hegel. I will do so very briefly” (“Subjectivité et transcendance,” Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 37, no. 5 (1937): 166).]

2. [The text of Wahl’s remarks from 1937 continues here. This section is introduced in the original text with the following words: “From Kierkegaard I pass in summary to Heidegger and Jaspers” (168).]

3. [This brings to a close Wahl’s integral remarks from 1937.]