(Meeting of the Société française de philosophie, December 4, 1937)
INTRODUCTORY NOTE AND DRAMATIS PERSONAE OF DECEMBER 4, 1937
by William C. Hackett
These extracts from the discussion and the letters submitted to the meeting of the Société française de philosophie are included as a long appendix to Wahl’s original book. They present virtually the entire discussion unchanged: only one oral contribution and one letter that appeared in the Bulletin of the society were excised from the book, as my annotations make plain below.
Before the translation of this final part of Wahl’s book, I provide a list of participants in the meeting, meant especially to offer orienting remarks about the lesser-known figures.
Aron, Raymond (1905–1983). French political philosopher, sociologist, and journalist; professor at the Sorbonne. Highly influenced by Max Weber, Aron exposed the highly dogmatic nature of modern, secular ideologies, coining the term secular religion. He later wrote the famous Opium of the Intellectuals (1955) criticizing the blind embrace of Marxism by many thinkers of his day.
Bastide, Georges (1901–1969). Moral philosopher at the University of Toulouse. His thought, concerned in the main with the problem of values, takes its starting point from the conviction that man perpetually desires the good which ever-exceeds him, and that therefore his life is marked by an unrest that becomes acutely manifest in moral decision making. This unrest discloses to human consciousness both the value inherent in things and the correlation of desire with the Absolute, understood as the origin of all value.
Berdyaev, Nicolai (1874–1948). Russian aristocrat and intellectual expelled from Russia by the Bolsheviks; author of numerous works of “Christian existentialism,” including The Freedom of the Spirit (1927) and The Beginning and the End (1947).
Berthelot, René (1872–1960). Professor of Philosophy at the University of Brussels until 1907; author of influential studies of evolution in philosophy and pragmatism.
Bespaloff, Rachel (1895–1949). Existentialist philosopher and literary critic from Bulgaria; emigrated to the United States from France in 1942 to escape persecution of Jews; author of On the Iliad: A Study of Homer’s Interpretation of Man in War and in Peace (1947). She sailed to the United States with Wahl and committed suicide there in 1949.
Brunschvicg, Léon (1869–1944). Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne until he fled from the Nazis to Southern France; an influential interpreter of Descartes, he initiated an important strain of French idealism for which judgment, as the synthesis of thought into concepts, creates the world of spirit, the only possible world of philosophical inquiry, as he already set out in his early work La modalité du jugement (1897). Brunschvicg cofounded both the influential journal Revue de Métaphysique et Morale, in 1893, and the Société française de philosophie, in 1901.
Delacroix, Henri (1873–1937). Influential psychologist; teacher at the Sorbonne; author of important books, on the psychology of the mystics in particular. Delacroix’s appearance in the meeting was only in the memories of those present. He died, according to the minutes recorded in the Bulletin, on the previous afternoon, December 3, 1937. Brunschvicg, the moderator of the meeting, introduced the meeting with a moving elegy to Delacroix’s life and thought. I translate here some extracts from his words:1 “Bad news circulates quickly…. Early yesterday afternoon, Henri Delacroix suddenly died, after a long, unsettling illness, with which, however, he seemed at peace…. [This is a moment of] mourning for our society, for philosophy, for the Sorbonne, and for friendship.
“What characterized Henri Delacroix was an extremely acute sensitivity, which impacted others with a profound intimacy: an artistic and religious sensitivity, a living bond with persons in their suffering and in their joy; at the same time, a free and victorious effort to command this sensitivity, in order to justify its value, through an impartial and disinterested attention to the conditions of its objectivity.
“His teaching and books show that nothing escaped him that could sustain and nourish the psychology of art, language, and religion. We know very well our very own meetings where he intervened in order to discuss Saint Thérèse with Émile Boutroux, or Saint John of the Cross with Father Laberthonière and Jean Baruzi…. His clear-sightedness in every domain he touched only served to multiply the efficacy of his beneficence. He is not only among those whom we are universally sorry to be without; he is missing and will continue to be missed.”
Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976). Heidegger’s thought is a central theme of Wahl’s presentation, understood in continuity with the “philosophy of existence” deriving from Kierkegaard. Heidegger’s brief letter totally rejects Wahl’s notion that he himself at least (Jaspers is another question) is engaged in simply a “secularization” of Kierkegaard’s religious existentialism. To understand his thought as another existentialism is wholly to misunderstand him.
Hersch, Jeanne (1910–2000). Swiss-Jewish philosopher; a student of Jaspers and the first female professor at the University of Geneva. The main theme of her works is the existentialist conception of freedom.
Jaspers, Karl (1883–1969). Influential psychiatrist, then philosopher (with a considerable impact on modern theology). Like Heidegger, Jaspers was unsettled by the label “existentialist.” He described his own philosophy as Existenzphilosophie, which he once defined as “to catch sight of reality at its origin and to grasp it through the way in which I, in thought, deal with myself.”2 Well before 1937, both Heidegger and Jaspers sought to distinguish clearly their philosophies from each other.
Landsberg, Paul (1901–1944). Jewish-Christian existentialist philosopher; a student of Husserl and Heidegger and close associate of Emmanuel Mounier in Paris; author of The Experience of Death: The Moral Problem of Suicide (1951). Landsberg died in the concentration camp at Oranienburg.
Lavelle, Louis (1883–1951.) Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne; a thinker in the stream of French “spiritualism” (opposed to “materialism”) after Bergson. For Lavelle, the domain of metaphysics was the “first-person” domain of subjective experience (opposed to the “third-person” domain of science). A major figure in his day, he is now all but forgotten. Articles on Lavelle and translations into English of selections from his numerous works can be found on the website of the Association Louis Lavelle (http://association-lavelle.chez-alice.fr/).
Lenoir, Raymond (1890–1972). Parisian philosopher and student of Emile Durkheim at the Sorbonne. Lenoir participated in another famous meeting of the Société française de la philosophie (1931), on “la notion de philosophie chrétienne,” with Gilson, Maritain, and others.3
Levinas, Emmanuel (1906–1995). A close associate of Wahl’s; Levinas, in his letter, rejects Wahl’s interpretation of continuity between Heidegger and Kierkegaard, and instead suggests that Wahl’s reading does not yet see what is radically at stake with Heideggerian transcendence.
Löwith, Karl (1897–1973). Jewish-Christian philosopher from Munich; a student of Heidegger; fled Germany in 1934; like Wahl and others at this event, he lived and taught in the United States during the 1940s. Löwith is the author of Meaning in History (1949), which argues that the modern concept of history has roots in Christian eschatology.
Marcel, Gabriel (1889–1973). Philosopher and playwright. His 1949–50 Gifford Lectures became his famous work The Mystery of Being (2 vols.). Similar to Jaspers, Marcel came to reject the term existentialism to describe his own thought. In his case this was especially meant to distinguish himself sharply from the crass materialism of existentialists like Sartre. He ultimately preferred the term neo-Socratism. A close associate and friend of Wahl, Marcel serves as his main interlocutor in the meeting.
Marck, Siegfried (1889–1957). Jewish neo-Kantian and socialist; student of Heinrich Rickert; taught philosophy at the University of Breslau (where Heidegger would block his appointment to full professor in 1930); subsequently exiled to France and then emigrated to America.
Nadler, Käte. German philosopher influenced particularly by Richard Kroner (of Von Kant bis Hegel fame); author of numerous studies on Hegel. Her most influential work was her doctoral dissertation, Der dialektische Widerspruch in Hegels Philosophie und das Paradoxon des Christentums (1931) comparing Kierkegaardian (Barthian) “paradox” to Hegelian “contradiction,” arguing that Christian paradox finds its highest expression, actually, in Hegel.
Pollnow, Hans (1902–1943). German psychiatrist and translator of philosophical works; fled Nazi-German persecution by emigrating to France in 1933. Pollnow was captured during the Occupation and died in the concentration camp at Mauthausen.
Rougemont, Denis de (1906–1985). Swiss philosopher who lived in Paris; author of Love in the Western World (1939/1972), which explores the Western conception of love as the union and conflict of passion and commitment.
Wahl, Jean (1888–1974). Wahl was a last-minute replacement for this meeting. As Brunschvicg notes in his opening remarks, the original speaker was a certain “Monsieur Leroux,” whose wife’s sudden illness forced him to withdraw.4
The paper “Subjectivity and Transcendence” was presented at a meeting of the Société française de philosophie on December 4, 1937. I present here some extracts from the discussion that followed as well as from some of the letters submitted to the author on this occasion.5
GABRIEL MARCEL: We read in the text provided for us: “We could ask if ‘transascendence’ is necessarily good, and ‘transdescendence’ necessarily bad.”6 Let us admit, even though this is probably not actually the case, that the meaning of these two terms transascendence and transdescendence is made sufficiently precise by the references which follow them: Blake, Gide, … et alia. But what remain in any case completely vague are the words good and bad. And I think for at least several of the poets invoked—I will say in any case in Lawrence and Cowper Powys, and very probably also in Gide—provided that we consider the entire scope of his thought—the same thing can be said: the idea of good and evil has not been submitted to a rigorous enough reflection. We must begin, then, by explaining the meaning of these two words as they appear in the sentence I just quoted.
I’m guessing the good is that which exalts our powers, or our feeling of this power? From this point of view it is in fact tempting to say that transdescendence could be good. In other words, in more precise language, at least more understandable, that in putting a very strong accent on the subterranean parts of ourselves, or, if you like, on the dark God—it is not difficult to find, in Lawrence in particular, some analogous expressions—one would be intensifying within us a certain immediate awareness of our existence conceived as force.
I would say that this is not a discovery, not even a paradox, but a truism. I wish to emphasize that this affirmation only has meaning if we begin by denaturing the idea of the good, that is, by accepting a bioenergetic meaning. On the contrary, the more we retain a preoccupation with remaining in agreement with the great spiritual tradition of humanity—it is not a matter here of Occidentalism—the more this affirmation appears devoid of meaning. But I wonder if we will not refuse carefully enough to explain as I have just done this radical change of meaning to the words good and evil if we do not somehow take our chances with the uncertainty that we find there.
In a general way, I would say that in speaking of transdescendence in opposition to transascendence we are merely, it seems to me, recalling what Schelling perfectly understood after Boehme: that the order of powers is reversible, and as far as I am concerned every philosophy that fails to recognize this possibility is in a sense completely obsolete. Only let me immediately add that philosophy is required to take a position in the face of this reversal, of taking it directly for what it is, that is, as a subversion, and it is precisely this that Schelling in particular never failed to do.
I think that if philosophy abstains from taking sides in that way in the presence of this reversal, it risks selling out. If treason is possible in philosophy, this is it. And this is exactly what, I would say, all the kinds of thinking that make a pact with an infrarational element are guilty of. And this is the point where I think that an agreement is made with the greatest ease between the philosophies of existence as I conceive them and a certain rationalism. Here I suppose that what should be addressed is the Nietzschean idea of transvaluation, Umwertung, and its implicit confusion of a will toward purification, a militant sincerity always more attentive to its own exigencies (which is the essential component of Nietzsche’s thought, and a sort of will toward subversion of fundamental values that takes root either in a collection of complex disquisitions as postulates, or in a naturalist metaphysics).
I will not easily accept the remark that transcendence is not necessarily God or the devil, but perhaps simply nature. Here again it seems to me that a certain conceptual imprecision can be traced back to an uncertainty in the thinker’s purposes. What does it mean to say “transcendence can be simply nature”? With nature being opposed to God, it seems that your observation can be reduced to: “nature can be itself experienced as being beyond the conceivable according to certain norms.” All the great lyrics almost without exception testify to this experience. It is simply a given. The philosophical problem is posed from this word, from this nature naturing and not nature natured. It is only here opposed to God because one is given, although again without explanation, a certain idea of God, for example as moral order of the world if you like, or perhaps as person, and so forth.
The question remains if, at the heart of this nature naturing, there is not to be distinguished, to be opposed, as the Romantics believed, a hierarchy of powers, the order of which can be, once again, reversed.
These remarks call for the response that I will make as far as the questions of the last paragraph concern me: can we conceive of a philosophy like Heidegger and Jaspers’s, the attraction of which is not partly explained by the fact that it consists of a nostalgia and echo of the religious? I would not speak here of an “attraction.” Instead, the problem is a matter of knowing if a philosophy of existence can be conceived without reference to the transcendent. Apparently, or if we are concerned only with the formal aspect of ideas, it certainly can. But the question still remains whether an existence not related to an inexhaustible transcendent does not just degenerate into pure facticity. Is it not the case that this philosophy of existence would be reduced to a schematic of observation? The danger of linking the philosophy of existence too directly to theology was pointed out. What does this mean? I detect here a peril that is real indeed: that the philosopher causes to crop up not elements of theology, but of an overly determined theology, and by that betrays [the cause of philosophy itself].
Here again a very careful examination is required. The idea of sin or fall as it appears in existential philosophy—does it not translate a fundamental given handed over to reflection as soon as we become fully aware of the situation that composes our existence? This is how I understand Jaspers, and even Heidegger.
It is a matter of seeing the intrinsic worth of these analyses. If they are found to coincide to some degree with the assertions of theology, it does not automatically mean we should be induced to defiance—if these analyses are accepted as accurate. Especially because, after all, we ought to wonder where these theological ideas came from. They did not fall from heaven.
Finally, a word on why I cannot go all the way with the final remark. The existence of Rimbaud, Nietzsche, or Hölderlin is not in itself philosophical or existential. You present these figures, however ambiguously, merely as functions of a philosophy of existence. What will prevent me, if I am a doctor, from treating the fate of Nietzsche as a clinical case, that is, syphilographically? Objectively nothing, absolutely nothing. One is always completely free to be totally baffled. But then it is a matter of justifying this other point of view, this existential viewpoint. This is philosophy, and it alone can do this—by showing that on a certain level (though it is necessary to establish it on this level) the pathological particularities that are unique to Nietzsche are void of meaning or at the very least possess a signification that should be interpreted based on a whole.
The conclusion of this set of remarks is, first, that what is given here does not add up to a philosophy. I think that it is completely vain to claim so. After all, the philosophies of existence are perhaps much less important than the lives that do the existing. What is doubtlessly true is that these lives are essential, and I even think—I will go so far as to say—that a philosophy of existence can likely be constituted in concreto only as “monography” (I do not like this word), or in other words through references to lives blessed with a certain tragic signification. Nothing seems to me to be more correct.
This does not mean, once again, that the consideration of these privileged lives is somehow sufficient in itself. I do not even see how one could think that.
Finally—and this is the point that I take most personally to heart, and on which a discussion could usefully ensue—I do not believe for a minute that a philosophy, existential if you like, can take any liberty with fundamental values. More precisely, it is doubtlessly capable of doing that, to the degree that, as philosophy, it is, if you like, freedom in action. It only remains to be seen whether this freedom, exercised in this way, I will say in a self-destructive fashion, is not its own annihilation.
JEAN WAHL: It is certainly the case, when I spoke of “transascendence” and “transdescendence,” that I have tied down the word transdescendence, attaching it to what Kierkegaard said, and hence with the idea of demonic force, and from that moment it takes on a moral dimension, and even an immoral dimension. I wanted to remain outside of these categories of the moral and immoral. I wanted to say—as in fact you said—that there are ways to reach the deep forces of being, and that this transdescendence is not degeneration. I did not want to say that evil is good. That is a problem with which I am not presently concerned. Have I betrayed [philosophy] by saying what I said? I do not believe so. But I believe that many betray philosophy who want to intervene with questions of morality and value when the question is really a matter of pure knowledge.
Here it is not a matter of saying what is good or evil, and I was wrong in this sense to employ those words. It is instead a matter of remaining in the realm of a kind of contemplation, whether it be sensory or artistic or metaphysical, of finding what in fact increases our knowledge and intensifies our spontaneity.
Your second objection pertains to the idea of nature. You say that nature is here divinized. It is possible. But it depends. Do you think the idea of divinization strictly entails the idea of a God? I mean: do you think that there is not actually a more primitive idea somewhere in there? I am trying precisely to return to this something more primitive. For a number of reasons the word nature is perhaps not very well chosen. I think I originally said “the world” and “the external world”—words equally insufficient. There is no word. I want to speak of the other that is neither necessarily the God of the religions, nor even of their heterodoxies.
You said that there cannot be philosophical reflection without transcendence. But I am struck by the fact that in Spencer, for example, there is transcendence, but we cannot find in him—I cannot find it in any case—this tension that I investigate in Kierkegaard. This does not depend on whether or not there is transcendence; what it also depends on is one’s attitude toward things. A philosopher with transcendence like Spencer is not very satisfying. And there can be this philosopher or that artist without transcendence who, by his intensity, gives me much more the impression of summoning up from within myself something from the depths.
As for the feeling of fallenness, I am not sure if we have it or not. It is a question for reflection. Do we primordially possess the feeling of the original fall? Sometimes we have a feeling of solitude, we have a feeling of angst, if you like, but I do not know if we naturally possess the feeling of fallenness.
For the artists and philosophers I mentioned at the end of my paper, I think a distinction should be made, for example, between Nietzsche and Rimbaud or Van Gogh, and then a distinction would have to be made between Rimbaud and Van Gogh. But there is surely a philosophical reflection in Nietzsche, and even in Rimbaud, and even, further, in Van Gogh, if we refer to some of his letters. So I do not see why I should be prohibited from turning toward them as philosophical sources. For this is precisely the way that I turn toward them. You say that, by themselves, they cannot be interpretations and responses. But that does not seem evident to me. You also say that Nietzsche could be explained by psychoanalysis. But perhaps inasmuch as Heidegger’s philosophy touches the depths of being, it could also be explained by psychoanalysis.
GABRIEL MARCEL: I would like to respond point by point.
First, it seems to me to be essential to analyze the idea of depth. For I think that here we have some dreadful equivocations. The elemental is, in one sense, the profound. But in another sense, it is not at all the profound. In reality, we should use these flattened-out metaphors prudentially. With them we cannot be more careful, I think.
In relation to my first objection, you spoke of pure knowledge. But we do not inhabit the order of knowledge; we are always in the order of evaluation. You say that the words good and evil with their moral resonance are perhaps not required here. All the same, it is necessary to substitute others, which are also themselves terms that express a judgment of value. Consequently, if we are in the realm of judgment (and it seems to me that if we are not there, then we are nowhere, for if it is not a matter of explanation, we are absolutely not involved with explanatory theory), if you introduce an evaluation, I believe that my objection reappears.
Moving to the second point, the transcendence of nature. You said: “I am not sure that nature, such as, for example, it is given in the great lyrics, is divinized. Is the idea of God truly found there?” I am terribly wary of the word idea. Certainly, if we place ourselves on an ideological terrain, we could quickly find ourselves in agreement with everything you are looking for. But what is important here is attitude. It is difficult to deny that in Schelling, for example, there is a certain attitude of adoration before nature. This is sufficient for me to speak of a sort of diffuse theology. It seems to me that you are using the words God and theology in a determined, hyper-Christian sense. But there could be a non-Christian theology. Really, it is this which is critical here.
It is not a matter of words. The term you use here is very important. Is it the case that, as soon as the term transcendence is introduced, to some degree one is doing theology? I do not think that the idea of transcendence, stretched to the limit, is secularizable. This is the expression I would use.
The third point. Regarding existence, you evoke Spencer. This is a man who has perhaps never reflected, and who, at the very least, probably has no idea about what we are able to call transcendence. I will therefore not speak about transcendence in relation to his doctrine. Here we are playing with analogies that are purely verbal. You cannot say that transcendence in Kierkegaard or Heidegger has anything in common with Spencer’s unknown—perhaps precisely because Spencer always inhabits a realm of knowledge. He is an intellectualist to the tenth degree, but he is all the same an intellectualist. He has not at all risen to a superior realm. Everything you said at the beginning on the relations of objectivity and transcendence, which is important and ought to be elaborated, is in contradiction with everything we find in Spencer. So I will not accept your use of Spencer as an example. With him, it seems to me, the problem is not even posed. We are not in the subjective, but in the infraobjective.
Regarding the feeling of fallenness: this remains a question that appears to me to be very ambiguous. It seems like you are asking this question for the sake of a potential investigation. Could it be said that all being finds in itself, in some way, this feeling or experience? I would say that it is infinitely likely that no, in any case, there is not this awareness. But I do not care at all about this; it does not interest me, and I would be the first to recognize that a sole being, a single soul where we truly find this experience or feeling to a certain degree of intensity and clarity, counts much more than millions who in short have no interior life at all.
On the other hand, it is difficult for me to subscribe to what you say about Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, et alia. First because I think that this rapprochement is altogether fallacious. Nietzsche is all the same a philosopher. That distorts everything. The problem that you pose exists in pure form only if you take artists who are in no way philosophers. From this point of view, if you wish to take it, Van Gogh, and I would say the same about Rimbaud, are more satisfying examples. But the question of interpretation remains. How can you make out of it an abstraction? Do they themselves furnish us with all the elements of this interpretation? This is not certain. We are here required to pose a methodological problem. When you say, at the end, after all, the philosophy of Heidegger itself can be considered in a certain way as a phenomenon subject to psychoanalysis like the experience of Rimbaud, you are not taking into account the difference between this philosophy and a nonphilosophy: above all, this philosophy is an effort to explain its own postulates. To the degree that Heidegger’s philosophy contains psychoanalytic elements, supposing that this is the case, it will admit this. And for me it is philosophy only on this condition. This is why I am always obliged to use this term, explication. This is the entire question. Starting from the point where there is explication, there is philosophy, and starting from there alone.
You say that lives like that are philosophical lives. I agree. I do not see any problem there. Only, are these sources of philosophy, somehow independently from the philosophers who interpret them and comment on them? It seems to me sufficient to pose this question in order then to resolve it.
JEAN WAHL: I think you risk diminishing philosophy, whereas I want to exalt it by saying that it exists as much in “nonphilosophers as in philosophers.” I do not see that philosophy should simply be defined as explication. When its postulates are implicit, then it is not philosophy? No. I would say that precisely in Rimbaud, whose postulates I am not entirely familiar with, there is not philosophy, but a source of philosophy. In this case you would say that I am in agreement with you since you admit that in Rimbaud there is a source of philosophy? The difference being that, according to you, the philosopher is the one who will reflect upon what is in another in an existential state?
GABRIEL MARCEL: Not necessarily. For I think that without a doubt the greatest are those who have been at once their own poet and their own philosopher. When you say that I am making philosophy a function of pure explication, you are deforming somewhat my thought. I believe that there is truly philosophy only where there is a certain interior creation that is absolutely fundamental. What I am saying is that if this creation is not accompanied by a reflection on itself, it is prephilosophical or periphilosophical. Here the example of Kierkegaard is significant.
JEAN WAHL: It is no less significant in the sense that he is an example of both. He is the model of a life that is not completely explicit … He is the model of someone who I can put on the same level as Nietzsche and even Rimbaud and Van Gogh, upon whom you doubtlessly bestow the name philosopher.
GABRIEL MARCEL: A failed philosophy.
JEAN WAHL: It is rather the source of philosophy, but a source that seems to me to be at least as great as philosophy.
GABRIEL MARCEL: As great … We are not asking the question in these terms. Who would dream of establishing a comparison between the grandeur of an artist and a philosopher? I do not see any meaning at all to this question. What I simply want to say is that a certain creation not accompanied by reflection is incomplete, is a creation that needs the other, and which is extended toward the other, even though, despite all, for me, if we remain faithful to a certain traditional idea, the philosopher is all the same autarkes.
JEAN WAHL: The essence of man is precisely that in him nothing is accomplished that is not at the same time reflection on that which he accomplishes, starting, at least, from a certain level. In Van Gogh or Rimbaud you cannot say that there is no reflection on what happens in them. So then, for you it would be a matter of completely putting philosophical reflections to one side, and to the other side a reflection that is not philosophical?
GABRIEL MARCEL: Rimbaud’s case is very depressing. When we look at the absolutely contradictory interpretations that continue to be proposed through Rimbaud’s evolution, we are forced to conclude that there is not found in Rimbaud himself anything to help shed light on him. I am not saying that this observation diminishes him at all, but it does not allow us to make him a philosopher.
JEAN WAHL: A great philosopher—and this is what in part composes his value—cannot be completely illumined.
GABRIEL MARCEL: I share this opinion with you. It is even certain that to the degree that a philosopher is inserted into a history, he calls out for interpretations that come after him. But we still have to say that all the same he has made a certain effort of self-interpretation. This does not mean that this self-interpretation is sufficient.
JEAN WAHL: This seems very difficult to me. I well see that Rimbaud does not express himself in the academic-speak that we use here, and that Heidegger more approaches the philosophical classroom. But I do not see at all that there is any less profound reflection in Rimbaud than in Heidegger. We would have to study the mode of reflection that you are calling philosophy.
GABRIEL MARCEL: At the risk of scandalizing all the disciples of Rimbaud, I would say that the greater the artist, the more he is reduced to a phenomenon; to the degree that there is the Rimbaud-phenomenon, what you say applies to him, but on the condition of refusing for him this autarkeia, the act of holding within oneself one’s own interpretation.
LÉON BRUNSCHVICG: Perhaps there are some autarkic philosophers who would like to intervene in order to arbitrate the debate?
RENÉ BERTHELOT: I would translate your two philosophical terms—subjectivity and transcendence—by two others that are to a large degree aesthetic and religious and which seem to me to indicate better who Kierkegaard was. In his thought subjectivity is Romanticism and transcendence is Calvinism. And if I were to try to define him by a formula that is fatally incomplete (like every formula of this kind), I would say that he was a Romantic Calvinist, and that is how he is distinguished both from other Romantics and other Calvinists.
In the first place, Kierkegaard (1813–55) seems to me functionally a Romantic, and, to be more precise, a German Romantic. He made a good claim that, his religious faith allowing him—so he says—to overcome subjectivity, he is thereby opposed to Romanticism, though we nevertheless find in him all the dominant traits. This is what Georg Brandès demonstrated in his study on German Romanticism, numerous chapters of which cite or summarize Kierkegaard in order to show point by point that his thought and his literary conception approach either that of Tieck (with his belief in the metaphysical meaning of music and humor), or that of Novalis, or of the Schlegel brothers, et alia. Brandès being Danish like Kierkegaard, and the influence of Kierkegaard being very great in the Denmark of Brandès’s time, it is natural that he wanted to show to his countrymen that Kierkegaard was not an isolated phenomenon, an aerolite, but rather a Danish reflection of the sensibilities, literary forms, and philosophical thought of the German Romantics.
Therefore I think that if one takes him in his concrete individuality and historicity, it is indispensable to begin by returning him to this current of German Romanticism.
JEAN WAHL: What I wanted to do is to separate him from this current in order to take him as he is in himself.
RENÉ BERTHELOT: But do you not risk deforming his physiognomy by isolating him, abstracting him from this current, if it is the case that taking him in himself and in his concrete reality are inseparable? If I insist on this point, it is because the thought of Kierkegaard does not seem to me to have a contemporary impact to the degree that German Romanticism has preserved one. What do we encounter in Kierkegaard? Precisely what we encounter with much more richness, creative poetic power, and philosophical depth in the great German Romantics. In some respects, Kierkegaard’s thought is tied to Schelling’s reaction, in his old age, to Hegel. But to take him more broadly, his subjectivism corresponds to an attitude intermediary between Fichte and Schelling. One recognizes in him something of the second Fichte and the first Schelling, during the period when these two were most directly related. Here is found a form of philosophical Romanticism that lasted only a few years, and the thought of Kierkegaard as a theory of subjectivity is linked—not exclusively but especially—to this era of German thought.
I pass to the second point: transcendence. As I said, I think that for us to approach Kierkegaard in his concrete individuality and historical reality we should set him squarely within the Calvinist current. He is conceived as isolated not only from other men, but from God. This shows up in his violent attacks on the official Danish church. And this double isolation, as you have said, is essential for him.
But we recognize this in Ibsen’s character Brand,7 and we know from Georg Brandès that this tragic figure was inspired by the personality of Kierkegaard. He portrays very well the double mark of transcendence in Kierkegaard, isolation in relation to his relatives, and the fact of conceiving his God as unattainable.
In certain of Ibsen’s heroes, as in Ibsen himself, there is what could be called a Calvinism without Christianity. Huxley (the elder, the friend of Darwin) said of Auguste Comte that his philosophy was a Catholicism without Christianity. There has even been for a half century now a certain number of thinkers and writers who one could say come from a Protestantism without Christianity, and for many of their number, a Calvinism without Christianity. This Calvinist pessimism ceaselessly marked Ibsen’s theatrical legacy to the end. Jean-Gabriel Borkman8 still resembles Brand. And in the playwright a durable influence of Kierkegaard’s thought remains, in the sense that you have defined it through the word transcendence. At the time that he sought to separate himself from the Romanticism of his youth and to break from traditional Protestantism, a persistence of the moral attitude of Calvinism remained. And, by virtue of the more literary than philosophical nature of the Kierkegaardian spirit, it is without a doubt in a playwright like Ibsen rather than among the philosophers that we ought to look for his most authentic heir. Kierkegaard is situated between Calvin and Ibsen.
In this way could be discerned those among his contemporaries to whom the Danish writer appears to be the closest, in sentiment, thought or literary manner. It is to Carlyle that we look, the Carlyle above all of the first period. The solitary Scotsman from Craigenputtock was of Puritan (hence Calvinist) formation as well as of Romantic formation (as defined by German Romanticism, from which he received his “unarticulated” “song” and his tormented sense of humor, so close to Kierkegaard’s own). Kierkegaard is a sort of Danish Carlyle who would have remained Sartor resartus, who would not have been subjected to the influence of Saint-Simonism, and dedicated to historical research.
From that I equally believe that we can draw some general conclusions about the use certain philosophers today make of Kierkegaard.
Can some of the central themes of his thought be made the point of departure for a philosophical doctrine? This is the problem that you have asked.
I will not go into the thought of Heidegger and Jaspers in any detail. Let a general indication be sufficient: it seems to me that these very different philosophies offer us above all the reflection bouncing off of a very particular state of the soul, and it is therefore quixotic to claim to interpret this state of soul as justified in its totality by a metaphysical doctrine that aims for universality. The mostly aesthetic character of Kierkegaard’s thought is one of the reasons that makes it difficult and, in my opinion, illegitimate to interpret as belonging to the same genre. And this critique seems to me to redound in many respects onto the Kierkegaardians about whom you have spoken, despite all the differences that separate these philosophers from their master. On this point I also do not find myself in disagreement with you.
I turn back to Schelling, from whom in philosophy Kierkegaard takes inspiration. For Schelling furnishes us with the elements by which we can compose a judgment not only of Kierkegaard but also of the Kierkegaardians of our day.
In an early work, The System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling declared, profoundly, that what is both necessary and incomprehensible in the development of spirit is the passage from “primitive limitation” to “derivative limitation.” Grossly speaking, primitive limitation is the necessity for spirit to manifest itself as a finite and individual ego. Derivative limitation is its act of being precisely this finite ego, precisely this individual ego that I am, in this instant of time, and no such other ego different from the one in such another instant. But, following Schelling, from the moment that spirit poses in the ego primitive limitation, it is impossible for it not to pose by the very same spiritual act derivative limitation. But, on the other hand, derivative limitation, the very particularity that I myself am, cannot escape from primitive limitation. What is simultaneously necessary and incomprehensible in philosophy, says Schelling, is therefore this passage from primitive to derived limitation. But wanting to interpret through a metaphysics that has a universal value—either Kierkegaard or the particular psychological cases analyzed by Heidegger and Jaspers, to which they pretended to attribute a universal value—is for the philosopher precisely to attempt this illegitimate, incomprehensible passage from primitive to derived limitation. And in this way, Schelling’s formula seems to me implicitly to contain the critique both of the general attitude of Kierkegaard and the contemporary philosophies you have discussed.
JEAN WAHL: Thank you very much indeed for the views that you have expressed about the elements that formed Kierkegaard’s thought.
NICOLAI BERDYAEV: I will offer two remarks.
We should make a distinction between existential philosophy and the philosophy of existence. I believe, fundamentally, that you have created this distinction. For example, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are existential philosophers. Heidegger and Jaspers are not. Theirs is a philosophy of existence. Existential philosophy is the expression of an existential experience, and it ascribes great value to philosophers themselves as living beings. The philosophy of existence, even if Jaspers says existence can never become an object, makes of existence an object of the philosopher’s knowledge.
Another remark. I think there is a great difference between transcendence and the simple supposition that there is a reality above us, an absolute reality, God, the “world beyond.” Because transcendence is an existential experience, it is a movement. One could suppose that a world beyond exists. For example Spencer supposes that there is the “unknowable,” and at the same time there is no transcendence in the very experience of Spencer and in his philosophy. Nothing happens here, whenever he says, “there is the unknowable”—absolutely nothing. This is exactly the contrary of transcendence as existential experience.
The philosopher, in his knowledge, is able to pass from subjectivity toward the objective, by objectification. And he can pass from subjectivity toward the transcendent by transcendence. These are completely different paths. I think that philosophy becomes less and less existential when the philosopher passes from subjectivity toward objectivity. It remains existential if the philosopher passes from subjectivity toward transcendence. Transcendence is never an object, never an objective world. It is something totally other. When transcendence is turned into an objective world, the exact contrary of an existential philosophy is created. I think the danger in Heidegger and Jaspers is found here—it is not very clear what they are doing: are they moving toward objectivity or transcendence?
In Kierkegaard everything is different.
One cannot remain in subjectivity (not only the philosopher but man himself). But man is a being that exceeds himself, transcends himself. There are different paths that open here, in this passing beyond oneself. Basically Jaspers (in his little book Vernunft und Existenz, and others) avers that existential philosophy is not possible. He says this. I think the real interesting thing in the philosophies of Heidegger and Jaspers is that here we have philosophers wounded by the existential experience of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Jaspers says this. This experience of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche influenced their philosophy. But even so theirs is not existential philosophy. It would perhaps be paradoxical to say it, but, for example, if we take the philosophy of Hegel, which is totally contrary to the philosophy of Kierkegaard and to existential philosophy as Kierkegaard understood it, it is still more existential than the philosophy of Heidegger or Jaspers because Hegel lived in the dialectic. He experienced it; for him it was existence in a certain sense; an existence totally different from the experience of transcendence, which is a catastrophic experience—and not a development, not an evolution. Hegel inhabited an existence of a completely different kind. But it was all the same a lived philosophy.
JEAN WAHL: I believe I am in complete agreement with you, though the question is open whether Heidegger lives his philosophy. But we do not have the right …
NICOLAI BERDYAEV: Every significant philosopher, every true philosopher does so, not only Heidegger. But if we say this, we should say more generally that the only philosophy is existential philosophy, but there is all the same here a certain difference.
PAUL LANDSBERG: I do not want to revisit the problem of existential philosophy, nor speak of Heidegger and Jaspers, because I think Berdyaev has expressed here and in his books manifest verities on this transformation of an existential philosophy into a false objectification of existence. It seems to me that this has irrefutably happened and that it is a tragic and fascinating fall of the mind that occurred there. I want to return to the captivating exchange between Messieurs Wahl and Marcel, particularly on the red-hot point of the problem of—I believe you said—“transascendence” and “transdescendence.” In any case, I think I understand what you mean by these terms.
I wonder if perhaps the problem generated by this exchange has not been posed in a sufficiently clear way, and if actually Messieurs Wahl, Marcel, and the rest of us still have some work to do in order first to clarify what the problem actually is. For I think that what we have here is definitely a real problem that exists in itself. If I rightly understand the train of Wahl’s thought, he begins—not only in his paper, … for I allow myself to speak a little about the history of his thought—he begins from the interpretation of Kierkegaard, finding there a certain description of a lived experience, an existential experience of transcendence.
And it is here that I should say that, for me, what is primary in Kierkegaard is that he is a Christian. He is a believer, a Christian, and all his philosophy, if it is a philosophy, is an interpretation and pedagogy of Christianity, an effort to lead people to a certain realization, to Christianity, to become a serious Christian—it being well understood that to be a Christian has no live meaning unless it means always becoming Christian. If we abstract from that I think Kierkegaard becomes completely obscure and we can no longer understand him. He is neither a universal philosopher in the sense that Hegel is, nor a Romantic. I do not want to deny what he has in common with German Romanticism, but he is not defined by that Romantic quality—the Christian quality in him is much more serious. I believe Monsieur Wahl and I agree on this point. The transcendence lived by Kierkegaard under a very particular form that you have finely distinguished is Christian transcendence and in any case a lived Christian transcendence. Kierkegaard’s importance is above all that in his day, in the middle of the nineteenth century, someone lived authentically Christian transcendence and expressed it in a way that belongs to no church, to no theology, but expressed it in a forthrightly dialectical way, in other words in the language of his century, and with all the richness of expression given by Romanticism, poetry, et cetera. You all know that this corresponds closely to Kierkegaard’s own interpretation of his vocation: to be a simple Christian who makes use of all the seductions of the language and thought of his century in order to make reunderstood so to speak the Christian situation and faith.
Monsieur Wahl has interpreted the thought of Kierkegaard—and you all know with what profundity he has done so. And he has drawn from it, as Jaspers and Heidegger have done in a completely different way, a certain idea of transcendence as such, which one could yet distinguish from lived Christian experience but which is so to speak this experience in a formalized state. I do not know if the expression is absolutely precise … That is, what is of concern here is a transcendence that, indeed, is essentially ascending and finds the other in the sacrifice of the self and also in the sacrifice of everything natural, of the natural temptation in relation to the self. Kierkegaard, in short, relinquishes the world and his self as a Christian, in order to give himself to his faith, in order to give himself to an ascending transcendence.
Following the train of his thinking, it seems to me that Monsieur Wahl has found that this lived experience that he has seen under a certain form in Kierkegaard has a much more universal meaning, that is, there are other experiences that share some remarkable features with this experience: above all the feature of the experience of the other in the strict and absolute sense that Monsieur Wahl has given to it in his interpretation of Kierkegaard. In other words, even in the sphere of biology, of biology as subject of a metaphysics of life, there are ecstasies in which a depersonalizing life takes this character of something absolutely other, in which the self feels the anguish of being lost and to which man, the self, can be given over. In fact, the self is found between two forces … that transcend it in this sense. It is true that the self can experience quakes of anguish, feelings analogous to the approach of these two forces, from below and from above, to utilize images, or in any case an essentially spiritual force and an essentially vital force. I believe that the most fecund interpretation would be to speak, after Nietzsche, of Dionysos. In fact, when he says that Dionysos is a god, he means that here it is a matter of a transcendence, that is, that the self is also anguished, sacrificed, destroyed, transcended in being united to Dionysos as in drawing near to a spiritual God. Up to this point I think that from this purely descriptive vantage there is truly an analogy, and up to this point I think that everything that Monsieur Wahl has said is justifiable as is a vantage situated finally closer to Monsieur Marcel. The problem touched on by Monsieur Marcel comes afterward and is a problem not of the philosophy of existence but of existential philosophy, to use the terms introduced by Berdyaev, and therefore that in existential philosophy man exists concretely between these two forces. The self is truly affected by these different forces, and it may grasp the difference between them. Whereas in existential philosophy, though I almost hate to say it—but allow me to in order to express myself with brevity—one attempts to follow a path closer to Kierkegaard, a path taken by men like him, where one can even recognize that there is a collision, not only between the self and an ascending transcendence, but also, after Jean Wahl, between the self and a different transcendence. If the problem of transcendence was only between the self and a sole transcendent “center,” things would be much simpler. What you have brought to our attention is much more complex, both that the self is found situated between two forces that oppose it and oppose each other.
From another point of view, where one is already engaged in definite existential philosophy, one could speak with Monsieur Marcel of a “subversion,” when a man is given over to a dark ecstasy. Monsieur Marcel has already decided for a certain direction of existence, whereas the point of view of Monsieur Wahl is purely descriptive, and perhaps with a certain penchant for what he calls transdescendence.
JEAN WAHL: I truly have nothing to say but thank you to Monsieur Landsberg.9
I would like to extend my thanks to Monsieur Berdyaev by commenting on something he said. I heartily agree in fact that the concept of transcendence greatly needs to be analyzed more deeply than what I was able to do here. To that end we would do well to recall a remark once made by Nicolai Hartmann, who said that we ought not to speak about transcendence but rather of a “movement of what transcends itself toward that which transcends it.” This would begin to clarify the discussion. There are movements of transcendence, movements of excess. But transcendence should not be applied to the end [terme] toward which this movement is directed. Such is Hartmann’s observation that perhaps should be contemplated.10
Monsieur Berdyaev envisages the same problem that Monsieur Landsberg has very profoundly highlighted: can there be a kind of transcendence toward that which is not the ordinary object of transcendence, toward the object of the movement of transcendence? This is what Monsieur Berdyaev has criticized, and it is this, if I understand him, that Monsieur Landsberg declares possible. But I do not want to end by presenting a solution because I think that the essence of existential philosophy is to tell us that questions have a value in themselves. Philosophical problems cannot be completely resolved. One has to … as Rimbaud said … make oneself a seer.11 One has to make oneself the question. And this is why I will not respond.
Translated by Jeffrey Hanson
[As in the original text, the response of Jean Wahl is in italics following each letter.]
I want to thank you kindly for your friendly invitation to your meeting; unfortunately I am not able to attend because of the current semester’s work.
Your critical remarks on the subject of the “philosophy of existence” are very instructive. I should, however, repeat that my philosophical tendencies, although there is a question in Sein und Zeit of “Existenz” and of “Kierkegaard,” are not able to be classed as Existenzphilosophie. But this error of interpretation would probably be difficult to rule out at the moment.
I in fact wholly agree with you in saying that “philosophy of existence” is exposed to a double danger: either of falling into theology or of falling into abstraction. But the question that preoccupies me is not that of human existence; it is that of being as a whole and as such. And Nietzsche is no philosopher of existence either, but in his doctrine of the will and of the eternal return, he poses the ancient and unique question of being. But this question (which is only posed in Sein und Zeit) is not in any way addressed by Kierkegaard or by Nietzsche, and Jaspers in fact leaves it completely by the wayside.
But maybe these remarks themselves are too general a sketch to clarify the essential.
I am pleased to be able to reproduce this letter. It nevertheless remains the case that philosophy of existence is for Heidegger the necessary point of departure, if one wants to constitute a philosophy of being. I also ask myself what Heidegger contributes with regard to being itself. He says that it is time, with its three moments, its three ecstasies. But it is very difficult to isolate his thinking on this point about the being of the “existential” elements, for these three ecstasies define themselves by relation to Sorge.
Letter from Emmanuel Levinas
According to Monsieur Wahl, existential philosophy contains, in fact, a certain number of notions of theological origin. Kierkegaard presents them as such; Heidegger and Jaspers try to secularize them. These notions nevertheless play a considerable role in these philosophers, constituting the attraction of their thought, and assuring its connection with the concrete.
We can ask if the link between theology and existential philosophy is not, at the same time, more profound and—in relation to Heidegger—less determinative for existential philosophy than Monsieur Wahl says it is.
It is more profound on the condition of not limiting theology to the dogmatics of any positive religion. The problems to which dogmatics provides responses are independent and come into being from the simple fact of modern man’s existence. For modern man, to exist is already to know solitude, death, and the need for salvation. When the soul doesn’t know the consolation of the presence of God, it has a positive experience of his absence. Discourse on God does not lose its religious essence when it appears as a “discourse on the absence of God” or even as a silence about God. The religious is not ever totally out of the blue. What therefore links existential philosophy with theology is before all else its object itself—existence—a reality that if not theological is at least religious.
But, on the other hand, under the form that existential philosophy assumes in Heidegger, it banishes theology as far as possible. Moreover, irrespective of the part played by theology in Heidegger’s intellectual formation, we can easily grant that, for him, to secularize a notion does not come down to camouflaging the religious aspect. Secularization must signify an operation that ends in truly surpassing the theological point of view. Therefore, the problem of the relation between Heidegger’s philosophy and theology depends on the meaning that this secularization takes on. The point at which it carries itself out is indeed like the neuralgic point of his philosophy.
In the theological attitude one envisages things and beings in a manner that in Heideggerian terms it would be right to call ontic. One deals with that which is, with “beings” that fulfill their destiny. They are the object of narratives. They are treated as individuals and take part in a drama in which we are ourselves involved. Theology is essentially history and mythology. That is why in theological matters authority can guarantee truth.
The great concern of Heideggerian philosophy consists in showing at the base of man’s ontic adventure that there is something more than a relation of a “being” to a “being,” namely, the comprehension of being, ontology. The fate of human existence only interests Heidegger because of this ontology that it brings to completion. Heidegger thus breaks with theology to the exact extent that he makes the distinction between the ontic and the ontological (and he does this with a radicalism which is without precedent in the history of philosophy) and where fundamental transcendence fulfills itself for him not in the passage of one “being” to another, but from “being” to Being.
Under these conditions, it would be necessary to say that if Kierkegaard remains a theologian, this is not because he identified the transcendent with God rather than nature or the devil, but because he interpreted transcendence as contact with a “being.” If Heidegger abandons the beyond, it is not because the beyond would be unknowable or “more theological” than the below, but because the very distinction between the beyond and the below is ontic and posterior to the ontological problem. Can we maintain that Heidegger constructs “the fall into the domain of the anonymous crowd” from the idea of sin? He seeks rather the ontological condition of the fall which is in fact ontic and of which original sin is a particular case (Sein und Zeit, § 40, n4). It always concerns finding the ontological conditions of different situations of actual existence, of passing from ontic and existentielle understanding to understanding that he calls ontological and existential. Heidegger in any case sees this as the essence of his philosophical discovery. According to him (Sein und Zeit, § 45 n6), what remains foreign to Kierkegaard is the status of the problem of existence as an existential problem (by contrast to the existentielle), in other words, the very perspective of ontology.
I would not willingly accept the idea that existence is by itself a religious reality. For me religion has the nature of a response. And existence has first of all the nature of a question.
There are responses to this question other than religious; every engagement, every risk, every decision, need not necessarily receive a religious qualification.
I recognize that secularization in Heidegger is a surpassing, or in any case a destruction, of the theological point of view.
And the observations of Monsieur Levinas permit us, I think, to draw out the deeper meaning of Heidegger’s reservations: the problem of being, which he tells us is his problem, is the problem of being transposed from the ontic domain to the existential domain (surely passing through the existentielle domain). But what I don’t see clearly is precisely what the existential domain is. I fear that it is determined by the problem of the conditions of the possibility of existence, a critique of existence, which does not pose its questions in a more authentic or more adequate fashion than the critique of reason, and which like it appeals to the formal idea of “conditions of possibility.” One of the questions to pose is to know how Heidegger conceives of this idea of possibility, which plays such a great role in his thought, as in that of Jaspers, and if he can give a definition or a theory that allows for a nonformal concept.
Letter from Karl Jaspers
A few weeks ago, you were good enough to send me your thesis entitled “Subjectivity and Transcendence.” I will confine my report to what you said on the subject of my philosophy:
1. You wrote that my clarifications of limit situations assume also, by the concept of limitation, the idea of a totality, that of the Good and the True, but that my manner of thinking cannot, fundamentally, accept this totality. Now, nowhere do I maintain only that there would be a knowledge of the totality of being; I admit only a knowledge of diverse “modes of encompassing” in which the knowable reveals itself to me each time in an original fashion. Each mode of encompassing—firstly, real being, then consciousness as such, then spirit, up to existence—encounters a limitation that is proper to it, and in this way they reach the situation where, in another space, the barrier can be broken up to the point that tranquillity would become possible in transcendence. This tranquillity, however, cannot be acquired by any act of knowledge. The limitation only exists therefore in relation to a mode of consciousness of being, but it is not absolute. Totality, in its turn, has several significations: that of perfection, of consistency, of the achievement of a harmony containing in itself unlimited connections; but totality also is only given each time in relation to a mode of encompassing. In transcendence, it ceases to be, as well as its contrary, since, there, all that is expressible is only inadequate metaphor.
2. Your saying that I find myself in opposition with Kierkegaard, in wanting to remain in this world here, which is proper to us, proffers a misunderstanding. It is true that I deny faith in a transcendence right where this faith does not manage to manifest itself, to reassure itself, to confirm itself in our world. I don’t deny, however, the status of transcendence, and I am struck by finding myself before the “exception” that Kierkegaard saw within himself; I also believe I find myself before it as he would have wanted it: it is not an example for imitation, but it only serves to attract attention; it submits itself to the general principle of the “realization of itself in the world,” like a standard it is aware of not satisfying, and that in constant ambiguity of either profound culpability or an amazing sense of being chosen for an irreplaceable and nonrepeatable uniqueness.
3. I would reject as dishonest every Ersatz of the idea of eternity by secularizing thought. The fact that, in the world, fidelity, continuity, “repetition” are a confirmation and an assurance of eternity, does not mean that they are substitutes for eternity; it means, not that eternity does not exist anymore, but that it founders for me if I no longer trust anyone, nor consequently in myself.
4. I would not deny that nostalgia for anything lost makes itself felt in my philosophy and that an echo of religion resounds in it. However, I think I can make out this echo in all philosophy that stands in the shadow of Plato and Kant, for whom a great nostalgia was the source of their investigation and of their vocation. Who among us would not wish, in the deepest part of our heart, that God would personally speak to him, as to a child—even if we know that the Divinity, in refusing this to us, has given us precisely through that refusal the possibility of existing in our freedom qua human beings (Kant)?
5. That a “theory” of existence rightly sets aside existence itself is true for erroneous interpretations operating in the world in service of thoughts that clarify existence and summon us, as if they could subsume, know, and decide something in a concrete situation. Existentialism is the death of philosophy of existence, as it has always been ever since Plato’s school. Philosophy can only awaken us.
6. As for “dangers,” either from too close an attachment to theology, or of a too complete detachment from all “concreteness,” I don’t recognize these as dangers properly speaking. I would rather say: precisely what you designate as dangers I would want to get hold of at least as I understand it. Concerning “theology”: what impresses itself on me as originally true, remains true, even when I understand that consequently, historically, it would probably not have entered my mind without Christianity. Concerning “concreteness”: it is necessary that the philosophy rationally communicated remain in itself an open construction whose achievement is each time the affair of the thinker. It ought not to contain the concrete in the way the concrete is acquired in the sciences or communicable in the visions of poets, or in such a way as to remain historical in its very substance, and thereby available for each possible life. The greatest efforts of philosophical thought tend, it appears to me, to acquire not an empty concreteness but one that is authentic and effective. It is in this sense, for example, that we need to quit basing postulates and commandments on an anticipation of what they will decide on in history. Whoever communicates philosophically should adopt an attitude opposite to that of a dictator and do so by almost disappearing in an apparent flexibility and gentleness, and so reserving a space entirely free to the listener; if the listener doesn’t go toward him, by philosophizing from his own resources, he would prefer to let him lose hope rather than offering him some pale imitation. What is more, we need to abandon, for example, “psychologizing” (among other concrete attitudes), which renders the abstract imaginable and denatures it precisely by doing so. Philosophy should seek to reach a degree of abstraction, which by its very form is capable of dealing with the most profound reality. Psychology—in our day, in the form of psychoanalysis—is the doppelganger of philosophy. As soon as it involves itself with that, philosophy is lost. But, for almost every manifest form of philosophy, this psychological interpretation constitutes an erroneously drawn parallel. Indeed, concrete acts, all the philosopher’s real doings, are indicative for the comprehension and examination of his philosophical thought. For philosophy is not, as is the case for science, a truth susceptible to being isolated. Down to the tone, down to the decisive nuance, one can recognize the thinker himself and what reflects itself in his entire life. However, psychological analysis—when psychoanalysis battles its adversary, not by substantial arguments, but by psychoanalyzing him—offers only a deformed image, already distorted at its origin. Yet, this deformed image is oriented to the truth: in philosophy, I work with the thoughts of another, such that thanks to those thoughts I come closer to the thinker himself, an encounter that is all the more profound the purer in form those thoughts become. “Concrete” analyses of my philosophy intend to be a crossing of the psychological in order to render intensely present possible existence.
7. You ask if Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard are not more existential and essentially more philosophical than philosophy of existence. That a philosophy would be existential is, to tell the truth, an impossibility. Only a man, in his temporal being, is possible existence … I am content if I am one of those who you say are better off feeling the value of these very exceptions.
8. Combining Heidegger’s name with mine, as if we are doing the same thing, exposes us both, it appears to me, to erroneous interpretations. What we have in common perhaps is a critical and negative attitude in regard to traditional university philosophy, along with a dependence on some of Kierkegaard’s ideas. But what distinguishes us are the substantial contents where our respective philosophies come to birth.
There you have my succinct observations; I ask you to excuse their insufficient quality. In fact I have not at all perfectly understood the theses you sent to me. Because with each philosophical thought we enter into a network so inextricable from the multiplicity of possible interpretations that only a fortuitous encounter occasionally makes perceptible to us—for an instant and through the original project of thinking—the indubitable simplicity of truth.
I thank Karl Jaspers for the clarifications brought by his response. They are valuable to me. And what he said in numbers 5 and 7 marks, it seems to me, an agreement. I follow him less easily when in number 6 he radically condemns the work of psychoanalysis. He recognizes in number 2 that he denies faith in a transcendence that neither reassures itself nor confirms itself in our world. If I understand these expressions properly, it is thus that he admits on this point a difference between his thought and that of Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling. I think that what he says in paragraph 1 does not resolve the antinomy that exists in his philosophy between the idea of limitation as good and the idea of limitation as evil—or only resolves it with the help of distinctions that remain less than conceptual. Besides, is there perhaps knowledge of the diverse modes of the Umgreifende? Do we not find here the antinomy between breadth and narrowness that sheds light on existence? I would admit rather (and I think that he may admit this) that this is one of the essential tensions, one of these antinomies that clings to the very nature of being.
I don’t think I discern (as he says in number 4) in Kant, and a fortiori in Plato, nostalgia for a lost religious climate, for they still live in this climate. And their nostalgia is religious nostalgia rather than nostalgia for the religious. As for what he says in number 3, the question is precisely to know if one can at the time pose the question of “eternity for me” and truly believe in eternity. It founders for me, says Jaspers, but perhaps the believer in eternity founders before it, but doesn’t see it as foundering “for him.”
Observations of Hans Pollnow
In developing, by his very instructive exposition, certain fundamental problems related to the philosophy of existence (or, more precisely, in developing their “interrogation”), Jean Wahl is entitled to expect responses intended to complete his own considerations rather than bring objections to them. I permit myself thus to answer three among many important questions that he has raised and to add some personal arguments.
1. The distinction made by Wahl between “transascendence” and “transdescendence” seems to me one of incontestable philosophical fecundity, since not only does it differentiate the two forms under which every relation with transcendence concretizes itself, but also it usefully recalls, by these very terms, that transcendence, perceived too often as a given frozen in a sort of objectification, essentially signifies an existential act of the knowing subject. It thus concerns, as Wahl has formulated it, knowing if transascendence necessarily entails a movement toward goodness, and transdescendence, on the contrary, an inevitable direction toward evil.
I think that the human mind, in placing some phenomena above, others below, according to a cosmic spatial order of values, both in philosophical interpretations and in religious conceptions of the world, only translates, through this primordial symbolism, a transcendental schema, so to speak, from its own “anthropological” structure. This schema, verifiable by our phenomenological consciousness, is transcendental because it ties both the phenomenality and the intelligibility of the world to a certain system of nonmetaphorical, but actual, directions; it is anthropological because it expresses precisely the primitive attitude of the human being toward all other beings together with the world in general, an attitude establishing in man’s rationality his “superiority” by relation to the rest of creation.
It thus appears to me that the process of rationalization is originally seen as a sort of ascent toward the light (we speak as well of the dawning of the day), and on the other hand as a return for man, who “ascends,” thanks to knowledge of the self and of the universe, to what remains unknown or even unknowable appearing as a descent toward the darkness or, in other words, as the falling of night. But it is only to the extent that the good is coordinated, in a philosophy, with the brightness of the rational and evil consequently with the obscurity of the irrational, essentially elementary in its force and impenetrable in its structure, that the good places itself on high and evil down below in the hierarchy of essential or moral values. The proof is that every conception of the world identifying the good with the irrational and rightly conceiving rationality as bad, implies the necessity of a transdescendence toward the good, for example in Goethe’s “Faust” under the form of “descent toward the realm of the Mothers” or that of a transascendence toward the evil, as is the case in the philosophy of Klages, who considers the spirit the irreconcilable enemy of the soul and of all essential and creative force. Besides, for a thought placing the good in the lower regions, it goes without saying that the pejorative and negative meaning of the below effaces itself by transforming into a positive meaning of depth, such that we find, for example, most explicitly in Romanticism.
2. I don’t see why all philosophy of existence, desirous of maintaining itself in close contact with concrete and specific facts in the historicity of life, should necessarily bear the characteristic of a theology. It appears to me that a fundamental difference exists between theological thought and philosophical thought, in this case, philosophy of religion. If both envisage the same data, they do so under very distinct aspects.
The certitude of the data forming the content of religion and thus constituting the point of departure for the theologian is only, for a philosophy of religion, an outcome, and by that very outcome, the crowning achievement of constructive thought. Let’s consider, from this angle, the function that proof for the existence of God enjoys, on the one hand, in the theological conception of the world, and on the other hand, in that of philosophy.
On the theological level, the need for resorting to a proof of the existence of God signals a crisis in religious consciousness, a crisis due to the dynamism of destructive rationalization that never holds back, all the more so when it comes to transcendence; it is thus to reassure itself in that transcendence that thought tries to search for proofs for the existence of God, proofs consequently bearing an apologetic character.
Quite to the contrary, on the philosophical level, proofs of the existence of God fulfill an essentially different function: they don’t serve an apologetic goal, but they participate in the accomplishment of a constructive effort of a philosophy of the totality, in translating the audacious élan of a thought sure enough of itself to transcend its proper limits and also support proof of the improvable.
That a concrete philosophy of existence can take, in its evolution, a religious turn, appears to me an indubitable and inevitable consequence. But why is it necessary to see a theological turn inherent to existentialism, that is to say, the abandonment of confidence in thought directed and controlled by itself, such that it represents the only authentically philosophical attitude? For this religious perspective is not intended, in my view, to reassure a weakened faith and bring a threatened existence back toward transcendence. I would consider precisely the most perfect attempt at a genuine conquest of transcendence and the veritable foundation of a free communication of subjectivity believing in transcendence, under the form of a philosophy of religion.
3. The problem of existence is firstly that of the possibility of realizing existence. Wherever the limits of this possibility don’t make themselves felt, existence cannot become problematic in itself and cannot form the object, or, to put it better, the content of a philosophy of existence. Existence is expressed then by forms other than those of the existent being’s on existence. But at the basis of all existential thought consciousness finds itself with a limited possibility of realizing existence. It is precisely there that the essential difference resides between Rimbaud and Van Gogh, on the one hand, and the philosophers of existence on the other, like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers, and Heidegger. For it is only the experienced limitation of existence susceptible to being realized that admits of representing, in a philosophy, that which is problematic in the essence of existence. Some live existence without thinking under the forms of the philosophy of existence; the lives that they realize carry an exemplary and apodictic character. For others, existence presents itself as an existential problem, thus providing them with material for reflection and guiding them toward the deployment of existential thought in a philosophy of existence.
In the course of the discussion on Wahl’s paper, a distinction between existential philosophy and philosophy of existence was proposed, but I don’t see the legitimacy of this distinction. I don’t understand how this antithesis can advance us in the development of problems otherwise than by revealing to us that we ought to abandon those problems that have been established for us in the first place. This distinction has been used to establish a sort of gradation of philosophers according to their value, by placing, for example, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, existential philosophers, on a higher rank to that of Jaspers and Heidegger, simple philosophers of existence. Such an evaluation appears to me totally arbitrary, since there is no reason to suppose that a philosophy of existence cannot be just as existential as any other philosophy. Of course I accept the characterization of Jaspers’s and Heidegger’s philosophies as philosophies of existence. But is the term existential philosophy anything other than a tautology? Allow me to examine still more closely the antithesis of these notions. All genuine and authentic philosophy, and Jaspers has emphasized this, can only be existential philosophy. It is precisely this existentiality that makes a thought, fundamentally, philosophical. It means that all genuinely philosophical thought is essentially existential or that all existential thought becomes philosophy as soon as it finds a systematic form. So why translate, by a tautological formula, that which constitutes the very essence of philosophy as such and which doesn’t distinguish it from philosophy of existence, for which it is just as valid, but from all incidental and harmless thought in relation to existence?
One could perhaps explain more precisely the difference that, in my opinion, exists not between the philosophy called “existential” and philosophy of existence, but rather between philosophy as such and philosophy of existence. To this end, it is necessary to realize the fact that all philosophy deserving this name is essentially existential by a transparency to the existence of the philosopher who illumines himself in it, and that philosophy of existence (philosophy no less existential, on the condition that it would be truly philosophical) has a double relation with existence qua philosophy, for existence illumines itself in it, and qua thought concerning existence, for so it illumines existence.
I think then that the antithesis breaks down, since the term existential philosophy annihilates itself entirely by its tautological nature, whereas philosophy of existence remains a framework wide enough to encompass Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as much as Jaspers and Heidegger.
I heartily accept the penetrating remarks that Pollnow has made in number 1, where he simultaneously puts in doubt the idea of a transascendence toward evil and thinks that analysis of the ideas of good and evil, begun with Nietzsche, has never been truly continued.
I have not said that all philosophy of existence ought to take the character of theology. And I tried to see how it could be freed from every religious idea. Pollnow wants on the contrary to show that its separation from religious ideas would diminish its vitality and maybe even be a symptom of death; he seeks to distinguish the function of the idea of transcendence in the religious man and in the philosopher. But doubtless he doesn’t take sufficient account of the fact that its function in the philosopher is explained because it takes place in an ebb of religious thought, at religion’s low tide. What he calls “the real conquest of transcendence, the foundation of free communication,” is often only the reversal of a movement of weakened and anguished faith.
I think that for Van Gogh or Rimbaud, existence has been a problem, although they haven’t exposited this problem primarily through reflection, but in their work and their life. They also have had an existence of limited possibilities, although it can be maintained that they have been able to realize themselves in their work in a more complete fashion than philosophers have been able to do in theirs. (It still remains a question. And Maine de Biran offers the example of a philosopher who remains a problem, who remains limited, and expresses himself in a work and a life that express this fully, precisely through their dissatisfied and unachieved nature.)
Despite the objections of Pollnow, I think that there is something useful and true in the distinction proposed by Berdyaev between existential philosophy and philosophy of existence. The case of Nietzsche and of Kierkegaard, that of Socrates, maybe that of Descartes and of Kant, these are examples of philosophies that are sources of themselves—even if one can enumerate their influences.
Letter from Jeanne Hersch
Apropos of the idea of repetition, of theories of the instant or those of the eternal return: is it right to see these as an “Ersatz” of the idea of eternity? “Ersatz” is strongly pejorative, suggesting that it concerns the same thing, but “in counterfeit,” without any compensation for its lost authenticity. But it appears to me that repetition, the instant, the eternal return, are projections, or translations, of eternity on the human level. Authenticity is only lost in appearance, and only when the translation is allowed to pass for the original. For my part, I am inclined even to think that authenticity is better protected by the attempts at translation than by the pure divine term. For we are human beings, and thus a nexus of forces and a crossing of paths, and I don’t think that one of these paths can be authentic for us without implicating the others. The divine end can only discover its authenticity for us by incarnating itself in our life and our thought laden with the body. Besides, we hardly recognize it in its purity but by its irreducible resistance to this human effort of incarnation. And doubtless there you have the function of these notions “repetition,” “instant,” “eternal return.” Is this the role of an Ersatz? I don’t think so.
Apropos of the more or less religious character of existential philosophy: I don’t think that either Heidegger, or Jaspers in any case, would deny it. Jaspers in no way seeks to eliminate it, and although he yet forcefully opposes his philosophy to all theology, it appears to me that he does so first and foremost because of a refusal: the refusal to speak of God as if he were given. You can ever only speak of the search for him. The “more or less” that I wrote at the beginning of this paragraph is pretty stupid, in short, because of the relative element that it introduces here: in one sense, this philosophy is absolutely religious since God is sought there and nothing else; in another sense, it absolutely is not because it refuses to speak of God as a revealed being. So, here again, there is a refusal to leave the human condition, because of the certitude that a man has no path of piety other than a human path, for his thought and his acts. But transcendence remains transcendent—whence the sense of a limit, of a failure, of all negative notions, not because of tragic love, but really because man is human, clearly.
The double danger you spoke of, theology or abstraction, appears to be one that definitely is a threat to existential philosophy. But this observation appears to me to prove its truth, its exact coincidence with the human condition: for I think that man, whatever he does, never definitively escapes from this double danger. There is no shelter against it, and to try to secure yourself against it is to have already given up. We have to be escaping it throughout our life or thought.
That some lives can be more existential and more philosophical than the philosophies of existence, there I fully agree with you, and Jaspers does too I think. (How many times have I heard him emphasize: “But philosophy is still not existence: it is a possibility of existence.”). And, doubtless not only Rimbaud, Van Gogh, and Nietzsche, but some very obscure lives. Yet existential philosophy appears to me to do more than make us feel their value: it is a call, maybe more direct for some, and in any case different, having grasped others differently. Can there be too many calls, too many kinds of call?
I see nothing to respond to in this strong letter, except that the reader of Jaspers does not always stay at the level where Mlle Hersch would want to keep him, and that, appropriately, this philosophy—but maybe this is the destiny of all philosophy of this type—can appear too difficult, by reason of the negative theology at its summit; or too easy, by the fact that the unknown God can be attained in multiple ways, and that we can always say, in one way or another, that God is attained in his ciphers and through historicity. It seems to me that this sentiment, comparable to my own, is expressed in the following letter that Mme Bespaloff has generously written to me.
Letter from Rachel Bespaloff
In short, what keeps me away from Jaspers’s philosophy is that it is far too convenient for me, that nothing in it wounds or offends me. Despite everything, it is a philosophy of defeat—we are ourselves defeats … Essentially, its last word is: suffering. I know it well, alas! that durch dulden besteht die Welt [the world is made up of suffering], I know it only too well. But is being convenient the first and last value?
Take the chapter on liberty in the second volume. It appears that all Jaspers’s gifts—his marvelous penetration, his conceptual clarity, including even the perfect probity of his mind—turn against him. While reading these pages, I approve of everything, and I have no objection to raise. But, when I arrive at the end of the chapter, I have the impression of a disaster: Freedom is no more, it never was. What happened to it?
Nietzsche, even when he denies it, renders it present to me—and this is not a freedom wedged between the conditioned necessity of Dasein and the unconditioned necessity of transcendence. It is the truth—and I would not know how to tell you how I recognize it. Why, consequently, would I agree with Jaspers, even when he confirms my own experience, rather than with the revelations of Nietzsche?
Es ist genug dass Sein ist [It is enough that being is]: doubtless Nietzsche says nothing else (even though he avoids the word being), but with such a tone, such an accent … That changes everything. The danger, for existential philosophy, is not, it seems to me, of linking itself too closely to the religious, it is of not tearing away from the ethical. Jaspers only pulls it off, in my opinion, by a transfiguration that is poetic, in the broadest sense of the word. For all in all, what is the “cipher,” except (under a new term still charged with magic) the transmutation of the apparent phenomenon where the unresolved meaning of being unfolds itself?
What enriches me in Jaspers’s philosophy is what it rightly struggles to put in the background: the depth and acuity of the psychological intuition that is perhaps, at the origin, a poetical intuition of temporality: the knowledge of man.
Letter from Karl Löwith
I think that Kierkegaard has destroyed, rather than vivified, philosophical conceptions. And as for Jaspers and Heidegger, I always had the impression that there was a paradox here; for Jaspers’s philosophy is essentially an Ersatz of religion, although Jaspers would be himself essentially a philosopher of antitheological enlightenment, whereas on the contrary, the philosophy of Heidegger is anti-Christian, although—or precisely because—he remains essentially a theologian. In Jaspers, “the echo of the religious” is no longer present except under the form of an existentialist Kantianism. In Heidegger, one still feels in his work an immediate religious impulse, but a perverted one.
Letter from Käte Nadler
Käte Nadler, who opposes existentialist philosophy from a Hegelian point of view, writes that she is in agreement with me on the double danger to which existential philosophy is exposed, which she herself signals in an article from Tatwelt.
Letter from Denis de Rougemont
Why do you want—or they want—philosophy to be purified of theology? Theology certainly deserves the name of science. It is even a much less variable science than the so-called exact sciences, the foundations of which are overturned every twenty years, from top to bottom.
I don’t think that transcendence can ever be “simply nature.” You see it in Goethe, in Tolstoy, in Nietzsche: to the extent that there is an element of transcendence, nature becomes divinity (and it has to be this way). For my part, I don’t perceive the concrete relation to transcendence wherever the feeling of the divine, of the sacred, would be lacking. But your paper usefully orients us toward a new analysis of transcendence in its relation to powers of imagination and not only in its relation to ethics.
Letter from Louis Lavelle
I would ask simply if, in the ambiguity of the divine and the demonic, or of the transascendent and transdescendent, the ambiguity that is in the very heart of anxiety, there is a principle of distinction that precisely causes there to be an ambiguity here and which is where this principle of distinction comes from. For it could be the effect of prejudice or, on the contrary, an exigency of consciousness, of the very act by which it constitutes itself, in which case it would consequently be a matter of searching for an ontological foundation.
I very willingly admit that the distinction between the divine and the demonic (influenced by theological and moral conceptions) and that of the transascendent and transdescendent would have to be kept separate, more so than I have done in my summary. The ambiguity does not thereby disappear; but perhaps one could see that it no longer appears except when ideas from a different origin are superimposed onto investigations of a metaphysical nature.
This is also more or less how I would respond to Raymond Aron.
Letter from Raymond Aron
Allow me to submit to you the following reflections:
You want to separate existential philosophy from the moral categories of good and evil, of above and below; you speak of transcendence without attaching to this term any shade of value. That being so, I perceive very well the difficulty of introducing into existential philosophy, such as you conceive it, the abstract notions of ethics or of religion. But what then do you have left in order to describe metaphysically lived experiences? What does transcendence signify, and a fortiori, transascendence and transdescendence? You say you renounce these words that signify effort in order to rise up, or, on the contrary, to sink down. But are you sure you respect lived experience this way? Doesn’t transcendence disappear if nature stops being the goal of transcendence toward the below? Is it not according to religious or moral categories, that these experiences define themselves, constitute themselves? So much so that your supposed faithfulness would express an arbitrary interpretation of these existing lives; I will call the interpretation you propose to us your aesthetic skepticism.
Indeed what value would you retain, having abstracted from good and evil, from spirit and nature, from God and the demon, in order to single out philosophical lives? That of intensity: the most intense existences, the most problematic, would be the most philosophical. I confess that I see in this a sort of amoralism and irrationalism, the psychological meaning of which I know better than the philosophical meaning. Wouldn’t the neurotic become the most philosophical, since who is more torn down than him? Isn’t the experience of destruction, of war, at least as intense as the experience of the philosopher who contemplates transcendence? You end up judging Rimbaud or Van Gogh more philosophical than the philosophers of existence. There again I find the bad conscience of the philosopher (in France) who feels himself inferior to the artist or the poet. In a sense, you may be right. If it’s about human greatness, Rimbaud is perhaps more important than all professors of philosophy, but I fear that such a question would be nonsensical. Why compare some types or others of human beings? Souls are incomparable. Your hierarchy translates some personal preferences, and I ask if the very idea of such a hierarchy is not spiritually sacrilegious (doesn’t God refuse to distribute prizes or fix ranks this way?). In any case, it exceeds the possibilities of our human understanding.
On the other hand, if we take philosophy in the strict sense, it seems to me that you are evidently wrong, for to experience intensely the philosophical drama, the problem of destiny, is perhaps to reveal a philosophical temperament, the condition of all philosophy. But, to the extent that these people don’t express their drama, or they express it in images or in verse, they are not philosophers or at the least they are only in the eyes of the philosopher who, in reflecting on his experience, perceives there the mark of what he and he alone determines as philosophy, because he is capable of describing conceptually, ethically, religiously that which would otherwise remain on the level of experience.
I fear that your alternative would be imprecise and that there would be means of easily avoiding both theology and abstraction. I don’t see why theology in itself would risk compromising existential philosophy. In order to be authentic, theology has no need to reject every borrowing in its doctrines. We know very well that mystical experiences are penetrated by the religious thought in which they participate. Existential philosophers are rather well united in a human universe that they imagine they are renewing by the fact that they live intensely either the antinomies or the fundamental data. But the more they are existential the less they are philosophers: not because they are theologians but because they confine themselves to expressing a previously established system, without demonstrating its validity, or situating themselves by reflection in the totality of human life.
As for the philosophies of existence, they no doubt slip into abstraction if, in the manner of Jaspers, they retain existential categories by formalizing them and would aim at the paradox of standing at the same time at both the level of existence and at the level of reflection. In this case, indeed, they would speak of a decision—without being precise on this—they deny the truth of philosophy altogether by linking up judgments that pretend to the truth. Abstract theory of man’s metaphysical situation: that’s more or less the theme of Jaspers’s philosophy, but in such a way that this theory is contradictory, for this theory isn’t lived through; in fact, we either think the life that we chose or we think concrete human life such that it unfolds itself across history. And, in this last case, all of Jaspers’s philosophy is only the introduction to a philosophical comprehension of human history and of the human being. In other words, one cannot stand in a philosophy of existence (of Jaspers’s type), but the same goes for indicating the alternative of theology and abstraction. For from the moment that you have not chosen the first term, you have chosen the second, and since you recognize the danger of abstraction, you recognize in a single stroke the necessity of going beyond abstract theory of choice toward a comprehension of the concrete human being and maybe beyond, toward philosophy of being or, in any case, of the human being and being for man. The path of philosophy opens with the phenomenology of existences.
I do not think that one can say that I accord to the word transcendence “no shade of value” or that I separate existential philosophy from the notions of above and below—of “elevating” and “lowering” unless they are taken in a purely moral sense (of good and of evil). I concede very readily that nature would be the goal of transcendence toward the below. (I am taking over Aron’s expressions in order to better indicate what I don’t accept in the thesis that he ascribes to me.)
I am not conscious of having this philosopher’s bad conscience that Aron attributes to French philosophers. On the contrary, I take the word philosopher in a very broad sense. I considered Rimbaud, Van Gogh, as “sources of philosophy”: and I would like to add that the source has a purity that its rivers do not; in the second place, it is perhaps owing to a slightly scholarly conception of philosophy that I have not dared to call them philosophers.
Aron says that the hierarchy exceeds the possibilities of our intellect; no doubt, but the question of the intellect is one for him to answer. For me, it is the question of an arbitrary evaluation: I want then to say I am the only arbiter.
I refuse the idea of a superiority of the one who would describe conceptually, ethically, religiously over the one who would otherwise remain at the level of experience. I note that by the words “only it is capable of …” and “level of experience” Aron establishes a hierarchy. Not that he would tell us about this though—isn’t there something sacrilegious about that according to him?
For me, here there is even less of the sacrilegious than the sacred; it is not philosophy because it is reflection, but what I have called the source of philosophy (or philosophy in the sense that I would like to give to this word), or even the hard kernel, impenetrable to reflection, that is at the root of all great works.
And therefore I don’t see in what I tried to express the effect of an aesthetic system, but an affirmation of the passion to see transcendence from the term of the movement of transcendence in relation to our conceptual thought and its immanence in the intensity of experience.
I believe I can also put Lavelle’s letter close to Bastide’s.
Letter from Georges Bastide
The meditation on the adventure of Kierkegaardian thought is full of instruction for philosophy, and since you characterize this thought by the junction of a tensed and anxious subjectivity with an anxiety-provoking transcendence, I think that you deeply grasp the dramatic nub. However, I have, on my own account, interpreted this drama across a duality of slightly different terms.
1. Subjectivity and transcendence only seem to me to be an effect of the realist usage of the concept of existing Unity in its double application to the subject and the object.
Applied to the subject, the concept of existing Unity gives birth to the concept of unicity: the subject is thought as a punctual unity; in space, it would be like the center of a sphere from which emanates an infinity of rays; in time, it is the instant where the past closes itself off and the future opens itself up.
Applied to the object, the concept of existent Unity gives birth to the concept of totality: the object is thought as a synthetic unity; in space, it is the indefinitely multiple flourishing of rays from the sphere; in time, it is the retrospective or prospective projection of the infinite multiplicity of possibilities.
The relation of the subject to the object is thus, for realist thought, the opposition of unicity to totality. It is because there is no object without subject, nor subject without object, that there is in all thought a “junction” of subjective unicity and transcendent totality.
2. This double acceptance of the existing Unity creates for realist thought, which poses the object in itself and the subject in itself, a fundamental antinomy where this thought irrecoverably stumbles.
In a totally general fashion first, the position of absolute existence of one of the terms causes the existence of the other to vanish into nothingness, for the absolute existence of the unicity is the negation of the multiple, and the absolute existence of the totality is on the contrary its affirmation. To pose the Being of the totality is to affirm the existence of the multiple and deny the existence of the unique; but to pose the Being of the One is to affirm the existence of the unique and deny that of the whole multiple. It is precisely the old Parmenidean problem.
One could follow the antinomy across the categories of space and time (Jaspers’s “communication” and “historicity”) where each of the terms would still reveal its subversive power by relation to the other.
To establish as absolute the unicity of the center of the sphere is to destroy the sphere, which only has existence by the multiplicity of its rays; but to establish as absolute the synthetic totality of the sphere is to destroy the existence in itself of the center, which is only the convergence of the rays.
In time, to set up absolutely the unicity of the instant is to destroy the existence of multiple “befores” and “afters”; but to affirm the existence of the multiples is to cause the instant, which becomes a simple limit, to vanish.
So, each time the subject wants to settle down in its unicity, totality loses existence, and this subject finds itself face-to-face with the Nothing (“To exist, Heidegger says, in fact comes down to this: to be maintained within nothingness,” Bifur, 1931, p. 15).12
The transcendence of the whole can only be thought then by a subject who loses the unicity of its existence. The subjectivity of the Unique can only think the transcendence of the Nothing like an object.
3. It is from there that anxiety is born. The presence of theological and moral elements results from the constant equation of Being and Value in all metaphysical realists. Being and the Good are there identical, and the judgments of reality of such a metaphysics are always judgments of value. It is why the antinomy becomes tragic and anxious.
The subjective Unique can only guard its being, that is to say its value, by opposing itself to a nothing of totality, that is to say a Nothing of transcendent value. Inversely, one can pose the transcendent existence of total Value only by denying the being and thus the value of the Unique. What results is that every gain of value for the subjective would be a loss of value for the transcendent. The “transascendence” of the subject is a “transdescendence” of the object, and vice versa. Man and God would endlessly trade back and forth the demonic accusation.
4. This fundamental antinomy constitutes the ultimate “barrier,” as Dostoyevsky felt it, against which realist thought is shattered. The Kierkegaardian moment is the nec plus ultra of this thought.
Realist thought indeed cannot transcend the duality of the subject and object. That is why it can’t think its way to a subsequent stage: Every attempt at overcoming, as Hegel called it, is taken up in the rebirth of this antinomy, which is always the very same. Only the nostalgic thought of an impossible return or a negation of all thought (Dostoyevsky’s “becoming deliberately foolish”) can make an appearance.
5. Realist consciousness can have then, at the base of its misfortune, the revelation of its essential perversion. That is what it translates by the idea of a fall that has radically separated it from Being.
But it can see also that, in a parallel perspective, the thought of Being is irremediably forbidden to it. Realist thought cannot be existential, for it carries in itself a power that dissolves all existence, which it wants to take hold of.
All that is left for this “perverted” thought to do is to “convert” itself to the idealist attitude, which moves in exactly an inverse sense.
The subject and object cease to be opposition in order to become relation. The relational Unity, unifying unity, escapes the antinomy of the Unique and the Total; and the act of valorizing thought coincides there exactly with the genesis of spiritual being.
I feel especially far from the thought of the last paragraph, at the moment where Bastide presents the idealist doctrine as a remedy. But he wanted to specify his position in a way that diminishes the distance I sense between us.
Second Letter from Georges Bastide
By idealism, I in no way understand a vision of the world that would be able to furnish to the mind once and for all the rest and the homeland that it searches for. I understand only the attitude of investigation and the direction of effort that find their departure and their orientation in consciousness’s grasp of the preeminence of the spiritual, and that are at the origin of all the works of the spirit.
I think that this attitude is never able to be achieved right away, that it can only rise up in the midst of the fragments of tragic realist consciousness, and even that the profundity of idealist thought, insofar as it produces value, is a function of the profundity of tragedy that has been achieved in realist thought. I would say even that as he writes a work where the tragic is thought, Kierkegaard is already implicitly in the idealist attitude since there is in his act the affirmation that thought of tragedy is superior, by rights, to tragedy that thinks.
Maybe these hasty reflections would permit you to find my thought less removed from yours.13
1. [See “Subjectivité et transcendance,” Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 37, no. 5 (1937): 163–64.]
2. [Philosophy of Existence, trans. Richard Grabau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 3.]
3. [Session of March 31, 1931; published in the society’s Bulletin 31, no. 2 (1931).]
4. [See the Bulletin (1937): 164.]
5. [Léon Brunschvicg, who moderated the meeting, inaugurated the discussion in this way: “I believe that Monsieur Gabriel Marcel, who has known Wahl’s thought as long as Wahl has known it, would like to be the first to respond?” (172). Marcel then began his live remarks with: “My intervention will bear on the written text rather than on Wahl’s oral presentation, because the latter seems to me to be attenuated in comparison to what we have read, especially on the point that occupies me most. I will not try, moreover, to interpret this divergence, which seems very sensible to me.
“Obviously the first part of the presentation will not be the focus of my remarks. When it comes to Kierkegaard, I am extremely less competent. I have the impression, by the way, that everything that has been said is true and concerns an essential element of Kierkegaardian thought. By contrast, I feel myself to be much less in agreement with the remarks presented thereafter” (173).]
6. [Marcel refers to the text that composes the first part of the chapter “Subjectivity and Transcendence,” above, which was provided for the members of the Société française de philosophie in anticipation of their meeting, featuring Wahl’s presentation of the same name.]
7. [Brand was the main character in Ibsen’s 1865 play of the same name.]
8. [The main character of Ibsen’s 1896 play of the same name.]
9. [In the original meeting there followed here a brief, idiosyncratic remark from Siegfried Marck, which I summarize, I think fairly, in the following way: The entire discussion can be understood as a fundamental critique of the philosophies of existence, and all the points of interrogation “are converging” toward a fundamental solution, namely, in the “absolute dialectic,” and a pure “return to immanence,” from which they take their point of departure and toward which they inevitably tend. Therefore [?] philosophy will possess a “Platonic” conception of transcendence. Jaspers and Heidegger fail as philosophers inasmuch as they wed the philosophers Kant and Husserl (respectively) to Kierkegaard’s nonphilosophy. This contribution was followed by a caustically brief response from Wahl. I quote: “Monsieur Marck says that he agrees with me. I fear that I cannot agree with him regarding the severe judgment he visits on Heidegger and Jaspers. I have much admiration for both of them. Doubtlessly, one of the points of departure for their thought is Kierkegaard, but I think that both possess a very profound elaboration in their own right and a very distinctive tone” (192). Wahl’s summative response to the entire discussion which directly followed is included in the book here without change.]
10. [The following footnote was added in the book:] Likewise, for Heidegger, the transcendent is not that toward which Dasein transcends, but Dasein itself. Perhaps immanence and transcendence could be distinguished depending on whether they are found in the theory of reality or the theory of knowledge. In this way Heidegger’s philosophy is a philosophy of immanence if seen from the point of view of the theory of reality; it is a theory of transcendence if seen from the point of view of the theory of knowledge. Brunschvicg’s theory would be a theory of immanence from the point of view of the theory of knowledge (apart, however, from the “shock”) and a theory of transcendence from the point of view of the theory of reality, at least in one sense. Thomism is a theory of transcendence from both perspectives.
But some reservations would have to be stated about these two terms inasmuch as they both preserve a certain echo of their spatial origin.
11. [Il faut se faire voyant. From the “Letter to Paul Demeny” (May 15, 1871), from the so-called Visionary Letters.]
12. [Bastide refers here to Corbin’s translation of Heidegger’s Was ist Metaphysik? which appeared in an issue of Bifur (June 1931).]
13. [I note here that the final letter present in the text from the Bulletin ([1937]: 209–11) does not appear in the book, which closes with Bastide’s second letter. This excised letter, by Raymond Lenoir, receives no response from Wahl unlike the others. That letter suggests (I summarize) that this meeting is evidence of a worldwide, transformational movement in philosophy gathering steam in “Italy, Germany, Poland, and Russia,” and assumes therefore that the “existencielle [sic] philosophie” discussed is only an instantiation of vitalism and its renewed concentration on the essential, the “sentiment de vie,” or, later in the letter, the “sens de la vie,” that broke open on the French scene with Biran and Ravaisson in the nineteenth century and was continued by Bergson in the twentieth. It is this sens de la vie that is, for Lenoir, clearly a student of Bergson, the secret reality behind every domain of appearing and meaning.]