JEAN WAHL

JEAN WAHL
 Was a French Philosopher.
 Born: May 25, 1888, Marseille, France.
 Studied at the Sorbonne, and taught at Besançon,
Nancy, and Lyons.
 In 1941, he was imprisoned in a concentration camp,
but was rescued and went to the U.S., where he taught
at the New School for Social Research in New York
City, Mount Holyoke, and Smith College.
 JEAN WAHL
 After World War ii, he became a professor at
the University of Paris and also developed the
Collège Philosophique for the presentation
and discussion of philosophical themes.
 wrote many important works, both on
traditional philosophy and on existentialism,
of which he became a leading exponent. 
 JEAN WAHL
 He wrote a series of works developing the existentialist
position, both in terms of its history and of his own ideas.
 He also wrote a volume of poems.
 Died: June 18, 1974, Paris, France.
 “Human Existence and
Transcendence”
 Jean Wahl's book is a meditation on the
meaning of TRANSCENDENCE.
 TRANSCENDENCE

 Going beyond or the existence or experience beyond the normal

or physical level.
 Superior, great, unsurpassed
 For Wahl, the word is polyvalent (chemistry),
designating both transcendence-as-end [terme] that
which transcends the human and transcendence-as-
movement, the way the human subject reaches beyond
itself
 TRANSCENDENCE

 For Wahl, both aspects are indispensable (important), and if one

is prioritized over the other, transcendence collapses.
 On the one hand, in traditional religious thinking,
transcendence is identified with the divine, in the face of which
the human subject and its movement of transcendence are
negated (ineffective) (25). 
 TRANSCENDENCE

 On the other hand, transcendence-as-movement cannot survive without

transcendence-as-end. For this latter argument, Wahl takes his lead from
Kierkegaard, for whom the encounter with divine transcendence institutes a
tension at the heart of the subject. 
  According to Kierkegaard, we need an encounter with the "absolute other" in
order to disrupt the subject, and elicit the movement of transcendence (31).
 In fact, Wahl suggests that Heidegger's atheistic ontology can only escape this
logic because it harbors the "echo" of religion, heard in the unacknowledged
normative shading of his accounts of abandonment and "accursed finitude" (36).
 TRANSCENDENCE

 To mediate between these two positions, Wahl elaborates a form of transcendence that
escapes our grasp, what he calls a "negative ontology" modeled on "negative
theology." But he also radicalizes what he thinks drives Kierkegaard's anxiety: we do
not know if we are truly in the presence of God (33). This is why Wahl coined the twin
terms "transascendence" and "transdescendence.“
 He suggests that we can never be sure whether the movement of transcendence leads
us to gods or to demons, to a higher or a lower plane. Perhaps, he muses,
transcendence is simply a facet of nature, which is not exhausted by our intellectual
categories and thus can constantly surprise. Moreover, Wahl claims that it is only
religious prejudice that leads us to mark one form of transcendence as good and the
other as evil (30).
 TRANSCENDENCE

 Wahl's solution to the antinomy (contradiction) of transcendence, therefore, is to

maintain (against Heidegger) the end or goal of transcendence. But, (against
traditional religion), he prevents the negation of the self that this stance usually
entails by making that end radically indeterminate. He thus institutes a "tension
between movement and its end. Neither the end nor the movement should be
considered as given, either one by the other, or one without the other" (26).
 If understood within his historical context, Wahl's argument reads as an attempt to
secularize Kierkegaard's existentialism.
 Transcendence, Wahl argues, need not reach towards the divine, for the world is also
enchanted and full of mysteries. 
 JEAN WAHL

 As an existentialist, Jean Wahl expounded a mode of thinking

that seemed to lead to reliance on poetic insights into the nature
of reality. His intellectual antecedents were Nietzsche and
Kierkegaard and, to some extent, Martin Heidegger.