Wahl Jean - Human Existence and Transcendence

HUMAN EXISTENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE

THRESHOLDS IN PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

Jeffrey Bloechl and Kevin Hart, series editors

Philosophy is provoked and enriched by the claims of faith in a revealed God. Theology is stimulated by its contact with the philosophy that proposes to investigate the full range of human experience. At the threshold where they meet, there inevitably arises a discipline of reciprocal interrogation and the promise of mutual enhancement. The works in this series contribute to that discipline and that promise.

HUMAN EXISTENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE

JEAN WAHL

TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY WILLIAM C. HACKETT WITH JEFFREY HANSON

FOREWORD BY KEVIN HART

University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

www.undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

English Language Edition Copyright 2016 by the University of Notre Dame

Translated by William C. Hackett from Jean Wahl, Existence Humaine et Transcendance, published by ditions de la Baconnire Neuchtel,

June 6, 1944. ditions de la Baconnire.

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wahl, Jean Andr, 1888-1974, author.

Title: Human existence and transcendence / Jean Wahl ; translated and edited by William C. Hackett, with Jeffrey Hanson ; foreword by Kevin Hart.

Other titles: Existence humaine et transcendence. English

Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. | Series: Thresholds in philosophy and theology | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016032983 (print) | LCCN 2016034178 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268101060 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 026810106X (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780268101084 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268101091 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Transcendence (Philosophy) | Ontology.

Classification: LCC BD362 .W3313 2016 (print) | LCC BD362 (ebook) | DDC 111dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032983

ISBN 9780268101091

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at .

Les circonstances ont empch lauteur de revoir les preuves
du prsent ouvrage. Lditeur sexcuse donc des erreurs qui
pourraient ne pas avoir t corriges et des initiatives quil a
d prendre sans lagrment de lauteur.

Circumstances prevented the author from reviewing the proofs
of the present work. The publisher thereby apologizes for
mistakes that may not have been corrected and initiatives that
had to be undertaken without the agreement of the author.

[Editorial apology affixed to the beginning of the original French text, published June 1944]

CONTENTS

Kevin Hart

William C. Hackett

William C. Hackett

Translated by Jeffrey Hanson

Jean Wahls Human Existence and Transcendence is a very important yet almost completely forgotten work in the history of twentieth-century French philosophy. It arose from a lecture given in 1937 and was expanded into a short book in the troubled years that followed. Apart from its intrinsic interest as a discussion of being, the absolute, and transcendence, the work is valuable insofar as it became a focal point for a great many European intellectuals. Their responses to Wahls thoughts, especially on transcendence, at once clarify many issues to do with existentialism as well as hint how it was to be transformed by a later thinker such as Emmanuel Levinas (whom we see here as a young man in full flush of enthusiasm for Heidegger).

Is transcendence exclusively a theological notion, or can it be put to philosophical use? This is Wahls animating question, and the question that excited or upset those who heard his lecture and the others who responded to it by mail. Wahl answers his own question: transcendence can indeed be lifted from the matrix of theology, reset as a concept, and then used to clarify the human situation. Of course, he was not the first or the only person to move in this direction. Heidegger had already rethought transcendence in Sein und Zeit (1927), having brooded on the concepts roots in the medieval tradition of the transcendentals: being, beauty, goodness, truth, and unity. Such things do not themselves settle into the Aristotelian categories but are found in all of them; they cross (trans) from one category to another. Centuries later in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787) Kant redirected this tradition, distinguishing between the transcendental and the transcendent. The former give conditions of possibility for knowledge; the latter exceed all possible knowledge. So Kant gives only a negative sense of transcendence. It is Heidegger who gives it a positive sense, which is human Daseins openness to pass from beings to being. This is fundamental-ontological transcendence, and it is this radical understanding of the concept that Levinas wishes to impress on Wahl in his letter to him after the lecture had been given.

In his letter Levinas points out that in rethinking transcendence Heidegger breaks decisively with theology. Here theology is regarded as limited by ontic concerns; one desires to pass from this world to another world above or beyond it, though this second world doubtless resembles ours in many ways (hell, purgatory, and heaven as evoked in Dantes Commedia, for example). Wahl is not entirely at ease with Levinass response to his lecture, and he could well point out that his rethinking of transcendence as transascendence also overcomes a nave theology: one transcends without term; there is no fall back into the immanence of a higher place. He also could remind Levinas of transcendences other dimension, transdescendence, in which one is taken without term down into the depths. In later years Levinas will gladly learn from Wahl: Totalit et infini (1961) could not have been conceived without the transascendence of the other person, and much that Levinas fears is perhaps contained in the thought of transdescendence.1 If transascendence is coordinate with the holy (and hence the ethical), its negative counterpart converges with the sacred.2 Wahl himself cites D. H. Lawrencehe may well have The Plumed Serpent (1926) in mindas a witness to the transdescendent.

Not that Wahls rethinking of transcendence is limited to the uses to which Levinas finally put it. His distinction illuminates a whole tendency of modern European thought, the quest to explain phenomena by way of what preconditions them, whether that be by way of preexistent constitution (Fink), the neutral (Blanchot), or la diffrance (Derrida). Perhaps one could extend the explanatory power of transdescendence further back into the history of philosophy, from the critical philosophy to structuralism, but let us not try to press too hard on it. Already, with Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida, it has done a job of work, as has its correlative idea, transcendence, which also quickens all three in their understanding of ethics. The work of transascendence is not yet over, and ironically it may well be the theologians task, rather than the philosophers, to continue it. For despite the power of various caricatures, in which Heidegger and Levinas both indulged themselves, Christian theology has never been committed to transcendence in the limited sense of passing from one world to another. The radical rethinking of God as infinite, as proposed by Saint Gregory of Nyssa in his argument with Eunomius, yields a massive elaboration of the Pauline figure in Philippians 3:13 of reaching forward to what is before him ( ). For Gregory, the Christian life is continual transcendence of self into the abundant life of God. In this life, we do not believe