Abstract
Despite his unassailable heritage, the passionate thinker to whom Levinas dedicated Totalité et infini has today nearly been forgotten outside France. This forgetting is the shared premise of two books published in recent years. The first is William C. Hackett and Jeffrey Hanson’s edition and translation of Wahl’s Existence humaine et transcendance (1944): Human Existence and Transcendence (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016, pp. 151), and the second is a volume of selections from Wahl’s philosophical writings edited by Alan D. Schrift and Ian Alexander Moore: Jean Wahl: Transcendence and the Concrete Selected Writings (New York: Fordham University Press, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, 2017, pp. 291).
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Notes
On first sight, it would seem that Chapter 7 of Shrift and Moore’s volume does not exactly map on Chapter 3 of Hackett and Hanson’s edition, since the former does not feature the whole chapter from the 1944 book, but only the short text that Wahl sent to the participants of the 1937 lecture and his lecture as such, which were different. But in fact the whole essay can be found in its integrity in both books, since Chapter 3 of Existence humaine et transcendance simply assembled the text sent by Wahl to all contributors and the one he read in his lecture.
For instance, “décourageant” will become “depressing” in Hanson’s translation instead of “discouraging"; Heidegger’s “leçons philosophiques” will become “philosophical classrooms” instead of “philosophical lectures,” and so on. And beyond the overlaps between the two volumes, one could wonder why, for example, the “mauvaises transcendances” discussed in Chapter 2 of Human Existence and Transcendence are translated “bad transcendencies” instead of “bad transcendences,” thus giving the misleading impression that Wahl is here using here some idiosyncratic vocabulary.
De Waelhens (1946, p. 328): “…la pensée ne peut éclairer qu'en se détruisant par le jeu de ses propres forces, que par l'éclat qu'elle jette en mourant…”
Wahl (1951, p. 74): “Course à travers l’océan des discours, qui paraissent tous contradictoires ou impossibles, mais à un certain stade de laquelle on se rendra compte qu’on est au milieu même de l’océan de la vérité et la beauté.”
Wahl (1951, p. 212).
Wahl (1951, p. 219): “L’absolu reste, impensable et présent. Mais relativité et spiritualité ont été en même temps affirmées.”
Alquié (1975, p. 79): “Issue d’un perpétuel jaillissement, d’une imprévisible invention, d’une critique toujours pénétrante, mais sans cesse improvisée, [sa philosophie] se dérobe à toute tentative de classification.”
References
Alquié, Ferdinand. “Jean Wahl,” Les Études philosophiques, Presses Universitaires de France, no. 1 (1975): 79–88.
Alphonse, De Waelhens. 1946. Jean Wahl, Existence humaine et Transcendance. Revue Philosophique de Louvain 44 (2): 328.
Wahl, Jean. 1951. Étude sur le Parménide de Platon. Paris: J. Vrin.
Wahl, Jean. 2016. Human Existence and Transcendence, tr. and ed. William Hackett. University of Notre Dame Press.
Wahl, Jean. 2017. Jean Wahl: Transcendence and the Concrete Selected Writings, tr. and ed. Alan D. Schrift and Ian A. Moore. New York: Fordham University Press.
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St-Laurent, G. Jean Wahl’s unassailable heritage. Cont Philos Rev 53, 103–111 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-020-09488-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-020-09488-8