Experience and Transcendence; or, An Ontological Journey

The following selection, whose title here brings together the two titles under which it was published, is more of a philosophical-poetic autobiography than an encyclopedia entry, even though it first appeared in 1957 in a volume of the Encyclopedie Francaise devoted to philosophy and religion. This revolutionary encyclopedia did not presume to order and record every facet of knowledge but, rather, to teach and inspire through a bold and creative synthesis of the most disparate domains.(1) Jean Wahl, surely among the greatest synthesizers of philosophy and himself a recognized poet, was no doubt fit for the task. In addition to a "Breve introduction aux philosophies francaises de l'existence" ("Brief introduction to the French philosophies of existence") and an article on "Philosophie et poesie" ("Philosophy and poetry"), Wahl wrote an entry under the heading "Experience and Transcendence" that not only touches on many of his philosophical, poetic, and artistic influences-Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, G.W.F. Hegel, William James, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, and Alfred North Whitehead, Paul Claudel, Novalis, and Paul Valery, Paul Cezanne and Vincent Van Gogh-but also brings them together in such a way as to present his own unique concerns with a radical empiricism, with relativity, negativity, and facticity, with the concrete, with surpassing dichotomies, with "the silences of the dialectic," with transcending transcendence, and especially with the preeminence of poetry. Indeed, in this text, which was later abridged and reprinted in 1963 under the title "An Ontological Journey" in a collection of autobiographies from many of the leading French philosophers of the preceding three decades, Wahl does more than just state the importance of poetry for philosophy; he demonstrates how it is crucial to his personal philosophical quest by interspersing his wide-ranging discussions with several poems of his own.(2)