Subjectivity and Transcendence

Emmanuel Leroux(1) had been scheduled to deliver a paper at the December 4, 1937, session of the eminent Societe Francaise de Philosophie. When it became clear that, because of his wife's illness, he would be unable to attend, the president of the society, Leon Brunschvicg, asked Jean Wahl to prepare a lecture and solicit responses in his stead. Wahl decided to discuss the connection between subjectivity and transcendence, and, despite the short notice, he managed to assemble contributions from some of the greatest philosophers of the day-far more than was typical(2)-for what would come to be called "a turning point in twentieth-century intellectual history."(3) Featuring replies and letters by Raymond Aron, Nicolas Berdyaev, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, Gabriel Marcel, and many others, Wahl's "Subjectivity and Transcendence" should indeed be included among the most important debates in twentieth-century European philosophy. For not only does it mark "an indispensable moment for any account of the secularization of Kierkegaard"(4) and "the occasion for Levinas's first use of the concept 'the other'";(5) it also provided a crucial forum in which to discuss and shape the future of existentialism.

While revealing Jaspers's and Heidegger's debt to Kierkegaard, Wahl at the same time worries that any attempt to provide a philosophy of the insights that stem from Kierkegaard's life would threaten either to fall into abstraction or to harbor implicit theological presuppositions. This, for Wahl, is precisely what makes existential philosophy so challenging. Once it provides a general theory of existence, to what extent can it still be existential? 6 Isn't there a danger, Wahl wonders, that what a philosophy of existence takes from an existence such as Kierkegaard's will remain tainted by what, according to Kierkegaard himself, cannot be detached from that existence, namely, its belief in God and every thing that goes along with this? Aren't we perhaps better off sticking with Kierkegaard, or someone like Rimbaud, Van Gogh, or Nietzsche, someone who is perhaps, in Wahl's words, "more existential and more truly philosophical than the philosophies of existence"? Someone who, rather than merely justifying or theorizing about choice, actually chooses for himself or herself?

Such questions, as Edward Baring has recently shown, proved pivotal for the development and transnational appreciation of existentialism. 7 Baring explains that, prior to Wahl's lecture and the translation of existentialism into France, German scholars had endeavored, if not always consistently, to distinguish among

1. existentiell analysis-an extraphilosophical examination of concrete, factual aspects of human existence, undertaken above all by dialectical theologians such as Karl Barth;

2. Existentialphilosophie-a philosophical analysis of the ontological structures of human existence, undertaken above all by Heidegger;

3. Existenzphilosophie-a nonobjectifying philosophy of human existence that remained wary of ontology, undertaken above all by Jaspers.

In French these were often unwittingly lumped together under the heading philosophie existentielle, leading, in fact, to many of the confusions and interesting debates in "Subjectivity and Transcendence." Moreover, Heidegger's careful distinctions in Being and Time between existenzial ("existential") and existenziell ("existentiell"), and even between Dasein ("being-there," i.e., the being of the human being) and Sein ("being" as such), at times collapsed, in French, into existentiell and l'etre, respectively.

These conflations had key implications for the history of ideas, a fact that may be gleaned from Heidegger's epistolary response to Wahl and its immense influence following the debate. It was precisely Heidegger's rejection of the label "philosophy of existence," and indeed of any philosophy focused chiefly on "the existence of man," that contributed to the reemergence of the more encompassing term "existentialism" (despite Heidegger's eventual rejection of this as well).(8) However, it did not matter what its title was-confusion still remained about what Heidegger was up to. Was he focused solely on the question of being (Sein), as he indicates in his letter, or did the question of the human being take precedence? Wahl, at least in the 1930s, favored the latter, even when he granted Heidegger's predilection for being.(9) Indeed, the fact that clear distinctions between Sein and Dasein and between an understanding of structures of existence (existenzial) and an understanding of the particular ways in which existence is carried out (existenziell) were not maintained surely contributed to what would become known as the " existentialist reading of Heidegger," centered as it was on the human being and the possibility of authenticity.(10)

Wahl's "famous communication,"(11) as Levinas described it, also set the stage for further dialogue about the nature of transcendence. Kierkegaardian anxiety, Wahl tells us, emerges from the remoteness of God and the presence of evil. We do not know whether we are transcending toward God or toward the devil; whether we are on the ascent or descent; whether our transcendence is, in Wahl's words, "transascendence" or "transdescendence." As Wahl reveals in his debate with Marcel(12) and in his responses to Aron and Louis Lavelle, both transcendences have a place, but both must be secularized. Transdescendence, in particular, is not so much a matter of evil and the demonic for Wahl as it is a movement toward and immersion in the intensity and depths of concrete life. In his short lecture at the international Descartes conference in 1937, "Sur l'idee de transcendance" ("On the Idea of Transcendence") (later reprinted along with "Subjectivity and Transcendence" in Wahl's 1944 book Existence humaine et transcendance [Human Existence and Transcendence]), Wahl clarifies that: "There is a movement of transcendence directed toward immanence; when transcendence transcends itself ... falling again into immanence." Such transdescendence would be "perhaps the greatest transcendence," even if it can never be accomplished in full.(13) The directional modes of transascendence and transdescendence would later be taken up in various ways by Levinas, Blanchot, Sartre, and the musicologist and semiologist Eero Tarasti,(14) to name but a few, and the idea of multidirectional transcendence, especially of a transcendence transcended toward immanence, would remain a constant theme throughout Wahl's career, appearing, for instance, in his ontological autobiography (see Chapter 11 in this volume) and as the culminating thought of his magisterial Traite de metaphysique (Treatise on metaphysics). More than merely influencing countless thinkers-no small feat in and of itself-"Subjectivity and Transcendence" thus stands out as an essential moment in Wahl's own thought as well.