Human Existence and Transcendence (Thresholds in Philosophy and Theology) - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Jean Wahl (1888–1974) was professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1936 to 1967. A number of his books have been translated into English, including A Short History of Existentialism and Philosophies of Existence.

William C. Hackett is Research Fellow and Lecturer in Philosophy at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne.

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It is perhaps not totally precise―although the observation wears well and should give us pause―to say after Jaspers that a new kind (do I say a new “race”?) of thinker was formed in the nineteenth century, that of the poet-thinker, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. It is not totally precise because Pascal, Lucretius, perhaps Dante―to set aside names even more ancient―are equally poet-thinkers. And it is also not totally precise anymore to say that the philosophy of existence was born in the nineteenth century. Pascal is the ever-living refutation of such a judgment. And is not the philosophy of Plato directly tied to the meditation of an existing being named Plato on two existing beings named Plato and Socrates? Plato’s philosophy is a reflection on the life, condemnation, and death of Socrates.

The fact no less remains that the borders of philosophy dissolved in this milieu at the end of the nineteenth century, as have also in a lesser way borders of every kind. There are no longer many pure painters (if there ever have been any). Courbet or Manet were perhaps the last great painters. Van Gogh and Cézanne are something else entirely. What thinker before Kierkegaard had taken as the center of his meditation his own most personal experience and his own history? To find some analogues, we would have to turn to poets like Nerval or Rimbaud.

But it is not only the fact that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are poet-thinkers,nor even that they have common adversaries (the historian and the professor of philosophy), nor even that before the unity of monism they raise up the unicity of both the Unique and of the Overman; and it is not only because they oppose philosophical reflection, one, with belief, the other, with the will to power―it is not simply these reasons that explain the profound kinship, the coincidence of opposites, that unite Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Beginning with the observation, God is dead―which they take in opposite senses (for one, the death of God is the death of a God who is revealed to be God by his death, and which is our salvation; for the other, our salvation is the death of God, of a God who by his death ceases to be God)―they pursue their meditation, hunting for eternity in the instant: for Kierkegaard in the instant of repetition and resurrection, lived by the Unique, for Nietzsche in the instant of the eternal return, lived by the Overman. The Nietzschean instant as much as the Kierkegaardian instant is the fusion of what Heidegger will call the three ecstasies of time, within what he will call (and on this point his meditation only continues that of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard) the resoluteness of decision.

One proposes an immanence capable of overwhelming us as much as transcendence does, if we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed; the other proposes a transcendence that terrifies and consoles us. Both place man before an abyss; and it is within a hairsbreadth of his downfall, in anguish and heartbreak, that he is revived and starts anew.

Through the paradoxes before which they find themselves (the birth and death of God, the eternal return), through the paradoxes that they feel in themselves and that they are in themselves, through living their discordances, the Kierkegaardian Unique and the Nietzschean Overman intensify their individuality.

Starting from this point Nietzsche and Kierkegaard construct their existential dialectic, starting from here they forge their personalities as a union of opposites and―to recall the ancient phrase of Heraclitus―a harmony of strife. They are a living, felt dialectic, not a dialectic that goes from thesis to antithesis and then to synthesis, but a dialectic that from a thesis goes to a thesis and an antithesis, in order then to go toward a thesis that is not posed, that cannot be posed, and which is like the disappearance of consciousness in the ecstasy at Sils Maria or in religious meditation.

By contrast to the Hegelian dialectic (thesis-antithesis-synthesis), and even to the Platonic dialectic (ascending dialectic, contemplation, descending dialectic), we could imagine an existential dialectic that would go from presence to dialectic, and from dialectic to ecstasy through the play of antitheses that destroy each other in order to cede their place to this ecstasy. From the ecstasy of perception (positive ontology) to the ecstasy of mystery (negative ontology), from the plenitude of the real to the apparent vacuity of surreal being, one passes through this dialectic, this coming and going of thought and ripping apart of antitheses.

Short dialectical chains between two moments where the dialogue ceases―at least the apparent dialogue―in order to leave the word, if I can put it this way, to silence. A silence of perception through which the spirit is nourished by things, a silence of ecstasy where it merges with the highest point of itself and the world.

Between the two, this tension, this intensity that defines existence placed between the transcendent immanence of perception and the immanent transcendence of ecstasy.

These last words show us that even in these moments where the dialogue ceases, it continues, that as soon as reflection is attached to them, there is a dialectic both of perception and ecstasy.

(Excerpted from Preface)