Transcendence and the Concrete

Jean Wahl’s influence on French philosophical thought can hardly be overestimated. About him, Emmanuel Levinas wrote that “during over a half century of teaching and research, [Jean Wahl] was the life force of the academic, extra-academic, and even, to a degree anti-academic philosophy necessary to a great culture.” And Gilles Deleuze, for his part, commented that “Apart from Sartre, who remained caught none the less in the trap of the verb to be, the most important philosopher in France was Jean Wahl.” As professor at the Sorbonne for over three decades, president of the Société Française de Philosophie (1960–74), editor of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale(1950–74), and founder and director of the Collège Philosophique, Wahl was in dialogue with some of the most prominent and well-known French philosophers and intellectuals of the twentieth century, including Bataille, Bergson, Beauvoir, Butor, Deleuze, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, Marcel, Lacan, Levinas, Maritain, Sartre, and Weil, impacting several of them greatly. Wahl also played a significant role, in some cases almost singlehandedly, in introducing French philosophy to movements like phenomenology, existentialism, American pragmatism and literature, and British empiricism. And Wahl was an original philosopher and poet in his own right. The goal of this volume of selections from Jean Wahl’s philosophical writings is to reintroduce Wahl to the English-speaking philosophical community, and to show the enormous influence he had through introducing the work of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Jaspers to several generations of French philosophers.