The Problem of Choice

First published in 1934 in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale and later republished with minor revisions in Études kierkegaardiennes, this extended discussion of Karl Jaspers’s three-volume Philosophie (1932) was among the first to address Jaspers’s work in France. While ranging widely over Jaspers’s three volumes, this essay is also strangely personal, addressing those topics in Jaspers’s work that most matter to Wahl: the question of choice, being in a situation, the limited, fragmented, and tragic character of existence. Wahl makes a point of drawing a distinction, one not always recognized, between philosophers of existence like Jaspers and Heidegger and existential philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. While not always agreeing with Jaspers, Wahl nevertheless recognizes that Jaspers’s thought is “situated in a place where some of the most eternal and most real philosophical problems are located.”