Jean Wahl the Precursor: Kierkegaard and Existentialism

Abstract

For Jean Wahl (1888–1974), Kierkegaard was the first “subjective thinker”, without whom we could not conceive any prefigurations of philosophy of the existence, which starts up the Christian existentialism. Jean Wahl began his career as a follower of Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and the American pluralist philosophers. Kierkegaard is a hero of the existence and an ally in the criticism of Hegel and his speculative thought. Going like Descartes, starting not with the doubt but anxiety, Kierkegaard went to a new sort of issue, not the thought or cogito, but existence. Evocating also Martin Heidegger, Jean Wahl draws the big moments of Heidegger’s reflection, but presenting him as « a negation of Kierkegaardian individualism ». For Kierkegaard reviewed by Jean Wahl, the Myth of Adam embodies the original sin as a condition of possibility for any individual, guilty, as told in the language of psychoanalysis, in the subordination to the Autority of the Name of Father. Wahl presented Kierkegaard as being always in a state of choice: « Everything or nothing » (« tout ou rien »), « Of two things the one » (« de deux choses l’une »). Nietzsches’s dominant idea, for Wahl, is the will of overpassing, the first idea of transcendence. Wahl thinks that, in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, modernity refuses itself. In a negative theology, we see how a quest of fully reflective justification is undertaken at the same moment in which we are anyway justified.