Luke’s Reviews > Transcendence and the Concrete: Selected Writings > Status Update

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It starts with some interesting biographical background. His life is comparable with Walter Benjamin recently, so the book landed in my hands the past month. I’m new to Jean Wahl and catching up on my Kierkegaard and Heidegger.

I’m skeptical of the Hegel vs. Kierkegaard debates and how Kierkegaard gets to be so influential of existentialism next to Hegel’s more general influence on philosophy and politics. After Schopenhauer, and leading up to Nietzsche, only Hegel and Kierkegaard can apparently undermine religion to the proper extent when philosophical lineages get drawn up. I didn’t realize how Kierkegaard’s relevance in France was initially due to Wahl. I see Wahl as a taboo character like Kierkegaard. He throws around entire philosophical and religious concepts without connecting them in more conventional philosophical ways. I do like less conventional takes when the concept juggling leads somewhere new, like Deleuze or Derrida.

I thought I’d have heard of Wahl more, especially with how influential this book makes him. Lots of Sartre (master of subject/object freedom) overtones. Jargon like “realism” next to the “real”. Hegel called the “young” Hegel like he’s Pliny, so he might get associated with Marxist or Communist stuff by the end.

Existentialism is becoming more relevant as media representation gets streamlined. Wahl is a convoluting character for existentialism and it’s already a difficult movement to explain as we become more secular. Positivism gets juxtaposed at opportune times against religion which polarizes things. Wahl’s use of phenomenology is new to me. He comes off like a modern day mystic of sorts. But his method is aware of its stoicism and that kind of negationary schism, which is different. There must be something to the idea of anxiety and negation from Kierkegaard’s perspective?

Interesting! Thank you :)