Brian Hamilton

Jean Wahl on Transcendence

Kevin Hart has repeatedly insisted on the significance of Jean Wahl’s work over the course of our seminar on Jean-Luc Marion. Jean Wahl (1888–1974), not often noted for his own work, was a French philosopher who exercised some heavy bit of influence on both Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas. Hart has mainly emphasized one small point in Wahl’s work, a distinction between transascendence and transdescendence. The former is what is usually understood by the notion of transcendence, passing beyond in a superior way, with a spatial metaphor of ascent. Transdescendence, though he really only flags the distinction without developing it, seems to denote a chthonic God, “a hierarchy directed downward.”

I’ll note another helpful section, immediately following the few sentences on transdescendence in the same book, Existence humain et transcendance (1944). Part of the paper I’ve been trying to write for Hart has been insisting on the circular character of theology for Denys the Areopagite, as opposed to Marion’s three ways, such that negation spills over into affirmation and affirmation is itself the catalyst of negation—with transcendence emerging as the inadequacy of both. But what I’m trying to show theologically, as an interpretation of Denys, Wahl shows philosophically. The book hasn’t been translated, so I’ll attempt a rough translation of the relevant section here.

The transcendence towards immanence

There is a movement of transcendence directed towards immanence; when transcendence transcends itself.

Perhaps the greatest transcendence is that which consists of transcending transcendence, which is to say falls back into immanence.

There would be, then, a second immanence after the transcendence which has been destroyed.

The idea of transcendence, one could conceive it as necessary to destroy the belief in a thought that knows nothing but itself, to make us grasp the feeling of our immergence in an immanence other than thought.

But this destructive idea—if it should be destroyed in turn—is never completely itself, is never completed transcended, and rests in the background of the spirit, like the idea of a paradise lost, from whose presence (hoped for, regretted) and loss flows the value of our attachment to what is here below.

—Jean Wahl, Human Existence and Transcendence, p. 38.

Transcendence comes not in an accomplished moment of any discourse or of any existence, but always with the character of a journey or of growth. Transcendence, like desire unto perfection, “has no stopping place but stretches out with the limitless” (Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, P.7). And rather than growing linearly, leaving behind what it has known of immanence, transcendence returns endlessly to immanence and endlessly transcends it again, transforming both movements in their relationship to distance. Rather than a simple exiting of immanence or a return to immanence, we get emergence and immergence. “L’immergence est l’immanence de l’immanence dans la transcendance. L’émergence…est la transcendance de l’immanence par rapport à l’immanence.”*

In the same way, for Denys, the denial of all things as God (apophasis) brings us to God as the Cause of all things—which results in praise of God as all things (émergence). The praise of God as all things (cataphasis) is simultaneously the praise of God as the source of all things (immergence). One does not emerge from affirmation and negation into a third way, but rather recognizes returns to them having left them, and finds them transformed.

Marion had earlier (and better) characterized the movement of transcendence as the endless traverse of distance, foregoing the hope of accomplishing the term of transcendence and rather admitting distance, in both senses of recognizing it and allowing it to enter. It is the “in-draft of distance,” as Marion calls it in The Idol and Distance, that transforms our speech into something worthy of itself. But this transcendence does not leave behind distance, nor does this new discourse leave behind affirmation and negation. Rather, distance gives itself to us: affirmation and negation themselves become displays of transcendence.

* “Immergence is the immanence of immanence within transcendence. Emergence… is the transcendence of immanence in connection with immanence” (p. 37).

5 May 2007 |
tags: Denys, Jean-Luc Marion