Jean Wahl and Hegel-scholarship in the Age of Existentialism (Part One)

The first edition of Wahl's book on Hegel.

This is the first of two posts on French Hegel-scholar Jean Wahl's work on Hegel in which he presents religion as more influential than political or economic struggle in Hegel's account of the development of self-conscious life.

Introduction (Stephen Cowley)

The French Hegel-scholar Jean Wahl (1888-1974) is said to have “begun the theoretical discourse of the French Hegel-renaissance” in the 1920s (Bellantone, II, 142). His main contribution to Hegel-scholarship was Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel [The Misfortune of Consciousness in Hegel’s Philosophy] (1929). Wahl argues in it that a religious striving for reconciliation is a key to Hegel’s philosophy as a whole. He also wrote books and essays on Anglo-American philosophy, Kierkegaard and existentialism. There are English and Spanish translations of some of his books. He later thought he had painted too romantic a portrait of Hegel’s thought (Bellantone, II, 177).

The historian of philosophy Karl Löwith presented philosophy after Hegel as developing in rival Marxist and existentialist directions in reaction to Hegel. This is true, though it passes over the important schools of Neo-Kantianism and Positivism. I have traced the Marxist wing through my recent reading of Lukács’s work on Hegel. Wahl on the other hand represents the existentialist direction. He modified the view of Hegel as primarily a logical, systematic thinker that dated back in France to Georges Noël’s La Logique de Hegel (1897). Jarczyk and Labarrière say that: “Jean Wahl contributed more than others to give French Hegelianism its existential, if not existentialist, coloring.” (Jarczyk and Labarrière, 27). There are English discussions of Wahl in Michael Kelly Hegel in France (1992) and Bruce Baugh French Hegel (2003).

Wahl’s book made a considerable impression on French philosophers. According to Jacques D’Hondt, Hegel’s name subsequently became more widely known in Paris through the surrealist press. The curiosity this awakened was met first by Alexandre Kojève’s lectures there in the 1930s, published in 1947  (D’Hondt, 1988, 157). In contrast to Wahl’s religious interpretation, politics and the struggle for recognition were the primary theme for Kojève. These books were accompanied by the famous translation and commentary of Jean Hyppolite on the Phenomenology of Spirit, completed in 1946. As a result, the Phenomenology for long remained the central text in the French – and French influenced - reception of Hegel, which had international prestige in the heyday of existentialism.

Much of what Wahl says rehearses material we already know from general biographies. He recapitulates Wilhelm Dilthey’s interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology as growing from the intuitions/views of his youth as found in the early manuscripts on Christianity. For example, he says:

 “His [Hegel’s] mysticism and his system of concepts both come, as Dilthey saw, from one will, from one intuition. [...] One must then place Hegel again within his era, as Dilthey did, in order precisely to see what is universal in him.” (29-30) 

Wahl also cites Richard Kroner’s From Kant to Hegel (1921-24) - a major book of the period - and a number of now forgotten German historical essays.

The book also contains a translation and interpretation of the first two thirds of the Unhappy Consciousness section of Chapter 4 of the Phenomenology. This covers the first two parts on the reception of Judaism and Christianity (i.e. paras 206-18), but ends before the third part on Christian asceticism and its limits. I will discuss this in a separate post.

One inconvenience for the modern reader is that Wahl wrote just before the Glockner edition of Hegel’s Werke appeared. Hence he cites the first German edition of Hegel (1832-). However, this differs from Glockner’s and other modern editions. The first collected edition included an essay on "The Relation of Philosophy to Philosophy of Nature" in Volume 1 that is now attributed to Schelling. Wahl cites this, though he also expresses doubt as to the authorship (77n). Glockner omitted this and hence there was a repagination of the first volume and some moving of material between volumes in Glockner. In addition, Wahl often refers to pages rather than giving direct quotations, so it is hard to identify the supporting evidence (see also Bellantone II, 149 on this).

In the content of his work, Wahl extends the concept of the “unhappy consciousness” to cover not only Judaism, the life of Christ and early to medieval Christianity, but also aspects of the 18th century, including Pietism, Romanticism, the Enlightenment and the conflicts between them. He echoes the young Hegel when he says that Judaism viewed nature as something dead. I find this unconvincing in a literal sense, as plants and animals are a separate order of creation in Genesis. Presumably he is speaking of the relation of the living God of the prophets to fallen human life. Wahl interprets Christ in romantic terms. He sees Christ as an individual mediating figure required to overcome the suffering of the “unhappy consciousness”. He even says: “Jesus is the unhappy consciousness, the first unhappy consciousness, the most essential.” (54) It is as if Christ were some kind of 18th century “man of feeling”, similar to Rousseau. This is not orthodox Christian theology, though it has some roots in Schleiermacher’s theology of feeling. For christians, the sympathy for romantic feeling is a poor compensation for the low Christology of the underlying Biblical hermeneutics. It may be that the comparison worked better in Wahl’s subsequent studies of Kierkegaard. At any rate, Wahl admitted that he drew from Hegel what served his own intellectual purposes (D’Hondt, 1988, 156).

The book tends to circle around its subjects, so I will organise the material thematically. Here I give an overview of the opening and some key themes from the book. In a later post, I will examine the commentary. In what follows, I enclose my own comments in square brackets.

In general, Wahl continued the subjective Diltheyan ethos of Lebensphilosophie into the age of existentialism. Yet his scholarship is a corrective to one-sidedly political readings of the key chapter four of the Phenomenology where, according to Hegel, we leave abstractions and first “step into the spiritual day of the present”.

References:
Bellantone, Andrea. Hegel en France. Hermann, 2010.
D’Hondt, Jacques. “Les études hégéliennes” in Cinquante ans de philosophie de langue française 1937-1987. Vrin, 1988.
Jarczyk, Gwendoline & Labarrière, Jean-Pierre. De Kojève à Hegel. Albin Michel, 1996.
Wahl, Jean. Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel. Riedler, 1929.

Summary of Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel 

Wahl begins: “Hegel’s philosophy cannot be reduced to a few logical formulae. Or rather, these formulae cover something that is not of a purely logical origin. The dialectic, before being a method, is an experience by which Hegel passes from one idea to another.” (9) [This is common ground with the interpretations of Haym and Lukács, but the development of the thought is somewhat different. Lukács ascribes to Wahl a desire to assimilate Hegel to Kierkegaard and to the Lebensphilosophie he associates with the neo-Hegelians. - SC] Wahl argues that the mind goes beyond what it is by negation but this is not simply abstract negation. He adds:

“And it is in part reflection on Christian thought, on the idea of a God made man, that led Hegel to the conception of the concrete universal. Behind the philosopher, we discover the theologian, and behind the rationalist, the romantic.” (9) 

Hence, despite Hegel's final atemporal standpoint, Wahl finds a “tragic, romantic, religious” element to Hegel’s thought, “a kind of mysticism and emotional warmth”. Hegel began from moral and religious problems, not intellectual questions. His early manuscripts confirm this impression for Wahl and he cites Rosenkranz, Haym, Dilthey and Nohl in support.

It is clear enough what Stoicism and Skepticism are but, Wahl observes, this is less the case with the unhappy consciousness. [Wahl seems to have introduced the term malheur as a translation of Hegel’s unglücklich with the assistance of French scholar Maurice Boucher, In French, malheur signifies misfortune, dissatisfaction, suffering. - SC] Wahl thinks that there is something cosmic, rather than fleetingly historical, in the breaks, mediations and reconciliations under discussion. This level of generality also applies to Hegel’s ideas of separation and union: in his language, separation is pain; contradiction is evil; opposition is dissatisfaction; reason is love. The unhappy consciousness is the main concept in this mixture of emotive and conceptual fragments. Following Dilthey, Wahl notes that Hegel’s thought passed through several stages:

• Enlightenment 
• Sturm und Drang 
• Return to Enlightenment colored by Kant 
• Critique of Kantianism and move to a mystical philosophy 

Hegel lived each of these positions. When consciousness becomes his key term, there is an implicit contrast with what is not conscious. [Or the object of consciousness is not clearly conceived, I would prefer to say. – SC] As a logician, he later conceived a system in which all these elements were conserved. Wahl says: “But this system, where the concepts seem at first so wonderfully handled and applied, is the expression of a lived experience; it is the answer to a question that is not purely intellectual.” (12)

It is a question of bringing resolution to discord, of transforming unhappiness into happiness. The writings on the Philosophy of history, Philosophy of religion, Aesthetics and Logic all share this common problem. Hegel’s concepts are not just inherited, they are remade in contact with an inner flame. However, they lose something of their life and harden in his later systematic writings [As Rudolf Haym argued – SC]. As rich as the system was, Wahl concludes, it was not rich enough to contain all the thoughts, imaginings, hopes and despair of the young Hegel.

Romanticism and Christianity

One of the most striking features of Wahl’s interpretation is his assimilation of Christianity to Romanticism. He speaks for example of a “religious emotion of love” in Hegel’s idea of spirit, which he later rationalised, without eliminating. This he calls “this romantic basis and this Christian blueprint of his thought” (248). In Hegel’s later thought, he says: “We can always find however, still living, these primitive elements of his thought, which for us make up the greatest part of the value, even if they risk bursting the framework of the system.” (250) This is an echo of the view that Hegel’s early sense of movement and life was later frozen into the rigid categories of his logic. To some extent this is simply of reflection of ideas taken over from Dilthey. Wahl writes for example:

“The young man who had dismissed Christianity in the name of Kant, who had then thought to reconcile the thought of Christ and that of Kant, at almost the same time as Friedrich Schlegel wished to hellenize the Fichtean philosophy, had been led, at least momentarily, to dismiss Kant in the name of Christ. However, he retained something very precious from Kant: this idea of an a priori synthesis, which perhaps, in a sense, is embodied in the union of two natures.” (241)

However, Dilthey is not Wahl’s only source. He points out for example, that Hegel borrowed thoughts from Meister Eckhart which he found in Mosheim’s Church History. The source of this is Nohl’s edition of Hegel’s Early Theological Writings (1907). At the same time, there is recognition of the distance that exists between Hegel and Christianity. This comes out in the treatment of Helmut Groos’s book Der deutsche Idealismus und das Christentum [German Idealism and Christianity] (1927). This is one of a number of now forgotten German works in his bibliography. The influence of Kierkegaard on Hegel scholarship was particularly evident in Groos’s book. Wahl writes:

“Mr Groos brought to light in a forceful and ingenious way the oppositions [between Hegelianism and Christianity] in his work German Idealism and Christianity. Hegel replaces the idea of creation unacceptable in his monism by the idea of a fall of the divine, the creation becomes bad. And on the other hand, sin becomes creation and principle of redemption. According to Mr Groos, one would be an accomplice here to a “complete reversal of Christian dogma”. The relationships though, appear more complex between Hegelianism and the Christian religion. However, one must signal that the creation of the Son and the creation of the world are identified by Hegel, that he adapts from the Gnostics the concept of the Adam Kadmon (Philosophy of Religion, ed. Lasson, I, 200) and that his theory appeared at times as a gnosis for which there was no more mystery.” (142n)

The "Adam Kadmon" (primordial man) is a created archetype of humanity. Wahl is seeking to rescue Hegel from the interpretation of his thought as a kind of panlogicism in earlier French scholarship, such as Georges Noël. He criticises interpretations focused on the Logic in a note on J.M.E. McTaggart:

“McTaggart’s interpretation gives us an intellectualised and “flattened” Hegel. He has diminished as much as possible the specific character of the moment of negativity. He recognised though that it is when it is a matter of crime, punishment and reconciliation, or of the death necessary for life, that one feels the real Hegel.” (129n) 

Wahl’s critical remarks on McTaggart are a reaction against the logic and system centred reception of Hegel in France and England towards the end of the 19th century of which McTaggart was part. This can be traced back in part to Wallace’s translation of the Encyclopaedia Logic in 1873. This logocentric tradition of interpretation was shaken and revised by Dilthey (whom Wahl had read) and Nohl’s discovery and publication of what they called the Early Theological Writings, which they thought represented a naive and vital religiosity that underlay Hegel’s later system.

Wahl’s approximation of Hegel to romanticism is clearly at odds with Hegel’s own views and is also contested by Lukács. The following passages shed some light on Wahl’s views of romanticism:

“Only romanticism will allow us to make Christianity live again in its essentials – where the essential form of the unhappy consciousness presents itself. [...] no moment of history appeared to Hegel as close both to the deepest despair and to the revelation of the eternal Gospel as that in which he wrote. [...] A hope crosses the world, and Christianity is really, above all, a religion of hope.” (30-31, 53)
“And if it be true that romanticism is at the same time a renaissance of religious feeling, would we not be led to say that it is the religious feeling itself that makes us feel the necessity of suffering? The religious soul, be it that of Pascal or Hamann, is a soul divided. Romanticism, Christianity, these two essential forms, though not the only ones, of suffering consciousness, are thus the necessary mediations for the emergence of Hegelianism, which will be a classical romanticism, a rational Christianity.” (34)
“It is a matter, for Hegel, of reworking the pragmatist history of Gibbon that had so much influence on him, but with the developed intuition that romanticism had given him.” (59)
“We will see at the end of this study that the mystery of Christianity, the incarnation of the absolute, the holy trinity, negativity in God, is at the same time the central mystery, the transparent and sombre mystery, in Hegel’s eyes, of philosophy.” (37-38) 

The reference to Gibbon is to the once-famous passage in Gibbon’s work on the Roman Empire about the rise of Christianity. The distinction of romantic and classic is significant for German literature of this time and indicates the distinction of feeling from its institutional expression.

Irrationalism

 Wahl goes so far as to say of Hegel at one point that: “We are in the presence of a deep irrationalism.” (220) Wahl writes of Hegel’s intentions:

“It will be necessary to do for philosophy what Schleiermacher did for religion: to rediscover it starting from romanticism, but to rediscover philosophy with all its objectivity and as a fact of reason and by that very act distinguish it profoundly from romanticism conceived as a simple aspiration. [...] Hegel opposes to the pietists as to the rationalists the enthusiasm of the artist, of the religious man, of the romantic philosopher. His work appears as a vast generalisation and a transposition of what is also expressed in Hölderlin and Schleiermacher.” (195-96)

This is a reference to Schleiermacher’s Discourses on Religion to its Cultured Despisers. Wahl argues that Hegel’s alleged romanticism was only transitory, though it left its mark. He says:

“Hegel, arrived at the extreme point of romantic irrationalism, concluded that this irrationalism, as deep as it might appear, yet remained superficial in a certain degree. Being, life, love, cannot end with irreflection, but must be completed by reflection.” (195, 221) 

My view is that there is indeed an openness to experience in Hegel, but that it is unwarranted to describe this as irrational. It is more a matter of the work of reason not yet (never yet) being accomplished. This openness continues into and is even strengthened in the late editions of the Encyclopaedia; the objection is more that Hegel is by then overly careless or presumptuous in fitting new literary material into his ready-to hand categories.

Logic and the “Death of God”

Wahl goes on later in the book to discuss the emergence of the core concepts of the system from this romantic ethos. The following passage expresses his view of Hegel's intentions: “The first books of the Logic will be, beyond the description of the categories, an effort to show that reality is not undetermined, as Schelling’s idealism would have it, nor is it unknowable, as Fichte’s idealism would have it, but is a determinate knowledge.” (94)

Hegel said: “The task of philosophy consists in uniting oppositions, in placing being in non-being as becoming, separation in the absolute as appearance of the absolute, finite in the infinite as life.” (Differenzschrift, 127; 97) The movement of the finite shows us that the truth is infinite. Hegel rejects Lessing’s idea that “sleep is the brother of death.” Hegel, according to Wahl, interprets the Incarnation and Atonement in terms of the logical distinction of particular and universal. Thus Jesus is particular, God the Father is universal. Wahl endorses this account of Hegel’s heretical views when he concludes:

“What the author of the Logic had, primitively, at the bottom of his soul, was a Christian vision of the cross and a Boehmean vision of the wrath of God. [...] there is in Hegel’s soul, united closely with these two ways of seeing, a third vision, that which, at the same time under a very different form, was expressed in certain poems of Blake, that which Hegel found in passages cited by Mosheim [in his Church History] which he copied out. “The good man is the only son of God whom the Father begets eternally. There is in souls something that is not created, and that is reason [...] What the Holy Spirit says of Christ, is all true of every divine man. All that is proper to the divine nature is proper to the divine man.” (Nohl, 387)” 

These heterodox citations, which deny the historical uniqueness of Christ, come from Meister Eckhardt. They show Hegel exploring a vein of mystical religious ideas, but not at this time in an orthodox spirit.

In Part Two, we discuss the reception history of Hegel's unhappy consciousness and Wahl's analysis of its role in the Phenomenology of Spirit in particular.