Jean Wahl 1888 – 1974

Jean Andre Wahl was a French philosopher and poet and the principal channel by which Hegel, Kierkegaard, and the wider current of existentialism reached French philosophical education in the years before and after the Second World War. After early work on the pluralist tradition in American philosophy, he produced his celebrated The Unhappy Consciousness in the Philosophy of Hegel, which gave his students Sartre, Beauvoir, Levinas, and Hyppolite their first sustained encounter with a Kierkegaardian Hegel. Toward the Concrete and Short History of Existentialism shaped postwar French philosophical culture. Of Jewish origin, he survived imprisonment at Drancy and sought refuge in the United States during the Occupation.

Jean André Wahl was born at Marseille in May 1888 into an Alsatian Jewish family. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1907, took the agrégation in philosophy in 1910, and completed his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1920 with theses on the pluralistic philosophies of England and America and on Descartes. He taught at Besançon, Nancy, and Lyon, was appointed to the Sorbonne in 1936, and during the war was arrested as a Jew in 1941, interned at Drancy, and after his release escaped to the United States, where he taught at Mount Holyoke and at Pennsylvania and helped found the École libre des hautes études in New York.

His books include Les Philosophies pluralistes d'Angleterre et d'Amérique (1920), Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (1929), Vers le concret (1932), Études kierkegaardiennes (1938), Existence humaine et transcendance (1944), Traité de métaphysique (1953), and Vers la fin de l'ontologie (1956). On returning to France in 1945 he resumed his Sorbonne chair and founded the Collège philosophique, an extramural seminar that drew Levinas, Bachelard, Bataille, Sartre, and Beauvoir.

Wahl was the principal French interpreter of Hegel's unhappy consciousness, of Kierkegaard's existential categories, and of the metaphysical pluralism of William James and Whitehead, and his classes and edited journals shaped a generation including Levinas, Deleuze, and Foucault. He died in Paris in June 1974.