Jean Wahl Quotes
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. The quotes below are attributed to Jean Wahl, organized by topic.
Browse Jean Wahl by topic
Jean Wahl on Death
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“He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.”
L'âge de raison ( The Age of Reason ) (1945)
Jean Wahl on Freedom
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Attributed to Jean Wahl:
“Kierkegaard taught us that to philosophize is to choose.”
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“Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom .”
L'imagination ( Imagination: A Psychological Critique ) (1936)
Jean Wahl on Knowledge
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“L'imagination ( Imagination: A Psychological Critique ) (1936)”
Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom . -
“What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?”
Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)" preface, Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Nègre et Malgache (1948) -
“Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)" preface, Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Nègre et Malgache (1948)”
What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes? -
“Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)”
Every age has its own poetry ; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
Jean Wahl on Life
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“He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism , smiling tolerance , resignation , common sense stoicism - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life.”
L'âge de raison ( The Age of Reason ) (1945)
Jean Wahl on Mind
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Attributed to Jean Wahl:
“Existentialism is the discovery that thought belongs to a singular life.”
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“L'âge de raison ( The Age of Reason ) (1945)”
He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being. -
“L'âge de raison ( The Age of Reason ) (1945)”
He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism , smiling tolerance , resignation , common sense stoicism - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life.
Jean Wahl on Time
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“Every age has its own poetry ; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.”
Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)
Jean Wahl on Truth
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Attributed to Jean Wahl:
“Philosophy must remain in contact with the concrete, however far it ventures.”
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Attributed to Jean Wahl:
“Hegel's spirit only lives where it is read against itself.”
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Attributed to Jean Wahl:
“Poetry is the philosophical act that knows itself.”