If it is certainly not a question here of examining in detail this course, which was itself already quite intricate in nature, by conducting a comparison with the Heideggerian “model,” it is however quite appropriate and necessary to reveal its intention in broad strokes. One must confess a major disappointment with Wahl’s text, especially since he had “just come back from visiting Heidegger.”60 What a contrast! In principle, the contents were the same, since Wahl followed the typed copy of the course. In fact, Wahl followed both parts of the course (“Philosophy and science” and “Philosophy and worldview”), and he closely followed Heidegger’s analyses (concerning the specificity of philosophy; its relation to the sciences; the meaning of worldview, truth, and the modes of being; Heidegger’s theses on truth, the concept of world and the Kantian interpretation; the world as a “play of life”; and finally philosophy as fundamental stance and shelter), even though he condensed the forty-six paragraphs of the course into twenty lectures.61
If the contrast is striking, although not flattering for Wahl, this is not only because a commentary is necessarily secondary in relation to the original that it addresses (Wahl could not have been unaware that he risked being overshadowed by a Heideggerian text); this is because, instead of effacing himself before the text to make its force and its extraordinary pedagogical virtues apparent (this is one of the best of Heidegger’s lecture courses), Wahl dithered without any method, with no guiding questions, multiplying the defects of an anarchic gloss. And while he was a Germanist and a decent translator in other respects, he kept the horrid translation of Dasein as “human reality.” Above all, he claimed mistakenly that Heidegger was criticizing the preeminence of the problem of being62 (he wrongly assumed that Heidegger “subordinated the problem of being to the problem of the world”63), and he did not at all clarify his own position, while asserting that he had detected “extreme idealist elements and also extreme realist elements”64 in Heidegger’s work. This projection of a traditional terminology onto the Heideggerian horizon (when Heidegger’s entire efforts had been to free himself from such a terminology) only added to the confusion without giving Heidegger his due—however debatable it might be. That being said, it must be admitted that Wahl followed Sartre, who had already resorted to the same kind of dualist reduction; furthermore, it would be out of place or unjust not to concede that he was able to identify decisive thresholds in the text (thus the passage from worldview as sheltering—Bergung—to worldview as stance—Haltung—was treated correctly in lessons 17 and 19).65 He also appropriately noticed that the Heideggerian notion of the divine was neither pantheistic, nor theistic, nor atheistic.66 Simply, his listeners would have needed exceptional skill in order to extract the most pertinent critical remarks from an occasionally brilliant, but most often improvised and quite disorganized, presentation. With some distance and thanks to the publication of this lecture course, we can however appraise
60. Kostas Axelos, who audited the course, had himself experienced at the time a similar disappointment: “It was pedestrian and also a paraphrase.” See our interview with Kostas Axelos in Heidegger en France, vol. 2: Entretiens. [TN: This interview with Kostas Axelos was not included in the English edition.]
61. We must keep in mind, however, that his dactylogram is likely to not have been as complete as the version we now have thanks to volume 27 of the Gesamtausgabe.
62. Wahl, Introduction à la pensée de Heidegger, 240.
63. Ibid., 246 (see also 240). Heidegger demonstrates the profound connection between the two problems: “The problem of being unfolds as the problem of the world, the problem of the world in turn deepens into the problem of being” (GA 27, 394).
64. Wahl, Introduction à la pensée de Heidegger, 247–248. See also 115.
65. However, Wahl is wrong in seeing in Heidegger a “disdain for sheltering” (ibid., 248).
66. Ibid., 211.