Something in Us by Jankélévitch

Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903-1985) was the philosopher, in all his glory. And even, he was philosophy incarnate, when speaking in front of his students this fine and discreet little man with abundant hair, separated by a parting in the middle of the skull. He devoted his life to teaching, to the point of appearing to live like an ascetic. You can still hear his high-pitched, slightly quavering voice in lessons recorded by his students or on radio broadcasts. One wonders what he would say today, in the midst of all these strange wars, and reading the intellectual biography of Françoise Schwab, Vladimir Jankélévitch. The irresistible charm of the je-ne-sais-quoi (1), we realize that we miss his word.

His word indeed: he taught like Socrates, in a quest for “purity of heart, rediscovered innocence, grace, charity, musical enchantment”, while keeping, like an aggregation cacique, a ” vigorous method made of perpetual questioning”. This virtuoso of thought was loved by his students who behaved like disciples with their master, despite his extreme humility. Every day he went from his apartment on the Quai aux Fleurs, where he had two grand pianos and thousands of books, to the Sorbonne where he taught. At home he liked to organize concerts for four hands during memorable afternoons. Capable of improvising on the piano as in class, from a tiny piece of paper, and bewitching his audience, he had his own way of dealing with questions of morality through singular concepts, the je-ne -sais-quoi and the almost nothing, forgiveness, lies, misunderstanding, the irreversible and nostalgia, or Le Nocturne: he was a philosopher and a musician, and music was for him philosophy, just as philosophy was music , an “experience of the ineffable” which takes us into another space-time, that of “a marvelous garden where all enchantments become possible”.

This “athlete of memory” as the philosopher Élisabeth de Fontenay says, after studying at the École Normale Supérieure, was expelled from university during the war because he was Jewish. Then he was hidden in Toulouse, where he continued his teaching in the back shops of cafes, in secret. After the war, he became the thinker of forgiveness, the condition of possibility of which, according to him, is not forgetting, but remembering. It is only on this condition that forgiveness is forgiveness. But how to forgive Nazism and the Holocaust? This is why this philosopher wanted to stand out from his peers and do without German culture, philosophy and music, a real challenge for the philosopher and musician that he was. The Holocaust, “this crime against humanity directed against a single people”, is inexpiable. As he says, “Forgiveness is stronger than evil and evil is stronger than forgiveness. I can’t get out of there. It is a kind of oscillation that in philosophy we would qualify as dialectic and which seems to me infinite. I believe in the immensity of forgiveness, in its supernaturality, I think I have said it enough, perhaps even dangerously, and on the other hand, I believe in wickedness. »

It would seem that his philosophy fought and built on this presupposition, to think after the Holocaust. This is why, far from Kantian or Hegelian rationalism, and against the criticism of Nietzschean morality, it is rooted in the philosophy of intuition and vital momentum of Henri Bergson, of whom he was the pupil and the disciple, as well as Plotinus, Pascal, Saint John of the Cross and Baltasar Gracian, who inspired the thought of the je-ne-sais-quoi: this “tiny notion” says more about thought than Reason, because it explores its limit and designates the fact of “losing consciousness” rather than gaining consciousness. An ethic of thought, in short, based on the humility he was accustomed to, as shown by his definition of morality: “Holding the maximum of love into the minimum of being” or even: “Love, give, forgive, create”: “These four words designate four forms of initiative, four forms of innocence. In these four forms consciousness accomplishes an efferent and direct movement towards the other or towards the object, a movement without turning back on itself. Thanks to this beautiful intellectual biography, one can learn about the man and his philosophy full of life and teachings on life; and to find in each of us this something of Jankélévitch which sleeps and which awakens to read it, to hear it, to know it, this je-ne-sais-quoi like a bewitching piece of music which carries us towards a beyond ourselves, without our really knowing why.

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