Vladimir Jankélévitch

Vladimir Jankélévitch (born August 31, 1903 in Bourges , † June 6, 1985 in Paris ) was a French philosopher and musicologist .

Life

Vladimir Jankélévitch came from a Jewish intellectual family who had emigrated from Odessa to France for fear of increasing anti-Semitism . His father Samuel Jankélévitch (1869–1951) translated works by Schelling , Hegel and Freud into French and published them in philosophical journals.

Jankélévitch spent his school days in Bourges and Paris, where he attended the schools Lycée Montaigne and Lycée Louis-le-Grand . In 1922 he began studying philosophy at the École normal supérieure . In 1923 he made the acquaintance of the philosopher Henri Bergson , with whom he remained on friendly terms until his death in 1941 and who exerted a strong influence on the thinking of the young philosopher.

With Emile Bréhier he wrote his diploma thesis in 1924 under the title Le Traité: la dialectique. Ennéade I 3 de Plotin . In the following years publications appeared on authors of the philosophy of life and on mysticism in contemporary Russian literature. In 1926 he passed the entrance exam agrégation in philosophy as the best of his class and in 1927 took up a position as a teacher at the Institut français in Prague, which he held for five years. During his time in Prague, Jankélévitch published articles in which he confirmed his vitalistic worldview. Liszt et les étapes de la musique moderne , his first article on music, appeared in 1929 , and in 1931 Henri Bergson , his first book.

Back in Paris, Jankélévitch completed his dissertation in 1933 on L'Odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling . He taught as a teacher in Caen and Lyon and from 1936 as a professor in Toulouse and Lille. After the occupation of France by the German Wehrmacht and the Armistice of Compiègne in 1940, Jankélévitch was dismissed from the civil service due to a law of the Vichy regime . He lost his French citizenship.

In 1941 Jankélévitch joined the Resistance and gave organized lectures in cafes to his students. A year later, thanks to former students at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon, he was able to publish his works Nocturne and Mensonge .

In 1944 - after the liberation from fascism - Jankélévitch organized concerts for Radio Toulouse-Pyrenées. He was responsible for the program editing. In 1947 he got his position back as a professor at the Faculty of Literature in Lille and married in Algiers. In 1951, a year after his mother's death, he was appointed professor of moral philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he succeeded René Le Senne. In 1953 his daughter Sophie was born. In 1954 Jankélévitch published the First Philosophy , his main work in the field of metaphysics . From 1963 Jankélévitch also taught at the Free University of Brussels and was promoted to doctorate in 1965.

Jankélévitch, who accused German culture not only of not preventing the Holocaust , but of having brought it about, turned away from German philosophy and music entirely after the Second World War . He opposed the zeitgeist, which was shaped by Franco-German rapprochement and repression of the past. With his essay Pardon , twenty years after the end of the war, Jankélévitch interfered in the then current debate on the statute of limitations for collaboration crimes. He was able to achieve that a corresponding motion was rejected by parliament. Nevertheless, Jankélévitch's work remained relatively unknown as long as existentialism and the confrontation with Nietzsche and Heidegger dominated France.

In 1975 he resigned from his position at the Sorbonne, but kept a doctoral seminar and did not finally retire until 1979. During the Mitterrand era , when the French's complicity in war crimes was discussed for the first time, Jankélévitch gained recognition for a while in France and Italy, where his music-theoretical works were particularly well received.

Jankélévitch is buried in the Châtenay-Malabry cemetery.

philosophy

Jankélévitch's philosophical work, especially his early essays, is in the tradition of Bergson and Simmel . Building on Bergson's definition of the moment , he continued and went beyond the philosophy of life by making death a central point of reference in his thinking. Fascinated by the paradox, he dealt with Plotinus , German idealism and Russian mysticism . In Jankélévitch's culturally critical writings, Nietzsche's influences can be seen; in terms of moral theory, he was less close to Kant than to Scheler's material ethics of values. Due to the emphasis on the subject of his reflections, in the center of which man is, he was often attested to belonging to existentialism in the broader sense, from which he distanced himself for life.

Moral philosophy

Jankélévitch, whose choice of topics is strongly influenced by his experiences in the Resistance, wrote about engagement, innocence and wickedness, decadence, lies, paradox and morality, seriousness and forgiveness, and irony , among other things .

Jankélévitch has neither created a system nor does he link moral judgments to intersubjective justifications, but rather - as is typical of the philosophy of life - upgrades experience and feelings against the categories of understanding. Only the simplicity of the heart , the sympathy expressed in good intentions, is a criterion for ethical action, since abstract, generally binding models of thought could not do justice to the seriousness of existence and the subjective situation.

Commitment and freedom

In contrast to existentialism, which identifies freedom with arbitrary options, Jankélévitch takes a Bergsonian view of freedom, which locates it not in the realm of thoughts and speech, but on the level of action. Freedom is not expressed in the consideration of whether or not to get involved; instead, freedom and commitment are identical. Jankélévitch defines commitment as a decision for the good that must be made wholeheartedly, leaves no room for back doors, rhetorical excuses and philosophical pseudo- problems and has an immediate liberating effect. In this respect, a free person is someone who acts in a completely authentic and self-determined manner, who realizes himself undisguised as what he is, and who is liberating and rousing, not through words, but through what he does.

For Jankélévitch, philosophy is primarily of practical importance: Your task is not to speak, but to act.

The lie

In the essay Du Mensonge ( From the Lie ), Jankélévitch underlines the importance that he attaches to emotional action and demonstrates originality, because he softens the classic division of guilt in lying in favor of mutual responsibility. The origin of the lie is the competitive rivalry, the impossibility of coexistence, as it occurs, for example, in hierarchical relationships. As a saving idea in self-defense situations or a cunning invention to enforce our own interests, it spares us violence, but has a fragile character in the long term, as it requires new embellishments to maintain it. Because repeated pretenses lead to a loss of ipseity , the authenticity of the person, and a false self-image, the liar is taking an additional risk.

When deciphering the lie, Jankélévitch does not require intellectual acumen but psychological empathy from what is lying, because he is partly to blame for the situation due to his “refusal to understand”, his “lack of human interest” and his cold feeling. Only love and mercy could convert the liar to the truth. Jankélévitch writes:
"The fundamental cause of the lie is the lack of generosity, and only generosity, since it is the source of the rediscovered existence, will make us innocent and pure as on the first day of the world."

More morally reprehensible than the lie is the heartlessly spoken truth, since its consequences can cause great damage - for example, if a lie could have saved a person from unjust persecution.

Forgiveness

In the debate about the statute of limitations for collaboration crimes, Jankélévitch argued that the Holocaust as something almost supernatural, in which “pure and ontological malice” had manifested itself, could not be measured by normal standards, since the Nazis did not persecute the Jews for certain actions ; a crime in which a population group is denied the right to exist is a crime against humanity and as such unforgivable:
every time an act denies the essence of a person as a person, the statute of limitations that would result in it contradicts him in his name to forgive morality, in turn morality.

Jankélévitch also strongly criticizes the way the past is dealt with. During his life he protested against a translation of his texts into German. He could not and would not forgive the Germans for the crimes of the Holocaust. He sees forgetting about the Holocaust as a grave insult to the victims, a lack of seriousness and dignity, a shameful frivolity.

Lawyers do not have the right to forgive in the name of dead victims and thus to give a legal and legitimate claim to oblivion. The only possible moral stance consists in remembering and in symbolic actions such as resentment towards the German-Austrian culture or the rejection of compensation.

metaphysics

By engaging with Russian and Spanish mysticism, Jankélévitch positions himself outside the French tradition, which has been shaped by empiricism and materialism since Comte. He argues that the methods of the natural sciences are unsuitable as an instrument to grasp the subject matter of the humanities and distinguishes between three levels of existence: empiricism, meta-empiricism and metalogic - each with its own responsibilities. The object of metalogic, which Jankélévitch also calls the first philosophy , is almost nothing.

The almost nothing

With the term Presque-Rien , almost nothing, Jankélévitch describes a point in time whose duration is so short that appearance and disappearance take place almost simultaneously. Similar to lightning, the almost nothing is only perceived when it is almost over. In its appearance as an intuitive idea or mystical experience, it is not a question of an arbitrarily highlighted point in time within a chain of events that necessarily follows from what happened in the past. Rather, the almost nothing as a single isolated moment, which is not granted a future, is a break in a development. The almost nothing is the extreme approximation of being to nothing, of this world to the hereafter. Knowledge of the metaphysical is only possible in an intuitive way. Jankélévitch writes:
This so rare and so inadequate flash of success is nevertheless the only metaphysical success that a person can strive for.

The death

Can one get an idea of ​​the nothingness of existence and consciousness? Can one think of death? Right at the beginning of “ La mort ”, one of his main works, Jankélévitch makes it clear that there is almost nothing to be said about death: we only know that it will occur, and incidentally we try to suppress the scandal of death, to gloss over or give us otherworldly hopes. Jankélévitch rejects these excuses. For him, death is an organon-obstacle, a tool and an obstacle, because on the one hand it puts an end to all activities, on the other hand the awareness of the limitations of life leads to the appreciation of the individual moments.

In this way, death fulfills the paradox of meaningful meaninglessness , because it destroys life and denies it its meaning, but at the same time it is also the prerequisite for individual meaningfulness.

Music philosophy

Jankélévitch published a total of twelve books about composers he loved and their music. Among the representatives of post-romanticism and impressionism, he was particularly interested in Liszt , Fauré , Ravel and Debussy .

For Jankélévitch, music plays an important role not only aesthetically but also philosophically: it gives expression to the inexpressible, the je-ne-sais-quoi and the presque-rien , and fills life with meaning when it approaches its limitations remind. By attesting to the music seriousness and frivolity, profundity and superficiality, sense and nonsense, Jankélévitch draws a line between metaphysics and ethics.

Works

Single issues

• Henri Bergson. Paris, 1931.
• L'Odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling. Paris, 1933.
• Valeur et signification de la mauvaise conscience. Paris, 1933.
• L'Ironie. Paris, 1936.
• L'Alternative. Paris, 1938.
• Gabriel Fauré et ses melodies. Paris, 1938.
• Maurice Ravel. Paris, 1939.
• Le Nocturne. Lyon, 1942.
• You Mensonge. Lyon, 1942.
• Le Mal. Cahiers du Collège philosophique. Paris, 1947.
• Traité des vertus. Paris, 1949.
• Debussy et le mystère. Neuchâtel, 1949.
• Philosophy première. Introduction à une philosophie du presque. Paris, 1954.
• La Rhapsodie verve et improvisation musicale. Paris, 1955.
• L'Austérité et la vie morale. Paris, 1956.
• Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien. Paris, 1957.
• Le Pur et l'Impur. Paris, 1960.
• La Musique et l'Ineffable. Paris, 1961.
• L'Aventure, l'Ennui et le Sérieux. Paris, 1963.
• L'ironie. Paris 1964.
• La Mort. Flammarion, Paris, 1966.
• Le pardon. Paris, 1967.
• La vie et la mort dans la musique de Debussy, Neuchâtel, 1968.
• Pardon? Paris, 1971.
• L'Irréversible et la Nostalgie. Paris, 1974.
• Fauré et l'Inexprimable. De la musique au silence, vol. 1. Paris, 1974.
• Debussy et le mystère de l'instant. De la musique au silence, Vol. 2., Paris, 1974.
• Quelque part dans l'inachevé (in collaboration with B. Berlowitz). Paris, 1978.
• Liszt et la Rhapsody: essai sur la virtuosité. De la musique au silence, Vol. 3, Paris, 1979.
• Le paradoxes de la morale. Paris, 1981.
• La Presence lointaine. Albeniz, Séverac, Mompou. Paris, 1983.
• Sources. Paris, 1984.

Posthumous publications

• L'Imprescriptible. Paris, 1986.
• La Musique et les Heures. Paris, 1988.
• Penser la Mort? Entretiens. Paris, 1994.
• Premières et Dernières Pages. Paris, 1994.
• Une vie en toutes lettres. Correspondance. Paris, 1995.
• Plotinus, Ennéades I.3. Sur la dialectique. Paris, 1998.
• Philosophy morale. Paris, 1998.
• Cours de philosophie morale. Paris, 2005.

German translations

• Maurice Ravel in personal testimonies and photo documents. Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1958.
• Forgiveness. Essays on morality and cultural philosophy. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, ​​2003.
• Can one think of death? Vienna, Turia + Kant, 2003, ISBN 978-3-85132-340-5 .
• From the lie. Berlin, Parerga Verlag GmbH, 2004.
• Bergson read. Vienna, Turia + Kant, 2004, ISBN 978-3-85132-383-2 .
• The death. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, ​​2005.
• First philosophy. Vienna, Turia + Kant, 2006, ISBN 978-3-85132-384-9 .
• Forgive? Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, ​​2006.
• Lecture on moral philosophy. Vienna, Turia + Kant, 2007, ISBN 978-3-85132-482-2 .
• Somewhere in the unfinished. Vienna, Turia + Kant, 2008, ISBN 978-3-85132-499-0 .
• The I-don't-know-what and the almost nothing. Vienna, Turia + Kant 2009, ISBN 978-3-85132-581-2 .
• Satie and the morning. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2010, ISBN 978-3-88221-670-7 .
• The irony. Berlin, Suhrkamp 2012, ISBN 978-3-518-58588-7 .
• The music and the unspeakable, Suhrkamp 2016, German by Ulrich Kunzmann, ISBN 978-3-518-58692-1 .
• Magic, improvisation, virtuosity, Suhrkamp 2020, German by Ulrich Kunzmann, ISBN 978-3-518-29871-8.

literature

• Lucien Jerphagnon: Ancestors and Wills: Vladimir Jankélévitch. From the Franz. By Jürgen Brankel. Vienna: Turia + Kant 2009. ISBN 978-3-85132-551-5 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Vladimir Jankélévitch in the catalog of the German National Library
• French website with information on panel discussions about Jankélévitch, current information, biography, bibliography, pictures and texts about the content of his works.

Quotes

1. ^ Vladimir Jankélévitch: Forgiveness. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp 2003, p. 113.
2. ^ Vladimir Jankélévitch: Forgiveness. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp 2003, p. 249.
3. ^ Vladimir Jankélévitch: Forgiveness. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp 2003, p. 250.
4. ^ Vladimir Jankélévitch: Forgiveness. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp 2003, p. 282.
5. ↑ Deutschlandfunk: Implacable moralist
6. ↑ Vladimir Jankélévitch: The I-don't-know-what and the almost nothing. Turia + Kant, Vienna 2009, p. 183 ff.