Vladimir Jankélévitch

Biography

Jankélévitch was the son of Russian Jewish parents, who had emigrated to France.

In 1922, he started studying philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. His first meeting with Henri Bergson was in 1923, and over the years the two developed a close friendship. In 1924, he completed his DES thesis (diplôme d'études supérieures, roughly equivalent to an MA thesis) on Le Traité : la dialectique. Ennéade I 3 de Plotin under the direction of Émile Bréhier. In 1926, he passed the agregation in philosophy, achieving the top of his class.

From 1927 to 1932, he taught at the Institut Français in Prague, where he wrote his doctorate on Schelling. He returned to France in 1933, where he taught at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon and at many universities, including Toulouse and Lille.

In 1940, he was dismissed from the military and banned from teaching and publishing by the antisemitic policies of the Vichy government. In 1941, he joined the French Resistance, through which he resumed his teaching and writing underground.

After the war, in 1951, he was appointed to the chair of Moral Philosophy at the Sorbonne (Paris I after 1971), where he taught until 1979.

In 1968, he was among the few French professors to participate in the May 68 protests.

Writing and teaching

He was distinctive in, among many other ways, his heavy use of exclamation marks. Of his writing, his friend and fellow philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas said, “Each word sprang up as new, […] as if, here, thought never left the flowing waters of its spontaneity, mistrusting the facile habits of language, its verbal habits and its rhetoric.” He labored on the subject of forgiveness in such works as Le Pardon and L’Imprescriptible, with particular emphasis on The Holocaust.

His students at the Sorbonne, such as French-Italian philosopher Robert Maggiori, remember him for his impassioned teaching style and charming idiosyncrasies. Maggiori wrote his doctoral thesis on Jankélévitch, never completed because of the man's death and that Maggiori did not want to complete under any other supervision. Robert Zaretsky also wrote about the strong impression Jankélévitch made upon his students and of the way that his colleagues were often daunted by him. Maggiori explains that Jankélévitch was simply very different from many of his colleagues in that he tended to be more sentimental and literary in his writing and teaching.

Jankélévitch made the je-ne-sais-quoi ("I know not what") a central concept in his philosophy, applying it to ontology, ethics and aesthetics. In Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien (1957), he used the term to describe what escapes reductive or purely rational explanation: the elusive difference between a thing's essence and its existence. He characterized the je-ne-sais-quoi as a presque-rien ("almost nothing"), neither an object nor a mode of being, but something singular that appears fleetingly and is grasped through intuition and alertness rather than structural or conceptual analysis.

On virtue

In his Traité des vertus (1949), Jankélévitch extended the notion of the je-ne-sais-quoi to virtues: goodness, for example. He distinguished enduring “virtues of the interval” from more fragile and intense “virtues of the point”, which are never fully possessed and arise in response to the unpredictable demands and desires, leading to action in the moment. According to Philosophie Magazine, the je-ne-sais-quoi in virtue is the surplus of sincerity, purity, love or disinterestedness that makes an act genuinely moral rather than merely an instance of duty or meritorious effort.

On music

Jankélévitch developed the aesthetic dimension of the je-ne-sais-quoi through his writings on music. He associated it with charme, the elusive quality that distinguishes the beautiful from the sublime and makes a thing special and irreplaceable. In Fauré ou l’inexprimable (1974), he described this charm as indeducible, indivisible, indefinable and inexpressible. Because the je-ne-sais-quoi resists conceptual analysis, Jankélévitch held that it can be approached only indirectly, by describing what it is not; music, for him, expresses it more adequately than language, which tends toward reduction.

Jankélévitch wrote twelve books on composers of music and extensively on the philosophy of music. To him, music was a paradox: deep but also superficial, that is both aesthetic and philosophical. It was a way to express the "inexpressible," as he wrote in La Musique et l’Ineffable (1961). In studying the philosophy of music, he nevertheless insisted that music is beyond structural analysis.