One of Vladimir Jankélévitch’s former students, now in his seventies, remembers him as a teacher at the Sorbonne in the late 1960s and 1970s: full of fire in the classroom, passionate and eccentric, and even somewhat sentimental.
Robert Maggiori hesitates over that word. Sentimental. He considers “affectionate” instead. Neither seems quite sufficient.
What he can say with certainty is that a lecture by Jankélévitch was always an event, in the fullest sense of the French word: événement.1
“I must say that he seemed like a Martian to us,” Maggiori recalls in a 2018 lecture titled “Jankélévitch et l’amour,”at the Colloque des Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco.1
Jankélévitch was philosophical in a way that seemed almost outside the ordinary world. Supernatural, perhaps. Maggiori uses the word magical.
Maggiori had begun a thesis on Jankélévitch and the Cynics under Jankélévitch’s own supervision. The work was interrupted by Jankélévitch’s death in 1985 and never completed. Maggiori did not want to finish it with anyone else. And so a man who went on to spend decades teaching philosophy, writing, and translating from Italian into French never earned a doctorate.
It is one of those small biographical facts that becomes larger in memory.
Maggiori remembers the lock of hair that would fall over Jankélévitch’s eyes while he taught. He remembers how softly he spoke in the lecture hall, so softly that students had to remain utterly still if they wanted to catch every word. The effect was almost spiritual: a room held in silence by concentration.
And then, suddenly, Jankélévitch would get carried away.
He might launch into Greek thought for ten minutes, a rush of associations and philosophical energy that left students bewildered, astonished, and captivated. Decades later, Maggiori still remembers it with affection.
He also remembers that Jankélévitch’s style did not always serve him well within academic philosophy. He was too lyrical, too literary, perhaps too sentimental. He was not a Marxist. He was not a structuralist. He did not fit cleanly into a school or a system, and Maggiori believes that this marginalization hurt him deeply.
But the inability to classify Jankélévitch may also be the key to understanding him.
His philosophy repeatedly turns toward things that resist possession and structure: music, love, virtue, forgiveness, death. He distrusted the idea that the most important things in human life could always be reduced to systems.
During the years of the Second World War, when antisemitism barred him from ordinary academic life during the years of Occupation in France, Jankélévitch continued his intellectual work underground. Joining the French Resistance, he continued to translate and work on German thinkers including Freud and Hegel even as the German language itself became increasingly difficult for him to inhabit emotionally. After the war, he would say that he would never speak German again.
That refusal would become inseparable from his thinking about forgiveness.
Shortly before Jankélévitch’s death, Maggiori interviewed him for Libération. Jankélévitch had spent much of his life thinking about love and forgiveness, but when confronted with the Holocaust, philosophy reached a limit.
He contrasted forgiveness with a perfume: a perfume overwhelms the senses. Forgiveness is different. It cannot simply spread everywhere, covering everything in its path. There are acts that cannot be absorbed into reconciliation. As Jankélévitch put it with devastating simplicity, one cannot forgive the unforgivable.
When it came to the Holocaust, Maggiori recalled, Jankélévitch could only circle the edges of forgiveness. It eluded him.
That difficulty is central to Jankélévitch’s thought. He was drawn to what philosophy cannot quite contain.
The same is true of virtue.
In his Traité des vertus, Jankélévitch dwells on love and on the strange status of virtue itself. Maggiori, discussing this aspect of his philosophy, puts it simply: “Virtue is only grasped when it escapes us.”
It is like music.
Music sounds, resounds, and vanishes. We hear it, but we do not possess it.
Virtue works in much the same way. Virtue is done. It is not had.
You do not have virtue.
You do good.
The good exists in the act.
Nor does good accumulate. You are not good because you once did good. Good exists only in the act.
That, in brief, is how Maggiori frames Jankélévitch’s philosophy of virtue. But don’t get too comfortable with the definition.
What about the opposite of good?
If it is true that we cannot possess goodness, but can only do good, then logic seems to demand the same of evil. We often reassure one another by saying, “You did something bad, but you are not bad. You are a good person who did something bad.” The distinction may comfort us when we are trying to reconcile ourselves to regret or remorse, but philosophically it gets messier.
As we have already seen, you cannot be a virtue. You can perform a virtuous act, but you cannot possess goodness as a permanent condition any more than you can possess evil in that way.
Virtue cannot be held still long enough for us to copy down the formula.
It appears in an act, and then it is gone.
And because it is so elusive, Maggiori says, we are tempted to deny that it exists at all. “Virtue is dead,” someone might declare in a moment of despair. Where is virtue in the world? We would all like to know.
The answer is that it is here.
Briefly.
In a moment. In an act.
It does not remain forever. It comes and goes. And then, if we are fortunate—or attentive—it comes again.
So Maggiori says: “Seize the opportunity.”
I take that to mean that virtue requires alertness. You have to be awake enough to recognize the moment in which something good can be done.
Maggiori recalled Jankélévitch using the fisherman as an analogy. The fisherman must remain alert for the bite. The bite is the opportunity. To notice it, he must be in harmony with his surroundings—in the present moment, hearing, seeing, feeling.
Then comes the act.
You notice the bite and respond.
Catch and release.
It is here, and then it is gone.
Or perhaps the fish feeds someone who is hungry.
Either way, the moment does not last.
Maybe that’s why we covet it. That moment of goodness makes us happy.
Happiness, too, is fleeting. It comes and goes.
Maggiori breaks it down in steps: you want to do good; you do good; it makes you happy; you want that experience again.
But you cannot do the good without wanting to do it. He uses the example of a drowning person to show how easily fear can interrupt that desire. Saving someone may be too frightening, too risky. Instead of wanting to act, you may feel only obligation: the sense that you must do something, an obligation you can either accept or resist.
We often think of goodness that way—as something we must do. As a duty. As a parent, a friend, a neighbor.
“But you must be crazy!” someone might say when the good requires risk. It’s easy for us, reading about it, to imagine ourselves joining the French Resistance, but it was far from easy for those who lived it.
Of course, if you do stand up to the bullies or save a drowning person, the rewards will be generous. You will be happy with yourself and with the moment. That goes without saying.
Worth the risk?
Is that what Anne Dufourmantelle (who died in the act of saving two drowning people)2 meant by praising risk?3 I think so.
Because what happens if you make the other choice? You do not enter the cold water. The person drowns. That missed opportunity may remain with you for the rest of your life.
But risk requires decision, and decision requires desire.
Obligation does not carry out an action. Nor does courage.
Jankélévitch was clear about that.
You want to do something good. You decide.
You act.
The courage is there—in the decision, in the movement toward the act.
So courage, like virtue, is not something you have.
It is something you do.
Deciding. Seizing. Acting.
Maggiori tells us that Vladimir Jankélévitch wanted desperately to capture that moment, like a snapshot, or a freeze frame in a film.
Just like goodness, just like badness, charm happens and charm escapes.
Charm happens in a moment of pleasure. Music. Art. Flowers.
Kindness? Attention? Care?
What is left when charm is gone?
We miss it. We want to get it back.
But sometimes charm is a trick. Les fleurs du mal?
Someone pulls the wool over our eyes in order to take something.
Maggiori loses me a little bit as he quotes Nietzsche on consciousness of morality.
It is inexplicable, though: why we are drawn to something or some place or someone, as if charmed, why we fall in love. Why are you charmed by a Van Gogh and not by a Modigliani, or vice versa. Colors and textures evoke a certain mood, trigger thoughts, perhaps memories. It’s not really either or, is it? We cannot really say which one is better. We only know what strikes us in that way that produces the charm.
Maggiori talks about shopping. In a market, you choose what you think is “the best.” But it doesn’t follow that what you don’t choose is “the worst.” He questions whether it’s a choice at all. You pick the thing where the charm happens.
The charm of spring or the evil of summer, the harshness of winter? Some people are charmed by the rain in autumn.
Maggiori says that he regrets to this day that Jankélévitch and Levinas did not collaborate more. He would have loved (he would have been charmed) by something written by the two philosophers in collaboration.
An idea. An ideal. That is perhaps a moral—something that we would move towards.
Now we have arrived at love. Jankélévitch defined it thus: An unconditional affirmation of the preference of the other? We are selfish (self-loving) except in love. In self-love, we affirm ourselves to deserve “the best” and to access all the charm. In love of another, we grant this generosity outward.
Love is giving. Unconditionally and unselfishly.
Love, though! It’s so difficult. It hinges on trust!
Maggiori implores us to read Jankélévitch’s own words on this point:
Traité des vertus (1949)
Les Vertus et l'Amour (1970)
Le Paradoxe de la morale (1981)
Because it is a paradox when you think about loving yourself and loving another, and what it takes. The nature of trust is unstable. How easily it turns into distrust. When trust is gone, so is the charm. There goes desire too along with the willingness to take the risk.
Or what if the problem is mistrust rather than distrust? You put your trust where, maybe, you ought not? You then pour yourself into loving that person, so much that you will lose yourself. That must be the fleur du mal. Indeed, the poison. The most devastating kind of love. Tragic love.
Maggiori says that Jankélévitch had a basic formula: the minimum of being and the maximum of love.
le minimum d’être dans le maximum d’amour
Because the paradox is, if we pour too much of ourselves (our being) into loving another, we lose the essence that makes us love in the first place. Nothing will matter anymore. We won’t care for anything, not even ourselves, let alone the supposed beloved.
Here Maggiori talks again of a paradox: But “love is to love, not to be” he says, invoking the philosophy of Plato about Eros.
I think love is indeed about loving, but love comes from the being. Maybe we ought to think of our being as the source. Maggiori already talked about morality as the place where you begin. You have to nurture the source. Water the soil. Because unless the soil is healthy, the flower does not bloom.
Love in bloom must be unconditional and cannot cease. If beauty fades, love does not—as long as the source is watered, love will sustain.
For Maggiori’s interpretation of Jankélévitch, what we call falling out of love may reveal that what we loved was not the other as such, but the feeling, image, or qualities we had attached to them. Jankélévitch, Maggiori says, never spoke of narcissism, but rather he spoke about these more subtle tendencies which we can easily mistake for love.
I think of the proverb, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” What absence really does is remind us of what is missing. Jankélévitch believed that love can never be domesticated. You can’t tie it down. You can’t make it stay anchored. Love must remain free. He said it has to be renewed, again and again. This takes me back to the watering of the soil. Love is in the aliveness? It’s in the act of nurturing itself.
It’s in the being and the essence of us that cares.
And it is always there. There is always someone to love.
Just as there is always a distraction.
Because love requires attention. You can’t care if you don’t notice. You won’t notice if you’re distracted.
We’re back to the fisherman, and the alertness required to sense the bite.
Footnotes
The description of a Jankélévitch lecture as an événement is Robert Zaretsky’s, but it is particularly apt in light of Maggiori’s recollections of Jankélévitch in the classroom. See Zaretsky, Robert. “Pardonne-Moi: On Vladimir Jankélévitch and the Philosophy of Forgiveness.” The Los Angeles Review of Books. 22 July 2021.
“French philosopher Dufourmantelle drowns rescuing children.” BBC News. 24 July 2027. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40703606.
Dufourmantelle, Anne. In Praise of Risk. Fordham University Press, 2019. ISBN: 9780823285440.