Abstract
The purpose of my article is to shed light on the relationship of proximity and distance that linked two major figures of 20th-century French philosophy: Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Jankélévitch. This article presents a comparative study of their respective views on Metaphysics and Ethics. It also deals with their contribution to the reflection on the fact of “Being Jewish”, the theme that was at the center of the preoccupations of these two artisans of the renewal of Jewish thought in France after the Shoah. I conduct a comparative analysis between the key concepts of their philosophy: Levinas’ “There is” and “Otherness” and Jankélévitch’s “I-know-not-what” and “Ipseity”. I point out the difference between Levinas’ ethics of Otherness and Jankélévitch’s morality of paradox. In the section on “Being Jewish”, I highlight the crucial distinction they both made between racism and anti-Semitism and the very different meaning they gave to it.
Highlights
It is not easy to compare two personalities as strong, two works as fruitful and original as those of Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Jankélévitch
Jankélévitch and Levinas both initiated the renewal of morality in the 20th century
The “pre-established harmony” that, according to Levinas, existed between them did not prevent them from giving to this renewal a very different form: Levinas elaborated an ethics of otherness which took a hyperbolic form by radicalizing itself in Otherwise than being; Jankélévitch developed a morality of love which was cast in the mold of paradox
Summary
It is not easy to compare two personalities as strong, two works as fruitful and original as those of Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Jankélévitch. Levinas described this convergence as a “kind of pre-established harmony” This manifested itself on more than one occasion in places they both frequented: Jean Wahl’s Collège de philosophie shortly after the War, where Levinas heard “the inimitable sonority of Vladimir Jankelevitch’s lofty and inspired speech, uttering the unheard in the Bergsonian message, formulating the ineffable, and drawing a packed hall at the Philosophical College” Levinas’ name hardly appears in Jankélévitch’s writings, his philosophy is not absent In his homage to Jankélévitch, Levinas discussed his metaphysics—the “I-know-what” and the “almost nothing”—and his ethics. Following Levinas’ homage, I will examine various aspects of his relationship with Jankélévitch: the way in which Jankélévitch made use of the Levinasian trope of “There is” to elaborate the key notions of his own metaphysics: the “I-know-not-what” and the “Almost-nothing” (“Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien”); Levinas’ and Jankélévitch’s view of ethics as “first philosophy”; and their conception of “Being Jewish” and their approach to racism and anti-Semitism as well as to the meaning of the State of Israel
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