Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

There are writers you do not so much read as live alongside: writers of a depth, a density, a multiplicity of suggestions that resist the sort of encapsulation by which their names wither into the occasion for empty allusions and knowing nods. For nearly twenty years now, the French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch has been such a writer for me. I know of few accounts more moving of the tragedy of the human condition than his The Irreversible and Nostalgia. His Pure and Impure has aided me in keeping my distance from many petty fanaticisms fashionable at present. He reminds me that “philosophy is not the construction of a system, but the resolution to look naively in and around oneself,” that the first sincere impulse toward knowledge is the patient articulation of one’s ignorance.  Born in 1903 in France, the son of Jews from Odesa, he studied in Paris with Henri Bergson, who was the subject of his first book in 1931, and whose ideas would remain central to his philosophical and musicological writings over the following half a century. He fought in the French Resistance in Toulouse, writing tracts encouraging Russian collaborators with the Wehrmacht to abandon their posts and giving the underground lectures in moral philosophy that would form the basis for his three-volume Treatise on the Virtues. Though he had written his dissertation on Schelling, and had even declared in his twenties to a friend that “only the Germans think deeply,” after the end of the Second World War he made an acrimonious public break with German culture (with exceptions for Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Liszt, and a few others) that extended even to Jewish thinkers writing in German. This intransigence, and more specifically his contempt for Heidegger and his relative indifference to Marx, placed Jankélévitch outside the major currents of French thought, though thinkers from Levinas to Derrida acknowledged a debt to him. (He also cared little for Freud, ironically, as his father had translated him into French.) Hence he was little known and little read even as friends and peers — Sartre, Foucault, Derrida — became minor or even major celebrities. It is hard to say how deeply this affected him. Biography is an English and American genre, and sadly, a recent life of Jankélévitch, François Schwab’s Vladimir Jankélévitch: Le charme irresistible du je-ne-sais-quoi (Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Irresistible Charm of the I-Don’t-Know-What), is uninformative on this and many other matters. He did say that he saw himself more as a teacher than as a writer, and remarked, who knows whether with bitterness or ironic forbearance, “This era and I are not interested in each other. I’m working for the twenty-first century.” He died in 1985. In the present diary, I have not wished to arrange into any schema the thoughts of this philosopher who affirmed that his only system was to have no system, for whom philosophy was a living thing rather than a specimen to be preserved in the formol of empty deliberation. I would only like to share, as though from one friend to another, a sampling of what I have learned — what I am still trying to learn — from him, for the benefit of those who cannot read his many works not yet translated into English, or for others who have yet to make his acquaintance.  Time Time is the medium and ultimate boundary of human freedom. In The Irreversible and Nostalgia, Jankélévitch describes movement as the elementary form of freedom, and locates the basic tragedy of human life in our inability to travel back and forth in time as we can in space. The irreversibility of time is the root of nostalgia, of guilt, and of regret; its unceasing transformation of present into future is the ground of hope; and the inevitable conclusion of this future in death is the origin of anguish and despair. Yet so long as death has not yet come, it is the endless openness of time, the endless regress of its horizon, that permits an endless rejuvenation of hope, and hope is, and must be, populated by yearnings shaped by the past.  These considerations seem elementary, and my attempts to share my enthusiasm for Jankélévitch have