Background
Jankélévftch, Vladmir was born in 1903 in Bourges, France.
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Vladmir Jankélévftch
Edit ProfileMoral philosopher Existentialist
Education
Lycée Louis.]e.Qran(j and École Normale Supérieure. Doctorate in 1933.
Career
Taught at the French Institute in Prague and at various lycées. 1936, tecturing posts at the University of Toulouse, and 1937, University of Lille. Dismissed by the vichy Government in 1940, but returned to academic life in 1945 as Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Paris.
Views
of science, which is the basis for prediction; and that of radical contingency, in which events are regarded as unique and related only by the free flow of time. The unique events of this third area are sometimes regarded as having sufficient similarity to the events studied by science to be reducible to them. According to Jankelevitch people have unity of being only at the preconscious stage of innocence. In becoming aware of any or all of the three spheres of philosophy, a gap opens up between themselves and either the world or themselves as objects of knowledge. This gap of awareness is the origin of pain and evil, which can be dealt with in several ways. One partial remedy is to be found by ignoring the radical contingency of events, and treating the uniqueness of one’s own predicament as a particular example of a general truth: in other words, by reducing radical to relative contingency. Another partial solution is by the use of irony, which detaches us from our unique situations, allows us to view events as part of an ongoing temporal process, and enlists other people as our accomplices in irony. But the most therapeutic remedy for pain and evil is to regard them as radically contingent occurrences at a particular moment in time, which do not have to prevent us from continuing to live our unique lives. On Jankelevitch’s view there is a two-tier hierarchy of moral virtues. In the upper tier are to be placed the virtues of courage, love, charity and humility, which require initiative and have their outcome in concrete and thus radically contingent situations. In the lower tier are virtues such as justice, loyalty and friendship, which require calculation, abstraction and continuity, and are thus to be found in the moral equivalent of the area of synthetic scientific truths. It is the person who is virtuous, not the action. Ethics is not reducible to a set of rules, and is to be located primarily in the area of radical contingency.
