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there are many books that matter, now more than ever, but only a few that change your life. Vladimir Jankélévitch's The Bad Conscience changed mine, not by the sheer power of intellection, though that also matters, but by the haunting music of the writer's thought. Philosophy prides itself on good thinking, which is surely something that can be taught, even a discipline to be practiced, like physical exercise, like yoga. What probably cannot be taught is wisdom, which, if it somehow or other manages to come alive in language, requires music as its indispensable medium. Much of modern philosophy has given up on wisdom.
Jankélévitch was a musician (a gifted pianist) and a connoisseur of music; after the Second World War he ran a radio program of musical selections and interpretations on Radio Toulouse. He wrote a fine-grained, lyrical philosophical book about music (La musique et l'ineffable 1961). His musicality carries over onto every page of his French prose. Like in music, his writing has a recursive quality; throughout his life, he kept returning to his major themes and sub-themes, honing them ever finer, pushing them into deeper realms of insight. Thus The Bad Conscience is, in a sense, an early version or adumbration of his later masterpiece, Forgiveness (Le Pardon, 1967). Reading them together—which I recommend—is like listening to Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of The Goldberg Variations and then listening to his 1981 recording of them (a year before he died), or vice versa. For various idiosyncratic reasons, in this short essay I am happy to stick to the earlier, somewhat rawer, still evolving variant.
Jankélévitch was a follower of Bergson and an indirect and passionate student of Simmel, Plotinus (his MA thesis was on Plotinus), and the Russian émigré maverick philosopher Lev Shestov. In Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, Shestov had a tremendous, fertilizing influence on a group of brilliant young Romanian writers and thinkers, including the poet Benjamin Fondane, and on well-known French intellectuals such as Georges Bataille and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. This is a story, a striking historical episode in the sociology of knowledge, still waiting to be told. Years after Shestov's death, Jankélévitch described himself as "Shestov reincarnated." It's hard to think of a more worthy, or...