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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Vladimir JankéLéVitch, who teaches philosophy at the Sorbonne, is one of the most highly individual philosophical writers in France today. He has been publishing books for some quarter of a century on both philosophy and music, of which the most recent, entitled La Rhapsodie: Verve et improvisation musicale, unites his two specialities. It is with his philosophical work that I want to deal here.
page 315 note 1 L'odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling, Alcan, 1932.
page 316 note 1 Arthaud, 1949.
page 316 note 2 Alcan, 1933.
page 318 note 1 L'ironie ou la bonne conscience, 1935.
page 320 note 1 Which is the “philosophy of ‘almost,’” as he explains on page 210 of Philosophie première: “The Instant (is) between Nothing and Being.... According as we elect to fix our ideas in relation to one or the other we shall call the instant either Almost-nothing or Almost-being... but, strictly speaking, the instant is neither.”
page 321 note 1 The Quod, it should be explained, pertains to the instant, the Quid to the interval. The quid asks what a thing is (was, quid), when it is in existence. The quod concerns itself with the fact that (dass, quod) something must come into being as the content of the instant. Jean Wahl (Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, Jan.-Jun. 1955, p. 168) compares Jankélévitch's quod and quid with Bradley's that and what. I think the quod is best conceived in relation to the immediate future, the next instant, when anything may happen, at least theoretically. Occurrence is here divorced from the idea of necessity and seen in its pure unwarrantedness. It is not usually profitable to consider this aspect of reality, since we are at almost all levels of human activity concerned with prediction, gaining control, justification, explanation or interpretation. But the stubborn quodditative ground of reality manifests itself in the fact that we can foreknow only schematically, never down to the last detail.
page 322 note 1 The moral question here discussed is discussed too in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1954–55, in articles by E. Gellner and R. M. Hare, and is taken up again by Gellner in Analysis for April, 1956.
page 323 note 1 The following appears to me a Rylean idea transposed into Jankélévitch's language and mould of thought: “God raises himself continually from nothing and creates by creating, somewhat as the human creature, according to Aristotle, becomes a blacksmith by shoeing horses and a zitherist by playing the zither; what would have to be fore-known in order to do is learnt by actually doing” (Philosophie première, p. 184).
page 324 note 1 This is somewhat reminiscent of F. Alquié's exposition of the role of reason in the last section of his Le Désir d'eternité entitled “La sagesse de Descartes.”
