Jankelevitch

Posted by Ali Reda | Posted in | Posted on 7/24/2015

Jankelevitch said about the limitations of language: “There are not enough keys on the keyboard of language to be able to describe all the endlessly subtle nuances of thinking and passion. Therefore we have to speak beyond words and induce misty clouds, a twilight zone, a halo around those words where ambivalence simmers and the powers of desire grow.” And then he ponders about the “logic” of music and the music can evade rational discourse and thus be highly ambivalent: “Music uses tones without inner meaning, that way staying perpetually new and accessible. Therefore music is made to be played, not to be spoken about!”. In other words, the lived experience of the moment that escapes our understanding engenders in us a desire to understand what we cannot grasp but only intimate. Jankelevitch uses words to dance around a point without extension, an instant without interval, a tangency without touch. Whether in his analyses of charm, charity (love or forgiveness). Each of these ideas, which are difficult to locate and thus identify, represents "an animating and mobilizing principle". They do not have an essence, are not phenomena, or potential objects of cognition. They move us; they awaken, quicken, and enlighten concrete human life. In other words, they are almost nothing, but they are not nothing. They are in between being and nothingness. Like Plotinus, one of his main influences, Jankelevitch establishes a kind of immanent transcendence in which humans have something in them that is greater than themselves even if they do not know what it is. It is something in them but also something that is radically other than them, which remains irreducible to them .

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