The Bad Conscience

197 Pages·2015·16.805 MB·English

by  Vladimir Jankélévitch

Vladimir Jankelevitch
The Bad
Conscience
Translated by Andrew Kelley
The University of Chicago Press / Chicago and London
Vladimir Jankelevitch (1903-85) held the Chair in Moral Philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1951 to
1978. He is the author of more than twenty books on philosophy and music, including le Pardon, or
Forgiveness, also published in English-language translation by the University of Chicago Press.
Andrew Kelley is associate professor of philosophy at Bradley University.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2015 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2015.
Printed in the United States of America
La mauvaise conscience, © Editions Montaigne, 1966 for the first Edition, © Flammarion, 1998
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 12345
ISBN-13:978-0-226-00953-7 (cloth)
Cet ouvrage a beneficie du soutien des Programmes d'aide a la publication de I'lnstitut fran^ais.
This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut
Fran^ais.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jankelevitch, Vladimir, author.
[Mauvaise conscience. English)
The bad conscience / Vladimir Jankelevitch ; translated by Andrew Kelley.
pages cm
Includes index.
"Although the original version of Vladimir Jankelevitch's book La mauvaise conscience appeared
in 1933, and a second, significantly expanded version appeared in 1951, the present translation
corresponds to the 1966 version of the book as it is found in the anthology Vladimir Jankelevitch,
philosophic morale."—Translator's introduction.
ISBN 978-0-226-00953-7 (cloth : alkaline paper)
1. Conscience. I. Kelley, Andrew, 1965- translator. 11. Title.
B)H7M3'3 2015
i7i'.6—dc23
2014013917
® This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Translator's Introduction
Chapter 1
The Semi-Conscience
Chapter 2
Irreversibility
Chapter 3
The Pacified Conscience
Postscript
On Joy
Index
Translator's Introduction
The Bad Conscience \La mauvaise conscience| by Vladi­
mir Jankelevitch (1903-85) was first published in 1933 after having been
submitted as the second, or shorter, of the two dissertations required for a
French doctorate during that era. And even though Jankelevitch had already
published important journal articles, as well as a monograph on Henri Berg-
son endorsed by Bergson himself, The Bad Conscience represents Jankele-
vitch's first attempt at a book-length exposition of his "own" philosophy. This
book would end up being, like many of his other writings, a work in prog­
ress.1 In 1951, at the time of being awarded a chair at the Sorbonne, he pub­
lished a revised edition of The Bad Conscience. This version included several
sections—parts 3 and 4 of chapter 2, concerning the irrevocable, the irrevers­
ible, and the inconsolable, as well as the postscript about joy—that, for all
intents and purposes, were completely new. In the third edition, from 1966,
he made fewer additions than in 1951, but ones that are nevertheless still im­
portant. Because of his Jewish heritage, Jankelevitch was forced to spend the
war years hiding from the Nazis. The effects on him of the war and especially
of the Shoah are apparent in the revisions that he makes to the 1951 and 1966
editions of the book. While most of these revisions entail additions of text
to the original 1933 version, it is important to recognize that there are some
significant deletions, too: for example, in 1951 and 1966 Jankelevitch edits
out a reference to Martin Heidegger, a philosopher of immense importance,
but one who had had ties to the Nazi regime. It should also be noted that in
1. In this regard, the noted French philosopher Alexis Philonenko writes about Jankelevitch:
"Jankelevitch acquires the bad habit of supplementing a book to the point of making a new
one. No work, with perhaps the exception of Philosophic premiere [First Philosophy| escapes
this law." Alexis Philonenko, lankelevitch: Un systeme de lethique concrete (Paris: Editions du
Sandre, 2012), p. 57.
viii Translator's Introduction
1966, when Jankelevitch was revising The Bad Conscience for a third time,
and at a time when the French government was debating issues of amnesty
and pardon for Germany and the Germans, Jankelevitch was also working on
his book Forgiveness, which would be published a year later. Beginning with
the original version of The Bad Conscience, there is a short, but significant,
discussion of forgiveness. Even though the topic of forgiveness would ac­
quire renewed importance in the years following the war, it is an issue with
which Jankelevitch had been concerned throughout his philosophical career
and one that is closely tied to the subject of the bad conscience.
After World War 1, the focus of French philosophy slowly began to move
away from both Bergsonism and reflexive philosophy —a French version
of neo-Kantianism, represented in that era by the figure of Leon Brunsch-
vicg, one of Jankelevitch's dissertation advisers—and toward German phe­
nomenology, as well as toward the thought of rediscovered historical figures
such as Hegel and Kierkegaard. But Jankelevitch, although aware of these
thinkers, maintained his interest in Bergson and vitalist philosophy in gen­
eral. In the late 1920s, when Jankelevitch began conceiving the project that
would become The Bad Conscience, Bergson had not yet published his own
statement on ethics, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, which first
appeared in 1932. But even though Jankelevitch had published one of the
earliest reviews of Bergson's Two Sources and while he makes references to
Bergson's book in The Bad Conscience, it would be inaccurate to view The
Bad Conscience simply as a response to Bergson's Two Sources. To be sure,
the vitalist philosophies of Bergson and Simmel serve as a foundation upon
which Jankelevitch builds his own view. But in the years leading up to the
writing and publication of his two dissertations, Jankelevitch held a posi­
tion at the French Institute in Prague, and the subjects of the courses that
he was giving at the time, such as mysticism, the virtues, the foundations of
morality, and Fenelon, all exerted a strong influence on his thought.
That this first work of Jankelevitch's "own" philosophy bears the title of
The Bad Conscience is noteworthy for several reasons. The topic of "con­
science" occupied an important place in early twentieth-century debates
within French philosophy. Bergson's inaugural work, near the turn of the
century, was entitled Essai sur les donnees immediate de la conscience, a
work that carried the much different title of Time and Free Will when it
was published in an English translation. Bergson continued to devote signifi­
cant attention to the topic of "conscience" in subsequent articles and book
chapters. Moreover, Leon Brunschvicg, a towering figure in early twentieth-
Translator's Introduction ix
century French philosophy, had been giving a course on the conscience at
the Ecole Normale Superieure since at least 1920,2 and went on to publish, in
1926, a two-volume work that carried the title The Progress of the Conscience
in Western Philosophy.3 (ankelevitch's own primary, or long, doctoral disser­
tation was entitled The Odyssey of the Conscience in Schelling's Late Work.
And (ankelevitch's book Irony, first published in 1936, would, for its 1950
republication, bear the title Irony; or, The Good Conscience. So, it is quite
understandable why Jankelevitch begins his first statement of his "own" phi­
losophy with a discussion of "conscience!1
Unlike with thinkers such as Plato, Schelling, Russell, Wittgenstein, et­
cetera, who are said—whether accurately or inaccurately—to embrace very
different philosophies at different stages of their lives, Jankelevitch's thought
grows and deepens over the course of his career, and the themes and topics
that appear in The Bad Conscience are still very much a part of his later writ­
ings. Jankelevitch often cited a passage from Bergson's essay "Philosophical
Intuition" in which Bergson claims, concerning the event of an intuition,
that "in this point is something simple, infinitely simple, so extraordinarily
simple that the philosopher has never succeeded in saying it. And this is why
he has spoken all of his life."4 Along these same lines, toward the end of his
career, Jankelevitch, in a letter to his friend Louis Beauduc, explains that the
large number of theses that he is supervising affords him little time to write
and then goes on to concede, as concerns his own writing, that at this point
in his life "the best that one can do is to continue one's furrow in the same
direction and to remain faithful to oneself."5 And the fact that Jankelevitch
returns to The Bad Conscience twice in order to add more material shows
that the book and its themes are still very central to Jankelevitch toward the
end of his career.
It goes without saying that the issue of the conscience lies at the heart
2. See Alan Schrift, Twentieth Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers (New
York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), p. 11.
3. Leon Brunschvicg, Le progres de la conscience dans la philosophic occidentale (Paris:
Alcan, 1926).
4. Henri Bergson, "Philosophical Intuition," Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics,
trans, by Mabelle Andison (New York: Dover Books, 2010), pp. 88-89, and "L'intuition philoso-
phique" dans La pensee et le mouvant, 2?ieme edition (Paris: PUF, 1962), p. 119. See also Vladi­
mir Jankelevitch, Philosophic premiere (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1954), pp. 226-27.
5. Vladimir Jankelevitch, line vie en toutes lettres, ed. by Fran^oise Schwab (Paris: Liana Levi,
1995), p. 365. (The letter is dated January 2,1970.)
x Translator's Introduction
of The Bad Conscience. But unlike in English or German, where there is an
explicit distinction between "consciousness" [Bewufetseinj and "conscience"
\Gewissen\, the French word "conscience" can mean either "consciousness" or
"conscience." This ambiguity in the sense of the word "conscience" underlies
much of [ankelevitch's analysis in the book and will eventually allow him
to connect ethics to metaphysics and epistemology. For Jankelevitch, "con­
science" cannot be understood as being the equivalent of the thinking sub­
ject, that is, the Cartesian "cogito" that had been so dear to the French idealist
and spiritualist philosophies up to that point. Neither can "conscience" be
equated merely with some kind of basic biological or neurological process.
Instead, "conscience" should be understood in terms of the various types
of awareness that the concrete person "there in the world" has. In an early
letter to his friend Louis Beauduc, jankelevitch remarks that Leon Brunsch-
vicg wanted to see jankelevitch write a supplementary dissertation in which
Jankelevitch "expresses his own notion of life."6 So, following in the vitalist
steps of Bergson and the German philosopher Georg Simmel (1858-1918),
Jankelevitch attempts to begin his analysis of the "conscience" from the im­
mediate experience—the life—that the concrete human being has. This is
why the concrete I |/e Moi\ becomes the starting point.7 But this I is not
exactly the same as the conscious Self |/e So/], which is the 1 that has become
an object of reflection for itself. For Jankelevitch, the hallmark of such a
conscious self is the splitting-in-two [dedoublement] of the I, which is differ­
ent than a thinking subject that has been doubled [double]. In other words,
the I is a mystery insofar as in reflexive consciousness it becomes two-in-
one, wherein each of the halves of this two-in-one structure is not simply
a mirror image of the other. The two halves are, contradictorily and simul­
taneously, same and other. But this distance, however slight it may be, and
which is represented by the self-as-subject looking on at the self-as-object,
is the hallmark of reflexive consciousness. This is the type of consciousness
or knowledge in which there is a subject that knows its object. When a per­
son attempts to have reflective or discursive knowledge of herself, she looks
at herself by turning herself into an object of thought. As a result, there is
always something that transcends the object of knowledge, namely, the sub­
ject that knows its object while it is knowing. Put in another way, the subject
6. |ankelevitch, Une vie en toutes lettres, p. 159. (The letter is dated July 7,1928.)
7. Vladimir Jankelevitch, Le serieux de /'intention, vol. 1 of the Traile des vertus (Paris: Flam-
marion/Poche, 1972), p. 145.
Translator's Introduction xi
that knows, in its activity of knowing, will always be outside of or beyond the
subject as known; there will always be a gap between the subject-as-known
and the "same" subject that is trying to know itself as an object.
Jankelevitch, however, acknowledges another mode of "knowing" than
this splitting-in-two of the I that occurs in reflexive or discursive knowl­
edge: intuition. With this notion that he acquires from Bergson and Simmel,
Jankelevitch admits a type of "awareness" that involves the "entirety of the
soul"—to use a phrase that he borrows from Bergson—one in which the I
becomes a unified, organic whole again, albeit for the lightning-flash of an
instant. Such intuitive instants arise in moments of true humility, heroism,
or self-sacrifice, or when love makes the subject-object structure of discur­
sive knowledge collapse, that is, when the lover becomes one with the be­
loved.
Jankelevitch's discussion of consciousness, of the I, and of the Self is not
simply an esoteric musing about epistemological or metaphysical psychol­
ogy. There are also profound moral implications associated with his analyses.
Jankelevitch is not asking us to abandon discursive knowledge. His point is
to show that there is more to knowing than discursive knowledge and that
there is more to the person than what we become aware of in discursive
knowledge. Much of the difficulty here stems from a conception of time that
we take for granted, one which, in turn, is linked to a problematic conception
of the person and her mental states. Following Bergson again, Jankelevitch
stresses that we have an inaccurate conception of time when we understand
time merely in terms of a point, known as the "present," that moves along a
line much in the way that a train advances down the tracks. In such a concep­
tion, past and future are simply the symmetrical halves that are separated
by the moving point of the present. For Jankelevitch, as for Bergson, we can
and do discursively or reflexively cognize the past in terms of a line, but we
can do so only retroactively, and, as such, we are able to look for causal and
logical connections between the various "moments" of the past. The future,
on the other hand, is wholly open, contingent, and without structure. But
we have come to conceive of it as symmetrical to the past to the extent that
we consider it in the future anterior, meaning, insofar as we imagine the
future on the model of something that will-have-happened, in the same way
as a play, novel, or movie unfolds. There is also a problematic notion of the
human person that is closely tied to this conception of temporality. For Jan­
kelevitch, again following Bergson, the person is an evolving organic whole.
He is not, as in some models, a neutral, independent "place holder"—such as
xii Translator's Introduction
the soul or even the body—that moves along a fixed timeline, acquiring and
losing experiences, feelings, and habits over the course of one's life, in the
same manner that one acquires and discards pieces of clothing. Instead, each
new experience, feeling, sentiment, etcetera, colors and affects the whole of
the person much like the addition of a spice to a soup affects the whole soup;
later, it is not possible to go back, isolate, and then remove the spice.
According to Jankelevitch, such misconceptions about time and the fun­
damental nature of the person are linked to the very structure of reflexive or
discursive knowledge. Reflexive knowledge, by its very nature, understands
or cognizes only by objectifying or reifying what it observes. This is why the
self that is known is related to the I but is not exactly the same as the I. With
reflexive knowledge, the 1, which is an evolving, organic whole, is seen as an
object that occupies a specific point on the timeline. Accordingly, we have
formed the habit of objectifying and then isolating complex mental phe­
nomena into simple, reified, atomic units. So, for example, phenomena such
as pain and pleasure have come to be understood on the model of simple,
individual units or events, whereas, according to Jankelevitch, they are actu­
ally much more complex, being closely tied into the organic unities that we,
as I's, truly are. The implications for ethics, at least in Jankelevitch's eyes, are
quite serious. First, Jankelevitch stresses that as soon as we begin seeing
pleasure in this manner, the reflexive consciousness of pleasure necessarily
involves an element of pain. From the moment that we, as subjects, stand
back from the pleasure and isolate it or objectify it as a "thing" at a particular
time, we have then in a manner lost it, and we are no longer wholly one with
it. In other words, as soon as we stand back from the pleasure and know it as
"pleasure" the direct experience of the pleasure itself has gone; it has become
something in the past. So, what is left is either to feel pleasure at having had
this pleasure—in the manner in which one reminisces about one's awards
and trophies from the past—which is different from directly experiencing
the pleasure, or to find new pleasures or supposedly new iterations of the
"former" pleasure. This is why Jankelevitch claims that consciousness of
pleasure always involves an element of pain or anxiety, however subtle it
may be. It is also for this reason that Jankelevitch, echoing La Rochefoucauld
or even some of Kant's worries, can make the connection between reflexive
consciousness and egoism. Because of this gap between the thinking subject
and its object—even when the object of thought is supposed to be oneself—
it is still always an "1" that is concerned with its object, and so, an element
of T-ness or egoism necessarily creeps into all reflexive knowledge. Hence,
Translator's Introduction xiii
on account of the intention behind the action, Jankelevitch sees little differ­
ence between the thoughts "I am trying to become powerful at all costs" and
"I am trying to be humble." On his view, the motive literally amounts to the
same: "I desire x," and for him, this is egoism plain and simple. This is why
Jankelevitch expresses concerns about so-called virtues when they are "con­
scious" of themselves. An intentional humility, an intentional courage, or an
intentional charity, moments in which a person knows herself as humble or
courageous, are no longer pure humility or pure courage because the per­
son is—literally—concerned with or about herself, how she is, and how she
looks; all of these entail an element of self-interestedness. Finally, according
to Jankelevitch, when systems of thought can no longer see the human per­
son as an organic whole, but rather merely as the sum of individual mental
or moral parts, we obtain ethical systems that tend to reduce morality to a
type of economic transaction. Hence, we have Jankelevitch's criticisms of
the notion of "merit" in much of The Bad Conscience. If pains or moral mis­
deeds, as well as pleasures and moral virtues, are capable of being isolated
and, thus, separated off from who a person is essentially, then it is very easy
to see how modern systems of ethics can attempt to make comparisons be­
tween everyone's pains, pleasures, vices, and virtues. If, for example, a per­
son makes false public accusations against her neighbor, ones that cause
mental anguish and a financial loss for the neighbor, then according to mod­
ern ethical views it becomes possible to calculate the specific amount of
harm done so as to require the wrongdoer to make up for the harm done
with repayments in the form of service, pain, or money. Morality has thus
become something akin to a business dealing.
In a letter to Louis Beauduc from 1929, Jankelevitch provides an excel­
lent summary not only of the inspiration for his ethical viewpoint but also of
some of the main ideas that appear in The Bad Conscience. He writes:
In several days 1 will present to Brunschvicg the subject of my small thesis, which
is, as you know: Remorse. I will try to connect this idea to the idea of irreversibility,
which seems to me more and more to be at the root of pain in general— 1 believe
that the very essence of morality resides in the fundamental impossibility of buying
back \rachat\. This conception alone is truly respectful of the spiritual dignity and of
the freedom of the person. Also, it alone grounds the idea of a radical transfigura­
tion, of an intimate purification of the conscience The morality of repenting, on
the contrary, is injurious to our freedom. It destroys the idea of gracious virtue, in
the proper sense of the word. I believe that with this point of view one can succeed