It has been 40 years since the death of one of France’s most important intellectuals—one whose name you’ve probably never heard: Vladimir Jankélévitch, Given the occupational hazards Jankélévitch faced as both a French Jew and a resistance fighter during the Nazi occupation of France, it is a stroke of luck that you are hearing his name now. Yet Jankélévitch survived those dark years to write on a dizzying array of subjects, ranging from death to music, in a dazzling—and, at times, confounding—style.
His ethical reflections—perhaps best characterized by his insistence that “morality is neither inscribed in tables nor prescribed in commandments”—are especially striking, shaped as they were by personal experience. The child of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, Jankélévitch graduated in 1926 from the École normale supérieure, France’s most prestigious university. After a brilliant start as an academic philosopher, Jankélévitch was wounded during the battle for France.
Even greater than the physical wound, though, was the emotional one wrought by anti-Semitism. An accomplished pianist, Jankélévitch could never forgive a country that gave the world a Schubert but also the Shoah. As his friend Jacques Madaule remarked, Jankélévitch’s rupture with German culture occurred “not just because he was a Jew, but because he was a human being.”
After he joined the Resistance, Jankélévitch’s underground activities ranged from teaching clandestine courses on philosophy to the creation and distribution of Resistance tracts and journals. Though he rejoiced at the liberation of France in 1944, Jankélévitch could never free himself from the significance of what had occurred during the war. He felt “the necessity to prolong in myself the sufferings from which I had been saved.”
That suffering left its mark on his massive Traité des vertus, or Treatise on Virtues, which he largely wrote during his years of underground activity. The book runs some 1,500 pages, a daunting length compounded by its unsystematic arrangement. And yet, I cannot think of a more vital activity today than to engage deeply with the book’s passages on fidelity.
We assume that most virtues, like tolerance and temperance, courage and compassion, do not come with fine print—we assume that their value is intrinsic. And though moral philosophers since Aristotle have debated the finer points of these ideas, there is general consensus that goodness is good, justice is just, and virtues are vital. As Alasdair MacIntyre concludes in his aptly titled book After Virtue, “the exercise of the virtues is itself a crucial component of the good life for man.”
Yet fidelity—the synonym for loyalty that moral philosophers tend to use—is unlike most virtues. Without it, the will to lead a good life is a will-o’-the-wisp, yet it lacks the intrinsic value of the other virtues. Although compassion—namely, our openness to the suffering of others—is inherently good, the goodness of loyalty depends on the goodness of its object. As Jankélévitch observes, its praiseworthiness hinges on how we answer the question, “Faithful to what?” How foolish to boast of my fidelity to, say, a brand of orange juice. Apart from the manufacturer, no one would praise me for this attachment. But if I insist on my faithfulness to justice, in principle, such fidelity would earn universal praise.
Elaborating on this distinction, Jankélévitch observes that “no one calls resentment a virtue, though it’s a kind of faithfulness—to hatreds and angers. To have a good memory for the affronts one has suffered is bad fidelity. No one call pettiness a virtue either, though it, too, is a kind of fidelity—to little things.” No less harmful is fidelity to an individual whose whims might threaten the other virtues to which we must remain faithful. This explains, I believe, Jankélévitch’s assertion that fidelity is the “virtue of Sameness”—it is a guarantee that persists without pause through time and across space.
Of course, such a virtue was vital to those engaged in resistance activity in occupied France. The loyalty these women and men had for one another, essential to the success of their work, was rooted in the values of 1789 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. In this fashion, they were also faithful to posterity—to how their deeds would be remembered. Jankélévitch argues that true fidelity—or what he calls desperate fidelity—is essential for the otherwise “unequal struggle between the irreversible tide of oblivion that eventually engulfs all things, and the desperate but intermittent protests of memory.”
Though not as eloquent as philosophers, especially if they are French, historians share this fidelity to the past. Memory is as frail as the past and cannot save it alone. Instead, the patient and painstaking work of documentation and verification corrects what we think we remember and cautions those who ignore or scorn the past. How else can we hold on to what is best in us and guard against what is worst? Of course, in the age of social platforms and AI, this fidelity to the past verges on the quixotic. Yet can we afford to abandon it?
Ultimately, the past needs us as much as we need the past. So valuable and yet so vulnerable, the past, Jankélévitch concludes, “needs our compassion and gratitude, for it cannot stand up for itself.” To allow others to reject or rewrite the past—the past as it truly was and must remain—we necessarily betray the future. Jankélévitch understood that such awareness is exhausting, but he also knew it was essential.
