Jeanne Hersch, philosopher with a clear voice

“Hello, who’s on the phone?” » The voice is clear, fresh, crystalline. Student ? Assistant? Any young girl, surely. “Mademoiselle, I would like to speak to Madame Jeanne Hersch…” “It’s herself!” » It was in the mid-1990s. The philosopher, born in 1910, was 85 years old at that time. Yet her voice seemed to be discovering the world, not being jaded by anything, just getting ready to live. Maybe it’s just a detail. But that fresh, youthful, clear, crisp timbre, at such an advanced age, could say a lot.

It might suggest that Jeanne Hersch’s acute relevance, despite time, has not lost its liveliness. No doubt her work is less well known than that of women philosophers born at the same time – Hannah Arendt (1906), Simone de Beauvoir (1908), Simone Weil (1909). However, the one who was notably the first woman professor of philosophy at the University of Geneva, and who headed the philosophy department of Unesco in the 1960s, left an intellectual heritage as clear and lively as her voice. It has never ceased to resist evils which, once again, threaten us: resignation, apathy, contempt for others, forgetfulness of the human.

We don’t mess with knowledge and freedom

Born in Geneva, Jeanne Hersch is the daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants. His father, a militant of the Bund, a secular Jewish socialist movement, taught demography and statistics at the university. His mother works at the League of Nations. As a child, she is convinced that everyone goes to university. Hence, perhaps, his side ” teacher “, pedagogue but firm, allergic to any carelessness. With her, we don’t mess with knowledge or with freedom, because they go together and define what is human.

“Freedom is the center of the whole philosophical affair. But you have to be free now. Otherwise, you will never be.”, she said. She began to understand it in Germany, in 1933, at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger’s students give the Nazi salute there while singing the Horst-Wessel-Liedthe anthem of the SA, “where they say the sidewalks are soaked in the blood of Jews”, emphasizes Jeanne Hersch. Previously, she studied philosophy in Heidelberg, with Karl Jaspers, an unfailingly humanist philosopher, her teacher and forever friend. She devotes to him, at 26, her first test, The Philosophical Illusion (Plon, 1936), and translated most of his books into French, notably, in 1948, German Guilt (Die Schuldfragefirst edition in 1946), which played a crucial role in the post-war period.

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