Jeanne Hersch was the author of an important body of work. She was a professor at Geneva University, a translator of philosophical and literary works, a lecturer, and the director of UNESCO’s Philosophy unit from 1966 to 1968. She used to introduce herself as someone who “answers, rather than constructs in an autonomous way”, more like “a presence in my time, rather than the author of an oeuvre”.

To Hersch, the field of philosophy doesn’t correspond to a determined set of topics, but to an attitude. She discovered this, she says, by “listening to Jaspers”: it is his teachings that would lead her, through a labor of profound exploration, to recognize the presence of something inaccessible, inexhaustible and unnamable at the root of all knowledge. Human beings have the capacity to establish a relationship with this something in virtue of that which, in themselves, is also irreducible to the physical world of causality, and therefore represents, in them, a center of freedom. It is in the exercise of thinking that, according to Jaspers, a certain experience of truth and freedom is to be found; such experience is what leads to an elucidation of each human being’s personal existence. Hersch’s contribution is thus inscribed within Philosophy of Existence. Her specific philosophizing, which we can describe as determined by the will to understand, links theoretical research to an ethical-political compromise which has at its nucleus the project of clarifying the human condition.

In Hersch, human condition’s paradoxical nucleus derives from the fact that human beings “constitute an exception in the world they live in”. This exceptionality derives from their condition as possibly free beings: to live humanly is to actualize this possibility, embodying it through action. Such action is what Hersch says consists of “giving shape to matter”. Consequently, freedom doesn’t consist of autonomy with respect to the material space which we belong to, but rather of the ability to modify matter while still paying attention to our surroundings.

Jeanne Hersch’s most unique trait is her commitment that her thought be set at the edge towards action. Rigid systematizations and definitive answers cannot fit in this space that is set at the limit. The way Hersch occupies this limiting space shows how her effort for clarification points towards relatively specific proposals in very diverse fields: from ontology to politics, via aesthetics and the history of thought.