Raymond Klibansky (1905-2005).
Pozzo, Riccardo
On 5 August 2005, Raymond Klibansky passed away in Montreal, just a
few weeks before his hundredth birthday--he was born in Paris on 15
October 1905. A true cosmopolitan, Klibansly divided his time among
McGill (whose faculty he had joined in 1946 as the John Frothingam
Professor of Logic and Metaphysics), Oxford, and Wolfenbtittel (he was
fellow of Wolfson College and every summer the guest of the director of
the Herzog August Bibliothek). Together with Ernst Junger and Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Klibansky belonged to the exclusive circle of those great
intellectuals who had the chance of living the twentieth century in its
entirety and in all its forms. Born in Paris but raised in Frankfurt,
Klibansky went first to the quite progressive Odenwald Schule in
Eppenheim; he then studied at Heidelberg under the direction of Karl
Jaspers, who provided him with funding to attend courses of Ferdinand
Tonnies at Kiel and of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf at Berlino. In
1926, Ernst Cassirer invited him to Hamburg to meet Aby Warburg and the
scholars of the Warburg-Bibliotek fur Kulturwissenschaft, especially
Fritz Saxl and Erwin Panofsky, with whom he would bring to completion
forty years later the work on Saturn and Melancholy, which Saxl and
Panofsky had initiated in 1923.
Klibansky was first and foremost a historian of philosophy;
however, he was also a philologist, a disciple of Friedrich Gundolf. The
critical edition of the Liber de sapiente by Charles de Bouelles was his
first publication. It appeared as an appendix to Ernst Cassirer's
monograph Individuum und Kosmos in der Renaissance. He obtained his
doctoral degree at Heidelberg in 1929 and his Habilitation in 1931. At
the end of 1933, with great peril and urgency Klibansky arranged, with
the head of the Warburg family, the banker Max Warburg, and the British
Academic Assistance Council, the salvage of the Warburg library, which
became the Warburg Institute at the University of London. From 1933 to
1939, Klibansky was at Oxford. Together with Herbert J. Paton he edited
the miscellany Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst
Cassirer. In 1938 he became a British citizen. During World War II, he
served first in the Political Intelligence section that was located at
Bletchley Park. He then accompanied the British troops during the
Italian campaign, and he was finally deployed in Germany in the months
that preceded and followed victory. As rumor has it, it was Klibansky
that managed to convince Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris to save
from bombings Cusa, the birthplace of Nicholas of Cusa.
Although Klibansky used to deny it, the rumor seemed not untrue
given the great stress Klibansky had put on the tradition of medieval
Platonism, in primis on authors such as Meister Eckhart and Cusa. His
essay The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition called into question a
vision of medieval philosophy anchored on the presupposed primacy of
Aristotelianism. In 1940 appeared the first volume of the Corpus
Platonicum Medii Aevi, the project that Klibansky had started at the
Warburg Institute, and which ought to have included sections on Platus
latinus, Platus arabus, Platus syrus, and Platus hebraicus. Only parts
of the first two sections saw the light. After moving to McGill in 1946,
Klibansky put into work a number of important initiatives for peace and
justice. Among them were the translations into most languages of
Locke's epistle on tolerance, the rebirth of the Institut
International de Philosophie in 1953 (it had been founded first in Paris
during the Descartes conference of 1937), the series Philosophie et
communaute mondiale, aimed at keeping alive the dialogue between the
Blocks during the Cold War, the Bibliographie internationale de la
philosophie, and the two doxographic works dedicated to
twentieth-century philosophy in its entirety, Contemporary
Philosophy--La philosophie contemporaine and La philosophie en Europe
(together with David Pears). Klibansky's engagement was effective.
One remembers the great passion with which he led a movement in support
of the Czech philosopher Jan Patoeka, who eventually was beaten to death
by the police in Prague in 1977.
An eminent scholar, Klibansky recognized d'emblee the efforts
of scholars who dedicated themselves to the investigation of the
traditions that are at the basis of our identity and of our cultures. He
was especially very encouraging with young scholars.--Riccardo Pozzo,
University of Verona
