Subjectivity and Evil. About the "Essai sur le mal" by Jean Nabert

Among the French philosophers of this century, Jean Nabert is not the one that has benefited or that is benefiting today of the most striking fortune. The work by this philosopher would seem to be marked by the same character both discreet and rigorous through which his contemporaries and friends have remembered him and have described his person. Nevertheless, the three works published when he was alive that is “L’expérience intérieure de la liberté” (1924), “Éléments pour une éthique” (1943), “L’Essai sur le mal” (1955), the collection of unpublished texts that appeared after his death under the title “Le désir de Dieu” (1966) and a great number of essays and articles today collected in a single work, have never stopped to be present more or less explicitly in the French philosophy. In fact, Nabert is one of the masters that we meet along the path made by Paul Ricœur and currently he is at the centre of studies that aim at examining the influence of his thought in the philosophy by Lévinas and by Ricœur himself. And if it’s true that the fame of Nabert both in this nation and abroad never reached the one that Jean-Paul Sartre had, of Maurice Merleau-Ponty or of other French philosophers of the 20th century, on the other hand, it is also true that he has never been totally outside the philosophic scenery. Getting to the context of this presentation focused on the topic of evil, we will statefirst of all that in what we can define without any doubt as his most dramatic work, the “Essai sur le mal”, Nabert not only expresses “his” thesis on evil, but through such a presentation, healso wants to re-think subjectivity, making it by starting from the experiences, which represent or are aimed at its destruction. Most of all, he aims at re-thinking that subjectivity capable of the most atrocious evil, the one of man against another man, as he had witnessed experiencing both World Wars.This hypothesis on subjectivity and on finitude where Nabert roots the most original evil, represents still nowadays – in a time torn by wars – the passionate challenge of a philosophy that has human beings and their wounds close at its heart.