Hersch, Jeanne (1910-2000)

Jeanne Hersch

Jeanne Hersch

*July 13, 1910 (Geneva, Switzerland)
†June 5, 2000 (Geneva, Switzerland)

Siblings: Joseph Hersch (1925-2012), Mathematician; Irène Chatelain, née Hersch (1917-2011)

Jeanne Hersch was a Swiss philosopher, a translator of philosophical and literary works (especially by Karl Jaspers and Czeslaw Milosz), a lecturer and the first Swiss woman professor in Philosophy at the University of Geneva, between 1956 and 1977. She was born in Geneva in 1910 as the daughter of Demography and Statistics professor at the University of Geneva Liebmann Hersch and Louta Lichtenbaum. In 1928, she took the Maturité reale latine and enrolled in the Faculty of Arts and Literature at the University of Geneva, where she graduated in 1931. In 1929 and between 1932 and 1933, she attended the University of Heidelberg, where she came to know her mentor Karl Jaspers, while in 1933 she spent a semester in Freiburg-im-Brisgau, in order to listen to Heidegger and to experience Nazism. Back in Geneva, she began her career as a teacher at the International School of Geneva, where she taught until 1955. In 1936, she entered the French philosophical circle thanks to Gabriel Marcel, who introduced her to some eminent French thinkers of the time, including Jean Wahl, Gaston Fessard and Paul Ricoeur. She was at the head of UNESCO Division of Philosophy between 1966 and 1968 and Swiss delegate to UNESCO Executive Council between 1970 and 1972. At the end of her mandate, she edited a collection to celebrate the twenty years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, entitled Le droit d’être un homme, which is her most famous work.

Jeanne Hersch’s philosophy is an existential point of view on the experience of freedom, through which she tries to clarify the human condition and to enhance the possibility of being free, both theoretically and practically. Thus, she engaged herself in several practical commitments, especially in politics, given her Social Democratic belief. She received various prestigious awards: the Prix Amiel in 1936; the Prix Adolphe Neumann in 1946; the Prix de la Fondation pour les droits de l’homme in 1973; the Prix Montaigne in 1979; the Prix de la Liberté Max Schmidheiny in 1980; the Prix Max Petitpierre; the Albert Einstein Medal in 1987; the UNESCO Prize for Human Rights Education in 1988; the Karl Jaspers Preis in 1992.

– Piergiacomo Severini

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