Jaspers, Karl
JASPERS, KARL (1883–1969), was one of the most influential German thinkers of the twentieth century and a founder of modern existential philosophy. Born in Oldenburg, Jaspers studied law and medicine. After writing several works on psychopathology, he turned to philosophy, and in 1920 he became a professor at Heidelberg. He was dismissed from that position by Nazi authorities in 1937; after 1948 he taught at Basel, where he died.
For Jaspers, philosophizing is an effort to understand and to express the authentic experience of realities that can never be conceptually explained and are not objectifiable; therefore it cannot pretend to be knowledge in the same sense as scientific knowledge. Jaspers accepts the Augustinian maxim "Deum et animam scire cupio" (I want to know God and the soul), but neither God nor the soul are possible positive objects of metaphysical speculation. Their place is taken respectively by "the all-encompassing" (das Allumgreifende), or transcendence, and existence. The latter, even though it reveals itself in one's empirical being (Dasein), is not a psychological subject, not an empirically accessible reality, and the former is not God in the sense of any mythological tradition. Still, both realities are known not only negatively, not only as a realm of the unknown beyond knowledge, but they are inseparably linked with each other: The transcendence is there only for existence; it opens itself to one insofar as one is able radically to experience one's freedom. The presence of the transcendence cannot be described in metaphysical or scientific language; in other words, one does not hear God's voice in the empirical word. It speaks to humans through ciphers they can meet in all forms of being: in nature, in history, in art, in mythology. Yet ciphers are untranslatable. Therefore, in vain does one try to grasp God in metaphysical doctrines or in the dogmas of an institutionalized religion. The language of mythology, too, is a way that humankind has tried to commune with the transcendence, but this language is sui generis, it cannot be converted into a philosophical system. Therefore, Jaspers totally opposed Bultmann's project of "demythologization," which, he argued, implied that myths are theories in disguise, that they could be translated into a profane tongue so that a theologian could salvage elements that are acceptable to scientifically trained "modern man" and discard the "superstitious" rest.
Myths, according to Jaspers, are the means by which people gain access to ultimate reality, and although they have no empirical reference, they are an indispensable part of culture. All attempts of positive theology to reach God in metaphysical categories are useless; so are efforts to express the transcendence in the dogmatic formulas of one or another confession. But a personal existence, in an effort of self-illumination, is able to meet the transcendence as a pendant of its own reality. Existence is not a substance within the empirical word and it cannot survive death; it nevertheless reaches eternity as moments of timelessness within empirical time. Therefore, existence cannot avoid the ultimate defeat; one's death cannot be given a meaning. Still, the radical awareness of one's own finitude is not necessarily a reason for discouragement: In the very acceptance of inevitable defeat one finds the way to being. While existence and the transcendence become real only in an encounter which is expressible in ciphers, and not in any scientific or theological knowledge, this encounter does not make one's communication with other people or one's living participation in historical processes unimportant. One can never isolate one's self entirely from empirical realities, from history, and from one's fellow human beings; quite the contrary, it is only from within, not by a kind of mystical detachment, that people can understand their relationships with infinity; and yet, this understanding can never take the form of "objective" knowledge.
Jaspers tried, in his historical studies, positively to assimilate the entire history of European philosophy which, from various angles, supported his intuition. Both those who stressed the radical irreducibility of personal existence to "objective" reality (Augustine, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche) and those who attempted, however awkwardly, to grasp unconditional being conceptually (Plotinus, Nicholas of Cusa, Bruno, Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel) represented in his view the human effort to cope with the eternal tension between one's life among things and one's desire to reach the ultimate.
In interpreting religious phenomena Jaspers rejected all positivist or scientific attempts to reduce them to needs that might have an anthropological, social, or psychological explanation. On the other hand, he refused to believe that a rational theological or metaphysical enquiry might elucidate them. Both institutionalized Christianity and the tradition of the Enlightenment were unable, in his view, to express properly the relationship between existence and transcendence.
Bibliography
Works by Jaspers
Allgemeine Psychopathologie. Berlin, 1913. Translated by J. Hoenig and Marian W. Hamilton as General Psychopathology (Chicago, 1963).
Die geistige Situation der Zeit. Berlin, 1931. Translated by Eden Paul and Cedar Paul as Man in the Modern Age (London, 1933).
Philosophie. 3 vols. Berlin, 1932. Translated by E. B. Ashton as Philosophy (Chicago, 1969).
Vernunft und Existenz. Groningen, 1935. Translated by William Earle as Reason and Existenz (New York, 1955).
Der philosophische Glaube. Zurich, 1948. Translated by Ralph Manheim as The Perennial Scope of Philosophy (New York, 1949).
Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte. Zurich, 1949. Translated by Michael Bullock as The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven, 1953).
Die Frage der Entmythologisierung. Written with Rudolf Bultmann. Munich, 1954. Translated as Myth and Christianity (New York, 1958).
Works About Jaspers
Bollnow, O. F. Existenzphilosophie und Pädagogik. Stuttgart, 1959.
Piper, Klaus, ed. Offener Horizont: Festschrift für Karl Jaspers. Munich, 1953.
Saner, Hans. Karl Jaspers in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1970.
Saner, Hans, ed. Karl Jaspers in der Diskussion. Munich, 1973.
Schilpp, Paul A., ed. The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers. New York, 1957.
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