Rehabilitating Karl Jaspers

One of my books lost with my arrest was one of Karl Jaspers. I did not finish it, as I did not finish many books the last 10 - 15 years before my arrest. It was not because I found him a dull or irrelevant writer. My non-reading seems to me now a symptom of my depression; an unwillingness to fight the nihilism created by my depression. This I regret even more while reading Deborah Casewell's Forgotten existentialist, an effort at reviving Jaspers' philosophy.

In fact, will say these paragraphs are exactly what I needed to read in 2009, and I hope you pay attention to them.

Jaspers’s existential philosophy is open to religious philosophy, but his stress on the unknowability of transcendence and the delay in the cipher abstracts the divine in his thought. Yet when we think of existentialist philosophy, aside from Kierkegaard, it is not something we think as directed towards the divine. It does, however, contain many other typical aspects of existentialist thought: a stress on anxiety, the awareness of death, the importance of the individual choice, and the freedom to make it. I would say that this is one of the many reasons why we should still read Jaspers today. Jaspers gives responsibility and an end to that freedom, and provides a way out of despair and anxiety while not sacrificing the restlessness in existence.

Jaspers’s distancing from a more popular idea of existentialism has much to do with the aims and ends of his philosophy of existence. In the three-volume Philosophie, the aim is to explore how to exist in the world philosophically. Rather than an act of reasoning, philosophy is an activity: it is a relationship towards the world. The three volumes of Philosophie can be seen as instruction manuals. They start from the position of the self, which finds itself immediately within a world, and from there one has to find out how to exist, rather than what existence is. The three volumes of his Philosophie each deal with different aspects of human existence and engagement in the world: orientation, existence, and metaphysical transcendence, as well as forms of knowledge associated with those aspects (objective knowledge, subjective self-reflection, and symbolic interpretation of the metaphysical). These stages of existence are continuously bound together with one another – we find ourselves in the world, we question ourselves and find we cannot ground or justify ourselves, and we look beyond ourselves to find the truth of existence.

Following on from his earlier psychological explorations, the focus in his philosophy of existence is on the individual and our relationship to the world around us. The individual is within the world but not at one with the world. However, as the individual is situated in the world, we cannot entirely separate ourselves from the world. We are torn between our individuality and the wholeness that the world seems to offer. Certain situations remind us of this more than others. As before, these are boundary or limit situations, here demarcated as guilt, suffering or death. We can never avoid these situations: life is never free from suffering or feelings of guilt, and we cannot escape death. In them we come up against the antinomy between ourselves and the world. We may feel we are subjects who have an infinite capacity, who feel boundless but, when hemmed in by guilt, suffering and death, we come up decisively against the finite reality of our existence.

In these situations, we have to act. We cannot stagnate or just remain in them, we have to either transcend these situations or not. We can cement ourselves further in ‘Dasein’ (mere existence) or transcend into ‘Existenz’. That movement of transcendence, of making a decision about ourselves, then brings about a new relationship to the world in which we have found ourselves.

That movement, which then becomes a continuous process, is what it means to exist philosophically. We have to decide something about ourselves, settle something for ourselves, and do so without any certainty or outside affirmation, or objective knowledge. To be in Existenz is to exist authentically. I either allow the course of things to ‘decide about me – vanishing as myself, since there is no real decision when everything just happens – or I deal with being originally, as myself, with the feeling that there must be a decision,’ wrote Jaspers. Grenzsituationen or limit situations offer us the opportunity to become ourselves, as when we enter them with open eyes and decide for ourselves in relation to them, then we ‘live philosophically as Existenz’.

I stagnated. I settled nothing. Not until I destroyed my life and had to face up to the fact that I was still among the living and had to figure how to live in a way differently than what I had.  One more quote:

Jaspers’s existential philosophy is open to religious philosophy, but his stress on the unknowability of transcendence and the delay in the cipher abstracts the divine in his thought. Yet when we think of existentialist philosophy, aside from Kierkegaard, it is not something we think as directed towards the divine. It does, however, contain many other typical aspects of existentialist thought: a stress on anxiety, the awareness of death, the importance of the individual choice, and the freedom to make it. I would say that this is one of the many reasons why we should still read Jaspers today. Jaspers gives responsibility and an end to that freedom, and provides a way out of despair and anxiety while not sacrificing the restlessness in existence.

It does very much strike me that I found something like this in the past 12 years.

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