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ОглавлениеPreface
IN THIS LITTLE BOOK Karl Jaspers provides one of the best short statements of both the main features of his own philosophy and his ideas about the nature and importance of philosophical thought in human life. Since he had just been dismissed from his university position by the Nazis, the lectures of 1937 which gave rise to this volume were his last opportunity for public statement for several years. They were delivered six years after the appearance of his Philosophie.* Although his gigantic Von der Wahrheit (On Truth) was not to be published for ten years (and is still not available in English), most of it was already written and the content of the present book was taken from it. As a result, these three lectures by Jaspers contain all his major ideas: the encompassing, existential truth, exception and authority, transcendence and transcending thought, reason, metaphysics and cipher language, and the relation between philosophy and its two closest styles of thought which are science and religion.
According to Jaspers, existential philosophy is neither new nor radically different from what usually goes by the name of philosophy. Straight off in the introductory lecture he insists that it is an integral part of what he calls the “one, primordial philosophy.” The only thing new about it is that at present Existenz is the key term. One understands Jaspers, then, only by understanding his conception of philosophical thought and the role played by Existenz as the concept around which all others are clustered and organized. These two ideas are not separate. Philosophy derives its unique features from the fact that it is performed by man as Existenz.
Philosophy, Science and Religion. Jaspers hardly ever speaks of ‘philosophy.’Instead, he prefers to use the present infinitive of the verb 'philosophieren,' which I have translated as ‘philosophizing.’By using this term Jaspers stresses the fact that philosophy is an activity, a movement of thought that knows no end and produces no set of doctrines, theories, or even concepts. Philosophizing is a process of thinking as inner action in which the thinker comes to an authentic awareness of himself and reality by pressing beyond or transcending everything objective. From the standpoint of the subjectivity of the thinker philosophizing can be described as the elucidation or clarification of Existenz. From the standpoint of the objects it is concerned with, philosophizing is the expression of an encounter with (intrinsic) being. This expression takes two directions: a reflection on the nature and limits of objective knowledge, which Jaspers calls world orientation, and a transcending thinking in which being itself comes to expression, which he calls metaphysics.
Philosophy is not only unable to provide objective theories; it also depends upon and lives at the boundaries of other disciplines. Philosophical understanding consists in part of an appreciation of the difference between philosophy and these other disciplines. In Jaspers'view the two most central to philosophy are science and religion, which are in fact the sources from which philosophizing springs.
Science is essential to philosophy. Without knowledge of science a philosopher has no knowledge of the world. He is, practically, blind. It is no accident that throughout history the greatest philosophers have been familiar with science. Unless it incorporates the scientific method as well as its results, philosophizing becomes mere speculation, reverie, or perhaps the expression of subjective vital interests or desires. Furthermore, Jaspers agrees with the positivists that questions of knowledge and fact are all scientific questions. Only through science do we learn to know the way things are. For this reason philosophy cannot produce any theories of its own. When it tries to become a science by claiming knowledge in its own right, it cuts a ridiculous figure.
If philosophy is not science, neither is science philosophy. Science is a process of thought involving precise and publicly verifiable concepts and methods. It views reality in terms of these constructions. Hence, it has definite limits. When reality is identified with what science alone can know, science itself becomes superstition. It becomes a narrow and unfounded philosophical position which turns everything, including man, into an object. Both being and human existence lose their depth. Philosophizing has the task of pointing out the nature of science and the limits of its application. In doing this, philosophy transcends science and gives evidence of another source from which philosophizing springs. Jaspers calls this source transcendence. One becomes aware of transcendence in the process of thinking beyond the limits of scientific knowledge. In this way Jaspers comes to the realization that both the thinker and reality are more than what can be known about them in objective terms. No known object is being itself.
Although Jaspers often claims that science is essential to philosophy, it is also true that the methods and doctrines of science do not enter into the content of his philosophy in any interesting or significant ways, as they do in Descartes, Leibnitz or Kant. Knowledge of science, according to Jaspers, keeps a philosopher from claiming to have factual and objective knowledge. But beyond this, there is little that science, either by its method or its results, contributes to philosophy. One must know science, it seems, in order to learn how not to philosophize.
Religion is the other source from which philosophizing springs. Through religion men have always given expression both to their own transcendence and to the transcendence of being beyond the natural world. Reality is more than our objective knowledge reveals; it transcends all the immanent levels of conceptual thought, which, in turn, may be viewed as appearances of this transcendence. Man, conceived in religious terms, is also more than a natural being. He is more than his objective knowledge conceives him to be. Because it considers man in relation to God and beyond all the conceptions and exigencies of life, thought and society, religion preserves man's transcendence, dignity and freedom. For this reason, philosophizing affirms religion and sees in it a source of its own idea of transcendence. Without the sense of the transcendence of being conveyed by religion, philosophy itself withers and dies. Reality, collapsing into its immanent modes, consists only of determinate natural objects acting in accordance with objective laws.
Even though philosophy is closely attached to religion, there is a sense in which it is as much opposed to religion as it is to absolutizing science. The chief defect of religion lies in its habit of objectifying transcendence in particular- istic symbols which are claimed to be authoritative for all men. Each religion recognizes as adequate only its own representation of transcendence; it sets forth one ideal of humanity, one set of truths and rules for action, to which all men must conform. In this process of objectifying what lies beyond all objectivity, religion destroys human freedom and transcendence just as science does when its objective conceptions of reality are absolutized into a philosophical dogma.
Philosophy, then, is different from both science and religion and yet it is bound to both. From science it gains critical, factual and objective knowledge. From religion it receives the idea of transcendence, although in a determinate and hence unacceptable form. In the process of coming to an awareness of the human situation and its authentic possibilities, however, philosophy must point out the defects and limits of both disciplines. Living thus at the boundaries of knowledge and religious faith, philosophy grasps the truth of being itself lying beyond those boundaries but coming to expression only within them.
The Encompassing. The basic idea in Jaspers'philosophy is that of the encompassing (das Umgreifende ). It is Jaspers'name for the form of our awareness of being which underlies all our scientific and common-sense knowledge and which is given expression in the myths and rituals of religion. But it can never become an object. Awareness of the encompassing is achieved by reflection upon our situation. As we reflect, we realize that all objects we are aware of, including religious ones, are determinate beings situated in a larger, encompassing context or horizon. We can enlarge the extent of our knowledge, but we can never escape the fact that it is fragmentary and only indefinitely extendable. It has limits. We are always within a horizon. The realization that we cannot make the whole of reality into an object is our awareness of the encompassing horizon of being in which all objects of awareness appear. Thus, the encompassing is a term that does not refer to any particular thing. Instead, it expresses a felt quality of all our experience and thought.
Jaspers discusses the encompassing in terms of what he calls its ‘modes.’To see what these are and how he derives them, one must understand something about his intentional view of consciousness. According to this view, consciousness is always awareness of something. Every act of awareness is therefore analyzable according to a model in which a subject is related to an object. The relationship may be of many kinds: sensory awareness, conceptual thought, feeling, emotion, action, and so on, each susceptible to an indefinite number of possible variations. The general relation of subject to object, therefore, is the horizon or encompassing background of all awareness, and the particular ways that a subject may be related to an object can be called modes of this encompassing. The analysis of the encompassing is thus an elucidation of the main ways a subject is related to an object. Because this subject-object relation is the basic model, the main modes of the encompassing are two: the encompassing that we are (the subject) and the encompassing that being itself is (the object). An analysis of subjectivity provides Jaspers with three main divisions of these modes: existence (Dasein), consciousness-in-general, and spirit. We shall return to these presently.
In addition, corresponding to the scientific-immanent and religious-transcendent levels of awareness, Jaspers identifies two other basic divisions of the encompassing. Remembering that the general structure is that of the subject-object relation, we get a transcendent mode of subjectivity (Existenz) and of objectivity (Transcendence.)
We can represent Jaspers'analysis of the encompassing in the following diagram:
THE ENCOMPASSING
The idea of the encompassing is complicated by the fact that each of its modes is also an encompassing, that is, an infinite and inexhaustible dimension. Within each of these levels we must distinguish between determinate subject-object relations and the indefinite background of possible relations. For example, at the level of existence men establish particular techniques for interacting with each other and with their environment in order to satisfy their desires and interests. But existence is not exhausted by a description of these techniques. It transcends them, for it is a creative source of new techniques. The same is true of all the other modes. Hence, at each level we never succeed in completely reducing the encompassing to a definitive set of objective relations between subjects and objects. There is always the possibility of further or different determinations of these relations. This implies that even in the immanent modes, where being and man are amenable to objective, scientific investigation, both man and being transcend what can be known about them.
There are three immanent modes of the subject-object relationship, their names deriving, as stated previously, from the subject side of the relation. Man is first an organic being who is there, who exists in a practical lifeworld in space and time. He has instincts, needs, and drives; he acts so as to satisfy them. The objects he is related to at this level are the objects of his practical concern and they constitute the world of ordinary experience. Jaspers calls this mode “Dasein” Wherever Jaspers uses the term “Dasein” I have translated it by the English word “existence,” because Dasein is the ordinary German word for existence. Some translators have used “being-there,” pointing out that it is a transliteration of Da-sein. But “being-there” is not an ordinary English word; it has the aura of a technical term, which in Jaspers it is not. Earle translated it as “empirical existence” in Reason and Existenz. This practice raises expectations of another kind of existence—perhaps nonempirical existence—which again is not the case for Jaspers. Besides, Jaspers generally uses the word without any adjectives.
Jaspers'use of Dasein must also be distinguished from Heidegger's. In Being and Time, Heidegger does use Dasein as a technical term. It is the name for human existence and is defined by Heidegger's existential categories such as care, freedom, historicity, fallenness, and so forth. Hence, it includes what Jaspers uses two words to express: existence in the ordinary sense and Existenz, which is a technical term in Jaspers'philosophy and which will be explained presently.
The second immanent mode of subjectivity is consciousness in general, or abstract rational and conceptual understanding. The world man knows at this level is not the world of ordinary experience. It is the world as represented in the sciences. The concepts and method employed by consciousness in general are public and verifiable, and its knowledge is universal and objective. This abstract level is common to all men, and is unique to no one. Hence, Jaspers says that at this level men are point-consciousnesses and interchangeable units.
The third immanent level is spirit. Borrowing the term from Hegel and the subsequent German idealist tradition, Jaspers often talks of spirit as a kind of synthesis of existence and abstract consciousness in general. Like existence, it is concrete and historical. Like consciousness in general, it is universal. It is, then, a concrete universal which Jaspers calls “idea.” As men participate in this concrete universal, they are bound together into historic unities. Examples of such unities are: the nation, a church or religion, a cultural tradition, professional organizations, etc. Each of these is formed by an idea. When viewed under the idea of spirit, men are not considered as individuals, but as members of totalities. One can get a sense of the objective pole of this level by reflecting on the ‘worlds’of politics, art, or science.
Existence, consciousness in general, and spirit—and the worlds corresponding to them—comprise the immanent modes of the encompassing. But they do not exhaust it. There are in addition the transcendent modes of Existenz and Transcendence. The centrality of these two modes, and especially of Existenz, constitutes the distinctive character of contemporary existential philosophy as the present form of the perennial philosophy. Emphasis upon them is a protest against the objectifying and dehumanizing tendencies in modern thought (philosophical as well as scientific) and against our increasingly technological and rationalized culture. The nature of these two modes and the relation between them are not very clear. But the following interpretation comes close to what Jaspers intends.
Existenz cannot be described even in a general way as the immanent modes can. Because it is a possibility in all men, it can only be pointed to or appealed to. But two features of it stand out. First, it is absolutely unique. It is each individual human being as a particular, concrete historical being in so far as he is authentic. In this sense Jaspers uses Existenz to refer to individual persons. He speaks of Existenz as doing or willing something. Secondly, Existenz is the ultimate source or ground of each individual self. In this latter capacity, it is best thought of as a principle of freedom, creativity, or pure spontaneity. It does not refer to an individual, but to a quality of life-authentic existence—in which individuals may or may not participate. In this sense Existenz is a universal structure, and Jaspers describes it by means of such concepts as historicity, freedom, resoluteness, and so on. In addition, he almost always refers to it as “possible Existenz” rather than as an actuality, because in principle it can never be fully actualized. Every actualization of Existenz results in some concrete and determinate creation, that is, some objectification of itself. But Existenz remains an origin (Ursprung), a limitless field of possibility. Consequently, man as Existenz completely transcends all that he is, knows or does. Existenz is the primordial, spontaneous depth of each self. Never given, it must be actualized by each person.
Yet there are no direct or immediate manifestations of Existenz. All knowledge and action must occur in the world in one or more of the three immanent modes. So Existenz seems to be a principle of spontaneity or creativity within them. It is man as Existenz who continually breaks out of established patterns to create new historical organizations at the level of existence, new knowledge and understanding at the level of consciousness in general, and new ideas in the realm of the spirit, as in morals, art, religion.
In view of these considerations, one can see that “Existenz” is a technical term in Jaspers'philosophy. It acquires its meaning from the ways Jaspers uses it and the things he says about it. Because the ordinary English word “existence” would be a misleading translation of Existenz, I have incorporated this German term in the translation and have treated it as an English word.
Corresponding to Existenz is transcendence. Transcendence is the representation of being itself beyond all objectivity. The world is an immanent reflection of it. Thus, transcendence expresses the dual feature that within any level of the world one never fully articulates all possibilities, and that beyond objective determination is a background or horizon of being itself to which Existenz is related. Because transcendence is being-itself, Jaspers says that Existenz is aware of itself as given to itself by transcendence. If there were no transcendence, if the world were all there were to being, Existenz would not be possible. Man would be a mundane being, describ-able in the concepts of the various immanent modes of the encompassing.
A sense of Existenz and transcendence develops in our experience of the great philosophers, artists and scientists. In their systems of thought and representations one senses something more than thought, some source of which their creations are symbols or, as Jaspers says, ciphers. Everything and anything can be a cipher of transcendence. It has only to be viewed in the correct way, and the correct way is from the viewpoint of Existenz and its freedom.
Neither Existenz nor transcendence are objects. They are sources from which everything else springs. But to talk about them is to bring them within the domain of consciousness and its subject-object structure. By necessity, then, we make objects out of them. Hence, talking about them is always liable to misunderstanding: One may take the propositions in their literal sense rather than as pointing to the indeterminate source. One may claim to have objective knowledge about man and being. But what Jaspers is aiming at is an inner awareness of Existenz and its relation to transcendence. Consequently, one must read Jaspers in such a way as to perform the inner action of transcending thought along with him. Until one takes his sentences and concepts as signa, or pointers, Jaspers'philosophy evades him. Only when it is appropriated inwardly by the reader does it take on its full meaning and become free of misunderstanding which itself is a cipher of transcendence.
Despite the hazard of misunderstanding, one can try to get a grip on Jaspers'philosophy by describing it in terms of traditional classifications. So considered, Jaspers comes out an idealist. Many themes in his philosophizing, but especially the clarification of the immanent modes of the encompassing, suggest the idealist stance. Jaspers lumps the objective pole into one entity called world, but he carefully distinguishes between existence, consciousness in general, and spirit. It is evident that there are world-counterparts to each of these subjective modes. But it is also evident that all the energy and priority is put into the subjective mode. Even transcendence is only for Existenz. And, although Jaspers says that transcendence is basic and ultimate, the source of Existenz, all his analyses show that what he says about transcendence is derived from the uniqueness and freedom of Existenz. Jaspers is therefore an ‘existential’idealist.
Truth and Reality. The last two lectures deal with truth and reality. Both concepts must be viewed against the background of the encompassing and its modes with especial attention to Existenz and transcendence. Here only a few points can be made:
1. Truth is not a simple idea. For Jaspers the term ‘truth’has a special meaning within each mode of the encompassing. At the level of existence truth is what works, what leads to the satisfaction of our vital needs and in- terests. For consciousness in general truth is a function of rational tests and methods, and is universal and compelling for all. At the level of spirit the truth of an idea is its power to establish and to secure spiritual totalities. Finally, the truth of Existenz is unique, particular and historic. It makes no claim at all to universality and objectivity, but because it is the basis of Existenz, the truth by which one lives, so to speak, it is absolute for the Existenz who accepts it. Here truth is a function of faith or commitment. It is Kierkegaard's idea of truth as subjectivity.
2. In spite of the fragmentation of truth into the truths within the modes of the encompassing and the truth of Existenz into the pluralities of Existenzen, there is a sense in which truth is one: the truth of being itself. But this one truth is only an ideal; it is never realized. Jaspers sees each authentic truth at the other levels as a symbol which points to the one truth which binds everything together and which yet is inaccessible, for every actual truth is an historic achievement in a concrete situation. Moreover, the truth of Existenz springs from the freedom and creativity of each Existenz. For Jaspers the one truth of being remains a matter of existential faith which he takes to be the presupposition of all thought and action. But since nothing definite is or can be said about this truth, it remains, for the most part, an organic part of Jaspers'own philosophical commitment. Whether it is only this, or, as Jaspers insists, necessary to philosophy is a question the reader may try to answer as he reads and reflects.
3. Corresponding to the subject-object structure of awareness, especially in the relation between Existenz and transcendence, are forms of truth which Jaspers calls exception and authority. He takes these terms from Kierkegaard. The truth of each primordial, free and creative Existenz is an exception in relation to universal truth. No universal truth or historical tradition encloses Existenz. It breaks out of all objectivities and demands the right to establish its own truth creatively. One is reminded of Nietzsche's superman transvaluing all given values and truths and establishing values and truths of his own as he comes to realize his creative possibilities–or of Kierkegaard's knight of faith, whose relation to the absolute allows him to suspend the judgments of objective ethics. The exception demands recognition as an exception, not on the basis of any arbitrary will-to-power, but in the interest of the truth of transcendence which evades objectification even while it permeates all the other modes. The exception is thus the servant of transcendence, or, as Jaspers says, the universal. His very life is testimony to the finite and limited character of all knowledge and practical arrangements. He preserves the freedom of man and the transcendence of being in his exceptional status.
If the exception exhausted the idea of truth, there would be a danger of its degenerating into mere willfulness. So Jaspers pairs it with another form of truth which he calls authority. Authority is based upon transcendence. Because all appearances at all the modes of the encompassing are symbols of transcendence, they have authority for men. An example of authority is the cultural tradition in which every person lives and matures. Without this tradition he would be nothing but an aggregate of purely biological and psychological drives. His tradition gives him substance and form—in short his human being. But at the same time this tradition is limited; it is historical, partial and only one among many traditions. It contains possibilities which Existenz is free to realize and tendencies it must resist. But when the exception resists authority, it should be done in a spirit of fear and trem- bling (to use Kierkegaard's terms) or in a spirit of seriousness and respect for authority (after the manner of Socrates in the Apology and Crito). There is no final resolution of the opposition between exception and authority. Creative life itself is the dialectical process of their interplay and history is the outcome of this interplay. Because the creative process is performed by concrete Existenzen, its results can not be foreseen, nor can techniques be developed to control it.
4. Jaspers develops a concept of reason at the end of the lecture on truth. Following Kant, he carefully distinguishes reason from the understanding. The latter, it turns out, is precisely identical with consciousness-in-general. The domain of the understanding is the domain of objective, scientific, compelling knowledge. It is directed towards determinate objects and thinks about them discursively in terms of testable concepts.
Reason, on the other hand, seems to be a motive within Existenz. Jaspers speaks of it as will—a will to unity and a will to communication. Reason not only respects but actively seeks out what is foreign to it in order to communicate with it and to project an encompassing unity which includes everything and lets nothing sink into oblivion. It seeks to go beyond all limits, all separations, all animosities, to present a total picture of being itself. But there is no total picture. There is no way of subsuming all the modes of the encompassing, all historical periods and traditions, all Existenzen and their particular truths and values into one harmonious whole. There is only the will to communicate with everyone and everything; there is only the spirit of honesty and openness. There is only a posture of reason, or an atmosphere of reason, based upon a faith in transcendence and the unity of all things in it. Reason is the basis of Jaspers'doctrine of the encompassing. As a frame of mind or existential attitude which is aware of the horizonal character of all our thought and action, it continually upsets the putatively complete pictures and theories that claim to be adequate analyses of all reality and presses on to further unity. It is a vision of the one transcendent reality beyond all finite interpretation that emerges from the self-awareness of Existenz in the presence of transcendence. Throughout history reason has been most adequately manifested in philosophy, which Jaspers calls “one great hymn to reason.” But by making claims to absolute truth, philosophy has also corrupted reason into an intellectual grasp of objects. For Jaspers everything depends upon our preserving the sense of reason as a radical openness, a binding force and a total will to communication.
5. The final point to note is Jaspers'idea of reality, with which he deals in his last lecture. As he uses the term, reality is identical with being-itself beyond all its finite appearances. He develops the concept by means of three examples. Reality is being beyond all possibility, it is historicity and it is unity. Reality so conceived is reached by an act of transcending thought (reason) in which one leaps out of the realm of the finite and stands before being itself. Only in this union is there any final rest and peace.
In one sense, of course, there is no union with being, pure and simple. Jaspers is not a mystic. Access to being can be had only through the world. Only as one participates in the levels of existence, consciousness in general and spirit in an attitude of reason, can one interpret his historical situation and his daily task as appearances of being, his acts of knowing as revelations of being, and his spiritual creations as its symbols. All these things become ciphers of ultimate reality which must be interpreted by each Existenz. Although nothing is a cipher by any natural right or special property, everything can be seen as a cipher pointing to being itself. Philosophizing is the process of allowing all things to open themselves to being and become its symbols.
Reality can be grasped only historically in terms of particular symbols. Hence there can be no adequate interpretation of it. Unlike religion, which makes transcendence into a supernatural determinate object, philosophizing brings all things into the domain of reason and regards them as transparent ciphers pointing to being. Because in philosophizing each individual recognizes his own truth as a mere cipher, he is able to recognize and respect the truths of other Existenzen and historical traditions. They are ciphers, also. Everything is united in the One. When this state of mind is reached, an attitude emerges which Jaspers in another place calls absolute consciousness. Here, in the vision which perceives being in all finite things, the quest finds an ultimate rest. One senses that being is and stands silent before the ultimate mystery.
With the mention of reason and reality and the contrast with religion and its objectifying view, we are back at our starting point. Now perhaps we can see what Jaspers means by calling philosophy a process of philosophizing, an inner action whose result is not knowledge of any object, or a theory about objects, but a vision of authentic reality in its symbolic appearances. This vision is at the same time an awareness of one's own authentic being. This attitude of mind and thought which transcends everything finite and objective, allowing being itself to reveal itself in its appearances, is what Jaspers means by the perennial philosophy. It has taken many forms, but today, because of the objectifying tendency in modern thought and culture, this philosophy must become an existential philosophy.
RICHARD F. GRABAU
* Philosophy, 3 vols; E. B. Ashton, trans., University of Chicago Press, 1969-1971.
