Philosophy of Existence by Karl Jaspers

First published:Existenzphilosophie, 1938 (English translation, 1971)

Edition(s) used:Philosophy of Existence. Translated with an introduction by Richard F. Grabau. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Essays; philosophy; theology

Core issue(s): Contemplation; faith; freedom and free will; knowledge; reason; religion; truth

Overview

Karl Jaspers saw being as polarity: It is the all-embracing out of which all comes to exist, but it is also the vast consciousness within. Where being appears, is world; where being is immanent, is consciousness. Jaspers’s thinking about being is like meditation about a web that embraces, sustains, and brings forth all, including oneself. All-embracing totality melts away when one approaches it as an object of research. For example, a living human being’s true nature disappears when one attempts to understand human beings in terms of anthropology. To understand humanness, one must be human—just as it is necessary to experience art in order to know art.

Next, Jaspers focuses on the nature of truth. Where variant truths clash, one can discern three basic variants. First is the truth of “being-there” (living), which is a function of staying alive and expanding life. This truth validates itself through practical usefulness. This truth has neither general validity nor compelling certainty. This truth supports living; its untruth is what damages, limits, and paralyzes life. As life changes, so does its truth change; hence, this truth remains a relative concept. Self-interested life speaks on condition of promoting its own existence. It speaks as in combat with other interests or as identity with other interests. Every life already contains its demise; being-there contains no lasting happiness.

The second truth is the truth-of-intellect, which is part of a locked whole. My true self never becomes my property; it develops. I experience myself as moving and changing through time. Truth-of-consciousness takes its compelling nature from empirical evidence; truth-of-intellect is conviction. Truth-of-intellect validates itself when the thought fits into the totality of ideas and, by fitting into it, also corroborates the totality of ideas. As intellect, an atmosphere of a concrete and unified entirety speaks. The speaker and the one who comprehends what is spoken are parts of this atmosphere.

Finally, the third truth, truth-of-existence, is simple immediacy that does not need to know itself. Existence experiences truth in faith as having broken through “being-in-the-world” to transcendence, to which true self returns. Truth-of-existence yields actualized consciousness of reality. Communication occurs in loving combat—not a combat for power and dominance but a combat for obviousness and clarity.

All truth is in the polarity of “exception” and “authority.” Exception challenges common truth; authority gags especially that truth which seeks absolute independence. While exception must yield to what is common, its battle with common thought is necessary, since it serves to test common thought. Paradoxically, every attempt at comprehending truth emerges from the receptivity to exception. Thus, exception influences the next authority. Authority compels and forces from outside, but in such a way as to speak from within. Authority rests in transcendence, out of which the one commanding it also is its obedient subject. The individual’s education comes from the authority in which he or she believes. The authority in which my self has matured is part of my transcendental foundation. When freedom challenges authority, self and identity develop, keeping authority inside the individual as transcendence. Freedom urges toward confirmation by authority, or it urges to oppose authority. Authority offers supportive strength to newly evolving freedom, or authority offers shape and solidity by its resistance to freedom. For the sake of this process, even the most independent person must wish for authority in the world.

One can understand authority objectively by way of seeing its decline. Authority loses truth when it seems to become forcible power in one’s life without a foundation of living sources of truth. Then, it commands thoughtless obedience instead of surrender to transcendent authority. Being commanded to obey a religious behavior, for example, is different from feeling the inner urge to obey a religious behavior. The former is a sign of authority in decline as it becomes force; the latter is transcendent authority. In sum, exception and authority are polarities: (1) They are both rooted in transcendence. (2) Both are unfinished. (3) Both are historical. (4) Both contain truth that, as object, forever escapes one.

The path that goes beyond the polarity of authority and exception is rationality. Taking that path is the task of philosophy. Rationality goes beyond scientific thinking toward an all-embracing connectivity that seeks to highlight what ultimately embraces all. Rationality is willingness to communicate; it wants to let all become concept. Rationality seeks unity by way of full and complete openness—in contrast to truth fanaticism. Rationality is where open eyes see reality itself with all its possibilities and possible interpretations; however, this open eye may not wax judgmental or dogmatic. Rationality is “mysticism of the understanding.”

Reality—becoming aware of the space of the all-embracing within one—is like changing dark walls into clear glass. I can see the expanse and all that is and can be present to me. This question about reality is the ultimate question of philosophizing. In its own way, all is reality and yet persists as mere perspective. The sum of all researchable parts is never a total reality. Researched nature appears to be reliable, but human technology ultimately is no different from the magical incantations in primitive cultures.

One cannot measure reality. When one tries to determine a factual circumstance, one must construct it first. Thus, all facticity is already theory and not deep reality. The reality of our own being does not exist outside ourselves; we are gifts to ourselves. Thus, our reality of existence is not the reality. Actual reality is being that cannot be thought of as potentiality; however, I can think only of such as can be thought of as potentiality. For that reason, reality resists all thinking about it, receding from the understanding until it finds a point of rest in transcendence. While hidden, transcendence is present philosophically as reality. Transcendence is the power through which I am myself. The most decisive language of transcendence is the language of freedom itself. Philosophical faith requires us to remain in the world and to find nothing more important than to apply all our strength to what appears to make sense while, at the same time, not forgetting the diminution of all in the face of transcendence. All that is manifested in being-there is what it is only as a secret codification of transcendence.

Christian Themes

Philosophically, one attempts to show the path to approach reality by way of truth. One seeks to grasp being, which is everywhere, but which is nowhere really apparent. Reality, which supports all, is experienced in religion as certainty, as authoritatively warranted, as something believed that is fundamentally different from all philosophizing. In religion, reality is spoken of as myth and as revelation. Myth, fairy tale, tragedy, and sublime poetry can be of greatest depth and meaning where they do not explain and where they are logically at the most nonsensical. The general truth is that where only story is narrated, there is reality. The language of fantasy meets reality, which recedes from any exploration otherwise. When we hear being in the secret code of story, then we hear reality. The language of mysterious codes in philosophy is the language of transcendent reality; in religion, that language is myth and revelation. Reality can be accessed only by believing recognition and by believing experience. As the reality of the world offers itself through the senses, so transcendence is accessible through philosophical or through religious faith.

Religious symbols cannot preserve the exclusivity of their specific sanctity for the philosophical mind. They remain symbols only as long as they are not part of dogma or purposive activity. Religious faith in revelation has placed transcendence in a historical singularity, which is to be objectively and exclusively valid for all and which is the condition for salvation. From the perspective of philosophy, religion here is attempting to force all other historicity into one historicity that is to be regarded as exclusively valid. Such an absolute world history, however, denies all other historicity, which should participate in dialogue. That denial includes the historicity of the individual, who has roots in transcendence and must thus not be subsumed under a single world historicity. One gives up rationality by changing freedom and openness into an absolute system that denies variances.

Religion is different from philosophy. Philosophy cannot offer certainties. Philosophizing, I experience the reality of transcendence in immediacy through myself as that which is not me in myself. Philosophical faith speaks and lives in communication with the realm of dialogue of various thinkers, all of whom participate in and none of whom owns philosophy. Philosophical faith has no creed because it has no dogma, although it touches reality.

Juxtaposing philosophy and religion, one must consider both to be at the same level; one may not consider one to be superior to or protected from the other. Though philosophy is in alienation from religion, it must fight religion as an untruth. The philosopher is part of the tension of religious reality, but philosophy is not a foundation for religion; instead, it is in polarity with religion, a polarity without which religion appears to sink away. Philosophy assumes that thought which seems to endanger religion is actually no danger at all for a true religion. Whatever cannot last in thinking, cannot really be authentic. The same is true for a religion that defensively refuses to listen or to be questioned; such defensive religion therefore should quite properly come seriously under attack.

One might think that philosophy must therefore be rejected as ruinous and dissolving religious thinking. However, the process of knowing includes philosophizing, which opens us to the expansion of the all-embracing, to risk loving battle through an exploration of every sense of truth, to keep rationality alert before even the most strange and the most failed, and to find one’s way back home to reality.

Sources for Further Study

Ehrlich, Leonard. Karl Jaspers: Philosophy as Faith. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975. An analysis of Jaspers’s understanding of philosophical thought as the expression of faith, in the underlying unity of the subject and the objective, examining such key themes as the role of freedom and transcendence.

Horn, Hermann. “Karl Jaspers, 1883-1969.” Quarterly Review of Comparative Education 23, nos. 3/4 (1993): 721-739. Several parts of this review of Jaspers’s ideas on education elucidate concepts from Philosophy of Existence.

Jaspers, Karl. “On My Philosophy.” In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, translated by Walter Kaufmann. 1941. New York: Penguin Books, 1975. Simple and straightforward in tone, style, and content, this essay echoes several themes from Philosophy of Existence.

Kirkbright, Suzanne. Karl Jaspers: A Biography. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. Kirkbright draws on Jaspers’s lifelong diaries and correspondence to portray the philosopher whose work on truth, integrity, and interpersonal communication was so starkly contrasted by the Germany of his times.

Thornhill, Chris. Karl Jaspers: Politics and Metaphysics. New York: Routledge, 2002. Examines the epistemological, metaphysical, and political work of Jaspers, who, according to Thornhill, deserves more attention in the context of hermeneutics, anthropological reflections on religion, idealism, and metaphysics.