The Course of my Development
On February 23, 1883 I was born in Oldenburg,
a son of Karl Jaspers, the former sheriff
and later bank director, and bis wife Henriette,
nee Tantzen. I passed a well-guarded childhood
in the company of my brothers and sisters,
either in the country with my grandparents
or at the seaside, sheltered by loved and
revered parents, led by the authority of
my Father, brought up with a regard for truth
and loyalty, for achievement and reliability,
yet without church religion (except for the
scanty formalities of the Protestant confession).
I attended the high school of my home town,
and from 1901 the University.
My path was not the normal one of professors
of philosophy. I did not intend to become
a doctor of philosophy by studying philosophy
(I am in fact a doctor of medicine) nor did
L by any means, intend originally to qualify
for a professorship by a dissertation on
philosophy. To decide to become a philosopher
seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become
a poet. Since my schooldays, however, I was
guided by philosophical questions. Philosophy
seemed to me the supreme, even the sole,
concern of man. Yet a certain awe kept me
from making it my profession.
Instead I felt that I should look for my
vocation in practical life. At first I chose
the study of law with the intention of becoming
an attorney. At the same time I attended
classes in philosophy. That proved disappointing.
The lectures offered nothing of what I sought
in philosophy: neither the fundamental experiences
of Being, nor guidance for inner action or
self-improvement, but rather, questionable
opinions making claim to scientific validity.
The study of law left me unsatisfied, because
I did not know the aspects of life which
it serves. I perceived only the intricate
mental juggling with fictions that did not
interest me. What I sought was perception
of reality. Concern with art and poetry were
incomplete substitutes; so even was an enthusiastic
journey to Italy to see Roma aeterna, to
sense history and to gaze on beauty (1902).
This aimless way of life came to an end after
my third semester. I began the study of medicine,
impelled by a desire for knowledge of facts
and of man. The resolution to do disciplined
work tied me to both laboratory and clinic
for a long time to come. Ostensibly I was
aiming at the practice of medicine; yet already
with the secrehought of eventually pursuing
an academic career at the university, though
actually not in philosophy but in psychiatry
or psychology. After some years (since 1909)
I published my psycho-pathological researches.
In 1913 I qualified as university lecturer
in psychology.
Up until then my life had been a spiritual
striving in what was, actually, politico-sociological
space, untroubled by general happenings and
without political consciousness, though with
momentary forebodings of possible distant
dangers. All intentness centred on my own
private life, on the high moments of intimate
communion with those closeso me. Contemplation
of the works of the spirit, research, continual
intercourse with things timeless, were the
purpose and meaning of life's activities.
Then in 1914 the World War caused the great
breach in our European existence. The paradisiacal
life before the World War, naive despite
all its sublime spirituality, could never
return: philosophy, with its seriousness,
became more important than ever.
To a great extent my psychology had assumed
the characteristics, without my being conscious
of it, of what X subsequently called Existenz
Clarification. This psychology was no longer
merely an empirical statement of the facts
and laws of events. It was an outline of
the potentialities of the soul which holds
a mirror up to man to show him what he can
be, what he can achieve and how far he can
go: such insights are meant as an appeal
to freedom, to let me choose in my inner
action what I really want. As the realisation
overcame me that, at the time, there was
no true philosophy uhe universities, I thought
that facing such a vacuum even he who was
too weak to create his own philosophy, had
the right to hold forth about philosophy,
to declare what it once was and what it could
be. Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday,
I made philosophy my life's work.
II. Making Tradition Our Own
We can ask primal questions, but we can never
stand near the beginning. Our questions and
answers are in part determined by the historical
tradition in which we find ourselves. We
apprehend truth from our own source within
the historical tradition.
The content of our truth depends upon our
appropriating the historical foundation.
Our own power of generation lies in the rebirth
of what has been handed down to us. If we
do hot wish to slip back, nothing must be
forgotten; but if philosophising is to be
genuine our thoughts must arise from our
own source. Hence all appropriation of tradition
proceeds from the intentness of our own life.
The more determinedly I exist, as myself,
within the conditions of the time, the more
clearly I shall hear the language of the
past, the nearer I shall feel the glow of
its life.
In what way the history of philosophy exists
for us is a fundamental problem of our philosophising
which demands a concrete solution in each
age. Philosophy is tested and characterised
by the way in which it appropriates its history.
It might seem to us that the truth of present-day
philosophy manifests itself less in the formation
of new fundamental concepts (as "borderline
situation," "the Encompassing")
than in the new sound it makes audible for
us in old thoughts.
A merely theoretical contemplation of the
history of philosophy is insufficient. If
philosophy is practice, a demand to know
the manner in which its history is to be
studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude
toward it becomes real only in the living
appropriation of its contents from the texts.
To apprehend thought with indifference prevents
its appropriation. Knowledge that does not
concern the knower comes between the content
of knowledge and its resurrection; but in
the assimilation of philosophy by later ages
a lapse of thought is a constant feature.
Concepts which were originally reality pass
through history as pieces of learning or
information. What was once life becomes a
pile of dead husks of concepts and these
in turn become the subject of an objective
history of philosophy.
Everything depends therefore on encountering
thought at its source. Such thought is the
reality of man's being, which achieved consciousness
and understanding of itself through it. Though
one needs knowledge of the concepts that
emerge in the history of philosophy, the
purpose of such knowledge remains to gain
entrance to the exalted living practice of
these pashoughts. My own being can be judged
by the depths I reach in making these historical
origins my own. There is no palpable criterion
for this in outward appearances. Such true
thinking goes through history as a mystery
which can reveal itself, however, to everyone
with understanding, for this hidden thinking
was once reality. Having been written down
it can be rediscovered: at any time it can
spark a new blaze.
The history of philosophy is not, like the
history of the sciences, to be studied with
the intellect alone. That which is receptive
in us and that which impinges upon us from
history is the reality of man's being, unfolding
itself in thought.
A philosophical history of philosophy has
the following characteristics:
1. The real import of history is the Great,
the Unique, the Irreplaceable
The great philosophers and the great works
are standards for the selection of what is
essential. Everything that we do in studying
the history of philosophy ultimately serves
their better understanding. All other questions
are secondary, as, for instance, whether
the Great is also the most effective, or
whether, perhaps, precisely the misunderstanding
of greatness has a wider public appeal because
of its mediocrity and its lowered standard.
How the quality of greatness appears to us,
with constanransposition and questioning,
in the totality of things, what we prefer
and how we prefer it, that must prove its
worth by our ability to see through the remainder,
the widespread, the universally prevalent,
in order to judge it fairly, and to appreciate
it. What remains strange and incomprehensible
to w is a limit to our own truth.
2. Understanding of the ideas demands a thorough
study of the texts
Philosophy can only be approached with the
most concrete comprehension. A great philosopher
demands unrelenting penetration into his
texts. This necessitates both the realisation
of a whole philosophy in its entirety, and
taking pains with every single sentence in
order to become conscious of its every nuance.
Comprehensive perception and accurate observation
are the basis of our understanding.
3. Understanding of philosophy demands a
universal historical view
As a universal history of philosophy, the
history of philosophy must become one great
unity. Philosophising, as it occurs in each
historical age, involves the penetration,
without limit, into the unity of the revelation
of Being. This solitary, but vast, moment
of a few millennia, emerging from three different
sources (China, India, Occident), is real
by virtue of a single internal connection.
Though too immense to be envisaged as a pattern,
it encompasses us nevertheless as a world.
No one person can attain that concrete nearness
everywhere. He can have his roots only in
relatively few sublime works. The immensity
of the Whole and the evocative tones of its
unity are indispensable for achieving universal
philosophic communication as well as for
realising the truth of each individual's
concrete understanding.
4.
The philosopher's invisible realm of the
spirit
The philosopher lives, as it were, in a hidden,
non-objective community to which every philosophising
person secretly longs to be admitted. Philosophy
has no institutional reality and is not in
competition with the church, the state, the
real communities of the world. Any objectification,
whether it be the formation of schools or
sects, is the ruin of philosophy. For the
freedom that can be attained in philosophising
cannot be handed down by the doctrine of
an institution. Only as an individual can
man become a philosopher. From becoming a
philosopher he can derive no claims. He must
not have the folly to wish to be recognised
as a philosopher. Professorships in philosophy
are instituted for free mediation of ideas
by teaching, which does not preclude their
being held by philosophers (Kant, Hegel,
Schelling). But in philosophy's realm of
the spirihere is no objective certainty and
no confirmation. In the realm of the spirit,
men become companions-in-thought through
the millennia, become occasions for each
other to find the way to truth from their
own source, although they cannot present
each other with readymade truth. It is a
self-development of individual in communication
with individual. It is a development of the
individual into community and from there
to the plane of history, without breaking
with contemporary life. It is the effort
to live from and on behalf of the fundamental,
though these become audible to him who philosophises,
without objective certainty (as in religion),
and only through indirect hints as possibilities
in the totality of philosophy.
5. The universal-historical view is a condition
for the most decisive consciousness of one's
own age
What can be experienced today becomes fully
tangible only in the face of humanity's experiences-both
those which can no longer be relived and
those which become a living experience for
the first time this very day. Only through
being conscious can the contents of the past,
transmuted into possibilities, become the
fully real contents of the present. The life
of truth in the realm of the spirit does
wt remove man from his world, but makes him
effective for serving his historical present.
These fundamental views of history developed
only slowly in me. I discovered that the
study of past philosophers is of little use
unless our own reality enters into it. Our
reality alone allows the thinker's questions
to become comprehensible. We can thereby
read their works as if a11 philosophers were
contemporaries.
The order in which the great stars of the
philosophers' heaven rose for me is, perhaps,
accidental. While I was still at school Spinoza
was the first. Kant then became the philosopher
for me and has remained so. In the voices
of Plotinus, Nicholas of Cusa, Bruno, and
Schelling I heard as truth the dreams of
the physicians. Kierkegaard located consciousness
both of the Source, which is so indispensable
today, and of our own historical situation.
Nietzsche gained importance for me only late
as the magnificent revelation of nihilism
and the task of overcoming it (in my youth
I had avoided him, repelled by the extremes,
the rapture, and the diversity). Goethe contributed
the atmosphere of humanitas and un-selfconsciousness.
To breathe this atmosphere, to love with
Goethe whatever is essential among the apparitions
of the world, and like him to touch, with
awe, the unveiled boundaries, was a blessing
amid the unrest, and be came a source of
justice and reason. Hegel for a long time
remained a well-nigh inexhaustible material
for study, particularly for my teaching activity
in seminars. The Greeks were always there;
after the discipline of their coolness, I
liked to turn to Augustine; however, despite
the depth of his existential clarification
displeasure with his rhetoric and with his
lack of all scientific objectivity and with
his ugly and violent emotions drove me back
again to the Greeks. Only finally I occupied
myself more thoroughly with Plato, who now
seemed to me perhaps the greatest of all.
Among my deceased contemporaries I owe what
I am able to think-those closeso me excepted-above
all to the one and only Max Weber. He alone,
through his being, showed me what human greatness
can be. Nissl, the brain anatomist and psychiatrist,
set an example for me, in the years I worked
under him, of critical research and the purest
scientific method.
Even in the history of philosophy we can
witness the tremendous incisiveness of our
age. Hegel is a consummation of two and a
half millennia of thought. True, in his basic
philosophic attitude, although not in his
concrete positions, Plato is as alive today
as ever, perhaps more than ever. Even now
we can philosophise from Kant. In actuality,
however, we cannot forget for one moment
what has been brought about since by Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche. We are so exposed that we
constantly find ourselves facing nothingness.
Our wounds are so deep that in our weak moments
we wonder if we are not, in fact, dying from
them.
At the present moment, the security of coherent
philosophy, which existed from Parmenides
to Hegel, is lost. This does not prevent
us from philosophising from the single foundation
of man's being on which was based the thinking
of those millennia in the Occident which
are now, in some sense, concluded. To become
aware of this foundation in yet another way,
we are referred to India and China as the
two other original paths of philosophic thought.
Instead of slipping into nothingness at the
disintegration of millennia we should like
to feel unshakeable ground beneath us. We
should like to comprehend in one historical
whole the only general phenomenon which may
permit posterity to probe its substance more
deeply than has ever been done. The alternative
"nothing or everything" stands
before our age as the question of man's spiritual
destiny.
III. Drives to the Basic Questions
Philosophy did not mean simply cognisance
of the universe (that results from the sum
total of the sciences in constant indetermination
and transition), nor epistemology
(which is a subject of logic), nor the knowledge
of the systems and texts of the history of
philosophy (such knowledge touches only the
surface of thinking). Philosophy grew in
me through my finding myself in the midst
of life itself. Philosophical thought is
practical activity, although a unique kind
of activity.
Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment
by which I attain Being and my own self,
not impartial thinking which studies a subject
with indifference. To be a mere onlooker
were vain. Even scientific knowledge, if
there is anything to it, is not a random
observation of random objects; for the critical
objectivity of significant knowledge is attained
as a practice only philosophically in inner
action.
Philosophy as practice does not mean its
restriction to utility or applicability,
that is, to what serves morality or produces
serenity of soul. The process, in which knowledge
is employed as a means of thinking out the
possibilities that, bear upon a finite objective,
is a technical, not a philosophical, activity.
Philosophising is the activity of thought
itself, by which the essence of man, in its
entirety, is realised in the individual man.
This activity originates from life in the
depths where it touches Eternity inside Time,
not at the surface where it moves in finite
purposes, even though the depths appear to
us only at the surface. It is for this reason
that philosophical activity is fully real
only at the summits of personal philosophising,
while objectivised philosophical thought
is a preparation for, and a recollection
of, it. At the summits the activity is the
inner action by which I become myself; it
is the revelation of Being; it is the activity
of being oneself which yet simultaneously
experiences itself as the passivity of being
given-to-oneself. The mystery of this boundary
of philosophising at which alone philosophy
is real, is only circumscribed by the unrolling
of thoughts in the philosophical work.
Since the basic questions of philosophy grow,
as practical activity, from life, their form
is at any given moment in keeping with the
historical situation; but this situation
is part of the continuity of tradition. The
questions put earlier in history are still
ours; in part identical with present ones,
word for word, after thousands of years,
in part more distant and strange, so that
we make them our own only by translation.
The basic questions were formulated by Kant
with, I felt, moving simplicity: 1. What
can I know? 2. What shall I do? 3. What may
I hope? 4. What is man? Today these questions
have been reborn for us in changed form and
thus become comprehensible to us anew also
in their origin. The transformation of these
questions is due to our finding ourselves
in the kind of life that our age produces:
1. Science
has gained an ever-growing overwhelming importance;
by its consequences it has become the fate
of the world. Technically, it provides the
basis for all human existence and compels
the unpredictable transmutation of all conditions.
Its contents cause wonder and ever greater
wonder. Its inversions cause scientific superstitions
and a desperate hatred of science. Science
cannot be avoided. It extends further than
in Kant's time; it is more radical than ever,
both in the precision of its methods and
in its consequences. The question "What
can I know?" therefore becomes more
concrete and at the same time more inexorable.
Seen from our point of view Kant still knew
too much (in Wrongly taking his own transcendental
philosophy for conclusive scientific knowledge
instead of philosophical insight to be accomplished
in transcending) and too little (because
the extraordinary mathematical, scientific
and historical discoveries and possibilities
of knowledge with their consequences were
in great part still outside his horizon).
2.
The community of masses of human beings has
produced an order of life in regulated channels
which connects individuals in a technically
functioning organisation, but not inwardly
from the historicity of their souls. The
emptiness caused by dissatisfaction with
mere achievement and the helplessness that
results when the channels of relation break
down have brought forth a loneliness of soul
such as never existed before, a loneliness
that hides itself, that seeks relief in vain
in the erotic or the irrational until it
leads eventually to a deep comprehension
of the importance of establishing communication
between man and man.
Even when regulating his existence man feels
as if the waves of events had drawn him beyond
his depth in the turbulent ocean of history
and as if he now had to find a foothold in
the drifting whirlpool. What was firm and
certain has nowhere remained the ultimate.
Morality is no longer adequately founded
on generally valid laws. The laws themselves
are in need of a deeper foundation. The Kantian
question "What shall I do?" is
no longer sufficiently answered by the categorical
imperative (though this imperative remains
inevitably true), but has to be complemented
by the foundation of every ethical act and
knowledge in communication. For the truth
of generally valid laws for my actions is
conditioned by the kind of communication
in which I act. '-What shall I do?"
presupposes "How is communication possible?
How can I reach the depth of possible communication?"
3.
We experience the limits of science as the
limits of our ability to know and as limits
of our realisation of the world through knowledge
and ability; the knowledge of science fails
in the face of all ultimate questions. We
experience limits of communication: something
is lacking even when it succeeds. The failure
of knowledge and the failure of communication
cause a confusion in which Being and truth
vanish. In vain a way out is sought either
in obedience to rules and regulations or
in thoughtlessness. The meaning of truth
assumes another value. Truth is more than
what we call truth (or rather correctness)
in the sciences. We want to grasp truth itself;
the way to it becomes a new, more urgent,
more exciting task.
Our philosophising can be summarised thus
within these three questions:
What can we know in the sciences? How shall
we realize the most profound communication?
How can truth become accessible to us?
The three fundamental drives for knowledge,
for communication and for truth produce these
questions. Through them we reach the path
of searching. But the aims of this searching
are man and Transcendence (or: the soul and
the Deity). Ahem the fourth and fifth fundamental
questions are aimed.
4.
In the world man alone is the reality which
is accessible to me. Here is presence, nearness,
fullness, life. Man is the place at which
and through which everything that is real
exists for us at all. To fail to be human
would mean to slip into nothingness. What
an is and can become is a fundamental question
for man.
Man, however, is not a sufficient separate
entity, but is constituted by the things
he rices his own. In every form of his being
man is related to something other than himself:
as a being to his world, as consciousness
to objects, as spirit to the idea of whatever
constitutes totality, as Existenz to Transcendence.
Man always becomes man by devoting himself
to this other. Only through his absorption
in the world of Being, in the immeasurable
space of objects, in ideas, in Transcendence,
does he become real to himself. If he makes
himself the immediate object of his efforts
he is on his last and perilous path; for
it is possible that in doing so he will lose
the Being of the other and then no longer
find anything in himself. If man wants to
grasp himself directly, he ceases to understand
himself, to know who he is and what he should
do.
This confusion was intensified as a result
of the process of education in the nineteenth
century. The wealth of knowledge of everything
that was produced a state in which it seemed
that man could gain mastery over all Being
without yet being anything himself. This
happened because he no longer devoted himself
to the thing as it was, but made it a function
of his education. Where humanity founds itself
only on itself, it is experienced again that
it has no ground beneath it.
The question about humanity is pushed forward.
It no longer suffices to ask beyond oneself
with Kant "What may I hope?" Man
strives more decisively than ever for a certainty
that he lacks, for the certainty that there
is that which is eternal, that there is a
Being through which alone he himself is.
If the Deity is, then all hope is possible.
5.
Hence the question "What is man?"
must be complemented by the essential question
whether and wharanscendence (Deity) is. The
thesis becomes possible: Transcendence alone
is the real Being. that the Deity is suffices.
To be certain of that is the only thing that
matters. Everything else follows from that.
Man is not worth considering. In the Deity
alone there is reality, truth, and the immutability
of being itself. In the Deity there is peace,
as well as the origin and aim of man who,
by himself, is nothing, and what he is he
is only in relation to the Deity.
Buime and again it is seen: for us the Deity,
if it exists, is only as it appears to us
in the world, as it speaks to us in the language
of man and the world. It exists for us only
in the way in which it assumes concrete shape,
which by human measure and thought always
serves to hide it at the same time. Only
in ways that man can grasp does the Deity
appear.
Thus it is seen that it is wrong to play
off against each other the question about
man and the question about the Deity. Although
in the world only man is reality for us that
does not preclude that precisely the quest
for man leads to Transcendence. that the
Deity alone is truly reality does not preclude
that this reality is accessible to us only
in the world; as it were, as an image in
the mirror of man, because something of the
Deity must be in him for him to be able to
respond to the Deity. Thus the theme of philosophy
is oriented, in polar alternation, in two
directions: deum et animam scire cupio [I
desire knowledge of God and the soul].
In taking up again Kant's fundamental questions
five questions arose: the question of science,
of communication, of truth, of man, and of
Transcendence. I shall now go a little further
into the meaning of these questions, both
into the impulses that lead to them and into
the preliminaries of a philosophical answer:
1. What is science?
-In my youth I sought philosophy as knowledge.
The doctrines which I heard and read seemed
to meet this claim. They reasoned, proved,
refuted; they n were analogous with all other
knowledge; yet they aimed at the whole rather
than at single subjects.
I soon found out that most philosophical
and many scientific doctrines failed to yield
certainty. My doubting did not become absolute
and radical. It was not doubt in the style
of Descartes; such doubt, which I encountered
later, I did not entertain in reality, but
only as a kind of game. Commencing at first
with the sciences, my doubt questioned single
assertions, each doubt being by way of an
experiment.
It shook my faith in the representatives
of science, though not in science itself,
to discover that famous scientists propounded
many things in their textbooks which they
passed off as the results of scientific investigation
although they were by no means proven. I
perceived the endless babble, the supposed
"knowledge". In school already
I was astonished, rightly or wrongly, when
the teachers' answers to objections remained
unsatisfactory. The parson proved the existence
of God from the failure of the stars to collide
and paid no heed to the objection that the
stars' great distance from each other makes
the probability of a collision small, or
that maybe there are collisions which we
do not observe because they have not yet
involved us. I observed the pathos of historians
when they conclude a series of explications
with the words "Now things necessarily
had to happen in this way", while actually
this statement was merely suggestive ex post
facto, but not at all convincing in itself:
alternatives seemed equally possible, and
there was always the element of chance. As
a physician and psychiatrist 1 saw the precarious
foundation of so many statements and actions,
and beheld the reign of imagined insights,
e. g. the causation of all mental illnesses
by brain processes (I called all this talk
about the brain, as it was fashionable then,
brain mythology; it was succeeded later by
the mythology of psychoanalysis), and realised
with horror how, in our expert opinions,
we based ourselves on positions which were
far from certain, because we had always to
come to a conclusion even when we did not
know, in order that science might provide
a cover, however unproved, for decisions
the state found necessary. I was surprised
that so much of medical advice and the majority
of prescriptions were based, not on rational
knowledge, but merely on the patient's wish
for treatment.
From these experiences the basic question
emerged: What is science? What can it do?
Where are its limits? It became clear that
science, to deserve its name, must be cogent
and universally valid. Self-discipline in
making assertions is necessary above everything
to maintain the sharpest criticism, the clearest
consciousness of method, the knowledge in
which way, for what reasons, and with what
certainty, I know in each case. Neither sceptically
to surrender everything, nor to seize something
dogmatically as a conclusion in advance,
but rather to retain the attitude of the
researcher, accepting knowledge only on the
way, with its reasons, and relative to its
viewpoints and methods, turned out to be
far from easy. This attitude of mind is attainable
only with an ever-active intellectual conscience.
As a consequence of this procedure, it appeared
that cogent validity does indeed exist and
that it is a great privilege of man to be
able to grasp it with clear judgment. It
appeared, however, that such scientific knowledge
is always particularised, that it does not
embrace the totality of Being but only a
specific subject, that it affords no aim
to life, has no answer to the essential problems
that move man, that it cannot even furnish
a compelling insight into its own importance
and significance. Man is reduced to a condition
of perplexity by confusing the knowledge
that he can prove with the convictions by
which he lives.
If science, with its limitation to cogent
and universally valid knowledge, can do so
little, failing as it does in the essentials,
in the eternal problems: why then science
at all?
Firstly, there is an irrepressible urge to
know the knowable, to view the facts as they
are, to learn about the events that happen
to us: for example, mental illnesses how
they manifest themselves in association with
those that harbour them, or how mental illness
might be connected with mental creativity.
The force of the original quest for knowledge
disappears in the grand anticipatory gestures
of seeming total knowledge and increases
in mastering what is concretely knowable.
Secondly, science has had tremendously far-reaching
effects. The state of our whole world, especially
for the last one hundred years, is conditioned
by science and its technical consequences:
the inner attitude of all humanity is determined
by the way and content of its knowledge.
I can grasp the fate of the world only if
I can grasp science. There is a fundamental
question: why, although there is rationalism
and intellectualisation wherever there are
humans, has science emerged only in the Occident,
taking former worlds off their hinges in
its consequences and forcing humanity to
obey it or perish? Only through science and
face-to-face with science can 1 acquire an
intensified consciousness of the historical
situation, can I truly live in the spiritual
situation of my time.
Thirdly, I have to turn to science in order
to learn what it is, in all science, that
impels and guides, without itself being cogent
knowledge. The ideas that master infinity,
the selection of what is essential, the comprehension
of knowledge in the totality of the sciences;
all this is not scientific insight, but reaches
clear consciousness only through the pursuit
of the sciences. Only by way of the sciences
can I free myself from the bondage of a limited,
dogmatic view of the world in order to arrive
at the totality of the world and its reality.
The experience of the indispensability and
compelling power of science caused me to
regard throughout my life the following demands
as valid for all philosophising: there must
be freedom for all sciences, so that there
may be freedom from scientific superstition,
i. e. from false absolutes and pseudoknowledge.
By freely espousing the sciences I become
receptive to that which is beyond science
but which can only become clear by way of
it. Although I should pursue one science
thoroughly, I should nevertheless turn to
all the others as well, not in order to amass
encyclopedic knowledge, but rather in order
to become familiar with the fundamental possibilities,
principles of knowledge, and the multiplicity
of methods. The ultimate objective is to
work out a methodology, which arises from
the ground of a universal consciousness of
Being and points up and illuminates Being.
Above all, the sciences are to be employed
as a tool of philosophy. Philosophy is not
to be ranged alongside them as merely another
science. For even though it is linked to
science and never occurs without it, philosophy
is wholly different from science. Philosophy
is the thinking by which I become aware of
Being itself through inner action; or rather
it is the thinking which prepares the ascent
to Transcendence, remembers it, and in an
exalted moment accomplishes the ascent itself
as a thinking act of the whole human being.
2. How is communication possible?
I do not know which impulse was stronger
in me when I began to think: the original
thirst for knowledge or the urge to communicate
with man. Knowledge attains its full meaning
only through the-bond that unites men; however,
the urge to achieve agreement with another
human being was so hard to satisfy. I was
shocked by the lack of understanding, paralysed,
as it were, by every reconciliation in which
what had gone before was not fully cleared
up. Early in my life and then later again
and again I was perplexed by people's rigid
inaccessibility and their failure to listen
to reasons, their disregard of facts, their
indifference which prohibited discussion,
their defensive attitude which kept you at
a distance and at the decisive moment buried
any possibility of a close approach, and
finally their shamelessness, that bares its
own soul with out reserve, as though no one
were present. When ready assent occurred
I remained unsatisfied, because it was not
based on true insight but on yielding to
persuasion; because it was the consequence
of friendly cooperation, not a meeting of
two selves. True, I knew the glory of friendship
(in common studies, in the cordial atmosphere
of home or countryside). But then came the
moments of strangeness, as if human beings
lived in different worlds. Steadily the consciousness
of loneliness grew upon me in my youth, yet
nothing seemed more pernicious to me than
loneliness, especially the loneliness in
the midst of social intercourse that deceives
itself in a multitude of friendships. No
urge seemed stronger to me than that for
communication with others. If the never-completed
movement of communication succeeds with but
a single human being, everything is achieved.
It is a criterion of this success that there
be a readiness to communicate with every
human being encountered and that grief is
felt whenever communication fails. Not merely
an exchange of words, nor friendliness and
sociability, but only the constant urge towards
total revelation reaches the path of communication.
The painful stimulus that was philosophically
decisive was the question how I was myself
to blame for the insufficiency of communication.
The insufficiency was indubitable fact. But
the fault could not lie only with the others.
I, too, am human like them. The same sources
of inhibition of communication exist in me
as in them. The inner action, by which I
train myself, had to illumine my self-concealment,
arbitrariness and obstinacy, and to compel
me to strive towards a revelation that can
never be completed. The philosophical insight
became possible precisely through my own
failure. We can only recognise that evil
which is in ourselves. What we cannot be
at all, we cannot understand either.
The philosophical mood arose from the experience
of insufficiency in communication. Occupation
with mere object which does not lead somehow
to communication seemed wrong to me. Solitary
devotion to nature this deep experience of
the universe in the landscape and in the
physical nearness to its shapes and elements,
this source of strength for the soul- could
seem like a wrong done to other human beings,
if it became a means of avoiding them, and
like a wrong done to myself, if iempted me
to a secluded self-sufficiency in nature.
Solitude in nature can indeed be a wonderful
source of self-being
; but whoever remains solitary in nature
is liable to impoverish his self-being and
to lose it in the end. To be near to nature
in the beautiful world around me therefore
became questionable when it did not lead
back to community with humanity and serve
this community as background and as language.
Subsequently the question "What do they
mean for communication?" passed through
my philosophising with respect to all thought,
all. experience, and all subject-matters.
Are they apt to promote communication or
to impede it? Are they tempters to solitude
- or heralds of communication?
This led to the basic philosophical questions:
How is communication possible? What forms
of communication can be accomplished? What
is their relation to each other? In what
sense are solitude and the strength to be
able to be alone sources of communication?
The answers are given, especially in the
second volume of my Philosophy, in terms
of concrete representations-by psychological
means-and their principles will be treated
in my Logic.
The thesis of my philosophising is: The individual
cannot become human by himself. Self-being
is only real in communication with another
self-being. Alone, I sink into gloomy isolation-only
in community with others can I be revealed!
in the act of mutual discovery. My own freedom
can only exist if the other is also free.
Isolated or self-isolating Being remains
mere potentiality or disappears into nothingness.
In institutions that maintain soothing contact
between men under unexpressed conditions
and within unadmitted limits are certainly
indispensable for communal existence; but
beyond that they are pernicious, because
they veil the truth in the manifestation
of human Existenz with illusory contentment.
3. What is truth?
The limits of science and the urge toward
communication both point to a truth that
is more than a possession of the intellect.
The cogent correctness of the sciences is
but a small part of truth. This correctness,
in its universal validity, does not unite
us completely as real human beings, but only
as intellectual beings. It unites w in the
object that is understood, in the particular,
but not in the totality. Admittedly, men
can be true friends through scientific research,
by means of the ideas that are realised in
this process, and the impulses towards Existenz
that make their appearance in it. But the
correctness of scientific knowledge unites
all intellectual beings in their equality,
as it were, as replaceable points, not, in
its essence, as human beings.
To the intellect all else, in comparison
with what is correct, counts only as feeling,
subjectivity, instinct. In this division,
apart from the bright world of the intellect,
there is only the irrational, in which is
lumped together, according to the point of
view, what is despised or desired. The impulse
which pursues real truth by thought springs
from the dissatisfaction with what is merely
correct. The division, spoken of previously,
paralyses this impulse; it causes man to
oscillate between the dogmatism of the intellecharanscends
its limits and, as it were, the rapture of
the vital, the chance of the moment, life.
The soul becomes impoverished in all the
multiplicity of disparate experience. Then
truth disappears from the field of vision
and is replaced by a variety of opinions
which are hung on the skeleton of a supposedly
rational pattern. Truth is infinitely more
than scientific correctness.
Communication, too, points to this more.
Communication is the path to truth in all
its forms. Thus the intellect finds clarity
only in discussion. How man as an existent,
as spirit, as Existenz, is or can be in communication-that
is what allows all other truth to appear.
The truth that makes itself felt at the boundary
of science is the same that is felt in this
movement of communication. The question arises
what kind of truth it is.
We call the source of this truth the Encompassing,
to distinguish it from the objective, the
determinate, and particular forms in which
beings confront us. This concept is by no
means familiar and by no means self-evident.
We may clarify the Encompassing philosophically,
but we cannot know it objectively.
At this point the decision is made whether
we can attain philosophising or whether we
fall back again at the boundary where the
leap to transcending thinking must be made
. If such words as feeling, instinct, heart,
drives, and affections, which are suggestive
of psychological analysis, are claimed as
sources of truth, then we merely name the
basis of our life, but it remains in darkness,
causing us to slip down into supposedly comprehensible
psychology, while actually everything depends
on reaching the bright region of truly philosophical
thought.
The methods of transcending are the bases
of all philosophy. It is impossible to anticipate
briefly accomplish. Perhaps a few words may
suggest, even if not explain, what is meant.
Everything that becomes an object to me approaches
me, as it were, from the dark background
of Being. Every object is a determinate being
(as this confronting me in a subject-object
division), but never all Being. No being
known as an object is the Being.
Does not the sum of all objects form the
totality of Being? No. As the horizon encompasses
all things in a landscape, so all objects
are encompassed by that in which they are.
As we move towards the horizon in the world
of space without ever reaching it, because
the horizon moves with us and re-establishes
itself ever anew as the Encompassing at each
moment, so objective research moves towards
totalities at each moment which never become
total and real Being, but must be passed
through towards new vistas. Only if all horizons
met in one closed whole, so that they formed
a finite multiplicity, could we attain, by
moving through all the horizons, the one
closed Being. Being, however, is not closed
for us and the horizons are not finite. On
all sides we are impelled towards the Infinite.
We inquire after the Being which, with the
manifestation of all encountered appearance
in object and horizon, yet re cedes itself.
This Being we call the Encompassing. The
Encompassing, then, is that which always
makes its presence known, which does not
appear itself, but from which everything
comes to us.
With this fundamental philosophical thought
we must think beyond all determinate beings
to the Encompassing in which we are and to
the Encompassing which we are ourselves.
It is a thoughurns us round, as it were,
because it frees us from the shackles of
determinate. Being; yet the thought of the
Encompassing is only a first approach. In
its brevity it is still a purely formal concept.
With further elaboration, modes of the Encompassing
soon emerge (the Being of the Encompassing
as such is world and Transcendence; the Being
of the Encompassing that we are is an existent,
a consciousness in general, spirit, Existenz).
Thus arises the task of clarifying all modes
of the Encompassing. We become aware of truth
in its total possibilities, its extent, its
width and depth, only with the modes of the
Encompassing.
The clarification of all the Encompassing
derives its motive from our Reason and Existenz.
The impulses in which we open ourselves without
limit, in which we want to give language
to everything that is, embrace, as it were,
all that is most strange and most distant,
seeking a relation with everything, denying
communication to nothing, these we call reason.
This word, to be distinguished radically
from intellect, meets the condition of truth
as it can emerge from all modes of the Encompassing.
Philosophical logic is the self-comprehension
of reason.
Truth in this comprehensive sense, in which
the truth of the intellect (and that of the
sciences with it) is but an element, is founded
in the Existenz that we can become. What
matters is that our life is guided by something
unconditional which can only spring from
the decision. Decision makes Existenz real,
forms life and changes it in inner action,
which, through clarification, keeps us soaring
upward. When it is founded on decision, love
is no longer an unreliably moving passion,
but the fulfilmeno which alone real Being
reveals itself.
What must be done in thinking of life is
to be served by a philosophising that discovers
truth by retrospection and by anticipation.
This philosophising has no meaning unless
a reality of the thinker complements the
thought. This reality is not profession or-application
of a doctrine, but the practice of being
human which propels itself forward in the
echo of the thought. It is a movement, an
upward soaring on two wings as it were. Both
wings, the thinking and the reality must
support the flight. Mere thinking would be
an empty moving of possibilities, mere reality
would remain a dull unconsciousness without
self-comprehension, and therefore without
unfolding.
This philosophising emerged for me from psychology,
which had to change and became Existenz Clarification.
Existenz Clarification in its turn pointed
to Philosophical World Orientation and to
physics. Finally, the sense of this thinking
is understands itself in a Philosophical
Logic this considers not only the intellect
and its products
(judgment and conclusion), but discovers
the foundation of truth, in its complete
range, in the Encompassing. Being is not
the sum of objects; rather objects extend,
as it were, towards our intellect in the
subject-object division, from the Encompassing
of Being itself, which is beyond objective
comprehension, but from which nevertheless
all separate, determinate objective knowledge
derives its limits and its meaning and from
which it derives the mood that comes out
of the totality in which it has significance.
4. What is man?
As a living being among others man is the
subject of anthropology. In his inner aspect
he is a subject for psychology, in his objective
structures, that is in communal life, a subject
for sociology. Man, in his empirical reality,
can be a subject of research in many directions;
but man is always more than he knows or can
know about himself.
As something knowable man appears in his
manifold empirical aspects. As a being that
is known he is always divided up into whatever
he will reveal himself to be according to
the methods of research employed. He is never
a unity and a whole, never man himself, once
he has become the subject of knowledge.
If I want to reassure myself philosophically
about being human I cannot, therefore, stop
at the knowable aspects of empirical man
in the world. Man, in a way, is everything
(as Aristotle says about the soul). Becoming
aware of man's being means becoming aware
of Being in time as a whole. Man is the Encompassing
that we are; yet even as the Encompassing,
man is split. As I said before, we become
aware of the Encompassing that we are in
a number of ways: as an existent, as consciousness
generally, as spirit, as Existenz. Man lives
in his world as an existent. As thinking
consciousness generally he is searchingly
oriented towards objects. As spirit he shapes
the idea of a whole in his world existence.
As possible Existenz he is related to Transcendence
through which he knows himself as given to
himself in his freedom How man achieves unity
is a problem, infinite in time and insoluble;
but it is nevertheless the path to his search.
Man is less certain of himself than ever.
In philosophising man is not a species of
particular existent beside other existents,
but he becomes clear to himself as something
unique, something all-enclosing, something
completely open, as the greatest potentiality
and the greatest danger in the world, as
being the exception of Being, as the communication
of scattered Being, which in him reveals
itself to itself.
5. What is Transcendence?
Man is for us the most interesting being
in the world. We, as human beings ourselves,
want to know what we are and can be; but
a constant occupation with man causes surfeit.
It seems as if, in that occupation, the essential
was missed. For man cannot be comprehended
on the basis of himself, and as we confront
man's being there is disclosed the other
through which he exists. For man as possible
Existenz that is Transcendence but while
man is in the world as a perceptive reality,
Transcendence is, as if it were not there.
Nor is it fathomable. Its being itself is
doubtful And yet all philosophising is directed
towards the goal of achieving certainty abouranscendence.
It may be objected that philosophy is mistakenly
trying to achieve what only religion can
achieve. In the cult religion offers the
bodily presence, or at least experience,
of Transcendence. It founds man on God's
revelation. It points paths of faith in revealed
reality, in mercy and salvation, and it gives
guarantees. Philosophy am achieve none of
that.
If philosophising is a revolving round Transcendence,
it must therefore have a relation to religion.
The manner in which philosophy and religion
react to each other is indeed an expression
of their self comprehension and of the depth
of their realisation. Historically we see
this relation in the form of struggle, of
subordination, of exclusion. A final and
unchanging relation is not possible. Here
a boundary shows itself. Where the problem
is not merely grasped by insight but is actually
solved, man has become narrow. When religion
is excluded by philosophy or philosophy by
religion; when one side asserts dominance
over the other, by claiming to be the sole
and most exalted authority, then man loses
his openness to Being and his own potentiality
in order to obtain a final closing of knowledge,
but even this remains closed to him. He becomes
whether he limits himself to religion or
to philosophy, dogmatic, fanatical and, finally,
with failure, nihilistic. To remain truthful
religion needs the cot science of philosophy.
To retain a significant content philosophy
needs the substance of religion; yet any
formula, such as this, is too simple; for
it obscures the fact that there is more than
one original truth in man. All that is possible
is to avoid mistaking one for the other.
Philosophy, from it side, cannot wish to
fight religion. It must acknowledge it, albeit
as its polar opposite, yet related to it
through this polarity. Religion must always
interest it because philosophy is constantly
stirred up, prodded, and addressed by its
Philosophy cannot wish to replace religion,
compete with it, nor make propaganda on its
own behalf against it. On the contrary: philosophy
will have to affirm religion at least as
the reality to which it, too, owes in existence.
If religion were not the life of mankind,
there would be no philosophy either.
Philosophy as such, however, cannot look
for Transcendence in the guarantee of revelation,
but must approach Being in the self-disclosures
of the Encompassing that are present in man
as man (not in the proofs of the intellect
or in the insights which the intellect, as
such, might obtain) and through the historicity
of the language of Transcendence.
The question "What is Transcendence?"
is not answered, therefore, by a knowledge
of Transcendence. The answer comes indirectly
by a clarification of the incompleteness
of the world, the imperfectibility of man,
the impossibility of a permanently valid
world order, the universal failure bearing
in mind at the same time that there is not
nothing, but that in nature, history, and
human existence, the magnificent is as real
as the terrible. The decisive alternative
in all philosophising is whether my thinking
leads me to the point where I am certain
that the "from outside" of Transcendence
is the source of the "from inside",
or whether I remain in Immanence with the
negative certainty that there is no outside
that is the basis and goal of everything
the world as well as what I am myself.
No proof of God succeeds in philosophy if
it attempts to provide compelling knowledge;
but it is possible for "proofs"
of God to succeed as ways of transcending
thought. Rational thinking can transcend
the categories of all that is thinkable to
the point where opposites coincide; it can
go beyond them in the individual category,
e g. that of sufficient cause or purpose-to
the, in fact, untenable thought of a last
cause and a final purpose. In that way, the
necessity of seeking is understood in the
baselessness of our merely factual existence
and our soul is kept open to the Origin.
The representation of the fragmentation of
Being and the radical contradictoriness present
in every form demonstrates that nothing we
can know endures through itself.
Part of the externality of Transcendence
is its unknowability; its internality is
the code message of all things. In view of
the fact that the limit and the basis of
all things can be made tangible, it is possible
to perceive everywhere the thread of light
which connects them with Transcendence. Even
though Transcendence is thus immanent, it
is so only in an unlimited ambiguity and
cannot be grasped with any finality. Philosophising
merely establishes the general right to trust
in that which seems to speak to me as the
light of Transcendence.
How I understand this language, however,
is based on what I really am myself. What
I am myself is based on my original relations
to Transcendence: in defiance and in surrender,
in falling away and in soaring up, in obedience
to the law of day and in the passion of night.
When I philosophise I clarify and remember
and prepare how, through these relations,
I can experience Eternity in Time. The experience
itself cannot be forced and cannot be proved:
it is the fulfilled historicity of my Existenz.
Philosophy can further demonstrate the consequences
that appear when the interpretation of Being
wishes to restrict itself to pure immanence.
It can lift the veils that threaten at all
times to wrap man in untruth. It accomplishes
this with unprovable propositions of the
intellect, with supposed knowledge of the
world as a whole, and with results seemingly
scientific. But in doing away with pseudo-knowledge
philosophy does not establish a positive
knowledge of Transcendence comparable to
scientific knowledge.
Philosophy can clarify our conscience; it
can show how we experience the demand of
a universal law that we recognise as inevitable.
At the boundary it can show the real failure
even of obedience to this law, and cause
the individual to feel anew the demand for
unconditional obedience which addresses him
in his historicity - though without universality
or universal validity; and here again philosophy
can show the boundary and the failure in
Time.
On all paths it is essential to reach the
Source where h highest consciousness the
demand becomes audible in the world which,
in spite of failing to be realised in the
world, yet produces the true Being through
obedience to it.
Philosophy can clarify that such a Source
is possible; yet what the Source is and what
it speaks it cannot anticipate. For reality
is historical and awaits every individual
that arises anew in this world. Everything
that philosophy says in substance and remembers
in history remains relative, in 50 far as
it is utterable, and has to be translated
and appropriated in order to become a path
to one's own original comprehension of the
Unconditional.
In thinking along these lines, philosophy
employs a two-fold presupposition that is
objectively unprovable but accomplishable
in practice. First, man is autonomous in
the face of all the authorities of the world:
the individual, reared by authority, at the
end of the process of his maturation decides
in his immediacy and responsibility before
Transcendence what is unconditionally true.
Second, man is a datum of Transcendence:
to obey Transcendence in that unconditional
decision leads man to his own Being.
How I can succeed in reading the code message
in the fullness of beings, in existing concretely
in my relations with Transcendence, in gaining
my own Being in historically formed obedience
to Transcendence, all this is conjoined to
the fundamental question how the One is in
the many, what it is, and how I can become
certain of the One.
On My Philosophy, from Existentialism from
Dostoyevsky to Sartre, edited by Walter Kaufman.
Half of article reproduced here.
|
Evans Experientialism 
