Volume 21, No. 1, Spring 2026

FORTHCOMING

Democracy and Cosmopolitanism

On the Luxury of Existing: Karl Jaspers and the Sacred (1975)
Reiner Schürmann | 1941 – 1993

In this essay, Reiner Schürmann approaches Karl Jaspers’s conception of the sacred as a lens through which to gauge the merits and limitations of the latter's philosophy of existence more generally. While Schürmann shares with Jaspers a critical view of any positivist restriction of knowledge, he argues that Jaspers' own understanding of the "scission of Being" separating existence from empirical reality results in a sweeping and equally problematic rejection of the possibilities of cognition. By locating the scission of Being between historical reality and existence, Jaspers winds up paradoxically affirming the restriction of all empirical knowledge to positivist knowledge. By contrast, Schürmann argues that the rupture must be positioned within historical reality, and its identification is dependent upon the help of various forms of cognition.

Keywords: Heidegger, Martin; communication; historicity; philosophy of existence; theory of knowledge; cipher; scission of Being; ontology; transcendence; Dasein.

Between Jaspers and Heidegger: Reiner Schürmann’s undecidable Remarks on the Political
David Payne | Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden

This essay explores Reiner Schürmann's undecidable remarks on the political. This will require that his hesitations are situated within a more clearly delineated – though for all that speculative – problem surrounding "the fate of the political." In speaking of the "fate of the political," immediate attention needs to be paid to the double genitive operative here, inasmuch that the political can be read either as the subject or object of this locution. On the one hand, "the fate of the political" points to the fate of phenomena that the political is responsible for displaying, for putting into (and out of) play. On the other hand, the phrase contains what doubtless for some may prove more disconcerting, since it broaches the possibility that the political is itself fated, that its very own display might itself have outplayed itself. The political as eclipsed. This second interpretive possibility, which will be inquired into below, will open up for an investigation into the "finitude of the political."

Keywords: tba.

"A luxury, perhaps": The Symbol versus the Cipher in the early Reiner Schürmann's Critique of Karl Jaspers
Francesco Guercio | European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland
Ian Alexander Moore | Loyola Marymount University

In the late 1960s, Reiner Schürmann began developing, alongside his work on Eckhart, a "hermeneutics of the symbol." His theological interest in the sacred and his philosophical interrogation of the ontological difference led him to regard Karl Jaspers as a privileged, albeit problematic, interlocutor. While Schürmann praised Jaspers' notions of the cipher and the symbol for their practical orientation and their "impact on existence," he nonetheless considered them insufficient as means to transcendence. On the basis of this insufficiency in Jaspers, Schürmann elaborated his own notion of the symbol, differentiating it both from Jaspers' conception of the symbol and from his conception of the cipher. This paper reconstructs Schürmann's analysis and suggests that his later critiques of Jaspers—concerning origins, the empirical, historicity, community, and communication—can be fully appreciated only when they are traced back to this initial symbolic divergence.

Keywords: Heidegger, Martin; theology; Dasein; transcendence; the sacred; God; the Other; existence; empirical; objectivity; historicity.

History and Existence: Reiner Schürmann's Critique of Jaspers
Kieran Aarons | University of Detroit Mercy
Nicolas Schneider | Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany

This essay aims to demonstrate how Reiner Schürmann's critique of Karl Jaspers prefigures both his later critiques of Hannah Arendt as well as his own philosophy of broken bonds. Schürmann argues that by grounding his philosophy in an absolute separation or rupture between the historical and the existential, Jaspers deprives himself of the conditions of possibility of any philosophy of existence. Rather than employing hermeneutical interpretation, Jaspers’s rejection of all forms of knowledge as inadequate to the existential leads him to replace it with an individualistic "philosophical faith." Against this, Schürmann claims that conceptual inquiry and its objectifications can indeed provide meaningful access to existence without therefore abandoning the critique of representationalism. This is expressed in his relentless attempts, throughout his philosophical writings, to work through the conflict that does not so much separate the empirical from the existential as traverse the historical-ontological unity of their opposition.

Keywords: Kant, Immanuel; Arendt, Hannah; Existenzphilosophie; hermeneutics; phenomenology; scission of Being; historicity; double bind.

Cosmopolitanism, World Philosophy, and the Axial Theory of History
Pierre Keller | University of California, Riverside

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Keywords: tba.

In the Shadow of Modern Colonialism: Totalitarianism or Democracy? Karl Jaspers' View on the Future of Modernity and the Authoritarian Turn in Contemporary Global Politics
Hans Schelkshorn | University of Vienna, Austria

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Keywords: tba.

Karl Jaspers, India, and Mahatma Gandhi: On the Usefulness of Jaspers' Book on the Atomic Bomb
Gerrit Steunebrink | Radboud University, Netherlands

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Keywords: tba.