Karl Jaspers
and Paul Ricoeur conducted a lively and respectful
public debate about religion. Ricoeur wrote his first
book on the philosophy of Karl Jaspers,(1)
had a published exchange with Jaspers on the question
of
religion,(2)
and continued to refer to Jaspers in many subsequent
books and essays. Whereas phenomenology and existentialism
and deep knowledge of the Western tradition of philosophy
gave them much in common, they differed most sharply
about religion. In this essay I propose to revisit
their debate and show that on several key points,
thanks to a careful reading of Jaspers, the gap between
them can be reduced if not overcome.
For Ricoeur, a discussion of
Jaspers on religion is complicated because Jaspers,
rather than taking religion on its own terms and
reflecting on it philosophically, takes it out
of its own context and locates it in "the new problematical
area of the
metaphysical dimension of reality."(3) Religion
thereby becomes a philosophical question worked out
in terms of the relation between appearance and Being
(or Transcendence). This is problematic for Ricoeur
since he sees it as a stumbling block for the Christ-myth
which is banished by a totally different conception
of mediation. From Jaspers' perspective, "religious
mediation [of which Christianity is a prime example]
is unacceptable because it claims to localize, and
then to guarantee, the presence of Transcendence
in immanence."(4) This critique does apply to some
versions of Christianity, the authoritarian ones
that Jaspers discusses in Von der Wahrheit under
the heading of "Catholicity." Ricoeur agrees with
this critique of authoritarian religion, calling
it religion's pretension; he holds that Jaspers misses
what he calls religion's intention.
It must be pointed out, however,
that Jaspers, working from his "metaphysical" perspective,
can affirm some kinds of religious adherence, including
Christian ones. That the Christ-myth is not simply
banished can be seen by noting the several important
points in this passage from Philosophie, Vol. III:
In extended historicity Existenz follows
the substance of the tradition out of which it arose. The
fact that the metaphysical content is historic means that
Existenz adheres to the revelation of transcendence it
has received in the particular configuration it has encountered
and in the language it has heard. This is so not because
this revelation is one configuration among others, thus
also a truth, but because it is, for Existenz, simply the
truth on the basis of which its self-being will stand or
fall.... As long as a community of free Existenzen is kept
in motion by such historic form, Existenz will not confuse
the meaning of universality and hence will remain open
to the truth of other Existenzen. Adhering unconditionally
to its own truth and conscious of its historicity, Existenz
would avoid exclusivity vis-à-vis others as well
as the claim to universality.... Existenz would, however,
respond affirmatively to the question whether the being
of the self in its transcendent relatedness could be grounded
in an accident of history. Historicity becomes the source
of the conviction of not being everything and of not regarding
oneself as the sole type of being there ought to be.(5)
An example of how Ricoeur shares
Jaspers' rejection of authoritarian religion is
found in his comments on the status of Scripture.
Ricoeur is "frightened by the word 'sacred'" applied
to Scripture because that could lead to arbitrariness,(6)
unnecessary compulsion, and resistance to critical
reflection. Moreover, in the case of the Christian
Bible, history shows that the text is not sacred
because adopting the canon involved choosing some
texts rather than others and because it was decided
that the texts could be translated into other languages
than the originals. He writes, "I am prepared
to say that I recognize something revealing that
is not frozen in any ultimate or immutable text."(7) Ricoeur is willing to say that Scripture is "authoritative," meaning
that it is a "text that constitutes the founding
act of the community."(8) But since revealing
is historical, "a permanent process of opening
something that is closed, of making manifest something
that was hidden,"(9) the community formed
around it is dynamic and changing. Scripture, nonetheless,
is a constant for the Christian community because
preaching permanently reinterprets it, and not
some other Scripture or literary text. Preaching
on another text would he a crisis for the community,
would put its identity in question, but would not
be a sacrilege. The continuity of one community
would be broken, but perhaps another community
would be in formation.
Now that we see that Jaspers
and Ricoeur stand together in rejecting authoritarian
and dogmatic religion, their opposition must lie
elsewhere. Let us go back to Ricoeur's contention
that whereas religion's primary intention is to save
freedom from its vanity.(10) Jaspers defines religion
in terms of the relation between appearance and Being.
If the primordial problems of religion and philosophy
are salvation and speculation respectively, they
can be in polar relation, a position that Ricoeur
advocates. He thinks, however, that Jaspers, by regarding
religion in terms of appearance and Being, is committed
to putting philosophy and religion in a mutually
exclusive relation. Is this the case?
The first thing to be said is
that Jaspers does not understand speculation in the
traditional sense of thinking that attempts to provide
a systematic theory of reality. For him, the metaphysical
dimension, and along with it ciphers and the reading
of ciphers, emerge only when the destiny of Existenz is at stake. There is, then, a religious dimension
to Jaspers' philosophizing, as witness his adoption
and development of the category of philosophical
faith. The question is whether Jaspers' philosophical
faith excludes religion, by either rejecting it or
absorbing it, as Ricoeur seems to think.
At one point in his exposition
of Jaspers, Ricoeur says that Jaspers forces a choice "between
the 'encipherment' (Chifferwerden) of all
things, and the Christian incarnation."(11) But
a look at the passage that Ricoeur cites in support
of his
point (at the very end of Von der Wahrheit)
shows that Jaspers is objecting not to Christianity
or
all positive religion but to those who claim that
their revelation and special historicity have validity
for all humans. Jaspers is criticizing those versions
of Christian teaching about Jesus which carry a certain
metaphysics, namely, that Jesus is both man and God.
Since Ricoeur has never adopted the metaphysics that
provided the terms in which the Chalcedonian Christological
dogmas were stated, it does not seem to me that he
needs to conclude that Jaspers is forcing a choice
between encipherment and Christian incarnation. The
issue for both thinkers is whether there is confusion:
between cipher and Being itself (Jaspers); between
symbol and that which is symbolized (Ricoeur). Again,
I find that they agree more than disagree.
The passage from Von der
Wahrheit is also
pertinent to Ricoeur's contention that Jaspers'
philosophical faith is prideful self-absorption on
the part of Existenz. The metaphysical experience
is not, for Jaspers, just a one-way matter originating
in Existenzen. He says, "Transcendence
has spoken historically...everywhere."(12) Existenz is
a gift in the first place, and when Existenz and
Transcendence
are related by ciphers the time for asserting ownership
and control has passed. If Ricoeur is right that
religion is concerned primarily with the salvation
of freedom, it is hard to see what quarrel he can
have with Jaspers who says that "the idea of
God is necessary so that man may come to himself,
so that man may become free of all the world for
himself," but that "an invented God cannot
have such an effect.... Only an actual God is capable
of this.... The origin lies in God. To each man must
be given from Him what he becomes through the fact
that he begins to perceive Being and how he begins
to perceive it."(13)
And, finally, the very last lines
of Von der Wahrheit suggest that philosophy
does not take Existenz all the way to the
goal, that philosophy (even philosophical faith)
does not completely absorb
or annex religion. "The communication of philosophy
does not give essential reality but makes it possible
to become aware of it. Philosophy awakens, makes
one attentive, shows ways, leads the way for a while,
makes ready, makes one ripe for the experience of
the utmost (das Äußerste)."(14)
I find here not mutual exclusion of philosophy and
religion,
but a strong hint of a complementary polarity à la Ricoeur, where philosophy and religion have distinct
roles.
So perhaps the conflict between
Jaspers and Ricoeur is not at the global level where
we have been working so far. Let us see whether it
lies in what Ricoeur finds to be a "confusion
of guilt and finitude" in Jaspers' account of
religion.(15) That Ricoeur regards this as an important
point is no surprise, since he devoted an entire
book to making the distinction between these two
concepts.(16)
At the level of eidetic reflection on human being
Ricoeur finds fallibility (finitude) and only the
possibility of fault (guilt). The reality of guilt
appears only when philosophy addresses, at the level
of empirics, actual human experience. Jaspers, according
to Ricoeur, makes the confusion because he finds
guilt at both the metaphysical and moral levels.
That is, guilt is a constitutional limitation of
existence and becomes deeper through specific action.
By becoming inevitable, Ricoeur says, guilt tends
invincibly to become a misfortune of existing which
is absolutely past possibility of pardon and redemption.(17)
What is more, Ricoeur thinks
that this makes understandable "the whole orientation
of the philosophy of Jaspers toward foundering rather
than toward 'rebirth'."(18) The ensuing paragraphs
complete the indictment in terms that are for the
most part prominent in Jaspers' own text: defeat,
disintegrative process, disaster, strange appetite
for ruin, wish to annihilate, abysmal lack, failure,
defiance, passion for the night, surrender, the drive
to destroy oneself, the drive of Existenz toward
its own failure, and the necessary ruin of everything
that becomes. The section ends with Ricoeur's judgment
that "'vanity' lies at the heart of the philosophy
of Jaspers" and his suggestion that Existenz is
burdened by "a freedom which is less enamored
of Being than of its own power to choose and its
own glory."(19) We must now assess Ricoeur's
account of Jaspers.
It seems that Ricoeur's concern
over Jaspers' confusion of finitude with guilt has
skewed his reading of Jaspers. He writes, "What
the believer cannot understand is a doctrine of guilt
loosed from a doctrine of forgiveness. For him guilt
is known retrospectively from the depths of a dawning
restoration."(20) The inability to understand
makes it impossible for Ricoeur to find any significant
element of deliverance or salvation (Erlösung,
is the multivalent German word) in Jaspers. The result
is that he seizes on the many negative terms listed
above and takes them as representative of Jaspers'
position. I believe I can show that if Ricoeur had
correctly seen the role of the negative terms he
would have been able to see the positive side of
Jaspers' position.
Even though Ricoeur's exposition
of Jaspers pays attention to the structure of Jaspers'
main works, Philosophie and Von der
Wahrheit, I contend
that he misreads the movement of the most pertinent
part of Philosophie, Vol. III, on metaphysics. Ricoeur acknowledges Jaspers' own statement that
each chapter is a self-contained whole with all of
the main elements in play in the way appropriate
to a given chapter. Accordingly, Philosophie does
not repeat the classical move from world to self
to God. Ricoeur notes that, "From the very first
pages of Philosophie, absolute Being is already present
as the goal of philosophy,"(21) and cites the
following example: "I can never be other wise
than in a situation, conscious of objects and searching
for
being-in-itself."(22) With this structural feature
in mind, Ricoeur rightly thinks that he is justified
in beginning his exposition of Jaspers' religious
philosophy with "the final thesis of the work,
the theory of ciphers."(23) What follows is
a searching and insightful presentation of Jaspers
on the relation
between philosophy and religion.
The problem with Ricoeur's reading
emerges in the concluding "Critical Remarks." Here
he contends that because Jaspers conflates finitude
and guilt he can offer nothing but failure and despair.
Since the concept of foundering or shipwreck (Scheitern)
is central to Jaspers' philosophy, he can find many
examples of failure and breakup. He takes them from
many different places in Jaspers' books, particularly
from the section on tragedy in Von der Wahrheit and
from the section on existential relations to transcendence
in Vol. III of Philosophie. But there is
a structural reason why this treatment of Jaspers
is deficient.
It fails to respect the movement of Volume III. As
I see it, this volume on metaphysics has four steps.
The first introduces the idea of Transcendence. The
next two, Formal Transcending and Existential Relations
to Transcendence, show how the realms of formal thought
and existence have a drive toward transcendence but
cannot break through to it on their own terms. The
book has its resolution in the fourth step, The Reading
of Ciphers. My point is that the middle steps, and
particularly the one dealing with existential relations
to transcendence that Ricoeur cites so often, should
not be taken as presenting Jaspers' position on the
relation of Existenz to Transcendence and
on the problem of guilt. Steps two and three lay
out an aporia, a difficulty that is addressed in
step four. Ricoeur is right to say that the theory
of ciphers
is Jaspers' "final thesis," but he is wrong
to ignore the reading of ciphers when he makes his
case on the question of deliverance. When he makes
his criticism he seems to have forgotten that he
earlier cited what I take to be the key passage to
the structural issue. At the end of the introductory
section on Transcendence, Jaspers writes, "The search for transcendence lies in the existential
relations to it [section three]; its presence lies
in cipher writing [section four]; the space for
both is held open by formal transcending [section
two]."(24)
A reference to Kant will perhaps
give a context for the argument I am making about
a structural reading of Jaspers. In The Great
Philosophers Jaspers
says that "Kant is the absolutely indispensable
philosopher" and that "the fate of philosophy
hinges on our attitude toward Kant." For Jaspers,
Kant "remains
a source of boundless inspiration," and he
wants "to enter into the movement of Kant's
creative thinking."(25) In Philosophie,
Jaspers says that Kant "always wants to transcend" and
creates the transcendental method to "transcend
to nonobjectiveness."(26) Vol. III of Philosophy is
a model example of how Jaspers enters into the movement
of Kant's thinking rather than woodenly
repeating it. Whereas Kant, in the "dialectic" chapters
of his Critiques, marks the limits of reason
by showing how it contradicts itself when it tries
to achieve
objective knowledge of what is not objective, Jaspers,
in the sections on "Formal Transcending" and "Existential
Relations to Transcendence," shows how neither of
these efforts can come to completion on their own
terms. "Formal Transcending," following
closely the rubrics of Kant's first two Critiques,
shows the impossibility of absolutizing the categories.
Jaspers concludes that "formal transcending
[by foundering] makes room for the cipher language
of transcendence."(27) Jaspers' creative advance
on Kant comes in the following section where he traces
a similar movement of transcending and foundering
under the existential rubrics of "Defiance and
Surrender," "Rise and Fall," etc. These sections, together, are a preparation for the
concluding one on the "Reading of Ciphers." There,
Jaspers offers his parallel to the Ideas and Ideal
of Reason which are Kant's nonobjectiveness. Jaspers
proposes "a kind of objectivity" that abides
by the strictures of Kant's critical philosophy,
namely, metaphysical objectivity or cipher. It is
in this section that we should look for Jaspers'
answer to the question of deliverance. Ricoeur's
failure to find deliverance in the earlier sections
is a failure to read Jaspers in the proper order.
Ricoeur's structural misreading,
which mistakes what we might call Jaspers' diagnosis
of a problem for his solution, is coupled, naturally
enough, with the second problem, his failure to see
the positive, though complex, proposal that Jaspers
makes for the relation between Existenz and Transcendence.
Since Ricoeur seems to find it significant that the
title of the final section of Reading Ciphers is "Vanishing
of Existence and Existenz as the Decisive Cipher
of Transcendence (Being in Foundering)," I will
focus my attention there. Jaspers himself raises
the pertinent issue: "Contained in the multifariousness
of foundering is the question whether foundering
is destruction plain and simple because that which
founders does, indeed, perish, or whether in foundering
a Being becomes manifest; whether foundering can
be not merely foundering but may be perpetuation."(28)
Jaspers holds that foundering
requires knowledge and that therefore only humans
can founder. The knowledge that is pertinent to foundering
is the discovery that every claim to finality is
false. A systematic doctrine of God overreaches,
for by presuming to talk about God in conceptual
terms it shows that it literally does not know what
it is talking about. Experience shows that an optimistic
philosophy of love is inadequate, just as is a pessimistic
philosophy of despair.
Jaspers distinguishes between
duration (Dauer) and perpetuation or eternalization
(Verewigen). If, as a natural being, I try
to achieve duration, I discover that things natural,
fabricated,
and human pass away. Timeless concepts do not satisfy
because they are unreal and empty. Jaspers says that "When...existence
as possible Existenz ultimately sees authentic Being
only in the present actuality of its own self-being,
even destruction and perishing become a Being if
they are grasped freely."(29) The present actuality
retains its historical particularity, but now Existenz is
aware that its own being is at stake. It is not,
however, left all alone, for it is now able to apprehend
Being. Being is present, but in the necessarily ambiguous
way that it must be since it is not present as such,
but through some aspect of worldly experience. Since
the distinctive thing about foundering is that a
cipher may emerge, any particular experience, including
destruction, can be the occasion for it. Accordingly,
Jaspers says that "there is nothing that could
not be a cipher."(30) And the complementary
and equally basic point is that "Existenz is
that which relates to itself and to its Transcendence."(31) That is, Existenz is only fully itself in a realized
relation
to Transcendence. Jaspers writes, "For any possible
Existenz, whether without, against, or with transcendence,
transcendence remains the ceaseless question." Jaspers
gives his answer to the question when he says in
the next paragraph, "The test of the possibility
of my Existenz is the knowledge that it rests upon
transcendence."(32)
Since no particular outcome is
attached to the achieved relation of Existenz to
Transcendence, we see that deliverance for Jaspers
is simply the assurance of Being: "That there
is Being suffices."(33) There is a certain peace
and serenity in this assurance. But it is attained
on the other side of fear, the ultimate fear in which
all seems hopeless. "The leap from fear to serenity
is the most tremendous one a man can make. That he
succeeds in it must be due to a reason beyond the Existenz of his self-being. Indefinably,
his faith ties him to transcendent being."(34)
The tie to transcendence, formed by the fear-leap-serenity
triad,
also makes possible seeing mundane realities without
reserve. This calls to mind Whitehead's insistence
on "the awful ultimate fact, which is the human
being, consciously alone with itself, for its own
sake.... if you are never solitary, you are never
religious" and that religion is what you do
with your solitariness: reach out to others, to the
world, and to God.(35)
The preceding discussion of religion
has attempted to show that the opposition between
Jaspers and Ricoeur is not as sharp as Ricoeur wanted
to draw it in 1957. If I am correct, there are non-oppositional
differences between them, such that each allows space
for the position of the other. I now turn to some
of those differences as they relate specifically
to the reading of ciphers.
Ricoeur's programme for a philosophy
of the will, announced in 1950, was to have three
parts: an eidetics, an empirics, and a poetics. The
first appeared in 1950 as Le Volontaire et l’involontaire (translated as Freedom
and Nature) and the second
in 1960 as Finitude et culpabilité: (I) L'Homme
faillible, (II) La symbolique du mal (translated
respectively as Fallible Man and The
Symbolism of Evil). The poetics never appeared. Whereas the first
two parts of the philosophy of will made an "abstraction" of
Transcendence, the poetics is to take up the connection
of Transcendence and freedom. Writing in terms that
resonate with Jaspers, Ricoeur says in the 1950 Introduction
to the whole project,
There is no thinkable system of freedom
and Transcendence.... We shall be led to criticize systems
which seek a conceptual harmonization of freedom and of
Transcendence, whether by sacrificing one to the other,
or by conjoining, without paradox, a half-freedom and a
half-Transcendence. We hope to show the fruitfulness of
an "a-logic of paradox" for recasting the old
debates about freedom and grace.... The paradox of freedom
and Transcendence can be sustained only as a mystery which
it is the task of poetics to discern.(36)
Although the third volume of
the Philosophy of the Will did not appear,
Ricoeur published several essays that carry out
some of
the tasks envisaged. For example, the 1961 essay, "The
Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection," culminates
in a searing critique of original sin when it is
taken as an intelligible concept which can yield
knowledge rather than as a symbol. Although
original sin is a pseudo-concept, "its irreplaceable
function is...to integrate the schema of inheritance
with that of contingence."(37) What follows
are four decades of work focused on the interpretation
of the "originary" language of religion.
He faults Ian Ramsey for discussing religious language
that "is highly elaborated from a theological
point of view." He holds
that "we should
consider the most originary, the most pretheological,
level of religious discourse possible. The parables,
proverbs, and eschatological sayings, for example."(38) Religious
discourse, rather than being scientific or ethical,
is existential. So although the Genesis account
of creation "is cosmologically out of date,
it remains existentially true."(39)
Ricoeur
aims the beam of reflection underneath objective
language and at the primitive,
the primordial, the original, which give "access
to the manifestation of the world...a world in
which man is placed at the center."(40) For
Ricoeur the existentialist there is a relation
between
limit-expressions and limit-experiences. Originary "religious
language...uses limit expressions only to open
up our very experience, to make it explode in the
direction of experiences that themselves are limit-experiences. The parable...redescribes experience. But it does
not redescribe it in the fashion of one more poetic
language among others, but according to its intending
of the extreme."(41) A
few lines later, Ricoeur, wanting to be more precise
about
the limit
experiences
he has in mind, says that they are not "just
experiences of distress as in the thought of Karl
Jaspers."(42)
We seem to have here, in 1978,
a reprise of the 1957 criticisms. For once again
Jaspers is linked with distress, and Ricoeur refers
to (merely) poetic language. But does the contrast
with Jaspers need to be drawn so sharply? It is
true that Jaspers, who deals with forms of language
at their breaking points, often discusses "highly
theological" religious language. But three
other factors place Jaspers closer to Ricoeur:
(1) Jaspers' positive appreciation of biblical
religion, (2) his conviction that faith is an existential
matter, and (3) his insistence that faith should
not lead one out of the world, but, rather, back
into the historical situation. I conclude by mentioning one
further point of convergence between Jaspers and
Ricoeur, namely their handling of the question
of God. Whereas Ricoeur reads Jaspers as in the
speculative tradition of Plotinus, Spinoza, and
Hegel and worries that the vanity of Existenz leads
Jaspers to a philosophical gnosticism,(43) it
seems to me that Leonard Ehrlich is closer to the
truth
when he writes that even though "Jaspers seems
not to have read Maimonides...it should be clear
that in conception, if not in its execution and
the historic circumstances in which it occurred,
Maimonides' negative theology approaches the intention
of Jaspers' cipher-philosophy."(44) Although
Ricoeur does not offer a negative theology (that
would
bring him too close to speculative concerns), he
is also a minimalist on the God question. A minimalist,
however, for whom God is the central religious
name.
The word "God" does not function
as a philosophical concept.... Even if one is tempted to
say...that "God" is the religious name for being,
still the word "God" says more: it presupposes
the total context constituted by the whole space of gravitation
of stories, prophecies, laws, hymns, and so forth. To understand
the word "God" is to follow the direction of
the meaning of the word. By the direction of the meaning
I mean its double power to gather all the significations
that issue from the partial discourses and to open up a
horizon that escapes from the closure of discourse.... The God-referent is at once the coordinator of these various
discourses and the index of their incompleteness, the point
at which something escapes them.(45)
In his Reply in 1957, Jaspers,
without abandoning his position, found a way to
accept many of Ricoeur's criticisms. I hope to
have shown (1) that some of Ricoeur's other criticisms
are without basis and (2) that a Jaspersian philosopher
could affirm the hermeneutical philosophy of religion
that Ricoeur has developed during the past four
decades. I hope, as well, that I have shown that
it is still fruitful to consider together these
two exemplars of the loving struggle of philosophizing.
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