A closer
examination of Jaspers' earlier books leads to the
conclusion that the concept of reason has neither
a dominant position in his Psychology of World-Views (1918), nor in his main work in Existentialism or
existential philosophy, the three volumes of the
book Philosophy published in 1932. The concept
of reason became relevant for Jaspers in his Existence
and Reason (1936). Then this concept got a basic
priority in the large book Von der Wahrheit (1948),
and also in Jaspers' main work in political philosophy,
The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man (1958).
An explicit demand to call his later philosophizing
a "philosophy
of reason" we can find in the book Reason
and Anti-Reason in our Time, written in 1950.(1)
These two different periods of
Jaspers' philosophizing are closely related to specific
biographical facts in his life. The period of his
existentialism or existential philosophizing – from
1919 until 1936 – was highly influenced by
two events which became formative all over Jaspers'
life. One event was a disastrous recognition concerning
his health: Jaspers was eighteen years old when he
learned that he was living with an incurable disease.
In his Philosophical Memoir we can read:
One basic fact of my existence qualified all the decisions of my life: I was organically ill from childhood on (bronchiectasis and cardiac decompensation). I was eighteen...when the correct diagnosis was made.... I read a treatise by Rudolf Virchow which described my ailment in every detail and gave the prognosis: in their thirties at the latest, these patients die of pyemia. I realized what mattered in treatment. I slowly learned the procedures, partly inventing them myself. They could not be carried out properly if I led the normal life of the healthy. If I wished to work, I had to risk what was harmful; if I wished to go on living, I had to observe a strict regimen and to avoid what was harmful. My existence passed between these poles. Frequent failures, by allowing fatigue to poison the body, were inevitable, and every time recovery was essential. The point was not to let concern about my illness turn the illness into the sum and substance of life. My task was to treat it properly almost without noticing it, and to keep working as if it did not exist. I had to adapt everything to it, without giving up to it. Time and again I made mistakes. The exigencies arising from my illness touched every hour and affected all my plans.(2)
The permanent confrontation
with the imminence of his own death because of
his disease had a great influence upon one of the
main thesis of Jaspers' existential philosophy,
namely, that the experience of boundary situations
like death, suffering, struggling, or guilt, is
an unavoidable condition of human existence. Experiencing
and overcoming those situations in the right way
provides a basic opportunity to realize the meaning
of life.
Another important biographical
fact during Jaspers' period of existential philosophizing
was his marriage to Gertrud Mayer in 1910, a woman
of Jewish origin. About her first encounter, he wrote
in his Autobiography:
Loneliness, melancholy, self-consciousness,
all that changed when I, at the age of twenty-four, met
Gertrud Mayer. Unforgettable when, accompanied by her brother,
I first entered her room.... It was as if self-evident
that the conversation soon turned to the basic questions
of life, as if we had already known each other for a long
time. From the first hour there was between us an inconceivable
harmony, something never expected to be possible.(3)
The deep personal relationship
with his wife has also shaped his conception of
interpersonal existential communication that
became a second aspect for the meaning of life
in Jaspers'
existentialism. A third and equally important biographical
fact that influenced Jaspers' philosophy and radically
changed his personal life, was his confrontation
with the Nazi-regime in Germany. After the Nazis
had come to power in 1933, Jaspers was excluded
from all administrative duties at the University
of Heidelberg. In 1937, he was denied the right
to teach, and a year later he was forbidden to
publish. Toward the end of WWII, Jaspers and his
wife were in great danger of being deported to
an extermination camp. His experience of Nazi-terrorism
was the dominant motivation why Jaspers together
with his wife left Germany after the war, and moved
to Switzerland to accept a professorship at the
University of Basle in 1948. These encounters constituted
a crucial motivation for developing a third conception
of the meaning of life, namely, a human being
is governed by reason.
In addition to my thesis, that
we have to distinguish three conceptions of the
meaning of life in Jaspers´ philosophy, I
wish to add a second thesis: All three of his conceptions
of the meaning of life are grounded on a normative
moral framework. We may call this framework an
implicit liberal ethos of humanity, or, in philosophical
terms, an implicit ethics of virtue. Jaspers never
makes explicit this moral framework as an ethical
position; indeed, he never intended to postulate
moral attitudes or virtues as explicit norms and
general ethical rules. He wanted, rather, to stimulate
their acceptance by his philosophy, and to appeal
to every individual in an indirect way to accept
these virtues in their own live and personal relations.
One final introductory remark
that I want to make concerns a severe methodological
problem that is implicated in Jaspers' existentialism
and his project of a transcending existential philosophizing.
I think that there is an element of mysticism in
his methodological framework that entails unacceptable
methodological consequences. This problem becomes
obvious in some of his meta-reflections on the
task of transcending philosophizing, where Jaspers
proposes to introduce contradictory statements
into philosophical contexts in order to accept
philosophical statements as mere sign-posts to
the dimension of a non-objective Being that he
calls "transcendence" and "existenz." He
wants us to relativise the descriptive meanings
and informative contents of philosophical statements.
We are confronted with a similar problem in connection
with the ladder-argument in Ludwig Wittgenstein's
Tractatus: If all sentences in the Tractatus have
the only function of climbing the steps of a ladder,(4)
and their cognitive and descriptive content is
absolutely irrelevant (i.e., if sentences
provide only a therapeutic function of learning
to see
the world in the right perspective), a discussion
of the descriptive content of those sentences is
of no purpose. Instead of serving as propositions,
they have only a therapeutic function, a sign-post
function. Whether or not they can fulfill such
function cannot be examined or proven, because
their sign-post dimension is non-objective and
cannot be verbally communicated.
I summarize my methodological
objection to Jaspers in this way: We must not follow
Jaspers in his demand to transcend or relativise
the descriptive contents of his sentences; in this
case we would not be allowed to give any interpretation
at all to his philosophical propositions. To be
sure, every interpretation presupposes a certain
content open to hermeneutic approaches. If every
content is a priori relativised, then we do not
have anything which can be interpreted in any way
or direction. In this case, philosophy as an activity
of interpretation and argumentation would come
to an end. There would remain only silence and
some intuitive awareness of a mystical or transcendental
dimension of Being, which we could not talk about
and communicate to others. This methodological
problem can be avoided only by not accepting Jaspers'
demand for transcending and relativising the contents
of his existential philosophy in a strict sense.
The best way to interpret him here is to see his
existential demands as an over-arching appeal to
an anti-dogmatic way of philosophizing, and to
a kind of philosophical open-mindedness that does
not reduce all Being to dimensions of empirical
and objective knowledge. The Anthropological Framework
We have come, now, to the second
section of my essay, which concerns the anthropological
framework of Jaspers' existential thinking. This
framework grounds the two conceptions of the meaning
of life that I mentioned earlier in connection with
Jaspers' Existentialist period.
Jaspers' anthropological framework
consists of a dual conception of man, and bears
in some basic aspects striking resemblances to
Immanuel Kant's philosophical anthropology and
to Søren Kierkegaard's conception of the
human being. Both influenced Jaspers intensively
as we can see from his early book Psychology
of World-Views (1919). Jaspers understands a human
being as an empirical and non-empirical phenomenon.
While the empirical dimension of man can be researched
by the sciences (e.g., biology, psychology, sociology),
the non-empirical dimension cannot be described
and explained in objectifying scientific terms.
In Psychology of World-Views, Jaspers argues that
the non-empirical dimension of humanity can be
elucidated only by a kind of hermeneutic approach
in psychology. In his works of existentialism he
holds the position that it is the task of an existential
transcending philosophizing to "elucidate" that
non-empirical dimension of human existence.
Furthermore, Jaspers argues that
a human being realises one's life and potentialities
in four modes, or four dimensions, of being. As the
first basic dimension of human self-realisation Jaspers
mentions naive vitality, or, vital existence. This
is the biological or physical part of oneself, where
physical conditions, spontaneous emotions, basic
interests and instinctive impulses dominate. Such
dimension of human life, Jaspers calls it bloßes
Dasein, is without self-reflection and self-consciousness.
Jaspers argues: "Physically I am part of life,
a part whose form and function is the continuity
of that ever-changing body of mine. I want this life;
without it I do not exist. I am present in its vital
functions, but these functions are not I. As nothing
but life, I would be just a natural process."(5)
The second dimension of human
self-realisation he calls Bewußtsein überhaupt (i.e., "consciousness in general" or "consciousness
at large"). This is to be understood by way
of analogy with Kant's epistemology: The human mind
has a mere formal structure in virtue of the forms
of perception (space and time) and the forms of conception
(categories of thought). Those formal elements are
a priori conditions for constituting knowledge. With
consciousness in general, Jaspers refers to the dimension
of logical thinking and rationality.
The third dimension of human
being Jaspers calls the dimension of Geist ("spirit" or "reason").
Though Geist is dependent upon correctness of understanding
and thinking, it goes beyond it. The specific capacity
of spirit is the production of ideas that allow one
to see different phenomena in terms of unities and
as parts of a meaningful whole. These ideas are manifest
in personal ideals, principles of religion, moral
world-views, political ideologies, creative conceptions
of the arts. Jaspers himself wrote three different
monographs concerning the idea of the university,
where the task and goals of university institutions
are pointed out.(6)
Now these three modes of being – or,
dimensions of self-realisation – represent
humans only as an empirical phenomenon. All human
beings, however, own as an existential possibility
or potentiality a fourth and non-empirical dimension
of self-realisation which is the highest form, self-realisation
as Existenz. The concept of Existenz stands for the
non-objective actuality of self-being and true self-hood,
the authentic ground of human being, exemplified
by the intimate dimension of personal autonomy, existential
freedom, and undetermined moral decisions. No empirical
studies or doctrines of ontology and ethics can provide
adequate understanding of subjectivity and humanity.
Understanding comes with realising this dimension
in one's own life and/or by elucidating it through
transcending philosophizing. "Self-realisation
as Existenz is equivalent to realising the meaning
of one's own life.
Jaspers' methodological conception
of elucidating Existenz has some basic aspects in
common with Kierkegaard's conception of subjective
reflection. Kierkegaard described this type of reflection
in contrary to objective reflection extensively in
his Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Objective
reasoning, as it dominates scientific thought, allows
one to gain knowledge of things in the world including
one's own objective nature (e.g., biological and
psychological nature). By subjective reflection,
one is directed to the non-objective and non-rational
dimension of selfhood. This kind of reflection, which
is genuine philosophical reflection, is not a mere
contemplation of oneself, but a reflection upon oneself
which itself is an action. It implies an act of self-conscious
choosing of oneself. This choice also implies a moral
act because in this act an individual takes full
responsibility for one's own life-style and its consequences.
Jaspers reformulates this Kierkegaardian position
in terms of the elucidation of Existenz.
In becoming Existenz,
one feels that existential self-realisation is not
the result
of ones own rational planning or solely a product
of ones own managing efforts. It is experienced as
a gift from Transcendence, or absolute Being, or
God, or the Encompassing – Jaspers uses these
terms (ciphers) synonymously – a dimension
of Being that, in a radical sense, is unknowable.
Jaspers cautions that religious creeds might evolve
into illegitimate objectifications and anthropomorphisations
of transcendent Being. Note that Jaspers does not
view religious faith in atheistic terms. Rather,
he takes a critical position against any conception
of a revelation that seeks to provide objective,
guaranteed proofs for the existence of God, or that
is bound to rituals, churches, priests, and theologians
who pretend to be the interpreters of God's will
or revelation.
How, then, can one realise one's
personal meaning of life as Existenz? Jaspers recognizes
tow basic possibilities: (1) the experience and overcoming
of boundary situations in a right way, and (2) the
experience of mutual existential communication with
another person. What follows is a brief analysis
of these two possibilities for realising the meaning
of life as developed by Jaspers during his period
of existentialism. Realising the Meaning of Life by Reacting to Boundary Situations
Like many other existentialists,
also Jaspers sees all human beings as constantly
involved in situations. We cannot leave a situation
without entering another. Occasionally, human beings
encounter unexpected events, or as Jaspers calls
them, Grenzsituationen (the term includes "boundary
situation," "limiting situation," "borderline
situation," and "ultimate situation").
Grenzsituationen cannot be dealt with by objective
and rational knowledge alone, that is typically
used to solve problems in everyday life. If we
try to escape boundary situations by managing them
with rationality and objective knowledge we must
necessarily founder. Instead, boundary situations
require a radical change in attitude in one's normal
ways of thinking. The proper way to react within
boundary situations "is not by planning and
calculating to overcome them but by the very different
activity of becoming the Existenz we potentially
are; we become ourselves by entering with open
eyes into the boundary situations. We can know
them only externally, and their reality can only
be felt by Existenz. To experience boundary situations
is the same as Existenz."(7)
Here again, the affinities
between Jaspers and Kierkegaard are evident. Jaspers
maintains that becoming Existenz by experiencing
boundary situations is necessarily tied to an intensive
process of self-reflection, i.e., a non-empirical
and non-objective relationship to one's self. By
means of self-reflection, a person elucidates his
or her own existential possibilities, and facing
boundary situations, the person is, ideally, lead
to an act of self-acceptance.
One of the most specific boundary
situations in human life is the inevitability of
death. Anticipating one's death, or that of a close
friend, a child or parent, can be the source of
fear and anxiety as well as nihilistic despair.
But death can also bring the occasion for living
authentically, without postponement or self-deception.
Jaspers points out a set of authentic moral attitudes
or virtues that should guide human beings confronted
by death: courage without self-deception, profound
serenity in spite of inextinguishable pain, finding
peace in realizing the finality of death, all of
this with the calm acceptance, composure, patience,
and dignity.
Another specific boundary situation
is suffering, and Jaspers focuses on the importance
of "active suffering" which is the opposite
of resignation. It implies effort to be happy despite
suffering. Due to the "antinomial structure" of
all life and reality, human beings always have
two basic options in confrontation with boundary
situations: an option of resignation, pessimism
and nihilistic despair, or in contrast, the option
of optimistic confidence in the meaning of life.
Moreover, the boundary situation
of guilt can bring a person the insight that both
action and non-action can always bring unforeseen
and unintended consequences that will affect others.
The authentic moral attitude Jaspers correlates
with guilt is one's permanent readiness for accepting
personal responsibility for all actions and their
consequences in the world.
Yet another boundary situation – inevitable
struggle – makes us conscious of the everlasting
life-struggles for material ends, prestige and
power, or social status in society. In struggle,
one's success is necessarily accompanied by the
defeat and suppression of other person's demands.
Struggle may be violent and coercive. Jaspers contrasts
the violent struggle for existence with an authentic
moral attitude, which he calls the "loving
struggle" for Existenz. The loving struggle
is a non-violent, non-coercive form of relation
to another person, the dominant norm of such a
relation is solidarity.
To summarize Jaspers' description
of the boundary situations, we may say that these
existential phenomena ought to be accompanied by
a radical change in one's personality and world-view.
In the unique and historical experience of boundary
situations, it is up to each individual to realise
the proper moral attitudes or virtues and, thereby,
individual authenticity. When succeeding in the
realisation of proper attitudes and virtues, one
has a good chance to realise the meaning of life,
at least as Jaspers has understood it during his
early period of existentialism: The internalisation
of such virtues into one's attitudes and life styles
is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for
realising the meaning of life.
Realising the Meaning of Life by Interpersonal Existential Communication
The second conception of realisation
of the meaning of life in Jaspers' existentialism
is grounded, as I already mentioned, in his philosophy
of communication. In his philosophical anthropology,
Jaspers distinguishes four types of communication
that are correlative to the distinction of the
four modes of human being. In the dimension of
naive vitality and spontaneous instinctive life,
humans live in primitive communities with others
who are used to reach vital ends, e. g., to satisfy
basic needs of sexuality, power, desires, etc. In this dimension of life the underlying motives
of communication are egocentric. In Kantian terms,
persons are treated only as means to an end, and
not as an end in itself.
In the dimension of consciousness
in general, a type of communication is realised
that is based on the capacity of rationality and
its formal rules and categories, such as, intellectual
discussions of experts with the aim of solving
a technical problem. Such experts can be replaced
should their intellectual capacity for solving
the given problem be exhausted. In this context,
it is not the irreplaceable individuality of a
person that constitutes the interpersonal relation
and communication, but rather the rational knowledge
and technical ability for problem-solving.
In the dimension of Geist,
human beings experience a mode of communication
that goes further than the previous two modes.
Jaspers writes: "Community in the idea of
a whole – of this state, this society, this
family, this university, this profession of mine – is
what puts me for the first time into substantial
communication.... Communication in the idea, and
in its realisation by Existenz, will move
a man closer to his fellow-man than will the intellect
or a purpose, or primitive community."(8)
While communication as vital
existence, consciousness in general, and Geist are objective forms of human interactions which
can be described and explained by the sciences,
the highest and most valuable form of communication
cannot be researched by the sciences nor adequately
described in an objectifying language. This type
of communication Jaspers calls "existential
communication." It can be elucidated only
by philosophy and is to be experienced in one's
own life. Existential communication constitutes
an intimate, personal relationship between two
human beings like friends, lovers, spouses, parent
and child, teacher and student, etc. Such intimate
forms of interpersonal communication entail existential
possibilities to realise the meaning of life as
Existenz. It is significant that Jaspers' moralistic
existentialist approach links this communicative
ideal of the meaning of life, yet again, to a set
of moral attitudes or virtues.
What follows is a brief discussion
of five such attitudes or virtues. The first attitude
concerns the dignity of solitude or the willingness
and ability to be in solitude. Solitude is not
the same as social isolation, it is "a sense
of readiness in possible Existenz... I cannot enter
into communication without being lonely."(9) Daring
to be lonely and to live in solitude as opposed
to desiring to escape loneliness and social isolation
at any price, even at the price of self-deception,
humiliation, and personal degradation is for Jaspers
an important feature of human dignity. His appeal
to lonely self-reflection can be interpreted as
opposing to the growing manipulative influences
of persuasive clichés and stereotypes of
human self-interpretation produced by information
technologies, mass media manipulation, and various
forms of self-help industries.
A second attitude involves
open-mindedness and frankness. Such dispositions
enable a person to communicate without prejudices
and veiled purposes. A third attitude entails one's
sincere intention to accept a communication partner
in his or her autonomy and individual possibility
for self-realisation. This means to abstain from
forcing one's own habits and standards of living
onto the other. Jaspers speaks in this context
of "existential solidarity" with one's
communication partner. A fourth moral attitude concerns
intellectual integrity and truthfulness. The individual
must remain open to self-criticism, and the recognition
of one's own failings and dogmatised opinions with
the same force as one recognizes the failings and
dogmatized opinions of others. Jaspers calls the
mutual critique and mutual support of communication
partners a "communicative" or "loving
struggle,"(10) where all kinds of power and
superiority, prejudice and calculating strategic
reserve against
the other are eliminated. A fifth moral attitude
is grounded in the idea that substantial communication
can only be realised on an equal existential level,
despite all the differences of comparable qualities
such as gender, ethnic origin, social status, etc. One must accept the communication partner as equal
in rank at the level of a self-becoming Existenz,
and it is necessary to assess the other as a whole
person.
In his hermeneutical reflections
on realising the meaning of life in communication,
Jaspers addresses deficiencies in communication,
ruptures of communication, and communicative situations.
His phenomenological descriptions are rich, containing
subtle psychological insights into moods, feelings,
attitudes, and emotional conditions that are relevant
for constituting or preventing communication. Here
it becomes clear that Jaspers incorporates his
experience as psychiatrist and psychologist directly
into his existential philosophy. Realising the Meaning of Life by Reason
The concept of reason became
the basic philosophical conception in Jaspers'
post-war philosophy. In his comprehensive treatment
of truth, Von der Wahrheit (1947), a book with
more then a thousand pages, he conjectures on widest
possible dimensions of reason. The concept of reason
also has a central position in his The Atom
Bomb and the Future of Man (1958). A closer examination
of this concept reveals that Jaspers uses reason
highly ambivalent. Nonetheless, I conjecture that
there are three dominant components at the core
of Jaspers' concept of reason: First, an anti-rationalist
component since Jaspers understands reason (Vernunft)
in strict opposition to mere rationality (Verstand);
second, a critical component that links reason
to some critical attitudes; and third, a normative
component, because Jaspers closely links his concept
of reason to various moral attitudes or virtues.
Here again, the normative background of an implicit
virtue ethics is evident.
In Jaspers' post-war philosophy,
the ideal of a reasonable person or reasonable
individual turns out as a new ideal of realising
the meaning of life. An increasing number of reasonable
individuals shall constitute a community of
reasonable persons all over the world.(11)
The function of reason is to give the basic impulses
for a radical change
or conversion of common worldviews, attitudes,
and modes of behavior, including the domain of
politics. Jaspers envisions the future political
process to be governed by "supra-political" ideals,(12)
especially by reason, and no longer dominated by
power politics or strictly national or ethnocentric
interests. Without the dominance of reason it would
not be possible to overcome the destructive twin
threats of the new technological age for the future
of mankind: that is, the possibility of annihilating
all life on earth with the atom bomb, as well as
the possibility of establishing a world-wide totalitarian
regime.(13)
Let us now take a close look
at two critical attitudes and a set of moral norms
or virtues that Jaspers correlates with his concept
of reason and ideal of a reasonable person. The
two critical attitudes include the anti-totalistic
and anti-monistic attitude and the anti-dogmatic
and anti-fundamentalist attitude.
Anti-totalistic and Anti-monistic.
The anti-totalistic attitude becomes manifest in
Jaspers' critique of illusionary ideas concerning
the ability of the human mind to gain complete
knowledge of the world, society, human nature,
or history. For Jaspers, totalistic modes of thinking
have disastrous consequences in many intellectual
fields and dimensions of life. They are forces
counter to existential and political freedom, including
all efforts for a life of human dignity in an open
democratic society, and the realisation of global
perpetual peace. Furthermore, they imply strong
tendencies to evoke repressive political regimes
and totalitarian political systems.
For comprehending the anti-monistic
attitude, Jaspers' link with the ideal of a reasonable
person must be kept in mind. Certainly, he refers
to a unity, like the unity of mankind, the unity
of Being, and the unity of the Encompassing. But
the word "unity" is not used as a concept
denoting an existing or realizable state or situation.
It functions as a regulative idea. Jaspers emphasizes
the diversity, plurality, and multiplicity of all
objective being in opposition to ontological conceptions
of a unity or monistic claims. We recognize this
anti-monistic attitude in his philosophy of the
encompassing, in his political philosophy, and
in his philosophy of history, especially evident
in the Axial Age thesis concerning world history.(14)
The Axial period in human history (800–200
BCE) reminds us not only of mankind's great cultural
achievements, but also of the threefold origin
of these achievements in China, India, and the
West. Jaspers' thesis is that our appreciation
of universal history must be pluralistic and not
monistic.
Anti-dogmatic and Anti-fundamentalist.
Jaspers strongly rejects every kind of dogmatism
and fundamentalism. He repeatedly warns against
claims for an exclusive, absolute, knowledge or
absolute true faith. Humans are, in principle,
imperfect and fallible creatures who cannot reach
any kind of absoluteness in life. Even the realisation
of the self as Existenz gives us only a glimpse
of absoluteness because the acts of becoming Existenz and becoming aware of transcendence have no constancy.
These last only a short time in existence.
The function of reason is to
prevent the dogmatization of any one single concept
of human self-realization, any one single conception
of individual freedom, truth, or God. The moral
attitudes or virtues that are linked to the concept
of reason and the ideal of a reasonable person
include:
-
composure, patience, and self-possession
through which a person is able to act in political,
moral,
and religious affairs without fanaticism.
-
intellectual integrity by which self-deception
can be minimized, such as self-deception in politics
about chances to change given spheres of power
to one's own advantage, or self-deception about
possible consequences of one's own actions. Such
intellectual integrity allows one to develop
a more accurate assessment for what is appropriate
and what is not appropriate in a given crisis.
-
A virtue which Max Weber had in mind when he
talked of an "ethics of responsibility," i.e.,
the principle of being willing to prove the consequences
of one's own political actions and behavior very
scrupulously and to stand up for them.
-
An openness to understand divergent cultural
and ethnic traditions and to be always ready
for communication with representatives of those
traditions. This openness also extends to such
cases where the life-style or moral norms of
the others are incompatible with one's own life-style
and norms.
Summary and Meta-Reflection
In this essay, I discuss the
three different ideas or ideals regarding the meaning
of life in Jaspers´ philosophy: reacting
to boundary situations, interpersonal existential
communication, and a life of reason. Second, I
claim that there is an implicit virtue ethics in
Jaspers' philosophy and I justify this thesis by
pointing out a number of moral attitudes or virtues
that Jaspers has correlated with his three ideals
of realising the meaning of life.
As a possible counterargument
to my first thesis, I will now address the distinction
of three different conceptions of the meaning of
life in Jaspers' philosophy. One could argue that
the conceptions of existential self-realisation
in boundary situations and in existential communication
overlap to such an extent that it makes no sense
to maintain a distinction between them. For both,
their central aim would be one's realisation of
Existenz.
I agree partially to this objection,
since every existential communication can be experienced
as a boundary situation due to the structural components
of struggle, loneliness, self-reflection, etc. However, and this is the crucial point, not every
act of self-realisation in boundary situations
is necessarily accompanied by an act of existential
communication. Becoming Existenz in boundary situations
can also be realised in an act of solitary self-reflection
and self-communication without any communication
partner. Jaspers does not make clear the similarities
and differences between these two conceptions of
self-realisation. He also did not succeed in unifying
them consistently in his existentialism.
I submit that these two conceptions
of the meaning of life reflect two different sources
of influence to his philosophizing besides the
aforementioned biographical influences. In my assessment,
Jaspers' idea of becoming Existenz in boundary
situations has its roots in his early reception
of Kierkegaardian concepts. For Kierkegaard, human
self-realisation is concentrated on the model of
an isolated, lonely individual, totally involved
in an intensive and exclusive process of self-reflection
and self-communication which constitutes a religious
mode of existence, that is, an exclusive subjective
relation to the Christian God, who is understood
principally as non-objectifyable Being.
The idea of becoming Existenz in existential communication was developed by Jaspers
in the late 1920s and the early 1930s. During this
time, the relevance of existential interpersonal
communication for constituting the personal identity
of individuals was a highly favored topic of philosophical
discussion. For example, consider Martin Buber's
philosophy of dialogue in his I and Thou (1922),
or Karl Löwith's contribution on the issue
in Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen (1928). I suspect that Jaspers was highly influenced
by this discussion, although he does not refer
to these texts in the three volumes of Philosophy (1932), his main work in existentialism. Supportive
evidence may be found in researching the library
of Karl Jaspers in Basel, Switzerland. I regret
that I have not had the opportunity to do this.
However, I would like to encourage interested scholars
to confirm or refute my conjecture by doing the
archival study.
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