Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) began his academic career working as apsychiatrist and, after a period of transition, he converted tophilosophy in the early 1920s. Throughout the middle decades of thetwentieth century he exercised considerable influence on a number ofareas of philosophical inquiry: especially on epistemology, thephilosophy of religion, and political theory.

The influence of Kant over Jaspers is widely acknowledged in theliterature, to the extent that he has been depicted as “Thefirst and the last Kantian” (Heinrich Barth, quoted in Ehrlich1975, 211). Usually this evaluation is based on his reliance on thesubjective-experiential transformation of Kantian philosophy, whichreconstructs Kantian transcendentalism as a doctrine of particularexperience and spontaneous freedom, and emphasizes the constitutiveimportance of lived existence for authentic knowledge. However,current commentators of his philosophy have started questioning thisview. Jaspers obtained his widest influence, not through hisphilosophy, but through his writings on governmental conditions inGermany, and after the collapse of National Socialist regime heemerged as a powerful spokesperson for moral-democratic education andreorientation in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Despite his importance in the evolution of both philosophy andpolitical theory in twentieth-century Germany, today Jaspers is to alarge extent a neglected thinker. The explanations that are given forthis are various. In the first place, it is argued that he did notfound a particular philosophical school. For him, philosophy is a wayof thought, which uses expert knowledge while going beyond it. Hebelieved that by means of devoting oneself to philosophy, individualsdo not cognize objects but explicate and actualize their being asthinkers and thus become themselves. Consequently, he did not attracta cohort of apostles, and, outside Germany at least, his works are notoften the subject of high philosophical discussion. This is partly theresult of the fact that the philosophers who now enjoy undisputeddominance in modern German philosophical history, especially MartinHeidegger, Georg Lukács and Theodor W. Adorno, wrotedisparagingly about Jaspers, and they were often unwilling to take hiswork entirely seriously. Another explanation for Jaspers’srelative marginality relates to problematic nature of the Englishtranslations of his writings that render his thinking ratherincommunicable to readers from English speaking countries. To be sure,he was extremely fortunate with his many translators, the mostprominent of whom are Ralph Manheim and E.B. Ashton. But thetranslations often use misleading expressions and use different wordsto express the very same word in the original German, therebyconfusing the readers. Also, unindicated omissions and other problemsthat result from favouring aesthetic considerations over accuracy allcontribute to falsifying the original. It has been argued that Jasperscould not appeal to the English-speaking philosophical mind due tobeing too speculative and metaphysical or simply beyond the reach ofthe Anglo-American cultural horizons. To all these factors, one mightadd the fact of Jaspers’s association with the more prosaicperiods of German political life, and of his name being tarred with anaura of staid bourgeois common sense. Nonetheless, Jaspers’swork set the parameters for a number of different philosophicaldebates, the consequences of which remain deeply influential incontemporary philosophy, and in recent years there have been signsthat a more favourable reconstructive approach to his work isbeginning to prevail.

• 1. Biography
• 2. Career
• 3. Early Psychiatric Writings
• 4. The Philosophical Writings
• 5. Philosophy and Religion
• 6. Later Works: The Politics of Humanism
• 7. Commentary and Edition of the complete works (KJG)
• Bibliography
  • Major Works by Jaspers
  • Selected Secondary Literature
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Biography

Karl Theodor Jaspers was born on 23^rd February 1883 in theNorth German town of Oldenburg near the North Sea, where his ancestorshad lived for generations. He was the son of a banker and arepresentative of the parliament (Landtagesabgeordneten), Carl WilhelmJaspers (1850–1940) and Henriette Tantzen (1862–1941), whoalso came from a family that was involved in local parliament.Jaspers’s family milieu was strongly influenced by the politicalculture of North German liberalism, and he often referred to theclimate of early liberal democratic thought as a formative aspect ofhis education. Moreover, although he claimed not to have beeninfluenced by any specifically ecclesiastical faith, his thought wasalso formed by the spirit of North German Protestantism, and hisphilosophical outlook can in many respects be placed in thereligiously inflected tradition of Kant and Kierkegaard.

Jaspers was a pupil at theAltes Gymnasium in Oldenburg.Since his early childhood, Jaspers suffered from chronicbronchiectasis that impaired his physical capabilities and awarenessof his physical disabilities shaped his routine throughout his adultlife and formed his sensitivity to psychological issues, includinghuman suffering. Jaspers attributed his ability to conduct a normativeroutine and to devote his life to his creative work to his strictdiscipline regarding his health.

In 1910 he married Gertrud Mayer (1879–1974), who came from apious German-Jewish merchant family. At the time, she was working asan assistant in the sanatorium of the neurologist and psychiatristOskar Kohnstamms (1871–1917) and was the sister of his closefriends Gustav Mayer and the philosopher Ernest Mayer. Only thanks toher marriage to the already known philosopher Karl Jaspers was GertrudMayer able to stay in Germany during the Nazi period.

2. Career

Jaspers received an extremely diverse and broad-ranging education. Heinitially enrolled as a student of law at the University of Heidelbergfor three semesters (1901–1902). Despite his already vivid interest inphilosophy, which he explored through Spinoza’sEthics(1677) and Kant’sCritique of Pure Reason(1781), he decided for medicine was based on his belief thatit best illuminated life itself and the challenges of human existence.Jaspers began his medicine studies in Berlin (1902/1903), then movedto Gottingen (1903–1906), and eventually finished them in Heidelberg(1906–1908). He submitted his dissertation,Heimweh undVerbrechen in 1908 and graduated M.D. in 1909. He was a researchassistant in the psychiatric clinic of the university of Heidelbergfrom 1909–1915, where he worked with some of the most famouspsychiatrists in Germany, including Nissl, Wilmanned, Gruhle, andMayer-Gross. Due to his illness with bronchiectasis, he was incapableof carrying out heavy duties in the clinic. The director of thepsychiatric clinic of the university of Heidelberg, Franz Nissl,permitted him to spend the majority of his time at the library ratherthan in the clinic and the laboratory. Indeed, his extraordinaryskills of critical thinking and abstract observation on humansituations were evident already then. From 1913 onward, Jaspers readphilosophy systematically. In 1913 he published hisAllgemeinePsychopathologie (General Psychopathology) which alreadymade apparent the viewpoints and methods that belong to the world ofthe humanities and social studies that were regarded by him asconverging into psychopathology. In the same year, he obtained hissecond doctorate (Habilitation) in psychology from thePhilosophy Faculty at the University of Heidelberg, supervised byWilhelm Windelband. He was a lecturer and later an Associate Professorof Psychology (Privatdozent) from 1913 to 1921. During thisperiod, in 1919, he published hisPsychologie derWeltanschauungen (Psychology of World Views). This workis considered as a transitional work, in which his psychologicalmethod was clearly shaped by philosophical influences and objectives,and was already evolving into a consistent philosophical doctrine andacquiring some of the main issues that were to be explored laterwithin his philosophy of existence. Then, in 1922, he took over thefull professorial chair of philosophy in the University of Heidelberg(after Heinrich Maier), a position from which he was dismissed in 1937by the Nazis. To a large extent, the two first major publications wereworks of psychology that contain many elements, albeit in inchoateform, of his later philosophy. Following his nomination as professor,he wrote nothing for ten years, except for two small works—apatholographyStirnberg and van Gogh in 1922 andDie Ideeder Universität (The Idea of the University) in 1923.

While he was working as a psychiatrist in Heidelberg, Jaspers cameinto contact with Max Weber, and also with the other intellectuals whowere grouped around Weber, including Ernst Bloch, Emil Lask, GeorgSimmel, and Lukács. His intellectual formation was marked in anumber of ways by this intellectual milieu. At a political level, heintegrated aspects of Weber’s enthusiasm for heroic liberalism,responsible nationalism and elite democracy into his own thought andattitudes. At a more theoretical level, his ideas were determined bythe increasingly critical responses to neo-Kantian philosophy, whichdominated methodological discussions around Weber and Lukács,and which subsequently coloured the intellectual horizon during WorldWar I and throughout the Weimar Republic. This period witnessed thedethroning of neo-Kantianism as the philosophical orthodoxy in theGerman academic establishment, and it was marked by a proliferation ofphilosophical models which rejected Kantian formalism and sought tointegrate experiential, historical and even sociological elements intophilosophical discourse. The attempt to rescue Kantian philosophy fromthe legalistic formalism of the South West German School ofneo-Kantian philosophy, centred around Heinrich Rickert and WilhelmWindelband, became one of the central features of Jaspers’swork, and in many ways his entire philosophical evolution wasmotivated by the desire to reconstruct Kantian thought, not as aformalist doctrine of self-legislation, but as an account ofmetaphysical experience, spontaneously decisive freedom, and authenticinner life. His early career as professor of philosophy was alsodeeply (and adversely) affected by neo-Kantian hostility to his work.Indeed, both neo-Kantians and phenomenological philosophers subjectedhis work to trenchant criticism in the early stages of hisphilosophical trajectory, and members of both these camps, especiallyRickert and Edmund Husserl, accused him of importing anthropologicaland experiential questions into philosophy and thus of contaminatingphilosophical analysis with contents properly pertaining to otherdisciplines.

If Weber was the first decisive personal influence and Kant was thefirst decisive philosophical influence on Jaspers, in the early 1920she encountered a further figure who assumed a decisive role in hisformation: that is, Martin Heidegger. It cannot be claimed withoutqualification that Heidegger directly determined the conceptualstructure or underlying preconditions of Jaspers’s work, northat Heidegger assimilated aspects of Jaspers’s thought into hisown philosophy. Throughout their theoretical trajectories, thedifferences between Heidegger and Jaspers were in many ways greaterthan the similarities. Indeed, the theoretical controversies betweenthem eventually culminated in an embittered personal and politicalaltercation, caused by Heidegger’s publicly declared sympathyfor the National Socialists in 1933. Jaspers felt himself personallythreatened by Heidegger’s infamous decision to support theNazis, as he was married to a Jewish woman, and he had previouslyattached himself to eminent liberal politicians and philosophers, mostnotably Weber, who were now vilified by Heidegger and otherintellectuals attached to the NSDAP. In 1933, Jaspers himself wasbriefly tempted into making certain incautiously optimistic statementsabout the Hitler regime. Indeed, these were remarks were not entirelyout of keeping with his other publications of the early 1930s. In thelast years of the Weimar Republic he published a controversialpolitical work,Die geistige Situation der Zeit (TheSpiritual Condition of the Age, 1931), which—to his lateracute embarrassment—contained a carefully worded critique ofparliamentary democracy. Throughout this period, he also stressed therelevance of Weberian ideas of strong leadership for the preservationof political order in Germany. The souring of his relations withHeidegger, however, seems to have hardened his mind into a strict andsustained opposition to National Socialism, and, unlike Heidegger, hisworks of the 1930s avoided political themes and were largelyconcentrated on elaborating the interior or religious aspects of hisphilosophy. In 1932, he published his trilogyPhilosophie,consisting of three separate volumes, each based on its own object oftranscending:Weltorientierung (Orientation of the World),Existenzerhellung (Illumination of Existence) andMetaphysik (Metaphysics). This book is generally consideredas hismagnum opus and he testified in retrospect that is wasthe closest work to his heart. The choice not to grant the book theexpected title of “Existential Philosophy”, despite theextensive use of the termExistenzphilosophie, reflects hisdiscontent about its narrowing his guiding ideal ofPhilosophiaPerennis. Later in hisVernunft und Widervernunft in unsererZeit (Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time), from 1950 he wouldexpress his preference for the expression ‘philosophy ofreason’.

Despite the at times envenomed relations between them, however,Heidegger and Jaspers are usually associated with each other as thetwo founding fathers of existential philosophy in Germany. Thisinterpretation of their philosophical status and relationship is atleast questionable. Heidegger resented being described as anexistentialist, and Jaspers, at least after 1933, resented beingidentified with Heidegger. Even during their early friendshipHeidegger was very critical of Jaspers’s philosophy; he wrote acommentary onPsychology of World Views, in which he claimedthat Jaspers’s methodological approach remained ensnared in thefalsehoods of subjectivist metaphysics and Cartesian ontology, andthat it illegitimately introduced the categories of Weberian sociologyinto philosophical analysis. Similarly, throughout his life Jasperskept a book of critical notes on Heidegger, and he routinely describedHeidegger’s fundamental ontology in a tone of moral-humanisticdisapprobation. Nonetheless, there remains a residue of validity inthe common association of Heidegger and Jaspers, and, although itrequires qualification, this association is not in every respectmisleading. Existentialism was, and remains, a highly diffusetheoretical movement, and it cannot be expected that two philosophersconnected with this movement should hold similar views in allrespects. However, existentialism had certain unifying features, andmany of these were common to both Jaspers and Heidegger. In the earlystages of its evolution, therefore, existentialism might be describedas a theoretical stance which: a) moved philosophical discourse awayfrom Kantian formalism and emphasized the belief that the content ofthought must reside in particular experiences and decisions; b)followed Kierkegaard in defining philosophy as a passionate and deeplyengaged activity, in which the integrity and the authenticity of thehuman being are decisively implicated; c) sought to overcome theantinomies (reason/experience; theory/praxis; transcendence/immanence;pure reason/practical reason) which determine the classicalmetaphysical tradition by incorporating all aspects (cognitive,practical and sensory) of human life in an encompassing account ofrational and experiential existence. If this definition ofexistentialism is accepted, then the suggestion of a family connectionbetween Jaspers and Heidegger cannot be entirely repudiated, for bothcontributed to the reorganization of philosophical questioning in the1920s in a manner which conforms to this definition. Ultimately,however, relations between Heidegger and Jaspers degenerated to aterminal impasse, and after World War II Jaspers refused to explain orexonerate Heidegger’s political actions during the Nazi yearsand he even recommended to a de-Nazification committee that Heideggershould be suspended from his university teaching responsibilities.

During the Nazi period from 1933 onwards, Jaspers was excluded fromany co-operation in the administration of the university until he wasdismissed from his chair as a professor in 1937 and was subject to apublication ban (Publikationsverbot). During the war, he andhis wife were in no physical danger. Yet he felt himself a marked manuntil the end of World War II. Jaspers once heard indirectly thatthere was a plan to deport him and his wife to a concentration camp inthe middle of April 1945. Fortunately, the American troops arrived inHeidelberg two weeks earlier, on April 1^st 1945. However,after 1945, his fortunes changed dramatically, and he figuredprominently on the White List of the US-American occupying forces:that is, on the list of politicians and intellectuals who were deemeduntarnished by any association with the NSDAP, and who were allowed toplay a public role in the process of German political re-foundation.From this time on Jaspers defined himself primarily as a popularphilosopher and educator. In the first role, he contributed extensiveedifying commentaries on questions of political orientation and civicmorality—first, in the interim state of 1945–1949, andthen, after 1949, in the early years of the Federal Republic ofGermany. In the second role, as one of the professors responsible forreopening the University of Heidelberg, to which he was appointed bythe American Army of Occupation as a contemporary rector, he wrote atlength on the necessity of university reforms, he emphasized the roleof liberal humanistic education as a means of disseminating democraticideas throughout Germany, and he took a firm line against therehabilitation of professors with a history of Nazi affiliation. In1946,The Idea of the University was published in anessentially different form from the book with the same title from1923. The later work presents the university as a free community ofscholars and students engaged in the task of seeking truth. As such,the university and the scholars that populate it can and should play adecisive role in rehabilitation of Europe based on the noblest ideasof the enlightenment. At that time and still, Jaspers is one of fewwho can justly speak for value and the need for such a stance againstthe threats upon freedom and humanity. The acknowledgment ofJaspers’s noble humanism in the first years after the war isapparent in the numerous honors granted to him, including the GoethePrize in 1947, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1958, theErasmus Prize in 1959, and the Prize of the Foundation of Oldenburgfor Honorary Citizens.

Of his post-1945 publications, therefore, Jaspers’s politicalcontributions are perhaps the most significant. His contribution tothe promotion of a democratic civic culture in West Germany at thistime was of great importance, and his writings and radio broadcastsshaped, in part, the gradually evolving democratic consensus of theearly Federal Republic. InDie Schuldfrage (The Questionof German Guilt, 1946), published at the time of theNürnberg trials, he argued that, although not all Germans couldbe legitimately brought to trial for war crimes, all Germans shouldaccept an implicit complicity in the holocaust and only the criticalself-reflection of all Germans could lead to cultural and politicalrenewal. In the 1950s, he supported the main policies of theliberal-conservative governments led by Konrad Adenauer(1949–1963), and he particularly endorsed the formation of theWestern Alliance, which he saw as a means of protecting the culturalresources of Western European culture from their colonization by theSoviet Union. Throughout this time, however, the cautiouslyconservative tenor of Jaspers’s political thought wasprogressively modified by his frequent and at times intenseintellectual exchanges with Hannah Arendt, who might well be seen asthe fourth great influence on his work. Jaspers had beenArendt’s tutor and supervisor before she emigrated from Germanyin the 1930s, but the period after 1945 saw something of a rolereversal in this relationship, which Jaspers seems to have acceptedquite graciously. Influenced by Arendt’s agonisticrepublicanism, he gradually turned against the relatively complacentspirit of political and intellectual restoration in the early FederalRepublic, and he finally devoted himself to elaborating models ofcitizenship founded in constitutional rights and legally enshrinedidentities. In this respect, he can be viewed as an importantprecursor of Jürgen Habermas, and his works contain an earlyconception of the doctrine later known asconstitutionalpatriotism. His views on German re-unification were alsoparticularly influential; he opposed the dominant outlooks of the timeby claiming that the demand for re-unification meant that Germanpolitics remained infected with the damaging traces of oldgeo-political ideas and ambitions, and it prevented the fundamentalredirection of German political life. Finally, then, in symbolicdemonstration of disgust at the persistence of pernicious politicalattitudes in Germany he relinquished his German citizenship, and,having earlier moved across the border to University of Basel in 1948,he became a Swiss national. In his last works, he placed himselfcloser to the political left, and he even argued that only a legalrevolution could ensure that the German state was organized on thebasis of a morally decisive constitution. He died of a stroke inBasel, Switzerland on February 26 1969 at the age of 86. His wife,Gertrud Jaspers, who served as his amanuensis throughout his entirelife as a scholar, died in Basel on May 25 1974 at the age of 95.

3. Early Psychiatric Writings

Less well-known, at least among the world of English-speakingpsychiatry, is Jaspers’s lasting contribution to the field ofpsychiatry that preceded his philosophical work, and in retrospecttranspires as not wholly unrelated it, at least in its common guidingspirit. During his distinguished career as a psychiatrist, Jaspersachieved an outstanding contribution to psychiatric thinking, latercalled ‘The Heidelberg School’ and led by Kurt Schneider.As a young man, he authored a number of scientific articles onhomesickness and crime, on intelligence tests, on hallucinations– all illustrated with detailed case histories. Also, Jasperspublished reports of the mental pathology of Van Gogh and Stirnberg.Among these, of special importance are his outstanding article from1910, in which he introduced his method and fundamental principlesregarding ‘mental processes’ and ‘personalitydevelopment’, and an article on the phenomenological method inpsychiatry from 1912, which established his pioneer status as a firstcommentator on the phenomenological study of subjective experiences atthe conscious level. At the age of barely thirty, in 1913, while hewas working as a physician in the psychiatric hospital at Heidelberg,Jaspers published hisAllgemeine Psychopathologie: Ein Leitfadenfür Studierenden, Ärzte und Psychologen (GeneralPsychopathology: A Guide for Students, Physicians and Psychologists).The aims of this book were to provide the framework of the scientificfield of psychopathology and its related facts and approaches, notonly for practitioners in this field but also for interestedintellectuals. This framework covers the problems and methods thatcapture the body of knowledge of the field rather than empiricalevidence or a system based on a theory. Instead of deciding betweenthe different existing approaches of his time, he stressed theirpeculiarity that entails the inherent justifications and the way theymight complement each other and together portray the many sides of thepsychopathological science. The hint of the spirit of his existentialphilosophy, yet to become expressed, is apparent in his declaration inthe preface of the book, according to which “in psychopathologyit is dangerous merely to learn the matter, our task is not to‘learn psychopathology’ but to learn to observe, askquestions, analyze, and think in psychopathological terms”.However, despite the very impressive of the achievement of thementioned book, which within the German speaking world was recognizedby leading psychiatrists as a monumental achievement in the field, itmarked the culmination of Jaspers’s psychiatric productivity.Just two years later, Jaspers moved away forever from psychiatricpractice and medicine in general, first towards psychology and thenphilosophy. Interestingly, though, Jaspers saw fit to revise andexpand the text in a few of its several editions. The first edition isthe shortest. In the second and third editions, there were minorchanges. The most considerably revised and expanded edition is thefourth, which appeared in 1942. To a large extent, the integration ofmany ideas from his then already mature existential philosophy fromthe thirties onwards, which more than doubled the scope of the text,in fact amount to a new version of the book. Now, the subtitle thatappeared in the earlier versions was removed and in the prefaceJaspers indicates its high aim of satisfying the demand for knowledge,not only for physicians but for all who make mankind their theme. Inthis enlarged version of the book, the imprint of Husserl’sdescriptive psychology is apparent in the attempt to address the innermental experiences of mentally ill people (mainly schizophrenicpatients) and regard them as indicative of the general phenomena ofhuman consciousness, i.e.: delusions, modes of ego-consciousness, andmodes of emotions. At the same time, the imprint of Wilhelm Dilthey(1833–1911) was perceptible in the centrality given to thedistinction between ‘understanding psychology’(Verstehende Psychologie), which relates to meaningful andcomprehensible connections that are inherent in one’spersonality and biography, and ‘explaining psychology’(Erklärende Psychologie), which focuses on causalconnections that are mainly rooted in biology.^1]

Jaspers’s declared conviction that the methodological principlesremain largely unaffected by the increased materials supported hisefforts to add entire sections to the new versions of the book –sections that aptly reveal his philosophical view on the pertinentconsiderations in curing mental illness. Notwithstanding this, Jaspersopposed the attempts to address existentialist ideas for the sake ofunderstanding mental illness. For him it is not possible that a humanbeing as a whole falls ill or alternatively that illness of any kindcan cover one’s entire being, rather there are always parts thatremain uninfected with illness or healthy.

It is worth noting that the appearance of the fourth edition ofGeneral Psychopathology was enabled despite the publicationban to which Jaspers was subject since 1938 for his outspoken anduncompromising resistance to the Nazis regime and his persistentloyalty to his Jewish wife. Probably the same title from 1913 and thescientific character, which covered the fact of incorporation of theof considerable sections which where imprinted with his philosophicalthinking, were helpful in this regard. Despite ceasing practicingpsychiatry, Jaspers retain his interest in psychopathology and wasfully aware of the developments in the field, in particular regardingthe neurological and somatic aspects of mental illness. However, afterthe fourth edition appeared, five more were printed in the same formatas the fourth, the latest appearing in 1973. An English translationexists for the seventh edition only and was published in 1963 by J.Hoenig and Miriam Hamilton. For various reasons—starting fromnot considering the ‘real causes’ of mental illness,continuing with its loaded style of writing and argumentation, itssevere (though inconsistent) criticism of psychoanalysis, which atthat time was regarded as indispensable in any consideration ofpsychopathology, and other reasons—the reception of GeneralPsychopathology in the English-speaking countries was far fromenthusiastic, except for the most respectful, and was sometimes evenhostile.

4. The Philosophical Writings

Jaspers’s first intervention in philosophical debate,Psychology of World Views, constructed a typology of mentalattitudes, which, close to Weber’s model of ideal types, wasintended to provide an interpretive account of basic psychologicaldispositions. The underlying argument in this work is that theconstitutive fact of human mental life is the division between subjectand object (Subjekt-Objekt-Spaltung). Human psychologicalforms—or world views—are positioned as antinomical momentswithin this founding antinomy, and they give distinct paradigmaticexpression to the relation between human subjective inclinations andfreedoms and the objective phenomena which the subject encounters.Unlike Weber, however, Jaspers argued that the construction of worldviews is not a merely neutral process, to be judged in non-evaluativemanner. Instead, all world views contain an element of pathology; theyincorporate strategies of defensiveness, suppression and subterfuge,and they are concentrated around false certainties or spuriouslyobjectivized modes of rationality, into which the human mind withdrawsin order to obtain security amongst the frighteningly limitlesspossibilities of human existence. World views, in consequence,commonly take the form of objectivized cages (Gehäuse),in which existence hardens itself against contents and experienceswhich threaten to transcend or unbalance the defensive restrictionswhich it has placed upon its operations. Although some world viewspossess an unconditioned component, most world views exist as thelimits of a formed mental apparatus. It is the task ofpsychological intervention, Jaspers thus argued, to guide humanexistence beyond the restricted antinomies around which it stabilizesitself, and to allow it decisively to confront the more authenticpossibilities, of subjective and objective life, which it effacesthrough its normal rational dispositions and attitudes.

In addition to this psychological typology, Jaspers’s analysisof world views also contains a wider critique of human rationality.Most modes of rationality, he suggested, are conveniently instrumentalor ideological forms, which serve distinct subjective and objectivefunctions, and they habitually stand in the way of genuine knowledge.At the same time, however, he also claimed that rationality possessescapacities of communicative integrity and phenomenologicalself-overcoming, and, if authentically exercised, it is able to escapeits narrowly functional form, to expose itself to new contents beyondits limits and antinomies, and to elaborate new and more cognitivelyunified conceptual structures. He therefore indicated thatformal-epistemological concepts of rationality must be expanded torecognize that experience and committed actions are formative ofauthentic knowledge, and that reason cannot, in Cartesian manner, bemonadically dislocated from its historical, sensory, experiential andvoluntaristic foundations. From the outset, therefore, Jaspers’swork, although methodologically marked by Weber, was also indeliblystamped by Hegel’s philosophy, and it sought to integrate thepreconditions of Hegel’s phenomenology into a systematicpsychological doctrine. Indeed, at this early stage in his developmentJaspers’s thought hinged on an existential—orKierkegaardian—alteration of Hegelian philosophy. In this, hetransposed the dialectical process through which Hegel accounted forthe overcoming of cognitive antinomies in the emergence ofself-consciousness into an analysis of cognitive formation which seesthe resolution of reason’s antinomies as effected through vitalexperiences, decisive acts of self-confrontation, or communicativetranscendence.

In this early work, Jaspers introduced several concepts which assumedgreat importance for all his work. Most importantly, this workcontains a theory of the limit (Grenze). This term designatesboth the habitual forms and attitudes of the human mental apparatus,and the experiences of the mind as it recognizes these attitudes asfalsely objectivized moments within its antinomical structure, and asit transcends these limits by disposing itself in new ways towardsitself and its objects. In his early philosophy Jaspers thus ascribedcentral status to ‘limit situations’(Grenzsituationen). Limit situations are moments, usuallyaccompanied by experiences of dread, guilt or acute anxiety, in whichthe human mind confronts the restrictions and pathological narrownessof its existing forms, and allows itself to abandon the securities ofits limitedness, and so to enter new realm of self-consciousness. Inconjunction with this, then, this work also contains a theory of theunconditioned (das Unbedingte). In this theory,Jaspers argued that limit situations are unconditioned moments ofhuman existence, in which reason is drawn by intense impulses orimperatives, which impel it to expose itself to the limits of itsconsciousness and to seek higher or more reflected modes of knowledge.The unconditioned, a term transported from Kantian doctrines ofsynthetic regress, is thus proposed by Jaspers as a vital impetus inreason, in which reason encounters its form as conditioned or limitedand desires to transcend the limits of this form. In relation to this,then, Jaspers’s early psychological work also introduced, albeitinchoately, the concept ofexistential communication. Inthis, he argued that the freedom of consciousness to overcome itslimits and antinomies can only be elaborated through speech: that is,as a process in which consciousness is elevated beyond its limitsthrough intensely engaged communication with other persons, and inwhich committed communication helps to suspend the prejudices andfixed attitudes of consciousness. Existentially open consciousness istherefore always communicative, and it is only where it abandons itsmonological structure that consciousness can fully elaborate itsexistential possibilities. In this early doctrine of communication,Jaspers helped to shape a wider communicative and intersubjectiveshift in German philosophy; indeed, the resonances of his existentialhermeneutics remained palpable in the much later works of Hans-GeorgGadamer and Paul Ricoeur. Less obviously, however, in this doctrine healso guided early existential thinking away from its originalassociation with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and, although assimilatingKierkegaardian elements of decisiveness and impassioned commitment, heclaimed that Kierkegaard’s cult of interiority, centred in thespeechlessness of inner life, was a miscarried attempt to envision theconditions of human authenticity. The decision for authenticself-overcoming and cognitive unity can only occur, he argued, throughshared participation in dialogue.

The main publication of Jaspers’s earlier period, and probablyof his entire career, is the three-volume work:Philosophy(1932). In this work, he retained the partly Hegelian focus of hisearlier publications, and he followed the spirit of Hegelianphenomenology in providing an account of the formation of humanconsciousness, which grasps consciousness as proceeding from the levelof immediate knowledge and progressing through a sequence ofantinomies towards a level of truthfully unified reflection andself-knowledge. In this, Jaspers again accentuated the claim that theantinomies which reason encounters and resolves in its unfolding astruth are at once both cognitive and experiential antinomies, and thatthe lived moments of human existence are always of cognitivelyconstitutive relevance for the formation of consciousness. These ideasin fact remained central to Jaspers’s philosophy throughout itssubsequent evolution. In his later philosophical works, especiallyVon der Wahrheit (Of Truth, 1947), he continued togive prominence to cognitive models derived from Hegelianphenomenology, and he proposed a concept ofthe encompassing(das Umgreifende) to determine the phenomenologicalgradations of thought and being. However, in addition to its concernwith Hegelian themes,Philosophy also contains a fundamentalreconstruction of Kantian themes, it has its foundation in a criticalreconstruction of Kant’s doctrine of transcendental ideas, andit is built around an endeavour to explain the elements of Kantianidealism as a systematic doctrine of subjective-metaphysicalexperience.

The three volumes ofPhilosophy bear the titlesPhilosophical World Orientation (volume I),TheIllumination of Existence (volume II), andMetaphysics(volume III). It was written during the 1920s after Jaspers obtainedthe full professorship at Heidelberg University. Each volume of thisbook describes a particular way of being:orientation,existence and metaphysicaltranscendence are thethree essential existential modalities of human life. At the sametime, each volume also describes a particular way of knowing, which iscorrelated with a way of being: orientation is cognitively determinedby objectively verifiable knowledge or by positive or scientificproof-forms, existence is determined by subjective/existentialself-reflection, and transcendence is determined by the symbolicinterpretation of metaphysical contents. Together, the three volumesofPhilosophy are designed to show how human existence andhuman knowledge necessarily progress from one level of being and onelevel of knowledge to another, and how consciousness graduallyevolves, through confrontation with its own antinomies, from animmediate and unformed state towards a condition of unity and integralself-experience. The three volumes are consequently bound together bythe argument that at the level of immediate objectiveknowledge—of orientation in the world—human consciousnessraises subjective-existential questions about itself and the groundsof its truth which it cannot resolve at this level of consciousness,and it encounters antinomies which call it to reflect existentiallyupon itself and to elevate it to the level of existence orexistentially committed self-reflection. At this higher level ofconsciousness, then, existence raises metaphysical questions aboutitself and its origin which it cannot begin to answer without anawareness that existence is, at an originary or authentic level,transcendent, and that its truth is metaphysical.

Each level of being in Jaspers’sPhilosophy correspondsto one of the Kantian transcendental ideas, and the modes of thinkingand knowing defining each level of existence elucidate theintellectual content of Kant’s ideas. The level of orientationin the world corresponds to the idea of the unity of the world; thelevel of existence corresponds to the idea of the soul’simmortality; the level of transcendence corresponds to the idea ofGod’s necessary existence. However, whereas Kant sawtranscendental ideas as the formal-regulative ideas of reason,serving, at most, to confer systematic organization on reason’simmanent operations, Jaspers viewed transcendental ideas as realms oflived knowledge, through which consciousness passes and by whoseexperienced antinomies it is formed and guided to a knowledge ofitselfas transcendent. Jaspers thus attributed totranscendental ideas a substantial and experiential content. Ideas donot, as for Kant, simply mark the formal limits of knowledge, markingout the bounds of sense against speculative or metaphysical questions.Instead, ideas provide a constant impulsion for reason to overcome itslimits, and to seek an ever more transcendent knowledge of itself, itscontents and its possibilities. In his mature philosophy, therefore,Jaspers transformed the Kantian transcendental ideas intoideas oftranscendence, in which consciousness apprehends and elaboratesthe possibility of substantial or metaphysical knowledge andself-knowledge. Central to this adjustment to Kant’s conceptionof ideas was also an implied, yet quite fundamental critique of thekey Kantian distinction between the transcendent and thetranscendental. In contrast to contemporary neo-Kantian readings ofKant, which were prepared to acknowledge the ideal element in Kantianidealism only, at most, as a regulative framework, generated byreason’s own autonomous functions, Jaspers argued that Kantianphilosophy always at once contains and suppresses a vision ofexperienced transcendence, and that the Kantian ideas should be viewedas challenges to reason to think beyond the limits of its autonomy,towards new and more authentic contents, self-experiences andfreedoms.

In replacing the transcendental with the transcendent, however,Jaspers did not argue that transcendent contents are obtainable aspositive elements of human knowledge. On the contrary, he argued thatconsciousness only acquires knowledge of its transcendence bycontemplating the evanescentciphers of transcendence, whichsignify the absolute limits of human consciousness. These ciphersmight be encountered in nature, in art, in religious symbolism, or inmetaphysical philosophy. But it is characteristic of all ciphers that,in alluding to transcendence, they also withhold transcendentknowledge from consciousness, and that they can only act as indices ofthe impossibility of such knowledge. The attitude of consciousnesswhich apprehends its limits and its possible transcendence cantherefore only be an attitude of foundering or failing(Scheitern), and transcendence can intrude in humanconsciousness only as an experience of the absolute insufficiency ofthis consciousness for interpreting its originary or metaphysicalcharacter. At this level, then, although opposing the formality andexperiential vacuity of neo-Kantianism, Jaspers also accepted theoriginal Kantian prohibition on positive transcendent or metaphysicalknowledge. He argued that consciousness always has a metaphysicalorientation to be other than, or transcendent to, its existing forms,but he also claimed that this orientation can only factually culminatein a crisis of transcendence, or in a crisis of metaphysics. Althoughreconsolidating the metaphysical aspects of Kantian philosophy,therefore, Jaspers’s own metaphysics is always a post-Kantianmetaphysics: it is anegative metaphysics, which resists allsuggestion that human reason might give itself an account ofmetaphysical essences, which defines the realm of human meaning asformed by its difference against positive metaphysical knowledge, butwhich nonetheless sees reason, in Kierkegaardian manner, as driven bya despairing desire for metaphysical transcendence.

Jaspers’s metaphysical reconstruction of Kantian idealism hasbeen denounced by other philosophers, most notably those in the broadmilieu of the Frankfurt School, as a stage in a wider course ofa cognitive degeneration, which falsely translates absolute metaphysicalcontents into moments of human inner experience. Despite this, thereare good grounds for arguing that Jaspers’s metaphysics is animportant critique of the fully autonomist accounts of rationalityproposed by neo-Kantianism, and it even coincides with the critiquesof Kantian formalism which underpinned the philosophies widelyassociated with the Frankfurt School. Jaspers intuited that Kantiantranscendentalism suppressed a deep-lying impulse for transcendence,and this aspect of Kant’s thought was badly neglected byinterpreters who saw Kant’s philosophy as a doctrine of pureimmanence or autonomy. Adorno’s later argument that Kant’stranscendental idealism always contains a lament over the closure ofreason against transcendence was thus anticipated by Jaspers, albeitin subjectivist terms, and Jaspers and Adorno—for all theirpolitical differences—can be placed close together as thinkerswho endeavoured to revitalize the metaphysical traces in idealism. Inany case, Jaspers’s insistence,contra Kant and theneo-Kantians, that reason itself is not the sole source of knowledge,and that the task of reason is not proscriptively to circumscribe thesphere of its validity against transcendence, but to overcome itscognitive limits and to envision contents which cannot be generated byits own autonomous functions, deserves to be rehabilitated as anabidingly significant contribution to modern debates on metaphysicsand epistemology.

5. Philosophy and Religion

The influences of Weber, Kant, Hegel and Kierkegaard are not difficultto discern in Jaspers’s work. Similarly, it is also notdifficult to identify the ways in which his work was influenced byNietzsche. Jaspers borrowed from Nietzsche a psychologistic approachto philosophical perspectives, and, like Nietzsche, he tended to viewphilosophical claims, not as formally verifiable postulates, but asexpressions of underlying mental dispositions. For this reason, healso borrowed from Nietzsche a dismissive approach to absolutizedclaims to truthful knowledge, and a resultant rejection of allrational purism. Most especially, however, like Heidegger, he tookfrom Nietzsche a critical approach to the residues of metaphysics inEuropean philosophy, and he denied the existence of essences which areexternal or indifferent to human experience. At the same time,however, Jaspers also clearly positioned his philosophy against manyelements of the Nietzschean legacy. He was clearly opposed to thenaturalistic vitalism evolving from Nietzsche’s work, and hisemphasis on human subjectivity as a locus of truthful transcendencemeant that Kierkegaard, rather than Nietzsche, was the existentialprototype for his work.

One further important formative influence on Jaspers’sphilosophy, however, was Schelling. Although he was at times criticalof the simple mysticism and the metaphysics of natural process inSchelling’s religious works, his metaphysical reconstruction ofKantian idealism rearticulated some elements of the positivephilosophy of the later Schelling, and it mirrored his attempt toaccount for truthful knowledge as a cognitive experience in whichreason is transfigured by its encounter with contents other than itsown form. In this respect, Jaspers adopted from Schelling anon-identitarian model of cognitive life, which views true (ortruthful) knowledge as obtained through acts of positiveinterpretation and revelation at the limits of rational consciousness.Unlike Schelling, he always rejected claims to absolute positiveknowledge; to this extent, he remained—in the ultimateanalysis—a Kantian philosopher. However, he was clearlysympathetic to Schelling’s critique of formal epistemologicalnegativism. Indeed, through his hermeneutical transformation ofidealism into a metaphysics of symbolic interpretation, he might beseen, like both Schelling and Johann Georg Hamann before him, as aphilosopher who was intent on re-invoking the truth of revelation, asan absolute and non-identical content of knowledge, against therational evidences of epistemology, and so on elaborating aninterpretive methodology adapted to a conception of truth as disclosedor revealed.

The discrete but important influence of Schelling on Jaspers’sphilosophy also provides a clue to understanding Jaspers’sphilosophy of religion. At one level, Jaspers was philosophicallycommitted to a sympathetic retrieval of religious contents. He wasinsistent that truth can only be interpreted as an element of radicalalterity in reason, or as reason’s experience of its own limits.Similarly, he was insistent that the conditions of human freedom arenot generated by human reason alone, but are experienced as incursionsof transcendence in rational thought. For these reasons, hisphilosophy is sympathetic towards the primary implications ofrevelation theology, and it cautiously upholds the essentialphilosophical claim of revelation: namely, that truth is a disclosureof otherness (transcendence) to reason, or at least an interpretedmoment of otherness in reason. At the same time, however, Jasperscannot in any obvious way be described as a religious philosopher. Infact, he was very critical of revelation theology, and of orthodoxreligions more generally, on a number of quite separate counts. First,he argued that the centre of religion is always formed by a falselyobjectivized or absolutized claim to truth, which fails to recognizethat transcendence occurs in many ways, and that transcendent truthscannot be made concrete as a set of factual statements or narratives.Religious world views are therefore examples of limited mentalattitudes, which seek a hold in uniform doctrine in order to evade aconfrontation with the uncertainty and instability of transcendence.In positing transcendence as a realized element of revelation,religion in fact obstructs the capacity for transcendence which allpeople possess; religion claims to offer transcendence, but itactually obstructs it. Second, then, as the foundations of dogma anddoctrinal orthodoxy, revealed truth-claims eliminate the self-criticaland communicative aspect of human reason, and they undermine thedialogical preconditions of transcendence and existentialself-knowledge. Jaspers thus viewed orthodox religion as anobstruction to communication, which places dogmatic limits on thecommon human capacity for truthfulness and transcendence. Nonetheless,as a philosopher of transcendence, he was also clear that humantruthfulness, or humanity more generally, cannot be conceived withouta recuperation of religious interpretive approaches and without arecognition of the fact that the founding contents of philosophy aretranscendent. Much of his work, in consequence, might be construed asan attempt to free the contents of religious thinking from thedogmatic orthodoxies imposed upon these contents in the name oforganized religion.

The central idea in Jaspers’s philosophy of religion is theconcept ofphilosophical faith, set out most extensively inDer Philosophische Glaube (Philosophical Faith,1948) andDer Philophische Glaube angesichts der christlichenOffenbarung (Philosophical Faith in face of ChristianRevelation, 1962). This notoriously difficult concept contains anumber of quite distinct meanings. First, it means that truephilosophy must be guided by a faith in the originary transcendence ofhuman existence, and that philosophy which negatively excludes orignores its transcendent origin falls short of the highest tasks ofphilosophy. Second, however, it also means that true philosophy cannotsimply abandon philosophical rationality for positively disclosedtruth-contents or dogma, and that the critical function of rationalityhas a constitutive role in the formation of absolute knowledge. Inthis respect, Jaspers revisited some of the controversies concerningthe relation between religion and philosophy which shaped thephilosophy of the Young Hegelians in the 1830s. Like the YoungHegelians, he insisted that faith needs philosophy, and faith devaluesits contents wherever these are dogmatically or positively proclaimed.Third, then, this concept also indicates that the evidences of faithare always paradoxical and uncertain and that those who pursueknowledge of these contents must accept an attitude of philosophicalrelativism and discursive exchange: if faith results in dogmatism, itimmediately undermines its claims to offer transcendent knowledge. Theconcept of philosophical faith is thus proposed, not as a doctrine offactual revelation or accomplished transcendence, but as a guide totranscendent communication, which balances the element of disclosurein faith with a critical philosophical veto on the absolutism ofreligious claims, and which consequently insists that transcendentknowledge must be accepted as relative and incomplete. In this regard,Jaspers held the religious aspects of his philosophy on a finedialectic between theological and anthropological assertions. Heimplied, at one level, that purely secularist accounts of human lifeocclude existence against its originary transcendent possibilities andfreedoms. At the same time, however, he also suggested that puretheological analysis closes humanity against the relativity andprecariousness of its truths, and against the communicative processesthrough which these truths are disclosed. Only philosophy which can atonce embrace and relativize secularism and embrace and relativizereligion is able to undertake adequate existential inquiry, andphilosophy which, in either direction, abandons the dialectical edgebetween these two commitments ceases to be genuine philosophy.

This critical-recuperative attitude towards religious inquiry wasfundamental to many of the public controversies in which Jaspersengaged. The religious elements of his work came under attack from theCalvinist theologian, Karl Barth, who denounced the lack of objectivereligious content in his concept of transcendence. More significantly,though, Jaspers also entered into a lengthy and influentialcontroversy with Rudolf Bultmann, the resonances of which still impacton liberal theological debate. At the centre of this debate wasJaspers’s critique of Bultmann’s strategy of scripturalde-mythologization: that is, his attempt to clarify thetruth-contents of the scriptures by eliminating the historical ormythological elements of the New Testament, and by concentrating, inan existentially intonated exegesis, on the perennially valid andpresent aspects of the Bible. At the time when Bultmann first proposedthis de-mythologizing approach Jaspers was widely (althougherroneously) identified with the liberal wing of Protestant theology,and it was perhaps expected that he might declare sympathy forBultmann’s hermeneutical approach. Jaspers, however, turnedsharply on Bultmann. He accused him, first, of propagating a falserationalism in religious debate; second, of arbitrarily dismissing themanifestations, embedded in myth, of the spiritual experiences ofthose living in earlier historical époques; and, third, ofaligning all transcendent experiences to a standard scheme of relativevalue, and so of imposing a new system of orthodoxy in theology andundermining the manifold possibilities of transcendence. In oppositionto Bultmann, therefore, Jaspers concluded that only a religioushermeneutic based in absoluteliberality, excluding allorthodoxy, could be appropriate to the task of interpreting thetranscendent contents of human life. Interpretive methods which effacethe traces of historical contingency from transcendence and reducetranscendence to one predetermined religious truth, he suggested, failto reflect on the plural and various forms in which transcendence canbe interpreted, they erroneously presuppose that transcendence can beencased in the categories of one exclusive doctrine, and theyundervalue the constitutive historical variability of transcendence.As a consequence, Jaspers argued implicitly for the importance ofmythical or symbolic forms in religious inquiry, and he indicated thatboth myth and religion contain, in similar measure, the interpretedresidues of transcendence. His analysis of religion culminated in adiscussion of Trinitarian theology which, echoing LudwigFeuerbach’s anthropological analysis, asserted that the threeparts of the trinity should be interpreted, not as factual elements ofdeity, but as symbolic ciphers of human possibility. In this, heascribed particular significance to the second person of the Trinity,Jesus Christ, as a cipher for the human existential possibility ofinner change, reversal and transformation. Wherever this cipher ishypostatically defined as mere positive fact of belief, he concludedhowever, the freedom of transcendence obtained through the sympatheticinterpretation and recuperation of this cipher is obstructed.

Underlying Jaspers’s interest in religion was a determination toconvert the elements of religious doctrine into an account of humanpossibilities and freedoms. Indeed, the ambition behind his work onreligion and myth was no less than to liberate transcendence fromtheology, and to permit an interpretive transformation of religiouslyconceived essences into the free moments of human self-interpretation.If his thought can truly be placed in the terrain of theologicaldiscourse, therefore, his approach to religion is one of extremeliberalism and latitudinarianism, which dismisses the claim thattranscendence is exclusively or even predominantly disclosed byreligion. The truth of religion, he intimated, only becomes true if itis interpreted as a human truth, not as a truth originally external orprior to humanity. In its orthodox form, however, religion normallyprevents the knowledge of transcendence which it purports tooffer.

6. Later Works: The Politics of Humanism

These humanistic reflections on the philosophy of religion are notisolated components of Jaspers’s work. In fact, his criticism ofreligious dogmatism evolved in conjunction with a wider doctrine ofhumanism, which ultimately became the defining component of his laterwork. Arguably, Jaspers was always a humanist; certainly, if humanismis defined as a doctrine which seeks to account for the specificity,uniqueness and dignity of human life his work can, from the outset, beseen as a variant on philosophical humanism. The argument runs throughall his early works that human beings are distinguished by the factthat they have authentic attributes of existence andtranscendence—that is, by their ability to raise questions aboutthemselves and their freedoms which cannot be posed in material orscientific terms, and by their resultant capacity for decisivereversal, self-transformation and transcendence. True humanity is thusa condition of free self-possession and transcendent authenticity. Ingeneral terms, existentialism can be divided between philosophers,such as Jean-Paul Sartre, who defined existentialism as a humanism,and those, such as Heidegger, who saw the organization of philosophyaround the analysis of human determinacy as a metaphysical corruptionof philosophy. Jaspers clearly belonged to the first category ofexistential philosophers.

In his writings after 1945, most especially inVomUrsprung und Ziel der Geschichte (The Origin and Goal ofHistory, 1949) andDie Atombombe und die Zukunft desMenschen (The Atom Bomb and the Future of Mankind,1961), Jaspers structured his work quite explicitly as a humanistdoctrine. From this time on, moreover, he attached greater importanceto the social and collective conditions of human integrity and hetended to tone down his earlier construction of interiority as theplace of human freedom. In fact, even the termExistenzbecame increasingly scarce in his post-1945 publications, and it wasreplaced, to a large extent, by ideas of shared humanity, founded, notin the decisive experiences of inner transformation, but in theresources of culture, tradition and ethically modulated politicallife. Central to these later works, consequently, was not only a turntowards humanistic reflection, but also an inquiry into the politicsof humanism and the distinctively human preconditions of politicalexistence.

Broadly reconstructed, in his later political work he argued that theemergence of European totalitarianism—exemplified by bothNational Socialism and Communism—was the result of a decline inpolitical humanity and of an increasing primacy of modes of technicalor instrumental rationality, which erode the authentic resources ofhuman life. He therefore sought to offer an account of a human polity,able to provide an enduring bastion against totalitarian inhumanity.First, he argued, the human polity must be sustained by an integralcultural tradition, so that human beings can interpret the ciphers oftheir integrity in the ethical contents of a national culture. Thepolitical betrayal of humanity, he suggested, is usually flanked by,and in fact presupposes, a cultural betrayal of humanity, andtotalitarian governance normally arises from the erosion orinstrumental subjection of culture. In the nineteenth century Marx hadargued that the reactionary malaise of German politics was caused bythe fact that German society habitually allowed culture to stand infor politics and defined the relatively de-politicized educatedbourgeois elite [Bildungsbürgertum] as the pillar ofsocial order and the arbiter of progress. Jaspers responded to thischaracterization of Germany by claiming that societies which underminethe cultural role of the bourgeois elite are inherently unstable, andthat the educated bourgeoisie has a primary role to play in upholdingthe preconditions of democratic culture. Second, he argued that thehuman polity must be based in free communication between citizens:communicative freedom is a prerequisite of public virtue. The humanpolity, he thus implied, is likely to be some kind of democracy, basedin some degree of publicly formed consensus. Like Arendt, in fact, heconcluded that social atomization creates cultures in whichtotalitarianism is likely to flourish, and that only unregulateddebate in the public sphere can offset this latent pathology of masssociety. Third, he argued that the resources of technological,scientific and economic planning employed by the political systemshould be kept at a minimum, and that the existence of an unplannedsphere of human interaction is necessary for the maintenance of ahuman political order. In this respect, he fervently opposed alltendencies towards technocratic governance, which he identified bothin the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe, and in the rapidly expandingwelfare state of the Federal Republic under Adenauer. Technocracy, heasserted, is the objective form of the instrumental tendencies inhuman reason, and if it is not counterbalanced by the integrally humanresources of cultural or rational communication it is likely to resultin oppressive government. In this respect, he moved close to quitestandard variants on political liberalism, and he endorsed limitedgovernment, relative cultural and economic freedom, and protection forsociety from unaccountable political direction. Fourth, he also arguedthat a human polity requires a constitutional apparatus, enshriningbasic rights, imposing moral-legal order on the operations of thestate, and restricting the prerogative powers of the politicalapparatus. Like Kant, therefore, he advocated the institution of aninternational federation of states, with shared constitutions, lawsand international courts. Fifth, however, he also retained aspects ofthe elite-democratic outlook which he had first inherited from Weber,and he continued to argue that the human polity must be supported andguided by reasonable persons or responsible elites.

After the traumas of National Socialism and the war, however, it isfair to say that Jaspers’s political philosophy never movedfinally beyond a sceptical attitude towards pure democracy, and hispolitical writings never fully renounced the sense that German societywas not sufficiently evolved to support a democracy, and Germansrequired education and guidance for democracy to take hold. Even inhis last writings of the 1960s, in which he declared tentative supportfor the activities of the student movement around 1968, there remaintraces of elite-democratic sympathy. For all his importance in modernGerman politics, therefore, his philosophy of politics was alwaysslightly anachronistic, and his position remained embedded in thepersonalistic ideals of statehood which characterized the old-liberalpolitical culture of Imperial Germany and persisted in theconservative-liberal fringes of the Weimar Republic.

Jaspers left unfinishedDie Großen Philosophen, whosedeclared aim was “promoting the happiness that comes of meetinggreat men and sharing in their thoughts”, and employed hispersonal method of constant questioning and struggle. This is amonumental project of universal history of philosophy, whose creatorswere the outstanding philosophers who inspired the human thought.Jaspers, who believed that only through communication with others canwe come to ourselves and to wisdom, regarded the philosophers hediscusses in this book as his “eternal contemporaries” and“the disturbers” in the sense of thinkers for whom doubtand despair loomed large. The first two volumes of this work appearedin 1958, while the third and fourth have been gathered from the vastmaterial of his posthumous papers. The editors Ermarth and Ehrlichhave, however, been able to stitch together a coherent book that, inaccordance with Jaspers’s plan, primarily covers thephilosophers whom he termed “the disturbers”: thinkers forwhom doubt and despair loomed large. The English translations were byRalf Manheim and edited by Hannah Arendt, and appeared in parts until1994.

7. Commentary and Edition of the complete works (KJG)

The Heidelberg Academy (“Heidelberger Forum Edition”) andthe academy of sciences in Göttingen initiated a project ofgathering in one standard edition the unconnected variety ofdistinguished editions, commentaries, and translations of the writingsof Karl Jaspers. The project is chaired by Otfried Höffe,together with the editors Thomas Fuchs, Jens Halfwassen, and ReinhardSchulz, with the cooperation of Anton Hügli, Kurt Salamun, undHans Saner. The planned project consists of three major divisions,altogether comprising 50 volumes: works (I. 1–27), estate (II.1–11), and letters (III. 1–12). While the first divisioncovers all the works that were printed and published duringJaspers’s lifetime, the second and the third encompassselections from the vast material of his posthumous papers, somealready published and others that have never appeared. The set’sgeneral objective is reviving the investigation of the philosophical,contemporary, and cultural preconditions for Jaspers’s thinking,and also tracing the history of his impact. The work on this editionat the Universities of Heidelberg and Oldenburg is projected to take18 years and is the fruit of cooperation with the Karl JaspersFoundation in Basel. The editors will have recourse to the unpublishedwritings kept at the German Literary Archives in Marbach and the11,000 volumes of the Jaspers Research Library in the future KarlJaspers House in Oldenburg. Over and above the commentary itself, theedition is designed to provide new impulses for research on thephilosopher and to enable the debates on present-day cultural andpolitical issues to profit from a species of thinking that can bedescribed as interdisciplinary and cosmopolitan in the best sense ofthose terms. For now, the following volumes exist:

Karl Jaspers Gesamtausgabe (KJG), Basel: Schwabe AG Verlag

I/3

Gesammelte Schriften zur Psychopathologie (2019)
Marazia, Chantal (Hrsg.)
Fonfara, Dirk (Mitwirkender)

I/6

Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (2019)
Immel, Oliver (Hrsg.)
Fonfara, Dirk (Mitwirkended)

I/10

Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (2017)
Kurt Salamun (Hrsg.)

I/13

Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung (2016)
Bernd Weidmann (Hrsg.)
mit Lesebändchen.

I/18

Nietzsche (2020)
Dominic Kaegi, Andreas Urs Sommer (Hg.)

I/21

Schriften zur Universitätsidee (2015)
Oliver Immel (Hrsg.)

I/23

Die Schuldfrage (2017)
Dominic Kaegi (Hrsg.)

II/1

Grundsätze des Philosophierens, Einführung inphilosophisches Leben (Nachlass) (2019)
Weidmann Bernd (Hrsg.)

I/8

Schriften zur Existenzphilosophie (2018)
Dominic Kaegi (Hrsg.)

III/8.1

Ausgewählte Verlags- undÜbersetzerkorrespondenzen (2017)
Dirk Fonfara (Hrsg.)

III/8.2

Ausgewählte Korrespondenzen mit dem Piper Verlag undKlaus Piper 1942–1968 (2020)
Dirk Fonfara (Hrsg.)

Bibliography

Major Works by Jaspers

Selected Secondary Literature

• Bakewell, Sarah, 2017,At the Existentialist Café:Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone deBeauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty andOthers, New York: Other Press.
• Bormuth, Matthias, 2002,Lebensführung in der Moderne,Karl Jaspers und die Psychoanalyse, Stuttgart (Bad Cannstatt):Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy and Pscyhopathology.
• –––, 2006,Life Conduct in Modern Times:Karl Jaspers and Psychoanalysis, Dordrecht: Springer.
• –––, 2010, “Psychiatrie alsKulturwissenschaft”,Der Nervenerzt, 81(11): 1346–1353.
• –––, 2013a, “Karl Jaspers thepathographer”, in Giovanni Stanghellini and Thomas Fuchs(eds.),One Century of Karl Jaspers’ GeneralPscyhopathology, Oxford: Oxford University Press,134–149.
• –––, 2013b, “Freedom and Mystery: An IntellectualHistory of Jaspers’ General Pscyhopathology”,Psychopathology, 46(5): 281–288.
• –––, 2019. “Karl Jaspers”,TheOxford Handbook of Phenomenological Pscyhopathology, Oxford:Oxford University Press, 96–103.
• Ehrlich, Leonard H., 1975,Karl Jaspers: Philosophy asFaith, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
• Ehrlich, Leonard H. and Wisser, Richard (eds.), 1988,KarlJaspers Today: Philosophy at the Threshold of the Future, Lanham:University Press of America.
• ––– (eds.), 1993,Karl Jaspers: Philosophunter Philosophen, Würzburg: Konigshausen &Neumann.
• Fuchs, Thomas, Thiemo Breyer, and Christoph Mundt (eds.), 2013,Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy and Pscyhopathology, New York,Heidelberg: Springer Science & Business Media.
• Harth, Dietrich (ed.), 1989,Karl Jaspers, Denken zwischenWissenschaft, Politik und Philosophie, Stuttgart: J.B. MetzlerVerlag.
• Hommel, Claus Uwe, 1968,Chiffer und Dogma, vomVerhältnis der Philosophie zur Religion bei Karl Jaspers,Zurich: EVZ Verlag, Abt. Editio Academicas.
• Howey, Richard Lowell, 1973,Heidegger and Jaspers onNietzsche:A Critical Examination of Heidegger’s andJaspers’ Interpretations of Nietzsche, The Hague:Nijhoff.
• Kirkbright, Suzanne, 2004,Karl Jaspers: ABiography—Navigations in Truth, New Haven: Yale UniversityPress.
• Klein, Aloys, 1973,Glaube und Mythos, Eine kritische,religionsphilosophischtheologische Untersuchung des Mythos-Begriffsbei Karl Jaspers, Munich: F. Schöningh.
• Lengert, Rudolf (ed.), 1983,Philosophie der Freiheit,Oldenburg: Holzberg.
• Miron, Ronny, 2012,Karl Jaspers: From Selfhood to Being,Amsterdam: Rodopi.
• –––, 2014,The Desire for Metaphysics:Selected Papers on Karl Jaspers, Champagne, IL: CommonGround.
• O’Connor, B.F., 1988,A Dialogue between Philosophy andReligion: The Perspective of Karl Jaspers, Lanham: Rowman &Littlefield Publishers.
• Olson, Alan M., 1979,Transcendence and Hermeneutics: AnInterpretation of the Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, Dordrecht:Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• ––– (ed.), 1993,Heidegger and Jaspers,Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Örnek, Yusuf, 1983,Karl Jaspers, Philosophie derFreiheit, Freiburg and Munich: K. Alber.
• Peach, Filiz, 2008,Death, ‘Deathlessness’ andExistenz in Karl Jaspers’s Philosophy, Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press.
• Richli, Urs, 1967,Transzendental Reflexion und sittlicheEntscheidung, Zum Problem der Selbsterkenntnis der Metaphysik beiJaspers und Kant, Bonn: H. Bouvier.
• Rinofner-Kreidl Sonja, 2014, “Phenomenological Intuitionismand Its Psychiatric Impact”, inKarl Jaspers’Philosophy and Psychopathology, Thomas Fuchs, Thiemo Breyer, andChristoph Mundt (eds.), Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 33–60.
• Samay, Sebastian, 1971,Reason Revisited: The Philosophy ofKarl Jaspers, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.
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