## 1. Biography



Karl Theodor Jaspers was born on 23rd February 1883 in the
North German town of Oldenburg near the North Sea, where his ancestors
had lived for generations. He was the son of a banker and a
representative of the parliament (Landtagesabgeordneten), Carl Wilhelm
Jaspers (1850-1940) and Henriette Tantzen (1862-1941), who
also came from a family that was involved in local parliament.
Jaspers's family milieu was strongly influenced by the political
culture of North German liberalism, and he often referred to the
climate of early liberal democratic thought as a formative aspect of
his education. Moreover, although he claimed not to have been
influenced by any specifically ecclesiastical faith, his thought was
also formed by the spirit of North German Protestantism, and his
philosophical outlook can in many respects be placed in the
religiously inflected tradition of Kant and Kierkegaard.



Jaspers was a pupil at the *Altes Gymnasium* in Oldenburg.
Since his early childhood, Jaspers suffered from chronic
bronchiectasis that impaired his physical capabilities and awareness
of his physical disabilities shaped his routine throughout his adult
life and formed his sensitivity to psychological issues, including
human suffering. Jaspers attributed his ability to conduct a normative
routine and to devote his life to his creative work to his strict
discipline regarding his health.



In 1910 he married Gertrud Mayer (1879-1974), who came from a
pious German-Jewish merchant family. At the time, she was working as
an assistant in the sanatorium of the neurologist and psychiatrist
Oskar Kohnstamms (1871-1917) and was the sister of his close
friends Gustav Mayer and the philosopher Ernest Mayer. Only thanks to
her marriage to the already known philosopher Karl Jaspers was Gertrud
Mayer able to stay in Germany during the Nazi period.


## 2. Career



Jaspers received an extremely diverse and broad-ranging education. He
initially enrolled as a student of law at the University of Heidelberg
for three semesters (1901-1902). Despite his already vivid interest in
philosophy, which he explored through Spinoza's *Ethics*
(1677) and Kant's *Critique of Pure Reason*
(1781), he decided for medicine was based on his belief that
it best illuminated life itself and the challenges of human existence.
Jaspers began his medicine studies in Berlin (1902/1903), then moved
to Gottingen (1903-1906), and eventually finished them in Heidelberg
(1906-1908). He submitted his dissertation, *Heimweh und
Verbrechen* in 1908 and graduated M.D. in 1909. He was a research
assistant in the psychiatric clinic of the university of Heidelberg
from 1909-1915, where he worked with some of the most famous
psychiatrists in Germany, including Nissl, Wilmanned, Gruhle, and
Mayer-Gross. Due to his illness with bronchiectasis, he was incapable
of carrying out heavy duties in the clinic. The director of the
psychiatric clinic of the university of Heidelberg, Franz Nissl,
permitted him to spend the majority of his time at the library rather
than in the clinic and the laboratory. Indeed, his extraordinary
skills of critical thinking and abstract observation on human
situations were evident already then. From 1913 onward, Jaspers read
philosophy systematically. In 1913 he published his *Allgemeine
Psychopathologie* (*General Psychopathology*) which already
made apparent the viewpoints and methods that belong to the world of
the humanities and social studies that were regarded by him as
converging into psychopathology. In the same year, he obtained his
second doctorate (*Habilitation*) in psychology from the
Philosophy Faculty at the University of Heidelberg, supervised by
Wilhelm Windelband. He was a lecturer and later an Associate Professor
of Psychology (*Privatdozent*) from 1913 to 1921. During this
period, in 1919, he published his *Psychologie der
Weltanschauungen* (*Psychology of World Views*). This work
is considered as a transitional work, in which his psychological
method was clearly shaped by philosophical influences and objectives,
and was already evolving into a consistent philosophical doctrine and
acquiring some of the main issues that were to be explored later
within his philosophy of existence. Then, in 1922, he took over the
full professorial chair of philosophy in the University of Heidelberg
(after Heinrich Maier), a position from which he was dismissed in 1937
by the Nazis. To a large extent, the two first major publications were
works of psychology that contain many elements, albeit in inchoate
form, of his later philosophy. Following his nomination as professor,
he wrote nothing for ten years, except for two small works--a
patholography *Stirnberg and van Gogh* in 1922 and *Die Idee
der Universitat* (The Idea of the University) in 1923.



While he was working as a psychiatrist in Heidelberg, Jaspers came
into contact with Max Weber, and also with the other intellectuals who
were grouped around Weber, including Ernst Bloch, Emil Lask, Georg
Simmel, and Lukacs. His intellectual formation was marked in a
number of ways by this intellectual milieu. At a political level, he
integrated aspects of Weber's enthusiasm for heroic liberalism,
responsible nationalism and elite democracy into his own thought and
attitudes. At a more theoretical level, his ideas were determined by
the increasingly critical responses to neo-Kantian philosophy, which
dominated methodological discussions around Weber and Lukacs,
and which subsequently coloured the intellectual horizon during World
War I and throughout the Weimar Republic. This period witnessed the
dethroning of neo-Kantianism as the philosophical orthodoxy in the
German academic establishment, and it was marked by a proliferation of
philosophical models which rejected Kantian formalism and sought to
integrate experiential, historical and even sociological elements into
philosophical discourse. The attempt to rescue Kantian philosophy from
the legalistic formalism of the South West German School of
neo-Kantian philosophy, centred around Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm
Windelband, became one of the central features of Jaspers's
work, and in many ways his entire philosophical evolution was
motivated by the desire to reconstruct Kantian thought, not as a
formalist doctrine of self-legislation, but as an account of
metaphysical experience, spontaneously decisive freedom, and authentic
inner life. His early career as professor of philosophy was also
deeply (and adversely) affected by neo-Kantian hostility to his work.
Indeed, both neo-Kantians and phenomenological philosophers subjected
his work to trenchant criticism in the early stages of his
philosophical trajectory, and members of both these camps, especially
Rickert and Edmund Husserl, accused him of importing anthropological
and experiential questions into philosophy and thus of contaminating
philosophical analysis with contents properly pertaining to other
disciplines.



If Weber was the first decisive personal influence and Kant was the
first decisive philosophical influence on Jaspers, in the early 1920s
he encountered a further figure who assumed a decisive role in his
formation: that is, Martin Heidegger. It cannot be claimed without
qualification that Heidegger directly determined the conceptual
structure or underlying preconditions of Jaspers's work, nor
that Heidegger assimilated aspects of Jaspers's thought into his
own philosophy. Throughout their theoretical trajectories, the
differences between Heidegger and Jaspers were in many ways greater
than the similarities. Indeed, the theoretical controversies between
them eventually culminated in an embittered personal and political
altercation, caused by Heidegger's publicly declared sympathy
for the National Socialists in 1933. Jaspers felt himself personally
threatened by Heidegger's infamous decision to support the
Nazis, as he was married to a Jewish woman, and he had previously
attached himself to eminent liberal politicians and philosophers, most
notably Weber, who were now vilified by Heidegger and other
intellectuals attached to the NSDAP. In 1933, Jaspers himself was
briefly tempted into making certain incautiously optimistic statements
about the Hitler regime. Indeed, these were remarks were not entirely
out of keeping with his other publications of the early 1930s. In the
last years of the Weimar Republic he published a controversial
political work, *Die geistige Situation der Zeit* (*The
Spiritual Condition of the Age*, 1931), which--to his later
acute embarrassment--contained a carefully worded critique of
parliamentary democracy. Throughout this period, he also stressed the
relevance of Weberian ideas of strong leadership for the preservation
of political order in Germany. The souring of his relations with
Heidegger, however, seems to have hardened his mind into a strict and
sustained opposition to National Socialism, and, unlike Heidegger, his
works of the 1930s avoided political themes and were largely
concentrated on elaborating the interior or religious aspects of his
philosophy. In 1932, he published his trilogy *Philosophie*,
consisting of three separate volumes, each based on its own object of
transcending: *Weltorientierung* (Orientation of the World),
*Existenzerhellung* (Illumination of Existence) and
*Metaphysik* (Metaphysics). This book is generally considered
as his *magnum opus* and he testified in retrospect that is was
the closest work to his heart. The choice not to grant the book the
expected title of "Existential Philosophy", despite the
extensive use of the term *Existenzphilosophie*, reflects his
discontent about its narrowing his guiding ideal of *Philosophia
Perennis*. Later in his *Vernunft und Widervernunft in unserer
Zeit* (Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time), from 1950 he would
express his preference for the expression 'philosophy of
reason'.



Despite the at times envenomed relations between them, however,
Heidegger and Jaspers are usually associated with each other as the
two founding fathers of existential philosophy in Germany. This
interpretation of their philosophical status and relationship is at
least questionable. Heidegger resented being described as an
existentialist, and Jaspers, at least after 1933, resented being
identified with Heidegger. Even during their early friendship
Heidegger was very critical of Jaspers's philosophy; he wrote a
commentary on *Psychology of World Views*, in which he claimed
that Jaspers's methodological approach remained ensnared in the
falsehoods of subjectivist metaphysics and Cartesian ontology, and
that it illegitimately introduced the categories of Weberian sociology
into philosophical analysis. Similarly, throughout his life Jaspers
kept a book of critical notes on Heidegger, and he routinely described
Heidegger's fundamental ontology in a tone of moral-humanistic
disapprobation. Nonetheless, there remains a residue of validity in
the common association of Heidegger and Jaspers, and, although it
requires qualification, this association is not in every respect
misleading. Existentialism was, and remains, a highly diffuse
theoretical movement, and it cannot be expected that two philosophers
connected with this movement should hold similar views in all
respects. However, existentialism had certain unifying features, and
many of these were common to both Jaspers and Heidegger. In the early
stages of its evolution, therefore, existentialism might be described
as a theoretical stance which: a) moved philosophical discourse away
from Kantian formalism and emphasized the belief that the content of
thought must reside in particular experiences and decisions; b)
followed Kierkegaard in defining philosophy as a passionate and deeply
engaged activity, in which the integrity and the authenticity of the
human being are decisively implicated; c) sought to overcome the
antinomies (reason/experience; theory/praxis; transcendence/immanence;
pure reason/practical reason) which determine the classical
metaphysical tradition by incorporating all aspects (cognitive,
practical and sensory) of human life in an encompassing account of
rational and experiential existence. If this definition of
existentialism is accepted, then the suggestion of a family connection
between Jaspers and Heidegger cannot be entirely repudiated, for both
contributed to the reorganization of philosophical questioning in the
1920s in a manner which conforms to this definition. Ultimately,
however, relations between Heidegger and Jaspers degenerated to a
terminal impasse, and after World War II Jaspers refused to explain or
exonerate Heidegger's political actions during the Nazi years
and he even recommended to a de-Nazification committee that Heidegger
should be suspended from his university teaching responsibilities.



During the Nazi period from 1933 onwards, Jaspers was excluded from
any co-operation in the administration of the university until he was
dismissed from his chair as a professor in 1937 and was subject to a
publication ban (*Publikationsverbot*). During the war, he and
his wife were in no physical danger. Yet he felt himself a marked man
until the end of World War II. Jaspers once heard indirectly that
there was a plan to deport him and his wife to a concentration camp in
the middle of April 1945. Fortunately, the American troops arrived in
Heidelberg two weeks earlier, on April 1st 1945. However,
after 1945, his fortunes changed dramatically, and he figured
prominently on the White List of the US-American occupying forces:
that is, on the list of politicians and intellectuals who were deemed
untarnished by any association with the NSDAP, and who were allowed to
play a public role in the process of German political re-foundation.
From this time on Jaspers defined himself primarily as a popular
philosopher and educator. In the first role, he contributed extensive
edifying commentaries on questions of political orientation and civic
morality--first, in the interim state of 1945-1949, and
then, after 1949, in the early years of the Federal Republic of
Germany. In the second role, as one of the professors responsible for
reopening the University of Heidelberg, to which he was appointed by
the American Army of Occupation as a contemporary rector, he wrote at
length on the necessity of university reforms, he emphasized the role
of liberal humanistic education as a means of disseminating democratic
ideas throughout Germany, and he took a firm line against the
rehabilitation of professors with a history of Nazi affiliation. In
1946, *The Idea of the University* was published in an
essentially different form from the book with the same title from
1923. The later work presents the university as a free community of
scholars and students engaged in the task of seeking truth. As such,
the university and the scholars that populate it can and should play a
decisive role in rehabilitation of Europe based on the noblest ideas
of the enlightenment. At that time and still, Jaspers is one of few
who can justly speak for value and the need for such a stance against
the threats upon freedom and humanity. The acknowledgment of
Jaspers's noble humanism in the first years after the war is
apparent in the numerous honors granted to him, including the Goethe
Prize in 1947, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1958, the
Erasmus Prize in 1959, and the Prize of the Foundation of Oldenburg
for Honorary Citizens.



Of his post-1945 publications, therefore, Jaspers's political
contributions are perhaps the most significant. His contribution to
the promotion of a democratic civic culture in West Germany at this
time was of great importance, and his writings and radio broadcasts
shaped, in part, the gradually evolving democratic consensus of the
early Federal Republic. In *Die Schuldfrage* (*The Question
of German Guilt*, 1946), published at the time of the
Nurnberg trials, he argued that, although not all Germans could
be legitimately brought to trial for war crimes, all Germans should
accept an implicit complicity in the holocaust and only the critical
self-reflection of all Germans could lead to cultural and political
renewal. In the 1950s, he supported the main policies of the
liberal-conservative governments led by Konrad Adenauer
(1949-1963), and he particularly endorsed the formation of the
Western Alliance, which he saw as a means of protecting the cultural
resources of Western European culture from their colonization by the
Soviet Union. Throughout this time, however, the cautiously
conservative tenor of Jaspers's political thought was
progressively modified by his frequent and at times intense
intellectual exchanges with Hannah Arendt, who might well be seen as
the fourth great influence on his work. Jaspers had been
Arendt's tutor and supervisor before she emigrated from Germany
in the 1930s, but the period after 1945 saw something of a role
reversal in this relationship, which Jaspers seems to have accepted
quite graciously. Influenced by Arendt's agonistic
republicanism, he gradually turned against the relatively complacent
spirit of political and intellectual restoration in the early Federal
Republic, and he finally devoted himself to elaborating models of
citizenship founded in constitutional rights and legally enshrined
identities. In this respect, he can be viewed as an important
precursor of Jurgen Habermas, and his works contain an early
conception of the doctrine later known as *constitutional
patriotism*. His views on German re-unification were also
particularly influential; he opposed the dominant outlooks of the time
by claiming that the demand for re-unification meant that German
politics remained infected with the damaging traces of old
geo-political ideas and ambitions, and it prevented the fundamental
redirection of German political life. Finally, then, in symbolic
demonstration of disgust at the persistence of pernicious political
attitudes 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 himself
closer to the political left, and he even argued that only a legal
revolution could ensure that the German state was organized on the
basis of a morally decisive constitution. He died of a stroke in
Basel, Switzerland on February 26 1969 at the age of 86. His wife,
Gertrud Jaspers, who served as his amanuensis throughout his entire
life 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-speaking
psychiatry, is Jaspers's lasting contribution to the field of
psychiatry that preceded his philosophical work, and in retrospect
transpires as not wholly unrelated it, at least in its common guiding
spirit. During his distinguished career as a psychiatrist, Jaspers
achieved an outstanding contribution to psychiatric thinking, later
called 'The Heidelberg School' and led by Kurt Schneider.
As a young man, he authored a number of scientific articles on
homesickness and crime, on intelligence tests, on hallucinations
- all illustrated with detailed case histories. Also, Jaspers
published reports of the mental pathology of Van Gogh and Stirnberg.
Among these, of special importance are his outstanding article from
1910, in which he introduced his method and fundamental principles
regarding 'mental processes' and 'personality
development', and an article on the phenomenological method in
psychiatry from 1912, which established his pioneer status as a first
commentator on the phenomenological study of subjective experiences at
the conscious level. At the age of barely thirty, in 1913, while he
was working as a physician in the psychiatric hospital at Heidelberg,
Jaspers published his *Allgemeine Psychopathologie: Ein Leitfaden
fur Studierenden, Arzte und Psychologen* (General
Psychopathology: A Guide for Students, Physicians and Psychologists).
The aims of this book were to provide the framework of the scientific
field of psychopathology and its related facts and approaches, not
only for practitioners in this field but also for interested
intellectuals. This framework covers the problems and methods that
capture the body of knowledge of the field rather than empirical
evidence or a system based on a theory. Instead of deciding between
the different existing approaches of his time, he stressed their
peculiarity that entails the inherent justifications and the way they
might complement each other and together portray the many sides of the
psychopathological science. The hint of the spirit of his existential
philosophy, yet to become expressed, is apparent in his declaration in
the preface of the book, according to which "in psychopathology
it is dangerous merely to learn the matter, our task is not to
'learn psychopathology' but to learn to observe, ask
questions, analyze, and think in psychopathological terms".
However, despite the very impressive of the achievement of the
mentioned book, which within the German speaking world was recognized
by leading psychiatrists as a monumental achievement in the field, it
marked the culmination of Jaspers's psychiatric productivity.
Just two years later, Jaspers moved away forever from psychiatric
practice and medicine in general, first towards psychology and then
philosophy. Interestingly, though, Jaspers saw fit to revise and
expand the text in a few of its several editions. The first edition is
the shortest. In the second and third editions, there were minor
changes. The most considerably revised and expanded edition is the
fourth, which appeared in 1942. To a large extent, the integration of
many ideas from his then already mature existential philosophy from
the thirties onwards, which more than doubled the scope of the text,
in fact amount to a new version of the book. Now, the subtitle that
appeared in the earlier versions was removed and in the preface
Jaspers indicates its high aim of satisfying the demand for knowledge,
not only for physicians but for all who make mankind their theme. In
this enlarged version of the book, the imprint of Husserl's
descriptive psychology is apparent in the attempt to address the inner
mental experiences of mentally ill people (mainly schizophrenic
patients) and regard them as indicative of the general phenomena of
human consciousness, i.e.: delusions, modes of ego-consciousness, and
modes of emotions. At the same time, the imprint of Wilhelm Dilthey
(1833-1911) was perceptible in the centrality given to the
distinction between 'understanding psychology'
(*Verstehende Psychologie*), which relates to meaningful and
comprehensible connections that are inherent in one's
personality and biography, and 'explaining psychology'
(*Erklarende Psychologie*), which focuses on causal
connections that are mainly rooted in
 biology.1]



Jaspers's declared conviction that the methodological principles
remain largely unaffected by the increased materials supported his
efforts to add entire sections to the new versions of the book -
sections that aptly reveal his philosophical view on the pertinent
considerations in curing mental illness. Notwithstanding this, Jaspers
opposed the attempts to address existentialist ideas for the sake of
understanding mental illness. For him it is not possible that a human
being as a whole falls ill or alternatively that illness of any kind
can cover one's entire being, rather there are always parts that
remain uninfected with illness or healthy.



It is worth noting that the appearance of the fourth edition of
*General Psychopathology* was enabled despite the publication
ban to which Jaspers was subject since 1938 for his outspoken and
uncompromising resistance to the Nazis regime and his persistent
loyalty to his Jewish wife. Probably the same title from 1913 and the
scientific character, which covered the fact of incorporation of the
of considerable sections which where imprinted with his philosophical
thinking, were helpful in this regard. Despite ceasing practicing
psychiatry, Jaspers retain his interest in psychopathology and was
fully aware of the developments in the field, in particular regarding
the neurological and somatic aspects of mental illness. However, after
the fourth edition appeared, five more were printed in the same format
as the fourth, the latest appearing in 1973. An English translation
exists for the seventh edition only and was published in 1963 by J.
Hoenig and Miriam Hamilton. For various reasons--starting from
not considering the 'real causes' of mental illness,
continuing with its loaded style of writing and argumentation, its
severe (though inconsistent) criticism of psychoanalysis, which at
that time was regarded as indispensable in any consideration of
psychopathology, and other reasons--the reception of General
Psychopathology in the English-speaking countries was far from
enthusiastic, except for the most respectful, and was sometimes even
hostile.


## 4. The Philosophical Writings



Jaspers's first intervention in philosophical debate,
*Psychology of World Views*, constructed a typology of mental
attitudes, which, close to Weber's model of ideal types, was
intended to provide an interpretive account of basic psychological
dispositions. The underlying argument in this work is that the
constitutive fact of human mental life is the division between subject
and object (*Subjekt-Objekt-Spaltung*). Human psychological
forms--or world views--are positioned as antinomical moments
within this founding antinomy, and they give distinct paradigmatic
expression to the relation between human subjective inclinations and
freedoms and the objective phenomena which the subject encounters.
Unlike Weber, however, Jaspers argued that the construction of world
views is not a merely neutral process, to be judged in non-evaluative
manner. Instead, all world views contain an element of pathology; they
incorporate strategies of defensiveness, suppression and subterfuge,
and they are concentrated around false certainties or spuriously
objectivized modes of rationality, into which the human mind withdraws
in order to obtain security amongst the frighteningly limitless
possibilities of human existence. World views, in consequence,
commonly take the form of objectivized cages (*Gehause*),
in which existence hardens itself against contents and experiences
which threaten to transcend or unbalance the defensive restrictions
which it has placed upon its operations. Although some world views
possess an unconditioned component, most world views exist as the
*limits* of a formed mental apparatus. It is the task of
psychological intervention, Jaspers thus argued, to guide human
existence beyond the restricted antinomies around which it stabilizes
itself, and to allow it decisively to confront the more authentic
possibilities, of subjective and objective life, which it effaces
through its normal rational dispositions and attitudes.



In addition to this psychological typology, Jaspers's analysis
of world views also contains a wider critique of human rationality.
Most modes of rationality, he suggested, are conveniently instrumental
or ideological forms, which serve distinct subjective and objective
functions, and they habitually stand in the way of genuine knowledge.
At the same time, however, he also claimed that rationality possesses
capacities of communicative integrity and phenomenological
self-overcoming, and, if authentically exercised, it is able to escape
its narrowly functional form, to expose itself to new contents beyond
its limits and antinomies, and to elaborate new and more cognitively
unified conceptual structures. He therefore indicated that
formal-epistemological concepts of rationality must be expanded to
recognize that experience and committed actions are formative of
authentic knowledge, and that reason cannot, in Cartesian manner, be
monadically dislocated from its historical, sensory, experiential and
voluntaristic foundations. From the outset, therefore, Jaspers's
work, although methodologically marked by Weber, was also indelibly
stamped by Hegel's philosophy, and it sought to integrate the
preconditions of Hegel's phenomenology into a systematic
psychological doctrine. Indeed, at this early stage in his development
Jaspers's thought hinged on an existential--or
Kierkegaardian--alteration of Hegelian philosophy. In this, he
transposed the dialectical process through which Hegel accounted for
the overcoming of cognitive antinomies in the emergence of
self-consciousness into an analysis of cognitive formation which sees
the resolution of reason's antinomies as effected through vital
experiences, decisive acts of self-confrontation, or communicative
transcendence.



In this early work, Jaspers introduced several concepts which assumed
great importance for all his work. Most importantly, this work
contains a theory of the limit (*Grenze*). This term designates
both the habitual forms and attitudes of the human mental apparatus,
and the experiences of the mind as it recognizes these attitudes as
falsely objectivized moments within its antinomical structure, and as
it transcends these limits by disposing itself in new ways towards
itself and its objects. In his early philosophy Jaspers thus ascribed
central status to 'limit situations'
(*Grenzsituationen*). Limit situations are moments, usually
accompanied by experiences of dread, guilt or acute anxiety, in which
the human mind confronts the restrictions and pathological narrowness
of its existing forms, and allows itself to abandon the securities of
its limitedness, and so to enter new realm of self-consciousness. In
conjunction with this, then, this work also contains a theory of the
*unconditioned* (*das Unbedingte*). In this theory,
Jaspers argued that limit situations are unconditioned moments of
human existence, in which reason is drawn by intense impulses or
imperatives, which impel it to expose itself to the limits of its
consciousness and to seek higher or more reflected modes of knowledge.
The unconditioned, a term transported from Kantian doctrines of
synthetic regress, is thus proposed by Jaspers as a vital impetus in
reason, in which reason encounters its form as conditioned or limited
and desires to transcend the limits of this form. In relation to this,
then, Jaspers's early psychological work also introduced, albeit
inchoately, the concept of *existential communication*. In
this, he argued that the freedom of consciousness to overcome its
limits and antinomies can only be elaborated through speech: that is,
as a process in which consciousness is elevated beyond its limits
through intensely engaged communication with other persons, and in
which committed communication helps to suspend the prejudices and
fixed attitudes of consciousness. Existentially open consciousness is
therefore always communicative, and it is only where it abandons its
monological structure that consciousness can fully elaborate its
existential possibilities. In this early doctrine of communication,
Jaspers helped to shape a wider communicative and intersubjective
shift in German philosophy; indeed, the resonances of his existential
hermeneutics remained palpable in the much later works of Hans-Georg
Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. Less obviously, however, in this doctrine he
also guided early existential thinking away from its original
association with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and, although assimilating
Kierkegaardian elements of decisiveness and impassioned commitment, he
claimed that Kierkegaard's cult of interiority, centred in the
speechlessness of inner life, was a miscarried attempt to envision the
conditions of human authenticity. The decision for authentic
self-overcoming and cognitive unity can only occur, he argued, through
shared participation in dialogue.



The major publication of Jaspers's earlier period, and probably
of his entire career, is the three-volume work: *Philosophy*
(1932). In this work, he retained the partly Hegelian focus of his
earlier publications, and he followed the spirit of Hegelian
phenomenology in providing an account of the formation of human
consciousness, which grasps consciousness as proceeding from the level
of immediate knowledge and progressing through a sequence of
antinomies towards a level of truthfully unified reflection and
self-knowledge. In this, Jaspers again accentuated the claim that the
antinomies which reason encounters and resolves in its unfolding as
truth are at once both cognitive and experiential antinomies, and that
the lived moments of human existence are always of cognitively
constitutive relevance for the formation of consciousness. These ideas
in fact remained central to Jaspers's philosophy throughout its
subsequent evolution. In his later philosophical works, especially
*Von der Wahrheit* (*Of Truth*, 1947), he continued to
give prominence to cognitive models derived from Hegelian
phenomenology, and he proposed a concept of *the encompassing*
(*das Umgreifende*) to determine the phenomenological
gradations of thought and being. However, in addition to its concern
with Hegelian themes, *Philosophy* also contains a fundamental
reconstruction of Kantian themes, it has its foundation in a critical
reconstruction of Kant's doctrine of transcendental ideas, and
it is built around an endeavour to explain the elements of Kantian
idealism as a systematic doctrine of subjective-metaphysical
experience.



The three volumes of *Philosophy* bear the titles
*Philosophical World Orientation* (volume I), *The
Illumination of Existence* (volume II), and *Metaphysics*
(volume III). It was written during the 1920s after Jaspers obtained
the full professorship at Heidelberg University. Each volume of this
book thus describes a particular way of being: *orientation*,
*existence* and metaphysical *transcendence* are the
three essential existential modalities of human life. At the same
time, each volume also describes a particular way of knowing, which is
correlated with a way of being: orientation is cognitively determined
by objectively verifiable knowledge or by positive or scientific
proof-forms, existence is determined by subjective/existential
self-reflection, and transcendence is determined by the symbolic
interpretation of metaphysical contents. Together, the three volumes
of *Philosophy* are designed to show how human existence and
human knowledge necessarily progress from one level of being and one
level of knowledge to another, and how consciousness gradually
evolves, through confrontation with its own antinomies, from an
immediate and unformed state towards a condition of unity and integral
self-experience. The three volumes are consequently bound together by
the argument that at the level of immediate objective
knowledge--of orientation in the world--human consciousness
raises subjective-existential questions about itself and the grounds
of its truth which it cannot resolve at this level of consciousness,
and it encounters antinomies which call it to reflect existentially
upon itself and to elevate it to the level of existence or
existentially committed self-reflection. At this higher level of
consciousness, then, existence raises metaphysical questions about
itself and its origin which it cannot begin to answer without an
awareness that existence is, at an originary or authentic level,
*transcendent*, and that its truth is metaphysical.



Each level of being in Jaspers's *Philosophy* corresponds
to one of the Kantian transcendental ideas, and the modes of thinking
and knowing defining each level of existence elucidate the
intellectual content of Kant's ideas. The level of orientation
in the world corresponds to the idea of the unity of the world; the
level of existence corresponds to the idea of the soul's
immortality; the level of transcendence corresponds to the idea of
God's necessary existence. However, whereas Kant saw
transcendental ideas as the formal-regulative ideas of reason,
serving, at most, to confer systematic organization on reason's
immanent operations, Jaspers viewed transcendental ideas as realms of
lived knowledge, through which consciousness passes and by whose
experienced antinomies it is formed and guided to a knowledge of
itself *as transcendent*. Jaspers thus attributed to
transcendental ideas a substantial and experiential content. Ideas do
not, as for Kant, simply mark the formal limits of knowledge, marking
out the bounds of sense against speculative or metaphysical questions.
Instead, ideas provide a constant impulsion for reason to overcome its
limits, and to seek an ever more transcendent knowledge of itself, its
contents and its possibilities. In his mature philosophy, therefore,
Jaspers transformed the Kantian transcendental ideas into *ideas of
transcendence*, in which consciousness apprehends and elaborates
the possibility of substantial or metaphysical knowledge and
self-knowledge. Central to this adjustment to Kant's conception
of ideas was also an implied, yet quite fundamental critique of the
key Kantian distinction between the transcendent and the
transcendental. In contrast to contemporary neo-Kantian readings of
Kant, which were prepared to acknowledge the ideal element in Kantian
idealism only, at most, as a regulative framework, generated by
reason's own autonomous functions, Jaspers argued that Kantian
philosophy always at once contains and suppresses a vision of
experienced transcendence, and that the Kantian ideas should be viewed
as challenges to reason to think beyond the limits of its autonomy,
towards new and more authentic contents, self-experiences and
freedoms.



In replacing the transcendental with the transcendent, however,
Jaspers did not argue that transcendent contents are obtainable as
positive elements of human knowledge. On the contrary, he argued that
consciousness only acquires knowledge of its transcendence by
contemplating the evanescent *ciphers of transcendence*, which
signify the absolute limits of human consciousness. These ciphers
might be encountered in nature, in art, in religious symbolism, or in
metaphysical philosophy. But it is characteristic of all ciphers that,
in alluding to transcendence, they also withhold transcendent
knowledge from consciousness, and that they can only act as indices of
the impossibility of such knowledge. The attitude of consciousness
which apprehends its limits and its possible transcendence can
therefore only be an attitude of foundering or failing
(*Scheitern*), and transcendence can intrude in human
consciousness only as an experience of the absolute insufficiency of
this consciousness for interpreting its originary or metaphysical
character. At this level, then, although opposing the formality and
experiential vacuity of neo-Kantianism, Jaspers also accepted the
original Kantian prohibition on positive transcendent or metaphysical
knowledge. He argued that consciousness always has a metaphysical
orientation to be other than, or transcendent to, its existing forms,
but he also claimed that this orientation can only factually culminate
in a crisis of transcendence, or in a crisis of metaphysics. Although
reconsolidating the metaphysical aspects of Kantian philosophy,
therefore, Jaspers's own metaphysics is always a post-Kantian
metaphysics: it is a *negative metaphysics*, which resists all
suggestion that human reason might give itself an account of
metaphysical essences, which defines the realm of human meaning as
formed by its difference against positive metaphysical knowledge, but
which nonetheless sees reason, in Kierkegaardian manner, as driven by
a despairing desire for metaphysical transcendence.



Jaspers's metaphysical reconstruction of Kantian idealism has
been denounced by other philosophers, most notably those in the broad
milieu of the Frankfurt School, as a stage in a wider course of
cognitive degeneration, which falsely translates absolute metaphysical
contents into moments of human inner experience. Despite this, there
are good grounds for arguing that Jaspers's metaphysics is an
important critique of the fully autonomist accounts of rationality
proposed by neo-Kantianism, and it even coincides with the critiques
of Kantian formalism which underpinned the philosophies widely
associated with the Frankfurt School. Jaspers intuited that Kantian
transcendentalism suppressed a deep-lying impulse for transcendence,
and this aspect of Kant's thought was badly neglected by
interpreters who saw Kant's philosophy as a doctrine of pure
immanence or autonomy. Adorno's later argument that Kant's
transcendental idealism always contains a lament over the closure of
reason against transcendence was thus anticipated by Jaspers, albeit
in subjectivist terms, and Jaspers and Adorno--for all their
political differences--can be placed close together as thinkers
who endeavoured to revitalize the metaphysical traces in idealism. In
any case, Jaspers's insistence, *contra* Kant and the
neo-Kantians, that reason itself is not the sole source of knowledge,
and that the task of reason is not proscriptively to circumscribe the
sphere of its validity against transcendence, but to overcome its
cognitive limits and to envision contents which cannot be generated by
its own autonomous functions, deserves to be rehabilitated as an
abidingly significant contribution to modern debates on metaphysics
and epistemology.


## 5. Philosophy and Religion



The influences of Weber, Kant, Hegel and Kierkegaard are not difficult
to discern in Jaspers's work. Similarly, it is also not
difficult to identify the ways in which his work was influenced by
Nietzsche. Jaspers borrowed from Nietzsche a psychologistic approach
to philosophical perspectives, and, like Nietzsche, he tended to view
philosophical claims, not as formally verifiable postulates, but as
expressions of underlying mental dispositions. For this reason, he
also borrowed from Nietzsche a dismissive approach to absolutized
claims to truthful knowledge, and a resultant rejection of all
rational purism. Most especially, however, like Heidegger, he took
from Nietzsche a critical approach to the residues of metaphysics in
European philosophy, and he denied the existence of essences which are
external or indifferent to human experience. At the same time,
however, Jaspers also clearly positioned his philosophy against many
elements of the Nietzschean legacy. He was clearly opposed to the
naturalistic vitalism evolving from Nietzsche's work, and his
emphasis on human subjectivity as a locus of truthful transcendence
meant that Kierkegaard, rather than Nietzsche, was the existential
prototype for his work.



One further important formative influence on Jaspers's
philosophy, however, was Schelling. Although he was at times critical
of the simple mysticism and the metaphysics of natural process in
Schelling's religious works, his metaphysical reconstruction of
Kantian idealism rearticulated some elements of the positive
philosophy of the later Schelling, and it mirrored his attempt to
account for truthful knowledge as a cognitive experience in which
reason is transfigured by its encounter with contents other than its
own form. In this respect, Jaspers adopted from Schelling a
non-identitarian model of cognitive life, which views true (or
truthful) knowledge as obtained through acts of positive
interpretation and revelation at the limits of rational consciousness.
Unlike Schelling, he always rejected claims to absolute positive
knowledge; to this extent, he remained--in the ultimate
analysis--a Kantian philosopher. However, he was clearly
sympathetic to Schelling's critique of formal epistemological
negativism. Indeed, through his hermeneutical transformation of
idealism into a metaphysics of symbolic interpretation, he might be
seen, like both Schelling and Johann Georg Hamann before him, as a
philosopher who was intent on re-invoking the truth of revelation, as
an absolute and non-identical content of knowledge, against the
rational evidences of epistemology, and so on elaborating an
interpretive methodology adapted to a conception of truth as disclosed
or revealed.



The discrete but important influence of Schelling on Jaspers's
philosophy also provides a clue to understanding Jaspers's
philosophy of religion. At one level, Jaspers was philosophically
committed to a sympathetic retrieval of religious contents. He was
insistent that truth can only be interpreted as an element of radical
alterity in reason, or as reason's experience of its own limits.
Similarly, he was insistent that the conditions of human freedom are
not generated by human reason alone, but are experienced as incursions
of transcendence in rational thought. For these reasons, his
philosophy is sympathetic towards the primary implications of
revelation theology, and it cautiously upholds the essential
philosophical claim of revelation: namely, that truth is a disclosure
of otherness (transcendence) to reason, or at least an interpreted
moment of otherness in reason. At the same time, however, Jaspers
cannot in any obvious way be described as a religious philosopher. In
fact, he was very critical of revelation theology, and of orthodox
religions more generally, on a number of quite separate counts. First,
he argued that the centre of religion is always formed by a falsely
objectivized or absolutized claim to truth, which fails to recognize
that transcendence occurs in many ways, and that transcendent truths
cannot be made concrete as a set of factual statements or narratives.
Religious world views are therefore examples of limited mental
attitudes, which seek a hold in uniform doctrine in order to evade a
confrontation 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 all
people possess; religion claims to offer transcendence, but it
actually obstructs it. Second, then, as the foundations of dogma and
doctrinal orthodoxy, revealed truth-claims eliminate the self-critical
and communicative aspect of human reason, and they undermine the
dialogical preconditions of transcendence and existential
self-knowledge. Jaspers thus viewed orthodox religion as an
obstruction to communication, which places dogmatic limits on the
common human capacity for truthfulness and transcendence. Nonetheless,
as a philosopher of transcendence, he was also clear that human
truthfulness, or humanity more generally, cannot be conceived without
a recuperation of religious interpretive approaches and without a
recognition of the fact that the founding contents of philosophy are
transcendent. Much of his work, in consequence, might be construed as
an attempt to free the contents of religious thinking from the
dogmatic orthodoxies imposed upon these contents in the name of
organized religion.



The central idea in Jaspers's philosophy of religion is the
concept of *philosophical faith*, set out most extensively in
*Der Philosophische Glaube* (*Philosophical Faith*,
1948) and *Der Philophische Glaube angesichts der christlichen
Offenbarung* (*Philosophical Faith in face of Christian
Revelation*, 1962). This notoriously difficult concept contains a
number of quite distinct meanings. First, it means that true
philosophy must be guided by a faith in the originary transcendence of
human existence, and that philosophy which negatively excludes or
ignores its transcendent origin falls short of the highest tasks of
philosophy. Second, however, it also means that true philosophy cannot
simply abandon philosophical rationality for positively disclosed
truth-contents or dogma, and that the critical function of rationality
has a constitutive role in the formation of absolute knowledge. In
this respect, Jaspers revisited some of the controversies concerning
the relation between religion and philosophy which shaped the
philosophy of the Young Hegelians in the 1830s. Like the Young
Hegelians, he insisted that faith needs philosophy, and faith devalues
its contents wherever these are dogmatically or positively proclaimed.
Third, then, this concept also indicates that the evidences of faith
are always paradoxical and uncertain and that those who pursue
knowledge of these contents must accept an attitude of philosophical
relativism and discursive exchange: if faith results in dogmatism, it
immediately undermines its claims to offer transcendent knowledge. The
concept of philosophical faith is thus proposed, not as a doctrine of
factual revelation or accomplished transcendence, but as a guide to
transcendent communication, which balances the element of disclosure
in faith with a critical philosophical veto on the absolutism of
religious claims, and which consequently insists that transcendent
knowledge must be accepted as relative and incomplete. In this regard,
Jaspers held the religious aspects of his philosophy on a fine
dialectic between theological and anthropological assertions. He
implied, at one level, that purely secularist accounts of human life
occlude existence against its originary transcendent possibilities and
freedoms. At the same time, however, he also suggested that pure
theological analysis closes humanity against the relativity and
precariousness of its truths, and against the communicative processes
through which these truths are disclosed. Only philosophy which can at
once embrace and relativize secularism and embrace and relativize
religion is able to undertake adequate existential inquiry, and
philosophy which, in either direction, abandons the dialectical edge
between these two commitments ceases to be genuine philosophy.



This critical-recuperative attitude towards religious inquiry was
fundamental to many of the public controversies in which Jaspers
engaged. The religious elements of his work came under attack from the
Calvinist theologian, Karl Barth, who denounced the lack of objective
religious content in his concept of transcendence. More significantly,
though, Jaspers also entered into a lengthy and influential
controversy with Rudolf Bultmann, the resonances of which still impact
on liberal theological debate. At the centre of this debate was
Jaspers's critique of Bultmann's strategy of scriptural
*de-mythologization*: that is, his attempt to clarify the
truth-contents of the scriptures by eliminating the historical or
mythological elements of the New Testament, and by concentrating, in
an existentially intonated exegesis, on the perennially valid and
present aspects of the Bible. At the time when Bultmann first proposed
this de-mythologizing approach Jaspers was widely (although
erroneously) identified with the liberal wing of Protestant theology,
and it was perhaps expected that he might declare sympathy for
Bultmann's hermeneutical approach. Jaspers, however, turned
sharply on Bultmann. He accused him, first, of propagating a false
rationalism in religious debate; second, of arbitrarily dismissing the
manifestations, embedded in myth, of the spiritual experiences of
those living in earlier historical epoques; and, third, of
aligning all transcendent experiences to a standard scheme of relative
value, and so of imposing a new system of orthodoxy in theology and
undermining the manifold possibilities of transcendence. In opposition
to Bultmann, therefore, Jaspers concluded that only a religious
hermeneutic based in absolute *liberality*, excluding all
orthodoxy, could be appropriate to the task of interpreting the
transcendent contents of human life. Interpretive methods which efface
the traces of historical contingency from transcendence and reduce
transcendence to one predetermined religious truth, he suggested, fail
to reflect on the plural and various forms in which transcendence can
be interpreted, they erroneously presuppose that transcendence can be
encased in the categories of one exclusive doctrine, and they
undervalue the constitutive historical variability of transcendence.
As a consequence, Jaspers argued implicitly for the importance of
mythical or symbolic forms in religious inquiry, and he indicated that
both myth and religion contain, in similar measure, the interpreted
residues of transcendence. His analysis of religion culminated in a
discussion of Trinitarian theology which, echoing Ludwig
Feuerbach's anthropological analysis, asserted that the three
parts of the trinity should be interpreted, not as factual elements of
deity, but as symbolic ciphers of human possibility. In this, he
ascribed particular significance to the second person of the Trinity,
Jesus Christ, as a cipher for the human existential possibility of
inner change, reversal and transformation. Wherever this cipher is
hypostatically defined as mere positive fact of belief, he concluded
however, the freedom of transcendence obtained through the sympathetic
interpretation and recuperation of this cipher is obstructed.



Underlying Jaspers's interest in religion was a determination to
convert the elements of religious doctrine into an account of human
possibilities and freedoms. Indeed, the ambition behind his work on
religion and myth was no less than to liberate transcendence from
theology, and to permit an interpretive transformation of religiously
conceived essences into the free moments of human self-interpretation.
If his thought can truly be placed in the terrain of theological
discourse, therefore, his approach to religion is one of extreme
liberalism and latitudinarianism, which dismisses the claim that
transcendence is exclusively or even predominantly disclosed by
religion. The truth of religion, he intimated, only becomes true if it
is interpreted as a human truth, not as a truth originally external or
prior to humanity. In its orthodox form, however, religion normally
prevents the knowledge of transcendence which it purports to
offer.


## 6. Later Works: The Politics of Humanism



These humanistic reflections on the philosophy of religion are not
isolated components of Jaspers's work. In fact, his criticism of
religious dogmatism evolved in conjunction with a wider doctrine of
humanism, which ultimately became the defining component of his later
work. Arguably, Jaspers was always a humanist; certainly, if humanism
is defined as a doctrine which seeks to account for the specificity,
uniqueness and dignity of human life his work can, from the outset, be
seen as a variant on philosophical humanism. The argument runs through
all his early works that human beings are distinguished by the fact
that they have authentic attributes of existence and
transcendence--that is, by their ability to raise questions about
themselves and their freedoms which cannot be posed in material or
scientific terms, and by their resultant capacity for decisive
reversal, self-transformation and transcendence. True humanity is thus
a condition of free self-possession and transcendent authenticity. In
general 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 philosophy
around the analysis of human determinacy as a metaphysical corruption
of philosophy. Jaspers clearly belonged to the first category of
existential philosophers.



In his writings after 1945, most especially in *Vom*
*Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte* (*The Origin and Goal of
History*, 1949) and *Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des
Menschen* (*The Atom Bomb and the Future of Mankind*,
1961), Jaspers structured his work quite explicitly as a humanist
doctrine. From this time on, moreover, he attached greater importance
to the social and collective conditions of human integrity and he
tended to tone down his earlier construction of interiority as the
place of human freedom. In fact, even the term *Existenz*
became increasingly scarce in his post-1945 publications, and it was
replaced, to a large extent, by ideas of shared humanity, founded, not
in the decisive experiences of inner transformation, but in the
resources of culture, tradition and ethically modulated political
life. Central to these later works, consequently, was not only a turn
towards humanistic reflection, but also an inquiry into the politics
of humanism and the distinctively human preconditions of political
existence.



Broadly reconstructed, in his later political work he argued that the
emergence of European totalitarianism--exemplified by both
National Socialism and Communism--was the result of a decline in
political humanity and of an increasing primacy of modes of technical
or instrumental rationality, which erode the authentic resources of
human 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 integral
cultural tradition, so that human beings can interpret the ciphers of
their integrity in the ethical contents of a national culture. The
political betrayal of humanity, he suggested, is usually flanked by,
and in fact presupposes, a cultural betrayal of humanity, and
totalitarian governance normally arises from the erosion or
instrumental subjection of culture. In the nineteenth century Marx had
argued that the reactionary malaise of German politics was caused by
the fact that German society habitually allowed culture to stand in
for politics and defined the relatively de-politicized educated
bourgeois elite [*Bildungsburgertum*] as the pillar of
social order and the arbiter of progress. Jaspers responded to this
characterization of Germany by claiming that societies which undermine
the cultural role of the bourgeois elite are inherently unstable, and
that the educated bourgeoisie has a primary role to play in upholding
the preconditions of democratic culture. Second, he argued that the
human polity must be based in free communication between citizens:
communicative freedom is a prerequisite of public virtue. The human
polity, he thus implied, is likely to be some kind of democracy, based
in some degree of publicly formed consensus. Like Arendt, in fact, he
concluded that social atomization creates cultures in which
totalitarianism is likely to flourish, and that only unregulated
debate in the public sphere can offset this latent pathology of mass
society. Third, he argued that the resources of technological,
scientific and economic planning employed by the political system
should be kept at a minimum, and that the existence of an unplanned
sphere of human interaction is necessary for the maintenance of a
human political order. In this respect, he fervently opposed all
tendencies towards technocratic governance, which he identified both
in the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe, and in the rapidly expanding
welfare state of the Federal Republic under Adenauer. Technocracy, he
asserted, is the objective form of the instrumental tendencies in
human reason, and if it is not counterbalanced by the integrally human
resources of cultural or rational communication it is likely to result
in oppressive government. In this respect, he moved close to quite
standard variants on political liberalism, and he endorsed limited
government, relative cultural and economic freedom, and protection for
society from unaccountable political direction. Fourth, he also argued
that a human polity requires a constitutional apparatus, enshrining
basic rights, imposing moral-legal order on the operations of the
state, and restricting the prerogative powers of the political
apparatus. Like Kant, therefore, he advocated the institution of an
international federation of states, with shared constitutions, laws
and international courts. Fifth, however, he also retained aspects of
the elite-democratic outlook which he had first inherited from Weber,
and he continued to argue that the human polity must be supported and
guided by reasonable persons or responsible elites.



After the traumas of National Socialism and the war, however, it is
fair to say that Jaspers's political philosophy never moved
finally beyond a sceptical attitude towards pure democracy, and his
political writings never fully renounced the sense that German society
was not sufficiently evolved to support a democracy, and Germans
required education and guidance for democracy to take hold. Even in
his last writings of the 1960s, in which he declared tentative support
for the activities of the student movement around 1968, there remain
traces of elite-democratic sympathy. For all his importance in modern
German politics, therefore, his philosophy of politics was always
slightly anachronistic, and his position remained embedded in the
personalistic ideals of statehood which characterized the old-liberal
political culture of Imperial Germany and persisted in the
conservative-liberal fringes of the Weimar Republic.



Jaspers left unfinished *Die Grossen Philosophen*, whose
declared aim was "promoting the happiness that comes of meeting
great men and sharing in their thoughts", and employed his
personal method of constant questioning and struggle. This is a
monumental project of universal history of philosophy, whose creators
were the outstanding philosophers who inspired the human thought.
Jaspers, who believed that only through communication with others can
we come to ourselves and to wisdom, regarded the philosophers he
discusses in this book as his "eternal contemporaries" and
"the disturbers" in the sense of thinkers for whom doubt
and despair loomed large. The first two volumes of this work appeared
in 1958, while the third and fourth have been gathered from the vast
material of his posthumous papers. The editors Ermarth and Ehrlich
have, however, been able to stitch together a coherent book that, in
accordance with Jaspers's plan, primarily covers the
philosophers whom he termed "the disturbers": thinkers for
whom doubt and despair loomed large. The English translations were by
Ralf Manheim and edited by Hannah Arendt, and appeared in parts until
1994.


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



The Heidelberg Academy ("Heidelberger Forum Edition") and
the academy of sciences in Gottingen initiated a project of
gathering in one standard edition the unconnected variety of
distinguished editions, commentaries, and translations of the writings
of Karl Jaspers. The project is chaired by Otfried Hoffe,
together with the editors Thomas Fuchs, Jens Halfwassen, and Reinhard
Schulz, with the cooperation of Anton Hugli, Kurt Salamun, und
Hans 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 division
covers all the works that were printed and published during
Jaspers's lifetime, the second and the third encompass
selections from the vast material of his posthumous papers, some
already published and others that have never appeared. The set's
general 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 edition
at the Universities of Heidelberg and Oldenburg is projected to take
18 years and is the fruit of cooperation with the Karl Jaspers
Foundation in Basel. The editors will have recourse to the unpublished
writings kept at the German Literary Archives in Marbach and the
11,000 volumes of the Jaspers Research Library in the future Karl
Jaspers House in Oldenburg. Over and above the commentary itself, the
edition is designed to provide new impulses for research on the
philosopher and to enable the debates on present-day cultural and
political issues to profit from a species of thinking that can be
described as interdisciplinary and cosmopolitan in the best sense of
those 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 Lesebandchen.
I/18
*Nietzsche* (2020)  

Dominic Kaegi, Andreas Urs Sommer (Hg.)
I/21
*Schriften zur Universitatsidee* (2015)  

Oliver Immel (Hrsg.)
I/23
*Die Schuldfrage* (2017)  

Dominic Kaegi (Hrsg.)
II/1
*Grundsatze des Philosophierens, Einfuhrung in
philosophisches Leben (Nachlass)* (2019)  

Weidmann Bernd (Hrsg.)
I/8
*Schriften zur Existenzphilosophie* (2018)  

Dominic Kaegi (Hrsg.)
III/8.1
*Ausgewahlte Verlags- und
Ubersetzerkorrespondenzen* (2017)  

Dirk Fonfara (Hrsg.)
III/8.2
*Ausgewahlte Korrespondenzen mit dem Piper Verlag und
Klaus Piper 1942-1968* (2020)  

Dirk Fonfara (Hrsg.)