Karl Jaspers
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 140th anniversary of the birth of Karl Jaspers (23 February 1883–26 February 1969), who was born in Oldenburg, Germany on this date in 1883. After the Second World War Jaspers moved to Basel, Switzerland and was eventually naturalized as a Swiss citizen.
Jaspers is remembered as a prominent philosopher of history, but he is not clearly associated with a particular doctrine within the philosophy of history, except, perhaps the idea of an Axial Age, which doesn’t have much content, by which I mean that philosophers of history with widely differing points of view might accept or reject the idea of an Axial Age with the epistemology and metaphysics intact. This, in turn, implies that the idea of an Axial Age has few if any epistemological or metaphysical commitments, although the idea has been widely circulated and has been the object of considerable comment. For example, I have written about Axial Ages on several occasions, as I find the idea useful and suggestive.
Joanne Miyang Cho in her paper “The Global History of Humankind in Karl Jaspers,” used Jasper’s conception of an Axial Age to situate Jaspers in relation to other historical thinkers:
“Jaspers rejected a Weimar historicist tendency towards civilizational isolationism and… he instead emphasized civilizational continuity. He established civilizational continuity through the Axial Age, which concentrated on the simultaneous, but independent, origins of civilizations between 800 to 200 BC. While it had a clear cosmopolitan intent, it was, however, vulnerable to charges of lacking empirical evidence… I will argue that instead of the Axial Age, a better way of showing Jaspers’ position of civilizational continuity is through his idea of mutual civilizational grafting, since it is based upon empirical history.”
Hellmuth Kornmueller opens his paper “Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy of History” with the claim that existentialism is rooted, in part, in historicism, which implies that historicism is naturally associated with Jaspers:
“An analysis of existentialism will reveal historicism as one of its roots. Consequently, we could as a matter of course, expect existentialism to present a total view of history. However, such a merely external cause as historicism would be completely insufficient to make perspicuous the raison d’etre of Jaspers’ philosophy of history. On the other hand, a comprehension of Jaspers’ philosophical thought clearly shows that the intrinsic makeup of this philosophy leads with necessity to a study of history in its totality.”
Cho also mentions the idea of total history in quoting Golo Mann:
“Jaspers’ historical consciousness became ‘sharpened through the experience of the crisis of our century.’ It led him to ‘a concept of humankind’ and ‘a concept of total history (Gesamtgeschichte)’.”
The total history and related concepts come up repeated in Jaspers, but receive no definitive treatment. In a letter to Hannah Arendt of 03 April 1953, Jaspers comments on Arendt’s essay “Ideologie und Terror” (which appeared in a Festschrift for Jaspers) in terms that evoke a totality of history:
“If we try to remain purely objective, we will have trouble getting hold of the ‘demons’ that get hold of us. So now you’ll hear the concerns I have after reading your essay. I know you enjoy this kind of discussion and are of one mind with me in it. I wonder if you are not seeing this new element, which you in fact do see and which you develop beautifully, in an exaggerated form that prompts you to take a position against everything in history that remains fundamentally the same, i.e., against continuity. You are afraid of any analogy whatsoever because it obscures the new impulse. What begins to take shape in your essay is a sense that there is a mysterious history inherent in a totality of events that is calling completely new forces into existence. These forces are melting down everything that has preceded them and are themselves absolute in nature. Over against that you also see, of course, the one great opportunity, human existence itself, that is continually being reborn, and you suggest that briefly and movingly.” (Letter 141)
Later in the same letter, after mentioning “your book” (I assume Jaspers is referring to The Origins of Totalitarianism)
“…you have opened up a line of investigation but not explored the reality of the totalitarian mode to its full extent within the overall human reality. For that is an unattainable goal, indeed, an absurd one. If we do not keep reminding ourselves of these limitations, we’re in danger of falling prey to a new demon of the philosophy of history.”
It seems as though Jaspers in this passage is making some kind of comparison between totalitarianism and total history, but this passage also contains two warnings: that the overall human reality is an unattainable goal, and we fall prey to a demon of the philosophy of history if we fail to acknowledge the limitations of ourselves and of the discipline. It would be interesting to know if Jaspers had the Cartesian demon in the back of his thoughts when he wrote about the demons of the philosophy of history, and what these other demons are (perhaps the ever-present shade of Hegel?).
Jaspers, however, thought that Descartes was at the root of a contemporary misunderstanding of science, as he argues in this passage from The Origin and Goal of History, in which he develops the theme of the limitations of science that he also mentioned in his correspondence with Arendt:
“In research we make a presupposition of the knowability of the world. For without this presupposition all research would be senseless. But this presupposition is susceptible of two interpretations: Firstly, that of the knowability of the objects in the world; secondly, that of the knowability of the world as a whole. The first supposition alone is correct, and it is impossible to know how much further cognition in the world can be carried. The second presupposition, on the contrary, is incorrect. That it is fallacious is demonstrated by the radical difficulties which, while placing no restrictions on research into contents, show the limit of knowledge; this limit is represented by the fact that not only does the world as a whole, as a single closed entity, evade cognition, but also that the world in the sense of something that can be thought and experienced without contradiction does not exist for us at all. These limits become clearly visible when we see the fallacious presupposition of the knowability of the world-as-a-whole come to grief on the facts of research. Insight into the error is by no means easy. The error entered into modern science through the supposition that it is a philosophy; it dates from Descartes. Hence the great and pressing task of our epoch is the pure apprehension of the meaning and limits of modern science.” (p. 94)
Presumably this limitation upon the knowability of the world as a whole, which is a limit upon science, is also a limitation for the philosophy of history, and this tallies with what Jaspers wrote in his letter to Arendt, quoted above. Yet Jaspers’ The Origin and Goal of History is throughout concerned with totality:
“The purpose of an overall philosophical view of history, such as we are seeking to arrive at, is to illumine our own situation within the totality of history. It serves to light up the consciousness of the present epoch and shows us where we stand.” (p. 81)
The totality of history gives us the context of our age and ourselves, and Jaspers further argues that we can approach the totality of history as a discrete, single individual:
“That which we make our own in the shape of the historically particular enables us to go forward to total history as to a single individual. All history is rooted in the matrix of this one comprehensive historicity.” (p. 243)
Taking familiar reference points in the philosophy of history, one would expect Jaspers at this point to align himself with the tradition of Windelband, Dilthey, and Ricket in positing a unique methodology of historical thought that focuses on the individual and the particular. Yet, this is not what Jaspers does. Jaspers remains elusive within the context of philosophy of history, and that, if nothing else, makes his thought worth studying.
Further Resources
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Last year’s post: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/Karl-Jaspers
Karl Jaspers' Philosophy of History - Volume 42, Issue 2, January 1965
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www.pdcnet.org
https://doi.org/10.5840/schoolman196542221
