Karl Jaspers and the Present as History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Friday 23 February 2024 is the 141st anniversary of the birth of Karl Jaspers (23 February 1883–26 February 1969), who was born in Oldenburg, Germany on this date in 1883.
Jaspers is widely considered to be, along with Heidegger and Sartre, one of the three founding fathers of existentialism, though all three of them rejected the label at one time or another. Many of Jaspers works are concerned with history, often in the form of a concern for contemporary history, as with Man in the Modern Age (1931; translated 1933, revised 1951), which takes the present and its distinctively modern problems as its point of departure, announcing several themes that we would now call existentialist, which Jaspers preferred to call existence-philosophy. Here is a passage from the book that I find to be particularly telling:
“Existence-philosophy is the way of thought by means of which man seeks to become himself; it makes use of expert knowledge while at the same time going beyond it. This way of thought does not cognise objects, but elucidates and makes actual the being of the thinker. Brought into a state of suspense by having transcended the cognitions of the world (as the adoption of a philosophical attitude towards the world) that fixate being, it appeals to its own freedom (as the elucidation of existence) and gains space for its own unconditioned activity through conjuring up Transcendence (as metaphysics).”
We think of existentialism today as abstruse and abstract philosophical concepts used to express issues of immediate and pressing urgency for the individual. If we wanted to be unsympathetic, we could call it a rationalization of naval-gazing. When thought doesn’t cognize objects, but elucidates and makes actual the being of the thinker, and pursues its own unconditioned activity, we have turned from outward engagement with the world, to inward engagement with the self.
Gilbert Murray might have called this inward turn another failure of nerve (I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone had charged the existentialists with a failure of nerve). Certainly it is the antithesis of dispassionate inquiry, effectively making one’s passion the point of entry into inquiry, as well as the object of inquiry. From a theoretical perspective, I’m not sure that this is a good idea. The case could be made for understanding a period of history through understanding a man from that period of history, but I’m not sure that the existentialists did make the case.
However, Jasper’s approach could be used to critique Collingwood’s philosophy of history, discussed yesterday in Collingwood and the Reenactment of Past Thought, in which history is the history of thought, and the task of the historian is to re-enact past thought in the historian’s own mind. If our focus is on the historical situatedness of the individual, and how their thought elucidates and makes actual the being of the thinker, then our thoughts, today, even if they are thoughts of the past, are elucidating and making actual our situation in history, and not some past situation in history, now lost to us. We could take this as an existentialist refutation of Collingwood, or as a Collingwoodian refutation of existentialism, or again as an opportunity to reconcile the two. Both Collingwood’s idealism and Jaspers’ existence-philosophy run into trouble with the objectively existing world outside out thoughts, though they run into different kinds of trouble, and so both could potentially benefit the other.
An inquiry into Jaspers and Collingwood in regard to the cognition of past objects would involve us in an inquiry into the role (or lack thereof) of historicism in the thought of each. Jaspers is often linked with historicism, though he does not himself explicitly discuss it. We can immediately see that the task of elucidating and making actual the being of the thinker in an act of thought implies that each individual so engaged in elucidation and actualization does so within a unique historical context, and, beyond a certain (admittedly unknown) scope of relevance, contexts of elucidation and actualization increasingly diverge and eventually become incommensurable. That is to say, each historical context is a world unto itself, and the thoughts of one world cannot be translated into the thoughts of another world, or so it seems. But this is a conclusion, and what I am suggesting is that a detailed analysis of the problem would repay the effort in insights.
Jaspers’ Nietzsche and Christianity (an essay based on a lecture delivered 12 May 1938; translated 1961) is largely concerned with Nietzsche’s conception of history. It is difficult to tell in this work where Jaspers’ exposition of Nietzsche leaves off, and Jaspers’ own voice is to be heard, speaking through Nietzsche. This remark is, I believe, Jaspers addressing the reader directly:
“The absolute view of history, as if it were a total knowledge, has beclouded our reality. It dominates vast areas of modern thought. It takes a jolt to free ourselves from it. The deliverance is easier in theory than in accomplishment.”
The theme of absolute history occurs with some regularity in Jaspers, but I haven’t yet figured out exactly what he means by it. At times, the historical absolute is presented as a form of totalitarianism, while at other times it is the pursuit of unity and wholeness. Near the end of Jaspers’ The Origin and Goal of History, he says that, “The totality of history is an open whole.” We could take this open whole as something frightening, Like Pascal gazing into an abyss next to his armchair (as Voltaire put it), or as something opening to possibilities and freedom, which is how Jaspers puts it.
Jaspers’ critique of Nietzsche’s critique of providential philosophies of history is often perceptive, and can help us to understand providential philosophies of history more generally, which are, unambiguously, the pursuit of unity and wholeness. Jaspers argues that “Nietzsche’s view of world history stems from Christian motives drained of their substance.” This is similar to a criticism that Max Scheler made in a moral context, arguing that Nietzsche’s critique of ressentiment was itself motivated by Nietzsche’s ressentiment of Christianity. This approach is also familiar in the form of Karl Lowith’s critique of philosophies of history as secularized eschatologies, though Lowith focused his critique on Enlightenment philosophies of history, and Nietzsche is, if anything, the antithesis of Enlightenment philosophy of history. It could be argued that Nietzsche is a figure of the counter-Enlightenment, and, as such, still belongs to the Enlightenment as an internal critic, and thus his philosophy of history still belongs to the progressivist philosophies of history of the Enlightenment, regardless of appearances to the contrary. I don’t think this is a very good argument, but the argument could be made, though a better argument could be made for taking Nietzsche at his word.
The Question of German Guilt (1947; English translation 1948) is a prescient work insofar as it proposes a problem that has only gotten larger with time: the problem of historical guilt. Since the Enlightenment we have come to view ideas of inherited sin as something primitive and superstitious, but the idea has only grown since the Enlightenment, though it is not presented in terms of inherited sin. The kind of historical guilt that Jaspers presents could be considered a secularization of inherited sin, just as inevitable human failings, which we now understand naturalistically, can be understood as a secularization of original sin, which latter is one form of inherited sin — perhaps a more general conception of inherited sin.
Again, the spectre of Karl Löwith hovers in the background: we could take the approach of Löwith’s Meaning in History and argue that contemporary naturalistic conceptions, whether of guilt or of anything else, are secularizations of traditional theological conceptions, but this is not Jaspers’ way. Jaspers gives us a taxonomy of forms of guilt, culminating in metaphysical guilt.
The Future of Germany (Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik? 1966; translated 1967) is a period piece, intended to be timely, with an Afterword written the next year to briefly discuss the Federal Republic of Germany election in 1965, largely free of reflections or speculation on the larger issues of Germany and Europe. This book is deeply embedded in its contemporaneous context, so I call it a period piece, but there is more going on here. Jaspers is acutely conscious that apparent historical order could break down suddenly and catastrophically, any time, any where. The ever-present threat of chaos, is, for Jaspers, the threat of a repeat of the second world war. I think the deeper theme in The Future of Germany and other similar works by Jaspers is his own attempt at philosophical atonement of the kind he proposed in The Question of German Guilt. The metaphysical guilt of the survivors of history — which is all of us alive today — can never really be expiated, which ought to be enough to make us suspicious, and to submit the idea to a deeper analysis.
The Future of Mankind (Die atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen, 1958; translated 1961) is somewhat larger in scope than The Future of Germany, but wtill, I would argue, a period piece marking what Jaspers calls “the New Fact,” which is the reality of atomic weapons and the possibility of humanity’s self-extermination:
“The threat of total extinction points to thoughts about the meaning of our existence. The atom bomb cannot be adequately comprehended as a special problem; man can prove equal to it only if his true self responds to the chance at hand. If he treats the matter as one among other difficulties, he will not master it.”
I mentioned this book in my episode on The Bombing of Dresden. It is probably even less justified to call The Future of Mankind a period piece, since the use of atomic weapons made the idea of existential threat palpably present to us; arguably Nick Bostrom’s idea of existential risk is the ultimate fruit of such meditations.
Jaspers most systematic work on philosophy of history is The Origin and Goal of History (1949; English translation 1953). This book introduces the idea of an Axial Age, which has gone on to a career beyond philosophers. As in the other books I have mentioned, Jaspers has much to say about the historical situation of the present, and there is quite a bit about philosophy of technology, which plays a constitutive role in the historical situation of the present. The book ends with a chapter on “Overcoming History,” in which we read:
“We are seized by a feeling of dissatisfaction with history. We should like to force our way through history to a point before and above all history, to the matrix of Being, before which the whole of history becomes a phenomenon that can never be ‘right’ in itself, to the point at which, sharing knowledge with creation so to speak, we are no longer entirely at the mercy of history. But for us the known Archimedian point can never be situated outside history. We are always within history. In forcing our way through to that which lies before, or athwart, or after all history, into that which comprehends everything, into Being itself, we are seeking in our existence and in transcendence, what this Archimedean point would be if it were capable of assuming the form of objective knowledge.”
It is as though Jaspers were inviting the reader to conduct a thought experiment, in which we ask what if there were an Archimedian point out of history, even though Jaspers recognized there was no such point, nor could there be.
Despite the warnings Jaspers issues, he was no pessimist. In Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time (1950, translated into English in 1952) Jaspers wrote:
“Even when the worst prognosis of decline is made, Reason refuses to accept it. When all the probabilities of the historical situation have been taken into account, the average qualities of the myriad human race, and the slavery and self-oblivion that have marked such great stretches of the human story, Reason still considers the forecast of ultimate catastrophe uncertain. Practical experience of unexpectedly favourable outcomes of apparently hopeless situations makes a deep impression. They are no proof that the same thing will happen again but they are, as it were, a guide for Reason in its basic attitude, which is to endure the tension, not to reckon with a certain future, to be conscious of the constant threat of disaster even in the most favourable circumstances, but not to overlook the range of possibilities in what may appear to be the most hopeless situations, and above all to keep on hoping; in any case to live, taking all the intellectual precautions possible and to decide one’s course of action as conscientiously as may be within the limits of the possible, in the activity of production — like the peasants on Mount Vesuvius who bring their glorious fruits to maturity under the constant threat of the all-engulfing lava.”
The same uncertainty of history that means a catastrophe could be visited upon us at any time, were it not for our perpetual vigilance, also means that a favorable outcome might unexpectedly appear from an apparently hopeless situation. This is another wrinkle to the idea of historical appearance and reality.
