Karl Jaspers

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

8 min readFeb 24, 2022

Today is the 139th anniversary of the birth of Karl Jaspers (23 February 1883–26 February 1969), who was born on this date in 1883.

Many of Jaspers’ many books discuss central issues in the philosophy of history, which latter unfolds as a continuous thread in Jaspers’ work, but it is as much a philosophy of contemporary history as a philosophy of history as we usually think of it, as a philosophy of events long past. What exactly do I mean by this? Let me try to explain. There is a passage I have quoted before by Judith Jarvis Thompson, discussing the work of Richard Cartwright:

“He gives no public lectures, he reviews no books for the popular press, and to the extent of my knowledge he has never declared himself on the crises of Modern Man or Modern Science,” (On Being and Saying: Essays for Richard Cartwright, Preface, p. vii)

This is worth quoting again because it succinctly draws a distinction between philosophers who will not deign to dirty their hands with contemporary history, and those philosophers who feel that they are called, indeed obligated, to visit the distinctive problems of their own time, which may include declaring oneself on the crises of Modern Man and Modern Science. Jaspers belongs to those philosophers of history who deal very much with the present, and who see their philosophical task as one of engagement with the present, including the present as history.

Jaspers’ Man in the Modern Age (1931; translated 1933, revised 1951) is a work that takes the present and its distinctively modern problems as its point of departure. Nietzsche and Christianity (a lecture delivered 12 May 1938; translated 1961) is largely concerned with Nietzsche’s conception of history. 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 FRG election in 1965, largely free of reflections or speculation on the larger issues of Germany and Europe. Indeed, it was a hallmark of pre-war thought to reflect on the destiny of Germany writ large, and if Jaspers had written something like this after the war, it would have come across as decidedly odd, or, rather, as historically tone deaf. The only fair way to judge a period piece of this kind is to place it in its immediate milieu.

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 still a period piece marking what Jaspers calls “the New Reality,” 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.”

The theme of humanity’s ability to destroy itself is the theme of existential risk, and it is the largest theme that human beings can conceive, but this largest of human themes is here twinned with mid-twentieth century political conflicts that no longer define our world today, though much in this work could be reformulated, mutatis mutandis, to demonstrate its ongoing relevance to our time.

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 the inevitability of naturalistically understood human failings can be understood as a secularization of original sin, which latter is one form of inherited sin. One could take Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History as a template for understanding contemporary naturalistic conceptions as secularizations of traditional theological conceptions, but this is not Jaspers’ way. Löwith formulated a non-philosophy of history, while Jaspers had no hesitation to take up philosophy of history in the spirit of formulating substantive philosophical conceptions of history.

In this work Jaspers distinguishes four kinds of guilt: criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical. Of metaphysical guilt Jaspers writes:

“Metaphysical guilt: There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge. If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent them, I too am guilty. If I was present at the murder of others without risking my life to prevent it, I feel guilty in a way not adequately conceivable either legally, politically or morally. That I live after such a thing has happened weighs upon me as indelible guilt. As human beings, unless good fortune spares us such situations, we come to a point where we must choose: either to risk our lives unconditionally, without chance of success and therefore to no purpose — or to prefer staying alive, because success is impossible. That somewhere among men the unconditioned prevails — the capacity to live only together or not at all, if crimes are committed against the one or the other, or if physical living requirements have to be shared therein consists the substance of their being. But that this does not extend to the solidarity of all men, nor to that of fellow — citizens or even of smaller groups, but remains confined to the closest human ties-therein lies this guilt of us all. Jurisdiction rests with God alone.”

Jaspers was careful to distance himself from the idea of collective guilt, except in a political context:

“…there can be no collective guilt of a people or a group within a people — except for political liability. To pronounce a group criminally, morally or metaphysically guilty is an error akin to the laziness and arrogance of average, uncritical thinking.” (p. 34)

It should be pointed out that, if there is metaphysical guilt, then there is also metaphysical innocence. I once wrote on metaphysical pride and metaphysical modesty, as well as epistemic hubris and humility. It may be that our moral psychology initially ascends to the metaphysical with only a single conception, like Jaspers’ conception of metaphysical guilt, but, once having attained that metaphysical perspective, it naturally develops into a entire metaphysical moral psychology. Developing this metaphysical moral psychology on the template of Jaspers, we could say of metaphysical innocence that there exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every virtuous action and every act of justice in the world, especially for beneficent acts committed in his presence or with his knowledge. Perhaps a metaphysical moral psychology is ultimately what is needed to make sense of history.

In The Origin and Goal of History (1949; English translation 1953) Jaspers again addressed guilt, and again in the context of the Second World War:

“That which has happened is a warning. To forget it is guilt. It must be continually remembered. It was possible for this to happen, and it remains possible for it to happen again at any minute. Only in knowledge can it be prevented. Here lies the danger. Unwillingness to know, forgetfulness and even disbelief (there are still people who deny the reality of what took place in the concentration camps); then the evil of docile readiness to accept mechanisation and finally indifference that seeks peace of mind in the nearby and the present, and the passivity of impotence leading to resignation in the face of the supposedly necessary.”

It is often said that Jaspers, Sartre, and Heidegger represent the core of existentialism, but it is equally often said that these three thinkers offer very different visions, and this is true, but the above passage reminds me of a passage from Sartre:

“I must confine myself to what I can see. Nor can I be sure that comrades-in-arms will take up my work after my death and carry it to the maximum perfection, seeing that those men are free agents and will freely decide, tomorrow, what man is then to be. Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish Fascism, and the others may be so cowardly or so slack as to let them do so. If so, Fascism will then be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be such as men have decided they shall be.”

The idea in Jaspers that “it remains possible for it to happen again at any minute,” and in Sartre that “Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish Fascism” is the idea of being instantaneously visited by fate, after which everything is changed, which in turn points to the ever-present Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation, which could rain down out of the sky at any moment, without warning, and without reprieve. Since the end of the Cold War much of this anxiety has been lost, but also during the more than forty years of the Cold War, we learned to live with this threat and to feel it much less acutely than those, like Jaspers and Sartre, who encountered this as fundamentally new to the human condition. Jaspers called this the “new fact,” which is the title of the first chapter of The Future of Mankind. Thus Jaspers:

“Experts say definitely that it is now possible for life on earth to be wiped out by human action. The scientists who brought the new fact into being have also publicized it.”

Jaspers engagement with the great problems of his time, with contemporary history as it unfolded before him, was developed in parallel with a larger conception of history that is to be found in The Origin and Goal of History, which introduces the concept of the Axial Age as transition in human history on a planetary scale. The “new fact” of humanity’s technological capability of self-destruction, appears in Jaspers work as another such transition in human history on a planetary scale.

These philosophical reflections on the present, time, and history are in turn developed within an even larger philosophical context of what Jaspers calls the “Encompassing.” In the interview with Jaspers linked below, in a beautiful simile he uses the experience of the ocean to demonstrate the embeddedness of human existence in infinity and eternity.