The Question of German Guilt

Although much material remains in unpublished manuscripts to this day, he did publish a score of books, including several volumes of historical commentary called The Great Philosophers and a thoroughgoing restatement of his own system in his treatise On Truth. Two of his lecture series gave a more succinct expression to his ideas: Reason and Existence and Philosophy of Existence. In these studies one sees a trait that sets him apart from many of his fellow existentialists, whose suspicions about science and technology he critiques in the course of his own on-going appreciative engagement with both the fruits of modern science and the habits of thinking typical of a scientific mind. His post-Second World War books also enter the dialogue of existentialism with religion. They include a debate on the demythologizing of the Scriptures, which he conducted with Rudolph Bultmann (Myth and Christianity), as well as several volumes of discussions with Protestant theologians (Philosophical Faith and the subsequent Philosophical Faith and Revelation).

In 1948 Jaspers left Heidelberg for a post at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Before his death in 1969, he also published a popular introduction to his philosophy (Way to Wisdom), a sophisticated reflection on the atomic age (The Atomic Bomb and the Future of Mankind), and his long-nurtured views on the philosophy of history (The Origin and Goal of History). It is this book that contains his famous theory of the Axial Age of history, the period from about 600 B.C. to 400 B.C. in which Chinese, Indian, Persian, Hebrew, and Greek thinkers all independently generated many of the political and metaphysical ideas that have been most decisive in shaping the rest of human history.

In Jaspers’s own judgment, the figure that was most important for the shaping of his own thinking was Immanual Kant, but he also credits Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Max Weber with inspiring his work.⁴ His readers, however, cannot help noticing the strongly Neoplatonist cast to much of his thought, and the four figures whom he quotes again and again are Plotinus, Bruno, Spinoza, and Schelling. The metaphysical matrix that in some way undergirds the rest of his writings, including the present volume, is Kantian and Neoplatonic. By his lights, it is simply impossible for a thinker to evade the “problem of being,” and yet one may never assume that “being is something generally understood.” With Kant, he repeatedly asserts the validity of the thesis that everything “objective” is always conditioned by “consciousness,” and thus he regards any claim about purely objective being (in his vocabulary, Dasein) as invariably an illusion.

Yet we live in the reality of the life-world, and so we do well to accept the Neoplatonic heritage of diverse spheres of being that philosophical reflection can progressively distinguish. There is a triad of levels of existence to be noticed: (1) the simple givenness of “objects” whenever individuals encounter anything real in their normal experience; (2) the human constructions of the life-world of the subject (internally within an individual and externally, for instance, in the trust-relations that constitute communities large and small); and (3) transcendent being that is always in principle beyond what any subject-mind can ever mentally encompass but to which the symbols devised by religion and philosophy regularly venture to point. Again, with Kant, Jaspers articulates a doctrine of Ideas that places him squarely in the tradition of German Idealism, yet always in a way that is tempered by the basic realism of Jaspers’s own medical and political heritage.