The Question of German Guilt

The result is that he is the sort of philosopher who can help “realists” learn what they need to discover from “idealism” and vice versa.⁵ More specifically, Jaspers amplifies Kant’s basic doctrine of the three Ideas (the world, the soul, and God) that reason must postulate in order to compensate for the fact that we are never presented with the whole of reality and yet we constantly feel the hunger to think about such wholes. We human beings know anything that we do come to know only within the boundaries of some horizon or other. Here Jaspers’s point is much like both that of Aristotle, who long before insisted that we know an object only by grasping its form or structure, and that of the long tradition of realism, which has regularly identified an object’s form with transcendental truth, the fundamental intelligibility of every being as being.⁶ But thinking this problem through as a Kantian committed to the doctrine that there is “no object without a subject” and thus no access to objectivity that is not categorically conditioned by consciousness and its attendant subjectivity, Jaspers proposes that “the world” (cosmos) is the Idea that we project in order to encompass all possible objective viewpoints, even though such a whole is actually unknowable to us in principle. Likewise, the depths of consciousness that are the ground for the second level of existence are never able to be fully plumbed by anyone, and so they are equally unknowable as a whole, and yet we need some way of thinking about them. So, according to Jaspers, following Kant, reason offers the I, the soul, as a useful mode of encompassing consciousness. At the third level, God or Transcendence is the Idea by which to encompass all of being, but the reality of such being is as ineffable as the One envisioned by Plotinus.

In each of Jaspers’s descriptions of the system of his thought we find him flexibly alert to the classical philosophical problem of the one and the many that these encompassing Ideas are designed to accommodate. The compelling and cogent reasoning of the scientific and technical realm, for example, belong to “world orientation,”⁷ where Jaspers explores the mutual interdependence of fact and theory in all the empirical sciences. For him, these factors are interlocking but intrinsically incomplete, and science, therefore, can claim to offer cogent and compelling demonstrations and yet has to retain an endlessly open perspective, since the search for objective truth will always go on. One sees some of this attitude in his comments about the practical dimensions of the political context of university life in the present volume on the question of guilt. For Jaspers, there are four interconnected but irreducible spheres of reality in “the world”: matter, life, soul, and spirit. Each is real, but each demands that we recognize a different mode of objectivity. The physician, for example, needs to have appropriate regard for biochemistry, for medicine, for therapy, and for the spiritual and emotional life of a patient. The importance of each level in itself demands philosophical and practical distinctions.