Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

30 Jan 2024 17:12

Without God, only idols remain.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

11 Jan 2024 22:04

What, in all the millenniums of human history and pre-history, no god had been able to do for man, man has done for himself. It is natural enough that in these achievements of his he should discern the true inwardness of being—until he shrinks back in alarm from the void he has made for himself.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

08 Jan 2024 17:36

[A]nyone who philosophizes strives for scientific knowledge, for it is the only way to genuine nonknowledge... Only definitive knowledge can make definitive nonknowledge possible.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

08 Jan 2024 17:21

Philosophy defines itself, relates itself directly to Godhead, and does not justify itself by any kind of utility. It grows out of the Primal Source in which man is given to himself.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

07 Jan 2024 15:46

The means of modern technology give the de facto ruler a tremendous preponderance of power... Modern technology ... furnishes the organisation and effects of bureaucracy with unprecedented scope. It can now become really totalitarian.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

18 Dec 2023 11:25

The image of the human being that we hold to be true becomes itself a factor in our lives. It determines the ways in which we deal with ourselves and with other people, it determines our attitude in life and our choice of tasks.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

11 Nov 2023 23:36

To make an absolute of spatial existence is to deny Transcendence; to turn this existence into a cipher is to permit the calm unfolding of contemplative vision.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

02 Nov 2023 17:33

Anyone who knows for certain what God says and wants, makes God into a being in the world, over which he disposes, and is thus on the road to superstition.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

30 Oct 2023 18:07

The unthinkable identity of substance and its modifications, so definitively separated for our thinking, becomes Transcendence for the thinking that founders on it.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

28 Oct 2023 21:32

To believe in God means to live by something which is not in the world, except in the polyvalent language of phenomena, which we call the ciphers of Transcendence.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

25 Oct 2023 07:36

Faith proper is the existential act by which Transcendence becomes conscious in its actuality.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

16 Oct 2023 09:03

Every Israeli must read this book and reflect on his/her personal responsibility for the crimes of Zionism.

Free download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ms606p8ubgbdo0y/Karl%20Jaspers.%20The%20Question%20of%20German%20Guilt.pdf?dl=0

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

02 Oct 2023 06:27

Because it shows us no new object, the idea [of Transcendence], measured by our customary worldly knowledge, is empty. But by its form it opens up to us infinite possibilties in which Being may manifest itself to us, and at the same time lends transparency to everything that is. It transforms the meaning of the world of objects by awakening in us a faculty of sensing what authentically is in the phenomenon.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

24 Sep 2023 11:20

Our independence itself requires help. We can only do our best and hope that something within us - invisible to the world - will in some unfathomable way come to our aid and lift us out of our limitations. The only independence possible for us is dependence on Transcendence.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

05 Apr 2020 10:13

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age?wprov=sfti1

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

29 Jan 2024 05:30

The decisive sign of one's free state is one's faith in freedom.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

10 Jan 2024 16:30

...In philosophical effort something takes place that is not seen by all those who reject it: in it man rediscovers his Primal Source. In this sense, philosophy is absolute and without aim. It can neither be justified through something else, nor on the basis of utility for any purpose. It is not a girder to support us or a straw to grasp at. No one can have philosophy at his disposal. No one can use it as a means.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

08 Jan 2024 17:22

Philosophy had only a brief moment of breathing the air of freedom, after freeing itself from the oppressive power of theology, when it fell into even deeper slavery to autocratic and despotic science.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

08 Jan 2024 17:14

The sciences do not encompass all of the truth but only the exact knowledge that is binding to the intellect and universally valid. Truth has a greater scope, and part of it can reveal itself only to philosophical reason.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

06 Jan 2024 15:42

True, the many religions lead to the one truth, but this truth cannot be attained at one stroke, but only along the roads that were really traveled, roads which cannot be traveled all at once and in the same way.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

22 Nov 2023 10:01

Scientific cognition of things is not cognition of Being. Scientific cognition is particular, concerned with determinate objects, not with Being itself. The philosophical relevance of science, therefore, is that, precisely by means of knowledge, it produces the most decisive knowledge of our lack of knowledge, namely our lack of knowledge of what Being itself is.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

08 Nov 2023 00:29

Truth is what joins us together.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

01 Nov 2023 17:17

The phenomenality of the empirical world is a basic insight of philosophical thought.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

30 Oct 2023 17:28

We ask for the principium individuationis: if being is conceived as universal and entire, where does individualization come from? And if being is conceived as the plurality of individual beings, where does the universal come from? ...

In the world there remains the disjointness, the universal and the individual in the particular categories that mutually repel each other. If I transcend this immanent being in which neither one will let me understand the other, I must conceive an absolute individual that is identical with the universal. It would be a universal with the unique character of a simultaneous individuality, and an individual of a sort that would be universal at the same time, in every definition.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

27 Oct 2023 16:10

We fight against the vertigo of philosophy, against the intimation that we should stand on our heads. We wish to remain 'sane', holding on to our objects and evading the rebirth of our nature in the act of transcending.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

19 Oct 2023 13:07

The world in its bottomless groundlessness, devoid of any meaning, will become unbearable to man. For some time, despite the consciousness of utter meaninglessness, the exploration of the limitless will continue, feeding on the aspiration for truth preserved from past centuries, but this transitional period will not be able to last long. When godlessness becomes a reality, all interest in the truth will die out. Disappointment and lack of a fulcrum will push more and more towards nihilism. For the longest time, perhaps, a purely technical interest in the existent will remain, but it will also run out — it will not stand on its own.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

16 Oct 2023 00:04

There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every evil 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. ... The metaphysical guilt results in a transformation of human self-consciousness before God. Pride is broken. This self-transformation by inner activity may lead to a new source of active life, but one linked with an indelible sense of guilt in that humility which grows modest before God and submerges all its doings in an atmosphere where arrogance becomes impossible. ... Metaphysical guilt is the lack of absolute solidarity with the human being as such—an indelible claim beyond morally meaningful duty. This solidarity is violated by my presence at a wrong or a crime. It is not enough that I cautiously risk my life to prevent it; if it happens, and if I was there, and if I survive where the other is killed, I know from a voice within myself: I am guilty of being still alive.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

27 Sep 2023 09:26

I ask about the possibility of being in the sense found by Kant: How is experience regarding objectivity possible at all? How is a systematic unity of this experience possible? How is autonomous action possible? How is a perception of beauty possible? How are living creatures possible? These questions are transcending because their point is not to get an understanding of one definite being from other being; rather, it is an understanding of existence itself that each question seeks at the boundary of existence, from principles that do not belong to existence as objects of cognition. … As answered by Kant, each question of possibility touches on the supersensory—on the thing-in-itself, on the objectivity of the idea, on the intelligible character, on the supersensory substrate of humanity, on the unity of the source of mechanical and teleological legality in the existence of life. But the supersensory itself is not touched upon in Kant's transcending. He stops at the boundary. What his transcending in thoughts of possibility clarifies, together with the mode of our existence, is its phenomenality as an expression of our assurance of intrinsic Being.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

05 Apr 2020 10:20

In view ... of the possibility of a totalitarian world empire and a totalitarian doctrinal truth corresponding to it, the only hope left is for the individual, for innumerable individuals, as they have lived from the Axial Age until today, from China to the West, to preserve the stream of philosophy, however narrow it may become. The independence from both Church and State of the deepest inner being of the man related to Transcendence, his liberty of soul, that draws courage from discourse with the great cultural heritage, this remains the last refuge, as it has been so often before in evil periods of transition.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

05 Apr 2020 10:12

In coming centuries men will perhaps arise who, sustained by the sight of the origin of the Axial Age, will proclaim truths replete with the knowledge and experience of our era that will really be believed and lived. Man would once more experience in full earnestness the meaning of the fact that God is, and once more know the pneuma that sweeps life along.