Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

17 Feb 2020 23:28

Nietzsche: endless reflection, auscultation and questioning of all things; digs deeply but discovers no foundations, except for new paradoxes. Violently anti-Christian.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

17 Feb 2020 23:24

Both [Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are] without system, both exceptions and victims. They are aware of the catastrophe, utter astounding truths, and show no way out. In them the age is documented by the most merciless self-criticism in human history.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

17 Feb 2020 23:12

Hegel: mastery and many-sided elaboration of the dialectic categories; explored the full range of intellectual attitudes, effected the most comprehensive summation of Western history.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

17 Feb 2020 23:01

Kant: for us the decisive step toward awareness of being; precision in the intellectual operation of transcending; an ethos growing out of our inadequacy; vastness of conception and humanitarian feeling; like Lessing, a personification of radiant reason. A noble man.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

17 Feb 2020 20:11

Leibniz, as universal as Aristotle, richer than all the philosophers of [VII] century in ideas and inventions, always creative, always intelligent, is in his metaphysics without the greatness that comes of a basic attitude which is profoundly human.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

17 Feb 2020 19:54

Descartes’ perverted conception of science and philosophy made his influence disastrous. Because of this, and because of the basic fallacy that is obvious in his work, we should study him today in order to know the road that is to be avoided.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

16 Feb 2020 17:56

He who believes that he understands everything is no longer engaged in philosophical thought. He who takes scientific insight for knowledge of being itself and as a whole has succumbed to scientific superstition. He who has ceased to be astonished has ceased to question. He who acknowledges no mystery is no longer a seeker. Because he humbly acknowledges the limits of possible knowledge the philosopher remains open to the unknowable that is revealed at those limits.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

21 Jan 2020 14:14

Humanism (which merely became explicit in the Renaissance, in Pico, Erasmus, Marsilio Ficino, who can still be read profitably today) goes through every age, since the conscious paideia of the Greeks and since the cultivation of Greek influence in Rome in the age of the Scipios. In our day it has grown weak. Its disappearance would be a catastrophe of incalculable intellectual and human consequence.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

21 Jan 2020 13:57

Plato teaches the eternal, fundamental experiences of philosophy. The movement of his thought embraces the whole wealth of the Greek philosophy that had gone before. Amid the breakdown of his own age he stood at the frontier of every time. He perceived the world of the thinkable with the most independent openness. He achieved the clearest communication of his thoughts, but he communicated them in such a way that the mystery of philosophical endeavour becomes speech while remaining always present as mystery. In him all materiality is smelted down. The essential is the operation of transcending. Plato achieved the summit beyond which, it would seem, man cannot pass in his thinking. Down to the present day the strongest philosophical impulses have emanated from him. He has always been misunderstood, for he has no doctrine that can be learned and his teachings must always be acquired anew. In the study of Plato, as of Kant, we obtain no fixed knowledge but learn to philosophize for ourselves. All subsequent thinkers reveal themselves in their manner of understanding Plato.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

21 Jan 2020 06:55

We arrive at the truth in independent thinking only if in our thinking we strive constantly to put ourselves in the place of every other man. We must learn to know what is possible for man. By seriously attempting to think what another has thought we broaden the potentialities of our own truth, even where we bar ourselves to the other's thinking. We learn to know it only if we venture to put ourselves entirely into it. The remote and alien, the extreme and the exception, even the anomalous all enjoin us to neglect no original thought, to miss no truth by blindness or indifference.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

21 Jan 2020 06:46

I venture these maxims: proceed resolutely but do not run aground; test and correct, not haphazardly or arbitrarily but in a constructive spirit, retaining every experience as an effective force in your thinking.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

21 Jan 2020 05:59

Philosophical thought is concerned with the ultimate, the authentic which becomes present in real life. Every man as man philosophizes.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

12 Jan 2020 13:23

Возникает ощущение никогда ранее не испытанной пустоты бытия, по сравнению с которой самое радикальное неверие античности было защищено полнотой образов еще сохраненной мифической действительности; она сквозит и в дидактической поэме эпикурейца Лукреция. Такое развитие не является, правда, неотвратимо обязательным для сознания, ибо оно предполагает искажение смысла точных наук в познании природы и абсолютизацию, перенесение их абсолютизированных категорий на бытие в целом. Однако оно возможно и стало действительностью, чему способствовали громадные технические и практические успехи названного познания. То, что ни один бог за тысячелетие не сделал для человека, человек делает сам. Вероятно, он надеялся узреть в этой деятельности бытие, но, испуганный, оказался перед им самим созданной пустотой

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

12 Jan 2020 12:57

Since the days of Schiller, the modern mind has become aware of the loss of the sense of a divine presence in the world—a loss characteristic of recent centuries. In the West this process has been carried to a far greater extreme than elsewhere. Doubtless there were sceptics in ancient India and in the classical world, men for whom nothing but the immediate present, as it discloses itself to our senses, counted for anything—the immediate present, inexorably grasped, and itself accounted as null. But, even so, for them the world as a whole was still a spiritualised entity. In the West, as a sequel of the spread of Christianity, scepticism of another kind became possible. The idea of a transcendent Creator, existing before, after, and apart from the world he had fashioned out of chaos, reduced that world to the level of a mere creature. The demons known to paganism vanished from the realm of nature, and the world became a godless world. All that had been created was now the object of human cognition, rethinking (as it were) God’s thoughts. Protestant Christianity took the matter very seriously. The natural sciences, with their rationalisation, mathematicisation, and mechanisation of the world, were closely akin to this form of Christianity. The great scientific investigators of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were pious Christians. But when, finally, advancing doubt made an end of God the Creator, there was left in being no more than the mechanical world-system recognised by the natural sciences—a world-system which would never have been so crudely denuded of spirit but for its previous degradation to the status of a creature.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

12 Jan 2020 12:10

In [Marxism], dialectic sank to become nothing more than a method, devoid both of the content of historical human existence and of metaphysics. Thus, indeed, it rendered possible the formulation of problems whose study furnished an impetus to fruitful researches in connexion with certain specific historical and sociological problems. But at the same time it gave currency to catchwords falsely denominated scientific, these being the form wherein the profound historical epochal consciousness as originally conceived became base coin passing freely from hand to hand. At length even dialectic was jettisoned. There rose up against Marxism the economico-materialistic simplifications, and the naturalisations of human existence to species engaged in a blind mutual struggle. In these variants a genuine historical epochal consciousness had disappeared.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

17 Feb 2020 23:25

Kierkegaard: forms of spiritual action, profound intellectual commitment. In him everything, particularly congealed Hegelian thought, is made fluid again. Violently Christian.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

17 Feb 2020 23:15

Schelling: indefatigable ponderings on the ultimate, broached disquieting mysteries; failed as creator of a system; opened up new paths.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

17 Feb 2020 23:06

Fichte: speculation carried to the point of fanaticism, frantic attempts at the impossible, brilliant construction, moral eloquence. He initiated a destructive trend of extremism and intolerance.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

17 Feb 2020 22:50

Hume is the brilliant analyst; an intelligent writer, even when tedious, he does not strike us as commonplace. His scepticism is the bold, unflinching integrity of a man who dares to stand at the limits and face the unfathomable, without speaking of it.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

17 Feb 2020 20:05

Spinoza is the metaphysician who with traditional and Cartesian concepts expresses a philosophical faith; he is original in the metaphysical mood which he alone possessed among the philosophers of his time. Of the philosophers of his century he alone has followers today.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

17 Feb 2020 19:30

[Calvin] is the supreme incarnation of that Christian intolerance against which there is no weapon but intolerance.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

13 Feb 2020 16:01

[П]сихическая субстанция (душа) есть бесконечно объемлющее, которое нельзя охватить в целом, а можно лишь изучать, проникая в него с помощью различных методов. У нас нет основополагающей системы понятий, с помощью которой мы могли бы определить человека как такового; нет и теории, которая могла бы исчерпывающе описать человеческое бытие как некую объективную реальность. Поэтому мы... должны быть готовы к восприятию любых эмпирических возможностей; нам ни при каких обстоятельствах нельзя сводить «человеческое» к чему-то единому.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

21 Jan 2020 14:05

Plotinus used the whole tradition of ancient philosophy as a means of expressing a wonderful metaphysics, original in mood, which has come down through the ages as the true metaphysics. Mystical serenity is communicated in the music of a speculation which remains unequalled and which re-echoes wherever men have thought metaphysically.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

21 Jan 2020 13:27

Hegel was the first philosopher who took a consciously philosophical view of the whole history of philosophy. For this reason his history of philosophy remains a magnificent achievement. But because of its Hegelian principles it penetrates but also kills. All the philosophers of the past live for a moment as in a wonderfully illuminating spotlight; but then it suddenly becomes apparent that Hegelian thinking cuts the heart out of them and buries their remains in the vast graveyard of history. Hegel was finished with the past because he believed he had encompassed the whole of it. His rational penetration is not candid exploration but destructive surgery, it is not enduring questioning but conquest and subjection, it is not a living-with but domination.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

21 Jan 2020 06:51

No philosopher, not even the greatest, is in possession of the truth. Amicus Plato, magis arnica veritas.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

21 Jan 2020 06:44

Experience in the sciences, their methods, their critical approach makes for the scientific attitude indispensable to honest philosophical endeavour.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

12 Jan 2020 13:53

Man is mind, and the situation of man as man is a mental situation... The mental situation of our day is pregnant with immense dangers and immense possibilities; and it is one which, if we are inadequate to the tasks which await us, will herald the failure of mankind.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

12 Jan 2020 13:00

The despiritualisation of the world is not the outcome of the unfaith of individuals, but is one of the possible consequences of a mental development which here has actually led to Nothingness. We feel the unprecedented vacancy of existence, a sense of vacancy against which even the keenest scepticism of classical times was safeguarded by the richly-peopled fulness of an undecayed mythical reality, with which the De rerum natura of Lucretius the Epicurean is instinct. Such a development is not, indeed, absolutely inevitable to the human consciousness, for it presupposes a misunderstanding of the true significance of natural science and an unduly rigid application of its categories to all being. But, as aforesaid, it is possible; and it has actually occurred, having been promoted by the overwhelming successes of science in the technical and practical fields. 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

12 Jan 2020 12:13

Kierkegaard was the first to undertake a comprehensive critique of his time, one distinguished from all previous attempts by its earnestness. This critique of his was the first to be applicable to the age in which we are now living, and reads as if it had been written but yesterday. He confronted man with Nothingness. Nietzsche, who wrote a few decades later, was unacquainted with the work of his predecessor Kierkegaard. He noted the advent of European nihilism, diagnosing its symptoms pitilessly. To their contemporaries these two philosophers seemed no more than freaks—prophets of a sensationalism which no one could take seriously. They were, in truth, pioneers who discerned what already existed but had not as yet aroused general disquiet, and only in our own day have they been acclaimed as thinkers dealing with contemporary actualities.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

12 Jan 2020 12:04

Dialectic disclosed the transformation of human consciousness by its own self. Each pulse of awareness was set in motion by self-awareness; every item of knowledge altered the knower; being thus altered, he must seek in his world a new knowledge of himself; in this way the stream flowed on unrestingly, for being and consciousness of being were severed, and they must perpetually renew their severance in a changed form, passing from one to the other; such was and is man’s historical process. The how of the process was demonstrated by Hegel with a fulness and depth which have never been excelled.