Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

03 Apr 2020 23:00

He who believes loves the believing man, wherever he meets him. Just as freedom strives that all around it shall become free, so faith strives that all shall come to their historical faith. It is not compulsion that is meaningful, and not enforcement, but to arouse attention through a language in which, no matter how, Transcendence is testified to. It is true that we cannot render each other decisive aid in the province of faith, but only meet one another. If Transcendence helps, it helps only the individual by his selfhood. In converse we can, however, encourage and unfold one another out of that which is innate in each individual.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

29 Mar 2020 10:31

Faith alone sets in motion the forces that master man’s basic animal instincts, deprive them of overlordship, and transform them into motors of upsurging humanity: the brutal force of the desire to dominate—delight in violence, in cruelty—the empty will to prestige—the desire for wealth and pleasure—the erotic instincts, which force themselves to the front wherever they are given the opportunity. The first step toward the taming of the naked instincts is external force accompanied by terror and the engendering of anxiety, then the already indirect force of the tabu; then adaptive conquest takes place through the faith of the man who masters himself through the meaning of his actions out of his faith. History is man’s advance toward liberty through the cultivation of faith. Out of faith are devised the laws that subjugate force, legitimacy is constituted, without which there can be no reliance on anything, man becomes himself through his subjection to absolute imperatives.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

29 Mar 2020 08:59

Always we live with symbols. In them we experience and apprehend Transcendence, authentic reality. Loss of this reality occurs both in making this symbol a real existence in the world, and in aestheticising the symbol into an optional guide for emotions.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

29 Mar 2020 08:52

The Godhead is origin and goal, it is peace of mind. There is security.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

29 Mar 2020 08:51

The notions of God produced by man are not God Himself. But we can bring the Godhead to consciousness only through the medium of mental images that operate like a language. These mental images are symbols, are historical, are always inadequate.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

29 Mar 2020 08:45

Man can veil himself and his origin, he can let it slip from consciousness, he can invert himself. But he can also re-establish himself. This is at all times possible to him. From the mystery of selfdiscovery in existence the profound consciousness of being grows in him—it requires thought and finds communicability in the products of thought—his consciousness of being becomes sure of itself in love—out of love the content of being is revealed. Out of the attitude of man to man in the acceptance of concern for others, in converse, in communication, there grows up the perception of the true, and the absolute is aroused.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

26 Mar 2020 16:43

Man cannot live without faith. For even nihilism, as the opposite pole to faith, exists only in relation to a possible, but denied, faith.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

26 Mar 2020 05:17

We must return to a deeper origin, to a fountainhead from which all faith once welled forth in its particular historical shapes, to this wellspring which can flow at any time man is ready for it. When trust in that which is manifest and given in the world no longer supports life, then trust in the Origin of all things must lay the foundations.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

16 Mar 2020 07:10

Если бы форма политического обихода была единственной господствующей формой, то возможность экзистенциальной коммуникации была бы уничтожена. Экзистенция прикасается к экзистенции только там, где разбито и оставлено общение людей как борьба врагов, борющихся один с другим за свое существование. Но абсолютизация форм политического обихода вплоть до мелочей повседневности, и даже вплоть до обхождения с самим собою - это искушение, желающее сделать возможным совместную жизнь в относительном покое, в котором ничто не выносится открыто на действительное решение. В таком случае решения следуют из коварных в молчании совершающихся процессов, в которых уже не соприкасаются между собою экзистенции. Политический обиход, если его превращают в форму жизни, вынуждает возможную экзистенцию совершенно исчезнуть под его покровом. Остаются витальные жизненные побуждение под прикрытием успокоенного и упорядоченного существования. Каждый имеет значение на началах обоюдности, а отнюдь не как он сам. Нет ни почтения, ни любви, а только форма упорядоченных, объективных соотношений власти и ранга. В сущности, господствует презрение к себе, а втайне - презрение ко всем другим. Уважение здесь питают только к власти, к авторитету в общественном мнении, к деньгам и успеху. Возмущение прорывается лишь там, где нарушается покой взаимной иллюзии посреди всеобщего замирения, где кто-нибудь говорит то, что есть, и называет вещи их несвященными именами. Поэтому в отдельном человеке абсолютизация политического обихода бывает выражением его экзистенциальной беспочвенности. Если его внутренняя пустота встречается с пустотой другого, здесь образуются примечательные отношения солидарности в безъэкзистенциальности. Люди, подходящие друг другу по характеру, в силу общих интересов, ситуаций и в общей ненависти питают доверие к взаимности, которому, однако, всегда сопутствует недоверие и которое думает о возможности предательства. Эта позиция может в таком случае сделаться их сущностью настолько, что и с самими собой они станут обходиться политически, если находят перед собою инстинктивную уверенность сокрытия, ловких поправок, определяющей цели софистической аргументации.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

12 Mar 2020 05:56

Never shall we find a fulfilment of history, save in every present as this presentness itself.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

11 Mar 2020 15:39

The only salvation is a world order based on the rule of law and possessing the power to preserve peace, by meeting every act of violence with superior force that robs it of all chance of success, and by punishing it as a crime.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

03 Mar 2020 14:20

The road to world order leads via the awakening and selfunderstanding of political liberty in as many countries as possible. This situation is without analogy in the conditions of transition to earlier world empires after the Axial Period. The idea and the task were scarcely conscious at that time; the reality of free States did not exist amongst the powers that were coming to sovereignty. World order today, if it is realised at all, will start from the federalism of the States which are already free. It will be successful only if it exercises a sufficiently strong attraction to lead others to follow it out of conviction, and peacefully to join in with the world order which brings liberty, wealth and spiritual creativeness, the potentiality of humanity in its plenitude and multiformity.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

03 Mar 2020 09:00

Both America and Russia ... measured against the primordial, world-creating cultures, are characterised by a lack of roots and thereby, simultaneously, by a magnificent open-mindedness. To look at them is singularly instructive and liberating for us, but also frightening.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

03 Mar 2020 07:29

The question is, along what path will the unitary world order be attained. It might take place along the desperate road of force, as, in the words of Bismarck, the unity of Germany could be achieved only by ‘blood and iron’. Or it might take place through an order arising by negotiation out of maturing understanding in mutuality, in the same way as, in the eighteenth century, the States of North America found their way to union at the cost of abrogating an essential part of their particular sovereignty in favour of the sovereignty of the whole. The shape of the order would, in the first case, be the static peace of despotism, in the second case, a peaceful community of all subject to transmutation in perennial democratic unrest and self-rectification. Reducing the possibilities to a simple antithesis, therefore, the issue is between the path to world empire or the path to world order. World empire. This is world peace through a single power, which coerces all from one point on the earth. It maintains itself by the use of force. It moulds the levelled masses by terror and total planning. A uniform world view is forced upon all, in simple outlines, by propaganda. Censorship and direction of spiritual activity compel the latter to play its part in the plan of the moment, which may be modified at any time. World order. This is unity without unifying force other than that afforded by common decision in negotiation. Orders agreed upon can only be altered along the legally fixed path by new decisions. The supremacy of this procedure and of majority decisions has been accepted in common; it guarantees the common rights of all, which also protect those who are for the time being in a minority; these rights remain an order of mankind in movement and selfrectification. The enslavement of all from one point stands in contrast to the order of all attendant upon renunciation by each single State of absolute sovereignty. Hence the road to world order leads via the voluntary renunciation of those with power as a precondition of liberty. Where a sovereignty remains which is not that of mankind as a whole, there also remains a source of unfreedom; for it must assert itself by force against force. The organisation of force, however, conquest and empire-building by conquest, lead to dictatorship, even if the starting-point was free democracy. So it happened in Rome in the transition from the Republic to Caesarism. So the French Revolution changed into the dictatorship of Napoleon. Democracy that conquers abandons itself. Democracy that lives on good terms with others lays the foundations for the union of all with equal rights. The demand for full sovereignty is rooted in the energy of self-assertion destitute of communication. In the age of absolutism, when the concept of sovereignty was defined, the consequences were ruthlessly made conscious in word and deed.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

03 Mar 2020 06:15

Three tendencies are today making their way through the world. They may be summed up by the words socialism, world order, and faith. Firstly: The human masses are striving toward order. Socialism shows the demands of just mass organisation. Secondly: The unity of the surface of the earth is pressing toward the implementation of this unity in peaceful intercourse. The alternative is shown to be world empire or world order. Thirdly: Loss of the traditional footholds in the substance of a common faith is pressing toward the authentic origin of faith in man with the question of whence and whither we are living. The alternative is shown to be nihilism or love. These three great basic tendencies of contemporary human happening and volition converge in the goal of accomplished human liberty.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

29 Mar 2020 10:50

Man in his manifestation should certainly not be of one single type, but he should be concerned with himself in all his multiformity. For our roots extend beyond our historically particular origin to the one origin that encompasses us all. This origin is the source of the demand for boundless communication, which, in the manifest world, is the path along which truth is disclosed.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

29 Mar 2020 09:10

Faith in man is faith in the possibility of freedom; the image of man remains incomplete if it lacks this basic feature of his existence, which does not take shape as an image: that he, bestowed upon himself by God, shall thank or blame himself for what becomes of him. The echo from history, that which lends wings to our intercourse with our ancestors as far back as the origin of the human race, is their quest for freedom, the fashion in which they realised freedom, the forms in which they discovered and desired it. We recognise ourselves in what men were capable of, and what they say to us out of their historical reality. To freedom pertains authentic communication, which is more than contact, compact, sympathy, community of interests and enjoyment. Liberty and communication, both of them evade demonstration. Where demonstration by experience begins, there is no liberty and no existential communication. Both of them give rise to that which then becomes the object of experience, without being adequately explicable as a phenomenon, and to that which is then a pointer to the processes of liberty, which in itself, where we gain a share in it, is understandable and compelling. Faith in man is faith in his potentialities arising from liberty, not faith in a man in the sense of the deification of that man. Faith in man presupposes faith in the Deity through whom he is. Without faith in God, faith in man degenerates into contempt for man, into loss of respect for man as man, with the final consequence that the alien human life is treated with indifference, as something to be used and destroyed.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

29 Mar 2020 08:53

It is impossible for man to lose Transcendence, without ceasing to be man.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

29 Mar 2020 08:51

In some way or other man becomes certain of Transcendence—it may be the space of nothingness in which everything is, this nothingness which may then suddenly become plenitude and authentic Being.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

29 Mar 2020 08:47

Notions and ideas come and go, and the language in which we call to mind the eternal. The latter itself cannot undergo mutation. It is. But no one knows it as such.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

26 Mar 2020 16:52

[H]istory is traversed not only by the many illusions, but also by the fight against them for truth. Admittedly, the man without power is particularly disposed to illusions, and today the individual is perhaps more powerless than ever before. But he can also lay hold of the only chance open to powerlessness, unconditional striving for truth.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

26 Mar 2020 16:21

Faith is not a matter of the goals of volition, nor of the contents of reason that become purposes. For faith cannot be willed, it does not consist in propositions, between which one has to choose, it evades the programme. ... Faith is not a particular content, not a dogma—dogma may be the expression of an historical shape assumed by faith; but it may also be a delusion. Faith is the fulfilling and moving element in the depths of man, in which man is linked, above and beyond himself, with the Origin of his being.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

18 Mar 2020 08:34

То, что не осуществляется в коммуникации, еще не обладает бытием; то, что в итоге не основывается на коммуникации, не имеет достаточного основания. Истина начинается вдвоем. Поэтому философия требует: постоянно искать коммуникации, всемерно отваживаться на нее, жертвовать своим настырным самоутверждением, которое постоянно облачается в новые маски, жить в надежде, что, отдавая себя, я буду сторицей дарован себе снова. Поэтому я должен постоянно заставлять себя сомневаться, я не смею быть окончательно уверенным, не смею держаться какого-то мнимого прочного пункта в себе, который якобы позволяет мне видеть себя насквозь и выносить истинные суждения. Подобная самоуверенность есть самая соблазнительная форма ложного самоутверждения.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

12 Mar 2020 05:56

The limit of historical possibilities has its deep foundation in humanity. No perfect end-state can ever be attained in the human world, because man is a creature that constantly strives to thrust out beyond itself, and is not only imperfect, but imperfectible. A mankind which desired only to be itself would, in restricting itself to itself, lose humanity.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

11 Mar 2020 15:59

The individual can become existence that is capable of finding its own eternal meaning in the manifestation of the epoch; the human group and mankind, however, can become an order that is a communal product of history only through generations and that gives scope to the potentialities and limitations of all individuals. But order only exists through the spirit with which individuals animate it and which gives individuals their stamp in the sequence of generations.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

03 Mar 2020 14:34

Once a dictatorship has been set up it cannot be got rid of again from within: Germany and Italy were set free from without. All attempts from within came to grief. This might be a coincidence. But if we call to mind the way in which a terrorist régime operates with the means of total planning and bureaucracy, it becomes evident how fundamentally insurmountable is the machine that maintains itself almost automatically, and in which everything that appears to oppose it from within is obliterated. The means of modern technology give the de facto ruler a tremendous preponderance of power, if he makes ruthless use of all the means at his disposal. There is just as little chance of overthrowing such a régime as there is of the inmates of a penitentiary overthrowing the governor and his staff. The machine reaches the peak of impregnability when the terror includes all, in such a manner that those who do not wish it become terrorised terrorists, killing in order not to be killed themselves. Hitherto such despotic terrorist régimes were local. Thus they could be annihilated from without, if not from within. If, however, the peoples should fail to absorb this into their consciousness and into their concern for the future, if they should all slip unawares into such a dictatorship in the shape of a world dictatorship, there would be no further prospect of liberation. The danger of this state of affairs coming about is all the more acute when people feel safe from it, and suppose, for example, that only the servile Germans could find themselves in such a situation. If the same fate befalls the rest of the world, there will be no more outside. The rigidification of the whole in total planning, stabilised by terror, would annihilate liberty and mean the road to increasing ruin for all.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

03 Mar 2020 14:18

The road to world unity starts from a few historical origins and from a quantitatively infinitesimal minority of man. World order springs from the same motives as the order of bourgeois society. Since bourgeois liberty was won at only a few places on the earth in historical processes unique to each, and since these constitute, as it were, the school of political liberty, the world will have to accomplish on a large scale what was there exemplified on a small one.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

03 Mar 2020 08:24

World order, with the abolition of absolute sovereignty, would mean the abolition of the old concept of the State in favour of mankind. The outcome would not be a World State (that would be a world empire), but an order, perennially re-established in negotiation and decision, of States governing themselves within legally restricted domains: an all-embracing federalism. World order would be the continuation and universalisation of internal political freedom. Both are possible only through restriction of the political order to questions of existence. On the plane of existence, the issue is not the development, moulding and fufilment of humanity in toto, but that which is or may be common to all men by nature, that which links men together above all diversities, above divergences of faith and world view—that which is universally human. Natural law has, since early times, sought to give prominence to this common bond. It is the foundation of the rights of man, and in world order would erect an authority that would also protect the individual person from acts of violence on the part of his State, through the possibility of effective legal action under the sovereignty of mankind. It is possible to evolve principles which are judicious for man as man (such as Kant’s principle of perpetual peace). The concepts of the right of self-determination, equality of rights, the sovereignty of the State, retain their relative, but lose their absolute significance. The total State and total war can be demonstrated as contradictory to natural law; because in them the means and prerequisites of humanity become the final goal, or because through absolutisation of the means the meaning of the whole, the right of man, is destroyed. Natural law is confined to the ordering of existence. Its end-purpose is always a relative one, that of the ordering of existence, but from the motive of the absolute end-purpose of authentic and complete humanity in the world.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

03 Mar 2020 07:23

If the first termination of the present development, which may not be so very far off, is the World State, this may appear either as an empire won by conquest and subject to a unified rule (perhaps in the form of a government which is in actual fact centralised, but which recognises the sham sovereignty of many States), or—the outcome of agreement and treaty—as a world government of united States which have renounced their individual sovereignty in favour of the sovereignty of mankind, that is seeking its way with legal order as the sovereign authority. Motives on this passage to world unity are, for one thing, the will to power, which is no less alive today than at any other time, and which knows no bounds until it has subjugated everything, and, for another, amongst powers none of which dare risk a decision by force in view of the monstrous perils, the great planetary distress that presses toward agreement—and above both these, the idea of human solidarity. All the phenomena of the present have the appearance of a preparatory struggle for the points of departure of the final battle for the planetary order. Contemporary world politics are seeking a basis for the ultimate settlement, whether this is to be reached by military or peaceful means. Until this has been achieved, all conditions and power relationships are temporary. Hence the present appears as a transition to this final planetary order, even if the exact opposite develops first: e.g. the radical interruption of communication on earth for the majority of people by totalitarian régimes.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

17 Feb 2020 23:42

In his debunking psychology Freud naturalized and trivialized the sublime insights of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. A barren, hateful worldview masked by humanitarian forms was indeed appropriate to an age whose hypocrisy it pitilessly dissected, but Freud failed to see that this world was not the whole world.