Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

06 Jan 2025 16:02

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

24 Dec 2024 00:45

The sense of a resolute refusal to realize is another matter. There my Existenz can see no compelling need for this existence in the world: while finding myself in existence, I can still fight existence as such. Mundane existence can be truly, consciously embraced only by an Existenz that has been touched by the question of this negative resolve. One must have potentially left the world and come back to it, to have it positively as a world in its splendor and in its dubiety and in its character as the sole place for the appearance of Existenz, the place where it can understand itself and other Existenz.

I am not alone in existence. It is this fact which makes that negative resolve to call mundane existence into doubt so doubtful, since all I do in it is to plunge worldlessly and uncommunicatively into the transcendent abyss. But Existenz in existence is the will to communicate; since communication is a premise of its being, it can neither stand absolutely on itself nor cling directly to Transcendence.

There is no individual salvation. No truth will let me reach the goal for myself alone.

I share in being what others are; I am responsible for that which is outside me, because I can address it and enter into active relations with it; I am a possible Existenz for other Existenz. I therefore reach the goal of my existence only if I grasp what is around me. I have not come to myself until the world with which I can establish possible communication has come to itself with me. Freedom depends upon the freedom of others. The measure of my self-being is my neighbor's self-being, and finally that of all men.

Only the eventual foundering of this realization will reveal what Being is.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

24 Dec 2024 00:16

All fulfillment is transitory, yet it is in and through fulfilled existence that I read the cipher script of Being.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

22 Dec 2024 13:58

[O]nly the pure soul can truthfully live in this tension: to know about the possible ruin and still remain tirelessly active for all that is possible in the world.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

22 Dec 2024 03:06

Death comes to all living existence. Man learns in his life and from his history that everything has to end. Realizations become untenable as social conditions change; thought possibilities are exhausted; modes of intellectual life fade out. We see greatness annihilated. We see profundity evaporate, with its effects seeming to continue after it has turned into something else. In history as a whole there has been progress only in technology and in the rationalization of existence; in the areas of true humanity and of the human mind, a history that brought forth the extraordinary has simultaneously been the triumphal parade route of destructive forces. Were mankind to develop without limits, no stable state, no permanent mundane existence could be achieved without destroying man as such. ... Should a fantastic technology accomplish things still inconceivable today, it would be capable of equally fantastic havoc. If the technological wrecking of the foundations of all human existence were a possibility, there is small doubt that some day it would be a reality. By our activities we can impede things, put them off, win periods of grace, but all the experience of human history suggests that some day, somewhere, somebody will do the worst that can be done.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

02 Aug 2024 00:07

Absolute Reality is to me transcendent; but in the immanence of empirical existence and Existenz I can experience limits where I feel its presence.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

25 Jul 2024 23:30

Superstitious belief in science must be exposed to the light of day. In our era of restless unbelief, men have snatched at science as a supposedly firm foundation, set their faith in so-called scientific findings, blindly subjected themselves to supposed experts, believed that the world as a whole could be put in order by scientific planning, expected science to provide life aims, which science can never offer—and expected a knowledge of being as a whole, which is beyond the scope of science. … [Philosophy] is science in the age-old and enduring sense of methodical thought, but it is not science in the pure modern sense of an inquiry into things, leading to universally valid, cogent knowledge, identical for all. The fallacious identification of philosophy and science by Descartes, a misconception in keeping with the spirit of these last centuries, has made science into supposedly total knowledge and has ruined philosophy. Today the purity of philosophy must be gained along with the purity of science. The two are inseparable, but they are not the same thing; philosophy is neither a specialized science along with others, nor a crowning science resulting from the others, nor a foundation-laying science by which the others are secured. Philosophy is bound to science and thinks in the medium of all sciences. Without the purity of scientific truth, the truth of philosophy is inaccessible. Science has its own realm and is guided by philosophical ideas which grow up in all the sciences, though they themselves can never be scientifically justified. ... The modern aspiration for consciousness of truth has become possible only on the basis of the sciences of the last [XIX] century, but it has not yet been achieved. The work required for its realization is among the most urgent needs of the present historical moment. In opposition to the disintegration of science into unrelated specialities, in opposition to the scientific superstition of the masses, in opposition to the superficiality brought upon philosophy by the confusion of science and philosophy—scientific research and philosophy must join hands to guide us on the path of authentic truth.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

11 Jun 2024 12:39

Our enduring task in philosophical endeavour is to become authentic men by becoming aware of Being; or, and this is the same thing: to become ourselves by achieving certainty of God.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

30 Apr 2024 16:26

The question now is whether the coming course of historical evolution will remain open and lead, through terrible sufferings, distortions and horrifying abysses, to the the creation of the real man. As to how this might happen we can form no idea.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

30 Apr 2024 00:12

Nowhere on earth can we find final truth, authentic salvation.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

29 Apr 2024 23:58

To see and understand others helps in the achievement of clarity about oneself, in overcoming the potential narrowness of all self-enclosed historicity, and in taking the leap into expanding reality. This venture into boundless communication is once again the secret of becoming-human, not as it occurred in the inaccessible prehistoric past, but as it takes place within ourselves.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

29 Apr 2024 23:44

That which binds all men together ... cannot be revelation but must be experience. Revelation is the form taken by particular historical creeds, experience is accessible to man as man.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

29 Feb 2024 00:17

The purest enlightenment recognizes that it cannot dispense with faith.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

25 Feb 2024 13:52

If there lurk in man certain elements of invincible evil, then the task of the true leader would be, not merely to carry on a pacifist campaign against war in its direct aspect, but also to work against its menacing causes, to the end that a lengthy period of peace shall give possibilities of space and time for development. He should not strive for peace at any price, but should continue to work against the evil spirit of war even when, through a concatenation of circumstances, war has become impossible to prevent—endeavouring deliberately to fulfil war with the intrinsic value of a historically relevant decision. He should strive to ensure that out of war, which as such is rooted only in evil and in blind chance, true destiny shall emerge.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

10 Feb 2024 22:58

[A]pplying numerical unity to the Deity is as inadequate as applying numerical multiplicity. What is intended, beyond anyone and many, in transcending to the transcendent One has to lie deeper than a number can express.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

27 Dec 2024 09:29

All Ukrainians, Israelis and their Western backers must read this book and reflect on their personal responsibility for the crimes of fascism — Banderism and Zionism.

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

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

24 Dec 2024 00:38

I might seem to have reason to think: Everything founders; I need not even begin, for everything is senseless anyway. This thought presupposes duration as a standard of value and absolutizes mundane existence. But although for existence — and thus for each one of us — the will to be lasting and extant is inescapable, although the thought that all things founder will initially express despair in the boundary situation, an Existenz cannot come to itself if it has not been in boundary situations.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

24 Dec 2024 00:10

The sense of foundering need not turn us into passive nonentities. It may be possible in consequence of it, to engage in true activity: what perishes must have been. Only a mundane reality can really perish; otherwise it would be just a possibility that disappears. This is why I put the full stress of my being on realization in existence, on permanence in my doings, and why I believe in this as something to be done. I want permanence in order to experience the fulfilled foundering that lights up Being for me. I go into the world and extend myself in its abundance with all my strength, to get an original view of the world's disjointness and perishability and not to know of them in abstract thoughts only. Unless I enter the world without reserve, suffering whatever mundane havoc may be wrought upon me, I cannot really experience foundering as a cipher [of Transcendence]. Otherwise there would be only the groundless, indifferent perdition of all things.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

22 Dec 2024 13:06

History passes on, from one turmoil, from one catastrophe to the next, with brief intervals of happiness, little islands which it spares for a time, until they too are engulfed. All in all — as Max Weber put it — a road paved by the devil with demolished values. … Once again we are faced with the question is it God or the devil who governs the world? And though we may believe that ultimately the devil is in the service of God, there is no proof of it.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

11 Sep 2024 10:37

Thoughts cannot convey a knowledge of God, only a consciousness of the way Transcendence enters our soul in our situation. … It seems to be the deity's own will that every way of seeking after truth be dared at the risk of error. We need not fear unveiling what it would conceal; what we have to fear is falsehood. Yet this daring all, and saying all, is limited to my own stage of consciousness. Not every man is ready to conceive each thought and to think it truly, to be struck by each fact and to sense the cipher in it. … There is a time for all things. The great leaps and crises change the whole of man, as if organs of sight were evolving, and others decaying. Men who really belong together may be kept apart by a discrepancy in their stages of consciousness.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

28 Jul 2024 00:30

Existenz can grasp itself in its own freedom only if at the same time, and in the same act, it will perceive something other than itself. Strict unconditionality makes me aware, not only that my existence is not selfmade and is the helpless prey of certain doom, but that I do not have myself alone to thank for my freedom either. In some way or other, the realization of unconditionality will occur only in relation to its Transcendence. … Freedom is not being-in-itself. In Transcendence freedom ceases because decision has an end; in Trancendence there is neither freedom nor unfreedom. Being free—the most profound appeal to us as long as it is still up to us what we are—is not the same as being transcendent. Confined to itself, even freedom withers. It seeks its fulfillment in Transcendence, which as such opens only to freedom, and whatever this fulfillment is will turn into a possibility for freedom: into the possibility of perfection or of reconciliation, of redemption or of pain at transcendent Being. In every case the end of possible self-sufficiency is freedom's ultimate satisfaction in temporal existence. … Existenz is either in relation to Transcendence or not at all.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

17 Jun 2024 23:41

[O]ur life in history is two things at once: the life that serves, and creates a basis for the life of those to come after us, and the life that cuts across history, the life in actuality as such, oriented toward Transcendence, that liberates us.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

30 Apr 2024 16:34

The one origin of mankind at the beginning of prehistory is as obscure as the future world of humanity dominating the globe, when it has entered into the unity of its legally ordered existence, whose spiritual and material horizons are infinite. Between the origin (which we simply cannot imagine or conceive) and the goal (of which we cannot formulate any adequate concrete image) our actual history is taking place. But origin and goal are interrelated: as I think of the one, so I think of the other. Symbols make manifest that which cannot attain any convincing perceptual shape as a reality: in the ‘Creation of Man’—the origin—and in the ‘Everlasting Realm of Spirits’—the goal.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

30 Apr 2024 07:26

The history of mankind visible to us took, so to speak, two breaths. The first led from the Promethean Age via the ancient civilisations to the Axial Age and its consequences. The second started with the scientific-technological, the new Promethean Age and may lead, through constructions that will be analogous to the organisation and planning of the ancient civilisations, into a new, second Axial Age, to the final process of becoming-human, which is still remote and invisible to us.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

30 Apr 2024 00:05

The claim to exclusive possession of truth, that tool of fanaticism, of human arrogance and self-deception through the will to power, that disaster for the West—most intensely so in its secularised forms, such as the dogmatic philosophies and the so-called scientific ideologies—can be vanquished by the very fact that God has manifested himself historically in several fashions and has opened up many ways toward Himself. It is as though the deity were issuing a warning, through the language of universal history, against the claim to exclusiveness in the possession of truth.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

29 Apr 2024 23:51

Wonder at the mystery is itself a fruitful act of understanding, in that it affords a point of departure for further research. It may even be the very goal of all understanding, since it means penetrating through the greatest possible amount of knowledge to authentic nonknowledge, instead of allowing Being to disappear by absolutising it away into a self-enclosed object of cognition.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

18 Mar 2024 23:04

The independence ... 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.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

26 Feb 2024 13:05

OTD 55 years ago Jaspers died.

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

23 Feb 2024 18:35

Happy birthday, Karl. Thank you!

Karl Jaspers ✨ Existentialism

04 Feb 2024 20:55

The demands of night are everywhere and can never be taken into the day as adequately justifiable. Lying for my country, perjuring myself for a woman — these are still surveyable acts contrary to particular moral and legal rules. But tearing a bond once given, so as to expand one's own creative life — as Goethe did to Friederike Brion — is an act he himself was never able to elucidate and vindicate. Thus Cromwell, for the power of his state, took inhumanity upon himself with a conscience that was never fully eased. In situations of this kind the historic realization, the very day himself, rests on the violation of diurnal orders. The scope of the nocturnal claim shows up here, in the will of men who act politically, if in case of failure they choose to go down themselves: they are putting so much real historic existence at stake, are sacrificing so many human lives to that existence, that their own, bound up with the cause and goal of their actions, will strike them as forfeit.