Philosophy of Existence

Karl Jaspers, Richard F. Grabau

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780812200867
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Existentialisme en philosophie

Philosophy of Existence was first presented to the public as a series of lectures invited by The German Academy of Frankfurt. In preparing these lectures Jaspers, whom the Nazis had already dismissed from his professorship at Heidelberg, knew that he was speaking in Germany for the last time. Jaspers used the occasion to offer an account of the cultural and intellectual situation from which existentialism emerged as well as a summary of his own philosophy.The book serves three purposes today: it brings the many strands of the existential movement into focus; it provides an overview of Jaspers's own philosophical position; and it demonstrates by example that philosophy need not be irrational, antiscientific, journalistic, or homiletic in order to be existential and engagé. In this short book Jaspers provides a corrective for the popular view of existentialism as a pessimistic, irrationalist philosophy. He maintains that it is, rather part of mainstream of Western philosophy—the form that philosophy has taken in our day.

Reality

As I ELUCIDATE the realm of the encompassing for myself, the dark walls of my prison seem to become transparent. I see the open space, and all there is can become present to me.—As I then ascertain the truth that is to reveal being to me, it is as if I were following the light and became free.—But as long as this light does not fall on anything, I and all things with me seem to be dissolved into unreality by its radiance. I seem to die from lucidity. I cannot love because nothing is real either in me or before me. There must be something that grows in the light of truth: the question of reality itself remains the ultimate question of philosophizing.

EVEN BEFORE we begin to philosophize, the question of reality seems to be already answered in every moment of our life. We deal with things, and obey the modes of reality as they have been handed down to us. There is this human existence, there are these demands and laws; human relations have an orderly arrangement and there are correct ways to govern them. Bodies exist; we find causal regularity in natural processes. Atoms exist, and energy. There are techniques for mastering nature; nature seems reliable, although the technical results of our knowledge often come about in ways scarcely different from those of primitive magic—with as little comprehension and just about as thoughtlessly.

In this unquestioning attitude we achieve a seemingly adequate view of the presence of reality. The problem arises only as I become conscious of a lack: when I desire reality that I neither yet know nor myself am, when this reality cannot be deliberately attained by productive and venturesome action or planning in the world, only then do I begin to philosophize. I inquire about reality.

I want to know true reality, as a whole, and proceed by the route of cognition.

I want to be; I want not only longevity, but to be my authentic self; I want eternity—and proceed by the route of efficacious action.

If we take the first route—the pursuit of knowledge— and desire to know what nature really is, we discover that whatever we conceive does not exist as such; it is a subjective appearance for us. We learned this gradually: first the perspectival foreshortening of things (in our first acquaintance with the world of astronomy); then the subjectivity of secondary qualities (color, sound, etc.), and today also the subjectivity of tangible things of space and time. Physical reality has become more and more alien. First it was conceived in terms of bodies arranged in non-perspectival space, without relation to a perceiver; then it was reduced to the underlying spatial being of particles differing from each other only quantitatively in size and motion; and finally now nature cannot even be imagined, but can be described only in mathematical formulae. As we came to know an unfathomably remote reality accessible only to measurement, the world began at the same time in a mysterious way to take on the character of “appearance” for us. In the end we were able to take this appearance for full reality once more, but in such a way that now “true” reality is nowhere. Everything is real in its own way, and at the same time everything is only a perspective.

The same thing happens to our knowledge of human existence.

Men believe that they understand their own existence realistically, whether in terms of economic facts, or of diplomatic and political action, diverse social systems, spiritual principles, etc. By declaring certain connections to be basic and deriving the rest from them as secondary superstructures, men are caught in a consciousness of reality that quickly decomposes in the light of critical knowledge. All these objects of investigation are indubitable factors; but again “true” reality cannot be encountered with them anywhere. Neither investigatable objects nor the sum-total or any arrangement of them ever comprises the whole.

Although reality seems to recede continually as we gain determinate knowledge, so that the question of what reality is can in principle never be answered by critical investigation, yet individual facts seem to remain as real. A fact—so it is said—either exists or does not exist; here is something unshakeable; here mutually opposing and even hostile views must recognize something common to them all; what exists, what has happened, what is done, must always be known, or at least knowable, to someone. But this is an error. In the first place, every actual individual thing is inexhaustible, and secondly every fact is subject to unlimited interpretation and re-interpretation. If one desires to grasp a fact in a determinate way, he will have to construct it. “All facts are already theories.” Every single fact remains inexhaustible and subject to further interpretation, even when one has re- moved all deception, patent falsehood, obfuscation, suppression and secrecy.

Whether I try to apprehend reality as a whole or as a single fact, in the end it is always the unattainable limit of methodical research.

On the second route—of action—we seek reality as our own being.

Our existence as such leaves us unsatified in its continual and endless drive for more, a drive that lacks a final goal and increasingly realizes its own meaningless-ness as it clearly forsees its own end. In deed, work, fame, and our effects on posterity we gain only a second duration for a slightly longer term; but we cannot conceal from ourselves the fact that this second temporal duration, too, has its absolute end in the silence of the universe.

Next we look for the reality of our own being in our selves as independent beings. But the more resolutely we are ourselves, the more decisively we learn that we are not ourselves through ourselves alone, but that we are given to ourselves. Even our own authentic reality as Existenz is not “ultimate” reality.

AS WE TRY to attain a conscious apprehension of reality by these routes, so that in the end we either would know it or be identical with it ourselves, we fall into an abyss. In this way we neither know reality as something other than ourselves nor do we possess it in ourselves. All routes—to the concrete sciences, to things themselves, to a subsisting object, to any kind of ontological knowledge—lead us, if we confine ourselves to them, only to modes of reality through modes of knowledge that prove to be inadequate.

Up to this point our philosophizing has only been clearing away difficulties. On the basis of this critical philosophizing we are looking for another kind of philosophizing in which we find the way back to reality. We are seeking a philosophizing that starts by granting all the possible modes of reality, i.e., that desires to grasp and know them without limit, but transcends them to reality itself. And there is the rub! Here philosophizing must prove itself. How this is accomplished can be shown only in the concrete process of philosophizing itself. For lack of space, examples must suffice. I shall choose abstract, speculative thinking in the narrow sense, and shall try to make its meaning evident merely by intimation:

AUTHENTIC reality is the being that cannot be thought in terms of possibility. What does this mean?

Any actuality, whose existence I comprehend through the causes that produced it, could have been different under different circumstances. Considered simply as something known, any known actuality is a realized possibility; as an object of thought it retains the character of possibility. Even the whole world, considered as an object of my thought, is one of many possible worlds. To the extent that I know reality, I have posited it in the realm of possibility.

When we are dealing with reality itself, however, possibility ceases. Reality is that which can no longer be translated into possibility. Where what I know is one of many possibilities, I am dealing with an appearance, not with reality itself. I can think about an object only if I think of it as a possibility.

Reality is therefore what resists all thought. Schelling expressed this idea: “The truly existent is precisely that which strikes down whatever comes from thought.” (Schelling, II, 3, 161.) Thought by itself cannot reach reality. It runs aground on reality. Only through the recoil of its inability can it make us feel that the crux of the matter is a leap into reality.

A completely thinkable reality would not be reality any longer, but only an addendum to what is possible. It would not be an origin, and therefore the real thing, but something derivative and secondary. And indeed, we are overcome by a feeling of nothingness the moment we imagine that we have transformed all of reality into conceivability; that is to say that we have put this total conceivability in the place of reality. Then the thought that there need be no reality is a sign that the nothingness of conceivability is sufficient to itself. But it is not sufficient to us, who in this nihilation of reality experience our own nihilation. Rather, the awareness of reality liberates us from the illusory world of what is merely thinkable. As we make contact with reality in transcending, thought is to us not primary; rather, since thought must be understood in the actuality of the thinker and in its recoil in the presence of the unthinkable, it is derivative in comparison with reality. “It is not because there is thought that there is being,” says Schelling (II, 3, 161n.), “but it is because there is being that there is thought.” If thought doubts even reality, Schelling answers in the presence of this unthinkable, preconceptual, primordial reality: “The infinitely existent, just because it is this, is safe against thought and all doubt” (II, 3,161).

In addition, the thinker's reality is prior to his thought. We are masters of our thoughts. To the extent that we are real we do not subordinate ourselves to a system of thought or to an idea of being. What I think is possibility, also in virtue of the fact that I can either embrace it or let it alone. No matter what I think, my own being as a whole is not contained in any thinking or thought. Rather, my thinking is subordinate to my reality, unless this reality is not I myself but an aspect of my empirical ex- istence, which in turn has rightly to subordinate itself— or else, unless I am not myself at all but have given up my reality and am indeed unwittingly subject to something else, whatever it may be.

Since reality as thought recedes from us while nonetheless being present as the all inclusive bearer, and since its presence consists in what no thought can turn into a possibility, philosophical thought means not that we void the inconceivability of authentic reality, but that we intensify it. The force of the real is made palpable by the foundering of thought.

Speculative thought must be defended against mis-understanding:

With the thought of the real that does not become possibility, I think my way to reality. If one uses the category of possibility to transcend to reality, both possibility and reality cease to be categories. If, however, we again turn them into determinate categories, that is, use them as concepts to acquire a knowledge of reality beyond all possibility, instead of using them to transcend to the unthinkable, we then have a pseudo-knowledge of the known necessity of the real. This deterioration of the transcending meaning into a possession of knowledge shows itself in the way we inwardly experience these thoughts (for mere thoughts apart from any relation to experience are empty anyway):

We are uneasy in the presence of an allegedly known reality without possibility. For our movement through possibility is the very breath of our temporal existence, is a condition of our freedom. Brutal facticity, inescapable necessity, unambiguous things in being, if they are held to be absolute reality in the form that we know them, overpower and suffocate us.

In genuine transcending, however, where we do not allow the thought to slip back into finite knowledge, it is precisely the possibilities in every appearance, in everything we can conceive, and in the ambiguity of appearing facts, that remain inviolate. Only as we move through these possibilities in our temporal existence do we come to a peace that is no longer a paralyzing malaise in the presence of facticity without possibility, but is the wonder before eternal being as it reveals itself in the infinity of temporal appearances, and is the profound satisfaction in this wonder.

As soon as I think, I am again in the realm of possibility. Therefore, on the one hand, thought always provides us with the domain of possibility in temporal appearance where our freedom and our hope have their stay; and therefore, on the other hand, thought stops in the presence of eternal reality without possibility, where we do not need freedom any longer, but find peace.

WE SHALL attempt to make reality perceptible by a second example: Reality appears to us as historicity.

Eternal reality can be encountered neither as a time-lessly subsisting other, nor as something permanent in time. Instead, reality is present to us as a transition. It acquires existence in the imminence of departing from existence. It attains neither the form of lasting duration nor that of unchanging order, but only that of foundering.

This nonsubsistence and transitional character of phenomenal reality can be described:

1. Man is the nothingness of a speck of dust in the limitless universe—and he is a creature of a depth capable of cognizing the universe, and of encompassing it within himself. He is both, between both. His faltering being is not an extant, determinable actuality.

2. Human history has no possible end-state, no lasting completeness, no goal. At any time a completion is possible that is at once end and decline. The greatness and essence of man stand under the condition of their moment. Reality reveals itself only to the transition—and does so not in the arbitrary moment of a mere occurrence, but in that fulfilled moment which is an unrepeatable, noninterchangeable presence of reality itself even in its evanescence, and which has been decided for the Existenz standing in it, and in its afterglow also for the spectator who reaches for this inconceivable reality with his understanding.

3. The reality of the world does not become a whole with which man could become identical and thereby achieve authentic being. When construed as the world, reality is always already lost. Ideas of perfection regarding the whole display only a deceptive harmony, whether in the form of a definitive ordering of a transparent reason, or of the whole of a universal life, of the continual emergence of justice from conflict, or a cyclical series, of the history of a fall and subsequent necessary restoration, or however conceived.

Situated between nothing and everything, continually merely in transition, lacking the perfectability of an all-encompassing totality, in every instance man is real only as historic. Conceiving reality as historicity does not mean knowing its history and then regulating one's actions on the basis of this knowledge (for example, by deducing both the task of the present age and my own task within it from knowledge of the place of this age in a whole of history). Rather, it means penetrating to the origin by becoming one with the temporally concrete appearance of the reality in which I stand.

There are many ways to formulate this. All are misunderstood if they are taken as rules of conduct; but they remain true if taken as indicating the modes of historic awareness of reality: to fulfill the moment; to meet the challenge of the day; to carry out one's unique function; to be wholly present. Further: to discover the depths of the present in its foundations in the past, and in the realm of possibilities from which the future is coming: recollection and vision of the future become the reality of the present, and not remote concerns that we use to escape from the present. They raise the present into an eternal present. Reality is only in the present, and as such, historic, unrepeatable.

Only through historicity do I become aware of the authentic being of transcendence—and only through transcendence does our ephemeral existence acquire historic substance.

LET US TRY A THIRD example: authentic reality is for us only if it is one.

Every unity is at first lost when the world is clarified by our knowledge of actualities:

1. All progress in knowledge shows ever more decisively that the world as we know it contains discontinuities between the modes of being. As our knowledge becomes clearer we find a gaping chasm between inorganic nature and life, between nature and life, between life and consciousness, between consciousness and spirit—and yet above and beyond all these discontinuities there is a union and a unity that, although constantly receding, is the presupposition and task of knowledge.

2. Man is not able correctly to order the world as a whole into a unity, in the sense of giving a final and permanent duration to his existence. Every one of his world-arrangements soon proves to be impossible, to contain the seeds of its own destruction, and to strive restlessly ...