Karl Jaspers is still relevant in many ways
“It is the search for the truth, not possession of the truth which is the way of philosophy.” — Karl Jaspers
On this day in 1969, a still-relevant German psychiatrist and important but neglected philosopher died in Basel as a naturalized citizen of Switzerland. For the Nazis his jüdische Versippun (“Jewish taint”) was having a Jewish wife, which resulted in his forced retirement from teaching (1937), a ban on publishing (1938), and constant danger until the end of the war. Afterwards, he moved from Heidelberg to Switzerland and continued to teach at the University of Basel until his death (Wikipedia).
In 1946 Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), a long-time friend of Hannah Arendt, wrote Die Schuldfrage (The Question of German Guilt) in which he identified four categories of German guilt in the Nazi’s atrocities: “criminal guilt (the commitment of overt acts), political guilt (the degree of political acquiescence in the Nazi regime), moral guilt (a matter of private judgment among one’s friends), and metaphysical guilt (a universally shared responsibility of those who chose to remain alive rather than die in protest against Nazi atrocities).” I suspect he saw himself in one of the latter categories.
“To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.” ― Karl Jaspers
Jaspers rejected religious dogma but still believed in transcendence. He was influenced by Christian mysticism and explored Buddhism while rejecting the “demythologizing” of Christianity. He argued that “evidences of faith are always paradoxical and uncertain and that those who pursue knowledge of these contents must accept an attitude of philosophical relativism and discursive exchange: if faith results in dogmatism, it immediately undermines its claims to offer transcendent knowledge” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Seeing “philosophical claims, not as formally verifiable postulates, but as expressions of underlying mental dispositions” Jaspers argued that only “absolute liberality, excluding all orthodoxy, could be appropriate to the task of interpreting the transcendent contents of human life.” In his later writings, he embraced existentialism and philosophical humanism and wrote about how the atom bomb “must turn our thoughts to the very meaning of existence, and by doing so, by forcing man to exercise his reasoning powers, it may force him to achieve a new political consciousness” (Goodreads).
“Reason is like an open secret that can become known to anyone at any time; it is the quiet space into which everyone can enter through his own thought.” — Karl Jaspers
As we remain under a threat of nuclear annihilation and witness Indian nationalists and engineers being shot while told to “get out of my country,” a Holocaust historian from France and Muhammed Ali’s son being detained at an airport, churches becoming sanctuaries for immigrants, an epidemic of bomb threats against Jewish organizations, and damaged headstones at a historic Jewish cemetery in St Louis and Philadelphia, it would be worthwhile to reflect on Jaspers’ categories of German guilt and how we might best avoid them — silence is not on my list.
Before his death, also on this date in 2013, Stéphane Hessel — another German who became a naturalized French citizen in 1939, was a concentration camp survivor, and a member of the French Resistance — wrote, it’s Time for Outrage! (2010).
“Ninety-three years old. The last leg of my journey. The end is in sight. I am lucky to be able to seize the time I have left to reflect on my lifelong commitment to politics: the Resistance and the program designed sixty-six years ago by the National Council of the Resistance.” — Stéphane Hessel
If you enjoyed this post, you might also like my eBook about what a secular humanist learned from his paternal German Lutheran and Methodist ancestors’ experience in Amerika:
