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Karl Jaspers: Philosophy As Faith

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The philosophers whom I usually consider important hardly show up in this book, KARL JASPERS: PHILOSOPHY AS FAITH by Leonard Ehrlich, but Kant is a major topic, and gets credit for picturing philosophy as an activity that adopts individual views about what is essential while merely thinking. Jaspers died in 1969. Leonard Ehrlich produced his own translations for KARL JASPERS: BASIC PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS, now available from the Humanities Paperback Library (1986, 1994), with an emphasis on many of the same topics. Both books have Bibliographies, but only KARL JASPERS: PHILOSOPHY AS FAITH has an index. Nietzsche is not a major topic in this book, appearing mainly in conjunction with other great philosophers. Only early in the book is there recognition that `Nietzsche's radical movements of doubt and extreme formulations, such as the well-known dictum, "nothing is true, all is permitted," are, accordingly, designed to force us to find the fulfillment of truth "in our own historicly present existence." ' (p. 28). A note on page 241 explains that `historically' is not being used because Ehrlich associates that term with history as "the course, the account and the interpretation of events; it corresponds to the German `Geschichte'. `Historic', on the other hand, is correlative with the noun `historicity', in German `Geschichlichkeit', meaning the circumstance that realities transcending the temporality of events--such as ideas, purposes, selfhood--become actual only in time and by virtue of deliberate human activity." (n. 50).

By the end of the book, Ehrlich has sorted out the distinctions which Jaspers makes about the nature of philosophers in a manner that only philosophers are likely to understand.

Philosophizing that proceeds with such regard is, for Jaspers, communicative rather than doctrinal, periechontologic rather than ontologic. It is thinking understood as faith in search of understanding rather than a disclosure of, or derivation from, absolute transsubjective insights, a way of thinking that is prepared to recover from the objectifications of formulated assurances. It is also a thinking that remains steadfastly itinerant lest the historicity of its vision usurp the place of truth beyond the finitude of its own vision. These are features of the kind of thinking for which the `seminal founders of philosophizing' are historically most significant:

In reading the works of Plato, Augustine, Kant, we experience the productivity of thinking itself, of the truth of Kant's remark that one cannot learn philosophy but only how to philosophize. . . . In them nothing is finished, and yet everything is at all times finished in the possible presence of the essential. . . . There was something inexhaustible in their manner of thinking. They open up worlds whose extent they themselves seem unable to fathom. They are as wide as reality and as the soul of man. . . . (pp. 220-221).

There are only nine chapters in KARL JASPERS: PHILOSOPHY AS FAITH. Faith is the main topic in the first four chapters, in which it is considered in comparison with knowledge, doubt, ignorance, unfaith, superstition, mysticism, intuition, mediation, mystery, and truth. Martin Buber and Karl Barth interact with Jaspers over philosophy's emphasis on what Barth mockingly calls "The somewhat arid commandment of tolerance," (p. 73). Jaspers has a faith that specifies, "The voice of conscience is not God's voice. It is precisely when conscience speaks that the deity is silent, that it remains hidden, here as elsewhere. . . . An identification of the voice of conscience with God's voice confuses me about myself and the deity if it puts me into the position of being addressed by God, confronted by him as by a `thou'. The self-communication of conscience is put into objective form, then, as a supposedly direct communication with God." (p. 97).

Chapter Five, Authority and Tradition, including `The Tension Between Freedom and Authority,' seeks `The Transcendent Ground of Authority,' which is, "like the personal directedness and realization of truth, historic." (p. 106). Chapter Six, The Idea of Philosophical Faith, seeks a basis in the source of fundamental knowledge. What it has to accept is "the lack of general acceptability of any fundamental knowledge." (p. 120). Catholicity is the term used for a system in which "Spiritual authority of this kind bases itself on a total knowledge, at least in principle, under which all that may come to man's awareness is subsumed according to its proper category. Moral authority of this kind reserves for itself the right to be the ultimate arbiter in questions of human action. Political authority of this kind potentially or actually seeks mastery over human affairs in its broad areas and in detail; catholicity in the form of political authority is, potentially and ultimately, totalitarianism. In the light of the possibility and actuality of political catholicity, intellectual and spiritual catholicity may seem harmless and trivial. Not so for Jaspers." (p. 129).

Chapter Seven, The Philosophy of Ciphers, reflects Ehrlich's interest in the topics covered by Jaspers in KARL JASPERS: BASIC PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS, Part Four, II. Metaphysical Truth: The Reading of Ciphers. `In this connection Jaspers speaks of "three languages" in which ciphers are read. Myth is the form of the "second language," where the "language of transcendence" "reverberates" in the form of "communicable" "images and notions." Here actuality itself can be mythical, where objects and events are pervaded by meaning beyond their apparent factuality.' (p. 147). `Different from these possibilities is the "third" or "speculative" language.' (p. 147). `Experience functions as the first language.' (p. 148).

Chapter Eight, The Problem of Evil, includes a discussion of the Biblical book of Job with ciphers of evil, endurance, and "Job is for Jaspers the cipher for the circumstance that man's assurance of the ultimate ground of his being in freedom is a matter of reading ciphers. . . . Moreover ciphers are actual as ciphers only historicly, i.e., as the testimony of assurance on the part of the self who in his interpretation becomes himself . . . " (p. 204).