{"id":683,"date":"2024-07-03T19:09:14","date_gmt":"2024-07-03T16:09:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/artemiada\/eng\/?p=683"},"modified":"2025-11-20T19:44:55","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T16:44:55","slug":"karl-jaspers-modes-of-existence-all-life-is-a-borderline-situation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/artemiada\/eng\/2024\/07\/03\/karl-jaspers-modes-of-existence-all-life-is-a-borderline-situation\/","title":{"rendered":"Karl Jaspers. Modes of existence. All life is a borderline situation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Karl Jaspers was born in 1883. In 1901, after graduating from a classical gymnasium, he entered the Heidelberg University Faculty of Law, but after a year and a half he transferred to the medical faculty. His interest in medicine was due, among other reasons, to a severe congenital bronchial disease that caused attacks of heart failure. Such a disease usually kills no later than 30 years of age, but a conscious attitude to this \u201cborderline situation\u201d allowed Jaspers to live a full life and, in a sense, \u201cdefeat death\u201d. In 1908, Jaspers graduated from the university, receiving the profession of a psychiatrist, in 1909 he became a doctor of medicine and went to work in the psychiatric and neurological clinic at Heidelberg University. In 1910, he married Gertrud Mayer, who became his friend and companion for life. She was seriously interested in philosophy, as was her brother, Ernst Mayer, a close friend of Jaspers. Largely under their influence, Jaspers moved from medicine as a natural science discipline first to psychology, and then to philosophy. The stages of this path are marked by his major works: 1913 – “General Psychopathology”; 1919 – “Psychology of Worldviews”. From this time on, his friendship with Heidegger begins.<\/span><\/p>\n

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In the Psychology of Worldviews, Jaspers already declared himself an independent philosopher and in 1922 became a professor of philosophy in Heidelberg. In 1931, Jaspers’s work The Spiritual Situation of the Time was published, in which he conducted a profound analysis of the spiritual crisis in Germany and the tendencies that led to the emergence and strengthening of fascism, and in 1932 – a three-volume work Philosophy, in which the philosopher attempted to structure the ideas and reflections that constituted the content of his existential philosophizing. With the rise to power of Nazism, Jaspers’s position became very dangerous due to the Jewish nationality of his wife. In 1937, he was suspended from teaching, in 1943 he was forbidden to publish in Germany (in fact, he did not have such an opportunity since 1938). Only after the war, Jaspers re-emerges on the scene and becomes one of the spiritual leaders of Germany, helping it to recover from the Nazi intoxication and return to humanistic traditions \u2013 on a new, existential level. Being a medical psychiatrist by education, Jaspers entered philosophy at a time of crisis in all respects as a good doctor: he formulated a diagnosis, looked for means of therapy \u2013 not only in the field of philosophical ideas, but also in the political and social sphere. Many criticized him for his \u201cpolitical engagement\u201d, allegedly unworthy of a philosopher. In 1945, Jaspers became one of the founders of the journal \u201cTransfiguration\u201d (die Wandlung) as a platform for the spiritual and moral renewal of Germany. His works \u201cOn Truth\u201d (1947), \u201cPhilosophical Faith\u201d (1948), \u201cThe Origins of History and Its Goal\u201d (1949), \u201cReason and Counter-Reason in Our Era\u201d (1950) were published. Jaspers died in 1969.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the beginning of his philosophical development, Jaspers lacked \u201cinclusion\u201d in the philosophical tradition. As early as 1931, Jaspers\u2019 historical and philosophical judgments were rather general and superficial. Jaspers began to deeply study the history of philosophy in the following years, when he was already an established philosopher, recognized as one of the founders of existentialism. In 1936\u20131937, his first historical and philosophical works, \u201cNietzsche. Approaches to Understanding His Philosophizing\u201d and \u201cDescartes and Philosophy,\u201d were published. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Jaspers devoted much attention to the philosophical understanding of the past of philosophy: his notes, published in 1982 under the title \u201cWorld History of Philosophy. Introduction,\u201d date back to 1950\u20131951. In 1957, the first volume of his large-scale work \u201cGreat Philosophers\u201d was published. Understanding the personalities of great philosophers, their \u201cexistential situation\u201d is one of the main directions of Jaspers\u2019 historical-philosophical method.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jaspers finds some motives for the existential type of philosophizing in Augustine, in the late Schelling and other philosophers; in a broad sense, such thinking may be characteristic not only of professional philosophers, but also of writers, artists, and even children. But according to Jaspers, only in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche does this type of thinking become dominant. They are the \u201cgreat awakeners,\u201d since they were the first to sense what it was like to stand before Nothingness, the emptiness of meaninglessness, after the world had been \u201cde-godized.\u201d The crisis of meaning they experienced for the first time became acutely felt in Europe in the following, twentieth, century, especially in the period between the two world wars. This crisis gave birth to the philosophy of existentialism.<\/span><\/p>\n

The conditions and causes of this crisis, according to Jaspers, were:<\/span><\/p>\n

1) \u201cde-divinization\u201d of the world; divine love and the posthumous fate of the soul could no longer fill the brief earthly existence of man on earth with meaning; faith as a direct connection between existence and transcendence was lost;<\/span><\/p>\n

2) acceleration of life: events pile up at such a speed that comprehension cannot keep up with them and, finally, stops striving to catch up with the meaning of the whole; the picture of a meaningful whole disintegrates into many fragments, each of which has only a problematic meaning;<\/span><\/p>\n

3) a break in the connection of times: torn from the roots in family, clan, and folk tradition, a person lives only for today – \u201ceverything a person does can be done quickly\u201d; he does not express the revival of the memory of the past and the greatness of future tasks.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the conditions of the world and human life becoming meaningless, existential philosophy has only one goal \u2013 to fill human life with new meaning. The method used by Jaspers for this is \u201cclarification of existence\u201d. This is not just a more conscious reflection of the life situation: awareness of the situation is in itself an effort aimed at mastering the situation, at liberating human existence.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although thinking is by its nature systematic, Jaspers admits, existential philosophizing cannot take the form of a complete system without losing the most essential thing – life. This philosophizing resists any absolutization, avoids formulas and even fixed definitions. Repeating Cusanus, Jaspers declares that his goal is “through the greatest knowledge to achieve genuine ignorance” (6, 48). In terms of modality, this philosophizing is not a statement or questioning, but a call, a call to conscious being with oneself.<\/span><\/p>\n

Modes of existence.<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0Classifying the types of philosophical thinking, Jaspers identifies four possible ways for a person to imagine his existence. These are both types of philosophizing and modes of existence, the main ways of a person’s existence in the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

1.<\/span>
\nExistence.<\/span><\/em>\u00a0Thinking \u201cdirected toward the world\u201d comprehends everything as a set of facts that can be ascertained and verified by experience. For such thinking, facts have immediate reality both in the external objective and in the internal subjective world. From this point of view, man is thought of as \u201cexistence\u201d \u2013 first of all, as a living body included in the flow of biological interrelations, and also as possessing consciousness and emotions \u2013 but only insofar as their manifestations and consequences can be objectively recorded. This description by Jaspers has in mind above all positivism and the natural sciences, which are positivistic in spirit, including psychology and medicine. Although this type of thinking is most alien to Jaspers, existential philosophy, in his understanding, must clarify both this way of representing the world and man, and the corresponding mode of existence.<\/span><\/p>\n

2.<\/span>
\nConsciousness in general.<\/span><\/em>\u00a0This type of thinking is most clearly expressed in neo-Kantianism: the entire world appears here as an object for the cognizing subject, comprehended in a generally significant way in rational categories. Man as the subject of such cognition is a kind of \u201cconsciousness in general,\u201d in which all individual differences merge in the abstract concept of \u201csubject.\u201d As subjects, all people are in the same relationship to laws \u2014 to the laws of logic, to the laws of nature, and to legal norms. Scientific and legal consciousness have their common root in this mode of existence.<\/span><\/p>\n

3. Spirit.<\/span><\/em>\u00a0If in the previous mode the intellect dominated, then here the mind comes to the fore. The world is comprehended here, in the spirit of Hegel, as an \u201cobjective idea\u201d moving towards the \u201csubjective idea\u201d. The idea, according to Kant, is an image of integrity unattainable for the intellect, therefore, as a rational spirit, man is aware of himself and exists as a moment in the life of the whole \u2013 people, nation, humanity. Unity in the spirit can never be fully realized at one or another moment in time \u2013 it is an ever-developing unity of the heterogeneous, and the space of reason is the space of spiritual struggle, in which man, finding himself, defends his right to be himself. But the more a man becomes himself, the more the struggle is resolved into a dialectical unity of minds and wills.<\/span><\/p>\n

4. Existence<\/span><\/em>\u00a0is man, comprehended in his \u201cself-being\u201d \u2013 Selbstsein, \u201cbeing oneself\u201d. This being is \u201cabsolutely historical\u201d, i.e., completely unique, not universally significant, but at the same time unconditional. At the level of existence, man is opposed only by transcendence \u2013 essentially, this is a philosophical term for God.<\/span><\/p>\n

Existence and average existence.<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0Like Heidegger, Jaspers contrasts the authentic and inauthentic modes of human existence in the world and associates the second of them primarily with the mass, average mode of existence. Jaspers acknowledges that in modern conditions, an absolutely necessary condition for human life on earth is mass technical production and the corresponding organization of life. But the apparatus of mass production, as it develops, increasingly destroys existence and the conditions in which it is possible. Even more than the elemental forces of nature, existence poses a mortal threat to the apparatus, destroying the average mode of existence imposed by it. Therefore, the apparatus strives, if possible, to completely destroy existence. Man must enter into a struggle for his existence, not allowing the apparatus to subjugate the spheres of thought, family, historical memory.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nature and history.<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0Jaspers distinguishes between the natural and the historical in human life. The \u201cnatural\u201d includes not only the biological aspect of life, but also the life of \u201ccultural organisms\u201d which, according to Spengler\u2019s theory popular at the time, live, grow and die like biological objects. Natural existence unfolds in time, and the succession of life forms is realized as inheritance.<\/span><\/p>\n

The historical dimension of human existence is the semantic dimension. History differs from all natural processes in time in the same way that meaning differs from a sign. Continuity in history is realized as a tradition. “At the beginning of history, a certain capital of human existence, as it were, accumulated in the prehistoric era, is discovered, which is not a biologically inherited, but a historical substance that can be increased or wasted” (6, 245). This “capital of meaning” is transmitted as the quintessence of life and thought of generations – only by assimilating it through his “roots” does a person become a person. A person torn from his roots, “atomized”, “dispersed”, loses access to this capital, but without it, what is truly human in his life is called into question.<\/span><\/p>\n

The historical dimension of human life, or the life of meaning, has its \u201csource\u201d in a situation. A situation is, so to speak, a \u201cunit of meaning\u201d<\/span>
\n[50]<\/span><\/sup><\/a>\u00a0. A situation is always individual and always integral; its semantic content is determined by its boundaries. The boundaries of a situation are the boundaries of the possibilities open in it.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to Jaspers, borderline situations<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0are of key importance for existence. The boundaries of a borderline situation coincide with the boundaries of existence, which means that consciousness cannot rise above such a situation in the position of a detached observer, since \u201cwe see nothing beyond the boundaries of this situation\u201d (13: 469). Borderline situations are final and cannot be changed by man. \u201cThey are like a wall that we run into and break against. We cannot change them, only clearly perceive them\u201d (13: 469). \u201cTherefore, a person who finds himself in a borderline situation cannot react to it according to any plan or rule; instead, if he enters the situation consciously, he becomes himself in a possible existence. To experience a borderline situation and to exist are one and the same thing\u201d (13: 469). In such a situation, \u201cbeing breaks through within me.\u201d \u201cDespite the fact that in a borderline situation the question of being is completely alien to man, it can become accessible to him through a leap\u201d (13: 469).<\/span><\/p>\n

The boundary of existence as the life of the I is death<\/span>
\n[51]<\/span><\/sup><\/a>\u00a0, therefore the general form of all borderline situations is an encounter with death, the experience of death.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a broad sense, all life is a borderline situation, but man does everything possible to suppress the awareness of this, moving from oblivion of death to horror of it and vice versa. The borderline situation is realized only where there is an existential experience of death. In such an experience, death is not experienced as an objective event in time, concerning another or even myself. \u201cDeath as an objective fact of existence is not yet a borderline situation\u201d (13: 483).<\/span><\/p>\n

Death in the broad sense is an existential experience of the border: the pain of renouncing possibilities that were an essential part of myself. Death understood in this way is present in border situations of guilt, suffering, serious illness, struggle. Death in the literal sense of the word is one of the types of border situation: the experience of the ultimate border of existence. Only at this border can I enter into communication with what is beyond existence \u2013 with transcendence, Being; only here does true existence begin. \u201cIf I had an unceasing existence, I would not exist\u201d (13: 484).<\/span><\/p>\n

Death in a borderline situation is never \u201cdeath in general\u201d: it is either the death of a neighbor who was the only one for me, my beloved, or my own death.<\/span><\/p>\n

If a person experiences death as an \u201cexistential shock,\u201d if he consciously renounces the possibilities taken away by death and dies in this sense, then a breakthrough occurs in his existence. \u201cThis leap is like the birth of a new life; death enters into a new life\u201d (13: 485). In this breakthrough, \u201cexistence\u2026 finds refuge in transcendence: what death took away is only an appearance, but not being itself\u201d (13: 485). After this experience, all events of life are evaluated \u201cfrom the point of view of death\u201d: \u201cwhat remains essential in the face of death enters into existence; what proves untenable remains no more than existence\u201d (13: 485).<\/span><\/p>\n

In general, we can say that existence is life in the face of death. But this does not mean fearing death or preparing for it in advance. The pain caused by death becomes a force that enlightens existence and thus a source of new life.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another key concept of Jaspers’ existentialism is communication. Situation, communication and faith are three “variables” in the formula of existence. The goal of existential philosophizing is to bring a person to a state of unlimited communication. “Infinity” of communication does not mean either the duration or the information saturation of communication. Even one glance can express unlimited communication. This is communication between people who have absolutely nothing to hide from each other, because each of them is themselves and it is in communication with the other that they become themselves. Unlimited communication is possible only on the basis of faith.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jaspers’ philosophical faith<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0is a condition for unlimited communication and, therefore, a condition for finding the authentic self-being of existence. Philosophical faith cannot be expressed in any dogmas or in any generally valid way. The truth of faith is not what I know and can tell others, but what I live by, what I am. “The truth by which I live exists only because I become identical with it; in its appearance it is historical, in its objective statement it is not generally valid, but unconditional” (6: 422). Thinkers united in philosophical faith must necessarily give it different expressions, in accordance with their historical situation. Jaspers expresses the content of philosophical faith in three theses (6: 434): God is (and He is transcendence); there is an unconditional demand; the world has a vanishing presence between God and existence (the world is the language of God’s love).<\/span><\/p>\n

Jaspers’ faith has its “saints” – these are philosophers who confirmed the philosophical faith by their martyrdom: Socrates, Boethius, Bruno. Jaspers does not have prayer in the usual sense as a verbal appeal to God or saints, but there is a certain analogue of prayer in the act of transcendence, when existence, turning outside itself, enters into direct communication with transcendence. “The objective must remain in motion and, as it were, evaporate, so that in the disappearing objectivity, precisely through disappearance, the filled consciousness of being becomes clear” (6: 429). With the “evaporation” of rationally fixed objectivity, existence acquires the ability to soar freely in the space of nothingness, which, instead of a terrifying abyss, becomes for it a space of free flight.<\/span><\/p>\n

The fundamental contradiction in Jaspers\u2019s philosophizing\u2014a contradiction that is recognized and accepted as a dialectical source of the movement of thought\u2014is the contradiction between the individual and the universal. On the side of the universal, firstly, is the demand for \u201climitless communication,\u201d which, for example, excludes the use of religious symbols that are not universally significant, unacceptable to every person, including those who do not believe in Revelation and miracles. If it were not for the fact that there are many religions, Jaspers would certainly have relied more definitely on Christianity, but he has to look for a \u201ccommon denominator\u201d of all religions that could be the basis for universal understanding in \u201climitless communication.\u201d Secondly, there is the demand for rationality. Reason is the demand for limitless communication and the movement toward it. \u201cAny sense of truth<\/span>
\n[52]<\/span><\/sup><\/a>\u00a0is revealed only in its pure form when it is purified in the movement of reason\u201d (6: 440). Accordingly, Jaspers denies in faith and its content everything irrational, inaccessible to reason and therefore uncommunicable, such as, for example, the experience of Christian mystics.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the other hand, the human situation is always individual, and in a borderline situation this loneliness is exposed especially acutely. But individuality never remains a self-sufficient, self-contained sphere, since existence is initially historical, in all four of its modes. This means that it produces itself from the material received from tradition, and tradition is always a message, a communication. Therefore, the question of what is primary, the individual or the universal, is meaningless.<\/span><\/p>\n

The individual confronts the universal in an eternal struggle – and this is not only a dialectical struggle on the plane of ideas, but also a spiritual struggle of the emerging spirit, and even a social and political struggle of man against the mass order of existence that destroys individuality. However, this struggle is ultimately resolved into a harmonious unity, since in no sphere, including the social, can the individual exist without the universal, and vice versa.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Literature<\/span><\/strong><\/h5>\n

1.<\/span>
\nJaspers K.<\/span><\/em>\u00a0Collected works on psychopathology: In 2 volumes. Moscow; St. Petersburg, 1996.<\/span><\/p>\n

2. Jaspers K.<\/span><\/em>\u00a0General psychopathology. M, 1997.<\/span><\/p>\n

3. Martin Heidegger \/ Karl Jaspers: Correspondence 1920-1963. M., 2001.<\/span>
\nA<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

4. Jaspers K.<\/span><\/em>\u00a0Strindberg and Van Gogh. St. Petersburg, 1999.<\/span><\/p>\n

5.<\/span>
\nJaspers K.<\/span><\/em>\u00a0Nietzsche: Introduction to Understanding His Philosophizing. St. Petersburg, 2004.<\/span><\/p>\n

6. Jaspers K.<\/span><\/em>\u00a0The meaning and purpose of history. M., 1994.<\/span><\/p>\n

7. Jaspers K.<\/span><\/em>\u00a0Introduction to Philosophy. Minsk, 2000.<\/span><\/p>\n

8. Jaspers K.<\/span><\/em>\u00a0The Question of Guilt: On Germany\u2019s Political Responsibility. Moscow, 1999.<\/span><\/p>\n

9. Jaspers K.<\/span><\/em>\u00a0World History of Philosophy. Introduction. St. Petersburg, 2000.<\/span><\/p>\n

10. Jaspers K.<\/span><\/em>\u00a0Philosophical autobiography. M., 1995.<\/span><\/p>\n

11. Bolnov O.<\/span><\/em>\u00a0Philosophy of existentialism. St. Petersburg, 1999.<\/span><\/p>\n

12. Gaidenko P. P.<\/span><\/em>\u00a0Breakthrough to the Transcendental. Moscow, 1997.<\/span><\/p>\n

13. Jaspers K.<\/span><\/em>\u00a0Philosophy. Berlin \u2014 Gott. \u2014 Heidelberg, 1948.<\/span><\/p>\n

14. Jaspers K.<\/span><\/em>\u00a0Chiffren der Transzendenz. Munich, 1970.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Karl Jaspers was born in 1883. In 1901, after graduating from a classical gymnasium, he entered the Heidelberg University Faculty of Law, but after a year and a half he transferred to the medical faculty. His interest in medicine was due, among other reasons, to a severe congenital bronchial disease that caused attacks of heart failure. Such a disease usually kills no later than 30 years of age, but a conscious attitude to this \u201cborderline situation\u201d allowed…<\/p>\n

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