Jaspers, Karl

Jaspers, Karl (1883-1969), German philosopher, one of the originators of existentialism, whose work, which comprised 30 books, influenced modern theology and psychiatry as well as philosophy. Born in Oldenburg on February 23, 1883, Jaspers studied law and medicine and received his MD from the University of Heidelberg. He taught psychiatry at Heidelberg University from 1916, turned to philosophy, and held the chair of philosophy until 1937. During most of the time that the Nazi Party was in power, Jaspers, whose wife was Jewish and refused to make any concessions to the Nazi authorities, was prevented from teaching. In 1948 he accepted a professorship in philosophy at Basel, Switzerland.

In his first major work, General Psychopathology (1913; trans. 1963), Jaspers criticized the scientific pretensions of psychotherapy as misleading and deterministic. He then published Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Psychology of World Views, 1919), a work particularly important for cataloguing various possible attitudes towards life.

Jaspers’s major work in three volumes, Philosophy (1932), gives his view of the history of philosophy and introduces his major themes. He identified philosophy with philosophical thinking itself, not with any particular set of conclusions. His philosophy is an effort to explore and describe the margins and limits of experience. He used the term das Umgreifende (“the encompassing”) to refer to the ultimate limits of being, the indefinite horizon in which all subjective and objective experience is possible, but which can never be rationally apprehended. Another important work is Existenzphilosophie (1938; Philosophy and Existence, 1971). The term Existenz designates the indefinable experience of freedom and possibility that constitutes the authentic being of individuals who become aware of the encompassing by confronting such limit-situations as chance, suffering, conflict, guilt, and death. Jaspers also wrote extensively on the threat to human freedom posed by modern science and modern economic and political institutions. Among his political works is The Question of German Guilt (1946; trans. 1947).

Jaspers died in Basel on February 20, 1969. His correspondence (1926-1969), with the German-born American philosopher Hannah Arendt was published in English in 1992.