Kirkbright's Life of Jaspers, part 2

Kirkbright observes that Jaspers’ letters home to his parents when he was an undergraduate ‘recorded how his mother was the ideal partner with whom from the start he rehearsed a process to which he was later to give the name “existential communication”’. The first part of the second volume of Jaspers’ Philosophy, titled Existential Elucidation, addresses such intersubjectivity in terms of Jaspers’ idea of ‘loving contest’. In his early essay ‘Solitude’, he had already formulated this idea as ‘the contest in the state of love’ (‘der Kampf in der Liebe’), so as to evoke (in Kirkbright’s words) ‘a new possibility of overcoming potential inequality between individuals through the intensity of communication’. Likewise, Jaspers’ work on the late lectures of Schelling articulated his interest in ‘communication as something more intense than dialogue, as something moving beyond the Platonic dialogue’; something which can foreground the disharmony attendant upon recognition of the relativity of truth. ‘No one who is in definitive possession of the truth, can speak properly with someone else – he breaks off authentic communication in favour of the belief that he holds’ [The Perennial Scope of Philosophy].

In statements which are chillingly prophetic of today’s stultifyingly careerist, ‘best practice’, academic bureaucracies, Jaspers’ 1946 lecture ‘About the Living Spirit of the University’ reflected on the sort of false, conciliatory communication which characterized Nazi times: a communication ultimately dedicated to self-preservation in an unreflective climate of nihilist drift. This is the communicative false harmony imposed by an authoritarian society.

‘Instead of an intellectual community in loving contest, what emerged, on the one hand, was a wariness of the common ground of social camaraderie, and on the other hand, endless rounds of discussion consisting of chance opinions, vain self-promotion and sophistry. Everywhere, a secret code of behaviour was valid: everything is still undecided; things are not to be taken so seriously. Conciliatory behaviour was the condition for being regarded as a decent human being.’

Kirkbright’s biography demonstrates how the opposition between a ‘secret code of behaviour’ and open, contestatory communication, was implicit already in Jaspers’ early Husserlian contributions to thinking about psychiatric therapy. As Kirkbright notes, Jaspers’ understanding of the task of therapy was centred on the patient-doctor relationship, and a concomitant awareness of the limitations of formal professional or disciplinary codes. She explains how Jaspers’ 1912 essay on ‘The Phenomenological Approach in Psychopathology’, a dry run for his classic textbook General Psychopathology, understood phenomenology both as ‘a descriptive practice by means of which a psychiatrist could assess patients’ communications, as derived through interviews or scrutiny of their biographies’, and as ‘a process of understanding the patient-doctor relationship’. ‘To investigate that perception of the confidential context of clinical practice was to clarify the repertoire of tools available for connecting a psychiatrist’s perception of the causes of patients’ afflictions and the patients’ need for understanding and an open exchange of information.’

Jaspers’ early involvement with Husserl’s thinking, as Kirkbright suggests, thus generated a conception of a hermeneutic, reflexive psychiatric method, which can enable what we could call reciprocal therapy. Jaspers, Kirkbright writes, focussed in on the limits of diagnostic technique: ‘the psychiatrist’s problem was essentially his craving for knowledge in his claim to understand another’s words’. Authoritarian definition of diagnostic truths is to be replaced by an opening to clinical communicative relativity: approaching both clinicians’ and patients’ statements on the same level. This is something that was still being called for by service users in a recent meeting at Hammersmith & Fulham Mind, almost a hundred years after Jaspers’ essay; that they be worked with , and not be regarded simply as the passive recipients of medication. ‘What Jaspers extracted from Husserl’s notion of “intentionality” was a principle that words and meanings are all, on some level, subjected to transposition by individual preference.’ This means that – once a divergence between the psychiatrist’s and the patient’s intentions is recognized – phenomenology can be taken as a reflexive, therapeutic hermeneutic. ‘The doctor was to be trained to apply interpretational methods to his cases, on condition that he might turn the tables upon himself. Hence, the psychiatrist is not only the subject in control of the process, but a legitimate target for self-reflection.’ As Jaspers puts it in the General Psychopathology:

‘The most vital part of the psychopathologist’s knowledge is drawn from his contact with people. What he gains from this depends upon the particular way he gives himself and as therapist partakes in events, whether he illuminates himself as well as his patients. The process is not only one of simple observation, like reading off a measurement, but the exercise of a self-involving vision in which the psyche itself is glimpsed.’

Kirkbright documents how Gertrud’s own experiences of caring for the mentally ill ‘marked out her capacity to understand Jaspers’ distinction between those used to suffering and those apparently indifferent’. Her sister Ida had suffered a nervous breakdown around 1904, and had been institutionalized in a sanatorium at Königstein im Taunus, where Gertrud nursed her along with other patients. Whilst working as an unpaid assistant at the Heidelberg Clinic of Psychiatry, Jaspers himself, as Kirkbright notes, bitterly regretted his inability to develop his career as a psychiatrist, owing to his physical incapacity to complete the rounds of patients. ‘In silent frustration, Jaspers’ imagination reinforced his impression that he was required to work twice as hard just to be accepted by his peers and his immediate superiors.’ But he was also attending Lask’s lectures, and already engaging with the ideas of Kant, Husserl and Weber. This meant that, as Kirkbright points out, ‘he was already working within the terms of philosophy, even during his training at the clinic.’ Indeed – Kirkbright maintains – it was precisely Kant who ‘introduced the element of humanity into Jaspers’ work as a scientist and thinker’. Kirkbright’s book stresses how Jaspers’ contact with Heidelberg’s philosophers taught him that ‘the clearest treatment of his study of the doctor-patient bond was not to be gleaned from psychology’. Instead, ‘his main aim was to preserve a calm atmosphere that might equally have derived from his study of Kant’s philosophy’. The General Psychopathology holds Kant to be the ‘true point of orientation’ (‘wahrer Orientierungspunkt’) for empirical psychiatric research.

Kirkbright’s life often refers to the importance, for Jaspers, of the attainment of a state of balance or harmony; or of ‘the calmness and clarity’, as he put it in a 1919 letter to his father, ‘which has been acquired in long, inner battles that have little to do with knowledge or reasoning but that traditionally is and deserves to be called wisdom’. Jaspers’ schooldays included a time of ‘almost abject misery’ precisely because then he was involved in ‘perpetual conflict’. The timelessness of meditative calm, by contrast, is associated in Jaspers’ thought with a communicative intensity moving towards intersubjective harmony. ‘One of the fascinations of Jaspers’ definition of communication remains […] an intimation of striving for harmony between two individuals so that the harmony achieves a timeless, eternal aspect.’ The Kantian and Platonist qualities of Jaspers’ thinking, intimated here, could be one reason why Arendt was concerned that he was – in Kirkbright’s words – ‘uninterested in politics because of his generation’s education in the humanities’. Yet, as this biography fully demonstrates, in fact Jaspers was deeply interested in politics: Kirkbright refers in particular to the ‘acute awareness of political affairs that is typical of his personal correspondence’. This is the philosopher who could remind his readers, prefacing the second edition of his Nietzsche in 1946, that ‘in the years 1934 and 1935, I […] intended to marshal against the National Socialists the world of thought of the man whom they had proclaimed as their own philosopher’.

Kirkbright’s book valuably shows how Jaspers’ understanding of the political context of Nazism attracted him to the sort of Eastern cultures which evolved ideas of meditative calm similar to his own. Jaspers’ relation to Eastern thought is a subject not covered by Thornhill’s study. Here it is shown to be rooted in his disgust at the barbarity of Western civilization. ‘Averting his gaze from the European continent, he ceased to believe that Germany automatically deserved a place amongst Europe’s civilized nations.’ Some weeks before Kristallnacht, Jaspers wrote to his sister, ‘For some time, I have felt such a strong need for humanity from faraway, if the source shares our roots and is indeed related to us – and I always have the globe in front of me on my desk.’ In the end Gertrud escaped deportation to the camps only by a personal intervention, at the last minute. Confined with her in internal exile at home in Heidelberg, but assisted by the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, Jaspers started researching Indian and Chinese philosophies.

Kirkbright wonders whether his ‘perception of global landscapes was born only of silent yearning to be anywhere except in Hitler’s Germany’, recalling the later fascination of postwar, working-class German youth (and Krautrock musicians) with science fiction and outer space: anywhere ‘out there’. In releases such as Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’ and ‘Trans Europe Express’ electronic musicians dialecticized contemporary techno-futurism and European cultural tradition (even Hitler’s motorways); on Kraftwerk’s ‘Europe Endless’, the continent itself becomes out there, infinite. Similarly Jaspers, in seeking deeper and more open communication amongst world religions, was seeking to re-ground modern European cultural identity in the transnational spiritualities of what he called the ‘axial age’, and create a new present out of the resources of the past. Speaking at the Geneva Rencontres, Jaspers argued that, ‘If we wish to live on a European basis, then we must allow a deeper origin to take effect.’ Located in the axial age c.800-200BC, this deeper origin spanned (as Jaspers wrote in The European Spirit), ‘the time from Homer to Archimedes, the time of the great Old Testament prophets and of Zarathustra, the time of the Upanishads and of Buddha, the time from the Songs of Shiking to Laotse, Confucius, and Tschuang-tse’.

Jaspers’ lifelong project of the cultivation of meditative calm and intersubjective harmony thus emerges from this biography as being far from otherworldly. Particularly in his later thinking, as Kirkbright notes, Jaspers theorized the inherent interdependence of philosophy, science and technology, and argued that ‘the task was to incorporate modern technological advancements into a supranational framework of civilized existence’. Many would say that the electronic rhythms released by musicians like Kraftwerk and Pantha du Prince have enabled us to hear intimations of what this task might sound like. Kirkbright reminds us that it is now our global challenge to continue to bring such harmonies into actuality.

‘After experiencing totalitarianism in Germany, Jaspers’ emphasis on the ancient sources of mankind’s civilization was an attempt to discover in the dim and nebulous past an ever deeper revival of the original openness that he applauded during the “axial” period when tolerance seemed to be captured in a kind of Golden Age, with the parallel awakening of the world’s religions. To promote […] an increasing sense of common links between Europe, China and India was no longer an exclusively European task.’

Next post: disability think-piece

Suzanne Kirkbright's Life of Karl Jaspers

In his ‘World History of Philosophy’, Karl Jaspers underlined the potential of genuine thinking to create a dialogue with the transcendental capacities of the singular human who thinks. ‘If we hear true philosophy, we enter into communication with human Existenz of the philosophical personality. Philosophy is, in essence, always personal in form. The thoughts that are released and freely floating only gain blood and energy if an Existenz accepts them and, in that way, they again become a motive of an entire philosophy’. If communicated  to another striving human, Jaspers intimates, true philosophy can make a philosopher of the one who receives. This sort of fluidly reciprocal or intersubjective experience of philosophy of course itself demands a particularly sensitive biographical account of the genuine philosopher, Karl Jaspers, who theorized it. In this pair of posts I want to point to ways in which I think Kirkbright succeeds in the biographical task of relaying the intersubjectivity of philosophical activity, in her Karl Jaspers, A Biography: Navigations in Truth.

Kirkbright does not set out to offer an intensive exposition of Jaspers’ philosophical ideas, and I would recommend Chris Thornhill’s Karl Jaspers: Politics and Metaphysics in this connection. She in fact explicitly draws attention to the ambiguities inherent in any biographically based interpretation of a philosopher’s work, arguing in her introduction that ‘there is no single or prescribed approach to the stated aim of illuminating aspects of Jaspers’ published works of philosophy within the context of his life’. Yet she does sometimes consider the aesthetic quality of Jaspers’ presentation of his concepts, and this treatment of the shifting aesthetics of his philosophical writing can itself help us to understand the shifts in his thinking. For example, Kirkbright notes Ernst Mayer’s interesting assessment, in 1953, of the aesthetic terms of a general progress on Jaspers’ part from existential to religious concerns. Aesthetically, Jaspers moved from a practice of direct illumination, or a sort of visionary definition of everyday life, to the deployment of cipher-language, of symbols of transcendence. ‘In the later period of his work, his task had been one of creating a language of ciphers through intuitivism, whereas his earlier illumination of Existenz illustrated what Mayer called a way to explore reality in ever closer approximation of truth.’ Kirkbright directs us to Jaspers’ use of metaphors, which can ‘allude to possibilities of a cipher language’: these are keywords, such as Erhellung (Schelling’s ‘illumination’) and Lichtpunkte (Hegel’s ‘light points’), which become for Jaspers signs (signa) of Existenz, ‘replete with further meaning leading on from the direction of his thought trails’.

Jaspers’ poetic language of light – of light in space – introduces an architectural quality to his bringing of the reader to Existenz (Hannah Arendt said that his ‘deepest aim is to “create space” in which the humanitas of man can appear pure and luminous’).  The airy, ‘pictorial or spatial’ dimension of Jaspers’ thinking also reminds us –  Kirkbright insightfully notes – of Jaspers’ chronic, intermittently life-threatening lung illness, and so of the necessary vulnerability and potential evanescence of his project: ‘concepts become intangible, perhaps as fragile as the high-pitched tone of his voice that was distorted in later years by the worsening of the illness’.  

The experience of impermanence, of failure, of foundering is integral to Jaspers’ philosophical activity. This was a reclamation and assertion of life’s imperfection in the face of the judgementalism of the healthy and strong. Kirkbright records how, when Jaspers was about to leave school, his headmaster told him ‘Nothing can become of you anyway, because your illness is an organic fact of life!’ Jaspers’ incurable bronchiectasis was finally diagnosed when he was eighteen, at which point he was not expected to live much longer than his early thirties. At about the age of seventeen he had already turned to philosophical thinking in order to revivify himself against the depressing influence of educators such as his headmaster. ‘With the view across the pastureland and the windmill – already feeling my life’s possibilities threatened and fallen victim to a melancholy with the cares of the world – I read, to gain strength, Spinoza.’ Philosophy was aligned with claiming the confidence to fight on as well as with refuge and rest. Of course, as Kirkbright writes, the ‘quiet life of contemplation[…] was so advantageous to Jaspers’ health’. But she is also correct to point out that ‘an early, unconscious rebellion against the circumstances of his illness appeared to have heightened his awareness of a need to find the meaning of life’.

By drawing attention to Jaspers’ awareness of the insecurity of rational activity, Kirkbright illuminates key aspects of his intellectual relationships with other major twentieth-century thinkers. Our understanding of his focus on Max Weber as ‘the key representative of modern life in all its fragility’, is deepened by Kirkbright’s citation of a comment on his mentor’s health from a 1910 letter of Jaspers’ to his parents: ‘It is as though a mighty will is constantly wrestling to control a nervous system that is going to become agitated.’ Jaspers’ important argument with Georg Lukács’ Marxism – which is expounded brilliantly in Thornhill’s study – is contextualized by Kirkbright’s account of their encounter in 1946 at the International Rencontres in Geneva. Jaspers and Lukács had enjoyed cordial relations before the First World War, and Jaspers acted as psychiatrist to Lukács’ first wife. Yet at the 1946 conference Lukács’ socialist-realist position led him to label Jaspers a ‘broken man’ representing – in the words of Stephen Spender’s report – ‘the point of view of a bankrupt individualism’. Lukács, as Kirkbright notes, would go on in The Destruction of Reason to attack Jaspers’ and Heidegger’s adoption of Kierkegaard’s conception of Existenz, which he impugned as ‘Romantic and individualistic cat’s wail’. In Geneva Lukács seems to be linking Jaspers’ personal weakness, his supposedly broken thinking, to the failures of capitalist economics. Yet as Thornhill’s study suggests, Jaspers’ thinking of failure in fact itself intimates, through its imbrication with his interrogation of the limits of objective orders of life, a very potent critique of capitalist economism.

Kirkbright quotes a 1907 letter to Jaspers from his brother Enno, in which the latter – in Kirkbright’s words – ‘struck a nerve when he called Jaspers’ existence an artificial shell, an alibi to conceal from others the true nature of his experiences’. The charge was that Jaspers’ awareness of his disability inhibited his acceptance of his existential life. ‘Your body prevents you from doing a lot of things, but to conclude a lack of personal experiences from that does not seem justified to me.’ Kirkbright, however, usefully shows how Jaspers’ trip to Italy in 1902 had already demonstrated his capacity to claim ‘independence from his illness and his family in a way that motivated him to embark on a different way of living’. The journey was a ‘watershed’ for Jaspers, in that it launched his route towards existentialism through an increasing acceptance of sensual experience. ‘Italy was, for me, the start of winning the world – while before Italy, I lived almost wholly in an abstract sense without the world.’ Though his time in Rome remained solitary and overshadowed by his illness, his letters home – as Kirkbright notes – testify to a shift from youthful Schopenhauerian gloom (an immersion in Sehnsucht [longing] and Weltschmerz [pain of the world]), to ‘a new understanding of the effect of beauty on an individual’s senses’. Jaspers found Italian girls more attractive than girls back home in Oldenburg ‘by ten to one’.

Throughout this biography Kirkbright emphasizes how his wife, Gertrud (née Mayer), represented ‘the life and soul of Jaspers’ intellectual life’. In Kirkbright’s presentation Gertrud brought Jaspers to existentialism, in the sense that insofar as their friendship originally ‘released Jaspers from his solitary lifestyle’, Gertrud ‘made visible the beauty of life’s possibilities’. Jaspers understood this beauty of existence in terms of harmony. ‘From the very first hour there was between us an inconceivable harmony, something never expected to be possible.’ The philosophical activity which was stimulated by awareness of this harmony would of course go on to draw in disharmony: for example when it foregrounds speech which is necessarily insufficient, uncertain, foundering. In the same way, as Kirkbright writes, the Jaspers’ marriage ‘evolved into a paradigm of communication as a “loving contest” that was a focal point of his perception of his philosophical achievement’.

Kirkbright quotes from Jaspers’ eulogy to his wife, which was delivered at her funeral in 1974. ‘We have lived this life philosophizing. If there is any substance in what I have presented to the world as philosophy, then it is her I have to thank for it.’ Gertrud, Kirkbright records, had attended the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert’s lectures in Freiburg, where she made the acquaintance of Rickert’s pupil Emil Lask. ‘Her acquaintance with Lask, who followed Rickert as an unpaid lecturer to Heidelberg, was instrumental in Jaspers’ introduction to Heidelberg’s Philosophical Seminar.’ Whilst training in the Clinic of Psychiatry at Heidelberg, Jaspers was taught Kant by Lask – and rebelled. Just as Gertrud Mayer would decide to discontinue reading philosophy altogether after presenting a résumé at one of Wilhelm Windelband’s seminars, Jaspers – as Thornhill notes – ‘sets himself emphatically against the prevailing orthodoxies in the neo-Kantianism of early twentieth-century Germany. In his attempt to deploy Kant as the basis for an existential metaphysic of possible lived unity, he seeks to wrest Kant from his epistemological assimilation into the philosophy of value (Wertphilosophie), which was pioneered by Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert.’

Another way in which Gertrud helped Jaspers to orientate himself intellectually, when he was still an unpaid voluntary assistant at the psychiatric clinic, uncertain whether to go on to work in the field of psychology or philosophy, was by encouraging him to socialize with the Webers. Kirkbright notes how, whenever Jaspers sought an appointment with Max Weber, he was encouraged by Gertrud’s friendship with Weber’s wife Marianne; and when he did find the courage to call upon Weber, he usually went along with Gertrud. Jaspers wrote to his parents, ‘I doubt whether I belong in that circle. The people are too clever.’ But, Kirkbright also records, the Jaspers did after all manage to mix with figures such as Georg Simmel at Weber’s Sunday afternoon gatherings, and from the end of 1914 onwards Jaspers regularly attended ‘cultural philosophical’ evenings with the likes of Ernst Bloch, Max Scheler and Lukács. ‘It may be assumed that Jaspers drew encouragement from his participation in the discussions, from which he appeared to have derived confirmation of the philosophical direction of his future work.’ Kirkbright writes of ‘the indispensability of Jaspers’ bond of trust with Weber’; indeed Weber ‘convinced Windelband to open the doors of Heidelberg’s philosophy faculty to Jaspers’.       

As Kirkbright notes, Martin Heidegger did not visit the Jaspers again after June 1933, due to Gertrud’s ‘deep mistrust’ of Heidegger’s activities as a Nazi party member. Gertrud was Jewish, and was also someone with whom Jaspers found it easier to be honest and open than in his friendship with Heidegger. Kirkbright quotes from Jaspers’ ‘Philosophical Autobiography’: ‘I had failed with regard to Heidegger, who himself had been seized by an intoxication. I had not told him that he had chosen the wrong road.’ Kirkbright records how already during the late 1920s, at the time of Jaspers and Heidegger’s discussions on Schelling, Jaspers had found that he ‘preferred to talk to Gertrud, whom he knew he could trust to contest his thinking, and to judge their conversations in the light of what they both believed in as the necessary questioning of the other’s position in a process of communication’. The importance for Jaspers of the potential for ‘open communication among free individuals’, is again underscored by Kirkbright when she documents how, after the Second World War, ‘Arendt understood that Jaspers’ belief in the power of communication was one reason why she had failed to broker a reunion between Heidegger and Jaspers, and that Heidegger’s complicity in the Nazis’ control of the university was not something Jaspers could forgive.’

Second part to be posted next week.