Either/Or (Part I)

Here are some of my reading notes on the first part of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

‘that eternity which lies not outside time but in the midst of it’ [51. Compare, regarding actualizing the eternal in the temporal (Bergman), the reference on 37 to ‘an idea that joined the finite and the infinite’. Cf. also 54, for instance the remark that ‘Only where the idea is brought to rest and transparency in a definite form can there be any question of a classic work’ (compare 103: ‘the stillness of the moment’). These references to rest and stillness are themselves worth comparing with Kierkegaard’s (hereafter SK’s) notion of ‘suspension’: ‘The art of recollecting and forgetting will also prevent a person from foundering in any particular relationship in life – and assures him complete suspension.’ (295) This effect of an ‘artistically [vs. ethically] achieved identity’ of forgetting and recollecting seems to me to correspond to the Buddhist meditative condition of detachment or acceptance; for me mindfulness can be what SK, on the same page, calls ‘the Archimedean point with which one lifts the whole world’. Suspension - also because it is an aesthetic position - is of course a relativistic state: one ‘does not hoist full sail for any decision’ (293).] 

‘When was it that the hetairias became common in Greece except at the time when the state was in the process of disintegration? And does not our age have a striking likeness to that age, which not even Aristophanes could make more ludicrous than it actually was? Has not the bond that in the political sense held the states together, invisibly and spiritually, dissolved; has not the power in religion that insisted upon the invisible been weakened and destroyed […]’ [141. These statements, like the similar ones in Irony, seem to evoke the conditions of Weimar era Germany – as well as the conditions of our time.]

‘Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state, kindred; it must turn the single individual over to himself completely in such a way that, strictly speaking, he becomes his own creator.’ [149. Cf. the ‘subjectivity reflected in itself’ on 143, and the quotation from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right regarding ‘the right of subjective freedom’ on 626 n. 13.]

 

‘since we […] acknowledge as characteristic of all human endeavour in its truth that it is fragmentary, that it is precisely this which distinguishes it from nature’s infinite coherence, that an individual’s wealth consists specifically in his capacity for fragmentary prodigality […]’ [151. Cf. the advocacy of concise communication – ‘simple statements’, ‘time-and-talk-saving pithy aphorisms’, ‘economizing’ – on 465. Cf. too the recommended ‘venture in fragmentary endeavour’ in line with ‘the disjointed and desultory character of unfinished papers’, and a vocation of obscurity, on 152 (& 137).]    

[quotation above from 151 regarding ‘fragmentary prodigality’ continues with:] ‘what is the producing individual’s enjoyment is the receiving individual’s also, not the laborious and careful accomplishment or the tedious interpretation of this accomplishment but the production and the pleasure of the glinting transiency, which for the producer holds much more than the consummated accomplishment, since it is a glimpse of the idea and holds a bonus for the recipient, since its fulguration [Fulguration] stimulates his own productivity […]’ [152. 629 n. 36 glosses ‘Fulguration’ as a loan word in Danish, meaning ‘a sudden flashing (for example, the flashing of molten gold or silver)’. Compare, therefore, 129: ‘Then in the most distant heavens, far off on the horizon, one sees a flash; it speeds away swiftly along the earth, is gone in an instant. […] it seems as if the darkness itself has lost its composure and is starting to move. […] There is an anxiety in that flash; it is as if in that deep darkness it were born in anxiety – just so is Don Giovanni’s life. There is an anxiety in him, but this anxiety is his energy. […] Don Giovanni’s life is not despair; it is, however, the full force of the sensuous, which is born in anxiety; and Don Giovanni himself is this anxiety, but this anxiety is precisely the demonic zest for life.’ In this relation, compare too SK’s constellation of aesthetic-intellectual love, risk and a Nietzsche-like terror of natural contingency (contingent even in its ‘infinite coherence’). ‘With what kind of love do we embrace nature? Is there not a secretive anxiety and horror in it, because its beautiful harmony works its way out of lawlessness and wild confusion, its security out of perfidy? But precisely this anxiety captivates the most. So also with love, if it is to be interesting. Behind it ought to brood the deep, anxious night from which springs the flower of love. Thus the nymphaea alba [white water lily] rests with its calyx on the surface of the water, while thought is anxious about plunging down into the deep darkness where it has its root.’ (424; cf. 294) On 102 Don Giovanni is posited as ‘absolutely musical’ because, unreflective and nonverbal, he ‘does not have that kind of [intellectual] continuance at all but hurries on in an eternal vanishing, just like the music’.]

‘love is always present tense’ [226]

‘the repelling force always required in the negative, which is actually the principle of motion. It is not merely repelling but infinitely repulsive, and whoever has the basic principle behind him must necessarily have infinite momentum for making discoveries.’ [285. Cf. Hegel’s infinite absolute negativity adopted in Irony, and Hegel’s definition of negativity as ‘the turning point of the movement of the Notion […] the innermost source of all activity’ quoted in 641 n. 3. Cf. with this principle of motion the ‘movement of thought […] in the service of reflection’ discussed on 188, where, for the will (mediation, and the ethical) to begin, or to free itself from serving reflection, it ‘must be altogether impartial, must begin in the power of its own willing; only then can there be any question of a beginning’. The logic of this replacement of the principle of (aesthetic-)intellectual motion by the free exercise of the will (the decision, ethics), seems to me to be analogous to the meditative logic wherein mindfulness emerges from (within, ‘in the power of’) the body’s own wisdom: the breath. Cf. also, however, SK’s opposition of spirit-motion to the perpetual motion imposed by the capitalist work ethic. He writes of the ‘businesslike zeal with which they work at the office’ on 289: ‘There is an indefatigable activity that shuts a person out of the world of spirit and places him in a class with the animals, which instinctively must always be in motion.’ (Cf. SK on ‘busy bustlers’ on 25, and critiquing working for a living on 31).]    

‘There is so much talk about man’s being a social animal, but basically he is a beast of prey, something that can be ascertained not only by looking at his teeth. Therefore, all this chatter about sociality and community is partly inherited hypocrisy and partly studied perfidy.’ [288. Cf. the quotation from Aristotle’s Politics in 642-43 n.12: ‘man is by nature a political [social] animal. […] the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts’. Cf. 22, and also Hobbes?]

‘Every erotic relationship must always be lived through in such a way that it is easy for one to produce an image that conveys all the beauty of it.’ [390. Cf. 418: ‘For love, everything is a symbol […]’; ‘Erotic love is much too substantial to be satisfied with chatter, the erotic situations much too significant to be filled with chatter. They are silent, still, definitely outlined, and yet eloquent, like the music of Memnon’s statue. Eros gesticulates, does not speak; or if he does, it is an enigmatic intimation, symbolic music.’]     

‘To have an understanding of the moment is not such an easy matter, and the one who misunderstands it is doomed to boredom for life. The moment is everything, and in the moment woman is everything; the consequences I do not understand.’ [433. Cf. the seducer’s statements with the references to the moment on 90 and (as 658 n. 209 points out) The Concept of Anxiety, 82-91.]

As in my previous post on The Concept of Irony, the page numbering here refers to the relevant volume of the Princeton edition of Kierkegaard’s Writings. 

Behind the Mountains, part 2

Gass returns to the characteristically depersonalized and depersonalizing quality of Walser’s writing when he notes the ‘detached, desperate “inhumanity” of his work’. The narrator’s depersonalizing self-negation is foregrounded explicitly in ‘The Alphabet’: ‘I. I skip over, for this is I myself.’ Depersonalizing narratorial strategies are most evident in ‘Tobold (II)’ however, in numerous instances of self-negating narration such as this sentence:

‘Concerning a keg of the finest rye whiskey that, to the delight of the steward and that of a certain additional person – namely, to my very own, grinning, hand-rubbing delight – showed up only to be closely inspected and quite thoroughly investigated and examined by the two abovementioned important or insignificant personages, I shall take care not to waste another word.’

In ‘Tobold (II)’, the ‘certain additional person’ that is the modern self is brushed aside and reduced to the point where his very moods and their attendant whims are directed by an invisible heteronomy. The narrator’s investigation of his workplace is less a focussed product of individual agency, than a dissipated effect of being seduced by that which is more powerful: ‘The castle itself was an imposing edifice, and the many beautiful rooms and chambers I was permitted to glance into as the mood struck me naturally captured my attention and interest with their aristocratic appearance.’ Narration once more becomes a vehicle for expressing the narrator’s self-alienation and loss of personal agency, in the following presentation of vigilant attention directed by the formless authority which it tends:   

‘One of the choicest duties I had to perform was caring for the numerous lamps, an occupation that gave me great pleasure, for I developed quite a fondness for it. Each evening at nightfall I brought light, so to speak, into the dubious twilight that reigned on all sides, or if you prefer, into the darkness. As the count was a fancier of beautiful lamps and lampshades, these always had to be tended and treated with the greatest care. On beautiful evenings, as I crept about the rooms, all quiet as a mouse, a delicate mood in the air, the entire castle seemed bewitched. All the rooms were as if enchanted, the park an enchanted park, and with my soft, discreet, cautious lamplight, I seemed like Aladdin leaping one evening with his magic or miraculous lamp up the high, broad palace steps spread with splendid oriental rugs.’  

In this passage the radical modesty of the narrator – as he creeps about the rooms, ‘all quiet as a mouse’ – renders him indistinguishable from the narrated environment: the succeeding clause, ‘a delicate mood in the air’, could refer to him just as easily as to the castle. Then this submersion of the narrator’s identity within the described environment blends into a self-alienation in the form of a self-fictionalization: ‘I seemed like Aladdin’. The sense of narratorial self-alienation has already been generated by the recurrently self-qualifying, self-negating prose: ‘I brought light, so to speak, […] or if you prefer […]’. Here we are reminded of Walser’s foregrounding of the depersonalized quality of his writing in ‘The Green Spider’, where the narrator refers to ‘my mouth and its modest tool, my inherited language’, so divorcing a potential description enabled by such language from his human physicality ‘incapable of […] stammering it out’. By self-consciously stressing that this is writing removed from its writer, Walser emphasizes his own radical alienation from the reader. This is the effect of the final lines of ‘A Flaubert Prose Piece’ too, which once more draw attention to Walser’s writerly self-abnegation and the depersonalized quality of his prose. ‘Her report contained nothing that might have surprised him. They glided and passed among the people gliding and passing by, like a dream vision within the vision of a dream.’  

I want to draw out the radical implications of Walser’s articulation of modern self-abnegation; of the radical modesty of being, as Gass puts it, ‘Lightly attached to people, to the formalities of society, to any work which lies beneath another’s will like a leg beneath a log’. To take a first example, Walser’s position of self-abnegation enables his writing to develop a powerful critique of self-interest. In her translator’s ‘Preface’ to the collection, Susan Bernofsky quotes Elias Canetti on Walser, in the former’s The Human Province : ‘His deep and instinctive distaste for everything “lofty”, for everything that has rank and privilege, makes him an essential writer of our time, which is choking on power.’ Walser’s fascination with power struggles – his typical focus on human relations in terms of conflict or war – is communicated, for instance, in the following passage in ‘Tobold (II)’. Here the narrator discerns two distinct forms of human conflict, low battles concerning self-interest and ‘noble’ battles concerning natural morality:

‘Intrigues show up in castles, the same as in all other major establishments and institutions. Now the cook wanted to incite me against the steward, now the steward against the cook, but all this factional bickering and class conflict left me cold, for I had no interest in it. Anywhere a noble, splendid, sensible struggle can be found, I’ll be glad, perhaps, to take part in it – why not? – for instance in the struggle of the good versus the wicked, the benevolent versus the malevolent, the open and flexible versus the hardened and insensitive, the quick-witted versus the unenlightened, the diligent and industrious versus those who do nothing yet always stay on top, the struggle of the guileless versus the crafty and sly. This could be a battle I might like to lend a hand in, it can rain blows and punches for all I care, the more the merrier.’     

Walser’s critique of modern, institutional self-interest relates to the way in which his writing – as I want to suggest – projects a similar opposition of modern purposive rationality to natural human life, to that proposed within Georg Simmel’s contemporaneous The Philosophy of Money. (Simmel’s text was published in 1907, whilst Walser’s ‘Aschinger’ and ‘The Battle of Sempach’ – to which we will refer soon – date from 1907 and 1908 respectively). In his German Political Philosophy, Chris Thornhill outlines how Simmel’s political and sociological theory involved ‘the first major step on the path towards a reconstruction of vitalist philosophy, especially that of Nietzsche’.

‘Like Nietzsche, […] Simmel saw the capitalist economy as marking the final triumph of the human being as a formally purposive agent, and he also saw the purposive rationality of capitalism as weakening or neutralizing the relation between people and the purposes or objects of their possession, and even between people and their own actions. Under the generalized rationality of capitalism, therefore, the purposes of economically constructed persons assume a heteronomous primacy over human life itself.’

Indeed, as Thornhill summarizes, because the formal purposiveness of modern monetary subjects involves an alienation of those subjects from their own true purposes, it generates – Simmel maintained in The Philosophy of Money – an experience of depersonalization, such as we have seen reflected throughout Walser’s prose pieces:

‘As an agent seeking purposes, he [Simmel] argued, the modern subject alienates itself from the experiential sources of genuine subjectivity, and it constructs itself as a thinly neutralized set of contents and objectives. The monetary alienation of the human subject from its purposes and actions, then, also leads to a weakening or dissipation of the relation between people and other people, and ultimately, to a weakening or dissipation of the person itself – to a lack of “definite substance in the centre of the soul” or to a diffuse experience of depersonalization.’

We can find Walser detailedly projecting an opposition of formal purposiveness to natural human life within the following extraordinary description of war in ‘The Battle of Sempach’.

‘The rushing crowd, apparently full of passion, drew closer. And the knights stood their ground; suddenly they seemed fused together. Iron men held out their lances; you could have gone for a buggy ride across this bridge of lances, the knights were squeezed in so tightly, lance upon lance stuck out so mindlessly, firm and unyielding – just the thing, you might think, for such an impetuous, raging human breast to impale itself on. Here, an idiotic wall of spikes; there, people half-covered with shirts. Here, the art of war, the most prejudiced there is; there, people seized with helpless rage. Just to put an end to this loathsome horror, one man after the other recklessly charged into a lance tip, maddened, insane, flung by fury and rage. Flung to the ground, that is, without even having struck the helmeted, plumed iron scoundrel with his hand weapon, bleeding pitiably from his breast, tumbling head over heels, face down into the dusty excrement left behind by the noble steeds. This was the fate of all these almost naked men, while the lances, already red with blood, seemed to smile in scorn.’     

Walser’s tableau foregrounds two aspects of human experience. The ‘people half-covered with shirts’ represent passionate humanity. Their behaviour, their purposes, are self-directed: these are people simply ‘impetuous’ or ‘seized with helpless rage’, who are representatives of uncontrolled nature – ‘maddened, insane, flung by fury and rage’. On the other hand, there are the knights reified into their weapons: ‘an idiotic wall of spikes’, ‘the art of war, the most prejudiced there is’. On this side it is impossible to separate reified humans (‘Iron men’, ‘the helmeted, plumed iron scoundrel’), from humanized lances which ‘seemed to smile in scorn’. These knights emblematize an alienated condition of formal purposiveness. Their behaviour is rigidly purposeful, to the point where they are themselves indistinguishable – ‘squeezed in so tightly, lance upon lance stuck out so mindlessly, firm and unyielding’ – from the object-world of instrumentality and neutralization that they project. Walser obsessively delineates what he intuits to be the structuring conflict underlying modern life, and his forecast of the outcome is not utopian: as he writes in the preceding sentence, ‘Nature is always annihilated in a battle’. 

Thornhill shows how Simmel’s opposition of formal purposiveness to natural human life was grounded in Nietzsche’s thinking about law, reason and nature. Nietzsche, Thornhill summarizes, thought that fear of nature stimulates the legislation of ‘rational or moral purposes for humans to pursue, so that they are distracted from their naturalness’. Laws are formed in order to differentiate human life from ‘the cyclical temporal processes of mere nature or from the chaotic temporal events of historical contingency’. ‘Laws and values produced in this manner serve to humanize the world’, Thornhill notes; ‘they allow human beings to live, at least, in an illusion of human justification and moral purpose’. But they also reflect ‘a fearful will to obtain power, a power that can only be secured through the extirpation of whatever is residually natural – including the residues of nature in reason itself’:

‘Whilst possessing the obvious psychological utility that they protect people from knowledge of their own naturalness, however, Nietzsche argued that the laws created by reason form highly coercive and dominatory intellectual structures, which, in seeking to suppress fear, fixate human reason on the acquisition of power.’ 

For Nietzsche, as Thornhill writes, this is ‘invariably the will to power of weak people’; it is ‘power resentfully desired by those who cannot contentedly tolerate the naturalness and spontaneous futility of life’. Those who cannot accept contingency, and remain trapped in nihilistic horror vacui, ‘produce sense for their lives only through the pursuit of obligatory, yet ultimately illusory laws and purposes’.  

We can argue that Walser’s writing articulates the perspective of those whom competitive capitalist society labels ‘weak’ or ‘vulnerable’ – of the radically modest – in order to discern, with Nietzsche and Simmel, the true weakness of those who pursue ‘obligatory, yet ultimately illusory laws and purposes’. In Walser’s ‘Aschinger’, their rushed, non-accepting satisfaction of appetitive processes of mere nature is not enough for the competitive and power-seeking, who must then flee into ‘the commercial air’.

‘The dissatisfied quickly find satisfaction at the beer spring and the warm sausage tower, and the satiated dash out again into the commercial air, generally with a briefcase beneath their arm, a letter in their pocket, an assignment in their brain, firm plans in their skull, and in their open palm a watch that says the time has come.’   

Walser suggests that, slotted into their new, artificial time (of money, not of nature), the supposedly ‘firm’ purposes of economically constructed persons do not derive from their own natural brains – or from any ‘definite substance in the centre of the soul’ – but are instead plucked out, as if at random, from the empty, depersonalized skulls within which they float. A critique of the modern differentiation of ‘plans’ from naturalness or contingency may also be said to lie behind Walser’s ironization of the self-with-attainments in ‘Tobold (II)’: ‘Incidentally, it should also be mentioned that the secretary was an excellent pianist. Why shouldn’t we have a fondness for people who bring us pleasure with their skills, gifts, sciences, or knowledge?’ Walser proposes, in ‘Marie’, that the illusory plans and instrumentalized attainments which animate the capitalist city merely sustain a society in which both ‘work’ and ‘sophisticated pleasure’ are paratactically, and barbarically, inseparable from ‘privation’:

            ‘“Where are you going?” Frau Bandi asked.

            “I’m not quite sure yet. Well, to one of the centres of contemporary civilization, culture, work, privation, sophisticated pleasure, modern elegance and education, to one of the big, noisy cities where I’ll learn how to go about winning some respect and repute for myself among my fellow men.”’

Tbc.

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.’

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