Behind the Mountains, part 3

A second radical implication of Walser’s articulation of modern self-abnegation, relates to the way in which it enables his writing to develop its thinking of freedom. In ‘Tobold (II)’ the narrator celebrates the fact that ‘I was a servant! I served!’:

‘My position, consequently, was a good one, which sufficed to set my person to rights. Isn’t it true our lives first take on beauty when we’ve learned to be unassuming, to forget or set aside our own wishes and desires, and instead devote ourselves with all our liberated, willing hearts to a precept and lifelong service, to satisfy people with our conduct, and meekly and boldly forgo beauty?’

The dialectic of the precept and liberation here is accompanied by a twinning of self-abnegation and self-exaltation (or self-transcending self-elevation), which Walser proposes in the preceding sentence. ‘So exalted I felt, even, I can say, yes, elevated far above my own person, which I scarcely dignified any more with so much as a hasty glance, or rather a hasty thought.’ Self-transcended, the narrator paradoxically no longer looks down on himself as on an alienated object (with ‘a hasty glance’), and can instead give a ‘hasty thought’ to his serving self. Walser’s sense of transcendence as something that gives one back to oneself, was voiced already in the following statements of the narrator’s towards the beginning of ‘Tobold (II)’.

‘Newly emerged from a terrible weariness of life, I attained fresh insights, began to enjoy living. As Peter, I’d had no real worldview, no true notion of life; […]. Living can be so tiresome when you lack an inspiring, elevating thought or point of view or vision to help you come to terms with the disappointments awaiting you in life. No longer did I chase after fame or the like; the sublime no longer drew my gaze. I had learned to love the small and insignificant, and, armed with this kind of love, I found life beautiful, just, and good. I was delighted to renounce all ambition.’

These lines identify self-abnegation, cast in terms of the renunciation of monetary ‘ambition’, with the self-transcending self-elevation enabled by pursuit of a transcendental idea, or ‘an inspiring, elevating thought or point of view or vision’. Walser thereby suggests that truly el(ev)ating happiness, true enjoyment of life, can be attained by holding to an inspiring vision of non-elevation. Elsewhere in ‘Tobold (II)’, the narrator identifies the happy condition of non-elevation itself – of ‘modest being’ – with spectatorship of an inspiring vision of others’ happiness. Genuinely fulfilling personal modesty is here contingent upon (liminal observation of) others’ illusory ‘glory’. Walser ironizes the notion that the elevated might really be freer: for him what matters is holding to the transcendental idea of happiness, to the 'glow' that surrounds the aristocratic diners 'playing their roles'. ‘I always took great pleasure in observing the splendour, the glory; for myself, though, I’d always desired a place in the quiet, modest background from which I could gaze with happy eyes up to and into the bright glow.’ The ‘twilight shadow’ is where the ‘common servant’ finds ‘a great benevolence’ and feels ‘most secure, most faithfully sheltered’, precisely because privileged life is viewed as a mere ‘magical spectacle’, at which the narrator ‘thought it lovely just to look on, entranced’. The idealizing worldview - the ‘whole picture’ – is what he ‘found so beautiful and cherished above all else’. But just this idealization of power is what enables him to find freedom in the refusal of power. ‘So I was always conscious of my merit, station, and joy in life, and took extraordinary delight in the modest being I embodied.’

In a short piece from 1917, ‘The End of the World’, Walser’s twinning of self-abnegatory, radical modesty with the self-transcending self-elevation enabled by pursuit of a transcendental idea, can be seen to expand into what could be called a broader geo-political twinning of apocalypse (or the limit) with utopia (or absolute freedom). In this piece, after ‘imagining the end of the world […] as a sea of bliss in which it could rock forever’, ‘everything looked so prosperous, fine, and free that at once the child was convinced this was the end of the world’. In this context we could also think of the inversion of nature associated by Walser with human conflict in ‘The Battle of Sempach’; when ‘Nature is […] annihilated in a battle’. ‘The sound was like a black, gaping abyss, and the sun now appeared to be shining from a darkened sky, glaring down more dazzling than ever, but as though from a hell, not the heavens.’ Here, unnaturally, the sun becomes brightest when as if apocalyptically detached from its heavens. Excessive brightness – brightness aspiring to the absolute, pushed to its limit – has already been associated with apocalypse on the previous page. ‘The whole earth, no matter how bright it looked, seemed to him to rumble and thunder in anger.’ Walser sees the earth, like the sky, to be darkened by its own aspiration to dazzle. A conception of the end of the world, for Walser, is inseparable from the conception of a transcendental urge towards brightness, freedom, utopia.

Walser’s imbrication of the limit and transcendence seems to me to be echoed by Karl Jaspers’ theorization of the decisive hermeneutic of transcendence available to those in existential crisis. As Thornhill summarizes in his book on Jaspers, for Jaspers ‘Transcendence is accessible only to a decisive hermeneutic, which stands in the absolute limit-situation of human existence, interpreting transcendence through its own crisis.’ Thornhill quotes from the third volume of Jaspers’ Philosophy : ‘“Failing [Scheitern]”, Jaspers argues, “is the encompassing ground of all cipher-being. Seeing the cipher of the reality of being arises from the experience of failing”.’

For Jaspers, Thornhill writes, ‘Being […] is present only negatively, as a series of possible implosions in the order of human consciousness, in which consciousness is referred to its own limits.’ Jaspers’ conception of the decisive hermeneutic of transcendence practiced by those in crisis, rests on the view that, subjectively, such implosions (as Thornhill notes) are ‘decisions’, through which ‘human life decides interpretively to reflect upon its own possibilities (ideas), acts in a manner which accords with these, and thus places itself upon a more unified level of reflection above its habitual practical and cognitive orientations’. The narrator in ‘Tobold (II)’ indeed decides to reflect upon self-abnegation, identifying it as a decision to ‘devote ourselves with all our liberated, willing hearts to a precept and lifelong service, to satisfy people with our conduct, and meekly and boldly forgo beauty’. Continuing his self-hermeneutic, he emphasizes too that to freely and decisively act upon such radical modesty, and ‘forgo heaven’, is to interpret the possibility of transcendence ‘many times more beautiful’:

‘For when I forgo something beautiful: doesn’t a brand-new, never-before-dreamed-of beauty a thousand times more beautiful come flying toward me in reward for my display of goodwill and my kind, strongly felt self-denial? And if, of my own free will, elevated by courage and compassion to nobler sentiments, I should forgo heaven: won’t I then, sooner or later, in reward for my righteous behaviour, fly into a heaven many times more beautiful?’    

We can view Walser’s writing as a whole in Masquerade and Other Stories as itself a decisive hermeneutic of transcendence, undertaken by a vulnerable adult. In linguistic terms, the transcendence at which it aims is, surely, the sort of visionary register to which Bernofsky points when – in her translator’s preface – she quotes from Walser’s ‘Meine Bemühungen’ (‘My Efforts’) of 1928-29. There he comments that in his late work he was ‘experimenting in the linguistic field in the hope that there existed in language an unknown vivacity which it is a pleasure to awaken’. This vivacity is in language but also beyond it, as Walser hinted already in his piece ‘Tableau Vivant’ from 1909. ‘Words won’t venture anywhere near the description of this dynamo. He sings, or something around him seems to be trembling with sounds. Behind the mountains, bells are ringing.’ Walser’s staged tableaux and prose masquerades are also aiming at transcendence in terms of an ideal ‘whole picture’, or ‘dream’, the construction of which they often dramatize. I am thinking here in particular of these marvellous lines in ‘The Aunt’:

‘Gradually I came into the mountains and soon reached an isolated village ringed all around by high crags; this was the birthplace of my mother. It seemed strange to me, yet also familiar and familial. The whole world, and I as well, appeared wonderfully old and young; earth and earthly life were suddenly a dream; I felt everything was perfectly comprehensible, yet also utterly inexplicable.’



Karl Hofer, 'Montagnola' (c. 1930)

What better description could there be of the goal of Jaspers’ hermeneutic process working towards (in Thornhill’s words) ‘a more unified level of reflection above its habitual practical and cognitive orientations’? Walser here captures the existential uncertainty – the sense of the ‘utterly inexplicable’ – which, for Jaspers, accompanies any decisive hermeneutic bid for a transcendental cognitive unity at the limit of knowledge. As Thornhill observes in Karl Jaspers, whilst Heidegger argued that language (as Thornhill puts it) ‘defines and constitutes the practically disclosed horizon of the world’, and thus ‘expressly excludes all ideal components from experience’, Jaspers by contrast maintained that language ‘always positions human consciousness in a relation (albeit existentially uncertain) to its primary ideal unity (its transcendence), and it thus permits an ideal/practical disclosure of this unity’. Thornhill, moreover, describes Jaspers' implicit fusion of Hamannian hermeneutics and Kantian epistemology by referring to Jaspers’ view of revelation or transcendence as mere ‘appearance’ – a term which seems to parallel Walser’s ‘whole picture’ or ‘dream’:

‘The hermeneutic of revelation […] has its profound validity in its ability to signal that the ideal limits of cognition do not reflect the absolute limits of being itself. Nonetheless, with Kant, Jaspers also argues that transcendence can only be knowable as a mere appearance of the possible unity of knowledge: true transcendence, thus, is inevitably beyond the limits of human thought.’

Walser’s lines in ‘The Aunt’, therefore, seem to me to exemplify what Jaspers would call an aesthetic cipher. Ciphers, though also decisive ‘moments of experience, embedded and disclosed in human historical life’, are for Jaspers (as Thornhill writes) ‘only the fleeting appearance of guiding ideas – akin to Kant’s transcendental ideas – which give shape to, but do not encompass, the ultimate underlying unity of human life and knowledge’. For Jaspers a truthful hermeneutic of ciphers ‘always also requires a critical-epistemological approach’ – Thornhill emphasizes – which with Kant and against Hamann, posits God as ‘an “idea”, which illuminates the limits of human consciousness, but which is never the realized experience of human transcendence’. (Walser: ‘It seemed strange to me, yet also familiar and familial.’) Thornhill sees that for Jaspers, it is indeed ‘only because the idea of God is not the experience [but the] appearance of transcendence that it is interpretable as transcendence’. As I have argued elsewhere, you could say that mere appearance lends the quality of definition (or decision) to Jaspers’ visionary hermeneutics – in Thornhill’s words, ‘it is the (epistemological) recognition of the limits of human knowledge which makes the (hermeneutical) disclosure of transcendence, in ciphers, so radical and truthful’.

Scheitern

In the last of this series of posts drawing heavily on Chris Thornhill's work on Karl Jaspers, I want to present a summary of Thornhill’s account of a central concept within Jaspers’ thought: that of foundering or failing (Scheitern). Probably the most fundamental context within which Thornhill addresses Jaspers’ concept of failure, is that of what Thornhill calls Jaspers’ and Kierkegaard’s ‘respective fusions of negative-anthropological and negative-metaphysical positions’. Influenced by Jaspers’ student Jeanne Hersch’s work on metaphysics and ontology in Jaspers, and discarding both Leonard Ehrlich’s description of his thinking as ‘negative theology’  and Sebastian Samay’s categorization of his thought as ‘negative ontology’ – though he does not contest Samay’s characterization – Thornhill suggests that we view Jaspers’ work as collapsing the universal metaphysics of Kantianism into a ‘negative-anthropological metaphysic’. Thornhill sees Jaspers as making ‘a clear Kierkegaardian addition to his basic Kantian position’. Kierkegaard’s theology, Thornhill notes, correlated a ‘negative anthropology’ – ‘in which the conditions for authentic human-being recede ceaselessly into the indeterminate, suffering interior of the historical person’ – with a ‘negative metaphysic’ which views the transcendent essence of humanity as a quality which can only be addressed as a ‘manifest absence’. Thornhill identifies a similar correlation within Jaspers’ thinking, resulting in a comparable negative-anthropological metaphysic.



              Jeanne Hersch                  

Jaspers’ reconstruction of Kant asserted, Thornhill writes, that ‘the possibility of transcendence enters human interactions as a telos, which draws life progressively out of its material orientations’. However unlike Kant, Thornhill argues, Jaspers also asserts that humanity ‘only has truthful access to the possibility of its own transcendence insofar as it reflects upon the impossibility of this possibility: in its failure (Scheitern)’. Partly determinant as it is of Jaspers’ communicative, negative hermeneutic liberated from objectivist preconditions, his negative-anthropological metaphysic maintains, as Thornhill puts it, that ‘human life only constitutes itself through processes of transcendent (self-)interpretation which cannot be accomplished in the modes of action and existence which are open to it’. Referring to Hersch’s explication, Thornhill adds that for Jaspers, ‘The metaphysical moment of transcendence […] exists only in a relation of unattainability to human reflection, and as such it describes both the unity and the absolute end of all determinations of human-being’. Thornhill also shows how Jaspers’ negative-anthropological metaphysic moves on from Kant’s philosophy of religion, and his ‘theory of religious unknowingness’. For Jaspers takes the absence of positive human knowledge about God as (in Thornhill’s words) ‘the fundamental experiential basis of human existence itself’:

‘In his response to Kant’s scepticism, Jaspers thus replaces the formal uncertainty of God, which is at the core of Kant’s critique of metaphysics, with an experiential uncertainty, which interprets transcendence as an elusive possibility of human life, and which ceaselessly refers humanity to a pained experience of its own antinomies and limits. The lack of a positive knowledge of God is for Jaspers, therefore, not an index of the formal limits of reason, but an experience of the limits of existence.’      

For Jaspers, metaphysical transcendence – Thornhill summarizes – ‘is thus never present: it is self-interpretation against the limit of this absence’. Jaspers’ subjection of ‘the tradition of occidental metaphysics to a hermeneutical (anthropological) reconstruction’ in this way, enlists the aid of his theory of ciphers of transcendence. Thornhill’s account of Jaspers’ thinking here quotes from the third volume of Jaspers’ Philosophy :

‘Human speculation, he asserts, interprets its innermost (metaphysical) essence in what he calls the ciphers of transcendence. Ciphers are “being which brings transcendence to the present”, and which permits human-being to interpret fleetingly its primary transcendent origin. “Wherever I read the cipher”, Jaspers explains, “I am responsible, because it is only through this that I read my self-being […] I attempt to tear myself out of the constant falling; I take myself in hand; I experience the decision, which emanates from me”.’

Thornhill sees Jaspers’ philosophy to be ‘a fractured, antinomical ontology’, ‘whose triadic conception of human life’ – in terms of levels such as orientation, illumination and metaphysics – is ‘rendered internally fluid by the fluidity of being itself, and of the absolute in being’. ‘“With the insight into the fragmentary nature of being”, he explains, “the demand for an ontology ceases and transforms itself into an impulse to obtain being, which I can never acquire as knowledge, through self-being”.’ In other words, as Thornhill puts it, ‘Only insofar as we experience and recognize the inevitable crisis (Scheitern) of our attempts to interpret our transcendent origin do we actually begin to approach this origin.’ Jaspers thus ‘de-objectifies the truth-claims of metaphysics’, so as to replace them with the self-interpretations undertaken by shattered humans. Thornhill continues:

‘Orientation, illumination and metaphysics are thus ways in which being is present to human consciousness. But none of these, ontologically, is being. Being, rather, is present only negatively, as a series of possible implosions in the order of human consciousness, in which consciousness is referred to its own limits.’

Thornhill distinguishes between such implosions in ‘objective logic’ – limit-situations such as ‘death, guilt, suffering and anxiety’ – and implosions in ‘subjective logic’. Crucially, in subjective logic, these implosions are ‘decisions’, through which ‘human life decides interpretively to reflect upon its own possibilities (ideas), acts in a manner which accords with these, and thus places itself upon a more unified level of reflection above its habitual practical and cognitive orientations’. In other words, as Thornhill summarizes, ‘Transcendence is accessible only to a decisive hermeneutic, which stands in the absolute limit-situation of human existence, interpreting transcendence through its own crisis.’ For Jaspers the ‘truthful hermeneutic of transcendence’, in Thornhill’s words, is ‘also a self-hermeneutic of individual crisis’. Thornhill quotes once more from the third volume of Jaspers’ Philosophy : ‘“Failing [Scheitern]”, Jaspers argues, “is the encompassing ground of all cipher-being. Seeing the cipher of the reality of being arises from the experience of failing”.’ Jaspers’ argument is grounded in his sense that, as Thornhill puts it, ‘Transcendence discloses itself as a response to the existential questions which I ask about myself, but for which – ultimately – no answer can be found in the world.’

‘My knowledge of my own absolute crisis releases me from any conviction that I can obtain cognitive or objective certainty about the conditions of my life. For this reason, however, it also prepares me for the evanescent interpretation of my transcendence in ciphers. The meaningful interpretation of the cipher, therefore, is possible only for being, which is “shattered as existence” and which “finds its ground in the being of transcendence”.’

We have already explored – in earlier posts – Jaspers’ understanding of foundering in terms of the imperfect communication which can begin to explain transcendence to humanity. Whilst Kierkegaard saw ‘the temporal presence of God’s absence only in closed interiority’, Thornhill notes, Jaspers sees ‘the presence of God’s absence as disclosed in the absolute, and yet absolutely believing, relativity of interpersonal communication’. You could say that speech, for Jaspers, is at once necessarily decisive and necessarily dysfluent; just as, whilst for him philosophical belief (as Thornhill writes) ‘has its only hold in the ciphers of transcendence’, the interpretation of these ciphers is ‘only existentially binding because they do not stabilize transcendence as certainty, but merely refer humanity to its own possibilities’. Necessarily dysfluent communication exemplarily enacts and enables recognition of our existential and cognitive uncertainty: the ‘imperfectibility of all communication’, Jaspers asserts in Reason and Existenz, reflects the ultimate inadequacy of ‘every shape of truth in the world’. But whilst human communication for Jaspers is a reflection of the impossibility of truth, enacting our existential uncertainty, the committed quality of existential communication also implies the possible resolution of that uncertainty: Reason and Existenz states how, ‘The imperfection of communication and the weight of its failing become the openness of a profundity, which nothing can fulfil but transcendence’. Necessarily failing, existential communication thus nonetheless forms what Thornhill calls ‘an ongoing attempt to articulate truthfulness: it is the only practically possible expression of transcendence’.  

To be continued.

Hamann and Jaspers, part 2

Freeing Human Transcendence from Law

Thornhill’s comparison of the two philosophers also traces ‘key distinctions’ between them. He begins by noting that Hamann’s thinking constituted an attempt to supplant Kantian epistemology with what W. M. Alexander called a ‘theological epistemology’, which relied on what Thornhill calls ‘Hamann’s conception of the linguistic cipher as pure divine disclosure’. ‘For Hamann’s pantheist hermeneutics, the relation to God (and therefore to human transcendence itself) is positively cast as an unalterable and dogmatic fact of history: as revelation.’ Viewed from Jaspers’ position, here Hamann – Thornhill stresses – ‘follows a logic of false objectivization […] which crudely encloses transcendence in material forms’. Whereas Hamann suggests that the ciphers of transcendence reveal (in Thornhill’s words) ‘the positive divinity of humanity’, Jaspers maintains that such ciphers indicate, as Thornhill puts it, ‘only the possible transcendence of humanity’. Jaspers’ critique of any false objectivization of transcendence, and refusal of positivizing religion, Thornhill sees, is grounded in Kant’s assertion of the limitedness of all knowledge. Thus as Thornhill writes, ‘even when he seeks to derive from Hamann a corrective to Kant’, Jaspers remains a Kantian when he argues that ‘revelation can never disclose in stable terms the potential transcendence of humanity, and truthful communication is rendered impossible wherever it assumes itself to be objectively in possession of truth’.

Jaspers’ agreement with Hamann’s attempts ‘both to give experiential substance to Kant’s subject, and to interpret transcendence as a full possible experience of humanity in history’, Thornhill importantly sees, means that – like Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Rosenzweig – Jaspers adopts from Hamann’s thinking ‘an epistemological structure which opposes experiential revelation to transcendental subjectivity’. Yet Jaspers also maintains – contra Hamann – that the revelation of transcendence is never, as Thornhill puts it, ‘tenable as a source of cognitive authority’. Whilst holding with Hamann to ‘the concept of revelation as a hermeneutic of possible transcendence’, and whilst he ‘draws heavily on the anti-idealist, anti-metaphysical and hermeneutical components of revelation theology (especially in its figuring by Hamann)’, Jaspers, Thornhill clarifies, argues that revelation ‘must ultimately be understood as an appearance of human historical relativity and limitation, not as the all-constituting axis of history’. This is because Jaspers ‘rejects the christological attempt (of which Hamann’s work is an example) to propose Jesus Christ himself as the unifying and sense-giving centre of human history, disclosed through the occurrence of revelation’. Jaspers’ position on revelation is also determined by his nature as a Kantian thinker, and by the grounding of his thinking in Kantian epistemology. As Thornhill emphasizes, ‘the foundation of Jaspers’ theological position might be viewed as a dialectical reading of Kant and Hamann’; Jaspers’ ‘theological reflections are […] premised in an implicit endeavour to effect a productive fusion of Hamann’s hermeneutics and Kant’s epistemology’:

‘Running through his entire debate with theology is a simultaneous attempt both to salvage the historical presence of transcendence in his theory of ciphers (influenced by Hamann’s linguistic theology), and yet also to understand this presence as a mere index of a possible non-realized unity of thought (influenced by Kant’s idealism). […] Hamann’s hermeneutics (for Jaspers) can indicate the transcending limit of human-being in a manner which is simply not possible for Kant’s formal epistemology. Despite this, however, Hamann cannot truly interpret this transcending limit as a limit, for his religious hermeneutics has no critical means for reflecting on where the ends of human reason are located.’

Thornhill also describes Jaspers' implicit fusion of Hamannian hermeneutics and Kantian epistemology by referring once more to Jaspers’ view of revelation or transcendence as mere ‘appearance’:

‘The hermeneutic of revelation […] has its profound validity in its ability to signal that the ideal limits of cognition do not reflect the absolute limits of being itself. Nonetheless, with Kant, Jaspers also argues that transcendence can only be knowable as a mere appearance of the possible unity of knowledge: true transcendence, thus, is inevitably beyond the limits of human thought.’

Ciphers, for example, though also decisive ‘moments of experience, embedded and disclosed in human historical life’, are for Jaspers (as Thornhill puts it) ‘only the fleeting appearance of guiding ideas – akin to Kant’s transcendental ideas – which give shape to, but do not encompass, the ultimate underlying unity of human life and knowledge’. For Jaspers a truthful hermeneutic of ciphers ‘always also requires a critical-epistemological approach’ – Thornhill emphasizes – which with Kant and against Hamann, posits God as ‘an “idea”, which illuminates the limits of human consciousness, but which is never the realized experience of human transcendence’. Thornhill sees that for Jaspers, it is indeed ‘only because the idea of God is not the experience [but the] appearance of transcendence that it is interpretable as transcendence’. You could say that mere appearance lends the quality of definition (or decision) to Jaspers’ visionary hermeneutics – in Thornhill’s words, ‘it is the (epistemological) recognition of the limits of human knowledge which makes the (hermeneutical) disclosure of transcendence, in ciphers, so radical and truthful’.

Thornhill usefully redescribes Hamann’s opposition of experiential revelation to transcendental subjectivity, as an opposition of ‘theological hermeneutics to transcendental epistemology’ which represented ‘the key theological debate at the heart of the German Enlightenment’, and which ‘is also at the heart of Jaspers’ work’. Thornhill thus identifies Jaspers sustaining a ‘balance’ between Hamann and Kant, and occupying ‘an unresolved and uncertain dialectic’ between the two ‘conceptions of human being-in-the-world’:

‘The hermeneutical approach has no truth without epistemology, and epistemology has no truth without hermeneutics. Both epistemology and hermeneutics forfeit their truth, however, when they consider themselves in possession of it: either as the disclosed law of revelation or the formal law of cognition.’

Thornhill thus sees more to Jaspers than a relativization of the truths of hermeneutics and epistemology. For, Thornhill argues, in that he can be seen to ‘turn simultaneously against both Hamann and Kant’, Jaspers shows that both earlier thinkers ultimately falsify metaphysics – and in doing so falsify humanity.

Hamann sought to objectively manifest the truth of metaphysics by interpreting God as a fact of worldly existence and certainty, whilst Kant sought both to ideally manifest the truth of metaphysics by transposing metaphysical ideas into elements of human consciousness and praxis, and to limit the truth of metaphysics by formally limiting such idealist human elements against metaphysics. In contrast to these ‘formal-ideal and objectivizing responses to metaphysics proposed by Kant and Hamann’, Thornhill writes, Jaspers’ thinking suggests that all attempts ‘either objectively or ideally to manifest or limit the truth of metaphysics can only ever be false truths’. Thornhill clarifies that both Kant’s formal-ideal and Hamann’s objectivizing reactions to the metaphysical legacy, are ‘in one respect paradoxically identical: both examine the human relation to transcendence as a juridical form’. The options are merely that human consciousness ‘either legally determines its inclusion of, and difference from, metaphysics (Kant), or accepts the objective disclosure of God’s will (Hamann)’. By positing an ultimately juridical human relation to transcendence in these ways however, Thornhill observes, both epistemology and hermeneutics falsify the truths of both metaphysics and humanity. It is the juridical human relation to transcendence which we can find Jaspers contesting. ‘The truth of metaphysics and humanity, for Jaspers however, is only in the ongoing and relative (self-)interpretation of humanity as metaphysical.’ Jaspers’ concept of philosophical belief is thus distinguished by the fact that, precisely whilst it fuses epistemology and hermeneutics (or philosophy and revelation), ‘it also seeks to disclose human truths in a manner which neither hermeneutics nor epistemology alone can accomplish’.       

Hamann and Jaspers

Possibilities of Human Transcendence

In my next posts I want to present a summary of Chris Thornhill’s account, in his Karl Jaspers, of the relation between the thinking of Hamann and that of Jaspers. Thornhill’s analysis identifies ‘deep symmetries’ between the two thinkers. ‘Hamann’s philosophy anticipates both Jaspers’ partial theological critique of Kant, and even certain features of his theory of communication and his transcendental hermeneutics.’

Thornhill observes that scant attention has been paid to ‘Hamann’s prefiguring of the critique of Kant which underpins existential philosophy’; which is unfortunate, because Hamann’s argument that (in Thornhill’s words) ‘the claims of reason cannot be separated from historical and linguistic horizons’ anticipates ‘the reflections on Kant set out by Jaspers, Heidegger and other thinkers in the existential line’. Because Hamann, like Heidegger, indicated that ‘cognition does not occur independently of existing practical relations, and that it is at all times pre-structured by language’, Hamann’s ‘attack on Kant’s epistemological abstraction […] represents a proto-Heideggerian assault on the conception of the thinking subject as an isolated being’. As Thornhill puts it later in his book, ‘Both Heidegger and Jaspers follow Hamann in conceiving of language as a non-formalized mode of cognitive agency, which counteracts the epistemological stasis of Kant’s transcendental reason.’ Unique to his anticipation of Jaspers, however – Thornhill notes – is Hamann’s conception of communication. Whilst ‘certainly foreshadowing both Heidegger and Rosenzweig’, Thornhill writes, ‘Hamann’s reflections on language alter the Kantian concept of the transcendental subject in a manner which equally strongly resembles Jaspers’ linguistic and hermeneutical theory’.

Hamann, Thornhill sees, supplants ‘the isolation of the Kantian subject’ with ‘a relational theology of language, in which human communication always involves a hermeneutical disclosure, or revelation, of the possibility of human transcendence’:

‘Like Jaspers after him, he argues that human reason interprets its own truthful possibilities in linguistic processes which confront reason with vital, practical, sensory and transcendent modes of experience. In language, thus, reason is able to conceive of its transcendence as a linguistic experience of, and a participation in, its own unifying origin, which is divine creation. In these reflections, Hamann prefigures the existential-communicative conception of being developed by Jaspers.’

As Thornhill observes, Jaspers’ theory of language is ‘an important corrective to Heidegger’s practical-linguistic critique of Kant’. Whilst Heidegger argued that language (in Thornhill’s words) ‘defines and constitutes the practically disclosed horizon of the world’, and thus ‘expressly excludes all ideal components from experience’, Jaspers by contrast maintained that language ‘always positions human consciousness in a relation (albeit existentially uncertain) to its primary ideal unity (its transcendence), and it thus permits an ideal/practical disclosure of this unity’. Like Hamann, Jaspers indicates that (as Thornhill writes) ‘language, and the written documents of language, always illuminate a primary unity of practical, sensory and transcendental experience to human life’.

Hamann’s thinking thus anticipated Jaspers’ transcendental hermeneutics by evolving a conception of language in terms of what Thornhill calls a ‘unifying originary hermeneutic’. ‘Indeed, Hamann’s attempt to undermine Kant’s (allegedly) false purification of reason by presenting language as a unifying originary hermeneutic, points most evidently in the direction of Jaspers’ attempt to refigure metaphysics and idealism as hermeneutics.’ Jaspers’ thinking proposes a hermeneutical renewal of metaphysics, or what Thornhill elsewhere [here] describes as a ‘hermeneutical transformation of idealism into a metaphysics of symbolic interpretation’. This is a move anticipated by Hamann, as Thornhill observes when he notes that Hamann suggested that (as Thornhill puts it), ‘In the images (Bilder) of language, […] documents of transcendence are preserved which always await interpretation’. ‘Like Jaspers after him, Hamann re-orders metaphysics as an immanent, yet transcendent process of communication and interpretation.’

As Thornhill sees, Jaspers does not follow Hamann in maintaining ‘an expressly theological argument’ on the transcendentally symbolic content of language. Yet the very fact that Hamann posits such content means that he prefigures the basis of Jaspers’ theory of the ‘ciphers of transcendence’. Jaspers proposed ciphers of transcendence (Chiffren der Transzendenz) as uncertain, yet decisive, symbolic forms – as opposed to reified doctrinal or scientific proof-forms – in which (Thornhill writes) ‘the possibility for transcendent self-realization is reflected to human thinking in fleeting moments of (self-)interpretation’. There is a ‘cipher of God’, but natural life and historical, cultural, mythological and philosophical artefacts also supply ciphers of transcendence. As Thornhill notes, ‘These ciphers, although not giving finally valid form to transcendence, remain as ephemeral presences, on the ground of which the most truthful existence occurs, and in which humanity experientially interprets itself as meta-physical.’ Our interpretation of such ephemeral presences is a necessarily unstable, uncertain hermeneutical process, which is attended by a ‘relative process of communication’ (Thornhill). Precisely the fraughtness of this existential, hermeneutic-communicative forcefield generates its force, its certainty. ‘Philosophical belief’, for Jaspers (Thornhill writes), ‘has its only hold in the ciphers of transcendence: yet the interpretation of these ciphers is only existentially binding because they do not stabilize transcendence as certainty, but merely refer humanity to its own possibilities, and thus invite communication on these’. Moreover, in this way the ‘false [reified] truths of theology, Jaspers thus intimates, become true again in the secular-existential praxis of our communicating about them’.

To be continued.

Irregular Language, part 2

The Living Word

In After Enlightenment, Betz notes how, in Hamann’s case, the dictum that one cannot understand the work apart from the man ‘applies to an almost unparalleled degree’. Hamann’s rational project of humbling proud autonomous reason, for example, reflected his own uncanny combination of ‘idiocy and profundity’. Betz quotes Friedrich Leopold of Stolberg’s comment that, ‘At one moment he has the appearance of one who cannot count to three; the next moment he overflows with genius and fire.’ Hamann himself wrote of aiming at a ‘stoic wisdom that interchangeably unites the imbecillitatem Hominis and the securitatem Dei ’. As Betz notes, the title of the fragment Apologie meines Cretinen refers to Hamann’s younger brother, who suffered from mental illness, and for whom Hamann and his partner Regina Schumacher cared until his premature death.

In The Fate of Reason, Beiser drew attention to the crucial importance for the development of Hamann’s thinking of his experiences as a young man in London, where he had been dispatched in 1757 by his friend the Riga trader Christoph Berens on some form of pointless business mission:

‘To locate the source of Hamann’s philosophy, we have to go back to his early years in London in 1758. What the young Hamann saw during a mystical experience contains the germ of his later philosophy, not to mention the basis for his critique of Kant and the Aufklärung.’

In Beiser’s words, the circumstances surrounding Hamann’s conversion to Christianity are ‘dramatic and moving, the stuff of a novel or play’. Humiliated and shaken by a derisive reception at the Russian Embassy in London, Hamann fell into despair, and felt lost and alone in a foreign land. Seeking to relieve his misery, he squandered all his money on a dissolute life. Then, ‘I went about depressed, staggering to and fro, without a soul with whom to share my burden, who could give me advice or help.’ Finally in the winter of 1758 he rented a room in Marlborough Street, seeking to seclude himself with his books. As Betz writes, ‘It was here, with no money, a £300 debt, and failing health that he began an intensive reading of the Bible.’ In Beiser’s account,

‘He read it in the most personal manner, as if it were God’s message to him alone. He saw the history of the Jewish people as a parable about his own sufferings. All that happened to him in London, all his trials and tribulations, seemed to be prefigured in the Bible.’

On the evening of March 31, 1758, reading the fifth book of Moses, Hamann began to – in Beiser’s words – ‘feel the spirit of God working through him’.

‘After hearing the voice of God inside himself, and after reading the Bible in his personal and allegorical way, Hamann came to believe that God was always communicating with him, if he would only listen. Indeed, he became convinced that everything that happened to him contained a secret message from God, and that it was an allegory like everything else in the Bible. This conviction then led Hamann to a grand and extraordinary metaphysical conclusion: that the creation is the secret language of God, the symbols by which he communicates his message to man. All nature and history therefore consist in hieroglyphs, divine ciphers, secret symbols, and puzzles. […] In Hamann’s metaphorical terms, “God is a writer, and his creation is his language.”’

Hamann understood language, Betz notes, as ‘the point of intersection between things divine and human’. In The Knight of the Rose-Cross, as Betz observes, Hamann presents language as being ‘at once fully human (“as natural as child’s play”) and fully divine (as having its ultimate source in the Creator)’. Hamann:

‘Every phenomenon of nature was a word – the sign, symbol, and pledge of a new, secret, inexpressible, but at the same time all the more intimate union, communication, and communion of divine energies and ideas. In the beginning everything that the man [Adam] heard, saw with his eyes, looked upon, and touched with his hands was a living word; for God was the Word. With this Word in his mouth and in his heart, the origin of language was as natural, so near and easy, as child’s play […].’

What Betz calls Hamann’s ‘view of original and redeemed language as a kind of innocent, “playful” response to the Logos’, seems to me to reimagine the garden of Eden as a stammerer’s fantasy of the fluent condition; for the stammerer spoken language is often far from ‘near and easy’, but for Hamann’s Adam, divinity has supplied communicative ease, naturalness and the self-confidence (or self-forgetfulness) required to be linguistically playful – just as Christian hermeneutics supported Hamann during his London breakdown. Deeply personal issues arising from his experiences of dysfluency and mental illness do seem to me to provide the existential context for Hamann’s conviction that, as Betz puts it, ‘language is essentially a dialogical religious phenomenon’, involving a suffering human and redemptive alterity. The concept of a 'living word’ is surely, at least on some level or in part, Hamann’s response to his own stammerer’s experience of communication as something which – at wholly unpredictable intervals – becomes blocked or frozen. Similarly, Hamann evolved a concept and practice of a living hermeneutic as a response to the depressive ‘cover’ clamping down on his mental health in London; the origin of the scriptural commentary he produced in London, the Biblical Meditations, was the urge to read ‘with more hunger’ so as to develop a mode of spontaneous exegesis from that renewed vitality:



‘Because I wanted to make a new beginning, it seemed as if I began to perceive a cover over my reason and my heart, which had kept the book closed to me the first time. I thus set out to read it with more attention, in a more orderly fashion, and with more hunger; and to write down my thoughts as they would occur.’

Betz matches Hamann’s concept of a living word to his concept of a living hermeneutic, when discussing Hamann’s perspective on the biblical critic J. D. Michaelis in Aesthetica in nuce. Writing of the way in  which, ‘as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, the language of Scripture is “living and active” (4: 12)’, Betz notes that for Hamann, ‘it is precisely this that Michaelis cannot see: lacking the inspired gift of interpretation (cf. 1 Cor. 12: 10), he cannot see the prophetic Spirit of God tabernacling within the contingent and seemingly arbitrary elements of human language’. Betz also records that by the time of his return to Germany from London, Hamann’s urge to practice his hermeneutic gift had grown into a vocation. ‘My vocation is neither to be a businessman, nor a civil servant, nor a man of the world […] Reading the Bible and praying are the work of a Christian’. Yet as Betz sees, already in 1746, as a student matriculating at the University of Königsberg, Hamann affiliated his dysfluency to his disinclination to practice professional Bible study: theology. ‘A more immediate reason he cites for not taking up theology, however, was a speech impediment, in addition to his poor memory, the corruption of the clergy, his high estimation of this vocation, and his sense of hypocrisy’.

For Hamann, ‘Humility of heart is the one required disposition and most indispensable preparation for the reading of the Bible.’ Betz fascinatingly shows how Hamann’s self-denying stammering, which disqualified him from becoming a theologian, and his conception of Scripture as something ‘living and active’ (Heb. 4: 12), alike enabled him to develop a practice of hermeneutic humility.  

‘For it is no longer a question of how can I (viewed as a complete, self-present, pre-textual identity) understand the text, but rather a question of how the text understands and constitutes me. Indeed, as Bayer puts it, “Scripture interprets me and not I scripture.” Accordingly, priority shifts from the modern subject, which constitutes itself (e.g., through Descartes’s radical doubt or Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception), to the text, which represents the subject to itself in a new light, metaschematically constituting (or reconstituting) its identity by means of the figures and parables in the story that is told.’

The humility underpinning Hamann’s self-reconstituting hermeneutics itself reflects the humility of the Bible’s author, who – Hamann believed – condescended to elevate human history into parables of sacred history. Betz:

‘Thus Hamann speaks in striking terms, in addition to [of] the humility of the Son, of the humility of the Holy Spirit, “who, in the face of our proud little mare of reason, produced a book as his Word, in which, like a foolish and crazy [spirit], what is more, like an unholy and unclean spirit, he made small, contemptuous events into the history of heaven and of God (1 Cor. 1: 25).”’

In summary, Hamann understands hermeneutics not as a form of philosophical reason which constitutes reality, but as an act of spiritual petition to the Scripture which, in his Christian view, constitutes reality. ‘As he puts it in the “Fragments,” “Nature and history are […] the two great commentarii on the divine Word; and the latter, on the other hand, the only key that unlocks our knowledge of both.”’ Hamann also thinks of faith as the key to understanding nature and history – in the Socratic Memorabilia he writes, ‘Without faith we cannot even understand creation and nature’ – and so in this way faith is equivalent to Scripture; but of course for Hamann faith is itself also necessary for accessing the truths of Scripture: ‘the Holy Spirit is promised to all who petition the heavenly Father’.

To be continued.

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.