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, part 2

Thornhill shows the congruity of Jaspers' conception of foundering communicative reason as a decisive ‘hermeneutic of possible transcendence’, with the Weimar socialist theologian Paul Tillich’s theorization of revelation. For Tillich as for Jaspers, revelation involves ‘the shattering of reason’ (in Thornhill’s words); precisely as such however, revelation ‘is not the negation of reason’, because it is ‘the moment where reason experiences its highest degree of transcendent and unconditioned truthfulness’. Both Jaspers and Tillich conceive of revelation as being ‘not solely a fact of faith, but also a philosophical possibility of human reason’, which presents itself wherever reason founders, or ‘encounters the limits of its formal processes’. Thornhill also explains how Jaspers’ theory of the limit, or of a decisive hermeneutic operating in existential limit-situations, parallels Tillich’s conceptualization of kairos, and how both thinkers thus theorize a ‘decisive moment of responsible transcendence’.

Tillich used the concept of kairos to capture what he called ‘fulfilled time’; the moments in human life ‘in which eternity breaks in’ on the usual conditions of human history. In Thornhill’s words, kairos is thus ‘a moment of historical time in which human life reflects upon its possibilities at the limits of its historicality’; in a way recalling Jaspers’ theory of the limit, Thornhill notes, Tillich could therefore assert kairos as a ‘historical consciousness […] whose ethos is unconditioned responsibility for the present moment in time’. Thornhill stresses that – and whilst Heidegger simply ‘interprets the moment of human decision as the awareness of the immutability of the historical forms in which human life is placed’ – Tillich and Jaspers alike understand ‘true kairological decisiveness’ to be an ‘ethical position’. This is because they both sense that genuine ‘transcendent(al) self-knowledge’ articulates itself in ‘acts of active self-choice, self-disclosure and, in the strict sense, historical responsibility towards others’. Both Tillich and Jaspers assert, Thornhill clarifies, that ‘kairos provides the grounds for an innerworldly ‘metaphysic of responsibility’. Quoting Tillich, Thornhill emphasizes this point:      

   

‘It is only in the kairological specificity of historical responsibility, not in the compliance with “universal law”, that human life explains and enacts the possibilities of its transcendence. The decisive moment of responsible transcendence (kairos for Tillich; Grenze [limit] for Jaspers) does not effect here (as for Barth) an absolute crisis of the human realm. Rather, in quasi-Kantian, or even quasi-Weberian manner, both Tillich and Jaspers see the kairos of responsibility as an ethical intrusion into the existing conditions of human life, and as an unconditioned position of accountability towards these conditions.’

It is important to note, finally, that when (what Thornhill calls) Jaspers’ ‘ethical kairology’ enables him to posit an innerworldly metaphysic of responsibility, he is thereby nonetheless thinking towards a true non-secularity; for Jaspers, as Thornhill writes, ‘the truth of history, although interpreted in history, cannot be reconciled with the present conditions of historical life’. Thornhill underlines this point by explicating the shared foundations of Jaspers’ and Karl Barth’s ‘eschatological hermeneutic as the guarantor of the historicality of history’.

Jaspers and Barth, Thornhill sees, ‘share the conviction that revelation cannot be objectified in a particular set of worldly imperatives, and that revelation cannot be cemented in any system of legal or political obligation’. Both assert that, as Thornhill puts it, ‘No order within history itself, […] can arrogate the authority of transcendence to itself. Any attempt of this kind is merely an example of bad secularity, or bad metaphysics.’ Hence both thinkers claim that ‘the disclosure of transcendence occurs at all times at the limit of history, and that it cannot be incorporated into the fixed orders of everyday history’. Moreover both Barth and Jaspers indicate that ‘human life can only interpret itself adequately insofar as it interprets itself and its products under the index of their limits and their possible otherness’. Barth and Jaspers’ shared argument that ‘humanity interprets its own transcendence only as it brings into suspension the forms in which it exists, only as it knows itself external to the forms of its worldliness’, Thornhill stresses, is precisely why Barth (from a christological viewpoint) and Jaspers (from a hermeneutical viewpoint), ‘retain a far stronger attachment to the eschatological basis of Christianity than their opponents amongst liberal and conservative theologians’. Jaspers’ identification of a truthful hermeneutic of transcendence with a self-hermeneutic of individual crisis or failure, means that for him – as for Barth – transcendence is, in Thornhill’s words, ‘merely a decisive possibility at the limit of the temporal’; for both thinkers ‘true interpretation must take place at the limit of objective self-awareness’, and ‘all attempts interpretively to integrate transcendence into a historical synthesis inevitably fall into the trap of false objectification’. Jaspers and Barth’s shared conviction that, as Thornhill writes, ‘the interpretation of revelation is never final’ is therefore what brings both Jaspers and Barth to suggest ‘an either explicitly or implicitly eschatological hermeneutic as the guarantor of the historicality of history’: both thinkers hold ‘the essentially eschatological belief that human history in its present condition cannot provide for final truthfulness, and that the truth of history, although interpreted in history, cannot be reconciled with the present conditions of historical life’.      

Thornhill thus pays considerable attention to the way in which Jaspers, like Barth, argues that ‘the interpretation of transcendence cannot be historically fixed as a reflex within any continuum of culture, politics or doctrine’. Yet, crucially, Thornhill also suggests that the type of non-secularity established within Barth’s thinking, is distinct from the true non-secularity established within Jaspers’. The truth of the non-secularity thought by Jaspers, Thornhill’s argument hints, hinges on his proposal of a self-hermeneutic of individual failure. Jaspers, Thornhill sees, charges Barth and the dialectical theologians with interpreting revelation as ‘the unique source of authority against human history’; precisely in their opposition to secular legitimacy, they ‘succeed only in recreating revelation at the limit of human history as a new source of objective authority’. Thornhill writes that when Barth in this way insisted on the objective authority of revelation, and so ultimately aligned himself with the Lutheran theologian Emanuel Hirsch and Barth’s other reactionary adversaries, he became ‘complicit in the process which secularizes and materializes religious contents’.

Crucially, Thornhill stresses that, viewed from Jaspers’ perspective, Barth’s thinking of radical anti-secularity necessarily creates an ‘objectivizing system of belief’, precisely because it fails to recognize ‘the human relativity of all truly transcendental interpretation’. Thornhill maintains that when the Lutherans, viewed from Jaspers’ position, ‘crudely press revelation into service for the authority of the nation state’, and Barth poses revelation at the limit of history as a new source of objective authority, this is because – so Jaspers’ thinking intimates – they all obscure ‘the absolute relativity of revelation’. ‘In this respect, both eliminate the genuine transcendence of revelation, which is its uncertainty, and both falsely concretize transcendence as authority – as law.’ Thornhill’s work suggests that, in opposition to this juridical tendency of Weimar theology, Jaspers’ identification of a truthful interpretation of transcendence with a self-hermeneutic of individual crisis or failure, recreates the relativity of truly transcendental hermeneutics, and so establishes a true non-secularity – one which ‘relies on an interpretive component of humanity, secularity and liberality ’.  

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.

The Spiritual Condition of the Age, part 2

In The Spiritual Condition of the Age, Jaspers maintained that ‘the problem of the mode of remembrance is the problem of such culture as still remains possible’. Rather than processing historical knowledge into discrete units of cognition which can then be bureaucratically distributed and assessed throughout the education system by means of ‘learning outcomes’ and ‘attainment’ league tables, as now, we could instead – Jaspers suggested – enable historical knowledge to become implicated with the self’s experience. This could rejuvenate culture, because we would have re-established a relationship between a person’s memory of culture and her own spiritual life – ‘a sincere historicity is a readiness to discover the sources which feed all life and therefore the life of the present as well’.

‘For remembrance as a mere knowledge of the past is nothing more than a collection of an infinite number of antiquarian details; remembrance as mere contemplation instinct with understanding realizes the pictures and the figures of the past only as a non-committal confrontation. It is not until remembrance takes the form of assimilation that there comes into being the reality of the selfhood of a contemporary human being in the form of veneration; subsequently as a standard for his own feeling and activity; and finally as participation in his own eternal being.’

The Spiritual Condition of the Age posits an awareness of temporal or historical continuity to be a mainstay of the formation of self-existence. For example, Jaspers sees that work can potentially consolidate selfhood, but ‘when the day’s work grew sufficient to itself and ceased to be built up into a constituent of the worker’s life – then man was, as it were, bereft of his world’. If the worker is ‘lacking all sense of historical continuity with past or future, man cannot remain man’. Jaspers opposes selfhood to the self which simply preserves itself: ‘if he craves for self-expression, there promptly arises a tension between his self-preservative impulse, on the one hand, and his real selfhood’. Tensions also arise with ‘the winners in the race’, who tend to ‘have qualities which disincline them to allow others to be their true selves’. Jaspers explains the familiar syndrome of the successful father and the failed son:  

‘Hence the winners tend to snub all those who aim at adequate self-expression, speaking of them as pretentious, eccentric, biased, unpractical, and measuring their achievements by insincere absolute standards; they are personally suspect, they are stigmatized as provocative, as disturbers of the peace […] Because he only “arrives” who has sacrificed his selfhood, the arrivist will not tolerate self-expression in subordinates.’  

In ‘Britain’s Liberal Riots’, Blond describes our contemporary society in which winners and losers alike have been brought to sacrifice their selfhood, and to be ruled by the instinct of self-preservation or self-interest alone. He notes that ‘the rule for the last thirty years is that one rules the many by persuading them that the values of the self-interested few ought to be their principles as well’. As a consequence of the UK’s general ‘moral and social collapse’ since Thatcher, the rioters were ‘merely acting out the values that now seem to govern and embody Britain – ruthless self-interest coupled to a rootless consumer nihilism’. Jaspers already saw how the totalizing of the principle of self-interest reveals self-interest to be not a real principle at all, but instead a valueless black hole which only creates rootlessness as it eats away at our sense of communal self-existence.

‘The crisis realizes itself as a lack of confidence. If people still cling to the coercion of the law, if they are still convinced by power, and by the rigidity of convention, it is only because of a calculus of material advantages, and not from any real confidence. When all has been reduced to the purposiveness of life-interests, the consciousness of the substantiality of the whole has been destroyed.’

Now that even career cliques based on competitive socializing, such as our dehumanizing humanities academia, are apparent to be no more than a source of income and status, we can see the relevance of Jaspers' argument that social confidence remains – can only be nurtured – within the sphere of personal ties or intersubjective communication.  ‘Every well-informed person is acquainted with the deceptions, the deviations, the untrustworthiness that prevail in his own familiar domain. Where confidence persists, it is only within very narrow circles, for it never extends to the totality.’ Quite probably, the more feral the operations of the professional club, the more emphasis is laid on what can be gained from interpersonal intimacy: so that this dialectic of communication (public suspicion/ private confidence), can be a harmful trap just as much as a life-enhancing opening.

Jaspers observes how we begin to view, and hence experience, social relations and interpersonal communication as a harmful trap when the principle of self-interest dominates. ‘It is, indeed, the tendency of the life-order to become absolute which arouses an uncontrollable dread of life.’ Because the self-preservative impulse is twinned with fear of self-destruction, the mental illness of anxiety is integral to modern society. ‘In the rationalization and universalization of the life-order there has grown contemporaneously with its fantastic success an awareness of imminent ruin tantamount to a dread of the approaching end of all that makes life worth living.’ With great insight, Jaspers notes the effects on the self’s communicative capacity of being ‘alarmed at the likelihood that he will in the near future become unable to obtain the vital necessaries’. Social exclusion becomes vulnerability’s self-fulfilling prophecy:

‘The sufferer from anxiety has confidence in no one; he will not enter into absolute ties with any other person. One who fails to participate in what others are doing is left alone. The threat of being sacrificed arouses the sense of having been utterly forsaken, and this drives the sufferer out of his frivolous ephemeralness into cynical hardness and then into anxiety. In general, life seems full of dread.’

Many many people, including myself, have lived like this, and it is possible to endure particularly if a person can come to terms with what Jaspers calls ‘a very different dread, namely that concerning his selfhood’, and the threat of losing it. Jaspers observes that psychiatry can never deal effectively with mental illness so long as it functions within an economy which threatens us all with social sacrifice. But psychiatry could genuinely help people, he argues, if it were to attend to the heady, spiritual formation of self-existence, in the face of the totalization of the principle of self-interest:

‘Doctors try and talk the sick or those who believe themselves sick out of the fear of death. But these institutions function effectively only when things are going well with the individual. The life-order cannot dispel the dread which is part of every individual’s lot. This anxiety can only be controlled by the more exalted dread felt by existence threatened with the loss of its selfhood, which induces an overriding religious or philosophical exaltation. When existence is paralysed, the dread of life cannot fail to grow. The all-embracing dominion of the life-order would destroy man as existence without ever being able to free him from the dread of life.’

Jaspers writes of how at crisis-points of the battle of life, mental illness can trigger physical sickness:

‘If a man comes to look upon his life as spiritually unacceptable, as intolerable were it merely because he can no longer understand its significance, he takes flight into illness, which envelops him like a visible protector. For in those limitary situations which (as mere life-experiences) crush him inwardly, man needs, either the selfhood of freedom, or else some objective point of support.’

The totalizing functionalism of the life-order, Jaspers argues, is threatened by its own limits as well as by ‘the selfhood of freedom’: ‘The unavoidability of the life-order finds its limit in the human being who refuses to be wholly absorbed into a function; and further in this, that no unique and perfected and definitive life-order is possible.’ Indeed, free refusal of technicizing objectivity by the vulnerable is enabled by the crisis-points – the ‘lacunæ’ – of technique itself. For example: when the labour market makes you unemployed, or when a university lecturer fails to arrange the placement that could help you back into work.

‘It is true that most us of us dread the freedom of selfhood. Still, it is possible that in the interconnexions of the titanic apparatus there are so many lacunæ that, for those who dare, it may remain possible, in some unexpected way, for them to realize their historicity out of their own sources. […] Pulling himself together on the border-line of destruction, the independent human being may arise, one who will take matters into his own hands and will enjoy true being.’

Seeing that ‘the basic problem of our time is whether an independent human being in his self-comprehended destiny is still possible’, Jaspers asserts that addressing the problem of contemporary freedom is a matter of the responsible self-development of personal existence: ‘this is a problem which, as clearly formulated and understood, tends to annul itself; for only he who is capable of being free can sincerely and comprehendingly moot the problem of freedom’. Hope for the possibility of a selfhood of freedom, Jaspers maintains, is dependent on an existentialist thinking which takes the risk of claiming freedom in itself, rather than arrogantly and presumptuously assuming that subjective freedom already exists, and is merely a means of planning objective freedom.

‘In objectifying thought, on the other hand, whereby the liberty of man is treated as an extant form of life and wherein the only question that arises is under what conditions liberty can be realized, it becomes conceivable that the whole history of mankind is a vain endeavour to be free.’ 

Anticipating contemporary academics’ focus on aspects of bureaucratic planning such as course designing, and their downplaying of sustained autonomous research in favour of cosy specialization, conference surfing and jumping on bandwagons, The Spiritual Condition of the Age comments on the degeneration of the university to its present state of being ‘no more than a school’. ‘An enforced curriculum relieves the individual from the risks attendant upon seeking a path for himself. But without the hazards of liberty, there can be no possibility of independent thought.’

Jaspers enables us to see that participation in the ‘hazards of liberty’ is an appropriate response to the flux of rootlessness, or to our condition of being ‘uprooted’ within the ‘historically determined and changing situation’ of modern secularism,  which – according to Blond’s analysis of last year’s rioting – we still inhabit. The development of a selfhood of freedom, for example through the practice of ‘independent thought’, is today no more than a ‘possibility’ precisely because now, as Jaspers writes, ‘existence is a mere possibility, not something possessed and guaranteed. All objectivity has become ambiguous: the true seems irrevocably lost; substance, perplexity: reality, a masquerade.’ The limit-point crises signified by mental illness, for example, are read by Jaspers as products and markers of our perplexifying modern existential state, which are also openings to the development of a selfhood of freedom:

‘He who wishes to find his way to the origin of the crisis must pass through the lost domain of truth, in order to revise it possessively; must traverse the domain of perplexity to reach decision concerning himself; must strip off the trappings of the masquerade, in order to disclose the genuine that lies beneath.’  

Jaspers suggests that risky intellectual work, precisely in its perilousness, is suited to developing its own freedom through the traversal of our critical spiritual condition; whereas ‘a new world cannot arise out of the crisis through the work of the rational life-order as such’.

‘What is needful is that the human being shall achieve something more than he brings to pass in the life-order, shall achieve it by way of the State as expressive of the will towards the whole, by the State to which the life-order has become nothing but a means – and also through mental creation, whereby he grows aware of his own being. Along both these roads he can regain consciousness of the origin and the aim of human existence in the nobility of free self-creation, cognizance of which has been lost in the life-order.’

Hence in this book Jaspers presents existentialism as a free and communicative thinking which exceeds the specialist cognition of the academic pseudo-community.

‘In fact, from the opening of the second half of the nineteenth century the traditional philosophy became everywhere an enterprise carried on by university schools which more and more seldom were communities of philosophic persons drawing from their own sources and communicating in the form of thought what had welled up in their own consciousness.’

Technical cognition of fragments of objectivity is to be exceeded by the visionary definition of self-existence, Jaspers argues, because only such meta-academic intellectual activity can hold the possibility of redeeming – or creating ‘a new world’ out of – the flux of rootlessness. We have already seen how, in Jaspers’ view, academic Marxism by contrast degrades the modern ‘dialectic of the extant being and consciousness’ by attaching being fixedly to its own simplistic historical analytic; when in fact the dialectic of modern secularism – like any historical dialectic – ‘cannot be properly understood on a purely intellectual plane, but can only be adequately grasped in the momentous fulfillment of that within us which, through its claim to selfhood, provides the spirit with its capacity for greatness’.       

‘Existence-philosophy is the way of thought by means of which man seeks to become himself; it makes use of expert knowledge while at the same time going beyond it. This way of thought does not cognize objects, but elucidates and makes actual the being of the thinker. Brought into a state of suspense by having transcended the cognitions of the world (as the adoption of a philosophical attitude towards the world) that fixate being, it appeals to its own freedom (as the elucidation of existence) and gains space for its own unconditioned activity through conjuring up Transcendence (as metaphysics).’

You could argue that, for Jaspers, the only way to think beyond modern rootlessness is by defining its flux. The communicative strand of Jaspers’ existentialism means that for him the dialectic of being and consciousness can only be adequately grasped – or defined in a sort of vision which draws on our originary transcendental impulses – through a dialectic of consciousness and consciousness. ‘This existence-philosophy cannot be rounded off in any particular work, nor can it acquire definitive perfectionment as the life of any particular thinker.’ For Jaspers ‘the study of the innermost springs of behaviour […] belongs to the domain of true communication’. Intersubjective communication enables existentialist thinking as a dialogue between originary transcendental capacities: such thinking cannot in itself redeem or bridge the dialectic of being and consciousness, but it can at least enable us to ‘regain consciousness of the origin and the aim of human existence’ – and so it holds the possibility of redeeming, or creating ‘a new world’ out of, the flux of rootlessness. ‘Existence-philosophy cannot discover any solution, but can only become real in the multiplicity of thought proceeding from extant origins in the communication from one to another.’ What the existentialist philosopher is really creating, in Jaspers’ view, is our various singular claims to transcendence, and a dialogue between them. ‘Not merged in the enterprise of the coming and going idols of the life-order, he works as self-existence on behalf of self-existence; for he creates life as a demand through influencing others out of their own sources.’ The flux of rootlessness can only be defined visionarily precisely through such a fulfilment of our originary transcendental impulses, through ‘influencing others out of their own sources’, or the dialectic of being and consciousness ‘adequately grasped in the momentous fulfillment of that within us which, through its claim to selfhood, provides the spirit with its capacity for greatness’.  

the flux of rootlessness is Bleak House in 2011, solitary spectator-consumers look on as the city spontaneously combusts in shame