Jaspers and Social Theory: Reason, Choice and Religion

By: Seyed Javad Meynagh

To be genuinely true, Truth

must be communicable.

Jaspers

Abstract

The question of choice is of paramount importance in the thought of Jaspers and religion is a sublime expression of that choice. Although social theory is a discourse on modern mindsets but it seems academic sociologies have hard time to deal with any discourse which takes religion seriously and here we are attempting to venture into the world of Jaspers in relation to reason, choice and religion, which would assist us in realizing how provincial disciplinary sociology has become in terms of interdisciplinary dialogue or dialogue among different sets of epistemes.

Introduction

Karl Jaspers was born on 23^rd of February 1883 in Oldenburg to Carl William and Henriette Jaspers, a respected family within the community. Carl was a lawyer, the local sheriff for a time, and a bank director. After studying law in Freiburg and Munich for three terms, Jaspers moved to Berlin and began to pursue a medical degree. Jaspers left Berlin for the University of Goettingen, where he studied from 1903 to 1906. Jaspers took the medical exams in 1908.

He received his initial degree in 1908 and later on Jaspers interned in the psychiatric ward at a hospital in Heidelberg. In February 1909 he received his M.D. and psychiatric degrees in Heidelberg, Germany. Jaspers’ doctorate thesis was “Homesickness and Crime.” Among psychiatric patients, Jaspers began to formulate a link between psychology and philosophy. Psychoanalysis and existentialism were also linked in the works of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and analysts Viktor Frankl and Rollo May. Four years after obtaining his psychiatric degree, Jaspers published General Psychopathology, a major work on mental illness that remains influential up to this very day. In 1916 Jaspers earned a professorship in psychology at Heidelberg. His interest in philosophy continued, as the war dragged to a conclusion. After the war concluded, Jaspers published Psychology of the World-View. Jaspers was awarded a professorship in philosophy, also at Heidelberg, in 1921. He was awarded tenure in 1922. Jaspers died on 26 February 1969, shortly after his eighty-sixth birthday. He left behind 25,000 letters and more than 35,000 pages of notes and manuscripts.

Karl Jaspers’ role in existentialism is not deeply appreciated, but he was an important contributor, who is even of an intercivilizational importance due to his engagement with great thinkers and religious founders of the world such as Buddhism, Islam, and Confucianism and so on. He coined the term “Existenzphilosophie” — a forerunner of the term existentialism — and this alone makes his contribution unique as it demonstrates that he had deep concerns about existentialistic issues that haunted human beings. Jaspers viewed his philosophy as active, forever changing. This approach compelled Jaspers to protest any attempt to group him with other philosophers.

As a philosopher who came upon the role along a circuitous path, Jaspers’ legacy is a merging of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Much like these two predecessors, Jaspers disliked formal philosophy (or what used to be called the Logical Positivism), especially as taught at universities. However, when merging the basics of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche into a foundation for existentialism, Jaspers did take liberties a “serious” philosopher would not have. According to Walter Kaufmann:

To Jaspers the differences between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche seem much less important than that which they have in common. What mattered most to them, does not matter to Jaspers: he dismisses Kierkegaard’s “forced Christianity” no less than Nietzsche’s “forced anti-Christianity” as relatively unimportant; he discounts Nietzsche’s ideas as absurdities, and he does not heed Kierkegaard’s central opposition to philosophy. All the many philosophers since Hegel and Schelling, however, fare far worse: they are at best instructive but lack human substance: “The original philosophers of the age are Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.” The crucial fact for Jaspers is that their thinking was not academically inspired but rooted in their Existenz. (Kaufmann, 1989. p 23)

Maybe it was his willingness to discard the prominent themes of both men that allowed Jaspers to create something unique and exciting. Kierkeaard’s Christianity was central to his writings, yet Jaspers had no difficulty dismissing Kierkegaard’s faith. Nietzsche’s “anti-Christian” tone was dismissed with equal ease by Jaspers, as he is one of those existentialists who is neither secularist like Sartre nor religious such as Kierkegaard but a thinker whose existentialism is based on a transcendental view of reality without relying on any specific orthodoxy.

The Core of Jaspers’ Philosophy

States of Being

Jaspers’ works present a system in which there are two states of being: the Dasein and Existenz. Some students of Jasperian existentialism are confused by these terms, as Dasein is the name used by Heidegger for a different conceptual framework. Dasein is existence in its most minimal sense; Dasein is the realm of objectivity and science. Jasper’s approach is not to devalue the importance of scientific objectivity but he does not view it as the alpha and omega of comprehension. On the contrary the objectivity is considered as a naïve approach to discovering the nature of existence and the self.

Existenz is “authentic” being. As with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre, we find that Jaspers emphasizes the importance of decision making and freedom in defining the individual. Total freedom for Jaspers translates into the same infinite possibility to redefine the self Sartre would describe in his responses to psychoanalysis. Freedom to make a decision apart from all previous decisions results in a sense of alienation and loneliness — again, the responsibility of creating a self is a major one. There are limits to our freedom, according to Jaspers. These limitations exist as “boundary situations” including death, suffering, guilt, chance, and conflict. Jaspers believed there is certain randomness to fate; chance situations arise forcing one to react in a manner not consistent with true freedom. Death stands apart from other boundaries as it is both the source of dread and the reason many choose to experience pleasures. Without death, there might not be a reason to search for pleasure. (Jaspers, 1986)

Self and Society

If Existenz is a subjective state of being, how can it be evaluated and analyzed by the individual? Jaspers suggests social interactions offer guidelines that individuals either adopt or reject. In other words, Existenz is a solitary state derived from the values of society. (Jaspers, 1933) As with Sartre’s idea of “mirrors” (“Hell is other people!”), Jaspers writes of the self as reflection in someone else’s authentic self. Unless we know what others think and expect of us, we cannot decide who we are or want to be. (Jaspers, 1967)

Jaspers, as a result, presents a view in which all people depend upon society for self-definition, even if the act of definition is a rejection of society’s values. (Jaspers, 1965) No one is strictly apart from society. In the extreme, a hermit defines his or her self as a total denunciation of social structures, but here is no “hermit” without a society from which to try to find a shelter. Accordingly, individuals experience a steady sensation of conflict: a desire to define the self freely while requiring society for that definition.

Leaps of Faith

Jaspers was a man of faith, but not a traditional religious thinker. His faith had little to do with orthodoxy as it appeared in Christian tradition (s). His break with tradition was a refutation of the formality and complex makeup of organized religion, not a rejection of transcendence or divine nature. Jaspers recognized his own faith lacked any basis in logic and more importantly he realized that his notion of philosophy is extremely far away from Logical Positivism at the time and instead of shying away he made a virtue of his idiosyncratic approach to questions of human existence that were totally absent from the logical parameters that positivist philosophers designed for human life. This “leap of faith” for Jaspers represented a free choice to believe in an existence grander than that perceived by modern episteme. (Kaufmann, 1989)

Religion and Modernity

The relation of religions to modernity has been approached from various points of departures by great many scholars in the past 200 hundred years and still is one of the most controversial issues within human sciences generally. Some have come to believe that modernity is an epoch within the history of humanity which, in turn, could be interpreted as if it has an inherent quality of its own in terms of values and nomos regulations. In this sense modernity has come to be viewed as a new axial age and some argue that it is equivalent to secularization while others have considered it as the heralding of new religious forms. (Lambert, 1999) This notion of axial age has, however, not been utilized by sociologists or social theorist to analyze modernity in a very systematic fashion.
Quite a lot of historians and philosophers have stressed the central role that certain periods in history have played in developing techniques, political structures, or worldviews which were to dominate the foreground of the next centuries or millennia before being, in turn, questioned, then replaced, or altered and inserted into new systems. (Lambert, 1999) Jaspers has attended to this question but rarely mentioned as a serious social theorist within the context of sociology or social theory. Jaspers approaches human history based on the concept of ‘Axial Age’ by attempting to delineate the profound complexities which each age brings to mankind globally. Man seems to have started again from scratch four times, Jaspers wrote (1954: 37-38): with the Neolithic age, with the earliest civilizations, with the emergence of the great empires, and with modernity. Each of these axial turns produced a general reshaping of the symbolic field, and a great religious commotion which led to disappearances, redefinitions, and emergences. Each period finally led to new religious configurations, respectively: oral agrarian religions, religions of antiquity, religions of salvation (Universalist Religions) and modern changes. The concept of "axial age" has been used to refer to one historical period: the emergence of universalism, philosophy, great religions and early science. (Jaspers 1954)
Jaspers, while in fact considering modernity as being a new axial period, regarded the turn taken by modernity in the nineteenth century as the harbinger of a probable "second axial period" (Jaspers 1954: 38). Jaspers identified modernity with four fundamental distinguishing features: modern science and technology, a craving for freedom, the emergence of the masses on the historical stage (nationalism, democracy, socialism, social movements), and globalization.
Jaspers (1954: 278-80) confined himself to some terse but insightful remarks: "If a transcendent aid does manifest itself," he predicted about completed modernity, "it can only be to free a man and by virtue of his autonomy," for "he that feels free lets his beliefs fluctuate, regardless of any clearly defined credo . . . in accordance with an unfettered faith, which escapes any particular definition, which remains separated while retaining the sense of the absolute and seriousness, along with their strong vitality." This faith, he holds, "still has not found any resonance with the masses" and is "despised by the representatives of the official, dogmatic, and doctrinaire creeds." But "It is likely, therefore, that the Bible religion will revive and undergo modifications." So Jaspers emphasizes the will to be free, which fits rather well with contemporary comments on individualization, but it also is, as Lambert notes (1999), an interesting prediction about fundamentalism and evangelism. In addition, Jaspers's own beliefs represent a radical demythologization: he neither believed in divine revelations nor in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus, whom he considered only as a spiritual genius. But he was convinced that there was a transcendent dimension in man, to be found within oneself and especially through the value of life and the need for achievement. So we could say that he added two more possible characteristics of religion in modernity, especially new forms of monism and this-worldliness. To revisit the Japserian thoughts on self and society within parameters of social theory and perhaps in relation to intercivilizational dialogue could prove constructive and timely indeed.

Reference

Jaspers, Karl. Man in the Modern Age. London: Routledge, 1933.

Jaspers, K. The Origin and Goal of History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1954.

Jaspers, K. Leonardo, Descartes, Max Weber: Three Essays. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965.

Jaspers, K. Philosophical faith and revelation. London: Collins, 1967.

Jaspers, K. Karl Jaspers, basic philosophical writings. Edited, Translated, with introductions by Edith Ehrlich, Leonard H. Ehrlich, George B. Pepper. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986.

Kaufmann, Walter; Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian, Penguin; 1989.
Lambert, Y. ‘Religion in Modernity as a New Axial Age: Secularization or New Religious Forms?’ Sociology of Religion, Fall 1999.

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