Karl Jaspers

1883-1969 · German · Existential Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Psychopathology, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of History

To philosophize is at the same time to learn how to live and to learn how to die.

Karl Jaspers came to philosophy through psychiatry — his General Psychopathology (1913) was the first systematic phenomenological account of mental illness, leaving him convinced something essential about human beings escaped clinical categories. When the Nazis stripped him of his Heidelberg chair because his wife Gertrud was Jewish, he refused to divorce her and waited out the occupation in hidden retreat, then wrote The Question of German Guilt (1946): four tiers — criminal, political, moral, metaphysical — that Germany could not rebuild without confronting.

Topics Karl Jaspers addresses

• existenz
• existenzerhellung
• grenzsituationen
• das umgreifende
• the modes of being
• kommunikation as liebender kampf
• scheitern
• philosophical faith
• ciphers of transcendence
• periechontologie
• vernunft and verstand
• revealed religion and the leap into authority
• the axial age
• the four tiers of guilt
• the german question and self-examination
• the atomic bomb and nuclear weapons
• philosophical world citizenship
• radical evil
• limit situations
• existenzphilosophie
• phenomenological psychiatry
• verstehende versus erklärende psychiatry
• the unconditional imperative
• the great philosophers project

Converse with Karl Jaspers on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Karl Jaspers's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.