![]() In 1932 he published his magnum opus, the three-volume Philosophie, which is a detailed development of the notions of transcendence and Existenz. He received a professorship in philosophy at Heidelberg in 1921, after declining similar offers from the universities of Kiel and Greifswald. Both of these early works were based on his medical experience. He later called it the first genuinely existentialist work. It is based on Wilhelm Dilthey's Typologie der Weltanschauungen and marks Jaspers's transition from psychology to philosophy. Shortly after World War I he published his Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Psychology of world views 1919), which consists of descriptions of many different attitudes toward life. In 1916 he became professor of psychology at Heidelberg. His first major work, Allgemeine Psychopathologie ( General Psychopathology, 1913), is a book on methodology showing the merits and limits of various psychological procedures and descriptions. Immediately upon graduation he became a volunteer assistant in psychiatry at Heidelberg. He received his MD from Heidelberg in 1909, upon completion of his dissertation on Heimweh und Verbrechen (Nostalgia and crime). ![]() Jaspers studied law at the universities of Heidelberg and Munich, and medicine at Berlin, G öttingen, and Heidelberg. His father was a banker, constable, and jurist. Jaspers was born in 1883 in the East Frisian city of Oldenburg. Jaspers's religious thought, although it ignored Aristotelianism and Scholasticism, was deeply influenced by Plotinus, Giordano Bruno, Benedict de Spinoza, and Friedrich von Schelling and gives a modern phenomenological restatement of many of the classical religious intuitions of humankind. Furthermore, Husserl's ideas of the transcendental ego and transcendental consciousness conform to Jaspers's descriptions of the inner self ( Existenz ) and the outermost boundaries of the world ( das Umgreifende ). Jaspers used Husserl's method of descriptive phenomenology and adopted Husserl's concept of intentionality as a central function of the self. The influence of Edmund Husserl is also apparent, although it is perhaps unconscious, since it is mostly unacknowledged. Jaspers was influenced especially by Immanuel Kant, but also by S øren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, whom he admired because they were prophets who articulated the structure of their existence, because they were not academic philosophers, because their thinking welled up directly from their personal existence, and because they illustrated the axiom that philosophic thinking begins in the attempt to communicate to another the nature of one's Existenz. Philosophy need not be metaphysics it can only illuminate some of the potentialities of an individual existence, an existence that is ineffable, unique, and free. Genuine philosophy arises directly out of the problems confronting the individual philosopher in his existential, or historical, situation. We must live philosophy, since we cannot meaningfully paraphrase its conclusions. To appreciate philosophic insights we must -as Socrates and Sigmund Freud saw -arrive at them ourselves. Philosophy is an activity, a becoming, not a state of being or a body of facts. As Jaspers saw it, philosophy begins where reason has suffered shipwreck. He was suspicious of contemporary overconfidence in science and, as an antidote, stresses the irrational in man. He spoke with authority to the nonphilosophic mind because of his deep and successful roots in medicine and psychology. Jaspers fulfilled the commonsense image of the philosopher through his vital concern with the contemporary political situation and his trenchant reflections on the threats to man's integrity and fulfillment posed by twentieth-century social, economic, and political institutions. It can be best characterized as a disciplined and organized description of the critical fringes of human existence, such as impenetrable limits, unmitigated freedom, and the experienced indefinite expanse of space, time, and consciousness. His philosophy is neither linguistic analysis nor metaphysics. Appearances notwithstanding, he was perhaps the most systematic of all existentialist philosophers. Yet careful and extensive reading of his works shows him to be a rigorous and responsible thinker. ![]() He was a prolific writer with a prolix style that is often inelegant, superficial, sentimental, and unclear and that over the years showed itself to be repetitious. Karl Jaspers was one of the architects of contemporary existentialism and one of the first philosophers to use the term existentialist.
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