Karl Jaspers was born in Oldenburg in 1883. After attending a humanistic gymnasium, he studied law, but became disillusioned and switched to medicine in 1908. He specialized in psychiatry, but was more interested in philosophy. His pursuit of medicine and psychology was actually driven by philosophical motivation, as he had been attracted to philosophy, especially Spinoza, since his youth. In 1913, he became a professor of psychology at Heidelberg University’s Faculty of Philosophy and did not return to clinical work.
In the forties, he became a professor of philosophy at the same university, where he remained until 1937, when he was retired due to his opposition to Hitler’s Nazism. After World War II, he became active again and in 1948, he moved to the University of Basel, where he taught and worked until his death in 1969.
Jaspers’ books have been translated into many languages. He became known to the wider public for his cultural criticisms and philosophical works. They are considered prominent achievements of the European spirit of the 20th century.
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In the 19th century, compared to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, a darker consciousness of time prevailed. While the public was satisfied with education and progress, independent spirits were filled with evil forebodings. Goethe could say: “Humanity will become smarter and more insightful, but not better, happier, or more effective. I see a time coming when God will no longer rejoice in humanity, so everything will have to be folded up again for the purpose of creating anew” […].
What is new, and what sets our century and its fulfillment apart from the past, is not at all conceivable even with the way the world is becoming godless and the principle of mechanization. Even without a clear knowledge, we are becoming more and more aware of being in a moment of global transformation that cannot be compared to any particular historical period. We live in a spiritually incomparably magnificent situation because it is brimming with possibilities. with uncertainty and danger, but if no one could satisfy her, she would have to become the most miserable period of a man who has failed.
When a man exists as a mass, he is no longer himself. The mass, on one hand, dissolves; there is a will in me that is not who I am. On the other hand, the mass isolates the individual into an atom that is sacrificed to its desire for survival: the fiction of equality for all is in effect. […]
[…] Separated from its foundation, without conscious history, without continuity of its existence, a man cannot remain a man. […]
The fact that the giant machinery takes care of survival reduces the individual to a function, separated from substantial life content, which previously, as tradition, was the man’s environment. It was said: people will be scattered among themselves like sand. The building is a machine in which people are placed here and there according to discretion, and it is not a historical substance that they would fill with their individuality. More and more people live such a torn existence. Thrown in different directions, Then, without work and anything else except bare survival, they no longer have a real place in any whole. It seems that the man, stripped from his roots, has become materialistic and lost what is essential. He does not care about the transparency of true existence. In joy and discomfort, in effort and fatigue, he is defined by his current function. Living from day to day, the only remaining goal above current work performance is to have the best possible position in the apparatus. The entire apparatus is controlled by a bureaucracy that is itself an apparatus, a human transformed into an apparatus, on which those who work in that apparatus depend. The state, municipality, factory, shop, everything is in operation through bureaucracy. Therefore, the boundary of the universal order of survival lies in the freedom of the individual, who must extract from themselves what no one else can take over, in order for people to remain people. Sport, as a mass phenomenon organized to enforce game rules, can drive away instincts that would otherwise become dangerous. for the camera. By fulfilling free time, sports contribute to mass relaxation. […]
It seems that what has been the world of man for millennia is now being broken. The emerging world as a apparatus cares for survival, forcing everyone to serve it. It destroys what has no place in it. Man seems to be blending into something that should only be a means, not a purpose, let alone a meaning. […]
Man is not only a human being through biological inheritance, but mostly through becoming through tradition. His education is that process that repeats itself with each individual. […]
Through his own existence, education brings the individual to participate in knowledge of the whole. […]
The symptom of unrest of our time regarding education is the intensity of pedagogical efforts without the unity of ideas, the vast amount of annual literature, the emphasis on didactic skill. […]
[…] Should education again become what it was in its best moments, enabling in historical continuity to become a person in self-being. In order to achieve that, it can only come from belief, which directly mediates some spiritual content through the strictness of learning and practice.
In our time of mass order, technology, and economy, when these inevitabilities are absolutized, the human spirit is in danger of being destroyed at its foundation: just as the state, as an ally of man, can weaken, so can the spirit, when it no longer lives from its own source, true life, but in the service of the masses, ultimately counterfeited life.
Education is a form of living, its backbone is discipline as the skill of thinking, and the space is organized knowledge. The view on the forms of the past, knowledge as necessarily valid insight, understanding of things, and proficiency in languages are its constituents.
Spiritual work, which, regardless of the current demands of the environment, requires a lasting endeavor, has its goal in the long term. […]
A man is always more than what he knows about himself. He is not what he once was forever, but he is a path; not just survival that needs to be established. as existence; but in this, man has the possibility through freedom, from which he decides what he is by his concrete actions.
The reality of the world cannot be bypassed. Experiencing the weight of reality is the only way for a person to reach themselves. Being active in reality, even if the goal is impossible, remains a condition for one’s own struggle. Hence the ethos that a person lives alongside the powers, without being consumed by them. […]
Only one who freely binds themselves is safe from the danger of desperately rebelling against themselves. Unattainable, yet the first and only task that remains for today’s person as a human being is: to find their way from their own source, at their own risk, towards nothingness, where life becomes whole despite all the distractions and restlessness scattered in every direction. […]
In the manner of their philosophical life lies the future of a person. […]
[…] Now, doing what is right is the only thing left for me to do with certainty.
Source: Karl Jasp Article. The spiritual situation of our time