Jaspers, Karl (1883–1969)

Abstract

Abstract Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) was an existentialist philosopher, deeply influenced by Kant, Kierkegaard, and Max Weber, whose philosophy formed a subjectivist counterpart, within the existentialist movement, to the fundamental ontology of Martin Heidegger. His works exercised great influence in a number of theoretical fields in Germany in the middle years of the twentieth century. He began his career as a psychiatrist, and published enduringly influential works in this field: notably his General Psychopathology (1913). The major philosophical publication of his philosophical career was the three‐volume work Philosophy (1932), which attempted to fuse Kantian and Hegelian ideas to provide an account of the experiential formation of human consciousness. In this work, he analyzed consciousness as proceeding from the level of immediate knowledge and progressing through a sequence of antinomies toward a level of truthfully unified reflection and self‐knowledge. Also of philosophical importance are Jaspers's interventions in religious debate. The central idea in Jaspers's philosophy of religion is the concept of philosophical faith , in which he promoted a critical‐recuperative attitude toward religious inquiry and attempted to convert elements of religious doctrine into a (secularist) account of human possibilities and freedoms. The ambition behind his work on religion and myth was to liberate transcendent knowledge from theology, and to permit an interpretive transformation of religiously conceived essences into aspects of human self‐interpretation.