Political Philosopher or Merely Political Writer?

Abstract

AbstractIn his last political writings Jaspers caused a misunderstanding because he wanted to be understood there merely as a “political writer”. This provoked many a derogatory judgement about his political thinking. However, if one analyses the context of these statements more closely, one comes to the conclusion that Jaspers does not use the word “writer” in the meaning that is familiar from everyday usage and from literary theory. There, persons are called writers who write novels, stories, essays, etc. In so doing they create from their literary imagination ideal-typical fictitious persons as patterns of identification and as symbols of human destinies and typical modes of behavior. Jaspers, on the other hand, used the word “writer” for thinkers who “glimpse” and “think through” the “horizons of political possibilities. They consider in “effectual imagination …in the space of possibilities the horizons of political worldviews.“ In this way, they enable the active politician to “orient himself in the broad space of conceivabilities“ without being able to derive his political resolutions and decisions directly from them (cf. HS 366–371). That Jaspers uses “political writer“ synonymously with “political thinker” or “political theorist,” in explicit contrast to persons who are actively engaged as politicians, is evidenced by the following passage from the preface of his book WOHIN TREIBT die Bundesrepublik?:A number of skeptical questions have been raised about Jaspers’ understanding of politics: