Background

Karl Theodor Jaspers was born on February 23, 1883, in the North German town of Oldenburg near the North Sea, where his ancestors had lived for generations. He was the son of a banker and a representative of the parliament (Landtagesabgeordneten), Carl Wilhelm Jaspers (1850-1940) and Henriette Tantzen (1862-1941), who also came from a family that was involved in the local parliament.

Education

Jaspers was a pupil at the Altes Gymnasium in Oldenburg. He received an extremely diverse and broad-ranging education. Jaspers initially enrolled as a student of law at the University of Heidelberg for three semesters. Despite his already vivid interest in philosophy, his decision for medicine was based on his belief that it best illuminated life itself and the challenges of human existence. Jaspers then became a student of medicine at Heidelberg in 1902. He earned his medical doctorate in 1908.

Career

Karl Jaspers began work at a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg where Emil Kraepelin had worked some years earlier. Jaspers became dissatisfied with the way the medical community of the time approached the study of mental illness and set himself the task of improving the psychiatric approach. In 1913 Jaspers gained a temporary post as a psychology teacher at Heidelberg University. The post later became permanent, and Jaspers never returned to clinical practice. He was dismissed from that position by Nazi authorities in 1937.

At the age of 38 Jaspers turned from psychology to philosophy, expanding on themes he had developed in his psychiatric works. He became a renowned philosopher, well respected in Germany and Europe. In 1948 Jaspers moved to the University of Basel in Switzerland. He remained prominent in the philosophical community until his death in Basel in 1969.

Achievements

• Karl Theodor Jaspers is widely known as a German philosopher who developed a unique theistic existential philosophy. He began his career as a psychopathologist. Jaspers applied Husserlian phenomenology and Dilthey's Hermeneutics into clinical psychiatry and published Allgemeine Psychopathologie (General Psychopathology) in 1913. Jaspers turned his focus to philosophy and published a number of monumental works. He had a wide range of contributions from philosophy of history (Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, The Origin and the Goal of History, 1949) to the philosophy of religion (Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Christlichen Offenbarung, Philosophical Faith and Revelation, 1962), Existentialism (Philosophie, Philosophy, 1932), and social criticism (Die Geistige Situation der Zeit, Man in the Modern Age, 1931).

Works

More photos

• book

  • General Psychopathology (Volume 1)

    (In 1910, Karl Jaspers wrote a seminal essay on morbid jea...)

    1997
  • The Perennial Scope of Philosophy

    (The text of six lectures in which Karl Jaspers redefines ...)

    2007
  • Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy

    (One of the founders of existentialism, the eminent philos...)

    1951
  • General Psychopathology (Volume II)

    (In his most important contribution to the Heidelberg scho...)

    1997
  • The Origin and Goal of History

    (This important book from eminent philosopher Karl Jaspers...)

    1949

Religion

Although he rejected explicit religious doctrines, including the notion of a personal God, Jaspers influenced contemporary theology through his philosophy of transcendence and the limits of human experience. Mystic Christian traditions influenced Jaspers himself tremendously. He also took an active interest in Eastern philosophies, particularly Buddhism, and developed the theory of an Axial Age, a period of substantial philosophical and religious development. Jaspers also entered public debates with Rudolf Bultmann, wherein Jaspers roundly criticized Bultmann's "demythologizing" of Christianity.

Politics

After the capitulation of Germany, Jaspers saw himself confronted with the tasks of rebuilding the university and helping to bring about a moral and political rebirth of the people. He dedicated all of his energies in the postwar years toward the accomplishment of these two tasks. He also represented the interests of the university to the military powers. He gathered his thoughts on how the universities could best be rebuilt in his work Die Idee der Universität (1946; The Idea of the University, 1959). He called for a complete de-Nazification of the teaching staff, but this proved to be impossible because the number of professors who had never compromised with the Nazis was too small. It was only gradually that the autonomous university of the pre-Nazi years could once again assert itself in Germany. Jaspers felt that an acknowledgment of national guilt was a necessary condition for the moral and political rebirth of Germany. In one of his best political works, Die Schuldfrage (1946; The Question of German Guilt, 1947), he stated that whoever had participated actively in the preparation or execution of war crimes and crimes against humanity was morally guilty. Those, however, who passively tolerated these happenings because they did not want to become victims of Nazism were only politically responsible. In this respect, all survivors of this era bore the same responsibility and shared a collective guilt. He felt that the fact that no one could escape this collective guilt and responsibility might enable the German people to transform their society from its state of collapse into a more highly developed and morally responsible democracy.

This revision was guided mainly by the conviction that modern technology in the sphere of communication and warfare had made it imperative for mankind to strive for world unity. This new development in his thinking was defined by him as world philosophy, and its primary task was the creation of a mode of thinking that could contribute to the possibility of a free world order. The transition from existence philosophy to world philosophy was based on his belief that a different kind of logic would make it possible for free communication to exist among all mankind. His thought was expressed in Der philosophische Glaube (1948; The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, 1949) and Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung (1962; Philosophical Faith and Revelation, 1967). Since all thought in its essence rests on beliefs, he reasoned, the task confronting man is to free philosophical thinking from all attachments to the transient objects of this world. To replace previous objectifications of all metaphysical and religious systems, Jaspers introduced the concept of the cipher. This was a philosophical abstraction that could represent all systems, provided that they entered into communication with one another by means of the cipher. In other words, the concept of the cipher enabled a common ground to be shared by all of the various systems of thought, thus leading to a far greater tolerance than had ever before been possible. A world history of philosophy, entitled Die grossen Philosophen, had as its aim to investigate to what extent all past thought could become communicable.

Jaspers also undertook to write a universal history of the world, called Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (1949; The Origin and Goal of History, 1953). At the center of history is the axial period (from 800 to 200 BC), during which time all the fundamental creations that underlie man’s current civilization came into being. Following from the insights that came to him in preparing this work, he was led to realize the possibility of a political unity of the world in a 1958 work called Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen (The Future of Mankind, 1961). The aim of this political world union would not be absolute sovereignty but rather world confederation, in which the various entities could live and communicate in freedom and peace.

Under the influence of these ideas, Jaspers closely observed, during the latter years of his life, both world politics and the politics of Germany. When the efforts toward democracy in Germany appeared to him to turn more and more into a national oligarchy of parties, he wrote a bitter attack on these tendencies in Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik? (1966; The Future of Germany, 1967). This book caused much annoyance among West German politicians of all shades. Jaspers, in turn, reacted to their unfair reception by returning his German passport in 1967 and taking out Swiss citizenship.

Views

Jaspers' dissatisfaction with the popular understanding of mental illness led him to question both the diagnostic criteria and the methods of clinical psychiatry. He published a revolutionary paper in 1910 in which he addressed the problem of whether paranoia was an aspect of personality or the result of biological changes. Whilst not broaching new ideas, this article introduced a new method of study. Jaspers studied several patients in detail, giving biographical information on the people concerned as well as providing notes on how the patients themselves felt about their symptoms. This has become known as the biographical method and now forms the mainstay of modern psychiatric practice.

Jaspers set about writing his views on mental illness in a book which he published as General Psychopathology. Jaspers applied Husserl's phenomenology and Dilthey's hermeneutics to his analysis. The two volumes which make up this work have become a classic in the psychiatric literature and many modern diagnostic criteria stem from ideas contained within them. Of particular importance, Jaspers believed that psychiatrists should diagnose symptoms (particularly of psychosis) by their form rather than by their content. For example, in diagnosing an hallucination, the fact that a person experiences visual phenomena when no sensory stimuli account for it (form) assumes more importance than what the patient sees (content).

Jaspers felt that psychiatry could also diagnose delusions in the same way. He argued that clinicians should not consider a belief delusional based on the content of the belief, but only based on the way in which a patient holds such a belief (see delusion for further discussion). Jaspers also distinguished between primary and secondary delusions. He defined primary delusions as "autochthonous" meaning arising without apparent cause, appearing incomprehensible in terms of normal mental processes. (This is a distinctly different use of the term autochthonous than its usual medical or sociological meaning of indigenous.) Secondary delusions, on the other hand, he classified as influenced by the person's background, current situation or mental state.

Jaspers considered primary delusions as ultimately "un-understandable," as he believed no coherent reasoning process existed behind their formation. This view has caused some controversy, and the likes of Ronald David Laing and Richard Bentall have criticized it, stressing that taking this stance can lead therapists into the complacency of assuming that because they do not understand a patient, the patient is deluded and further investigation on the part of the therapist will have no effect.

Personality

Physical Characteristics: Since his early childhood, Jaspers suffered from chronic bronchiectasis that impaired his physical capabilities and awareness of his physical disabilities shaped his routine throughout his adult life and formed his sensitivity to psychological issues, including human suffering. Jaspers attributed his ability to conduct a normative routine and to devote his life to his creative work to his strict discipline regarding his health.

Interests

• Reading

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Kierkegaard, Nietzsche

Connections

In 1910 he married Gertrud Mayer (1879-1974), who came from a pious German-Jewish merchant family. At the time, she was working as an assistant in the sanatorium of the neurologist and psychiatrist Oskar Kohnstamms (1871-1917) and was the sister of his close friends Gustav Mayer and the philosopher Ernest Mayer. Only thanks to her marriage to the already known philosopher Karl Jaspers was Gertrud Mayer able to stay in Germany during the Nazi period.

Father:

Carl Wilhelm Jaspers

(1850-1940)

Mother:

Henriette Tantzen

(1862-1941)

Spouse:

Gertrud Mayer

(married 1910)

colleague:

Franz Nissl

References

• Karl Jaspers: A Biography by Suzanne Kirkbright
  2004