In each of Jaspers’s descriptions of the system of his thought we find him flexibly alert to the classical philosophical problem of the one and the many that these encompassing Ideas are designed to accommodate. The compelling and cogent reasoning of the scientific and technical realm, for example, belong to “world orientation,”7 where Jaspers explores the mutual interdependence of fact and theory in all the empirical sciences. For him, these factors are interlocking but intrinsically incomplete, and science, therefore, can claim to offer cogent and compelling demonstrations and yet has to retain an endlessly open perspective, since the search for objective truth will always go on. One sees some of this attitude in his comments about the practical dimensions of the political context of university life in the present volume on the question of guilt. For Jaspers, there are four interconnected but irreducible spheres of reality in “the world”: matter, life, soul, and spirit. Each is real, but each demands that we recognize a different mode of objectivity. The physician, for example, needs to have appropriate regard for biochemistry, for medicine, for therapy, and for the spiritual and emotional life of a patient. The importance of each level in itself demands philosophical and practical distinctions.
Much of the discussion in the present book turns on questions of truth, freedom, and ethics. On the issue of guilt and responsibility there are necessarily going to be conflicts of freedom and authority, of religion and philosophy, and of politics and academia. For Jaspers, these are all areas in which the compelling certainties of scientific reason are unavailable and yet where choices must still be made, however large the risk of failure looms. In the face of such possible tragedy, he still insists that even failure (“shipwreck”) can be philosophically significant in the discovery of the meaning of being. In the tragic situations that are central to his meditations in this book, such failures may well prove particularly significant for coming to a proper acknowledgment of one’s level of responsibility. For Jaspers, the freedom of the I (the soul) is ultimately indefinable and unprovable,8 but is nevertheless a reality that constantly contradicts the reductive efforts of determinists to deny it on the faulty assumption that “objective material being” is “the whole of being.” Jaspers keeps his readers mindful that human beings are conscious of their freedom in various ways, including (1) through their existential choices, that is, the various decisions one makes in the course of one’s life by which one progressively becomes precisely who one is, and (2) through the personal unity of one’s own existence simultaneously at the levels of matter, life, soul, and spirit. By virtue of embodiment and self-consciousness, one’s freedom inescapably involves the reconciliation of necessity and free choice: although my choices are free, the world in which I make these choices is often quite recalcitrant, and yet I bind myself by them (sometimes in order to change that world), and I must accept the consequences of the choices I make. These choices are not simply determined by empirical reality, however much they are conditioned thereby.
In the present study we find Jaspers discussing the phenomenon of guilt. For him, guilt is not alien to freedom but comes precisely from being free. It comes as an intrinsic consequence of some of the choices we make and some of the situations in which we find ourselves and which we accept. Our existence requires actions of various sorts, actions that we must will, choose, and carry out. But the human condition is also such that even nonaction is really a kind of action, a result of choice. By each of my choices and my acts, I make myself more of just the sort of person who chooses that sort of action, for I have embraced one possibility and cast other possibilities aside. All this happens within groups and communities of various sorts (a part of the givenness of our “world”), and this can implicate us in guilt that would not otherwise be our own, just as it permits us to participate with profit and delight in the successes of communities to which we belong but for which we are not personally responsible. In Jaspers’s more biblical moments one even detects echoes of the “original guilt” that some religious traditions have recognized as “original sin,” but in his more philosophical moments one finds him focused more on the categories of political and metaphysical guilt that this book articulates in contrast to criminal and moral guilt.
What is perhaps especially valuable in a book like this is its integration of the speculative and the practical. Jaspers’s steady respect for staying open to truth and for acknowledging responsibility for action and choice has its roots in the quest for an adequate philosophy of being that is not paralyzed by the Cartesian split of human from nonhuman being. That split has often been invoked to justify ethical theories that attend to a person’s intention in isolation from the embodied nature of any action or from the wide-reaching consequences of personal choices. If not everything in Jaspers’s system is completely convincing (for example, his reticence about revealed truth and the ultimate inaccessibility of God as anything other than an Idea), his insights into the question at hand remain undeniable.
Joseph W. Koterski, S.J.
Fordham University
January 23, 2000
THE QUESTION OF GERMAN GUILT
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Those of you who sat in these rooms as students in recent years are now thinking, perhaps, Everything suddenly sounds altogether different; the cast has changed; the course of political events presents the figures—now these, now those—as puppets; as organs of power they recite their little verses; whichever way they talk, none can be trusted, for professors do not bite the hand that feeds them, either.
I can understand this distrust in all young people awakened to full consciousness during the past twelve years, in this environment. But I beg you in the course of your studies to keep an open mind for the possibility that now it may be different—that now there really may be truth at stake. You are the ones who are called upon, each to help in his place so that truth may be revealed. For the time being, listen to my conception of the situation of the sciences at the university, and examine it. It is as follows:
In some sciences you will hear scarcely anything different from the past years. There, scholars who remained true to themselves have always taught truth. You will have met many a teacher again who in tone of voice as well as in the contents and fundamental views of his lectures faced you the same as he was all through these years.
On the other hand, notably in the philosophical and political fields, you may receive a strange impression. There everything does indeed sound altogether different. True, if those who studied here before 1933 or even in the first years afterwards were to come back, they probably would note a coinciding basic attitude in many of us. But there, too, it may be possible to feel a change wrought by the upheavals of this decade. And the change of cast is a fact. Teachers who would expound the National-Socialist phraseology to you have vanished. Others have reappeared as old men out of the past, or joined as young ones in a metamorphosis to freedom and candor, while’til now they had to wear masks.
Again I ask you: beware the premature conclusion that only the opposite of recent values is taught, that we are talking just as before though in reverse, fighting what used to be glorified and glorifying what used to be fought—that in either case, today as yesterday, the doctrine was a result of political compulsion and thus no real truth. No; at least it is not so in all places. Where it is, there would indeed be no essential difference. The way of thought would not have changed, only the direction of aggressiveness or mendacious glorification.