26 February marks the 50th anniversary of the death of philosopher Karl Jaspers. In this interview, Oldenburg philosopher Matthias Bormuth talks about Jaspers' ideas on the maturity of the individual citizen, the topicality of his ideas and the best reading to start with.
"More prominent than Precht and Sloterdijk: the almost forgotten Karl Jaspers was once the German star intellectual." - This is how the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT described Karl Jaspers two years ago. The occasion was the publication of the philosopher and physician's correspondence, which you, Mr Bormuth, co-edited. What made Jaspers the "star intellectual" of his time in the 1960s?
The late Jaspers emphasised the "daring of the public" and, with regard to Hannah Ahrendt, his close student, spoke of the "independence of thought - independent precisely of the opinions of the major parties, of society. As a non-party member, he became a committed philosopher who wanted to provoke thought.
Jaspers was initially rather conservative, but then changed...
This transformation began after his experiences under National Socialism. He had been forced to retire in 1937 because his wife Gertrud was Jewish, and had lived in internal emigration for seven years. After the end of the Second World War, he was very much in favour of German self-reflection and was once again very welcome as an "unencumbered person". In 1948, Jaspers followed a call to Basel in the knowledge that self-reflection had failed to materialise and that the restorative climate had prevailed in Germany. That was the turning point for him. From then on, Hannah Arendt came to him every year to philosophise and talk about the political dimensions of Germany, America and the world. Jaspers developed a specific philosophy of freedom based on Kant's ideas. Hannah Arendt later referred above all to the American founding fathers, to their ideas of a democracy in which individual groups, including local ones, have influence and which does not act in a centralised manner, as was the case in Germany in the 1960s in Jaspers' opinion.
How relevant are Jaspers' ideas for us today?
Jaspers is a great innovator of the Kantian philosophy of politically relevant reason. Its central element is the maturity of the individual citizen, who should follow his conscience and speak his mind in the public sphere. In this way, reasonable people who talk to each other can help to ensure that in a democracy, decisions are not made from above, but that individual groups and interests can also have their say, register protests or express alternatives. This maturity also includes thinking for oneself. Freedom is demanding and does not come naturally. Freedom means developing your own power of judgement, reflecting on world events and their scientific conditions, asking which ideas could be philosophically helpful, thinking for yourself. Such a responsible citizen - I am speaking here for both sexes - arrives at opinions in dialogue with others that can play a role in political events.
So Jaspers wanted to encourage people to think, to reach out to them...
Jaspers originally came from a medical background and moved into philosophy as a psychologist. Max Weber had supported him in Heidelberg. Jaspers was therefore familiar with scientific and humanities discourses and increasingly endeavoured to write in a clear and comprehensible language. His "Psychology of Worldviews" was a first success in 1919. As a philosopher, he wanted to reach not only the elites, but also a broader, educated audience, for whom their own existence appeared to be a questionable "borderline situation" in the best sense of the word. His essays, which he also saw as suggestions for understanding the times, became increasingly political after 1945. They appeared in major magazines and newspapers, as large non-fiction books, which were also bestsellers in the end. However, he also warned against trying to make things too easy for oneself intellectually
In 1960, Karl Jaspers wrote: "...the idea of the nation state today [is] the calamity of Europe and now of all continents." What would Jaspers' attitude be to current political debates in which nation-state ideas are once again playing a greater role?
Jaspers had adopted the idea of "cosmopolitanism" from Kant. In other words, the idea of freedom that the individual strives for and the one nation that all nations should possess. His idea was that the European-Western nations were mutually dependent on each other and that it was therefore necessary to act together. At the same time, his work on Eastern philosophy opened him up to global contexts. Cultural life was the basis for economic life; it should first unite all people as free people. On this basis, according to Jaspers, nation states should come together, act together and conclude treaties. His idea was that societies worldwide belong together. And in these societies, individuals are needed who emphasise moral and philosophical necessities - even against the interests of others. Hence the idea of axial thinking, which Jan and Aleida Assmann recently emphasised in their Frankfurt Peace Prize speech. How can such communication between conscientious individuals succeed? This was his vision of the "philosophical minds" - starting with the Israeli prophets and other religious founders, but also independent intellectuals of earlier times: how can spiritual and moral objectives be represented in society - especially in view of the tendency to allow interests that rob freedom to gain strength.
Since the Jaspers Year, the university's lecture theatre centre has read: "Truth is what unites us". What do you associate with this Jaspers quote?
Historically, it is a quote that goes back to Nietzsche and that Jaspers used in an exchange of letters with Hannah Arendt. It is aimed at a core idea of his philosophy, namely that communication between people is crucial. And that the intimate, familiar communication between two or three familiar people is important in order to clarify their actual thoughts and philosophical objectives. For both Jaspers and Arendt, the decisive factor was that the values, norms or truths that people find arise in dialogue between individuals - but also in the conversation that I have with myself and in the opportunity to "talk" with people who have long since passed away about their books. In other words, communicating with a book is not just about the knowledge that I acquire, but also about the opportunity to enter into dialogue with an intellectual position, with values and truths that were considered by a person a long time ago. It's about not simply adopting them, but saying: what does this tell me, and how does the other person's view change my view in my personal and public life?
Which texts do you recommend to those who want to engage with Jaspers and his ideas for the first time?
There is an excellent text, "Die geistige Situation der Zeit" from 1931, which was intended for a wider, middle-class audience and was very well received. It interprets Jaspers' philosophy of existence in its social significance - in essayistic form over 150 pages. You get the picture: How did Jaspers think before 1945? His short essay "The Question of Guilt" is important for the time afterwards - it helps to understand the post-war Jaspers in his appeal for German self-reflection. In it, he is concerned with understanding one's own guilt in the categories of moral, legal, metaphysical and criminal guilt. Later political writings such as "Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik?" are of particular interest, as are introductions such as "Kleine Schule des philosophischen Denkens", which Jaspers deliberately planned as radio and television programmes in the form of lectures. A "Biography in Letters" will soon be published under the title "Life as a Borderline Situation". In the letters to Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Bloch, Golo Mann and Rudolf Augstein, but also in early letters to his family, one can recognise individual pieces of the whole Jaspers.
Interview: Constanze Böttcher
