CHAPTER IV

EXISTENTIAL ONTOLOGY: MARTIN HEIDEGGER *

A. THE PHILOSOPHY OF EXISTENCE IN GENERAL AND ITS

HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIP TO WESTERN THOUGHT

Just as Husserl's doctrines mark a turning-point in the history of philoso-

phy with regard to method, so does Heidegger's philosophy with respect
to content or substance. The Heidegger ontology involves a most unusual
mode of thought, and one that is exceedingly difficult to grasp. To facil-
itate understanding, we shall present some general characterizations and
historical remarks before going on to an account of the doctrine itself.
Also since many of the basic motivations in Heidegger and Jaspers are
closely akin, we shall often be required to anticipate the consideration
of the latter's philosophy. At the same time, since the two thinkers C"ffer
fundamentally about the final aim of philosophical discussion, a sep: rate
detailed treatment has seemed necessary.
In considering Heidegger's philosophy, we need to pay special attention
to the following aspects:
(1) We noted above, in reviewing Scheler's thought, that both the
philosophy of Existence and existential ontology attempt to overcome
the contradiction between spirit and drive by pushing on to a deeper level
of Being. This comment, however, should not be taken to mean that they
seek some unified, creative fountain-head - in Being or in man - from
which all life and spiritual activity pour forth. On the contrary, what these
philosophies understand by 'Existence' is separated by a veritable abyss
from Scheler's concepts of Person and of life. While the Scheler concepts
give expression to something rich, overflowing and full of content, what
the others are concerned with is an empty, content-less, yet ultimate and
unconditioned center of Being in man.
Access to this center of Being is possible only if we put ourselves in the
basic mood characteristic of the philosophy of Existence. This frame of
mind contrasts sharply with the experience of being secure in a familiar
world - of being immersed in an overall cosmic life that flows throughout
134 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

the universe (Life-Philosophy) or of being placed in the hands of an

encompassing world-spirit (Hegelian idealism), or of the two together
(Scheler). Instead, it is the feeling of insecurity, of the uncanny, alien and
enigmatic character of the world, and at the same time of the absolutely
finite and bounded nature of one's own Being, of having been cast into
an unintelligible, absurd reality, of having been consigned to death, guilt
and that fundamental frame of mind that serves as background to all
surface feelings and moods - dread ( Angst). In this experience of bound-
less loneliness and of having been forsaken by any sustaining and sense-
endowing world order all that remains to man is either despair or a with-
drawal into the innermost pole of his own Being: Existence (Existenz).
Here what the term 'Existence' refers to is not merely the simple fact
that man is - this bare, passive reality is designated by the expression
'Dasein' ('human Being', 'a man's Being'). Rather, Existence is something
ultimate and unconditioned, and a proper instance of it can appear when
all values, all gratification of life and spirit, all knowledge about Dasein's
being ordered and rooted in an absolute become questionable, superficial
and relative, and prove, if one is completely honest, to be pure illusion.
As all contentual relations to the world crumble, as everything moves off
into the distance (even one's own self, in so far as it still possesses any
abundance, richness or substance), man is gripped by the experience of
the pure 'that' of Being. And it is this experience, this sudden invasion of
the feeling 'that I am and have to be', that serves to announce Existence,
which man may then grasp or fail to grasp.
Existence, therefore, is not a definite, fixed entity, which is always
there and into which man may withdraw whenever his spiritual life is
endangered. It is, on the contrary, a possibility that he can realize only
by the most active, most concentrated self-commitment. Moreover, as
contrasted with the notions of Life-Philosophy, pantheistic metaphysics
of spirit or personalism, it is something wholly undefinable, simple, and
lying beyond anything that can be the subject of contentual statements.
It also follows that there is no continuous transition to existential Being,
as there is between a more moral life and a more immoral one, a richer
and a poorer, one more joyful and one more sorrowful. Man reaches
existential Being only by a leap. The transition between the antithetic
dimensions of 'mere human Being' or Dasein and 'Existence' (Jaspers) or,
in Heidegger's terminology, between 'in authentic' (uneigentliches) and
 MAR TIN HEIDEGGER 135

'authentic Existence' is thus an abrupt one, and for that very reason has
nothing to do with differences in ethical valuation. Always at the outset,
and for the most part to the end, man lives in the mode of inauthentic
Existence, or of mere human Being, even when he may justly be assigned
the value predicate 'good'. Authentic Existence demands not a mere
enhancement of the value or the vital quality of life, but a complete
turning away from it, the calling back of one's self from the 'forfeiture'
or 'fallen-ness' (Verfallenheit) characteristic of everyday life.
If what becomes manifest in the basic existential mood is to be ex-
pressed in philosophical terms, we must either alter our entire conceptual
apparatus, or else renounce scientific knowledge altogether, and simply
'appeal' to man to consummate the experience of Existence and avail
himself of the possibility it reveals for authentic self-Being. The first
alternative occurs in the philosophy of Heidegger, the second in that of
Jaspers.
(2) The development of a fundamentally new theme requires an extra-
ordinary method. In Heidegger's case, this need is met by phenomenology,
which, however, must now assume a more radical form corresponding to
the new task. Phenomenology for Husserl consisted in 'bracketing out'
everything contingent by abstaining from existential judgments; Scheler
added a demand for the exclusion of all emotive Being so that a pure
outpouring of spirit might result. Now in Heidegger's hands phenome-
nology becomes a counter-move to the everyday way of thinking as such.
That is to say, this latter mode of thought is nothing more than an ex-
pression of inauthentic, 'forfeiting' human Being, an expression that con-
ceals what really matters. Hence a philosophical knowledge of essences is
necessarily dependent on our tearing ourselves loose from this everyday
attitude. To grasp the truth is to fetch or snatch out of hiding the know-
ledge of Being that is suppressed by the vulgar explanation of the world.
Thus in Heidegger's view, the course of ontological investigation is an
incessant struggle against the 'natural angle of vision', to which those who
philosophize repeatedly succumb. This entails not just the simple elimi-
nation of this attitude, as in Husserl, but a continuing spiritual exertion
constantly menaced by the danger of failure.
(3) In addition to the access by way of mood or frame of mind, there
is also a logical path that leads to the concept of Existence. Scholastic
philosophy drew a distinction between existentia (Dasein) and essentia
136 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

(Sosein). The latter aspect focussed on what a thing is, the former on the
fact that something of this nature really occurs. Here the actuality of
Being remained the contingent element of 'hic et nunc', which is not
involved in the analysis of essences. Husserl, too, clearly held that in
bringing essences into the light we must leave the fact of human Being
(das faktische Dasein) out of consideration as non-essential. But ac-
cording to Heidegger such a bracketing out of human Being is impossible,
and for the precise reason that human Being contains what really matters.
'Existentia' means the same as 'on-hand-ness' ('Vorhandenheit'). It can
therefore be properly ascribed only to an entity that can be treated as a
thing on hand alongside of other things. Man, however, is not this sort
of entity, but a being concerned about his own Being. This 'being con-
cerned about ... ' contains the relationship to himself that precedes all
theoretical reflection. It is in this concern that Existence manifests itself.
As stated above, Existence cannot be fixed by contentual definitions; we
can try to get at it only in terms of its 'how'. But the 'how' of Being is
simply its Being-so (Sosein). It is consequently a fundamental error to
disengage Dasein from Sosein, for the latter is nothing other than the way
in which a being distinguished by Existence is. The traits of Sosein - the
contentual determinations of Being - are potentialities which he who
exists has either made use of or missed. The 'whatness' of man is made up
not of extant properties of an extant thing, but of possible ways to be. It is
not that Socrates is, and moreover 'possesses' certain properties; rather,
he availed himself of certain possibilities, and it was this availing himself
of them that imprinted on him his character, what he was. Hence if
Sosein expresses the 'how' of Being, that is, if Sosein 'flows' to a certain
extent out of Being, then Heidegger can state what from the standpoint
of traditional ontology is the unintelligible proposition: "The essence of
Dasein lies in its Existence". In this context, as always with Heidegger,
'Dasein' is to be understood as 'human Being'. An elucidation of the
essence of man therefore cannot ignore (much less deliberately exclude)
as contingent and non-essential the fact that man is; for the entire em-
phasis of the analysis rests precisely on the 'that' of Being. To illuminate
essences is at the same time and above all to illuminate human Being.
(4) Since the Being of man cannot be got at with the conceptual schema
of traditional ontology, and since it is precisely through that schema that
Being as such is supposed to attain conceptual definition, the concept in
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER 137

general of Being becomes problematic for Heidegger. And it is just here

that his own formulation of the whole problem begins. That is, the basic
question Heidegger poses at the opening of his inquiry is whether we
understand at all what we mean when we use the term 'being' ('seiend').
In point of fact, we do understand something by it when we utter such
sentences as 'The weather is beautiful', 'I am sick', 'Everyone for himself
(i.e., Everyone safeguard his own Being)'. But when we come to define it
conceptually, are we not perhaps made fools of by a tendency, rooted
in our very Being, toward misinterpretation? The example of man
seems to confirm this. Accordingly, Heidegger concludes that while we
always understand something by 'Being', we lack a genuine concept of
Being.
(5) For Heidegger, this poses an even more fundamental and compre-
hensive task than the one Husserl sought to master with the notion of
material and formal ontology. Husserl's materialontologies, inasmuch as
they were to work out the essential structures of the areas dealt with by
the individual sciences, were ranked ahead of these disciplines. His formal
ontology had the even more central task, which he regarded as of maxi-
mum generality and conclusiveness, of comprehending what is valid for
all domains of Being. Now, in Heidegger's view a third step forward is
needed, one that broaches the "question of the meaning of Being" ("die
Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein")l, and this constitutes the theme of funda-
mental ontology. According to Heidegger, mere categorial analysis, even
when it produces a complete table of categories and an axiomatic theory
grounded in the table, remains blind. Instead of leaving us open to the
basic question of metaphysics, such analysis prematurely seals us off from
it. Moreover, Heidegger does not take it to be obvious (as a simple ex-
tension of the Husserlian schema might lead us to suppose) that with this
question we step over into a domain in which we speak only of the 'most
general of generalities'. Indeed, it is precisely the fundamental way in
which the problem is posed that can necessitate a turning toward that
which is most concrete.
(6) This becomes evident as soon as we ask: where are we to begin the
attack on the problem of Being? Heidegger sees no other possible starting-
point than the above-mentioned fact of the human comprehension of Being,
which already contains some sort of knowledge of Being without having
come to a clear concept. In order to place the inquiry on the broadest
138 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

possible base as well as to work out the contradiction between the pre-
scientific human understanding of Being and the philosophical idea of
Being, the analysis ought to begin exactly at the place where an authentic
comprehension of Being is suppressed; that is, with everyday human
Dasein. Here Heidegger finds the meeting-point of (1) the Aristotelian
problematic (the question of Being), (2) the phenomenological method
(according to which all purely conceptual discussions are invalid unless
a direct showing is made of something given, in this case an instance of
the being 'man'), and (3) the aspect of man stressed by the philosophy of
existence - that he lives for the most part in a state of inauthentic, isolated
and impersonal Dasein. We can also now understand why the explicit
opening up of the question of Being leads to something concrete. For one
thing, the starting-point is to be sought in man; for another, and this is
most important, the illuminating of man's essential structure cannot be
achieved by bracketing out the fact of his Dasein but, as indicated earlier,
must begin precisely with this Dasein. Thus the set of problems posed by
Being is put within the 'here and now'. The greatest question that man
can possibly ask, one that cannot be exceeded in generality, flows directly
into what is most immediate and most concrete.
(7) As already noted, Heidegger calls his investigation 'fundamental
ontology' because it is intended to work out the question of Being and
thus secure the foundation for both material and formal ontologies.
'Philosophical anthropology' might seem an equally or even more ap-
propriate designation, since the inquiry starts with man and, if we leave
aside the governing statement of the problem, does not proceed beyond
man's orbit. But it would be a mistake to disregard this guiding statement;
for the formulation of the problem determines the entire course of the
investigation. Therefore, the subject of the inquiry is not man as man,
as in the case of anthropology2; rather, it is man as a channel through
which to pass to an adequate concept of Being - a process in which,
corresponding to the basic attitude of the philosophy of Existence, the
finitude of man stands in the foreground. The analysis of human Dasein
is thus kept under constant tension by the problem: Is there a road that
leads out of finitude to Being? In the case of Heidegger the theoretical
approach to this matter dominates; for Jaspers, on the other hand, the
question assumes an eminently practical significance with regard to the
actual carrying on of life - something that Heidegger deliberately leaves
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER 139

aside as an 'ontic affair 'of the particular Dasein, not to be treated scien-
tifically.
(8) The procedure in analyzing everyday human Dasein is related
historically to Henri Bergson's notion of 'homo faber'. Man in his
ordinary 'in-the-first-instance' and 'for-the-most-part' is not a self-suf-
ficient entity vis-a-vis the world. Nor is he a disinterested subject who
takes in sense impressions and so mirrors the external world in his mind.
On the contrary, active and concerned, he is absorbed in the world with
and around him, where he encounters not things on hand (vorhandene
Dinge) or a stock of things, but 'stuff at hand' ("zuhandenes Zeug").
Thus, purely formally and not dependent on what Existence philosophy
sees as the hostile character of the world, the relation of man to the world
holds a special importance. To be sure, as already pointed out, Existence
must be thought of as devoid of any contentual determination. At the
same time, it is not just some indeterminate thing, which is the constant
companion of Dasein. In existential ontology, there is a much sharper
line drawn between the concepts of Existence and substance than, say,
in Scheler; but since for Heidegger man does not possess the character
of a thing, the concept of Being still becomes generally questionable.
Hence Existence cannot possibly be analyzed by laying down its substan-
tive properties as if it were some 'thing on hand', but by examining the
'how' of its Being, that is, the mode and manner of its relation to the world.
Now this demand for something other than and standing opposite
Existence, which fits Existence into a relationship pointing beyond itself
and which helps condition Existence itself, this necessity for a correlate
to Existence and hence for the inclusion of the world in the analysis of
Existence, becomes so strong in Heidegger that the problem of a self-
subsistent external world loses all force and meaning. The world is every
bit as immediately 'there' as Dasein itself. No longer is man obliged to
break through the bounds of his consciousness or through his '1' in order
to get out in the world; in all that he does, his caring, his knowing, even
his forgetting, he is already, or still, in the world 'outside'. This state of
affairs, which Heidegger calls 'being-in-the-world', is at the same time a
more basic form of the concept of intentionality, and thus establishes a
relation to Brentano and Husserl. In addition, from the standpoint of
epistemology it signifies an interesting attempt to find for the cognitive
relation a point of departure lying beyond the foundation customarily
140 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

provided by the subject-object relationship. We also have here one ex-

ample of the many detailed respects in which Heidegger clearly differ-
entiates himself from Jaspers; for in the latter's view, the subject-object
relationship constitutes a basic cleavage, rationally insoluble and quite
analogous to what we find in Schopenhauer's well-known dictum: 'No
object without a subject, no subject without an object'.
(9) When relatedness is singled out as the basic character of Existence,
what is meant is not solely relatedness to the world. Existence is at the
same time relation to itself. The only way Kierkegaard could elucidate this
curious state of affairs was by paradoxically defining mind or spirit as a
relationship that has a certain relation to itself. In Heidegger, however,
the idea has developed to a point of ontological clarity, and man is
characterized in an initial step (still formally undetermined) as that being
who in his Being is concerned about this Being itself (" dasjenige Seiende
dem es in seinem Sein um dieses Sein selbst geht"). This statement of man's
Being exhibits a notable feature of the Heidegger philosophy: its extra-
ordinary ability, without doing violence to the actual phenomena, to coin
ontological concepts for apparently irrational states of affairs that the
ontology and metaphysics of the past had ignored altogether, and that
Life-Philosophy and Kierkegaard had been able to express only in formu-
lations so paradoxical as to result in their being rejected as 'unscientific'.
Striving not to neglect any positive contributions of Western philosophy,
Heidegger at the same time necessarily looked on both rationalism and
its opposition as one-sided philosophical approaches. Rationalism he
pronounced 'impotent', and mysticism 'aimless'. But it would be wrong
to conclude from this that his own philosophy may be regarded as a
'rationalized mysticism' or a 'mystical rationalism'; rather, here again his
concern is to push toward a deeper level from which vantage point these
modes of philosophizing seem one-sided. This is what permits Heidegger
to make the striking statement: "When irrationalism, as the counterplay
of rationalism, talks about the things to which rationalism is blind, it does
so only with a squint" (" Der Irrationalismus - als das Gegenspiel des
Rationalismus - redet nur schielend von dem, wogegen dieser blind ist").3
The characterization of man as a being concerned about his own Being
will be denoted later by the term 'care' ('Sorge'). Unless we achieve
clarity about this concept at the very outset by fully disengaging ourselves
from all accepted traditional starting-points, we shall not be able to
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER 141

understand Heidegger's further analysis. Obviously a violent revolution

is needed to obtain the definitions of existential ontology from the usual
modes of thought. To anyone who cannot execute such a 'sharp turn'
himself, this whole new world will remain foreign or even appear to be
empty talk. Scheler has stressed that the phenomenologist can only lead
the perceiver to the set of facts and then, at the crucial moment, point
and say: 'Look, there it is.' If the other person is unable to see, then a
controversy is engendered that cannot be settled and any further effort
to come to an understanding is as futile as trying to 'explain' colors to a
blind man. This observation applies all the more in Heidegger's case,
since he is seeking to make a turn that brings into question the original
point of departure of all Western metaphysics. Hence if we protest that
we cannot follow the ideas contained in Heidegger's philosophy, its
defenders can presumably reply: because traditional modes of thought
are so deeply entrenched we should not be surprised if only a few indi-
viduals are able to achieve the new way of seeing things; the depth of the
insight, however, always carries with it its own criterion.
(10) This account of man as concerned with his own Being might lead
to the complaint that Heidegger limits the starting-point of his analysis
to egocentric man. But such an objection is not justified so long as that
which 'belongs' to this Being is left undetermined. In other words, since
the relation to the world is essential for existential Being, man is able to
include as much else as he pleases in this relationship of 'for his own sake'
('Umwillen seiner selbst'). As to other men, Heidegger, through a formal
treatment of some of Scheler's ideas, elaborates the basic notion of 'Being-
with' (' Mitsein'), which helps constitute the existential Being of the indi-
vidual man. It surrounds the 'for his own sake' and holds the fundamental
possibility that Being-one's-self is gained only through surrender to others.
(11) There is another feature common to Scheler and the philosophy
of Existence in general, namely, the thought that as we go 'higher up' the
graduated structure of the real world, the beings become more unique,
individual, temporal and historical. Of course, the two philosophies differ
very greatly in the way they carry out this thought. In Scheler we have
the Person filled with a wealth of spiritual acts and embedded in a cosmic
context of Being; we have the basic optimistic mood of being sustained
by a Universal Life that flows throughout the world, and of participating
in the process whereby the spirit orders this Life. In the philosophy of
142 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

Existence, there is the 'naked that' of existing, Existence stripped of all

richness of content, the openly hostile limiting of Existence by a reality
that crowds it threateningly, the basic tragic feeling of being cast into an
unintelligible world.
(12) The German sociologist Max Weber developed a special procedure
for comprehending the socio-historical world - the use of 'ideal types'.
The method consists in creating various schemas of human behavior in
order to hold them up against reality and measure the latter by them.
The fuller significance of this procedure is that a deeper comprehension
of historical processes requires more than a mere description of what is
in fact present and the uncovering of individual causal connections. For
a human action is seen in a clear light only if the many other possible
ways of behaving are also perceived. A proper understanding of historical
phenomena therefore demands that what is actual at any moment in the
human domain be considered within the full scope of human possibilities in
general. The penetration of the possible into the actual, which in Weber
remains simply a theoretical matter for the scholar, acquires metaphysical
importance in Heidegger's hands: man always understands his own selfin
terms of possibilities, because his Being is not yet finally fixed. The sole
'plenitude' allowed man by the idea of Existence is that of 'standing-in-
the-midst-of-a-plenitude-of-possibilities'. Man does not 'possess' these
possibilities as if they were some perceptible attributes; he lives in them,
they form the innermost core of his Being. Hence for Heidegger it is
possibility or potentiality, not actuality, that is the highest and most
positive modal principle. Of course, here too inauthenticity at the outset
continually usurps power since man, instead of drawing the possibilities
out of his innate self, loses his way among randomly appearing possi-
bilities or permits these possibilities to come forward out of the 'public
we-world' (' offentliche Wir- Welt').
Since the concept of possibility is basic, it must necessarily enter into the
concept of Existence. We have seen that Existence is a relationship to
itself, a Being 'for the sake of itself'. Now the 'for-what' (Wozu) of this
'bearing-a-relation-to' is ascertained as 'Being-possible' (Moglichsein) or,
as Heidegger also puts it, 'potentiality-for-Being' (' Seinkonnen'). This is
why he says later that man is a being who is concerned about his own
potentiality-for-Being or whose Being is to be conceived of as Being-
toward-the-potentiality-for-Being (Sein zum Seinkonnen). The expression
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER 143

'Being-toward-the-potentiality-for-Being' now takes on a clear meaning:

the 'toward' ('zu') in this phrase is designed to express the fact of Being-
related-to-itself, which is the same as what was intended in the preliminary
characterization of man as a being concerned about his own Being, or a
being that is for the sake of itself. The 'potentiality-for-Being' is directed
to the other aspect - the Being-possible. We must guard against the notion
that in the case of man, i.e., the being that has a certain relation to him-
self, what is involved is a thing on hand, and not something that exists
exclusively as the possibility of being one way or another. Also, we must
constantly keep before us this characterization of man as Being-toward-
the-potentiality-for-Being, for it serves to anchor the Heidegger concept
of the 'future' and hence of 'time', neither of which can be understood
without it.
As a bar to any reification or to any conception of man as a (con-
tingent) sample of a species, Heidegger emphasizes one further aspect of
the concept of Existence - that the Being of this being is in each case mine
(je meines). All additional determinations of Existence must be viewed
in the light of this 'mine-ness'.
(13) The notion, often encountered in Life-Philosophy, that life signi-
fies a going beyond itself (in Georg Simmel's phrase, "Living is living-
beyond") is also found in the philosophy of Existence. In part, it is
already contained in the nature of possibility mentioned above. If the
Being of man is a Being-possible, then he himself is never at the end, but
lives as an everlasting 'not yet'. He must constantly surmount or transcend
the present state; this going beyond is an essential law of Existence.
In Heidegger, to be sure, this notion is bound up with a further idea
stemming partly from Kantian philosophy and partly from Wilhelm
DiIthey. For Kant, knowledge is possible only with the help of the cate-
gories, hence only by virtue of the fact that the knower dwells, as it were,
'in' the categories. Similarly, in Heidegger, man must live in a medium
of understanding (Heidegger calls it 'world') if he is to be able to con-
ceive of a being as determined in one fashion or another. Thus any indi-
vidual being must have 'risen above' this horizon of understanding in order
to be accessible at all. For instance, a relationship of things on hand can
be encountered only within the horizon of 'on-hand-ness', a 'tool' only
within the horizon of the everyday world, and so forth. Later we shall
discuss the 'ultimate surmounting' or the transcending of all beings
144 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

toward nothingness. But first some comments are needed on the role
played by moods in the philosophy of Existence.
(14) The first to call attention to the phenomenon of mood in its
philosophical significance was the Danish thinker Kierkegaard, so that
on the whole he is to be looked on as the spiritual father of Existence
philosophy. There was in his case, of course, an extremely close con-
nection with religious matters.4
To the 'abstract thinkers', of whom Hegel in his view was typical,
Kierkegaard counterposed the 'living thinkers'. By the former he meant
those who rely on abstract logical thinking alone, to the exclusion of
their entire personal existence - those who (metaphorically speaking)
build castles in their thoughts but do not themselves reside in them, so
that nothing happens to them if the castle burns down. The living
thinkers, on the other hand, consider knowledge to be neither disinter-
ested contemplation, nor a world-spurning end in itself, nor some aesthetic
amusement running on alongside of life. Instead, their philosophizing
springs from the inmost necessity of their Existence; they place thinking
at the service of living; they enter personally and passionately into the
questions that assail them. Hence for them there is no such thing as a
complete system. They are open without limit to the actual world with
its impenetrable riddles, and this prohibits them from ignoring reality in
the name of some intellectual edifice supposed to solve all problems.
The basic mood of Existence philosophy already comes into play here.
The world in which we live is utterly unintelligible, absurd. How then is
it possible for a life to be authentic and to look the uncanniness (Unheim-
lichkeit) of the world squarely in the eye, instead of denying it away?
Man's insecurity is revealed above all in his moods. Of these, dread
occupies a central position. As distinguished from fear, which is always
directed toward something definite (the danger of being hurt, of failing
in some task, of being punished), dread lacks a specific object of which
to be afraid. Dread is groundless, yet at the same time of an unbroken
totality. For it is not just that one aspect of man or some particular
relationship to the world is threatened; it is that the entire Being of man
together with all of his relations to the world is placed fundamentally in
question. Man loses all hold; all rational knowledge and belief collapse;
the familiar and the intimate are pushed into inconceivable distance. All
that remains is the self in absolute loneliness and despair.
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER 145

But it is precisely in this situation that man is compelled to decide

whether he will dare endure dread and thus become capable of reaching
the authenticity of his Existence, or whether, having failed to do so, he
will flee to the noisy bustle of the world in order to drown out the sound
of dread. It is for this reason that Kierkegaard calls dread the 'whirlpool
of freedom'. Boredom operates along the same line, if less basically, for
it too causes everything to subside into complete indifference. When man,
as a result of his failure in the face of dread and boredom, takes refuge
in distraction, but then learns from experience that such flight is indeed
hopeless, he is overcome with melancholy. The private awareness that he
cannot authentically be himself rests on him like a heavy burden. When
dread, till then suppressed, suddenly breaks through, melancholy grows
into desperation. In this latter state, however, authentic Existence attains
realization, for anyone who has wholly abandoned himself to desperation
has gained his authentic self.
Finitude, however, cannot provide an ultimate solution to the existen-
tial set of problems. Even the most authentically existing man cannot get
along without an absolute. And thus nothing is left for Kierkegaard at
the end but a leap into Christianity - not a Christianity that leads gradu-
ally to belief by way of rational proofs and the like, but a blind leap into
Divinity. This does not eliminate the questionable and incomprehensible
character of reality, since Christianity itself remains as "the absurd clung
to with infinite passion".
(I5) In the case of Heidegger, on the other hand, the path to an abso-
lute, extra-mundane center is blocked by his acceptance of a basic idea
due to Dilthey, another philosopher who plays a central role in Heidegger's
thought. From Dilthey, Heidegger took over the notion of man as an
historical creature, and with it the method of the hermeneutic, or the
immanent exegesis of the meaning of the world without transcendent
assumptions. Dilthey sought to understand man in his own terms. What
made such understanding possible, he believed, was the conception of
man as a member of the historico-social world, embedded in the historical
contexts of becoming and acting - combined with the notion of the
historical relativity of world views. Aided by a sympathetic appreciation
of past human possibilities, man should be able to free himself from
the narrowness of his own particular horizon and learn to understand
himself in his historicality (Geschichtlichkeit). But the severity of the basic
146 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

mood and problematic of Existence philosophy was unknown to Dilthey;

his was a gentler, more intuitive nature, which found aesthetic satis-
faction, perhaps even a substitute for religion, in historical analysis. 5 The
assimilation of his conception into Heidegger's existential ontology, how-
ever, of necessity intensifies the problems posed - it now appears that for
finite human Being there is absolutely no way out.
(16) This development in turn creates a tie with certain aspects of the
work of Rainer Maria Rilke. With unrelenting acuity, this poet-philoso-
pher puts into words the experience of the unbounded strangeness and
incomprehensibility of the world, of the total insecurity of human Dasein,
as well as the absorption of man into a mass Dasein without color and
without Existence. For Rilke, it is death that guides man to the greatest
enhancement of life and first makes it meaningful - not the 'little death'
which is mass-produced in the cities, the death which 'they' die, but the
'great death' achieved and perfected by man in his non-replaceable indi-
viduality as an accomplishment that is most uniquely his own and that
cannot be taken away from him. In Rilke's later writings the fact that
man is constantly menaced by death assumes an increasingly central
significance. But while Rilke allows metaphysical explanations to enter
as well, Heidegger, in accordance with the idea of immanence, interprets
death strictly in its function in life itself (hence in its role with regard to
the consciousness of the human Dasein, aware of death and thinking
about it). Death serves, on the one hand, as the basis for obtaining the
concept of authentic Existence, and on the other to work out the existen-
tial-ontological concept of finitude.
The finitude of human Existence is entirely different from that of a
thing. A thing is finite because it is surrounded by other things and there-
fore is bounded in relation to them. Thus it 'has' boundaries and these
determine its finitude. Existence, on the contrary, is its boundary; the
Being of the boundary runs through the very fabric of Existence, and does
not first appear at its ascertainable terminations. Death is not a boundary
of life in the way that a path has its boundary at the place where it ends.
Death stands within Dasein: explicitly or not, Dasein is continuously
coming to an understanding with death. Dasein is a constant having-a-
relation to death - a 'Being-toward-death' ('Se in zum Tode'), as Heidegger
puts it - and thus death shares in determining Dasein's attitude toward
Existence, whether this attitude is authentic or inauthentic. Hence the
 MAR TIN HEIDEGGER 147

consciousness of death is constitutive of the consciousness of finitude; for

nothing so much as death hurls a person out of his everydayness and
forces upon him the consciousness of his limitation, yet at the same time
intensifies his awareness of the necessity for existential commitment.
Anyone who wants to arrive at a more intuitive understanding may
construct an imaginary model in which men do not die. Doubtless, things
would not simply remain as of old, with life continuing the same as
before except that the final end would be missing. All of life would take
on a different character - proof of the fact that even in life death is a
moulding force. Nay, more. According to Heidegger, without death there
would be no authentic Existence, since only in enduring the indeterminate
possibility of death is Existence present. The chief stress here is on inde-
terminacy. For this precludes any notion that an authentic relation to
death can take the form of man conceiving a fine plan, carrying it out
and then at the end saying: 'I have done my duty, the meaning of my life
has been fulfilled, now let death come.' Death, in fact, can break in upon
man at any moment and make it impossible for him to execute his long-
term design. Therefore, the only way for authentic Existence to behave
toward death is to consider it in its character as an indeterminate possibility.
(17) Closely connected to death is another fundamental feature of the
Being of human Existence, which for Heidegger ultimately plays the most
important role of all - temporality Zeitlichkeit. The concept of death
necessarily raises the question of how we are to reconcile the nature of
time with the fact that death already plays a role in the present. As an
actual event, death occurs only in the future. Consequently, the essence
of time itself must contain a reference from the future back to the present.
By the same token, any discussion of the historical nature of man im-
mediately raises the question of the inclusion of the past in the present.
In opposition to the notion of a continuously flowing, measurable,
objective world-time, Life-Philosophy emphasized 'subjective' or actually
experienced time which, depending on the type of experience, sometimes
creeps slowly along and sometimes seems to fly. But this subjective fact
was regarded only as an aspect of an underlying objective time. In Ex-
istence philosophy, on the other hand, subjective time is accorded a
central position as a medium without which it is impossible to under-
stand man. Heidegger even derives objective time, which he calls 'within-
time-ness' ('Innerzeitigkeit'), from SUbjective time.
148 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

Here there is a clear relationship to the most profound interpretation

of subjective time in Western philosophy, that of Augustine. The latter
chose to conceive the mysterious essence of time as that which is momen-
tary or instantaneous, and thus as having the character of something made
or created, in contrast to a motionless and constant eternity. He was
aware that in accepting this conception we run into a series of paradoxes.
Assume that time at any given instant consists of an indivisible moment.
Then since such a moment or point is a nullity, we should have to assume
that all beings run their course in a nullity. Moreover, we could not speak
of longer or shorter times, or know anything of a past or a future. If,
however, we take as our starting-point an extended moment, then this
breaks down immediately into past, present and future; and we must
further assume that this extended moment, moving on in time, contains
simultaneously both past and future. Or, we again fall back into the
consequences first listed. Augustine finds the solution in the 'expansion
of the soul' (distentio animi): the soul unites within itself past, present
and future. In the present moment, it still holds on to what is hurrying
back into the past and already looks forward in eager anticipation to what
is coming. This is what makes it possible to apprehend duration and to
measure time.
In existential ontology, the 'three-dimensionality' of time serves to
characterize the essence of human Dasein. The momentary Being of Ex-
istence is this extendedness in the three temporal directions. Thus time is
again connected in thought to the concepts of death and finitude, since
it is temporality (which, for Heidegger, makes up the innermost core of
man) that determines finitude as finite. In contrast to the Life-Philoso-
pher's picture of an effervescent time-flux of reality, the decisive element
here is once again the inexorable severity of the basic existential mood:
the present is characterized as that which, closing threateningly around
Existence, either compels it to make a decision or causes it to fall short
of attainable heights and sink back forlornly into the inauthenticity of
mass Dasein; the past, instead of being a supportive foundation, is that
which forces man into the present situation and thus narrows his possi-
bilities of Being; the future consists in possibilities yet to be grasped, for
which a continuous background is supplied by the extreme and most
indeterminate possibility of death. If Existence is confronted by the op-
posed directions, 'authenticity-inauthenticity' (an antithesis that is dis-
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER 149

continuous and to be bridged only by a leap), then the resultant tension

must have effect on time. The temporality of Existence is quite different
from that of Dasein, which conceals from itself the feeling of uncanniness
and is driven along passively by the course of the world. Existence is open,
tense yet composed, and thus 'of the moment'. It attains its supreme
authenticity and most concentrated form in what Heidegger calls 'anti-
cipatory resoluteness' ('vorlauJende Entschlossenheit'). By this is meant
the courageous delivery of oneself over to death as the non-replaceable,
indeterminate and final possibility of Dasein - a delivery that impels one
to activity and makes one keenly aware for the first time of the positive
possibilities of one's own Existence and of the Existences of others.
(18) The characteristic features cited thus far have no doubt already
made clear that there is often a relation between the conceptions of
Existence philosophy and the ideas of religion and theology. For example,
Heidegger describes man as a being who is concerned about his own
Being; this suggests care about one's own salvation - a suggestion that
is all the more striking because the same term 'care' ('Sorge') is bestowed
by Heidegger on that formal structure of the constitution of Existence
expressed in his description of man. The relation shows up even more
clearly in the analysis of guilt and conscience. What is decisive, however,
is that all these concepts are severed from their original metaphysical
roots and receive (in Dilthey's sense) a purely immanent exegesis. Care
about the salvation of the soul becomes care as a comprehensive charac-
terization of the essence of human Existence. Guilt (or original sin) as a
unique historical event gives rise to Being-guilty as an existential a priori
feature of man. Conscience as a summons from God turns into a call from
Existence to itself. Thus one might be inclined (at least in a certain respect)
to view Heidegger as a 'recreant Christian theologian'.
(19) We are now able to summarize the most important basic determi-
nations of man, as presented in Heidegger's existential ontology.6 The
constitution of Existence (ExistenzverJassung) , which is formally deter-
mined by the initial characterization of man as a being who is concerned
about his own Being, is intended to set off man as against the realm of
things-on-hand. 'Mine-ness' (Jemeinigkeit) signifies the shutting out of
all forms of cosmic unity that cancel the loneliness of man. Situation
marks that by which Existence is essentially imprisoned, from which
Existence can never free itself and which - although itself a stranger to
150 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

Existence - constantly menaces it and presses it to a decision. Since

Existence itself is devoid of content, we must reckon among the elements
of the situation that surround Existence and constitute its Other not only
the external configuration of life's circumstances but also one's own Ego
with its dispositions, character and inclinations. 'Thrown-ness' (Geworfen-
heit) means that without my being asked and without my willing it I have
been put into this body, this character, this historical spot, and this place
in the universe, and left to myself. The term 'world' is intended to empha-
size that Existence can realize itself only through a relation to an Other,
even though the latter be experienced as an unintelligible and restrictive
power. Transcendence expresses the incomplete, unfinished character of
Existence, which can be only by constantly going beyond itself (but com-
pare the concept of transcendence in Jaspers, which is altogether different
and which will be dealt with later). Falling-down (Verfallen) points to the
fact that for the most part man is not truly himself but exists in the
mode of inauthenticity; the authenticity possible for him is attainable not
by a gradual transition but by a radical reversal, a leap. The world is not
first opened to human understanding through theoretical comprehension
but through mood. Here dread (Angst) occupies a central position be-
cause it makes manifest the true character of the world, its uncanniness
(Unheimlichkeit) in the face of which everyday familiarity (Vertrautheit)
amounts to no more than a glossing over of the world's real countenance.
It is in death and guilt (Schuld) that the finitude of Existence, as a being
interwoven with its own boundary, breaks through; and it is in the call
of conscience (Gewissensruf) that the inauthenticity of normal, everyday
Dasein, aJ well as the task of authentically being oneself, reaches man's
consciousness. Temporality (Zeitlichkeit) is both a comprehensive charac-
terization of Existence and an emphasis on the openness of Existence
simultaneously to past happenings, present encounters and future possi-
bilities. Historicality (Geschichtlichkeit) exposes man to view as a reca-
pitulating creature (wiederholendes Wesen) who can attain the possibilities
of his Existence only by a deepening assimilation of the historical heritage.
By singling out these partial aspects in the structure of Existence, we
at the same time delimit existential ontology with respect to philosophical
tendencies that at first appear closely akin. We have already called at-
tention to the difference as regards Scheler's personalism. This becomes
even clearer when we contrast the two conceptions of the essence of
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER 151

spirit. In Scheler, spirit is that essential form of mental life which frees us
from bondage to the organic environment, which opens the way for a
candid look at the world as one not relative to the instincts of the per-
ceiving organism, and which makes access possible to the realm of
essences. Heidegger, on the other hand, holds that the specific dis-
tinguishing marks of the spirit are the mood of dread (as distinct from
mere fear, which is also present among the lower organisms), the experi-
ence of guilt, the hearing of the call of conscience, the potentiality-for-
gaining-or-losing-oneself, dying (as opposed to mere living-out-one's-life-
to-the-end), the appropriation of what history has handed down.
The philosophy of Heidegger also differs from Life-Philosophy. The
latter is dominated by the notion, reminiscent of pantheism, that human
Dasein is embedded in the context of the world; that individuality is ab-
sorbed into something impersonal (e.g., in Nietzsche's 'amor fati'); that
our sharply defined concepts are inadequate to deal with the continuous
flux of life; but that in spite of everything it is possible to gain an approxi-
mate grasp of reality and of the creatively developing life-power. In
contrast, Existence philosophy centers around the insecurity and loneli-
ness of the self, the indissolubility of individuality, the absolute unintelli-
gibility of the world, the lack of all that is creative or progressive - for
in the momentary tension of Existence the thought of progress becomes
meaningless.
Existential ontology is likewise sharply delimited from nihilism, as
exemplified in Schopenhauer. Nothingness is not a place of last refuge
which frees life from a meaningless world through the gradual extinction
of the will to be (des Willens zum Dasein). Rather, it is what thrusts man
back into the world and impels him to the most active commitment.
Hence there is no connection here with any romantic conceptions of
death.
By the same token, Existence philosophy has nothing in common with
that form of mysticism dominated by the notions of passively sinking
back into one's own inner state, uniting one's soul with God and thus
enjoying - in direct opposition to the basic mood of Existence philosophy
- a feeling of absolute peace.
This is not to deny, of course, that the most varied relations do exist
with all of these currents of thought; indeed, the preceding remarks were
meant to indicate the manifold connections between Heidegger's existen-
152 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

tial ontology and the works of the Western mind that history has handed
down to us.
(20) We conclude with a further comment on Heidegger's concept of
'nothingness' ('Nichts'), as a preliminary to an overall exposition of his
existential ontology. We may get at this concept by way of Spinoza's
principle that "omnis determinatio est negatio". In order to conceive of
something as being determined in a certain way, we must be in a position
to contrast it with something else. We can grasp the col or 'red' in its
individuality only because we are also acquainted with other colors. If
from birth we had seen everything as red, we would not know what it
means to call something 'red'. This being so, how then do we arrive at the
concept of a being at all? What is the Other from which we mark off
Being? Nothing seems to be left except nothingness. But the latter does
not admit of being thought, since thinking always needs an object to
which it refers. Thus nothingness must be given to us in some other way.
This other way, Heidegger says, is the mood of dread, in which there is
consummated that emptying out of Being which he calls 'annihilation'
('Nichtung'). When we say, after the dread passes, 'It was really nothing',
this is to be taken literally. In dread, man's Being is manifested to him
as a Being-maintained in nothingness (ein Hineingehaltensein in das
Nichts). This is why Heidegger says: "In the Being of a being there takes
place the annihilation of nothingness." In order to comprehend Being as
a positive fulfillment in the sentence 'Something is', it is thus not enough
for Heidegger, as it is for Scheler, simply to have gazed into absolute
nothingness. On the contrary, for the question of Being to become
meaningful, nothingness must have been experienced in dread as a happen-
ing touching the whole of Existence.
These references to the many intellectual motivations of existential
ontology may incline some to believe that a philosophy that effects a
synthesis of Aristotle's problematic of Being, Kierkegaard's idea of Ex-
istence, Rilke's concept of death, the Kantian notion of transcendence,
the phenomenology of Hussed, a concept of understanding that stems
from Dilthey, the Augustinian conception of time, and the like, can only
result in an extremely artificial eclecticism. The following summary ac-
count of Heidegger's philosophy is intended to demonstrate the contrary.
We shall not be able, however, to satisfy the need for a fully rounded
elaboration of the ideas; for while Heidegger is a systematic thinker, he
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER 153

is not a system thinker, and in his own philosophizing he himself fulfills

the law that finite Existence can lay hands only on what is fragmentary,
remains always en route, and never arrives at its goal.

B. THE ONTOLOGY OF FINITE 'DASEIN,7

1. The Problem of Being and Being-in-the-World

We start with the Aristotelian question: What do we really mean when
we use the word 'being' (,seiend')? This is the question of the 'meaning
of Being' (' Sinn von Sein'). The only basis available, to begin with, is the
vague understanding of Being that governs us all and is present in each
use of the little word 'is'. Consequently, an investigation into fundamental
ontology must begin by analyzing this human Dasein which understands
Being, and it must analyze it in just that mode in which an authentic
understanding is suppressed: the mode of everyday-ness. Thus man is to
function as the exemplary being who will be interrogated about his Being.
All the essential traits that crop up in this process are to be viewed in the
light of the idea of Existence. That is to say, man is not to be regarded
as an instance of a species of things appearing along with other things,
but as the kind of being who is concerned about his own Being. The
Being of this being is in each case mine; his Being-what is to be under-
stood as a possible way for him to be (namely, to be one way or another)
and not as a sum of properties with which he is endowed. Essence, there-
fore, is to be interpreted on the basis of Existence. That this can be so
rests on the fact that the Being of the being 'man' is to be comprehended
as Being-possible, and that man who is concerned about his own Being
is thus related to his own Being as to a possibility.8 Dasein is the possi-
bility of either being or not being oneself; in the first instance, it is
authentic, in the second it is inauthentic. Man is not a thing-on-hand;
hence the determinations of the Being of a thing-on-hand, namely, the
categories, are not applicable in his case. In contradistinction to the
categories, Heidegger calls Dasein's characters of Being 'Existenzialien'.
The basic a priori constitutive state of Dasein, which already governs
the analysis of everyday-ness, is Being-in-the-world (In-der- Welt-sein).
This structural aspect is counterposed to methodological solipsism,
customary since Descartes, which assumes as the immediately given a
consciousness without a world and certain only of its own Being. 'Being-
154 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

in' or 'in-Being' does not signify the Being-on-hand of one thing in

another (as a book, e.g., is 'in' the drawer); instead, it means the familiar
residing in something, 'staying at'. Man dwells in the world familiar to
him; he is, as a straightforward and unbiased analysis of the phenomena
shows, directly in the 'outside' world and does not have to cross some
kind of border of a fictitiously established 'consciousness' in order to get
there. The various forms of Being-in are not perceptions or cognitions.
They are such modes of behavior as having to do with something, pro-
ducing something, using something, undertaking, accomplishing and so
on, for which the comprehensive term 'to-be-concerned-with' ('Besorgen')
is introduced. The aim is to work out a natural concept of the world,
which the ontology transmitted to us has ignored. While for traditional
ontology the world consists of a cosmos of natural things on hand, for
Heidegger it is evident at the outset that what is given is not something-
on-hand but something-at-hand-for-use, not things but stuff (Zeug). The
traditional starting-point is, of course, understandable. For being-con-
cerned-with includes a special kind of looking into the world: circum-
spection (Umsicht). When concerned handling or manipulation ceases,
this kind of sight is lost; what remains is a mere lingering in the world,
and in this placid lingering, a being is revealed as a pure something-on-
hand. 9 But every theoretical approach rests precisely on the assumption
that concerned absorption in the world has faded into mere contem-
plation; this leads the theorist to believe mistakenly that what is primary
consists of things on hand.
With this point in mind, we can also understand Heidegger's critique
of Western metaphysics, which latter takes it for granted that by a being
is meant something on hand. According to Heidegger, however, it is only
the kind of vision acquired from an artificial theoretical approach that
sees the world as a complex of things. Viewed in this fashion, man ap-
pears as one of the many things on hand in the world and is therefore
classified as part of this complex of things. And what makes the existen-
tial-ontological starting-point so difficult to understand is the fact that it
seeks to obtain a correct insight into the Being of man by completely
eliminating just this theoretical way of considering matters.
The stuff or equipment that Dasein handles is at the outset incon-
spicuous, and environment, which consists of such stuff, remains obscure
in its character as world. This character is uncovered not through theo-
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER 155

retical cognition but in the course of being-concerned-with and specifi-

cally in this manner: that needed equipment is lacking (say, a hammer for
fastening something down), in certain cases even disturbs the concern,
and attracts attention by its not being at hand. Now for the first time
the world shines forth as the 'in-order-to' connection to the totality of
stuff, a connection anchored in an ultimate 'for-the-sake-of' - in ration-
alist terms, 'purpose' - grounded in man himself. The hammer, e.g., is
for or toward hitting nails, the nails for fastening something down, this
something for protection against bad weather - this last, however, only
on account of man since, in the Heidegger language, it is "for the sake
of a possibility of human Being". This shows, for one thing, that all
being-concerned-with maintains itself within the medium of under-
standing that has to do with the in-order-to connection, a medium which
Heidegger calls 'world'. It also shows that all interconnections of stuff or
equipment spring from the Being of Dasein or, more exactly, from a
possibility of this Being. The Heidegger definition of the world we are
forced to omit, since the explanation would hold us up too long.
Being in the world, besides a Being alongside of stuff that is the object
of concern, is at the same time a Being with other men. Being-with is
part of human Being. The others (men) are neither (things) on-hand nor
(stuff) at-hand; they are there also and with. The world of man is a with-
world (Mitwelt), his Being is a Being-with (Mitsein), the Being-in-them-
selves (Ansichsein) of others is a Dasein-with (Mitdasein). The others are
not objects of concern, as equipment would be, but are objects of solici-
tude (Fiirsorge) - a term to be taken without any socio-ethical flavor and
intended only to characterize in general the Being-alongside (Beisammen-
sein) of human, existential Being as contrasted to the occurring-together
of things. Being-against-one-another, passing-one-another-by, and the
like are also to be included. The particular kind of vision (Sichtart)
governing here is identified as either considerateness (Riicksicht) or for-
bearance (Nachsicht), both of which may range through the modes of
indifference up to inconsiderateness.

2. The 'They' (Das Man)

In the domain of the with-world, the question arises as to the subject of
existing, the who of Dasein. Here Heidegger does not hesitate to deny the
seemingly obvious fact that the subject is 'I'. He maintains, instead, that
156 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

the subject is 'They' ('Man'), that is to say, the inauthentic self whose
concern is to keep a distance from others, who suppresses every significant
exception and reduces to a single level all possibilities of Being, who
obscures any primordial access to matters, furtively evades any decision,
removes responsibility from Dasein and thus relieves it of its burden.
Up to this point, we have discussed the correlate that corresponds
generally to Existence in its relation to the Other. The task now is to get
at the Being of Existence itself. It is the essence of Dasein not simply to be,
in general, but to be 'there'. This 'there' is meant to express that man's
own Being is not entirely inaccessible to him, but is originally disclosed
(erschlossen) to him. When we speak of a lumen naturale, we refer meta-
phorically to the fact that to Dasein belongs its own Being-cleared
(Gelichtetsein) or Being-lighted-up, together with - since Dasein is only
as Being-in-the-world - the lighting-up of the world, or what is usually
designated by the rather obfuscating term 'consciousness'.

3. State-oJ-Mind and Understanding

The two forms of disclosedness in Heidegger are state-oJ-mind (Befind-
lichkeit) and understanding (Verstehen). By the former is meant mood.
In mood, there is disclosed to Dasein the fact that it is. However, the 'that'
appearing here is not an undifferentiated one, but a 'that it is and has to
be', which is laden with existential weight. What becomes manifest in
mood is the character of Being as a burden. Here Dasein experiences the
uncanniness of having been delivered over to itself without knowing
whence it came, whither it is going and for-what it is. This experience does
not merely appear from time to time; it takes place constantly because
man is always in some kind of mood. Even the idle lack of mood is a
thoroughly positive form of having a mood, in which man is satiated with
himself. Man's having been delivered to himself, which mood discloses,
is designated by Heidegger as 'thrown-ness' {'Geworfenheit'). Dasein for-
ever tries to become master of its moods; but this is possible only with the
aid of a counter-mood. Thus mood closes off as primordially as it dis-
closes. The burdensome character of Being is revealed to Dasein in the
form of an evasive withdrawal, that is, Dasein always attempts to flee the
burden. Mood, here, is not to be conceived of as a subjective state of
feeling which is then 'projected' onto the external world. This would pre-
suppose that the world is already 'there' independent of mood. For
 MAR TIN HEIDEGGER 157

Heidegger, the world is first discovered in mood (as opposed to Scheler,

for whom the experience of resistance affords knowledge of the external
world). In mood, Dasein first experiences itself as something located in
the midst of beings and surrendered to the world, by which means alone
it can be approached by beings that come from the world. The resonance
that man's mood finds in world processes is therefore the deepest and
most primordial communication between the individual man and other
beings. At the same time, mood is the basic stratum which sustains all
rational knowledge and understanding.
The second aspect constituting the disclosedness of Dasein is under-
standing. In contrast to the passivity of mood, this aspect brings to the
fore the more active element. 'Understanding' is used here in the original
sense of 'being able to cope with something' or 'being able to do some-
thing'. This being-able-to suggests that Dasein's existential state of Being
is Being-possible. Possibility, in human Dasein, does not mean something
not yet actual; rather, it represents the most positive mode of Being.
Existential Dasein does not signify to be on hand, but to live in and by
means of possibilities. The Being of Dasein is therefore potentiality-for-
Being (Seink(jnnen). This potentiality-for-Being, however, is always at-
tuned, that is to say, the two-fold disclosedness of Dasein expresses itself
in the fact that Dasein experiences itself as 'thrown possibility'. While for
the most part Dasein exists inauthentically and allows the possibilities to
be presented to it from the 'They', yet precisely on account of its character
as a possibility it is a Being-free for its very own potentiality-for-Being.
That the Dasein of a being discloses itself in this way, that it penetrates
the conditions of its own possibility, is grounded in the fact that it pos-
sesses 'projection' (Entwurf). What is meant by this is the structure-of-
Being of the range of possibilities. If man, as long as he lives, is thrown
into the necessity of projecting, this does not signify that he behaves only
rationally in accordance with thought-out plans. Rather, it signifies that
in the projection he understands himself solely in terms of possibilities,
to be sure without thematically grasping these possibilities as such. The
sentence 'Become who you are', which at first glance seems to say some-
thing nonsensical, receives a meaning in the existential interpretation.
If we think of man as something on hand, then, on the basis of the
structure of projection, we should have to say that he is more than in
fact he is. But in the existential sense, he is never more than he actually
158 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

is because the potentiality-for-Being, the not-yet, is part of his Existence.

All scientific expositions are grounded in this primordial understanding,
as are everyday explanations. To want to understand something as some-
thing presupposes that in a certain respect we have set our sights upon
this something, which is possible only if it is already available in pre-
thematic understanding. Thus all understanding has a circular structure.
Any questioning is possible only if that which is being asked about is
already somehow understood; otherwise, we could not ask the question
at all. This also holds for the basic question of fundamental ontology:
the meaning of Being can be posed as a problem only because we have
at our disposal a non-thematic understanding of Being, though it is not
developed to the point of conceptual clarity.
Talk or discourse (Rede) is likewise rooted in the disclosedness of
Dasein. Dasein expresses itself in discourse as understanding-state-of-
mind. The meanings that can be grasped in the disc10sedness of the world
are put into words; what appears is that words accrue to meanings, not
that arbitrary meanings are supplied to artificially devised word-things.
In the mode of inauthenticity, understanding presents itself as idle talk,
curiosity and ambiguity. The first of these is a baseless telling and retelling,
which rests on the loss of any real relation to whatever is being talked
about, and through which the original disclosure of something is con-
verted into the most stubborn sort of closing-off. Because this bars the
way to genuine appropriation and hinders a deeper involvement in the
matter, such inauthentic understanding then assumes the additional
character of not staying at any place and of always hunting for what is
new - curiosity. Ambiguity points to the uncanny fact that we have no
criterion at our disposal enabling us to distinguish between what is
genuine in the world and what is not. These three aspects taken together
characterize man's falling-down into or being continually and incessantly
whirled into the inauthenticity and groundlessness of the 'They'.

4. Dread and the Care-Structure of Dasein

In our exposition thus far, we have discussed Dasein solely as something
neutral or even explicitly as inauthentic. What is still missing is access to
the authentic self. Such access is provided by dread or anxiety. Dread
alone can fetch man back from the falling-down upon world and public-
ness, liberate him from the dictatorship of the 'They' and, through total
 MAR TIN HEIDEGGER 159

upheaval, render him accessible as 'solus ipse'. Because dread is not

directed toward anything definite but causes the familiar environment
and 'with-world' as a whole to sink back into absolute meaninglessness 10,
it reveals to Dasein the uncanniness of its individualization. That, in the
face of which man dreads, is the same as that about which he dreads:
he is anxious in the face of Being in the world and at the same time about
(his) Being-in-the-world. The term 'uncanniness' is intended to express
the coinciding, in the case of dread, of in-the-face-of-which and about-
which. What also becomes evident here is how mood discloses Dasein in
the manner of an evasive turning away. By busy absorption in everyday-
ness, man tries to flee the feeling, made manifest in dread, of 'not being
at home'. The familiar and intimate are supposed to conceal the basic
mood of dread, which, however, stilI pursues Dasein in all forms of
being concerned. It is not the familiar world that is the primordial ele-
ment, breached at times by the mood of dread; rather, what is original
is uncanniness, and familiarity is a derived, inauthentic mood of it. Thus
it is apparent that while dread can bring men to the point where freedom
for authentic Being-one's-self may be seized, yet man at first and for the
most part fails in this task.
The unity of these existential structures Heidegger calls 'care'. Actually
the aspect of care was already present in the formal determination of man
as a being who is for the sake of himself, in other words, in man's for-the-
sake-of relationship to his own Being. Now the care aspect is displayed
in the structures of thrownness, of understanding projection 11, of falling,
and of the basic mood of dread. Under this aspect, Dasein always appears
as an absolutely individualized creature, concerned about its own Being
and threatened simultaneously from two sides: from within by the deep
stratum of fundamental moods, and from without by the mass which
swallows up the individual. In addition, the three-fold direction of time is
already hinted at in existential care: the future, in Being-ahead-of-itself;
the present, in Being-fallen; and the past, in thrown-ness.

5. Reality and Truth

The existential analysis of Dasein has important consequences for the
problems of reality and truth. For Heidegger, the question of the reality
of the external world is without meaning. It arises only because, instead of
analyzing and exhibiting the actual phenomenon of Being-in-the-world,
160 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

we split asunder the real unity and construct a world-less subject, which
we then seek in vain to glue back together with the other fragments (the
external world).
The problem of truth is carried to a deeper level by the analysis of dis-
closedness. Knowledge is possible only because Dasein, as Being that is
of understanding-state-of-mind and that is in-the-world, is able to un-
cover being in Dasein itself. The sole criterion of truth consists in the fact
that the being, which was referred to by a judgment, exhibits or identifies
its own self, and this confirms the fact that the judgment was actually an
uncovering. The judgment having been uttered, the uncovering appears
and along with it the relation, as embodied in it, to the uncovered being.
In the case of the theoretical approach, which causes everything to fade
into mere on-handness, assertions themselves become things on hand,
and truth becomes a relation between two things: an assertion and the
asserted being. This is the origin of the theory of adequatio rei et intellectus.
But the truth of a judgment in the sense of uncovering is possible only
because Dasein, and with it the world, is disclosed (lighted up) - that is,
because Dasein is 'in the truth'. Here Heidegger is speaking of ontic truth.
This includes disclosedness (or 'awareness', in the usual terminology),
thrownness (in which Dasein reveals itself as my Dasein in the midst of
other beings), understanding projection, and falling. This last aspect,
however, already expresses the fact that man always exists at the same
time 'in untruth', and this inauthentic way of Being makes possible closing
off, illusion, and error. Hence a deeper analysis shows that the proposition
'The locus of truth is the judgment' becomes its reverse, 'The locus of the
judgment is truth', that is, ontic truth, in which the maker of the judgment
must already stand at all times in order to be able to judge. It follows
further that there can be truth only so long as there is Dasein, which is to
say, so long as men exist; otherwise, beings cannot be uncovered. Also,
from this point of view the necessity to presuppose truth loses its obvious-
ness; for we are required to make this presupposition only because we
must 'presuppose' (i.e., accept simply as being-there) our own selves. But
this 'presupposition' is not 'necessary' so long as we are not asked whether
we wish at all to be or not to be.

6. Being-toward-Death
We obtain the totality of Dasein, which thus far has been broken down
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER 161

into various kinds of separate structures, by including the phenomenon

of death. According to the ontology of on-handness, death is a Being-at-
an-end of Dasein in the sense that a substantial '1' passes through a
temporal interval and with death such passage ceases. Actually, however,
death as a boundary is permanently interwoven with existing Dasein, for
the latter knows about death and is constantly trying to come to terms
with it. This continuous, if for the most part 'unconscious', relationship
to death Heidegger calls 'Being-toward-death'. Death is that possibility
of human Being most his own, since it cannot be taken over from him by
any proxy. Death is non-relational, since it abolishes all relations to the
world and throws Dasein back into its loneliness. It cannot be outstripped
because it signifies the last possibility of living existence. Moreover, it is
certain, yet indeterminate with respect to its occurrence in fact. Because
Dasein for the most part exists falling, man thus behaves inauthentically
at first to this ownmost, non-relational, not-to-be-outstripped, certain but
indeterminate possibility. He trivializes death by putting it aside as some-
thing occurring in the future which does not yet affect him. In this manner,
he conceals from himself the fact that death is possible at any moment.
Hence authentic Being-toward-death can consist only in the fact that
death is not evaded but endured, and indeed precisely in its character as
an indeterminate possibility. Such enduring is for Heidegger the ultimate
ideal of Existence; he calls it 'anticipation of death' (' Vorlaufen in den
Tod'). Here Dasein first reaches its supreme authenticity in that it is freed
from the nullity of everydayness and is called upon to exert the greatest
of effort. Any resting on past 'victories' is henceforth impossible, and now
for the first time man's eyes are opened to the magnitude of other
Existences.

7. Conscience, Being-Guilty, and Authentic Existence

The ideal of an authentic Existence expresses most distinctively the im-
manent character of Heidegger's philosophy - its renunciation of any
attempt to define the authenticity of man with the aid of such transcendent
entities as God or absolute values. In the very nature of the case, such an
ideal could not be secured through a simple analysis of the phenomena.
In order to regain firm phenomenal ground, we must look for a factually
discoverable aspect of Dasein that is a summons to authentic Being. This
phenomenon is conscience. In it Dasein calls to its own self, and it does
162 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

so in the uncanny mode of keeping silent. What is being called to is not

something defined as to content; rather, Dasein is summoned or aroused
to be its very own self. No wonder the voice of the summons seems
strange; for nothing could be more strange to a Dasein that exists in the
mode of Being of the 'They' than the self absolutely individualized to
itself. Likewise, the uncanny certainty with which the summoner makes
contact with the summoned can rest solely on the fact that the two are
identical. The call, of course, is not consciously planned; it comes from
me, yet from beyond me.
What makes the call of conscience manifest is Dasein's Being-guilty.
By this Heidegger means not a factual incurring of guilt, but the essential
nullity of Dasein, which consists above all in the contradictory character
of Being-a-man. On the one hand, man himself has to lay the ground-
work of his Being (since he, as Being-possible, must first decide about his
own self); on the other hand, he finds himself already set down in the fact
of his Being, thus has not of himself established this Being and so can
never become fully master of his self. Dasein is first fully disclosed in its
Being-guilty when it comprehends itself as guilty up to its end. But this
is possible only if it itself anticipates the end, that is, death. Thus the
notion of authentic Existence anticipating death is brought into harmony
with the phenomenon of conscience. The tensed attitude that springs from
authentically hearing the call of conscience and in which Dasein first
arrives at its existential truth, Heidegger designates by the name' resolute-
ness' {'Entschlossenheit'). The final formula for the ideal of Existence
then is: 'the silent, prepared-for-dread, self-projection upon one's own-
most Being-guilty'.

8. Temporality
The existential and anthropological problematic governing these last
several analyses gains further ontological importance when the meaning-
of-Being of care is set forth as temporality. By meaning here is meant
nothing other than that as which the unity of the care structure can be
understood. It may seem at first that the unity of human Dasein has
become even more questionable as a result of Dasein's being enlarged by
the addition of the phenomena of death, guilt and conscience. Yet, as a
matter of fact, the existential concept of death will now provide the initial
step in expounding the structure of time.
 MAR TIN HEIDEGGER 163

When authentic man anticipates death as a possibility of his own, the

paradoxical element here seems to lie in the fact that man, to whom as
an entity existing in the form of possibilities also belongs the final possi-
bility of death, comes toward his own self (auf sich selbst zukommt).
Now Heidegger sees in this coming-toward-oneself the primordial phe-
nomenon of the future (Zukunft). In this sense, the future has nothing
to do with a later, uniquely occurring point 'now', but simply character-
izes that medium in which Being-ahead-of-oneself is possible. Man is, as
such, 'futural' (zukiinftig), and he is so 'at every moment'. On the other
hand, when the call of conscience impels man to take over or accept his
nullity and thrownness, this means that he is to take over himself as that
which he already always was. Thrownness thus contains the' character of
having-been' (' Gewesenheit'). Because anticipatory resoluteness and the
taking over of Being-guilty bring about a cleared hearing for what is
encountered, there is then called forth an openness to the present. The
unity of the future, the having-been and the present is seen to be the
meaning that makes care possible, and this unity Heidegger calls 'tempo-
rality'. We thus reach the ultimate stratum of Being in man and at the
same time bring man's finitude under a unified formula.
Authenticity and inauthenticity now turn out to be modes of bringing
about temporality. In inauthentic Being-in-the-world - where Dasein
allows itself to be driven along, and skips from one distraction to another
- the arc spanning past and future is compressed to a minimum. The non-
resolute yet bustling absorption in the momentary that rules here,
Heidegger labels 'making present' ('Gegenwartigen'); and the setting of
sights on what are still objects of concern, that prevails at the same time,
he designates 'awaiting' ('Gewartigen'). Since in the mode of inauthen-
ticity, Dasein has closed itself off from taking over thrownness (i.e., Being-
guilty), its having-been has passed into having-forgotten. Thus the unity
of inauthentic Dasein's temporality is an awaiting that forgets and makes
present (das vergessend-gegenwartigende Gewartigen).
In authentic Existence, on the other hand, the three-dimensionality of
time achieves its full due. For what results here is a resolute turning to the
future (death), which is simultaneously a return to nullity (having-been),
and which lets the existential moment (of vision) spring forth in a concen-
trated burst of power.12 Dasein's openness to the world comes about in
conformity with the three dimensions of time: through this openness
164 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

alone can beings be encountered in the present, future possibilities grasped

as such, and the past understood as the past. Such openness is possible
only because Dasein itself is nothing but Being-opened temporally. There-
fore Heidegger speaks of the three 'ekstases' of temporality. The essential
point is that this primordial time is qualitative and finite (bounded by
birth and death), and not quantitative and infinite. Infinite or so-called
objective time has its origin in finite time. Within the concerned inter-
course of the world, a chronology arises based on the original time data
expressed by Dasein in such words as 'now', 'then', 'in those days'. This
chronology acquires a public character, and treats time as if it were some-
thing itself encountered in the world. Finally, because the theoretical atti-
tude causes everything to fade into mere things on hand, time too is
levelled off and becomes an uninterrupted, undifferentiated sequence of
qualitatively neutral 'now-points' on hand.

9. Historicality and Repetition

Temporality also serves as the foundation for historicality. Man is tem-
poral not because he stands in the flux of time, but because temporality
constitutes his innermost essential core. Similarly, man is not historical
in character because he is part of the 'objective' course of world history;
rather, something like objective world history is possible only because
Dasein as such is constituted by historicality. In this instance, too, the
objective element is reduced to a structural aspect of subjectivity.
Heidegger ties the problem of historicality to the question of whence
authentically existing man takes the possibilities of which he is to avail
himself. While man gains his resoluteness by looking unconcealed death
in the face, yet he cannot obtain the possibilities themselves from death,
since death itself exerts the powerful pressure that throws Dasein back
into moment-to-moment decision. Rather, the possibilities stem from the
heritage that Dasein hands down to itself. While inauthentic Dasein
snatches up the random flow of ambiguous opportunities offered it by
publicness, authentic Existence goes back explicitly to the have-been
possibilities of Existence which it makes its own. The less ambiguously
Dasein projects itself onto its ownmost possibility of death, the more un-
ambiguous is the choice of a hero, made here, and the more certain the
discovery of the Existence-possibilities that are to be appropriated. Thus
in historicality, too, the future is the primary mode of bringing Dasein
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER 165

to maturity. The more 'futural' Dasein is, the more open it is to the have-
been possibilities of Being. Hence man, and specifically authentically
existing man, is a repeating creature. Repetition is not an empty bringing
back of the past, nor merely a tying back of the present to what has been
outstripped; it is a rejoinder to what has-been-there, which comes out of
the depths of Existence, but which, as a decision of the moment, is at the
same time a decisive disavowal of the mere working out of the past in
the present. Human activity acquires historical meaning not because it is
part of a presumably known, objective, historical context of meaning, but
because it bends back to the individual uniqueness of what has been, and
answering this, pushes forward into the still uncertain obscurity of the
future.
But only the acceptance of thrownness, not the deliverance from it, can
bring about historicality. This boundary cannot be infringed by finite
Existence. All of these aspects are summarized by Heidegger in a sentence
that illustrates both the extraordinary difficulty of his language and its
powerful dynamics: "Only an entity which, in its Being, is essentially
futural so that it is free for its death and can let itself be thrown back upon
its factical 'there' by shattering itself against death - that is to say, only
an entity which, as futural, is equiprimordially in the process of having-
been, can, by handing down to itself the possibility it has inherited, take
over its own thrownness and be in the moment of vision for 'its time'.
Only authentic temporality which is at the same time finite, makes possible
something like ... authentic historicality." 13
Thus, in the overall view of existential ontology, man is pictured as a
nugatory creature thrown unasked into the world, finite, wedged between
the dark poles of birth and death, placed in situations that cannot be
lighted up, filled with dread to the depths of his being - a creature who
comports himself with concern for the world around him, solicitude for
his fellow-men, and care for himself, who for the most part exists lost
in the 'They', and is called upon by conscience to take over Being-guilty
by enduring his own death, and to make use of his historicality by a
repeating or recapitulating appropriation of what has been. But the inner-
most core of man, which for the first time allows all of these structural
aspects to be seen in unity, is temporality. It is the medium, the horizon,
within which a genuine understanding of the Being of human Dasein is
to be obtained.
166 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

The original inquiry, however, was addressed not to man but to the
meaning of Being in general. Man's finite Existence was to constitute
only the transit point toward this goal. Time has been shown to be the
horizon of understanding of human Being. But the question still is
whether time forms the medium for the understanding of Being in general.
This question, which suggests the further one as to whether we can push
on through finitude to Being itself, marks the close of the first part of
Sein und Zeit. 14
C. EVALUATION

Heidegger's philosophy is one of those undertakings designed to effect a

turn in the development of philosophy, but which at the same time carry
with them the danger of making all that has gone before look antiquated.
The inevitable result is a certain lack of inner restraint in thinking.
Such a philosophy, with its fundamentally new method of approach,
contains the potential for a two-fold reaction. If we do not make the
turn even experimentally with Heidegger, but judge his philosophy
from some rigidly assumed standpoint, then the whole thing is bound
to seem an incomprehensible word-picture, or at best a vain attempt at
a rationalized irrationalism. If, on the contrary, we do succeed in exe-
cuting the turn, we make the acquaintance of a fundamentally new way
of looking at questions, which can so strongly dominate and take pos-
session of us that all previous achievements in philosophy appear out-
moded. These two viewpoints are equally one-sided, yet they are the
usual ones. It is the inner tragedy of Heidegger's philosophy that neither
friends nor foes have paid attention to the positive metaphysical points
in his 'system'. In the case of foes, this is not surprising; what always
distinguishes blanket rejections is the willful failure to perceive new
knowledge, along with the errors that are sought. But even the approval
accorded Heidegger has often done his philosophy more harm than good.
For the very fact that he has presented a metaphysical interpretation of
the fundamental mood of modern man (whether that mood is consciously
experienced or resonates as an unconscious undertone) has inevitably
called forth all kinds of uncontrolled fancies and improvisations. These
stand in odd contrast to a philosophy that made the critical rigor of
Husserl its chief methodological principle.
We have deliberately refrained from giving an account of the various
 MAR TIN HEIDEGGER 167

writings published by Heidegger since the appearance of his main work.

These studies are not systematically connected to one another; moreover
in each of them only a quite special problem is considered. Hence they
would all require individual exposition and evaluation, for which space
is not available in this book. We deem it more important to afford the
reader a closer view of the range of ideas in Heidegger's chief work, for
only an understanding of this work opens the door to his other writings.
We shall, however, make one exception, and insert a brief discussion of
Heidegger's book on Kant. Our intent is not only to illustrate once more
what is peculiar to Heidegger's kind of thinking, using as an example his
critique of an earlier philosophical doctrine, but also to exhibit with the
aid of the Kant book some of the dangers that lie hidden in Heidegger's
thought. Since in this instance our exposition is directly followed by a
critical assessment, we have included this section in the evaluation of
Heidegger's philosophy.
Heidegger emphatically denies that Kant's aim in the Critique of Pure
Reason (hereafter abbreviated as CPR) was wholly or even in part to
provide an epistemology so as to base on it a metaphysics. A proper
understanding of Kant, says Heidegger, is impossible unless indeed we
first start from what metaphysics essentially is, namely, a theory of Being
or ontology. But we obtain access to the problem of Being only by way
of man's understanding of Being; therefore the question of Being as such
must be preceded by the question of human Being. This latter question
forms the exclusive subject-matter of the metaphysics of human Dasein or
fundamental ontology, without which no further metaphysics is possible.
Thus the ultimate starting-point of fundamental ontology is not some
problem posed abstractly, but the concrete question: 'What is man?' It
was precisely this question, according to Heidegger, that moved Kant so
deeply and determined the direction of all of his investigations of meta-
physics. And when Kant, in his theoretical philosophy, analyzed the
human capacity for knowledge, that analysis was not an end in itself. On
the contrary, insight into human knowledge was to be the means of
gaining insight into the essence of human Dasein. Kant's goal was to
"reveal the finitude in man", which was to show itself in the finitude of
human knowledge. The latter expresses itself in the fact that all human
knowledge is referred to intuition. That is to say, all intuiting is in its
essence 'receptive', and consists in a primal 'acceptance'. This is not
168 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

contradicted by Kant's later emphasis on the "spontaneity of the under-

standing". For all thinking must travel a roundabout way through general
concepts in order to be able to represent what is particular. But this
'roundaboutness' or discursiveness of the understanding is the keenest
index of its finitude. Even human reason remains imprisoned by finitude;
it cannot rise above experience and is therefore a "pure, sensuous reason".
Kant's three-fold division of human knowledge into sensibility, under-
standing and reason is therefore, in Heidegger's view, merely preliminary
in character. These three 'faculties', it turns out, are originally united in
a single 'root-faculty'. Heidegger believes he can prove that this pri-
mordial faculty is Kant's transcendental imagination. 15 By discovering this
basic faculty, Kant was able to grasp the problem of finitude in all of its
acuteness. At this juncture, however, according to Heidegger, something
quite essential occurred which he regards as the really important develop-
ment in the Kantian critique of reason: Kant took fright at this "dis-
closure of the subjectivity of the subject" and pulled back from his own
discovery. The transcendental imagination was, for him, the disturbing
unknown; in the second edition of the CPR, he thrust it aside and substi-
tuted the understanding in its place.
There is no doubt that Heidegger's interpretation of Kant, sketched
here only in rough outline, contains many other interesting and instructive
detailed analyses. Nevertheless, an interpretation of this sort cannot but
appear extremely questionable. The very attempt to understand Kant's
critique of reason from the standpoint of the question of Being already
does violence to it. For this involves operating with a concept of meta-
physics - namely, metaphysics as the theory of Being - that is repugnant
to the Kantian spirit. The Heidegger concept of metaphysics contains a
characterization of the subject-matter of this discipline, a characterization
based on what it is that metaphysics (primarily or exclusively) concerns
itself with. Kant raised many objections to this way of conceiving meta-
physics (see CPR, B, pp. 870 if.). In his view, the only possible characteri-
zation of metaphysics is a formal one, that is, one couched in terms of the
essential features of metaphysical statements. Such a characterization is
made feasible by Kant's ingenious classification of judgments into empiri-
cal and a priori, on the one hand, and analytic and synthetic, on the other.
Metaphysical statements are synthetic a priori statements, more exactly,
non-mathematical synthetic a priori statements (i.e., those that do not rest
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER 169

on constructions in the intuition). We have already briefly described such

statements in a previous passage as propositions whose truth-values we
can establish, even though this determination requires no observations
and cannot be obtained solely with the means of formal logic.
Kant's critique of reason, when looked at from the standpoint of
synthetic a priori statements, falls into two parts, one constructive, the
other destructive, In the latter part, the 'bad' metaphysical statements
(that is, those that do not stand up under a rigorous critique) are rejected;
these are the propositions of rational metaphysics, which make claims
about God, the soul, and the universe as a whole. The constructive part
contains, besides an analysis of mathematical knowledge, the exposition
and proof of 'good' metaphysical statements. These comprise all such
synthetic a priori statements as are presupposed by the general validity
of the propositions of the natural sciences, and even of those of pre-
scientific experience. In a certain respect it is therefore correct to say that
Kant was concerned primarily not with epistemology but with the es-
tablishment of a metaphysics. The latter, however, was neither a rational
metaphysics nor one in the Heidegger sense (which is governed by the
question of Being), but a metaphysics of experience. The kernel of it, in
CPR, is Kant's 'Analytic of Principles' - which, by the way, Heidegger
completely neglects. It was there that Kant undertook systematically to
assemble the synthetic a priori presuppositions of empirical knowledge.
According to Kant, all empirical sciences rest on metaphysical pre-
suppositions. The reverse side of the coin, however, is that a scientifically
tenable metaphysics necessarily completes its task once it has formulated
these presuppositions of empirical knowledge. It cannot provide anything
more than these presuppositions; in particular, it cannot become a science
of reality that goes beyond empirical data, as 'bad' rational metaphysics
claims to do.
Suppose we now make the following Gedankenexperiment: Instead of
interpreting the Kantian critique from the standpoint of Heidegger's con-
ception of the problem of Being, let us turn the question around and ask
how we are to characterize Heidegger's philosophy ifwe take as our basis
the problematic and results of Kant's CPR. The answer is quite plain.
Viewed from the Kantian standpoint, Heidegger's existential ontology
comes under 'bad' metaphysics, more exactly, under rational psychology.
Here, of course, 'rational psychology' is not to be taken in the special
170 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

historical form in which it was passed on to Kant. Heidegger's philosophy

contains no proof either of the substantiality of the soul or of its im-
mortality. However, it is also true that the Kantian critique is not directed
solely against these special theses of the Wolffian rational psychology, but
against the very possibility of an a priori science of man. Yet this is
precisely the claim that Heidegger makes for his analysis of the essence
of man. For, since the Heidegger results neither follow from mere con-
ceptual analysis nor rest on observations, they represent, in Kant's termi-
nology, non-mathematical synthetic a priori statements and hence are
metaphysical. Yet they are certainly not statements in which the pre-
suppositions of empirical scientific knowledge are formulated (as with
'good' metaphysics). On the contrary, they are statements that supposedly
contain essential insights into some domain of reality (as in the case of
scientifically untenable metaphysics). It is true that Heidegger includes in
the title of his studies the Kantian predicate 'transcendental', and that his
pursuit of human Dasein is not an end in itself but the pathway to a
metaphysics of Being. These circumstances, however, should not deceive
us as to the fact that Heidegger here is aiming at the kind of knowledge
that Kant held to be impossible.
This conclusion is in no way intended to 'play off' Kant against
Heidegger. We are not assuming that the Kantian position is correct; we
have formulated only the conditional assertion: if the Kantian standpoint
is accepted in principle, then Heidegger's philosophy is vulnerable to
Kant's destructive critique. For the sake of historical accuracy and justice,
it is absolutely necessary that we see this point clearly.
We can agree fully that interpreting the constructive part of Kant's
philosophy as a metaphysics of experience is not the only way of viewing
it. Kant's thought operates on many levels and thus offers many possi-
bilities of interpretation. For example, we may place the main emphasis
on the foundation laid by Kant for transcendental idealism; or we may
look upon his theoretical philosophy as a constituting of the concept of
the real world; or, finally, we may even interpret his endeavors from the
standpoint of the formulation of particular problems, say, the theory of
an objective temporal order (the topology of time). But no matter how
we interpret Kant, Heidegger's chosen starting-point - the formulation
of questions in the terms of fundamental ontology - is the one least suited
to gaining real access to Kant's concerns. Hence one can only be dis-
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER 171

tressed when Heidegger states flatly and aggressively that by means of his
analysis of Kant he has 'refuted conclusively' all interpretations that con-
nect Kant's formulations of problems to questions of epistemology. In
support of Heidegger's account, the point may be made that the "problem
of finitude in man" does touch a very important concern of Kant's. This
we can concede. But we ought not to overlook the fact that in Kant's view
there also exist concepts of reason, which are all rooted in the idea of the
unconditioned, and that man as a moral being - that is to say, as a freely
deciding creature - does not remain imprisoned by temporality and fini-
tude, but belongs to the intelligible world. On the basis of his ethics, and
within the framework of his philosophy of religion, Kant was stilI able
to arrive in the end at a metaphysics of the supersensible, although the
latter could not be proved theoretically.
We may regard as the main point of this metaphysics the proposition
that a man lacking revelation - that is, a man who in religious matters
does not rely on revelation - is entitled (but not obliged) to believe in God
and the immortality of the soul. This proposition is demonstrated by
starting from the interests of practical reason: A moral personality has
an interest in belonging to a world that affords it the prospect of un-
limited ethical perfection and, in addition, the prospect of a happiness
corresponding to its ethical value. According to Kant, through a principle
of inference not logically demonstrable, we may, basing ourselves on the
interests of practical reason, move on to a belief in the existence of that
which satisfies these interests - that is, a moral world - from which in
turn we can easily derive the existence of God and the immortality of the
soul.
This aspect of the Kantian philosophy has been given so much promi-
nence because it serves to make clear the great contrast to Heidegger's
thinking. Heidegger is a philosophical 'monist' in the sense that for him
there is nothing beyond the domain of temporal human Dasein, with all
the existential-ontological traits cited above. When he attempts to reduce
the three Kantian cognitive faculties to the transcendental imagination,
he imposes a monism upon Kant, too; for there is left standing, for the
whole interpretation of Kant, only one plane of reference of temporal
human Dasein. But Kant was not a monist, he was a dualist - man as a
moral creature belongs not to the phenomenal world to which our theo-
retical knowledge is restricted, but to the noumenal or intelligible world.
172 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

Man, as the intelligible T, is not subject to the temporality andfinitude of

Dasein. In the domain of theoretical knowledge, the tendency of reason
is to try to go beyond sense experience, without being able in fact to leave
the plane of experience. With respect to practice, however, reason does
succeed in breaking out of the world of the senses and obtaining a view
of the supra-temporal. Consequently, when Heidegger construes the
Kantian reason as "pure sensuous reason", this in the Kantian sense is
like saying 'wooden iron'. For in Kant's view, reason is precisely that
'faculty' which presses on to the supersensible and the supra-temporal.
In a critical review of Heidegger's book on Kant, Ernst Cassirer, one of
the finest Kant scholars, has accordingly remarked that Heidegger speaks
not as a 'commentator' on Kant but as a "usurper who, as it were, pushes
his way into the Kantian system by force of arms in order to subjugate it
and make it serve his own problematic".16
This brings us to the heart of the matter. When Heidegger says that
Kant's concern is the problem of finitude, what must be added is that
Kant's concept offinitude is entirely different from Heidegger's. Kant has
in mind the limitation of the human cognitive faculty. For Heidegger, the
finitude of human Dasein is characterized by dread, death, Being-guilty,
and falling; finite Dasein is a Being-maintained in nothingness. There is
a spiritual atmosphere behind this characterization, a feeling about life and
the world, essentially different from that of Kant. Yet it is only by in-
admissibly projecting this basic Kierkegaardian mood of Existence philo-
sophy onto Kant, that Heidegger arrives at his unwarranted 'dramati-
zation' of 'what really happened' in Kant's critique of reason - that Kant
had looked into the abyss of finite human Dasein and had drawn back
in alarm at what he saw, only to cover it up in the second edition of his
CPR.
On the other hand, if we start with Kant's concept of finitude, we see
that the only thing he could have drawn back from in fright was the re-
nunciation of any rational metaphysics of supersensible objects. But in
his Critical phase Kant never retreated from this consequence of his
theory; the abandonment of rational metaphysics held no hidden terrors
for him. Furthermore, it can be said that Heidegger, in his interpretation,
has introduced here an hypothesis that historically is extremely improba-
ble. For we know the external circumstance that moved Kant to revise
his CP R: it was a review that contained a psychologistic interpretation
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER 173

of his doctrine. Kant's efforts were aimed at recasting those portions of

the critique of reason that were liable to such misinterpretation. What is
more, the parts of the CPR in which the transcendental imagination plays
a leading role Kant did not change at all.
We said above that the whole mood in Kant differs completely in kind
from the basic mood of Existence philosophy, and that consequently the
image of a Kant gazing into an 'abyss' is false. There is no better de-
scription of Kant's attitude than the words of Cassirer: "Kant is and
remains a thinker of the Enlightenment, in the noblest and most beautiful
sense of the term; he strives for light and clarity even when he meditates
on the deepest and most hidden grounds of being. "17
Just what the danger is in Heidegger's philosophy for the interpretation
of historically transmitted doctrines should by now be clear. Briefly, it
consists in superimposing the basic mood of Existence philosophy upon
thinkers with an entirely different attitude toward life and in giving their
formulations of problems and their results an interpretation not only
remote from these thinkers but also impossible to obtain regardless of
how intensively one tries to 'think further about' or 'think through' their
doctrines - always provided, of course, one does not force this foreign
atmosphere upon them by erecting as an absolute the feeling toward life
characteristic of Existence philosophy. One would have expected of a
philosophy like Heidegger's especially, which puts so much stress on the
historicality of man, that it allow historical accuracy to govern in the
intellectual mastering of past philosophy.
Another reason for discussing the example of Kant in such detail is
that it serves to illustrate one of the chief differences between the philo-
sophies of Jaspers and Heidegger. Of the two, Jaspers is essentially closer
to Kant, above all to the Kant who is cognizant of concepts of reason,
and of the idea of the unconditioned: who in his practical philosophy con-
ceives of man as a creature who is a freely deciding personality and hence
at bottom only what he makes of himself; and who finally in his philoso-
phy of religion points out a "philosophical road to salvation". In Jaspers,
of course, we also find the very different basic mood of Existence phi-
losophy, which is essentially foreign to Kant, as well as an emphasis on
the unique in contradistinction to Kant's underscoring of the universally
binding (particularly, with respect to moral decisions). Nonetheless, the
concept of 'possible Existence' in Jaspers bears a much closer resemblance
174 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

to the intelligible'!' of Kant than it does, say, to the concept of authentic

Existence in Heidegger. This rests ultimately on the fact that Jaspers, like
Kant, is a dualist. As a matter of fact, Jaspers' dualism results from a
thoroughgoing acceptance of Kant's epistemological position: man as
possible Existence belongs, like Divinity, not to the domain of what can
be comprehended by the understanding but to that of the 'things-in-
themselves'. In his book on Kant, Heidegger, through the notion of
'sensuous reason', basically negates the Kantian concept of reason by
drawing this concept down to the plane of temporal Dasein. Conversely,
Jaspers tries to widen the Kantian concept of reason and endow it with
an additional dynamic and greater existential importance as the opposite
pole to the concept of Existence.
As to the systematic part of the Heidegger philosophy, we wish to
confine ourselves in the main to a brief discussion of a single point, the
problem of Being, which Heidegger selects as the place to begin his studies.
In his view, the point of departure in dealing with this problem must be
the pre-scientific understanding of Being, present when in everyday life
we use the auxiliary verb 'to be' ('sein') as in such statements as 'The sky
is blue' or 'Hans is blond'. We can and must concede Heidegger his point
of departure. But we should expect him then to do something altogether
different from what he actually does - we should expect him to analyze
more closely the ordinary meanings of or the various ways of using the
auxiliary verb 'to be'. True enough, he does emphasize at the very be-
ginning that man in the 'mode of everydayness' actually 'suppresses' an
'authentic' understanding of Being. But whatever may be the case in that
respect, the very first thing to be examined is whether the expression 'to be'
is not in general used ambiguously, whether it does not, so to speak,
accidentally unite in one 'person' different functions or usages (just as,
e.g., the roles of bank director, chairman of a board, and horse-breeder
may by chance be combined in the person of one man).
A closer examination shows that there are in fact entirely different uses
of the verb 'to be'. Some of these indeed were already known to Aristotle.
For example, in the statement 'Schiller is the author of Wallenstein' the
verb 'to be' is intended to be taken in the sense of identity; in the state-
ment 'Schiller is a poet' the verb serves to express the thing-property
relation (or, in extensional terms, the class-membership relation, since the
statement is equivalent to the assertion that Schiller is a member of the
 MAR TIN HEIDEGGER 175

class of poets). The statement 'God is' expresses an existential assertion

(namely, 'God exists' or 'There is a God'). With respect to the use of 'to
be', the example 'The sky is blue' is on a par with 'Schiller is a poet'.
On the other hand, the statement 'The lion is a wild animal' exhibits a
quite different use of 'to be', and it would therefore be entirely wrong to
interpret this use as being the same as in 'The sky is blue'. The misleading
similarity between these last two cases rests on the fact that the definite
article is employed in both. But whereas the expression 'the sky' serves
to designate a definite object, the expression 'the lion' does not. Rather,
the statement about lions means the same as 'Lions are wild animals'.
Thus what it refers to is not a relation between an object and a property,
as in the other two instances, but a relation between a property and another
property that embraces it (in extensional terms, between a sub-class and
a class which includes that subclass). That the thing-property relation (or
the class-membership relation) can be employed even when the 'thing' in
question is itself a class or property is shown by the example 'The apostles
are twelve (in number)'. Here 'twelve' is affirmed of the property of being
an apostle (or of the class of apostles) and not of the individual apostles
(otherwise we should have the absurd consequence that each individual
apostle is twelve; whereas from the statement 'The apostles are pious',
we can in fact infer that each apostle is pious).
In addition, there are uses of 'to be' in modal contexts, such as 'It is
possible that it will rain tomorrow' or 'It is necessary that man dies'; and
still other uses are found in, say, 'This is so-so', or in expressions of agree-
ment, such as 'Yes, that is right!,18
The vagueness of the 'everyday understanding of Being' is manifested
above all in the fact that one and the same word is employed for all the
quite different functions cited here. We do away with this vagueness (that
is, we eliminate the equivocations on 'to be') as soon as we decide to
choose distinct signs and to associate with each of them one and only one
of the uses of 'to be' indicated above. (This, in fact, is done in a logically
precise language, such as that of mathematics, where the three different
symbols' = " 'E' and 'c' are used for identity, class membership, and
class inclusion respectively.)
Accordingly, an indispensable preliminary task for any ontology must
be to sort out the various verbal meanings of 'to be'. Now the objection
might be offered that Heidegger assumes this (apparently) 'trivial' task
176 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

to have already been achieved. But this is contradicted by the fact that the
examples he gives are quite heterogeneous in character: at times he ap-
pears to take 'Being' (' Sein') in the sense of Existence, but then he intro-
duces 'to be' ('sein') as a copula, as in 'The sky is blue'. More serious,
perhaps, than the failure to distinguish among these various meanings is
the tacitly assumed Platonism involved in employing 'to be' ('sein') as a
substantive, specifically in the expression 'the Being' (' das Sein'). All the
difficulties cited by Brentano arise here. The expression 'the Being' is
supposed to characterize an object (in the wider sense of the term, in
which we call 'object' anything to which we can refer by means of a name
or a description), and thus this object must itself have a Being. Hence
if it is permissible to speak of the Being, we must also grant that this
Being itself has a Being, thus that there is a Being of the Being, and so
forth ad infinitum.
What has been said about Being applies analogously to all predicate
expressions. Let us call such predicates concrete general terms, since they
can be applied to concrete objects; and let us call the names of objects
singular terms. The question that then arises is whether, in addition to
concrete singular terms (names of individuals), there are also abstract
singular terms, which designate non-concrete objects, such as colors or
other qualities, relations and the like. The transition to Platonism consists
in interpreting concrete general terms as being at the same time abstract
singular terms. For instance, the general predicate 'red', predicable of
concrete objects, is conceived of as the name of an object, namely, redness.
Non-Platonists, such as Brentano, would reject this account and ac-
cordingly would recognize the Heidegger expressions 'historicality',
'temporality', 'resoluteness' merely as 'synsemantic'.
These remarks are not intended as a polemic against the Platonism of
Heidegger. We merely want to call attention to the following difficulty.
Undoubtedly, the problem of universals is an ontological problem, and
one that is neutral with respect to interpreting the de terminations of
Being either as 'Existenzialien' or as categories. Now we should expect
that an investigation in fundamental ontology, which is supposed to
precede all special ontologies, would use only such formulations as are
independent of any particular standpoint on the question of universals,
or else that it would raise this problem and proceed toward a solution.
Such an investigation, however, dare not assume that this problem is
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER 177

solved, in particular solved in the Platonist sense. Yet this is precisely

what Heidegger does.
As concerns the problem of Being, it is simply not so that this whole
problem comes to nothing unless we believe in Being (das Sein). We can
by all means raise the Aristotelian question about being as being (nach
dem Seienden als Seiendem); but we are not permitted to go on - at least,
not without a thorough inquiry and demonstration - to reinterpret this
question in a Platonist fashion as one about the Being of all being (nach
dem Sein des Seienden).
The misgivings raised here against Being are strengthened when
Heidegger talks of nothingness (das Nichts). He does not do so in his
chief work, but in his Was 1st Metaphysik?, where nothingness is the
main topic discussed. Since the expression 'nothing' ('nichts') stems from
everyday language, we should, prior to any further reflections, consider
what function this word fulfills. At first glance, the word seems to possess
the function of a grammatical subject; for in 'nothing is both round and
square', the expression 'nothing' ('nichts') occupies exactly the same place
as the word 'Brazil' in 'Brazil is large and thinly populated'. This gram-
matical resemblance is the basic reason why philosophers, Heidegger in
particular, time and again conceive the expression 'nothing' as designating
a subject and hence use it substantively, supplying it with the definite
article. According to this conception, there must then be an object to
which we refer by means of the designation 'nothingness' ('das Nichts').
That such a view is untenable is shown by the fact, among others, that
within a statement with a compound predicate we can shift an object-
designation over the 'and', thereby obtaining a compound statement
equivalent to the original simple one. In the case of 'nothing', however,
this does not work. For instance, the statement 'Brazil is large and thinly
populated' is logically equivalent to the statement 'Brazil is large and
Brazil is thinly populated'; but 'nothing is round and square' is obviously
not equivalent to 'nothing is round and nothing is square'. For the latter
is false, while the statement from which it is derived is true.
As a matter of fact, the word 'nothing' serves to deny a general assertion
of existence. It is only by historical accident that the two symbols 'not'
('nicht') and 'there is' ('es gibt') in this sequence have fused into the
single word 'nothing' (,nichts'). For example, our original statement,
formulated more exactly, says 'It is not the case that there is something
178 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

that is both round and square'. Hence in a language freed from the
vaguenesses and especially from the misleading grammar of ordinary
language, the word 'nothing' or an equivalent cannot occur at all, and
therefore a disposition to speak of 'nothingness' can no longer arise.
Perhaps the objection might be made that Heidegger uses the expression
'nothing' in a sense entirely different from that of ordinary language when
he says that nothingness manifests itself in dread and this experience
reveals the fact that Dasein is a Being-maintained in nothingness. But
even apart from the fact that it would still be extremely misleading to
take an expression used both in ordinary life and in science in a quite
definite way and suddenly provide it with an entirely new meaning, this
objection does not hold. Heidegger undertakes his analysis more for the
purpose of investigating the essence of negation. As soon as he comes to
the task of metaphysics, he says: "Metaphysics occupies itself with being
and nothing else (sonst nichts)." And in the very next sentence he asks:
"How do matters stand with this nothingness (dieses Nichts)?" In the
first of the two sentences, the word 'nothing' is used in quite the custom-
ary sense; for this statement is equivalent to 'It is not the case that meta-
physics occupies itself with something other than being'. In the second
sentence the expression 'nothing(ness)' suddenly functions as the desig-
nation for an object, as it does in the various other questions that
Heidegger throws out, such as 'How do we know nothingness?', 'How
do we find nothingness?' and the like. With this, the grammatical sleight-
of-hand is accomplished, and all further speculations rely on it.
We must now bring the discussion of Heidegger to a close. In our view,
the two thinkers to whom Heidegger stands nearest are Dilthey and
Kierkegaard. From the former he has taken over the radical immanentist
standpoint, explaining human Dasein 'in its own terms' without intro-
ducing transcendent entities. The spiritual atmosphere in which Heidegger
thinks and the attitude toward life which nourishes his philosophy are
those of Kierkegaard. We should perhaps add Augustine, whose philo-
sophical reflections about time were fitted into the Heidegger system in
a rather naive form. In addition, Heidegger himself explicitly stresses his
positive relation to Aristotle, one of the greatest logicians of all times,
and to Kant, one of the greatest epistemologists of all times. Neverthe-
less, in the light of the brief discussion above of Heidegger's book on
Kant and of the role that 'Being' and 'nothingness' play within the frame-
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER 179

work of the ontological problematic, we cannot help but ask whether

Heidegger's fondness for Aristotle and Kant is not an instance of mis-
placed affection.
We do not want to leave the philosophy of Heidegger without expressly
pointing out that his work offers a virtually inexhaustible abundance of
new philosophical insights. Their full significance will be disclosed only
in the course of time - perhaps when the spiritual atmosphere and atti-
tude toward life have altered, and people recognize that Heidegger does
not speak to man only in the "need or urgency of his Being".

REFERENCES

• The English equivalents used here for Heidegger's unique philosophical vocabulary
are, for the most part, those introduced by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
in their translation of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, entitled Being and Time, New York
1962. These include in particular 'Being' for 'Sein' and 'being' for 'seiend' (but here
also for 'Seiendes'). In addition, two brief passages from Sein und Zeit have been
quoted from the translation. ffranslator's note.]
1 Heidegger understands here by 'meaning' not what comes to mind when we speak
of the 'meaning of the world' or the 'meaning of existence' ('Sinn des Seins'), but
simply the ordinary verbal sense of 'Being'. Nicolai Hartmann's objection that this is
too little for the formulation of metaphysical problems does not hold in the case of
Heidegger. For reasons stated above, Heidegger's question is whether, in understanding
the word 'Being', we have not already fallen victim to a misinterpretation.
2 The word 'anthropology' here is taken in the widest sense conceivable so as to
embrace philosophical studies of man; it is not confined, as is often the custom today,
to the narrower circle of medical and biological problems.
3 M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 1927, 1960, p. 136 (translated into English by John
Macquarrie and Edward Robinson as Being and Time, 1962, p. 175).
4 Kierkegaard referred to himself not as a philosopher but as a religious writer.
5 Cf. F. Heinemann, Neue Wege der Philosophie, 1929, pp. 186ff.
6 Cf. the exceptionally clear account by O. Bollnow, 'Existenz-philosophie', in Syste-
matische philosophie (ed. by N. Hartmann), 1942.
7 It should be recalled that here and in the sequel, in accordance with the Heidegger
terminology, by 'Dasein' is to be understood 'human Dasein'.
8 Cf. the introductory comments in the preceding section (point 12).
9 We should note the connection with ScheIer's concept of spirit. But what in Scheler
is made possible by the introduction of a new principle, is here derived from a changed
attitude toward the world.
10 The same suspension of all world meaning takes place in true boredom. As Heidegger
says in Was 1st Metaphysik?, (1929, 1943): "Deep boredom, moving to and fro in the
abysses of Dasein like a silent mist, draws together all things, men and even oneself
with them, into a strange indifference" (p. 14).
11 Because Dasein as Being-possible includes the not-yet, i.e., because Dasein is Being-
toward-the-potentiaIity-of-Being, Heidegger also speaks of 'Being-ahead-of-oneself'.
180 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

Since the 'not-yet realized' possibilities of man belong to his existential Being, man
always is already ahead of himself. If we designate thrownness by 'Being-already'
(-in-the-world) and falling by 'Being-alongside' (-of-the-world), we obtain Heidegger's
not very graceful expression for care: "being-ahead-of-itself - in-being-already-in ... -
as Being-alongside' ('Sich-vorweg-sein - im-schon-sein-in ... - als Sein-bei'). See M.
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, op. cit., p. 196.
12 We must omit the temporal interpretations of the individual Existenzialien (under-
standing, state-of-mind and the like), as well as of world transcendence.
13 Sein und Zeit, op. cit., p. 385 (English tr., op. cit., p. 437).
14 The second part has not appeared, although more than 40 years have passed since
publication of Part One.
15 In elucidating this expression, we must limit ourselves to noting that Kant called
transcendental or pure those acts of consciousness that constitute the source of a priori
cognitions. The expression 'imagination' (,Einbildungskraft') is introduced because,
according to Kant, it is through the imagination that "the manifold of intuition is
brought into a single image". The pure imagination divides into pure apprehension
(the a priori component in the combining of simultaneously given contents of the
intuition) and pure reproduction (the a priori component in the combining of present
contents of consciousness with recollections of the past). In Kant's view, such non-
empirical or 'pure' faculties must exist, otherwise the synthetic unity of the contents
of our intuition would be inexplicable. For any such synthetic unity also contains a
synthesis of space and time; but both of these latter are, for Kant, a priori intuitions
and therefore cannot be combined into unities by empirical 'faculties'.
16 Kant-Studien 36 (1931) 17.
17 Op. cit., p. 24.
18 For a more detailed analysis of all these cases, see W. Stegmiiller, 'Sprache und
Logik', Studium Generate 9 (1956) #2, esp. pp. 57-65,74--77.
 CHAPTER V

THE PHILOSOPHY OF EXISTENCE:

KARL JASPERS

A. PHILOSOPHICAL WORLD-ORIENTATION, ILLUMINATION OF

EXISTENCE, AND METAPHYSICS

Heidegger, we have seen, goes beyond the domain of Existence philoso-

phy in his formulation of the problem of ontology. He strives, by means
of new forms of conceptual thought, to open up a more fundamental
access to the Being of man and thereby to all Being; and having thus set
himself a scientific goal, he rejects the name "Existence philosophy" for
his investigations.
Jaspers, on the other hand, explicitly renounces any scientific inquiry
into Being-human (Menschsein) , and in so doing is the first to give
definitive expression to the characteristic element in Existence philosophy.
All of his philosophizing is governed by the practical problem of how
man can manage to live in an impossible world, of which there is no
conclusive knowledge and which does not manifest itself in its true
character to any belief. All theoretical explanations in the end serve only
this practical aim. Although Jaspers' entire thought revolves continuously
around man, yet he holds that no final knowledge of man can be reached.
Existence philosophy, it is said, would cancel itself out if it claimed to know
what man is. The absurdity and unintelligibility of the real world extends
also to man himself and renders him incomprehensible to his own self.
In the world, nevertheless, man is obliged to arrive at meaningful
decision and significant action. In this situation, philosophy must serve
to provide man with a self-certainty that neither conjures up for him some
illusory world of fantasy nor delivers him over to skepticism and despair
after liberating him from all illusions, but leads the positive core of his
essence to supreme personal commitment. Since objective knowledge of
the Being of human Existence is not possible, philosophical self-certainty
cannot be attained simply as a by-product of generally valid knowledge.
Instead, special methods of philosophizing must be devised that have
nothing in common with the procedures of reasoning used in science.
182 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

First, since man at the outset is dominated by the belief that the totality
of beings can be understood scientifically, he has to be led to the boundary
of the objectively knowable where he can then be made aware that all
generally valid cognition is relative and of no use for grasping what
really matters. Second, this negative phase of eliminating all alleged
knowledge is followed by the positive philosophical stage. Here man is
summoned to be truly his own self without being offered knowledge of
his own Being and without being relieved of responsibility for his own
Dasein through being presented with universally applicable maxims of
conduct. Yet man himself, no matter how honest he may be or how
intensively he may exert his personality, is not able to find any ultimate
meaning in himself alone. Therefore philosophizing, in a third and final
step, presses on beyond even the inner world of man in order to assure
itself of the absolute, and this in an undogmatic manner that does not
imply definitive rational knowledge. In conformity with these three tasks,
Jaspers divides his first great philosophical work, Philosophie (1932), into
three parts: world-orientation (Weltorientierung), the illumination of
Existence (Existenzerhellung) and metaphysics.

1. World-Orientation
By world-orienting thought, Jaspers means the totality of those processes
of consciousness that are directed toward achieving universally valid
knowledge. It is exclusively through such processes that scientific world-
orientation operates. Philosophical world-orientation, on the other hand,
tries to make us see that thinking in categories suited to objects does not
capture true Being, that what is knowable for us is not Being in itself.
This basic idea coincides with that of Kant's theoretical philosophy. In
carrying it out, however, Jaspers takes other paths than does Kant;
Jaspers, likewise, has a different purpose in bringing man up to the limits
of cognition. Whereas Kant attempted by rational argumentation to
demonstrate his notion of the inapplicability of generally valid knowledge
to the world of things in themselves, Jaspers already moves beyond the
rational in the method he employs. For in his case, as opposed to Kant,
we cannot even know wherein the unknowability of the actual world
consists, since awareness of the basis for this unknowability of beings-in-
themselves would itself constitute cogent knowledge of Being. In place of
a logical demonstration, Jaspers picks out a number of examples from the
 KARL JASPERS 183

most varied fields of learning and uses these to exhibit the actual limits
of knowledge. As a rule, he applies a dialectical procedure: he starts with
a particular concept, analyzes it and shows at what point it necessarily
requires supplementation. When the supplement is forthcoming, he then
shows that it has not captured the decisive element, and indeed that this
element lies beyond what can be grasped in these concepts. When I
inquire into Being, e.g., I find that there are many kinds of Being: dead
and living, thing-like and personal, ideal and real, and so forth. All of
these together constitute an object for me, and thus fall under the heading
of Being-an-object. But this Being-an-object does not by any means
exhaust all Being; for whenever I confront an object I do so as that which
is not an object. Even when I attempt to lay hold of myself, I am there
as the 'I' to whom I become an object. The necessary correlate to Being-
an-object is Being-I, or Being-a-subject. Neither of these, however,
captures Being itself. When I try to grasp Being in itself, then, to the
extent that I apprehend it, I convert it into an object for myself and
thereby reduce it to Being-an-object. Thus the three ways of Being inter-
penetrate, although I am not able to set down anyone of them absolutely:
Being-in-itself, which is comprehensible only as a boundary concept;
relative Being-an-object; and Being-I, which is not an object.
This is simply one of many examples from world-orientation. It is
intended to show how Jaspers begins by attempting to introduce us to
that intellectual vortex from which rational knowledge provides no exit.
Here he displays an extraordinary ability to evoke, from continually new
vantage points, an awareness of (impenetrable) boundaries. But his goal
is not, as in the case of Kant, to resolve fundamental problems in the
theory of knowledge; instead, it is to expose the disunion, disharmony
and problematic character of the world - a world in which the lonely
thinker finds himself placed in situations impossible to elucidate, unable
to gain peace in universally valid knowledge. What really matters, namely,
the non-replaceable individual in his personal uniqueness, is suppressed
and eliminated by scientific cognition. The latter is directed not to the
individual as such but to the replaceable I, that is, to that stratum in man's
understanding which he has in common with other men and with regard
to which, therefore, all men are interchangeable. Thus it is only the surface
aspect of man and not his non-replaceable core that can find peace in the
results of the sciences.
184 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

If objective knowledge of the world's Being is not attainable, then no

closed philosophical system can furnish ultimate satisfaction. Jaspers
cites two types of such 'closed world-orientations' - the positivist and the
idealist. By the former he understands theories of Being that in some
fashion equate Being-in-itself with Being-an-object, that conceive every-
thing as coming under the category of causality, that admit no unknow-
abIes and regard it as ideal that everything be easily producible. The
idealists in their turn equate all Being with the Being of spirit and give the
subject precedence over the object; they attribute true reality to the Being
of the idea alone, ascribing such reality to all else solely on the basis of
participation in the idea, and in the end see everything as a perfect whole.
Common to both types of world outlook is the view that only the uni-
versal and the whole count as true Being, while the particular and the
individual are interpreted as mere constellations of universal forces or as
dependent members of one comprehensive totality. Both confuse the self-
willed hence nugatory individual with the existential core, and believe
that in principle everything can be known. Under the illusion that they
possess truth, they prevent a candid look into the mystery and dreadful-
ness of an open-ended reality, and put universal laws in place of Existence's
responsible decision-making in historically unique situations. Jaspers'
rejection of these two intellectual orientations to the world makes evident
the manner in which Existence philosophy revolutionizes the evaluation
of reality. True Being is not the universal, the eternal, the law-like, the
stable; what really counts is that which is historically unique, situation-
determined, and which achieves its break-through in irrational, inde-
pendent decision. To gain an unhampered view of what alone is the
positive element of Existence in its unrepeatable individuality, we must
first shatter the illusion that the Being of the world is whole and complete.
To a man who truly is, in whom existential reality has laid hold of itself,
there is no universally comprehensible world, no absolutely valid analysis
of Being, no objective hierarchy of values, no arrangement of society and
the state that is the best that ingenious reason can devise. What is dis-
cordant in the world must be grasped without illusion if the dissatisfaction
with it is to produce a leap into Existence.
Philosophy is thus differentiated from all science. The latter aims at
cogent knowledge, the former transcends all that is generally knowable.
Science directs itself exclusively to the interchangeable understanding,
 KARL JASPERS 185

philosophy makes appeal to the non-replaceable individual. Whereas the

underlying reason for his efforts is itself not comprehensible to the
scientist, the person who philosophizes tries to ascertain precisely the
ultimate basis for all his actions. In science there is only impersonal
conflict over issues; in philosophy the other person is to be helped,
through the medium of what is universal, to obtain an inner stimulus or
impetus. Scientific inquiry is a continuous process carried out over gener-
ations; philosophy always begins afresh and presses on to a definitive
conclusion even in the single instance. Science aims at knowledge
as a possession at its disposal; radical philosophical inquiry shatters
any supposed possession and throws the inquirer back into total insecu-
rity.
Philosophy is likewise separated by a gulf from the other two forms of
spirit that also contend for Being - art and religion. Art indeed affords
an immediate fulfillment, which philosophy can never provide. But it is
able to do so only in another world far from the actual one to which
man returns all the more disconsolate and forlorn the deeper was his
aesthetic enjoyment; for in the real world, beauty leaves him stranded
and life abandons him to himself. In place of a realization so remote from
life, philosophy proposes not to construct a second world but to convert
thought into genuine decision.
Similarly, philosophy must be in conflict with religion, and can at most
view it as an equally justified but altogether different mode of authentic
Being-human. Religion appeals to historical revelation, requires entrance
into the community of the church and also obedience, sustains a real
relation to Divinity in prayer and worship, and claims exclusive absolute
title to valid objectivity. The philosopher, on the other hand, accords no
historical event an unequivocally privileged status, since in his view any-
thing may serve as the language of the one absolute. Moreover, he recog-
nizes no binding community, but pictures himself in the independent
status of Being-his-self with another Existence, with whom he enters into
loving communication. He sees no possibility of arbitrarily reproducible
relations to some hidden Divinity; in his limitless questioning, he ac-
knowledges no such thing as conclusive objectivity. He rejects any sub-
mergence in an ulterior Being that does not take the form of active com-
mitment in this world, any love for God that is not actualized as love for
individual men.
186 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

2. The Illumination of Existence

Once philosophical world-orientation has marked philosophy off from
other forms of spiritual Being and has conducted us to the boundaries of
the knowable, the illumination of Existence attempts to serve the individual
directly as an awakener. This does not mean that scientific thought is
invalidated and put aside once and for all as inessential. Rather, the
process of illuminating Existence must time and again proceed via world-
orientation. An unlimited desire for knowledge is an immanent principle
of all philosophizing and cannot be passed over. The philosopher has to
try again and again to grasp cognitively the one whole, so that in the
foundering of this attempt he may execute the leap into Existence.
What does Jaspers understand by 'Existence' ('Existenz')? In one
passage he says that 'Existence', in philosophical language, means pre-
cisely what 'soul' does in the language of myth. But a proper definition
is nowhere to be found, and indeed, according to Jaspers, cannot be
given since Existence is not to be spoken of as an object. Actually, we
are not permitted to talk about 'the' Existence (i.e., Existences) because
there is no generic concept 'Existence' of which the various Existences that
occur are (contingent) instances. Existence is only for another Existence
in historical encounter, not for a scientific consciousness. Nevertheless,
for the purpose of clarification we shall try to give a rough definition of
the concept. This runs: Existence is the unconditioned and absolute core
in man which cannot be comprehended in rational concepts and hence as
such cannot be communicated, but accompanies mere living as a possibility
of which man mayor may not avail himself. Existence is the authentic
Being-one's-self of man which is to be realized only through free and un-
conditioned decision.
The chief emphasis is on unconditionality and possibility. Of these two
aspects, the first signifies that Existence is realized in man only in that
moment when he possesses the absolutely satisfying certitude: "This is
what I myself actually will, this is done for eternity, here something
absolute has been decided." In Jaspers this first aspect is especially under-
scored by the further circumstance that Existence is only with reference
to transcendence (i.e., Divinity), from which, as he knows, man receives
himself as Existence. The second aspect points to the fact that existential
Being is not given with man's factual Dasein, but still has to be realized.
 KARL 1 ASPERS 187

For that reason Jaspers says that Dasein as such is not Existence; man
in Dasein is possible Existence. Here again we encounter the notion of
possibility, which plays such a central role in Heidegger's philosophy.
From Heidegger's novel ontological angle of vision, however, man appears
as such in the light of the constitution of Existence and thus as essentially
characterized by Being-possible. Jaspers, on the other hand, in considering
man scientifically, retains the categorial way of thinking and simply sets
out what Heidegger calls 'authentic Existence' as a possibility in contrast
to objectively comprehensible Dasein. In this respect too, therefore, his
philosophy has a more pronounced irrational flavor than that of
Heidegger. The latter is still able to get a grip on Existence itself by
transforming a conceptual comprehension based on categories (which
define the Being of things-on-hand) into one based on Existenzialien.
Jaspers, on the contrary, renounces any objective comprehension of
Existence and thus for him the question of transforming categories into
Existenzialien does not arise.
If we cannot grasp Existence as such, how then can we speak of it
philosophically at all, and what purpose does such talk serve? Existence-
illumination is not intended to make universally binding statements about
beings (as is done in the world-orienting thinking of the sciences) but to
appeal to the possible Existence in men. Thinking that illuminates Exist-
ence or appeals does not refer to what can be perceived by everyone and
must therefore devise new methods of reflection. This raises a knotty
problem, which Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in their day strove in vain to
master: the problem of communicating Existence. The fulfilled certainty
of authentic Existence does not admit of expression in categories appli-
cable to objects. But we can speak to others only in universal linguistic
symbols and concepts. Hence the spiritual process directed to other men
must fully alter its usual sense. Existence-illuminating thought requires,
so to speak, two wings to fly: one wing is universal comprehensibility,
which belongs to thinking as thinking; the other is the existential con-
sciousness of Being which vibrates in resonance with that thinking. It is
essential that these two aspects coincide; this alone differentiates Exist-
ence-illumination from all kinds of psychology, including the Verstehen-
psychology of the cultural sciences. 1 To express Existence itself is impos-
sible, since realized Existence as such is mute. From the existential stand-
point, talking merely in universal categories is untrue because it fails to
188 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

make perceptible possible Existence as such; instead such talk slides off
into a scientific-psychological mode of comprehension directed not to the
other person in his uniqueness but to the stratum of understanding com-
mon to men, to 'consciousness-as-such', as Jaspers puts it (adopting the
terminology of Kant). This is the reason why Jaspers sets so much store
by linguistic expression. For it is through the type of formulation, the
manner of posing questions and the choice of ideas that the spark of
Being-his-self is to be kindled in man. To this end Jaspers has devised
for his philosophizing a striking language of his own; much easier to
understand than Heidegger's, it possesses an impressive transparency in
saying the inexpressible that becomes manifest only after one has steeped
himself in Jaspers' works.
There are three methods by which we may try, through universal
thinking, to arrive at Existence-illuminating statements. The first re-
sembles that of philosophical world orientation; it consists in moving up
to the boundaries of knowledge, where there is nothing except the absolute
void. It is here that the appeal begins, which is to reach the target of
possible Existence. The second involves speaking in the object-applicable
concepts of psychology, logic and metaphysics, in the course of which the
danger of remaining the captive of universal categories is counteracted
by means of circles, contradictions and paradoxical formulations. The
third consists in employing existential signs, such as 'Existence', 'Being-
one's-self', 'Freedom' and the like. These, however, are not simply to be
accepted as such; for in the sense of universal knowledge there is no such
thing as Existence or freedom or historicality, but only my Existence, my
freedom, my historicality. In order to guard against slipping into the
universal therefore, Jaspers in his Existence-illumination always speaks
in the first person. Nonetheless, the danger of being misunderstood is
naturally much greater in the case of Existence-illuminating statements
than in that of scientific knowledge. In the latter case a misunderstanding
occurs only if concepts are taken in a signification other than the one
defined; in the former it is already present whenever the existential Being
does not attain resonance with the Other.
In the actual carrying out of Existence-illumination, Jaspers differs from
Heidegger in four respects especially. First, Jaspers is not chiefly concerned
with handling a particular metaphysical problem. He proceeds from a much
broader base, introducing the whole gamut of psychical factors in order
 KARL JASPERS 189

to make them comprehensible to us as distorted versions of true existential

Being or to suggest the path that leads them into the Being of possible
Existence. Second, as opposed to Heidegger, who has a predilection for
the unfathomable in man, Jaspers places in the foreground the luminous
aspects of Existence, such as freedom, (productive) imagination, and love.
A third difference has to do with the relationship to community. For
Heidegger, although Being-with others is indeed a basic Existenzial of
man, authentic Existence is realized only through anticipatory resolute-
ness in absolute solitude. For Jaspers, on the other hand, man can reach
his authentic self only in spiritual communication with another Existence.
From a scientific viewpoint this results in the paradox that the 'two'
Existences were not there prior to their Being-for-and-through-one-
another, yet their realization through communication cannot be con-
ceived of as an outcome of mere beings that are there without Existence.
In existential communication, one's own Being-one's-self stands in 'loving
strife' with the other Being-its-self; each of the Existences contends with
the other for absolute openness. In this strife, which knows no victor,
there takes place the miracle of Existence becoming manifest and realizing
itself. Only in this community, only through the other Existence and at
the same time with it, can Existence come to its own self. In nearly all
inter-personal relations, even in those of master and servant, as well as in
political association, what is initially an external relationship may deepen
into existential communication. As far as philosophizing is concerned,
communication is indispensable; it is impossible to philosophize in soli-
tude. But the loving strife of men-being-themselves does not fail to note
that all Being, for us, is Being-broken, and hence does not lead to con-
clusive, knowable truth. Existential communication, within philosophy,
is therefore at the same time an expression of the incompletability of
truth in (the Being-there of) time.
The fourth and perhaps most crucial difference between Jaspers and
Heidegger is that Existence illumination, even from the viewpoint of
Existence philosophy, cannot provide the last word. According to Jaspers,
not even the unconditioned core of man is able to realize an ultimate
meaning. Hence once again and more fundamentally than in Existence
illumination, philosophizing for him presses on beyond the Being of the
world in order to be assured of the Absolute, which in religious thought
is called 'God' and which Jaspers calls 'transcendence'.2
190 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

To move beyond thinking in terms of objects and to transform such

thinking into the appeal directed to possible Existence requires a tran-
sition from the realm of what is causally determined to the realm of
freedom. Here man comes to know himself only in a paradoxical manner
as a Baron Miinchhausen who lifts himself by his own boot-straps out of
the swamp of nothingness into Dasein, from empirical consciousness to
absolute consciousness (love, faith, imagination), from goal-conditioned to
unconditioned activities (e.g., suicide, religion, philosophy), and from
world historical situations into ultimate situations (Grenzsituationen). It
is above all these ultimate situations that play the decisive role with
Jaspers, for in them the basic mood of Existence philosophy comes to be
most forcibly felt. By ultimate situations Jaspers understands those of
death, suffering, strife, guilt and the like, in which all of a sudden the
whole problematic nature of Dasein breaks through and against which
our understanding seems to collide as if against ultimate, impenetrable
walls - situations in which the whole of our supposed knowledge of God,
objective values, the meaning of the world, our duties, basically collapses
and we find ourselves faced with the fact of absolute solitude and the
necessity of making our own decision. These situations also exhibit a
danger for anyone who brings with him a will to authentic Being-one's-self.
In the beginning there is mere living, or Dasein. Dasein's pure will,
absorbed in satisfaction and enjoyment, does not reach its goal. Know-
ledge of this, combined with the uncanniness of the ultimate situations
that set in, causes man to become conscious that this mode of his Being
is a betrayal of the deeper-lying possible Existence. Having once accepted
responsibility for the claims of Existence, anyone who presses beyond the
level of the mere will to live is immediately threatened by the alternatives
of ending up in a shell or else falling into nihilistic despair. Metaphysical
anxiety causes us to look for a secure foothold, and, together with the
ultimate situations, impels whoever wants to be his own self to construct
out of objective rules of conduct, proofs of God's existence and the like,
a rational shell into which he can creep at any time and thus survive the
raging floods of the ultimate situations. Should the dishonesty of this
procedure become apparent and one's openness shatter all closed world
pictures, then a second threat would arise - skepticism, a relativism with-
out obligation or a world-denying nihilism. Both dangers are betrayals of
existential Being, in which man becomes conscious that his decision is
 KARL JASPERS 191

not a matter of indifference, that it does depend on him, although he

cannot be assured in a rationally cogent form of the necessity and mean-
ing of his actions. It is at this point that the existential problematic of
Being-human becomes particularly evident: man, entirely dependent on
himself, must at each moment come to a decision. The very fact that he
does not take his own life but continues to live is a primal decision about
his own Being that is constantly repeated. The unequivocal character of
this decision would demand that a man be completely clear about the
situation in which he is, that he know exactly what to make of himself
and the world. But it is precisely this that he never knows. Here is the
paradox of human life - to be conditioned upon something that is never
realized. No wonder man falls into one of the two alternatives mentioned
above, or sinks back into a mere unquestioning will to live. The man who
authentically is, however, seizes hold of something unconditioned despite
having experienced the absurdity of the world. He knows that he is abso-
lutely responsible for his actions and his character, although he did not
shape the latter himself and was not asked whether he wished to be in the
world. He accepts the danger of making decisions in the face of the uni-
versal irrationality and unintelligibility of the world. He is certain that
everything depends on his attitude and behavior, even though he is the
farthest removed from his own self. He knows that it is essential that he
become his own self, but that the more firmly he turns his gaze upon
himself, the more that self evades him.
Furthermore, the existential impetus is not something attained once and
for all; it must forever be achieved anew in continuous struggle. Man
cannot gain his authentic Being-his-self for all time, but only for the
moment, and accordingly finds himself in constant danger of slipping off
and delivering himself up to Existence-less Dasein. Here we must mention
another basic feature of Existence philosophy as represented by Jaspers,
namely, the historical character of Existence. This seems to rest on the
simple fact that on the one hand all Dasein is temporal, while on the other
Existence remains tied to Dasein so that a Dasein-Iess Existence is im-
possible. But Existence, although tied to Dasein, is still always infinitely
more than Dasein. Historicality, in the case of Dasein as such, signifies
no more than that Dasein is temporal: it comes into Being, grows and
disappears. Sharply distinguished from the historical character of Dasein
- as well as from the historicality of the spirit, which becomes conscious
192 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

of its own self in its having-come-into-Being - is existential historicality.

The latter is, in the Being-there of time, more than the Being-there of
time: it is fulfilled time, or completion through the everlasting presence
of Being within the moment. Existential historicality therefore can not be
described other than through the paradoxical notion of the unity of
temporality and eternity.
Mere inner effort and readiness alone, however, are not enough to
attain authentic Being-one's-self. One can become one's self only by way
of the other man with whom Existence comes into inner communication.
Thus Existence in the final analysis is at the same time a being-presented-
with, realized only by participation in an absolute without which the
whole world would be a nullity of no concern. Jaspers says: "Existence
is only with respect to transcendence." What this means is that within the
realm of immanence - a realm which includes not only the open-ended
world, but also possible Existence standing in contrast to it - an ultimate
realization of meaning is impossible, unless a ray coming from the
transcendent and absolute penetrates the sphere of immanence. (See,
however, the different way of delimiting the immanent presented later in
the section on the philosophy of the Encompassing.)

3. Metaphysics
Just as the philosophical science of the mind must be replaced by Exist-
ence-illumination, so philosophical theology, with its claims to universal
validity, must give way to a philosophical metaphysics which describes
how Existence can rise to the transcendent One, the origin of all Being.
This ascent to the Absolute may be effected in a three-fold manner: by
transcending the contents of the world as grasped in categories of thought;
by the taking in of existential relations to transcendence; and by reading
the ciphers of the Absolute. These types of relations to Divinity, however,
are all so constituted that they can settle nothing conclusively, no final
knowledge is attainable through them, the search for authentic Being can
find no ultimate rest. The struggle for Existence never ends; likewise the
rise to transcendence must always be accomplished anew, since transcen-
dence itself is to be apprehended only as it vanishes. Jaspers rejects both
prophetic metaphysics, in which a single individual believes himself sum-
moned, and scientific metaphysics, which through rational demonstration
would guide us to a Divinity conceived of as underlying all Being. The
 KARL JASPERS 193

former supposes incorrectly that it can convert the consciousness of God

obtained in the existential moment into a generally intelligible language
and teach it as objectively valid truth. The latter would offer to man, as
a replaceable rational being ('consciousness-as-such') that which only the
freedom of Being-one's-self can apprehend. According to Jaspers, how-
ever, all that is possible is an appropriative metaphysics (aneignende Meta-
physik), which gives life to historically transmitted metaphysics by hearing
selectively within it the voice of transcendence. The person who philoso-
phizes honestly today is not so naive as to engage in a renewed excogi-
tation of metaphysical systems, such as was still possible a century ago.
Thus outside of the historical assimilation of past metaphysics, there are
simply the three kinds of metaphysical approach mentioned just above.
Transcendence of the world displays a similarity to what is called negative
theology. Here categories that in reality are applicable only to specific
immanent Being are carried over to the Absolute. But the error thus
committed is cancelled out by revoking these categories or by the simul-
taneous application of opposing categories (e.g., conceiving transcendence
as being absolutely contingent and absolutely necessary at the same time).
Thus it is through logical contradiction, circularity and revocation -
through acts of thought that founder - that the Absolute is to be illumi-
nated indirectly and to become present for the moment. Because the
Absolute can never be comprehended in complete form, the relations of
possible Existence to transcendence can likewise never be unambiguous:
defiance, submission, and godforsakenness are dialectically alternating
approaches to transcendence. Yet Divinity does not come out of its
concealment for any existential relation. None of these relations can
liberate us from the straining toward transcendence and from the in-
trinsic disunion of the world. By reading the ciphers (Chiffren) oftranscen-
dence, Jaspers means perceiving the cryptic language of the Absolute. This
can take place for any arbitrary content of the world, since all things can
become transparent and point toward such a concealed transcendent entity.
Man is obliged on the one hand to decide about himself in solitude
and selfhood. On the other, he must press beyond all that has hitherto
been known and believed. The tension thus generated Jaspers terms the
tension between reason and Existence. As opposed to understanding,
which is content with rational knowledge, reason questions everything,
pushes on beyond every boundary of knowledge, and in eternal restless-
194 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

ness strives for unity and the Absolute. There is, however, a reciprocal
relation between reason and Existence. Reason without the existential
basis would become mere aesthetic play, an empty and irresponsible
movement of the intellect; Existence without reason would mean stub-
bornly barricading oneself against all openness. (See the more detailed
exposition in the following section.)
The path into Being is not a straight line, and leads to no definitive
result. At the end there is always annihilation and the senseless destruction
of what was authentic, positive and of existential magnitude. The remark-
able thing about Jaspers' metaphysics is that the absolute questionability
of the world, which becomes manifest infoundering, itself acts as a cipher
or symbol of transcendence. His view that foundering must be ultimate
rests on the fact that from the existential standpoint duration, continuance
and validity appear as inauthentic and indifferent. The steadfast has no
true height; height may be attributed only to the momentary upswing or
impetus. In order to preserve the point-like character of the height every-
thing essential must disappear at once, that is, move toward foundering.
But because it is in this movement that authentic Being finds its voice,
foundering is at the same time the language of the Absolute. In Heidegger,
the concept of foundering is absent because time itself seems reduced to
the moment. On the other hand Jaspers, who still applies categorial
thinking to the world, understands by time a continuous sequence. If
Existence philosophy's concept of moment is looked at through the
medium of the category 'continuous sequence', then it appears as an
ascent that arises in time and immediately perishes in time, in other words,
as foundering. This is why Jaspers' Metaphysik (the third volume of his
Philosophie) closes with these words: "It is not by luxuriating in perfection
but along the road of suffering, with our gaze fixed on the inexorable
countenance of world-Dasein and in the unconditionality of our Being-
ourselves in communication, that possible Existence can attain that which
is not to be planned and which would become absurd if desired - in
foundering, to experience Being."

B. THE BEING OF THE ENCOMPASSING, AND TRUTH

1. The M odes of the Encompassing

In Jaspers' second great philosophical work, Von der Wahrheit, three
 KARL JASPERS 195

features stand out especially. The first is a new concept, that of the
Encompassing (das Umgreifende), which actually becomes the center of
his philosophizing. The second is the significance assigned to reason as
the counter-concept and supplement to the concept of Existence. The
third is the tendency to view all essential formulations of philosophical
problems in the light of the problem of truth and to subordinate them to
this problem.
The idea of the Encompassing has its origin in the experience of the
circumscribed character of knowledge. We experience and come to know
certain objects, but these are not Being itself. We recognize connections
among objects of our world, yet these too are only appearances of Being
and point beyond themselves. We apprehend objects as parts of that
whole in which, as in a horizon of our knowledge, they are enclosed, but
we are forced again and again to break through these supposed wholes
(horizons) because Being itself remains unenclosed for us and extends in
all directions into the unbounded. When we seek Being itself, we learn
from experience that everything that is given us and known by us as an
object is encompassed by something else. This Encompassing is neither
object nor horizon, but that toward which all objects and horizons point
and which makes itself known only in them.
We can, as a first approximation, try to visualize with the aid of Kant's
theory of space and time what Jaspers means by the Encompassing. In
Kant's view, space and time are not perceptual objects; but whatever is
perceivable appears in them. Similarly, for Jaspers the Encompassing is
not an object either of perception or of thought; but all objects present
themselves in it. According to Jaspers, when we philosophize we seek the
Encompassing. But we cannot search for it by disregarding both the
apprehensible and the horizons; for then we would simply fall prey to
empty enthusiasms. We must remain on the clear ground of our know-
ledge. In so far as we philosophize, however, all of the things we know
as objects must become 'transparent' when viewed from the standpoint
of the Encompassing, and must as objects finally disappear, for only in
this way do we become aware of Being. When in philosophizing we think
something non-objective in the objective, we are breaking through the
knowable order to the actual meaningful order. The sense of what is
known as an object is thereby transformed and our own Being and
thinking gain depth.
196 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

As soon as we attempt to illuminate the content of the Encompassing,

we find that it breaks down into seven modes. Of these, the Being that
we ourselves are, as Encompassing, divides into four modes: Dasein,
consciousness-as-such, spirit and Existence. The Encompassing that is
Being itself embraces two more: world and transcendence. The final mode
is reason which, while 'in us', also forms the bond of all the Encom-
passings. According to a different arrangement, Being that is immanent
(that is, Dasein, consciousness-as-such, spirit, world) is counterposed to
being that is to be reached only through a 'transcending leap' (namely,
Existence and transcendence). Here again reason represents the em-
bracing bond. These modes are for us ultimate sources or causes, spaces
of Being, as it were, with their own irreducible structures. Everything that
appears in anyone of these modes points beyond itself to the particular
Encompassing to which it belongs; and in turn each of these Encom-
pas sings itself points beyond itself to the other Encompassings.
Dasein is human living in the world, with all of life's physical happen-
ings and conscious processes. It comes to be and ceases to be, presses for
gratification and happiness, is driven by the will to be there and the will
to power and as such threatens other Dasein, only at the same time to
live in constant dread of being threatened. Dasein is always realized as
something unique and individual. It is encompassing, since for us as men
everything must appear in this Dasein, whether through physical contact
or through apprehension by perception, feeling or thought, in order to
exist for us at all. We can get nowhere if we bypass Dasein. In contrast to
animal Dasein, human Dasein is conscious of itself and hence can become
an object of scientific inquiry. Whatever has Dasein lives at first on the
basis of taking everything for granted and without question. But it also
learns from experience that in itself it has no final goal and no fulfillment.
It is transitory, it staggers on without rest and never arrives at a realizable
happiness or a permanent state. As Dasein, it cannot fulfill its meaning.
Dasein's dissatisfaction with its own self points to some other origin
beyond mere Dasein.
Consciousness-as-such (Bewusstsein uberhaupt), in contradistinction to
the individual consciousness of individual men, is that identical conscious-
ness present in all particular processes of consciousness. Through it all
beings become apprehensible for us and through it our theoretical know-
ledge, as well as our non-theoretical (e.g., ethical or aesthetic knowledge),
 KARL JASPERS 197

achieves general validity. Consciousness-as-such is boundless in that it

embraces whatever can be meant as an object at all. The sense of truth
peculiar to consciousness-as-such is universally binding, cogent truth.
Hence with consciousness-as-such we reach as far as universally valid
knowledge can extend. But this consciousness also points beyond itself
to that of which we can no longer speak in a universally binding manner:
the unknowable, on which the sense of truth specific to consciousness-as-
such founders.
Spirit (Geist) is that Encompassing through which man, in his own
inwardness but also in the world, seeks to realize 'wholeness'. Spirit is
guided by ideas. Unlike consciousness-as-such, it is not timelessly and
universally valid; rather, it is historical and is always in motion in reali-
zation and understanding appropriation. In contrast to Dasein, it is not
actuated by obscure, unconscious drives and propensities; it perfects itself
in the "inwardness of understanding its own self" . We encounter the
works ofthe spirit, e.g., in art, in achievements ofthe intellect, in govern-
ment institutions and laws, in morals. Spirit is active not only in creatively
producing all of these but also in attaining that sympathetic sharing of
them that we call 'spiritual understanding'.
Over against the immanent Being that we ourselves are (Dasein, con-
sciousness-as-such, spirit) stands the world as absolutely the Other and
yet as immanent Being. It is not possible to give a more exact characteri-
zation of this very difficult concept of Jaspers', and we shall have to
content ourselves with a few indications. What we first encounter is not
a world but a multiplicity of worlds that differ in accordance with the
multiplicity of individuals and the diversity of life. From the environ-
mental world of animals we pass by way of the environmental world of
man to the specifically human worlds, such as the technical, the economic,
the political, the historical. All these special worlds are embraced by the
one world which constitutes the object of scientific cognition. This one
world is the objective correlate to consciousness-as-such; it is the Encom-
passing of Being itself in so far as Being can be known in universally valid
cognition. The world itself, however, cannot be grasped as an individual
object, as can anything that appears in the world. Here we can draw the
clearest analogy to the Kantian representation of space and time. The
world is an a priori presupposition, although not itself an object, and the
framework within which individual objects can be given us. It is "that from
198 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

which there emerge all the phenomena through which the Being oftheworld
becomes accessible to us". But all efforts to conceive the Being of the
world in its totality are bound to fail: we never encounter anything but
relations and complexes of objects in the world. The world as such is
infinite, whereas only the finite can be the object of human cognition.
The world as Encompassing remains an idea in the Kantian sense. We
become entangled in logical contradictions (the Kantian antinomies) as
soon as we try to transform this idea into a cognitive object.
This insight into the incompletability of our knowledge of the world
is, according to Jaspers, of great positive significance. For, the fact that
we constantly break through every fixed point in supposedly conclusive
knowledge, and thereby place 'in the balance' all knowledge of the world,
generates in us a consciousness of Being that makes us aware of our
freedom. We become free for the world and for ourselves in the world in
that we are no longer engulfed in the finite and the expedient. Above all,
it is in relation to transcendence that we become free for ourselves. For if
I do not absolutize the world, then for me whatever is cognized as an
object becomes transparent for something else that is not the world; and
it is only through this placing-in-the-balance of the world that the basis
of my own Existence shines forth as that which remains certain within
this relativization.
Existence and transcendence are introduced in a manner analogous to
that in Jaspers' first philosophical work. Both can be attained only by a
transcending leap. In fact, in the philosophical representation of Dasein,
consciousness-as-such, spirit and world, there also takes place a trans-
cending, that is, a passing beyond the particular objectivity to an aware-
ness of these Encompassings. Yet even here the objectively knowable still
constitutes the point of departure. Existence and transcendence, however,
exhibit a transcendent Being in a more basic sense than the other modes
of the Encompassing. We do not become aware of them through a gradual
transcending of individual comprehensible objects; rather, we reach them,
if at all, only by leaving entirely behind us all immanent Being, to which
the other modes of the Encompassing belong. These two new realities,
Existence and transcendence, although they sustain everything else, cannot
be grasped as objects at all. In his indirect characterization of the two,
Jaspers strives for a clarity beyond what was said in his three-volume work
Philosophy by counterposing them to the other modes of the Encom-
 KARL JASPERS 199

passing. Thus he contrasts them with the other modes, and also discusses
the relations among all modes of the Encompassing. In the course of this
discussion, the relationship between Existence and transcendence again
becomes the central point in his philosophizing.
Existence still designates man's authentic Being-his-self and is realized
only through free decision. Thus Existence basically is not Being but a
potentiality-for-Being. Dasein belongs to man; but it is man as Existence
that first animates Dasein, by taking hold of the Dasein given him with its
properties and transforming it. Here we face an ultimate and inexplicable
mystery: something that is more than Dasein bears a relationship to
Dasein and makes a decision whose origin does not lie in Dasein. Being-
one's-self, as Existence, makes itself known in "man's urge to reach
beyond Dasein to the eternal". This urge must have "some other than
immanent ground". While fortunate hereditary factors and favorable
circumstances may produce a successful man, it would be a fatal de-
ception for him to be proud of his Being-so. For this would mean con-
fusing freedom with what was given to him as Dasein.
Existence stands out in clear contrast not only to Dasein but equally
to consciousness-as-such. The latter is the site of universally valid know-
ledge, and as a knower I am arbitrarily replaceable by others. Existence,
on the other hand, is always the "non-replaceable historicality of the
uniquely occurring origin". The difference between these two Encom-
passings is further clarified by the difference in character of their opposite
poles: the opposite pole to consciousness-as-such is objective Being in the
world; for Existence, the counterposed Other is transcendence, which
exhibits itself only to Existence. The relation between Existence and
transcendence is not one of external counterposition, as in the case of
consciousness-as-such and the world, but is an especially intimate one.
Without Being as Existence there would be no transcendence for men,
and conversely without transcendence there would be no Being-one's-
self as Existence. For part of Being-myself is the knowledge that
transcendence is the power through which alone I am authentically
myself.
Existence is also clearly distinguished from spirit. As a spiritual creature,
man belongs to a transparent and closed totality, and in his behavior
tends to be determined by ideas and universally valid norms. As Existence,
he pierces through any closedness by making exclusionary decisions.
200 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

Spirit, on the other hand, makes no decisions. It "shines as bright in the

service of the devil as in that of God".
If we were asked to specify a characteristic that unites Dasein, con-
sciousness-as-such and spirit, and clearly differentiates them from Exist-
ence, we would cite replaceability. What takes place in Dasein, conscious-
ness-as-such and spirit is a process that is replaceable in all of its indivi-
dualizations, "a performance with roles and costumes in which no one
performs". It is Existence which, itself unique and not otherwise repre-
sentable, sustains and acts these roles. Nonetheless and despite these
antitheses, Existence is inseparable from consciousness-as-such and
spirit; it has need of both as the "medium of its becoming illumina-
ted" .
Transcendence, once again, is for Jaspers the absolute Other, which
can be heard only by Existence. In contrast to the remaining modes of
the Encompassing, transcendence can be doubted since, unlike Dasein,
spirit, world and the like, it does not possess "a corporeal presence of its
own" but speaks to us only through the other modes of the Encompassing.
True, the world was also characterized as an 'absolutely Other' ('schlecht-
hin Anderes') that stands counterposed to us. However, as opposed to
transcendence, the world is a 'fundamentally Other' Cradikal Anderes').
For it is not 'of itself', or causa sui, to use mythical language; it is created
Being. Transcendence, on the contrary, is Being grounded in itself, in
which all other Being is grounded. As compared with what might be
called the specific transcendence of the individual Encompassings, it is
the transcendence of all transcendences. Jaspers also calls it the Encom-
passing of all Encompassings.
In Jaspers, the relationship between Existence and transcendence has
a strongly religious accent (at least in the broader sense of religion). In
the first place, it is through transcendence that I as Being-myself first
become free. The tie between the existential concept of freedom and
transcendence is not a logically compelling one. Indeed, one of the
rationally unsolvable paradoxes in Jaspers' philosophy is that I can be
free only through something Other than what I myself am (whereas in
the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, e.g., man's freedom does not
require any such transcendent Being). In the second place, Existence
find its ultimate footing in transcendence; it is to transcendence alone
that Existence can surrender itself completely. If in Jaspers, nevertheless,
 KARL JASPERS 201

the word 'transcendence' cannot be replaced in all contexts by the word

'God', this is because the latter term serves to emphasize only one par-
ticular relationship of Existence to transcendence. That is to say, in so
far as we refer to transcendence in abstract transcending thought, it is
the one immutable Being. In so far as transcendence speaks to us in our
life as something that challenges and governs us, we call it Divinity. In
so far as we are personally touched by it and acquire a person-to-person
relationship to it, we call it God.
The bond that connects all the modes of the Encompassing is reason.
It is the faculty in us that brings about unity and seeks to bind everything
together. At the beginning, there is no unity for us. Everything divides
and breaks down into incalculable multiplicities - first into the particular
modes of the Encompassing, and then, within these modes, into indi-
vidual phenomena (e.g., the innumerable individualizations of Dasein and
spirit, the abundance of the world's contents and aspects, the hetero-
geneous historical appearances of transcendence for individual Existences
and so forth). Reason is expressed, in relation to each Encompassing, as
the tendency to combine into a whole that which belongs to that particu-
lar Encompassing. In the domain of consciousness-as-such, for instance,
it is expressed as the idea of the unity of all the sciences. But reason is
not content with any such pursuit of isolated modes of the Encompassing,
and especially not with the demand for universal validity on the part of
consciousness-as-such. Reason pushes beyond to an all-embracing union
and aims at the unity of all the Encompassings. The fundamental posture
of reason is a limitless Being-open, an "omnipresent listening to that
which speaks and to that which it itself first makes speak", an unbounded
ability to perceive whatever is. This attitude is one of justness toward all
that "is from the origin", so as to allow it full recognition. Reason does
not halt at any firm knowledge attained by the understanding; it is thus
a motive force that promotes uneasiness and demands "dissociation from
all that has become finite and determined" and that finds rest only when
the one Being discloses itself to it.
From these characterizations it follows that of all the modes of the
Encompassing, reason stands closest to philosophy as activity: it is the
vehicle of philosophizing. Reason, for Jaspers, forms the subject-matter
of philosophical logic. Just as Existence-illumination, as philosophical
activity, is associated with Existence and formal logic with the under-
202 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

standing, so philosophical logic is associated with reason as reason's

self-consciousness.
With respect to men, reason and Existence are the two Encompassings
that we ourselves really are. Hence they stand to one another in a neces-
sary and peculiar relation of polarity, in which each mutually conditions
the other. "Existence is the stimulus of reason, reason is the awakener of
Existence" .
There is the danger that once again the individual modes of the En-
compassing will themselves be conceived as so many objects which stand
in a certain relation to one another. Such a view, however, would be
erroneous. Basically, what is meant each time is the one transcendent
Being, to which we find no other access than through the modes of the
Encompassing that lie nearer to us. Each of these modes is, in a certain
sense, everything; but in each of them the Encompassing is at the same
time so modified that we are not able to derive anyone mode from the
others. Hence if we speak of relations among the Encompassings, these
relations themselves are something Encompassing. As soon as we seek to
make ourselves conscious of these relations, we inevitably think of them
in categories. These categories, however, may only be applied in a tran-
scending fashion; otherwise, in dealing philosophically with the En-
compassing, everything would again be reduced to the plane of conscious-
ness-as-such, with its claim to universal validity. But then in every such
'knowable simplicity', Being itself has disappeared. The Encompassings
and their modes become accessible not to man the theorizing subject, but
to living man as Being-his-self, and to him only as an intricate web which
cannot be grasped in its entirety. Only by joining in weaving this web may
we hope "to be able to touch in a historical way the basis of everything
in the One".
Jaspers understands the doctrine of the Encompassing as laying the
logical foundation for Existence philosophy. The philosophy of the En-
compassing will teach us "in thinking, to be ourselves; in thinking, to
allow Being to unfold itself".

2. The Forms of Truth

Philosophical reflection about truth grows out of the philosophy of the
Encompassing. To the individual modes of the Encompassing there corre-
spond different orders, and in turn to each of these orders there corre-
 KARL JASPERS 203

spond its own truth and its own errors in thought. Hence the word 'truth',
as employed by Jaspers, has a much wider signification than in ordinary
logical and epistemological usage, where what is meant is simply the truth
of a judgment or a statement, or, in Jaspers' terminology, the truth of con-
sciousness-as-such. Everything that has a positive value is subsumed under
the concept of truth, up to and including Being itself - that Being "which
comes to be only through its becoming manifest", i.e., human Existence and
absolute Being in its state of having become manifest for us as Existence.
That truth is one is obvious and immune to any doubt. But the One
itself is never given to us. It breaks down into the modes of the En-
compassing; hence for us the forms of truth grow out of the modes of
the Encompassing. To each of these modes corresponds a unique and dis-
tinctive meaning of truth. According to the correspondence theory of
truth, the essential mark of truth consists in the agreement or corre-
spondence of thought and reality (judgment and state of affairs). For
Jaspers, too, agreement is the factor that characterizes all forms of truth,
a factor which, according to Jaspers, changes slightly depending on the
particular form of truth under consideration. In the domain of conscious-
ness-as-such, truth consists in the agreement between belief and situation
(or, with regard to objective ethical principles, which Jaspers likewise
places in the domain of consciousness-as-such, the agreement between
what one wants to do and what one ought to do). In the domain of Dasein,
truth is the agreement between belief and what is useful for living. On the
other hand, in the domain of spirit and Existence truth cannot be inter-
preted as a relation between two entities comprehended as objects. Of
course, we may say that for the domain of the spirit, e.g., truth consists
in the correspondence between the actual state of affairs and an idea (as
when we speak of a 'true polity', a 'true marriage', a 'true friend'). The
idea itself, however, should never be taken as an object, but only as the
stimulus experienced through participation in that idea. Still less in the
case of Existence can we conceive truth as a relation admitting of objective
characterization; rather, truth here consists in the "agreement between
my realization and my possible Existence", that is, between what I actually
realize in myself and what I as authentic Being-myself can realize in my-
self. In respect to the world, truth consists in the agreement between thing
and archetype. Applied to transcendence, truth lies "in the agreement
between the symbols which have become objects and Being itself". This
204 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

last sense of truth presupposes that the symbols for existential experience
have become appearances of transcendence. When, however, we speak
of the truth of transcendence itself (as, say, in the proposition 'God is
truth'), such truth cannot be captured by the notion of agreement. In this
instance, the notion of agreement becomes an empty idea, for there is
nothing here that has the character of an object.
The notion that there is a universally valid realm of truth has, for
Jaspers, only a relative justification. This thought applies solely in the
domain of the scientific truth of consciousness-as-such. But, as the account
of the various forms of truth has shown, the truth of consciousness-as-such
(conclusive certainty) does not by any means embrace all truth. For us, of
course, all truth becomes clear only in the medium of consciousness-as-
such, which is "the all-encompassing space of all Being-true for us". The
other forms of truth come into contact with conclusive certainty in one
or another fashion, whether by being repelled by this sort of truth or by
assimilating, as a condition, the truth of consciousness-as-such.
Untruth is the reverse side of truth. In every form that is accessible to
us, truth turns out to be fragile; moreover, by reason of our finite and
limited capacity to realize truth, untruth is a constitutive element of
Being-true itself. Philosophical truth in the broad sense embraces all that
is positive in value. Similarly, for Jaspers, untruth includes all that is
negative in value, in particular evil in all of its forms, all kinds of false-
hood, lies, fraud, hypocrisy, and the like.
While the various kinds of truth must be distinguished in accordance
with the modes of the Encompassing, there is the opposing tendency for
the various senses of truth to be reunited in a unity of truth. Just as the
Encompassings do not stand in isolation from one another, but are inter-
related in many ways (even if these ways cannot be grasped as objects),
so too the forms of truth are pointed toward one another, interpenetrate
and supplement each other. And just as the ultimate source of all modes
of the Encompassing and of their relations is the transcendent One, so
in the province of truth the basic certainty for us is that "all particular
truth becomes truth only through the One", although no definitive and
cogent knowledge can be acquired as to whether or not a One exists at all.
But there is an "indicator pointed toward unity" - the fact, especially,
that each mode of truth pushes toward the others and bursts through its
own meaning of truth.
 KARL JASPERS 205

For man, however, the fundamental situation remains the torn or

broken character of Being. And the basic philosophical decision has to
do with how, in this situation, man seizes hold of unity. Man presses
incessantly toward such unity, but he can never gain it in conclusive and
fixed form. Consequently, he must in turn break through every unity he
has grasped; truth for him exists only as "truth in break-through". Man
is thus led to the threshold of two possible existential decisions. He can
attempt to reach the unity of truth by professing faith in a fixed historical
unity and submitting himself to the authority of this unity (called 'catho-
licity', by Jaspers). Or, if there seems to be no adequate ground for be-
lieving in the universal validity of such a historical unity, he may decide
in favor of the "boundless, revealing and soaring movement of reason",
which leads to no establishable result and in which he becomes aware of
the transcendent One only in isolated sublime moments.
Truth can manifest itself to man only if he dares to question everything
and so risks the danger of being shattered. It is only by way of such daring
that man (as Existence and by means of reason) can arrive at a perfection
of Being-true. We may speak of such a perfection only when there is the
greatest proximity to the one truth that is Being in general becoming
manifest. This one truth is "the Being in the certainty of which man finds
rest". In Jaspers' view, the crowning achievement of philosophical logic
is that it exhibits the forms of this perfecting movement of reason. The
first step, in the basic situation of Being-human, is to make one's own the
great metaphysical questions and the answers given to them by the various
religions and philosophies. These questions and answers, however, may
be included in existential experience only as possibilities of truth. We must
reject every attempt to freeze these answers by some illusory claim to
rational comprehension. Man must maintain a tension that cannot be
eliminated rationally. By "taking these questions into his soul", man can
make his own those possibilities of thought by which alone the "move-
ment of Being-human" is evoked in him and through which he experi-
ences a strengthening of his own consciousness of Being. But if these
possibilities of thought are taken as assertions to be understood literally,
they fall of their own weight - as false theology or as false doctrine about
the relationship between God and the world.
Secondly, Being-true can be completed or perfected in temporality, but
in a manner that cannot be formulated rationally except as a paradox, to
206 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

wit, as existential historicality. This concept is paradoxical because it con-

tains the notion that in a genuine decision not only is the past realized but
also the eternal is present in the moment. And it is precisely through this
that time becomes qualitatively filled out time. Man is genuinely a being
only "in his Being-given-as-a-gift" by transcendence. In this way, ex-
istentially realized presence can become assured in man as eternal present
(time).
Third, the perfection of truth also takes place by way of primal in tu-
itions in religion, art and poetry. These intuitions constitute a special
'language of truth', which historically precedes systematic philosophizing.
Philosophizing itself, whether it appropriates or combats these primal
spiritual intuitions, is inseparable from them. They first mark off the area
for philosophizing, and thus become its organon. Their substance can
never be wholly translated into the language of concepts; the intuited
content extends beyond what can be interpreted philosophically. This is
especially true of tragical knowledge, which finds its intuitive, artistic
expression in tragedy. Knowledge of this sort is of extraordinary im-
portance for Jaspers. According to him, when man arrives at tragical
knowledge, it is "like a rent in the fabric of history"; for with this know-
ledge "a historical movement begins that takes place not only in external
events but in the depths of Being-human itself". Nevertheless, we may
still ask what the tragic has to do with the problem of Being-true. The
answer must then be: tragedy is not the presence of an unsolvable conflict,
neither does it consist in the antithesis of truth and untruth, of the positive
and negative in value, nor is even very great misery a tragedy. Genuine
tragedy exists only where each of the powers in conflict is true in itself;
"the split character of truth is the basic finding reported by tragical
knowledge". Tragedy may be seen, among other ways, in the fact that
the hero defeated in Dasein really is the victor - man's victory is in
foundering. Bound up with tragical intuition is a transcending knowledge
in which human need is seen in a metaphysical mooring. Without this
transcending knowledge, there would be no tragedy, only misery, mis-
fortune and failure. Along with transcending, however, what also takes
place in tragical intuition is a liberation - either a redemption in the tragic
(if the tragic still remains, but man endures it and therein transforms
himself), or a deliverance from the tragic (where the tragedy, as it were,
dissolves and ceases to be). Only the contact with the transcendent justifies
 KARL JASPERS 207

us in characterizing tragical intuition as a way of completing Being-true

in intuition.
It is sometimes said that Existence philosophy itself views Dasein as
such under a tragic aspect. This is not true at all of Jaspers. He explicitly
rejects a 'Pan-tragicism' or "metaphysics of universal tragedy" (as ex-
emplified, say, in the philosophy of Friedrich Hebbel). Such a philosophy
would be merely another example of a false, absolutizing metaphysics.
Jaspers holds that it is absurd to say that the ground of Being is tragical.
Tragedy lies in phenomena; in transcendent knowledge of the tragic, an
Other that is not tragical always shines through.
The fourth and final way cited by Jaspers is the perfection of truth in
philosophizing. For anyone truly engaged in philosophizing, the main
thing is not to relinquish the basic position that "truth within time is
always on the way" and that "even in its most wondrous crystallizations,
truth is not definitive". Here three things need to be touched on again:
reason, love and the objectivity of the simile (cipher). The movement of
reason cannot take place in isolated individuals, but only in the course
of communication between individuals. The total will to communicate is
part of the essence of reason; for reason includes the perfect openness
of man to all forms of truth. Thus on the one hand, the truth attainable
by man is never universally valid; each man, as Existence, must arrive
at his truth by "relativizing without limit whatever has the character of
an object". On the other hand, the 'loving communication' of reason
includes acknowledging the equally justified truth in the other man. It is
precisely this, of course, that leads to insight into the incompletability of
the truth we aim at through communication. But when thought, having
experienced the incompletability of every communication, does grasp
transcendence, then that thought is almost like a proof of God's ex-
istence: "under the assumption that truth must be", it has come upon
transcendence.
The question now arises whether with this notion we have not passed
beyond communication. Jaspers leaves this possibility open. The ne-
cessity for communication is in the last analysis a deficiency. In "isolated
and fleeting sublime moments" we experience a full harmony in becoming
one with Being over and above what can be communicated in language.
In our boundless will to communicate, which belongs to reason and
Existence, are we not already living on the ground of Being itself, which
208 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

has no need to communicate? This question, according to Jaspers, is

unanswerable: either it is propounded in a vacuum, or it is an unquestion-
able certainty, which, falsely stated, would only destroy itself by paralyzing
the unconditional readiness to communicate that impels one to ask it.
For Jaspers, love also is required for the completion of Being-true in
philosophizing. There is a two-fold reason for this: my Being obtains
fulfillment only through love, and love opens the way for that which is.
As to the first of these, love coincides with authentic Being-myself, with
truthfulness of Existence - 'Being-one's-self and love are identical'. But
this Being-one's-self as love is not gained through planning or the ex-
ertion of will; on the contrary, I am given to myself as a gift in love. As
to the second, love is most intimately connected with reason. If reason is
to be able to represent Being becoming manifest, there must already exist
that inner relationship to Being which makes it possible for Being to be
revealed at all. This inner relationship exists only in love. Real truth is
not accessible to the understanding (consciousness-as-such); "truth is dis-
closed to love, it grows out of the resolve gained in love". Love's openness
to Being, which enables us to see what really is by "disclosing the essence
of a being in all of its forms", furnishes reason its positive content. Where
reason and love operate without restriction, they merge. It is only "know-
ledge that is love and love that is knowledge that bring Being-true to
perfection" .
Reason in its movement finds stability in the objectivity of the cipher.
This objectivity is not a knowable object, but "something objective that
exceeds all knowledge"; it is lodged in what may be called 'ciphers' or
'symbols' or 'similes'. Any being may be a cipher for us if it becomes
'transparent' and within it the one unconditioned Being becomes per-
ceptible in its 'self-presence'. Ciphers are "mediators between the phe-
nomenon and transcendence". In Jaspers' view, it is the business of
philosophy to locate this symbolism and to assimilate it as profoundly
and comprehensively as possible. If the person engaged in philosophizing
reads the cipher-script of Being, he himself then generates a new cipher-
script of ideas - "the thought itself becomes a symbol". For example, the
philosophical idea that God speaks only in ciphers is itself an image, or
cipher; the idea that I participate in Being through ciphers is likewise an
image. The perfection of man, the rise to the one God, according to
Jaspers, is possible only through 'mediation'. The one path to God, for
 KARL JASPERS 209

us, is that the world contents we meet become ciphers. It is of course

tempting to believe that we can conceive or experience God (e.g., as in
a mystical union). But "even if there were a direct experience of God,
it could not be communicated", and in turn could be confirmed only by
phenomena in this world. If we wish to conceive or experience God him-
self, we still only reach other ciphers of God. Yet "God is not a cipher,
but reality itself".
We can, according to Jaspers, speak of a "philosophical road to sal-
vation". This road, however, does not lead to deliverance in the religious
sense, but only to an "analogue of deliverance"; for it supplies no
'embodiment' and offers no guaranty. There is no binding instance in the
world for the person who philosophizes; he "cannot thank any histori-
cally given revelation for his salvation". Hence the philosophical road to
salvation leads not through philosophy as the totality of received works
and doctrines, but through a philosophizing that is irreplaceably different
in each individual and that is subject to the responsibility and conscience
of the individual- philosophizing for which the works and doctrines can
provide no more than illumination and stimulus. Philosophy is "the way,
the truth and the life", but only in so far as a man who finds himself on
this road may earn the Eternal by thinking, without any hope, however,
of objective finality. Consequently, even philosophy itself provides no
stable footing; "the only firm support is the One, Transcendence, God".
That there is a stable footing, however, and what it is, can become
manifest in philosophizing, although only in a unique and irreplaceable
fashion for each Being-one's-self. "This stable footing exhibits itself
through reason, the joy in the clarity of all-embracing openness; through
love, which brings the joy of fulfillment; through ciphers, whose language
shows the real Being" (Von der Wahrheit, p. 966).

C. EVALUATION

Jaspers' work is to be classed with those philosophies which do not address

themselves to man as a rational being but rather depend for their effect
upon the extent to which man, through assimilating them, is inwardly
moved and transformed. A comparison of his philosophy to that of
Heidegger shows how far apart these two thinkers are; and the distance
has increased with the appearance of Von der Wahrheit.
210 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

In Heidegger, we encounter the stubborn incisiveness of an analyst,

mixed with a rare form of rustic primitivism with all of its lights and
shadows. Jaspers stands before us as a philosopher who, by virtue of his
enormously wide horizon, draws into his thinking the entire content of
the philosophy, art and religion of the West, and even beyond; who
makes us see this content in the light of man's existential problematic;
and who at the same time seeks, with unflinching honesty, to awaken our
conscience to the innumerable dangers of slipping into systems of rational
metaphysics, into spurious irrationalisms or fixed beliefs and dogmas.
Jaspers' description of reason may be regarded as an implicit avowal on
his part of a philosophy of 'all-embracing openness'. Heidegger's ultimate
goal is theoretical in tendency, that of Jaspers is not. According to the
latter, for anyone who truly engages in it, philosophy should occupy the
place that religion holds for the person who is not orientated toward
philosophy. For this reason, Jaspers' expositions carry a kind of religious
passion that is lacking in Heidegger. 3
One thing should be expressly noted before we venture some critical
remarks. It is much more difficult, in a brief compass, to give even a
partially adequate account of Jaspers' philosophy than it would be for
any other philosopher considered here. Jaspers' statements about com-
munication, belief, guilt and the like always rely on painstaking psycho-
logical and phenomenological analyses, and it has not been possible to
include these in our presentation. The exposition has had therefore to
remain in many respects a meager schema, which can be filled out only by
reading the relevant passages in Jaspers. For example, in calling attention
to the important role Jaspers assigns to love, we should have added that
he does not merely speak of love in general but distinguishes its many
forms, which taken together constitute a hierarchy; that he characterizes
all these forms in detail- sexual, intellectual, spiritual, metaphysical, and
so forth; that he compares them with other aspects of the human psyche,
discusses their biological, psychological and metaphysical interpreta-
tions, exhibits the one-sided features present in both metaphysical or
objectivizing knowledge of love, and psychological or subjectivizing
knowledge of love, and considers the various possible perversions and
aberrations of love; finally, that he includes all these reflections in his
philosophy of the Encompassing and of truth. Many of the analyses pre-
sented by Jaspers - the analysis oflove is but one example - do not depend
 KARL JASPERS 211

upon the ultimate intent of his philosophy and can serve as a most valu-
able stimulus to thinkers who are not prepared to accept the fundamental
approach of Existence philosophy. A particularly outstanding example
is the treatment of the tragic (Von der Wahrheit, pp. 915ff.), with its
analysis of the Oedipus tragedy and of Hamlet, which probably ranks
among the best discussions of these matters ever offered. In addition,
Jaspers' critical observations on culture and the times contain many
important conclusions that are largely independent of his philosophical
position.
A critical appraisal of the actual content of Jaspers' philosophy is
possible only to a very limited extent. Fundamentally, a scientific and
philosophical critique can be addressed only to statements that claim to
express objective knowledge. But Jaspers does not make this claim for
his philosophical statements, at any rate not for those that he deems
crucial. The criterion of truth for such statements is not theoretical in-
sight, but what man may become by understandingly appropriating them.
In other words, the criterion is whether these statements touch man as
possible Existence and open his ears to the language of transcendence.
No theoretically grounded assertions can be made, however, concerning
the ability of Jaspers' philosophy to accomplish this; for such an effect
takes place invisibly and cannot be objectively apprehended.
Nevertheless, we shall try to show that a critique is possible regarding,
first, the presuppositions on which Jaspers' philosophy rests; second, the
substance of his philosophy in so far as this is accessible to rational
scrutiny; and third, the consequences of his philosophy.
The presuppositions include above all the acceptance, in very large part,
of Kant's epistemological position, not only his starting-point but also
the final results of his theory of knowledge - in particular, transcendental
idealism and the doctrine of the unknowability of the things-in-them-
selves. There is even some question as to whether Jaspers did not also
tacitly accept some of the theses of neo-Kantianism. He himself explicitly
stressed his dependence on Kant. This is also evident externally in the
adoption of certain expressions and concepts that are peculiar to
Kantianism. One example is the expression 'consciousness-as-such',
which for Jaspers designates one of the modes of the Encompassing.
Other instances are Jaspers' conception of the world as the objective
correlate of consciousness-as-such, and his version of the concept of
212 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

universally valid knowledge and its coordination with consciousness-as-

such. His portrayal of reason also follows Kant closely.
Here a fundamental problem arises: Kanfs theoretical philosophy and
the epistemologies of the neo-Kantians claim to be scientific in character,
that is, they involve rationally discussable views which, in the scientific
sense of truth, must be either true or false. On the other hand, Jaspers'
philosophy, although not an irrationalism in the radical sense that it dis-
cards scientific truth, is nonetheless irrationalistic in that it goes beyond
scientifically attainable truth, attempts from a 'higher' vantage-point
to relativize all that is scientifically knowable, and locates the deepest
accessible truth in the existential experience of the individual which itself
cannot be communicated. Should we not expect a philosophy of this kind
to be independent of all theoretical or scientific philosophy, whether
Kantian or any other? But it is impossible to foretell how much of
Jaspers' philosophy would go by the board or at least be essentially
modified if the correctness of Kanfs philosophy were to be challenged.
Now in point of fact, these results are contested by many present-day
thinkers. This holds not only for philosophers of a 'positivistic' bent but
also for those who are concerned with a philosophical approach to beings
as they are 'in themselves', that is, with serious ontology. Thus anyone
who has occupied himself with recent philosophy of nature must surely
find it a bit strange when Jaspers, in support of his thesis that knowledge
of the world as a whole is impossible, cites Kanfs doctrine of the anti-
nomies and endorses the claim that we can rationally prove both that the
world is finite and that it is infinite (Von der Wahrheit, p. 97). Since Kanfs
day, as we know, the situation in this area of cosmology has changed
completely. In the first place, the contemporary natural philosopher
would no longer even try to prove on a priori grounds any assertion about
the spatial or temporal extent of the world. This, of course, does not
exclude setting up meaningful hypotheses based on empirically tested
physical and astronomical uniformities. In the second place, today we
are aware that the Kantian construction of the so-called mathematical
antinomies rests on conceptual confusions, such as the failure to dis-
tinguish between space as unbounded and space as infinite, and the
erroneous inference from the former to the latter. As against this, relativ-
istic cosmology assumes a world space that is both unbounded and finite
(as, say, the surface of a sphere is unbounded yet finite).
 KARL JASPERS 213

This example merely illustrates to what extent a presumably incorrect

(at least highly problematical) although rationally discussable theoretical
view helps at times to determine Jaspers' philosophical point-of-departure.
But it is not these details that are of interest to us. It is the general problem
of whether we do not have here a truly paradoxical situation, namely, that
in his procedure, Jaspers presupposes not only the problematic but also the
end results of a scientific philosophy that according to his own philosophy
cannot exist at all.
In the middle portion of Von der Wahrheit, Jaspers addresses himself,
among other things, to epistemology and formal logic in the customary
sense. We purposely did not consider this section of his work in the
exposition above. To have done so would have detracted from the overall
picture, since this is by far the weakest part of Jaspers' philosophy. When
he discusses logical and epistemological questions, Jaspers enters a
province in which he is not really at home. This is a judgment with which
not only philosophers in the fields of modern logic and analytic theory
of knowledge but also Kantians and phenomenologists would agree.
We shall cite just one obscurity by way of illustration. The expression
'cogent or compelling knowledge' ('zwingendes Wissen') , which Jaspers
employs to characterize scientific knowledge, is in many respects vague
as well as misleading. It suggests that in the domain of science we always
obtain definitive results and also that these results can be 'extracted'
('erzwungen') without constant creative activity. But in the first place, all
theories in the realm of natural science remain merely hypotheses, and
for this reason it is better to avoid using the expression '(settled) know-
ledge' (' Wissen') for them; even those hypotheses of natural science that
are best confirmed inductively may be upset at any time by new obser-
vations. Second, even in mathematics, indeed even in formal logic, theo-
rems cannot simply be 'extracted' but require the creative imagination of
the theorist. Today we know (and in a mathematically exact sense) that
in most mathematical disciplines as well as in formal logic generally, there
is no mathematically compelling decision procedure for the validity of
propositions. 4 Moreover, this use of the expression 'cogent knowledge'
fails to make clear whether such knowledge is to include only the findings
of the various sciences, or perhaps also philosophical assertions about
reality. In the first volume of his Philosophie of 1932 (Philosophische
Weltorientierung, pp. 89ft'.), Jaspers counts the intuiting of essences and
214 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

categorial analyses as cogent knowledge. Yet it is not evident from what

he says how far knowledge of this sort can extend. Furthermore, it is
doubtful whether this conception is compatible with his entire philo-
sophical view as well as with the Kantian position from which he starts.
Thus far we have talked only about epistemological presuppositions.
As already mentioned, Jaspers is thoroughly aware of his dependence on
Kant. The question is whether he is not also dependent - and this time
without being altogether aware of it - upon an implicitly assumed on-
tology, as when he considers everything once again under "the aspect of
Being". Is the verb 'to be' ('sein'), when used substantivally in the ex-
pression 'Being' ('das Sein') and decked out with a definite article, an
adequate linguistic means to express what Jaspers wants to say? Some
ontologists, among them Heidegger and Nicolai Hartmann, defend the
view that while this usage is justified, we do have to distinguish between
'Being' ('Sein') and 'beings' or 'a being' (,Seiende') and that Jaspers
frequently employs the expression 'Being' where he ought to speak of
'a being' (e.g., when he uses the expression to refer to the transcendent
One). Other metaphysicians, such as Brentano, reject the expression
'Being' when used as a name for something. And when Jaspers goes so
far as to speak of the 'Being of Being' (Von der Wahrheit, p. 117), we note
that the infinite regress indicated therein is one of the reasons why
Brentano denied that there is any such thing as a concept of Being differ-
ent from the concept of a being. But whether Brentano was right or not,
the expression employed here by Jaspers still seems to need further
conceptual clarification.
As far as the substance of Jaspers' philosophy is concerned, there are
a number of points from which to initiate a critique. We might, e.g.,
question whether we should extend the concept of truth as widely as
Jaspers does, or whether it would not be better, instead of speaking of
the 'forms or guises of truth', to speak of the various meanings of the
ambiguous expression 'true'. This expression is already ambiguous in
everyday life where we not only apply it to statements but also use it in
the phrases cited by Jaspers himself - 'true friend', 'true democracy' and
the like. We might then conclude that 'true' is made considerably more
ambiguous by Jaspers when under it he subsumes existential truthfulness
together with everything that has a positive value, including finally even
what he calls the 'truth of transcendence'. We shall, however, disregard
 KARL JASPERS 215

this question which is partly but not wholly terminological. Instead, we

shall point out a problem that concerns what for Jaspers is the most
important relationship, that between Existence and transcendence.
When Jaspers says that man as Being-his-self or Existence experiences
transcendence, then the simple and, again, epistemological question arises:
Does this experience guarantee that the transcendent One is in fact a
reality that has being in itself and is not merely a subjective phenomenon,
which psychological inquiry would reveal to be a delusion?
There appear to be only two alternatives here. On the one hand, we
may grant that the experiencing of some particular content of the world
(a Beethoven symphony, perhaps) as a cipher cannot, as experience, give
such a guarantee. In that event, the reality of transcendence is only in-
ferred from the experience and the question remains whether or not the
assumption contained in the conclusion is correct. The problem of truth
then comes up again in its original form, that is, injust that form in which
Jaspers recognizes it only for the sphere of consciousness-as-such and not
for the other domains, in particular not for the "becoming manifest of
transcendence". Thus the experience of transcendence is not a pure ex-
perience but an apprehension in the sense of knowing about something,
and it does make a difference whether this knowledge is factual or merely
imaginary. Further, what is involved is not merely the question of know-
ing about the Being-real of something that cannot be characterized more
closely, as if all that is to be ascertained is that transcendence is an
actuality and not a delusion. On the contrary, transcendence must in some
way be given as content, if we are to be able to say that it is one rather
than many, and that it provides a stablefooting for human Existence. For
such statements presuppose that both theoretical categories and value
predicates may properly be applied to transcendence. Thus anyone who
elects this first alternative must interpret the experience of transcendence
as a cognitive process and must withdraw the thesis that theoretical truth
(the 'truth of consciousness-as-such') is to be relativized and can not be
applied to the phenomenon of transcendence becoming manifest to
Existence.
On the other hand, we may take our stand with experience as such and
deny that any theoretical interpretation or inference is also involved here.
We thus maintain that the one Being is itself present in the experience of
transcendence, and that the seeming epistemological problematic arises
216 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

only because we are unable to provide any contentual representation for

this coming into contact of Existence and transcendence. If this is the case,
then what Jaspers says here is no longer distinguishable from the teachings
of those mystics who speak of the soul becoming completely one with
God. Jaspers himself has always been concerned to draw a line between
his philosophy and the doctrines of the mystics, and to accord these
doctrines recognition as partial truths only to the extent that he does the
same for the great systems of religion and the conceptual edifices of the
metaphysicians. In fact, it has often been pointed out that the 'world-
fleeing' attitude of the mystic is fundamentally different from the notion
in Existence philosophy that man realizes his authentic Being-his-self only
through active decision in the world. It is not true, however, that all
mystical doctrines preach a flight from the world in this sense; moreover,
the point at issue in the present context is not how the mystic views the
relations of man to the world, but what he has to say about the relation of
man to God. In this respect, there seems to be no essential difference be-
tween a unio mystica, or perfect union of man and God, and the Jaspers
experience of transcendence. Thus the Jaspers metaphysics moves into
closest proximity - if the second of our two alternatives is adopted - to
the outstanding mystics of the past, and less to the Christian mystics than
to Plotinus. But for anyone who stands outside the mystical experience
of unity, not only must the claim that there is such an experience remain
problematical, not only must the possibility of something of this sort be
incomprehensible to him; the whole notion must be unintelligible in the
basic sense that he cannot even understand what is actually meant here. 5
It would seem, therefore, that philosophical statements about Existence
and transcendence present us with the following choice: Either we assign
to theoretical truth a far wider domain of application than Jaspers allows,
and thereby acknowledge that all rationally discussable epistemological
problems are situated in a place where, according to Jaspers, 'conscious-
ness-as-such' is supposed not to reach - namely, in the "reading of the
cipher-script" and in other forms of the transcendence-experience; or we
look upon these statements as propositions of an otherwise unintelligible
mysticism.
With regard to the consequences of Jaspers' philosophy, two things
should be pointed out. The first concerns the problem of the genuine
propagation of his philosophy, that is, a propagation that rests on the
 KARL JASPERS 217

inner assimilation of this philosophy and not merely on a superficial

acquaintance with it. This point is best discussed on the basis of the con-
clusion already reached, that Jaspers' Existence philosophy is conceived
of in a certain respect as a 'substitute for religion'. But to serve such a
purpose, should not this philosophy then have been expounded in a
simpler form and with fewer presuppositions as to both verbal formu-
lations and conceptual apparatus? Jaspers' assertions are couched in an
original, metaphorical and often moving language; but for the most part
they are very difficult to grasp. The average reader of his works will not
understand many of his allusions, which assume an extensive acquaint-
ance with individual philosophical disciplines, the history of philosophy
and other realms of the spirit. To this the reply may be that very few men
can be expected to attain authentic Being-one's-self. This answer, how-
ever, would not be satisfactory; for in principle every man is supposed to
be a possible Existence, and the realization of this possibility ought not to
be tied to a particular intellectual level. Provisionally, at any rate, this
philosophy is addressed not to all men but only to a small circle of those
who possess the appropriate intellectual prerequisites. Hence we ask:
must not the influence it seeks be withheld so long as Existence philosophy
fails to arrive at the plain and simple language of religion?
The second point is closely connected with the experience of transcen-
dence. According to Jaspers, one's own activity does not suffice to ac-
complish the leap from mere Dasein to existential Being. There must in
addition be communication, the transcendence-experience, and the Being-
presented-with-oneselJ through the medium of transcendence. This last
aspect is nothing other than Existence philosophy's interpretation of the
religious concept of mercy, which also may be absent. The transcendence-
experience likewise does not depend on one's own will alone. Further-
more, only those may share this experience to whom the capacity for it
is given. According to Jaspers, however, a possible meaning can be ex-
tracted from life only by arriving at one's own unconditionality and with
it the assurance of transcendence. Hence for anyone who fails, the end
must be the utter meaninglessness of the world and his own despair. The
question then is: may not an appeal directed to the 'possible Existence'
of the individual destroy more than it builds? Where positive fulfillment
is absent in the individual man, Existence philosophy necessarily takes
on the aspect of a rigid nihilism.
218 MAIN CURRENTS IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

Jaspers himself saw the danger that Existence philosophy might give
rise to a hysterical type of philosophizing. What at one time appeared as
a danger has in recent years become a reality. The external circumstances
of life may have been a contributing factor. But does this not indicate in
practice that one cannot rest with this kind of philosophizing? Actually
the call to go further is found in the substance of Existence philosophy
itself. For if man is a creature who presses on beyond himself, who can
find ultimate meaning only in his ownmost Being-his-self and who must
be on guard against every dogmatic rigidity, then we must concede the
possibility of some other kind of philosophizing - under pain of Existence
philosophy itself hardening into dogmatism. Nietzsche's principle of
'don't follow me, follow yourself', the meaning of which Existence phi-
losophy seeks to deepen, must in all consistency be applied also to the
substance of Existence philosophy.
While Existence philosophy leads beyond itself, going beyond it ought
not to be confused with falling behind it. The person who honestly engages
in philosophy today will of course seek to assimilate historically such
systems as those of Spinoza or Leibniz or Fichte or ScheIIing. But he is
no longer so naive as to be able to believe in their validity. It is not honest
to operate with outmoded forms of philosophical thought - once real
enough - as if they were philosophies advocated today, when in fact they
represent no more than pallid schemas and empty dogmatisms. Jaspers'
philosophy is suited, as is scarcely any other, for keeping a critical-
existential conscience on guard against any such manoeuvering.

REFERENCES

1 Only interconnections of motives can be understood. Therefore understanding

(Verstehen) is bound up with causality and lack of freedom. Hence to understand is
also always to forgive, since to understand is to grasp the necessary reasons. On the
other hand, Existence illumination endeavors to charge man with the consciousness
of responsibility for his Being.
2 The term 'transcendence' is meant to designate Divinity as the absolute Other
vis-a-vis both the Being of the world and Existence. It signalizes the strongly theistic
touch in Jaspers' metaphysics. We must add, of course, that Jaspers himself presumably
would not accept the expression 'theism', except as a characterization in mythical
language of his philosophy.
3 Jaspers seems thus far to have exerted a factually greater influence on Protestant
theology than on contemporary philosophy. Catholic theologians, on the other hand,
generally take Heidegger more seriously, presumably because of his ontological