Abstract
Largely forgotten today, Karl Jaspers was one of the foremost public figures in post-war Germany to champion the idea of liberty, offering a unique blend of paternalist and populist politics. Freedom for Jaspers was both ideal and real, tied closely to the depths of existential being yet made concrete through the actions and choices of thinking individuals. Alongside developing this multi-layered conception of freedom, Jaspers also set out a number of ways that a culture of freedom could be fostered on both a national and an international level. A nationwide political education, guided by both paternalist great statesmen and by the people themselves, was to form the bedrock of Germany’s transition to democracy. Internationally, Jaspers believed that a decentralised system of cooperation, one which rose above the world’s increasingly irrelevant nation states, was the only means to stave off the dangers of totalitarianism. By placing Jaspers in his historical and intellectual contexts and comparing him with his contemporaries, we can shine new light into the tensions behind the polemics of this philosopher turned political pundit and highlight his important role as one of the Bundesrepublik’s intellectual fathers.
Introduction: Ferocious Yet Forgotten
For a philosopher championing communication, an odd silence surrounds Karl Jaspers. Most students of German or continental philosophy will not have heard his name, and in the minds of those that have he is likely to be overshadowed by his famous student, Hannah Arendt, and his infamous colleague, Martin Heidegger. This absence of contemporary interest is all the more unusual given Jaspers’ prominence in his own day. As well as his pre-war studies in psychopathology and Existenzphilosophie, he also penned numerous political works, many of which were provocative and wide-reaching. Jaspers was among the first to broach the question of German war guilt with his 1946 book Die Schuldfrage and, nearly forty years later, his Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik? attracted no small amount of attention either as it climbed to the top of the best-seller charts. Jaspers had yet another advantage in being an intellectual less tainted by the Nazi catastrophe than most, a white-listed friend of the new post-war American establishment, and thus a moral authority in a nation looking to revive its reputation, all things we might expect to have lined him up for a celebrated legacy as one of the new Germany’s intellectual founding fathers.Footnote1 By the end of his life, the popular press certainly seems to have seen Jaspers as a paternal role model in this vein: the German local newspaper Honnefer Volkzeitung reported his ailing physical health as front-page news;Footnote2 the French-Swiss paper L’impartial lamented the passing of ‘le grand philosophe allemand’, a master of the existential school, upon his death;Footnote3 and the German-language paper Freiburger Nachrichten declared him to be one of the year’s ‘grossen Toten’ alongside figures such as Franz von Papen and Ho Chi Minh.Footnote4
Yet this fame at the end of his life never sustained itself and interest in Jaspers has dwindled over time. A slew of reasons have been given for why this might be, among them — to name but a few — Jaspers’ failure to inculcate apostles,Footnote5 the dismissal of his work by prominent figures such as Jürgen Habermas,Footnote6 and his uncanny ability to make political enemies, simultaneously being denounced by the Left as ‘NATO’s philosopher’ and accused by the Right of ‘Vaterlandsverrat’.Footnote7 It should also be noted, however, that perhaps Jaspers scholarship has also played a role in his fall into obscurity. Balanced portrayals of his work which bring out the most innovative aspects of his thought can still be hard to come by. Critical accounts such as that of Richard Wolin, for example, suggest that, even in the post-war period, Jaspers never became a ‘convinced democrat’.Footnote8 At the same time, we find more positive appraisals from those such as Indu Sarin who suggests, perhaps overenthusiastically, that Jaspers’ philosophy of universal communication ‘contributes significantly in bringing world peace’.Footnote9
An effective way to redress some of this imbalance and do justice to Jaspers’ legacy is to re-examine and re-emphasise the driving force behind his post-war politics: freedom. As Golo Mann astutely points out, the importance of freedom for Jaspers is difficult to overstate as it is held by him to be ‘das höchste menschliche Anliegen’, no mere ‘Ding unter anderen Dingen’.Footnote10 Freedom for Jaspers is both ideal and real, tied closely to the depths of existential being yet made concrete through the actions and choices of thinking individuals. It lies at the spiritual core of what it means to be human but may still be threatened by worldly developments, the brutal rise of totalitarianism chief among them. It is thus both historical and transcendent.
Contrary to the many critics who have, as Kurt Salamun notes, stereotyped him as ‘ein wirklichkeitsferner Moralist und politischer Neo-Romantiker’,Footnote11 Jaspers does not shy away from the messy realities of freedom. He declares in his 1947 pamphlet Europa der Gegenwart, for example, that the European conception of freedom is one which seeks ‘die Extreme, die Tiefe der Zerrissenheit’, taking us ‘durch den Nihilismus zum gegründeten Seinsbewußtsein’.Footnote12 Jaspers’ discussions of freedom in politics are thus not the product of an intellectual patriarch far removed from the struggles of the day. In reality, they form an important and considered strain of his wider thought, one which separates him from other existentialists such as Heidegger and Sartre who opposed liberalism and at various points showed support for authoritarian, even totalitarian, political movements. As we shall see, Jaspers’ politics undeniably contain a paternalist streak in that he believes the German masses need to be educated towards freedom and takes a high-minded view towards the role played by petty, squabbling nation states. Unlike his more illiberal colleagues, however, this is not where his thought ends. Like any good parent or teacher, Jaspers takes the Socratic idea of an education seriously: the end of an education towards freedom must be a democratic and self-governing German people, one immunised against the dangers of demagoguery and ready to enter into dialogue with a wider community of nations.
From Auschwitz to the Gulag: Between Totalitarianisms
Jaspers’ philosophical and political inquiries into the nature of freedom are not formed in an ahistorical vacuum and are not intended by him to be a set of eternally valid axioms. They are, on the contrary, reactions to developments in the real world. For Jaspers, two threats loom large in the post-war era, both of which are expanded upon in his 1957 work Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen. Unsurprisingly given the title of the work, the first of these is the atomic bomb, a device which for the first time threatens to erase humanity in its entirety if a significant change in consciousness does not occur. The second is the antithesis against which freedom must struggle:
Der Atombombe, als dem Problem des Daseins der Menschheit schlechthin, ist nur ein einziges anderes Problem gleichwertig: die Gefahr der totalitären Herrschaft (nicht schon das Problem von Diktatur, Marxismus, Rassentheorie) mit ihrer alle Freiheit und Menschenwürde vertilgenden terroristischen Struktur. Dort ist das Dasein, hier das lebenswerte Dasein verloren.Footnote13
However, Jaspers’ concern for concretising or defining freedom is not simply the product of this general Cold-War context. Its roots also lie in his earlier experiences of National Socialist rule. Despite himself only escaping deportation to Ravensbrück with his wife by a matter of weeks,Footnote16 the implications of the Nazi regime’s industrial genocide weighed heavily on Jaspers’ conscience. As several critics have pointed out, this is in part because Jaspers is not without sin when it comes to his murky navigation through the crises of the Weimar Republic and the Hitler regime. Anson Rabinbach, for example, emphasises that Jaspers’ 1931 book Die geistige Situation der Zeit ‘exemplified the melancholic pathos of antimodernity and nostalgia for “substance” and “authority” typical of the conservative revolution of the 1930s’, though this admittedly does not culminate in an endorsement of what was to come.Footnote17 Jaspers also failed to criticise his friends, most notably Heidegger, who were siding with the newly installed Führer. Rather than clearly distancing himself from Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede, Jaspers writes to his philosophical colleague in 1933 that:
Mein Vertrauen zu Ihrem Philosophieren, das ich seit dem Frühjahr und unseren damaligen Gesprächen in neuer Stärke habe, wird nicht gestört durch Eigenschaften dieser Rede, die zeitgemäß sind, durch etwas darin, was mich ein wenig forciert anmutet und durch Sätze, die mir auch wohl einen hohlen Klang zu haben scheinen.Footnote18
Tausende haben in Deutschland im Widerstand gegen das Regime den Tod gesucht oder doch gefunden, die meisten anonym. Wir Überlebenden haben nicht den Tod gesucht. […] Wir haben es verzogen, am Leben zu bleiben mit dem schwachen, wenn auch richtigen Grund, unser Tod hätte doch nichts helfen können. Daß wir leben, ist unsere Schuld.Footnote20
Untangling the Knots: Freedom, Existential and Political
The entanglement between politics and existential concerns in Die Schuldfrage runs throughout Jaspers’ post-war discussions of freedom, both in its political and its higher, metaphysical senses. The concept of existential freedom is by itself a difficult one to grasp and would require a deep dive into Jaspers’ pre-war writings to fully elaborate. Though this makes a complete explanation of existential freedom impossible here, a brief survey of some of Jaspers’ earlier philosophical works is nonetheless useful for situating his political ideas and their development over time. Jaspers’ preoccupation with freedom emerges even in his first attempt at a full-length philosophical text. Writing in his 1919 tome Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, Jaspers declares:
Das Leben des Geistes ist Freiheit. Da das Leben nirgends ein konkretes Einzelwesen restlos durchwirkt, ist, empirisch angesehen, nirgends die Freiheit vollendet da. […] So ist es mit allen Momenten des Lebens im eigentlichen Sinne: Da das Leben Bewegung ist und alles zugleich da und auch nicht da ist, ist das Wesen des geistigen Lebens, nie in Ruhe, nie fertig, sondern der Weg zu sein, seine Qualitäten zu verwirklichen. […] Darum ist […] der Mensch nie frei, weil er immerfort frei werden muß, und er ist zugleich frei, sofern er lebendig ist.Footnote25
Niemals kann ich als Dasein aus dem In-Situationen-sein heraus; mein Handeln selbst, durch das ich Situationen wandle und herbeizuführen suche, tritt mir in seinen Folgen als eine von mir mitbedingte Situation entgegen, die nun gegeben ist. Situation wird zur Grenzsituation, wenn sie das Subjekt durch radikale Erschütterung seines Daseins zur Existenz erweckt. Solche Situationen können wir nicht überschauen; hinter ihnen sehen wir nichts anderes mehr; wir können sie nur klären.Footnote26
Turning to Jaspers’ post-war writings, it is clear that these earlier ideas are taken up into his political thought and developed further for more pragmatic purposes, though this does not mean that a concern for existential freedom entirely disappears. The idea of free choice, of individuals transforming potential into reality according to their own internal drives and unique situations, is central to Jaspers’ conception of existential freedom after the Second World War, something which separates him from Kant, one of the major influences on his political thought, who insists that autonomy is bound up with universal moral law. This subjective aspect to freedom comes out in Jaspers’ 1947 work Europa der Gegenwart where he states:
Freiheit ist Überwindung der Willkür. […] Der Anspruch der Freiheit ist daher, nicht aus Willkür, nicht aus blindem Gehorsam, nicht aus äußerem Zwang zu handeln, sondern aus eigener Vergewisserung, aus Einsicht.Footnote27
This emphasis on authenticity should not, however, be mistaken for a slide into atomistic individualism where any resistance from the external world is regarded as a restriction upon our freedom. Jaspers also stresses, for example, the importance of communication and an experience of the other to existential freedom. He argues in his 1949 essay ‘Über Bedingungen und Möglichkeit eines neuen Humanismus’, the title of which is likely an allusion to Heidegger’s famous letter Über den Humanismus published as a response to Sartre in 1947, that:
Wir sind nicht frei durch uns selbst, sondern im Grunde der Freiheit durch das, worin wir uns geschenkt werden. Das wird uns erfahrbar, wenn wir uns ausbleiben, und nicht schon frei sein können allein dadurch, daß wir es wollen. Auf der Höhe der Freiheit ist das Bewußtsein des Sichgeschenktwerdens in unserer Freiheit, aus der wir leben, die wir aber nicht selbst erzwingen können.Footnote29
The gradual transformation of a rigidly organised hierarchic system into one where men could at least attempt to shape their own life, where man gained the opportunity of knowing and choosing between different forms of life, is closely associated with the growth of commerce.Footnote30
For Jaspers, freedom is not merely the capacity to be an authentic self: it also entails a political form in the ability to enact this self in concrete manifestations. Jaspers insists on the enacted nature of political freedom as opposed to the more diffuse nature of a higher, existential freedom in his text Europa der Gegenwart:
Wo die Freiheit in einer Abstraktion zum Ziel gemacht wird, da wird die Phrase auf dem Wege zu irgendeiner neuen Gewaltsamkeit. Wo in Freiheit redliche Selbstbezwingung aller, die miteinander handeln, stattfindet, da geschehen konkrete Schritte zur Verwirklichung der Freiheit der Zustände.Footnote33
Hence, in spite of the great influence the concept of an inner, non-political freedom has exerted upon the tradition of thought, it seems safe to say that man would know nothing of inner freedom if he had not first experienced a condition of being free as a worldly tangible reality. We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.Footnote34
With the mention of both externality and negotiation, we already begin to notice a key feature of Jaspers’ conception of political freedom, one which pairs with the openness of existential freedom: sociability. This emphasis comes as no surprise and is demonstrative of Kant’s influence on Jaspers with its roots in his famous words on the origins of social order in the 1784 essay ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’. For Kant, humans exhibit a form of ‘ungesellige Geselligkeit’, wanting to establish a common order to guarantee their safety, yet aiming to avoid as much social constriction as possible so that they may pursue their own oddities and ends.Footnote35 Jaspers makes a very similar point to this in the 1951 essay ‘Freiheit und Autorität’ where he claims:
Jedoch gehören Freiheit und Autorität zusammen. Die eine wird wahrer, reiner, tiefer nur mit der anderen. Gegner werden sie erst, wenn Freiheit zur Willkür, wenn Autorität zur Gewalt wird. In dem Maße als sie Gegner werden, verlieren beide ihr Wesen. Der Einzelne ohne Autorität, in Willkür geraten, weiß nicht, was er soll. Die Autorität ohne Freiheit läßt Gewalt zum Terror werden.Footnote36
That such a life order can be sustained, and how we might go about doing so, is inherently uncertain as it involves a complex interaction between many moving parts. This reliance on spontaneous order thus brings out a more innovative element of Jaspers’ discussions of political freedom: risk. In his 1953 essay ‘Die Aufgabe der Philosophie in der Gegenwart’, Jaspers identifies freedom itself as being in a state of risk. In modern technical societies, atomisation threatens to cut individuals off from truth:
Denn in völliger Verlassenheit des Einzelnen kann das Zutrauen zu sich selber aufhören, kann der Zweifel beginnen an der offenbaren Wahrheit, wenn nur er allein sie sieht, ohne Sprache mit den Anderen bleibt.Footnote38
The vital task that Jaspers’ approach to political philosophy assigns to the individual therefore also brings risk in the form of unpredictability, a denial of the possibility of precise social planning. In the 1966 work Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik?, the acceptance of this controlled chaos is one of the cornerstones of political freedom:
Die menschlichen Dinge gestatten keine absolute Sicherheit. Freiheit kann sich nur durch Freiheit im Risiko behaupten. Wer absolute Sicherheit will, will die Unfreiheit und den politischen Tod.Footnote41
For Jaspers, the only humane option left open to us is to shoulder this risk and to trust that each individual is the person best situated to judge how their own life should be managed. He takes the opportunity to frame this predicament as ultimately one of hope rather than desperation in his television lecture series Kleine Schule des philosophischen Denkens:
In der Freiheit ist zwar das Verderben groß, das völlige Verderben möglich. Ohne Freiheit ist das Verderben gewiß.
Die politische Freiheit, dem eingeborenen Adel des Menschen gemäß, erlaubt Hoffnung. Der andere Weg ist von vornherein hoffnungslos. Wir verachten uns selbst, wenn wir den Mut der Vernunft aufgeben, in dem die Hoffnung gründet.Footnote44
Exoteric and Elitist: What is a Political Education?
Jaspers’ concentration on the bond between freedom and risk and its entailing demands for communication and heroism underscores the fragility of human liberty, something which raises an urgent question: how are we to anchor freedom in our politics? The answer, or at least part of it, seems to lie in political education. On the surface, this turn to education is surprising given Jaspers’ vocal criticism in his 1951 essay ‘Freiheit und Autorität’ of how politics, particularly under its totalitarian guise, has a tendency to instrumentalise learning and thus transform it into something rather sinister:
Unter totalitären Regimen vollzieht sich dieser Verlust durch methodische Vernichtung der Überlieferung von Religion, Metaphysik, Philosophie. Während hier der gesamten Bevölkerung mit Lesen und Schreiben zugleich alle Lernbarkeiten vermittelt werden, wird sie doch nur zur Verwendung im modernen technischen Arbeitsprozeß brauchbar gemacht. Eine partikulare gesteigerte Bewußtseinserhellung wird durch die Schulen überliefert, während geschichtlich ein totaler Bewußtseinsverlust stattfindet.Footnote47
If the introduction of politics into education has the potential to produce such a disaster, what, then, does a true political education look like? For Jaspers, there are two kinds of teacher that will dictate whether an education towards freedom and democracy is a success: Staatsmänner as educators of the people, and the people as educators of themselves. Batthyány correctly identifies that Jaspers’ focus on these two elements springs from his belief in the sovereignty of individuals, something which means he constantly places ‘die Person und nicht die Institution in den Mittelpunkt seiner politischen Überlegungen’.Footnote50 Neither the guiding vision and ambition of statesmen nor the reasoned conversations of ordinary people operate within a strict institutional structure, meaning that political education must take place through individuals. Provoking the outrage of literary scholar Ernst Robert Curtius who wrongly and mysteriously detected an attack on German heroes of the past, Jaspers suggests an individualist approach to cultural renewal in his 1949 speech Unsere Zukunft und Goethe:
Sie wird nicht im Ganzen durch Maßnahmen und nicht durch Umerziehung zustande gebracht, kann überhaupt nicht gewollt und nicht geplant werden, sondern sie ist zunächst Sache des Einzelnen, jedes Einzelnen.Footnote51
Jaspers’ understanding of what a statesman is and how he should act is primarily derived from the thought of his hero Max Weber. In his 1919 lecture Politik als Beruf, Weber draws an essentially undemocratic outline of what a statesman is, stressing that such a man must ‘ein Führer und nicht nur das, sondern auch — in einem sehr schlichten Wortsinn — ein Held sein’ if he is to guide the ship of state with the necessary ‘Leidenschaft und Augenmaß’.Footnote53 In the eyes of Richard Wolin, Jaspers’ politics continue to promote this kind of paternalist figure even after 1945 and exhibit a reliance ‘on the authority of “notables” or “great men” to promote freedom and keep the degenerative risks of mass society at bay’.Footnote54 This concern is echoed by Hermann Lübbe who argues that Jaspers’ conception of ‘Massengesellschaft’ is ‘grob einseitig’ because it fails to acknowledge that modern egalitarianism ‘statt homogenisierend und nivellierend, vielmehr differenzierend und entproletarisierend wirkt’.Footnote55 To give both of these critics their due, Jaspers does continue to display a veneration of powerful statesmen after the War that is not in line with the democratic spirit of his late thought. A prime example of this is his lamentation at a global lack of leadership in a letter to Arendt from December 1956:
Mir scheint jetzt fast das Gefährlichste, daß die Welt führerlos ist. Da waren Truman und Stalin doch noch Kerle, die wußten, was sie wollten, und bei denen es eine politische »Logik« gab! Eisenhower ist dagegen ein Beamter oder General, der eigentlich auf »Anweisungen« wartet, und die Russen eine mit sich selber streitende Gesellschaft […]Footnote56
Claims of elitism must also be tempered, though they admittedly cannot be eliminated, in light of Jaspers’ description of how the true statesman comes into being in the 1965 Kleine Schule television series:
Die Welt politischer Freiheit ist verloren ohne große Staatsmänner, die durch die Schulung freier Männer zuverlässig von Generation zu Generation neu erwachsen. Mit allem, was sie tun, kämpfen sie in den gegebenen Chancen der Freiheit für diese. Sie kennen die Gefahr. Das Wagnis lohnt sich ihnen, weil es um das höchste Daseinsgut der Menschen geht. Sie haben Mut, Urteilskraft und Geduld.Footnote57
Part of this tension can be explained if we turn to the other key influence on Jaspers’ political thought and his discussions of freedom: Kant. Alongside the Weberian statesman, a Kantian-Enlightenment current also flows through Jaspers’ ideas on political education which emphasises the need for each citizen to outgrow the tutelage of the great and the good — sapere aude, or so Kant might say. In his commentary to Zum ewigen Frieden, Jaspers suggests that Kant wishes us to discard the idea of a glorious leader we must obey:
Der Verzicht auf den übermenschlichen Führer ist der unerbittliche Anspruch an jeden Menschen als Menschen. Der Weiseste soll sich an alle wenden und wissen, daß er selber einer ihrer Art, ein Mensch und nicht mehr, ist.Footnote59
This popular aspect of Jaspers’ thought reaches its climax in the 1966 Bundesrepublik book, a response to numerous failures by the German political elite such as the 1962 Spiegel-Affäre. Jaspers hits out at political parties in particular: rather than fulfilling their function as ‘Organe des Volkes’ which carry out its will and follow it as a teacher, they have morphed into a new ‘Obrigkeitsstaat’ which lives disconnected from the desires of the populace.Footnote61 Jaspers does not end his criticism there, intensifying it with a much bolder attack on the structure of the Federal Republic itself:
Unsere Staatsstruktur beruht auf […] dem Mißtrauen gegen das Volk. Das Mißtrauen, zu dem umgekehrt vorläufig noch das Volk gegenüber Parteien, Regierung und Politikern verpflichtet wäre, gibt sich nicht genügend und nicht wirksam kund. Wieder scheint der Untertanengeist zu siegen als Vertrauen, die Regierung werde es schon gut machen.Footnote62
Despite this potential nuance, there is still a sense that Jaspers is being inconsistent. His statement that the ‘Untertanengeist’ may win out among the German people reflects a fear that something like National Socialism could return, an anxiety which seems out of place for 1960s West Germany. This was, in any case, the view of the SPD’s Erhard Eppler who entitled his review of the Bundesrepublik book ‘Wohin treibt Karl Jaspers?’, proceeding to dismiss Jaspers as a hypocritical Cold-War warrior who, ‘im “chemisch reinen” Raum seines Basler Studierzimmers’, had no sense of Germany’s current political realities.Footnote65 What Jaspers’ anxieties do, however, reflect is his disillusionment with post-war Germany and his belief that a national Erziehung to freedom had failed. This sentiment becomes apparent when we consider Jaspers’ view of the relationship of Germans with the constitution of the FRG:
Der gegenwärtige unheilträchtige Zustand wird gefördert dadurch, daß man die Grundrechte nicht immer ernst nimmt. Das Grundgesetz ist im Volke so gut wie nicht bekannt. Es fehlt das Bewußtsein, die Verletzung des Grundgesetzes sei das größte politische Verbrechen, weil es unser staatspolitisches Dasein in Frage stellt.Footnote66
It should also be noted that Jaspers’ feeling of despair at the state of Germany’s constitutional order in the 1960s was not a new one as he had already begun to become disappointed in the Adenauer government as early as 1952.Footnote68 His feeling was not an isolated case either as other German mainstream liberals of his day also voiced similar concerns. FDP politician Ralf Dahrendorf, for example, argues in a 1963 journal article that many Germans still crave absolute authority and observes that ‘the multi-party system seems to be popular to the extent to which it does not function as such, but leads to all-party coalitions and unanimous decisions’.Footnote69 All this helps to explain why, alongside a national education which he acknowledged as fragile, Jaspers also insisted upon a new international order as a safeguard for freedom.
Drawing the Curtains: World Order or World Empire?
Jaspers’ dissatisfaction with the nation state in general, and the West German one as a guarantor of freedom in particular, is evident throughout many of his post-war writings. Writing to Arendt in 1947, he gives a damning summary of his frustrations:
Das »Deutsche« — es bleibt in der Tat nur die Sprache, […] aber das ist sehr viel, und eine große Sache wäre es, wenn in kommenden Jahrhunderten auf der Welt noch irgendwo deutsch gesprochen und geschrieben würde. Gewiß ist das nicht mehr. Und abhängig ist dies davon, ob das Prinzip der Freiheit schließlich zum Siege kommt oder ob statt einer Weltordnung ein Weltimperium durch Diktatur entsteht. Wie gleichgültig sind doch heute die »Nationen« geworden, und doch steht ihr Geschrei im Vordergrund der öffentlich sichtbaren Politik.Footnote70
This formulation of the two possible alternatives for the future of the globe appears to be heavily influenced by Kant’s Zum ewigen Frieden. Kant identifies two strikingly similar forms of global governance under the opposition between a Völkerbund and a Völkerstaat:
Völker, als Staaten, können wie einzelne Menschen beurteilt werden, die sich in ihrem Naturzustande […] schon durch ihr Nebeneinandersein lädieren, und deren jeder, um seiner Sicherheit willen, von dem andern fordern kann und soll, mit ihm in eine, der bürgerlichen ähnliche, Verfassung zu treten, wo jedem sein Recht gesichert werden kann. Die wäre ein Völkerbund, der aber gleichwohl kein Völkerstaat sein müßte.Footnote72
Throughout his post-war works, Jaspers is consistently preoccupied with the fear of the totalitarian route to world unity winning out over human freedom. In the Atombombe book, it is the blatant use of force rather than the search for consent which distinguishes this world empire from the preferred world order of free states:
Der Totalitarismus dagegen will erzwingen. Er sucht die Welteinheit des Friedens als Eroberung durch sich selber. […] Nicht ein Völkerbund in Freiheit, sondern totale Herrschaft in Unterjochung durch einen Terrorapprat ist das Ziel.Footnote76
Jaspers was by no means the only thinker to worry about the implications of a unified world state under totalitarian rule might have for political freedom’s continued existence, with Dahrendorf writing in 1963 that the desire for peace cannot come to mean that we attempt to abolish all forms of conflict:
Wherever there is social life, there is conflict. […] Techniques of suppressing conflict are older than the word ‘totalitarian’ […] Not infrequently, such techniques are embellished by ideologies of conflict resolution, according to which there can be disinterested authorities and organizational solutions eliminating the causes of conflict.Footnote78
That Jaspers and indeed Kant give some thought to this problem and attempt to avoid it is obvious from Jaspers’ commentary on Zum ewigen Frieden. As Sarin highlights, world peace for Jaspers cannot come from a place of fear or a paranoid desire to avoid all forms of disagreement if it is to produce a free form of governance: it relies on the ‘veneration of human dignity’ and thus demands that we undergo a ‘moral transformation’.Footnote79 Explaining Kant’s attitude towards peace, Jaspers states just this point in his own terms:
Der Friedenszustand ist kein Naturzustand. Er kann nicht in einem bloßen Nebeneinander (Koexistenz) bestehen. Er muß gestiftet werden (durch Kooperation). Das bloße Nebeneinander führt notwendig zu neuem Ausbruch der Gewalt. Die Stiftung des Friedens aber ist nur möglich durch Stiftung eines rechtlichen Zustands.Footnote80
In fact, tension and conflict are the characteristic features of both Jaspers’ understanding of freedom and of his philosophy in general: a spirit of constant self-improvement and embracing critique emerges even in his pre-war writings with his claim in the 1937 lecture series Existenzphilosophie that, though we are led by ideals, these operate more like ‘Seezeichen’.Footnote82 Lofty goals guide us along on our journey yet, like buoys, never offer us a chance for respite, only ever signalling towards where we could travel on a vast plane of philosophical open water. Alongside this tension in Jaspers’ mode of philosophising, there is also a tension between the two ways we might consider him an intellectual father of the Federal Republic. At times, he is paternalist in the sense of appearing to be a stern and distant figure, dealing with ideas of freedom at a high level of abstraction and advocating for a class of elite statesmen to actively shape the Germans into a democratic people, placing him within the framework of a longer tradition of German national liberalism. In an extreme form, this paternalism paradoxically undermines the freedom it sets out to defend: it claims to know the people’s freedom better than they themselves and thus coddles them rather than allowing them to choose their own destiny. Yet Jaspers is also an intellectual father in a more Socratic sense: as his discussions of political education and world federation demonstrate, he also wishes to see the world’s peoples outgrow these tutors and become truly self-governing. This is not merely pontification on Jaspers’ part. His friendship with Arendt, his willingness to learn from someone much younger than himself who had even been his former pupil, and his constant attempts to engage with the public through television and radio show that he took this Socratic ideal seriously. This kind of openness to criticism and change is one of his key measures of freedom in the televised 1965 Kleine Schule lectures:
Öffentlichkeit ist der Raum der Politik eines freien Volkes. Das Maß der Öffentlichkeit ist Kriterium seiner Freiheit. Entwerfen wir zunächst den idealen Zustand: Die politische Freiheit verlangt, daß öffentlich geschehe, was das Schicksal aller bestimmt.Footnote83
Acknowledgements
My research is generously funded by the AHRC Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Robbie Spiers
Robbie Spiers is a PhD student in German at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the work of twentieth-century psychiatrist-philosophers such as Karl Jaspers, Carl Jung, and Viktor Frankl. He is particularly interested in comparing their thoughts on health, science, and religion.
Notes
1 See Mark Clark, ‘A Prophet without Honour: Karl Jaspers in Germany, 1945–1948’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37.2 (2002), 197–222, here p. 197.
2 Honnefer Volkszeitung, ‘Karl Jaspers schwer erkrankt’, 5 December 1968, p. 1 <https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/newspaper/item/IYNDCZI775Z3YVG2PAVCQVL3OE5GOMAN?fromDay=1&toYear=1970&fromYear=1968&toDay=1&toMonth=1&fromMonth=1&query=%22Karl±Jaspers%22&hit=2&issuepage=1> [accessed 3 August 2023].
3 L’impartial, ‘Le grand philosophe Karl Jaspers est mort à Bâle’, 27 February 1969, p. 18 <www.e-newspaperarchives.ch/?a=d&d=IMP19690227-01.2.91> [accessed 3 August 2023].
4 Freiburger Nachrichten, ‘Die grossen Toten des Jahres’, 31 December 1969, p. 13 <www.e-newspaperarchives.ch/?a=d&d=FZG19691231-01.2.50> [accessed 3 August 2023].
5 Chris Thornhill and Ronny Miron, ‘Karl Jaspers’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2020), <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/jaspers/> [accessed 1 May 2022].
6 See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Deutschland — wohin? Ansichten und Einsichten: Karl Jaspers über den moralischen Notstand in der Bundesrepublik’, Die Zeit (13th May 1966) <https://www.zeit.de/1966/20/deutschland-wohin/komplettansicht> [accessed 1 May 2022].
7 Thorsten Paprotny, Politik als Pflicht?: Zur politischen Philosophie von Max Weber und Karl Jaspers (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1996), pp. 101–02.
8 Richard Wolin, The Frankfurt School Revisited (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 144.
9 Indu Sarin, The Global Vision: Karl Jaspers (Bern: Lang, 2009), p. 13.
10 Golo Mann, ‘Freiheit und Sozialwissenschaft’ in Karl Jaspers, ed. by Paul Arthur Schilpp (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1957), p. 555.
11 Kurt Salamun, Karl Jaspers, 2nd edn. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), p. 77.
12 Karl Jaspers, Europa der Gegenwart (Wien: Amadeus-Edition, 1947), p. 20.
13 Karl Jaspers, Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen: Politisches Bewußtsein in unserer Zeit, 2nd edn. (Munich: Piper, 1958), p. 22.
14 Ibid., p. 164.
15 Philipp Batthyány, Existentielle Freiheit und politische Freiheit: Die Freiheitsideen von Karl Jaspers und Friedrich August von Hayek im Vergleich (Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 2019), p. 345.
16 Godfrey Robert Carr, Karl Jaspers as an Intellectual Critic: The Political Dimension of his Thought (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1983), p. 71.
17 Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 137.
18 Walter Biemel and Hans Saner (eds.), Martin Heidegger/Karl Jaspers. Briefwechsel 1920–1963. (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann; Munich: Piper, 1990), p. 155.
19 Hans Saner, Karl Jaspers in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1970), p. 44.
20 Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Frage, 4th edn. (Zurich: Artemis, 1947), p. 49.
21 Clark, ‘Prophet without Honour’, p. 213.
22 Klaus von Beyme, ‘Zeitkritik: Von der Kulturkritik zur Politikkritik im Werk von Karl Jaspers’, in Karl Jaspers — Philosophie und Politik, ed. by Reiner Wiehl and Dominic Kaegi (Heidelberg: Winter, 1999), p. 76.
23 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edn. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967), p. vii.
24 Ibid., p. xxix.
25 Karl Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Berlin: Springer, 1919), p. 290.
26 Karl Jaspers, Philosophie, 2nd edn. (Berlin: Springer, 1948), pp. 48–49.
27 Jaspers, Europa, p. 15.
28 Isaiah Berlin, Liberty, ed. by Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 170.
29 Karl Jaspers, Rechenschaft und Ausblick (Munich: Piper, 1951), p. 269.
30 Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 14–15.
31 Batthyány, Existentielle Freiheit und politische Freiheit, p. 57.
32 Karl Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit (Munich: Piper, 1947), p. 53.
33 Jaspers, Europa, p. 23.
34 Hannah Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. by Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 442.
35 Kant, Immanuel, Werke in sechs Bänden, 5th edn, 6 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), VI, 37.
36 Karl Jaspers, Philosophie und Welt (Munich: Piper, 1958), p. 45.
37 Chris Thornhill, Karl Jaspers: Politics and Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 182.
38 Jaspers, Philosophie und Welt, p. 12.
39 Hannah Arendt, ‘Karl Jaspers: Bürger der Welt’ in Schilpp, Karl Jaspers, p. 536.
40 Jaspers, Philosophie und Welt, p. 15.
41 Karl Jaspers, Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik: Tatsachen. Gefahren. Chancen (Munich: Piper, 1966), p. 145.
42 Golo Mann, ‘Freiheit und Sozialwissenschaft’ in Schilpp, Karl Jaspers, p. 549.
43 Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt, pp. 438–39.
44 Karl Jaspers, Kleine Schule des philosophischen Denkens, 5th edn. (Munich: Piper, 1965), p. 92.
45 Helmut Fahrenbach, ‘Zeitanalyse, Politik und Philosophie der Vernunft im Werk von Karl Jaspers’, in Karl Jaspers: Denken zwischen Wissenschaft, Politik und Philosophie, ed. by Dietrich Harth (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989), p. 154.
46 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Freedom and Karl Jaspers Philosophy (London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 46.
47 Jaspers, Philosophie und Welt, pp. 52–53.
48 Karl Jaspers, Die Idee der Universität (Berlin: Springer, 1946), p. 46.
49 Arthur Koestler et al., The God that Failed: Six Studies in Communism (London: Hamilton, 1950), p. 56.
50 Batthyány, Existentielle und politische Freiheit, p. 96.
51 Karl Jaspers, Unsere Zukunft und Goethe (Bremen: Storm, 1949), p. 7.
52 See Fritz Böversen, ‘Der einzelne, die Gemeinschaft und die Autorität. Zum Autoritätsbegriff von Karl Jaspers’ in Karl Jaspers: Zur Aktualität seines Denkens, ed. by Kurt Salamun (Munich: Piper, 1991), p. 125.
53 Max Weber, Politik als Beruf, ed. by Klaus Fischer (Schutterwald: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1994), p. 92.
54 Wolin, The Frankfurt School Revisited, p. 144.
55 Hermann Lübbe, ‘Moralische Entscheidung, politische Option und der Lauf der Welt. Karl Jaspers als politischer Denker’ in Wiehl and Kaegi, Karl Jaspers, p. 38.
56 Lotte Köhler and Hans Saner (eds.), Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers. Briefwechsel 1926–1969. (Munich: Piper, 1985), p. 244.
57 Jaspers, Kleine Schule, p. 87.
58 Weber, Politik als Beruf, p. 42.
59 Jaspers, Philosophie und Welt, p. 128.
60 Thornhill, Karl Jaspers, p. 172.
61 Jaspers, Bundesrepublik, p. 133.
62 Ibid., p. 167.
63 Ralf Kadereit, Karl Jaspers und die Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Politische Gedanken eines Philosophen (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999), p. 167.
64 Ibid., p. 136.
65 Erhard Eppler, ‘Wohin treibt Karl Jaspers?’, Die Zeit, 22 July 1966 <https://www.zeit.de/1966/30/wohin-treibt-karl-jaspers/komplettansicht> [accessed 10 August 23].
66 Jaspers, Bundesrepublik, p. 177.
67 Thornhill, Karl Jaspers, p. 203.
68 See Jon Nixon, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 95.
69 Ralf Dahrendorf, ‘Conflict and Liberty: Some Remarks on the Social Structure of German Politics’, The British Journal of Sociology, 14.3 (1963), 210.
70 Köhler and Saner, Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers, p. 108.
71 Ibid., p. 124.
72 Kant, Werke, pp. 208–09.
73 Ibid., p. 211.
74 Jaspers, Europa, p. 41.
75 See Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 84.
76 Jaspers, Die Atombombe, p. 149.
77 Arendt, ‘Karl Jaspers: Bürger der Welt’ in Schilpp, Karl Jaspers, p.532.
78 Dahrendorf, ‘Conflict and Liberty’, p. 207.
79 Sarin, The Global Vision, p. 213.
80 Jaspers, Philosophie und Welt, p. 99.
81 Ibid., p. 103.
82 Karl Jaspers, Existenzphilosophie: Drei Vorlesungen gehalten am Freien Deutschen Hochstift in Frankfurt am Main September 1937, 4th edn. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1974), p. 23.
83 Jaspers, Kleine Schule, p. 121.
84 Karl Jaspers, Der philosophische Glaube (Munich: Piper, 1948), p.59.