Abstract
An analysis of the strengths and ambiguities in Jaspers’ concept of philosophical faith in three related contexts: language, religion, and value. The linguistic and semantic context discusses subtle differences of meaning in the Latin, English, and German expressions of faith. The religious context focuses on reason and revelation in the monotheistic traditions of the Middle East. Questions regarding the nature and future of humanity are discussed with respect to truth claims and an axiology of value.
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Notes
- 1.
Incendiary bombs alone killed upwards of 2.5 million German and Japanese civilians during WWII. The Mark 77 bomb (MK-77), used in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the direct successor to the napalm cluster bombs that were outlawed following the Vietnam War in 1981. Encouraged to attend the 65th anniversary memorial of Hiroshima in 2010, President Obama declined on the excuse that such an activity on his part might be deemed “controversial.”
- 2.
Karl Jaspers, The Atom Bomb and the Future of Mankind, trans. E.B. Aston (Chicago, IL, 1961), pp. 209, 262; Die Atombombe und die Zunkunft des Menschen (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1958), “Nur in der Philosophie gibt es die Klarheit gegen die Unphilosophie, d.h. gegen die Verkehrung der Vernunft” and “Philosophischer Glaube is nicht ein Inhalt, an den geglaubt wird, sonder ein Tun, mit dem geglaubt wird” (pp. 289, 366).
- 3.
Jaspers introduced this concept in 1947 by way of a series of six lectures at the University of Basel, published as Der philosophische Glaube (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1948), and translated into English by Ralph Manheim under the title, The Perennial Scope of Philosophy (New York, NY: Philosophical Library, 1949). Jaspers further developed this notion in the early 1960 s, with specific attention to religion and theology, under the more expansive title, Der Philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung, translated into English by E.B. Ashton under the title, Philosophical Faith and Revelation, and published as Vol. 17 in the prestigious Harper & Row “Religious Perspectives” series edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen. It is important to note that Der Philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung, in its first German edition (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1962), was preceded by an essay entitled Der Philosophische Glaube angesichts der christlichen Offenbarung, Jaspers contributed to a 1958 Festschrift for his Basel colleague, Heinrich Barth, who is the only theologian quoted favorably in the book length manuscript bearing nearly the same title; I say nearly the same title, because while the Christian understanding of revelation remains central to Jaspers’ discussion, the modifier christlichen is dropped in the book and the adverb angesichts is introduced as if to suggest a vis-à-vis stance regarding the tensions between philosophical faith and religions of revelation generally, although this tension is increasingly ameliorated by Jaspers’ attention to world religions late in his career. It should also be noted that the principal American expositor of the notion of philosophical faith, and Karl Jaspers’ philosophy generally, is Leonard Ehrlich, to whom this collection of essays is dedicated. See Leonard Ehrlich, Karl Jaspers: Philosophy as Faith (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975).
- 4.
As Chris Thornhill argues, correctly, in my view, “The central idea in Jaspers’ philosophy of religion is the concept of philosophical faith… This notoriously difficult concept contains a number of quite distinct meanings. First, it means that true philosophy must be guided by a faith in the originary transcendence of human existence, and that philosophy which negatively excludes or ignores its transcendent origin falls short of the highest tasks of philosophy. Second, it also means that true philosophy cannot simply abandon philosophical rationality for positively disclosed truth-contents or dogma, and that the critical function of rationality has a constitutive role in the formation of absolute knowledge. In this respect, Jaspers revisited some of the controversies concerning the relation between religion and philosophy which shaped the philosophy of the Young Hegelians in the 1830 s. Like the Young Hegelians, he insisted that faith needs philosophy, and faith devalues its contents wherever these are dogmatically or positively proclaimed. Third, this concept also indicates that the evidences of faith are always paradoxical and uncertain and that those who pursue knowledge of these contents must accept an attitude of philosophical relativism and discursive exchange: if faith results in dogmatism, it immediately undermines its claims to offer transcendent knowledge.” See Christopher Thornhill’s fine entry on Jaspers in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/jaspers.
- 5.
See Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, “In Memory of Karl Jaspers” in Karl Jaspers Today, eds., Leonard H. Ehrlich and Richard Wisser (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology & University Press of America, 1988), p. 27. I am reminded of the highly nationalistic monument in front of the Saint Lamberti-Kirche in Oldenburg, where Jaspers was confirmed, which proclaims: Ein Gott, Ein Volk, Eine Wahrheit, a graphical indication of the political conservatism of the Lutheran Church during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Germany. It is interesting to note that Rudolf Bultmann, with whom Jaspers had a prolonged and inconclusive debate in Die Frage der Entmythologisierung (1954), also came from the Duchy of Oldenburg.
- 6.
J.N. Findlay’s lecture on “The Systematic Unity of Value” (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas, 1968) can be found in Ascent to the Absolute (London: Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1970). Findlay’s most complete statement on this subject can be found in his Values and Intentions: A Study in Value Theory and the Philosophy of Mind (London: Allen & Unwin, 1961), a study influenced a great deal by the realist ontology of his teacher at Graz, Alexius Meinong, and also by Franz Brentano.
- 7.
See Jaspers, Way to Wisdom: Introduction to Philosophy, Ralph Manheim (translator) provides the title for the English translations of these lectures (English editions, Yale, 1951 and 1954).
- 8.
See Sartre’s famous essay on “Existentialism and Humanism” (1946), Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1950); and Will Herberg, Four Existentialist Theologians (1958).
- 9.
See A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), required reading for students of philosophy in the 1940 s and 1950 s; also Richard Hare, The Language of Morals (1952).
- 10.
See Herman Stark’s very helpful analysis of Heidegger’s Was Heist Denken? in the contributed papers of the 20th World Congress of Philosophy. http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContStar.htm.
- 11.
See Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), passim; also his recent major work, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
- 12.
G.W.F. Hegel, Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, Bd. II, Stück I (Juli 1802).
- 13.
Hegel Werke 2, Jenaer Schriften, 1801–1807 (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), p. 288. [Henceforth cited as JS]
- 14.
See Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. Peter Hodgson (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1985).
- 15.
For a more complete discussion of perichontology, see Karl Jaspers: Philosopher Among Philosophers, eds., Richard Wisser and Leonard H. Ehrlich (Würzburg: Kõnighausen & Neumann, 1993), esp. pp. 135ff, where Leonard Ehrlich differentiates Heidegger’s fundamental ontology from Jaspers’ perichontology with respect to Heidegger’s notion of aletheia, upshot of his argument being that Jaspers clearly has more regard for the truths of biblical revelation and Heidegger does not. See also Gerhard Knauss, “The Concept of the Encompassing in Jaspers’ Philosophy” in The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, Schilpp Edition, Vol. IX (Open Court, 1957), pp. 141–176. Knauss argues, correctly in my view, that the basic difference between ontology and perichonotology is that the former proposes to offer a definitive word (logos) about being (ontos), that is to say, the essence of Being. But Jaspers, as a Kantian, thinks this impossible since the thing-in-itself cannot be known and that reason (Vernunft) founders like a ship on the rocks in the face of such an attempt. Hence the task of perichontology, as Knauss argues, is to know what the Being of the Encompassing means “for us” by way of Verstehensphilosophie or hermeneutics. This pro me, extra nos conception of perichontology seems to me very close to theological conceptions of the Trinity and Jaspers’ notion of perichontology may, in fact, have its origins in Patristic theology and the notion of perichoresis where the Fathers attempt to explain both the unity and the diversity of the three persons of the Trinity, i.e., that the three hypostases or instances of the Being of the Absolute as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are separate but distinct revelations having their source or ground within the absolute unity of the Godhead or “the god above god,” as in Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite. As such, Jaspers’ notion also seems somewhat related to the communication idiomatum and the manner in which the divine properties or attributes of Christ are communicated in the various idioms of Christology, while the divinity of Christ, as such, remains absolute and “beyond Being,” so to speak, the whole being greater than its parts. The notion of panentheism, as Tillich has it, seems to me also very close to what informs Jaspers’ notion of the Encompassing.
- 16.
See J.N. Findlay, Ascent to the Absolute (Allen & Unwin, 1970), and other works, including: Values and Intentions (Allen & Unwin, 1961), and, of course, his Gifford Lectures, The Discipline of the Cave and The Transcendence of the Cave (Allen & Unwin, 1966, 1957). Findlay, like Ricoeur and also Jaspers, I think, thought it best to philosophize between Kant and Hegel.
- 17.
By “biblical religions” he means Judaism and Christianity. Since 9/11 it has become painfully obvious to many that this notion must also includes Islam, about which Jaspers and, before him, Hegel, says little or nothing.
- 18.
Fritz Buri, Jaspers’ colleague in Basel and who was strongly influenced by him, wrote a book entitled Theologie der Existenz, in 1954, translated into English and published by Fortress Press in 1968 under the title of Thinking Faith.
- 19.
Philosophical Faith and Revelation, p. 363.
- 20.
See Andreas Cesana, “World Philosophy and Philosophical Faith,” in Existenz, Vol. 2, Nos. 1–2 (Fall 2007), pp. 25–31. http://www.existenz.us/volumes/Vol.4-1Cesana.pdf.
- 21.
See Armin Wildermuth, “Jaspers and the Concept of Philosophical Faith,” in Existenz, Vol. 2, Nos. 1–2, pp. 8–18. http://www.existenz.us/volumes/Vol.2Wildermuth.pdf. [Henceforth quoted as JCPF]
- 22.
This would include Islam although Jaspers, like Hegel, says little or nothing about Islam. Indeed, Islam, for Hegel, is a “deviant denomination,” so to speak, and a throwback to the medieval ages.
- 23.
Tertullian (160–220 AD), Carthagenian Montanist and the first great Christian fundamentalist, is famous for what has been called the credo quia absurdum and the question: Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis? His answer, of course, being that the reference points of Athens and Jerusalem, reason and faith, are wholly incommensurable.
- 24.
See Alan M. Olson, ed., Heidegger and Jaspers (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994), pp. 14–28.
- 25.
I developed this theme at some length in my article, “Cultural Factors in the North American Reception of Karl Jaspers” during Jaspersjahr at Oldenburg (2008). See Existenz, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2009), pp. 40–51. http://www.existenz.us/volumes/Vol.4-1Olson.pdf; see also Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Karl Jaspers Gesellschaft, Vol. 22, pp. 71–96.
- 26.
Biblical scholars have pointed out that the famous and oft-quoted passage from Hebrews mentioned above probably did not come directly from the hand of Saint Paul but rather Barnabas, Paul’s right-hand man in Rome. Others, like Adolf von Harnack, suggest it came from the hand of Pricilla, and still others suggest that it might have originated from Alexandrine authorities such as Clement and Origin. Whatever the case, it is an assertion informed by the notion that one should believe Jesus is the Christ because of the testimony of authorities, whether eye witnesses, the witnesses of witnesses or, in the case of Saint Paul, by way of an ecstatic conversion experience akin to his famous theophany on the road to Damascus.
- 27.
I argued as much in my book on Jaspers, namely, that this dialectic passes from Jaspers to Ricoeur and, indeed, also Lonergan and Gadamer, although Gadamer is usually understood has being more influenced by Heidegger’s understanding of hermeneutics. See: Transcendence and Hermeneutics (Springer, 1979).
- 28.
“And Abraham believed and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” (KJV, Galatians 3:6); “Gleichwie Abraham hat Gott geglaubt und es ist ihm gerechnet zur Gerechtigkeit” (Luther Bible). Recent English translations prefer the term “righteous” to the German “gerecht” as being closer, perhaps, to the original Hebrew in the Abramic instance.
- 29.
See some of the current noisy voices in the current atheism discussion: Sam Harris, The End of Faith (Norton, 2004); Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great (New York, NY: Hatchette, 2007); Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York, NY: Mariner, 2008); and, more reasonably, Dan Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Penguin, 2006).
- 30.
“Verlaß dich auf den Herrn von ganzem Herzen und verlaß dich nicht auf deinen Verstand” (Luther Bible, 1545); Verlaß, as in the noun Vertrauen, meaning “trust” or “reliance,” and Vertrauen is a cognate of Glauben in German. Fidelity and Trust (as in a financial trust) are analogues of faith in English.
- 31.
It is precisely this definition that informs those who, like Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, doubt that Barack Hussein Obama II is a Christian.
- 32.
See William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (1906), passim.
- 33.
Indeed, Jaspers believes that all worldviews, especially religious worldviews, are contaminated by a certain amount of psychopathology. See Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Springer, 1954).
- 34.
Jaspers, The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York, NY: Philosophical Library, 1949), p. 162. Faith as a “duty” is analogous to the notion in popular sports culture that “You gotta believe!” that the home team will be all-victorious, and that the consequence of “not believing.” In my case, will be “excommunication” from “Red Sox Nation.”
- 35.
See Luther’s Small Catechism, explanation to the Third Article of the Apostle’s Creed which reads as follows in German: Ich glaube, daß ich nicht aus eigener Vernunft noch Kraft an Jesus Christus, meinen Herrn, glauben oder zu ihm kommen kann; sondern der Heilige Geist hat mich durch das Evangelium berufen, mit seinen Gaben erleuchtet, im rechten Glauben geheiligt und erhalten; gleichwie er die ganze Christenheit auf Erden beruft, sammelt, erleuchtet, heiligt und bei Jesus Christus erhält im rechten, einigen Glauben; in welcher Christenheit er mir und allen Gläubigen täglich alle Sünden reichlich vergibt und am Jüngsten Tage mich und alle Toten auferwecken wird und mir samt allen Gläubigen in Christus ein ewiges Leben geben wird. Das ist gewißlich wahr. This, of course, was the form that Jaspers had to memorize as a teenager for catechization and conformation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church.
- 36.
See Rudolf Otto’s classic The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige, 1917), trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford, 1923). Otto argues that Luther, especially the early Luther, was deeply influenced by Rhineland mysticism, especially that of Johannes Tauler, and that Jacob Bõhmer may be viewed as a continuation of Luther’s spirituality. It is not surprising that once embroiled in politics, as he was after 1520, Luther became less and less mystical. Jaspers’ admiration of the Rhineland mystics, of course, is well documented in his works, especially The Great Philosophers, 4 vols. (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1995).
- 37.
I believe that Luther’s enigmatic assertion in his Kleine Katachismus (see n. 17) has a strong bearing on the formulation of Hegel’s doctrine of Geist, and I argued as much in my book, Hegel and the Spirit: Philosophy as Pneumatology (Princeton, NJ, 1992). Given his interest in mystics such as Eckhart and Cusanus, the same can be said, I think, of Jaspers.
- 38.
Biblical literature usually refers to God as “good” because he does “good things,” like providing us with food as in the popular table prayer. In this instance I refer to “the good” the way Jesus does: “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God” (Mark 10:18, KJV); “Aber Jesus sprach zu ihm: Was heißest du mich gut? Niemand ist gut denn der einige Gott” (Luther Bibel), since this synoptic assertion provides the textual basis for the fusion of “the good” and “the One” in Judeo-Christian tradition as modified and transformed by Platonism. This transformation is taken for granted, not only by Jaspers, but also by Kant and Hegel, and certainly undergirds Jaspers’ First Principle of the Philosophical Life, namely, “Gott Ist”, supra.
- 39.
“Die Nacht, worin alle Kühe schwarz sind”, Vorwort, Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807). Few scholars referring to this expression really understand what it means since it presupposes a time “before the power lines,” in the phrase of Erazim Kohak, and the experience of looking for the cows at night in order to bring them in for milking. When it is dark, one looks for the “white” on Holstein cattle, which makes them easier to find than the Black Angus, for example, which was a breed developed for meat and not milk in Scotland during the early 1800 s. Needless to say all farm animals and poultry in Hegel’s day were “free range” creatures and not imprisoned in the “iron cages” of factory farms, such as is the case today.
- 40.
The doxological prayer, “Preserve us in thy Truth, O Lord, all things begun and ended in Thee” (BCP) has a ring of the All Encompassing, needless to say.
- 41.
Op. cit.
- 42.
See my essay in Existenz, “Faith and Reason: Ishmael and Isaac Revisited,” Vol. 1, Nos. 1–2 (Fall 2006), pp. 55–63. http://www.existenz.us/volumes/Vol.1Olson.pdf.
- 43.
Tillich, op. cit.
- 44.
See Bernard J.F. Lonergan, Insight: A Study in Human Understanding (New York, NY: Philosophical Library, 1957), passim.
- 45.
See Christopher Thornhill, Karl Jaspers: Politics and Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 2002), especially his section on Jaspers and Kant, pp. 31–54. Thornhill points out, rightly, I think, that Rickert was not only opposed to Jaspers’ appointment to the Heidelberg Philosophy Faculty (since he was “a psychologist and not a trained philosopher”), but also a conflict as to who was the better friend of Max Weber, Rickert or Jaspers!
- 46.
Kurt Salamun, “The Concept of Liberality in Jaspers’ Philosophy and the Idea of the University,” in The Tasks of Truth, ed. Gregory J. Walters (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 39–54. See also Kurt Salamun, “Der Fundamentalismus aus der Sicht von Jaspers’ Philosophie,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Karl Jaspers Gesellschaft, Vol. 23 (2010), pp. 71–86.
- 47.
Op. cit.
- 48.
Atom Bomb, p. 217. Emphasis mine. See my Transcendence and Hermeneutics, op. cit., which was, in fact, inspired by Jaspers’ concept of transcending-thinking which I prefer to Ashton’s translation., i.e., transzendierenden Denkens or thinking that transcends precisely because it is grounded in the Encompassing. The German text of the last lines is as follows: “Wenn of this Transzendieren aus Anlaß des Ungenügens in der Welt geschieht, Doch es entspringt aus der Gegenwart des Umgeifenden alles Umgreifenden. Es wird nicht getrieben von dem, worüber es hinausgeht. Es wird gezogen von dorther, wohin es geht.”
- 49.
See Findlay’s three lectures on “Absolute Theory” in Ascent to the Absolute, op. cit.
- 50.
See, in this volume, the Nachlassfragment of Karl Jaspers, Principles of Philosophising: Introduction to Philosophical Life, written in 1942/43.
- 51.
This, in fact, is the third of his five principles of philosophizing, viz., “man is finite and incomplete,” and this incompleteness is the reason for transcending-thinking. Supra.
- 52.
Gadamer did not give Jaspers the credit he deserved for hermeneutical insights in his magnum opus, Wahrheit und Methode (1960) and, later in life, acknowledged this in Philosophical Apprenticeships (MIT, 1985), first published as Philosophische Lehrjahre (Klostermann, 1977). As he puts it regarding the impact of Jaspers’ Existenzphilosophie, “What distinguishes Jaspers is that he was at once a great teacher and a great moralist. His all-encompassing spirit had at its disposal his broadly streaming and finely nuanced language, but it also experienced the fate of finiteness, which he never forgot precisely in the unrealizability of his universal will to knowledge… There is no conclusion to the impact of Karl Jaspers,” p. 167.
- 53.
COJ.
- 54.
Jaspers’ notion of “metaphysical guilt” in Die Schuldfrage (1948) rests on this assumption, as I agued in an essay by the same title. See Existenz, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 9–19. http://www.existenz/volumes/Vol.3-1Olson.pdf.
- 55.
See Chiffren der Transzendenz (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1970).
- 56.
See J.N. Findlay, “The Absolute and Rational Eschatology,” in Ascent to the Absolute (Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1970). As he puts it eloquently, “Of the three supremely paradigmatic men that our race has produced, Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus, one was a polytheist, one an atheist, and one a monotheist, a fit reminder that those best qualified to perceive and enjoy the Absolute also perceived it quite differently” (p. 74). Jaspers, of course, identifies “four paradigmatic” individuals in Volume One of The Great Philosophers, and does so in 1956, namely Socrates, Buddha, Jesus and Confucius. That academic philosophy fails to recognize and, in fact, intentionally “neglects” these “suprahistorical figures who are our eternal contemporaries” is a sign of philosophy’s “irresponsibility” and decline over the past 50 years, as Jaspers observes in 1957 (pp. vi–vii, Preface to the Original Edition).
- 57.
Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers, Vol. 1, (1962) p. 67.
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Olson, A.M. (2012). Philosophical Faith and Its Ambiguities. In: Wautischer, H., Olson, A., Walters, G. (eds) Philosophical Faith and the Future of Humanity. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2223-1_8
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