Karl Jaspers

German-Swiss psychiatrist and existentialist philosopher (1883–1969), author of Philosophie (three vols., 1932), Existenzphilosophie (1938), Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (1949), and many other works. With Heidegger, one of the two founders of German Existenzphilosophie (a label Heidegger refused; Jaspers retained it). Politically and personally distinct from Heidegger after 1933.

Role in the Wiki

Per Mounier (Personalism Informal Introduction p. xx): Jaspers is named as a central figure of agnostic personalism — "Gabriel Marcel and Jaspers, the one Christian, the other agnostic, are also contributors of capital importance to the structural description of the personal universe." Jaspers is paired with Marcel as the two principal philosophers of personhood whose agnostic-Christian pairing illustrates the constitutive plurality of personalisms.

Other Mounier attestations:

  • Invocation (Ch II p. 23) — Jaspers's term for the call that nourishes the spirit, akin to Mounier's appel.
  • The transcendent as nameless and inaccessible (Ch VI p. 65) — Mounier qualifies Jaspers's reading: "for Jaspers, personal reality presupposes an inner transcendence, but this transcendent being is nameless and inaccessible, except in a kind of mathematical language." Mounier's own reading of transcendence is more "intimately distinctional" (Augustinian).
  • Elevation (Ch VI p. 68) — Jaspers's term for the upward direction of personal transcendence; Mounier adopts the term.
  • The questions of suicide and mysticism (Ch IV p. 47) — Jaspers's framing of the "staggering question" of ultimate negations.
  • Engagement (Ch VII p. 91, n. 1) — Mounier traces the philosophical theme of engagement "back to Scheler and Jaspers" before its 1930s French Esprit development.

Jaspers is currently a gap entity — multiply attested from Mounier but no primary Jaspers source in the wiki.

Key Positions (per Mounier 1950)

  • Personal reality presupposes inner transcendence — but the transcendent is nameless and inaccessible.
  • Invocation / call as the structure of the personal life.
  • Elevation as the directional character of transcendence.
  • The staggering question of suicide and mysticism as the limit-cases of negation.
  • Philosophical priority of engagement — Jaspers (with Scheler) is the German source for the engagement theme that Esprit developed in France pre-1939.

Connections

  • contributes to the personalist constellation alongside Marcel (Christian) — the agnostic-Christian pair
  • anchors the personalist invocation / call vocabulary
  • prefigures (with Scheler) the theme of engagement developed by Mounier and the Esprit group pre-1939, then taken up by Sartre after 1945
  • qualified by Mounier on the nameless-inaccessible character of transcendence — Mounier prefers the Augustinian intimate-distinction

Sources

  • mounier-1950-personalism — Informal Introduction p. xx; Ch II p. 23; Ch IV p. 47; Ch VI p. 65, 68, 72; Ch VII p. 91 n1. Multiple attestations across the primer.

Open Questions

  • Jaspers's specific philosophical articulation of "the encompassing" (das Umgreifende) is not developed by Mounier; a Jaspers primary source would clarify.
  • The Jaspers-Heidegger relation (the two founders of German Existenzphilosophie) is not addressed by Mounier; it would warrant separate treatment.
  • The German-language attestation of engagement (Jaspers, Scheler) pre-1939 is asserted by Mounier but not documented; verification would strengthen the philological priority claim — see claims#mounier-engagement-priority-pre-sartrean.