Saturday, June 1, 2024

Some notes on Jaspers


 

 

 Karl Jaspers




Worldview in politics

 

            Jaspers was dismissed from his position as chair of the philosophy department at the University of Heidelberg in 1937 by the Nazis. Much of his work after this point is about politics and on reconstructing society after the Holocaust.  

 

            During the National Socialist era, the term Weltanschauung (worldview) became identified with the official German ideology and its policies regarding "Weltanschauungen der Rassen" -- supposed basic features of 'races' -- underlying state-run ethnic cleansing and eugenics programs. "Weltanschauung" and "Ideologie" became synonyms. At the same time, the ideal of a wissenschaftliche Weltanschauung (scientific worldview) was replaced by a new 'race-based science' in service to the new, specifically 'Aryan' Weltanschauung

            The adjective, weltanschaulich, now meant 'correct,' 'politically correct,' 'ideologically correct.'  Worldview indicated particularity one's political views -- one's status with the party.

           

 

             Jaspers was unfazed by the spectacle of the National Socialist rĂ©gime and resisted calls to "join in."

 

            As the humanistic disciplines became less influential in society, the term 'worldview' became less prominent than the term 'worldpicture.'  Jaspers' Man in The Modern Age (1933) examines the dumbing-down of society under totalitarianism, the increasing power of symbols, and the lessening status of literate critical intelligence. Jaspers' discussion of the "language of mystification" in this work shows how perceptual information, such as eyewitness reports, fade quickly, but also get idealized according to social norms, and in so doing become actually more vivid and more likely false.  The language we are born into gives us a stock of ready-made phrases that circulate in the society -- we articulate our experiences in this medium -- typifying schemata tend to idealize and socialize what were originally private and sensory experiences.  This shows how social stereotypes, articulated in speech, tend to swamp and outlast genuine insights.  Dominant interests in society make use of the simplification process in language itself to help solidify the impact of propaganda and maintain mass-rule via obfuscation.

            In 1945, Jaspers returned to lead the University of Heidelberg after the Allied victory, now empowered ro re-establish humanistic education in Germany, taking a strong line against rehabilitating instructors with Nazi affiliations.  Jaspers' The Idea of the University (1946) conceives the university as a free community of scholars and students engaged in the task of seeking truth.  The university has no worldview to sell -- more precisely, it has the opposite responsibility -- to initiate the habit of reason and the practice of critical examination.

            By Jaspers' analysis, "political moods" sweep over a people and cloud its capacity for democracy.  Jaspers worked in many different capacities in the post-war period to re-establish the worldview of human confidence in reason -- the general orientation of 'positive regard' applied to the world of politics -- seeing the point of society as furthering the development of the individual -- rather than individuals subjected to state power or becoming absorbed into a collectivity.  "The democratic idea has its ground in man's task of self-actualization ... to despair of democracy is to despair of man."

            C.G. Jung introduced the problem of "collective guilt" into German discourse around this same time.  He argued that addressing this shared state of being had to become a main focus for research in psychology and for therapy.  Jaspers tried to make the case for optimism and democratic engagement in a renewed society in his sober response to Jung The Question of German Guilt (1947).  Guilt is an existential given -- acknowledging it, like acknowledging sickness, old age, and death, is a step towards moral and political rebirth. 

           

           

            Worldview in philosophy

 

            Jaspers' reflections on worldviews culminate in his unfinished masterwork The Great Philosophers (1957).  This work rings a number of key changes from Jaspers' original ideas.  Isolation, loneliness, alienation, and standing apart are major themes in early existential works, including Jaspers' founding work -- Psychology of Worldviews -- and kindred works like Camus' novel The Stranger.  To step outide the norm is to risk being alone.  Jaspers' early work also focuses on Western sources exclusively.  The turn to politics in Jaspers' late work alters his portrait of reflection -- now seen as a "joining of minds" -- and vastly expands his frame of reference -- now become a planetary community. 

            The Great Philosophers conceives the idea of the universal history of philosophy -- philosophy no longer the creation of any single culture -- philosophy is itself a human universal.   An understanding of the world history of philosophy has become a vital resource for thinking  in our time, and reveals a key transition -- the Axis point -- in which universalizing modes of thought appear in cultures all over the world -- from China to India to Europe.  "This is a new consciousness in which man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself, and of his own limits. He experiences the terror of the world and his own powerlessness. He raises the fundamental questions."

            The world over there are "great disturbers" and "great awakeners" -- we meet these thinkers in the space of philosophical questioning the instant we ourselves step outside the routines of everyday life -- Confucius, Lao-Tzu, the Buddha, Nagarjuna -- Socrates and Plato, Augustine and Kant.  These are our "eternal contemporaries" in whose company we achieve the greatest happiness a human being can experience.  Eternity appears in the present,  as we join the conversation.  In time, we can get "askew" of time, we can reach eternity in time.

 

            The political realization of the idea of a planetary history of philosophy runs parallel with Jaspers' concept of mankind and of world-citizenship -- his cosmopolitan ideal.  The axial principle concerns "the way in which the unity of mankind becomes a concrete reality for us."

 

            Jaspers did not begin 'from the beginning' but from the situation he found himself in. His time was the epoch of World Wars, the clash of ideologies -- he came to the conclusion that the healthy person escapes “the shells of fixed doctrines”  -- he saw his work as a thinking person’s response to living in a time of destructive conflict and war, looking for a way out, grounded by reflecting on the truth of the human condition. Mankind suffers together, thrown together in having to face -- or trying to avoid -- the great problems of creating meaning and confronting death.  Human being, if we take it in as a whole, from the perspective of the human condition, offers up a “cosmos of worldviews.” 

            The sheer plurality of these visions is another way of stating the defining problem of our time – the problem of division and interminable conflict -- "the problem of tolerating the historic finitude of the truth I am searching for, or have discovered, or been given, in response to the challenge of the truth that my neighbor seeks, or has discovered, or been given" – attempting to learn from sheer plurality to reject closed-off and totalizing structures.  The problem is to find a way forward from the natural standpoint.  Philosophy is the way forward.   Philosophy is the practice of radical questioning -- philosophy is the respect we show for argument.

 

            Jaspers observed that even the madman, the criminal, the addict and the dictator have their 'worldviews,' which makes one despair of getting all of this down to one process.  He concluded: there is no such process.  There is no continuous process that includes everyone's point of view, and that can be told as a single narrative.  There is no total view of the universe, of the state, or of the self.  There is no total view of anything.  For example, there is no total view of philosophy -- a total view of the history of philosophy is impossible.  

 

             "We are in it.  We see it from within, not from some point of view outside it."  We can peer into the history of philosophy, but always via the background which makes our questions possible.

            The existentialist idea is that there are some things whose sheer existence is something one has to face.  The reality of philosophical disagreement is one of them. There are people who are not going to look at the world the way we do.  Suffering, death, war, accidents -- we have to face the colossal stupidity at work in the world.  There is the powerful experience of shipwreck (a frequent Jaspers term) when everything you believe in, everything you have faith in, blows up in your face.  There is the sudden realization of freedom, a great feeling of dizzyness that Kierkegaard described.  Jaspers thinks that things like guilt and isolation and gut-wrenching pain at injustice are also basic existential givens people must face in life.  So, if you face them, you win some integrity.  Maybe you don't know what the truth is, but you're not kidding yourself.  Nor are you dictating to anyone how to look at the world, or what the world amounts to, or what this whole thing means.  That is: genuine honesty makes one renounce imposing beliefs on people.  

 

 

            Jaspers argues that (as people who have worldviews) we have to face the reality that even our own understanding founders -- that is: one can never completely understand oneself -- there is no total account of the self.  Honesty brings us to renounce dogmatism and impose this cognitive self-limitation on ourselves.  Jaspers argues that doing so takes us to a new stage of moral consciousness.  This is the turning of the axis.  As he says in thinking about Plato, insight is bound up with a "turning."  You see that you are in a cave, and that, to find the light, you must leave it. 

            This dark place that a person must leave in order to see is a worldview. We grow up in worldviews, we take them on and leave them behind, our worldviews get challenged, updated and overthrown.  We have to learn to be bigger in our own lives than they are. 




Wednesday, February 7, 2024

winter 2024

 studying Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology

 January/ February 2024 / winter storm





Thursday, December 21, 2023

Thursday, September 14, 2023

Thursday, May 11, 2023

Michael Marder

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Philosophy of the Dump / Dumpology

Commentary on the 2021 work

by the Canadian philosopher

Michael Marder 

 

Hegel said that philosophy is its own time expressed in concepts. Heidegger held that every epoch coins its own word for Being.  Marder notes that our word for being is dump; our own time is expressed in the concept: dump.  Marder explores dump responsibility, dump care, dump meaning, meaning in the world of the dump.  The new formulation of nihilism is to shit without giving a shit.  In this capacity, polluted, we and the world perish together, categorized into nothingness.  The Anthropocene becomes the epoch of dumping.  Marder says the the 'we' he is talking about is the collective technobody.  As it were, this conglomerate remains in the anal stage, creating excrement and still learning control -- emerging out of not giving a shit. 

 

Marder says all this and more to set the stage for his question -- is it too late? -- it may be that the destruction wrought by the technobody -- its carelessness, its nihilism, its excrement -- is past the critical threshold.  Societal growth takes time, yet we may not have any.  This is urgent. 

 

His ideas for positive steps: call it out, name it, attack it, clean it up.  Marcuse: the power of exaggeration.  Ramsey: the power of imagination.  Intellectually and morally lazy people create and live in a world of shit.  Every kind of crap floats up -- everything is coated with this shit in our very messy, foul, stinks-to-heaven world.  This is the people who laughed at the crucifixtion.  This is the people who salute their dictatators and gobble up their shit and spew it everywhere.

 

Some escape to minimize the effects of the dump, but the very force of existence has changed. The dump is everywhere, even in the high rise, the superyacht, the tax shelter, the country club. 

 

What we dump in the Earth follows our metaphysics.  We sought for eternal being, and now we have created an eternal nightmare.  This is the nuclear waste, plastic waste, industrial, fossil fuel, globalized garbage dump -- the culture of porn and fake news and buy-it-now and shit on tomorrow.  Ethnic cleansing, washing our hands, whitewashing, washing it away -- it just grows. 

 

Perhaps we can finally reach parity when all of us are entirely and irredeemably coated in shit. 

 

Note the disparity: the line I draw, the ideal line; the ideal of pure water, the water I drink. 

 

The child makes its way past the anal stage by reinterpreting garbage as a gift that loving parents will welcome -- the child gets more control though nurturing encouragement than from being neglected or hectored and demeaned or ignored or smeared with its own excrement.  

 

The dump implies: look what we have done, mommy!  But also: God, look what we have done!

 

Remind, realign, reawaken, renew, recreate the transformation we must bring forth into a gift.  

 

Heidegger imagined building, dwelling, thinking -- Marder observes the garbage dump -- we discover a retroactive self-definition for ourselves by the consequences of our actions.  Is this what we have built?  Is this where we dwell?  Is this what are are forced to think by everything we see in front of us?  The idiots assemble in the dump and laugh as everything gets smeared. 

 

It is humanizing, humiliating to really see ourselves inside the mess we have made of the Earth. 

 

It is dehumanizing to just stay here and dump more in and do nothing to clean up this garbage!

 

We have to exit the dump -- exit the cave -- climb up to see the light -- perhaps to find some insight -- in order to return and help clean up at least some small space in this enormous dark shadowy rank sick polluted and degraded world of the dump. 

 

 

Monday, November 7, 2022

Return to Kolakowski

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Polish thinker Leszek Kolakowski is the author of "Husserl and the Search for Certitude" (1975) and "Metaphysical Horror' (1988) and "Modernity on Endless Trial" (1990) and "My Correct Views on Everything" (2005).

 

Kolakowski died in 2009. He was a Marxist and an anti-Marxist; a positivist and an anti-positivist; a student of Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein - also a critic of all of them - storyteller, treedom fighter, scholar. And: amazingly, he had a sense of humor. Here are a few of his key ideas, which speak to me in the present crises we are facing.

 

"A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself ot being a charlatan must be a shallow mind and comeone whose work is probably not worth reading."

 

"Philosophy, once it appears, can never be done away with, no matter how often or how vociferously its futility is denounced."

 

"If existence were pointless and the universe were devoid of meaning, we would never have achieved the ability to imagine otherwise - or even to entertain the very thought that existence is pointless and that the universe is devoid of meaning."

 

"Among all modern thinkers, it is Karl Jaspers perhaps who deserves the highest praise, especially for his efforts at resisting so many things - he faced the demise of the Absolute; he resisted the temptation to make the self a god; he never fell into any cheap scientistic interpretation; he refused to accept mere empiricism, and held out for the importance of something beyond us that can never quite find its way into words; he took his Hippocratic oath seriously and tried to heal both himself and all the rest of us; and he kept returning to the idea that the search is what makes us human."

 

"It is impossible to grasp what is at stake in philosophy without diving into the problem of the criterion and honestly facing the questions that emerge from it."

 

"The cultural role of philosophy is not to deliver truth but to build the spirit of truth. And this means: never to let the inquisitive energy of mind go to sleep, never to stop questioning what appears to be obvious and definitive, always to defy the seemingly intact resources of common sense, always to suspect that there might be "another side" in what we take for granted, and never to allow us to forget that there are questions that lie beyond the legitimate horizon of science but are nonetheless crucially important to the survival of humanity as we know it."

 

"All the most traditional worries of philosophers - how to tell good from evil, true from false, real from unreal, being from nothingness, just from uniust, necessary from contingent, myself from others, man from animal, mind from body, or how to find order in chaos. providence in absurdity, timelessness in time, laws in facts, God in the world, world in language - all of them boil down to the quest for meaning; and they presuppose that in dissecting such questions, we may employ the instruments of Reason, even if the ultimate outcome is the dismissal of Reason or its defeat."

 

"We can escape the contradictions that emerge in our philosophical researches only by trying to place ourselves outside philosophy, to suspend our interest in the issues and to climb up to a vantage point from which philosophy itself appears as a part of the history of civilization. The trouble is, however, that to reach this point we almost certainly need philosophy - we need premises and conceptual instruments and much else that has been elaborated in the ambiguous realm of philosophy."

 

A quote from the Hungarian teacher and critic George Gamori about Kolakowski:

 

"This is the gist of his message: you cannot love both truth and authority. You have to choose, without dogmas, and oftentimes you must rethink things. This is a philosophy for real people - for adults."