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 régime 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.
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