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P A R T I S A N R E V I E
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philosophy. In other words, either Heidegger has said his last word
on the condition of contemporary philosophy or he will have to break
with his own philosophy. While Jaspers belongs without any such
break to contemporary philosophy, and will develop and decisively
intervene in its discussion.
Jaspers achieved his break with the traditional pailosophy in his
Psychologie der Weltanschauungen,
where he represents and rela–
tivizes all philosophical systems as mythologizing structures, in which
Man, seeking protection, flees before the real questions of his Existenz. -
A Weltanschauung which pretends to have grasped the meaning of
Being, systems as "formulated doctrines of the Whole," are for
Jaspers only shells which "drain the experience of extreme situations"
and confer a peace of mind which is fundamentally unphilosophical.
From these extreme situations he seeks to project a new type of
philosophising, in which he invokes Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; this
new philosophizing will, above all, teach nothing; it will be, rather, a
"perpetual shaking up, a perpetual
appeal
(my italics) to the
powers of life in oneself and others." In this manner Jaspers places
himself in the revolt, fundamental to the new philosophy, of the
philosophers against philosophy. He seeks to dissolve philosophy in
philosophizing and to find ways in which philosophical "results" can
be so communicated that they lose their character as results.
One of the principal problems of this philosophy becomes there–
fore the question of communicability generally. Communication is
the extraordinary form of philosophic intelligence; at the same time
it goes along with philosophizing, in which there is no question of
results but of the "Iilumination of Existenz." The affinity of this
method to the Socratic maieutic is evident; except that what Socrates
calls maieutic, Jaspers calls appeal. This difference in stress is again
no accident. Jaspers searches, in fact, with the Socratic method, but
by removing its pedagogical character. In Jaspers, as in Socrates,
there does not exist
the
philosopher, who (since Aristotle) has led
an Existenz singled out from other men. Nor with him does the So–
cratic priority of the questioner exist; for in communication the
philosopher moves among his fellows, to whom he appeals as they
in turn can appeal to him. Thereby philosophy has left the sphere
of the sciences and specializations, the philosopher has deprived him–
self of every specialized prerogative.
In so far as Jaspers communicates "results," he puts them in
the form of
"pl~yful
metaphysics," in the form of a perpetually ex–
perimenting, never fixed representation of definite movements of
