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PARTISAN REVIEW
nate experience, in which thought itself (though not the thinking man)
fails. In the foundering of thought (and not of the man) Man,–
who is more than thought, because more real and more free-ex–
periences what Jaspers calls "the cipher of transcendence." That
transcendence is experienced as a cipher only in foundering, is itself
a sign of Existenz, which "is aware not only that as human reality
it has not created itself and that as human reality it is helplessly sur–
rendered to inevitable destruction, but also that even as freedom it is
not indebted to itself alone." That transcendence is experienced in
failure is a sign of the limitation of human Existenz.
J aspers' "failure" is not to be confused with what Heidegger
called "Fall" or "Decline"; which latter Jaspers himself calls "Slipping
away"
(Abgleiten).
In Jaspers this latter is described in many ways,
is psychologically explicable, but is not (as in Heidegger) a struc–
turally necessary Fall from one's authentic Being as a man. Jaspers
holds that in philosophy every ontology claiming it can say what
Being really is, is a Slipping-away into the absolutizing of particular
categories of Being. The existentiel meaning of such Slipping-away
would be that such a philosophy robs Man of a freedom which
can persist only so long as Man does not know what Being really is.
Expressed formally, Being is transcendence and as such a "reality
without transformation into possibility"; something which I can't re–
present to myself a<; not being-which, in principle, I can do for
every individual thing that is. Through the fact that my thinking
fails on the That of Reality, the "weight of Reality" first becomeF.
felt. In this measure the failure of thought is the condition for
Existenz, which as free always seeks to transcend the merely given
world; the condition, namely, for the fact that Existenz, encounter–
ing this "weight of Reality" inserts itself into it and belongs to it
in the only way i11 which Man can belong to it-in that he chooses it..
In this failure Man experiences the fact that he can neither know
nor create Being and that thus he is not God. In this experience he
realizes the limitation of his Existenz, the limits of which he tries to
trace in philosophizing. In the failing transcendence of all limits he
experiences Reality given to him as the cipher of a Being which he
himself is not.
The task of philosophy is to free Man from "the illusory world
of the pure object of thought" and "let him find his way home to
Reality." Philosophic thought can never cancel the fact that Reality
cannot be resolved into the thinkable; its job is rather "to aggravate
... this unthinkability." This is all the more urgent in that the
