EXISTENZ PHILOSOPHY
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"reality of the thinker precedes his thought" and his real freedom
alone decides what he thinks and what not.
The real content of Jaspers' philosophy is not to be S).lmmarized
in the form of a report, since this content lies essentially in the ways
and movements of his philosophizing. In this fashion Jaspers has come
to all the fundamental problems of contemporary philosophy, with–
out answering or settling any of them in a conclusive way. He has
singled out for modern philosophy the ways it must travel if it is not
to get stuck in the blind alley of a positivistic or nihilistic fanaticism.
The most important among these ways appear to be the follow–
ing: Being as such is not knowable, it is to be experienced only as
something "surrounding" us. Thus the very ancient search for an
ontology is liquidated-a search which looked for Being in the existant,
so to speak, as if for a magical all-pervasive substance, which makes
present everything that is, and which appears in language in the
little word "is." With the liberation of this world from the ghost of
Being and the illusion of being able to understand it, there disappeared
the necessity of having to explain it monistically from one principle–
namely, from this all-pervasive substance. Instead of which, the
"discordance of Being" (where this Being does not mean the Being of
ontologies) can be admitted; and the modern feeling of alienation in
the world can be taken into account, as well as the modern will to
create a human world which can be a home within a world which is
no longer a home. It is as if with this concept of Being as that which
"surrounds" us in fluid contour there were traced an island, on which
Man, unmenaced by the dark Unknowable, that in traditional
philosophy pervades every existant like an additional quality-can
freely rule and choose.
The limits of this island of human freedom are traced out in the
"extreme situations," in which man experiences the limitations which
immediately become the conditions of his freedom and the ground
of his activity. Proceeding from them, he can "illuminate" his Existenz,
trace out what he can and cannot do; and thereby from mere "Being
as a result" pass to "Existenz"- which, in Jaspers, is only another,
and more explicit, word for being a man .
. Existenz itself is never essentially isolated; it exists only in com–
munication and in the knowledge of the Existenz of others. One's
fellow men are not (as in Heidegger) an element which, though
structurally necessary, nevertheless destroys Existenz; but, on the
contrary, Existenz can develop only in the togetherness of men in the
common given world. In the concept of communication there lies
