Karl Jaspers Quotes & Sayings

Metaphysical guilt is the lack of absolute solidarity with the human being as such
an indelible claim beyond morally meaningful duty. This solidarity is violated by my presence at a wrong or a crime. It is not enough that I cautiously risk my life to prevent it; if it happens, and I was there, and if I survive where the other is killed, I know from a voice within myself: I am guilty of being still alive. — Karl Jaspers

Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life's work. — Karl Jaspers

Greatness of mind becomes an object of love only when the power at work in it itself has a noble character — Karl Jaspers

The soul of a landscape, the spirits of the elements, the genius of every place will be revealed to a loving view of nature. — Karl Jaspers

Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility. — Karl Jaspers

Even scientific knowledge, if there is anything to it, is not a random observation of random objects; for the critical objectivity of significant knowledge is attained as a practice only philosophically in inner action. — Karl Jaspers

On the question of the world as a whole, science founders. For scientific knowledge the world lies in fragments, the more so the more precise our scientific knowledge becomes. — Karl Jaspers

Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations. "If I can but grasp it, if I can but cognise it", so he thinks, "I can make it my servant. — Karl Jaspers

There is no God, cry the masses more and more vociferously; and with the loss of God man loses his sense of values - is, as it were, massacred because he feels himself of no account. — Karl Jaspers

Existenz only becomes clear through reason; reason only has content through Existenz. — Karl Jaspers

Philosophy as practice does not mean its restriction to utility or applicability, that is, to what serves morality or produces serenity of soul. — Karl Jaspers

If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts. — Karl Jaspers

The community of masses of human beings has produced an order of life in regulated channels which connects individuals in a technically functioning organisation, but not inwardly from the historicity of their souls. — Karl Jaspers

The study of law left me unsatisfied, because I did not know the aspects of life which it serves. I perceived only the intricate mental juggling with fictions that did not interest me. — Karl Jaspers

Only as an individual can man become a philosopher. — Karl Jaspers

The 'public' is a phantom, the phantom of an opinion supposed to exist in a vast number of persons who have no effective interrelation and though the opinion is not effectively present in the units. Such an opinion is spoken of as 'public opinion,' a fiction which is appealed to by individuals and by groups as supporting their special views. It is impalpable, illusory, transient; 'tis here, 'tis there, 'tis gone'; a nullity which can nevertheless for a moment endow the multitude with power to uplift or destroy. — Karl Jaspers

To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet. — Karl Jaspers

At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost. — Karl Jaspers

Even the best institutions at the university are apt to deteriorate and to become distorted. Thus the very translation of thought into teachable form tends to impoverish its intellectual vitality. Once intellectual achievement is admitted into the body of accepted learning those achievements tend to assume an air of finality. Thus, it is merely a matter of convention at what point one subject ends and the other begins. It is possible, moreover, that an excellent scholar may not be able to find a place for himself within the established departmental divisions. A mediocre scholar may be preferred to him simply because his work fits into the traditional scheme. Any institution tends to consider itself an end in itself. — Karl Jaspers

When in our isolation we see our lives seeping away as a mere succession of moments, tossed meaninglessly about by accidents and overwhelming events; when we contemplate a history that seems to be at an end, leaving only chaos behind it, then we are impelled to raise ourselves above history. — Karl Jaspers

Reason is like an open secret that can become known to anyone at any time; it is the quiet space into which everyone can enter through his own thought. — Karl Jaspers

What makes us afraid is our great freedom in the face of the emptiness that has still to be filled. — Karl Jaspers

Man is always something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process; he is not merely an extant life, but is, within that life, endowed with possibilities through the freedom he possesses to make of himself what he will by the activities on which he decides. — Karl Jaspers

All democracies demand common public education because nothing makes people so much alike as the same education. — Karl Jaspers

It has become obligatory to fulfil a function which shall in some way be regarded as useful to the masses ... Even an articulated mass always tends to become unspiritual and inhuman. It is life without existence, superstition without faith. It may stamp all flat; it is disinclined to tolerate independence and greatness, but prone to constrain people to become as automatic as ants. — Karl Jaspers

Everything depends therefore on encountering thought at its source. Such thought is the reality of man's being, which achieved consciousness and understanding of itself through it. — Karl Jaspers

I live in a kind of tension between the will to say yes to my suffering, and my inability to utter this yes with complete sincerity. — Karl Jaspers

Tragedy occurs whenever awareness exceeds power; and particularly where awareness of a major need exceeds the power to satisfy it. — Karl Jaspers

Man's primary will to know struggles against the selfsatisfied formalism of empty learning which drugs man into
the illusory calm of fulfillment. It fights against empty intellectualism,
against nihilism which has ceased wanting anything and thus has ceased wanting to know. It battles against mediocrity which never takes stock of itself and which confuses knowledge with the mere learning of facts and <> The only satisfaction which man derives from a radical commitment to knowledge is the hope of advancing the frontier of knowledge to a point beyond which he cannot advance except by transcending knowledge itself. — Karl Jaspers

The more determinedly I exist, as myself, within the conditions of the time, the more clearly I shall hear the language of the past, the nearer I shall feel the glow of its life. — Karl Jaspers

I discovered that the study of past philosophers is of little use unless our own reality enters into it. Our reality alone allows the thinker's questions to become comprehensible. — Karl Jaspers

Schumpeter remarked how pleased he was with the Russian Revolution. Socialism was now no longer a discussion on paper, but had to prove its viability. Max Weber responded in great agitation: Communism, at this stage in Russian development, was virtually a crime, the road would lead over unparalleled human misery and end in a terrible catastrophe. "Quite likely", Schumpeter answered, "but what a fine laboratory". "A laboratory filled with mounds of corpses", Weber answered heatedly. — Karl Jaspers

Philosophy is tested and characterised by the way in which it appropriates its history. — Karl Jaspers

Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment by which I attain Being and my own self, not impartial thinking which studies a subject with indifference. — Karl Jaspers

The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding. — Karl Jaspers

When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself. — Karl Jaspers

With the disintegration of all that [Nietzsche] had revered, existence, to him, had become a desert in which only one thing remained, namely that which had relentlessly forced him into this path: truthfulness that knows no limits and is not subject to any condition. — Karl Jaspers

But each one of us is guilty insofar as he remained inactive. The guilt of passivity is different. Impotence excuses; no moral law demands a spectacular death. Plato already deemed it a matter of course to go into hiding in desperate times of calamity, and to survive. But passivity knows itself morally guilty of every failure, every neglect to act whenever possible, to shield the imperiled, to relieve wrong, to countervail. Impotent submission always left a margin of activity which, though not without risk, could still be cautiously effective. Its anxious omission weighs upon the individual as moral guilt. Blindness for the misfortune of others, lack of imagination of the heart, inner differences toward the witnessed evil
that is moral guilt. — Karl Jaspers

We must learn to talk with each other, and we mutually must understand and accept one another in our extraordinary differences. — Karl Jaspers

The Greek word for philosopher (philosophos) connotes a distinction from sophos. It signifies the lover of wisdom (knowledge) as distinguished from him who considers himself wise in the possession of knowledge. This meaning of the word still endures: the essence of philosophy is not the possession of the truth but the search for truth ... Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question. — Karl Jaspers

I began the study of medicine, impelled by a desire for knowledge of facts and of man. The resolution to do disciplined work tied me to both laboratory and clinic for a long time to come. — Karl Jaspers

Only in those moments when I exercise my freedom am I fully myself. — Karl Jaspers

My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own. — Karl Jaspers

Reason is the inextinguishable impulse to philosophize with whose destruction reason itself is destroyed. — Karl Jaspers

What is meaningful cannot in fact be isolated ... . We achieve understanding within a circular movement from particular facts to the whole that includes them and back again from the whole thus reached to the particular significant facts. — Karl Jaspers

A scientific approach means knowing what one knows and what one doesn't. Absolute or complete knowledge is unscientific. — Karl Jaspers

Nietzsche's ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community. — Karl Jaspers

The Socratic teacher turns his students away from himself and back onto themselves; he hides in paradoxes, makes himself inaccessible. The intimate relationship between student and teacher here is not one of submission, but of a contest for truth. — Karl Jaspers

Conflicts may be the sources of defeat, lost life and a limitation of our potentiality but they may also lead to greater depth of living and the birth of more far-reaching unities, which flourish in the tensions that engender them. — Karl Jaspers

As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity. — Karl Jaspers

Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension. — Karl Jaspers

An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other to his advantage. — Karl Jaspers

Only a development of thought achieved through the self-education of the whole man can prevent any body of thought whatsoever from becoming a poison; can prevent enlightenment from becoming an agent of death. — Karl Jaspers

The history of philosophy is not, like the history of the sciences, to be studied with the intellect alone. That which is receptive in us and that which impinges upon us from history is the reality of man's being, unfolding itself in thought. — Karl Jaspers

The moment is the sole reality. — Karl Jaspers

The limits of science have always been the source of bitter disappointment when people expected something from science that it was not able to provide. Take the following examples: a man without faith seeking to find in science a substitute for his faith on which to build his life; a man unsatisfied by philosophy seeking an all-embracing universal truth in science; a spiritually shallow person growing aware of his own futility in the course of engaging in the endless reflections imposed by science. In every one of these cases, science begins as an object of blind idolatry and ends up as an object of hatred and
contempt. Disenchantment inevitably follows upon these and similar misconceptions. One question remains: What value can science possibly have when its limitations have become so painfully clear? — Karl Jaspers