Karl Jaspers Quotes

I do not know which impulse was stronger in me when I began to think: the original thirst for knowledge or the urge to communicate with man. Knowledge attains its full meaning only through the bond that unites men; however, the urge to achieve agreement with another human being was so hard to satisfy. I was shocked by the lack of understanding, paralyzed, as it were, by every reconciliation in which what had gone before was not fully cleared up. Early in my life and then later again and again I was perplexed by people’s rigid inaccessibility and their failure to listen to reasons, their disregard of facts, their indifference which prohibited discussion, their defensive attitude which kept you at a distance and at the decisive moment buried any possibility of a close approach, and finally their shamelessness, that bares its own soul without reserve, as though no one were present. When ready assent occurred I remained unsatisfied, because it was not based on true insight but on yielding to persuasion; because it was the consequence of friendly cooperation, not a meeting of two selves. True, I knew the glory of friendship (in common studies, in the cordial atmosphere of home or countryside). But then came the moments of strangeness, as if human beings lived in different worlds. Steadily the consciousness of loneliness grew upon me in my youth, yet nothing seemed more pernicious to me than loneliness, especially the loneliness in the midst of social intercourse that deceives itself in a multitude of friendships. No urge seemed stronger to me than that for communication with others. If the never-completed movement of communication succeeds with but a single human being, everything is achieved. It is a criterion of this success that there be a readiness to communicate with every human being encountered and that grief is felt whenever communication fails. Not merely an exchange of words, nor friendliness and sociability, but only the constant urge towards total revelation

Every truth that we may think complete will prove itself untruth at the moment of shipwreck.

Crucial for man is his attitude toward failure: whether it remains hidden from him and overwhelms him only objectively at the end or whether he perceives it unobscured as the constant limit of his existence; whether he snatches at fantastic solutions and consolations or faces it honestly, in silence before the unfathomable. The way in which man approaches his failure determines what he will become.

Three things are required at a university: professional training, education of the whole man, research. For the university is simultaneously a professional school, a cultural center and a research institute. People have tried to force the university to choose between these three possibilities. They have asked what it is that we really expect the university to do. Since, so they say, it cannot do everything it ought to decide upon one of these three alternatives. It was even suggested that the university as such be dissolved, to be replaced by three special types of school: institutes for professional training, institutes for general education possibly involving a special staff, and research institutes. In the idea of the university, however, these three are indissolubly united. One cannot be cut off from the others without destroying the intellectual substance of the university, and without at the same time crippling itself. All three are factors of a living whole. By isolating them, the spirit of the university perishes.

We must all continuously recapture ourselves from indecision.

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

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.

Truth and reality split apart.

إن الفلسفة قد تكون شعوريّة أو لا شعوريّة، واضحة أو مُبهمة، حسنة أو سيّئة، ولكنها في كل هذه الحالات لا تخرج عن كونها فلسفة. وكل من يَنبُذ الفلسفة، إنما يؤكد بذلك أن له فلسفته، دون أن يفطن هو نفسه إلى ذلك.

There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge. If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent them, I too am guilty.

To philosophize is to learn to die – philosophizing is a soaring up to the Godhead – the knowledge of Being as Being.

“Philosophy and Science”, World Review Magazine (March 1950).

Existenz only becomes clear through reason; reason only has content through Existenz.

To the intellect all else, in comparison with what is correct, counts only as feeling, subjectivity, instinct. In this division, apart from the bright world of the intellect, there is only the irrational, in which is lumped together, according to the point of view, what is despised or desired. The impulse which pursues real truth by thought springs from the dissatisfaction with what is merely correct. The division, spoken of previously, paralyses this impulse; it causes man to oscillate between the dogmatism of the intellect that transcends its limits and, as it were, the rapture of the vital, the chance of the moment, life. The soul becomes impoverished in all the multiplicity of disparate experience. Then truth disappears from the field of vision and is replaced by a variety of opinions which are hung on the skeleton of a supposedly rational pattern. Truth is infinitely more than scientific correctness.

"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."

Ona věta „To je vaše vina!“ může znamenat:

Jste odpovědni za činy režimu, který jste trpěli - zde jde o naši politickou vinu.

Je vaše vina, že jste nadto tento režim podporovali a pomáhali jej vytvářet – v tom spočívá naše morální vina.

Je vaše vina, že jste nečinně přihlíželi, když se páchaly zločiny – zde se naznačuje metafyzická vina.

Tyto tři věty pokládám za pravdivé, třebaže jen první z nich - větu o politické odpovědnosti – lze vyslovit bez okolků a třebaže jen ona je zcela správna, zatímco druhá a třetí – věty o morální a metafyzické vině - se v juristické podobě stávají jako výpovědi, které jsou bez lásky, nepravdivými.
len jste se na oněch zločinech, tedy jste sami zločinci.

Věta „To je vaše vina“ může dále znamenat: Podíleli jste se na oněch zločinech, tedy jste sami zločinci. To je, pokud jde o převážnou většinu Němců, zřejmě mylné.

Konečně může tato věta znamenat: Jste jako národ méněcenní, bez důstojnosti, zločinní, jste vyvrhelové lidstva, lišíte se od všech ostatních národů. – To je myšlení a hodnocení v pojmech kolektivů, které svou subsumací každého jedince pod toto všeobecné jsou radikálně falešné a samy o sobě nelidské, ať už se děje v dobrém, nebo špatném smyslu.