Who Jaspers Was

Jaspers was a doctor before he was a philosopher. The clinical eye he had trained in medicine and psychology stays present in his philosophical work: careful description, attention to particular cases, suspicion of grand abstractions that do not connect to actual human experience. The Nazi years cost him his career as a German academic but did not stop him; he carried on from Basel for another twenty-four years and produced some of the twentieth century’s most serious work on education.

The long route to philosophy

Karl Jaspers was born in 1883 and died in 1969. His professional life took an unusual route. He began as a medical doctor, graduating from medical school at the University of Heidelberg in 1908. He moved into psychology in 1913, taking up a teaching post at Heidelberg in that field. Only in 1921 did he move on from psychology to philosophy. By the time he was writing the work that made his name, he had spent two decades in disciplines that taught him to look carefully at particular human beings.

This biographical detail matters for reading him. His philosophy of education is not detached from real human experience. It is the work of someone who had spent his early career listening to actual patients and observing actual minds at work. When Jaspers writes about the development of a student, he is drawing on direct clinical experience as well as on philosophical argument. The two strands run together throughout his work.

His philosophical school was existentialism in the European sense developed at the end of the previous chapter. He was also a Neo-Kantian: an heir to the Kantian tradition the guide worked through earlier, who took the Kantian commitments to freedom and to the limits of knowledge as starting points and developed them in new directions. The existentialist and Neo-Kantian commitments combine to produce a philosophy in which the individual person’s free engagement with the conditions of their existence is at the centre.

Flashcard

What unusual route did Jaspers take to philosophy?

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Answer

Medicine first (1908), then psychology (1913), then philosophy (1921)

He spent two decades in disciplines that taught him to look carefully at particular human beings before he moved into philosophy proper. The biographical detail matters: his philosophy is not detached from real human experience but draws on direct clinical experience of actual minds at work. He was both an existentialist and a Neo-Kantian, combining the commitments of both traditions in his own philosophy.

Under Hitler

The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 cost Jaspers his German academic career. He had been a public critic of the rising nationalism and of the authoritarian militaristic state long before the Nazis came to power. He was an outspoken opponent of any society organised around a caste structure. His Jewish wife placed him under additional official suspicion; he was officially classified as having a Jewish taint through her, even though he himself was not Jewish.

After the Nazi seizure of power, Jaspers was forced to retire from his Heidelberg position. He was barred from publishing in Germany for most of the Nazi period. He stayed in Heidelberg with his wife throughout the war, in increasing danger; the family had a suicide plan ready in case the deportation order came. The deportation order did not come; the Americans reached Heidelberg before the SS got around to him.

After the war Jaspers spent some time at Heidelberg again, trying to help rebuild German higher education in the difficult post-war years. He eventually relocated to the University of Basel in Switzerland, partly because the strain of working inside the recovering German system was more than he wanted to take on at his age. He remained prominent in the philosophical community there until his death in 1969.

This biographical context shapes his educational writing in a specific way. Jaspers had seen, in his own life, what happens when an education system is captured by an authoritarian state. He had watched colleagues lose their positions, students absorb the official doctrines, the university become an instrument of the regime. The picture is the background to his insistence that real education has to be free, that authoritarian education is not really education, and that the university has a duty to serve as the intellectual conscience of its era against the pressures of the state.

Flashcard

What did the Nazi seizure of power do to Jaspers's career?

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Answer

He was forced to retire from his Heidelberg position and barred from publishing in Germany

Jaspers had been a public critic of authoritarian nationalism before the Nazis came to power. His Jewish wife placed him under official suspicion; he was officially classified as having a Jewish taint through her. The family stayed in Heidelberg through the war with a suicide plan ready in case of deportation. The Americans reached Heidelberg before the SS did. He eventually moved to Basel and remained prominent in the philosophical community until 1969.

Philosophy through science

Jaspers’s route to philosophy ran through science, and his philosophy never lost interest in the relationship between scientific knowledge and philosophical understanding. He spent much of his career analysing how science and philosophy related to each other, what each could and could not do, and how a person could hold both seriously without subordinating either.

For Jaspers, science was the disciplined investigation of particular questions that could be answered through evidence and reasoning. Science could produce knowledge of specific facts about the world. It could not, by itself, tell anyone what to do with that knowledge or how to live in light of it. Those were philosophical questions, and philosophical questions had to be answered by the individual person in the existential sense developed at the end of the previous chapter.

The relationship between the two was therefore complementary rather than competitive. Science supplied facts; philosophy supplied the framework within which the facts mattered. A culture that took science seriously but treated philosophy as old-fashioned would end up with lots of facts and no framework for what to do with them. A culture that took philosophy seriously but treated science as irrelevant would end up with frameworks disconnected from how the world actually worked. Both errors were possible, and Jaspers saw both happening in different parts of twentieth-century intellectual life.

The implication for education is direct. A real education has to introduce the student to both scientific inquiry and philosophical reflection, in a way that lets the two strengthen each other. A school that teaches only science produces students who can analyse data but cannot decide what to do with their analysis. A school that teaches only philosophy produces students who can reflect on the world but cannot engage with how it actually works. The Jaspers school does both.

Flashcard

How does Jaspers describe the relationship between science and philosophy?

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Answer

Complementary: science supplies facts, philosophy supplies the framework for what the facts mean

Science is the disciplined investigation of particular questions answerable through evidence and reasoning. It produces knowledge of specific facts but cannot tell anyone what to do with the knowledge or how to live in light of it. Those are philosophical questions, answered by the individual in the existential sense. A culture that takes only one seriously produces either facts without framework or frameworks without facts.