Das Umgreifende and the structural metaphysics: can the doctrine of the Encompassing — the modes within which all particular horizons of beings are enclosed — replace traditional ontology, or is it a placeholder schema that doesn't carry real ontological weight?

Karl Jaspers, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Das Umgreifende is the necessary alternative to traditional ontology, because objectifying thinking always misses Being. Every attempt to grasp Being as an object reduces it to a being-in-the-world. The seven modes — world and Transcendence on the side of Being-itself; existence as Dasein, consciousness- as-such (Bewusstsein überhaupt), Geist or spirit, and Existenz on the side of the Being-we-are; plus Vernunft as the bond — are not psychological compartments but the structure of Being's appearing-to-us.

The doctrine is ascertained (sich vergewissern) through periechontological method, not directly possessed; and this refusal of objectifying possession is itself the philosophical claim.¹²³

Sources

1. The universality of true faith cannot however be formulated as a universally valid statement, it cannot be accepted as immediate, or objectively fixed as a product of history; we can only ascertain it historically by following the movement of time. But this occurs in the realm of the Comprehensive, which is neither exclusively subject nor exclusively object.

   The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, pp. 9–10

2. Both are inseparably bound together. The presence of Being is in the movement which grasps and permeates subject and object simultaneously. We take possession of Being in the polarity, but in such a way that subject and object mutually overlap.

   Truth and Symbol, pp. 20–21

3. What is logically impossible to accomplish in the usual sense of knowledge is nonetheless philosophically possible as increasing lucidity of a sense of being totally different from all determinate knowledge.

   Philosophy of Existence, p. 19

Where the argument is made

• Philosophie I (1932), opening sections on Weltorientierung and the structure of philosophizing
• Vernunft und Existenz (1935), Lecture 2 'The Encompassing'
• Von der Wahrheit (1947), the long Periechontologie sections opening Book I (English access via Truth and Symbol 1959 introduction)
• Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time (1950), the chapter on Reason
• Philosophical Faith and Revelation (Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung, 1962) on the modes of Being

How the argument was received

Set out in Philosophie I (1932), developed in Vernunft und Existenz (1935), worked through most fully in the periechontology of Von der Wahrheit (1947), and carried into the late religious works (Der philosophische Glaube 1948, Philosophical Faith and Revelation 1962). The architectonic was challenged in the Library of Living Philosophers volume by Knauss (sympathetic pressure on the principle of articulation) and Kunz (severe pressure on whether Transcendence is real Being or only a regulative idea). I responded in detail in the Reply to My Critics (1957). The position has not been retracted.