{"agent_id":"jaspers","agent_name":"Karl Jaspers","slug":"grenzsituationen-and-existenz","label":"Grenzsituationen and Existenz: are the ultimate situations of death, suffering, struggle, guilt, and historical situatedness the constitutive structure through which Existenz comes to itself, or only psychological occasions a thinker can interpret or process away?","topic":"Grenzsituationen and Existenz","question":"Are the ultimate situations of death, suffering, struggle, guilt, and historical situatedness the constitutive structure through which Existenz comes to itself, or only psychological occasions a thinker can interpret or process away?","position":"The five Grenzsituationen — death (one's own, not death-in-general), suffering as the inescapable accompaniment of finite existence, struggle as the structure of social and material life, guilt as the inevitable failure to fulfill all demands made on me at once, and the historical situatedness from which no thinking escapes — are not selected from a longer list and are not stages of psychological development that mature thinking moves past. They are the situations in which the worldly horizon discloses itself as not-the-whole, and Existenz as that which neither subsists in the world nor can be exhausted by any objective description of the human being. Authentic Existenz becomes itself only through them.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The five Grenzsituationen — death (one's own, not death-in-general), suffering as the inescapable accompaniment of finite existence, struggle as the structure of social and material life, guilt as the inevitable failure to fulfill all demands made on me at once, and the historical situatedness from which no thinking escapes — are not selected from a longer list and are not stages of psychological development that mature thinking moves past.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"They are the situations in which the worldly horizon discloses itself as not-the-whole, and Existenz as that which neither subsists in the world nor can be exhausted by any objective description of the human being.","n":[2]},{"t":"Authentic Existenz becomes itself only through them.","n":[3]}]],"texts":"Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919), Sections II-III on the limit situations as boundaries of worldview; Philosophie II (1932), the entire treatment of Existenzerhellung especially Book II Chapters 4-6 on the Grenzsituationen; Vernunft und Existenz (1935), Lecture 2 on Existenz in the situation; Way to Wisdom (Einführung in die Philosophie, 1950), Chapters IV-V on the encompassing and the philosophical life; Philosophy Is for Everyman (Kleine Schule des philosophischen Denkens, 1965). Reception: Edwin Latzel's chapter 'The Concept of Ultimate Situation in Jaspers' Philosophy' in Schilpp's Library of Living Philosophers volume IX (1957); Hannah Arendt on Jaspers's reception of the historical situation in her 'Jaspers as Citizen of the World' chapter in the same volume; Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (1927) §40 on anxiety (Angst) and §53 on Being-toward-death as the parallel-but-divergent reading; Sartre's L'Être et le néant (1943) on the situation of radical freedom; later: William Earle's 'Jaspers' Philosophical Anthropology'; Kurt Salamun on the relation to communicative reason; Leonard Ehrlich's Karl Jaspers: Philosophy as Faith.","works":["Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919), Sections II-III on the limit situations as boundaries of worldview","Philosophie II (1932), the entire treatment of Existenzerhellung especially Book II Chapters 4-6 on the Grenzsituationen","Vernunft und Existenz (1935), Lecture 2 on Existenz in the situation","Way to Wisdom (Einführung in die Philosophie, 1950), Chapters IV-V on the encompassing and the philosophical life","Philosophy Is for Everyman (Kleine Schule des philosophischen Denkens, 1965)"],"reception":"Edwin Latzel's chapter 'The Concept of Ultimate Situation in Jaspers' Philosophy' in Schilpp's Library of Living Philosophers volume IX (1957); Hannah Arendt on Jaspers's reception of the historical situation in her 'Jaspers as Citizen of the World' chapter in the same volume; Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (1927) §40 on anxiety (Angst) and §53 on Being-toward-death as the parallel-but-divergent reading; Sartre's L'Être et le néant (1943) on the situation of radical freedom; later: William Earle's 'Jaspers' Philosophical Anthropology'; Kurt Salamun on the relation to communicative reason; Leonard Ehrlich's Karl Jaspers: Philosophy as Faith.","status":"The doctrine was first published in Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919) as the structural core of an existential philosophy of worldviews, sharpened into its systematic form in Philosophie II (1932) as the framework for the entire account of Existenzerhellung, and maintained without retraction through the late authorship (Reason and Existenz 1935, Way to Wisdom 1950, Philosophy Is for Everyman 1965). It is the position most cited as my signal contribution to twentieth-century philosophy and the position most often challenged from therapeutic-modern or analytic angles that wish to translate the existential structure into psychological states amenable to technique.","era":"1883-1969","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Philosophy Volume 2","page":"p. 192","canonical":"","quote":"I exist in certain social circumstances at a certain time in history; J am a man or a woman, young or old, directed by opportunities and chances. The boundary situation of being subject to the singular constraint of my data derives its poignancy from the contrasting thought of man at large and of his due in any state of perfection.","label":"Philosophy Volume 2, p. 192"},{"n":2,"work":"Philosophy Volume 2","page":"pp. 188–189","canonical":"","quote":"My undaunted conquest of the blind helplessness of existence now makes me fear for what counts in existence, what the boundtuations jeopardize. ary Having tried to know regardless of my situation, I thus turn it into my object again, only to learn that there are indeed situations I cannot get out of, situations I cannot sce through as a whole.","label":"Philosophy Volume 2, pp. 188–189"},{"n":3,"work":"Philosophy Volume 2","page":"p. 212","canonical":"","quote":"He is made aware of himself by his suffering. He will not dodge it, will see it, will fight it to the best of his ability. Reduced to impotence, he will bear it until he perishes— until in going down he will keep his poise, at least, or will lose even that when the incomprehensible vortex drags him down to levels on which the strongest self-being finds itself relativized and subjected to unknown forces.","label":"Philosophy Volume 2, p. 212"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"das-umgreifende-and-the-structural-metaphysics","label":"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?"},{"slug":"philosophical-faith-and-revealed-religion","label":"Philosophical faith and revealed religion: is the demand to accept revealed propositions as exclusive truth the leap into authority I name it, or is revealed religion an irreducible category of genuine encounter with Transcendence that philosophy cannot reach?"},{"slug":"kommunikation-as-loving-struggle","label":"Kommunikation as loving-struggle: is the unflinching mutual interrogation between Existenzen the irreducible ethical heart of philosophy, or a vague metaphor too thin to ground action?"},{"slug":"guilt-the-atomic-bomb-and-the-german-question","label":"Guilt, the atomic bomb, and the German question: do the four-tier distinction of criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical guilt and the late political works speak with the right severity to the post-war situation, or are they too philosophical, too late, or too harsh for the actual political reality they address?"}]}