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?

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

The position in brief

The four-tier distinction is necessary precisely because indignation cannot think clearly about guilt and because the post-war situation required distinctions that could survive both the Allied moralizing and the German evasion.1 Criminal guilt is what the courts adjudicate; political guilt is what every citizen of a state bears for what that state does; moral guilt is what each person bears for one's own actions and omissions; metaphysical guilt is the inescapable solidarity of all human beings with what is done in human community — and it is this, not collective criminal guilt, that I insisted Germans acknowledge.23

The Federal Republic's failure to undertake serious Selbstprüfung (self-examination) of the Nazi past is what the Bundesrepublik book documents; the moral case against nuclear weapons is that they make impossible the political community within which alone moral life proceeds.45

Sources

  1. Scheme of Distinctions > FOUR > CONCEPTS > OF GUILT We must distinguish between: (I) CrimimL gzdt: Crimes are acts capable of objective proof and violate unequivocal laws. Jurisdiction rests with the court, which in formal proceedings can be relied upon to find the facts and apply the law.
    The Question of German Guilt, pp. 25–26
  2. That I live after such a thing has happened weighs upon me as indelible guilt. As human beings, unless good fortune spares us such situations, we come to a point where we must choose: either to risk our lives unconditionally, without chance of success and therefore to no purpose-vr to prefer staying alive, be- cause success is impossible.
    The Question of German Guilt, pp. 26–27
  3. Criminal guilt-that affects just a few, not me; it does Moral guilt--I hear that my conscience alone has juris- diction, others have no right to accuse me. Well, my con- science is not going to be too hard on me. It wasn't really so bad; let's forget about it, and make a fresh start. not concern me. Metaphysical guilt-of that, finally, I was expressly told that none can charge it to another.
    The Question of German Guilt, pp. 68–69
  4. But even more went right on with their activ- t 66 1 ities, undisturbed in their social life and amusements, as if nothing had happened. That is moral guilt. But the ones who in utter impotence, outraged and des- pairing, were unable to prevent the crimes took another step in their metamorphosis by a growing consciousness of meta- physical guilt.
    The Question of German Guilt, pp. 67–68
  5. All these distinctions become erroneous, however, if we fail to keep in mind the close connection between the things distinguished. Every concept of guilt demonstrates (or manifests) reaiities, the consequences of which appear in the spheres of the other concepts of guilt.
    The Question of German Guilt, pp. 27–29

Where the argument is made

  • Die Schuldfrage (1946) — translated as The Question of German Guilt (1947) — the four lectures delivered at Heidelberg in winter 1945-46 setting out the four-tier distinction
  • Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen (1958) — translated as The Future of Mankind (1961) — the long study on nuclear weapons and political life
  • Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik? (1966) — translated as The Future of Germany (1967) — the polemic against the Federal Republic's failure to confront the Nazi past and the emergency-laws drift
  • the public addresses and political essays scattered through Philosophy and the World (Philosophie und Welt, 1958) and the late lecture cycles
  • the Goethe Prize address 'Our Future and Goethe' (1947, in Existentialism and Humanism: Three Essays)

How the argument was received

The four-tier distinction has held without revision since Die Schuldfrage (1946); the Atombombe book (1958) extends the framework to the new technological situation; the Bundesrepublik book (1966) applies it to the political failure of the Federal Republic. The political-conscience work was hostile-received in Germany in the late 1940s (the Selbstprüfung demand was felt as unfair by colleagues who had not emigrated), again in the late 1960s (the Bundesrepublik book read as bitterness from the Basel exile), and has been substantially vindicated by the historical record and by the late-twentieth-century German reckoning with the Nazi past it had postponed.