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?

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

The position in brief

Communication is the irreducible heart of the ethics, not a derivative or an application. Existenz does not become itself in solitary reflection — solitary reflection produces only the abstracted subject of consciousness-as-such, not the singular self that I am — but only in the loving-struggle (liebender Kampf) with another Existenz who refuses to flatter me, refuses to be flattered by me, and is willing to risk the relation by speaking what neither of us yet quite sees.1 Without communication there is no Existenz; without Existenz there is no genuine philosophical thinking.2345

Sources

  1. Now the only Teality left to me, and the only one in which that overall harmony might become visible as a cipher of being, is manifestation in the mutually self-establishing and self-sustaining Existenz. If 1 know in advance that all will be well in the end, I need only ascertain the end; it is not up to me.
    Philosophy Volume 2, p. 105
  2. Even the will to communicate in these three modes holds its own energy at the service of a universal will to communicate which comes out of reason and Existenz. Let us now characterize this further? B. Existential and rational communication.
    Reason and Existenz, pp. 91–92
  3. It is only in this existential communication, which I cannot lose, that I am. As existence I need some forms of recognition, more or less, depending on my type of vital constitution, just as I need nourishment to live; but my Existenz is threatened with confusion if I mistake the search for its assurance of being for a claim to the kind of recognition and affirmation entailed by social intercourse, Put into words,…
    Philosophy Volume 2, p. 222
  4. Stripped of the element of appealing, of calling for their translation into real Existenz, the signs of existential elucidation can be talked about in terms of applying it, as if something were or were not so. A consummate doctrine, indeed the very rudiment, of an ontology of Existenz would have the same meaning. The result is the specific sophistry that accompanies all existential philosophizing.
    Philosophy Volume 2, pp. 383–384
  5. All this is not incidental or unimportant. It might be, if there were a truth that might satisfy me in my isolation. I should not suffer so deeply from lack of communication or find such unique pleasure in authentic communication if I for myself, in absolute solitude, could be certain of the truth. But I am only in conjunction with the Other, alone I am nothing.
    Way to Wisdom, p. 11

Where the argument is made

  • Philosophie II (1932), Book II 'Existenzerhellung' especially the chapters on the I-thou relation and on communication as the form of becoming-oneself
  • Vernunft und Existenz (1935), Lectures 3-5 on communication
  • Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time (Vernunft und Widervernunft, 1950), the late chapters on communicative reason against authoritarian closure
  • Philosophy Is for Everyman (1965) on philosophy and community
  • the long correspondence with Hannah Arendt 1926-1969 and with Martin Heidegger 1920-1963 as documents of the practice

How the argument was received

Set out as the structural center of the ethics in Philosophie II (1932), developed in Vernunft und Existenz (1935), maintained and sharpened against totalitarian closure in Reason and Anti- Reason in Our Time (1950), and instantiated practically across five decades of correspondence and friendship. Fritz Kaufmann's Schilpp chapter (the longest essay in the entire volume) established it as the scholarly center of my philosophy; Kurt Salamun's late-twentieth-century work has read it as proto- Habermasian. I responded to both readings, gratefully and with precision, in the Reply to My Critics and in subsequent writings.