Volume 9: Kierkegaard and Existentialism

Jon Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351874212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Existentialism in Philosophy

There can be no doubt that most of the thinkers who are usually associated with the existentialist tradition, whatever their actual doctrines, were in one way or another influenced by the writings of Kierkegaard. This influence is so great that it can be fairly stated that the existentialist movement was largely responsible for the major advance in Kierkegaard's international reception that took place in the twentieth century. In Kierkegaard's writings one can find a rich array of concepts such as anxiety, despair, freedom, sin, the crowd, and sickness that all came to be standard motifs in existentialist literature. Sartre played an important role in canonizing Kierkegaard as one of the forerunners of existentialism. However, recent scholarship has been attentive to his ideological use of Kierkegaard. Indeed, Sartre seemed to be exploiting Kierkegaard for his own purposes and suspicions of misrepresentation and distortions have led recent commentators to go back and reexamine the complex relation between Kierkegaard and the existentialist thinkers. The articles in the present volume feature figures from the French, German, Spanish and Russian traditions of existentialism. They examine the rich and varied use of Kierkegaard by these later thinkers, and, most importantly, they critically analyze his purported role in this famous intellectual movement.

Karl Jaspers:

A Great Awakener’s Way to Philosophy of Existence

István Czakó

The German psychologist and philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) was surely one of the most important figures in the twentieth-century reception of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. Whether the reception of his thought “in a stricter philosophical sense” really began with Jaspers himself, as it was claimed by Anz,¹ is open to discussion. Jaspers’ prominent contribution to the philosophical interpretation and dissemination of Kierkegaard’s thinking at a very early stage of reception, however, is indisputable.² The influence of the Danish thinker on Jaspers can hardly be overestimated;³ his entire work can also be read, as Theunissen remarks, “as a unique Kierkegaard commentary.”⁴ Although, as we shall see, he did not assimilate Kierkegaard’s thought without reserve or ambivalence, Jaspers can rightly be characterized as a “genuinely productive recipient”⁵ in this regard. In what follows, first Jaspers’ philosophical development will be outlined, thereafter the results of the preceding research will be surveyed, and finally an attempt will be made to reconstruct Jaspers’ readings, reception and interpretation of Kierkegaard in the light of his published works as well as his Nachlass.⁶

I. Underway to Kierkegaard: A Brief Survey of Jaspers’ Philosophical Development

Karl Theodor Jaspers was born in the northern German town of Oldenburg in February 23, 1883.⁷ His father Karl Jaspers (1850–1940) was a jurist who later became a bank manager and his mother Henriette Tantzen (1862–1941) was from a local farming community. The climate of his family was strongly influenced by the political culture of liberalism, and Jaspers often referred to the milieu of early liberal democratic thought as a specific aspect of his education. Jaspers continued his studies in rather different scientific fields. Although he showed an early interest in philosophy, especially in the thought of the rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), he initially studied law for three semesters in Heidelberg and Munich, subsequently switching to medicine in 1902. One reason for this shift of interest may be seen in the fact that Jaspers’ very serious, life-long illness was first diagnosed at the age of 18. His early teaching on the “limit-situations”⁸ such as illness, struggle, and death presumably can also have its origin to a certain degree in his permanent experience of his extremely frail health condition.⁹

Jaspers obtained a doctorate in medicine (Dr. med.) in 1909. Thereafter he became an assistant at the Psychiatric Clinic in Heidelberg where Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926), the founder of contemporary scientific psychiatry, as well as of psychopharmacology and psychiatric genetics, had worked some years earlier. In 1913 Jaspers published his first major work entitled General Psychopathology¹⁰ and obtained his Habilitation in psychology from the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Heidelberg. Due to this book, especially to his methodology, Jaspers gained fame in the field of psychopathology, and in 1916 he became extraordinary professor of psychology. In 1919 he issued his protophilosophical work Psychologie der Weltanschauungen¹¹ which was based on his university lectures and in which he first discussed Kierkegaard. Although Jaspers’ famous Neo-Kantian colleague Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), the representative of the “scientific philosophy,” was rather critical and skeptical concerning the philosophical relevance and consistency of his whole project,¹² this work became gradually canonized as the inauguration of a new philosophical school called “existential philosophy”¹³ from the mid-1920s. In this book Jaspers’ psychological method was already expressly shaped by philosophical influences and was evolving into a philosophical doctrine. Two years after Psychologie der Weltanschauungen was published, in 1921, Jaspers—in spite of Rickert’s explicit opposition—became full professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg.¹⁴

While Jaspers was working as a psychologist in Heidelberg, he came into contact with Max Weber (1864–1920), and also with other intellectuals who gathered around him. Weber’s influence on Jaspers both in a political and in intellectual sense remained all the time preponderant; he was profoundly captivated by Weber’s greatness as a thinker and man. At the same time Jaspers was rather dissatisfied with Wilhelm Windelband’s (1848–1915) and Heinrich Rickert’s pure formalistic interpretation of Kantian philosophy, and he tried to reconstruct his thought as an account of metaphysical experience, spontaneously decisive freedom, and authentic inner life. He was deeply influenced by Kant’s system, and his whole philosophical enterprise can also be seen as an expansion of the main Kantian thoughts in the life-problems of existential philosophy.¹⁵ This critical attitude towards Neo-Kantianism was shared by Jaspers and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), with whom Jaspers became acquainted via Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the founder of phenomenological philosophy, in Freiburg in 1920. In the following years Heidegger visited Jaspers repeatedly in Heidelberg; moreover, in the beginning, he considered Jaspers as a fellow-in-arms in the struggle against the formalistic philosophies of the professors of that time. Although originally both of them were fundamentally engaged with problems of Existenz, which were raised by Kierkegaard in a genuine manner,¹⁶ their cooperation was never fully untroubled, and finally Heidegger’s short, but politically highly problematic rectorate in 1933 caused an open break between them.¹⁷

Obviously the beginnings of existential philosophy would be completely inconceivable without the discovery and intensive appropriation of Søren Kierkegaard’s thinking. Although some German translations as well as monographs were available from a very early period,¹⁸ indeed the first 12-volume edition of the Gesammelte Werke was in progress from 1909,¹⁹ nonetheless, according to Ludwig Edelstein, Jaspers first heard about Kierkegaard from his philosopher friend Erich Frank (1883–1949).²⁰ Edelstein recounts this event as follows:

Among all his Heidelberg friends, it was Karl Jaspers with whom Frank had the closest philosophical contact. Jaspers himself was deeply troubled by the same problems that beset Frank. Like him, he had studied the great philosophers of the past, but “with his insurpassable intellectual integrity, his independence of mind, he had always maintained a critical attitude toward them.” Naturally, Frank spoke to his friend about his exciting new discovery of Kierkegaard in whom he thought he had found the conceptual means for a new approach to philosophy. And, according to Frank’s own account, “Jaspers caught fire at once. It was in this discussion that the movement of existentialism was started.”²¹

It was July 1914, the time of the outbreak of the First World War. Jaspers’ chronic illness kept him from military service. He took a position as lecturer in psychology in the Philosophical Faculty. As Ehrlich reports, much of Jaspers’ “avid reading of the first German edition of collected works by Kierkegaard, edited by Gottsched and Schrempf, found its way in the lecture courses of those years. The subjects of those courses were keyed to the concept of Weltanschauung, which was much in use at that time.”²²

Another important source for Jaspers’ early knowledge of Kierkegaard was certainly the Innsbruck-based fortnightly cultural periodical Der Brenner, which was founded and edited by Ludwig von Ficker (1880–1967).²³ This periodical was a very important organ for the dissemination of Kierkegaard’s thought, especially in consequence of Theodor Haecker’s (1879–1945), association with the Brenner Circle and contribution to the periodical.²⁴ Martin Heidegger subscribed to Der Brenner from 1911;²⁵ Edmund Husserl also read the periodical regularly and enjoyed Haecker’s essays.²⁶ Karl Jaspers’ relation to Der Brenner and his knowledge of Kierkegaard through this important organ undoubtedly requires further historical research. It is clear, however, that he “read Der Brenner in its early years, with the result that his landmark analysis of key Kierkegaardian categories appeared in 1919 under the title Psychologie der Weltanschauungen.”²⁷ The Brenner served to heighten a sense of crisis in many thinkers; also Jaspers’ critique of modernity is evidently indebted to basic Kierkegaardian thoughts which were at that time mediated by this highly important organ.

According to the University records, Jaspers announced altogether five courses on Kierkegaard at the University of Heidelberg betwe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Simone de Beauvoir: A Founding Feminist’s Appreciation of Kierkegaard
• Nicholas Berdyaev: Kierkegaard amongst the Artists, Mystics, and Solitary Thinkers
• Martin Buber: “No-One Can so Refute Kierkegaard as Kierkegaard Himself”
• Albert Camus: Walled within God
• Martin Heidegger: Kierkegaard’s Influence Hidden and In Full View
• Michel Henry: The Goodness of Living Affectivity
• Karl Jaspers: A Great Awakener’s Way to Philosophy of Existence
• Gabriel Marcel: The Silence of Truth
• Jacques Maritain: Kierkegaard as “Champion of the Singular”
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Kierkegaard’s Influence on His Work
• Friedrich Nietzsche: Rival Visions of the Best Way of Life
• Franz Rosenzweig: A Kindred Spirit in Alignment with Kierkegaard
• Jean-Paul Sartre: Kierkegaard’s Influence on His Theory of Nothingness
• Lev Shestov: Kierkegaard in the Ox of Phalaris
• Miguel de Unamuno: Kierkegaard’s Spanish “Brother”
• Jean Wahl: Philosophies of Existence and the Introduction of Kierkegaard in the non-Germanic World
• Index of Persons
• Index of Subjects