Man in the Modern Age (Routledge Revivals)

Karl Jaspers

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415570619
• eBook ISBN: 9781317832638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in English in 1933, this detailed philosophical examination of the contemporary state and nature of mankind is a seminal work by influential German philosopher Karl Jaspers. Elucidating his theories on a variety of topics pertaining to contemporary and future human existence, Man in the Modern Age is an ambitious and wide-ranging work, which meditates upon such diverse subjects as the tension between mass-order and individual human life, our present conception of human life and the potential for mankind's future existence. Written shortly before the accession to power of Hitler and National Socialism, this is not only an important philosophical work, but also an insightful and intriguing historical document.

PART ONE

LIMITS OF THE LIFE-ORDER

OWING to the turmoil of modern life, what is really happening eludes our comprehension. We are voyaging upon an uncharted sea, unable to reach a shore from which a clear outlook on the whole would be attainable. Or, to modify the image, we circle in a whirlpool which only discloses things to us because we are dragged along in its eddies.

To-day it is taken as a matter of course that human life is the supply of mass-needs by rationalised production with the aid of technical advances. The assumption seems to be that the whole can be reduced to perfect order by reason alone. But if this knowledge of the entirety of a comprehensible process of human organisation of the world should advance to become a decisive awareness of the being of the present, then that being would be for us no longer an unfathomable maelstrom of utterly elusive possibilities, but would present itself as the necessary economic evolution of an apparatus currently at work.

However, the life-order is perpetually troubled; its decay seems imminent; it appears incapable of perfectionment. The question arises whether it can itself become the ‘whole’ for us, or whether it is really no more than a part of an environing and overriding whole. The frontiers of the life-order disclose to us the State, mind, and humanity itself as the origins of human activity—as origins which do not enter into any life-order, although they are essential to making this order possible.

The way wherein man evokes his knowledge of reality out of these origins is what first, in combination with this reality, creates his mental situation. In order to elucidate this situation, we set out from the manner in which reality is contemplated to-day. A bare depiction of contemporary existence such as will prove acceptable to every one no matter what his political or philosophical outlook may be, will suffice to make it clear that a knowledge of the reality of man is not identical with that reality itself, although each throws the other into relief. The reality which manifests itself in apparently inevitable glimpses seems to show that man is entirely dependent; and yet what man himself becomes is the upshot of the way in which he elaborates the knowledge which the contemporary mental situation forces on him. Man is faced by the problem whether he will fatalistically submit to the sway of the mighty forces which appear to determine everything that happens, or whether, after all, paths are discernible along which he can walk freely because on them the writ of the aforesaid powers no longer runs.

1. TECHNIQUE AND APPARATUS AS DETERMINANTS OF MASS-LIFE

Estimates of the total population of the world are: for 1800, roughly 850 millions; for the present time, 1,800 millions. This unprecedented increase, whereby the population has been considerably more than doubled in four-thirds of a century, was rendered possible by technical advances. The results of discoveries and inventions were as follows: a new basis for production; the organisation of enterprises; a methodical increase in the productivity of labour; a worldwide and enormous improvement in the means of transport and communication; the codification of law and the establishment of effective police systems, whereby public order was ensured; and, as the combined effect of all the foregoing, greatly improved facilities for anticipating the results of industrial and commercial enterprise. Huge undertakings can now be purposively guided from a single centre, even though their employees are numbered by the hundred thousand and their tentacles extend over the entire surface of the globe.

This development is associated with the rationalisation of productive and distributive activity, resolves being made in accordance with knowledge and calculation instead of mere instinct and desire; and it is likewise associated with mechanisation, all the work being done under detailed rules and regulations which apply to every one concerned. Whereas in such matters people used to wait upon events, and make no more until ‘something turned up’, they now think things out beforehand and leave nothing to chance—with the result, however, that in many respects the individual worker becomes little more than a part of the machinery.

The broad masses of the population could not exist to-day but for the titanic interlocking wheelwork of which each worker is one of the cogs. Thereby our elementary needs are supplied with an efficiency new to history. As late as the beginning of the nineteenth century there were famines in Germany. Pestilences wrought havoc, infant mortality was terribly high, and very few persons lived to be old. To-day famine during peace-time is unknown in western civilised lands. Whereas in 1750 the annual death-rate among the inhabitants of London was one in twenty, to-day it is one in eighty. Thanks to insurance against illness and unemployment in conjunction with other social-welfare institutions, no one is nowadays left remorselessly exposed to the danger of death by starvation, as used to be the lot of whole sections of the European population. In Asia, on the other hand, this risk is still regarded as a matter of course.

The supply of the masses with the necessaries of life is not effected in accordance with a unified plan, being the outcome of an enormously complicated system in which rationalisation and mechanisation bring together a mighty stream deriving from numberless sources. The general result is not a slave-economy wherein human beings can be dealt with like the lower animals, but an economy of independent personalities, the good will and voluntary co-operation of each in his place being essential to the proper working of the whole. Democracy in one form or another must, therefore, be the political structure of this apparatus. No longer can anyone arbitrarily decide, in accordance with a preconceived plan, what the masses are to do; for popular approval or tolerance is now indispensable. Substantially the working of the apparatus is the resultant of a vast number of individual voluntary tensions, which collaborate in the end despite reciprocal conflicts; and what the individual does is, in the long run, determined by his efficiency as a producer. Thus, though all work is purposive, there is no purposive economy as a whole.

During the last two centuries the science of political economy has evolved upon the basis of this conception of the life-order. Since technico-economic and social developments, as realised by the general consciousness, have come more and more to determine the historical course of events, a knowledge of these movements has tended to become the science of human affairs. That explains why the seemingly simple principle of a purposive and rational ordering of the provision of the elementary necessaries of human life has assumed so extraordinarily complicated an aspect. We are concerned here with regulation and control which are never visible as such in their integrality, and can only keep in being through incessant transformation.

2. MASS-RULE

The technical life-order and the masses are closely interrelated. The huge machinery of social provision must be adapted to the peculiarities of the masses; its functioning, to the amount of labour power available; its output, to the demands of the consumers. We infer, therefore, that the masses must rule, and yet we find that they cannot rule.

Peculiarities of the Masses. The term ‘masses’ is ambiguous. If we mean an undifferentiated aggregate of contemporary persons in a particular situation and forming a unity because they are all under the stress of the same affects, it is plain that such an aggregate can only exist for a brief space of time. If we use the word ‘masses’ as a synonym for the ‘public’, this denotes a group of persons mentally interlinked by their common reception of certain opinions, but a group vague in its limits and its stratification, though at times a typical historical product. The ‘masses’, however, as an aggregate of persons who are articulated in some apparatus of the life-order in such a manner that the will and the peculiarities of the majority among them are decisive, constitute the unceasingly operative and effective power in our world—the power which manifests itself no more than transiently in the ‘public’ or in a ‘mob’.

The peculiarities of the masses as the fleeting unity of a mob or crowd have been ably analysed by Gustav le Bon as impulsiveness, suggestibility, intolerance, and mutability. The ‘public’ is a phantom, the phantom of an opinion supposed to exist in a vast number of persons who have no effective interrelation and though the opinion is not effectively present in the units. Such an opinion is spoken of as ‘public opinion’, a fiction which is appealed to by individuals and by groups as supporting their special views. It is impalpable, illusory, transient; ‘’tis here, ’tis there, ’tis gone’; a nullity which can nevertheless for a moment endow the multitude with power to uplift or to destroy.

The peculiarities of the masses articulated in an apparatus are not uniform. The manual worker, the salaried employee, the doctor, the lawyer, do not as such combine to form the masses; each is a potential individual; but the proletariat, the general body of the medical profession, the teaching staff of a university—these respectively combine to form an articulated ‘mass’ insofar as in actual fact the majority of the corporation decides the nature, the actions, the resolves of all its members. One might expect that the average qualities of human nature would everywhere prevail. What the ‘mass-man’ on the average is, is disclosed in what most people do; in what is usually bought and consumed; in what one can generally expect when one has to deal with people ‘in the mass’—as apart from the ‘fads’ of individuals. Just as the budget of a private household throws light upon the tastes of the members of that household, so does the budget of a State (to the extent that the majority decides) disclose the tastes of the bulk of its citizens. If we know how much money an individual has to spend, we can infer his peculiarities when he tells us ‘I cannot afford this, but I can afford that’. Contact with many persons teaches us what, on the average, we can expect from them. For millenniums, judgments in these respects have been remarkably similar. People ‘in the mass’ would seem to be guided by the search for pleasure and to work only under the crack of the whip or when impelled by a craving for bread and for dainties; yet they are bored when they have nothing to do, and have a perpetual craving for novelty.

An articulated mass, however, has other qualities than these. In that sense there is no ‘mass’ of all mankind; there are only diverse masses which form, dissolve, and reform. The corporations which, by tranquil efficiency or by organised voting, decide what shall happen, are articulated masses when within each of them the individual counts only as a unit among many having like powers. Yet these articulated masses are mutable, diversified, transitory expressions of some specific historical outcome of human existence. Articulated masses can, however, express themselves at times in other than average ways, showing themselves capable on these occasions of the unusual. Although as a rule the mass is stupider and less cultivated than the individual, in exceptional instances it may excel the individual in shrewdness and profundity.

Importance of the Masses. Man as member of a mass is no longer his isolated self. The individual is merged in the mass, to become something other than he is when he stands alone. On the other hand in the mass the individual becomes an isolated atom whose individual craving to exist has been sacrificed, since the fiction of a general equality prevails. Yet each individual continues to say to himself: ‘What another has, I also want; what another can do, I also can do.’ In secret, therefore, envy persists, and so does the longing to enjoy by having more and being of more importance than others.

This inevitable mass-effect is intensified to-day by the complicated articulations of a modern economic society. The rule of the masses affects the activities and habits of the individual. It has become obligatory to fulfil a function which shall in some way be regarded as useful to the masses. The masses and their apparatus are the object of our most vital interest. The masses are our masters; and for every one who looks facts in the face his existence has become dependent on them, so that the thought of them must control his doings, his cares, and his duties. He may despise them in their average aspects; or he may feel that the solidarity of all mankind is destined some day to become a reality; or he may, while not denying the responsibility which each man has for all, still hold more or less aloof: but it remains a responsibility he can never evade. He belongs to the masses, though they threaten to let him founder amid rhetoric and the commotions of the multitude. Even an articulated mass always tends to become unspiritual and inhuman. It is life without existence, superstition without faith. It may stamp all flat; it is disinclined to tolerate independence and greatness, but prone to constrain people to become as automatic as ants.

When the titanic apparatus of the mass-order has been consolidated, the individual has to serve it, and must from time to time combine with his fellows in order to renovate it. If he wants to make his livelihood by intellectual activity, he will find it very difficult to do this except by satisfying the needs of the many. He must give currency to something that will please the crowd. They seek satisfaction in the pleasures of the table, eroticism, self-assertion; they find no joy in life if one of these gratifications be curtailed. They also desire some means of self-knowledge. They desire to be led in such a way that they can fancy themselves leaders. Without wishing to be free, they would fain be accounted free. One who would please their taste must produce what is really average and commonplace, though not frankly styled such; must glorify or at least justify something as universally human. Whatever is beyond their understanding is uncongenial to them.

One who would influence the masses must have recourse to the art of advertisement. The clamour of puffery is to-day requisite even for an intellectual movement. The days of quiet and unpretentious activity seem over and done with. You must keep yourself in the public eye, give lectures, make speeches, arouse a sensation. Yet the mass-apparatus lacks true greatness of representation, lacks solemnity. No one believes in festal celebrations, not even the participants. In the Middle Ages, the Pope sometimes made a quasi-royal progress through Europe; but we can hardly conceive such a thing to-day in (let us suppose) the United States, the present chief centre of world-power. The Americans would not take the successor of St. Peter seriously!

3. THE TENSION BETWEEN TECHNICAL MASS-ORDER AND HUMAN LIFE

Limits are imposed upon the life-order by a specifically modern conflict. The mass-order brings into being a universal life-apparatus, which proves destructive to the world of a truly human life.

Man lives as part of a social environment to which he is bound by remembered and prospective ties. Men do not exist as isolated units, but as members of a family in the home; as friends in a group; as parts of this, that, or the other ‘herd’ with well-known historical origins. He has become what he is thanks to a tradition which enables him to look back into the obscurity of his beginnings and makes him responsible for his own future and that of his associates. Only in virtue of a long view before and after does he acquire a substantial tenure in that world which he constructs out of his heritage from the past. His daily life is permeated by the spirit of a perceptibly present world which, however small, is still something other than himself. His inviolable property is a narrow space, the ownership of which enables him to share in the totality of human history.

The technical life-order which came into being for the supply of the needs of the masses did at the outset preserve these real worlds of human creatures, by furnishing them with commodities. But when at length the time arrived when nothing in the individual’s immediate and real environing world was any longer made, shaped, or fashioned by that individual for his own purposes; when everything that came, came merely as the gratification of momentary need, to be used up and cast aside; when the very dwelling-place was machine-made, when the environment had become despiritualised, when the day’s work grew sufficient to itself and ceased to be built up into a constituent of the worker’s life—then man was, as it were, bereft of his world. Cast adrift in this way, lacking all sense of historical continuity with past or future, man cannot remain man. The universalisation of the life-order threatens to reduce the life of the real man in a real world to mere functioning.

But man as individual refuses to allow himself to be absorbed into a life-order which would only leave him in being as a function for the maintenance of the whole. True, he can live in the apparatus with the aid of a thousand relationships on which he is dependent and in which he collaborates; but since he has become a mere replaceable cog in a wheelwork regardless of his individuality, he rebels if there is no other way in which he can manifest his selfhood.

If, however, he wants to ‘be himself’, if he craves for selfexpression, there promptly arises a tension between his selfpreservative impulse, on the one hand, and his real selfhood, on the other. Immediate self-will is what primarily moves him, for he is animated by a blind desire for the advantages attendant on making good in the struggle for life. Yet the urge to self-expression drives him into incalculable hazards which may render his means of livelihood perilously insecure. Under stress of these two conflicting impulses he may act in ways which will interfere with the tranquil and stable functioning of the life-order. Consequently the disturbance of the life-order has its permanent antinomy in a twofold possibility. Inasmuch as self-will provides the space wherein selfhood can realise itself as existence, the former is as it were the body of the latter, and may drag the latter down to ruin or (in favourable circumstances) bring it to fruition.

If, then, self-will and existence both seek a world for themselves, they come into conflict with the universal life-order. But this, in its turn, strives to gain mastery over the powers which are threatening its frontiers. It is, therefore, profoundly concerned about matters which are not directly contributory to the self-preservative impulse. This latter, which can be indifferently regarded as a vital need for obtaining the necessaries of life and as an existential absolute, may be termed the ‘non-rational’. When thus negatively conceived, it is degraded to a being of the second order: but it is either promoted once more to the first rank within certain restricted provinces; in contrast with purely rational aims, it may acquire a positive interest, as in love, adventure, sport, and play. Or it may be resisted as undesirable, this being what we see in those who are affected with a dread of life or a lack of joy in work. Thus in one or other of these ways it is diverted into the decisively and exclusively vital field—to the denial of the claim to existence slumbering within it. The powers interested in the functioning of the apparatus, in the paralysing of the masses, in the individual mind, seek to further the demands of the self-preservative impulse as a non-committal gratification, and to deprive it of its possible absoluteness. By rationalising the non-rational, in order to re-establish it as a kind of gratification of elementary needs, the attempt is made to achieve that which is not genuinely possible. The result is that what was originally fostered as something other than it is, is destroyed by what seems to be an endeavour to care for it. A prey to technical dominance, it assumes a grey tint or a crude motley coloration, wherein man no longer recognises himself, being robbed of his individuality as a human creature. Yet, since it is uncontrollable, it rides rough-shod over the ordinances formulated to destroy it.

The claim to self-will and to existence [to self-expression] cannot be abrogated—any more than there is a possibility, once the masses have come into being, of dispensing with the need for a universal apparatus as an essential condition for the life and welfare of every individual. Tension between the universal life-apparatus and a truly human world is, therefore, inevitable. Each is endowed with its reality only in virtue of the other; and were one to effect a definitive conquest of the other, it would thereby instantly destroy itself. Attempted mastery and attempted revolt will continue their reciprocal strike, each misunderstanding the other, though each fruitfully stimulates the other. Mutual misunderstanding is unavoidable because of the conflict between the self-preservative impulse as a vital urge and existence [the craving for higher forms of self-expression] in its absoluteness.

The limits to the life-order will eve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD TO THE NEW IMPRESSION
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE. LIMITS OF THE LIFE-ORDER
• PART TWO. WILL IN THE WHOLE
• PART THREE. DECAY AND POSSIBILITIES OF THE MIND
• PART FOUR. OUR PRESENT CONCEPTION OF HUMAN EXISTENCE
• PART FIVE. WHAT MANKIND CAN BECOME
• INDEX