One of the founders of modern Existentialism, the philosophic trend that has attracted so much attention of late, KARL JASPERS has since the downfall of Hitler become a spokesman of Germany’s highest conscience. The present article was part of a lecture he delivered at Geneva on September 13, 1946, in the course of the Rencontres de Genève on which Stephen Spender reported in the January 1947 COMMENTARY.
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Europe’s situation in the world has undergone a radical and rapid change, both outwardly and inwardly.
To begin with the exterior changes: we must live now with the globe ever before our eyes. Europe has grown small. The importance of industrial capacity in the modern world carries with it the superiority of the large continents, America and Asia: space, raw materials, and masses of men essentially determine the reality of power. The one-time colony comes to be master over Europe. America and Russia, the two last great structures of Western civilization, are becoming the masters of the world. If there existed today a United States of Europe, it might perhaps still equal Russia and America in power. But leaving aside all doubts as to the desirability of such a development, the natural growth of the two great continental world powers would soon reduce even a united Europe to inferiority.
For the time being, the political course of the world is still set by Western countries—America and Russia. With the destruction of Japan, the world of East Asia remains without any technologically grounded power of its own. But that will change in time. Already it seems as though China might soon become a decisive factor in world politics.
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What, then, is the position of America and Russia toward our shrinking Europe? Both were settled by Europeans. Russians poured into the East and populated all of northern Asia; Europeans of all nations migrated to America and populated the new continent. Dostoevsky saw the analogy when he wrote, in the 1870’s: “The turn to Asia may bring about for us what happened to Europe when America was discovered. . . . In the movement to Asia our spirit will rise again, and our powers will be reinvigorated.”
But there is this difference: Russia’s European and Asiatic territories remained a unit, and so did her population; America, although her population is descended from European peoples, was separated from Europe politically. Russia is geographically close and spiritually far from us, with the very strangeness of the Russian spirit adding to her attraction for us. America is geographically far but spiritually close—so close that we almost recognize ourselves in her, as if she were returning our own potentialities to us. Certainly there is infinitely more to Russia than the popular notions of Bolshevism and dictatorship would indicate; and there is infinitely more to America than capitalism and mass conformism.
Both now look at Europe from the outside, with admiration and scorn, love and hatred.
Shrinking Europe now assumes an intermediate position between great powers with which it is unable to cope politically. Indeed, Europe will become one of the areas of their political contention—unless it manages to resign itself to a federation of its powers, remaining just strong enough to maintain its neutrality in whatever political and military struggles may divide the world. As Palestine in antiquity lay between Mesopotamia and Egypt, and as Germany now lies between East and West, so Europe may soon lie between two great powers. The fruit of such situations is a struggle rendered vain by the lack of real power, and then impotence, suffering, and humiliation.
Europe’s situation must either lead to destruction or else compel a life springing from quite another source than power.
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The external transformation of the world is accompanied by an inner one. The area of experience in which we are conscious of ourselves has not only broadened but has changed its meaning. The Christian conquest of the world is at a standstill and the absolute certainty of Christianity no longer a matter of course. China and India confront us as autonomous spiritual worlds. They share our problem: how, in this technological world, to derive a new spiritual form from their, or our, tradition? Europe’s self-confidence is no longer what it used to be. Europe is now only one structure among many, and a growing awareness of her own spiritual diminution threatens her self-respect.
The decay of Christianity, that loss of faith by which tradition has been incapacitated for further resistance to serious attack, has reached the point of nihilism. Half a century ago the disquiet of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who prophesied this age, was not yet understood. To these prophets, it was almost incredible that the people among whom they lived could be so unconcerned—that they could fail to see that 19th-century Europe was racing toward the abyss. These people lived in self-assurance, in purposeful and rational labor, in the aesthetically satisfied contemplation of culture, but without an existential basis. They could not understand those who warned them of Europe’s future; instead, they rejected uneasiness as decadence and permitted the development that led to the world wars and all the horrible manifestations of a lost humanity.
There were others who took up these prophets for their sensationalism, admired their literary qualities, and devoted themselves to the creation of a poetry and prose that fed on the sense of doom. There followed a mood of jumbled conversation, an atmosphere of irresponsible assertion and denial, of fanaticism and shrugging indifference. In this transformation, the intellectuals became steadily less effective and less important by comparison with the masses, who on their side espoused various slogans and dogmas, but in their essentially unreflective behavior continued to serve the purposes of despotism.
When all these material, political, and spiritual metamorphoses are viewed as a whole, the phrase “Decline of the West,” coined in Germany in 1918, rings convincingly. No longer radiant and powerful, but weak in every way and doubting itself—thus Europe now stands in the world.
This is the great question: is this indeed Europe’s decline, or is it a crisis of rebirth? Is it the lapse into unconsciousness after the last pyrotechnics of an intellectuality already drained of its content—or is the elasticity of the European spirit active even now, to make our life rebound to the heights?
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Possible Aims of a European Self-Consciousness
No one can know what will happen. But, within the undetermined boundaries of Europe’s possibilities for the future, each can ask himself where he stands and what he wants. No one can see the whole. Always we are simply in it, neither outside nor above it.
We may feel that the individual can do little or nothing to change the course of events; but nobody can know even this. No one needs to know what use the transcendent makes of him. Even to ask is already presumptuous. Our human task is to grasp what is possible, out of the comprehensive whole which we can never survey.
This may encourage us Europeans: what Europe has brought forth, Europe itself can overcome spiritually. The ages-old essence of Europe provides a chance, in the present situation of the world, to carry on toward new creation.
The world of today has grown out of the Europe of past centuries. Without this Europe, the great civilizations would still exist quietly side by side as they did a thousand years ago; without this Europe, there would be no unity of the globe, no world history, no world wars, and no question of the dangers and potentialities of mankind as a whole. The spirit that created science and technology must itself contain the means of restoring order to its creations.
For our every aim today is subject to the prior necessity of adapting ourselves to the technological world. Technology has determined our manner of work, our economy, our social structure, our bureaucracy. The world-historical leap that has taken place in the past hundred years is so great that it can hardly be compared with any previous one: only the inventions of fire and tools are adequate parallels. It is as if all past history has now closed itself off from us—the past becomes remembrance, and knowledge of it only a form of intellectual discipline. Only the final, fundamental traits of man remain the same; the conditions of life are so transformed that history at large acquires a new character. Every people must either come to terms with technology and its results or become extinct. There is no evading the issue.
Our aims, therefore, must be primarily economic and political. .Economically, we must seek by planning and order to introduce justice into the material conditions of our technologically-determined existence—this is an unending task in the struggle for the right. Politically, we must seek to insure the peaceful nature of this metamorphosis, and to introduce order into the relations between states—as a pre-condition for everything else we can want. Violence and terror—terrible realities today, which have been conquered in one particular form but are still the dread of mankind—lead in the end to nothing. But if violence and terror are crimes requiring that the criminals be made harmless, they may at the same time be the expression of a real despair that has grown up because, under the guise of justice, justice is denied, unbearably and hopelessly, by force. What is done and what is not done in dealing with this problem of violence and justice will be of enormous importance to the future of Europe. But all this is the province of politics and not our theme.
We are inquiring into an element of human life that is also among the pre-conditions of political action: the spirit. The possibilities of the spirit always depend, it is true, on the conditions of existence, but the spirit is itself an independent source of its own being. It exists by virtue of freedom, and therefore it lives by the self-awareness of the individual. The way to the future leads through the individual, through every individual.
There follows from this what the European, above all, has come to be fully aware of: every man embodies the possibilities of his own being. Men are never mere material, and therefore men are not transformable into machine parts or stud animals. Masses are never mere mass; every member of a mass is an individual, a human being—is himself. Opposed to this realization of the unique importance of every human being, there is misanthropy with its annihilating conviction that man cannot be free.
Let us seek now to decide what, in this age of technology, we can set up as the spiritual aims of a European self-consciousness. First, broadening the idea of Europe into the idea of humanity, we shall seek paths to world order. Second, limiting ourselves to the particular tasks of Europe, we shall seek the way to the humanism of a European museum. Finally, we shall look to our historical origins for the possibility of basing our life on the transformation of Biblical religion.
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Towards World Order
Nowhere has the idea of humanity appeared as forcefully as in Europe. The Bible postulates a single origin for all men: whoever is human must be recognized as human. Though Europeans have been guilty of the greatest outrages, Europeans have also been able to understand most broadly what other men are. The old outward urge to control the world has been transformed into a desire to understand others, a desire for a universally candid communication among men.
The liberation of the world lies in this idea. As Europeans we can only seek a world in which Europe has a place but which is dominated neither by Europe nor by any other culture—a world in which men leave each other free and share each other’s fate in mutual sympathy.
The idea we live by is not European but Western, for it includes Russia and America; and it is an idea that seeks to turn into the idea of humanity.
It is obvious, as all the statesmen tell us, that from the point of view of power politics Europe can no longer have any conceivable meaning except in a world order that offers peace to all and a task and opportunity to Europe. The menace of war, which today threatens to destroy Western humanity, intensifies our eagerness to create a world order that will exclude war not only for the present but for ages to come—if not forever.
But is this striving for world order no different from earlier efforts to secure eternal peace made in the age of Europe’s great national powers and their wars? Is world order still no more than a pleasant phrase? Perhaps. But if we must live prepared for the worst, we need not consider it inevitable. What will happen still depends on the free choice of human beings. Whoever talks of the inevitable says more than he can know, and feeds the passions of the nihilist, who waits for the moment of catastrophe to bring him either the indirect suicide he desires or absolute power by force.
Again we are concerned neither with the political question—how to overcome absolute state sovereignties for the sake of a superior order, how to conquer the dark passions of the “ape-tiger” (as the Chinese have called man) for the sake of realizing human reason—nor with the social-economic question—how to overcome the selfishness of interested groups for the sake of all men’s claims to justice. We are concerned with the spiritual question only: what are the possibilities before us, and where is the starting point in the ethos of the individual?
Schematically, the alternatives are: world empire or world order.
World empire means world peace through the conquest of all by one, by a single power. World order means unity without a unifying power other than the power of agreement issuing from negotiation. Universal enslavement and universal order stand opposed to each other. In the former, one power preempts sovereignty; in the latter, each voluntarily renounces sovereignty.
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Past empires—the pre-Hellenic empires of Egypt and the Orient, the Chinese and Indian empires, the Roman Empire—were indeed, in their fashion, great structures of order, but these were orders of violence and dictatorship. In limited areas only—temporarily in Athens and Rome and the towns of the late Middle Ages, later in Switzerland, in the Low Countries, in France, in England and America—liberty has grown of itself, through popular education and under favoring circumstances, but at the risk of life. So far, liberty has developed only in the West, and even there never perfectly but full of flaws and contradictions and in constant peril. These are the main points of this liberty: submission to common laws which can be changed by due process only; majority rule and protection of minority rights; general solidarity against personal power.
When any sovereignty remains other than that of the order of mankind at large, the source of unfreedom remains, too: for sovereignty must resort to force to maintain itself against force; and organized force—conquest and empire by conquest—leads to dictatorship even though its starting point may be free democracy. Thus Caesarism evolved from the Roman republic, and the Napoleonic dictatorship from the French Revolution. A conquering democracy abandons itself; a conciliatory democracy prepares the ground for the unity of all under equal rights. The claim of full sovereignty springs from uncompromising self-assertion; the consequences of such self-assertion were made ruthlessly apparent in the age of absolutism when the concept of sovereignty was first established.
The way to world order is through renunciation by those who are powerful, whether this is done in deference to their own humanity or in prudent anticipation of the failure of their power without universal union. Europe might lead in this renunciation, setting the example of submission to reason and unconditional acceptance of the idea of lawfulness.
Large events, however, are the projection of the small; the spirit of the whole is rooted in the actions of each individual. An examination of world history defrauds the individual of his possibilities if it suggests to him that he cannot change anything anyway, that his life means no more to the whole than does his vote in a plebiscite of millions. This paralysis delivers us to the violence of despotic minorities.
Unless the individual regards himself as the very one who counts, and unless he acts as if the principles guiding his actions should be the principles of a world yet to be made, the freedom of all is lost. It is up to every man to keep from slipping either into a dogma of sociological, psychological, or racial fatalism or into the uncontrolled confusion of life. It makes no difference whether I merely look on, passively allowing myself to be carried along, or whether I am myself swept into the active whirl; in either case I have become irresponsible, and what I am and do plays no part in the course of events.
Discussion is one example of the link between the small and the large. Large organizations, parties, and states deal with each other just as individuals do. Everything rests upon whether and how we get along together, from the first practical compromise on questions of daily life to the highest degree of mutual confidence. No world order is possible unless the basic attitudes of meaningful discusion—that is to say, of discussion carried on with feelings of solidarity and mutual sympathy—prevail and are not surrendered under any circumstances. Thus the attitude we maintain at home in our day-today behavior is in a real sense the ultimate source of the order of the world. What happens in the world at large is made possible by the acts of every individual.
What the individual must require of himself is that he see everybody else’s point of view, that he use his communication with others to bring truth to light, that he keep his heart open and receptive, ready to give active aid and to revise his own opinions. This is the fundamental problem for the man who seeks to realize himself: to preserve the possibilities of communication.
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On the way to world order, there must take place two spiritual transformations. The first of these is the purification of politics.
Politics should confine itself to practical and immediate problems; whatever does not disturb the legal order of the conditions of material life should be left free to unfold in spiritual struggle. It is a liberating tendency for men to look on politics as both securing and limiting their living conditions, but not their spirit. The cleansing of politics by separating its tasks from all others would deprive politics of its claim to totality, and of its fanaticism. Ideological parties waging religious war upon each other would disappear and make room for parties retaining their basic solidarity even though in opposition. There is no talking with religious warriors.
Modestly to limit politics to its own essential nature is also an act of faith, the only faith that never gets involved in battles: it rests upon faith in the communication of creatures existing by their own right, upon the belief that genuine discussion leads men to truth, and thus to unanimity. So, with infinite patience, a self-limiting politics even tries the seemingly impossible: to reason with the religious warrior. For it assumes that no man is merely a religious warrior; he is at the same time a man among men.
The growth of such modest restraint in politics would only serve to raise the profession of politics to a higher moral level. The politician would know that what he was striving for was a pre-condition of everything else; but he would know also that he cannot directly produce what is beyond his realm. Thus politics, so often seen as mere power that shrinks from no means, would be transformed into a part of the common spiritual struggle for the order of human life within the order of law that encompasses all men. This transformation can be successful, however, only if the pragmatism of power, which constitutes the present essence of politics, while recognized and understood as an ever-surviving force, is not made absolute.
Purity and candor would govern the politician, modestly aware of the limitations of his function and yet controlling the real course of events. We might speak of a subordination of politics, provided that this subordination is understood to mean, in reality, that politics is limited to the control of the elementary needs of all human affairs. Such subordination would mean a personal enhancement of the politician, of whom more would be required, in character and reason, than was ever required of him before.
The second transformation that must take place on the way to a world order is the de-glamorizing of the history of states. The picture of a history made impressive by great states, mighty events (not excluding disasters), and unheard-of deeds, by myths of war-lords and statesmen and by fame reverberating through scores of centuries—this picture must be superseded. The glory must fall instead upon the upward surges of human life.
Towards the Humanism of a European Museum
If the idea of Europe is expanded into the idea of mankind, it might realize itself in a world order. If, on the other hand, Europe concentrates upon itself, it might preserve what is its very own. Then the issue would be the issue of Europe in the narrower sense—this small area where the spirit of the West has been developing for centuries, this corner of the world that is even now acquiring the character of a museum. The European rests upon his past; but he cannot preserve the past as reality, for it is unrepeatable.
A museum—the “museal” life—means to live by what has been, to live in a present contained in the knowledge and vision of the past, and in the conservation and restoration of its works.
Such an existence rests on the charm of the spirit as such, separated from life; and perhaps it means also a horror and resentment of reality. But is such a retirement from the world actually possible? Are not America and Russia showing us the real way into the future, a way that cannot be avoided and is therefore worthy of free acceptance? Are we not living in romantic illusions if we have other aims, if we wish to maintain Europe as a preserve of old knowledge, old languages, old works, old manners? Is this not a lifeless concern? One hears contemptuous voices: Europe a museum! Are we to be museum custodians and tourist guides for the world?
Yet even this would still be a life if things were to turn out that way. Let us not depreciate what remains here: a world of memories precious to, all men. It is not so bad to live as an interpreter, caring for what ought never to be lost.
True, the humanistic life does not sustain itself, but must be willed by others. But it is willed by the Western world; the museums of America and Russia are a sign of this. Europe is taking on a character similar to that of Greece in the orbis terrarum of antiquity. It harbors the holy places of the West, as there are holy places for the Asiatic world in China and India. Even in our growing impotence, even in ruins, we still guard these jewels, the origins of the West.
The “museal” life is the life of the historical soul, in which the spiritual tradition speaks to us out of the past and we live in an environment that fills us with love.
But this is a life of piety, not an original life with a greatness of its own. Are we free to desire more? Does not our distaste for the idea of a “museal” character contain an impulse toward more profound possibilities? No, the life of the museum will never be enough.
True, Europe’s consciousness of itself grows out of the image of the past, but it is decisively influenced by our present existence. We aspire to reach the point where we no longer merely view historically, or merely gaze aesthetically, or merely remember lovingly, or merely wish and see, but where we shall be real because we shall have realized our own identity. It is at this point that we shall become aware of that which even now sustains our life.
We must not wear the mask of the past and live as specters of what has been. We can capture the truth of the past only by transforming it into the real appearances of the present; only then will the depth of tradition link itself with the future. Based securely upon our Western origins, we must also keep our minds free and dispassionate if we are to accomplish the great transformation that lies before us. Let us dare to glance at our task.
Towards a Transformation of Biblical Religion
European humanism has always been characterized by its counterpole: a sense of insecurity in a world that is not self-sufficient, a fear of missing the essence of life in too great a concern with worldly happiness. The anti-humanist impulse is not destructive alone, but is itself a source of life, especially in times when humanism, in the enjoyment of its intellectual wealth, becomes untrue to itself as a cultural order.
The strongest counter-statement to humanism is Christianity. Although, as Christian humanism, it constantly creates secular forms, Christianity still contains the elements to subvert whatever tends toward a settled and spiritually sheltered state of the world.
Today, however, Europe is not merely in a phase in which anti-humanist demands arise out of the extreme situations created by recent catastrophes. Christianity and Biblical religion are also denied in the minds of many, and in the actions of others. And thus the entire polarity of humanism and Christianity is threatened with collapse.
Yet, if we ask whether and how Europe could exist without the Bible, resting on its pre-Biblical and pre-Hellenic sources alone, we find always that it is the Biblical religion and the secularizations that have emerged from it—from the very basis of human existence to the motivations of modern science and the impulses of our great philosophies—that have made us what we are. The fact is that without the Bible we slide into nothingness. We cannot give up our historic origins. Nihilism as the fruit of Christian development, and therefore a nihilism still determined by Christianity, was Nietzsche’s great theme. But nihilism can only be a fleeting mood, for it is only against other things and nothing by itself.
Europe seems to have reached the critical moment of preparation: the collapse of all that was once solid now leaves us free to launch on new paths that we feel to exist but do not yet know. What frightens us is our great freedom in the face of a future that is still blank, a future that we ourselves must create.
We live as though knocking at still unopened gates. What may be taking place now, in utter privacy, does not yet establish a world; it is still confined to the individual—but perhaps it will found a world, if the scattered elements meet.
Nobody can foresee the future. To sketch it out would be to create it. We can only say, indefinitely, that the Bible and the tradition of Antiquity in the forms in which we have so far known them are not enough. Both must be transformed. The metamorphosis of Biblical religion is the vital issue of the times to come.
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Whence can the transformation come? Only from the original faith that created the Bible itself, only from the source that at no time was but always is, from eternal truth: man and God, the existent and the transcendent. Everything else seems mere foreground compared to what the Biblical religion has produced for Jews and Christians, and even for Islam.
Biblical religion is in fact constantly changing its appearance—its clothing, so to speak. But what is it that remains always the same? We can express it only abstractly: the one God; the divinely creative transcendent; man’s encounter with God; God’s commandment, the distinction between good and evil as absolutely valid for man; the consciousness of history; the meaning and the dignity of suffering; the possibility of the unsolvable.
In the Bible, polarities prevail, even to the point of exclusive opposites: cult religion and cult-disdaining Prophetic religion; the religion of law and the religion of love; the religion of the Chosen People and the religion of mankind; the religion of Christ and the religion of Jesus who said, “Why callest thou me good? None is good, save one, that is, God.” The true faith escapes being fixed at either pole, and each new age is required to transform the outer clothing in order to save the truth of the substance.
The Bible is pervaded by a passion that is unique because it is related to God. It is the deposit of ten centuries of extreme human experience.
According to the sense of this faith, the transformation and reappropriation of Biblical religion in the churches and in philosophy can never happen except at the borders of extremity. It will not succeed unless we make extremity utterly effective in our souls. There is today a profound trouble: a terrible forgetfulness pervades the world. Enormous suffering has been borne, and each who survives is glad just to be alive; he erases the past, yet it still torments him in his every nerve. The soul has not encompassed the enormity. The dead no longer exist, and the dance of life begins again.
But we fail if we merely endure suffering, dully or fearfully. Once fear has passed, a false self-assurance captures the life that has been accidentally saved. We hide what we do not wish to know. Nothing will come from men who do not inwardly expose themselves to their suffering. We must not forget the dead, the millions of dead, and how they sought death or had to suffer it. We must see all suffering, even that which did not personally touch us, as something that should have touched us and from which we were undeservedly rescued. Indifference becomes all the more culpable in view of the frightful calamity that may yet threaten us all and that we talk about but do not realize in our souls. Perhaps Kierkegaard was right in saying, “All the horrors of war will not suffice—not until the eternal punishments of hell come true again will man be shaken into earnestness.”
I dare to believe: no, the punishments of hell are not the only way—man can come to his earnestness humanely and truthfully.
As the companion and counter-pole of the organized religions, philosophy too will help men to find their way to unconditional earnestness, quietly and without passion. Today in various countries of Europe there is growing up, under the name of Existentialism, the idea of a common practice of life—diverse to the point of being unrelated, but perhaps springing from kindred impulses.
Here, beginning with the later Schelling, decisively launched by Kierkegaard, furthered by pragmatist impulses, tried in adversity—a way of thought has grown that recognizes itself in ancient philosophizing (which was always Existentialist) and yet knows itself called upon to play its part today, when extremity has come upon us in the smashing of all past orders.
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Today the philosophically serious European faces a choice of opposite philosophical possibilities. Does he seek a confined and fixed truth that in the end must only be obeyed—or does he seek an infinitely open truth? That is to say: will he submit to a dogma, or will he keep all the possibilities of thought and knowledge in balance, as the tools of his existence? Will he protect his independence by rigidity, as in Stoic philosophy, creating a refuge from the failure of the world, content in the calm of apathy and in the solitude of a dogmatically or sceptically rational attitude; or will he win this inner independence in the perils of the open world—as in Existentialist philosophy, the philosophy of communication, where the individual realizes himself on condition that others also realize themselves; where there is no lonely calm but, rather, a constant dissatisfaction, and man inwardly takes suffering upon himself?
We seek no fixed human image, as in the deceptive ideal of Stoicism, but the human way. .We trust to its direction in holding to three aims: (1) unlimited communication between man and man in all the concerns of life, from the heights of the living and brotherly struggle for truth down to the honest compromises of everyday life; (2) mastery of our own thoughts, submission to no dogma of final knowledge, attachment to no fixed point of view and no “ism”; (3) recognition of love as the ultimate guide, with the inevitable hatreds brought to terms and, as soon as possible, made to disappear.
Some may say that Existentialism is dream and fantasy. If it is a dream, then I dare to answer that it may be one of those which from time immemorial have given birth to what is human and what makes life possible.
But if the bottomless makes us dizzy—and extremity still seems to lie ahead of us—then we can say: if all things fail, God remains. It is enough that there exists a transcendent.
Even Europe is not our ultimate concern. We become Europeans on condition that we truly become human beings—that is to say, human beings out of the depths of the source and of the goal, which rest in God.
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