Jaspers in his time

The chapter describes Jaspers’ debt towards XIX century philosophies - in particular Nietzsche’s Lebensphilosophie, Weber’s sociological thinking, Dilthey’s philosophy of Geisteswissenschaften, Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl offered Jaspers an access to the ground structures of human experience, beyond abstractions and intelletual reconstructions of traditional philosophy and psychology. Dilthey provided him a neat epistemological differentiation between the methods of explication (natural sciences) and comprehension (human sciences). Weber’s sociology elaborated a precious notion of “Idealtypus”, central to Jaspers phenomenological psychopatology. Nietzsche’s meditation on the Uebermensch offered Jaspers, paradoxically enough, an insight about the nature of illness on weakness, which Jaspers philosophical anthropology assumed since the Allgemeine Psychopatologie as a constitutive dimension of human life as such.