Das Nahe und das Ferne, das Einzelne und das Allgemeine, das Zeitliche und das Ewige. Über die Grundpolarität in Jaspers Denken

Karl Jaspers received the basic figure of his thinking from Kierkegaard: that of the self-caring subjective thinker who, by relating himself to himself, re- lates to another. The two moments that make up this basic figure – my rela- tionship with myself and the other on which this relationship is based – run through Jaspers’ entire thinking: be it as the individual versus the general, as the present versus the Eternal, as the near One versus the distant One, as existence versus transcendence. It is man’s job to endure the tension between these two poles and to in- tegrate them into his life. This task can only be solved existentially, but it is understood correctly only through philosophical thinking. Because the two poles are beyond all knowledge and can only be illuminated by philosophical thought, but never caught up conceptually, each individual is called upon to choose freely what he believes in and “which star he wants to bind himself to”. It is this incessant process of making oneself sure of oneself and of the encompassing being that, according to Jaspers, defines philosophy as philoso- phia perennis and yet always ties it back to the historical situation in which the individual thinker finds himself and tries to find out what is true to him in the eternal sense. These two sides in Jaspers’ philosophy – his understanding of philosophy as philosophia perennis and his insistence on the respective his- torical situation – are therefore only two aspects of the basic polarity of his thinking.