Existential philosopher, specialist in religion, history and political philosophies: Who is Karl Jaspers?

Karl Theodor Jaspers, who lived between 23 February 1883 and 26 February 1969, was a German philosopher and psychiatrist, one of the theorists of the existentialist movement in philosophy. It has had significant impacts on fields such as modern psychiatry, philosophy of religion, philosophy of history and political philosophy.

According to Jaspers, after the collapse of classical philosophy or metaphysics with Hegel, things got worse, especially for humans; Because some philosophers, with a positivist attitude, reduced philosophy to science and limited themselves to making some claims about science or were content to develop a philosophy of life based on science. Others appealed to religious dogmas in an idealistic manner.

Karl Theodor Jaspers (23 February 1883 – 26 February 1969) was a German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry, and philosophy. After being trained in and practising psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative philosophical system. He was often viewed as a major exponent of existentialism in Germany, though he did not accept the label.

For Jaspers, the distress is the same in both cases. Human beings are crushed under the pressure of science or religion, in short, authority, and become more alienated and impersonal with each passing day. Or put another way, according to Jaspers, in the modern period both attitudes result in the denial of individuality or, what amounts to the same thing, existenz or existence.

Positivist or idealist philosophers have discarded existenz because they want to reduce everything to something that we can easily grasp, even if superficially. In the worldviews offered by positivism and idealism, there is no room for the individual, decisions, personal choice, concern and freedom.

Based on this general observation about the age and his evaluations about the difficulties caused by the fact that the "question of Being" cannot be answered satisfactorily by both idealism and materialism, Jaspers argues that the most fundamental issue of philosophy is the "question of Being", a question as old as the history of man. It claims to provide a solid solution.

Arguing that this burning question should be addressed from the point of view of the philosophy of existence, Jaspers says that the "question of existence" and the issue of personal existence have been completely left aside due to the influence of the scientific way of thinking on contemporary minds.

JASPERS' STUDENT AND MEDICAL CAREER

Although Karl Jaspers began to show interest in philosophy from an early age, he decided to study law at university under the influence of his lawyer father. However, he soon got bored of law and started studying medicine in 1902.

He graduated from medical school in 1909 and started working in a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg. Dissatisfied with the approach of the medical circles of his time to mental illnesses, Jaspers took it upon himself to develop the psychiatric approach and started teaching psychology temporarily at the University of Heidelberg in 1913. His position later became permanent, and Jaspers never returned to clinical practice.

In his work “General Psychopathology” (1913), he examined the connections between psychopathology methods and phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches, and successfully applied these approaches to some psychopathology problems.

JASPERS' CAREER

The work titled "Psychologie der Weltanschauungen" (1919) by Jaspers, who turned from psychology studies to philosophy studies at the age of 40, is very important in terms of both evaluating psychology in the need to create a vision of the world we perceive and showing the extent to which he was influenced by Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Weber. Some of the other important philosophers who influenced Jaspers are Plato, Plotinus, Hegel, Schelling, Dilthey and Husserl.

Karl Jaspers expressed his understanding of existentialism in his comprehensive book "Philosophy" (1932), which is described as his masterpiece, and the book was banned in Nazi Germany. For this reason, Jaspers, who went to Switzerland and started teaching at the University of Basel, cut off his ties with philosophy during this period and was more interested in political philosophy. The most important indicator of this is his work "The Future of Humanity with the Atomic Bomb" (1958). Until his death, most of his works consisted of "philosophy of religion".

Jaspers' Philosophy

Karl Jaspers has developed interesting insights in many areas of philosophy.

Karl Jaspers developed a philosophy of existence that analyzes the possible attitudes of humans towards the world, the decisions that the individual has to make in the face of situations such as death, war, change and crime, and that will solve the problem of existence through reason.

Developing a morality of belief, Jaspers said that in order to realize one's existence, one must go beyond science and go to the "absolute" or "God". A person who establishes his existence in this way also finds what is morally right.