Nine
BEING AS ENCOMPASSING
The transcendence viewed through the experience of foundering still remained a
Being beyond the world a nd Existenz. However, the task “to experience Being in
foundering,”
1
with which Karl Jaspers concluded Philosophy, hinted to Being
becoming the focus of his interest in the works published later: Reason and
Existenz, Philosophy of Existenz, and Out of Truth.
2
It was probably due to the
publication ban imposed on his writings in 1938 that Jaspers was unable to
publish his book Out of Truth (1947) until after the end of the war. Many of the
ideas appearing in this book were formulated in his writings published in the mid-
nineteen-thirties, especially in Reason and Existenz (1935) and Philosophy of
Existenz (1937/1938). Ernst Mayer, Jasper’s brother-in-law, who followed his
work closely, claimed that Reason and Existenz and Philosophy of Existenz were a
preparation for Out of Truth.
3
Kurt Salamun and Gerhard Knauss attributed the
origin of the perception of encompassing in the appendix Jaspers wrote about
Immanuel Kant’s theory of ideas that was appended to Psychology.
4
They believe
this perception constitutes an interpretation of the Kantian theory of ideas.
5
Compare also Urs Richli’s position, whereby the concept of the encompassing is
an interpretation of Kant’s theory of ideas and transcendental deduction.
6
In these
writings, Jaspers addresses Being using concepts like reality (Wirklichkeit) and
Being (Sein), but the central concept denoting it was encompassing
(Umgreifende). Although crucial aspects connected to the explication of Being
appeared already in Philosophy, the discussion of Being in his later writings
marked a further adva nce in the development of the metaphysical consciousness in
Jaspers’s writings. These writings show the tendency to propose an explication
precisely for what was for Kant beyond the boundaries of the philosophical
discussion: Being-in-itself. Transcendence and the transcendent, extensively
discussed in Philosophy, continue to represent in his later works some aspects of
Being that are not accessible using the tools of philosophical thinking. However,
in these writings, Jaspers’s effort to turn philosophizing itself into a tool for the
comprehensive and complete explication of Being becomes apparent.
At the center of our discussion in this chapter is Jaspers’s perception of the
encompassing, which reached the peak of its development in Out of Truth.
Already the immediate meaning arising from this original term of Jaspers’s shows
a basic duality: the encompassing is located on the margins of another reality in
relation to which it is central, but at the same time this reality is surrounded by
something existing beyond it. Jaspers coined the term Umgreifende by combining
