Nor is philosophical thought, like sciences, characterized by progressive development. Beyond any doubt, we are far more advanced than Hippocrates, the Greek physician. But we are scarcely entitled to say that we have progressed beyond Plato. (skip)
The certainty to which it aspires is not of the objective, scientific sort, which is the same for every mind; it is inner certainty in which a man's whole being participates. Whereas science always pertains to particular objects, the knowledge of which is by no means indispensable to all men, philosophy deals with the whole of being, which concerns man as man, with a truth which, wherever it is manifested, moves us more deeply than any scientific knowledge.
Our own humanity, our own destiny, our own experience strike us as a sufficient basis for philosophical opinions.
(skip) The circuitous paths traveled by specialists in philosophy have meaning only if they lead man to an awareness of being and of his place in it.
(skip) Every man must accomplish it for himself.
The Greek word for philosopher (philosophos) connotes a distinction from sophos. It signifies the lover of wisdom (knowledge) (skip) the essence of philosophy is not the possession of truth but the search for truth, (skip) Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question.
Philosophy is the principle of concentration through which man becomes himself, by partaking reality.
It is a task which man will face in one form or another as long as he remains man.
The Stoic Epictetus said, "Philosophy arises when we become aware of our own weakness and helplessness." (skip) By looking upon everything that is not within my power as necessary and indifferent to me, but by raising what does depend on me, namely the mode and content of my ideas, to clarity and freedom by thought.
I must die, I must suffer, I must struggle, I am subject to chance, I involve myself inexorably in guilt. We call these fundamental situations of our existence ultimate situations. (skip) Along with wonder and doubt, awareness of these ultimate situations is the most profound source of philosophy. In our day-to-day lives we often evade them, by closing our eyes and living as if they did not exist. We forget that we must die, forget our guilt, and forget that we are at the mercy of chance. We face only concrete situations and master them to our profit, we react to them by planning and acting in the world, under the impulsion of our practical interests. But to ultimate situations we react either by obfuscation or, if we really apprehend them, by despair and rebirth; we become ourselves by changing our consciousness of being.
no reliance can be placed in worldly existence.
But there is a counterweight to the general unreliability of the world: there are in the world things worthy of faith, things that arouse confidence. (skip) But precariousness of all worldly existence is a warning to us, it forbids us to content ourselves with the world: it points to something else.
The way in which man approaches his failure determines how that man will become.
I should not suffer deeply from lack of communication or find such unique pleasure in authentic communication if I for myself, in absolute solitude, could be certain of the truth. But I am only in conjunction with the Other, alone I am nothing.
And so we may say that wonder, doubt, the experience of ultimate situations are indeed the sources of philosophy, but the ultimate source is the will to authentic communication, which embraces all the rest.
As Schopenhauer said, there is no object without subject and there is no subject without object. (skip)
It can only mean that being as a whole neither subject nor object but must be the Comprehensive,
as Dasein, being-there
The fall from absolutes which were after all illusory becomes an ability to soar; what seemed an abyss becomes space for freedom; apparent Nothingness is transformed into that from which authentic being speaks to us.
But this God of the Greek thinkers is a God originating in thought, not the living God of Jeremiah. In essence the two coincide. From this twofold rook Western theology and philosophy have, in infinite modulations, reflected that God is and pondered on what He is.
limiting himself to determine object knowledge, that is to scientific cognition, he ceases to philosophize, saying: It is best not to talk of what we do not know.
God never becomes a tangible object in the world - and this means that man must not abandon his freedom to the tangibilities, authorities, powers of the world; that he bears responsibility for himself, and must not evade this responsibility by renouncing freedom ostensibly for the sake of freedom. He must owe his own decision and the road he chooses to himself.
In every case an aim determines means appropriate to it.
Only when I live by something that can no longer be explained by object knowledge do I live by the unconditional.
(skip)
the unconditional attitude implies a decision, lucidly taken, out of unfathomable depth, a decision with which I myself am identical. (skip)
The unconditional is hidden, only in extreme situations does it by silent decision determine a man's road; (skip)
since man arrives at his unconditional foundation not by the degrees but by a leap into another dimension.
The unconditional imperative is not given like empirical existence. It grows within man in time.
evil is the life of the man who remains in the sphere of the contingent, who merely lives from day to day like an animal, well or badly, in the unrest of change - a life in which there is no decision.
Good in contradiction is the life of the man who does not reject the happiness in this world but subordinates it to the morally admissible, seen as the universal law of just action.
A man can only want one thing or the other, if he is authentic. (skip) Instead of deciding, we vacillate and stumble through life, combine the one with the other and even accept such a state of things as a necessary contradiction. This indecision is in itself evil. (skip) He becomes himself when he decides which way he is going and acts accordingly.
Man is fundamentally more than he can know about himself.
In the world, those powers which have flung us to the ground strive to dominate us: fear of the future, anxious attachment to present possessions, care in the face of dire possibilities. Opposing them man can perhaps in the face of death gain a confidence which will enable him, even in the most extreme, inexplicable, meaningless situation, to die in peace.
To be a man is to become a man.
We have heard the outcry: Science destroys faith. Greek science could be built into faith and was useful for its elucidation, but modern science is utterly ruinous. (skip)
Where science lost man falls into the twilight of vaguely edifying sentiments, of fanatical decisions arrived at in self-willed blindness. Barriers are erected, man is led into new prisons.
The spiritual process which took place between 800 to 200 B.C. seems to constitute such an axis. (skip) "axial age." Extraordinary events are crowded into this period. In China lived Confucius and Lao Tse, all the trends in Chinese philosophy arose, it was the era of MoTse, Chuang Tse and countless others. In India it was the age of the Upanishads and of Buddha; as in China, all philosophical trends, including skepticism and materialism, sophistry and nihilism, were developed. In Iran Zarathustra put forward his challenging conception of the cosmic process as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine prophets arose: Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Deutero-Isaiah; Greece produced Homer, the philosophers Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, the tragic poets, Thucydides, and Archimedes. All the vast development of which these names are a mere intimation took place in these few centuries, independently and almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West.
(skip) And in consciously apprehending his limits he set himself the highest aims. He experienced the absolute in the depth of selfhood and in the clarity of transcendence.
(skip)
For the first time there were philosophers. Men dared to stand upon their own feet as individuals. Hermits and wandering thinkers in China, ascetics in India, philosophers in Greece, prophets in Israel may be grouped together, greatly as they differ in faith, ideas, and inner attitude. Man opposed his own inwardness to the whole world. He discovered in himself the primal source, by virtue of which he might rise above himself and the world.
(skip) renaissances. True, there have been great new spiritual creations but they have been inspired by ideas acquired in the axial age. (skip)
But today we are living in the era of the most terrible catastrophes. It seems as though everything that had been transmitted to us were being melted down, and yet there is no convincing sigh that a new edifice is in the making.
Being is revealed in man through his dealings with other men.
When in our isolation we see our lives seeping away as a mere succession of moments, tossed meaninglessly about by accidents and overwhelmed events; when we contemplate a history that seems to be at the end, leaving only chaos behind it, then we are impelled to raise ourselves above history.
Yet we must remain aware of our epoch and our situation. (skip) We must not adjust our potentialities to the low level of our age, not subordinate ourselves to our epoch, but attempt, by elucidating the age, to arrive at the point where we can live out of our primal source.
(skip) By making history our own, we cast an anchor through history into eternity.
An irresponsible playing with contradictions permits such a man to take any position he finds convenient. He is versed in all methods but adheres strictly to none. (skip) No authentic discussion with him is possible but only a talking back and forth about a wide variety of "interesting" things.
(skip)
We drift along, without desire to do or to be anything in particular. We do what is asked of us or what seems appropriate. Genuine emotion is absurd. We are helpful in our everyday dealings with men.
No horizon, so distance, neither past nor future sustain this life which expects nothing and lives only here and now.
let us be master of our thoughts;
(skip)
let us acquire the power to learn from all the past by making it our own; let us listen from our contemporaries and remain open to all possibilities;
let each of us as an individual immerse himself in his own historicity, in his origin, in what he has done; let him posses himself of what he was, of what he has become, and of what has been given to him;
let us not to cease to grow through our own historicity into the historicity of man as a whole and thus make ourselves into citizens of the world.
(skip) only by rising from the chains that bind us to our emotions, not by destroying them do we come to ourselves. (skip) Then we shall suffer without complaining, despair without succumbing; we shall be shake but not overturned, for the inner independence that grows up in us will sustain us.
by repetition we must gain depth.
The desire to lead a philosophical life springs from the darkness in which the individual finds himself, from his sense of forlornness when he stares without love into the void, from his self-forgetfulness when he feels that he is being consumed by the busy-ness of the world, when he suddenly wakes up in terror and asks himself: What am I, what am I failing to do, what should I do?
(skip) it may even lead a man to feel that he is part of the machine, interchangeably shunted in here and there, and when left free, to feel that he is nothing and can do nothing with himself. (skip)
He must snatch himself out of it if he is not to lose himself to the world, to habits, to thoughtless banalities, to the beaten track.
What I gain for myself alone in reflection would - if it were all - be as nothing gained.
(skip) The truth begins with two.
Consequently philosophy demands: seek constant communication, risk it without reserve, renounce the defiant self-assertion which forces itself upon you in ever new disguises, live in the hope that in our very renunciation you will in some incalculable way be given back to yourself.
To philosophize is then at once to learn how to live and to how how to die.
(skip)
If to philosophize is to learn how to die, then we must learn how to die in order to lead a good life. To learn to live and learn how to die are one and the same thing.
Meditation teaches us the power of thought.
Thought is the beginning of human existence.
Our states of being are only manifestations of existential striving or failure. It lies in our very nature to be on the way.
(skip)
The ascent of philosophical life is the ascent of the individual man.
Having oriented himself on secure dry land - through realistic observation, through the special sciences, through logic and methodology - the philosopher at the limits of this land, explores the world of ideas over tranquil paths. And now like a butterfly he flutters over the ocean shore, out over the water; he spies a ship in which he would like to go on a voyage of discovery, to seek out the one thing which as transcendence is present in his existence. He peers after the ship - the method of philosophical thoughts and philosophical life - the ship which he sees and yet can never fully reach; and he struggles to reach it, sometimes strangely staggering and reeling.
We are creatures of this sort, and we are lost if we relinquish our orientation to the dry land. But we are not content to remain there. That is why our flutterings are so uncertain and perhaps so absurd to those who sit secure and content on dry land, and are intelligible only to those who have seized by the same unrest. For them the world is a point of departure for that flight upon which everything depends, which each man must venture on his own though in common with other men, and which can never become the object of any doctrine.
The churches are for all, philosophy for individuals. (skip) Philosophy is an expression of a realm of minds linked with one another through all people and ages; it is represented by no institution which excludes and welcomes.
Bruno, Descartes, Spinoza were solitary thinkers, without any institution behind them, seeking the truth for its own sake;
For philosophy is essentially concerned with the present. We have only one reality, and that is here and now. What we miss by our evasions will never return, but if we squander ourselves, then too we lose being. Each day is precious: a moment is everything.
We are remiss in our task if you lose ourselves in the past or future. Only through present reality can we gain access to the timeless: only in apprehending time can we attain to that sphere where all time is extinguished.
Even Greeks, to be sure, conceived of science as methodical, cogently certain, and universally valid knowledge. (skip)
To modern science nothing is indifferent. (skip) There is nothing that can evade it. Nothing must be hidden or passed alone in silence; nothing must remain a mystery.
Today neither theology nor philosophy creates a whole.
we are always on our way to a solution. And in this history helps us. Independent thinking does not spring from the void. What we think must have roots in reality.
And the very essence of philosophical thought is openness to the truth as a whole, not to barren, abstract truth but to truth in the diversity of its supreme realizations.
- 한국에서 읽은 '철학입문'을 다시 영어로 읽음. 언어에 따라 느껴지는 울림은 약간은 다른 듯 하지만 와 닿는 부분은 결국 같은 구절들이다.
Jaspers의 철학은 Nietzsche나 Sartre처럼 참신한 생각의 벌침을 맞는 것처럼 느껴지는 것이 아니라 너무도 자명한 삶의 본질적 부분이나 일상의 삶에서 간과되고 있는 부분을 잘 보여주고 일깨워 준다. 철학은 한 사람의 생각에서 시작되어 철학적 자세로 발전되고 다른 사람과의 관계에서 그 결실을 가지는 것, 道上의 철학. 결과가 아니라 과정으로서 인간의 삶을 시간과 역사속에서 빛을 비추어 주는 것. 이러한 철학적 삶으로의 비약이 현실을 부정하는 것이 아니라 현실에 단단히 뿌리를 내리고 비상과 항해를 꿈꾸고 계획하고 실천하는 것. '인간은 자기 자신이 되는 것이다.'라는 그의 말에 그의 생각이 응축되어 있는 것 같다. 그는 모든 것을 포용하면서도 치우치지 않으며 인간 존재에 대한 절대적 긍정을 가지고 살아나가는 것을 가르친다. 무엇보다도 불안정한 각박한 현대를 살아가는 데 필요한 가치인 듯.
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