Karl Jaspers 1883 – 1969

Karl Jaspers was a 20th-century German philosopher and psychiatrist, one of the founders of existentialism and a major figure of mid-20th century European thought. His early work General Psychopathology established his reputation in psychiatry and developed a phenomenological method for understanding subjective experience that he later extended into philosophy. His three-volume Philosophy and his later The Origin and Goal of History articulated his account of existence, the limit-situations in which authentic existence is at stake, and the Axial Age in which several of the world's major philosophical and religious traditions emerged independently. He was a friend of Martin Heidegger early in their careers and a sharp post-war critic of Heidegger's Nazi associations. His wife was Jewish and he was forced from his university post by the Nazi regime, after which he wrote The Question of German Guilt addressing collective responsibility for Nazi crimes.

Karl Jaspers was born in 1883 in Oldenburg in northwest Germany. He studied law and then medicine, taking his medical degree at Heidelberg in 1909 and joining the psychiatric clinic there. His habilitation in psychology and the publication of General Psychopathology in 1913 established him as a major figure in the methodology of psychiatry; in 1921 he transferred to a chair in philosophy at Heidelberg.

His mature philosophical work is concentrated in the three-volume Philosophie (1932), Reason and Existenz (1935), and the postwar On Truth (1947) and The Origin and Goal of History (1949), to which must be added the popular The Question of German Guilt (1946). Removed from his chair in 1937 because his wife Gertrud was Jewish, the couple narrowly escaped deportation; in 1948 Jaspers moved permanently to Basel.

His existence-philosophy centers on the boundary situations of death, suffering, struggle, and guilt in which the self is thrown back on its own freedom; on the Encompassing as the horizon within which all objective knowledge appears; and on the axial age, his thesis that the fundamental categories of human thought were forged independently between 800 and 200 BC across Eurasia. He died in Basel in 1969.