Karl Jaspers Quotes on Truth
Karl Jaspers’s Philosophy (Philosophie, three volumes, 1932) and the late Reason and Existenz (1935) gave twentieth-century German existential philosophy one of its most influential analyses of the situated character of philosophical truth. The central thesis is that genuine philosophical truth is not the impersonal-objective truth the natural sciences produce but the truth that an existing self attains in the limit-situations (Grenzsituationen) of suffering, struggle, guilt, and death — with the corresponding distinction between the empirical objectivity of scientific truth, the rational coherence of philosophical Weltanschauung, and the existential truth of authentic personal commitment supplying the principal categorial frame of Jaspers’s mature philosophy. The framework, developed alongside Jaspers’s parallel work on the philosophy of religion and the medical-psychiatric origins of his philosophical career, shaped subsequent German existentialism and the broader twentieth-century engagement with the limits of objectivist philosophical method.
Quotes
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Attributed to Karl Jaspers:
“Truth begins with two.”
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Attributed to Karl Jaspers:
“Communication is the unique value of philosophical life.”
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Attributed to Karl Jaspers:
“Whoever offers himself as an arbiter of aesthetic matters takes a great risk.”
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“On Truth (1948), Pt 2, Ch. 3, II, B, 3, b)”
The interlacedness of the two heterogeneous origins [Remark: This refers to the origins of governance: (1) necessity to work cooperatively, (2) the fight between man and man] prevails as the fundamental characteristic of governance. Therefore even any true community, being successful somewhere between boundaries for a common purpose, elsewhere becomes in theory a means for misleading, used to inte -
“The Greek word for philosopher ( philosophos ) connotes a distinction from sophos . It signifies the lover of wisdom (knowledge) as distinguished from him who considers himself wise in the possession of knowledge . This meaning of the word still endures: the essence of philosophy is not the possession of the truth but the search for truth. … Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers , and every answer becomes a new question.”
Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy (1951) as translated by Ralph Mannheim , Ch. 1, What is Philosophy?, p. 12 | Variant translation: It is the search for the truth , not possession of the truth which is the way of philosophy. Its questions are more relevant than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question. -
“Variant translation: It is the search for the truth , not possession of the truth which is the way of philosophy. Its questions are more relevant than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question.”
The Greek word for philosopher ( philosophos ) connotes a distinction from sophos . It signifies the lover of wisdom (knowledge) as distinguished from him who considers himself wise in the possession of knowledge . This meaning of the word still endures: the essence of philosophy is not the possession of the truth but the search for truth. … Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are mor -
“When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself.”
Man in the Modern Age(1933) -
“In old days the plastic arts, music, and poesy were so germane to man in his totality that his Transcendence plainly manifest in them. ... What is to-day obvious to all is a decay in the essence of art. ... the opposition to man's true nature as man.”
Man in the Modern Age(1933)