Border situations – death, chance, guilt, and the unreliable nature of the world – point to harm. What should I do faced with this absolute harm, the comprehension of which I cannot avoid if I present everything to myself with honesty? (…) We are always in situations. (...) To summarize: the source of philosophy lies in wonder, doubt, the awareness of being lost. In any case, everything begins with the fact that man is grabbed and shook by something, and in that feeling of being astounded, he always seeks a goal. (...) In other words: man is looking for salvation. Salvation is offered by great universal salvation religions. Their characteristic is an objective warranty of truthfulness and the reality of salvation. Their path leads towards an act of conversion of an individual. Philosophy cannot offer that. Nevertheless, the entire scope of philosophy is overcoming the world, an analogy of salvation.
(Karl Jaspers, 1973: 137-138)
There are people mobilizations and activism, but all this is going in a very destructive way.
(Ноам Чомски, 2021: 137-138)
And, finally, we should not think that a virus will be our doom, we will forge our own.
(Ким Симонсен, 2021: 16)
Introduction
To those who know nothing or very little of the works and constatations of Karl Jaspers, Erich Fromm, and Noam Chomsky, and who may have heard/read some of their quotes, it will seem as though they, at first glance, apparently have nothing in common. Nevertheless, their humanistic philosophical eros, but also their most often pessimistic, dystopian conclusions and apocalyptic predictions are the things that converge them and make them similar, somewhere even identical, and that is primarily due to the fact they essentially start with convergent, and sometimes the same, generally theoretical/philosophical, even ideological, premises. This is comparable besides the fact that their discourses are expressed in different words/languages. The same could be said of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Marx, as the most famous anti-Hegelian philosophers and their different “languages” and styles of writing and expression, but that is, understandably, a theme for the region of history of philosophy. In this essay, we are able to only superficially list, quote, and paraphrase some dimensions and contents, and to maybe interpret and comment on some of their attitudes on the very poor/pathological/suicidal situation in which the contemporary global society is (Hannah Arendt would say “conditio humana”), and which, if it continues to rely on the current principles of growth and development, literally has no chance to survive and live (Honneth, 2007; 2020).
Just to put all dilemmas aside, it is the principles of capitalist/profit political economy as the “ontology of the social being” (Lukacs). Let us not forget that the word principle (lat. principium), in a philosophical vocabulary, means the beginning, starting point, assumption, maxim. A principle is that according to which being, is based on what it develops, and what thought returns to as its foundations and, according to Kant, the mind is the “power of the principle” (Filipović, 1989: 265) (Underlined by – D.S.). Therefore, our constant (re) actualizations of the theories of some philosophers are a kind of permanent re-reading, reminding ourselves of some of their statements, attitudes, and judgments which, neither today nor in the future, do not lose and will not lose their relevance and truthfulness. This is proof that not only is a man constantly found in situations but repeats them in certain historical cycles as words which are the same or similar, i.e., the man repeats the situations of previous generations, and in which the future generations will find themselves, meaning all of us - hic et nunc. This is true regardless of the famous ironic remark by Hegel on the repetition of history, once as tragedy and then as a farce, meaning it contains a great dose of humor, satire, and laughter. However, we must state and acknowledge in a responsible and honest way (as would Jaspers once say, and today Honet) that the current global situation is all but humorous and funny, considering the millions of sacrifices being laid daily at the altar of the technological profit civilization (located primarily in the highly developed post industrial capitalistic countries), which threatens to pull down all other parts of humanity (Honet, 2009). That is why we believe that the most relevant/most precise division of contemporary civilization – among so many others – is that by the theoreticians and analysts who divide it into The West and the Rest (Ferguson, 2012; Busek, 2007; Skalovski, 2019).
If we manage to pique the interest of a potential reader to read and analyze the rich philosophical heritage of these three philosophers, which is very important and useful if we want to precisely/correctly understand the reasons/causality for the deep axiological crisis of the Western society and its hierarchy/value 165 Pannoniana, vol. V, no. I (2021): 163-183 system, we will consider ourselves successful in the primary intent of this paper. It is understood that, in the past decades, a spectrum of followers and free/ creative minds of different philosophical, scientific, and ideological provenance has converged around these thinkers. Regardless, what brings them together in a homologous, ontological way is the exclamative and explicit “diagnosis” by Noam Chomsky, which subsumes them “…if we are dealing with a global society based on these principles, then we are on the way towards mass self-destruction.” (Чомски, 2021: 134; Донев, 2019)
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers is the first we chose for our short analysis. He can also be put on the list of those philosophers who have been unjustly forgotten and who are the source for a spectrum of philosophical ideas and notions for their followers or people simply following their popular successors without any great justification. Simply put, for a number of reasons which are often not philosophical, they were “more popular”. This is the example of Horkheimer as opposed to Adorno and, in this case, Jaspers as opposed to Heidegger and then Sartre. However, this is an entirely different question, and we will not elaborate on it but immediately move to Jaspers as the founder of the contemporary philosophy of existence and its interactivity, complementarity, and interference, among others, with the Marxist philosophy with which it shares similar humanistic values, ideas and “ideals”; This, besides the fact that Jaspers never seriously studied Marx and the Marxists, reducing them to Stalinists which is completely understandable in the times of the absolute domination of Stalinist interpretations and the (post) Stalinist social theory and practice in general. As such, and precisely due to this, the philosophy of Jaspers deserves a (re)actualization which, truth be told, was started by Miladin Životić in the former Yugoslavian space at the beginning of the 1970s, meaning right after the death of Jaspers.
Jaspers is definitely the most encompassing, deep, and heterogeneous in discourse in philosophy when compared to Fromm and Chomsky, which in no way lessens the value and the truth behind the thoughts of the two later theoreticians who never “declared” themselves to be philosophers, and which ultimately does not matter. This is especially important to state when taking into consideration the subtle analyses of “transcendent” referential points of similarities and differences on the relations between philosophy ↔ religion ↔ science and the defense of the autonomy and “dignity” of each of them. This is due to the fact that each of them discovers only a fraction of the truth, meaning that the knowledge it reaches is limited. This is the primary reason why, but also because of the impossibility to summarize, elaborate, and understand all of this in one paper, we will contain ourselves only to that which is the reason he became “popular”. Those are the famous “border situations” that man faces every day in an existential way (as the questions of “life and death”, “to be or not to be”) and which cannot be understood without previously listing the main points of his philosophical anthropology, which is subsumed under the notion of comprehensiveness (Das Umgreifende). (Јосифовски, 2002: 169-170; Batovanja: 2009: 141-150; Životić, 1973: 15-27)
As a consistent holist, Jasper states that philosophy starts with the realization of the science limits. That does not mean the rejection of science and its utmost importance in the cognitive processes, especially if talking about the science of man, only because scientific cognition cannot, on its own, encompass the entire cognition and knowledge of man. For Jaspers, reductionism and the narrowing of sciences are unacceptable, with the pretense to represent themselves as the only possible forms of realizing reality. This reduction brings about a situation in which there is no clear insight into the real place of science in the entirety of human life; the awareness of the real purpose of science is lost, and man loses control over the use of scientific results. Science realizes causal-genetic relationships which exist in the world/reality, but it cannot comprehend the totality and wholeness of being (Totalwissen) due to the fact that the whole is not only a whole of objects, but man is also, as a subject (I-being), included as an inherent part of that whole and the empirical science on the subject is impossible, Jaspers believes. (Џепароски, 1993) The existence of the world is not reality as a whole. Philosophy is not and cannot be a “strict science”, as Husserl would say, and it is not an encyclopaedical summary of scientific knowledge because man is “missing” from it, and without him/her, totality is not wholesome while he/she is “lost” as a “tree in the woods”, which is the most common objection to Hegel’s “anthropology”. Marx would say a man is “alienated”, Lukač that the man is “objectified/reified”, Heidegger and Sartre would say the man is “thrown”, Habermas that he/she is “uncommunicative” and Arendt, Bloch, and other Marxists that what is left to man is “hope” for a better future for the realization of which he/she must necessarily engage, fight and be active, if he/she means to survive, advance, and liberate themselves from the dogmatic chains and stereotypes of all kinds. (Arendt, 2020; Honet, 2009) In other words, where the horizons of science “end”, the horizons of philosophy only “begin”; where science sees problems as definitely “solved”, for philosophy they are only created; the limits to which science arrives and where it falters are the limits from which philosophy only starts and goes on into a comprehensive and spatially and temporally infinite speculative transcendence, Jaspers believes. (Jaspers, 1960: 42-70)
By starting from Kant’s demarcation of thinking about phenomena with our reason and the thinking with our mind on the whole of reality which gives regulatory principles for our practical actions, philosophical thought, Jaspers considers, beings to wonder about the purpose of the whole, the purpose of being which is not turned (only) towards the world of objects but (also) towards the inside of the human being. Only then, Jaspers believes, when reaching the thinking which is turned towards the man and their personal being (I-being), when we reach thought turned towards the sphere of personal experience, only then do we reach being-in-itself (Das Ding an sich), the whole. Only then do we reach thought described in that manner, and only then can we claim that thought is comprehensive (Das Um-greifende). (Životić, 1973: 9-11)
We have previously stated that we will focus more on the notion of comprehensive because, without it, we cannot understand border situations as “limitless”, which is only a new unsolvable contradiction and paradox/dialectic of human existence without which man could not exist nor be open (the notion of Öffenlichkeit/openness, namely, is understood as a freedom of thought and is mentioned from Kant and Marx, all the way to Popper). To be open means to be ready and receptive of ever-new “challenges” and undiscovered possibilities of self-finding, self-cognition, self-fulfillment, self-creation, as acts of self transcending, self-overcoming, self-control, and self-liberation towards the infinite totality of “being comprehensive.” (Jaspers, 1973: 48-59)
Namely, the comprehensive (Das Umgreifende) is the main symbol, “key”, “code” to understand the philosophy of Jaspers; that thinking, that mind, and that being which are one and who, at the same time, set up and surpass existential limits which they set for themselves. (Jaspers, 1960: 42-70)
““The comprehensive” is that thought which liberates the consciousness of all special knowledge, all the knowledge of the objects of the world and rational notions of logic and mathematics, and turns to that point where the subjective and objective are unified in one horizon. That point is - existence. T he totality of reality, comprehensive reality, is that reality created by an unrepeatable human being - existence. Comprehensive thought is identical with the realization of the sense of your own existence; that thought is identical with the realization of existential human possibilities.” (Životić, 1973: 15-16)