Karl Jaspers, . German psychiatrist, philosopher, and theologian. A founder of modern existentialism, he was concerned with human reactions to extreme situations. His works include Man and the Modern Age (1931) and Philosophy (1932).
Philosophy carries out the quest for reality by means of thinking as inner action...A little philosophy leads away from reality, but complete philosophy leads back to it. Superficial philosophy...may fritter itself away in endless problems, in historical knowledge of school doctrines, in bright ideas, in see-sawing intellectual deliberations---and lose reality in the process. Complete philosophy, however, is master of these possibilities. It is essentially the concentration whereby man becomes himself by sharing in reality.
Philosophy must even leave the possibility of full communication in uncertainty, though it lives by faith in communication and stakes everything on communication. We can believe in it but not know it. To believe that we possess it is to have lost it.
By technically applying my knowledge I can act outwardly but nonknowledge makes possible an inner action by which I transform myself. This is another and deeper kind of thought; it is not detached from being and oriented toward an object but is a process of my innermost self, in which though and being become identical. Measured by outward, technical power, this thought of inner action is as nothing, it is no applied knowledge that can be possessed, it cannot be fashioned according to plan and purpose; it is an authentic illumination and growth into being.
Any philosopher who is not trained in a scientific discipline and who fails to keep his scientific interests constantly alive will inevitably bungle and stumble and mistake uncritical rough drafts for definitive knowledge. Unless an idea is submitted to the coldly dispassionate test of scientific inquiry, it is rapidly consumed in the fire of emotions and passions, or else it withers into a dry and narrow fanaticism . . . rejecting superstitious belief in science as well as contempt of science, philosophy grants its unconditional recognition to modern science.
Today independence seems to be silently disappearing beneath the inundation of all life by the typical, the habitual, the unquestioned commonplace.
The philosopher lives, as if it were, in a hidden, non-objective community to which every philosophizing person secretly longs to be admitted.
