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).
If man wants to grasp himself directly, he ceases to understand himself, to know who he is and what he should do.
Man strives more decisively than ever for a certainity that he lacks, for the certainty that there is that which is eternal, that there is a Being through which alone he himself is. If the Deity is, then all hope is possible.
But time and time again it is seen: for us the Deity, if it exists, is only as it appears to us in the world, as it speaks to us in the language of man and the world. It exists for us only in the way in which it assumes concrete shape, which by human measure and thought always to serve to hide it at the same time. Only in ways that man can grasp does the Deity appear.
We inquire after the Being which, with the manifestation of all encountered appearance in object and horizon, yet recedes itself. This Being we call the Encompassing. The Encompassing, then, is that which always makes its presence known, which does not appear itself, but from which everything comes to us.
What must be done in thinking of life is to be served by a philosophizing that discovers truth by retrospection and by anticipation.
Becoming aware of man's being means becoming aware of Being in time as a whole.
