Philosophy is not only unable to provide objective theories; it also depends upon and lives at the boundaries of other disciplines. Philosophical understanding consists in part of an appreciation of the difference between philosophy and these other disciplines. In Jaspers'view the two most central to philosophy are science and religion, which are in fact the sources from which philosophizing springs.
Science is essential to philosophy. Without knowledge of science a philosopher has no knowledge of the world. He is, practically, blind. It is no accident that throughout history the greatest philosophers have been familiar with science. Unless it incorporates the scientific method as well as its results, philosophizing becomes mere speculation, reverie, or perhaps the expression of subjective vital interests or desires. Furthermore, Jaspers agrees with the positivists that questions of knowledge and fact are all scientific questions. Only through science do we learn to know the way things are. For this reason philosophy cannot produce any theories of its own. When it tries to become a science by claiming knowledge in its own right, it cuts a ridiculous figure.
If philosophy is not science, neither is science philosophy. Science is a process of thought involving precise and publicly verifiable concepts and methods. It views reality in terms of these constructions. Hence, it has definite limits. When reality is identified with what science alone can know, science itself becomes superstition. It becomes a narrow and unfounded philosophical position which turns everything, including man, into an object. Both being and human existence lose their depth. Philosophizing has the task of pointing out the nature of science and the limits of its application. In doing this, philosophy transcends science and gives evidence of another source from which philosophizing springs. Jaspers calls this source transcendence. One becomes aware of transcendence in the process of thinking beyond the limits of scientific knowledge. In this way Jaspers comes to the realization that both the thinker and reality are more than what can be known about them in objective terms. No known object is being itself.
Although Jaspers often claims that science is essential to philosophy, it is also true that the methods and doctrines of science do not enter into the content of his philosophy in any interesting or significant ways, as they do in Descartes, Leibnitz or Kant. Knowledge of science, according to Jaspers, keeps a philosopher from claiming to have factual and objective knowledge. But beyond this, there is little that science, either by its method or its results, contributes to philosophy. One must know science, it seems, in order to learn how not to philosophize.
Religion is the other source from which philosophizing springs. Through religion men have always given expression both to their own transcendence and to the transcendence of being beyond the natural world. Reality is more than our objective knowledge reveals; it transcends all the immanent levels of conceptual thought, which, in turn, may be viewed as appearances of this transcendence. Man, conceived in religious terms, is also more than a natural being. He is more than his objective knowledge conceives him to be. Because it considers man in relation to God and beyond all the conceptions and exigencies of life, thought and society, religion preserves man's transcendence, dignity and freedom. For this reason, philosophizing affirms religion and sees in it a source of its own idea of transcendence. Without the sense of the transcendence of being conveyed by religion, philosophy itself withers and dies. Reality, collapsing into its immanent modes, consists only of determinate natural objects acting in accordance with objective laws.
Even though philosophy is closely attached to religion, there is a sense in which it is as much opposed to religion as it is to absolutizing science. The chief defect of religion lies in its habit of objectifying transcendence in particular- istic symbols which are claimed to be authoritative for all men. Each religion recognizes as adequate only its own representation of transcendence; it sets forth one ideal of humanity, one set of truths and rules for action, to which all men must conform. In this process of objectifying what lies beyond all objectivity, religion destroys human freedom and transcendence just as science does when its objective conceptions of reality are absolutized into a philosophical dogma.
Philosophy, then, is different from both science and religion and yet it is bound to both. From science it gains critical, factual and objective knowledge. From religion it receives the idea of transcendence, although in a determinate and hence unacceptable form. In the process of coming to an awareness of the human situation and its authentic possibilities, however, philosophy must point out the defects and limits of both disciplines. Living thus at the boundaries of knowledge and religious faith, philosophy grasps the truth of being itself lying beyond those boundaries but coming to expression only within them.
The Encompassing. The basic idea in Jaspers'philosophy is that of the encompassing (das Umgreifende ). It is Jaspers'name for the form of our awareness of being which underlies all our scientific and common-sense knowledge and which is given expression in the myths and rituals of religion. But it can never become an object. Awareness of the encompassing is achieved by reflection upon our situation. As we reflect, we realize that all objects we are aware of, including religious ones, are determinate beings situated in a larger, encompassing context or horizon. We can enlarge the extent of our knowledge, but we can never escape the fact that it is fragmentary and only indefinitely extendable. It has limits. We are always within a horizon. The realization that we cannot make the whole of reality into an object is our awareness of the encompassing horizon of being in which all objects of awareness appear. Thus, the encompassing is a term that does not refer to any particular thing. Instead, it expresses a felt quality of all our experience and thought.
Jaspers discusses the encompassing in terms of what he calls its ‘modes.’To see what these are and how he derives them, one must understand something about his intentional view of consciousness. According to this view, consciousness is always awareness of something. Every act of awareness is therefore analyzable according to a model in which a subject is related to an object. The relationship may be of many kinds: sensory awareness, conceptual thought, feeling, emotion, action, and so on, each susceptible to an indefinite number of possible variations. The general relation of subject to object, therefore, is the horizon or encompassing background of all awareness, and the particular ways that a subject may be related to an object can be called modes of this encompassing. The analysis of the encompassing is thus an elucidation of the main ways a subject is related to an object. Because this subject-object relation is the basic model, the main modes of the encompassing are two: the encompassing that we are (the subject) and the encompassing that being itself is (the object). An analysis of subjectivity provides Jaspers with three main divisions of these modes: existence (Dasein), consciousness-in-general, and spirit. We shall return to these presently.
In addition, corresponding to the scientific-immanent and religious-transcendent levels of awareness, Jaspers identifies two other basic divisions of the encompassing. Remembering that the general structure is that of the subject-object relation, we get a transcendent mode of subjectivity (Existenz) and of objectivity (Transcendence.)
We can represent Jaspers'analysis of the encompassing in the following diagram:
THE ENCOMPASSING
The idea of the encompassing is complicated by the fact that each of its modes is also an encompassing, that is, an infinite and inexhaustible dimension. Within each of these levels we must distinguish between determinate subject-object relations and the indefinite background of possible relations. For example, at the level of existence men establish particular techniques for interacting with each other and with their environment in order to satisfy their desires and interests. But existence is not exhausted by a description of these techniques. It transcends them, for it is a creative source of new techniques. The same is true of all the other modes. Hence, at each level we never succeed in