There are three immanent modes of the subject-object relationship, their names deriving, as stated previously, from the subject side of the relation. Man is first an organic being who is there, who exists in a practical lifeworld in space and time. He has instincts, needs, and drives; he acts so as to satisfy them. The objects he is related to at this level are the objects of his practical concern and they constitute the world of ordinary experience. Jaspers calls this mode “Dasein” Wherever Jaspers uses the term “Dasein” I have translated it by the English word “existence,” because Dasein is the ordinary German word for existence. Some translators have used “being-there,” pointing out that it is a transliteration of Da-sein. But “being-there” is not an ordinary English word; it has the aura of a technical term, which in Jaspers it is not. Earle translated it as “empirical existence” in Reason and Existenz. This practice raises expectations of another kind of existence—perhaps nonempirical existence—which again is not the case for Jaspers. Besides, Jaspers generally uses the word without any adjectives.
Jaspers'use of Dasein must also be distinguished from Heidegger's. In Being and Time, Heidegger does use Dasein as a technical term. It is the name for human existence and is defined by Heidegger's existential categories such as care, freedom, historicity, fallenness, and so forth. Hence, it includes what Jaspers uses two words to express: existence in the ordinary sense and Existenz, which is a technical term in Jaspers'philosophy and which will be explained presently.
The second immanent mode of subjectivity is consciousness in general, or abstract rational and conceptual understanding. The world man knows at this level is not the world of ordinary experience. It is the world as represented in the sciences. The concepts and method employed by consciousness in general are public and verifiable, and its knowledge is universal and objective. This abstract level is common to all men, and is unique to no one. Hence, Jaspers says that at this level men are point-consciousnesses and interchangeable units.
The third immanent level is spirit. Borrowing the term from Hegel and the subsequent German idealist tradition, Jaspers often talks of spirit as a kind of synthesis of existence and abstract consciousness in general. Like existence, it is concrete and historical. Like consciousness in general, it is universal. It is, then, a concrete universal which Jaspers calls “idea.” As men participate in this concrete universal, they are bound together into historic unities. Examples of such unities are: the nation, a church or religion, a cultural tradition, professional organizations, etc. Each of these is formed by an idea. When viewed under the idea of spirit, men are not considered as individuals, but as members of totalities. One can get a sense of the objective pole of this level by reflecting on the ‘worlds’of politics, art, or science.
Existence, consciousness in general, and spirit—and the worlds corresponding to them—comprise the immanent modes of the encompassing. But they do not exhaust it. There are in addition the transcendent modes of Existenz and Transcendence. The centrality of these two modes, and especially of Existenz, constitutes the distinctive character of contemporary existential philosophy as the present form of the perennial philosophy. Emphasis upon them is a protest against the objectifying and dehumanizing tendencies in modern thought (philosophical as well as scientific) and against our increasingly technological and rationalized culture. The nature of these two modes and the relation between them are not very clear. But the following interpretation comes close to what Jaspers intends.
Existenz cannot be described even in a general way as the immanent modes can. Because it is a possibility in all men, it can only be pointed to or appealed to. But two features of it stand out. First, it is absolutely unique. It is each individual human being as a particular, concrete historical being in so far as he is authentic. In this sense Jaspers uses Existenz to refer to individual persons. He speaks of Existenz as doing or willing something. Secondly, Existenz is the ultimate source or ground of each individual self. In this latter capacity, it is best thought of as a principle of freedom, creativity, or pure spontaneity. It does not refer to an individual, but to a quality of life-authentic existence—in which individuals may or may not participate. In this sense Existenz is a universal structure, and Jaspers describes it by means of such concepts as historicity, freedom, resoluteness, and so on. In addition, he almost always refers to it as “possible Existenz” rather than as an actuality, because in principle it can never be fully actualized. Every actualization of Existenz results in some concrete and determinate creation, that is, some objectification of itself. But Existenz remains an origin (Ursprung), a limitless field of possibility. Consequently, man as Existenz completely transcends all that he is, knows or does. Existenz is the primordial, spontaneous depth of each self. Never given, it must be actualized by each person.
Yet there are no direct or immediate manifestations of Existenz. All knowledge and action must occur in the world in one or more of the three immanent modes. So Existenz seems to be a principle of spontaneity or creativity within them. It is man as Existenz who continually breaks out of established patterns to create new historical organizations at the level of existence, new knowledge and understanding at the level of consciousness in general, and new ideas in the realm of the spirit, as in morals, art, religion.
In view of these considerations, one can see that “Existenz” is a technical term in Jaspers'philosophy. It acquires its meaning from the ways Jaspers uses it and the things he says about it. Because the ordinary English word “existence” would be a misleading translation of Existenz, I have incorporated this German term in the translation and have treated it as an English word.
Corresponding to Existenz is transcendence. Transcendence is the representation of being itself beyond all objectivity. The world is an immanent reflection of it. Thus, transcendence expresses the dual feature that within any level of the world one never fully articulates all possibilities, and that beyond objective determination is a background or horizon of being itself to which Existenz is related. Because transcendence is being-itself, Jaspers says that Existenz is aware of itself as given to itself by transcendence. If there were no transcendence, if the world were all there were to being, Existenz would not be possible. Man would be a mundane being, describ-able in the concepts of the various immanent modes of the encompassing.
A sense of Existenz and transcendence develops in our experience of the great philosophers, artists and scientists. In their systems of thought and representations one senses something more than thought, some source of which their creations are symbols or, as Jaspers says, ciphers. Everything and anything can be a cipher of transcendence. It has only to be viewed in the correct way, and the correct way is from the viewpoint of Existenz and its freedom.
Neither Existenz nor transcendence are objects. They are sources from which everything else springs. But to talk about them is to bring them within the domain of consciousness and its subject-object structure. By necessity, then, we make objects out of them. Hence, talking about them is always liable to misunderstanding: One may take the propositions in their literal sense rather than as pointing to the indeterminate source. One may claim to have objective knowledge about man and being. But what Jaspers is aiming at is an inner awareness of Existenz and its relation to transcendence. Consequently, one must read Jaspers in such a way as to perform the inner action of transcending thought along with him. Until one takes his sentences and concepts as signa, or pointers, Jaspers'philosophy evades him. Only when it is appropriated inwardly by the reader does it take on its full meaning and become free of misunderstanding which itself is a cipher of transcendence.
Despite the hazard of misunderstanding, one can try to get a grip on Jaspers'philosophy by describing it in terms of traditional classifications. So considered, Jaspers comes out an idealist. Many themes in his philosophizing, but especially the clarification of the immanent modes of the encompassing, suggest the idealist stance. Jaspers lumps the objective pole into one entity called world, but he carefully distinguishes between existence, consciousness in general, and spirit. It