Truth and Reality. The last two lectures deal with truth and reality. Both concepts must be viewed against the background of the encompassing and its modes with especial attention to Existenz and transcendence. Here only a few points can be made:
1. Truth is not a simple idea. For Jaspers the term ‘truth’has a special meaning within each mode of the encompassing. At the level of existence truth is what works, what leads to the satisfaction of our vital needs and in- terests. For consciousness in general truth is a function of rational tests and methods, and is universal and compelling for all. At the level of spirit the truth of an idea is its power to establish and to secure spiritual totalities. Finally, the truth of Existenz is unique, particular and historic. It makes no claim at all to universality and objectivity, but because it is the basis of Existenz, the truth by which one lives, so to speak, it is absolute for the Existenz who accepts it. Here truth is a function of faith or commitment. It is Kierkegaard's idea of truth as subjectivity.
2. In spite of the fragmentation of truth into the truths within the modes of the encompassing and the truth of Existenz into the pluralities of Existenzen, there is a sense in which truth is one: the truth of being itself. But this one truth is only an ideal; it is never realized. Jaspers sees each authentic truth at the other levels as a symbol which points to the one truth which binds everything together and which yet is inaccessible, for every actual truth is an historic achievement in a concrete situation. Moreover, the truth of Existenz springs from the freedom and creativity of each Existenz. For Jaspers the one truth of being remains a matter of existential faith which he takes to be the presupposition of all thought and action. But since nothing definite is or can be said about this truth, it remains, for the most part, an organic part of Jaspers'own philosophical commitment. Whether it is only this, or, as Jaspers insists, necessary to philosophy is a question the reader may try to answer as he reads and reflects.
3. Corresponding to the subject-object structure of awareness, especially in the relation between Existenz and transcendence, are forms of truth which Jaspers calls exception and authority. He takes these terms from Kierkegaard. The truth of each primordial, free and creative Existenz is an exception in relation to universal truth. No universal truth or historical tradition encloses Existenz. It breaks out of all objectivities and demands the right to establish its own truth creatively. One is reminded of Nietzsche's superman transvaluing all given values and truths and establishing values and truths of his own as he comes to realize his creative possibilities–or of Kierkegaard's knight of faith, whose relation to the absolute allows him to suspend the judgments of objective ethics. The exception demands recognition as an exception, not on the basis of any arbitrary will-to-power, but in the interest of the truth of transcendence which evades objectification even while it permeates all the other modes. The exception is thus the servant of transcendence, or, as Jaspers says, the universal. His very life is testimony to the finite and limited character of all knowledge and practical arrangements. He preserves the freedom of man and the transcendence of being in his exceptional status.
If the exception exhausted the idea of truth, there would be a danger of its degenerating into mere willfulness. So Jaspers pairs it with another form of truth which he calls authority. Authority is based upon transcendence. Because all appearances at all the modes of the encompassing are symbols of transcendence, they have authority for men. An example of authority is the cultural tradition in which every person lives and matures. Without this tradition he would be nothing but an aggregate of purely biological and psychological drives. His tradition gives him substance and form—in short his human being. But at the same time this tradition is limited; it is historical, partial and only one among many traditions. It contains possibilities which Existenz is free to realize and tendencies it must resist. But when the exception resists authority, it should be done in a spirit of fear and trem- bling (to use Kierkegaard's terms) or in a spirit of seriousness and respect for authority (after the manner of Socrates in the Apology and Crito). There is no final resolution of the opposition between exception and authority. Creative life itself is the dialectical process of their interplay and history is the outcome of this interplay. Because the creative process is performed by concrete Existenzen, its results can not be foreseen, nor can techniques be developed to control it.
4. Jaspers develops a concept of reason at the end of the lecture on truth. Following Kant, he carefully distinguishes reason from the understanding. The latter, it turns out, is precisely identical with consciousness-in-general. The domain of the understanding is the domain of objective, scientific, compelling knowledge. It is directed towards determinate objects and thinks about them discursively in terms of testable concepts.
Reason, on the other hand, seems to be a motive within Existenz. Jaspers speaks of it as will—a will to unity and a will to communication. Reason not only respects but actively seeks out what is foreign to it in order to communicate with it and to project an encompassing unity which includes everything and lets nothing sink into oblivion. It seeks to go beyond all limits, all separations, all animosities, to present a total picture of being itself. But there is no total picture. There is no way of subsuming all the modes of the encompassing, all historical periods and traditions, all Existenzen and their particular truths and values into one harmonious whole. There is only the will to communicate with everyone and everything; there is only the spirit of honesty and openness. There is only a posture of reason, or an atmosphere of reason, based upon a faith in transcendence and the unity of all things in it. Reason is the basis of Jaspers'doctrine of the encompassing. As a frame of mind or existential attitude which is aware of the horizonal character of all our thought and action, it continually upsets the putatively complete pictures and theories that claim to be adequate analyses of all reality and presses on to further unity. It is a vision of the one transcendent reality beyond all finite interpretation that emerges from the self-awareness of Existenz in the presence of transcendence. Throughout history reason has been most adequately manifested in philosophy, which Jaspers calls “one great hymn to reason.” But by making claims to absolute truth, philosophy has also corrupted reason into an intellectual grasp of objects. For Jaspers everything depends upon our preserving the sense of reason as a radical openness, a binding force and a total will to communication.
5. The final point to note is Jaspers'idea of reality, with which he deals in his last lecture. As he uses the term, reality is identical with being-itself beyond all its finite appearances. He develops the concept by means of three examples. Reality is being beyond all possibility, it is historicity and it is unity. Reality so conceived is reached by an act of transcending thought (reason) in which one leaps out of the realm of the finite and stands before being itself. Only in this union is there any final rest and peace.
In one sense, of course, there is no union with being, pure and simple. Jaspers is not a mystic. Access to being can be had only through the world. Only as one participates in the levels of existence, consciousness in general and spirit in an attitude of reason, can one interpret his historical situation and his daily task as appearances of being, his acts of knowing as revelations of being, and his spiritual creations as its symbols. All these things become ciphers of ultimate reality which must be interpreted by each Existenz. Although nothing is a cipher by any natural right or special property, everything can be seen as a cipher pointing to being itself. Philosophizing is the process of allowing all things to open themselves to being and become its symbols.
Reality can be grasped only historically in terms of particular symbols. Hence there can be no adequate interpretation of it. Unlike religion, which makes transcendence into a supernatural determinate object, philosophizing brings all things into the domain of reason and regards them as transparent ciphers pointing to being. Because in philosophizing each individual recognizes his own truth as a mere cipher, he is able to recognize and respect the truths of other Existenzen and historical traditions. They are ciphers, also. Everything is united in the One. When this state of mind is reached, an attitude emerges which Jaspers in another place calls absolute