Volume 14, No 2, Fall 2019 ISSN 1932-1066 Jaspers on Death Kiki Berk Southern New Hampshire University [email protected] Abstract: This essay offers an analytic engagement with Karl Jaspers' philosophy of death. One of the central ideas in Jaspers' philosophy of death is that the way in which one confronts one's mortality and responds to the existential Angst it generates has profound existential significance. Particularly, Jaspers holds that one can achieve genuine authenticity only by facing up to one's mortality and by confronting it with courage. This essay situates Jaspers' philosophy of death within the current analytic philosophy of death and presents Jaspers' answers to its main questions including whether death is bad, whether one should fear death, whether death can be survived, and whether immortality is desirable. Keywords: Jaspers, Karl; death; mortality; Angst; authenticity; philosophy of death; analytic existentialism. Death has become a popular topic in contemporary The Existential Significance of Death analytic philosophy. Analytic existentialism addresses Viewed Analytically questions such as what happens at the time of death, whether death is bad for the one who dies, whether we In a nutshell, Jaspers' philosophy of death can be ought to fear death, and whether it is rational to want to understood as follows: What makes death existentially live forever. Unfortunately, this literature rarely engages significant is not the fact that one must die but rather the work of traditional existentialist philosophers such the confrontation with mortality that it generates. This as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, confrontation gives rise to existential Angst, and it is Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers. The main reason precisely one's response to such Angst that determines for this lack of engagement is that analytic philosophers whether one can come to realize one's full potential. perceive the writings of these Continental philosophers Simple avoidance, which can take on a variety of as being obscure. This essay is an attempt to remedy different forms, is the usual response to existential this lack of engagement by analyzing from an analytic Angst. Nonetheless, avoiding such Angst comes at a perspective Jaspers' philosophy of death, as set forth in high price, since it is only by facing up to death with the second volume of his Philosophy,1 and by connecting courage that one is able to live authentically. Death, it to corresponding debates in analytic existentialism. then, is a test, and facing up to and accepting one's own Drawing upon these connections, I attempt to enrich mortality provides an opportunity to become true to the debate in analytic existentialism by introducing oneself and to others. Jaspers' ideas on death. In her analysis of Jaspers' concept of death, Filiz Peach observes that there is a sense in which death is 1 Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, Volume 2, transl. E. B. Ashton, existentially significant and another sense in which it Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971. [Henceforth cited as P2] Kiki Berk, "Jaspers on Death," Existenz 14/2 (2019), 32-38 First posted 11-29-2020 Jaspers on Death 33 is not.2 For the objective self, death is not existentially reality."4 When seen in this way, death is outside of significant. For the sake of clarity, "objective self" is human experience and, as such, does not have any here used with reference to Jaspers' notion of Dasein, or existential or subjective significance. Sartre writes to this "existence," or "mere existence," or "empirical existence," effect: "Since death is always beyond my subjectivity, according to which the self is understood as a concrete there is no place for it in my subjectivity" (BN 548). In physical and sociological human being. Nonetheless, Being and Nothingness, Sartre argues strongly (though the objective self's finitude gives rise to what Jaspers not explicitly) against Martin Heidegger's view that calls "boundary situations." Peach describes these as death is existentially significant. However, for Jaspers, "unclear and oppressive, situations that one cannot there is more to the story, and, as is shown below, his modify" (DDE 42). As a boundary situation, death view is ultimately much closer to Heidegger's than it is brings about existential significance for the existential to Sartre's. self. I shall use "existential self" when referring to For Jaspers, a human person does not just exist as Jaspers' notion of Existenz, or "Self-Being," or, in Peach's an objective self, but is also potentially an existential words, the "ineffable inner core of the individual," which self. Being opposed to the objective self, the existential is "the non-empirical and non-objective dimension self is infinite but aware of the objective self's finitude. of the human being" (DDE 35). Peach points out that When confronted with death (one's own or somebody "Jaspers often refers to Existenz as 'possible Existenz'" else's), a boundary situation can occur. Occasionally (DDE 36), thereby making a distinction between a translated as "limit situations," or "ultimate situations," momentary experience of Existenz and one's progressive boundary situations play an important role in Jaspers' achievement of authentic selfhood. early philosophy and are best understood as existential For the objective self, death is an objective and crises. For example, Ronny Miron and Chris Thornhill general fact. All humans are going to die, and death is explain: the end of one's phenomenal, practical existence in the Limit situations are moments, usually accompanied world. Finitude is a fundamental feature of the objective by experiences of dread, guilt or acute anxiety, in self: every single human person is a finite biological which the human mind confronts the restrictions being with a limited lifespan. When merely taken and pathological narrowness of its existing forms, as being an objective limit to one's existence, death is and allows itself to abandon the securities of its not existentially significant. After all, the objective limitedness, and so to enter new realm of self- self arguably does not experience its own death and, consciousness.5 instead, experiences itself as being timeless. Sigmund Expanding upon Adolph Lichtigfeld's interpretation Freud goes so far as to claim: that a boundary situation "succeeds in awakening the We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; whenever individual self to its existential content," Peach adds we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as that boundary situations "can also be seen as the crises spectators. The school of psychoanalysis could thus in human existence in which they appear as internal assert that at bottom no one believes in his own death, contradictions" (DDE 42). I think that the idea of an which amounts to saying: in the unconscious every one existential crisis maps quite well onto Jaspers' concept of us is convinced of his immortality.3 of a boundary situation. In this account, death is simply the point in time Jaspers distinguishes four specific boundary when the curtain drops, and experience stops. This situations: suffering, guilt, struggle, and death. When is reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre's view when he being confronted with one's own mortality, and by describes death as being "the final boundary of human life...a door opening upon the nothingness of human- 4 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, transl. Hazel E. Barnes, 2 Filiz Peach, Death, "Deathlessness" and Existenz in New York, NY: Philosophical Library 1958, p. 532. Karl Jaspers' Philosophy, Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh [Henceforth cited as BN]. University Press, 2008. [Henceforth cited as DDE] 5 Chris Thornhill and Ronny Miron, "Karl Jaspers," 3 Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death, New The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive (Spring York, NY: Moffat, Yard and Company 1918, p. 41. 2020 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato. Hathi Trust online https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd. stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/jaspers/ ah6r55. (last accessed 6-28-2020). Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts 34 Kiki Berk becoming fully aware of one's own future death, despair are commonly associated with this state. Facing existential Angst manifests itself. The existential up to existential Angst gradually changes the focus from significance of this experience, that is, the existential youthful illusions of courageous conquest to realistic crisis that mortality evokes, consists in the unique assessments of the inevitability of the soon-to-come opportunity it provides: facing up to it with courage by event, regardless of whether or not one tries to avoid it. accepting that each breath taken is one fewer breath to Jaspers' discussion of the ways of avoiding existential take and, by grasping the illusory permanence of youth Angst provides great insight into Jaspers' idea as to how and health, can lead to the realization of authenticity one ought not to address mortality. and selfhood. These reflections on death make the One way to avoid existential Angst consists in similarities between Jaspers and Heidegger apparent: immersing oneself in the objective self. This means that Heidegger, too, thinks that being-toward-death enables one clings entirely to worldly phenomena and takes one to live authentically. them as being endless and absolute instead of being Jaspers does not say much more about how, finite, transitory, and insignificant. In other words, the exactly, one copes with an existential crisis with courage focus is fully on worldly pleasures and activities. "I lose or what it entails to achieve authenticity and selfhood. myself in appearance" (P2 196), as Jaspers puts it; and Nonetheless, Peach offers the following insight: this, he argues leads to a hunger for life, jealousy, pride, Jaspers holds that since one cannot escape from death, ambition, and fear. one should face up to it with dignity, accept it and Another way to avoid existential Angst is the come to terms with it, instead of living with the fear of opposite of the previous one: by trying to ignore the it.