Product Description

Throughout his life, German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) recorded his experiences and reflections in diaries and correspondence. This comprehensive biography is the first to explore these extensive and candid private writings to illuminate not only Jaspers' life and relationships but also the ideas he proposed in Way to Wisdom, The Question of German Guilt, and many other published works. Suzanne Kirkbright provides a sensitive and intimate portrait of the philosopher whose work on truth, personal integrity, and the capacity for communication contrasted acutely with the erosion of such values in Germany in his lifetime. She describes how Jaspers' Jewish wife Gertrud influenced his thinking, the loss in 1937 of his professorship at Heidelberg University, and his relationship with such celebrated colleagues as Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Kirkbright examines the unshakeable ethical content of Jaspers' philosophy and demonstrates his unique and scrupulous personal adherence to the philosophical principles he espoused.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #693195 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

Martin Jay, London Review of Books, June 8 2006
'The appearance of a new Life is a welcome event. ... Kirkbright has drawn on some new sources...to considerable effect.'

About the Author
Suzanne Kirkbright is lecturer in German at Aston University, Birmingham, England.

Customer Reviews

More of a personal than an intellectual biography
I was delighted to see this book being published and hastilty ordered and read it. It is well-written and a delight to read. There is sometimes a slight jarring between chapters, which favour thematic over chronological organization.

Jaspers was a tremendous and admirable man and this biography is hopefully an indication of renewed interest in his work as both a psychiatrist and a philosopher. My reservations are mainly to do with that I would have liked it to be a lot longer and that there was a lot of material I was familiar from other sources, including his own philosophical autobiography, that was not covered in this biography. I think Atkinson has used as her primary sources Jaspers' correspondence with his wife and family and thus it is this Jaspers, the son, husband, brother, whom is the subject of the book. The correspondence with Arendt and Heidegger is not discussed and the influential intellecual relationships are granted less importance than this reader would have liked. Perhaps the feeling is that Heidegger-Jaspers-Arendt, Jaspers-Weber, Jaspers-Husserl-Heidegger relationships have been covered elsewhere, but I had hoped for more of an intellectual biography, especially as all these relationships were of great emotional sognificance to Jaspers, and impacted greatly on his methodology and how he viewed his work.

Atkinson has done a great job of giving us Jaspers the family man: my gripe is that I wished it was twice as along and I had the academic as well!

how to live in dignity ...
Already as a child, German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) suffered under bronchiktasis and an accompanying heart insufficiency, which was classified as incurable and life-shortening. the fear to die early pushed him to live concentrated and not to waste any time. Being exhausted very soon, throughout his life he was forced to work lying horizontal on a divan. His daily creative working periods (of reading and writing) had been very short, so he was obliged to budget his targets carefully. "A man will be, what he will be, via the things, he has chosen for his own affair..." was the way, he programmed himself. "The minimum of being self-determinate is associated with the joy to work. without that, everyone will get paralyzed. Therefore to save the joy of working is the main problem in the technical world. Assigned work mostly is a work, which separates being a human and being a worker. But the duties of a physician, teacher, minister etc. cannot not be technically rationalized, because they depend on vital existence ..." Jaspers noted in his tiny but important book "The Mental Situation Of Our Age". Beginning as psychiatrist (among other things with the fundamental work "PSYCHOLOGY of the WORLD VIEWS") he extended his horizon of views to a stable existence-philosophical theory, which at first united him with the academic colleague Martin Heidegger, then however, ethical standardizes taking seriously, had to lead him away from this Nazi-collaborator. Jaspers wrote after the end of WWII to the American Military Government in Germany: "Heidegger's kind of thinking appears to me unfreely, dictatorial, without any sense for communication. Nowadays it would (practiced at universities) have a fatal effect ...". Added to the lifelong illness of Jaspers was the threat by the Third Reich. Jaspers' woman was Jewess. The married couple during the Nazi-era always carried in their pockets cyanide-capsules, to be faster, if Gestapo would try to arrest them. "No longer able to continue the fight, suicide becomes more and more fascinating. It seems to be the last moral effort of autonomous humans. To end voluntary is like coming home to oneself... " Jaspers wrote in those dark days. "The rule of the apparatus favors humans, who live contemplativelessly without any leisure , bedeviled sleeplessly by their wishes of climbing up the social ladders. It is required to be skilful, slippery, oily. You have to become beloved, you must ingratiate on everyone with a clever fuss of persuading and captivating, you have to become zealous, indispensable, you have to be silent, insidious, you have to present a modest gesture, you have to work only to please your chief, you never are allowed to show any independence against a superior ...". Jaspers analyzed the Hitler-Germany and Martin Heidegger, the post war German society and "The Question of German Guilt" - but in the center he defined how to live with dignity - in any time...