Abstract
The bond between Jaspers and Plato is deep and fascinating. Indeed, it is impossible to survey and adjudicate the significance of transcending-thinking as a primary motif in Jaspers’ thought without a consideration of Plato who, together with Augustine and Kant, Jaspers regards as the “greatest” of the “great philosophers.”1 In this chapter I will attempt to clarify this relationship by exploring three conceptual features of “transcending-thinking” directly influenced by Plato and Platonism generally. First we will focus on Platonic dialectic in relation to Jaspers’ possible Existenz; secondly, on Platonic chorismos and the Jaspersian boundary situation; and thirdly, on the eidetic One of Plato and Plotinus and Jaspers’ Transcendence-Itself or the Encompassing.
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References
Origin and Goal of History, p. 244.
Great Phil., I, pp. 169, 380.
Ibid., I., p. 161.
Great Phil., I., p. 131.
Ibid., p. 150.
Ibid., I., p. 145.
Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 48ff. Cf., also Philosophy of Existent pp. 20–21, where Jaspers specifically develops “transcending-thinking” in terms of “thought steps.”
Enneads, I, 3, 1.
It would appear that Gordon D. Kaufman has overlooked this in his article “Transcendence Without Mythology.” Cf., God the Problem (Cambridge: Harvard, 1973), pp. 41–71.
Cf. Enneads, I, 6, 5.
Cf., Republic, 533, and Parmemdes, 241ff.
Great Phil., I., p. 136.
Ibid., p. 146.
Ibid., p. 89.
Great Phil., I., p. 69.
Ibid., p. 91. This again seems to be the basis of Gordon Kaufman’s argument; cf., God the Problem, op. cit., p. 52ff.
Anders Nygren, as neo-Kantian, misses completely this very central differentiation. Cf., Method and Meaning (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), pp. 21–25.
A classic example of this can be found in Barth’s reply to Tillich on the “lack of authority” present to Tillich’s apology for the paradoxical “Boundary” situation. Cf., The Beginnings of Dialectical Theology, ed. James Robinson (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1968), pp. 133–162.
Great Phil., I., p. 147.
Cf., Timaeus 52a.Cf., also Perennial Scope of Philosophy, pp. 24ff., for “shifts” implicit in such differentiations.
This, of course, was Lessing’s reaction to the same extrinsicism. Cf. Theological Writings, op. cit., pp. 51ff.
Great Phil., p. 45. Cf., also II, pp. 56ff., and Phil., III, pp. 195ff.
Phil., III, pp. 8–10, 43.
Cf., Great Phil., II, pp. 79–80.
Ennead, IV, 9, 5.
Phil., III, p. 17.
Cf., Chiffren der Transzendenz, p. 21ff., Psych. der Welt., passim.
Der Gott der neuzeitlichen Metaphysik (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), pp. 111–112.
Great Phil., II., pp. 67, 80. Cf., also Phil., III, p. 12f., “Superstition materializes things and positivistic unbelief dissolves them into illusions.”
Great Phil., II., p. 49. Cf., Plotinus, Enneads, IV, 9, 1ff. It is the Plotinian notion of the One that undergirds the ontological aspect of Jaspers’ Transcendent Encompassing at every turn.
Ibid., p. 49.
Enneads, III, 8, 10. Cf., also Phil., III, pp. 18–19, 204ff.
Phil., III., pp. 7–8.
Enneads, III, 8, 10.
Man in the Modern Age, p. 179ff.
Phil., III, pp. 8–9.
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© 1979 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers bv, The Hague
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Olson, A.M. (1979). Jaspers and Platonic Idealism. In: Transcendence and Hermeneutics. Studies in Philosophy and Religion, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9270-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9270-2_5
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