Diversity in Unity in Post-Truth Times: Max Weber's Challenge and Karl Jaspers's Response

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Philosophy and Social Criticism

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Diversity in unity in post- ª The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0191453719860225
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challenge and Karl
Jaspers’s response
Carmen Lea Dege

Department of Political Science, Yale University, USA
Abstract
Max Weber famously diagnosed both an excess and a subordination of meaning in modernity when
he coined the term disenchantment next to the fragmentation and irreconcilability of value
spheres. Unlike Weber, however, who sought to keep the ideological and the rationalist sides of
the modern divide together, his immediate followers capitalized either on his decisionism (i.e. Carl
Schmitt) or on his universalism (i.e. Jürgen Habermas). In an attempt to develop a constructive
perspective on the question of how we can conceive of irreconcilable values within a larger
normative horizon, this article introduces Karl Jaspers’s interpretation and refinement of Weber’s
work. Most fundamentally, Jaspers’s existentialist philosophy of communication sought to turn
Weber’s warring gods into a source of solidarity rather than divisiveness. I argue that Jaspers did so
in rooting human freedom not in the decision or the law but in an experiential uncertainty and the
knowledge not to know. The article closes with a discussion of some practical and theoretical
implications of Jaspers’s thought for our understanding of diversity in unity in post-truth times.
Keywords
Axial Age, difference and identity, faith, Karl Jaspers, liberalism, Max Weber, political theology,
polytheism of values, secularity
Introduction
Max Weber is among those most pessimistic about the future of social cohesion in
modernity. He remains the foremost diagnostician of secularization who has given rise
Corresponding author:
Carmen Lea Dege, Department of Political Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.
Email: carmen.dege@yale.edu
2 Philosophy and Social Criticism XX(X)
to the enduring anxiety of whether democratically organized forms of diversity in unity

can persist in a disenchanted age. In this article, I illuminate the central division which
underlies this diagnosis. Modernity, according to Weber, is inconceivable without the
division between knowledge and religion, science and politics, facts and values. This
division creates tensions that can have detrimental effects. On the one hand, the truth of
religious and ideological values cannot be proven on the basis of generalizable evidence.
It might well go against reflection and lead to violent clashes of irreconcilable views.
The evidence of science, on the other hand, lacks meaning, or worse: it might dispel all
possible illusions about happiness, God and the good life. So while one side disenchants,
the other re-enchants. While one side becomes more detached and more differentiated,
the other side becomes more emotionally invested and politicized.
This division informs Weber’s ontology of the world. Its default mode is a polytheism
of rationally irreconcilable values. Indeed, this worldview and the twin phenomenon of
radicalization and rationalization are deeply related to the crisis of the Enlightenment
project in fin-de-siècle Europe and their influential prophets Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
It rests on the more fundamental challenge of nihilism which comes to haunt secular
societies: If there is mainly difference and no unity, how can there be meaning and truth?
Isn’t the universe, and history in particular, utterly indifferent? Struggling with nihilism,
Weber sought to unite the tensions in an ethics of responsibility, a charismatic leader and
Gesamtpersönlichkeit. His immediate followers, however, severed this bond and capi-
talized either on Weber’s universalist and disenchanting or his realist and re-enchanting
dimensions. Thus, for instance, Heinrich Rickert turned Weber into a scientist who
pursues a generalizable grasp of social life. This focus shows clear affinities to the
rationalist way Talcott Parsons later interpreted Weber as one of the founding fathers
of sociology or the universalist way Jürgen Habermas adopted Weber normatively to
move from instrumental to communicative reason. On the other hand, Carl Schmitt
justifiably considered himself a student of Weber by stressing Weber’s decisionist side,
as do political realists like Joseph Schumpeter and Hans Morgenthau. In light of these
views, Weber’s conflicted attempts to respond to the modern challenge of divisiveness
and relativism seem either heroic yet unsuccessful or contradictory and overly mired in a
dark existentialist outlook specific to his time and mental constitution.
Against this perspective, this article argues there is a third and forgotten response to
Weber’s tensions which offers a reinterpretation of Weber’s polytheism of values. It
claims that Weber has not only suffered from the tragedy implied in modern dichotomies
but consciously held on to it. Indeed, according to this view, Weber’s legacy consists
largely in sharpening our awareness of the normative and empirical significance of these
modern tensions for plural societies. A liberal thinker who emphasized this dimension in
Weber was his long-term friend and colleague Karl Jaspers. Rather than seeking to unite
differences on the basis of a thin concept of toleration, a compromise of interests or
procedural rules for deliberation, Jaspers understood difference as a source for solidarity
and meaning-making. He could do so based on the introduction of a third conception of
truth, defined as cipher, which actively engages with difference in order to revise, trans-
form and renew factual and ideological truth claims. Unlike Schmitt, however, who
equally derived identity from difference, Jaspers turned the warring gods into a com-
municative struggle and refrained from naturalizing difference in a friend versus foe
Dege 3
scenario. For Jaspers, human freedom and solidarity were rooted not in the decision
(Schmitt) or the law (Habermas) but in an experiential uncertainty and the knowledge not
to know. This knowledge does not turn into a withdrawal from the world. On the
contrary, it draws people into conversation, turns them around and allows for genuine
change. Rather than sharing specific values or alluding to universal facts, Jaspers saw our
common ground in groundlessness. So he would agree with political theology, the liberal
state draws its life from preconditions that it cannot itself guarantee, but this ground-
lessness of liberalism is not only a danger but a moral foundation for any law, decision
and consensus that seeks to redefine itself meaningfully in time.
Weber exemplified this liberalism for Jaspers as the collisions between facts and
values remain grounded in groundlessness and sustained by a strong faith in truth.
Despite the strong criticism by his own colleagues, Jaspers argued that Weber was a
scientist and politician only on the basis of being a philosopher committed to a truth that
can only show itself indirectly. This philosophical way of life is best expressed in
Weber’s truthfulness which to Jaspers marked one way to overcome nihilism without
sacrificing intellect or commitment.
Yet, when hitherto unknown correspondences of Weber, made available to the
80-year-old Jaspers in 1963, revealed that Weber had cheated on his wife and con-
structed a web of lies to conceal this fact, Jaspers saw his earlier interpretation of Weber
as a role model around whom he developed his own philosophy of existence fundamen-
tally called into question. The discovery of this secret dimension of Weber’s life pro-
voked Jaspers to re-read Weber’s work and reconsider his most essential assumptions.
Jaspers now noticed an existential strain that was disturbingly different to Weber’s other
mental problems of which he was aware as a former psychiatrist and close friend. The
dark, inner loneliness Jaspers saw now touched on the question whether Weber’s ten-
sions were indeed consciously embraced, giving rise to a hidden truth, or whether his
struggle was based on the nihilistic denial of any unifying being whatsoever. Jaspers was
no longer sure.
I use this contrast between Jaspers’s early and late Weber as a framework not only to
point to a productive and overlooked interpretation of Weber but also to find a way into
the complex and fascinating work of the psychologist and existential philosopher him-
self. To Jaspers, Weber was one of the most important persons in his life, next to his wife
and his brother-in-law.1 And while at first glance, the revelations about Weber’s secret
life might have destroyed Jaspers’s image of the truthful Weber, Jaspers retained what he
thought Weber comprehended without illusions like no one else: Facts and values cannot
be rationally reconciled even though they depend on each other for the assertion of truth
claims. Facts are interpreted, values call for proof. So if there is no way to derive an
absolute notion of truth from religion, science, history or politics, any attempt to do so
represents forms of escapism and distraction, or, to put it in more contemporary words, it
represents forms of post-truth, that is realities that declare something to be authentic,
valid or correct despite obvious contradictions and inconsistencies. Post-truth therefore
implicitly embraces a nihilistic worldview. Jaspers insisted that unlike Nietzsche and
Kierkegaard who confronted the challenge of nihilism but sought refuge in either the will
to power or Christianity, Weber fully acknowledged this condition but remained invested
in truth and the world. Weber might have failed in living up to his own insights, he might
not have fully embodied his own legacy. But in understanding the depth of nihilism, he
was able to poignantly raise the question of truth in relation to facts and values. Indeed, I
argue that Jaspers’s own philosophy can be regarded as an attempt to rescue this Weber-
ian legacy not only against Weber himself but also against a scientist and political
interpretation of him. The discussion of these two major sides of the Weberian coin
forms a thread that runs through this article. I will specifically illustrate a Jaspersian
rejoinder to the rationalist philosophy of Rickert, Cassirer and Habermas as well as the
decisionist variants of Baumgarten, Heidegger and Schmitt. This shows the extent to
which Jaspers’s engagement with Weber represents a most valuable entryway into the
work of Jaspers as a whole.
Hence, this article takes shape within two sets of dynamics: the recurring divisions in
Weber, specifically between science and politics, and the ways in which Jaspers wrestled
with Weber’s philosophical legacy. If Weber did not say how a life based on responsi-
bility and conviction unfolds, Jaspers sought to do exactly that in seeking to respond to
the crises of Weimar and National Socialism: He followed in Weber’s footsteps and
offered ways to integrate both sides without resolving but deepening the tension between
them. After sketching Jaspers’s Weber, I turn to his reconceptualization of Weber’s
polytheism of values which, in my view, represents one of the most original and far-
reaching contributions to the contemporary debate on identity and difference. Jaspers
was convinced that a defence of liberal democracy involves grappling with its
theologico-political predicament. Like other existentialists of his time, such as Martin
Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger, he was convinced that
cultural, economic and political explanations could not sufficiently address what Jaspers
understood as a crisis of faith unravelling in an increasingly global, unequal and tech-
nological world. Unlike these existentialists, however, Jaspers did not seek to reinsert
individual or collective sovereignty and re-establish authority and control in mystical or
decisionist ways. Instead, he developed a cipher philosophy which allowed him to
connect affect to reason. And unlike the opposite Weberian dimension represented by
the political liberalism of Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, Jaspers did not evade to
grapple with the foundational void of secular states. Rather than decoupling value
questions from ‘public reason’, Jaspers’s post-metaphysical view of politics is based
on a meta-political philosophy of communication and plurality. He remained suspicious
of relying too heavily on theodicies of progress and growth through history, because he
did not believe that history delivers us to a new and irreversible mode of experience and
rationality beyond metaphysical commitments. And indeed, the return of religious extre-
mism, the rise of ethnic nationalism and a radicalizing politics of fear and resentment can
be interpreted as a fateful reminder of liberalism’s ground in groundlessness. I claim that
Jaspers understood this predicament very well. This becomes especially clear in com-
parison to the political thought of Schmitt and Habermas to which I turn in the
conclusion.2
Over all, this article seeks to argue for an independent focus on Jaspers’s work which
is usually, if at all, viewed through the eyes of other thinkers.3 Jaspers’s potential in
forcefully responding to Weber’s challenge without succumbing to either illiberalism or
rationalism has not received the attention it deserves. Thinking with Jaspers can help us
understand the current crisis of liberal democracy and retrieve intuitions and sensibilities
Dege 5
that might be highly valuable in navigating the sociopolitical and cultural tides of our
time.
Jaspers’s Weber
Long before Talcott Parsons, Herbert Marcuse and Raymond Aron, among others, rein-
vigorated academic interest in Weber’s oeuvre at the Heidelberger Soziologentag in
1964, and long before the legacy of Weber gained widespread influence through dis-
tinguished scholars such as M Rainer Lepsius, Wolfgang Schluchter and Wolfgang
Mommsen, Jaspers presented a philosophically crafted portrayal of Weber’s ‘greatness’ 4
which related the fundamental tension undergirding Weber’s diagnosis of modernity to
the fragmentary nature of his scientific and political achievements.
There is one notable element in Jaspers’s depiction of Weber that provoked harsh
criticism when Jaspers first presented his view in the interwar period, but which fell into
oblivion afterwards. Unlike other scholars at the time and later, who mainly saw in
Weber a sociologist or politician, Jaspers saw in him a philosopher.
If Max Weber was a politician, scientist, and philosopher, then he was, nevertheless, not
merely one and also the other, but the whole human being who grasped the world in an
unprecedented vastness from the depths of his being, which, indivisibly one, is really what a
human being as a human being can be: a seeker of truth. As a philosopher, he is a politician;
as a philosopher, he is a scientist.5
To be sure, Jaspers explained, Weber’s ‘philosophical reality’ is not expressed in

theoretical systems or universal norms. But Jaspers’s classification of philosophy, first
introduced in his Psychology of Worldviews,6 helps to explain his choice of words.
Therein, Jaspers distinguished three types of philosophical teachers: (1) Those who
argue for a life according to specific principles and who found schools and educate
disciples to secure a following and the proliferation of their ideas. Jaspers mentioned the
Epicureans and Stoics as examples. (2) Those who develop a total system of life, give
everything and everyone an equal share, seek to avoid one-sidedness and embed contra-
dictions in an overall framework. Among the most memorable creators of such systems
are Aristotle, Aquinas and Hegel. (3) The third group does not generalize particular
principles and does not believe in the neutrality of a system. Instead, it points to the
spark between those fighting swords that are infinitely returning. This spark is an indirect
expression of truth that cannot become manifest in real life but provides the ground for
personal growth. Philosophers of this group reject being prophets; they consider them-
selves gadflies and midwives. According to Jaspers, this group shows the strongest urge
to communication because it appeals to the freedom of the other which it can only inspire
but never determine. Jaspers considered Socrates, Kant and Kierkegaard to be represen-
tative for this type of philosophy.7 Without any doubt, Jaspers regarded Weber to be part
of this group as well.8
This classification illustrates why Jaspers argued that Weber’s philosophy is ‘the
richest and deepest realization of the meaning of floundering in our time’.9 But philo-
sophy as a way of life, specifically in relation to Weber, sounds heretical to the ears of
system theorists, historicists and empiricists alike. And indeed, Jaspers had to break with
the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert – a rupture that stood symptomatically for Jaspers’s
relationship to his own discipline.10 The most pivotal encounter, however, happened
with Weber’s nephew Eduard Baumgarten, who disagreed so vehemently with Jaspers’s
interpretation that he showed him Weber’s love letters with Else Jaffé to prove him
wrong.11 If Rickert conceived of Weber as a neo-Kantian sociologist, Baumgarten
emphasized the naturalist and psychoanalytic dimension of his character which he found
reflected in his love-drunk reverie of the letters. In Jaspers’s eyes, however, Rickert and
Baumgarten represented only the two different sides of the same Weberian coin the
depth and character of which neither of them were able to grasp. While Rickert was
indifferent to the existential clash of values which could not be reconciled, Baumgarten
was indifferent to the consequences of value commitments which contradict their fun-
damental motivation. Weber held these two sides together. He was non-indifferent: He
was attuned to difference without succumbing to its naturalization. This critical distance
was part and parcel of the intellectual honesty expressed in both his work and personal
convictions. Thus, despite his own fundamental doubts, Jaspers reaffirmed key dimen-
sions of his early Weber in his autobiographical writings of 1967, shortly before he died.
I see in Max Weber the Galilei of the Humanities, with the will to achieve the utmost
possible in science while simultaneously developing the principles and methods necessary
for this science. But this would not be enough. Behind all of this exists a man who relates to
this entire business of science as a mere foreground which does not do justice to him. He has
a sense for everything that represents greatness, he loves it, but his own truthfulness does not
allow him to forget how things were before and how they are today and what life really
means. In his life I discern a completely irremediable tornness. He never succeeded in
arriving at a moment of closure. The tragedy of a modern person, namely the tragedy we
also see in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who might have been superior in their imaginative
productivity, but who both stay forever in their youth, stormy, it enables them to grasp
intuitively and fathom the extraordinary, while Max Weber is the man who endures the
tornness in real life. For Kierkegaard had an exit by way of Christian faith, and Nietzsche
conjured something up about the eternal return and the will to power. Such exit strategies
were impossible for Max Weber due to his truthfulness. His tornness was irresolvable: A
man who could not be reduced to a common denominator, who feels eerie to me, who, every
now and then in his life, has experienced an inner drive to suicide, who is sick, then healthy
again, who, one has to say, is no role model. Nowhere in the kind of way that would make
me say: I want to be like him.12
Weber remained to Jaspers a man of truthfulness who understood that there is no

escape from the underlying tensions of human life: Certainty and meaning cannot be
guaranteed, not through scientific discovery, religious belief, nihilistic hedonism or a
nostalgic return to the past. On the other hand, however, Weber was no longer a role
model – a gap had opened between an ideal and a real Weber, between a Weber who
consciously embraced a torn life and a tragic Weber who, at times heroically, at times
desperately, could not help himself but survive as a deeply conflicted soul. This insight
into the deeply undesirable parts of Weber’s personality did not lead Jaspers to agree
Dege 7
with his colleagues, though. He believed that despite and because of Weber’s failures,
truth and vulnerability are not mutually exclusive. We can conceive of certainty as
deeply limited creatures without ending up in despair. I therefore argue that Weber’s
legacy for Jaspers continued to consist in genuinely recognizing the irresolvable tensions
between facts and values and in implicitly, yet forcefully, posing the question how we
can conceive of a moral ground upon which these tensions can be based so that they
remain generative of new ways of life and do not harden or brutalize.
The relation of fragments and unity

Jaspers attempted to conceptualize this type of moral ground. In order to illustrate his
response, I wish to focus on a second, more unexpected, dimension of Jaspers’s early
conception of Weber. In line with his understanding of Weber as a philosopher, Jaspers
labelled Weber ‘the most fervent believer of our time’.13 Certainly, this view does not fit
the image of Weber as the meticulous scientist and resolute diagnostician of modern
rationalization who, despite his interest in pietistic sects, never hesitated to make here-
tical remarks.14 At a second glance, however, Jaspers’s argument is not as far-fetched.
He is fully aware that there was no religion or ideology for Weber that did not involve a
sacrifice of the intellect and that Weber despised such a sacrifice from the bottom of his
heart. 15 Indeed, Jaspers noted himself that whenever Weber ‘talked about self-
deceptions in theodicy and its experiments, he often became bitingly ironic. Sometimes
his words could sound like blasphemy’. But he equally pointed out that Weber’s rejec-
tion of religion or ideology arose ‘from deep veracity’ against any kind of pseudo-belief
that ‘obscures and has a calming effect on reality’. To Jaspers, this profound scepticism
did not convey any cynicism or indifferent relativism. Quite the contrary, Weber’s
rejection of any intellectual sacrifice expressed for Jaspers ‘a terribly serious awareness
of an inexpressible, incomprehensible absolute’.16 And it is this serious awareness and
truthfulness that defined Weber as a man of faith for him. However, Weber’s faith was
secular. Indeed, Jaspers, who, by way of his Axial Age thesis,17 defined secularity as the
collapse of immediacy, situated Weber’s novelty most pre-eminently in this secularity.
Jaspers observed a shift from mythological thought to thought in myth around 500 BC.
While in civilizations before, such as in Ancient Egypt or Babylonia, a ‘vigorous start
was made in the ideas concerning justice . . . , the problem of meaning was not expressly
posed. It is as though the answer were there before the question’.18 Now, any self-evident
certainty breaks down and faith becomes both necessary and possible for the first time.
So while secularity is usually understood as the loss of transcendence or clericalism, for
Jaspers it indicated a loss of certainty – a permanent loss of normal. Secularity denotes
human being and time in contrast to mythological and unconscious forms of existence.
And like Kierkegaard who would later famously emphasize that the loss of God as the
causa sui makes faith possible in the first place, Jaspers argued that this secularity
remains deeply related to transcendence and the sacred while becoming critical of
religious and doctrinal expressions of it. Faith knows that it does not know and can
therefore embrace love, meaning, and truth as something unfathomable that is only
indirectly manifested in the world through myths, or what Jaspers called ciphers. I will
come back to this concept in my discussion of Jaspers’s alternative metaphysics. For
now, it suffices to state that ciphers arise in response to an existential rift caused by the
collapse of immediacy and, in turn, express faith in freedom and truth as a third motiva-
tional force next to knowledge and values, science and religion. Although Jaspers him-
self would rather have used the word ‘enlightenment’, or describe the secular moment as
‘coming to consciousness as being conscious’, I agree with Chris Thornhill in assuming
that secularity in Jaspers, defined as the collapse of immediacy, is prior to faith. ‘Without
secularity . . . there can be no belief’.19
Most interestingly, in writing his book on the Axial Age, Jaspers took his lead from
the great sociologists, philologists and historians of the time which were interested in the
historical coincidence of the rise of the world religions – such as Alfred and Max Weber,
Ernst Troeltsch and Jacob Burckhardt, Victor von Strauss and Ernst von Lasaulx.20 But
he indirectly criticized them for their (rationalist) Occidentalism and did not engage with
Max Weber in more detail.21 This might be due to one main difference. In contrast to
Weber’s comparative sociology of religion, Jaspers’s turn to the Axial Age is concerned
with the birth of philosophy and not monotheism or religion more broadly conceived. In
line with his third definition of philosophy as the communicative practice of indirect
thought, the Axial Age reflected for him a pluralization of truths resulting in the loss of
self-evident certainty across Asian, Greek and Middle Eastern cultures. According to
Jaspers, this period of philosophical enlightenment manifested a moment of disenchant-
ment which gave rise to, but was distinct from the foundation of world religions.22 Yet,
as if he directly picked up on Weber’s warring gods who continue to arise from their
graves resuming their eternal struggle with one another, Jaspers argued that the explo-
sion of debate during the Axial Age resulted in irresolvable divisions that have infinitely
returned until today, such as the clashes between sceptics and moralists, nihilists and
dogmatists, realists and idealists. In addition, this age posed the problem of meaning for
the first time. People began to understand that truth is a question for humans, not for the
divine or nature. Despite the conspicuous omission of Weber as a sociologist in his
treatment of the Axial Age, therefore, Jaspers saw Weber as a philosopher squarely in
line with this spirit. Weber was a fervent believer to him because he trusted in the
significance of failure for human existence holding on to a ‘primary faith’ in truth and
meaning prior to any religious or ideological doctrine. Precisely because there was
neither a prophetic belief that could be announced nor a philosophical system that could
bestow a world concept as receptacle, consolation, survey, and shelter . . . , the fragmentary
[in Weber], without being directly desired, needed a deep symbolic meaning.23
Based on the awareness of his own fragmentary nature, Weber could represent a unity
of contradictory movements, an ‘antinomial synthesis’. He was a ‘fragmentarian from a
consciousness of totality and the absolute’.
At this point, Jaspers was still convinced that to communicate within the oppositions
of the subjective and the objective was Weber’s strength. He was invested in life but not
fully consumed, distanced but not indifferent, sceptical but not nihilistic. Equally, his
sociological comparisons, elective affinities and ideal types walked a tightrope between
relativist historicism and formal universality. Weber straddled these divides as he dis-
agreed with both the rationalists, ‘because they do not critically observe the laws of
Dege 9
knowledge’, and the irrationalists, ‘because they fail to recognize the meaning of knowl-
edge and its irreplaceable manner of seizing the truth’.24 In this light, Jaspers interpreted
Weber’s mysterious words during Jaspers’s last visit shortly before he died: ‘That which
is true is the truth’.
To us, [these words] are not a tautology but a kind of magic incantation as the expression of
an existence whose truth recognizes the modes of knowledge, like knowledge gained
through experience only as a function of a responsible process whose source and aim remain
unknown, though affirmed.25
In other words, Jaspers observed in Weber, after the collapse of immediacy, a learned
form of enchanted wonder, a self-conscious naı¨veté – despite and because of all
reflection.
The final puzzle: Truth, communication and politics in Weber

Jaspers clearly sought to present his interpretation of Weber as a philosopher in light of
irresolvable tensions that he considered constitutive of plural, liberal societies. Philoso-
phy in this sense reflects an attitude and ethos that can be cultivated by everyone. A
philosophical way of life requires faith because, other than the immediate and direct
truths of facts and values, it only manifests truth indirectly. Unlike science, however, it
provides meaning, and unlike religion and ideology, it leaves reflection intact.
While this interpretation of Weber is certainly honourable and bold, it begs the
question of whether Weber would have agreed to the liberal existentialist portrayal of
him. Jaspers came to doubt this himself. Weber turned into a puzzle for him towards the
end of his life. How could he have been so sure about the unifying source that holds
Weber’s Gesamtpersönlichkeit together? The web of lies Weber constructed to conceal
his affair with Else Jaffé seemed to call into question whether Weber has indeed been
truthful. Weber’s letters reflected for Jaspers rather a ‘confusing self-betrayal, a specta-
cular dance into nihilism under the spell of magic’.26
Jaspers’s picture of Weber therefore changed, but not his own philosophy and the role
Weber has played in it. While Jaspers previously interpreted Weber as a modern-day
Socrates, they now diverged dramatically. The philosophical way of life illustrated by
Plato’s Socrates is inherently communicative for Jaspers: Faith in truth finds expression
in the active pursuit of dialogue because truth is what is not true for me alone. Since I
cannot possess objective truth, ‘I go to waste when I am nothing but I’,27 and since I can
never entirely know myself, ‘communication is the form in which truth is revealed in
time’.28 Until he studied the letters and re-read Weber’s work, Jaspers had been con-
vinced that Weber would have agreed with Nietzsche’s ‘The truth begins with two’.
Weber’s style of ceaseless questioning and listening, his passion as a teacher and his
dedication to in-depth conversations with his friends and colleagues had always been an
indication that Weber acted most naturally upon his knowledge not to know. But now,
Jaspers was no longer sure. Was Weber’s communicativeness an expression of his will in
communication or a fear to be alone with himself? Was there an ‘abyss of loneliness’ to
him that ‘forecloses communication?’ 29 To be clear, Jaspers’s Philosophy also
emphasized that loneliness is an essential precondition for communication. We cannot

genuinely interact, if the duality and plurality of oneself with oneself is not experienced
within one’s own mind when it is alone and meets only itself. 30 On the other hand, if this
mindful loneliness does not eventually yield an inner agreement between contradictory
parts of oneself, ‘I can be in default of myself’ (Ich kann mir ausbleiben), and parts of the
self might turn into the self’s own adversary. Plato’s Socrates knows about the impor-
tance of a mindful loneliness that prevents a deficient and painful loneliness from taking
hold of the self. Therefore, communication is predicated on a coherent sense of selfhood
and an awareness of its own limits.31 The late image of Weber suggested to Jaspers that
his loneliness might not be related to genuine reflection actively invested in inner and
outer dialogue, it might rather spring from the urge to escape this mindful loneliness.
Weber had trouble keeping himself company. And so Jaspers concluded:
[Weber’s] rational Gestalt shows the all-around openness, the tornness, the struggles, but
not the unity . . . I have long taken [it] for granted . . . . This assumption is definitely not
correct. It remains the irresolvable question, to what extent it would have been possi-
ble . . . to engage with Max Weber in a communication about that which cannot be captured
and determined as a standpoint – where the rational discussion about the interpretation of
values goes beyond itself in the understanding of questions about the disclosure of being.32
Whether Jaspers can argue that, unlike Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, his Weber points
to a self-reflective naı̈veté which prevails over nihilism hinges on Weber’s ability to
communicate the incomprehensible and its meaning for him.
Jaspers had not been aware of an illuminating letter that Weber wrote to Ferdinand
Tönnies in 1919. Therein, Weber engaged with the question of being, or his relationship
to it. Outwardly, it casts further doubt on whether Weber can be regarded as a secular
believer driven to communication. Viewed more closely, however, it might also offer an
explanation reminiscent of Jaspers’s earlier view of Weber.
When I studied modern Catholic literature in Rome a few years ago, I became convinced
how hopeless is to think that there are any scientific results this church cannot digest . . . I
could not honestly participate in such anti-clericalism. It is true that I am absolutely unmu-
sical in matters religious and that I have neither the need nor the ability to erect any religious
edifices within me – that is simply impossible for me, and I reject it. But after examining
myself carefully I must say that I am neither anti-religious nor irreligious. In this regard too I
consider myself a cripple, a stunted man whose fate it is to admit honestly that he must put
up with this state of affairs (so as not to fall for some romantic swindle).33
In this letter, Weber stated that he does not feel any need or ability to be religious. He
also spoke of himself as a cripple and clearly pointed out that he does not reject faith.
Indeed, he distanced himself from anti-clericalism and atheism for the same reason: he
considered himself spiritually unmusical. Most interesting, this lack of spirituality was
presented as a personal limit that handicapped Weber. Something was missing and
Weber painfully felt it. The late Jaspers seemed to agree with this self-observation. The
question is whether this painful lack was an indirect confession of faith, though. Weber’s
Dege 11
disability might have attested to the knowledge not to know, a faith in truth that reflects
its own limits and remains aware of ‘romantic swindle’.34 But his disability could have
also resulted from his unsuccessful struggle with nihilism – hence the pain. In any event,
such an indirect confession of faith was not consciously expressed by Weber himself. His
avowed inability to be (anti-)religious does not answer the question for us whether
nothingness or being was ultimately driving Weber. Did his tensions gesture towards
a lack that was genuinely embraced as it affirmed the existence of a hidden truth or did it
mark the denial of any possible being and remain ensnared in the iron cage of
rationalization?
The significance of this question is unmistakably pronounced in Jaspers’s and
Weber’s views on politics and the ways they (dis)agreed. While both found that ‘modern
law creates a spurious metaphysic, . . . a system of false transcendence’35 under which
the dominance of the anonymous masses and formalized public institutions reflect a
deceptive mode of freedom, they placed different hopes on politics to amend this
groundlessness. Although Weber, in contrast to Schmitt, never assumed that politics can
produce its own compelling metaphysical validity, his ideas of political charisma come
close to this claim. If Weber identified the political leader with a potential Gesamt-
persönlichkeit that unites conviction and responsibility, Jaspers did not believe that
political action itself can emancipate a disenchanted world. Even though he remained
sympathetic to Weber’s leader-democracy and believed, until the end of his life, that a
political-pedagogic elite is a major precondition for political participation and not its
antithesis, he could not concur with Weber’s suggestion of charisma as a remedy for the
rational, legal, and bureaucratic. When Jaspers mentioned that he was not in complete
agreement with Weber’s political thought, he distanced himself also from a general
radicalism he sensed among other post-romantic thinkers of political existentialism such
as Ernst Jünger, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Schmitt. Compared to Weber, he wrote, ‘I
lacked the consciousness of the greatness of Prussia and of Bismarck, which I recognized
only theoretically and, at heart, with aversion. I lacked the military spirit’.36
Against the attempt to find an existential ground in political action, Jaspers did not
believe that politics could, on its own terms, justify itself without drawing on the distinct
value spheres of ethics and metaphysics. Human life, according to Jaspers, fulfilled its
potentials most adequately not in politics, but in communication within a cultural hor-
izon and concrete historical situation which, in turn, help sustain a liberal political
framework that enables the expression of human freedom. In the years following the
war, Jaspers therefore focused his efforts on civic education: He reopened the University
of Heidelberg with his lecture on The Question of German Guilt in 1945/1946,37 gave
radio talks, founded the journal Die Wandlung together with Dolf Sternberger, Alfred
Weber, and Werner Krauss, and lectured and published on the Idea of the University.38
These initiatives all aimed explicitly at a spiritual renewal of German culture.39 As we
can gauge from Jaspers’s political writings,40 the role of the state consists most impor-
tantly in upholding a legal democratic framework that supports (civic) education and a
free press. Unlike for Weber, thus, politics was post-metaphysical for Jaspers. It provides
a framework for the transformation and reinterpretation of ciphers, such as the consti-
tution or freedom and democracy, that cannot become finally manifested. Political
institutions do not represent a people, a god or idea in direct form, they constitute a
placeholder that actively announces the deferral of the manifestation of being and
thereby engenders the liberty for its recurrent explication in cipher languages.41
When Jaspers indicated that Weber shows the incommensurability of differences but
not their unity, a polytheism of values but not their underlying connection, he was aware
that this lack can have ethical and political consequences. And while he publicly
defended his interpretation of Weber, Jaspers nonetheless raised the possibility of nihi-
lism at the end of a long life so highly indebted to Weber – leaving the question open.
Might Weber’s attempt to move beyond nihilism have either been inconclusive or too
radical? Might we end up where we started, namely with a disenchanted scientific world
of facts, detached from particular differences, on the one hand, and a re-enchanted
commitment to one value over another, on the other, turning a blind eye to ideological
consequences and confronting the other as foe?
Jaspers was aware of the ambiguities of his own interpretation. Indeed, I argue that the
gap between his earlier Weber and the Weber he encountered later in his life has been a
dilemma for him all along. He has been thinking with Weber against him. In his own
reconsideration of a polytheism of values, Jaspers tamed Weber’s tragedy in filling in the
metaphysical gap that can, so he hoped, unite reflection and experience and ground a
post-metaphysical politics. If Weber did not know how to express his faith in truth and if
he could not connect his secular faith with an embodied practice of responsibility and
conviction, Jaspers set out to do just that: His conceptualization of secular faith provided
him with a metaphysics which conceded to political theology that a secular, liberal state
draws its life from preconditions that it cannot itself guarantee, but which understood this
groundlessness of liberalism not primarily as a danger but a moral ground for any law,
decision and consensus that seeks to revise itself meaningfully in time.
The rise and return of the question of being

Going into the details of Jaspers’s metaphysics, I choose two kindred spirits who simul-
taneously reflect the two sides of the Weberian coin: The existentialist philosopher
Martin Heidegger and the neo-Kantian thinker Ernst Cassirer. Jaspers’s (dis)agreements
with them illustrate his own position between decisionism and moralism. With Heideg-
ger he shared a reversal of metaphysical directionality but criticized his mysticism. With
Cassirer he shared the pluralization of indirect articulations of truth but rejected the
epistemological framing of transcendence.
Jaspers advanced a ‘metaphysics with other means’42 that paralleled central moves
Heidegger made against Cassirer in Davos. At the time still close friends and intellectual
companions, Jaspers would have joined Heidegger in criticizing Cassirer’s conceptua-
lization of Kantian transcendence as essentially immanent. Within such an immanent
frame, metaphysics becomes superfluous and philosophy is relegated to mere epistemol-
ogy. Jaspers argued that, in order to understand Kant correctly, metaphysics needs to be
defined as the deepening and not the surpassing of immanent reality. In other words, the
directionality of the question of being had to be reversed: The question was not how to
approach transcendence from immanence, but how to understand immanence in light of
transcendence. Truth concerns pre-eminently human existence as it can question itself –
for God there is no question about truth, just as truth is probably no question for nature.
Dege 13
The question of ‘Why?’ is the starting point of all metaphysics and it originates in the
confrontation of being and nothingness experienced in the concrete limit situation when
we are confronted with death, suffering, contingency and guilt. In these situations, all
certainties become fragile: Feelings, knowledge, principles and convictions43 can be
helpful guides, but they can also become totalizing or crumble, they can lead to aliena-
tion or fall apart. Eventually, neither emotional certainty and ideological homogeneity
nor generalizable facts and natural law can give enough support. Faced with a crisis of
adolescence or a midlife crisis, for instance, my questioning struggles with what I
experience as the indifference of knowledge and doctrine. But it cannot make well-
formed choices independently of these belief systems either. In turn, I become a question
to myself and take a leap on behalf of my own freedom, which I realize cannot be
achieved, possessed or produced based on my autonomous will. ‘I do not accomplish
my freedom. I did not make myself. I do not exist by my own means’. This experience of
one’s own transcendent freedom is key for the kind of ontological indeterminacy Hei-
degger and Jaspers sought. Freedom and autonomy are no longer the same. In Jaspers’s
words, transcendence is neither experienced as ‘materialized transcendence’ nor as
‘another world in the beyond’. It represents a ‘rupture of immanence’ that ‘is located
neither in this world nor in another. Its location is a boundary’.44
At this point, however, Jaspers parted ways with Heidegger who, in his eyes, defined
this rupture as a mystical event and did not break free from an ultimately solipsistic
fixation on being. He argued that Heidegger’s (fundamental) ontology depends on an
external event without which the existential experience of a rupture moment cannot
reflect on its own limits. Yet, these events, and the prophetic mysticism announcing
them, could easily become stifling. After his Rectoral Address in 1933, Jaspers dealt
extensively with the question to what extent Heidegger’s politics reflected his philoso-
phy. He specifically detected a fundamental problem in the way Heidegger conceived of
the ontological difference between being and existence [Sein and Dasein]. Since Hei-
degger erected a dogmatic contrast between truth as unconcealedness and truth as cor-
respondence or agreement, philosophy becomes the place where the truth of being is at
stake. This fundamental either/or needs to turn philosophy into a unio mystica, that itself
is no longer thinking in the sense of differentiating, speaking, imparting. Yet, ‘we can
only talk – and communicate – within the oppositions, in the appearances of the infi-
nite’.45 We cannot turn peasants, Romantic poets and Heraclitan philosophy into shep-
herds of being and declare the rest to drown in shallowness. The subtlety of Jaspers’s
appeal for communicative mediation between worldly diversity and transcendent being
is well captured in the following lines which Jaspers sent to Heidegger in 1949:
Not only Schelling’s indifference and all other phrases of the idealists, but also mysticism in
its obsession with images, which always say the same thing, seem to me to be a great
temptation to run away from the world and from men and from friends – and to get nothing
in return, when it succeeds, but an endless light, an unfillable abyss. I admit that I follow this
path all too readily at the hand of the ancients, but a shock must always free us from this
enchantment.46
Against the indifferent subject in rationalist idealism and against the enchanted
authenticity of the Heideggerian mystic, Jaspers never wavered in his conviction con-
cerning the importance of genuine Aus-ein-ander-setzung – the communicative practice
of constituting and deepening difference and identity at once. So where Heidegger
moved deeper into language as the house of being, Jaspers sought to liberate the house
from magic and doctrine. In contrast to Heidegger, being, for Jaspers, transcended
language, ‘the house needs windows’.47
At this point, Jaspers moved closer to Cassirer, which is most obvious in his treatment
of the Axial Age. It is the rise of the question of being during this age that sparks a rise in
(limit-)consciousness and communication. What is new about the Axial Age across
Asian, Greek and Middle Eastern cultures ‘is that man becomes conscious of Being as
a whole, of himself and his limitations. He experiences the terror of the world and his
own powerlessness. He asks radical questions’.48 So while in archaic communities, the
fundamental human problems are embedded in sacred knowledge of a magical character,
thinking now becomes its own object and ‘consciousness . . . conscious of itself’.49 This
doubling of consciousness provoked by the question of being ushers in ideas of trans-
cendence and multiplying struggles between opposing truth claims. These developments
do not cause the disappearance of myths – myths are remoulded. Jaspers wrote that the
Axial Age is ‘myth-creating after a new fashion, at the very moment when the structure
of the myth as a whole is destroyed’. Why? Because newly found certainty becomes
doubtful and history begins to rhyme. A general awareness spreads that essential tensions
cannot be resolved and no ultimate wholeness is realizable. But the tensions can be
clarified and a unifying whole indirectly conceived. We thus move from mythical
thought to thought in myths. Faith becomes possible because uncertainty will return:
‘Together with his world and his own self, Being becomes sensible to man, but not with
finality: the question remains’.50
Based on this depiction of human history, Jaspers developed a narrative that differed
in crucial ways from those offered by Heidegger (and ultimately Weber). Against Hei-
degger’s anti-modernist critique of Plato(nism), Jaspers held that the truth of uncon-
cealedness did not fall into oblivion due to the triumphant advance of science and
technology, not because epistemology has replaced ontology. We have lost the ability
to inquire about the question behind the answer, because we dread uncertainty and long
for manifested and revealed forms of truth. In believing that philosophy needs to over-
come the subject–object divide and disclose being, Heidegger violated the unhiddenness
of truth that he sought to protect. Philosophy’s main power for Jaspers was to question,
diagnose and appeal. Concrete answers are given by science and politics; philosophy
speaks an evocative language.
Ernst Cassirer was equally interested in the interstices of subject and object. His
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms works with myths as a fragile, historically relative indi-
cation of possible transcendence. Indeed, both agreed that myths work through symbols,
imagery, rituals and speculative reflection. They incorporate meaningful elements of our
existence that, once materialized, point beyond their manifestation. In other words,
myths incorporate the initial groundlessness of the question which enables them to resist
being turned into dogma or ideology, a ‘political lie’ or an ‘illusion’. This is also why
Jaspers chose a separate term for them. He called them ciphers. Ciphers remain an
Dege 15
animating warning against the force of revealed truth by pluralizing the experience of
one unifying truth that cannot be grasped.51 In this sense, ciphers generate a third
language, a language of faith and limit-consciousness next to the languages of facts and
values that express material and immaterial certainties.
Where Jaspers transitioned from mythology to cipher languages, Cassirer shifted
from ‘mythos’ to ‘religion’.52 What was second-order consciousness for Jaspers repre-
sented the insight into the symbolizing nature of symbols for Cassirer. It is therefore
hardly surprising that both thinkers contrasted Heidegger’s mysticism with the mysti-
cism of Nicholas of Cusa, the great cardinal from the Mosel River in the German
Rhineland. Zealous Thomists regarded Cusanus as a thoroughgoing pantheist; Jaspers
and Cassirer, however, saw in him a ‘Renaissance Kant’, who was able to speak the
language of ciphers. Jaspers conceived of Cusanus as a genuine mystic because he
‘maintains and does not nullify the subject-object relation. Moreover, it is precisely
through his maintenance of the subject-object polarity – and indeed, its extenuation –
that Transcendence appears’.53 Cusanus’s concept of docta ignorantia comes very close
to Jaspers’s depiction of Weber’s philosophy as a philosophy of floundering, and Cusa-
nus’s ‘learned ignorance’ bears striking similarities to the knowing non-knowledge of
Jaspers’s self-reflective naı̈veté. Most importantly, both were driven and sustained by
Plato’s ‘good beyond all being’, which Cusanus expressed as the ‘non-otherness’ (non
aliud) of God and Jaspers as the all-encompassing of being. Jaspers therefore introduced
Cusanus’s non aliud in terms highly evocative of his own depiction of transcendence.
The non-otherness is no negation of otherness, as it defines it by preceding it. . . . God is

without negation. He is the non-otherness which is neither opposed by the other nor by
nothingness, because he also precedes nothingness and defines it. Hence Dionysus: God
were in everything all and in nothingness – nothing.54
However, Jaspers and Cassirer differed in their respective interpretations of this

concealed positivity of being that precedes all negation. For Jaspers, it represented a
cipher which means he embedded it within ordinary experience. Cassirer, on the con-
trary, fixated the origin of symbolic language in a strictly neo-Kantian theory of con-
sciousness, that is, as the Urgrund of all language. Jaspers regarded cipherscript not as a
primordial Urgrund, upon which one may develop an ontology of symbolic form, but as
the region between (‘Zwischenreich’) the encompassing being and the particular horizon
of historical existence. It is only through the experience of limit situations that direct
truths turn into ciphers that can then be interpreted and revised. Cassirer, however,
treated the symbol not only as the matrix of human experience but as the matrix of
reality and truth as a whole.55
In short, Jaspers proposed the concept of a distant and hidden, yet unified being as a
cipher against both Cassirer’s tendency to objectify language beyond ordinary experi-
ence as well as against Heidegger’s tendency to confuse philosophy with mythological
prophecy. While Cassirer returned to traditional metaphysics with an emphasis on unity
and reason, Heidegger embraced authenticity as the unio mystica of existence and being
and foregrounded the importance of rupture and difference. Jaspers looked for an alter-
native concept of reason which could mediate diversity and unity and which would have
to be dynamic, communicative and hermeneutically open. In other words, he hoped that

cipher languages could offer a possibility to turn Weber’s warring gods into a source of
solidarity rather than divisiveness.
To illustrate the use of ciphers more concretely, it is first important to realize that any
fact or value can be turned into a cipher: freedom, God, but also the love of a friend or
parent, the identification with a political constitution, or a scientific discovery. I choose
the example of religion discussed between Heidegger and Jaspers to show what changes
if it is expressed in cipherscript. Heidegger wrote Jaspers in 1927 about his last hour at
his mother’s death bed. To him this was a ‘lesson in practical philosophy’ because she
asked him a final time to return to Christianity and he realized in this moment that ‘the
question of theology and philosophy is no longer purely for the writing desk’.56 So the
issue presented itself to Heidegger as an either/or decision. He felt pressed to side with or
against his own conviction, with or against his mother, speak or belie the truth. And it is
clear that he decided against his mother. In his response, Jaspers tried to move beyond
what he considered a wrong dichotomy between religion and philosophy which Heideg-
ger misunderstands as an either/or decision because his concept of truth is still tied to
revelation. It is a possessive truth – Heidegger wants to own his authentic self. Jaspers’s
response illustrates the turn from religion as value to religion as cipher.
You are having a difficult experience with your mother, which I can comprehend from a
distance. That the alternative philosophy-theology can play a role here is heart rending. If I
were to inject myself into it, I would – in the consciousness of knowing nothing, but
respecting the belief of the loved one, more than that, recognizing it as truth – perhaps
speak in its forms and representations, and ask [her] to put in a good word for me in heaven,
and promise on my side to do what I could. But to you that will seem very remote and
hopeless.57
This brief paragraph illustrates that Jaspers’s ciphers do not express a truth understood
as a compromise of irreconcilable views or the agreement (to disagree), neither do they
encourage to lie – Jaspers does not mean to pretend some kind of belief in heaven to do
the loved one a favour. Rather, the love for one’s mother turns her beliefs into truthful
ciphers that offer a language which everyone can speak without giving up one’s own
beliefs or defining it through the negation of the other.
With this conceptualization of ciphers, Jaspers integrated two ostensibly contradic-
tory effects: a pluralization of beliefs and a deepening of a common ground; a diversi-
fication of views in relation to one another and an identification with a unifying
framework. I call this also his concept of diversity in unity.
Weber’s polytheism of values revisited

Jaspers’s metaphysical turn to ciphers helped him demote Weber’s fatalistic view of
polytheism as the default position in history. Unlike Weber, he did not view history as ‘a
street paved by the devil with destroyed values’.58 Rather, history has an origin and a
goal even if we cannot know them and approach them as ciphers. This led to the
Dege 17
following reconsideration of a polytheism of values that reflects Jaspers commitment to

diversity in unity:
[T]he nearby God is indispensable to finite beings but exists in ciphers only. These are
naturally manifold, and as a result the nearby God will come to be polytheistic. Surrepti-
tiously this happens even in the faith in revelation, which dogmatically preserves the one
God: if this one God is near, he will imperceptibly appear to the believer in one specific
form at a time, while the One remains the distant God whose very Oneness is a cipher. If the
ciphers turn into God’s concrete reality, they will soon be many gods, untrue, and objects of
superstition. Only as ciphers, as historic voices of the distant God, can they stay potentially
true. It is precisely as a mere conception that the distant God expands the scope of our
freedom. His conception liberates us from concrete, superstitiously fixed gods and revela-
tions; it liberates us from all exclusivities, all fanaticisms, all acts of violence that lie hidden
in the faith in a God who shows himself in time and space.59
This quote mirrors Kierkegaard’s insight that the loss of the scholastic idea of God as
causa sui represents the beginning of all faith that exists beyond proof and power. Jaspers
interpreted religion as human, not in order to secularize it, but, dialectically, to preserve
its transcendence. This type of secular faith remains deeply related to the ‘very Oneness’
of transcendence but understands it as a cipher. It embraces a sense of groundlessness
that knows that it does not know and can therefore embrace love, freedom, and truth as
something unfathomable that is only indirectly manifested in the world through ‘historic
voices of the distant God’.
In contrast to Cassirer’s and Heidegger’s reading of Kant, Jaspers found in him a
source for this type of unified polytheistic thought. Kant comes close to Cusanus’s
negative theology because he understood that ‘the arguments for the existence of God
do not lose their validity as ideas because they have lost their power to prove’. They
amount to a confirmation of faith and can, in dialogue with other faiths, ‘become a
fundament of ourselves’.60 Jaspers particularly turned to Kant’s transcendental reflec-
tions in order to show that they provided ‘a scientific form to immediate experience as
something that cannot be an object of science. [They] speak of something that is the
ground of all objectivity, but that is not itself an object’.61 Unlike Kant’s turn to epis-
temology, however, Jaspers interpreted this groundless ground of all objectivity in an
existential and not formal way. He was convinced that we will not find a definite law,
principle or category, although the process of finding ‘such propositions’ is ultimately
meaningful, as it allows these propositions to remain (hermeneutically) accessible as
ciphers and not turn into ideology or dogma.
[Transcendental reflections] do not transcend in a forward direction, so to speak, away from

all objects toward something that lies beyond, but in a backward direction, away from all
consciousness of objects, toward the ground of possibility of this diverse objectiveness.62
To retrieve and pluralize the diversity from within the absolute images that hold us
captive constitutes the core of Jaspers’s metaphysics with other means. The absence of
positive human knowledge about God and absolute truth cannot be resolved by the
positing of God as an antinomically regulative idea. On the contrary, the absence of this
knowledge is the precondition of life and freedom. Thornhill summarizes this move in
the following way:
In his response to Kant’s scepticism, Jaspers . . . replaces the formal uncertainty of God,
which is at the core of Kant’s critique of metaphysics, with an experiential uncertainty,
which interprets transcendence as an elusive possibility of human life, and which cease-
lessly refers humanity to a[n] . . . experience of its own antinomies and limits.63
This step from formal to experiential uncertainty is comparable with Jaspers’s inter-
pretation of Weber against Rickert. With the appearance of Weber’s Nervi fragment,
written 1902–1903 during his stay in Nervi (near Genoa, Italy), we know today that
Weber rejected the Rickertian version of neo-Kantianism in a Jaspersian vein, namely on
a metaphysical level. Refusing the possibility of grasping the substance of a value or
norm, Weber ‘advanced the exactly opposite view: that the ultimate values are in nec-
essary conflict, and therefore can in no way be said to be objective’.64
The logical possibility of a ‘formal ethics’ . . . shows us that the concept of norms [covering]
the infinite multiplicity of the object of these norms does not in itself guarantee that [such
norms] can be formulated in substance.65
Weber certainly did not further explore the following step Jaspers would pursue: If the
logical possibility of an absolute substance results in alternative and irreconcilable
values, none of which can exclude the others, it might be better described as an encom-
passing, always receding horizon which constitutes a highly productive form of ground-
lessness. It is by way of its underlying and irresolvable questions that worldviews
become conscious of themselves as worldviews. In insisting on the primacy and return
of the question, a worldview gains the ability to problematize the answers it gives to the
question. Only a life which remains problematic to itself can continue to develop and
create itself beyond its once established form.66
In emphasizing the productivity of groundlessness, Jaspers defined failure as the
highest cipher.67 This move shifted his entire programme to the question of how we can
set the tension between opposing gods in motion so that they form part of a loving
struggle and do not start a war. As the reversed directionality of Jaspers’s metaphysics
indicates, transcendental reflections do not reach for eternity. Rather than liberating the
subject from its own finitude, they seek to enable the subject to become finite in face of
the inexpressible in limit situations.68 In moments of experiential uncertainty, people
realize that their relationship to truth does not reflect a position of waiting, reconciliation
or determination, it rather gives rise to a mode of suspension that brings different truth
claims in dialogue in a responsible, albeit doubtlessly tragic fashion.
Jaspers’s reconsideration of a polytheism of values is therefore equally sceptical of
formal as well as theological versions of a unifying substance. Any identification of the
universe with the divine as in pantheism or a reconciliation of infinite expressions of one
transcendent truth as in Lessing’s deistic ‘Ring Parable’69 remains within the cipher-
script of an encompassing truth which is indicative of a unity based on the
Dege 19
interrelatedness of antinomies.70 As I have argued, this model of diversity in unity

represents the normative foundation of Jaspers’s philosophy of communication. Accord-
ing to Jaspers, we find ourselves in irreducibly unique and distinct situations, but we can
all relate to experiential uncertainty, a knowledge not to know, which, expressed in
cipher language, provides the ground on which different value commitments can ‘mean-
ingfully meet around the world, ready to recommit themselves to their own historic
traditions, to purify them, to transform them, but not to abandon them’.71
Conclusion: A political ethic of non-indifference

Karl Jaspers’s thought moves within the gap between the two Webers I have presented:
A philosophical Weber who has faith in an inexpressible truth and maintains the fun-
damental tensions of a secular life, and a nihilist Weber who dissolves into two irrecon-
cilable souls, a value-based decisionist and a facts-based rationalist soul. Against the two
dominant interpretations of Weber which capitalized either on Weber’s politics or on his
science, Jaspers raised the problem of nihilism which called for a deeper understanding
of the philosophical dimensions in Weber.
While Weber famously depicted both an excess and a subordination of meaning in
modernity when he coined the term disenchantment next to the fragmentation and
irreconcilability of value spheres, it was mainly Jaspers and Carl Schmitt who turned
this diagnosis into existentialist philosophies. In doing so both sought to address Weber’s
challenge, namely, how we can bring opposite views together and account for a political
solidarity, if different values are rationally irreconcilable and a secular world cannot be
based on one, clearly expressed, unified truth.
Unlike Jaspers’s philosophical Weber, however, Schmitt did not keep the ideological
and rationalist sides of the modern divide together. He turned Weber into a decisionist.
According to him, Weber’s democracy is a leader-democracy which retains a funda-
mental trace of divine command that surfaces in exceptional circumstances, when rulers
make sovereign decisions. So political authority requires extra-rational and transcendent
foundations which Schmitt believed cannot be provided by liberalism.
Habermas, representing the opposite side of the Weberian coin, tried to rescue Weber
from Schmitt and argued that the rationalization of disenchantment also comes with
reflexivity and reflexivity creates mutual agreement through deliberation.
The argument I advanced in this article suggests that Jaspers would see in Schmitt an
all too quick and lazy return to authority in the moment of uncertainty and lack of
control. Habermas, on the other hand, has not even grappled with the foundational void
of liberal democracy. Like Rawls, he cannot answer why we ought to become post-
metaphysical, and his engagement with religion and irreconcilable commitments seems
half-hearted given that a rational concept of unity prevails a priori. Thus, a Habermasian
rescue of Weber from a Schmittian ‘interpretive sovereignty’ will prove futile.
Jaspers, in comparison, was sitting between Schmitt and Habermas. He would have
agreed with Schmitt that a rationalist faith in reason is no longer possible in an age that
systematically decouples meaning from rationality. But he did not give up on reason. On
the one hand, he was a child of his time and identified with the world of romantic doubt
and a renewed openness to art and mythology. On the other hand, he did not close the
door on philosophy and metaphysics. This predestinated Jaspers to offer a highly com-
pelling response to Weber’s challenge that addresses both meaninglessness and radica-
lization without seeking for an escape in religion, the will to power, rationality or
mysticism.
As a result, Jaspers developed a metaphysics which roots human freedom and soli-
darity not in the decision (Schmitt) or the law (Habermas) but in an experiential uncer-
tainty and the knowledge not to know. Rather than deciding for and against common
values or alluding to universal facts, Jaspers emphasized the significance of experiential
uncertainty for the ways we make decisions and revise them. It is generative of a limit-
consciousness that introduces a third language of secular faith next to the languages of
facts and values. Jaspers would therefore agree with Schmitt, the liberal state cannot
ground itself, but this groundlessness of liberalism is a moral foundation for any law,
decision and consensus that seeks to become self-reflective and transform itself in
meaningful and reasonable ways.
In light of Jaspers’s Weber and his diagnosis of a re-enchanted disenchantment, the
simultaneous increase of radicalization and disinterestedness in liberal democracies can
be grasped on a deeper level. Common to this twin phenomenon is a growing tendency of
not engaging with other worldviews. People refrain from dialogue and revert to thin
concepts of toleration, liberal compromise and a moral relativism which declares per-
sonal truths to be as subjective as tastes and opinions. In turn, fear, anger and a discourse
of security can easily prevail over freedom. Oftentimes, a post-metaphysical understand-
ing of liberty does not acknowledge that it is based on absolute principles such as non-
interference, individual respect or mutual recognition that cannot be defended without
difficulty. This lack of genuine justification easily backfires, once communities and
individuals are confronted with existential threats and the disruption of their normal
lives. The revival of populist and ideological radicalism, ethnic nationalism and pseudo-
spiritual re-enchantments are symptomatic of a time which is torn between the two
conflictual Webers – between dispensing with truth altogether or hiding behind its
authority. What I described as two sides of the same Weberian coin is therefore most
visible when any well-intentioned ethics and political liberalism collapse once identities
become politicized and fight against each other in potentially violent and value-
destroying conflicts.
Note that, according to Jaspers’s more sceptical philosophy of communication, a
Habermasian turn to communicative reason would not be able to respond to this
problem. A focus on deliberation in the public sphere would both overstretch and
underestimate the possibilities of solidarity. Larger groups formed on the basis of
personal interest and geared towards mutual understanding cannot cultivate the mental
and linguistic sensibilities for the fundamental questions behind people’s concerns.
The pressure to agree is too high and the groups too big so that frustration due to
shallow and formal compromises is foreseeable, power structures (re)insert themselves
and a climate of self-assertion, emotional conflict and dogmatic pressures might result
in fear and resentment. Yet, Jaspers’s idea of communicative action clarifies rather
than solves problems, it suspends the quest for certainty and discovers the intrinsic
value of the question.
Dege 21
Thus, rather than moving procedurally from real conditions to an ideal speech situ-
ation or insisting on a sovereign subject that controls the exception, Jaspers was con-
vinced that the work of solidarity takes place within the tensions between the ideal and
the real in ordinary experience as it turns our gaze to meaningful activities and trans-
forms wounded attachments by liberating them from the totalizing effects of convictions
and the numbing ignorance inherent in worldviews. A Jaspersian communicative reason
lingers over uncertainty and suspends the urge to know in order to make and revise
decisions and, ultimately, learn how to become fluent not only in the languages of facts
and values but also in the language of ciphers.
While there would be more to say about the relationship between different ciphers and
the extent to which they are neither relative nor absolute, this article has focused on
Jaspers’s overall turn to cipher philosophy embedded in a metaphysics with other means.
In contrast to the truth claims of feelings, knowledge and ideas, ciphers are inherently
self-critical: Being is concealed in the moment of its disclosure and thereby renders
language reflexive. Jaspers’s distinction between indirect and direct expressions of truth
allowed him to speak of ciphers as what relates direct truths back to their primary
questions which arise from the indirect horizons of encompassing truth. These questions
are irresolvable and can remain productive since they do not indicate a void that seeks
filling or a problem that can be solved. Instead, ciphers are fundamentally indebted to the
type of infinitely returning questions which have become part of our collective memory
since the Axial Age. As the example of Heidegger’s mother shows, ciphers are not
sustained by authenticity or a provable truth but involve an inherently pluralizing and
communicative expression of what it means to be human.
I close this article with a final illustration of a political cipher that can meaningfully
respond to one of the limit situations that Jaspers considered constitutive of our human
existence: guilt. Willy Brandt’s historic gesture of kneeling at the Warsaw Ghetto mem-
orial in 1970 expresses a response to this limit situation in form of the cipher of solidarity
and its relation to collective identity. Prior to signing a treaty with Poland that recognized
the Polish borders and began a new chapter in German–Polish relations, Brandt, German
Chancellor at the time, visited a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which was
the 1943 act of Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto to oppose Nazi Germany’s final
effort to transport the remaining ghetto population to the Majdanek and Treblinka
concentration camps. After laying down a wreath, Brandt knelt in silence for about half
a minute, which no one had expected. He later said: ‘Under the weight of recent history, I
did what people do when words fail them. In this way I commemorated millions of
murdered people’. Brandt was not religious, but his gesture of humility and penance
acknowledged the truth of a guilt that cannot be defined in words. It is groundless.
Brandt, who spent most of Nazi Germany in exile, was not politically or legally guilty,
but he knew he had lived while others had died – he had remained a witness to the worst
crimes against humanity perpetrated by his own people. With this powerful gesture,
Brandt captured a truth about collective guilt that can only be expressed indirectly,
because the question of who counts as German and how Germans should relate to their
past cannot be clearly answered. But in opening a space for public shame, Brandt
allowed for these irresolvable questions to enter the consciousness of the time. And
although Brandt’s symbolic act was not received well in Germany at first, the tide
changed quickly and it became the stepping stone of a different relation between Eastern
Europe and West Germany. The language of this cipher had opened the hearts of many
people, gave them a sense of collectivity and provided a new discourse particularly for
German and Polish youth through which they could engage genuinely with each other,
often for the first time.72
To conclude, this article has introduced Jaspers’s work as a response to the twin
phenomenon of radicalization and meaninglessness. He was concerned that liberalism
fails in addressing the motivational sources of its own survival because it struggles to
come to terms with its own groundlessness. As a result, its response to illiberal devel-
opments often remains moralist, cynical or technocratic. A decisionist rejection of
groundlessness for the sake of friend versus foe demarcations, on the other hand, further
fuels the revival of populist and ideological radicalism. We seem to be stuck between
Victor Orban and Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Angela Merkel, the two irrecon-
cilable, yet profoundly intertwined sides of the Weberian coin that are symptomatic of a
post-truth world. I have argued that Jaspers’s return to metaphysics presents a third,
forgotten response to the Weberian challenge. In many ways, his philosophy conceptua-
lizes a meta-political grounding of politics in communicative and hermeneutic practices
73
that develop with a growing sense of limit situations such as death or guilt and their
expression in ciphers (as shown in the example of Heidegger’s mother or Brandt’s
Kniefall). If Rickert, Cassirer and Habermas ignored and Schmitt and Heidegger rejected
groundlessness, Jaspers had faith in it. I define this faith also as an ethos of non-indif-
ference because it addresses indifference on behalf of difference – it seeks to disrupt the
ignorance inherent in direct forms of truth. Jaspers’s polytheism of values was therefore
inherently pedagogical. He believed we can bring opposites together if we base solidarity
on communal learning through ethical collisions rather than on homogeneity (Schmitt) or
toleration (Habermas). Instead of having radicalizing or depoliticizing effects, differ-
ence, thus understood, can meaningfully point to encompassing material and immaterial
bonds and give rise to an awareness of human finitude that turns the divisiveness of facts
and values into a cipher language of solidarity.
ORCID iD
Carmen Lea Dege https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1982-3907
Notes
1. In his autobiographical writings published shortly before Jaspers died, he mentions Weber
next to his wife, Gudrun Jaspers, and his brother-in-law, Ernst Mayer, as the three persons that
had the largest impact on his life. He continues in the following way: ‘[T]he standard for men
historically distant, became embodied for me, in a singular, marvelous fashion, in the person
of Max Weber. . . . His thought as well as his nature became as essential for my philosophy,
even ‘til today, as no other thinker’ ( Jaspers 1981a, 29).
2. To my knowledge, the only comparative analysis of Schmitt and Jaspers (Bielefeldt 1994)
offers a careful and illuminating reading but falls short of an in-depth engagement with the
philosophical and existentialist underpinnings of both worldviews. With regards to Habermas,
I am not aware of a comparative interpretation that takes up Helmut Fahrenbach’s call to
further investigate their relationship (Fahrenbach 1991). This lack is most astonishing given
Dege 23
Habermas’s frequent return to Jaspers and his ideas of communicative action, constitutional
patriotism and the Axial Age. See also the following quote by Martin Jay: ‘Although Haber-
mas is perhaps the most notable advocate of communicative reason, he was not the first to
defend it. Karl Jaspers, for example, wrote in his 1947 Von der Wahrheit, “reason is the total
will to communication . . . It wants to make authentic communication possible and, hence,
seeks to realize the honesty whose attributes are unlimited openness and probing, as well as
a sense of justice that wants all that arises from primal sources to attain its own validity,
though also to let it founder against its limits” ( Jaspers 1994, 181)’ (Jay 2016, 219). The
seemingly smooth line between Habermas and Jaspers is deceptive, though. They specifically
disagree about the role of metaphysics and religion. If Habermas deals with religion only half-
heartedly (until recently) and advocates for a post-metaphysical thinking, Jaspers’s philoso-
phy of communication would be unimaginable without his deep awareness of value conflicts
and his return to metaphysics to ground a post-metaphysical politics. While a more detailed
analysis of these differences lies beyond the scope of this article, I do argue that Jaspers shows
greater potential than Habermas in rescuing Weber from a Schmittian ‘interpretive
sovereignty’.
3. Especially Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno come to mind. Next to
Heidegger, Jaspers is considered the founder of German existentialism and had an impact on
Heidegger’s concept of death as a limit situation of human existence. Compare Heidegger’s
acknowledgement of this influence in Heidegger (1996, 249 n. 6, 301 n. 17, 338 n. 3) and the
main comprehensive investigation of their relationship in Olson (1994). The differences
between both thinkers become most astute in relation to their common student and friend,
Hannah Arendt. While Arendt shares Jaspers’s philosophy of reflective judgment and Socratic
thinking, she ultimately sides with Heidegger’s anti-Platonic conception of truth which moves
her closer to decisionism (compare Arendt and Jaspers 1992, 284–87). Thus, neither an
Arendtian nor a Heideggerian interpretation of Jaspers’s philosophy and politics will suffice
to gauge Jaspers’s unusual position in between science and religion. Adorno, on the other
hand, is usually understood to be diametrically opposed to Jaspers due to his disparagement of
Jaspers’s ‘jargon of authenticity’. While I would refute any reliance on authenticity on Jas-
pers’s part, it is certainly true that, unlike Adorno, Jaspers does not believe that Marxism or
psychoanalysis can adequately respond to the challenge of disenchantment or a growing
uncertainty and deep plurality of values. As Thornhill has convincingly argued, however,
Adorno and Jaspers share substantially more common ground than one might expect (Thorn-
hill 2005). This finding points to other missed encounters with critical theory such as the
impact Jaspers had on the work of Michel Foucault. The considerable overlap between
Weber’s, Jaspers’s and Foucault’s Nietzsche, their understanding of truth as being outside
of power and their implicit or explicit reliance on a concept of limit experience or de-raison
can only indirectly be addressed in this article. For a comprehensive treatment of Weber and
Foucault which also discusses Jaspers’s thought, see Szakolczai (1998).
4. Jaspers (1989a, 1989b).
5. Jaspers (1989b, 38).
6. Jaspers (1960, 376–77). Note that Jaspers emphasizes that this book was written under
Weber’s influence. Jaspers (1981a, 29).
7. Among the three, Kant is maybe the most surprising pick. And indeed, Jaspers offers a
fascinating, yet uncommon reading of Kant that is directed against the neo-Kantian
dominance in philosophy at his time. For more details, compare chapter 2 in Thornhill (2002,
31–54) as well as Samay (1971). Hannah Arendt’s understanding of Kant is influenced by
Jaspers whom she mentions in her lecture on Kant’s Third Critique as ‘the only disciple which
Kant ever had’ (Arendt 1992, 7).
8. The bond between Jaspers and Plato is deep and fascinating and it makes sense to read
Jaspers’s Weber next to his Plato (Jaspers 1962, 3–64). Indeed, the relationship of Plato to
Socrates and the way Jaspers conceives of this relationship can form a valuable instrument to
grasp the depth of Jaspers’s Weber as a ‘modern-day Socrates’ (Kirkbright 2004, 91). Com-
pare an article by Ernst Moritz Manasse on this parallel and Jaspers’s approving response to it:
Manasse (1981); Jaspers (1981b). Manasse suggests that, just as Plato’s philosophy could be
interpreted as his attempt to say what he had experienced through Socrates, so it is possible to
consider Jaspers’s thinking as his way of expressing what he had experienced through Max
Weber. Jaspers explicitly welcomes this exposition.
9. Jaspers (1989b, 36–37). Compare also the following portrayal of Weber as a tragic character:
‘Max Weber was a great political writer, the founder of present-day sociology, a recognized
scientist and author of extraordinary works, a companion to his wife, and a friend to his
friends: a human being who knew happiness. But, political action was denied him, his works
remain gigantic fragments, and his existence for many years was vitally shaken and narrowly
limited in its effect’ (130).
10. Jaspers recounts his clash with Rickert in the following way: ‘After Max Weber’s death I
hesitated to go to Rickert for fear that he might use inappropriate words in the face of this
event, which cut so unforeseeably deep into our intellectual as well as into our German
existence. Not until the fifth day did I decide to see him. At first we exchanged a few words
of deep emotion which set me at ease. But then Rickert began to speak of Max Weber as of his
disciple. . . . Now the disaster had occurred. I became angry and went so far as to say: ‘If you
think that you and your philosophy will be known at all in the future, you may perhaps be
right, but only because your name is mentioned in a footnote in one of Max Weber’s works as
the man to whom Max Weber expresses his gratitude for certain logical insights’. Since that
time the relationship between Rickert and myself was disturbed. . . . When, a few weeks later, I
had given my commemorative address on Max Weber before the student body of the Uni-
versity of Heidelberg, . . . and when Rickert had read it, he angrily addressed me as I entered to
call on him: ‘That you construct a philosophy out of Max Weber may be your rightful
privilege, but to call him a philosopher is absurd’. From then on Rickert was my enemy’
(“Intellectual Autobiography,” 31–32). For a more detailed discussion, see Adair-Toteff
(2002).
11. Jaffé shared the correspondence piece by piece beginning in 1957, after Baumgarten accused
her of being partly responsible for Weber’s death. In February 1963, Baumgarten cannot ‘stop
himself shocking the eighty-year-old Jaspers with a selection from these letters’, revealing a
Weber in agony over the choice between marriage and eroticism. Jaspers recognizes that the
letters contain not just a brief adventure but something that forces him to reconsider his image
of Weber (Radkau 2009, 557–58).
12. Jaspers (1967b, 33–4, translation mine).
13. Jaspers (1989a, 16).
14. Most famous is his contempt for all those who cannot stand the truths of modern science and
need to return to the ‘old churches’: ‘To anyone who is unable to endure the fate of the age like
Dege 25
a man we must say that he should return to the welcoming and merciful embrace of the old
churches – simply, silently, and without any of the usual public bluster of the renegade. They
will surely not make it hard for him. In the process, he will inevitably be forced to make a
“sacrifice of the intellect,” one way or the other. We shall not bear him a grudge if he can
really do it. For such a sacrifice of the intellect in favor of an unconditional religious com-
mitment is one thing. But morally, it is a very different thing if one shirks his straightforward
intellectual integrity. This is what happens when he lacks the courage to make up his mind
about his ultimate standpoint but instead resorts to feeble equivocation in order to make his
duty less onerous’ Weber (2004, 31).
15. Compare also: ‘There is absolutely no “unbroken” religion working as a vital force which is
not compelled at some point to demand the credo non quod, sed quia absurdum – the
“sacrifice of the intellect”’ (Weber 2009).
16. Jaspers (1989a, 22).
17. Jaspers coins the term ‘Axial Age’ which represents, in various ways, a theory of ‘multiple
modernities’ avant la lettre. He develops the main empirical and theoretical framework which,
in its core elements, has been confirmed by sociologists, historians and anthropologists. (For
an overview compare Bellah (2005); Bellah (2011); Bellah and Joas (2012); Arnason, Eisen-
stadt, and Wittrock (2005); and Joas (2017, 279–354.) In The Origin and Goal of History,
Jaspers introduces the Axial Age in the following way: ‘The most extraordinary events are
concentrated in this period, Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of
Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu and a host
of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of
philosophical possibilities down to scepticism, to materialism, sophism and nihilism; in Iran
Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in
Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to
Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers Parmenides,
Heraclitus and Plato, of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by
these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and
the West, without any one of these regions knowing of the others’ (Jaspers 1965, 2).
18. Jaspers (1965, 48).
19. Thornhill (2002, 167).
20. Most explicitly, Jaspers was indebted to Lasaulx’s formulation of the Axial Age thesis avant
la lettre: ‘It can by no means be coincidental that at about the same time, 600 before Christ,
there appear in Persia Zoroaster, in India Gautama Buddha, in China Confucius, among the
Jews the prophets, in Rome the king Numa and in Hellas the first philosophers . . . as reformers
of popular religion; this remarkable coincidence can have its foundation only in the inner
substantial unity of mankind and the life of peoples . . . , not in the particular effervescence of
one national spirit’. (Ernst von Lasaulx, Neuer Versuch, 137, translated by Joas in “The Axial
Age Debate as Religious Discourse,” 15–16; quoted in Jaspers (1965, 8.)
21. To Hans Joas, Jaspers’s book on the Axial Age marks a break with Weber’s ‘occidental
rationalism’ (2017, 299). I would not go that far as Jaspers does not directly address Weber
in his book. Joas is correct, however, in emphasizing that Jaspers breaks with the Eurocentric
Western tradition. Compare also Jeffrey Alexander who celebrates the ways in which
Jaspers’s Axial Age thesis unsettles Weber’s ‘myopia of Orientalism’ (Alexander 2013, 3).
22. Compare Jaspers’s summary of the Axial Age as the beginning of philosophy: ‘Consciousness
became . . . conscious of itself, thinking became its own object. Spiritual conflicts arose,
accompanied by attempts to convince others through the communication of thoughts, reasons
and experiences. The most contradictory possibilities were essayed. Discussion, the formation
of parties and the division of the spiritual realm into opposites which nonetheless remained
related to one another, created unrest and movement to the very brink of spiritual chaos. In this
age were born the fundamental categories within which we still think today, and the begin-
nings of the world religions, by which human beings still live, were created’ (Jaspers 1965, 2).
See also Jaspers’s understanding of history which distinguishes between the Axial Age, the
age of religion and the age of rationality: ‘Once reason used to be sheltered in the very faith it
clarified. Then the institutional forms of faith turned against reason. Finally, in the modern
world of technological know-how and propaganda blasts for everything and nothing, both
faith and reason came to seem eclipsed by the mere intellect’ (Jaspers 1969, 35).
23. Jaspers (1989a, 13–14).
24. Jaspers (1989b, 127).
25. Jaspers (1989b, 127).
26. Quoted in Radkau (2009, 558).
27. Jaspers (1970, 52).
28. Jaspers (1950, 48).
29. Quoted in Henrich (1988, 7–31, 29, translation mine).
30. Compare Jaspers (1970, 71).
31. Jaspers (1970, 58).
32. Quoted in Henrich (1988, 29, translation mine).
33. Max Weber, letter to Ferdinand Tönnies, 19 February 1909, as cited in Kloppenberg (1986,
498).
34. For a similar interpretation, compare Joas (2017, 281–82).
35. Thornhill (2002, 62). Thornhill summarizes this apt depiction of their common ground in the
following way: ‘In a close analogy to Jaspers’ critique of Kantian legal formalism, . . . Weber
claims that the dislocation of law from its transcendental securities has not opened new
possibilities for human emancipation. On the contrary, the formality of modern law has
distributed power anonymously through all social systems, and disengaged human actions
from all discernible substantial purposes. The final outcome of law, Weber concludes there-
fore, is “the increasing evaluation of all valid law as a rational, technical apparatus, which can
at any time be reorganized for purposive-rational motives, and which is devoid of any inherent
sanctity”’ (Thornhill 2002, 60; quote from Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 513).
For a more elaborate account on Jaspers and Weber, see Thornhill (2002, 55–73, 168–207).
36. Jaspers (1981a, 57–58).
37. Jaspers (2000).
38. Jaspers (1959). For a collection of lectures and talks on education and the political situation in
Germany directly after World War II, see Jaspers (1986).
39. In the lead article of the first edition of Die Wandlung, Jaspers writes that, after National
Socialism, there are no longer any valid universal standards. Cultural learning will need to
involve ethical conflict and an honest exchange of opposing minds as ‘we do not come with a
program’ (Die Wandlung: Geleitwort: Volume 1, November 1945, 1–6). Jaspers’s focus on
civic culture and education explains as well, why he becomes frustrated early one when
Dege 27
political and educational institutions are not willing to come to terms with National Socialism.
While he has stayed in Heidelberg over the entire period of the Nazi regime, with his Jewish
wife in increasing isolation and without the ability to publish or teach, he now emigrates to
Switzerland in 1948 as freedom becomes possible but is, in his view, forfeited on a large scale.
40. The book which most closely mirrors Weber’s political thought is Jaspers (1971a, first pub-
lished in 1932); English translation: Jaspers (1951). Jaspers later political writings are less
Weberian. Hannah Arendt was particularly influential although Jaspers never embraced her
republicanism and remained critical of her political existentialism. Compare specifically
Jaspers (1973, 1967c).
41. Thornhill has rightly highlighted the difference between the placeholder and the personifica-
tion or institutionalization of being and its significance for Jaspers’s political thought, com-
pare Thornhill (2002, 69–70).
42. I adopt this term from Michael Schene. It nicely integrates Jaspers’s scepticism of traditional
metaphysics, on the one hand, positioning him squarely in the post-metaphysical thinking
after Kant, and his attempt to rehabilitate the tradition of metaphysics, on the other hand, via
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Compare specifically the introduction in Schene (2010).
43. Jaspers’s corresponding categories are empirical existence (feelings and needs), conscious-
ness in general (knowledge and intellect) and spirit (ideas and values). They represent direct
and immanent expressions of truth. Thus, feelings are immediate, knowledge aims to be free
of contradictions, and ideas offer forceful and compelling discourses. Compare for a more
elaborate account Karl Jaspers (1969, 43–64).
44. Jaspers (1971b, 13).
45. Jaspers to Heidegger, 17 August 1949 (Heidegger and Jaspers 2003, 174, my emphasis).
46. Jaspers to Heidegger, 17 August 1949 (Heidegger and Jaspers 2003, 173–74).
47. I am thankful for Karsten Harries’s insights into the relationship between Heidegger and
Jaspers and this particular formulation which he used during a conversation at Yale University
in September 2016.
48. Jaspers (1965, 2).
49. Jaspers (1965, 2).
50. Jaspers (1965, 3).
51. Compare the following depiction of ciphers: ‘The cipher is what brings transcendence to mind
without obliging transcendence to become an objective being, and without obliging [exis-
tence] to become a subjective being’ (Jaspers 1971b, 120).
52. Cassirer (1965).
53. Olson (1979, 93).
54. Jaspers (1987, 91, translation mine). The original quote is worth reading in comparison: ‘Das
Nichtanders aber ist kein Gegensatz zum Anders, da es dieses dadurch definiert dass es ihm
vorhergeht . . . Gott ist ohne Gegensatz. Er ist das Nichtanderssein, dem weder das Andere
noch das Nichts entgegensteht, da er auch dem Nichts vorhergeht und es definiert. Daher
Dionysius: Gott sei in Allem alles und in Nichts – nichts’.
55. Compare Olson’s comment: ‘It is possible, in Cassirer’s view, to reduce all questions con-
cerning the nature of reality to the symbolic form of their content. If one’s intention is that of
laying hold of Truth, one will not find it by either addressing the object as subject nor the
subject as object but by closely scrutinizing the phenomenon of language because whatever
Truth, is through language. . . . It is at the heart of the intuitive-creative symbol, then, that
Cassirer finds consubstantiality between man and world, subject and object; a primordial,
undifferentiated “presence” which is simultaneously material and dynamic’ (Olson 1979,
126).
56. Heidegger to Jaspers, 1 March 1927 (Heidegger and Jaspers (2003, 74–75).
57. Jaspers to Heidegger, 2 March 1927 (Heidegger and Jaspers 2003, 76, emphasis mine).
58. Jaspers (1965, 270).
59. Jaspers (1967a, 325).
60. Jaspers (1950, 35).
61. Jaspers and Bultmann (2005, 29).
62. Jaspers and Bultmann (2005, 29).
63. Thornhill (2002, 124).
64. Bruun (2012, xxi).
65. Weber (2012, 413–14).
66. There are various examples that shows Weber’s appreciation of uncertainty, even though he
never spelled out in more detail a corresponding ethic or philosophy. For instance, in ‘Science
as a Vocation’, Weber asserts that it is an ethical achievement to teach uncomfortable facts:
‘[T]he first task of a competent teacher is to teach his students to acknowledge inconvenient
facts. By these I mean facts that are inconvenient for their own personal political views. Such
extremely inconvenient facts exist for every political position, including my own. I believe
that when the university teacher makes his listeners accustom themselves to such facts, his
achievement is more than merely intellectual. I would be immodest enough to describe it as an
“ethical achievement”’ (Weber 2004, 22).
67. Compare especially the preface of Jaspers (1969), as well as part 4 of Jaspers (1971b, 192–
207), on ‘The Decisive Cipher of Transcendence: Being in Foundering’, and chapter 5 of
O’Connor (1988, 147–97).
68. Note that Jaspers already interprets Kant along these lines in his first philosophical work, The
Psychology of Worldviews, from 1919: ‘That it is precisely this uncertainty of all contents
which, for us finite beings, defines the only way to spiritedness, intellectuality and vitality, has
been superbly shown by Kant: If “God and eternity with their dreadful majesty lied unceas-
ingly before our eyes (for, as regards certainty, what we can perfectly prove counts as much for
us as what we assure ourselves of as manifest to the eye),” the conduct of human beings would
“be converted into a mere mechanism, where as in a puppet show, everything would gesticu-
late well but there would still be no life in the figures.” . . . “Thus what the study of nature and
of the human being teaches us sufficiently elsewhere may well be correct here also, viz., that
the inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in what it has
refused us than in what it has allotted us”’ (Jaspers 1960, 342–3, translation mine, translation
of Kant quote from Kant (2002, 185)).
69. Jaspers thinks highly of Lessing but he is also adamantly clear that his tale of the three rings
does not reflect our situation of a profound clash of existential truths. ‘What we know in the
various aspects of religion is not one truth in different form; it is the sole universal of
transcendence, rather, which in mundane existence makes irreconcilable truth fight in the
form of currently historic universals. This struggle has kindled greater passions than have the
vital interests of existence. In the faith in transcendence everything seems at stake – not just
the believer’s being, but being itself’ (Jaspers 1971b, 24).
Dege 29
70. Jaspers’s interpretation of Plato provides another helpful resource to understand the relation of
irreconcilable particulars and the unifying horizon of the encompassing. According to Jaspers,
the experience of dissatisfaction, uncertainty and perplexity is both the beginning of philoso-
phy and the goad to communication for Plato. Jaspers saw Plato’s dialogues to be built around
profound movements of oppositions that remain essentially aporetic – the warring gods return
endlessly. Yet, Jaspers equally stressed that the aporias establish an intervening bond (demos)
and being-between (metaxy) whereby separates are joined: the one is present in the other or
has a share in it (Jaspers 1962, 33–34).
71. Jaspers (1967a, xxv).
72. For the corresponding political theory in Jaspers, see his lectures on German guilt which argue
for a notion of collective guilt that understands national identity as a cipher, or, in his words, as
a task and not a condition ( Jaspers 2000, 73–74).
73. I am thankful for the suggestion of this formulation by an anonymous reviewer of Philosophy
& Social Criticism.
References
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Diversity in Unity in Post-Truth Times: Max Weber's Challenge and Karl Jaspers's Response

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Philosophy and Social Criticism

truth times: Max Weber’s sagepub.com/journals-permissions

Carmen Lea Dege

to the enduring anxiety of whether democratically organized forms of diversity in unity

To be sure, Jaspers explained, Weber’s ‘philosophical reality’ is not expressed in

Weber remained to Jaspers a man of truthfulness who understood that there is no

The relation of fragments and unity

The final puzzle: Truth, communication and politics in Weber

emphasized that loneliness is an essential precondition for communication. We cannot

The rise and return of the question of being

The non-otherness is no negation of otherness, as it defines it by preceding it. . . . God is

However, Jaspers and Cassirer differed in their respective interpretations of this

to be dynamic, communicative and hermeneutically open. In other words, he hoped that

Weber’s polytheism of values revisited

following reconsideration of a polytheism of values that reflects Jaspers commitment to

[Transcendental reflections] do not transcend in a forward direction, so to speak, away from

interrelatedness of antinomies.70 As I have argued, this model of diversity in unity

Conclusion: A political ethic of non-indifference

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