ABSTRACT
The conclusion to this work is unlikely to satisfy any of the common perspectives on Jaspers. This work rejects throughout the left-leaning perspective on Jaspers, which associates Jaspers with clearly reactionary political and ideological positions and which accuses him of promulgating an ethic of politically compliant inwardness. However, it also contradicts the earlier, more enthusiastic receptions of Jaspers, which see Jaspers’ philosophy, and existentialism in general, as ground-breaking philosophical innovations. This work makes its claims for Jaspers’ theoretical importance on the basis of his communicative reconstruction of idealism, his critique of reification, his humanism, his contributions to the philosophy of religion, and his debates with his contemporaries, such as Heidegger and Lukács. Underlying these assessments is an emphasis on the philosophical-anthropological elements in his work. These arguments, however, are unlikely to find favour with Jaspers’ devotees, such as they exist, as Jaspers expressly denied that his ideas had an anthropological content. The basic position set out by this work, in short, is that Jaspers is an important thinker, who is unjustly excluded from contemporary philosophical discourse, who exercises considerable influence on other important thinkers, but whose importance always needs some qualification.
