Karl Jaspers

Jaspers was born in Oldenburg in northern Germany to a banker's family with a congenital heart defect and bronchiectasis; doctors predicted he would not reach thirty, and he lived by a strict regimen all his life. He studied law, then medicine, took his MD in 1908 and worked in the Heidelberg psychiatric clinic. General Psychopathology (1913) brought phenomenological description into psychiatry and distinguished 'understanding' from 'explaining'; it remains a classic of the field.

He moved from psychology into philosophy and became professor at Heidelberg in 1921. His friendship with Heidegger was closest in the 1920s, when the two planned to reform German philosophy together; after 1933 they broke. His wife Gertrud was Jewish and he refused to divorce her; he was dismissed in 1937 and forbidden to publish in 1938. The couple kept cyanide ready, and when American troops entered Heidelberg in April 1945 they were reportedly two weeks from deportation.

The three volumes of Philosophy (1932) are his main work: world-orientation, illumination of existence, metaphysics, corresponding to science, philosophy and religion. Existence is not an object and cannot be known, only illuminated in 'limit situations' (death, suffering, struggle, guilt), where one either flees or becomes oneself. The Transcendent cannot be known, only read through 'ciphers'. Reason and Existenz (1935) argued that reason and existence need each other and that communication is the way to truth.

After the war he helped rebuild Heidelberg University, and The Question of German Guilt (1946) distinguished criminal, political, moral and metaphysical guilt, holding that every German must face the last two. Disappointed with Germany, he moved to Basel in 1948. The Origin and Goal of History (1949) proposed the 'Axial Age': between 800 and 200 BCE, China, India, Persia, Israel and Greece all saw a breakthrough of the human spirit on which all later history rests. In old age he opposed West German rearmament and nuclear weapons, and his correspondence with Arendt lasted forty years.