What is the part other people play in my work, as I search for the
truth and try to write?
Jaspers:
Truth is in communication
From:
Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existenz,
tr. W. Earle İNoonday Press
Page 2
Community through communication is found, to be sure, already among the
merely living existences; it is in consciousness as such, and it is in
spirit. However, on the level of mere vitality, it can remain instinctive
sympathies or interests limited to certain purposes. In consciousness as
such, it can remain an unconcerned agreement upon what is correct or
valid; in spirit, a deceptive consciousness of totality which however
suddenly breaks off fellowship.
The communication of Existenz is accomplished through membership in the
spirit, through the universality of consciousness as such, through proving
itself in empirical existence, but also by breaking through these, passing
beyond them in the loving struggle of those who will to become themselves.
In contrast to the communication of identical and indifferently
replaceable points of consciousness as such, this existential
communication is between irreplaceable individuals. In contrast to the
struggle for existence over power, superiority, and annihilation, here the
struggle over the content of Existenz is without the will to power in the
same sense; it is a struggle where every advance of the individual comes
only if the other advances too, and every destruction of the other is my
own.
In contrast to spiritual community, where there is security in the
comprehensive Idea, it does not overlook the crack in Being for us, and it
is open for Transcendence. It expresses the inevitability of struggle in
temporal existence and the inability of truth to be completed by
unceasingly pushing the movement of communication forward as the authentic
appearance of truth. To be self and to be true are nothing else than to be
in communication unconditionally. Here in the depths, to preserve oneself
would be precisely to lose oneself.
Cf. by Jaspers, The
Spirit of Europe | Pascal,
Method & purpose |
Rilke, Letter to a Young Poet |
Plato, Whom are we talking to?
| Kierkegaard, My work as an
author | Emerson,
Self-knowledge |
Gibson -
McRury, Discovering one's face |
Emerson, We differ
in art, not in wisdom
