Way to Wisdom

[Rachel Louise]

In August we'll be reading Karl Jaspers' Way To Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy. Feel free to leave comments and discussion points down below.

This book might be a little hard or expensive to purchase, so if you can't participate in this months read then don't worry. I'm pretty sure you can find the full text somewhere online though.

[Miguel]

Is there a kindle edition?

[Michael]

Mickey wrote: "Is there a kindle edition?"

probably not

[Alain]

Sounds fun. When will the discussion open and close?

[Fernando]

Well, I finished it a few days ago. I’ll exercise a bit more freedom in my discussion as I think that we’re all here to talk philosophy and not just review the book. And I’d like to apologize in advance if my perspective results offensive to anyone because it’s not my intention to offend; quite on the contrary, I'd really like to read an insight different to mine. I extracted some of the questions that came to me while reading and would like you fellow readers to share your answers if you want.

Did this feel like a true existentialist experience?

Long story short: not really, but almost. I called this book in my main review a “pamphlet on philosophical theocentrism” because that’s the way I perceived the discussion on the topics brought in by Jaspers. Maybe my perspective itself is heavily biased by Nietzsche instead of that of the author’s, but that’s really a fruitless debate, so I’ll just say that I (tried to) read the whole book taking Jaspers’ word as valid and following his elucidations.

And it is very difficult for me to just accept his word as true not because I’m an atheist myself, but because of the importance that the whole text gives to the figure of god (with a lowercase g, as in its figure and not itself. This will gain importance in a moment). It seemed to me that the whole book was not a discussion about stochasticity, the randomness of existence and how to deal with it (the existentialist way, as I perceive it), but instead a deterministic manifesto about how we are doomed to be eternally unable to know or comprehend at least in a proto-scientific manner the way things actually work. The delicate part in the former statement comes with the word eternally, as if the universe will never open up to human comprehension, turning our quest to a superior state of mind completely futile.

And, by all means, I am well aware of the limitations of the current human thought model and the whole subject-object dichotomy mentioned by Jaspers, but the attempt to qualify an entity as superior to subjects and objects just because it escapes both the subject and the object characteristics is as retrograde as using this thought model itself. That’s why I don’t see much sense in basing the whole discussion of the book in unreachable entities such as the “Comprehensive” (capital C), which is to me a futile attempt to replace God (this time with a capital G as well) as the core of a man’s life.

What is the Comprehensive? Does it have anything (or everything) to do with God?

But, now talking in concrete terms, what is the Comprehensive? (I know it’s not an object and that it can’t be defined, but I’m asking as a reader to you, fellow readers, to try and understand what Jaspers meant by trying to define a non-object with an object-like definition, thus turning his whole entity into an empty word) My self-proclaimed lack of a God has restructured my thought structure and, hence, turned my notion of the Comprehensive un-comprehensible. That’s a funny paradox indeed, but maybe I’m just not looking at things the right way.

To me, as I said earlier, the whole first part of the book (up to chapter seven or so), and consequently, the rest of the text, got transformed into a “theocentric pamphlet” the moment Jaspers introduces his Comprehensive as a substitute (or complement, perhaps?) for the notion of God. And although this is explicitly never specified, it turns out to be awfully convenient that both the Comprehensive and God are both unfathomable entities by our senses, and even by our reason. This last assertion should not surprise anyone, as there are many things indeed that our senses cannot perceive (high frequency sounds or certain EM waves, low pressure gradients on the skin and so on) and it shouldn’t be new either that our minds and reason are as well heavily biased and censored by many factors, both internal and external (e.g. language), but the way I see things, it is our duty as men and women, as philosophers and as humans, to transcend those limits (or at least try to) by denying arbitrary limitations such as pointing out notions that, by definition, cannot be and never will be comprehended.

It is by this mechanism that, when one leaves objects arbitrarily out of reach, they capture a mystic and supernatural aura, leaving the Comprehensive in the same thought space as God, and making them interchangeable “for the sake of discussion” as one will never be able to contemplate one or the other. Truth is, this mechanism seems very dangerous to me, and I will never tire of disapproving it. Things that are not possible can be made possible by a slight change in circumstances or conditions.

What is your main feeling about this book? Did you like it?

My main observation about this text, and it is because of this that I’m actually a bit upset, is the fact that most of the discussion never fully achieves independence from the notion of God. If one were, for instance, to take a hypothetical position stating that “God is dead and we have killed him” (again, a misplaced Nietzsche reference), the text would lose all meaning as (paraphrasing from the book) “The man is what he is because of his relation to God”. Even without being so radical, taking the free market to be one’s god instead of foolishly proclaiming its death, said statement would lose some of its meaning, as man cannot be fully comprehended as his relation to an object or notion because that would be an incomplete description and, hence, no description at all. Man is not an object or a subject.

The book was not a complete bust, however. There are pretty good sections here and there (thankfully isolated from the notions of God and the Comprehensive) that really caught my eye. I’ll throw in another quote that I really liked: “The philosopher should not exploit his nonknowledge in order to evade all answers.” It’s curious because that exploitation of the nonknowledge is exactly what I perceived in discussions about God and the Comprehensive, and precisely the reason I didn’t fully liked this book.

I didn’t find this book really productive because of this, too. Almost every usable conclusion became tainted in a concluding remark by relating it somehow to the Comprehensive or to God, and thereby rendering it obsolete or just inapplicable to me or to my particular philosophical framework. This book might be a great read to a religious person, as it is actually a great book from an aesthetic point of view. I just found its perspective to be extremely narrow for an early twentieth century text, more or less contemporary to other free thinking figures such as Nietzsche or Sartre, who clearly were (in my opinion) a bit more fearless (one could even say informal, but I don’t see it that way) when addressing such topics.

What was your favorite part?

I liked the historic bits, Chapters IX and XII. They appear to me as the more knowledgeable parts of the whole book, not ridden with uncertainty and ‘the determinism of dread’, although there are some sections on these chapters that really got to my nerves (guess which ones).

I would really recommend reading the appendices, as both are a lot more concrete than the whole book. The first one, “Philosophy and Science” turned out to be an excellent read, as it didn’t actually treat the reader with such dread and striking “certainty about the perpetually uncertain” about life, but felt a lot more like a straightforward essay. It may be a matter of taste and liking, but I enjoyed it way more than the first part of the book.

The second appendix “On Reading Philosophy” struck me as the only section of the book truly presented as a formal “introduction to philosophy”, but nonetheless it is a dangerous introduction, as the material presented there is quite biased to a certain philosophic insight and interest (as most of the book is). For instance, some friends have heavily recommended me to read Hegel’s Philosophy of History treating it as “quite accurate” and without all the additional commentary introduced by Jaspers. The point is that, even when this material appears to be adequate to introduce a newcomer to philosophy, the introduction would probably be traumatic later on, comparing ideas exposed here with the actual works.

Looking forward to reading all your reviews, insights or discussions, as it is kind of a difficult book to interpret, as well as a difficult topic. And if you did read all of my post, thanks for the time. c:

[Fernando]

Armando wrote: "Hi, Fernando,
I found your questions interesting and thought provoking. Here are my thoughts regarding your questions. I hope they might contribute to your insight. "

Thanks for answering. I do have to say that I feel a lot more comfortable with Jaspers' notion of God than the usual church-compatible one. The former is incredibly more consistent with our perception of reality than the latter.

But the thing that really bugs me is the common usage of such notion, regardless of which one is chosen, as a comprehensible provisional answer (I'll add intentionally provisional for the sake of clarity) for a question that we are not able to comprehend just yet given the actual philosophical framework (a framework that has been historically weighed down because of such sophistic vices). That's what I meant when comparing the Comprehensive to God: our way of seeing, thinking and understanding things ultimately rules and limits us (not in a conscious manner, of course), and men historically have had a really bad habit of labeling uncomprehensible things [at its given moment in time] as "gods" and rulers, e.g. the sun, rain, fire and/or lightning by the egyptians or the native americans. I mean, one would be just crazy to defy a lightning or the sun. And really, we are (discarding minor phenotypical differences) the same kind of men as the kind these cultures were composed of in a neurological way, so what became natural to them might surface in our "more advanced" times, such as the manifestation of a more adequate version of a God, this time ridden with sophistically, semantically and syntactically misleading descriptions in order to never let itself manifest in an explicit way.

I mean, that's just what I saw in the definition (or notion, I don't really know what would be more appropriate) of the Comprehensive, and although I accept it as valid during my read, I have to be a little skeptical about it for it represents an obstacle in my ultimate purpose for reading the whole book. And rereading this whole response, I have to ask you to please excuse my almost irrationally atheist perspective, but I find these discussions as something really fun and I have a really bad habit of (quite frequently) losing myself in the discussion. Again, thanks for answering c:

PS. I forgot to ask your perception of the book (i.e. how would you rate it), as I don't see a rating and would really like to know if others liked this text.