Immanence, Self-experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein and Karl Jaspers

Karl Jaspers on Transcendence

Before moving on to discuss Edith Stein, I want now to turn to another conception of the transcendent that was being explored in Germany around the same time Husserl was writing. I am referring of course to Karl Jaspers who had a huge influence on the Heidegger ofBeing and Time , and thereby, indirectly, had an influence on Edith Stein. Jaspers made transcendence a central issue in relation to the ‘illumination of existence’ (Existenzerhellung ), especially in his massive three-volume work,Philosophie , which, although it did not appear until 1932, had been in gestation all through the nineteen twenties.[^22] Indeed, many of Jaspers’ central concepts had already been articulatedin nuce in his 1919Psychology of Worldviews (Psychologie der Weltanschauungen ), which Heidegger reviewed critically at a formative stage in his own career.[^23] In his writing Jaspers outlines various ways of dealing with the individual openness to transcendence; one can deny or resist it, or seek a way in the world to accommodate it.[^24] But transcendence continues to intrude on our individual lives since transcendence is what makes our lives individual and authentically experienced.

Jaspers begins from the existential starting-point: ‘everything essentially real is for me only by virtue of the fact that I am I myself.’[^25] My existence is the ‘arena’ for my self-realization.Existenz (a term he consciously borrowed from Kierkegaard, who himself found it in Schelling who opposedExistenz to the Hegelian Idea) refers to ‘possible’ individual existence in terms of its freedom and willing. For Jaspers, the very essence ofExistenz is its intentional tending to the other, i.e. its transcendence.[^26] Jaspers writes:

Just as I do not exist without the world, I am not myself without transcendence. … I stand before transcendence, which does not occur to me as existing in the world of phenomenal things but speaks to me as possible – speaks to me in the voice of whatever exists, and most decidedly in that of my self-being. The transcendence before which I stand is the measure of my own depth.[^27]

For Jaspers,Existenz is always directed towards transcendence: ‘Its authentic being consists in the search for transcendence’. Jaspers writes:

Existence is the self-being that relates to itself and thereby also to transcendence from which it knows that it has been given to itself and upon which it is grounded.[^28]

Freedom exists, for Jaspers, only with and by transcendence.[^29] For Jaspers, transcendence is that which is experienced as beyond the person; but it cannot be thought of as anything empirically real or actual. Transcendenceencompasses individuals, but it cannot be objectified; it is preciselybeyond both subjectivity and objectivity. Transcendence is not something in the world nor is it simply to be identified with human freedom, but transcendence appears wherever there isExistenz .

Jaspers begins, as does Husserl, with the subject-object relation familiar to modern philosophy. But for Jaspers, to become aware of the subject-object relation is already to be moving in the domain of what Jaspers calls the ‘Encompassing’ (das Umgreifende ). For Jaspers, all thinking involves transcending, beyond the objective and towards the ‘Encompassing’ which

we experience as the ‘horizon of horizons’,[^30] the being which is beyond our categorizations; ‘The encompassing preserves my freedom against knowability.’[^31] Jaspers writes:

But the encompassing (Umgreifende ) is not the horizon of our knowledge at any particular moment. Rather, it is the source from which all new horizons emerge, without itself ever being visible even as a horizon. The encompassing always merely announces itself - in present objects and within the horizons - but itnever becomes anobject . Never appearing to us itself, it is that wherein everything else appears.[^32]

Jaspers and Husserl share this concept of the ‘horizon’ as that in which objectivity appears as such. The problem for both is that to try to think of the ‘encompassing’ or of ‘horizonality’ is already to objectify it. The result is therefore, as Jaspers says, that ‘every proposition concerning the encompassing thus contains a paradox’.[^33]

Despite the fact that we cannot grasp the ‘encompassing’, nevertheless Jaspers suggests that we can become aware of it in a lucidity different from determinate knowledge. Jaspers wants us to philosophize ‘in the modes of the encompassing’ by detaching oneself from determinate knowledge.[^34] For Jaspers, transcendence is experienced through ‘cyphers’.Existenz is the cypher for transcendence.[^35] These ‘cyphers’ appear in art, religion and in specific aspects of lived human existence (especially our ‘limit situations’), and, while somehow pointing towards transcendence, also withhold knowledge of the transcendent, and indeed they confirm the impossibility of such knowledge. As consciousness comes to recognise its own limits it takes on an attitude of foundering or ‘failing’ (Scheitern ), an experience of insufficiency before the transcendent. More specifically, it is my historicity that makes me aware of transcendence:

Only through historicity do I become aware of the authentic being of transcendence –and only through transcendence does our ephemeral existence acquire historical substance.[^36]

My very contingent existing is itself a cypher of transcendence.

Paradoxically, and it is not clear to me what this means, Jaspers maintains that there is only one transcendence even though there are many existences. The experience of absolute reality is that it is one and that it contains no possibility.

Existenz is not a self-contained unity. If there is unity it only is in transcendence.[^37]

Moreover, ‘transcendence is not a matter of proof, but one of witness’.[^38] For Jaspers, the perennial task iscommunication , but the transcendent does not communicate directly with humans. Transcendence is ineffable and incommunicable. It can however somehow beexperienced or lived through. Jasper further says that ‘the paradox of transcendence is that it can only be grasped historically but cannot be adequately conceived as being itself historical.’[^39]

Paradoxically, given its incommunicability, Jaspers defines transcendence is defined in relational terms: ‘There is transcendence only by virtue of the reality of my unconditionality’.[^40] There is no transcendence except for existence: ‘Existenz is either in relation to transcendence or not at

all’.[^41] ‘I am existentially myself in the act of apprehending transcendence.’[^42] I experience myself as given to myself not by myself but by something other, by transcendence.[^43] Jaspers maintains that the ‘place of transcendence is neither in this world or beyond, but it is the boundary - the boundary at which I confront transcendence whenever I am my true self.’[^44] Jaspers has the view that my sense of being-in-myself is shattered by the experience of transcendence.