When reading his ideas on freedom I assumed he had read Camus’s work – Jaspers postulates a man who cannot accept the transcendence of freedom. On checking dates it was a shock to learn this book was published two years before Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus.

Either I sink into the bottomless of the infinite: I stand in Nothingness, in the face of which I am what I can be through myself alone.” . . . “If nothing comes to meet me, if I do not love, if what is does not come to me through my love and I do not become myself in it, then I remain in the end as an existence that can be used only like raw material.

(Jaspers would not claim that there is an error in Camus’ thinking.) Jaspers, like all the Germans, is big into talking about Being with a capital B. This used to annoy me until I realised the word does not come loaded with preconceptions. I think of it as all that is or can be spoken of, or thought, or felt. The word itself however does tend to lead to questions such as what is the Being of “belief”? – avenues which Sartre goes down ad nauseum. What Jaspers points out is that Being is not and cannot be restricted to only determinate objects. Being has at times in history variously been interpreted as purely objects, or purely subjectivity, or matter, or energy, or mathematical law, or God, or illusion, or spirit. By understanding these attempts to grasp being I can approach Jasper’s thought that it is something else, and even saying “is” here is already deceptive. He uses the word “the encompassing” to encompass the reality that yields both objects and the subjectivity that encounters them. The word already presumes some kind of unity – a more analytic person will insist on sticking with things that can be known and will be forced into taking one mode of being for all of being and dismissing other thoughtpaths as worthless. (This ‘dismissal’ is more brave and honest than the alternative.)

It is strange to me to think that Jasper’s ideas are discussed in philosophy departments in universities. I can’t imagine students sitting around talking about these things. Sometimes I take a sentence at random from this book just to feel how gnomic it sounds out of context. His thought is not well-argued; it is precise, not vague, lucid, always lucid.

“we make our existence into an object for ourselves, acting upon it and manipulating it.”

The masses are our masters; and for every one who looks facts in the face his existence has become dependent on them, so that the thought of them must control his doings, his cares, and his duties.

Here is the wiki page of quotations from Jaspers. Mark them well. Here are some more.