Karl Jaspers

For Heidegger, existence in its attempt to transcend its limits ends in nothingness. For Jaspers (1883-1969) transcendence -- as a unique and absolute Being -- is always beyond and just outside the existent being. The more the "being in the world" clarifies his existence, the further the Absolute Being will remain from him. The transcendence of Being is intangible to human experience.

The philosophical search of Jaspers may be divided into three stages:

* (1) The discovery of the world;
* (2) The clarification of existence;
* (3) The attempt to transcend the world of objects.

The first stage considers "the being in the world" understood as a mere fact: I exist and things exist around me. In this first stage, man believes that he can reach being in its totality. This attempt is illusory and hence it is destined to fail. Indeed, all knowledge of the "being in the world" is a "limitation of horizon." Jaspers distinguishes three main types of limitation of horizon:

* (1) The horizon in which reality reveals itself in its individuality as a mere being in the world;
* (2) The horizon in which reality reveals itself through an abstract system of laws representing things in extra-temporal schemes in the Kantian sense;
* (3) The horizon in which reality develops itself from an Idea (which can be called Spirit in the Hegelian sense) according to a dialectic rhythm.

There are three types of truth corresponding to this threefold horizon:

* (1) The truth about empirical individuality; such a truth coincides with utility, i.e., a thing is true "for me" if it is useful to me;
* (2) Scientific truth, which consists in the common way of thinking about reality;
* (3) Spiritual truth, which consists in what I myself and others feel to be connected with the wholeness of being.

But not one of these types of knowledge is able to comprehend being in its entirety.

Every degree of human knowledge is a limitation of horizon beyond which there is something more. Knowledge is a subjective point of view belonging to the being in the world. It is also limited because of the existence of many subjective points of view.

Thus the intellect tells us of a multiplicity of possible presentations of reality, each of them based on the actual existence of a being. Jaspers calls this discovery of multiple existence a transcendent act, in so far as the intellect transcends the particularity of the various points of view and reaches what is absolute in these presentations: the fact that they are found in an existing being.

Thus we pass to the second stage of philosophizing, whose object is the clarification of existence. Thought, in so far as it is a faculty illuminating existence, is called "reason" by Jaspers. Because of the illumination of reason, the difficulty which was found in the first stage of philosophizing is now transferred to existence. Indeed, existence, on the one hand, illuminated by reason, becomes conscious of its own limitations; on the other hand, reason shows us other modes of existence, and beyond all, the transcendent, to which our existence should be related in order to be constituted on its true level.

The study of "transcendence" belongs to metaphysics, and hence we are in the third stage of philosophizing. But the difficulty already found in the first and second stages appears again. Our existence is a search for transcendence; but transcendence cannot be reached, because if transcendence were attainable, it would not be transcendence.

Thus the transcendence of being is always something else, something more; and any attempt to attain it is destined to fail. There is in my existence an impassable barrier, a limit beyond which there is Transcendence (God), inaccessible to my being in the world.

However, the transcendent Being can be perceived in the form of "ciphers" or symbolic characters expressed by the things of the world. Philosophy, in its search for being, reads these ciphers as possible traces of God ("vestigia Dei"), as signs and signals pointing toward the ultimate depth and plenitude of Being.