(1) Criminal guilt belongs only to those who violated the law (taken broadly to include the natural law and international law, if not the positive law in force at the time in one’s own country) and who have been convicted by a court with appropriate jurisdiction (hence the elaborate justification being offered at the time for the trials conducted at Nuremberg).
(2) Political guilt, by contrast, comes about for the entire citizenry of a modern state, for modern states allow no one to be apolitical. Unfair as it seems, this sort of guilt is what all citizens of a country are presumed to bear for the deeds of their governments. In this sphere, even declining to vote in elections is taken to make a person co-responsible for the way in which one is governed, for one had the chance to participate. Regardless of whether the individual citizen likes or dislikes a given regime, all citizens have to suffer the consequences that the victorious powers impose upon the whole country for the misdeeds of its regime.
(3) Moral guilt names the personal responsibility one bears before the tribunal of one’s own conscience for one’s own deeds—even for deciding to follow the orders one receives from one’s superiors. Here especially Jaspers counsels complete and utter honesty, for no one can ever know another person’s heart, and thus no one may ever judge another’s moral guilt. But neither may anyone simply pass over assessing one’s own genuine moral responsibility, even if some grand reversal of fortunes has suddenly afflicted the individual or the community with great sufferings in turn. If there really is moral guilt in one’s past, the demands of conscience require the responsibility to be faced.
(4) Perhaps the most controversial category is what Jaspers calls metaphysical guilt, the responsibility that survivors often feel toward those who suffered and died. With a carefulness of reasoning that stems both from his long studies in psychology and psychiatry as well as from his reverential deference to God, Jaspers here delineates the feeling of guilt that can encompass an otherwise innocent person in whose presence or with whose knowledge crimes were committed. Even if one in no way consented to a wicked deed (to have done so would entail moral guilt), human solidarity will bring the sensitive person to feel a kind of co-responsibility for having done nothing to prevent the deed at those decisive moments when choosing to act might well have involved risking one’s life.
For Jaspers, these distinctions emerge from the basic principle that a person’s degree of responsibility is proportionate to the extent of one’s participation. By distinguishing the types of participation in which one may have been involved, the truly innocent can be free of the shame of being tarred by too broad a brush. Each of these four types will require truthfulness before the appropriate tribunal—respectively, a legitimate court with formal jurisdiction in a specific case, the parley of the victors, one’s own conscience, and God. Truthfulness will both allow for the genuine exoneration of the innocent and initiate the appropriate punishments, the needed reparations, and eventually the full restoration of healthy living for individuals and even for nations. On the other hand, Jaspers argues, a refusal to make the necessary distinctions is likely to reduce Germany and its citizens to the status of an outcast pariah and thus perpetuate the cycle of violence and vengeance that indiscriminate sanctions are likely to foster by provoking rage at unfair treatment.
There is just enough allusion in this volume to the events of the time to keep us alert to the specific situation that prompted the book’s composition and that made it so difficult to gain any clarity at all on the problem amid the shrill accusations and woeful laments that were tearing Germany apart. But much practiced at the detachment for which philosophy strives, Jaspers produced a study of guilt and responsibility that can be applied in diverse scenarios far different from that of postwar Germany. Imagine the complexity of sorting out responsibility when a culture is emerging from generations of apartheid, as in South Africa, or from the genocide in Cambodia, from the culture of distrust and suspicion in the new republics spawned from the old Soviet empire, or from the culture of death still gripping many countries of the West. The standard techniques for cloaking violence remain the same across the whole range of examples: the use of some form of semantic gymnastics to disguise an evil action by labeling it with some euphemism (for example, the use of terms like “social parasite” or “life unworth living”); the cultural sanitization of the violent practice by having respected authorities like doctors, lawyers, or clergy give their approval; and the desensitizing of personal consciences by removing the actual process from public view (for example, the division of labor in the camps of the “final solution” or the warehousing of people who are aged and senile).
The situation today is vastly different from that of Jaspers’s time, and yet the philosophical universality he achieves keeps his message fresh. Although his audience was eagerly looking for any sign of hope and was desperately anxious for a restoration of sanity and morality, his opening remarks (before he treats the guilt question formally) should strike a chord with those tempted to cynicism today by the suspicion that all that ever matters is power. Much like his 1948 book The Idea of the University, the remarks in this book were also addressed to those who assembled to reopen the University of Heidelberg. In 1948 its buildings were in shambles, its professoriate decimated, its new students suspicious that all they would hear would be the new line of thinking that had suddenly become “politically compulsory” under the thumb of the Allied military government in Germany, and thus no different in principle from the propaganda of the previous twelve years of the Nazi regime. Jaspers is mindful that many of the professors had collapsed under the pressure and were now disgraced, that a few had continued to teach the truths they had always taught, that some had been dismissed (as he had been, for having a Jewish wife) or even executed for their fearless and outspoken opposition, and that still others had been timid and thus bear some of what he termed “metaphysical guilt” for the silence by which they survived.
What he counsels is a cultivation of truth—the teachers will have to show their students that they are returning to their classrooms with a difference—that there would be no more propaganda, but only a genuine truthfulness that is always the authentic goal of human intelligence by its very nature. Called upon by the Allies to be Heidelberg’s first postwar rector, Jaspers recognized that the freedom a university needs from political control demands in turn that professors not use their podiums for politically committed (we might now say “politically correct”) speech. In short, he counsels that academic freedom requires mature self-restraint and a personal dedication to keeping one’s professional remarks within the canons and methods of one’s discipline. Now as then professors have a difficult time remembering to temper their own opinions on subjects beyond their professional expertise and to revere truth above all when feelings and passions become inflamed.
But here or in any walk of life, habits of truthfulness cultivated in times of peace and prosperity will be rewarded by a clear conscience, even in the harshest scenarios. By the practice of honesty and truthfulness even in the smallest matters and most mundane affairs, one will be all the more ready to act authentically in moments of crisis, personal or social, and perhaps even to take the risks that Edmund Burke envisioned when he wrote that all that is needed for evil to triumph is for the good to do nothing.
JASPERS: HIS LIFE AND BASIC CONVICTIONS
In the history of twentieth-century philosophy, Jaspers is counted among the existentialists.2 His many books, large and small, did much to bring existentialist concerns and tendencies in philosophy to public attention, for his books offered interesting analyses of many current situations but were also well written in relatively simple language, free from the neologisms that rendered other existentialists more difficult to grasp. Not just the present volume on the question of war guilt but comparable essays that redefined the meaning of the university, examined prevalent conditions of political liberty, and promoted belief in the European spirit reflect his special brand of existentialism: one that did not just talk about engagement with social and cultural conditions but that tried to make specific and positive contributions to current problems.