Such purification makes us free. The course of events lies not in man’s hand, though man may go incalculably far in guiding his existence. There remains uncertainty and the possibility of new and greater disasters, while no new happiness is guaranteed by the awareness of guilt and the resulting transformation of our being. These are the reasons why purification alone can free us so as to be ready for whatever comes. For only the pure soul can truthfully live in this tension: to know about the possible ruin and still remain tirelessly active for all that is possible in the world.
In regarding world events we do well to think of Jeremiah. When Jerusalem had been destroyed, state and country lost, the prophet forcibly taken along by the last few Jews who were fleeing to Egypt—when he had to see those sacrificing to Isis in the hope that she would do more for them than Jehovah, his disciple Baruch despaired. And Jeremiah answered, “The Lord saith thus: Behold; that which I have built will I break down, and that which I have planted I will pluck up, and seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not.” What does that mean? That God is, is enough. When all things fade away, God is—that is the only fixed point.
But what is true in the face of death, in extremity, turns into a dangerous temptation if fatigue, impatience, despair drive man to plunge into it prematurely. For this stand on the verge is true only if borne by the unswerving deliberation always to seize what remains possible while life endures. Our share is humility and moderation.
1 Among the many recent volumes that have been reconsidering the question, an especially interesting one is Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of Character by David H. Jones (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999) and Ervin Staub, The Root of Eviclass="underline" The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). See also the essay by Amitai Etzioni, “Kris-tallnacht Remembered” in Commonweal (February 12, 1999): 12-15.
2 Two classics studies of his place among the existentialists are those by James Collins, The Existentialists: A Critical Study (Chicago: Regnery, 1952) and by I. M. Bochenski, Contemporary European Philosophy, as translated by Donald Nicholl and Karl Aschenbrenner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956).
7 See volume one of his 1932 trilogy Philosophy, translated by E. B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
3 Karl Jaspers, “Philosophical Autobiography” in The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (The Library of Living Philosophers), edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp (LaSalle, 111.: Open Court, 1974):5-94 at p. 6.
4 A convenient source for a well-balanced survey of Jaspers’s thought is the volume Karl Jaspers: Basic Philosophical Writings, edited, translated, with introductions by Edith Ehrlich, Leonard H. Ehrlich, and George B. Pepper (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1986).
5 See my article “Jaspers on Realism and Idealism” in Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Kart Jaspers Gesellschaft 11 (1998):58-69.
6 On this theme see Josef Pieper, Living the Truth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), which contains a thoroughgoing historical essay on the difference between the classical metaphysical doctrine of the transcendentals of being and the corresponding doctrines in Kantian (and generally in Idealist) philosophy.
8 See volume two of Philosophy, translated by E. B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), especially 154-74.
* Only this last section on the guilt question is published in the following pages, with the contents elaborated on and freed from the form of academic lectures.
* “Theses on Political Liberty” were published by me in Wandlung, No. 6, p. 460ff.
* Reprinted in Wandlung, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1945.
* Hannah Arendt’s moving, soberly factual article, “Organized Guilt,” Jewish Frontier, January, 1945.