Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time
by Karl Jaspers
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Karl Jaspers has some harsh words for Marxism and the psychoanalysis fashions of the time in which he wrote Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time, these words presented in the first of three parts of the book. Those three parts, The Challenge of the Scientific Method, Reason, and Reason in its Struggle, are based on three lectures he gave in series. He waxes a bit purple and poetic in parts of the second of these lectures, but cogent analysis of the challenges pop culture sets in the path of rationality, the nature of the human act of reasoning, and the value it brings us as the only honest (and, consequently, perhaps asymptotic) approach to truth, all pervade the text. Along with the brilliance of his characterization of the matters show more relevant to his theses, it makes for a fascinating read.
Jaspers sets the always-outnumbered champions of reason in their proper place, outnumbered but not outgunned as he reveals the remarkable tendency of reason to arise anew after every effort to put it down, a phenomenon he describes as not emerging from the nature of the human condition but rather consciously pursued (and often at great cost) by leverage of the condition of freedom and exercise of the faculty of choice. A nearly pocket-sized, largely featureless red hardcover, my copy of Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time came into my possession by some now-forgotten happenstance with (intellectually rather unimpressive) notes handwritten in the margins of the book's yellowing pages by someone using dismayingly poor penmanship, lending it a well-loved charm and warm sense of inspirational authority that other copies will probably lack. The content itself, however, is a stellar work of philosophical rationalism that must benefit anyone with the wit and will to understand it, regardless of the form and condition of the published book, and my only possible regret is that I had not plucked it from my to-read shelf sooner. It is getting a place of honor on another shelf tonight, among books that have special significance for me. As I have with the Tao Te Ching, I rather suspect I will return to it from time to time in my life.
The term "philosophy" in literal translation yields the meaning "love of wisdom". This is a book for authentic philosophers, who exercise Reason in search of the wisdom they love. show less
Jaspers sets the always-outnumbered champions of reason in their proper place, outnumbered but not outgunned as he reveals the remarkable tendency of reason to arise anew after every effort to put it down, a phenomenon he describes as not emerging from the nature of the human condition but rather consciously pursued (and often at great cost) by leverage of the condition of freedom and exercise of the faculty of choice. A nearly pocket-sized, largely featureless red hardcover, my copy of Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time came into my possession by some now-forgotten happenstance with (intellectually rather unimpressive) notes handwritten in the margins of the book's yellowing pages by someone using dismayingly poor penmanship, lending it a well-loved charm and warm sense of inspirational authority that other copies will probably lack. The content itself, however, is a stellar work of philosophical rationalism that must benefit anyone with the wit and will to understand it, regardless of the form and condition of the published book, and my only possible regret is that I had not plucked it from my to-read shelf sooner. It is getting a place of honor on another shelf tonight, among books that have special significance for me. As I have with the Tao Te Ching, I rather suspect I will return to it from time to time in my life.
The term "philosophy" in literal translation yields the meaning "love of wisdom". This is a book for authentic philosophers, who exercise Reason in search of the wisdom they love. show less
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Karl Jaspers was one of the originators of German existentialism. He began his career as a psychiatrist but was increasingly concerned about philosophical and moral issues. His was "a lucid and flexible intelligence in the service of a genuine and passionate concern for mankind." Removed from his professorship at the University of Heidelberg by show more the Nazis in 1937, he was reinstated in 1945 on the approval of the American occupation forces. In 1949 he went to the University of Basel. The New York Times wrote of him in his lifetime: "Jaspers shows himself . . . to be one of the most diligent and sensitive students of contemporary history. He has a good eye for the present because he knows what to fear in it---particularly the loss of individual freedom." Jaspers was deeply concerned about the human condition, and in his book The Future of Mankind (1957), entitled in its updated edition The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man (1961), he attempted to arouse conscience in the face of the deadly danger of atomic warfare "at the same time . . . attempt[ing] to apply the principles of his philosophy to a new field, and to lay the foundations of a political philosophy" (Times Literary Supplement). After the German publication of this book, Jaspers was awarded the German Peace Prize at the 1958 Frankfurt Book Fair. Hannah Arendt, who had been his student and a translator of some of his works, made the presentation. Jaspers's multivolume work, The Great Philosophers---edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Ralph Manheim, and published in English from 1962 to 1966---was hailed by the Library Journal as "a major work, a brilliant book . . . Jaspers defends the unity of philosophy and his aim is to make philosophy available to all, to provide the serous reader with a guide "to the thinking of the great philosophers and to a personal encounter with them." The obituary of Jaspers in the New York Times said in assessing him: "With Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Jaspers was one of the makers and shapers of existentialist philosophy. For almost 50 years, in books, essays and lectures, he strove to give a personalist answer to modern man's questions about his own nature and the nature of existence." (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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