One of the founders of modern Existentialism, KARL JASPERS has since the downfall of Hitler become a spokesman of Germany’s highest conscience. The present article was part of a lecture he delivered at Geneva on September 13, 1946
“World empire means world peace through the conquest of all by one, by a single power. World order means unity without a unifying power other than the power of agreement issuing from negotiation. Universal enslavement and universal order stand opposed to each other. In the former, one power preempts sovereignty; in the latter, each voluntarily renounces sovereignty...”
Europe’s situation in the world has undergone a radical and rapid change, both outwardly and inwardly.
To begin with the exterior changes: we must live now with the globe ever before our eyes. Europe has grown small. The importance of industrial capacity in the modern world carries with it the superiority of the large continents, America and Asia: space, raw materials, and masses of men essentially determine the reality of power. The one-time colony comes to be master over Europe. America and Russia, the two last great structures of Western civilization, are becoming the masters of the world. If there existed today a United States of Europe, it might perhaps still equal Russia and America in power. But leaving aside all doubts as to the desirability of such a development, the natural growth of the two great continental world powers would soon reduce even a united Europe to inferiority.
For the time being, the political course of the world is still set by Western countries—America and Russia. With the destruction of Japan, the world of East Asia remains without any technologically grounded power of its own. But that will change in time. Already it seems as though China might soon become a decisive factor in world politics.
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What, then, is the position of America and Russia toward our shrinking Europe? Both were settled by Europeans. Russians poured into the East and populated all of northern Asia; Europeans of all nations migrated to America and populated the new continent. Dostoevsky saw the analogy when he wrote, in the 1870’s: “The turn to Asia may bring about for us what happened to Europe when America was discovered. . . . In the movement to Asia our spirit will rise again, and our powers will be reinvigorated.”
But there is this difference: Russia’s European and Asiatic territories remained a unit, and so did her population; America, although her population is descended from European peoples, was separated from Europe politically. Russia is geographically close and spiritually far from us, with the very strangeness of the Russian spirit adding to her attraction for us. America is geographically far but spiritually close—so close that we almost recognize ourselves in her, as if she were returning our own potentialities to us. Certainly there is infinitely more to Russia than the popular notions of Bolshevism and dictatorship would indicate; and there is infinitely more to America than capitalism and mass conformism.
Both now look at Europe from the outside, with admiration and scorn, love and hatred.
Shrinking Europe now assumes an intermediate position between great powers with which it is unable to cope politically. Indeed, Europe will become one of the areas of their political contention—unless it manages to resign itself to a federation of its powers, remaining just strong enough to maintain its neutrality in whatever political and military struggles may divide the world. As Palestine in antiquity lay between Mesopotamia and Egypt, and as Germany now lies between East and West, so Europe may soon lie between two great powers. The fruit of such situations is a struggle rendered vain by the lack of real power, and then impotence, suffering, and humiliation.
Europe’s situation must either lead to destruction or else compel a life springing from quite another source than power.
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The external transformation of the world is accompanied by an inner one. The area of experience in which we are conscious of ourselves has not only broadened but has changed its meaning. The Christian conquest of the world is at a standstill and the absolute certainty of Christianity no longer a matter of course. China and India confront us as autonomous spiritual worlds. They share our problem: how, in this technological world, to derive a new spiritual form from their, or our, tradition? Europe’s self-confidence is no longer what it used to be. Europe is now only one structure among many, and a growing awareness of her own spiritual diminution threatens her self-respect.
The decay of Christianity, that loss of faith by which tradition has been incapacitated for further resistance to serious attack, has reached the point of nihilism. Half a century ago the disquiet of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who prophesied this age, was not yet understood. To these prophets, it was almost incredible that the people among whom they lived could be so unconcerned—that they could fail to see that 19th-century Europe was racing toward the abyss. These people lived in self-assurance, in purposeful and rational labor, in the aesthetically satisfied contemplation of culture, but without an existential basis. They could not understand those who warned them of Europe’s future; instead, they rejected uneasiness as decadence and permitted the development that led to the world wars and all the horrible manifestations of a lost humanity.
There were others who took up these prophets for their sensationalism, admired their literary qualities, and devoted themselves to the creation of a poetry and prose that fed on the sense of doom. There followed a mood of jumbled conversation, an atmosphere of irresponsible assertion and denial, of fanaticism and shrugging indifference. In this transformation, the intellectuals became steadily less effective and less important by comparison with the masses, who on their side espoused various slogans and dogmas, but in their essentially unreflective behavior continued to serve the purposes of despotism.
When all these material, political, and spiritual metamorphoses are viewed as a whole, the phrase “Decline of the West,” coined in Germany in 1918, rings convincingly. No longer radiant and powerful, but weak in every way and doubting itself—thus Europe now stands in the world.
This is the great question: is this indeed Europe’s decline, or is it a crisis of rebirth? Is it the lapse into unconsciousness after the last pyrotechnics of an intellectuality already drained of its content—or is the elasticity of the European spirit active even now, to make our life rebound to the heights?
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Possible Aims of a European Self-Consciousness
No one can know what will happen. But, within the undetermined boundaries of Europe’s possibilities for the future, each can ask himself where he stands and what he wants. No one can see the whole. Always we are simply in it, neither outside nor above it.
We may feel that the individual can do little or nothing to change the course of events; but nobody can know even this. No one needs to know what use the transcendent makes of him. Even to ask is already presumptuous. Our human task is to grasp what is possible, out of the comprehensive whole which we can never survey.
This may encourage us Europeans: what Europe has brought forth, Europe itself can overcome spiritually. The ages-old essence of Europe provides a chance, in the present situation of the world, to carry on toward new creation.
The world of today has grown out of the Europe of past centuries. Without this Europe, the great civilizations would still exist quietly side by side as they did a thousand years ago; without this Europe, there would be no unity of the globe, no world history, no world wars, and no question of the dangers and potentialities of mankind as a whole. The spirit that created science and technology must itself contain the means of restoring order to its creations.
For our every aim today is subject to the prior necessity of adapting ourselves to the technological world. Technology has determined our manner of work, our economy, our social structure, our bureaucracy. The world-historical leap that has taken place in the past hundred years is so great that it can hardly be compared with any previous one: only the inventions of fire and tools are adequate parallels. It is as if all past history has now closed itself off from us—the past becomes remembrance, and knowledge of it only a form of intellectual discipline. Only the final, fundamental traits of man remain the same; the conditions of life are so transformed that history at large acquires a new character. Every people must either come to terms with technology and its results or become extinct. There is no evading the issue.
Our aims, therefore, must be primarily economic and political. .Economically, we must seek by planning and order to introduce justice into the material conditions of our technologically-determined existence—this is an unending task in the struggle for the right. Politically, we must seek to insure the peaceful nature of this metamorphosis, and to introduce order into the relations between states—as a pre-condition for everything else we can want. Violence and terror—terrible realities today, which have been conquered in one particular form but are still the dread of mankind—lead in the end to nothing. But if violence and terror are crimes requiring that the criminals be made harmless, they may at the same time be the expression of a real despair that has grown up because, under the guise of justice, justice is denied, unbearably and hopelessly, by force. What is done and what is not done in dealing with this problem of violence and justice will be of enormous importance to the future of Europe. But all this is the province of politics and not our theme.
We are inquiring into an element of human life that is also among the pre-conditions of political action: the spirit. The possibilities of the spirit always depend, it is true, on the conditions of existence, but the spirit is itself an independent source of its own being. It exists by virtue of freedom, and therefore it lives by the self-awareness of the individual. The way to the future leads through the individual, through every individual.
There follows from this what the European, above all, has come to be fully aware of: every man embodies the possibilities of his own being. Men are never mere material, and therefore men are not transformable into machine parts or stud animals. Masses are never mere mass; every member of a mass is an individual, a human being—is himself. Opposed to this realization of the unique importance of every human being, there is misanthropy with its annihilating conviction that man cannot be free.
Let us seek now to decide what, in this age of technology, we can set up as the spiritual aims of a European self-consciousness. First, broadening the idea of Europe into the idea of humanity, we shall seek paths to world order. Second, limiting ourselves to the particular tasks of Europe, we shall seek the way to the humanism of a European museum. Finally, we shall look to our historical origins for the possibility of basing our life on the transformation of Biblical religion.
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Towards World Order
Nowhere has the idea of humanity appeared as forcefully as in Europe. The Bible postulates a single origin for all men: whoever is human must be recognized as human. Though Europeans have been guilty of the greatest outrages, Europeans have also been able to understand most broadly what other men are. The old outward urge to control the world has been transformed into a desire to understand others, a desire for a universally candid communication among men.
The liberation of the world lies in this idea. As Europeans we can only seek a world in which Europe has a place but which is dominated neither by Europe nor by any other culture—a world in which men leave each other free and share each other’s fate in mutual sympathy.
The idea we live by is not European but Western, for it includes Russia and America; and it is an idea that seeks to turn into the idea of humanity.
It is obvious, as all the statesmen tell us, that from the point of view of power politics Europe can no longer have any conceivable meaning except in a world order that offers peace to all and a task and opportunity to Europe. The menace of war, which today threatens to destroy Western humanity, intensifies our eagerness to create a world order that will exclude war not only for the present but for ages to come—if not forever.
But is this striving for world order no different from earlier efforts to secure eternal peace made in the age of Europe’s great national powers and their wars? Is world order still no more than a pleasant phrase? Perhaps. But if we must live prepared for the worst, we need not consider it inevitable. What will happen still depends on the free choice of human beings. Whoever talks of the inevitable says more than he can know, and feeds the passions of the nihilist, who waits for the moment of catastrophe to bring him either the indirect suicide he desires or absolute power by force.
Again we are concerned neither with the political question—how to overcome absolute state sovereignties for the sake of a superior order, how to conquer the dark passions of the “ape-tiger” (as the Chinese have called man) for the sake of realizing human reason—nor with the social-economic question—how to overcome the selfishness of interested groups for the sake of all men’s claims to justice. We are concerned with the spiritual question only: what are the possibilities before us, and where is the starting point in the ethos of the individual?
Schematically, the alternatives are: world empire or world order.…
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