KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA60 (Grandpierre)

Commentary 14 (to C11, Muller)

( JASPERS AND RELIGION )
by Glenn C Wood
9 December 2003, posted 21 December 2003

Thank you for the important insight as to your reasons for using Karl Jaspers' name for the Forum. Your friend was fortunate to have studied under Karl Jaspers. You are to be commended for uneasily volunteering this information, i.e., for not seeking authoritative status because of this friendship with one directly influenced by KJ.

<2>
As regards my comments about general interests : My view is that it would be great if KJ's philosophy and psychology could be known by the general public but it would be better aloof rather than misunderstood. But the idea that philosophy ought not be of general interest is an incorrect -- and intriguing -- understanding of my intent. I simply meant KJ is not well known in contrast to evolutionism talk. For instance while visiting a detoxification center in St Louis in the late sixties or early seventies, I ask the psychiatrist there if he was familiar with Karl Jaspers (I was telling him about my intentions of using Existenz philosophy at the alcoholism clinic where I was employed). He said, yes, he'd heard of KJ but that he is difficult to read. I think you, HM, meant something similar when you wrote that KJ's writings were convoluted. Thoroughness though can be thought to be difficult or convoluted. What appears like convolution is perhaps more circumstantial minuteness. But then, perhaps you are correct in the sense that the brain is convoluted, especially the cerebrum, i.e., seen as such though our structures.

<3>
KJ cannot be understood if one persists in thinking that the encompassing can be interpreted theistically (that God is ... merely ... conjured) and that such structuring has no relevance to the Encompassing of the encompassing.

<4>
Rather than KJ, what is unfortunately of general interest is evolutionism and creationism. Evolutionism can be talked about endlessly on the Forum -- as endlessly as the participation in the superstitious or mythical stuff that's part of the encompassing of our experience. As regards superstition and the ground of it -- mythical or mysterious, Karl Jaspers is a philosophical theologian but more than that a theological philosopher, and theology too therefore is relevant to the Forum. But scientific superstition takes the route of least resistance through evolutionism on the Forum as seen in comments referred to, including comments from theologians that they have no problem with evolution, and references to religious evolution. Jaspers says: "If a theologian, unable to tell science from scientific superstition, comes to regard a modern world image as irreversible" [such as the church of evolution, Teilhard, Forum authors too but in secular terms -- GW , not KJ's statement] it amounts to de-mythologizing the bibical faith. (Philosophical Faith and Revelation p287, Chapter on "Liberation and freedom now.") Demythologizing the biblical faith is bad psychology such as seen in the incarnation – embodiment -- in Edward Moore's TA51C1.

<5>
The Pope's and Schuller's view of evolution not only makes use of scientific superstition, but confirms religiously whatever degree of superstition is involved. It's another case of the vultures circling the corporeal or embodiment (Matthew 24:28). It's a case of theologians exploiting science. Schuller, quite needlessly, enhances his authority by reminding the people he had a personal acquaintance with Carl Menninger and Victor Frankle, and that he majored in psychology at Hope College. Meaning from this association is equal to, and perhaps an effort to excuse, the association with evolutionism and it shows how a very important person can have a less than perfect philosophy and psychology of religion. Schuller would have been more correct in showing the influence of the author of the Power of Positivie thinking, Norman V. Peale.

<6>
However, as you know, and as Jaspers says, "we cannot escape from the knowledge derived from science, nor from the conditions in existence which science and technology continue to transform at an alarmingly increasing pace." That's not a mere convoluted sentence but rather seeing the dual nature of science, benefits as well as the dangers.

<7>
It is so easy to interpret KJ atheistically, but if done one is seeing his anti-institutional side, not his faith. The established large institution will proclaim KJ to be atheistic; and even fundamentalists might refer to him as an antichrist.

<8>
Here is what I mean : I was sitting -- not invited -- next to Leonard H. Ehrlich as he said that Karl Jaspers wanted nothing to do with revealed truth, or words similar to that. I thought Ehrlich was seeing the anti-apparatus side of Jaspers. I nodded in agreement, but interpreted the statement as relative to the frame of reference of the historical Catholic Church, and especially the support of it through Descartes. It would have been easy for atheists to have taken this statement as tending to support their position. I saw it, as I hope Ehrlich meant it, from a balanced perspective.

------------------------------------------

Glenn C Wood