Commentary on "Karl Jaspers and Edmund Husserl"

Walker Argues, against conventional interpretations of Jaspers, that there is a considerable debt to Kant in Jaspers' work; specifically that concepts such as "appearance" and "representation"are pivotal to his phenomenology. Walker makes a detailed analysis of the use of such concepts in Jaspers and develops a convincing case for a Kantian influence in the employment of such distinctions as form and content, concept, and intuition. The degree of such influence, however, is less clear. Walker's discussion of Kant and Jaspers brings out some of the difficulties in Kantian interpretation.

First there is the problem of ambiguity in Kant's use of the term "appearance." This sometimes seems to correspond to a physical object of which we can have experience; at other times the term seems to indicate appearance of something else (the thing-in-itself). The latter interpretation is suggested by A42-43/B60 of the Critique of Pure Reason:

What we have meant to say is that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance. What the objects may be in themselves would never become known to us even through the most enlightened knowledge of that which alone is given to us, namely their appearance [my emphasis].

(Kant 1970)

The former however is suggested in the following passage:

Either the object alone must make the representation possible, or the representation alone must make the object possible. In the former case, this relation is only empirical, and the representation is only possible a posteriori. This is true of appearances, as regards that [element] in them which belongs to sensation. None the less the representation is a priori determinant of the object, if it be the case that only through the representation is it possible to know anything as an object.

(Kant 1970, A93/B125)

Walker's account could make more of this ambiguity in Kant's use of the term "appearance," for example when on page 71 he says that "[T]he essence of Kant's view is that appearance must become [my emphasis] a 'representation'" and then goes on to quote Kant as saying that "appearances are [my emphasis] themselves nothing but sensible representations." If the latter claim is true then what it is that becomes a representation is unclear.

Walker explains Kant's "two-stem" theory of form and content, concept and intuition, but speaks of a "two-step" theory in Jaspers. The first step is said to be the "understanding experience," which is sympathetic understanding of the (content of) the patient's experience, followed by "the careful definition and conceptualization [form] of subjective experience" (33). Walker does not attribute two steps to Kant, but it would be helpful to draw attention to the way in which Jaspers has been influenced by Kantian ideas, yet used them in a different way.

In Kant's philosophy there are not two steps. We experience an objective world, and for such experience to be possible, concepts (the categories) are already presupposed. This might not have been the case:

Appearances might very well be so constituted that the understanding should not find them to be in accordance with the conditions of unity . . . Everything might be in such confusion that, for instance, in the series of appearances nothing presented itself which might yield a rule of synthesis. . . .

(Kant 1970, A91/B123)

But in fact "all experience does contain, in addition to the intuition of the senses through which something is given, a concept of an object as being thereby given, that is to say, as appearing" (Kant 1970, A93/B126).

Walker's account thus shows both how Kantian ideas are taken up and developed in Jaspers' thought, and points to some of the difficulties in Kantian interpretation.

Related Articles

Feature Article: Karl Jaspers and Edmund Husserl—III: Jaspers as a Kantian Phenomenologist

Commentary: Commentary by Chadwick