Finished reading: Man in the Modern Age by Karl Jaspers 📚

The significance of entering into the world constitutes the value of philosophy. True philosophy is not an instrument, and still less is it a talisman; but it is awareness in the process of realisation. Philosophy is the thought with which or as which I am active as my own self. It is not to be regarded as the objective validity of any sort of knowledge, but as the consciousness of being in the world.

I would love to do a better write-up here, but time ain’t on my side. Instead, some notes I took along the way:

• Just about everything I feel about the modern precarity of being, knowing, doing, nicely contained in a little book nearly 100 years old; just about every criticism of the modern age — the modern age even up to now — that I have ever heard or felt is right here, written in 1930. Our modern malady is a lot older than the iPhone or the internet or the ubiquity of home televisions.
• Of course, there’s nothing in the book about AI, but several passages could easily be aimed at it. And I think every single problem we face with AI is essentially a problem that preceded it.
• Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun and whatnot. Most meaningful day-to-day questions were in some form faced by humans thousands of years ago as well as now. (No chronological snobbery, even in our maladies.) But if there are some forms specific to the “modern age” — and I believe there are a few — none of them are essentially new to our century or to my generation.
• Though many have taken the critique to greater depths and aimed at more specific targets of modern technology, Jaspers’ precedes Ellul, Mumford, even Heidegger, I believe. (I’m certain other writers preceeded Jaspers as well. You may even be thinking of some right now that make all this seem obvious.)
• It’s hard not to see Jaspers as helping to lay some of the groundwork for 20th-century writers who show a desperate need for, if not anarchism, at very least James C. Scott’s “anarchist squint.” When Jaspers says that, against the “herding of the masses” and the “increasing technicisation of daily life,” people cling to a “primitive world with increasing tenacity,” he means it as a good thing: what he means by “primitive world” is mutual, unofficial trustworthiness and “reciprocal obligations.”
• Though not simply a nay-sayer of liberalism, he clearly (fore)saw the same lack we are experiencing: the vacancy of liberalism’s meaning for life.
• I’m currently, along some other fine microbloggers, who are miles ahead of me in this (and probably every) regard, reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine. So it shouldn’t be surprising that there is copious overlappage. Take this for example, the language of which will probably give away Jaspers, but the substance could easily be Kingsnorth today:

  The present moment seems to be one which makes extensive claims, makes claims it is almost impossible to satisfy. Deprived of his world by the crisis, man has to reconstruct it from its beginnings with the materials and presuppositions at his disposal. There opens to him the supreme possibility of freedom, which he has to grasp even in face of impossibility, with the alternative of sinking into nullity. If he does not pursue the path of self-existence, there is nothing left for him but the self-willed enjoyment of life amid the coercions of the apparatus against which he no longer strives. He must either on his own initiative independently gain possession of the mechanism of his life, or else, himself degraded to become a machine, surrender to the apparatus.

• Jaspers may have, in philosophical terms, predicted the mid-life crisis. 🙂
• In the end, he gives a decent description not just of our dilemma but of a responsible Yes to the world.