Jaspers, Karl (1883—1969)
German psychiatrist and philosopher, considered one of the fathers (along with Heidegger, Martin) of German existentialism. Born in the northern German town of Oldenburg, Jaspers initially followed his father’s footsteps into law, but soon switched to medicine. He obtained a doctorate in medicine in 1908 and then took his habilitation in psychology. He worked briefly as a psychiatrist, but spent the bulk of his professional life as an academic. However, his earliest publications were clinical in orientation. His two-volume work, Allgemeine Psychopathologie (General Psychopathlogy, 1913) remains an important reference point today as one of the pioneering works of the so-called ‘biographical method’ of diagnosis. In the early 1920s, Jaspers shifted into philosophy and it is as a philosopher that he is best known. Because his wife was Jewish, Jaspers was removed from his university post in 1937 by the Nazis. This made for difficult times for the Jaspers during the war years, but in the aftermath of the war, because he was untainted by any direct association with the Nazis (in contrast to Heidegger), he was able to take on a leadership role in rebuilding the German university system. Jaspers wrote widely, and for a broadly popular audience, on the question of Germany’s future, including the difficult issue of how it should deal with its guilt. In the years following the war, Jaspers became a high-profile spokesperson for the humanist viewpoint. Perhaps because of this, inasmuch as the humanist perspective became very outmoded in the structuralism period Jaspers’s work is quite neglected today.