At the center of Jaspers’s philosophizing is the notion of the Umgreifende. Some have translated this basic notion as the “Comprehensive”; others have found the English term, the “Encompassing,” to be a more accurate rendition of the original German. The Encompassing lies beyond all horizons of determinate being, and thus never makes its appearance as a determinable object of knowledge. Like philosopher Immanuel Kant’s noumenal realm, it remains hidden behind the phenomena. Jaspers readily agrees with Kant that the Encompassing as a designation for ultimate reality is objectively unknowable. It escapes every determinate objectivity, emerging neither as a particular object nor as the totality of objects. As such, it sets the limits to the horizon of humanity’s conceptual categories. In thought, there always arises that which passes beyond thought itself. Humanity encounters the Encompassing not within a conceptual scheme but in existential decision and philosophical faith. This Encompassing appears and disappears only in its modal differentiations. The two fundamental modes of the Encompassing are the “Encompassing as being-in-itself” and the “Encompassing as being-which-we-are.” Both of these modes have their ground and animation in Existenz.
Jaspers’s concern for a clarification of the meaning and forms of being assuredly links him with the great metaphysicians of the Western tradition, and he is ready to acknowledge his debt to Plato, Aristotle, Baruch Spinoza, Hegel, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. However, he differs from the classical metaphysicians in his relocation of the starting point for philosophical inquiry. Classical metaphysics has taken as its point of departure being-in-itself, conceived either as Nature, the World, or God. Jaspers approaches his program of clarification from being-which-we-are. This approach was already opened up by the critical philosophy of Kant, which remains for Jaspers the valid starting point for philosophical elucidation.
The Encompassing as being-which-we-are passes into further internally articulated structural modes. Here empirical existence (Dasein), consciousness as such (Bewusstsein überhaupt), and spirit (Geist) make their appearance. Empirical existence indicates oneself as object, by virtue of which one becomes a datum for examination by the various scientific disciplines such as biology, psychology, anthropology, and sociology. In this mode of being, one apprehends oneself simply as an object among other objects, subject to various conditioning factors. One is not yet properly known as human. One’s distinctive existential freedom has not yet been disclosed. One is simply an item particularized by...