The Encompassing

Every object of experience or thought appears within a horizon: a background context that makes it possible to attend to this thing rather than that. But the horizon itself can never be made into an object — the moment we try to look directly at the horizon, it recedes and a new horizon takes its place. This is not a regrettable limitation but the fundamental structure of finite knowing: we always think and experience from within a situation that we cannot see whole. The Encompassing is Jaspers's name for this inexhaustible background.

Jaspers distinguishes several modes of the Encompassing. There is the Encompassing that we are: Dasein (bare being-there), Consciousness-in-general (the universal subject), Spirit (the wholeness of meaning we inhabit as cultural beings), and Existenz (authentic personal freedom). There is also the Encompassing that Being itself is: World (the totality of all that exists in space and time) and Transcendence (the Being that surpasses all immanent reality). These modes are not parts of a whole — the Encompassing has no parts — but different ways in which the inexhaustible background makes itself felt.

Transcendence — the Encompassing as Being itself, not merely as the horizon of human experience — is the ultimate reference point of Jaspers's philosophy. It cannot be known theoretically or experienced directly. It communicates itself only through "ciphers": symbols, myths, philosophical concepts, and the language of the great religious and philosophical traditions that, when approached with the right inner attitude, allow Transcendence to speak through them without being reduced to them. The philosophical life is the practice of attending to these ciphers without mistaking any of them for the Transcendence they evoke.

The Encompassing is developed in Jaspers's later work, especially Reason and Existenz (1935) and Von der Wahrheit (1947), and compressed in Philosophy of Existence (1938). It represents Jaspers's mature answer to the question of how a philosopher who rejects all metaphysical systems can nonetheless speak seriously about Being and Transcendence.