“Scientific cognition of things is not cognition of being. Scientific cognition is particular, concerned with determinate [phenomenal] objects, not with being itself. The philosophical relevance of science, therefore, is that, precisely by means of knowledge, it produces the most decisive knowledge of our lack of knowledge, namely our lack of knowledge of what being itself is.” — Karl Jaspers
“Science is essential to philosophy. Without knowledge of science a philosopher has no knowledge of the world. He is, practically, blind. It is no accident that throughout history the greatest philosophers have been familiar with science. Unless it incorporates the scientific method as well as its results, philosophizing becomes mere speculation, reverie, or perhaps the expression of subjective vital interests or desires. Furthermore, Jaspers agrees with the positivists that questions of knowledge and fact are all scientific questions. Only through science do we learn to know the way things are. For this reason philosophy cannot produce any theories of its own. When it tries to become a science by claiming knowledge in its own right, it cuts a ridiculous figure. If philosophy is not science, neither is science philosophy. Science is a process of thought involving precise and publicly verifiable concepts and methods. It views reality in terms of these constructions. Hence, it has definite limits. When reality is identified with what science alone can know, science itself becomes superstition. It becomes a narrow and unfounded philosophical position which turns everything, including man, into an object. Both being and human existence lose their depth. Philosophizing has the task of pointing out the nature of science and the limits of its application. In doing this, philosophy transcends science and gives evidence of another source from which philosophizing springs. Jaspers calls this source transcendence. One becomes aware of transcendence in the process of thinking beyond the limits of scientific knowledge. In this way Jaspers comes to the realization that both the thinker and reality are more than what can be known about them in objective terms. No known object is being itself. Although Jaspers often claims that science is essential to philosophy, it is also true that the methods and doctrines of science do not enter into the content of his philosophy in any interesting or significant ways, as they do in Descartes, Leibnitz or Kant. Knowledge of science, according to Jaspers, keeps a philosopher from claiming to have factual and objective knowledge. But beyond this, there is little that science, either by its method or its results, contributes to philosophy. One must know science, it seems, in order to learn how not to philosophize.” — Richard F. Grabau
“Jaspers stresses the fact that philosophy is an activity, a movement of thought that knows no end and produces no set of doctrines, theories, or even concepts. Philosophizing is a process of thinking as inner action in which the thinker comes to an authentic awareness of himself and reality by pressing beyond or transcending everything objective. From the standpoint of the subjectivity of the thinker philosophizing can be described as the elucidation or clarification of Existenz. From the standpoint of the objects it is concerned with, philosophizing is the expression of an encounter with (intrinsic) being. This expression takes two directions: a reflection on the nature and limits of objective knowledge, which Jaspers calls world orientation, and a transcending thinking in which being itself comes to expression, which he calls metaphysics.” — Richard F. Grabau
“What it means to “be” is the unending question of philosophizing.
As defined being it is knowable. The categories show the basic modes of its definition. Their establishment in logic makes us explicitly conscious of the modes of being: being in the sense of “being known and conceived” becomes objective in its ramifications and in its diversity. But this does not exhaust being proper.
As empirical reality, being includes something I must take for granted, something covered, but not penetrated, by my thought. In world orientation I have taken hold of this reality which defies surveyal as a whole but permits knowledge and relative cognition of its several sides, and of any single thing’s particular being. Being in the sense of “being in the realm of cognition” always carries at its bounds whatever is outside the realm of cognition. But this mundane being — cognition plus the cognitively recognized unknown — does not exhaust being either.
From mundane being, breaking through it, I come to myself as possible Existenz. There my being lies in freedom and communication and is aimed at other free being. It is an interior being that has yet to decide whether and what it is, a being that cannot get out of itself and cannot observe itself. But even this being is not one with which all things would be exhaustible. It is not only together with other free beings; it refers in itself to a being that is not Existenz but its Transcendence.
Thus, when I want to know what being is, it appears to me disjoint, the more so the more relentlessly I keep asking, and the less I let myself be deceived by some construction of being. I do not have the being anywhere; I always have only a being. The being comes down to the empty definition of an undefinably ambiguous communicative function — the statement I make in the copula “is” — but there is no tenable way for it to become a concept comprising the common features of all being. It does not become the whole of a gist expressed in all the modes of being, much less a specific being with the distinction of emerging as the source of all things. Whenever I try to grasp being qua being, I fail. …
Nowhere do I have what it is to “be.” I come up against limits everywhere, moved by the search for being that is tied to my freedom because it is my freedom. When I do not search for being, it is as if I myself ceased to be. I seem to find it in the concrete historicity of my active existence, yet whenever I want to grasp it in philosophizing, I must see it slip out of my hands.
When I face this being as Transcendence, I am seeking the ultimate ground in a singular fashion. The ground seems to open up, but it no sooner comes into view than it dissolves again; if I mean to grasp it, I take hold of nothing. If I try to advance to the source of being, I drop into the unfathomable. I never get to know, substantially, what is. Yet this abyss, a void for the intellect, can fill up for Existenz. I am transcending where this depth has opened and the search as such has become a finding in temporal existence; for a man’s possible Existenz may turn his transcending of temporal existence into a unity of presence and search — a presence which is nothing but the search that has not been detached from what he is seeking. I can seek only by anticipating what I am to find. Transcendence must be present where I seek it. In transcending I have no objective knowledge of being, as in world orientation, nor do I come to be aware of it as of myself in the elucidation of Existenz. I know about it, rather, in an inner action which lets me stay with this intrinsic being even as I fail. Without finding it as an objective support, Existenz can look to this being for the strength to uplift itself in existence, to rise to itself and to Transcendence in one.
The modes of this search for being by possible Existenz are ways to Transcendence. Their elucidation is philosophical metaphysics.” — Karl Jaspers
It is not metaphysics that is dead, but your mind, Pigliucci.
