The Black Flame: A Philosophy of Acausality by Denys Spirin - HTML preview
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Chapter 7
The subject entered the world through delegation, discovered the freedom of discursion, dismantled the constructs that consumed the will, and arrived at the threshold of self-closure. Karl Jaspers walked this path in academic philosophy with unusual honesty. His work maps the approach to self-closure, and its final move reveals the limit of a consciousness that still requires transcendence.
Jaspers begins with the world. Ordinary existence, Dasein, is life inside the metric. Science explains the world; morality organizes behavior; society assigns roles; everything is accounted for; each question has an answer or a procedure for finding one. Jaspers finds this insufficient. Ordinary existence is total. The metric covers everything, and in covering everything, it leaves no room for the one who lives inside. The subject vanishes into the generality.
From this dissatisfaction Jaspers moves into what he calls Existenzerhellung, the illumination of existence. In our terms it is the meta-position. He steps above the metric, examines it and sees freedom, the capacity to act on the regularities:
In existential elucidation a specific manner of thinking made freedom communicable in awakening appeals. What led to this elucidation was discontent with merely general, merely mundane existence.
(All quotes in this chapter are from Philosophy, volumes 1 and 3.) Freedom is communicable: the subject sees it, transmits it through a waking call (erweckender Appell). This is discursion applied to the subject's own condition; turned inward, producing awareness of the metric as a metric. But Jaspers notes a second dissatisfaction:
But no definitive satisfaction could be obtained in existential elucidation either.
Seeing freedom is not the same as being free. The meta-position is still a position, the thinker and the thought remain distinct. Discursion can show the metric and the exit, but showing is an act within the apparatus of differentiation, and differentiation preserves the separation between subject and acted-upon. Jaspers hits the ceiling of the discursion: the meta-position is necessary, but it does not close the loop.
Then he describes what lies beyond:
Consciousness at large, an objective observer, cannot see any Existenz. Existenz is real only for Existenz, in communication. Philosophizing to elucidate it does not mean getting to know something else; it means to reveal essential being as I come to myself. It is the self-being that cannot once more confront itself.
Zusichselbstkommen, the coming-to-oneself, being that is here and cannot encounter itself once more. This is self-closure, a revelation (Offenbarung), where the distinction between the one who reveals and what is revealed collapses. Being cannot encounter itself as an object because the encounter requires two, and there is only one. And "cannot once more confront itself" is irreversibility, the act does not undo itself.
A human being first meets himself in differentiation. Psyche, intellect, memory, desire, temperament, role, history — each appears as something present within him, something he can reshape or cast off. He discovers that none of these exhausts the one who says "I." They are his, yet each can change while he remains himself. This recognition strips away every candidate for identity that can still stand before him as content. The remainder cannot appear as one more trait or object within experience. At that point he is driven to postulate himself as that which can no longer be placed opposite itself. This is self-closure in its existential form. The Buddhist move begins at the same point but takes the opposite direction: toward self-extinction.
Jaspers identifies the impulse that drives the act. He calls it Eigensinn, stubbornness, literally "own-sense":
There is a rift in the will to truth. As the self-will of mere existence it is indeed without pathos, a nonentity of instincts and, if purposely embraced, of evil; but as a risk freely taken, the rift in self-being qualifies the pathos of autonomous being proper. In the rift, defiance is an origin of Existenz: its potential unconditionality.
The rift (Bruch) in self-being, upon which freedom decides. Pathos des eigenständigen eigentlichen Seins, the passion of self-standing authentic being. Eigen twice: self-grounded, self-authentic. Stubbornness as the origin of existence, as the possibility of unconditionality. For us, this is the will stripped of all delegated content, standing at the point where self-closure becomes possible. Jaspers registers its unconditional character.
Everything up to here follows the same path the previous chapters described. The meta-position, dismantling, the will concentrated in a single point.
Now the turn. Jaspers stands at the threshold and interprets what he sees there as a reason to step back:
Yet Existenz can grasp itself in its own freedom only if at the same time, and in the same act, it will perceive something other than itself. Strict unconditionality makes me aware, not only that my existence is not selfmade and is the helpless prey of certain doom, but that I do not have myself alone to thank for my freedom either. In some way or other, the realization of unconditionality will occur only in relation to its transcendence.
The loop is about to close, and in the same act Existenz perceives "something other than itself." At the moment of self-closure, the will splits back: I am free, but my freedom comes from elsewhere. The act was almost complete, the ground was about to become self-generated, but Jaspers reintroduced the separation and delegated freedom to transcendence.
The break occurs at the point of groundlessness.
To me as Existenz absolute independence is indeed my true unconditionality in temporal existence, but it also drives me to despair. I am aware that as flatly self-based I would have to sink into the void.
To ground itself absolutely on itself plunges existence into despair, absolute self-sufficiency means sinking into the void. Jaspers is phenomenologically accurate: self-closure is experienced as the loss of all coordinates, all external support and orientation. The void is real, but the conclusion he draws is wrong. The void is a catastrophe for a person defined by the metric: remove the laws, and the person loses ground.
Jaspers reaches the threshold, but one last construct remains invisible to him: the assumption that being itself must ultimately rest upon something else. He experiences the void as a lack that must be filled from outside. In this unseen reliance the final delegation survives. He did not dissolve this last postulate.
For my self-realization I depend on a fulfillment that comes to me. I am not myself if I happen to default; I relate to myself as if selfhood were bestowed upon me. The test of the possibility of my Existenz is the knowledge that it rests upon transcendence.
The difference is not the phenomenology but the conclusion. Jaspers feels the groundlessness and reaches for a hand, converting the void into dependence, while self-closure requires the will to stand without meeting anything at all.
I close the door to my becoming Existenz if I take it for being proper.
The whole path affirms the opposite: freedom is authentic being, the ground that requires no further grounding; Jaspers holds the proof of his autonomy and reads it as proof of dependence.
The surrender extends to Eigensinn:
Defiance, not to be voided on general grounds, can be voided only on its own ground. The deity grants me the freedom to become myself, and only the deity will let me overcome defiance by self-being-not by some miraculous supersensory act, however, but by tying myself in existence to the One with which I shall remain historically, unconditionally linked. It is with this alone that, yielding to it, I become myself. I yield in the world, the intermediary outside of which there is no road to transcendence.
Eigensinn cannot be destroyed by arguments, that's correct, because it precedes argument. The metric's tools are powerless against the point where the metric loses definition. Jaspers knows that it can only be abolished in its ground, from within. The subject must voluntarily surrender what no one can take by force. But it is the deity who permits him to be free. Every word preserves the appearance of self-grounding while the structure is delegation.
And the final move — the renunciation of knowledge:
In surrender I dispense with knowledge and put my trust in the ground of being. I truly yield myself only when I do not know, when my existence is sublimated in being, both voided and sheltered in being, although I cannot know that there is being. Whenever I would knowingly justify it, my surrender becomes untruthful. But as not knowing, as acquiescing in active trust, it is a glimpse of transcendence.
Devotion renounces knowledge. Knowledge is the meta-position, the instrument that makes the metric visible. To renounce knowledge is to dismantle the meta-position voluntarily, to return inside the metric. Unknowing here is the complete inversion of gnosis. Gnosis is knowledge that dissolves the metric. For Jaspers truth is in unknowing that restores the bond with transcendence.
He then seals retreat with a version of the ontological proof:
I conceive the thought of infinity. I myself am a finite being and in existence I meet only finite things. That I harbor that thought, and that I come to be aware of being finite, must be due to a reason that cannot lie in my finiteness alone. The reason must fit the enormity of the thought. In other words: there must be the infinity I think, else I could not understand that I think it.
I think the thought of infinity while I am finite: therefore the thought must have a ground outside my finitude. Therefore infinity must exist. That is Anselm and Descartes restated in the vocabulary of existence. The capacity to think the infinite is a property of discursion: differentiation of differentiation has no ceiling, unlimited recursion. The infinity of the thought is a property of acausality. Jaspers reads it as proof of something beyond.
This is the pattern throughout. Grundlosigkeit (groundlessness) is what Jaspers encounters when the foundation is removed. He names it abyss, Abgrund. Transcendence is the term through which he preserves relation to that groundlessness without allowing it to stand as the medium of autonomous will. Yet abyss and transcendence share the same predicates: both resist objectification, both cannot become content of knowledge. They mark one and the same groundlessness, divided within thought itself. The abyss appears below as dissolution, transcendence is above as unity. Above and below already belong to the metric. At the point of self-closure, they vanish. What stands under the name of abyss and transcendence are two placements of the same groundlessness once thought still seeks orientation.
Eigensinn (stubbornness) is the moment when he stands in the groundlessness and has not yet split it. A second later, fear kicks in, the void divides into a lower half (despair, sinking) and an upper half (transcendence, trust), and Jaspers leaps upward. But there is nowhere to leap to — he is already standing in it.
Jaspers is the most honest cartographer of the Right-Hand Path in philosophy. He reaches the threshold, describes its phenomenology, and then restores transcendence at the point where self-grounding would have to stand without support.