Alexander Lobok read for us the book of Karl Jaspers «Philosophy»
For a long time, they tried to convince the Soviet person that the history of philosophy is nothing more than an ascent from “wrong” philosophical views to more and more correct and, ultimately, to the “only true” ones — those that are set out in a textbook called “Foundations Marxist-Leninist Philosophy». However, in fact, philosophy is not at all the sum of universal truths, but something directly opposite. This is not ready-made knowledge, but the ultimate questioning of man to himself and to the world. Something that is born in us as an inner effort, as an intense search.
There is not and cannot be a single philosophy “for all”, but there are philosophical worlds and their complex interaction. Each of them is true or correct exactly to the extent that its author manages to develop a tense dialogue between his unique «existential situation» (a situation in which a person discovers his self, his unique «I») and the world.
Karl Jaspers wrote his book about how this dialogue develops and develops. He reflects on how and why we are trying to find the existential self — that is, one for whom life turns out to be not a fake cast of schemes prepared by someone, but a process of discovering one’s «I», an effort to freedom. Genuine philosophizing is always the awareness of one’s ultimate loneliness before the world. Being is always only my being. Only in this case I build my true life, and not a certain amount of simulacra, fakes, in which I am indistinguishable from others.
This difficult experience of defining the boundaries and possibilities of one’s «I» in the world is the essence of what can be called «philosophical orientation in the world.» And only to the extent that a person has this experience (always non-borrowed, always his own!), he is able to enter into a dialogue with other philosophical worlds — in particular, with those that textbooks on the history of philosophy tell about …
Jaspers’ book is, to a certain extent, a justification of philosophy, which from a pragmatic point of view is absolutely inconclusive. He explains where the need to philosophize comes from in general, what its nature is and what consequences this need leads to for society. And this book will be of interest to anyone who is interested in how the «fine muscles» of culture are arranged — its philosophical «muscles», which allows this culture to be truly alive, mobile and productive.