Breyer Thiemo - Karl Jaspers philosophy and psychopathology

Institute for Philosophy, University of Oldenburg, Postfach 2503, 26111 Oldenburg, Germany

Matthias Bormuth

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In the first edition of the General Psychopathology in 1913 there is already a hint that Jaspers was preoccupied with the role that Friedrich Hlderlins medical history played for his poetry. With a study by the Tbingen psychiatrist Wilhelm Lange in mind Jaspers writes: Pathography is a delicate matter (Jaspers , p. 423).

The Heidelberg philologist Norbert von Hellingraths view of these poems could not have been more different. Indeed it was with the first edition of this controversial late poetry that he launched the Hlderlin renaissance of the time. The first sentence of his foreword is a direct rebuttal of Lange: This volume contains the heart, core, and pinnacles of Hlderlins oeuvre, his true legacy (Hlderlin , p. 100).

The focus of this essay is Jaspers pathographical reading of Hlderlin from 1913/14 onward, and the positive influence that Jaspers felt the poets psychopathology had on his modernity . The German literary scholar Walter Mller-Seidel had made this point several years beforehand in his interpretation of Hlderlin, making direct reference to Jaspers topos of the boundary situation and emphasizing that the psychiatrist had aligned himself in his anthropology with Dilthey (Mller-Seidel , p. 71).

In his essay Mller-Seidel posited an epochal affiliation between romanticism and modernism on the basis of their shared receptiveness to the idea of illness as a means of higher synthesis (Mller-Seidel , p. 244).

The conceptual nexus of psychopathology and modernity is not only key to Jaspers study of Hlderlin; it informs his entire pathographical oeuvre, as will become clear by comparing his thoughts on van Gogh, Nietzsche, and Max Weber. Amazingly, this view also surfaces in his Notizen zu Martin Heidegger [notes on Martin Heidegger] when Jaspers compares Heideggers famous interpretation of Hlderlin with the edition published by Hellingrath two decades earlier. Jaspers also read the elegy Bread and Wine, which was to become so central for Heidegger, with remarkable intensity. No other poem in Jaspers personal copy of the Hellingrath edition is surrounded by a greater profusion of pencil markings and notes (Hlderlin ).

As part of the inner circle around Max Weber, Jaspers doubtless joined other scholars from the circle at the enthusiastic readings and elucidations on Hlderlin that made Hellingrath legendary in Heidelberg around 1913/14 (Rilke and von Hellingrath , p. 100). As a former psychiatrist who was now influential as a psychologist among philosophers, Jaspers would have made an attractive conversation partner for the young philologist, at a time when the late poetry was still widely regarded as an expression of psychopathological experience. Indeed in a letter dated June 1914 to Gustav Radbruch, an historian of law who belonged to the Weber circle, Jaspers writes: Hellingrath has published a Hlderlin volume which brings almost everything together in an entirely new way. I recently looked at some of Hlderlins manuscripts with him. It was most moving to have his whole life right there before me in his own handwriting. H[ellingrath] had specimens from all phases of his life. The two men shared a graphological interest that had been kindled by Ludwig Klages in Munich, perhaps at a similar time (Schmidt 1963/64, p. 148).

Whatever the case, the meeting in Heidelberg certainly informed the Hlderlin chapter that Jaspers added in 1921 to Strindberg and van Gogh. An Attempt of a Pathographic Analysis with Reference to Parallel Cases of Swedenborg and Hlderlin. Initially he seems keen to intercede in the controversy with Lange, writing: Both opinions, excluding each other in their evaluation, need not be incompatible in every respect, concerning the facts on which their observations are based. Lange can be correct by declaring the psychosis to be the cause of the changes in the poetry, and so can v. Hellingrath when he detects changes without asking questions in regard to the psychosis (Jaspers , p. 136).

It follows that in his pathographical outline of Langes thesis, which argued that from 1802 onward the psychotic process had a solely destructive impact, he directly endorses Hellingraths view. Namely that the late poems represent a continuous development which took place until the complete collapse and which from a mental standpoint, is entirely understandable (Jaspers , p. XIX f).

To anyone with a knowledge of psychiatry, it is clear that in differentiating between intelligible development and unintelligible process, Hellingrath is applying the famous category which became the methodological premise of Jaspers General Psychopathology. This is referred to in psychiatric circles today as Jaspers theorem of unintelligibility. Central to its pathographical relevance for Jaspers is that in the analysis of incomprehensible causal relationships, e.g. between the onset of mental illness and an artists creative work unequivocally genealogical explanations are avoided. Ultimately Jaspers regarded the sick but prodigiously talented artist as a mystery that no science could fully fathom in either psychopathological or existential terms. As he wrote in the foreword to the second edition of the pathography which was published in a series of Philosophical Studies in 1926: Not by supposedly supreme insights, by which we might perhaps discover the truth, but by insights which provide the perspective from which the actual problems can be recognized (Jaspers , p. 134).

It is not clear whether Hellingrath arrived at this opinion in the course of his conversations with Jaspers, through the study of his methodological classic, or whether he developed it quite independently. Even in his appraisal of Hlderlins Pindar Translations, he dissociates himself from the right, claimed by Lange, to draw genealogical conclusions between work and illness, because I must not leave the territory of pure descriptiveness and literary observation (von Hellingrath , p. 216 f).

While Lange essentially sought to apply psychiatric categories to apprehend the formally and linguistically unusual nature of Hlderlins art as an expression of alterity, Jaspers wanted to learn from the philologists. He was inspired not only by Hellingrath but also by Wilhelm Dilthey, whose 1906 collected volume Poetry and Experience included an essay on Hlderlin (Dilthey , p. 102).

Jaspers follows the two humanists a considerable way in their hermeneutic attempts to interpret Hlderlins late poetry as a sublime experience of modernity . Yet he also accentuates the psychiatric understanding that strange-seeming phenomena are the expression of a pathological process. He writes, with obvious ambivalence: I read in the fourth volume of the v. Hellingrath edition, a different atmosphere in the linguistic and formal expression (except for a number of poems at the outset of the volume, which date back to 1800 or to the end of 1799), but I am not about to objectify this feeling (Jaspers , p. 138).