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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Immanence, Self-experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein and Karl Jaspers Karl Jaspers on Transcendence Before moving on to discuss Edith Stein, I want now to turn to another conception of the transcendent that was being explored in Germany around the same time Husserl was writing.

I am referring of course to Karl Jaspers who had a huge influence on the Heidegger of Being and Time , and thereby, indirectly, had an influence on Edith Stein.

Jaspers made transcendence a central issue in relation to the ‘illumination of existence’ ( Existenzerhellung ), especially in his massive three-volume work, Philosophie , which, although it did not appear until 1932, had been in gestation all through the nineteen twenties.[^22] Indeed, many of Jaspers’ central concepts had already been articulated in nuce in his 1919 Psychology of Worldviews ( Psychologie der Weltanschauungen ), which Heidegger reviewed critically at a formative stage in his own career.[^23] In his writing Jaspers outlines various ways of dealing with the individual openness to transcendence; one can deny or resist it, or seek a way in the world to accommodate it.[^24] But transcendence continues to intrude on our individual lives since transcendence is what makes our lives individual and authentically experienced.

Jaspers begins from the existential starting-point: ‘everything essentially real is for me only by virtue of the fact that I am I myself.’[^25] My existence is the ‘arena’ for my self-realization. Existenz (a term he consciously borrowed from Kierkegaard, who himself found it in Schelling who opposed Existenz to the Hegelian Idea) refers to ‘possible’ individual existence in terms of its freedom and willing. For Jaspers, the very essence of Existenz is its intentional tending to the other, i.e.

its transcendence.[^26] Jaspers writes: Just as I do not exist without the world, I am not myself without transcendence. … I stand before transcendence, which does not occur to me as existing in the world of phenomenal things but speaks to me as possible – speaks to me in the voice of whatever exists, and most decidedly in that of my self-being.

The transcendence before which I stand is the measure of my own depth.[^27] For Jaspers, Existenz is always directed towards transcendence: ‘Its authentic being consists in the search for transcendence’.