Jaspers writes...

Jaspers writes: Existence is the self-being that relates to itself and thereby also to transcendence from which it knows that it has been given to itself and upon which it is grounded.[^28] Freedom exists, for Jaspers, only with and by transcendence.[^29] For Jaspers, transcendence is that which is experienced as beyond the person; but it cannot be thought of as anything empirically real or actual.

Transcendence encompasses individuals, but it cannot be objectified; it is precisely beyond both subjectivity and objectivity. Transcendence is not something in the world nor is it simply to be identified with human freedom, but transcendence appears wherever there is Existenz . Jaspers begins, as does Husserl, with the subject-object relation familiar to modern philosophy.

But for Jaspers, to become aware of the subject-object relation is already to be moving in the domain of what Jaspers calls the ‘Encompassing’ ( das Umgreifende ).

For Jaspers, all thinking involves transcending, beyond the objective and towards the ‘Encompassing’ which we experience as the ‘horizon of horizons’,[^30] the being which is beyond our categorizations; ‘The encompassing preserves my freedom against knowability.’[^31] Jaspers writes: But the encompassing ( Umgreifende ) is not the horizon of our knowledge at any particular moment. Rather, it is the source from which all new horizons emerge, without itself ever being visible even as a horizon.

The encompassing always merely announces itself - in present objects and within the horizons - but it never becomes an object . Never appearing to us itself, it is that wherein everything else appears.[^32] Jaspers and Husserl share this concept of the ‘horizon’ as that in which objectivity appears as such. The problem for both is that to try to think of the ‘encompassing’ or of ‘horizonality’ is already to objectify it.

The result is therefore, as Jaspers says, that ‘every proposition concerning the encompassing thus contains a paradox’.[^33] Despite the fact that we cannot grasp the ‘encompassing’, nevertheless Jaspers suggests that we can become aware of it in a lucidity different from determinate knowledge. Jaspers wants us to philosophize ‘in the modes of the encompassing’ by detaching oneself from determinate knowledge.[^34] For Jaspers, transcendence is experienced through ‘cyphers’.