Il fondamento «sovrapolitico» della politica: l’attualità della prospettiva jaspersiana

Abstract

Emblematic of Karl Jaspers’ awareness of the present and his thoughtful concern for it, are two works written in critical periods of European history: Die geistige Situation der Zeit (1931) and Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen (1958). These analyses still have great relevance today since they express Jaspers’ conviction that what defines the crisis of a certain epoch is not the mere historical situation with its particular socio-political conditions, but the inauthentic and irresponsible way man relates and reacts to such a set of circumstances. The two representative writings show a substantially analogous pattern of reasoning: in so far as they both identify the two main crisis factors with the absolutization of Dasein’s reality and with the closedness to transcendence, and they both appeal to the “conversion” of the individual as the only way towards the resolution of the crisis. Lastly, the call for the individual’s transformation culminates, in both writings, in the idea of an invisible solidarity between self-realized existences, which finds further consistency in the supra-political «community of reasonable people» described in the 1958 text.