DE Weekly: Jaspers, Existenz, & the Encompassing
Below is an archived email originally sent on September 14, 2026.
Jaspers, Existenz, & the Encompassing
I have only mentioned the German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers a few times by way of sharing his quotes in some newsletters over the years, but I have not dedicated an entire newsletter to him and his writings yet. Today, I’ll share a bit about this man whose influence on modern psychiatry and on Existentialism should not be overlooked.
Jaspers defined philosophy not as simply something we think about or write about in order to “understand” big ideas, rather, he believed philosophy was something we undertake as an “active search.”
This active search sought after things such as our existence (hello Existentialism), human freedom, and how we interact with and relate to our reality.
Jaspers’ writing confronted these ideas from the standpoint of human psychology, which ended up differentiating him nicely from some of his contemporaries he might otherwise be compared to, such as Jean-Paul Sartre. (You’ll see later in this newsletter how he differed from Sartre in some key areas.)
Existenz was the word Jaspers used to describe the authentic Self that we achieve when we “wake up” from ordinary life and assume the full, total responsibility of our radical freedom and the choices that entails.
Existenz should be viewed separately from Martin Heidegger’s Dasein, or “being there,” that he used to describe how we as human beings exist in the world.
Dasein is meant to describe the minutiae––the basic, everyday functions of human life that we all take part in. We wake up and follow a routine, conform to whatever social role we find ourselves in, and survive another day doing so.
Existenz, on the other hand, means to capture our essence––our true, authentic Self––and cannot be so easily explained. In short, it only appears when we wake up, as I said before, and only remains if we commit to exercising our radical freedom and responsibility for our choices.
So, if Existenz is to take us a step further than Dasein, how do we activate it? How do we wake up?
Jaspers wrote that we wake up our Existenz when we encounter Grenzsituationen––boundary situations, in English––and face them head on.
These boundary situations, Jaspers believed, included such life events as suffering and death. These are situations that cannot be avoided for any of us, nor can the limit of the suffering and struggle they create be limited or diminished.
It is in facing these boundary situations head on that we can destroy any illusions about our Self and about our life to see our true Self and our true life––our true level of freedom that we did not recognize before we encountered this boundary situation.
Encountering something like loss or struggle or death wakes us up from our Dasein and forces us into Existenz: real existence.
I think it would be fair to say in considering the existential phrase “existence precedes essence” that Jaspers might have believed if we do not encounter a boundary situation that forces us to wake up into our Existenz, then we have not yet discovered the totality of what our essence could be.
This brings us to another one of his ideas, one he dubbed with the moniker the “Encompassing.”
The Encompassing, for Jaspers, served as the ultimate horizon of all that is in the world. While we will never be able to see and to understand the whole of reality as God intended it and can see, we can “bump” into it through encounters with Grenzsituationen.
It is necessary to clarify that Jaspers did not believe we could somehow reach the horizon of the Encompassing and achieve a Faustian level of knowledge about the world.
Rather, it was this very horizon that we wished to try and encounter but could not. No matter how many limit-situations we experience and the countless boundaries we might bump into, this horizon remains still ever out of reach.
That does not mean that the Encompassing must remain an abstract mystery to us, however. Jaspers was unique in that he emphasized concrete personal experiences and perceptions over the abstract nature with which some existentialists wrote regarding the same subject matter.
While it is true that for Jaspers the Encompassing was more of a background for human life than a finite object we can grasp with full understanding, he still encouraged us to reach for it. We could reach for it through attempting to draw closer to true selfhood––through aiming for full, true authenticity––in open and honest communication with others.
This is where Jaspers differs in a very important way from the likes of Sartre.
Where Sartre might have lamented the fact that a Self must negotiate with the Other to create a life of meaning, Jaspers would welcome and encourage it. This is where the emphasis on psychiatry comes into play: we are to place high importance on communication and cooperation with the Other to wake up our Existenz. It is crucial in the philosophy of Jaspers.
Through deep, honest connection with the Other, we can discover our authentic Self and live our Existenz in a way not previously available to us.
This is the best use of our freedom: to try and achieve what Jaspers called transcendence; transcendence meaning aligning our freedom with a higher reality, with God.
Jaspers was so unique among the existentialists in that he did not seek to master that which he could not; he did not seek to break through the limit of the unknowable and to tame the human condition to his liking.
He simply sought to bump into it––to engage it on a human level, and to understand his Existenz.
“I do not accomplish my freedom. I did not make myself. I do not exist by my own means.” –– Karl Jaspers
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
It’s nice to write about ideas I haven’t covered before. Are there any other philosophers whose ideas I haven’t covered yet or you’d like to see more of?
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