Word: jasperse
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
THE FUTURE OF GERMANY by Karl Jaspers. 173 pages. University of Chicago Press. $4.95.
Philosopher Karl Jaspers, 85, is a ghost at the German banquet who knows just how to haunt complacent fellow countrymen. Ever since the end of World War II, he has been relentlessly reminding his people that guilt belongs not only to Hitler but to the Germans who supported and obeyed...
Jaspers sees Germany today as morally adrift in prosperity, pretty much as it was morally adrift in poverty in 1931, when he warned of the approaching collapse of the Weimar Republic in Man in the Modern Age. Does he now foresee a neo-Nazi takeover? Hardly. But he does assert...
Passion for Order. In their "immoderate desire for security," Jaspers finds Germans as overresponsive as ever to instant recipes for political salvation. They continue to put too much trust in the wrong things: the rationalism of know-how, the promise of perfection through the conquest of technology. Above all, "with...
LIFE is too short. Perhaps no single force has worked so powerfully on man as his knowledge that he must surely die. Whole civilizations have been built in death's dominion: the Egyptians turned their land into a vast necropolis, and the Aztecs conquered Mexico not for booty but...