Jaspers on Freedom: Becoming Oneself Through Decision

Original Text

The passage is a working quotation in English, translated from Karl Jaspers' German original in Philosophie, Bd. 2: Existenzerhellung (Berlin: Springer, 1932; rev. ed. 1956), and rendered in E. B. Ashton's English translation:

"Either I allow the course of things to decide about me — vanishing as myself, since there is no real decision when everything just happens — or I deal with being originally, as myself, with the feeling that there must be a decision."

The German source text of this specific sentence could not be independently verified word for word; the English rendering above is the attested form cited in peer-reviewed scholarship (Hinchman and Hinchman, Review of Politics 53.3, 1991, p. 9) and follows the Ashton translation of Existenzerhellung.

Translation

In plain English, Jaspers is describing the two ways a person can stand in relation to their own life. The first is to drift: to let events, routines, and the opinions of others make the decisions that should be one's own. In that mode, Jaspers says, the self "vanishes," because a life in which "everything just happens" contains no real decision and therefore no real self. The second way is to meet one's situation as a self — to feel that one's own being is at stake, that a choice must be made, and to make it from one's own ground. Freedom, on this reading, is not a property we possess but an act we perform; we are free precisely insofar as we decide, and we become ourselves through the decisions we take responsibility for.

Context

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) published his three-volume Philosophy between 1932 and 1955, with the second volume, Existenzerhellung ("Illumination of Existenz"), appearing in 1932. The work grew out of his earlier clinical experience as a psychiatrist and his conviction that scientific psychology could never exhaust what it means to be a person. Existenzerhellung is Jaspers' attempt to "illuminate" the mode of being he calls Existenz — the dimension of the self that cannot be objectified, measured, or treated as a thing among things, and that is realized only through freedom, communication, and decision.

Jaspers wrote against the backdrop of Weimar Germany's intellectual crisis and the rise of totalitarian ideologies that promised to relieve individuals of the burden of choice. In his view, the great temptation of the age was to hand one's freedom over — to the state, to an ideology, to the "course of things." The passage above is part of his sustained argument that such a surrender is not relief but self-annihilation: where nothing is decided, no one exists as a self.

Meaning

The quote presents freedom as an existential alternative rather than a philosophical proof. Jaspers is not claiming that free will can be demonstrated; he is describing what it feels like to live as a being who must choose. The "course of things" stands for everything that would decide for us — biology, society, history, habit, fate. To let the course of things decide is to vanish "as myself," because a self is not a thing that persists automatically but something that is enacted through decisions.

The other option — "I deal with being originally, as myself, with the feeling that there must be a decision" — is Jaspers' definition of existential freedom. It is not arbitrary license, the freedom to do anything whatsoever. It is the freedom to take a stand toward one's situation, to own it, and to let one's choices express who one is. The "feeling that there must be a decision" is the conscience of the free person: the awareness that silence, postponement, and passivity are themselves decisions — usually bad ones. For Jaspers, freedom and guilt are inseparable; to choose one possibility is always to betray others, and this is the price of being a self at all.

Philosophical Interpretation

Jaspers' account of freedom belongs to the existentialist tradition he helped found, but it differs in important ways from the versions of Sartre and Heidegger. Where Sartre locates freedom in consciousness's capacity to negate any given situation, Jaspers locates it in the decision that realizes Existenz — a deeper, non-objectifiable selfhood that is disclosed rather than constructed. Where Heidegger analyzes freedom through thrownness and resoluteness, Jaspers emphasizes the impossibility of proving freedom and the necessity of experiencing it in boundary situations (death, suffering, guilt, struggle), where the ordinary securities of everyday life collapse.

Jaspers' influence runs through Hannah Arendt, who took from him the conviction that action and speech are the ways human beings disclose who they are — a political translation of his existential freedom. His insistence that freedom is inseparable from decision and guilt also anticipates the existential psychotherapies of the mid-century, which treat the refusal to decide as a primary form of psychological illness. The quote remains a compact statement of one of existentialism's deepest claims: to be free is not to be unconstrained, but to be the one who decides — and to bear the consequences.

Related Concepts

• Freedom — freedom as decision rather than license
• Authenticity — becoming oneself through owned choice
• Courage — the strength to decide without guarantee
• Existentialism — the tradition that makes freedom the center of human being

Related Learning Path

Continue exploring existentialist reflections on freedom and selfhood through the Existentialist Wisdom collection. For a contrasting account of freedom as the foundation of ethics, see Sartre's claim that we are condemned to be free; for the experience of being thrown into a situation we did not choose, see Heidegger on thrownness. Together these pages trace a learning path from the discovery of freedom, through the anxiety it produces, to the decision that makes a self.