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Just as Socrates raised the question of self in response to the plethora of inconclusive materialist worldviews which preceded him, so also Jaspers' second formal mode of transcending, Existenzerhellung, introduces the "subject" and the subject's role in the development of world. As we have seen, the initial mode of transcending in "world-orientation" is extrinsic movement-towards-a-world sustained by a naive empirical realism. Enchanted by the quantitative endlessness of the material order, the transcending subject, according to Jaspers, is ultimately overwhelmed by the inconclusive and oppressive plurality of the external world — with the multifariousness of "things" — and no abiding unity. The subject's response to this debilitating state of affairs is characterized by Jaspers, as we have seen, as a kind of "recoil" or "reversal" whereby the subject is thrown back upon himself as subject and away from the world as object. While this Socratic moment can be the prelude to either subjectivism or metaphysical dualism, it can also function as the constructive conversion to a more intrinsic modality of world-Being and to a heightened level of cognitive transcending. The question concomitant with this conversion is simply, "What is there other than mundane being?" ¹ — in short, the arrival of the meta-question induced by what might be termed an experience of the "limitedness of limitlessness."

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-9270-2_2

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