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Although Jaspers rarely refers to his philosophy as hermeneutical it is hermeneutical throughout, for it is an interpretation of Existenz in relation to Transcendence. There are perhaps two primary reasons why he is reluctant to use the term and why he never aligned himself formally with the so-called hermeneutical movement that has exerted so much influence during the past thirty years. First, when Jaspers wrote his primary philosophical works during the 1930's and 1940's, the term hermeneu-tics, in its modern significance, was identified largely with Martin Heidegger's Daseinsanalyse as a rigorous science of existence. Insofar as the early Heidegger was dependent on Husserl, Jaspers considered Daseinsanalyse as a pseudo-science inasmuch as it intends a Wesensschau of Dasein's being-in-a-world which, on Kantian grounds, Jaspers believed impossible. Also, since the early Heidegger was commonly regarded as being an existentialist in the Sartrean sense (and for reasons we have already mentioned) Jaspers rejected pure existentialism which, he believed, led to voiding of authentic Transcendence and the substitution of surrogate forms of Transcendence.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-9270-2_8

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