Fate Is Not Blind

THE FUTURE OF MANKIND (342 pp.) --Karl Jaspers--University of Chicago ($5.95).

"Not famine, not pestilence, not war will bring back seriousness," Kierkegaard once said. "It is not till the eternal punishments of hell regain their reality that man will turn serious." German Philosopher Karl Jaspers feels that there is a fairly vivid equivalent of the horrors of hell in the threatened nuclear extinction of the human race. The Future of Mankind is a stern call to seriousness. It is also a call to reason, courage and responsibility. It is based on a premise that may sound bleak, but has probably been the rock of man's endurance through the ages: "No situation is absolutely hopeless."

After Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, 77, is the ranking German existentialist. Unlike Heidegger, who flirted briefly with the Nazis, Jaspers maintained a quiet but obstinate dissent. Ticketed for a concentration camp in 1945, he and his wife were saved by the U.S. Army's capture of Heidelberg. Though he tends to view Christianity less in orthodox terms than as a body of myth and symbols, Jaspers is a member of the Evangelical Church, and in 1946, in his book The Question of German Guilt, he bade Germans cross-examine their consciences on the war-guilt issue. Outspokenly independent, he inflamed many Germans last summer by calling the reunification of Germany "politically unrealistic and irrelevant."

Unfortunately, German philosophers write like German philosophers. Intellectually, Jaspers is easier to lose than to follow. The reader has an uneasy sensation of being caught in a brambly thicket of dialectics. But the book has a staunch nobility of spirit that commands respect.

The Rule of Reason. The first thing men must do, says Jaspers, is to stop not thinking about the bomb. "Creative fear" will stimulate saving thought and action. Since the menace is apocalyptic, the remedy must be radical and all-embracing. Jaspers proposes nothing less than an inner transformation of man that would consist of being true to his own best self. To skeptics who deny that a change in man is possible, Jaspers insists that it has happened historically "with the Hebrew prophets, with the Greek poets and philosophers, with the Hellenistic and Christian regenerations of the first centuries A.D., with the biblically grounded ethics of the Protestant world." Jaspers prefers reason above all other contemporary regenerative forces because it is "not apt to become a church, a doctrine, a system; it is the ever-moving freedom of man himself."

Reason would undoubtedly help man cope with the bomb, but the human situation is complicated by another monstrous threat--totalitarian rule, as embodied by Russia: "By one, we lose life; by the other, a life that is worth living." The confrontation of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., each bomb-laden, has led to panaceas, abstractions and frauds in the quest for peace. Peaceful coexistence is one such fraud, according to Jaspers: "Peace never comes from coexistence, only from cooperation." What happens under the formula of coexistence is that "one side is hiding its will to eventual world conquest by coercion, the other its will to world conquest by persuasion."

Another delusion is that of unilateral disarmament and Gandhi-like nonviolence. Hungary 1956, Jaspers makes clear, is the way Russia would have dealt with Gandhi. World government is an abstraction dear to many, but Jaspers insists that it could only be established by conquest and maintained by despotism. Harshly he calls the U.N. "a basic untruth." Its executive power depends "not on the United Nations but solely on the policies of the sovereign powers."

A Drop of Ink. From his rigorous criticism of such peace mechanisms as exist, one might expect Jaspers to lose hope for the future. Quite the contrary. Fatalism and despair, he argues, rise from certainties that are not really certain. If one atom bomb is dropped, there is no certainty that all will be dropped or that every last man will perish. If humanity is blackmailed into totalitarian slavery out of fear of the bomb, there is also no certainty that in tortuous, labyrinthine ways, man would not eventually recover his freedom.

However, Jaspers' essential confidence does not stem from such cold comforts. He insists that "however minute a quantity the individual may be among the factors that make history, he is a factor." Just as a drop of ink stains a glass of water, so the humblest of men, in the exercise of his free will and choice, affects the course of history. Those who throw up their hands in futility have, in Jaspers' view, succumbed to the Marxist fallacy of regarding history as an irreversible process of doom or salvation. In truth, says Jaspers, the basic process of history lies in freedom itself: "It results from human decisions--decisions which have not yet been finally made."

Nothing is more foolish, Jaspers feels, than to listen to scientists on these ultimate questions. That is to confuse technical means with moral ends. To know the limits of know-how is the beginning of know-why. Philosophy, the kind that every man consciously or unconsciously possesses, "enables man to ascertain what exists and what he wants . . . Man can see what matters, can reflect, can change and can act. What happens if he does not is his fault, not blind fate."

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