The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.
Karl JaspersRead
What is meaningful cannot in fact be isolated…. We achieve understanding within a circular movement from particular facts to the whole that includes them and back again from the whole thus reached to the particular significant facts.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Understanding is an interconnected process that moves between the details and the broader context.
In this quote, Karl Jaspers emphasizes the idea that true understanding cannot be derived from isolated facts. Instead, it requires a circular and iterative process where one moves back and forth between specific details and the larger context they exist within, thereby gaining a deeper and more meaningful comprehension of the subject at hand.
Themes
UnderstandingContextMeaningPhilosophyKnowledge
In practice
Example use cases
In a classroom discussion about literature, this quote can be used to illustrate how the meaning of a story comes from both its specific events and its overall themes.
More from Karl Jaspers
All quotes →The community of masses of human beings has produced an order of life in regulated channels which connects individuals in a technically functioning organisation, but not inwardly from the historicity of their souls.
Karl JaspersRead
We must learn to talk with each other, and we mutually must understand and accept one another in our extraordinary differences.
Karl JaspersRead
The study of law left me unsatisfied, because I did not know the aspects of life which it serves. I perceived only the intricate mental juggling with fictions that did not interest me.
Karl JaspersRead
If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts.
Karl JaspersRead
Reason is like an open secret that can become known to anyone at any time; it is the quiet space into which everyone can enter through his own thought
Karl JaspersRead
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