Starting at the Edge: Karl Jaspers - Life, Method and Philosophy

Karl Jaspers is one of those philosophers who often gets mentioned in the same breath as Heidegger or Sartre, yet remains curiously under-read. Part of the reason is that his work resists easy classification. He was not a system-builder in the style of Hegel, nor did he write manifestos like Sartre. His voice is quieter, more probing, sometimes even hesitant. But it is precisely this tone that makes him such a valuable guide for our time. Jaspers’ philosophy does not claim to solve the mysteries of existence; it seeks instead to illuminate the conditions in which we face those mysteries honestly, without shortcuts or illusions.

To understand why Jaspers matters, it helps to begin with the arc of his life. Born in Oldenburg in 1883, he first trained as a physician and made his name in psychiatry. His early research on mental illness—later published as General Psychopathology—was revolutionary: he rejected the reduction of patients to mere biological dysfunction and insisted on understanding their inner world. This sensitivity to the lived experience of individuals would remain the hallmark of his philosophy. Yet Jaspers eventually grew dissatisfied with psychiatry, sensing that medicine, science, and even psychology had limits. They could explain the mechanisms of life, but they could not touch the core of human existence—freedom, guilt, mortality, the search for meaning. Out of this dissatisfaction grew his lifelong project: philosophy as orientation in the world and as illumination of what he called Existenz.

Philosophy as Orientation

For Jaspers, philosophy is not a luxury or an academic discipline in the narrow sense. It is an act of orientation: a way of finding our bearings in a reality that is often confusing, contingent, and overwhelming. Science offers maps of the world, but they are maps of objects—of things measurable, quantifiable, predictable. Philosophy, by contrast, orients us as subjects who must live and decide in that world. It is the practice of asking where we stand, how we should act, and what lies beyond what we can know. In this way Jaspers brings philosophy down to its ancient task: helping us live, not merely cataloging knowledge.

This orientation requires a special vocabulary. Central to it is the idea of Existenz—not existence in the everyday sense, but existence as the self who becomes itself in freedom and decision. One could say Existenz is the self at its most authentic, the dimension of the human that can never be fully captured by scientific description or social roles. Philosophy, then, is the attempt to “illuminate” this Existenz—not to define it once and for all, but to shed light on its possibilities.

Limits and the Encompassing

Jaspers also insisted that we constantly encounter limits. No matter how much knowledge we accumulate, there are boundary situations—death, guilt, suffering, chance—where explanation fails us. At these edges, the project of orientation takes a new shape: instead of mastering the world, we are confronted with the mystery of being itself. For Jaspers, this is not a failure but an opening. In the very moment when knowledge reaches its limit, philosophy can awaken us to freedom and to what he calls the Encompassing—the whole within which we live, think, and act, yet which always exceeds our grasp.

Already here we sense the unique timbre of Jaspers’ thought: he is neither dismissive of science nor content with it. He honors reason but insists on its humility. His philosophy is not an alternative to rational thought but a deepening of it, a way of recognizing where reason ends and freedom begins.

Jaspers's Invitation

It is tempting to place Jaspers neatly in the existentialist camp, but this obscures as much as it clarifies. Compared to Heidegger, Jaspers resists the temptation to make metaphysics out of existence; compared to Sartre, he avoids the polemical style and the reduction of freedom to mere choice. Jaspers stands apart in his insistence on communication, transcendence, and faith—not faith as dogma, but what he calls philosophical faith, a trust in transcendence without claims to final truth. In this way, he is both more modest and, perhaps, more radical than his better-known peers.

To begin reading Jaspers, then, is to accept an invitation. He does not offer a system to be memorized but a set of paths to walk. His writing asks us to look at our own lives, at the moments where science and common sense fail, and to consider how freedom, communication, and transcendence might appear there. He is a philosopher of beginnings—of standing at the edge where certainty falters, and asking what it means to live responsibly, truthfully, and in dialogue with others.

In this series, we will follow Jaspers step by step, beginning with the experience of limits and moving toward his vision of truth, transcendence, and responsibility. The hope is not only to understand him but to find in his thought a companion for our own questions. Because for Jaspers, philosophy is never about answers stored in books; it is about the way we orient ourselves in the fragile, unpredictable, yet deeply meaningful business of being human.

Understand More:

When Explanation Breaks: Jaspers on Boundary Situations (Grenzsituationen)

Argue Like You Love Me: Jaspers on Communication, The Loving Struggle and Existential

Thinking Beyond: Jaspers on The Encompassing, Transcendence, and Philosophical Faith

Existence in Public:  Jaspers on Guilt, Pluralism, and the Idea of the University

From Symbolic Anthropology to Digital Rituals: ‘Body Ritual among the Nacirema’ Revisited

In 1956, Horace Miner published a short anthropological essay that continues to surface in classrooms, syllabi, and internet searches alike: "Body Ritual among the Nacirema". A satire masked as ethnography, the piece describes the bizarre, elaborate hygiene practices of a North American group—the Nacirema—who engage in daily rites involving "mouth-rites," ritual ablutions, and visits to the "holy-mouth-man."

The twist, of course, is that the Nacirema are simply Americans spelled backward. By adopting the detached tone of the cultural outsider, Miner exposed the implicit absurdities and unexamined rituals of mid-century American life. What appeared exotic was, in fact, ordinary. The essay became an instant classic of symbolic anthropology, a field that examines how rituals and symbols construct meaning within a culture.

Theory Snapshot: Symbolic Anthropology

Symbolic anthropology, particularly as shaped by figures like Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner, treats culture not as a fixed set of practices but as a constantly shifting system of signs, stories, and rituals. It asks us to decode gestures, ceremonies, and symbols the way one might read a novel or a sacred text. Culture, in this view, is semiotic: it speaks.

Geertz famously described culture as "webs of significance" spun by humans themselves. The role of the anthropologist, then, is to interpret those webs—to understand what a cockfight in Bali or a mouth-rite in North America means within its specific symbolic universe. Turner's contributions emphasized performance, liminality, and the transformative potential of ritual. Together, their work positions symbolic anthropology as a tool not just for studying the Other, but for holding a mirror to ourselves.

Case in Point: The Digital Rituals of Today

Fast forward to the present day—an age of TikTok challenges, curated Instagram stories, and hyper-personalized wellness routines. What would Miner make of us now, endlessly documenting ourselves, performing to the algorithm, and crafting online selves that are both public and private shrines?

Consider the selfie: a repeated, stylized act, often taken in similar poses or contexts, then offered to the digital collective for validation. It is both intimate and performative, sacred and mundane. Or think of the viral hashtag challenge, where participants replicate a behavior (a dance, a prank, a transformation) in highly structured ways, often with a prescribed soundtrack and aesthetic. These aren't just trends; they are rituals, complete with rules, symbolic objects (the ring light, the filter, the branded hashtag), and public performances that reinforce group identity and social norms.

Even the language we use—"going viral," "content creator," "followers"—carries the trace of the sacred and ceremonial. Like the Nacirema’s shrine-box filled with magical potions (a.k.a. the medicine cabinet), we curate altars of self-presentation: apps, gear, lighting, captions. We anoint ourselves with filters, seek blessings in the form of likes, and perform penance through digital detoxes.

The rituals are repetitive, emotionally charged, and often tied to invisible economies of reward: not just followers or influence, but social recognition, belonging, and existential reassurance. In a fragmented world, digital rituals anchor us in shared rhythms.

Us, The Contemporary Nacirema 

Symbolic anthropology urges us to read culture not at face value but as layered, coded, mythic. What Miner's essay made clear—and what digital rituals underscore today—is that modernity does not escape ritual; it reinvents it, often in faster, more dispersed forms.

In an era where online behavior is often dismissed as superficial or performative, symbolic anthropology invites a deeper interpretation. What do our digital rites say about our values, fears, and aspirations? How do they mediate the sacred and the profane in a supposedly secular world? Who gets to participate in these rituals, and who gets excluded?

Minimally, they offer continuity. Maximally, they construct meaning. Just as the Nacirema's obsessive mouth-care hinted at deeper anxieties about purity, status, and control, our digital performances reveal submerged narratives about identity, visibility, and self-worth.

To study the Nacirema now is to see ourselves more clearly—not just through satire, but through the enduring lens of ritual. It reminds us that culture, even our own, is always stranger than it seems.

The Flesh of the World: Merleau-Ponty’s Late Ontology

By the late 1950s, Merleau-Ponty felt that his Phenomenology of Perception had not gone far enough. Describing how the body structures perception still risked leaving intact the old oppositions between subject and object, inner and outer, self and world. What was needed was a deeper account of being itself—an ontology that could explain why these dualisms arise and how they might be overcome. His unfinished masterpiece, The Visible and the Invisible, takes up this task.

Reversibility and the Chiasm

A striking example guides his shift: the hand that touches another hand. When I place one hand upon the other, I am both the toucher and the touched. The roles can reverse in an instant, but they cannot be lived simultaneously. This reversible relation reveals a truth deeper than either subjective experience or objective description: the body is woven into a circuit of perception where the seer can be seen, the toucher can be touched.

Merleau-Ponty calls this structure the chiasm, borrowing the Greek word for a crossing or intertwining. Consciousness and world are not two separate orders that somehow connect—they are folded into one another.

The Flesh of the World

To name this deeper layer, he introduces the concept of flesh. Flesh is not matter, substance, or spirit. It is the elemental fabric of reality, the shared medium that makes perception and relation possible. My body is made of the same “stuff” as the world it perceives, and so there is no absolute gulf between subject and object. Instead, there is a continuous texture that allows for their reversible relation.

This ontology of flesh transforms phenomenology into a philosophy of being. The world is not an object before a subject; it is the very tissue in which subjects and objects co-emerge.

The idea of flesh dissolves the classical binaries that haunted Western thought. Mind and body, nature and culture, even self and other, are not radically opposed but variations within the same fabric. This does not erase difference but situates it within a field of intertwining.

The implications are wide-ranging. In ecology, it suggests a kinship between humans and the natural world: we belong to the same flesh, not as detached observers but as participants. In ethics, it grounds intersubjectivity in a shared being: the other is not radically alien but already inscribed in the fabric I inhabit. In art, it illuminates how painting, music, or poetry can disclose dimensions of reality inaccessible to science.

An Unfinished Vision

Merleau-Ponty died suddenly in 1961 at the age of 53, leaving The Visible and the Invisible in fragments. Yet even in its incomplete state, the work reveals the trajectory of his thought: from describing the lived body to articulating a new ontology where body and world, self and other, meet in the elemental flesh.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Philosopher of the Lived Body

Embodiment and Perception: Merleau-Ponty’s Reversal of the Cogito

Merleau-Ponty and The Phenomenology of the World: Intersubjectivity, Language, and Expression

Merleau-Ponty and The Phenomenology of the World: Intersubjectivity, Language, and Expression

From the Individual to the World

After establishing the body as the ground of perception, Merleau-Ponty turns to the broader question: how does my embodied being connect me to others and to a shared world of meaning? If the body is my way of being in the world, then it must also be my way of being with others. Perception is never solitary. It is already oriented toward intersubjectivity—the mutual recognition of embodied beings inhabiting the same field of existence.

This is not a matter of inferring that others have minds, as Descartes once worried. I do not reason my way to the existence of the other. I encounter the other directly through their gestures, expressions, and presence. A smile, a raised eyebrow, the tilt of a head—these are not signs I must decode but forms of meaning that my body immediately understands.

The Silent Language of Gestures

Merleau-Ponty gives priority to this pre-verbal communication. Before language, there is the dialogue of bodies. A mother and infant exchange looks and touches that already establish a world of meaning. A dancer’s movement or an actor’s posture can express more than a paragraph of words.

This insight helps us understand intersubjectivity without reducing it either to biological reflexes or abstract reasoning. We are open to others because we inhabit the same “flesh of the world,” and our bodies are attuned to the gestures of others as meaningful.

Language as Embodied Expression

From this starting point, Merleau-Ponty develops his rich philosophy of language. He resists the temptation to treat language as a neutral code or a transparent tool for transmitting ideas. Words are not just labels attached to ready-made thoughts. Language is a form of expression that brings meaning into being.

When a poet finds the right word, it is not a simple act of attaching language to a pre-existing idea. The idea itself crystallizes through the word. Similarly, when we struggle to articulate a feeling, we do not merely translate from inner sensation to outer sound—we discover what the feeling is by giving it form in speech.

Merleau-Ponty describes this as the difference between spoken speech (language already sedimented into conventions) and speaking speech (the living act of expression). In speaking speech, language is not a vessel but a creative force.

Art as the Revelation of Perception

It is no surprise, then, that Merleau-Ponty was drawn to the arts, especially painting. He wrote extensively on Cézanne, whom he admired for showing the world not as a finished object but as it comes into being through vision. For Merleau-Ponty, a painting is not an imitation of reality but a revelation of perception’s structure. The brushstroke discloses the way the eye dwells in color and form.

Art exemplifies the intertwining of perception and expression. Just as language makes thought manifest, painting makes visible the invisible act of seeing. This explains why artworks can strike us as more “true” than a photograph: they express the very way the world is given to us, rather than a mere reproduction of surfaces.

The Social Body and Political Expression

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy also extends into the political sphere. If our very capacity to share a world depends on embodied intersubjectivity, then social life is rooted in the body as well. Politics is not simply a matter of institutions and laws but of how bodies encounter one another in public space, how voices are heard or silenced, how gestures of solidarity or exclusion shape the fabric of community.

This explains why he was drawn to Marxism in his early years—not because he accepted determinist doctrine, but because he sought a philosophy that could honor the lived, bodily reality of oppression and struggle. Later, as he distanced himself from dogma, he still maintained that politics must be understood as a field of embodied meaning, not as a chessboard of abstract forces.

Expression as Ontology

At this stage of his thought, Merleau-Ponty sees expression not as a secondary activity layered onto a silent world but as the very way the world becomes meaningful. Gestures, words, paintings, and political acts are all forms of expression that disclose reality. The world is not a mute background but an inexhaustible field that calls for articulation.

Why This Matters

Merleau-Ponty’s account of intersubjectivity and expression offers a way to think about communication, art, and politics without falling into dualisms. It helps explain why miscommunication is so painful: it is not simply a failure of codes but a fracture in the shared world. It clarifies why art can transform perception itself, not just reflect it. And it grounds the idea that social justice is not only about resources or rules but about recognition—whether bodies are seen, heard, and allowed to express themselves.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Philosopher of the Lived Body

Embodiment and Perception: Merleau-Ponty’s Reversal of the Cogito

The Flesh of the World: Merleau-Ponty’s Late Ontology

Embodiment and Perception: Merleau-Ponty’s Reversal of the Cogito

The Body as Our General Medium for Having a World

Merleau-Ponty’s most famous declaration is deceptively simple: “The body is our general medium for having a world.” With this, he rewrites the opening line of modern philosophy. Instead of Descartes’ cogito, which begins with thinking as the foundation of certainty, Merleau-Ponty situates perception—bodily, situated, pre-reflective perception—as the true starting point. Before we reflect, reason, or judge, we are already immersed in a field of meaningful relations.

What this means is that the world does not appear to us as a collection of raw data waiting to be processed, nor as an idea constructed by pure reason. It appears as already meaningful through the body’s engagement with it. The child reaching for a toy, the driver instinctively steering into a curve, the pianist playing without conscious calculation—all these are examples of what Merleau-Ponty calls motor intentionality.

Against Empiricism and Intellectualism

Merleau-Ponty identifies two dominant but flawed accounts of perception.

1. Empiricism assumes perception is passive reception of sense-impressions, like light striking a photographic plate. But this fails to explain how we perceive structures and meanings rather than scattered sensations. We do not see dots of color—we see a chair, a path, a face.

2. Intellectualism claims perception is the product of mental construction: the mind organizes sense-data according to categories. But this overlooks the fact that perception comes before thought, before the application of concepts.

His radical alternative is that the body itself is intelligent. Perception is not the result of reasoning but the very mode in which we are in touch with the world.

The Pre-Reflective Layer of Experience

One of Merleau-Ponty’s great contributions is the insistence on the pre-reflective. Reflection—our ability to analyze and interpret—does not create meaning from nothing but rests on a foundation of embodied, unthematized contact with the world.

Consider the phenomenon of the phantom limb, which fascinated him. Even after amputation, a person may continue to feel the presence of their lost arm or leg. This is not an illusion in the ordinary sense but a sign that the body’s sense of itself is not reducible to physical parts. The body is lived from within as a schema of possible actions and perceptions.

In everyday life this becomes clear in habit. A skilled typist does not think of each key, nor does a tennis player calculate angles. The body has absorbed patterns that guide action without explicit thought. Habits are not mechanical routines but expressions of embodied intelligence, showing that the line between perception and action is porous.

The Reversal of the Cogito

By grounding knowledge in the lived body, Merleau-Ponty overturns centuries of philosophy. The I think of Descartes gives way to an I can. Consciousness is not first a detached gaze upon the world but a capacity to move, grasp, and dwell in it.

This shift has profound consequences. It means that philosophy must start not from a universal subject or abstract reason but from the concrete, bodily subject situated in history and culture. It also means that science, while powerful, cannot exhaust the richness of perception: the body is not merely an object among others but the very condition of appearing.

Why This Matters

Merleau-Ponty’s analysis resonates far beyond the seminar room. In psychology, it anticipates embodied approaches to cognition. In the arts, it explains why a painting can disclose the structure of vision more vividly than a scientific diagram. In daily life, it gives language to something we intuit: that much of our knowing and being is carried in the silent wisdom of the body.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Philosopher of the Lived Body

Merleau-Ponty and The Phenomenology of the World: Intersubjectivity, Language, and Expression

The Flesh of the World: Merleau-Ponty’s Late Ontology

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Philosopher of the Lived Body

The Forgotten Partner of Existentialism

When people think of mid-20th century French philosophy, names like Sartre, Beauvoir, or perhaps Camus come up first. Merleau-Ponty is often left in the margins, even though during his lifetime he was one of the most respected philosophers in France. He taught at the Sorbonne and later at the Collège de France, co-edited Les Temps Modernes with Sartre, and was deeply engaged in politics and art. Yet his project was never quite reducible to existentialism, Marxism, or phenomenology in the strict sense.

Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) is best understood as the philosopher who placed embodiment at the center of philosophy. Where Descartes began with the thinking subject, and Husserl with the structures of consciousness, Merleau-Ponty began with the lived body—that mysterious intersection where perception, action, and world are inseparable.

A Life Between Philosophy and Politics

Born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, he grew up in a France shaken by two world wars. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure alongside Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, forming intellectual friendships that would shape postwar philosophy. Politically, he was at first sympathetic to Marxism, searching for a way to reconcile freedom with social structures, though he would later distance himself from rigid ideology.

His major works include The Structure of Behavior (1942), Phenomenology of Perception (1945), and the unfinished The Visible and the Invisible (1964, published posthumously). Each book deepened his commitment to the idea that philosophy must return to the world of experience, before science or theory abstracts it away.

The Body as Our Medium of Being-in-the-World

For Merleau-Ponty, the body is not just an object in space, like a machine controlled by a mind. It is the very condition for having a world at all. We do not first think and then perceive; rather, our body perceives before reflection, orienting us in space and time.

This insight seems simple but it has radical consequences. It overturns centuries of philosophy that separated mind and body, subject and object. In contrast to Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” Merleau-Ponty suggests something closer to “I perceive, therefore I am embodied.”

Context Among His Peers

Merleau-Ponty’s position can be clarified by contrast:

• Against empiricism, he argued that perception is not mere reception of sense-data. We don’t build the world out of raw inputs.

• Against intellectualism, he claimed that perception is not a construction by abstract reason. Meaning arises in the act of perceiving itself.

• With Husserl, he shared the phenomenological method of returning “to the things themselves,” but he radicalized it by stressing the primacy of the body.

• Alongside Sartre, he explored freedom and lived experience, but resisted Sartre’s sharp dualisms between self and other, freedom and facticity.

Why Begin with Merleau-Ponty?

For a reader with philosophical training, Merleau-Ponty offers a way of thinking that is both rigorous and deeply human. He resists both the cold reductions of science and the abstractions of pure theory. His focus is the texture of lived life: the feel of a hand’s movement, the silent communication of a gaze, the painter’s brushstroke revealing a world.

To approach Merleau-Ponty is to be reminded that philosophy is not only about logic or metaphysics but about our actual inhabitation of the world—our breathing, moving, perceiving selves.

Get More Embodied:

In the next part of this series, we will dive into his central thesis: embodiment and perception as the foundation of knowledge and meaning. There, Merleau-Ponty makes his most radical claim—that consciousness is not a detached spectator but is always already in the world, sensing, acting, and being acted upon.

1. Embodiment and Perception: Merleau-Ponty’s Reversal of the Cogito
2. Merleau-Ponty and The Phenomenology of the World: Intersubjectivity, Language, and Expression
3. The Flesh of the World: Merleau-Ponty’s Late Ontology

The Aesthetics of Disappearance: Paul Virilio on Time, Memory, and the Instant

For Paul Virilio, speed was not only a political force or a technological condition—it was an aesthetic problem. In works like The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1980), he argued that acceleration reshapes not just how we live, but how we perceive time itself. What disappears in a culture of immediacy, he asked, is not simply slowness, but memory, depth, and duration.

The Instant as Dominant Form

Virilio believed that modern society is defined by the rule of the instant. Real-time communication abolishes delay; instant replay annihilates the uniqueness of events; the constant scroll of news feeds devours attention before reflection can take root. Time no longer unfolds—it implodes into the perpetual now.

In such a world, disappearance becomes the hidden aesthetic. Things vanish before they can be grasped. Events appear, circulate, and are replaced, leaving behind little more than traces on a screen.

Accidents of Perception

Virilio’s thinking grew out of his fascination with accidents—not only technological crashes but perceptual ones. He described moments when attention lapses, when reality flickers, when presence slips away. In the age of television and now the internet, these “gaps” are no longer rare—they are the fabric of experience.

Disappearance is not just the fading of things over time; it is their collapse in the glare of constant visibility.

Case in Point: Viral Culture

Today’s digital media dramatizes Virilio’s insights. A meme surges and vanishes within hours. A TikTok trend flares, peaks, and disappears before slower institutions even notice it. News events cycle so quickly that yesterday’s outrage feels like last year’s.

In Virilio’s terms, culture no longer accumulates; it evaporates. What we consume is not memory but momentum, the thrill of appearing and vanishing in the same gesture.

Why It Matters

Virilio’s aesthetics of disappearance offers a warning and a challenge. A world governed by the instant risks forgetting itself, unable to sustain historical consciousness or collective memory. Political life becomes a succession of spectacles; cultural life, a stream of fleeting images.

Yet he also hints at a possible counter-politics: the defense of slowness, of delay, of memory. To resist disappearance may mean cultivating practices of duration—ritual, archive, storytelling—that refuse the tyranny of the instant.

In the end, Virilio shows us that acceleration does not only change how fast we move—it changes how, and whether, we remember. And if history is increasingly consumed in real time, then perhaps the most radical act is not to keep up, but to slow down.

Know More:

Introduction and Overview of Paul Virilio's Thought

The Politics of Speed: Paul Virilio’s Dromology Explained

The Invention of the Accident: Paul Virilio on Technology’s Shadow

The Vision Machine: Paul Virilio on Seeing and Being Seen