Jaspers

[Machine translation] This volume of Luigi Pareyson's Complete Works (1918-1991) proposes the critical edition of the philosopher's first book, published in 1940. The book was the first work published in Italy concerning the existentialist movement, seen in the light of the thought of Karl Jaspers, who seemed to the young Pareyson the most appropriate to offer an overall view of it. In this text, after stating that existentialism can be divided into three currents (German, French and Russian), he highlights how German existentialism is characterized by the dialectic of implication. It considers the encounter of time and eternity as a relationship based on opposition that, through the implication of positive and negative, leads — as emerges in relation to the themes of the three Jaspersian volumes of Philosophie, namely the world, existence and transcendence, analyzed in the first two parts of the book — in the identity of opposites and therefore in the impossibility of choice. In search of an adequate foundation of the person, Pareyson resorts, in harmony with Marcel but also with Guzzo and Carlini, to the dialectic of immeasurability that, by separating and not opposing finite and infinite, allows human autonomy and freedom. In the Introduction to the second edition of the volume — published in 1983 with the addition of a third part and now re-proposed — he argues that in the first edition it was not possible for him to grasp the deepest level of Jaspersian investigation, which goes beyond the moral plane and draws on the ontological plane of existence in which the original “freedom” is embodied. This book therefore shows how Jaspers' philosophy, from which Pareyson's reflection was born, constitutes one of the essential sources of the ontology of freedom with which he concluded his itinerary of thought.