At a time of unbridled nuclear arms race, the perilous escalation of the “Cold War,” and heated debates among physicists, political scientists, and peace activists, Jaspers—with his 500-page work from 1958, which quickly became a bestseller—was one of the few philosophers to take a detailed stance on the now-possible self-destruction of humanity. Given the pitfalls of political thought in dealing with what he viewed as equally grave threats—the atomic bomb and totalitarianism—Jaspers saw only one salvation: the influence of the “super-political”—as the ethos of reason within each individual that makes peace possible in the first place—clashed, with its prerequisite of a “revolution in the way of thinking,” and a call to move away from thinking in terms of feasibility and utility, resisted the temptation to “dumb down” the discourse on humanity’s potential self-annihilation with supposedly simple solutions (Hochhuth); yet at the same time, with its unorthodox approach, it exposed itself to incomprehension and accusations of meaningless “philosophical confusion.”

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