The Guilt which we are: An Ontological Approach to Karl Jaspers' Idea of Guilt

This paper suggests a phenomenological reading of Karl Jaspers' writings regarding the issue of guilt. This reading aims to extricate from them an ontological understanding of guilt, at the centre of which stand the various appearances of guilt and not the subjective awareness of its experience. The discussed ontology of guilt does not exist in Jaspers' thinking in its entirety, but rather is only implicitly interwoven in his ideas – some of them referring to the issue of guilt, but spread over his writings in a elementary and not systematic manner, while others, no less central to the phenomenology of guilt, are not exposed by him as referring to the idea of guilt, but according to the suggested interpretation are relevant to the ontology of guilt (for example, the idea of historicity). Although the suggested phenomenological-ontological reading contains a certain reconstruction of Jaspers' ideas, the reconstruction itself serves only as a means for a thematic crystallization of a possible ontology of guilt based upon his thinking but not realized by him as he rejected the very idea of ontology from the outset.