EDITORS:
Existence (Dasein), consciousness-as-such, spirit (Geist), and Existenz, which are familiar modes of Being, are here presented as the subject-modes of the Encompassing, as encompassing modes of being human. The first three are characterized as immanent modes, i.e., as modes to which some form of objectivity is proper. Existenz is the transcendent mode of being-human, in that no form of objectivity is proper to it save its appearance within the other modes, in particular existence, which Jaspers has already touched upon in Section 8.
p.141
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TEXT:
Existence is the Encompassing which I am as a living human being, having a beginning and an end; as such it is the space of my actuality in which there is everything that I am and that is for me…..
Only in ourselves can we be certain of what existence is. Encompassing existence can fundamentally and comprehensively be aware only of itself………we see encompassing existence as a particular actuality occurring in the world. We call it “life”…….But whatever becomes object for us as life is, as object, no longer the Encompassing……
Cognition brings about separation and cannot reclaim the one whole once it has been lost to cognition. Illumination remains within the whole, resolves internally, and does not arrive at any specialized cognition…….
The illumination of encompassing existence, on the other hand, does not take place by my regarding something else, alien or objective, but, by my being aware of what I am……
…..the propositions dealing with the illumination of existence have to be ambiguous and vague…..
p.145
The self-discovery of existence is a deep mystery; for this existence is that pinpoint of light which, in existence, brings about—in the darkness of the unfathomable universe--- its own appearance and that of the world. Only in the glow of this pinpoint of light which we are does the nature of Being become accessible to us. As w become aware of the accidental character of our own existence, it is brought home to us to an increasing degree that there is Being: it would be possible for me not to be; existence as such also might not be—but I am actual. This limit-thought which makes us sense existence in the mystery of its “that it is”, also reveals to us that existence is not through itself.