Science, Culture and Integral Yoga :: 101 rh. Re: a response to the question why, how

Through the secure validity of a common principle that permeated all everyday life, there was, almost until the present time, a cohesion among men which rarely permitted communication to become a special problem. People could content themselves with the saying: we can pray together, but not talk together. Today, when we cannot even pray together, we are at length becoming fully aware that humanity implies unreserved communication among men.

Manifested being is fragmented by the multiplicity of our own sources of faith, and of the historical form of our communities, each with its own special background. The only things we have identically in common are science and technology as reﬂected in the general categories of the understanding. These however are united only in an abstract, universal consciousness; in practice they serve both as weapons and media of communication. Everything real in man is historical. But historicity means also multiple historicity. Hence the postulates of true communication are:

1 ) to become concerned with the historically different without becoming untrue to one's own historicity –

2) to reveal the relativity of scientiﬁc truth, while fully recognizing its just claims –

3) to abandon the claim of faith to exclusivity because of the breach of communication it implies, yet without losing the absoluteness of one's own fundament –

4) to take up the inevitable struggle with the historically different, but to sublimate the battle in the loving battle, in communication through the truth that develops when men act in common, not as abstract individuals –

5) to orient ourselves toward the depths that are disclosed only with the division into manifold historicities, to one of which I belong, but which all concern me and which all together guide me to that source.

Philosophical faith is inseparable from complete openness to communication. For authentic truth arises only where faiths meet in the presence of the Comprehensive. …

Boundless openness to communication is not the consequence of any knowledge, it is the decision to follow a human road. The idea of communication is not utopia, but faith. Each man is confronted with the question whether he strives toward it, whether he believes in it, not as in something otherworldly , but as in something utterly actual; whether he believes in our potentiality really to live together, to speak together, through this togetherness to ﬁnd our way to the truth, and hereby ﬁnally to become authentically ourselves.

(Jaspers, 1950)

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