There is a sentence in Jaspers to which I keep returning because it haunts me, draws me back to it: like a tongue to a missing tooth. It sits in the third volume of the Philosophy. In this chapter, I see now he has at last stopped circling and committed himself to saying what the whole architecture has been built to say:

Scheitern ist das Letzte.

Foundering is the ultimate

(Jaspers 1932 [1971], 195).

The last thing. The terminus. What is left when you have finished saying everything you can say, and it was never enough.

Burnout as a personal brand.

I want to talk about why this sentence contains a key disclosure. Furthermore, I want to at least touch upon why it has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the kind of melancholy gravitas that gets attributed to it, esp. in undergraduate seminars and in those dreadful introductions to existentialism where every German philosopher is reduced to a noir cigarette. Jaspers is not telling us that life is suffering. He is not telling us that everything ends in ruin. He is not, Yoda help us, advising us to be brave about it. He is saying something far weirder and far harder: The experience of breakdown is the medium through, with, and in which transcendence becomes legible to us at all. But then, in the part nobody quotes, he immediately turns around and tells us we are forbidden to want it.

Let me put the passage down so we can look at it together:

A direct will to founder would be a perversion, a renewed total obscuring of being into nothingness. The true, revealing foundering does not lie in random perdition, not in every destruction, not in each instance of self-abandonment, resignation, or failure. The cipher of eternalization in foundering is lucid only when I do not want to founder even though I take the risk. I cannot plan to read the cipher of foundering; I can plan only for duration. The cipher unveils, not when I will it, but when I do all I can to avoid its reality. (Jaspers 1932 [1971], 196)

Read it twice. Read it three times. I find an entire ethics packed into the small space between “I do not want to founder” and “I take the risk.”

What Jaspers is doing here is dismantling, with surgical precision, every romantic-tragic posture that has ever tried to claim him as patron saint. The nineteenth century had a whole vocabulary for noble failure (Untergang, the sublime ruin, the Wagnerian self-immolation); the twentieth century took that vocabulary and weaponized it. The Wille zum Scheitern: the will to founder. The aesthetic embrace of one’s own destruction. The cult of the magnificent collapse. Jaspers names this and calls it a perversion. A perversion? He chooses the word carefully. It is a turning-aside, a torsion away from the thing one claims to honor. The person who wants to founder has already foreclosed the cipher of shipwreck. The breakdown that arrives because one was theatrically beckoning it has nothing to disclose. It is just another performance of mastery, the ego writing its own ruin and signing the script.

This matters, and it matters now, because we live in a culture that has gotten extraordinarily good at aestheticizing breakdown:

Mental illness as content.

The artful Instagram caption about how everything is falling apart, written in the same hand that built the carefully filtered photo grid above it.

Jaspers, almost a hundred years ago, saw this coming and put up a roadblock. The cipher unveils, he says, “when I do all I can to avoid its reality.” When I take the risk of living, of acting, of committing, of loving, knowing that any of these might break me, and then, only if and when the breaking actually comes, and only if I have genuinely resisted it, can the breaking become legible as something other than a closed-off catastrophe.

There is a queer angle here that I cannot stop turning in my hand. Queer life has a long, complicated relationship to failure. Halberstam has made a whole career out of celebrating it, and not without reason. The refusal of straight time, straight reproduction, straight success, the embrace of what falls outside the metrics: all of this has been productive, has cleared real space. But Jaspers gives us a discipline that I think queer thought needs more of, which is the discipline of distinguishing between the failure one undergoes and the failure one stages. These are not the same. The genderqueer kid who has been thrown out of their parents’ house has foundered. The professor writing their fourth book on the subversive potential of failure has not. To collapse the distinction is to do violence to the first by aestheticizing the second.

Now I need to slow down, because there is a place where Jaspers will trip you if you read him fast, and I want to mark it. Ashton, who translated the Philosophy into English, uses the word “duration” in two passages that sit only one page apart and seem to point in opposite directions. On page 195 of the third volume, Jaspers writes that “I must be thoughtless to confuse prolonged existence with imperishability” (Jaspers 1932 [1971], 195), and the entire surrounding passage criticizes the search for duration as a kind of evasion. On page 196, he then says “I cannot plan to read the cipher of foundering; I can plan only for duration” (Jaspers 1932 [1971], 196), and here duration is the only legitimate thing one can plan for. The German underneath both is the same word, Dauer, and Ashton renders it the same way both times.

But English will let us do something the German cannot, and I think we should take the offer. Let me call the thing Jaspers criticizes duration, and the thing he endorses endurance. Duration in this register is passive and accumulative. A rock has duration. A monument has duration. The bourgeois legacy-fantasy has duration in this sense: it persists by inertia, by sheer not-having-stopped, and it tempts us into the category error of mistaking more time for eternity. Endurance is different. Endurance is what you do, not what happens to you. Endurance is the active sustaining of a life through deliberate effort, the planning, the building, the loving, all of it undertaken in full knowledge that foundering is ultimate. Ashton gives us the same English word for both moments because Jaspers gives him the same German word, but the conceptual distinction is there in Jaspers, and English happens to have the lexical resources to sharpen it. So, I am going to use them.

What Jaspers will not let us have is the cheap comfort of either pole. He will not let us have the bourgeois fantasy of duration, the careful life as a hedge against finitude, the legacy preserved in works that outlast us as a substitute for the eternal. But neither will he let us have the inverted bourgeois fantasy of the magnificent ruin, the willed shipwreck, the embrace of the abyss as a kind of style. Both of these, in his vocabulary, are evasions of the actual structure of human existence, which is that we are creatures who can know our own breakdown and must therefore react to it (Jaspers 1932 [1971], 193). What he asks of us instead is endurance: the discipline of building a mortal life and tending it well, knowing that the tending will not save it.

The animal does not founder, Jaspers says. The animal merely perishes. Scheitern requires the capacity to know what is happening to one and to be in a relation to that knowledge. This is, I think, the most philosophically anthropological sentence in the whole metaphysics. It locates the human precisely at the site where breakdown becomes meaningful rather than merely fatal. And it makes foundering not an unfortunate accident that befalls some lives but a constitutive feature of being the kind of creature we are.

Which brings me, finally, to the sentence I have been circling around without saying: I cannot plan to read the cipher of foundering; I can plan only for endurance. (I am using my own word now, but Jaspers is the one who is giving us permission.) There is something almost tender in this, if you let yourself hear it. Jaspers is not asking us to live in a state of permanent existential vigilance, scanning ourselves for revelatory collapse. He is saying: Go on… make the dinner reservation. Plan the trip. Build the thing. Love the person. Take the job. Write the book. Do all the small mortal work of making a life last. And then, when something cracks, and something inevitably will, be there for the crack. Do not give yourself over to rehearsing it. Do not let yourself succumb to wanting it. Do not prepare your reasons via a thinkpiece queued up about the inevitability of it all. Just be there, with whatever degree of lucidity you can muster, while the foundering does what foundering does.

This is, I think, what Jaspers means when he ends this whole movement of the argument with the phrase amor fati, He immediately qualifies it, because he knows what the word has been made to mean by those who believe themselves guided by Nietzsche. This must be the difference: “… a fatalism that surrenders prematurely and thus does not founder any more would be untrue” (Jaspers 1932 [1971], 196). The fatalist who has already given up is not foundering. The fatalist is just absent. The foundering Jaspers is naming requires presence (showing-up). Such shipwreck demands that I or you or whomever have actually been there, actually wanted to follow plans, actually built toward the endurance that the breakdown will eventually interrupt.

I do not know how to end this entry except by saying that I find this discipline almost unbearably difficult while almost unbearably necessary as well. The temptation toward staged collapse is constant. The temptation toward defended duration is constant. Between them is the narrow path of endurance, and I am not sure anyone walks it reliably. But Jaspers says the cipher is there, in the unstaged breaking of a life that was genuinely attempting to last.

I will keep attempting to last. I will keep, I hope, failing to want to fail.

Works Cited

Jaspers, Karl. 1971. Philosophy, Volume 3: Metaphysics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Originally published 1932 as Philosophie III: Metaphysik.]

— Maggie