A lifelong death-threat shaped Jaspers’ whole philosophy of limit situations

Evidence

From childhood, he had suffered from a heart condition so severe that he always expected to die at any moment. He also had emphysema, which forced him to speak slowly, taking long pauses to catch his breath. Both illnesses meant that he had to budget his energies with care in order to get his work done without endangering his life. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 275

Categorization

• XREF: Philosophers whose embodied finitude shaped their thought — cf. Merleau-Ponty’s later phenomenology of the body. — connects to: Fatalism is the theme of people who cannot separate from limit-situations. — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 327

Broader Connections

• Fatalism is the theme of people who cannot separate from limit-situations. #expands (0.72) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 327