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Notation: If one searches “Karl Jaspers” the paronomastic “HighBeam Encyclopedia” accosts one by its optimal glare within the first 10 hits. The Site manifests intellectual dishonesty in the following manner. First, there is a statement about Jaspers attributed to The Columbia Encyclopedia––but there is no author named, i.e., no individual named for accountability. The greater dishonesty appears immediately to the optimal right in the “You Tube” video, with a link also to a narrative, designed to promote atheism, doing so by misrepresenting what Jaspers has to say about the psychopathological category of “delusions”. Ultimate dishonesty is seen in the implication that Jaspers thought and taught that belief in the imageless God should be replaced with belief in atheism. The link to The Columbia Encyclopedia is designed to add academic prestige to atheism. This unnamed author’s half-truth correctly itemizes Jaspers’ criterion for the concept of delusion. The obscure-author does not give the textbook reference, which of course is found in General Psychopathology p. 95ff. The obscure-author with obvious intentionality fails to refer the search-engine or the video and/or reader to Jaspers’ individual performances where “delusion” is more refined from a pragmatic perspective pp. 194ff. Here Jaspers points at the difficulties (such as that “HighBeam”-ilk type misology) involved in misusing the concept of “delusion”.

But…the rest of the truth is found as Jaspers continues: “There is difficulty here because the same characteristics might apply to the judgments of exceptional people who creatively open new ways of thought (195)” and “If incorrigible wrong judgments are termed ‘delusion’, who will there be without delusion, since we are all capable of having convictions and it is a universal human characteristic to hold on to our own mistaken judgments?”

I might add that it seems safe to assume that this Googled optimized unnamed author would have to classify any hero as delusional, as wrong, and yet the author boldly stands reaping the benefits of others’ unreasonable sacrifice, including Jesus’ drawing attention to the inhumanity of crucifixions. Rather than one’s biological fundamentalism, it is this evil, this suffering humanity, that “We should address…[as to] what it is that occasions the incorrigibility and causes us to recognize certain modes of wrong judgment as delusion…delusion can be considered in four ways…195ff”. Jaspers expands on “delusions” in such a manner that it reflect’s HighBeam’s superciliousness. (GP, U Chicago Press, English trans. 1963)

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