Jaspers and the animals

In his 1935 lectures printed as "Reason and Existenz", Jaspers contrasts the animal with the human.

Even at the time of the lectures, the concept of the organism in its environment was evolving (and offering hope to anti-Darwinians such as Heidegger, strangely enough.)

Today almost nothing that Jaspers says about animals in those lectures remains defensible.  While not as vulgar as Catholic Peter Geach in his treatment of "brutes" in Mental Acts, Jaspers fails to acknowledge any of the aspects of great apes, dolphins or elephants which now place them on a continuum with what had been seen as distinctively human: a minimal level of self-awareness, a minimal level of social learning, a minimal level of culture - and, in the case of the elephant, almost certainly grief.

What interests me is to see whether Jaspers' overall views of the person and a life with others could be revived and revised in a variant suitable for Alcoholics Anonymous.

By middle-age most of us have friends afflicted with alcohol addiction and among them likely one who has rejected AA for its requirement to acknowledge a higher power.  Jaspers thought is far more subtle than typical Christian-inspired theism and is free of the taint of Medard Boss and the Heideggerian "Daseinanalyse" movement.