Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann was a German philosopher. He was
born in Berlin, and educated with the intention of a military career.
He entered the artillery of the Guards as an officer in 1860, but
was forced him to leave in 1865 because of a knee problem. After
some hesitation between music and philosophy, he decided to make
the latter his profession, and in 1867 obtained a Ph. D. from the
University of Rostock. He subsequently returned to Berlin, and died
at Grosslichterfelde.
His
reputation as a philosopher was established by his first book,
The Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869). This success was largely
clue to the originality of its title, the diversity of its contents
(von Hartmann professing to obtain his speculative results by
the methods of inductive science, and making plentiful use of
concrete illustrations), the fashionableness of its pessimism
and the vigour and lucidity of its style. The conception of the
Unconscious, by which von Hartmann describes his ultimate metaphysical
principle, is not at bottom as paradoxical as it sounds, being
merely a new and mysterious designation for the Absolute of German
metaphysicians.
The
Unconscious appears as a combination of the metaphysic of Georg
Hegel with that of Arthur Schopenhauer. The Unconscious is both
Will and Reason and the absolute all-embracing ground of all existence.
Von Hartmann thus combines pantheism with panlogism in a manner
adumbrated by Schelling in his positive philosophy. Nevertheless
Will and not Reason is the primary aspect of the Unconscious,
whose melancholy career is determined by the primacy of the Will
and the subservience of the Reason.
Precosmically
the Will is potential and the Reason latent, and the Will is void
of reason when it passes from potentiaiity to actual willing.
This latter is absolute misery, and to cure it the Unconscious
evokes its Reason and with its aid creates the best of all possible
worlds, which contains the promise of its redemption from actual
existence by the emancipation of the Reason from its subjugation
to the Will in the conscious reason of the enlightened pessimist.
When the greater part of the Will in existence is so far enlightened
by reason as to perceive the inevitable misery of existence, a
collective effort to will non-existence will be made, and the
world will relapse into nothingness, the Unconscious into quiescence.
Von
Hartmann is a pessimist, but not an unmitigated one. The individual's
happiness is indeed unattainable either here and now or hereafter
and in the future, but he does not despair of ultimately releasing
the Unconscious from its sufferings. He differs from Schopenhauer
in making salvation by the negation of the Will-to-live depend
on a collective social effort and not on individualistic asceticism.
The conception of a redemption of the Unconscious also supplies
the ultimate basis of von Hartmann's ethics.
We
must provisionally affirm life and devote ourselves to social
evolution, instead of striving after a happiness which is impossible;
in so doing we shall find that morality renders life less unhappy
than it would otherwise be. Suicide, and all other forms of selfishness,
are highly reprehensible. Epistemologically von Hartmann is a
transcendental realist, who ably defends his views and acutely
criticizes those of his opponents. His realism enables him to
maintain the reality of Time, and so of the process of the world's
redemption. |
