Eduard von Hartmann

Eduard von Hartmann (Berlin, 1842 – Groß-Lichterfelde, 1906) was a German philosopher of the second half of the nineteenth century, associated with irrationalism and with the legacy of Schopenhauer and Hegel. He is best remembered for his metaphysics of the Unconscious, which still appears in histories of nineteenth-century thought as a bridge between German Idealism and later pessimism.

He was brought up with a view to a military career. He joined the Prussian artillery as an officer, but a chronic knee problem forced him out of the army, which he left for good in 1868. Torn between music and philosophy, he chose the latter and earned his doctorate at the University of Rostock in 1867. His first major book, Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), made him famous overnight and sparked a controversy over pessimism in Germany. He turned down chairs at Leipzig, Göttingen and Berlin, preferring to work as an independent scholar, often in bed and in considerable pain.

His central claim is that the Unconscious is the ultimate principle of everything. It has two original attributes: Will, blind and aimless, and Reason or Idea, unconscious yet logical, which shapes the forms of the world. Will generates suffering, while Reason makes the world, despite everything, the best possible one, because it holds the promise of its own redemption. Once enough of the Will understands the misery of existence, a collective effort to will nothingness will follow. Here he parted ways with Schopenhauer: salvation comes through social process rather than individual asceticism. His ethics advises provisionally affirming life and working for social evolution, since suicide and selfishness are condemned. His so-called transcendental realism holds that we can infer, by induction from experience, the existence of things beyond it.

His influence was real in the debates on pessimism and in the philosophy of will of the early twentieth century, though his vast output was soon overshadowed by Nietzsche and the neo-Kantian reaction.