Hartmann, Eduard von
Hartmann, Eduard von
(1842-1906) Hybridizing Schopenhauer’s voluntarism with Hegel’s intellectualism, and stimulated by Schelling, the eclectic v.H. sought to overcome irrationalism and rationalism by postulating the Unconscious, raised into a neutral absolute which has in it both will and idea in co-ordination. Backed by an encyclopaedic knowledge he showed, allegedly inductively, how this generates all values in a conformism or correlationism which circumvents a subjective monistic idealism no less than a phenomenalism by means of a transcendental realism. Writing at a time when vitalists were hard put to be endeavored to synthesize the new natural sciences and teleology by assigning to mechanistic causility a special function in the natural process under a more generalized and deeper purposiveness. Dispensing with a pure rationalism, but without taking refuge in a vital force, v.H. was then able to establish a neo-vitalism. In ethics he transcended an original pessimism, flowing from the admittance of the alogical and dis-teleological, in a qualified optimism founded upon an evolutionary hypothesis which regards nature with its laws subservient to the logical, as a species of the teleological, and to reason which, as product of development, redeems the irrational will once it has been permitted to create a world in which existence means unhappiness.
E. von Hartmann, Philos. des Unbewussten, 3 vol. 1869 (Eng. tr. Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1931); Die Religion des Geistes, 1882; Aesthetik, 1886; Kategorienlehre, 1897; Geschichte der Metaphysik, 1900; Das Problem des Lebens, 1906; System der Philosophie in Grundriss, 1906-10. — K.F.L.