Nicolai Hartmann


Paul Nicolai Hartmann was a Baltic German philosopher. He is regarded as a key representative of critical realism and as one of the most important twentieth century metaphysicians.

Biography

Hartmann was born a Baltic German in Riga, which was then the capital of the Governorate of Livonia in the Russian Empire, and which is now in Latvia. He was the son of the engineer Carl August Hartmann and his wife Helene, born Hackmann. He attended from 1897 the German-language high school in Saint Petersburg. In the years 1902–1903 he studied Medicine at the University of Yuryev, and 1903–1905 classical philology and philosophy at the Saint Petersburg Imperial University with his friend Vasily Sesemann. In 1905 he went to the University of Marburg, where he studied with the neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. In Marburg began a lifelong friendship with Heinz Heimsoeth. In 1907 he received his doctorate with the thesis Das Seinsproblem in der griechischen Philosophie vor Plato. In 1909 he published the book Platos Logik des Seins. The same year he completed his habilitation on Proclus: Des Proklus Diadochus philosophische Anfangsgründe der Mathematik.
In 1911, Hartmann married Alice Stepanitz, with whom he had a daughter, Dagmar, in 1912. In 1912 he published Die philosophischen Grundfragen der Biologie. From 1914 to 1918 he did military service as an interpreter, letter censor, and intelligence officer. In 1919, i.e., after the war, he received a position as Privatdozent in Marburg. Around this time he met Martin Heidegger. In 1920 he became Associate Professor and in 1921 appeared the work that established him as an independent philosophical thinker, Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis. The following year he became Full Professor as successor of the Chair held by Natorp. In 1925, he moved to Cologne, where he came into contact with Max Scheler. In 1926 he published his second major work—Ethik—in which he develops a material value ethics akin to that of Scheler. The same year he divorced from his wife.
In 1929 Hartmann married Frida Rosenfeld, with whom he had a son, Olaf, and a daughter, Lise. In 1931 he became Professor of Theoretical Philosophy in Berlin. He held the Chair until 1945. During this time he successively published many pieces of his ontology: Das Problem des geistigen Seins , Zur Grundlegung der Ontologie , Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit and Der Aufbau der realen Welt. Grundriß der allgemeinen Kategorienlehre . The unrest of the National Socialist period seems to have left Hartmann relatively undisturbed in his task of developing a new ontology. In the "'-Dossiers über Philosophie-Professoren" that were set up by the SS Security Service Nicolai Hartmann was classified from an SS-point of view in the following way: "has always been a nationalist. Loyal to National Socialism, too, without political activity, but a social attitude has to be acknowledged. ".
In 1942, Hartmann edited a volume entitled Systematische Philosophie, in which he contributed the essay Neue Wege der Ontologie, which summarizes his work in ontology.
Between 1945 and 1950, Hartmann taught in Göttingen. He died of a stroke in 1950. In the year of his death, there appeared his Philosophie der Natur. His works Teleologisches Denken and Ästhetik were published posthumously.
He is regarded as an important representative of critical realism and as one of the major metaphysicians of the twentieth century. Among Hartmann's many students were Boris Pasternak, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emil Cioran, Jakob Klein, Delfim Santos and Max Wehrli. He is the modern discoverer of emergence — originally called by him categorial novum. His encyclopedic work is basically forgotten today, although famous during his lifetime. His early work in the philosophy of biology has been cited in modern discussions of genomics and cloning, and his views on consciousness and free will are currently in vogue among contributors to the Journal of Consciousness Studies.

Ontological theory

In Hartmann's ontological theory, the levels of reality are: the inorganic level, the organic level, the psychical/emotional level and the intellectual/cultural level. In The Structure of the Real World, Hartmann postulates four laws that apply to the levels of reality.
  1. The law of recurrence: Lower categories recur in the higher levels as a subaspect of higher categories, but never vice versa.
  2. The law of modification: The categorial elements modify in their recurrence in the higher levels.
  3. The law of the novum: The higher category is composed of a diversity of lower elements, but it is a specific novum that is not included in the lower levels.
  4. The law of distance between levels: Since the different levels do not develop continuously but in leaps, they can be clearly distinguished.

    Ethical theory

The central concept of Hartmann's ethical theory is that of a value. Hartmann's 1926 book, Ethik, elaborates a material ethics of value according to which moral knowledge is achieved through phenomenological investigation into our experiences of values. Moral phenomena are understood by Hartmann to be experiences of a realm of being which is distinct from that of material things, namely, the realm of values. The values inhabiting this realm are unchanging, super-temporal, and super-historical, though human consciousness of them shifts in focus over time. Borrowing a style of phrase from Kant, Hartmann characterizes values as conditions of the possibility of goods; in other words, values are what make it possible for situations in the world to be good. Our knowledge of the goodness of situations is derived from our emotional experiences of them, experiences which are made possible by an a priori capacity for the appreciation of value. For Hartmann, this means that our awareness of the value of a state of affairs is not arrived at through a process of reasoning, but rather, by way of an experience of feeling, which he calls valuational consciousness. If, then, ethics is the study of what one ought to do, or what states of affairs one ought to bring about, such studies, according to Hartmann, must be carried out by paying close attention to our emotional capacities to discern what is valuable in the world. As such, Hartmann's conception of proper moral philosophy contrasts with rationalist and formalist theories, such as Kant's, according to which ethical knowledge is derived from purely rational principles.

Quotations

"The tragedy of man is that of somebody who is starving and sitting at a richly laden table but does not reach out with his hand, because he cannot see what is right in front of him. For the real world has inexhaustible splendour, the real life is full of meaning and abundance, where we grasp it, it is full of miracles and glory."

Works

Works in German

;Books
;Articles