Nicolai Hartmann

German philosopher

• Born: February 20, 1882
• Birthplace: Riga, Latvia, Russian Empire (now Riga, Latvia)
• Died: October 9, 1950
• Place of death: Göttingen, West Germany (now in Germany)

Hartmann successfully vindicated ontology, the study of existing things or “being as such,” as worthy of a scientific study of being to his contemporaries who treated it with disdain.

Early Life

Nicolai Hartmann (NEE-koh-li HAHRT-mahn) was born in Riga, Latvia, to Karl August, a merchant, and Helene, daughter of a pastor. His father died early, and his mother founded and directed a German private school in Riga. Her educational undertakings and the moral rigors of her father’s personality must have strengthened the pedagogical propensities and austerity of thought that Hartmann displayed later in his life.

His education started at a gymnasium in St. Petersburg, a vibrant center of European intellectual activity in those days. After graduation from the gymnasium, he studied medicine in Dorpat in Estonia and, later, classical philology and philosophy in Marburg, a university town in Hesse, Germany. It was in Marburg that Hartmann came under the influence of Herman Cohen, the founder of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, and his outstanding pupil Paul Natorp an influence that stayed with Hartmann in one form or another for the rest of his life. His juvenilia bustles with neo-Kantian idealism. Even in his more mature works, Hartmann is often seen conducting a dialogue with Immanuel Kant while moving away from him.

Life’s Work

In 1907, Hartmann was graduated from the University of Marburg with a Ph.D. He was made a privatdocent in philosophy in 1909, joined the army, experienced battle on the Russian front, and in 1920 became professor of philosophy at Marburg, a profession that helped him think dispassionately and analyze philosophically his dehumanizing experiences of war. Consequently Hartmann wrote a three-volume work on the ethos of humankind called Ethik (1926; Ethics , 1932), criticizing the Kantian ethics of categorical imperatives, thereby giving a message to the world that it is possible to put humanity back onto the right track in spite of the wounds of war. Hartmann agreed with Kant that moral imperatives or values are a priori and objective, but he disagreed with Kant’s idea that their objectivity issues from human reason, probably, arguing the possible reasons of a war. Hartmann saw the objectivity of moral imperatives in their unique ontological existence, “an existence in themselves, independent of all imagination and longing. It means consciousness of them does not determine values, but the values determine the consciousness of them.”

If values exist so independent of human consciousness, one wonders how they get actualized in it unless they stick to it as barnacles do to the bottom of the ship. Hartmann believed that values are endowed with almost an innate and an irresistible urge to come into being, which they do through the human agency. Once values are embedded in human consciousness, they shape its ethical consciousness with the same power as the physiological structure of the eye, which determines for the owner of the eye the shape of things he sees with that eye. The owner of the eye cannot choose to see what the eye does not permit.

These values harbor in them innate antinomies much like the antinomic nature of Aristotle’s “virtue.” For example, happiness, a so-called good value, is not without its antinomic bad. As Hartmann comments, “even in happiness there lurks a hidden disvalue,” which makes “anyone who is spoiled by happiness . . . shallow.” Because of the antinomic nature of value, punctiliously analyzed by Hartmann in the second volume of his Ethics, it is clear that humans have the moral freedom to choose between two antinomic goods of a given value. This concept of moral freedom or freedom of will is explored in greater detail in the third volume of Ethics through an analysis of humanity’s sense of responsibility and the human working of guilt. Hartmann’s ethics projects a picture of a moral world that is free from the determinisms of all kind: Kantian, teleological, and axiological. It is not a chaotic world of the nihilist, because of the presence in it of a healthy reaction between its own world and the world of human consciousness.

In spite of a lesson in moral values, Hartmann, like many of his contemporaries, must have been uncomfortable at the uneasy truce following the war and the impending danger of the global destruction of a possible second war. Eschewing politics completely, as most of the intellectuals of his days did, Hartmann sublimated his inherent fears in an ontological investigation of being in four books that can loosely be described as an ontological quartet: Zur Grundlegung der Ontologie (1935; on the foundations of ontology), Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit (1938; possibility and reality), Der Aufbau der realen Welt (1940; structure of real world), and Neue Wege der Ontologie (1949; New Ways of Ontology , 1952). “Quartet” is an appropriate description of these works not only because they form a chain of four books on one subject but also because the various problems of the subject of being are discussed in a stereophonic way, creating a Platonic commingling of the conceptually formal with the aesthetically beautiful.

Ontology is the study of really, truly existing things, described as being-in-itself, among other terms. Hartmann’s term for this is Ansichsein, which is consistently translated as being-in-itself. This being-in-itself, as Hartmann explores it in the first volume of his quartet, is a being of everything not only the being of humans displaying not the generality of a genus as color is the genus of red, blue, and yellow, but the generality of a summum genus, a generality that is not a species of anything. This being is transcendental in the sense that it is beyond the grasp of any consciousness. At the same time it is real because it exists the way two-and-two-makes-four exists, going beyond space and time. What saves it from being a nothing and makes it ontologically viable is its structure.

In spite of a convincing argument for the ontological viability of the being-in-itself, one cannot help wondering if it is ever possible to understand it. This question of possibility led Hartmann to an investigation of the modality of being-in-itself in the second and the most difficult volume of the quartet, Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit. In ordinary language, possibility is discussed as if it were on the same footing with the real (Wirklichkeit). For example, when a television commercial says, “It is possible that you will be the winner of this lottery,” it is assumed that the reality of winning or not winning exists in a disjunct yet a copresent way. That is, if winning is considered real, not winning becomes a disjunct reality, a ghostlike presence and vice versa. Hartmann argues that in real life there is nothing like a disjunctive presence, a ghostlike reality. According to his argument, for something to be a real possibility (reale Möglichkeit) it has to meet all the conditions that make it necessary. Once it meets the necessary conditions, it is also meeting the conditions for being real. Therefore, real possibility is also inevitable reality (Wirklichkeit). Extrapolating on this finding, it is not difficult to see how a being-in-itself that has been convincingly argued in the preceding work of the quartet to be possible will be real enough for the consciousness to understand it.

Der Aufbau der realen Welt, the third member of the quartet, replays its music in fragmented tunes. It explores the categories of being-in-itself, which is an enunciation of the being-such-and-such, Sosein, the equivalent of a law, a structure, a theoretical formulation of a modus operandi. In this study, Hartmann devises a hierarchy or a chain of being-such-and-such, with matter at the lowest level and life, consciousness, and spirituality standing on it in that order, the lower one controlling the one immediately above it in that the lower one is the necessary condition for the one above to exist. Thus, life is not possible without matter, consciousness without life, spirituality without consciousness. In spite of the mechanistic rigidity of the system, it offers scope for innovation, as New Ways of Ontology, the last member of the quartet, demonstrates. The last volume of the quartet gives a final touch to the various tunes of the other works and ends on a happy note.

Significance

Hartmann is remembered in the history of philosophy for the outstanding example that he set to encourage philosophy to change from system-building to problem-solving through a revival of aporetics, the ancient Greek philosophical method that tries to unravel a problem into its strands. A problem’s solution emerges in this unraveling, not in the building of a system. Socrates, for example, in the early dialogues of Plato, asked a series of questions that raised many objections without providing answers, without putting all his effort into creating a system.

Hartmann’s first important work, Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntis (1921), primarily explains the futility of system-building instead of using an existing system to solve a specific problem, although a system may emerge in the process. Hartmann himself freely used the insights of Aristotle, Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Edmund Husserl and at times can be seen unintentionally building what can be described as a system. His main focus, however, has been to bring out the contradictions in a systematic solution and resolve them aporetically; his method was a rainbow of methods.

Bibliography

Cadwallader, Eva H. “The Continuing Relevance of Nicolai Hartmann’s Theory of Value.” Journal of Value Enquiry 18 (1984): 113-121. Not only good for understanding Hartmann’s contribution to axiology but also useful in understanding the contemporary American moral scene, especially its polarization into the moral majority and the new morality.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Searchlight on Values: Nicolai Hartmann’s Twentieth Century Value Platonism. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984. As the subtitle suggests, this work is mostly a study a critical one of the Platonic theory of value. Anglo-American readers will value the inclusion of G. E. Moore, an influential philosopher of the twentieth century.

Heiss, Robert. “Nicolai Hartmann: A Personal Sketch.” The Personalist 42 (October, 1961): 469-486. One of Hartmann’s students pays glowing tributes to his teacher.

Hook, Sidney. “A Critique of Ethical Realism.” International Journal of Ethics 40 (January, 1930): 179-210. Hartmann was introduced to the English-speaking world through this article written by a tough critic who mostly disagrees with Hartmann but pays some of the best compliments to his analytical acumen.

Jordan, Robert Welsh. “Nicolai Hartmann: Proper Ethics Is Atheistic.” In Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy: A Handbook, edited by John J. Drummond and Lester Embree. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2002. This essay about Hartmann is included in a study of the phenomenological view of ethics and morality.

Kuhn, Helmut. “Nicolai Hartmann’s Ontology.” Philosophical Quarterly 1 (July, 1951): 289-318. An excellent introduction to the most difficult subject of Hartmann’s work, explaining his ontology in the light of influences such as Aristotle and Husserl.

McGrath, Alister E. The Order of Things: Explorations in Scientific Theology. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006. This collection of essays about scientific theology includes an essay about Hartmann.

Mohanty, Jitendranath. Nicolai Hartmann and Alfred North Whitehead: A Study in Recent Platonism. Calcutta, India: Progressive, 1957. Though published in India, this book is held by many libraries in the United States. The chapter on Hartmann is very useful in understanding his idealism, even if readers are not interested in Whitehead. The author’s strong base in Husserl and phenomenology helps in appreciating Hartmann.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Phenomenology: Between Essentialism and Transcendental Philosophy. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1997. This book examining phenomenology in the realm of essentialism and transcendental philosophy includes a chapter entitled “Nicolai Hartmann’s Phenomenological Ontology.”

Samuel, Otto. A Foundation of Ontology: A Critical Analysis of Nicolai Hartmann. Translated by Frank Gaynor. New York: Philosophical Library, 1953. This work is specifically intended to introduce Hartmann to American readers. The result is questionable; it is both a digest and a critical commentary on Hartmann’s Zur Grundlegung der Ontologie. The digest part is confusing, but the commentary is insightful.