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German literature
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The 19th century. Fin de siecle
movements
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Friedrich Nietzsche
"Thus Spoke Zarathustra"
Hugo von
Hofmannsthal
"Poems"
Stefan
George
Arthur
Schnitzler
Thomas Mann
Heinrich Mann
Arthur
Schopenhauer
"Essays"
Rainer Maria Rilke
"Duino
Elegies"
Hermann
Hesse
"Siddhartha"
Friedrich de
la Motte Fouqué
"Undine"
Gustav Theodor Fechner
Ludwig Feuerbach
Rudolf Hermann Lotze
Karl Marx
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Albert Lange
Wilhelm Wundt
Wilhelm Dilthey
Franz Brentano
Rudolf Christoph Eucken
Wilhelm Windelband
Alexius Meinong
Edmund Husserl
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Fin de siècle
movements
Friedrich Nietzsche
Writing at the same time as the later realists and
the naturalist writers but forming a bridge to
German Modernism,
Friedrich Nietzsche
developed a philosophy that understood art as the
result of a fundamental conflict between two
opposing forces—the Apollonian, or the desire for
Classical form and serenity, and the Dionysian, or
the ecstatic and quasi-religious search for
liberation from formal constraints. His Die Geburt
der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872; The
Birth of Tragedy) was a significant influence on
20th-century literature and aesthetic theory.
Nietzsche’s
later works combined cultural pessimism with a
vitalistic philosophy that called for the
development of the “superman,” or titanic
personality, capable of providing a new and more
forceful type of cultural leadership. Rejecting
mediocrity,
Nietzsche believed that the ideal
personality was in a constant state of development,
affirming its identity by continually enlarging its
sphere of experience. Also sprach Zarathustra
(1883–85;
Thus Spoke
Zarathustra) and Jenseits von Gut und
Böse (1886; Beyond Good and Evil) proclaimed the new
ideals. In these works, Nietzsche also questioned
the value of truth and knowledge, espousing the view
that “facts are precisely what there is not, only
interpretations.”
Nietzsche’s
perspectivism, reflected in the composition of some
of his works as an assemblage of aphorisms and
essays, and his insistence that objectivity is a
fiction provided an important basis for Modernist
presentations of reality.
Friedrich Nietzsche
"Thus
Spoke Zarathustra"

German philosopher
born Oct. 15, 1844, Röcken, Saxony,
Prussia [now in Germany]
died Aug. 25, 1900, Weimar, Thuringian
States
Main
German classical scholar, philosopher,
and critic of culture, who became one of
the most influential of all modern
thinkers. His attempts to unmask the
motives that underlie traditional
Western religion, morality, and
philosophy deeply affected generations
of theologians, philosophers,
psychologists, poets, novelists, and
playwrights. He thought through the
consequences of the triumph of the
Enlightenment’s secularism, expressed in
his observation that “God is dead,” in a
way that determined the agenda for many
of Europe’s most celebrated
intellectuals after his death. Although
he was an ardent foe of nationalism,
anti-Semitism, and power politics, his
name was later invoked by Fascists to
advance the very things he loathed.
The early years
Nietzsche’s home was a stronghold of
Lutheran piety. His paternal grandfather
had published books defending
Protestantism and had achieved the
ecclesiastical position of
superintendent; his maternal grandfather
was a country parson; his father, Carl
Ludwig Nietzsche, was appointed pastor
at Röcken by order of King Friedrich
Wilhelm IV of Prussia, after whom
Friedrich Nietzsche was named. His
father died in 1849, before Nietzsche’s
fifth birthday, and he spent most of his
early life in a household consisting of
five women: his mother Franziska, his
younger sister Elisabeth, his maternal
grandmother, and two maiden aunts.
In 1850 the family moved to Naumburg on
the Saale River, where Nietzsche
attended a private preparatory school,
the Domgymnasium. In 1858 he earned a
scholarship to Schulpforta, Germany’s
leading Protestant boarding school. He
excelled academically at Pforta,
received an outstanding classical
education there, and, having graduated
in 1864, went to the University of Bonn
to study theology and classical
philology. Despite efforts to take part
in the university’s social life, the two
semesters at Bonn were a failure, owing
chiefly to acrimonious quarrels between
his two leading classics professors,
Otto Jahn and Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl.
Nietzsche sought refuge in music,
writing a number of compositions
strongly influenced by Robert Schumann,
the German Romantic composer. In 1865 he
transferred to the University of
Leipzig, joining Ritschl, who had
accepted an appointment there.
Nietzsche prospered under Ritschl’s
tutelage in Leipzig. He became the only
student ever to publish in Ritschl’s
journal, Rheinisches Museum (“Rhenish
Museum”). He began military service in
October 1867 in the cavalry company of
an artillery regiment, sustained a
serious chest injury while mounting a
horse in March 1868, and resumed his
studies in Leipzig in October 1868 while
on extended sick leave from the
military. During the years in Leipzig,
Nietzsche discovered Arthur
Schopenhauer’s philosophy, met the great
operatic composer Richard Wagner, and
began his lifelong friendship with
fellow classicist Erwin Rohde (author of
Psyche).
The Basel years (1869–79)
When a professorship in classical
philology fell vacant in 1869 in Basel,
Switz., Ritschl recommended Nietzsche
with unparalleled praise. He had
completed neither his doctoral thesis
nor the additional dissertation required
for a German degree; yet Ritschl assured
the University of Basel that he had
never seen anyone like Nietzsche in 40
years of teaching and that his talents
were limitless. In 1869 the University
of Leipzig conferred the doctorate
without examination or dissertation on
the strength of his published writings,
and the University of Basel appointed
him extraordinary professor of classical
philology. The following year Nietzsche
became a Swiss citizen and was promoted
to ordinary professor.
Nietzsche obtained a leave to serve as a
volunteer medical orderly in August
1870, after the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian War. Within a month,
while accompanying a transport of
wounded, he contracted dysentery and
diphtheria, which ruined his health
permanently. He returned to Basel in
October to resume a heavy teaching load,
but as early as 1871 ill health prompted
him to seek relief from the stultifying
chores of a professor of classical
philology; he applied for the vacant
chair of philosophy and proposed Rohde
as his successor, all to no avail.
During these early Basel years
Nietzsche’s ambivalent friendship with
Wagner ripened, and he seized every
opportunity to visit Richard and his
wife, Cosima. Wagner appreciated
Nietzsche as a brilliant professorial
apostle, but Wagner’s increasing
exploitation of Christian motifs, as in
Parsifal, coupled with his chauvinism
and anti-Semitism proved to be more than
Nietzsche could bear. By 1878 the breach
between the two men had become final.
Nietzsche’s first book, Die Geburt der
Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872;
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of
Music), marked his emancipation from the
trappings of classical scholarship. A
speculative rather than exegetical work,
it argued that Greek tragedy arose out
of the fusion of what he termed
Apollonian and Dionysian elements—the
former representing measure, restraint,
harmony, and the latter representing
unbridled passion—and that Socratic
rationalism and optimism spelled the
death of Greek tragedy. The final 10
sections of the book are a rhapsody
about the rebirth of tragedy from the
spirit of Wagner’s music. Greeted by
stony silence at first, it became the
object of heated controversy on the part
of those who mistook it for a
conventional work of classical
scholarship. It was undoubtedly “a work
of profound imaginative insight, which
left the scholarship of a generation
toiling in the rear,” as the British
classicist F.M. Cornford wrote in 1912.
It remains a classic in the history of
aesthetics to this day.
By October 1876 Nietzsche requested and
received a year’s sick leave. In 1877 he
set up house with his sister and Peter
Gast, and in 1878 his aphoristic
Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human,
All-Too-Human) appeared. Because his
health deteriorated steadily he resigned
his professorial chair on June 14, 1879,
and was granted a pension of 3,000 Swiss
francs per year for six years.
Decade of isolation and creativity
(1879–89)
Apart from the books Nietzsche wrote
between 1879 and 1889, it is doubtful
that his life held any intrinsic
interest. Seriously ill, half-blind, in
virtually unrelenting pain, he lived in
boarding houses in Switzerland, the
French Riviera, and Italy, with only
limited human contact. His friendship
with Paul Rée was undermined by 1882 by
their mutual if unacknowledged affection
for Lou Salomé (author, later the wife
of the Orientalist F.C. Andreas,
mistress of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke,
and confidant of Sigmund Freud) as well
as by Elisabeth Nietzsche’s jealous
meddling.
Nietzsche’s acknowledged literary and
philosophical masterpiece in biblical
narrative form, Also sprach Zarathustra
(Thus Spoke Zarathustra), was published
between 1883 and 1885 in four parts, the
last part a private printing at his own
expense. As with most of his works it
received little attention. His attempts
to set forth his philosophy in more
direct prose, in the publications in
1886 of Jenseits von Gut und Böse
(Beyond Good and Evil) and in 1887 of
Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the
Genealogy of Morals), also failed to win
a proper audience.
Nietzsche’s final lucid year, 1888, was
a period of supreme productivity. He
wrote and published Der Fall Wagner (The
Case of Wagner) and wrote a synopsis of
his philosophy, Die Götzen-Dämmerung
(Twilight of the Idols), Der Antichrist
(The Antichrist), Nietzsche contra
Wagner (Eng. trans., Nietzsche contra
Wagner), and Ecce Homo (Eng. trans.,
Ecce Homo), a reflection on his own
works and significance. Twilight of the
Idols appeared in 1889, Der Antichrist
and Nietzsche contra Wagner were not
published until 1895, the former
mistakenly as book one of The Will to
Power, and Ecce Homo was withheld from
publication until 1908, 20 years after
its composition.
Collapse and misuse
Nietzsche collapsed in the streets of
Turin, Italy, in January 1889, having
lost control of his mental faculties
completely. Bizarre but meaningful notes
he sent immediately after his collapse
brought Franz Overbeck to Italy to
return Nietzsche to Basel. Nietzsche
spent the last 11 years of his life in
total mental darkness, first in a Basel
asylum, then in Naumburg under his
mother’s care and, after her death in
1897, in Weimar in his sister’s care. He
died in 1900. Informed opinion favours a
diagnosis of atypical general paralysis
caused by dormant tertiary syphilis.
The association of Nietzsche’s name with
Adolf Hitler and Fascism owes much to
the use made of his works by his sister
Elisabeth. She had married a leading
chauvinist and anti-Semite, Bernhard
Förster, and after his suicide in 1889
she worked diligently to refashion
Nietzsche in Förster’s image. Elisabeth
maintained ruthless control over
Nietzsche’s literary estate and,
dominated by greed, produced collections
of his “works” consisting of discarded
notes, such as Der Wille zur Macht
(1901; The Will to Power). She also
committed petty forgeries. Generations
of commentators were misled. Equally
important, her enthusiasm for Hitler
linked Nietzsche’s name with that of the
dictator in the public mind.
Nietzsche’s mature philosophy
Nietzsche’s writings fall into three
well-defined periods. The early works,
The Birth of Tragedy and the four
Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (1873;
Untimely Meditations), are dominated by
a Romantic perspective influenced by
Schopenhauer and Wagner. The middle
period, from Human, All-Too-Human up to
The Gay Science, reflects the tradition
of French aphorists. It extols reason
and science, experiments with literary
genres, and expresses Nietzsche’s
emancipation from his earlier
Romanticism and from Schopenhauer and
Wagner. Nietzsche’s mature philosophy
emerged after The Gay Science.
In his mature writings Nietzsche was
preoccupied by the origin and function
of values in human life. If, as he
believed, life neither possesses nor
lacks intrinsic value and yet is always
being evaluated, then such evaluations
can usefully be read as symptoms of the
condition of the evaluator. He was
especially interested, therefore, in a
probing analysis and evaluation of the
fundamental cultural values of Western
philosophy, religion, and morality,
which he characterized as expressions of
the ascetic ideal.
The ascetic ideal is born when suffering
becomes endowed with ultimate
significance. According to Nietzsche the
Judeo-Christian tradition, for example,
made suffering tolerable by interpreting
it as God’s intention and as an occasion
for atonement. Christianity,
accordingly, owed its triumph to the
flattering doctrine of personal
immortality, that is, to the conceit
that each individual’s life and death
have cosmic significance. Similarly,
traditional philosophy expressed the
ascetic ideal when it privileged soul
over body, mind over senses, duty over
desire, reality over appearance, the
timeless over the temporal. While
Christianity promised salvation for the
sinner who repents, philosophy held out
hope for salvation, albeit secular, for
its sages. Common to traditional
religion and philosophy was the unstated
but powerful motivating assumption that
existence requires explanation,
justification, or expiation. Both
denigrated experience in favour of some
other, “true” world. Both may be read as
symptoms of a declining life, or life in
distress.
Nietzsche’s critique of traditional
morality centred on the typology of
“master” and “slave” morality. By
examining the etymology of the German
words gut (“good”), schlecht (“bad”),
and böse (“evil”), Nietzsche maintained
that the distinction between good and
bad was originally descriptive, that is,
a nonmoral reference to those who were
privileged, the masters, as opposed to
those who were base, the slaves. The
good/evil contrast arose when slaves
avenged themselves by converting
attributes of mastery into vices. If the
favoured, the “good,” were powerful, it
was said that the meek would inherit the
earth. Pride became sin. Charity,
humility, and obedience replaced
competition, pride, and autonomy.
Crucial to the triumph of slave morality
was its claim to being the only true
morality. This insistence on
absoluteness is as essential to
philosophical as to religious ethics.
Although Nietzsche gave a historical
genealogy of master and slave morality,
he maintained that it was an ahistorical
typology of traits present in everyone.
“Nihilism” was the term Nietzsche used
to describe the devaluation of the
highest values posited by the ascetic
ideal. He thought of the age in which he
lived as one of passive nihilism, that
is, as an age that was not yet aware
that religious and philosophical
absolutes had dissolved in the emergence
of 19th-century Positivism. With the
collapse of metaphysical and theological
foundations and sanctions for
traditional morality only a pervasive
sense of purposelessness and
meaninglessness would remain. And the
triumph of meaninglessness is the
triumph of nihilism: “God is dead.”
Nietzsche thought, however, that most
men could not accept the eclipse of the
ascetic ideal and the intrinsic
meaninglessness of existence but would
seek supplanting absolutes to invest
life with meaning. He thought the
emerging nationalism of his day
represented one such ominous surrogate
god, in which the nation-state would be
invested with transcendent value and
purpose. And just as absoluteness of
doctrine had found expression in
philosophy and religion, absoluteness
would become attached to the
nation-state with missionary fervour.
The slaughter of rivals and the conquest
of the earth would proceed under banners
of universal brotherhood, democracy, and
socialism. Nietzsche’s prescience here
was particularly poignant, and the use
later made of him especially repellent.
For example, two books were standard
issue for the rucksacks of German
soldiers during World War I, Thus Spoke
Zarathustra and The Gospel According to
St. John. It is difficult to say which
author was more compromised by this
gesture.
Nietzsche often thought of his writings
as struggles with nihilism, and apart
from his critiques of religion,
philosophy, and morality he developed
original theses that have commanded
attention, especially perspectivism,
will to power, eternal recurrence, and
the superman.
Perspectivism is a concept which holds
that knowledge is always perspectival,
that there are no immaculate
perceptions, and that knowledge from no
point of view is as incoherent a notion
as seeing from no particular vantage
point. Perspectivism also denies the
possibility of an all-inclusive
perspective, which could contain all
others and, hence, make reality
available as it is in itself. The
concept of such an all-inclusive
perspective is as incoherent as the
concept of seeing an object from every
possible vantage point simultaneously.
Nietzsche’s perspectivism has sometimes
been mistakenly identified with
relativism and skepticism. Nonetheless,
it raises the question of how one is to
understand Nietzsche’s own theses, for
example, that the dominant values of the
common heritage have been underwritten
by an ascetic ideal. Is this thesis true
absolutely or only from a certain
perspective? It may also be asked
whether perspectivism can be asserted
consistently without self-contradiction,
since perspectivism must presumably be
true in an absolute, that is a
nonperspectival sense. Concerns such as
these have generated much fruitful
Nietzsche commentary as well as useful
work in the theory of knowledge.
Nietzsche often identified life itself
with “will to power,” that is, with an
instinct for growth and durability. This
concept provides yet another way of
interpreting the ascetic ideal, since it
is Nietzsche’s contention “that all the
supreme values of mankind lack this
will—that values which are symptomatic
of decline, nihilistic values, are
lording it under the holiest names.”
Thus, traditional philosophy, religion,
and morality have been so many masks a
deficient will to power wears. The
sustaining values of Western
civilization have been sublimated
products of decadence in that the
ascetic ideal endorses existence as pain
and suffering. Some commentators have
attempted to extend Nietzsche’s concept
of the will to power from human life to
the organic and inorganic realms,
ascribing a metaphysics of will to power
to him. Such interpretations, however,
cannot be sustained by reference to his
published works.
The doctrine of eternal recurrence, the
basic conception of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, asks the question “How well
disposed would a person have to become
to himself and to life to crave nothing
more fervently than the infinite
repetition, without alteration, of each
and every moment?” Presumably most men
would, or should, find such a thought
shattering because they should always
find it possible to prefer the eternal
repetition of their lives in an edited
version rather than to crave nothing
more fervently than the eternal
recurrence of each of its horrors. The
person who could accept recurrence
without self-deception or evasion would
be a superhuman being (Übermensch), a
superman whose distance from the
ordinary man is greater than the
distance between man and ape, Nietzsche
says. Commentators still disagree
whether there are specific character
traits that define the person who
embraces eternal recurrence.
Nietzsche’s influence
Nietzsche once wrote that some men are
born posthumously, and this is certainly
true in his case. The history of
20th-century philosophy, theology, and
psychology are unintelligible without
him. The German philosophers Max
Scheler, Karl Jaspers, and Martin
Heidegger laboured in his debt, for
example, as did the French philosophers
Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, and
Michel Foucault. Existentialism and
deconstructionism, a movement in
philosophy and literary criticism, owe
much to him. The theologians Paul
Tillich and Lev Shestov acknowledged
their debt as did the “God is dead”
theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer; Martin
Buber, Judaism’s greatest 20th-century
thinker, counted Nietzsche among the
three most important influences in his
life and translated the first part of
Zarathustra into Polish. The
psychologists Alfred Adler and Carl Jung
were deeply influenced, as was Sigmund
Freud, who said of Nietzsche that he had
a more penetrating understanding of
himself than any man who ever lived or
was ever likely to live. Novelists like
Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, André
Malraux, André Gide, and John Gardner
were inspired by him and wrote about
him, as did the poets and playwrights
George Bernard Shaw, Rainer Maria Rilke,
Stefan George, and William Butler Yeats,
among others. Nietzsche is certainly one
of the most influential philosophers who
ever lived; and this is due not only to
his originality but also to the fact
that he was the German language’s most
brilliant prose writer.
Bernd Magnus
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Aestheticism
In the final decades of the 19th century the
literary scene was divided between naturalism and
its opposites, variously collected under terms such
as Neoromanticism, Impressionism, Jugendstil, and
Decadence. Aestheticism—the belief that the work of
art need have no moral or political use beyond its
existence as a beautiful object—may prove to be the
most appropriate overarching term for this period.
In a series of essays written between 1890 and 1904,
the Austrian critic and playwright Hermann Bahr
explained the unsettling effects of Impressionism,
which appeared to dissolve the boundaries of objects
and make even the perceiving subject little more
than a fluctuating angle of vision.
Hugo von
Hofmannsthal presented a fictional analysis
of the Impressionist philosophy in his influential
essay Ein Brief (1902; “A Letter,” commonly known as
“Chandos-Brief,” Eng. trans. The Lord Chandos
Letter), a fictive missive from Lord Chandos to Sir
Francis Bacon. In the Letter, Chandos
describes an experience akin to sickness or
paralysis. Language, he feels, has become a depleted
and meaningless medium. He feels himself pulled into
a whirlpool of words that have lost all coherence.
At the end of the Letter, Chandos expresses his
longing for a new language that has no words as
such, a language “in which dumb things will speak to
me.” Sometimes regarded as a personal testimony to
the “crisis of language” that accompanied the
Aestheticist movement, Ein Brief is in fact a
diagnosis and critique of that crisis. It became a
central document that initiated some of the most
important experiments of German literary Modernism.
A number of
specialized periodicals, published in Berlin,
Munich, Vienna, and Prague, led to a wide
dissemination of Aestheticist writing. Magazines
such as Pan and Die weissen Blatter (“White Pages”)
welcomed short texts by young authors experimenting
with what was regarded at the time as the “modern”
style; and the annual Inselalmanach (“Insel
Yearbook”) featured new writing by authors in the
then-Aestheticist Insel Publishing House. Stefan
George’s early lyric poetry, together with
Hofmannsthal’s poems and lyrical dramas and
Arthur Schnitzler’s dramas and short stories,
set the tone for the Aestheticist movement in the
1890s. The influence of French Symbolism is
especially evident in the poetry of George
and
Hofmannsthal.
A novel by
Thomas Mann,
Buddenbrooks (1901; subtitled Verfall einer Famille,
or “The Decline of a Family,” Eng. trans.
Buddenbrooks), links aesthetic decadence with social
and moral decline.
Arthur
Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the will and
Nietzsche’s
cultural pessimism are important ingredients in
Mann’s
engagement with Aestheticism. His early stories, for
example Tonio Kröger (1903) and the novella Der Tod
in Venedig (1912; Death in Venice), turn upon a
simultaneous fascination with and critique of the
Aestheticist impulse. His preoccupation with the
figure of the artist, perennially longing to
participate in the active and robust life of
bourgeois society but perennially condemned to
decadence, illness, and an inability to cope with
practical realities, is a characteristic theme of
Aestheticism.
Rainer Maria Rilke and
Hermann
Hesse
also explore this problematic relation between the
artist and real life.
Rilke’s early
poetry belongs to the Aestheticist movement, and
even his later, more boldly experimental works,
Duineser Elegien (1923; Duino Elegies) and Sonette
an Orpheus (1923; Sonnets to Orpheus), bear clear
traces of his Aestheticist origins. The early
stories of
Franz Kafka
also owe much to Aestheticism.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
"Poems"

Austrian author
born Feb. 1, 1874, Vienna
died July 15, 1929, Rodaun, a suburb of Vienna
Main
Austrian poet, dramatist, and essayist. He made his reputation with his
lyrical poems and plays and became internationally famous for his
collaboration with the German operatic composer Richard Strauss.
The only child of a bank director, Hofmannsthal studied law at
Vienna. At 16 he published his first poems, under the pseudonym Loris.
They created a stir in Vienna and in Germany with their lyrical beauty,
magic evocativeness of language, and dreamlike quality. Their
anticipation of mature experience and formal virtuosity seem incredible
in one so young. After his year of compulsory military service, he
studied Romance philology with a view to an academic career but in 1901
married and became a free-lance writer.
Between 1891 and 1899 Hofmannsthal wrote a number of short verse
plays, influenced by the static dramas of the Belgian writer Maurice
Maeterlinck, the dramatic monologues of the English Romantic poet Robert
Browning, and the proverbes dramatiques of the French poet Alfred de
Musset. These plays include Gestern (1891; “Yesterday”), Der Tod des
Tizian (1892; The Death of Titian, 1913), Der Tor und der Tod (1893;
Death and the Fool, 1913), Das kleine Welttheater (1897; “The Little
Theatre of the World”), Der Weisse Fächer (1898; partially translated as
The White Fan, 1909), Die Frau im Fenster (1898; Madonna Dianora, 1916),
Der Abenteurer und die Sängerin (1899; The Adventurer and the Singer,
1917–18), and Die Hochzeit der Sobeide (1899; The Marriage of Sobeide,
1961). Of the same exquisite beauty as the poems, these playlets are
lyric reflections on appearance and reality, transience and
timelessness, and continuity and change within the human
personality—themes constantly recurring in his later works. After the
turn of the century, however, Hofmannsthal renounced purely lyrical
forms in his essay “Ein Brief” (also called “Chandos Brief,” 1902). This
essay was more than the revelation of a personal predicament; it has
come to be recognized as symptomatic of the crisis that undermined the
esthetic Symbolist movement of the end of the century.
During a period of reorientation and transition Hofmannsthal
experimented with Elizabethan and classical tragic forms, adapting
Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (1682) as Das gerettete Venedig (1904)
and writing Elektra (1903), later set to music by Strauss. At the same
time he began his novel, Andreas (1932; The United, 1936), which he
never completed. The theatre increasingly became his medium. To the end
of his life he collaborated with Strauss, writing the librettos for the
operas Der Rosenkavalier (performed 1911; “The Cavalier of the Rose”),
Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919; “The Woman
Without a Shadow”), Die ägyptische Helena (1928; Helen in Egypt, 1963),
and Arabella (performed 1933).
After World War I, with the theatrical producer and designer Max
Reinhardt, he founded the Salzburg Festival, at which performances have
regularly been given of his Jedermann (1911; “Everyman”) and Das
Salzburger grosse Welttheater (1922; The Great Salzburg Theatre of the
World, 1963). His comedies, Cristinas Heimreise (1910; Christina’s
Journey Home, 1916), Der Schwierige (1921; The Difficult Man, 1963), and
Der Unbestechliche (performed 1923, published 1956; “The
Incorruptible”), are written in Viennese dialect and set in contemporary
Austrian society; concerned with moral issues, they blend realism with
concealed symbolism.
Hofmannsthal’s reflections on the crisis and disintegration of
European civilization after World War I found expression in his
political drama Der Turm (1925; The Tower, 1963) and in several essays
that were prophetic of the future of Western culture. He responded to
the collapse of the Habsburg empire by an increased awareness of his
Austrian heritage, at the same time committing himself to the European
tradition. His art continued to develop, and he always maintained the
delicate grace and sense of transcendent beauty typical of his earliest
works, but he was unable to accommodate himself to the 20th century.
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Stefan George

born July 12, 1868, Büdesheim, near
Bingen, Hesse [Germany]
died Dec. 4, 1933, Minusio, near
Locarno, Switz.
lyric poet responsible in part for the
emergence of Aestheticism in German
poetry at the close of the 19th century.
After attending a Gymnasium in
Darmstadt, George traveled to England,
Switzerland, and France. He studied
philosophy and the history of art in
Paris, becoming associated with the poet
Stéphane Mallarmé and others in the
Symbolist movement. Returning to
Germany, where he divided his time
between Berlin, Munich, and Heidelberg,
he founded a literary school of his own,
the George-Kreis, held together by the
force of his personality. Many
well-known writers (e.g., Friedrich
Gundolf, Karl Wolfskehl, and Georg
Simmel) belonged to it or contributed to
its journal, Blätter für die Kunst,
published from 1892 to 1919. The chief
aim of the journal was to revitalize the
German literary language.
George aimed for new aesthetic forms
in German poetry, avoiding impure rhymes
and metrical irregularities. Vowels and
consonants were arranged with precision
to achieve harmony. The resulting
symbolic poem was intended to evoke a
sense of intoxication. These poetic
ideals were a protest not only against
the debasement of the language but also
against materialism and naturalism, to
which George opposed an austerity of
life and a standard of poetic
excellence. He advocated a humanism
inspired by Friedrich Hölderlin, which
he hoped would be realized in a new
society. His ideas, and the affectations
into which they led some of his
disciples, his claim of superiority, and
his obsession with power were ridiculed,
attacked, and misused by those who
misunderstood them. But George himself
was strongly opposed to the political
developments—above all, the rise of
Nazism—which his ideas are sometimes
thought to reflect. When the Nazi
government offered him money and
honours, he refused them and went into
exile.
George’s collected works fill 18
volumes (Gesamtausgabe, 1927–34),
including five of translations and one
of prose sketches. His collections of
poetry, of which Hymnen (1890),
Pilgerfahrten (1891), Algabal (1892),
Das Jahr der Seele (1897), Der Teppich
des Lebens (1899), Der siebente Ring
(1907), Der Stern des Bundes (1914), and
Das neue Reich (1928) are the most
important, show his poetic and spiritual
development from early doubts and
searching self-examination to confidence
in his role as a seer and as leader of
the new society he projected.
Personally, and spiritually, he found
the fulfillment of his striving for
significance in “Maximin” (Maximilian
Kronberger [1888–1904]), a beautiful and
gifted youth whom he met in Munich in
1902. After the boy’s death George
claimed that he had been a god,
glorifying him in his later poetry and
explaining his attitude to him in
Maximin, ein Gedenkbuch (privately
published, 1906).
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Arthur Schnitzler

born May 15, 1862, Vienna, Austria
died Oct. 21, 1931, Vienna
Austrian playwright and novelist known
for his psychological dramas that
dissect turn-of-the-century Viennese
bourgeois life.
Schnitzler, the son of a well-known
Jewish physician, took a medical degree
and practiced medicine for much of his
life, interesting himself particularly
in psychiatry. He made his name as a
writer with Anatol (1893), a series of
seven one-act plays depicting the casual
amours of a wealthy young Viennese
man-about-town. Although these plays
were much less probing than his later
works, they revealed a gift of
characterization, a power to evoke
moods, and a detached, often
melancholic, humour.
Schnitzler’s Reigen (1897;
Merry-Go-Round), a cycle of 10 dramatic
dialogues, depicts the heartlessness of
men and women in the grip of lust.
Though it gave rise to scandal even in
1920, when it was finally performed, in
1950 it was made into a successful
French film, La Ronde, by Max Ophüls.
Schnitzler was adept at creating a
single, precisely shaded mood in a
one-act play or short story. He often
evoked the atmosphere of corrupt
self-deception he saw in the last years
of the Habsburg empire. He explored
human psychology, portraying egotism in
love, fear of death, the complexities of
the erotic life, and the morbidity of
spirit induced by a weary introspection.
He depicted the hollowness of the
Austrian military code of honour in the
plays Liebelei (1896; Playing with Love)
and Freiwild (1896; “Free Game”). His
most successful novel, Leutnant Gustl
(1901; None but the Brave), dealing with
a similar theme, was the first European
masterpiece written as an interior
monologue. In Flucht in die Finsternis
(1931; Flight into Darkness) he showed
the onset of madness, stage by stage. In
the play Professor Bernhardi (1912) and
the novel Der Weg ins Freie (1908; The
Road to the Open) he analyzed the
position of the Jews in Austria. His
other works include plays, novels,
collections of stories, and several
medical tracts.
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Thomas Mann

German author
born June 6, 1875, Lübeck, Ger.
died Aug. 12, 1955, near Zürich, Switz.
Main
German novelist and essayist whose early novels—Buddenbrooks (1900), Der
Tod in Venedig (1912; Death in Venice), and Der Zauberberg (1924; The
Magic Mountain)—earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.
Early literary endeavours
Mann’s father died in 1891, and Mann moved to Munich, a centre of art
and literature, where he lived until 1933. After perfunctory work in an
insurance office and on the editorial staff of Simplicissimus, a
satirical weekly, he devoted himself to writing, as his elder brother
Heinrich had already done. His early tales, collected as Der kleine Herr
Friedemann (1898), reflect the aestheticism of the 1890s but are given
depth by the influence of the philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
and the composer Wagner, to all of whom Mann was always to acknowledge a
deep, if ambiguous, debt. Most of Mann’s first stories centre in the
problem of the creative artist, who in his devotion to form contests the
meaninglessness of existence, an antithesis that Mann enlarged into that
between spirit (Geist) and life (Leben). But while he showed sympathy
for the artistic misfits he described, Mann was also aware that the
world of imagination is a world of make-believe, and the closeness of
the artist to the charlatan was already becoming a theme. At the same
time, a certain nostalgia for ordinary, unproblematical life appeared in
his work.
This ambivalence found full expression in his first novel,
Buddenbrooks, which Mann had at first intended to be a novella in which
the experience of the transcendental realities of Wagner’s music would
extinguish the will to live in the son of a bourgeois family. On this
beginning, the novel builds the story of the family and its business
house over four generations, showing how an artistic streak not only
unfits the family’s later members for the practicalities of business
life but undermines their vitality as well. But, almost against his
will, in Buddenbrooks Mann wrote a tender elegy for the old bourgeois
virtues.
In 1905 Mann married Katja Pringsheim. There were six children of the
marriage, which was a happy one. It was this happiness, perhaps, that
led Mann, in Royal Highness, to provide a fairy-tale reconciliation of
“form” and “life,” of degenerate feudal authority and the vigour of
modern American capitalism. In 1912, however, he returned to the tragic
dilemma of the artist with Death in Venice, a sombre masterpiece. In
this story, the main character, a distinguished writer whose nervous and
“decadent” sensibility is controlled by the discipline of style and
composition, seeks relaxation from overstrain in Venice, where, as
disease creeps over the city, he succumbs to an infatuation and the wish
for death. Symbols of eros and death weave a subtle pattern in the
sensuous opulence of this tale, which closes an epoch in Mann’s work.
World War I and political crisis
The outbreak of World War I evoked Mann’s ardent patriotism and awoke,
too, an awareness of the artist’s social commitment. His brother
Heinrich was one of the few German writers to question German war aims,
and his criticism of German authoritarianism stung Thomas to a bitter
attack on cosmopolitan litterateurs. In 1918 he published a large
political treatise, Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, in which all his
ingenuity of mind was summoned to justify the authoritarian state as
against democracy, creative irrationalism as against “flat” rationalism,
and inward culture as against moralistic civilization. This work belongs
to the tradition of “revolutionary conservatism” that leads from the
19th-century German nationalistic and antidemocratic thinkers Paul Anton
de Lagarde and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the apostle of the
superiority of the “Germanic” race, toward National Socialism; and Mann
later was to repudiate these ideas.
With the establishment of the German (Weimar) Republic in 1919, Mann
slowly revised his outlook; the essays “Goethe und Tolstoi” and “Von
deutscher Republik” (“The German Republic”) show his somewhat hesitant
espousal of democratic principles. His new position was clarified in the
novel The Magic Mountain. Its theme grows out of an earlier motif: a
young engineer, Hans Castorp, visiting a cousin in a sanatorium in
Davos, abandons practical life to submit to the rich seductions of
disease, inwardness, and death. But the sanatorium comes to be the
spiritual reflection of the possibilities and dangers of the actual
world. In the end, somewhat skeptically but humanely, Castorp decides
for life and service to his people: a decision Mann calls “a
leave-taking from many a perilous sympathy, enchantment, and temptation,
to which the European soul had been inclined.” In this great work Mann
formulates with remarkable insight the fateful choices facing Europe.
World War II and exile
From this time onward Mann’s imaginative effort was directed to the
novel, scarcely interrupted by the charming personal novella Early
Sorrow or by Mario and the Magician, a novella that, in the person of a
seedy illusionist, symbolizes the character of Fascism. His literary and
cultural essays began to play an ever-growing part in elucidating and
communicating his awareness of the fragility of humaneness, tolerance,
and reason in the face of political crisis. His essays on Freud (1929)
and Wagner (1933) are concerned with this, as are those on Goethe
(1932), who more and more became for Mann an exemplary figure in his
wisdom and balance. The various essays on Nietzsche document with
particular poignancy Mann’s struggle against attitudes once dear to him.
In 1930 he gave a courageous address in Berlin, “Ein Appell an die
Vernunft” (“An Appeal to Reason”), appealing for the formation of a
common front of the cultured bourgeoisie and the Socialist working class
against the inhuman fanaticism of the National Socialists. In essays and
on lecture tours in Germany, to Paris, Vienna, Warsaw, Amsterdam, and
elsewhere during the 1930s, Mann, while steadfastly attacking Nazi
policy, often expressed sympathy with socialist and communist principles
in the very general sense that they were the guarantee of humanism and
freedom.
When Hitler became chancellor early in 1933, Mann and his wife, on
holiday in Switzerland, were warned by their son and daughter in Munich
not to return. For some years his home was in Switzerland, near Zürich,
but he traveled widely, visiting the United States on lecture tours and
finally, in 1938, settling there, first at Princeton, and from 1941 to
1952 in southern California. In 1936 he was deprived of his German
citizenship; in the same year the University of Bonn took away the
honorary doctorate it had bestowed in 1919 (it was restored in 1949).
From 1936 to 1944 Mann was a citizen of Czechoslovakia. In 1944 he
became a U.S. citizen.
After the war, Mann visited both East Germany and West Germany
several times and received many public honours, but he refused to return
to Germany to live. In 1952 he settled again near Zürich. His last major
essays—on Goethe (1949), Chekhov (1954), and Schiller (1955)—are
impressive evocations of the moral and social responsibilities of
writers.
Later novels
The novels on which Mann was working throughout this period reflect
variously the cultural crisis of his times. In 1933 he published The
Tales of Jacob (U.S. title, Joseph and His Brothers), the first part of
his four-part novel on the biblical Joseph, continued the following year
in The Young Joseph and two years later with Joseph in Egypt, and
completed with Joseph the Provider in 1943. In the complete work,
published as Joseph and His Brothers, Mann reinterpreted the biblical
story as the emergence of mobile, responsible individuality out of the
tribal collective, of history out of myth, and of a human God out of the
unknowable. In the first volume a timeless myth seems to be reenacted in
the lives of the Hebrews. Joseph, however, though sustained by the
belief that his life too is the reenactment of a myth, is thrown out of
the “timeless collective” into Egypt, the world of change and history,
and there learns the management of events, ideas, and himself. Though
based on wide and scholarly study of history, the work is not a
historical novel, and the “history” is full of irony and humour, of
conscious modernization. Mann’s concern is to provide a myth for his own
times, capable of sustaining and directing his generation and of
restoring a belief in the power of humane reason.
Mann took time off from this work to write, in the same spirit, his
Lotte in Weimar (U.S. title, The Beloved Returns). Lotte Kestner, the
heroine of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, his
semi-autobiographical story of unrequited love and romantic despair,
visits Weimar in old age to see once again her old lover, now famous,
and win some acknowledgment from him. But Goethe remains distant and
refuses to reenter the past; she learns from him that true reverence for
man means also acceptance of and reverence for change, intelligent
activity directed to the “demand of the day.” In this, as in the Joseph
novels, in settings so distant from his own time, Mann was seeking to
define the essential principles of humane civilization; their spacious
and often humorous serenity of tone implicitly challenges the inhuman
irrationalism of the Nazis.
In Doktor Faustus, begun in 1943 at the darkest period of the war,
Mann wrote the most directly political of his novels. It is the life
story of a German composer, Adrian Leverkühn, born in 1885, who dies in
1940 after 10 years of mental alienation. A solitary, estranged figure,
he “speaks” the experience of his times in his music, and the story of
Leverkühn’s compositions is that of German culture in the two decades
before 1930—more specifically of the collapse of traditional humanism
and the victory of the mixture of sophisticated nihilism and barbaric
primitivism that undermine it. With imaginative insight Mann interpreted
the new musical forms and themes of Leverkühn’s compositions up to the
final work, a setting of the lament of Doctor Faustus in the
16th-century version of the Faust legend, who once, in hope, had made a
pact with the Devil, but in the end is reduced to hopelessness. The one
gleam of hope in this sombre work, however, in which the personal
tragedy of Leverkühn is subtly related to Germany’s destruction in the
war through the comments of the fictitious narrator, Zeitblom, lies in
its very grief.
The composition of the novel was fully documented by Mann in 1949 in
The Genesis of a Novel. Doktor Faustus exhausted him as no other work of
his had done, and The Holy Sinner and The Black Swan, published in 1951
and 1953, respectively, show a relaxation of intensity in spite of their
accomplished, even virtuoso style. Mann rounded off his imaginative work
in 1954 with The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, the light,
often uproariously funny story of a confidence man who wins the favour
and love of others by enacting the roles they desire of him.
Mann’s style is finely wrought and full of resources, enriched by
humour, irony, and parody; his composition is subtle and many-layered,
brilliantly realistic on one level and yet reaching to deeper levels of
symbolism. His works lack simplicity, and his tendency to set his
characters at a distance by his own ironical view of them has sometimes
laid him open to the charge of lack of heart. He was, however, aware
that simplicity and sentiment lend themselves to manipulation by
ideological and political powers, and the sometimes elaborate
sophistication of his works cannot hide from the discerning reader his
underlying impassioned and tender solicitude for mankind.
Assessment
Mann was the greatest German novelist of the 20th century, and by the
end of his life his works had acquired the status of classics both
within and without Germany. His subtly structured novels and shorter
stories constitute a persistent and imaginative enquiry into the nature
of Western bourgeois culture, in which a haunting awareness of its
precariousness and threatened disintegration is balanced by an
appreciation of and tender concern for its spiritual achievements. Round
this central theme cluster a group of related problems that recur in
different forms—the relation of thought to reality and of the artist to
society, the complexity of reality and of time, the seductions of
spirituality, eros, and death. Mann’s imaginative and practical
involvement in the social and political catastrophes of his time
provided him with fresh insights that make his work rich and varied. His
finely wrought essays, notably those on Tolstoy, Goethe, Freud, and
Nietzsche, record the intellectual struggles through which he reached
the ethical commitment that shapes the major imaginative works.
Roy Pascal
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Arthur
Schopenhauer
"Essays"

German philosopher
born Feb. 22, 1788, Danzig, Prussia
[now Gdańsk, Pol.]
died Sept. 21, 1860, Frankfurt am Main
Main
German philosopher, often called the
“philosopher of pessimism,” who was
primarily important as the exponent of a
metaphysical doctrine of the will in
immediate reaction against Hegelian
idealism. His writings influenced later
existential philosophy and Freudian
psychology.
Early life and education.
Schopenhauer was the son of a wealthy
merchant, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer,
and his wife, Johanna, who later became
famous for her novels, essays, and
travelogues. In 1793, when Danzig came
under Prussian sovereignty, they moved
to the free city of Hamburg. Arthur
enjoyed a gentlemanly private education.
He then attended a private business
school, where he became acquainted with
the spirit of the Enlightenment and was
exposed to a Pietistic attitude
sensitive to the plight of man. In 1803
he accompanied his parents for a year on
an extensive journey through Belgium,
England, France, Switzerland, and
Austria.
The sudden death of his father in April
1805 precipitated a decisive change in
his life. His mother and his young
sister Adele moved to Weimar, where his
mother succeeded in joining the social
circle of the poets J.W. von Goethe and
Christoph Martin Wieland (often called
the German Voltaire). Arthur himself had
to remain in Hamburg for more than a
year, yet with more freedom to engage in
the arts and sciences. In May 1807 he
was finally able to leave Hamburg.
During the next two years, spent in
Gotha and Weimar, he acquired the
necessary academic preparation for
attendance at a university.
In the fall of 1809 he matriculated as a
student of medicine at the University of
Göttingen and mainly attended lectures
on the natural sciences. As early as his
second semester, however, he transferred
to the humanities, concentrating first
on the study of Plato and Immanuel Kant.
From 1811 to 1813 he attended the
University of Berlin (where he heard
such philosophers as J.G. Fichte and
Friedrich Schleiermacher, with little
appreciation); and in Rudolstadt, during
the summer of 1813, he finished his
dissertation, which earned him the
doctor of philosophy degree from the
University of Jena.
Active maturity.
The following winter (1813–14) he spent
in Weimar, in intimate association with
Goethe, with whom he discussed various
philosophical topics. In that same
winter the Orientalist Friedrich Majer,
a disciple of Johann Gottfried Herder,
introduced him to the teachings of
Indian antiquity—the philosophy of
Vedānta and the mysticism of the Vedas
(Hindu scriptures). Later, Schopenhauer
considered that the Upaniṣads
(philosophic Vedas), together with Plato
and Kant, constituted the foundation on
which he erected his own philosophical
system.
In May 1814 he left his beloved Weimar
after a quarrel with his mother over her
frivolous way of life, of which he
disapproved. He then lived in Dresden
until 1818, associating occasionally
with a group of writers for the
Dresdener Abendzeitung (“Dresden Evening
Newspaper”). Schopenhauer finished his
trea tise Über das Sehn und die Farben
(1816; “On Vision and Colours”),
supporting Goethe against Isaac Newton.
His next three years were dedicated
exclusively to the preparation and
composition of his main work, Die Welt
als Wille und Vorstellung (1819; The
World as Will and Idea). The fundamental
idea of this work—which is condensed
into a short formula in the title
itself—is developed in four books
composed of two comprehensive series of
reflections that include successively
the theory of knowledge and the
philosophy of nature, aesthetics, and
ethics.
The first book begins with Kant. The
world is my representation, says
Schopenhauer. It is only comprehensible
with the aid of the constructs of man’s
intellect—space, time, and causality.
But these constructs show the world only
as appearance, as a multiplicity of
things next to and following one
another—not as the thing in itself,
which Kant considered to be unknowable.
The second book advances to a
consideration of the essences of the
concepts presented. Of all the things in
the world, only one is presented to a
person in two ways: he knows himself
externally as body or as appearance, and
he knows himself internally as part of
the primary essence of all things, as
will. The will is the thing in itself;
it is unitary, unfathomable,
unchangeable, beyond space and time,
without causes and purposes. In the
world of appearances, it is reflected in
an ascending series of realizations.
From the blind impulses in the forces of
inorganic nature, through organic nature
(plants and animals) to the rationally
guided actions of men, an enormous chain
of restless desires, agitations, and
drives stretch forth—a continual
struggle of the higher forms against the
lower, an eternally aimless and
insatiable striving, inseparably united
with misery and misfortune. At the end,
however, stands death, the great reproof
that the will-to-live receives, posing
the question to each single person: Have
you had enough?
Whereas the first two books present the
will in an affirmative mode, the last
two, dealing with aesthetics and ethics,
surpass them by pointing to the negation
of the will as a possible liberation.
Evoking as their leading figures the
genius and the saint, who illustrate
this negation, these books present the
“pessimistic” world view that values
nonbeing more highly than being. The
arts summon man to a will-less way of
viewing things, in which the play of the
passions ceases. To the succession of
levels achieved by the realizations of
the will corresponds a gradation of
levels in the arts, from the lowest—the
art of building (architecture)—through
the art of poetry to the highest of
arts—music. But the arts liberate a
person only momentarily from the service
of the will. A genuine liberation
results only from breaking through the
bounds of individuality imposed by the
ego. Whoever feels acts of compassion,
selflessness, and human kindness and
feels the suffering of other beings as
his own is on the way to the abnegation
of the will to life, achieved by the
saints of all peoples and times in
asceticism. Schopenhauer’s anthropology
and sociology do not, in the manner of
Hegel, commence with the state or with
the community; they focus upon
man—patient, suffering man who toils by
himself—and show him certain
possibilities of standing his ground and
of living together with others.
The book marked the summit of
Schopenhauer’s thought. In the many
years thereafter, no further development
of his philosophy occurred, no inner
struggles or changes, no critical
reorganization of basic thoughts. From
then onward, his work consisted merely
of more detailed exposition,
clarification, and affirmation.
In March 1820, after a lengthy first
tour of Italy and a triumphant dispute
with Hegel, he qualified to lecture at
the University of Berlin. Though he
remained a member of the university for
24 semesters, only his first lecture was
actually held; for he had scheduled (and
continued to schedule) his lectures at
the same hour when Hegel lectured to a
large and ever-growing audience.
Clearly, he could not successfully
challenge a persistently advancing
philosophy. Even his book received scant
attention. For a second time
Schopenhauer went on a year-long trip to
Italy, and this was followed by a year
of illness in Munich. In May 1825 he
made one last attempt in Berlin, but in
vain. He now occupied himself with
secondary works, primarily translations.
Scholarly retirement in Frankfurt.
During his remaining 28 years, he lived
in Frankfurt, which he felt to be free
from the threat of cholera, and left the
city only for brief interludes. He had
finally renounced his career as a
university professor and lived
henceforth as a recluse, totally
absorbed in his studies (especially in
the natural sciences) and his writings.
His life now took on the shape that
posterity first came to know: the
measured uniformity of the days; the
strict, ascetic lifestyle modeled after
Kant; the old-fashioned attire; the
tendency to gesticulative soliloquy.
His leisure, though, was not idle. In
1836, after 19 years of “silent
indignation,” he published his short
treatise Über den Willen in der Natur
(On the Will in Nature), which
skillfully employed the queries and
findings of the rapidly expanding
natural sciences in support of his
theory of the will. The preface for the
first time openly expressed his
devastating verdict on the “charlatan”
Hegel and his clique. He also published
essays.
The second edition of The World as Will
and Idea (1844) included an additional
volume but failed to break what he
called “the resistance of a dull world.”
The little weight that Schopenhauer’s
name carried became evident when three
publishers rejected his latest work.
Finally, a rather obscure Berlin
bookseller accepted the manuscript
without remuneration. In this book,
which brought the beginning of worldwide
recognition, Schopenhauer turned to
significant topics hitherto not treated
individually within the framework of his
writings: the work of six years yielded
the essays and comments compiled in two
volumes under the title Parerga und
Paralipomena (1851). The Parerga (“Minor
Works”) include fragments concerning the
history of philosophy; the famous
treatise “Über die
Universitäts-Philosophie”; the
enigmatically profound “Transzendente
Spekulation über die anscheinende
Absichtlichkeit im Schicksale des
Einzelnen” (“Transcendent Speculation on
the Apparent Premeditation in Personal
Fate”); the “Versuch über das
Geistersehn und was damit zusammenhängt”
(“Essay on Ghost-seeing and Its Related
Aspects”)—the first investigation,
classification, and critical reflection
concerning parapsychology; and the
“Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit”
(“Aphorisms on Practical Wisdom”), a
serene and brilliant account garnered
from his long life. The Paralipomena
(“Remnants”), or as Schopenhauer called
them “separate, yet systematically
ordered thoughts on various subjects,”
included essays on writing and style, on
women, on education, on noise and sound,
and on numerous other topics.
During the last years of his life, he
added the finishing touches to most of
his works. Even a third edition of The
World as Will and Idea, containing an
exultant preface, appeared in 1859 and,
in 1860, a second edition of his Ethics.
Soon after Schopenhauer’s sudden and
painless death, Julius Frauenstädt
published new and enlarged editions,
with many handwritten additions, of the
Parerga and Paralipomena (1862), On the
Fourfold Root (1864), the essay On the
Will in Nature (1867), the treatise on
colours (1870), and finally even a
fourth edition of his main work (1873).
Later that same year Frauenstädt
published the first complete edition of
his works in six volumes.
Influence.
During this time, the actual impact and
influence of Schopenhauer began to
spread. By turning away from spirit and
reason to the powers of intuition,
creativity, and the irrational, his
thought has affected—partly via
Nietzsche—the ideas and methods of
vitalism, of life philosophy, of
existential philosophy, and of
anthropology. Through his disciple
Julius Bahnsen and through Eduard von
Hartmann’s philosophy of the
unconscious, the connection to modern
psychology and to Sigmund Freud and his
school can be established. The
philosophy of history of Jacob
Burckhardt, a Swiss cultural historian,
also proceeds from Schopenhauer. Within
the German cultural realm,
Schopenhauer’s influence on music and
literature brings to mind such diverse
names as Richard Wagner, Hans Pfitzner,
Wilhelm Busch, Gerhart Hauptmann, Frank
Wedekind, and Thomas Mann. Since 1911
the Schopenhauer Society in Frankfurt am
Main has been dedicated to the study,
exposition, and dissemination of
Schopenhauer’s philosophy.
Arthur Hübscher
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Rainer
Maria Rilke
"Duino
Elegies"

original name René Maria Rilke
born Dec. 4, 1875, Prague, Bohemia,
Austria-Hungary [now in Czech Republic]
died Dec. 29, 1926, Valmont, Switz.
Austro-German poet who became
internationally famous with such works
as Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus.
Early life.
Rilke was the only son of a
not-too-happy marriage. His father,
Josef, a civil servant, was a man
frustrated in his career; his mother,
the daughter of an upper-middle-class
merchant and imperial councillor, was a
difficult woman, who felt that she had
married beneath her. She left her
husband in 1884 and moved to Vienna so
as to be close to the imperial court.
Rilke’s education was ill planned and
fragmentary. It had been decided that he
was to become an officer to assure him
the social standing barred to his
father. Consequently, after some years
at a rather select school run by the
Piarist brothers of Prague, he was
enrolled in the military lower
Realschule of Sankt Pölten (Austria) and
four years later entered the military
upper Realschule at
Mährisch-Weisskirchen (Bohemia). These
two schools were completely at variance
with the needs of this highly sensitive
boy, and he finally was forced to leave
the school prematurely because of poor
health. In later life he called these
years a time of merciless affliction, a
“primer of horror.” After another futile
year spent at the Academy of Business
Administration at Linz (1891–92), Rilke,
with the energetic help of a paternal
uncle, was able to straighten out his
misguided educational career. In the
summer of 1895, he completed the course
of studies at the German Gymnasium (a
school designed to prepare for the
university) of the Prague suburb of
Neustadt.
By the time he left school, Rilke had
already published a volume of poetry
(1894), and he had no doubt that he
would pursue a literary career.
Matriculating at Prague’s Charles
University in 1895, he enrolled in
courses in German literature and art
history and, to appease his family, read
one semester of law. But he could not
become really involved in his studies,
and so in 1896 he left school and went
to Munich, a city whose artistic and
cosmopolitan atmosphere held a strong
appeal. Thus began his mature life, of
the restless travels of a man driven by
inner needs, and of the artist who
managed to persuade others of the
validity of his vision. The European
continent in all its breadth and
variety—Russia, France, Spain, Austria,
Switzerland, and Italy—was to be the
physical setting of that life.
Maturity.
In May 1897 Rilke met Lou
Andreas-Salomé, who shortly became his
mistress. Lou, 36 years of age, was from
St. Petersburg, the daughter of a
Russian general and a German mother. In
her youth she had been wooed by, and
refused, the philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche; 10 years before her meeting
with Rilke she had married a German
professor. Rilke’s affair with Lou was a
turning point in his life. More than
mistress, she was surrogate mother, the
leading influence in his éducation
sentimentale, and, above all, the person
who introduced Russia to him. Even after
their affair ended, Lou remained his
close friend and confidante. In late
1897 he followed her to Berlin to take
part in her life as far as possible.
Russia was a milestone in Rilke’s
life. It was the first and most incisive
of a series of “elective homelands,”
leaving a deeper mark than any of his
subsequent discoveries, with the
possible exception of Paris. He and Lou
visited Russia first in the spring of
1899 and then in the summer of 1900.
There he found an external reality that
he saw as the ideal symbol of his
feelings, his inner reality. Russia for
him was imbued with an amorphous,
elemental, almost religiously moving
quality—a harmonious, powerful
constellation of “God,” “human
community,” and “nature”—the
distillation of the “cosmic” spirit of
being.
Russia evoked in him a poetic
response that he later said marked the
true beginning of his serious work: a
long three-part cycle of poems written
between 1899 and 1903, Das Stunden-Buch
(1905). Here the poetic “I” presents
himself to the reader in the guise of a
young monk who circles his god with
swarms of prayers, a god conceived as
the incarnation of “life,” as the
numinous quality of the innerworldly
diversity of “things.” The language and
motifs of the work are largely those of
Europe of the 1890s: Art Nouveau, moods
inspired by the dramas of Henrik Ibsen
and Maurice Maeterlinck, the enthusiasm
for art of John Ruskin and Walter Pater,
and, above all, the emphasis on “life”
of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Yet, the
self-celebratory fervour of these
devotional exercises, with their
rhythmic, suggestive power and flowing
musicality, contained a completely new
element. In them, a poet of unique
stature had found his voice.
Soon after his second trip to Russia,
Rilke joined the artists’ colony of
Worpswede, near Bremen, where he hoped
to settle down among congenial artists
experimenting with developing a new
life-style. In April 1901 he married
Clara Westhoff, a young sculptor from
Bremen who had studied with Auguste
Rodin. The couple set up housekeeping in
a farm cottage in nearby Westerwede.
There Rilke worked on the second part of
the Stunden-Buch and also wrote a book
about the Worpswede colony. In December
1901 Clara gave birth to a daughter, and
soon afterward the two decided on a
friendly separation so as to be free to
pursue their separate careers.
Rilke was commissioned by a German
publisher to write a book about Rodin
and went to Paris, where the sculptor
lived, in 1902. For the next 12 years
Paris was the geographic centre of
Rilke’s life. He frequently left the
city for visits to other cities and
countries, beginning in the spring of
1903, when, to recover from what seemed
to him the indifferent life of Paris, he
went to Viareggio, Italy. There he wrote
the third part of the Stunden-Buch. He
also worked in Rome (1903–04), in Sweden
(1904), and repeatedly in Capri
(1906–08); he travelled to the south of
France, Spain, Tunisia, and Egypt and
frequently visited friends in Germany
and Austria. Yet Paris was his second
elective home, no less important than
Russia, for both its historic, human,
“scenic” qualities and its intellectual
challenge.
Rilke’s Paris was not the belle
époque capital steeped in luxury and
eroticism; it was a city of abysmal,
dehumanizing misery, of the faceless and
the dispossessed, and of the aged, sick,
and dying. It was the capital of fear,
poverty, and death. His preoccupation
with these phenomena combined with a
second one: his growing awareness of new
approaches to art and creativity, an
awareness gained through his association
with Rodin. Their friendship lasted
until the spring of 1906. Rodin taught
him his personal art ethic of
unremitting work, which stood in sharp
contrast to the traditional idea of
artistic inspiration. Rodin’s method was
one of dedication to detail and nuance
and of unswerving search for “form” in
the sense of concentration and
objectivization. Rodin also gave Rilke
new insight into the treasures of the
Louvre, the Cathedral of Chartres, and
the forms and shapes of Paris. Of the
literary models, the poet Charles
Baudelaire impressed him the most.
During those Paris years Rilke
developed a new style of lyrical poetry,
the so-called Ding-Gedicht (“object
poem”), which attempts to capture the
plastic essence of a physical object.
Some of the most successful of these
poems are imaginative verbal
translations of certain works of the
visual arts. Other poems deal with
landscapes, portraits, and biblical and
mythological themes as a painter would
depict them. These Neue Gedichte
(1907–08) represented a departure from
traditional German lyric poetry. Rilke
forced his language to such extremes of
subtlety and refinement that it may be
characterized as a distinct art among
other arts and a language distinct from
existing languages. The worldly elegance
of these poems cannot obscure their
inherent emotional and moral engagement.
When Rilke, in letters about Paul
Cézanne written in the autumn of 1907,
defines the painter’s method as a “using
up of love in anonymous labour,” he
doubtless was also speaking of himself.
In a letter to Lou Salomé written in
July 1903, he had defined his method
with this formulation: “making objects
out of fear.”
Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids
Brigge (1910; The Notebook of Malte
Laurids Brigge, 1930), on which he began
work in Rome in 1904, is a prose
counterpart to the Neue Gedichte. That
which hovered in the background in the
poems, behind the perfection of style,
is in the foreground of the prose work:
the subjective, personal problems of the
lonely occupant of a Paris hotel room,
the “fear” that is the inspiration for
the creation of “the objects.” If the
poems seem like a glorious affirmation
of the Symbolists’ idea of “pure
poetry,” the Aufzeichnungen reads like a
brilliant early example of
Existentialist writing. It is an
artfully assembled suite of descriptive,
reminiscent, and meditative parts,
supposedly written by Malte, a young
Danish expatriate in Paris who refuses
to abide by the traditional chronology
of narrative exposition but, instead,
presents his themes as “simultaneous”
occurrences set against a background of
an all-encompassing “spatial time.” Here
are found all of Rilke’s major themes:
love, death, the fears of childhood, the
idolization of woman, and, finally, the
matter of “God,” which is treated simply
as a “tendency of the heart.” The work
must be seen as the description of the
disintegration of a soul—but a
disintegration not devoid of a dialectic
mental reservation: “Only a step,”
writes Malte, “and my deepest misery
could turn into bliss.”
The price Rilke paid for these
masterpieces was a writing block and
depression so severe that it led him to
toy with the idea of giving up writing.
Aside from a short poetry cycle, Das
Marienleben (1913), he did not publish
anything for 13 years. The first works
in which he transcended even his Neue
Gedichte were written early in 1912—two
long poems in the style of elegies. He
did not undertake their immediate
publication, however, because they
promised to become part of a new cycle.
He wrote these two poems while staying
at Duino Castle, near Trieste.
At the outbreak of World War I Rilke
was in Munich, where he decided to
remain, spending most of the war there.
In December 1915 he was called up for
military service with the Austrian army
at Vienna, but by June 1916 he had
returned to civilian life. The social
climate of these years was inimical to
his way of life and to his poetry, and
when the war ended he felt almost
completely paralyzed. He had only one
relatively productive phase: the fall of
1915, when, in addition to a series of
new poems, he wrote the “Fourth Duino
Elegy.”
Late life.
Rilke spent the next seven years in
Switzerland, the last of his series of
elective homes. He once more came into
full command of his creative gifts. In
the summer of 1921 he took up residence
at the Château de Muzot, a castle in the
Rhône Valley, as the guest of a Swiss
patron. In February 1922, within the
space of a few days of obsessive
productivity, he completed the Duino
cycle begun years earlier and,
unexpectedly and almost effortlessly,
another superb cycle of 55 poems, in
mood and theme closely related to the
Elegies—his Sonette an Orpheus (Sonnets
to Orpheus).
The Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies)
are the culmination of the development
of Rilke’s poetry. That which in the
Stunden-Buch had begun as a naively
uncertain celebration of “life,” as a
devotional exercise of mystical worship
of God, and which in Malte led him to
assert that “this life suspended over an
abyss is in fact impossible” in the
Elegies sounds an affirmative note, in
panegyric justification of life as an
entity: “The affirmation of life and
death prove to be identical in the
Elegies,” wrote Rilke in 1925. These
poems can be seen as a new myth that
reflects the condition of “modern” man,
the condition of an emancipated,
“disinherited” consciousness maintaining
itself as a counterpart to the
traditional cosmic image of
Christianity. Like Nietzsche, Rilke
opposes the Christian dualism of
immanence and transcendence. Instead, he
speaks out for an emphatic monism of the
“cosmic inner space,” gathering life and
death, earth and space, and all
dimensions of time into one
all-encompassing unity. This Rilkean
myth is articulated in an image-laden
cosmology that, analogous to medieval
models, sees all of reality—from animal
to “angel”—as a hierarchical order. This
cosmology in turn results in a
systematic, consistent doctrine of life
and being in which man is assigned the
task of transforming everything that is
visible into the invisible through the
power of his sensory perceptions: “We
are the bees of the invisible.” And this
ultimate fate of man is concretized in
the activity that alternately is called
“saying,” “singing,” “extolling,” or
“praising.” Thus the poet is turned into
the protagonist of humanity, its
representative “before the Angel” (the
pseudonym of God), as in the “Ninth
Elegy,” and even more strikingly in the
Sonnets to Orpheus. This message of the
late Rilke has been celebrated by some
as a new religion of “life” and rejected
by others as the expression of an
unbridled aestheticism and an attempt on
the part of the poet at
“self-redemption” by virtue of his
personal gift.
The triumphant breakthrough of
February 1922 was Rilke’s last major
contribution, yet both thematically and
stylistically some of his late poems go
beyond even the Elegies and the Sonnets
in their experimentation with forms that
no longer seem at all related to the
nature of the poetic language of the
1920s. In addition to these late works
he also wrote a number of simple, almost
songlike poems, some short cycles, and
four collections in French, in which he
pays homage to the landscape of Valais.
Muzot remained his home, but he
continued his travels, mostly within
Switzerland, devoting himself to his
friends and his vast, superbly
articulate correspondence. Early in 1925
he again went to Paris, with whose
literary life he had remained in close
touch. He was royally received by such
old friends as André Gide and Paul
Valéry as well as by new admirers; for
the first and only time in his life he
was at the centre of a literary season
in a European metropolis. But the strain
of this visit proved too much for his
frail health. On August 18, unannounced,
he slipped out of Paris. He had been ill
since 1923, but the cause of his
debility, a rare form of incurable
leukemia, was not diagnosed until a few
weeks before his death in 1926. He died
at a sanatorium above Territet, on Lake
Geneva.
Hans Egon Holthusen
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Hermann
Hesse
"Siddhartha"

German writer
born July 2, 1877, Calw, Ger.
died Aug. 9, 1962, Montagnola, Switz.
Main
German novelist, poet, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1946, whose main theme deals with man’s breaking out of the established
modes of civilization to find his essential spirit. With his appeal for
self-realization and his celebration of Eastern mysticism, Hesse
posthumously became a cult figure to young people in the
English-speaking world.
At the behest of his father, Hesse entered the Maulbronn seminary.
Though a model student, he was unable to adapt, so he was apprenticed in
a Calw tower-clock factory and later in a Tübingen bookstore. His
disgust with conventional schooling was expressed in the novel Unterm
Rad (1906; Beneath the Wheel), in which an overly diligent student is
driven to self-destruction.
Hesse remained in the bookselling business until 1904, when he became
a free-lance writer and brought out his first novel, Peter Camenzind,
about a failed and dissipated writer. The inward and outward search of
the artist is further explored in Gertrud (1910) and Rosshalde (1914). A
visit to India in these years was later reflected in Siddhartha (1922),
a lyric novel based on the early life of Buddha.
During World War I, Hesse lived in neutral Switzerland, wrote
denunciations of militarism and nationalism, and edited a journal for
German war prisoners and internees. He became a permanent resident of
Switzerland in 1919 and a citizen in 1923, settling in Montagnola.
A deepening sense of personal crisis led Hesse to psychoanalysis with
J.B. Lang, a disciple of Carl Gustav Jung. The influence of analysis
appears in Demian (1919), an examination of the achievement of
self-awareness by a troubled adolescent. This novel had a pervasive
effect on a troubled Germany and made its author famous. Hesse’s later
work shows his interest in Jungian concepts of introversion and
extroversion, the collective unconscious, idealism, and symbols. The
duality of man’s nature preoccupied Hesse throughout the rest of his
career.
Der Steppenwolf (1927; Steppenwolf ) describes the conflict between
bourgeois acceptance and spiritual self-realization in a middle-aged
man. In Narziss und Goldmund (1930; Narcissus and Goldmund), an
intellectual ascetic who is content with established religious faith is
contrasted with an artistic sensualist pursuing his own form of
salvation. In his last and longest novel, Das Glasperlenspiel (1943;
English titles The Glass Bead Game, or Magister Ludi), Hesse again
explores the dualism of the contemplative and the active life, this time
through the figure of a supremely gifted intellectual.
Additional Reading
Soul of the Age, ed. by Theodore Ziolkowski (1991), contains an
extensive selection of Hesse’s letters in translation. Biography and
criticism may be found in G.W. Field, Hermann Hesse (1970); Joseph
Mileck, Hermann Hesse: Biography and Bibliography, 2 vol. (1977),
Hermann Hesse: Life and Art (1978); and Ralph Freedman, Hermann Hesse,
Pilgrim of Crisis: A Biography (1978, reissued 1997).
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APPENDIX
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Friedrich de
la Motte Fouqué
"Undine"
born Feb. 12,
1777, Brandenburg
died Jan. 23, 1843, Berlin
German novelist and playwright remembered
chiefly as the author of the popular fairy tale
Undine (1811).
Fouqué was a
descendant of French aristocrats, an eager
reader of English and Scandinavian literature
and Greek and Norse myths, and a military
officer. He became a serious writer after he met
scholar and critic August Wilhelm Schlegel. In
his writings Fouqué expressed heroic ideals of
chivalry designed to arouse a sense of German
tradition and national character in his
contemporaries during the Napoleonic era. His
ideas, based on the view of linguistic
development first conceived by the philosopher
J.G. Fichte, stressed the influence of the
mother tongue in shaping the mind.
A prolific
writer, Fouqué gathered much of his material
from Scandinavian sagas and myths. His dramatic
trilogy, Der Held des Nordens (1808–10; “Hero of
the North”), is the first modern dramatic
treatment of the Nibelung story and a precedent
for the later dramas of Friedrich Hebbel and the
operas of Richard Wagner. His most lasting
success, however, has been the story of Undine,
a water sprite who marries the knight Hildebrand
to acquire a soul and thus become human but who
later loses this love to the treacheries of her
uncle Kuhleborn and the lady Berthulda. Although
Fouqué’s works were at first enthusiastically
received, after 1820 they rapidly passed out of
fashion. Fouqué died in poverty after belated
recognition by Frederick William IV.
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Gustav Theodor Fechner

born April 19, 1801, Gross Särchen, near Muskau, Lusatia
[Germany]
died Nov. 18, 1887, Leipzig, Ger.
German physicist and philosopher who was a key figure in the
founding of psychophysics, the science concerned with
quantitative relations between sensations and the stimuli
producing them.
Although he was educated in biological science, Fechner
turned to mathematics and physics. In 1834 he was appointed
professor of physics at the University of Leipzig. His health
broke down several years later; his partial blindness and
painful sensitivity to light in all likelihood developed as a
result of his gazing at the Sun during the study of visual
afterimages (1839–40).
Pensioned modestly by the university in 1844, he began
delving more deeply into philosophy and conceived of a highly
animistic universe with God as its soul. He discussed his idea
of a universal consciousness at length in a work containing his
plan of psychophysics, Zend-Avesta: oder über die Dinge des
Himmels und des Jenseits (1851; Zend-Avesta: On the Things of
Heaven and the Hereafter).
Fechner’s Elemente der Psychophysik, 2 vol. (1860; Elements
of Psychophysics), established his lasting importance in
psychology. In this work he postulated that mind and body,
though appearing to be separate entities, are actually different
sides of one reality. He also developed experimental procedures,
still useful in experimental psychology, for measuring
sensations in relation to the physical magnitude of stimuli.
Most important, he devised an equation to express the theory of
the just-noticeable difference, advanced earlier by Ernst
Heinrich Weber. This theory concerns the sensory ability to
discriminate when two stimuli (e.g., two weights) are just
noticeably different from each other. Later research has shown,
however, that Fechner’s equation is applicable within the
midrange of stimulus intensity and then holds only approximately
true.
From about 1865 he delved into experimental aesthetics and
sought to determine by actual measurements which shapes and
dimensions are most aesthetically pleasing.
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Ludwig Feuerbach

born July 28, 1804, Landshut, Bavaria [now in Germany]
died Sept. 13, 1872, Rechenberg, Ger.
German philosopher and moralist remembered for his influence
on Karl Marx and for his humanistic theologizing.
The fourth son of the eminent jurist Paul von Feuerbach,
Ludwig Feuerbach abandoned theological studies to become a
student of philosophy under G.W.F. Hegel for two years at
Berlin. In 1828 he went to Erlangen to study natural
science, and two years later his first book, Gedanken über
Tod und Unsterblichkeit (“Thoughts on Death and
Immortality”), was published anonymously. In this work
Feuerbach attacked the concept of personal immortality and
proposed a type of immortality by which human qualities are
reabsorbed into nature. His Abälard und Heloise (1834) and
Pierre Bayle (1838) were followed by Über Philosophie und
Christentum (1839; “On Philosophy and Christianity”), in
which he claimed “that Christianity has in fact long
vanished not only from the reason but from the life of
mankind, that it is nothing more than a fixed idea.”
Continuing this view in his most important work, Das Wesen
des Christentums (1841; The Essence of Christianity),
Feuerbach posited the notion that man is to himself his own
object of thought and religion nothing more than a
consciousness of the infinite. The result of this view is
the notion that God is merely the outward projection of
man’s inward nature. In the first part of his book, which
strongly influenced Marx, Feuerbach analyzed the “true or
anthropological essence of religion.” Discussing God’s
aspects “as a being of the understanding,” “as a moral being
or law,” “as love,” and others, he argued that they
correspond to different needs in human nature. In the second
section he analyzed the “false or theological essence of
religion,” contending that the view that God has an
existence independent of human existence leads to a belief
in revelation and sacraments, which are items of an
undesirable religious materialism.
Although Feuerbach denied that he was an atheist, he
nevertheless contended that the God of Christianity is an
illusion. As he expanded his discussion to other
disciplines, including philosophy, he came to see Hegel’s
principles as quasi-religious and embraced instead a form of
materialism that Marx subsequently criticized in his Thesen
über Feuerbach (written 1845). Attacking religious orthodoxy
during the politically turbulent years of 1848–49, Feuerbach
was seen as a hero by many of the revolutionaries. His
influence was greatest on such anti-Christian publicists as
David Friedrich Strauss, author of the skeptical Das Leben
Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (1835–36; The Life of Jesus
Critically Examined), and Bruno Bauer, who, like Feuerbach,
had abandoned Hegelianism for naturalism. Some of
Feuerbach’s views were later endorsed by extremists in the
struggle between church and state in Germany and by those
who, like Marx, led the revolt of labour against capitalism.
Among his other works are Theogonie (1857) and Gottheit,
Freiheit, und Unsterblichkeit (1866; “God, Freedom, and
Immortality”).
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Rudolf Hermann Lotze

born May 21, 1817, Bautzen, Saxony [Germany]
died July 1, 1881, Berlin
German philosopher who bridged the gap between classical
German philosophy and 20th-century idealism and founded Theistic
Idealism.
While studying for doctorates in medicine and philosophy at
the University of Leipzig (1834–38), he began interpreting
physical processes as essentially mechanistic. After a short
medical practice, he concentrated his efforts on philosophy by
teaching at Leipzig (1842–44) and becoming professor of
philosophy at the universities of Göttingen (1844–80) and Berlin
(1881).
He first became known as a physiologist in his polemic
against vitalism. Although he regarded physical and psychic
sciences equally, he espoused a natural order to the creation of
the universe as determined by a supreme being. His religious
philosophy affected modern thought by emphasizing the problem of
delineating value from existence. The foundation for his
theories is documented in Logik (1843), Mikrokosmos, 3 vol.
(1856–64), and Metaphysik (1879).
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Karl Marx

German philosopher
in full Karl Heinrich Marx
born May 5, 1818, Trier, Rhine province, Prussia
[Germany]
died March 14, 1883, London
Main
revolutionary, sociologist, historian, and economist. He
published (with Friedrich Engels) Manifest der
Kommunistischen Partei (1848), commonly known as The
Communist Manifesto, the most celebrated pamphlet in the
history of the socialist movement. He also was the author of
the movement’s most important book, Das Kapital. These
writings and others by Marx and Engels form the basis of the
body of thought and belief known as Marxism.
See the articles socialism and Communism for full
treatment of those ideologies.
Early years
Karl Heinrich Marx was the oldest surviving boy of nine
children. His father, Heinrich, a successful lawyer, was a
man of the Enlightenment, devoted to Kant and Voltaire, who
took part in agitations for a constitution in Prussia. His
mother, born Henrietta Pressburg, was from Holland. Both
parents were Jewish and were descended from a long line of
rabbis, but, a year or so before Karl was born, his
father—probably because his professional career required
it—was baptized in the Evangelical Established Church. Karl
was baptized when he was six years old. Although as a youth
Karl was influenced less by religion than by the critical,
sometimes radical social policies of the Enlightenment, his
Jewish background exposed him to prejudice and
discrimination that may have led him to question the role of
religion in society and contributed to his desire for social
change.
Marx was educated from 1830 to 1835 at the high school in
Trier. Suspected of harbouring liberal teachers and pupils,
the school was under police surveillance. Marx’s writings
during this period exhibited a spirit of Christian devotion
and a longing for self-sacrifice on behalf of humanity. In
October 1835 he matriculated at the University of Bonn. The
courses he attended were exclusively in the humanities, in
such subjects as Greek and Roman mythology and the history
of art. He participated in customary student activities,
fought a duel, and spent a day in jail for being drunk and
disorderly. He presided at the Tavern Club, which was at
odds with the more aristocratic student associations, and
joined a poets’ club that included some political activists.
A politically rebellious student culture was, indeed, part
of life at Bonn. Many students had been arrested; some were
still being expelled in Marx’s time, particularly as a
result of an effort by students to disrupt a session of the
Federal Diet at Frankfurt. Marx, however, left Bonn after a
year and in October 1836 enrolled at the University of
Berlin to study law and philosophy.
Marx’s crucial experience at Berlin was his introduction
to Hegel’s philosophy, regnant there, and his adherence to
the Young Hegelians. At first he felt a repugnance toward
Hegel’s doctrines; when Marx fell sick it was partially, as
he wrote his father, “from intense vexation at having to
make an idol of a view I detested.” The Hegelian pressure in
the revolutionary student culture was powerful, however, and
Marx joined a society called the Doctor Club, whose members
were intensely involved in the new literary and
philosophical movement. Their chief figure was Bruno Bauer,
a young lecturer in theology, who was developing the idea
that the Christian Gospels were a record not of history but
of human fantasies arising from emotional needs and that
Jesus had not been a historical person. Marx enrolled in a
course of lectures given by Bauer on the prophet Isaiah.
Bauer taught that a new social catastrophe “more tremendous”
than that of the advent of Christianity was in the making.
The Young Hegelians began moving rapidly toward atheism and
also talked vaguely of political action.
The Prussian government, fearful of the subversion latent
in the Young Hegelians, soon undertook to drive them from
the universities. Bauer was dismissed from his post in 1839.
Marx’s “most intimate friend” of this period, Adolph
Rutenberg, an older journalist who had served a prison
sentence for his political radicalism, pressed for a deeper
social involvement. By 1841 the Young Hegelians had become
left republicans. Marx’s studies, meanwhile, were lagging.
Urged by his friends, he submitted a doctoral dissertation
to the university at Jena, which was known to be lax in its
academic requirements, and received his degree in April
1841. His thesis analyzed in a Hegelian fashion the
difference between the natural philosophies of Democritus
and Epicurus. More distinctively, it sounded a note of
Promethean defiance:
Philosophy makes no secret of it. Prometheus’ admission:
“In sooth all gods I hate,” is its own admission, its own
motto against all gods, . . . Prometheus is the noblest
saint and martyr in the calendar of philosophy.
In 1841 Marx, together with other Young Hegelians, was
much influenced by the publication of Das Wesen des
Christentums (1841; The Essence of Christianity) by Ludwig
Feuerbach. Its author, to Marx’s mind, successfully
criticized Hegel, an idealist who believed that matter or
existence was inferior to and dependent upon mind or spirit,
from the opposite, or materialist, standpoint, showing how
the “Absolute Spirit” was a projection of “the real man
standing on the foundation of nature.” Henceforth Marx’s
philosophical efforts were toward a combination of Hegel’s
dialectic—the idea that all things are in a continual
process of change resulting from the conflicts between their
contradictory aspects—with Feuerbach’s materialism, which
placed material conditions above ideas.
In January 1842 Marx began contributing to a newspaper
newly founded in Cologne, the Rheinische Zeitung. It was the
liberal democratic organ of a group of young merchants,
bankers, and industrialists; Cologne was the centre of the
most industrially advanced section of Prussia. To this stage
of Marx’s life belongs an essay on the freedom of the press.
Since he then took for granted the existence of absolute
moral standards and universal principles of ethics, he
condemned censorship as a moral evil that entailed spying
into people’s minds and hearts and assigned to weak and
malevolent mortals powers that presupposed an omniscient
mind. He believed that censorship could have only evil
consequences.
On Oct. 15, 1842, Marx became editor of the Rheinische
Zeitung. As such, he was obliged to write editorials on a
variety of social and economic issues, ranging from the
housing of the Berlin poor and the theft by peasants of wood
from the forests to the new phenomenon of communism. He
found Hegelian idealism of little use in these matters. At
the same time he was becoming estranged from his Hegelian
friends for whom shocking the bourgeois was a sufficient
mode of social activity. Marx, friendly at this time to the
“liberal-minded practical men” who were “struggling
step-by-step for freedom within constitutional limits,”
succeeded in trebling his newspaper’s circulation and making
it a leading journal in Prussia. Nevertheless, Prussian
authorities suspended it for being too outspoken, and Marx
agreed to coedit with the liberal Hegelian Arnold Ruge a new
review, the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher (“German-French
Yearbooks”), which was to be published in Paris.
First, however, in June 1843 Marx, after an engagement of
seven years, married Jenny von Westphalen. Jenny was an
attractive, intelligent, and much-admired woman, four years
older than Karl; she came of a family of military and
administrative distinction. Her half-brother later became a
highly reactionary Prussian minister of the interior. Her
father, a follower of the French socialist Saint-Simon, was
fond of Karl, though others in her family opposed the
marriage. Marx’s father also feared that Jenny was destined
to become a sacrifice to the demon that possessed his son.
Four months after their marriage, the young couple moved
to Paris, which was then the centre of socialist thought and
of the more extreme sects that went under the name of
communism. There, Marx first became a revolutionary and a
communist and began to associate with communist societies of
French and German workingmen. Their ideas were, in his view,
“utterly crude and unintelligent,” but their character moved
him: “The brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them,
but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us
from their work-hardened bodies,” he wrote in his so-called
“Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844”
(written in 1844; Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844 [1959]). (These manuscripts were not published for some
100 years, but they are influential because they show the
humanist background to Marx’s later historical and economic
theories.)
The “German-French Yearbooks” proved short-lived, but
through their publication Marx befriended Friedrich Engels,
a contributor who was to become his lifelong collaborator,
and in their pages appeared Marx’s article “Zur Kritik der
Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie” (“Toward the Critique of the
Hegelian Philosophy of Right”) with its oft-quoted assertion
that religion is the “opium of the people.” It was there,
too, that he first raised the call for an “uprising of the
proletariat” to realize the conceptions of philosophy. Once
more, however, the Prussian government intervened against
Marx. He was expelled from France and left for
Brussels—followed by Engels—in February 1845. That year in
Belgium he renounced his Prussian nationality.
Brussels period
The next two years in Brussels saw the deepening of Marx’s
collaboration with Engels. Engels had seen at firsthand in
Manchester, Eng., where a branch factory of his father’s
textile firm was located, all the depressing aspects of the
Industrial Revolution. He had also been a Young Hegelian and
had been converted to communism by Moses Hess, who was
called the “communist rabbi.” In England he associated with
the followers of Robert Owen. Now he and Marx, finding that
they shared the same views, combined their intellectual
resources and published Die heilige Familie (1845; The Holy
Family), a prolix criticism of the Hegelian idealism of the
theologian Bruno Bauer. Their next work, Die deutsche
Ideologie (written 1845–46, published 1932; The German
Ideology), contained the fullest exposition of their
important materialistic conception of history, which set out
to show how, historically, societies had been structured to
promote the interests of the economically dominant class.
But it found no publisher and remained unknown during its
authors’ lifetimes.
During his Brussels years, Marx developed his views and,
through confrontations with the chief leaders of the
working-class movement, established his intellectual
standing. In 1846 he publicly excoriated the German leader
Wilhelm Weitling for his moralistic appeals. Marx insisted
that the stage of bourgeois society could not be skipped
over; the proletariat could not just leap into communism;
the workers’ movement required a scientific basis, not
moralistic phrases. He also polemicized against the French
socialist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in Misère de la
philosophie (1847; The Poverty of Philosophy), a mordant
attack on Proudhon’s book subtitled Philosophie de la misère
(1846; The Philosophy of Poverty). Proudhon wanted to unite
the best features of such contraries as competition and
monopoly; he hoped to save the good features in economic
institutions while eliminating the bad. Marx, however,
declared that no equilibrium was possible between the
antagonisms in any given economic system. Social structures
were transient historic forms determined by the productive
forces: “The handmill gives you society with the feudal
lord; the steammill, society with the industrial
capitalist.” Proudhon’s mode of reasoning, Marx wrote, was
typical of the petty bourgeois, who failed to see the
underlying laws of history.
An unusual sequence of events led Marx and Engels to
write their pamphlet The Communist Manifesto. In June 1847 a
secret society, the League of the Just, composed mainly of
emigrant German handicraftsmen, met in London and decided to
formulate a political program. They sent a representative to
Marx to ask him to join the league; Marx overcame his doubts
and, with Engels, joined the organization, which thereupon
changed its name to the Communist League and enacted a
democratic constitution. Entrusted with the task of
composing their program, Marx and Engels worked from the
middle of December 1847 to the end of January 1848. The
London Communists were already impatiently threatening Marx
with disciplinary action when he sent them the manuscript;
they promptly adopted it as their manifesto. It enunciated
the proposition that all history had hitherto been a history
of class struggles, summarized in pithy form the materialist
conception of history worked out in The German Ideology, and
asserted that the forthcoming victory of the proletariat
would put an end to class society forever. It mercilessly
criticized all forms of socialism founded on philosophical
“cobwebs” such as “alienation.” It rejected the avenue of
“social Utopias,” small experiments in community, as
deadening the class struggle and therefore as being
“reactionary sects.” It set forth 10 immediate measures as
first steps toward communism, ranging from a progressive
income tax and the abolition of inheritances to free
education for all children. It closed with the words, “The
proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They
have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!”
Revolution suddenly erupted in Europe in the first months
of 1848, in France, Italy, and Austria. Marx had been
invited to Paris by a member of the provisional government
just in time to avoid expulsion by the Belgian government.
As the revolution gained in Austria and Germany, Marx
returned to the Rhineland. In Cologne he advocated a policy
of coalition between the working class and the democratic
bourgeoisie, opposing for this reason the nomination of
independent workers’ candidates for the Frankfurt Assembly
and arguing strenuously against the program for proletarian
revolution advocated by the leaders of the Workers’ Union.
He concurred in Engels’ judgment that The Communist
Manifesto should be shelved and the Communist League
disbanded. Marx pressed his policy through the pages of the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung, newly founded in June 1849, urging
a constitutional democracy and war with Russia. When the
more revolutionary leader of the Workers’ Union, Andreas
Gottschalk, was arrested, Marx supplanted him and organized
the first Rhineland Democratic Congress in August 1848. When
the king of Prussia dissolved the Prussian Assembly in
Berlin, Marx called for arms and men to help the resistance.
Bourgeois liberals withdrew their support from Marx’s
newspaper, and he himself was indicted on several charges,
including advocacy of the nonpayment of taxes. In his trial
he defended himself with the argument that the crown was
engaged in making an unlawful counterrevolution. The jury
acquitted him unanimously and with thanks. Nevertheless, as
the last hopeless fighting flared in Dresden and Baden, Marx
was ordered banished as an alien on May 16, 1849. The final
issue of his newspaper, printed in red, caused a great
sensation.
Early years in London
Expelled once more from Paris, Marx went to London in August
1849. It was to be his home for the rest of his life.
Chagrined by the failure of his own tactics of collaboration
with the liberal bourgeoisie, he rejoined the Communist
League in London and for about a year advocated a bolder
revolutionary policy. An “Address of the Central Committee
to the Communist League,” written with Engels in March 1850,
urged that in future revolutionary situations they struggle
to make the revolution “permanent” by avoiding subservience
to the bourgeois party and by setting up “their own
revolutionary workers’ governments” alongside any new
bourgeois one. Marx hoped that the economic crisis would
shortly lead to a revival of the revolutionary movement;
when this hope faded, he came into conflict once more with
those whom he called “the alchemists of the revolution,”
such as August von Willich, a communist who proposed to
hasten the advent of revolution by undertaking direct
revolutionary ventures. Such persons, Marx wrote in
September 1850, substitute “idealism for materialism” and
regard
pure will as the motive power of revolution instead of
actual conditions. While we say to the workers: “You have
got to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars
and national wars not merely in order to change your
conditions but in order to change yourselves and become
qualified for political power,” you on the contrary tell
them, “We must achieve power immediately.”
The militant faction in turn ridiculed Marx for being a
revolutionary who limited his activity to lectures on
political economy to the Communist Workers’ Educational
Union. The upshot was that Marx gradually stopped attending
meetings of the London Communists. In 1852 he devoted
himself intensely to working for the defense of 11
communists arrested and tried in Cologne on charges of
revolutionary conspiracy and wrote a pamphlet on their
behalf. The same year he also published, in a
German-American periodical, his essay “Der Achtzehnte
Brumaire des Louis Napoleon” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte), with its acute analysis of the formation
of a bureaucratic absolutist state with the support of the
peasant class. In other respects the next 12 years were, in
Marx’s words, years of “isolation” both for him and for
Engels in his Manchester factory.
From 1850 to 1864 Marx lived in material misery and
spiritual pain. His funds were gone, and except on one
occasion he could not bring himself to seek paid employment.
In March 1850 he and his wife and four small children were
evicted and their belongings seized. Several of his children
died—including a son Guido, “a sacrifice to bourgeois
misery,” and a daughter Franziska, for whom his wife rushed
about frantically trying to borrow money for a coffin. For
six years the family lived in two small rooms in Soho, often
subsisting on bread and potatoes. The children learned to
lie to the creditors: “Mr. Marx ain’t upstairs.” Once he had
to escape them by fleeing to Manchester. His wife suffered
breakdowns.
During all these years Engels loyally contributed to
Marx’s financial support. The sums were not large at first,
for Engels was only a clerk in the firm of Ermen and Engels
at Manchester. Later, however, in 1864, when he became a
partner, his subventions were generous. Marx was proud of
Engels’ friendship and would tolerate no criticism of him.
Bequests from the relatives of Marx’s wife and from Marx’s
friend Wilhelm Wolff also helped to alleviate their economic
distress.
Marx had one relatively steady source of earned income in
the United States. On the invitation of Charles A. Dana,
managing editor of The New York Tribune, he became in 1851
its European correspondent. The newspaper, edited by Horace
Greeley, had sympathies for Fourierism, a Utopian socialist
system developed by the French theorist Charles Fourier.
From 1851 to 1862 Marx contributed close to 500 articles and
editorials (Engels providing about a fourth of them). He
ranged over the whole political universe, analyzing social
movements and agitations from India and China to Britain and
Spain.
In 1859 Marx published his first book on economic theory,
Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy). In its preface he again
summarized his materialistic conception of history, his
theory that the course of history is dependent on economic
developments. At this time, however, Marx regarded his
studies in economic and social history at the British Museum
as his main task. He was busy producing the drafts of his
magnum opus, which was to be published later as Das Kapital.
Some of these drafts, including the Outlines and the
Theories of Surplus Value, are important in their own right
and were published after Marx’s death.
Role in the First International
Marx’s political isolation ended in 1864 with the founding
of the International Working Men’s Association. Although he
was neither its founder nor its head, he soon became its
leading spirit. Its first public meeting, called by English
trade union leaders and French workers’ representatives,
took place at St. Martin’s Hall in London on Sept. 28, 1864.
Marx, who had been invited through a French intermediary to
attend as a representative of the German workers, sat
silently on the platform. A committee was set up to produce
a program and a constitution for the new organization. After
various drafts had been submitted that were felt to be
unsatisfactory, Marx, serving on a subcommittee, drew upon
his immense journalistic experience. His “Address and the
Provisional Rules of the International Working Men’s
Association,” unlike his other writings, stressed the
positive achievements of the cooperative movement and of
parliamentary legislation; the gradual conquest of political
power would enable the British proletariat to extend these
achievements on a national scale.
As a member of the organization’s General Council, and
corresponding secretary for Germany, Marx was henceforth
assiduous in attendance at its meetings, which were
sometimes held several times a week. For several years he
showed a rare diplomatic tact in composing differences among
various parties, factions, and tendencies. The International
grew in prestige and membership, its numbers reaching
perhaps 800,000 in 1869. It was successful in several
interventions on behalf of European trade unions engaged in
struggles with employers.
In 1870, however, Marx was still unknown as a European
political personality; it was the Paris Commune that made
him into an international figure, “the best calumniated and
most menaced man of London,” as he wrote. When the
Franco-German War broke out in 1870, Marx and Engels
disagreed with followers in Germany who refused to vote in
the Reichstag in favour of the war. The General Council
declared that “on the German side the war was a war of
defence.” After the defeat of the French armies, however,
they felt that the German terms amounted to aggrandizement
at the expense of the French people. When an insurrection
broke out in Paris and the Paris Commune was proclaimed,
Marx gave it his unswerving support. On May 30, 1871, after
the Commune had been crushed, he hailed it in a famous
address entitled Civil War in France:
History has no comparable example of such greatness. . .
. Its martyrs are enshrined forever in the great heart of
the working class.
In Engels’ judgment, the Paris Commune was history’s
first example of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Marx’s name, as the leader of The First International and
author of the notorious Civil War, became synonymous
throughout Europe with the revolutionary spirit symbolized
by the Paris Commune.
The advent of the Commune, however, exacerbated the
antagonisms within the International Working Men’s
Association and thus brought about its downfall. English
trade unionists such as George Odger, former president of
the General Council, opposed Marx’s support of the Paris
Commune. The Reform Bill of 1867, which had enfranchised the
British working class, had opened vast opportunities for
political action by the trade unions. English labour leaders
found they could make many practical advances by cooperating
with the Liberal Party and, regarding Marx’s rhetoric as an
encumbrance, resented his charge that they had “sold
themselves” to the Liberals.
A left opposition also developed under the leadership of
the famed Russian revolutionary Mikhail Alexandrovich
Bakunin. A veteran of tsarist prisons and Siberian exile,
Bakunin could move men by his oratory, which one listener
compared to “a raging storm with lightning, flashes and
thunderclaps, and a roaring as of lions.” Bakunin admired
Marx’s intellect but could hardly forget that Marx had
published a report in 1848 charging him with being a Russian
agent. He felt that Marx was a German authoritarian and an
arrogant Jew who wanted to transform the General Council
into a personal dictatorship over the workers. He strongly
opposed several of Marx’s theories, especially Marx’s
support of the centralized structure of the International,
Marx’s view that the proletariat class should act as a
political party against prevailing parties but within the
existing parliamentary system, and Marx’s belief that the
proletariat, after it had overthrown the bourgeois state,
should establish its own regime. To Bakunin, the mission of
the revolutionary was destruction; he looked to the Russian
peasantry, with its propensities for violence and its
uncurbed revolutionary instincts, rather than to the effete,
civilized workers of the industrial countries. The students,
he hoped, would be the officers of the revolution. He
acquired followers, mostly young men, in Italy, Switzerland,
and France, and he organized a secret society, the
International Alliance of Social Democracy, which in 1869
challenged the hegemony of the General Council at the
congress in Basel, Switz. Marx, however, had already
succeeded in preventing its admission as an organized body
into the International.
To the Bakuninists, the Paris Commune was a model of
revolutionary direct action and a refutation of what they
considered to be Marx’s “authoritarian communism.” Bakunin
began organizing sections of the International for an attack
on the alleged dictatorship of Marx and the General Council.
Marx in reply publicized Bakunin’s embroilment with an
unscrupulous Russian student leader, Sergey Gennadiyevich
Nechayev, who had practiced blackmail and murder.
Without a supporting right wing and with the anarchist
left against him, Marx feared losing control of the
International to Bakunin. He also wanted to return to his
studies and to finish Das Kapital. At the congress of the
International at The Hague in 1872, the only one he ever
attended, Marx managed to defeat the Bakuninists. Then, to
the consternation of the delegates, Engels moved that the
seat of the General Council be transferred from London to
New York City. The Bakuninists were expelled, but the
International languished and was finally disbanded in
Philadelphia in 1876.
Last years
During the next and last decade of his life, Marx’s creative
energies declined. He was beset by what he called “chronic
mental depression,” and his life turned inward toward his
family. He was unable to complete any substantial work,
though he still read widely and undertook to learn Russian.
He became crotchety in his political opinions. When his own
followers and those of the German revolutionary Ferdinand
Lassalle, a rival who believed that socialist goals should
be achieved through cooperation with the state, coalesced in
1875 to found the German Social Democratic Party, Marx wrote
a caustic criticism of their program (the so-called Gotha
Program), claiming that it made too many compromises with
the status quo. The German leaders put his objections aside
and tried to mollify him personally. Increasingly, he looked
to a European war for the overthrow of Russian tsarism, the
mainstay of reaction, hoping that this would revive the
political energies of the working classes. He was moved by
what he considered to be the selfless courage of the Russian
terrorists who assassinated the tsar, Alexander II, in 1881;
he felt this to be “a historically inevitable means of
action.”
Despite Marx’s withdrawal from active politics, he still
retained what Engels called his “peculiar influence” on the
leaders of working-class and socialist movements. In 1879,
when the French Socialist Workers’ Federation was founded,
its leader Jules Guesde went to London to consult with Marx,
who dictated the preamble of its program and shaped much of
its content. In 1881 Henry Mayers Hyndman in his England for
All drew heavily on his conversations with Marx but angered
him by being afraid to acknowledge him by name.
During his last years Marx spent much time at health
resorts and even traveled to Algiers. He was broken by the
death of his wife on Dec. 2, 1881, and of his eldest
daughter, Jenny Longuet, on Jan. 11, 1883. He died in
London, evidently of a lung abscess, in the following year.
Character and significance
At Marx’s funeral in Highgate Cemetery, Engels declared that
Marx had made two great discoveries, the law of development
of human history and the law of motion of bourgeois society.
But “Marx was before all else a revolutionist.” He was “the
best-hated and most-calumniated man of his time,” yet he
also died “beloved, revered and mourned by millions of
revolutionary fellow-workers.”
The contradictory emotions Marx engendered are reflected
in the sometimes conflicting aspects of his character. Marx
was a combination of the Promethean rebel and the rigorous
intellectual. He gave most persons an impression of
intellectual arrogance. A Russian writer, Pavel Annenkov,
who observed Marx in debate in 1846 recalled that “he spoke
only in the imperative, brooking no contradiction,” and
seemed to be “the personification of a democratic dictator
such as might appear before one in moments of fantasy.” But
Marx obviously felt uneasy before mass audiences and avoided
the atmosphere of factional controversies at congresses. He
went to no demonstrations, his wife remarked, and rarely
spoke at public meetings. He kept away from the congresses
of the International where the rival socialist groups
debated important resolutions. He was a “small groups” man,
most at home in the atmosphere of the General Council or on
the staff of a newspaper, where his character could impress
itself forcefully on a small body of coworkers. At the same
time he avoided meeting distinguished scholars with whom he
might have discussed questions of economics and sociology on
a footing of intellectual equality. Despite his broad
intellectual sweep, he was prey to obsessive ideas such as
that the British foreign minister, Lord Palmerston, was an
agent of the Russian government. He was determined not to
let bourgeois society make “a money-making machine” out of
him, yet he submitted to living on the largess of Engels and
the bequests of relatives. He remained the eternal student
in his personal habits and way of life, even to the point of
joining two friends in a students’ prank during which they
systematically broke four or five streetlamps in a London
street and then fled from the police. He was a great reader
of novels, especially those of Sir Walter Scott and Balzac;
and the family made a cult of Shakespeare. He was an
affectionate father, saying that he admired Jesus for his
love of children, but sacrificed the lives and health of his
own. Of his seven children, three daughters grew to
maturity. His favourite daughter, Eleanor, worried him with
her nervous, brooding, emotional character and her desire to
be an actress. Another shadow was cast on Marx’s domestic
life by the birth to their loyal servant, Helene Demuth, of
an illegitimate son, Frederick; Engels as he was dying
disclosed to Eleanor that Marx had been the father. Above
all, Marx was a fighter, willing to sacrifice anything in
the battle for his conception of a better society. He
regarded struggle as the law of life and existence.
The influence of Marx’s ideas has been enormous. Marx’s
masterpiece, Das Kapital, the “Bible of the working class,”
as it was officially described in a resolution of the
International Working Men’s Association, was published in
1867 in Berlin and received a second edition in 1873. Only
the first volume was completed and published in Marx’s
lifetime. The second and third volumes, unfinished by Marx,
were edited by Engels and published in 1885 and 1894. The
economic categories he employed were those of the classical
British economics of David Ricardo; but Marx used them in
accordance with his dialectical method to argue that
bourgeois society, like every social organism, must follow
its inevitable path of development. Through the working of
such immanent tendencies as the declining rate of profit,
capitalism would die and be replaced by another, higher,
society. The most memorable pages in Das Kapital are the
descriptive passages, culled from Parliamentary Blue Books,
on the misery of the English working class. Marx believed
that this misery would increase, while at the same time the
monopoly of capital would become a fetter upon production
until finally “the knell of capitalist private property
sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”
Marx never claimed to have discovered the existence of
classes and class struggles in modern society. “Bourgeois”
historians, he acknowledged, had described them long before
he had. He did claim, however, to have proved that each
phase in the development of production was associated with a
corresponding class structure and that the struggle of
classes led necessarily to the dictatorship of the
proletariat, ushering in the advent of a classless society.
Marx took up the very different versions of socialism
current in the early 19th century and welded them together
into a doctrine that continued to be the dominant version of
socialism for half a century after his death. His emphasis
on the influence of economic structure on historical
development has proved to be of lasting significance.
Although Marx stressed economic issues in his writings,
his major impact has been in the fields of sociology and
history. Marx’s most important contribution to sociological
theory was his general mode of analysis, the “dialectical”
model, which regards every social system as having within it
immanent forces that give rise to “contradictions”
(disequilibria) that can be resolved only by a new social
system. Neo-Marxists, who no longer accept the economic
reasoning in Das Kapital, are still guided by this model in
their approach to capitalist society. In this sense, Marx’s
mode of analysis, like those of Thomas Malthus, Herbert
Spencer, or Vilfredo Pareto, has become one of the
theoretical structures that are the heritage of the social
scientist.
Lewis S. Feuer
David T. McLellan
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Friedrich Engels

German philosopher
born November 28, 1820, Barmen, Rhine Province, Prussia
died August 5, 1895, London
Main
German Socialist philosopher, the closest collaborator of
Karl Marx in the foundation of modern Communism. They
co-authored the Communist Manifesto (1848), and Engels
edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital after
Marx’s death.
Early life
Engels grew up in the environment of a family marked by
moderately liberal political views, a steadfast loyalty to
Prussia, and a pronounced Protestant faith. His father was
the owner of a textile factory in Barmen and also a partner
in the Ermen & Engels cotton plant in Manchester, Eng. Even
after Engels openly pursued the revolutionary goals that
threatened the traditional values of the family, he usually
could count on financial aid from home. The influence of his
mother, to whom he was devoted, may have been a factor in
preserving the tie between father and son.
Aside from such disciplinary actions as the father
considered necessary in rearing a gifted but somewhat
rebellious son, the only instance in which his father forced
his will on Engels was in deciding upon a career for him.
Engels did attend a Gymnasium (secondary school), but he
dropped out a year before graduation, probably because his
father felt that his plans for the future were too
undefined. Engels showed some skill in writing poetry, but
his father insisted that he go to work in the expanding
business. Engels, accordingly, spent the next three years
(1838–41) in Bremen acquiring practical business experience
in the offices of an export firm.
In Bremen, Engels began to show the capacity for living
the double life that characterized his middle years. During
regular hours, he operated effectively as a business
apprentice. An outgoing person, he joined a choral society,
frequented the famed Ratskeller, became an expert swimmer,
and practiced fencing and riding (he outrode most Englishmen
in the fox hunts). Engels also cultivated his capacity for
learning languages; he boasted to his sister that he knew
24. In private, however, he developed an interest in liberal
and revolutionary works, notably the banned writings of
“Young German” authors such as Ludwig Börne, Karl Gutzkow,
and Heinrich Heine. But he soon rejected them as
undisciplined and inconclusive in favour of the more
systematic and all embracing philosophy of Hegel as
expounded by the “Young Hegelians,” a group of leftist
intellectuals, including the theologian and historian Bruno
Bauer and the anarchist Max Stirner. They accepted the
Hegelian dialectic—basically that rational progress and
historical change result from the conflict of opposing
views, ending in a new synthesis. The Young Hegelians were
bent on accelerating the process by criticizing all that
they considered irrational, outmoded, and repressive. As
their first assault was directed against the foundations of
Christianity, they helped convert an agnostic Engels into a
militant atheist, a relatively easy task since by this time
Engels’ revolutionary convictions made him ready to strike
out in almost any direction.
In Bremen, Engels also demonstrated his talent for
journalism by publishing articles under the pseudonym of
Friedrich Oswald, perhaps to spare the feelings of his
family. He possessed pungent critical abilities and a clear
style, qualities that were utilized later by Marx in
articulating their revolutionary goals.
After returning to Barmen in 1841, the question of a
future career was shelved temporarily when Engels enlisted
as a one-year volunteer in an artillery regiment in Berlin.
No antimilitarist disposition prevented him from serving
commendably as a recruit; in fact, military matters later
became one of his specialties. In the future, friends would
often address him as “the general.” Military service allowed
Engels time for more compelling interests in Berlin. Though
he lacked the formal requirements, he attended lectures at
the university. His Friedrich Oswald articles gained him
entrée into the Young Hegelian circle of The Free, formerly
the Doctors Club frequented by Karl Marx. There he gained
recognition as a formidable protagonist in the philosophical
battles, mainly directed against religion.
Conversion to communism
After his discharge in 1842, Engels met Moses Hess, the man
who converted him to communism. Hess, the son of wealthy
Jewish parents and a promoter of radical causes and
publications, demonstrated to Engels that the logical
consequence of the Hegelian philosophy and dialectic was
communism. Hess also stressed the role that England, with
its advanced industry, burgeoning proletariat, and portents
of class conflict, was destined to play in future upheavals.
Engels eagerly seized the opportunity to go to England,
ostensibly to continue his business training in the family
firm in Manchester.
In England (1842–44), Engels again functioned
successfully in business. After hours, however, he pursued
his real interests: writing articles on communism for
continental and English journals, reading books and
parliamentary reports on economic and political conditions
in England, mingling with workers, meeting radical leaders,
and gathering materials for a projected history of England
that would stress the rise of industry and the wretched
position of the workers.
In Manchester, Engels established an enduring attachment
to Mary Burns, an uneducated Irish working girl, and, though
he rejected the institution of marriage, they lived together
as husband and wife. In fact, the one serious strain in the
Marx–Engels friendship occurred when Mary died in 1863 and
Engels thought that Marx responded a little too casually to
the news of her death. In the future, however, Marx made a
point of being more considerate, and, when Engels later
lived with Mary’s sister Lizzy, on similar terms, Marx
always carefully closed his letters with greetings to “Mrs.
Lizzy” or “Mrs. Burns.” Engels finally married Lizzy, but
only as a deathbed concession to her.
In 1844 Engels contributed two articles to the Deutsch-Französische
Jahrbücher (“German-French Yearbooks”), which were edited by
Marx in Paris. In them Engels put forth an early version of
the principles of scientific socialism. He revealed what he
regarded as the contradictions in liberal economic doctrine
and set out to prove that the existing system based on
private property was leading to a world made up of
“millionaires and paupers.” The revolution that would follow
would lead to the elimination of private property and to a
“reconciliation of humanity with nature and itself.”
Partnership with Marx
On his way to Barmen, Engels went to Paris for a 10-day
visit with Marx, whom he had earlier met in Cologne. This
visit resulted in a permanent partnership to promote the
socialist movement. Back in Barmen, Engels published Die
Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (1845; The Condition
of the Working Class in England in 1844, 1887), a classic in
a field that later became Marx’s specialty. Their first
major joint work was Die deutsche Ideologie (1845; The
German Ideology), which, however, was not published until
more than 80 years later. It was a highly polemical critique
that denounced and ridiculed certain of their earlier Young
Hegelian associates and then proceeded to attack various
German socialists who rejected the need for revolution.
Marx’s and Engels’ own constructive ideas were inserted here
and there, always in a fragmentary manner and only as
corrective responses to the views they were condemning.
Upon rejoining Marx in Brussels in 1845, Engels endorsed
his newly formulated economic, or materialistic,
interpretation of history, which assumed an eventual
communist triumph. That summer he escorted Marx on a tour of
England. Thereafter he spent much time in Paris, where his
social engagements did not interfere significantly with his
major purpose, that of attempting to convert various émigré
German worker groups—among them a socialist secret society,
the League of the Just—as well as leading French socialists
to his and Marx’s views. When the league held its first
congress in London in June 1847, Engels helped bring about
its transformation into the Communist League.
Marx and he together persuaded a second Communist
Congress in London to adopt their views. The two men were
authorized to draft a statement of communist principles and
policies, which appeared in 1848 as the Manifest der
kommunistischen Partei (commonly called the Communist
Manifesto). It included much of the preliminary definition
of views prepared earlier by Engels in the Grundsätze des
Kommunismus (1847; Principles of Communism) but was
primarily the work of Marx.
The Revolution of 1848, which was precipitated by the
attempt of the German states to throw off an authoritarian,
almost feudal, political system and replace it with a
constitutional, representative form of government, was a
momentous event in the lives of Marx and Engels. It was
their only opportunity to participate directly in a
revolution and to demonstrate their flexibility as
revolutionary tacticians with the aim of turning the
revolution into a communist victory. Their major tool was
the newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which Marx edited in
Cologne with the able assistance of Engels. Such a party
organ, then appearing in a democratic guise, was of prime
importance for their purposes; with it they could furnish
daily guidelines and incitement in the face of shifting
events, together with a sustained criticism of governments,
parties, policies, and politicians.
After the failure of the revolution, Engels and Marx were
reunited in London, where they reorganized the Communist
League and drafted tactical directives for the communists in
the belief that another revolution would soon take place.
But how to replace his depleted income soon became Engels’
main problem. To support both himself and Marx, he accepted
a subordinate position in the offices of Ermen & Engels in
Manchester, eventually becoming a full-fledged partner in
the concern. He again functioned successfully as a
businessman, never allowing his communist principles and
criticism of capitalist ways to interfere with the
profitable operations of his firm. Hence he was able to send
money to Marx constantly, often in the form of £5 notes, but
later in far higher figures. When Engels sold his
partnership in the business in 1869, he received enough for
it to live comfortably until his death in 1895 and to
provide Marx with an annual grant of £350, with the promise
of more to cover all contingencies.
Engels, who was forced to live in Manchester,
corresponded constantly with Marx in London and frequently
wrote newspaper articles for him; he wrote the articles that
appeared in the New York Tribune (1851–52) under Marx’s name
and that were later published under Engels’ name as
Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany in 1848 (1896).
In the informal division of labour that the two protagonists
of communism had established, Engels was the specialist in
nationality questions, military matters, to some extent in
international affairs, and in the sciences. Marx also turned
to him repeatedly for clarification of economic questions,
notably for information on business practices and industrial
operations.
Marx’s Das Kapital (Capital), his most important work,
bears in part a made-in-Manchester stamp. Marx similarly
called on Engels’ writing facility to help “popularize”
their joint views. While Marx was the brilliant theoretician
of the pair, it was Engels, as the apt salesman of Marxism
directing attention to Das Kapital through his reviews of
the book, who implanted the thought that it was their
“bible.” Engels almost alone wrote Herrn Eugen Dührings
Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (1878; Herr Eugen Dühring’s
Revolution in Science [Anti-Dühring]), the book that
probably did most to promote Marxian thought. It destroyed
the influence of Karl Eugen Dühring, a Berlin professor who
threatened to supplant Marx’s position among German Social
Democrats.
Last years
After Marx’s death (1883), Engels served as the foremost
authority on Marx and Marxism. Aside from occasional
writings on a variety of subjects and introductions to new
editions of Marx’s works, Engels completed volumes 2 and 3
of Das Kapital (1885 and 1894) on the basis of Marx’s
uncompleted manuscripts and rough notes. Engels’ other two
late publications were the books Der Ursprung der Familie,
des Privateigenthums und des Staats (1884; The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State) and Ludwig Feuerbach
und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie (1888;
Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German
Philosophy). All the while he corresponded extensively with
German Social Democrats and followers everywhere, so as to
perpetuate the image of Marx and to foster some degree of
conformity among the “faithful.” His work was interrupted
when he was stricken with cancer; he died of the disease not
long after.
During his lifetime, Engels experienced, in a milder
form, the same attacks and veneration that fell upon Marx.
An urbane individual with the demeanour of an English
gentleman, Engels customarily was a gay and witty associate
with a great zest for living. He had a code of honour that
responded quickly to an insult, even to the point of
violence. As the hatchetman of the “partnership,” he could
be most offensive and ruthless, so much so that in 1848
various friends attempted unsuccessfully to persuade Marx to
disavow him.
Except for the communist countries, where Engels has
received due recognition, posterity has generally lumped him
together with Marx without adequately clarifying Engels’
significant role. The attention Engels does receive is
likely to be in the form of a close scrutiny of his works to
discover what differences existed between him and Marx. As a
result, some scholars have concluded that Engels’ writings
and influence are responsible for certain deviations from,
or distortions of, “true Marxism” as they see it. Yet
scholars in general acknowledge that Marx himself apparently
was unaware of any essential divergence of ideas and
opinions. The Marx-Engels correspondence, which reveals a
close cooperation in formulating Marxist policies, bears out
that view.
Oscar J. Hammen
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Friedrich Albert Lange

German philosopher
born Sept. 28, 1828, Wald, near Solingen, Prussia
died Nov. 21, 1875, Marburg, Ger.
Main
German philosopher and Socialist, important for his
refutation of materialism and for establishing a lasting
tradition of Neo-Kantianism at the University of Marburg.
Lange was the son of theologian Johann Peter Lange and
was educated at Cologne, Bonn, and Duisburg. In 1861 he
became involved in politics. Among his best known works are
Die Leibesübungen (1863; “On Physical Exercise”); Die
Arbeiterfrage (1865; “The Worker Question”); Die Grundlagen
der mathematischen Psychologie (1865; “The Foundation of
Mathematical Psychology”); Geschichte des Materialismus und
Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (1866; History of
Materialism); J. St. Mill’s Ansichten über die soziale Frage
(1866; “John Stuart Mill’s Theories About the Social
Question”). Lange left Germany in 1866 and moved to
Winterthur, near Zürich, to write for a democratic
newspaper. He also wrote the Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte
des Materialismus (1867; “A New Contribution on the History
of Materialism”) and in 1870 became professor of philosophy
at the University of Zürich, resigning his post in 1872
because of the pro-French sympathies of the Swiss in the
Franco-German War. He then accepted the chair of philosophy
at the University of Marburg and was largely responsible for
a Kantian revival there. His Logische Studien (“Studies in
Logic”) was published in 1877, after his death.
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Wilhelm Wundt

born , Aug. 16, 1832, Neckarau, near Mannheim, Baden
[Germany]
died Aug. 31, 1920, Grossbothen, Ger.
German physiologist and psychologist who is generally
acknowledged as the founder of experimental psychology.
Wundt earned a medical degree at the University of Heidelberg
in 1856. After studying briefly with Johannes Müller, he was
appointed lecturer in physiology at the University of
Heidelberg, where in 1858 he became an assistant to the
physicist and physiologist Wilhelm von Helmholtz. There he wrote
Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung (1858–62;
“Contributions to the Theory of Sense Perception”).
It was during this period, in 1862, that Wundt offered the
first course ever taught in scientific psychology. Until then,
psychology had been regarded as a branch of philosophy and,
hence, to be conducted primarily by rational analysis. Wundt
instead stressed the use of experimental methods drawn from the
natural sciences. His lectures on psychology were published as
Vorlesungen über die Menschen und Thierseele (1863; “Lectures on
the Mind of Humans and Animals”). He was promoted to assistant
professor of physiology in 1864.
Bypassed in 1871 for the appointment to succeed Helmholtz,
Wundt then applied himself to writing a work that came to be one
of the most important in the history of psychology, Grundzüge
der physiologischen Psychologie, 2 vol. (1873–74; 3 vol., 6th
ed., 1908–11; Principles of Physiological Psychology). The
Grundzüge advanced a system of psychology that sought to
investigate the immediate experiences of consciousness,
including sensations, feelings, volitions, and ideas; it also
contained the concept of apperception, or conscious perception.
The methodology prescribed was introspection, or conscious
examination of conscious experience.
In 1874 Wundt went to the University of Zürich for a year
before embarking on the most productive phase of his career, as
professor at the University of Leipzig (1875–1917). There, in
1879, he established the first psychological laboratory in the
world, and two years later he founded the first journal of
psychology, Philosophische Studien (“Philosophical Studies”).
Wundt’s most important later works include Grundriss der
Psychologie (1896; “Outline of Psychology”) and
Völkerpsychologie, 10 vol. (1900–20; “Ethnic Psychology”).
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Wilhelm Dilthey

born Nov. 19, 1833, Biebrich, near Wiesbaden, Nassau
died Oct. 1, 1911, Seis am Schlern, near Bozen, South Tirol,
Austria-Hungary
German philosopher who made important contributions to a
methodology of the humanities and other human sciences. He
objected to the pervasive influence of the natural sciences
and developed a philosophy of life that perceived man in his
historical contingency and changeability. Dilthey
established a comprehensive treatment of history from the
cultural viewpoint that has been of great consequence,
particularly to the study of literature.
Dilthey was the son of a Reformed Church theologian.
After he finished grammar school in Wiesbaden, he began to
study theology, first at Heidelberg, then at Berlin, where
he soon transferred to philosophy. After completing exams in
theology and philosophy, he taught for some time at
secondary schools in Berlin but soon abandoned this to
dedicate himself fully to scholarly endeavours.
During these years he was bursting with energy, and his
investigations led him into diverse directions. In addition
to extensive studies on the history of early Christianity
and on the history of philosophy and literature, he had a
strong interest in music, and he was eager to absorb
everything that was being discovered in the unfolding
empirical sciences of man: sociology and ethnology,
psychology and physiology. Hundreds of reviews and essays
testify to an almost inexhaustible productivity.
In 1864 he took his doctorate at Berlin and obtained the
right to lecture. He was appointed to a chair at the
University of Basel in 1866; appointments to Kiel, in 1868,
and Breslau, in 1871, followed. In 1882 he succeeded R.H.
Lotze at the University of Berlin, where he spent the
remainder of his life.
During these years Dilthey led the quiet life of a
scholar, devoid of great external excitement and in total
dedication to his work. He searched for the philosophical
foundation of what he first and rather vaguely summarized as
the “sciences of man, of society, and the state,” which he
later called Geisteswissenschaften (“human sciences”)—a term
that eventually gained general recognition to collectively
denote the fields of history, philosophy, religion,
psychology, art, literature, law, politics, and economics.
In 1883, as a result of these studies, the first volume of
his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (“Introduction
to Human Sciences”) appeared. The second volume, on which he
worked continually, never did appear. This introductory work
yielded a series of important essays; one of these—his
“Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde
Psychologie” (1894; “Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and
Analytical Psychology”)—instigated the formation of a
cognitive (Verstehen), or structural, psychology. During the
last years of his life, Dilthey resumed this work on a new
level in his treatise Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in
den Geisteswissenschaften (1910; “The Structure of the
Historical World in the Human Sciences”), which was also
left unfinished.
Opposed to the trend in the historical and social
sciences to approximate the methodological ideal of the
natural sciences, Dilthey tried to establish the humanities
as interpretative sciences in their own right. In the course
of this work he broke new philosophical ground by his study
of the relations between personal experience, its
realization in creative expression, and the reflective
understanding of this experience; the interdependence of
self-knowledge and knowledge of other persons; and, finally,
the logical development from these to the understanding of
social groups and historical processes. The subject matter
of the historical and social sciences is the human mind, not
as it is enjoyed in immediate experience nor as it is
analyzed in psychological theory, but as it manifests or
“objectifies” itself in languages and literatures, actions,
and institutions. Dilthey emphasized that the essence of
human beings cannot be grasped by introspection but only
from a knowledge of all of history; this understanding,
however, can never be final because history itself never is:
“The prototype ‘man’ disintegrates during the process of
history.” For this reason, his philosophical works were
closely connected to his historical studies. From these
works later arose the encompassing scheme of his Studien zur
Geschichte des deutschen Geistes (“Studies Concerning the
History of the German Mind”); the notes for this work make
up a complete coherent manuscript, but only parts have been
published.
Dilthey held that historical consciousness—i.e., the
consciousness of the historical relativity of all ideas,
attitudes, and institutions—is the most characteristic and
challenging fact in the intellectual life of the modern
world. It shakes all belief in absolute principles, but it
thereby sets people free to understand and appreciate all
the diverse possibilities of human experience. Dilthey did
not have the ability for definitive formulation; he was
suspicious of rationally constructed systems and preferred
to leave questions unsettled, realizing that they involved
complexity. For a long time, therefore, he was regarded
primarily as a sensitive cultural historian who lacked the
power of systematic thought. Only posthumously, through the
editorial and interpretative work of his disciples, did the
significance of the methodology of his historical philosophy
of life emerge.
Otto Friedrich Bollnow
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Franz Brentano

German philosopher
in full Franz Clemens Brentano
born January 16, 1838, Marienberg, Hesse-Nassau [Germany]
died March 17, 1917, Zürich, Switzerland
Main
German philosopher generally regarded as the founder of act
psychology, or intentionalism, which concerns itself with
the acts of the mind rather than with the contents of the
mind. He was a nephew of the poet Clemens Brentano.
Brentano was ordained a Roman Catholic priest (1864) and
was appointed Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer) in
philosophy (1866) and professor (1872) at the University of
Würzburg. Religious doubts, exacerbated by the doctrine of
papal infallibility (1870), led to his resignation from his
post and the priesthood (1873).
Brentano then began writing one of his best-known and
most influential works, Psychologie vom empirischen
Standpunkte (1874; “Psychology from an Empirical
Standpoint”), in which he tried to present a systematic
psychology that would be a science of the soul.
Concerned with mental processes, or acts, he revived and
modernized the scholastic philosophical theory of
“intentional existence,” or, as he called it, “immanent
objectivity”; in psychical phenomena, he held, there is a
“direction of the mind to an object” (e.g., one sees
something). The object seen is said to “inexist” within the
act of seeing or to have “immanent objectivity.” He
suggested that, fundamentally, the mind can refer to objects
by perception and ideation, including sensing and imagining;
by judgment, including acts of acknowledgment, rejection,
and recall; and by loving or hating, which take into account
desires, intentions, wishes, and feelings. The ideas
expressed in the Psychologie formed the credo of his
followers and became the starting point of their work.
In 1874 Brentano was appointed professor at the
University of Vienna. His decision to marry in 1880 was
blocked by Austrian authorities, who refused to accept his
resignation from the priesthood and, considering him still a
cleric, denied him permission to marry. He was forced to
resign his professorship, and he moved with his wife to
Leipzig. The following year he was allowed to return to the
University of Vienna as a Privatdozent, and he remained
there until 1895. He enjoyed wide popularity with his
students, among whom were psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud,
psychologist Carl Stumpf, philosopher Edmund Husserl, and
Tomáš Masaryk, the founder of modern Czechoslovakia. Another
major work of Brentano’s, Untersuchungen zur
Sinnespsychologie (“Inquiry into Sense Psychology”),
appeared in 1907. Completing his early masterwork was Von
der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene (1911; “On the
Classification of Psychological Phenomena”).
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Rudolf Christoph Eucken

born Jan. 5, 1846, Aurich, East Friesland [now in Germany]
died Sept. 14, 1926, Jena, Ger.
German Idealist philosopher, winner of the Nobel Prize
for Literature (1908), interpreter of Aristotle, and author
of works in ethics and religion.
Eucken studied at the University of Göttingen under the
German thinker Rudolf Hermann Lotze, a teleological
Idealist, and at Berlin under Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg,
a German philosopher whose ethical concerns and historical
treatment of philosophy attracted him. Appointed professor
of philosophy at the University of Basel, Switz., in 1871,
Eucken left in 1874 to become professor of philosophy at the
University of Jena, a position he held until 1920.
Distrusting abstract intellectualism and systematics,
Eucken centred his philosophy upon actual human experience.
He maintained that man is the meeting place of nature and
spirit and that it is his duty and his privilege to overcome
his nonspiritual nature by incessant active striving after
the spiritual life. This pursuit, sometimes termed ethical
activism, involves all of man’s faculties but especially
requires efforts of the will and intuition.
A strident critic of naturalist philosophy, Eucken held
that man’s soul differentiated him from the rest of the
natural world and that the soul could not be explained only
by reference to natural processes. His criticisms are
particularly evident in Individual and Society (1923) and
Der Sozialismus und seine Lebensgestaltung (1920; Socialism:
An Analysis, 1921). The second work attacked Socialism as a
system that limits human freedom and denigrates spiritual
and cultural aspects of life.
Eucken’s Nobel Prize diploma referred to the “warmth and
strength in presentation with which in his numerous works he
has vindicated and developed an idealist philosophy of
life.” His other works include Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens
(1908; The Meaning and Value of Life, 1909) and Können wir
noch Christen sein? (1911; Can We Still Be Christians?,
1914).
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Wilhelm Windelband

Wilhelm Windelband (W. Windelband) (May 11, 1848 – October
22, 1915) was a German philosopher of the Baden School.
Born in Potsdam, he is now mainly remembered for the
terms nomothetic and idiographic, which he introduced. These
have currency in psychology and other areas, though not
necessarily in line with his original meanings. Windelband
was a neo-Kantian who protested other neo-Kantians of his
time and maintained that "to understand Kant rightly means
to go beyond him". Against his positivist contemporaries,
Windelband argued that philosophy should engage in
humanistic dialogue with the natural sciences rather than
uncritically appropriating its methodologies. His interests
in psychology and cultural sciences represented an
opposition to psychologism and historicism schools by a
critical philosophic system.
Windelband relied in his effort to reach beyond Kant on
such philosophers as Hegel, Herbart and Lotze. Closely
associated with Windelband was Heinrich Rickert.
Windelband's disciples were not only noted philosophers, but
sociologists like Max Weber and theologians like Ernst
Troeltsch and Albert Schweitzer.
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Alexius Meinong

Austrian philosopher and psychologist
born July 17, 1853, Lemberg, Galicia, Austrian Empire
[now Lviv, Ukraine]
died Nov. 27, 1920, Graz, Austria
Main
Austrian philosopher and psychologist remembered for his
contributions to axiology, or theory of values, and for his
Gegenstandstheorie, or theory of objects.
After studying under the philosophical psychologist Franz
Brentano from 1875 to 1878 in Vienna, he joined the faculty
of philosophy at the University of Graz, where he remained
as a professor from 1889 until his death. With Brentano he
helped promote the Austrian school of values but eventually
dissented from Brentano’s views on epistemology.
In his major work, Über Annahmen (1902; “On
Assumptions”), Meinong discussed the assumptions men make in
believing they know or do not know a particular truth. Like
Brentano, Meinong considered intentionality, or the
direction of attention to objects, to be the basic feature
of mental states. Yet he drew his own distinction between
two elements in every experience of the objective world:
“content,” which differentiates one object from another, and
“act,” by which the experience approaches its object.
Anticipating the work of the Phenomenologists, Meinong
maintained that objects remain objects and have a definite
character and definite properties (Sosein) even if they have
no being (Sein). Thus, “golden mountain” is an object
existing as a concept, even though no golden mountains exist
in the world of sense experience. Bertrand Russell was among
those influenced by this aspect of Meinong’s thought. Like
every other type of object knowable by different mental
states, values could also be classified as objects existing
independently of the experience of values and of the world
of sense experience. Two examples of value feeling are
Seinsfreude, the experience of joy in the existence of a
particular object, and Seinsleid, the experience of sadness
at the object’s existence.
Meinong’s Gegenstandstheorie is discussed in his
Gesammelte Abhandlungen, 2 vol. (1913–14; “Collected
Treatises”), and in John N. Findlay, Meinong’s Theory of
Objects (1933). His other important writings include Über
Möglichkeit und Wahrscheinlichkeit (1915; “On Possibility
and Probability”) and Über emotionale Präsentation (1917).
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Edmund Husserl

German philosopher
born April 8, 1859, Prossnitz, Moravia, Austrian Empire
[now Prostějov, Czech Republic]
died April 27, 1938, Freiburg im Breisgau, Ger.
Main
German philosopher, the founder of Phenomenology, a method
for the description and analysis of consciousness through
which philosophy attempts to gain the character of a strict
science. The method reflects an effort to resolve the
opposition between Empiricism, which stresses observation,
and Rationalism, which stresses reason and theory, by
indicating the origin of all philosophical and scientific
systems and developments of theory in the interests and
structures of the experiential life. (See phenomenology.)
Education and early life.
Husserl was born into a Jewish family and completed his
qualifying examinations in 1876 at the German public
gymnasium in the neighbouring city of Olmütz (Olomouc). He
then studied physics, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy
at the universities of Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna. In
Vienna he received his doctor of philosophy degree in 1882
with a dissertation entitled Beiträge zur Theorie der
Variationsrechnung (“Contributions to the Theory of the
Calculus of Variations”). In the autumn of 1883, Husserl
moved to Vienna to study with the philosopher and
psychologist Franz Brentano. Brentano’s critique of any
psychology oriented purely along scientific and
psychophysical lines and his claim that he had grounded
philosophy on his new descriptive psychology had a
widespread influence.
Husserl received a decisive impetus from Brentano and
from his circle of students. The spirit of the
Enlightenment, with its religious tolerance and its quest
for a rational philosophy, was very much alive in this
circle. Husserl’s striving for a more strictly rational
foundation found its corroboration here. From the outset,
such a foundation meant for him not only a theoretical act
but the moral meaning of responsibility in the sense of
ethical autonomy. In Vienna Husserl converted to the
Evangelical Lutheran faith, and one year later, in 1887, he
married Malvine Steinschneider, the daughter of a
secondary-school professor from Prossnitz. As his energetic
and skilled wife, she was his indispensable support, until
his death, in all the things of their daily life.
Lecturer at Halle.
In 1886 Husserl went—with a recommendation from Brentano—to
Carl Stumpf, the oldest of Brentano’s students, who had
further developed his psychology and who was professor of
philosophy and psychology at the University of Halle. In
1887 Husserl qualified as a lecturer in the university
(Habilitation). He had become a close friend of Stumpf, and
he was indebted to Stumpf for many suggestions in the
formation of his own descriptive concepts. The theme of
Husserl’s Habilitation thesis, Über den Begriff der Zahl:
Psychologische Analysen (“On the Concept of Number:
Psychological Analyses”), already showed Husserl in the
transition from his mathematical research to a reflection
upon the psychological source of the basic concepts of
mathematics. These investigations were an earlier draft of
his Philosophie der Arithmetik: Psychologische und logische
Untersuchungen, the first volume of which appeared in 1891.
The title of his inaugural lecture in Halle was “Über die
Ziele und Aufgaben der Metaphysik” (“On the Goals and
Problems of Metaphysics”). In the traditional sense
metaphysics is the study of Being. Though the text is lost,
it is clear that Husserl already understood his method of
the analysis of consciousness to be the way to a new
universal philosophy and metaphysics, which he hoped would
lay all previous schemes of metaphysics to rest.
The years of his teaching in Halle (1887–1901) were later
seen by Husserl to have been his most difficult. He often
doubted his ability as a philosopher and believed he would
have to give up his occupation. The problem of uniting a
psychological analysis of consciousness with a philosophical
grounding of formal mathematics and logic seemed insoluble.
But from this crisis there emerged the insight that the
philosophical grounding of logic and mathematics must
commence with an analysis of the experience that lies before
all formal thinking. It demanded an intensive study of the
British Empiricists (such as John Locke, George Berkeley,
David Hume, and John Stuart Mill) and a coming to terms with
the logic and semantics stemming from this
tradition—especially the logic of Mill—and with the attempts
at a “psycho-logic” grounding of logic then being made in
Germany.
The fruits of this interaction were presented in the
Logische Untersuchungen (1900–01; “Logical Investigations”),
which employed a method of analysis that Husserl now
designated as “phenomenological.” The revolutionary
significance of this work was only gradually recognized, for
its method could not be subsumed under any of the
philosophical orientations well known at that time. Bertrand
Russell, in a retrospective glance at the Logische
Untersuchungen, spoke of them as constituting one of the
monumental works of the present philosophical epoch.
Influence as a teacher.
After the publication of the Logische Untersuchungen,
Husserl was called, at the instigation of David Hilbert, a
Formalist mathematician, to the position of
ausserordentlicher Professor (university lecturer) by the
University of Göttingen. Husserl’s time of teaching in
Göttingen, from 1901 to 1916, was important as the source of
the Phenomenological movement and marked the formation of a
school reaching out to many lands and branching out in
numerous directions.
The phenomenological analysis of experienced
reality—i.e., of reality as it immediately presents itself
to consciousness—drew not only the German students who were
unsatisfied with the Neo-Kantianism that then prevailed in
Germany but also many young foreign philosophers who came
from the traditions of Empiricism and Pragmatism. From about
1905, Husserl’s students formed themselves into a group with
a common style of life and work. Standing in close personal
contact with their teacher, they always spoke of him as the
“master” and often accompanied him, philosophizing, on his
walks. They understood Phenomenology as the way to the
reform of the spiritual life.
This group was not a school, however, in any sense of
swearing by every word of the master; Husserl gave each of
his students the freedom to pursue suggestions in an
independent way. He wanted his teaching to be not a
transmission of finished results but rather the preparation
for a responsible setting of the problem. Thus, he
understood Phenomenology as a field to be worked over by the
coming generations of philosophers and claimed for himself
only the role of the “beginner.” In view of this freedom of
his teaching, the fact that Phenomenology soon branched off
in many directions is understandable, and it explains its
rapid international expansion.
Husserl himself had developed an individual style of
working: all of his thoughts were conceived in writing—the
minutes, so to speak, of the movement of his thought. During
his life he produced more than 40,000 pages written in
Gabelberger stenographic script.
Husserl was still at Göttingen when Max Scheler, who was
at that time a Privatdozent (unsalaried university lecturer)
in Jena and who later became an important Phenomenologist,
came in contact with Husserl (1910–11). Husserl’s friendship
with Wilhelm Dilthey, a pioneering theoretician of the human
sciences, also falls within the Göttingen period. Dilthey
saw the publication of the Logische Untersuchungen as a new
encouragement to the further development of his own
philosophical theory of the human sciences; and Husserl
himself later acknowledged that his encounter with Dilthey
had turned his attention to the historical life out of which
all of the sciences originated and that, in so doing, it had
opened for him the dimension of history as the foundation of
every theory of knowledge.
Phenomenology as the universal science.
In the Göttingen years, Husserl drafted the outline of
Phenomenology as a universal philosophical science. Its
fundamental methodological principle was what Husserl called
the phenomenological reduction. It focuses the philosopher’s
attention on uninterpreted basic experience and the quest,
thereby, for the essences of things. In this sense, it is
“eidetic” reduction. On the other hand, it is also the
reflection on the functions by which essences become
conscious. As such, the reduction reveals the ego for which
everything has meaning. Hence, Phenomenology took on the
character of a new style of transcendental philosophy, which
repeats and improves Kant’s mediation between Empiricism and
Rationalism in a modern way. Husserl presented its program
and its systematic outline in the Ideen zu einer reinen
Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (1913;
Ideas; General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology), of
which, however, only the first part was completed.
(Completion of the second part was hindered by the outbreak
of World War I.) With this work, Husserl wanted to give his
students a manual. The result, however, was just the
opposite: most of his students took Husserl’s turn to
transcendental philosophy as a lapse back into the old
system of thought and therefore rejected it. Because of this
turn, as well as the war, the phenomenological school fell
apart.
In contrast to the esteem that Husserl enjoyed from his
students, his position among his colleagues in Göttingen was
always difficult. His appointment to Persönlichen Ordinarius
(full professor) in 1906 had resulted from the decision of
the minister of education against the will of the faculty.
The representatives of the humanities faculty had
predominantly philological and historical interests and had
little appreciation for philosophy, whereas the natural
scientists were disappointed that, with the division of the
philosophical faculty, Husserl did not go over to the new
faculty of natural sciences.
Phenomenology and the renewal of spiritual life.
Thus his call in 1916 to the position of ordentlicher
Professor (university professor) at the University of
Freiburg meant a new beginning for Husserl in every respect.
His inaugural lecture on “Die reine Phänomenologie, ihr
Forschungsgebiet und ihre Methode” (“Pure Phenomenology, Its
Area of Research and Its Method”) circumscribed his program
of work. He had understood World War I as the collapse of
the old European world, in which spiritual culture, science,
and philosophy had held an incontestable position. In this
situation, the epistemological grounding that he had
previously provided for Phenomenology no longer satisfied
him; after this, his reflections were directed with special
emphasis upon philosophy’s task in the renewal of life.
In this sense he had set forth in his lectures on Erste
Philosophie (1923–24; “First Philosophy”) the thesis that
Phenomenology, with its method of reduction, is the way to
the absolute vindication of life—i.e., to the realization of
the ethical autonomy of man. Upon this basis, he continued
his clarification of the relation between a psychological
and a phenomenological analysis of consciousness and his
research into the grounding of logic, which he published as
the Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik
der logischen Vernunft (1929; Formal and Transcendental
Logic, 1969).
Husserl’s teaching, in this last period of his life,
assumed a different style from that at Göttingen. It did not
lead to the founding of a new school. Husserl was so intent
upon completing his work that his thinking and teaching
assumed more the character of a monologue. At the same time,
however, his influence upon his listeners and the members of
his seminar was not diminished, and he placed his
intellectual stamp upon many of them. Numerous foreign
guests usually took part in his seminar. For a period,
Rudolf Carnap, a leading figure in the Vienna Circle, where
Logical Positivism was born, also studied under Husserl.
Recognition from without was not wanting. In 1919 the law
faculty of the University of Bonn bestowed upon Husserl the
title of Dr. jur. honoris causa. He was the first German
scholar after the war to be invited to lecture at the
University of London (1922). He turned down a prestigious
call to the University of Berlin as the successor to Ernst
Troeltsch in order to devote his energies to Phenomenology
without interruption. An invitation followed to give some
lectures at the University of Amsterdam and later, in 1930,
at the Sorbonne—lectures that furnished the occasion for
preparing a new systematic presentation of Phenomenology,
which then appeared in a French translation under the title
of Méditations cartésiennes (1931).
When he retired in 1928, Martin Heidegger, who was
destined to become a leading Existentialist and one of
Germany’s foremost philosophers, became his successor.
Husserl had looked upon him as his legitimate heir. Only
later did he see that Heidegger’s chief work, Sein und Zeit
(1927; Being and Time, 1962), had given Phenomenology a turn
that would lead down an entirely different path. Husserl’s
disappointment led to a cooling of their relationship after
1930.
Later years.
Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 did not break
Husserl’s ability to work. Rather, the experience of this
upheaval was, for him, the occasion for concentrating more
than ever upon Phenomenology’s task of preserving the
freedom of the mind. He was excluded from the university;
but the loneliness of his study was broken through his daily
philosophical walks with his research assistant, Eugen Fink,
through his friendships with a few colleagues who belonged
to the circles of the resistance and the “Denominational
Church,” and through numerous visits by foreign philosophers
and scholars. Condemned to silence in Germany, he received,
in the spring of 1935, an invitation to address the Cultural
Society in Vienna. There he spoke freely for two and
one-half hours on “Die Philosophie in der Krisis der
europäischen Menschheit” (“Philosophy in the Crisis of
European Mankind”) and repeated the lecture two days later.
During this time, the Cercle Philosophique de Prague made
it possible through a Rockefeller grant for Ludwig
Landgrebe, a Dozent (lecturer) at the German University in
Prague and Husserl’s former assistant, to begin the
classification and transcription of Husserl’s unpublished
manuscripts. Through the Cercle, Husserl received an
invitation to address the German and Czechoslovakian
University in Prague in the fall of 1935, after which many
discussions took place in the smaller circles. Thus, in a
place which already stood under the threat of Hitler, the
voice of free philosophy was once again audible through
Husserl. The impression of his absolute sovereignty over all
of the confusions of this time was overpowering for his
listeners.
Out of these lectures came Husserl’s last work, Die
Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die
transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die
phänomenologische Philosophie (1936; The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 1970), of which
only the first part could appear, in a periodical for
emigrants. The following period until the summer of 1937 was
entirely devoted to the continuation of this work, in which
Husserl developed for the first time his concept of the
Lebenswelt (“life-world”).
In the summer of 1937, the illness that made it
impossible for him to continue his work set in. From the
beginning of 1938 he saw only one remaining task: to be able
to die in a way worthy of a philosopher. Not committed to a
particular church creed, he had respect for all authentic
religious belief, just as his philosophy demanded the
recognition of each authentic experience as such. His
concept of absolute philosophical self-responsibility stood
close to the Protestant concept of the freedom of man in his
immediate relationship with God. In fact, it is evident that
Husserl characterized the maintenance of the
phenomenological reduction not only as a method of but also
as a kind of religious conversion. Thus, on the one hand, he
could refuse spiritual help at his death—“I have lived as a
philosopher,” he said, “and I want to die as a
philosopher”—yet, on the other hand, he could explain a few
days before his death: “God has in grace received me and
allowed me to die.” He died in April 1938, and his ashes
were buried in the cemetery in Günterstal near Freiburg.
Ludwig M. Landgrebe
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