Eduard von Hartmann 1842 – 1906

Eduard von Hartmann was a German philosopher whose Philosophy of the Unconscious, published in 1869, became one of the most widely read philosophical books of the late nineteenth century. Drawing on Schopenhauer, Hegel, and the new natural sciences, he developed a metaphysics in which the absolute principle of being is an unconscious unity of will and reason that drives the evolution of nature and history. His pessimistic conclusion that the wisest course is the eventual extinction of conscious willing made him a target of energetic criticism and an important influence on Nietzsche, Hartmann's younger contemporary, and on the broader currents of fin-de-siecle thought.

Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann was born in 1842 in Berlin, the son of a Prussian army officer. After his own short military career — ended around 1865 by a chronic knee injury — he turned to philosophy and remained, for the rest of his life, a private scholar in Berlin, working in his study, supported partly by his pension and partly by his books. He never held an academic chair.

His major works are the immensely successful Philosophy of the Unconscious (Philosophie des Unbewussten, 1869), which ran through ten German editions in his lifetime; the long polemics with materialism, monism, and pessimism that followed it (Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness, Religious Consciousness of Mankind, Aesthetik); and the systematic outlines of the Categories Doctrine, the Modern Psychology, and the late System of Philosophy in Outline.

Hartmann tried to reconcile Schopenhauer and Hegel into a metaphysics in which an originally unconscious absolute, with the attributes of will and idea, drives the world process toward conscious self-redemption. His pessimism — tempered, he insisted, by an evolutionary optimism about consciousness — and his integration of the new biological and psychological sciences with idealist metaphysics made him one of the most widely read German philosophers of the later nineteenth century. He died at Gross-Lichterfelde near Berlin in June 1906.