Nicolai Hartmann - Ethics, Vol. 1: Moral Phenomena

Moral Phenomena

Library of Conservative Thought

Americas British Culture, Kirk

Authority and the Liberal Tradition, Heineman

A Better Guide Than Reason, Bradford

Burke Street, Scott-Moncrieff

The Case for Conservatism, Wilson

Cline, Hindus

Character and Culture, Babbitt

Collected Letters of John Randolph to John Brockenbrough, Shorey

Conservatism: Dream and Reality, Nisbet

A Critical Examination of Socialism, Mallock

Edmund Burke: Appraisals & Applications, Ritchie

Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment & Revolution, Stanlis

The Essential Calhoun, Wilson

The Foundations of Political Science, Burgess

Ghosts on the Roof, Chambers

The God of the Machine, Paterson

A Historian and His World, Scott

Historical Consciousness, Lukacs

I Chose Freedom, Kravchenko

I Chose Justice, Kravchenko

Irving Babbitt, Literature, and the Democratic Culture, Hindus

The Jewish East Side 1881-1924, Hindus

Law Without Force, Niemeyer

Lord George Bentinck, Disraeli

The Moral Foundations of Civil Society, Roepke

Moral Phenomena, Hartmann

Moral Values, Hartmann

Natural Law, dEntrves

On Divorce, de Bonald

Orestes Brownson, Kirk

The Phantom Public, Lippmann

Political Philosophy and Cultural Renewal:

Collected Essays, Wilson

Politics of the Center, Starzinger

Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States, Davidson

Rousseau and Romanticism, Babbitt

The Social Crisis of Our Time, Roepke

Tensions of Order and Freedom, Menczer

The Vision of Richard Weaver, Scotchie

The Voegelinian Revolution, Sandoz

We the People, McDonald

Originally published in 1932 by The Macmillan Company

Published 2002 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2001053504

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hartmann, Nicolai, 1882-1950.

[Struktur des ethischen Phnomens. English]

Moral phenomena : volume one of Ethics / Nicolai Hartmann ; with a new introduction by Andreas A. M. Kinneging.

p. cm.(Library of conservative thought)

Originally published: Vol. 1 of Ethics. New York : Macmillian, 1932, in series: Library of philosophy. With new introd.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7658-0909-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Ethics. I. Title. II. Series.

BJ1012.H342 2002
170dc21 2001053504

ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0909-4 (pbk)

DURING his lifetime, Nicolai Hartmann (18821950) was widely regarded as one of Germanys most distinguished philosophers. His works were widely discussed, and he figured prominently in various well-known general overviews of contemporary philosophy.

How to explain this decline in interest? After WW II, both in the English-speaking world and on the European continent, philosophical currents have come to the fore that are antithetical to Hartmanns philosophical position. Most of these fashionable currents are either strands of subjectivism and relativism in the broadest sense of the word, or strands of materialism and empiricism. Little of it is really newmost of it a reiterationwith marginal modifications of views originating in the nineteenth century.

The subjectivist and relativist currents are all heirs to a modern, post-Kantian idealism, subscribing to the idea that our knowledge of the world is mediated by categories or language posited by man, or alternatively, by the culture one belongs to. Knowledge of the world is always knowledge of what it is for us. The world in itself is unknowable or even non-existent.

The various types of materialism and empiricism are successors to nineteenth-century positivism as developed by Comte, Mill, and Mach, and continued by the Vienna circle, or in a very different vein, successors to Marx and Freud. Notwithstanding the vast differences between the views grouped together here, they all reduce the world to that which is given by the senses: physical, material reality. All agree that spiritual and mental phenomena are nothing but manifestationsepiphenomenaof what are essentially physical, material things or events. And all agree that this world of physical, material things and events is governed by deterministic causal laws.

Hartmanns philosophy is developed in conscious and explicit opposition to both idealism and materialism and empiricism in their original nineteenth- and early twentieth-century shape. Since most of the fashionable currents in philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century are heir to these earlier ideas, it is no mystery why Hartmann has been relatively neglected in the past half century.

At the same time, however, this demonstrates Hartmanns importance to us. Here we have a philosopher who struggled with two views that, in different clothing but in essence unchanged, still dominate the philosophical landscape and are both unsatisfactory, one because of its subjectivism and relativism, and the other because of its reductionism and determinism. If these really are the only options we have of rationally making sense of the world, we are in the unenviable position of having to choose between the devil and Beelzebub. Hartmanns philosophy is an effortone of the most impressive yetto overcome this unpleasant dilemma.

I. LIFE, WORK, INFLUENCES

Nicolai Hartmann was born in Riga, the capital of Latvia, which was at the time part of the Russian Empire, on the twentieth of February 1882. His parents belonged to the large German community that lived in the Baltic states at the time. He studied medicine in Dorpat (the present Tartu, Estonia) for a year, but then changed to St. Petersburg to study philosophy and classical philology. He stayed there from 1903 to 1905. Then he moved to Marburg, fleeing from the political upheavals in St. Petersburg. Hartmann remained in Marburg until 1925, interrupted only by four years of military service from 1914 until 1918. He studied with the neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. In 1909 he became Privatdozent, in 1920 Extraordinarius, and in 1922 was appointed Ordinarius as successor to the chair of Natorp.

In 1923 Heidegger became Hartmanns colleague in Marburg, but a fruitful discussion between the two never ensued, if only because their daily schedule was incompatible. At five oclock in the morning, when the lights in Heideggers house were turned on, they were turned off at the Hartmanns, as a result of which one jokingly spoke of the actuality of the philosophia perennis in Marburg. When Heideggers charisma drew more and more students away from Hartmann, and he was exposed to malicious attacks by the students of Heidegger, Hartmann gladly accepted a call to Cologne. Here he taught from 1925 until 1931, when he was appointed to the most prestigious chair in philosophy in Germany, at the University of Berlin.