Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 37:146 (Apr 1880)
Article: Hartmann’s Philosophy Of The Unconscious
Author: Charles Franklin Thwing

BSac 37:146 (April 1880) p. 327

Hartmann’s Philosophy Of The Unconscious1

Rev. Charles P. Thwing

The critical philosophy of Kant was an attempt to limit the field of human knowledge to the boundaries of experience and phenomena. It laid down, as he himself said, the “indispensable prolegomena necessary for any future philosophy.” It gave what seemed to be, in 1787, the date of the second edition of the “Critique,” the death-blow to all attempts to establish a philosophy of the Absolute. But within forty years of the death of the great Königsberger three philosophies of the Absolute arose in Germany. Fichte, with his “subjective idealism”; Schelling, with his “polar logic”; and Hegel, with his “pure being” and “pure nothing,” attempted to discover the Unconditioned. After the uselessness of the dialectic of Hegel had been fully proved, Schopenhauer’s “Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung” attempted a new solution of the old problem; and in the closing years of the last decade Eduard von Hartmann took up the glove which Kant threw down eighty years before, and pub-

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lished his “Philosophic des Unbewussten “as a final attempt to found a philosophy of the Absolute. The Unconscious is Hartniann’s Absolute. What the Idea is to Plato and Hegel, what Substance is to Spinoza, what the Ego is to Fichte, what the Subject-Object is to Schelling that is the Unconscious to Hartmaim: it is the noumenon, the Ding-an-sich, the real Being, of which all else is only shadow and reflection.

The starting-point of that system, of which this Article is intended to be a resumé, is a remark of Kant, that to have ideas and not to be conscious of them is an apparent contradiction, since how can you know that you have ideas unless you are conscious of them? But the contradiction is only apparent; for although you cannot be immediately, you can be mediately, conscious of having such ideas.2 In the examination, therefore, of the principle of the Unconscious, it is necessary to abandon the deductive method of the dogmatists and of the philosophers of the Absolute, and to attempt to arrive at speculative results by the inductive method of natural science. The first duty is to collect data relating to the principal phenomena of animate existence — relating to the voluntary movements of the body, to reflex

BSac 37:146 (April 1880) p. 329

action, to the vis medicatrix naturae, to instinct human and animal, to sensual love, to feeling, to sensation, to thought, to the origin of language, to aesthetic theories, to music, and to history; and, secondly, it...