Hartmann Eduard von (1842–1906), German philosopher who sought to synthesize the thought of Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. The most important of his fifteen books was Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1869). For Hartmann both will and idea are interrelated and are expressions of an absolute ‘thing-in-itself,’ the unconscious. The unconscious is the active essence in natural and psychic processes and is the teleological dynamic in organic life. Paradoxically, he claimed that the teleology immanent in the world order and the life process leads to insight into the irrationality of the ‘will-to-live.’ The maturation of rational consciousness would, he held, lead to the negation of the total volitional process and the entire world process would cease. Ideas indicate the ‘what’ of existence and constitute, along with will and the unconscious, the three modes of being. Despite its pessimism, this work enjoyed considerable popularity.
Hartmann was an unusual combination of speculative idealist and philosopher of science (defending vitalism and attacking mechanistic materialism); his pessimistic ethics was part of a cosmic drama of redemption. Some of his later works dealt with a critical form of Darwinism that led him to adopt a positive evolutionary stance that undermined his earlier pessimism. His general philosophical position was selfdescribed as ‘transcendental realism.’ His Philosophy of the Unconscious was translated into English by W. C. Coupland in three volumes in 1884. There is little doubt that his metaphysics of the unconscious prepared the way for Freud’s later theory of the unconscious mind.
See also FREUD, HEGEL, SCHELLING , SCHO- PENHAUE. G.J.S. Nicolai (1882–1950), Latvian-born German philosopher. He taught at the universities of Marburg, Cologne, Berlin, and Göttingen, and wrote more than a dozen major works on the history of philosophy, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. A realist in epistemology and ontology, Hartmann held that cognition is the apprehension of something independent of the act of apprehension or any other mental events. An accurate phenomenology, such as Husserl’s, would acknowledge, according to him, that we apprehend not only particular, spatiotemporal objects, but also ‘ideal objects,’ ‘essences,’ which Hartmann explicitly identified with Platonic Forms. Among these are ethical values and the objects of mathematics and logic. Our apprehension of values is emotional in character, as Scheler had held. This point is compatible with their objectivity and their mindindependence, since the emotions are just another mode of apprehension. The point applies, however, only to ethical values. Aesthetic values are essentially subjective; they exist only for the subject experiencing them. The number of ethical values is far greater than usually supposed, nor are they derivable from a single fundamental value. At best we only glimpse some of them, and even these may not be simultaneously realizable. This explains and to some extent justifies the existence of moral disagreement, between persons as well as between whole cultures. Hartmann was most obviously influenced by Plato, Husserl, and Scheler. But he was a major, original philosopher in his own right. He has received less recognition than he deserves probably because his views were quite different from those dominant in recent Anglo-American philosophy or in recent Continental philosophy. What is perhaps his most important work, Ethics, was published in German in 1926, one year before Heidegger’s Being and Time, and appeared in English in 1932. See also A PRIORI, HUSSERL , MORAL REAL- ISM , PLATO , SCHELE. P.B.u Hartshorne, Charles (b.1897), chief American exponent of process philosophy and theology in the late twentieth century. After receiving the Ph.D. at Harvard in 1923 he came under the influence of Whitehead, and later, with Paul Weiss, edited The Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce (1931–35). In The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation (1934) Hartshorne argued that all sensations are feelings on an affective continuum. These ideas were later incorporated into a neoclassical metaphysic that is panpsychist, indeterministic, and theistic. Nature is a theater of interactions among ephemeral centers of creative activity, each of which becomes objectively immortal in the memory of God. In Man’s Vision of God (1941) Hartshorne chastised philosophers for being insufficiently attentive to the varieties of theism. His alternative, called dipolar theism, also defended in The Divine Relativity (1948), pictures God as supremely related to and perfectly responding to every actuality. The universe is God’s body. The divine is, in different respects, infinite and finite, eternal and temporal, necessary and contingent. Establishing God’s existence is a metaphysical project, which Hartshorne characterizes in Creative Synthesis (1970) as the search for necessary truths about existence. The central element in his cumulative case for God’s existence, called the global argument, is a modal version of the ontological argument, which Hartshorne was instrumental in rehabilitating in The Logic of Perfection (1962) and Anselm’s Discovery (1965).
Creative Synthesis also articulated the theory that aesthetic values are the most universal and that beauty is a mean between the twin extremes of order/disorder and simplicity/complexity. The Zero Fallacy (1997), Hartshorne’s twentieth book, summarized his assessment of the history of philosophy – also found in Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers (1983) and Creativity in American Philosophy (1984) – and introduced important refinements of his metaphysics.
See also PANPSYCHISM , PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION , PROCESS PHILOSOPHY, WHITE – HEA. D.W.V.