Category: Hartmann, Nicolai

Crises There Will Always Be

I cite the example of Nicolai Hartmann in a Substack entry from March, 2022.

So buck up and fight on. Philosophy is a great consolation. We lesser lights ought to look up to the luminaries, and their example. Boethius wrote in prison, Nicolai Hartmann in Berlin in 1945 in the midst of the Allied assault.

We won't give up and we won't give in. We will battle the bastards that are out to destroy our Republic.  But the wise among us know that this world is a vanishing quantity and that to expend all one's energies in the defense of the fleeting finitudes of the here and now is folly. There are things worth living for that transcend the passing scene. So apportion your time accordingly.  

There Have Always Been Crises

My wife just now handed me a book from her library, one that I had read in the '70s, but had forgotten, The Pursuit of Loneliness by Philip Slater. It was published in 1970 by the Beacon Press (Boston). It bears the subtitle, "American Culture at the Breaking Point."

Somehow we didn't break: here we are schlepfussing along 50 years later. Things are arguably worse now, but it's a huge topic and not my present one.  I just want to say that there have always been crises. So buck up and fight on. Philosophy is a great consolation. We lesser lights ought to look up to the luminaries, and their example. Boethius wrote in prison, Nicolai Hartmann in Berlin in 1945 in the midst of the Allied assault.

In February 1945, the university building in which Hartmann used to lecture was destroyed in an aerial bombing and all his classes were suspended. He was then living in Berlin, which had been transformed into a real-life inferno. Without teaching obligations, Hartmann decided to write his aesthetics book, completing the first draft in the period from March to September 1945. Perhaps the most fascinating book in his entire opus [corpus], there is no despair in it over war and violence, maimed bodies, and destroyed buildings. As a boy he learned to measure the movement of the stars against the objects on earth, and now he measured the events of the day against the eternal beauty of Bach's music, the portraits of Rembrandt, the dramas of Shakespeare, and the novels of Dostoevsky. He delivers a remarkable message:wherever we are and whatever events pull us into their currents, we should not lose sight [of] and cease to strive toward the highest and most sublime. (Predrag Cicovacki, The Analysis of Wonder: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nicolai Hartmann, Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 159.)

Hartmann Nicolai

 

Nicolai Hartmann on Søren Kierkegaard and Competing Attitudes Toward Individuality

Although existentialist themes can be traced all the way back to Socrates and then forward through St. Augustine and Blaise Pascal, to mention only three pre-Kierkegaardian luminaries, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is rightly regarded as the father of existentialism. His worked proved to be seminal for that of Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Jean-Paul Sartre, to mention just three post-Kierkegaardian luminaries.  You won't be able to understand properly Angst, Existenz, or Sein-Zum-Tode in Heidegger without having read Kierkegaard. And the same goes for the key concepts of the others who are loosely collectible under the umbrella of existentialism.

Kierkegaard's subjective-existential philosophical approach is one that is the polar opposite of one that could be described as objectivist or cosmological, for want of better labels. Nicolai Hartmann is an excellent representative of the latter tendency.  Here is what Wolfgang Stegmueller has to say about Hartmann's attitude toward Kierkegaard (the translation is mine):

In Kierkegaard, the spiritual creator of existential philosophy, Hartmann sees the unhappiest and most cunningly refined (raffiniertesten) self-tormentor of human history.  Hartmann denies to anxiety and death any metaphysical significance while admitting their role as emotional phenomena.  Only an egotist (Ichmensch) consumed with self-importance sees in anxiety and death something unsettling and terrifying.  Cosmically considered, the death of the individual  shows itself to be a totally insignificant event in the totality of the world process.  It is only an unnatural attitude of protracted self-reflection that artificially induces anxiety of death which then assumes metaphysical weight. (Hauptstroemungen der Gegenwartsphilosophie, Alfred Kroener Verlag, 1960, 242.)

For Hartmann, then, Kierkegaard's concern with the existing individual , and in the first instance himself as existing individual, merely reflects unhealthy self-absorption and egocentricity.  The individual, whether an individual rock, plant, animal or man is fleeting, ephemeral, of no final significance.

Maybe I will finish this entry some day. Maybe I will die first. It has been languishing  in the queue for many a year. So here it is, a stub. If it gets you reading the luminaries mentioned, then it was worth posting.

Contingent, Necessary, Impossible: A Note on Nicolai Hartmann

Hartmann Nicolai Hartmann, Moeglichkeit und Wirklichkeit, p. 29:  . . . denn das Zufaellige ist immerhim wirklich, und nur die Notwendigkeit negiert.  Hartmann is saying in effect that everything contingent is actual, and that the contingent and the necessary are polar opposites:  what is contingent is not necessary, and what is not necessary is contingent.

I beg to differ.  First of all, not everything contingent is actual.  My being asleep now and my being awake (= not asleep) now are both possible states of affairs.  The second  is actual, the first  is not.  But both are contingent.  So not everything contingent is actual.  The imagery of possible worlds ought to make this graphic for the modally challenged.  A contingent state of affairs is one that obtains in some but not all possible worlds.  Now my being asleep now obtains in some but not all possible worlds.  Therefore, my being asleep now is contingent though not actual.  So not everything contingent is actual.

Second, it is not the case that x is contingent if and only if x is not necessary.  For there are states of affairs that are not necessary but also not contingent.  My being both awake and not awake now is an impossible state of affairs.  It is neither necessary nor contingent.  Not necessary, because it does not obtain in every possible world.  Not contingent, because it it does not obtain in some (but not all) possible worlds. 

The polar opposite of the contingent is not the necessary but the the noncontingent.  The noncontingent   embraces both the the necessary and the impossible, that which exists/obtains in all worlds, and that which exists/obtains in no world.  Reality, then, is modally tripartite:

The necessary: that which exists/obtains in all possible worlds.  The contingent: that which exists/obtains in some but not all possible worlds.  The impossible: that which exists/obtains in no possible world.

You say you are uncomfortable with the patois of possible worlds?  The distinctions can be sliced without this jargon.  The necessary is that which cannot not be.  The contingent is that which is possible to be and possible not to be. The impossible is that which cannot be.

And that's all she wrote, modally speaking.