Abstract
Nicolai Hartmann contributed significantly to the revitalization of the discipline of ontology in the early twentieth century. Developing a systematic, post-Kantian critical ontology ‘this side’ of idealism and realism, he subverted the widespread impression that philosophy must either exhaust itself in foundationalist epistemology or engage in system-building metaphysical excess. This essay provides an introduction to Hartmann’s approach in light of the recent translation of his early essay ‘How is Critical Ontology Possible?’ (1923) In it Hartmann criticizes both the pretensions of epistemology as well as the principal errors of classical ontology, and he proposes a series of correctives that lead to his development of a highly original and elaborate stratified categorial ontology. This introduction explains the most important errors of the ‘old’ ontology, his correctives to them, and further fleshes out these correctives with reference to his mature ontological work.
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Notes
The book is subtitled “Attempt at a Marxist Self-Understanding,” or, a bit more expansively, “An Attempt to Reconcile Hartmann with my version of Marxism.” Harich was, perhaps paradoxically, a life-long follower and friend of Georg Lukács, as well as a great admirer and former student of Hartmann in the 1940s. As the subtitle hints, he always hoped to be able to show how Hartmann’s work could provide a sound ontological framework for Marxism. The book was composed in the 1980s and was never published, and after 1992 the manuscript was given to Martin Morgenstern. For a description of the intriguing history and vicissitudes of the two volumes by Harich recently edited by Morgenstern, see the editor’s forewords to both: Harich (2000, pp. vii–xix); and Harich (2004, pp. vii–xxi).
In this dialogue Harich goes on to explain that Heidegger was familiar with these two early works, referring to them in a footnote in Being and Time. He goes further to claim that Being and Time had Hartmann’s approach to ontology as one of its major targets, and that opposition to Hartmann forms the subtext of many of the discussions throughout the book, in footnotes and other passages where Hartmann is not mentioned by name. He also remarks that Hartmann, after moving on to Köln, read Being and Time in full awareness that he was one of the targets of the critique leveled in it, and that in GO (and other works) he “struck back” against Heidegger (Harich 2004, 166).
It is also necessary to take into account the other contributors to the revivification of the ontological tradition at the time, and to consider Hartmann’s relation to them. While others “announced” the coming of a new ontology, in his own estimation Hartmann was the only one to have actually “carried it out.” There is some justification for this belief. His oeuvre is imposing, covers all major thematic areas of philosophy, and his four volumes of ontology alone span more than 2,000 pages. In this relation he mentions Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Günther Jakoby, Alexius Meinong, Max Scheler, and Heidegger (GO VII), and elsewhere Hans Pichler and Emil Lask. Hans Pichler is singled out as one who “strengthened [Hartmann’s] conviction that [he] was on the right track,” but he too did not develop the new ontology.
Corresponding pages in the Aufbau version of each text are pp. 61–156, and pp. 375–521. References to Der Aufbau der realen Welt: Grundriss der allgemeinen Kategorienlehre (1940) hereafter ‘A’ followed by page numbers. For an early discussion of “categorial laws” in English, see pp. 395–402 of the 1926 Ethics (Hartmann 1932, Vol. II), which he must have been working on concurrently with the 1925 essay “Categorial Laws.” With the exception of New Ways of Ontology (1943, hereafter NW) passages, all translations of Hartmann are my own.
Hartmann himself recognizes the central significance of this error when he devotes a whole section to it alone in NW 54–62. Obviously there may be many other historical and contextual reasons for the development of his theory of stratification aside from this systematic one, only some aspects of which are reflected in the brief treatment of this error in the essay. Harich (2004) is currently the best resource for placing Hartmann in the context of early 20th century debates over positivism, materialism, vitalism, psychologism, historicism, existentialism, Marxism, neo-Thomism, etc.
I have discussed some aspects of his contemporary relevance in Peterson (2010) and Peterson (2012). The person who has contributed most to current renewed interest in Hartmann’s work and argues for its significant contemporary relevance is the Italian philosopher Roberto Poli. Many of his writings on Hartmann can be found on his website, http://robertopoli.co.cc/.
For his more nuanced interpretation of Kant, see Hartmann (1924).
These are usually elaborated in entirely separate sections in the A version.
Dasein means “existence” for Hartmann, “that something is at all.” (He deliberately uses the term in a more traditional way in contrast to Heidegger’s idiosyncratic usage.) The “ways of being” [Seinsweise] are two: ideal being and real being, and he also calls them the two “primary spheres” of being. (The “secondary spheres” include those of logic, cognition [or knowledge], and thinking.) The two primary spheres are distinguishable principally through their different ‘modalities’ of being, which Hartmann exhaustively investigates in his Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit (1938). There is more discussion of the spheres above. Sosein has been translated by some as “specific character,” and indicates the “what” of something. He glosses it here with “configuration, structure, and content.” It is important to note that he does not use Sosein as a synonym for “essence,” “form,” or “nature” in any traditional sense. It should also be noted that Sosein is not merely ideal while Dasein is real being, for ideal and real concreta each have a Dasein and Sosein of their own. Contemporaries like Meinong and Scheler also used the term Sosein, but each with their own meaning. For Hartmann’s thorough discussion of Sosein and Dasein, see GO 81–138. I leave the term Sosein untranslated.
Even if ontology will eventually have to come down on the side of realism, it is unlike any conventional type. “The expression ‘realism’ is not at all fitting for the position of ontology, which is also why none of the conventional types of realist classification is in accord with it” (GO 140).
“…[O]ntology is superior to epistemology [Gnoseologie] in that it takes up the whole breadth of the cognitive relation within itself and recognizes in it just one among other ontological relations” (Hartmann 1921, 185).
Throughout I will use the Kleinere Schriften page numbers, included in brackets in the translation.
“There is no such thing as ‘knowing’ isolated by itself. It appears only in the complex of other transcendent acts, in which the coherence of life consists” (GO 222).
Like Husserl, Hartmann distinguishes between a “natural attitude” toward the world and the “reflective attitude” adopted by logic and epistemology. These he calls intentio recta and intentio obliqua respectively. Unlike Husserl he thinks that the reflective attitude is not a sound basis for ontology, and takes ontology, as he does science, to be an extension of the natural attitude. See GO 46 and note.
He discusses this term further in GO. “‘Ansichsein’ is not a strictly ontological concept. It is only a defense and a line of demarcation against merely objective being. Epistemology needs this line of demarcation, it has to draw it for its own sake. For it and its reflective stance what is as such becomes apparent only in exceeding the object-relation. ‘Ansichsein’ is and remains a gnoseological concept. Ontology can do without it. Ontology has reverted to intentio recta from intentio obliqua. This defense is not needed for it; the correlativist prejudice does not belong to it. In its concept of ‘what is insofar as it is’ the concept of Ansichsein is already surpassed.” (GO 78–79).
“The greatest and most difficult of all metaphysical questions is precisely this: whether and how far thinking, with its own lawfulness, can even strike upon the essence of being” (HCOP 274).
For a thorough critique of teleology in all its forms, see Hartmann (1951).
For a full treatment of the distinction between primary and secondary spheres, see Hartmann (1938).
Hartmann’s relationship to the phenomenologists is complex. For one view, see Spiegelberg (1960, 358–389). While he learned much from the early Husserl, Scheler, and the Munich circle, and recognized in phenomenology a valuable descriptive method that would help prevent precipitous category errors, he did not believe that phenomenology could on its own solve long-standing philosophical problems. See his critical remarks in, for example, A 535 note, and 536–537.
There is a much expanded discussion of this error in A 72–78.
For his analysis of the category of causality see Hartmann (1950, 318–330).
This position is already clearly stated in HCOP: “The only evident fact is that within the ultimate intelligible stratum all members are reciprocally conditioned by one another, such that in a certain sense each is the supreme principle and yet each is dependent upon all the others” (304), so that we have “a plurality of ultimate conceivable elements.” A quick review of his “rhapsodic” table of fundamental pairs of contraries reveals 36 altogether, and if we add modal categories (possibility, actuality, necessity) and their negative counterparts (negative possibility, inactuality, impossibility), as well as categorial laws (four groups of four), we end up with no less than 58 fundamental ontological categories. While it may be possible to describe the ideal sphere with fewer categories, we cannot understand the real world with a smaller number. In fact, the special categories stemming from specific domains of physical, biological, psychological, and spiritual phenomena must be added to the list. We may safely conclude that Hartmann’s ontological taxonomy is one of the most elaborate ever created.
He repeated this sentence with a few alterations in A: “The postulate of a punctual unity is a human-subjective rationalistic atavism of immature thinking” (143). He adds that ‘dualism’ is another version of the error of heterogeneity, an exaggeration of the significance of one categorial pair over all others (145–146).
“Each category that falls at all within the realm of identity simultaneously belongs to both spheres, the ontically real and the gnoseological actual sphere, but it spans this double allocation with only one part of its nature, in the other part it is split or torn apart by it. Obviously, the division for each category is also substantively different, such that an unlimited multiplicity of gradations between the extremes of full identity and of complete nonidentity is possible. Here is a new, as yet completely fallow field for research, undoubtedly rich with consequences, with whose disclosure and fruitful treatment the task of a critical ontology can first genuinely begin.” (300) To further clarify these relations would require a more detailed look at his epistemology than can be pursued here.
Hartmann does not always make a clear distinction between categories understood as principles that 1) determine both ontologically and cognitively, structuring both spheres while not being thematized by cognition (partially identical categories); 2) those that are used involuntarily or ‘intuitively’ by thinkers in order to understand objects; and 3) those that are more deliberately ‘applied’ by cognition to objects. The distinction between ‘intuitive’ and ‘applied’ categories is discussed in Aufbau, pp. 98, 114–115.
The explicit argument for doing so comes out clearly in Hartshorne (1969). He argues that we have to choose psychological over physical categories as basic principles because as fundamental categories the values of physical categories could never cover the range necessary to explain sentient beings. See pp. 111–123. Hartmann would approve of the fact that Hartshorne recognizes that two sets of categories apply to different domains of phenomena, but would charge him with Grenzüberschreitung when he generalizes the psychological set to cover the whole of reality. The same charge would likely be made against Whitehead.
This is one of the most frequent mistakes in interpretations of Hartmann’s philosophy. Real concreta are on a flat plane of tangled spatial and temporal determination and interconnection where their ontological principles are immanent to them. These concreta might be conceived, as in ecology, to occupy levels of a scalar hierarchy where every higher level incorporates elements from the lower. These relations between concreta are orthogonal to the conception of categorial stratification and do not coincide with it in any respect. I’ll discuss this further below. Even a reader as sympathetic as Peruzzi makes claims about “genesis” between levels that indicate an unfortunate misunderstanding of Hartmann’s theory of strata (2001).
For further discussion of strata laws see NW 73–83 and A 429–464.
This is the only “pure case of superformation” (NW 82) between strata, where the totality of the higher stratum takes up all of the categories of the lower stratum within itself.
This simple ontological observation is one of the roots of Hartmann’s generalized non-anthropocentrism. Hartmann uses it, and the previous law, to guard against teleological interpretations of the world that are explicitly or implicitly anthropocentric. “All teleology of forms […] makes the mistake of inverting the law of strength. It makes the higher categories the stronger ones. This corresponds to a certain dream image of the world, fondly framed by man at all times. It permits him to consider himself, in his capacity as a spiritual being, the crowning achievement of the world.” (NW 89–90). In contrast, he claims that our task is “to come to terms with a world not made for” us.
References
Hartmann’s Works
Hartmann N (1921) Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis. De Gruyter, Berlin-Leipzig
Hartmann N (1923) Wie ist kritische Ontologie überhaupt möglich? In Kleinere Schriften III (1958) De Gruyter, Berlin, pp 268–313
Hartmann N (1924) Diesseits von Idealismus und Realismus, ein Beitrag zur Scheidung des Geschichtlichen und Übergeschichtlichen in der Kantischen Philosophie. Kant-Studien 29: 160–206. (In Kleinere Schriften II [1957] De Gruyter, Berlin, pp 278–322)
Hartmann N (1925–1926) Kategoriale Gesetze: Ein Kapitel zur Grundlegung der Allgemeinen Kategorienlehre. Philosophischer Anzeiger 1: 201–266
Hartmann N (1932) Ethics. 3 vols. Trans. Coit. George Allen & Unwin, London (reprinted with new Introductions by A. A. Kinneging, Transaction Press, 2002–2004)
Hartmann N (1935) Zur Grundlegung der Ontologie. De Gruyter, Berlin
Hartmann N (1938) Möglichkeit und Wircklichkeit. De Gruyter, Berlin
Hartmann N (1940) Der Aufbau der realen Welt. Grundriss der allgemeinen Kategorienlehre. De Gruyter, Berlin
Hartmann N (1943) Neue Wege der Ontologie. In: Hartmann N (ed) Systematische Philosophie. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, pp 199–311
Hartmann N (1947) Ziele und Wege der Kategorialanalyse. In Kleinere Schriften, 1 (1958), De Gruyter, Berlin, pp 89–121
Hartmann N (1949) Erkenntnis im Lichte der Ontologie. In Kleinere Schriften, 1 (1958), De Gruyter, Berlin, pp 122–179
Hartmann N (1950) Philosophie der Natur. De Gruyter, Berlin
Hartmann N (1951) Teleologisches Denken. De Gruyter, Berlin [orig. 1944]
Hartmann N (1953) New Ways of Ontology. Trans. Kuhn. Henry Regnery Company, Chicago
Other Works
Harich W (2000) Nicolai Hartmann: Leben, Werk, Wirkung. In: Morgenstern O (ed) Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg
Harich W (2004) Nicolai Hartmann: Größe und Grenzen. In: Martin Morgenstern (ed) Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg
Hartshorne C (1969) Beyond humanism: essays in the new philosophy of nature. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln
Heimsoeth H (ed) (1952) Nicolai Hartmann: Der Denker und sein Werk. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen
Kant I (2007) Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd edn. Trans. Kemp-Smith. Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Klein J (1952) Nicolai Hartmann und die Marburger Schule. In Heimsoeth (ed) Nicolai Hartmann: Der Denker und sein Werk. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, pp 105–130
Peruzzi A (2001) Hartmann’s stratified reality. Axiomathes 12:227–260
Peterson K (2010) All that we are: philosophical anthropology and ecophilosophy. Cosmos Hist J Nat Soc Philos 6(1):60–82
Peterson K (2012) Nicolai Hartmann’s Critical Ontology: Stratification and Nonanthropocentrism. In: Kuperus G, Oele M (eds) Ontology of nature. Springer, New York
Plessner H (1952) Offene Problemgeschichte. In: Heimsoeth (ed) Nicolai Hartmann: Der Denker und sein Werk. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, pp 97–104
Spiegelberg H (1960) The phenomenological movement, vol 1. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Frederic Tremblay and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
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Peterson, K.R. An Introduction to Nicolai Hartmann’s Critical Ontology. Axiomathes 22, 291–314 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-012-9184-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-012-9184-1