Nicolai Hartmann: Proper Ethics Is Atheistic

Abstract

Nicolai Hartmann was educated at his birthplace Riga (Latvia) and at St. Petersburg (Russia), where he graduated from gymnasium in 1901, prior to his university studies in medicine at Tartu (German, Dorpat; Russian, Yuryev) in Estonia and in classical philology at St. Petersburg. When he changed fields to philosophy, he moved to the university at Marburg, Germany. The principal chairs in philosophy there were held by the neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. Under their direction, he worked intensively on ancient philosophy, completing his doctoral dissertation in 1907 and his Habilitationschrift on Platos Logik des Seins (Plato’s logic of being) in 1909. By 1912, however, Hartmann began a struggle against the general neo-Kantian approach and against the logical idealism of his chief academic mentors at Marburg. This shift was brought on, as he himself later reported, largely by studying the work of Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler. The change did not become public, however, until his Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis (Outlines of a metaphysics of cognition) appeared in 1921, after he assumed in 1920 the chair Natorp had held at Marburg. In that work he declares affinity with the work of these phenomenologists, whom he identified as his nearest philosophical neighbors. Still, he had hardly any contact with other members of the phenomenological movement until 1925, when he became a colleague of Scheler at Cologne. They remained friends until Scheler’s death in 1928. In 1931 Hartmann transferred to a chair at Berlin and finally to Göttingen in 1945. He died at Göttingen on October 9, 1950.