Eduard von Hartmann

Eduard von Hartmann (1842 to 1906) was a German philosopher and independent scholar, the author of the widely read Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869). Born in Berlin as the son of a Prussian major general, he was trained for an army career and reached the rank of first lieutenant before a chronic knee problem ended it in 1865. After earning a doctorate at Rostock in 1867 he declined professorships offered by Leipzig, Göttingen and Berlin and lived as a private scholar in Berlin, doing most of his work in bed while in great pain. His metaphysics took the Unconscious, at once Will and Reason, as the all-embracing ground of existence, combining pantheism with panlogism and joining something of Hegel with something of Schopenhauer. His pessimistic reading of the best of all possible worlds drew him into the pessimism controversy, and his thought is sometimes seen as a bridge between Schopenhauer's Will and Freud's unconscious.