The Rogue of All Rogues: Nietzsche's Presentation of Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophie des Unbewussten and Hartmann's Response to Nietzsche
Rent from DeepDyveBefore now there has been no study in English devoted exclusively to the relation between Eduard von Hartmann and Friedrich Nietzsche.1 What few mentions have appeared in the secondary literature come to us more often than not in the form of discussions of Nietzsche and psychology in general.2 Hartmann was, however, one of the first psychologists whose works Nietzsche read a great deal.3 Over time, Nietzsche came to own six large volumes of his writings, two of which remain in his private library, and many pages of which bear Nietzsche's marginal notes.4 His name and thought appear prominently in part 2 of Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" (hereafter HL), and even more so in his Nachlass and personal correspondence.5 Nietzsche's interest in Hartmann endured throughout his career.6 Moreover, Hartmann was himself one of the earliest commentators on Nietzsche, having already in 1891 and 1898 published articles on Nietzsche's so-called neue Moral.7 His significance as a psychologist and the importance of his Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious) to Nietzschean scholarship thus stands assured but too often unrecognized.8
This neglect, however, is not without cause: the overgrown thicket of Nietzsche's relation to Hartmann is difficult to traverse because of the exceedingly sarcastic manner in which Nietzsche consistently portrays him. Nietzsche declaims Hartmann as a Schalk or a Schelm, designations best translated as "rogue," or "knave," or "jester." But it is at best unclear why he repeatedly chose to do so, what meaning these terms have, or why Hartmann merited such an obfuscated treatment. In this essay, I will discuss Hartmann's thought and will suggest several motivations for Nietzsche's peculiar presentation of it. Then, I will outline and assess Hartmann's criticisms of Nietzsche. Finally, I will determine what, if any, positive influence there may have been between the two thinkers upon one another, something that I hope will contribute to a better understanding of Nietzsche's psychology and of the latter chapters of On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. [End Page 41]
A Psychologist among Historians
Our first piece of this relationship's puzzle is uncovered when we notice the location of the discussion in which Nietzsche situates Hartmann: the antepenultimate chapter of his 1874 HL. But why would Nietzsche place a critical discussion of a psychologist within an essay on history? To answer this we must first familiarize ourselves with Hartmann's position in the history of thought because he is a relative unknown in the English-speaking world. Although there is no doubt Hartmann considered himself a psychologist, something not identical with today's version thereof, he was equally concerned with ethics, theology, modern physics, history, and especially the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Hegel. His thoughts on these varying topics, though, were systematically rooted in what he called the psychological Weltanschauung, where he—not unlike Nietzsche—sought to uncover the drives and motivations at work in those who populate such fields of thought and in the masses affected by them, what motivations lead to which resulting actions, and what instincts drive which cultures to what ends. As such, he was regarded in a light similar to that of his immediate contemporary Wilhelm Wundt, widely vaunted as the father of modern psychology, who also published on logic (1880–83) and ethics (1886) and even a work of systematic philosophy (1889).9 More the experimentalist, Wundt would later transform the speculative psychology of Hartmann—and, for that matter, of someone like Nietzsche—into the empirical discipline more generally accepted today.
In a manner that echoes Hegel, Hartmann characterizes his own work as the "Striving for Spiritual Monism...
