Hartmann, KARL ROBERT EDUARD VON, German philosopher, born at Berlin on 23d February 1842. From 1858 to 1865 he served as an artillery officer in the Prussian guards, but was compelled to abandon his calling owing to an affection of the knee. Since 1867 he has lived in Berlin, busied with the elaboration of a comprehensive system of philosophy. His activity may be divided into two periods; in the first, from 1868 to 1877, he was chiefly working out his ideas on methodology, the philosophy of the natural sciences, psychology, metaphysics, and the theory of knowledge (Erkenntnisstheorie); in the latter, from 1878 onwards, he has been chiefly concerned with ethics, the philosophy of religion, and aesthetics. His system is a synthesis of Hegel's and Schopenhauer's systems, which he has reduced, by means of Schelling's conception of the Unconscious and his doctrine of principles, to a concrete monism; and his substructure is built upon an empirical basis with the aid of the inductive methods employed in the natural sciences and history. In his own words—'As I have followed Schelling's precedent in uniting Hegel's one-sided identification of the world's substance with the logical Idea with Schopenhauer's similarly one-sided identification of it with Will, so I have also endeavoured to effect a higher unity between Hegel's coldness and want of feeling, whereby the individual is degraded to an insensitive instrument of the Idea, with whose fate, with whose weal or woe, philosophy does not concern itself, and Schopenhauer's lack of interest in the process of the All, and his insistence on the redemption of self from an individual existence of pain as the sole end of life. In a similar manner I have corrected Hegel's idea of the philosophy of religion. He has endeavoured to interpret Christianity in a false and unhistorical manner, in that speculatively he makes it the absolute religion of the intellect (Geist). This faulty conception I have amended with certain elements of thought derived from Schopenhauer, to wit, a recognition of the deep and peculiar significance of the Indian religions, of which Hegel had no comprehension and with which he had consequently no sympathy. In my ethics I have assigned to Schopenhauer's emotion morality its proper place beside Hegel's intellectual morality, and have linked Hegel's demand for the subordination of the individual to the teleological end of the absolute Idea to Schopenhauer's conception that the ethical subordination of the individual is conditioned by the unity of substance which obtains between all separate individualities and the one world-substance. But in all these departments of thinking the richer and more important factors were contributed by Hegel's philosophy, whilst Schopenhauer's less elaborated system furnished me with complementary elements. In aesthetics the only thing I had to do in principle was to emphasise still more sharply than Hegel himself has done the antithesis between his concrete idealism and the abstract idealism of Schelling and of Schopenhauer.'
The great aim Ed. von Hartmann has set before himself is that of harmonising and reconciling philosophy with science, by gathering up the varied results of modern scientific investigation into an all-comprehensive philosophic conception of the world (Weltanschauung). His speculative system is commonly believed to be pessimistic in temper; but that is not the case. The Unconscious (the universal monistic principle) is both real and ideal, both will and presentation—the substantial and intelligent principles respectively. And the world-process, instead of being negative, is a process of evolutionary optimism. The substantial principle involves intrinsically an excess of pain over pleasure in the world; and this excess of pain can only be abolished by the annihilation of the substantial principle, Will, and its specific energy, willing, not, however, in individual beings, but once for all universally. The agency by which this 'best possible' consummation is to be achieved is the intellectual principle, working through its own creations, consciousness and individuality, along the lines of progressive development. And this strikes the keynote of the philosophic temper in which Von Hartmann writes. He is an ardent champion of evolutionary progress, a believer in the mission of western energy and enlightenment, and in its teleological justification, an admirer of the modern spirit of enterprise, its robust vigour, its keen delight in struggle and conflict, and its restless practical activity. Hence he proclaims himself as opposed to the teaching and attitude of the prophets of the Weltschmerz; hence he condemns the temper of oriental passivity, the unmanly fashion of cowering and shivering before the March blasts of misery, and despises that 'weariness ere eventide' which is now become so common amongst us.
Ed. von Hartmann also gives close attention to the public questions of the day in Germany, and writes ably and clearly on such matters as education, politics, &c. The results of his activity in these departments will be found in Zur Reform des höheren Schulwesens (1875), Die politischen Aufgaben und Zustände des Deutschen Reichs (1881), Moderne Probleme (1885), Gesammelte Studien und Aufsätze (1876)—this last containing an autobiography—and Zwei Jahrzehnte Deutscher Politik (1889), besides numerous contributions to magazines, such as Die Gegenwart, &c.
The books in which his philosophical creed is laid down bear the following titles: Philosophie des Unbewussten (1869; 10th ed. 1890; Eng. trans. by Coupland, 1884); Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins (1878; 2d ed. 1886); Das religiöse Bewusstsein der Menschheit im Stufengang seiner Entwicklung (1882); Die Religion des Geistes (1882); Die Deutsche Aesthetik seit Kant (1886); and Die Philosophie des Schönen (1887). Besides these, he has written several books supplementary to his principal lines of thought, such as Kritische Grundlegung des transzendentalen Realismus (3d ed. 1885); Neukantianismus, Schopenhauerianismus, und Hegelianismus (2d ed. 1878); Die Selbstsetzung des Christentums und die Religion der Zukunft (2d ed. 1874; Eng. trans. by Dore, 1886); a work on the theory of knowledge (1889); Kritische Wanderungen durch die Philosophie der Gegenwart (1890), &c. Useful helps to the study of his system are Koeber's excellent condensation, Das philosophische System H. von Hartmanns (1884), and Plunacher's Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (1884).