Eugen Dühring

Eugen Karl Dühring (12 January 1833, Berlin – 21 September 1921, Nowawes in modern-day Potsdam-Babelsberg, aged 88) was an antisemitic German philosopher, positivist, economist, and socialist who was a strong critic of Marxism.

Life and works

Dühring was born in Berlin, Prussia. After a legal education he practised law in Berlin until 1859. A weakness of the eyes, ending in total blindness, led him to take up the studies with which his name is now connected. In 1864, he became docent of the University of Berlin, but, in consequence of a quarrel with the professoriate, was deprived of his licence to teach in 1874.^[1]

Among his works are Kapital und Arbeit (1865); Der Wert des Lebens (1865); Natürliche Dialektik (1865); Kritische Geschichte der Philosophie (von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart) (1869); Kritische Geschichte der allgemeinen Principien der Mechanik (1872), one of his most successful works; Kursus der National und Sozialokonomie (1873); Kursus der Philosophie (1875), entitled in a later edition Wirklichkeitsphilosophie; Logik und Wissenschaftstheorie (1878); and Der Ersatz der Religion durch Vollkommeneres (1883).^[1] He also published Die Judenfrage als Racen-, Sitten- und Culturfrage (1881, The Jewish Question as a Racial, Moral, and Cultural Question).^[2]^[3]

He published his autobiography in 1882 under the title Sache, Leben und Feinde; the mention of Feinde ('enemies') is characteristic. Dühring's philosophy claims to be emphatically the philosophy of reality. He is passionate in his denunciation of everything which, like mysticism, tries to veil reality. He is, in the words of historian Carlton J. H. Hayes "almost Lucretian in his anger against religion"^[4] which would withdraw the secret of the universe from our direct gaze. His substitute for religion is a doctrine in many points akin to Auguste Comte and Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, the former of whom he resembles in his sentimentalism.^[1]

Dühring's economic views are said to derive largely from those of Friedrich List.^[5]^[6] On other matters, particularly their attitudes toward Jews, the two men held very different opinions.^[7]

Thought

He was "deeply" influenced by Schopenhauer throughout his career.^[8] Dühring's opinions changed considerably after his first appearance as a writer. His earlier work, Natürliche Dialektik (Natural Dialectics), is entirely in the spirit of critical philosophy. Later, in his movement towards positivism, beginning with the publication of Kritische Geschichte der Philosophie (Critical History of Philosophy), he rejects Immanuel Kant's separation of phenomenon from noumenon and claims that our intellect is capable of grasping the whole reality. This adequacy of thought to things is because the universe contains but one reality, i.e. matter. It is to matter that we must look for the explanation both of conscious and of physical states. But matter is not, in his system, to be understood with the common meaning, but with a deeper sense as the substratum of all conscious and physical existence; and thus the laws of being are identified with the laws of thought. In this idealistic system Dühring finds room for teleology. The end of nature, he holds, is the production of a race of conscious beings. From his belief in teleology he is not deterred by the enigma of pain. As a determined optimist, he asserts that pain exists to throw pleasure into conscious relief.^[1]

In ethics, Dühring follows Auguste Comte in making sympathy the foundation of morality. In political philosophy, he teaches an ethical communism and attacks Herbert Spencer's principle of Social Darwinism. In economics, he is best known by his vindication of the American writer H. C. Carey, who attracts him both by his theory of value, which suggests an ultimate harmony of the interests of capitalists and labourers; and also by his doctrine of national political economy, which advocates protection on the ground that the morals and culture of a people are promoted by having its whole system of industry complete within its own borders. His patriotism is fervent, but narrow and exclusive. He idolized Frederick the Great, and denounced Jews, Greeks, and the cosmopolitan Goethe. His writing has been characterized as clear and incisive, "though disfigured by arrogance and ill-temper, failings which may be extenuated on the ground of his physical affliction".^[1]

Throughout his life, Dühring was a vehement antisemite and was one of the first proponents of racial antisemitism in Germany. In 1881 Dühring's pamphlet Die Judenfrage als Racen-, Sitten- und Culturfrage (The Jewish Question as a Question of Race, Morals and Culture) was published. It was a pseudo-scientific attempt to give antisemitism as a political movement a biological, historical, and philosophical foundation. He described the "Jewish question" similarly to Wilhelm Marr, as an expression of an irresolvable racial antagonism, and openly advocated for the "murder and extermination" of Jews as a solution to the Jewish question.^[9]

Legacy

He is chiefly remembered among English-speakers because of Engels' criticism of his views in Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science. Engels wrote his Anti-Dühring in opposition to Dühring's ideas, which had found some disciples among the German Social Democrats. He is also the most prominent representative of the socialism of that era attacked by Nietzsche in his later works. Most of Dühring's work remains unavailable in English, aside from his work on the Jewish question.^[10] Dühring's writing on the Jewish question influenced later antisemites and racist thinkers such as Theodor Fritsch, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Georg von Schönerer. Through this legacy, Dühring's antisemitic views later found their way into the racial doctrines of Nazism.^[11]

Friedrich Nietzsche heavily criticized Dühring's opinions on morality in his work On the Genealogy of Morality:

I again remind readers who have ears to hear of that apostle of revenge from Berlin, Eugen Dühring, who makes the most indecent and disgusting use of moral clap-trap of anyone in Germany today: Dühring, today's biggest loudmouth of morality, even amongst his kind, the anti-Semites.^[12]

"Heroic materialism" characterized Dühring's philosophy. He attacked capitalism, Marxism, and organized Christianity and Judaism. Many scholars^[13] believe that Dühring's invention of a modern-sounding antisemitism helped persuade Theodor Herzl that Zionism was the only answer:

Herzl acknowledged this over and over in his diaries and correspondence: "I will fight anti-Semitism in the place it originated—in Germany and in Austria," he said in one letter. He identified the genealogy of modern, racist antisemitism in the writings of the German social scientist Dr. Eugen Duehring in the 1890s.^[14]

Notes

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Sturt, Henry (1911). "Dühring, Eugen Karl". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 8 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 649.
^ Dühring, Eugen (1881). Die Judenfrage als Racen-, Sitten- und Culturfrage: Mit einer weltgeschichtlichen Antwort [The Jewish Question as a Racial, Moral, and Cultural Question: With a World-historical Answer] (PDF scan) (in German) (1st ed.). Karlsruhe; Leipzig: H. Reuther. Title page. OCLC 827007878 – via Internet Archive.
^ Fonseca, Gonçalo L. "Eugen Karl Dühring, 1833–1921". The History of Economic Thought. Institute for New Economic Thinking. Archived from the original on 31 May 2018. Retrieved 31 May 2018. – Major Works of Eugen Dühring[:] [...] (mx) Die Judenfrage als Racen-, Sitten- und Culturfrage, 1881, (on Google Books) (later editions retitled Die Judenfrage als Frage der Rassenschadlichkeit fur Existenz, Sitte und Kultur der Volker, mit einer weltgeschichtlichen Antwort, 1886 3rd ed, 1892 4th ed, 1901 5th ed.)
^ Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, 1941, p. 128.
^ "It would be better to read Herr Dühring's chapter on mercantilism in the 'original', that is, in F. List's National System, Chapter 29..." Anti-Dühring.
^ "Eugen Dühring", a lecturer at the university of Berlin, declared that List's doctrines represented 'the first real advance' in economics since the publication of The Wealth of Nations. (Henderson, William O. Friedrich List: Economist and Visionary (Frank Cass, London 1983).
^ "Up to the time of Philip II... Spain possessed all the elements of greatness and prosperity, when bigotry, in alliance with despotism, set to work to stifle the high spirit of the nation. The first commencement of this work of darkness was the expulsion of the Jews, and its crowning act the expulsion of the Moors, whereby two millions of the most industrious and well-to-do inhabitants were driven out of Spain with their capital." (From List's The National System of Political Economy, p. 58.)
^ This is according to historian Frederick C. Beiser in his Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, Chapter 6, "The Optimism of Eugen Dühring," p. 87. "As a young man Dühring read Schopenhauer, who deeply impressed him. He admired his clarity, rigour and bluntness, and especially his stand against university philosophy. In his opinion, in breadth and depth, Schopenhauer stood head and shoulders above all the post-Kantians. It was Schopenhauer's great merit, Dühring believed, to have dragged philosophy out of its scholastic cocoon and to have made it confront the greatest question of them all: to be or not to be. That question was for Dühring nothing less than 'the chief theme of philosophy.' " (Der Werth des Lebens (1865), p. 1.
^ Rose, Paul Lawrence (2014-07-14). German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-6111-8.
^ Dühring, Eugen (1997). Eugen Dühring on the Jews. Brighton, England: Nineteen Eighty Four Press. p. 228. ISBN 0-906879-31-0.
^ Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, Vom Konkurrenten des Karl Marx zum Vorläufer Hitlers: Eugen Dühring, in: Karl Schwedhelm (Hrsg.): Propheten des Nationalsozialismus, 1969.
^ Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (15 March 2020). On the Genealogy of Morality. Arcturus Publishing Limited. p. 91. ISBN 978-1-83857-572-4. OCLC 1130664996.
^ Gordis, Daniel (2016). Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers. p. 18.
^ Herzl's Road to Zionism Archived January 12, 2007, at the Wayback Machine

References

Kritische Geschichte der allgemeinen Principien der Mechanik
Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Sozialismus
Cursus der Philosophie als streng wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung
MIA Glossary of People, under the GFDL
Encyclopedia of Marxism (Creative Commons)