Passive and Active Transcendence in Ethics of Nicolai Hartmann

Natalia Danilkina

In his new ontology, Nicolai Hartmann investigates the relationship between the ideality of absolute moral values and the reality of human behaviour. He joins Max Scheler in his criticism towards Kant’s and neo-Kantian formalism and resorts to certain implements of phenomenology. This paper will focus on two types of the transcendental acts, which are majorly discussed in Hartmann’s ethics: acts of knowing and acts of willing. Hartmann argues against the statement that object is built by the knowing subject in the process of cognition. On the contrary, he claims, the being, both real and ideal, is prior to cognition; value entities are seen and not built by knowing subject. The being as such needs no mirror of itself, no counter-world; it does not need subjective representations, it is indifferent to the knowing subject, his consciousness or any kind of cognition. Value seeing as a transcendental act of cognition is merely receptive; it is unable to change anything in the ideal being of values. Whether the consciousness ‘captures’ its fragments or not, it has no active building or transformative power towards them, it only builds representations of the objects of cognition. The knowing subject turns to be “purely receptive” in his beholding of values, whereas the practical subject is “a being who can will, act, set up ends and pursue them, who can foster dispositions and feel values, is capable of moral conduct, either of a positive or negative kind” (Hartmann 2007: 214). With regard to the Ought, the consciousness itself appears to be “not a knowing, but an active striving, a willing, a doing” (Hartmann 2007: 259). This is what Hartmann identifies as the phenomenon of moral consciousness. The knowing theoretical subject is thinkable without contradiction, but, in fact, there is no one like this, the theoretical consciousness is not manifested at the level of phenomena. Thus, we find two types of transcendence in Hartmann’s ontology: theoretical and practical, or passive and active, respectively. The former pertains to a mere philosophical construct and has nothing to do with human creative power, which appears to be an intrinsic characteristic of practical subject. Hartmann’s ambitious project excluding Kant from the philosophical tradition in the beginning, nonetheless, has to revisit Kant’s philosophical system and present a sort of phenomenological interpretation of its statements. Bibliography Hartmann, Nicolai. (2007). Moral Phenomena: Volume One of Ethics, with a new introduction by Andreas A.M. Kinneging. New Brunswick, London: Transaction Publishers.