Eduard von Hartmann (1842 to 1906) was a German philosopher whose Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869) held that the will at the root of all things can never be finally satisfied. A satisfied wish is felt only for a moment and then fades into habit, whilst every unmet want goes on being felt; ambition and the urge to possess grow with every success, so that no achievement ever settles a life. Therapeutic Shamanism recognises the restless hunger he described, but traces it to separation from the living world and to the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer, not to the nature of existence itself.
Who was Eduard von Hartmann? #
He was born in Berlin in 1842, the son of a Prussian artillery officer, and was educated for the army until a knee injury in 1861 made a military career impossible. He turned to philosophy instead.1 He spent the rest of his life as a writer, publishing many further books on ethics, religion and aesthetics. His Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious) appeared in Berlin in 1869, ran to nine editions by 1882, and was translated into English in three volumes in 1884.2 It made him famous as “the philosopher of the unconscious” and put him at the centre of what became known in Germany as the pessimism controversy, a long argument in the second half of the nineteenth century over whether life is worth living.3 He died in 1906 at Gross Lichterfelde, near Berlin.1
What did he mean by the unconscious? #
A single, all-embracing principle at work beneath everything, in nature and in us, which combines blind will with an unconscious intelligence. He took the will from the earlier pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer and the idea of a rational order unfolding through history from Hegel, and tried to join them.4 The will is what drives things to want, to strive and to go on existing; the intelligence is what gives the world its order. Conscious life, for Hartmann, is only a small, late part of this much larger process.
Why did he think achieving never settles a life? #
Because of how wanting works. In the long chapter of his book on the misery of existence he set out the reasons. A satisfaction lasts little more than a passing moment, whereas a want lasts as long as the will behind it, and there is hardly an instant when we are not wanting something.5 Satisfactions that become habit stop being felt as pleasure at all, so most of what goes well in a life drops out of awareness, whilst every disappointment is felt in full.6
Ambition, he thought, makes this worse. Quoting an old saying, he called it one of those impulses “which, like salt water, makes one the more thirsty the more one drinks.” For every satisfaction of ambition there are a hundred mortifications, and “Every satisfaction of ambition only serves to screw up one’s claims more highly”, so that only a triumph greater than all before it can give fresh pleasure. His example is a young singer who rises step by step in public favour, takes each triumph as her due, hardly notices her happiness while it lasts, and feels the fall a thousand times more keenly when a younger rival pushes her into second place.7
The urge to possess more than is needed follows the same pattern. Money promises access to every enjoyment, but once possession becomes an end in itself it turns into a torment, through “the insatiableness of the instinct, whose thirst is extinguished by no satisfaction”.8 Even ordinary work, for Hartmann, is mostly taken up to escape something worse, whether want, the torment of ambition or plain boredom.9
What did he think of contentment? #
That it is the best a person can hope for, and that it is not a positive happiness at all. Health, youth, freedom and enough to live on remove the worst pains; add a willing acceptance of what cannot be changed, and contentment follows, so long as no great misfortune strikes. Contentment wants no positive happiness, only freedom from serious pain, and greater goods and good fortune can only put it at risk, because the more there is to lose, the more there is to suffer. So, he observed, it is the poorest and those with the fewest wants who can most easily hold on to it.10
What were his three stages of illusion? #
Three places where people have looked for the happiness that striving never delivers. In the first, linked to the ancient world and to childhood, happiness is thought to be within reach in this life, now. In the second, linked to the Middle Ages and to youth, it is put off to a life after death. In the third, linked to modern times and to adulthood, it is placed in the future of the world, in progress. Hartmann thought each was an illusion, and devoted most of his chapter to taking the first apart, one good at a time: love, friendship, honour, ambition, religion, science and art, wealth and comfort.11 The third illusion is a direct answer to the hope in progress that Hegel had made the meaning of history (see What did Hegel teach about history, freedom and the state?).
Was Hartmann simply a pessimist? #
Not simply. He held that the will brings more pain than pleasure, but he did not counsel giving up. His practical advice was to throw oneself fully into the work of the world and of culture, because he believed that consciousness, once mature enough, could at last turn the whole of volition back into nothing and so bring the suffering of the world to an end.12 His reputation as a pessimist has been judged exaggerated, and his outlook in the end optimistic.13 The philosopher Frederick Beiser describes it as a mixture of pessimism about happiness and optimism about evolution, and his reviewer Sandra Shapshay notes that it was also elitist, holding that the masses could not be made happy but an elite could justify its existence through its part in cultural progress, which depended on social inequality.14
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Through the hunger he described. Therapeutic Shamanism also sees a restlessness at the heart of modern life, a deep ache, a hole that people try and fail to fill with food and drugs, consumer goods, work, television and the internet. That hole is a wound caused by separation, by the loss of the experience of being part of an interconnected whole, and it is healed by reconnection, above all by time in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer.15 The insatiable acquiring that Hartmann saw as a torment is close to wetiko, a parasitic spirit “motivated by greed, selfishness and excessive consumption”, which persuades people that consuming the life-force of others is a natural and admirable way to live.16
His remark about contentment fits too. Hunter-gatherers, the Leavers in Daniel Quinn‘s terms, took only what they needed and left the rest; Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer takes more than it needs and leaves nothing.17 A people with few wants is, by Hartmann’s own reasoning, the people best placed for contentment. See What are Taker and Leaver cultures? and Who was Marshall Sahlins, and what is the original affluent society?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On where the hunger comes from. For Hartmann, endless wanting is built into the will, and so into existence itself; every living thing is caught in it, and the only final release is for willing to stop. Therapeutic Shamanism places it in the human story, not in the nature of things. For hunter-gatherers the other Peoples were the beings who showed humans how to live.18
The meaning of life, in the animist answer, is “to be what Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this intended you to be”, and rocks, trees and cats know that exactly. What makes humans unique is not a greater capacity to strive, but a capacity to forget how we are meant to live, and to invent stories in place of the one Mother Earth gave us.19 On this reading, a life that piles one achievement on another and is never settled is a life that has lost its way, and what settles it is not giving up wanting, as Hartmann concluded, but coming home to who one is, in relationship with the rest of the living world. See What does animism say about the meaning of life?
