Harald Høffding

Works

• 1894A History of Modern Philosophy

  Two volumes (1894–95) from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century, translated into many languages: the great systems are presented as attempts to grasp the relation between knowledge, nature and value, with attention to their psychological and ethical sides.

• 1901The Philosophy of Religion

  Religion is examined not as knowledge of the supernatural but as faith in the conservation of value – the conviction that what has value is not lost in the course of the world; dogmas are symbols of this experience.

Position

Høffding is on the map as the central Danish philosopher between Kierkegaard and the twentieth century and as a mediator of European debates. His “Psychology on the Basis of Experience” (1882) treated the mind as a unity of knowing, feeling and willing, studied empirically without reducing consciousness to physiology; he called his position “critical monism”: mind and matter are two aspects of one reality, known from different sides. His “Ethics” (1887) made the welfare of all the measure of morality, in the line of Bentham and Mill. In 1889 he answered Georg Brandes’s essay on Nietzsche with “Democratic Radicalism”, defending the happiness of the many against an ethics of great individuals – a debate that is now read as an early dispute over the Nordic welfare state. In the “Philosophy of Religion” (1901) the core of religion is the faith in the conservation of value. He wrote one of the first philosophical studies of Kierkegaard (1892), a widely used “History of Modern Philosophy” and a study of Bergson (1914), to which Bergson replied with a letter on intuition. William James wrote the preface to the English translation of his “Problems of Philosophy” (1905).

Life & context

Harald Høffding was born on 11 March 1843 in Copenhagen into a merchant family. He studied theology at the University of Copenhagen, went through a religious crisis while reading Kierkegaard and turned to philosophy, taking his doctorate in 1870. After years as a schoolteacher he became lecturer (1880) and then professor of philosophy at Copenhagen (1883), where he taught until 1915. His textbooks in psychology, ethics and the history of philosophy were translated into many languages, and he corresponded with William James, Henri Bergson and Ferdinand Tönnies, among others. Among his students was Niels Bohr. From 1914 he lived in the Carlsberg honorary residence, which the Carlsberg Foundation provides for a distinguished Danish scholar or artist. He died in Copenhagen on 2 July 1931.

Further main works

• Psykologi i Omrids paa Grundlag af Erfaring (1882)
• Etik (1887)
• Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof (1892)
• Den nyere Filosofis Historie (2 vols., 1894–95)
• Religionsfilosofi (1901)
• Filosofiske Problemer (1902; The Problems of Philosophy, 1905)
• Henri Bergsons Filosofi (1914)