HÖNIGSWALD, RICHARD
(1875–1947)

Richard Hönigswald, the German philosopher, was born in Magyarovar, a small Hungarian town near the Austrian border. He received a degree in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1902 and then studied philosophy under Alexius Meinong at Graz and Alois Riehl at Halle, receiving a doctorate in philosophy in 1904. He taught at the University of Breslau from 1906 until 1930, when he accepted a chair in philosophy at the University of Munich. Because he was a Jew, Hönigswald was deprived of his academic position in 1933. After the pogrom of 1938 he was sent to Dachau, but in 1939 he managed to immigrate to the United States. He lived in New York and engaged in research and writing until his death.

Hönigswald remained closer to the original doctrine of Immanuel Kant, as exemplified in the Transcendental Aesthetic, the Critique of Practical Reason, and the Critique of Judgment, than did such Neo-Kantians as Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Heinrich Rickert. However, he emphasized the insufficient consideration Kant had devoted to the importance of the concrete subject as a historical and empirical entity. Out of this criticism of Kant, Hönigswald developed his own influential theory of concrete subjectivity, the psychology of thinking (Denkpsychologie ). According to Hönigswald, the concrete subject, an individual monad, is both fact (Tatsache ) and principle (Prinzip )—that is, it is both a constituent of the world and an entity that recognizes itself as the correlate of the world, confronting it in cognition, volition, and artistic productivity. In the concrete subject, ground and grounded, objectivity and object, coincide; in a natural object they are separated. This doctrine forms the basis of Hönigswald's cosmology. In its attempt to determine the concrete subject's position in the world and its specific temporal structure in terms of a regional ontology, Hönigswald's philosophy exhibits similarities to Edmund Husserl's Konstitutionslehre, Martin Heidegger's analysis of Dasein, and Nicolai Hartmann's theory of stratified being. Hönigswald's approach differs from these in that he adhered to classical principles of validity (Geltungsprinzipien ) in epistemology, ethics, legal and political philosophy, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion. He found the key to the differentiation of the corresponding judgments and cultural realms in the constitutive features of the subject (thereby departing from Marburg and southwest German Neo-Kantianism), which he classed as intentionality, self-determination, reference to nature, and unlimitedness.

Hönigswald's philosophy of language made a considerable impact on Continental linguistics. Just as fact and principle coincide in the individual monad, Hönigswald claimed, the intermonadic reference of language constitutes the one other instance of the coincidence of fact and principle. Hönigswald's educational thought influenced such philosophers as Moritz Löwi and Alfred Petzelt, who, like him, emphasized the notions of tradition, concentration, and projection into the future. A number of thinkers, including Bruno Bauch, Theodor Litt, Wolfgang Cramer, and Hans Wagner, have engaged in evaluating Hönigswald's teachings for the study of fundamental problems in philosophy.

See also Cohen, Hermann; Hartmann, Nicolai; Heidegger, Martin; Husserl, Edmund; Kant, Immanuel; Language, Philosophy of; Meinong, Alexius; Natorp, Paul; Neo-Kantianism; Rickert, Heinrich; Riehl, Alois; Subjectivity.

Bibliography

works by hÖnigswald

Über die Lehre Hume's von der Realität der Aussendinge. Berlin, 1904.

Hobbes und die Staatsphilosophie. Munich: Reinhardt, 1924.

Immanuel Kant. Breslau, 1924.

Die Philosophie des Altertums, 2nd ed. Leipzig: Teubner, 1924.

Die Grundlagen der Denkpsychologie, 2nd ed. Leipzig: Teubner, 1925.

Über die Grundlagen der Pädagogik, 2nd ed. Munich: Reinhardt, 1927.

Grundfragen der Erkenntnistheorie. Tübingen: Mohr, 1931.

Geschichte der Erkenntnistheorie. Berlin, 1933.

Philosophie und Sprache. Basel: Haus zum Falken, 1937.

Schriften aus dem Nachlass. Vols. I–IV, Stuttgart, 1957–1961; Vol. V, Bonn, 1965; Vol. VI, 1967; Vol. VII–VIII, 1970.

A fuller but incomplete bibliography may be found in Werner Ziegenfuss, Philosophen-Lexikon, Vol. I, 553–554. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1949.

Posthumous papers are available in Hönigswald-Archiv, University of Bonn.

works on hÖnigswald

Opahle, Oswald. "Richard Hönigswald und seine Stellung zum Ganzheitsproblem." Die Ganzheitsschule 10 (1961): 1–9.

Ueberweg, Friedrich. Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, 13th ed., Vol. IV, 432. Tübingen, 1951.

Wolandt, Gerd. "Problemgeschichte, Weltentstehungsmythos und Glaube in der Philosophie Richard Hönigswalds." Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 12 (1958): 188–217.

Wolandt, Gerd. Gegenständlichkeit und Gliederung. Untersuchungen zur Prinzipientheorie Richard Hönigswalds. Cologne: University of Cologne Press, 1964.

Gerd Wolandt (1967)

Translated by Eva Schaper