Following Ernst Haeckel: The “Monistic Ethics” of Heinrich Schmidt

Abstract

The article scrutinizes the ethical conception of Heinrich Schmidt (1874–1935), a student of “German Darwin” Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel was not only an eminent champion of Darwinism, but also a philosopher who created a universal evolutionism, or “monism”. Haeckel’s doctrine is founded on the concept of evolution as a universal phenomenon, including everything from inorganic matter to the human beings. He believed in the unity of body and soul, as well as in the unity of spirit and matter. The acceptance of substantial monism as a scientific metamethodology and the basis of a new Weltanschauung was accomplished by Haeckel’s philosophical achievement. Haeckel united matter, energy and psychoma (i. e. world soul) into the trinity of substance, thus covering all the basic physical and mental properties within the framework of one doctrine. All three elements correspond with the certain laws of conservation: the conservation of matter, energy, and psychoma or Empfindung (i. e. perception). To Haeckel, his monistic perspective reconciles the “old” disputes between materialism, energy and panpsychism. Schmidt, Haeckel’s immediate student, tried to further develop Haeckel’s philosophy and proposed an integral monistic doctrine. Schmidt proceeded from Haeckel’s principle of substance, leading to the idea of material evolution towards ever greater perfection and, consequently, the emergence of the human mind and associated with it infinitely self-improving science and culture. Accordingly, the moral (the good) is what leads to the preservation and improvement of existence. The evolution of human society follows the direction of “the good”, understood as harmony, while “evil” is the absence of harmony. He expressed this idea in his main ethical work The Search for Harmony in Monistic Ethics. In his later writings, Schmidt made efforts to adapt monist ethics to the ideology of National-Socialism. The failure of those attempts is a historical and philosophical argument in favor of the concept of the fundamental incompatibility of Haeckeliantype monism and Nazism.