Alois Dempf

Alois Dempf (born January 2, 1891 in Altomünster ; † November 15, 1982 in Eggstätt ) was a Catholic philosopher who turned against the regime during the Nazi era and was banned from teaching from 1938. His main focus was the sociology of knowledge of the Middle Ages and the philosophy of culture .

Life

Youth - War - Doctorate

Dempf was the son of the postman from Altomünster, who ran a small farm as a sideline. His grandfather had been the town's mayor, his uncle a theologian. He grew up in a liberal Catholic environment and attended grammar school in Schäftlarn and the cathedral grammar school in Freising . On the advice of a friend of his uncle, he began studying Herman Schell's teaching (“God and Spirit”) while he was still at school and then began studying philosophy in Innsbruck with the aim of becoming a theologian. The purely neo-scholastic training did not satisfy him, however, so that after the Philosophicum [the intermediate philosophical examination] he changed the subject and, in accordance with his father's wish, began studying medicine in Munich. In 1914 he had a kind of "awakening experience" that brought him back to philosophy. As part of his participation in Catholic youth work, it was known that he was very enthusiastic about Schell's ideas. A smaller, unpublished work went to Hermann Platz , one of the co-founders of the Catholic Association of Academics . He invited Dempf to a meeting of former Schell students in Düsseldorf. At the Platz family home he met such important personalities as Paul Simon , Theodor Abele and Heinrich Brüning . There he heard a lecture by Hugo Paulus, who had completed his doctorate with Schell and then went to parish. Dempf reported on this in a letter:

"I have to choose the strongest expressions to convey the very unique experience that Düsseldorf meant for me, [...] This magnificent religious head of character Dr. Paul, thanks to whom I felt I was coming into direct contact with the dynamic Catholicism of Schell and whom I really learned to love over the two days! "

The circle, with which Dempf maintained close, friendly contacts for many years, was part of the liturgical movement and was close to the Quickborn and the conferences at Rothenfels Castle , at which Dempf later also appeared as a speaker.

When the First World War broke out , he had completed seven semesters of his medical studies and was drafted to the Eastern Front as a field doctor. During his military service he found enough time to study philosophical works in detail, in particular with Plato , Kant , Fichte and Hegel . In a letter to Platz in 1918, he described the special importance that Thomas Aquinas had acquired for him:

“But all philosophers achieved, and that is only natural, only a spiritual, humanistic unity of the value order, so they only satisfy the intellectualistic soul type. Only Thomas, who proceeds directly from the concept of God, seems to have a universal unity of spiritual life with his sentence: omne ens naturaliter verum et bonum <et pulchrum?> [All being is by nature true and good (and beautiful?)], Everything real is in itself sensible and valuable to have achieved and with a proposition which I would like to designate for the time being the transcendent unity doctrine of the spirit, namely that the adequate object of the unified soul forces in their ultimate purity is only the absolute, antikantianissime, with the practical meaning that the unity of the soul can only be reached theocentrically. But that is precisely what is formally part of an even more sudden intellectualism than even Hegelian is. "

After the end of the war, he continued his philosophy studies in Munich, married the mathematician Maria Theresia Jütte, who came from Westphalia, and at the same time ran his parents' farm. During their studies and shortly afterwards, the couple had two daughters and a son. During his student days (from 1919) Dempf wrote several articles for the Hochland magazine .

In 1921 he did his doctorate in philosophy with Hans Meyer and Clemens Baeumker on the subject of The Thought of Value in Aristotelian Ethics and Politics . In this work Dempf tried to link Scheler's ethics of values with Aristotelian thinking. He wrote his first two books in 1924 and 1925 while still in Altomünster, using the library of the Scheyern monastery . The first, world history as action and community , is a first elaboration of his systematic approach to a philosophy of culture . In the other, the main form of medieval worldview , he realized two aspects that made him known in specialist circles. On the one hand, he worked intensively on the philosophy of the Middle Ages , in particular patristics , which made him a name among the medievalists. On the other hand, he structured the material inspired by Hegel's phenomenology of the mind and the typological work of Max Weber and Scheler according to sociological aspects and is therefore considered the founder of the medieval sociology of knowledge .

Bonn

In Munich, Baeumker's successor and neo-scholastic Josef Geyser refused to do his habilitation for Dempf, who was no longer at the university. He then looked for another representative of a “Christian philosophy” and, with the help of Platz, found access to Adolf Dyroff , the Bonn-based holder of a concordat chair, through his friend Ernst Robert Curtius . The topic of the habilitation thesis, with which Dempf was habilitated on February 26, 1926, was: The infinite in medieval metaphysics and in the Kantian dialectic . In this work he found parallels between Augustine and Kant, while with Thomas Aquinas he saw a structural coexistence of the a priori - transcendental and a posteriori - experience-based mode of knowledge.

With the habilitation , Dempf was given the opportunity to work as a private lecturer in Bonn, so that the family moved to Bonn in 1926. From Hermann place he became editor in the publication of the magazine Abendland. German monthly issues for European culture, politics and economy included. This magazine, founded by Platz and intended as a counterbalance to nationalist endeavors, "became an engine of supranational understanding, especially reconciliation with France" At a conference in Cologne in 1925 Dempf met the Italian anti-fascist Luigi Sturzo , with whom he became friends and whose book he became Italy and Fascism (Cologne 1926) he translated. Sturzo issued an urgent warning against the conclusion of a concordat with the fascists. Dempf campaigned personally against the conclusion of the Concordat with the National Socialists.

“Before the conclusion of the German Concordat operated by Franz von Papen in the year 34, I went to Rome with Brüning's closest friend, Hermann Joseph Schmidt, to thoroughly explain the warning from us German anti-Nazis to the Secretary of Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli , Professor Leiber . For three days Leiber ran as a courier from the Gregoriana to the Vatican , unfortunately without success. "

Manfred Schröter and Alfred Baeumler , the editors of the Munich Handbook for Philosophy , commissioned Dempf to write three articles. As a specialist in the Middle Ages, he wrote The Ethics of the Middle Ages (1927) and the Metaphysics of the Middle Ages (1930). In addition, he was allowed to present his systematic contribution to the philosophy of culture (1932) in the collective work. In the synopsis of medieval ethics, Dempf saw three basic motives for ethical behavior:

“But in the end there are still at least three types of ethical system before us, the symbolic moral doctrine, which sees the soul as a microcosmic image of the entire universe, then the teleological system, which seeks a living unity of the natural and supernatural orders of life under the Aristotelian concept of perfection, and lastly the metaphysical ethics of German mysticism , especially Meister Eckart , which connects the ethical self-perfection as God's birth in the soul with the entire timeless world process. "

In considering the metaphysics of the Middle Ages, Dempf represented the controversial view at the time that medieval philosophy should not be viewed as a process of decay towards late scholasticism , but that the foundations of modern thinking were laid in the way via late scholasticism . Parallel to the two volumes for the manual, Dempf had worked on the preparation of the state philosophy in the Middle Ages and published it in his book "Sacrum Imperium" in 1929. For him, history is a supra-individual process that develops dialectically in the tension between the individual and the community. The overall context is determined by the philosophically recognized and Christian revealed God who willingly intervenes in the event. The royal coronation rite contains the idea of ​​the unity of church and kingdom. In the struggle for supremacy, the university emerges from the investiture dispute as a neutralization of this conflict, which at the same time also helps the emerging bourgeoisie to become more independent. Dempf advocated an aristocratic explanation of history. It is not a dark time process that determines history, but the political and social awareness of the historically significant people in their time.

In his culture philosophy Dempf referred to two basic insights that he had already found in Plato .

• On the one hand, there are the ideas as time-overlapping norms in logic and mathematics, in ethics as well as in the cosmic order: “And since then it has always been the classic teaching of every scientific policy and the countless varieties of natural law theological and philosophical, conservative and revolutionary kind, that above all places of self-interest an objective location for the representation of the totality of the common good and the total work of the professions can be found, and all utopias have tried again and again to make this ideal of social justice an absolute and immutable. "(50 )
• In a similar way, for him, the structural elements worked out by Plato in the Politeia could be found again throughout the history of culture and philosophy: “The basis of cultural unity was recognized with full clarity by Plato, who also saw through its anthropological law. From the three faculties of the soul three character types emerge: the spirit man, the will man and the instinct man, to which the three virtues of teaching, defense and nourishment correspond. He has even already recognized that the type of culture such as the Greek, Scythian or Phoenician is determined by the predominance of a class, and has given as his formula of cultural wholeness social justice , the right order of classes to one another in which everyone Stand and each individual does his own thing. The anthropological and characterological differentiation of people is the origin of the typical class formation. The specific main human faculties are shaped in the various arts of people. This oldest insight in cultural philosophy can only be improved in details. "(135)

From Hegel, Dempf took over the idea of ​​philosophy as a holistic system and history as a dialectical but not a schematic process. The dialectical three-step does not do justice to the complexity of the world and is therefore naive. He rejected Hegel's idea of ​​an absolute world spirit that gave itself away. The true wholeness only exists in the absolute sphere of God, to which man can only approach in his finitude. (131) The idea of ​​the world as an organic unit contradicts the idea of ​​individual freedom, which would not exist if history were understood as a manifestation of the world spirit. Rather, the individuals in the world form ideal units within the framework of their respective cultures, the structures of which must be explored historically and empirically.

“If the law prevails in the cultural area, then there is no history of the unique, positive and singular, no true individuation. If the old-style philosophy of history attempted to elevate history to science by making the progress of history legally determined, it has in fact destroyed the character of history. "(121)

Dempf turned against monisms in the interpretation of history, be it the objective spirit of Hegel or dialectical materialism . This would result in hypostasis of either the state or the economy as metaphysical entities . Similar to Spengler , when he looks at history solely from the point of view of emerging and dying “cultural souls”. This is how new gods emerge under terms such as “ will to power ”, “ Élan vital ” or “drive and urge fantasy”. In truth, one must state critically that neither the idealistic nor the naturalistic historical metaphysics are suitable to grasp the regional character of the rule of the unique in history and thus freedom and individual responsibility . Dempf, however, saw a structural constancy on the ontological basis of immutable norms. However, he also did not share Fichte's idea that history is shaped solely by the great personalities. This “geniocracy” has its correspondence in the “leader principle” of the fascist cultural view, even if Fichte's ethical autonomy is supplanted there by the absolute state principle. (Culture Philosophy 104)

After the National Socialists seized power , Dempf tried in various ways to counter the threatened development. On the one hand, this was his urgent warning against the Concordat. Furthermore, he and several others contributed to the studies on the myth of the 20th century , one at the suggestion of Karl Barth and Erik Peterson - both knew Dempf from their work in Bonn - a counter-writ to Rosenberg's myth . It documents, among other things, the refutation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion . This document, which was widely distributed with a print run of 200,000 copies, was printed and distributed to all Catholic and Protestant pastors with the help of the church historian Wilhelm Neuss and Bishop Graf Galen , who later became Cardinal from Münster, who was known for his opposition to National Socialism.

A third campaign from 1934 was the publication Die Glaubensnot der German Catholics , which Dempf wrote under the pseudonym Michael Schäffler. In this pamphlet he analyzes the totalitarian mechanisms of the National Socialist worldview and urges the official church, like the Confessing Church, to oppose the new rulers. It was printed in Switzerland after Karl Barth smuggled the paper across the border when he moved.

An affront to Rosenberg was the introduction to Meister Eckart , also published in 1934 , in which Dempf rejected any pantheistic interpretation possibilities and thus led Eckart's classification as a Nordic pioneer ad absurdum . The book about Kierkegaard is at the same time a critical examination of Barth's dialectical theology . The philosophy of religion (1937) contains a link with Dempf's philosophy of culture and history. After his cultural philosophy was translated into Spanish in 1934, he was invited to a lecture in Santander in 1935, where he gave a lecture on German sociology. Here he made friends with the Spanish philosopher Juan Zaragüeta . A lecture on late scholastic Spanish constitutional law was planned for 1936, but it did not take place because of the Spanish Civil War . Dempf used the preparation in a work on Christian State Philosophy in Spain (1937). This book, as well as his contributions to the Manual of Philosophy, has been translated into Spanish. In 1938 a small text on Christian philosophy was published , which was aimed at laypeople and had a circulation of 20,000 thanks to the publishing house of the Bonn book club.

Vienna and Munich

After attempts to obtain a professorship in Bonn or Breslau failed despite a positive vote by Erich Rothacker because of Rosenberg's objection, Dempf was welcome when he received a call in 1937 at the suggestion of the ethnologists Wilhelm Schmidt (SVD) and Wilhelm Koppers (SVD) received the chair of Moritz Schlick in Vienna. Here he taught for two semesters and had good relationships with, among others, Eric Voegelin and Karl and Charlotte Bühler . Immediately after the annexation of Austria , Dempf lost his teaching license in 1938. He had various offers to go abroad, but he decided to emigrate internally and worked on a systematic history of philosophy over the seven years. A summary of these largely unpublished works appeared in 1947 under the title Self-Criticism of Philosophy . During the war Dempf published a short biography about the church historian Albert Ehrhard , whom he knew from the Schell circle.

After the end of the Second World War Dempf got his chair back in Vienna. There was Ernst Topitsch his assistant. Dempf took part as co-editor of the journal Science and Worldview . He turned down a call to Cologne, but in 1948 he switched to a chair at the University of Munich , where he was in close contact with Aloys Wenzl and Helmut Kuhn . From 1950 to 1960 he was editor of the Philosophical Yearbook of the Görres Society . He also became a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .

Dempf's writings published during his time in Munich serve above all to deepen his previous philosophy. In theoretical anthropology, he followed up on the work of Jakob von Uexküll .

“The human spiritual soul of knowing, willing and feeling, already according to Aristotle, has been supplemented by the Christian thinkers with the concept of the person. Selfhood has its preliminary stage in animal individuality through partnership with conspecifics and defense against enemies, through eye-to-eye seeing, confrontation and following movements. The schematic of this partnership up and down, right and left, up and down, back and forth is expressed logically in the language of the self-confident person. "

The book Die Einheit der Wissenschaft (1955) understood Dempf as a structured representation of the sciences in a similar way as Hegel did in his "Encyclopedia". The Critique of Historical Reason (1957) is a juxtaposition of intellectual and legal worlds in their theoretical, practical and poietic forms and the structuring of the occidental era from these points of view. Dempf described the invisible world of images (1959) as a “control attempt” by applying his typifications to the field of the performing arts.

“The historiological question is about the temporal tension between the forces of life, to what extent the symbolizing or practical or theoretical reason in the antithesis of a cultural crisis has created a new stylistic unit, from whose priority the others are determined. Practical reason makes the leap from tribal history to high culture, the theoretical one, the philosophical full culture and the symbolizing reason, the founder religions. "

Dempf counted among his students Ingeborg Bachmann , Walter Böhm , Henry Deku , Hermann Krings , Bernhard Lakebrink , Wolfgang Markus , Friedrich Mordstein , Gustav Siewerth and Rainer Specht .

Alois Dempf was married to Christa Dempf-Dulckeit, née Dulckeit-von Arnim.

Honors

• 1961: Bavarian Order of Merit
• 1966: Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

Fonts

• The idea of ​​value in Aristotelian ethics and politics . Diss. 1922 (from the estate, VWGÖ, Vienna 1989)
• World history as action and community. A comparative culture philosophy . Niemeyer, Halle 1924
• The main form of medieval worldview. A humanities study of the summa . Oldenbourg, Munich 1925
• The infinite in medieval metaphysics and in the Kantian dialectic . Aschendorff, Münster 1926
• Medieval ethics . Oldenbourg, Munich 1927
• Sacrum empire. Historiography and state philosophy of the Middle Ages and the political renaissance . Oldenbourg, Munich 1929 (2nd edition 1954 with a foreword)
• Metaphysics of the Middle Ages . Oldenbourg, Munich 1930
• Culture philosophy . Oldenbourg, Munich 1932
• Görres speaks in our time. The thinker and his work . Herder, Freiburg 1933
• Master Eckhart. An introduction to his work . Hegner, Leipzig 1934
• The misery of the German Catholics . Roland, Zurich 1934 (under the pseudonym Michael Schäffler)
• Kierkegaard's consequences . Hegner, Leipzig 1935
• Philosophy of religion . Hegner, Vienna 1937
• Christian state philosophy in Spain . Pustet, Salzburg 1937
• Christian philosophy. Man between God and the world . Verl. Bonner Buchgem, Bonn 1938 (2nd edition 1952 with a dedication)
• Albert Erhard. The man and the work in intellectual history at the turn of the century . Alsatia, Colmar 1944
• The three trucks. Dostoyevsky's depth psychology . Alber, Munich 1946
• Self-criticism of philosophy and an outline of a comparative history of philosophy . Herder, Vienna 1947
• Theoretical anthropology . Leo Lehnen, Munich 1950
• The world idea . Johannes Verl. Einsiedeln 1955
• The unity of science . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1955
• Critique of Historical Reason . Oldenbourg, Munich 1957
• World order and salvation history . Johannes Verl. Einsiedeln 1958
• The invisible world of images. An intellectual history of art . Benziger, Zurich 1959
• Spiritual history of early Christian culture . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1964
• Religious sociology of Christianity. On the typology of Christian community formation . Oldenbourg, Munich 1972
• Self-expression . In: Philosophy in self-portrayals . LJ Pongratz, Volume I. Meiner, Hamburg 1975.
• Metaphysics. Attempt to synthesize the history of the problem . Rodopi, Amsterdam 1986 (from the estate completed by Christa Dempf-Dulckeit)

literature

• Vincent Berning, Hans Maier (ed.): Alois Dempf 1891–1982. Philosopher, cultural theorist, prophet against National Socialism . Konrad, Weißenhorn 1992, ISBN 3-87437-333-9 .
• Giovanni Franchi: Alois Dempf: etica sociale come critica filosofica della cultura . In: Giovanni Franchi, Bonum Ordinis. Studi di etica sociale e della cultura , Edizioni Nuova Cultura, Roma 2011, pp. 67-159, ISBN 9788861345553 .
• Giovanni Franchi: Alois Dempf e l'idea di Europa nel cattolicesimo tedesco del XX secolo , “Europea”, May 2017, pp. 131–151, ISBN 9788825502961 .
• Manfred Lochbrunner: Hans Urs von Balthasar and his philosopher friends. Five double portraits . Echter, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 978-3-429027407 .
• Hans Maier : Dempf, Alois. In: LThK ³ 3, 89.
• Friedrich Mordstein (Ed.): Festschrift for Alois Dempf . Alber, Munich 1960.
• Friedrich Mordstein : The Philosophy of Dialectical Materialism. Alois Dempf on his 90th birthday, in: Philosophisches Jahrbuch 78 (1971) 134–144.
• Heinrich Schneider : Metaphysics Today. Alois Dempf on his 90th birthday, in: Philosophisches Jahrbuch 88 (1981) 133–135.

Web links

• Literature by and about Alois Dempf in the catalog of the German National Library
• Hans Niedermayer: Alois Dempf: An early warning against National Socialism. In: Freisinger Dom-Spiegel 7 (1999), 22 ( Memento from October 19, 2007 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biographical information mainly based on the description of Dempf's daughter: Felicitas Hagen-Dempf, in: Vincent Berning, Hans Maier (ed.): Alois Dempf 1891–1982. Philosopher, cultural theorist, prophet against National Socialism . Konrad, White Horn in 1992, as well as overview of the philosophical theses by: Alois Dempf: self-expression , in: J. Ludwig Pongratz (ed.): Philosophy in self-portraits I . Meiner, Hamburg 1975, 37-79.
2. ↑ quoted from: Vincent Berning, Hans Maier (Ed.): Alois Dempf 1891–1982. Philosopher, cultural theorist, prophet against National Socialism . Konrad, Weißenhorn 1992, 80.
3. ↑ quoted from: Vincent Berning, Hans Maier (Ed.): Alois Dempf 1891–1982. Philosopher, cultural theorist, prophet against National Socialism . Konrad, Weissenhorn 1992, 81-82.
4. ^ Heinz Hürten: German Catholics 1918 to 1945 . Schöningh, Paderborn 1992, p. 152; See also Vanessa Conze: Das Europa der Deutschen: Ideen von Europa in Deutschland between imperial tradition and western orientation (1920–1970) . Oldenbourg, Munich 2005, 30-32; full section on the magazine pp. 27–56; readable online
5. ↑ Alois Dempf: Self-Presentation . In: Louis J. Pongratz (ed.): Philosophy in self-portraits I . Meiner, Hamburg 1975, 42.
6. ↑ Alois Dempf: Ethics of the Middle Ages . Oldenbourg, Munich 1927, 3.
7. ^ Friedrich Mordstein: The new picture of philosophy with Adolf Dempf . In: Vincent Berning / Hans Maier (ed.): Alois Dempf 1891–1982. Philosopher, cultural theorist, prophet against National Socialism . Konrad, Weißenhorn 1992, 156-182, here 162-164.
8. ↑ Michael Schäffler, Alois Dempf: Die Glaubensnot German Catholics . Reprinted in: Vincent Berning, Hans Maier (Eds.): Alois Dempf 1891–1982. Philosopher, cultural theorist, prophet against National Socialism . Konrad, Weissenhorn 1992, 196-242.
9. ↑ Alois Dempf: self-expression , in: J. Ludwig Pongratz (ed.): Philosophy in self-portraits I . Meiner, Hamburg 1975, pp. 37-79, 55.
10. ↑ Alois Dempf: self-expression , in: J. Ludwig Pongratz (ed.): Philosophy in self-portraits I . Meiner, Hamburg 1975, pp. 37-79, 63.
11. ↑ Alois Dempf: Self-Presentation . In: Louis J. Pongratz (ed.): Philosophy in self-portraits I . Meiner, Hamburg 1975, pp. 37-79, 78-79.
12. ↑ Philosophisches Jahrbuch 97 (1990) 440f.
13. ↑ Philosophisches Jahrbuch 68 (1960) 140.