Paul Feldkeller

Paul Feldkeller (born April 12, 1889 in Danzig , † January 20, 1972 presumably in Hameln ) was a German philosopher and psychologist .

After receiving his doctorate, Feldkeller took part in the First World War without giving up his studies. He then worked in various fields, including the history of philosophy, the philosophy of religion and other areas, as editor and author.

After the Second World War , Feldkeller worked for the Berlin magistrate, his move to his new West Berlin office led to a conflict with the authorities and a brief imprisonment. After his release he also worked as a university professor, most recently as chief psychologist at the West Berlin State Labor Office. Feldkeller's best-known work, however, was not a philosophical one, but The Letter of the Merchant , a textbook and exercise book for commercial correspondence, which had numerous editions.

Life

Feldkeller's biography can sometimes only be reconstructed with gaps and with approximate dates. In 1913 he received his doctorate in Tübingen with a dissertation published in 1914, investigations into normative and non-normative thinking , his doctoral supervisor was Karl Groos . At this time, Feldkeller also published a number of essays, including The Logic of the Oath in the journal for the entire criminal law science and a consideration of the contribution of thinking to musical art enjoyment in the journal for aesthetics and general art history .

Feldkeller took part in the First World War without foregoing scientific studies. After at the beginning of the war he attributed this to a beneficial effect on culture (Feldkeller spoke of intelligence), the first part of his work Der Patriotismus appeared towards the end of the war , in which he criticized the nationalistic and imperialistic exuberance of war journalism (a further part no longer appeared, but in 1919 a continuation under the title Vaterland ). From then on, Feldkeller apparently worked as a kind of private scholar with close contact with university lecturers and scientific societies (he had been a member of the Kant Society since 1920 ). From 1923 to 1926 he published Reichl's Philosophical Almanach with Reichl Verlag and the Philosophical World Gazette from 1927 to 1931 (three editions each). In Der Leuchter, also published by Reichl by Hermann Keyserling . Yearbook of the School of Wisdom. Feldkeller wrote a number of articles.

In 1934 and 1937 Feldkeller took part in the International Philosophers' Congresses in Prague and Paris , where he met acquaintances who had meanwhile emigrated. In Prague he spoke about geophilosophy and historiurgy, in Paris about the personality of the world logo . In those years Feldkeller also published in feature sections of newspapers that were not yet directly affiliated with the NSDAP , probably most frequently in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung . As a special correspondent, he reported a. a. in April 1939 by the general assembly of the German Shakespeare Society in Weimar . During the Second World War, Feldkeller was hardly able to publish on a large scale; he contributed a contribution about Raffael to the book by his friend Bernhard Hecke, Die Tierseele , published in 1940 . Feldkeller wrote about the latest developments in positive sciences for the German occupation organ Brussels newspaper . He also worked for the West German observer .

With his article Against the Propaganda , published in the Tagesspiegel on November 23, 1945 , Feldkeller spoke up for the first time after the war. Probably from 1946 he worked in the work department of the Berlin magistrate, where he was particularly concerned with the management of psychological aptitude tests. On October 30, 1948, the Tagesspiegel reported that Feldkeller had wanted to bring his work documents and research materials to his new West Berlin office and had been prevented from doing so by the East Berlin police, whereupon he stowed his work documents in a rucksack and had it thrown out of a window and then fled. Feldkeller then returned to a police station in the eastern sector to prove that this material was his property, whereupon he was arrested as a thief. The Daily News , published by the Red Army , accused him of being a saboteur. He should have been released quickly, however, because on November 14, 1948 , he wrote a letter from Berlin-Wilmersdorf to the main advisor Reinhard in the Magistrate of Greater Berlin, Public Education Department, which contained a memorandum on the creation of a "Psycho-political research Institute ”.

Another immediate post-war activity was Feldkeller's support for the revival of the Kant society, which initially only succeeded for a short time as part of the Kulturbund until it was re-established in West Germany in the mid-1950s. The legacy of Arthur Liebert , the former executive president of the Kant Society, was, however, continued in West Berlin in the form of the journal Philosophical Studies . The latter was published by De Gruyter from 1949 to 1951 and Feldkeller was also one of the editors. In addition to Feldkeller's essay on the ancient doctrine of thinking being (1950), there was also a review of his book Das impersonliche Denk durch Gustav Wyneken .

Feldkeller probably gave lectures at the German University of Politics from 1948 . In 1949 De Gruyter published the aforementioned work The impersonal thinking . Otherwise, Feldkeller continued to work in the West Berlin administration, most recently as chief psychologist at the state employment office, where he, meanwhile living in Berlin-Buckow , remained until 1956. Two more works by him were then published, in 1957 by Raphael's self-published fresco “The Philosophy”, called “ The School of Athens ” , a reflection on this well-known work by Raphael, and in 1967 the Dictionary of Psychopolitics , in which he summarized his complete works.

Feldkeller was married twice, his first wife Frida Johanna Feldkeller nee. Krähe died in January 1958 after 43 years of marriage. He was married to his second wife Annemarie until his death.

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According to Günter Wirth , Feldkeller's work in the period from the 1920s to the seizure of power in 1933 can be divided into various disciplines, which in turn would indicate that Feldkeller worked interdisciplinary between areas of philosophy, psychology, historiography and (according to today's definition) political science.

• He assigns Feldkeller's works Der Patriotismus , its continuation Das Vaterland and the following works Ethics for Germans (1921) and Understanding as a Philosophical Problem (1928, reviewed in the following year in the Frankfurter Zeitung by Theodor Heuss ) to the first line of work. The topics taken up there would have enabled Feldkeller after the Second World War to take them up again as leitmotifs and, in particular, to combine them with his research in the border area between philosophy and psychology.
• Wirth locates the second direction in the history of philosophy, which can be seen in a 1928 article in the Kant Studies , the journal of the Kant Society, on "Philosophical-Geographical Research", an essay in Reichl's Philosophy entitled The Philosophy of Nations in the Mirror of Their Societies Almanac 1925/26 as well as its 1928 processing of "Maps and Texts" in the German Cultural Atlas . In the Philosophical Almanac of 1924 Feldkeller also published a history of the philosophical journals.
• The third direction followed by Feldkeller's systematic-philosophical work, with which he gave his “own thoughtful impulse”. Wirth sees here as a transition from the interests in the history of philosophy, Count Keyserling's path to the supersensible , published in 1922, as a representative, but above all meaning, authenticity, love according to Paul Hofmann's analysis of meaning and its significance for the worldview crisis of the present (1931). The post-war work The Impersonal Thinking (1949), which is related to the first research direction, is one of them.
• Finally, Wirth defines the fourth direction as an activity in the field of religious philosophy, including theological questions. This includes The Idea of ​​Correct Religion (1921) as well as the consideration of the psychology of belief and pedagogy of belief that appeared in the International Church Journal in the same year . Wirth particularly emphasizes the essay Religion and Philosophy (1928), which appeared in the yearbook of the Schopenhauer Society . It is therefore “in a certain sense logical” that the editors of the lexicon series Religion in Past and Present entrusted Feldkeller with the article on Keyserling (1959).

Wirth sees Feldkeller's book Der Brief des Kaufmanns (1924) as seemingly out of the ordinary, becoming his most successful work, which appeared in 14 editions up to 1974 and is still distributed today (as of 2015) by Springer-Wissenschaftsverlag . The Logic for Merchants , published in 1921 . A way of thinking for business and everyday life. was also published in a translation in the Netherlands .

The fact that Feldkeller took up his earlier work after the Second World War is also evident in his support for the re-establishment of the Kant Society and in his final work, Dictionary of Psychopolitics, as a summary of his work. Günter Wirth ascribed "a militant anti-nationalist republicanism" rather than "rational republicanism", but Feldkeller shared other widespread views of his time, as shown in his approval of positive aspects of the war in 1914 as well as in his aversion to the Afro-American population.

literature

• Günter Wirth : Paul Feldkeller - more than a “private scholar” . In: UTOPIE Kreativ , issue 177/178 (July / August 2005), pp. 731–744, rosalux.de (PDF)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Peter Hoeres : War of the Philosophers. German and British philosophy in the First World War. Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 2004, ISBN 978-3-506-71731-3 , S 453. Revised dissertation Münster 2002.
2. ^ Rolf Falter: De Brussels newspaper (1940-1944) . In: Historica Lovaniensia 137, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Faculty of History), Löwen 1982, p. 72.
3. ^ Institute for Newspaper Studies at the University of Berlin (ed.): Handbook of the German daily press. 7th edition. Armanen-Verlag, Leipzig 1944, p. 78.
4. ↑ 14., revised. Published by Gabler Verlag, Wiesbaden 1974, ISBN 978-3-409-80411-0 .