Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 37
Schaller
Julius Schaller taught, like Erdmann, in Halle and worked on both of Erdmann’s themes: Body and Soul (1855) and The Mental Life of Man (1860).
That he was a Hegelian, Erdmann himself says — in his History of Philosophy, and with a detail that amounts to more than a classification:
Schaller had “immediately defended the Hegelian standpoint against these attacks, not only in a critique of his own, but in a work of his own” — the Philosophy of Our Time (Leipzig 1837). It refuted the objections against Hegel: that he was dogmatic, that he was formalist, that he denied freedom and left God without personality.[1]
And one argument from it anticipates Exner by five years. Schaller showed “that the opponents who believe they can reach different results from Hegel’s own by using Hegel’s method are in truth applying a different method.”
This is the answer to the divergence argument before it was even raised — and it strikes at the root: whoever gets something different out of the same method has not applied the same method.
His tone, nevertheless, is a different one than Erdmann’s or Rosenkranz’s. In the preface of 1860 he announces that he will “not conceal the limits beyond which I was unable to carry the investigations,” that he has “uncovered the difficulties without reservation,” and has “often contented [himself] with merely making clear the tasks that still remain to be solved.”
This is the language of a researcher, not of a systematizer — a striking contrast to Rosenkranz’s program of “following on Hegel’s heels.”
Erdmann places him precisely within the school: Schaller belongs to the center, alongside Rosenkranz — because he conceded to David Friedrich Strauss much that Göschel and Bruno Bauer disputed. Vatke, who sharply criticized Schaller’s Historical Christ, conceded that he had reached “the outermost limits of concession” and thereby drawn close to Strauss.
And Body and Soul has an addressee that the title does not reveal. Erdmann lists it among the critical writings and gives the full title: Body and Soul. Toward Clarification Concerning “Charcoal-Burner’s Faith and Science” — “written with particular reference to Karl Vogt and Rudolph Wagner.”
This is the materialism controversy. In 1854, at the meeting of natural scientists in Göttingen, Wagner had argued for the compatibility of the soul with natural science; Vogt responded with Charcoal-Burner’s Faith and Science — the very text containing the statements about thought as a secretion of the brain.
Schaller’s book is thus not a contribution to the interpretation of Hegel but an intervention — and it shows what anthropology was needed for: as an argument against equating the mental with the physiological, one year after the controversy.
And Schaller came out of the philosophy of nature: he had begun a History of the Philosophy of Nature from Bacon of Verulam to Our Time (1841 and 1846), which broke off after the second volume. Erdmann notes that he achieved most where “philosophy and natural science come into contact.”
The table of contents of the 1860 book shows how he works — and confirms the suspicion that he needs Hegel without naming him.
He begins historically, with Leibniz and Herbart: the monads, dualism, the “fundamental contradictions” of Herbartian psychology. This is the front of 1842 unrolled once more, now from the other side.
Then follows “The Nature of the Organism” in three steps — and all three come from Hegel:
a. The teleological view, with the keyword that fixes the position: “Kant’s unfulfilled demand to mediate the mechanical and teleological conceptions.” That is exactly what Hegel’s inner purposiveness accomplishes.
b. The empirical observation of life processes — and Schaller lists them: “The processes of shaping, of assimilation, and of the genus.” This is Hegel’s articulation of the animal organism, word for word (§§ 352–376).
c. The physical view of the organism.
Hegel’s name does not appear in the table of contents — his concepts are fully present in it. For a book intervening in 1860 in a debate where Hegel is considered finished, this is not dishonesty but the condition of being heard.
And it explains the tone. Anyone who wants to advance his case without invoking a disreputed name must make each argument individually — and thereby inevitably becomes what Schaller announces in his preface: someone who uncovers difficulties rather than one who sets out a system.
In substance, then, he stands where the Hegelians stand — but on a front Hegel never knew, and without being able to invoke him.
And both books occupy a position that this volume itself describes: they carry the objection into a debate that does not want to hear it — and remain, as Stederoth established for Wolff, within their own camp.
II.3 The Opponents
The dispute is fully documented, and that is rare: Exner’s attack of 1842, the Hegelians’ replies in the prefaces to their subsequent editions, and Exner’s response to them in the second issue of 1844. One can follow the controversy step by step.
Johann Eduard Erdmann, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 3 (Die deutsche Philosophie seit Hegel), §§ 333.2 and 337.4. Cited according to the English edition, pp. 25 f. and 67. ↩︎