Exner and the Austrian Anti-Hegel Policy (1842/1844)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Franz Serafin Exner (1802-1853) transformed Herbart’s philosophical position into education policy. As a professor in Prague and later as an influential advisor to the Austrian ministry of education, he became the architect of a systematic displacement of Hegelianism from Habsburg education. Together with Allihn and Taute, he belonged to those who—as Erdmann puts it—saw “in attacks on the Hegelian method almost their life’s task.”[1]
The Philosophical Offensive
Exner’s main work, The Psychology of the Hegelian School (1842), aimed directly at the sensitive nerve of Hegel’s philosophy of real spirit: the philosophy of subjective spirit.[2] His strategy was methodologically refined and scientifically sober—not dogmatic like the theological opponents, which made his critique all the more dangerous.
Exner’s points of criticism:
First, the charge of construction: Hegel, he argued, does not describe psychic phenomena (sensation, consciousness, memory) from experience but constructs them purely logically. He supposedly already knows in advance what must come out, and forces the facts into his dialectical scheme.
Second, the confusion of logic and reality: Hegel confuses logical relations (the development of concepts) with real causal relations. For Exner as a Herbartian, the soul is a “real thing”; for Hegel, a “moment of spirit.” The suggestion: Hegel’s method may work in pure logic, but as soon as it touches the real world, it talks nonsense.
Third, the divergence argument: Exner analyzed the accounts of subjective spirit in Erdmann, Michelet, and Rosenkranz and demonstrated that they did not agree. If Hegel’s philosophy were truly science—if the categories could really be “derived from logic”—then the accounts would have to be identical. The factual divergences prove arbitrary construction.
This last argument is rhetorically effective but systematically problematic. It confuses the logical structure (which is identical among all Hegelians: anthropology–phenomenology–psychology) with the concrete execution (which can legitimately vary). Logic provides the skeleton, not the flesh. But for the offensive in education policy, the appearance of proof sufficed.
The Philosophical “War of Succession” in Austria
Exner’s critique struck the Hegelian school so sensitively that it provoked a direct reaction. Not only the prolific Karl Rosenkranz but also Johann Eduard Erdmann himself—our historian, who here becomes a primary source as a participant—felt compelled to take a stand.
Tellingly, the responses appeared not as separate polemical pamphlets but within new editions of their respective psychologies. Rosenkranz added a lengthy appendix to the second edition of his Psychology (1843), in which he addressed all of Exner’s criticisms in detail. Erdmann, by contrast, contented himself in the third edition of his Psychology (1847) with a brief statement at the end of the preface: he had corrected errors that seemed convincing to him—but to conclude from this that Hegelian philosophy was false would be just as if one claimed that calculus was false because someone had made an arithmetic mistake.[3]
These differing reactions are revealing: Rosenkranz, the school’s most prolific author, entered into systematic engagement; Erdmann, the historian, countered with an elegant methodological argument. Exner responded in 1844 with a second volume bearing the telling title: The Rejoinders of Messrs. K. Rosenkranz and J. E. Erdmann.[4] This shows that these two were perceived as the official “spokesmen” of the defense. Michelet, meanwhile, was more concerned with historical placement in his History of the Development of the Most Recent German Philosophy (1843).
The debate over Exner marks the high point of the institutional conflict between Hegelianism and Herbartianism—a “war of succession” over Kant’s legacy, fought out not only philosophically but also in education policy.
The Effect on Education Policy
Erdmann states: “Thanks to Exner’s influence, the Austrian professors in particular went over to Herbart’s school.”[5] Robert Zimmermann, Franz Lott, and Wilhelm Volkmann became the chief representatives of this Austrian turn.
The reforms of the 1840s, in which Exner participated, served a clear goal: to push speculative idealism and Hegelian philosophy of history out of university and secondary-school instruction. In their place came a psychological-empiricist and theologically less explosive curriculum. The Catholic Habsburg monarchy saw in Hegel’s philosophy of history—with its implicit privileging of Protestant Prussia as the “realization of freedom”—a political danger.
The result was a lasting split in the landscape of German philosophy: while Hegelianism (despite official distancing after 1840) remained academically present in Prussia, Austria became the center of Herbartianism. This constellation shaped Austrian philosophy well into the twentieth century—Brentano’s empirical psychology and the Vienna Circle stand within this anti-Hegelian tradition.
Erdmann (1866/1878), Vol. 3, section on Exner, Allihn, and Taute. ↩︎
Franz Serafin Exner: Die Psychologie der Hegelschen Schule, First Issue, Leipzig 1842. Digitized version available at https://hegel.net/exner/ ↩︎
Karl Rosenkranz: Psychologie oder die Wissenschaft vom subjektiven Geist, 2nd ed., Königsberg 1843, appendix; Johann Eduard Erdmann: Psychologie, 3rd ed., Leipzig 1847, preface. ↩︎
Franz Serafin Exner: Die Psychologie der Hegelschen Schule. Zweites Heft: Die Erwiderungen der Herren K. Rosenkranz und J. E. Erdmann, Leipzig 1844. Digitized version available at https://hegel.net/exner/ ↩︎
Erdmann (1866/1878), Vol. 3, section on the Austrian reception. ↩︎