
There’s a truth about philosophy that no one tells you in the books. It doesn’t matter how many centuries pass, or how many names you throw out at a dinner party—philosophy will always be this giant maze you’ll keep walking through, hoping you’ll find the exit, but knowing deep down that you’ll probably hit a dead end.
Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher who sits in the shadows of Hegel and Schopenhauer, is like that eerie figure in the corner of the bar, sipping a drink while everyone else is laughing at whatever trendy idea is going around. He’s the guy who stares into the abyss, says “Yeah, that’s about right,” and keeps drinking.
If you’re thinking, “Who the hell is Eduard von Hartmann?” welcome to the club.
No one remembers his name unless they’ve got a deep need to wrestle with the soul-crushing idea that maybe the unconscious mind is running the show.
And I’m not talking about the subconscious you hear about in therapy—some fuzzy, warm “inner child” nonsense.
Von Hartmann wasn’t interested in all that self-help mumbo jumbo. No, he was staring deep into the black hole of your existence, watching you twitch around like a puppet, and saying, “You’re not the one pulling the strings, my friend. It’s the unconscious. And it’s laughing at you.”
The Unconscious: The Real Puppet Master
Von Hartmann’s philosophy starts with the uncomfortable realization that you’re not really in charge of anything.
Think about it. You wake up, you make your coffee, you go to work, you laugh at a meme, you curse traffic, and then you go to bed.
Somewhere in between, you think you’re making choices. You think, “I chose to go to the gym today. I chose to leave that toxic relationship. I’m the captain of my fate.”
But here’s the bitter pill: what if you’re not.
The unconscious mind, according to von Hartmann, is like the director of a play where you’re the actor, except you don’t even have the script.
It’s a relentless, dark force that shapes you, moves you, and ultimately dictates the whole damn show. You’re just a passenger in your own life. You think you make decisions, but really, it’s all a complex game of chance and instinctive responses, triggered by things you can’t even remember.
And if you think that’s hard to swallow, try living with that knowledge for a week. You’ll start questioning whether the coffee you brew in the morning is even your choice or just an automatic reflex passed down from some primal desire to feel normal.
Von Hartmann wasn’t some philosopher with flowers in his hair. He didn’t wax poetic about how everything is connected in some divine, cosmic dance.
No. His worldview was far more pessimistic. The unconscious is not just this passive background process. It’s the force that shapes your very reality, pushes you through life’s motions, and often does so without your conscious mind even getting a say.
We may look out over the world and say, “I’m in control of this, I’m doing this, I’m making this happen,” but in reality, it’s all happening to you. You just think you’re calling the shots.
Table 1: Conscious vs. Unconscious – Who’s Really in Charge?
Aspect | Conscious Mind | Unconscious Mind |
---|---|---|
Awareness | You think you’re aware of your actions. | Unknown, hidden, shaping every moment. |
Decision-Making | Feels like a choice, doesn’t it? | Your choices are influenced by deep-seated urges. |
Control | You think you’ve got it all under control. | It pulls the strings. You’re a puppet. |
Influence on Behavior | Limited by logic and immediate desires. | Unseen, driving your instincts, fears, and habits. |
The Dark, Empty Core of Free Will
One of von Hartmann’s central ideas is that we don’t have free will. Yeah, I said it. In his view, free will isn’t real.
That thought we all hold onto like it’s some lifeline—“I can make a choice. I can change. I can be better tomorrow”— to Von Hartmann – it’s all a lie.
A neat, comforting lie. Von Hartmann would tell you that you’ve been fooled by your own mind. You can’t control the deepest urges inside of you, and those unconscious drives are constantly pushing you into decisions before you even know they’re there.
You think you’re acting freely, but it’s like being stuck in a train, heading down a track you can’t escape.
It’s not about big, dramatic decisions either. It’s about the tiny, seemingly insignificant moments where you feel like you’re “choosing.”
You decide to stay in a dead-end job because it’s easier. You end a relationship that could’ve been good because it’s more comfortable to stick with what you know.
Von Hartmann, in his beautiful, pessimistic style, would tell you that all of this, every choice, is already written somewhere deep in your unconscious mind.
Think about a character like Meursault from Camus’ The Stranger.
He doesn’t make choices in the way we think about choice. His actions come from a place so deep, so buried in the unconscious, that they don’t even feel like decisions to him.
He just reacts. The idea of free will is pointless to him. It’s a joke. And von Hartmann would agree. You’re reacting to the unconscious forces that have been built into you from the moment you were born.
Explaining It to the Apprentice: The Kid’s Guide to the Unconscious
Alright kid, here’s the deal. Imagine you’re at a carnival, and you’re playing that game where you throw rings at bottles. You think you’re the one in control, right? You throw the ring, and it either lands on the bottle or it doesn’t.
But here’s the trick: behind you, there’s someone pulling the strings. Every time you throw the ring, you’re not actually controlling the outcome. Someone else is setting it all up so that you feel like you’re making the decision, but it’s already been decided for you.
That’s what von Hartmann is talking about. You think you’re choosing what happens, but there’s something bigger—something hidden—making sure the ring either lands on the bottle or falls off.
The unconscious mind is like that unseen hand behind the carnival game. It’s pulling the strings while you stand there thinking you’re winning. And in the grand game of life, you’re just another player, blindly following along.
The Optimists and Free-Will Believers
But of course, not everyone agrees with von Hartmann’s cold, harsh view of reality. Some folks—Sartre, for example—are sticking to their guns, arguing that humans do indeed have free will, and the meaning of life comes from our ability to choose.
Yeah, sure, Jean-Paul, tell that to someone who’s trying to scrape meaning out of a world that feels like it’s falling apart.
The existentialists will tell you to pick yourself up by the bootstraps and decide who you are. But von Hartmann would throw a drink in their face and laugh. “You’re not in control,” he’d say. “There’s no grand meaning. It’s all just an illusion.”
If you want to find freedom, von Hartmann argues, you have to confront the fact that you don’t have it.
The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can stop lying to yourself about having a choice. It’s not about making the right decision; it’s about surviving in a world where the unconscious is steering the ship.
Even modern neuroscience doesn’t buy the whole “free will” thing anymore. The brain is a mess of impulses and reactions, firing off like a machine that’s been programmed long before you showed up.
You think you’re thinking? Nah. You’re just reacting to whatever’s been planted there over the years.
Table 2: Philosophers Who Challenge von Hartmann’s Pessimism
Thinker | Main Idea | Response to von Hartmann |
---|---|---|
Jean-Paul Sartre | We are free to make choices, to define our existence. | Denies the idea that the unconscious controls us. |
B.F. Skinner | Behavior is shaped by external stimuli, not internal free will. | Agrees with the idea of determinism, but leans toward environmental conditioning. |
Neuroscientists | Our brain is plastic, capable of change and agency. | Accepts unconscious influence, but still emphasizes conscious control over actions. |
The Dark Night of the Soul
So, here we are. We’ve stared into the void, dug into the muck, and found something we weren’t really ready to see: the unconscious mind is the true puppet master.
Von Hartmann’s vision of reality beyond awareness isn’t just some cool theory to ponder over a glass of whiskey. It’s a damn cold slap in the face.
We’re not in control. We never were. We’re all just playing a game where the rules were set for us long before we ever knew how to read them.
Maybe we can’t change the forces that pull us. Maybe we can’t escape the unconscious that drives us.
But we can try to live with it. The only choice we really have is whether to succumb to it or to keep fighting, even knowing the odds are stacked against us. Absurd, right?
Maybe von Hartmann was right—life is suffering, and we’re all just pawns in a game we didn’t ask to play.
Maybe every single muscle twitch is predetermned.
Maybe we are in a cell we can’t even see.
Maybe it’s the act of realizing this that liberates us, albeit partially.
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