Marja JalavaHegel or Nietzsche? – The Concept of Truth in the Finnish Philosophical Discourse at the Turn of the 20th CenturyThe aim of my study is to examine the concept of truth in the Finnish philosophical discourse at the turn of the 20th century. I am focusing on the debate between the dominating Hegelian outlook, represented by Thiodolf Rein (1838-1919), Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, and the Nietzschean rebellion against this system, led by the young Master of Arts Rolf Lagerborg (1874-1959) and the authoress and women’s rights activist Gerda von Mickwitz (1862-1948). The main arena for this debate was the Finnish cultural journal Finsk Tidskrift. Besides that, Lagerborg was also trying to promote his ideas inside the narrow circles of The Philosophical Society of Finland. The Hegelian system had become dominant at the University of Helsinki from the 1820s. It managed to achieve an extra-ordinary ascendancy over the Finnish intellectual world mostly because of its connection with the Finnish-nationalist movement and the strong personal influence of J.V. Snellman (1806-1881), nominated for "the national philosopher of Finland" by the succeeding generation. The Finnish Hegelians were ready to admit that there did not exist any eternal truths, if truth was considered as a statement, the content of which being valid always and everywhere. For them, the only eternal ‘thing’ was the movement of Spirit (Geist), understood as a continuous process of rational thinking, "the living Concept itself" (der lebendige Begriff selbst), as Snellman put it. In spite of this relativism, however, there were concrete historical communities or peoples which were seen as temporal embodiments of Spirit, Volksgeister. Thus, at the given moment within a certain community, the truth was to be found in its Sittlichkeit, a Hegelian term, which referred to the moral obligations people had to an ongoing community of which they were part. According to Hegelians, these obligations were based on established norms, uses, and a set of institutions and practices with which people could – and they had to – identify themselves. So, instead of the absolute truth, Hegelians like Th. Rein were offering an "objective truth", considered to be valid for every member of a given nation. In the debate over the Nietzschean philosophy, Th. Rein acknowledged that Friedrich Nietzsche was a man of genius, but, as he added, the mistakes done by such men were often the most dangerous ones to all mankind. In his exaggerating individualism, Nietzsche had abandoned the Western ideas of freedom, human rights and equality as well as the value of nationality and patriotism, said Rein. The core problem of the Nietzschean way of thinking was, according to Rein, the inability to tell the difference between the absolute truth and an objective truth. Because of this error, Nietzsche and his followers were declaring all moral obligations to be pure human inventions without any "higher" foundation. The Nietzschean "superman", who called all established norms and uses into question and made his own values for himself, was for Rein a dreadful pseudo-God, who was ready to crush others weaker than himself under his feet. From Rein’s point of view, it was impossible to articulate the rights of an individual against his community or imagine a situation where the established norms and uses of a community might have been iniquitous for its own members (e.g. a totalitarian state). For the opposite party, Rolf Lagerborg and Gerda von Mickwitz, Nietzsche was the real defender of truth just because he did not pretend that there existed One Truth, be it considered as "absolute" or "objective". As Nietzsche claimed, truth was always a relative and subjective matter, at bottom only "my truth" – even if members of some religious group, metaphysical school or historical community imagined that they had found it. Actually, these people were the real danger to humankind, since while claiming their truth to be objective, they were also demanding others to submit to it. As an alternative to Rein’s collective ethics, Lagerborg and Mickwitz were thus offering moral pluralism and the recognition of actual diversity of ethical outlooks. In their enthusiastic praise of individuality and individual rights, they did not pay any serious attention to Rein’s anxiety about the disappearance of common moral standards in the modern Western societies. On a general level, the both lines of thought can be seen as different attempts to answer to the same question, which we may call as the key problem of a (post)modern man: how we can justify our conception of human beings, our outlook on the world, and our ethical commitment, if we consider ourselves as independent actors released from God and all other constitutive goods external to man? In the face of rapid globalisation and the growing need for global ethics, this issue is today probably even more urgent than it was a hundred years ago. Marja Jalava
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