Alois Dempf

Alois Dempf (2 January 1891 – 15 November 1982 in Eggstätt) was a Catholic philosopher who turned against the regime during the National Socialist era and was banned from teaching in 1938. His main areas of interest were the sociology of knowledge of the Middle Ages and cultural philosophy.

Biography

Alois Dempf was born in Altomünster, the son of a local postmaster who ran a small farm concurrently with his job. His grandfather had been mayor of the village, his uncle a theologian. He grew up in a liberal Catholic environment and attended the grammar school in Schäftlarn and the cathedral grammar school in Freising. On the advice of a friend of his uncle, he became involved with the teachings of Herman Schell (God and Spirit) while still at school and then began to study philosophy in Innsbruck with the aim of becoming a theologian. However, the purely neo-scholastic education did not satisfy him, so that after the Philosophicum [the intermediate philosophical examination] he changed the subject and, in accordance with a wish of his father, began to study medicine in Munich.

In 1914 he had a kind of "revival experience" that brought him back to philosophy. As part of his involvement in Catholic youth work, it was known that he was very enthusiastic about Schell's ideas. A smaller, unpublished work reached Hermann Platz, one of the co-founders of the Catholic Academic Association. The latter invited Dempf to a meeting of former Schell students in Düsseldorf. In the Platz family home he met such important personalities as Paul Simon, Theodor Abele and Heinrich Brüning. There he heard a lecture by Hugo Paulus, who had received his doctorate from Schell and had then gone into parish ministry.

His intellectual circle, with which he maintained close, friendly contacts for many years, counted itself among the Liturgical Movement and was close to Quickborn and the conferences at Rothenfels Castle, where Dempf later also appeared as a speaker.

At the outbreak of World War I, he had completed seven semesters of his medical studies and was drafted to the Eastern Front as a field surgeon. During his military service, he found enough time to study philosophical works at length, especially Plato, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. He described the special importance that Thomas Aquinas had gained for him in a letter to Platz in 1918.

After the end of the war, he continued his studies of philosophy in Munich, married Maria Theresia Jütte, a mathematician from Westphalia, and at the same time managed his parents' farm. While still studying and shortly thereafter, the couple had two daughters and a son. Already during his studies (from 1919) Dempf wrote some articles for the magazine Hochland.

In 1921 he received his doctorate in philosophy under Hans Meyer and Clemens Baeumker on the topic of The Idea of Value in Aristotelian Ethics and Politics. In this work, Dempf attempted to link Scheler's value ethics with Aristotelian thought. He wrote his first two books in 1924 and 1925 while still in Altomünster, drawing on the library of the Scheyern Abbey. The first, World History as Deed and Community, is a first elaboration of his systematic approach to a philosophy of culture. In the other, The Main Form of Medieval Worldview, he realized two aspects that made him famous in professional circles. On the one hand, he worked intensively on the philosophy of the Middle Ages, especially Patristics, which made his name among medievalists. On the other hand, inspired by Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and by the typological works of Max Weber and Scheler, he structured the material according to sociological aspects, and because of this he is considered the founder of the medieval sociology of knowledge.

In Munich, Baeumker's successor and neo-scholastic Joseph Geyser refused to habilitate Dempf, who was no longer active at the university. Dempf then sought another representative of a "Christian philosophy" and, with Platz's help, found access to Adolf Dyroff, the Bonn holder of a concordat chair, through his friend Ernst Robert Curtius. The topic of the habilitation thesis, with which Dempf was habilitated on February 26, 1926, was: The Infinite in Medieval Metaphysics and in Kant's Dialectic. In this work he noted parallels between Augustine and Kant, while with Thomas Aquinas he saw a structural coexistence of the a priori-transcendental and a posterior-experiential modes of cognition.

With his habilitation, Dempf was given the opportunity to work as a private lecturer in Bonn, so that the family moved there in 1926. Through Hermann Platz, he was involved as an editor in the publication of the journal Abendland. Deutsche Monatshefte für europäische Kultur, Politik und Wirtschaft. This journal, founded by Platz and intended as a counterweight to nationalist efforts, "became a motor of supranational understanding, especially of reconciliation with France." At a conference in Cologne in 1925, Dempf met Luigi Sturzo, with whom he became friends and whose book Italy and Fascism (1926) he translated. An urgent warning against the conclusion of a concordat with the fascists goes back to Sturzo. Dempf personally opposed the conclusion of the concordat with the National Socialists.

Manfred Schröter and Alfred Baeumler, the editors of the Munich Handbook of Philosophy, commissioned Dempf to write three articles at once. As a medievalist, he wrote The Ethics of the Middle Ages (1927) and Metaphysics of the Middle Ages (1930). In addition, he was allowed to present his systematic contribution to the Philosophy of Culture (1932) in the collective work.

In his consideration of the metaphysics of the Middle Ages, Dempf held the view, which was controversial at the time, that medieval philosophy should not be regarded as a process of decay towards late scholasticism, but that the foundations of modern thought had been laid in the path via late scholasticism. Parallel to the two volumes for the handbook, Dempf had worked on the preparation of the philosophy of the state in the Middle Ages and published it in his book Sacrum Imperium (1929). For him, history is a supra-individual process that develops dialectically in the tension between individual and community. The overall context is determined by the philosophically recognized and Christianly revealed God, who willingly intervenes in the events. The royal coronation rite contains the idea of the unity of church and kingdom. In the struggle for supremacy, the university emerges from the investiture dispute as a neutralization of this conflict, which at the same time also helps the emerging bourgeoisie to gain more independence. Dempf advocated an intellectual-aristocratic explanation of history. It is not a dark process of time that determines history, but the political and social consciousness of the historically significant persons in their time.

In his philosophy of culture, Dempf referred to two basic insights that he had already found in Plato:

• On the one hand, there are the ideas as time-transcending norms in logic and mathematics, in ethics as well as in the cosmic order: "And since then it has always been the classical doctrine of every scientific politics and of the innumerable varieties of natural law doctrines of theological and philosophical, conservative and revolutionary kind, that above all places of self-interest there is to be found an objective location of representation of the totality of the common good and of the total work of the professions, and all utopias have always tried to make this ideal of social justice an absolute and unchangeable one."

• In a similar way, the structural elements worked out by Plato in the Politeia were to be found again for him through the entire history of culture and philosophy: "The basis of the cultural unity has been recognized in full clarity by Plato, who has also already seen through its anthropological law. From the three soul faculties emerge three character types of the spirit man, will man and instinct man, to which the three virtues of teaching status, defense status and nourishing status correspond. He has even already recognized that the type of culture, such as the Greek, Scythian or Phoenician, is also determined by the predominance of one state, and has given as his formula of cultural wholeness the social justice, the right order of the states to each other, in which each state and each individual does his own. The anthropological and characterological differentiation of people is the origin of the typical formation of estates. The specific human main abilities are formed in the different arts of the people. One can only improve this oldest insight of cultural philosophy in details."

From Hegel Dempf took over the idea of philosophy as a holistic system and history as a dialectical, but not schematic process. The dialectical three-step does not do justice to the complexity of the world and is therefore naive. He rejected Hegel's idea of an absolute world spirit expressing itself. True wholeness exists only in the absolute sphere of God, which man in his finitude can only approach. The idea of the world as an organic unity contradicts the idea of individual freedom, which would not exist if history were conceived as a manifestation of the world spirit. Rather, the individuals in the world form ideal units within the framework of their respective cultures, the structures of which are to be investigated historically-empirically.

If law prevails in the field of culture, then there is no history of the unique, positive and singular, no true individuation. If the old-style philosophy of history attempted to elevate history to a science by making the progress of history a legally determined one, it actually destroyed the character of history.

He opposed monisms in the interpretation of history, be it Hegel's objective spirit or dialectical materialism. This would result in hypostatizing either the state or the economy into metaphysical entities. Similarly with Spengler, when he considers history solely from the point of view of emerging and dying "cultural souls". Thus, under terms like "will to power", "Élan vital" or "drive and urge fantasy", new gods emerge. In truth, one has to state worldview-critically that neither the idealistic, nor the naturalistic metaphysics of history are suitable to grasp the regional character of the rule of the unique in history and thus freedom and individual responsibility. Dempf, on the other hand, saw structural constancy on the ontological basis of unchanging norms. However, he also did not share Fichte's idea that history is shaped solely by the great personalities. This "geniocracy" has its counterpart in the "leader principle" of the Nationalist cultural view, even if Fichte's ethical autonomy is displaced there by the absolute principle of the state.

After the rise of the National Socialists, Dempf tried to oppose the threatening development in various ways. This was, on the one hand, his urgent warning against the Concordat. Furthermore, he contributed with several others authors to the Studies on the Myth of the 20th Century, a rebuttal of Rosenberg's famous book The Myth of the Twentieth Century, written at the suggestion of Karl Barth and Erik Peterson — both of whom Dempf knew from their work in Bonn. This publication contains, among other things, a refutation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A printing of 200,000 copies were distributed to all Catholic and Protestant pastors in the Empire and was carried out with the help of church historian Wilhelm Neuß and Bishop von Galen, the later cardinal from Münster.

A third action from 1934 was the pamphlet The Faith Distress of German Catholics, which Dempf wrote under the pseudonym Michael Schäffler. In this pamphlet he analyzes the totalitarian mechanisms of the National Socialist worldview and urges the official church to oppose the new rulers like the Confessing Church. The printing took place in Switzerland, after Karl Barth had smuggled the manuscript across the border during his move.

An affront to Rosenberg was the introduction to Meister Eckart, also published in 1934, in which Dempf rejected any pantheistic possibilities of interpretation and thus made a nonsense of Eckart's classification as a Nordic thought leader. The book on Kierkegaard is at the same time a critical examination of Barth's dialectical theology. The Philosophy of Religion (1937) contains a link with Dempf's philosophy of culture and history. After his Philosophy of Culture was translated into Spanish in 1934, he was invited to Santander in 1935 to lecture on German sociology. He became friends with the Spanish philosopher Juan Zaragüeta. A lecture on late scholastic Spanish constitutional theory was planned for 1936, but it did not materialize because of the Spanish Civil War. Dempf utilized the preparation in a work on Christian Philosophy of State in Spain (1937). This book, as well as his contributions to the Handbook of Philosophy, were translated into Spanish. In 1938 a small work on Christian Philosophy was published, addressed to laymen.

After attempts to obtain a professorship in Bonn or Breslau failed due to Rosenberg's objection, despite a positive vote by Erich Rothacker in each case. Dempf finally received a call to Moritz Schlick's chair in Vienna in 1937 at the suggestion of the ethnologists Wilhelm Schmidt (SVD) and Wilhelm Koppers (SVD). In Vienna he taught for two semesters and had good relations with Eric Voegelin and Karl and Charlotte Bühler, among others. Immediately after the annexation of Austria, Dempf lost his teaching license in 1938. He had several offers to go abroad, but he opted for internal emigration and spent the seven years working on a systematic history of philosophy. A summary account of this largely unpublished work appeared in 1947 under the title Self-criticism of Philosophy. During World War II, Dempf also published a small biography of the church historian Albert Ehrhard, whom he knew from Schell's circle.

After the end of the war, Dempf was given back his chair in Vienna. Ernst Topitsch was then his assistant. Dempf participated as co-editor in the journal Wissenschaft und Weltbild. He turned down a call to Cologne, but in 1948 moved to a chair at the University of Munich, where he was in close contact with Aloys Wenzl and Helmut Kuhn.

From 1950 to 1960 Dempf was the editor of the Philosophisches Jahrbuch of the Görres Society. From 1955 he was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the non-fiction series Rowohlt's German Encyclopedia. He also became a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.

Dempf's writings published during the Munich period serve primarily to deepen his previous philosophy. In Theoretical Anthropology he took up the work of Jakob Johann von Uexküll.

Dempf understood the book The Unity of Science (1955) as a structured presentation of the sciences in a similar way as Hegel did in his "Encyclopedia". The Critique of Historical Reason (1957) was a juxtaposition of spiritual and legal worlds in their theoretical, practical and poietic forms and the structuring of the occidental ages from these points of view. Dempf described The Invisible World of Images (1959) as an "attempt at control" by applying his typifications to the realm of the performing arts.

Dempf counted among his students Ingeborg Bachmann, Walter Böhm, Henry Deku, Hermann Krings, Bernhard Lakebrink, Wolfgang Markus, Friedrich Mordstein, Gustav Siewerth, and Rainer Specht.

Private life

Alois Dempf was married to Christa Dempf-Dulckeit (née Dulckeit-von Arnim).

Works

• Der Wertgedanke in der Aristotelischen Ethik und Politik (1922)
• Weltgeschichte als Tat und Gemeinschaft. Eine vergleichende Kulturphilosophie (1924)
• Die Hauptform mittelalterlicher Weltanschauung. Eine geisteswissenschaftliche Studie über die Summa (1925)
• Das Unendliche in der mittelalterlichen Metaphysik und in der Kantischen Dialektik (1926)
• Ethik des Mittelalters (1927)
• Sacrum Imperium. Geschichtsschreibung und Staatsphilosophie des Mittelalters und der politischen Renaissance (1929)
• Metaphysik des Mittelalters (1930)
• Kulturphilosophie (1932)
• Görres spricht zu unserer Zeit. Der Denker und sein Werk (1933)
• Meister Eckhart. Eine Einführung in sein Werk (1934)
• Die Glaubensnot der deutschen Katholiken (1934; under the pen name Michael Schäffler)
• Kierkegaards Folgen (1935)
• Religionsphilosophie (1937)
• Christliche Staatsphilosophie in Spanien (1937)
• Christliche Philosophie. Der Mensch zwischen Gott und der Welt (1938)
• Albert Erhard. Der Mann und das Werk in der Geistesgeschichte um die Jahrhundertwende (1944)
• Die drei Laster. Dostojewskis Tiefenpsychologie (1946)
• Selbstkritik der Philosophie und eine vergleichende Philosophiegeschichte im Umriß (1947)
• Theoretische Anthropologie (1950)
• Die Weltidee (1955)
• Die Einheit der Wissenschaft (1955)
• Kritik der Historischen Vernunft (1957)
• Weltordnung und Heilsgeschichte (1958)
• Die unsichtbare Bilderwelt. Eine Geistesgeschichte der Kunst (1959)
• Geistesgeschichte der altchristlichen Kultur (1964)
• Religionssoziologie der Christenheit. Zur Typologie christlicher Gemeinschaftsbildungen (1972)
• "Selbstdarstellung." In: Philosophie in Selbstdarstellungen (1975)
• Metaphysik. Versuch einer problemgeschichtlichen Synthese (1986; edited by Christa Dempf-Dulckeit)

Translated into English

• "The Significance of Mediaeval Intellectual Culture," The Review of Politics, Vol. IX, No. 4 (1947)

External links

• Works by Alois Dempf at JSTOR