Dietrich von Hildebrand: Master of Phenomenological Value-Ethics

Abstract

Dietrich von Hildebrand was born in Florence in 1889, the son of the great German sculptor, Adolf von Hildebrand. He was educated by tutors at home until he began his university studies in Munich in 1906. Between 1909 and 1911 he spent several semesters studying with Husserl in Gottingen. He was profoundly formed by Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations), which gave him a fundamental philosophical orientation that he never lost. In Gottingen he also studied with Husserl’s assistant, Adolf Reinach, whom he always venerated as his real teacher in philosophy. Max Scheler lived in Gottingen at this time, and in fact shared an apartment with von Hildebrand, who acknowledged receiving immeasurably much for his moral philosophy from his fifteen-year association with Scheler. In 1912 von Hildebrand received his doctorate in Gottingen with a dissertation entitled “Die Idee der sittlichen Handlung” (The idea of moral action).1 Husserl wrote in his evaluation of it: “I almost want to say that the genius of Adolf von Hildebrand has been inherited by his son, the author, as a philosophical genius.” He also said that von Hildebrand “astonishes the reader by an incomparably intimate knowledge of the various formations of affective consciousness and their objective correlates.”2 Husserl published the dissertation in its entirety in his Jahrbuch fur Philosophie und phanomenologische Forschung in 1916. It has recently come to light that Husserl made repeated use of it in his own research.3