Эйген Дюринг: философ, экономист и антисемит

German philosopher and economist (1833–1921)
Eugen Karl Dühring (12 January 1833, Berlin21 September 1921, Nowawes in modern day Potsdam Babelsberg, aged 88) was an antisemitic German philosopher, positivist, economist, and socialist who was a strong critic of Marxism.

Dühring was born in Berlin, Prussia. After a legal education he practised law in Berlin until 1859. A weakness of the eyes, ending in total blindness, led him to take up the studies with which his name is now connected. In 1864, he became docent of the University of Berlin, but, in consequence of a quarrel with the professoriate, was deprived of his licence to teach in 1874. He published his autobiography in 1882 under the title Sache, Leben und Feinde; the mention of Feinde ('enemies') is characteristic. Dühring's philosophy claims to be emphatically the philosophy of reality. He is passionate in his denunciation of everything which, like mysticism, tries to veil reality. He is, in the words of historian Carlton J. H. Hayes "almost Lucretian in his anger against religion" which would withdraw the secret of the universe from our direct gaze. His substitute for religion is a doctrine in many points akin to Auguste Comte and Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, the former of whom he resembles in his sentimentalism. On other matters, particularly their attitudes toward Jews, the two men held very different opinions.

He was "deeply" influenced by Schopenhauer throughout his career. Dühring's opinions changed considerably after his first appearance as a writer. His earlier work, Natürliche Dialektik (Natural Dialectics), is entirely in the spirit of critical philosophy. Later, in his movement towards positivism, beginning with the publication of Kritische Geschichte der Philosophie (Critical History of Philosophy), he rejects Immanuel Kant's separation of phenomenon from noumenon and claims that our intellect is capable of grasping the whole reality. This adequacy of thought to things is because the universe contains but one reality, i. e. matter. It is to matter that we must look for the explanation both of conscious and of physical states. But matter is not, in his system, to be understood with the common meaning, but with a deeper sense as the substratum of all conscious and physical existence; and thus the laws of being are identified with the laws of thought. In this idealistic system Dühring finds room for teleology. The end of nature, he holds, is the production of a race of conscious beings. From his belief in teleology he is not deterred by the enigma of pain. As a determined optimist, he asserts that pain exists to throw pleasure into conscious relief. Throughout his life, Dühring was a vehement antisemite and was one of the first proponents of racial antisemitism in Germany. In 1881 Dühring's pamphlet Die Judenfrage als Racen , Sitten und Culturfrage (The Jewish Question as a Question of Race, Morals and Culture) was published. It was a pseudo scientific attempt to give antisemitism as a political movement a biological, historical, and philosophical foundation. He described the "Jewish question" similarly to Wilhelm Marr, as an expression of an irresolvable racial antagonism, and openly advocated for the "murder and extermination" of Jews as a solution to the Jewish question.