DEUTINGER, MARTIN. - Philosopher, b. at Langenpreising (Upper Bavaria) on 24 March 1815, d. at Pfäfers (Switzerland) on 9 September 1864. He studied at Munich, and had as teachers F. X. von Baader and F. W. J. Schelling. He was ordained a priest in 1837; in 1841 he became a teacher of philosophy at the lyceum of Freising, in 1846 a Privatdozent at the University of Munich, then at Dillingen (1847-52). From 1852, having been placed on leave at his own request, he was preacher at the University of Munich.
He felt the influence of his teachers, of Hegel and of modern philosophy as a whole, and, it seems, also of Günther, while nevertheless pursuing, as he himself affirms, a path entirely his own. He opposes, in fact, Günther's Cartesian dualism, Hegelian rationalism and absolute idealism; he is a tenacious adversary of materialism and pantheism; and he sets out to reconcile faith and science in the spirit of Christian Revelation. He reproaches Scholasticism for not having sufficiently clarified the relationship between philosophy and theology, which he intends to settle in an attempt to reconcile religious tradition with the progress of culture, under the influence of modern speculation. His reaction to Anton Günther sets him against modernism, of which he was wrongly considered a follower. D. wishes to raise faith to the level of science in order to vindicate, against apriorism, the positivity of Revelation and the incontestable truth of the dogmas.
Man is at the center of reality as the subject of knowledge. There is a threefold source of knowing that leads to the triad of God, nature, man: self-consciousness is possible by virtue of the action of the unconscious world upon man and in dependence on a third independent being, God, without whom a dependent being cannot be conceived. The human personality is not exhausted in rational activity. As a concrete being for itself, it draws on the threefold form of thinking, power and acting. Subjectivity is free action, and the will is the mediating and unifying force of thought and being, the essential presupposition of the conscious act of self-consciousness. This solution is intended to resolve the constitutive dualism of experience and to demolish the theoretical vision of idealism. Connected with it, and clarifying the relationship between self-conscious activity and the action of the transcendent, is a fundamental distinction between natural philosophy and philosophy of religion. The first seeks, in man, the principles of intelligibility of natural phenomena; the second has the task of justifying the mediation of the objective truths of Revelation with the cognitive faculty of the human subject.
D. divided philosophy into theory of thought or ideology, ethics and aesthetics. He also occupied himself with interest in the latter (as well as in philosophy of law and sociology) and developed, with Schellingian influences, the idealistic viewpoint that reunites the representation of art with the interiority of inspiration.
Principal works: Grundlinien einer positiven Philosophie (7 parts, Regensburg 1843-53); Grundriss der Moralphilosophie (Dillingen 1847); Geist der christlichen Überlieferung, I (Augsburg 1850), II (Regensburg 1851); Das Prinzip der neueren Philosophie und die christliche Wissenschaft (ibid. 1857); Über das Verhältnis der Poesie zur Religion (Augsburg 1861); Das Reich Gottes nach dem Apostel Johannes (3 vols., Freiburg im Breisgau 1862-65); Der gegenwärtige Zustand der deutschen Philosophie (posthumous ed. by L. Kastner, Munich 1866).