DEUTINGER, Martin. – Philosopher, b. at Langenpreising (Upper Bavaria) on 24 March 1815, d. at Pfäfers (Switzerland) on 9 September 1864. He studied in Munich, where his teachers included F. X. von Baader and F. W. J. Schelling. He was ordained priest in 1837; in 1841 he became a philosophy lecturer at the lyceum in Freising, and in 1846 a Privatdozent at the University of Munich, later moving to Dillingen (1847–52). From 1852, having retired at his own request, he served as university preacher in Munich.
He was influenced by his teachers, by Hegel, and by modern philosophy in general, and, it seems, also by Günther, though he claimed to follow an entirely personal path. He opposed, in fact, the Cartesian dualism of Günther, the rationalism of Hegel, and absolute idealism; he was also an opponent of materialism and pantheism, aiming to reconcile faith and science in the spirit of Christian Revelation. He criticized Scholasticism for not having sufficiently clarified the relationship between philosophy and theology, which he sought to systematize in an attempt to reconcile religious tradition with the progress of culture under the influence of modern speculation. His reaction against Anton Günther placed him against modernism, of which he was wrongly considered a follower. He sought to elevate faith to the level of science in order to vindicate, against apriorism, the positivity of Revelation and the incontestable truth of dogmas.
Man stands at the center of reality as the subject of knowledge. There is a threefold source of knowledge that leads to the triad of God, nature, and man: self-consciousness is possible by virtue of the action of the unconscious world upon man and in function of a third independent being, God, without whom a dependent being cannot be conceived. Human personality is not exhausted in rational activity. As a concrete being-for-itself, it draws upon the threefold form of thinking, power, and action. Subjectivity is free action, and the will is the mediating and unifying force of thought and being, an essential presupposition of the conscious act of self-consciousness. This solution aims to resolve the constitutive dualism of experience and demolish the theoretical vision of idealism. Linked to this is a fundamental distinction between natural philosophy and philosophy of religion, the former investigating in man the principles of intelligibility of natural phenomena, the latter having the task of justifying the mediation of the objective truths of Revelation with the cognitive faculty of the human subject.
Deutinger divided philosophy into the theory of thought or ideology, ethics, and aesthetics. He also took a keen interest in the latter (as well as in philosophy of law and sociology) and developed, under Schillinghian influences, the idealistic viewpoint that reconnects artistic representation to the interiority of inspiration.
Principal works: *Grundlinien einer positiven Philosophie* (7 parts, Regensburg 1843–53); *Grundrisse der Moralphilosophie* (Dillingen 1847); *Geist der christlichen Überlieferung*, I (Augsburg 1850), II (Regensburg 1851); *Das Privat- und der neueren Philosophie und die christliche Wissenschaft* (IV 1857); *Über das Verhältnis der Poesie zur Religion* (Augsburg 1861); *Das Reich Gottes nach dem Apostel Johannes* (3 vols., Freiburg im Br. 1862–65); *Der gegenwärtige Zustand der deutschen Philosophie* (posthumous ed. by L. Kastner, Munich 1866).