DEUTINGER, MARTIN. — Philosopher, b. at Langenpreising (Upper Bavaria) on 24 March 1815, d. at Pfäfers (Switzerland) on 9 Sept. 1864. He studied in Munich, where his teachers were F. X. von Baader and F. W. J. Schelling. He was ordained a priest in 1837; in 1841 he became lecturer in philosophy at the Freising lyceum, in 1846 Privatdozent at the University of Munich, and then taught at Dillingen (1847–52). From 1852, having retired at his own request, he was preacher at the University of Munich.
He felt the influence of his teachers, of Hegel, and of the whole of modern philosophy, and, it seems, also of Günther, although, as he himself asserted, he continued along an entirely independent path. Indeed, he opposed Günther’s Cartesian dualism, Hegelian rationalism, and absolute idealism; he was a tenacious opponent of materialism and pantheism; and he sought to reconcile faith and science in the spirit of Christian Revelation. He reproached scholasticism for not having sufficiently clarified the relationship between philosophy and theology, which he intended 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 in opposition to modernism, of which he was wrongly considered a follower. D. wished to raise faith to the level of science in order to assert, 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. He is a threefold source of knowing, leading 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 relation to 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 existing for itself, it draws upon 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 the philosophy of religion. The former seeks, in man, the principles that render natural phenomena intelligible; the latter has the task of justifying the mediation of the objective truths of Revelation through the cognitive faculty of the human subject.
D. divides philosophy into the theory of thought or ideology, ethics, and aesthetics. He also took a keen interest in the latter (as well as in the philosophy of law and sociology) and developed, under Schellingian influences, the idealist point of view that connects 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
(there 1857); Über das Verhältnis der Poesie zur Religion (Augsburg 1861); Das Reich Gottes nach dem Apostel Johannes (3 vols., Freiburg i. Br. 1862–65); Der gegenwärtige Zustand der deutschen Philosophie (posthumous ed. by L. Kastner, Munich 1866).