WEISSE, CHRISTIAN HERMANN. — Philosopher of the Hegelian right, born in Leipzig on 10 August 1801, died there on 19 September 1866. In Leipzig he held the chair of philosophy from 1844 until his death.
Hegel (v.) Schelling (v.). His thought, however, aims to be an effort to make use of idealist positions and to insert them into the spiritualist and Christian tradition, in order to preserve the concept of the personality of God (whose existence W. considers demonstrated by the cosmological argument: Philos. Dogmatik, I, p. 340). The point of departure is the concept of freedom; logical necessity, in fact, with its dialectical progression, permits only the constitution of general schemas devoid of real content. For reality to be attained, a free creative act is necessary, and this is first posited by God. In God, logicality constitutes the forms of the possibility of existence, and is connected with imagination and volition. The triad of the absolute spirit is thus conceived as the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. In the figure of Christ, W. sees God made human, establishing himself as a stimulus to humanity’s moral progress, which aspires, as to an ideal, to communion in the kingdom of heaven.
His aesthetic doctrines are important. Aesthetics is divided into: 1) the doctrine of the concept of the beautiful; 2) the doctrine of art, as the objectification of the beautiful; 3) the doctrine of genius, understood also in its objective form, that is, natural beauty, customs, and sexual love (Geschlechtliebe). The aesthetic faculty is, in man and in God, imagination (Gemüt).
Principal works: Die Idee der Gottheit (Dresden 1823); De Platonis et Aristotelis in constituendis summis philosophiae principis differentia (Leipzig 1827); Darstellung der griech. Mythologie (there 1829); System d. Ästhetik als Wissenschaft, V. d. Idee des Schönen (there 1830); Grundzüge der Metaphysik (Hamburg 1835); Die evangelische Geschichte (2 vols., Leipzig 1838); In welchem Sinne die deutsche Philos. jetzt wieder an Kant sich zu orientieren hat (there 1847); Philosophische Dogmatik oder Philosophie des Christentums (3 vols., Leipzig 1855–62).