WEISSE, CHRISTIAN HERMANN. - Philosopher of the Hegelian right, b. in Leipzig on 10 Aug. 1801, d. there on 19 Sept. 1866. In Leipzig he held the chair of philosophy from 1844 until his death.
He was influenced by Hegel (v.) and Schelling (v.). His thought, however, aims to be an effort to make use of idealistic positions and insert them into the spiritualist and Christian tradition, in order to save the concept of the personality of God (whose existence W. considers proved by the cosmological argument: Philos. Dogmatik, I, p. 340). The starting point is the concept of freedom; logical necessity, in fact, with its dialectical procedure, permits only the constitution of general schemas, devoid of real content. For reality to be attained, a free creative act is required, which is first of all posited by God. In God, logicality constitutes the forms of the possibility of existing, and is connected with imagination and will. The triad of absolute spirit is thus conceived as the True, the Beautiful, the Good. In the figure of Christ, W. sees the humanized God constituting himself as a stimulus to the moral progress of humanity, which aspires, as to an ideal, to the communion of the kingdom of heaven.
His aesthetic doctrines are important. Aesthetics is distinguished into: 1) doctrine of the concept of the beautiful; 2) doctrine of art, as objectification of the beautiful; 3) 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, the 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 (ibid. 1829); System d. Ästhetik als Wissenschaft, v. d. Idee des Schönen (ibid. 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 (ibid. 1847); Philosophische Dogmatik oder Philosophie des Christentums (3 vols., Leipzig 1855-62).
Bibliography2 works
Enzo Maccagnolo