Friedrich Paulsen

Born July 16, 1846, in Langenhorn, Schleswig; died Aug. 14, 1908, in Berlin. German idealist philosopher and teacher.

Paulsen became a professor at the University of Berlin in 1878. In his pantheistic view of the world as a revelation of a unified “All-One,” or God, Paulsen sees nature as animated and as the manifestation of psychical life, the universal principle of which is will. This idealist conception resembles the voluntarism of the German philosophers A. Schopenhauer and G. Fechner. In ethics, as a counter to hedonism, Paulsen further developed the concept of energism: a man’s happiness is seen in his will for life, in the active display of his nature, and in the very process of his activities. Paulsen’s philosophical views were criticized by V. I. Lenin (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol, 29, pp. 335–38). Paulsen was the author of a number of works on the history of pedagogy.