Erich Unger

Erich Unger (1887-1950) was a Jewish philosopher of standing who published many articles and a number of books, many of them in his native tongue, German. His writings cover a wide range of topics: poetry, Nietzsche, political theory, general philosophy and Jewish philosophy.

Born in Berlin in 1887, Dr Erich Unger was interested, from an early age, in novel ideas and intellectual debate. He attended school in Berlin-Lichterfelde, a wealthy residential area that was heavily influenced by Prussian nobility and members of the Prussian armed forces. At school at "Friedrich-Gymnasium" he met Oskar Goldberg who ran a literary club at the age of seventeen. As a young man Unger became one of the founder members of the literary Expressionist movement in Germany. (cf. Richard Sheppard, Die Schriften des Neuen Klubs, 1908–14, Hildesheim,1980,83). Unger's contributions to journals of the day were frequently sought after. (cf. Manfred Voigts, Vom Expressionismus zum Mythos des Hebraertums, Wurzburg: Koenigshausen und Neumann, 1994).

The first World War saw Unger in Switzerland, where he made new friends, among them Walter Benjamin who admired his work and also sought his literary collaboration (cf. G.Scholem, Walter Benjamin. Briefe. Frankfurt-am-Main, 1966). In the 1920s, Unger provided an intellectual forum for a group of young and distinguished scholars who regularly discussed their ideas on science, politics and philosophy. The group rapidly became a centre for the Berlin intelligentsia of the day. (cf. Manfred Voigts, Oskar Goldberg, Berlin 1992).

The advent of Hitler ended a promising academic career and Unger took his young family into exile in 1933, first to Paris and later (1936) to London, where he lived to the end of his life in 1950.

The imagination of reason or systematic imagination in philosophy. This, in Unger's thinking, is a basic tool in any philosophical enquiry into the world of being – into reality beyond experience. Speaking of the latter, Unger writes: "The matter of the world as a whole is not an empirical object, although it is unquestionable real" ('The Living and the Divine' Ch.1). In this essay Unger explains how, in order to apprehend that reality and other, like concepts, such as being or consciousness, we require the imagination of reason. Not unlike astronomers who research heavenly constellations of which they have only a partial direct experience and who then need to complement their experience by using a reasoning imagination to access the aspect that is beyond their direct experience.

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