Georg Brandes

Introduction

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) was a Danish literary critic and public intellectual who helped usher in modern secular thought in Scandinavia. In his early work Dualismen i vor nyeste Filosofi (1866), Brandes launched a sharp critique of the philosophical dualism defended by his former teacher Rasmus Nielsen — a dualism between faith and knowledge, subject and object, that Nielsen had tried to preserve against the rising tide of naturalism. Brandes rejected this framework as outdated and obstructive to intellectual progress, arguing instead for a unified, scientific worldview informed by Darwinism, historical criticism, and individual autonomy. This cultural revolt against inherited dualisms — between spirit and nature, science and subjectivity — formed part of the intellectual background against which Niels Bohr later developed his own philosophy of science. While Bohr would ultimately maintain a form of complementarity between subject and object, he did so with an acute awareness of the tensions and inheritances from earlier Danish debates about epistemology, freedom, and the limits of knowledge — debates in which Brandes and Nielsen stood on opposing sides.

Loose notes

Brandes was a student of Sibbern, Nielsen, and Brøchner
As a student, Brandes was friends with Julius Lange
In his 1866 Dualismen i vor nyeste philosophie, Brandes argues against Rasmus Nielsen’s view that science and religion are based on heterogeneous principles (uensartede Principper).
In the first volume of his Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur (1872), Georg Brandes presents Darwinism not merely as a scientific theory but as a powerful cultural force that challenges the foundations of traditional religion. He argues that Darwin’s account of natural selection destabilizes the metaphysical assumptions that undergird religious doctrines, including those concerning divine purpose, human exceptionalism, and the authority of revealed morality. For Brandes, the intellectual revolution sparked by Darwin is part of a broader emancipation from dogma, compelling modern individuals to seek moral guidance not from inherited religious teachings but from critical reason, historical understanding, and secular ideals. Thus, while he does not claim that Darwinism directly disproves religious ethics, he sees it as contributing decisively to the decline of their cultural legitimacy.
Christian Bohr visited Brandes in Berlin.
1889: Brandes publishes “Aristocratic radicalism”

Dualism

A passage from his book:

If two such propositions as
a) “The world was created in six days”
b) “The world was not created in six days”
are absolutely heterogeneous, then this amounts to saying that the first is an utterance of a being (essentia) that is absolutely heterogeneous from the being of which the second is an utterance. Fiat applicatio: if Prof. R. Nielsen utters proposition a), then he is absolutely different from (heterogeneous with) the one who utters proposition b); to call them both by the same name is a harmless jest, like Hostrup’s conceit in Soldaterløier, where all three heirs are called Peter. That Prof. Nielsen refers to himself by the same name in both cases is a whim we may allow him — so long as we are careful not to let ourselves be misled by it.

In truth, there are not only two persons here, but two persons each belonging to a world that is absolutely heterogeneous with the other; for any division within a subject is a division within the entire objective world that mirrors itself in the subject — since the subject, in the final analysis, is itself an expression of that world. If the subject is divided, this arises, in principle, from the fact that the entire world has already divided itself (essentia) beforehand.

One should not ask how it fares with a man’s self-consciousness when he harbors such fundamentally contradictory views; for such a man cannot exist.

Primary sources

Dualismen i vor nyeste philosophie
Det moderne gennembruds mænd
Levned
Magdalene Thoresen og Georg Brandes. En brevveksling (1865-1872)

Secondary sources