Paul Rée
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Paul Ludwig Carl Heinrich Rée was born in Pomerania, on 21 November 1849, on the noble estate "Rittergut Adlig Bartelshagen am Grabow"near the south coast of the [[Baltic Sea].He was the third child of the lord of the manor Ferdinand Philipp Rée from Hamburg and of Jenny Julie Philippine Rée nee Jenny Emilie Julie Georgine Jonas. He died in a climbing accident in the gorge Charnadüra of the suisse mountains near Celerina on 28 October 1901.
It is his fate that he is less known as an important philosopher than as a kind of side character through his friendship with the German philosopher [[Friedrich Nietzsche]and Lou von Salomé. Most of the general judgements of his character and work go back to formulations of Nietzsche and von Salomé.Nietzsche criticised Rée in the preface of On the Genealogy of Morals.
His status as the son of a wealthy businessman and landowner allowed him to study philosophy and law at the University of Leipzig. The monthly allowance Rée received from his family allowed him to pursue his own interests in his studies. He had read Darwin, Schopenhauer, and French writers such as La Bruyère and La Rochfoucauld. Rée conglomerated his diverse studies under the heading of “psychological observations”, describing human nature through aphorisms, literary and philosophical exegesis. By 1875, Rée had qualified for his doctorate from Halle, and produced a dissertation on “the noble” in Aristotle’s Ethics.
The Origins of the Moral Sensations was largely written in the autumn of 1877 in Sorrento, where Rée and Nietzsche had worked together by invitation of Malwida von Meysenbug. The book sought to answer two questions. First, Rée attempted to explain the occurrence of altruistic feelings in human beings. Second, Rée tried to explain the interpretive process which denoted altruistic feelings as moral. Reiterating the conclusions of Psychological Observations, Rée claimed altruism was an innate human drive that over the course of centuries has been strengthened by selection.
Published in 1877, The Origin of the Moral Sensations was Rée's second book. It's standpoint, Rée announced in the foreword, was inductive. Rée first observed the empirical phenomena he thought constituted man's moral nature and then looked into their origin. Rée proceeded from the premise that we feel that some actions to be good and others to be evil. From the latter came the guilty conscience. Rée also followed many philosophers in rejecting the idea of freedom of the will. The error of free will, Rée claims, is behind the development of the feeling of justice: "The feeling of justice thus arises out of two errors, namely, because the punishments inflicted by authorities and educators appear as acts of retribution, and because people believe in the freedom of the will." (Ree [1877] 2003) Rée rejected metaphysical explanations of good and evil; he thought that the best explanations were those of offered by Darwin and Lamarck, who had traced moral phenomena back to their natural causes. Rée argued that our moral sentiments were the result of changes that had occurred over the course of many generations. Like Lamarck and Darwin, R\'{e}e argued that acquired habits could be passed to later generations as innate characteristics. As an acquired habit, altruistic behavior eventually became an innate characteristic. Altruistic behavior was so beneficial, Rée claimed, that it came to be praised unconditionally, as something good in itself, apart from its outcomes.
[edit] References
Ree, Paul, Robin Small (2003). The Origin of the Moral Sensations. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Ludger Luetkehaus:Ein Heiliger Immoralist. Paul Rée(1849-1901).Biografischer Essay.Basilisken Presse, Marburg 2001(ISBN 392534764X)
Ruth Stummann-Bowert(Hrsg.): Malwida von Meysenbug-Paul Rée: Briefe an einen Freund.Würzburg:Könighausen und Neumann,1998(ISBN 3-8260-1464-2)
Hubert Treiber(Hrsg.):Paul Rée:Gesammelte Werke,1875-1885.Walter der Gruyter Verlag.Berlin-New York 2004(ISBN 3 1101 5031X)
