Constantin Brunner als Denker der Moderne. Eine biographische und philosophische Skizze

Abstract The essay is meant to be an introduction to both Brunner’s life and work. It follows Brunner’s development from a young man, deeply rooted in Jewish orthodoxy, to a secular thinker who made his own original contribution to modern philosophy. In his basic and most important work, Die Lehre von den Geistigen und vom Volk, he develops a quite innovative theory of our »relative« world perception, which is on a par with Einstein’s theory of relativity. In his attempt to define the unifying experience of true reality in the faculty of »spiritual thinking« Brunner sheds a new light on the figure of Jesus Christ by making him a representative of a new secular spirituality. But Brunner is also portrayed as an enlightened political thinker, a partisan of Jewish emancipation and a fierce critic of antisemitism, whose criticism of Zionism made him a controversial figure inside the Jewish community.