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

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.