The Ontic Reversal in Gustav Teichmüller’s Once Neglected Ontology
Among the subterranean tributaries of 19th-century metaphysical thought, the name of Gustav Teichmüller (1832–1888) remains known only to the most assiduous spelunkers of philosophical archaeology. His major work, *Die wirkliche und die scheinbare Welt* (The Real and the Apparent World), offers a nearly unparalleled instance of proto-personalist ontology, constituting what might be termed an “ontic reversal” of classical substance metaphysics. In the following, I shall examine a subtle but crucial innovation in Teichmüller’s early personalist framework—namely, his metaphysical positing of the “individual essence” (*individuelle Wesenheit*) as logically prior to both empiric subjectivity and metaphysical substance.
This reversal—whereby the individual person becomes an ontic primitive rather than a derivative phenomenon—is both radical and largely unexamined. While scholars have somewhat recently begun to situate Teichmüller within contexts of proto-existentialism and neo-Leibnizian monadology, they often overlook the delicately woven epistemic rationale that supports his commitment to the personal as metaphysical foundation. The presumption that ontological wildness necessitates either pluralism or irrationalism masks what is, in Teichmüller’s case, a rigorous and disciplined revaluation of the constituents of reality.
The key passage occurs in the seventh chapter of *Die wirkliche und die scheinbare Welt*, where Teichmüller introduces the concept of the *ideale Persönlichkeit*, or “ideal personality,” which he distinguishes from the empirical ego. The former, rooted neither in sensibility nor in rationality alone, functions as the metaphysical archetype of a person—something of a transcendental ego, but refracted through an expressive rather than cognitive medium. Unlike Kant’s transcendental subject, who remains an empty form of unity, Teichmüller’s ideal personality possesses qualitative character, affective intensity, and purpose-directed intentionality. It is not a point but a plane, not a vessel but a source.
Critically, Teichmüller asserts that it is only through the recognition of ourselves as ideal personalities that we grasp the true structure of the world, which he terms the “actual world” (*wirkliche Welt*) in contradistinction to the apparent world of sensory flux and conceptual schemata. The subtlety lies precisely here, in the metaphysical structure implicit in self-awareness. Our knowledge of selfhood, argues Teichmüller, is not mediated by representations—a claim that distances him significantly from Kant. Rather, this knowledge is immediate and ontologically disclosive. As such, self-awareness is not an epistemic faculty, but an ontic fact: the individual essence discloses itself through its very act of being.
This leads to what I here call Teichmüller’s “ontic reversal”: against the dominant metaphysical narrative that locates the individual at the terminus of a developmental arc—beginning with Being, bifurcating into Substance, and finally crystallizing as particular thing—Teichmüller inverts the order. For him, the individual is not the end point of ontological differentiation but its starting point. His philosophy is thus, in a real sense, atomist. But unlike Democritus, whose atoms inhabit a void, Teichmüller’s ontic atoms (ideal personalities) instantiate inner fullness; they are both self-contained and expressive, solitary yet radiant.
In a stunning passage, he writes: “Nicht aus dem Einen geht das Viele hervor, sondern das Viele ist das Ursprungsmoment aller Einheit.” (“It is not from the One that the Many arises, but the Many is the originating moment of all unity.”) This phrase overturns the ontological primacy of unity in the tradition of Parmenides, Plotinus, and even Hegel. And in doing so, it carves out space for a pluralism not reducible to accumulation, but germinative and inexhaustibly rich.
To comprehend the magnitude of this shift, let us consider its implications for both metaphysics and epistemology. Where traditional idealism attempts to ascend from multiplicity to unity—typically through dialectic or noetic abstraction—Teichmüller begins at the multiplicity itself, treating unity not as an arche but a regulative synthesis. The individual essence, in his system, is not absorbed into a greater Whole but remains as a living depth, each essence expressing its own cosmos. Here one may discern echoes of Leibniz’s monads, but even Leibniz’s monads are ultimately harmonized by a pre-established rational order, whereas in Teichmüller the harmonization is aesthetic and emergent, never preordained.
This positions Teichmüller closer to Kierkegaard than to any of his immediate German contemporaries, though without Kierkegaard’s epistemic anxiety. For Teichmüller, the immediacy of self-awareness is not reason for dread but foundation for edification. The inward apprehension of one’s ideal personality is simultaneously a grasp of the actual world, precisely because the actual world *just is* the infinite plurality of such essences in their expressive becoming.
A most delicate point, however, lies in Teichmüller’s account of temporality. He maintains, perhaps influenced by Schelling, that the development of the ideal personality unfolds diachronically, but its ontic foundation lies wholly outside time. Temporality is not intrinsic to the essence, but is the manner in which it appears to itself amid limitation. The world’s temporality thus arises not from the firing of mechanical processes in physical matter, but from the expressive differentiation of ideal personality. Time, in this view, is personified—not merely phenomenologically, but ontologically.1
One might object that such a system is irremediably solipsistic or subjectivist. But Teichmüller responds with the critical notion of “mutual self-disclosure”—he posits that the only genuine knowledge of others occurs when one ideal personality discloses itself free of coercion and thereby invites the recognition of another. Knowledge is thus communicative and dialogic, grounded not in external observables but in ontic resonance.2 Far from subjectivism, this becomes a metaphysical intersubjectivity, a community of essences rather than of minds.
The ethical implications of this framework, though vast, must remain only gestured at here. Suffice it to say that moral duty, on Teichmüller’s view, arises not from categorical imperatives or divine commands, but from the aesthetic demand of the self in the presence of another essence. To disregard the ontic reality of another personality is, in his words, to “wound the metaphysical fabric of the world.”3 Morality here is contemplative: a recognition of value rather than a rule-bound obedience.
In conclusion, the significance of Teichmüller’s ontic reversal is not only philosophical but methodological. In recentering the metaphysical project upon the individual essence, he rescues philosophy from the reified abstractions of substance metaphysics and offers instead a vision of reality as a communion of expressive depths. His system, though neglected, surely deserves reentry into the canon, not merely as historical curiosity but as a vital contribution to any renewed metaphysics of personhood.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
individual essence, ontic reversal, German idealism, Teichmüller, metaphysics, pluralism, personhood
—
1 Teichmüller, Gustav. *Die wirkliche und die scheinbare Welt*, 2nd ed., Leipzig: Veit & Comp., 1882, p. 315.
2 Ibid., p. 402.
3 Ibid., p. 478.