I really appreciate you digging into this, Dr. Zoidberg. I stumbled on Brunner about 15 years ago, and I still feel like I have a tiger by the tail. I’m so grateful to the Internet community for giving me the opportunity to test out my understanding of Brunner’s ideas. I hope that I can do something to bring attention to what I consider one of the greatest of souls. His followers have made many attempts in this regard. Most recently there is a volume entitled
Constantin Brunner im Kontext, which is mainly a collection of papers delivered at a conference in Berlin a couple of years ago.
As far as I know, I am the first and only native English speaker to actively promote his work, much of which is still untranslated from German. I have a
website where I have posted a good deal of material, including a blog with some of my own extrapolations from my reading of Brunner. I am responsible for the English Wikipedia article. The International Constantin Brunner Institute, with which I am involved, also has a
website.
Brunner fused together a number of thought streams. He is a great, perhaps the greatest system-builder. He has been described as the most German of Jews and the most Jewish of Germans. It is his fusion of German philosophy with Judaism and Spinoza that gives his work such astounding range.
Here is one quotation that might help give some idea of Brunner’s view:
Man is a thing, a thing in motion, and inwardly conscious of his own specific motion. Therein consists the degree of his thinking. With man's death his body dies, i.e. his specific motional state comes to an end and passes into another motional state. Simultaneously his degree of thinking also passes into another degree. All is one interconnection; it is the one self-thinking motion, where thinking is nothing in itself but motion alone is the reality which in consciousness experiences itself. And all our conscious motions, in unitary coherence, merge into those that proceed unconsciously for us in the parts of our body and into those others which our body as a whole undergoes through being moved in larger motional unities—and thus the motion and with it the consciousness of the entire universe is a uniformly coherent transformation. It is difficult to visualize this scientifically abstract truth. Just as we consider our physical existence as an individually self-contained one, although it is but a wave in the ocean that constantly impinges upon other waves, issuing from them and merging into them, just so we have immediate consciousness only as of something discrete, separate within us and in other consciousness-gifted beings, as of something that is pluralistic and substantial. Each consciousness appears as a substance. Against this it will be of some help if one reflects how in our own consciousness certain areas seem to us to be isolated which in truth compose a coherent whole. In the specificate of feeling we think only our feeling, in that of willing only our volitions, in that of knowing only knowledge—and moreover in each case only that which lies in the foreground of our intellective interest without including simultaneously all that knowledge stored away in our memory.
In like manner the whole of our consciousness, i.e. the sum-total of feeling, knowing, willing, makes us aware only of the motion of our own human thingliness, viz. only of that which serves our life maintenance. This consciousness conceives itself to be isolated, and even after the thought of the one thingly motion seems to have taken hold, the naive conception still retains its power. The worst offence against the thought of universal oneness continues to be committed as long as one does not abandon the assumption of discrete, insular, substantial units of consciousness in the midst of the continuity of thingly motion.
You can read more
here in a primer I have prepared.
