Axel Hägerström

Axel Hägerström: The Man Who Declared War on Metaphysics

Roman senators were said to end every speech, whatever its subject, with the demand that Carthage be destroyed. A Swedish pastor's son adapted the formula for his own campaign: *Praeterea censeo metaphysicam esse delendam* — furthermore, I hold that metaphysics must be destroyed. Axel Hägerström meant it comprehensively. Rights, duties, moral truths, the binding force of a contract: all of them, he concluded, were fantasies people had mistaken for facts.

A Pastor's Son in Vireda

He was born Axel Anders Theodor Hägerström on 6 September 1868 in Vireda, in Jönköping County, the son of a Church of Sweden pastor. The household was religious and the path was laid out: he entered Uppsala University in 1886 to read theology. He did not stay. The move from theology to philosophy is the hinge of his life, and the direction of travel — from a discipline that assumes an invisible order to one that would spend forty years denying there was any — explains the peculiar intensity of his later work. Men raised without faith rarely attack metaphysics with that much energy.

He began teaching at Uppsala in 1893 and remained there as professor until his retirement in 1933, serving also as Inspektor of the Östgöta student nation from 1925 to 1933. He spent essentially his entire adult life in one university town, and turned it into a philosophical address.

From Kant to Demolition

Hägerström's early work was idealist and Kantian, shaped by the Marburg neo-Kantians, and concerned with the role of the ego in constituting an individual's reality. *Das Prinzip der Wissenschaft* (1908) belongs to that phase. What followed was a self-inflicted demolition. He came to hold that the whole apparatus of subject-constituted reality was itself a metaphysical construction, and he set about clearing it out, refusing thereafter to commit to any inherited system and building his own method instead: close phenomenological and conceptual analysis, the rejection of metaphysical suppositions, and the rejection of subjectivism along with them.

That programme became the Uppsala School. It ran in parallel with, and largely independently of, the Vienna Circle's logical positivism and the analytic turn in Britain — the same broad instinct that philosophy's job is to clarify language and dissolve pseudo-problems, arrived at in Swedish, in a provincial university, before either of the more famous movements had formed.

The Truth of Moral Propositions

The decisive text is the 1911 essay *Om moraliska föreställningars sanning* — "On the Truth of Moral Propositions." Its argument is that moral statements are not statements at all. "Stealing is wrong" looks grammatically like "iron rusts," but it does not describe anything; nothing in the world could make it true or false. Hägerström suggested that such sentences function more like sentences in the optative mood — expressions of wish or feeling wearing the clothes of assertion. Value judgments are emotional expressions, not genuine judgments.

This is moral non-cognitivism, and something close to emotivism, set out in 1911 — a quarter of a century before A. J. Ayer made the position famous in English. The doctrine acquired the name value nihilism in Scandinavia, which was not entirely fair: Hägerström was not saying that nothing matters, but that moral claims cannot be true, which is a narrower and stranger position and a harder one to live with.

Rights as Fantasies

Hägerström then applied the same scalpel to law, and this is where his influence became institutional rather than merely academic. Concepts like *right*, *duty* and *obligation*, he argued, are not descriptions of any verifiable feature of the world. A right is not a thing anybody has ever found. When a lawyer says a person has a right, he is not reporting a fact; he is invoking a notion that survives from an older, magical understanding of the world in which words and rituals bound the universe.

He took the argument into legal history in his two-volume study *Der römische Obligationsbegriff im Lichte der allgemeinen römischen Rechtsanschauung* (1927–41), examining the Roman concept of obligation in the light of the Roman conception of law as a whole. The point was not antiquarian. If the binding force of an obligation descends from ritual formula, then modern jurisprudence has been performing a ceremony while believing itself to be doing science.

Scandinavian Legal Realism

What Hägerström founded outlived him and travelled further than his epistemology. Anders Vilhelm Lundstedt, Karl Olivecrona and the Dane Alf Ross took his analysis of legal language and built Scandinavian legal realism on it: law as social fact and behaviour, not as a system of real entities called rights. Natural law was rejected outright, and so — by Hägerström's followers — was the doctrine of human rights, on the ground that it was metaphysics with better public relations. For a generation this was close to the governing philosophy of law in Scandinavia.

Why Axel Is Called a Genius

The quality at issue is a very pure form of conceptual nerve: the willingness to look at a word everybody uses confidently, ask what in the world could possibly make sentences containing it true, and accept the answer even when it is nothing. Hägerström did this to moral language, then to legal language, then to the Roman law tradition at its root, and did not flinch at conclusions most philosophers would have treated as a reductio of their own premises.

The strongest evidence for originality is chronological. He arrived at non-cognitivism about value in 1911, independently, before the Vienna Circle existed and long before emotivism became a standard Anglophone position, and he did it in Swedish, outside the conversation that would later claim the idea. Priority reached in isolation is worth more than priority reached in a crowd.

The counter-case is serious. Hägerström wrote densely and obscurely, in Swedish and German, and much of his positive philosophy of reality is now read by almost nobody; what survives is the negative programme and the legal application. His influence outside Scandinavia has been modest, and analytic philosophy developed comparable positions without him. Most seriously, the doctrine has consequences he never had to face: a philosophy holding that rights are fantasies and that moral claims cannot be true offers no principled ground for preferring one legal order to another, and his successors' rejection of human rights doctrine is not an accident of the theory but an implication of it. He was rigorous, early and largely coherent about the logic. Whether he was wise is a different question, and the century that followed asked it hard.

Legacy

Hägerström died in Uppsala on 7 July 1939, weeks before the war that would test what a purely factual account of law could say about a state that made lawful whatever it liked. His school dominated Swedish philosophy for decades and gave Scandinavian jurisprudence its distinctive, deflationary character, still visible in the region's legal scholarship. He remains one of the clearest cases in modern philosophy of a thinker who reached a major twentieth-century position first and received almost none of the credit, because he reached it in the wrong language, in the wrong country, twenty-five years early.

Achievements

• Held posts at Uppsala University