Now that we have examined Kuno Fischer, Eduard Zeller, Jürgen Bona Meyer and Otto Liebmann, we come to the last member of the grand quintumvirate that revived neo-Kantianism in the 1860s: Friedrich Albert Lange (1828–1875). If Lange comes last, he does not come least. His reputation overshadows that of his allies. His Geschichte des Materialismus, which first appeared in 1866, was a landmark in the history of neo-Kantianism. No other work did more to revive Kant’s reputation, to place him at the centre of German philosophy in the middle of the 19th century. Its influence overshadows Fischer’s and Zeller’s 1860 lectures and Liebmann’s 1865 Kant und die Epigonen.
Though Lange’s importance and influence is clear and uncontroversial, the same cannot be said for his place in the history of neo-Kantianism. Assessing this place is tricky, and it has been a matter of dispute. It is at least plain and uncontentious that Lange belongs to the physiological-psychological tradition of the interpretation of Kant. Like Fries, Beneke and Helmholtz, he saw that interpretation as the only means of ensuring Kant’s relevance in the modern scientific age. The physiological-psychological interpretation was for him nothing less than “improved and refined Kantianism”. Yet it would be a mistake to stuff Lange completely in this pigeon-hole, as if it exhausted his understanding of Kant. For Lange also transformed the Kantian dualism between the noumenal and phenomenal into a dualism between ideal and reality, norm and fact, value and existence. The distinction between entities became a distinction between logical types. We can already find in Lange the basis for the theory of value of the Southwestern school.1
Lange has often been seen as “the father of Marburg Neo-Kantianism”.2 He acquired this reputation partly because of his academic position, and partly because of his patronage of Hermann Cohen, the later leader of the Marburg school. Lange was an ordinary professor in Marburg from 1872 to 1875, the predecessor of Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. He was a strong supporter of Cohen, who became a Privatdozent largely thanks to his efforts. Forever grateful to Lange, Cohen tended to stress his debts to him and the affinities in their thought. But there are good reasons to doubt that Lange sired Marburgian neo-Kantianism in any more than an external academic sense. There is only a superficial similarity between Lange’s and Cohen’s thought; and the more closely we consider them, the more they show themselves to be deeply at odds, both in their interpretation of Kant and in their conception of the method of philosophy.3 Lange’s nominalism and empiricism, his psychological interpretation of Kant, his reduction of religion down to aesthetic ideas, his critique of Platonism—all these offended Cohen’s sensibilities and clashed with his basic beliefs. The philosophy of the young Cohen, as we shall later see, grew out of his reaction against Lange. If Lange is the father of Marburg neo-Kantianism, then that tradition was based on patricide.
Lange has also been cast in another dubious role: founder of neo-Kantian socialism.4 This common and venerable view has been recently advocated by Thomas Willey: “His most important contribution to neo-Kantianism was in his use of Kant to go beyond the boundaries of liberal social philosophy.”5 Although some of Lange’s political views, namely, the value of co-operatives and the critique of historical inevitability, might have had some influence on later neo-Kantians, there is still a problem in crowning him the founder of neo-Kantian socialism. This interpretation joins together, plausibly enough, two basic facts: that Lange was a neo-Kantian and a founder of the social-democratic movement. However, there is a third stubborn fact that keeps these two apart: Lange himself never really connected his neo-Kantianism with his socialism.6 Never did Lange, in his defence of social-democracy, appeal to Kantian moral principles, and never did he give a Kantian moral foundation to social-democratic ideals. It is indeed striking that in his two major works on politics—Die Arbeiterfrage and Mills Ansichten über die sociale Frage7—Lange not only casts his argument in eudemonistic or perfectionalist terms,8 but he also rejects Kant’s moral philosophy as a guide in questions of political economy. In Die Arbeiterfrage Lange criticizes Kant severely for attempting to provide an a priori deduction of the institution of private ownership, and for excluding the possibility of communal ownership of the land.9 Although Kant tries to justify that institution on eternal rational grounds, it is plain to Lange that it arose from all too natural and all too historical facts: conquest, power and exploitation. In this respect, Lange charges Kant with “a vulgar servility toward the powers-that-be and a hypocritical apology for injustice and exploitation”. On the whole, Lange is sceptical of Kant’s method in ethics on the grounds that it cannot justify specific precepts from very general principles. In Mills Ansichten Lange refers approvingly to Kant’s categorical imperative, though only to declare that he prefers Smith’s principle of sympathy over Kant!10 Given Lange’s empiricism and naturalism, his preference for Smith is perfectly understandable; but it has gone unnoticed by Lange commentators, who cling to their faith that there must be some connection between Lange’s neo-Kantianism and his socialism.11
Given the absence of Kantianism in Lange’s socialism, and given the importance of his Geschichte des Materialismus, we will focus in this chapter on Lange’s book rather than his social and political philosophy. This is contrary to the practice of most neo-Kantian historians, who dwell fondly and at length on Lange’s social and political views, even though, properly seen, they fall outside the history of neo-Kantianism. It is in his Geschichte des Materialismus that Lange’s significance lies for neo-Kantianism. This work presents a challenging legacy: it is long, complex, rich and subtle, and the source of some controversy. Before we examine its contents, though, we must place its author in context and trace his early philosophical development.
Friedrich Albert Lange was born September 28, 1828, in Wald bei Sollingen.12 Since his grandfather was a drayman, a wagon driver who hauled beer for local breweries, Lange had working class roots, a fact which must have played a role in forming his later political convictions. His father, Johann Peter Lange, worked his way up in the world, first becoming a pastor and eventually a professor of theology. The family residence was in Duisburg, where Friedrich Albert attended the local school until he was 12. In 1841, the family moved to Switzerland after Lange’s father received a call to be professor at the university in Zurich. A man of orthodox faith, Johann Peter Lange was the right man to replace his notorious predecessor, David Friedrich Strauß, who was forced to resign because of the scandal aroused by his Das Leben Jesu.
Lange attended Gymnasium in Zurich, where he first acquired his taste for philosophy. One day a teacher gave a talk on Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, which was his first exposure to philosophy. Lange was later proud to say that he was one of the few among his classmates to have understood that talk. In April 1847 Lange matriculated at the university in Zurich, where he studied theology and philology. There he also attended the lectures of Eduard Bobrik, who was a Herbartian. From these lectures Lange developed an interest in Herbart’s psychology, which would preoccupy him for many years. Lange was first a Herbartian, then a Kantian. It was his disillusionment with Herbart that eventually drove him to Kant.13
After attending the university at Zurich for one year, Lange moved to Bonn, where he was a student at the university there from 1848 to 1851. He studied philology under Friedrich Ritschl (1806–1876), and art history under Friedrich Welcker (1784–1868), who both imparted to him a historicist methodology. Rather than going to more lectures, Lange spent most of his time on his own, studying mathematics, physics and classical history. He also enjoyed English, and even learned how to speak it from English students at the university.14 This facility gave him access to English philosophy, history and literature, which were important in shaping his later outlook on moral, social and economic questions. While at Bonn Lange did not study philosophy much, because it took away the time and energy he needed to prepare for examinations in philology. Philology was for Lange a Brotstudium, a means to help him qualify as a schoolteacher. After his father advised him not to neglect philosophy, he attended two courses on the history of classical philosophy by Christian August Brandis (1790–1867), who had been a student of Schleiermacher and Trendelenburg. In a meeting with Brandis Lange explained that, though he could not attend more lectures on philosophy, he had not been neglecting the subject and that he had his own “wild philosophy”, which he wanted to grow a little before applying a strict method to it.15
From his correspondence with friends, we know a little about Lange’s “wild philosophy” during his student days. The most revealing letter he wrote sometime in 1851 to Conrad Kambli (1829–1914),16 an old schoolmate and pastor in Switzerland. Responding to Kambli’s inquiries about his religious and philosophical views, Lange wrote that his philosophy was still crude and inchoate, a work-in-progress, and that he proceeded slowly and carefully because, before he adopted any philosophical position, he needed to make a thorough study of its history (this the legacy of Ritschl and Welcker). After these caveats, Lange sketched some of his still developing views, which were indeed radical and crude. He comes close to espousing a complete relativism, declaring that “there is no absolute content to conscience”, and that there is no objective reality outside the mind for goodness, beauty or the god of theism. All that we know is relative to human beings, the product of their psychology and physiology. The only objective truths are the laws of nature, which show us how the ideas of goodness, beauty and god arise of necessity from human nature. This belief in natural necessity, the inevitable working of natural laws, makes Lange doubt the reality of freedom, a belief which he regards as antiquated by natural science. All actions are necessary, and we call them “free” only where my decision follows my own nature. All of the radical views suggested in this letter—its historicism, relativism and naturalism—will emerge untamed in Lange’s later philosophy.
Lange’s student days came to a close in March 1851, when he took his qualifying exams, which he passed with the highest possible grade, “eximine cum laude”. For his doctorate he wrote a dissertation on Latin verse, Quaestiones metricae. In June he passed the state examinations to be a schoolteacher, where he was certified to teach classical languages, history, mathematics and psychology. After a brief year in military service, Lange worked at a Gymnasium in Cologne from 1852 to 1855. Frustrated by working for three years only as an assistant, Lange left the Gymnasium and decided to try an academic career. In June 1855 he habilitated at the University of Bonn with a dissertation on Herbart’s psychology.17 From 1855 to 1858 he worked as a Privatdozent in Bonn, holding lectures there on psychology, moral statistics, logic and pedagogics.
It was during his Bonn Dozentenjahre that Lange began his first intensive study of philosophy. In June 1855, Lange wrote a letter to the university registrar in Bonn about his desire to habilitate in philosophy. He explained that all his beliefs had been thrown into doubt, and that he needed to get back to fundamentals.18 His chief concern had been pedagogical theory, but the basis of modern pedagogy, Herbart’s psychology, had proven bankrupt. It was necessary to fashion a new psychology, and that would require intensive work in philosophy.
It was also during these years that Lange began his first study of Kant. It was his need to write a new psychology that seems to have moved him towards the critical philosophy. He had plans to write a critique of psychology, in which he would follow Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft. We get some insight into his reasons for turning to Kant, and his general philosophical views around this time, from his September 27, 1858, letter to Kambli:
As far as my “direction” or “confession” is concerned, I have to tell you that you judge me quite falsely as a teacher of philosophy when you speak about deepening oneself in “speculation”. That is from times past! And hopefully for all Germany. I regard the Hegelian system as a relapse into scholasticism, from which we are already freed. Herbart, whom I followed in the beginning, is only a bridge for me to Kant, to whom so many solid scholars now return, and who do that to complete what Kant did only half way: destroy metaphysics. I regard every metaphysics as a kind of delusion (Wahnsinn), which has only an aesthetic or subjective justification. My logic is probability calculus, my ethics is moral statistics, my psychology rests entirely on physiology; in a word, I try to move only in the circles of the exact sciences.19
This letter reveals Lange’s positivist attitude, which will emerge as a central force in his mature philosophy. This positivist temper is indeed the chief reason for Lange’s later sympathy with materialism. It would be a mistake, however, to regard positivism as the complete or whole spirit of Lange’s early philosophy. For there was another side to Lange, one that led him away from the exact sciences and that balanced out his positivist views. This was his “poetic” side, his knack for writing verse, which he would indulge constantly and on every occasion. Writing poetry was his most passionate preoccupation, and he would have made a career out of it if poetry earned any money.20 This poetic trait was the force behind the other side of Lange’s philosophy, what he would later call “the standpoint of the ideal”. Lange thinks that there are two sides to humanity: the rational mentality apparent in the exact sciences, and “our poetic nature”, which expresses itself in creative activity, in giving voice to the deepest aspirations of humanity through religion and art. We shall later see how Lange’s mature philosophy attempts to balance and do justice to these two sides of human nature.
Other passages from Lange’s long September 27 letter to Kambli reveal more about his early attitude towards Kant.21 Lange finds Kant’s greatness chiefly in his theoretical philosophy, in his critique of metaphysics. He took to heart Kant’s critical teaching that philosophy should remain within the limits of possible experience, because that seemed to bring philosophy in accord with the methods and standards of the exact sciences. Like all the neo-Kantians before him, Lange saw Kant’s critical medicine as the proper antidote to the “scholasticism” of Hegelianism and the “Begriffsromantik” of German idealism. The practical side of Kant’s system, however, was something entirely different for Lange. He saw its chief achievement as “Kant’s proof of the unprovability of the ideas of God, freedom and immortality”, but he had little sympathy for Kant’s “positive constructions”, that is, his particular practical demonstrations of the beliefs in God, providence and immortality. That effort seemed to him a timid bow to religious orthodoxy. Since Lange also disputes Kant’s method in ethics, as we have seen, it seems as if he entirely rejects Kant’s practical philosophy. Yet it is important to note that he does accept one crucial aspect of Kant’s practical philosophy: namely, “its starting point”, the attempt to provide a justification for moral and religious ideas through practical reason. Though Lange rejected Kant’s demonstrations of the standard Christian beliefs, he still approved of the general strategy of using practical reason to defend morality and religion.22 This point, already present in the letter to Kambli, will play a crucial role Lange’s later philosophy. For it will be practical reason that provides the foundation for “the standpoint of the ideal”.
In 1855, in his first semester teaching at Bonn, Lange wrote drafts for lectures on logic,23 which he later gave at Marburg in 1873/74. These lectures were later revised by Lange himself, and then published posthumously by Hermann Cohen in 1877 as Logische Studien.24 Though little read, this work is very revealing about Lange’s views on Kant and the foundations of logic. Lange’s chief concern in these lectures was the possibility of a formal logic, that is, whether there could be a formal logic having apodictic certainty like mathematics, and separate from all the intractable questions of epistemology (Erkenntnistheorie). The formal logic Lange has in mind here is nothing like the later Fregean discipline, still decades away from conception; it is rather Aristotle’s syllogistic logic separated from questions of grammar and metaphysics. Whether there could be such a formal logic was a controversial issue in the 1850s, because the Trendelenburgian school had stressed the connection of Aristotle’s logic with his metaphysics and grammar.25 Against them, Lange affirms the possibility of a purely formal logic. It is possible to have a formal logic independent of all grammar and metaphysics, he argues, because the validity of Aristotle’s syllogisms are not affected by his particular views on grammar and metaphysics. No matter how one theorizes about the syllogisms, and whether one accepts Aristotle’s views or not, their sheer formal validity still shines through. What gives them that validity, Lange theorizes, is their intuitability, the immediate perception of their truth, which cuts through all grammar and metaphysics.
The more speculative and controversial aspect of Lange’s theory concerns this intuitability (Anschaulichkeit). The basis for it Lange finds in a priori spatial intuition. The main premise behind this at first blush very odd thesis seems to be this: that when we reason syllogistically, we place terms into classes, and this relation of inclusion or subsumption is perceived in spatial terms, by the placing of parts within wholes.26 Lange then goes on to give an account of the fundamental role of a priori spatial intuition in our mental economy: it is the basis of part/whole relationships, all quantitative relationships, of even number itself, and it is the source of time, which we conceive as a point moving along a line (139, 141, 147). Much of Lange’s theory is inspired by Kant, to whom he refers constantly in these lectures. But he is forced to take issue with Kant in two important respects. First, he cannot accept Kant’s thesis that logical truth is based on the principle of contradiction while the truths of mathematics are synthetic a priori (9). He insists that all necessary propositions are synthetic, and that what connects their distinct terms is a priori intuition. There is no difference between logical and mathematical truth in that both require an intuition where some particular sign or figure represents something universal (23). Second, Lange thinks that Kant commits a fundamental error in separating so sharply understanding and sensibility (9). All intuition requires thought, all thought requires intuition. The presence of intuition in thought is especially apparent, Lange contends, not only in geometrical constructions but in logical truth itself where spatial intuition is behind all reasoning.
The other important work of the Dozentenjahre was Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus, which was already in gestation in these early years. But its genesis and intentions is a much longer story, which we must now tell.
Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus was one of the great works of philosophy of the second half of the 19th century, the peer of Lotze’s Mikrokosmus and Trendelenburg’s Logische Untersuchungen. The title of the book is somewhat misleading. It is not only a history of materialism from classical to modern times, but, like its peers, the statement of an entire worldview. Lange chose the theme of materialism because he saw it as key to the cultural crisis of his age, and because the conflict between materialism and idealism is central to philosophy itself. The work is as much philosophy as history: it engages in philosophy to make sense of history, and history to give concrete shape to philosophy.
Lange’s work appeared to great critical acclaim, somewhat to the surprise of its author. Because of its elegance and topical theme, the work was widely read. It was praised for its clarity, for its scholarship, and for the author’s wide knowledge of the latest scientific research. The main message of the work—that materialism is a valuable research programme though an untenable metaphysics—appealed to both left and right, scientists and theologians. Such was the success of the book that it appeared in ten editions, the last in 1974.27 Two editions appeared in Lange’s lifetime, the first in 1866, the second from 1873 to 1875.28
Geschichte des Materialismus is almost two books rather than one. The second edition was so enlarged and revised that it is virtually a new book. The first edition was a single volume of 557 pages; but the second edition came in two volumes, the first consisting in 428 pages and the second in 569 pages. Thus the book had almost doubled in size! For the second edition Lange took into account not only new developments in the sciences but also the latest contributions to the materialism controversy. But the second edition did not simply enlargen the first; much of the material from the first edition was dropped or rewritten. There are important changes in opinion and outlook in the second edition, especially with regard to Lange’s interpretation of Kant.29 But there is also a significant shift in Lange’s whole conception of the work. In the preface to the first edition he said that he wrote for the enlightenment of his contemporaries, and that he did not want to write an academic monograph; he therefore left aside the scholarly apparatus of footnotes. But the second edition eventually became that monograph: it contains extensive notes after each main chapter.
Writing the first edition of the Geschichte took some nine years.30 The original idea for a book on this theme came almost by accident and not from Lange himself. In 1857 Lange’s students at the University of Bonn sent him a note requesting that he lecture on the history of materialism for the Summer Semester of 1857.31 Though himself preoccupied with pedagogical projects, Lange complied with their request. His lectures were the rough draft for part of the book. Ellissen, Lange’s first biographer, reports that there was a large manuscript of material for these lectures which corresponds with much of the first part of the later published book.32 Because of his successive jobs as a schoolteacher, a journalist and a customs official, Lange could work on the book only intermittently and sporadically. Finally in January 1864 he could inform his publisher that part of the manuscript was ready for printing.33 Suffering from stomach cancer and realizing that his health might not last, he concentrated all his energy on finishing the second edition in the autumn of 1874.34 In the preface to the second volume of the second edition he regretted that his health had not permitted him to consider all the latest publications relevant to his theme. Still, he managed to muster enough energy to see the second edition through the press. Lange died November 21, 1875, only 47 years old, slightly more than one year after the appearance of the second edition.
Why did Lange write his Geschichte? What were his aims or motives? In the preface to the first edition he tells us that he began the book in the hope of providing a solution to some issues raised by the materialism controversy (iii). He does not specify which issues, but we know from the content of the book that chief among them is the conflict between science and faith posed by the materialism controversy. It is also clear from this preface that Kant will play the decisive role in Lange’s resolution of this conflict. Thus, immediately after declaring his intention to contribute to the controversy, Lange introduces Kant. It is as if it were self-evident that he would have to discuss the venerable sage of Königsberg. We soon see why: “In recent days Kant has achieved great renown, especially among natural scientists, and the enduring elements in his system are increasingly the common property of leading minds, even outside the narrow circles of academic philosophy.” (iv) But if Kant is a decisive figure, Lange warns us not to take him uncritically, as if he were an absolute authority. “It is necessary, however, to crush the false absolutism of his system; the false appearance of a rigorous deduction has to be laid aside, so that the simple truth can come forward in an unmistakable manner.” (iv)
What is this “simple truth”? Although Lange does not spell it out for us, the context reveals his meaning. “The simple truth” consists in Kant’s strategy for resolving the conflict between reason and faith. In his preface Lange at first explains this strategy in very narrow terms: it is the via media between the orthodox and positivist Kantians. The orthodox Kantians, who are dogmatic theologians, underrate Kant’s affinity with materialism and overrate his doctrine of practical faith. The positivist Kantians do just the opposite: they overrate his affinity with materialism and underrate his defence of moral and religious ideas (iv–v). The real Kant, Lange implies, is neither positivist nor orthodox, because he champions in equal measure both natural science and religious idealism.
But much more was at stake than a quarrel between Kantian schools. Lange also sees Kant’s strategy in much broader terms: it is the middle path between the two clashing ideologies of his age, materialism and speculative idealism. If materialism stands for the triumph of a complete mechanism and naturalism, which undermines moral and religious ideals, speculative idealism represents a revival of metaphysical rationalism, which save these ideals but only by going beyond the limits of reason. Kant’s philosophy offers a middle path between these extremes, because it saves the autonomy of our moral and religious ideals without metaphysics, and because it upholds the principles of mechanism and naturalism without jeopardizing morality and religion. Explaining just how Kant could accomplish this feat would be one of the central tasks of Lange’s book.
Lange’s central theme—that Kant could resolve the conflict between science and faith, speculative idealism and materialism—was not the least reason for the remarkable success of his book. His message was embraced by a younger generation. We know from the correspondence and reminiscences of Friedrich Paulsen, Hans Vaihinger, Benno Erdmann, Paul Natorp and Hermann Cohen that Lange’s book made a great impact upon them.35 To them, Lange had shown where the great value and power lay behind Kant’s philosophy: in endorsing modern science without having to accept materialism; in preserving moral and religious belief without having to engage in metaphysics or to indulge in mysticism. Essentially, Lange’s book did for the 1860s and 1870s what K.L. Reinhold’s Briefe über die kantische Philosophie did for the 1790s. Just as Reinhold had popularized Kantian teaching by showing how it could resolve the conflict between reason and faith in the pantheism controversy, so Lange did the same by explaining how it could resolve that conflict in the materialism controversy. Lange was thus the Reinhold of the 19th century.
Lange was well aware of, and very pleased by, the effects of his work in promoting the Kant revival. Hence, in the beginning of the second volume of the second edition of his Geschichte, he noted with some satisfaction that it was no longer necessary to justify the importance he had given to Kant in the first edition (II, 1–2). Since the publication of that edition some eight years ago, he wrote, there had been a great revival of interest in Kant among a younger generation. In a footnote Lange mentioned the work of Otto Liebmann, Jürgen Bona Meyer, Emil Arnoldt and Hermann Cohen (115, n.1). There was now a new Kant philology, he observed, that could compete with classical philology in its devotion to detail and accuracy in the interpretation of texts.
Responding to the materialism controversy was a central motive for writing the Geschichte des Materialismus. This could not be, however, a complete account of its author’s intentions. For Lange often describes his aims in more ambitious and broader terms, as if he has not only philosophical but also social and political goals. Thus he writes in the preface to the first edition that his aims are entirely practical, that he wants to contribute to “the great struggles of his age”, that he hopes to promote “the spiritual survival of his nation”.36 Picking up on these lines, some scholars see Lange’s goals as primarily social and political, though they have conflicting interpretations of them. Helmut Holzhey sees Lange’s aim as the promotion of forthcoming social and political revolution,37 whereas Hans-Martin Sass thinks that Lange’s intent was to warn the public about that revolution and to provide an antidote to it with his “standpoint of the ideal”.38 Which of these interpretations are true? Lange cannot be both promoting revolution and warning against it.
Before we sort out this issue, we do well to note that there are problems with both interpretations. First, Lange developed his socialist agenda only by 1863, when large parts of the Geschichte were already written.39 Though Lange continued writing the book after formulating his socialist views, and though they were indeed worked into the second edition of the book, they alone cannot explain why he undertook a study of materialism in the first place. His reasons are just those he sets forth in his preface, and which we can take at face value: taking a stand on the issues raised by the materialism controversy. Second, it is hard to see how writing a book on the history of materialism could have a vital effect on the fundamental social-political problem of his age, which was what Lange called “the social question”, that is, the fact that the great mass of people lived in poverty. If it were Lange’s aim to contribute to its solution, he had chosen a very indirect and inefficient means of doing so in writing his Geschichte. These were reasons for writing his Die Arbeiterfrage and Mills Ansichten über die Socialfrage, to be sure, but they were not reasons for writing a whole history of materialism. That seemed like a long way around the barn. In any case, neither Holzhey nor Sass provide a clear account of how the philosophical theses of Lange’s book are relevant to his politics, still less how his politics shape these theses.
These problems with the social–political interpretation do not mean, however, that Lange’s book has no social–political dimension at all. There is indeed an important connection between Lange’s philosophy and politics after all. The connection becomes clear when we note the social and political valence of materialism and idealism around the time of the 1848 Revolution. The materialists (viz. Jacob Moleschott, Karl Vogt and Ludwig Büchner) had stood on the left during the great struggles of the March Revolution; they had advocated a broad franchise, greater social and economic equality, the separation of church and state, and limiting royal prerogative. However, the idealists, who were Hegel, Trendelenburg and the Romantics, at least according to Lange’s interpretation,40 stood on the right and had supported the Restoration. For political reasons, Lange could accept neither extreme. Though he endorsed the progressive causes of materialism, he feared that it was leading towards a completely egoistic conception of society where everyone competed with everyone else.41 While he despised the Restoration, he still believed that the Romantic and idealist traditions had stood for an important side to human beings: their sacrifice and love for the ideal. Despite their metaphysics, and despite their scholastic and bankrupt methodology, the idealists were right to stand for the integrity and autonomy of the ideal. The task of Lange’s book was therefore to develop a philosophical position that could preserve the good sides, and cancel the bad ones, in each philosophy. His aim was to defend the progressive causes of the materialists, without the egoism, while still upholding the moral idealism of the romantics and idealists, without the reactionary politics.
And what about the forthcoming revolution? Was it Lange’s aim to promote or to forestall it? There can be no question that Lange was a champion of fundamental social, political and economic change sufficient to resolve the social question. It was the task of philosophy “to carry forward the torch of criticism, to collect the rays of knowledge into one, and to promote and palliate the revolutions of history”.42 Though Lange, unlike Marx, was no believer in the inevitability of revolution, he made plain his solidarity with it should one occur: resistance against it deserved all the curses radicals hurled against reactionaries.43 He was indeed opposed to attempts to tinker with the capitalist system that would only continue its survival without addressing the deeper needs of the masses. Poor laws, charity, increases in wages, emigration were not solutions to injustice and poverty. Lange was a sharp critic of the Selbsthilfe or co-operative movement of Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch, as well as the Staatshilfe or parliamentarian movement of Ferdinand Lasalle, on the grounds that they would not really emancipate workers but would simply mollify them.44 Still, Lange’s advocacy of fundamental social, political and economic change was never a call for violent agitation or revolution; he always stood for cautious and gradual reform. He maintained that Marx’s belief in the necessity of revolution was “an obsolete standpoint” because of growing organization and education among the workers, and because of new laws and reforms on the part of the government.45 So it is indeed correct to say that Lange wrote from “fear of revolution”, given that he was very much concerned about the consequences of a violent social and political upheaval. It was his firm conviction that the cruelty and chaos of the French Revolution should never be repeated, and that it serves as a lesson about the dangers of all revolutions.46 There is no guarantee, he argued, that the social question will be resolved on the day after a political revolution, because the ultimate success of any broad programme of social and political change depends on “the spiritual constitution of a generation and the reform of all its views and principles.”47
Lange’s attitude towards revolution was very much that of the humanists of the Goethezeit—Schiller, Herder, Humboldt—who insisted that the success of social and political reform depends on the education of the people, on their acquiring “political virtue” so that they learn to put the needs of their nation over their own self-interest. What Lange feared most of all in a revolution was that it would unleash egoistic impulses, the drive to satisfy material needs alone, with no striving for the higher moral and intellectual ideals upon which culture is based. The purpose of Lange’s standpoint of the ideal was to represent the fundamental moral, aesthetic and cultural ideals for the education of the people. These ideals were very much those of the German humanists, whose standpoint Lange explicitly endorses.48
Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus presents itself as a critique of materialism. Its very subtitle, Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, announces its critical intentions. The book was celebrated chiefly because of its penetrating criticisms of the materialists, namely, Büchner, Czolbe, Moleschott, Vogt and Feuerbach. Yet Lange’s book was also in an important sense a defence of materialism. Lange not only believed that materialism had been misunderstood and underappreciated by its critics, both ancient and modern, but he also nurtured a fondness for some of its main doctrines. He admired the basic ideal of materialism—a complete scientific explanation of the world—and he embraced some of its fundamental tenets: empiricism, nominalism and mechanism. Much of the Geschichte is a defence of these doctrines, which Lange saw as essential to natural science.
Not the least reason for Lange’s attraction to materialism was its ethical agenda: emancipation, the liberation of the individual from arbitrary authority and religious superstition. Behind the materialist critique of religion, Lange rightly saw, lay its ideal of human autonomy, the right and power of the individual to lead his life according to his own laws and aspirations.49 The great danger to this autonomy came with religion, the materialist taught, because it introduced the fear of the gods, who would punish those who did not obey their laws. Such fear grew out of superstition, that is, the belief that natural events had spiritual or supernatural causes. The materialist’s antidote to such superstition was natural science, which would show that the true causes of things lay in nature rather than supernatural spirits. Lange embraced this critique, not because it would undermine religion as such, but because it could destroy superstition, which was the basis for what he saw as the greatest source of human oppression, namely, dogmatic theology and ecclesiastical authority.50 “The greatest curse upon modern nations” Lange believed, came from the power of the church over the very soul of a human being, its right “to bind and loosen”, that is, to open and shut the door to eternal salvation (I, 489). By destroying superstition, the materialist critique would remove that curse and clear the path for human autonomy.
The model for Lange’s Geschichte, though never made explicit, was Gottfried Arnold’s Unparteiische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie,51 a classic of the radical Protestant tradition, a work much admired by Lessing and Herder. Lange also revered Arnold’s work, and it is probably not accidental that he praises it in the Geschichte des Materialismus.52 Writing in the early 18th century, Arnold contended that the true Christians were the heretics, those persecuted by the established churches, which persistently oppressed genuine faith through dogmas and rituals. Just as Arnold’s history was a plea for liberty of conscience, a defence of heretics against persecution, so Lange’s history was an appeal for liberty of press, a defence of materialists against prosecution. Persecution and prosecution, Lange noted, had been the perennial fate of materialism. Ancient materialists had been persecuted by the state, and now the same was happening to their modern counterparts.
The first book of the Geschichte des Materialismus, the entire first volume of the second edition, is a history of materialism from Democritus in the 5th century Bc to La Mettrie and Holbach in the 18th century. It is a narrative about how natural science originated in materialism, and how its advance was hindered, in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, by the hegemony of the church and the Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy. The birth of the natural sciences in the early modern era, Lange argues, was due in great measure to the rediscovery of materialism, to the reaffirmation of its central doctrines by Bacon, Hobbes, Gassendi and Descartes. Enlightenment and materialism are for Lange almost one and the same: the more enlightened the philosophy, the closer it stands to materialism.
Why write a whole history of materialism if one’s goal is a critique of materialism, especially a critique of its contemporary relevance? This too seems like a long way around the barn. For Lange, however, critique is first and foremost historical critique,53 involving an account of the origins and development of the philosophy, religion or art under investigation. Such a critique is especially important in the case of the materialism controversy, he believes, because both materialists and their critics show a complete lack of historical sense.54 The materialists think that their materialism is the result of modern science alone, completely unaware how their main ideas, goals and problems go back to 5th-century Athens. They need to realize that what they think and teach did not grow out of the head of some contemporary Medusa, but that it is the result of a long history, that they are the descendents of Democritus, Epicurus and Empedocles. Becoming aware of their own history, Lange believed, would have a great moral and political value for the materialists: they would gain strength and motivation in their struggle against the reactionary forces if they see that they are part of a long glorious tradition, the materialists’ centuries long battle on behalf of enlightenment and progress (II, 171). But the critics of materialism were also in desperate need of a historical education. For they liked to dismiss materialism as if it were the latest intellectual fad, as if it were not worthy of discussion even as a form of philosophy. But if one could show that materialism had its sources in antiquity, that philosophers of no less stature than Plato and Aristotle took materialism seriously, then one would show that materialism is indeed a form of philosophy after all. Knowing that might have the valuable effect of producing a discussion or dialogue between idealists and materialists.
Lange’s historical education begins with the very first sentence of the Geschichte des Materialismus, which is laden with significance. “Materialism is as old as philosophy, but not older.”55 The first phrase of the sentence is directed against modern materialists and their critics. The modern materialists had insisted that their doctrine is science, not philosophy; their critics had claimed that materialism is not even philosophy. The first phrase tells us both are wrong: that materialism is indeed philosophy. This means that the critics of materialism should take it seriously because it is philosophy after all, and that modern materialists should stop claiming their doctrines are purely scientific, as if they did not emerge from philosophy. The second phrase of the sentence is no less significant. To say that materialism is not older than philosophy means that it did not originate in myth, the first form of human awareness about the world. Myths are forms of belief and art, but they are not theories, attempts to explain the world. Materialism arose with philosophy itself, Lange explains, because it was the first attempt to provide a consistent and general theory of nature (8–9). Its goal was to explain all phenomena according to a single principle, and on a naturalistic basis, so that nature is understood through nature, that is, the supernatural is banished and everything in nature is understood according to its own general laws (4, 8). Modern materialism shares the same ideal.
Materialism, Lange informs us, can take many forms. It can be vitalistic, pantheistic or hylozoistic. The purest and most consistent form, however, is atomism, because it assumes that the basic entities of nature are bodies, to which it attributes no spiritual or mystical qualities but only physical ones, that is, those that are observable and in space and time (I, 123 nn. 1, 8). The chief advocate of atomism was Democritus, for whom Lange’s admiration could hardly have been higher: “Among the greatest thinkers of antiquity, Democritus may in fact be counted the greatest.” (11). Lange tells us how Democritus went to visit Athens but quickly left the city because he could not abide the sophists, still less Plato, “whose entire philosophy was only dialectical wordplay” (11).
In the second edition,56 Lange gives a concise summary of Democritus’ philosophy (I, 12–19). He lists six chief principles:
1) From nothing comes nothing, and what exists cannot be destroyed. All change is unification and separation of parts.
2) Nothing happens by chance but only for a reason, and from necessity.
3) Nothing exists except atoms and the void.
4) The atoms are infinite in number and form.
5) The differences between things comes from differences in the number, size and shape of the atoms.
6) The soul consists of fine, smooth and round atoms, like those of fire.57
There is no specific chapter or section of the first book of the Geschichte des Materialismus devoted to a defence of materialism. Lange’s sympathy for it is often implicit and disparate, scattered in various places in the text. It first appears from his comments on the materialists’ chief principles. Regarding the second principle, Lange remarks that it was intended as a maxim of mechanical explanation, according to which every event is explained by prior events acting upon it (I, 13). This principle is meant to exclude teleology, the explanation of events by final causes or purposes. Lange makes it perfectly clear that he endorses such mechanism; for him final causes are a refuge of ignorance, “a partial negation of science, an arbitrary cordon around a field that has still not been investigated” (14–15). All teleological explanation is for Lange anthropomorphic, because it explains events by analogy with human intentions. Such explanations violate the chief principle of naturalism, according to which everything in nature should be explained in natural terms (47–48, 63).
Lange’s sympathy with materialism is no less apparent from his attitude towards Democritus’ chief critics, who were Socrates and Plato. The reaction against Democritus began with Socrates and came to a climax in Plato, Lange tells us (I, 44). Socrates attempted to revive the older teleological way of seeing things, which was explicitly and intentionally anthropomorphic. He conceived the architect of the world as a person, and the reason by which it creates the world as akin to human reason (47, 48). Rather than explaining man from his place in nature, Socrates wanted to explain nature according to man (47). Because he aimed to revive teleology, Lange regards Socrates’ reaction against materialism as “a great step backwards” (29).
Attempting to revive teleology, it turns out, was not Socrates’ only retrograde step. There was another of no less significance: the belief in the existence of universals. The Socrates-Platonic tradition gave a mystical significance to words, whose meanings were placed in a special intelligible realm. Lange traces this doctrine back to two sources: Socrates’ theory of definition, according to which there is a natural relationship between words and their designata (I, 39, 51); and his method of dialectic, which supports an hypothesis by ascending to a higher level of abstraction and universality (39). These Socratic doctrines eventually reached their climax in Plato’s theory of ideas, according to which ideas alone have reality (58). Lange thinks that the belief in the existence of ideas is entirely illusory, because it arises from the hypostasis of meanings, which exist only in the mind (41, 162). He even recommends that the theory of ideas be banished from the sciences, because it turns away from the particular things of nature and towards the hypostases of mere words (60). Nominalism, we shall soon see, is one of Lange’s fundamental doctrines, the critique of hypostasis one of the main underlying themes of the Geschichte des Materialismus.
It was one of the great misfortunes of the history of philosophy, Lange laments, that Plato’s doctrine of ideas and final causes was continued by Aristotle. Although Aristotle attempted to correct Plato’s theory that universals exist in some special realm of being, he still assumed that universals exist in things and that they are not simply creatures of the mind. His logic and theory of categories is a deficient organon of science, Lange argues, because it confuses kinds of assertion with kinds of being. The hypostasis of forms of speech, as if properties of language were somehow forms of being, is indeed “the essential characteristic of Aristotelian thinking” (I, 159). Unfortunately, Aristotle’s philosophy dominated the Middle Ages. It was entirely due to its hegemony, Lange maintains, that the Middle Ages proved to be so barren for the development of natural science. Thanks to Aristotle, the Middle Ages was an era “dominated by words, by hypostasis, by complete unclarity about the meaning of phenomena given to the senses” (162).
Lange ascribes the rebirth of natural science in the early modern era mainly to two thinkers: Bacon and Descartes. Their thought marks a return to the materialism of the ancient world, insofar as they advocate atomism, nominalism and mechanism. Although Bacon and Descartes explicitly disavowed materialism, they were still able to revive natural science in virtue of the materialist tendencies of their thought. Bacon, Lange believes, should be even called the father of modern materialism (195).
Although Lange’s narrative about the history of materialism seems to make it alone responsible for the birth and advance of the sciences, he realizes that such a story is much too simplistic. He admits that the Platonic tradition has been the motivation for some of the most important scientific discoveries in the ancient world (I, 92; II, 174, 178–179). The love of order and harmony, so characteristic of this tradition, was a spur to scientific discovery, enabling it to go much further and faster towards its goal than the grind of ordinary induction. The chief value of materialism towards the advance of science, Lange explains, was its development of a sober and solid methodological way of thinking that demanded considering the phenomena of nature for their own sake, independent of their utility and religious meaning (I, 95).
As much as Lange champions ancient materialism, he still does not hesitate to criticize it. Throughout the first book of his Geschichte des Materialismus he emphasizes that there has been one perennial unsolved problem of materialism: the explanation of consciousness and thinking according to the laws of nature (I, 15–16, 18, 110–111, 232, 390). Lange understands this problem in more specific terms: how to explain the qualitative dimension of sensation? The difficulty for the materialist was to account for how sense qualities arise from the motions of material particles (390). There seems to be the greatest heterogeneity between sounds or colours and their causes in the material world, namely, light rays and sound waves, which are measurable and quantifiable. It was a fundamental principle of materialism to explain all differences in things from the differences in number, size, motion and the shape of the atoms (18). But this principle ran into difficulty with the difference in kind between sense qualities and the physical characteristics supposed to give rise to them (15–16, 18). This problem thwarted materialism from achieving its grand goal of explaining all of nature according to a single principle. Lange thinks that this objection is convincing, doubting that there will ever be a bridge to close the gap between consciousness and matter.
While Lange stresses the explanation of sensation as the fundamental problem of materialism, he also suggests another criticism of no less importance. Towards the end of the first book Lange remarks that materialism has been much too dismissive in its attitude towards morality, religion and metaphysics. While the ideas of purposiveness and intelligence in nature are indeed anthropomorphic, lacking all objective validity, they still have an “aesthetic justification” all their own (I, 374). What Lange means by this aesthetic justification is not entirely clear, and it seems to amount to nothing more than giving them “poetic value”. Whatever that means, it soon emerges that these ideas are “poetic” in the sense that they are created by us, and that they should be appraised according to their own sui generis standards (376). Lange suggests that we evaluate moral and aesthetic ideas according to very different standards from those of objective truth or cognitive worth, and that the materialist has missed their point in dismissing them for not matching such theoretical standards. When we say that a painting is ugly, that a person is evil, that a fallacy has been committed, we are not saying that they are false but that they do not conform to ideals or norms. We shall soon see how this criticism of materialism, only suggested in the first book, eventually becomes a major theme of Lange’s general philosophy.
In the history of materialism Lange gave great importance to Kant. The second book of the Geschichte des Materialimus—the second volume of the second edition—begins with his section on Kant, the longest and densest in the entire book.58 Lange saw Kant’s philosophy as a caesura in the history of materialism, as a crisis in the long tradition that had begun in the 5th century Bc. Having exposed its major weaknesses, Kant’s philosophy was “the beginning of the end, the catastrophe of the tragedy”.59 Though new forms of materialism would arise after Kant, they proved weak and unstable, just because they could not overcome the problems that Kant had posed for them. The only reason materialism returned after Kant, Lange claimed, is that speculative idealism had swept away the constraints of the critical philosophy (II, 67–68). It was Lange’s chief goal, therefore, to re-impose those constraints, to teach the materialists some basic critical lessons.
What problems had Kant exposed in materialism? It is striking that Lange does not think it consists in showing the inexplicability of sensation, the classical difficulty that had been the chief stumbling block of ancient materialism. It is also notable that Lange, contrary to the orthodox Kantians, gives no weight to Kant’s doctrine of practical faith. In the second edition he bluntly declared Kant’s practical philosophy—and here he meant specifically his doctrine of practical faith—to be the weakest side of his system (II, 2). The real significance of Kant’s philosophy, he declared, lay entirely with his critique of theoretical reason.60
According to Lange, Kant’s philosophy posed two fundamental challenges to materialism. First, it exposed the naive realism of materialism, that is, its belief that material things are the immediate objects of perception. The materialist assumed that sense perception gives us the objective truth about the world, that what we see through our senses continues to exist just as we perceive it. Though he would concede that some perceived qualities depend on our perception of them, namely, the so-called “secondary qualities”, such as colours, smells and sounds, he insisted that others really do inhere in the object itself, existing in it independent of our perception, namely, the so-called “primary qualities”, such as size, shape and weight. It was just this realism, Lange argues, that was destroyed by Kant’s Copernican Revolution (II, 2, 5, 38). Kant had shown that all sense qualities depend upon our perceptive and cognitive organization, so that our entire world would appear differently had we a different perceptive and cognitive constitution (5). This is true not only for the secondary qualities but also for the primary ones, because Kant had demonstrated that even the perception of space itself depends on a priori forms of sense perception.
Though classical materialism had always been vulnerable to the scepticism of Protagoras, who had taught that man is the measure of all things, Kant marked a more potent threat to materialism, Lange argued, because he had provided a more systematic and scientific justification for Protagoras’ teaching (II, 4–5). While the materialists had dismissed Berkeley’s arguments against realism as so many sophistical paradoxes, they could not do the same to Kant, because his case was supported by “a new sphere of scientific research”, namely, “the physiology of sense organs” (4–5). Here Lange, a student of Helmholtz, was alluding to the experiments of Johannes Müller, which seemed to establish the active role of our physiology in forming the qualities of experience.61 These experiments seemed to show that what we perceive, the content of our experience, depends on our nervous constitution. If this were so, then the materialists would be beaten at their own game. They had insisted that science is on their side, and that only superstition opposed them. But now Lange was pointing out that science really undermines a fundamental dogma of the materialists, their belief in the existence of an objective world.
The second basic challenge Kant posed for materialism involves its belief in causal necessity. It was a fundamental principle of materialism that everything happens of necessity, that all events conform to regular laws. But this assumption too proved to be naive, especially in the face of Hume’s scepticism. Hume had shown that there is no rationale for the belief in causal necessity, that there are no grounds to assume, from either logic or experience, that there is a necessary connection between cause and effect. There is no reason in logic, because there is no contradiction if we affirm a cause and deny an effect; and there is no reason from experience, because our senses give no evidence for a necessary connection. Kant had appropriated this Humean theme, which he used to demonstrate that universal and necessary order derives not from things-in-themselves but from our cognitive constitution (II, 7, 12). All the order we find in the world is order that we create, and it is not given to us with things-in-themselves.
Both these problems of classical materialism are instances of what Kant called “dogmatism”. That term means at least two things: first, accepting beliefs without subjecting them to critical scrutiny, holding them without considering whether they are based on solid reasons; and, second, being unaware or unreflective about the subjective sources of one’s beliefs, hypostasizing or reifying them, as if they refer to things in the world when they really arise subconsciously from our mental activities. Hypostasis, Kant teaches, is the characteristic fallacy of dogmatism, the common source of its many fallacies, namely, the paralogisms, amphibolies and antinomies. In assuming that our representations refer to actual things in the world, and that the connections we posit between events are really in the events themselves, the materialist shows himself to be guilty of dogmatism in both senses. Criticism stands on a higher level of reflection than dogmatism, Lange implies, precisely because it makes us aware of the subjective sources of our ways of thinking about the world. Thus both dogmatic strands of materialism mean that it is epistemologically naive. This is an especially embarrassing lesson for materialism, which attempts to expose the naivety of religion by revealing its hypostases and anthropomorphic sources. Now Lange had turned those criticisms against materialism itself: the same charges of anthropomorphism and hypostasis applied to the materialist’s belief in material objects and causal necessity. Now that materialism had shown itself to be as dogmatic as religion, there seemed no turning back to the naive pre-critical era. Hence Lange’s belief that Kant’s philosophy represented an irreversible turning point in the history of materialism. The catastrophe was total, putting it beyond redemption or resurrection.
Besides his belief in the existence of matter and causal relations, Lange thinks that the materialist is guilty of yet another hypostasis: belief in the existence of atoms.62 Büchner thought that it was one of the great merits of modern chemistry that, whereas the ancient materialists had to resort to speculation, it had actually proved the existence of atoms.63 Lange, however, believed that in saying this Büchner had only revealed, once again, the naivety and dogmatism of modern materialism. He could see no justification whatsoever for the existence of atoms, which were for him only a construction to explain the data. While Lange praised the modern atomists, namely, Dalton and Guy-Lussac, for developing a concept of the ultimate constitution of matter that is very intuitive and intuitable (II, 187, 211)—viz., atoms are like little balls swirling around in a space having a precise size, shape and place—he warned that the intuitability of a theory does not prove its actuality (190). In any case, recent research in physics and chemistry had made the atom something far less intuitable, into something even supersensible, because it has turned the atom into a centre of forces, an unextended point that is the locus of attraction and repulsion (192, 204, 212). More generally, the progress of science consists, Lange declared, in replacing the concept of a thing with that of relations (207), so that the concept of force now replaces the atom (204). After its analysis into forces, the concept of matter amounts to little more than that of a substrate, the subject in which the forces somehow inhere (205). It thus serves the same role as the old concept of substance, and it is no less a hypostasis, the reification of a grammatical subject. But Lange took his critique of hypostasis a step further, applying it to the concept of force itself. Force, he argued, is really only a personification of the mathematical formulae that physicists use to describe and predict phenomena (205). We do not develop the formulae to describe the force, which somehow actually exists in nature, but we develop the idea of force to describe the formulae (205, 206). Force is a personification of what formulae describe, the projection of feelings of pushes, pulls and pressures onto things (204).
In his chapter on Kant in the Geschichte des Materialismus Lange had focused chiefly on the conflict between the critical philosophy and materialism, portraying them as antithetical worldviews. Indeed, he sagely remarked at one point: “One can regard Kant’s entire system as a splendid attempt to destroy materialism once and for all without falling into scepticism.” (II, 65) Yet it is noteworthy this is only one side of the story that Lange told about the relationship between Kant and materialism. There is another side, because Lange also stresses the great affinity between them. Thus he remarks that Kant was not implacably opposed to materialism, that he was much closer to materialism than its other opponents, and that he praised Epicurus for wisely keeping his philosophy within the bounds of experience (5). Lange even claims that Kant saw materialism, along with scepticism, as the two preliminary stages of the critical philosophy (9). The nemesis of the critical philosophy, Lange suggested, is not materialism but Platonic idealism, which transcends the limits of experience and claims insight into things-in-themselves (9–10). It was just this Platonic idealism, we have seen, that had been the great enemy of materialism. So given that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, it seemed that the critical philosophy could now embrace materialism as a comrade in the struggle against Platonic idealism.
Prima facie Lange champions Kant because he defeats materialism. But this too is only one side of the story. Lange embraces Kant not only because he destroys materialism (in some respects) but also because he saves it (in other respects), even incorporating it into his own philosophy. Lange knew all too well that the affinity between Kant and materialism goes much further than the empiricism he mentions in his chapter on Kant. He was fully aware that Kant also supports, even if more implicitly, the nominalist and mechanistic strands of materialism.64 Furthermore, both philosophies are champions of the new natural sciences and the mathematical theory of nature. As Lange saw it, then, the critical philosophy has all the strengths and none of the weaknesses of materialism: all the strengths, because it too is empiricist, mechanist and nominalist; and none of the weaknesses because it, unlike materialism, is not dogmatic. In a later chapter of his Geschichte des Materialismus Lange is perfectly explicit about the deep and broad affinity between Kant and materialism: “the whole worldview of materialism is, as it were, incorporated into the Kantian system without altering its basic idealistic character.” (147) For Lange, then, Kant’s theoretical philosophy is to be recommended not as the antithesis of materialism but simply as a critical or phenomenalistic materialism.
Stressing such a close affinity between Kant’s philosophy and materialism breaks down, however, at one vulnerable point: the thing-in-itself. The whole point of that concept is to set limits to naturalistic explanation, the very kind of explanation championed by materialism. This raises the important question: What was Lange’s stance towards the thing-in-itself?
As it had for his contemporaries, this concept created many difficulties for Lange, who never really resolved them. He vascillates about the status of this concept and fails to develop a fully consistent position. In the first edition of the Geschichte des Materialismus Lange had tried to defend the existence of things-in-themselves.65 After taking note of Überweg’s objection that the idea of the thing-in-itself as the cause of experience involves a transcendent application of the category of causality, Lange replies that if we can apply that category to everything within experience, it should also determine its limits, at least in the sense that we know there are limits and that there is something beyond them. “The fish in the pond can only swim in the water and not on the earth; or he can still bump his head against the ground and walls. In the same manner we can use the concept of causality to measure the whole realm of experience and find that beyond it there is something other than it, an inaccessible domain for our organs.” (267) However, he immediately poses a problem for such reasoning: that if the categories have meaning only with reference to appearances, then the thing-in-itself, which is postulated by the category of causality, should also be only an appearance; in other words, the entire distinction between appearance and thing-in-itself should fall within the realm of appearances (267–268). Undaunted, Lange persists in maintaining the reality of the thing-in-itself. A consideration of our faculty of knowledge shows us, he argues, that what appears is relative to it, that what we know is determined by our specific physiological constitution. This means that the world will appear differently to creatures having different faculties. There must be something that appears so differently to all these creatures, “a common unknown source”, and that something will be the thing-in-itself (268).
In the second edition of his Geschichte des Materialismus, however, Lange attempts to eliminate the very thing-in-itself whose existence he defended in the first edition. He now argues expressly that the limitations Kant had placed on knowledge do not allow him to assume the existence of the thing-in-itself. If all knowledge is limited to possible experience, as Kant had preached in the first Kritik, then he cannot claim that the thing-in-itself exists, given that the thing-in-itself transcends all possible experience. And so Lange writes: “That there are things-in-themselves that have a spaceless and timeless existence Kant could not prove from his own principles, for that would be a transcendent, even if negative, knowledge of the properties of things-in-themselves, and such knowledge is completely impossible according to Kant’s own theory.” (36) While in the first edition of his Geschichte des Materialismus Lange had expressly defended the existence of the thing-in-itself, in the second edition he came to the conclusion that Kant himself had seen the inconsistency in such an assumption and intended to remove the thing-in-itself (48–49).66 The thing-in-itself, Lange is now convinced, is only “a limiting concept”, a “problematic concept” (49). Its main purpose is to show us that we cannot know anything beyond the world we create and experience; but it does not imply that there is some existing realm outside of us.
Yet Lange never entirely succeeded in eliminating the thing-in-itself, not even in the second edition of his Geschichte des Materialismus. There are other passages of this edition where, in so many words, Lange commits himself to its existence. In the final chapter of the book, for example, we learn that our cognitive powers of synthesis are limited, and that our representations of things arise from something that does not derive from our own activity, something Lange variously calls an “object”, “non-ego”, or “power” that cannot be resolved into the forms of knowledge (II, 542). If this were not enough, in Chapter 2 of Book II Lange re-invokes the thing-in-itself as an unknowable entity to curb the dogmatic pretensions of idealism and materialism. Thus he argues that it is utter dogmatism to assume that how we perceive the world according to our cognitive faculties is the only way and form in which it exists or appears. The whole point of the Kantian doctrine of the thing-in-itself is to point out the limiting factors of our own cognitive faculties, and to remind us that our faculties are only one of the possible ways to perceive things-in-themselves (99). When a worm, a beetle, a human and an angel perceive a tree, there are four different representations of one tree; each creature knows the tree only from its perspective and physiology; but none knows the tree in itself (102–103). We should never generalize about reality-in-itself from our own cognitive faculties, Lange cautions, because the difference between the thing-in-itself and the thing for me is as great as the difference between a single factor and infinitely many factors (i.e. all the workings of physiology and the environment) behind a product (consciousness) (103). These arguments occur in the background of a more general theory according to which knowledge arises from the interaction of the subject and object, where the subject fashions the object according to its faculties, and where the object is given as the source of an “objective influence” on our sensibility (98).
Thus Lange, like Liebmann, discovered that the thing-in-itself, the great stumbling block of the critical philosophy, is not so easily eliminable after all: that we are bound to postulate its existence as soon as we consider that our knowing faculties are finite, and that these faculties are only one way in which an independent reality is perceived.
Lange’s naturalistic interpretation of Kant’s philosophy extended to its methodology. His conception of Kant’s transcendental enquiry was greatly influenced by the physiological-psychological tradition of Fries, Beneke and Helmholtz. “The physiology of the sense organs” was in his view nothing less than “developed or corrected Kantianism” (II, 409). It was “corrected Kantianism” because there were still respects in which Kant clung to the old dogmatic method of Wolff, which demands strict demonstrations and a priori reasoning; but, Lange assures us, this was a vestige of Kant’s rationalist heritage, which does not represent the true tendency or spirit of his teaching. That tendency or spirit consists in its “psychological-physiological research programme”. We can regard Kant’s entire system, Lange says, as “a programme for new discoveries in this field [the physiology of the sense organs].” (409) Like Fries, Beneke and Helmholtz, then, Lange sees Kant’s epistemology as fundamentally an empirical investigation into the physiology and psychology of human perception; it deals primarily with first-order questions about the causes of experience rather than second-order questions about the reasons for beliefs. This interpretation suited Lange’s general interpretation of modern philosophy, which stressed its affinity with the natural sciences. With the exception of the “Begriffsromantik” of speculative idealism, a perverse aberration, modern philosophy is characterized by its “natural-scientific manner of thought” (145).
Following his naturalistic conception of transcendental philosophy, Lange interpreted the a priori in terms of what he calls our “physical-psychological organization” (II, 30). The a priori consists in those constant, or universal and necessary, factors in our physiological and psychological constitution that condition us to perceive the world in certain ways. This organization is a priori in the sense that it precedes our experience and lays down the necessary conditions under which we perceive it (28). In saying this Lange was still mindful of Mill’s critique of innatism, according to which an apparently innate part of our psychology often turns out to be nothing more than an engrained habit. While he accepted Mill’s point, he did not think that it demonstrated that all the basic ways of perceiving and conceiving the world had to derive from experience. There are still parts of our physiological and psychological constitution that are inherent in our human nature and that determine the nature of our experience. It is the special task of the transcendental philosopher to distinguish between those factors that are a constant part of our human nature and those that arise only from habit and experience (31).
Though intended to give some scientific backing for Kant’s theory, Lange’s naturalistic conception of the a priori licensed some basic departures from Kantian doctrine. The conception of the a priori should be broadened, Lange argued, so that it extends beyond the Kantian forms of intuition (space and time) and understanding (the twelve categories). Any kind of human functioning that is inherent in, or natural to, our physiological-psychological constitution should count as part of the a priori conditions of experience. There are, for example, a priori conditions of even colour perception, which consist in how our visual nerves respond to light waves (II, 28, 33). Lange also objected to the Kantian assumption that only the form of experience is a priori while its content is a posteriori; he maintained that even its content could have its own a priori dimension. For example, the law that the intensity of the consciousness of a sensation is directly proportional to the intensity of its stimulus deals only with sensations, the content of experience, though it too could be regarded among the a priori laws or factors of sense perception (33–34). It is also a mistake, Lange held, to assume that sensation is an entirely passive factor in experience, for sensation is also a conditioning factor in determining how the forms of spatial perception are applied (34). Though Lange advocated broadening the concept of the a priori, and though he stressed the a priori factors in sensation itself, he still maintained that Kant had been broadly correct to argue for the a priori nature of space and time (34). Like Fischer and Liebmann, Lange saw the Transcendental Aesthetic as one of Kant’s greatest accomplishments.
Although influenced by Fries, Beneke and Helmholtz, Lange did not take over their physiological-psychological interpretation of Kant unreflectively. He had his own reasons for adopting it, and he went to some pains to justify it. In a long endnote attached to the second edition of the Geschichte des Materialismus Lange explained why he introduced the term “physical-psychological organization” for the subject matter of Kant’s epistemology (II, 125–127, n. 25). Kant’s own vocabulary of the “transcendental” smacked of the thing-in-itself, which is very problematic, given that Kant had forbidden all speculation about it. The reason Kant introduced the term “transcendental” was to avoid the danger of materialism; but then he fell prey to the opposite error of sanctioning speculation about things-in-themselves. The whole point about the term “physical-psychological organization”, Lange wrote, is to bring the apparently transcendental into the realm of experience itself, so that the a priori is made the subject of proper empirical investigation (126). Lange insisted on defining “physical-psychological organization” in empirical terms, avoiding all reference to metaphysical assumptions. This organization was nothing more than “what appears to our external senses as part of our physical organization, and which stands in an immediate causal connection with our psychic functions” (127). Whether this organization was supported by a soul or matter was simply bracketed off as having no relevance for a strictly epistemological investigation.
One of the most obscure and difficult questions about Kant’s philosophy, Lange believed, concerns Kant’s method, and more specifically how he discovers the a priori or necessary conditions of experience (II, 28). Kant himself gave few explanations about his own methodology, leaving his progeny to piece together his few hints and suggestions dropped here and there. Lange described an apparent dilemma facing any attempt to reconstruct Kant’s methodology: Kant cannot discover these conditions following either an a priori or an empirical method (II, 29). While an a priori method seems too rationalistic and dogmatic, an empirical method appears inappropriate to determine a priori conditions, which are universal and necessary and so underivable from empirical data. Yet Lange argues that this is a false dilemma. Like Fries and Meyer, he believes that it is possible to determine a priori conditions through empirical means.67 It is one thing to discover these conditions, quite another to demonstrate them (30). While demonstration indeed requires an a priori method, discovery involves nothing more than an empirical one. Kant’s method, Lange then assures us, consists in nothing more than reflection on the facts of consciousness and normal ordinary induction (29).
Lange was well aware that Kant would often make claims for his transcendental philosophy that went beyond what any empirical method could provide. He claimed, for example, that his method ensured both “completeness” and “apodictic certainty”, though an empirical method could give at best merely piecemeal and hypothetical results. Yet Lange explained those strong claims from the residual rationalism clinging to Kant’s philosophy. While Kant had been a powerful critic of rationalist metaphysics, he still had not completely liberated himself from use of its “dogmatic method”, namely, rigour in the use of syllogistic reasoning, thoroughness in the analysis of concepts. Indeed, Kant had explicitly endorsed this method in the second preface to the Kritik (B xxxv). But, for Lange, this was Kant’s great mistake, violating the spirit of the “natural-scientific mode of thought” that was the guiding spirit of modern philosophy. If one of Kant’s greatest feats was his critique of rationalist speculation, his attempt to restrict knowledge within experience, one of his greatest failures was his persistent use of the rationalist methodology (32).
Because he rejects Kant’s dogmatic method and recommends an empirical one, and because he explains the subject matter of Kant’s critique as our “physiological-psychological constitution”, there seems no question that Lange embraces a psychologistic interpretation of Kant. There are some places, however, where Lange seems to waver in this interpretation. There is a passage in the second edition of the Geschichte des Materialismus where Lange states unequivocally that Kant’s concern is not psychological at all. “The psychological side of the question [What must I presuppose to explain the fact of experience?] is not only not his [Kant’s] chief interest, but he even attempts to avoid it, since he poses his question in such a general manner that the answer is compatible with the most diverse psychological theories.” (29) What does Lange mean here? Did he recognize the limits and problems of the psychological interpretation after all? Not really. The explanation for this confusing statement appears in a footnote attached to the end of the chapter (124, n.23). Here Lange states “the greatest part of the obscurity of the Critique of Pure Reason derives from the single fact that Kant conducts what is in its general nature a psychological investigation though he does not have any special psychological theory.” Thus Lange acknowledges and reaffirms the general psychological nature of Kant’s investigation; he means only that it is not psychological in any more specific sense; in other words, Kant does not intend to develop a specific metaphysical theory about the nature of the soul, namely, whether it is entirely spiritual or physical or some combination of both.
Some passages in Lange’s Logische Studien, however, seem to abandon the psychological interpretation more unequivocally. Here Lange often notes a basic point about Kant’s transcendental discourse that seems to belie the psychological interpretation: that the transcendental conditions of experience cannot be in experience itself; the very attempt to know them through experience presupposes them. This point is taken to some remarkable conclusions at the very close of the book. Here Lange remarks that the basic laws of logic and mathematics are the foundation of our intellectual organization, and that they derive not from “the region of our empirical consciousness” but from “the subconscious foundation of our self, together with all appearances in which this world consists” (148). We then learn that the transcendental self, which is the source of these laws, is distinct from the empirical self: the former is the condition for the experience of the latter; but because all knowledge is limited to experience, the transcendental self becomes “the completely in determinate and indeterminable X, of whose existence we cannot make any positive judgment” (149). Thus, remarkably, Lange had made the same discovery as Liebmann: that the thing-in-itself is ineliminable as the condition of knowledge itself. He was also making the very points that had been the source of so much speculation in the German idealist tradition. He sees this all too well, remarking that he had stumbled across “a playground for a febrile speculation” (149). This transcendental self, he writes, is like the old Averroist Nous that dwelled as one and the same being in all consciousness. This opens the door to a whole new world, Lange says. But then, having seen that new world, Lange immediately declares that he will not enter into it. Having preached that knowledge is limited to experience, he realized that consistency demands restraint.
It was one of the ironies of Lange’s interpretation of Kant that, though he affirmed the first-order psychological nature of transcendental enquiry, he also laid great importance on Kant’s reply to scepticism. Unlike Cohen,68 Lange had fully recognized the challenge Hume posed for Kant, how it affected his intellectual development, and how it determined the shape of the critical philosophy as a whole. Thus he quoted at length Kant’s statement in the Prolegomena about how Hume had awakened him from his dogmatic slumber, and about how Hume’s sceptical doubts about the principle of causality had alerted him to the general problem of transcendental philosophy (II, 39–42). Yet there is an irony here because Kant could not reply to Hume without the use of the very “dogmatic” or rationalist method that Lange saw as Kant’s great mistake. After all, Hume would not have been impressed with any attempt to defend the principle of causality through an empirical method. We could use that method to discover that principle; but the sceptical problem concerns not its discovery but its demonstration, that is, not the quid facti? about its genesis but the quid juris? about its justification. Lange explained that it was a great mistake on Kant’s part to attempt to provide a demonstration of the principle of causality, to attempt to deduce it from some even higher principles (51). All that Kant needed to demonstrate is that the principle of causality lay deep within our physiology, that it is an essential part of our organization (44, 45). In effect, he was agreeing with Fries that the ultimate response to the sceptic consists in pointing out a deep and ineradicable feature of our physiology. But that too was a premise that Hume would never have questioned. It is noteworthy that Kant had rejected justifying causality on these grounds just because it could not reply to the sceptic. Even if the principle of causality were an integral part of the working of our physiology and psychology, the sceptic would ask, does that alone give it objective validity?69
As much as Lange admired the materialist’s ideal of a unified worldview, of a universe completely explicable according to natural laws, he still believed it to be unattainable. We have already seen how in the first book of Geschichte des Materialismus he had maintained that materialism faces an insurmountable obstacle: the explanation of sensation and consciousness. Lange returns to this theme in the second section of book two, especially in its second edition.70 Now, however, his reflections on this theme are the occasion for a general discussion of metaphysics. Nowhere else in Lange’s big book did he engage in such sustained metaphysical reasoning. His conclusions are important for his general worldview.
In this section Lange attempts to vindicate his original objection against materialism by taking into account the latest scientific research. Recent work in physiology and physics has shown, he argues, that the problem of explaining consciousness is as irresolvable now as it had been in antiquity. To prove his point, Lange considers a recent lecture by the physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond, ‘Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens’, which was given in August 1872 at the Versammlung deutscher Naturforscher und Ärtze in Leipzig.71 As a physiologist of some renown, Du Bois-Reymond’s lecture carried some weight in the scientific community, and it duly attracted much discussion and aroused much controversy, the famous Ignorabimusstreit.72 Du Bois-Reymond maintains, much as Lange had held in his first edition, that the realm of consciousness remains inaccessible to scientific explanation. Even though everything in the physical world, at least in principle, can be predicted with complete accuracy, and even though we can correlate precisely events in consciousness with brain states, the problem remains that we cannot conceive how consciousness is caused by the brain states; cause (e.g. light rays and sound waves) and effect (colours and sounds) are completely heterogeneous, so that we cannot explain how one arose from the other.
Lange’s defence of Du Bois-Reymond’s thesis mainly consists in refuting Du Bois-Reymond’s critics, whom Lange, borrowing some Kantian lines, likens to the Scottish critics of Hume: they assumed what he had doubted; and they had demonstrated with zeal what he had never thought of bringing into question (II, 153). But it is not Lange’s defence of Du Bois-Reymond’s thesis that interests us here so much as the broader conclusions he draws from it. Lange sees his thesis as evidence for a more general theory about the existence of “two worlds”: a natural world and a mental one (156). These very different worlds are occupied by the same human beings, the same actions, all having the same movements and gestures. Yet in the natural world, human actions take place with no thought or feeling, as if human beings were automatons; and in the mental world, the same actions take place with thought or feeling, as if human beings were free agents.
Perhaps not accidently, Lange’s dualism between “two worlds” here is reminiscent of Leibniz’s pre-established harmony, according to which two completely different realms are perfectly co-ordinated by one set of laws that governs both. A little later, however, Lange reformulates his theory, so that it is less about “two worlds” than different perspectives or aspects of the same world. To illustrate his point, he now mentions another very different historical precedent: Spinoza. Thus he suggests that Du Bois-Reymond’s thesis that brain and mental events coincide, without exerting causal influence on one another, is reminiscent of Spinoza’s doctrine that the mental and the physical are distinct attributes of one and the same thing (163).
Having introduced Spinoza, Lange then asks whether the conflict between idealism and materialism is ultimately only a matter of perspective. Du Bois-Reymond had speculated whether the present limits of scientific research could be overcome if one only had a complete understanding of matter.73 Perhaps then one could say that it belongs to the very nature of matter for it to develop thinking and feeling (II, 158)? But Lange quickly turns this around and suggests the opposite possibility: that if we only knew enough about the mind, then perhaps we could see why the natural world appears to it in the form of matter and force (158)? In this case idealism and materialism would be only two different forms of explanation of one and the same thing. We could then have our unified worldview after all. Though Lange does not admit it, such speculation came close to Schelling’s system of absolute identity, according to which all of nature is explicable either from an idealist or realist standpoint.
But no sooner does Lange propose this Schellingian metaphysics than he abandons it. It is as if it were all sheer fantasy and wild speculation. He is not willing or able to envisage a complete idealistic explanation of the world anymore than a materialist one. There is still the thing-in-itself lurking in the background, which poses severe limits on any such explanation. Monism, whether in a materialist or idealist form, proved to be an impossible ideal for Lange.
Although Lange thinks that a complete naturalistic explanation of consciousness is impossible, it is noteworthy that he still finds the naturalist’s paradigm of explanation—nomological explanation or mechanism—the only possible one. “The limits of natural knowledge are the limits of knowledge in general.” (161) Lange rejects any other possible form of explanation. Although he insists that the realm of consciousness is accessible through introspection, he is quick to add that self-consciousness alone is not a sufficient basis for scientific knowledge (160). It is useful as a source of knowledge only if it is confirmed by, complemented with and integrated into a general system of natural laws. While Lange denies that these laws can explain consciousness as such, he still maintains they are sufficient to explain human actions in the external world. It is interesting to note that, in this context, he refers to the debate about the “Geisteswissenschaften”—an allusion not to any controversy surrounding Droysen or Dilthey, whose work was still not widely known, but to the recent appearance of a translation of Mill’s Logic, which had rendered “moral sciences” as “Geisteswissenschaften”.74 Remarkably, Lange accepts Mill’s thesis that explanation in the moral sciences is in principle the same as that in the natural sciences, though he thinks that Mill has placed too much reliance on introspection (288, n. 4). We are left wondering what Lange’s position would have been had he knew about the later course of this debate, which would expand greatly later in the 1880s.75 Droysen and Dilthey had stressed the insufficiency of naturalistic explanation, and they had argued for the necessity of some form of internal or hermeneutical understanding. Lange, however, was not aware of the hermeneutical forms of explanation later advanced by Dilthey and Droysen.
Lange’s metaphysics, as he presents it in section two of Book II of the Geschichte des Materialismus, is dualistic in its division of reality into the mental and physical. He presents this dualism sometimes as a difference of entity, sometimes as a difference of attribute of a single entity. We will leave aside these differences of formulation here, however, because they are of small moment compared to an even larger dualism that dominates Lange’s philosophy. This is a dualism not within the realm of existence or reality but a much broader dualism between the realm of values or ideals and the entire realm of existence or reality. For Lange, the fundamental division in the world is not between different forms of existence or being, namely, the mental and physical, but between ideal and reality, values and existence. It was in pointing out this realm of values or ideals that Lange believed that he found the ultimate limit of materialism. Even if the materialist could explain the entire realm of consciousness, he still would face this even greater chasm, the gulf between ideal and reality, value and existence. Thus Lange argues that idealism captures the important truth that we are not only intellectual beings who know about the real world, but that we are also creative beings who have the power to produce an ideal world (II, 176).76 We go astray if we evaluate these ideas according to the criteria of knowledge. For the point of these ideas is not to give us knowledge about the world that exists, but to create norms for a world that ought to exist (177). They belong to a completely different intellectual order from that of truth: namely, the order of value (Werth). Of course, we can explain the origin of these ideas from some psychological viewpoint, but this still fails to understand their purpose and meaning. “An idea distinguishes itself from an illusion through its value and not through its origin.” (177) Ideals and norms set or pose values, and we have to evaluate them as such: “We compare the Cologne cathedral with other works of art; and stones with other stones.” (178) It was in pointing out this sui generis realm of ideals and values that Lange anticipates the later theory of values of Windelband and the Southwestern school.
As much as Lange loathed clericalism and ecclesiastical authority, and as much as he admired the materialist critique of superstition and enthusiasm, he was still reluctant to abolish religion entirely. He shared none of the materialists’ hostility towards religion as such, and he feared that their critique of superstition and enthusiasm might destroy all religion. As far as he was concerned, the materialist critique was in danger of throwing the baby of religion out with the bathwater of superstition. The more one reads of Geschichte des Materialismus the more one is indeed struck by Lange’s deep sympathy for religion. Several chapters of the final fourth section of Book II of Volume II are devoted to a defence of religion against its materialist detractors.
These sections assign a great importance to religion in the cultural struggles of the modern era. One of the most potent forces behind the recent revolutions in Europe, Lange writes in Chapter 2, came from the ideas of Christianity, which has inspired the masses to transform the state for their benefit (II, 484). We then learn in Chapter 3 that the main weapon against the stultifying and stupefying forces of materialism, which would transform the world into a marketplace and a competitive scramble of self-interest, has to come from renewed forms of religion (537–538). It was only religion that could inspire the masses to change their world so that it would conform to their justified moral aspirations (557).77 The importance that Lange gives to religion in social and political change is proto-Weberian and stands in sharp contrast to Marx.
But what form should religion take in the post-revolutionary era? That, for Lange and most of his contemporaries, was the vital and pressing question. The context for his reflections about religion was set by the “free community” movement in Germany—the attempt to break with traditional religious authority, whether Protestant or Catholic, and to create new churches according to more rational and humanitarian ideals. After the 1848 Revolution, there was much discussion about the appropriate forms of ritual, belief and church organization, and many different communities arose reflecting a wide variety of views. In the final chapter of his Geschichte des Materialismus Lange discussed some of these issues. His own attitude is deeply ambivalent. Though filled with mistrust about any form of organized religion,78 he also does not want religion to disappear or to collapse into the state. Comte’s “cult of humanity”, which would prescribe rituals and dogmas no less than the Roman Catholic Church, was utterly repellent to him (II, 506–7, 510).
Religion, Lange explained, now faces a terrible crisis. The spread of enlightenment and the growth of the natural sciences have had a devastating effect on traditional religious belief, so that it is no longer possible to uphold the old dogmas (II, 547). Not only the beliefs of revealed religion (viz. the trinity and atonement), but also those of natural religion (viz. God, providence and immortality), have shown themselves to be vulnerable to criticism. What, though, is to replace such beliefs? Religion now stood at a crossroad (546). One had to choose between two paths: the complete abolition of religion, where its traditional functions in regulating moral conduct are handed over to the state; or the total reformation of religion, so that it is no longer seen as dogma or metaphysics, and so that it is recognized instead simply as “poetry”, a product of the activity of human beings. To go down the first path ultimately would backfire, Lange warns, because the people will resent the state dictating their religion, and they are likely to clamour for some of their old superstitions (547). Furthermore, this path simply represses the feelings and creative forces behind religion, and fails to give them a legitimate outlet. The second path is the more hopeful. What this involves is the gradual transformation and reformulation of religion by artists and poets so that it expresses the highest ideals and values of the people. The artist or poet will now take over the traditional function of the priest. For Lange, the model for such a transformation of religion is the philosophical poetry of Schiller. His poem ‘Reich der Schatten’, for example, expresses everything that one felt in the suffering and resurrection of Christ (547–548).79 The thrust of Lange’s programme was thus to transform religion from a form of belief into an aesthetic experience. Everything that we feel in religion, Lange wagers, is ultimately formulable in poetry without loss of meaning, and without involving all the problematic beliefs of dogma, metaphysics or myth. Poetry has the power to express religious feeling in the form of symbols and images, which could have the same function as belief in elevating us above the world of the senses and in allowing us to feel the value or worth of the ideal.
Lange’s project for an aesthetic reformation of religion has its roots in the Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Hölderlin, Schleiermacher, Schlegel and Novalis all stressed the affinity between religion and art, and they too wanted the artist to take over the traditional function of the priest. The artist has the power to evoke in us the feeling of the sublime and beautiful, which give witness to the infinite in the finite, the divine within nature. We have already seen how Fries and Herbart clung to these aspects of romantic religion. Lange follows in their footsteps. There is an important difference, however, between Lange’s reformed religion and that of the Romantics: Lange refuses to regard aesthetic experience as a form of cognition; an awareness of the sublime is not an intuition of the infinite. For Lange, as a good Kantian, aesthetic experience is strictly non-cognitive; knowledge is the exclusive prerogative of the exact sciences.
The philosophical basis for Lange’s aesthetic reformation of religion is his distinction between the realms of ideal and reality, value and existence. The real core and essence of religion, Lange insists, lies not in trying to know the realm of reality or existence but in creating an ideal world that expresses our ultimate values (II, 547). Traditional religion had been blind to the sui generis nature of this ideal world, chiefly because of its deep-rooted tendency to hypostasize ideals, to make them into objects of belief rather than ideals for action. But, for Lange, recognizing the precise logical status of this ideal world, and placing religion firmly within it, is utterly crucial to saving religion in the modern world. If religion is understood as dogma or metaphysics, as an attempt to acquire knowledge about existence or reality, it cannot compete with science, and so it is doomed to eventual destruction. If, however, religion is seen as an attempt to create values and ideals through art, then it stands outside the whole sphere of knowledge, and thus beyond the ken of criticism. After all, who would attempt to refute a Mass by Palestrina or a Madonna by Raphael? (561).
The inspiration for Lange’s attempt to rescue religion ultimately came from Kant. Prima facie this is surprising because of Lange’s statement, in the very beginning of his Kant chapter, that the real significance of Kant’s philosophy lay in its theoretical part, and that the practical part was “the changeable and perishable part of the Kantian system” (II, 2). That makes it seem as if Lange completely repudiated Kant’s doctrine of practical faith. While he indeed rejected Kant’s attempt to rescue the old beliefs of natural religion, namely, the beliefs in God, providence and immortality, he still endorsed his attempt to provide a practical or moral justification of religion. Following Kant, Lange would divide science and religion into separate spheres, and he would justify religion by practical rather than theoretical means. His loyalty to the Kantian doctrine is fully apparent from his June 2, 1870 letter to Überweg, where he attempts to answer Überweg’s question of whether he follows Kant’s practical philosophy in his justification of religion. The answer is ‘no’, he says, insofar as he does not attempt to justify the same beliefs as Kant; but it is ‘yes’, insofar as he too attempts to provide a practical justification for moral and religious ideas.80
Though Lange followed some basic Kantian guidelines, he still departed from them in important ways. His distinction between value and existence was meant to replace Kant’s distinction between noumena and phenomena. In providing a secure space for religion, his distinction would do the same work as Kant’s, but it would not require Kant’s postulate of a mysterious noumenal realm of existence. Kant, Lange argued, had failed to see that these ideals, values and norms are created by us, and that they do not exist in some special realm of being independent of us (II, 61). There is no need to postulate, therefore, an extra ontological realm to account for the integrity of our ideals and values, to show their difference from the natural world. In postulating a special realm of reality or existence to place religious belief, Kant had lapsed into the very error he had exposed in rationalist metaphysics: hypostasis.
Lange also refused to accept Kant’s account of the content of practical faith. For Kant, that content consists in some of the basic beliefs of natural religion, namely, the beliefs in God, freedom and immortality. But Lange refuses to recognize these beliefs as rational, whether by theoretical or practical guidelines. It is no longer the case, he argues, that morality requires the beliefs in God and immortality, because history and common experience has shown that we can be perfectly moral agents without holding these beliefs (II, 488–489). Lange also pointed out that some free communities had already dispensed even with these beliefs, and that they were fully content with a humanistic faith (496). It was Kant’s attempt to prove these beliefs on the basis of practical reason that Lange regarded as “the changeable and perishable” side of his doctrine of practical faith. This showed Kant to be a child of the 18th century, just another disciple of Enlightenment deism and natural religion.
Granted that religion falls into the realm of values and ideals, and granted that the old beliefs are obsolete, what standards determine the new values and ideals? What criteria adjudicate between conflicting views about these values and ideals? The new community movement had made this question all the more urgent and important. It was, however, a question for which Lange still had no definite answer in his Geschichte des Materialismus.81 It is clear that we cannot appeal to normal theoretical criteria, which determine only matters of fact in the natural world. Following Kant’s precedent, we now have to resort to practical criteria, such as the moral law. But nowhere does Lange explain how the moral law provides such a criterion. We learn only that tolerance towards others is one measure for the possession of spirit (II, 553), but little more. Morality seems to give at best a negative criterion to exclude ideas and values that are immoral; but it does not appear strong enough to provide a positive criterion to choose between ideas and values that are moral. Between moral ideals and values Lange offers nothing but aesthetic criteria. He makes the following puzzling statement: “To put it rather bluntly, this is a matter of taste; but, of course, the essential deciding factor is not the subjective taste of the individual, but the general cultural condition of nations, the dominant patterns of the association of ideas and, conditioned by an infinitude of factors, a certain basic attitude of mind.” (497)
The shift away from moral to aesthetic criteria is perfectly understandable given how Lange conceives of the creative activity behind religion. That activity he describes as “poetic”, though “poetic” in the broad classical sense as the power to produce beautiful things. The products of this poetic activity he calls “ideas”, though “ideas” in the Kantian sense, where they are “images” “symbols” of the rational or supersensible (II, 494). Given that religion consists in such images or symbols, it is only appropriate to measure them by aesthetic standards; cognitive or practical standards miss their purpose and meaning. Still, Lange’s move from aesthetic standards to a “matter of taste” remains puzzling and surprising. After all, aesthetic criteria can be, or at least purport to be, universal and necessary, and so not a mere matter of taste depending upon the general spirit of the age.
Remarkably, Lange had posed the main objection to this position in the preface to the first edition of his Geschichte des Materialismus. After stating his theory that the essence of religion consists in creative activity, Lange introduces an hypothetical objector who declares that this too is subjective; it leaves only aesthetic criteria, which would allow for even forms of superstition and idolatry provided that they are aesthetically pleasing (vii). Was not the Catholic Mass, after all, an aesthetic experience? Though Lange admits that this objection weighs heavily upon him, he leaves us with the baffling confession: “I depend upon the correctness of the signatura temporis, as I understand it” (viii). This was essentially a surrender to relativism, to the whims of the Zeitgeist. As Lange well knew, the signatura temporis, the Zeitgeist, was sending conflicting signals, given that there was the greatest disagreement in the free community movement about the best ideals and values for the new age.
In his Geschichte des Materialismus Lange was very clear that the ideas of metaphysics (viz. God, freedom, the soul) are based upon practical reason and that they have only a “poetic validity”. He did not explain, however, just how they are based on practical reason, or what exactly their poetic validity means. The net result: one half of the entire globus intellectualis, the poetic half, and its relation to the other scientific half, had been left in darkness. Lange finally confronted these issues in an unlikely place, in a chapter for a book on Schiller’s philosophical poetry. He had worked on this book for nearly a decade but never published it, even though parts of it were already in proof stage. The book was eventually published posthumously by his biographer, A.O. Ellissen, as Einleitung und Kommentar zu Schillers philosophischen Gedichten.82
A book on Schiller’s philosophical poetry seems an implausible place for reflection on such issues. All the more so when we consider the book’s purpose: to serve as a teacher’s guide to help Gymnasium students read Schiller’s more difficult philosophical poems. For Lange, however, the introduction to this book was the best occasion to raise just these philosophical questions. Schiller had always loomed large in his philosophical thinking, and on just these issues. Regarding the relationship between practical reason and the ideas, Lange told his friend Überweg on June 2, 1870, that he was “more a Schillerian than a Kantian”.83 In the preface to the first edition of the Geschichte des Materialismus he stated that the Kantian who came closest to his own views was Schiller, and he regretted that he did not have space to explain the philosophy of “the great poet” (v). In general, Lange held up Schiller’s philosophical poetry as the model for where philosophy should go after it renounces its traditional metaphysical pretensions and realizes the crucial tasks that lie before it: the aesthetic education of the nation.
The first chapter of Lange’s Einleitung und Kommentar, titled ‘Philosophie und Poesie’,84 contains his most detailed account of the relationship between the two halves of the intellectual sphere. He first identifies these halves with the realms of truth and beauty. They are distinct, Lange explains, because truth and beauty impose different demands upon us. The scientist has to determine the truth, even if it is ugly; the artist has to create the beautiful, even if it means ignoring the imperfections and particularities of reality (1). Of course, we want the two to be united: we hate beautiful lies, we prize elegant exposition. Still, the standards of these realms remain distinct, and the idea of their unity is only a fiction (2). Why, exactly, are they different? Lange provides no explicit explanation, but his underlying presuppositions are plain enough. Truth and beauty are for him the objects of science and art, which are distinct kinds of activity. All science strives for knowledge, which is limited to the world of experience, where an object is given to us through the senses. Art, however, simply creates its own object; it can transcend experience, and is not limited to reproducing something given to us. We confuse these realms, Lange warns us, if we assume that the beautiful is something that exists, as if it could somehow be an object of knowledge; to make such an assumption would be to hypostasize our own creations (5).
The most striking feature of Lange’s map of the intellectual sphere is that it is dualistic, divided between the demands of truth and beauty, science and art, leaving no place for the realm of morality. Lange is implicitly departing from Kant’s own topography, which divided the whole intellectual sphere into three realms: truth, beauty and goodness.85 Lange was subordinating the moral realm to the aesthetic one—a not unnatural move for someone who had devoted much of his early career to Herbart’s psychology. Why, though, this subordination of morality to art? Lange was simply taking some Kantian doctrines to their ultimate conclusion. First, he holds that the ideas of reason—the ideas of God, freedom and immorality—that play such a central role in morality are only our own creations, and that if we assume that there is some reality corresponding to them we indulge in hypostasis, the basic fallacy of pure reason according to the Transcendental Dialectic of the first Kritik. Second, like Kant, Lange thinks that moral principles are constructions, that the principles to which we are subject as autonomous agents should be also the principles that we create for ourselves as rational beings. Why, though, does the production of these principles not conform to sui generis moral standards? Nowhere does Lange explicitly address this question. But the answer seems to lie in his rejection of Kant’s deductions of moral principles. As we have already seen,86 Lange does not think that we can provide an a priori deduction of a moral principle that will show it to be valid universally, necessarily, and for all times and places. The historicist strand in his thinking made him reject moral absolutes; the empiricist strand made him want to base moral principles upon sentiment, just as Smith had done. Justifying moral principles on sentiment brings them closer to the aesthetic sphere.
Whatever its ultimate rationale, Lange’s subordination of the moral to the aesthetic realm has an important result for his conception of practical reason and how it justifies metaphysical ideas. At first Lange seems to accept Kant’s practical justification at face value: it means that although we cannot know the ideas are true, we are still allowed to proceed as if they were, or that we are permitted to think that they are true for the purposes of moral action (4). On this account, the practical justification of the ideas is based on morality: the ideas are justified when we show that believing in or acting upon them is necessary to fulfill the demands of moral principles. Thus, regarding the idea of freedom, Lange says that though we cannot know we are free, we are still justified in thinking that we are so for the sake of moral responsibility (4). Yet a little later Lange gives practical justification a very different twist, one that reflects the domination of the aesthetic in his thinking. Kant went astray, he argues, when he attempted to provide a logical deduction of the ideas from practical reason, a procedure just as illusory as that of the old metaphysics (8). There is indeed a necessity behind the ideas, Lange assures us, but it is not a logical but a strictly aesthetic necessity (8). What justifies the Kantian ideas, in other words, is not their morality but their beauty, or better yet their sublimity. It is ultimately the idea of the sublime, Lange argues, that proves to be the real standard and justification for the Kantian ideas: “Even if one does not want to place Kant’s system under the idea of the beautiful, it still belongs all the more surely under the idea of the sublime.” (8–9)
Where do we put philosophy on Lange’s intellectual map? It seems to have no place at all because philosophy is neither natural science nor art. Traditional philosophy was metaphysics, which pretended to be a kind of science through pure reason, a demonstrative knowledge of the objects falling under the ideas. We know now, however, that metaphysics is illusory, partly because it hypostasizes its own creations, and partly because it attempts to transcend experience, which determine the limits of knowledge. So Lange has a clear place for metaphysics on his intellectual map: since it is not a form of knowledge, and since it creates its own objects, it is really a form of art rather than science (8). More simply, metaphysics is poetry (Dichtung) (8). Lange does not draw the conclusion, however, that all philosophy is a form of art. He makes a distinction between two kinds of philosophy: critical philosophy, which is science, because it involves methods of empirical investigation; and positive philosophy, which is a form of art or poetry (7–8). Positive philosophy takes over the task of traditional metaphysics: it attempts to provide us with a general worldview; but rather than pretending to provide knowledge of apparent supersensible objects, it is self-conscious poetry.
Lange’s conception of positive philosophy came with a drastic deflation of the ideals and claims of traditional metaphysics. Metaphysics could no longer pretend to provide a worldview having universal validity. Since positive philosophy is a form of poetry, and so subject to aesthetic standards, there is no single form it should take; there is no single system of philosophy that will be valid for everyone alike, for there are all kinds of ways of constructing a system of philosophy, and which system we adopt will be a matter of taste (6). There is an obvious non sequitur involved in such reasoning: just because we apply aesthetic standards does not mean we are limited to personal taste. Why not universal aesthetic standards? For reasons best known to himself, Lange does not accept that possibility; the realm of universal validity is for him co-extensive with the realm of knowledge. Perhaps one reason he does not believe in the possibility of universal aesthetic standards is because of his historicism, his belief that philosophy, religion and art are subject to the Zeitgeist, that they are the expression of the values and ways of life of a particular nation. This historicism appears clearly when he writes that the principles of positive philosophy change with the times, that they differ from one generation to the next (8). We have already seen how the choice of religion is determined by the signatura temporis; the same now seems to be the case with philosophy itself.
The final result of Lange’s reflections on the relationship between philosophy and poetry was a harsh dilemma: either hard science or poetry. There is no other legitimate form of intellectual discourse. Traditional philosophy, which was neither empirical science nor poetry, had been squeezed out, eliminated from the globus intellectualis. What Lange termed “critical philosophy” was really nothing more than a branch of empirical science, fully in accord with his conception of transcendental philosophy as psychological and physiological research. In short, Lange was making philosophy redundant, dissolving it into empirical science or poetry. This proved a severe challenge for his successors. The young Hermann Cohen and Wilhelm Windelband were determined to uphold the traditional conception of philosophy, to keep a place for philosophy between empirical science or poetry. We shall soon see what came of their efforts.
1 This point has also been made before by Hans-Ludwig Ollig, Der Neukantianismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979), p. 19.
2 This epithet has been taken over by Sieg, Aufstieg und Niedergang des Marburger Neukantianismus Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994), pp. 86–106.
3 This argument has been made before, though on different grounds, by Lehmann, Geschichte der nachkantischen Philosophie (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1931), pp. 177–178. Lehmann’s claim that idealism is for Lange “Haus aus metaphysische Dichtung” conflates a reference to speculative idealism with Kant’s transcendental idealism.
4 The source of this view is perhaps Eduard Bernstein, who saw Lange as a forerunner of the social-democratic movement. See Eduard Bernstein, ‘Zur Würdigung Friedrich Albert Lange’, Die neue Zeit, Jahrgang X, (1891–1892), II, 68–78, 101–109, 132–141. Bernstein insisted (pp. 101–102) that there is no dualism between Lange’s philosophy and his political views, though he did not explain the connection.
5 Thomas E. Willey, Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought, 1860–1914 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1978), p. 84.
6 The lack of connection here is seen by Harry van den Linden, Kantian Ethics and Socialism (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1968), p. 294, who notes that Lange was rather negative about Kant’s ethics.
7 See Friedrich Albert Lange, J. St. Mill’s Ansichten über die sociale Frage und die angebliche Umwälzung der Socialwissenschaft durch Carey (Duisburg: Falk & Lange, 1866); and Die Arbeiterfrage in ihrer Bedeutung für Gegenwart und Zukunft (Duisburg: Falk & Volmer, 1865). Lange greatly expanded and revised this work for the third edition. Here I cite the fourth edition, Die Arbeiter Fragen. Ihre Bedeutung für Gegenwart und Zukunft (Winterthur: Bleuler-Hausheer & Co., 1879), which incorporates all changes Lange made for the third.
8 See, for example, Die Arbeiterfrage, pp. 126–127, where Lange appeals to the “principle of human perfection”. Chapter 4, pp. 147–211, considers the question of “the standard of life”, which is measured in eudemonistic terms. In Chapter 6, p. 338, Lange refers to “the idea of humanity”, a reference to the tradition of Herder and Schiller.
9 See Lange, Die Arbeiterfrage, pp. 268–274.
10 Lange, Mills Ansichten, p. 21.
11 In his ‘Kant und der Sozialismus’, Kant-Studien 4 (1900), 361–412, esp. 370, Karl Vorländer notes the lack of systematic connection between Lange’s socialism and neo-Kantianism. He still believes, however, that Lange connected the two through his “noble personality”. Helmut Holzhey grants that the connection is not overt, but he still insists that it is somehow unmistakable, lurking in the background. See his ‘Philosophische Kritik. Zum Verhältnis von Erkenntnistheorie und Sozialphilosophie bei F.A. Lange’, in Friedrich Albert Lange, Leben und Werke, eds J.H. Knoll and J.H. Schoeps (Duisburg: Walter Braun Verlag, 1975), 207–225, esp. 219. Vorländer notes but Holzhey ignores Lange’s critique of Kant in Die Arbeiterfrage and his preference for Smith in Mills Ansichten. Köhnke too, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 240, seems to believe there is some connection, because he claims that Lange “composed in Kant’s spirit” his ‘Aufruf an die Menschenfreunde aller Nationen’, an appeal for peace he wrote during the Franco-Prussian War. See this document in Friedrich Albert Lange: Über Politik und Philosophie, Briefe und Leitartikel, 1862–1875, ed. Georg Eckert (Duisburg: Walter Braun Verlag, 1968), pp. 296–298. But Köhnke reads more into the document than the evidence warrants. Lange never appeals to Kantian ideas but only “the principles of Christianity and humanity”. Köhnke polemicizes against the alternatives “Neu-kantianisch-idealistischer Ethiker oder linker Politiker” (p. 246), though he does not see the lack of Kantian ethical principles behind his politics.
12 The following account is based on Eckert, Über Politik und Philosophie, and A.O. Ellissen, Friedrich Albert Lange. Eine Lebensbeschreibung (Leipzig: Baedeker, 1894).
13 Ellissen, Lange p. 245, speculates that Lange came to Kant via Schopenhauer, though it seems more likely he came to Kant via Herbart. Lange tells us in his September 27, 1858, letter to Kambli that he now valued Herbart only because he was “a bridge to Kant”. See Ellissen, Lange, p. 106.
14 The young Lange had travel plans to go to London, though his father tried to dissuade him by noting what happened to Hamann on a similar adventure. Did Lange want to become a mere Pachthofverwalter too? See Ellissen, Lange, p. 36.
15 See Lange to his father, winter 1849/50, in Ellissen, Lange, p. 244.
16 Ellissen, Lange, pp. 69–71.
17 The dissertation eventually became a book: Die Grundlegung der mathematischen Psychologie. Ein Versuch zur Nachweisung des fundamentalen Fehler bei Herbart und Drobisch (Winterthur: Bleuler-Hausheer & Co., 1865).
18 Ellissen, Lange, p. 90.
19 Ellissen, Lange, p. 106.
20 According to Ellissen, Lange, p. 45, it was only after “a hard inner struggle” that Lange gave up poetry for philosophy.
21 Ellissen, Lange, p. 107.
22 This point, often ignored in Lange scholarship, is explicit in Lange’s June 2, 1870, letter to Überweg: “Ob ich z.B. in meiner practischen Philosophie auch dem Grundgedanken Kants folge? Ja: sofern ich ebenfalls—und shärfer als Kant—die sittliche Berechtigung der Ideen von ihrer objektiven Begründung trenne; nein: sofern ich wesentlich andere Ideen brauche und dieselben mit Religion und Dichtung in ein gemeinsames Gebiet verweise.” See Ellissen, Lange, p. 263.
23 See Klaus Plump, ‘Der Nachlaß F.A. Langes im Stadtarchiv Duisburg’, in Knoll and Schoeps, Lange Leben und Werk, pp. 236–267, esp. 246. According to Plump, there are four manuscripts dating from 1855, totalling some 200 pages. Two manuscripts are entitled ‘Die reine Logik’ and ‘Reine Logik’, showing that Lange already had his concern with a purely formal logic in 1855.
24 Friedrich Albert Lange, Logische Studien: Ein Beitrag zur Neubegründung der formalen Logik und der Erkenntnistheorie (Iserlohn: Baedeker, 1877).
25 Lange takes aim at the “die pseudo-aristotelische Erkenntnistheorie der Gegenwart”, p. 17. On Trendelenburg’s conception of Aristotle’s syllogistik, see Logische Untersuchungen (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1870), II, 388–389, and Geschichte der Kategorienlehre (Berlin: Bethge, 1846), pp. 13, 19–20.
26 See Lange, Logische Studien, pp. 23, 128.
27 Friedrich Albert Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, ed. Alfred Schmidt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974). The last English translation is Ernest Chester Thomas, The History of Materialism and Criticism of its Present Importance (London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1975), 3rd edition.
28 Friedrich Albert Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (Iserlohn: J. Baedeker, 1866). The second edition appeared in two volumes, the first in 1873 and the second in 1875. See Geschichte des Materialismsus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, Zweite, verbesserte und vermehrte Auflage. Band I: Erstes Buch. Geschichte des Materialismus bis auf Kant. Band I (Iserlohn: J. Baedeker, 1873). Band II: Geschichte des Materialismus seit Kant (Iserlohn: J. Baedeker, 1875). All references in parentheses will be, unless otherwise noted, to the second edition, Roman numerals for volume numbers and Arabic numerals for page numbers.
29 See Lange’s March 14, 1867, letter to Anton Dohrn and his June 2, 1871, letter to Friedrich Ueberweg, in Ellissen, Lange, pp. 258–264.
30 See Lange to Max Hirsch, November 27, 1865, in Eckert, Über Politik und Philosophie, p. 106.
31 Ellissen, Lange, pp. 96–97. According to Plump, ‘Nachlaß’, p. 245, there is indeed a 361-page manuscript in the Duisburg Nachlass entitled ‘Kritische Geschichte des Materialismus’, which he dates back to ‘Bonner Vorlesung Sommersemesters 1857’.
32 Plump, ‘Nachlaß’, p. 250.
33 Plump, ‘Nachlaß’, p. 126.
34 See Lange to Ernst Haeckel, October 12, 1874, in Eckert, Über Politik und Philosophie, p. 336.
35 For Lange’s influence on these figures, see Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg, pp. 323–327.
36 See Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus (1866), pp. viii, 241.
37 See Holzhey, ‘Philosophische Kritik’, pp. 212–217.
38 Hans-Martin Sass, ‘Der Standpunkt des Ideals als kritische Überwindung materialistischer und idealistischer Metaphysik’, in Friedrich Albert Lange, Leben und Werk, eds Knoll and Schoeps (Duisburg: Walter Braun Verlag, 1975), pp. 188–206.
39 This point is made by Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg, pp. 247, 490 n.40, against Sass, though it also applies against Holzhey, whom Köhnke supports “almost on all points”, p. 492 n.71.
40 On Lange’s critique of Trendelenburg, see Mills Ansichten, pp. 98–103. On Lange’s interpretation of Hegel, see Geschichte II, 553–554. Lange’s more considered view on Hegel is in Die Arbeiterfrage, pp. 257–262. Lange’s views of Hegel, which are nuanced and complicated, cannot be discussed here. On Lange’s interpretation of Hegel, see Hermann Lübbe, Politische Philosophie in Deutschland (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1974), pp. 90–94.
41 Lange vascillates somewhat on the connection between materialism and egoism. He first associates them, as if there is a straightforward connection. See Geschichte II, 453. He later weakens the connection, saying that theoretical materialism and ethical materialism (i.e. egoism) are bound up with one another, though the former is also compatible with altruism. See Geschichte II, 512–513. In the end he affirms a connection between the two because sympathy always means something else for the materialist, namely, refined self-interest (513). “In the long run” (auf die Dauer), he says, a materialist worldview leads to ethical materialism (514). It is inaccurate to say with Köhnke, therefore, that Lange holds ethical and theoretical materialism have “nichts als den Namen gemein.” (Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg, p. 243). This is to miss the social and political valence that Lange gives to materialism.
42 Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus (1866), p. 328.
43 Lange, Die Arbeiterfrage, 4th edn, pp. 26–27.
44 See his critique of these figures in Lange, Die Arbeiterfrage, pp. 353–364.
45 Lange, Die Arbeiterfrage, pp. 158, 349.
46 Lange, Die Arbeiterfrage, pp. 389–390.
47 Lange, Die Arbeiterfrage, p. 388.
48 Lange, Die Arbeiterfrage, p. 338.
49 See Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, I, 34, 100: “dies Streben der Befreiung [ist] gerade der Nerv des epikureischen Systemes”.
50 On Lange’s opinion of ecclesiastical authority, see Geschichte des Materialismus, II, 487, 489, 507, 557.
51 Gottfried Arnold, Unparteiische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie (Frankfurt: Fritsch, 1729).
52 Lange mentions Arnold’s work and praises it for being “mächtige Stütze der Denkfreiheit”, Geschichte des Materialismus (I, 402). He explicitly adopts the Arnoldian thesis that the heretics are the true Christians and champions of humanity. See Geschichte des Materialismus, II, 485–486.
53 See Geschichte des Materialismus, II, 170: “Hand in Hand mit der philosophischen Bildung geht die historische.”; and II, 171: “Geschichte und Kritik sind oft eins und dasselbe.”
54 See Geschichte des Materialismus, II, 68, 71, 90, 170.
55 Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, I, 3. The 1866 edition begins with the same sentence (p. 3), showing the importance Lange gave it. The second edition provides a commentary on the first sentence, I, 123–124 n.1.
56 The first edition gives a very different summary, pp. 7–8.
1) The principles of all things are atoms and empty space; all else is opinion.
2) There are infinite worlds in number and extension, which are constantly coming into and going out of being.
3) From nothing nothing comes, and something can never be destroyed.
4) The atoms are in constant rotary motion, and all coming into and out of being is due to their unification and separation.
5) The differences in things comes from the differences in number and shape of atoms; and originally there are no qualitative differences between atoms
6) Everything happens of necessity; final causes are to be rejected.
57 One of the difficult points in Lange’s account of materialism concerns his understanding of the relationship between materialism and what he calls “sensualism”. Sensualism is for him an empiricist doctrine that states the immediate object and content of consciousness consists in sensation alone (27). In one passage Lange states that sensualism is “a natural development of materialism” (27). Sensualism derives from materialism because the sensualist holds that the objects and contents of consciousness ultimately reflect and derive from matter, which is the source of all being. Yet in another passage Lange states that sensualism is “a transitional stage toward idealism” (131, n.30), which is the antithesis of materialism because it undermines the materialist’s belief in the objective reality of matter. Sensualism leads to idealism because it holds that the immediate objects of consciousness are not material objects but sensations in us, so that it is impossible to know matter directly or in itself (26–27). So just how sensualism relates to materialism is left unclear. It seems to derive from materialism but also to be opposed to it. Lange tries to resolve this tension when he explains that Protagoras, the chief exponent of sensualism, held that matter is indeterminate, realizing itself in all kinds of ways in the different sensations of different minds (29).
58 This chapter was heavily revised and expanded in the second edition. All references in parentheses above, unless otherwise noted, are to the second volume of the second edition.
59 As Lange put it in the first edition, p. 241.
60 Lange’s statement here, however, has to be compared with his statements elsewhere to see exactly what he accepts and rejects in Kant’s doctrine of practical faith. See Section 3, 5 and 9.
61 On Müller’s experiments, see Chapter 4, Section 5.
62 See Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus (1875), II, 181–220. This chapter anticipates the later philosophy of science of the Marburg school.
63 Ludwig Büchner, Natur und Geist, Gespräche zweier Freunde über den Materialismus und über real-philosophischen Fragen der Gegenwart (Frankfurt: Meidinger Sohn & Comp. 1857), p. 102. Büchner is not quite as naive as Lange makes him appear, because a few pages later (pp. 104–105) he notes that the modern atomic theory is still crude and speculative.
64 Kant’s mechanism is most apparent from his doctrine about the regulative status of teleology, and in his insistence on a mathematical paradigm of explanation. His nominalism appears in at least two major forms: his thesis that the form of experience, the relations between things, originates in the mind; and his doctrine of synthesis, according to which all connection results from the spontaneity of understanding. The theme of hypostasis, which is central to the Transcendental Dialectic, was also a standard nominalist trope. Still, nominalism is only one side of Kant. It has been well-argued that there is also a Platonic side. See, for example, Patrick Riley, Kant’s Political Philosophy (Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield, 1983), and T.K. Seung, Kant’s Platonic Revolution in Moral and Political Philosophy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
65 See also Lange’s March 14, 1867, letter to Dohrn, in Ellissen, Lange, pp. 258–259, which affirms a realistic conception of things-in-themselves. Here Lange writes: “Ich glaube weder, daß Kant selbst jemals gedacht hat, das „Ding an sich” habe keine Realität außer uns, noch huldige ich selbst einer solchen Ansicht. . . Ich halte dasselbe nur für gänzlich unerkennbar, ebenso aber auch das Wesen unserer Organization für unerkennbar.”
66 Lange writes in an endnote (II, 130, Anm. 35) that he was changing his view about the status of the thing-in-itself before he read Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, which appeared in 1871, between the first and second editions of his Geschichte des Materialismus. Now that he had read Cohen, however, he had been encouraged to make a total revision of his views. He says that he agrees with Cohen on most points but that he does not think that Kant is as consistent as Cohen assumes.
67 See Chapter 1, Section 3; and Chapter 8, Section 4.
68 See Chapter 13, Section 7.
69 See Kant, KrV, B 167–168.
70 See Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus (1875), Buch I, Zweiter Abschnitt’, ‘Der Materialismus und die exacte Forschung’, II, 139–181.
71 Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens. Ein Vortrag in der zweiten öffentlichen Sitzung der 45. Versammlung deutscher Naturforscher und Ärtze zu Leipzig 14 August 1872 (Leipzig: Veit & Co., 1872).
72 On that dispute, see my After Hegel: German Philosophy 1840–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), Chapter 3.
73 See du Bois-Reymond, Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens, p. 33.
74 J.S. Mill, System der induktiven und deduktiven Logik, aus dem Englischen von J. Schiel (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1862–1863). Though there were earlier uses of the term “Geisteswissenschaften”, Mill’s use of it seems especially important for Lange, given that he refers to Mill often and in just this context (II, 288, n.4).
75 Dilthey published his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften first in 1883; and though Droysen’s Grundriß der Historik first appeared in 1868, it was not widely understood. On the fate of Droysen’s historics, see my The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 289–291.
76 Cf. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, I, 374–376.
77 For an insightful treatment of this theme, see Adam Weyer, ‘Religion und Sozialismus bei F.A. Lange’, in eds Schoeps and Knoll, Lange, Leben und Werk (Duisburg: Walter Braun Verlag, 1975), pp. 226–235.
78 Lange seems very sympathetic to the free community movement, but also very wary of its ultimate direction. He writes that “every form of ecclesiastical organization of a community of faith is a state within the state and may in any moment easily trespass into the civil arena.” Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, II, 558.
79 See Friedrich Schiller, ‘Das Reich der Schatten’, in Schillers Werke, Nationalausgabe, eds Julius Petersen und Friedrich Beißner (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1943), pp. 245–253.
80 See Ellissen, Lange, p. 263.
81 In the first chapter of Section II Lange suggests that the standards are those for “inner truth” in art and religion, which determine whether an idea leads to “the harmonic satisfaction of the human mind” (II, 177). What this phrase meant, however, Lange did not begin to explain.
82 Friedrich Albert Lange, Einleitung und Kommentar zu Schillers philosophischen Gedichten (Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1897), ed. A.O. Ellissen. All references in parentheses above are to this edition.
83 Ellissen, Lange, p. 263.
84 Lange, Einleitung und Kommentar, pp. 1–25. Though Ellissen says that the manuscript was already in proof stage (p. x), this chapter seems to have been incomplete, because it ends in mid-sentence (25).
85 See Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §5, AA V, 209–211.