Philosopher, born in Bautzen, E Germany. He studied medicine and philosophy at Leipzig, and went on to become professor of philosophy at Leipzig (18424), Göttingen (184480), and Berlin (18801). He first became known as a physiologist, opposing the popular doctrine of vitalism, and helped to found the science of physiological psychology, but he is best known for his religious philosophy, Theistic Idealism, expounded in Mikrokosmos (3 vols, 18568).
He argued that if the physical world is governed by mechanical laws, relations and developments in the universe could be explained as the functioning of a world mind.He attended the University of Leipzig as a student of philosophy and natural sciences, but entered officially as a student of medicine. It appears that thus early Lotze's studies were governed by two distinct interests.
Lotze's first essay was his dissertation De futurae biologiae principibus philosophicis, with which he gained (1838) the degree of doctor of medicine, only four months after obtaining the degree of doctor of philosophy. He laid the foundation of his philosophical system in his Metaphysik (Leipzig, 1841) and his Logik (1843), short books published while still a junior lecturer at Leipzig, from where he moved to Göttingen, succeeding Johann Friedrich Herbart in the chair of philosophy.
It was only during the last decade of his life that he ventured, hesitantly, to present his ideas in a systematic and final form. His two early books remained unnoticed by the reading public, and Lotze first became known to a larger circle through a series of works which aimed at establishing in the study of the physical and mental phenomena of the human organism in its normal and diseased states the same general principles which had been adopted in.
When Lotze published these works, medical science was still under the influence of Schelling's philosophy of nature.
These doctrines of Lotze, though pronounced with the distinct and reiterated reserve that they did not contain a solution of the philosophical question regarding the nature of mechanism, were nevertheless by many considered to be the last word of the philosopher, denouncing the reveries of Schelling or the idealistic theories of Hegel. Published as they were during the years when the modern school of German materialism was at its height, these works of Lotze were counted among the opposition literature of empirical philosophy. Fichte (the younger) did not escape this misinterpretation of Lotze's true meaning.
The misinterpretations which he had suffered induced Lotze to publish a small polemical pamphlet (Streitschriften, Leipzig, 1857), in which he corrected two mistakes. Lotze denied that he belonged to the school of Herbart.
When Lotze wrote these explanations, he had already published the first volume of his Mikrokosmus (vol. In many passages of his works on pathology, physiology, and psychology Lotze had distinctly stated that the method of research which he advocated there did not give an explanation of the phenomena of life and mind, but only the means of observing and connecting them together; we gain the necessary data for deciding what meaning attaches to the existence of this microcosm, or small world of human life, in the macrocosm of the universe.
This review, which extends, in three volumes, over the wide field of anthropology, beginning with the human frame, the soul, and their union in life, advancing to man his mind, and the course of the world, and concluding with history, progress, and the connexion of things, ends with the same idea which was expressed in Lotze's earliest work, his Metaphysik. The view peculiar to him is reached in the end as the crowning conception towards which all separate channels of thought have tended, and in the light of which the life of man in nature and mind, in the individual and in society, had been surveyed. To comprehend the real position we are forced to the conviction that the world of facts is the field in which, and that laws are the means by which, those higher standards of moral and aesthetic value are being realized; and such a union can again only become intelligible through he idea of a personal Deity, who in the creation and preservation of a world has voluntarily chosen certain forms and laws, through the natural operation of which the ends of His work are gained. Whilst Lotze had thus in his published works closed the circle of his thought, beginning with a conception metaphysically gained, proceeding to an exhaustive contemplation of things in the light it afforded, and ending with the stronger conviction of its truth which observation, experience, and life could afford, he had all the time been lecturing on the various branches of philosophy according to the scheme of academical instruction transmitted from his predecessors. His lectures ranged over a wide field: he delivered annually lectures on psychology and on logic (the latter including a survey of the entirety of philosophical research under the title Encyclopädie der Philosophie), then at longer intervals lectures on metaphysics, philosophy of nature, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, rarely on history of philosophy and ethics. In these lectures he expounded his peculiar views in a stricter form, and during the last decade of his life he embodied the substance of those courses in his System der Philosophie, of which only two volumes have appeared (vol. The third and concluding volume, which was to treat in a more condensed form the principal problems of practical philosophy, of philosophy of art and religion, never appeared. Appended to this volume is a complete list of Lotze's writings, compiled by Professor Rehnisch of Göttingen.
To understand this series of Lotze's writings, it is necessary to begin with his definition of philosophy. the existence in our mind of certain laws and forms according to which we connect the material supplied to us by our senses, and, secondly, the fact that logical thought cannot be usefully employed without the assumption of a further set of connexions, not logically necessary, but assumed to exist between the data of experience and observation. this to try to bring unity and harmony into the scattered thoughts of our general culture, to trace them to their primary assumptions and follow them into their ultimate consequences, to connect them all together, to remodel, curtail or amplify them, so as to remove their apparent contradictions, and to combine them in the unity of an harmonious view of things, and especially to investigate those conceptions which form the initial assumptions of the several sciences, and to fix the limits of their applicability This is the formal definition of philosophy. The main proof of the objective value of the view we may gain will rather lie in the degree in which it succeeds in assigning to every element of culture its due position, or in which it is able to appreciate and combine different and apparently opposite tendencies and interests, in the sort of justice with which it weighs our manifold desires and aspirations, balancing them in due proportions, refusing to sacrifice to a one-sided principle any truth or conviction which experience has proven to be useful and necessary. The investigations will then naturally divide themselves into three parts, the first of which deals with those to our mind inevitable forms in which we are obliged to think about things, if we think at all (metaphysics), the second being devoted to the great region of facts, trying to apply the results of metaphysics to these, specially the two great regions of external and mental phenomena (cosmology and psychology), the third dealing with those standards of value from which we pronounce our aesthetic or ethical approval or disapproval. In each department we shall have to aim first of all at views clear and consistent within themselves, but, secondly, we shall in the end wish to form some general idea or to risk an opinion how laws, facts and standards of value may be combined in one comprehensive view. Considerations of this latter kind will naturally present themselves in the two great departments of cosmology and psychology, or they may be delegated to an independent research under the name of religious philosophy. We have already mentioned the final conception in which Lotze's speculation culminates, that of a personal Deity, Himself the essence of all that merits existence for its own sake, who in the creation and government of a world has voluntarily chosen certain laws and forms through which His ends are to be realized. We may add that according to this view nothing is real but the living spirit of God and the world of living spirits which He has created; It is natural that Lotze, having this great and final conception always before him, works under its influence from the very beginning of his speculations, permitting us, as we progress, to gain every now and then a glimpse of that interpretation of things which to him contains the solution of our difficulties.
The key to Lotze's theoretical philosophy lies in his metaphysics, to the exposition of which important subject the first and last of his larger publications have been devoted. To understand Lotze's philosophy, a careful and repeated perusal of these works is absolutely necessary. The further assumption, that the modified notions thus gained have an objective meaning, and that they somehow correspond to the real order of the existing world which of course they can never actually describe, depends upon a general confidence which we must have in our reasoning powers, and in the significance of a world in which we ourselves with all the necessary courses of our thoughts have a due place assigned. The principle therefore of these investigations is opposed to two attempts frequently repeated in the history of philosophy, viz.: (1) the attempt to establish general laws or forms, which the development of things must have obeyed, or which a Creator must have followed in the creation of a world (Hegel); What remains to be done is, not to explain how such a world manages to be what it is, nor how we came to form these notions, but merely this--to expel from the circle and totality of our conceptions those abstract notions which are inconsistent and jarring, or to remodel and define them so that they may constitute a consistent and harmonious view.
In this endeavour Lotze discards as useless and untenable many favourite conceptions of the school, many crude notions of everyday life. But, further, every attempt to think clearly what those relations are, what we really mean, if we talk of a fixed order of events, forces upon us the necessity of thinking also that the different things which stand in relations to the different phases which follow each other cannot be merely externally strung together or moved about by some indefinable external power, in the form of some predestination or inexorable fate The things themselves which exist and their changing phases must stand in some internal connexion; This would lead to the view of Leibniz, that the world consists of monads, self-sufficient beings leading an inner life. This conception, according to Lotze, is neither necessary nor thoroughly intelligible. But, in attempting to make this conception quite clear and thinkable, we are forced to represent the connexion of things as a universal substance, the essence of which we conceive as a system of laws which underlies everything and in its own self connects everything, but is imperceptible, and known to us merely through the impressions it produces on us, which we call things.
A final reflection then teaches us that the nature of this universal and all-pervading substance can only be imagined by us as something analogous to our own mental life, where alone we experience the unity of a substance (which we call self) preserved in the multitude of its (mental) states. It also becomes clear that only where such mental life really appears need we assign an independent existence, but that the purposes of everyday life as well as those of science are equally served if we deprive the material things outside of us of an independence, and assign to them merely a connected existence through the universal substance by the action of which alone they can appear to us.
The universal substance, which we may call the absolute, is at this stage of our investigations not endowed with the attributes of a personal Deity, and it will remain to be seen by further analysis in how far we are able--without contradiction--to identify it with the object of religious veneration, in how far that which to metaphysics is merely a postulate can be gradually brought nearer to us and become a living power. Much in this direction is said by Lotze in various passages of his writings; The actual result of his personal inquiries, the great idea which lies at the foundation of his philosophy, we know. It may be safely stated that Lotze would allow much latitude to individual convictions, as indeed it is evident that the empty notion of an absolute can only become living and significant to us in the same degree as experience and thought have taught us to realize the seriousness of life, the significance of creation, the value of the beautiful and the good, and the supreme worth of personal holiness.
We have still to mention that aesthetics formed a principal and favourite study of Lotze's, and that he has treated this subject also in the light of the leading ideas of his philosophy.
Lotze's historical position is of much interest. Though he disclaims being a follower of Herbart, his formal definition of philosophy and his conception of the object of metaphysics are similar to those of Herbart, who defines philosophy as an attempt to remodel the notions given by experience. In this endeavour he forms with Herbart an opposition to the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, which aimed at objective and absolute knowledge, and also to the criticism of Kant, which aimed at determining the validity of all human knowledge. But this formal agreement includes material differences, and the spirit which breathes in Lotze's writings is more akin to the objects and aspirations of the idealistic school than to the cold formalism of Herbart. What, however, with the idealists was an object of thought alone, the absolute, is to Lotze only inadequately definable in rigorous philosophical language; the essence and worth which is in them reveals itself only to the student of detail, for reality is larger and wider than philosophy; This conviction of the emptiness of terms and abstract notions, and of the fulness of individual life, has enabled Lotze to combine in his writings the two courses into which German philosophical thought had been moving since the death of its great founder, Leibniz. We may define these courses by the terms esoteric and exoteric--the former the philosophy of the school, cultivated principally at the universities, trying to systematize everything and reduce all our knowledge to an intelligible principle, losing in this attempt the deeper meaning of Leibniz's philosophy; the latter the unsystematized philosophy of general culture which we find in the work of the great writers of the classical period, Lessing, Winckelmann, Goethe, Schiller and Herder, all of whom expressed in some degree their indebtedness to Leibniz. Lotze can be said to have brought philosophy out of the lecture-room into the market-place of life.
The age in which Lotze lived and wrote in Germany was not one peculiarly fitted to appreciate the position he took up. "Frege, Lotze, and the Continental Roots of Early Analytic Philosophy" in E. Hauser, K., 2003, "Lotze and Husserl," Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 85: 152-178. Milkov, N., 2000, "Lotze and the Early Cambridge Analytic Philosophy," Prima Philosophia 13: 133-153. Pierson, G., 1988, "Lotze's Concept of Value," Journal of Value Inquiry 22: 115-125. D., 2001, "Lotze on the Sensory Representation of Space" in L. "Hermann Lotze on Abstraction and Platonic Ideas", Idealization XI: Historical Studies on Abstraction and Idealization, edited by Francesco Coniglione, Roberto Poli, and Robin Rollinger, in Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and Humanities, Vol. Edited, with an introduction and Lotze bibliography, by Paul Grimley Kuntz. -----, 1998, "Rudolf Hermann Lotze" in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. Woodward, W.R, 1978, "From Association to Gestalt: The Fate of Hermann Lotze's Theory of Spatial Perception, 1846-1920," Isis 69: 572–582.
User Comments Add a comment…