Hermann Lotze - Biography

Biography

Lotze was born in Bautzen (Budziszyn), Saxony, Germany, the son of a physician. He was educated at the gymnasium of Zittau; he had an enduring love of the classical authors, publishing a translation of Sophocles' Antigone into Latin verse in his middle age.

He attended the University of Leipzig as a student of philosophy and natural sciences, but entered officially as a student of medicine when he was seventeen. Lotze's early studies were mostly governed by two distinct interests: the first was scientific, based upon mathematical and physical studies under the guidance of E. H. Weber, Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann and Gustav Fechner. The other was his aesthetic and artistic interest, which was developed under the care of Christian Hermann Weisse. He was attracted both by science and by the idealism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Lotze's first essay was his dissertation De futurae biologiae principibus philosophicis, with which he gained (1838) the degree of doctor of medicine, four months after obtaining the degree of doctor of philosophy. He laid the foundation of his philosophical system in his Metaphysik (Leipzig, 1841) (published in English as Metaphysic: In Three Books, Ontology, Cosmology, and Psychology) and his Logik (1843), (published in English as Logic: In Three Books, of Thought, of Investigation, and of Knowledge), short books published while still a junior lecturer at Leipzig, from whence he moved to Göttingen, succeeding Johann Friedrich Herbart in the chair of philosophy.

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 the investigation of inorganic phenomena. These works were his Allgemeine Pathologie und Therapie als mechanische Naturwissenschaften (1842, 2nd ed., 1848), the articles "Lebenskraft" (1843) and "Seele und Seelenleben" (1846) in Rudolf Wagner's Handwörterbuch der Physiologie, his Allgemeine Physiologie des Körperlichen Lebens (1851), and his Medizinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele (1852).

When Lotze published these works, medical science was still under the influence of Schelling's philosophy of nature. The mechanical laws, to which external things were subject, were conceived as being valid only in the inorganic world. Mechanism was the unalterable connexion of every phenomenon a with other phenomena b, c, d, either as following or preceding it; mechanism was the inexorable form into which the events of this world are cast, and by which they are connected. The object of those writings was to establish the all-pervading rule of mechanism. But the mechanical view of nature is not identical with the materialistic. In the last of the above-mentioned works the question is discussed at great length how we have to consider mind, and the relation between mind and body; the answer is we have to consider mind as an immaterial principle, its action, however, on the body and vice versa as purely mechanical, indicated by the fixed laws of a psycho-physical mechanism.

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.

The misinterpretations which he had suffered induced Lotze to publish a small polemical pamphlet (Streitschriften, 1857), in which he corrected two mistakes. His opposition to Hegel's formalism had induced some to associate him with the materialistic school, others to count him among the followers of Herbart. Lotze denied that he belonged to the school of Herbart. He admitted, though, that historically the same doctrine which might be considered the forerunner of Herbart's teachings might lead to his own views, viz. the monadology of Leibniz.