German Positivism

German Positivism emerges, first, as a reaction against Idealism in general and Hegelianism in particular; and, secondly, as a development of the Kantian theory of knowledge. Both Idealism and Hegelianism have a starting point in common with Positivism; namely, that man knows nothing except sensible data conceived of as facts of consciousness. From such a beginning it is impossible to derive any metaphysics except a materialistic and atheistic one. Such is the character of German Positivism.

The various developments of German Positivism are usually classified as follows: (1) the so-called "Hegelian Left"; (2) Haeckel's materialism; (3) the Neo-Kantianism of Lange; (4) immanentism. We shall examine only the greater representatives of each of these four current of thought.

THE HEGELIAN LEFT

Shortly after the death of its master Georg W. F. Hegel, the Hegelian School split into two wings, called the Right and the Left. The Right sought to interpret Hegelian Idealism in the traditional theist and Christian sense. Such an interpretation of Hegelianism was plainly arbitrary and was destined to fail. Its exponents never attained any great importance.

The Left Wing adhered to Hegel's immanentism. According to this faction, no reality can continue to exist unless it denies itself in its present state and is reborn in a higher reality. This principle, developed without restraint, leads to irreligion, atheism and anarchy. Hegel, moreover, had affirmed the perfect coincidence of the real with the rational, and of the universal with the particular. Hence the Left Wing rejects all distinction and affirms that the unique reality is the datum of experience. This doctrine, as we know, is the starting point of Positivism.

The most important exponents of the Left Wing are the following: Ludwig Andrew Feuerbach (1804-1872), Karl Marx (1818-1883), and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895).

LUDWIG A. FEUERBACH

Both in Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity) and Vorlesungen uber das Wesen der Religion (Lectures on the Essence of Religion), Ludwig Feuerbach sought to reduce religion to the cult of humanity. To this end, he literally overturned the terms of Hegelian Idealism. For Hegel, nature is the outward projection of the Idea. For Feuerbach, on the contrary, nature is the true reality, and the Idea is but its faint image.

Nature consists in the real existence of individuals, and real individuals are an end in themselves. How, then, did religion arise? Man, according to Feuerbach, concretizes in the Divine whatever he desires and cannot actuate through experience. The object of religion, therefore, is not the real, transcendent Being, but the objectivation of ideals represented by imagination.

Philosophy must supplant this imaginary object with the real object, which is man or "humanity," that is, the human species, human society. Likewise, philosophy should supplant transcendent happiness with an immanent happiness. Thus Feuerbach arrives at the conclusion that Comte reached through a different path, namely, the cult of humanity. This, of course, implies the denial of all true religion.


MARX AND ENGELS


HAECKEL'S MATERIALISM

Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919), was a monist and a materialist in the true sense of the word. For him, reality was matter animated by energy. All phenomena are only different products of the same primitive matter. Man, of course, like all other beings, is a compound of matter and energy. Human beings and animals differ only by degree of energy. God is the sum of all the forces acting in the universe; He is the moving spirit of the universe itself. True religion is knowledge and wondering admiration of the operation of the universe.

THE NEO-KANTIANISM OF LANGE

Friedrich Albert Lange (1828-1875) in his History of Materialism demonstrates the necessity of rejecting and overcoming materialism because it presumes to derive knowledge from material motion. Raising his voice in a Spinozan psycho-physical parallelism, Lange affirms that immediate experiences shows two series of parallels -- psychic and physical -- distinct from one another but unified in an absolute reality. This reality, however, escapes our comprehension. Neither of these parallels is derivable from experience -- not the psychic one, because knowledge is not a link in the chain of experience, but rather its internal aspect; not the physical one, because experience is a result of our mode of perceiving.

Matter, according to Lange (who in this follows George Berkeley) is mere representation, pure sensation. Even our brain and sensory organs exist only through our knowledge of them. If we perceive in a fixed manner, the reason is because such is our "organization." It is clear that such a theory of knowledge can be parent to no metaphysics or religion.

IMMANENTISM

Ernst Laas (1837-1885) in his work Idealism and Positivism shows that science is a rational systematization of facts. By fact he means whatever is present to our consciousness, whether or not it be reducible to mechanism. Every fact, according to Laas, is characterized by the correlativity of subject and object. The subject is such because there is an object; in other words, there is a perceiving subject because there is an object perceived, and vice versa.

However, the object (nature) is nothing more than a phenomenon, something that appears to our consciousness. It is impossible to know whether reality underlies these appearances. However, the object is not a mere flux of sensations in the consciousness. Sensations, in their totality, indicate a reciprocal relationship in accordance with a law which is the object of universal knowledge.

The only possible metaphysics flowing from this theory of knowledge is immanentist and hence pantheistic and atheistic.