Philosophy of Rudolph Hermann Lotze

Life and Works

Rudolf Hermann Lotze was born on May 21, 1817 and died on July 1, 1881. He was a German philosopher who attempted to reconcile the concepts of mechanistic science with the principles of romantic idealism. A student of both medicine and philosophy at Leipzig, he later lectured there in both fields, becoming a professor in 1842. In 1844 he succeeded Johann Friedrich Herbart as professor at Gottingen, and in 1881 he joined the faculty at Berlin.

His chief works are: Metaphysik (1841); Allegemeine Pathologie und Therapeutik als mechanische Naturwissenschaften (1842); Logik (1843); Physiologie (1851); Medizinische Psychologie (1852); Microcosmos, 3 vols. (1856-1864); System der Philosophic: Logik (1874); Metaphysik (1879).

General Comments

Lotze reestablished philosophy by combining the monadology of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz with the pantheism of Benedict Spinoza. He sought to reconcile monism and pluralism, mechanism and teleology, realism and idealism, pantheism and theism. He called his system teleological idealism. Lotze recognized the claims of the ethical-religious idealism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and related it to a sober scientific interpretation of natural phenomena.

Lotze combined a firm belief in the universality of scientific law with a conviction of the need for metaphysics. He insisted that philosophy be rooted in the natural sciences, because human beings are subject to the same natural laws as inanimate objects. He protested against attempts to deduce reality from mere principles; knowledge, he held, is the result of observation and experimentation, not of logical dialectic. The task of metaphysics is therefore to analyze and systematize concepts that the sciences produce.

According to Lotze, nature is governed by mechanical law, but the system of nature is a set of means to a divinely appointed end. He considered all things as immanent in God; what the scientist sees as mechanical causality is simply the expression of the divine activity. So-called laws are the divine action itself, the mode of God's operation.

Mechanism and Teleology

Lotze asserted that man cannot find ethical-religious satisfaction in the mechanized universe. Organic and inorganic matter differ in their arrangement of parts. The force of matter gives direction to the separate parts. The living body is a machine. The mechanical conception of the universe leaves no room for human purposes and ideals. Mechanism, according to Lotze, is inadequate for the explanation of life.

Sensations, perceptions and logical laws are functions of the subject -- the self. Reality, things-in-themselves, must have the capacity to act and be acted upon, and remain the same in all change. Reality is known only in ourselves through the self-determining principle of unity called the soul. The soul is distinct from the body. It is the capacity of the mind to combine manifold phenomena in the unity of conscious experience.

Lotze maintains that the real universe must be interpreted, therefore, in terms of mind or that which is known to us. Matter is full of life and action but mental life is higher. It illuminates the gross forms of matter and is superior to it. The phenomenal world is not meaningless, but it must be conceived of as an ethically ordered world.

Logic and Metaphysics

Forms of thinking -- logical laws -- are rooted in the demand for the good; reality is rooted in the good. The relation of the body -- mechanism -- and the soul -- teleology -- occurs by interaction, but how this occurs we cannot tell.

The body, according to Lotze, is a system of monads or spiritual forces. The soul is related to the brain. And it dominates the body.

Pantheism

Lotze transforms the mechanistic theory into a system of spiritual reality in reciprocal relations with one another. The pluralistic world demands the foundation of universal substance of which all phenomena are modes of expression. Mechanism is an expression of the Absolute, the infinite Being.

Lotze's philosophy becomes an idealistic pantheism in which the substance of Spinoza and the monads of Leibniz are united. The human soul interprets the universal substance and regards it as personality, an absolutely good being, a God of love.

Microcosmos

Lotze's principal work is Microcosmos (1856-64). In this book, Lotze advanced the idea that the physicists are right in claiming that the universe is made up of atoms, but the atoms are sentient and they influence one another in a causal fashion predictable according to natural law. The sentient atoms, or monads, may be considered causally from without, but internally they are the expressions of will. All nature, which is a mechanism directed by purpose, is the expression of the creative will of God.

Also, according to Lotze in this work, Man is unique because of his mind; although, like the other animals, man evolved in the struggle for existence, his history cannot understood in purely mechanical terms. Man, who is himself a unity, brings unity to existence by the use of ideas and ideals; wholes in nature are products of mind.