Lotze, Rudolph Hermann (1817–81)

1. Philosophy of biology

Hermann Lotze was born in Bautzen and attended the Gymnasium at Zittau. At the University of Leipzig he studied medicine and philosophy. In 1844 he was nominated at Göttingen as the successor to Herbart in the chair of philosophy. Here he remained until the call to Berlin in 1881. His work after the ‘materialism controversy’ (from the convention at Göttingen in 1854) made clear his anti-naturalism and his affinities with the epistemological bent of early Neo-Kantianism (see Neo-Kantianism §2). A quasi-systematic philosopher, Lotze none the less eschewed the presumptions of German Idealism while preserving its ethical imperative.

As a student of Christian Hermann Weisse, Lotze fell under the sway of his teacher’s post-Hegelian view of idealism (so-called Spätidealismus). Yet as a medical scientist he came to reject key aspects of the idealist and Romantic philosophy of nature, most notably, its dependence upon the notion of ‘vital force’ (Lebenskraft) (see Naturphilosophie). After Kant there had quickly arisen an acceptance, within biological thought, of a special vital force, indicative of an organizing principle of organic bodies.Lotze presented a series of arguments designed to correct false applications of this concept. He reiterated Kant’s warning that the assumption of purposive organization could only be a regulative (not a constitutive) principle. As part of an organizing principle of merely subjective validity, the concept of vital force must not be hypostatized: that is, such force ought not to be treated as a material cause of organic phenomena.

Therefore, while inquiry must begin with the assumption of a purposive organization, no conclusion should be drawn which identifies vital force as an actual causal principle in the biological realm. On the other hand, this assumption does not imply that mechanistic explanation may be precluded. Teleology and mechanism are mutually compatible, not competing, investigative procedures. Lotze rejects the notion of a special force as superfluous for the scientific side of the investigation. Yet the formal constraint of ‘order’ or ‘purpose’ remains a necessary presupposition: mechanism should be understood as the way in which purpose realizes itself in our world.

As some concept of finality is required to fill the ‘metaphysical vacuum’ left by the intrusion of mechanistic procedures (not only in life science, but in the human sciences as well), an idealistic Weltanschauung is combined with a clear recognition of the power of scientific explanation. This requirement harks back to Fichte’s imperative to determine what is on the basis of what ought to be, but with an important difference: this ethical requirement, in Lotze’s hands, was translated into a new language of ‘values’. The terminology of ‘is’ and ‘ought’ is replaced by that of ‘existence’ and ‘meaning’: science may be allowed to determine what actually exists, but philosophy is required to expound what this existence means. These early convictions are retained in the mature expositions of Lotze’s thought, found in his Mikrokosmus (Microcosmos) (1858–64) and System der Philosophie (System of Philosophy). Of the latter, which was intended as a three-volume work, only two volumes had been published at his death: Logik (Logic) (1874) and Metaphysik (Metaphysics) (1879).