## 1. Life and Career



Lange was born on September 28, 1828 in Wald, near Solingen, Germany.
He was the son of a protestant theologian, pastor and professor. Soon
after Lange was born, the family moved to Langenberg near Elberfeld
and then in 1832 to Duisburg. Lange went to both elementary school and
high school in Duisburg. The family moved in 1841 to Zurich so that
his father could take up the position as pastor and Professor of
Theology that had been withdrawn from David Friedrich Strauss as a
result of Strauss's controversial book *The Life of
Jesus*. Lange continued his high school education in Zurich. Lange
also attended lectures at the university for two semesters on
philology and theology. He was exposed to both Hegel and Herbart in
Zurich. This exposure to Herbart influenced his later interests in
education theory, but more importantly led him back to Kant. In 1848
he went to study philology at the University of Bonn under Friedrich
Ritschl. Here he also took courses in philosophy, the history of
classical German literature, and analytic geometry and calculus. He
finished a dissertation on Greek poetry, "Quaestiones
metricae", and was awarded his doctorate in
 1851.[1]



After doing his military service in Cologne, he became an assistant
high school teacher there in 1852 at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Gymnasium.
After failing to be promoted from assistant teacher to teacher after
three years, he resigned and received his *habilitation*
(qualification as a university lecturer) at the University of Bonn. In
1855 he became a Privatdozent of Philosophy and Pedagogy at the
University of
 Bonn.[2]
 His inaugural lecture was on the relation between the education
systems and dominant world views of various time periods (Lange
 1855).[3]
 He gave lectures on psychology and pedagogy. He began lecturing on
the history of materialism during the summer of 1857. This was the
beginning of the research that would eventually yield his book,
*The History of Materialism*, many years later. He also gave
lectures on "Moralstatistik", the view popular in some
circles in the nineteenth century that there are statistical
correlations between the rates of certain kinds of morally significant
behavior such as crimes, marriages, and suicides. Lange's
thoughts about how to reform logic also begin during this period even
though his book, *Logical Studies*, that eventually emerged
from his investigations, was only published posthumously. It is
presumably significant for his later views that during this time he
heard Hermann von Helmholtz lecture on the "Physiology of the
Sense
 Organs".[4]



After failing to find a university position better than that of
Privatdozent, he accepted an offer to teach at his old school, the
Duisburg Gymnasium. He taught there from 1858-1862. He gave
classes on Greek, Latin, German and philosophy. He was also busy
outside the classroom writing reports for the school authorities and
participating in politics as an elector. He wrote many articles for
Karl Schmid's encyclopedia of pedagogy during this time (Lange
1869-75). This was the period when Lange really became a
political activist. He participated in the organization of the new
consumer cooperatives meant to help the working class avoid
exploitation by merchant traders--the traders sold low-quality
goods at high prices and encouraged indebtedness. He was involved with
the liberal, nationalist society, the *Deutsche Nationalverein*
(whose members were later to form a similarly motivated political
party, the *Deutsche Fortschrittspartei*) attempting to achieve
German unification.



Lange's political activism brought him into conflict with various
authorities. He had to quit his teaching post because of political
problems in 1862. The school authorities had issued a decree in
January warning teachers not to engage in "agitation".
Lange attempted to organize the teachers against the decree. He
followed this up with a spirited public defense of the view that
teachers needed to be fully active citizens in order to lead their
students, by example, to the life of a true citizen (Lange 1862).
Lange continued to resist attempts by the authorities to bring state
employees, including teachers, into line. Another warning followed in
June and, despite failed attempts at reconciliation with the
authorities, Lange decided to leave his position at the end of the
school year. He became co-editor of the liberal *Rhein- und
Ruhrzeitung* and secretary of the Duisburg Chamber of Commerce.
The newspaper was an outspoken critic of the right-wing policies of
Bismarck, and already had strained relations with the authorities.
Lange also wrote for other papers and magazines, and often resorted to
publishing short pamphlets that were widely distributed. He joined the
management of a small publishing house with the intention of
publishing a series of popular works for the working class.



Despite working on a liberal paper, his own position shifted in the
socialist direction. His political positions split the editorial staff
of the newspaper, and alienated the members of the Chamber of
Commerce. He soon left the newspaper because he thought it was not
taking the interests of the working class seriously enough. Similarly,
he broke with the *Fortschrittspartei* and what he took to be
its anti-worker platform.



A crucial event in his political development was his participation, a
few weeks after Ferdinand Lassalle's death, in the second
Congress of the German Workers' Association, *Vereinstag
deutscher Arbeitervereine* (VDAV) in Leipzig in October 1864. The
VDAV was founded initially as a counterweight to Lassalle's more
radical, more Prussian, *Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiterverein*
(ADAV) (General German Workers' Association)--one of the
ancestors of the current Social Democratic Party. The VDAV was set up
as a loose organization, in contrast again to the ADAV, but acquired
more structure later as the Federation of German Workers'
Associations, *Verband Deutscher Arbeitervereine* (which kept
the same initials in German) (SED 1966, 216; Na'aman 1980).
Lange attended the 1864 Congress as a representative of his Duisburg
consumers' cooperative. He was elected to the Standing Committee
and attempted to mediate between various factions, in particular
between the Lassalleans of the ADAV and the more liberal participants
of the Congress. The politics were quite complicated, since there were
voices even further to the left of the leadership of the ADAV,
famously Marx and Engels. The disagreements were in essence about
which existing social, political, and economic structures and forces
should or had to be accepted and worked within, and which could and
should be replaced. The disagreements reflected splits between the
middle class and the working class. Despite his role as mediator,
Lange was clear that the workers must not be co-opted for a bourgeois,
liberal agenda, and that the workers' movement as a whole must
remain focused on the class interests of the working class (Bernstein
1892, 139; Mehring 1908, 368). Lange failed to succeed in his
mediating efforts, and felt compelled to explain his own position in
his *Arbeiterfrage* (*The Labor Question*) (Lange
1865a).



These political conflicts pushed Lange's plans to publish short
works for the working class into the background. He did publish two
smaller works (Lange 1863b, 1865c). He was also writing his most
famous book, *The History of Materialism*, during this time. In
his *Grundlegung der mathematischen Psychologie* (1865b), also
written during this time, he indicated that he had already finished
his *History of Materialism*. It eventually came out in print
in 1866.



With August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, Lange continued to try to
push the VDAV to the left: from the initial liberal position of
Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch to a position that took the interests of the
working class itself more seriously (Bebel 1958, 103; Hundt 1965;
Na'aman 1980, xxv). He also joined the International Working
Men's Association, the First International, in 1866 (Weikart
1999, 84). As the political repression increased, newspapers were no
longer willing to publish Lange's articles. Lange set up his own
newspaper, *Der Bote vom Niederrhein*, that ran from October
1865 to June 1866. Marx and Engels had turned down his initial request
for support for such a newspaper (Lange 1968b, 78-79; Irmer
1975,
 14).[5]
 Lange had intended the newspaper to help maintain unity within the
workers' movement, but he failed in these efforts (Hundt 1965,
694-96; Offermann 2002, 42, 147-148; Lange [1866] 1968a,
23 May 1866, 3 June 1866). By the end of this period Lange was
politically isolated, having broken with the liberals, and being
unwilling to fully join the socialists. (He did not attend the VDAV in
Nuremberg in 1868, despite Bebel's encouragement to do so; see Ridolfi
2015, 23). He was also losing hope in the working class, and felt that
the left was being outmaneuvered by Bismarck, in part because of the
international military successes of Bismarckian politics (Ellissen
1905, 7; Nipperdey 1985, 790-803). Discouraged, he left for
Switzerland.



He settled in Winterthur, became co-editor of the *Winterthurer
Landboten*, and joined a friend's publishing house. He
became very involved in Swiss politics, particularly in the movement
to reform the constitution and make it more democratic--a
movement that was particularly strong in his Zurich canton. He was on
the boards of many social organizations and on various state
committees as an expert on education, banking, and the railways
(Weinkauff 1883, 30). During this time, he also taught occasionally at
the Winterthur Gymnasium. He continued working on his contributions to
Schmid's education encyclopedia (Lange 1859-75) and he
responded to criticisms of the first edition of his *History of
Materialism* in *Neue Beitrage zur Geschichte des
Materialismus* (Lange 1867).



In 1869 he joined the Zurich faculty as a Privatdozent. He finished
the heavily revised second edition of the *Arbeiterfrage* in
1870. In 1870 he also finally received a professorship at Zurich,
though, unfortunately, this happened quite soon after he was diagnosed
with cancer. Despite the illness he continued working on the second
edition of *The History of Materialism* (Lange 1873-75).
After rejecting offers from Konigsberg and Wurzburg, he
accepted an invitation to take up a professorship at Marburg in 1872.
He gave lectures right till the end, but cancer eventually led to his
death on 21 November 1875 in Marburg.


## 2. Pedagogy



One of Lange's earliest intellectual interests was in
theoretical questions about the purpose and method of education.
Before he had even taken up his first job as a high school teacher in
Cologne, he was already thinking and writing about reforming the
German Gymnasium system. Like others, he was concerned that the
emphasis on the classics in the Gymnasia failed to prepare students
for a time in which the natural sciences were increasingly important
(Lange 1865a, 401).



Lange returned throughout his career to questions of pedagogy and the
history of pedagogy. Knoll concludes that, despite his many
publications and lectures on pedagogy, despite his collaboration with
K. A. Schmid on the *Encyklopadie des gesammten Erziehungs-
und Unterrichtswesens*, Lange appears not to have made a
significant impact, either on his contemporaries or in the history of
pedagogy (Knoll 1975a, 8). He attempted to give lectures on pedagogy
when he started teaching at the University of Bonn, but failed to
generate any interest among the students for his lectures (Knoll
1975b, 112-13). Knoll's claims are dubious, however. As
Beiser (2014a) points out, almost all professors in Jena at the time
had trouble attracting students to their lectures because "there
were not enough students", and it is hard to imagine that Bonn
was much different (p. 41). Moreover, Jacobsen (1999), Kohnke
(1991), and others observe that Max Weber counted Lange's
lectures among his favorites (Jacobsen 1999, 7 and passim), and that
the pedagogist Friedrich Paulsen, and the philosophers and pedagogists
Paul Natorp and Hans Vaihinger, among others, were influenced
significantly by Lange's work (Kohnke 1991, 211-213
and passim). Ultimately, Lange was to have a profound influence on Max
Weber (Jacobsen 1999). Finally, Lange's colleague in Bonn,
Friedrich Uberweg, wrote in his well-known and widely used
textbook *Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie* notes
Lange's influence on the pedagogist and educator Theobald
Ziegler (1846-1918) (p. 249).



Lange claimed that the purpose of education should be to produce
rational, cultured citizens. Lange tried to show that turning to both
the history of education and the history of pedagogy would throw light
on the question of how to produce such citizens. The history of
education would help us understand the way in which social, cultural
and political conditions interact to bring about specific kinds of
education in particular historical contexts (Lange 1855).



Creating free citizens and leaders requires that the teachers
themselves be actively engaged in their communities as citizens.
Teachers should not be prevented from political engagement, as only
politically engaged teachers will be able to communicate to their
students the love of freedom and fatherland. As he was later to
emphasize in his *History of Materialism*, simply instructing
people, including students, to be ethical--to be concerned with
the good of humanity in general--does not have much of an impact.
In the case of education one can have an impact by presenting a role
model and by being a personal inspiration for one's students.
His example is that of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, whom he believed was
able to shape his students' ethical views precisely because he
was so impressive as a person. This personality was the result of, and
constituted by, his active engagement with the political issues of his
time (Lange 1862).



Christian virtues were for Lange an essential part of education;
however, the relevant form of Christianity seems to be quite vague,
indeed bordering at times on some form of "indeterminate
pantheism" (Knoll 1975a, 13). This is no surprise given his
later discussions of religion (see below). Education, in the inclusive
sense of *Bildung*, also required instruction in philosophy.
Exposure to philosophy is an essential part of learning how to make
reasoned decisions. There must also be education in politics. This
gives one the requisite knowledge to participate in political affairs
and helps prepare one for being a citizen (Knoll 1975b, 123).



The importance of education, and the crucial role of the freedom of
thought in education, implied, for Lange, that any social entity
should have the right to set up schools and decide what should be
taught in them. The state should set up schools only where existing
structures of civil society have failed to generate enough schools.
The state should restrict the opening of a school only when it poses a
genuine threat to a legitimate state or explicitly promotes criminal
activity. There should be no requirement that there be any religious
instruction, let alone a requirement that any particular religion be
taught. In state schools, there should be no religious instruction
(Lange 1968b, 125-127).



Lange tries to take a middle position on the relative importance of
natural talent and social environment for both the method and results
of education. He grants that there probably are given differences in
dispositions, but maintains that the environment has a significant
influence on how these dispositions express themselves and on how
students' talents develop. He criticizes social Darwinist
theories that think there is no need to pay attention to the barriers
to development created by the lack of economic or social privileges
(Lange 1873-75, 255; Lange 1894a, 48-49). On the other
hand, he warns against an idealism that assumes fundamental human
equality of ability (Knoll 1975a, 19-20).



Finally, Lange went against contemporary trends to argue that pedagogy
should be informed by the emerging science of empirical psychology;
though he granted that empirical psychology was a very young
discipline that had so far failed to produce many compelling results
(Lange 1859-1875, "Seelenlehre", 142; Knoll 1975a,
16). He emphasized the importance of statistical methods--an
emphasis that was also quite prescient for the later development of
pedagogy (Knoll 1975a, 19).


## 3. The Labor Question



Lange developed an interest in, and sympathy for, labor movements in
their socialist and communist manifestations from the very early days
of his university career. He should probably be regarded as occupying
a middle position between left liberalism and socialism.



The first edition of the *Arbeiterfrage* was created in
response to heated debates about political strategy in the developing
labor movement. It was followed by a second and third edition that
took up more theoretical questions. The *Arbeiterfrage* was,
like the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and others of the
period, shaped by a direct experience of rapid industrialization. A
crucial consequence of this industrialization was the generation of an
impoverished urban working
 class.[6]
 The heart of this process in Germany was in the Ruhrgebiet and in the
Rhineland, where Lange lived. Lange concluded that the solution to the
problem of what to do about the working class, the
"Arbeiterfrage"--literally the "worker
question"--as it was called, must come from the workers
themselves. This required politically organizing the workers and their
organizations to form a front against the bourgeoisie (Irmer 1975,
2).



Lange's position is one of *socialist* Darwinism (as
opposed to *social* Darwinism). Lange accepted a modified
version of Thomas Malthus's concerns about the relation between
increases in population and food production: "The truth of the
Malthusian theory consists therefore in this, that the growth of the
population constantly reaches the limit that the growth of the means
of subsistence permits" (Lange 1975b, 31; Weikart 1999, 86).
This is an essential part of the explanation of the social conditions
of the working class. He quotes Darwin (Chapter 3 of *Origin*)
to emphasize that population pressure lies behind the struggle for
existence for all organisms. This, he emphasizes, includes humans
(Lange 1894, 2). Within capitalism, the struggle for existence for the
working class becomes a struggle for wages.



Malthus granted in principle that measures like contraception could
prevent the increase in population that reduces standards of living to
the subsistence level but he held out little hope. Lange was more
sanguine, but the positive note in his book may have come too late to
prevent its opening chapters from ensuring its unpopularity. The talk
of the struggle for existence, and the rigid-sounding laws that govern
it, could hardly have been inspiring to the workers' movement it
was meant for (Mehring 1960, 352). Nonetheless, Lange did not draw the
conclusions from Darwin that the social Darwinists did. He did not
take Darwinism as supporting capitalism, in part because he took it to
be a mistake to straightforwardly infer any normative conclusions from
the Darwinian explanatory claims: "Where Darwinism assumes that gross
changes can be explained in terms of the 'summation of slight
individual variations' over millennia, Lange suggests that this
will not suffice as an all-purpose explanatory framework. In some
cases, he thinks, it is necessary to appeal to organisms'
capacity to initiate rapid, deliberate change" (Clarke 2021, 299). In
keeping with this critical perspective, Lange seemed to regard the
principles appealed to in Darwin and Malthus as natural tendencies
that could be mitigated by human reason. These explanatory laws do not
determine how we should think, nor do they determine how we must
inevitably think:



> 
> In our present writing on the labor question Darwin plays a large
> role, insofar as we have attempted to derive the conditions which
> produce the labor question from the principles developed by Darwin,
> without, however, viewing them as absolutely necessary ingredients of
> human existence. (Lange 1975b, 30-31; Weikart 1999, 89)
> 



Just as human reason can control and mitigate the struggle for
existence among the plants we cultivate, it can control and mitigate
the struggle for existence among humans.



Once the quality of their living conditions becomes high enough, the
working class will become reasonable enough to be susceptible to
rational arguments in favor of having a reasonable number of children.
Their lack of rationality in this matter is a result of their misery
and ignorance. The improvement of living conditions to a sufficient
level requires organizing the working class so that they can demand
better wages and a decrease in the concentration of capital. This may
be possible while maintaining private property in the means of
production, but, if not, we should try for communism, or whatever
other path promises success, including various forms of mixed
economies. We will only learn slowly through experience what the best
system is (Lange 1866a, 113-114; Lange 1894a,
212-262).



It is important to note, given the political context in which Lange
was writing, that he did not seem to think that some revolutionary act
would bring us suddenly closer to such improved conditions of
existence. He saw the process of such development as a slow one.
Simply changing the legal property relations or the official structure
of the state will not be sufficient, he argues. What is required in
addition to changes in the structure of the state and the legal system
are fundamental changes in the way people think, which will always
take time. The reform of the state and laws provides the preconditions
for this change in consciousness, but does not bring about this change
immediately. Lange is careful not to deny that the kind of revolution
some socialists and communists supported could bring us closer to the
goal. But any such revolution would be merely one step in a long
process that will involve both progress and regress (Lange 1894a,
249-251).



On the other hand "the view that the state has nothing to do
with the matter" is just as mistaken (Lange 1894a, 250). Lange
criticizes the kind of self-help approach that some of the liberal
middle-class, in particular Franz-Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch, famously
pushed. Schulze-Delitzsch believed that the goals of the liberal
bourgeoisie and the working class did not have to be thought of as in
conflict.The problems facing the working class could be dealt with
within the existing capitalist mode of production. The working class,
to put it crudely, could, thanks to the help of a series of consumer,
credit and production cooperatives, educate itself and save enough
money to compete with capitalists on their own terms. Lange thought
this position was completely unrealistic, and that those who pushed it
failed to actually listen to the workers themselves. He criticized the
paternalistic attitude of these liberal reformers and mocked their
inability to even understand the dialects spoken by many of the
workers.



Marx and Engels disagreed strongly with Lange's position
(Weikart 1999, 31; Marx and Engels 1975, 43: 158, 527-528). The
view Engels expresses in a letter to Lange seems to be that taking the
Malthusian view requires treating what is a historical law, in other
words a contingent law that holds during a particular mode of
production, as an "eternal" law. The problem of producing
enough is a problem generated by the existing mode of production. The
technological means available then and in the future are and would be
more than enough to deal with any increases in population as long as
capitalism is overcome. Theories of eternal laws are part of an
ideology that supports the existing mode of production because they
present what are contingent laws as necessary, thus creating the
impression that the social order cannot be changed. This inhibits the
interest in changing society (Lange 1968b, 80-81; Marx and
Engels 1975, 42: 136).



They also disagreed about the usefulness of Hegel. Lange suspected
that Hegelian dialectic, even in the more empiricist and materialist
form that Marx deployed it, was not very useful for purposes of
explanation. He expresses his surprise that at a time in which Hegel
was no longer taken seriously in philosophy, Hegelian ideas could be
so influential in the workers' movement, in the thought of
Lassalle and Marx (Lange 1894a, 247-249, 260-262). Lange
had immense respect for Marx, and thought of him as the leading
economist of the time. However, he thought that when it came to
Marx's writings, the Hegelian "speculative form ...
tiresomely intrudes on the content of some parts of the work to the
disadvantage of its effectiveness" and undermines the effect of
the "astounding" display of detailed empirical evidence
(Lange 1894a, 248). Lange also thought that the emphasis on
revolution, and the thought that a revolution could somehow suddenly
change the conditions of the working class and the mode of production,
was also the result of the negative influence of Hegel. Marx and
Engels, on the other hand, were committed to some kind of dialectic
form of explanation. Marx thought that Lange's basic attitude
towards Hegel and dialectic was fundamentally
mistaken--"simply childish"--and, indeed, showed
that Lange "understands *rien* [nothing] about
Hegel's method and therefore, second, still less about my
critical manner of applying it" (Marx and Engels 1975, 43: 528).
There is evidence that Lange did understand what was at stake, though,
as is shown by his clear discussion of idealism in psychology, and in
the study of nature in general, in his "Seelenlehre"
(Lange 1859-1875, 144-45).



Lange had an indirect impact on what was later known as the
revisionist debate within socialism. Eduard Bernstein, the father of
revisionism, eventually broke with Marxian orthodoxy, and argued that
achieving socialism did not require a revolution, or at least that
much could be achieved by working within existing democratic political
structures. This was in part a result of Bernstein's developing
neo-Kantianism (Steger 1992). He claimed that it was primarily
Lange's work that led him to both Kant and revisionism
(Vorlander 1900, 47; Bernstein 1892). He suggests that when it
comes to articulating a path forward for socialism, "I would
translate 'back to Kant' by 'back to
Lange'" (Bernstein 1902, 187-88).


## 4. Neo-Kantianism


### 4.1 Materialism, Psychology without the Soul, and the Back to Kant Movement



The domination of German philosophy by Hegelian Idealism for the first
third of the nineteenth century was followed by a revival of
materialism. This was in part brought on by the criticisms of
Christian theology and supernaturalism in David Friedrich
Strauss's *The Life of Jesus* and the criticisms of
Christian theology and Hegelian idealism in the works of Ludwig
Feuerbach, most famously in *The Essence of Christianity*. The
revival was also given impetus by the recent successes and the
increasing prestige of the natural sciences. This new materialism was
represented by figures including Karl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, Eugen
Duhring, Ludwig Buchner, and Heinrich Czolbe. These
materialists explicitly took the natural sciences as their ideal.
Indeed, many of them were practicing natural scientists. (See Edgar
(2015), sections 6.2, 6.5, and *passim*, for analysis of
Buchner's and Lange's accounts of objectivity. See
Mayerhofer and Vanacek 2007 and Pecere 2000, ch. 4, for Lange's
psychology and its relationship to his philosophy.)



Lange thought that materialism faced serious problems; however, he
also thought that Hegelian idealism was bankrupt. What was needed was
a philosophical approach that would be compatible with the recent
successes of materialistic explanations as deployed by the natural
sciences but not simply be a form of materialism. Lange was one of the
first in this period to argue that the appropriate response to the
philosophical situation in Germany at the middle of the nineteenth
century was to return to Kant. (See Widmer, forthcoming, for a new
evaluation of Lange's positions on Kant. Beiser (2014) contains a
careful appreciation of Lange as a central figure in the "Coming
of Age" of Neo-Kantianism; see Patton (2015) and Edgar (2015)
for reviews of Beiser.) As Lange put it in a letter, "I take the
Hegelian System to be a step backward towards Scholasticism from which
we are really already free. Herbart, to whom I first attached myself,
was for me only a bridge to Kant, to whom so many honest researchers
return in order to, where possible, complete what Kant had only half
done: the annihilation of metaphysics" (Ellissen 1894, 106).
Lange was thus one of the founding figures in what was to emerge as
the neo-Kantian movement rallied by Otto Liebmann's slogan
"Back to Kant!"



While keeping much of the language of Kant, Hermann von Helmholtz,
among others, worked to change the questions being asked in
Kant's name and the methods used to find answers to these
questions. It is not easy to assess the degree of continuity between
the strands of neo-Kantianism that emerged and Kant's own
interests. Lange is sometimes taken as the founder of the Marburg
School of neo-Kantianism. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say
that Lange was a mentor of the first famous member of the Marburg
School, Hermann Cohen. The other well-known members were Paul Natorp
and Ernst Cassirer. The appendices of the second volume of Holzhey
(1986) contains Cohen's correspondence, including some
correspondence between Cohen and Lange. In general, Holzhey (1986) is
an excellent source of information on the foundation of the Marburg
School, as is Sieg 1994. Holzhey and Buee (2011) and Holzhey
(2005) explore the relationship between Cohen and Lange. Karl
Vorlander published a review of Cohen's lengthy
"Introduction" to Lange's *History of
Materialism* in 1897, in *Kant-Studien*.
Vorlander's brief review nonetheless sets out a number of
differences of method and conclusion between Cohen and Lange. In many
ways Hermann Cohen returned to a conception of the basic questions of
epistemology that was closer to Kant's, one Vorlander calls
"critical idealism". Lange, on the other hand, drew on
Helmholtz's early thought to conclude that the scientific
investigation of the physiology of the sense organs provided partial
confirmation of Kant's fundamental claims.



In the 1850s, Helmholtz had argued that contemporary science was
confirming on empirical grounds insights that Kant had had but that
Kant took as supported by a priori considerations. In his famous
address, "On Goethe's Scientific Researches", he
claimed:



> 
> The result of [scientific] examination, as at present understood, is
> that the organs of sense do indeed give us information about external
> effects produced on them, but convey those effects to our
> consciousness in a totally different form, so that the character of a
> sensuous perception depends not so much on the properties of the
> object perceived as on those of the organ by which we receive the
> information. (Helmholtz 1853, 13)
> 



The ground for this conclusion was supposed to be the fact, uncovered
by physiology, that nerves are not faithful transmitters of external
properties to consciousness (Helmholtz 1853, 13). Helmholtz inferred
from this his famous sign theory, according to which "our sensations
are for us only symbols of the objects of the external world, and
correspond to them only in some such way as written characters or
articulate words to the things they denote. They give us, it is true,
information respecting the properties of things without us, but no
better information than we give a blind man about colour by verbal
descriptions" (Helmholtz 1853, 14). Thus, Helmholtz argues,
"what the recent physiology of the senses has shown by the way
of experience is what Kant had tried to show for the representations
of the human mind in general when he laid out the participation of the
particular, built-in rules of the mind, the organization of the mind
as it were, in our representations" (Helmholtz 1855, 58).
Helmholtz thinks the confirmation of Kant goes further. The only way
to get from the "world of sensations" to the "world
of reality", the "external world", is through an
inference. We infer that there is an external world because there has
to be a "*cause* of our nerve excitations because there
can be no effect without cause." But, Helmholtz asks, "How
do we know that there is no effect without a cause?" This is not
a principle we could learn from experience, since it must be in place
before we can come to any conclusions about the world, including the
conclusion that cause follows effect. Thus, "the investigation
of sensory perception also leads us to what *Kant* had already
recognized, namely that the principle, 'No effect without
cause', is a law of our thought given before all
experience" (Helmholtz 1855, 77). Thus, as he puts it later,
what science shows us does not decide the question between idealism
and realism:



> 
> It is always good to keep this in mind so as not to conclude more from
> the facts than is warranted. The different shadings of idealistic and
> realistic opinions are metaphysical hypothesis which, so long as they
> are recognized as such, and however injurious they may become when
> represented as dogma or as supposed necessities of thought, are
> completely justified scientifically. (Helmholtz 1878, 360).
> 



One should wholeheartedly welcome the successes of natural science and
empirical methodology, but the naive realism of the materialists was
mistaken. The epistemological questions need to be taken
seriously.



Lange's most famous book, *The History of Materialism and
Critique of its Contemporary Significance*, is in essence a
defense of such a return to Kant. It is also a detailed history of
materialism (and was read well into the twentieth century for
precisely this reason). More fundamentally, *The History of
Materialism* was meant to drive home the above-mentioned concerns.
Lange accepted materialism as a sensible maxim for the construction of
theories within natural science. However, as a comprehensive
philosophical system, as both fundamental ontology and epistemology,
materialism is self-undermining.



Lange's *History* is divided into two parts. The first
part covers the history of materialism from the atomism of Democritus
till the time of Kant. It includes discussions of what Lange considers
to be reactions to materialism: the philosophical positions of Plato
and Aristotle and the theological positions taken by both Christian
and Muslim scholars. He includes a discussion of the dominance of
Aristotelianism in the writings of the Scholastics. Materialism
finally returns with the regeneration of science. In this context,
after discussions of Gassendi and Hobbes, he turns to Newton and
Locke. Finally he treats Leibniz as a German reaction to materialism.
The second part covers the history of materialism from the time of
Kant. The opening section of this part is a discussion of Kant's
own position in relation to materialism and sets the stage for
Lange's "back to Kant" arguments. These arguments
are directed against the contemporary forms of materialism mentioned
above.



Lange claims that "the empirical method has celebrated its
highest triumph" in the physiology of the sense organs. But this
triumph "at the same time ... leads us to the very limits
of our knowledge, and betrays to us at least so much of the sphere
beyond it as to convince us of its existence" (Lange
1873-75, 3:202; see also 2:158). Such physiological
investigation into the sense organs may initially look favourable for
the materialists, in that it promises to give us a materialistic
account of our knowledge of the world. In fact, it is deadly to
materialism as an ontology. Physiology shows us that the sense organs
do not show us how the world really is and indeed that our very
concept of matter may have nothing to do with what is really there in
the world (Lange 1873-75, 3:
 205-19).[7]



The arguments Lange deploys are drawn from research into the
physiology of perception, by materialist researchers and by Helmholtz
himself. For example, Lange claims that the physiology of our eyes
shows that the visual sensation of a single three-dimensional object
in front of me is in fact a composite generated from the two
two-dimensional stimulations of each of my retinas (Lange 1873-75,
3:203). Supposedly we learn that even the simplest of sensations is
not the result of a single natural process, but the combination of
many different processes (3:203-204). Furthermore, we learn that
"colours, sounds, smells, &c., do not belong to things in
themselves, ... they are peculiar forms of excitation of our
sensibility, which are called forth by corresponding but qualitatively
very different phenomena in the world" (3:217). Indeed,
according to these physiological accounts, only a very specific set of
vibrations is picked out and the rest are ignored (3:217). We learn
that there is a blind spot on the retina but that the brain fills in
the spot when constructing our image of the world (3:220). The
conclusion Lange wants us to draw from all of this is that the world
we think we see is radically different from the way the world really
is by materialism's own lights.



Lange considers the possibility that many of these then commonplace
arguments could perhaps be seen merely as arguments in favour of a
subjective account of secondary qualities, and that one could respond
by insisting that nonetheless the empirical theory we construct gives
us a correct account of the primary qualities. Indeed, for all that
has been said, someone might argue, we may still be warranted in
thinking that reality is composed of bodies in motion in space.
However, Lange wants to resist even this move, the "last refuge
of Materialism" as he calls it (3:224):



> 
> Just as the vibrations of the phenomenal world we have to deal with
> are related to the colours of the immediately seen, so too an
> entirely, to us, inconceivable order of things might be related to the
> order of time and space that rules in our perceptions.
> (3:224-225)
> 



For example, Lange claims that physical space could easily be of more
than three dimensions without that having any effect on our phenomenal
world (3:227). Thus materialism, as the belief in "material,
self-existent things" is thoroughly undermined: the
"consistent Materialistic view thus changes around, therefore,
into a consistently idealistic view" (Lange 1873-75,
3:215, 223).



In trying to understand Lange's position, it is helpful to see
the kind of view he thinks would escape these worries. Lange considers
one version of materialism in his book that he thinks does not
undermine itself. This is the position of Heinrich Czolbe, the author
of *Neue Darstellung des Sensualismus*. Lange credits him for
being the only one among the materialists to truly face up to the
problems regarding perception generated by materialism for itself
(Lange 1873-75, 2: 105).



Czolbe gets credit from Lange for facing up to the self-undermining
nature of materialism, precisely because Czolbe takes as central the
problem created by the above mentioned empirical arguments about the
nature of nerve processes in sense organs. He takes this to be the
problem that Feuerbach, Vogt, Moleschott, and others have not dealt
with adequately (Czolbe 1855, vi; Lange 1873-75, 3:286). Indeed,
Czolbe complains that the physiologists play right into the hands of
the speculative, idealistic philosophers, because they do not think
through the philosophical consequences of their physiological theories
(Czolbe 1856, 27-28). The only way to defeat the speculative
philosophers, Czolbe argues, is to insist that sensory qualities are
mechanically propagated through the nerves without any change (Czolbe
1855, 14; 1856, 15-16, 27-28). His view appears to be that
qualitative properties such as colours or sounds are transmitted
directly from the outside to the inside. The suggestion is that
colours and sounds exist independently of the subject. They are not
generated by the nerves, rather, they are transmitted to the inside of
the brain by the nerves. Of course, Czolbe was not ignorant of wave
theories of light or sound, but claimed that the wave particle already
is the colour or sound, which has only to be transmitted to the right
spot in the brain in order for us to be conscious of it. As Lange
mockingly emphasizes, the sound waves somehow involve the experience
of their sound in themselves already (Lange 1873-75, 2:111).
Czolbe appears to bite this bullet, and accepts Hermann Lotze's
description of his view, according to which



> 
> the sensible qualities of sensation are already completely present in
> the external stimuli, that from a red-radiating object a ready-made
> redness, from a sound source a melody, detaches itself in order to
> penetrate into us through the portals of the sense organs (Czolbe
> 1856, 14).
> 



If this were the correct view of how the sense organs work, then,
Czolbe claims, we would have an empirical account of knowledge that
was not self-undermining.



One immediate problem was how to defend such a view against the
empirical evidence then available. Consider, for example, something
Czolbe was aware of: the presence of electrical currents in nerves.
The worry for Czolbe is that light waves end up being converted to
electrical currents in the nerves, which might lead back to the
supposedly self-undermining empirical stories of the other
materialists. Czolbe's response is first to point out that it is
possible that both electricity and light--not just light waves
but the sensations of light--could be transmitted at the same
time. He then points to supposed empirical data that at the moment of
excitation the electrical current in the nerve weakens. This, he
thinks, is decisive evidence that the electrical current is not
responsible for transmission since if it were, the electrical current
would have to *increase* at the moment of excitation rather
than decrease (Czolbe 1855: 16-17).



Lange concedes that Czolbe's materialism, were it to actually be
supported by empirical evidence, is in principle able to avoid
undermining itself. To Lange, though, Czolbe has to twist the
empirical evidence, and so Czolbe's materialism ultimately does
undermine itself. Lange accuses Czolbe of being obstinate and treating
the results of scientific investigations in an unscientific manner, as
mere illusions that would disappear on closer examination (Lange
1873-75, 2:291).



Lange thus thinks he has good grounds for drawing the following
conclusions from his discussion of physiology and materialism:


1. The sense-world is a product of our organisation.
2. Our visible (bodily) organs are, like all other parts of the
phenomenal world, only pictures of an unknown object.
3. The transcendent basis of our organisation remains therefore just
as unknown to us as the things which act upon it. We have always
before us only the product of both. (Lange 1873-75, 3: 219)



He sees himself as agreeing with Helmholtz when Helmholtz
"resolves the activity of the senses into a kind of
inference" (Lange 1873-75, 3:228). It does not follow, he
emphasizes, that "the search for a physical mechanism of
sensation, as of thought, [is] superfluous or inadmissible. At length,
however, we see that such a mechanism, like every other represented
mechanism, must be itself only a necessarily occurring picture of an
unknown state of things" (Lange 1873-75, 3:229). He
concludes:



> 
> The senses give us, as Helmholtz says, *effects* of things, not
> faithful copies, let alone the things themselves. To these mere
> effects, however, belong also the senses themselves, together with the
> brain and the supposed molecular movements in it. We must therefore
> recognise the existence of a transcendent world order, whether this
> depends on "things-in-themselves", or whether--since
> even the "thing in itself" is but a last application of
> our intuitive thought--it depends on mere relations, which
> exhibit themselves in various minds as various kinds and stages of the
> sensible, without its being at all conceivable what an adequate
> appearance of the absolute in a cognizing mind would be. (Lange
> 1873-75, 3:230)
> 



That we do not have knowledge of this transcendent order shows us that
all metaphysics is, like art, a creation of the imagination.
Nonetheless we should still "in natural science everywhere apply
the same conceptions and methods as the Materialist; but what to the
latter is definitive truth is to the Idealist only the necessary
result of our organisation" (Lange 1873-75, 3:324).



As the nineteenth century came to a close, critics of the Back to Kant
movement, including Ernst Mach, began to question Helmholtz's
and Lange's appeal to the thing in itself. Edgar (2012)
identifies a "deep tension": Helmholtz and Lange
"wanted to conceive of things in themselves as the causes of our
sensations, while their own accounts of causal inference ruled that
claim out" (p. 1). Edgar (2012) goes on to argue that
"These Neo-Kantians' problems with things in themselves
were fully solved only by Ernst Mach, in the context of the
uncompromisingly austere theory of knowledge he developed in the early
1880s, in his 1882 'The Economical Nature of Physical
Inquiry' and his 1884 'Contributions to the Analysis of
Sensations'" (p. 2). While Mach is critical of Helmholtz
and of Lange, Edgar emphasizes nonetheless that:



> 
> In a context where German-speaking philosophers were responding in a
> variety of ways to a rapid accumulation of results in experimental
> psychology and the physiology of the sense organs, Mach's views
> of knowledge from the 1880s are in certain central respects continuous
> with the psychologistic epistemology that Back to Kant Neo-Kantians
> sought to articulate over the course of the 1860s and 1870s. Like
> Lange and others, Mach took Muller's and Helmholtz's
> physiological investigations of sensory processes as a model for how
> to marshal the methods of natural science in the project of explaining
> the cognitive processes that give rise to knowledge (p. 19).
> 



In summer 2015, a special issue of *Philosophical Readings*,
edited by Pietro Gori, focused on "Anti-metaphysical
Psychology". Gori (2015b) and Martinelli (2015), especially,
focus on Lange's place within the tradition of "psychology
without a soul", as Lange and Brentano dubbed it. The work of
Michael Heidelberger (2015, among other works) investigates
Lange's place in the physiological tradition.



Lange's *History of Materialism* is known to have had an
influence on Friedrich Nietzsche, who learned about Gustav Fechner and
others in the "psychophysics" movement from Lange's
work. Nietzsche went on to re-define philosophy as
"psycho-physiology" in *Beyond Good and Evil*
(Nietzsche 2002/1886, 23, see also Gori 2015a). George L.
Stack's *Lange and Nietzsche* brought the question of
Lange's influence on Nietzsche to the forefront. For critical
responses see Breazeale (1989), Seigfried (1989), Wilcox (1989), and
Pletsch (1991); also see Salaquarda (1978, 1979, and 1996), Leiter
(2013), Campioni (2019); Swift (2005). Stack responds to critics in
Stack (1989 and 1991). R. Kevin Hill assesses the influence of Lange,
Schopenhauer, and Kant on Nietzsche's thought (2003); for a
critical perspective see Clark and Dudrick (2005). Villarroel
Soto et al. (2020) and Slama (2019) assess the extent to which
Nietzsche can be considered a Kantian, and how Lange may have
influenced Nietzsche in this direction.



The section following details Lange's criticisms of metaphysics
and religion on the basis of materialism and scientific achievement,
and his argument that the ethical standpoint, like metaphysics, is a
creation of the imagination like Schiller's poetry. These ideas
are perhaps one reason why Nietzsche himself cited Lange as an
influence on his thought.


### 4.2 Ethics and the Critique of Religion and Metaphysics



According to Beiser's account (2014b), Lange's work in
*The History of Materialism* "succeeded in throwing the
materialists back on the defensive" (p. 95).
"Lange's book," Beiser writes, "appealed to
everyone who wanted the materialist critique of religion and its
scientific program but who also could not approve of its naive
metaphysics and its failure to account for basic human values"
(p. 95).



For Lange, the realization that metaphysics is a creation of the
imagination, similar to art, opens up a way to respond to the damaging
ethical consequences of the materialistic world view (Widmer,
forthcoming). Though he does seem to think that the materialistic
world views of many of his contemporaries influence their ethics, it
is less clear whether Lange thinks that the kind of materialism
discussed above actually entails any ethical positions. At times Lange
claims that both a normative principle of ethical egoism and a
principle of sympathy for humanity can both be "derived"
[*abgeleitet*] from theoretical materialism (Lange
1873-75, 3:260, 303). It is perhaps most charitable to read
Lange as suggesting that there is nothing in materialism that requires
one principle or the other, but that one could find oneself attracted
to either principle, even if one started from theoretical materialism.
His considered view appears to be that materialists have a plausible
explanatory account for certain kinds of human behaviour, but that
they slide from this plausible explanatory account to problematic
normative claims. His label "ethical materialism" seems to
be a label for the kind of ethical positions that materialists tend to
accept as a matter of sociological or psychological fact rather than
some particular ethical position required by materialism.



Lange begins by granting that regarding humans as egoists concerned
only with satisfying their desires may well be an abstraction that
allows for some degree of predictive success when it comes to
explaining human behaviour in the marketplace. The mistake the
materialist makes is "in confounding this abstraction with
reality" (Lange 1873-75, 3:233-237). The materialist
assumes that the abstraction of the rational egoist is an accurate
picture of all of human behaviour and, perhaps even more damagingly,
an ethical ideal for how we should behave. Part of the problem is that
ethical materialism has a mistaken account of the human good. It
claims that "a man is all the happier the more wants he has, if
he has at the same time sufficient means for their satisfaction"
(Lange 1873-75, 3:239). This is mistaken because what matters is
the nature of the want and, so Lange, the way the want comes about and
is satisfied (Lange 1873-75, 3:241). Finally serious concerns
about issues of distributive justice are avoided by what Lange
considers to be quite implausible appeals to "invisible
hand" arguments (Lange 1873-75, 3:242-259). As in
the case of Marx, this does not mean that Lange denies the usefulness
of markets in increasing productivity and encouraging technical
innovation. The problem with markets is that they generate inequality
and hinder human flourishing.



Lange thinks that materialism, or rather science in general, will
undermine religion, or at least traditional forms of it. He takes
seriously the concern that this might also undermine moral commitment.
He points out that it is not obvious how effective religion really is
in influencing moral behaviour. The New Testament's claim that
it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for
a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven seems to have little impact
on the acquisitiveness of contemporary Christian capitalists,
"while the servants of the Church sit at the tables of the rich
and preach submissiveness to the poor" (Lange 1873-75,
3:270-271). Such Christian ideas have encouraged universalistic
concern and have combatted egoism and this, other things equal, is
morally beneficial. What prevents these ideas from having more
influence, and more of a purely positive influence, is the dogmatic
form in which they appear, and the nature of the institution of the
Church itself. The power of the Church to force the acceptance of its
dogmas not only results in unwarranted beliefs but also in a general
debasement of our mental abilities (Lange 1873-75, 3:275).



Religion, like the other creations of our imagination, can have a
powerful influence. The mistake is to confuse such creations with the
knowledge that science provides (Lange 1873-75, 3:280). Lange
thinks that "the classification of religion with art and
metaphysics will at no very distant time be generally conceded".
The "great mass of believers of all religions" are
"in a state of mind like that in which children listen to
fairy-tales" (Lange 1873-75, 3:281). The coming
realization though that these are all fairy tales does not mean that
"the sense for poesy" is not important even when we are,
so to speak, adults (Lange 1873-75, 3:281). When it comes to
"the direction of the impulses towards the general good",
then "mere moral teaching will hardly be likely to produce a
frame of mind to which trumpet-peals and hymns are appropriate"
(Lange 1873-75, 3:299). We need to set up ideals, indeed
"[o]ne thing is certain, that man needs to supplement reality by
an ideal world of his own creation". This ideal world, these
myths, are meant to inspire us to be moral and help us overcome
"spiritual impoverishment" just as the myths, the ideals,
of Christianity can, at their best, inspire us (cf. Kant 1787,
A569/B597 and Kant 1793, SS17). His model is Schiller's
philosophical poetry (Lange 1873-75, 3:342-44; Lange
1897).



But what are these myths supposed to inspire us to? Are there
constraints on which myths we should create? This is not always clear
in Lange. As we have seen it does seem that at least we are supposed
to be inspired to be moral. This suggests that at least morality
itself is not a myth. But if it is not a myth, then does this mean
that we have some way of knowing moral truths--that morality
somehow escapes the problems raised for other areas of purported
metaphysical knowledge? Again, Lange's writings on this point
are not clear and there is some evidence that he was not quite sure
what position to take. Given the general emphasis on Kant, it comes as
no surprise that Lange would take seriously what Kant has to say about
this. What variation on Kant's view he finally accepts though is
harder to discern.



The version of Kant's view that Lange considers is the one
presented in the *Critique of Practical Reason*. Lange's
focus on this version, like his interpretation of Kant's views
on theoretical reason, set him apart from many later Kant scholars.
The *Critique of Practical Reason* shares with Kant's
other writings the claim that there is a fundamental law of practical
reason which is also the moral law. It focusses though on one
particular formulation of this law: "So act that the maxim of
your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a
giving of universal law". What is distinctive about the
*Critique* *of Practical Reason* is that Kant then
proceeds to give a distinctive account of how we come to know this law
or how this law is justified. He writes:



> 
> Consciousness of this fundamental law may be called a fact of reason
> because one cannot reason it out from antecedent data of reason, for
> example, from consciousness of freedom (since this is not antecedently
> given to us) and because it instead forces itself upon us of itself as
> a synthetic a priori proposition that is not based on any intuition,
> either pure or empirical. (Kant 1788, 5:31)
> 



According to this "fact of reason" version, we seem to
have a particular moral law forced on us in our mental lives and we
are unable to give any deeper justification of this moral law--it
is just a fact that we have to accept. It is a fact that I am bound by
the moral law. However, I could not be bound by the moral law unless I
could follow it and I cannot follow this moral law unless I am free.
Kant thus argues that we can conclude for practical purposes that we
are free.



Lange seems to accept the content of the law, and treats it as
supporting the kind of universalistic and impartial concern he sees as
standing in opposition to egoism. However, he is clearly worried about
whether Kant has really succeeded in providing a justification for the
moral law.



In the first edition of his *History*, he claims that any moral
philosophy could use this strategy and thus that "if Kant
believes that he has absolutely proved his [moral philosophy], then he
simply commits the usual mistake of all metaphysicians". In the
first edition, this claim comes near the end of the section on Kant,
and is immediately followed by a summary of what he takes to be
Kant's "Copernican Revolution": (i) "The world
of appearances is a consequence of our concepts". (ii)
"The ideas", in Kant's sense presumably of concepts
of reason whose objects are not such that they could be met in
experience (Kant 1787, A311/B368-A320/B377), "give us no
knowledge, rather they lead us to an imagined world. It is precisely
in this that their usefulness lies. We deceive ourselves when we try
to increase our knowledge through them; we enrich ourselves when we
make them the foundation of our actions." (iii) "The one
absolute that man has is the moral law and from this fixed point a
secure order can be brought to the unstable world of the ideas".
After this summary of what he takes to be Kant's position, Lange
declares his support for (i) and (ii) but seems to reject (iii) for
grounds similar to those we have already seen. Kant's claim that
his moral law is a fixed point is somehow "subjective" and
shows Kant as being a child of his times. According to Lange, the
lasting achievement of (iii) is the more general claim that "the
ideal is no longer to be judged by supposed evidence but rather by its
relationship to the ethical ends of mankind" (Lange 1866b,
277-78). This is where the discussion of the fundamental moral
law in the first edition ends. It leaves open the question of what
ethical ends are supposed to be used to judge the ideals we create in
our myths, and of how we are supposed to defend these ethical ends
without becoming metaphysicians.



In the second edition of his *History*, the claims quoted in
the previous paragraph have been removed. After giving a brief summary
of Kant's appeal to a "fact of reason" and his
argument for freedom, Lange does not go on to suggest that Kant may be
making the mistake of all metaphysicians. Rather, he writes: "So
far Kant's doctrine of freedom is perfectly clear
and--apart from the question of the *a priority* of the
moral law--invulnerable" (Lange 1873-75, 2:229). What
follows is a new discussion of Kant's conception of our freedom
and worries about our freedom being apparently restricted only to the
noumenal realm. Lange does return to declarations in favour of
constructing ideals, but gives no further explanation of how we are
supposed to find ethical ends, or a moral law, that guides the
construction of these ideals, nor, for that matter, what problem in
specific lies behind the above mentioned "question of the *a
priority* of the moral law" (Lange 1873-75).



One possible reason for the changes to the material on Kant between
Lange's first and second editions is the influence of Hermann
Cohen, Lange's protege and the founder of the Marburg School of
Neo-Kantianism. As Sieg (1994) details, Cohen published his major work
*Kant's Theory of Experience* in 1871, in which he
criticized "Lange's understanding of the Kantian a priori
as a naturalist misinterpretation" (p. 104). By November 1871,
Lange and Cohen were in correspondence, and Lange indicated that he
was impressed by Cohen's criticisms. According to Sieg (1994),
Lange's second edition shows that he is interpreting the Kantian
thing in itself as a "limiting concept [Grenzbegriff]" in
Cohen's sense (p. 104). For an account of the development of
Lange's thought on this score, and of the mutual influence of
Lange and Cohen, see Adelmann (2012), pp. 83-93.



Beiser (2014b) suggests that some of the changes between the first and
the second editions of the *History of Materialism* were
prompted by a sea change in the prevailing view in the natural
sciences. The older theories of Czolbe, Buchner, and Vogt had
been spectacularly superseded by Darwinism and its interpretations by
his German exponents, Ernst Hackel and Carl Gegenbauer (p. 96).
Beiser notes that Darwinism's triumph should not be read as
"a vindication of materialism itself" (p. 96). As Hermann
Lotze observes, Darwin's explanations of organisms and species
did not require that those organisms or species be viewed as reducible
to solely material objects (see Beiser 2014b, p. 96). Nonetheless, the
increasing dominance of Darwinism in Germany meant that the
materialist program dwindled in influence as a scientific project, and
so its broader impact was checked as well. Lange's death in 1875
coincided with the rise of Darwinism in Germany, and thus his
responses to this change in the intellectual context were limited.


### 4.3 Logic and Scientific Methodology



When Lange died in 1875, he was working on a revision of the
*History of Materialism*, and on the first part of a work
called the *Logische Studien* (*Logical Studies*).
Hermann Cohen saw the *Logische Studien* to press and wrote a
short introduction. While the argument of the *Logische
Studien* remains incomplete, it makes several contributions, some
ahead of their time. Thiel (1994) and Patton (2011) are appreciations
of the *Logische Studien*, Wille (2011) is a review of Patton
(2011). Bellucci (2013) examines accounts of diagrammatic reasoning in
Lange and in Charles Sanders Peirce.



The first chapter of the *Logische Studien* situates
Lange's text in the tradition of wissenschaftliche
Erkenntnistheorie, loosely, scientific epistemology. This tradition
responds to the successes of materialism and empirical science
mentioned above, by focusing on scientific methodology. Johann
Herbart, a founder of empirical psychology, and Friedrich Adolf
Trendelenburg, a philosopher and classicist, are particularly
important for Lange (see Patton 2011, Haaparanta 2009). Herbart had
argued that scientific methodology and inference could be based on
psychology (Maigne 2002, Hatfield 1990). Trendelenburg responds
that the logic of science should establish how the content of
scientific theories is proven with certainty, which cannot be
accomplished within any particular science, but only in an overall
critique of scientific thought and methods (Trendelenburg 1862,
9-10).



Lange responds to Herbart by arguing that, while the synthesis of
representations (in Kant's sense) can be explained
psychologically, the reasons why that synthesis are necessary and
apply to objects are not reducible to psychology. However, Lange does
argue that the natural and the normative explanations of necessity are
compatible, and that this explains our access to normative
conclusions. As Ernst Schroder points out, "In striving for
our goals, we can thus take comfort in the belief that under certain
knowable conditions the objective necessity that we are searching for
will always also become subjective. Namely, if we are talking about
the unification of unmediated contradictions, then both formal
necessities will always occur together. In this context, F. A. Lange
remarks very aptly, 'The law of non-contradiction is the point
at which the *natural law* of thought comes into contact with
the *normative law*'" (Schroder (1890),
11-13, citation from Lange (1877), 27-28).



Lange agrees with Trendelenburg that logic, like epistemology of
science, ought to concern itself with an analysis of necessity, which
informs Lange's response to Herbart. However, Lange disagrees
with Trendelenburg on the status of logic. Trendelenburg was what
might be called a neo-Aristotelian logician. He wrote several works on
Aristotelian logic, especially the logic of the categories. As such,
Trendelenburg works on what Lange refers to as the "traditional
logic of content". Lange considers that this has been superseded
by the new, English "logic of extension," associated with
John Venn and others.



One major goal of Lange's book is thus to show that the formal
inferences of Aristotelian logic, the syllogistic, can all be captured
within the logic of extension, which might now be called propositional
logic. Lange accomplishes this in the next few chapters of the book.
He does so by using Euler-Gergonne diagrams, which would now be called
Venn diagrams--but Lange died before Venn first published the
Venn diagrams in 1880 (in "On the Forms of Logical
Proposition", in the journal *Mind*). In *Symbolic
Logic*, published the following year, Venn remarks:



> 
> When the substance of this chapter was first written out for
> *Mind* I was unable to ascertain that any attempt had been made
> to reconstruct the syllogistic figures upon this propositional scheme.
> I have since found that almost exactly the same results as are given
> here had been already obtained by F.A. Lange, in his admirable
> *Logische Studien*, though from a somewhat different point of
> view (Venn (1881), 17n).
> 



Another major goal of the book is to argue for the notion that all
certain or "apodictic" (sometimes spelled
"apodeictic") scientific inference is the same in kind.
Again, although Lange does not agree with Herbart that a naturalistic
description of thought can capture the necessity of scientific proofs,
he disagrees with the notion that only derivation from a priori
principles yields certain knowledge. The year after Lange's book
appeared, J. A. Stewart reviewed the work in *Mind*,
saying:



> 
> The metaphysicians have had it so much their own way since
> Aristotle's time that the mere *form* of deduction has
> come to be identified with the apodeictic, however disputed in each
> system the principles may be and the conclusions derived from them.
> The professor of a systematic metaphysic thus elevates himself above
> the man of science to whom he denies the apodeictic (Stewart 1878,
> 112).
> 



As Lange puts it,



> 
> According to the metaphysicians' account, Faraday has no
> knowledge of magnetism, Meynert no knowledge of the construction of
> the brain, Helmholtz's doctrine of the sensations of tone or his
> physiological optics are not science, because they are not deduced
> from *physei proteron*, but are built on experiments; maybe, at
> most, those elements that can be deduced solely and entirely from
> mathematical principles can be called "science" (Lange
> (1877), 6).
> 



Lange tries to steer a middle course, between "the
metaphysicians' account" and the "bare"
materialism he rejects in the *History of Materialism*. This
leads him to reject Hegelian idealism (see above), but also to put
into question some elements even of the Kantian system. Seventy-four
years before the publication of Quine's "Two Dogmas of
Empiricism", Lange explicitly rejects the analytic-synthetic
distinction:



> 
> It is known that Kant took *mathematical* judgments in general
> to be synthetic, and that to him, mathematics is the primary proof
> that there are judgments that are synthetic, but at the same time are
> connected with the consciousness of *necessity* and thus, as
> Kant concluded, are not empirical. This theory was new; but since then
> the view has been prevalent that even mathematical judgments are
> analytic and rest on the principle of contradiction. This view finds
> energetic adherents even to this day, to whom Kant himself essentially
> handed a weapon in the form of his view of the purely analytic nature
> of formal logic. In fact, it can be proven that *the nature of all
> necessarily valid judgments is essentially one and the same* and
> that it follows from this that they are either all synthetic, or all
> analytic, or that this distinction in the Kantian, exclusive sense is
> not correct at all. In fact, the latter is the case (Lange (1877), 9).
> 



A recurring theme in the *Logische Studien* is Lange's
belief in the essential unity of apodictic, certain and necessary,
judgments. It is for this reason that he does not think the methods of
science can be reduced to derivation from metaphysical first
principles, to the inferences of analytic formal logic, or to a
naturalist, purely descriptive psychology.



Lange's commitment to the unity of valid inferences even leads
him to reject another Kantian distinction, that between thought and
intuition:



> 
> it can be shown, that "intuition" of any object in general
> cannot arise without the cooperation of spontaneity. Conversely, even
> in the most abstract objects there is no thought without intuition
> (Lange 1877, 9).
> 



Lange's rejection of two distinctions central to Kantian thought
are one argument against placing him squarely in any neo-Kantian
tradition. However, Lange's work in the *Logische
Studien* and in the "Standpoint of the Ideal" chapter
are difficult to reconcile with a purely empiricist stance either, so
he is difficult to place in the philosophical tradition. In addition,
Lange concludes the *Logische Studien* with an intriguing, but
somewhat perplexing, appeal to neo-Platonist thought in explaining his
theory of space and time. In general, while it is true that Lange
proposed rejecting these fundamental Kantian distinctions, there is
reason to question whether he conceived of a coherent view that
dispenses with them. For instance, Lange suggests that certain logical
inferences are based on manipulations of the "formal"
aspects of our representations, but, arguably, Lange does not explain
how we are to distinguish formal from material in this context (see
Patton 2011, 150-151).



The footnotes and first chapter of the *Logische Studien*
reveal the extent to which Lange was engaged in discussions with
philosophers in Bonn and in Berlin who were particularly interested in
the methodology of science, including Hermann Cohen, Friedrich Adolf
Trendelenburg, Friedrich Uberweg, and others. These late
nineteenth century discussions set the stage for the work of more
well-known philosophers of science of the early twentieth century.
Lange's work in this context is a counterpoint to the
neo-Kantian and materialist traditions.


## 5. Lange as Intellectual and Activist



Lange's work was seen as a potent response to the intellectual
and practical crises provoked by the materialist positions dominant in
Germany in the mid-19th century. Along with the neo-Kantians including
Cohen and Windelband, Lange saw the positions of Czolbe, Vogt,
Buchner, and other materialists as (justifiably) undermining
long-held religious and metaphysical positions. Drawing on his views
on practical pedagogy and workers' rights, Lange developed a
form of "socialist Darwinism" (Weikart 1999) and defended
a Kantian "ethical standpoint of the ideal" to replace
what he saw as religious and metaphysical dogmatism.



Throughout his career, Lange was remarkable for his practical
engagement in political and workers' movements. As discussed in
section 1 above, his commitment to the workers' movement led him
to participate in the second Congress of the German Workers'
Association. He formulated his political views in *Die
Arbeiterfrage* of 1865, which in turn led him to engagement with
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Ferdinand Lassalle, August Bebel, Eduard
Bernstein, and other significant political figures.



Lange's influence on nineteenth and twentieth century thought
included, but was not limited to, his influence on the nascent Marburg
school of neo-Kantianism (in this respect, see Sieg 1994, Kohnke
1991, Holzhey 1986). His engagement with Darwinism, materialism,
socialism, and Marxism contributed to his "unusually
strong" presence in the "intellectual climate of the final
quarter of the nineteenth century" in Germany (Jacobsen 1999,
7). Max Weber, the philosopher and pedagogist Friedrich Paulsen, and
others were influenced by Lange's work (Jacobsen 1999, see also
Braun 1881, Freimuth 1995). In fact, "Friedrich Paulsen, Paul
Natorp, and Hans Vaihinger, all describe their reading of Lange as a
conversion experience leading them into philosophy" (Hill 2003,
Kohnke 1991, 211-213).



Friedrich Albert Lange is a figure whose influence and thought remains
to be judged accurately, especially in the Anglophone tradition. His
influence as a teacher and as a mentor was as strong as were his more
public intellectual contributions. The positions Lange carved out were
not merely a response to nineteenth century intellectual movements
including neo-Kantianism, materialism, Marxism, and Darwinism, though
they were regarded widely as effective responses. Lange conceived
independent and influential positions in logic, in national economy,
in pedagogy, and in epistemology. He did so while pursuing a career as
an activist and social organizer. His place in the history of
philosophy, of politics, and of science remains to be established by
future scholarship.