In this book Frederick Beiser continues his exploration of German idealism into a period represented predominantly by Adolf Trendelenburg and Hermann Lotze. These two are presented as the ‘most important but most neglected’ philosophers (7) of the period, with traceable links both back to Kant, Hegel and early German Romanticism and to later philosophers such as the neo-Kantians, Brentano and Frege. Beiser documents these connections in considerable detail but regards his exploration as introductory (15) and mainly historical (131, 151). He treats each philosopher separately while noting the connections and relations between them, and devotes almost twice as much space to Lotze as to Trendelenburg. The result is an illuminating account of the two careers in which their lives and philosophical work are chronologically related.
The picture which Beiser paints of the two men shows that they shared some central views but also diverged in their approach to philosophy. Both reacted strongly against aspects of Hegel’s thought, particularly his logic and dialectical method, and both pursued their own interests in the shadow of Kant and his later interpreters. They variously accepted and rejected vital parts of Kant’s work, as they interpreted it, but could not escape that influential background. Both sought a systematic and unified worldview, and both saw a major task as that of overcoming the problematic conflicts in various dualisms (e.g. intuition/concept, fact/value, subject/object, thought/being) inherited from a Kant seen through the eyes of Hegel. Their main divergence of approach comes from their different backgrounds. Trendelenburg came to philosophy through the Greeks and sought throughout his career, according to Beiser, to combine the merits of Plato and Aristotle with a recognition of the authority of mid-nineteenth-century science. Lotze, by contrast, began his academic career as a physiologist and medic whose interests spanned both a unifying teleological metaphysics with similarities to Trendelenburg’s view but also detailed work as a doctor and a theorist of medical science, physiology, and latterly psychology. Their personal differences seem well captured in the splendid jacket images of the two men. Trendelenburg appears well-established, self-confident, even somewhat patronizing; Lotze looks more diffident, self-effacing, intellectually but not physically tough. Despite the apparent differences Beiser notes a basic requirement in both philosophers which links them to the early German romantics, namely to regard life and philosophy as a work of art (99, 315).
Beiser’s account of Trendelenburg emphasizes his early commitment to, and scholarly work on, the Greek philosophers and goes on to outline his central philosophy in Logische Untersuchungen (1840) and Naturrecht auf dem Grunde der Ethik (1860). A final projected Ethische Untersuchungen was never written. Trendelenburg is represented as a well-established philosophical power in Berlin, heavily involved in the social and political issues of the 1840s and with a long-standing influence on educational policy. He played an active part in the constitutional debates in those political upheavals as a right of centre liberal and worked with the Prussian ministry of education in part to ensure that philosophy remained on the Gymnasium curriculum. The centrepiece of his philosophy was an organic, teleological metaphysics, which had at its heart a belief in the primacy of the concept of ‘motion’, or perhaps better ‘development’ or ‘process’ towards some underlying goal. It is easy to see in that basic idea a reference to Aristotle, but the doctrine was designed to accommodate also contemporary ideas about science. Trendelenburg believed that only by insisting on the primacy of such a concept of ‘motion’ could the truth of mathematics or the application of mathematics to nature be guaranteed (44–6). Only in this way could it be shown that mathematics expresses the structure of nature. Beyond that central doctrine his more general philosophical interests ranged widely over the work of Spinoza and issues in aesthetics, ethics, politics and religion.
That philosophical development is mapped in Beiser’s book from the early work on Greek philosophy and criticism of Hegel’s dialectic to a metaphysics which aspired to be ‘idealism without subjectivism; and realism without materialism’ (68). Though Trendelenburg rejected Hegel’s position he nevertheless accepted Hegel’s problems about reconciling apparently opposed dichotomies such as subject and object, fact and value, or thought and being. Trendelenburg’s central motives are shown to rest on a rejection of materialism, positivism and naturalism, and though his form of idealism was developed under the influence of Kant he notoriously rejected what he took to be Kant’s subjectivism. For Trendelenburg Kant in denying transcendental realism had prevented mathematics from holding of reality, or, as he puts it of ‘things in themselves’ (59), and had blocked any adequate justification for our knowledge of the real world. According to this view Kant left us with a second-class knowledge only of subjective appearances rather than an adequate knowledge of real things in themselves. Those latter convictions came vividly to the surface in the polemic with Kuno Fischer, for which perhaps Trendelenburg is now most remembered. Beiser offers a well-judged, brief, account of that debate, which stresses that the disagreement ranged over more than merely the issue of Kant interpretation about the supposed ‘neglected alternative’ from the Aesthetic. But the brevity of the discussion reflects Beiser’s reasonable view that the polemic has little if any real philosophical value. Something similar is implied in Beiser’s overall assessment of Trendelenburg’s philosophical legacy, which half-heartedly gives him no more than a limited place in the history of philosophy as the preserver of a tradition (123).
Beiser’s account of Lotze is longer and, despite some concise criticisms, more sympathetic than his account of Trendelenburg. It notes the philosophical origins of Lotze’s thinking in several literary romantic works of poetry and an unfinished novel, Die Deutschen. It surveys the development of his professional and philosophical interests in medicine, physiology and psychology in such works as Allgemeine Pathologie und Therapie (1842), Allgemeine Physiologie des körperlichen Lebens (1851) and Medicinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele (1852). But the focus of his attention is on Lotze’s early Metaphysik (1841), and on the culmination of his philosophical worldview in the three volumes of Mikrokosmos (1856–64). Beiser describes the philosophy resting on these works as ‘near a masterpiece’ in its harmonious unification of other available philosophical theories (315). He notes that a projected System der Philosophie was never completed and reserves its first two volumes (1874–9) for later discussion. Lotze’s interests, like Trendelenburg’s, also ranged widely over the history of philosophy, focusing not so much on the Greeks as on Leibniz and Spinoza, as well as on aesthetics, logic, moral, political and religious philosophy. Like Trendelenburg Lotze was hostile to materialism, though his work in medicine and physiology acknowledged the explanatory primacy of material mechanisms. In Mikrokosmos and other works, however, the ultimate priority is firmly given to ‘ideas’, to spirit rather than mechanism (233), in a worldview which can be labelled ‘ethical idealism’ (278–80) instead of an earlier ‘teleological idealism’ (163, 267). Beiser offers a discussion of Lotze’s changing attitudes to ‘spiritualism’ and ‘panpsychism’, and critically notes a potential circularity in the relations Lotze canvassed between his metaphysics and his ethics (290, 296).
Beiser’s account demonstrates the similarities between Trendelenburg’s and Lotze’s metaphysical worldviews, the wide range of their philosophical interests, and the indefatigable industry with which they prosecuted them. Both were involved in polemical disputes, Trendelenburg vigorously at first with Fischer and Lotze reluctantly with Heinrich Czolbe; but their lives were markedly different. Trendelenburg became a prominent academic and political figure in Berlin society while Lotze kept out of politics and public life and was happiest in the more secluded atmosphere of his years in Göttingen. The story Beiser outlines is personally and historically illuminating, while the survey of the two men’s philosophical ideas is not only detailed and comprehensive but succeeds in locating their position between Kant and Hegel on one side and later philosophers such as Brentano and Frege on the other. But Beiser describes his book as ‘introductory’ and plainly raises an underlying question about the philosophical value to us of the two men’s work. Two questions in particular naturally arise from the discussion; one is whether either Trendelenburg’s or Lotze’s philosophical legacy has anything to teach us now; another is whether their work throws light on how we should understand the notion of ‘idealism’.
As to the former Lotze seems closer to current issues by virtue of his position at the beginning of a scientific psychology and his perceptive links through logic with the later Frege. Beiser stresses Lotze’s emphasis on an anti-naturalism derived from appeal to ‘value’, ‘meaning’ and ‘intension’, and this evidently has echoes in current views about physicalism and the adequacy of extensional logic. Trendelenburg seems to point more decisively backwards to the Greeks and has less of a connection with current views. But few philosophers nowadays would aspire to construct a unified metaphysical worldview with the idea of a single purpose governing the whole of reality. Most would, I think, regard such a goal as too ambitious for philosophy and would in any case find it hard to see how such a metaphysical worldview could be adequately established. They might look to Trendelenburg and Lotze to see how they hoped to establish such a view, but Beiser’s work suggests that those two philosophers were never quite clear about the status of their position or, consequently, about the right way to establish it. Sometimes their central view seems to do no more than to offer a consistent way in which certain conflicting concepts, particularly mechanical, material explanation and spiritual, intensional purpose, can coexist. As a work of art their metaphysical picture may then claim only fictional intelligibility rather than literal truth. At other times they seem committed to the stronger belief that their metaphysical worldview is true and can be demonstrated to be so. That stronger view is most obviously expressed in their final position, to put it in Kantian terms, that the central claim of such a worldview is constitutively true rather than just regulatively heuristic. But here it is natural and tempting to think that they might have done better to follow Kant rather than disagree with him.
As to the second question both Trendelenburg and Lotze inherited some form of idealism from Kant and Hegel, but as Beiser makes clear (e.g. 55–9) there are different conceptions of the doctrine in the context. Crudely we might say that at least a central part of Kant’s (transcendental) idealism raised a Cartesian/Berkeleyan question about a justification for belief in external objects on the basis of subjective sense experience. Kant himself answered that question in his Refutation of Idealism by providing such a justification for what he would call ‘empirical (not transcendental) realism’. But both Trendelenburg and Lotze pay more attention to a conflict between material mechanism and organic purpose than to one between private sense experience and public outer objects. Both firmly regarded their idealism as ‘objective’ and both insisted that in their doctrine nature, or reality, conforms to the ideal (or to the ‘idea’) (14, 55). But that conformity relates nature to an overall purpose rather than relating sense experience to external objects. Where that earlier Kantian issue is addressed Beiser makes clear that the discussion is ‘insufficient’ (55–9), but the situation is worse than this. For at least in Trendelenburg’s case his argument attempted to establish the real existence of ‘things in themselves’ and so of a ‘transcendental (not empirical) realism’ which Kant repudiated. In the end Trendelenburg’s and Lotze’s idealism insists minimally on the compatibility of mechanism and purpose in nature; where they go further, in claiming that purpose or spirit is primary and mechanism or matter secondary (233), the argument becomes less clear.
Beiser has told an intriguing and sympathetic story about the life and work of Trendelenburg and Lotze, and provides a helpful introduction to guide anyone who wishes to explore their philosophical views.
