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HERMANN LOTZE — SCIENCE, BELIEF AND THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY
theory of knowledge which was adopted by a few thinkers in England to attack
the positivist trend there. There he was first known as a critic of Hegel, but
afterwards his whole work became appreciated.
Although it is excessive to say that Lotze was a Pragmatist avant la lettre,
William James, together with Charles Peirce (1839-1914) the father of Pragma¬
tism, came to modify his Pragmatism in line with what he learned in Gottingen.
James put aside the speculative metaphysical and immaterial world of Lotze,
to embrace the typical American way of looking at things. What is, is what
has success, instead of “what is, is what ought to be”. The influence of Lotze
on Edmund Husserl’s (1859-1938) Phenomenology could be summarized as
follows. Husserl took over the anti-psychologist attitude, but more radically
than Lotze, because he intended to eliminate all elements or viewpoints which
could be interpreted as subjectivist. After all Husserl wanted to design a scien¬
tific radical objective philosophy, thereby creating his concept of uniformity of
mental activity. At the same time Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) is the main, but
not the only link between analytic philosophy and Lotze. Central is his logic
and his anti-psychologist approach, but also the special relation between logic
and arithmetic. Analytic philosophy however developed rapidly away from an
Idealistic viewpoint.*
Apart from Lotze’s influence on different movements in thinking, attention
also can be focused on different fields. In the ethical domain, for instance,
Lotze showed the importance of appreciation, which he had discerned already
at the epistemological level. The feelings generate valuation, but the values,
experienced in concrete situations, do not solely depend on the feelings. The
feelings enable the existence of values. They are so to speak catalysts. In theol¬
ogy especially Lotze’s epistemology and concept of the soul are responsible for
the development of Protestant thinking in Germany and Methodism in the
USA, but also for the development of Personalism.
In aesthetics the beginning of the concept “aesthetic sympathy” can be
traced back to Lotze’s Grundzüge der Aesthetik. In system theory Reinhart
Pester found remarkable analogies between the system theory of Ludwig von
Bertalanffy (1901-1972) and what Pester calls Lotze’s “information” theory.’ As
to value theory, Lotze’s definition was somewhat ambiguous. The feelings are
3 Cf. MENDEHLSON, Richard L., The Philosophy of Gottlob Frege, Cambridge, Cambridge Univer¬
sity Press, 2005.
PESTER, Reinhart, Hermann Lotze: Wege seines Denkens und Forschens. Ein Kapitel Deutscher
Philosophy- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert, Würzburg, Königshausen & Neu¬
mann, 1997.; Davipson, Mark, Uncommon Sense: The Life and Thought of Ludwig von Bertalanffy
(1901-1971), Father of General Systems Theory, Los Angeles, J.P. Tarcher, 1983.
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