LANGE, FRIEDRICH ALBERT. — German philosopher, born at Wald near Solingen on 29 September 1828, died at Marburg on 21 December 1875. After teaching actively in secondary schools and serving as Privatdozent of psychology and pedagogy at Bonn (1855), he became professor of philosophy at Zurich (1870), and then at Marburg (1872). He may be regarded as the founder of neo-Kantianism. His principal work is the Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (Iserlohn 1886; reprint, with modifications by the author himself, in 1873; 7th expanded ed., Leipzig 1902; new ed. there 1921; Italian trans. by A. Treves, 2 vols., Milan 1932), one of the finest contributions to nineteenth-century German historiography and still highly useful today.
L.’s neo-Kantianism matured through the historical-critical reconstruction of materialism; even granting materialism’s fundamental thesis (the explanation of spiritual activity by the law of the conservation of force and by the functioning of the nervous system and, in general, of the physiological organism), it nevertheless remains true that all material facts are representations of the subject and therefore that physical reality is such insofar as our mental constitution makes it appear so. Our experience depends on our intellectual organization; if we were organized differently, we would experience and think differently (and this is what occurs with other differently organized beings), and therefore objects would appear different (Gesch. d. M., cited trans., I, p. 6). Thus, the sensible world is nothing but a product of our organization, and our bodily organs (like everything in the phenomenal world) are merely images of an unknown object; consequently, the transcendental foundation of our organization is unknown to us (ibid., II, p. 423). For L., it is impossible to leave the phenomenal in order to reach the noumenal or the thing in itself. It is evident that in this way L. does not criticize materialism on the basis of Kantian criticism, but interprets Kant empiricistically (and does not exclude the possibility that in the future Kantianism might be translated into physiological terms). Nor, for L., can moral and aesthetic values be apprehended outside the phenomenal world, to which positive knowledge is confined by an insurmountable limit.
But man cannot be content with this knowledge and therefore, through «poetic creation», creates an ideal world, that intelligible world of which Kant and Plato speak, without having become convinced that it is not an object of demonstrative science. Thus L., ultimately, ends up supporting materialism: what man knows and understands is only the corporeal world, whose boundary can be crossed only by poetic fantasy. This does not mean, however, as some critics have maintained, that L. makes reality evaporate into the realm of phantoms: creative fantasy is not idle fancy, but an activity that reveals a reality that is not deceptive. In the same way, religion has value not merely because of its theoretical content, but because it raises man above the phenomenal and creates (it too is «poetic») a spiritual homeland.
Other principal works: Die Grundlage d. math. Psychologie (Duisburg 1865); Die Arbeiterfrage (there 1865; Leipzig and Berlin 1910); Beitr. zur Neubegründung d. formalen Logik u. d. Erkenntnistheorie (Iserlohn 1877); furthermore, together with F. Weinkauff: Die päpstl. Rundschreiben u. di 80 verdammten Sätze (against the Syllabus, anonymous, 1865; under the title Antisyllabus, 1875).