LANGE, FRIEDRICH ALBERT. — German philosopher, born at Wald near Solingen on 29 September 1828, died at Marburg on 21 December 1875. After actively teaching in secondary schools and as a Privatdozent in psychology and pedagogy at Bonn (1855), he became professor of philosophy at Zurich (1870), and then at Marburg (1872). He may be considered the founder of Neo-Kantianism. His principal work is Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (Iserlohn 1866; revised by the author himself in 1873; 7th enlarged ed., Leipzig 1902; new ed. ibid. 1921; Italian trans. by A. Treves, 2 vols., Milan 1932), one of the finest contributions to 19th-century German historiography and still highly useful today.
Lange’s Neo-Kantianism matured through the historical-critical reconstruction of materialism. Even if one accepts the fundamental thesis of materialism (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 remains the case that all material facts are representations of the subject, and therefore physical reality is such only 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 so it is for other beings differently organized), and therefore the objects would appear different (Gesch. d. M., cited trans., I, p. 6). Hence, the sensible world is merely a product of our organization, and our organs, like the entire phenomenal world, are only images of an unknown object; therefore the transcendental foundation of our organization is unknown (ibid., II, p. 423). For Lange, it is impossible to go beyond the phenomenal to reach the thing-in-itself. It is evident that in this way Lange does not criticize materialism on the basis of Kantian criticism, but interprets Kant in an empiricist manner (and does not exclude the possibility that in the future Kantianism might be translated into physiological terms). For Lange, moral and aesthetic values also cannot be grasped outside the phenomenal world, which sets an impassable limit to positive knowledge.
Yet man cannot be satisfied with this knowledge, and so through poetic creation he constructs an ideal world, that intelligible world of which Kant and Plato speak, without, however, being convinced that it is the object of demonstrative science. Thus, in the end, Lange ends up giving reason to materialism: what man knows and knows about is only the corporeal world, whose limit can only be transcended by poetic imagination. This does not mean, however, as some critics have claimed, that Lange dissolves the real into the realm of phantoms: creative imagination is not fantastical, but a revelatory activity of a non-deceptive reality. In the same way, religion is not valid merely for its theoretical content, but because it elevates man above the phenomenal and creates (it too is poetic) a spiritual homeland.
Other principal works: Die Grundlagen der mathematischen Psychologie (Duisburg 1865); Die Arbeiterfrage (ibid. 1865; Leipzig and Berlin 1910); Beiträge zur Neubegründung der formalen Logik und der Erkenntnistheorie (Iserlohn 1877); also together with F. Weinkauff: Die päpstlichen Rundschreiben und die 80 verdammten Sätze (against the Syllabus, 1865; with the title Antisyllabus, 1875).