LANGE, FRIEDRICH ALBERT. - German philosopher, b. at Wald near Solingen on 29 Sept. 1828, d. at Marburg on 21 Dec. 1875. After having taught actively in secondary schools and as a Privatdozent of psychology and pedagogy at Bonn (1855), he was professor of philosophy at Zurich (1870), then at Marburg (1872). He may be considered the founder of neo-Kantianism. His principal work is the Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (Iserlohn 1886; reprinted with revisions by the author himself in 1873; 7th enlarged ed., Leipzig 1902; new ed. there 1921; Italian trans. by A. Treves, 2 vols., Milan 1932), one of the best contributions of German historiography of the last century and still today extremely useful.
L.'s neo-Kantianism matured through the historical-critical reconstruction of materialism; even granting the fundamental thesis of materialism (explanation of spiritual activity by the law of conservation of force and by the functioning of the nervous system and in general of the physiological organism), it nonetheless remains that all material facts are representations of the subject and therefore 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 so it happens for other beings differently organized) and therefore objects would appear different (Gesch. d. M., trans. cit., I, p. 6). Thus, the sensible world is nothing but a product of our organization and our bodily organs (like the whole phenomenal world) are only images of an unknown object; therefore the transcendental foundation of our organization is unknown to us (ibid., II, p. 423). To step outside the phenomenal in order to reach the noumenal or the thing in itself is for L. impossible. It is evident that in this way L. does not criticize materialism on the basis of Kantian criticism, but interprets Kant in an empiricist manner (and does not exclude that in the future a translation of Kantianism into physiological terms may be possible). Even moral and aesthetic values, for L., cannot be grasped outside the phenomenal world, to which he insuperably limits positive knowledge.
But man cannot be content with this knowledge and therefore through "poetic creation" he creates for himself an ideal world, that intelligible world of which Kant and Plato speak, but without having convinced himself that it is not the object of demonstrative science. Thus L., at bottom, ends up agreeing with materialism: what man knows and can know is only the corporeal world, whose limit can be crossed only by poetic fantasy. This, however, does not mean, as some critic has maintained, that L. makes the real evaporate into the realm of phantoms: the creative fantasy is not fantasticality, but an activity that reveals a reality that is not deceptive. In the same way religion has value not for its theoretical content alone, but because it raises one above the phenomenal and creates (it too is "poetic") a spiritual homeland.
Other principal works: Die Grundlage d. math. Psychologie (Duisburg 1865); Die Arbeiterfrage (ibid. 1865; Leipzig and Berlin 1910); Beitr. zur Neubegründung d. formalen Logik u. d. Erkenntnistheorie (Iserlohn 1877); moreover together with F. Weinkauff: Die päpstl. Rundschreiben u. di 80 verdammten Sätze (against the Syllabus, anonymous, 1865; with the title Antisyllabus, 1875).
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Michele Federico Sciacca