Friedrich Lange

From Philosopedia

Lange, Friedrich Albert (28 September 1828 - 23 November 1875)

Lange, whose father was theologian Johann Peter Lange, was a German neo-Kantian philosopher, author of Gesckhichte des Materialismus und Kritik senier Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (1866; tr. A History of Materialism, 3rd ed., 1950).

In its introduction, Bertrand Russell wrote that Lange was “an opposite of the Kantian view of the world.” Lange held that materialism is unable to explain consciousness and is refuted, on scientific grounds, by the psychology and physiology of sensation, which shows that the world studied by physics is a world dependent upon our modes of perception, not a world existing independently on its own account.

Lange praised Nietzsche’s first major work, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872), but, according to Gordon Stein, was unsympathetic to materialism.

Lange’s view on Pantheism included the thought that some truths of nature are not only unknowable but also unverifiable. Consciousness he regarded as subjective experience, not just the effect of matter.

Lange was one of the originators of neo-Kantianism and important as one of the founders of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. Also, he played a significant role in the German labor movement.

(See entries for Materialism and for Richard C. Vitzthum.)

{BDF; CE; ER, George J. Stack; RAT; RE}