Hermann Lotze’s Gestalt Metaphysics in Light of the Schelling and Hegel Renaissance (1838–1841)

Abstract

Situating Lotze in School of Speculative Theology, I use debates about Schelling's critique of Hegel—then and now—to understand Lotze's critique of Hegel. Lotze's early metaphysics seems to employ a version of Hegel's dialectical analysis of being, phenomena, and mind emphasizing the interconnection of things. One can equally argue that he proceeds in an analytic style of reviewing and testing alternative theories. My tentative conclusion is that he assumes existence of reality (the Absolute) like Schelling, and makes cognition a process subordinate to that reality. In this respect, he goes beyond his Kantian mentors J. F. Fries and E. F. Apelt. From all these sources came a radically original Gestalt metaphysics. For example, he reverses Kant's of intuition (Anschauung) into forms of intuitability(Anschaulichkeit), including relational categories of space, time, motion, mechanism, organism, law, and event. He then makes categories into ethical levels of a teleological idealism. In this way he overcomes his Herbartian teachers' separation of metaphysics from ethics, evincing his center Hegelian roots.