Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg

FA Trendelenburg

Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg ( November 30, 1802 in Eutin – January 24, 1872 in Berlin ) was a German philosopher and educator. He was primarily oriented towards Kant and Aristotle.

Life

Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg came from a family of academics that was particularly widespread in Mecklenburg and Western Pomerania and that can be traced back to the time of the Reformation. He was a great-grandson of the evangelical theologian and superintendent Theodor Trendelenburg , who played a central role as the progenitor of numerous pastor families in the church history of Mecklenburg-Strelitz , and a grandson of the Lübeck doctor Karl Ludwig Friedrich Trendelenburg .

Commemorative plaque at the birthplace in Eutin

Trendelenburg was born in Eutin in 1802 as the son of the postal commissioner Friedrich Wilhelm Trendelenburg and the Ratekau pastor's daughter Susanna Katharina née Schroeter. There he attended high school , where the Kantian Georg Ludwig König worked as rector, to whom Trendelenburg later dedicated his dissertation. He studied philology and philosophy at the universities of Kiel , Leipzig and Berlin . His philosophical teachers in Kiel were Karl Leonhard Reinhold and above all Johann Erich von Berger , whose basic ideas that philosophy is the comprehensive bond of individual sciences and the world should be viewed organically, strongly influenced Trendelenburg. He also heard Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann , August Detlef Christian Twesten , August Boeckh , Franz Bopp , Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , August Neander , Friedrich Schleiermacher and Henrich Steffens . In 1826 he was promoted to Dr. phil. PhD. After that he was tutor to the Prussian general postmaster Karl Ferdinand Friedrich von Nagler . In 1833 he became an associate professor and in 1837 a full professor of philosophy and education at the University of Berlin . In 1845/46, 1856/57 and 1863/64 he was rector of the university. He was also an employee of the Prussian Minister of Culture Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein .

While still a private tutor, Trendelenburg published Aristotle 's writing About the Soul and subsequently created a system of logic and epistemology that was essentially based on Aristotle . He also wrote The Moral Idea of ​​Law and Historical Contributions to Philosophy and influenced Prussian university policy, particularly philosophical teacher training ( Philosophicum ). Trendelenburg followed the new trend of offering regular seminars in addition to lectures.

The so-called Trendelenburg gap became known, in which Trendelenburg criticized Immanuel Kant's argumentation of the transcendental aesthetics that the proof for the exclusively subjective nature of space and time was missing. This led to a public dispute with Kuno Fischer , in which Hermann Cohen also intervened. Trendelenburg was the first to use the term terminology for Leibniz's program of a lingua rationalis . This should make conceptual expressions from the simplest characteristics or concepts immediately readable. Gottlob Frege adopted this expression in a modified form in his term writing . On March 18, 1848, he went to see King Friedrich Wilhelm IV in Berlin in order to (continue to) mediate between him and the students, who had meanwhile become rebellious. From 1849 to 1851 he was a member of the 2nd Chamber of the Prussian House of Representatives , where he belonged to the Old Liberals. Trendelenburg was also an honorary doctor of law and theology. From 1847 to 1871 he was Secretary of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences and from 1859 a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich. In 1861 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In the same year he was elected a foreign member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . On March 31, 1869, Trendelenburg was declared a "foreign member" of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques de l'Institut impériale de France. Shortly before his death, on January 24, 1872, Trendelenburg was inducted into the Order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts .

Trendelenburg's students included Friedrich Ueberweg , Eugen Dühring , Rudolf Eucken , Franz Brentano , Gustav Teichmüller , Carl von Prantl , Jürgen Bona Meyer , Friedrich Paulsen , Hermann Cohen , Hans Vaihinger , Wilhelm Dilthey , and the politician Georg von Hertling . Hermann Bonitz , who succeeded him as lecturer in the Prussian Ministry of Education, was also influenced by Trendelenburg and his Aristotelianism, even though he was explicitly critical of it in his conception of the theory of categories . The estate is in the Berlin State Library .

family

Trendelenburg married Ferdinande Becker (1811–1893) in 1836. the daughter of his friend Karl Ferdinand Becker . He had eight children. One of his sons was the physician Friedrich Trendelenburg . His daughter Minna (1842-1924) married the archaeologist Adolf Michaelis (1835-1910).

philosophical concepts

Trendelenburg's philosophical references are characterized very differently. He is usually characterized as an Aristotelian. He is also known as a prominent critic of Hegel. However, the intensive examination of Hegel also meant that elements of Hegelian philosophy can be found in Trendelenburg, such as the conception of philosophy as a whole, in which the individual systems only participate, as well as the idealistic basic attitude or the idea of ​​development. Trendelenburg also criticized Kant in various respects, especially with regard to the theory of categories. Nevertheless, Kant's fundamental thesis “Thoughts without content are empty, perceptions without concepts are blind” (Immanuel Kant: AA III, 75) runs through Trendelenburg's entire work. In contrast, his metaphysical-ontological basic conception of an organic genetic world order took its basic ideas in important aspects of Schelling's natural philosophy, which he had taken up from his teacher Erich von Berger. In ethics, Trendelenburg also defended Aristotelian virtue ethics against Kant's ethics of reason.

The relationship between philosophy and science

Against Hegel, Trendelenburg emphasized that all philosophical knowledge must take experience as its starting point. Accordingly, any systematic thinking should be replaced by "Logical Investigations", the title of his main systematic work, in which experience is explored by gaining the general from the particular. Trendelenburg resisted the construction of a system whose correctness has yet to be proven in practice. Rather, he regarded the nature and practice of the individual sciences as the correct starting point, which in logic and metaphysics are to be reduced to a common denominator, to unity. "The sciences happily try their own ways, but partly without closer account of the method, since they are directed to their object and not to the procedure." Here logic would have the task of observing and comparing, of raising the unconscious to consciousness and to comprehend the different in the common origin. Without careful consideration of the method of the separate sciences, it must miss its aim, because then it has no definite object on which to find its bearings in its theories." (LU 1, IV)

Philosophy is not autonomous, but the science of the sciences that give it the material. The principles of philosophy cannot be used to deduce how the individual sciences must proceed methodically in order to adequately grasp their material. On the other hand, the individual sciences each have their own perspective, so that it is the task of philosophy to put them in context and thus work out the unity of thought. Logic cannot be limited to the formal analysis of concepts, but must also deal with content-related judgments. "Logic must become a metaphysics of the real sciences insofar as it must grasp the real principles of the same in order to understand the act of thinking within its area and only thereby become true logic." With this view Trendelenburg essentially came into being contributed to the modern theory of science as a philosophical discipline.

With this reorientation of logic as science, Trendelenburg believed he had found a concept with which philosophy, which had lost much of its importance after the collapse of German idealism, could once again connect to the strongly developing individual sciences. "Philosophy will not regain its old power until it becomes permanent, and it will not exist until it grows in the same way as the other sciences grow, until it develops steadily, not in each head starts anew and puts it down again, but historically takes up the problems again and continues them." (LU 1,VIII)

systems of philosophy

In a kind of longitudinal section, Trendelenburg tried to analyze which characteristics can be found for the various systems in the history of philosophy as consistently applicable criteria for distinguishing them. In doing so, he came to the conclusion that all great philosophers have directly or indirectly taken a position on the opposition of blind power and conscious thought as the original impetus of world events. Accordingly, positions of materialistic "Democritism", idealistic " Platonism " and holistic identity-philosophical (panpsychistic) " Spinozism " can be found as basic attitudes at all times . Trendelenburg emphasized the variety of variations and hybrids behind the three keywords, but felt that each system tended towards one side of the opposite at the end. Despite his epistemology, which was also based on intuition and reason, he regarded Locke as a materialist because he saw human consciousness as a "tabula rasa". Descartes, on the other hand, despite a physicalistic view of nature, considered him a Platonist because of his idealistic ethics . He himself left no doubt that he preferred the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, which for him reached as far as Kant and German idealism. “Whoever does something with the efficient cause, whoever uses it, bears the end, carries a higher thought in him, in a similar way as organic life subjects the efficient causes to the ends of the whole. That glorification of forces [in materialism] is done in the name of a thought that recognizes them or uses them.”

The basic principle of the movement

The central category in Trendelenburg's systematic philosophy is that of movement, in which being and thinking are mediated through sensuality and reason. Knowledge can only arise when an outer movement is comprehended and brought into line with an inner constructive movement, not in the sense of a reflection as an image, but as a correspondence. One cannot define the concept of movement without already having an idea of ​​movement. The idea of ​​the physical concept of force, which is usually used to define movement, already includes the idea of ​​movement. Based on this consideration and the view that becoming is always based on perception and therefore cannot have its reason in the purely abstract concepts of being and nothingness, Trendelenburg criticized the supposedly pure conceptuality of the Hegelian dialectic. "The dialectic had to prove that self-contained thinking grasps reality. But the proof is missing. For everywhere it has opened up artificially in order to take in from the outside what it lacks from the inside. The closed eye only sees fantasies.” (LU 1, 109) One cannot only talk about reality in pure terms, one needs the perception. "Human thinking lives from perception, and if it should live from its own entrails, it dies of starvation." (LU 1, 109)

Everything in nature is movement. “When forces are transformed into one another, such as mechanical force into heat and vice versa, then in the law of conservation of force movement is what runs through the forms of transformation. Everything that has become, every form that is there, be it the form of the crystal or the earth spheroid, is created by the active movement that dominates the matter.” (LU1, 141) One can see the stillness and solid structures from the movement explain by force and counterforce, but not vice versa. The inner movement of thinking corresponds to the outer movement. “We call this movement, in contrast to the outer one in space, the constructive one and recognize it initially in the intuition.” (LU 1, 143) The ideas that result from the sensory perception are an understanding of the outer movement. But even purely abstract thinking, as in logic, creates an order that has a spatial structure. It is a higher, lower or secondary order. "Every development of thinking sets moments one after the other through which a connecting movement must run." (LU 1, 145) Every act of thinking, every intellectual creation, connection and differentiation is a movement in the inner space, "in which the imagination draws, so to speak" . (LU 1, 143)

From this fundamental importance of the category of movement, Trendelenburg developed his own theory of space and time, which opposes the usual concepts. For him, space and time are also dependent on movement, because they cannot be thought of without the movement that generates them. “In this view [movement is composed of space and time], space and time are placed before the movement, and these finished elements become, as it were, the two factors in the movement. But where do we get space and time as ready-made elements? Furthermore, is the concept of the composition of the interacting factors an original concept? This question shows that all three elements of the explanation given by the movement (space, time, factor) presuppose the movement itself." (LU 1, 150)

Mathematics, geometry as well as arithmetic, is a method of abstraction that is not based on experience. Straight lines and points without extension do not exist in nature (LU 1, 274-275) The construction of a point is an idealized idea to fix the movement. (LU 1, 276) But the point is the basis for constructing a straight line and all geometric shapes from it. If we determine the three types of movement according to their importance, then the movement that creates space creates the substance of the figure, the formative counter-movement according to the difference in which it merges with the first, the form, and the coherent penetration creates unity Of the whole. These three movements, whose function we have distinguished, are in fact inseparably one." (LU 1, 280-281)

For Trendelenburg, the concept of movement is also the starting point for the derivation of the basic categories. "The basic concepts that express the necessary structures and relationships of movement are general and necessary because they come from an act that is part of all thinking and without which there is no empirical recording." (LU 1, 393) . In the spirit of Aristotle, these basic concepts are, in addition to movement, matter with the category of causality, form as the basis of substance in matter and purpose in the living area as the third basic principle.

The gradation of the world

Trendelenburg viewed the world as a holistic organic system. "The system represents this great unity and is, as it were, only an extended judgment. Thanking and being correspond here as well. The concept became alive in the judgment, like substance in action. The reason poured into its consequences as the cause into its effect. The connection between concepts and judgments forms the system, just as the connection between substances and activities forms the world.” (LU 2, 446) “The individual systems of the sciences are themselves only parts of a large system. They grow together by drawing nourishment from each other. When these dependent members unite to form an organism that realizes itself, the image of the great system that wants to be the spiritual counterpart of the world arises." (LU 2, 447)

From the system idea, Trendelenburg developed a graduated structure of the world or the scientific knowledge process, which is genetically oriented towards two structural characteristics. The simpler is the basis of the composite. The earlier is the lower compared to the later. These characteristics are applied to the principles of effective cause and purpose. The elementary mediation of thinking and being is the constructive movement of consciousness, which connects to the unconscious causal activity of movement in space. A priori before experience, the first stage is the development of mathematical knowledge, which also contains the principle of necessity. The second stage is experience, which is determined by the given. "The one who recognizes stands in real interaction with the real on the same, and the perception that finally becomes sensitive to him in pleasure and displeasure guarantees him reality." (LU 2, 449) Experiences are bound to facts. “The appropriation through the senses takes place with the help of the constructive movement; exploration goes back to mathematical laws; Matter can ultimately only be understood through movement. This answers the question of how the experience of material forces (physics in the narrower sense) is possible.” (LU 2, 450) The third level is the area of ​​organic nature. The dominant principle is the telos. The question of how knowledge of organic nature is possible is answered in the purpose that the inventive spirit designs and the observing spirit recognizes where it is realized, in the purpose that can only be understood from the prefigurative thought that anticipates the effect to the cause be." (LU 2, 450)

Finally, the final fourth level is the level of ethics. “It dominates the earlier ones and frees them at the same time. If one asks how a knowledge of the ethical is possible, the answer lies in the fact that the ultimate end of the human being and human nature as a means or organ to that end can be known. When the law now enters the will, ethical necessity appears, and when the will satisfies the law of its essence, the same necessity appears as freedom. In ethical necessity, organic necessity is presupposed, which determines multiplicity from unity, and along with organic necessity physical and mathematical necessity. The forces that are in the organic means rise in the ethical to persons who are both means and ends in themselves.” (LU 2, 451) In this genetic structure of the world order, logic and metaphysics have the basic disciplines of philosophy a special position. Trendelenburg assigned them the task of demonstrating the origin and unity of the sciences.

The unconditional is not comprehensible to man because of its finitude. Nevertheless, man constantly strives to go beyond the limits of his cognitive abilities. This is only possible for him by trying to imitate the idea of ​​a divine creation in his mind. "Science is perfected only in the presupposition of a spirit whose thought is the origin of all being. What is striven for in the finite is fulfilled here. The principle of knowledge and the principle of being is one principle. And because this idea of ​​God underlies the world, the same unity is sought in things and found again as in the picture. "The act of divine knowing is the substance of all things." (LU 2, 510) With this view, Trendelenburg sided against materialism with Plato, who outlined the concept of the Demiurge, and with Aristotle, who understood the idea of ​​the divine ground as an unmoved mover.

writings

• Platonis de ideis et numeris doctrina ex Aristotele illustrata , 1826 (doctoral dissertation) digitized
• Elementa logices Aristoteleae , 1837 (9th ed. 1892) (Collection of Greek text passages with Latin translation) Digitized
• De Platonis Philebi consilio , Berlin 1837.
• Logical Investigations , 1840 (3rd ed. 1870) ( vol. 1 , vol. 2 )
• Explanatory Notes on the Elements of Aristotelian Logic , 1842 (3rd ed. 1876) ( Google Books )
• Raphael's School of Athens , Berlin 1843.
• The logical question in Hegel's system. Two polemics , Leipzig 1843. (with Friedrich Altenstein) ( Google Books )
• Historical Contributions to Philosophy , three volumes, 1846, 1855 and 1867
  • History of Categories (in Volume I) ( Google Books )
  • On the Last Difference of Philosophical Systems (in Volume II Google Books )
  • On Spinoza's Thoughts and Its Success , 1850 (in Volume II) ( Google Books )
  • Herbart's practical philosophy and the ethics of the ancients , 1856 (in Volume III) ( Google Books )
• The Moral Idea of ​​Right , 1849 ( Google Books )
• Leibniz and the Philosophical Activity of the Academy in the Last Century , 1852 ( Google Books )
• On Herbart's Metaphysics and the New Approaches to It , 1853 ( Google Books )
• On Leibniz's Draft of a General Characteristic , 1856 ( Google Books )
• The Inherited Task of Our University: Speech Delivered August 3, 1857 ( Google Books )
• Natural law on the basis of ethics , Leipzig 1860 (2nd ed. 1868) ( Google Books )
• In Memory of Johann Gottlieb Fichte , 1862 ( Google Books )
• Kuno Fischer and his Kant: A Rejoinder , 1869 ( Google Books )
• Gaps in International Law , 1870 ( Google Books )
• Small writings , two volumes 1871 (especially on culture and pedagogy) ( volume 1 )
• On the history of the word person . Posthumous essay by Adolf Trendelenburg. Introduced by Rudolf Eucken. Kant Studies 13 (1908)
• the purpose . Edited and provided with an introduction and notes by Georg Wunderle. Schoeningh, Paderborn 1925

literature

• Hermann Bonitz : In memory of Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg. Berlin 1872. ( Digital copy in the Digital Library Mecklenburg-West Pomerania)
• Ernst Bratuschek: Adolf Trendelenburg. Henschel, Berlin 1873.
• Georg Buchholtz: The basic ethical ideas of Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg. Schlimper, Blankenhain 1904.
• Gerald Hartung, Klaus Christian Köhnke (ed.): Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg's effect (= Eutin research Vol. 10). Eutin State Library, Eutin 2006 (documentation of a conference in 2002)
• Klaus Christian Köhnke: Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg's intermediary position between idealistic and neo-Kantian epoch . in ders.: Emergence and Rise of Neo-Kantianism. German university philosophy between idealism and positivism . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1993, pp. 23–57
• Peter Petersen : The philosophy of Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg. A Contribution to the History of Aristotle in the Nineteenth Century . Hamburg 1913
• Arthur Richter:  Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf . In: General German Biography (ADB). Volume 38, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1894, pp. 569-572.
• Josef Schmidt : Hegel's science of logic and its criticism by Adolf Trendelenburg . Munich 1977
• Klaus-Gunther Wesseling:  Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf. In: Biographical-Bibliographical Church Lexicon (BBKL). Volume 12, Bautz, Herzberg 1997, ISBN 3-88309-068-9 , cols. 449–458.
• Gottfried Gabriel : Trendelenburg , in: Jürgen Mittelstraß (ed.): Encyclopedia philosophy and philosophy of science. 2nd Edition. Volume 8: Th - Z. Stuttgart, Metzler 2018, ISBN 978-3-476-02107-6 , pp. 114 - 115 (detailed work and bibliography).

web links

Wikisource: Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg  - sources and full texts

• Literature by and about Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg in the German National Library catalogue
• Works by and about Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg  in the German Digital Library
• Wilt Aden Schröder : Biogram of Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg in the scholarly historical prosopography of the Teuchos Center

itemizations

1. ↑ Ulrich Johannes Schneider : ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: production possibilities of philosophy in the 19th century. Lectures in Berlin 1810 to 1890 (PDF; 6.0 MB) )
2. ↑ Hermann Cohen: On the controversy between Trendelenburg and Kuno Fischer, in: Journal for Folk Psychology and Linguistics, 7 (1871), 249-296; see also: Ernst Wolfgang Orth : Trendelenburg and science as a cultural fact, in: Wolfgang Marx, Ernst Wolfgang Orth (ed.): Hermann Cohen and the epistemology, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2001, 49-61
3. ↑ Cf. G. Gabriel: Conceptual writing , in: Joachim Ritter : Historical Dictionary of Philosophy , Volume 1, Schwabe Verlag, Basel 1971, p. 814
4. ↑ Ferdinande Trendelenburg: "A picture of life - compiled from her notes and letters for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren", Christmas 1896 - printed as a manuscript, Halle an der Saale; Orphanage Printing Office, pp. 162-180
5. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, philological-historical class. Episode 3, vol. 246 = treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, mathematical-physical class. Episode 3, Vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Goettingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 242.
6. ↑ Copy of the certificate of appointment by Napoléon III in the hands of some of Adolf Trendelenburg's great-great-grandchildren
7. ↑ Hermann Bonitz: About the categories of Aristotle . From the May issue of the year 1853 of the meeting reports of the philos.-histor. Classe of the Academy of Sciences [X. vol., p. 591ff] specially printed ( restricted preview in Google book search)
8. ↑ Immanuel Kant, Collected Writings. Ed.: Vol. 1-22 Prussian Academy of Sciences, Vol. 23 German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, from Vol. 24 Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Berlin 1900ff., AA III, 75 .
9. ↑ Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg: The conflict between Kant and Aristotle in ethics, in: Historical contributions to philosophy. Miscellaneous Treatises, Volume 3, Bethge, Berlin 1867, 171-214
10. ↑ LU = Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg: Logical investigations, Leipzig, Hirzel, 1840, 3rd increased edition 1870, here foreword to the 1st edition; the 3rd edition is always quoted; LU 1 = Band 1, LU 2 = Band 2
11. ↑ Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg: The logical question in Hegel's system. Two polemics, Leipzig, Brockhaus 1843, 50
12. ↑ Klaus Christian Köhnke: Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg's position as an intermediary between the idealistic and neo-Kantian epoch. in ders.: Emergence and Rise of Neo-Kantianism. The German university philosophy between idealism and positivism. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1993, pp. 23-57, here 37-38; similar to Elisabeth Ströker : Relations between the theory of science and epistemology in the 19th century, in: Wolfgang Marx, Ernst Wolfgang Orth (eds.): Hermann Cohen and the epistemology, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2001, 11-30, 18
13. ↑ Adolf Trendelenburg: About the last difference in philosophical systems [1847], ed. and introduced by Hermann Glockner , Fromanns, Stuttgart 1949
14. ↑ Adolf Trendelenburg: About the last difference in philosophical systems [1847], ed. and introduced by Hermann Glockner, Fromanns, Stuttgart 1949, 44